Coming up, I'm going to castigate the Democrats, not only for bringing terrorists into this country, but then protecting them and their families once they engage in violent acts.
I'll spell out a list of really good things in this big, beautiful bill, and I think on balance, Congress should just move and get it done.
We're going to talk about the outrage to which her family has been subjected.
She's also going to make the case for Trump, pardoning her husband, former America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Before I dive into my two main topics for today's episode, I want to comment on a couple of smaller but somewhat amusing or interesting things that are in the news.
I don't know if you've seen, but the Biden press secretary, Corinne Jean-Pierre, is apparently coming out with a book.
And the comical element here is it's called A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.
So this appears to me to be another Jake Tapper-ish kind of maneuver.
In other words, not only a person who was complicit in the lies of the Biden administration, but the very face of those lies.
There are just innumerable clips of KJP saying things that are flatly untrue, certainly flatly untrue about Biden's competence, but flatly untrue on a wide range of topics.
And now she's trying to recover some credibility by saying, in effect, that the White House is, quote, Broken.
Now, first of all, this phrase broken has become a little bit of a cliche of our time.
I don't really like it because it doesn't describe anything of value.
There's nothing, quote, broken about the White House per se.
You know, you hear, we have a broken system, we have a broken White House, we have broken money.
No.
These things aren't broken, by the way.
They are running perfectly as the people who devised and set them up intended.
You think our money is broken?
No.
Our money is run like a cartel, and there are beneficiaries of that cartel, and from their point of view, it's working beautifully because they get to print more money, and they get to devalue the money that's in your pocket and mine.
Similarly, the Biden White House was not broken.
It was working perfectly according to the people who set up that system, who are the people who sat Biden down and said, listen, you're a ventriloquist puppet for four years.
You can nod your head obligingly or, by the way, just sit and, you know, stare at the ceiling and we'll run the place.
So broken?
No, not from their point of view.
And so this is a woman who just needs to fade away.
By the way, it's kind of apparently she was angling for a job on The View.
And, you know, you would think that on The View, the standards would be so low that even a KJP, but no, even they found her a bit too much.
And so I really don't know what her options are at this point.
But let's move on to Trump.
A travel ban for some Middle Eastern and African countries, including Afghanistan.
Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and apparently a partial travel ban that includes Cuba and Venezuela.
So this is Trump signaling, I think, that this idea of bringing all these radicals into the country, people who have their own agenda, They come here not because they want the American way of life per se or that they're loyal to our country or our laws.
They have insidious plans afoot.
And frankly, we don't need to sort them out.
We don't have to...
Who cares?
Keep them all out.
I think this is Trump's approach, and I think it's the right approach, because, quite frankly, how are we expected to vet people in these other countries?
You know, seven Libyans get in here.
Do we know who they are?
Do we know where they went to school?
Do we know what their families are like?
Do we know what kind of madrasa or what kind of...
We can't.
And so taking prudent action is, by the way, this is what was not done under Biden.
And this now brings me to one of my main themes, which is this guy, Mohammed Suleiman.
This is the fellow who firebombed the supporters of Israel who are peacefully marching in Boulder, Colorado.
And the Trump administration moved pretty quickly to say, all right, we're going to arrest this guy, we're going to charge him, and we're going to deport the whole family because, guess what?
The whole family is illegal.
They're all illegal.
Now, a Colorado federal judge, Gordon Gallagher, No surprise, a Biden appointee.
I always look for it.
Is it an Obama appointee or a Biden appointee?
And by the way, it may not make a whole lot of difference.
If you believe, as I think Debbie and I largely do, that Obama's been running things in the Biden administration also, we're talking about Obama appointees no matter what.
This guy issues an order blocking the Trump administration from deporting the wife and the five children.
Apparently, the judges, and if you look at this rather brief statement, he pompously asserts, well, you know, we're not in the habit in this country of blaming the family for the crimes of the blah, blah, blah.
Let's remember, nobody's charging the wife and the five children with terrorism.
Nobody's charging them with a crime other than...
And so this idea that these are people who cannot be summarily deported, well, I guess it gets to the larger issue.
