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March 12, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:59
THE TRUMP RESET Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1039
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Coming up, Trump is changing the rules of the game.
He's doing a Trump reset.
I'll tell you what that is.
I'll discuss the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian national, who has called for the destruction of Western civilization as part of his pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University.
And I'll also begin an examination of my book on Ronald Reagan.
It's called Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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There is a Trump reset underway and I want to show that this Trump reset is not something that we have seen before and therefore it's likely to Be something that takes us by surprise and also creates some instability or nervousness.
Another way to put it is that Trump has, I believe, a high tolerance, a high endurance for the bumpy ride.
And therefore, to Trump, it's normal.
It's no big deal.
Trump is like, yeah, of course there's turbulence.
The road is that way.
Or we're taking the dirt road.
Or it's normal for the airplane to experience some turbulence.
And so turbulence is going to get us to where we want to go.
But for a lot of people, this is something that generates disquiet.
A sense that Trump really knows what he's doing.
And then you look up Trump and he has this supreme confidence, this kind of natural elan.
And Trump gives you the idea, I certainly know what I'm doing, even if you don't.
And Trump will sometimes say things that...
Allude to a certain kind of interior knowledge.
And so, classic example, recently he goes, well, you know, Zelensky needs to make peace.
He has every reason to want to make peace.
Look at the suffering that's been imposed on his country.
And then he goes, and I happen to know, he goes, I'm not going to tell you why, but I happen to know that Putin as well wants peace.
Putin too wants to make a deal.
Now, why does Putin want to make a deal?
Can't Putin push through to victory, particularly if he knows that Zelensky is kind of giving up and looking for the peaceful path out?
Trump doesn't say.
Trump is essentially saying, defer to me, I'm the commander-in-chief, I'm the guy who wrote the art of the deal, this is my domain.
So, now, the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, as they say, and what this means is that, guess what?
And the war between Russia and Ukraine is satisfactorily concluded, and Ukraine keeps its country, and the Russians go home, well, that will be a fantastic achievement, a great victory for Trump, and not to mention just a victory for peace in the world.
And that does not seem to be something that is unrealistic.
Here's Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Quote, we've offered Ukraine an immediate ceasefire.
They accepted.
We will now take this to the Russians.
The ball is now in their court.
So guess what?
After all the rumble tumble, after all the petulance and pouting, Zelensky is on the same page as Trump.
And now, having signed on the dotted line, this was, by the way, a meeting in Riyadh presided over by the Saudis.
The United States delegation can go to Putin and see what can be worked out with that guy.
More Trump reset.
The Trump administration has stopped funding to the entire University of Maine system, all the campuses.
Why?
Because the state, led by the governor, you remember the little showdown with the governor and Trump, they refused to comply with the executive order to keep transgender athletes out of women's sports, and so...
Boom.
Now, this is again where Trump does what he says.
There are a lot of Republicans who raise issues and warnings and then they don't do anything.
And we are so used to this kind of lack of follow-up, lack of action, that we're a little surprised when Trump...
Follows through.
Trump remembers.
For Trump, it's not just we had a lively exchange and now we move on.
No, we had a lively exchange and she made it clear that she has no intention of following the executive order, which, by the way, has the force of law or at least the force of executive action.
And so it's time to cut off the funding.
And so it is.
Trump is also now driving his new red Tesla, you might have seen.
I've only ridden, well, Debbie and I only a few times, two or three times, I think, in a Tesla.
Usually it's been an Uber Tesla.
And our neighbors have a Tesla, that's right.
And it's a very interesting car.
I mean, it is, first of all, deathly quiet.
We're just not used to, neither Debbie nor I, used to driving in a car where there is no sound at all.
And I say this not entirely as a positive.
I mean, maybe it's a case that we've all gotten kind of used to the sound of a car, but I kind of like the sound of a car.
Now, I'm not one of these guys who will buy a Porsche because I like the...
I don't necessarily want the race car sound, but that kind of soothing hum, kind of like the hum of an air conditioner, is to me kind of a positive.
Debbie goes, maybe we should get a Tesla.
No, thank you, honey.
I think I like my Mercedes, at least as of now.
I've got a really nice Mercedes.
And honestly, I was not going to get it.
Debbie talked me into it.
She said, you have to get this car.
And it's a burgundy car.
Don't tell people what color it is.
Honey, I doubt it's the only burgundy car on the road, so I don't think I can be identified.
