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July 7, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:12
WHY, ELON, WHY? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1119
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Coming up, I'll talk about what's the deal with the Epstein files and the Epstein list.
Where is it?
I want to talk about Zoran Mamdani pretending to be black or African American to get a leg up in his admission to Columbia University.
I'm also going to focus on Elon Musk.
What's the deal with this new party?
I'll explore both the potential benefits, but also the dangers of it.
And I'm going to identify the key figure behind the Russia collusion framing of Trump, and it isn't Hillary.
Congressman Brandon Gill joins me.
We're going to talk about the benefits of the big, beautiful bill.
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My main topic for today is Elon Musk and his announcement of a new party, the America Party, a third party.
And I want to go into his motives, his goals, the problems with this project, because I don't think that they're quite the same as many people think.
And I want to argue that third parties can work under certain conditions, but we are not under those conditions.
And I want to look a little bit at history.
I want to look a little bit at the example of other countries which have third and fourth and fifth parties.
So I want to give this a little bit of a treatment in depth that it deserves.
But first, I want to hit upon some other things happening in the news, important stuff.
I'll start with the Epstein files.
And I've got to say, I'm a bit at a loss here because this is crazy.
We're told now that there are really no Epstein files and that there is no Epstein list.
And moreover, that we know that Epstein killed himself because there is video of his cell and you can't see anybody go in or go out.
Now, let's leave aside for the moment the issue of whether Epstein killed himself.
I still don't think it makes any sense to say he does, that he did, because I think it is too bizarre that the surveillance stopped working and the guards were not on the scene.
Those two things alone, each of them improbable by themselves, but putting them together suggests to me that somebody orchestrated that.
And it wasn't Epstein.
And that's not even going into the pathologist Baden and others who talked about the way in which his neck was broken.
It was not in the manner of someone who did it themselves.
But let's leave that to the side because I think the big issue is that it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that Epstein was running a trafficking operation.
We've seen enough evidence that he was.
Prince Andrew was involved.
We've seen some of the girls, not to mention the fact that Epstein himself was in prison and Gillen Maxwell is in prison now.
Well, if she wasn't doing this trafficking, if you didn't have a kind of massive prostitution ring with underage girls, if that wasn't going on, why is Gillen Maxwell even incarcerated right now?
If you had all these girls, were they all there just to kind of give Epstein himself a massage?
Was he the sole client?
Well, we know he wasn't because Prince Andrew.
And there are the flight logs of all these people going to Epstein Island.
I remember from her interview, Melinda Gates saying, well, finally, I just had enough with Bill Gates.
He just kept going to Epstein Island.
He refused to stop going.
So, and believe me, Bill Gates was not going there because it's got really good beaches and really good food.
Bill Gates had a reason to be going to Epstein Island.
So I think that something malevolent is afoot here.
Now, here's Alex Jones, the DOJ's running cover for the CIA and Mossad.
This is the suggestion that somehow Epstein was being controlled by these intelligence agencies.
And normally I would say, prove it.
Or how do we know that?
Or if that is so, there is a lot of accounting that needs to be done.
People need to be asked questions.
If Israel is involved, we've got to take it up with the Israelis.
So, I'm not reluctant or unwilling to believe that this was, in fact, either a U.S. government operation or an operation run by some foreign intelligence.
I don't know why we would be reluctant to expose that.
I've always had considerable confidence.
Well, I have confidence in Trump, but I also have confidence in Cash and in Bongino.
I can't think of two people I would rather have put there myself to do the job of excavating what the deal is.
And therefore, I'm caught in saying something has to be going on based upon what we know.
We don't know what's going on, and the people we trust to tell us what's going on are, for whatever reason, not telling us.
So this is not good.
I'm not happy about it.
I don't know if anything more is even likely to come out.
It looks like they are very eager to sort of close the case and close the file and move on.
I'm sure somebody else who wants to move on is John Brennan and another figure that I'm going to get to in a moment.
I'm now talking about Russia collusion.
And there is some new information here reported on by Miranda Devine in the New York Post, a new email uncovered in an internal review by the CIA.
