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May 21, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:45
CANCERGATE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1088
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Coming up, Joe Biden's cancer is now a big scandal.
I'm going to call it Cancergate.
I'm going to give you the key questions that the Trump administration needs to ask and answer to enforce accountability in this big scandal.
James Comey has a more elaborate story about those shells that he supposedly saw with his wife on the seashore.
I'll go into that.
And I want to ask whether Congresswomen who rush the ICE facility in New Jersey will be the first big Democrat to get prosecuted by the DOJ.
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you Finally, people are starting to take a closer look at those Biden pardons.
All of this, of course, has been ignited Maybe reignited because of the revelation that Biden was gone, demented, by which I mean suffering from dementia.
Now it turns out riddled with cancer.
And so one new kind of disclosure after the other.
And naturally people have started to ask, wait a minute.
Who was running the country?
Wait a minute.
Who was making these important foreign policy decisions?
Going back, for example, to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Who was conducting foreign policy?
Who was making economic decisions?
I'm going to forgive student loans.
Was that actually Biden?
Was that someone else?
Who opened the border?
Trump had a remarkable post where he said, in effect, I don't think it was Biden.
Trump said that, he goes, I've known Biden.
I've known who this guy is.
You can look at his record.
He's not an open borders guy.
In fact, if anything, some of his early rhetoric as a senator seems to suggest the opposite.
So could it be that Biden...
Trump was sidelined to such a degree that other people were making decisions that not only were not the decisions that Biden would have made, but the very opposite of what he would have made.
See, many of us have argued Biden was clearly or obviously acquiescent, that Biden may not have been running the show, but he deferred to other people.
Yeah, you make the decision, tell me what to say, whisper in my ear.
But Trump is going further.
Trump is saying basically, what if this guy...
We're so out of it that essentially the people running the show, the real president, if you will, or presidents of the country, the secret junta, they were like, it doesn't matter if Biden is tough on crime, we'll be soft on crime.
We don't care if he was for restricted borders.
We will open the border.
We are running the country now, guys.
Don't you realize this guy is essentially, let's say mentally speaking, flat on his back.
And he's worried about other things.
In fact, probably the only thing he can focus on right now is counting his money, collecting his 10% for the big guy, looking at what's in the suitcase, making sure that the money trail doesn't lead directly to him.
He's going to be focusing his energy, by the way, as most people in their last days are, in quote, settling their accounts and kind of getting things right within the family.
And so Trump is basically saying this is a kind of treason.
And it's hard to disagree with him because we live in a country where we elect a guy to represent us.
We don't elect another guy to disappear and let 10 other guys, whom we don't even know who they are, run the country in this person's stead.
And the fact that this was kept from us...
By the way, it wasn't kept from the media, contrary to Jake Tapper.
This is basically Jake Tapper's effort, I think, to salvage his own reputation and the reputation of the mainstream media, for whom he is a kind of appropriate spokesman.
So what you have is a propagandist.
It's kind of like Goebbels.
He's realized that everything is falling down.
The Nazis are going to be out of power.
In fact, they are out of power as of now.
So Goebbels' job is to say, hey, listen.
I simply got false information.
The German officers kept sending me all this data.
It wasn't really true, but I didn't know any better.
And this is the masquerade that, I mean, Tapper is basically relying, he's relying, first of all, on the left.
And the book buyers on the left go, oh, well, this is very interesting.
Oh, yes, they really kept us in the dark.
No, we weren't as stupid as everyone is saying.
We were just deceived by, and notice that they're not, We're not pointing any fingers specifically to anyone.
Because if there is a deceit, all right, who are the deceivers?
Let's name them.
Has anybody named Ron Klain the Biden chief of staff?
No.
Has anybody named KJP the press secretary?
Was she lying to us?
No.
Has anybody named Anita Betz?
I mean, there's a whole list of people.
Let's go through them.
Let's go and find out who was operating the auto pen, who was making these decisions, who was giving orders to whom.
I think that the Trump administration needs to get to the bottom of this.
In fact, it's imperative that they do.
They have the power to do it.
They have the DOJ.
They have the investigative agencies to do it.
This is Kash Patel at the FBI.
This is Homeland Security.
This is the Republican Congress.
This is the Republican Senate.
So this is your chance.
