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Feb. 29, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:05
LIFE AFTER MITCH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep780
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Coming up, I'll argue that Mitch McConnell's departure signals the end of the era of the peacetime generals.
And I'll lay out what to expect once McConnell leaves.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey joins me.
We're going to talk about his lawsuit against Planned Parenthood.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, and in fact a longtime Republican leader of the Senate, Is getting out.
And he's not leaving now.
He's leaving in November after the election.
But nevertheless, his announcement that he's quitting is big.
It signals, I think, not only an end for McConnell, but as I'm going to go on to argue, a real new beginning for the Republican Party.
Now, why do I say that?
I say that because The Republican Party had been dominated by a certain type of person in a leadership role.
And I'm going to mention three people.
In the House, Kevin McCarthy.
At the RNC, Rona McDaniel.
And in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.
Now, these three aren't exactly the same.
In personality, they're quite different.
Mitch is kind of a grumpy guy.
in a sense you could call him Senator No.
He's an odd person to be in a leadership position.
He's a very good strategist, he's a good vote counter.
I'm going to give him credit for good things that he has done.
But nevertheless, he doesn't have that kind of charisma, that gregariousness you expect in a leader.
Now interestingly, Kevin McCarthy does.
Kevin McCarthy is a very gregarious guy.
He is somebody who remembers your name.
He's somebody who will call you back.
He's somebody who built a powerful donor network.
He's somebody who...
So in personality, I would not say that those two are the same.
And then of course you have inert...
You know, useless Rona McDaniel, who I think of as essentially a large individual sitting Buddha-like on a statue, motionless, while Republican fortunes go down the tubes.
So an inert individual, a do-nothing.
And that's not, that would not be true of either Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell.
You may not like what Mitch McConnell's doing, but he's up to something.
He's up to, he might be doing bad stuff.
Like, okay, I'm going to make sure this Ukraine aid bill passes no matter what.
And then McConnell is indefatigable in making sure that happens.
Or, I'm determined, and this is on a more positive note, to block Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland I mean, let's pause for a moment here and think about how great that is, because this is, to me, Mitch McConnell's finest moment.
It's when he essentially held on in the teeth.
He was being attacked from all quarters, and the media was after him.
But no, like a sort of a dog with a bone, he would not give in.
He kept that seat open.
And Trump was able to appoint.
Trump won the 2016 election.
I mean, think about Merrick Garland, this absolute monster, this nasty individual who has been destroying people's lives.
Now, I mean, I suppose one could say, hey, listen, Merrick Garland was on the court.
He couldn't be doing the bad stuff he's doing at DOJ. But the bad stuff he's doing at DOJ is a confirmation of how horrific it would be to have this guy on the court.
So I think McConnell deserves a lot of credit.
For having done that. And over the years, McConnell has done good stuff.
He has gotten some conservative priorities through.
He has passed even legislation that was supported by Trump, the Trump tax bill, for example.
So one can't look back over Mitch McConnell's record and just say it's a record of failure.
No, it actually isn't.
But it was failure at the end.
Mitch really was out of it.
Mitch himself kind of knows he was out of it.
I'm quoting him now. Believe me, I know the politics within my party at this particular time.
I have many false, misunderstanding politics is not one of them.
Now, according to the New York Times article, McConnell just stepped down as leader at the end of the year, they say that Mitch, quote, acknowledged that his views on national security had put him out of step with his party.
So the implication here is that Mitch McConnell was out of sync, was out of step on one issue, which is foreign policy, specifically Ukraine.
But I want to argue that this is not in fact true.
Mitch McConnell is totally out of step of the mood of the party as a whole.
What is that mood of the party?
The mood of the party basically is that we are no longer in a peacetime environment, politically speaking.
We don't need peacetime generals anymore because the country is in a very dire situation.
And so, we need combat-ready generals.
And again, by combat, I mean political combat.
We need people who are willing to fight.
And now, in this environment, Rona McDaniel...