The CIA is looking at its own role, the agency's own role, in the Trump-Russia collusion assessment.
And it looks like John Brennan may have lied to Congress.
Brennan is, of course, the disgraced former CIA director under Obama.
And essentially, Brennan was apparently approached by two of the CIA's most senior Russia experts who said, this steel dossier does not meet even the most basic standards of accuracy, of veracity.
You can't trust it.
But Brennan overruled them.
And Brennan insisted that this steel dossier be included.
And when I say included, it's not like there was a whole lot else.
The case for Russia collusion was the dossier.
That was almost the beginning and the end of it.
And it was the dossier was part of a package that was classified so that even though the sources were dubious, no one would ever find that out because no one could look at those sources, including, by the way, media people to whom this information was conveniently leaked, all with the intention of exposing and damaging Trump.
Now, the aspect of the story that is highlighted by the investigative writer Lee Smith is the involvement of Obama.
And Lee Smith makes the point that this is not an operation that Clapper was running by himself.
And this is, I think, quite important.
It's not an operation that was primarily being driven by Hillary either.
Sure, the Hillary campaign cooked it up.
Sure, they paid for the steel dossier.
Sure, they had a lot to gain by portraying Trump as a Russian agent.
But quite honestly, once Trump won the election, yes, of course, you could say Hillary still had more to gain because she could convince herself, well, I should have won.
And Trump only won because of Russia.
But the guy who really wanted to hurt the Trump presidency, so not only Trump's chances of being elected, but also to discredit the Trump presidency was none other than Barack Obama.
To see this, we have to understand that Trump is the anti-Obama.
Obama comes in in 2008.
He does a tremendous amount of damage between 2008 and 2016, but he doesn't finish off the country.
He can't go that far.
Trump comes in and undoes a lot of that.
And of course, Obama's watching all of this with dismay.
Obama knew that Trump is going to stop his demolition, what he called his remaking, but it really amounted to a demolition of America.
So Obama is the main guy here.
Obama is the one who saw that this could be used effectively against Trump.
Obama is the one who, in a sense, lured the media apparatus, which, by the way, had been worshiping him virtually nonstop for eight years.
So the media was very much in on it.
And again, whether we will see accountability for any of these people is another question.
We're getting exposés, which I think is valuable.
But really what I think is needed here are some indictments.
And so if I were Trump, I would be pressing Pam Bondi to be taking this to its logical conclusion.
And its logical conclusion is handcuffs and indictments.
Let me say a couple of words about Zoran Mamdani, who, as it turns out, tried to get into Columbia University by claiming he was, quote, African American.
Now, it's quite amusing to see a bunch of people on the left say, duh, the guy grew up in Uganda.
That makes him African American.
Now, this is very disingenuous because the people saying this know full well that the purpose of affirmative action of racial preferences, and by the way, this extends to government contracts.
It extends to people who discuss reparations.
If somebody was paying reparations in this country, would we pay reparations to, say, Elon Musk?
No.
And not just because he's the richest guy in the world and doesn't need it.
It's because he's A white guy, and reparations is for the descendants of slaves.
Reparations is aimed at making whole, leaving aside the arguments for reparations, which I'm not going into.
I think the reparations is a bad idea.
But what I'm saying is that all of these policies going back to the early onset of affirmative action in 1968, well, of course, Lyndon Johnson had advocated for it even before that, but Nixon introduced the first affirmative action program.
The whole ideas were dealing with American blacks.
It doesn't even really apply to some guy who was raised in Trinidad or Uganda because they haven't been part of American history.
But leave alone a guy like Mom Ghani who has two Indian parents.
This guy is not biracial like Obama.
This guy is 100% Indian.
It's kind of like saying, you know, I'm Indian.
I have two Indian parents.
If I went and lived in Uganda or if I, let's say, went to Kenya, which I have been to Kenya, somehow I now become, quote, African American.
It's absurd.
So clearly, the reason this expose was so damaging to Mamdani is pretty simple, and that is he was trying to steal a seat for himself from some poor black guy.
