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May 19, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:47
EAT YOUR TARIFFS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1086
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Coming up, Joe Biden has an aggressive form of cancer, but not everything adds up here.
And I'll talk about why the timing of this announcement is not only very suspicious, but leads to a further and deeper web of lies coming from Biden and from the Democrats and from the media.
I also want to talk about Trump's insistence that Walmart eat the tariffs.
And also James Comey's veiled threat against Trump.
And also how Reagan prepared for his crucial presidential contest against Jimmy Carter.
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Joe Biden, it turns out, has prostate cancer and a very aggressive form of prostate cancer Now, this was all announced with suspicious conveniency just yesterday.
And it was announced at a time when Joe Biden was being blasted, really from all quarters, blasted by Republicans and conservatives and MAGA people, no surprise, but equally blasted by Democrats.
And particularly Democrats in the media.
Why?
Because it looks like they were trying to offload the responsibility for Biden's condition on Biden himself.
And on the Democratic Party.
So the line of Jake Tapper, the line of the media was pretty straightforward.
And that is that we were deceived.
The Democratic Party lied to us.
Joe Biden was not candid about his condition.
It wasn't until that debate where he stumbled and mumbled and dragged his words and didn't seem to know where he was or what he was saying.
That's when we figured it out.
But before that, we, the media, were in the dark.
So Biden was getting battered as being the millstone who dragged the Democratic Party down to defeat in 2024.
He hung in there.
He tried to be the nominee.
He then had to be sort of jettisoned at the last minute.
This didn't give Kamala Harris much of a chance.
So this narrative was cooking.
Joe Biden has cancer.
And it looks like this was some sort of diagnosis that just came out.
And yet, it has now become clear from multiple sources, including eminent doctors, and in fact, a newly reliable source, which is Grok or AI.
And it's become eminently clear that there is no way...
For Joe Biden to have this advanced metastasized cancer without him having had it for quite a while.
And we're not talking about days.
We're talking about years.
Here is a prominent physician, Dr. Zeke Emanuel.
He's on with Morning Joe.
And I'm now quoting him.
He did not develop it in the last 100-200 days.
He had it while he was president.
He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.
I don't think there's any disagreement about that.
So what Dr. Emanuel is saying is that all doctors agree that this is not something that could have been just found out right now.
This is something that...
It's in fact an easy cancer to diagnose.
Remember that Joe Biden has, as president, constant top-level medical supervision.
He's constantly taking tests.
They're checking him out.
The White House doctor is certifying time and time again.
And in fact, this is the White House physician, Dr. Kevin O 'Connor.
So is it really possible that this guy O 'Connor is such an incompetent buffoon that he has no idea that Joe Biden has an aggressive cancer spreading through his bones?
It seems much more likely that he did know.
The White House knew.
Joe Biden knew.
Jill Biden knew.
Everybody on the inside knew, and nobody on the outside was told about it.
So the media just took it at faith.
Oh, he's doing fine.
See, we told you.
Biden's doing great.
He seems incoherent.
Here's Jake Tapper.
You know what?
I think it's got to be his stutter.
He's had a stutter for a long time.
That's the only thing that's wrong here, is Joe Biden has a congenital stutter.
Stop making fun of his stutter.
The point I want to get at here is that instead of this new revelation, the news here is not that Joe Biden has cancer.
The guy has had cancer for a long time.
He's had cancer probably throughout his entire presidency.
The news is that they chose now to disclose it.
In other words, this is a strategically timed announcement.
And as a strategically timed announcement, It reveals the lie that preceded it, the lie that said, in effect, that Joe Biden is in perfectly good health.
Aren't the American people entitled to know if the president, the elected president or the seemingly elected president, is riddled with a rapidly aggressive form of spreading cancer?
Of course we are.
Were we told about this?
No.
So all of this means that the lies...
They've lied about COVID.
They've lied about mail-in ballots.
They've lied about Hunter Biden's laptop.
They've lied about the election.
They've lied about Biden's level of competency.
They've lied about Biden signing documents and pardons.