We're not talking here about fabricating some kind of political persecution in the way the Biden people did, the previous regime did.
We're talking about a real scandal that needs to be blown wide open.
The doors need to be flung open and all the sordid details brought to light so that the people with the handcuffs and, if necessary, straitjackets.
Can all be on hand when they are needed.
Now, here's a very insightful observation that I pick up from Myla Joy on social media.
She looks at two of the pardons.
One of them is the, I'm looking at it now myself, one is the January 6th pardon, and the other one is the Fauci pardon.
And by the way, I have one of these pardons myself, so I know that this is the authentic pardon document.
It looks exactly like the one I have, sitting right here about 20 feet from where I'm sitting now at home.
And the pardon at the bottom tells you where it was signed, meaning in what location.
And when you look into the small print, it says very clearly that these pardons were signed in, quote, the city of Washington, i.e., Washington, D.C. That's where these pardons were signed.
And so we have a very simple question.
Where was Joe Biden on these dates?
And the answer?
Charleston, South Carolina.
And before getting on his final official flight on Air Force One, and off he went from there to Delaware.
To put it somewhat differently, he did not sign these pardons.
Who signed them?
The Autopen.
Who operated the Autopen?
Someone else.
So, boom.
There you go.
This is now right there on the record, and this is the basis for opening up the part in inquiry.
Who did sign these documents?
So, we have a series of key questions, and I want to go through those.
I'm actually relying here on a comment by the writer Walter Kern.
He goes, only these questions matter.
So, what are they?
Let's go through them.
One.
Who was commanding the military?
If it wasn't Biden, this is by itself a giant scandal.
Two, who was pardoning people?
The question that naturally arises just out of what I said a moment ago.
Number three, who was the acting president?
Remember Obama's notorious comment that he wouldn't mind doing it remotely.
Was he doing it from Calorama?
Was it a group of Obama aides who were getting basically the wink or the instruction from Obama?
They were the ones carrying it out.
There's some sort of a scheme or operation here.
We need to know who it was, what it was.
We need to know the sort of flow chart of it.
Who knew the truth and wasn't saying?
Another key question, because this, again, is a serious...
Betrayal of democracy, and it may even be a serious crime.
I can't cite the statute that would tell you it's a crime, but I'm pretty sure that Pam Bondi can find that statute.
We have a giant accordion of federal statutes, and there's going to be one in there that's going to say, you can't do this.
This is a subversion of our democratic system.
Maybe it's just the treason statute right there, because it's hard to believe.
Let's just say, you know, that a Essentially, the country has been usurped.
Our democracy has been usurped.
Someone else is running the country.
And you don't say that.
Even though you're in power, you're in authority, you don't disclose that.
This is far worse than not disclosing a murder.
It's far worse than not disclosing a burglary.
You are a participant.
You are complicit.
You are aiding and abetting.
And there needs to be the severest consequences for this.
So who was telling what lies and breaking what laws to do this?
And then the final, and I would say the most important question of all, and how will they pay?
Now, I know that you are, as I am, a little tired of saying this and getting no answer to it, because we have so many people, such a trail of abuse.
Such a trail of criminality from Hillary to the Clinton Foundation to Obama to Lois Lerner to Mayorkas.
All these people flouting the law left and right.
And how have they paid?
Well, not at all.
So when I raise the question, how will they pay?
We're used to, they're not going to pay at all.
What about all those Jeffrey Epstein customers?
How have they paid?
Not at all.
Not at all.
So here's Jeffrey Epstein, and I know that we're hearing now, Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in a criminal scheme in which apparently he was running this sex trafficking operation, and there were apparently girls involved, but there were no takers.
There were no customers.
Nobody was, in fact, the...
Participants of this scheme or all those people are being somehow protected.
Protected by whom?
Well, we understand that they were being protected by the Biden administration, but it seems now inevitable that they are at least temporarily being protected by the Trump administration.
Is there any other way to see it?
Trump administration has been in power now for several months.
It's not like they're unaware of the issue.
They're very aware of it.
But they haven't yet done it.
And so my advice to them is that the clock is ticking.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
It's time to fess up.
It's time to give us the names.
It's time to publish the list.
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I have a few more comments to make about Biden, and then I want to move on and talk about...
A couple of other things.
