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May 27, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
58:30
ELON’S EXIT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1091
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Coming up, Elon Musk is exiting, or at least backing away from politics, and that's indicative, I want to argue, of a crisis in the Republican Party and also in the country.
I want to show why Harvard is on a path to ruin, and it's one largely of its own making.
And a guy named Gavin McClemon, an expert on South Africa, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about the situation involving the white farmers in South Africa.
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I'm going to talk in this opening segment about Elon Musk's exit from Doge and his frustration with government that is pushing him in a completely new direction.
And the significance of that, not so much for Elon Musk as for the Republican Party and for the country.
But before I do that, I want to mention a couple of important things that have been going on.
One is that a whole bunch of people, some 100 staffers at the National Security Council, fired, removed, evicted from their offices.
Great news.
In a functional society, you would go, wait a minute, these are national security officials.
We have to feel really nervous because they are the ones who help us to be safe.
But you can be fairly sure that these national security officials don't do that.
They don't help us to be safe.
They're actually going after people like you and me.
They're going after people like Trump.
These are people who try to manipulate the government.
They are part of the deep state, the police state, if you will.
And evicting them, eradicating them, clearing them out is part of what So there's a little bit of freak out on the left, but we should welcome that, because their hysteria is a confirmation that Trump is doing exactly what he pledged to do.
Now, let's turn to Elon Musk, because Musk has basically said, Or to use another quotation from a reply that he did on X to another guy, quote, did my best.
So what does that mean?
What this is really saying is that Musk tried, but alas, he feels it's not happening.
Why is it not happening?
Not because Doge hasn't cut USAID, not because Doge hasn't stopped a whole bunch of other abuses from going on.
But because A, Doge ultimately can only act now and then Doge basically goes into a kind of permanent advisory role in which other people are going to have to take action.
Not only the executive branch, but of course, ideally Congress.
And you notice there were so many Republican congressmen who loved to meet Elon Musk and be seen with Elon Musk and photographed with Elon Musk and Doge is so important to what we're doing.
And yet when it comes to essentially legislating these Doge cuts, institutionalizing them, making them permanent so that they can't be easily undone, even in a subsequent Democratic administration.
We have seen, at least up to now, no action on that front.
Now, we should not be too impatient.
No action doesn't mean that no action is ever coming, because arguably, I'm sure if we sat down here, Mike Johnson and John Thune, they would be like, guys, we are in the throes of working this one big beautiful bill.
This bill contains so much, and in fact, quite honestly, a lot of very good stuff in the bill.
Even though it must be said that this bill is not a break, it's not a real stoppage of excessive federal spending, but there are a lot of good things in the bill, and it does reflect our priorities, not the left's priorities.
So I think on balance, I think it is a good thing.
Let's get it through.
And maybe after that, it's next up, you know, doge.
So I'm not giving up on the idea of Congress taking any action, but it's clearly very hard to do.
And clearly there is...
And the resistance is coming, of course, uniformly from the Democratic Party.
If the Democratic Party had its way, they would just spend the country into complete bankruptcy.
And then they would shriek and claim that when things collapse, they would say that the millionaires and billionaires now have to bail everybody out.
So this is their playbook.
It is essentially a playbook of ruin.
But the sad news is that the other party, Our party, the party that's there to stop them, the party that's the party that's supposed to make things right, the team that's supposed to make America great again, also has its own problems.
And that is that, by and large, in the Republican Party, the principle is.
Now, there are some principled budget cutters.
And some of those guys, by the way, are the people who oppose the one big beautiful bill.
Trump kind of came down on them hard.
Trump basically set up Thomas Massey like, this guy doesn't even understand government, needs to be voted out of office.
I think what Trump was saying is that there's a lack of kind of pragmatism about Massey.
But there's also good things about guys like Massey and Chip Roy and some of the other guys.
And that is that they genuinely are trying to reduce the size of spending.
And I've got farmers in my district.
I want to continue farm subsidies.
I've got construction workers in my district.
I want to continue to fund these lavish construction projects.
And on and on it goes.
I want tax breaks and business advantages for people in my district.
