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May 7, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:41
MOVERS AND TAKERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1078
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Coming up, I'll talk about congressmen and senators who are movers, really trying to change the country, and those that are merely takers, merely trying to advance themselves.
Laura Loomer joins me, the investigative journalist.
We're going to talk about how Trump is doing and ways in which the Trump vetting operation could be a lot better.
I'll also talk about Reagan and his first term as governor of California.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube or X or Rumble or listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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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.
You might notice, guys, that I am in a somewhat different environment.
And that is because I am in, well, I'm visiting Brandon and Danielle in the...
In their district, north of Dallas.
And that's because Danielle is about to have her baby, just in a couple of days.
And Brandon is in D.C. doing the work of Congress, and he's going to be heading back here tomorrow.
But Danielle was like, hey, what if I go into labor if something happens?
So I am kind of manning the fort.
As an excited grandfather of now two grandchildren, the second one very close to making its appearance.
Is it a boy or a girl?
Answer, I don't know.
Neither does anyone else.
Well, the doctors know, but Danielle and Brandon have elected not to find out until it's here.
I'd like to hit on a few topics in this opening monologue.
And then I'm going to bring on Laura Loomer, the investigative journalist, to talk about her work in vetting the Trump administration because it seems like there are some dubious characters slipping through and slipping through into high-ranking positions in the administration.
Let me start with a couple of comments on foreign policy.
There's some tension, serious tension, between India and Pakistan.
I don't think that this is going to escalate into an all-out war, at least I certainly hope not, but it's a conflict with considerable deep roots.
In fact, a lot of it goes back to the British.
There was, in fact, no really good reason to partition India, in my opinion, in the first place.
But the guy who was the head of the Muslim group, who was, by the way, a secular guy, not even a religious Muslim, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, he convinced the British that Muslims would never be safe in Hindu India.
And even though India was going to be set up as a secular and not a Hindu society, so the British acceded.
They divided India into really two parts, Pakistan and India.
Pakistan has subsequently become increasingly Not only Islamic, but Islamicist, which is to say based upon a society that has a kind of religious foundation or a religious anchor.
Turkey has become increasingly Islamicist in recent years.
And the India-Pakistan conflict, a lot of it revolves around the northern area of Kashmir, a part of India that is largely made up of Muslims.
So the Pakistanis go, these are Muslims, they're our fellow religionists, and they belong in Pakistan.
The Indians go, oh no, the British, when they divided the country, geographically Kashmir belongs to India.
We have other Muslims that live all over India.
In fact, India is something like 18% Muslim.
So out of a billion people, that's a giant number of Muslims, 180 million Muslims, as many as there are in other or more than in other exclusively or largely Muslim countries.
And so this is what the fight is about.
By the way, it's somewhat...
It resembles what Putin is saying about the Russian-dominated areas of Ukraine.
Putin is like, "Those are Russian people.
They speak the Russian language.
They have Russian culture.
They want to be part of Russia." And yet they're not.
They're in the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, and that's what the fight is about.
So the Indians and the Pakistanis have been skirmishing, really going all the way back to 1948, with it sometimes getting hotter and other times...
What I find strange is that these two countries can't recognize that the future belongs to entrepreneurial success and productivity and technology and improving life for your people.
That has actually been happening to a large degree in India.
So there's really no reason.
I don't think it's in the Indian interest to get into any kind of fight with Pakistan.
And I'm hoping that the Pakistanis see it the same way.
In fact, the Yemeni airport that the Houthis control...
And this is a case where I kind of laughed when I saw this video of all these Hooties.
Now, obviously, I don't follow their language, but they're incredibly animated and upset that their airplanes are on fire and their trucks are on fire and their trees are on fire.
But look, this is a case where, you know, I realize it's fun to bomb some other guy and then you laugh when they are in misery, but it's not so much fun when they turn around and bomb you.
And that's really what's going on.
The Hooties are getting a taste of...
Trump says that the Houthis are done.
They want to quit.
They don't want to do this anymore.
I haven't seen that coming from the Houthis themselves, but it would be good to see the Houthis get out of the fight.
By the way, the Houthis are funded almost entirely by Iran.
They're an extension of Iran.
So what we're seeing in the Middle East now is some of these organizations from Hezbollah To the terrorist group Hezbollah, to the Houthi operation, these are Iranian proxies.
Iran has become powerful enough to be able to mobilize the Hezbollah from the north, the Houthis from the south.
And interestingly, even though Hamas is a Sunni group and not Shia, and the Iranians are Shia, the Iranians are also behind a lot of the agitation from Hamas.
