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March 29, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:31
Jeff Deist - "Trumpism and the Old Right"

Former US Rep Ron Paul Chief of Staff Jeff Deist takes a look at how the "Old Right" is making a comeback and what we can do to help it triumph.

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Time Text
The Left on Heels 00:15:07
Our next speaker, great friend of the Ron Paul Institute, longtime friend, and just a great friend in general.
He's the former chief of staff for Dr. Paul when Dr. Paul was in Congress, former president of the Mises Institute, where he did a stellar job, in my opinion.
He left the place in great shape.
And he currently works for monetary metals as their general counsel.
Monetary metals, you can save, earn, and finance the production of gold.
So he's also a gold guy.
Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Deist.
Thank you, Chris.
You know, as with so many other things, we overthink Trump.
We overthink Trumpism.
And we do so, I think, at our own peril, at the peril of paralysis, when we ought to be optimistic.
I really think that the glass is half full.
You know, we needed, let's say, humility.
We needed Calvin Coolidge.
We got grandiosity.
We got sort of this Ursatz, Teddy Roosevelt, a little taller.
But nonetheless, I would say we did not get John McCain, as much as Tom tells us that every politician is that.
And I think it's very important that we understand that what's happening and what has been happening over the past 10 years is positive and it's beneficial and that we be optimistic about this.
Because in my view, it's really not about Trump or his politics per se or his policies, you want to use that term, or his personnel.
Trump the man, well, okay, he is what he is.
His virtues, his foibles, his faults are his own.
We all sort of understand that, but he's not wired for ideology.
It's just not part of his DNA.
And he's certainly not a leftist by orientation.
He's not a blank slate egalitarian type.
His instincts, his impulses are often good, and we ought to reward that and steer him in that direction.
You know, people talk about a president's policies.
Well, we're supposed to have this Congress thing that sets policies, but it's done nothing but shrink for the past hundred years.
So Trump doesn't have policies.
He shoots from the hip.
He's an ad hoc guy.
You know, if you read Bob Woodward's book, Fear, you'll find out that as far as his personnel, well, Trump runs a pretty chaotic White House.
He loves palace intrigue.
He loves to pit people against people and have these factions.
He loves to be informed to these sort of unofficial back channels with Jared and Ivanka and that sort of thing.
And generally, he's highly susceptible to flattery.
And according to Bob Woodward, he often changes his mind at the last minute based on the last person to advise him or catch his ear on a particular matter.
So we think, well, that's not so good.
But so be it.
The most important thing to understand about Trump is very, very simple.
He doesn't hate our guts.
Okay, and that really is something.
That may sound silly, but if we think about the Bushes and the Gores and the Clintons and the Obamas and the Careys and the Bidens and the Cheneys, these people really do hate our guts.
They actively work to make our lives worse.
Trump's not one of them.
He doesn't come from the political class.
He doesn't reflexively hate bourgeois America.
He doesn't reflexively hate middle America.
And in this hyper-politicized world of ours, that means more than we might imagine it means.
But here's the thing: neither Trump the man nor the broader phenomenon, call it mega, call it the new right, call it whatever you want.
That's not really the story of the last 10 years.
And I include Brexit broadly within this revolution, let's say we're in the midst of.
The real story is us.
And what I mean by that is this great pushback that we've been experiencing that we never thought we would, maybe as Ron Paul fans back in 2008.
This great pushback, this discovery that twice, not once, but twice, 80 million Americans were willing to go off script and vote for this man instead of voting for Hillary Clinton, who was just the inevitable first female president.
You know, this progressive arc to history, all that, you know, Francis Fukuyama, the end of history.
80 million Americans said, no, no, thanks.
And they did it twice.
If we can't be optimistic about that, I'm not so sure what we can be optimistic about.
These two parties, these two wretched political parties of ours, were rendered impotent, even irrelevant.
Trump went direct to the people through his own digital platforms, through podcasts the second time around, a million digital platforms.
The political class was absolutely rejected.
And the world they were building for us, Hillary Clinton's world, that's an authoritarian, an illiberal hellscape.