I want to talk about Doge.
And if I have time in this segment, I'll also say a word about Comey.
But let me start with a couple of thoughts about Biden.
Even though the Jake Tapper, Alex Thompson book is itself a cover-up operation, it's covering up the cover-up.
Nevertheless, one of the things that...
Journalists do is they dig up some tidbits.
And I wish I could say that our side was doing this because we have the resources to do it.
Fox News has the resources to do it.
Other people do.
They just don't do it.
They just don't do the work.
And yet, the work is what needs to be done.
We get nonstop punditry from some of these people.
They regurgitate the same stuff.
You can leave the TV on for 10 hours and you keep hearing the same thing for 10 hours.
And I suppose part of it is our own failure.
You know, we're satisfied with this regurgitated stuff.
When if we turn the TV off or we demand it, they would deliver.
Fox News could hire 100 investigative journalists and come up with the kind of stuff that we see Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson come up with.
And here's a little tidbit that gives you an idea that they do find some stuff that's interesting to know.
So apparently, the Biden campaign...
Trump was too afraid to have Biden do an actual town hall because then the fact that there was no there there, the fact that there was no upstairs, the fact that you are dealing with a kind of a vegetable, this would be too obvious.
So what they decided to do is to make campaign commercials out of a staged town hall.
Ha!
This is pretty interesting.
What is a staged town hall?
A staged town hall is where the whole audience is staged.
Basically, it's all actors.
You're going to pretend to be doing a town hall.
You're not really doing a town hall.
The cameras are there.
They obviously can stop and cut and tell you to say this and plant the question.
So the whole thing is rehearsed.
And the idea was to record like two hours of this and find just a few seconds here, a few seconds there, where Biden is on his game and he's...
Responding effectively to a question.
So even though they did the stage town hall, they then looked at the footage and they realized, we can't even pull a few seconds.
This guy is like so far gone that he cannot even perform momentarily.
And so what did they do?
Even though they spent millions of dollars on choreographing all this, they just had to throw it out.
One thing I will say is that even though they threw it out, Nobody in the administration, nobody on the campaign, not one person who was there at that town hall leaked it.
And this really shows that you have, shows really how effective the Democrats are at controlling the message, doesn't it?
Because you would think, if Republicans did this, let's just say that they had, you know, 200 actors in the audience, but these actors are people who've been hired to play a role.
Here comes Trump, you know, nothing he says makes any sense.
People would be like, guess what?
You know, you tell your neighbor, how is that this thing?
And I saw Trump and the guy made no sense and it would get out and some reporter would get a wind of it and it would be in a news article and then they would demand to have the footage of the town hall.
But the fact that none of this happened shows the way that the Democrats are able to control their message.
I was thinking about the 2020 election, 2000 mules.
So think about this.
We are now recognizing that Biden was Essentially a vegetable all the way through.
We're realizing that this guy was riddled with cancer.
We're realizing this guy was not well physically, mentally, in no way.
And yet it's worth noting that he got an historically large number of votes.
And I should add, without campaigning.
So here are some numbers that you can chew on.
Obama, 2008.
69 million votes.
Obama, 2012.
65 million votes.
That means enthusiasm was a little bit less, but still in the same range.
69 million to 65 million.
Hillary, 65 million votes in 2016.
Kamala, 68 million votes.
Notice that the Democratic vote here is within 4 million votes.
It's between a low of 65 and a high of 69. And then you have an anomaly, a standout, something that demands explanation.
Joe Biden, $81 million.
Please.
If that right there isn't prima facie evidence of something deeply wrong, and I will go on to say coordinated massive fraud, I don't know what is.
How can you explain that perhaps the least well, the most disabled, President to set foot in the Oval Office comes in, sweeping, getting more votes than Kamala,
than Hillary, but even Obama in his two elections, the guy who was proclaimed to be first black president, American messiah, and yet, nope, the numero uno by a margin of over 10 million votes is Joe Biden.
I smell a rat.
You smell a rat.
We all smell a rat.
Even the Democrats know that there was a rat, except that they were the rats.
Now, let me turn to some comments about Doge, because I just heard an interview with Elon Musk, and I got the sense that he is a little disappointed.
In fact, I know he's a little disappointed because what he said was that in the midterm election, he's...
