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April 10, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:12
CRAZY MAN STRATEGY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1060
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Coming up, I'm going to argue that Trump in his tariff policy is using a crazy man strategy, which has its roots in Richard Nixon and going further back in Machiavelli.
I'm going to examine whether there's a chance of a recession this year.
I'm going to make the case that if there is, tariff policies are not the main cause.
Something else is, and I'll tell you what it is.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, 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 was happy to notice this morning that I passed 5 million followers on X. A very nice milestone.
In fact, it throws my mind back.
I think it was 2013, maybe 2012, when I first got on.
Twitter. And I was very dubious about what the purpose of it was.
And my assistant at the King's College, where I was the president, said, oh, no, this is very cool.
You can post every day, tell people what you're doing.
And I'm like, why would I want to tell people what I'm doing?
Oh, no, it's a form of self-expression.
And so somewhat reluctantly, I Got on Twitter and the initial posts were done by my assistant Tyler, not even by me.
He was masquerading as me.
So let me just be you and kind of give it a try.
Anyway, that's how all this got started.
And then I think back now through all the events of the past decade or so.
Obama, my campaign finance case, incarceration, Trump 1.0.
Biden, censorship, Elon Musk, the conversion to X, Trump 2.0.
So it's really been quite a journey.
So in any event, I'm delighted to have crossed that barrier.
Let me talk about, continue my discussion really of the tariff debate.
And what we've seen with Trump is a very strange action, which is to say, The announcement of radical tariffs really across the board on pretty much every single country, a 10% across the board tariff, and then targeted tariffs all over the place,
including to some remote islands and things, and people are like, why would you want to tariff this remote island?
Well, the answer, of course, is that Trump's idea was that Countries that are being tariffed can use third places as their launching pads.
Think about, for example, if there are high tax rates, people will go set up in Bermuda.
They set up in the Cayman Islands and they put their company over there.
It's a way of going around.
A tax problem.
And similarly with tariffs.
The Chinese can say, well, you know what, we'll set our operations up so we come out of this remote island.
They're not tariffed.
We're tariffed.
But since they're not, so this was the, even though the left pretended like this makes absolutely no sense, it actually does make sense.
It's a way of covering the ground, making sure the tariffs are uniform.
But then, no sooner did Trump declare them, impose them, Then he withdrew them, or at least he withdrew them for 90 days, and then he imposed massive tariffs on China.
In fact, looking at Trump's post, 125%.
So that's a big one, right?
Think of a Chinese product that is, let's say, well, $100.
That means that the tariff on that product is $125, meaning on top of the $100.
Now, the company that's doing the export or even the company in America that's selling the product has a choice.
They don't have to raise the price to $225, but they could or they could absorb some of that.
What is Trump doing here?
I think he's doing a couple of things.
Well, first of all, let's turn to his stated objective.
And his stated objective is to offer medicine, as he puts it.
To the U.S. economy.
Reporter, is there pain in the market at some point you're unwilling to tolerate?
I think your question, this is Trump, is so stupid.
I don't want to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.
And then the Treasury Secretary Besson says pretty much the same thing.
The economy is like a bodybuilder taking steroids.
Outside you're great, inside you're killing your vital organs.
That's what was going on here.
So... I take this to mean the following, which is that the American economy is addicted to cheap foreign goods, and specifically cheap foreign goods from China.
Now, you might say that that is the consumer's choice.
This is what a libertarian would say, the consumer's choosing to buy all this junk.
And most of it is junk.
Not all of it, but most of it.
And so, why would you question the choices of the consumer?
Well, let's remember that the choices of the consumer are themselves affected by the unlevel trade playing field.
Just as, for example, the choices of the consumer with regard to food.
We suddenly have this massive outbreak of obesity in America.
This has been going on for now 20 years.
Why is that?
Well, the reason for that is that a lot of these corporations use the high fructose corn syrup.
Why do they do that?
Because that is subsidized by the US government.
Because the FDA has been bought and paid for by the food companies.
The food companies are able to convince the FDA to recommend fatty foods, unhealthy foods.
And so the consumer choice, my point is, is not being made in a vacuum.
People are choosing based upon options that have already been decided for them in advance.
This is what Trump is on to.
So I think Trump's strategy is...
That look, we need to sort of change the habits of the consumer.
We need to kind of kick the American consumer in the butt.