I mean, the idea of affirmative action is to help disadvantaged blacks, i.e.
descendants of slaves.
Momdani was trying to pass himself off as black in pretty much the same way that Elizabeth Warren illicitly tried to pass herself off as Native American.
These people are opportunists.
They're trying to claim benefits for themselves based upon racial posturing and ethnic fakery.
The New York Times, of all people, exposed.
Now the left is railing on the Times.
Of course, they batter the Times.
The Times has to do some preposterous, groveling, not apology, but here's why we did it.
We're trying to cover all aspects of this man.
So you have this kind of pathetic, sycophantic account by Patrick Healy, the assistant managing editor of The Times, when what he's really apologizing for, if you will, is that The Times for once does some reporting that is damaging to the left.
The Times is assumed by the left to be a partisan of the left.
They're assumed to be, by and large, someone who runs cover for the left.
And when they don't do that, they are immediately called to account.
All right.
Let me now turn to Elon Musk and what's going on there.
I think Elon Musk has made it really clear what's going on.
And that is that he's looking at these charts, which basically show $4.5 trillion, closer to $5 trillion of revenue, and then over $6 trillion of spending.
And he's going, where is this going to take us?
Where is this going to lead?
And I think his answer is pretty simple.
Bankruptcy, ruin.
The country is going to accumulate debts that it's having trouble paying them now.
When the interest rate alone on the debt is over a trillion dollars, what happens when the interest rate becomes $2 trillion?
Then you have to look at unimaginably high tax increases or unimaginable levels of printed money, which debases your money and my money, makes our money buy less.
And so Elon was like, if this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day.
And it looks like he's quite serious.
Our country needs an alternative, he says to the Democratic-Republican, UNA Party.
Now, let's look at things from Elon's point of view.
First of all, is there a UNA party?
My answer to that question is yes and no.
Certainly, look at Trump over the past, look at Trump and the Congress over the past six months.
We've had six months of Trump.
Does it feel like, does it look like, is it like six months of Kamala Harris?
No, not at all.
It couldn't be more different.
And so right there, you see that the notion that the two parties are the same, it would be all the same if Kamala Harris were to be running things.
This is downright absurd.
This is the case against the notion of a uniparty.
If you let the Democrats go, they will spend us into bankruptcy vastly, vastly quicker.
Now, the degree to which Elon Musk is right is the fact that there is a swamp and Republican congressmen no less than Democrats have vested interests and have lobbyists who try to corral them and corner them.
And there are spending goodies in these bills for Republicans no less than for Democrats.
And there were New York congressmen, Republicans who pushed for subsidies, state and local tax subsidies in this bill to protect New York state and local taxpayers, to allow them to, in a sense, offload their increased state and local taxes onto the U.S. taxpayer.
So there is an element of truth to what Elon Musk is saying here.
Now, Elon is frustrated, and many people interpret this frustration, which he has been quite explicit about, the idea that, hey, what's the point of having me do Doge when you're going to increase the debt in this way, increase the debt ceiling, and then also increase the level of spending.
By the way, I'm going to have my son-in-law, Brandon Gill, on.
I'm going to explicitly ask him about Elon's critique and have him as an advocate for the bill, someone who is out front and center defending it, to, in a sense, speak aloud to Elon Musk about it.
But I don't think that the people who say that Elon is upset because he wanted electric vehicle mandates, in other words, he's upset because he had his own subsidies that are being eliminated.
I don't think that that's right or fair to Elon.
I also don't think it's quite right to say, although there may be an element of this, that Elon Musk is just bitter at Trump.
He's angry with the Republicans.
He wants to sort of get his revenge.
He wants to have them pay for what they did.
I'm sure Elon has these kinds of feelings.
But I think that Elon Musk's real motive is this.
He thinks that a third party, however small, could hold the balance of power between the two parties.
In other words, when you have a closely divided country, and let's remember that the Trump margin, even though it was in the electoral vote, it seemed pretty decisive for Trump.
It was a very close election.
Just a point or two in certain areas, and it could have swung the other way.