What due process is owed to people who are manifestly here illegally?
They've overstayed their visa.
They have come here without a visa in the first place.
Why can't we simply remove them?
In the end, I think this is something the Supreme Court is going to have to weigh in on.
I mean, let's look at it.
This guy, Muhammad Suleiman, appears to have Muslim Brotherhood ties.
He is, by his own acknowledgement, a jihadi.
A video has surfaced of him.
This is before the attacks, talking about the fact that he is a sort of jihadi, professing, if you will, that ideology.
And so what do you really make of his family?
Is his family, like, unaware?
Are they critics and dissidents against the jihadi ideology?
Or, as seems quite likely, They're all on board.
They're for it.
They think that he's doing something just great.
It's Allahu Akbar all the way around.
And so they are part of that picture in the same way that in Gaza, a lot of the people who are civilians, they're not military, they're not directly Hamas, but every time there is an October 7th, these are the people on the street jumping up and down, cheering, embracing, tears streaming down their face.
Allahu Akbar!
So they're on board with the terrorism.
They are part of the terrorist team.
And the other point I want to make is that this is really what the Democrats want.
This is what they are all about.
They are all about bringing people like Muhammad Suleiman into this country, letting them in, and then protecting them from being pushed out.
So you have, on the one hand, the Mayorkas and the Biden officials, all of whom put up the welcome signs all over the world.
You're all welcome to come across the border, and people did.
And now, even when you have a guy with a horrendous criminal charge, by the way, not even something that we are all in the dark about, we all saw it on video, so we know what we're talking about.
Nevertheless, you have a judge even in that case.
A case even more egregious than, you know, Kilmar Obrego Garcia, where there you're arguing about, is he an MS-13?
What do the tattoos on his knuckles mean?
But no one had claimed that Kilmar Garcia had killed anybody or was trying to kill anybody or firebombed anybody.
So this is a more outrageous case.
And yet, here we go, the Democrats once again, this time in the form of their judicial team, so to speak.
Are to the rescue, blocking the deportation.
In the end, I think Trump will have his way.
But again, this is a delay caused by the Democrats saying, in effect, let's keep these guys here as long as we possibly can.
Now, let me turn to the fate of the big, beautiful bill.
I see this very peculiar press conference by Chuck Schumer.
And with a straight face, he has a big headline, the We Are All Going to Die Act.
Now, at first, I thought this must be some kind of a joke or it might be like AI.
But then I hear Chuck Schumer talking.
And of course, these days, that even could be AI.
But no, it is Chuck Schumer talking.
Quite serious.
He claims that we will all figure out that this is a we're going to die act.
So according to him, if the bill passes, which by the way, I think it will, we're all going to be, well, we're not going to be able to come back and discuss it because none of us are really going to be here.
This is the...
The real clash is not over there.
Nobody really cares what Chuck Schumer has to say.
But we do care what Elon Musk has to say.
And this morning, Elon Musk puts out a meme.
Well, he shares a meme by somebody else.
And what it shows is a school bus.
Which has assigned the money that Doge has saved the government.
So the school bus represents that.
And then you see the school bus being just like smashed or overrun by a sort of a freight train.
And the freight train is labeled Trump's big, beautiful bill.
So this is Elon Musk, not exactly in his most subtle mode, but certainly making a point.
And he is not hesitating to post, and this is from yesterday, call your senator, call your congressman.
Bankrupting America is not okay.
Kill the Bill.
And if the point wasn't even clear, you remember that film that was, I think it was Quentin Tarantino from several years ago, Kill Bill.
He even has a Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill meme.
So Elon Musk is kind of going all out and going all out on the platform X. And I get where this guy is coming from.
In fact, almost everything that he says about the government could not be more right on.
Here is something he said from a recent interview.
My frank opinion of the government is that it's like the DMV.
He goes, and so he says, when you want to have the government do something, always think, do you want the DMV to do it?
Now, you couldn't even count the number of examples that illustrate Elon Musk's point.
And Doge has not only exposed the fact that you have waste.
