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May 12, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:23
THE ICEMAN COMETH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1081
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Coming up, I'm going to cover Trump's new executive order on pharmaceuticals and drug pricing.
I'm also going to discuss the confrontation between ICE and Democratic officials who are trying to rush the New Jersey ICE facility.
And veteran broadcaster Joe Pags joins me.
He's going to talk about current issues, but also about his new podcast.
It's called Unshaken and Unafraid with Joe Pags.
It's coming out from Salem Media.
Hey, if you're watching on XRumble or YouTube 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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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Huge announcement by President Trump this morning.
And I, when I was on the treadmill this morning, was listening to the news conference with Trump.
And he was flanked on both sides.
There was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. up there.
There was Dr. Martin McCary.
There was Jay Bhattacharya.
So Dr. Oz, the top people related to health and drugs and pharmaceuticals all up there making this, I think, historic announcement.
An announcement that is both intellectually very powerful, but also politically brilliant.
And I want to talk a little bit about both those things.
If I have time later in the segment, I want to also talk about these Democrats who rushed the ICE facility in New Jersey.
But let me start with pharmaceuticals.
It has apparently been going on for years, indeed decades, and yet something that Democrats rail against but never do anything about, and never do anything about for the obvious reason that they are in the pay, they are in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry.
Think of a guy like Bernie.
I'm going to work to bring down pharmaceutical prices.
But he's not going to.
He never intended to.
He's made no real effort to.
And his point is, elect me president and I'll do this.
But meanwhile, Big Pharma is slipping large amounts of money into Bernie's pocket or into his campaigns, I should say.
And so this is, by the way, not simply a problem with the Democratic Party.
They're Republicans, too.
Big Pharma is, as Trump himself said, one of the most, maybe the most powerful lobby in Washington.
They own...
The U.S. Congress.
It may be an exaggeration, but if it is, it's only a slight exaggeration.
And the consequence of this is the drug prices in America are astronomical.
Prescription drugs, astronomical.
And yet, oddly enough, when you go to other countries, you notice that they're not.
You go to Canada, and you notice that prices for drugs are much lower.
You go to Europe.
Trump gives a very Trumpian example, he says, and I'm now paraphrasing, but you'll get the gist of it and also the humor of it.
Trump goes, well, I know this guy.
He's a really rich guy, but he's also extremely fat.
And he goes, as a result, he's taking like the fat medication and the fat pills.
And he goes, the fat guy?
Who's also a smart guy, he goes, calls me from London, and he goes, what the heck?
He goes, my fat treatments in London are like $88, something like that, and my fat treatments in America are like $1,300.
And being a business guy, he's asking Trump, like, what's going on?
And of course, Trump figures it out, and Trump figures out that basically what's happening is that Big Pharma is ripping off the American consumer.
By charging much higher prices.
When Big Pharma goes to the European Union, the EU guys sit down, the Big Pharma guys, and go, listen, this is all we're paying for the drugs.
So you're not going to get another penny out of us.
And Big Pharma goes, okay.
And then they go to Asia and they get even lower prices.
And in America, the drugs are 50%, 100%, 200%, 400%, in some cases, 10 times.
1,000% higher.
So you're talking about drugs that cost $50 somewhere else and $500 in the United States.
This is what the American consumer is paying.
Think about this.
How can you talk about America first and allow this ripoff to continue?
So for Trump, it's all about equalization.
The new executive order basically says that he will insist, the U.S. is going to insist that it get itself most favored nation status, which means when there's a drug, You go find out what is the lowest price being paid in the industrialized world.
We're not talking about Somalia or we're not talking about third world countries or countries suffering famine or disease where Trump is willing to make exceptions.
We're talking about industrialized countries like Australia and Canada and Norway and Spain and you find the lowest price in those countries and the United States gets that price.
Trump is like, we're not paying.
The American consumer is not paying anymore.
Now think about this.
Think about the, first of all, Trump calls this equalization, and it is basic fairness.
Why should the United States pay more?
Now the drug companies have a reason.
They say, listen, the reason the United States pays more is that there's a lot of research and development that goes into developing new drugs.
And by the way, Americans of all political persuasions, including libertarians, are like, oh, what a reasonable argument.
Yes, there's high R&D costs.
I can't tell you how many articles I've read in Reason Magazine and all the libertarian publications, basically immediately swallowing this nonsense wholesale.
But Trump's point is...
Of course, there are high research and development costs, but why don't all the beneficiary countries that are getting to sell the drugs share that cost?
Why should the cost fall 100% on the United States?
And the only answer to that, coming from the drug companies, they will actually admit it in private, is, listen, the other countries just refuse to pay.
So in other words, we're screwing over the American consumer because the American consumer is a sucker and we can get away with it.
And the reason we can get away with it is we own the congressmen on the left side of the aisle and a bunch of them on the right side of the aisle.
So Trump is like, that's it.
No more.
This is not happening.
Not to say that there shouldn't be research and development.
There should be research and development.