Trump gained in all the swing states, and he gained even in blue areas, and he gained a little bit more in red areas.
But still, you're looking at close majorities in the House and the Senate.
So I think here's Elon's view.
If I have in my pocket or in my camp, I'm talking now as Elon, you know, let's just say two senators and ten congressmen, then we kind of hold the balance of power.
And so both parties would have to negotiate with us.
Think, for example, about the religious parties in Israel.
They're able to negotiate with Netanyahu and wrest all kinds of advantages for themselves.
And I'm not saying that Elon is looking for perks and advantages.
I think Elon is basically saying if we're the balance, we hold the balance of power, you're going to have to take our issue.
And in this case, let's say it's budget cuts.
You're going to have to take that seriously.
Many people have pointed out that a third party in America means is only good for the Democrats.
Look at the example of Ross Perot.
And I agree with this analysis.
Historically, we've had, of course, the emergence of third parties when the, or at least of parties that split up.
I'm thinking here of the Jefferson Party, which was called the Democratic-Republican Party.
It was, by the way, it at one point became the only party.
Why?
Because the Whig Party, the Federalists, the Federalists basically dissolved.
They went away.
And so Jefferson's party, the Democratic-Republican Party, was the only party that was left.
And so what happened was it split.
It split into two and it became ultimately the Democratic Party, founded in a way by Andrew Jackson, and then the Whigs.
And later the Whigs, of course, also went away and the Republican Party.
But notice that you don't really have a third party here.
You have when the Democrats, when the Democratic-Republican Party had a monopoly, it split into two.
And then when the Whig Party went away, the Republican Party replaced it.
So you've really had persistently a two-party system in American politics.
And for this reason, I think that the third party is most likely, despite Elon's, I think, aspirations for it, to have a destructive influence.
So I'm hoping it's not going to be Trump, but there are people in the Trump administration, notably J.D. Vance, notably people like David Sachs, who's the crypto czar, and there are others who are close to Elon Musk.
And I'm hoping that they will prevail upon him to see that his own goals will be better achieved, not by creating a new party, as by supporting supermajorities in the Republican Party, in the House, and in the Senate.
And by supermajorities, I don't mean supermajorities made up of weak-kneed Republicans, but supermajorities made up of budget hawks.
This way, you have an actual majority of budget hawks in the House and the Senate.
And then I think Elon can really begin to see his agenda be put into effect.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Brandon Gill.
You all know Brandon, my son-in-law, congressman from Texas, District 26, Newly rising star in the GOP.
He's in the media everywhere.
And he was at the forefront of the passage of this big, beautiful bill.
And Brandon, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
By the way, the website, BrandonGillForCongress.com.
You can follow him on X at rep Brandon Gill or real Brandon Gill, his personal account.
Brandon, this seems to be like a massive achievement on the part, not only of Trump, but really of the GOP Congress.
And I say that because really narrow majority in the House, little bit of a bigger margin in the Senate, but still a pretty broad spectrum of ideological views in the Senate.
And yet somehow at the end of it, you got it done.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
And, you know, there are so many wins in this bill, it's easy to lose track of them.
But whenever you think of how small our majority is right now, we've had about four or five seats right now.
That's tiny.
And whenever you think of the Republican conference, we've got all kinds of different factions and disagreements.
You've got the libertarians on one end of the spectrum.
Then you've got the neoconservatives.
You've got the paleoconservatives.
You've got the fusionists who are kind of everything in between.
And then you've got other guys who have their own views, whether it fits in one of those categories or not.
And to bring all of those different people together, almost 220 of them, that's a lot of different viewpoints on how the country should be run, and get them to pass a bill of this magnitude that is one of the biggest, probably the biggest and most substantial piece of legislation we've seen out of the House in years, if not decades, and some of the biggest conservative wins we've certainly seen in at least a decade.
That's a huge achievement.
I do think that that speaks to the ability of Speaker Johnson to get everybody on the same page.
You know, this is something that took six months, and at least in this Congress, and I know it's something that the Speaker's been teeing up for long before that.