What you also have is double dealing, self-dealing, corruption, sending money around the block so it circles right back to you.
And as of now, Congress has not done anything about Doge.
They haven't done anything to institutionalize the Doge cuts.
Now the good news is that they are getting started on that next.
And by that I mean that Rescission just meaning pulling back.
Slashes a billion dollars from NPR and PBS, cuts about $8 billion in foreign aid and USAID funding.
So this is not the end of the story, but it is the beginning of the story.
And I think Elon Musk should take some solace in the fact that this is not something that is being abandoned, although it is being put behind the big, beautiful bill.
Now, as I mentioned yesterday, The big, quote, cost of the bill is not that it is adding spending.
No.
It is merely that it has a tax cut built into it, and the tax cut is going to cost the government money.
Why does it cost the government money?
Because people pay less in taxes, and so the government gets less revenue.
I think you and I can both agree that it's much better for money to stay in our pocket than it is just to go into the government's coffers, even if it is supposedly being used to retire debt.
Because as you and I know, that's not how they spend it anyway.
If you and I were to swallow and go, OK, listen, we don't mind.
We're going to work harder.
We're going to give more money to the government.
You know that they will waste it before it even reaches.
The moment they know it's coming, they will spend it.
It will be gone.
They are not even going to apply it to the deficit.
So this is not to dispute Elon Musk.
It's merely a way of saying that the level of irresponsibility at the level of Congress is, in fact, unconscionable.
I do want to highlight a few, well, more than a few, several really good things in this bill that are Escaping public attention because there's so much focus on just what is the impact going to be on the debt.
An obviously critical and relevant issue, but the issues I'm about to mention are relevant also.
So let's go down this list very quickly.
This is all good stuff that's in the bill.
Here we go.
No taxes on tips.
Trump promised it.
It's in the bill.
Make the Trump tax cuts permanent.
Trump has been talking about that.
Now he's doing it.
It's a very good thing.
This is part of why the Democrats are all agitated.
They want our taxes to go up automatically.
Child tax credit raised to $2,500.
Very good.
Overtime pay tax free for the working class.
Excellent idea.
There is $1.6 trillion in spending cuts.
This is maybe the largest rollback of government spending In living memory, perhaps even in U.S. history, again, it pales against the backdrop of a $38 trillion debt, but on the other hand, you've got to get started somewhere.
Work requirements for welfare, who can be against that?
Well, the lazy bum sitting on the couch can be against that, but who else?
Deporting a million illegal immigrants a year.
This is excellent news.
When you think of 10 million immigrants who are illegals, I don't even want to use the word immigrants, they're not immigrants.
You know, we get to send a few million of them back.
That's progress.
Finish building the wall of 10,000 new ICE agents.
Now, again, you know, you could sit back.
Trump campaigned on not only sealing the border, but sending the bad guys back.
You need personnel to do that.
They're not going to all self-deport.
You can try that, but self-deportation also is made more likely when you've actually got agents ready to kind of take you by the arm and usher you to the door, so to speak.
Eliminating Medicaid for illegal aliens, slashing IRS funding, unleashing energy production, extending estate tax protections, repealing DEI mandates, barring the, quote, pronoun usage in the federal government, the National Missile Defense, a golden dome of the kind that Israel has to protect U.S. citizens from a
Voter ID for federal elections.
Getting rid of these ESG or climate-related mandates.
Restricting Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland.
Getting rid of all federal diversity czars.
Fully reviving the Keystone Pipeline.
Now, this is a kind of a laundry list, and I could probably go on for a little bit about it.
Outlawing federal funding for gender transitions for minors.
There is some funding to encourage people to go to trade schools.
So just look at this.
This is a kind of MAGA wish list.
And we should note that all of this was done.
By the key people in the Trump administration, meeting with key people in Congress and the Senate.
So while I do hear Elon Musk and some others saying, you know what, throw the bill out, go back to the drawing board, number one, that would take many, many months.
In fact, it would probably push us into the end of this year, if not the beginning of next year.
So we lose valuable time.
And you lose all these priorities that are now enshrined or built into this bill.
