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April 8, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:22
WALL STREET AND THE REST OF US Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1058
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Coming up, I'll discuss several aspects of the tariff debate, contrasting the interests of Wall Street with those of Main Street.
The Supreme Court comes in with a big rebuke of Judge Boasberg.
I'll tell you what the specifics are, and I continue my summary of the traits that made Reagan a great leader.
I want to compare those traits between Reagan and Trump.
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Trump has won a big decision at the Supreme Court.
It's big in a certain way and yet it is limited in some of its details.
So let's start with the big aspect of this and that is that you had this judge.
Boasberg, who was out of control, kind of a runaway judge, and somebody who was relishing not merely the exercise of his power, but relishing the idea that he could trip up, he could lasso the Trump administration, and at the very least hold it down for a while.
And Boasberg was being backed up by the Court of Appeals.
So this wasn't exclusively Boasberg.
It was Boasberg and then the court above him essentially went, we like Boasberg.
We like what he's doing.
Kind of keep going with Boasberg.
And so there was a Trump petition before the Supreme Court and it remained to be seen if the court would hear it.
Likely that they would and they did.
And interesting to see how they came out on it.
Now, how they came out on it was five to four.
Interesting. Who did we lose?
When this generally happens, Debbie and I have this little guessing game, and usually it is, is it Roberts or is it Amy Coney Barrett?
And our intuitions were right.
In fact, Debbie called it.
It was, in fact, Amy Coney Barrett.
Now, there are a bunch of people on social media arguing that Amy Coney Barrett is part of a deep state and Amy Coney Barrett was a horrible mistake.
And Amy Coney Barrett has a lot of contempt for Trump.
Look at the expression on her face when you had Trump speaking before the Congress and you see that close-up interaction.
She looks almost unhappy.
To be in his presence.
And I looked at all that and I don't know what to make of those kinds of tea leaves.
But it is the case that Amy Coney Barrett is proving to be an occasional defector.
It is kind of nice that we have at least a nominal 6-3 majority because we can afford to lose Roberts over here and Barrett over there.
Now, in general, we can't afford to lose both of them, right?
Because if we take Barrett and Roberts and then add the three women, Sotomayor, Jackson, Kagan, you then have a Democratic 5-4.
So, fortunately, that hasn't happened very much.
It's a real rarity.
But in this case, as it turns out, it's the women against the men.
Because think about it.
You've got the three female Democratic nominees, whom I just mentioned, add Amy Coney Barrett, the sole female Republican nominee on the court, and you now have four women on one side and five guys on the other side.
So this was a gender...
Breakdown outcome.
And what did the court basically say?
It should be noted that the court here is not ruling on the merits of whether or not the Trump administration violated the Alien Enemies Act of, what is it, 1798, I believe.
The Supreme Court was not considering the merits, and quite honestly, the Court of Appeals wasn't considering the merits, and Judge Boasberg wasn't considering the merits either.
So what was this case all about?
This is how we have to sort of grasp what is being adjudicated, and then we can understand more clearly what's going on.
So here's what's going on.
Judge Boasberg basically said...
We need to have a trial to determine whether or not the president is acting constitutionally in using the Alien Enemies Act to dispatch these defendants,
but also this category of defendants, which is to say criminal aliens, to deport them to other countries, and some of them to a third country, in this case L. And although the ACLU had filed this case on behalf of five specific defendants, the judge was looking at it like this affects all defendants.
This affects everybody that Trump is dealing with under this act.
And of course, a lot of attention had focused on one guy that had been sent to El Salvador.
And the left kept saying he's not a member of a gang.
He's not an MS-13.
There's no proof he's an MS-13.
Well, apparently there had been an earlier adjudication that he was, in fact, a member of MS-13.
At least a gang informant had identified him as a member and an immigration judge had accepted that identification as accurate.
And so here's this guy in a prison in El Salvador.
And the left said, you have to bring him back.
You have to free him.
You have to use your leverage with Bukele, the president of El Salvador, and you have to return this man.
And the Trump administration, very reluctant to do that because their argument was that even though there had been some paperwork error in this particular case, nevertheless, this guy was in fact a gang member and they had an intention of deporting him anyway.
And now, Trump has at least temporarily prevailed in that.
This guy is not going to be returned, at least not for now.
But more dramatically, what the Supreme Court decided was that Boasberg's sort of TRO, his temporary restraining order, what Boasberg is basically saying is, I need to hear this case, but in the meantime...