Now, the way that tariffs work is that they hurt consumers or they don't hurt consumers in a direct way because the consumer always has the choice of buying an American product.
So if there's a tariff on a Chinese product, let's say, it's not because there are no other products available.
The Chinese product might have been cheaper for all kinds of reasons.
Maybe part of it is the product is poorer quality but still cheaper.
Now with the tariff it won't be cheaper.
Now you can actually buy the better quality American product which turns out to be now less expensive than the tariffed Chinese product.
Trump is clearly playing some kind of a game with China and maybe also with other trading partners.
It's amazing to see how these trading partners are running now to the White House one by one.
Here's Taiwan.
Taiwan does not seek retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. Instead, we'll start talking from bilateral zero.
tariffs. Isn't it amazing these countries suddenly discover the virtues of free trade?
It's kind of like when Elon Musk censored those leftists on Twitter for one day.
Suddenly the left discovered the beauty of the First Amendment.
They're quoting John Stuart Mill.
We're being censored.
You know, the very advocates of censorship for weeks, months, years suddenly become absolute defenders of free speech when their free speech rights are threatened.
And so suddenly here, suddenly when Taiwan is threatened with tariffs, they become, oh, let's start with free trade.
Let's begin with the level playing field.
The EU pretty much
Now, here's an observation by Chamath Palihapitiya.
This is an entrepreneur, friend of David Sachs, somebody who was a longtime Democrat, but is now a Trumpster.
And he's making a point about negotiations.
And I want to tie this point into Nixon's famous crazy man strategy.
Nixon's crazy man strategy was to let the other side believe that you're slightly nuts.
I think Nixon once told, it was Haldeman or one of his top officials, tell the Russians that I'm a little crazy.
And Nixon was very deliberate about this because he wanted the Russians to be like off balance.
Trump, I think, does this as well.
He plays the crazy man strategy and People never know what he's going to do.
He'll tell the Taliban, hey, listen, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do, but I just happen to know where you live.
Here's your home address.
And that guy's thinking, what does this mean?
What is Trump saying?
What is going to happen to me?
They know my home address.
Is a bomb going to explode over the top of my house?
Answer, unknown.
But the unknown itself turns out to be very beneficial because it chastens the behavior of the Taliban.
Now, here's Chamath's observation.
I've observed high-stakes negotiations over the years because one tactic I've seen work well, and here you've got to pay attention and see this is exactly what Trump is doing.
He says, when you find the leverage to bring your opponent to the edge of the cliff, hold them over the cliff so they see the abyss.
Threaten to push them off.
This is Trump.
I'm going to put ridiculous tariffs on you.
Your economy will never be the same.
You'll never recover.
You can just see the panic on the face of like Justin Trudeau.
I mean, the guy looks like he did something in his pants when he hears this because he realizes that this is like curtains for the Canadian economy.
I'm continuing here with Chama.
Turns out when you then don't push them, but back off, they develop Stockholm Syndrome.
So in other words, they...
I think that you are capable of pushing them and therefore they become, in a sense, brainwashed by you.
And so they give you more than you would have otherwise because they're thankful for the reprieve.
They're like, oh, wow, you know, it's like the captive.
They didn't kill me.
So suddenly you become unbelievably grateful, sycophantic, a kind of a puppy dog.
And so the...
Conditions for that.
I don't know what the plan is, but the conditions for that are the same.
75 countries are on a 90-day shot clock to get a grand bargain done.
Many of these people now seem incredibly thankful to be able to get off the tariff highway and find a kind of deal, a rapprochement, a common ground with Trump, even if this is much worse for them than before.
Remember, they had a great deal before.
Big tariffs that they put on us.
Low tariffs or no tariffs that we put on them.
Trump has basically said those days are over.
And so while we don't see fully through the end of the tunnel, Trump seems to see through the end of the tunnel.
We don't.
We don't know how all of this will play out.
It does seem that there is a strategy, maybe a crazy man strategy, maybe a modified version of that strategy.
But there is a strategy in play here.
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I want to talk about recession.
And the fears that the country may be moving toward a recession.
Saw an article recently that a recession is kind of priced in now with the stock market having pulled back.
Stock market is in a period of gyration back and forth.
But nevertheless, a lot of Wall Street seems to think that a recession is down the road.
And there's a very good article.
On the website of the Mises Institute, it's mises.org, named after, of course, Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist.
And the article is called, There's Only One Possible Cause of the Next Recession, and It Isn't Tariffs.
