Lex Fridman Podcast
#454 – Saagar Enjeti: Trump, MAGA, DOGE, Obama, FDR, JFK, History & Politics
Sun, 08 Dec 2024
Saagar Enjeti is a political journalist & commentator, co-host of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar and The Realignment Podcast. He is exceptionally well-read, and the books he recommends are always fascinating and eye-opening. You can check out all the books he mentions in this episode here: https://lexfridman.com/saagar-books Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep454-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/saagar-enjeti-2-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Saagar's Book Recommendations: https://lexfridman.com/saagar-books Saagar's Substack (where he recommends more books): https://saagarenjeti.substack.com/ Saagar's X: https://x.com/esaagar Saagar's Instagram: https://instagram.com/esaagar Breaking Points: https://youtube.com/@breakingpoints The Realignment Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@therealignment Saagar's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/esaagar SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Eight Sleep: Temp-controlled smart mattress cover. Go to https://eightsleep.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (09:47) - Why Trump won (14:48) - Book recommendations (18:24) - History of wokeism (25:54) - History of Scots-Irish (32:32) - Biden (36:34) - FDR (38:36) - George W Bush (40:59) - LBJ (46:15) - Cuban Missile Crisis (53:48) - Immigration (1:25:46) - DOGE (1:52:27) - MAGA ideology (1:55:39) - Bernie Sanders (2:04:00) - Obama vs Trump (2:21:00) - Nancy Pelosi (2:24:14) - Kamala Harris (2:40:00) - 2020 Election (3:03:49) - Sam Harris (3:14:55) - UFOs (3:20:47) - Future of the Republican Party (3:27:24) - Future of the Democratic Party (3:35:21) - Hope
The following is a conversation with Sagar Anjati, his second time in the podcast. Sagar is a political commentator, journalist, co-host of Breaking Points with Crystal Ball and of the Realignment podcast with Marshall Kozlov. Sagar is one of the most well-read people I've ever met.
His love of history and the wisdom gained from reading thousands of history books radiates through every analysis he makes of the world. In this podcast, we trace out the history of the various ideological movements that led up to the current political moment. In doing so, we mention a large number of amazing books.
We'll put a link to them in the description for those interested to learn more about each topic. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Asleep for naps, AG1 for health, Element for hydration, BetterHelp for the mind, Shopify for the wallet, and NetSuite for your business. Choose wisely, my friends.
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for a multitude of reasons, go to lexfriedman.com contact. And now, on to the full wide reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep, and it's pod 4 ultra.
I'm going to try a new thing where I hold on to a theme as I talk about these ads. I use Asleep and the Pod 4 Ultra to cool the bed. And since Sagar knows pretty much more than anybody I've ever met about the various U.S. presidents and presidential politics and the history of politics in U.S., Let me mention a little factoid.
Did you know that the White House didn't get air conditioning until 1933 under Hoover, who funded it just before leaving office for FDR? So all that praise that Sagar gives to FDR, just remember, maybe it wouldn't be possible without the cool, fresh air that Hoover gave to the great FDR.
And that, in fact, and I'm not sure why I'm using this voice in talking, but that, in fact, is essential for sleep, controlling the temperature of the bed, controlling the temperature of the sleeping environment. There you go. The more you know. Go to asleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get up to $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled. That's asleep.com slash Lex.
This episode is brought to you by AG1. Basically a nice multivitamin that's also delicious, that I drink every day, that makes me feel like I have my life together, which I barely do. Now, speaking of drinks that you believe make you feel better, you know, placebo effect, that kind of thing. Here's a little presidential-themed factoid.
John Adams drank hard cider every morning, believing it promoted good health. I would love to get a health advice podcast with Winston Churchill. Another president, William Howard Taft, had the White House kitchen prepare special protein shakes made from eggs, milk, and beef extract. I would love the dietary details of some of the presidents.
I'm sure a bunch of them just smoked and drank and had their own little habits. that serve as a kind of escape from the madness of the world. Anyway, get AG1, and it'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix.
And here, I have to return, again, to the presidents who consumed various kinds of liquids. Did you know that Thomas Jefferson spent $11,000 on wine during his presidency? And we're not talking about quality here. We are, in fact, talking about quantity. That's equivalent to about $300,000 in today's money. Whatever works.
It's like that meme that there's a perfect optimal amount of alcohol that makes you productive in programming. I have never found that optimal. Actually, if I have a drink, my productivity and my clarity of thinking and my creativity all go down.
Now, I start enjoying the social interactions more and more because I am fundamentally an introvert that have anxiety about social interaction, so that helps. But in terms of productivity or creative juices or whatever, nope. Anyway, you can get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. And there's actually quite a lot of presidents that really struggled with anxiety, with depression, with all kinds of complicated mental states. Coolidge, for example, fell into a deep depression after his son died from blood poisoning. And that changed him forever, actually.
It's difficult to come back from that. John Quincy Adams, somewhat famously, kept extremely detailed diary for 68 years, often writing sort of a detailed analysis and almost like log of his mental states. That's an interesting thing to do, actually. I don't do that enough. I speak it. I don't write it down. Perhaps there's some magic in writing it down.
But there is, with BetterHelp, also magic in speaking it with a professional. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. So Abraham Lincoln actually owned a general store.
And he has famously written that he wished he had Shopify. It would be much more convenient. Anyway, he had a general store that failed. So, you know, sometimes you need the right job for the right man. That match to be made and everything else is not going to work out. I sold shoes, women's shoes, at Sears, kind of like Al Bundy for Married With Children, if you know the show.
And, you know, I did okay. But I think it wasn't quite the right fit for me. You know, I was quite technically savvy. I knew about computers. And I said I should probably be selling electronics and computers. And they said, yes, yes, yes. One day you will, but now we need helping shoes. So let's start you there.
And if I stayed there for many more years, perhaps I would have upgraded to electronics. But then I also saw the beauty in selling women's shoes. There was a real joy in finding the right match for the right person. And that joy can be scaled significantly with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase.
Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. Ulysses S. Grant, the famed general, kept extremely detailed expense accounts, recording every single penny he spent. Now, rigor, attention to detail, obsession with detail, financial detail, is important because
But if you have the right tool for the job, that's made easier. I would love to kind of throw some of these people, some of these leaders, some of these brilliant minds from history into the modern world that is digitized. I think a lot of them would actually be destroyed by it.
because the machine of distraction will pull them away from the focus you can more easily attain in a non-technological world. And some of them, I think, will become even more super productive, so it'll be really interesting. And there's been a lot of presidents that kind of pushed the White House and government in general into the direction of great record keeping, from George Washington,
to Carter, to FDR, as Sagar talks a lot about. Anyway, all that is in the realm of politics, but the realm of business in many ways is the same, especially when the government is working well. So NetSuite is for business. In fact, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite. Take advantage of their flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sagar and Jetty. So let's start with the obvious big question. Why do you think Trump won? Let's break it down. Before the election, you said that if Trump wins, it's going to be because of immigration. So aside from immigration, what are the maybe less than obvious reasons that Trump won?