This policy is going to be reversed.
The Trump people have to stop it.
They can't deport anybody else under this act and they have to turn the planes around.
This is what he was really upset about, that the Trump administration didn't turn the planes around and bring all these people back pending.
No. We are going to stay...
the stay, which is to say we are going to stop you, Judge Bozberg, from stopping the Trump administration from being able to carry out its policies.
Now, the Supreme Court was pretty clear in saying, we're not saying that any individual criminal alien Doesn't have any kind of due process.
They can file for habeas corpus, which is another word for due process.
They can demand that their case go to court.
But, and this was a key point in this particular case, let's think about it.
The five guys who were being deported, who were the defendants, who were the plaintiffs actually in this action, because they were the ones suing the Trump administration.
These five guys were not from Washington, D.C. I believe that some, if not all of them, were from Texas.
But nevertheless, Judge Boasberg, who's in D.C., got the case.
How did he get the case?
Liberal court shopping.
And so the idea here is that you have a bunch of people who are in one place, X. And the liberals go to a judge in a completely different place.
Why? Where the judge is friendly to them and the judge goes, great, I'll take the case and then starts making rulings about people that aren't even in his jurisdiction and apply those rulings nationwide.
And what the Supreme Court said is, no can do.
That's not going to work.
In other words, you cannot file a case in Washington DC when none of these people who are affected in the case are from here.
This is not the proper jurisdiction.
And so, in a way, what the court was saying is, we know what you're doing here.
You are just finding a like-minded judge who will play along with you.
And we're not going to play along with that.
So this is good news, right?
This is good news because even though the win is limited, the court is not saying, Trump, you can go right ahead.
It's not saying that there need to be no judicial proceedings at all.
The court is saying that, Trump, you can go ahead, but the defendants or the plaintiffs here...
Do have rights.
They can go to court, but they have to go to court in the place that they live.
They have to go to court in their own jurisdictions.
And this kind of judge shopping, which has really defined the way in which the left has responded to Trump's executive orders, at least in this case, that particular strategy has been slapped down.
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I want to talk about tariffs, but do it now in the connection of Wall Street versus Main Street.
And the reason for this distinction is because this is the driving motive of these tariffs.
The tariffs are ostensibly about trade.
They're ostensibly about exports and imports.
They're ostensibly about the United States being taken advantage of.
But those are all relative abstractions.
Now, we've seen a very interesting phenomenon over the past 30 years in which one group of people in this country have benefited enormously from globalization, our trade policies.
And this is the same group of people who have not been severely hurt by inflation.
Now, why is that?
How is it that some group of people can not be hurt by inflation while others are?
Well, the answer to this is really quite simple.
And that is that if you own assets, and assets here refers to stocks, index funds, real estate, a second home, investment units or investment property, valuable art that goes up in value, any of these things, these are all assets.
And they're called assets because you buy them.
In order for them to appreciate or go up in value.
So when you have inflation, inflation is manifest in rising prices.
But we got to remember that these rising prices aren't just the price of gas, the price of groceries.
When prices go up, the prices of homes go up.
The prices of rental property go up.
The prices of valuable art goes up.
The prices of stocks goes up.
So the truth of it is that if you have those things, the cost of inflation is blunted.
Why? Because your assets are going up in value.
Now, imagine people who aren't on this kind of favorable side of things.
They don't have assets.
They don't have stocks.
Or they have very little stocks.
And conversely, they are not on the rental income side.
They are on the paying rent side.
You're the one who's actually paying the rent to the landlord.
You don't own the property.
You're the one paying the rent.
You live largely in a paycheck-to-paycheck cash economy.
And so inflation takes away or subtracts the value of your dollars.
I mean, it doesn't change the number of dollars in your pocket.
But it does change what those dollars can buy because what is inflation doing?
Prices are going up and that's another way of saying that the value of your money is going down.
So, coming back to my point, you've got all these people who have benefited from the global economy of the past 30 years and they have moved up.
If they were rich, they've gotten richer.
If they were well off, they've gotten...
And if they were middle class, they are now comfortably in the upper middle class because they are the beneficiaries of the globalist trade policies of the past few decades.
And then you have another group of people that have been hurt across the board.
They live in a money economy when their money is going down in value.
They find that the jobs that they once could count on, some of them intergenerational jobs in the auto industry, the steel industry, even in agriculture, those jobs no longer exist.