So I want to go through this article because it's very simple, but in some ways it is a very valuable economic education.
The article begins by saying that the president has said, That the country, in order to come out right or right side up, needs to go through a period of short-term adjustment and let's not even try to sugarcoat it, short-term pain.
And then, says the author, quote, that is a remarkably and refreshingly honest position for an administration to have.
Why? Because it's so rare.
Presidents rarely say, "Listen, we've gotten ourselves into a ditch, into a bad way.
We're going to have to get out.
It's not going to be all that easy, but get ready because that's what we have to do."
So the author is saying this is something that is a hallmark of Trump.
You wouldn't get it from Biden.
You'd never get it from Obama.
Those are people who will turn on you, undermine you, devalue your money.
And yet pretend that everything is all right.
Pretend like they're not doing that.
And even in Biden's case, state the opposite of the truth.
Still, says the author, the fear of a recession in the wake of tariffs is not unreasonable, particularly if Trump triggers a reciprocal kind of chain reaction.
Of tariffs.
Tariffs over here, tariffs over there, higher tariffs over here, higher tariffs over there, and back and forth it goes.
And all of this is just a way of saying that you're putting more burdens, roadblocks, but that's what a tariff is.
It's a cost, it's a price, it's a tax, it's a roadblock.
And so that can't be good for the world economy.
True. But, says the author, tariffs might tip us into a recession, but tariffs cannot cause a recession.
Tariffs by definition cannot do that.
Now, why is that?
Let's think about what a tariff is.
I'm going to read and then comment.
Tariffs create supply decreases that raise the prices of certain goods.
So, for example, let's say that there are tariffs on China.
These tariffs will increase the cost on China of sending goods here to the United States.
That's very painful for the people who want or need those goods.
The assumption here, of course, is that there will be some price increase that goes with those Chinese goods and so people will have to pay more.
But it's also beneficial to the companies competing with the firms hit by the tariff.
Another way to put that is Tariffs are a form of redistribution.
They're redistributing wealth away from companies that do business with China, and they redistribute that wealth toward companies that don't do business with China.
So notice here that tariffs aren't stopping the economy as a whole.
They're moving money around from one set of people to another set of people.
Or to put it very bluntly, they're moving money away from the Wall Street crowd and toward the Main Street crowd.
And both Trump and Scott Besant have said this is in fact their goal.
So they're effectively a wealth transfer.
And this is not a bad way to understand tariffs.
Tariffs is a way of punishing certain types of activity.
In this case, activity that involves trade with China, perhaps with other countries if you have tariffs there.
But the author of the article then goes...
It isn't.
It isn't.
So what does produce the drag on the economy?
Well, says the author, Of the article.
His name, by the way, is Connor O'Keefe.
The article is called There's Only One Possible Cause of the Next Recession and it isn't Harris.
And so we kind of get to the punchline, which is what then is the cause?
And the answer is really simple.
Printing money.
Quote, when new dollars are created and injected into credit markets as loanable funds, they warp the entire structure of production because they are not based on Actual savings.
What the author is getting at here is the following.
Normally, people save money and they use that savings to invest, to put the money to work, so to speak, and that money then becomes deployed toward new businesses, making new types of goods and services,
and so on.
But what happens when the government just prints money?
Well, when you think about it, no new goods and services are created by that by itself, right?
If you have a village and let's just say, for example, they have 100 tractors or they have 50 tractors and you double the amount of money in the village, how many more tractors turn up?
None. You still have 50. You've doubled the amount of coins or notes.
or bills or whatever but you haven't done anything to increase the productivity of that society you've simply increased the amount of currency or money in the society in fact what you have done by doing that is you have created an artificial sort of expansion that is illusory it's illusory because nothing new has in fact been produced the only thing that's been produced are new But it gives the false impression that new things are being produced because all this money
is flying around and people go, wow, we are all doing great.
It's kind of like a drinking binge, if you will.
And then, says the author, That this illusion collapses because at some point people realize there's nothing new around here in the village.
We still got the same 50 tractors.
It's just that all these tractors are now more expensive.
People then realize this.
And so a recession is the hangover.
It's the corrective.
It's the morning after.
It is, in fact, kind of a healthy adjustment that comes after this preposterous and unjustified.
Printing money binge.
And printing money binges have caused many of the inflations of the past hundred years.
And these inflations are then followed by the hangover, which turns out to be a recession that can be mild and long, or it can be sharp.
