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Aug. 13, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE PIED PIPER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1146
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Coming up, I'll reveal how Adam Schiff seems to have orchestrated damaging leaks of classified information to get Trump indicted.
Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President, joins me.
He's going to show how the pied piper, namely Obama, organized a deep state operation to frame Trump and ruin his presidency.
Lee has the details.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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podcast.
Music Music you I'd like to talk about two topics in the opening segment.
The first one is the crime rate in Washington, DC, a topic I've addressed before, but I'd like to say a couple of new things about it.
And the other topic is Adam Schiff, Shifty Schiff, piece of Schiff.
Adam Schiff is in trouble again, and this time, well, he's in trouble on more than one count.
But this is a new count that I want to tell you about and it involves leaking classified information.
So we'll get to that in a bit.
But let's talk first about Washington, DC.
We're hearing a lot about how the crime rate in Washington, DC has gone down.
Now, there are two reasons that a crime rate can go down, and only one of them is likely to occur to us.
And that is if there's less crime, then the crime rate does go down.
But there is another way that the crime rate goes down, and this is something that we're not hearing a lot about, and yet it's something that that we know has been going on not just in Washington, DC, but also in other cities.
And that is you have progressive prosecutors.
Some people call them soros prosecutors, soros DAs.
Progressive prosecutors stop prosecuting whole categories of crime.
Or what they do is they downgrade felonies, which are mainly gun crimes, to misdemeanors.
They do this under the rubric of criminal justice reform, but obviously what that does is it makes the number of felonies look smaller because you got rid of a bunch of felonies by just not calling them felonies.
So this classification scheme is a ruse for disguising the fact that the crime rates remain high, but they only look low because you're counting differently.
The point about how things are counted is always significant.
I remember when I had the head of the hurricane center in here to talk about climate change.
This was a little while ago, but it was very striking to me because he said, listen, one reason there appear to be more hurricanes is we're counting more of them.
We used to have hurricanes and we wouldn't count them them until they hit shore.
Now they get named even when they're out in the sea.
Even if they miss the shores of the United States, they still remain counted as hurricanes because we noticed them beforehand.
And so the change in the manner of counting is what is responsible for the increased number of hurricanes, not that there actually are more hurricanes.
And kind of the same logic applies here.
Now you might have seen the head of police, who was by the way the former equity officer in Washington, DC.
She was asked about the chain of command, and not only did she not respond, not only did she not know the chain of command, she didn't know what chain of command meant.
She evidently had never heard the term before, so she said something like, well, what is the chain of command?
What are you asking about?
This would be like a pilot asking about what is a cockpit or what is the what does it mean to retract the flaps?
In other words, the basic terminology of being a pilot requires a knowledge of those things, and similarly here, how can you be an authority in a police force?
Well, we kind of know the answer to that.
She came from the Affirmative Action Office.
She was the Chief Equity Officer.
So I'm sure if you asked her, like, what are the sixty seven genders, she could probably tell you.
She knows about that stuff.
What she doesn't know about is chain of command, what she doesn't know about is police operations, what she doesn't know about is how to keep the streets of DC safe.
Now, if you want to know whether the streets of DC have been safe in recent years, all you have to do is take a look at the advice, the memos that the DC police was putting out here's one from twenty twenty one, which is telling citizens of DC how not to get carjacked.
So pause for a minute and think, if carjacking is a problem is not a problem, it happens very rarely, you're not going to get memos being circulated by the DC police on ten steps every citizen should be aware of to minimize the risk of being carjacked.
The reason that they do the memo is because this is a real threat.
This is a real problem.
They want citizens to be aware of this.
Well, I see this all the time driving around Texas.
They will sometimes post fatality rates.
Why?
Because they're telling you these fatality rates are way too high.
It could be you.
You want to be careful.
Or you might see flashing signs on a highway in certain states, don't text and drive.
Now, why are they telling you this?
Because far too many people get into crashes because they text and drive if texting and driving were not a problem.
See, they don't post signs on things that are really not a problem, right?
So they don't say, for example, while you're drivinging, don't take out your wallet and count your money.
