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June 11, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BORDER FIASCO Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep851
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Coming up, I'll discuss the Hunter Biden guilty verdict.
I also want to talk about the various issues that give rise to political infighting on the right.
I want to show how this can be avoided.
John Gwynn, a retired U.S. Border Patrol division chief, joins me.
We're going to talk about the utter inadequacy and, in fact, hypocrisy of Biden's new executive order on the border.
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.
We just got a verdict in the Hunter Biden trial.
the Hunter Biden trial.
This is Hunter Biden on trial for lying about his possession of a firearm.
By the way, a relatively minor charge.
Why? Because here's Hunter Biden involved in massive corruption schemes involving multiple members of his family Including and probably headed by Joe Biden.
All of that is pushed to the side.
So there are some people who think, and there's good reason to think, that this is...
This is a sort of a slap on the wrist type of prosecution, given how corrupt Hunter Biden is and given how corrupt this whole family is.
It's almost a way of saying, we'll go after Hunter so we can leave Joe out of it.
But nevertheless, it is a charge, and it is a charge that is legally serious.
It's a felony. It carries, potentially, a severe prison sentence.
And Debbie and I were talking about how this is likely to go.
We had seen very troubling reports about the fact that jurors seem to be very sympathetic to Hunter Biden.
They were very much coming out of the sort of Delaware country in which, of course, Joe Biden has reigned as a kind of kingpin for decades.
So this morning, Debbie was like, well, you know, I'm expecting an acquittal or a hung jury.
I'm not expecting a conviction.
However, the case against Hunter Biden was always absolutely cut and dry.
Was he in possession of a weapon?
Yes. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In fact, I believe it was Halle Biden who had testified throwing the gun into some sort of a dumpster.
So there was a gun. It was in their possession.
They were trying to, quote, get rid of it.
And so there was a gun.
And then you have the form.
And Hunter Biden is clearly asked about it, about the gun.
And he clearly lies on the form.
So... It's a...
This is not a case with a lot of ambiguity.
This is not a case where you gotta really think through, did he really do it?
Yes, he did it. And it looks like the jury recognized that...
That there's no other way to go here.
I mean, I guess you could go with jury nullification.
Namely, we like Hunter Biden.
We don't want to do anything to hurt the Biden family.
We don't care what the law says.
Juries can do that.
But in general, they don't.
And here they haven't.
Now, it still remains to be seen what's going to happen.
I suspect that Hunter Biden's penalty is not going to be all that severe.
And if it does happen to be severe, the question is, will Joe Biden pardon him?
Now, if Joe Biden pardons Hunter Biden, I think that the political fallout will be bad for him.
Just because it'll be obvious.
This is a guy who's like, no one's above the law.
We'll have to hold Trump accountable to the full extent of the law.
Oh, my son is found guilty.
Pardon. So...
So this will not really work politically.
It'll probably be a wound for Joe Biden, but it might be a wound that he's willing to endure.
I mean, let's think about it. Hunter Biden is somebody...
First of all, he seems to admire Hunter Biden.
I mean, he's literally said Hunter Biden is the most intelligent man he's ever met, which...
I mean, who knows?
But Joe is not going to want to have Hunter Biden behind bars.
I think that's fair to say.
So he's going to carefully weigh what the political fallout might be.
All right. Let me move on to the topic I had planned to talk about before the news came through, which is just I wanted to make a comment about conservative infighting.
Because a lot of this is going on.
I can think of three examples right off the top of my head.
All the infighting in the Daily Wire over Candace Owens, which has not subsided, by the way.
There's still new revelations about this and that.
Candace now claims that the Daily Wire had a spy who was trying to trap her into saying certain things and secretly recording her.
Then you've got the...
You had a very acrimonious recent combat between Laura Loomer.
Well, Laura Loomer's had combat with several people, but I'm specifically thinking of Dana Lash.
I don't even know what that one was all about, but I do know it devolved into very vicious ad hominem in which Laura Loomer was making comments about Dana Lash's husband and Dana Lash was lashing back.
And then more recently still, the...
The very acerbic exchanges between, on the one hand, some of the FBI whistleblowers, including Kyle Serafin, Garrett O'Boyle, Steve Friend, but also a lawyer involved in the J6 proceedings.