Well, Rona McDaniel doesn't cut it in any environment.
But nevertheless, perhaps there is an environment in which Kevin McCarthy is okay.
And perhaps there is an environment in which Mitch McConnell is okay.
And I've been in the past okay with Mitch McConnell and have even praised him.
But... That is not the America that we live in today.
And we are looking for fighters.
Now, this is made very clear by the kind of praise that is coming for Mitch McConnell from people like Romney, from people like Lisa Murkowski.
And what's interesting is they are saying the same thing.
So here's Romney.
No senator in memory has demonstrated more respect for the institution of the Senate than leader Mitch McConnell.
Okay, pretty much the same thing from Lisa Makarski.
She says, throughout his tenure as leader, his focus was always on preserving the institution of the Senate.
And I say...
Would anyone ever say this about, say, Chuck Schumer?
Quote, his focus was on preserving the institution of the Senate.
No! Chuck Schumer doesn't care about the institution of the Senate.
Schumer does his best to deliver for the Democrats.
That's how he understands his mission.
So this right here is why Republicans lose, because they have institution men instead of fighters.
Mitch McConnell protected the institution of the Senate.
I think the Republican base is looking for leaders that will fight for them.
And this is really what a functional and a healthy party does.
And in this sense, the Democratic Party is more functional, more healthy than the Republican Party.
Why? Look at Democratic leaders.
Look at, for example, Pelosi's long tenure in the House.
What did she do? She fought for the priorities of her base.
She fought for the ideological priorities of the left.
Schumer is exactly the same.
So we need leaders on our side who are like that.
And instead, what we have are these kind of institution men who actually pride themselves on standing on principle and going against the wishes of their own base.
Enough of that. So I'm actually glad that Mitch has come to the end of the road.
And I think the good news is that Mitch's departure, again...
I give him an ambiguous legacy.
I think as we look back on Mitch McConnell, we're not going to see this guy as a complete failure, but we're going to see this guy as someone who did some important things along the way, who really failed in the end.
But there's an opportunity here, because with Rona McDaniel out, with McCarthy out, and now with Mitch McConnell out, We can look forward to getting a new Republican Party that is more in ideological sync, in moral sync, and also in cultural sync.
That speaks, in a way, the tone and the values of the base.
And in this way, you have leaders that you are happy to fight for, happy to work for, happy to elect, because you know when they get in there...
They're not going to take pride in stabbing you in the back.
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Trump has been getting some bad news lately, and so it is very good that he is also getting some good news.
And as I'm going to go on to argue on the balance, for a guy who is facing a blizzard I mean, two separate cases in New York.
Judge Enderon's case, and then you have the Alvin Bragg case, which will be starting up soon.
You got the case in D.C. January 6th before a very hostile judge, Tanya Chutkin.
You've got the case in Florida over the classified documents.
You've got the Georgia case.
But I'm going to argue that Trump is...
Actually doing extremely well and he might ultimately beat every single one of these raps.
That is actually not out of the question.
And this goes against my original instinct when I saw these cases was, look, the left is making sure that they get at least one, maybe more convictions.
That's the point of 91 charges.
How do you get out from 91 charges?
How do you avoid that big guilty verdict splashed right across the full front page of the New York Times?
And my thought was, there's no way.
They're filing in hospitable jurisdictions.
Now, not always. They don't have a hospitable jurisdiction in Florida.
They've got a Trump judge who's causing Jack Smith a lot of problems.
But they're going to have hospitable jurisdictions most of the place.
But as you'll see in a moment, the sky is brightening for Trump in important ways.
Now, he does have to come up with $500 million, a giant sum of money, and he's going to have to put up something to take a loan In order to do that.
Now, my guess, quite honestly, is that he probably could get a loan against Mar-a-Lago, which, even though the judge says it's worth $17 million, laughable number, is probably worth closer to a quarter of a billion dollars, $250 million. So there's half of what Trump needs right there.
Trump has the assets. He's going to be able to do it.
