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April 9, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:29
CHAOS THEORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1059
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Coming up, this episode is called Chaos Theory, and I want to show that underneath the chaos, there is a method to Trump's apparent madness.
A big win for Trump at the Supreme Court.
He's going to be able to keep federal workers off the job.
I'll give you the details.
An influencer, actor, and author Braden Sorbo joins me.
We're going to talk about relationships between young men and women in the context of his new book.
Embrace masculinity.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
Hit the subscribe or the follow or the notifications button.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Music
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 is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'm calling today's episode of the podcast Chaos Theory, which is a term that is lifted out of physics and refers to the long-term indecipherable effects of things that happen in the physical world.
Something happens over here and it affects something way over there that doesn't appear to even be connected.
So the importance of chaos theory is to try to track what's really going on and what the causes and what the effects are and this stuff is not obvious.
Now, the reason I mention all this is because when you're hearing these critiques of what Trump is doing, And what Trump is doing is very aggressive and it is a gamble and it is part of a comprehensive strategy.
A strategy that includes tariffs but is not limited to tariffs.
It includes tax policies, it includes regulatory policies, it includes transactional deals that are made one-on-one with different countries.
It is an effort to reset the American economy on a different and stronger basis.
But the critics are looking at it and are making what can only be considered wildly contradictory doomsday forecasts.
So one of the doomsday forecasts is that tariffs are inflationary.
And in the same breath, or almost in the same breath, you hear, America is headed for a recession, if not another Great Depression.
Now, right away you know that these are opposite effects.
What is the opposite of inflation?
Recession. What is the opposite of runaway inflation?
The Great Depression.
So, how is it possible to have both?
Coming together.
Answer, it's really not possible.
So, clearly what we're seeing is a certain amount of economic gobbledygook being advanced here.
And we need to try to sort through what is going on, paying careful attention to some of the particulars.
So let me start with China, because Debbie said to me this morning, China is increasing its tariffs on America by another, I forget the percentage, but it's a big number.
And here's the point, this is China's, I would call it China's second retaliation.
So Trump announced the tariffs, China goes, we're gonna put on tariffs.
I think there were 50% tariffs.
Trump increases his tariffs and now China increases their tariffs.
Now, on the face of it, this looks like something that is...
It's quite simply because tariffs,
reciprocal tariffs, let's just say both countries tariff each other 200%.
Let's just take an outrageous number for effect.
Now, this would be very similar to me and my local Walmart tariffing each other 200%.
It's not going to have the same effect on us, is it?
Why? Because I buy a whole bunch of stuff from Walmart.
What exactly does Walmart buy from me?
Nothing. So, when you're talking about reciprocal tariffs, you first have to ask, Who is buying what from whom?
Now, here's the simple truth.
The United States buys a whole bunch of stuff from China.
China buys some stuff from America, but a whole lot less.
The proportion of trade that America buys from China is vastly greater, greater by a factor of five, than what China buys from us.
We don't sell a whole lot of cars to China.
We don't sell a whole lot of pretty much anything.
The only thing I can think of that jumps out off the top of my head that we export to China, Hollywood movies.
So if China wants a tear of Hollywood movies by 400%, I would, for one, would be really happy about that, not only because Hollywood stinks.
Quite frankly, it's also really good for China.
China doesn't need the pollution that comes from Hollywood movies.
So this would be a marvelous move all around.
Go ahead, China.
In fact, I recommend 800% tariffs on Hollywood.
Good for us and good for you.
And good to teach Hollywood a lesson.
So here's my point, that this trade war only has the effect America does not need other countries as much as other countries need us.
This is a sentiment that's worth reflecting on.
Many countries maintain their own prosperity by tapping into and selling into the American market.
Case in point, Mexico.
Case in point, Canada.
Case in point, some of the European countries.
They sell to each other to be sure, but they also sell a lot to us.
How much do we sell to them?
Not a lot.
When you travel in Europe, ask yourself, how often do I see American cars on the Autobahn in Germany?
Almost never.
How often do I see German cars on the American highways?
All the time.
I'm using this example as a stand-in for other products as well.
