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April 16, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HARVARD HATES AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1064
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Coming up, I'll examine the Trump administration's ultimatum to Harvard University and Harvard's defiant response with $9 billion in federal aid and Harvard's tax-exempt status on the line.
Oren McIntyre of The Blaze joins me.
We're going to talk about Trump's deportations and the efforts by Judge Bozberg and other Democrat-appointed judges to stop it or to slow it down.
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My topic for today is Harvard University, and we're calling this episode Harvard Hates America.
Now, many of you will not remember this, but that was actually the title of a book.
It was written by a Republican congressman many years ago.
He went to Harvard.
His name was John Laboudier.
You probably won't remember that name.
But we knew him when I was a student at Dartmouth.
He might have come to speak in Dartmouth while I was there.
In any event, his book was an expose of all the left-wing chicanery going on at Harvard at that time, all of which has become exponentially worse.
And Harvard seems ready now to do battle with the Trump administration.
A real contrast here between Harvard on the one hand and, say, Columbia, which largely surrendered to Trump.
Yes, we'll do this.
Yes, we'll do that.
They didn't agree to all the Trump administration's demands, but they agreed to most.
And as a result, the Trump people have sort of backed off from going after Colombia.
But with Harvard, it looks like a big battle is shaping up, and I am here for it.
Not to mention the fact that I think Harvard is beginning to recognize already that they have picked the wrong guy to go to battle with.
So here's the Harvard president.
No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach.
Whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
So this is a sort of a pompous declaration of independence.
We, Harvard, our private university, we're independent.
We can do whatever we want.
But of course, the do whatever we want doesn't really work when you are taking federal funds.
No organization that takes federal money can do whatever it wants, which is not to say it isn't private or it isn't independent, but it is to say that it has to conform to federal laws.
And I'll get in a moment to what these laws are, but let me just say the Trump administration is like, okay, Harvard, that's your stance.
And so Trump has immediately frozen $2 billion in funding to Harvard.
And basically said, until you get rid of all your DEI and until you stop discriminating against Jews and vilifying Jews in a manner that would never be tolerated if you say vilified blacks in this way, so until you establish a race-blind standard of dealing with ethnic groups,
you're not going to get federal funding.
Now, they haven't canceled all the federal funding.
Apparently, Harvard gets something.
Like $9 billion in federal funding.
It's a good question why Harvard gets any money at all.
This is a university, by the way, that has a giant endowment, over $50 billion.
So their university is quite capable of being self-sufficient.
This may not be true of most or certainly not all other universities that get federal funding.
Some of them are quite dependent on it.
You pull the federal funding, the university goes flat on its back.
But Harvard does get a fair amount of federal money, and direct grants are not the only way to get federal funding.
Students get Pell grants.
They then turn around and pay that money in tuition.
So there are different ways in which federal money makes its way to an institution like Harvard.
But Trump, not content with cutting or at least holding the federal funding, Has gone a step further.
Perhaps Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status.
So here is really cutting close to the bone because think about it.
Most of the people who give money, private individuals, private foundations that give money to a place like Harvard, they count on getting a tax deduction.
If Harvard loses its tax-exempt status, it doesn't just take away the federal money, but it takes away the attractiveness of Harvard for donors because now if they give money to Harvard, they lose.
All that money, they don't get to take it off their taxes at all.
But again, Trump here can appeal to a precedent that was set up by the left.
You might remember a generation ago, the Democrats went after Bob Jones University.
Bob Jones University, a small, private Christian university, but apparently they had some sort of policy that forbade interracial dating.
Now, I don't know why they had that policy.
Maybe they thought it was somehow not permitted in the Bible or something like this, which I don't think is really true.
But nevertheless, this was Bob Jones's policy.
But the federal government decided we're going to destroy this university.
We're going to take away its tax-exempt status.
We're going to pull its federal funding.
And at the time, Republicans raised the point that, listen, this is really a...
An overreach of federal power.
Why don't we let these universities along?
I mean, this is not exactly like a national problem.
Bob Jones is very much in a camp of its own.
But the Democrats were like, no, if they're not in conformity with federal law to the letter, too bad for them, and down they go.
Well, guess what?
This principle is now coming back to haunt them.
The left didn't have to worry about this because for a long time, Republicans would point to a double standard, but they would not do the opposite when they came to power.
They wouldn't go after the liberal universities.
So what makes Trump different?
He's like, all right, I'm going to take this exact Bob Jones principle, except the principle is a little different now.
It's not just don't discriminate against blacks, it's don't discriminate against any ethnic group.
You cannot give preferences to blacks and Hispanics over whites and Asians.