Why?
Because not a lot of people do that.
They haven't found that in accidents it's very common to have people counting their money in their wallet and then kaboom you go into a tree or you plough into somebody else.
The sign is there because that is what the authorities observe to be a real problem.
So let's look at this carjacking advice.
Always keep your doors locked and windows rolled up.
No matter how short the distance you're traveling, drive in the center lane to make it harder for potential carjackers to approach the car.
car, avoid driving alone, travel with someone wherever possible, especially at night.
I want to highlight here how pathological this whole condition is.
You're living in a city and you have to take all these steps in order to get by, in order to survive, in order to avoid having your car stolen, and to avoid having people open your door and jump in your car, sometimes armed with guns or with knives, making you get out of the car and taking your car.
When you're coming to a stop, leave enough room to maneuver around other cars, especially if you sense trouble and need to get away.
Always drive with the doors locked.
If a thief can't get in your vehicle, you stand a better chance of leaving with it.
So wow.
All these little tit bits of advice.
Drive in the center lane so that other cars can't ram you, can't stop in front of you and take your car.
And again, this advice is being given for one simple reason.
It is needed in Washington, DC.
Let's turn to Adam Schiff.
There's new information now that's now come out.
from the declassified information coming out of the FBI, coming from Cash Patel, coming from Dan Bongino.
And the source of this information is a lifelong Democrat.
It's a Democratic staffer who goes to the FBI and says what?
Well, says that Adam Schiff, while on the intelligence committee, was knowingly leaking classified information to the media.
His motive, very simple, to get Trump.
The stafferser, it could very well be this whistleblower, raised the problem.
You can't do this.
This is not allowed.
This is not only illegal, it borders on treason.
And apparently the other staffers told him, Don't worry, we're not going to get caught, don't worry, we're not going to get busted.
Now, one reason by the way that staffers can give this kind of assurance is they know that nobody is going to out them.
The media that receives the leaks wants to keep getting them.
They also are ideologically in league with Adam Schiff.
and the intelligence committee, and so they are in a way colluding with the intelligence committee to get these leaks out.
The leaks only have power after all if they can be transmitted widely through the media.
The media is playing a very knowing role in this whole escapade.
Obviously, Adam Schiff himself is not going to hold his staffers accountable.
He's the one who's directing the leaks in the first place.
And finally, apparently, Adam Schiff had a kind of an ambition behind all this, and that is to become the CIA director.
Think of it.
The leaker on the intelligence committee was hoping that Hillary Clinton would win the election and he would become the CIA chief if she won.
So here you see that absolutely ugly and sordid, not ugly and sordid, Adam Shiv.
You may have thought I was going to go there, but I meant this ugly and sordid combination of motives, personal aggrandizement, ideological viciousness, no holds bard, willing to break the law, this smug confidence that I can do it because no one's ever going to come after me.
Who's going to come after me?
Democrats always get away with this kind of stuff.
This is the world in which this character Adam Schiff inhabits.
And this is really one reason why it is not only ideal, it's not only preferable, it is an utter necessity that the DOJ within the limits of the statute of limitations brings charges against these people.
Now, Adam Schiff, you know, is not only facing some liability here, he's also facing some risk or some liability on his mortgage scams.
And by the mortgage scams, what I mean is that he is simultaneously declaring a home in California as a primary residence.
This way he gets the California Home Owners' Tax exemption, at the same time that he's listing his home in Maryland as his primary residence to get preferential loan terms for his mortgage in the Washington DC area.
You can't have two primary residences, either you live in California and you commute to DC and have a second place there or the other way around.
But Schiff has been having it both ways and taking by the making these claims by the way at the same time.
It's not like he was initially permanently based in California, then he moved.
and made Maryland his primary residence, he is simultaneously claiming benefits in a sense at both ends.
So it would be really nice to see Schiff held accountable on both counts, held accountable for the seeming mortgage shenanigans on the one hand, that's called that personal corruption, and then also be held accountable for these illegal leaks if they are in fact found to be criminally culpable upon further investigation.