Not going to put in the same level of money that he put in in 2024.
And I've got to say, I don't really blame him.
Why?
Well, he said, you know, I've done enough.
But I don't think that's the real reason that he's done enough.
If he was enthusiastic, he would happily do more.
So why is Elon Musk not enthusiastic?
Well, the answer is that here's a guy.
Who is coming up with the specifics?
You want to know where there's waste and fraud?
He's going to tell you and he's got a crack team and they've been telling us every day.
Just go to the Doge website and it spells it out.
And no one has come up and been able to show that these numbers are wrong.
They might argue about what they total up to or what the total savings is going to be.
Here's the most recent example.
This just comes from one agency.
The National Endowment for the Humanities.
Doge is talking about the fact that you had a $350,000 grant for interactive gay travel guides.
$350,000 to create a Spanish version of a gay website.
$247,000 to digitize stories of transgender adults in the Northwest.
$60,000 to research how LGBTQ cartoonists Functioned in the 1980s and 90s.
And it goes on and on and on.
This is basically what Doge is putting out there.
And Doge is, in fact, canceling several of these grants.
But here's the point.
This is all very temporary.
You can cancel it because you're part of the administration.
But if another administration comes in, they can restore all this money.
So the only way to really cancel these grants is for Congress not to allocate the money or to put it differently.
For Congress to institutionalize the doge cuts.
Remember, none of these doge cuts, when you go down the list, none of it is even remotely defensible, and certainly not defensible by any Republican.
Republicans are never going to say, well, you know what?
I really think it's a good idea to spend $350,000 to create a Spanish version of a gay website.
I don't think there's a Republican in the country that would say that.
And yet, why hasn't the Congress moved?
I mean, I think that's the question Elon Musk is asking himself, and there's really no answer to that question, because really what it shows is not just the slow pace, but the fact that our Congress does not get these things done, even when it's in the interest of the Republicans to do it.
I mean, think about it.
The Republican congressmen and senators know, if I do this, if I deliver, I'm going to be on the right side of Elon Musk.
When I go up for re-election, this guy is going to be right behind me because I stood behind him or at least behind the public-spirited effort that Elon Musk led in the name of Doge.
But guess what?
I'm not going to do that because, number one, I...
I want to protect my own sinecure.
I want to keep boondoggles going for my constituents.
And so if we start down this cutting road and I'm cutting somebody else's programs, they're going to want to cut my programs.
So I would rather just keep this spending bandwagon going.
I would rather send the bandwagon off the cliff.
Recognize that at some point the country itself will go off the cliff, but hopefully I won't be around when that happens.
This is the shameful, irresponsible attitude of too many people, including some people on our side.
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Was on a late night show.
In fact, looking at it right here, it's Colbert.
And Comey is explaining what happened with these numbers, this numbered pattern of seashells that he posted on Instagram, subsequently deleted, had a conversation with the Secret Service.
He may or may not be charged over this.
I think part of his campaign is to kind of...
Make sure that he's not charged by giving an innocent explanation.
And I have to say that this was a case where you see Colbert, who is, by the way, not a dumb guy, but he is a guy who views his job as covering for Comey.
So he's nodding receptively as Comey puts out this utterly preposterous story.
So let me summarize Comey's story with a couple of quotes.
Here's Comey.
My wife and I were walking on the beach and we saw those numbers in shells.
Right there, there's something that's sort of questionable, which is to say, is it really believable that Comey and his wife are walking on the beach and they see these patterned shells right in front of them?
Most likely, Comey did it himself.
That's what I think is more likely.
But let's accept Comey's explanation for now.
He's walking with his wife and they see these shelves.
Comey says, they puzzle over the shelves, like, what does that mean?
And according to Comey, his wife says, quote, you know what I think?
It's a reference to restaurants.
Look at this.
Look at this idiocy.
The wife apparently says, in a restaurant, when you leave the restaurant or you decamp for another restaurant, People use the phrase 86. And so presumably the wife is saying that this message, which neither of them can decipher, must be a reference to restaurants.
There's no way for the wife to even think that if she didn't separate the first two numbers, 86, from the last two numbers.
In other words, when you see a four-digit number, You don't automatically break it up into two, right?
I see 1793.
I don't think to myself, you know, 17 probably refers to my life when I was 17 years old.