In university admissions and faculty hiring, in fact, in nothing at all.
You have to apply a strict colorblind standard.
Number two, you cannot treat men and women as interchangeable.
It's one of the legacies of the civil rights movement that separate but equal, the doctrine that was objectionable in the case of race, is not objectionable in the area of gender.
In fact, that's how we get women's sports.
That's how we get Title IX.
We have separate tournaments, separate spheres for men and women, and that includes, by extension, separate locker rooms, separate bathrooms, and so on.
So the Trump administration here is on very strong ground, not only legally, but also politically, because these kinds of preferences are utterly objectionable.
Objectionable to most Americans.
And so you have the remarkable spectacle of all these Ivy League presidents who think that they are in the glorious civil rights tradition, but nevertheless, they have been active discriminators.
They have created a culture of discrimination, and the Trump administration has realized, guess what?
You have basically placed a...
Hatchet in our hands to now go after you and go after you in exactly the same way that you yourself did.
You have weaponized civil rights law.
You can't complain now, don't weaponize the law.
You weaponize the law.
The law is a weapon.
It's just a weapon that we have now learned to use.
We're beginning to deploy it against you for the very first time.
Here's Trump in a post today, and being Trump, he goes way beyond the issue.
He could have just stayed on the issue of the civil rights laws.
No, I'm going to read parts and interpret Trump.
Everyone knows that Harvard has lost its way.
Harvard isn't just not following the law.
They've lost their way.
Why? They've hired from New York Bill de Blasio and Chicago Lori Lightfoot.
So here Trump is pointing out that...
Basically, Harvard has become a retirement home for failed liberal Democrats.
Useless politicians who have ended up in flames somehow end up teaching politics at Harvard.
So he calls them the most incompetent mayors in the history of our country to, quote, teach, teaches, unquote, municipal management and government.
these two radical fools left behind two cities that will take years to recover from their incompetence and evil.
Harvard has been hiring almost all woke radical left idiots and quote bird brains who are only capable of teaching failure
to students and so-called, quote, future leaders.
And then he goes on, look to the recent past of their plagiarizing president who so greatly embarrassed Harvard.
And goes on.
He talks about the fact that in corporate America, she would have been fired on the spot.
Many others, like these leftist dopes, are teaching at Harvard.
And because of that, Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning and should not be considered on the list of the world's great universities or colleges.
Harvard is a, quote, all caps, joke.
So this is actually quite a remarkable spectacle.
I cannot think of any president who would speak of...
Probably the primary educational institution in this country in this slash-and-burn way.
But I think it's a mark of where we are as a country and the complete breakdown of confidence in these types of institutions.
I mean, I remember even all the time when I was at Dartmouth, for example, and in many subsequent years...
Nevertheless, retaining a certain measure of not just respect, but even reverence for these institutions.
Because when I was there, they were a hotbed of all kinds of very smart people.
They were doing important research.
All of this is now gone.
And so while I sent my daughter to Dartmouth, for example, I'm really not sure if I have the confidence.
I know Debbie would back me up on this.
I don't know if this can be done anymore.
I think we have to give up on these institutions.
They are a total disaster.
And so the Trumpian attitude, which is basically going with a bulldozer, use the leverage and the levers of federal law to force these people into compliance, you know, beat them over the head legally.
They have become the cesspools that they have become by their own choice.
They have been ruthless and discriminating against conservatives, against Republicans, against white people, against males, against Christians.
So guess what?
You treat people really badly, and what do you do?
You create a...
Demoralized, discontented, resentful, in fact, hateful class of people whose main objective is now to get rid of you.
In fact, if I think of an analogy, it would be somewhat similar to this.
It was the British when they ruled India.
The Indians in the early part of the 20th century were actually quite pro-British.
There was an Indian guy who actually wrote a book critical of the British Empire.
It was called The Un-Britishness of British Rule in India.
Think about it.
What he was saying is, I like the British.
I like what they stand for.
My objection is that they are not pursuing those standards of Western civilization here in India.
They're being un-British.
But what happened is that when you use a heavy hand, when you start locking people up, when you start trying them for offenses they haven't committed, when you start degrading them, insulting them, and so on, you create a rebel class of people whose main goal is ultimately to topple your power,
to overthrow you.
And at that point, your pleas for decency and mercy and, oh, let's have fair play, all fall by the wayside because you have created...
That's where we are with these universities.
I think the attitude on the right is burn them to the ground.
Burn them to the ground legally, politically.
I'm not talking about literally burn them to the ground.
I'm talking about take them on in every way.
Don't give any quarter.
And this is the approach that the Trump administration is doing for the first time in my lifetime with results that I am eager to see.