Now, I want to make another point.
Related to the thumbnail of today's podcast, and that is the movers and the takers.
Here's an interesting post by Eli Crane, the congressman.
He says there are two types of Republicans in Congress.
On the one hand, you have those trying to solve the problems threatening the long-term survival of America.
So this would be...
My son-in-law, Brandon.
He's motivated by wanting to help the country.
He is willing to take political risk to do that.
He wants to be on the front line.
He wants to be effective both as a legislator and in appearing before the media.
So he is in it for the right reasons.
But here, on the other hand, you have a bunch of folks running around grabbing as many valuables as they can before the ship goes down.
This is the part that really scares me because, remember, number one, we're not talking about Democrats.
We're talking about Republicans.
Number two, these are people who by and large see the government as a mechanism.
To bankroll their own successful future campaigns.
And so they look at giveaways of taxpayer money as a way of earning favors that they can cash in when they run for re-election.
And they realize, you tell them, hey, listen, the country is, you know, it's going to be soon $38 trillion in debt.
Soon it's going to be $40 trillion.
And then it's going to go up from there.
And they're like, yeah, that's a problem.
What do you intend to do about that problem?
What kind of funding are you willing to reduce?
Well, I'm not really willing to do that.
These people have gotten used to this funding.
I don't want to be blamed for cutting their benefits.
And so the point that's going on here that Eli Crane is saying is that these are people who, by and large, are told you're on the Titanic, the Titanic is going to go down, and their view is, guess what?
We can live well in the meantime, and we're hoping to get on a lifeboat before the Titanic itself goes down.
The Titanic here being, regrettably, the United States of America.
So these are people who, even though they would be most reluctant to say this, They're not patriots.
They don't, in fact, love America.
They love themselves and their own welfare and their own political success more than they love the country.
And they are willing to hurt the country because there's no other way to look at it other than when, you know, if you're an individual household and you're making, let's just say, $100,000 a year or...
$300,000 a year.
You're well off.
You're a successful household.
But when you look at your liabilities and you add up your mortgage and your car loan and this and that and your vacations...
You're earning $300,000 a year.
You're netting, let's say, $250,000, and you're spending $400,000.
That is not an erroneous picture writ large of what the country is in.
And that is obviously a disastrous course to stay on.
Why?
Because if you keep doing this, you're going to go broke.
Now, countries don't really go broke because they can print money.
At least the United States can print money.
But the printing money is itself a disaster because it devalues the money.
The money of every American that has money.
The money in your savings account, the money you're putting aside for your kids, all that money gets devalued when the government prints more.
I think this is an honest and disturbing description of the state of the Republican Party.
It also helps to explain why the Republican Party in Congress isn't doing more.
It's because it's difficult to get a majority when you are looking at people who are in the first camp.
In other words, the people who are, quote, trying to solve the problems threatening the long-term survival of America.
I'm sad to say that I think if I had to do a rough count.
I would say that roughly of the 200 or so, 220 or so Republicans in the House, it is a minority and a small minority of people who fall into the first camp, maybe 50 out of 240.
And what that means ultimately is that the responsibility falls also on the voters.
Why?
Because very often in red districts, in safe districts, we elect people who are not of the first stripe.
But of the second stripe.
In other words, these are people who will feather their own nest.
They will look out to their own political success.
At the expense of the country.
I obviously have no problem with people looking out for their political success.
Democratic societies generally attract leaders who are ambitious people.
Washington was ambitious.
Lincoln was ambitious.
But they were ambitious within limits.
When Washington was faced with the choice between his own ambition and the country, he chose the country.
"Hey, I'm gonna step down.
I'm done.
I'm gonna go back to my farm.
I'm gonna go back." To, well, making whiskey, which is what George Washington did.
So I think what this means is that we have a lot of problems in our elected branch, and the Make America Great Again project under Trump is going to make progress, but there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of work to do.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a friend, Laura Loomer.
Well, she's an investigative journalist of a unique type.
I won't say she goes where angels fear to tread, but she goes where other people fear to tread.
And she's broken some huge stories.
Check out her website.
It's Loomerd.com.
And Laura, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
I'm trying to remember when we first crossed paths.
Now, I vividly remember, and this is so typical of your fearless style, when you chained yourself to the front door of Twitter in New York.
I couldn't go, but I sent Danielle, my daughter, and she was just amazed at how you withstood all the...
The negativity and the censorship that was weighing down on all of us at the time.
Was that the first time we crossed bats?
Yeah, we had spoken previously on Twitter in the DMs, but that was the first time that we had ever actually spoken on the phone.
