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March 25, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:53
THE LAWFARE CONTINUES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1048
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Coming up, I'll discuss Judge Bosberg's crusade against Trump and what can be done about these runaway judges.
In fact, I have Attorney Ron Coleman joining me.
We're going to talk about that topic.
And I'll also consider the ramifications of a Pentagon leak that has divulged some so-called war plans to a magazine editor, the editor of The Atlantic.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Thank you.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This. We are seeing the quite remarkable spectacle of the left.
And by the left here, I mean the Democrats.
I mean much of the mainstream media.
And I also mean some of the runaway or rogue judges.
What we're seeing is that these judges are showing their hand.
They're showing that their real sympathies are with some of these absolutely horrific gang members, trendy Aragua, MS-13, hardened criminals, and they are very concerned about the due process rights of these people and also about their treatment in prison.
Now, here we see an article in PBS.
Talking about the prison in El Salvador, the prison doesn't offer workshops or educational programs to prepare people to return to society after their sentences.
I'm sure this is true.
In fact, I think at one point I heard Bukele saying, we don't plan to return these people anywhere.
They're here to be incarcerated.
These are essentially habitual, lifelong criminals, bad guys, and it's not good for society to see them back on the street.
But what I'm highlighting here is the...
Tender solicitousness for the conditions in prison.
Now, notice that when January 6th prisoners were thrown into conditions, they were in the D.C. Gulag.
You have all these Haitian and Jamaican guards.
The guards are black.
Some of the prisoners are white.
The black guards are taunting them, bullying them, denying them food, throwing them into solitary confinement.
You didn't see any judicial concerns.
You didn't see very many media concerns.
And you certainly didn't see Democrats saying, we need to examine these facilities.
We need to make sure that there are, you know, to quote the PBS article, workshops and educational programs being offered.
No, they didn't care.
And so the conclusion to be drawn, and there's no other conclusion to be drawn, is that the left...
It cares more about trendy Aragua than it does, for example, about Republicans.
I don't see another way to interpret this disjunction, this contradiction, this dual set of facts.
Here's a leftist on the bulwark, which is the Never Trump site, and he's railing about a guy named Andrus.
A gay Venezuelan man who was sent to an El Salvador prison camp with no due process.
Now, first of all, I don't think that we need to take the facts as supplied by the left at face value.
Most of the time, they will tell you one thing and suppress another thing.
So let's just say, for example, this guy's a gay men, he's a fallen man, but guess what else he did?
We're not going to tell you any of that.
We're just going to tell you he's a gay man, so we're going to give you the idea that the only reason he's being deported is because he's gay.
No. He's not being deported for being gay.
We should not go along with this.
And, you know, here is the bulwark guy.
It's evil, and anyone involved with it is evil.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, again, this is the pattern I'm describing here.
This guy is exercised about the gay Venezuelan who has been erroneous.
And, again, these are people who didn't care when Lake and Riley was killed.
A big deal.
You know, all these mothers are grieving because they were...
Their daughters were raped and murdered by illegals.
Big deal.
That's what happens.
You know what?
We want to bring in all these people.
There are going to be some gang members.
There are going to be some, you know, MS-13.
What do you expect, Anish?
So the left is quite willing, when it makes its own omelets, to break a whole bunch of eggs.
And yet suddenly they are now become the moral referees of our society, telling us how we need to feel.
Look. You know, in the old days, we'd get all worked up about all this and try to explain ourselves and justify our compassion.
We really don't need to do any of that.
I think our attitude should be simply a little more, I would call it anthropological.
Just kind of note the peculiarity of the behavior of the bulwark and the people of the bulwark, and then just kind of snicker at them.
We don't get all worked up.
We don't demand to know more information about the Venezuelan guy.
There's a process underway.
These people have been designated terrorists.
And guess what?
Whenever government steps in, makes rules, makes designations, you're going to have people treated as members of a collective.
And so it's kind of like saying, you know, when they decided, let's round up the January 6th defendants, they didn't make...