But the cost needs to be shared more evenly over all the people benefiting from the drugs.
Now, I think Trump here is reacting also in part, he's reacting to high drug prices and the ripoff I just described, but he's also acting in part in reaction to COVID because he knows that these pharmaceutical companies swindled the country.
They swindled him, but they also swindled the country.
They swindled him by basically promoting a vaccine on false premises.
It's going to cure COVID.
It's going to prevent you from getting COVID or giving away COVID.
And Trump went along with it, assuming that these people are telling him the truth.
They weren't.
They also knew that these drugs had all kinds of inadequacies, all kinds of side effects, weren't properly tested.
But of course, they all wanted to become billionaires.
They all wanted to make giant amounts of money.
So I think Trump realizes these people do not hesitate to be...
And it's not just the pharmaceutical companies.
There are all kinds of middlemen.
Trump is like, who are these middlemen?
They make a bunch of money off of these drugs.
They don't produce anything.
They don't make the drugs.
They just stand in between the consumer and the pharmaceutical company.
And Trump goes, hey, listen, I've got to give it to these guys.
If you can sell nothing and make a bunch of money, you're a clever businessman.
But you're not going to be clever at our expense anymore.
So I think that this is political.
This is not only something that makes a lot of sense, the new executive order, it's politically unopposable.
I mean, if you're Bernie Sanders, and I went to Bernie Sanders' feed to see what he has to say about it, nothing.
The guy is totally silent about it.
Why?
Because Trump is doing more than Bernie even promised.
Bernie promised with no intention to do.
Elizabeth Warren promises with no intention to do.
Trump promises, and he delivers.
And I think that if Democrats come out against this, against reducing prescription drug prices substantially, we're not talking about discounts of like 5 or 10 percent.
We're talking about a realignment of drug pricing, where drug pricing in America now matches the drug prices in other developed countries.
This is going to be wonderful for seniors.
It's going to be wonderful, by and large, for the American consumer.
So this is an America first stroke of genius.
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I'm going to talk in this segment about two things.
One is the...
Democratic officials, including a local mayor and a couple of members of Congress, who rushed the ICE facility in New Jersey.
I'm also going to talk about Trump and his alleged gift of a plane by the nation of Qatar.
Now, with regard to the rushing of the ICE facility, there is a lot of disputed Accounts of what really happened.
And from the Democrats, there are accounts that not only dispute the Trump account or the account that is being given by the Department of Homeland Security and by ICE, but the Democratic accounts contradict each other.
So that tells you that there's something off about what the Democrats are saying.
What they are saying is that they were at the facility, and they have every right to inspect the ICE facility.
They are, after all, members of Congress.
And the local mayor says, I'm the mayor, and so I have the right to inspect the facility.
But you just have to look at the videos to see there's not a whole lot of inspection going on.
There's a lot of shouting.
There's obscenities.
There is pushing and shoving.
And if you look closely, you can kind of see who's doing the pushing and shoving.
And the answer is, it's the Democratic officials who are doing the pushing and shoving.
If you watch the video, it's the woman in the red jacket, and she is a left-wing, black, Democratic congresswoman.
And so these are people who then go out on TV later and their allies go out on TV and say, oh, nothing happened.
We were extremely well behaved.
We were doing our oversight responsibilities.
In fact, in one case, CNN, while they're listening to this apologist for the Democrats talk, they made the mistake of playing the video.
Which absolutely contradicted what the woman was saying, because you could see the woman in the red coat standing out, in fact, pushing, shoving, virtually punching these law enforcement officials and ICE officials.
And so the question becomes what now?
Well, the mayor has been arrested.
He's been charged, a very minor charge, by the way.
Basically, a misdemeanor and its trespassing, so a very modest charge, and yet the guy goes on TV, goes, you know, I'm distressed, I'm humiliated.
And I was actually very relieved to hear him say that, because it is important for us to humiliate the other side, humiliate them, of course, in areas where they do need to be humiliated, because why?
Because people avoid humiliation.
And so if you want to deter the Democrats from doing this kind of stuff, you have to humiliate them.
Humiliation is actually a political necessity.
There's some talk about potentially charging these congressmen and congresswomen, but that has not happened.
By the way, we're talking about one of the congressmen is Robert, is Menendez, the son of the Senator Menendez, who is now actually in the big house.
And I saw a funny post on social media basically saying the reason Robert Menendez was trying to break into these federal facilities is he was looking for his dad.
So I think that it would be good to charge these people, even if the charges are modest, because, hey, they're on body cam.
They're on video.
The case is right there.
Now, again, I'm assuming that if you look at the video as a whole, it is in fact as a...
As incriminating as the clips that I've seen on social media, so I'm not trying to prejudge the full case.
But if the case is as the DHS, the Homeland Security people, and ICE are saying, then I think we need to prove the point, the Democrats' point, by the way, that they kept echoing for years.
No one is above the law.
I noticed that after saying no one is above the law, Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California, is now sounding a different tune.
You can't arrest your political opponents.
