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Aug. 27, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
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NEXT STOP, CHICAGO Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1156
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Coming up, I'll discuss why Democrats, very upset that homicides have gone to zero or near zero in Washington, DC, are now afraid Trump may bring homicides down to zero in Chicago.
I'll review a single exam administered by the political scientist Alan Bloom at Cornell to show you how much academic standards have plummeted in a single generation.
And Sarah McAbee, whose husband was a January 6 political prisoner, joins me.
We're going to talk about her organization called Stand in the Gap, which helps people targeted by the Biden regime with family support and reintegration into society.
Hey, if you're watching on YouTube, X or Rumble, listening on Apple or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
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The FBI has decided to hire back some of the whistleblowers who were fired or pushed out or removed.
under the old Biden FBI.
This is a very welcome development and it involves people that I know.
Garrett O'Boyle is an FBI whistleblower, very competent guy.
He's been he was removed really for objecting to bad practices at the FBI and they denied him pay and benefits, treated him very badly to be honest.
I'm glad to see that Garrett is back.
I don't know Garrett O'Boyle very well, but I did meet him on the set of the film Police State.
Steve Friend, whom I know better and who was in the film Police State has been reinstated at the FBI.
And I'm delighted about this.
Steve is just such an FBI guy.
He even kind of looks the part.
If you saw him in Police State, I mean, he's basically playing himself, although regrettably he was playing himself really being asked to leave.
And so I'm delighted that he's back.
And I think this helps to rectify things a little bit, because I know that some of these whistleblowers were sullen that the FBI.
has been now under Cash Patel and Dan Bonjino, but gee, wait a minute, how come you have kept a lot of the bad people on who were involved in January sixth?
And meanwhile, the FBI whistleblowers who were pushed out are not being asked to come back.
So I see this as a good move by Cash and by Dan to put the ship right side up.
Now, I regret to say that the fences are not mended with Kyle Seraphin, who has substituted for me on the podcast.
was also part of this FBI circle, but there appears to be bad blood that's developed for it's a bit of a long story.
I won't really get into it.
Bad blood between Kyle Serafin and Julie Kelly.
Also bad blood between Kyle Serafin and Dan Bongino.
And all this is kind of unfortunate.
I mean, we were all part of a single team, or at least that's what I thought.
On the set of Police State, everyone interacted in a very cordial and friendly way with each other.
So it is a pity that there has been this kind of schism, even though in politics, these kinds of things.
Let me talk about flag burning because there is a debate about whether what Trump is doing can even be allowed because the Constitution of course allows freedom of expression, but the truth of it is that the left does prosecute free speech.
Here's an article I'm looking at it right now Shiloh Hendrix.
You remember Shiloh Hendrix?
She's basically the white woman at the playground with her kid and she was confronted by some guy who was opening her bag, and so she called him the N word, which shouldn't be used, but nevertheless, hey, either we have free speech or we don't.
But here we see Shiloh Hendrix has been charged with three counts of disorderly conduct.
And yet from the video which I saw, she didn't engage in any conduct, she merely yelled out at this guy.
So where's the conduct?
There was no physical fracas or there were no exchanges of blows, so you can't say no, we're punishing her for her actions, not her speech.
She is quite clearly being punished for her speech, but it's disguised as conduct.
So the point I think that I make and others are also making in the MAGA camp is yes, we believe in free speech.
We are willing to embrace a near absolutist position on free speech, not an absolutely absolutist position, but a near absolutist position, but it has to be applied even handedly.
If you're going to go and punish people because they wrote over the pride parade sign, which is also speech, then you're basically saying that the left gets to shut down free speech when they want, but we don't get think that's a position that we're willing to live with nor should we.
I think part of the trap of what's going on here with Trump is that he is luring the Democrats into doing something that is going to be politically very damaging for them.
In fact, I saw a video in which Tim Waltz is like, well, you know, we're going to burn the flag and prove to Trump that he's not going to be able to do anything.
And what I'm getting at is, hey, if Trump induces these Democrats to go around burning the flag or presiding over the burning of the flag, how do you think that's going going to look before the American people?
Because the American people already suspect that there is a streak, a strong streak of anti Americanism in the Democratic Party, and this will be absolutely confirmed if you have prominent Democrats, even in the presence of flag burning, even if they're defiantly saying, Trump, come and get us.
The truth of it is burning the flag is not going to look good, not in America.
I mean, think about it, you're burning the flag of your own country.
