Transcription
It's just so counterintuitive. Donald Trump is Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, and then he gets the highest number of Latino and black votes of any Republican, maybe since George Bush. Latinos and maybe he's trying to tell people that the black truck driver, the Hispanic electrician, and the white plumber all have things in common much more with each other than the white guy does with the Stanford Professor, than the Hispanic electrician does with the Latinx anchorwoman. That was what the election was about; what this MAGA movement was. It was a holistic assault on a system that has become calcified and AI-ified, and it has no connection with reality.
I often begin interviews by asking an easy question, just to start off lightly. But because one of the many highlights for me of our last conversation was how smoothly you responded to my question about the strongest aspects of the Biden presidency, I wanted to start things off with a bit of a harder question. You wrote a book, a best-selling book called *The Case for Trump*, but what I'm wondering is, are there any things that you're especially worried about going into his new presidency?
Well, it's not just me; every, every large movement has contradictions or paradoxes or challenges. So this MAGA movement is now incorporating people across the spectrum, whether it's RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, all the way over to Horowitz, Andreas, David Sachs, Elon Musk, Ramana Maharshi. So you've got a lot of different, and then you have the Steve Bannon core. So what that means is, take taxes for the middle class. So if you say you, you, you float the idea that you're going to reduce taxes for veterans, first responders, waitresses, Social Security, you're talking a trillion dollars. And then you've got Viac and Elon saying they want to cut between one and two trillion, but they can't touch entitlements or defense, so you're down to 30% of the budget, but you're going to, you're going to cut a trillion. So the theory is that by cutting those taxes and the regular tax cut, you're going to grow the economy more than 2% GDP, maybe get three, and then you're going to get another trillion dollars. But again, the, I, nobody's ever quite done that—cut taxes like Reagan did and then say that you're going to control, control spending or cut. Reagan didn't do it, so he got deficits, and so did George W. Bush. The only person that's balanced a budget for three years since 1970, 70, 73, I think Nixon did it, was Bill Clinton, and he made a deal with GenR. So for every tax cut GenR wanted, there was a spending, I mean spending cut for GenR, tax cut, spending cut for both of them, actually.
And then there's the, the MAGA protocol is you don't get involved with optional Middle East Wars. So you don't want to, you're against getting involved in Ukraine, and you don't want to go in Syria. But last time he inherited sort of an uneasy world where he had to restore deterrence; this time it's worse. So he's inheriting a world following the scandal from Afghanistan, the Chinese two-theater wars, a weakened military—40,000. So there are going to be people who test his resolve. For example, he says if they don't return the hostages, he's going to have to unload on them, and everybody supports that. So what I'm getting at is the MAGA people are going to have to understand that to restore deterrence, so you don't have to even think about getting an opt-out, you're going to have to use force sometimes. That's going to be an optional—that's another challenge, I think. And you saw the one about the H1B visas; that's another one. MAGA says we're not going to bring in foreigners to do the work Americans can do. Viac, Elon says, but we're going to bring in people that we need in Silicon Valley. And between those two poles, you're going to have to find a compromise. And I think the compromise is, if they're only coming in with BAs, and there's a lot of American can do that, if they're coming in with Masters and PhDs and they're unique in their field, then of course bring them. But these are just three examples, and they, the, the cause of that is that this, they had not won the popular vote in 20 years, since George H., since George W. Bush, who barely did it in 2004, and they had lost seven out of the last eight popular votes. So to break that, uh, baleful legacy, they had to expand the party. So it was, it was really amazing; they got record numbers of youth. Trump did, for the Republican Party, blacks, Hispanics, and of course disaffected Democrats. He brought in the tech money, but to do that you're expanding the people who have a seat at the table. So there's a lot of people who reflect views that were important for him getting elected, but they're going to be in contradiction with the hardcore MAGA base.
Yeah, you've already mentioned a number of things that I want to talk about in greater detail, especially, I mean, the cabinet is a huge topic of discussion right now; then there are these theater wars. I think this problem of the extent to which Trump is beholden to these various MAGA interests is also interesting. I'd really like to start though with, um, your podcast, actually, yeah, because it's something that we, we discussed briefly before we started rolling, and it also connects to some of these geopolitical issues. And one question has to do with Trump's rhetoric. And first of all, for our listeners who, who might not be familiar with this, what is the question about whether or not Hanada should be made into a state, and where does that fit into Trump's platform right now and his rhetorical strategy?