In other words, what we have now are these disclosures that seem to point to violations of law.
but further investigation will reveal whether there were in fact these violations of law, and if there were, and if there are these violations of law, then it would be great to see Schiff held accountable for it.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to have back on the podcast a guest who is really the man on the issue of Russia collusion, the plot to frame Trump.
I'm talking about Lee Smith, who is the author of the best selling book The Plot Against the President.
And Lee is you can follow him on X at Lee Smith DC.
He is an author and also contributor to the tablet.
The website of the tablet is just tabletmag dot com.
Lee, welcome.
Thanks for joining me.
As you are more aware than anyone else, this whole issue has kind of burst into flames once again.
It's right in front of the public, investigations are underway.
I think many of us are eagerly anticipating high level indictments.
I want to ask your opinion about the possibility or probability of indictments.
But before we do that, I think a lot of people have a general idea of what happened here.
There was a kind of scheme concocted to frame Trump, prevent him from becoming president if possible, but failing that to undermine and destroy his presidency.
And all this was done with foreness, it was done by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
But I want to track with you what it is that they did and who it is that did it.
So, can we?
So, go ahead.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's you're right, it's complicated.
And this is, I mean, this started the Russia Gate campaign against Trump started nearly a decade ago at this point.
So I like to break it down into two separate legs of the Russia Gate operation.
The first leg was started with the Hillary Clinton campaign for presidency in 2016.
What they did was they ginned up a press campaign alleging that Donald Trump was a Russian spy.
So this was all out in the public.
This was the kind of things that people were hearing in the spring and summer of 2016.
What people didn't know what was happening, what some reporters knew, but the public was not aware of was that there was also the FBI was investigating Donald Trump and the investigation was based on what Hillary Clinton campaign contractors had stitched together this fake story that Donald Trump and some of Trump's aides were were actually Russian agents so that was something we didn't know that was something that didn't become public until later in
any case that's the that's the that's the the pre-election leg of Russia gate.
So what it amounts to is Hillary Clinton with a really dirty campaign trick, right?
Smearing her...
The really bad thing that was going on, look, I mean, dirty tricks in the campaign.
Is it worse than what LBJ did or would have done?
I'm not sure.
The really bad thing that happened was, again, the FBI was using this Clinton material as a pretext, as evidence to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
That's very bad.
There is probably a lot of unlawful activity there.
And what I'm quite certain the FBI and Department of Justice will be investigating is if there was.
unlawful activity going on there before the campaign.
After the campaign, this is the second leg of Russia Gate.
Hillary Clinton loses.
She's out of the picture.
At that point, Barack Obama takes over Russia Gate.
What Barack Obama decides to do is he decides to further weaponize this instrument handed off by Hillary Clinton to delegitimize Donald Trump's presidency.
Now, that is.
certainly the first couple of years with the Mueller investigation.
The other thing it did was it split the country, right?
Because people who supported Donald Trump, who had voted for Donald Trump, were at best unwitting dupes and at worst collaborators with a Russian agent to undermine the government of the United States.
So what Barack Obama did was by driving Americans against each other, really poisoned the public sphere.
And you know, I'm not Pollyannish, and I know you're not either to imagine that.
Republicans and Democrats have always gotten along and we've always been able to settle our, uh, our, our issues with reasonable debate.
We're not.
Our issues are settled through elections, right?
That's how they're settled.
There's a winner and there's a loser.
Donald Trump won, it should have been settled at that point.
The continuing fight should have happened in the Hills of Congress, or rather, Capitol Hill, the halls of Congress and in other venues.
It should not have been conducted by spy chiefs who were tapped by Barack Obama to coordinate with the press to delegitimize the Trump presidency and jam up and basically destabilize the American government.
So these are the two legs of Russia Gate preelection, postelection.
Hillary Clinton is in charge of the first, Barack Obama is in charge of the second.
The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be or are, according to trustworthy reporters like John Solomon, they are investigating both legs of Russia Gate.
All right, Lee, let's put what you said into a little bit of slow motion, and let me ask you a few more pointed or specific questions about these two phases.
Let's start with phase number one.