How often do we see other things made in other countries over here?
All the time.
How often do we see our stuff over there?
I'll use India as an example.
India exports all kinds of things, call centers, services, technology.
To America.
And sure, there are American, you know, you'll go to an Indian city, you'll see an American bank.
But that is a rare and unusual sight.
By and large, American products are not easily, and certainly not American agricultural products.
Many of these countries block our agriculture from making its way over there.
Now, we are seeing Wall Street Issuing all these panic alerts and essentially Wall Street is demanding that Main Street freak out.
But Main Street isn't freaking out and I would argue Main Street is kind of right not to freak out.
why. Quite frankly, how much sympathy did Wall Street show for Main Street in the 2008 crash?
When Wall Street, by the way, got bailed out, when all these executives gave themselves million dollar bonuses and multi-million dollar bonuses, they were laughing all the way to the bank.
Many people lost their homes.
Many people were foreclosed on.
Many people went bankrupt.
I didn't hear a lot of sympathy coming from Wall Street.
Similarly in COVID, did you hear Wall Street jumping up and down, protesting lockdowns, demanding that people not be fired for not taking the vaccine?
Not at all.
And so I think that Wall Street is getting the same treatment, and rightly so, because as Scott Besson said this morning in a clip that I shared, he goes, it's Main Street's turn.
It's Main Street's turn now to fix things.
And it's Main Street's turn to get some of the benefits.
Of the American economy that have been denied and deprived.
Now, by the way, not denied by free markets.
We got to disabuse ourselves of the idea that somehow free trade worldwide is controlled by free markets.
Not at all.
Free trade is controlled, is not free trade, because of foreign tariffs, because of foreign regulations, because of the VAT or value-added tax, because of currency manipulation.
There are seven things that are blocking the free market from operating in international trade.
And on top of that, you've got the Federal Reserve printing money.
Where is the free trade in that?
There's no free trade.
There's a monopoly.
In fact, a government-controlled monopoly.
Isn't it strange?
We live in a capitalist system, and the most important fuel of that system, namely money, is 100% controlled by the U.S. government.
They quite literally make money.
And they make it by printing it, and they print it at their own discretion.
Where is the free trade in any of this?
So I think part of the lesson that we've learned here is that we haven't changed our minds about free trade.
We've learned to be a little more savvy about recognizing the ways in which the rules have been bent, twisted, twisted,
And it's time, as Trump himself says, to level the playing field.
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Listen to these remarkable numbers that have come out of Elon Musk's doge.
This is from probing the Social Security Administration.
Now, the moment that Doge even moved toward Social Security, a deafening, caterwauling howl went up that Doge is going to ruin Social Security.
Doge is going to get your Social Security number.
Doge is going to mess with your Social Security check.
And we can now see why the Democrats were so skittish, so jittery.
So, defensive.
Why Elon Musk gives them the heebie-jeebies?
And the answer is, they have been doing all kinds of shenanigans inside of Social Security.
In the name of Social Security, knowing that Social Security is a kind of taboo, it's a third rail, you can't touch it.
Even Trump has said, I'm not going to be changing Social Security benefits.
And so the Democrats realized, if we do all kinds of crookery, all kinds of not just waste and fraud, but if we can do even election interference through Social Security, the Republicans will be scared to go in there.
And if they do, we just scream, they're interfering with Social Security.
This is the landscape that Elon Musk is dealing with.
And here is one of the things that Doge has found that kind of shows you what the Democrats have been up to.
These are the Social Security numbers issued to non-citizens in the past four years.
This is during the Biden years.
So 2021, 270,000.
2022. 590,000.
So, in just one year, a virtual doubling.
What are we talking about?
The number of non-citizens who are being issued social security numbers, thus, in a sense, paving their way, not only to get social security payments, but also to have a form of identification or verification that opens the door to other things such as voting.
So 590,000 in 2022, 964,000, almost another doubling by 2023, and 2,095,000, so another doubling by 2024.
So what we're really seeing is a rapid ratcheting up of the potential for fraud, fraud both in Social Security payments and fraud of other kinds, specifically election fraud.