Outsourcing technology has stepped in.
And so these are people whose jobs are more insecure.
Their savings are largely, if they have savings at all, their savings are in cash, which is going down in value.
And so these are the people who have been...
It's true.
And this is really why our middle class has kind of collapsed.
It's not that the middle class has somehow disappeared, but I would say a third of our middle class has moved up and two-thirds of the middle class has either been stagnant or moved down.
Now, stagnant may not sound so bad, but it's really bad when it's occurring over 20 or 30 years because that really means that You don't have a life any better than your parents.
And in some ways, because life moves on, imagine someone who's in their 20s and then they go to their 30s and they're no better off than they were in their 20s.
And then they go to the 40s and 50s and they're no better off than they were in their 30s.
Well, that kind of stagnation really shows you are not getting ahead.
Even though you're advancing in age, supposedly you're advancing in knowledge, supposedly you're getting better in your job, but your job is not getting better for you.
You're not making more money.
Your life isn't improving.
And these are the people that Trump wants to rescue.
And he wants to rescue them not by, quote, bailing them out.
Let's remember that the rich bankers, the investment houses all got major bailouts after the 2008 crash.
The government stepped in, printed a bunch of money.
Essentially bought these assets, these mortgage securities.
The government told these banks, you're not going to fail.
You can keep the profits of your reckless lending, but if you lose money and are going under, we are there to bail you out.
And we're there to bail you out with the taxpayers' money.
So then, right in the wake of that 2008 crash, all these rich bankers gave themselves major bonuses.
They were essentially all laughing.
All their way to the bank.
And this was in fact a bailout.
What Trump wants to do is something that's quite different, and that is he wants to restructure the rules of the game so that the people who have been hurt the most, which is to say a lot of Main Street as opposed to Wall Street, that we see some benefits coming to Main Street.
What kind of benefits are those?
One, better jobs.
How does tariffs produce better jobs?
The answer is pretty simple.
What tariffs do is they make foreign products more expensive.
And that means it's more profitable to make those same products or similar products here at home.
How do you make products at home?
You employ people domestically to make them.
And that means when there's a greater demand for labor, The price of labor goes up, which is a way of saying that people's jobs now begin to pay more, they get better benefits.
And so you begin to see a jobs recovery.
And I'm, by the way, not just talking here about the number of jobs, because if you look at our unemployment numbers, it looks like, well, we're not doing too badly.
Not that many people are unemployed.
But when you have a guy who used to be in the steel industry making $80,000 a year with a 401k plan, now let's say driving for Uber or working as a greeter.
In a store or working as a cashier at Target, making half of what he used to make without benefits or without adequate or comparable benefits, that is a job.
But what kind of a job?
It's not the type of job that built America into a manufacturing powerhouse in the middle of the last century.
Now, there's a kind of deep disingenuousness in the left.
You might remember just a few years ago when there was a sharp downturn in the stock market.
There was high inflation that at one point approached 9% under Biden.
And people were flustered, and the media said, oh, don't worry about it.
The stock market is doing fine.
It's 30,000.
It's at 30,000.
And this inflation stuff is overblown.
Don't worry about it.
It's not that serious.
Well, all right, let's compare to now.
What is the inflation rate right now?
Somewhere between 2% and 3%.
Much lower than the 9% it was under Biden.
And where is the stock market?
Is it like down to 15,000?
Actually, no.
It's around 38,000.
In other words, the stock market is way higher than it was a couple of years ago when the left said not to worry, the economy is doing great.
The freakout, I guess what I'm saying is, is a pose.
It is artificial.
There were worse conditions under Biden, and we were assured that there wasn't a problem.
The situation is vastly better, despite the stock market correction.
The situation objectively is better, and yet we're told, be afraid.
Be very afraid.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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From the moment that Trump was elected for a second time, When Doge was exposing waste here, waste there, waste everywhere, the left kept saying, Trump doesn't care about you.
He only cares about enriching his millionaire and billionaire friends.
This was all part of the Elon Musk is trying to enrich himself.
Elon Musk is stealing from you.
Rather unbelievable from the outset.
But think of how ludicrous it is now.
Because who are the people who have been hurt most by this jolt to the market?
Well, the answer is it's the millionaires and billionaires who own the vast majority.
of the stocks that have gone down in value.