He goes by the nickname of Ship.
He shipwrecked crew on X. That's his handle.
And all of them on the one hand and Julie Kelly on the other.
Now, in general, what I want to say is that there are legitimate disagreements that crop up on the right.
So, for example, the argument on the Julie Kelly front has to do with whether or not the lethal force instruction in the FBI's papers, was it a standard instruction, no big deal, routinely used by the FBI, or was there something anomalous about it?
Now, With regard to the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Now, obviously, both sides have a point.
The point being made by the FBI guys is that, hey, listen, this is something that appears pretty much with any raid.
It's just part of the paperwork.
It's pre-printed.
You don't expect the ordinary FBI agent who sees this on every single raid instruction to go to a supervisor and go, why is this over here?
Let's reconsider this policy.
But on the other hand, Julie Kelly's point is that this was not an ordinary circumstance.
Nobody's saying that the ordinary FBI agent needs to do anything.
But this is a raid approved by Merrick Garland, by the DOJ at the highest level.
Wouldn't they have said, hey, listen, we normally have a lethal force instruction, but this is the former president.
We need to remove that because we're not dealing with a normal circumstance at all.
We have the Secret Service over there, the potential for escalation.
So my point is not even that they can't be disagreements because obviously...
Even in a party that wants unity going into the election, people do disagree.
The issue really isn't whether you disagree.
It's the tone of the disagreement.
So the tone of the disagreement very often, and I see this even in the attacks on Julie Kelly, Julie doesn't know what she's talking about.
She used to be a food blogger.
She should stay in her own lane.
None of this is really even necessary.
Julie Kelly has been doing extremely good work.
She's in... In the courtroom again and again, she reads all the briefs, she reports on them, she's given us a fuller picture of the January 6th cases than really anyone else, and this is not a well-reported topic.
So one should keep the appreciation of that in sight, and even if you have a disagreement about this particular instruction on an FBI document, there's no reason to go after Julie Kelly.
I think that's what I'm getting at.
Let's save our fire for the other side.
Let's disagree with our own side if we have to, but do it in a collegial and respectful way.
Let's recognize, after all, not only that we're all on the same team, that's obvious, but it's also the case that we're dealing with a formidable opposition at a time when the country itself hangs in the balance.
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There is a very...
A sharp vein of panic running through the left as we approach the 2024 election.
Now look, this is not an election I'm taking for granted.
I'm not one of these guys who goes, oh, Trump's got it in the bag.
Not at all. Debbie is actually more pessimistic than me.
She's like, well, you know, if I had to bet today, just because of the determination of the left, the resources of the left, the cheating of the left, I'm not sure that Trump would make it if it were right now, even though Trump is leading in the polls in all the swing states.
But nevertheless, the left likes to have elections...
To be a foregone conclusion.
And they had the shock of their lifetimes in 2016 when even though every poll had Hillary Clinton decisively ahead, Trump won the election.
In 2020, Trump was behind and substantially behind in every single poll.
Not once in the duration of that election was Trump actually leading.
But he is leading now.
And so I was not surprised to see an article.
This is in a London publication.
It's The Independent.
And it's written by a guy who used to be a fairly high up guy in the trust and safety division of Twitter, of X.
His name is Mark Burrows.
And essentially he's whining that he no longer has the same kind of influence that he once had and other people like him had to control the debate, to essentially regulate the discourse leading into the election.
Now, he doesn't see it this way.
He doesn't put it this way.
Here's the title of the article. Fake news on social media is the crisis we're all ignoring.
Trust me, I worked for Twitter.
First of all, we don't trust him.
What he really means, decoded.
You have to translate all these articles these days.
What he really means is...
That in 2020, we at Twitter had a chance to regulate the debate, suppress information we don't like, and help Biden win the election.
Or help Biden get across the finishing point.
Whether or not Biden won the election is a whole different issue.
However, he can't say that.
He can't say, we want to regulate political discourse to our own benefit.
And so he's got to frame it as, quote, separating the truth from the lies.
So... The pompous opening line of this, separating the truth from the lies on social media will be a defining challenge of our time.
My first question is, why are you the person to do it?
