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June 18, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:38
FINAL EXIT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1107
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Coming up, the curtain may be coming down on the terrorist regime in Iran.
Trump certainly thinks so.
I want to envision what a post-jihadist country might look like.
And examining the arrest of New York Comptroller Brad Lander, I'm going to insist that the no one is above the law principle does not contain any kind of exemption for Democrats.
Mike Lindell joins me.
He's going to talk about the verdict in his recent election case.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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Here's a message from Trump to the leadership of Iran, or at least the remaining leadership of Iran.
All caps, unconditional surrender.
Trump says, we know exactly where the so-called supreme leader is hiding.
He's an easy target.
But it's safe there.
We're not going to take him out, parentheses, kill.
At least not for now.
He goes on to say, our patience is wearing thin.
Now, I don't think any other world leader would speak like this.
This is very Trump.
It's a reflection of the era we're in.
It's a reflection of the man in charge.
And you can see where Trump is going here.
He doesn't necessarily want regime change.
I think he's quite willing to have it, but he's not pushing for it.
What he's pushing for is unconditional surrender on the nuclear issue.
Not unconditional surrender in the way that Japan surrendered or Germany surrendered and were, by the way, uh, um, um, Trump is not into nation building, democracy exporting, any of that.
But what he is into is the complete cessation, abandonment of the nuclear program.
And Israel, it seems, has become our, I'm going to call it, angel of vengeance in the Middle East.
Because we're tempted to think, and many people do think, and some on the MAGA right do think, that somehow this is like all about Israel.
That Israel is achieving its objectives, but those are not our objectives.
Well, let's think about this.
First of all, who's responsible for Iran becoming a radical Islamic nation?
Answer, in part we are.
And by that I mean the Shah was admittedly unpopular.
But the United States pulled the Persian rug out from under the Shah.
That was Jimmy Carter.
That was the Democrats.
They forced the Shah to abdicate.
And then we got Khomeini.
So we, to some degree, helped create the monster.
And this has been a real monster because this is not just Khomeini.
It's Khomeiniism.
It's jihadism.
This has been going on now since really 1979.
It's been going on for 46 years.
Iran has been unrelentingly opposed to the United States.
Death to America is not something new.
This has been their slogan since, you guessed it, 1979.
Death to Israel is kind of their afterthought.
So it's not like they started with death to Israel and then came up with death to America.
It's the opposite.
They started with death to America.
And then Israel was seen as a subset, a pawn, a little Satan, to America's great Satan.
And the Iranians have been bad boys, you might say, for the whole time.
The Beirut bombing, innumerable bombings in the 1990s, Koba Towers in Saudi Arabia, the funding of Hamas and Hezbollah, and all the Hezbollah machinations, not just in the Middle East, but in South America and Mexico.
The building of the atomic bomb is just the top rung of a very nefarious A very nefarious totem pole, a very nefarious structure of terrorism, mayhem, and evil that the Iranian regime has been sowing.
And now the Israelis are saying, we might be able to end it all.
We might be able to finish these people off.
We might be able to get rid of them.
And who's going to be cheering the loudest?
Well, you might think it's Israel, but no, the people who are going to be cheering the loudest are the Iranian people themselves.
These are the people who get forgotten.
Whenever I hear people say, and there are a lot of people saying this in social media, Iran has a right to defend themselves.
Well, who are they talking about?
They're talking about the right of the regime to defend itself.
They're concerned about the welfare of the regime and not the Iranian people.
Don't the Iranian people have a right to defend themselves against the regime?
Of course they do.
And now, look, I agree that the United States should not be getting involved in a big war.
We certainly shouldn't be getting involved in an occupation.
But let's propose a thought experiment.
This came up yesterday when I did my locals' Q&A, and somebody said very clearly, like, what price are we willing to pay?
And I said, look, let's think it out.
Let's say that Israel says to the United States that we will take care of Iran.
We will use weaponry.