Yes, we absolutely need to return to immigration. But without that... Multifaceted explanation. Let's start with the easiest one. There has been a wave of anti-incumbent energy around the world. Financial Times chart recently went viral showing for the first time I think since World War II, possibly since 1905.
I need to look at the data set that all anti-incumbent parties all across the world suffered major defeats. So that's a very, very high level analysis. And we can return to that if we talk about Donald Trump's victory in 2016, because there were similar global precursors. That individual level in the United States, there's a very simple explanation as well, which is that Joe Biden was very old.
He was very unpopular. Inflation was high. Inflation is one of the highest determiners of people switching their votes and putting their primacy on that ahead of any other issue at the ballot box. So that's that. But I think it's actually much deeper at a psychological level for who America is and what it is.
to Donald Trump in the popular vote, where really is like an apotheosis of several social forces. So we're going to talk about the great awakening or so-called awokening, which is very important to understanding all of this. There's also really Donald Trump himself, who is really one of the most unique individual American politicians that we've seen in decades.
At this point, Donald Trump's victory makes him the most important and transformative figure in American politics. since FDR. And thought process for the audience is in 2028, there will be an 18-year-old who's eligible to vote who cannot remember a time when Donald J. Trump was not the central American figure.
And there's stories in World War II where troops were on the front lines, some of them were 18, 19 years old, FDR died, and they literally said, well, who's the president? And they said, Harry Truman, you dumbass. And they go, who? They couldn't conceive of a universe. where FDR was not the president of the United States. And Donald Trump, even during the Biden administration, he was the figure.
Joe Biden defined his entire candidacy and his legacy around defeating this man. And obviously, he's failed. We should talk a lot about Joe Biden as well for his own failed theories of the presidency. So I think at macro level, it's easy to understand. At a basic level, inflation, it's easy to understand.
But what I really hope that a lot of people can take away is how fundamentally unique Donald Trump is as a political figure and what he was able to do to realign American politics really forever. I mean, in the white working class realignment originally of 2016.
The activation really of a multiracial kind of working class coalition and of really splitting American lines along a single individual question of did you attend a four year college degree institution or not? And this is a crazy thing to say. Donald Trump is one of the most racially depolarizing Republicans. electoral figures in American history.
We lived in 2016 at a time when racial groups really voted in blocs, Latinos, blacks, whites. There was some, of course, division between the white working class and the white college-educated, white-collar workers. But by and large, you could pretty fairly say that Asians were... Indians, everyone, 80, 90 percent were going to vote for the Democratic Party. Latinos as well.
I'm born here in Texas, in the state of Texas. George W. Bush shocked people when he won some 40 percent of the Latino vote. Donald Trump just beat Kamala Harris with Latino men and he ran up the table for young men. So really, fundamentally, we have witnessed a full realignment here. in American politics. And that's a really fundamental problem for the modern left.
It's erased a lot of the conversation around gerrymandering, around the electoral college, the so-called electoral college bias towards Republicans, really being able to win the popular vote. for the first time since 2004 is shocking and landmark achievement by a Republican. In 2008, I have a book on my shelf, and I always look at it to remind myself of how much things can change.
James Carville, and it says, 40 More Years, How Democrats Will Never Lose an Election Again. 2008, they wrote that book after the Obama coalition and the landslide. And something I love so much about this country, people change their minds all the time. I was born in 1992. I watched red states go blue. I've seen blue states go red. I've seen swing states go red or blue. I've seen...
Millions of people pick up and move the greatest internal migration in the United States since World War Two. And it's really inspiring because it's a really dynamic, interesting place. And I love covering and I love thinking about it, talking about it, talking to people. It's awesome.
One of the reasons I'm a big fan of yours is you're a student of history. And so you've recommended a bunch of books to me. And they and others thread the different movements throughout American history. Some movements take off and do hold power for a long time. Some don't. And some are started by a small number of people and are controlled by a small number of people. Some are mass movements.
And it's just fascinating to me. watch how those movements evolve and then fit themselves maybe into the constraints of a two-party system. And I'd love to sort of talk about the various perspectives of that. So would it be fair to say that this election was turned into a kind of class struggle?
Well, I won't go that far because to say it's a class struggle really implies that things fundamentally align on economic lines. And I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Although if if that's your lane lens, you could get there. So there's a very big statistic going around right now where Kamala Harris increased her vote share and won households over one hundred thousand dollars or more.
And Donald Trump won households under one hundred thousand. So you could do that in an economic way. lens. The problem, again, that I have is that that is much more a proxy for four-year college degree and for education. And so one of my favorite books is called Coming Apart by Charles Murray.
And that book really, really underscores how the cultural milieu that people swim in when they attend a four-year college degree and the trajectory of their life, not only on where they move to, who they marry, What type of grocery store they go to, their cultural, what television shows that they watch. One of my favorite questions from Charles Murray is called a bubble quiz.
I encourage people to go take it, by the way, which asks you a question. It's like, what does the word Branson mean to you? And it has a couple of answers. One of them is Branson is Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson. Number two is Branson, Missouri, which is like a country music tourist style destination. Three is it means nothing.
So you are less in a bubble if you say country music and you're very much in the bubble if you say Richard Branson. And I remember taking that test for the first time. I go, obviously, Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic. Like what? And then I was like, wait, I'm like, I'm in the bubble. And there are other things in there, like can you name various different military ranks?
I can because I'm a history nerd, but the vast majority of college educated people don't know anybody who served in the United States military. They don't have family members who do. The most popular shows in America are like the Big Bang Theory and NCIS, whereas people in our probably cultural milieu, our favorite shows are White Lotus, The Last of Us. This is prestige television, right?
With a very small audience, but high income, high education. So The point is, is that culture really defines who we are as Americans, where we live. And rural urban is one way to describe it. But honestly, with the work from home revolution and more rich people and highly educated people moving to more rural, suburban or areas they traditionally weren't able to commute in, that's changing.
And so really, the Internet is everything. The stuff that you consume on the Internet, the stuff that you spend your time doing, type of books you read, whether you read a book at all, frankly. Whether you travel to Europe, whether you have a passport, all the things that you value in your life, that is the real cultural divide in America.