There's two things going on with Trump when he trolls. So he looks around the spectrum of foreign policy challenges, and he has certain things he thinks need to be addressed, and he knows it's not eccentric that other people have mentioned it. So I'll give you an example: people for a long time have talked about, since World War II, that Greenland is in North America, and it's very important the United States needs extra rights there to base. Then he looks at Panama, and he looks back at the treaty that Carter signed in 1979, and it gave primacy for the United States to go through at a discount rate, and it was supposed to be free of foreign, and he sees China there. So then he looks at Canada, and he says they're under our nuclear umbrella, they're not paying their fair share of the defense, the border is open, and they've got a radical Trudeau. Then he looks at Mexico, and he says they've got $63 billion in remittances that's coming in; it's their largest source of foreign exchange, and yet that comes in from anywhere from 12 to 20 million illegal aliens, many of them who were on public assistance that were subsidizing it. It's the largest source of foreign exchange, and yet they let caravans come right through from Guatemala. So he sees all these problems, so then he starts to bring attention to them by being art of the deal outrageous. So instead of saying, "We're very worried," if he was a sober, judicious politician, he'd say, "I'm very worried about China; there's some ambiguities in the treaty, and this is a concern, and I'm bringing a bipartisan commission." No, he's going to say, "China's taking it over; we might have to go in there; I won't rule out the POR." Then he'll say, "Why doesn't Greenland just come join the United States? We'll buy it," or he'll say, "The Gulf of Mexico; why isn't it the Gulf of America?" Or then he'll say, "Canada; we can make it a 51st state." So that's outrageous, and that gets attention, and then people start to discuss the real problem, because there are real problems there. And then there's another element that it's trolling, because the more you start to talk about it and you dismiss, dismiss Trump as the Europeans do—boisterous, divisive, eccentric—you start to look at other realities, and they're, and the realities are irony. Take the Gulf of America. So Trump says, "Ah, it's time for, time to be Gulf of America. How you like that, Mexico?" But then you look at the coastline; the coastline of the Gulf of America is 1700 miles on the US side, and it's 1700 miles on the Mexican side. It's been Gulf of Mexico for 400 years, and the left introduced into the popular discourse the idea that there are no names sacrosanct. If you have the Woodrow Wilson Center, change it; the Boathouse, change it; the Earl Warren Center at Berkeley, change it. In fact, right out here, maybe I don't know, 200 yards from where we were speaking were my so-called addresses at the Hoover Tower. I come in one day, and it's the J.P. Morgan Plaza; next time I come, it's the James Stanford Plaza. So he's saying, "Well, they change names; they do it, not me. So I'm just going to change the name. They've had 400 years; it'll be Gulf of America. We have the same amount; it's fair." And that gets people upset, and then Mexico gets upset, and then suddenly Mexico says, "We'll stop that caravan, and let's negotiate." And then Panama, he says, "Well, you think we're an imperial power? You, you're against imperialism and Yankees; you brought in the Chinese; they're worse imperialists than we are; you're a colony of China." And that gets a further irony. Then he says to the Danish, "You're lecturing us, me, that I'm getting in your internal affairs? You're a little tiny country, and you are a colonial power; you've got this big continent, and you're acting like you're a 19th-century colony." And this is coming from the EU, and you look at Greenland; the distance from New York to Greenland is shorter than from Greenland to Copenhagen, and Greenland's in North, North America. So it's 19th-century, 18th-century Europeans coming into North America and colonizing, and I want to let the people of Greenland decide. And the same thing with Canada; he's saying, "Well, maybe you should defend yourself, because you know you don't want people, we don't want people to be our colony, and we have all this, uh, one-way trade with you. I guess we're a mercantile colonial power where the British learned that colonialism didn't work. So either be part of us, or just stop it; just go your own way. And you know, but if you don't, and you want to have a symmetrical, you better close the border, and you better have reciprocal trade charges, and you better pay up if you want to be a partner. But if you want to be a colonial subject, then keep doing what you want, and we'll treat you that way." So there's irony on all of these, but the, the point of all of them is to bring attention in an, in an eccentric fashion and get something done quickly. I hope that even our listeners, and many of them will be this way, strongly dislike Trump; I hope that they can at least accept he has a real tremendous degree of emotional intelligence in a certain sense, and certainly a tremendous rhetorical ability. And I, I would like to keep talking about it a bit more, just because I find it so fascinating. I'm a podcast host, but I don't think I'm the most gifted rhetorician or anything like that. But what I wanted to ask about was where the Panama Canal and the Panama Treaty fits into this whole nexus of concepts.
Well, China has a, as you know, the Silk Belt and Road Initiative, and they have targeted Latin America, Central and South America, and they are trying to get around, uh, around the United States' symmetrical tariffs. So the United States will be telling them, "You are going to pay penny for penny, dollar for dollar what you charge us. If we have a Chevy truck going in there, the same price is going to be." And if you look at all of the tariffs down the line, they're all asymmetrical; they're all AI-ified from a period in which the Bush Administration, the first Bush Administration, said, "We have to give them leeway," and then Bill Clinton did, and so did George W., because they're going to be prosperous and capitalist and they'll turn into, to be a democracy. It didn't quite work out. So Trump comes along and said that didn't work, and it's not fair. And what they're doing to get around these, they're going to Latin America and Mexico, and they're giving, giving them their assembled raw product or their not-quite-assembled product, and then they're assembling it in those countries and sending it in, in case of Mexico, under NAFTA or under less tariffs. And then, second of all, nothing comes free from the Chinese. So they have a strong presence in an area where, under the, you could call it the Monroe Doctrine, the Good Neighbor policy, whatever you want to call it, we've had a, we have interest there because if we get in an existential crisis and we want six frigates from Virginia to get to San Diego, that's the quickest way. So we need to go, if we have a big problem on the horizon, we need to get over to Japan, and we send them there, and they say, "Well, wait a minute; you've got to wait, wait, wait; we got to get in line, and you got to pay." And we say, "No, no, no; we cut in A-E." That's what we did when we signed the treaty. So that's what he's trying to do. And, uh, the thing about it is, he reflects human nature in the raw form, and that's why people despise him. So you take certain things that have happened so far: why in the world would Hamas, who hates him and feels they can talk to Biden and Blinken and Sullivan, why would they be more likely to get a deal in fear of him coming in? In other words, the reductionist answer is, they know that they're getting away with murder, and he won't let them do that. Why all of a sudden is the Iranian prime minister on television saying, "There's no, we never tried to kill the president of the United States; we never did." He, he, he had all summer to say that, and why is he saying now, "We have no problem with the United States, and we have not enriched R, and we do not, we seek peace"? This is exactly the opposite rhetoric they have been giving. And why all of a sudden did the rebels think that they could take out the Assad regime and that the United States apparently would be for that, or as it was ambiguous? So he, he's got this, he's unpredictable, and people, and unpredictability, according to his opponents, think that's dangerous, but that's not the way the real world works. When you're somebody is unpredictable, then you're more careful about them. And all of these concessions that he's gotten before he's entered office are not because people like him, and they're not because they were forced to do it; they were, they're all, as he sees it, and we can either adjudicate it wrong or right, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So he sees these problems that have been festering that are asymmetrical, then he goes art of the deal—he says it in his book—way overboard, and then he negotiates back down, and the problem then is symmetrical, and it wouldn't, it wouldn't be that way if there was not an asymmetry. So why is the Danish government right now offering to give a billion dollars to Greenland and putting on the royal coat of arms of the Danish monarchy? Why are they putting Greenland imagery on? Do they think it's, "Oh, we were forced to do that," or do they think, "Well, actually, we've been taking advantage of these 50,000 people; they don't have much say; they have this big, we're not going to spend any money, and that's just the way it is." So that's how he, he looks for people's vulnerabilities, but he also knows that to avoid the impression that he's an imperialist or a bully or crazy, there's always an element there of the, the targeted party knows what they've been doing is wrong, or it's not, it's not going to be convincing what they're doing.