And then, of course, I went on your show.
But you were probably one of the more outspoken, if not the most outspoken, conservative commentator and author in support of me.
A lot of people were very critical of when I handcuffed myself to Twitter and they said, oh, she's acting like a leftist.
This is what the left does.
It makes us look bad.
But I think quickly over time, Republicans started to realize that if you want to, You have to take those Alinsky tactics and use them against your enemy.
It was quite effective.
It was very effective in raising awareness about the censorship of conservatives, which in 2018, when I handcuffed myself, was still being called a right-wing conspiracy theory, even by some Republicans who had not yet been subjected to the censorship regime, which we now know is a coordinated effort between law enforcement agencies, the federal government, and all the big tech social media giants.
I will always be grateful to you and your daughter, Danielle.
For supporting me in that because it was one of the first cases of Masty platforming.
I'd like to say that myself and Alex Jones are really the canaries in the coal mine for what so many other people are now just starting to experience.
Yeah, you were, I think, at one point, quite clearly the most banned and deplatformed person in America.
Probably Alex Jones a close second, but I think you edged him out by, you know, by certainly a little bit.
I fast forward now to just maybe a couple of weeks ago when I see a sulking host on, it might have been CNN or MSNBC.
She's talking about Laura Loomers and the White House.
This far-right influencer has a lot of influence over Trump.
And she's now become, in a sense, part of the vetting process.
And I'm thinking, wow, Laura, you've really come full circle from being the most excluded and banned individual in the country.
And now they're worried about the amount of influence you have.
On the government.
Yeah, and, you know, look, it just shows that persistence will beat the resistance, as I like to say, and a lot of people give up.
A lot of people did give up when they were deplatformed and censored, but I knew that the light would be at the end of the tunnel, and I kept on pushing forward, and it hasn't been easy.
This started in 2017 when I started to become subjected to a lot of censorship and deplatforming, and that is correct.
I think I still am the most censored woman in this country, if not the most censored person, because Aside from X, thanks to Elon Musk giving me back my account when he purchased Twitter and turned it into X. I'm still banned on all the other sites that banned me before, including all the payment processors and apps.
So I like to think of how much more successful or how much more influence, as they say, I would have if I had access to all these other sites that I'm still banned from.
So it's just a reminder that, you know, you should never give up, as President Trump says, never, ever, ever give up.
And you should always keep on going, despite what the haters have to say about you.
Everybody I met in the conservative movement told me that, you know, you can't do this.
You'll never do this.
That's impossible.
You won't ever be able to do this.
And I just never took no for an answer.
And I think that that's the best advice I could give someone is play by your own rules and never take no for an answer.
I mean, what I admire is two things, Laura.
One is you did it without a lot of institutional support.
It wasn't that you were being backed by some large corporate entity or sitting in some media organization that had your back.
It looks like nobody really had your back.
This was probably, I don't know if this was 19 or 20, but, you know, you had a couple of posts that were kind of on the dark side, basically saying, hey, listen, you know, I'm just in my early 20s and all these massive institutions are trying to destroy my life.
Like, what's going on?
So I got a sense from those posts that it must have been pretty hard for you.
Yeah, look, I definitely struggled with depression during those times because it can be very isolating.
My generation is the generation of social media and the Internet.
And so you can imagine being completely isolated from your social setting and nobody wanting to work with you because really in this day and age, you were able to build your career before social media because, you know, you became a household name and a commentator and a well-respected author and filmmaker before this dependence on social media back in the day where people would be.
You know, selling more books as opposed to using podcasts as their primary source for distributing their content.
And so if you grew up in, you know, the era that I grew up in, then you have to rely on social media.
And it's a prerequisite for getting hired in this industry of conservative media and even journalism because they ask you, what's your social media handle?
Or are you proficient in social media?
And not only was I dealing with bans from social media as a conservative My degree is in broadcast journalism.
I was valedictorian at a 4.0 GPA.
So I was paying off student loans for a degree that I wasn't even able to use because I was banned everywhere.
And then I was running for Congress.
And even though I won my primary, I wasn't able to debate or communicate with voters because I was the only candidate in the nation denied all access to social media.
It really starts to limit your career prospects.
And so it was very hard.
And people tend to forget you when they don't get those reminders on Facebook or Instagram about whose birthday it is.
Or people tend to forget you when they don't get the updates on their phone or their social media about their memories with you.
And you become subjected to what I call a digital ghetto.
It's a digital ghetto.
Laura, you've now done something that I think is...
Really, not only remarkable, but sort of rare.