And there's a table on social media, you can look it up, showing how, for example, the richest people in the world have all lost, well, not millions, but in some case, billions of dollars as a result.
of this market correction.
So my point is just this, the talking point that Trump is just trying, all he cares about is enriching the millionaires and billionaires, the kind of Bernie staple rhetoric, suddenly, I mean, it never made a whole lot of sense, but now it makes no sense whatsoever.
There have also been some surveys that show that working class people and the people who voted for Trump are very happy about Trump's policies.
He's got...
His approval ratings have not gone down.
In fact, they have stayed constant or even edged up.
And that's another way of saying that the never-Trumpers who say, I know my uncle who voted for Trump is now regretting his vote.
All of this appears to be, well, at the best you could say, I'm not saying it is fictitious or made up, although I think it might be, but even if it's not, it is anecdotal, which is to say it does not reflect a societal trend.
It doesn't show up in any kind of data or numbers.
Trump himself is kind of unfazed.
I like this.
The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done decades ago.
Don't be weak.
Don't be stupid.
Don't be a panikin.
Trump has coined a term, panikin.
It's not a Republican.
It's not a Democrat per se.
This is what he calls it.
A new party based on weak and stupid people.
He says, "Be strong, courageous, and patient, and greatness will be the result." Another way of putting this is that Trump is very secure and confident about this.
You Trump has the biggest balls of all.
This guy is...
No wonder he hired big balls, because he is himself, you may say, bigger balls.
And he is not in any way backing down.
China, in fact, announced that they were going to be retaliating against our tariffs.
And you might think Trump will go, oh, well, this is very bad.
I need to reconsider.
No, Trump's view is, okay, you want to do that?
you're going to be looking at tariffs like you've never seen before and these are going to be tariffs that no other country has.
So let's see whose economy blinks first or to put it differently, if you want to play Trump is ready to play.
Now, what is the underlying logic behind all this?
What is Trump really going for here?
Let's take a couple of concrete examples.
In Norway, This is actually a post from a European guy I follow on social media.
He says, a Chevy Tahoe costs $175,000.
Now, why is that?
Why would a Tahoe that...
What does a Tahoe cost, honey, here in the United States?
About $70,000 or $80,000?
Why would a Tahoe cost more than double?
And the answer is really simple.
Massive European tariffs on American cars.
So can you buy a Tahoe?
Yes. But if you get it, you're going to be paying massive tariffs, and that's obviously a way of discouraging people from buying Tahoes.
That's what the Norwegians are doing.
By the way, these are supposed to be our allies.
And Trump's view is, why should the Norwegians, or for that matter, the others, the Germans, the French?
The British.
All these friends of ours who don't hesitate to impose massive tariffs.
Why shouldn't we tariff their goods the same?
And it isn't even simply a matter of a tariff rate because there are other ways to block another country's products.
So, for example, one way to block a country's products is to impose enormous regulatory or to impose special types of burdens or permits that they require in order to be able to bring those products in in the first place or to create situations in which the transportation costs are prohibitive so or
you manipulate the currency this is another way of putting obstacles in a kind of backhanded way that is not quite as obvious as simply imposing a tariff.
And the Trump people know all this.
And so their point is trade has to be based upon genuine reciprocity, and the reciprocity has to take into account the full picture, not just the tariff rate, but all these other issues that bear upon how easy or difficult it is for us to be able to sell our stuff over there.
Let's look at a Now, the United States has giant, well...
You know by just flying over the country.
We have tons of trees.
We have large amounts of lumber that is there for the taking.
There's absolutely no problem in the United States producing a great deal of lumber.
And yet you find that when people are building homes, the construction people buy their lumber from Canada.
Now why is that?
Is it because Canadian trees are easier to cut down than American trees?
No. Is it because it's cheaper to get a tree from Canada?
I mean, think about it.
It should be more expensive, right?
If you want to cut down a big tree, let's just say in Vancouver and bring the lumber over here, it should cost a lot more than cutting down a similar tree right here, let's just say in Colorado, and using the lumber.
Well, the answer is that the Canadian lumber is in fact cheaper.
And the reason it's cheaper is the government subsidizes the lumber industry.
So this is another way of bringing down artificially the price of Canadian lumber so that they can sell more of it over here.
And as a result, we have our own companies not using American lumber, which should be...
And in fact is, in terms of actual costs, cheaper to produce.