So two things that, or two ways in which you described Trump: that he embodies raw human nature, and that he's unpredictable. And you said that a lot of people despise him for this. One of his most outspoken critics, at least in places I'm listening, is Sam Harris, and Sam Harris is often talking about these things and how Trump is unstatesmanlike; I mean, you can't trust him; any of these things, and all these things, uh, preclude, or should preclude his being president. And I started out by asking whether there's anything you're worried about coming into his presidency, and you gave me a great list of challenges he's going to be facing, but I'm wondering if there are any ways in which you think his embodiment of this—
I ask you a question, and as an answer, sure. So you've been here with your podcast for the last four years; was there, did you have podcast, were there things that worried you about the FBI, CIA, the DOJ? Did you ever have a, a, a conversation like this where you said, "It's very scary if the CIA has contractors still working for them, and yet they say that they're all 51 retired authorities, and they get a call from Biden's campaign aide, Anthony Blinken, who calls the former CIA director, Mike Morell, up, and he says, 'You know what, we've got a debate coming up, and we only got two weeks before this election, and this laptop is a bombshell; there are things that are really going to hurt us, so I want you guys to say that has all the hallmarks. Got to have an escape because we know the FBI has it, and the FBI's already authenticated it, but we want you to tell the nation in a letter, all you sober and judicious, calm people, that this is Russian disinformation, but just say it has all the hallmarks, because we know Leon Panetta and Brennan and Clapper and the rest of them will not be telling the truth, but we can't quite prove it because of…'" And they did. And then Biden waves this thing up in the debate and says, "How dare you?" 51, or the FBI was working with it; Facebook, and as Mark Zuckerberg said, they would be hysterical; the administration would call up and say, "We don't want you this, and don't report this," and, and then the FBI would be consulting to suppress the news. Or you might have said, "Wow, Joe Biden kept saying, 'Why isn't Merrick Garland prosecuting Trump?' He's told us he never talked to anybody, and then on one day in November of, I think it was 2022, in the same day, Nathan Wade, the counsel of Danny Willis, is in meeting with the White House counsel, the same day Jack Smith is appointed special counsel, and the same day Mr. Coangelo from the DOJ decides he, who came from the LA, James, a prosecutor, and then he went to the DOJ number three, then he decides that very same day he's going to resign to go to work for Alvin Bragg. So my point is this, that everybody was worried about what Donald Trump might do, or he might politicize, and I was watching the confirmation hearing the other day, but be it's because the way he presents things, but if you're sober and judicious and you have a particular type of résumé, you can be exempt; nobody says anything; nobody's ever said anything about Joe Biden's—I'm very worried about Joe Biden. He told the country six times he wasn't going to pardon his son; he pardoned him with a future pardon; anything comes up in the next 10 years. So if we find out, I don't know, tomorrow that Hunter Biden didn't just not report $7 million, but he didn't report another $10 million, it doesn't matter. So I, I think a lot of it is the way people look at what they deci, what they define in Washingtonian terms as sober, judicious, and careful, and what they don't. And so if you've got the FBI director talking to the deputy attorney general about how they can wear a wire and trap the president of the United States in a lapse and show that he's cognitively challenged, as Rod Rosenstein did along with Andrew McCabe, and then you can get the 25th Amendment invoked, that is fine. And so is the next president, who now, we, *The Wall Street Journal* tells us after talking to 50 sources that they've known for four years that the president was debilitated, cognitively unfit, and yet his press secretary said he was fit as a fiddle. So I think that's why people, that explains the election—that we have all, all of these people with these titles and these résumés from these Ivy League schools and a particular comportment and, uh, vocabulary, syntax, uh, and they have done things that if they didn't have that veneer they would be put in jail. So then we have another guy come along and says, "They're all crooks; they're just nuts." Fani Willis is just nuts; they've never charged anybody; everybody calls up a registry if you're angry, uh, about an election, of course they do. I didn't say venom; I said they're there; go find them. Everybody says that. Or Letitia James: have you ever charged a person with overvaluing a real estate, and then the loan was made and you paid it off on time with interest to the delight of the Deutsche Bank? No, that I could go on, but my point is that in those lawfare cases, in every single case, three things were true: number one, if Donald Trump was not the target, they would have never charged him; number two, if he had just said in January, after January, said, "I'm never going to run again; I'm done," they would have never charged him; and number three, they will never charge anybody, famous or not famous, with those crimes; they don't exist. If you have some, I don't know, minor little official in New York that has a, a tryst with some person who's blackmailing him, so he has a non-disclosure for him, they're not going to go back in there and say, "You didn't report that as a campaign expense," even the feds didn't want to do it; they said there's nothing there until Alvin Bragg, with Mr. Coangelo's help. So I guess that's where the big divide is in the country right now—that as you look at all the confirmation of Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi and the rest of them, there was a, the common denominator is, Cash Patel, Pam—where's your Harvard, Yale, Stanford degree? You don't have any. Where's your, uh, "I'm not, I don't quite recall that, uh, let me think about that; it's problematic." No, it's this blunt, brash, "We need to get warriors; we don't need to get a, we have too many generals," that kind of stuff. So it's what this MAGA movement was; it was a holistic assault on a system that has become calcified and AI-ified, and it has no connection with reality.
