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June 10, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MARINE LANDING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1101
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Coming up, I'll lay out the significance of Trump unleashing the National Guard and the Marines on the rioters in Los Angeles.
It's basically the Trump administration versus the sanctuary city.
Lieutenant Colonel Allen West, chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, joins me.
We're going to talk about how to suppress political violence, his assessment of the Big Beautiful Bill, also his recent trip to Normandy and the best way to restore the constitutional republic that we've moved away over.
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It seems that the agitation, the rioting, the protests in California are escalating.
And Debbie and I were talking about it in the car on the way over here to the studio.
And Debbie's like, that's kind of weird, because isn't it true that we have all this police presence, National Guard presence, now even the limited deployment of Marines to keep law and order?
How is it possible that these protests are escalating?
Well, it is possible if more people join the protests.
And as we will see, They are organized.
They are conducted in some cases by people who have trained for weeks, maybe months, for this kind of activism.
Some of the people in high office in California are themselves trained agitators, and I'll talk specifically about one.
It's, by the way, not...
It's Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles.
And so we should take stock of what is going on here.
Now, politically, I think this is all really good for Trump.
And I say that because there is no...
In fact, how can there be?
If we think back to the L.A. riots of the 1990s or even the George Floyd riots, in both cases, there was some underlying obvious grievance.
So there was the Rodney King beating and the idea was, yeah, we're outraged by that.
So you had to take into account the fact that there was this sort of provocative incident.
That caused these riots, or at least triggered them, set them off.
Same could be said in 2020.
There was the George Floyd video.
And you have to admit that even if George Floyd ultimately died because of fentanyl or because of other drugs in his system, the video was kind of appalling and quite shocking.
and it did look like It looked that way.
And that set off these George Floyd protests.
Now, they took on a whole different character, but I'm just saying in both the cases of Rodney King and Floyd, there was something to be outraged about.
But what about here?
What is the equivalent of that?
Nothing more than the enforcement of the immigration laws.
And even the immigration laws are not even being fully enforced because if they were being enforced, then all the one million or so, and arguably more than that, illegals in California would be systematically identified and removed.
And that is not happening.
The Trump administration is adopting a kind of limited approach.
Let's go after criminal aliens.
Now, if there are other people harboring them, or if you take the criminal alien and put him in a place with 10 other aliens, then you know what?
They all do get deported.
but they're not out there hunting for aliens who are not in the criminal category.
And yet...
And California is, you know, numero uno of sanctuary states.
And you should understand that what sanctuary states means is not merely that we are, quote, giving the sanctuary to these illegal migrants.
It means that we will mobilize the instrumentalities of the government, including law enforcement, including the cops, the sheriffs.
Hide these people, protect these people, shield them from federal authority, shield them from ICE.
And so this is the way that Governor Newsom, Karen Bass view their role.
They are essentially the shielders of the aliens and also of the criminal, of the criminal aliens.
This is really why they want Trump to butt out.
Because they're like, listen, we like these people.
They're our people.
We hope eventually they'll be our voters.
They are Angelenos, as Karen Bass says.
So she sees them as her constituents.
And that's why we see that California has sued the Trump administration to force the evacuation of the National Guardsmen and the Marines.
And any kind of federal authority.
Now, Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard Law professor whose work I look at, basically says that this is one of those injunctions that is not going to stand.
Even if they can find, as they probably can, some local judge to slap a temporary restraining order, this is a case where the federal government is deploying federal troops and federal agents.
And the Supreme Court cannot possibly allow the federal government to be deprived of that kind of authority.
This would actually completely destroy the court's own credibility.
And so for that reason alone, even if the court is somewhat like, we want to put some shackles on the Trump administration, they can't do it here.
And so, says Vermeule, this is going to create An almost immediate Supreme Court intervention because there's really nothing else, no other way for the Supreme Court to go on this.
And I agree with this.
And so ultimately what it comes down to is not, the legal blockade is not going to work.
What they're going to have to rely on is just this kind of hope that they can do 2020-style protests and get away with it as they did four or five years ago.