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It's always good to have Oren McIntyre back on the podcast.
He is the host of the Oren McIntyre Show, also a columnist for Blaze News.
His new book is The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, and that's available now.
A-U-R-O-N McIntyre, M-A-C-I-N-T-Y-R-E.
Oren, thanks for joining me.
I appreciate it.
I just found out that Judge Boesberg...
issued a finding or a ruling saying that he has, quote, probable cause, probable cause to find Trump administration officials in contempt of court.
And he wants a list of the names of those officials who, according to him, refuse to turn the Venezuela-bound flights around and bring him back to the United States.
It looks like this guy is really pushing the envelope.
What do you think he's going for here?
Does he want to arrest Trump administration officials?
Do you think that he's trying to establish that Trump has a disregard for law so that he can then create a ground for Democrats later to try to impeach Trump a third time?
How do you read what's happening here with this guy, Bozberg?
I think this one really is just simply a case of political activism from the bench.
He wants to be seen as someone who's taking a stand against fascism and the dangers of the new orange Hitler.
In the first Trump administration, we all saw that it was the deep state that fought back.
It was the unelected bureaucracy, the administrative state, and J.D. Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have all talked about how aware they are this time that that was a strategy that the left had going in and how important it was to dismantle that and be prepared to handle that.
This time, however, it seems that we also have a judiciary insurrection where the...
President is using lawful powers under Article 2, and yet every judge across the country with a leftist bent thinks that it's their job to get in there and destroy what the administration is doing, obstruct as much as possible what the elected president...
And this is why I think it helps to understand it as the total state, because we see that the progressives didn't just have a deep resistance built into the executive branch, but in the judiciary and everywhere else, it's very clear that there are diehard political activists willing to throw their credibility and their jobs away,
ultimately, if only they can hinder the advance of Donald Trump's agenda.
It seems, you know, addressing this broadly or thinking about it in broad terms, that there are quite obvious checks.
When we think about checks and balances, I can think of a number of checks on Congress, right?
Congress can't make a law, for example, without the president signing it into law.
The president has veto power over Congress.
Courts have the ability to rule that a congressional statute is unconstitutional.
So there are checks on Congress.
There are checks on the executive branch.
My question is this.
What are the checks on the judiciary?
Let's just say, for example, that these unelected judges just decide, let's take every single Trump action, bar none, and just declare it illegal, at least illegal for now.
Now Trump is free to run through the appellate process, make his way to the Supreme Court, but that's going to take a long time.
So we essentially paralyze the presidency for the better part of the first year through this strategy.
What checks exist?
To make sure that the judiciary can't do that.
Well, the main two checks on the judiciary is, one, just explicitly passing a law or instead creating a constitutional amendment that makes it very hard for the judge to argue that the Constitution is being violated.
The other one is obviously to impeach the judge.
And at this point, even though that is the real check on the judiciary branch, we impeach basically no judges and have it for quite a long time.
So we have not really been using the check on the judicial branch.
for many, many decades, and you can tell because the judicial supremacy really has arisen in many of these instances.
Ultimately, it really matters as to whether or not the judges in question feel like they're going to get any kind of pressure, any kind of pushback, any kind of consequence, because at this point it really is clear that their intention is to bend or break the law, make up whatever interpretations they need to in order to,
again, obstruct the president in the And that simply can't stand.
So you need to have some kind of plan.
But unfortunately, in our current modern narrative framework, the basic check on judiciary of impeaching a judge would be seen as some kind of a dictatorial move.
That would be the narrative sold by the left.
Oh, the Republicans are impeaching a judge because he's out of control?
No, they're impeaching him because he's restricting Trump.
And so this is paving the way for more and more fascism.
I mean, it's obviously a huge relief that the Supreme Court is leaning our way 5-4 or perhaps 6-3 in some cases, but it's kind of terrifying to comprehend that if this were not the case, let's say it were a democratic Supreme Court, We would almost have no recourse in this situation,
would we?
I mean, I know that there are some MAGA activists who are like, well, Trump should just ignore the judge.
What can he do?
He can't go and get those illegals back from Venezuela.
Let him try quoting Andrew Jackson.
Now the judge has made his decision.
Let's see him enforce it.
Ha ha ha.
But what do you think of this strategy?
Quite honestly, I'm deriding it a little bit, but Lincoln used it.
I mean, when Lincoln was elected, he ignored the Dred Scott decision.
He followed it to the degree that Dred Scott, the slave, went back to his master, but Lincoln refused to enforce the decision beyond that particular case.