But it's a major nuisance.
Imagine forcing somebody to produce a bond for half a billion dollars.
Even when someone's a billionaire, typically your assets aren't liquid.
They're tied up.
They're in complex relationships to partnerships and so on.
You're building hotels together with some other guys and so on.
So this is a real injustice.
And it's an injustice where even if the case is overthrown, the appellate court throws it out, that could take two years.
For it to even get to the appellate court.
So they're trying to immobilize to disable Trump in the meantime.
However, on a brighter note, the Supreme Court is taking the Trump immunity challenge.
Now, ironically, it was Jack Smith who went to the Supreme Court and said, please take the immunity issue, please settle it so that this case can move quickly on.
But interestingly, the I think?
And the decision will come probably, I'm guessing, in May.
And that, if the Supreme Court says, no, Trump doesn't have complete immunity, the case will then get jump-started again.
But that doesn't mean it goes to trial in May, because there's a lot to be done.
There's a lot of information that has to go back and forth, depositions.
So, even if Jack Smith speeds it up, and in order to speed it up, by the way, he might have to pare down the case.
He may have to simplify it, cut it back, try to prove a narrower point.
But even then it's not even clear that this case will go to trial before the election.
It's very obvious that Jack Smith is a highly political prosecutor.
He is going for that guilty verdict before the election.
He realizes that people will lose interest after the election.
And so this is a politically motivated prosecution.
Even though Jack Smith won't admit it, everybody knows that that is the case.
So, interestingly there are now going to be three Trump-related cases before SCOTUS.
One they've already heard, the Colorado case about throwing Trump off the ballot.
We're waiting for a decision in that case.
The second is the obstruction of an official proceeding case.
That's the case that deals with a lot of January 6th.
But it also involves Trump, because for January 6th protesters and for Trump, this is a felony charge.
And if it's thrown out, it knocks the wind out of the case, because to say things like, you know, the January 6th guy was trespassing, he was in an unauthorized area of the Capitol, those are misdemeanors.
But obstructing an official proceeding is a felony.
So that's before the court.
And now this issue of presidential immunity.
So the left is screaming about this.
They're like, why did the Supreme Court take this case?
They didn't even have to take the case.
They could have left intact the ruling of the appellate court.
Now, the appellate court basically said Trump doesn't have absolute immunity.
But interestingly, the Supreme Court doesn't have to find that Trump has absolute immunity in order to say that he would have immunity for these actions that are alleged on January 6th.
In other words, some of the hypotheticals that were put to the Trump attorneys, oh, you know, if Trump instructs SEAL Team 6 to go assassinate his political rivals, would that constitute, does he have immunity to do that?
No, we're not talking about that.
Trump didn't do that.
That's an interesting sort of discussion for the philosophy seminar.
But the court doesn't have to reach that kind of absolute immunity to simply say, look, what are we looking at?
We're looking at the actions of a president...
On January 6th, in other words, while he is in office, not after the presidency, but during the presidency, the actions of a president to contest the result of the election.
Does a president have the absolute right to do that?
And regardless of how he went about it, he made a phone call over here, he instigated this, he did that.
Was he within the conduct of his presidential duties and therefore immune?
And the Supreme Court could go, Yes.
We're not saying that he's immune in theory.
We can envision circumstances that would not be immune, but this would be immune.
So regardless of what President Trump did or didn't do, even if everything that the prosecution says is true, it would be covered by immunity.
And so the bottom line of it, and actually Megyn Kelly sums this up pretty well, she goes...
She goes, Trump may well have pulled the inside straight that he needs to beat all these cases.
She says New York is a joke.
Georgia is dying slash severely delayed.
This is the Fannie Willis business.
Florida ain't happening before November.
And now... Neither is the January 6th DC case.
And she says, incredible. Which, I mean, again, it seemed very unlikely at one point that Trump could beat all of these raps.
But now there is.
I wouldn't say the likelihood.