And that is that a lot of conservatives are sort of professional bloviators.
They're pundits.
They offer opinions on things and sometimes things they don't know a whole lot about.
But what you do is you chase down facts.
I mean, Hunter Biden is abroad and he's hanging out somewhere and you know where he is and you know what he's doing and you trace connections.
Or somebody talks about a judge and you're like, guess what?
The judge has a daughter and you know what?
She's getting a whole bunch of money from the government.
And so this becomes indispensable reading because you're not merely saying, hey, I, Laura Loomer, think this, so I, Laura Loomer, think that.
You're like, here are the facts.
You can independently verify them for yourself.
Stuff that you don't know, and it makes a difference to how you see things.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, I never want to call myself a commentator.
I know some people like to call me a commentator, although the media likes to just call me a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
That seems to be their favorite term for me.
But I want to produce news.
I want to drive the news.
I want to be the news.
And so while other conservatives simply just comment on the news, I want to create news cycles instead of just commenting on news cycles.
And that's what I do.
I create news cycles with the Investigations that I conduct or the opposition research that I uncover and produce and distribute.
And I'm not just tweeting out, you know, selfies and pithy little one-liners and jokes and memes on Twitter like so many other people do.
I produce very long-form content, and I don't paywall this content either.
And, you know, I believe that the American people deserve to have this content and the flow of information now that we have access to X. And for the most part, it seems to be fairly unreserved.
Although I was subjected to censorship in December after getting in a little spat with Elon Musk.
But for the most part, it's a lot better than what it was like under Twitter 1.0.
And I mean, look, you've been banned from Chase Bank before.
I know what it's like to be debanked by Chase Bank.
I'm not just talking about, oh, they shadow banned my post and, oh, I'm getting less likes today than I did tomorrow.
I'm talking about total digital extermination, total financial extermination.
As somebody who knows what it's like to have no access to distribution for information, I'm not taking advantage of it or I'm not going to take it for granted at all.
Every single day I wake up, I'm taking advantage of, you know, the access that I have on social media to inform people and to really try to save our country and also get information to the President of the United States because...
It needs to be done.
And there are, unfortunately, still gatekeepers in the administration.
There's gatekeepers in the GOP.
And I think it's very important that you provide documentation, provide receipts, provide citations, provide sources for the investigations, because at the end of the day, it's going to be your receipts versus the gatekeepers.
And if the gatekeeper is facing down the president of the United States and your receipts are on the table, well, if your receipts are solid, your receipts are going to surpass and break through the gatekeeper.
And so that's the strategy that I like to deploy when, you know, doing my investigations because it's very difficult, as you know, Dinesh, to break through gatekeepers.
Yeah, and this is one of your big beats these days.
Not your only one, but nevertheless, maybe your main one.
And that is the whole vetting process of the Trump administration to make sure that Trump is getting people who are loyal to him, but more importantly, loyal to his agenda, and not...
Kind of playing a double game.
I mean, I've seen throughout my political career, even going back to Reagan, just the problem of the backstabber who pretends to be a friend and nevertheless weasels their way into high positions in the administration.
Let's begin by talking a little bit about this Mike Walsh signal gate controversy, because what I thought was really interesting was it was quite obvious that perhaps accidentally or perhaps not, nevertheless, Mike Walsh and his team with Alex Wong somehow lets Jeff Goldberg into the chat.
And then right after that, the whole media with one voice is screaming for Pete Hegset to resign.
So I was like, something seems to be a little off here.
And I'm sure it was.
How did you approach that story?
Well, look, I ultimately reviewed the screenshots that were released to the public, and it clearly says that the chat was set up on Michael Waltz's watch, and Alex Wong was one of the first names entered into the chat, and he clearly says that he's putting Alex Wong, who is now the former deputy NSC advisor, in charge of communicating with all of these agency heads and the envoys and the national security officials who were on the signal.
I think a lot of people were a bit shocked to see that the government was utilizing Signal for these group chats and their conversations.
But, you know, I guess we all learned that Signal is approved communication or an approved means of communication for information amongst these different agency heads, as the Trump administration has said multiple times.
But I started investigating Alex Wong because I wanted to know.
The affiliations and the background and maybe the motivational forces behind the individuals who set up this chat and accidentally, as they said, added this Jeff Goldberg from The Atlantic.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever used Signal, Dinesh, but I use it occasionally.
Personally, I don't really like the user face of it.
I prefer Telegram.
Signal itself has multiple steps of verification when you add somebody to a chat.
It takes like five steps.