You've sold us to do it, but that's fine.
We will do the job.
We will fight.
You don't have to fight.
We're not asking some, you know, guy to get off his couch in Peoria and come fight for the IDF.
We don't need those people.
We haven't asked for them.
And we will do it.
Now, there might be a couple of these nuclear facilities that require American bunker-busting bombs.
So let's just say that we want to borrow five of your B-52s to drop those bunker-busting bombs on Iran overnight.
In other words, we want to borrow your planes for 24 hours to do that.
We'll take care of it.
We'll get it done.
And you'll get your planes back.
They're on loan.
We're not trying to take them.
You don't have to give them to us.
We just need them to help us complete the task.
And the effect of this is going to be the collapse of the nuclear program, potentially the fleeing of the mullahs, potentially the recovery of the whole society by the Iranian people.
And then, of course, you get the inevitable, but then what happens next, Dinesh?
How are you going to insure?
And the answer is, we're not going to insure anything.
What we are going to say is that what comes after will be decided not by us, but by the Iranian people.
We don't need to get involved.
It's their country.
They can figure it out.
We can be pretty sure that what's going to come after is going to be better than what's there now.
We're not going to have jihadi mallahs who are shouting, death to America and trying to build nuclear weapons to give them the means to do it.
How is it not good for us to have that kind of a result?
It is.
It is good for us to have that kind of a result.
And the post-jihadi society is something that the Iranians can figure out for themselves.
As I say, it's certainly better than what we have now.
Now, the one guy who I think is crying silently over all this is none other than, you guessed it, Barack Obama.
His name doesn't come up.
I saw today an article in the New York Times that Obama is behind the scenes.
Very upset and trying to convince Democrats to be more outspoken.
Institutions like Harvard to fight harder against Trump.
And I can see why Obama is so discombobulated.
Why?
Because Trump is the anti-Obama.
Think of it.
Obama basically had his remaking that was going from 2008 to 2012.
He wanted it to be continued by Hillary.
Who ruined it?
Trump.
And then the Democrats kind of clawed it back with Biden and maybe Obama was whispering in Biden's ear for four years.
And who stopped all that?
Trump again.
So Trump is foiling Obama on the home front.
But the point I want to highlight now, even bigger than that, is that Netanyahu has been foiling Obama on the international stage.
Why?
Because drawing on the dreams of his lunatic father, Obama's dream was to give Iran a nuclear weapon.
Now, this may seem a little shocking, but it shouldn't be shocking for anyone who's watched my film, 2016, Obama's America.
It's all laid out.
Obama's goal was to weaken the United States, to empower our enemies.
It's all part, as I say, of this crackpot anti-colonial ideology that he got from his deranged dad.
And in some ways, the ghost of his father has been ruling this country indirectly through the sun.
The spirit of the father lives through the son, you may say, in a kind of unholy transmission.
And now it looks finally like both in the domestic stage through Trump and on the international stage through Netanyahu, that malevolent ghost is happily being exorcised.
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July 6th marks a major meeting among nations that control The Democrats seem to be taking the view that lawlessness is their prerogative.
They appear to have the premise that no one is above the law except them.
And the latest example of this is this guy, Brad Lander.
This guy is the comptroller of New York.
Now, normally a comptroller, you think of a comptroller as a kind of accountant, right?
The comptroller is the guy who balances the books.
Kind of a money guy.
The last thing you expect the comptroller to be is some sort of an activist, some kind of a maniac.
And yet, that's who this Brad Lander is.
He was recently arrested by ICE for obstructing the arrest of an illegal.
And so let me set the scene.
You have this illegal.
Brad Lander, you know, projects himself forward and tells ICE, basically, show me the warrant.
Now ICE is like, we don't have to show you the warrant.
First of all, we don't need a warrant.
There's no warrant that is required when you arrest an illegal.
There is some due process that's required, but there is no warrant that's required.
