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March 19, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:09
WHO’S THE REAL THIEF? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1044
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Coming up, I'll reflect on the peculiarity of Democrats insisting Elon Musk is stealing money when he's actually returning it to the U.S. Treasury.
I want to review some remarkable admissions about how COVID originated from a lab leak in Wuhan.
And economist Peter St. Ange joins me.
We're going to talk about Trump's economic policies and how tariffs might, in fact, be consistent with a free market.
If you're watching on X or Rumble or YouTube, listening on Apple, Google or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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I want to talk about Elon Musk and a very strange accusation that we are hearing a lot of people on the left make against Musk.
The accusation is that Elon Musk is...
Now, there are a lot of things you could say about Elon Musk, but this is one of the strangest accusations to make against someone like him.
Why?
Because Elon Musk, of all people, has undertaken this governmental responsibility.
Not out of any personal interest at all.
This is not a government guy.
This is a guy who is a creative genius, an innovator, an engineer, an entrepreneur.
He has his hands full with multiple, multi-billion dollar companies.
His public recognition is secure.
His place in history, I would argue, is secure.
He doesn't need any of it.
Not only that, but by undertaking this government Doge project, he opens himself to a tack that he wouldn't otherwise face.
Elon Musk was kind of a darling of the liberals.
Remember, he's the guy who made the kind of original, quintessential electric vehicle, electric car.
And so a lot of liberals were like, let me go out and buy the electric car because I've got to save the planet.
Elon Musk is helping us save the planet.
This was his reputation pre-Trump, you might say.
And Elon Musk stepped into controversy when he bought Twitter, when he paid $44 billion.
Let's think about it.
He's got a lot of money, but $44 billion is a very big number.
And Twitter was not...
So Elon Musk overpaid for it because, in his words, free speech is priceless.
So this is a guy who has every incentive not to be in the political arena, and yet there he is, and he's doing it to save the country, to save the government from teetering on bankruptcy,
to create a situation in which government revenues can somewhat match.
Government spending.
So, what sense does it make to call Elon Musk a thief?
And yet, there's Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut.
There's AOC.
There's Elizabeth Warren.
There's so many others.
And this is, of course, amplified and repeated by pundits.
Elon Musk is a thief.
Elon Musk is stealing from us.
Again, there's a certain strangeness to this kind of accusation, right?
Because what is Elon Musk actually doing?
He does not have control over government spending, but to the degree that he can identify waste and fraud in government programs, what happens to the money that is not spent?
What happens to the money that is not paid to bureaucrats, for example, who are Led on the street, who are fired, who are removed.
Where does that money go?
Does it go to Elon Musk?
Does it fill the coffers of Tesla?
No.
It goes back to the U.S. Treasury.
It goes back, you might say, into the coffers of the taxpayer.
It becomes unspent government money that can then be used to spend elsewhere, or to retire debt, or to return to the American people in the form of tax cuts.
And so, I come back to the question, What do the Democrats mean when they say Elon Musk is a thief?
I think here is what they mean.
And it was actually David Sachs who pointed this out in a recent interview, and I think he's 100% correct.
David Sachs said, for the Democrats, taxpayer money is their money.
When money is paid in taxes to the government, the Democrats think, okay, It is now ours to do with as we wish.
We can keep some of it for ourselves.
We can float some of it through NGOs and have it circled back to us.
We can spend it on our own coveted programs.
We can use it to buy votes.
But however we want to spend it, it is our money.
And therefore, if you take it away from us...
If the government can no longer spend it, if it can be no longer used to buy votes, if it is no longer paying for this fattened bureaucracy that is 100% in the Democrats' corner, in other words, if it is returned to the taxpayer,
that is a, quote, giveaway.
Now, the Democrats can't really complain about giveaways to So they make it sound like this money is being given away to, quote, the rich.
But of course, if you have across the board tax cuts, it isn't being given away to the rich.
It's being given away proportionately to everybody who pays.