And now you could say that they are still lying about Biden's cancer, lying by not being upfront about precisely when this was discovered and what they did to Conceal it for all this time.
In fact, it becomes pretty clear looking back what the plan of the Democrats was.
And the plan of the Democrats was this.
Let's run Biden.
Let's absolutely deceive the country about his dementia, about his cancer, about everything.
Let's kind of get him back into the White House.
And the moment he is elected, he can...
Oops, he has...
Cancer.
He can't go on.
Health reasons force him to step down, and so he's got to step aside.
Kamala Harris is then ushered into the presidency, and basically her reign of chaos and terror and political recriminations and all the rest of it, censorship, could then resume at full blast and full force.
This is a hypothesis.
This is an argument.
This is a theory.
But I think it's a theory that is quite...
Strongly supported not only by what we have learned, but when we have learned it and the way that we have learned it.
Now, one immediate implication of this Biden kind of revelation, revelations about his mental state, revelations about his cancer, this guy was simply unfit.
He was incapable.
He was non-compos mentis.
He didn't know what he was doing.
Trump has raised the point that he was not the guy who was operating the auto pen.
And yet, somebody else was operating the auto pen.
Who was it?
That's a good question.
And not simply who were the people...
Who were physically manipulating the auto pen, but who was giving them the orders?
It's like the line from The Godfather.
Who gave the order?
Who gave the order to sign this document or that document if it wasn't Biden?
Who gave the order to stop the count that happened simultaneously in five states right about the same time, not only on the same day, election day, but on this right about the same hour?
And then, of course, you have Biden's pardons.
Now, these are important pardons for Biden, right?
Because they involve pardons of Fauci, pardons of the January 6th committee, and pardons of members of Biden's own family.
Now, a pardon is not something that can be signed by an auto pen.
A pardon has to be done by the president.
And let's remember that on a single day, January 17th, Biden granted 2,490 commutations.
No chief executive has signed this many.
And these were all done in one day.
And no chief executive has granted this many over their entire presidency.
So yet Biden supposedly is the one who made his decision in these cases and not any other cases.
So these were the ones that were chosen by Biden.
And the question is, who made that decision?
Was it really Biden?
Almost certainly no.
And so we have a problem here.
And fortunately, the attorney that is in charge of pardons, this is Ed Martin.
He's the U.S. pardon attorney.
And he put out the message on social media.
The integrity of the American pardon system requires that we examine the Biden pardons and who did what.
We will get to the bottom of it.
So I am...
Glad to see this investigation going forward.
I would like to see them seriously move to invalidate the Biden pardons on the grounds that this man was simply, you know, when you have criminal trials and you say, listen, this guy has Alzheimer's.
This guy is not all there.
This guy doesn't know what's going on in the courtroom.
The trial basically has to be suspended.
You cannot try a person who does not have a comprehension of what is really going on.
It creates, at the presidential level, a certain type of crisis.
And I would argue that we are in that crisis, generated not just by Biden and Biden's health, but the massive agglomeration or collection of lies that has surrounded Biden's physical and mental condition from the very beginning.
So far from making the questions go away, and I would also argue far from people, you know, in a sense going all sympathetic on Biden.
You see a lot of people who are going the other way.
They are, if anything, even more enraged, and I think rightly so, because it seems like our government has become, certainly under the Democrats, almost a bottomless well of deception.
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Over the weekend, James Comey, former FBI director, posted a very strange and, in a way, telling meme on social media.
I think this was on Comey's Instagram.
And in the sand, he has, in shells, the number 8647.
No explanation and just the numbers by themselves.
Now, people began to think about that and realized, guess what?
47 is Trump, the 47th president.
What's 86?
Well, as it turns out, if you look at the kind of lingo of law enforcement, but even beyond law enforcement, The number 86 is, and you can look it up yourself, what does 86 stand for?
It stands for making something disappear, making something go away, getting rid of something or someone.
And therefore, putting these numbers together, 8647, can be read to, say, get rid of Trump.
But how can you get rid of Trump when Trump has been elected?
You can't.
You can't get rid of Trump.
I suppose one could say, well, you can impeach Trump, but is a Republican Congress and a Republican Senate going to impeach Trump?