And so, ultimately, pork Become somebody else's spending, but never your own.
Never the spending that you think is necessary, not only for your district, but also to maintain your own political support.
So we have a problem here, and in some ways, it is a problem with the Republican Party.
I would argue it's also a problem with democracy itself.
And I say this because, once again, if you sit down the traditional Republican, I'm not talking about the hardcore Republican.
I'm not even talking about Brandon Gill.
I'm talking about the typical Republican who is conservative, but not part of any kind of rebel camp.
and you sit that guy down and you say, "Well, why aren't you on board with cutting spending across the board dramatically, bringing our expenditures into line with our revenues?" That guy would say something like, "Because my constituents demand it.
They have gotten used to it.
Their lifestyles depend on it.
Taking it away is so much more difficult.
difficult, they're not giving it to them in the first place, and if I do it, they will take out their rage on me.
They will vote for another Republican who's not going to do it, or they will defect, particularly in the so-called purple districts, and go for a Democrat, and then we Republicans lose our seat and we lose our narrow majority.
And I say a rich guy because, after all, we are collectively an affluent society.
No one can really deny that.
But we're like a rich guy who is spending himself into oblivion, into ruin, into a very bad situation in which there are only going to be bad options.
The Trump administration appears to have shifted its focus and is now focusing on economic growth.
And I'll talk more about this in subsequent days, but the idea here is that an economy which grows at typically 1.5%, 2%, if that economy can grow at 4% or 5%, then it is true.
We have a bigger pie.
Because we have a bigger pie, tax revenues become a bigger slice.
Ultimately, that makes it easier to balance the budget, to perhaps even over time pay down the debt, although at this point paying down the debt is not even an issue because we are adding more debt.
So all of this, I think, is bigger than Elon Musk.
Elon Musk's retreat...
I'm going to focus on things that help to grow the economy.
I'm going to work on AI.
I'm going to work on Tesla.
I'm going to work on all my different companies, the Boring Company and SpaceX.
And I'm going to try to facilitate a boom in U.S. economic growth, U.S. economic competitiveness.
And hopefully those things will solve the problem in a way that Doge, which The administration has their sleeves rolled up in streamlining.
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The Trump administration's beatdown of Harvard University.
And I must say, the aggression of it has surprised me.
I did not expect Trump to open up a battle like this, but watching it, it is awesome.
It is awesome because Harvard is essentially a machine, a factory of ideological propaganda, and Harvard does need to be brought to its knees.
This will have the great benefit of taming.
this out-of-control, rogue, left-wing, anti-Trump institution.
An institution, by the way, And by that I mean the one-sidedness of it.
The 95% of Harvard people all vote the same way.
It gives you an idea of the regime propaganda that is being pushed at Harvard University.
Now, I agree that there's regime propaganda being pushed also in North Korea and also in China.
I saw this morning that somebody was saying, well, you know, we need to have a strong Harvard to compete with the Chinese universities.
And I'm thinking to myself, you know what?
The Chinese universities are actually in some ways in a better position than Harvard because even though they indulge in regime propaganda, they're being forced to do so by the government.
The Chinese Communist Party, the CCP.
No one is putting that pressure on Harvard, but still they tow a party line.
They're a little bit like the media.
They act like a propaganda machine, even though the state is not pushing them in that way.
The battle with Harvard began with the Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, basically saying, Harvard, I'm not quoting her, Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government since none will be provided.
She's referring here mainly to the Department of Education.
But then came Kristi Noem, boom, with a second salvo, and that is that Harvard is not going to be able to enroll foreign students, not only new foreign students.
Harvard is going to have to transfer out its existing foreign student population because they're not going to have their visas renewed.
Now, this is an escalation, but it's based on the idea that Harvard has become, as I say, an engine of propaganda.
But not only that, you can be an engine of propaganda, but Harvard is also violating federal laws, notably the laws against discrimination.
The laws against racial profiling, racial preferences, these have become widely institutionalized at Harvard.
So Harvard interprets these laws as you can discriminate in favor of minorities, but ultimately it's perfectly fine to discriminate against whites.
And that's allowed.