In other words, granted that there are people in any forum, whether it's the New York Times or CBS News or social media, there are people who say false things.
They say things that are not true.
But who appointed this guy to be the guardian of discourse?
Why don't I do it? Appoint me.
I'll separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the lies.
And so, there is an assumption here that, A, there is a sharp line, a clear line distinguishing truth from fiction, and that, by and large, a committee of leftists, of the ilk of this guy, Mark Burroughs, are the trustworthy authorities To do this in a politically fair and neutral way.
This is where I think the whole thing becomes a complete joke.
And yet, Burroughs doesn't think it's a joke, and he continues with the same solemnities.
Back when I worked at Twitter in the days before Elon Musk, we took the threat of misinformation incredibly seriously.
Oh really? So let's test that thesis.
They took the threat of misinformation seriously.
So I want to cite a piece of misinformation being put out by the head of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky.
Namely, her statement that if you take the vaccine, you cannot get COVID and you cannot transmit COVID. My simple question is, was her statement censored on X? Because it clearly represents flagrant misinformation.
The answer? No.
She was never censored.
She was never censored on X. She was never censored on YouTube.
She was never censored on Meta or Facebook.
She was never censored anywhere.
And therefore, right there, the we took the threat of misinformation incredibly seriously is a complete joke.
Then he goes on to say, and very disturbingly, we worked with Reuters and Associated Press to debunk rapidly growing and unreliable stories.
Now, these are two of the most flagrantly left-wing outlets, Reuters and AP. AP's fact-checkers are themselves brazen liars.
These are people who essentially convert argument into so-called fact-checking.
I've seen this with my own films, but you can see this in so many different contexts.
They twist things.
If Joe Biden says something flagrantly false, they'll rank it true.
They'll say it because when you look at the context, you can clearly see what he meant to say.
So even though Joe Biden said one thing, he actually meant another thing.
This kind of forgiving approach is never taken toward anybody on the right.
And then this guy, Mark Burroughs, actually goes on to say, we coined the term pre-bunk.
So you debunk a story.
You pre-bunk a story before it even really spreads.
You're pre-bunking it.
So a story has not even gotten out there.
It's not viral. No one's actually paying any attention to it.
But you're like, I'm going to identify this story as a potential source of misinformation.
I'm going to shut it down.
When needless to say, this guy is really upset with Elon Musk.
He goes, first of all, he says, my team was the first to be cut when Musk took over Twitter.
Great. He also says, quote, he undid years of work.
Since we know what this guy means by work, the undoing of years of work is excellent.
Wiping out or reducing those areas of the company that dealt with misinformation, disbanding the trust and safety team.
So you can see this is all great stuff by Elon Musk.
And then this guy Burroughs goes on to say that X is the social media platform platform.
With the highest disinformation rate.
In other words, it is a truly...
It's much more of a free speech platform.
People can say whatever they think.
Let's remember that these guys, they frequently label as misinformation nothing more than opinion that they don't like.
So that's what he means. It's full of misinformation, meaning the right...
And Republicans and conservatives are also allowed to speak.
And then he goes on to say that X is perhaps the most influential of all the platforms.
That's why he's so disturbed.
And I think he's particularly disturbed.
And he concludes the article by basically saying that, listen, as we go into the 2024 election, quote,"...the potential for turbocharging fake news is terrifying." So the left is terrified.
They're not terrified of misinformation per se.
They put out plenty of misinformation from their side.
All of that is normally allowed.
They're terrified of information coming out from the other side.
They're just as terrified of true information from the right as they are of false information.
So I'm actually glad to see the alarm, the quivers, the panic, because it suggests to me that these guys are...
We are recognizing that even one free speech platform out of five, out of six, nevertheless, it does have an effect.
Elon Musk is having an effect.
And this effect, we'll have to wait for the results of the 2024 election to see if this factor, this free speech factor proves to be decisive.
But I think there's a good possibility that it will be.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, with the election approaching, I'd like to invite you to check out my locals channel and consider becoming a monthly or an annual subscriber.
It's a great way to support my work.
I post a lot of exclusive content on locals, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast John Gwynn.
He's the retired division chief of the New Orleans sector of the Border Patrol.