So again, Trump's point is, well, listen, why don't we impose tariffs on you that cancel out the effects of that government subsidy?
Then you have to compete kind of mano a mano or straight on on a level playing field against
So all of this seems to me to be This is an attack on the free market.
We don't have a free market in trade.
That's the starting point.
It's like saying, you know, if you criticize the Fed, you're attacking the free market.
How is that possible?
The Fed is a kind of...
Monopoly. The Fed is the central bank that issues currency.
It's not far from it being the product of the free market.
It controls the free market by setting interest rates and so on.
And here's Larry Summers.
He says that Trump's policies are, quote, not the result of any kind of proven economic theory.
And it's worth noting here that the proven economic theories that That Larry Summers is referring to is just a bunch of garbled Keynesian nonsense.
Virtually every economic theory that is stated as proven is not, in fact, proven.
Let's look at some of these proven economic theories.
In the last second half of the 20th century, one of the proven theories was called the Phillips curve, which basically says that inflation and unemployment move in opposite directions.
But all you have to do is look at the empirical data to see that's not true.
You have inflation and unemployment often moving in the same direction.
That's a refutation of the Phillips curve.
It's not a proven theory.
The Federal Reserve sets a target for inflation of 2%.
We've got to print 2% of new money every year because why?
There's no theory at all that justifies that.
There's no economic argument that inflation of any kind is good for a country as a whole or contributes to material prosperity.
This is not a proven theory.
In fact, it comes very close to being a disproven theory.
Both after the 2008 crash and COVID, the government printed oceans of money.
What proven theory says that that's a good thing or even a necessary thing to do?
The point is...
The government has been acting like a bunch of robbers, like a bunch of bandits, helping their friends and hurting everybody else.
And this is in the name of proven economic theories that are not proven at all.
I'm continuing my discussion of Reagan from the opening chapter called Why Reagan Gets No Respect.
And I'm summing up some of the qualities that...
Made Reagan unique.
Made him different.
Made him extraordinary, even though he retains some of the ordinariness of his upbringing and of his life.
I want to make the point that Reagan had a moral compass in the same way that Lincoln did.
And for Reagan, moral issues were paramount.
He... Approached these issues with a kind of almost childlike simplicity.
The simplicity that is never lost, even though it has to recognize in adulthood that the world is more complex.
But it is a bigger danger to lose sight of the basic distinction between right and wrong than it is.
To be too wedded to that distinction and lose sight of the complexity that that distinction becomes part of.
Reagan came to Washington a little bit like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
And what that means is that he never lost his capacity to be outraged.
To say, what?
This is how it works?
This is not how it's supposed to be.
That was the kind of driving impetus of Jimmy Stewart and the same with Reagan.
Even when he became sort of the ultimate insider, he retained his status as the outsider.
Trump, by the way, I think is somewhat similar to Reagan in this respect.
Now, Reagan was, as Lincoln was, ambitious, maybe even opportunistic.
But Reagan was ambitious mainly for the triumph of his ideas.
He really didn't care about power for its own sake.
He wanted to be president to make the world better.
And he believed deeply that his values, his core values, were the right ones.
No amount of persuasion or even poll results.
The American people don't agree with you on this.
In a way, Reagan did not submit his core values to popular referendum.
He was closed-minded in the sense that he believed this is the way it should be.
And quite honestly, if the American people don't agree, then the American people are wrong.
He was incorruptible.
It's inconceivable that you could have lured Reagan with the kind of bribes.
That became commonplace in the Biden administration.
Put your son on the board of this, collect money over there, have this money move from one LLC to another, end up in your pocket.
None of this was even alleged against Reagan.
And in fairness, it had never been alleged against Reagan's predecessor Jimmy Carter either.
Reagan had a sign on his desk, there's no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets...
The credit.
I have to say, this is one area where Reagan is completely different from, say, Obama or even, say, Trump.
Because Obama was full of himself in the quite literal meaning of that term.
And Trump likes to get credit for what he does.
In fact, he demands it.
For Reagan, this was a matter of indifference.
And Reagan courted the affection of the American people because he wanted to build support for his policies.
But when it came to a point of principle, he seemed to be impervious, indifferent, resistant to public attacks.
Sometimes in the media and the universities, even people in his own party would sometimes say the most hurtful things about Reagan, as they do, by the way, about Trump.
But with Trump, it...
It outrages him.
He remembers.
He wants to hit back.