But to actually get it done is a huge, huge achievement.
And I think it's going to set us up well for the midterms as well.
Give us an idea, Brandon.
You were obviously in the thick of this.
You were doing long hours in D.C. At some point, it seemed like you might be like pulling an all-nighter like the old days in college.
What was that, what is the sausage making of this process look like?
Is it back and forth with the Trump White House?
Is it back and forth with Thune and his sort of team in the Senate?
How do you get this across the finish line?
What's the mechanics of it?
Yeah, it's really an all-hands-on-deck process.
So the White House is involved, the president's involved, his legislative team is involved, every member of Congress is involved, and of course the Speaker and leadership.
But what we saw throughout, you know, there are multiple steps in this process.
And what we saw throughout the whole thing is that there are constant negotiations going on back and forth.
And that's why you see some of these all-nighters, you know, whenever we ended up passing the reconciliation instructions a couple months ago, which really unlocked the whole reconciliation process, we had an all-nighter then.
And that's because you've got different factions who are negotiating until the very last second here.
You know, in fact, we've had times whenever the vote for the bill or for the rule on the bill is open and you still have people negotiating different parts of it or trying to think through or just better understand, you know, the nuances of the legislation.
So what ends up happening is that it really never ends.
And I think that that's why it's such a monumental achievement is to get everybody on board in the end.
But you do have the president weighing in.
And he, of course, is the undisputed leader of the party.
And to have him give his viewpoint, I think carries a lot of weight with the conference.
I mean, in some ways, it must be kind of annoying, both for the Trump people and for Johnson and for Thun, because when you have razor-thin majorities, really everybody becomes a potential blackmailer, don't they?
And by that, I mean it's like, I won't vote for the bill unless my seven pet priorities or my giant demand is acceded to.
It must be endlessly frustrating to try to figure out how do you bring all these cats into line.
And I think what you're highlighting is, but guess what?
At the end of the day, they got it done.
And that is, in fact, an achievement.
And for a lot of people who didn't think that these kinds of achievements would even occur.
Let me turn to Elon Musk because he is in a major, I won't say tantrum, probably does him injustice.
But I think his point is, you know, what's the point of Doge if this bill raises the debt ceiling, adds three, I think he's claiming $5 trillion to the debt.
Was this something that made you reluctant to jump on board with this bill?
What would you say if you could be addressing Elon Musk right now to make the case that on the balance, this is a really needed and good bill?
What would you tell him?
Yeah, well, you know, Elon's done phenomenal work with the Doge movement and helping us out in the last election cycle.
And he's got a lot of serious concerns about the debt, which I share as well, and all conservatives should.
I think the reality is that this bill is fiscally responsible.
The key here is what does economic growth look like over the next 10 years?
We know that whenever you cut taxes, that stimulates economic growth.
We also know that this bill has the biggest mandatory spending reduction in American history.
So the key factor, the plug there in the equation is what is growth?
How much does the spending cuts and economic growth offset the tax cuts?
And I think whenever you see all of the president's economic agenda here, you have the tax cuts, Which, of course, are in this bill.
Then you have a massive deregulatory regime that the president has been pursuing aggressively, which also stimulates economic growth and brings capital abroad into the United States.
And then you have something else that's not taken into account in any of these calculations, which is tax revenue from tariffs.
We've seen already this year, the president's raised over $121 billion in revenue from tariffs.
That is not taken into the equation here.
So if you look at the president's agenda on the whole, the tariffs, the tax cuts, the deregulatory regime, and the big, beautiful bill, some of which is in that, I think you have a formula or the pieces to really explode this economy in a way that we haven't seen in decades.
And that is going to grow us out of this debt.
And I think that over the next 10 years, you're going to see a hugely positive impact on the debt from everything the president's doing.
But if Elon were to come back and say, well, look, I put myself on the line.
I put my company at risk.
I put my reputation at risk.
People were throwing stones at Tesla.
I showed you a roadmap for cutting a couple of trillion dollars.
Don't you guys, meaning the Republican Party as a whole, including Trump, couldn't you have bended more in my direction?