This is a man who spent 23 years of service with the Border Patrol.
He's worked with Border Patrol agents and staff in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Also, of course, in New Orleans.
He also worked with the Border Patrol infrastructure in Washington, D.C. He's been an instructor at the Border Patrol Academy, and he's also done patrolling along the Rio Grande River near Brownsville or in the Brownsville area of Texas.
John, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
We had the pleasure of meeting at the reunion in the Rio Grande Valley of Debbie and her class at Harlingen High School, the 40th reunion.
And you graciously agreed to come on and join me.
Let's talk about this border crisis.
I want to get to Biden's recent executive order.
But before I do...
How did we get to a point in which we've had, really over the past few years, several million people entering the country illegally with the immigration laws that we have in place?
How is it possible to flout the law or at least go around the law and have this kind of mass invasion, I guess I could say, of this country?
How did that happen? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
I would have to go back over my career.
I worked for four administrations, starting with Bill Clinton, then to George W. Bush, and to Barack Obama, and finally with Donald Trump when I retired in 2020.
What I've seen over the years is every president approaches immigration slightly differently, but they also have in some ways, to use just a simple term, of kicking the can down the road to not being able to actually address any of the key problems.
From my perspective, I think it boils down to this very simple fact.
When you have people from Mexico enter the United States, they are able to be sent back almost immediately.
When anyone else from any part of the world enters, they are not able to be just sent back unless there is intense cooperation between the United States and Mexico, which was what was established with President Trump.
So what you're dealing with now, despite the semantics of this executive order, you will still have people entering the United States that cannot be sent back to Mexico, because they're from Honduras, they're from China, they're from Moldovia, they're from wherever.
But the problem is that you cannot send them back to Mexico without a formal deportation.
John, explain to me...
You say they can't be sent back to or through Mexico.
Why aren't they refused entry in the first place?
In other words, does the country really have to have treaties with other countries?
If I build a fence around my home and people come and say, hey, I want to come visit you and I want to have a court date or whatever, Why don't I just say, well, listen, your court date is next year.
Show up when the court date is due.
And in the meantime, sayonara.
We're not letting you in the country because you showed up of your own volition and you have no legal right to enter.
So why do we need treaties?
Why do we need funding? Why don't we simply say you're not allowed in?
Well, I think it just boils down to simply, like, for example, there were lots of times when I was working in Brownsville that you would have people from Honduras or El Salvador or from Guatemala who would cross and they would pretend to be from Mexico.
And during that time, you could grant someone a voluntary return, simply send them to the port of entry to the Brownsville gateway port of entry, and then they would walk across the bridge.
But then Mexican customs would greet them, and they would quickly determine that they were not Mexican citizens, and they would send them right back to immigration at the port.
So the problem is that Mexico will not take back nationals from another country.
They'll allow them to transit their country from wherever.
But they will not take them back without causing a lot of problems for both logistically for the Border Patrol and for them.
I think if the administration, as President Trump had done in the past, used leverage on Mexico to make them take them back, that would be very simple to do just as you have illustrated.
You want to have an asylum hearing?
Absolutely. We'll get you a court date, wherever that would be most convenient for you.
Then you return to Mexico, you wait there, and then when your court date comes around, you can enter at the port of entry and it'll be held on that date.
Right. I mean, isn't the point, John, that Mexico is the country that seemingly is allowing these people to travel through Mexico to get to the U.S. border, right?
So that's where the Mexican culpability comes in.
But let's talk about Biden.
What was the big departure of Biden from the Trump policies?
Did Biden basically just say, hey listen, by and large if people show up, whether Mexicans or not, at the U.S. border, claim that they want asylum, We will give you a court date, but allow you to stay in the United States in the meantime.
You scatter throughout the country and you may or may not show up for the court date.
So in other words, you essentially now are in America, even though you are not legally here.
Well, going all the way back to my first year in the patrol in 1997, the ability for the Border Patrol to...
We don't house people.
We don't have a... At the time, we only had a small detention center.
We don't even have the facilities that, say, a county jail would have to hold people for extensive periods.
Now they have an elaborate structure of tents and all kinds of things in South Texas.
But another portion of the government immigration or the enforcement and removal operations, they handle the housing of these people.