Highly unlikely.
So the implication here appears to be get rid of Trump some other way.
But what other way is there?
And surely Comey knows that Trump has already been subject to two Attempted assassination attempts.
And so there's a kind of dark undertone to these remarks, or at least to this meme put out by Comey.
And so people began to say, what's going on?
Comey is calling for Trump to be killed.
And in fact, even Donald Trump Jr. accepts that interpretation of what Comey did.
Comey then takes down the meme and posts this bizarre message.
I'm now quoting, I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.
I didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.
It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down.
So Comey is saying, and think of the kind of implausibility of this, he was walking on the beach.
He sees these numbers on the beach, on the sand.
And he doesn't know what 86 even means.
And if he doesn't know what 86 even means, that means he doesn't know what the full number, 8647, means.
And yet, he says he decided to share it.
Now, that makes absolutely no sense.
If I am on the beach and I see some numbers, let's just call it 9247, I look at it and it doesn't mean anything to me.
I don't even interpret 47 to mean Trump because I would only do that if I knew what the preceding two numbers stood for.
If I didn't know, it would just be a four-digit number.
So are you telling me that Comey seriously, quote, assumed it was a political message but he didn't know what the message was?
This just is, this drains credulity, and in fact, can only be accepted by people who were born yesterday.
So we have to agree.
I think that the problem becomes even more serious, because now Comey is lying about why he posted the message.
He did know what it meant.
He realizes now it was unwise to post it.
But see, when you post a threat against the president, you can then take it down.
But you've still posted the threat.
As it turns out, the U.S. government appears to have gone very lightly on Comey.
The Secret Service apparently had a talk with him.
But as far as we know, hasn't gone any further.
This is not to say that they couldn't go further.
But as of now, they have not gone further.
And by the way, the vulnerability of Comey is not merely to be prosecuted for threatening the life of the president.
It's also for lying to the authorities, because if you do an interview with government officials, whether it be the FBI, the Secret Service, and you lie to them, I didn't know what that meant.
Oh, no, I just thought it was an interesting political message, but I was unaware of what the content of that message was, so I posted it anyway.
If you are found to have lied to a federal official in this manner, in a criminal investigation, You can be sent to prison for lying.
The lying itself is part of the accordion of federal statutes, and you can go afoul of that statute.
It becomes a kind of a lying or a perjury trap.
Now, I thought it was interesting that both Kash Patel and Dan Bongino Did sort of a blast against Comey, basically saying this guy has disgraced the FBI, all of which I think is certainly true.
And in fact, Kash Patel in his interview suggested that he was going to be releasing some new documents about FISA, about Crossfire Hurricane, about the Russia collusion stuff.
And a, quote, wave of transparency, he told Maria Bar de Romo.
And so I'm going to look forward eagerly to those documents.
But I do want to comment on something that both Kash Patel and Bongino both said, which is they said that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
Now, they didn't offer any proof that this is the case.
They merely said...
We've seen the evidence, and there is no evidence that somebody else took Epstein's life.
Now, I want to suggest that the idea that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself is almost, almost on the face of it, absurd.
You have a guy who has an ongoing appeal that, according to his own family and lawyers, he was looking forward to seeing if it would get anywhere.
And he was actively discussing the arguments to be made in that appeal with his attorney.
And then you have the surveillance system.
Mysteriously breaking down so there's no surveillance of what happened.
And the guards evidently were either asleep or not on the scene.
In any case, they were not there to prevent what happened.
So putting those facts together, does it make any sense to say this guy took his own life?
If I had to bet on this on a probability of 1 to 100, I would give it less than a 1% chance.
So what are Kash Patel and Bongino saying?
Are they saying that there is positive proof that this guy killed himself?
Or are they merely saying that apart from the shutdown cameras, and apart from the missing guards, and apart from the evident lack of motive, we don't have any...
Further information to implicate somebody else.
It's just another way of saying that whoever did this may well have gotten away with it.
If somebody, for example, was able to either call off the guards or put the guards to sleep, turn off the camera, do what they did, get rid of Epstein, and basically make their getaway or be off the scene, take off.