So when you look in California, all these sober and judicious people had this system where the mayor was in Ghana, and the deputy mayor that she appointed for safety was basically under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat to the city council. The fire chief has been promising that there was 70% DEI hiring, and she paraded herself as the first LGBTQ person, and she said, "Well, I don't know why there wasn't any water in the hydrants; that's not my fault; my job doesn't start until the water comes out." And then you had the assistant fire chief making $300,000, saying, "Well, if I go, maybe you think I can't carry a man if I go into a person's house and the male says, 'Carry me,' and I, well, he's in the wrong place." So Robinson, you have a heart attack in your kitchen, and the, the fire person says, "I'm sorry; I can't carry you out; you're in the wrong place." And then we had the Public Works director of Water and Power, Ms. Qu Kones, who gets, she was so valuable they had to double her salary to $750,000, and she came from a checkered career at the PG&E, and what does she do? She has a 10-million-gallon lake that could have saved Pacific, and it's sitting there for nine months empty, with 300 hydrants are empty, and she, and what did they all say? This: "How dare you say that this might be because we were hired for reasons other than our illustrious merit record? How dare you say that you know that I don't have a right to go to Ghana right when I'm warned there's Santa Ana record winds on the horizon, and it's dry." Or you have a, a governor who says, "No, yes, you voted for $.5 billion in water bonds, and no, I'm not going to build the SES Reservoir, the Los Banos Grande Reservoir, and the Temperance Flat Reservoir and give you people five million acre-feet—not gallons, acre-feet—but I am going to use that money to blow up four dams on the Klamath River and lose 80,000 homes, power for hydroelectric, irrigation, flood control, and, um, a water supply." And that's all just, we're all supposed to say, "Okay." But when you object to this system, and you do it in a way that's not sober, then people get very angry. So if, if I write about what I just talked about, I will get a call from somebody and says, "Are you afraid of a powerful black woman?" No, I don't care what color she is; I said race was not on my mind; I said it was your, it was your assistant fire chief who said that people feel more comfortable if they see somebody… Well, I live in a community that is 90% Hispanic, and I didn't, I had a very serious serum tryptase problem—what made me, serum tryptase—yes, it's something that makes you, uh, allergic to things; I didn't quite understand it. So a year ago on my farm, I got stung by two bees, and I went into, uh, you know, just anaphylactic shock; my heart rate went up to 160, and my blood pressure went 70 to 30; I almost died. So I, the last thing I remember before passing out was calling the local fire, so who came and woke me up on the lawn? Three Hispanic women, and they were wonderful. Did I feel that it would have been better if three white people came at that moment in my life? I could care less; I just wanted three competent people, right? And they proved very competent; within five minutes in the ambulance I had singular, I had Benadryl, I had EpiPens, and my face was swollen; I had welts everywhere. That time I got to the emergency room, I was going to make it. But the idea that I would want somebody to look like me, I could care less. If a white person came and they didn't know what to do, those three Hispanic people did, would I feel great because they were white and when I died? So what I'm getting at, this whole thing has been absurd, and it does, it, and it's not just you and I talking about rhetorical stuff and that Trump derangement syndrome or the de, it really affects people's lives. We've never had a fire, 25,000 acres in the middle of the city; 250,000 people evacuate; 10,000 of the most beautiful homes—I was teaching at Prep, just went through that neighborhood; it is one of the most beautiful places on Earth—and so it's gone. And then the people who are suffering are asking questions now: "Where was the water? How about the reservoir? Why was it empty? Why, when the mayor, why didn't we get the brush off the chaparral? Why are the reservoirs in LA not being filled by the aqueduct?" And the answer is, "How dare you ask that?" So what I try to do is, I don't, I just think that if you just look at empirically at all of these and don't worry about what people say or, or, then you get a very different impression. So that's a long, windy answer. Am I worried about Donald Trump? What he said? I'm worried what he, he, I won't worry until I see what he's actually done. And I hope he does not do what happened; I hope he does not weaponize the IRS, which was going to give a secret sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden before a judge caught it; I hope he does not weaponize the DOJ, which we saw coordinated many of these suits; I hope he does not weaponize like James Comey did and Andrew McCabe did. Andrew McCabe lied four times to federal investigators, or Kevin Kline Smith and FBI, he lied under oath and about forging a FISA document. I hope that doesn't happen, and if it does happen, I'll be a very fierce critic of Donald Trump, but the tweets—I'll give you an example what he said today as we're speaking; I was driving over here on my farm, and this is why people don't like him: he said, "I just want to warn everybody that don't bring in any appointees, nominees for appointments from any listed people from warmonger, LIIs, from bird-brain Nikki Haley," you're smiling yourself, yes, and from war hawk John Bolton. And it was like infantile, right? But the point is that you're smiling and I'm smiling, but a sober, judicious person doesn't do that. But if you look at all those people, what they did, they, you could say there, there's a lot of culpability there, and does it have the effect? Yes, it brings attention to it. And so it's a holistic idea to blow up, not just to blow up the discourse, the rhetoric, what's—I think what the whole MAGA thing, the idea of Trump was that people use very sophisticated vocabulary and résumés to do really awful things, so you scream and yell, and that tears off the veneer, and then you're with a reality, and you can judge it one or the other.
As always, many of the things that you just said are quite fascinating. I want to dig into one in particular, because one of the neat things about speaking with you is that I'm very aware that I'm interviewing three people at one time; I'm interviewing a, a political commentator, maybe four, maybe four people—a political commentator, a military historian, a classicist, and a farmer. And I think the fact that you're a farmer is integral to this discussion, because in many ways you are on both sides of this divide; you are part of Stanford and Hoover, but you're also a farmer. And I want to talk a bit more about the fires and how you view them as a farmer, especially because we're so close to them, and also how you think maybe they should be dealt with.