And in many cases, it's not being given away at all.
The immediate effect of what Elon Musk is doing is not to return money to anyone, just to put it right back in the U.S. Treasury.
And yet that action is described by theft.
So really what this is, is not a description of what Elon Musk is doing, but a revealing indication of how Democrats think.
The way the Democrats think is that your money...
Paid to the government, or should I say extracted from you by the government forcibly through taxes, seizes to be your money and becomes their money.
And if anyone threatens to take it away from them, then that person, namely Elon Musk, is a thief.
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You remember, surely, the theory that said that COVID-19 came out of a lab leak in Wuhan.
Now, the common sense of the matter, as Jon Stewart and many others have pointed out, is that you have an outbreak of a pandemic in Wuhan.
Which happens to be the site of a lab that is making deadly viruses and doing gain-of-function research.
It's kind of like if you had a, let's just say, an obesity problem in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Turns out to be the result of kids eating way too much chocolate.
And there happens to be right in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The Hershey Chocolate Factory.
And therefore, isn't it reasonable to posit that the problem arises there, or quite likely arises there?
And yet, this lab leak hypothesis was derided.
It was debunked by many prominent virologists.
It was...
It was scorned in science magazines and popular magazines and it became even a pretext for deplatforming, censoring, restricting, banning people who are advancing this plausible theory in social media and in other public statements.
And now we are getting admissions from the left.
And from the scientific community that the conspiracy theorists were right and that the conspiracy theory was not really a theory, but there was an actual conspiracy to shut down truthful discussion of where this virus came from.
I want to give two notable examples of this.
And the first one comes from Great Britain, where a classified dossier Compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove.
This is the former head of MI-16.
MI-16 is essentially Great Britain's answer to the CIA.
It is their top intelligence service.
And this classified dossier was passed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the very beginning of the COVID epidemic in March 2020.
And I'm now quoting the single telling line from this dossier.
It is now beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 was engineered in the WIV, in the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
He's not saying it's a theory.
He's not saying that it needs to be explored.
He's not saying that we need more discussion and not censorship.
He's saying it is beyond a reasonable doubt that this is where it came from.
And so Boris Johnson knew that.
It's also the case that the former UK science minister, this is Patrick Vallance, suppressed the theory.
He did his best to dispute what he secretly knew to be true.
And so this is the beginning of the public denial of what these top officials already knew.
And this is happening, as I mentioned, in Great Britain.
Now let's come to the United States.
And here in the New York Times, we have this article called, We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.
It's written by Zineb Tefeke, a columnist at the New York Times.
And the whole thing is a massive exercise.
It's both an exercise in admitting the truth finally now.
And an exercise in massive hypocrisy.
Why?
Because the New York Times was itself very active in suppressing the truth, in deriding people who spoke the truth, and yet...
And this is kind of a habit on the part of the Times.
They put out massive lies.
Biden is very competent.
Biden knows what's going on.
Biden deserves to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry because he's so knowledgeable.
His memory is legendary.
Then, later, when it becomes impossible to sustain that, they publish insiders revealed that Biden didn't really know what was going on.
And they act as if they are revealing important information, even though...
They were the ones perpetrating the lies.
They were the ones in a position to find out that those were lies at the very beginning.
And yet they are now purporting to be the...
Truth tellers.
And the same thing is going on here.
The New York Times, which is a very guilty party in promulgating the falsehood that the COVID virus somehow demonstrably came out of a wet market in Wuhan.
Now they're backtracking and saying, but they're not saying we were at fault.
Here's what they're saying.
Quote, many public health officials and prominent scientists dismiss the idea as a conspiracy theory.
So the blame is now falling on the public officials and the scientists.
And by the way, it does belong there.
The writer goes on to say...
That when EcoHealth Alliance, which was, by the way, the North Carolina outfit that got government money and was doing gain-of-function research and working closely with Wuhan, when people pointed out that the EcoHealth Alliance had lax safety standards,
77 Nobel laureates, 31 scientific societies all lined up to defend this organization.
The Times article goes on to show that officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices, all of which were aimed at putting out a false theory.