The big uprising is planned for June 14th, the very day, Flag Day, the day of the big rally in D.C. You have local Democratic officials all threatening to mobilize resistance.
This is kind of their favorite word.
And I've mentioned their playbook before.
Their playbook is this.
Provoke violence.
And action from the federal troops and the National Guardsmen.
Then the moment the National Guardsmen spring into action, record it on video, put it out there and claim that we're moving toward authoritarianism and these are fascist tactics being used by the state.
This is a Marxist playbook and guess what?
Mayor Bass got her start in politics.
Through Marxist activism.
She joined a group funded, by the way, by the communists in Cuba.
It was called the Venser Ramos Brigade.
And that was a kind of a domestic terrorist group that was connected with other groups like the Weather Underground, other types of groups that were causing Later, she went on to work at the National Endowment for Democracy, and so she took her kind of Marxist organizing skills abroad, trying to produce regime change in other countries, essentially creating these fake grassroots mobs.
That were not really grassroots.
They were paid agitators, but they were funded by USAID, funded really by the U.S. government.
And we have been doing this bad stuff abroad, but it has schooled people like Karen Bass in bringing those tactics right here to this country.
The key, if you watch what Gavin Newsom is doing, is he's essentially encouraging the agitators and then claiming plausible deniability.
So, yeah, let's get really upset.
Yeah, we're dealing with fascism.
Yeah, normally the only reasonable response to fascism is to use force to overthrow the fascists.
How else was Mussolini overthrown?
How else was Hitler overthrown, if not by force?
But then, let's be really peaceful.
let's not cross the line, let's not So this is a way of egging on the thugs, but then turning around so you can say, well, of course, I'm not in favor of thuggery, even though you view these thugs on the street as your foot soldiers doing your bidding or at least promoting your cause.
There's been some very good expose by Data Republican on Twitter about the NGOs that are involved here.
Apparently, one of them is the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights.
It's called CHURLA.
And another is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which, yes, as the name suggests, is in fact a communist operation.
So you have a communist operation working hand-in-hand with one of these NGOs.
And these are people, by the way, that all tap government money.
The Trump administration needs to be following these pathways so that it can not only confront these groups on the street but cut off their streams of funding, particularly any kind of federal funding.
Now, there is some talk about this becoming a sort of jihadi operation.
And it is a little bit odd because you see mostly these Mexican flags.
But I have noticed among the agitators some Palestinian flags.
And so this is the true meaning of, well, intersectionality, right?
Intersectionality means your, your, black cause blends with my feminist cause, which blends with this guy's gay cause, which blends with that guy's trans cause, and which blends with Greta Thunberg's climate cause and somebody else's Palestinian or Hamas cause.
And essentially, we all have this interchangeable In fact, the more victimized you are, the higher you are on the victim's totem pole.
This is the sort of logic of intersectionality or the illogic of it, probably a better term.
And so I wouldn't be surprised if there is a jihadi element in all this, although unlikely to maybe be the driving element.
The media, of course, is doing its level best to cover up for what's going on.
And so we're back to a regurgitation of the, quote, mostly peaceful riots.
So most people are not rioting.
And Brian Stelter, who's kind of one of the more comically dumb He always states it in the dumbest form.
So in a way, what he does is he takes liberal logic and he makes it explicit because he's too...
They know how to say something.
So they'll say something like, well, of course, the majority of people out there are just there to protest.
They're peaceful.
There are a few agitators.
And this is kind of the refined way to say it.
But Stelter will say something like, I just got a memo from one of my friends in LA, and he says that 99% of the people in LA are living normal lives.
They're not part of all this.
So the implication here is that if it's only 1% that are involved, it's not a problem.
But that really doesn't follow.
It's kind of like saying, well, listen, I mean, 95% of Californians are unaffected by the Manson murders.
Therefore, the Manson murders are really not a big deal.
I don't understand why they're getting so much coverage.
I don't understand why there's a massive investigative apparatus.
It's just, what was it, like five people?
What percentage is that of the whole population?
So this is a kind of bizarre way to go.
The truth of it is, you have these agitators.
They're out on the street.
There are a lot of them.