It had to be stopped.
And if Trump's the agent, so be it.
We would have preferred Ron.
So be it.
And this hellscape that they were planning for us, that's the very thing that they project onto Trump, isn't it?
He's not authoritarian.
Did he create Medicare Part D?
Did he create Homeland Security?
Please.
This repudiation, this willingness of so many Americans to say no to that, that's the story, folks.
That's the opportunity.
Okay?
So now, all of us in this room, we face a question: can Trump and Trumpism be turned into a force for good in this battle we're in?
Can they be steered towards their best impulses and away from their worst?
Well, I think perhaps they can, but it's going to take a lot of effort from people like us to capture or at least steer what we can call the new right.
And the best way to do that, thankfully, is a blueprint that's already given to us.
It's the best and truest traditions and impulses of what we all know as the old right.
The 1900 to let's say roughly 1950 U.S. American right, which is a very unique phenomenon in world history.
So I know what a lot of you might be thinking: well, why this focus on the right, Jeff?
You know, why talk about prospects for the right wing?
Well, which, let's be fair, has been pretty useless for decades when it wasn't actively harmful.
Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, et cetera.
Well, the simple answer is that it's the only game in town, folks.
In my strong opinion, the left is just too far gone.
It's too far removed from reality.
It's too captured by its factions.
We see this happening right in front of us right now.
I just think progressivism is rooted in unreality.
It's rooted in a denial of human nature.
And in my opinion, I think most of us in this room would agree, that's just per se evil.
And so it can't be dealt with.
It just has to be vanquished.
Progressivism, it's egalitarianism, it's a death cult.
And it only goes in one direction and it only ends up in one place.
So good luck trying to capture that.
And the truth of the matter is, you may not be interested in left and right, but left and right is interested in you.
And that's a fact, Jack.
And if you're not a blank slate egalitarian, they're always going to call you and everybody else in this room a right-winger.
Fine, I'm a right-winger.
Now, none of this means that the left is vanquished.
Don't get me wrong.
On the contrary, they might come roaring back.
I mean, if the economy tanks, as soon as the midterms, these people just regroup, right?
There's going to be a strong reaction to Trumpism.
But even there, this reaction, that's one of the big lessons that I think a lot of us are missing.
For the first time in our lifetimes, I'm in my 50s.
For the first time in our lifetimes, the left is the reactionaries.
Isn't that absolutely beautiful?
They're reduced to being against Trump.
That's all they've got, instead of for something.
And some of you might remember the late Dr. Gary North.
Gary North always told us, he says, you know, here's the thing: you can't beat something with nothing.
And the Democrats are nothing.
And Trump managed to flip the script.
He managed to turn the Democrats into the opposition party, which the Republicans have been, like the team that plays the Harlem Globetrotters, you know, that's been the Republicans for what?
50 years at least, half a century.
So now the left is on its heels.
The left actually has to explain itself, right?
And they're constantly beaten down by this relentless mastery of Trump in the news cycle.
He has this amazing ability to always frame the debate and come up with something new.
You know, one day they're worried about this.
The next day he says, well, we're going to buy Greenland.
And they just can't deal with it.
It's absolutely astonishing.
And putting them on their heels, they've enjoyed the advantage of being the aggressors for so long that they're absolutely bewildered and enraged.
They're psychologically unhinged.
And it started with Hillary Clinton's defeat, which was a psychological wound to millions of Americans.
Don't dismiss that.
So I say seize this day.
Let's focus our efforts on where they might bear fruit.
I mean, yes, the right may be stupid and disorganized, but somehow what Trump has managed to do is bring a spark to this without any ground game, without any of this political apparatus.
He didn't even have the precincts back in 2016.
They were actively, his own party was actively working against him.
So we could have Jeb or someone.
Okay?
And he won.
He won.
So there's big lessons here.
The new right, our right, is up for grabs, folks.
America really is at a tipping point in terms of its political alignment.
Americans, God bless them, they are war-weary.
They're alarmed by mass immigration, and they are deeply worried about inflation and housing costs and their economic fortunes and health care.
