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June 24, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:07
REGIME CHANGE? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1111
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Coming up, I'm going to confront head-on the controversial issue of regime change.
I'm going to argue it shouldn't be our goal in Iran, but it should be an outcome we welcome.
I'm also going to talk about the elusive ceasefire.
Frank Affney of the Center for Security Policy joins me.
We're going to talk about Iran, the nuclear program, how effectively it's been stymied or decimated, and where the U.S. and Iran should go from here.
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We are living in interesting times, like they say.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing, but what it does mean is there's a lot of stuff happening on many fronts.
And while I'm going to focus on the ceasefire or the ceasefire that got violated, I want to start by talking about a couple of other things.
The first one is that a socialist looks like he might win for the mayor in New York City.
And this is a, well, he's a Muslim socialist, which some people would say is the worst of all worlds.
It's Zoran Mamdani.
And this guy is very dynamic.
In fact, I was looking at his post this morning, and he says something like, you know, this is the way we take charge of tomorrow.
Just the kind of vacuous statement that screams, Obama.
So in my view, this is the Muslim Obama.
And his policies are guaranteed to put New York further into the sinkhole.
He wants government-run grocery stores.
This guy wants to reinstitute rent control.
Quite frankly, if you're listening to this podcast, you have a business, you have money, you're in New York, you might want to be looking for the exit because I think that, and look, this is one of the great things about democracy, but it's also one of the bad things about democracy, and that is you kind of get to dig your own grave.
And New York, I think, is going to do that because at least when I look on polymarket, it looks like Mamdani is going to has a 61% chance to win over Andrew Cuomo, 38. Now, Andrew Cuomo has his problems, and I can kind of see why this young dynamic guy, but again, this is the Obama trap.
The guy looks good, he sounds good, he seems dynamic, he's cool, all right, but his policies are going to essentially empty your pocket.
So if that's what you want, that's what you're going to get, and it's going to be your fault if you vote for him.
All right, let's turn to the shooter in Minnesota.
People have probably forgotten about him.
We don't read anything about it in the media.
And here's why.
Because it's come out, this is from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, that the shooter had a motive.
And one of his motives is he wanted to kill Amy Kolobachar.
Why?
Because apparently he wanted Tim Waltz to run for Amy Kolobachar's seat.
Think about this.
Now, of course, you'd say the guy is, you know, he's friggin' nuts.
And I agree.
But my point is he is a friggin leftist nutcase.
He's trying to help Tim Waltz.
He's trying to help the very guy who gave him an appointment.
And he wants Tim Waltz apparently to surface in Amy Klobuchar's seat.
So my point is the left had been saying this guy's MAGA.
He's a Christian nationalist.
They've gone dead silent on all this.
Why?
Because it's kind of obvious that although he's a nut, he's their nut, not ours.
All right.
Let's see what else.
The Supreme Court says that Trump is now free to deport criminal aliens, not aliens in general, but criminal aliens to other countries.
In other words, not even necessarily to the country they came from.
You can deport them.
They're criminal.
They're aliens.
You can send them abroad if you want to.
This is a 6-3 opinion, the conservatives on one side.
And by the way, again, we do have six conservatives.
I want to push back against this idea that somehow Roberts is a closet liberal and Amy Coney Barrett has sold us out.
None of this is true.
On the balance, both of these guys are right of center.
Now, they may not be as right of center as Thomas and Alito, I grant, but they have a consistent judicial philosophy.
I think Roberts sees himself, because he's the chief, as a little bit more of a, let's keep the court, let's keep the ship, if you will, sailing in a certain kind of direction.
Let's keep the balance, if you will, on the court.
So he does do some of that.
But here we go, a 6-3 decision, big win for Trump.
And, you know, some of the MAGA guys are like, deportations, you know, galore.
I think the really interesting consequence of this is going to be to encourage self-deportation.
And what I mean by that is that think about it.
If you're a criminal alien and you suddenly realize, guess what?