It's not as simple as simply creating an iMessage group chat and then maybe you accidentally add someone that has a similar name or similar initial as Michael Waltz was suggesting had happened.
You have to verify at least three different times.
There's about four steps you have to take if you want to create.
Not only that, every single person that accepts the chat has to approve the safety number of the people that are participating in the chat.
So it just doesn't really, it didn't really seem plausible.
You know, I started looking into Alex Wong, and I like to look at the spouses.
I like to look at the family members of these individuals and come to find out, you know, Alex Wong is not this Trump loyalist as he proclaims to be.
His wife had worked at the DOJ under the Biden administration and was involved in cases pertaining to January 6th political prisoners.
And come to find out, he has deep ties to Romney.
And, you know...
Then you have this very tangled web that paints a very sinister image, and you start asking yourself, well, how does an individual like this surpass vetting, right?
How does somebody like this get through the vetting process?
And ultimately, you know, you start to identify patterns, and you realize, well, this isn't just somebody who slipped through the cracks.
There's clearly a vetting crisis.
And, you know, I went very deep with Alex Wong looking at his family ties, including his father-in-law, who has since disappeared.
We have a deputy NSC advisor who is one of the top national security officials in our country with direct proximity to the President of the United States, whose father-in-law was one of the top executives at the premier satellite company used by China in Asia for the CCP and helps manage the satellites used by China's PLA.
Again, that's a major conflict, and that is something that creates, you know, just a very potentially detrimental degree of separation.
I guess you could call it that that could become very harmful or problematic for our national security or the Trump administration.
I don't work for Donald Trump.
I don't tell Donald Trump what to do.
But obviously, Donald Trump found the receipts and the documentation to be compelling enough to make some serious changes within his administration at the NSC and the NSA.
I mean, you have some of these people that were Biden holdovers, and as we saw...
The NSA was weaponized to spy on President Donald Trump.
Not just when he ran for president the first time, but during his entire administration.
We saw countless lawsuits were filed with Trump administration officials and Trump campaign officials talking about how the intel agencies were weaponized to spy on them.
I mean, this is what really gave birth to Crossfire Hurricane and the Russia collusion hoax and all of these scandals and all of these phony impeachments against the president of the United States.
And so the question is, given the fact that the NSA is probably, you know...
The most important intelligence agency, security agency in our country.
Why would we want to have a Biden official, somebody that passed Biden's parameters for what it means to be loyal?
Given how diametrically opposed President Trump and Joe Biden are in their perceptions of what it means to have strong national security.
I mean, they don't even agree on what it means to have strong national security.
Donald Trump means, you know, it means we need to close our borders and deport all the jihadis and all the criminal illegal aliens.
And Joe Biden wants to appoint the criminal illegal aliens and the jihadis to positions of national security, but lock up all the Trump supporters and MAGA fascists and white supremacist Trump voters.
So it's very concerning.
These people are not going to be loyal to the president's vision for America, which is, you know, overwhelmingly via a mandate, the vision that, you know, majority of Americans voted for when they voted to send Donald Trump and the Republicans, not just to the White House, but also in control of the House and the Senate in November.
It seems quite obvious that if you're dealing with, you know, a CCP, Chinese Communist Party connection, or you're dealing with a Biden holdover, that this is a clear failure of the vetting process because, hey, you've got enemies of the United States or you've got people who are clearly politically hostile to you who are somehow worming their way into senior positions in the administration.
The trickier one, my guess, is going to be with Republicans themselves, right?
Because you do have some Republicans, I think of people like Rubio or J.D. Vance, who were hostile to Trump but have obviously warmed to Trump ever since.
And yet you have other Republicans who have never really liked Trump, never been on board with the MAGA agenda, but know enough to sound some of those notes when they run for re-election, they still seek Trump's endorsement.
How do you...
How do you figure those people out?
Is it simply a matter of doing, like, deep digging into these characters to figure out where their loyalties currently lie?
Well, that's a good question.
And look, in the case of Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, I'd like to think that they made amends, right?
I mean, obviously, we can't overlook the fact that J.D. Vance once said that Trump was essentially like Hitler.
But he has actually addressed this, and it's been well documented that he went to the president when he was running for Senate, and he apologized, asked for his forgiveness, and asked for his endorsement.
A lot of the people that are problematic, that are slipping through the cracks in the horrendous, and I would even say non-existent vetting process that exists, And the White House are people who are hoping that their statements never go detected or people who are lying about their loyalty, saying that they've always been with Trump.
But, you know, if you do a keyword search on January 6th and their name on X, you see a million tweets from them saying that, oh, you know, he's a dictator.