At this point, I would simply say the clear and distinct possibility that he will.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome, welcome back to the podcast, our friend Andrew Bailey.
He is the Attorney General of the State of Missouri.
He's a decorated combat veteran, father of four, constitutional conservative.
You can follow him on x at agandrewbailey.
Andrew, thanks for joining me.
Welcome. You have taken up the legal cudgels against Planned Parenthood in your home state of Missouri.
What is Planned Parenthood doing right now in Missouri?
I'm sure it can't be good, but give us the details.
Yeah, well thank you for having me on and discussing this important topic.
We are taking on the fight, once again, against this cult of death.
The Planned Parenthood has consistently and repeatedly and willfully...
Refused to comply with state statute.
This goes back more than a half a decade.
And my predecessors began this operation and I'm going to finish it to once and for all attempt to drive Planned Parenthood for the state of Missouri for their unlawful behavior, their commitment to unlawful behavior.
In 2023, in November, at the end of last year, an investigative journalist with Project Veritas filmed a video at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Kansas City where an agent of Planned Parenthood bragged, bragged to the camera about trafficking minors out of state for abortions, refusing to obtain parental consent, refusing to comply with state statute regarding reporting requirements, and refusing to be a mandatory reporter for a sexual
offense against a minor, thereby concealing the sexual exploitation of young girls.
This is abhorrent and criminal behavior.
We're going to court. We filed a lawsuit today.
This needs to be the beginning of the end of this cult of death and its operations in the state of Missouri.
Now, I'm assuming that there are laws on the books in Missouri that say that if a minor is going to get an abortion, there needs to be parental consent.
Is that the law that Planned Parenthood is violating?
That is one of the laws we believe that they're violating.
Absolutely. And again, this is based on an investigative video that we've obtained of a clinic in Kansas City where the clinician brags about forging documents, deceiving custodial parents, Schools, the court system, in order to traffic these young girls out of state for abortion.
She breadbags three times.
They do it every day, every day, every day.
If that is true and bears out, these are serious offenses.
Even if proven that they're not reporting or recording proper consent and notifications, that still is a violation of state statute.
So this is a consistent pattern of behavior going all the way back to 2018.
My predecessor, Josh Hawley, when he was Attorney General, brought suit and uncovered that Planned Parenthood was using a moldy abortion machine on women and refusing to report and record medical complications that they experienced.
So that started this process.
And then in 2019, 2020, my predecessor, then Attorney General Eric Schmidt, filed suit and got Planned Parenthood officials to admit under oath that physicians were refusing to provide the risk notification to the patients who were undergoing these dangerous procedures and thus failing to comply with state statute. And now we have this conduct occurring in 2024.
Again, this is a consistent pattern of behavior where Planned Parenthood prioritizes the destruction of human life above the health and safety of women. And it can't be allowed to continue. And it seems that from what you're describing, the woman wasn't merely saying that I, a rogue operator at Planned Parenthood, am doing this on my own.
She seemed to be saying that this is actually normal practice at the Planned Parenthood clinic.
In other words, that this was part of what Planned Parenthood was organizing.
Certainly. If anyone watches that video, that investigative video, you will see that this agent of Planned Parenthood at the clinic in Kansas City is speaking on behalf of her colleagues at the clinic.
Again, that's why I call her an agent of the clinic.
This isn't a rogue individual.
She says this is the habit, routine, and custom of Planned Parenthood.
And again, that's consistent with what we've uncovered in years past about Planned Parenthood's refusal to comply with state statute.
This issue is, it seems, Andrew, a pretty personal one for you because you have taken in adopted children.
This is an issue that you've seen firsthand.
Can you talk about why this is an important issue for you and why this matters?
I believe all life is sacred and should be valued.
Not only have my wife and I adopted children out of the foster system, but my wife gave birth to my daughter and she only lived for an hour and I got to hold her in my arms and I wouldn't trade a minute of that time for anything in the world.
How dare anyone break the laws of the state of Missouri and endanger the health and safety of women and girls in order to destroy human life?