Basically the way that immigration achieved this is that they would take these illegals and the illegals would file for asylum.
Now filing for asylum is itself largely a scam because by and large of a hundred people who file for asylum maybe one or two guys Actually qualifies.
The standards for meeting asylum are pretty high.
And so the game being played here is let's file for asylum because since there's such a backlog, it's going to be 18 months or even two years or maybe three years before my case comes up.
In the meantime, I'm going to live and work in the United States.
And guess what?
A few months later, I'm going to get a social security number.
This is exactly what has in fact been happening.
So that illegals have been getting work permits, even though in general, Not only are illegals not supposed to work, they're not even supposed to be here, but even legals to America are often not supposed to work.
Case in point, I came to the United States as an exchange student.
Could I work in that time and get paid?
No. Why?
Because exchange students are legal, but they can't work.
Then I had a student visa for four years.
I did have a work-study program that was approved, and that is within Dartmouth.
I was paid, in effect, by the college to work at the college.
But was I allowed to take a job, another job, an outside job?
No, not allowed.
Students are not allowed to work in the country because they don't have work permits or green cards.
And so the whole point is there are legals who are not allowed to work.
This is a...
This was a Biden-Harris left-wing scheme to set up illegals staying permanently and voting in this country.
Now, naturally, the Democrats have been using these judges around the country to go after not just Doge, but to go after the whole Trump project and Trump's executive orders in general.
One of the things that they've been going after are the federal employees who are being let go, who are being removed, who are being fired in the downsizing and scaling back that has been going on.
A San Francisco judge named William Alsup issued an injunction, this was last month, requiring six federal agencies to reinstate the thousands of federal workers, so-called probationary employees,
And so Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.
Good news from that front.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, so yesterday, blocked this judge's order and basically said that these six agencies are allowed to keep these people.
Off the payroll.
In other words, they remain removed and fired pending the litigation.
So let's remember that all these restraining orders have to do with the meantime, with the interregnum, with what is the status, who gets to prevail while we're waiting for the litigation to take place.
And the reason this is significant is the litigation can take months.
In some cases, it could take a year.
So the question is, does Trump get his way in the meantime?
Or can the liberals, in a sense, cancel out Trump's action?
Pending the outcome of the litigation.
It looks like Trump is going to win.
I've said this before, most if not all of these suits.
And here is a good example of it.
So this is good news.
And by the way, if you think that somehow Trump, with all the stuff that he's doing on so many different fronts, that people are horrified, here is CNN's pollster Harry Enten.
Quote, he ain't no lame duck.
He's a soaring eagle.
So what Henry Enten is saying is that when you look at surveys, the vast majority of the American people think that Trump is A, very powerful, not a lame duck, B, exercising his power,
and C, and this is maybe the most important, doing exactly what he said he was going to do.
And this is a key point because it is kind of a...
Conventional wisdom in American politics that you campaign by saying you'll do things.
George W. Bush, oh, I'm going to end abortion.
Then you do nothing.
Oh, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to impose tariffs.
And then you don't.
I'm going to make sure that Iran doesn't get a nuclear bomb.
And then Iran keeps making progress toward a nuclear bomb.
You've done nothing.
I'm going to take back the Panama Canal.
Remember, Trump's not the first person to say it, but no one has done it.
And so this has been a standard trope of campaigning by making promises that are then dutifully abandoned.
And the thing about Trump is he campaigned.
People ask, what are you going to do about American jobs?
I'm going to put tariffs on these companies.
I'm going to make sure they don't take advantage of America.
I'm going to bring the jobs back to America.
That's what he campaigned on.
And that is exactly what he's doing.
I'm going to cut the waste in the government.
I'm going to slash it back.
We have 10 people doing the job that three guys can do.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast our friend Brayden Sorbo.
We actually got to know Brayden through his parents, the actor Kevin Sorbo and his mom Sam Sorbo, who's also a radio host.
Brayden is just 23 years old, but he is wise for his years.
He is an actor.
He is a social media guru.
He is an author.
And his book, which is just about to come out, it's called Embrace Masculinity.
Great title.