And we see here that these judges, they may have two or three plaintiffs in front of them, but they are applying their rulings sort of nationwide and to an entire group of people.
bring all the Venezuelans back.
You know, you can't fire anybody who's at USAID.
So they're painting with a very broad brush.
And it seems that Trump
I'm sure the Trump DOJ is trying to figure out how do you deal with this judicial strategy.
And that really is the very important question on the books at this moment, because like I said, I think they were prepared this time for the bureaucratic opposition.
But it seems that they were not as...
I mean, I know that they know that there was going to be legal challenges, but I don't know if they knew the degree to which we would see judges across the country suddenly decide that they are actually the ones who can do things like direct troop movements on behalf of the United States military.
And so you really are in a bind.
Once again, in a way, it's a public relations war because these judges are ready to...
They're ready to throw away the actual rule of law.
These judges are not concerned ultimately with maintaining the credibility of their office.
Their first priority is to attack Donald Trump.
And like you said, it's very important that there's a backstop of the Supreme Court.
You can thank the pro-life movement for that, by the way.
Everybody who has been deriding that, while that court is going to be very useful for other things besides pro-life, you wouldn't have that court without the pro-life issue.
That is very important to remember as we address this, but ultimately the Trump administration is going to have to find a way to battle through this narrative that they are against the rule of law or they're against justice.
This is going to be what the Democrats are selling, that Trump is a dictator, that Trump ignores the rule of law, that he throws away judges, that he blows past this, and ultimately you have to recognize that you should probably take...
The court rulings that you can and win those.
You should live with the ones that you can live with.
But if you must take lawful action and you have irresponsible judges taking the kinds of actions they're taking, then you need to do the best to do what the American people elected you to do.
Think about Joe Biden bragging over and over again about how he was violating Supreme Court rulings and forgiving student debt anyway, right?
This is not a problem for the left.
They do not care about the violation of court rulings.
They just care if their agenda gets done.
And I'm not even sure that they care about public opinion per se.
And the reason I say that is that they know, for example, Bosberg knows, that there is an overwhelming group of Americans, many Democrats, by the way, who think that illegal immigration is out of control and that Trump needs to not merely seal the border in not allowing more home invaders in.
But send a bunch of the ones that are already here that came over the last few years, send them back.
But the judges, it seems, inhabit a kind of bubble or they inhabit a more narrow cultural universe in which all their friends and the people that they admire and the people that they go to the Kennedy Center with and the people that their neighbors all think that Trump is evil,
Trump is a fascist, and so they get a certain...
You said it, heroic status by being the frontline resistor of what Trump is doing.
So it seems to me, given that, that public opinion doesn't provide a real check on them because they're not up for election.
And in their world, they are overwhelmingly popular based on what they're doing.
That's true, of course.
You're correct that they are living inside that bubble, and that's why we see people across the spectrum.
I mean, we have colonels in the military refusing to display Donald Trump as the commander-in-chief in their chain of command, which is direct violation of actual orders, people who are actually supposed to respect him as commander-in-chief.
So, of course, we have judges who think that they're going to build their entire reputation.
All of the people who they care about, their progressive friends, the people at their dinner parties, they're going to be the ones praising them.
And again, that's really what we have to do.
The problem with institutional credibility is it's critical to bind a civilization together when you have a shared worldview, when you have a shared moral vision as to how things should work and how people should behave themselves.
How they should conduct themselves.
But when that starts to fray, when you start to see almost a cultural cold civil war occur inside your country, then it's no longer about maintaining the credibility of the institution.
Every institution is simply fuel to feed the fire of your movement, your political agenda.
And I fear that too many of these judges no longer care about the credibility of the bench, the credibility of the Constitution, the credibility of the law.
What they care about is hearing the kind of people that you were talking about.
Talking about telling them that they're doing a great job and that they're heroes and they want to make their name.
They want to get the accolades.
That's what they're doing here.
Just like journalists no longer report on anything.
They just want to make a name for themselves.
They just want to get ingratiated with the right people and praised by the right people.
And I don't see a short-term fix to that problem when it comes to judiciary.
And I think what you're saying, Arne, is that this is a more extended problem.
I mean, I've been thinking, for example, about let's just look at these elite universities.
They are saying, oh, this is an attack on an independent institution.
First of all, they're not that independent.
They're getting Pell grants.
They're getting all kinds of federal grants and loans, getting all kinds of money from the federal government.
But at one time, people did respect these institutions as having a certain kind of independence, even if they had a pronounced ideological tilt.
And I think what you're saying is that there is now a broad skepticism, and in fact, perhaps a justified skepticism, so that...