Why would you do something like that unless it's reflecting, in fact, the way you feel about the country, the way you feel about the flag, the way you feel about the founding?
This is actually a little bit of a ruse, and it's going to be kind of interesting to see if the Democrats kind of fall for it.
And then let me talk briefly about the Trump anti crime operation, its success in Washington, DC, and the idea of bringing it to other cities.
Probably the next stop would be Chicago.
Now, first of all, in DC, for almost two weeks straight, you had a city without, I won't say without a single crime, that's unlikely in any city, but without a single homicide.
The number of homicides in DC Zero.
And this is something of a shock because DC was accustomed to daily a daily dose of homicides.
And think about the left's position.
It's like homicides in DC were down, but we don't want them to go down further.
We don't want to go down, we don't want to bring them down to zero, Dinesh.
That's too low.
We like our homicide.
We need to have at least some homicides.
Think about the preposterousness of this kind of a position.
Who can be against this?
Now, I believe yesterday there was a homicide breaking this like twelve day or two week streak.
But we're still talking about one homicide in a period of two weeks.
And just go to Memphis, go to St. Louis, go to Chicago, look at the numbers and you'll see what an achievement this really is.
And people in Chicago are taking notice and I was showing Debbie this morning a video of this guy.
It's extremely amusing.
He begins by saying, Oh, they say that federal troops are coming to Chicago.
And then he goes, he goes, this is terrifying.
And then he immediately reverses course and he goes, Bring the troops, bring the army.
Army, bring the Navy, bring the Air Force, bring the whole fleet, because he goes, I work downtown, and he goes, and it is a mess.
He goes, I see homeless encampments, I see vandalism, I see fights breaking out, I see violence.
He didn't say shootings, but I'm sure that if you go at night, he could be he'd see some of those.
And he goes on to say that this level of just social disorder and degeneracy is the norm.
And I would go further and say not only is it the norm, but the Democrats like it that way.
What they're really terrified about is if Trump comes in and cleans up the place, what are they going to say?
Because they act like this is all not only normal, but kind of inevitable.
This is what happens in big cities.
Big cities attract all kinds of people and they are going to rub up against each other and you're going to have this kind of stuff happen.
The homeless are drawn to cities.
And Trump is about to prove, in fact, he sort of has proven in DC and he's about to prove elsewhere that no, all this disorder, all this decay is a choice.
Democrats not just kind of enable it through incompetence, in some ways they bring it out.
Now, why would they bring it out?
Why would Democrats want this kind of social breakdown?
Well, the answer is they create whole industries around it, industries of social workers.
Consider, for example, in San Francisco, if you go and count the number of homeless, and then you count the number of people who are quote serving the homeless, the number of people serving the homeless is like eight to ten times the number of the homeless.
You literally have like ten guys for each homeless guy.
And you can see from the Democrats' point of view, like if one homeless guy decides to go away or he dies or he moves like ten guys are out of a job.
So they don't want that to happen.
They would rather have a few more homeless guys so that they can hire more bureaucrats to service them.
This is how the Democratic welfare state operates.
Its real constituency is not the homeless.
The homeless are the putative, the front man constituency.
The real constituency is all the bureaucrats who are patronized, who are serviced.
They are the ones who intercept the money.
And that's why you can't take the homeless budget and divide it by the number of homeless because all the homeless people would immediately become millionaires.
The budget is not aimed at the homeless.
at servicing this other call it the homeless industry.
So this is the urban blight that Trump has set his sights on.
In some ways it's the base of the Democratic Party.
If you take away the cities from the Democrats, what do they have left?
Answer nothing.
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Debbie and I are driving to the podcast this morning and she shows me this video which has a professor at one of our campuses.
I don't even remember which college and I don't remember which subject.
But you got this whole class of students and the professor announces, hey, I have news, big news.
And you're like, what could that be?
Apparently the news is that Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift are engaged.
Whoopty do.
But evidently for this guy it was a huge deal.
Now, I'm not even sure how big a deal it was for the class.
There was some kind of a buzz when he said this, but then his next statement is the true shocker, which is class is over.
I'm canceling class apparently in celebration of this momentous event.
And he's like, oh, he couldn't concentrate.
Oh yes, so does Debbie goes, he couldn't concentrate.
The event was so it took over his mind, so to speak, which really tells you a little bit about his psychology.
And all of this brought to mind something that I had seen, and I went back and pulled it out.