This was the one issue I was concerned about.
Do you think that more could have been done to accommodate this?
Are there ways now to, in a second round, take up some of these Doge issues?
I know that you've been involved with the Doge subcommittee.
What can be done to tell the fiscal hawks that, guess what?
We're on your side.
And even though we have this plan to grow our way out of things, we're still going to be doing some really meaningful cuts.
Yeah, and the speakers talked about, and I think the president's mentioned, that this isn't the only reconciliation bill we're going to do.
We're hoping to do two more here in the next year and a half or so.
So we've got a lot more that we can do.
There's a couple of things here, though.
Remember that the Doge cuts that Elon Musk highlighted, I'm on the Doge subcommittee that we've identified, those have to be done via rescission bills because that is a discretionary spending.
In reconciliation, you can only deal with mandatory spending.
So those are two different buckets there.
We passed the first rescission bill out of the House a few weeks ago, which defunded NPR and PBS and large portions of USAID.
The Senate's going to take that up, and I imagine they're going to pass that pretty easily.
And we're going to have many, many more of those to come.
So all the work that Doge did is going to be codified, and it's being codified right now.
But going back to reconciliation, what specifically can be done via the reconciliation process?
And remember, the reason that we do this in reconciliation is because it allows us to bypass the 60-seat majority in the Senate.
Because we know no matter what we do, whether it's tax cuts or deregulation or spending cuts, no Democrat is going to vote for us.
We use the reconciliation vehicle to get this stuff done.
I think that there's a whole lot more that we can cut.
I was pushing for that every step of the way during this process.
We've got more of the Green New Deal we can and should be rolling back, whether it's tax subsidies or tax credits that are given to green energy companies that everybody else ultimately ends up paying for.
That's one area.
I think that there are more areas of reform in Medicaid that we can do.
We can strengthen the work requirements that we put into this big, beautiful bill.
That can save more money.
There are areas on provider taxes and state-directed payments that we can look at that will save additional money.
And I think that there are some more areas of waste, fraud, and abuse that we can strip out of the budget via reconciliation.
So there's a whole lot more we can do.
This is just the first step of the process.
And I can tell you, we're definitely not stopping here.
Do you think, though, that, I mean, this idea of creating a third party, you said something a moment ago, which is that no Democrat is on board with any of this.
And so our starting point, I think, can be that anything that strengthens the Democrats is going to be absolutely horrendous for budget reduction.
And so do you agree with those who say, hey, Elon, listen, you're playing into the hands of the other side.
If you want to help our side and you want to achieve the goal of reducing the size of government, we kind of need a Republican supermajority in the House and the Senate.
If we had that, then you wouldn't be able to have small bands of Republicans hold the entire team hostage and say, I want this favored cut in the bill.
I want this subsidy.
The leadership would be able to say, well, actually, we have the votes without you.
And so take a hike.
You're 100% right.
And I'll give you a specific example of that.
During these negotiations, you had a small group of Republicans, or maybe five or six of them, maybe seven at most, who were pushing for a greater salt tax deduction.
Now, SALT is what allows you to write off your state and local taxes from your federal taxes.
And that's a big deal for California and New York and liberal states that have really high tax rates.
They were pushing to increase the available deduction there.
Well, that's basically a big tax handout for blue liberal states.
And it costs us money and reduced revenue to the federal government.
The reason that they were able to increase that SALT cap from 10,000 to 40,000 was because we had such a slim majority.
If we had a bigger majority, they wouldn't have the same negotiating leverage to force that.
That would have had a hugely positive impact on our debts and deficits from this bill.
So that's a specific example where just a greater Republican majority can tangibly and significantly help push things in the right direction.
I think once you start looking at going third party, we've seen what the impact of third party runs are.
We saw what Ross Perot is probably the best example of that, how it splits the ticket and oftentimes benefits Democrats.
And remember, think about what Democrats want here.
There's not a single dollar from our federal government other than the military that Democrats would ever agree to cut.
Another portion of this big, beautiful bill, which I believe Elon very much agrees with, is border security.