How does this issue now play out?
What have you filed?
Is it a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood?
Is it a motion for an injunction for the court to step in and stop the practice?
What happens next?
Yeah, it's a lawsuit seeking injunctive relief to order Planned Parenthood to cease and desist violations of state statute.
That is prospective relief.
We're going to obtain discovery in this process and we're going to hold wrongdoers accountable.
We're going to continue this investigation and look back in time and figure out what happened here and individuals who are violating the civil or criminal code of the state of Missouri will be held accountable.
This is just the opening phase in a sequence of events.
I think it's important to highlight here the two things that are working in conjunction to make something happen here.
First of all, the investigative reporting, because you can be pretty sure that something like this is happening all over the country.
We know Planned Parenthood's rather nefarious history in the eugenics movement, and now we also know the profitability of abortion to an organization like Planned Parenthood.
So I think that their actions can be understood in the context of the fact that this is big business for this organization, but it takes somebody to blow the whistle and go, hey, take a look at this. This is what's happening. Here is it coming out of the horse's mouth.
We have too little of that, it seems to me, on our side.
And of course, the mainstream media isn't going to do this kind of reporting.
So we have to credit, in this case, the work of Project Veritas.
They drew your attention to this.
But then, number two, it takes an attorney general to go, hey, this is not consonant with the laws of Missouri.
I'm going to take action instead of looking the other way.
And so kudos to you for it.
Well, thank you.
And I will say credit to the investigative journalists who undertook this investigation.
And shame on the legacy media.
Planned Parenthood, for some reason, is the sacred cow of the left and has carte blanche to operate at will.
If any conservative organization were as flagrant and brazen of their violation of statutes as Planned Parenthood was...
We would be roasted. And yet, again, the legacy media once again falls down on the job and exposes its own hypocrisy and bias.
So proud that we were able to obtain this video from these investigative journalists who were doing the right thing by exposing this corruption, this deceit.
Again, this woman on the video is conspiring with a minor to transport that minor across state lines for an abortion, to traffic that minor, and to conceal the sexual exploitation of that minor.
minor. Let me point that out as well. The clinic in this instance is a mandatory reporter.
The victim in the video explains to the individual at the clinic that she's 13 years old. A 13 year old under Missouri law cannot consent to sexual contact. This was a sexual offense, a crime committed against this 13 year old. And here the Planned Parenthood was willing to conceal that criminal offense in violation of their mandatory reporting requirements.
These are the enemy that we're up against. And this has to be exposed and called what it is with moral clarity.
But you're highlighting a second part of it, which is that somebody who's 13 years old is not in a position to make a responsible decision involving something as important as sexuality, the continuation of life.
I mean, isn't that the basis for the statutory rape laws?
I mean, if some, you know, 35-year-old has sex with a 13-year-old, that is rape, regardless of whether the 13-year-old says yes.
Why? Because the 13-year-old is presumably not in a mature enough condition to give full consent, and that principle, you're saying, is applicable here as well.
Absolutely. Look, in the video, the victim that came forward and said that she was a 13-year-old who was pregnant was a victim of a sexual offense.
And rather than assisting that victim as the statute required, in this instance, Planned Parenthood was willing to further victimize this individual and conceal that criminal offense.
This is deplorable conduct.
And again, no one should be surprised by this because it's a consistent pattern of behavior from this cult of death.
Now, when you go to the court, what are you asking the court to do?
Are you asking the court to stop Planned Parenthood from doing this in the future?
But is there going to be any actual accountability for what they've already done?
Yes, we're demanding a court order to force Planned Parenthood to get into compliance with state statute because they willfully refuse to do it on their own.
That's prospective relief, but we are absolutely going to use our investigative authority and the tools of discovery to look back and figure out who did what and when, and if there were violations of the civil, criminal, or regulatory code of the state of Missouri, we will hold those individuals accountable in separate legal actions.
Yeah. This is all excellent news.