Before I, I'll do that, just to comment on what you said, said about aspects of my life. So when I came here to Hoover, 2002, I won't mention the person's name; I won't give any information that could identify him, but a high-ranking dual appointee came to me and said, after I talked to him, he said, "Well, you're in the quote 'big leagues' right now, and I'm going to have to acculturate you to the Stanford climate." Person did not have an Ivy League degree. Now, I, I didn't care; I only noticed that later. But you've got to, you're coming from Cal State, and we don't take people from Fresno State; Fresno State professors do not come to the Hoover Institution or Stanford. So it's going to be a big shock to you. And so I said, "I got a PhD from Stanford; I'm the seventh person in my family to go to, sixth person to go to Stanford; my mother was one of the first women to go to Stanford Law School, and she got a double BA from the University of Pacific and Stanford and an JD, LLB, I think it was called in those states; she was the first Superior Court female in C, second in Fresno County; I think she was the second appellate court judge." So I went on with this, and he, and then I said, "I've written 17 books." But the point was, he didn't care about that; it was the idea in his academic hierarchy, and he was going to talk down to me, and so, and I said something to him, I said, "You know, if you ever came to Fresno County and you wanted to learn about farming, I would not assume you're an idiot; I would ask you what you wanted to know, but I wouldn't…" So I really, it's not that I have this SK, today I was with all these very poor people working, and today I'm here, same day. But there is something wrong with the academic world and the bicoastal; it is really wrong, and they, I agree, yes, I know you do; that's why I'm here. But they have assumptions about things, and the irony is, it makes them very vulnerable to fads and trends because they're not connected with earthy, real things. They don't know where their water comes from, their sewage goes, how the electricity works on their home, how to plumb; they don't know people who work with their hands; they don't, I'm generalizing, but they don't. And the people on the other side, they maybe they're not intellectuals, maybe they're not well-read, maybe they don't understand the laws of the universe, but they're, they're tied to the, to the real things, and they're very, they're full of common sense. So you know, if a Mexican-American electrician—this happened not too long ago—said to me, "I'm not going to let my daughter be in that locker room with a guy who has blank, blank, blank when she's 12 years old," makes sense to people; the people who promote that doesn't. And so that, so getting to, to your question about farming, it's very simple: two-thirds of the people in California have always lived where there's one-third of the precipitation; two-thirds of the precipitation and snow melt occur in two places: along the Sierra Nevada mountains and north of Sacramento. So our grandfathers, my grandfather, your great-great-grandfathers, they came up with an idea; they called the federal project, the Central Valley Project, and the state version came in later with a very good governor who happened to be Pat Brown; he sued the Sierra Club as attorney general to get this reproved. So the idea is, why don't we take the Sacramento tributaries along the Feather, along the Calaveras, along the American, and bring dams, and then channel that water to go south as it does, but when it gets to the Delta and it floods and makes these dams, will prevent it from flooding, and it'll be measured, and then we will pump it out of the Delta into the aqueduct, and it will go down, all, all down the western side of the San Joaquin Valley, and then what's
Lost the Recreation; ugly, and so all the farmers say, “Why do these people understand that when they go to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, the food comes from somewhere?” The people of Los Angeles are then asking what Gavin Newsom said. Well, the reservoirs are all full, and what he meant was, “We haven't had snow in a month, and we are in drought conditions already.” But last year we had a really heavy, a heavy, heavy snow melt, and I let a lot of the water out. But they still can't—it's not all gone, so we have 75%, and it's going down each day. But I think Folsom is only 30%, so he basically lied to California and said, “I didn’t do what I did; they’re full.” They’re not full, and the reservoirs in Los Angeles will not have enough water to be full. So they look at all this and ask, “Was this ever voted on?” It was voted on one time to build reservoirs, but people—in their—in they thought, “Well, these are just stupid farmers and stupid people that want water, and they don't understand the sophisticated ecosystem that I do.” And that that was what.
So when you see the Los Angeles thing, it transcends farming; it was like an electric shock to the whole green DEI mentality. You started to learn certain things about it; it was a pastime of very elite, wealthy people. So suddenly they were saying, “Well, there’s no police protection; we have my house burned down, but I had a safe and I had Krugerrands and gold and all these things.” And people are, “Well, what did you think when you voted to decriminalize looting and theft to $950?” And then they said, “Well, we cleaned out all of our area around our house, but the over the the city on and the county on that hill,” and they said the milk vetch was a protected species of bush, so they never, they never cleaned it off, and the fire came right up and it burned the milk vetches and then burned my house down. Yes, that's what it does. When some people come in and they try to sue the city and say that’s a milk vetch, a protected species, and it was like, “Oh wow, the mayor doesn't know anything about.” We have and the fire chief has 100 fire vehicles that are sitting there with no money to repair them. And she says that her job starts when the water comes out the hydrant, and the the deputy mayor of safety is under house supervision because he fell. And they think, “Well, who hired these people?” You did, because they fit a particular ideology whose consequences you’re never subject to because your ZIP code, your money, your degree, your network of friends protect you from that. And that’s what they—that was a shock.
So when you look at the whole California disaster of paying 13.3% top income tax—high, second highest, highest gas tax, fourth highest sales tax, 45th in test scores—as you look at how some of the traffic magazines rate our freeways, about 48, you ask that question, then you to say, “Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Kamala Harris, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom; they’re all from the same place, they’re all from the same class, they’re all very wealthy, they all have estates.” And I could go to cabins; May be living in a $9 million home; Jerry’s got a big uh Grass Valley estate; Feinstein had one of the most beautiful homes in Tahoe; Barbara Boxer’s at Ranch Mirage. But their policy made sure that people where I live can’t buy a house because of the regulations; it’s so hard to do, or they made sure that food is very expensive, or there’s no natural gas, and because it doesn’t affect them because they have enough money that they don’t really care about the rates. They can either get their income and capital gains or get ride up, but they don’t really worry about it. And then something like Los Angeles happens, and now that everybody’s dumbfounded, “My God, I’m not insulated from this.” No, you’re not, because you—you meaning the people of Los Angeles—you voted for a city council that has 14 people out of 15 in the same party. You voted for a state governance—forget about whether Democrats or Republicans—but everybody knows under our system you want 50/50 or 40/60 or some kind of diversity of thought, but we have a—no Statewide attorney general, controller, Lieutenant Governor—all one party super majorities, and the legislator—one party; nine out of 52 congressional seats are Republicans; 14 out of 15 people on the city council—same party. That could go on.