Hey, there goes Dinesh!
Now, some people on the left are, Trump has become a car salesman.
Trump is suddenly promoting a car.
Guess what?
Biden had an electric vehicle summit in 2021. He did not invite the biggest maker of electric vehicles, namely Elon Musk, out of pure spite.
He just realized that Elon Musk doesn't seem to be a political ally, so let's punish him.
And Biden was right in front of the White House displaying all these cars.
And promoting them.
In fact, Biden showed off an all-electric Hummer EV, also a Jeep Wrangler hybrid.
And you could say, well, Biden's promoting American cars, but Tesla is made in America as well.
In fact, it's the number one electric car.
And so it does all the jobs that all the other cars do.
It's electric.
It creates a lot of jobs.
But Biden wanted to make a statement, and Trump wanted to make a statement in the other.
Remember that BLM mural that was right in front of the Trump Hotel in New York City?
It's like BLM Plaza.
BLM had its own plaza, and it took over the road.
And so now Trump has put some political pressure on New York.
And the BLM mural is gone.
It's been painted over.
It's been removed.
BLM Plaza is history.
And I think this is a very good thing for the simple reason that, well, quite honestly, black lives don't matter any more than anybody else's life.
And if you think that's a controversial statement, Martin Luther King had a dream very much to that, very much to that effect.
More of the Trump reset.
Greenland just had an election, and many people thought that the Social Democrats, who have ruled Greenland for much of its history, were going to win.
But no, it is the right-wing party that has won.
Now, Greenland had two parties on the right.
One was the sort of Democracy Party, called the Democrats, but the Democrats are really more like the Republicans.
And then there is another party, which is called NALARAC, N-A-L-A-R-A-Q, and that is like a MAGA party.
That's the party that wants Greenland to come under the American aegis.
And guess which two parties got the most votes in the election?
Number one, the Democrats, meaning the Republicans.
And number two, the MAGA party or the NALRAC party.
Now, Greenland's a small country.
I think it's just like something like 30,000 votes and the entire country decide the election.
But...
What we clearly have, we don't have Greenland deciding to join America, and Trump has made it clear, ultimately, it's their decision.
What we have is Greenland pushing to the right.
So we see a rightward movement.
In the American election, we saw a rightward movement pretty much across the country.
Even blue states and blue areas moved rightward.
I think we're seeing a global rightward drift.
And this election in Greenland is...
Part of that.
It's all part, as I say, of something bigger going on which is the Trump reset.
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I'd like to talk about the case of Mahmoud Khalil.
This guy is a student at Columbia University.
He is not an ordinary left-wing activist.
He is not merely somebody who says that Israel is in the wrong or that Israel is occupying Palestinian land.
Those kinds of views would be fairly standard on the left.
This guy is a Hamas guy.
And I don't mean he's a member of Hamas or that he's himself a terrorist, but he is certainly a defender of terrorism.
And we know this because he has been disseminating posters.
He's the leader of a so-called resistance movement.
And the posters that he has been putting up are all pro-Hamas.
One of them has Hamas.
Terrorists standing on a tank.
And it says, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Now, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was Hamas's official designated name for the October 7th attacks.
So, these attacks are being celebrated in this poster.
Here's another poster I'm looking at.
It says, Sometimes history needs a flood.
And it has a profile of Yahya Sinwar.
A notorious terrorist, now happily no longer with us, but somebody evidently being celebrated in these posters.
And so this is a very bad guy, and he is here as a student in America.
He is not a citizen.
He is, in fact, a Syrian national.
So you have a Syrian national.
Who is here on a green card, which is to say on a legal status.
He's not an illegal.
He's legal, but he's not a citizen.
And for those people who are talking about his First Amendment rights, it's important to realize that the First Amendment rights, in fact, all our rights, are civil rights and are civil liberties.
Accrue to American citizens.
Think of the country as a kind of a social compact, a kind of deal between citizens who...
We swear certain allegiances to each other.
Hey, if somebody attacks the country, I will be willing to put my life on the line to defend it.
That's part of what it means to be a citizen.
By the way, if you have a green card, you can't be drafted.
You don't take on those obligations.
You are sort of a foreigner living in this country.
I was at one point on a green card.
After my Dartmouth days, I had a green card for about five years while I went through the naturalization process, and then I became a U.S. So, the Trump administration has a very clear policy, and by the way, one completely consistent with immigration law.