You just have to look at the Democrats'reaction to the bill to realize that this is not their type of bill.
And so when you hear people like Rand Paul or Elon Musk throw the bill out, you'll immediately see Hakeem Jeffries cheering and Eric Swalwell cheering and Gavin Newsom cheering and Elizabeth Warren cheering.
'cause they want nothing more than to sink the big beauty And at some point in politics, you've got to realize that we have a window of opportunity.
Let's seize it.
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Well, none of it makes any sense.
And the more I looked into it, the clearer it became.
This whole Medicare system is really not designed to be easy.
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Guys, I'm very happy to welcome back to the podcast our friend Martha Byrne.
She is a three-time Emmy award-winning actress, writer and producer for 30 years in the entertainment industry, probably best known as the character Lily and later her twin sister Rose on the daytime drama As the World Turns.
We're here to talk about her new book.
But her book that deals with a family ordeal involving her husband, retired NYPD detective Michael McMahon, he was sentenced in a Brooklyn courtroom to 18 months in federal prison for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and interstate stalking.
We want to talk about the book, by the way, is called In the Interest of Justice, one woman's fight against a weaponized Justice Department to save her husband.
The book is now out and available right now.
And so check it out.
By the way, you can also go to the website, pipehitterfoundation.org.
You can follow Martha Byrne on X at Martha Byrne 10, the number 10. Martha, welcome.
Thanks for...
Let me begin on a little bit of a depressing note, which is to say your husband is facing this conviction that he had his sentencing.
Is his incarceration close to imminent, and how is your family dealing with that?
Thank you so much for having me on again.
Yes, he's supposed to turn himself in on June 16th, which is right around the corner.
I can't even wrap my brain around that, that that is even a reality after what we've been through and what happened and the fact he committed no crime.
He didn't do anything illegal.
And we fought back.
And when we fought back, that's when it got extremely, um, And the tactics to win at all costs from the Department of Justice, the Biden Department of Justice, was outrageous.
So just to give you a little bit of a brief background, my husband is a retired NYPD sergeant.
He earned 78 medals while he was on the NYPD, and he was in a severe accident, which ended his career, so he became a private investigator.
In 2016, got a routine case for some background searches, asset searches.
And he worked for a few days, hired two NYPD retired detectives as well to work with him, did surveillance.
Very, very, very routine case.
Everything he did was by the book, notified the local police he was there doing surveillance, and then never thought about it again.
And four years later, the FBI came to our house and arrested him for violating Farah, as you said, and interstate stalking.
There was nothing about this case, and the evidence proved that there was no foreign government connection to his work on this case.
And he's a private investigator parked on a public street.
And the subjects never saw him, couldn't identify him in court, never filed a police report, never filed a protective order, never took a picture of a car that was following them.
And he was still found guilty, which gives you an overview of how, in the federal government, when they want to convict you with a 99% conviction rate, there's a way they do that.
And that's what's in the book, is really a map as to the tactics.
How they can get away with that, which is outrageous and falsifying evidence, lying.
The list never ends.
But we wanted to fight back because he's innocent and he's a hero and he loves this country.
And he would never sacrifice anything for a few thousand dollars.
This man who has proven his entire life to serve us would never sacrifice our country, the sanctity of our family, our safety for a few thousand dollars for legal, private, investigative work.
Martha, you're saying something that I, of course, understand completely and resonate with.
But for a lot of Americans, it's, and you probably experience this yourself, it's a little hard for them to comprehend because they don't realize that there is a massive accordion of federal statutes and that they can truly pick anyone on the street.
And if they want to put you in prison, Whether it's your tax returns or whether if you're a doctor, they charge you with administering illegal pain medicine and then they produce some old woman in court who goes, yeah, I wasn't really in pain, but I got to prescribe these medications.
Boom!
Suddenly you're facing years in prison and it is in an orchestrated setup where behind the dignity of the courtroom, you got a judge, you got a prosecutor, and of course the jury thinks, well, Why would this guy be here if he didn't do all these horrible things that the government is saying?
Was it for you a peculiar experience as an American?