The Trump administration is right to see Harvard as merely an extension or an arm of the Democratic Party and simply a wing of the ideological left because that is what it has allowed itself to become.
That's exactly right.
And I just wrote a piece on this for The Blaze.
I think that what we're seeing is that neoliberalism has really...
They're in a situation where they relied on our institutions to be the objective, mediating things that create truth, create narrative for the people, bind them together in the absence of a shared culture or shared religion.
But ultimately, that has fallen apart.
The woke religion they tried to paste over in these institutions did not succeed, and the institutions became so political and so willing to bend and break.
That it became obvious that they were willing to lie.
And so what the Trump administration is trying to do is to navigate waters in which kind of the social consensus has broken down.
And institutions people used to be able to trust, like Harvard or the judiciary, are obviously willing to throw their credibility away just to get a temporary fix of political power or political praise.
And in that moment, it becomes very difficult because you need to communicate to the American people that you are still about law and order.
That you are still about the rule of law.
That you are still about keeping America safe.
And bizarrely, but truly, you have a court system that in many cases is willing to throw all of that by the wayside just to get a pat on the head by the New York Times.
Well, we come back, Lauren.
I want to ask you about this case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
We'll be right back.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I'm back with Oren McIntyre.
TV host at The Blaze.
Follow him on X at Oren McIntyre.
His book, The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.
And that is, in fact, the topic that we've been talking about.
But let me ask you, Oren, about the case of this fellow Kilmar Garcia.
He was dispatched to El Salvador.
He's evidently incarcerated in one of the kind of notorious prisons there.
The left is saying, hey, this guy is not a proven member of MS-13.
Senator Van Hollen is on his way, or maybe he's already in El Salvador right now, probably trying to muscle his way into the prison.
He apparently wants to talk to Garcia.
He wants to demand his return.
I do find it quite a spectacle that the Democrats are...
Let's say it's somewhat ambiguous if he's in MS-13.
He's allegedly in MS-13.
He may be in MS-13.
But we know that he's illegally in this country.
It also came out this morning from journalist Andy Ngo.
His wife has filed a restraining order against him.
This is not exactly like a model citizen.
And yet...
It is amazing how these guys become the sort of martyrs, the poster boys, the celebrities and the left is willing to go to considerable lengths to try to rescue them.
The great news, Dinesh, is that the Lord has blessed us with stupid enemies.
And that's a true gift.
Over and over again, the Democrats make evil criminals the center of their defense.
It's always who they stand up for.
It's never innocent people.
It's never innocent victims.
It's always the people who are accused of or convicted of violent crime, hurting people, killing people, or just entering the country illegally.
I don't care whether or not this man is part of MS-13.
Is he an illegal immigrant?
Then he should not be here.
It is really that simple.
If he is part of MS-13, then all the more reason to get him out of my country.
If a man breaks into my home and refuses to leave after I have asked him to stay, I'm not hanging out and waiting until he stabs me or my wife or my kids before I try to remove him.
I tried to remove him with all necessary force immediately.
This man was here illegally.
He knew he was here illegally.
He was told to leave.
He refused to leave.
And he got sent back.
If he's a gang member, all the more reason for him to be there.
But ultimately, either way, I'm glad that the people who aren't supposed to be in this country are no longer here.
You know, I was with on Pierce Morgan.
They record this morning.
And I was making the point that the reason that the immigration judge, the immigration judge actually agreed that he was a member of MS-13, but the immigration judge said, listen, let's not deport him because he might face a risk in El Salvador from a rival gang.
Now, let's think about this for a second because it tells me two really important things.
One is, if he's at risk from a member of a rival gang, he must be in a gang, right?
That's why the rival gang wants to get him.
Number two...
The rival gang no longer exists.
I mean, we've had the massive Bukele crackdown in El Salvador.
The gangs have been essentially wiped out.
So whatever danger this guy was in at some time in the past has evaporated.
And so the reason for not sending him back no longer exists.
But I think the most important thing is this dude is a Salvadoran citizen.
So we've sent him back to his home country where he belongs.
Now, is it our concern what they do with him?
Do they try him?
Do they incarcerate him?
Does he get due process?
It seems to me that we're kind of missing the point.
The left is missing the point here that this is not our problem.
It's amazing.
You know, I've heard over and over again that immigration, we only get the best and the brightest.
We get all the doctors and the lawyers and the brain surgeons.
They're the ones coming over and they're going to rejuvenate America.
In fact, they're better than America.
But when we actually see who's here, when we actually see what is happening, we see the Democrats have basically just turned the United States into a dumping ground for criminals and insane people from other places around the world.
If these people are so great, then they should make their own countries great.
Stay there.
