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April 28, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:53
THE NAKED EMPEROR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1071
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Coming up, glad to be back from Israel after some terrific film shooting over there.
I want to talk about how the mainstream media consistently distorts the truth about Trump's first hundred days.
His popularity is plummeting.
We'll find out if that's true.
Also revealed the role DEI played in that helicopter collision in Washington, D.C. Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or X or Rumble or 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.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza
Podcast.
It is very good to be back and back in my podcast seat.
I hope that you enjoyed Danielle taking over from me in my absence.
As you know, Debbie and I were in Israel for nine days and quite honestly, we had a remarkable...
Remarkable trip in a personal sense, but also a fantastic film shooting journey.
We were all over the country from the north to the historic sites, the areas that are now called the West Bank, but historically and biblically, it's Judea and Samaria.
We were in the south.
In fact, we got somewhat close to the fighting, more than somewhat close.
Debbie and I plan to talk about this a little bit more in our Friday roundup that will come up later this week.
In fact, I asked Debbie, I said, you want to come on the podcast today?
She's laughing on the sidelines.
She's like...
No, thank you.
I'm still somewhat jet-lagged, and so I don't want to come across as a drunken zombie on the podcast.
So I'm going to hold my fire, and we can talk about it later in the week.
A drunken zombie?
Well, I said like a drunken.
I know you're a teetotaler, honey.
So drunken is not exactly the right term to apply to you in any circumstance.
You know, interestingly, when we went to Australia, we were noting this.
It's a longer journey.
But we adjusted faster.
I don't know if it's because it is so far away that your body just does an upside down tumble and then like tumbles right back.
But I think maybe the factor is that not only is this a long journey, I mean essentially we flew Texas to Newark.
Newark is the launching pad for the flight to Tel Aviv.
That flight is...
You know, 10, 11 hours.
It's about 12 coming back.
But in between the two flights, we had nonstop blizzard of activity.
So shooting days that are very long, starting early in the morning, sometimes 6, 6.30 in the morning, and going basically straight through to dinner, with often some fairly lengthy travel.
In between.
Israel is not a big country.
People say it's really small.
It's the size of New Jersey.
But when you're hauling to one end and then over to the other end, it's still a couple of hours each way with a lot of shooting in between.
So, in any event, it was hugely satisfying and we're back.
Safe and healthy and with really good footage, so we feel good.
Generally, when you go to a place like this, you go, you have some ideas of what you want to do, but you have to improvise when you're there.
And so we did major improvisation, and as a result, we have really good footage, and now begins the laborious task, but also exciting task of putting it all together.
Alright, let's talk about what's going on.
Today's episode is called The Naked Emperor.
It's a reference to the emperor has no clothes.
And who is the emperor here?
Well, it is none other than the mainstream media.
And these are guys who are doing their best to try to hurl javelins at Trump.
They're doing it in small ways and in big.
And they are trying ultimately to do what they always do, which is to create a false picture.
They do it, as I say, even in the littlest things.
There's an article in Fortune magazine.
Now, this is an article about Trump going to the Pope's funeral.
Something innocuous enough.
There's Trump.
He's, you know, in the crowd.
But the article is, look at Trump.
He is violating etiquette.
He is insulting the Pope.
He is showing that he doesn't know the art of diplomacy.
And why?
Because Trump is wearing a blue suit.
And so Fortune has this closely cropped picture.
And you have Trump.
He's in a blue suit.
And there are like four or five guys around him who are wearing black or gray suits.
All right.
Well, under normal circumstances, if this had happened some years ago, Republicans would go, well, this is a little troubling.
The guy needs to have a better advice about how he should dress.
Except we are in the age of social media.
We're in the age of the X platform.
And so what happens is people go and grab wider angled photos.
I have one right in front of me.
And when you look at it, you've got about 30 guys in blue suits.
So sure, the majority is probably gray and black suits, but you've got a lot of people.
In fact, it took me a little while to find Trump because there were so many blue suits.
This is just an example of when people will lie to you at this level, you know how they can't be trusted at all.
Well, the big thing here these days is the idea that polls are showing that Trump's popularity is really sinking.
