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April 7, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:27
RETHINKING TARIFFS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1057
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Coming up, the big topic is tariffs, and I'm going to examine the question, if tariffs are so bad, why do countries that are booming economically all have them?
I'll examine the brutal murder of a 17-year-old high school student as a reflection of a pathology in our culture.
And John Saylor of the Manhattan Institute joins me.
We're going to talk about whether universities will give up DEI without a fight.
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I want to talk about what else?
Tariffs. Because we are seeing a major roiling of the stock market, not just the American market, but global markets.
We're seeing a vaporization of large amounts of equity, huge consequences.
The so-called Magnificent Seven, the big companies, companies like Apple and Google are seeing the sharp declines.
And some people are predicting some version of economic apocalypse, either something like the 2008 crash or perhaps even a worse unraveling of the economy, and all because of these tariffs.
Now, from the left's point of view, it's Trump is doing it, and so the tariffs are...
Terrible. If Biden did the same tariffs, they would be cheering them or protecting the labor.
And of course, the UAW, the United Auto Workers, have come out and said how much they support Trump.
I saw Tim Walz was on one of these TV shows.
I think he might have been on with Jake Tapper.
And Jake Tapper was just reading the statement from the UAW.
And of course, Tim Walz, who pretends to be the champion of unions, the champion of working class, was just looking with his eyes wide because what do you say when the biggest union, one of the biggest unions in the country is basically saying, we love this.
This is going to be really good for American-made cars, for American jobs in the auto industry.
And so Tim Walz was just looking like, what do I say to this?
But it's important to realize that tariffs are very controversial, even on the right.
And I've had economists on this show, Stephen Moore, Brian Westbury, and in general, free market economists are opposed to tariffs.
And they're opposed to tariffs really for a couple of reasons.
One is that a tariff is a tax.
And free market economists are the anti-tax guys.
They don't want taxation and they find this to be just another, a new form of taxation.
A second reason is that tariffs are a restriction on trade.
And by and large, trade is, this is kind of one of the core principles of economics, is trade is beneficial to both parties.
If you and I are, let's just say, living in a primitive village and you have shoes and I have wheat, if you want wheat and I want shoes, we can make a trade.
We wouldn't trade, I wouldn't trade you my shoes for the wheat if I didn't think your wheat was more important to me than the shoes.
And conversely, you wouldn't make the trade if you didn't think the shoes were more important to you than the wheat.
So trade in this sense is by definition something that benefits both sides.
Now, that being said, the truth of it is, the vast majority of countries in the world, and this is not just the countries that are limping along and not doing so well, but countries that are very successful or countries that have been the big booming economies of the past 30 years.
Countries like China.
To a lesser degree, but still, India, which has also boomed relative to the kind of poverty-stricken country it was when I grew up there.
So the point is, all of these countries have tariffs.
And all of these countries have more tariffs than we do.
This is, of course, something that motivates Trump.
And I'll come back to why it motivates him.
But here's a question just to think about.
If tariffs are so terrible...
Why do all these countries have them?
Why do all these countries insist upon keeping them?
Why, when confronted by a Trump who says, listen, I want you to take all your tariffs down and then we won't have any tariffs on you, these countries are very reluctant to do that.
Now, in fact, some of them are notably bending on this and suddenly they are very receptive.
to the possibility of a no-tariff trade system with the United States.
I saw a report that the EU may be considering this.
The Japanese want to come here and negotiate over a trade deal.
The Singaporeans have said, we're not putting any retaliatory tariffs.
We want to work out basically an open trade arrangement.
I think ultimately we'll see something quite similar with both Canada and Mexico.
So countries are under pressure, willing to say, all right, we'll take this one down, we'll take that one down, or even we'll take them all down.
But notice that you have to pressure them to do this.
If they thought it was in their interest not to have tariffs, if they thought, if they agreed with all the economists, and I see Larry Summers, a number of prominent economists are all out there, tariffs are a kind of an economic boomerang.
If you have tariffs, that's like, you know, shooting yourself in the head.
Well... Why has China got tariffs then?
Are they shooting themselves in the head?