And second of all, even if there was a warrant that was required, it doesn't mean that any third party can show up and demand to see the warrant.
They don't have any inherent right to show the warrant.
Just like, for example, if the police show up at the...
And they say, we have a warrant to search the house.
The suspect has a right to say, show me the warrant.
But not some neighbor or some visiting uncle or some third party that has nothing to do with the case.
They don't have a right to demand, well, let me see the war.
Let me make sure that you're up to snuff in what you're doing.
And this is basically what this Lander character was trying to do.
When you see him doing the familiar jostling and pushing and shoving, very similar, by the way, to what Senator Alex Padilla said, Same thing.
You know, Padilla's now been going around giving these pompous speeches.
You know, I have every right to oversight.
I was merely trying to ask a question.
But again, let's go back to the scene to see what he was doing.
You had Kristi Noem giving a speech.
This was not a Q&A.
She was making a statement.
And this guy starts shouting from the audience during the statement.
So, interrupting.
Her presentation, which you can't do.
This is not Q&A.
And so what do they do?
They try to make him leave and usher him out.
And then he starts again wrestling, jostling, pushing, shoving, refusing to leave.
And finally, they just flop him onto the ground.
So there's a video of all this, and you can see this guy is...
It can happen to anyone.
The truth of it is, if you or I did that in any kind of proceeding, we would be treated much more harshly.
This guy was kind of given the rather soft treatment in all this.
And then the moment that he is apprehended for being unruly and disruptive, he plays the victim.
Earlier, of course, we had the third incident.
This is why I'm talking about this is a kind of a emerging pattern here of the Congresswoman.
Remember, was it Monica MacIver?
I think from memory, I apologize if I'm getting it wrong, but I don't think I am.
I think that is, in fact, her name, Representative MacIver.
You know, the woman in the red jacket pushing and shoving and really fighting her way through ice at the New Jersey facility.
She gets arrested.
She gets charged.
And the remarkable thing here is in all these cases, the leadership of the Democrats is rushing to the defense of these people and exalting them as moral exemplars.
So what you're getting at here is not only the law breaking by the Democrats, but it is being egged on.
These Democrats who do this kind of thing are becoming...
And what that tells you is that we can expect more of this.
Why?
Because think of it.
Had you heard of Senator Alex Padilla before?
No.
But you've heard of him now.
I'm talking about him now.
Have you heard of Monica McIver?
No.
But you might have heard of her name now.
I'm talking about her now.
And the same with this.
I mean, whoever heard of the comptroller?
Brad Lander, as Eva Peron says in the musical Evita, you wouldn't be recognized by your own grandmother.
And that's probably true of Brad Lander.
He's a complete non-entity.
Nobody knows who he is until now.
So what I'm saying is that these people are now staging these kind of events.
the events have become a sort of performance artistry.
The latest example I saw of it is this event He's running against Cuomo.
He's running against a bunch of other candidates.
But again, you have an event.
And Tom Holman is there.
And this Mamdani guy, again, it's really all theatrics.
He's pretending to fight his way to confront Tom Holman.
Now, other people are holding him back.
But, you know, it's like one of those things that happens in a schoolyard fight.
Let me at him!
Let me at him!
This is basically what this dude is doing.
And he's a fraud.
I mean, this is all theatrics, but again...
He wants to make it seem that he's such a fighter.
He's not going to sit back and take it.
This is the image he's trying to convey in his mayoral race.
And so the Democrats really, after, think of it, for four years they've been lecturing us, no one is above the law.
Yes, we have.
You know, 95 charges against Trump.
Yes, they're coming from multiple jurisdictions.
All of the prosecutors are Democrats, some at the state level, some at the level of the Biden DOJ.
But it's all in the up and up because if you break the law or if we can even say that you broke the law, guess what?
You're going to be held accountable.
And now it's the exact opposite.
Now they say things like, oh, it's so authoritarian.
It's political targeting.
Trump is the Trump.