I could be sent to the Sudan.
I could be sent to El Salvador and then I'm going to have like, you know, Bukele running around with a whip.
I don't want that.
Guess what?
I might be taking the next, you know, bus out of here and make my way elsewhere or to my home country where I can fend for myself like I did before.
So I think this is a good thing.
By the way, some 1 million aliens have already self-deported.
Self-deportation is really the best, right?
Because you don't have to round people up.
You don't have to throw them in a van.
You don't have to...
All right, let's talk about what's going on with Iran, with Israel.
So Trump today expressed a kind of annoyance, a kind of irritation, and he said they are both violating the ceasefire.
We're talking, of course, about the ceasefire that Trump announced just hours earlier in a massive surprise and, in fact, a massive win for him, which is, guess what?
I pummeled these guys.
I blew up their nuclear facilities.
And now we've all kind of come to the table.
We've all agreed to a treaty.
Trump, for a while there, the left was salivating because they're like, Iran is really going to strike back.
They're obliged to strike back.
They're a revolutionary regime.
And then Trump revealed, and this is really a humiliation for Iran, Trump's like, psps, guess what?
The Iranians called me beforehand and told me when and where they're going to strike so we could kind of basically move personnel out of there.
The strike was basically, Trump even literally likened it to they were like blowing off steam.
But I don't think they were blowing off steam so much as they wanted propaganda for the home audience.
Like, listen, we're really going to teach them a lesson.
But the Iranians realize we can't teach them a real lesson because if we kill any Americans, it's going to be hell to pay.
And we don't want that to happen because then essentially they'll start leveling Tehran.
They'll start leveling these other cities and Shiraz and so on.
And so the Iranians have essentially decided to play nice doggy.
But the ceasefire was apparently violated.
Now, again, the kind of pundits who have, I think, a very poor comprehension of all this stuff are like, look, it's all breaking down again.
And of course, you can see the wishful thinking on the part of the media.
They're hoping it all breaks down because they would love to see things disintegrate.
In fact, they were hoping there wouldn't be a ceasefire.
You know, you could just see on CNN and MSNBC, the hosts were like, well, Iran hasn't agreed to a ceasefire.
And then their correspondent comes on and goes, well, actually, Iran has agreed.
And you can see the like the disappointment on the face of these CNN hosts, like, oh, really?
We're really hoping.
So now, my view, the ceasefire, a complete and unimportant sideshow.
Quite honestly, no one cares.
Even Trump is, I think, pretending to care.
And Trump does care because Trump basically wants to, he wants to make it look like he's running everything and he's micromanaging and I got him all where I want him.
And so there's a little bit of pride here.
But the point I'm trying to make is a ceasefire is unimportant.
Why?
Because the really important thing is the degradation, the debilitation, the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities.
And to the degree that that's done, mission accomplished.
Now, there are like 20 different ways to violate a ceasefire, right?
What happens is the ceasefire is supposed to go into effect at 12 a.m.
midnight.
But of course, there are time differences.
And so Iran can go, well, it's 12 a.m.
over there, but not over here.
And Israel and Iran goes, why don't we just fire them some rockets at the last minute?
And Israel goes, well, you just killed a bunch of Israelis.
We have to respond.
We can't let this go.
And so what you have is it's kind of like two guys.
You've pulled them apart.
They're fighting.
But the moment that you slightly let go, they start punching each other again.
And I think Trump's view of this should be to step back and essentially say that the goal of this expedition has been achieved.
Whether Israel and Iran exchange some further punches is kind of up to them.
Trump gave a really good view, though, of where he wants all this to go.
And that is, he said, really just an hour or so ago, he said, Iran needs to stop being a kind of a war nation, and it needs to start becoming a great trading nation.
And right here you see, I think, how Trump views the world.
Trump views the world as peaceful nations that are producing stuff, entrepreneurship, innovation, making people's lives better, and trading with each other, admittedly on fair and even terms, on what Trump would call the level playing field.