Well, if they've been shooting themselves in the head, they refuse to go down because the Chinese economy has just gotten bigger, stronger, bigger, stronger, and all with tariffs.
I just saw a post from a guy I've known, at least certainly knew in my days in Washington, D.C., Fareed Zakaria, smart guy on CNN, and Fareed Zakaria was saying this.
He's like, you know, The United States did have tariffs in the 19th century, but America was a marginal country.
We were not really a world power.
Trump is trying to take us back to a time when America was very sidelined on the world stage.
We've only become a global power in the 20th century, and so the idea here is that somehow we are regressing to a more infantile, undeveloped phase of our history.
Now, what I want to say about this is connected to what I said a moment ago about these other countries having tariffs, and that is this.
The United States had a lot of tariffs in the 19th century.
But far from the 19th century being a time of like...
Backwardness and things weren't going so well and America was marginal.
I mean, think about it.
America started out as an agricultural society that was indeed pretty marginal in the world scheme of things.
Great Britain, of course, was a much more powerful country than the United States going back to the 18th century when we had the founding.
But not just Great Britain.
France was more powerful than America and so were a whole bunch of other countries.
So when did America become an economic powerhouse?
Well, in the 19th century.
It was really between about 1820 and about 1890 that America became this juggernaut of economic growth.
The American economy became the biggest in the world.
So the 19th century, particularly the second half, and this is notwithstanding the Civil War, was a period of huge prosperity for the United States.
In fact, the United States only became a global power in the 20th century because it had already become a global economic power.
So the 19th century was, in fact, a time of great prosperity for America, and it was all done with tariffs, or it was all done at the same time that the United States had massive tariffs.
And so if tariffs are so destructive, why didn't they destroy the U.S. economy in the 19th century?
Now, our economy has, in fact, become bloated.
It has become, in some ways, dysfunctional.
But why is that?
That is basically because of reckless spending and reckless money printing over the past 75 years.
So it wasn't the 19th century that undermined America.
It is what has happened really since the 1930s to some degree, but certainly since the 1960s.
Enormous debt, enormous waste, expanding federal programs.
Look at all the stuff being uncovered by Doge.
is what has put us in our current mess.
And what Trump is trying to do, if you want to say Trump is taking us back to the 19th century, we didn't have any of this mess in the 19th century.
So to that degree, the criticism may be valid, but far from it being a case where he's taking us back to a horrible time when America was a mess, no, America was not a mess.
America was actually advancing on all fronts in the 19th century.
And if we can root out some of the rot that has crept into our economy and our...
Since then, that may not be entirely a bad thing.
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By another 17-year-old, Carmelo Anthony, who has now been charged with murder.
And all of this happened just a few days ago, in fact, on April 2nd.
The father of Austin Metcalf has been going on TV and saying things that are actually startled and maybe even riled.
Many of the people who are outraged at this wanton, seemingly unnecessary, horrible killing.
And Metcalf's dad has been saying, number one, let's not make this a race issue.
And number two, let's not make this a political issue.
Even though this is a case of a black-on-white crime.
I mean, we only have to pause for a moment and switch them around.
If the white kid had stabbed the black kid under these circumstances, this would be bigger than George Floyd.
This would be huge.
This would be a racial incident through and through.
So is it really possible to ignore the racial dimension of this and the double standard that seems to...
I feel sorry for the individual who made a mistake.
Again, a strange downplaying of...
Imagine if someone were to...
murder your son or daughter like this.
Just stab him at a game when the circumstances are that this kid, Carmelo Anthony, was evidently in the wrong stands or the wrong box.
He was sitting in the seats of the wrong team.
And so this kid runs up to him and basically tells him to move.
And that is what provoked the stabbing.
So would you actually describe this as a mistake?
Now, Carmelo Anthony claims that this was, quote, in self-defense.
And Debbie was telling me just a moment ago that people have contributed money in a sort of a GoFundMe or similar campaign, around $75,000 for his defense.