But when you have that monolithic monopoly of thought, and you can get away with it because the state is so wealthy and you’ve got all these tech—$9 trillion here and market capitalization—you got—you inherited this wonderful UC system, state college system, Water Project center from a very different type of generation, which you now denigrate—the old nutty Republicans or, you know, that was a Ronald Reagan, George Pete Wilson project. So this is where we’re in—on a state level and a national level, there’s a complete re-examination right now of what we’ve seen, and it’s not a political thing; it’s more of a cultural, social counterrevolution. Now, I think it’s kind of be boiled down as: these people are not capable people; they’re very dangerous people. And the fact that where they went to college or what color their skin is or what uh sexual orientation they are—we don’t care; we don’t care what the resume says; they just want to judge people on what they do, and they’re found wanting. And that was what the election, I think, was about; it’s not—it—it wasn’t so much about Donald Trump; it was about this stuff that I’m talking about. Yeah, how do you see that divide again? Again, it is nice to make it very concrete what you see the two sides of this divide as being. And then the last time we spoke was just a few days before the election; how explicitly do you see this divide being reflected in the outcome?
Well, this was an election about two things. Uh, it was the Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that had expanded its residence because it brought in people who had not been in the party, and he deliberately tried to do that. So the Garbage Truck stunt, the McDonald’s stunt, the Madison Square Garden—so he comes into Madison Square Garden; nobody in their mind had ever seen that menagerie in one place: RFK, Dana White, Hulk Hogan, Speaker Johnson, Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk—right, all in one place. So it was that; Hogan cannot be forgotten. Yes, so they’re all there, and they represented folk heroes—left-wing, right-wing, rich, poor, crazy, normal—everything. So it was that ecumenical effort. And then the second thing was people in 2020 thought Donald Trump was too chaotic, and sober, judicious old joke from Scranton was going to bring—as—as I—I went back and looked at his uh speeches in the primary when he ran against the—it was unity, unity, unity. And although he catered to the hard left after the South Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, excuse me, Nevada—he lost the first three, and he was going nowhere, and he was cognitively—people had said that—not me; Cory Booker said that on a debate. So then the powers that be said, “These people in our party are not electable.” Barack Obama was electable because he was a brilliant rhetorician and charismatic; these people aren’t—Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie—said they’re not going to win, but we can get old Joe Biden and put him as a veneer, and then we’ll run the country. And that’s what they did; they knew he was—but so what had happened—it wasn’t—we had a porous border; we had no border; it wasn’t—we decided gradually to get out of Afghanistan; we just left and left $50 billion dollars of equipment to terrorists; it wasn’t that we let China do a little bit; we let them have a Chinese spy balloon go across the United States with impunity; we had our two diplomats in March dressed down and insulted in Anchorage by China; it wasn’t that we said we’re going to ease up on crime; we redefined crime basically with critical legal theory where we didn’t even arrest Biden offenders under these George Soros Finance 15 or 16 Chelsea Chelsea Budin or George gcan; they were letting people out who committed real crimes. So it was a revolutionary moment; partly it was a—I think the COVID lockdown part; it was Trump part; it was the George Floyd—but whatever it was, people didn’t like it. So they said in 2024, “I’m tired of hyperinflation; I’m tired of being humiliated abroad; I’m tired of crime; I’m tired of the president mumbling and stumbling, and I don’t even—” So some of it was that they didn’t like Trump, but they voted against Biden, and some was they thought Trump was an anecdote to this. Well, he was the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote; he won the House; he won the Senate with the Supreme Court; he’s got a sort of a mandate; we’ll see if he can govern with it.
No, on the on the one hand we have the quote-unquote intellectual elites who are purportedly not actually competent, and then we have the people without these prestigious degrees but have a tie to some skill and value—competence. Something that I find quite interesting here in this dichotomy is that one of the main topics of discussion in the media right now is Trump’s cabinet picks, and the allegations from the left are unilaterally that these nominees are unqualified; they don’t have these prestigious degrees; they don’t have the requisite experience; they uh in many ways are probably brash or unpredictable. And since you’ve mentioned some of these names already, like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, uh RFK, I’m wondering, because these are very important issues, if we could talk about them one by one maybe, because I’d like to hear your thoughts on—well, one, what are the allegations against them, and do they hold any merit—hold any weight? Okay, there’s three things that they all have in common; we don’t have to go through all 13 of them, but they’re similar. Number one, they’re a reaction to 2017 to 21, so he was in there at the first time, and all of a sudden he didn’t know anybody, and they all came to him and said we’re going to have these. So it turned out that Rex Tillerson almost immediately said that he was an idiot and that he knew better about foreign policy. I know Jim Mattis; I like him, but he—his—his idea was that he—Donald Trump didn’t understand NATO and all these things; there was Anonymous in Homeland Security was writing all this stuff about—he was going to internally block—I am a great friend of H.R. McMaster, so I don’t include him, but his replacement, John Bolton, basically said Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. So he—so he said this time I’m not going to have to have all this internal dissension—number one. Number two, I want to look at the people who had all the résumés, so you have—have Lloyd Austin; he came out of Ron, and he’s going to go back to Ron; he had a prostate problem; he was gone for seven days and never told anybody; he was completely AWOL on the job; he was the person along with General Milley who told us that the Afghan Army was viable; it collapsed, and he didn’t—so he has all the résumés; Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State; he has all the résumés. As soon as they came in, they did about five things: they restored oil sales to Iran; they begged them to get back on the Iran deal; they suspended, by the way, offensive arms approved by Trump to Ukraine, and they started pressuring Israel. I could go on a long exit Jesus, but I think that had a lot to do—that attitude with Afghanistan, that end of deterrence with what happened with Putin going into Ukraine, and by the way, he’d gone—he’s of the last four administrations, he went in three of them but not one, and there was a reason for that. So all of the people that these controversial people are replacing had what they didn’t—they had acceptability in terms of degrees and experience, and