Do we know who in the Hillary campaign is the evil genius, if you will, who cooked up this scheme?
And related to that, is there now evidence that Hillary either did or must have signed off on it?
In other words, is it possible that these were just malevolent campaign staffers who were feeding stuff to the press?
Hillary's completely in the dark, she's in the clear, she doesn't know what's going on, or do we actually know that she was part of it?
Well, a report that was declassified documents that were declassified within the last couple of weeks.
That was John Durham's 2023 report and an annex that was recently declassified.
It says that that foreign policy advisor was a woman named Julianne Smith.
But my contention is that it's not really, it doesn't really matter who came up with it, because someone was going to have to come up with it because the number one liability for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign was her was her use of a private email server, Those emails we know from FBI documents that during the Biden administration were redacted.
One of her emails to President Barack Obama was almost certainly hacked by the Russians.
Hillary's big problem then was what was going to happen if there was an October surprise when her emails, not DNC emails, which were which were released, which were leaked at the DNC in July 2016, not John Podesta emails, which were leaked in October 2016, early October, but if Hillary Clinton's actual emails were leaked, this was a major concern for the campaign.
What did they do?
The answer was the only way to defend against that leak was to misdirect people, say what's important here is not the, Forget about her corruption.
Forget about her dealing with foreign businessmen, with foreign governments.
about what the Clinton Foundation was up to.
The really big deal here And the reason that happened is because of Russia and they were doing it to help Donald Trump.
So that was the plan.
Someone was going to have to come up with that plan.
If you look at an Anne Applebaum column from around the time of the DNC in July 2016, she explains it.
I mean, she says, why is everyone paying attention to the nature of the DNC leaks?
What's going on there about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Bernie Sanders when the really important thing is who leaked these emails and for what purpose?
She said it out loud.
It was the Russians who hacked them and leaked them to help Donald Trump.
So that was the plan.
So whether it was Julianne Smith or Jake Sullivan or Hillary herself, someone was going to have to come up with that idea in order to divert attention from Hillary's emails in the event they were really leaked by someone, whether it was a foreign power like Russia or China or Iran or whether it was some bizarre hacking group.
So that's how I see it.
That's how I've been reporting it since 2019 with Plot Against the President.
Okay.
So we've talked about the Hillary campaign.
Let's now turn to the FBI, which you say was even more so before the election using the pretext of the Hillary dossier, the Steel dossier, in order to open up this investigation into Trump.
Now, who are the names, the key figures who would be driving that?
Is that, was that Comey who was the driver of that?
James Comey.
This is one of the important things that we learned from that Durham report in May 2023.
According to Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, it was James Comey who was really driving the energy there.
He wanted the spy warrant on the Trump campaign.
Now look, certainly Andrew McCabe has reason for putting it on his boss, James Comey.
But if you're prosecutors and investigators looking at what McCabe is saying about his former boss, that's certainly a lead you'd want to pursue.
One of the other things about this Durham report and this annex that was declassified that shows something very, very significant, and you can rest assured that this is something else investigators and prosecutors will be looking at.
And that's what's called the Clinton Plan Intelligence.
And the Clinton Plan Intelligence is this.
A Dutch spy agency had managed to hack into a Russian intelligence agency.
What the Dutch found was that the Russians were reading the emails of Hillary Clinton allies.
The Dutch passed this information on to the CIA.
John Brennan had it.
John Brennan documented or the CIA documented that they referred this matter to an investigation for the FBI.
As it turns out, the people from the Crossfire Hurricane team did not get that referral.
Right?
So what we're seeing here is someone buried very vital intelligence that would have either that should have clearly stopped the investigation., right?
If we were, if we were dealing with honest players, honest brokers, it would have stopped the investigation into Trump as a Russian agent because it would have given proof that, look guys, if this ever gets out that we're investigating Donald Trump because of a Hillary Clinton campaign stunt, we're all in a heck of a lot of trouble here.
So that gives evidence that there is, that there is foul play at the top levels of the FBI.
James Comey knew about this Clinton plan intelligence, as did John Brandon and James Clapper.