And the Times even says, perhaps we were misled on purpose.
Now, they don't really say what the purpose was, and that's really what I want to focus on here, because I think what the purpose is, is this.
You had the U.S. government funding this gain-of-function research through the NIH, through the other health organizations, and they were funding it in America, but the Americans were working hand-in-hand with the people in Wuhan.
And then you have the lab leak, and then you have a global epidemic, and you have people dropping dead in dozens or hundreds of countries, and the death toll ultimately, honey, I don't know what the death toll ended up being, but it was something like 10 million people, right?
Or was it even more?
All right, so let's just go with probably a low estimate of 10 million people, certainly many millions of people.
So imagine the responsibility if it comes out that you, i.e.
the U.S. government, using taxpayer money, has been bankrolling this extremely dangerous gain-of-function operation so that we get a virus that we wouldn't otherwise have had, a virus not minted by nature, a virus that we helped make.
So I think the U.S. health authorities were like, uh-oh, guess what?
We are going to be seen as horrible.
We will be seen as participants in crimes against humanity.
Debbie is totally right here.
And so we need to cover that up.
We need to block it.
And of course, China has an equal interest in blocking it.
And the World Health Organization, which obviously didn't make sufficient protests against gain-of-function research before, they're, in a sense, guilty of at worst horrible negligence if they are not actively involved.
And so...
This, I think, is the reason for all the lies and all the suppression.
And the New York Times goes into some of the details about ways in which, for example, you have leading virologists who privately said, we think it probably came from a lab.
Here's biologist Christian Anderson from California.
The lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.
But guess what?
Christian Andersen says this only in private.
In public, he says the exact opposite.
And when he's confronted later about it, he goes, well, I changed my mind.
I thought it might have come from a lab, but then I changed my mind.
What he didn't say is that his organization, his university, his research operation gets a whole bunch of government money.
And so you have prominent government figures who were pressuring these virologists.
This guy, Christian Anderson, and a couple of other virologists wrote an article in which they discuss, under pressure, by the way, from the U.S. government, which doesn't need to remind them that you're getting our money.
And so they write this article sort of leaning toward the idea that it came out of a wet market and not from a lab.
And they send this article to a guy named Jeremy Farrar, who is now the chief scientist of the World Health Organization.
Jeremy Farrar comes back to them and goes, listen, strengthen your case.
Don't give any credulity to the idea that it might have come out of a lab.
So you see here the way in which the world's top scientists are deliberately twisting the truth for a political and a personal cover-up agenda.
There was also an influential Letter published in 2020 in the scientific magazine called The Lancet, which some people believe, along with Nature, to be the most prestigious science magazine in the world.
Well, it turns out that Peter Daszak, who is the president of EcoHealth, he drafted that letter.
But of course, he concealed his own involvement.
Why?
Because he gets gain-of-function money.
And so all of these shenanigans are now finally being revealed.
The New York Times goes on to point out that the CIA has changed its assessment and now thinks that COVID came out of a lab.
The Department of Energy thinks exactly the same thing.
The FBI came to the same conclusion.
So you can see here this disgraceful situation of people high in authority misleading us, lying to us, gaslighting us, and not to mention you've got Meta and Facebook.
You've got YouTube.
They become...
They become, ultimately, not only do they become participants in spreading the lies, they are active in suppressing the other point of view.
They don't allow dissenting voices to blurt out the truth.
And yet the truth is now finally coming out.
And we know that this regime of censorship is so destructive and so damaging that even when I...
I told Abby, I'm like, I'm planning to talk about this today.
She's like, well, be a little careful because you could still be censored on YouTube.
So this is how bad our public debate is.
When you now have MI-16, you now have Great Britain, you now have the New York Times, you have all this evidence pointing to not just the possibility, but the probability.
And as the MI-16 guy goes...
Not even the probability.