Rescue those countries.
If they're not great, well, then that's their problem to deal with.
Their country has to deal with that.
We are not gonna take in every rival gang member who might get shot on the street because he's in the wrong place in a foreign country.
That's absolutely insane.
It will obviously make our country unsustainable, less safe, and we just simply do not have a duty to these people.
I think that's pretty insane.
I'd like, Lauren, to ask you to do a sort of a...
Report card on how Trump is doing versus the total state, which is the title of your book, because I think you would argue...
To some degree in my film called Police State make the same point that, look, the police state has been advancing on so many different fronts, right?
They've recruited the digital platforms into doing the censorship work for them.
They've got this massive army of NGOs.
They've got the universities lined up to do their bidding, propaganda, indoctrination, censorship.
They've got the cultural industry that encompasses Hollywood and the music industry.
They've got the permanent bureau.
Bureaucracy, not the political appointees, but the guys who, like, never go away.
They are making careers of being in the government, and they are always there to subvert a Republican administration from within.
So this is the full scope of the left.
This is a full inventory of the left's troops.
And now we've been talking about the judiciary to add to all that.
So Trump has an awful lot of dismantling and disrupting to do.
Now, he's only been in for a couple of months.
How do you think he's doing so far?
Well, like you said, it's a difficult mix of things to address, and I think that the results are themselves mixed.
I think he came out very strong early.
We saw a really strong deportation strategy.
The one thing that a lot of people who were overexcited about the deportations, I think, didn't realize is that you would need to create a logistical chain to make this work.
You can't just round up every illegal in the United States and put them in a camp and then try to figure out whether or not you can send them home.
That's a nightmare scenario that creates exactly the type of narrative that the left would like to create.
You need to establish relationships.
You need to figure out a process.
You need to have a force ready.
To actually do the mass deportations.
So you probably aren't going to get tens of millions of people out of the country in the first year.
That said, Trump's deportations have stayed relatively steady and I would really like to see them increase.
Though obviously he's fighting a lot of legal battles, which is throwing a wrench into that.
We're also seeing a very, very drastic reduction in border entrances, which I think is Trump's strongest argument.
We've seen an amazing number of reduction in the number of people trying to cross into the United States, in no small part to the fact that some of them might realize that they're going to get shipped back to, say, their own country's prisons in El Salvador.
And so it's no longer worth the sacrifice of trying to get across the border because there's no longer a cushy set of accommodations waiting for you the minute you cross over.
Instead, you might just get thrown right back into your own country or even into prison when you get back there.
So I think people are waking up.
I love that he slashed USAID.
I love that he slashed the Department of Education.
These are, again, critical parts of the bureaucracy that fund the progressive machine, and the fact that you can make huge cuts in those is a huge deal.
The next step, I think, is going to be attacking the Ivy League institutions.
You see institutions like Harvard standing against and saying, we will not comply.
And there's a really simple solution to that.
You just need to start cutting federal funding across the board to any of these higher institutions of learning that are not willing to comply.
I think that the trade portion of what Trump was doing is critical, but I don't know if I would have prioritized it before.
The deportations and other things being secured.
I would have cut down bureaucracy and I would have got the deportations secured before I moved to something like tariffs, which is a little harder to sell to the public, a little more difficult to communicate, even though, again, I think it's a good program.
I think there is a positive aspect to removing us from dependence on China.
But I think I would have ordered the sequence.
But of course, again, Trump is trying to do a lot.
And he has to do it all at once.
He's only got so many years left to get this done.
And obviously, we know that the first few months of every presidency are often when the agenda is set and real momentum is set.
So again, I would have ordered those slightly differently.
But I think overall, he is attacking the problem correctly.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you completely.
I do think that the tariff strategy needs to be complemented with a...
A deregulation strategy, a privatization strategy, a decentralized government strategy, a tax cut strategy.
You kind of want to do all those pieces simultaneously because tariffs do cause some types of pain, and it offsets the pain if you give people, for example, tax relief.
And so there are ways that Trump can protect himself, not just in the long term, but of course, we know the importance of the upcoming midterms.
I'll leave you with a final question, which is this.
Don't you agree that the university strategy needs to be complemented with an all-out guns-blazing strategy against...
NPR and PBS, because these are two fat and easy targets.
They are heavily funded by the government.
Now, they pretend like they're not.
They're like, well, the funding goes to our local stations, but then they charge big fat fees to those local stations, and the federal money comes right back into their coffers.
So these are scam operations.
They're propaganda arms of the left.
It looks like Trump is moving to get these people defunded, and I think that would be fantastic, don't you?
Yeah, again, the argument here is really simple.