His website is Brayden, B-R-A-E-D-E-N, Sorbo, S-O-R-B-O, dot com.
And you can follow him on X at Brayden, B-R-A-E-D-E-N, Sorbo.
Brayden, great to have you.
Thanks for joining me.
You must be excited about having this book that is really on the verge of coming out.
And I saw an advanced copy, thanks to you.
And, you know, this topic is one that is generating a lot of traction and a lot of interest.
I think it's because in the younger generation, the kind of older Can you describe,
if you were, for example, just flashback to, say, a parent's generation and yours?
What is the key difference, and what is the issue as you see it?
Well, the key difference is the sexual revolution has become prevalent in mainstream.
Not just, you know, in the Hollywood and the music sphere, but because those influence the culture, it's become prevalent in the culture.
One in ten women my age currently have an OnlyFans account, and that number is set to increase as time goes on.
We said to women, you can go be anything you want and do anything you want.
And one-tenth of them, 10%, decided that they wanted to be online prostitutes.
It's terrible that people are doing this self-degrading thing, but it is sort of prevalent in the mainstream because we encourage it.
And the problem is not just women, but the young men who are also indulging and purchasing and subscribing to these young women.
And studies are showing right now that 18 to 25 year olds, there was a survey done of them.
45% had never approached a woman in real life because they've been taught not to, right?
They've been taught that it's much easier to go to your phone and to subscribe to the girls only fans than it is to actually have a conversation where you might end up getting rejected.
And so this society in which we live has sort of devolved because of the sexual revolution and its consequences.
It used to be a man would go to school, he would graduate, he would find a job, he would build up his net worth, and then he would find a wife that loved him and was willing to be with him so that he could protect and provide for her.
I mean, the pinnacle of success for any man's career and life is having a family that loves and cherishes him.
I mean, the most extraordinary thing about an ordinary man and a woman is the fact that they're married and have kids, right?
I'm pretty sure that's C.S. Lewis.
And so we have destroyed society.
We have desecrated what it means to be a proper family unit in America.
And so marriages are happening later in life and they're less successful and less happy.
Divorce rates are up.
Depression and anxiety is skyrocketing.
70% of women are on at least one sort of medication at some point during their life, if not more.
50% of men are following suit.
I mean, we have this epidemic in America and really the root of it is the fact that we're not able to form relationships with people.
Now, let's talk a little bit about OnlyFans because while I've heard of it and I kind of know what it is, I don't actually know what it is.
And I'm guessing a lot of people who listen or watch this podcast maybe are in the same position.
You use the phrase online prostitutes.
What does that actually mean?
How do you become an online prostitute?
What do you do on OnlyFans?
So OnlyFans was set up as another Patreon subscription service thing, but the creators of it had previously done sexual pornography, camera, websites, and things like that.
And so OnlyFans really caters to that 18 plus demographic.
And the idea of a girl going on OnlyFans is she creates an account, she sets a monthly price like you would on Patreon, except the product that she is giving is herself.
In sexual ways.
And so many men are subscribing to these girls because the girls are willing to have conversations with them and it makes them feel wanted.
I mean, one in three people consider themselves to be lonely in America today.
We have an epidemic of loneliness.
And so OnlyFans comes in and fills that hole for a lot of these people because...
They get that interaction that they so desperately crave.
The problem is that interaction is vapid and fake.
Like, none of it's real.
But OnlyFans, essentially, for the viewers out there who aren't aware, is a website where people are prostituting themselves out for a couple dollars a month, which unfortunately inherently lowers their value.
And it's not a permanent lower.
Like, I would love for these people to get off and change.
But if you are putting yourself on that website for $5 a month, then you have set your value at...
So, what you're saying, Brayden, is that as a consequence of perhaps feminism, perhaps a sexual revolution,
the women that men once wanted to marry have now adopted a different goal.
And their goal is not necessarily to be the wife and mom.
It is to be myself.
It is to be a boss.
It is to do what I want to do and be what I want to be.
And you're saying that this new package, if you will, turns off a lot of guys who go, well, I don't actually like these real women and what they have to offer.
And so I'm now going to go into sort of fantasy world and I'm going to find a woman on OnlyFans or online and interact in this kind of twisted artificial way.