He says that it is beyond a reasonable doubt that COVID-19 did not come out of a wet market, but came instead out of the Wuhan lab.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast the economist Peter St. Ange.
He's a Mises Institute Associated Scholar.
He's a former Economic Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
You can follow him on X at ProfStange, S-T-O-N-G-E, so ProfStange.
And the website is Mises.org, but there's also his website, ProfStange.
Peter, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
You were just saying to me a moment ago off camera that after delivering four years of laments and jeremiads and warnings that we were approaching the precipice, by the way, I was doing very much the same thing.
It is actually a really good feeling to have turned the corner, a new administration that seems to be hitting it on so many different fronts.
I thought I'd just begin by asking you for a kind of brief overview of Trump's economic approach and how it differs from what we've had to endure for the past four years.
Yeah, so we've just started getting some economic numbers in for Trump, and it's actually been far better than I expected.
I've been very pro-Trump.
I like his economic strategy, but the numbers have just been surreal.
So Joe Biden's last inflation report had inflation running at an annualized 5.7%.
Trump just came out last week with his first inflation report.
It's at 2.4%.
That is one heck of a move in, what is it, six weeks.
Trump's job reports are, what, he came in at 155,000 jobs.
Joe Biden had done 125, but there's a big difference because 93% of the job creation under Trump is private sector.
Under Joe Biden, throughout his presidency, it was about 70%.
That was either government jobs or it was NGOs, part of the welfare industrial complex, the term the The Trump recipe,
he's continuing what he did in his first term, which is tax cuts, regulatory cuts, getting rid of red tape, and energy drilling.
Of course, he's adding to that now with two big areas, which are mass deportation.
He was deporting before, but now it's really a priority because voters I mean, of course, what happened under Biden and the voters are really interested in it.
And then the other one is Doge.
So Doge aggressively cutting spending.
Now, those two add-ons, they're interesting because they're very, very important for the wealth of the country, right?
We want to get out criminal illegals.
We want to get out people on welfare who aren't supposed to be here in the first place.
Of course, we want to cut this wasteful government spending.
A lot of it bankrolls the entire left, the things that Doge is finding.
But the thing is that those two elements, they actually, they look bad on paper.
They reduce GDP.
And the reason is because GDP includes government spending.
So this might be surprising to people, but Elon Musk gave an example.
If you fire every car worker in America and you hire them at the DMV to look out the window all day, but you pay them more at the DMV, you've actually increased GDP, which is bizarre, but that's how they count it because, of course,
government comes up with GDP numbers, so they're going to count themselves.
As part of that.
So as you cut government spending and as you deport potentially millions of illegals, this actually decreases GDP on paper.
So I've been calling that a paper recession.
Now, we went through something very similar in the 1940s.
So after World War II, we had 11 million soldiers to demobilize.
Now, that crashed GDP.
I think it fell by about 12% in 1946.
Just absolute brutal.
Great Depression level.
On paper.
Now, of course, we could have kept those guys on the payroll.
We could have just had them march around in circles or dig holes and fill them.
That would have bankrupted the country.
It would have starved the private industry and factories of workers.
But we didn't do that.
But the point here is that GDP went down a bunch.
Now, because we put all those men into actual productive jobs, we then had the 1950s.
So you have one year, maybe a year and a half of pain, followed by a decade.
Of boom.
So that, I think, is a distinct possibility we're looking at here, where we could get a paper recession.
It could be 12 to 18 months as government workers are laid off, as illegals leave.
Illegal immigrants, they go to McDonald's, they go to the dentist.
So if millions of them leave, then you do get less GDP.
Now, of course, you can see your dentist, so that is a positive.
But the point is that we could be coming into a recession specifically because...
Trump is doing the exact things to make the country richer.
Wow, that's very interesting.
It shows you that GDP is to some degree an artificial number, doesn't it?
