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March 20, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:40
THE LEFT’S TERROR TACTIC Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1045
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Coming up, a number of prominent conservative influencers are being swatted.
I'll explain how that goes down, and I'll talk about how this is a case of the left really endangering people's lives.
Country music singer John Rich joins me.
We're going to talk about his early assessment of Trump's second term and his candid take on the politics in the music industry.
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I want to talk about this disturbing phenomenon of swatting.
The swatting of prominent conservative influencers by the political left.
Now, when I say by the political left, this swatting is going on in a very...
Deceitful, sneaky, underground ways.
Because what swatting involves is making a false report to the police that something is happening inside of the home of one of these conservative influencers.
You say something like, you know, he's killed his entire family, or he's holding his wife or his ex-wife hostage, or that there are reports that he's killed his children.
And so what happens is the police can't ignore this kind of a report.
And so they dispatch major SWAT teams to raid the house, to bang on the door, sometimes to break in, to intercept what is reported as a major incident inside the house.
Now, this is all made up.
This is not, in fact, going on.
And so it is, as I said, a false report.
Now, normally, if you call 911 or if you call the police, there are ways to find you, right?
There are ways to track the call.
There are ways to identify who is making that call.
And so you know right away where the false report is coming from.
And so what these people who are pulling these schemes do is they disguise the call.
I don't know if they use burner phones.
I don't know if they route the call through a VPN that is coming from some foreign country.
So you have no way of telling where that call is coming from.
In any event, all of this demands major investigation.
This is not a case where this has happened to one guy or two guys.
It started out that way.
I'm scrolling through social media, and our friend Sean Farish, who's a Trump impersonator, he talks about being swatted.
I'm like, wow, why are they going after Sean?
He just does hilarious commentary where he...
He has the voice that you can almost not distinguish from Trump's.
And then Gunther Eagleman posts the same thing.
I've been swatted.
And then I see other people, all of whom I recognize and most of whom follow me and I follow them and they share my content.
I see just today Juanita Broderick.
This is the woman who's now got a big presence on social media.
She's the one, by the way, who accused Bill Clinton of raping her.
And Juanita Broderick got swatted.
And she says about 10 police and SWAT teams showed up.
And they said the caller said there were two masked men and people inside her house had been shot.
So this is how they got the police to come out in force.
Debbie has been, and I am now, good friends with Joe Paggs, who's a prominent radio host out of the San Antonio area.
He's got a national following.
And Joe got SWATed.
And Joe released some footage about what happened.
And then also our friend Larry Taunton, whom I've had on this podcast several times.
And here's Larry.
I'm just going to go through his thread because it gives you kind of chapter and verse.
It gives you the detail of how this happens.
And Larry also must have some sort of a ring camera or door camera because he has all of this on video.
I was swatted last night, he says.
As you can see in these three videos, I was in bed.
But notice Ranger, my German Shepherd, was on the prowl, his ears up.
So Larry's like, something's up, right?
The dog's instinct is perked up.
He says, then I saw a flicker on my bedroom door.
The dog goes out to investigate.
He goes and gets his gun.
What does he see?
Quote, I saw the silhouette of a man on my deck with an AR-15.
Imagine this.
You're asleep.
You hear some motion.
You see a guy with an AR-15.
Larry then goes on to say, I could hear whispers and saw two other men also in body armor, heavily armed.
He says, I turned on the lights.
I told them to identify themselves.
And he says, and from there, things began to deescalate.
He says, they did.
He says, the officers told me they received a call from someone who claimed to be, the person claimed to be in his home.
And hiding while I shot people.
So that was the report given to the cops.
And so Larry goes, these were the good guys.
I mean, the cops were not doing anything wrong.
They were responding to a report.
And he says they were doing what they should be doing.
And he goes on to say, I doubt any of them voted for Biden or Kamala, which means he probably chatted with them afterward.
And they were like, this is horrible.
But this is what these people do.