All of us have kind of this civics book idea of America, but you're standing there and you see a very different justice system, don't you?
It is an absolute breakdown of what this country is supposed to be about.
It's due process.
It is the amount of illegal documents that were obtained as far as spying on us and searches.
To your point, Dinesh, not one person testified against my husband in this trial.
No one.
The case agent who worked on the case for years, he didn't testify.
The victims, alleged victims, got on the stand and couldn't identify him in court.
All of our evidence was back to the fact that he was innocent, but the prosecutors didn't.
For instance, his interrogation video, which is overwhelmingly positive for him, where he is clearly innocent.
We were not allowed to show that to the jury.
The idea that you can't defend yourself properly in the federal court system has to change.
And there's already been changes about that.
So I think people need to understand, just because you're innocent, why should it cost you your life?
You're home.
I mean, you're talking millions of dollars.
You know this, Dinesh, to fight these cases.
And they know they're going to bankrupt you.
And they encrypted our files.
We couldn't open them.
You know, the amount of gymnastics they went through to convict my husband, who was innocent.
And they know he's innocent.
They all know he's innocent.
The judge knows he's innocent.
But what they get away with, with inferring, making things up, you know, and painting this picture of a hero sitting there, it was so painful.
Every day that they tore him apart on the public state, world stage, Dadesh, world stage.
They're calling my husband a traitor.
I mean, this is outrageous.
This is a guy who would never do anything.
He's never broken a law in his life.
They couldn't find anything he'd ever done wrong in his life.
They couldn't even find a tax return.
They couldn't find anything he'd ever done wrong.
So they just made it up, made up a story.
Martha, how do we understand this?
Because in some ways, we talk in general terms about a weaponized justice system.
In this case, it seems like you had some prosecutors, and they didn't want to actually go after the really bad guys, which were these Chinese guys who apparently had free kind of...
So they make your husband sort of the fall guy in this investigation.
But I sometimes think, and I noticed this in my own campaign finance case with the judge, he seemed to be kind of in on it with the prosecutors.
But I kept asking myself, why?
He's on the bench.
He's got a lifetime appointment.
Why would he take a document, for example, that he knows is full of falsehoods?
In fact, it's been pointed out to him that the cases that they're talking about, I'm now talking about my own situation, are made up.
They're altering facts.
They're deleting irrelevant information.
And he knows that, but he seems to be kind of okay with it.
And that's the part of it that's maybe, for me, the hardest to understand.
What on earth happened to these judges?
How did they lose any sense of what a justice system is supposed to be about?
I asked the same question.
I mean, we had overwhelming evidence that there was a quid pro quo.
To us, there was communications between the FBI, New Jersey, and the alleged victims in this case about their immigration, for instance.
There was a civil lawsuit against them for $30 million we couldn't talk about, we couldn't tell the jury about.
We were not allowed to bring that into our evidence.
And the judge said no.
We were not allowed to talk about any of the crimes that the alleged victim had committed.
We were prevented from presenting the evidence that showed that Mike was actually The hero in this case, and was doing his due diligence in his work, and the opposite was going on.
They were favoring other people.
And even the FBI agents, they spoke to these Chinese agents for years, let them come and go, interviewed them.
One of the FBI witnesses, the star witnesses, I think he said on the stand he had lied to the FBI about seven or eight times, the case agent, and they still put him on the stand.
So that makes sense.
And he wasn't testifying against Mike, but he was their star witness.
This whole case is shocking.
But until I read the sidebar conversations, when I really dug into what was how the tactics of suppressing evidence that would be helpful to the defense, I couldn't believe it.
I couldn't believe that when we would try to present something that was helpful to Michael, which he should have that, he should have that opportunity.
We didn't get one ruling in four and a half years.
Nothing.
Does that tell you?
How is that balanced?
We argued it.
We put motions in.
We filed.
Discovery took months, sometimes years.
Listen, this was a classic case of giving power to people who did not have the proper agenda for this country.
There was a personal A professional agenda, for sure.
China optics case, I guess.
But the people involved kept it very quiet.