This is from the Leo Strauss Foundation, and it's 1966, so it goes back, let's just say a whole generation, maybe a generation and a half.
And it's Alan Bloom's final exam at Cornell to his class in political science.
I'm going to kind of go through this with a little bit of detail because I want to show you that this is the kind of thing that students, and let's consider them college seniors.
I don't know if this class was restricted to seniors, but this is the kind of thing that students in America at good colleges were expected to be able to know and to answer.
I probably won't go over all the questions, but I'm going to just go through a few of them.
For Nietzsche, what are the three uses of history and in what way can each be abused?
Wow.
I don't even know if I can answer that question off the top of my head.
I can kind of answer it, but I don't know if I can separate it out into the three uses of history, but it's not just a matter of recalling what they are.
For Nietzsche, each of these ways was susceptible to being kind of undermined or undercutting the truth.
And the question is say how.
Discuss the significance of the persons and actions in Flaubert's description of the watch over Emma's dead body.
And most people who would read this today would be like, I don't even know what you're talking about.
I do know.
He's talking about Emma Bovery in Flaubert's masterpiece called Madame Bovery.
But the question concerns a watch that is lying over Emma's dead body.
What does that watch symbolize?
Time, commerce, the prosaic ordinary life as opposed to the romantic life that Emma fanc is dead and the watch continues to tick.
What does that mean?
What does that tell you?
This is what Bloom is trying to draw out of his students, and I venture to say that for students today they would just give you that kind of what is now there was a New York Times article on this, by the way, it was called the Gen Z Long stare.
What's the long stare?
It's when you say something to apparently a member of Generation Z, the younger generation, and they don't reply.
They just give you a deliberate.
lengthy look, a meaningful look that conveys apparently something, but it's hard to put much thought behind it because nothing comes out of their mouth.
For Toqueville, what is the importance of the law of inheritance?
Now, I have read Democracy in America probably two or three times.
I don't remember.
I don't remember what Toqueville says about the law of inheritance.
I can again venture to guess based upon Toqueville's view of the relationship of the past to the present, but here Bloom doesn't want speculation, he wants you to be sufficiently familiar with Toqueville to be able to answer the question.
This is an easier question, and yet I would submit probably many students today, certainly the students in that professor's class, the Travis Kelsey Taylor Smith Guy, Swift Guy, for Locke, why do men enter into civil society?
This is the kind of question that it's worth all of us thinking about.
This is not just like a college question, because here we are human beings and we are in civil society, we live under governments, we have constitutions, but why is it necessary for people to live that way?
Why can't they live freely kind of on their own?
Was there a society that predated civil society?
What is the sort of logic that drives people into community and into civil society?
Locke has an answer to this question has to do with something that Locke calls the state of nature, which is an admittedly hypothetical, maybe even imaginary, but the state of nature is a very important type of important concept in political philosophy which shows you why people go from a state of nature to a state of civil society.
Notice that this is not about the form of government in the civil society.
It can be a monarchy, it can be democracy, it can be aristocracy.
Why do men enter into civil society at all?
Here's a question that's a bit of a mindbender for Hobbes.
What is the relation between natural right and natural law?
This is one that we need to think about.
because you can't even answer the question If first of all you don't understand what the Greeks meant by nature.
Natural right.
Why use the word natural?
What's natural about it?
The Greeks used the phrase natural right, the medieval Christians used the phrase natural law, and they seemed to mean by it something of the same thing, but it was clearly not the identical thing, because the medievals were familiar with the Greek concept of natural right, and they changed it to natural law.
Now both natural right and natural law refer to principles of right and wrong.
But interestingly for the Greeks, those principles of right and wrong, which are seen as coming from nature, they're not something that you make up, they're not subjective, they're not inwardly generated, they exist in nature.
So the Greeks and the Medievals were in agreement that these principles come from nature, but notice that the Greeks call it a right, whereas for the Medievals, it's something more of an obligation.
That's why they use the term law, right?
A law is something that is not a right.
A law is something that you need to do.
You need to follow.
Hey, don't go over the speed limit.
That's the law.
A law imposes constraints on you, whereas a right is something that you avail yourself of.
A right is in fact optional.
I have a right to vote.
Do I have to vote?
No, but it's a right available to me.
I have a claim on the right to vote, so nobody would say that voting to some degree is something that is imposed or forced.
It's not a law in that sense.
And so you can see here Bloom with his expansive mind is tapping into really core concepts of political philosophy.