They had approached the house without sirens and silence because they thought there might be an active shooting going on.
And he says, this might have been a bloodbath, but for restraint on both sides.
This was an attempt to get me and my wife killed.
It ended in smiles and handshakes.
But what might have happened?
This is the point that, you know, Larry is a literary guy and he's noting the irony.
They came, they crouched, they hid, they had guns, and by the end of it all, we were buddies.
But I think what he's also communicating in this thread is the fact that this is a dangerous business.
Because it could easily have gotten Larry or one of his family members killed.
Imagine if Larry didn't see what was going on.
He just sees silhouettes.
He opens fire thinking that he's somehow having a home invasion.
And then they return fire and you have Larry as a casualty.
Larry says, let's remember, all of this is going on in pitch darkness.
So nine police vehicles in his drive, and this is really terrible.
This has been going on too long, and this is not normal types of protests.
This is...
A kind of terrorism of its own that is putting lives at stake.
Now, I was glad to see that Kash Patel is all over it.
He posted recently that the FBI is aware of these swatting incidents.
They are investigating them.
There needs to be no holds barred prosecutions of the people who are doing this stuff.
This is not a case where you look the other way.
This is not a harmless prank.
This is...
This is putting people's lives at risk.
And I think what it shows you is that the left has had a monopoly of discourse, a monopoly caused by their guys running the media, running these social media platforms, and not only having that kind of domination,
but being able to censor the platform and ban.
People who disagreed with them.
And they began to enjoy this monopoly.
Who wouldn't, right?
A monopoly allows you to essentially have your point of view prevail because there's no other point of view that is even allowed or entertained.
And now that the game is different, now that these conservative influencers are having their say, and not only having their say but winning the argument, and not only winning the argument but giving the left back in its own currency.
So the left relies on sarcasm.
Derision, memes, outrage.
Well, there's a MAGA machine that produces the same.
Larry does powerful work in documenting the activities of the NGOs and the international left.
And Joe Pags is out there on the radio slamming these guys in his very effective way.
And Gunter Eagleman is all over social media.
So these people have become, in a way, a real threat.
to the political domination and perhaps even political monopoly of the left and because they are a threat the left wouldn't go to all this trouble If the left didn't feel that its empire, its racket, the corrupt arrangement that they have got between politicians on the one hand and the media on the other,
all of this stuff that's been going on for years that is now coming out into the sunlight and making them look really bad, this swatting is their way of desperately lashing out.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast the legendary country singer, John.
He is a multi-platinum hit generator and music industry leader.
And he's also a proud father of two sons and recently celebrated his 13th wedding anniversary.
He is a philanthropist.
He is the founder of the Redneck Riviera whiskey brand.
You can follow him on x at John Rich, the website redneckriviera.com.
John, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
You follow me on social media and I thought, gee, I'd love to have you on the podcast.
We haven't had a chance to do this.
And in preparation for this, Debbie and I were listening to your song that is called Earth to God.
What a beautiful and powerful song.
And I thought I might just start by asking you, how do you come up with songs like this?
How do you choose what to sing?
Well, first of all, I would say any self-respecting patriot is going to follow Dinesh, okay?
You got to follow him.
I mean, I was excited that you reached out to do this interview.
You know, the work you did over those four years of being in the wilderness with Joe Biden was so important.
I mean, the work you did educated millions and millions of people as a lot of the truth that was actually happening behind the chaos that a lot of us couldn't understand.
So before I get into anything, I just want to say thank you.
For being such a patriot and putting yourself out there really in harm's way many times to make sure that we all heard the truth.
So it was an honor to get the request.
You know, songs come to me in a variety of ways.
I've been writing songs since high school.
I've written over 2,000 songs, and about 230 of them have been recorded, meaning...
Either by myself or by other artists, really a lot by other artists.
I've written songs for all kinds of people.
I actually wrote songs with Taylor Swift on her early records before she went hard left and went off the rails.