But there are FBI agents who are working on the Trump investigation who, according to this report, did not have that intelligence.
Again, intelligence that came from the Dutch who had hacked the Russians.
And the Russians knew from intercepting the emails of Clinton allies and Clinton supporters what the Clinton campaign was up to.
So that gives evidence that something really bad was going on at the higher levels of the FBI.
It wasn't just that they were part of this bogus investigation.
investigation the Russian investigation on the Trump team but that they knew better and there was documentary evidence that they knew better and they should not have conducted this investigation So again, I suspect that this is a major part of whatever investigation is going on right now at FBI and DOJ.
Let's turn to phase two, the post election phase when Obama gets involved, presumably for his own reasons.
And the reason that seems apparent to me is that you had Obama going about his remaking of America.
He had been at it for two terms.
He got a lot of it done, although he wasn't finished.
And then here comes Donald Trump, who was quite clearly a kind of anti Obama.
Trump had, of course, challenged Obama on multiple fronts going back to whether Obama was born in America.
No question Obama probably hated Trump.
And so he we can clearly see why he would want to torpedo as if he could the Trump presidency.
Doesn't that mean really that in terms of driving this operation, Obama and not Hillary is the kingpin.
Hillary was engaging in, as you say, bare knuckles political strategy, but Hillary was not the president, Obama was.
the one who was using presidential power in an evidently nefarious way.
I absolutely agree, and this is how I've been explaining it for years.
And I understand when news of RussiaGate first broke.
Look, there's such contempt among Republicans for the Clintons, understandably.
That should come as no surprise to any of us.
But it's the problem with that was throwing everything at Hillary.
What it did was it really served the Obama, it served Obama's purposes and served the purpose of Obama's spy chiefs, right?
Right, even before the election, just not to complicate matters, but it has to be said, James Comey and John Brennan answered to Barack Obama.
So even before the election, there's no way that these intelligence bureaucrats were moving on their own.
They had top cover from the President of the United States.
So Dinesh, you're absolutely right.
The main villain here and my latest book, Disappearing the President, explains is very clear how Barack Obama was driving force not just behind Russia Gate, but also other initiatives like the censorship regime.
And this also started right after the Trump victory.
He pulled Mark Zuckerberg aside at a conference in Lima, Peru, and this was about ten days after the election.
He pulled Zuckerberg aside and this was the beginning of the censorship campaign right there.
Also Barack Obama's role in the COVID lockdowns, Barack Obama's role in pushing the novel election procedures that facilitated election fraud in 2020.
So yes, absolutely, Barack Obama is the guy that people should be looking at.
And again, I detail this pretty clearly in Disappearing the President, which again is my most recent book, which came out shortly before our 2024 election.
This is amazing.
In fact, this is stuff I didn't even know, Lee.
And I'm going to have to have you back to talk a little further about some of the details you just revealed.
But let's keep going a little bit more, because one of the things we hear is that Obama was in the White House, and precisely by virtue of being in the White House, he has complete presidential immunity.
Nobody can really go after him.
Yes, you can th't criminally charge him.
Now, is that really true or is it possible that if Obama was active above and beyond his presidency, that those actions would not be immune, would not be protected, and he could possibly face some liability for his post presidential behavior?
I've heard different I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak with a lot of authority on this, but I've heard some people that I respect who say, look, it's not clear that Barack Obama will enjoy immunity.
if he was up to really bad things and if he really did arrange if he's responsible for arranging what not effectively what was a coup right what was a rolling coup um so i i look i have to say though i i think that um There's plenty of evidence that Barack Obama was driving the entire thing.
Is there enough evidence to charge Barack Obama?
That I have to say.
Again, I'm not sure of it.
I think right now, I'm hopeful that people, that investigators and prosecutors are focused on Barack Obama's spy chiefs like John Brennan, like James Comey, because it seems to me that with a lot of the documents that have become, and also Adam Schiff, we should say that with a lot of documents that are being declassified and released to the public, there appear there appears to be evidence of their wrongdoing, of their criminal wrongdoing.
