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April 3, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:16
WHO THREATENS DEMOCRACY? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep803
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Coming up, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
says Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Trump.
I'll tell you why he's right.
Conservative activist Bill Mitchell joins me.
This is a guy who was for DeSantis, but he now makes the case for why Republicans in general and DeSantis supporters in particular should now unify behind Trump.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Who is a bigger threat to democracy?
Trump or Biden?
Well, I'll start with the latest poll.
This is Wall Street Journal.
Trump leading Biden in six of the seven closest swing states.
Evidently Trump is leading in places like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan.
The only place where Biden has a small lead, well, he leads by three, is in Wisconsin if you make it a three-way race with Trump and Biden and Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.
Now, the topic of being a threat to democracy was raised on CNN by Erin Burnett.
She was talking with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and she goes, you know, do you agree that Trump is a big threat to democracy?
And evidently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. agrees.
But then he makes this statement, which took CNN and in fact has taken the left by surprise.
And now quoting him, he says, President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy.
And then he goes on to say, and the reason for that is that President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech.
to censor his opponent." Now, Aaron Burnett tried to recover from that and come back with, well, Trump tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
But what do we mean here by saying that Trump tried to overturn the results?
What it means is that he questioned the results.
He questioned the election.
He legally challenged the results of the election.
Now, what was the basis of Trump doing that?
Well, we know that in the 2020 election, laws were not followed.
Chain of custody laws weren't kept.
The requirement of having surveillance video on drop boxes, that was not done.
There were massive infusions of Zuckerberg's money.
There were errors in signature verification.
There were dirty voter rolls.
There were invalid votes.
There's of course the evidence presented in 2000 Mules.
So whether or not you think that the outcome would have been changed, this was not, I repeat not, the most secure election in history.
That was just utter propaganda, even at the time it was said, it wasn't true.
And no one ever showed that there was less fraud in 2020 than there was in any previous election.
So we have court decisions, we have affidavits, we have expert testimony, we have Mules.
So Trump was basically saying, what really happened here?
I want to challenge this.
And in fact, it is consistent with democracy that you can publicly question the outcome.
Trump went through the legal processes.
When the legal processes didn't work, Trump exited the White House.
So what is undemocratic or anti-democratic about that?
Here, by the way, is the actress Mia Farrow.
And, you know, I've been a fan of Mia Farrow's acting.
Certainly liked her in Rosemary's Baby.
But here she goes.
The ex-president knew and was told by everyone, even judges he appointed, that he had lost the election.
But he wasn't man enough to admit it.
He was embarrassed, so he lied and tore the nation apart.
Here's my response on X. Let's turn to Biden for a moment, because while with Trump, you're hard-pressed to say, how is Trump a threat to democracy?
You're not hard-pressed to say how Biden is.
Robert F. Kennedy only mentioned the censorship, and that is, let's call that a very partial case for exposing Biden as a threat to democracy.
Let's look at some ways in which Biden threatens democracy.
First of all, there is the censorship.
That's the one that Robert F. Kennedy mentioned, the active engagement with censorship on digital platforms.
And by the way, it's censorship of Biden's political opponents.
It's not censorship across the board.
Number two, Democrats are expanding ways for illegals to vote in elections.
There are all kinds of efforts to do this in various cities.
There are efforts to give illegals driver's licenses, ways to basically get these illegals into the voting process.
And even if illegals didn't vote, they could still have children in America that become citizens.
They still are used for the basis of census counting, and that affects political apportionment.
Democrats explicitly blocked an amendment that would prevent illegals from voting.
So Biden is importing this sort of new electorate with millions of potential Democratic voters in the longer term.
And that's undemocratic.
It's undemocratic because he's doing it by flouting existing laws.
He's doing it essentially just because he can.
And just because the legal mechanisms of trying to stop him move slowly, he says, I can get away with it, so let me do it.
Biden has defended states like Colorado from saying which candidates people can vote for.
Now, that's an attack on democracy.
In fact, what is Biden doing?
He's trying to keep his main political opponent off the ballot.
Talk about an attack on democracy.
Democracy is simply the ability of the people to choose which candidate they want to be president.
Biden's DOJ is trying to lock up his main political opponent ahead of November's election.
Isn't that an attack on democracy?
