Michael Reagan dissects Trump’s media war, contrasting his father’s Cold War statesmanship—like pressuring Gorbachev into Soviet collapse—with Trump’s "thin-skinned" reactions, warning policy wins risk overshadowing by personal controversies. He mocks the Times’ anti-Trump bias, cites Black voter shifts (8%→36% approval), and links media hypocrisy to figures like Brennan vs. Sarah Sanders. Legal analyst Jenna Ellis argues Colorado’s anti-baker persecution could backfire, exposing Democratic overreach on First Amendment grounds. Reagan’s foundation battles "woke" history erasure, framing Reagan’s legacy as a bulwark against socialism, while Trump’s luck (Clinton opponent) and divisive persona threaten his long-term standing. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has joined with the Boston Globe and more than 300 other newspapers in publishing an editorial attacking Donald Trump in unison for falsely accusing them of attacking him in unison, like in the editorial.
The newspapers joined in celebrating an independent free press by acting in perfect conformity, all expressing the exact same opinion, celebrating their independence and the freedom to be exactly like all the other independent papers, saying the same thing freely and independently, as long as it's the same.
The Times editorial was written by their editorial board, which includes Sarah Jong, who says she enjoys being cruel to old white men.
The board also includes several old white men who presumably enjoy being treated cruelly by Sarah Zhang.
And of course, there are some women and dark-skinned men who, I guess, just like watching that sort of thing.
All in all, the Times editorial board sounds like some kind of fun S ⁇ M dungeon or some other sick pornographic fantasy for filthy-minded perverts and therefore deserves our respect.
The editorial says in part, quote, In answer to the vicious attacks on the press by Donald Trump, we hereby unite in viciously attacking Donald Trump, which, okay, we've been doing for about three years now, but this time we really mean it.
Trump's false claim that the news media has become a corrupt arm of the Democratic Party and other far-left socialist institutions will be forever put to rest by this demonstration of how much we all hate him for standing in the way of the Democratic Party with his false accusations.
Rest assured, as a free press, we will continue to defend free speech by assassinating the character of anyone who disagrees with us.
Unquote.
The editorial was first published yesterday, but you can probably still read it if you pull it out of the bottom of your canary cage and brush the bird crap off it until you can read the horse crap underneath.
Trick or warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are on the brink of the Clavenless weekend.
Don't panic.
Oh, wait, no, that's the wrong advice.
Panic.
Sorry.
But we have a big show with Jenna Ellis is going to come on and talk to us about the Colorado Gate Baker who has got that poor man is in trouble again.
They are just, they just will not stop hounding him.
Michael Reagan is also going to be on to talk about his attempts to keep the memory of our history alive, which is really interesting.
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So here's just an interesting thing.
A new Rasmussen poll shows that Trump's approval rating in the black community is now up around 36%, which is unbelievable.
started down around 8%.
And I predicted this was going to happen for a simple reason.
I've happened to notice that black Americans have eyes to see with and ears to hear with, and they know when they're being gamed.
I mean, how long can you game a person before he catches on?
But it also tells us something else.
It also tells us that in the battle between Trump and the press, which is this pitched battle, it's like Moriarty and Holmes with their hands wrapped around each other's throat as they go off the falls together, Trump's winning.
Trump is winning because this has been their main avenue of attack, as it always is.
Everyone who disagrees with the left is a racist.
Say that, you know, a guy is stupid, he happens to be black.
Oh, you said it because he's a racist, not because he's stupid, which he may also be, right?
If you say that President Obama was incompetent and corrupt, you said it not because he was incompetent and corrupt.
No, it couldn't be that.
It's got to be because his skin happens to be a little tanner than your skin.
That's got to be what you're thinking about.
So now they've got this routine.
So all of this, and they just do it and do it and do it.
And people aren't listening because their lives are getting better, because America is getting better, because we're at peace.
They've seen ISIS has been wiped off.
They've wiped off the face of the earth.
They see that Trump is behaving in, even though his weird personal behavior is weird.
His behavior as president is within the bounds of the Constitution.
They can see this with their own eyes.
And it doesn't matter what the press keeps hammering away at.
Now they're on this Amarosa, this obvious person.
He called her a dog.
So it's got to be because she's black and a woman, but he's called Mitt Romney a dog.
He called Michael Wolfe a dog.
This is a thing he says.
So, but don't be afraid of this because Brian Williams is investigating.
It's cut number two.
Does this president really physically not like dogs?
That's right, Brian.
He's actually the first president in more than 100 years who's not had a dog as a pet in the White House.
He has lived with a dog before when he first got married to his first wife, Ivana.
She brought with her a poodle.
He resisted the dog.