yet they all have been wanting in their jobs. Merrick Garland weaponized the the DOJ; we’re never going to see anything—uh FBI—Robert Mueller said under oath he was the special counsel, but he had been—that he had no idea what the Steele dossier—I don’t know what it is; I don’t know it—those were the catalysts for his appointment; his successor, James Comey, said 245 times, “I don’t know; I forgot,” under oath; his successor, Andrew McCabe, lied four times—a federal investigator; Bill Barr should have charged him, but he said, “You know what, good would that do?” And then we had Christopher Wray whose FBI spied on parents at school board meetings. I mean, so the second thing was that Trump was saying, “These people with all these sober, judicious—they’re politicized or weaponized; they’re incompetent, and um they’re dangerous, so I’m going to get people who are loyal; we’re not going to have the mess of the first one,” just like Obama did; he fired almost everybody; I can tell you I was on the American Battlefield Monuments Commission—as apolitical—as soon as Obama came in, he fired me and he fired every Republican on that commission, and that’s what Obama did, and I don’t blame him; that was what he wanted—people on the same team, but Trump didn’t, so he’s going to do what most people do—get a team in there, and he’s going to get people who don’t fit that background of Merrick Garland, Lloyd Austin, Blinken, Sullivan, Alejandro Mayorkas; he destroyed the border; he—he was a Secretary of Homeland Insecurity. And then the third thing, and this is point—it gets back to the point about irony about the Panama Canal, so there was going to be irony, so he said, “To make sure that these people understand what I’m dealing with, I’m going to pick people who have been targeted by these people.” Let’s see—National Institute of Health—that is the most important of all the organizations, and under Francis Collins, they targeted people; in fact, they targeted Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford; they went after him; I’ll make him the head of NIH; FBI—they targeted people; they put surveillance on Kash Patel when he was a congressional—I’m going to make him the head of the FBI; oh, I know—Secretary of Defense—Pete Hegseth wrote a book chronicling all the problems with the revolving door; I’m going to make him the head of the Defense Department; oh—Director of National Intelligence—ah—Tulsi Gabbard—she was on a terrorist watch list; she will be the head of the Director of National Intelligence. So that’s what he did, so it was an effort to get people on the same page, like most people had done, and which he had not done in 2017; it was to get people who were not part of the establishment, and it was—get people who had been aggrieved by the very system that they were now in charge of, and that’s what—I watched the confirmations, and I was really—I mean, it was—there was two things going on; it wasn’t—there wasn’t one question—“Mr. Hegseth, is the Triad still valuable? Do we have the uh submarine Polaris? Do we have the land-based, and we have the bombing uh element of nuclear?” Not one question; it was all—“You were drunk, or you this or this.” But then that brought up the question—who polices the police? Chuck Schumer was talking a lot about—I thought, “Okay, you got a mob outside the Supreme Court at the doors of the Supreme Court, and you yelled—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh—you sowed the wind; you’re going to reap the whirlwind when you don’t know what’s going to hit you,” to—to Supreme Court judges. And almost each person that was talking—I thought Tim Kaine was the funniest because he said that he really—that Pete Hegseth was an adulterer and he—and that disqualified him; he is an adulterer, but he’s a confessed adulterer, but he was one of the biggest supporters of Kamala Harris’s husband who impregnated the nanny and forced her to get an abortion; did he ever say as a matter of principle—I just don’t know; he didn’t say that; he didn’t say anything about Bill Clinton; he said he did once and he felt regretful that he’d ever brought that up. So what was it all about then if it wasn’t about what the actual job was going to be? Pam Bondi here—what do you think the—how many terrorists do you think are in the United States? What do you think is the great—no, it was all about—“Did you do this?” And okay, but if you’re going to go down on that route, you got to make sure that the people are asking the questions have some level of moral integrity and superiority to the people they’re condemning as their inferiors, and they didn’t, and that came off as—it resonated—that these people were the least, and Elizabeth Warren was going on and on; she said, “Well, you said that you shouldn’t have revolving generals; now you’re a hypocrite because you won’t say that you won’t work.” He said, “I’m not a general,” and so she was talking, and you think, “Wait a minute, I remember you—you are in the catalog of the Harvard Law School as the first Native American professor with 0.000000001 DNA, and you use that lie to parlay a professorship from Oakland to Texas to Harvard.” And Elizabeth—does anybody ever think you had ever been hired based on what you actually did as a Harvard law professor unless they could say that you’re—they were—and it said—“Our first Native American law professor.” So now you’re talking about Pete Hegseth not being candid. So the American people look at all this, and—and they’re not dumb; everybody thinks they’re dumb on the coasts, and uh I was—yesterday I was watching that confirmation, and I had a guy in the field, and he was spraying a a pre-emergent herbicide and a knockdown; it’s not easy stuff, and the pump went out, and so he was on his belly underneath the spray rig and he had to keep it agitating so it didn’t settle, trying to fix a leak, and I was talking to him; he knew where the leak was; he knew the danger involved; he had protected equipment, and within 30 minutes he was back on the thing, and I asked—I said, “How long you—” I used to do the same thing, and I was curious uh because he did a lot better job than I used to do, and he did it like that. So what I’m getting at is that there’s a lot of very competent people that make the country run, and I don’t think people appreciate it; they don’t. And there’s a lot of incompetent people who have mastered certain requirements to succeed, and I’m not a revolutionary—say this is unfair; that’s just the way it is, but don’t tell me because that’s the way it is that it represents reality or it’s legitimate, and that’s what this counterrevolution is about; it’s really—it—it’s just so counterintuitive—“Donald Trump is Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!” And then he gets the highest number of Latino and black votes of any Republican, maybe since George Bush—Latinos and—maybe he’s trying to tell people that the black truck driver and the Hispanic electrician and the white plumber all have things in common much more with each other than the white guy does with the Stanford professor than the Hispanic electrician does with the Latina anchorwoman, and maybe the black uh plumber or carpenter has more with these guys than he does Joy Reid. That was what the election was about; it was about a class, and it was—it was—it was kind of remarkable; it really was—whether it’s going to be sustainable, I don’t know, because this is all—populist movements can be very erratic and unsustainable; he’s got a huge coalition, and they’ve all got different agendas.