Well, the Supreme Court has said that's not allowed, and the Trump administration is basically now enforcing this.
The point that Kristi Noem also makes is that even if Harvard wants to do propaganda, do it on your own time.
Do it on your own dollar.
You've got a $53 billion endowment.
Spend that down.
You love foreign students?
Give them scholarships.
Pay for them to attend Harvard if you want to.
Harvard, of course, is doubling down.
Here is a Harvard posting from a couple of days ago.
Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.
And that alone is an interesting statement.
Why is that really true?
I mean, if you go back even to the, let's say, the year 2000, Harvard had foreign students, but they were something like 7% or 8% of the population.
Now they're about 25% to 30% of the population.
So what is it that requires a 25% to 30% foreign student population to, quote, be Harvard?
What is it about Harvard that is so different now that it mandates this high, you may say, well, Foreign students bring money.
Yeah, but again, Harvard is sitting on this giant endowment in which it doesn't really need the Chinese money or the Qatari money or the foreign student money.
Harvard can rely on its own money, which is to say on the accumulated gains, revenues from its own alumni and then, of course, the successful investments of those.
Of those revenues.
To get an idea of how ideological Harvard still is, I'm looking here at a page in the Harvard yearbook.
And look, the Harvard yearbook is not supposed to be that political.
It's kind of a record of events.
And yet, I just looked up October 7th.
And here we go.
October 7th, quote, war breaks out in Gaza.
No mention of the Hamas raid.
No mention of Israel being attacked.
War breaks out in Gaza.
This is the way that they treat these events, and this gives you an idea of their rotted mindset.
Here is the writer James Surowiecki.
Can we just let private institutions admit and hire the people they want to admit and hire instead of having the government dictate to them who they have to accept?
My answer to it is, yes, we can.
As long as we don't have civil rights laws.
But we've had civil rights laws since the 1950s and 1960s, and the civil rights laws notably do not merely restrict government discrimination, but also private discrimination.
They have been used constantly.
So the Trump administration is not doing something new.
It's doing the same thing.
The only difference is that it's enforcing discrimination against whites with the same vigor that earlier democratic administrations have enforced discrimination against blacks.
Now, Harvard is looking to other universities to help back it up, and other universities are giving lip service.
Oh, yes, don't take on Harvard.
Oh, Harvard's being mistreated.
But I think this is a very interesting game here, because we saw it also with the law firms.
When Trump targeted certain law firms and said, listen, you're going to have to bend the knee, other law firms were like, we stand with Paul Weiss, and we stand with Skad and Arps, and we stand with these firms.
But quietly, they were poaching the clients.
I think the same thing is going to happen with universities because Harvard is in trouble and other elite universities are going to realize we should be able to attract a lot of these Harvard scholars, pull them over to our campuses.
So Harvard ultimately, I think, is going to be rated by other schools looking to, in a sense, peel off Harvard talent that is not going to get federal grants at Harvard, but might indeed qualify for federal grants at UVA or at some other institution, maybe even some of the state institutions.
Who's going to win this fight between Trump and Harvard?
I think the answer is Trump.
Now, a federal judge, Alison Burroughs, has blocked the Trump administration revoking Harvard's Foreign student certification.
And she has said the federal government can't do that.
But the Trump administration is going to appeal.
And so let's look at this for a moment from the point of view of a foreign student.
You're a foreign student at Harvard.
A judge has said that for now you can stay.
But another judge might well say tomorrow or next week or two months from now.
You got to leave.
The government is within its rights to make this restriction.
Harvard is not owed anything by the federal government.
The federal government has the power to withhold who gets to come in and outside the country.
And that's going to be the end of it.
You're going to have to transfer then.
So what I'm getting at is if you're a foreign student now, even though Harvard is assuring you everything's okay, we're standing up and fighting, we're taking on these fascists.
Nevertheless, you're going to think, well, listen, my situation here is very uncomfortable.
I do rely on the government to renew my visa.
Why don't I transfer to MIT?
Why don't I go to Caltech?
Why don't I go to Berkeley?
Why don't I go to Stanford?
So I think Harvard is already going to feel the effect.