He didn't want to have anything to do with the poodle, but she said, the poodle's coming along.
Chappie's coming along.
Turns out Chappie didn't like Trump very much because whenever Trump would come near Ivana's closet, Chappie would bark at him.
I'm glad we got to the bottom of that.
See, this is the problem the press has, that everything Trump says about them is true.
It really is interesting, you know, if they would just, either, if either Trump or the press would just edge a little bit toward compromise, if Trump would say, you know what, you know, yeah, the Russians fiddled with the election, but that had nothing to do with the results.
I won because I won.
If he would say that, you know, they wouldn't be able to get him on this constant, you know, oh, it's a witch hunt and whatever.
He says, but if the press would just say, you know what, you know what?
Trump is right.
We are biased.
There are too many Democrats, too many people, not enough Trump voters, no Trump voters in any of our editorial spots.
If they would just move a little bit, but they are, no matter how badly Trump behaves, they behave worse.
And people ultimately think to hell with them.
You know, why should we do this?
And it's not just the press, it's the whole Democrat Party.
But I repeat myself because the Democrat Party and the press are the same thing.
You know, let's take a look the other day, I think it was yesterday, Chris Cromo's less intelligent brother, I can hardly believe those words are coming out of my mouth, the governor of New York, and here's what he had to say to the people.
And his people, listen to their reaction.
Man, look, the simple point is all this comes down to this.
We're not going to make America great again.
It was never that great.
We have not reached greatness.
We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged.
We will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51% of our population is gone and every woman's full potential is realized and unleashed and every woman is making her full contribution.
When that happens, this nation is going to be taken even higher because we have not yet fully liberated the women in this country.
So let me get this straight.
We are the first, we were the first constitutional republic in our time.
All the others are imitations.
We won two world wars and the Cold War, setting all of the world free.
Not a single person who is politically free does not owe a debt to the United States of America.
But the problem is our women are living in the handmaid's tale.
You see them on the street with those flying nun hats and all the red things and being forced to bear other people's children.
You see this in front of you, except you don't, except it's all in his imagination.
But he is not the only one on the left.
You know, Carl Rove has a piece in the journal today.
He says, New York, New Jersey Senator Corey Booker declared that we are at a time where injustice has grown to be normal in our country.
Elizabeth Warren says, the hard truth about our criminal justice system is it's racist.
I mean, all the way front to back.
And as Rove points out, this doesn't speak well of former attorneys general Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, who made the justice system the way it is today.
They had eight years to change it.
It's not Donald Trump's justice system.
It's still theirs.
California Senator Kamala Harris joined the assault telling NetRoots that our criminal justice system has failed, besides vowing not to be shut up by opponents of identity politics.
Ms. Harris unconsciously took a swipe at President Obama's record, saying we have an economy that is at work for those at the very top, but not for those doing the hardest.
Life in America is awful according to these people.
Alexandria Ecazio-Cortez, the Democratic socialist who became the left's overnight sensation, told NetRoots that immigration and customs enforcement, these law enforcement officers, has repeatedly, systematically, and violently committed human rights abuses.
This is the way the Democrats talk about America.
This is the way they talk about America.
No matter what Donald Trump is doing, no matter what they say, no matter what tape they come up with, they're worse.
They're worse than he is.
They cannot come up with a charge.
They hate the country.
They keep telling us they hate the country.
And listen to won the primaries yesterday.
Listen to the Democrats who won the primary yesterday.
This is diversity.
Diversity is our strength.
Diverse Voices Discuss America00:02:49
You know that.
Diversity is our strength.
Here's a diverse group of people.
There's Randy Bryce, who is an admitted drunk driver.
He's going to try and get the seat of Paul Ryan, the House Speaker.
In Minnesota, Keith Ellison won his nomination for attorney general while denying accusations that he abused a former girlfriend.
Democrat Archie Parnell in South Carolina admitted to beating his wife decades ago, and he won a congressional primary.
And oh, in Vermont, the governor, the Democrat running for the governor of Vermont is, let me see if I've got her.
Yeah, I do.
Christine Holquist, here's Don Lemon.
He, I don't know what to call.
He's a guy who dresses up as a girl, so I guess that makes him a transgender something.
Here's his interview with Don Lemon.
Do you see this as a victory for all transgender Americans, all Americans?
Yes, I do see it as a victory for all of Americans.
But I will tell you, it's no surprise to me living in Vermont.
I love Vermont, and this is pretty typical for what Vermont is.
Vermont's been a loving state, a leader in civil rights, and we're going to continue to show the rest of the country what good democracy looks like.
Good democracy looks like a guy in a skirt.
I mean, it's like a monthly Python routine.