Well, just to make sure that we run the gamut in this—in this time we have—I want to get back to some of the challenges that you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, and you mentioned theater wars; I’m going to add in potential theater wars, and we also spoke a bit about the Panama Canal, and China came up in that context. So first off, how in general do you see our relationship with China right now, and to what extent does Trump face a challenge here? Well, China says it’s looked at the COVID lockdown; it looked at the George Floyd aftermath; it looks like the Biden administration; it looks at the DEI woke revolution; it looks at the Green Revolution, and it understands us, so it can build two coal plants a month and then attack us for global warming; it can have a million Uyghurs in camps and have signs during COVID that Africans can’t go into McDonald’s and will call us uh a history of racism and a yellow peril and and racism against Chinese. So it has our number, and that things that we’re in decline, and it’s got 1.4 billion people, and our GDP is still higher—than not a lot but still higher—and we only have 330 million. So they say, “I don’t know what this country is doing; it looks decadent to me, but one American produces more goods and services than four Chinese, and our system doesn’t work, so we’re going to appropriate all their technology, and we’re going to send 300,000 people over here to—to—to be taught that there, and we’re going to bring it all back, and we’re going to have this communist monolithic authoritarian—we won’t get into all this messy democracy—and we’re going to beat them, and we’re going to become a hegemon, and it’s going to be a different type of—” And that’s what they think, and they—they get frustrated because they think they have the population; they think they have the discipline; they think they have uh better craftsmanship as far as stealing our ideas, and yet they—they—they’re not there yet, and they keep thinking—“What’s the next thing? Belt and Road? Oh my God, we owe—all these countries are angry; it’s not—oh, we’ll have a huge middle class like the United States; oh, we have a real estate bubble.” So when you have an authoritarian system like they—they do, it’s very efficient in the short term, but in the long term it’s not, so they are very frustrated, and their whole point is to dethrone the United States and to create a post-post-war world with them as the adjudicator, and we’ve seen what they do to people when you’re in their orbit, and they’re very resentful of Australia and Japan and North uh South Korea and Taiwan, and they think this is our orbit, and they’re free democracies, and they like the United States, and they look at the EU and they say that’s where the United States is going—disarmed, 1.45 fertility rate, socialist uh—and we want the United States to be just like that, and we’re not yet. So it’s an existential threat—has to be managed—they’re—they’re on a breakneck—they’re building more ships; they’re building more nuclear weapons per month than we are—everything—but we have a big head start, so we’ve got to—Joe Biden said they were not a rival; he said that literally—they are a rival. The key with China is if we did to China what they’re doing to us, they would go to war with us. So if we sent 300,000 Americans over there and they were systematically—1% of them bringing technology back—or we sent a balloon across the Chinese—or we started to uh do things uh about their uh espionage, cyberattacks—they would go crazy. So it’s all predicated—the United States doesn’t do what we do, and the world—the United States doesn’t do what we do; they create it. So it’s—it’s uh very dangerous, and uh that’s—that’s an existential threat; there’s no doubt about it. And um if you look at the Middle East, that’s the most chaotic and optimistic that I’ve seen in my lifetime, really, because we pressured and pressured and pressured Israel and tried to keep distance from it; Biden at times couldn’t do that because he had people within the Democratic party and the opposition that wouldn’t let him do, but he wanted to continue the Obama strategic tension—you know, empower the Shia, the Persians, and play them off against Israel and have tension. But if we had this conversation a year ago and I said to you, “Iran’s going to send 500 projectiles into Israel; only about 1% are going to do anything and no damage, and in retaliation Israel is going to send 300 planes and destroy entirely all of their air defenses, leaving it completely naked and can be destroyed anytime they want; then they’re going to go into Hezbollah and they’re going to target with pagers and walk and blow up 4,000 explosions, and then they’re going to go into No Man’s Land, the the graveyard of empires, and to Lebanon, and they’re going to destroy the whole apparatus of Hezbollah, and then they’re going to go into Gaza after October 7th and destroy this terrorist apparatus, and then they’re going to finally retaliate to Houthis and destroy their port facilities and their power grid—they’ve done some of that—and then, oh, by the way, they’re going to—so weaken Iran and so weaken Hezbollah that the Syrian Assad, arch-enemy of the United—it’s going to fall, and it’s going to be chaos,” no one would believe you, and that’s where we are now. And so there’s—it’s chaos, and there’s a lot of opportunity for the United States and the West and and moderate Arabs to come in, but it wasn’t—it wasn’t because of Antony Blinken. And so when I listened to that lecture from Biden two days ago to the State Department about all this—what I just entailed that he did—it was all despite him, not because of him; it was because of this person—they consider a monster—of Benjamin Netanyahu, who they thought would be out, and they wanted him out, and so he had this amazing comeback, and he basically destroyed the ability of enemies of half a century to harm Israel and harm the West, and uh it was very—it’s very—it’s kind of what we talked about once with Donald Trump—he—he’s a tragic hero because he did more to curb terrorism and to stop uh radical Islamic people injuring the West than anybody has, and the West hated him for it. So it was—but—not—they didn’t hate him enough to say, “Wait a minute, don’t—don’t destroy that; don’t destroy Hezbollah, or—well, you were too—you went into Hamas, but you went into Gaza; you shouldn’t have, but it’s not—we’re not criticizing you; you did that to Hamas, and please don’t start a war, but it’s kind of good what you did to Iran, but we don’t do it—we don’t like people who do what you do, but we’ll take the benefits from it.” That’s the essence of a Sophoclean hero.
Well, Victor, I always—always love these conversations; I think this is the fifth time you’ve been on the show, and you’ve—I mean, become a friend and one of my favorite guests that I have, and I—I’m looking forward to continuing this in um a couple of months when we see what the—the first couple of months of Trump’s presidency—going to be very interesting; it’ll be very interesting. Um, there’s a window that he can do pretty much—they can get an agenda through, but then Obama started out that way; he won the House and Senate, and then—then he had the Tea Party two years later, and he lost 62, 63 seats; same thing can happen to any president, but we’ll see. The key is whether the—the person is the movement or the movement is the person, and this time around it’s not just Donald Trump; he’s created a movement, and it’s ecumenical and it’s diverse, but it transcends race, and that’s very—that’s very I think good, and it’s—it’s a middle-class movement, and that—and that’s the largest class in the United States. So I never thought I’d see Elon Musk on the same page with a longshoreman union. All right, well, thanks again, and—and we will talk again soon. Thank you. [Music]