So his position has shifted from no one is above the law to you can't arrest us since we are the political opposition.
When we said that under the Trump years, they were like, no, we certainly can.
We're going to go ahead because no one is above the law.
So it's really important for us to insist upon holding them, the Democrats, to the same standard.
And that, it seems, is what we are looking at.
But looking at is not enough.
We need to actually do it, i.e.
handcuffs, charges, indictments, and let's find the right jurisdiction in which to bring these charges.
All right, let me pivot, now talk about the Trump airplane.
Now, I wasn't aware of the backstory of all this, which really makes this whole story an interesting example of how the media works, because you get this explosive article in the New York Times, then immediately picked up by NBC News, NBC News confirms, CBS News confirms, ABC News confirms, it's everywhere, that Trump is basically accepting a gift.
Of this airplane from Qatar.
And not only that, he's not just accepting it as a gift for the country, as a kind of replacement for Air Force One.
He's accepting it for himself, because the plane is going to be given after the Trump years to the Trump Library, where Trump himself will get personal use out of it.
So this was the story.
Bill Kristol was all over it.
The Never Trumpers are all over it.
Corruption, bribery, Qatar funds terrorism.
You can see that on the face of it, this would be a big story.
And of course, you have Republicans starting to run for cover in the familiar pattern where you've got even Trump supporters saying, I don't know about this.
This doesn't look good.
The problem here, as always, is they buy into the media narrative.
Despite all the stuff that we know about the New York Times, these people are chronic liars.
These are people who, by and large, sit around and connive about what can we do to drop a bomb on Trump on Monday, and then we need another one for Tuesday, even though we know this is how they are.
Nevertheless, when it comes out, we're like, oh!
And we have that deer-in-the-headlights horrified expression, and this is just a kind of measure of...
Of their effectiveness and our stupidity.
Because we start looking at it a little more closely, we realize all the elements of the story are actually false.
So let's look at what actually happened step by step.
Number one, Trump became aware that the United States has a deal with Boeing to make a new Air Force One.
Except Boeing is, no surprise, ripping off the U.S. government.
They're ripping off the U.S. government because no one pays attention to what the taxpayer is paying.
So Boeing keeps adding things, delaying the project, new billings.
I'm sure there are billings coming in every week, every month for giant amounts of money.
And Trump takes a look at this and he goes, this is an outrageous...
It's one thing if you say, all right, I'm going to do an amazing job.
I'm going to deliver it ahead of schedule, but it's going to cost a little more.
None of that.
It's going to take longer.
We're going to do a horrible job, and we're going to bill you and bill you and bill you.
And this, by the way, is a pattern of people, contractors, who basically have learned that they can rip off the taxpayer to their heart's content because bureaucrats don't really care because it is not their money.
So Trump basically starts looking around for a way to get a plane, number one, at least in the meantime, and number two, to put some pressure on Boeing.
He finds out that the nation of Qatar has a plane that is sitting somewhere in Palm Beach.
And Trump basically says, why don't we figure out a way to buy that plane?
And retrofit it and make it a temporary Air Force One, not a permanent plane, but a temporary plane that we can use.
So he's looking at a way to save the government money, put pressure on Boeing to deliver quickly and lower costs.
And then Qatar, the nation of Qatar, basically goes, that plane is in Palm Beach.
You can have it.
So now Trump has an interesting dilemma.
He can say, no, I insist, I want to give you a billion dollars for the plane.
Or he can say, okay.
And remember, the plane, Trump is very clear about this.
The plane would be donated to the U.S. government.
It would be used by Trump temporarily.
It would then go to the Trump library, but not for Trump's personal use.
Trump, in fact, has his own forms of transportation.
By the way, if you go to the Reagan library, sitting right in the middle of the Reagan library, Debbie and I have seen it, is a giant Air Force One.
This was the Air Force One that Reagan used in Reagan's own day.
And so when the plane was not being used anymore, There it is on display in the library.
And Trump had kind of the same idea for this plane.
So Trump tells the anecdote about a golfer who makes the point that, listen, when your opponents give you a putt, basically say, in effect, you can have the putt.
It's a close putt.
We're going to let you have it.
He goes, is there any golfer who is going to go, no, thank you.
I insist on making the putt, which I may or may not miss.
No, because you're getting a gift.
Take it.
Move on to the next hole.
Hit the ball the next time.
So Trump's point is, you know, that the United States is such a sucker that, by and large, everybody else is grabbing free stuff.
And the United States sends free stuff all over the world.
But the one time that somebody else offers you free stuff, you're like, I can't take it.
I insist on paying.
We want to give more money to the oil-rich nation of Qatar.
No.
Trump's point is, when they said, hey, we'll donate the plane, To the United States, to the taxpayer, to the US government, Trump was like, on behalf of the US taxpayer, I'll take it.
Thank you very much.
End of story.
So I think this is a story where the left has thrown themselves into a massive contortion.
They've made some headway because, like I say, there are so many Republicans on our side who don't do any research.