The Biden administration has been pushing for a renewal of the FISA warrants, which allows them to spy on Americans, including their political opponents.
The Biden blocked...
Biden has been doing his best to rig the Democratic primary.
So in other words, you don't have normal debates.
You don't really have a normal primary.
All the other candidates are institutionally choked off and the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to be neutral among candidates, is clearly basically trying to drag Biden across the finish line and push everybody else out of the race.
How is that consistent with democracy?
And I could go on.
You've got the Biden administration supporting all kinds of anti-democratic efforts in other countries.
Ukraine, for example, they cancel elections.
They go after political opponents.
They lock up journalists.
And what do we do? We here, meaning the Biden administration, we are...
Passing along a huge amount of money to these guys.
And then Biden's DOJ gives a pass and get out of jail free card to Biden, even though they are going after Trump for exactly the same thing, which is, hey, this guy was in possession of classified documents.
You cannot be holding the nation's most important secrets.
Well, Biden was doing it.
They were in his garage. They were all over the place.
And what does the FBI do?
They kind of clean it up.
They take the boxes with all the classified documents dripping out of them.
They reseal the boxes and act like, oh, look, things are looking pretty neat right now.
So this is one way upon another.
And I could go on.
The pro-lifers being arrested, the moms for liberty, the moms at school board meetings, a lot of the stuff that was covered in police state.
So The truth of it is it's not even really close.
Trump poses no threat to democracy, and part of the proof for that was what did Trump do when he was president to go after his political opponents?
Nothing. How many prominent Democrats were arrested and indicted?
None. Trump, there was some talk about lock Hillary up.
Was Hillary locked up during the Trump years?
No, she wasn't.
So Trump poses no threat to democracy, but Biden most emphatically does.
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Guys, the overriding challenge for the Republican Party in 2024, the challenge of coming together of unity.
And this is the topic I want to talk about with our guest.
He is Bill Mitchell.
He is host of Your Voice America.
He's an avid political pundit.
In fact, a very vociferous DeSantis ally, but he's now supporting Donald Trump.
And we're going to talk about that.
You can follow him on X at Mitchell Vii, which is at Mitchell Roman numeral seven.
Bill, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I gotta say, Bill, I first encountered you, I think it was around 2016, in the lead up to 2016.
You were the original Trumpster and just a wonderful Trump promoter and enthusiast.
And let's talk about that first.
What was it about Trump originally that appealed to you when many others, including me, didn't really see what Trump was all about?
Right. You know, I had always wanted a business person to run for the White House, ever since Ross Perot.
And I was a big Ross Perot guy until he went kind of crazy.
And then I was like, I wasn't so much a Ross Perot guy anymore.
But when Trump came down the escalator, I got very excited because I really wasn't into anybody in the race so far.
Maybe Ted Cruz, but I wasn't really following it that closely.
But when Trump announced, I said to myself, wait a minute, we can have a really strong business person who can come out there and fight You know, Trump coined the term, I am your voice.
He became our self-actualization because for decades, we've been wanting to stand up to the left, stand up to the Democrats, stand up to the establishment, but we didn't have the voice.
We didn't have the ability to do that.
And so Trump was saying and doing the things in front of these people that we would say and do if we were there.
And so he became our voice.
He became our self-actualization.
And this is why I believe people have had such a hard time leaving Trump behind, despite some of the voibles and the missteps and so on and so forth, because he is us.
We don't leave ourselves. And as their political self-actualization, he represents their political life, their political thinking.
So how can they walk away from him?
So I think that's what has kept him so strong with people.
He's more than just a man.
He's a symbol at this point for standing up to the left.
And people like the toughness.
You know, sometimes the drama gets on my last nerve because I have to, as a pundit, I've got to, you know, spin it, right?
But, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, in fiber country, they like that.
You know, this guy is like the WWF version of a president.
This guy is like the MMA version of a president.
He's a brawler. And they like that about him.
So that's why I initially joined Trump.
And I was nobody in politics before that.
Nobody ever heard of me before. But my account blew up and so on and so forth.
And, you know, here I am sitting talking to the great Dinesh D'Souza today because all that happened.
So it's an amazing journey.
So Bill, Trump comes in and he has a first term, 2016 to 2020.
How did he perform in the wake of your expectations?
Did he deliver the goods?
What was it that you liked about the Trump presidency?