And they are blocking roads.
They've taken over bridges.
They are surrounding federal buildings.
They are, by their own account, producing, quote, a siege.
And they have to be stopped.
And law and order has to be restored.
California doesn't intend to do it.
In fact, as I mentioned, as a sanctuary state, they are on the side of the rioters.
And so that's why we have a federal presence there.
Now, it is worth noting, and I'll close on this, that the authors of this mayhem are Mayorkas and Harris and...
Some of it, admittedly, has been created over a longer period of time.
Illegals, of course, have been coming to California now for some decades.
But the intensification, the acceleration of this problem, that's really occurred in the last four years.
And now we are living with the poisoned fruits of all that.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome as my guest for today...
Lieutenant Colonel Allen West, he really doesn't need any introduction, but he, well, he's chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party.
He is a former congressman from Florida.
He's executive director of the ACRU, and we'll talk about that organization in a little bit.
He's also author of a number of books, Hold Texas, Hold the Nation, We Can Overcome, Guardian of the Republic.
You can follow him on X at Allen, A-L-L-E-N, West.
And Alan, welcome.
Thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let's start, if we may, talking about all this business going on in Los Angeles.
What is your diagnosis of this?
Is this simply a case where you've got a sanctuary state, kind of an open rebellion against the Trump administration trying to enforce the immigration law?
How do you read what's happening there?
Well, it's great to be back with you, Dinesh.
And again, congratulations on becoming a two-time grandpa.
I know what that's like.
It's a fantastic occurrence in your life.
And it's great to be with your program.
Let's look at this from a political perspective and also a constitutional perspective.
From a political perspective, you just don't understand why the Democrat Party continues to drop hand grenades on themselves when they saw the results of what happened in the November 2024 election when this issue of illegal immigration was so high and so important, so hot.
And then from a constitutional perspective, you have people that are taken to the streets.
You have elected officials that are standing up, supposedly elected.
There are officials that took a note to the Constitution that are in complete violation of that Constitution, Article 4, Section 4, which is known as the Guarantee Clause, where it says that the federal government is supposed to guarantee to every state in the union protection from invasion.
What we saw happen in the four years of the Biden administration, Mr. Autopin administration, was a complete and utter invasion of the United States by criminal illegal immigrants as well as non-state, non-uniform belligerents and single military-aged males.
It is true.
Truly what the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 termed as predatory incursion.
And so what you have seen of these sanctuary cities, sanctuary states have been created and they believe that they are above the Constitution and the rule of law.
You have judicial activists that are acting based upon their ideology and not upon the rule of law that are extending benefits and rights to people that are here criminally, first of all, because they came across the border.
And then secondly, they've been committing acts of crime against legal law abiding citizens here.
From either perspective, the people out there in Los Angeles, Karen Bass and also Gavin Newsom and all of those people up in Washington, D.C., they do not have a good leg to stand upon from the perspective of politics and the perspective of the Constitution.
So it just begs the question, why are they doing it?
Yeah, and I was going to press you on that a little bit because normally when a party does something that seems politically very dumb against their own interests, There's still something in it for them, right?
There's some rationale that is pushing them forward.
I know that California at one point used to be a Republican state, right?
In the days of Nixon, in the days of Reagan.
Is it that the large presence of Hispanics has dipped the state over into the democratic camp?
Is that why they're so attached to this whole issue of illegals?
What do you think their rationale is for doing it?
Because in some ways it's making them look bad.
They know that on the national scale.
They don't seem to care.
And so I'm assuming that there is some local benefit in it for them.
Well, maybe they think it is something local, but if you look at the state of Texas in the last November's election, 12 of 14 border counties flipped and went red.
That's why Donald Trump went from a differential of six percentage points with Joe Biden in 2020 in Texas to 15. Percentage points against Joe Biden.
So those people that are in the Hispanic community, those hardworking families, business owners, people that want to be a part of this American experience, they are not for the side of criminal legal immigrants being in their communities, people that are committing murder, predatory acts upon their children, rapists committing acts of assault, things of this nature.
And furthermore, it's not just Hispanics, there are others that are there.