But this is how you get mutual prosperity, right?
You make something, you make semiconductors, Taiwan does, America needs semiconductors.
We buy them from Taiwan.
But the Taiwanese need stuff that we have to sell.
So they open our markets to our products.
And so Trump's point is Iran, you know, admittedly, if you look at history, Iran became historically rich and powerful both through trade and through conquest.
And I don't just mean Islam.
I would go further back, Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire.
So the Iranians are used to doing it both ways.
And what Trump is saying is: stop doing it one way, try to do it the other way.
You're actually got, you have historical experience with both.
Even under Islam, there were great trading empires, and the Muslims are very good traders.
They're very good traders.
I've saw them function like this in India.
And Trump is like, go back to doing that.
And by the way, the same is true of Israel.
Look at the India-Pakistan conflict.
Both countries would be better off if they traded with each other.
They're smart people on both sides.
They both make stuff that the other side would like to buy.
And so Trump sees the solution forward as diffusing this kind of ethnic conflict, territorial grabbing, expropriation, and substituting for that production, manufacture, trade, prosperity.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast really an old friend that goes back to the Reagan days.
It's Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Institute for the American Future.
This is a new not-for-profit aimed at securing the security and well-being of our constitutional republic.
Frank is also the host of Securing America, a daily program on the Real Americas Voice Network.
And you can follow him on X at Frank Gaffney, website usfuture.org.
Frank, you and I go back to the days of Reagan.
And I remember, gosh, I don't know if this was the 80s or the early 90s, the issue of nuclear weapons, strategic missile defense, all the stuff that we talked about.
And quite honestly, I was learning about, but you were a genuine expert on these subjects.
So the topic of nukes is something that is familiar to you.
In recent decades, you've been focusing on the jihadis, on radical Islam.
So I thought you're the perfect guy for me to bring on at this critical time.
We've had this surgical strike on the Iran nuclear facilities.
We have also had an announced ceasefire by Trump.
Apparently, then Trump, like 10 minutes later, comes out and says the ceasefire is being violated.
My view, Frank, is that the ceasefire is a sideshow because it's kind of like, you know, I said this in my monologue.
You have two guys fighting, you pull them apart.
The moment they have a chance, they land a couple of like last-minute blows on each other.
But the important thing is the debilitation of the Iran nukes.
So to the degree that that strike was successful, that is a big deal that Trump has gifted the world.
Give us your take on all this stuff going on now and a kind of assessment of how well Trump has done so far and what comes next.
Well, that's a pretty full plate.
First of all, thank you, Dinesh, for calling to mind a remarkable period in my life.
I had the privilege of actually working for President Reagan on those portfolio items you talked about, nuclear weapons, arms control, missile defense were in my wheelhouse initially as a deputy assistant secretary and then acting as an assistant secretary with that responsibility.
And it was an amazing on-the-job learning experience, I can tell you, but also one that has, I think, served me well in the subsequent years because as you rightly note, none of those problems has gone away.
The Soviet Union fortunately has, which was the main concern then.
But in its wake, we've seen not only an ongoing problem with Russia, now particularly evident in Ukraine, but China emerging as a superpower peer to us, nuclear, among other standards.
And then there are these others that have been kind of, in many cases, like Iran, metastasizing.
And your question about the strike that Donald Trump executed, I must say, brilliantly.
And not just the actual feat of getting these extraordinary weapons delivered with precision and apparently decisive effect, but doing it with absolute secrecy, which in this town, as you know, having spent some time here, I didn't think was possible, honestly, but it was proven to be.
This brings us to kind of the present moment.
Frank, before you continue, let me jump in on the secrecy issue, because do you agree that the reason for the secrecy was that Trump, that had Trump notified the broad swath of Congress,
had Trump not cleaned out the, let's call them the backstabbers who are in the administration and in the sort of apparatus of decision making, there's no way this would not have gotten out because the people who oppose it would have, I'm not saying that they would have gone and directly notified Iran, but they would have notified the New York Times.