And by the way, it's not attacking people who have gender dysphoria, who have problems with this, but really, really, I mean, that's what good democracy looks like.
I mean, just look like, like Monty Python.
All right, never mind.
But here's a tip for all of you guys in skirts and not skirts.
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Brennan and the Supreme Court Controversy00:12:20
Have we got Jenna Ellis with us?
Let us bring on Jenna Ellis.
She is the friend of the show, a director of the Dobson Policy Center, a contributor to the Washington Examiner.
She has a book which I just finished reading, which I really, I really, well, you and I will have to talk about this book.
A very interesting argument about the Constitution called The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, a guide for Christians to understand America's current constitutional crisis.
But all of that is paled by the fact that you were now tweeted by the President of the United States.
I was so impressed.
I was reading the Twitter feed.
I thought, I know her.
I know Jenna.
That's there she is.
You know what?
Sound again, Andrew.
And yeah, that was my phone just immediately blew up with all these people going, I know you.
This is you.
This is amazing.
And it was quite an honor to now be featured in the president's Twitter feed.
Absolutely.
You know, my one ambition left in life is to be the answer to a crossword puzzle, but that's pretty close, I have to say.
All right.
So what is going on with this poor guy in California?
Got a little tension in a crossword puzzle.
Yeah.
What is going on with this big cake baker?
He just got out of trouble.
The Supreme Court let him go, and now he's back in trouble again.
Yeah, you know, this is just a relentless attack on religious liberty by the state of Colorado.
And what's going on is that, of course, everyone's familiar with the Masterpiece Cake Shop opinion that was handed down by the Supreme Court that strongly condemned the very same commission for showing overt hostility and animus against religious freedom and Jack the Cake Baker for refusing to decline, refusing to create a custom cake on the basis of his sincerely held religious beliefs.
And so what's happened now is that he's back in front of the exact same commission, which found probable cause that he discriminated this time against a Colorado attorney who is self-proclaimed transgender, who on the very same day, is this a coincidence?
I don't think so.
The very same day that the Supreme Court agreed to take up the Masterpiece cake shop case called Masterpiece and asked for a blue exterior pink interior cake that was specifically intended to celebrate his transition from male to female.
Of course, Masterpiece declined respectfully.
And now the Colorado Commission, rather than following the masterpiece opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court, is again, frankly, just overtly harassing Jack, making him go through the system.
And this time, Alliance Defending Freedom, which are his attorneys, they're fighting back.
They actually filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday night in the Colorado District Court, claiming that the commission is not following the opinion and asking for a permanent and continuing injunctive relief, basically stopping the commission from enforcing the Anti-Discrimination Act and Colorado law against Jack.
I mean, this is so obviously persecution.
And one of the things the Supreme Court cited in their decision was the clear animus that the commission had against this guy, which I don't see how they're going to disprove, having gone right back against him.
But does this speak at all to the, a lot of people at the time complained about the narrowness of the Supreme Court's decision.
Does this give credence to that?
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, from a legal perspective, this is a really bad strategic move for the commission for several reasons.
One is because this is again showing just their overt hostility for them to find probable cause when this was clearly just an attack and a setup against Jack.
But then this is providing yet another opportunity to go back in front of the Supreme Court, potentially, and Justice Kennedy, who wrote that majority opinion that was very narrow, to have the opportunity with potentially a Justice Brett Kavanaugh and a 5-4 conservative majority that would implement a better decision like Justice Thomas's or Justice Gorsuch's concurrence that should provide a much broader opinion and a broader protection and application of the First Amendment.
Really interesting.
You know, I was just thinking about Kavanaugh when he was nominated.
There was all this noise about Roe v. Wade because that's what the left thinks is going to move the country against him.
But it kind of occurred to me, I think it occurred to me while I was reading your book, actually, that Obergfeld was so the one putting gay marriage, essentially inserting gay marriage into the Constitution, was so poorly decided since the Constitution gives no power to the federal government to rule on marriage at all.
It was so badly decided, I thought maybe that would be the one that Kavanaugh would be far more likely to overturn since it's fresh and hasn't become precedent.
Do you think there's any truth to that?
Yeah, I think that all of these unconstitutional Supreme Court opinions, whether it starts with, you know, Griswold versus Connecticut in 1965, finding these emanations from the penumbra of the Constitution that somehow, you know, with the, yeah, with this crystal ball, the justices can somehow find rights that aren't specifically enumerated and articulated and then give the government unilateral power to somehow restrict those rights.
So anything that flows from that case in 1965, which would include Roe versus Wade, Planned Parenthood versus Casey, Obergefell, all of these social issue cases that have just advanced the sexual revolution, those will now probably and hopefully be up for reconsideration with a genuinely conservative court that would say these were unconstitutionally decided and actually adhere to the Constitution and reverse those decisions.