And I actually think that's what this revolution of Donald Trump was activating and bringing people to the polls, bringing a lot of those traditional working class voters of all races away from the Democratic Party along the lines of elitism, of sneering, and of a general cultural feeling that these people don't understand me and my struggles in this life.
And so the trivial formulation is that it's the wokeism, the anti-wokeism movement.
Yeah.
So it's not necessarily that Trump winning was a statement against wokeism. It was the broader anti-elitism.
It's difficult to say because I wouldn't dismiss anti-wokeism or wokeism. as an explanation. But we need to understand like the electoral impacts of woke. So there's varying degrees of like how you're going to encounter, quote unquote, woke ism. And this is a very difficult thing to define.
So let me just try and break it down, which is there are the types of things that you're going to interact with on a cultural basis. And what I mean by that is going to watch a TV show. And just for some reason, there's like two trans characters And it's never like particularly explained why they just are there or watching a commercial. And it's the same thing watching. I don't know.
I remember I was watching. I think it was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And the main it was a terrible movie, by the way. Don't recommend it. But one of the characters, I think her name was like America and she wore a gay pride flag.
Look, many left-wingers would make fun of me for saying these things, but that is obviously a social agenda to the point as in they believe it is deeply acceptable that is used by Hollywood and cultural elites who really value those progress in sexual orientation and others. They really believe it's important to, quote unquote, showcase it for representation.
So that's like one way that we may encounter, quote unquote, wokeism. But the more important ways, frankly, are the ways that affirmative action, which really has its roots in American society all the way going back to the 1960s. Thank you so much for having me.
was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because it created an entire new legal regime and understanding of race in the American character and how the government was going to enforce that. And that really ties in with another one of the books that I recommended to you about the origins of Trump by Jim Webb. And Senator Jim Webb, incredible, incredible man.
He's so underappreciated, intellectual. He was anti-war. And people may remember him from The 2016 primary and they asked him, I had asked him a question I don't exactly remember about one of his enemies. And he's like, well, one of them was a guy shot in Vietnam and he was running against Hillary. And that guy, he wrote the book Born Fighting.
I think it's what's history of the Scots Irish people, something like that. And that book really opened my eyes to the way that affirmative action and racial preferences that were playing out through the HR managerial elite really turned a lot of people within the white working class away from the Democratic Party and felt fundamentally discriminated against by the professional managerial class.
And so there's a lot of roots to this, the managerial revolution by James Burnham and And in terms of the origin of kind of how we got here, but the crystallization of like DEI and or affirmative action, I prefer to use the term affirmative action in the highest echelons of business. And there became this idea that representation itself was the only thing that mattered.
And I think that right around 2014, that really went on steroids. And that's why it's not an accident that Donald J. Trump elected in 2016.
At this point, do you think this election is the kind of statement that wokeism as a movement is dead?
I don't know. I mean, it's very difficult to say because wokeism itself is not a movement with a party leader. It's a amorphous belief that has worked its way through institutions now for almost 40 or 50 years. I mean, it's effectively a religion. And part of the reason why it's difficult to find is it means different things to different people.
So, for example, there are varying degrees of how we would define, quote unquote, wokeism. Do I think that the Democrats will be speaking in so-called academic language? Yes, I do think they will. I think that the next Democratic nominee will not do that.
However, Kamala Harris actually did move as much as she could away from quote unquote woke, but she basically was punished for a lot of the sins of both herself from 2019.
But a general cultural feeling that her and the people around her do not understand me and not only do not understand me but have racial preferences or a regime or an understanding that would lead to a quote-unquote equity mindset, equal outcomes for everybody as opposed to equality of opportunity, which is more of a colorblind philosophy. So I can't say. I think it's way too early.
And, you know, again, like you can not use the word Latinx, but do you still believe in an effective affirmative action regime, you know, in terms of how you would run your Department of Justice, in terms of how you view the world, in terms of what you think the real dividing lines in America are? Because I would say that's still actually kind of a woke mindset.
And that's part of the reason why the The term itself doesn't really mean a whole lot. And we have to get actually really specific about what it looks like in operations. In operation, it means affirmative action. It means the NASDAQ passing some law that if you want to go public or something that you have to have a woman and a person of color on your board.
This is a blatant and extraordinary thing. look, racialism that they've enshrined in their bylaws. So you can get rid of ESG. That's great. But, you know, you can get rid of DEI. I think that's great. But it's really about a mindset and a view of the world. And I don't think that's going anywhere.
And you think the reason it doesn't work well in practice is because there's a big degree to which it's anti-meritocracy.
It's anti-American, really. I mean, you know, DEI and woke and affirmative action make perfect sense in a lot of different countries. There are a lot of countries out there that are multi-ethnic and they're heterogeneous and they are run by basically quasi-dictators and the way it works is that you pay off the Christians and you pay off the Muslims and
They get this guy and they get that guy and everybody kind of shakes it. It's very explicit where they're like, we have 10 spots and they go to the Christians. We have 10 spots and it goes to the Hindus. You know, I'm talking India is a country I know pretty well. And this does kind of work like that on state politics level in some respect.
But in America, you know, fundamentally, we really believe that no matter where you are from, that you come here and basically within a generation, especially if you migrate here legally and you integrate that, you leave a lot of that stuff behind.
And the story, the American dream that is ingrained in so many of us is one that really does not mesh well with any sort of racial preference regime or anything that's not meritocratic. And I mean, I will give the left wingers some credit in the idea that meritocracy itself could have preference for people who have privileged backgrounds. I think that's true.
And so the way I would like to see it is to increase everybody's equality of opportunity to make sure that they all have a chance at, quote unquote, willing out the American dream. But that doesn't erase meritocracy, hard work, and many of the other things that we associate with the American character, with the American frontier.
So these are two ideologies which are really at odds, like in a lot of ways, like wokeism, racialism and all this is a third world ideology. It's one that's very prevalent in Europe and all across Asia, but it doesn't mix well here and it shouldn't. And I'm really glad that America feels the same way.
Yeah, I got to go back to Jim Webb and that book. What a badass, fascinating book. Oh, my God. It's amazing. Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. So I did not realize to the degree, first of all, how badass the Scots-Irish are. And to the degree, many of the things that kind of identify as American and part of the American spirit were defined by...
this relatively small group of people. As he describes, the motto could be summarized as fight, sing, drink, and pray. So there's the principles of fierce individualism, the principles of a deep distrust of government, the elites, the authorities, bottom-up governance,
Over 2,000 years of a military tradition, they made up 40% of the Revolutionary War Army and produced numerous military leaders, including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a bunch of presidents. Some of the more gangster presidents. Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton. Just the whole cultural legacy of country music.