Fine discrimination.
So here's a grandma.
She was only in there for 10 minutes.
So we're not going to charge her.
No, they charged her too.
And so that's the way that these generalities work.
And the only reason the left is shrieking is it's now happening to them.
Which brings me to Judge Boesberg.
And I'm going to be talking in a little bit with Attorney Ron Coleman about Judge Boesberg.
So I'm not going to say a lot about it now.
But I do want to note that this guy is...
He's starting to back off.
And by starting to back off, what I mean is I think he's miffed that the Trump administration has invoked essentially national security and refuses to give him information, specific information about when the planes took off, carrying these deportees, carrying these gang members, spiriting them off to El Salvador and other places.
I think the Trump administration's view is that this is partly a military operation.
We don't need to tell you those details.
We are telling you...
Remember that Judge Bozberg is presiding over a case that is filed by the ACLU, a bunch of other law firms, on behalf of five guys.
Where are those five guys?
They're in the United States.
They have not been deported.
So one of the things that is going on here is that the ACLU and other of these law firms...
They're trying to make a class action case.
They're trying to get Judge Bozberg to rule not just on the five people in question, but on the entire class of people that have been designated as enemies by Trump and as part of this, quote, kind of predatory incursion into the country.
But Bozberg, having taken this kind of hard line with regard to the flights, Is taking a softer line with regard to the actual captives.
In other words, Bosberg is saying now, and he wasn't saying this before, so I think this is actually quite significant, is he's saying, look, you do have the right to make a designation.
You also do have a right to arrest them.
You also do have a right to hold them.
So the issue here under the Alien Act is merely concerning their deportation to a foreign...
Not about the right of the executive to carry out its exercise of executive power.
And he also went on to say that you have powers that come outside of the alien act.
In other words, I am ruling on the The constitutionality of a law, an old law that goes back really to the 18th century, but it's not like the president doesn't have executive powers outside the law.
And so I am not restricting you in any way concerning the exercise of your executive powers that do not arise out of the alien act.
So I think what Boesberg is doing now is he is retracing, he is backpedaling, he is creating room.
Because I think he knows that if he takes the extreme hard line here, he's sure to be slapped down.
He's probably going to be slapped down sooner rather than later.
And if it doesn't happen by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, it will surely happen by the Supreme Court.
So Bozberg, I think, here has now realized, listen, I want to be a roadblock to the Trump administration, but I want to do so in a way that maintains at least a shred of credibility.
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who hasn't, this leak that happened on the platform or the channel called Signal.
These are the facts as we know them.
There was a signal chat or discussion that involved a lot of the top people in the U.S. government.
Pete Hegseth was on that chat.
The vice president was on the chat.
Tulsi Gabbard was on the chat.
Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, was on the chat.
The president, Donald Trump, was not on the chat.
In any event, they're chatting about The Trump administration's military plans regarding the Houthis.
The Houthis are a kind of offshoot or a wing, just like Hezbollah is a terrorist wing of Iran.
The Houthis are also an extension of Iranian terrorism and Iranian power.
But somehow, somebody, and I think it is Mike Waltz, It included a journalist named Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, a left-wing magazine that has been a resolute opponent of Trump and the Trump administration.
So this gets us to our first question.
Why did Mike Waltz, if it is Mike Waltz, do this?
Why is Mike Waltz talking to Jeffrey Goldberg?
Is it really wise to include the sworn enemies of your administration into your conversations?
Now, the point here is not the...
I mean, obviously, Mike Waltz didn't mean for Jeffrey Goldberg to be in this chat.
It's accidental.
But the point is, he is on...
Jeffrey Goldberg's list.
I'm sorry, he is on Mike Walz's list.
Mike Walz, in other words, talks to Jeffrey Goldberg.
And I think that really is the problem.
I know that there is now some question about Mike Walz's future in the administration.
I don't really want to comment on any of that because I don't know the inside details.
But I do think it is a blunder and a big one to have done this.