And no one recorded any of that.
And now it's, of course, been quite a while, so it's not exactly like you're going to find footprints or DNA at this stage of the game.
So the point I want to just stress is the difference between saying about something, we don't have any further evidence.
We can't prove that somebody else did this to Epstein.
And saying...
What is a quite different statement, we know or we believe as a matter of fact that Jeffrey Epstein is the author of his own demise.
I do not believe that he was, and I don't think that we have heard anything that should convince any reasonable person otherwise.
I want to close out this segment by just making an observation, or I want to make a reaction, if you will, to this issue of tariffs, because Trump made the statement that Walmart is going to have to eat some of the tariffs.
And this has produced a kind of wave of response, particularly from economics types, saying, how ridiculous is this?
A president is trying to tell a private company what to charge and so on.
And I don't think that this shows a proper understanding of how prices work at all.
Let's remember that Walmart has made huge profits.
Off of a kind of incoming avalanche of Chinese goods.
This is what has made Walmart one of the massively successful companies in America.
It gets stuff from China at very low prices, and it's able to keep its prices reasonably low, but still there's plenty of margin for a whole bunch of people who transport the products, people who market the products, and of course Walmart itself.
To make a bunch of money.
And Trump is just saying, hey listen, you know, it's now a new set of rules.
And these products are going to face a kind of surcharge or tariff.
But it doesn't follow.
I think this is the key point.
When you have a tariff, it doesn't follow that the full cost of that tariff has to be transplanted to the customer.
Let's take a simple example.
Let's say, for example, that I'm selling a certain, I'm Walmart, I'm selling a certain type of toy for, let's say, $20.
And I'm buying that toy from China, and its costs are, let's say, $7.
And so, I'm buying the product at $7, I'm selling it for $20, and I'm making $13 in the process.
Let's say that under tariffs, that product doesn't cost $7, but costs $14.
The tariffs, in fact, are not that high.
They're not 100% anymore.
Trump has pulled back on the tariffs, but China still has tariffs.
Let's say, though, that the product is $14.
That doesn't mean that Walmart has now got to say, well, since the tariff is an additional $7, we're now going to charge $27 for the product.
Walmart can say, well, guess what?
Out of that $7, we will eat or we will absorb $5 and we will raise the price of the product by just $2.
So the $20 item becomes $22.
The customer pays more, but it's only a very little bit more.
Or alternatively, Walmart could say, we will eat the tariff completely because it turns out that the tariff...
Plus, the Chinese price is still lower than what we're selling the product for.
So there's still profit in it for us.
Not as much profit as we were making before, but some profit nevertheless.
And so Trump is not able to, and he's not trying to, instruct Walmart what to do.
But he's telling Walmart, hey, you have an option.
You don't have to raise the prices on your customers.
Let alone to do it in a political way so that they can, in a sense, their political annoyance is all directed at Trump.
Trump's point is you have other options available, and one of them is to absorb at least some of the cost of these tariffs.
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Guys, I'm delighted to have back on the podcast Philip Patrick, who is a precious metals specialist at Birch Gold.
He was born in London, got a degree in politics and international relations at the prestigious University of Reading in Berkshire, England.
He also spent a number of years as a private wealth manager at Citigroup.
He joined Birch Gold as a precious metals specialist in 2012, by the way, to contact Birch Gold.
You can go to birtsgold.com slash Dinesh, or you can text the word Dinesh, my name, to 989898.
Philip, welcome.
Thanks for joining me once again.
And we have an important event coming up in Rio de Janeiro this summer, and I want to get to that.
But we're going to be discussing the issue of the dollar as the global reserve.
Now, I think most people understand that that means that people in other countries or other countries themselves hold dollars and use dollars to buy stuff, sometimes from each other, things like oil and other things like that.
But I think it's not immediately obvious why it is a good thing to have or to be the global reserve currency.
Why has this been an asset for the United States?
Over the past, let's say, 75 years.
Well, it's a great question, and you're absolutely correct.
The dollar is the international standard for trade.