They didn't share information when they were doing this investigation from 2016 to 2020.
They kept it secret in the New Jersey FBI field office.
They didn't share intel.
There's so many problems with this case.
Which is the opposite of protecting the American people and my family.
Dinesh, they didn't protect my family.
They knew we were targeted for years.
They spied.
They looked through all of our personal information.
I mean, 10 years of our banking records, trying to find out if he had done something wrong.
My husband, he has never done...
Why are you focusing on a hero?
And putting all your chips on him to convict him.
He didn't do anything wrong, so they just made it up.
I mean, this is ultimately, I think you're experiencing this kind of maddening sense that you've got a case.
I think you told me it was something like a $5,000 or $10,000 case for your husband.
You know, violate the laws, risk years in prison for 10 grand is just on the face of it preposterous.
And yet you've lived through it.
you've written a book about it, would you say that, I mean, to me, the importance of your book is that it shows people that even outside the, They've heard about some of the prosecutions of Under the Face Act of some of the pro-lifers.
But what they don't realize is that this kind of stuff, this weaponized prosecution, is going on all over the place.
Correct.
And your family's experience is kind of typical of it because it doesn't fit any of these molds, and yet there it is.
And people need to know what has happened to our justice system and the way that it is completely unwound.
Let me ask you this.
At this point, is your best hope drawing this to the attention of the Trump administration, to President Trump, to the pardon attorney, Martin, and trying to get some movement in that direction?
Is that what you're hoping for, at least in the short term?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, June 16th is around the corner.
We have filed official pardon.
Package with Ed Martin, Alice Johnson, they, it has been, you know, is it with the office of the Trump administration, the Trump team?
I pray every single day when I get up and before I go to bed, I think Donald Trump, when he hears the details of this case, he will say, that happened to me, that the same people targeted me and spied on me and weaponized a justice system against an innocent person.
I feel like he's such a back-the-blue guy.
He loves the NYPD.
He would be horrified when he hears the details of what they did to my husband with this hiding exculpatory evidence and not going after the real bad guys here.
So I pray President Trump will pardon Mike.
I know that if he heard the details, and I know he will, I think Ed Martin is an incredible man.
He's in my book.
He endorsed the book.
I met Ed before.
He was just at the Schlafly Foundation, and I just thought he was an amazing person.
And I loved his support for just right and wrong.
And here he is now, you know, and doing such an incredible job.
We're all fortunate in this country to have an Ed Martin in place.
And Alice Johnson, what she's been through, and her horrific abuse that never should have happened.
So I think people who understand, have empathy, and who understand they've been wronged will see this case and say, please, we really need to keep Mike home.
It would be an absolute travesty of justice if a man like my husband, who...
Would even put one second in any federal prison.
It would be such an outrage.
And I feel like, I know the Trump team.
Look, I knew the administration.
I went to the inauguration.
I know that the real work is being done there.
You see it every day.
We see how it's not politics the same way anymore, which is great news.
And I think this case is a perfect case for Donald Trump to say no more.
No more.
Of attacking innocent people for some political agenda, personal agenda, and any agenda.
If you're innocent, that's it.
Done.
Move on.
Don't try to create a case around an innocent man anymore or woman or anyone anymore.
I mean, Martha, I agree.
I think that maybe the biggest obstacle right now is nothing other than the fact that the You've got the big, beautiful bill.
You've got all the tariff stuff going on.
You've got all the various people trying to undermine Trump.
And Elon Musk is now in the mix.
But this is really why we have a part in attorney.
I've crossed paths with Ed Martin a few times over the years.
I think he used to have a radio show with the Phyllis Schlafly Network.
I've been on with Ed a bunch of times.
So Ed, if this gets to you, if you're listening to this, it's time to get this done because Trump is busy.
That's why we have an auto pen, Ed.
We've been hearing a lot about the auto pen, but there are legitimate uses of the auto pen, or at least put it right on Trump's desk and tell him, hey, this is a worthwhile case.
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I've been talking to Martha Byrne.
Martha, thank you very much for joining me.
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Thank you for having me on yet again.