So if they did not have space for those folks, they were granted what's called a notice to appear.
They were given a court date, say, in Dallas, or you'd ask the person, where are you going?
I'm going to Dallas. Okay, we'll set up a court date in Dallas.
Then they just transit to Dallas because there was no way for them to be housed.
I jokingly say sometimes you can't put the entire country of Honduras in jail unless you build large enough facilities to hold those.
And I think the optics of building internment camps would probably be something that any politician, Republican or Democrat, would not want to do.
It's simply a question of logistics.
If you want people to be deported back to their country, you're going to have to pay for them to go back.
Or you're going to have to force Mexico to receive them and transit them back through their own country in the way that they allowed them to enter in the first place.
So you can put the illness on Mexico to actually do more to support this.
But otherwise, it's the same thing that happened when I first began being a Border Patrol agent in 1997.
You grant people a notice to appear and you never see them again.
What impact, if any, is Biden's executive order going to have?
I mean, it seems quite obvious.
It's released shortly before the election.
It's not even a kind of necessarily enduring order in a sense that carries through for a few months.
And it also is porous.
In other words, it's not a full stop on illegals.
It rather is, we're just going to sort of monitor and reduce the number of illegals coming in.
So it seems largely political optics.
What effect, if any, is it really going to have on what's happening at the border?
I don't foresee any real impact because what's happening, you may say, the folks who enter illegally will not be able to apply for asylum.
But the one thing I learned early on in my career studying immigration law, it's one of the most complex law systems that I have ever encountered.
There's certain things that the law says, this cannot happen, this will never happen, and then boom, there's a waiver.
So you automatically see waivers in this executive order for all different types of people, including unaccompanied juveniles, etc.
I don't think there'll be any change whatever because ultimately as I've said, the people enter and unless Mexico agrees to take them back, they are released because there's never enough funding to hold the people in detention centers.
So I think this is not only too little too late, but it's really, there's no there there.
There's no real teeth to this, despite the fact that a lot of people on the left are howling at this as a departure from what Biden had said originally.
But I don't think there's much change is going to be occurring.
It's just an attempt to look as if they're trying to actually address the border crisis.
The problem, as you describe it, John, would even seem to be a problem if Trump is re-elected because there's been a lot of general talk about number one, closing the border, number two, deporting or sending back a bunch of the illegals who are now here.
But as you outline it, this is going to be no easy task.
It's going to be both cumbersome and expensive because you have to track these people down and then you have to pay, as you say, to evict them, to eradicate them.
How would you go about it?
If Trump were to call you and say, listen, develop a plan for me to carry this out, how would you do it?
Again, I think the optics would be so bad for building internment camps for people to be housed.
I think both sides, left and right, would decry this as some sort of reminiscent of Japanese internment camps during World War II, and it would look bad.
I think... Ultimately, there has to be something that dissuades the people from coming.
You know, we've heard about these push-pull factors for years about why people come to the United States.
Well, now they're avoiding gangs or they're avoiding crime or they're avoiding our climate change has affected their homeland or even COVID, I heard, is an excuse for coming to the United States.
But the problem is that once they come here and they're allowed to work and they're allowed to integrate into the society, whether they're here legally or illegally, there's no real disincentive for them to not come.
So if they can't find a job and the laws that are on the books now are actually enforced about not employing illegal aliens, They would stop coming.
Well, the people who legitimately wanted a job would stop coming, but I think the folks who would be coming here to do nefarious things would not.
They would continue to enter.
Not to mention, isn't it a fact that as long as the illegals qualify for a whole ensemble of benefits, which we're seeing in many, many cities, I'm assuming that the package of benefits varies depending on whether you're in New York or Indiana or wherever.
But nevertheless, you hear about illegals are provided subsidies for housing, they're provided subsidies for food, they get various forms of medical care.
So if you're getting all that, I mean, it doesn't even matter if you don't have a job because you probably have a better life in the United States simply subsisting off the taxpayer and the state than you would if you were to try your hand at jobs in Honduras or Mexico or wherever.
Well, you're exactly right.
I mean, if there isn't a reason for them not to come, they'll continue to be here and telling them that, well, you won't be able to apply for asylum now.