And that's going to substitute for having a real relationship.
And so what you end up with are neither women that men want or.
I really want to marry one of these regular OnlyFans patrons, right?
So you've created, in a sense, undesirable men.
And undesirable women.
Is that what you're saying?
That is exactly what I'm saying, actually.
Yes. The situation in which we live was men, like I said at the beginning, built up their value and then a woman they would marry would respect and love them.
It's really hard to respect your significant other if you're posting yourself naked online for people to see.
It's really hard to have that level of respect for your spouse when you are offering the parts of you that should be private and within marriage only.
To the rest of the world.
And so, men are, essentially, I call them the Peter Pan Neverland boys.
Like, they're staying, you know, as the lost boys over on the island refusing to grow up because the rewards of growing up, which were a successful marriage, have essentially diminished.
And the problem is, I say that this generation, my generation, Gen Z, has the hardest battle of all time with lust and pornography being so rampant.
On my phone, I have access to more than King Solomon did, who had 700 wives or 700 concubines and 300 wives.
I have more access to lustful content than the greatest kings of the old world.
So this battle is about accessibility.
And the problem is when people make themselves accessible to everybody, they become limited in how much they can give to one person because they lose satisfaction with one person.
And it destroys kind of this idea that was instituted by God as marriage.
And so it really is up to men to...
Men used to go fight battles.
They used to go do great things with the promise of building up a legacy, that being children and a wife.
That promise is not there anymore.
And so these men in my generation, we have to be willing to make a stand and take the fight without essentially a guarantee.
That there will be a light at the end of the tunnel other than living our lives as best as we can.
And are you saying, Brayden, that if we can see this kind of cultural shift on the part of men, that it will then produce a cultural shift on the part of women?
In other words, I think what you're saying is, and I'm not disagreeing with it, but I'm just spelling it out.
You're recommending a kind of soft patriarchy in which men take the lead, right?
Because the theory of our culture is that no one should take the lead and that everybody should be kind of, everyone should be doing their own thing.
But I think what you're saying is as a group, men should lead.
And if they do lead, they will find that the women are on board with them.
...made to follow and submit themselves to the man.
That is not an order of hierarchy as in one is better than the other.
Jesus submitted to the will of the Father.
Jesus is not less than God.
He just realized that there was a divine order instituted in the creation of the world and he followed it.
So there's a great quote that I like to say and I use it in the book as well.
I say that Eve was not taken from Adam's head so that she would lord it over him.
She was not taken from Adam's feet so that he would walk over her.
She was taken from his rib to be next to him, from under his arm to be protected by him, and from next to his heart to be loved by him.
There is a divine order created in the universe.
And chapter three, I believe, of the book is called The War Between the Patriarchies.
It is not a matter of if a man is going to lead.
That is never the question and it never will be.
It is a matter of which men will lead and whether or not they will be good or bad.
And right now we have bad leaders in place who are using all of the resources that they have to destroy what masculinity is in order to prevent an uprising of good men.
And so it is up to the good men to fight back.
And if the men do, eventually the tides will turn because the women will follow.
That's just how it's going to be.
And as much as people might want to argue with it, they simply can't because this is how we are genetically hardwired from the moment of conception.
and they were like screaming for women's sexuality and women's rights, and I noticed that cheering them were basically all the male pornographers.
So you'd have Larry Flint and you'd have Bob Guccione.
So in other words, the guy from Penthouse, the guy from Playboy, the guy from Hustler, they were all there saying, feminism, yes, we are for it.
And so at the time, the connection between this kind of porn revolution and the feminist revolution were not exactly clear.
But I think now we have seen it play out.
That is the baseline of an immature...
Adolescent man.
And so, and I can't even call them men.
They're boys.
And so we see this all throughout the pornography industry as well.
Alvin Goldstein is known as the father of hardcore pornography in America.
He was quoted as saying, we, the people in porn, hate Jesus.
And so we aim to destroy his daughters by using them in porn, right?
He aims to desecrate.
What it means to be married.
What it means to have sex.