We owe them so much, and they really don't get their due, unfortunately. A lot of – for the reasons that I just described around racialism is because post mass immigration from Europe, the term white kind of became blanket applied to new Irish, to Italians, to Slovenians, and –
As you and I both know, if you travel those countries, people are pretty different, and it's not that different here in the United States.
Scots-Irish were some of the original settlers here in America, and particularly in Appalachia, and their contribution to the fighting spirit and their own culture and who we are as individualists and some of the first people to ever settle the frontier, and that frontier mindset really does change. Come from them.
We owe them just as much we do the Puritans, but they don't ever really get their due. And the reason I recommend that book is if you read that book and you understand then, you know, how exactly could this group of white working class voters forego from 2012 voting for a man named Barack Hussein Obama?
Donald J. Trump, it makes perfect sense if you combine it with a lot of the stuff I'm talking about here, about affirmative action, about distrust of the elites, about feeling as if institutions are not seeing through to you, and specifically also not valuing your contribution to American history, and in some cases, actively looking down. I'm glad you pointed out not only their role in the
revolutionary war, but in the civil war as well. And, you know, just how much of a contribution culturally really that we owe them for setting the groundwork that so many of us who came later could build upon and adopt some of their own ideas and their culture as our own. It's one of the things that makes America great. Mark Twain. Yeah.
I mean, so much of the culture, so much of the American spirit, the whole idea, the whole shape and form and type of populism that represents our democracy. So would you trace that fierce individualism that we think of back to them? Definitely.
It's a huge part of them about who they were, about the screw you attitude. I mean, that book actually kind of had a renaissance back in 2016 when Hillbilly Elegy came out. I'm sure you remember this. which it's kind of weird to think that it's now the vice president-elect of the United States. It's kind of wild, honestly, to think about. But J.D.
Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, I think was really important for a lot of American elites who were like, how do these people support Trump? Where does this shit come from that they're really I mean, if you really think back to that time, it was shocking to the elite character that any person in the world could ever vote for Donald Trump and not just vote. He won the election. How does that happen?
And that's Hillbilly Elegy guided people in an understanding of what that's like on a lived day to day basis. And J.D., to his credit, talks about Scott's Irish heritage, about Appalachia. and the legacy of what that culture looks like today, and how a lot of these people voted for Donald Trump.
But we got to give credit to Jim Webb, who wrote the history of these people and taught me and you about their original fight against the oppressors in Scotland and Ireland and their militant spirit and how they were able to bring that over here. And they got their due in Andrew Jackson and some of our other populist presidents who set us up on the road to Donald Trump to where we are today.
Dude, it got me pumped, excited to be an American. Me too.
I love that book.
It's crazy that J.D., the same guy, because that's Hillbilly Elegy is what I kind of thought of him as.
Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you, for me, it's actually pretty surreal. I met J.D. Vance in like 2017 in like a bar. I didn't ever think he would be the vice president elect of the United States. I mean, just kind of wild. One of my friends went back and dug up the email that we originally sent him, just like, hey, do you want to meet up? And he's like, sure. I was watching on television.
I mean, the first time that it really hit me, I was like, Whoa. And it was like naming a history book is whenever he became the vice presidential nominee. I was watching on TV and the confetti was falling and he was waving with his wife. And I was like, wow, like, that's it. You're in the history books now forever, especially now. So as the literal vice president elect.
But his own evolution is actually a fascinating, fascinating story for us, too, because I think a lot of the time I've spent right now is kind of this. A lot of what I'm giving right now are like 2016 kind of takes about like why Trump won that time. But we should spend a lot of time on how Donald Trump won this election.
And like how what happened, some of the failures of the Biden administration, some of the payback for the Great Awakening. But also, if you look at the evolution of J.D. Vance, this is a person who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. And not a lot of people pay attention to this. But if you read Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. was much more of a traditional conservative at that time. He was citing, you know, report.
I think the famous passage is about like payday loans and why they're good or something like that. I don't know his position today, but I would assume that he's probably changed that.
But the point is, is that his ideological evolution from watching somebody who really was more of a traditional Republican with a deep empathy for the white working class, then eventually become a champion and a disciple of Donald Trump.
and to believe that he himself was the vehicle for accomplishing and bettering the United States, but specifically for working class Americans, really, of all stripes. And that story is really one of the rise of the modern left as it exists as a political project, as an ideology.
It's also one of the Republican Party, which coalesced now with Donald Trump as a legitimate figure and as the single bulwark against cultural leftism and elitism that eventually was normalized to the point that Majority of Americans decided to vote for him in 2024.
So let's talk about 2024. What happened with with the left? What happened with Biden? What's your take on Biden?
Biden is I try to remove myself from it and I try not to give like hit big history takes while you're in the moment. But it's really hard not to say that he's one of the worst presidents in modern history. And I think the reason why I'm going to go with it is because I want to judge him by the things that he set out to do. So Joe Biden has been the same person for his entire political career.
He is a basically C student who thinks he's an A student. The chip on his shoulder against the elites has played to his benefit in his original election to the United States Senate through his entire career as a United States senator, where he always wanted to be the star and the center of attention, and to his 1988 presidential campaign.
And one of the most fascinating things about Biden and watching him age is watching him become even more of what he already was. And so a book recommendation, it's called What It Takes. And it was written in 1988. And there's actually a long chapter on Joe Biden and about the plagiarism scandal.
And one of the things that comes across is his sheer arrogance and belief in himself as to why he should be the center of attention. Now, the reason I'm laying all this out is the arrogance of Joe Biden, the individual and his character, is fundamentally the reason this presidency went awry.
This is a person who was elected in 2020 really because of a feeling of chaos, of Donald Trump, of we need normalcy, decides to come into the office.
portrays himself as a quote unquote transitional president slowly, you know, begins to lose a lot of his faculties and then surrounds himself with sycophants, the same ones who have been around him for so long that he had no single input into his life to tell him that he needed to stop and he needed to drop out of the race until it became truly undeniable to the vast majority of the American people.
And that's why I'm trying to keep it as like him as an individual, as a president, because we can separate him from some of his accomplishments and the things that happen. Some I support, some I don't. But generally, a lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the CHIPS Act.
A lot of people are not going to look back and think about Joe Biden and the Build Back Better bill or whatever, his Lena Kahn antitrust policy. They're going to look back on him and they're going to remember high inflation. They're going to remember somebody who fundamentally never was up to the job in the sense that
One, again, book recommendation, Freedom from Fear by David Kennedy is about the Roosevelt years. And one of the most important things people don't understand is the New Deal didn't really work in the way that a lot of people wanted it to. Right. Like there was still high unemployment. There was still a lot of suffering. But you know what changed?