Of the Trump pressure.
The pressure is coming from many different directions.
Just today, Trump sent a letter to the federal agencies.
This is not Homeland Security.
This is not the Department of Education.
This is all the other agencies basically saying, stop giving money to Harvard.
So there's an across-the-agency ban on giving money to Harvard.
Harvard is basically losing federal funding.
And so Harvard can fight and scream and yell all at once.
But I think ultimately the chickens are coming home to roost, and I say that's a good thing.
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D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Guys, the issue of South Africa is very prominent in the news these days, and I have a guest who can help illuminate what is going on there.
Gavin McClemon is a veteran of the Rhodesian Bush War.
He's an experienced diplomatic professional.
With 15 years of distinguished service at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. This is a guy who knows this topic inside or out.
In fact, a moment ago, he's like, how deep do you want to go into this, Tinesh?
And I'm like, well, let's go as deep as we can, and we'll have you back to talk more, because this is, I think, a very rich and interesting topic.
Gavin, welcome.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Let's begin with this question about what is happening in South Africa.
The Trump administration used the term genocide.
As you know, the South African prime minister was in town.
He essentially said, oh no, there's no such thing going on in South Africa.
And so there appears to be a little bit of an impasse as to the degree of abuses of human rights, the magnitude of racial discrimination, the degree to which these farmers are being targeted.
How can we begin by throwing some clarity on what the situation is like on the ground in South Africa today?
is look at the fact that there are 11 official languages in South Africa.
And when we look at the 11 languages, we go to the Cape Province, Cape Town area, and that in 1652 was where Jan van Riebeek landed.
And they established a fortress of some sort where basically it was a go-between for the ships.
It was a hang of a difficult area to traverse.
So they needed a shipping port for repairs, for resupply, etc.
And at that time, the only folks they met were the Khoisan.
And the Khoisan have now had a problem claiming their original indigenous rights to the Cape province because...
He was the African National Congress Youth League and he now has EFF, Economic Freedom Fighters.
His claim is that they were there first, the blacks were in Africa first, in South Africa first, and therefore the whites, the boers, the farmers need to leave.
However, When we look into this political realm, we see that the koisan who oppose Julius Malema, the one who is sprouting forth with the most rhetoric at the moment, when they oppose him, when they oppose the ANC, for some reason or other, they are not heard, and they are axed from the conversation, and sometimes permanently missing, i.e.
to the grave.
So therein lies a negotiating problem, really.
How do you negotiate when you don't have the Khoisan and the African National Congress seeing eye to eye?
And then saying that the Boer needs to leave, whereas really the Boer, the word Boer means farmer, they are producing all the food and the workers on the farms, there are a tremendous amount.
Of black people working on the farms.
If you want economic freedom, you want to keep those farms alive.
A, you're producing food for the country, and B, you're employing a lot of people who are very happy working on those farms.
So therein lies a straightforward issue.
I was just going to zoom into this principle that if you don't show up to the Oasis first, you and your group of Bedouins has to leave because there was another guy here before I mean, it would mean that all the white people in America need to leave because the American Indians were here first.
All the Australians need to clear out of Australia because the Aborigines were there first.
Most of the people in India have to leave because only some of the indigenous Hindus were there first.
So what I'm getting at is right.
Even that principle that the Dutch need to clear out and go back to Holland or wherever, even though they've been here for 400 years because there was a group of black people here first.
Am I not right in learning that some of the other black people, the Bantu and so on, migrated to South Africa from other parts of Africa?
And, you know, for the Western viewer, it's like, well, it's just black people over there.
But no, some of these other people are not indigenous to South Africa either.
They came from someplace else, the same as the Dutch.
And to clarify that, we're looking at a gap in the years of 120.
It was 120 years before the Bantu, who were warring tribes themselves.
And we have to think of the equator coming down to the Tropic of Capricorn.
So we think of a southerly migration from Central Africa.
And we see the arrival of whites at the very tip of Africa.
And 120 years later, they happened to meet each other for the first time, apart from the Khoisan who were there.
So, yes, we have that as an issue.