Because what you're describing is we're doing good things, and yet because GDP is adding up, let's say, for example, if a bureaucrat sits all day and twiddles his thumbs and does a three-martini lunch but then collects a paycheck, His salary is counted as part of GDP,
isn't it?
So if you unload this do-nothing bureaucrat, you have reduced GDP.
So what I think I draw from that, the fact that the GDP numbers by themselves are not quite as meaningful as people sometimes take them to be.
Now, the one policy that seems to have stirred the most concerns and maybe rocked the market a little bit, and certainly the liberal pundits are up in arms about this,
The first thing I want to notice about this is that when they keep saying that tariffs are a tax, tariffs are going to result in higher prices, these are the same people that, by the way, advocate Tax increases,
right?
These are people who are always calling for income taxes to go up.
And when they do, they always say, if you say, well, if you raise income taxes and so on, or you have taxes on corporations, prices will go up.
They go, oh no, because the corporation should take it out of their greedy profits.
These people are making obscene profits.
So if we tax them, they should be able to take it out of their profits and their prices don't need to go up.
And yet, when it comes to Yeah, so tariffs are pretty big for the stock market.
The reason is because you have to change up your supply chains.
If you are an American company who's importing things from China, now you have to find them from another source.
Or your costs do go up, or you have to try to build things domestically.
They're very disruptive for companies in the short run.
So that hits stock prices.
That's why we're seeing that in the markets.
But the important thing here is that economically, they're not nearly as destructive.
The key point is, you know, there are many countries in the world that have used very, very aggressive tariffs, and it's worked for them.
This includes Japan, Korea.
It includes China.
And the key is that if you're going to put up tariffs, you have to make it attractive to manufacture in your country.
So most cases of tariffs fail, places like Brazil or countries in Africa, because they put up the wall, but they don't bother making it attractive to produce in their country.
Maybe they're incompetent or they're corrupt.
So Trump is trying to do that.
He's trying to reduce business taxes, especially for small business.
He keeps saying that he wants to get rid of the entire...
Income tax.
Harold Lutnick, his commerce secretary, was just up saying that he wants to get rid of all income tax for anybody under 150,000.
If you combine those with cutting red tape, Trump has said, I think he's up to 10 to 1. He wants to get rid of 10. If you do that, if you cut the red tape and you cut the taxes and you put up the tariff barriers, that becomes irresistible for foreign companies to move their production to the U.S. That's already happening.
We're seeing Taiwanese companies, Japanese companies who are moving production to the U.S. Because remember, the U.S. is one quarter of the entire world economy.
We are massive.
If you put a tariff umbrella over that and then you cut Business taxes, income taxes, and red tape.
Every company in the world, especially Europe, you don't have to be suicidal if you're Volkswagen to keep producing things in Europe.
You can't even get electricity because they keep cutting it off.
They got the green energy.
So that's really sort of the key here, is that if you're putting up tariffs...
As a longer strategy to make your country attractive and to draw in production, which Trump is doing everything right for that.
He does need Congress for it.
If you're doing that, yes, you have some short-term pain.
You have an enormous amount of benefit.
Now, the other thing that's interesting is that Trump, of course, did impose tariffs in his first term.
And we have the receipts for those.
What happened is that there was very, very little inflation.
In fact, when Trump left office, I believe inflation was about 1.4.
Anyway, it was very, very tame, even with all those taxes or even with all those tariffs.
And the reason is because especially China, what China does is they cover the tariffs for Chinese exporters.
And the reason they do that is so that they can maintain market share in the U.S. So what ended up happening with the tariffs first term is that literally the government of China paid them for us.
Now, if China does that again, then, well, at that point, it effectively neutralizes the tariffs, but it turns China into, say, a $200 billion donor to the U.S. government, which is a pretty fantastic idea.
But when you boil it out, if Trump is using tariffs tactically as a way to pressure other countries, that will 100% work.
We are far more dominant than any of our trade partners.
If you take Canada, for example, one-fifth of the Canadian economy is exporting to the U.S., about 1% of our economy is exporting to them.