Because you're basically, what you're doing is, the problem is not...
The problem is not what Jeffrey Goldberg makes it out to be.
Oh, these are sensitive national security matters.
These are war plans.
First of all, there are no war plans.
I mean, there are war plans, but they were not on the chat.
Jeffrey Goebbels says, yes, they were, but I didn't tell you about them.
Well, we don't really believe Jeffrey Goldberg.
He's a major perpetrator of the...
Iraq lies of the Bush administration.
He's a major perpetrator of the Russia hoax.
I mean, you cannot trust this guy as far as you can throw him.
So I don't think we need to go with anything that Jeffrey Goldberg says that he can't show.
If he has war plans, let's see the war plans.
We haven't seen them, and I'm going to presume that he doesn't have them.
Now, I have heard Tulsi Gabbard and others say, and Carolyn Leavitt, the press secretary, confirmed this morning, There was no classified information on the chat.
So this is really not the problem.
The problem isn't that the Houthis found out or even that Jeffrey Goldberg found out.
Apparently, Jeffrey Goldberg had some idea that there was some strike coming two hours later, but he didn't know where and he didn't know by who.
So the problem here is not the military operation itself.
In fact, Pete Hex said today that the military operation was just fine.
It was successful.
It was carried out just as it was designed.
None of this interfered with any of that.
That's not the problem I'm talking about.
The problem I'm talking about is you've got the left, and the last thing you want to do is give these people, who are quite frankly a more dangerous enemy than the Houthis, these people pose far greater threats to our national security than the Houthis.
So let's not be giving them any kind of piranha food, shall we?
Because they're piranhas, and that's what they do.
And if you give them a little bit, sure enough, right away, They activate the entire democratic apparatus and then Pete Buttigieg is out there and Chuck Schumer is out there.
Pete Hegseth needs to resign.
This is a grave breach of our national security.
Now, we don't need to freak out because we've learned not to freak out, right?
In the old days, we'd be like, oh, we have to answer all this.
We don't have to answer any of it.
Frankly, we stay calm.
We stay cool.
We assess what is really going on.
And what's really going on is let's try to avoid this kind of stupid behavior by giving the left the kind of access that it salivates to have and that unfortunately was given to them in this particular case.
Part of what's amusing, though, to me, is I like looking inside the chat to see what the people in it were saying.
And apparently, as it turns out, there was a very interesting debate going on in here about the Houthis between J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth.
And it had to do with the fact that J.D. Vance was like, listen, you know, why are we doing military operations like all over again?
Like, what is the point of this?
This seems to be something that the Europeans are pushing for.
Let's take action, Ukraine.
Let's take action against the Houthis.
Let's bomb over here.
Let's bomb over there.
And by the way, United States, you do all the bombing.
You bear all the expense.
You take all the risk.
And we will just sit back and kind of applaud and cash in on the benefits.
And J.D. Vance was saying, in effect, like, I don't like, you know...
Kind of subsidizing the Europeans again in one more arena of conflict.
And Hegseth was basically saying, you know, I kind of get it, and I think you should share this point of view with the president.
So there was, I think, if the left is trying to make it look like our side is really dumb, they're dumb for including Jeff Goldberg, yes.
But they're actually having a very normal conversation inside this chat about strategy, about the United States' strategy.
So not war plans, but sort of how is all this consistent with what we as a Trump administration, we as a MAGA movement, are trying to accomplish?
It's interesting how they're using very normal language to have their conversations.
No kind of antiseptic discourse that you can't figure out that's written as if it was in some kind of academic legalese.
It's stuff like, gee, what will the Europeans think about this?
IDK? I don't know.
You know, emojis.
So you have normal people thinking out loud.
And a part of that was shared with Goldberg.
Look, there's nothing damaging in here.
Nobody looks bad.
It's clear that there's reasonable debate that's going on.
And so my point is, yeah, seal the leaks.
Let's not have that kind of thing happen again.