And then we have to look really further at there is at the time of the referendum, there was and there still is quite a strong issue.
And the Zulus are 25% of the population.
And we're looking at, on the white population, I would say about 60% of the Boer farmer and the other 40% are British.
Ultimately, everybody has to come to the table.
If the Boer and the Zulu actually were...
We need to calm down.
We can't just genocide all the farmers and expect the country to survive.
Then perhaps we would have a more even playing table.
Somehow or other, this rhetoric that a white knight killed a boer has to...
There has to be a discussion in the media in South Africa.
There has to be a willingness on the side of the African National Congress to say, you know what?
Our country is worth more than this.
We don't want to have this violence.
We're going to take all the tourism out of the country.
We're going to take all the farming production out of the country.
And we're going to start going into a bit of a rabble.
We're going to lose our government strength.
Let's see what we can do.
It has to get to that point.
Let me try out a sort of diagnosis on you and have you respond to this, if you will.
I remember when apartheid first collapsed, Mandela came in.
Many of us who were in our youth very critical of the ANC, we saw it as infiltrated with communists and left-wingers and bad guys, and nevertheless tempered our criticism, pulled back, because we thought, okay, well, here's this guy Mandela, and he appears to be a unifying force, a healing force.
He's not calling for vendettas or vengeance.
But it almost looks like the moment that Mandela himself faded from the scene, the kind of original impulses of the ANC came back to the forefront, and South Africa began to degenerate, if you will.
Now, the Western media has not covered it, I think, for a couple of reasons.
One is they don't want to make it seem like black people can't run a country.
And so they've been very eager to kind of look the other way, downplay any accounts of vicious There are numerous murders and so on that have been going on.
But what are the prospects that the ANC, which does have power and appears to have had a fairly consistent hold of power for the past 25 years, what is the chance of convincing those guys not to enact the politics of vengeance, not to just say, hey, listen, I could grow my own food, but it's easier to go grab some other guy's farm.
There's something kind of appealing in democratic politics where you can use the power of a majority just to take somebody else's stuff.
What are the chances of convincing the ANC that's not a good way to go?
I think there are people in the ANC who would like to see that movement, but I don't quite know how one is going to be able to really negotiate with Julius Malema.
That is a youth, a very powerful youth, military in their, if you think of every single person that goes into the military, when do they go into the military?
They go in their late teens and early 20s.
That's when they listen to what a militaristic voice would tell them.
And then obey it.
A, you're still quite young, still fairly immature, so you don't really know exactly how the world works.
You're still learning.
But you do have the testosterone that can be motivated.
It has to start with somebody opposing Julius Malema in his viewpoint.
And that someone has not yet come to the fore.
South Africa has to find someone in its midst and actually within the African National Congress, they within themselves have to have a debate on do we keep on supporting Julius Malema or do we admonish his strides which are only going to propagate genocide?
Now, Malema is the guy who leads the chants of kill the boar, kill the farmer.
That's who we're talking about.
Let me ask you about the prime minister.
Is he...
Is he afraid that a guy like Malema might usurp his power if he goes against him?
How is the ruling guys of South Africa, how do they view a renegade, if you will, like Malema?
Well, you know, I watched the body language of Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House.
And he did not seem to show much in the way of empathy or compassion, especially when also President Trump showed in the Oval Office that procession of crosses, white crosses, on either side of the road stretching for miles.
And there's a few thousand.
Every cross.
You have to think of every cross not just as one person.
You have to think of that person as the leader of a farm.
You have to think of when that leader of a farm is out of the picture, what happens to the farm production?
You can have a massive decline rapidly.
So I was not that impressed, favorably impressed, should I say, with Cyril Ramaphosa's reflection upon That video of the thousands of white crosses on either side of the road depicting the genocide that has already happened.
So, again, we would have to have a look.
Now, I remember Cyril Ramaphosa when he was a secretary general, a young man, and I was at the embassy, the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., and I remember him sitting at the table.
He did not really speak that much.
He allowed President Mandela to say everything he wished to say.
And on our first visit of President Mandela, prior to him being president, he came over on a special visit.
And we all housed together at the ambassador's residence.