And that would be a great thing for our country to actually abide by our Constitution.
That'd be a new idea, I know.
So where do you think Kavanaugh is in the confirmation process?
How do you think he's doing?
I think he's doing great.
He's definitely been meeting with the key senators over the past few weeks.
And then the Senate Judiciary Committee just announced last week that September 4th, the day after Labor Day, will be the initial hearings that will begin.
And the process that happens is that initially he goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
They will then issue a report to the full Senate that can be positive, negative, or neutral.
But that's not binding, of course, on the votes.
That's just kind of their report.
And then it'll go before the full Senate for consideration and vote.
And because the left forced the nuclear option with Gorsuch and 51 votes as a majority is now the Senate rule for confirmation, that's the only threshold that Brett Kavanaugh has to look at.
And I think he will get there without question.
Interesting, interesting.
You know, I have to tell you, there are so many questions I have to ask about your book.
So I want to bring you back and do that specifically.
I won't do it now.
Jenna, thanks so much for coming on.
It's always good to talk to you.
Thanks, Andrew.
Hi.
Yeah, we have to talk.
We have to bring her back and just talk about the book because she makes some arguments I've never heard before, which is pretty rare at this point.
I think I've heard everything.
You know, just to go back for a minute, though, to what I was talking about before about the fact that the problem that the press has and the problem that the Democrats have is that it's just apparent to people who have eyes and ears, which is like a lot of people.
It's apparent that they have behaved very, very badly.
So anything they say about Trump just kind of keeps coming back on them.
And that was true with this John Brennan when they pulled his security clearance.
You know, the thing about pulling the guy's security clearance is it costs him money.
You know, he's out there selling his expertise.
John Brennan has a contract, I think, with NBC.
He's out there selling his expertise.
He can be consulted, go to do consultancy work and say, yes, I have an inside track.
So when this happens to him and the press, oh my goodness, he's punishing his enemies.
But the people, remember, since we started by saying this, the people aren't listening to the press because the press has just behaved so badly.
So what do the people say?
What do you say?
What do I say?
When I hear that John Brennan's security clearance has been pulled, I think, well, okay, what did he do?
And what did Trump do?
Well, what did Brennan do?
First of all, he set up Trump on this ridiculous Russia investigation.
He accused him of treason.
He's just been an insidious blowhard.
He has been a gas bag from the beginning with his big words.
And he's just, let's play, here's, let's listen to Brennan's reaction to having his security clearance pulled, which, by the way, is a privilege.
It's not a right.
He just, they just something they do as a favor to him.
Let's listen to his reaction.
I've seen this type of behavior and actions on the part of foreign tyrants and despots and autocrats for many, many years during my CIA and national security career.
I never ever thought that I would see it here in the United States.
And so I do believe that all Americans really need to take stock of what is happening right now in our government and how abnormal and how irresponsible and how dangerous these actions are.
He said it was a threat to his free speech.
And you can hear how he's been silenced, utterly silenced.
I mean, what a gas bag.
He's talking about Trump as a foreign tyrant because he pulled this privilege that he had after he's done all this.
So here's Sarah Sanders.
So here's the thing, right?
If the people are not listening to the media, if they're not listening to the media narrative, they're making decisions on their own.
That's what we started with.
They're making decisions on their own.
So they listen to the gas bag, the insidious gas bag, and then they listen to Sarah Sanders, who's reading Trump's statement on pulling Brennan's security clearance.
Mr. Brennan has a history that calls into question his objectivity and credibility.
In 2014, for example, he denied to Congress that CIA officials under his supervision had improperly accessed the computer files of congressional staffers.
He told the Council of Foreign Relations that the CIA would never do such a thing.
The CIA's inspector general, however, contradicted Mr. Brennan directly, concluding unequivocally that agency officials had indeed improperly accessed congressional staffers' files.
More recently, Mr. Brennan told Congress that the intelligence community did not make use of the so-called steel dossier in an assessment regarding the 2016 election.
An assertion contradicted by at least two other senior officials in the intelligence community and all of the facts.
Additionally, Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration.
Mr. Brennan's line and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation's most closely held secrets and facilities, the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos.
So you hear the insidious gas bag, gas baggery, and then you listen to that, which is absolutely accurate description of what John Brennan has been up to both in office and since he has gotten out of office.
And I think most people are going to come to the same conclusion as Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.
I think most Americans look at our national intelligence experts as being above politics.
Mr. Brennan has demonstrated that that's not the case.
He's been totally political.
I think I called him a butthead, and I meant it.