So any trade war, Trump will win.
And then if he's doing this sort of for the long game of bringing companies back home, if he gets his way on taxes and red tape, that is going to work as well.
That would create a new dawn in America.
I saw an interesting argument I'd like to have you comment on.
It was by a free market economist who made the point that, look, from a free market point of view, a complete free market, no tariffs, just free trade is the ideal solution.
However, he says, it is a great illusion to believe that we live in such a world, that in fact, other countries, many other countries have tariffs.
That dwarf our tariffs.
In fact, they have extensive tariffs and extremely high tariffs, and they have a lot of them.
So in other words, when you're looking at the market, the international market, you're not seeing prices that have been set by free trade.
You're seeing prices that have been set by a regime of existing mercantilism and tariffs.
And so the economist was arguing that...
Tariffs of the kind that Trump is imposing might be a kind of second-best solution, second-best to a pure free market, but also seen as a kind of tool to try to bring us closer to that free market by using tariffs as a weapon to dismantle other people's tariffs.
Do you think that this kind of line of reasoning holds water?
I think that's absolutely correct.
You know, Trump is talking, I've been calling them the nuclear tariffs because they're going to hit almost every country.
On April 2nd, Trump wants to do reciprocal tariffs on all of our trade partners, and that's exactly what he's doing.
He's quantifying their tariffs on us, and he's saying, look, we're just going to match you guys.
And when you go through the numbers, it's astounding.
So straight tariffs, where you just put like a 3% tariff on something, in most of our trading partners, those are typically about two to three times higher than what we do to them.
But there's also this other category of what's called non-tariff barriers.
And those can be enormous.
So to give an example, the U.S. medical equipment industry is the leader in the world.
If you are a top hospital in China, you are buying Medtronics.
You are not buying the local stuff.
Yet, you can't export this stuff to Europe because they have their own FDA who goes through it and says, no, no, no, this stuff isn't up to snuff.
So they play games with regulatory approvals.
They do that on agricultural products.
They do it on electronics.
They do it on cars.
They have VATs, so these sales taxes in Europe that can be quite high, 20% or more.
They exempt their own products for export.
They don't exempt us.
When you put those together, Europe taxes us.
Or tariffs us 18% more than we tariff them.
So the irony here is that the entire left-wing global media is painting Trump as some anti-trade guy.
He's the one who's trying to straighten this out.
The Europeans are absolute gangsters on trade.
They literally charge Norway and Switzerland money.
They have to pay billions of dollars to access the European market.
Because otherwise they can't trade with Europe.
And this is just pure gangster.
If we did that to Europe, we'd be charging them, what, 30, 50 billion dollars a year.
So Europe is one of the worst offenders.
China, of course.
India.
Almost every partner that we trade with tariffs us at a far higher rate than we tariff them.
Where do you think this is going?
I think, Peter, that it's obviously important for Republicans not to lose the House in the midterm election.
I remember thinking back to the Reagan days, how Reagan had really put up with a very severe recession in 1982, but the economy began to roar back in 83, and Reagan, of course,
had a resounding re-election.
But Reagan had a pretty bad midterm in 82 because the economy was faltering.
My question is, with such a narrow majority in the House, and a little better in the Senate, but not too much better, is Trump even more hemmed in to the degree that you can have some bumps in the road in 2025,
but things need to be looking better to the second half of 26 in order for us, for the GOP to hold in the midterm election?
Yeah, absolutely right.
And there's a couple of interesting things there.
One of them is that if we're going to get pain from government layoffs and deportations, it's better to get that early.
Because then the economy has enough time to recover.
So if we're looking at it now, we've got, what, 18 months until the midterm election.
So earlier is better, which Trump seemed to be doing.
The other interesting point is, I think one of the most important takeaways from the 2024 election was that media...
Legacy media, left-wing media, does not have the power that it once had.
They were rolling out comparisons to Austrian corporals every single day in the last week of the election, and it didn't work.
It all bounced off.