If two nations trade with each other that do not share a common currency, they're doing so almost exclusively in the dollar.
And what this has done is given us what they call exorbitant privilege, right?
Cheap borrowing, for example, thanks to huge demand for dollars globally.
Massive control.
For the U.S. over global financial flows.
Essentially, we have the power to veto any nation's ability to engage in international trade.
And we saw this recently with Russia.
It's also allowed us, and the federal government specifically, to run massive deficits without facing immediate collapse.
And I think, ultimately, it's allowed American capital markets to dominate the globe and made us the wealthiest nation in history.
I think it's hard to overstate how important this status has been.
I think it's underpinned our economic, diplomatic, and military power worldwide.
Isn't there another benefit that I think is implicit in what you said, but you didn't flesh it out, I don't think?
And that's this.
If the United States government, in a sense, prints money, makes money out of thin air, so to speak.
Normally, the effect of that would be inflationary.
It would be also to devalue the money in your pocket and mine and in our savings accounts.
But I think what you implied was that, hey, if you've got all these dollars that are floating all over the world, the effect of the inflation is dispersed worldwide.
It isn't just Americans who must bear that It absolutely is.
And I'll say, you know, we're not really an export nation anymore, but what we do export is debt.
And I think that now is coming back to bite us.
We're seeing borrowing costs start to skyrocket and nations now are starting to look for alternatives.
Factor in a lot of the weaponization that the Biden administration did by seizing Russia's assets.
That, I think, showed nations around the world they need to start diversifying away from U.S. dollars.
And it's happening at the moment, and that's really what the BRICS Summit is about.
And so what you're saying is that you have these powerful and sort of proud and independent countries, right, like China and India and Brazil, and these are large countries with huge populations and massive land area, and they're saying, in effect, why should the United States sort of dictate the way that the flow of money goes all over the world?
They want to, it seems, create a...
A rival currency, and isn't that the purpose?
I mean, this would be a remarkable thing, right?
Because you had the...
The pound as the global reserve currency for many decades, really, until World War I. Then the dollar starts taking over as the global reserve currency.
But it's been either the pound or the dollar.
There's never been any sort of other currency that anyone has been able to impose globally, prior to, of course, gold being a kind of universal gold standard for much of the developed world in the 19th century.
So here's my question.
What's going to be happening at this Rio summit?
How far down the road of a rival currency are these people planning to go?
I mean, the answer is...
Is very far.
And if we look at the institutions and what they've done already, it becomes very, very interesting.
Look, officially, this is another summit, right?
This is talking about economic cooperation, international prosperity.
Unofficially, what we're hearing is the BRICS leadership are expected to announce major advancements, essentially in a shadow financial system, a 21st century alternative to the existing dollar-denominated system.
So, you know, what we're hearing is they're going, There's going to be a coordinated push to link the various systems that BRICS have been developing over the last decade, things like Enbridge, BRICS Pay and Commodity Settled Trade, the goal being to make dollar-free international transactions now possible at scale.
The culmination of an ongoing project to dilute the dollar's monopoly as global reserve currency and give these guys more power on the international stage.
And are you saying, Philip, that the Chinese and the others are kind of, in a way, smart enough to realize, hey, we can't just...
You know, introduce the Chinese currency and tell everybody, you've got to take our currency, because first of all, not a whole lot of people trust the government of China, and so that's not going to work.
But what could work, arguably, is if they find some kind of basket of commodities or some kind of neutral system...
Peg this new currency to that and say that unlike the dollar, which the Federal Reserve can manipulate at will, in conjunction, of course, with the U.S. government, our currency, our better currency, is not going to be manipulated in that way.
Is that a pretty accurate summary of where I think these guys are going?
Yeah, it absolutely is.
And you also hit the problem that they have on the head.
isn't as tough, as problematic as the dollar is at the moment, it's still the best of a band.
Yes, China want to dump dollars, but they don't want to hold reserves in rubles or rupees.
They are far too volatile to use for international trade.
What they've been doing at the moment is using gold as a means to de-dollarize, and you can see it through trade, right?
So US dollar holdings by central banks are at 30%.
Gold buying by central banks have set record Three years consecutively.