Okay, young people, my goodness, they feel absolutely locked out of family formation and home buying.
They're not even dating each other.
So this whole America first thing, yeah, okay, it sounds jingoistic, it sounds nationalistic to some ears.
But these domestic concerns that I just mentioned, they're the reason Trump won.
Domestic concerns.
Let's not forget this.
Trump didn't win because Americans care about Ukraine.
The Ukraine.
Nobody could find Ukraine on a map in America.
They don't even know whether Massachusetts is a state or a foreign country.
Okay?
So we have before us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, maybe a once-in-a-century opportunity to remake the American right in keeping with the best impulses and traditions of the old right.
Peace and non-interventionism instead of these undeclared endless wars and nation building.
Sound money instead of infinite central banking.
Accountability, frugality, and humility instead of big government grandiosity.
Main Street instead of Wall Street.
But this is a difficult task.
We shouldn't delude ourselves.
We have a very limited window of time in this Trump 2.0 because the new right, which has emerged in the last 10 years alongside Trump, podcasters, etc., let's face it, it's a very mixed bag.
There's a lot of grifters and opportunists and bad actors.
And some of these people found their way into his cabinet, by the way.
Not to mention, of course, apart from the new right, these long-standing Beltway constituencies, which are not just going to go quietly.
We all know they're working overtime to co-opt Trump.
The Israel firsters, the defense contractors, etc.
But for a brief and shining moment, right now, the momentum is with us, and we ought to take it as far as we can.
So when we're talking about the new right, we have to understand the old right.
What do I mean by the old right?
How can it inform us today?
How can it be relevant today?
Well, the critical task in remaking the right is to guard against, to understand, to recognize these errors of the past, where the right went so badly wrong in, let's say, the second half of the 20th century under the very, very dubious auspices of, let's say, Buckleyism, which inevitably led to neoconservatism.
There's a lot of people in this room old enough to have actually been Cold War skeptics to not buy into that.
And really, any American born between, let's say, the end of World War II and the 80s, maybe even into the 90s, grew up being told and believing, you know, the Soviet Union is this existential threat, the Soviet bear.
And we have to have this domino theory with respect to our foreign policy.
We have to contain communism, Soviet communism, you know, because it's a threat to our entire way of life.
And if we don't contain it, we're going to end up like Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia.
And the American public, unfortunately, good people that they are, they bought into this.
And the American right wing in particular lost its mind during the Cold War.
They rejected the true conservatism of the old right in favor of this buckleyite new right, which soon morphed into something very, very grotesque and foreign, actually alien to the best American traditions, namely neoconservatism.
And it's still with us today in the form of David Frum and Bill Kristol and these other people who are happy to trot on over to the Democratic Party where they belong.
So fast forward to the 90s, unfortunately, it turns out that us Cold War skeptics were right.
The Cold War was totally unnecessary.
It was fought against a hapless foe, almost a phantom.
The Soviet economy was an absolute basket case by the middle 80s.
Its people were starving.
Paul Samuelson said famously that the Soviet economy would outgrow America's by the 1990s.
What a farce.
Their vaunted nuclear arsenal, it was rotting in silos due to neglect and age.
The Soviet military was low-tech.
They had terrible tanks.
They were dependent on sheer numbers to fight an old-fashioned land war, outdated technologically utterly by American artillery, tanks, jets, naval fleet.
It was all unnecessary.
It was all a ruse.
It was all a lie.
But the cost of winning this Cold War, which Reagan claimed, was very, very high because it made America far too comfortable with trillions spent on welfare at home to appease the neoconservatives who didn't care a whit about that.
But we were absolutely hemorrhaging money to support this growing empire abroad, an enormous standing military, which we heard about.
750 military bases in 80 countries, an entrenched permanent deep state bureaucracy, DOD, CIA, NSA, State Department, Apparatches who answered to nobody, and perhaps worst of all, a gigantic growth industry of defense contractors in America, permanent, who now gross about $900 billion in annual revenue.
Striking Legacy Root and Branch 00:03:57
There's your private sector defense contractors.