So I think that we're going to have the boss battle here, where their side is going to say, Trump pulled this recession out of thin air.
Our side is going to correctly point out that Biden had lined this thing up.
Before the election, betting markets were 50-50, whether we were We're going to have a recession this year.
So this recession was already queued up.
And what Trump is doing is pulling up the private sector, getting rid of the fat, the government spending.
Does that come out to a plus or minus zero?
I don't know.
But this is going to be the messaging battle royale, the true test.
Does new media, people like you, me, podcasters, do we have the power now to go toe-to-toe with the legacy media?
Fascinating stuff.
Guys, I've been talking to Peter Sinanj, economist at the Mises Institute.
Follow him on xProfS-T-O-N-G-E, the website profs-t-o-n-g-e.com.
Peter, great pleasure.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Of course, Sinanj.
Great to see you.
I now begin Chapter 1 of Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And this chapter is called Why Reagan Gets No Respect.
Now, it should be remembered that I think Reagan does get a lot of respect now, but I think that in the 1990s when I wrote this book, there was a lot of Clinton-inspired derision and denunciation of Reagan.
And to some degree, what I'm saying in this opening chapter is that that's understandable.
There is something about Reagan that is mysterious, that is elusive.
So let's get right into it.
Reagan did more than any other single man in the second half of the 20th century to shape our world.
Yet his presidency and his character remain little understood and often grossly misunderstood.
Any intelligent examination of Reagan must begin with the recognition that he was a mystery, both politically and personally.
Most people find this difficult to believe because during his two terms in office, Reagan established an intimate television rapport with us.
Whether we approve or disapprove of his policies, we think that we know him, yet we forget he was an actor.
So this is my way of getting into it.
And I am doing what often you want to do in a book is you want to take the subject and raise some kind of unanswered question about him.
And here the unanswered question doesn't pertain just to one of his policies.
It pertains to Reagan himself.
What is it about Reagan that made him so effective?
Now, I quote Lou Cannon.
A journalist from the Washington Post who covered Reagan really since the 1960s.
I'm quoting him.
He says, I regard Reagan as a puzzle.
I'm still trying to understand the man.
And I note that virtually everyone who knows Reagan, including people who know Reagan well and have observed him closely, they kind of agree.
They say that there's a public Reagan, but...
The effort to understand the man behind the mask is frustratingly elusive.
Here's a story in Edmund Morris, Reagan's official biographer.
He says Reagan is the most incomprehensible figure he's ever encountered.
Even Reagan's family, I say, found him enigmatic and impenetrable.
His four children confessed that in many ways he was a stranger to them.
And here's Ron Reagan.
This is Reagan's son.
Ron Reagan is his son with Nancy Reagan.
And he says, quote, you get just so far and then the curtain drops.
So kind of unusual to see someone saying that about their own dad.
And Reagan's adopted son, Michael Reagan, had wrote an autobiography.
Many years ago, it was called On the Outside Looking In.
What an odd title for a book.
But I think, again, what he's getting at is there's an aspect of Reagan that is elusive, that remains mysterious.
Even Nancy Reagan says the same thing.
At one point, she said that, quote, there is a wall around him.
He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.
So, this is in a way the task I've set myself in this book to succeed where all these other figures have failed, namely in trying to look behind that wall, to at the very least discern what is behind the barrier.
Peggy Noonan, a shrewd observer of Reagan, one of his star speechwriters, says that Reagan was, quote, a paradox all the way down.
Now, what is Peggy getting at?
Here's Reagan.
He's got the most important job in the world.
He's the leader of the free world.
And yet, he seems to be very casual, almost whimsical, almost like he's got better things to do than run the country and run the world.
That's paradox number one.
Reagan seems determined to reduce the size of government, change the scope of government, redefine what government is all about.
And yet he seems curiously removed or detached from the everyday operations of government.
Even though Reagan is ideological, maybe the most ideological president of the second half of the 20th century, at the same time, he's not really an intellectual of any kind.