And then, you know, 30 seconds later, the Iranians would know all about it.
So a lot of kind of preparatory groundwork seems to have gone into making sure that there is a structure in place where this kind of thing can be done.
And isn't that part of the bureaucratic accomplishment of Trump?
I'd like to think so.
Dinesh, I have to tell you, I know of a number of people that I consider to be, well, batting for the other team, who fortunately are still inside the administration.
So I think it may be more a function of compartmentalization.
Just if they're not deemed to have a need to know, they were not read in.
And it's certainly the case that it was helpful with respect to the Congress.
Now, their panties are in a bunch because they're claiming in some cases that this was unconstitutional or an impeachable offense, what have you.
But had they been read in, you can bet exactly as you say, the mission would have been scrubbed necessarily.
But if I could just come to your second and maybe most important point, has the ceasefire locked in a denuclearized Iran and thereby permitted us to say, well, it's somewhat a pejorative term these days, I guess, mission accomplished?
I don't think so.
And I'm frankly apprehensive about anything that precludes what I consider to be the absolutely necessary step if a decisive victory is to be established, an unconditional surrender, to use the president's term.
And that is the fall of the regime in Iran.
Not at our hands, perhaps with the help of the Israelis, and they've been providing a lot of it, but at the hands of the people of Iran, who are desperate to achieve that and have been prevented from doing so under successive American presidencies,
unfortunately both Republican and Democratic, who simply averted their gaze from the aspirations of the people of Iran and decided they'd stick with the regime and in some cases actually prop it up, enrich it, embolden it for sure, and I could argue enable this nuclear weapons ambitions as well.
Is part of what you're saying, Frank, here, just this, that, look, to the degree that the regime remains in place, the mullahs are still in power.
And that is, in fact, one of the implications of a, let's say the ceasefire works beautifully.
Well, what do the mullahs buy?
They buy a lot of time, right?
And no matter how degraded their facilities, we know what their ideology is.
It still remains death to America, right?
We also know that they have the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons.
We know that they have allies, Venezuela, North Korea, that either have weapons or have weapons-grade material.
So I think what you're saying is they will now start cooking again in the kitchen or maybe have to make some new kitchens, but they have the recipe and they're going to try to do it and maybe try to do it even faster this time.
And the logic of that is a way of saying that only regime change, to use that controversial term, really brings this to a decisive end.
And yet, my sense is that Trump does not want to go that far.
At least he does not want the United States to go that far.
And there's a great deal of kind of MAGA anxiety, even about what Trump has done so far.
Trump no more than mentioned the term regime change and people were having like palpitations.
They were triggered, as they say.
So how do we make our way through this?
I mean, you say that you want the Iranian people to do it, but you and I know that the Iranian people cannot do it on their own unless the regime is so weakened now that there is a unique opportunity to pull off a kind of Iranian version of the Arab Spring.
Is that what you were hinting toward?
Iranians in the streets, massive demonstrations, almost a replay of 1979, the same kind of pressures that pushed out the Shah?
Let me be clear.
I think that what our goal should be is not regime change as we have known it and I think, frankly, malpracticed it.
Namely, we decide somebody has to go and we decide who is going to replace them or we control the apparatus by which that decision is made at a minimum.
I think we need to help the people of Iran free Iran.
And that is the goal, it seems to me, to enable it to return to what it was before the mullahs were allowed In by Jimmy Carter, among others, namely, a part of the Western civilized world.
Yes, a Muslim nation, of course, but still very much, well, secular to a considerable degree, but also very much pro-Western.
That aspiration, I think, has to be helped along.
And this is what the Israelis were doing, I think, assiduously with the takedown of rank after rank after rank of the Iranian military, the Iranian intelligence services, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and even some in the political leadership as well, or at least encourage them to go elsewhere like the president.