I think he's given the national intelligence community a bad name.
I love this guy.
I love John Kennedy.
We will say anything.
Anyway, this is the problem they have, why the press is losing, why I think the Democrats are losing a lot more than maybe the polls show because they have just behaved badly and they have behaved badly for a longer time than Donald Trump.
Hey, it's almost speaking of people who behave badly.
Michael Knowles is going to be on the conversation Tuesday, August 21st, 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
Knowles will answer your questions moderated by our lovely host, Alicia Krauss, who makes dealing with Knowles look almost effortless, almost.
The Q ⁇ A will stream live on YouTube and Facebook for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask Knowles questions over at thedailywire.com.
Ronald Reagan's Legacy00:15:04
So you should subscribe.
You can be in the mailbag.
We had a good mailbag yesterday, and we'll have another one next week, All Your Problems Solved.
Subscribe.
What are you doing with the 10 bucks anyway, right?
Nothing.
All right.
Michael Reagan is, of course, the son of President Ronald Reagan and the president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
The foundation just recently opened its Walkway to Victory, a World War II memorial in France.
And Michael joined me to talk about that and a lot more.
Here he is.
Michael Reagan, thanks so much for being here.
I appreciate it.
Great to be here.
Thank you very much for having me.
So you've always been a very clear-headed viewer of politics.
But before I talk about the present, I think I want to talk about the past because you're doing a lot of work with the Reagan Legacy Foundation based around World War II.
If I got that right.
Yeah, World War II.
Actually, I got out of radio in 2009, really to carry on the legacy of my father and do what I could to lift him up worldwide, if you will.
And we started the Legacy Foundation as a way to raise money, scholarships, if you will, money, for the men and women who serve aboard the USS Ronald Reagan.
Got it.
And we started that way back when.
And that's worked out so well over the years.
And the kids really enjoy the fact that we go to the ship, we get on the ship, we provide the scholarships.
But we do something else.
We give scholarships also to the family members who are at home trying to better their education.
So we give a thousand dollar scholarship to the kid on the ship and 2,000 to the family member left home.
And it's just so fulfilling to be able to do that.
So that's where it started.
And then I went to, gosh, Germany a few years back, and I was talking to a young man.
I said, what do you know about the Berlin Wall?
Well, he said the Americans put it up to keep the communists out of their sector.
No, did he say?
Yeah.
And I went, really?
And I walked around.
is nothing about Ronald Reagan in Berlin at all.
Nothing.
So I started working with the Maurer Museum, Checkpoint Charlie Museum.
And just as they were doing the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, we opened up a Ronald Reagan exhibit there at the Maurer Museum in Berlin.
And it's right over Checkpoint Charlie.
And a few years ago, after browbeating the German government forever, they allowed us to put a plaque in the ground to commemorate the speech in 1987.
So we have that in the ground, which is great.
We worked with the Poles to have a statue of my father at Pope John Paul in Gdance, Poland.
And then a few years ago, I was going to go to Normandy.
And I was playing golf with a 28-year-old young man.
And I told him, I said, I'm going to France tomorrow.
Why?
Well, I'm going out to Normandy on Sunday.
I've been asked to raise the American flag at the American Cemetery in Normandy on Sunday.
And he said to me, why is there an American cemetery in Normandy?
Oh, I'm so sorry.
And I said to him, I said, did you think D-Day was the day your report card came home?
And by the end of the round, I figured out he's the normal and he is the normal.
Kids still believe, you know, what they believe about America and Germany.
They probably do believe, well, you put up to keep the communists out of your sector.
They don't know why there was a Second World War, who fought in the Second World War, who died in the Second World War.
So we began to work with Normandy.
And that has been just so wonderful, what we've been able to do in Normandy over the last few years.
We've built a Ronald Reagan Center at St. Mary Lee's, Normandy, France.
First town freed by America on D-Day, 4 a.m. in the morning.
You got the 101st, 82nd Airborne, the 505, all of them there.
And then we made another agreement with him just this last year to start doing a walkway to victory.
And people could go online, walkwaytovictory.com, and purchase a brick to honor a veteran of World War II, fought in the European theater.
And we lay the bricks all through the area there of the museum at Normandy, France.
It's just wonderful.
We just played the first 300 bricks.
Does it ever bother you when you think of the fact that Ronald Reagan freed so many people?
And I won't say he did it single-handedly, of course not, but he had a vision that other people around him did not have.
I remember, you know, he said, we were going to win the Cold War.
No Nobel Prize, no remembrance of him in the media.
I mean, they gave Obama a Nobel Prize basically just for showing up.
Does that bother you?
Yeah, well, it bothers me, but it wouldn't have bothered him.