People are going after their political enemies.
And it's just so ridiculous because of all that we've lived through.
If we hadn't lived through all of it, the Democrats maybe would make a point.
And I think a lot of Republicans would have said, you know, yeah, maybe we should ease up.
But having been through what we have, She's talking about basically a bunch of these security officials grabbing this guy Brad Lander and arresting him.
And I said, listen.
This is not authoritarianism.
Contact me after there are pre-dawn FBI raids, helicopters over his house, long guns drawn at his family.
He's dragged down the stairs with his head bouncing against the steps.
He's pulled out into the front yard where his neighbors are gawking at him and CNN has been tipped off.
Then he's thrown in jail into solitary confinement.
He's confined for about a year or two years before his trial even comes up, before he's even I've been convicted of anything.
When all of that happens, DM me.
Send me a message and I'll be alarmed or I'll be concerned.
But until then, I'm not really going to worry about it because it's not half as bad as the stuff that you, your team, has been doing to us.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to bring back on the podcast my friend Mike Lindell, the one and only Mike Lindell, founder and CEO of MyPillow.
He is also founder of the Lindell Recovery Network.
He's author of What Are the Odds?
He's CEO at Lindell TV and he's just been through a big election integrity case that I want to talk to him about.
By the way, the website, LindellTV.com.
Mike, welcome.
Thank you for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
You have just had quite an ordeal in the courtroom, something that was some time in the making.
It must have been a little bit of an eerie experience.
Tell us about it.
Well, yeah, it was a long time coming.
And I've had people call it the trial of the century because it's so important to our country.
And here's what I mean by this.
I'm going to take people back to January of 2021.
Remember, these voting machine companies and stuff, they sued and sent over almost 100 individuals and platforms, news platforms.
And that was called lawfare.
And it hadn't been done in our country since the 1700s to this magnitude.
If you spoke up about the election, boy, you could be sued.
And, well, all of them since that point.
And, by the way, MyPillow was the only company, the only advertiser to ever get sued.
Can you imagine advertising?
On some show or something, or some podcast or something, and they say something, and now they sue the advertisement.
I mean, it was bizarre, okay?
This whole thing was so bizarre.
Back in 21, when I got sued by three different of these companies and their affiliates, MyPillow also got sued, which was very upsetting to me.
I mean, I was just living.
My employee-owned company, MyPillow, they did nothing.
As you know, Dinesh, I stood up for free speech in our country, and I'd never backed down.
But we get there to the trial, and it was very interesting.
I had never been.
I was there three weeks, almost a month.
Mike, before we jump into trial, let me ask you this.
Do you think that the motive of suing MyPillow, given that you say, you know, MyPillow is a merchandise company selling sheets and pillows.
Do you think the motive of filing the suit was to scare away the box stores, scare away your suppliers, your distributors, and basically tell them, this guy's radioactive.
You don't want to be doing business with MyPillow.
You think that's what they were going for?
Yeah, absolutely.
But their biggest incentive was to silence Mike Lindell.
It was to silence my voice.
Remember, Dinesh, on January 7th and 8th of 2021, 1.2 million Americans were deplatformed off Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, Jack Dorsey's Twitter.
And even the president lost, if you remember, 100 million followers on Twitter back then.
And those two days are living history, you know, January 7th and 8th.
I compare it when we were growing up as kids.
You turn off a black and white TV and we go down this little tiny dot.
And we'd turn it back on, it would come back to life.
Well, that little dot was our voice.
Anybody that had spoke up about the election, they were deplatformed, or there were things also back then about controversy over the vaccines, but they just wanted to silence our voice.
And that's why they went after my pillow.
They went after everything.
They came at me from every different angle you could imagine.
Came after my money.
They came after, let's go, and like you say, all the box stores were canceled.
Those were actually canceled before.
And they even sued me.
They had sent threatening letters out.
Here's another thing, too.