We were able to get funding for border security to an unprecedented degree as part of this bill to build the wall, river barriers, 10,000 new ICE agents.
That's something that no Democrat will ever vote for.
And if we didn't have a majority, we wouldn't be able to do that.
That's what's going to be funding President Trump's deportations as well.
So I think going in a third-party direction is not a good idea.
It can only have, in my view, a negative impact on debts and deficits and border security and strengthen the left.
Great stuff, guys.
I've been talking to Brandon Gill, Texas Congressman from District 26.
Follow him on X at rep BrandonGill or at real Brandon Gill.
The website is BrandonGill4Congress.com.
I'm continuing my discussion of Reagan, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
That's the name of the book.
We are in a chapter toward the middle.
It's called Confronting the Evil Empire.
And I talked previously about the Doves and their view of Reagan.
But now I want to talk about the Hawks, the right wing, the criticism of Reagan coming from his own side, which in some ways is more interesting, partly because the Hawks are right about their understanding of the Soviet Union, and yet they too got it wrong in the end.
So let's look to see where the Hawks were wrong.
But we start by looking at what it is that they had to say.
I'm now in the text.
Hawks applauded Reagan's willingness to confront the Soviet Union rhetorically.
They supported his ambitious military program to rebuild America's defenses.
They had been calling for Reagan to do this for years.
And yet, this is me, yet beneath this agreement about the fundamental nature of the Soviet Union and what needed to be done in the short term to meet the Soviet threat was a crucial disagreement between Reagan and the Hawks about the durability of Soviet communism.
And so what this meant is that under certain conditions, the right and Reagan would have the same strategy for dealing with Soviet communism, but then at other times, their strategy would diverge.
And this is what happened in Reagan's second term.
In fact, during that term, if you recall, and I have plenty of footnotes and citations to show this in the book, many on the right were critical of Reagan.
Some called him a useful idiot.
This is when he changed course in his dealing with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Mikhail Gorbachev.
Now, let's look at in what key respect Reagan's understanding of the Soviet Union and Soviet communism differed from that of the Hawks.
Now, the Hawks and the Dubs, the two sides, the right and the left, they had many disagreements, but they did in fact agree on one thing.
They agreed on the permanence and immutability.
Immutability simply means unchangeability of Soviet communism.
So for the Hawks, the evil of communism was no obstruction, no bar to its success.
Communist victories were attributed to a communism's virtually unlimited capacity for deceit.
The Hawks regarded the communist ideology as inspiring in its followers a kind of fanatical determination, a willingness to win by any means necessary.
They saw communist states as implacably unified behind a kind of goal of global domination.
You might know the name Whitaker Chambers.
Whitaker Chambers was a former communist who became an ex-communist, became an anti-communist, in fact testified before the House on American Affairs Committee in 1948.
And he made a very poignant and interesting statement.
He said, in leaving a communism, he says, quote, I am leaving the winning side for the losing side.
And this actually reflected the way many on the right thought at the time.
George Orwell was not clearly a man of the right.
He was anti-communist, to be sure, but he was in some ways always called himself a man of the left.
But nevertheless, Orwell was in the same pessimistic camp.
You see this in his dystopian novels, Animal Farm, 1984.
He kind of anticipates that this trend toward communist tyranny will get worse and worse and worse.
There's a book written in 1983 by Jean-François Ravel, a French anti-communist right-winger.
And Ravel basically said that democracies are inherently vulnerable to the kind of threat, the kind of ruthless challenge posed by totalitarian states.
He says democratic societies are fickle.
You vote for this guy, then you vote for that guy.
They have division, they have self-doubt.
And so the West is up against an opponent that is confident, that is efficient, that has a singular goal, that's willing to endure enormous sacrifice to achieve its long-term purpose.
So we are likely to lose.
And in fact, says Ravel, quote, communist totalitarianism is both durable and immutable.
Durable, it is here to stay.
Immutable, we can't really change it.
Now, interestingly, this was not, by this I mean All these examples I've been giving, all these sources I'm citing, Reagan did not really agree with them.