And in many, in a kind of delightful way, he does hit back.
But Reagan didn't hit back like that.
For Reagan, he kind of laughed it off.
He genuinely didn't really care what the people at the New York Times or the Aspen Institute or the World Economic Forum.
To Reagan, this was a...
This was like beside the point.
He paid little attention to it.
Now, although Reagan was firm in his convictions, it should be emphasized that he was a practical man.
He understood that you sort of campaign or think in poetry.
This is how I want America to be, but you govern in prose, which is to say, this is what I can actually get.
And so if Reagan could get 100%, he'd take it.
But if he could get 50%, he would take that.
So he was a good negotiator, and he normally didn't get 50%.
He got 75%.
In some ways, he practiced the art of the deal even before Trump.
Reagan did know how to drive a good bargain and we saw that.
We will see that in the book in his dealings with the Soviets and with Gorbachev, but also in his dealings with the Democrats.
Now, Reagan was an actor and he saw the presidency in that way to a degree that it was a performance.
He had to put it on.
He had to Put on a show.
He had to show himself to the public in a certain way.
But for the left, which kept saying, well, he's only an actor.
He's just an actor.
The implication here, I think, is false, which is that, you know, that any actor can do what Reagan did.
So, like, put Susan Sarandon and or Ed Asner to take two names from the past.
These were prominent actors who were also on the political left, but you couldn't exactly stick them in the White House and expect them to do the kind of job that Reagan did, even on the other side of the aisle.
Reagan used his acting skills and his persona to, in some ways, make a more effective impression than even had he been the real thing.
This is something very odd to say, right?
If someone is, let's say, playing a doctor, But Reagan could.
And the proof of this can be seen in the reaction to Reagan by the military.
Reagan was not, in fact, a military man.
He did serve in World War II, but in a very limited capacity, not in combat.
He made war movies, to be honest, in World War II.
Contrast this with George H.W. Bush, his successor, who was a genuine war hero.
And yet, who was more popular for the military, Reagan or Bush?
Answer, Reagan.
You could just see it.
When Bush went before the military, they liked him, they respected him.
But when Reagan went before the military, they were blown away.
They were excited.
They were wowed.
They would jump out of their seats.
Even though, as I say, Reagan was not one of them, which is another way of saying that Reagan was able to project these military or martial values better.
than another guy, Bush, who had come from those Reagan was often known as a great communicator, a reference to his speeches, to his oratorical skills, even to his kind of spontaneous repartee.
He was believed to be a great speaker.
But I want to...
Distinguish here between two kinds of great speakers.
There was an ancient writer who once said this.
He said, when we hear Cicero speak, we say, what a clever man is Cicero.
But when we hear Demosthenes speak, we say, let us march against Philip.
Philip here being Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great.
So the distinction here is between making a speech that draws attention to how intelligent the speaker is.
And in our own time, we have lots of people.
And there are sometimes professors who are like this.
They want to draw attention to themselves.
And so their speeches are self-referential.
They're demonstrations of erudition or sort of smarty-pants intelligence.
And then there's another type of speaker who does not want to draw attention to himself or herself.
The other type of speaker wants you to do something.
The speech is aimed at persuasion.
It's aimed at producing an effect.
And this is the point of when we heard de Monsigny speak, we said let us march against Philip.
De Monsigny could actually get you to do what he wanted you to do.
And so Reagan was more a great communicator in that sense.
He deployed his famous skills not to display his own intelligence or his own eloquence, look at me I'm amazing, but really to generate support for his ideas and for his policies.
Now, I'll close out today by simply noting that Reagan was a generalist.
And what I mean by a generalist is that a democratic leader doesn't get into the nitty-gritty details of public policy.
You don't have to.
You're somebody who supplies direction.
And here the question is, how do you supply direction?
If you're a democratic leader, and let's just say the people want to go that way, do you run ahead of them and say, all right, all of you want to go that way, I'm going to take you that way?
way, that was not actually Reagan's view of leadership.
leadership was that a leader should in fact embody the values and aspirations And so Reagan believed it was the duty of a democratic leader.
To share those aspirations.
And yet, if the people said, we want to solve the problem of poverty by you giving us more handouts, Reagan's view was, no, that's actually not the way.
There's a better way to realize your own goals and your own aspirations.
So, in other words, what I'm saying is that Reagan was not a slavish devotee of public opinion.
In fact, he worked hard to shape it.
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