I'll just cover one or two before summing up.
How does Aristotle show that the polis is natural?
Once again, we are at the very fundamental concept of the polis.
And what is the polis?
It's often defined as quote society.
That's actually not what Aristotle means.
He means a political community, a political community that is organized in some political fashion.
A tribe, for example, that is just out there, let's just say, you know, chasing a bison or chasing.
the hunt.
That's not a polis.
A polis by and large is a settled community that is organized politically.
And what is Aristotle saying?
It is quote natural.
What do we mean by natural?
Well, again, for the Greeks, natural has to be contrasted with conventional.
So conventional is something that occurs by convention, by custom.
And Aristotle, of course, knew that conventions differ from place to place.
They eat rice in India and they eat wineheat somewhere else, and they eat noodles in China and pasta in Italy.
That's conventional.
But that human beings need to eat and eat every day, that's natural.
Because something that is natural is something that humans everywhere and at all times inevitably do.
Why?
Because it's part of their nature.
And so here's Aristotle, and what is he saying?
He's saying that the polis, the political community, is natural.
In other words, it's not quote an invention.
You see right here, by the way, that Aristotle is going against people like Locke and Hobbs and Rousseau.
Remember earlier I said that for Hobbs and for Locke and for Rousseau, the idea of a political community has to be explained.
Human beings are imagined to exist in some pre political state and then by consent they establish a political community or a polis.
Aristotle says no.
Human beings don't have to enter into any such agreement.
They don't have to make a quote social contract.
The political community or the polis is natural.
And by natural here, we mean it is an extension of our nature as human beings.
But notice that everything I've just said doesn't even answer Bloom's question because Bloom's question is how does Aristotle show this?
How does Aristotle what reasons does he give that the polis is natural and not conventional?
So I sometimes wonder if you were to take the brightest kids at some of our best colleges and put them all into a room and give them this exact test, how would they do?
I think the I won't presume to fully answer that question.
I'm going to assume that there are going to be some students who are very smart, very well read, are capable of answering at least some of these questions, but I would submit that the majority would not be able to answer most of these questions today.
Why?
I don't even blame them.
Debbie's like, Are you going to unload on the Gen Z?
I'm like, No, I'm actually not going to blame the Gen Z at all.
I'm going to blame their teachers.
I'm going to blame the administrators.
I'm going to blame the forces of DEI.
I'm going to blame the dumbing down of American education.
And some of it is the blame of the schools because if the universities get students who have not read anything when they get there, they're going to have to start with the basics.
And so universities then become remedial when they should be building on the basics to take people to an advanced level.
So our situation today in academia an utter disgrace.
And just looking over the questions of a single, this is government two hundred and two zero three mister Bloom final examination january twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six.
This is the kind of document a historian will uncover in some future generation and say, wow, there were at one time here in America good students who actually knew and could answer and were expected to answer these sorts of questions.
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Guys, I'm very happy to welcome back to the podcast.
Sarah McAbee.
Now Sarah is the wife of a january sixth political prisoner who was ultimately pardoned with many others by President Trump.
I had her on the podcast, gosh, it now seems like three years ago when all of this was just a terrifying ordeal.
And we now have a little bit of perspective on all this.
I'm delighted Sarah's been reunited with family, but she's staying active with some important things that she's doing now.
And I want her to complete the story that was an unfinished.
story in 2022.
Now Sarah is the founder, the co-founder of Stand in the Gap, and we'll talk about what that group does.
The website is standinthegap.foundation.
Sarah, welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
It's been a while.
If I remember the last time we talked, you're you had quite an ordeal on your hands, and it had no end in sight.
In fact, the left was escalating its persecution of Trump supporters.
This was not just happening in the context of January 6, they were going after pro-lifers, they were obviously going after Trump himself, the 90 plus criminal charges.
Let's start by me asking you to describe your life in those days, because I'm sure it had a transformative effect on you.
Let's talk about what happened prior to the presidential pardon.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for having me on to bring your audience up to speed, not only what's happening with Colton, but to so many other January 6 defendants.
Going back to what life was like for me for three and a half years, others for four.
It was a very horroring experience to see what could really happen with our justice system when it's rigged against you because they did not like what January 6 defendants stood up for on January 6 because the sitting president of the United States called Americans to Washington, DC because they were certifying the election to encourage their representatives to do the right thing and because of the stolen election.
The aftermath of that was January 6.