And there are five or six of these polls, and you just have to, first of all, you have to step back and say, how good have these polls been of late?
Did they call the 24 election?
No.
Were they accurate in 2016?
No.
They seem systematically biased against the right, and this is no different.
If you look at the samples that they're using, their strategy is really simple.
If you're polling 100 people, and let's just say that typically in the country there are 40 Republicans and 40 Democrats, it's really simple.
You just poll 45 Democrats and 35 Republicans.
In other words, you just wait the poll in such a way that you're going to get the result.
And the second way that you rig the poll is you rig the questions.
Let me read you a few of the questions on the Washington Post poll so you can get an idea of how they do this.
Do you support or oppose each of the following?
Now, one.
Sending undocumented immigrants who are suspected of being members of a criminal group to prison in El Salvador without a court hearing.
Support or oppose?
Now, look closely at the way that the question is rigged.
Undocumented immigrants.
If you change that to illegal aliens, you're likely to get a completely different result.
Who are suspected of being members of a criminal group.
If you change that to who are gang members of MS-13, you get a completely different result.
To a prison in El Salvador without a court hearing.
The implication here somehow is that people who are illegally in this country have a right to a court hearing.
Not at all.
There's no such right.
This is not the same as being charged in this country with a criminal offense.
You are illegal.
You're here illegally.
You can be deported.
There doesn't need to be a court hearing.
But there is a presumption in here that Trump is somehow violating norms, if not the law.
That's just question number one.
Two, deporting international students who have criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East.
As if not deporting active Hamas supporters who take over buildings and advocate terrorism.
No, it's deporting international students.
So you get the idea, you've got some student, let's say, coming in from the Philippines or coming in from Africa.
He's critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Whoops, they grab him, they deport him.
That's not actually what's going on.
And it goes on like this, on and on.
Ending birthright citizenship under which anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen.
Again, you see the kind of tendentious thrust here.
They frame the question to get an answer that they want.
Reducing federal funding for medical research.
Now, here's the point.
The funding that goes to medical research.
A lot of it goes, let's just say, to transition kids from boys to girls.
Studies of, by and large, psychological adjustment based upon being a trans.
So this kind of stuff is cut.
No one talks about trans.
It's not even mentioned yet.
It's reducing federal funding for medical research.
So that's why these polls are utterly worthless.
They're worthless because they are...
So the message here is that we shouldn't really freak out about all this.
We're being given false information.
And the idea is to do what?
It's really twofold.
It's to demoralize our side, and it's to incentivize, to motivate the other side.
So what the media is going for here, the pollsters are going for, is that they want to fire up the Democrats to do more opposition.
And they want Republicans to start backing away from Trump.
So this stuff has worked in the past.
We are like suckers for this.
And it's a mark of our stupidity that over the years and the decades, we never learn.
We recognize that they lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, but we're like, well, there may be to tell the truth this time.
We recognize that their polls were rigged before, but maybe these polls are accurate.
So it is...
The task of people like me to look at the polls even now and say, listen, this is just as rigged as the last one.
You're dealing with the same characters that you were before.
So try to learn who they are so you can develop a healthy distrust of these people.
In other words, this is not a case where they're being...
They have earned our distrust.
I think that's what I'm trying to say.
And Trump is, by the way, all over it.
He talks about the fact that The failing New York Times poll, the ABC-Washington Post poll, and he goes on to say, these people should be investigated for election fraud.
They're negative criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I win big elections, and they suffer from Trump derangement syndrome.
In all caps, they are sick and almost only write negative stories about me.
They are truly the enemy of the people.
I'll pick this up when we come back and talk about the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where the head of the association stands up and says, we are not the opposition, we are not the enemies of the people.
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The White House Correspondents' Dinner was different this year.
Why?
Trump wasn't there.
Vance wasn't there.
No one from the cabinet was there.
No one from the administration went at all.
In fact, there was a kind of word sent out by the Trump people, don't go.
So you see, even symbolically here, that the media is over here and the administration is over here.
There are two ships passing in the night.
See, in the past, if you go to these White House...