And we could tell straight away, this man had gone through a lot.
Yes, he had deftly communist upbringing.
In fact, the six people who were arrested with him, In fact, they were all Jewish communists, all six of them, in 1963.
They were the ones who were behind the push of this communist league within the African National Congress.
We would have to get away from that doctrine, and can we?
In fact, there's no choice.
We have to.
So Cyril Ramaphosa could do a lot more if he wanted to.
Nelson Mandela did.
Nelson Mandela showed the way, and he held the fort.
When, as you correctly say, when Nelson Mandela, at the end of, well, it was 1994, April, through April of 1998, that was Nelson Mandela's term, After that, you could see immediately, right, the old man is out of office.
Now we have our way to play.
Not good.
We have to get back to what Nelson Mandela stipulated and carry on from there.
Let me ask you finally, Gavin, about the, as you know, there were some 60 or so South Africans who were accepted as refugees to the United States.
But by and large, the Boer families have stayed in South Africa, have seen their future as belonging to South Africa.
Their families have been there not just for decades, but really for centuries.
And yet there are other countries, I think, for example, Venezuela and others, where things get so out of hand that ultimately it's difficult to see a future and people who can.
Try to get out of there.
Do you think that a stage might come in which certainly the boar, but maybe the white population generally decides, you know what, there's really no future for us here in Africa.
Things are going from bad to worse.
And our best hope is, hard though it is because our families have been here for so long, is to try to make our way someplace else.
Are we even close to that point?
Or is that point in the remote future?
There are some who are already at the brink, definitely.
Let me put into an example here, Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe, and what happened to those farmers, because when Zimbabwe was not welcoming the farmers and was also on a genocidal path towards them, in stepped the president of Zambia.
And Zambia, they said, well, if you farmers are not welcome in Zimbabwe, Come up to Zambia.
We will give you land.
It has never been plowed, never been tilled.
It is going to be very difficult for you, but none of us want to tackle it.
If you're up, you go for it.
It took them a year to till the soil.
In fact, a lot of those Zimbabwean white farmers went back to Zimbabwe, to the factories, and manufactured extra strength.
Tillage material, just so they could till the ground.
After they had graded the land, and that means bulldozers with big chains pulling down trees, and a year later planting crops, within two years they had substantial product, which they then exported back to their homeland, Zimbabwe.
So there is black and white working it out together.
A black president who says, you know what?
You fellows really know what you're doing.
You are probably the most outstanding farmers on the planet.
You've had to tackle the wildlife, etc., etc., etc.
We want you.
Don't go away.
Stay.
So there you have reconciliation from a president, bearing in mind there was also a...
And it went through its hiccups, but then you have a Zambian president who is now looking at everything admirably, honestly, fairly, for all humanity.
That example can be drawn upon in the media conversations in South Africa as well.
I was not familiar with that, and that is a fascinating not only example, but a kind of model, if you will, for a good way for South Africa to go forward.
Guys, there's a lot more here, and I've only gotten a little bit of a start with Gavin.
So we're going to have to have him back to talk more about South Africa and about the region.
I've been talking to Gavin McClellan, a veteran of the Rhodesian Bush War but also a diplomatic professional with 15 years at the South African Embassy.
Gavin, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
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I'm continuing my discussion of Reagan, the book Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And sometimes as I'm putting together the podcast, I think to myself, there's so much going on.
Why am I covering a topic as, well, relatively, not ancient, but old in some ways, as Reagan?
And the answer is...
but also on the larger landscape of events.
So we can...
And so this is the reason for exploring things in this way.
And we're in Chapter 4, which is a walk on the supply side.
And we're dealing with a lot of economic issues, as I've talked about today.
Other times.
And this is an economics chapter.
It's about supply-side economics, which is really not obvious or intuitive to people.
And I'm going to try to go beyond slogans to dig into what this actually means.
But I want to begin by saying that Reagan came to Washington and came into the Oval Office with a pretty ambitious agenda.
And an agenda that was Kind of laid out, laid out at the outset.
And in some ways there were people who have compared Reagan to FDR.
FDR, of course, had an ambitious program that came to be known as the New Deal.