And they put these individuals through quite a living hell and what their families had to endure for four years for the most part.
And they are still living in that.
It's just been an atrocity to see what has happened to American citizens in the aftermath of truly political persecution.
I mean, we had political prisoners sitting in our own nation's capital for four years.
I think that people know how unjust this was, but they don't have a good sense of how the federal government using its resources and power can not only rig the system, but really break the back of American families.
And by this I mean bankrupt them, put their kids in a terrible situation, create a situation where even later, even when you get out, your life is not easy.
You can't put it back together very well.
Let me start by asking about your own family.
Has tell me how the pardon came about?
How did you hear about it?
And has it and have you been able to kind of mend and heal from this experience?
You know, on January 20, President Trump did exactly what he said he was going to do, promises made, promises kept, and on January 20, 211 January 6 defendants were released from prison that night.
And those individuals got to go home to their families or what was left of their families.
And, you know, I can really only speak to what I have witnessed personally, and there is no going back to somewhat what you would consider normal.
Once you go through the fire, you can't come out, you know, not being burnt or even at least smelling like smoke.
So there is a new normal for all 1600 January 6 defendants' families and what they're going through.
And I do believe that the general public thinks, Oh, well, President Trump pardoned them, so they got out of prison and life went back to normal, but their families were destroyed.
The divorce rate is astronomical.
Kids no longer talk to their parents because of what they had to go through with their friends and the general public.
The defamation that happened in the media, their reputations have not been restored.
You know, they're still working on getting jobs.
Some of them lost their homes, their vehicles.
And so it's really a day-by-day thing to piece their life back together because the federal government bankrupted them.
You're absolutely right in saying that.
Is it the case, Sarah?
I've seen a couple of the January 6th activists basically say, listen, the federal government needs to do something to make us whole.
And I know that I think it might have been, I don't remember if it was Stuart from the Oathkeepers who was saying this, but it might have been.
someone else, but they were basically saying, look, you have extracted a terrible toll.
You were unjustly locked up.
In fact, in some of those cases, as you know, some of those people were facing long prison terms.
And in some cases, they weren't even in DC on January 6.
So the level of absurdity that went on is truly unbelievable.
Do you think that there is something that the government itself can do?
Or do you think that this is something that now has to be handled outside of the government just really through people's own efforts and efforts that, for example, you are undertaking now.
You know, it has been the American public, American patriots that have carried us thus far.
I do believe that the federal government must step in to right its wrong.
This is one of the largest stains in American history.
And has this stuff happened before?
Absolutely, but not on the scale that it did to January 6 defendants.
And I truly believe that it had to be this way because even someone like myself, I believed in the justice system.
And when the FBI came and took Colton in August of 2021, I believed he was going to be out on bond.
I thought he was going to have a fair trial.
And what we saw was the justice system doing what it does best and it was rigged against us.
And so I believe not only restitution has to happen for these families to be financially able to provide again, but just to be made, I don't even know if you can be made whole again to be honest with you, but I believe there are steps that the federal government has to take to right this wrong and truly to right history.
Sarah, talk about the organization that you've co-founded.
It's called Stand in the Gap.
What gave you the idea to do it and what is the.
What was the goal of the foundation?
Stand in the Gap is a nonprofit, January 6 foundation, to not only help the defendants and their families, but now that President Trump has pardoned them to help rebuild their lives.
So we actually started it because, you know, in Washington, DC, the defendants were denied visits for two years.
And then finally, when Congressional member Troy Nels went to the DC jail, he said, you know what?
People on death row, they even get visitation.
These individuals deserve visitation.
And so they did, but you're talking about, you know, 75 to 100 men from every state that their families had to take their kids out of school, get off work for an hour visit on Friday, and they just couldn't afford it because they had already been in financial ruin for two years.
And so I was like, okay, this is something the general public said they wanted to help, so let's help them.
And so we funded about seventy five families to be reunited through our program called Operation Love Wins.
And as we were doing that, we just realized there were a lot of needs not being met in this community because nobody wanted to touch us.
We were like a scarlet letter, a stain.
And so we said, you know what?
Nobody's coming to save us.
We're going to come save ourselves.
And so we're just knowing long term that President Trump would pardon these individuals, they would get out and we would need to help them rebuild their lives.
And so we're doing everything from accepting vehicles for individuals to get back and forth from work.
We have a place in Texas where we build tiny homes for families that did lose their homes.