She didn't used to be like that.
But I was writing with songs for Tim and Faith and Jason Aldean, Gretchen Wilson, Taylor Swift, and lots of people.
So when you're in that mode of songwriting, you're writing for someone else.
You're trying to land something, say something that they want to say.
But you mentioned a song called Earth to God.
So Earth to God is a song that I wrote when the pandemic was happening, the plandemic.
And you look out the window, the United States is burning to the ground.
Everybody's locked up.
We know that medical tyranny is raining down on us.
We know everything is going wrong in the country.
And as I'm in the same mindset everybody else is in, I have this picture of like, Humanity grabbing a CB radio, you know, those old school radios, and going, Earth to God, come in, God.
Earth to God, come in, God.
Like you're hailing God with an SOS.
Because that's how I felt.
And the truth about him is he is right there.
He's literally right there.
If you reach out to him, he's there.
And he will respond.
And so that was the impetus behind that song.
And it actually, it took off.
I currently don't have a record deal.
I don't have a publishing deal.
I don't have any affiliation with the music industry on any level, with any company, anywhere.
I'm about as independent as an artist can be.
And so Earth to God, I just put it out there and told everybody, hey, here's a song called Earth to God.
I hope you like it.
And it actually became the number one most downloaded song on iTunes for two weeks in a row.
Wow, that's downright amazing.
John, is that because the music industry has sort of lost its way?
I say this because For many years, going back now to the 1980s and 90s, it seemed like there were quite a few country singers who were conservative.
I mean, maybe there were some on the other side as well, but it looked like an industry that was leaning conservative.
Maybe rock music was different, and maybe rap music was different, but country music seemed to be sort of, you could say, right of center.
But did that all go sideways, and did country music kind of go the way of the other genres of music?
So that the companies and the people in charge became hostile to the type of music that someone like you would make?
Yeah, so you're actually pretty spot on.
So up through the early 2000s, I would say 2003, 4, 5, in that range is when it started to change.
And so what happened in Nashville is they conglomerized.
So they became conglomerates.
And so basically, here's the three big companies that control country music.
Are you ready?
You ready for these names?
Tell me if these names sound familiar.
Universal, Sony, and Warner Brothers.
Okay?
Between those three companies, 95% of all the artists are signed to one of those three companies for a subsidiary of one of those three companies.
And those are the same companies that run Hollywood.
And so what happened is...
And LA and New York started sending in CEOs to come into Nashville and replace the ones that had been here for a very long time.
And so when they did that, the entire ideology changed in Nashville.
So now you have to make the record label happy.
I mean, I remember being called in after doing like an interview with Sean Hannity I did one time about some subject that was going on.
And Warner Brothers called me in for a meeting and sat me down and said, hey.
We want you to stop doing interviews like that.
And for God's sake, don't comment on anything that could cause anybody to get upset out there.
We're trying to sell records here, man.
My response to them was, well, I thought that's what country music was.
I thought we were the ones who were pro-America and we're the ones that we speak the truth in country music.
I mean, that's Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash.
That's all the greats.
I mean, I thought that's what it was.
They go, Yeah, but you can't go to those subjects anymore, those networks, because it's bad for business.
And so that began the unwinding for me of being in the music industry.
Listen, Dinesh, I was at the absolute top of what you can get at as a songwriter in Nashville.
So there's two big companies.
One's called BMI and one is called ASCAP, A-S-C-A-P.
They're the two big ones that handle all the songwriters.
Vinesh, I was ASCAP Songwriter of the Year for three years in a row.
Three-peat, meaning nobody had more hit songs on the radio in those three years than I did.
So I was at the very, very top of the game.
So it was quite a thing to consider severing that relationship with them because I got a lot out of that.
I mean, I grew up in a double-wide trailer in Texas.
I have a high school diploma.
That's pretty much the extent.
Of my pedigree.
Music was always my focus.