They had sent over 150 threatening letters out to people that had just seen stuff happen during the election and said, hey, you keep your mouth shut or you too could be sued.
You better be careful putting out disinformation.
They called it in a trial, they're calling it disinformation, malinformation, misinformation.
There's all these different kinds of information.
Well, you know what?
It got brought up by my lawyers.
Where are we as a society?
You know, you go back to 1984, the movie or whatever it was, and the truth tellers, if you can't question your government or the attachments from, i.e.
these machine companies that are part of, we pay for them as taxpayers.
If you can't question these things without the threat of getting sued or even raising your hand, that's pretty bad.
That goes back to, you know, a communist state.
Mike, in the trial itself, was the focus on your right to speak?
Did they also get into the various types of evidence of what types of fraud may have occurred in 2020?
What was the substance of the trial and how did it come out?
Well, this, I'll tell you, this was...
She already deemed them defamatory, where the jury didn't even have to decide if they were defamatory or not.
That was a horrible, horrible ruling.
You're basically just deciding which ones you did maliciously and all this other stuff.
Who said they were defamatory?
I called their lawyers criminals.
I mean, I'm sorry.
They went after my company, MyPillow.
Two of the things that I said, the only two things they got me on, personally, I said when MyPillow was attacked and sued.
Well, if you sue my company, you don't think I'm going to go, oh, I'm sorry.
What did I do?
What did they do?
But they did make it.
You're spot on.
We were trying to make it go the...
But they wanted to make it all about the machines and the elections.
They brought in all these experts about the machines are vulnerable.
So in my mind, it comes back to they want to keep these electronic voting machines and I want to get rid of them like 132 other countries that have banned them.
So they made it about something.
And then my evidence, I was bringing in, because they're saying, you only got your evidence from one person.
Well, as I think the whole world knows, I've spent four years and $50 million and hired more experts than anyone known to man.
I have three different camera angles of a diamond heist.
I went around, and one of the evidence that they really suppressed that we entered in, once I realized they were going that route, the judge said, no, you cannot talk about Dr. Frank.
They called him a high school math teacher.
Well, they neglected to say he teaches kids with IQs of 145 or better.
They neglected to say he was up for the Nobel Prize.
They neglected to say he's won 66, or got published 66 peer reviewed journals.
This guy's a genius and he got all his information from So when I met him in the spring of 21, I went around the country for a year and a half, put 780 hours, 780 hours on an airplane.
We're out four pilots flying around, meeting Secretary of State, Attorney Generals in all the states and giving data from that.
Giving the data right from the state.
Some of them I had to pay for.
This actually came up in the trial, Dinesh, was one of the first states I went to was Alabama, and I bought their voter rolls for $42,000.
I met with the Secretary of State, and his name was John Merrill, Republican.
These were all these uniparty Republican blockers, but he was one of the first ones.
And I had his data from Alabama, and I said, John, Do you realize that it says here 4,662 people voted in the state of Alabama that were between ages of 110 and 200 years old?
Now, and John looked at me and said, well, Mike, we live pretty good here in Alabama.
I thought he was joking, right?
And I brought this up in court, what these voter rolls, what I actually had.
This isn't Mike Lindell having evidence or not.
These are numbers that are impossible.
And you know, their expert in court, when he was confronted with that, he goes, who cares?
That was his word.
Who cares?
Alabama has voter ID.
Well, we know they have voter ID.
That's even more so that these names did not vote.
And then it got brought up in court that we're talking about anomalies and deviations.
I brought up in court in Georgia where this nice lady, she's a Democrat.
She got zero votes in her own precinct and her and her husband and daughter live in that precinct.
So they got brought up in the court and Alex Halderman, They called it a computer glitch, and she actually went from third place to first place.
But I always say, if she hadn't got zero votes, if they'd have gave her three votes, Dinesh, they would have told her, in the day and age we're in, I'm sorry, man, no one loves you but your husband and your daughter.
Nobody voted for you.