He's got to go.
He's just destroyed democracy, blah, blah, blah.
So, you know.
If people are willing to make amends and they're willing to be honest about their new realizations and they're willing to come clean, I think it's a different conversation.
But when you have people, for example, like Ivan Canapathy, who was made the director for Asia at NSC under Michael Waltz, who just two months prior to his appointment was working with Obama's CIA officials, Mike Murrell and Leon Panetta, where he had an executive-level position.
at Beacon Global Strategies where he could have either removed these people as advisors or as counsel.
And he chose to instead retain their counsel while knowing that those two individuals were two of the 51 spies who lied, who helped create the letter that we now know was coordinated by our intel agencies to try to help Joe Biden steal the election in 2020 by falsely...
labeling Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation, even though his own laptop was inserted as evidence in his own trial in Delaware.
So, again, those are the types of massive vetting failures I'm talking about.
I mean, there are people who work in the admin.
Even Michael Waltz himself is on video saying that Donald Trump – Has been disrespectful to service members and, you know, promoted the lie that Donald Trump called veterans suckers and losers.
He's on video saying this in 2016 for an anti-Trump veterans pack.
And so, but he's never, I've never heard him apologize for that.
I've never heard him come clean about that.
I don't even think the president of the United States had ever seen that video.
But you have a lot of people that are just unwilling to make amends and be honest.
And it doesn't really make sense to me because, you know, shockingly, Donald Trump is a pretty gracious and generous person.
They like to make him out to be some, like, ruthless killer.
But, I mean, look, I wasn't sitting front row at the inauguration.
It was Mark Zuckerberg who tried to steal the election.
And it was Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon and Washington Post who helped manufacture the Russia collusion hoax that made President Trump's life a living hell the last time.
So, I mean, obviously, Donald Trump is more gracious than people give him credit for.
He could have just fired Michael Waltz, but he exiled him to Siberia, right?
Still a position.
He exiled him to the United Nations, where he's ambassador.
But that's pretty gracious, in my opinion.
I would have just fired these people.
Yeah, it's actually a very good observation about Trump, Laura, and that is that people think of Trump as this mean-spirited guy, but I find that Trump time and time again extends the olive branch.
I mean, look at his latest executive order, which is a kind of effort to protect Hollywood.
Now, again, you and I, if we were sitting in a room, we'd be like, let's help Hollywood sink into the ocean.
We never want to hear from those people again.
The last thing we want to do is help their business to grow abroad.
But I think the way Trump looks at it is Hollywood is an American industry.
It's done well abroad in the past.
Let me see if I can...
So this is the exact opposite of what people portray about Trump.
How is your assessment about Trump, if we can close on this, has it changed over the years?
What is your take on the man in this sort of new second round of his administration?
Look, I think that Donald Trump was the greatest president of my lifetime during his first term, and I believe he's going to prove that record to continue on in his second term.
But the facts still remain the same and that Donald Trump's greatest flaw is his judgment when he exercises judgment when hiring personnel.
This was the this was what undid his first administration and led to so much of the chaos and so many of the controversies and manufactured outrage and manufactured scandals in the Trump administration.
There's there's such a lack of judgment for a guy who and I say this as somebody who loves and adores President Trump.
I mean, he's you know, he's a hero to me.
He really is.
But but it's strange that somebody who has accomplished so much, who's a billionaire, you know, real estate developer, entrepreneur, former entrepreneur.
He has all these brands, all these golf clubs and buildings all around the world.
He's president of the United States, okay?
He has successful children.
I mean, it's hard to be a billionaire and not have degenerates as children, but Donald Trump has children who are all, you know, doing very well in their own accord.
And it's fascinating to me that somebody like Donald Trump who has all of that and has had such A high success rate has such poor judgment when it comes to the people that he surrounds himself and the people that he hires.
Nobody's perfect, right?
No one's perfect, even Donald Trump.
But that's probably the most perplexing thing and the most perplexing observation I've had about Donald Trump over the years is that he's a phenomenal political figure, transformative political figure, phenomenal businessman.
I mean, just a brilliant business mind.
But he exercises, in my personal opinion, the worst judgment when it comes to the people that he hires.
And I think a lot of people, Who call themselves Trump loyalists and the MAGA base, the MAGA loyal would agree with me.
That's probably the biggest issue.
I think there has been some improvement in this, and I say this because, you know, when the left would point out that, look, no president has had so many of his own senior appointees denounce him, write books about him, endorse his opponent in the next election, you know, his own defense secretary, his own chief of staff, all these people kind of millie, Mark Millie went rogue on him.