So again, I always imagine that if someone that if they're going to get Barack Obama, if the target is Barack Obama, that's going to have to come through someone talking, that John Brennan, James Comey, someone like that, wanting to give up Barack Obama.
And look, that's certainly not past John Brennan.
We've seen different things that he's done.
His handwritten notes showing that he briefed Obama on the Clinton plan intelligence.
It's a possibility, but right now, I think your great audience should be optimistic that people like Cash Patel, John Ratcliffe, Pam Bondy, Tulsi Gabbard right now are focused on some of the heavy hitters from the Obama administration, like Brennan and Comey.
Let me just ask you one more thing, Lee, before I let you go, and that is the role of the media because it is.
conceivable that this kind of operation is hatched in the Hillary campaign, it's later taken up by Obama, it's got all these spooks behind the scene who are working it, some of the information is classified so it's behind a screen.
So it's conceivable, although to me not really believable, that the media is just duped.
They're taken in.
They're fed this information, they don't know better, they're like, wow, this is amazing.
And obviously they have an ideological axe to grind against Trump.
But it appears that it was much more than that and that the media was in a way part of it.
They knew it was a smear and they ran with it anyway.
What is the proof or how do we know that the reporters who broke these stories and used them to fuel the fire for two years of the Trump presidency, if not until the Mueller report came out, how do we know that these guys were part of it?
Well, I mean, I document this very thoroughly in the first book about this plot against the president.
Look, what happened here is no, the media was not fooled.
The media was not duped by their sources.
What happened was the media served as a platform.
I mean, it was a crime spree because the number of leaks of classified intelligence that the media put through to prosecute a political operation against the president of the United States.
I'm sorry, that's very different.
We saw the reports about Adam Schiff, what he was doing, and they were telling staffers, Schiff was telling staffers, well, you're safe leaking this under the speech and debate clause.
No, that's ridiculous.
The speech and debate clause does not protect people who are running a political operation against the president of the United States or against any other political rival for that matter.
So no, the evidence that they were doing something much worse than just being fooled or pursuing a party campaign, again, is the sheer bulk of the classified intelligence that appeared in places like the New York Times, like the Washington Post, like CNN.
So no, they're, they are 100%.
They were the indispensable part of the anti-Trump operation.
Because without them, who are these spy, yeah, you know, who are these rogue intelligence officers leaking to?
How are they putting out this information?
So no, the press is one hundred percent part of what happened here.
Will they be held responsible?
I don't know exactly how that happens.
I mean, you look at ratings at places like CNN right now and you say, well, it appears they're already being held responsible.
Are there are there are legal risks as well?
Well, I know if I was someone like there are a lot of victims of Russia Gate, Trump AIDS, the president's family and the president has had some success with the press with a large settlement that came from CBS.
He's now suing the Wall Street Journal.
So if victims, Russia Gate victims decide.
decided to start bringing civil lawsuits against major media organizations.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have some success.
And I would imagine that, uh, that media executives are concerned about this right now.
They should be anyway.
Fascinating stuff, guys.
I've been talking to Lee Smith, uh, author and contributor to The Tablet.
Follow him on X at Lee Smith DC, uh, the website tabletmag dot com dot Uh, The books, well, there's The Plot Against the President, and also there's the latest one.
Lee, tell me the title of it again.
Disappearing the President.
Disappearing the President.
Wonderful stuff.
Lee, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you very kindly for inviting me on.
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I'm continuing my discussion of my book Ronald Reagan How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And we've now completed an in depth discussion of Reagan's economic policies as well as his victories in the foreign arena, both in the Reagan doctrine and also in the Cold War.
And these have been somewhat policy dense discussions about actions Reagan took and things that have been happening around the world and also in the United States.
We now turn to one of the later chapters.
This is chapter nine.
It's called The Man Behind the Mask.
And it's a different chapter because it's a look at Reagan the Man.
This is a chapter for those of you who are interested in leadership, but also in human psychology in trying to kind of get Reagan or grasp Reagan.
I will say that there are very few efforts to really do this out there in the literature.
Very surprising because Reagan was a massively important figure.