I think you've had some Vietnamese individuals, some other Asian individuals that have been arrested by ICE out in California.
Look at what happened in Boulder, Colorado.
That was an Egyptian.
Criminal illegal immigrant who had overstayed his visa here that threw those Molotov cocktails against those Jewish citizens.
So I think maybe they believe that this voting base could keep them in power locally, being at the municipal level or maybe even the state level.
But in the long run, it's not going to help them nationally.
And I know that they want to have national power.
And again, when you go to the Constitution, Article 6, Section 1, the Supremacy Clause, Donald Trump, the Trump administration, They have every right to take the actions that they're taking because they are acting in pursuance thereof to the Constitution, to the rule of law, and Karen Bass and them, they are not.
Alan, let's turn, if I may, to Trump himself and to the big, beautiful bill that has passed the House, although narrowly is now being considered in the Senate.
Of course, that seems to have been a little bit of the trigger for Trump.
The underlying issue as I understand it is that you've got some holdout Republicans who are basically saying The government is spending way too much money.
And I think Elon Musk's view of this is that Doge can highlight that cuts need to be made here or there.
But if these are not codified legislatively, then they become temporary cuts that can easily be reversed by any subsequent administration.
What is your take on this big, beautiful bill?
Are there ways in which the government can do better to bring its spending under control?
I mean, you're a guy who was in Congress.
You've seen all of this come and go.
How do you read it now, watching it somewhat spectatorially?
Well, I will tell you, when you say big, beautiful bill in Washington, D.C., that's oxymoronic, with a little bit of an emphasis on the word moron, because omnibus spending bills, all of these things that are so big and huge, you just don't understand what's in it.
I think it would have been better that we had taken this thing and broken it down piece by piece.
the most important thing that American people needed initially was the tax relief.
And that's an easy sell to get out there.
But I remember this movie, maybe I'm dating myself, called Dave, where Kevin Kline was like the poser impersonating president, and he had a dear friend who was an accountant, Charles Grodin.
They sat down and they went line by line through the federal government budget, and they found all kinds of ways that they can cut out it.
Every single committee of jurisdiction should have been charged to do exactly that under the Republican control in the House, who was the holder of the purse strings.
And they should have come up with effective cuts there in the federal government, which, though, showed us that there's a lot of fraud and a lot of waste and a lot of abuse.
So I don't think that we need to have that big, beautiful bill.
I don't like that terminology because, again, that just brings me back to omnibus spending bills and things of this nature.
We need to have something simple, something that is tied directly to the things that the American people can understand and that will help them with their pocketbooks as well.
So this should have been broken down a little bit better.
And they could have had this thing ready to go as soon as the November 2024 elections were over.
We knew we were going to have a Republican majority in the House, Republican majority in the Senate.
I'm assuming that the counter-argument to that and the The logic of having a single bill, I think, is as follows.
That the Republican majority is not a real majority.
It's so narrow that they're always going to be, on any given issue, a handful of defectors, if not more.
And so, as a result, you're going to have to get, let's just say, 25 different times, you're going to have to try to cobble together this majority.
And so, I'm assuming that what the Trump people thought is, well, listen, why don't we take the key priorities of the election, border security, you know, put a bunch of this stuff all together.
It's not going to please anybody, perhaps completely.
But on the other hand, if it's all in a single bill...
I'm guessing, do you think that's right?
That's why they did it this way?
Because they thought that this is the only way to get the sort of big ball across the finish line as opposed to trying to get 12 different smaller balls across?
Well, it kind of goes back to one of the things I love about football.
You know, you can get first down and you can attempt to go deep and try to get the touchdown on that one pass.
And if it's incomplete, guess what you got?
Second down and 10. I prefer the old Bear Bryant way at the University of Alabama, old SEC football.
First down, you pick up three, four yards.
Second down, you pick up another three, four yards.
Then third down, you got third down and one, you pick it up, and now you got a first down.
You continue to march down the field.
But that comes back to leadership.
And that comes back to vision.
And that comes back to laying this out to say, this is how we're going to do this.