And so like you're saying, all of these pornographic content creators back in the 70s and 80s with Jane Fonda and all the actresses screaming for sexual liberation were cheering it on for a reason.
And there's a reason why weak men love abortion.
It's because it frees them of the consequences of having premarital sex.
That is why abortion, when it was passed, was so rampantly accepted by women because women said, we want to be like men.
Except they want to be like the men that they condemn, the bad men who go out and have one-night stands and leave a girl.
That doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
But the consequence of sex is pregnancy.
That is how it works.
I don't put a cake in the oven and get surprised when it turns into a cake when I actually wanted a banana.
That doesn't make any sense.
What the sexual liberation movement, I say liberation, but it really was more of a sexual slavery movement, did was it freed people of the consequences of their actions, but bound their souls.
And so now we have to fight back against that.
And that is why I say it's an uphill battle because this is something that many people, although they are slowly starting to wake up to in my generation are struggling with greatly.
I mean, the past election, more young men voted red than ever before and more young women voted blue than ever before.
Out of a poll, 67% of young women, Gen Z women said that their biggest election issue
Not the economy.
Not the border.
Not mass immigration, like illegal immigration.
Not the stock market.
Nothing. But abortion.
Young men?
All of the other issues.
The border security, the economy.
Men wanted to take care of their communities and their families, and the women wanted the right to kill a baby in their womb.
So there is a deep divide right now happening in my generation, which is why I keep saying this book is so necessary because this is the handbook, this is the guide for young women on the steps to take to achieve the righteous means.
I mean, for sure, Brayden.
Embrace Masculinity.
That's the title of the book.
And I think that even though what you're describing is uphill, there is a wide recognition that something has gone wrong, right?
The boys know it.
The men know it.
The women know it.
They both know it.
And if I think to myself, why would women be such fervent advocates of abortion?
It seems to me that one reason for that, quite likely, is that they feel like, guess what?
My boyfriend or the guy who produced this kid is not going to be around to raise it, so I can't count on some guy.
And conversely, the guy in the picture is basically saying, guess what?
It wasn't my choice to have this child.
We have abortion being legal.
If the woman chooses to have the child, well, that's her choice.
I wasn't consulted.
I don't get parental rights unless the woman says so.
And so this is a complete breakdown in which both sides, in a sense, are incentivized to produce I think destructive behavior because neither can kind of count on the other.
Yeah, without a doubt.
We have desecrated what marriage is.
We've made it this sort of like, oh, get married.
You know, it's a legal thing.
It doesn't really have much of a purpose other than, you know, you get to file taxes differently.
And if you want, maybe have some kids when you're in your 30s and 40s.
Like, who really cares?
Marriage is a sacred matrimony.
You cannot get divorced.
If we make marriage serious again in this country, if we bring this country back to a standard of morality that is higher than what we currently have, people will begin to take it more seriously.
The first, the abortion laws need to be redacted.
We abortion needs to be fully abolished.
Second though, we need,
Because like you touched on, these men are going, well, I don't really have a say in the kids, so we need to make it that the men and the women must work together in this, as opposed to pitting them against each other.
because right now men are avoiding marriage because the court system favors women.
Men get married.
They provide financial security, stability, all of these things.
Women are providing nurturing, love, sex, things like that.
And then they get divorced and the women don't have to provide that anymore.
But if they have kids, the men still have to provide everything that they did when they were married.
So guys are afraid of marriage wholeheartedly.
A lot of young men are afraid of marriage because the courts are stacked against them.
those people will stay together.
Studies show that couples that pray together every single day have a 99% chance of success.
99%!
That's statistically pretty much as good as you can get because nothing's ever going to be perfect.
And so we need to bring back the morality in marriage if we want this country to succeed.
Because right now, we are close to the brink of collapse.
With everything going on, with how society is drifting away, people are fighting more and more and more every single day, we need to bring morality back into the conversation, which a lot of people are afraid to do.
Guys, the book is Embrace Masculinity.
It's written by Brayden Sorbo.
Follow him on X at Brayden, B-R-A-E-D-E-N, Sorbo, and the website braydensorbo.com.