They felt that they had a vigorous commander in chief who is doing everything in his power to attack the problems of the everyday American. So even though things didn't even materially change, the vigor, that's a term that was often associated with John F. Kennedy at VIGA, you know, in the Massachusetts accent.
We had this young, vibrant president in 1960, and he was running around, and he wanted to convince us that he was working every single day tirelessly. And when you have an 80-year-old man... who is simply just eating ice cream and going to the beach while people's grocery prices and all this thing go up by 25%. And we don't see the same vigor.
We don't see the same action, the bias to action, which is so important in the modern presidency. That is fundamentally why I think the Democrats, part of the reason why the Democrats lost the election and also why I think that he missed his moment. in such a dramatic way. And he had the opportunity. He could have done it, you know, if he wanted to, but maybe 20 years ago.
But the truth is that his own narcissism, his own misplaced belief in himself and his own accidental rise to the presidency ended up in his downfall. And it's kind of amazing because, again, if we if we look back to his original campaign speech, 2019, why I'm running for president. It was Charlottesville. And he said, I want to defeat Donald Trump forever.
And I want to make sure that he never gets back in the white house again. So by his own metric, he did fail. That was his, it was the only thing he wanted to do.
And he failed, failed from, you said a lot of interesting stuff. So one FDR, that's really interesting. It's not about the specific policy. It's about like fighting for the people and doing that with charisma and just uniting the entire country for the, This is the same with Bernie.
Maybe there's a lot of people that disagree with Bernie that still support him because we just want somebody- Feels authentic. Yeah. That's it. We just want somebody to fight authentically for us.
Yes. FDR. FDR was like a king. He was like Jesus Christ in the US. Some of it was because of what he did, but it was just the fight. People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate. He gets all this stuff through.
But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right? We've had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do-nothing joke who would dine nine-course meals in the White House and he was a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has him fireside chats. He's passing legislation.
But more importantly, so he tries various different programs. Then they get ruled unconstitutional. He tries even more.
from that every single time if he gets knocked down he comes back fighting and that was a really part of his character that he developed after he got polio and it was it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America has really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression.
He's such an inspirational figure. He really is. And people think of him for World War II, and of course, we can spend forever on that. But in my opinion, the early years are not studied enough. 33 to 37 is one of the most remarkable periods in American history. We were not ruled by a president. We were ruled by a king, by a monarch, and people liked it. He was a dictator, and he was a good one.
Yeah. So to sort of push back against the implied thing that you said. So when saying Biden is the worst president.
No, second worst. In modern history, that's what I said.
In modern history, who's the worst?
W, no question.
I see, because of the horrible wars, probably.
I mean, Iraq is. just so bad. One of my favorite authors is a guy, Gene Edward Smith. He's written a bunch of presidential biographies. And in the opening of his book, W biography, he's like, there's just no question. There's a single worst foreign policy mistake in all of American history. And W is one of our worst presidents ever. He had terrible judgment.
and got us into a war of his own choosing. It was a disaster. And it set us up for failure. By the way, we talked a lot about Donald Trump. Nobody is more responsible for the rise of Donald Trump than George W. Bush. But I could go off on Bush for a long time. Oh, we will.
We will return there. So as part of the pushback, I'd like to say, because I agree with your criticism of arrogance and narcissism against Joe Biden. The same could be said about Donald Trump.
You're absolutely right.
Of arrogance. Yes. And I think you've also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.
Absolutely. But sometimes for a benefit. You have to be a pretty crazy person to want to be president. I put out a tweet that got some controversy. And I think it was Joe Rogan, who I love. But he was like, I want to find out who Kamala Harris is as a human being. And I was like, I'm actually not interested in who politicians are as human beings at all.
I was like, I've read too much about them to know. I know who you are. If you spend your life and because I live in Washington and I spent a lot of time around would be politicians. I know what it takes to actually become the president. It's crazy. You have to give up everything, everything. Every night, you're not spending it with your wife.
You're spending it at dinner with potential donors, with friends, with people who can connect you. Even after you get elected, that's even more so. Now you've got to raise money, and now you're on to the next thing. Now you want to get your political thing through. You're going to spend all your time on your phone. You and your staff are going to be more like this.
Your entire life revolves around your career. Honestly, you need an insane level of narcissism to do it. Because you have to believe that you are better than everybody else, which is already pretty crazy. And not only that, your own personal characteristics and foibles lead you to the pursuit of this office and to the pursuit of the idolatry of the self and everything around you.
There's a famous story. of Lady Bird Johnson after Johnson becomes the president. He's talking to the White House butler. And she was like, everything in this house revolves around my husband. Whatever's left goes to the girls, her two children, and I'll take the scraps. So everything revolved around Johnson's political career.
And his daughters, when they're honest, because they like to paper over some of the things That happened under him, but they didn't spend any time with him. Saturday morning was for breakfast with Richard Russell, I forget. These are all in the Robert A. Caro books. Sunday was for Rayburn. There was no time for his kids. That's what it was.
And by the way, he's one of the greatest politicians to ever live. But he also died from a massive heart attack, and he was a deeply sad and depressed individual.
Yeah, I saw that tweet, to go back to that. And also, I listened to your incredible debate about it with Marshall on the Realignment podcast, and I have to side with Marshall. I think you're just wrong on this. Because I think revealing the character of a person is really important to understand how they will act in a room full of generals and
full of... Yeah, this gets to the judgment question.
The judgment.
And that's... I think of Johnson and of Nixon, of Teddy Roosevelt, even of FDR. I can give you a laundry list of personal problems that all those people had. I think they had really, really good judgment. And I'm not sure how intrinsic their own personal character was to their exploration and thinking
So JFK is – actually, JFK might be our best example because he had the best judgment out of anybody in the room as a brand-new president in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he got us out and avoided nuclear war, which he deserves eternal credit for that. But how did he arrive to good judgment? Some of it certainly was his character, and we can go again, though, into his laundry list of that.
But most of it was around being with his father, seeing some of the mistakes that he would make. And he also had a deeply inquisitive mind, and he experienced World War II at the personal level.
after PT 109 so it is look I get it I actually could steal man and I could the response to what I'm saying is judgment is not divisible from personal character but just because I know a lot of politicians and I've read enough with the really great ones the people who I I revere the most there's really bad personal stuff basically every single time but you're saying the judgment was good judgment was great on the missile crisis yes some of the best
about judgment and decision making in the history of America.
Yes. And we should study a lot of it. And I encourage people out there. This is a brutal text. We were forced to read it in graduate school. The Essence of Decision by Graham Allison. I'm so thankful we did. It's one of the foundations of political science because it lays out theories of how government works.