And as I read an article about this, this is actually from People magazine, it talks about the fact that, according to some witness, The white kid, Austin Metcalf, told the black kid to move, and the black kid said something like,
well, don't touch me, and apparently the other guy was, in fact, touching him, and so the black kid felt provoked, felt that he was somehow being disrespected, and therefore he pulled out a knife and, quote, touch me and see what happens.
And then that's what caused this, according to the eyewitness.
But even if this were true, I don't think the facts have been clearly established, but even if it's true, where's the self-defense?
I mean, self-defense is when you have a reasonable belief that your life or basic safety is mortally threatened.
That was obviously touching somebody does not cause that.
It doesn't rise to that level.
So this appears to be the case of a largely unprovoked attack.
Now, interestingly, there is some commentary on social media.
In fact, my friend Jason Whitlock, a radio host, and I've been on his show a few times, very smart guy.
Jason says about Austin Metcalf's father, quote, he's not groveling.
He is telling the truth.
And here is Jason Whitlock's point, which I want to develop because I think it's actually a quite profound meditation about what's happening here.
Jason says that Carmelo Anthony did feel disrespected and turned violent.
Jason says, quote, it is the exact same thinking that leads black boys to kill other black boys.
This is worth pausing and thinking about because what Jason is saying is that when Metcalfe's father says it's not a race issue, Jason is saying it's true.
It's not a race issue in the sense that a generation of young black teens have been raised in our society in A culture, not just of peer pressure and gangs, but a culture in general that teaches them to...
that I mean think about hip hop music and think about the sort of rebel stance rebel without a cause you know the kind of the kind of teenager who won't take it anymore the whole idea that you are somehow disrespecting someone if you don't grant them their space or if you touch them in any way, suddenly you are justified in lashing out with extreme violence.
And Jason goes, well, this is a death culture, a satanic culture, a demonic culture.
And he says the rules of dissing or disrespecting apply to everyone regardless of color.
This is a nihilism promoted by the idols that the American mainstream has placed on pedestals.
What Jason is saying here is that we're not just talking about black culture.
We are talking about black culture, but we're talking about a Hollywood and a music industry and a Broadway industry, all of which have like valorized this black culture.
I mean, think about it.
By and large, which is more cool in our society over the past 30 years?
A middle-aged black real estate agent?
Or some young punk who has got, you know, flared up hair and is like a rough kid in the ghetto.
Who is setting the tone for the culture?
By the way, not just for black culture, but even for rebellious white boys.
Who would they consider to be more cool?
Who would they more rather be like?
Somebody like Tupac Shakur or somebody like the real estate agent down the road?
And the answer is the former.
And so this is what Jason is getting at.
You cannot drink the poison of a rotten culture and not turn rotten.
And so I guess what he's saying is that Carmelo Anthony, yeah, the guy is going to be held liable and he should be.
But he is also the product of a rotten set of values that have been transmitted on the urban street.
But more than that, it'd be one thing if the society at large rejected those values and was making an effort through education and other means to root them out.
But no.
And so the point being, and this is I think where Jason is going with this, that's how you get a Carmelo Anthony.
That's how you get an unnecessary, wanton, horrible, tragic, and entirely avoidable murder like this one.
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Hey guys, I'd like to welcome to the podcast John Saylor.
He is the Director of Higher Education Policy and also a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York.
His research covers academic freedom, free speech, and ideological capture in higher education.
You can follow him on X at John D. Saylor, S-A-I-L-E-R, a website.
This is for the Manhattan Institute's publication called City Journal.
It's city-journal.org.
John, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I wanted to have you on because you are the man on the front lines keeping track of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Now, it seems to me, John, that in the corporate sector and with these law firms that are kind of bowing the knee or bending the knee to Trump, They were never all that enthusiastic about DEI.
Some of them got kind of arm twisted into it or intimidated into it.
And it's not that hard for them to back out of it, particularly when they're facing pressure to do so.
The universities, however, seem to me to be a different matter because DEI was kind of baked and cooked in the university.
It has become almost central to the mission of the modern day university.
The more elite the university, the more they seem to be into the DEI stuff.
Am I right about that?
that rooting out DEI in higher education is a whole different matter than trying to root it out from, say, corporate America or the tech world.