They would never dream of doing this kind of investigative work themselves.
They let the left do the investigative work.
The left then comes out with this big headline.
We start jumping as if we're standing on hot coals.
So we've got to unlearn this bad habit of letting the other side, quote, "set the facts, set the agenda, and sort of knock us off our stride." We've got to realize that these people are almost all We need to investigate the facts for ourselves first, and then, if necessary, jump up and down as if on hot coals.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest, and I'm a little surprised he's a new guest because he's a really good friend of Debbie's and mine, and he is a massive personality and TV and radio figure in his own right, Joe Paggs.
This is Joe Paggs Pagliarulo.
He's been in TV and radio broadcasting for 30 years.
He's based in Texas, but he's been all over the place.
He's been in Saginaw, he's been in Kalamazoo, he's been in Lansing, Schenectady, and he's launching a new podcast, in fact, starting this month.
It's on Salem Media, so he's sharing a platform with me and my podcast, and it's called Unshaken and Unafraid with Joe Pags.
By the way, you can follow Joe on X at JoeTalkShow.
Joe, welcome.
Thanks for coming on.
Geez, you know, I feel a little bad.
Debbie and I have been on your show innumerable times.
And Debbie just told me, she's like, we've never had Joe on this podcast, which is downright crazy.
But we're delighted to have you now.
Joe, talk a little bit about you've been a radio staple and a radio legend, I would say.
You're now navigating into the podcast space.
How do you see a podcast as different from being on the radio?
Well, Danash, first of all, I love when you and Debbie guest on my show.
And it's actually odd for me to be a guest.
So we're sort of changing the roles, which is very interesting.
Thanks for having me on your very successful podcast.
I'm a long-form guy.
I always have been.
It's hard to do that on radio.
On radio, we've got the time constraints.
We've got maybe a 15-minute segment.
With you, we sometimes would do two segments because you and I get talking.
We go for half an hour sometimes.
But in the podcast world, as you know very well, you can just take your time.
If it's going to take an hour, take an hour.
If it takes 15 minutes, take 15 minutes.
But it's about a flow.
It's about a normal conversation where information is certainly gained and shared, but it's more of an in-depth dive.
Like I had Will Kane on.
He'll be airing today, but he's a Fox News host.
I was at his set, and I just looked at him and I said, so you're a lawyer.
Tell me about that.
Have you ever used that?
I don't think you have that opportunity when you're having an eight-minute segment or sometimes on national television, a four-minute segment.
So this is long form.
People can really dig in, grab their popcorn, and enjoy it.
We found in this last presidential election that long form is really where people are getting it.
If they want Dinesh D'Souza and David D'Souza, they're going to go to your podcast, watch it when they want to.
They set no schedule because it's 7 p.m. at night.
They've got to watch it right then.
They can binge my show, you know, five different episodes of the radio show all weekend.
And they do that.
So it's just a different, it's a different form of medium that doesn't have the constraints that I see in my daily Monday through Friday radio show.
Let me ask you, Joe, about this new executive order that Trump announced this morning.
The one that, as he calls it, it's an equalization.
It's a demand that the United States consumer don't pay any higher price for drugs.
than European countries and other developed countries and apparently you've had the system going on for years if not decades in which the costs of research and development so-called R&D costs have been inflicted On the U.S. consumer and no one else.
So all these other countries basically get the big retail discount.
And the American consumer buying a product from American corporations run by CEOs who you think would like America and be patriots of America.
But nevertheless, they don't hesitate to stiff the American consumer.
And in a sense, you can see America first, can't you?
With Trump basically saying...
Why are we the ones bearing all the burden?
What do you make of this?
How significant do you think this new executive order is?
It's a huge deal.
If you live in the northern border, you go across the border to Canada, you pay a whole lot less.
If you're on the southern border, you go across the border to Mexico, you pay a whole lot less.
I don't want it as a conservative to be something where the overlording government says, you must charge me this.
But at the same time, there are laws against price gouging, which is exactly what's been happening to this country for a long time.
What I love about what the president's doing is that he's doing all of this trade stuff, and especially this pharmaceutical stuff, through leverage.
He's not saying, I'm the overlord, I'm the price fixer, you'll do what I say, or else there will be penalties.
What he's saying is, we've got the leverage as being the 30, I think we're 34% or 35% of the global consumer market with 4% of the population.
That carries a lot of leverage, that carries a lot of weight.
So doing this...
In the guise of, we have leverage, we just won't buy your stuff anymore, we'll start making it here, we'll stop trading as much with China.
That makes sense to me.
Saying you're price gouging, that also makes sense.
Like after a hurricane, you can't raise the price of a generator by 10 times because more people will need generators.
So I like what he's doing.
I want to be careful in how he does it because as conservatives, we don't like when a centralized government has somebody dictating exactly what's going to happen.
I don't think he's doing it that way.
I think he's doing it a very smart way.
And people in this country, like my mom, who needs pharmaceuticals, like when our families need pharmaceuticals, will certainly not be taken advantage of anymore the way that we have been.