They wouldn't have either looked into it.
This is what I kept bringing up in court, but the judge would not let our experts, you know, like I say, even though that they brought it up, we were very, I'm very happy that my pillow got 100% vindicated.
That was how the court came out.
Zero.
I mean, it was like, did they do anything wrong?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It was beautiful.
It was in spite of all the setbacks by the judge.
And being in Colorado, everyone didn't give us a chance.
But you know what?
Of all those people that got sued four years ago, everyone so far has settled because their insurance companies say, just settle.
It's going to cost too much to fight in court.
Or they are in fear.
Or you could end up destroyed like Mike Lindell.
They keep destroying him because he won't give up.
So this was historical that this trial went all the way to jury trial and we won.
Now, there is an old corporation that was on there that they put, you see out in the news, $2 million-some damages.
Well, let me tell you, everybody, the jury didn't know how to set the damages because there was no damages.
There was no evidence of damages.
So my lawyers today, we have a meeting this afternoon, and according to them, it's going to be bye-bye, you know, gone.
But I'm not – You wouldn't have had advertisers anywhere, Dinesh.
When I prayed that before this happened, that it was finally a breakthrough to break on through and open these doors up, these problems in our elections.
And we're not going to...
The president, incidentally, Remember, you're supposed to hold these records for 22 months.
That's a federal law.
And Colorado has a very habit of just deleting them right away because it's very corrupt.
Mike, it seems to me if I look at the big picture here, they were trying to get my pillow.
They completely failed.
They were trying to prove that you were...
They were trying to get, what, $100 million from you.
They got a token verdict of a couple of million dollars which you're going to appeal.
You know, sometimes a jury is sending a message and juries have been known, for example, to award a guy $1 or $10.
And it's kind of the jury's way of saying, you know what, I'm going to give you a, quote, moral victory of some sort.
And maybe the judge set it up in such a way that that was going to be the outcome.
But I don't think that the people who sued you got what they intended.
Now, I will say that maybe in one way, these things are always bad, because I even hesitate to speculate on how much money you spend on legal fees, right?
Legal fees are a hemorrhage, and it costs a great deal of money.
And I do want to...
Many people say that, and then they don't do that, but you actually did that.
Right, and you know, Dinesh, I want to tell everybody, at the end, when you want to talk about their motives, at the end of the trial, or when they were doing final arguments, Their attorney addressed the jury, and here's what they said.
We're asking you for $60 million, but you can go a lot higher.
And as you heard, you heard in the testimony here that Mr. Lindell had a net worth of $50 million.
Now it's minus 10. And he goes, but don't let, if this, if your verdict bankrupts him.
This is what he told the jury.
In other words, his motive is, his motive is, we don't, we don't, um, They're looking at it going, hey, this ain't about the money.
This is about you send a lesson to Mike Lindell and the rest of the country and suppress their First Amendment right of free speech.
Can you even believe he said that?
It was the hush fell over the crowd.
I mean, and the people that were sitting in the courtroom couldn't, they would just go, what?
And the judge had to quiet it.
You know, it was unreal.
Well, Mike, you are a guy who puts your money and you've put your company behind standing up for election integrity.
Let's close out by talking about some pillows.
I don't mean to make it seem trivial, but guess what?
You're in the business of selling stuff, and that's what's kept you going, and that's what's given you the ability to have the voice that you have.
And you have a special offer for the Dinesh D'Souza viewers.
And listeners, so tell them about that, and we'll close out.
Yeah, this is the best special we've ever ran, everybody.
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You're going to love it.
I mean, I'm telling you.
I even added to it after this trial.
So, you guys, it's a win-win-win.
You're helping support my employee-owned company.
We just got a big win.
But the cost, like you said, Dinesh, of this trial was off the charts of what it takes to get it to that point.
And I didn't have any insurance company paying me.
You know why?
Because way back when in 2000, I mean in 2010, We made a deal because I did not want them dictating all these lawsuits saying, we want to settle and we want to go to mediation.