So to cut them loose was a very big decision to make, but it was the right decision.
Now, today we hear about these prominent country stars who are left-wing, and I'm kind of wondering whether it's just that the...
You have a new generation of country guys who happen to go left.
Or, what seems now to be more likely, in light of what you just said, is that you've got young country singers who can read the tea leaves.
And they notice now that there's an establishment that rewards you for being on the left.
Kind of like if you go into the media.
If you're a conservative and you go, let's just say by some mistake you're hired by the New York Times, you quickly figure out, this is the way for me to get ahead.
If I want to get a Pulitzer Prize...
I don't want to be talking about the plandemic.
I want to be spouting the same thing as Dr. Fauci.
So what I'm getting at is, do you think that part of what's happened here is that the younger country singers have got the message that they will have a better future if their politics lean left instead of right?
Well, yeah, they absolutely know that.
And you have to put yourself in the position, let's talk about the new artists, because that's what you're focusing on.
If you're a new artist, okay, and you spend your whole life getting great at singing and writing songs and performing, and you pull up shop and you move to Nashville, Tennessee, and you bet it all.
I mean, you go chase the American dream, and you finally get that record deal.
And then you find out, well, this is who's running the record label, and they hate everything about the people that I'm singing to, and they really hate everything about me, too.
I can't let them know that.
Or I'll lose my record deal.
I mean, there went my American dream.
That's a hard position.
That's a really tough spot for an American dream chaser to find themselves in.
But I will step above that and tell you, some of the biggest artists in country music, I'm talking football stadium, packing out football stadium level artists, are conservatives, and they will not say boo.
They won't say anything.
They will not step out of line for fear of losing some big contract or who knows what.
They're so big, honestly, you can't cancel them.
The biggest artist out there in country music that's a conservative that has decided they're not going to play ball with the industry on the subject we're talking about is Jason Aldean.
I remember Aldean even reaching out to me early on.
His wife had gone on Instagram and made some comments about You know, gender stuff with kids when they were dragging kids in and, you know, hormone replacement and surgeries and all this stuff.
And she made some strong comments about that.
They started attacking his wife on social media.
And I think that's when he realized, okay, this is put up or shut up time for him.
And he decided to put up.
He decided to go like this.
And when he did, his crowds doubled.
And the industry couldn't do anything about it because he's too big.
He's Jason Aldean.
I wish other headliners would have that level of commitment to the country and really to themselves.
Listen, you're an American.
If you believe something strongly, you want to say it, say it.
Don't let anybody scare you out of exercising your freedom of speech.
I mean, a recent example would be Carrie Underwood.
So Carrie didn't make any statements.
Carrie didn't go on a campaign trail.
She didn't do anything like that.
She merely sings America the Beautiful at Trump's inauguration.
And what happened?
Here they come.
Whoosh!
They all come running in on Carrie Underwood like she's a bad person for singing America the Beautiful, but good for her.
She knew she would get that and she did it anyway.
So hopefully as these years continue to click by Dinesh, more and more people find more and more courage and just realize how ridiculous.
The situation is.
You know, I suspect to some degree, John, that this is also true for actors in Hollywood.
In other words, I find it hard to believe that there's like not a single major actor that has conservative views.
And the way Debbie, my wife, and I talk about it is we say, look, if you've seen an actor...
That has been pretty dead silent over the past five years and has not been railing against Trump or doing any of that.
You can probably reasonably suspect that that guy or that...
Woman is conservative, and their way of showing it is really by not showing it, which is to say by just keeping it zipped.
Whereas all the actors on the left, of course, there's no penalty for being on the left.
In fact, if anything, the opposite.
So those guys are all speaking out, so you can pick out the conservatives not so much by what they say, but by the fact that you don't hear from them.
I mean, that's probably a very accurate perception there.
Yeah, they are...
They're protesting with silence.
They refuse to engage in the leftist propaganda, so they just stay quiet.