I think with FDR, the two most important figures, two most important presidents in the twentieth century, for better or worse, I think in FDR's case, in many ways for worse, in Reagan's case, almost always for better.
But nevertheless, for people who didn't know Reagan or weren't close to Reagan, people who just try to read up on Reagan, it's difficult to get an understanding of this elusive man and some of the kind of popular understandings of Reagan really don't work.
So the way to get to the bottom of Reagan, to get behind Reagan, so to speak, I make an effort to do this in this chapter, and I begin by appreciating the paradoxical aspect of Reagan.
So we have to start right away by recognizing that there is a problem to be solved.
There is an enigma to be deciphered.
If you think Reagan is obvious, oh, he was a patriot, he loved America, or oh, you know., he was a he was a guy who said it like it is, and that's what really made him so effective.
Or he was not a politician.
He came from outside of government.
These are popular but somewhat nonsensical statements, and they can be easily tested by simply asking, all right, well, let me pick some other guy off the street who's not in government and put him in the White House and let's see if he can do what Reagan did.
He won't be able to.
Or let's take some other plain spoken guy.
I mean, you know, the guy who cuts my grass is a really plain spoken guy.
He tells it like it is.
Let's put him in the White House and see if he can do what Reagan did.
He won't be able to.
So these explanations don't get to the heart of what makes someone like Reagan so capable on such a large and complex stage.
Now, let's look at the aspects of Reagan that made him paradoxical.
Number one, he was intensely ambitious, and yet he was very modest.
He was he faced a lot of tragedy in his life, and yet he was unfailingly upbeat and optimistic.
He was a realist who had a kind of a low view of human nature.
At the same time, he was an optimist who had a high view of human possibility.
He was a tolerant man, but he had firm, almost unalterable convictions.
He was gregarious, he liked people, and yet he was a loner who seemed happiest, most content, and even kind of complete within himself.
He spent short hours at work, he didn't overwork, and yet he accomplished a great deal.
He was genuine, almost mystical in his religious beliefs, but he didn't really go to church.
He took a rather sardonic, somewhat humorous view of organized religion and clergy.
He was an advocate of family values, but and he had a very good relationship, I should say, with his second wife, but he had difficult relationships with his children, and virtually none, we have to admit, with his grandchildren.
So these are, as I mentioned, paradoxes, but a paradox is not a contradiction.
A paradox is an apparent contradiction that upon closer examination, you begin to see that there is a deeper coherence that explains it.
And so that's what I'm going to attempt here is to come up with a character portrait of Reagan that goes beyond the appearances.
Now in order to do this, we should look at the way Reagan approached the presidency.
He had the toughest job in the country, maybe in the world, but he approached it as if it was not tough.
He approached it as if it was really rather easy.
For him, the presidency never appeared to be a burden.
It appeared to be like another day at the office.
And the aides around Reagan found this attitude in Reagan surprising, especially because his predecessors who are not successful.
as he was, both on the Republican and the Democratic side.
Think, for example, of figures like Carter or Nixon.
These are people who bore the presidency very heavily.
You thought of them as like, Oh my gosh, this is a real strain on me.
And Carter and Nixon were identical in this regard.
And then here comes Reagan, and it's like, Well, what do I got to what do I need to figure out today?
What problem do I need to solve to straighten out the world basically by mid afternoon?
That was the Reaganite attitude.
Reagan also loved to hear Marine Bands, he loved to hear Hail to the Chief.
But I think a key difference between Reagan and Trump is that Reagan had an elevated opinion of the office, not an elevated opinion of Reagan.
He was kind of humble with regard to being the president.
At one time, his aide, Michael Deaver, told me he said, you know, Reagan would work at his desk and he's wearing his jacket the whole day.
And he goes, some days, especially DC gets very hot in the summer, he says to Reagan, goes, Oh no, he goes, I can't take off my coat in this office.
So Reagan's view is I'm the president, I represent the presidency, I have to keep my coat on.
The George Schultz, whom I knew through the Hoover Institution in my later years after AEI, George Schultz would always stress that Reagan was a man with very little ego, not no ego.