If these things are barely funded by the government anyway, then just pull what's left.
What's the big deal, right?
Like, if you're not relying on the money, if it's just not that important, well, then just get rid of the last bit of it, and then Republicans don't have any more talking points against you, right?
Should be a pretty simple thing.
They're not doing it for a reason.
That's not a mistake.
That's not some tactical error on their part.
So you recognize that there are many things that are anti-American being funded by the American public, and PBS and NPR are certainly those.
So I think it's pretty simple.
Again, like you said, we should take steps towards defunding that.
Republicans have been saying that literally my entire life.
But, you know, they also said that they'd be defunding the Department of Education my entire life, and that finally happened under Trump.
So if he can get that one done or mostly done, there's still more dismantling of the Department of Education that needs to get done.
But if he can get a good chunk of that done, then why not this as well?
I mean, this is the amazing thing about this guy is that he's taken so many things that were previously considered undoable.
You know, you can't fire a career federal employee.
Boom, they're out.
You know, you can't get rid of the Department of Education.
Yes, we can.
So I think this is the radicalism of Trump.
And it's very much, I think, a response to all the stuff they tried to do to him over the last four years.
I think this has really given him not only the desire, but the conviction to forge ahead the way he has.
Guys, I'm talking to Oren McIntyre, TV host at The Blaze.
Follow him on X at Oren McIntyre and get the book, The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.
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I'm discussing my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And we're talking about Reagan's early life.
I've spoken about his college days, Where we left off, Reagan had just arrived in Hollywood.
So I'm now going to talk about Reagan in Hollywood and this really insult that became, for the left, a standard insult of the Reagan years.
He's merely an actor.
And always uttered with a tone of derision and contempt.
Now, the left actually loves actors, and they celebrate actors, and they love to be surrounded with Hollywood types.
They like to be at the Oscars.
They like to bring Hollywood people to Washington.
But nevertheless, for Reagan, this was supposed to be some major strike against him.
Even though Reagan ran for, when he ran against Carter, He was 69 years old.
It was 1980.
Reagan had not made a feature film.
Well, he made only one feature film after 1957.
So it's not exactly like he was a practicing professional actor.
He had left that career behind.
In fact, he had served two terms as governor of California in between.
Now, when Reagan first ran for California governor against Pat Brown, Pat Brown had mocked Reagan's acting career, particularly mocked him as being the star of Bedtime for Bonzo.
And the implication here is that...
Reagan can't be taken seriously.
The guy is a clown.
He's a performer.
He's a buffoon.
But I want to talk about Reagan's view of acting.
And not only that, but the way in which, oddly enough, being an actor prepared Reagan for the challenges of leadership at the national political level.
Reagan insisted.
Reagan always believed that being an actor enabled him to govern.
More effectively.
To campaign more effectively.
So not only to get elected, but to get things done.
So how is this possible?
Well, number one, I think Reagan learned as being an actor from his acting career that what mattered was not the endorsement of the critics, but the success at the box office.
Now this is really important in politics because it tells you who you're playing to.
Who's the audience you're playing to?
Not the critics.
But the guys who come into the theater pay a few dollars and want to watch the movie.
And I think later when Reagan was in politics, he realized, I don't need to court the intellectuals.
What I need is to court the voters.
The voters are the guys who are turning in their ticket, which is in this case their ballot.
That's whose support I need.
I think being an actor helped Reagan to recognize that.
I think Reagan was also in Hollywood at a time when you couldn't make a successful movie without appealing to a broad audience.
There were some exceptions to that rule.
One of them was, say, Woody Allen.
Woody Allen would make kind of New York Jewish movies for a kind of New York Jewish audience, and then a few people beyond that who appreciated that type of humor, which was, by the way, later made mainstream by a guy like Seinfeld.
But that was niche.
That was kind of niche moviemaking.
By and large, the kind of movies that were made with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Reagan.
You had to appeal to the broad audience.
And not only that, but you couldn't really be ethnic.
You had to have a broad appeal.
If you notice, if you listen to Reagan speak, you can't tell which part of the country he's from.
Is he from the New England?
Is he from the Midwest?
Is he from the South?
Is he from California?
Well, he had a little of all of that, that kind of transcendent appeal.
And that is also something that Reagan imported.
Now, the left portrayed actors, or at least Reagan, as a kind of faker, as somebody who's like telling you something that isn't really the case.
He's putting it on.
He's acting.
But I think for Reagan, acting was a way to project ideals.
And this is particularly true in the type of films that Reagan made, and not only Reagan, the type of films that Rock Hudson made and John Wayne made and Clint Eastwood, at least the young Clint Eastwood made.