You know what?
I haven't heard it put that way, but you're probably right about that.
And again, it's a lot to ask, especially of the up-and-comers.
I mean, they spend their whole life chasing that, and that's what they're built to do, and they're good at it.
And they realize that the industry has their set of rules, and you play by those rules, and you don't make it.
So, you know, for me, I had enough of it.
And I just decided that my freedom of speech was worth more to me than their affection.
And to take it a step further, a lot of people in the music industry are not just leftists.
They're actually bad people.
Actually bad.
And so if bad people think highly of you, what does that say about you?
Shouldn't bad people really have a problem with you if you're a good guy?
Yes, they should.
Bad people should hate you.
They should absolutely hate everything about you.
And they do.
They hate me big time.
They don't want me anywhere around them.
And that puts a grin on my face.
It's like I told my wife, I said, if those people thought well of me, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you sense, I mean, for a while there it seemed, you know, maybe politically more for you, but culturally more for you, we were sort of in the wilderness, right?
In other words, it looked like the whole weight of the U.S. government was coming down on us and you had all these powerful institutions, the media, academia, and so on, all united.
Do you think that the second Trump term is producing a kind of a vibe shift?
And by that I mean not just in the political domain, but in the social domain, there's just a greater acceptability of the conservative position.
Yeah, that's exactly what has happened.
And I think, you know, when they tried to kill Trump, and he came up with his fists like that, Any conservative out there that was concerned about backlash that they may get got over it real quick.
Because when you see that man come up and his first reaction is not to cover his face or duck and run, it was this.
I mean, I think a lot of people said, you know what, if he can come back from getting hit with a bullet with his fist in the air fighting for America, what's my problem?
I think that got a lot of people over their fear of going forward.
And yes, I do agree with you that the left now looks so ridiculous as they continue to regurgitate the same talking points, but now America has moved on from them.
They sound so ridiculous.
It's almost comical.
It's like a joke.
It's like a never-ending Saturday Night Live skit.
Listen, they're in such bad shape that the person speaking, The most common sense right now for the Democrats is a guy who wears gym shorts and a sweatshirt to the Senate floor and looks like he would have fit right in with the Adams family.
That's their best guy.
That's their top guy.
If I said, who's the most rational, moderately minded Democrat out there?
I'd go, I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's probably John Fetterman.
So they're down to John Fetterman.
They're down to Fetterman at this point.
I mean, that's how in disarray they are.
So anybody watching this interview, if you're still concerned about somebody calling you a bad name or giving you a look at work or unfriending you on Facebook, get over it.
Because we won.
We're here to turn this country around.
We got four years, hopefully more.
But we got the better part of four years to really make a difference.
Dinesh, I know that's what you're doing.
That's what I'm doing, too.
What do you think, John, is the significance of the...
Well, Elon Musk in particular, but also this little constellation of tech guys around him.
I think that these are guys who thought they could largely stay out of politics.
These are guys who are building things.
And, you know, Elon Musk has got like five multi-billion dollar companies.
He's primarily, I think, a visionary, an entrepreneur, an engineer.
But it looks like all these guys who at one time might even have called themselves Democrats have now suddenly decided collectively...
The country is in a kind of emergency.
Something needs to be done to restructure the government.
And they've all gone like hands-on in this enterprise.
Would you agree with me that this is actually one of the most remarkable things that we've seen in our adult lifetime and something very big is going on here with these dudes?
Well, if you believe that that's an honest transformation, I don't.
I don't believe that's honest at all.
What do you think's going on?
What's Elon Musk's motivation if it wasn't this large-mindedness about the country?
Well, you mentioned tech brothers in general.
You mentioned all these big tech people.
So I wouldn't solo Elon out.
But when you start talking about Zuckerberg and the guys running Google and Bezos and all those kind of guys all of a sudden coming in and...
I mean, that's like the wolf putting on a sheep suit and going, I know I've been a wolf my whole life, but now I'm one of you guys.