And it's just like a campaign plan.
It's like a battle plan in the military.
In World War II, I mean, we didn't start off at the beginning of World War II saying, we're going right straight for Berlin.
Why did we start off in North Africa?
I mean, that would be a head-scratcher.
But there was a strategy to that.
And then it filtered down to the tactical level.
So I think it's very important that we have leadership that sets out a vision and understands how that vision.
It has to be communicated to the American people and saying, this is phase one, this is phase two, this is phase three.
And you have the measures of effectiveness and you have those things that allow you to move on to the next phase.
And again, this is about looking people in eyeball to eyeball and say, look, we've got the opportunity.
We've got a majority.
The American people expect us to produce.
Either you're a producer or you're an oxygen thief.
And I don't think you want to be an oxygen thief.
Alan, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to ask you about politics in Texas.
I want to ask you about your recent trip to Normandy and also about your organization, the ACRU.
We will be right back.
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I'm back with the one and only Alan West, chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, former congressman from Florida, author of Hold Texas, Hold the Nation, We Can Overcome, Guardian of the Republic.
Follow him on X at Alan West.
Alan, let's talk a little bit about Texas.
I wanted to focus on the anomaly of Texas politics, particularly in the House of Representatives, where the Speaker, and in that sense the powers that be, derived their power from a majority of the Democrats plus a relatively small slice of Republicans.
And then that is the majority vote seemingly working against the Conservatives in the House who are a plurality of the Republicans but are not a majority in the House in general.
So you've got this very odd situation.
As far as I know, it's not a situation that you commonly find.
In blue states, where let's say Republicans are able to make allies with some Democrats, essentially Republicans pick the speaker even though it's a blue state, and the Democrats then work with the Republicans to undermine the leftists who are in the legislature.
So what is your take on how Texas got into this weird situation, and also maybe is there a way out of it?
This is one of the most perplexing things.
You know, I was formerly the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, and when I saw this happen, it was just a head-scratcher.
This current legislature, the 89th Texas legislature, we just concluded that session.
It's a buy-in session every other year.
You have, out of the 150 in the Texas State House, 88. 88 Republicans and 62 Democrats.
You should be able to do any and everything that you want because you also have a supermajority over there in the Texas State Senate.
But incredibly so, you had some 36, I believe, Texas House Republicans that went over and joined 49. Texas House Democrats to select the Speaker of the Texas State House.
And you're right.
Guess what that does when it comes to the legislative priorities of the Republican Party of Texas?
The people that actually get out there in the hot Texas sun and campaign and make phone calls and door knock and all these things to get these folks elected.
This goes back to Joe Strauss, and this is the holdover of the GOP establishment.
I call it the Bush Roe of Cabal that is here, that continues to work with Democrats and have this simpatico with people that, if you recall, the Democrats picked up and left and went to Washington, D.C. a couple of sessions ago to try to stymie election integrity legislation being passed.
But yet, So Texas is in danger politically if we continue to have Republicans that want to join hand with progressive socialist leftists, Marxists even, that don't feel that they have the best interests of Texas at heart.
And also, when you look at all of the major population centers here in Texas, It's controlled by the blue.
It's not just Democrats, but hard leftists being it here where I am in Dallas, Dallas County, down in Austin, Texas, Travis County, down by where you are in Houston, Harris County, San Antonio, Bexar County, and out to El Paso.
So we have to be very, very circumspect about what is happening because eventually you don't want to get to the point where East Texas and West Texas cannot prop up the entire state.
Is this ultimately a problem with the voters themselves?
By that, I mean that, you know, are conservative voters and conservative districts electing moderate representatives who don't have a problem working with Democrats?
I say this because now that I'm partly through my son-in-law, a little closer to the election process, even for state and local offices, I see very often you might have a kind of right wing or a MAGA candidate.
And so they're up against some other guy who has the support of the business community, maybe has more money himself or herself to put into the race.
They get the big endorsements.
And as a result, you've got a red county, but nevertheless, it's represented by a guy who is much less red than the county itself.
No, you're absolutely right.
And the Austin lobby is a big part of that.