This is also a useful transition, by the way, if we want to talk about Trump and some of his cabinet and how that is shaping up. because people really need to understand Washington. Washington is a creature with traditions, with institutions that don't care about you. They don't even really care about the president. They have self-perpetuating mechanisms, which have been done a certain way.
And it usually takes a great shocking event like World War II to change really anything beyond the marginal. Every once in a while, you have a figure like Teddy Roosevelt, who's actually able to take peacetime presidency and transform the country, but it needs an extraordinary individual to get something like that done.
So the question around the essence of decision was the theory behind the Cuban Missile Crisis of how Kennedy arrived at his decision. And there are various different schools of thought, but one of the things I love about the book is it presents a case for all three, the organizational theory, the bureaucratic politics theory, and then kind of the great man theory as well.
So there's a – you and I could sit here and I could tell you a case about PT-109 and about how John F. Kennedy experienced World War II. as this, I think he was like a first lieutenant or something like that, and how he literally swam miles with a wounded man's life jacket strap in his teeth with a broken back, and he saved him, and he ended up on the cover of Life magazine, and he was a war hero.
And he was a deeply smart individual who wrote a book in 1939 called Why England Slept, which to this day is considered a A text which at the moment was able to describe in detail why Neville Chamberlain and the British political system arrived at the policy of appeasement. I actually have an original copy.
It's one of my most prized possessions because – and from 1939 because this is a 23-year-old kid. Who the fuck are you, John F. Kennedy? Turns out he's a brilliant man. And – Another just favorite aside is that at the Potsdam Conference, you know, where Harry Truman is there with Stalin and everybody.
So in the room at the same time, Harry S. Truman, president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general, right, who will succeed him, 26-year-old John F. Kennedy as a journalist, some shithead journalist on the side. And all three of those presidents were in the same room with Joseph Stalin and others. And that's the story of America right there. It's kind of amazing.
I love people to say that because you never know about who will end up rising to power. Are you announcing that you're running for president? No, absolutely not. I don't have what it takes. I don't think so. I'm self-aware.
Well, maybe humility is necessary for greatness. Okay. So actually, can we just linger on that book?
Yeah.
So the book, Essence of Decision, Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison. It presents three different models of how government works. The rational act model, so seeing government as one entity trying to maximize the national interest.
Also seeing government through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures, sort of this giant organization that's just doing things how it's always been done. and the government politics model of there's just these individual internal power struggles within government.
And all of that is like a different way to view, and they're probably all true to a degree, of how decisions are made within this giant machinery of government.
That's why it's so important is because you cannot read that book and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is more true than the other, but all of them are deeply true. And this is one – this is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because – and I guess for the people out there who don't think I've been too obsequious, he'll be my criticism.
Trump said something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast, probably the most important thing that he ever said, which is he said, I like to have people like John Bolton in my administration. Well, because they scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational individual in the room.
So at a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that and then they can rationalize while there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House. People like Mike Waltz and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a quote unquote anti neocon, anti Liz Cheney agenda. Now, Trump's theory of this is.
is that he likes to have quote unquote like psychopaths like John Bolton in the room with him while he's sitting across from Kim Jong-un because it gets scared. What I think Trump never understood when he was president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out.
which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump, I don't think quite gets is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reached the president's desk.
One of the most important Obama quotes ever is by the time it gets to my desk, nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don't have an answer. That's why I have to make the call. So
The theory that Trump has, that you can have people in there who are, let's say, warmongers, neocons or whatever, who don't necessarily agree with you, is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I'll still be able to rein those people in as an influence. Here's the issue. Let's say for Mike Waltz, who's going to be the national security advisor.
A lot of people don't really understand. There's this theory of national security advisor where you call me into your office and you're the president. You're like, hey, what do we think about Iran? I'm like, I think you should do X, Y, and Z. No, that's not how it works. The national security advisor's job is to coordinate the interagency process.
So his job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room, CIA, State Department, SECDEF, others. Before the POTUS even walks in, we have options. So we're like, hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. We need a package of options. Those packages of options are going to concede of three things. We're going to have one group. We're going to call it the dovish option.
Two, we're going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package. Trump walks in. This is how it's supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, okay, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do we do? Mr. President, we've prepared three options for you. We've got one, two, and three. Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks one, two, or three?
Or is it the man who decides what's even in option one, two, and three? That is the part where Trump needs to really understand how these things happen. And I watched this happen to him in his first administration. He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn, but him and Trump were at least like this on foreign policy.
Flynn gets outed because what I would call an FBI coup, whatever. 33 days, he's out as a national security advisor, HR master. He's got a nice shiny uniform, four star, all of this. The master doesn't agree with Donald Trump at all. And so Trump says, I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan. I want to get out of Afghanistan. They're like, yeah, yeah, we'll get out of Afghanistan.
But before we get out, we got to go back in, as in we need more troops in there. And he's like, oh, okay. It's like all this. And he approves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017 where he ends up escalating and increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan.
And it's only till February 2020 that he gets to sign a deal, the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017. But the reason why that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory, where H.R. McMaster is able to guide the interagency process
bring the uniform recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others to give Donald Trump no option but to say we must put troops. Another example of this is a book called Obama's War by Bob Woodward. I highly encourage people to read this book because this book talks about how Obama comes into the White House in 2009 and he says, I want to get out of Iraq and I don't want to increase.
I want to fight the good war in Afghanistan. Right. And he's doing Obama's a thoughtful guy. too thoughtful, actually. And so he sits there and he's working out his opinions. And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his options begin to narrow because strategic leaks start to come out from the White House Situation Room about what we should do in Afghanistan.
And pretty soon, David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire national security apparatus has Obama pegged where he basically politically at the time decides to take the advantage position of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both ways by saying, but in two years, we're gonna withdraw.
That book really demonstrates how the deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with ones which you don't even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down the extreme directions. That's why when Trump says things like, I want to get out of Syria, that doesn't compute up here for the Pentagon.
Because first of all, you know, if I even asked you how many troops we have in Syria and you go on the DOD website, it'll tell you a number. The number's bullshit because the way they do it is if you're only there for 179 days, you don't count as active military contracts. The real number is, let's say, five times. And so Trump would be like, hey, I want to get out of Syria. We'll do it.
Six months, right? We need six months. After six months ago, so are we out of Syria yet? And they're like, no, well, we got to wrap this up. We got this base. We got that. We have this important mission. And next thing you know, you're out of office and it's over. So there's all these things which I don't think he quite understands.