Give me a break.
I don't believe that at all for one second.
They know that they're beat.
They know that Trump is going to upend the system, that he's going to set into motion things that will not include them if they don't get with the program.
But that being said...
No.
I mean, the second there's another Democrat in the White House, the same exact guys are going to be out there doing the same crap.
Now, RFK coming in, you know, I know you did a lot of work on COVID and the vaccines.
I've talked about it extensively as well.
I'm hoping guys like RFK, Kash Patel, that they can get in there and change it to such a degree and maybe even get some laws passed that codify certain things outside of an executive order that make it really, really tough.
For us ever to find ourselves in those positions again, especially RFK.
I mean, what we've learned about what's in our food, what's in the medicine, how Big Pharma controls all the news networks by those stupid commercials that they run ad nauseum that you cannot get away from.
Only America and New Zealand are the only two countries on Earth where you can sell drugs to people on TV.
I mean, most people don't realize that.
Why is that?
Oh, because they own all the politicians, including the Republicans.
They own all them too.
I'm hoping by the time this 48-month run of Trump is over, we have a completely different chessboard sitting in front of us, and I hope it's the American people that are holding the power pieces.
I mean, what I found remarkable, and I read something where these pharma guys, they...
Don't buy these ads because they are, in a sense, hoping to sell enough products to justify the expenditure.
What they're really doing is buying off the media outlet that runs the ads.
And that is like one of those cases where the light goes on and you go, I get it.
This is a political contribution, not really an ad.
No, exactly.
I mean, that's a big thing.
That hopefully the general public will get their heads wrapped around as RFK starts to tell us more.
But yeah, so if Pfizer spends a billion dollars with NBC, okay, then they can probably tell NBC how they want NBC to report the news about the vaccine.
Not probably.
They will tell them.
And NBC will do what they're told.
And then now we're getting propagandized from the company.
That built a poison that is promoting it that is then telling us the news.
So they got this whole hamster wheel thing going.
And those are the kinds of things, Dinesh, that if the American people can finally see that and see it clearly, it'll be really hard to ever con us into that kind of thing again.
I think Trump not winning in 2020 or Trump not taking office in 2020, let me put it that way, was probably one of the greatest things that could have happened for our country.
Because four years of pain, four years of...
Of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, understanding there are actual evil and wicked individuals and places of power in this country that don't care anything about you, and they hate America.
So you could have said that over and over and over if Trump was in in 2020, and everybody would have said, ah, conspiracy theorists.
I mean, they call you that anyway, but now it's not conspiracy.
Everybody knows that's an actual fact.
Short of that happening, Dinesh, I don't know that another four years of Trump would have accomplished what needed to be accomplished to get us to this point.
I mean, don't you see that in people that you interview or people that you talk to?
The level of awareness that people have now is light years from what it was in 2019.
Yeah, it's almost like we had to go through the fire to come out of the other end.
And as you say, it's not just it's widened our understanding, it's also fortified our political courage, The country is not only manifestly different, I even think that Republicans are getting a tougher spine than they have shown any time in the last,
really in living memory.
Guys, I've been talking to country music singer John Rich.
Follow him on X at John Rich.
The website, redneckriviera.com.
John, what a great pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you, man.
I've always wanted to talk to you.
I haven't met you in person yet, so we've got to make sure that happens next.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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Again, it's Dinesh.locals.com I'm now in the opening chapter of my book on Reagan, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And the American people thought that they had a good understanding of Reagan, how Reagan got elected and what made Reagan successful.
Now, when Reagan first ran in 1980, he ran on a very simple idea.
I call it the before and after rule.
You know how you...
Sometimes when you're looking at home repairs, they go, here's the home before and here's the home after.
Or here's the guy before he took his medication and here's the guy after or before he underwent.
Here's the person before the weight loss program and here's the person after the weight loss program.
Well, for Reagan, the political equivalent of this was a simple question.