If it is the case that Waltz is the culprit here, at the very least, there needs to be a talking to.
But I'll leave you with something that the Babylon...
Well, the Babylon Bee and Elon Musk weighed in on this.
Here's the Babylon Bee.
4D chess.
Genius Trump leaks war plans to the Atlantic where no one will ever see them.
In other words, who reads the Atlantic?
And then Elon Musk, best place to hide a dead body is page two of the Atlantic because no one ever goes there.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast attorney Ron Coleman.
He is at roncoleman.com.
That's the website.
And you can follow him on x at Ron Coleman.
I've had him on before.
He's just the right guy to talk about the subject on my mind right now, which is these seemingly rogue judges that are trying to intercept Trump executive actions on a whole bunch of fronts.
Ron, welcome.
Thanks for coming back on the podcast.
Let me start by asking you about Judge Boesberg, who seems to be in the front rank, if you will, of these judges.
Is it the case that Boesberg...
Being in D.C. is known to be a left-wing fanatic, or does he have a better reputation?
Is he, as a judge, more of a straight arrow?
How would you describe Judge Boasberg?
That's the right question, Dinesh.
Judge Boasberg is not considered a particularly ideological judge.
He's rather mild-mannered.
He's not really political.
Something, however, about the ascent of Donald Trump to power...
Definitely had an effect on him.
His January 6th jurisprudence was very problematic, pretty much down the middle as D.C. district judges go, but he is not a bomb thrower.
On the other hand, he has found himself in the middle of this Alien Enemies Act case, and it has gotten a little bit wild there.
Let's tease out some of the elements of the case.
And I think to make the issue clear, I'm going to sort of play Judge Boesberg, if I may, and frame the arguments the best I can his way.
And I want you to sort of evaluate what Judge Boesberg is saying.
So I'm going to start with Judge Boesberg demanding of the Trump administration, is it not the case, guys, that you violated my order?
In other words, I think Judge Boesberg is saying you may agree with it or disagree with it.
You may want to appeal it if you want to.
But the way that the law works is I get to say what the law means until it's appealed and overturned by somebody else.
So I told you to turn those flights back.
Did you or did you not do that?
It seems a bit, Ron, sidelining the main issue, which is the legitimacy of Trump's original actions.
But Judge Boesberg would seem to have a point here.
In demanding that the Trump people follow his rules until those rules are either stayed or overruled.
So the Trump administration, the Department of Justice, has not taken the position that many of our friends are urging them to, which is to say to Judge Bosberg, your order is just such a problematic, unconstitutional one.
It's so...
Breaches the separation among the branches of government that we simply aren't going to accommodate you.
That's not what the DOJ is saying.
What the DOJ is saying is, what order?
The only order we know of was the one that was entered by you several hours after the hearing.
And by that time, the planes were gone.
And we are...
You know, the exact timing of the plain judge, when they took off and where they were.
Frankly, we're going to retain our Article 2 power here to not disclose specific information about the operation, which was handled in part by the United States military.
But we are representing to you that we have no intention to disobey the court's order, and we have not.
Disobey the court's order.
And Ron, this would seem to be, I think, a wise course of action on two different fronts.
I mean, one of them is simply that this is, in fact, the way our system works.
We have a system of district judges, appellate judges, the Supreme Court.
So there is a way to go about things.
But I think a second point, which actually my wife had made originally, is this.
And that is that you don't want to create a situation where later, let's say the Democrats win the House in the midterm election, where they begin impeachment proceedings against Trump.
Even if Trump prevails in the end, they'll say, listen, the judge gave an order.
The order had the force of law.
You willfully and deliberately ignored the law.
You told the judge to take a hike.
This is a real attack on our constitutional system.
So do you agree that for these reasons, Absolutely.
I mean, there may very well come a point where the administration will conclude that it has no choice but to say no to one of these judges.
But this isn't one of those cases.
The worst possible thing that happens is that there's a political loss of face.
They may have to apologize.