But there's an important difference between Reagan and FDR.
Number one, FDR did not, in fact, have this ambitious agenda up front.
He came in, he knew, quote, something had to be done.
He took a couple of measures and then he began to scramble and look around and over time developed the various initiatives that came to be known as the New Deal.
They were kind of improvisational strategies by a guy who wasn't all that ideological, but in the end, of course, ended up with the sort of welfare state ideology.
Now, Reagan, by contrast, had it all figured out.
How he had it all figured out will come to in a minute, but he had a plan that was already sort of set, and he just needed to push it through, get it through the Congress, which, as we see now, not so easy to do as Congress deliberates on the one big beautiful bill, which is through the House very narrowly and is facing some headwinds in the Senate.
The other thing to note about FDR was that FDR was following in a line of welfare states that had already been established in Europe.
There were welfare states in Great Britain.
The National Health Service had been set up right after World War II.
There were welfare states in France and Germany.
So it wasn't that FDR was doing anything all that new.
It's like, let's do what the Europeans have been doing for decades.
And also, FDR had the support of the American intelligentsia.
They were like cheering him on.
They loved the idea of the planned economy.
This is the very meaning of progressivism.
Experts make decisions, not the ordinary people.
Reagan, by contrast, was swimming very much against the intellectual current, against the conventional wisdom.
Reagan wasn't too impressed with the intellectual class.
He did learn from them.
He wasn't anti-intellectual in any way.
But he didn't think intellectuals should be planning the economy.
He didn't think they knew how to do it.
And he thought that the most creative people in a society are not the sort of pointy-headed guys, not the thinkers per se, but are the entrepreneurs.
Not the intellectuals, not the bureaucrats, but the people who make new things and the people who come up with new innovations and new inventions.
And so Reagan saw his job as creating an environment.
In some ways, I think this is very similar to Trump because, as I've suggested, Trump is coming to the realization that cutting government is very difficult to do.
I'm not even sure his heart is in it, at least not in making substantial cuts.
And if you're not going to cut government, then there is only one other option, and that is to boost economic growth.
And who can do that if not the entrepreneur?
So Reagan's strategy, tax cuts across the board.
Let businesses and citizens keep more of their own money.
Limit the growth of government.
If you can't cut it, at least corral it.
Keep it from growing.
Reduce burdensome federal regulation.
Also do privatization, which is transferring government-run services to private.
Organizations.
If this seems like, why would that be a good idea?
Well, think about the post office, for example, versus, say, FedEx or UPS.
Notice that UPS and FedEx are much more speedy, more reliable than the post office.
No surprise.
FedEx is private.
UPS is private.
The post office is not.
And Reagan also believed in federalism, which is decentralizing power away to the states.
So you notice here that the principles of MAGA are largely here.
The economic principles of MAGA are here in Reagan.
In that sense, they're not new.
What's new, perhaps, is the environment, is their application.
And there is something different about the MAGA approach to foreign policy.
But here we're talking about economic policy.
Even though Reagan had this far-reaching agenda, he never approached it with a certain type of intensity or ferocity.
He always seemed to be at ease.
In fact, on Inauguration Day itself, apparently Michael Dever, who was Reagan's top aide in the governor's office in California, arrived to find Reagan still in bed.
And Dever goes, where's the governor?
They still call him governor because he hadn't been inaugurated yet.
Nancy goes, well, he seems to be sleeping.
Deva just walks into Reagan's bedroom and he says the lights were out, the curtains were drawn.
He goes, governor?
Yeah.
It's nine o 'clock.
Yeah.
You're going to be inaugurated in two hours.
Does that mean I have to get up?
So this is Reagan.
Everything is in his own pace.
He doesn't get too excited, even if things are really important.
He has the, well, I call it the unhurried style.
And this is something that was not just unique to Inauguration Day.
Reagan kept up this pace for really two terms.
By and large, he was told very early on the first meetings for the president start at 7.30 a.m.
Reagan goes, well, in that case, they're going to have to start without me.
Because he would show up at 9, and so the meetings had to be rescheduled to 9.30.