In a few cases, it is both sharp and long.
That, in fact, is the name for the Great Depression.
It was sharp, but it also lasted 15 years.
But we've had other recessions that have been painful in their own way.
Either very sharp or in some cases not so sharp, but nevertheless a recession that lasted for a pretty long time.
So, the conclusion of the article is that it is monetary irresponsibility and fiscal irresponsibility, not tariffs, that are at the root of our current predicament.
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It is D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
With all the discussion of nutrition and health and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I'm delighted to bring back to the podcast Kim Bright.
She's the founder of BrightCore.
She's a pioneer in the nutrition industry and expert on health and wellness.
She's been on nationally syndicated radio programs and TV programs really since the 1980s, educating people on health.
You can follow her on x at mybrightcore and the website mybrightcore.com slash Dinesh.
We'll have a special offer for you on that, but we'll talk about that in a bit.
Kim, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
There's a lot of stuff in the news about toxins in our food, in agriculture, and all of this having a bad effect on our health.
Can you explain what's going on here?
Sure, Dinesh.
Thanks for having me back.
It's nice to be back with you.
We've had an inundation of different Types of chemicals into our food supply, whether it's being sprayed on like herbicides or pesticides, or whether it's being added as preservatives or artificial colorings, artificial flavorings.
We have approximately 10,000 additions to our food.
As opposed to 400 over in Europe.
It's huge how much poison we're ingesting every day.
Now this is generational too.
This is not just affecting us.
It goes back generations when this started.
So our bodies don't deal with this type of inflow into these bodies.
These bodies really do well with real foodstuffs.
So our bodies have been battling.
For generations now, this influx of chemicals, and they don't know what to do with it.
They store it in fat cells.
The toxins get stored in fat cells.
They get stored around our organs that don't move too much.
They get stored so many places in our body that really injure us, and they injure our microbiome in our gut and on our skin, in our brain, everywhere.
So these really wreak havoc and they speed up the aging process.
We really have this accelerated aging, not only in older adults like ourselves, but in children.
That's why we're seeing, you know, cancers and heart disease in children and teenagers.
This should not be happening, Dinesh.
What can be done, Kim, to...
I mean, I know that there are some policy issues under discussion, but what can an ordinary person do to start...
Like reversing or halting this kind of damage, you know, for your own life or for your own family?
Well, I think first and foremost, you have to decide that what's been going on is not working.
And so now you make the decision to change.
And what does that involve?
When you look at what really...
Our bodies need Dinesh.
It's very common sense.
And so they need, first and foremost, oxygen.
We gain oxygen through movement, exercise in our body.
And we must have oxygen in our blood in order to carry what nutrients we're getting into our cells and toxins out of our cells.
So oxygen is first and foremost.
Do deep breathing exercises.
Get exercise.
Move. Second, water.
We have to stay hydrated.
It's just like your car battery.
If your car battery runs out of water, that car is not going to run because the electrical positive and negatives are not communicating with each other.
We are an electric body.
Our body communicates through electricity as well.
So when we're dehydrated, think about that.
Our body doesn't function properly, so we have to hydrate a half ounce for every pound of weight we are.
Then we have to look at our food, and we have to change our food.
We have to start maybe supporting our local farmer's markets.
Eat local, eat in season, eat real food, and stop eating the artificial things.
Those are found in the center of the grocery stores, around the perimeters where you should shop.
The problem arises that for generations, because we've been eating these things, We are not getting the nutrition our body needs.
And so we have to supplement.
And there are certain supplements that are even more important than others that are critical to our body.
And, you know, things like collagen and hyaluronic acid are naturally occurring in our body.
But as we age, around 20, 25, the production starts slowing down.
And those are critical components to our everyday health.
You know, for many years, just typically as I would either exercise or get around, I'd hear about collagen.
I always thought it was something that you like rub into your skin to make your skin more supple.
And then I find that Debbie says, oh, Dinesh, you know, I've been slipping collagen now into our lattes.
By the way, something that I don't even notice, the lattes taste just the same as always, but collagen is now in the latte.
So initially I was like baffled because what?
Why would you put collagen in a latte?
So can you explain what is collagen and what does it really do?
Well, you've married a very smart woman there.
Debbie's very smart to do that for you.
Because collagen is the glue that holds our connective tissues together.
It's in every single connective tissue in our body, Dinesh.