Here's mediation.
There's only one truth and the truth has to get out there.
So we're very grateful and you guys use that promo code and I think there's a 1-800 number they can call too if you have that.
I have it right here.
So it's 800-876-0227.
That's the phone number to call or just go to MyPillow.com.
And don't forget the promo code.
It's just my name, D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
Mike, thank you very much for joining me.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
And you guys, I'm never stopping.
The media asks me, are you going to stop now about this?
No.
We're going to win.
I made a promise to our president.
I said, sir, your next four years, I promise you, will not be in vain.
We are going to secure these election platforms like other countries have around the world.
So we don't want these next four years just to be a blip in history.
We want it to save the American dream.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Mike.
I'm now in a section of my book on Reagan, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And what's interesting to me about rereading this book 25, even almost 30 years later, is how relevant The issues are to what we're talking about today.
I'm now going to go into a section of the book that was not all that controversial when I wrote it, but is very controversial today.
Namely, the great displacement of jobs and opportunity in our economy.
As a result of changes, some of which Reagan helped to bring about, some of which were not specific to Reagan but were happening at the time.
Now, what are these changes that I am talking about?
Well, there really are two big ones.
There is globalization and there is technology.
Now, Reagan had something to do with both in the sense that Reagan brought down, in the end, the Soviet Empire.
And that accelerated globalization because previously the world was in two rival blocs.
There was sort of the capitalist bloc, and then there was the communist bloc.
But with China moving away from a communist or centrally controlled economy, And then with Russia also moving toward, again, a flawed, a twisted, a kind of gangster capitalism in the aftermath of the Soviet Empire.
With all that happening, you now had a global capitalist or maybe quasi-capitalist market.
I say quasi because there are powerful states still having a lot to do with the flow of goods and goods.
And Reagan did accelerate.
He didn't create, but he accelerated the technological revolution.
How?
Well, with his policies.
His policies were Very favorable to entrepreneurship, innovation.
Reagan promoted privatization, deregulation, lower taxes, more incentives, and also the kind of, I would call it, celebration of the entrepreneurial ethic.
I'll talk about some of these things later in the book when I'm discussing Reagan's personality, his character.
But the truth of it is that there were big changes going on in the economy.
And some of the problems that have become very serious subsequently were just getting started.
So you started seeing layoffs in automobiles, steel, textiles, shoes, rubber, machine tools.
Why?
Two reasons.
One, other countries could make steel, rubber, shoes a lot cheaper.
And number two, technology makes human labor.
Or it reduces the need for it.
Think, for example, about an example that was very relevant in the Reagan years, the family farm.
The family farm had been a kind of staple of American cultural life.
America started out, of course, as an agricultural society.
And there were just countless family farms all over the country.
It's difficult today to have family farms.
But one big reason for it was it used to be that the whole family would work on the farm and then you'd hire laborers who would work on the farm with you.
And now if you go and see these farms, you will see a farm of 10,000 acres with one guy, you know, with...
You don't need a whole bunch of people.
You just need one or two guys, and they're able to do the job that was previously done by a lot of guys.
And so farmers found themselves in a position where they just weren't needed, at least not in the same volume as before.
And so what happens in a society with a welfare state is that everybody comes screaming to Congress and wants to be bailed out.
Bail out the steel companies.
Bail out the textile companies.
Bail out the farmers.
Now, there were some subsidies for farmers already in place, but the farmers wanted more subsidies.
And all of this was packaged by the Democrats in a single ribbon-bearing package that was called industrial policy.
And what's industrial policy?
Well, no surprise.
The government should be running everything.
The government, according to the Democrats, should decide which sectors of the economy are, quote, sunrise sectors and which sectors of the economy are, quote, sunset sectors.
And what the government should do is, quote, invest in the sunrise sectors and bail out the sunset sectors to protect jobs.
And this came before Reagan.