Let me pivot to another case that the state of Missouri is involved in, your office is involved in, and that is the case, the Missouri versus Biden case, in which the states of Missouri and Louisiana are suing the Biden administration.
This is over digital censorship, about the government's active collusion or even direction of digital platforms to censor large numbers of people.
I know that the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.
What's the update? When does it come up?
When is it going to be heard? When are we going to have a decision?
Well, I'm excited to tell you that we will be arguing that case at the United States Supreme Court on March 18th.
I will be there at counsel table.
We're excited to take the fight to the enemies of freedom, these proponents of government censorship.
But I would describe the relationship between the federal government and Big Tech as one of coercion.
That the federal government actually coerced Big Tech into changing its censorship algorithms to satisfy federal officials' demands for censorship.
And look, this was viewpoint discrimination.
This is a cowardly act.
The Biden administration and its army of federal bureaucrats can't win the argument on the merits about their terrible policy position, so they have to silence any voice in opposition.
This is the exact sort of viewpoint discrimination that the First Amendment was intended to protect against.
And I've said it before and will say it again.
We have got to build a wall of separation between tech and state to protect our First Amendment right to free speech.
And this lawsuit is the first opportunity to lay the brick in the wall of separation between tech and state. That was done when the district court handed down its nationwide injunction.
And this lawsuit is the first opportunity to lay the brick to protect against. And I've said it before and will say it again, we have got to build a wall of separation between tech and state to protect our First Amendment right to free speech.
We defended that twice at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
So the score is Missouri 3, Biden 0 in the fight for free speech, and we're going to the Super Bowl.
Bowl. How would you defend against or how would you answer if the...
Let's say the Biden administration shows up and they argue, yeah, we absolutely have been telling these platforms what to do, but guess what?
They're on our side.
They agree with us.
They are advocates of censorship themselves, and so we're not forcing them.
They are willing collaborators with us to fight disinformation.
What do you do when you're dealing with a platform that is, in a sense, as bad as the administration and very happy to set up these portals and engage in active censorship, admittedly at government direction, but with complete cooperation?
Yeah, well, let me say first and foremost that we obtained preliminary discovery, 20,000 pages of documents or more, numerous depositions, and we took that evidence to court.
This isn't hypothesis or legal theory or conspiracy theory.
These are facts that have been established by the presentation of evidence in court and were accepted into evidence in court.
80 pages of So that's why I'm using the word coercion.
So the Biden administration can't go back now and re-litigate that issue or pretend like it didn't happen.
It's already been proven in court. I see.
So in other words, what you're saying is that, and this actually makes a little bit of sense to me, many of the guys who set up these tech platforms were libertarian-oriented guys, so the idea that they automatically transposed into authoritarians is a little hard to believe.
Somebody must have twisting their arm from the back, and of course they get government benefits in the form of Section 230, not to mention other types of immunity, so they have every good reason to play along, don't they?
Absolutely. This is a government-sanctioned monopoly that is now under the direct control of the Biden administration and an army of federal bureaucrats.
In fact, the vast censorship enterprise grew so rapidly under Biden's tenure that the federal government had to design and build a new bureaucratic apparatus to manage it.
In other words, the censorship demands increased with such frequency and regularity that they had to construct a process to make those demands so it was less scattershot This is government at its worst.
This is government gone wrong and awry and in violation of our rights.
And let me say this too. One of the findings that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals made was that the harm was to everyone in the United States of America who's ever looked at any social media platform and that the harm is in fact ongoing.
It's not just the speakers who were silenced that were harmed, but the listeners as well.
And now what's happening is that individuals are self-censoring.
They're less likely to go on big tech and talk about COVID tyranny.
Or President Trump. Or election integrity for fear of being de-emphasized, de-platformed, booted off these big tech social media platforms.
So the heart is ongoing.
These are factual matters that have been established in court.
And then the Supreme Court will take notice of.
Very important and very exciting.
And we'll be watching with great interest.
Thank you very much, Andrew Bailey, for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me on.