But also here in the state of Texas, we don't have closed primaries.
And you say, well, what difference does that make?
Let's look at what happened in Orange County, Texas, around the Beaumont area, where the former Speaker of the House, Dave Phelan, was forced into a runoff against David Covey in the Republican primary.
But guess what ended up happening?
When Democrats came into that Republican runoff and voted for Dave Phelan, he ended up winning by just about 400 votes because over 1,200 Democrats came in and voted for him.
And how do you know they were Democrats?
You can just go back and look at their voting history.
So I think that that is something we have to look at, closing off our primaries so that we don't have Democrats that are coming in and tipping the scale in Republican primaries toward the more palatable Republicans.
That they feel will be acquiescent to their ideological agenda and their legislative priorities.
And you brought up a great point.
When Democrats are in power, when they're in the majority, they're tyrannical.
They're not looking to work with anybody.
They're looking to push their agenda.
And even when they're in a minority, they're still tenacious.
And so what I see happening in Texas is that we need to have strong constitutional conservatives.
Down at that statehouse level, state Senate level, that are pushing the right priorities for the state of Texas.
You lose Texas, you lose the United States of America.
And an article just came out in Wall Street Journal this week that they are still, George Soros is back in the pack, that is still looking at how they can flip Texas because they're focused on the next redistricting coming up, I believe that'll be 2032.
Alan, you made a recent trip to Normandy, and it must have been really something as an Army guy, as a vet, to be there.
Tell us a little bit about your experience.
It's an incredible emotional experience, my second time being over there.
This time I had the opportunity in conjunction with Young America's Foundation, which I know you know very well.
you've spoken for them.
We got a chance to take 25 campus conservative students over there.
And what an And then they also got to see me jump out of a C-47 aircraft.
That flew 81 years ago over those drop zones, and we did a parachute jump.
I'm a member of the Round Canopy Parachute Team USA, so I'm still jumping out of airplanes at the age of 64. To put on a period uniform and to jump out of an aircraft that carried our paratroopers 81 years ago, you just can't beat that.
But what is interesting, Dinesh, is that on the 6th of June, when I'm in Normandy walking students along Utah Beach, guess what was happening here in my country?
In my country, we had people taken to the streets protesting for criminal illegal immigrants.
That's not what they fought for 81 years ago.
Wow.
Let's close out, Alan.
I want you to tell people about the ACRU.
You've always been a strong constitutionalist.
I think your belief is that our country has drifted away from its core constitutional principles.
What is the ACRU and what are its priorities?
The American Constitutional Rights Union was founded by members of the Reagan administration, former members of his administration, Attorney General Ed Meese, who is still on our board, and Robert Carlson, who was the guy that developed his welfare reform package.
The whole thing was to have an organization that was counter to the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, because we have to meet them on this ideological battlefield.
Well, I've been with them going on five years now as their executive director.
What we're focused on right now is what we call the Defender Initiative, because the ACLU was actually sending out threatening letters to sheriffs that were working with ICE under what is called a 287G program.
And so we're going out and we're supporting these sheriffs under our Defender Initiative.
And we're also shaming those sheriffs that are out there not working with ICE.
So that's our current focus right now.
But again, it's all about the Constitution and restoring constitutional governance.
You can also check out Alan West at alanwest.substack.com.
I've been talking to Lieutenant Colonel Alan West.
Alan, what a pleasure, and thank you for joining me.
Always mine.
Thanks so much, Dinesh.
God bless you.
I'm in the section of my Reagan book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
Well, we're talking about reducing domestic spending and the effort to do that on the part of Reagan.
Now, in 1981, Reagan was able to get some fairly modest spending cuts.
He got Congress to agree to $35 billion of cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, public service jobs, housing subsidies, unemployment compensation, mass transit, student loans, and welfare.
One program, which was kind of a make-work program from the 1970s, called CEDA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, where you essentially got paid, well, to do trivial tasks, but it was a job creation program.
Reagan got rid of it.
All he was able to do.
And he was warned about the fact that his defense increase combined with his spending cuts would produce this rather massive deficit.