Well, you know, to me, most of these or 90% of the asylum cases, especially in the district in El Paso, they were rejected as not being legitimate.
You'd have to change the law in order for them to actually be able to qualify for asylum, despite what they're saying.
We understand that economics, I think, will continue to be the main pull factor for anybody else in this country or outside of this country to be here.
They want to be a part of this country in order to reap the benefits of being here, whether they're a citizen or not, living in the shadows or not.
I think if President Trump would reinstitute the stay in Mexico policy, I think you would see an immediate change in the flow.
Because if you told the people, well, we'll set up your asylum hearing, but you're going back to Mexico and you're not going to be able to stay here in this country and benefit from anything.
If you truly want asylum, go back to Mexico, wait your turn, per se, and then see what happens.
But that's not, in my opinion, that's not why people are coming.
They just simply want to be able to be let in, as they have for the last 25, 30 years, and then just simply disappear into the scenery.
Because ultimately, you need more agents on the interior to go and find these folks.
Are there enough ICE agents, HSI, Homeland Security Investigations?
Are there enough of those folks to find them?
I would say no. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a case where asylum has become not really asylum, but a pretext, right?
Because I remember going back to the Reagan days that asylum really had a very specific meaning.
It meant that you were fleeing persecution, by and large, from a communist country.
That's it. Not that you were in a poor country and there are gangs that are molesting your family or that you kind of needed to get out or that the rains were too heavy and your home got washed away.
None of this was even taken seriously.
So the fact that someone can show up here from pretty much anywhere and say asylum, it's almost like it's become the magic password to get in the country.
Well, John, you're giving us an idea of how Difficult this problem is to solve.
I mean, Biden doesn't want to solve it, but even if you did, it's not an easy one to undo.
But I've been talking, guys, to John D. Gwynne.
He's retired division chief of the New Orleans sector of the Border Patrol.
John, I really appreciate your insights, and thank you very much for joining me.
Well, thank you for the opportunity.
I really do appreciate it.
It was nice meeting you and seeing Deb be there at the reunion.
It was a good time was had by all.
Absolutely. Welcome to my show!
And I made the point last time, but I want to focus on it now, which is that even though most of the border people were scruffy, they were poor, this doesn't mean that there wasn't a borderland elite.
There was a borderland elite even in Great Britain.
These were the people who were the leaders, the landowners, the heads of these big Scottish and Irish clans.
Now, what's a clan? It's an extended family.
It's people who are bound together by blood and by sort of neighborliness, people who think the same way, live the same way.
If you watch the movie Braveheart, you see in it these clans resisting the force of the British.
And the Klan leaders were the top echelon of border society.
So when they come to America, it's pretty much the same thing.
What develops in America is a backcountry elite, a backcountry aristocracy.
Now, because these are border people, their aristocracy is a little more sort of roughneck, Than a traditional aristocracy.
A Puritan aristocracy, you can imagine, would be very refined, would be very cultivated, which is not to say it eschews violence or avoids violence, but the violence is channeled through legal mechanisms.
So-and-so is going to be, you know, burned at the stake and so on.
But it's not like, I'm going to go burn you at the stake myself.
But what you have with the backcountry aristocracy, the sort of redneck aristocracy, is people who are raised as gentlemen, who are educated, but these are also rough people and tough people.
And a classic example of this is Andrew Jackson.
So, let's look at a little bit about Andrew Jackson.
This is a guy who was quick-tempered.
He used foul language.
He took up with the wife of another man.
This was a woman named Rachel Donaldson.
She, too, by the way, was from a fairly sort of aristocratic, if you will, redneck family.
And he made her his wife basically through mutual agreement.
And this, of course, raised the possibility of all kinds of conflict.
In fact, the conflict and scandal with her ex-husband went on for years.
But this was the way Andrew Jackson was.
When Andrew Jackson got into a political conflict with John Calhoun, Over South Carolina threatening to secede from the union and Andrew Jackson was president.
He basically threatened to hang Calhoun himself by the neck.
So this is redneck behavior for sure.
And Andrew Jackson was in that sense the quintessential redneck.
This is not to say that Andrew Jackson wasn't, quote, Southern in some ways.