Are you better off than you were four years ago?
Reagan invented that question.
Dropped it in the middle of the 1980 campaign.
And it really proved devastating to Jimmy Carter because if you compared America in 1976 to America in 1980, America was clearly worse off.
I came to America, by the way, right in that time, right in the middle of it.
I came in 1978 in the fall.
And you could see that people were becoming increasingly frustrated and disgusted.
There was runaway inflation.
There were high interest rates.
The economy had ground to a halt in what was called stagflation.
The Soviet bear was on the prowl.
There were hostages in Iran.
So there was no reasonable way to answer, oh yeah, I'm better off in 1980.
So this was a...
As they say, a rhetorical question, a question that answers itself.
And I think this question, more than anything else, did its work in propelling Reagan to the White House.
Now, the American people throughout Reagan's eight years very much identified with him, and they saw him as this kind of regular guy, sort of one of them.
And Reagan himself was very much that way in his style.
He had a kind of...
Dignity and aplomb.
He had a twinkle in his eye.
He cocked his head.
He liked to tell anecdotes.
One time when he was asked at the age of 73, is he too old to run for re-election?
He goes, what the devil would a young fellow like me do if I quit the job?
This is very Reagan, very whimsical, light-hearted, easygoing.
And so people looked at Reagan as a very normal guy.
But I want to argue that this public understanding of Reagan as a good-natured, typical American, doesn't really get to who Reagan was and doesn't solve either the personal or the political mystery of the man.
Here's what I mean.
I'm now reading from the text.
Here was the son of the town drunk who grew up poor in the Midwest.
Without any connections, he made his way to Hollywood.
And survived its cutthroat culture to become a major star.
He ran as a right-wing conservative and was elected governor of California, the largest and one of the most progressive states in the country.
He challenged the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, for the Republican nomination in 1976 and almost beat him.
In 1980, he defeated Jimmy Carter to win the presidency in a landslide.
He was re-elected in 1984 by one of the largest margins in history, losing only his opponent's home state of Minnesota and winning 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale's 13. For eight consecutive years,
the Gallup poll pronounced him the most admired man in the country.
When he left office, his approval rating was around 70%, the highest of any president in the modern era, higher than that of Eisenhower or Kennedy.
He was one of the few presidents in the century to bequeath the office to a hand-picked successor, George Bush, who was elected in 1988 largely on the strength of Reagan's success.
With the election of many of Reagan's ideological offspring to a new Republican majority in both houses of Congress in 1994, one of the most stunning developments in modern political history, you could say that Reagan, in a way, won his fourth term.
Television reporter Sam Donaldson, who sparred with Reagan, recently told me, meaning recently around the time of this book, told me that if not for the constitutional limitations on his physical condition, Reagan could have been president for life.
moreover Reagan was more than a mere occupant of the White House throughout the world his name was identified with a coherent philosophy and outlook that people call Reagan's
And after all that,
I write...
How many ordinary fellows accomplished all of that?
So this is a way of saying that when you take in the magnitude of Reagan's life, His larger-than-life personality, his spectacular achievements in the movie business.
Let's remember that Reagan was like Trump in being a cultural figure before he became a political figure.
Reagan came out of Hollywood.
Trump came out of the world of television.
Reagan came out of the world of movies.
But there is a certain...
Now, Reagan wasn't an entrepreneur in the same way that Trump was.
But Reagan was active in the Screen Actors Guild.
He was also a public speaker.
And then, of course, he was unlike Trump.
Trump essentially entered presidential politics.
From the outside.
Reagan, on the other hand, ran for governor of California, served for two terms, and then ran for president, as I mentioned, first against Gerald Ford in 1976 for the nomination, which he lost, and then he got the nomination in 80 and beat Jimmy Carter.
So this is not, I think this is the point I'm going for, this is not an ordinary man.
To the pundits, which is to say to the media, the political scientists, the historians, they could never get their heads around Reagan.