We have emergency funding to help from everything from kids now going back to school that need school supplies and backpacks to individuals that need clothes to go to interviews.
So really everything you can think of to pull your life back together.
And the persecution really isn't over for some of these people.
There's a Green Beret, 20-year veteran, who is being sued by a DC cop, civily sued for half a million dollars.
And so now he's being sued civily and needs an attorney.
So we are still working on that legal front as well.
Guys, this is a really important cause because these are people who in many cases did absolutely nothing.
There might even have been some guys who did some stuff that was wrong, but in my opinion, even those people had their rights abused because they were disproportionately prosecuted.
They were given very severe sentences for things that they did where in some cases they were putting up a shield to defend themselves against blows raining down on their head.
The whole thing is an absolute disgrace.
And Debbie and I have done a lot to help, but we will do more and we want you to help.
So let me give you the website again, it's standinthegap.foundation.
Like Sarah said, you can give money, but you can also donate things that are needed.
And maybe the website, I'm assuming Sarah, kind of specifies ways in which people can reach out and help.
You can by the way, also follow the group on X., it is SITG, Stand in the Gap Foundation.
So at SITG Foundation, I have been talking to Sarah McAbee, cofounder of the organization.
Sarah, thank you very much for joining me and keep up the good work.
Thank you.
God bless you.
I'm going to try today to wrap up how an ordinary man became an extraordinary leader by summing up some of the key themes of Reagan.
This is coming from, well, in the book it's the penultimate chapter, but I'm going to close out with this chapter spirit of a leader.
And I want to begin by noting that with Reagan, and I think the same could be said of Trump, they don't allow their positions to be determined.
Influenced, yes, determined no, by pollsters.
It's customary for politicians, not just presidents, but senators, even congressmen, take a poll.
Let's see what the people think.
And I'm going to kind of structure or choreograph my position to be in line with.
But this wasn't Reagan's view.
Reagan's view was public opinion is a mess.
People haven't thought it through.
Their opinion is uninformed.
So even if it's formed, it's uninformed.
And moreover, Reagan's view was you elected me to make these decisions, not planning on you doing them yourselves.
So for Reagan, leadership involves shaping public opinion as much as it involves responding to it.
You can see how Reagan even thought about the issue when somebody told him in 1982 when the country was in a recession that Reagan's popularity had plummeted.
Reagan goes, guess what?
Time for me to be shot again.
In other words, Reagan had noted that his popularity soared after the assassination attempt.
So here's Reagan being jovial even on a topic like that.
Here's Richard Wertland, Reagan's pollster in a conversation I had with him.
He says this, Reagan consulted the polls to identify areas where a majority of his fellow citizens disagreed with him so he could use his power of persuasion to change their minds.
Reagan was also not that impressed by experience.
You had elites around him, people who had served in high capacities for a long time and they thought that they always knew how it was, Reagan was willing to do things differently.
When Reagan first came in in nineteen eighty one, he wanted to get rid of the law of the Sea Treaty, and his Secretary of State, Al Hag, said to Reagan, You can't do that.
There are presidents before you of both parties who have embraced the law of the Sea Treaty, and discussions about this have been going on for years.
Almost everybody accepts the framework of the treaty.
And Reagan goes, Well, yes, Al, but What?
It was about the law of the sea treaty.
Reagan goes, No, it was about not doing things just because that's the way they've been done before.
And here you see Reagan again willing to forge a new path.
Now, Reagan had an unshakable confidence in his own convictions.
And he believed them to be as right and as obvious as like the law of gravity.
It never occurred to Reagan that he was fundamentally wrong.
He could be wrong about a policy, but he wasn't wrong about his basic convictions.
And I think that gave Reagan a focus and a direction that is a key to his leadership.
He understood Reagan did that the press was biased against him.
I don't think it was as biased as it is against Trump.
You didn't have this kind of brazen and naked partisanship, but it was partisanship all the same.
And the media was always trying to undermine Reagan, and this is why Reagan used his power of the pulpit.
to kind of go over the heads of the media.
And so they were never really able to get him.
They kept trying to they keep identifying so called gaffes that he had made, but nobody ever seemed to mind.
The gaffes never seemed to hurt him.
Sam Donaldson was constantly dueling with Reagan, but he never seemed to score a point.
He's like one of these fencers where he just keeps dancing around you and flailing at you, but he never really gets you.
And Donaldson himself ultimately kind of understood this, and he gave up in a remarkable way.