Gold actually overtook the euro last year as the number two global reserve asset.
So right now they're using gold as a means to de-dollarize, but you're correct.
Any talk of a BRICS currency, they're talking about pegging it to gold to give it stability, legitimacy.
Their rival payment systems allow for multiple different currencies.
They allow for convertibility through gold.
So it's a modern-day version.
I mean, this is so interesting, isn't it?
Because the United States went off the gold standard under Nixon in 1971.
And in effect, we have today no currency that is on a gold standard per se.
And yet, as you mentioned, you've got all these central banks, including ours, that...
Hoards and buys and keeps a whole bunch of gold, almost as if to say that we need a certain deposit of the old gold standard in order for people to trust our currency.
It's not enough to say, you know, hey, it's based on the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, because people might go, well, I don't really accept the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, which hasn't been too responsible with the way it has been a steward of money lately.
So doesn't the holding of large amounts of gold by these central banks suggest that in gold, you do have something that for really thousands of years has been an accepted universal store of value?
The answer is absolutely yes.
A student of history and of currency understands that currencies are, you know, they disappear, right?
There's been hundreds of currencies over the centuries, and they've even been devalued significantly.
The British pound sterling after losing global reserve currency up until today, or they've disappeared entirely.
Look at countries like China.
They have a populace that really like to buy gold because they've seen through generations the fragility of currency.
And I think, you know, what we've seen since 1945 is relative stability, growth.
You know, it's really unheard of in history, and I think what we're seeing now is a reversion to the mean.
But this problem that we're facing today is one that we've seen time and time again throughout history, a nation becoming an empire, controlling the global money supply, increasing the money supply, and collapsing the empire.
We've seen it time and time again.
And the one thing that sustains is gold, and governments understand that.
And I tell my clients all the time, listen, ignore me.
If central banks are setting records year-off, I think for me, you know, I began this podcast in early 2021.
This was almost a product of COVID.
Before that, I was traveling around to campuses and doing a lot of speaking and a lot of that shut down under COVID.
So I began the podcast.
And I also began to evaluate what had happened to money in the United States, let's say, over the preceding three decades.
And it was quite remarkable to see the way in which dollars have lost purchasing power.
So if you simply, you know, people often think, oh, my house is going up in value.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
Another is that your dollars buy less than they used to.
You know, prices are going up, eggs cost more, and everything, cars cost more.
Well, another way to look at it...
Your dollar buys less than it used to.
And so, for me, this was a persuasive argument for, you know, through you guys, through Birch Gold, getting some gold.
And I gotta tell you, I've been actually very happy because you know when I know that gold has been doing very well, precisely because I think more people are realizing that our financial system has some real built-in fragility.
It's absolutely spot on.
I couldn't say it better myself.
And that's simply why we buy gold.
And that's what people have to understand.
The one thing about gold is consistency of purchasing power, right?
You could go back to biblical scriptures.
One ounce of gold would buy 400 loaves of bread.
And today it does the same thing.
So you are absolutely correct in your assertion.
It's not gold's value that's fluctuating.
It's the dollar's value.
And essentially, as dollars become weaker, we need more weaker dollars to buy the same ounce, hence the inverse relationship.
Then you look at where we are.
I mean, the US got downgraded by Moody's and it was because of debt.
And deficit.
We cannot get a handle on deficit spending.
So we're in a position now where U.S. national debt a year from now will be at 40 trillion.
A year from there will increase unless we can get a handle on it.
And I think the world is saying now we got problems and we need to start hedging ourselves.
And that's where gold comes in.
Whenever currency is up in the air.
People, nations, they turn to gold, and it's exactly what's happening now.
And I always tell people, listen, what applies to central banks, it applies to us, just at a much smaller scale.
They're holding dollars, they use them for trade.
It's the same as us.
Just scale it down.
Guys, I've been talking to Philip Patrick, Precious Metals Specialist at Birch Gold, to get more information.
In fact, a free information kit on gold with no obligation, just information so you can learn more.
Go to birchgold.com slash Dinesh or, easy, text Dinesh, just my name, the word Dinesh, to 989898.