It is the most abundant protein throughout our body.
For instance, your bones.
Everybody thinks they're calcium.
Got to take lots of calcium supplements, right, for our bones.
No, bones are 90% collagen.
And when we start losing collagen at age 20, 25, our bones start losing collagen.
Our joints start losing collagen.
They're 65%.
So anybody out there having aches and pains, having problems with bone density, do you have wrinkles, fine lines and wrinkles?
Is your skin starting to sag?
This is all showing collagen loss.
And so we have to Put this back in.
And I'm telling you, people don't get collagen in everyday eating.
Your steak, your T-bone, your filet, your chicken breast.
Don't contain collagen just because they're protein.
That's not collagen.
You have to be eating on an everyday basis organ meats, bone broth, the hooves of animals that have been cooked down into gelatin.
That's how you get collagen.
And good on you if you're eating that way.
But 99% of the American people don't eat that way.
So you have to supplement collagen.
You have to put this back in to revive yourself.
One of the products offered by Brightcore is Revive, and it is a collagen supplement, but it is not your ordinary collagen supplement.
It does more.
So talk a little bit about Revive and what specifically it does.
Well, Revive we've put together is very unique because not only are we not just using one or two types of collagen, we're using five.
Type 1, 2, 3, 5, and 10. That covers from the top of our head to the bottom of our feet.
That's our skin, our bones, our tendons, our ligaments.
It's great for healing.
So many people have problems when they get older.
They don't recover from surgeries or from illness as fast, and collagen plays a role in that.
Put together these five types of collagen, and our sourcing is very clean sourcing.
We use grass-fed bovine, wild Atlantic cod, free-range chickens, and the eggshell membranes from those.
We also put back in one of the substances I mentioned when I said collagen at the beginning of the show, which is hyaluronic acid.
Now, what is hyaluronic acid?
Hyaluronic acid is a Humectant that is found in synovial fluid that is around our joints.
And so people that get these creaky, achy joints, it's showing the hyaluronic acid and the collagen are exiting.
And so we have to put the hyaluronic acid back in to keep those joints moving smoothly.
So we add that back in.
Biotin, a B vitamin, well known for many, many decades, is vital for great healing.
And of course, collagen plays a great role in that.
And people have their hair thinning, falling out, you know, going bald.
Collagen puts these things back in, in the hyaluronic acid, and all of a sudden, in the biotin, your hair is growing again.
It's thicker.
It's shiny.
Your skin is lifting up again because the structure's there, the humectant from the hyaluronic acid's there.
And then, of course, vitamin C is a cofactor for collagen in our body, not only to help produce it, but to absorb it.
And speaking of absorption, we also use a method called hydrolyzation.
And what that does is it takes these large molecules of collagen that we can't absorb easily because they're very long amino acid chains and it breaks it down into small chains of the peptides.
So then now we can absorb that better.
And that's the difference in Revive as opposed to, you know, using other collagens that are out on the market.
And it's very effective.
I got to say, Kim, you're kind of You're kind of dispelling a myth that I've sustained for many years because I, you know, I have a full head of hair, my skin is pretty supple, and for a long time I thought to myself...
That's obviously because I'm from India.
And I say kind of the same thing about Debbie.
Debbie, you look so young because you're from Venezuela.
But then I actually, this was online, I was looking at a reunion of a lot of guys from my class.
And I'm sorry to say that most of them looked like they were 100 years old.
And so I realized this kind of superior Indian gene that I thought was sustaining me, Debbie's chuckling here on the side here, is obviously kind of a myth.
And so I think it must be that I'm either eating I think what you're saying is that these specific ingredients can do wonders for you, right?
That it can help you with not only the natural aging process, but in some degree, the unnatural aging process that Americans are enduring right now.
Exactly. It's kind of like I've got this rubber band, you can see, and this is when we have collagen in our body, our tendons, our bones, everything is moving properly, our connective tissues, they're holding up our organs, our bladder's staying together.
All of our organs are working properly, but then if we don't get enough collagen at some point, boom!
Snaps and breaks.
It's like those radial tires going down the highway where you see them all coming apart.
That's your collagen as you're aging.
And if you're not putting it back in, in that hyaluronic acid, you're going to creak, you're going to squeak, you're going to be a mess.
And so you want to have this collagen back in.
So especially helpful for those bones and joints, hair, skin, and nails, and muscle mass.
How many people are not as strong as they used to be?