It creates the illusion of a certain camaraderie between the two, because Republican presidents, Bush was no exception, even Reagan, would go to these dinners and make jokes.
But in the meantime, they also get flayed by these people, not only at the dinner, but they get flayed all year.
So it's almost like a ritual humiliation.
You've got to be kind of a, quote, a good sport about it.
And Trump's view is, I'm not going to be a good sport.
I'm just not going.
So, in other words, I'm not going to play along with a certain type of polite charade.
And interestingly, at the dinner, the media did a lot of its sort of defensive attempts to say that they were heroic.
The head of the association, who's this black guy, he's like an MSNBC guy, so he's obviously a leftist.
But he goes, we're not the opposition.
Well...
I beg to differ.
We're not enemies of the state.
That's why I think Trump is here to rub it in.
Yes, you actually are.
And so what can't be denied is that these people are dug-in ideologues.
They will lie.
They will omit facts.
They will do whatever is necessary to try to advance the left and suppress.
Defeating Trump while preventing his election and having failed to do that, undermining his presidency, that's really their mission.
And they don't have to send memos to each other.
They all understand that that is what they're doing and their actions are completely consistent with it.
At one point, Axios' Alex Thompson gets up there and he says, well, we bear a little bit of the blame because we made an error and not...
And you have to just...
While it's, again, you know, in the old days, Republicans would be like, look, here's an honest reporter.
He admits they made an error.
He admits that they should have covered Biden's decline.
All of this is too little, too late.
And quite frankly, it is nothing more than an effort to cover up for the media because this was not an error.
They were entirely in league.
With the deceivers in the White House.
The deceivers in the White House could never have gotten away with these lies had the media not been right on their side.
In fact, they knew that they could count on the media to promulgate the lie.
Biden is sparkling.
He's quick-witted.
Anyone who's seen him in private realizes he's a master of clear thinking and excellent vocabulary.
All of this complete nonsense.
So the fact that Alex Thompson is now writing a book about how, yes, this was a problem and there should have been more coverage.
Look, it's not really our goal to save these guys.
And we certainly don't want to be using these pathetic...
Admissions now to rebuild trust.
These people have done a lot to discredit themselves, and we are not being unduly harsh.
We are, as I've said before, only being duly harsh on them.
To give just one more example, Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, was being interviewed by Martha Raddatz, and he makes an excellent point.
He goes, you remember about two weeks ago when the stock market plummeted?
The tariffs have been announced and people said, this is the worst stock market since the Great Depression.
This is going to be a terrible month of April.
And then guess what?
In the next two weeks, the market recovered.
And the NASDAQ is now up on the month of April.
And Besant goes, you know, I haven't seen a single story that says, hey, stock market has the biggest bounce back ever.
So, you report on the market when it goes down.
Now, Martha Raddatz tried to cover her quickly by saying, well, it goes up and it goes down, but this misses Scott Besson's point, or at least it avoids Scott Besson's point, which is that, of course, it goes up and it goes down, but you report on it in apocalyptic tones when it goes down, and then you go quiet when it goes back up.
That's the point.
The media coverage looks at one side, but not the other.
Let me say a few words about our friend and my fellow Dartmouth colleague from the old days, Harmeet Dillon, who is now the Assistant Secretary at the Department of Justice for Civil Rights.
There's a great article in the New York Times, the theme of which is that There's a bloodbath going on at the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.
And the key word here is bloodbath.
Because if you are a Trump appointee, this is a very good word.
If you're a Trump appointee and you see that you are causing a bloodbath, you know you're doing an excellent job.
By contrast, or conversely, I would say if you're a Trump appointee and you have not been accused of doing a bloodbath, you need to ramp it up.
You're not doing an adequate job because you haven't shaken things up enough that the media is freaking out and calling it a bloodbath.
The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is essentially in the job of terrorizing companies by accusing them of racism even though they're not racist.
The basis of accusing them of racism is very often the fact that there are, quote, proportionately fewer black or Hispanic or, in some cases, female employees.
And then what you do is you bludgeon these companies into changing their hiring policies, doing more DEI, paying fines to the government, funding all kinds of educational programs for women and minorities.