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So God bless you and your family and let's pray this is over soon and we can all celebrate again.
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We are having a big budget debate right now, and therefore it seems quite appropriate in this section of the book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, I'm going to be talking about, well, the budget.
And it turns out that the battle of 1981 is very similar to what we are dealing with now.
The main figure, I think, in opposition to the Senate bill is, well, in the Senate, it's probably Rand Paul, but Rand Paul is being strongly backed up by Elon Musk, as I've discussed.
In Reagan's time, the main figure of opposition was, ironically, inside the administration.
In fact, it was Reagan's own head of the Office of Management and Budget.
And this is David Stockman.
Now, let's talk about David Stockman.
This guy was truly a kind of revolutionary.
He didn't look the part.
He was a bespectacled, sort of dapper guy.
But he had been an anti-war activist with Students for Democratic Society in the 60s, and he became a kind of hardcore libertarian, a kind of a budget cutter, and some would say a budget slasher.
And he came in thinking that Reagan was a lot like him.
And very soon he...
And he said, Reagan is a really nice guy, but he's not a revolutionary.
He doesn't really want to change things.
He just wants to tinker with things.
And so Stockman said that because Reagan wanted to cut taxes but did not seem as willing or eager to cut spending, therefore Reagan was Not a true supply sider.
And moreover, Stockman said he would stop being a supply sider as well because for him, being a supply sider meant cutting both taxes and spending.
And so Stockman kind of defected.
He quit the administration.
He was embraced by the liberal pundits.
I mean, just as right now, anyone who criticizes Trump.
is automatically elevated by the media.
And Debbie and I were joking the other day, and Debbie goes, you know what would happen if you became a critic of Trump, right?
And I'm like, yeah, I actually do know.
I'd be suddenly being invited to go on CNN every day and MSNBC every day, and I'd be on The View.
So this is the same thing.
Stockman became the hero of the Atlantic Monthly, which had a big cover story on him.
And ultimately, Stockman just kind of faded from the scene.
And it often happens, right?
You're a defector.
The left kind of uses you while they can.
And after a while, you've kind of outlived your usefulness.
Think of a guy like Michael Steele, the black guy who was, you know, head of the RNC, then became kind of a useful, you know, pimp for the left.
But after a while, they're like, who cares?
Everybody now knows what the guy thinks.
And so, you know, Michael Steele basically becomes one of these guys who's like sitting in the MSNBC waiting room, like, can I go on?
Can I go on?
And they're like, not really.
So that's what happened to Stockman.
He disappeared from public life.
And by and large, Stockman, like Elon Musk, was...
And all of this, I think, was based upon this idea that somehow Reagan came in meaning to do all that, and he failed.
I think this is actually well worth keeping in mind now when we're dealing with Trump, because I think in some ways we're dealing with something very similar.
Trump campaigned, but Trump did not campaign on slashing the size of government.
We may regret that.
I personally think I would cut government a lot more than Trump, but I would have campaigned on it.
Trump did not campaign on it.
He did campaign on reducing waste and fraud, i.e.
the Doge project, and he has, in fact, put those gears into action.
But the same applies to Reagan.
Reagan talked about reducing the size of government.
He did do that in generic terms.
I think what he meant by that is, I'm going to reduce the size of government relative to the economy.
I'm going to increase the scope of private entrepreneurship.
I'm going to encourage the technological revolution that was just getting underway.
But nowhere did Reagan basically say something like, I'm going to launch a frontal assault on the welfare state.
No, not only that, but Reagan had campaigned on increasing defense spending.
And the analogy to Trump here is not in the area of defense spending, but is actually in the area of border security.
Trump wants to spend more on border security.
He also, by the way, does want to spend more on the military, but the Trump military buildup.
is not of the same magnitude as the Reagan military buildup.
The Reagan military buildup was based upon the idea that U.S. defense spending had dropped from about 50% of the budget, which it was in 1960, to about 20%, 25% in the 1970s.
And so Reagan told Caspar Weinberger, his defense secretary, I want to build up the military.
Not only do I want more ships, I want more troops, I want a bigger army, a bigger navy, I want more planes.