We essentially remade America and ruined the American right to fight a phantom that in hindsight posed no threat to our security or way of life.
It was a colossal error and a colossal waste of what could have come out of World War II and those two terrible European wars.
So all of this Cold War anti-communism hysteria was of course especially disastrous for the right.
We abandoned all of our impulses, the heart and soul of conservatism, because the commies made us do it.
And the right paid a heavy price for this politically.
They might as well have been AWOL from 1950 all the way to 2015 and Trump, considering how progressive steamrolled them and us in those 60-odd years.
And that's a long time in the wilderness, folks.
So how do we come back from that?
How do we revive the right?
Well, I mean, miraculously, almost out of nowhere, just so sudden, it's bewildering.
You know, we have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Things that were unthinkable that nobody even talked about 10 years ago are suddenly not so unthinkable.
Conversations about cutting spending drastically, closing the Department of Education, getting out of NATO.
These are the kind of things Ron was saying in the 90s and 2000s, and people kind of chuckled and rolled their eyes a little bit at him.
But a worthy and effective new right, by the way, has to adopt this worldview of the old right and apply the lessons of it.
We have to introduce these younger generations to these thinkers, right?
We have to bring them the wisdom, the greatness of Mencken.
We have to let them know about Calvin Coolidge, Albert J. Knott, Garrett Garrett, Robert Taft, Mel Bradford, Sam Francis, Joe Sobrin, Murray Rothbard, Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, Ron Paul.
We have to bring this legacy forward.
And there are vehicles, there are instruments, there are agents for this, people like Tucker Carlson, people like Colonel Douglas McGregor, people like David Stockman.
The new right still exists.
It still has a pulse.
And at the same time, we have to convince them to reject this legacy, this terrible bequest that they have of the Bushes and the Reagan's and the Buckleys and the National Reviews and the Leo Strauss's and Bill Crystals who so badly distorted American conservatism over the past 70 years.
We have to strike them out root and branch.
And we have to read the room, right?
What we're talking about is popular.
Americans are tired of foreign conflicts.
They're ready to turn homeward.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
So this new coalition that I propose, a new new right based on the old right, it's different.
It's built different.
It kicks out the three legs from under Reagan's stool that we've probably all heard about growing up and replaces them with three new ones, which of course are not new at all.
Plank one, peace and non-interventionism.
Absolute necessity.
Plank two, sound money and populist economics.
Good economics is also popular economics, if presented properly.
Plank three, the toughest one.
We all have to swallow hard, and we have to reject this post-war liberal consensus with America as hegemon.
It's absolutely necessary to the first two planks.
We have to get over ourselves.
More silent cow, less Teddy Roosevelt.
So as for peace, Planck one, you know, we only have to remember back to last summer, these Trump rallies, he got huge applause for talking about ending the war in Ukraine.
You know, and despite the best efforts of our political class, Americans just aren't buying that Putin's invasion of Ukraine threatens Europe and it's a European conflict.
They're not buying it.
Kir Starmer, he's not Church Hill.
Tariffs and the Dollar's Future 00:05:38
Russia's facing demographic collapse.
It will almost surely lose territory over the next 50 to 100 years across 11 time zones rather than gain territory.
Putin's not going to resuscitate the Warsaw Pact.
He's not going to roll tanks into Hungary and Poland.
This is absolute fantasy.
Ukraine's a regional conflict and it doesn't involve us.
Americans already spent $8 trillion grinding our gears and killing a lot of people in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
And this tempers American people's support for these indefinite meat grinders today in Ukraine, for example.
And Trump, to his credit, he appears to have a deal mindset rather than a warhawk mindset when it comes to China, Iran, Gaza as well.
He has his foibles.
He's imperfect here, certainly.
But we have to push this hard with the American public because that's what they want.
And we have to loudly decry his bad cabinet pits like Marco.
Now, as for Plank 2, sound money, this is the perfect populist issue in a time when people have real inflation pain.
I mean, Americans may not understand the Fed.