In theory, they may have to fly a bunch of disgusting gangbangers back to the country.
That's not an emergency.
That doesn't in and of itself upset the bounce of power and the separation of powers.
So yes, again, a lot of our friends on the internet...
I believe that the time has come, and we've got to force the Supreme Court into it.
The Supreme Court probably does need some nudging, but this is not the way to do it.
This is certainly not the way to impress John Roberts.
I also noticed something that Judge Bozberg said in his most recent statement, which I thought was interesting, and that is he says, look, I am not requiring you to release these people into the interior of the country.
In other words, you've apprehended them.
And your right to detain them is not in question here.
The question is, did you have the right to fly them to the Salvador in prison or dispatch them out of the country?
Is that in conformity with this law?
Now, part of what the judge seems to be saying here, Ron, is that we are not...
At war with Venezuela, and there is no proof, I think he says, that this trendy Aragua, noxious and evil, though they may be as a gang, that they are operating at the orders of the Venezuelan regime.
Does this, to me, this doesn't really hold a whole lot of water, not because the judge is right or wrong, but...
Who makes these decisions?
I mean, is it Judge Bozberg sitting around going, I don't believe the Maduro regime controls 10-30?
He doesn't know one way or the other.
Isn't this a determination for the president to make?
Under the statute and under the Supreme Court decisions interpreting and applying the statute, the answer to your question is yes, it is the president's decision.
Judges have gotten so used to second-guessing the executive that, and also to an attitude, I mean, an attitude in Washington that immigration is somehow not a big thing.
It's not a matter of national security.
It's not something that the president should busy himself with.
And if immigration agents are mean...
To immigrants, or if they don't clip open the barbed wire, then that's some kind of constitutional violation.
This has to do with socialization.
I don't mean in a socialist sense.
It has to do with a mindset that has overtaken the judiciary and the deep state to a large extent, which is that this is not something that government should be doing for us.
But in fact, Congress made a very different decision.
And it has made such decisions for 250 years.
This is not some new right-wing conspiracy type thing.
If an executive can't do this, then you basically have an open border.
They come in and then they get to bargain with you about what you're going to do with them.
Yeah, I mean, Judge Bozberg makes a point about, he says something like, well, we should allow these individual Deportees to file individual cases and make their case in court and then see where all that plays out.
I'm assuming that this is something that maybe would have a little more force if he was speaking of US citizens.
But when we're talking about aliens...
And when we're looking at the clear language of the act, it appears that the president should be and does have the power to make these general determinations.
Listen, this group of people, I don't have to sort them out individually.
I'm making a determination that as a group, they pose a threat.
I think the term is something like predatory incursion in the act itself.
So let's generalize from this, Ron, because I think we have a broader issue here.
We have some 30 TROs or...
We're restraining orders from many different judges on many different fronts.
I think you're beginning to feel the reason you have this internet chatter, as you put it, is that the MAGA guys are getting frustrated.
Trump has four years.
These judges get to sit there for life.
And so, you know, should they have the ability to hold him up for three months, six months, a year, just tie him up in the entire first year of his administration?
What? What would you advise him?
If Trump were to call you right now and say, listen, Ron, I just need to figure out a way for me to exercise my legitimate executive authority, and it's being towarded on 30 different fronts, what do I do?
Well, I mean, one point that I would make in response to the Judge Boasberg issue before going on is it's very difficult for him to say, These people are entitled to individual hearings, but I'm certifying them as a class.
The class certification here was one of the strangest things and is eminently reversible.
But that does feed into your next question, which is, what kind of procedural hoops should a functioning government have to enforce its own borders in a matter authorized by Congress?
Why is it that...
The judiciary should be a filter through which every single action of the executive has to pass.
The answer is, it doesn't.
What would I be doing if I were in, you know, in the White House Counsel's office with my friend and former partner, David Warrington?
I would do just exactly what I'm doing.
And as frustrating as it is to our bomb throwers.
The relationship with the judiciary isn't going away tomorrow.