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Welcome to my show!
He sort of does a short but very meaningful tour through the life and events and great early speeches of Lincoln, which are a foreshadowing of what is to come in Lincoln's life.
In other words, the great showdown with Douglass, then the even bigger 1860 campaign, and of course the beginning and conduct of the Civil War.
Now, Jaffa makes the point at the outset that Lincoln sort of began with a pretty ordinary political career.
He was, first of all, a menial worker.
Then he was a lawyer.
He was known to be a really good lawyer, but he had a strange mode of argument that's probably worth mentioning because it's so interesting.
Evidently, when he's defending somebody in a business case or even a criminal case, let's say a guy's accused of murder, Lincoln had a very strange strategy, which is different than what you normally see.
What you normally see is a lawyer defending a client will come and say, well, he had no motive to do the murder, but you know what?
If he had a motive, he didn't have a gun.
Well, but if he had a gun, he was actually somewhere else.
He had no opportunity to use it.
And if you can prove that he was on the scene of the crime, he's a very bad shot and he probably didn't get the guy.
It was probably somebody else who did it.
So, in other words, what a defense lawyer will do is attack the evidence in every direction, trying to make a little chip here, a little hole there, a scratch over here, and then hoping the jury will kind of go for it and believe, well, there's a little bit of doubt here, here, a little bit of doubt there.
Lincoln's strategy was not this at all.
Lincoln's strategy was unbelievably to not only concede a lot of the case against his own client, but affirm it strongly himself.
So he would come up to the podium and go, many of you probably think at this point that my client is a bum.
That's because he is a bum.
I hate him. I don't like him at all.
And then the prosecution will also contend that he has an excellent motive for killing his wife.
And I agree. After all, if your wife is cheating on someone else, I'd want to kill him myself.
So this is almost unbelievable because the defense attorney seems to be giving up the case to the prosecution.
But then Lincoln would say, even though he's a bad guy, even though he has a motive, and even though, yeah, he did go out and buy a gun, This whole case turns on one single point.
And what Lincoln would do is he would kind of bore into the case, kind of dive into the case, and he would find the one kind of area of ambiguity or doubt where the prosecution had not proven its case, and then Lincoln would focus his entire defense on that.
And he was remarkably successful because, again, when a defense lawyer is trying to defend on every front, the jury goes, well, yeah, of course he's doing that.
It's his job. He's being paid to raise doubts.
He's trying to raise doubts even when there really aren't reasonable doubts.
So this guy is doing nothing more than sort of throwing mud at a prosecution, whereas Lincoln would say, look, a case is sort of like a chain, a chain in a set of links.
And every link in the chain needs to be firm for the case to work.
Because, think about it.
Let's say a guy is a bad guy.
Let's say he has a motive.
Let's say he was at the scene of the crime.
The real question is, did he do it?
And the prosecution has to prove that he did it beyond a reasonable doubt.
So Lincoln would zoom in there.
And so this was the...
Welcome to my show!
Who would have predicted that this guy would not only make his way to President of the United States, but become by common consent the greatest president the country has produced?
By the way, I am in agreement with the judgment that Lincoln should be placed at number one.
A lot of people reflexively say George Washington was our best president.
In my view, George Washington was our second best president, and for reasons that we will understand a little bit better as we go through this book, Lincoln was in a league of his own.
I mentioned yesterday Lincoln's very modest self-presentation, which continues the idea that he's kind of a nobody.
Let me give a couple of examples of this.
Somebody asked him, This is when Lincoln was nominated for the presidency.
So let's look at what we're talking about.
He lost the Senate race to Douglas in 1858.
He is now nominated somewhat implausibly.
He was not initially the leading candidate.
That was another guy named Seward.
But Lincoln is nominated for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1860.
And somebody asked him, can you kind of tell us a little bit about your early life?
And Lincoln basically goes...
Kind of like, what's there to tell?
I'm quoting Lincoln. Why, he said, it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life.