In fact, he provokes a lot of derision from the intelligentsia and many in the press.
Even his own aides often condescend to him.
And yet, a normal person, when you're faced with this kind of derision, this kind of condescension, you'd become very uptight.
You'd become very irritable.
You would try to push back.
I mean, look at the way, for example, Trump responds to criticism.
He fires back.
But Reagan sort of laughed it off.
He didn't seem to mind the scorn.
In a way, he almost acted like it didn't even matter.
Reagan was comfortable consorting with aristocrats, playing golf with millionaires and billionaires who considered him to belong in their company, and yet at the same time, Reagan was equally at home with a miner, a construction worker, and they were convinced he shared their values and that he was one of them.
A few other presidents have enjoyed greater public accolade and affection.
I think you'd again have to compare Reagan to Trump.
Where you have this almost devotional attachment to Trump.
Reagan had some of that too, and yet it didn't seem important to him.
It didn't seem to satisfy any kind of emotional need in him.
Reagan appeared self-contained in a way that even, I think, Trump does not.
Reagan was gregarious.
He liked people.
And yet, oddly enough, very few people felt that they were close to him.
Reagan would often talk about God and speak sometimes even very familiar terms.
He's a man upstairs and so on.
But even though he championed a restoration of traditional values and spiritual life, he didn't himself go to church.
He was an exponent of family values, yet he was divorced, had somewhat strained relationships, at least with some of his children, and he rarely saw his grandchildren.
So these are some of the personal Kind of oddities about Reagan.
And now we come to something much bigger, the political mystery surrounding Reagan.
And I say that this was well expressed by his national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, in a conversation with Reagan's Secretary of State, George Shultz.
I'm now quoting McFarlane.
Quote, he knows so little and accomplishes so much.
What an interesting line, because McFarlane, who was himself a seasoned diplomat, coming out of the kind of elite schools and the foreign policy establishment, McFarlane, I think, felt that he himself had a much more comprehensive and detailed knowledge of things going on around the world.
Reagan supposedly didn't.
This is the point about he knows so little.
And yet, McFarlane is saying, He accomplishes so much.
Here I think a very illuminating contrast.
I don't say this right here in the book, but the contrast is with Nixon.
Nixon was in fact a kind of almost maniacal student of history and of foreign policy.
Nixon would read Thucydides, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu.
He was often quoting philosophers and strategists.
And Nixon and Kissinger would have these kinds of deep conversations.
And so even though Nixon was the intellectual, it was Reagan who ended the Cold War.
Reagan's assessment of the Soviet Union turned out to be much more prescient, much more on target than Nixon's.
In fact, Nixon himself, Nixon spoke at the Reagan Library in 1991, and he said this.
He said, I visited Reagan once in the White House, and I tried to engage him in a discussion of Marxist theory and Soviet strategy.
And Nixon says Reagan really wasn't that interested.
In fact, Reagan insisted on telling Nixon some jokes about Soviet farmers who didn't have any incentive to produce under the communist system.
And Nixon was a little put off.
Nixon says, you know, I was troubled to hear this kind of flippant approach from the leader of the Western world.
And Nixon himself had written books talking about Reagan's lack of realism.
Nixon was warning, hey, listen, the Soviet Union isn't going anywhere.
It's not going to collapse.
He says, you know, we have to learn to live with the Soviet Union.
We've got to do what Nixon called hard-headed detente.
And yet, two and a half years after Reagan left office, right there at the Reagan library, Nixon admitted that he was wrong and Reagan was right.
Quote, Ronald Reagan has been justified by what has happened.
History has justified his leadership.
So, what I want to do in this book is to unravel these mysteries, give you a window into Reagan the man, and also give you a sense of how this man This ordinary man,
who came from a somewhat dysfunctional family in the Midwest, had a very remarkable career starting out in Hollywood, then at General Motors, then running for office in California,
and finally making his way at a fairly advanced age to become the President of the United States.
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