They may not understand sort of the circularity of how debt is monetized, et cetera, but they know their paychecks and savings are declining when measured in real stuff.
I don't want to hear about GDP.
I don't want to hear about other currencies.
People know that stuff costs more.
And you go to the grocery and stuff is smaller.
I don't know if you've seen a Hershey bar lately, the traditional Hershey bar I knew as a kid, it's thinner.
You pick it up and it's thinner.
That's how they keep the price the same.
It's really pretty amazing.
And so this financialization of the economy, which sort of the Cato free marketers, they roll their eyes, oh, Jeff, there's no such thing.
No, there is.
There is such thing as the financialization of the economy.
What I mean by this is the distortion of the capital structure of firms in favor of debt over equity, MA over organic growth, instead of focusing on stock buybacks and short-term juicing of earnings to satisfy the next quarter, instead of focusing on the real things like capex and shareholder dividends.
This financialization, it's a real phenomenon, and it favors Wall Street over Main Street, and the American people feel it, and they know it.
Fiscal, monetary, tax policy, they all encourage this.
Debt payments are deductible.
Dividends aren't, for example.
We've got to get back to dividends.
We've got to get back to real companies.
We should press Trump's populist buttons to consider a greater role for gold in the U.S. financial system with some measure of convertibility, perhaps along the lines of what Judy Shelton is recommending in terms of a redeemable gold bond.
And while revaluation of the Treasury gold at today's gold price, it won't solve the debt crisis.
It would create maybe $700 billion of new Treasury credits over at the Fed and money for the Treasury to spend, although we don't want them to do that.
But it would, more importantly, send a message that the largest holder of gold on the planet still intends to view gold as a monetary asset.
It's time to stop using the dollar as a weapon, right, to export our inflation and boss the rest of the world around and make Americans feel unnaturally wealthy.
A populist economic program has absolutely got to be part of Trump's plank.
And I think it is.
You know, these tariffs he proposes, okay, they're not the worst idea.
They're better than income taxes if we had to choose.
Even Mises conceded that tariffs might be justified to match the rate of domestic sales taxes on imported consumption goods, for example, and as a retaliatory measure against specific countries.
So Trump doesn't understand, of course, that making input goods more expensive from abroad is actually going to make U.S. firms less productive, less competitive.
And many of these firms might simply say, hey, we'll wait it out four years and Trump will be gone and maybe these tariffs will be gone.
We all understand in this room that these tariffs, if they hold, are going to backfire in a lot of different ways on Trump.
But at least his basic approach is intended to help the little guy.
Let's at least give him that.
In his view and maybe the view of his new Treasury Secretary, if it's this thought out, who is a brilliant man, by the way, it's at least like, hey, look, these tariffs will cause some instability.
We need to crash the juiced stock market a little bit, maybe 20%.
That's going to move more cash into treasuries.
That's going to lower interest rates on treasuries and everything else, and that's going to force companies, especially agriculture producers, to sell more products in the U.S. at a lower cost.
And after all, when we talk about the stock market, you know, 8% of Americans own 90-something percent of those equities.
So it really is kind of a Wall Street phenomenon rather than a mainstream phenomenon.
And Trump's trying.
He's trying to do something populist, but he just needs better people around him.
We need to catch his ear on this.
So finally, this third plank, disabusing America of its identity as a post-war hegemon, is again necessary to advance the first two because it costs a hell of a lot of money to be the unipolar boss of everybody.
But what I'm talking about is a fundamental shift in the perception of average Americans towards a worldview that everybody knew was true, but in fact, it was deeply false.
And we're finding out through USAID and other things how false it was, how artificial it was.
Disabusing America 00:05:46
The heralded post-war consensus.
Right?
We all grew up hearing this in the aftermath of World War II.
There's got to be a new reality.
We have to have universal liberal democracy.
We have to have this international rules-based order always centered around America as boss, of course, as the moral avatar.
We have to have this NATO alliance to surround the Soviets.
We need to have this vast American military as the global police.
And most importantly, perhaps, we need a fiat U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.
This is how we order the world.