It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray's elegy, the short and simple annals of the poor.
Now, here is a very tricky type of statement, because first of all, The ordinary guy who's just lived a undistinguished life like some poor laborer is not really going to be quoting a poem written by the British poet Thomas Gray, in which Lincoln not only is familiar with Gray, but can quote Gray's elegy.
So it takes a certain type of person to be able to do that.
So right away, that's a little bit of a giveaway.
Another time, Lincoln was asked to write out some biographical details about himself, and here's what he says.
I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.
I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me.
My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate." But, this is a very strange statement, if the good people and their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.
This requires a little bit of unpacking here.
Because, first of all, while I'm thinking now here a little bit about my son-in-law, Brandon Gill, running for Congress, can you imagine Brandon saying, my fellow citizens of Denton County, if you choose to elect me, I will work tirelessly on your behalf.
But guess what? If you...
If you choose to pass me over, elect somebody else, no big deal.
I'm kind of a loser anyway.
I've been dealt a lot of hard knocks in life.
This will just be another hard knock for me.
So no problem, guys.
This is unusual rhetoric coming from a politician, and it's at a time when Lincoln is running for office in his home state of Illinois.
You have to realize what Lincoln is doing here is he is very consciously making himself out to be an everyman, an ordinary fellow, which think about it.
This is something that you want to do in a democratic society because you want to say to the ordinary man, you should vote for me.
I'm one of you. I'm not coming here with big connections.
So Lincoln here is crafting...
The Lincoln myth.
And by myth here, I don't mean something that is false.
I just mean the Lincoln story that then becomes very powerfully present to the public now.
One of a prominent political scientist, Richard Hofstadter, wrote, the first author of the Lincoln legend and the greatest of the Lincoln dramatists was Lincoln himself.
Now, how do we know that Lincoln was a little different than the portrait that I've just given, than Lincoln's own self-portrait?
Well, Lincoln had a law partner, and this is a guy named Herndon.
He was Lincoln's law partner for many, many years.
Think of it. These two guys work out of a small two-room office in Illinois for years on multiple cases.
They saw each other every day.
So Herndon knew Lincoln very well.
And somebody asked Herndon, how would you describe Abraham Lincoln?
And here is Herndon, quote, His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.
End quote. So what Herndon is saying is that, no, the ordinary guy is just about glad to get through the day.
He collects his paycheck, he goes home to his family, he looks forward to the weekend...
The ordinary guy now, not so different from the ordinary guy then, but, says Herndon, that's not Lincoln.
He's not like that. This guy, even if he gets from A to C or A to D, he next wants to figure out, how do you get to F? How do you get to G? The moment he gets there, he wants to move on.
So Lincoln is...
Lincoln has this great ambition, which of course requires appropriate circumstances in order for him to be able to play on the biggest stage.
So Lincoln recognizes just having the ambition isn't enough.
Having the talent isn't enough.
Having hard work isn't enough.
There has to be also political opportunity.
By the way, another guy who thought very much the same way was Winston Churchill.
Winston Churchill at a young age, I just read a letter that he wrote at the age of 16, and he basically said, I am going to be the savior of London.
I'm going to be the savior of England.
The whole country is going to come under some incredible threat, and I'm going to be the one to save it.
Now think about it. When Churchill wrote that, he was, I believe, 16 years old.
I'm paraphrasing, of course.
It was a long way.
It was not even a long way from World War II. It was a long way from World War I. And it required events to bring about the conditions that Churchill was describing so that he could, in fact, become the savior of England as he turned out to be.
Same with Lincoln. Here's a guy, and this is what Jaffa's getting at.
Even though he's in the sidelines, even though he's in the shadows, even though he portrays himself as kind of an ordinary guy, kind of a nobody, he is preparing himself to perform on a great stage, but a great stage whose lights have not yet been turned on, whose direction he doesn't really know.
He doesn't know the full role that he's going to play.
What can be said is that he's getting himself ready to Play it.
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