And so that, I think, was absolutely true in the first term.
You've pointed out to a lot of problems even in the second term, but isn't it fair to say that I think his cabinet this time around, much more loyal, much more on board.
I don't think we're going to see the same experience as we did last time.
The cabinet this time is better.
However...
You know, the cabinet still has to delegate.
And all it takes is one bad apple within that delegation inside these agencies to torpedo an entire cabinet.
And that's what I'm concerned about.
For the most part, I would say that the cabinet is much better.
More loyal, although I still have some questions about some of the individuals and their judgment in the Trump administration and the cabinet and some senior roles in the West Wing.
But I will say that it is much better.
It seems to be a lot more structured.
We have seen a lot less turnover, and I know that that is to Suzy Weil's credit because she is, you know, very, very big on...
I think that Susie's done a good job as chief of staff, like really managing the chaos and keeping people on track.
But as I've exposed, there are still some very glaring betting issues that...
Pose a massive national security risk and a massive threat to President Donald Trump and the inner workings of the White House.
And so I'm hopeful that this can be resolved and that the vetting can be improved because, you know, all it takes is one bad apple to create a scandal or to create some kind of distraction that derails all of the progress and all of the wins of the Trump administration.
Good stuff, Laura, and keep it up.
You're doing great work, and I can see why the president likes to draw you aside and say, what have you found?
Show me your receipts, because you're the one who produces those receipts.
Guys, I've been talking to Laura Loomer, investigative journalist.
Check out her website, loomer.com.
Laura, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate it.
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Music Guys, I'm going to continue my discussion of Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
I want to talk today about Reagan's tenure as governor of California.
Two terms.
He was elected in 1966, re-elected in 1970.
So to get a trajectory of Reagan, he serves through the late 60s.
He serves through the early 70s.
He is then kind of done in 1974, and then in 76, he will run for the Republican nomination against Gerald Ford, narrowly losing, and then he will run again and get the nomination and win the presidency in 1980.
Now, Reagan comes in as the newly elected governor of California, and he's surprisingly candid about what he doesn't know.
In fact, when he was asked about his first priority as governor, he says, I don't know.
I've never played a governor.
He's being humorous, of course, but he's also being honest.
He's saying, in effect, I've come into politics from the outside.
Don't actually know how all of this works.
And this is, by the way, it reminds me a little bit of Trump 1.0, right?
When Trump came in the first time.
I think Trump was fairly confident that he could figure it out.
And he was confident that he could run the government like a business.
And he did figure it out.
And he had a successful first term.
But there was also a tremendous amount of chaos right at the beginning.
And I think it's fair to say it's because Trump had never, quote, played a president.
Trump had never been president.
Some of the stuff that he was encountering for the first time was utterly unfamiliar to him.
I think Trump was also discovering that the world of politics is not the same.
The world of government is not the same as the world of business.
Now, Reagan comes in as governor of California and he adopts his easygoing schedule.
Which is to say, he works from 9 to 5. He doesn't believe in this whole 80 or 90-hour work week.
In fact, he often tells people working for the government, hey, it's 5 o 'clock.
Go home to your family.
And they'd be like, well, I just have to finish.
And he'd be like, well, okay, finish.
But sometimes he'd say, well, it's not that important.
Do it tomorrow morning.
And so Reagan's idea was to get things done.
But not to take the work too seriously.
And he didn't believe that to accomplish important things, you needed to put in an insane or ungodly, as we say, amount of time.
He also was not familiar with all the intricate details of government.
And I want to tell a little anecdote to illustrate the point.
This would later become very clear when he became president.
Reagan picks a guy to head the campaign.
In San Bernardino.
This is for his gubernatorial campaign.
And he gets a call from Richard Nixon, who was the chairman of Reagan's campaign, statewide campaign.
And Nixon says, hey, listen, how could you have picked that guy?
He's horrible.
He's not the right guy for the job.
And then Nixon goes into a kind of biographical rundown of why this man should not have been picked by Reagan.
And Reagan turns over to his aide, Michael Dever, and he goes, Who's he talking about?
This is, to me, highly amusing because here you've got Nixon, who's sufficiently Machiavellian, detail-oriented, labor-oriented.
He's obsessed.
He's like, you know, it's really important that I do well in San Bernardino.
We need to have the right guy running it.
After all, it's a mid-sized California county.
But Reagan's view was, it's a mid-sized California county.
It's not going to make all that much difference.
Reagan didn't even know who the guy was.
And as I say, that becomes later a kind of hallmark of Reagan where little details go by him, and he's not embarrassed by that fact.