Brayden, great job, and we're all excited about this book.
We're going to buy a bunch of copies ourselves.
We've got some young people in our family, an extended family, and we're going to be sharing your message.
So thanks for joining me.
Well, thank you for having me.
I'm excited that people are hopefully going to be checking this out.
I'm in the section of my book on Reagan in which I'm outlining Reagan's unusual qualities and the qualities that made him so effective.
And throughout I'm comparing Reagan's qualities with Trump's.
They are similar in some ways but quite opposed in others.
So I want to begin here with the topic of pragmatism.
Because Reagan was both a visionary and a pragmatist.
So not one as opposed to the other, but the two in tandem.
How are they compatible?
How can you be a visionary and a pragmatist?
Well, you're a visionary in goals.
This is where I want to go.
You're a pragmatist in means, or you're a pragmatist in how you go about it.
And there were these pragmatists in the White House, and they had disagreements with Reagan, but nevertheless, Reagan somehow got his agenda through.
could use them to his benefit, but some of them thought that they were sort of had a better idea of how to do things than Reagan.
But interestingly, you could test this by seeing how they fared when they were detached from Reagan.
Many of these aides went on to careers in the Bush administration, and guess what?
They didn't do so well, which tells me that their pragmatism was effective only when it was attached to Reagan's kind of visionary perspectives.
It's kind of like saying I'm debating whether to use a car or a train or a plane, but quite honestly, I don't know where I'm going.
This was the problem with these pragmatists when they didn't have a Reagan to tell them that's where we're going.
Now, Reagan was friendly on the outside, but he was also in some ways a man unto himself.
And here's what I mean.
He was uniformly Pleasant, fair-minded with his aides, but you never got the sense that he was all that close to any of them.
Even Ed Meese, a good friend of Reagan, going back to the California days, they were friendly, but I don't know if they were close friends.
It's almost like Reagan saw these guys as kind of people he dealt with, kind of fellow passengers on a journey, but when his path I remember once hearing one of the Reaganites complain that he worked with Reagan like almost daily.
But he said after Reagan left office, he goes, I never heard from the guy.
Not a phone call.
Never. So, in some ways, these inner circle of Reagan became a little frustrated with Reagan.
In fact, this is one of the reasons why some of these people subsequently wrote memoirs.
I think part of it is this.
These are people who wanted to be in Reagan's inner circle.
And they kind of fought their way up the ranks.
And then finally they realized, guess what?
There is no inner circle.
It's only Reagan.
Reagan is the only member of his inner circle.
And so this annoyed them and frustrated them.
In other words, part of the reason for this is the aides realized that they were kind of dispensable.
They were not the source of Reagan's ideas, really.
And in fact, they didn't even make any of the major decisions Reagan did, and sometimes over their strong objections.
In Reagan's two terms, he went through Four White House chiefs of staff, six national security advisors, many of the cabinet members were swapped out, and somehow people came and people went, but Reagan forged ahead,
and Reagan's agenda forged ahead.
Speechwriters came and went, but Reagan's message remained the same.
Reagan had acquaintances, but as far as I could see, he did not have real friends.
And this was hard for people to notice because outwardly, Reagan was very friendly.
He liked people in general.
But I guess what I'm saying is he liked
in general, but he was kind of indifferent to Tom or Dick or Harry.
So he liked people as people, but he wasn't particularly close to any particular person.
I think this is part of what made Don Regan, who was Reagan's chief of staff, particularly annoyed.
They were both Irishmen.
They were roughly the same age.
I think Regan saw himself as having had a more impressive career.
He had been the head of a major investment company beforehand, and I think he thought he came in ahead of Reagan.
And then he discovered that not only was he not ahead of Reagan, but...
Reagan liked him, but could have done without him.
And Reagan was like, I can't believe this guy.
And perhaps this can be seen as a flaw in Reagan's character, I don't know.
But in some ways, I think it also helped Reagan to endure all these critiques, even from people who are right around him.
It was that Reagan genuinely didn't care.
He genuinely was his own man in that sense.
And this detachment that I'm talking about, which is...
Very characteristic of Reagan.
By the way, not characteristic of Trump.