Something, again, that's very similar to Trump.
Debbie and I were just talking about this a minute ago, and Debbie was making the point that with Reagan, they were condescending, they were derisive, they looked down on Reagan.
Reagan did not, however, get the same kind of rage, molten rage and indignation that Trump gets.
They are unnerved by Trump to a degree more so than even Reagan, although there are some similarities.
And Debbie was saying that's because Reagan...
He poked the bear, but he was a gentle poker.
Trump, on the other hand, is almost like a matador who incites the bull by flashing the red.
And then the bull goes insane and starts a wild charge.
And then Trump deftly steps to the side.
And then the bull goes crashing into the wall and then has to turn around and resume the charge.
So this is what we're living through now.
But there is a little bit of deja vu for Debbie and me going back to the 80s because there was some...
Something like this going on with Reagan as well, although, as I mentioned, with a slightly different thrust, a slightly different tone, a slightly different complexion.
Reagan was sometimes likened to the character Chauncey Gardner in Peter Sellers' film being there, as if Reagan was sort of, he presided over these large events that happened over eight years, but he didn't really do them.
So he was the totemic figure in office.
In some ways, the left treated Reagan the way that we treated Biden in 2020, with the big difference that Reagan got Alzheimer's later.
I think he announced the Alzheimer's in 1993 or 4. This was well after his presidency, which ended in 19...
At the end of 1988, or at least the beginning of 1989.
So this was utterly unfair to Reagan, but it came out of the fact that the left couldn't figure out how a guy like Reagan could achieve these things.
So he couldn't have achieved them.
Somebody else achieved them.
In 1996, right about the time I wrote this book, the historian Arthur Schlesinger rounded up a bunch of historians.
To make a kind of ranking of the presidents.
And there were all kinds of prominent figures who were asked to weigh in on this.
And no surprise, Reagan comes in very low down the list.
He's not the worst president, but he's in the kind of lower category of average.
In fact, Reagan scores lower than George Bush.
George H. W. Bush.
Reagan is put in the undistinguished company of Jimmy Carter, Chester Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison.
Other surveys by the American Sociological Association and others produce similar results.
So what I'm getting at here is that Reagan was underestimated, misjudged, really throughout his entire presidency.
He was producing these remarkable results.
He was getting this massive...
Accolades and vindication by the American people.
He was brought in on sweeping majorities that even Trump could not even come close to Reagan.
And this is not really because of any inadequacy on the part of Trump.
It's because the country has changed.
But let's remember, 1980, Reagan wins 44 states.
And the Democrats can only win six.
Look at the lopsidedness of that.
And then in 1984, it's even worse.
I mean, worse meaning better, from our point of view.
Reagan wins 49 states.
Mondale can only win his home state.
You have to go back to Nixon in 1972, when Nixon won that kind of majority against McGovern.
And McGovern was, in a way, a more marginal, far-left guy, anti-Vietnam War guy.
Whereas Mondale was actually a strong candidate.
Mondale was a center-left Democrat.
He was fairly tough on foreign policy, not a bad guy at all, and yet he could only take one state against Reagan.
So throughout Reagan's presidency, the elites jeer, the elites scorn, the elites treat Reagan as if he's some kind of lightweight.
And the remarkable thing about Reagan is, and this is the difference between Reagan and Trump, Reagan didn't seem to mind.
Trump minds.
If you say the slightest negative thing about Trump, there he is blasting you on Truth Social with a lengthy screed.
He calls you all kinds of creative and imaginative names.
Reagan would do none of it.
Reagan almost acted as if it didn't matter.
In a way, you could say that Reagan's philosophy was summed up by something he said once in a debate against Jimmy Carter.
There you go again.
That was Reagan's attitude.
There you go again.
And so in some ways, I don't know which was more irritating to the left to be blasted in the way that Trump does or to have Reagan just look the other way, pay no attention.
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