And what was it that you didn't like about it?
Well, you know, we always hear from the left and the Democrats and the media that, you know, Trump is an election denier.
The MAGA people are election deniers.
This is a new term they coined.
But they were the original election deniers.
You know, they were like, Trump is not my president.
They did the whole fake Russiagate thing.
You know, he's illegitimate, so on and so forth.
Letitia James in New York ran on the fact, saying, Trump is illegitimate.
I'm going to get this guy. So they were the original election deniers, but they didn't call it that.
At the time, they just said, well, we're just standing up for what we think is right.
Okay. Democrats are always having fun with words.
But what I liked so much about Trump's first term was that he was going in there.
You know, he was trying to build the wall.
He was making our energy sector stronger.
He was very strong on the international stage.
You know, we didn't have a lot of new wars and so on and so forth under Trump.
So he really presented a strong image.
He was a great brand guy.
He was a great guy for the brand of America.
And I really liked that about him.
Some of the things I didn't like were some of the people he hired and so on and so forth.
But I understand why he did that.
Because when he joined as the president, I think that it was actually a humility move that he didn't want to come in there and be the brash young guy in the country club who's a scratch golfer and beats all the older guys and humiliates them.
He wanted to come in and say, listen, I'm willing to work across the aisle.
I'll work with the establishment.
I'll work with the Democrats. You know, the fact that he gave Hillary a pass.
On a dining room after saying, lock her up.
These were all attempts to hand out the olive branch to the other side to build coalitions.
For his agenda, unfortunately, I think he was not used to dealing with government people, and he underestimated how deep the depravity and the corruption was in D.C., and he got some people in his organization that were really working against him and making things difficult.
So he faced Russiagate, he faced Mitch McConnell, he faced Paul Ryan, he faced other people in his own organizations that were working against him.
So considering he faced all that, his first three years were actually quite remarkable.
As far as being a success, and of course, COVID, you know, I mean, who can deal with that?
It's all very obvious in retrospect what we should have done.
But when you're in the moment, you know, we didn't know if this was going to be the Spanish flu, 2.0.
We didn't know if hundreds of millions were going to die.
You know, and Trump, I think, with rushing the vaccine through, although in retrospect, we think that was unwise, at the moment, he's like, I just want to save lives.
And he had, you know, Fauci, who was the top guy in the field, whispering in his ear, you need to do this.
He had, you know, Burks and all these people.
So I can understand in the moment why he did that, although, you know, we're not happy about it in retrospect.
So I'd say that his first three years, I was pretty happy with.
I wish that he was more of a student of legislation.
You know, they say that he doesn't like to sit down and read through a 40-page position paper.
He likes somebody to give him Cliff Notes Bergen.
You know, Trump is not a legislative wonk.
He just is not. He is a brand guy.
If I had to compare him, I was a headhunter for 30 years, so I'll make this corporate comparison.
If I had to compare him to a corporate CEO versus a president, the CEO doesn't run the day-to-day operations.
They're just the brand person.
They're the person that stands on the hill, says that away.
They come up with the big ideas.
They negotiate the big deals and so on and so forth.
Trump is more of the brand guy, more of the CEO. Whereas in the corporate world, the president runs the day-to-day operations of the various divisions and so on and so forth.
So I think that when Trump is doing something he enjoys, he has really brilliance.
He's a savant when he's doing something he enjoys.
But with something that bores him, like the day-to-day operations and hiring people and so on and so forth, I think he tends to push those off and you don't tap into that brilliant side of his nature.
So that's one of the reasons why, and I'll talk about it a little bit later, I have somebody else in mind as his potential VP because that person could be the day-to-day operations person and let Trump be the CEO. I mean, Bill, this is very interesting stuff.
And I think in this respect, Trump actually resembles Reagan.
Reagan wasn't a detailed guy.
I don't think you could give Reagan a 100-page piece of legislation and expect him to sort of work his way through it.
Reagan looked at the larger picture and relied on other people to carry out...
his vision. In fact, I think Peggy Noonan said at one point that even when Reagan wasn't around, the idea of Reagan ruled. In other words, those of us who worked for Reagan, we actually didn't need Reagan saying do this because we actually knew what Reagan would do and Reagan's vision kind of carried us through. Now, I think the big difference, however, is this and that is that Reagan could count on pretty rock solid support from the
Republican side.