It's going to be a much more protracted battle.
Isn't that right?
That is right.
You know, it's interesting to see how much has changed as quickly as it has.
And we really have seen some huge dramatic changes in response to not even just actions taken by the Trump administration, but taken in anticipation of future Trump administration actions.
So, you know, there are some big victories if you're looking from the perspective of, you know, rolling back this bureaucracy that's spun out of control over the last 15 years and really threatened things like academic freedom.
But at the same time, it's possible to look at everything that's happened and say that, you
So to give one example of massive change, or maybe I should give a couple, the University of Michigan.
If I were to name one single university that has set the tone for higher education in the realm of DEI over the last 20 years, it really would be the University of Michigan.
You know, a lot of my time is spent as a researcher and an investigative reporter writing about these issues that stem really from things like the way universities hire faculty.
And there's hardly an institution that has had more influence than the University of Michigan.
The University of Michigan was one of the first recipients of this National Science Foundation grant called ADVANCE, which is essentially a sort of proto-DEI office incubator.
The National Science Foundation would give universities grants, and this continued right up until 2025.
It would give universities grants to develop out.
...offices that focus on equity or to develop out projects that focus on equity.
And one of the early recipients was the University of Michigan.
Michigan Advanced shaped how they created their diversity office.
It also, though, was enormously influential for other universities that once they were pressured, either by students or by social justice activists outside the university, to adopt DEI policies.
They looked to this model created by Michigan, and a lot of them just adopted these strategies.
One of them is called the STRIDE framework.
There are just so many acronyms that get tossed around.
One of them is the STRIDE framework that is all about infusing these principles into the way that faculty are hired.
But, you know, recently the University of Michigan announced that it was doing away with its DEI office.
It's enormous.
Highly, highly costly now, DEI office.
That's just a big deal.
And for all the criticism that I think I'll eventually get to in this conversation of the way that this reaction might be overblown, that's still a really big deal that Michigan has announced that they're going to pull back and essentially either just do away with certain positions or restructure what the office is doing so that it From what we can ascertain right now,
it looks like they're moving more towards a race-neutral alternative to DEI, and I think that that's an incredibly good step for just a variety of reasons.
But perhaps foremost is just that we've created this symbolic victory where the wellspring of these policies has...
Turned around and said, actually, this is not something we're going to do.
Similarly, the University of California system, you know, for years, they had been the trailblazer for this policy that I focused on for a long time and reported on for a long time, where universities require job applicants to write a statement on their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
And then they're actually, you know, evaluated for their response.
And that factors in.
John, it seems to me that this is a big deal.
The things you've described on Two somewhat distinct fronts.
The first front, of course, is that when you say, I'm going to stop doing something, regardless of whether you do it or not, you are conceding that that something is no longer defensible, right?
You're basically saying, all right, DEI, it's time is up.
We surrender.
We're going to be dismantling our DEI.
And so intellectually, These aren't...
Just cosmetic changes.
Because it's conceivable that somebody could take all the deans and sub-deans and deanlets and, you know, the whole platoon of diversity people and just rename their jobs.
Call them director of human resources and director of planning and director of implementation of initiatives.
And this would be a cosmetic change.
But I think what you're telling us is that not only is there a kind of intellectual retreat, but real change is happening on the ground in a couple of the very institutions that pioneered DEI.
And that's a good sign.
What do you make, John, of the Trump administration's back and forth with Columbia University, but I believe also with some other universities?
It seems like the Trump administration has brought the issue of anti-Semitism sort of to the forefront.
You need to suspend your DEI, but you also need to outlaw anti-Semitism.
I just thought I'd get your sort of appraisal of the prudence of approaching.
the issue that way, are they going about it the right way?
You know, if you look at the sort of list of demands that the Trump, or I should say conditions that the Trump administration gave Columbia, and then the conditions that it's now given to Harvard in a similar sort of re-evaluation of a massive amount of grant funding that comes from the federal government to those institutions.
You'll see that a lot of the requests that the administration makes are actually just kind of requests to follow the law.
You know, and in so far as those are the conditions for grant funding, it is absolutely unimpeachable what they're doing.