Immigration law basically says that if you are a foreigner in this country, and you are a supporter of terrorism of any kind, you can be removed.
And that's what Trump and the Trump team is trying to do.
The DOJ, they've arrested this guy, and they want him deported.
Now, evidently, this has spurred all kinds of protests.
And there's a lot of agitation at Columbia itself.
There are demands that the other faculty members go on strike.
To protest the arrest of Khalil.
They're trying to make it sound like the government somehow abducted him.
By the way, an arrest is not an abduction.
He wasn't kidnapped.
He's been arrested pending deportation proceedings.
Now, a New York judge has jumped into the middle of this and basically said, you can't deport him.
At least you can't deport him right now.
And so what the Trump DOJ wants to do Is to move the case out of New York.
They have the discretion to be able to do that.
And so I think they're going to ask that this case be heard elsewhere.
In part because otherwise the agitators all show up.
They surround the court building.
They do the usual type of intimidation that they're famous or infamous for doing.
And they try to put pressure on the New York authorities and maybe even the New York Democratic establishment.
To somehow let this guy stay.
Now, interestingly, although there's a lot of pressure to free Mahmoud Khalil, notice that these same people were not enthusiastic about freeing the hostages, even though some of those hostages are American.
This is a matter of indifference to the left.
What matters here is that this guy, this guy is basically the, you could call it the Palestinian equivalent of George Floyd.
And I'm referring here not to the man George Floyd, but to the broader issue, where a very dubious character, George Floyd, and here a very dubious character, Mahmoud Khalil, are now somehow elevated into ideological or secular sainthood.
That's what's going on.
This guy is the spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest.
It's called CUAD, C-U-A-D.
And one of their themes is the total eradication of Western civilization.
Well, guess what?
You don't really get to go to another country, which is part of Western civilization, and tell the people over there that you are for the total eradication of their way of life.
Don't those people have a right to say, well, bye-bye, we don't really want you here?
Isn't that a normal reaction to someone who takes that kind of an attitude?
I think yes.
Kuad, the Columbia University Apartheid Group, also says October 7th was, quote, a moral, military, and political victory.
Well, if it was such a moral, military, and political victory, then you shouldn't complain about the retaliation from Israel against it, because after all, you had a strategic victory, kind of like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, but that is not the end of the fight.
That's actually only the beginning of it.
And then when a certain amount of retaliation is visited upon you, you shouldn't be whining and screaming and claiming that you're a victim, because after all, you started it, and then you jumped up and down and celebrated what you did.
This group also says that violence is the only path forward.
These are the people who accuse the Israelis of normalizing genocide.
So all of this stuff is going on and the left can't really defend it on its merits.
They don't want to come out as openly pro-Hamas, even though some of them clearly are.
And so they use free speech.
We're defending his right to say it.
Well, I defend his right to say it, but I also defend the country's right to remove him.
Because defending his right to say it simply means that he cannot be censored.
Well, no one's censoring him.
He's free to say whatever he wants.
He's free to post whatever he wants.
He can make posters.
We're talking about the location of his physical presence and is it within the rights of the country and within the laws of the country to relocate him.
Interestingly, I think it was Ilhan Omar or one of the squad posted, well, you know, let's bring him home.
Well, my reply to that was, we are bringing him home.
He's from Syria.
He's a Syrian national.
He's not an American citizen.
So, in other words, relocating him, deporting him, is in fact, for him, a homebound journey.
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I hope you'll consider becoming an annual subscriber.
I've just put a couple of new films up on Locals, the political thriller Infidel, starring Jim Caviezel, and also my own film Trump Card.
And those are available for free to annual subscribers.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Joe Bishop.
He is Editorial and Content Manager for the Mises Institute.
He also previously was the Deputy Communications Director at the House Financial Services Committee.
His articles have appeared in The Federalist, Daily Caller, Business Insider, Washington Times.
You can follow him on x, at Tho, T-H-O, Bishop, B-I-S-H-O-P. The website for the Mises Institute is just Mises, M-I-S-E-S, after the great Ludwig Juan Mises, Mises.org.
Tho, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me.
Absolutely.
Let's talk about Trump's broad policies because it looks like he wants to make the tax cuts permanent.
He wants to slash regulation.
I saw this morning that he's trying to sell off a bunch of federal buildings, unload some federal buildings.
I call that privatization, moving things from the government sector into the private sector.