We need to be able to retain credibility with them.
We can't have them imposing sanctions on us.
When we pass through this particular maelstrom, which we will, and it's not going to take nine months.
I have predicted it's going to happen in the spring.
It's going to get to the Supreme Court and there is going to be a broad ruling and it is going to change the landscape of how this is going.
I know that when you counsel patients, you end up sounding to a lot of people like a trust the plan guy.
And I have been guilty of saying trust the plan in the past when the plan wasn't really So let me rephrase the plan here, because I want people to be really clear what you're saying, and I actually agree with it, and that's this.
The Supreme Court...
Although it likes to move in a measured way.
And of course, Chief Justice Roberts stepped in and said, look, let's not start impeaching the judges right and left.
There is a judicial process.
So let the process play itself out.
If you have a problem with the process at the end, we can hear about it then.
But this process has not played out.
I took that to be the meaning of his statement.
And I think what you're saying is that you can't have intelligent people on the court, which we do have.
Who don't look at all this and go, something is a little amiss here because we have three branches of government and what we have are really some, you know, two and a half dozen judicial quarterbacks.
Essentially trying to be presidents in absentia.
And Trump himself made a statement, I think very effective, where he goes, these guys didn't win 80 million votes, did they?
I did.
So there is a subversion going on here.
I think it's hard to deny.
And I think what you're saying is the court will let the cases percolate up.
But when it does, the court will realize we're not just going to resolve.
We're not just going to answer Judge Bozberg.
we're going to make some statements or a statement that clarifies that this is the legitimate province of the executive and essentially judges should go, I am saying it.
And although even friends such as Mike Davis have gone so far as to say, we already crossed that line.
We've already reached the point where it's too late.
And there's this tremendous credibility and legitimacy, you know, gap that has emerged because of the Supreme Court's Attitude that the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Having said all that, when that decision is made, and I do believe it will be, it will have additional credibility.
It will have been framed properly in a way the Supreme Court wants it to be framed, and it will be much more defensible in future litigation.
That's a great point.
And I think what you're saying also is that it'll be easier for these judges to follow orders when it's coming down the pike from their own branch.
It's kind of like the CEO of your own company, i.e., Chief Justice Roberts and that gang, are sending the memo down.
You know, which is back off, guys.
Whereas to the degree that they're getting resistance from the Trump administration, I'm sure that some of these judges think, well, this is just a more aggressive flouting of the law by a lawless president.
And our job, if we are going to retain a modicum of integrity as judges, is to fight back.
So in other words, it creates, I think what you're saying is a bad dynamic when there is a better option available to us.
I think so, too.
And I just...
Again, I am sometimes accused by friendlies of reposing too much faith in the judicial system, and I plead guilty.
And I've been burned by the judicial system, including in many political cases.
But I do think this is what we're in for.
This is how the system has to work.
And I'm not saying there can be no conceivable case where The nuclear option could be employed, but I don't think we're there yet, and I don't think it's wise to be premature.
I mean, presumably you'd agree, Ron, that if Trump decided that we need to bomb the Houthis and Judge Bosberg said, no, turn the military planes back, that would be a clear example of a case where Trump would need to tell Judge Bosberg to take a hike, because that would be so preposterously outside his realm of authority.
Right. And the mere fact that you have, as a president, assigned the military a role in immigration enforcement doesn't necessarily make it a military operation.
But we know there are always going to be gray areas, and sometimes they have to remain gray areas so that there's flexibility on both sides to work.
To get things done that have to get done.
Yeah, yeah.
Guys, I've been talking to Ron Coleman, attorney.
His website is roncoleman.com.
Follow him on x at Ron Coleman.
Ron, thanks so much.
Very illuminating and very helpful.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
I'm in the early stage of discussing my book on Reagan, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
Here's the book in paperback.
I urge you to take a look at it.
In fact, read along as I talk about it on the podcast.
It has my favorite picture of Reagan.