He was self confident unto himself, but very little of a craving for public praise.
And Reagan often liked to do something that Trump never does, which is he had the self deprecating style.
The self deprecating style is a way of undercutting yourself as a way of elevating the circumstances around you.
Here's a classic example of this.
Somebody asked Reagan, what's it like being the most powerful man in the world?
Here's Reagan.
He goes, I don't believe that.
He goes, over there at the White House somewhere, he's pointing to the West Wing.
He goes, There's a fellow who puts a piece of paper on my desk every day that tells me what I'm going to do every fifteen minutes.
Reagan adds, he's the most powerful man in the world.
So Reagan is being a little facetious here.
Obviously that guy is acting at his direction.
Reagan can decide to have meetings or not have them.
The guy is probably in reality nothing more than a glorified scheduler.
But Reagan is also acknowledging a certain truth which is that gatekeepers, a chief of staff, the person who is a head of presidential personnel, the person in charge of appointments, they actually exercise a lot of de facto power because no person in charge can every single day decide these are all the meetings I'm going to have outline in advance.
This is the agenda we're going to go over.
A lot of that is kind of put in front of you, obviously by people you've hired and people that you trust.
But here's Reagan taking advantage of that obvious situation to say, guess what?
I'm not the guy who's really in charge.
I'm not making the most important decisions.
Hahaha.
It's those dudes who are really running the country, if not the world.
Now, let's talk about Reagan's day, which gives you a bit of a look at what the president's day in general looks like, but I'm speaking specifically of Reagan.
He was not an early riser.
He woke up about seven thirty.
operator would give him a wake up call.
Reagan would read the newspapers by and large.
He wouldn't hesitate to skim the headlines and then read the comics.
It may seem a little odd thing for Reagan to do, but Reagan's view of the comics are interesting in their own right.
They reveal the ironies of life in a very light and entertaining way.
Reagan would be given a packet of press clippings for him to look at.
He would take a look at those, basically get in the office at nine AM.
So he was a nine to five man in the most traditional sense of the term.
took afternoon naps, in fact he didn't do that, but in the latter part of his presidency, particularly the second term, and by the way, Reagan did not have Alzheimer's in the second term.
He might have had some elderly forgetfulness, by the way, not surprising at his age, but he didn't do the Calvin Coolidge let me take a nap and change into my pajamas for the purpose.
Reagan's day, fairly typical of the president, a lot of meetings, a briefing daily at nine thirty by the National Security Advisor, often he would have conferences with various cabinet members.
Sometimes with staff, congressmen, representatives of various groups, foreign visitors, and the staff would try to give Reagan an hour in the late morning to catch up with reading and answer correspondence.
And Reagan would almost every day look at his favorite publications, which were two.
By the way, both publications that are still around, although very different than they used to be, and of course not as influential as they used to be.
His favorite publication was actually Human Events.
Reagan loved Human Events.
I wrote, by the way, articles for Human Events in the old days.
And Reagan would not only read Human Events, he would cut out articles and keep the clippings.
Sometimes when other people came to see him, he'd like to pull out a clipping and show it to him.
This is obviously in the world long before the digital world that we live in now, Reagan operated through physical newspaper clippings.
And in fact, one of his aides, Richard Darman, used to joke, he's like, listen, I better give you two subscriptions because a lot of times you clip an article and then you're upset that you can't clip the article on the back side of the page.
So we might need to get you two subscriptions.
So Human Events, his favorite magazine, his second favorite publication., National Review, which was Bill Buckley's magazine, actually the magazine I got my start with.
I published my first article in National Review when I was a senior at Dartmouth.
And I'm trying to think, I think it was called Dartmouth's Restoration, a long cover article I wrote with a colleague of mine, a fellow editor of the Dartmouth Review named Greg Fawcett.
The two of us published the article together.
It was really my introduction to writing, doing journalism on the national scene.
So this is Reagan getting started with his day.
And as we continue, I'll talk more about what Reagan did in the office, the way he approached his schedule, the way he handled meetings, all of these aimed at giving you insights into the man's character, but also into effective techniques for getting things done.
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