Trump could not. Trump had deadly enemies in his own party.
and moreover i think in the reagan era many of us viscerally trusted certain institutions that we thought of as conservative so we didn't trust the Right. Right. Probably pretty dismaying for Trump to learn,
and this was a painful lesson, that his own FBI and his own DOJ is out to get him.
And that John Kelly, although coming from the military, might be working to subvert him in the White House.
And that if he goes to Anthony Fauci in a medical crisis and says, what do we do?
He can't rely on uncontaminated advice.
So this must have been...
This must have been painful for Trump, as I think it would be painful for anybody, any of us in that position.
Yeah, one of the things that people don't understand about leaders is that they very rarely have complete information when they make a decision.
You're lucky if you have 30% of the data when you make a decision.
So it's pretty much 30% data and 70% gut.
And so, you know, Trump is great at leading with boldness.
He's very good at going out there.
And then, you know, what I would recommend for him to do in his second term, better than what he did in the first term, he tend to stick to his guns, double, triple, quadruple down.
I think that he needs to have a little bit of humility and he needs to learn how to tack into the wind.
You know, not everybody understands what that means.
That's a sailing term. That means that you can actually sail forward.
Into a wind that's blowing against you.
By turning the sails in such a way that you've got the pressure against the rudder and the wind blowing, and it pushes you against the water back and forth, and you tack back and forth, and you move forward that way.
I think he needs to be better at that.
I think if he makes a bad decision, he needs to say, fine, you know, this was not what we thought it was, and then we're going to go this direction.
I think he will get a lot of respect from people if he does that.
So that's one way I think he can grow in his second term, and that's one of the things that I'm praying for.
And I said this, you know, all along, that if the guy that I want to win the nomination doesn't win, that's fine.
I'm going to pray for the other guy.
God will fix some of these little things, knock some of these rough edges off so we can be more successful.
Because, you know, once you nominate your person, that's it.
You know, there's not a plan B to go with.
You either get your person or you get Joe Biden.
And in my mind, we just can't have Joe Biden.
We'll be right back with Bill Mitchell to talk about DeSantis and to talk about why he finally came back to Trump.
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I'm back with Bill Mitchell, host of Your Voice America.
You can follow him on x at Mitchell, V-I-I, which is at Mitchell, Roman numeral seven.
Billy, we're talking about Trump.
Let's pivot to DeSantis.
And there were many people who, many of the Trumpsters who treated you as a heretic, and they were They were very, very angry that you went for DeSantis.
I frankly can understand why you went for DeSantis.
You looked at the qualities of DeSantis, and you saw that there was a lot of good things that he not only said, but he actually did.
Let's talk about what you saw as DeSantis' greatest strengths.
But then I also want to ask you why it is that this guy, this political star in Florida, did Didn't really get off the ground in the presidential race.
So let's start by talking about what is it that appealed most to you about DeSantis?
Well, to me, DeSantis was like Trump without the drama.
You know, I'm going to get the full-blown MAGA agenda.
You know, the things that we're missing in Trump, the missing pieces, you know, not being strong legislatively, so on and so forth.
I mean, DeSantis is a full-blown legislative walk.
I mean, the guy just reads, you know, books this thick on legislation.
He loves that sort of thing.
So you know that DeSantis was going to be great at crafting legislation.
You know that he's going to be great at whipping Congress.
He's also one of Congress's own.
So he's not going to be like that brash young kid that goes to the country club.
He's going to go to Congress. He's like, listen, I served three terms with you guys.
You know me, okay? So he's going to have more of an open door there.
I like that. I like that he could serve two terms.
I like that he had a young, attractive family.
And there wasn't all these indictments and so on and so forth coming.
So it just seemed like the low drama approached this whole sort of thing.
So on paper, he was perfect.
And my initial desire was not for him to be the candidate over Trump.
My initial desire was for Trump to be the candidate and then DeSantis to be his VP. To me, that was my plan A. But You know, Trump being Trump, when DeSantis didn't endorse him, Trump came out with the claws, with the teeth, against DeSantis and called him a globalist and establishment, which are preposterous, you know?
Folks, this is what Trump does, okay?
He diminishes his opponent with this name calling and all this sort of thing.
And you may not like it, but you can't deny that it's effective, okay?