This is the classic Reagan in a cowboy hat, which I think captures a lot about the Reaganite spirit.
And even though we're in the opening section of the book, I sometimes as an author will do a kind of rhetorical strategy, which is that I will frame a problem and I will...
Answer the puzzle, the conundrum, the mystery in the introduction itself, letting you know where the book is going.
This is very different from, say, a film where you're never going to reveal the conclusion at the beginning.
There are some rare exceptions where films will do that.
In fact, one notable exception is Columbo.
Notice that in Columbo you see the whodunit is resolved at the beginning of the story.
You see the bad guy, you see what he did, you see how cleverly he did it or she did it, and then...
The intrigue is Columbo figuring it out.
But that's not the norm.
The norm in a film is you follow the story and you don't know what's happening and you don't know how it's going to come out and then it comes out at the end as a form of revelation or epiphany.
But in a book, you can go the legal brief style.
Kind of like the opening in a courtroom, where in a courtroom a prosecuting attorney will stand up and say, I'm going to prove to you the following eight things.
I'm going to show you that that man right there is the one who committed the murder or the one who robbed the bank, and I'm going to show you exactly how that happened.
And you lay out the case up front so that everybody kind of knows what's coming, and then the interest is in following the level of proof, of documentation.
The anticipation of objections and so on.
All right.
So we dive into this chapter, why Reagan gets no respect.
And I begin by making a point that I, like many others...
I kind of underestimated Reagan.
At least I underestimated him at the time when I set out to write this book.
I obviously think I have a good estimation of him now and a good estimation of him that is contained in the book itself.
But I'm saying that leading up to it, in the period from 1989 when Reagan left office to 1996 when I wrote the book, I too was part of the, you could say, the conservative intelligentsia that took a somewhat condescending view of Reagan.
And as a result, I underestimated Reagan.
Not that I didn't appreciate him at all.
I didn't appreciate him enough.
Now, there is an old saying, and I quote it here, no man is a hero to his valet, or valet, as some people say.
I say valet.
And this proverb, if you will, has one meaning.
But I want to give it a different, I think, a deeper meaning.
The obvious meaning is this.
The valet is not too impressed by the master.
Why? Because the valet is close enough to observe the weaknesses, the defects of the master.
So someone might appear to be spectacular to the general public, but the people up close to him know, you know what?
The guy's actually very petty.
Yeah, you know what?
The guy's actually very selfish.
You know what?
The guy's a horrible boss.
And so this is the kind of conventional wisdom.
But, say I, the deeper truth is that the valet's low opinion of the master arises partly because he doesn't understand the ingredients of the master's success.
The valet is the toughest guy to convince that there are good reasons why he is the valet and the master is in charge.
In other words, what I'm saying is that one reason no man is a hero to his valet is the valet is always tempted to believe, I'm as good as the master.
I should, in fact, be the master.
It's a mere accident.
It's a mere result of lottery or chance that the master is the master and I'm the valet.
In reality, our talents are quite similar, if not the fact that I am the superior one.
The truth of it is the valet has always got to recognize or always got to contend with the fact that the master is the one that is setting the stage, telling him what to do, making the rules.
And so the valet has to come to terms with that reality of their situation.
And so it was with Reagan.
The valets of Reagan, me included, Did not really grasp at the time the secret of his success.
And in fairness, it wasn't all that easy to see where that was.
Reagan had a certain easy-goingness to him.
He's very different than, well, let me take the example drawing on the president of, say, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is a kind of obvious genius.
He is an obvious workaholic.
He says that he wakes up in the morning, he starts work pretty much after waking up, he eats his meals while working, and then he works through the night, and then he goes to sleep.
So this is, you can kind of see how a guy like that, with that kind of ability and work ethic, is going to achieve a lot of amazing things.
Reagan actually wasn't like that.
You never got the impression he was working particularly hard.
Reagan appeared to have lots of time to do whimsical things.
And so there was a certain kind of, I get it done without really doing a whole lot.