The whole thing is a racket.
It has nothing to do with civil rights and the original meaning of the term, which is two guys apply for a job, the black guy is better qualified, the white guy gets a job.
That's what most people think that the Justice Department is doing, is prosecuting those cases.
In fact, those cases barely exist at all.
You probably have to search the whole country to find five of them.
The civil rights enforcement in practice bears no resemblance to what people think is going on.
And so Harmeet comes marching in there and essentially says, stop all this nonsense.
We're going to be adopting some new goals and priorities.
This is what has Ken Delanian of NBC freaking out.
He's the author of this article and warning of the bloodbath.
Quote, forcing out a majority of career managers, abandoning a decades-long mission of enforcing laws.
And then he quotes a bunch of anonymous people in a very familiar way.
They're like, these documents have been created in a vacuum, completely divorced from reality.
Well, this is their view of reality.
Their view of reality is America's a racist country.
We need to be battering down the ramparts of racism.
And that's their reality.
It's not our reality.
In fact, it's not reality at all.
So we've got to be on guard for these kinds of words, which are highly loaded.
Departs from the division's longstanding mission.
No.
It's true that the department has operated this way for 30 or 40 years.
By and large, it's the Democrats' priority.
Republicans have sort of gone along with it by making only slight adjustments.
And so Trump is taking...
The broad picture here is that Trump is really trying to shift the direction of the federal government.
And he's doing it in very disruptive ways, but this is the only way to do it.
Why?
Because bureaucratic inertia...
You can almost imagine it's like 50 guys who lock arms and sit tight and say, you can't move us.
You've got to drag us.
We're not going to go anywhere.
And so Trump is like, okay, I'm going to drag you.
And he starts dragging them and then they start screaming.
And very soon the word bloodbath enters the vocabulary.
And so according to this article, Harmeet Dhillon's priorities now are, quote, defending women from gender ideology extremism, the trans issue, restoring merit-based opportunity,
so going from DEI to now requiring the jobs and positions be based on merit, designating English as the official language of the United States, and, quote, eradicating anti-Christian bias.
So, hey!
Civil rights now has not only a new sheriff, or maybe I should say a female sheriff, but it also has a new set of priorities.
And this is the new reality, whether or not the left likes it.
So I want to congratulate Harmeet on going in, guns blazing, causing havoc and causing a bloodbath.
That's how you know that she's off to a really good start.
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Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my locals channel.
Consider becoming an annual subscriber.
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I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content you won't find anywhere else.
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I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday.
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Remember the fatal crash at Reagan Airport in which a helicopter was flying and flew right into a descending airplane?
Was it American Airlines, honey?
I think it was an American Airlines jet that was landing.
Now, the jet was doing what jets all do.
It had been cleared to land.
It was coming down.
It had the runway in sight.
And when you look at the video, the helicopter flies right into it.
Boom!
And, of course, terrible tragedy.
Lots of fatalities and casualties.
And at the time, there was some speculation about what caused this crash.
It was, of course, a female pilot, a woman named Rebecca Lobach, L-O-B-A-C-H.
And some people said, well, it looks like it may be DEI.
And while it's true that people jumped to that kind of a conclusion, it turns out that they were right.
DEI is the primary factor here.
And the New York Times article, which is to be commended in that it has the most in-depth reporting on the incident, it also goes into what the crash investigators have found to date.
But as is typical of the New York Times, they want to conceal, minimize, or hide the DEI culpability.
And so I give you their headline.
Missteps, equipment problems, and a common but risky practice led to a fatal crash.
Very, very vague.
Missteps.
Don't say who's missteps.
Equipment problems.
There really weren't equipment problems per se.
And a common but risky practice.
We're going to get into some of these details to figure out what they're really getting at.
Now, in the helicopter was Rebecca Loback, who was flying the plane.
And alongside her, a guy named Andrew Lloyd-Eves.
He was a chief warrant officer.
She was the pilot.
She was in charge of the helicopter, but he was there as the kind of second in command, and he was there to assist her.
He was also there, by the way, to evaluate her.