Collagen is in muscle as well.
That lean muscle mass, we need that there to stay strong and stand up.
So anti-aging effects inside and out.
Kim, talk about Revive as a product.
Is it a capsule?
Is it a powder?
How do people take it?
Is it easy to take?
And how often should you take it?
Yes. We're made 100% in the USA, which is really important to us.
And it is a powder.
There's two different types.
There's unflavored, which Debbie's using in your coffee, hopefully, because I made a mistake and I wasn't awake one morning and I put the strawberry lemonade in my coffee and I had to dump it out.
That doesn't taste good in coffee.
But it tastes really good in the afternoon in some water and then put some ice cubes in after you're done or use the unflavored in other things.
You can bake with it.
You can throw it in pancakes, put it in some soups.
You can get it in any way that you want to.
So it's really, really important that you get it in every single day because depending on when you start using the collagen, if you're 40,
If you're 50 and 60, start taking it, hyperdosing, two times a day, three times if you can because your collagen's already fallen off a cliff at that point.
You might have 20% of what you had when you were younger.
So you want to feel great.
Kim, let's close out by...
My viewers, my listeners, they like good deals.
They like to be able to get something that they can use that's going to benefit them, but they also like to get some special offers.
Can you close out by telling us what you have for them and what kind of a deal you can give them?
Yes, I can, Dinesh.
You can get 25% off your order of Revive today using the code DINESH.
And you go to mybrightcore.com forward slash Dinesh Podcast.
Again, that's mybrightcore.com forward slash Dinesh Podcast.
Or we would really love it if you call us.
And you call 888-927-5980 and we're going to sweeten that deal.
We're going to give you up to 50% off and free shipping when you call in.
And we're also going to give you something really wonderful.
It's a collagen sheet mask, and it has rose.
oil, Damascus rose oil, and it has collagen, hyaluronic acid.
So call in today at 888-927-5980.
You will not believe how your skin feels when you use our
Our collagen and hyaluronic mask, and that's free when you call in and up to 50% off.
So please do yourself a favor, glue yourself back together, get those bones strong again, get those fine lines and wrinkles going away, and feel great with Revive Collagen from BrightCore.
Debbie says she loves the mask.
And, you know, I think it is great for people to call because, you know, particularly when people are talking about health issues, they've obviously got stuff particular to themselves.
And this way they can talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about and discuss how Revive and how collagen can be good for them.
Guys, I've been talking to Kim Bright, the founder of BrightCore.
Once again, the website is mybrightcore.com forward slash Dinesh.
And I think you mentioned Dinesh podcast.
Kim, thank you very much for...
Thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
And one thing before we go, I just want everybody to know, I'm 70. I look pretty good for that.
I use Revive.
I'm now beginning Chapter 2 of my book on Reagan.
This is it right here.
Picture of Reagan with the cowboy hat.
Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
Good book, by the way, to get a follow along as we talk about it, but also a good book to have because in just about 200 pages, it distills, it captures, it makes the case for Reagan without a lot of extraneous biological...
biographical details, stuff that's not all that important.
This is not trying to be a systematic biography.
What it's trying to do is to get to the heart of Reagan's effectiveness as a leader, partly so we can understand leadership.
Now, let's go back to...
1980. A very interesting thought experiment.
We are pushing ourselves 45 years back.
Obviously, for people who are listening or watching who are under the age of 45 or just around that age, Reagan will be someone who they don't remember directly, at least they don't remember directly as president.
But in 1980, America was...
In need of a new kind of leader.
This is how I begin the chapter.
And I say the problem was not just that the economy was in a mess, so the United States was losing its dominant position in the world.
The problem was that in the face of these crises, no one seemed to know what to do.
Two years earlier, Michael Blumenthal, President Carter's Secretary of the Treasury, conveyed the bewilderment of the experts when he said, quote, This is a little bit of a multi-headed snake.
This is something that I don't really get.
We don't know how to take it on.
Economist Lester Thoreau says, quote, To get a significant improvement in the inflation rate, the US needs some good luck.
Again, Thoreau reflecting the kind of predominant Keynesian way of thinking at the time.
The Keynesian philosophy had been predominant going back to the era of the Great Depression.
inflation of the 1970s was a mystery.
What to do with it was also a mystery.
And Carter, the president, tells Congress that he doesn't know what to do either.
We'll see in a moment that Carter essentially said that the problem was a problem of the country as a whole.