And the people around him who were actually more like Elon Musk.
Many of them were like really sweating, reading, writing, coming up with ideas, strategizing, war games, this and that.
And they couldn't figure out Reagan.
But what I'm going to argue in this book is that Reagan was the opposite of what a lot of A lot of people thought about Reagan, well, you know, he's really a remarkable man, but he's not really an outstanding leader.
And I'm going to argue the opposite.
Reagan, as a man, had certain quite notable limitations and faults.
And those faults are not the worst faults to have, but they're faults nevertheless.
And yet he was, in fact, an outstanding statesman and leader.
And when I say he's outstanding, I don't just mean that he was like an above-average president.
He was in the upper half.
I really mean that this guy belongs in the pantheon, in the gallery of our great presidents.
In the category of, say, Washington, who was the founder of the country, or Lincoln, to me, those presidents have a more elevated place in the presidential pantheon.
But I will say that I think Reagan dominates American politics in the second half of the 20th century very much in the way that FDR dominated the first half.
And he was the supreme statesman of his own age, a leader of the caliber, I would say, of a Charles de Gaulle, of a Winston Churchill, really a figure for history and for the history books.
The diplomat Claire Booth Luce once said that history, which has no room for clutter, will remember each president by a single line.
Kind of an interesting idea, isn't it?
You know, when you live through a presidency, let's just take the Trump presidency or the George W. Bush presidency, and someone were to ask you, how do you assess the presidency?
You're a little hard-pressed to say because your mind is flooded by a lot of different things.
Well, he did this, and on the other hand, he did that, and this didn't work out so well, but that worked out better.
And this is the, you could call it the muddle-headedness of the present.
But as we recede in time, as we move further away, People don't see the small stuff.
They don't care about what happened with housing policy under Reagan or what exactly did George H.W. Bush do about a certain affirmative action rule that came down from the equal employment.
No one cares about any of this.
What people care about is what's the big thing that happened and what did he have to do with it.
And that becomes, and that's what Claire Booth-Luce is saying.
What's the one line?
So I'm going to give you some one lines.
So Washington was the father of the country.
Lincoln freed the slaves.
Now, as I mentioned, even presidents themselves don't often go along with the judgment that we would ascribe to them.
So here's Thomas Jefferson.
He wanted on his gravestone these three things to be recorded.
One. He wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Two, he wrote the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty.
Three, he was the founder of the University of Virginia.
And that's it.
You notice that perhaps the thing that we would remember Jefferson for, as much as the others, In fact, probably second to writing the Declaration of Independence was the fact that he was, in fact, a two-term president, and his party, under his successor Madison, won a third term.
But no record of this.
Jefferson didn't care about it, or at least it wasn't the most important thing to him.
So what's the—I want to leave you with the line that I would ascribe to Reagan.
Now, Margaret Thatcher came pretty close to composing Reagan's historical epitaph when she said, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
I mean, I have to admit, a great line, very succinct.
This is, in fact, the one line.
But I think Reagan actually did more than that, and that is that he won the Cold War, but he also revived the American spirit, and he made the world safe for an era of technological capitalism and entrepreneurship that...
So all of this, in my mind, defines the Reagan era.
And very few presidents, maybe Washington, maybe Lincoln.
And now, of course, we could say maybe Trump.
But I think with Trump, it's too early to...
Why? Because Trump is still in the middle, well, at the beginning of his second term.
Now, if Trump didn't have a second term, I think his historical place would have been smaller.
But the fact that he has two terms, notice it takes two terms to really make an abiding difference, for better or worse.
Obama had two terms and he did a lot of damage.
Arguably, he had three terms.
The third term being the Biden regime.
But Trump is more like the general who is in the middle of the stream.
So his full impact is going to be obvious and apparent only as time goes on.
And certainly, that time begins to count at the end of his second term.
But Reagan is one for the ages.
And when we pick it up tomorrow, I will say more about...
The difficulty that we have in trying to understand, particularly in our own time, greatness.
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