No, that's not the number.
The number is 1793.
So similarly, unless the wife knew that 47 refers to Trump, she would not even ask herself the question, what does 86 refer to?
So right away, Comey's story is unbelievable, which is to say it can't be believed.
And then Comey goes on to say that he says, no, it's not a restaurant reference, it's a political message.
Now, for that, Comey would have to know that 47 is President Trump, and he would also have to know that 86 has to do with something to do with Trump, and in this case, getting rid of Trump.
Outwit Trump.
Move Trump out of there.
If Comey didn't know those two things, then it makes no sense that he would recognize this as a political message.
It's not a political message any more than any other four numbers are a political message.
And then, according to Comey, quote, she said, you should Instagram that, and he goes, okay.
So, is this really credible?
The wife says it's a reference to restaurants.
That's stupid.
Comey says it's a political message, but neither of them know what the political message says, and the wife says Instagram it anyway.
She's telling the former director of the FBI that a message that she knows, if she's right about, you know, leaving the restaurant, then she knows 86 means get rid of.
Let's just say she doesn't know what 47 is.
I think she obviously does.
But she's telling Comey, we don't know what this means, but put her on your Instagram anyway.
And Hukomi goes, yeah, I'll do that.
So this right here is an absolutely concocted tale.
I don't think it should be taken seriously for one minute.
It is a bald-faced, some people say a bold-faced lie, but that's actually wrong.
It's a bald, B-A-L-D, it's a bald-faced lie.
All right, I want to talk now a little bit about the arrest of Congresswoman She's been charged in New Jersey with charging that ICE facility, the immigration facility.
Look at the video for yourself.
You probably already have.
She's pushing.
She's shoving.
She's kind of like muscling her way in there.
She's shouting at the ICE officials and the other law enforcement officials.
She uses obscenities, the MF word.
And all of this is on tape.
There it is.
And now I see a completely different picture of a much kind of calmer, more sober Congresswoman McIver.
I was merely performing my oversight duties.
Yes, things got a little bit heated, but she gives the impression she didn't get heated.
ICE got heated.
ICE were the people who caused the problems.
They were the ones who committed the aggression on her.
She didn't commit any aggression for her own part.
And yet the video says the exact opposite.
The video shows that she is trying to force her way into the facility.
Now, while Congresswoman McIver seems to say that she's merely performing oversight responsibilities, the question is, what are your powers of oversight?
Yes, you have the right to show up to a facility, but...
You have the right to show up to a facility to demand that you be let in.
If they don't let you in, you can go back and take it up with the house.
You can look to see what remedies are available to you.
You need to communicate with the head of ICE and with the head of Homeland Security, which is Kristi Noem.
Hey, I have oversight responsibilities.
I showed up yesterday.
I wasn't allowed in.
None of this occurs.
Basically what she's saying is part of my oversight responsibility is the ability against the objections of ICE to muscle my way into the facility.
And that is clearly absurd.
Because that means that if this were allowed to go unchecked, she would be setting a precedent for anyone.
Any member of Congress can show up, fight their way into a facility for which they have oversight responsibility, overpower or push past the authorities.
And this is nonsense.
This is clearly not allowed.
This is clearly against the law.
And if you think that the specter of other people doing this is somehow fanciful, it's imaginary, you know, this was a one-off incident, Dimesh.
She got a little carried away, but this is not going to become a pattern.
Here is Eric Swalwell commenting on the incident.
Saying as follows, quote, I promise you there's going to be more unnoticed visits.
Now by unnoticed here, he doesn't mean unnoticed in the conventional sense, which is nobody takes notice or that nobody sees it.
By unnoticed, he means by not giving official advance notice.
So congressmen typically, when they want to inspect a facility, they give you notice.
Hey, I'm going to be showing up at 10 a.m.
I'm giving you notice.
Please be there so you can usher me in.
So he says, I promise you there's going to be more unnoticed visits by my colleagues where they show up and they better be let in.
In fact, he says that if they aren't let in, he says the Democrats will, quote, go one rung higher.
So think about this.
Any reservations, any qualms, any doubts about this prosecution, they should be laid to rest because prosecutions are...
To punish the offender, but they are also to deter other people committing the offense.
And here's Eric Swalwell basically saying, we're going to up the ante.