He's also an enthusiast of tariffs.
And I know that from a free market point of view, that's perhaps the most problematic aspect of his domestic policies.
Well, first and foremost, I think it's important to understand just how much of a weaker economy he is taking over in this presidency than he had the first time around.
And obviously that itself, right, the Obama years were a period of great stagnation.
There's a whole horror story to be told about post-2008.
Financial policy, fiscal policy, everything that has...
Americans have been suffering from for quite some time.
And when it comes to this time around, obviously we have a lot of new players involved within the administration.
We have a lot of energy, a lot of focus on Doge, spending cuts.
The congressional element of it is a continuing, frustrating process.
A lot less appetite with Congress for the spending cuts we desperately need than you have with Doge and from other aspects of the Trump administration.
But the tariff aspect, I think, is one of the most interesting because I think it brings up this broader question of, is Trump truly a protectionist?
He talks like a protectionist.
In many ways, he seems to view tariffs in the same way that Frederick Bastiat would or a free market economist would, that it's essentially an act of coercion.
It's a gun at the table for negotiating purposes.
Sometimes he talks about tariffs in the context of, as a replacement for the IRS and internal taxation.
That itself would require significant cuts to spending, I think, to make anything like that work.
And then the other side, he talks like a protectionist, but he also likes signing free trade deals.
And so I think that's one of the issues that is difficult in covering Trump purely from an economic lens, is that it's easy to focus on some of his rhetoric at times when his actions don't always follow that rhetoric.
Again, I think he's always kind of this deal-making mode.
So the question is, what does he desire?
From his policy of tariffs, is it sort of economic nationalism and trying to build up barriers for global trade and bringing more manufacturing in?
That's one dynamic.
Is it renegotiating trade deals, having it in some cases more trade deals?
He's talked about trade deals with Argentina, for example.
He's talked about reciprocal tariffs and perhaps using this pressure to lower trade barriers elsewhere.
Or is he seen as a revenue component, which again would be very difficult to do as long as we have spending the way it is.
And so I think it's difficult to figure out exactly what of those courses truly is the overarching theme of things.
And so that's what it can make it kind of difficult to analyze that because each of those things have different components to it, the different ends, different means, do the means achieve those ends.
And that I think comes with just sort of the broader chaos at times that can come from.
I mean, I think your point can be illustrated in the fact that Trump goes, we're going to put tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and then a little bit later, they're going to be paused for a month, and then the Canadians say, we're going to retaliate and have 25% taxes on tariffs on electricity.
Trump is outraged, and then he goes, well, your tariffs are going to 50%.
Then the Canadians go, well, we've thought better of it.
We're going to drop the 25% electricity idea.
So it appears like this is a little bit of a game of chicken, as my wife puts it, that Trump is playing, right?
I'm going to drive straight up to you to see who backs down first.
And by and large, Trump has shown that he can get the other guy to back down first.
Well, I definitely don't want to be a staring contest with Donald J. Trump, that's for sure.
But it does open up a large number, I think, of very important topics because, one, I mean, the economic nationalist sort of concerns about the American economy, right, the massive outsourcing of industry, things like that, there's a very true narrative to that, right?
The economic policies that America has engaged with have been extremely detrimental internally.
That has pushed various companies elsewhere.
China has been a big benefactor of not just America's own internal regulatory policies, our own internal tax policies, also kind of the desire, I think, short-term and I think faulty of trying to access the Chinese domestic marketplace, which creates secondary issues because in order to have that, you end up having to bow down to the regime in Beijing.
And we've seen companies get burnt from that.
And so there is a real story here of the American public, the people, getting severely damaged by this massive administrative regulatory state.
There's a need for corrective measures there.
There's a tariff on Chinese goods necessary to overcome some of the political incentives there.
That kind of goes into a national security issue beyond simply, I think, pure economics.
Louis von Mises, I think, would even...
I have some things to say there about retaliatory tariffs and aspects of dealing with other foreign actors.
There's also just a myth out there, and I think that's one of the great challenges we have.
And as someone who believes in free markets, who believes in capitalism, we've done a very big misservice.
To the extent by which all of the institutions in America that have been the most prominent and sort of rearing the mantle of free markets, right?
You can think of a variety of DC think tanks, very prominent, serious economists teaching at very important universities, right?
They claim to be free markets, and yet they have ignored the consequences of the Federal Reserve.