And so Reagan kind of took a good hard look at these problems and he decided to do absolutely nothing.
In other words, Reagan decided that inaction was the best course of action.
And I mention this very candidly because this is going to be, at least today, when the situation is different, somewhat controversial.
Certainly different from the Trump approach.
The Trump approach is we need to bring manufacturing back and we need to do this and we need to do that.
And Reagan's view was, no, we don't need to do those things.
In fact, the best thing for me to do is to quash these bad ideas that are coming from the Democrats, which, by the way, were genuinely bad ideas.
And Reagan wasn't really trying to rock the boat.
Reagan was like, listen, I'm not going to eliminate the farm subsidies that are there now.
I'm going to let them be.
I'm just not going to add any new ones.
And similarly, I'm not going to create tariffs.
Same problem that Trump has faced, and Trump is much more aggressive in saying, and by the way, Trump was kind of saying this even at that time.
If you go back to early interviews with Trump from the 80s, Trump is saying, you know, the other countries are taking advantage of us.
So Trump, in a way, was ahead of his time.
But in Reagan's time, Reagan's view was different than Trump's.
Here's Reagan.
If one partner shoots a hole in the bottom of the boat, tariffs, does it make sense for the other partner to shoot another hole in the boat?
What's the boat?
Global trade.
And Reagan's view is that if somebody else puts tariffs, we only make the problem.
Yes, we should be negotiating to reduce those tariffs.
but Now, of course, Trump's rebuttal.
I'm conducting this Reagan-Trump debate that never happened in reality, but I'm conducting it in my mind and putting it in front of you.
Trump, we need to bludgeon those guys for them to bring down their tariffs.
What else is going to cause them to do that if not doing the same to them?
And so here you go.
This is, again, a remarkably familiar way of talking and shows you the relevance of these issues even.
Reagan was approached in the mid-80s by a group of shoe manufacturers from the Northeast, business guys, who came to see him.
These are Republicans.
And these guys basically dominated the shoemaking industry in the United States.
And they were Reagan donors.
And why were they coming to see Reagan?
They wanted him to block cheap foreign shoes from being allowed into this country.
Now, it's important to realize that when you're dealing with trade, the interest of producers and consumers, I'm talking about producers and consumers in America, is not the same.
Right?
Why?
Because the producer says, hey, listen, I want to charge $100 for shoes.
I don't want foreign shoes coming in the charge that costs $40 or $50.
But of course, the American consumer goes, well, I'd kind of like to buy a pair of shoes for $50.
I don't want to pay $100.
So trade isn't just like us against them.
To some degree, it also reflects the different interests between American producers and American consumers.
And Reagan understood that.
Reagan knew that.
So Reagan brings in these Republican business guys, these donors.
And they want to talk to him about shoes and all about trade and all about how foreign trade has got to be blocked.
And what does Reagan do?
Well, Reagan steers the conversation into lengthy anecdotes about his time on the ranch, how he loves cowboy boots, what his favorite type of cowboy boots are, how it's really hard to get a really good pair like they used to make in the old days.
And Reagan goes on and on and the meeting is over.
Now, when the business guys leave, they look at each other and they go, man, you know, we don't think that Reagan even followed our line of reasoning about why we need to block these foreign products.
But the truth of it is Reagan knew exactly what they were there for.
Reagan did not want to give in to them.
Reagan didn't want to have to fight with them about it.
And so what did Reagan do?
He just basically did what you and I would do when someone comes to confront us with something that we don't want to deal with.
We change the topic.
We take them down some big road and start drawing them into some common experience we all had.
Remember our college reunion when we all went down and had a picnic and did this and did that.
And so what Reagan was able to do in a very subtle Reaganite way, without offending these people, But with giving them the wrong idea that he, Reagan, was, quote, out of it, didn't really understood.
He understood all too well what these guys wanted.
He didn't want to say yes.
And so, in a sense, he deflected them with anecdotes.
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