And at this point, you might be going, wow, well, that just shows you how little Reagan knows.
Aren't these the kind of great 20th century figures writing about a phenomenon that they had studied intently?
All true.
And yet, I want to argue that Reagan's more intuitive understanding of communism, less theoretical, less academic, maybe even less imaginative, more basic, more prosaic, turned out to be better.
Why?
Here's Reagan.
Reagan's view was that communism is not immutable.
It is not omnipotent.
It is not inherently here to stay.
It is vulnerable.
And where do we see Reagan saying this?
Where did Reagan confess the vulnerability of Soviet communism?
Well, the first place that he did that was, oddly enough, in his jokes.
I give several examples in the book, but I'm just going to focus on one, which I think is maybe the best one, but it's also kind of fairly typical.
Here's one of Reagan's anecdotes that he liked to tell.
In fact, he liked to tell this going back to the 70s before he even became president.
And one thing with Reagan is he didn't mind telling his jokes again and again.
I mean, I think his view was, well, maybe you haven't heard it.
And I found myself, because I worked in the White House, I would hear sometimes the same jokes.
And I realized that they always kind of made me chuckle.
Now, I won't say that they made me guffaw because I'd heard it before, but I'm like, so here it comes.
I know the punchline.
But I was kind of chuckling partly because of Reagan's kind of flawless way of telling a joke.
It's like he was telling it to you for the first time.
But then second, I always look around and saw how much other people appreciated it.
And so I was like, wow, yeah, that was a good one.
So here we go.
A man goes to the Soviet Bureau of Transportation.
He wants to order a car.
He's told, listen, pay now.
But there is a 10-year wait.
The man fills out a bunch of forms.
He goes, processes them through various agencies.
He signs here and there and everywhere.
Finally, he gets to the last agency.
They stamp his papers.
He pays the money and they go, listen, come back in 10 years and get the car.
And he goes, morning or afternoon?
And the man in the agency goes, man, it's 10 years from now.
What difference is going to make?
And the man goes, well, the plumber is coming in the morning.
This is very Reagan.
You can't see Trump telling a joke of this sort.
Trump has humor, but it's of a different variety.
But what I want to highlight here about this joke from Reagan, I want to kind of analyze it a little bit, it's not about the evil of communism at all, is it?
What is it about?
It's about the incompetence of it.
Reagan agreed with the conservatives that the Soviet experiment was immoral, it was wicked, but he also thought it was dumb.
It was too bureaucratic.
It required too much centralized authority.
It couldn't be done.
Reagan knows that in economics, it's laughable to have a kind of philosophy that denies the fact that people work in proportion to the reward that they receive, that if you remove people's incentives, the system just isn't going to work.
Reagan knew that if you have a centralized planning agency telling you, you should make this many cars and this many computers and you should, this kind of project is doomed to disastrous failure.
And so Reagan had this idea.
People sometimes talk about the Soviet bear.
The Soviet bear is on the prowl.
In fact, one of Reagan's famous ads, this is from the 84 campaign, is that there's a bear in the woods.
And again, Reagan in no way denies that the bear is dangerous.
But at the same time, Reagan's view is that the bear is sick.
It's a sick bear.
Now, think about it.
A sick bear does not equate to a non-dangerous bear.
In fact, a sick bear can be more dangerous.
Why?
It can lash out.
It realizes its time is limited.
It is not as effective in its usual type of hunting.
And so it becomes, it's willing to charge at a human being, whereas otherwise it would pay no attention to a human being, which is not part of its normal menu, its normal food.
So Reagan's view was, yes, we have to deal cautiously with this dangerous adversary, but the adversary is not as strong, not as omnipotent, not as immutable as many on the right think.
And that means that a different strategy than some on the right are calling for may be warranted under certain circumstances.
And in Reagan's second term, as we will see, those circumstances came into play.
And in many ways, Reagan broke with this mainstream view on the right.
He chose to kind of go the road not taken.
He went his own way, and yet his own way turned out to be, in retrospect, the correct one.
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