Reagan's own hero was, in fact, John Wayne.
And, in fact, there's a funny story about John Wayne that's not in my Reagan book, but I want to mention it to you because I think it captures the point I'm trying to make here about acting and ideals.
This anecdote comes from Rock Hudson's autobiography.
And Rock Hudson said that John Wayne, whose real name, by the way, was not John Wayne.
I think it was Morrison, something like that.
Anyway, his acting, his stage name was John Wayne.
And at one point, Rock Hudson was offered a role in the movie.
In which he was supposed to play kind of a, not a trans, but kind of like a very submissive, effeminate, and weak character.
And Rock Hudson was kind of excited because it was an artistically demanding role.
And John Wayne came up to him and said, well, Rock, he's like, you're not going to take that sissy role, are you?
And Rock Hudson was like, he said, well, John.
You know, he goes, we're actors.
We play roles.
But then Rock Hudson says the following, and I've always remembered, he goes, but he didn't see it that way at all.
He thought he really was John Wayne, right?
Which was a way of saying that for John Wayne, the characters that he played were a projection of an ideal.
This is the way that it ought to be.
Not that every cowboy was like that, but they should have been.
That is the moral ideal we want to convey to the American public through films.
Reagan was on John Wayne's side of this debate.
And Reagan used to say something about being an actor, which is he would say, you can't lie to the camera.
And I want to reflect about that for a minute because...
Because what most people understand by you can't lie to the camera is that the camera shows all your defects.
The camera will unmask any fakery or pretension.
The camera kind of shows it the way it is.
You can't lie to the camera.
But I don't think that's actually what Reagan meant.
I think what Reagan meant is that really great acting requires deep conviction.
So what you need to do, in a sense, is you need to become the character that you're playing.
You need to sort of at least imaginatively live their life.
Ideally, you even want to live their past.
Again, imaginatively, because you can't actually do that.
But when you do that, what is now, I guess, more conventionally called method acting...
You are not so much stepping into a role as you are trying to live out a life, but do it on camera.
And that is the way that Reagan looked at it.
And I think it is also a way of thinking about politics.
Why? Because in politics, you are to some degree playing a role.
No one can deny that when a politician steps before a crowd, he's not the same guy that he is eating dinner at home.
He is, I will never rest until the unemployment rate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, there's an element of theatricality and all that, of stagecraft.
And I think what Reagan realized is that acting is going to help you in that regard.
Not because you're faking it.
It's because you're projecting a certain type of a persona.
Now, one of the things that Reagan did as an actor is he also realized that actors...
Aren't all that well-paid.
Now, Reagan was decently paid.
He was not the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.
He was kind of in the middle, but he was a star.
But he also realized that there were a lot of people in the other Hollywood.
These are people who were...
Extras and they were gaffers and they handled the camera and they did the editing.
These are people who all came to California from all over the country.
They worked as cooks and waitresses and bartenders in local restaurants, all trying to break into the movie world and many of them were not paid all that well.
Reagan became their representative.
In other words, he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild.
He was actually elected four times in that role.
And here he developed something else that most actors don't necessarily develop at all, which is actually a superb negotiating style.
It's a negotiating style that in some ways could be compared to Trump.
It was Reagan's own art of the deal.
But Reagan's art of the deal was a little different than Trump's art of the deal.
And it's interesting to compare the strategies of the two.
In Trump's art of the deal, Trump always comes across as brash, as tough.
As giving nothing, demanding a great deal, start off very high and then slowly back down.
But with Reagan, his style was a little different negotiating style.
It was the goofball style.
And you saw this even with Reagan in the way that he cocked his head, made a joke.
Reagan's idea is when you negotiate with people, it's...
Actually not important to intimidate them.
It's not important to knock them flat and then pick them up or go high and then come down.
Reagan's view was that you have to come across as a really nice guy.
That doesn't mean you're not tough, but you come across as a guy who is also looking out for their interests in addition to yours.
And apparently Reagan would go into these negotiations with a little...
A little sort of three-part notepad.
And what I mean is part one, these are the things that my members have to have.
Like, I got to get this done.
Number two, the things I'd like to have.
And number three, the things that are just a complete bonus or a complete win.
And the whole point is you want to get everything on the first part of your list.
Try to get most of what is on the second part, and then if you get anything that's on the third part, you're doing great.
And Reagan proved to be a superb negotiator.
Even some of the people who didn't like Reagan's politics agreed that he represented the screen actors really well, and this is why he kept getting re-elected.
So the point I'm trying to make here is that his acting career, even though the left derided it nonstop for years, was actually a pretty good preparation.
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