I'm very careful as a conservative in how he does it.
I think he's going to do it right.
Let me push you on that a little bit, Joe, just because I want to suggest that the...
Old way of conservative thinking about the government versus the private sector may be somewhat obsolete in our own time.
And here's what I mean by that.
I think habitually as conservatives, we rightly think that we need to watch the government very carefully, because after all, government has a monopoly.
Government also has coercive power that by and large private sector companies don't.
And therefore, we say things like we want to be very careful about the government setting prices or the government telling private corporations what to do.
However, one of the, I think, most significant discoveries of the last 10 years is the way in which these private corporations, and I'm talking here about big tech and digital media.
I'm talking about the pharmaceutical companies.
They have borrowed their way inside the government.
They own members of Congress.
They control the regulatory agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
And so...
They're able to go to the government and tell the government, not only must you mandate that everybody buy our vaccine and take our stuff, but you need to start firing people across the country who refuse to take the vaccine.
I mean, this kind of deep collusion, I would call it, between large corporations and the pharmaceutical sector in particular and the government.
This seems to suggest that the old idea of government versus the private corporations, it doesn't really quite work that way.
And so, you know, in some ways you need the government to sort of take on these private corporations and break up this collusion.
I mean, to me, one of the interesting things Trump said was, he goes, listen, Big Pharma gives a lot of money to political candidates on both sides of the aisle.
But they don't own me, and they don't own the Republican Party.
No, I think you're absolutely right about that.
You know, there's one thing that I agree with Obama on.
And what Obama did was, he said, if your company borrows billions of dollars from American taxpayers...
You have to cap your CEO pay at $500,000 a year.
At that point, the company had a decision to make.
Am I going to take taxpayer dollars and pay my CEO $500,000, or will I not take that money and pay him or her whatever I want to pay them?
This is similar.
I think that you just really laid it out very well.
If the pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in government, they basically are a hand of government.
If there's a revolving door from government to pharma to pharma to government, that's a problem for me.
When you've got NIH people making royalties off of the vaccines that we were...
We're all forced to take, which I didn't, by the way.
Then you've got a collusion there that is no longer private sector versus government.
It's really government being bedfellows with government.
So I like what you said, and I think that separation should happen.
We should go and add things like no revolving door.
You leave government, you can't be in big pharma for 10 years.
You leave big pharma, you can't be in government for 10 years.
And we certainly should take a look at who's paying whom when it comes to lobbyists and when it comes to NIH and CDC and HHS and all of that stuff.
I hear what you're saying, and I don't disagree with you.
If it were truly private, private companies here, government is over here, it might be a different discussion.
But you're right.
There are bedfellows at this point.
Let me ask you about this episode, Joe, recently where you had a mayor and a multiple...
Democratic officials, Congress, members of Congress, rushing this ICE facility in New Jersey.
Now, there's some argument about what exactly happened, but certainly if you look at the social media clips, it seems pretty obvious that at some point, these Democratic officials were pushing, were shoving, were certainly using obscenities.
My mind flashed back to January 6th, where you see people who are in the Capitol, but they're courteous, they're peaceful.
They don't even touch.
They don't touch officers, but they certainly don't touch anything in there.
They don't do any vandalism.
There's no pushing.
There's no shoving.
And yet, these are people who were charged.
They were convicted.
They got substantial sentences.
So, is there any...
Good rationale not to charge these congressmen and congresswomen and simply hold them to the same standard that they insisted.
They were like, no one's above the law.
When we said, hey, you're locking up people in the political opposition, they go, oh, well, doesn't matter because no one's above the law.
Why don't we hold them to this exact standard?
Well, we should.
And the bottom line is this.
The lying legacy media has been saying that this guy Baraka, this mayor of Trenton, showed up and was just peaceably protesting along with McIver and some other people, some members of Congress.
That was a lie.
He literally was trespassing.
He was arrested for trespassing after being told to leave many, many times.
If you and I trespass Dinesh, we're going to be arrested.
That's just the way that it works.
Then you've got McIver, I believe it was, who was wearing the red outfit.
Who is clearly pushing and shoving ICE agents when she's just simply told to leave.
She's pushing.
She looks like a football player trying to knock people down.
That person should face charges.
Of course, she showed up on MSNBC or CNN and said that she was a victim and somehow targeted, and there were racial overtones, none of which is true.
The bottom line is this, and your fans know this.
Those who listen to me know this as well.
This is a facility that is privately owned.
It is leased by the federal government, by ICE, and yes, members of Congress have oversight.
They've got to make a plan.
They've got to say they're going to come and visit.
They've got to put it on the schedule and then be accepted in to go and oversee whatever they want.
You don't show up, start a riot sort of situation scenario, and then claim that you're somehow the victim.
You're just there trying to do your jobs.
Those people should all be put in handcuffs.
They should all be arrested like that judge was in Wisconsin for allegedly breaking the law because nobody is above the law.
Like you said, we've been told for how many years nobody's above the law.