Philip, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
I'm picking up my discussion of Reagan.
The book is Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And I want to talk about Reagan.
Getting lined up, getting ready for his great presidential run against Carter in 1980.
It was one of those pivotal moments of the 20th century and one of those pivotal moments of modern, of recent history.
When we look through history, there are certain critical elections that shift the whole direction of the country.
I would say the election of 1912, which was Woodrow Wilson.
The progressive movement came to power for the first time with lasting consequences.
1932, Franklin Roosevelt was elected, basically got four terms, and we were with Roosevelt all the way through World War II.
And after that, Reagan, 1980.
And then perhaps Obama, 2008.
And Trump 2016 and now of course again 2024.
But Reagan had flirted with the idea of running for president as early as 1968.
It was way too early.
Nixon was the frontrunner.
Reagan didn't really have a chance.
He wasn't even really ready.
But he thought about it.
He had the idea.
And it's important to know then that Reagan was running for 12 years before he made it to the presidency.
His real first serious run was in 1976.
And it was an uphill run because he was challenging the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, admittedly a president who had been somewhat wounded.
Ford was Nixon's number two man.
Of course, he inherited the presidency when Nixon resigned in 1974.
So Ford had not been elected in his own right.
And he had also pardoned Nixon, which was a controversial thing to do.
And so...
Ford was not unbeatable as the Republican nominee, even though he was the sitting president.
Reagan challenged him.
And Reagan challenged him from the right.
Now, what I mean by from the right is that the Democratic Party had moved left in the 1970s.
This started in the period of the Vietnam War.
You saw it with McGovern's candidacy in 1972.
You saw it in the emergence of the radical movements of the 1960s.
And certainly in the area of foreign policy, the Democrats had become accommodationists.
They had become champions of disarmament.
They had become advocates of limiting American power, and particularly the size of our nuclear arsenal.
And the Republican Party responded to that not by rejecting it outright, but by saying, well, we can make a deal with the Soviet Union, just as you suggest, but we need to play from a strong hand.
In other words, we need to have what Nixon himself would later call hard-headed detente.
So make a deal, yes, but make a good deal with the Soviets.
Reagan, on the other hand, attacked detente.
Reagan's point was, we don't really need a deal of this kind, because the Soviet Union has been on an absolutely aggressive and massive arms-building program, and to just say essentially both sides should stop now doesn't really work.
So Reagan was in some ways advocating an arms race, an arms race that he thought that the Soviets could not win.
And Reagan saw the Soviet Union in starker terms than the Republican Party.
The Republican Party would be like the Soviet bear is on the prowl.
The Soviets need to be checked.
They need to be contained, to use the famous expression of a diplomat from the 1950s, George Kennan, who articulated a doctrine of containment.
It's almost like, let's put a circle around these guys and prevent their power from expanding outward.
But Reagan wasn't for containment.
Reagan was for rollback.
And rollback is a much more bold and outrageous idea.
It's, let's roll the Soviet Empire back.
Let's take away the colonial properties that the Soviet Union has acquired in places like, well, in 1979, you'd have to add Afghanistan to the list, but it was places like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Somalia and Angola and many others.
You had just country after country falling into the Soviet orbit in the 1970s.
And another issue, interestingly, that Reagan used against Ford was the issue of the Panama Canal.
Now recently we've had Trump talking about taking back the canal.
Reagan was the first guy to talk about taking back the canal.
The canal was...
Given to Panama in the early 1970s, and ultimately that transaction was completed under Jimmy Carter, but it was a case where the United States, I think, foolishly relinquished control of the Panama Canal.
Reagan challenged this.
Reagan's view was, quote, we bought it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we're going to keep it.
And Reagan realized that this was a very powerful line.
That would draw applause for him throughout the country, particularly in the Midwest and in the South and in the Far West.
And these would end up becoming strong bases of Reagan's support.
The professionals in the State Department all thought it was very unsophisticated of Reagan to say such things and that this was the era of decolonization and the United States shouldn't be running other people's It shouldn't be managing the waterways that are adjoining other countries.