This is the way in which Reagan and Trump are quite different.
Trump is outwardly less friendly than Reagan.
When you look at Trump, he doesn't have that geniality that Reagan had where Reagan could make you feel at ease, make you feel at home.
But yet Trump is far more dependent on people than Reagan.
Trump genuinely needs people.
He needs their reaction.
He needs their approbation.
And he's more needy in that sense.
Reagan was less so.
Reagan was more detached.
And Reagan was more detached even with his own family.
Now, his first wife, Jane Wyman, once said that this was the reason that she left.
That Reagan was sort of there, but he wasn't really there.
And we see this with Reagan's kids.
Reagan was...
Reagan had problems with both his kids with Nancy Reagan.
Now, they were both liberals.
Ron Reagan Jr., who I can testify from personal experience, is a major ass.
So I can kind of see why Reagan was like, how do you deal with this guy?
But Reagan didn't get along any better with Patty Davis, who was his daughter from with Nancy Reagan.
And to be honest, he wasn't all that close to Maureen Reagan.
And not even to, perhaps he was the closest to Michael Reagan, who was ironically adopted, the adopted son.
But even with Michael Reagan, you got the sense that Reagan dealt with him as a caring parent, but they weren't all that close.
I write here, even his children felt the icy blast of his emotional withdrawal.
Reagan was in fact close to Nancy Reagan.
And many people in fact came to believe that Nancy Reagan was really running the White House.
There were all these articles, Nancy is the power behind the throne.
And all of this I can tell you as someone kind of in that circle myself.
And obviously dealing daily with people who had interactions with Reagan.
Nancy did not run the White House.
Not at all.
In fact, Nancy was a socialite.
She didn't care about politics.
She cared about Reagan.
And she did get involved, but usually she got involved when she thought that there was some kind of...
Inside attempt to undermine Reagan.
And she saw these inside attempts, by the way, coming from all directions, including from the right-wing conservatives.
And so some of the right-wing conservatives didn't like Nancy Reagan because they basically thought that she was some kind of a secret liberal.
But she wasn't a secret liberal, nor was she a secret conservative.
She was kind of a secret nothing.
And I think I captured it myself when I once said that Reagan's...
In fact, I should close this segment on a story.
I was speaking at the Reagan Library, and I had a kind of a whimsical, funny talk about Reagan.
But in this particular case, Nancy Reagan was in the audience and sitting like in the third row.
I don't remember if any of the other Reagan kids were there, but I do remember Nancy Reagan was there.
And in the speech...
I fired off this line.
I go, well, people say that Nancy Reagan was running the show.
I said, but Nancy Reagan doesn't care about politics.
I go, you know, Reagan's hero was Calvin Coolidge, and Nancy's hero is Calvin Klein.
So this was a way of highlighting that she cared about handbags and designers, and her best friend was Betsy Bloomingdale of Bloomingdale's fame.
And so this is who Nancy Reagan was.
Now, when she got involved in things, she often, you know, made enemies and she's like, we got to get rid of this guy.
But as I said, her motive was to protect her husband.
She didn't really care about tax cuts or strategic defense or the Contras.
And quite honestly, she never, to whatever her views on those things, it never affected Reagan.
He maintained his steady course on those things.
And so I sum up by saying that I'm quoting myself now.
I'm reading from the book.
The portrait of Reagan that emerges from this book is one of a complex man, hardly the one-dimensional figure that both his admirers and critics are used to.
He's larger than life.
There's much about leadership that we can learn from him today.
Our world is the world that he made.
And I think that the Reagan revolution, which began in 1980, Had a pretty long-lasting effect.
I mean, it's pretty amazing if you can have an effect that lasts, let's say, a quarter of a century.
And Reagan did.
All the way from 1980 until, I think, 2008.
When Obama came in, he came in with the specific intention of undoing the Reagan revolution, or at least undoing...
The effects of the Reagan revolution to the degree he could.
And so you'd have to say that in 2008, the Reagan era ended and something new and I think darker, more malevolent began.
And we can understand Trump as a reaction to and a response to that thing that started with Obama in 2008.
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