We're going to be showing up.
We're going to be doing more of this.
She is basically setting an example and a precedent for us.
And in fact, not only are we going to do it, we're going to go further.
We're going to, as he puts it, go one rung higher.
And so I think that all of this now becomes part of the prosecution.
In the prosecution, you tell the jury, listen, she was setting a pattern that other Democrats were promising to take up.
It's kind of like saying she got away with robbing the bank.
Guess what?
We're going to be showing up and robbing the bank as well.
And that's part of our oversight responsibility.
No, it's your responsibility to oversee things, but that has to follow certain guidelines and procedures.
You don't just get to fight your way into the bank because you are a congressman.
And that is what clearly happened here.
So I'm very glad.
Well, first of all, I think it's overdue for leading Democrats to have indictments, obviously not made-up indictments, but indictments based upon real lawbreaking that's occurred, and the lawbreaking clearly has occurred here.
So this is an excellent indictment, and kudos to Alina Haba.
Now, by the way, she dropped the charge against the other guy, which was the mayor.
The local mayor.
And he had a trespassing charge.
And I think Alina Haba was trying to communicate the idea that, look, I'm not just trying to go after everybody because they're elected officials.
They're on the other side.
I'm not just trying to do payback on the Democrats.
In my prosecutorial discretion, I'm going to recognize that what the mayor did...
He was in the wrong place.
He was, in fact, trespassing.
But I'm going to let that go.
But what I'm not going to let go is trying to use physical force against law enforcement and against ICE.
That's what was done by Representative McIver, and that needs to be held accountable to law.
I'm continuing my discussion of my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
We're somewhat in the early section of the book where we're talking about the Reagan-Carter campaign.
And I mentioned yesterday that the Carter people were delighted that Reagan was the nominee.
By the way, very similar to, if you fast forward to 2016, the Hillary people were really happy that Trump was the nominee.
He's such a buffoon.
We'll defeat him easily.
Pretty much the same attitude on the part of the Carter people.
They knew that their record on both domestic and foreign policy, not good, but they thought, that's okay, because we've got this washed-up actor.
We can make him the issue.
Now, the media, of course, just like today, I think the media has reached a new level of deceptiveness and viciousness, but they were pretty deceptive and vicious before.
So it's not as if the media has undergone some massive transformation.
They have just become more seasoned at what they do.
Their level of bias has just reached more extreme levels.
Their dishonesty meter has gone up.
But it was very evident in the early days, going back to 1980.
So this problem with the press, I think, really goes back to Watergate days.
But it was very evident in 1980.
So the focus on Reagan was that he was a kind of a gaffmeister.
His presidency, or at least his attempt to become president, was marked by stumbles.
And of course they were like, of course, that's because he's an actor.
He hasn't been given a script, so obviously he doesn't know what to say.
And they would constantly try to fact-check Reagan.
Sound familiar?
They didn't call it fact-checking then, but they would talk about a gaffe, and a gaffe here reflected not sort of a Biden-esque rhetorical stumble or just a sentence that means nothing.
They were saying that Reagan was essentially putting out false information.
One of the famous examples had to do with Reagan's stump speech.
In which he would talk about a kind of like a welfare queen from Chicago.
Reagan said, oh yeah, she had like, you know, 75 fake names and she had 25 fake addresses and she had 10 social security cards and she made a tax-free income of like $150,000 a year.
Just think $150,000 a year in today's money, probably $300,000 a year.
So this was Reagan's kind of staple anecdote.
And the media would be like, no, this is not true.
We found this woman in Chicago, and she doesn't have 75 fake names.
She only has 11 fake names, and she doesn't have 20 fake IDs.
She only has 7 fake IDs, and she didn't build the city out of $150,000 a year.
It was actually only $82,000 a year.
So two things are going on here.
One, they were kind of busting Reagan on his exaggerations.
And Reagan was, in fact, exaggerating.
Reagan had a tendency to take a story.
And it's not that Reagan was lying.
It's that Reagan would take a story.
People would respond.
They would laugh.
They would clap.
The next time he told a story, he would get a little better.
I guess we all do this to some degree.
We pat on a little bit for effect.
Reagan would do the same thing.
And by the time he ended up, the woman had like 75 fake names when Reagan really started out at a much, much lower number.