Joe, let me ask you to step back and survey the first chapter of this new Trump administration.
I think we can both agree that it has a different feel, a different tone, a different level of aggression or zeal than the first Trump administration.
Exuberant over what's happening, or are you also somewhat anxious?
And I say that because, like, Debbie and I chat about this all the time, and sometimes she'll be like, well, I'm a little worried Trump is maybe biting off more than he can chew, partly because even unlike Reagan, this guy is fighting on, like...
37 different fronts, right?
Reagan would tend to focus on, I'm going to focus on making a deal with Gorbachev, and then I'm going to focus on getting the tax cut through.
So Reagan was a man who would set a few priorities and then kind of focus on those laser-like.
With Trump, it appears like this guy does not hesitate.
Even though he's got three battles on Tuesday, there's a new one coming on Wednesday.
Just like we have no idea what this guy is going to do tomorrow.
Yeah, he's throwing so many trial balloons up in the air.
You're right, he's juggling a lot of very important issues.
I think the sense of urgency that you're getting and that I'm getting, that those watching and listening are getting, is that he's only got four years this time.
He doesn't have a full two terms to look at, and he wants to get as much done as he can.
I think he's learned from the mistakes of the first time, and those mistakes were surrounding himself with people that he couldn't trust, people leaking constantly, anonymously and otherwise, people writing books from the White House.
This time he walked in and he said, I'm going to do as many things as I possibly can.
And I think overall, Overall, he's been extremely successful.
The one, I think, road bump for me, anyway, was how they rolled out the tariff idea.
I don't think people understood tariffs.
I don't think people get what tariffs are.
I don't think they understand what the leverage play was.
But then on April 2nd, he came out and he showed an actual chart.
And then actually, I think when he shows the chart, everybody watching said, oh, they're screwing us like that?
I get it now.
That makes sense.
Talking about tariffs for a month and a half, two months before that confused a lot of people.
I think it upset the markets as well.
I like the pace at which he's going.
I like the people he surrounded himself with.
I think the star, and I wonder what your thoughts are on this.
I think the star so far for me has been Marco Rubio.
Holy mackerel.
This guy has come out as the most staunch America first guy I've ever seen.
I love his attitude.
I love his drive.
I never knew he had all that in him when he was a senator.
But he surrounded himself with people that so far he can trust.
And the first time he surrounded himself with people that kissed up, but he couldn't trust.
I like the pace at which he's going.
It can't continue.
At this breakneck speed, that'd be crazy if it did.
But get it, front load all of it and then let people argue about it for the next six months.
I think it makes sense so far.
I mean, I agree.
I am just genuinely thrilled by Trump's speed of action and the fact that...
It's so effective because when the Democrats jump onto one thing, Trump is onto the next thing.
So, you know, they're all about, you know, Kilmar, Abrego, Garcia, and then boom, here comes the next thing.
And then they jump on the plane and Trump is talking about invading Greenland.
So they can barely keep up with the guy.
You know, with regard to the cabinet, I mean, I would highlight two people.
One you mentioned, and that's Rubio.
The other, I think, is the Treasury Secretary.
I don't know if you've seen this Besant guy in action, but he dismantles the media like nobody's business.
And he does so with such calm, aplomb and authority that they literally have nothing to say in response.
And so they kind of move on to the next thing.
So there are a lot of standouts in the administration.
I mean, the one person I think needs to be...
Upping the ante, and I'd be curious what you think about this, Pam Bondi, because I think there are so many opportunities to bring indictments.
And one thing we've learned from the Democrats is those guys indict first, ask questions later.
So they indict, and then they begin the investigation, because they know that once they've indicted you, number one, you often have to step down from office.
Number two, you've got to hire a lawyer.
So essentially, you are thrown off your stride.
So if it were me, if I were in Pam Bondi's spot, I would already have indicted Letitia James because that seems to me an open and shut case.
And so I think Pam Bondi is doing the right thing.
She wants to, you know, cross every T, dot every I, but she needs to take a page from the Democrats, indict first, investigate later.
Well, I think you stole my line.
I was going to say, she's saying she's got to cross every T and dot every I. And it certainly is a discernible difference between the way the Democrats did it.
They threw every indictment they could against the wall just to see what would stick.
I would like to see more speed of action.
I like Kash Patel in his sway and the way that he's taking on, I'm going to go after people who broke the law.
The one thing that I think set Pam Bondi back, and I like her, I know her, is that...
When she released the Epstein files, that was clunky as hell.
That was very strange.
You handed out a file that basically had exactly what we already knew in it, and you gave it to, like, 14 influencers that didn't make sense.
I think if you're going to do it, do it and make sure that you make sure it sticks.
I'm not really for the wholesale throw everything against the wall, see what happens, but you're right, and I think I can probably move this to the Judiciary Committee if I may.
Instead of just paying Bondi...
You now have Jim Jordan who's sitting atop the Judiciary Committee who's been saying for four years, I can't do anything because Biden's in office.
Now you've got Trump.