So he does this. And so that kind of made me mad because I really liked and respected DeSantis.
And so this is when I sort of came out hard against Trump and I made a conscious decision.
I said, listen, You know, am I going to go Mr.
Rogers here? Am I going to go Clint Eastwood here?
Am I going to play both ends against the middle and be nice to Trump and nice to Santas?
Or am I going to give back to Trump as hard as he's giving it to us, you know?
And I made the decision to give back as hard.
That was not a wise decision.
That was not as wise. I should have been more of a uniter.
I should have promoted both candidates and the positives of both candidates.
And then say, may the best man win.
Because, you know, it's like the old story about pushing or pulling on a rope.
You know, if you have a long rope and you push on the rope, what's going to happen?
Nothing happens. The rope just curls up.
But if you pull on it, you can draw people to you.
And I think that, in essence, by going so hard against Trump, I wasn't really attracting people to the stands.
I was just making Trump supporters hate me.
Now, Bill, let me ask you this about Trump.
Do you think that the...
I can think of two possible explanations for why the Trump-Desantis, which I think most political pundits looking at it objectively would have to say, this is going to be very close between these two guys, because they both have strengths.
But the reason it wasn't so close, it seems to me, is one of two explanations.
I want to know which one you think it is.
The first one is...
That Trump just is this kind of, he's this sort of larger than life figure.
He's this sort of mega cultural phenomenon.
And whatever you say about DeSantis, nice guy, very articulate, very effective, but he's not that.
In other words, if DeSantis walks into a ballroom, a jolt of electricity doesn't go through the ballroom, but it does with Trump.
That's one possibility.
The other possibility has to do with a more substantive issue, which is the fact Fairly widespread belief on the Republican side that Trump really won the 2020 election.
And it follows from that, that if Trump really won, he should be in the White House now.
This should be his second term.
And so the Republicans go, listen, whatever Trump's flaws, and all candidates have flaws, and the flaws may even be pretty big— He deserves a second shot because he was denied a legitimate possession of the White House.
Which of these two factors, or maybe it's both, do you think was critical for the Republicans really getting behind Trump?
Yeah, you know, Republicans have a very strong sense of justice.
And so the two-tier justice that we see all the time is extremely offensive to us.
And so we felt like, you know, 2020 was an example of two-tier justice.
Now, Biden was polling ahead of Trump, and it was reasonable that Biden might have beaten Trump, but a lot of things seemed very strange.
A lot of statistics didn't add up.
You know, Biden lost 17 out of 18 Bellwether counties.
He lost Ohio and Iowa and Florida.
No presidential winner has ever lost all those, and so on and so forth.
Okay, so these things bothered us, and many of us felt like Trump had been ripped off, like a great injustice had been done to him.
And so, people forget that in the early primaries, I believe before DeSantis even announced, that DeSantis was rising in the polls.
He was closing in on Trump very quickly, and then what happened?
The Bragg indictment happened.
And all of a sudden, the entire thing turned around, and Trump started to skyrocket, and DeSantis fell down.
Why is that? Because that Bragg indictment and these following indictments reminded people of this two-tier justice And Trump went from just being a man that might have some flaws here and there to being a symbol.
He became a symbol again.
He became our voice.
And it's like, wait a minute. You know, we're not going to let him do this to this guy.
Okay, this is unfair. He got ripped off the first time.
They're trying to rip him off again.
We're going to stand about behind him.
We're going to rally the wagons around this guy.
And so I think that happened.
I think there's another layer to it as well.
is that DeSantis, I believe, made a conscious effort initially to be the nice guy in this race.
He wanted to be the opposite of Trump, be the low drama guy, the antithesis of Trump. And so he had his wife on the stage with him, he had the kids on the stage with him. It was a very much homegrown Rogers sort of thing. But I think what DeSantis underestimated was, there's a large segment of the MAGA base that loves the Clint Eastwood and Trump, okay?
They love that tough guy in your face, go ahead and make my day sort of thing.
And I think that a lot of these people, when they first were a little bit upset with Trump on the drama, and they said, yeah, I'm going to give a look at DeSantis.
And then DeSantis came out and he just wasn't a brawler.
You know, he wasn't tough.
He was too nice. He was trying to be too, you know, too diplomatic and so on and so forth.