But the interesting thing I want to point out is that attacking Reagan in this way, she didn't have 75 fake names, you know, only 30. People were like, well, 30 is still a lot.
She didn't build the city of $150,000.
It was only, you know, a half of that.
Well, people are like, that's a lot of money to be building the city out of.
So in a way, these...
And, of course, the topic that Reagan was on is a topic we're all very familiar with right now.
It's the doge topic, isn't it?
It's the topic of waste and fraud.
It's the topic about people who are playing the system.
Now, Reagan really wasn't on to the issue of how the politicians and the bureaucrats from the inside played the system.
Reagan was talking really about outsiders playing the system.
By juggling the criteria for their entitlements and essentially electing not to work, or to put it differently, to work at bilking the government, to work at being a thief.
Now, Reagan was also ridiculed by the media for saying the U.S. economy was in a depression.
Now, let's remember, in 1980, the economy was in bad shape.
But it was in bad shape.
Because of inflation.
At the same time, it did have a very stagnant economy.
The country wasn't strictly in a depression, but Reagan was very clever in being able to say that this is really partly a matter of perspective, of where you're coming from.
So here's Jimmy Carter.
This shows how little he knows, meaning...
Reagan's a buffoon.
There aren't any economists who are calling it a depression.
Reagan's calling it a depression.
Reagan's obviously wrong.
And Carter goes, he doesn't understand the difference between a recession and a depression.
And this is when Reagan gets off one of his trademark lines, really one of the best lines of his career, in my opinion.
Here we go.
A recession is when your neighbor loses his job.
A depression is when you lose your job.
And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job.
I mean, what a crushing and ingenious formulation.
I don't know if this was original with Reagan.
In other words, if somebody gave it to him or if he came up with it.
But he's entirely capable of having come up with it.
In fact, it's very congruent with Reagan's style of wit.
And this became one of the, no surprise, best received lines on the...
Now, it became really clear that Reagan was sort of striking a chord with some middle-class Democrats, some working-class Democrats.
Again, it's a preview of the Trump coalition that would come much, much later, a whole generation later.
But Reagan, too, was stamping.
Disenchanted Democrats.
Some people call them blue dog Democrats, moderate Democrats, Democrats who are unhappy with the trajectory of the Democratic Party.
And the Jimmy Carter people were getting alarmed because Reagan was, as I say, resonating with beyond the right-wing base, not only across the board with Republicans, but tapping into independents and Democrats.
And so the Democrats pulled their card, their best card.
By the way, ultimately Reagan took away this card.
So today when we talk about the Democrats' best card, it's usually like the race card or the tyranny card, the Nazi card.
But in Reagan's time, there was a different card.
And this was the Reagan is going to blow up the world card.
Reagan is a warmonger card.
Reagan is going to make America unsafe card.
And by the way, this card had already been tried.
It had already been pulled.
It had been used before.
By whom?
Well, by Lyndon Johnson against Goldwater.
Basically, Lyndon Johnson had shown an infamous campaign commercial of a little girl playing with flowers.
Daisies, I believe it was.
It was called the Daisy Commercial.
And I guess it was because, I don't remember if it was because the little girl was named Daisy or if she was playing with daisies.
In any event, she's playing with these little flowers and then kaboom!
She's blown to smithereens.
The screen goes blank.
The world blows up.
And the idea was, this is what Goldwater's going to do to you.
You can't trust him.
He's an extremist.
He's a fanatic.
He will have itchy fingers on the nuclear codes.
And it worked!
Lyndon Johnson won that election in a landslide.
And so the Carter people were like, you know what?
Let's try this on Reagan.
He's an extremist.
He's outside the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Let's accuse him of blowing up the world.
But the problem with this strategy was really very simple.
And that is, Reagan wasn't Goldwater.
See, Goldwater was this kind of hard-edged guy.
A guy who was in many ways deeply principled.
I don't mean to really be running down Goldwater, but I'm just saying that politically Goldwater looked like the kind of guy who probably would have a severe approach to things.
And so the charge of extremism would work on Goldwater because of his personality.
The stiff jaw, the, I think I mentioned to you the lie, every good American should kick Jerry Falwell in the ass.
This is Goldwater.
This is his tone.