They've made peace with DC as a whole.
They talk about this sort of golden age of free trade, even though what it really is, is globally managed.
We have very few actual true free trade treaties.
That's why Murray Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian, an advocate of the free market to the fullest extent, was against NAFTA. And so now you have all these people saying, oh, I can't believe Trump is rethinking X, Y, and Z, thinking that that is some form of free market capitalism.
When X, Y, and Z have always been fraudulent, have always served the disinterest of the public here.
And sometimes you need a disruptor, as chaotic as it could be.
To start rethinking fundamentally a lot of the damage that Washington has created for our economy over decades and decades and decades.
So one of the things that Mises himself pointed out, and I think this is not widely known, and I normally wouldn't bring it up except with somebody from the Mises Institute.
Because it is the issue of how inflation, the kind of pain of inflation, does not fall evenly on everybody.
When we think about the way in which our lower middle class, our middle class, our working class have been damaged over the past generation or so, most people think...
They would point to outsourcing, right?
They would point to the fact that jobs have been sort of dispatched abroad, things are made cheaper abroad, or even to technology having substituted for certain types of manual labor.
But there is another effect that goes unnoticed, and that is that when you have inflation...
Inflation does raise prices, but it doesn't raise prices across the board.
It benefits the people who get the money first.
In other words, the new money that comes off the printer, the spanking new bills, you might say.
They don't go to everybody, right?
And there are also ways that you can protect yourself against inflation.
If you go buy beachfront property that's very scarce, let's just say, for example, in Newport Beach or Miami Beach, you're going to see your asset prices go up.
That's part of...
What inflation does is it pushes up asset prices, and so you come out ahead.
But on the other hand, some guy who's on a fixed income, some guy who's living paycheck to paycheck, some guy whose balances are in a normal savings account recognizes that inflation is just eating away at their savings, and so they are worse off in that sense as well.
Absolutely.
Yeah, you're absolutely correct on this.
Cantillon effects is sort of a technical term after Richard Cantillon was the first person to kind of identify that.
And you're absolutely correct there.
And that's why, you know, if you look at the real estate prices around Washington, they are skyrocketing even in the worst economic of times.
Wall Street, a major, major winner there.
In the modern economy, Silicon Valley.
It's typically one of the hottest hotbeds to invest that newly printed cash.
The defense industry typically does pretty well within that.
And this really is one of the true crimes of modern finance.
And it's something that's been escalated significantly, as I mentioned earlier, during 2008, where the explicit policy of the Fed cheered on by, and unfortunately, largely bipartisan support.
We're going to push people away from traditional savings accounts and force them into the stock market in order to get yield.
This not only has a massive generational effect, and newer generations always are the worst off within that, right?
So the one asset you can't save is your labor, right?
And so if you are working paycheck to paycheck, you are at a massive disadvantage.
But beyond that aspect as well, and this is something very, very concerning, is that we're actively subsidizing risk within the system.
Think about how many things we don't even typically think about as financial institutions, but pension funds, insurance companies, right?
For them to be able to pay out the obligations they have to people that have trusted them for their future, they need a reliable rate of return.
And what we've had since 2008 is a deliberate policy to push down government borrowing rates, to push down A savings rate is pushed down the interest you get after having a deposit, right?
Forcing them into the stock market.
And I don't care if you're talking about the most blue chip stocks, right?
Those are always more volatile.
There's always a layer of risk there greater than these traditional safe haven assets.
And so we've pushed tremendous amount of risk within the financial system.
And the danger is another Misesian insight is that when we think about booms and busts, we think about recessions and things like that.
Those are typically seen as problems to be solved.
By the political class.
But what the bus truly is, is health.
It is restoring, it is showing the reality of bad investments made in the past.
And so we've had a deliberate policy of trying just giving painkillers to the underlying problems.
Certain people in power getting very, very rich off of that in form of bailouts and other forms.
Where what you really need is a corrective.
Elon Musk was warning about this prior to the election, saying short term is probably going to be some pain.
There's recession risks out there now.
People are talking about GDP possibly dropping.
Well, GDP, a major factor of that is government spending.
So all of the corrective measures necessary to create an environment where younger generations can profit, where the middle class can start getting ahead again, are going to require short-term pain.
And of course, every policymaker is going to try and all the experts and all the privileged classes are going to try to use that as a means to attack the corrective measurements that our economy so desperately needs.