These people are like, no, that's not what I want.
That's not my guy. And then when the indictments came out, that just accentuated it.
So, you know, you only get one chance with these people to make a first impression.
And he just, you know, DeSantis, I think, underestimated that part that people really liked and they wanted that about him.
So, You know, this is how it turned out.
I mean, they spent over $100 million in Iowa and got, what, 23,000 votes?
Yeah, well, it wasn't good.
So I think that people just decided, yeah, Trump deserves another bite at the apple, and we're going to give it to him, and we're going to hope he does a few things better than he did before.
But he's basically, you know, our guy, our brand, our MAGA brand.
And I think that that's why he stood behind him, and I think that's why the Sanders campaign didn't work out.
Bill, you've been championing the fact that, listen, like it or not, Trump is our nominee.
And so like it or not, Republicans, even if you were for another candidate, and even if you were for DeSantis, it's kind of time to come home for Trump.
And I take it that this is based upon the simple, mature political calculation that the choice is going to be between Trump and Biden.
And so even if you think Trump has got, you know, let's say you think Trump is a bad guy.
or evil to the other guy who's a lot worse. And so politics is a choice between the options that are actually on the table. But I think that beyond that you're making a second point and this is the point I want to ask you to elaborate and that is that Trump has an opportunity with his vice presidential pick to pick DeSantis or to pick somebody like DeSantis.
So make the case for why DeSantis, even though there's been some skirmishing and so on between the two guys, that there might be a way.
What would DeSantis bring to the table if Trump were to say, all right, let's put all this behind me.
DeSantis is out of the race.
He's endorsed me. He's going to be my VP nominee.
Why would that be such a great idea?
Yeah, to answer your first question, the reason why I went over to Trump is very obvious.
We're faced with a binary choice.
You know, if the Titanic has gone down, I'm freezing in the water, I'm about to drown, and a lifeboat comes by and there's one seat left, I'm not going to complain about the color of the upholstery on the seats, okay?
I'm just going to get in the lifeboat.
And that's where we are right now.
We can't endure another four years of Joe Biden because what's going to happen is if Joe Biden wins and he wins the Senate, they're going to end the filibuster.
You just need a straight-up vote to end the filibuster.
They're going to end the filibuster.
They're going to pack the Supreme Court and have 13 Supreme Court justices.
They're going to be mostly liberals, so they'll take over the Supreme Court.
They're going to give the vote to illegals.
They're going to pass election laws like they have in California and make them federal.
And people say, oh, wait, election laws are a state.
It's like you need to read the Constitution because election laws are states until the federal says, no, this is the new rule.
And then it's up to the federal government on what the election laws are.
So they could change America so much that we could never get back to the White House.
And what I've been saying to my friends on the DeSantis side is if you want DeSantis to have a real shot at this in 2028, and I know you do, you need to vote for Trump now because if Biden is president again and he wins the House, he wins the Senate, DeSantis may never even get a chance to get up to the plate in 2028.
Okay, now, with regards to the question of DeSantis being the vice president.
Now, I know that DeSantis has said, I have no interest in being vice president.
Well, they always say that, you know.
I mean, in 2021, he was on Hannity, and Hannity said, are you going to run for, you know, president?
He said, no, that's not on our plans.
We're not going to do that. You know, these are not questions of facts.
These are questions of opinion.
And opinion changes as the facts change.
And so he could say, yeah, I'm not going to run for vice president.
But if something happens and Trump comes to him in a private meeting and says, listen, if I bring you on as VP, I'm going to let you run the day-to-day shop.
I'm going to let you whip Congress. I'm going to let you, you know, construct legislation and so on and so forth.
Just so you won't just be one of these, you know, vice president that kisses babies and goes to, you know, Funerals of foreign dignitaries, okay, but a really meaningful vice presidency.
I think that Sanders would be very hard pressed not to take that up.
And to me, again, it's the CEO and the president.
Trump, if he picks a Sanders, Trump can be free.
To be out there, be the brand guy, do the deals, okay?
Be the strong vision for America.
These are the things that he loves, that he's best at.
And to hand off the day-to-day operations to somebody who's very good at that, And one of the best things about that is, like today, take somebody like Vivek.
Vivek, obviously a sharp guy, but he's too dynamic.
He's too, you know, he's too charismatic.