Now you've got the DOJ.
I think that Bundy's...
Defense might be.
They haven't given us any of this stuff from Congress yet.
We're waiting for them to make referrals.
Then we will indict everybody if we can.
I think Congress is still sketchy and a little bit skittish about doing it.
I like Jamie Comer.
He's great on oversight.
I like Jim Jordan.
He's great on judiciary.
Start making every referral you possibly can.
Hunter Biden should be testifying in front of committees right now so that everybody who is involved is going to be implicated.
And by the way, he can't take the Fifth Amendment.
None of those people...
I don't know what's on her desk.
Neither do you.
But once it gets there, then we should start screaming to high heaven, hey, do something now.
Dennis, that's the first thing people say to me, maybe to you and Debbie as well when you're out and about.
When are they going to start arresting people?
I want to see the perp walks.
So I'm with you.
I'm anxious.
I'm ready to go as well.
But I want it to stick.
I don't want Letitia James to get away with it.
I don't want these people that brought all this lawfare against Trump to get away with it.
I don't want Fannie Willis to get away with it.
I want it to stick, if that makes sense.
Absolutely true, and always good points, Joe, as always.
Guys, I've been talking to Joe Paggs, the new podcast, Unshaken and Unafraid with Joe Paggs.
You can find it on Salem Media.
Follow Joe on X, at JoeTalkShow.
Joe, we've got to do this again.
And, of course, you mentioned to me the idea of coming on your podcast, which I'll be delighted to do.
But thank you very much today for coming on mine.
Dinesh, thank you so much.
It's an absolute pleasure, my friend.
And thank you so much for all you do.
I'm discussing Ronald Reagan, how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader.
And in this new section I'm beginning now, I'm going to talk about Reagan.
Now, you can't understand Reagan's success in doing that without understanding how he redefined the message to the Republican Party, making the Republican Party appealing to a majority of middle class and working class Americans.
We talked today about Trump's appeal to the working class.
We don't talk so much about the middle class anymore because the middle class has bifurcated into an affluent upper middle class and a not affluent, struggling lower middle class.
But a lot of pundits, in trying to understand Reagan, tend to link Reagan with Goldwater.
That's because Reagan came to prominence on the national scene when he gave the 1964 opening.
At the convention that would nominate Goldwater to run against LBJ.
But let's remember, Goldwater lost, and he lost terribly.
Reagan won, and he won decisively.
So something seems a bit off in saying that Reagan is, quote, another Goldwater.
And yet a lot of people thought he was.
I remember...
Shortly after Reagan was president, elected, I was at an anniversary dinner at National Review.
George Will stood up at his keynote address and he said, it took, I'm quoting him, approximately 16 years to count the vote in the 1964 election and Goldwater won.
This is the very typical kind of aphoristic, pithy, and in fact kind of witty George Will formulation.
It's clever.
And it's completely wrong.
And it's completely wrong for the reason I'm about to give.
Now, Goldwater was a pioneering figure.
He did attract an enthusiastic new generation of conservative activists to the Republican Party.
Some of the people who would later become big Reaganites came to the GOP via Goldwater.
That's true.
Also, in 1964, the Republican Party had a tendency to nominate from the moderate wing of the party.
Let's go back.
Eisenhower, moderate.
Nixon, from the moderate wing.
Ford, the same.
Goldwater was an exception to that.
So Goldwater represented the takeover, the temporary takeover of the Republican Party, by the right wing over the moderate wing.
And that was a precursor to Reagan.
But there are really some key differences.
An Old Testament guy.
And by that I mean is he was anchored in the past.
He was somebody who saw the present as uncertain and the future as kind of anathema.
He was a big naysayer.
His favorite word was no.
And he had a hard combative edge.
So he would say things that were in some ways correct.
But nevertheless, they came across as incendiary, as over the top.
Here's Goldwater.
At one point, he says the United States should, quote, lob one into the men's room of the Kremlin.
And he means a nuclear bomb.
So, I mean, can you imagine?
So, this was obviously portrayed.
The man is a lunatic.
He's going to bring about a world war.
So Goldwater could, in fact, be charming in person, but he also could be extremely insulting.
And, in fact, he didn't hesitate to insult fellow Republicans.
This happened many years later, but he was talking about Jerry Falwell.
This was around 1980.
In fact, in the Reagan era, Goldwater was, by that time, kind of retired.
But he goes, every good American should kick Jerry Falwell in the rear end.
He didn't say rear end.
He actually said ASS.
But that was Goldwater.
And you'd be like, why would you say that?
What's that?
Goldwater?
Yeah, I mean, Goldwater was incendiary in 1964.
As time went on, he became like the harmless, grumpy uncle, and that's when the Democrats began to praise him.
Kind of the same way they began to praise McCain later, when McCain became a little bit on the doddering side and tended to support the Democrats.
They didn't praise McCain when McCain ran for president against Obama.
Reagan was a New Testament figure.
Reagan was capable of making outrageous statements, even about the Soviet Union.