And it wasn't that Reagan was indifferent to the deficit.
At times, he did joke about it.
At one point, he said something like, well, I don't know, guys, the deficit is big enough to take care of itself.
But he was being whimsical.
He did this in a kind of humorous context.
In reality, he was concerned about it, and he wanted to bring the deficit down.
Now, Ed Meese, who was then Reagan's chief of staff, told him that, look, I'm working on a deal with the Democrats.
They agree that if we raise $1 in taxes, they will agree to $3 in spending cuts.
And Reagan was always a reasonable guy.
He was open to negotiation.
Well, let me try this.
Now, Reagan did not want to do a tax increase on income taxes.
He had just brought them down.
And he had brought the top rate, as I mentioned before, down from 70% to 50%.
Later, it would go down to 28%.
Reagan didn't want to undo those tax cuts, even though that's really what the Democrats were pushing him to do.
Reagan agreed to raise some business taxes and some excise taxes.
He soon discovered that these spending cuts were illusory.
Congress did not cut the spending.
They did not deliver on their end of the bargain.
This was a ruse to get tax increases out of Reagan.
And Reagan remembered that in California, he had seen that every time you raise taxes and appropriate money, the legislature turns around and spends it.
The notion that money raised through taxation is somehow going to be deployed to reduce debt, reduce the deficit, doesn't end up that way.
And so Reagan was like, okay, well, I now have taken the measure of these guys.
I'm not going to make the same mistake again.
So Reagan tried a different route.
And this will all sound quite familiar because it is, in a sense, Reagan's equivalent of Doge.
It's the equivalent of Elon Musk's Doge project.
And what Reagan did was he asked a businessman, Peter Grace, the head of the Grace Company, to create a commission to look at waste and fraud in the government.
The exact same phrase.
The idea here was we're not cutting programs per se.
We're not reducing benefits per se.
But there's a lot of waste and fraud in government.
And so the Grace Commission compiled this rather massive report.
At one point, I remember it was sitting on my desk.
Hundreds of pages long.
It went through all the different agencies and cabinet departments.
And a lot of this just offended common sense, things that were just not needed or really had no plausible justification at all.
Now, the administration was able to take some of these recommendations and implement them, and yet a lot of them it could not and did not.
Why?
Because We're seeing, again, the same thing playing out again.
Will Congress legislatively codify the Doge cuts?
And that has not happened yet.
The Trump administration has submitted its initial sort of $10 billion Doge savings, but $10 billion is a pretty small amount.
When you consider the size of the deficit and the size of the debt.
The other thing that Reagan discovered, the administration discovered, is that, you know, when you spend money, however absurd, however preposterous, there are constituencies that benefit from that money.
And so, when we talk about waste, one man's waste turns out to be another man's subsidy.
Let's just say grow corn.
But to the farmer, it's not a waste.
He thinks, well, I need the money.
And these subsidies are important for the farming industry.
And technology has undermined the family farm.
And so to save family farms, we need to be getting some support.
And so I'm not going to vote against any politician, Republican or Democrat, that wants to cut farm subsidies.
This is what we are dealing with.
This is the natural waste and fraud that develops in a democracy.
Why?
Because there is a constituency that benefits from it.
And so Reagan was reduced at some level to frustration, and it was part of Reagan's character that when he was frustrated, he tended to make jokes.
Even a kind of black humor.
In fact, there was a cabinet meeting.
I was actually told about this directly by somebody who was there.
And he was told, he was like, why are we wasting this money?
And then he was told, listen, this is a subsidy to the dairy industry.
It's been done by Congress, not by us.
The federal government is stabilizing market prices by buying butter.
Reagan was like, buying butter?
Well, where do we keep all this butter?
And they told him, well, we keep it in federal government warehouses.
And he goes, well, how much butter do we have?
And they go, we've got 478 million pounds of butter.
And Reagan goes, 478 million pounds of butter?
Does anyone know where we can find 478 million pounds of popcorn?
So this is Reagan's kind of grim humor.
Recognizing that this is the kind of waste that is produced by Congress.
Somebody was benefiting in that dairy industry from these subsidies.