Both as governor and then later as president, Reagan liked to have all issues summarized in very short and precise brevity.
And by that I mean he wanted to have essentially a one-page memorandum, and the memorandum needed to be...
A kind of summary of a four-page document.
So not a 20-page document, not a lot of attachments.
You can have attachments, but they need to be basically brief.
And here's what you need.
You need to state the problem, detail the relevant facts, list the items for discussion, and recommending a course of action.
You always needed that.
This is actually a phrase attributed to Lyndon Johnson, and therefore what?
Meaning, what is it that you are asking me to do?
But before that, you need to lay out, these are the facts, these are the options, these are my choices, and here's the one I think that you should make.
And while you could attach documentation, as I say, There's no guarantee that the governor would read it.
So reporters thought this is like a terrible way to run a state.
And later they would say a terrible way to run a country.
But Reagan's view is, hey, listen, I've got a very good memory.
I've got a very good grasp of the situation.
This is going to give me a bird's eye view of the problem.
I've got specialists.
I've got people lower down the ranks.
Now, all that being said, Reagan's first term was, I would have to say, not a big success.
In fact, to be fair, not a success at all.
Most of the things that he did in the first term didn't work.
Number one.
He inherited a terrible problem of overspending, no surprise, from the Democrats.
And so Reagan had campaigned, I'm not going to raise corporate taxes, but in fact, he raises corporate taxes and he raises sales taxes and he raises income taxes.
So he ends up being credited or debited, maybe one could say, with the largest tax increase in California history.
He felt he had to do it.
It was necessary to reduce fiscal irresponsibility, but he said he wasn't going to, and he did.
Number two, Reagan wasn't really able to cut profligate government spending.
In fact, annual state spending under Reagan more than doubled.
It was about $5 billion when he came in.
It was about $10 billion at the end of his first term.
So that's a giant increase.
Reagan signed the most liberal abortion law in the country.
Again, in Reagan's defense, this was not a Roe v.
Wade.
It was not a abortion on demand.
It was essentially abortion will only be allowed where the life or health of the mother is jeopardized.
Seems actually like a fairly reasonable type of law, particularly in California.
But the opponents of the law, including the cardinal, the Catholic cardinal of California, I'm feeling bad.
So, in other words, that the law was written in a sneaky way to allow a lot more abortions than when there is a genuine health crisis or a genuine health emergency.
But Reagan signed the law.
It became the most liberal.
It became a...
One of the most liberal abortion laws in the country in practice.
To read it, it didn't sound that way, but in practice it did.
Number of abortions in California skyrocketed really from a small number, under 1,000 in 1967, to an average of 100,000.
But this is my point.
You come in, you're a newcomer.
You don't read the fine print.
You think you're signing a law that's reasonable, but it's not reasonable.
Essentially, the left was able to outsmart Reagan on this law and get their wish with regard to abortion.
And yet, despite all this, Reagan was reelected in 1970.
He was re-elected because, and remember, this is a state where even then, Democrats outnumbered Republicans basically by three to two.
That number is, by the way, much more lopsided now, largely as a result of both legal and illegal immigration to the state.
But at the time, it was still a Democratic advantage.
Reagan had to win Democratic votes in order to win.
And he won re-election, I think, largely because people saw, A, he was a really nice guy.
B, he had the right set of priorities and values.
C, he was fully capable of learning on the job.
His second term would be far more successful than the first.
And he was willing also to try new things.
And by trying new things, I mean he was willing to do stuff that was unheard of in California politics.
Early in his second term, he was told that the California economy was doing really well.
This is, by the way, before the slowdown of the 1970s, OPEC, the problems that developed later.
Reagan was told, hey, we're going to be in the black.
And Reagan's answer was really simple.
Give it back to the taxpayers.
Reagan's own aides, in fact, his finance director, Caspar Weinberger, said, give it back.
That's never been done before.
Governments don't give money back.
When they get more money, they just have more money to spend.
And in fact, they often spend on things that will guarantee their own political success.
But Reagan was like, no.
He's like, he said, this is money that belongs to the taxpayer.
It is the taxpayer's money, and it's only right to give the taxpayer the money back.
And of course, you'd see the media headlines.
Here's one state senator indignantly denouncing Reagan, quote, I consider this an unnecessary expenditure of state funds.
Here you see right away the democratic psychology, their view is returning surplus funds to the taxpayer.
Is a form of, quote, making an unnecessary expenditure.
Why?
Because these bureaucrats think that once the money is in their control, it belongs to them.
It's no longer your money.
It's their money.
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