The main thing is, Dinesh, I believe as a result of all that, it was absolutely palpable before this deal was announced yesterday evening, as we speak, that the regime is dying.
And all I'm saying is, do not resuscitate.
And I'm fearful that if we're not careful, for two reasons, the effect of having this ceasefire will amount to resuscitating this dying regime.
One is it legitimates the regime.
It signals to them, unfortunately, but also the rest of the world, that we're perfectly good with them remaining in power.
And secondly, what that says to the people of Iran is don't even think about trying to replace them, because it will be yet again, as it has been up to this point, really, a suicide mission.
And some will take it on, but most will sit it out.
And that means what could be the most epic opportunity for transforming fundamentally, to use Barack Obama's famous phrase, but for the good.
Not just Iran, and not just the Iran-Israel dynamic, but the region more generally, I think.
And frankly, as I said earlier, I think the Western civil, the Judeo-Christian civilized world, which the mullahs of Iran have in their crosshairs, as much as they've had, as you said, death to Israel and death to America as part of their mantra.
I take you to be saying, Frank, that we should not, well, it's wrong for me to say snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, because I think that this operation has been a success.
But I think what you're saying is let's not snatch partial victory from the jaws of total victory.
And total victory here would be not just a vindication of, would be a vindication of our interests, would be a protection of Israel.
But the third and forgotten party in all this is the Iranian people themselves.
I think what you're saying is that one problem with any kind of status quoism that says, okay, listen, guys, let's stop the fight.
Let's kind of each go back to their own business.
I think Trump is exhorting the Iranian leadership to invest in trade and become the kind of great trading nation that admittedly Iran has been historically in the past.
The problem with all that is that the Iranian regime tyrannizes most of all over its own people.
And there is an even bigger win in sight, which is to say, if the mullahs come down and the Iranian people are sort of dancing in the streets, and then leave it to them, I think this is maybe the great lesson that we've learned from Iraq and Afghanistan.
All this, you know, don't go with the, if we broke it, we have to own it and we've got to go in there and we've got to organize tribal meetings and try to figure out how these different tribes get along with each other.
We stay out of all that.
We let the Iranian people figure that part of it out and we just kind of hope that they've learned a bitter lesson.
And I say a bitter lesson because you and I, not everybody's old enough to remember who listens to this podcast, but you and I are, that at one time the Iranians, you know, they mobilized in the streets.
They pushed out the Shah.
Now, Jimmy Carter helped them, but they did it.
And they ignored the old conservative maxim that when you have a revolution, you don't always know what's going to happen afterward.
You don't know what's going to come next.
You might go from the frying pan into the fire and see how hard it is now to undo all that.
You're a serious student of history, Dinesh.
It's one of the things I've long admired about you.
And I'm reminded of what happened at a critical moment in our own history, in our revolution.
In 1777, the Kingdom of France decided to become an ally of this nascent United States of America and to help materially the colonists who were revolting against the French enemy, Britain, both with material assistance, but also political support, diplomatic assistance, and the like.
And it was absolutely decisive.
George Washington and his ragged band would never have gotten to Yorktown, let alone defeated the Brits, without the help of the French.
Notably, of course, in the Battle of Yorktown, most especially.
And I'm simply saying that a similar kind of support for freedom-aspiring people by our country, with thankfully none of the heavy lifting required,
because the Israelis are perfectly prepared to provide that, to help further degrade, or attrit, if you will, the mullahs and their ability to maintain power, to control and terrorize and otherwise repress the Iranian people.
And then, as you say, if we, I believe, trust in the people of Iran as the French ultimately trusted in our forefathers, who turned out to be a pretty spectacular group of people.
I know not whether their kind is in Iran at the moment.
I'm praying it will be.
But out of it came the greatest nation ever.
And we need to remember that it would not have happened without the help of a foreign power that was willing to be supportive.