And so they were like, no, we have to give up the canal.
And Reagan would sometimes joke.
He'd say, well, I'll consider giving up the canal a quote if we can throw in the State Department.
We'll give you guys over to Panama as well.
This is a very classic kind of Reagan quip that always brought chuckles from the audience.
Now, Reagan lost in his effort to contest the nomination from Ford.
It was very narrow.
Ford got 1,187 delegates.
Reagan got 1,070.
So we're talking about the difference of about 150 delegates.
And Reagan was the keynote speaker at the Republican Convention.
He gave such a powerful...
And stirring a dress that a lot of people in the convention looked at each other as if to say, whoa, we nominated the wrong guy.
We're going with Ford, but we should have gone with this guy.
This is our guy.
And this, of course, set up Reagan beautifully for the challenge to come in 1980.
And that's really when Reagan resolved to try again.
And this time, of course, his opponent was Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter had beaten Ford in 1976, but Carter was really vulnerable.
His record on both domestic and foreign policy was absolutely horrendous.
Domestically, the economy was in collapse.
You actually had something that economists thought you couldn't have, which is stagflation.
Stagflation is a kind of marriage of two separate words, words that were considered to be contradictory.
Stagnancy, typically accompanied by high unemployment, and inflation.
Now, stagnancy normally means things stand still.
The economy doesn't grow.
Inflation means that things expand.
Prices go up, but on the other hand, you have a kind of expansionist economy driven, if only by, the printing of new money.
But the Keynesian way of thinking, the Keynesian economics that had dominated the field since the 1930s held that there was a kind of inverse relationship between stagnancy.
And inflation, or to put it differently, between unemployment and inflation.
This was called the Phillips Curve, and it basically said you can have one or the other, but not both.
If you have high unemployment, you're going to have low inflation.
If you have low unemployment, you're going to have high inflation.
But high unemployment and high inflation?
That's impossible.
Those two operate kind of like the two, they operate sort of like a seesaw.
When one is up, the other one is down.
And yet, this is exactly what you had.
Call it the worst of all worlds.
Under Keynesianism, you kind of had to make a choice.
You had to get one good thing, but you're going to get one evil thing to go with it.
And so, yes, you want to have a growth economy.
You can have that.
But if you get growth on the one hand and not stagnancy, then the seesaw is going to move to the other side, and so you're going to have to deal with the problems that go with that.
But under Carter, you had the worst.
You had unemployment, you had inflation, and then you had massive problems on the international front.
And Reagan's solution, as he looked across this landscape, Was twofold.
One was tax cuts and the stimulation of economic growth.
And the other was a kind of active foreign policy to stop the Soviet empire in its tracks and also to defeat the Soviet sort of satellites all over the world.
So this was Reagan kind of gathering his ideas.
For the campaign of 1980.
But when I pick up on this topic tomorrow, I want to explain or go into how Reaganism wasn't a simple matter of Reagan-deriving ideas.
Rather, there was a very active intellectual ferment in the 1970s.
It was driven by It was driven by National Review.
It was driven by think tanks.
It was driven by academics in prominent institutions.
Gene Kirkpatrick, for example, was a professor at Georgetown.
Jude Wineski was a writer at the Wall Street Journal.
Arthur Laffer was an economist at, I believe, the University of California at San Diego.
Certainly, it was one of the UC campuses in California.
A lot of different people were generating interesting ideas and proposals, and in some cases, specific policies.
And so all of this, which later came to be known under the umbrella of Reaganism, a lot of this preceded Reagan.
That's the point I'm trying to make, that it developed ideologically before Reagan.
Reagan came along, surveyed the landscape.
Picked up this idea over here and that idea over there.
So it was Reagan who put it together.
It was Reagan who created the kind of new amalgam, but he created it out of existing materials.
But that set of ideas then came to be identified with him.
It kind of took on his name and people would come along later and think it was just...
No, there was a lot of credit to be given elsewhere, and I'll be doing that when I pick up on this tomorrow.
We're looking at the way in which Reaganism preceded Reagan, but ultimately became Reaganism because of its adoption.
Bye, Reagan.
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