I also want more nuclear weapons because the Soviets in this time, in the previous several years, had surpassed the United States.
Not only do they have more missiles, more warheads, but bigger ones.
So Reagan was like, we need the MX missile.
And also, Reagan kind of came up with the idea of a missile defense.
Now, this was not something that came up immediately.
The SDI, or Strategic Defense Initiative.
And by the way, again, one of the items in this big, beautiful bill is what?
It's a missile defense bill.
So, isn't it interesting that this idea of missile defense, which got dropped after Reagan, was abandoned by Clinton, was not picked up by either of the Bushes?
And here we are, once again, talking about missile defense.
So, for Reagan, you have a military buildup that's more than 50% in cost.
And then you have tax cuts.
So, think about it.
You put those two things together, you are going to get a deficit.
And Reagan's view on the military buildup was pretty simple.
Not only do we need it for reasons of security, but to go further, it's going to save us money in the long run.
And what Reagan meant was, we're spending all this money to fight the Cold War.
And what if we win it?
What if we're able to roll back the Soviet Empire?
Our defense costs can and will and should go down.
And Reagan was right.
There were massive savings in defense expenditures in the 1990s.
Now, this actually came after Reagan.
Actually, politically benefited Clinton because Clinton could say, hey, listen, I've brought the deficit way down.
Clinton didn't do any of that.
He took no action that can be correlated with bringing the deficit down.
But what happened was you got what was sometimes called the military dividend or the peace dividend that came at the end of the Cold War.
And that's why the deficit came down dramatically in the 1990s.
It was, in fact, one economist called it the best money we've ever spent.
And this is not to say that Reagan did not want to cut domestic spending.
In fact, Reagan encouraged Stockman.
He goes, come on, Dave, you come up with ideas.
And at one point, Stockman said to Reagan, well, you know, I'm taking a lot of heat for all this.
And Reagan said, listen, we'll take the heat together.
At one point, Reagan even joked with Stockman.
He said, you know, we won't leave you out there, Dave.
We'll all come to your hanging.
So Reagan here was, in his own whimsical way, conveying to Stockman, listen, this is not going to be easy.
And it's not going to be easy because these kinds of spending programs are not only popular with, of course, the people who benefit from them, but they're very popular with the congressmen and senators in whose districts the spending is happening, even some of the wasteful spending.
Now, obviously, these guys are embarrassed when you point out something patently absurd, and then they go, oh, yeah, we were not really in favor of that one, but they're in favor of all the rest of it.
That's the key point.
Stockman, in the end, I think, found out that he couldn't get it done, and he became disillusioned.
In some ways, I think Stockman's disillusionment, for me, greatly resembles what's happening kind of right now with Elon Musk, which is to say that both men, Elon Musk and Stockman, they're sort of economic geniuses.
But their political instincts are a little bit off because it seems like they both come in with this kind of somewhat naive idea.
Hey, listen, reducing spending is a good idea.
Therefore, everyone's going to get behind me when I want to get it done.
And if the president isn't like completely on board, then we can conclude that the president has sold us out and we need to torpedo his programs.
This is all for me eerily familiar.
And if we don't have popular consent, there really isn't any other alternative to going out there and building it.
In other words, going out there and convincing the American people, and not to mention, if you have congressmen and senators who are in opposition, voting them out and bringing in other congressmen and senators who are going to be more hospitable to bringing the budget into line.
So, Reagan understood that in some ways this big budget-cutting enterprise is unrighteous.
Not impossible to do, but hard to do.
Whereas guys like Stockman were of the view that ultimately it should be done.
It's a good idea.
There's no gap between theory and practice.
if something is a good idea, it just has to be done.
Now, in favor of Stockman, it should be said, And this is the way people run a business, right?
In other words, I've got so much money to spend on marketing.
That's it.
We don't have any more money to spend.
It doesn't matter if all the vendors go, yeah, but we like all the marketing expenses.
So I totally get what Elon is saying.
I totally get what David Stockman was saying in the 1980s.
And my only critique of both men is at the end of the day, it doesn't make