I know that some of the people around him who disagree with these picks do is the reason why these picks really matter is not only are the voices in the situation room for the really, really high profile stuff, it's for all the little things to never get to that president's desk. of which can shape extraordinary policy. And I'll give you the best example.
There was never a decision by FDR as president of the United States to oil embargo Japan, one which he thought about as deeply as you and I would want. It was a decision kind of made within the State Department. It was a decision that was made by some of his advisors. I think he eventually signed off on it.
It was a conscious choice, but it was not one which ever was understood the implications that by doing that, we invite a potential response like Pearl Harbor. So think about what the organizational bureaucratic model can tell us about the extraordinary blowback that we can get and why we want people with great judgment all the way up and down the entire national security chain in the White House.
Also, I just realized I did not talk about immigration, which is so insane. One of the reasons Donald Trump won in 2024, of course, was because of the massive change to the immigration status quo.
The truth is, is that it may actually be second to inflation in terms of the reason that Trump did win the presidency was because Joe Biden fundamentally changed the immigration status quo in this country. That was another thing about the Scots-Irish people and others that we need to understand is that when government machinery and elitism and liberalism
appears to be more concerned about people who are coming here in a disorderly and illegal process and about their rights and their ability to, quote unquote, pursue the American dream while the American dream is dying for the native born population. That is a huge reason why people are turning against mass immigration.
Historically as well, my friend Raihan Salaam wrote a book called Melting Pot or Civil War. And one of the most important parts about that book is the history of mass migration to the United States. So if we think about the transition from Scots-Irish America to the opening of America to the Irish and to mass European immigration, what a lot of people don't realize is it caused a ton of problems.
There were mass movements at the time, the Know-Nothings and others in the 1860s, who rose up against mass European migration. They were particularly concerned about Catholicism.
By as the religion of a lot of the new immigrants, but really what it was is about the changing of the American character by people who are not have the same traditions, values and skills as the native born population and their understanding of what they're owed and their role in American society is very different from the way that people previously had.
One of the most tumultuous periods of US politics was actually during the resolution of the immigration question, where we had massive waves of foreign-born population come to the United States. We had them integrated, luckily, actually, at the time, with the Industrial Revolution. So we actually did have jobs for them.
One of the problems is that today in the United States, we have one of the highest levels of foreign-born population than ever before, actually, since that time. in the early 1900s, but we have all of the same attendant problems. But even worse is we don't live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in a predominantly service-based economy that has long moved past manufacturing.
Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't bring some of that back, but the truth is that manufacturing today is not what it was to work in a steel mill in 1875. I think we can all be reasonable and we can agree on that. And part of the problems with extremely high levels of foreign-born population particularly unskilled.
And the vast majority of the people who are coming here and who are claiming asylum are doing so under fraudulent purposes. They're doing so because they are economic migrants and they're abusing asylum law to basically gain entrance to the United States without going through a process of application or of merit. And
This has all of its traces back to 1965, where the Immigration Naturalization Act of 1965 really reversed and changed the status quo of immigration from the 1920s to 1960, which really shut down levels of immigration in the United States. In my opinion, it was one of the most important things that ever happened. And one of the reasons why is it forced and caused integration.
It also forced by slowing down the increase in the number of foreign born population. It redeveloped an American character and understanding that was more homogenous and was the ability for you and me to understand despite the difference in our background.
If you accelerate and you continue this trend of the very high foreign born unskilled population, you unfortunately are basically creating a mass, you know, on and it's basically an It's a non-citizen population of illegal immigrants, people who are not as skilled. I read 27% of the people who've come under Joe Biden illegally don't even have a college degree.
That means that we're lucky if they're even literate in Spanish, let alone English. So there are major problems about integrating that type of person, even in the past, whenever we had a mass industrial economy. Now imagine today. The amount of strain that would put on social services if mass citizenship happened to that population would be extraordinary.
And even if we were to do so, I don't think it's a good idea, but even if we were to do so, we would still need to pair it with a dramatic change. And part of the problem right now is I don't think a lot of people understand the immigration system. The immigration system in the United States, effectively, they call it family-based migration. I call it chain migration.
chain migration is the term which implies that let's say you come over here and you get your green card. You can use sponsorship and others by gaming the quota system to get your cousin or whatever to be able to come. The problem with that is who is your cousin? Like, is he a plumber? Is he, you know, does he have Is he a coder? You know, that doesn't actually matter because he's your cousin.
So he actually has preference. The way that it should work is it should be nobody cares if he's your cousin. What does he do? You know, what does she do? What is she going to bring to this country? All immigration in the United States, in my opinion, should be net positive without doing fake statistics about oh, they actually increased the GDP or whatever.
It's like, we need a merit-based immigration system. We are the largest country in the world and one of the only non-Western or one of the only Western countries in the world that does not have a merit-based, points-based immigration system like Australia and or Canada. And, I mean, I get it because a lot of people did come to this country under non-merit based purposes.
So they're really reluctant to let that go.
But I do think that Biden, by changing the immigration status quo and by basically just allowing, you know, tens of millions, potentially tens of millions, at the very least 12 million new entrants to come to the US under these pretenses of complete disorder and of no conduct, really broke a lot of people's understanding and even like mercy in that regard.
And so that was obviously a massive part of Trump's victory.
Speaking of illegal immigration, what do you think about the border czar, Tom Homan?
Tom Homan is a very legit dude. Got to know him a little bit in Trump 1.0. He is an original, like, true believer on enforcing immigration law as it is. Now, notice how I just said that. That's a politically correct way of saying mass deportation. Um, uh, and I, I, I will point out for my left wing critics in that. Yeah. He really believes in the ability at the, in the ability to
in the necessity of mass deportation, and he has the background to be able to carry that out. I will give some warnings, and this will apply to Doge too. Czar has no statutory or constitutional authority. Czar has as much authority as the president of the United States gives him.
Donald Trump, I think it's fair to say, even his critics or even the people who love him could say he can be capricious at times. And he can strip you or not strip you or give you the ability to compel. So czar in and of itself is frankly a very flawed position in the White House. And it's one that I really wish we would move away from. I understand why we do it.
It's basically to do a national security advisor, interagency convener to accomplish certain goals. That said, there is a person, Stephen Miller, who will be in the White House, the deputy White House chief of staff. who has well-founded beliefs, experience in government, and a rock-solid ideology on this, which I think would also give him the ability to work with Homan to pull that off.
That said, a corollary to this, and frankly, this is the one I am the most mystified yet, is Kirstie Noem as the Department of Homeland Security Secretary. So, Let me just lay this out for people because people don't know what this is. Department of Homeland Security, 90% of the time, the way you're going to interact with them is TSA. You don't think about it.