No more nationalism, no more strong gods, as R.R. Reno talks about in his book.
You know, no more Auschwitzes.
We have to turn to something new.
You ever notice nobody ever says no more Holodomors or no more Hiroshimas?
There's always no more Auschwitzes.
You know, the West, it's just an idea, Jeff.
It's replicable anywhere.
But yet we need lots of mass immigration, you know, south to north, east to west.
And all of this progressive arc, this post-war consensus, it's all going to culminate really beautifully in the end of history.
I would like to see the end of Francis Fukuyama's sinecure salary.
That's what I would like to see the end of.
I think I might get that sooner than I'll get the end of history.
That guy, he just never goes away.
Talk about not being subject to market forces.
Enter the nonprofit NGO world, folks.
I recommend it.
But he ludicrously termed this idea the end of history.
And this is all going to bring forth, you know, Karl Popper's open society.
It's going to be pluralistic and democratic.
And we have to worry more about meaning in our lives than any sort of objective or, God forbid, transcendent or religious truth, right?
But now, in 2025, in the cold, hard light of day, we see that it was all fake and gay, as the kids like to say.
It was all fake and gay.
It was an elite-driven narrative.
It was a manufactured set of beliefs.
They were never popular, and they were virtually always rejected across the West when voters were given an opportunity to reject them at the ballot box.
It was forced on the American public by government and politicians, by global elites and moneyed interests.
It was filtered relentlessly through these media creeps, through public schools, until we all just assumed it was conventional wisdom.
But the conventional wisdom was wrong.
This end of the Soviet Union didn't bring us the end of history.
There was no peace dividend, and in fact, no peace.
U.S. hegemony and interventionism has hollowed us out.
It's bankrupted us.
And the mighty fiat U.S. dollar has turned us into a nation of zombie spendthrifts who just fill their houses and garages and closets with more stuff.
It was all fake.
So let me end with this, because there's apparently caffeinated beverages available in the back.
It was all fake and gay, but the Ron Paul Institute, by contrast, is not fake, and it does not have sinecures and grants and billionaires finding sneaky ways to funnel money into it.
It has a Liberty Report.
It has Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams, both of whom have more integrity in their little pinky fingers than every NGO ever funded by USAID.
So please support them as much as you can.
These three planks of an effective new right, it's up to us.
It's up to people in this room.
We can't wait on others.
It's too late for that.
It's going to take pain and it's going to take sacrifice to get there.
It can't be done from the sidelines.
And I stress more than anything, this is a pragmatic populist program, not an ideological one.
Garrett's lesson from 1938 is just as applicable today.
The revolution already was.
It's in the rearview mirror, folks.
We can't wish our way into some intellectual, heavy reading American society any more than we can wish our way into Francis Fukuyama land.
After all, folks, we all spent years and years and decades in these ideological cul-de-sacs, didn't we?
We built this perfect system, our own highly developed ideology, which God knows we debated and perfected, you know, everything from Mises' classical liberalism to Rothbardian anarchism to a hoppy and private law society.
We all had this grandiose ideological visit, vision.
But in our own way, who did we mimic in this?
We mimicked those grandiose ideological neoconservatives.
I hate to say it.
There's that famous scene in Godfather where Michael Corleone is walking with Kay Adams, the quiet New England girl who's shacking up with this Italian boy.
And Kay says to Michael, she says, Michael, do you know how naive you sound?
Senators and presidents don't have men killed.
And of course, Michael Corleone turns to her.
He's like, who's being naive?
No, Kay.
Well, it turns out we were the naive ones.
We were.
We have to turn away from the old modes and methods and embrace the digital era, the direct-to-consumer, no-middleman approach, which Trump has perfected.
We need a pragmatic, pugilistic approach.
It's not 1985 anymore, folks.
This isn't C-SPAN.
It's Mencken time, not Brian Lamb.
Liberty is not an ideology.
It's what happens when you leave people alone.
It's pragmatism and common law and organizing society in concert with human nature rather than blank slate fantasy.
This is the old right encapsulated, and it's the best, brightest hope for our future.
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