And see, I ran into him once and I asked him about Reagan.
I said, you know, Reagan's been out of office.
What is your assessment about these clashes that you would have with him on the news every day?
And Sam Donaldson, and this is a tribute to Donaldson as much as to Reagan, he said, well, we thought he was a lightweight, but he really wasn't.
And here's the line I quote in the book.
He came to Washington to change the world for the better.
And for the most part, he did.
What a statement to come out of Sam Donaldson.
He kind of understood later when it was admittedly too late.
And he never said this elsewhere to my knowledge in public, but he acknowledged the power of Reagan.
Now Reagan had for all his eight years two camps that I was very familiar with the pragmatists and the ideologues, and the ideologues were the real Reaganites who were on board with Reagan.
They wanted to overthrow the Soviet Empire.
These are the ideologues, and the pragmatists were people like James Baker, George Schultz, and these were the guys who focused on, yeah, but it's not practical.
Hey, that's not going to be able to get there.
And the ideologues always wanted Reagan to choose them over the pragmatists, but interestingly, Reagan never did.
And I want to give the reason why.
This, by the way, is relevant to the discussions we have today about even rhinos and so called Republicans in name only.
Reagan never used that term.
I'm not aware of a single time he used that term, not just because it was quote coined later, it's because he didn't think like that.
Reagan's view was that you have ideologues and Reagan his heart was with them, and you have pragmatists, but Reagan understood that very often the pragmatists know better than the ideologues how to actually get something done, how to get a vote through Congress, how to frame a legal argument so it survives constitutional scrutiny, how to organize a political campaign that appeals to the center as much as it does to the right.
So I would summarize this by saying that for Reagan, the ideologues supply the goal, and the pragmatists supply the means.
And Reagan would actually make jokes about it.
In fact, he once said, Hey guys, my right hand doesn't know what my far right hand is doing.
And what he meant by this is that you got two camps and they're pushing in different directions.
But see, interestingly for Reagan, the right hand was the pragmatists.
So Reagan understood that yeah, they're maybe not as right wing as the ideologues, those of the far right, but they're also on the right.
They're on our team, and we should not think of them as somehow people that are enemies or people that we want to somehow root out of the Republican Party.
I think Reagan would have considered that preposterous.
The speechwriters, many of whom I knew pretty well Peggy Noonan, Peter Robinson, who was a colleague of mine at Dartmouth, Tony Dolan, who was Reagan's chief speechwriter.
They all said of Reagan, they said, You know, people think that speechwriters write speeches and the president delivers them, but the speechwriter said, Look, you know, he didn't steal from us.
He isn't using our great lines.
We stole from him.
We went back to Reagan's days as governor.
We read Reagan's old speeches and Reagan's scribblings and writings, and Reagan basically wrote many of his own best lines.
I give some examples in the book and I won't go into them where I show you this is what the speechwriter drafted about strategic defense.
And then I show how Reagan rewrote the paragraph to make it cleaner, more clear, remove unnecessary jargon, academic legalities, and even in the Evil Empire speech, Reagan simplified, made it more forceful.
He had the ability to do that.
by just reading the last couple of paragraphs which I think are my way of offering a tribute to Reagan, a little bit with a personal twist to it.
Shortly before he left office in january nineteen eighty nine, Reagan met with a group of us at a reception in the White House.
We have had a revolution, he said, and the revolution has been a success.
Reagan listed some data showing how much the country and the rest of the world had changed for the better.
And then he ended on a characteristically light note.
Quote, all in all, I must say, not bad for a fellow who couldn't get his facts straight and worked for four hours a day.
Reagan's classic self deprecating humor.
And note how different this is than something Trump would say.
Trump would never say something like this.
This is one of the temperamental differences between Reagan and Trump.
And then Reagan goes almost apologetically, they say I have to go.
And I reflected for a moment on that phrase.
It conveyed the message to me that Reagan didn't really want to say goodbye, he'd rather spend more time with us.
This is kind of the impression he's giving.
But his AIDS, these are the bad guys, they're making him leave.
And even in the little things, Reagan reveals his political kind of subtlety.
But it did hit me at that point that this really actually was the end.
Reagan was in fact leaving.
He was returning to California, and I would probably never see him again.
That turned out to be true.
I never saw him again.
A few days later, amid much fanfare, the Reagans boarded a plane and departed.
But I like to think of him riding off into the sunset, a lone horseman silhouetted against an open sky.
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