At one point, he famously said that he had just signed legislation, quote, outlawing Russia forever.
The bombing begins in five minutes.
But the point is, Reagan was joking.
Reagan said this on a radio show.
He was on a hot mic.
He didn't know he was being recorded.
And of course, he was saying it as a quip, not as a policy.
Reagan's other favorite phrases was, sometimes moderation should be taken in moderation, which is another way of saying that Reagan did take the hard line on issues.
But when Reagan said these things, there was kind of a twinkle in his eye.
He had a warmer public persona than Goldwater.
He was philosophically conservative but temperamentally genial.
Now, they also differed in substance.
Goldwater was a man who would run down the New Deal.
And Reagan did not.
Reagan was the original Reagan Democrat.
Reagan said that he was for the New Deal, but against the Great Society.
Reagan said that the values that he promoted, anti-communism, economic growth, traditional values, he says, hey, listen, these are the values of the Democratic Party once promoted, but has now moved away from.
Reagan was forward-looking, optimistic.
He liked to quote, Thomas Paine, quote, we have it in our power to begin the world over again.
It's worth noting that this is not a, quote, conservative sentiment because by and large conservatives philosophically and certainly historically Do not like this idea of beginning the world all over again.
Why?
Because that erases the past.
Conservatism is based on the idea we want to conserve what is valuable from the past, and so everything begins kind of in medias res, meaning in the middle of the action, because, of course, everything has a past.
Unless you're talking about something new, here comes the internet, or, you know, here comes the new self-driving cars.
Most of what we deal with in life we've seen before.
Other people have come before us and dealt with the same problems.
So this was a very Reaganite kind of futurism that was different from the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Reagan was also a populist.
He had a pretty good faith in the confidence of the American people.
He didn't think the people were always right by any means.
In fact, often he would say, I gotta go out and kind of tell people what's what, meaning he understood that he had to shape.
Popular sentiment and popular opinion.
But I want to say that although Reagan had all these qualities, that if you followed Reaganism, if you were a Reagan enthusiast, as I am, you would recognize all the things I'm saying.
But it's important to realize that when Reagan first completed his second term as governor of California, remember that ended in 1974, he was not ready to run for the presidency.
Why?
He had been a California guy.
He had a pretty good familiarity of California issues, but not national issues.
So he wasn't ready for the country, and I would say the country was also not ready for him.
Why not?
Because the country's politics had been defined by Watergate.
Remember, Watergate was 1974, the very year that Reagan exited his second term as governor of California.
Watergate was a catastrophe for the Republican Party.
A whole generation of left-leaning Democrats came into power.
Republicans lost terribly in the midterm election of 1974.
In this new context, Reagan was seen as a kind of far-right figure.
He has a small constituency of reactionaries, but this guy does not have a future in national.
That was indeed the conventional wisdom.
And I say in the book that the six years from 1974 to 1980 were kind of the Reagan, I call them wilderness years, because Reagan had to sort of regroup.
Reagan had to prepare himself to enter the national arena.
Reagan in these years, by the way, didn't really have a job.
He founded a political action committee called Citizens of the Republic.
He wrote a syndicated column.
He did a radio commentary.
He would give speeches.
And he also did a lot of reading.
Now, this, I think, is important because, first of all, we live at a time when people don't do a lot of reading.
But Reagan was a reader.
He wasn't an intellectual.
But he respected intellectuals and he tried to learn from them.
He even would read the literature of the far left.
At one point he was spotted reading the World Marxist Review.
And when somebody kind of raised an eyebrow, Reagan just quizzically said to them, he goes, well, I gotta find out what the other side is up to.
So he did not hesitate to kind of peek in at the literature of the left and indeed the far left.
And I want to talk about some of the things that Reagan read.
He read Hayek.
He read Bastiat, the philosopher of liberty.
He read Whitaker Chambers and Alexander Solzhenitsyn on communism.
All these works, by the way, worth reading today.
He liked books on the American founding.
One of Reagan's early biographers, a guy named Lee Edwards, whom I knew from the Heritage Foundation, Lee told me that he would look at the books in Reagan's study.
When he was writing about Reagan, and he said, I would go through those books and I would see that all through the books there were Reagan's markings.
He had passages that were highlighted.
He had notes that he made in the margins.
Sometimes he would just, you know, do a squiggly face or a smiley face.
So the point is that Reagan read a lot.
He wasn't reading for systematic analysis per se.
What he was reading was for little nuggets of information, trenchant or pungent turns of phrase.
And he would then digest and absorb these and integrate them into his own communication, his own commentaries, and his own speeches.
Every now and then, if you listen to Reagan's speeches, you notice a very surprising type of references and analogies.
He'll talk about, let me tell you about the Roman Emperor Diocletian's policy of wage and price controls.
And you're like, wow!
Or he'll talk about the medieval Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun's view on taxation and government revenues.
You're like, wow, but Reagan was a forager, and he would pick this stuff up off of this book or that book, and he would kind of pull it all together in his own mind.
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