Trump is never going to pick somebody like that because he's going to overshadow Trump.
But DeSantis, one of his greatest points in this is he's just not a very charismatic guy.
He's a great guy, but he's, you know, he's kind of like Trump is like the Fonz and DeSantis is like Richie Cunningham.
Okay. That's a good one.
Richie Cunningham was a great guy, but nobody tuned in to Happy Days every week to watch Richie Cunningham.
They tuned in to watch the Fonz.
So Trump can be the Fonz. DeSantis can be Richie Cunningham.
And then DeSantis can build all those alliances and so on and so forth and build up his team and so on and so forth so that in 2028, when Trump...
It's done. The Sanders can waltz right into the White House and we have 12 solid years of really conservative quality governance.
So to me, that's what I think is going to could happen.
And, you know, people are like, oh, Trump's going to pick this person.
Trump's not going to pick anybody until about a week before the convention.
You know, he might try to head fakey, but, you know, why pick early?
Just wait until the last possible minute.
So I think that we'll see what happens on that.
I think DeSantis would be an outstanding choice.
And, you know, we've seen all these polls coming up.
And poll after poll after poll.
People are like, who do you want Trump's VP to be?
People say, DeSantis. And, you know, right now, the Republican Party is very divided.
There's no way we can win.
And, you know, in November, if we go into his body as this, if you put Trump in the same ticket, that is the most unifying ticket you could possibly have.
And we could really do very well with that ticket.
So that's what I want. We'll see what we'll see what turns out.
But that's what I want. Bill, very interesting stuff.
And thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. Sure, Dinesh.
I'm continuing my discussion of Abraham Lincoln.
We're working our way through Harry Jaffa's book Crisis of the House Divided.
We're about two thirds of the way through so not all that much more to go.
And we're talking now about the combined effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established Douglas' doctrine of popular sovereignty, that, and also the Dred Scott decision.
The two things went hand in hand.
And in fact, they worked toward kind of the same goal.
You can see this because what did the Kansas-Nebraska Act do?
It superseded the Missouri Compromise by essentially establishing both in the North and the South the idea of popular sovereignty.
At least it did so for all the territories.
And then along comes the Dred Scott decision, which says that Congress doesn't have any power to regulate slavery in the territories.
So, both the Douglas move and the decision by Taney's Supreme Court have the effect of allowing slavery in all the territories.
Territories north of the Mason-Dixon line and territories south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Now, we have to step back, kind of put ourselves into a...
Not just the 19th century historical mode, but also the 18th century historical mode to realize how extreme, how radical the Dred Scott decision is.
Let's go back to the time right after the American founding.
The founders, or at least right after the founders, a Congress mostly made up of founders.
Passes the famous Northwest Ordinance.
Now, what does a Northwest Ordinance do?
It takes the territories in the Northwest.
Many of them, by the way, not part of the United States.
They're not states yet.
These are territories. And it outlaws slavery in the territorial Northwest.
So, here is Congress acting to outlaw slavery in the territories.
Now, Abraham Lincoln himself talked about this, and he says the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was drafted by Jefferson.
It was signed off on by virtually all the living founders at the time.
It passed with overwhelming support.
And so here comes the Supreme Court in the 1850s to say Congress has no power to regulate slavery in the territories.
That would invalidate the whole Northwest Ordinance.
That would say that the founders themselves didn't understand the Constitution that they wrote.
So, Lincoln is here highlighting the sort of absolute preposterousness of this Supreme Court ruling.
He's essentially saying, no, you Tawney are acting like you're following the wishes of the founders, but you are engaging in what, I guess today, this was not a phrase in Lincoln's time, we would call radical judicial activism.
You're restricting Congress in a way that Congress is never intended to be restricted under the Constitution.
Here's the second point.
The Dred Scott decision was only the second decision where the Supreme Court invalidated an act of Congress.
And the act of Congress here, by the way, is the Missouri Compromise, which had been passed around 1820.
And essentially what Justice Taney and the Dred Scott Court said is the Missouri Compromise is not only superseded, it's unconstitutional.
And the first time that the Supreme Court invalidated an act of Congress goes all the way back to Marbury v.
Madison. If you take constitutional law in college, this is like the first case you study.
And the decision was written by the famous Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.
Now, Marshall wasn't the first Supreme Court justice.