Okay.
Because he wasn't doing it for the praise.
Right.
What was the placard on his desk?
No telling what a man can accomplish or where he can go if he doesn't worry who gets the credit.
Today, unfortunately, we have too many people wanting to take credit and getting nothing done.
Ronald Reagan didn't mind sharing the credit because he looked at the big picture.
We want the Berlin Wall to come down.
Who do I work with?
Pope John Paul II, Lech Valencia, Vako Havel, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, and ultimately Mikhail Gorbachev.
They all ultimately brought that down.
Yes, you can give credit to my father for bringing the team together, but all of them working together were able to accomplish much.
Yeah.
Although, I mean, it bothers me when I hear people crediting Gorbachev, who would have happily kept the Soviet Union going if he could have done it.
He just couldn't.
Well, what was that first meeting my dad had with Gorbachev?
He said, listen, you can go along with what I want you to do, or we can just bankrupt you.
And so what he did was just bankrupt him.
Right.
You know, when I look back at Ronald Reagan, I mean, we are now getting some really wonderful conservative policies accomplished.
But the personality of the White House today and the personality of the White House back then, very, very different.
Reagan always was acknowledged for his good humor, his kind of elegant way of, I mean, he was very harsh with the Democrats, but he did it in a very elegant, general way.
What is your reaction to seeing Donald Trump?
I mean, let's talk about both policy and personality.
How do you react to that?
Policies are fine.
Personality sucks.
Okay.
It's really, I have an op-ed piece that I'm writing.
And basically the op-ed piece is about Donald Trump, that if he allows his personality to take over his accomplishments, he will lose.
And so you have people out there who really dislike him personally.
And my fear is that that will overshadow the accomplishments that he has on the board with the tax cuts and all the positive things that are going on with unemployment and what have you across the United States of America.
My father, as I said in a tweet at Reagan World the other day, I said, my father never reacted to the negative press that was coming his direction, ever.
Which was just as intense.
But he ended up winning the Cold War because he didn't react to the press.
He didn't have the thin skin that this president seems to have about anything and everything.
I'll tell you, on Monday of inaugural week, I called president-elect, left a message with his office.
I said, congratulations.
I want to welcome from the 40th First Family.
I'd like to welcome the new 45th First Family to the ballroom.
And I said, it's going to be a week.
You will never have another one like it.
It's going to be your day.
Enjoy it and what have you.
Give that message to the president, president-elect.
And that's where I left it.
Three hours later, my phone rings.
I look at my phone and it's Trump.
I go, I better take the call.
So I take the call.
Now, what do you think the first thing Donald Trump says to me?
I'm afraid to ask.
He says, you know, you didn't support me in the primaries.
I'm thinking to myself, really?
I called to say, congratulations, enjoy this week.
And you come back and say, you know, you didn't support me in the primaries, but that's him.
And then he said, you know, I didn't know your dad, but I liked your dad.
Because I liked your dad, I liked you.
And we need to have a Ronald Reagan day at the White House.
I said, great, we'll have a Trump day at the Reagan Ranch, if you will.
And we talked about that and congratulations and so on and so forth and hung up.
But the first thing he says to me, remind me, I told him, I said, I had 16 other choices.
I said, but I did support you when you won the at the convention.
He said, that's right, you did.
He keeps track of every human being on the planet.
Sure.
He does.
Sure.
You know, I've heard...
Hey, Bob, you didn't vote for me.
I've heard the theory that after your father got elected, the press, not in a conspiracy sense, but just in an emotional sense, decided that things had gotten away from them and they never wanted this to happen again.
And if you chart the bias of the press, which today is almost absurd, I mean, the bias, the left-wing bias of the press is now beyond anything I've ever seen.
And it was always biased to the left, but now it's just.
Do you think that maybe there is a reason why it took a Donald Trump to get elected, that maybe someone as elegant and soft-spoken as your father would have been up against a worse?
But remember, Ronald Reagan was not a politician either.
He's a citizen politician, but he wasn't a politician.
So it's the angst against politicians getting absolutely nothing done, if you will, that you have the angst.
And so it's to see a fresh face, if you will.
And the fact that, let's be honest, Donald Trump was lucky.
He was running against Hillary Clinton.
I mean, I don't even think Bill voted for Hillary Clinton.
So come on.
I mean, it was the luckiest talk about draw poker.
You go, oh boy, I got an ace on this one.
I'm running against Hillary.
And so it was kind of a weird election in that way.
But there's a lot of media out there today, left and right.
And I will tell you, my father got together with Tip O'Neill at the White House.
I don't think you do that today.
I don't think a Republican can invite like a Tip O'Neill to the White House and put together a package of many sorts and not catch hell from everybody.