But people don't know the Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest law enforcement, if maybe the largest law enforcement agency in the world. It's gigantic. You have extraordinary statutory power to be able to prove investigations. You have Border Patrol, ICE, TSA, CBP, all these other agencies that report up to you.
But most importantly for this, you will be the public face of mass deportation. So I was there in the White House briefing room last time around when Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the DHS secretary there, under Donald Trump and specifically the one who enforced child separation for a limited period of time. She was a smart woman. She has long experience in government.
And honestly, she melted under the criticism. Kiersey Noem is the governor of South Dakota. I mean, that's great. You have a little bit of executive experience. But to be honest, I mean, you have no law enforcement background.
You have no ability to you have no, frankly, with understanding of what it is going to be like to be the secretary of one of the most controversial programs in modern American history. You have to go on television and defend that every single day, a literal job requirement under Donald Trump. And you will have to have extraordinary command of the facts. You have to have a very high intellect.
You have to have the ability to really break through. And I mean, we all watch how she handled that situation with her dog and her interviews. And that does not give me confidence that she will be able to do all that well in the position.
So what do you think is behind that? So a crystal balls theory on breaking point is that there's some kind of interpersonal, like, uh, I didn't know. I should know this, but I didn't know any of the, there was some cheating or whatever.
There's a rumor, nobody knows if it's true, that Corey Lewandowski and Kirstie Noem had a previous relationship. Ongoing, Corey Lewandowski is a Trump official and that he maybe put her in front. I don't know. Is this like the Real Housewives of DC? Yeah, kind of. Although, I mean, it was the most open secret in the world. Allegedly, I don't know.
was true okay all right i mean i don't like to traffic too much in personal theories but i mean in this respect it might actually be correct in terms of how it all came down i have no idea what he's thinking to be i truly don't um i mean maybe it's like he was last time he said i want a woman who's like softer and like emotionally and the ability to be the face of my immigration program
I mean, again, like I said, I don't see it in terms of her experience and her media. It's frankly like not very good.
So you think she needs to be able to articulate, not just be like the softer face of this radical policy, but also be able to articulate what's happening with the reasoning behind all this?
Yes, you need to give justification for everything. Here's the thing. Under mass deportation, the media will drag up every sob story known to planet Earth about this person and that person who came here illegally and why they deserve to stay. And really what the quasi thing is, that's why the program itself is bad and we should legalize everybody who's here illegally. Okay.
So the thing is, is that you need to be able to have extraordinary oversight. You need a great team with you. You need to make sure that everything is being done by the book. The way that the media is being handled is that you throw every question back in their face and you say, well, you know, you either talk about crime or you talk about the enforceability of the law, the necessity.
I mean, I just, I think articulated a very coherent case for why we need much less high levels of immigration to the United States. And I am the son of people who immigrated to this country. But one of the favorite phrases I heard from this from a guy named Mark Corian, who's a center for immigration studies, is we don't make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandparents.
We make immigration policy for the benefit of our grandchildren. And that is an extraordinary and good way to put it. And in fact, I would say it's a triumph of the American system that somebody whose parent family benefited from the immigration regime and was able to come here.
My parents had PhDs, came here legally, applied, spent thousands of dollars through the process, can arrive at the conclusion that actually we need to care about all of our fellow American citizens. I'm not talking about other Indians or whatever. I'm talking about all of us. I care about everybody who is here in this country.
But fundamentally, that will mean that we are going to have to exclude some people from the US. And another thing that the open borders people don't ever really grapple with is that even within their own framework, It makes no sense. So, for example, a common left wing talking point is that it's America's fault that El Salvador and Honduras and Central America is fucked up.
And so because of that, we have a responsibility to take all those people in because it's our fault. or Haiti, right? But if you think about it, America is responsible, and I'm just being honest, for destroying and ruining a lot of countries. They just don't benefit from the geographic ability to walk to the United States.
So, I mean, if we're doing grievance politics, Iraqis have way more of a claim to be able to come here than anybody from El Salvador who's talking about something that happened in 1982. So within its own logic, it doesn't make any sense. Even under the asylum process, you know, people I mean, people don't even know this. You're literally able to claim asylum from domestic violence.
OK, there are I mean, imagine that like that's frankly, that is a local law enforcement and problem of people who are experiencing that in their home country. I know how cold hearted this sounds, but maybe honestly, it could be because I'm Indian. One of the things that whenever you visit India and you see a country with over a This is crazy.
And you understand both the sheer numbers of the amount of people involved. And also, there is nothing in the world you could ever do to solve all problems for everybody. It's a very complex and dynamic problem. And it's really nice to be bleeding heart and to say, oh, well, we have responsibility to this and to all mankind and all that. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work with a nation state.
It doesn't work with a sovereign nation. We're the luckiest people in the history of the world to live here in this country. And you need to protect it. And protecting it requires really thinking about the fundamentals of immigration itself and not telling us stories.
There's a famous moment in the Trump White House where Jim Acosta, CNN White House correspondent, got into it with Stephen Miller, the current – who will be the current deputy chief. And he was like, what do you say – something along the lines to people who say you're violating that quote on the Statue of Liberty, like give me your tired, your poor, your hungry –
All of that, the Emma Lazarus quote. And Stephen very logically was like, what level of immigration comports with the Emma Lazarus quote? Is it 200,000 people a year? Is it 300? Is it 1 million? Is it 1.5 million? And that's such a great way of putting it because. There is no limiting principle on Emma Lazarus quote.
There is, when you start talking, honestly, you're like, okay, we live in X, Y, and Z society with X, Y, and Z GDP. People who are coming here should be able to benefit for themselves and us, not rely on welfare, not be people who we have to take care of after because we have our own problems here right now.
And who are the population, the types of people that we can study and look at who will be able to benefit? And based on that, yeah, immigration is great. But there are a lot of economic, legal, and societal reasons for why you definitely don't want the current level. But...
Another thing is, even if we turn the switch and we still let in a million five people a year under the chain family-based migration, I think it would be a colossal mistake because it's not rooted in the idea that people who are coming to America are explicitly doing so at the benefit of America.
It's doing so based on the familial connections of people who already gamed the immigration system to be able to come here. I have a lot of family in India, and I love them, and some of them are actually very talented and qualified.
If they wanted to come here, I think they should be able to apply on their own merit, and that should have nothing to do with their familial status of the fact that I'm a US citizen.
Like you mentioned the book, Melting Pot or Civil War by Raihan Salam, he makes an argument against open borders. The thesis there is assimilation should be a big part. Mm-hmm. I guess there's some kind of optimal rate of immigration, which allows for assimilation.