And that goes to one of the very, very big difficulties.
It's a massive bomb.
It's massive economic illiteracy that is baked into the pie of how much of Washington functions as usual.
I mean, when Trump said something like there could be some bumps along the road, he was saying nothing more than if you had an economic policy policy.
Well, I mean, a good analogy, I think, would be that if you go on a massive drinking binge, right, that's the boom, then the bust is the hangover.
Now, economically, most people don't like the bust.
It's a little more fun to be in the boom.
But the truth of it, and this, I think, is the point that the Austrian economists made, you actually need the bust because the bust is what restores you to sanity after the drinking binge.
And then you can actually make...
But without any kind of a bust, what you get is, you know, imagine if someone comes along and says, we've had one drinking binge, and the best way to cure the fact that you feel bad the next morning is just to take another six-pack out and start drinking that, right?
Isn't that, in a sense, what we've been doing with our economic policy?
And isn't that what the Fed has been doing for the past decade and a half?
Absolutely.
We can talk about these material consequences, and we can talk about the dangers that it puts on people that rely upon the economy functioning as normal, but there's also something deeper there.
I think there's a cultural component, because what this economic policy does is that you're incentivized to think about the short term at the expense of the long term.
Civilization is built by planting that tree that you know you'll never bear the fruits from, but your children and your grandchildren will.
And so we punish savings, when we punish long-term decision-making, when we get policy subsidizing, short-term gratification at the expense of long-term growth.
What sort of society are we creating?
We are actively incentivizing the sort of cultural degradation that we're seeing throughout the West.
And the strength, the best thing America has going for it, the best thing the Fed has going for it, the best thing that Washington has going for it, is the fact that one of America's most potent exports.
The past century has been bad economic ideas.
And so the Fed is really bad if you look at it within on itself.
But relative to the ECB, relative to the Bank of China, relative to just about every other central bank, as insane as our Fed is, they're even worse.
As bad as Washington is when it's spending bidges, we've got a larger economy.
We can suffer.
There's a lot of ruin in our nation, to use another phrase out there, than other nations do.
The reason why we haven't seen bigger distress domestically is because we live in a global marketplace.
And so for all of the bad policies that we've had from our own policymakers, compared to everyone else, still doesn't look that bad.
And so what will be interesting is, you know, now we're seeing different models out there.
South America and Argentina and El Salvador has some very interesting models out there.
The question is going to be, can we write our shift?
Can we take that short-term pain and get America in a firmer footing?
Or are there going to be other challengers out there that do that first and then really starting having global competition?
And then that will completely reset the game in terms of the dollar's reserve currency and a lot of things that we've taken for granted for such a long period of time.
So I'm hoping our people right the ship faster than anyone else.
And again, I'm encouraged to the extent to which you're seeing, I think, a lot more realistic, a lot more realism in the perception of the way the economy is supposed to focus in ways that national security, other issues, again, plenty of problems, but we are, I think, making significant intellectual strides.
And ultimately, as Mises understood, the future of a nation...
Really is driven by the ideas that percolate as much as anything else.
And I think that we're seeing positive trends ideologically right now in America that we're not seeing in the rest of the world, with a few exceptions in South America.
You know, for me, though, I think that...
One of the things I think is very healthy that's going on right now is that there are a lot of assumptions that have been built in, some of them going back to Reagan or going back to the middle of the last century, things like, you know, the Federal Reserve needs to have a 2% target for printing money, because after all, if the economy is growing at 2%, we need to print money at the rate of 2%.
This is something that most people of my generation, I mean conservatives, took as an article of faith.
A lot of it came from the work of Milton Friedman.
I think what's going on here with tariffs and so many other things is that Trump kind of upsets the apple cart.
Everybody freaks out, but then suddenly you begin to look at it more closely and you realize that embedded in the kind of conventional wisdom is some assumption that itself doesn't really withstand scrutiny.
And so one healthy intellectual aspect here is, I think, the reexamination that's going on of the fundamental premises of our economic policy.
Guys, I've been talking to Tho Bishop, editorial and content manager at the Mises Institute.
Follow him on X at Tho, T-H-O, Bishop.
The website is misis.org.
Tho, we'll have to have you back.
There's a lot here that we have touched on, and there's a whole economic education behind the stuff that we're bantering back and forth about.
Absolutely.
Economic education is so important, right?
You learn proper economics, know how we're being ripped off.