And I just would close by saying, Dinesh, that the danger of this ceasefire, assuming it holds and assuming that the language that the president expressed today that was harshly critical of the Israelis,
for example, for responding to a violation of the ceasefire by the Iranians, by the way, we might well see snatched, I'm afraid, not from the jaws of a partial victory, but the jaws of what could have been a complete victory, a strategic defeat that will cost us very dearly.
You know, much of this is about no more endless wars.
There is no more endless war on this planet today than the one Iran has waged against us and Israel and the free world.
We will have more of it if the people who have brought it to us are allowed to continue.
This blows out, Frank, by me framing my last question this way.
You're saying that the United States should, in a sense, play the role of the French.
And the role of the French, of course, was not to fight our battles for us, but to let Washington and his army do the heavy lifting.
And the French go, hey, listen, you know, we'll help you.
And that's, you play a subordinate and assisting role, which, by the way, as you know, as well as I do, this was of the essence of the Reagan doctrine, right?
Reagan's idea was in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua, in Somalia, Angola.
You guys fight for your own freedom.
We'll help, but it's your fight and not ours.
I think that what is maybe holding the MAGA legions back, if you will, is a debate that has not been fully articulated, but it's a debate inside of libertarianism itself.
And I want to make it explicit and close out by having you comment on it.
One view of libertarianism says we believe in freedom, but we have to be focused on what's going on in our own country.
That's the meaning of America first.
Everybody else's freedom is not our problem.
And therefore, we need to avert our gaze from all that and focus on things like deportations, building up our own domestic manufacturing, and you know the catalog, and we both agree with it.
The other view of libertarianism says that libertarianism is partisanship on behalf of liberty.
And liberty is, in fact, a universal aspiration.
And the United States should not recklessly go in search of monsters to destroy.
But on the other hand, we should be friends of liberty wherever we can.
And moreover, we should deploy reasonable and prudent resources and diplomacy in defense of liberty.
Why?
Because the more that we can multiply the friends of liberty, ultimately the better off they are, but also the better off we are.
I'm assuming that, in a sense, what you've been arguing here for is the second view of libertarianism.
And I'd like you to comment on that.
Well, I would certainly defer to you on matters of political genealogy.
I've never heard libertarians described as having that second view.
I think that's more of a conservative view, honestly.
Certainly one I subscribe to.
And the dynamic I would describe a little bit differently, but I think there's some overlap, the Vunn diagram, as Kamala Harris would say.
MAGA is, of course, about a strong America.
America first, as interpreted at least by what I would call the Lindbergh America-firsters, hearkening back to Charles Lindbergh, who during the first run of this phrase made it all about isolationism.
In fact, a pro-Nazi policy, which he subsequently apologized for having, by the way, when it was so clearly wrong.
That is up against, I think, a Trumpian America-first policy, at least what we've understood it entails to date.
And that is, yes, you let other people fight their fights with our support if it's furthering the idea of freedom and our interests, obviously.
In the case of the Trump doctrine, I would say that what he's added to that mix, and it turns out the state of Israel is the prime exemplar of it.
And that is enable them to fight our fight as well as their fight.
And that's exactly, I believe, what's going on in Iran today, because, well, and for that matter, with respect to Hamas and with respect to the Hezbollahs and with respect to the Houthis as well, all of which are part of this, you know, Iranian totalitarian Sharia supremacist enterprise.
So we have the happy option of actually doing very little at all at this point to try to help bring down the government of Iran and enable people aspiring to freedom to produce a free Iran in its place.
The Israelis, I think, are perfectly prepared to be of assistance in a way that we might otherwise have to be.
And that's where the Trump doctrine complements the Reagan doctrine and creates an opportunity for having Both an America that's made great again and an America that is first in the sense of being exercising successfully peace through strength.
I mean, this is very interesting because, you know, as you know, there's a MAGA faction that thinks that the United States is doing Israel's work.
And you've been arguing the exact opposite, that Israel might very well be doing at a very low cost our work for us, and we should cheer them on.