This is not Reagan's tone.
Reagan would never say that.
And Reagan's tone was whimsical.
Reagan's tone was kind of likable.
One of Reagan's speechwriters, a guy named Landon Parvin, he said this.
He said, look, at the beginning, when the Democrats began to accuse Reagan, by the way, amplified by the media, of being an extremist, he goes, people sort of believed it because they were reading.
They were reading in the Boston Globe.
They were reading in the New York Times.
But then they turn on the TV.
They saw Reagan.
They kind of saw this guy who was like chuckling, cocking his head.
There you go again.
This is kind of like Reagan's trademark line.
And notice that there you go again conveys a certain forbearance.
It's like, okay, here we go.
That's the attitude.
That's not the attitude of some guy who's like...
Itching to blow up the world or itching to hit the nuclear button.
So people began to realize that this accusation being thrown at Reagan didn't make sense, didn't really stand up.
And so Reagan did it.
Once you've removed the obstacles, once people realized this guy's going to be okay, Reagan was swept across the finish line.
And in fact, there was a last minute, and by last minute I mean in the last 48 hours, I believe Reagan won an additional 10 states.
I was there at the time.
I was not following it all that closely.
I was obviously just in the country for a year.
But what you saw was that Reagan started to push ahead.
Had the election been held two days earlier, Reagan would have won, but he probably would have won 27 states to 23, something like that.
Instead, Reagan won 44 states.
Carter only won six.
I mean, think about that.
Think of how difficult that would be to pull off today.
People talk about the fact that Trump won decisively, but not even close to Reagan.
Trump did not win 44 states.
Trump happened to win all the swing states.
But even if you add all the swing states in, it's still a relatively narrow victory.
By and large, the blue states were blue.
By and large, the red states were red.
But in 1980, pretty much the whole country looked red, with the exception of six states.
And then if you fast forward to 1984, just to get ahead of our story a little bit, Reagan won 49 states.
Think about that again.
Mondale won one state, his home state of Minnesota.
And I think that those kinds of results would be close to impossible to achieve.
In fact, virtually impossible to achieve today.
The writer Lou Cannon, who wrote for the Washington Post, published a book shortly after Reagan's election.
It was called Role of a Lifetime.
And Cannon's idea was Reagan now gets to play the role he's always wanted to play.
So this is the media there.
They can't give up on the actor theme.
Reagan is now playing his role of a lifetime.
This kind of thing passed for intelligent commentary in those days.
And I think looking back on it, we have to realize that guys like Lou Cannon...
Even though they were thought to be Solomonic sages, smart guys, they were actually complete idiots.
They were basically no better than Jim Acosta or Chris Silliza of CNN, any of these clowns that you see today.
The difference, of course, was that a guy like Luke Cannon had a little better air about him.
He'd twiddle his mustache, he would scratch his head, he appeared to be a little bit more deliberative or reflective.
But if you look back at the content of what these people were writing, it was lightweight, it was garbage, it had no insight at all.
Imagine, you know...
This guy is finally, the movie actor is now in the Oval Office.
We can expect him to be playing the role of a lifetime.
This is supposed to be like witty, intelligent, thoughtful commentary.
And in fact, it was unbelievably short-sighted and vacuous.
But even though this was the view of Reagan, in some ways it was a view that greatly...
Miss Reagan, greatly underestimated Reagan, greatly elided over the fact that this guy, for all his whimsical exterior, was coming in to make some big changes.
This was a guy you couldn't buy.
He was not for sale.
He was not seduced by the temptations of power or prestige.
I'm now reading from the book.
He was a lone warrior who was willing to withstand the disapproval of the intellectuals, the media, and even his own aides.
He was a shrewd gambler who was ready to take risks to achieve his objectives.
So these were the qualities underappreciated at the time that Reagan brought with himself, brought in, took with him to the White House.
In January of 1981, when Reagan was inaugurated.
So, next time, when we pick up on this theme, and it's going to be not tomorrow, but next Tuesday, the reason being Memorial Day, so no podcast on Monday, but I'll pick up the Reagan theme on Tuesday.
Now, I have a normal podcast Thursday and Friday.
I'm just not going to be covering...
The Reagan book, I'm going to pick it up next week with Chapter 4, which is called A Walk on the Supply Side.
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