And when a reporter asked Reagan about his reluctance to put in, quote, the long workday, Reagan, of course, uttered one of his famous lines, well, they say hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance?
This was Reagan.
Reagan's approach, I think, was very beautifully symbolized by the fact that when he came into the Oval Office, there was a portrait of Harry Truman.
Reagan liked Harry Truman.
But nevertheless, he decided, Harry Truman's a Democrat, time to take him down.
Down goes Harry Truman, and up goes Calvin Coolidge.
Now, Calvin Coolidge is regarded by many historians as a, quote, do-nothing president.
But nevertheless, Calvin Coolidge's term in office is, Very successful.
The country was doing great.
The economy was doing great.
And Calvin Coolidge's philosophy was that you don't need to shake up the government.
You don't need to go crazy doing stuff.
The country is running fine.
And so Calvin Coolidge, Reagan is known for taking an occasional nap.
Calvin Coolidge took a daily nap.
And not only did he take a daily nap, but this is kind of my favorite part, he would change into his pajamas for the nap.
And typically when he would wake up, his aides would be peering at him, and he would grin and say, is the country still here?
So this is Coolidge's ironic way of saying, guess what?
Things do run fine, even without the president being kind of fully at the wheel.
That's the whole point of having a successful free market economy.
So, Calvin Coolidge had prosperity.
He won re-election in a landslide.
It's no surprise he was one of Reagan's favorite presidents.
Now, Reagan also had a...
He had all kinds of people with different views in the administration.
These were divided by some conservatives into pragmatists and conservatives.
Reagan really...
He wasn't freaked out by having these so-called pragmatists, even though they supposedly didn't share his full agenda.
I think the reason for this, I actually came to figure this out later.
I didn't quite understand it when I was in the administration.
Reagan's view was that one group of people, the conservatives, show you where you want to go.
And the pragmatists are the people who show you how to get there.
So Reagan realized you actually need both.
You need goals set by conservatives, and you need means, which are by and large the pragmatists who are better at doing that, navigating something through the Congress, handling the media.
These were more practiced hands, if you will, at the art of the government.
The most important thing for Reagan was he wanted to hire people who didn't "want to work in government." He wanted to hire people who had to be persuaded to work in the government.
And Reagan's view of that was that these are the guys who actually know how to get things done.
They're doing things in the private sector.
And so, when People were like, well, this is traditionally a group made up of economists.
And Reagan goes, I've got several millionaires in my cabinet who have made their own money.
Why do I need a bunch of economists?
So again, Reagan's view is the millionaires actually know how markets work.
They're doing things in the market.
Meanwhile, the economist is a kind of theoretician who comes right typically out of the university, who studies tables and graphs and charts, who understands the market as a spectator, not as a participant.
The other thing about Reagan is he did not hesitate to make big decisions based on instinct.
Reagan's instinct was you could sometimes pick up something about a guy With a single detail.
And that's enough.
So here's a great example, which I love.
Some guys had nominated Malcolm Baldrige to be Reagan's Commerce Secretary.
And Baldrige had actually supported Bush in the primaries, George H.W. Bush.
And Reagan wasn't too sure that he wanted this guy.
And he certainly didn't even know him.
So Reagan said, listen, I better talk to Baldrige over the phone.
But his aides told him, we can't reach him.
Because he is somewhere out.
And Reagan goes, well, where is he?
And they go, well, he's out west.
And Reagan goes, well, doing what?
They go, well, he's riding in a rodeo.
So Reagan goes, well, is he actually riding?
In other words, he's participating in the rodeo.
He's not just watching the rodeo.
So they go, yes.
So Reagan goes, don't bother to reach him.
Let's go ahead with his nomination.
He'll be fine.
This is classic Reagan.
His idea was, I want kind of a real man to be doing this job.
Baldridge is not only a highly successful business guy, but he's obviously an all-rounded guy.
This is a guy who actually rides in a rodeo.
And Reagan himself, a horse guy, an outdoors guy, realized this guy is probably somewhat like me.
He's not some namby-pamby East Coast guy.
He's actually going to be good.
And guess what?
He turned out to be good.
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