Quoting from the New York Times, this was called a checkride, and a checkride is that she wanted to be certified to fly that route on a regular basis, and he was there to make sure that she was doing it right.
Now, it looks like what happened here is that there were two very serious mistakes that were on the part of Jennifer Loback.
First, she was flying too high.
The FDA mandates an altitude of no higher than 300 feet.
Like, above that, completely unacceptable, very dangerous.
And she was flying, in fact, at 300 feet.
So she was flying at the absolute limit.
So she needed to descend.
Now she was aware of that.
She knew that she had to descend, but evidently she did not, in fact, descend fast enough.
And that's part of the reason that you had the crash.
One way it could be avoided.
Is go down.
And by going down, move yourself outside the reach of the landing American Airlines jet.
The second way to avoid the crash would have been to veer left.
So now I'm reading from the New York Times.
The Black Hawk was 15 seconds away from crossing paths with the jet.
In other words, it's about to fly right into the jet.
With impact projected in 15 seconds.
Warrant Officer Eves then turned his attention to Captain Loback.
He told her he believed air traffic control wanted them to turn left toward the East River Bank.
Continuing with the article, turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33. And then we read, she did not turn left.
So, summing up, she could have avoided this crash by going lower.
She could also have avoided the crash by going left.
And she didn't do that.
So, she's given repeated instructions, warnings, advice to descend, turn, get out of the way of the airplane.
But she...
I remember this going back to my freshman year in college where I walked into the The
inverted pyramid is take the most important information that you're reporting in an article, the who, the what, the when, the where, the why, and put as much of it into the first paragraph.
Certainly you want to say the what.
What happened?
What is the news?
So here, what's the headline?
Well, the headline is that you've got a pilot whose competence was being evaluated, who has shown, in this case, an unwillingness to take direction, an unwillingness to follow instructions, refusal to cooperate with her co-pilot,
and...
Did not take the actions that would have prevented this crash.
Those are facts.
And yet, you have to dig.
This is a very long article, by the way, in the Times.
I think if you, when I tried to print it out, it was like 20 pages long.
So you have to go to like page 14 or 15 or 18. And that's where you go, aha, so this is really what happened.
And so this continues my theme of the way in which...
You get media distortion of these kinds of events.
Essentially, the New York Times realizes that they want to be the protectors of DEI.
They want to downplay the role of DEI.
Now, no one is saying that DEI is the only factor involved here.
Evidently, And I'm back into the Times article.
There was also an issue of air traffic control.
But if you look at the two issues, the air traffic control issue is much more minor than the pilot's failure.
Because let's look at what this air traffic control issue is.
It is essentially an issue of staffing.
A single controller was working both on the helicopter traffic.
And the commercial runway traffic.
Now, normally, you have two separate people doing that.
One guy is doing the helicopters.
One guy is doing the airlines.
But it is apparently not uncommon to combine these duties.
In other words, there's nothing that says that an air traffic controller can't monitor the...
The helicopters and can also monitor incoming planes.
Generally, however, this is not common practice.
And when it is, when the same guy is doing it, it tends to be later in the evening, typically 9 p.m. and afterwards.
So yeah, you have this issue where evidently there were not enough controllers on the scene.
Obviously, arguably, had there been, there might have been more explicit instructions or maybe the flow of information would have been better.
But again, what you have is two fatal, you know, two aircraft, a helicopter and a plane moving toward each other.
And the pilot was aware.
That there was a plane, was aware, go lower, was aware that she was flying at the 300-foot level, which is the absolute highest you should be flying.
So you would think that normal human prudence would kick in and you'd go, listen, I'm now over the airport.
And so you got planes coming down.
Why don't I go as low as possible?
And then you're told by your co-pilot, hey, listen, the air traffic people want us to go left, move away, and you're 15 seconds from colliding with the plane.
But you don't go left.
You keep going.
And guess what?
You're dead.
Your co-pilot is dead.
The people on the American Airlines plane who, by the way, did nothing wrong.
There's no indication at all that there were any fault on the part of the pilots of the American Airlines plane.
They were doing what they were supposed to do.