And I also, I say this, I think today Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting nominated by the Republican Party.
And I think John F. Kennedy would be a hard time getting nominated by the Democrat Party.
Kennedy would be too conservative.
Reagan would be too liberal.
You think Reagan would be too liberal for today's Republican?
Yeah, I think he would be too liberal.
Well, I go back because what happens today, what you did in the past, no matter what you did later, is held against you in the court of public opinion.
Governor raised taxes.
Governor signed an abortion bill.
Now, he gave the money back after he got more money in the coffers in California, but you never hear that side of it.
And he went back and said, I've changed my mind on abortion.
But again, he did sign an abortion bill.
He also, back in 1986, gave you Simpson Mazzoli.
So how would Ronald Reagan do today within the Republican Party?
And I think it'd be very tough for him.
I think if he got through the process, he'd win, but it's hard to get through the process anymore, as it would be for John F. Kennedy.
Pro-tax cuts, pro-business, pro-military.
That guy would never see the light of day in the Democrats.
His speeches sound like a Republican speech.
When you go back and look at Kennedy's speeches, they sound like a Republican.
Yeah.
But Ronald Reagan go back and listen to his speeches when he was a Democrat.
He was a conservative Democrat.
He just changed over to become a conservative Republican.
He was still the conservative.
When you look, if you could chart an imaginary course for the country for the next 10 years, say, and everything goes right, what would you like to see happen?
What I would like to see happen, what I'd like to see happen is I'd like to see an immigration bill.
Yeah.
Before anything else, I'd like to see an immigration bill because until that's solved, you're going to have problems in the United States or America.
You're just going to have problems, truly, in the United States of America.
I would like to see education taken away from Washington, just like my dad tried to, but couldn't when he was elected.
I think the educational system in America is creating socialists, not conservatives.
That's why Young America's Foundation, who I speak for and do things for, and we'll be doing in a couple of weeks again, is so important on the conservative side of the equation.
The education system, if we don't fix the education system, we're not going to fix America.
Just not going to happen.
And we've got to come to realize, why is Chicago like Chicago?
Why are there so many killings?
Because back in the 1960s, I said to Don Lemon one night on CNN, I said, the problem you guys have is you think the history of the country started this morning when you got out of bed.
It's totally true.
I said, you go back to the 60s.
What did we do in the 60s?
We told husbands, if you want your wife, who just gave birth to your baby, to get welfare, you have to get out of the house.
So we chased the husbands out of the house.
Babies were born with no fathers in the home, right?
What is a gang?
It's a family.
If you destroy the family on that side, they're going to find a family on that side.
And the family becomes the Crips, the Bloods, MS-13, whatever the family is.
But we refuse to look at the past to learn from it.
We keep on putting band-aids on this side of it, and it never gets any better.
And that's really sad.
So that brings us back to where we started.
You're setting up the walk of victory so people understand what World War II is.
You set up something at Checkpoint Charlie so people understand.
What are you trying to teach people with these things?
What do you want them to learn?
What I want them to learn is what the history of this country really is.
Why they speak English, not German.
Right.
Okay?
Who these people were.
You know, these people that flew in and parachuted into that area of the world into France back on D-Day, what they were trying to accomplish.
17, 18-year-old kids were doing this and they ended up saving the world.
And we're not teaching this in school.
We don't teach it in school.
We don't teach what they did at all.
We don't lift up America.
One thing that upset my father more than anything else, we used to talk about this.
When Americans went overseas and pointed fingers back at America and blamed us for anything, he said, no one should blame America for anything.
If it wasn't for America, where would the world be?
And we need more leaders like this that quit, you know, quit blaming America, but lifting up America.
Dad talked about the shining city on a hill.
We need to be talking about that shining city on the hill.
And why it's a shining city and start looking at the good side of America.
What's it say on his gravesite?
In all men there is good.
Ronald Reagan looked for the good in all men.
We're not looking for the good today because we don't get ratings looking for good.
We get ratings looking for bad.
We started looking for good.
We want to talk about Ronald Reagan and lift up Ronald Reagan to start looking for the good.
Michael Reagan, thank you very much for coming on.
Why We Lost the Good Stuff00:03:59
I appreciate it.
Good to be with you.
Clearly, Michael not listening, getting the word from Andrew Cuomo that America's no good.
I don't know how that communications broke down.
All right, stuff I like.
From movies that are so obscure to various bits of literature.
He likes his heroes to be tough.
Actual cannibals shine above.
Jamiro talks about stuff he hates.
Knowles has glasses made of dinner plates.
If you don't approve, let me take a hike.
Announcing His Majesty's stuff I like.