Why would we stop them from doing that?
Guys, I've been talking to Frank Gaffney, president of the Institute for the American Future, the website usfuture.org.
Follow him on X at Frank Gaffney.
Frank, as always, thank you very much for joining me.
God bless you, Dinesh.
Great to talk to you.
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I'm planning today to complete my discussion of Reagan's economic policy with a special focus on the issue of deficits, an issue that we talk a lot about today.
Of course, the deficits today are wildly worse, larger, more menacing than anything in the Reagan era, but they seem menacing even then.
The left had warned about $200 billion deficits.
And of course, now that we're dealing with $1.2 trillion deficits, those $200 billion deficits seem minuscule.
But it's important to know that in the 80s, the left and the Democrats predicted that the deficits would do certain things.
And we have to look to see if those things actually happened.
First, they predicted that the deficits under Reagan would promote inflation.
Why?
Because deficits are basically government spending, right?
And so using the kind of Keynesian model, when you do spending, you're pushing more money into the economy, and this is going to cause prices to go up.
Now, there is actually an economic fallacy here because money always comes from somewhere.
And even if you print money, it's coming from somewhere, which is to say it's coming from the other people who already have money because you're diluting their money.
So when you move money from one bucket to another, that by itself does not cause inflation.
So in any event, inflation was predicted for the Reagan era, but it did not occur.
Inflation actually went dramatically down.
And interest rates were also predicted to go up and kind of for the same reason, right?
There's more money pumped into the economy.
And therefore, interest rates are likely to, well, the true logic of it is interest rates should go down when there's more money in the economy.
But the simple truth of it is that the prediction that interest rates would rise, again, based on kind of Keynesian modeling, turned out not to be true.
What's the proof?
Well, let's look at inflation.
Inflation was very high before Reagan, and so were interest rates.
Interest rates were 20%.
And after Reagan, interest rates plunged.
And even though interest rates came down, even if you took inflation into account, the real interest rate, the real interest rate is the sort of the nominal interest rate, the stated interest rate, minus inflation.
So let's say inflation is 5% and the nominal or stated interest rate is 10. The real interest rate is 5 because it's being diluted by inflation.
Now, none of this means deficits are good.
They're bad because they represent borrowing.
Borrowing means you have to pay the price of the borrowing.
That's the interest rate.
And at some point, you have to pay the money back.
So that's not good.
But Reagan thought we can endure these deficits.
Reagan hoped that these deficits would put some brake on the Democrats' appetite for government spending.
Why?
Because there's like less money to spend, right?
If you're paying more and more interest on the debt, that becomes part of the line item of the budget.
And so you got less discretionary money to allocate elsewhere.
Now, the Democrats eventually, and this is over time, learned to weasel their way around this essentially by printing money, not by raising taxes, but by printing money.
But for a while, the Democrats were a stymied in the Reagan era.
In other words, not that they cut spending, they didn't do that, but they weren't able to increase it a lot.
Why?
Because they had to deal with these deficits and deal with the annual interest payments on the debt.
And the Democrats like complained about that.
They're like, oh, Reagan is making it difficult for us to spend money on things that we need to spend money on.
And Reagan would sit back and kind of chuckle and go, well, actually, that's a good thing.
Now, Reagan's real goal was the same as Trump's.
And that is the way you whittle down the deficit is you don't reduce it in monetary or real terms.
But what you do is you make the overall pie bigger.
So think of the deficit as like a slice of pizza, right?
And the deficit might get bigger, but even if it gets bigger, if you have a bigger pizza, the deficit can be a smaller proportion of that larger pizza, even though the deficit is growing.
Why?
Because the overall pizza is growing and maybe growing faster than the deficit is.
And this is exactly what happened in the Reagan era.
The deficit began to decline as a proportion of the economy.
So the deficit consumed 6.3% of GDP in 1983, shrank to about 3% by the time Reagan left office.
So the deficit proportionately is cut in half.