That's why government schools don't teach it very well.
If you have any listeners that are interested in their kids having a good economic education, we have a wonderful summer program called Mises University.
M-I-S-E-S dot org, Mises dot org slash events.
And if anyone wants a free book, Mises dot org slash money.
We're giving away a short copy of what has government done to our money, which is about inflation, the history of the Fed, a lot of these topics we've talked about.
So we were really good at free material.
Hope your listeners will enjoy it.
I will attest myself that that slim volume written by Murray Rothbard is one of the most, not only eye-opening, but kind of mind-blowing introductions to money that you will ever read.
So I highly recommend it.
I didn't realize you were giving it away for free.
I'm probably going to sign up for a few copies myself to hand out.
So it's been a real pleasure.
Good talking to you.
Thank you.
you.
It's been an honor.
I have completed The Big Lie, and I hope you enjoyed it.
Well, enjoyed is maybe not the right word, because the book is such a tour through the precincts of fascism and Nazism, draws all these disturbing historical connections, but connections with a lot of contemporary resonance.
And now I'm going to take Debbie's counsel here and pick up with the Reagan book.
Now, the two books are connected in this way, in that the fascist enterprise, as we'll see, was part of a bigger movement in the 20th century.
The bigger movement was collectivism.
And there was a very interesting book that came out many years ago called Three New Deals.
Kind of an odd title.
But the theme of the book, written by a German historian, was that the New Deal, FDR's New Deal, which was continued with LBJ's Great Society, the New Deal was part of a progressive collectivist project.
But it wasn't the only collectivist project.
At the same time, there were two other big collectivist projects underway.
One was the fascist slash Nazi project, which was also statist and collectivist.
And the third was the Communist Project, which was also statist and collectivist.
So the three forms of collectivism, the three New Deals, and specifically here this German historian had in mind the Mussolini New Deal or the Mussolini form of collectivism and then also the Soviet form of collectivism.
These ran parallel to each other and they were recognized to be kins, to be related to each other intellectually, philosophically, ideologically.
So Reaganism cannot be understood except against that backdrop.
And that's part of what I'm going to do in the Reagan stories.
I'm not just going to talk about Reagan the man.
I'm going to talk about the forces that brought about Reaganism.
And those forces are far bigger and deeper than just Jimmy Carter and the incompetence of Carter, the hostage crisis and so on.
We'll talk about all that, but there's more to it than that.
Reagan, in other words, is going to be seen against the vista of the 20th century.
And then I'm going to relate him to the 21st century by drawing comparisons and contrasts as I go along.
With Trump, with what is happening now.
And Trump and Reagan are in many ways similar and yet in many ways very different.
It's a classic type of, when you draw an analogy, there's an old saying that analogies don't travel on all fours, which really means that people or things are not alike in every respect.
If things were alike in every respect, they would be the same thing.
So when I say, That, you know, this guy reminds me of an old family horse.
I don't mean that he actually has four legs and a mane and eats grass.
I mean that he resembles a horse in some ways, but clearly is different from a horse in many other ways.
Now, there's a photo, you can dig it up or look it up, of young Trump meeting with Reagan.
Trump seems to be about 30 or 35. He's the brash entrepreneur, the head of the Trump Organization.
And he looks thrilled to be in Reagan's presence.
And Reagan is the avuncular older man.
So this is the two generations with a gap between them of now some 40 years.
Kind of reaching out and quite physically touching each other.
So the Trump-Reagan connection is going to be an ongoing interest of mine as I look at this Reagan book.
Which is to say, I wrote this book.
It's called Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
It's like $15 on Amazon.
It's now available in paperback.
I think it's a fun addition to your...
To your library.
And it's a fun book to read on Reagan.
I've had so many people over the years who've said, you know, I used to work in the Reagan White House.
I've read a lot of stuff on Reagan.
And this is the book that gets Reagan, that kind of captures Reagan.
That it's not a biography in the formal sense.
Biographies typically go into extensive detail.
Reagan was born in so-and-so hospital and present at the time where his aunt and so on.
This is not the type of coverage you're going to get from this book.
This book is really more a political...
Essay on the meaning of Reagan and Reaganism.
It does have the details of Reagan's life, but mainly in broad outline.
And then it draws on particular episodes, snapshots in Reagan's life to illustrate points that the book is trying to make.
So it's not a biography in the typical sense of the term.