The fault is with the helicopter.
So again, I would say maybe there's some responsibility on the part of the air traffic people.
They could have done a better job.
But this is a case where when you get DEI...
You get incompetence, and the incompetence in some areas maybe doesn't matter as much, but when you're dealing with surgeons and you're dealing with pilots, quite obviously incompetence can be fatal.
After a short hiatus, we are back into my Reagan book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And we're in the early section of the book.
I try to frame my segments in such a way that even if you miss one, the segments are self-contained.
They deal with an aspect of the subject that I'm covering.
And when we last left off, I had covered Reagan as an actor.
And the chapter itself is called The Education of an Actor.
Now I want to talk about Reagan's pivot into politics, which was not a one-step, but a two- or three-step maneuver.
He first became involved in the politics of the Screen Actors Guild, and then he essentially moved away from Hollywood and went to work as a public speaker on behalf of GE,
General Electric.
And I want to argue that that was in fact the significant He changed the pathway leading him to run for office and ultimately to run for president.
Now, when Reagan got into the Screen Actors Guild, the place was dominated by communist activists.
This may seem incredible.
How do communists get into acting?
How do they get into the Screen Actors Guild?
But the Screen Actors Guild was a union, and communists love to penetrate and take over these union movements.
And we should remember that in the aftermath of the Great Depression, there was a lot of Marxism and communism in the United States.
Many people quite sincerely believed that capitalism had failed.
That communism was the best path.
And these were very often people who looked at the Soviet Union, to Moscow, for guidance.
Reagan clashed with these communists.
He didn't like them.
I think he recognized that they were sleazy people.
They were, as communists are, willing to lie to achieve their goals.
They're not inhibited by traditional moral constraints.
And they are even willing to use violence to intimidate kind of a...
They constituted a certain type of mafia within the Screen Actors Guild.
But Reagan didn't stand for it, and he took him on.
And I think it gave him his first exposure to a little bit of bare-knuckled politics, and it was within the field of acting.
I want to say a few words about Reagan's...
He married a woman named Jane Wyman, who became, in fact, a very successful actor.
She won an Academy Award.
It elevated her career.
She became more famous than Reagan was, a bigger actor than Reagan was.
And it's not easy to say what happened to their marriage.
Jane Wyman filed for divorce.
She said that there was not a whole lot in common between her and Reagan.
I suspect that part of what was going on here was that Reagan had about him, and I've mentioned this before, a certain type of a reserve, a detachment, you could almost call it a wall, a wall around himself, and it made it difficult to get through to him on the inside.
It's almost like everybody who dealt with Reagan was in the outer portals of the house.
They never kind of got into the inner sanctum, and I think this is...
This is what, if you look at the statements that Jane Wyman made, she had no hostility toward Reagan.
They don't seem to have had anything very turbulent between them.
There certainly were no accusations of infidelity or any of that.
She just didn't feel like there was a full relationship there.
And I suspect there wasn't.
Reagan then met a woman named Nancy Davis.
He met her in a funny way.
He was head of the Screen Actors Guild, and Nancy Davis had been accused of being a communist.
Now, she came to Reagan to say, help me, they're calling me a communist.
I'm not a communist.
It turns out that there was a communist sympathizer in Hollywood of the same name.
It wasn't her.
But this is how Reagan met Nancy.
And, of course, ultimately they married and Nancy Davis became Nancy Reagan.
So that kind of solved the problem.
She no longer had the same name as Nancy Davis the Communist.
And Reagan and Nancy had a very remarkable...
She understood Reagan probably better than anybody else.
She knew that he was outwardly a kind of decent and dependable guy, a fun guy, but he was also very ambitious.
He had a furnace of ambition driving him.
I don't think you can really get to the presidency if you don't have that, because the amount of effort it takes to get there requires this kind of...
Ambition.
Lincoln had it.
Of course, Trump has it.
I mean, think about the indefatigable schedule that this guy, Trump, keeps even today.
Nancy Reagan was a pretty well-known actress.
She made one movie with Reagan called Hellcats of the Navy, but pretty soon after that she quit her acting career and she became...