Again, this doesn't mean the government is spending less money.
It's spending less money as a fraction of the overall economy.
So it's time to kind of sum up here.
Reagan came into office in 1981.
The economy was a mess.
The basic problem was economic stagnation plus runaway inflation.
So this was Reagan's main target to get the economy jump-started.
That's to deal with the stag part of it, which is stagnation.
And the second part of it is bring down inflation.
And Reagan did that so well that ultimately people sort of forgot about inflation as a real problem, even though it is a problem.
So by the end of the 80s, people stopped talking about inflation, whereas in the 70s, they could talk about like nothing else, at least in economic policy.
And then by the 90s, inflation sort of stayed low.
This was the after effect of Reaganism.
And we came into the 21st century a little bit careless about that topic because we thought, okay, we've sort of slain the inflation dragon.
And of course, the Federal Reserve went back to printing money.
The Democrats went back to spending money.
And inflation became a serious problem again, really starting in 2008, because we printed a ton of money after the 2008 economic crash.
It wasn't really a crash, but it was a retraction.
And then a huge amount of money under COVID.
The combined effect of this printing money is something like $10 trillion, something like one out of every four dollar bills in circulation was printed between 2009 and essentially 2022.
So this is a massive dilution of your money and mine.
And this is essentially stealing of our wealth by the government, a transfer of wealth from us over to them.
But that's all post-Reagan.
Reagan's tax cuts, his privatization, his deregulation produced a real juggernaut of economic growth.
There was also a lot of corporate restructuring.
There was a boosting of entrepreneurship and companies like Microsoft and Dell, Apple, all of them sprang to prominence in the 1980s.
They continued, of course, on fire in the 1990s and beyond.
So what Reagan did was he vindicated capitalism and free markets at a time when people had begun to wonder, can these advanced industrialized economies grow?
It seemed like their growth had ground to a halt, and the only growth was coming in sort of small economies that were on the periphery of modern capitalism.
So countries like Singapore were growing, Thailand, Malaysia, some of these so-called Asian tigers.
China was slowly beginning to come out of its doldrums under the reforms of Deng Choping.
And people thought the United States was kind of on the way out.
Now, people think now that the United States is on the way out, and this is the whole point of Trump's Make America Great Again.
We wouldn't need to be made great again if we were doing great already.
So there's a recognition that there's a lot that needs to be fixed.
I would say that what Reagan did is he gave the country like a 25-year economic reprieve.
What is reprieve?
A kind of lease on life, an extension.
It's kind of like, I'm going to keep you going for 25 years.
And by the way, if you think about Trump, you know, it's no victories in politics are really permanent.
If Trump does a great job in the second term, again, what's he going to do?
He's going to give America a reprieve.
If Trump can say for the next 25 years, the United States will be doing better rather than worse.
People will start doing better than their parents and not worse.
The working class will start seeing its condition improve and not deteriorate.
And that's going to go for a quarter of a century.
This would be a spectacular accomplishment.
Well, this is exactly Reagan's accomplishment.
But I close by noting that on this point, Reagan had one key difference from Trump.
And you see this every day, and it always kind of makes me laugh.
And that is that Trump greedily hungers for credit.
He wants credit.
He's extremely annoyed When he doesn't get it, he demands it.
He says things like, I should be getting like five Nobel Prizes right about now, but of course I won't get any because of all these dumb losers.
And it's not that Trump is wrong, but what it is is that for Trump, it is important that people point to him and say, You did it, you got it done.
With Reagan, that was not the case.
Reagan's view was that the American people deserve the credit, which, by the way, was wrong.
The American people did not deserve the credit.
The American people didn't do anything that produced these results.
But it was Reagan's kind of gracious democratic deference, as if it was some property in the people that brought about tax cuts, some property in the people.
Now, the people, of course, did respond to these economic incentives.
They did work hard.
They did see the fruits of that success.
But in this way, we see an important personality difference between Reagan and Trump.
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