If you're saying that what you need to do is maintain order and follow certain Time, place, and manner restrictions for protests.
Well, you know, that's absolutely within the bounds of the, you know, not only within the bounds of the law with regard to free speech, because it still allows for the possibility, you know, it still allows for the possibility and encouragement of student speech, but it's also ultimately a request that universities actually enforce the law, especially when it comes to issues like harassment or issues like Discrimination.
And you'll notice that actually the Trump administration, it managed to get a long list of concessions from Columbia, and it seems to be satisfied.
Its requests to Harvard now in the same sort of process are a little bit different.
There's a little bit more of an emphasis on DEI.
There's a little bit more of an emphasis on Not just anti-Semitism, but actually what I would say is the root of the whole issue, the whole reason these things got under control.
And now it's funny because sometimes, you know, I talk to all sorts of people.
I talk to a lot of progressive reporters about these issues.
And I'm asked, do you think that the administration is going too far?
And I absolutely think it's possible for the federal government to go too far in making demands of private institutions.
So you should be very sensitive to that and follow.
You know, follow the law and encourage this to kind of be an above-board process.
But actually, I think that one way that I would answer is I actually think my worry is that they might not go far enough on certain issues that I think are really, really important.
So you could look at anti-Semitism on college campuses as merely an issue of universities allowing these crazy protests to take place.
Actually, I think that what's fostered anti-Semitism in higher education, to the extent that that is a kind of issue that has arisen, to the extent that that's happened, it's been fostered by a kind of ideological capture in universities where really only a very limited number of perspectives have been welcomed on campus.
And not only that, but in many cases, actually a lot of universities...
Encourage people who embrace activism as a vision for higher education to hold positions of leadership, to get on to faculty, to have elevated positions in the student body.
And that's a real issue.
And that's an issue that, you know, it's a difficult one to tackle.
But that has to be, I think, the way that we frame the problem.
And we've created a pipeline of scholar activists that have really reshaped what higher education is.
And until we address that, then we might see that even after these ground shaking threats that the Trump administration is making, there might still be.
If I can put this slightly differently and see if you agree with my formulation of it, John, long before anti-Semitism as a visible problem, there was A vicious anti-white ideology.
There was a strong anti-Christian bias in these universities.
In other words, I think what you're saying is that a complex system of victimology developed on the campus, the way of trying to capitalize on victim status, and the radical Muslims kind of noticed that this was already in place.
They didn't have to really invent anything.
They just had to slide themselves into the approved category.
move Jews from their sort of Holocaust victim position into the victimizer position.
In other words, you the Israelis are now the genocidal ones.
We are the victims.
And they had a ready-made structure of oppression that they could then pose as the great fighters of that oppression.
So I think what you're saying is that the Trump administration needs to realize it's the underlying structure that needs to be dismantled and not just its latest symptom or manifestation.
You know, I was encouraged looking at the letter that they sent to Harvard that it seemed like they were attuned to that issue.
That it's not just that we have kind of policies that have been not enforced.
You know, that's an issue.
Universities have these protest policies and then they don't enforce them.
They don't maintain order.
That's a bad thing.
But why is it that university professors, we have just a huge number of instances around the country where university professors have openly, when the October 7th attack took place, they openly rejoiced.
They said, they essentially said that this What creates that environment where people just...
I feel like that they can say that with a straight face.
Well, you know, some people are just going to be radicals and they'll do it in a, they'll be contrarians and they'll say that kind of thing no matter what.
And it's totally fine in the context of academia for people to hold radical views.
But what we've done is gone beyond that.
We've actually fostered an academia for the last 20 plus years where the people who view what they are doing as a tool for progressive action Activism.
Professors who view their job not necessarily as pursuing truth, but rather pursuing their vision of social justice.
Those people have been empowered in academia, and to some extent, all other opposing viewpoints have not been welcomed.
So it's no surprise that there are people who feel a sense of impunity when it comes to saying these things that I think are just absolutely unjustifiable.
Why do they feel a sense of impunity?
It's because they're not challenged.