Chris Hines.
Good guitar.
Nice riff.
All right.
One of the things that always bugs me is that there's so much new stuff coming out, and I appreciate that, especially on TV.
It really is still, maybe not still the golden age of TV, but it's still a silver age of TV.
But nobody goes back to the old stuff.
I always used to notice this in movie places when they used to have, remember when they used to have video stores before everything streamed?
You would go in and like blockbusters with walls and walls and walls of movies that were released two months ago and then one little section of what they would call classics.
And you think like, yeah, the movie industry has been here.
It was really at its peak in 1939.
People should watch this stuff.
It holds up.
It's not like it's dated or anything like that.
And TV is a little different because TV really was bad.
TV really was bad until it started to be good.
And it started to be good right around the 80s, I would say.
1980s was when some of this good stuff started.
But I remember I was writing in the 90s these mysteries and crime stories with very troubled characters, guys who weren't typical good guys, guys who were kind of anti-heroes.
And I got a lot of flack for it.
And then one day I remember I was watching The Shield, the first episode of The Shield, and I said to my wife, you know, it's all going to be on TV now.
All the stuff that they yelled at me for doing, they're going to be doing on TV.
And that's what happened.
But if you go back into the 90s, if you haven't seen it, you should watch NYPD Blue.
It holds up brilliantly today.
It is by two of the absolute pioneers of the golden age of TV.
Stephen Bochko, who in the 80s put on Hill Street Blues, which was a jaw-dropping, a jaw-dropping police show when it first came on and you saw the cops kind of portrayed as real people doing real things.
You just went like, whoa, this is totally new, totally new structure of storytelling.
And then he went on and joined up with David Milch, who went on to do Deadwood.
So these are two of the giants of the TV revolution, and they created the show NY Blue.
It started out with these two actors, Dennis Franz and David Caruso.
And after the first season, Caruso, who was kind of legendarily tough to work with, quit in the middle of the second season because he wasn't getting the contract that he wanted.
And he thought, well, I'm a star now.
I'm just going to go off.
And he went off and did movies and they bombed.
And suddenly he was, you know, not only humiliated, he actually kind of got the point.
He came back and he said, you know what?
I was kind of a jerk and I should have treasured what I had.
And he wound up on CSI Miami and created a character there.
But he never, ever hit his peak as he did in NYPD Blue.
His performance as Detective Kelly is just unbelievable.
And the structure of it, you could see as I'm watching the first episode, and I saw it a couple of times when it was on, but I never really watched it.
And I've just gone back to watch it from the beginning.
I watched the first episode and I thought, man, the plotting in this is just perfect.
The acting is great.
They really are.
And Dennis Franz turns in a performance.
He became the star of the show.
This kind of not incredibly handsome, overweight guy who played a cop like we had just not seen on television before.
A good guy cop who was a little bit racist.
He was a little bit prejudiced against people.
And he would go in and treat a bad guy, not so much by the book.
So here's a scene of Dennis Franz, you know, just going in and talking to a wife, having a conversation with a wife beater.
Detective Kelly's Rise00:02:25
Tell me what's going on here.
Yeah.
You're going to central booking to get processed for beating your wife.
Is she pressing charges?
Oh, she sure is.
Okay, now we got to get an attorney up.
You like smacking people around, Frank?
No.
You sure like smacking your wife around.
There's a lot more to it.
No!
Stop!
Don't you try smacking me around, Frank.
Guard!
He left.
Come on, hit me, Frank.
Stop!
Or do you only like hitting women?
Did you leave me alone?
All right, here's what's going to happen, Frank.
You're going in the system.
And when you get out, whether it's a week or a month from now, I'm going to be there waiting for you.
And then I'm going to drive you over to a bus station and I'm going to buy you a cup of coffee and a candy.
And you're going to get on that bus and you're never going to set foot around here again.
Because if you do, I will put you in the hospital.
You got it.
Yeah.
That's just great, tough guy stuff.
And Franz is great.
He used to live in Santa Barbara and I'd see him all the time.
And of course, he's a perfectly nice gentleman.
But on the show, he plays this guy.
And it is a terrific show.
NYPD Blue, if you haven't seen it, go and take a look.
Also, before we say goodbye, we've got to say goodbye to Aretha Franklin, one of the truly, truly great voices.
We'll close with a little stuff from her.
She died at 76.
And another thing is they always play her later stuff.
And she was great through most of her career, but her early stuff, when you hear her voice, it was just like a voice of an angel.
Really beautiful stuff.
All right, we got to say goodbye.
The Clavenless Weekend is here.
Do what you can.
And survivors gather here on Monday.
I'll see you then.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Claven Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.