And the reason it's not a biography like that is there was another guy, Edmund Boris.
Who had been selected by Reagan to write his official biography.
Now, Reagan, in selecting Morris, made a huge mistake because Edmund Morris had written a very good biography of Teddy Roosevelt.
But Edmund Morris admired Teddy Roosevelt because Edmund Morris is of kind of British South African descent.
I think South African is right.
He grew up in some part of Africa.
Anyway, he had an English education.
He might have been a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge.
In any event, he admired Teddy Roosevelt because Teddy Roosevelt was a member of the aristocracy.
Roosevelt was elite in many respects, and in that sense, very different than Reagan.
But Reagan thought that since Edmund Morris liked Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt was kind of a tough guy.
He rode a horse.
He was kind of a cowboy.
Reagan thought, well, he's probably going to understand me.
And this was a...
A case of a massive lapse in judgment because the biography that Edmund Morris wrote is very demeaning to Reagan.
It's actually horribly written.
And it sunk like a stone almost from the day it came out.
So it is unreadable, not worth reading, highly unrecommended by me.
And not just because my book is a lot better.
My book wouldn't have to do very much to be a lot better.
In fact, this opening segment that you've been hearing for the last few minutes is by itself better.
Now, there is a really good book on Reagan that does capture parts of Reagan, and that is Peggy Noonan's book, which is called What I Saw at the Revolution.
This book, again, is a little bit of an artifact.
Peggy Noonan has become something of a never-Trumper.
She, quite honestly, has lost her way, and she now writes elegant but meaningless op-eds in the Wall Street Journal.
She was, for a time, fancied for her kind of commentary on political rhetoric and presidential rhetoric, because she was a speechwriter for Reagan, and a very good one, I must add.
And her book is excellent, because it does capture something of Reagan.
But the book really is not about Reagan.
As you can tell from the title, What I Saw at the Revolution, the book is really about Peggy.
And Peggy, the kind of feisty Irish girl who found her way into the White House, is very much of an opportunist, but of an endearing sort.
And I was friends with Peggy.
Peggy wrote actually a blurb on the back of my Reagan book.
And I've always liked Peggy, but I think that along with Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz and so many others, she is one of the gang that saw themselves as sort of intellectually superior to Trump.
They dug in against Trump.
They might even have realized how wrong they were about Trump, but they refused to admit it.
They dug in even more.
Their pride became at stake.
And so they have ceased to be useful or ceased to be valuable in terms of making a contribution to the kind of issues that are swirling around us now.
They sit on the spectatorial balcony, so to speak, and issue meaningless bromides.
My relationship with Reagan was a combination of spotting him...
When I was a student at Dartmouth, becoming a young Reaganite in the early 1980s, graduating in the mid-80s, finding myself in the Reagan White House in 87 through 89. So for a couple of years, I was a mid-level policy analyst.
I did not have a lot of...
Direct interaction with Reagan.
Most of it was confined to my office photo with Reagan.
It's the only time I shook his hand.
And then standing in the back of the room and watching Reagan in meetings where I would not participate.
I was not really permitted to participate.
The senior staff were around the table.
But it was really fun to get a window into Reagan himself.
of watch him conduct meetings and exercise leadership of a certain sort, which I'll describe as I get into the book.
So I haven't really started with paid debbie.
He's like, "Where's your book?
"I thought you were talking about Reagan." I'm like, "Well, I'm gonna do the preamble to the book.
I'm going to do the general introduction to the topic itself.
And this is going to be, I think, a very interesting project because Reagan and Reaganism loom against the backdrop of Trump.
And some of the anxieties about Trump that people share, I get it from conventional Republicans all the time, including Debbie, is, well, I'm really concerned that Trump is doing it.
And usually when you hear that, it's because Reagan was different in that respect.
And so Reaganism becomes the kind of yardstick or measuring stick for Trump.
I want to actually argue that it's...
Not right to simply measure one man against the other.
In fact, the measurement can go both ways.
So that Trump does something, and now you look back and say, well, was Reagan right to hold a different view?
Instead of just going, well, Reagan was obviously right, and is Trump departing from the fold?
So there's a very kind of productive dynamism between Reagan and Trump, and I'm hoping that that will be one of the themes that I'm able to cover as we go.
Well, I shouldn't say I'm hoping.
I'm covering it, so I should be able to meet my own expectations.
I hope I can do it.
I should be able to do it.
After all, it is up to me.
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