They're not in an environment where the other people engaging in their discipline, in sociology or criminology or Middle Eastern studies, they're not being challenged on these basic issues.
And because of that, it's just a much easier environment for radicalism to spring up.
And you're absolutely right.
To some extent, the protests on university campuses, they were heavily funded by moneyed groups.
And the student radicalism, the kind of intersectional ideology, the critical race theory that has just been almost a campus orthodoxy in a lot of places, was incredibly useful.
For people who wanted to push a political cause that is actually in a lot of ways oddly not in sync with contemporary American social justice politics.
You wouldn't think that we would see something like Queers for Palestine given the way that places like Palestine view same-sex attraction.
But yet we do, and it's because It's incredibly useful to have this very simplified or that a lot of students have this very simplified view of power, of oppression and you can simply copy and paste whatever oppressor group you would like to and suddenly you have a pretty handily made political agenda that a lot of students can get behind even if they don't really understand what's going on.
Yeah, that seems to me a really good point.
These champions of diversity would not dream of moving to Ramallah or moving to Palestine, where their lives would be quite miserable.
But they don't have to worry about that because they're not doing that.
dorm at Columbia or taking over a building at Harvard.
And so they have the luxury, I think you're saying, of being able to view things through a framework that's never going to actually apply to them in any direct way.
Guys, I've been talking to John Saylor, Director of Higher Education Policy at the Manhattan Institute.
Follow him on X at John D. Saylor, S-A-I-L-E-R.
John, thank you very much for joining me.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I'm discussing my book, Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
I'm doing it in part so we can compare and contrast Reagan with Trump.
Because we are facing with Trump now a kind of questioning of the basic order of things very much in the manner that Reagan did and in some ways going beyond what Reagan did.
And the last time I talked about the fact that Reagan was A visionary, someone who could see the world differently than it is.
Trump, the same.
At a time when many people are just panicking and freaking out over tariffs, it's almost like Trump is looking through the tunnel.
He has a clear vision of what's on the other side.
And as a result, he appears very calm, almost unflappable.
I just saw that he was meeting with a bunch of football players and a couple of senators from California.
And Trump is like, he's whimsical.
He's like, well, glad to have you all here.
I see a couple of senators, but they're not the people I particularly like, so I'm not going to be introducing them.
I won't be naming them.
So this is Trump.
You know, other people think, oh, it's going to be, it's economic nuclear winter.
The economy is melting down.
With Trump, you get the idea that he doesn't see it that way.
And he has this kind of clear perception of the future.
Now, the second thing I want to highlight about Reagan, he had what Edmund Burke calls moral imagination.
And moral imagination is seeing the world through the clear lens of right and wrong.
For a lot of people, that's not the way to see the world.
They think that good and evil are these kind of extreme, simplistic, outdated categories.
You got to see the world through clashing interests and rival motives and subjective goals on the part of either individuals or countries.
But for Reagan...
There are good people, there are bad people.
Reagan would have agreed that we're not saying that there are people who are absolutely bad, although some people are.
And we're not saying that we are absolutely good.
But we do say that this moral distinction is critical to understanding the world and understanding politics.
And Reagan believed that there was a struggle between good and evil underway.
And it wasn't just a struggle between the West and the Soviet Empire.
It wasn't even just a struggle between capitalism and communism.
There was an element of it that was even domestic within this country.
You would almost say that it was ultimately over collectivism and collectivism as an ideology that Reagan, I think, viewed on the balance as evil.
Reagan also believed that there would be a struggle and it would go on for a while, but it wouldn't go on forever.
Moreover, that good was going to win.
Good would prevail over evil.
This is called an ideology or a hopefulness.
I think hopefulness is a better term here than optimism.
Optimism is sort of the cheerful...
I don't think that was Reagan's view.
Reagan's view was that in this great struggle, good will ultimately prevail because good is stronger in the end than evil.
And Reagan's views of this were, I think, derived from a religious root.
That's why I use the term hope.
One would never talk about Christian optimism, but you can talk about Christian hope.
And Reagan had a certain providential idea of America and of destiny.
And in the providential scheme of things, the good guys would come out ahead.