He was a slave owner and he had plantations.
But again, if you compare Andrew Jackson to a lot of other Southern planters, he was more rough, more vicious.
One time when one of his slaves ran away, he basically offered a reward.
And he goes, and I'll throw in some extra money if you catch the guy and give him some lashes.
This is, by the way, a scene depicted in Hillary's America.
Now, there were a number of other presidents, American presidents of the 19th century, who also come from this kind of borderland or redneck stock.
James Polk, who was a Democrat, in fact a Democrat, who was president when Texas...
When there was the Mexican War with America, Zachary Taylor and even Calhoun himself had some borderland or redneck roots.
Now, Another classic borderland or redneck hero would be Sam Houston.
His ancestor, John Houston, arrived in America, and he was one of the leaders of the group that came.
So again, he was probably an influential figure back in the home country, and so he signed himself John Houston Gent, meaning gentleman.
Sam Houston was raised in a courtly manner, well-educated, but at the same time, a fighter.
A man who would ultimately...
Lead a Texas group of fighters against Santana and the Mexicans and help achieve the liberation of Texas.
Later, of course, Sam Houston becomes the governor.
And even later, he was imprisoned during the Civil War because Texas voted for secession and Sam Houston was opposed.
When I think about all this, I try to place a guy like Trump because I think part of the appeal of Trump is that Trump, although a billionaire, and again, we shouldn't say although a billionaire because there were many people from the borderlands who were very well off.
It's not as if they didn't have their rich guys and their millionaires.
Obviously in the 19th century you wouldn't have billionaires, but you would have millionaires with a lot of purchasing power, comparable perhaps to a billionaire of today.
Trump has the redneck style.
His ancestors are Scott Irish, so he does have some of those roots.
And I was telling Debbie this morning, over breakfast actually, that I cannot think, while I can think of Democratic presidents, and I've just named two, Andrew Jackson and Polk, who were borderland redneck types, I don't think I can name a Republican president who fits that description.
And Trump may well be, in that sense, the first, the only one.
Reagan had Scott Irish roots as well, by the way, but Reagan grew up in Illinois, in Dixon, Illinois.
If you look at the Reagan style, although it's not the same as Mike Pence or the same as a...
As other typical Midwesterners, Reagan does have the Midwestern style.
He's very genial. He would rather settle an argument with a quip or a joke.
Reagan's manner was, in that sense, soft.
Even though Reagan could show a flash of anger, Reagan was a strong figure.
But nevertheless, I would say Reagan was more of a Midwesterner.
And What about George W. Bush?
Well, George W. Bush kind of feigned or put on the redneck style.
He'd say things like, you know, in Texas, when we, you know, the Texas swagger, we call it walking.
And so he liked to come across as a redneck, but he was a fake redneck.
The Bushes, of course, were from Connecticut.
So they were actually New Englanders who had moved to Texas.
And And then when we think of other figures, too, they clearly are, they don't fit this redneck mold in the way that Trump does.
Certainly in language, the, I mean, Trump is a lot more coarse than a typical politician.
In fact, Debbie knows this, I was speaking with Trump on the phone, and, you know, he will throw in some words and so on, and you're like, wow!
But that There's a kind of brutal candor to the way that Trump is, which would differentiate him from, say, McCain or Bob Dole, certainly Mitt Romney, who is very much of a, you know, in some ways a New England Puritan, at least in his style.
I'm not saying he's obviously a Mormon, but the point I'm trying to get at as governor of Massachusetts is The Romneys, although they originally came from Michigan, very much a hybrid of the Midwestern style and the New England style.
But it could be, this is the point I'm trying to make, that Trump's style is the key to understanding why he, more than any other Republican, connects with working class America.
Because working class America, although it comes from all different sectors of society, by and large, is closest to the borderland or redneck style than it would be, for example, to the New England Puritan style or the royalist cavalier style of Virginia or even the Quaker style that we've seen shaping the culture of the Midwest.
So all of this is a way of saying that Trump sort of has a certain...
Maybe secret sauce is the right way to put it.
And it's not obvious that other Republicans after Trump, unless they become more Trumpian, will have the same enduring connection with working people that we see in Donald Trump.
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