She essentially devoted herself to family life.
They had two kids between them, Patty and Ron Reagan.
Interestingly, Nancy was a kind of genius at advancing her husband.
She kind of knew how to play that role.
And in fact, Jimmy Stewart, who was a good friend of Reagan, the famous actor Jimmy Stewart, once said that if Reagan had married Nancy instead of Jane Wyman at the beginning, This is Jimmy Stewart talking.
He never would have gone into politics.
She would have made sure that he got all the best parts.
He would have won three or four Oscars and he would have become a huge star.
So Jimmy Stewart is implying that Reagan, and this is true, was never a huge star in the magnitude of, say, Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart himself.
And in some ways, that is part of what caused Reagan to pivot and go in a different direction, into politics.
So the idea here is that...
Maybe if he was a huge star, he'd be so famous that he would have wanted to stay in Hollywood and would never have thought about diverting to politics.
For Reagan, acting was cool.
It was fun.
It paid well.
But he never made too big a deal about it.
And in fact, he would joke about it later when he was governor, when he was president.
He would say, you know, now that I'm something besides an actor, everybody...
Claims I'm an actor.
And so what Reagan's getting at is when he was an actor, nobody really talked about him that much, but later they were like, oh, he was only an actor.
And Reagan's point is, yeah, I was, but that's not central to what I'm doing now.
Of course, as I mentioned in an earlier episode, it does play a role because part of politics is projecting a certain type of image.
Now, Reagan was not like the first actor to seek political office.
There are others who had done it before.
But when Reagan got into politics, there was a kind of uproar, an uproar in Hollywood, an uproar in the media, an uproar certainly in the Washington establishment.
Apparently, Reagan's old boss, Jack Warner, was asked, what do you think about Reagan going into politics?
And he goes, it's all wrong.
He goes, no.
He says, Jimmy Stewart for governor, Reagan for best friend.
The joke here is that if they were casting a movie, they would not have cast Reagan in the lead governor.
It would be Jimmy Stewart.
Reagan would be kind of the sidekick.
And that's what Warner is getting at.
But, ironically, when it came to politics, Reagan showed that he knew how to play the lead role.
He, in fact, was the leading man.
In California for eight years.
And this was turbulent times.
Remember, this was the age of the 60s.
It was the age of the hippies.
It was the anti-war movement.
It was the drug revolution, the sexual revolution.
So Reagan had to deal with all that.
He cut his teeth in the kind of welter of California politics of the 1960s.
But before that, and I'll dive into this a little bit more next time.
I want to argue that Reagan's real political education began when he took an offer from General Electric to be a motivational speaker for them.
General Electric, of course, was a giant company, and they funded a lot of public education stuff, including General Electric Theater.
And so they asked Reagan, they said, listen, you can kind of be our corporate ambassador.
You go around the country and you're talking about General Electric, but you're really talking more about the larger issues affecting the country.
And Reagan did that for eight years, 1954 to 1962.
Let's remember that.
Soon after that, he ran for governor of California and served two terms.
So the preparation for that was right here working for General Electric.
It is the place where, according to a former GE executive, a guy named Edward Langley, he says, Reagan discovered the native conservatism of working America.
The native conservatism of working America.
I would argue that this is, by the way, the key even now.
Fast-forwarding 40 years, 50 years, this is the Trump base, right?
What is it?
The native conservatism of the working class.
So Reagan is sort of stumbling on it, and it's going to take...
Two generations, arguably, for the working class to sort of move decisively into the Republican Party.
Let's remember that in the preceding 40 years, the Democrats had worked really hard, going right back to FDR and the Great Depression, to get all these people into their camp.
And against the backdrop of the Depression and World War II, the working class was democratic and quite fiercely loyal to FDR and to the Democratic Party.
Weaning them away to the Republican Party, a party that was identified with the Midwest, was identified with small business, was identified with banking, small banks, people with toothbrush mustaches and umbrellas.
The Republican Party didn't exactly have the most cool or chic image at that time.
And so there was a lot of work to be done to build up this party.
But as we see...
It had, in Reagan, an emerging leader who would take it to a remarkable level.
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