It's very similar to Christians who say that when you look at the human story, I know how it ends.
God is going to win in the end.
Reagan believed something of the same thing about America.
Now, Reagan's ideas.
Reagan was an ideological or philosophical man.
He cared about ideas.
This may seem sort of like, well, who doesn't?
Well, the truth of it is most people don't.
Think about, like, Bob Dole.
Bob Dole didn't care about ideas.
And John McCain, as far as I could see, didn't care about ideas.
I don't think either Bush, father or son, cared particularly about ideas.
They were ultimately, you could say, pragmatists of a sort.
They thought that they could kind of muddle through and do the best with a given situation, but they weren't driven by ideas.
And one test of whether someone is driven by ideas is whether they speak about ideas and also whether they read.
Reagan was a reader, but his ideas weren't unique in the sense that he didn't come up with them.
The ideas very often came from other people, but Reagan didn't mind.
Reagan was a kind of forager in the world of ideas, and he would pick up ideas, but the point is he was curious about them, and he was like, I like this thing.
This is very interesting.
Where do you come up with that?
What does it mean?
This was the way Reagan operated, and yet for Reagan, I should say that these ideas were not academic in the sense that they didn't float free in the...
They weren't like balloons.
They were ideas grounded in experience.
So Reagan would see these ideas played out in his own life, in the history of the country.
And as a result, he saw that ideas ultimately are powerful to the degree that you could implement them.
They weren't simply something to talk about.
They were things that you would work with.
Ideas in that sense become like tools to make the country better.
Some people say that Reagan was like, he had a few good ideas, but they were the right ones.
This was often said about Reagan, that he had a few sort of simple beliefs.
He wasn't a complex man.
But I think this is a non sequitur.
This is like saying that Abraham Lincoln...
He just had one idea, Dinesh.
All he cared about is slavery.
In fact, Lincoln was a very complex man, and Lincoln understood that in his time, this one issue mattered more than all the others, and in fact, more than all the others combined.
And so Lincoln viewed his great presidential campaigns...
As revolving around the resolution of this mammoth issue that was in some ways a rebuke to the American founding itself.
And the same with Reagan.
Reagan focused on a few issues, but to him those were the issues that really mattered.
Those were the issues that defined what it means to be an American.
Which in some ways you could say is always in American history the most important question.
What is the defining feature of this American way of life?
What is the character of the American dream?
And Reagan had this ability to separate the things that were central from the things that were peripheral.
One interesting thing going on with Trump now is that he is...
Unleashing on so many fronts.
In fact, no sooner are we focusing on one issue like deportations, then another issue rears its head.
And that's even bigger than the one before.
And so we got to stop talking about deportations and start talking about the Trump tariffs.
And so with Trump, you get the sense that there's just a lot going on.
But it doesn't follow that Trump doesn't have a And by focus, what I mean is the issue of sealing the border, the issue of making things in America, the issue of reducing the burden on the American working class.
These are not like disconnected issues.
These aren't separate Don Quixote crusades.
These are all of a piece.
And in some ways, what Trump is doing is he is seeing the interrelatedness of having a border with controlling the flow of products.
Because after all, think of it this way.
Immigration, whether legal or illegal, is a flow of human beings across borders.
Trade is a flow of goods and services across borders.
And so Trump, in thinking about America first and thinking about also, I would say, the Americans who have been left behind for a long time, he's thinking about the impact of all of this.
And I want to close this segment by, I'll pick it up tomorrow, by noting that Reagan understood collectivism and its most malign or malevolent expression, which is Soviet communism, with the same moral clarity that Lincoln understood slavery.
In other words, Reagan understood, as Lincoln did, that there are a lot of dimensions to this issue.
This isn't something that started all at once.
This isn't something that we merely find in the Soviet Union.
After all, we have in America an expanding welfare state that bears some resemblance and, in fact, historically had a connection with socialism, fascism, and communism.
So it's not a simple matter, but at its core, there is a moral divide.
Between the free world and communism in the same way that Lincoln identified a moral divide between what Lincoln called free labor and, on the other hand, unfree labor, also known as slavery.
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