Here is Carter's, I'm now drawing from his so-called malaise speech.
He says, we're suffering from a national malaise, a quote, crisis of confidence that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will, threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.
Carter says one of the problems is that most Americans want to live better than their parents.
They expect America to be the world leader, and Carter's basically saying these expectations are proving to be untenable.
They need to be modified.
Americans have to learn to live with less.
The new era is going to be an era of limits.
Now, we'll see in a little bit that Reagan rejected all of this.
Reagan did not believe that the problem was with the American people.
He believed the problem was with the government.
The problem was with the guy who was in the Oval Office.
The problem was with the kind of thinking that had created these problems and consequently did not know what to do about them.
Now, on the foreign policy stage, things were not looking a whole lot better, again, and
there was a hostage crisis, you might remember.
A group of Iranian extremists took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
They seized 52 American hostages, and they held them captive.
Carter tried to freeze Iranian assets.
He appealed to the United Nations.
He tried diplomacy, tried economic initiatives, but you know nothing.
The Ayatollah Khomeini was recalcitrant.
He kept denouncing the United States as a great Satan.
That was his main response every time Carter tried to make some appeal to him.
And every day, people would turn on their TV sets to see throngs of men and women burning American flags in the streets of Iran and chanting, Death to America.
That this death to America stuff was kind of new at that time.
We've heard a lot of it now.
We're quite used to radical Muslims burning flags, death to America, great Satan, blah, blah, blah.
But all of that was invented right here in 1979 by the Iranian revolutionaries.
And Carter was nonplussed.
He was bewildered.
He was flummoxed.
He didn't know what to do.
He tried a kind of clumsy rescue attempt south of Tehran, but the helicopters flew into a sandstorm.
They lost use of their gyroscopes.
Two others malfunctioned.
A fourth crashed into a transport plane.
And this was such a picture of incompetence.
By the way, it's very similar, let's say, to Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan many, many years later.
In a sense, a single image, a single picture captures the incompetence of the whole administration.
And that was certainly true of Carter.
You have the sight of gas fires, airplanes down, dead soldiers, dancing Iranian militants, all symbolizing, if you will, the humiliation of the country.
And so in a way, This is how I set up the chapter and I'm just going to read.
In this time of ignominy and crisis, when the very issue of national identity was at stake, Americans needed a leader of unusual vision and determination.
The country required a statesman who would not accept His country's decline as an inevitable fate.
Such a leader would need to find creative solutions to domestic and international problems that had eluded the most sophisticated minds and were the source of national demoralization.
Even more important, he had to have the skills to navigate the treacherous currents of politics in order to win legislative victories and put his programs into effect.
In California,
the support of a large majority.
The nation's woes called for nothing less than a man who could turn the tide of history and renew the American spirit.
In California,
There was such a man.
So this is the setup for the chapter.
And then I go into a section here, which I'm only going to briefly abbreviate now, where Reagan's election, this was very similar, by the way, to Trump in 2016.
Even though Carter was a fool, and even though his unpopularity had risen, The media was behind him.
Just as the media had been behind Obama, the media pushed so hard for Hillary in 2016, the media expected Reagan to lose.
And in fact, the polls showed that Reagan was losing.
And so Reagan's election brought a surge of media.
Disbelief. And not just the media.
It was the broader intellectual class.
They couldn't believe that this Hollywood guy, this B-movie actor, this affable dunce, as they saw him, had made his way into the Oval Office.
They thought he was a howling idiot, a reactionary kook, a dangerous warmonger.
Here's a quote from columnist William Grider.
Who wrote in those years for the Atlantic Monthly, quote, My God, they've elected this guy who nine months ago we thought was a hopeless clown.
There's something going on here that we don't understand.
So... And even Republicans...
Reagan with a certain amount of condescension.
You might not remember now, but George Bush, listening to Reagan talk about economics, called it voodoo economics.
And there was a kind of disdain toward Reagan shown, well, in the Republican primary, you had a number of Republicans who had run against Reagan.
And in some ways, they were all They all looked down on Reagan as if to say he was the kind of fool in the group.
Notice, for example, how when Trump first ran, you had a full stage of Republicans.
And who stood out?
Trump stood out.
And in some ways, they all looked at Trump like, what are you doing here?
What makes you think you belong on this stage?
Reagan got much of the same kind of thing.
And as I say, he faced ridicule not just from Democrats.
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