No one really needed the butter, but the government is paying for butter.
The taxpayers really paying for butter.
Now, Reagan accepts the situation of the deficit, not because he likes it, but because it's the best deal that he can get under the circumstances.
He doesn't want to give up on his tax cut.
He doesn't want to give up on the defense increase.
And so the deficit arises out of that.
And yet you'd have to say that Reagan in domestic policy had produced a real transformation.
Really, for the first time, the government was moving away from the priorities of FDR.
In other words, if you look at the federal government from FDR all the way to Reagan, both Democrats and Republicans were, by and large, On board with the welfare state, increasing the size of the welfare state.
It was simply a matter of are these Democratic priorities or Republican priorities, but in general it was the same thing.
Tax more, spend more, and now suddenly with Reagan you had something quite different.
You had tax less, spend more, but not on domestic programs, on defense, and essentially accept that there's going to be a deficit that arises.
Now, we turn to the Reagan strategy for combating the biggest domestic problem facing the Carter administration, facing the country, a problem that has not gone away.
It was, I would have to say, tamed under Reagan, brought under control.
For the eight years of Reagan, it remained under control to a degree for a decade even after Reagan.
But once again, in the 21st century, this problem is with us.
It's back.
It has been lubricated or fostered by the 2008 financial crash, also by the economic and financial policies following COVID.
We are talking, of course, about runaway inflation.
And let me say a word about inflation before getting into this, because inflation is a concept that most people don't really understand.
In fact, arguably, it's a concept that even the Federal Reserve, which is the cause of inflation, which produces the inflation, Doesn't understand either, or at least pretends not to understand.
The Federal Reserve basically says that inflation in modest amounts is a good thing.
And they have a goal, typically, of 2% inflation.
And if they reach that goal, they think that they deserve a pat on the back.
They have met their objective.
And yet, think about it from a slightly different point of view.
The effect of 2% inflation, by and large, It's going to be a price increase of roughly 2% across the entire economy.
Another way to put it is that your money is going to buy 2% less than it used to a year before, and 2% less the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that.
Now, imagine if your employer were to come to you and say to you, hey, listen, why don't you sign up to work for me under, let's say, a three-year contract or a five-year contract, and every year I'll pay you 2% less so that your income will keep going down by 2% a year.
And notice that over a decent period of time, three years, five years, ten years, you're looking at a fairly massive diminution of what you get.
Now, obviously, in the case of inflation, your money remains the same.
If you take a $10 bill and keep it in your pocket and do nothing with it for, let's say, a year or three years, you still have the $10 bill.
And you have the illusion that, hey, this $10 bill is, you know, it's as good as a dollar.
As they say, it's as good as $10.
It's just the same $10 bill I had before.
But you notice, because of inflation, that this $10 bill now buys less than it used to.
It buys less.
Every single year.
And the money, in a sense, is diminishing in its buying power, which is to say it is being devalued.
This is what inflation is.
This is what inflation does.
And we have been living with inflation in this country basically for 100 years.
The inflationary spiral begins slowly at first with the founding of the Federal Reserve.
But it begins to accelerate.
And it accelerates more and more and more.
There was very bad inflation in the 1970s.
Now, I'll go into the causes of that.
But here we're just talking about the phenomenon of inflation.
And the question we want to ask ourselves is this.
Why do we have inflation at all?
Wouldn't it be better if we had no inflation?
If by and large, it's not to say, by the way, that things don't, in an economy, go up in price.
There are new products that come on the market.
There are new efficiencies that are developed, new innovations, things that used to cost, you know, VCRs are no longer, people don't buy them anymore.
And other products, a big screen TV that used to cost $4,000 now cost $700.
So prices do go up and down in a free market economy as a result of competition and other factors.
But we're talking about the overall level of prices across the board in an economy.
That is what the inflation level of a society is.
It's almost like we're not looking at this wave or that wave.
We're looking, by and large, at the level of the tide.
We're looking at the tide in general.
So, inflation was Reagan's number one problem, and he set about with a certain kind of Reaganite precision and focus and determination to conquer it, and as we will see, he did.
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