I believe he was the third.
But very early in the days of the Supreme Court, You had this landmark Marbury v.
Madison ruling, and I believe 1803 was Marbury v.
Madison. So from 1803 all the way to the 1850s, Congress had never in that half century overturned an act of Congress until the Dred Scott decision.
The radicalism of the Dred Scott decision can also be seen in its effect upon the Republican Party.
Now, the Republican Party was founded in 1854.
It was founded because the, well, the Whig Party, which was the main rival to the Democrats, was starting to erode, was starting to collapse.
Partly it was because of a clash between the Northern and the Southern Whigs.
And so a new party, there was room for a new party to come along.
And that new party was the Republican Party.
Now, the Republican Party ran in the election of 1856 and came surprisingly close.
It came surprisingly close, but it lost and the Democrat, Buchanan, became the president.
But the reason the Republican Party lost is that the Whig still existed.
And there was also the Know-Nothing Party.
And so the Whig Party took some votes and the Know-Nothing Party took some votes.
But it was very clear, even in 1856, that as the Whig Party dissolved and as the Know-Nothing Party sort of blended into the Republican Party, the Republican Party had the votes to win the 1860 election.
So the Republican Party was sort of the favorite in the 1860 election.
Now, what was the main platform of the Republican Party?
Very simply, to stop the spread of slavery into the territories.
And who was going to do that?
Congress. So the Republican Party was based upon the platform.
This was the central plank of the Republican platform in 1860.
In fact, it's not an exaggeration to say the Republicans virtually ran as a one-issue party.
There were other issues.
It wasn't, strictly speaking, the sole issue, but this was the decisive issue.
So the Republican Party is running on the platform that slavery can continue to exist in the southern states because the founders let it there.
And so the Republicans were like, we're not going to be redoing the work of the founders.
However, in the new territories, Congress must and should act.
And we, if elected, will act to stop slavery in the territories.
Now... Let's come back to the Dred Scott decision.
The Dred Scott decision is saying Congress does not have the power to do this.
So what is the Dred Scott decision saying?
That the entire platform of the Republican Party is unconstitutional.
That even if the Republican Party were to be elected, it cannot do what it is running on, because what it is running on is against the Constitution.
So I mentioned these two things, the Northwest Ordinance and the sort of Republican platform to show that the Dred Scott decision was, well, it was a very extreme and radical decision in its implications.
And it, of course, far from calming things down, it ramped them up.
It actually increased the aggression of the Republican Party against the court.
And in fact, very interestingly, because we talk now about the Supreme Court and the effect of the Supreme Court, Lincoln's view about the Dred Scott decision was very interesting.
Lincoln said, basically, that if I'm elected...
I'm not going to be really respecting this decision.
Now, Lincoln didn't say it that way, but this is what Lincoln said.
He goes, a Supreme Court decision is valid in the case that it adjudicates.
So Dred Scott was a slave who was claiming that he was free by virtue of having gone to a free state, and the Supreme Court said, no, sorry, Dred Scott, you're still a slave.
And Lincoln goes, all right, we're going to abide by the decision, and that means that Dred Scott is still a slave.
But the broader implication of the decision, says Lincoln, that's not exclusively up to the Supreme Court.
Where does it say in the Constitution itself that the Supreme Court is the sole arbiter of what the Constitution means?
Who's to say that Congress doesn't have a say in that?
Who's to say that the President doesn't have a say in that?
Now today, this opinion of Lincoln would be considered kind of out of bounds.
But at the time of the Civil War, or in the period leading up to the Civil War, this was Lincoln's position.
And we come back to the fact that Lincoln is issuing a warning in the...
In the late 1850s that slavery is kind of on the loose.
Slavery is no longer confined to the south.
It wants to make its way into the territories.
And then using the idea of the slave owner who goes north into the free states...
What the Southern Democrats really want is they want slavery to be legal throughout the country.
In other words, they want to be able to take their slaves to Massachusetts and New York and Maine and Illinois, and they want those states, whether they want to or not, whether they like it or not, to be constitutionally required to We're good to go.
Found that the Dred Scott decision went too far.
So we'll find as these debates go on that you find Douglass, with time, becoming very uneasy about the Dred Scott decision because the Dred Scott decision in some ways undermined even Douglass' own doctrine of popular sovereignty.
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