Larry Swiker joins me in the War Room to discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the impact it has had on American politics and politics in general election day, and how it applies to today's political landscape. We also talk about how the loss of a presidential candidate like Charlie Kirk changed American politics forever.
00:07:21.000The individual that's probably, I think, at his age, the greatest individual this country's produced politically, culturally, since the revolution.
00:07:32.000Remember, all of the revolution with 30.
00:07:34.000Charlie Kirk, hell, he's 31 years old.
00:07:37.000He's been doing this since he was 18, 17 or 18.
00:19:06.000The important things, I believe, are the underlying policies that are driving the movement, maybe a part of people aren't coalescing around.
00:19:18.000I talked about this, you know, earlier in the week on, I think it was the Tuesday...
00:19:25.000I don't think it was Christmas Eve, but the Tuesday show, I had Rabbi Willicki in, in the morning, which he talked about, you know, the situation in Syria and Rabbi Willicki and Laura Loomer, who I name checked right there, talk about Israeli, Israel sovereignty and our independence.
00:19:41.000Well, let's say subsequent to that, it came out in the papers that Ron Dermer, who I worked very closely with in the first Trump administration, particularly Ron was, I think he was ambassador from Israel to the United States at the time.
00:20:00.000Also, somebody worked with us very closely on moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
00:20:04.000He is now, it's now been announced that he's working on a strategic plan underneath Prime Minister Netanyahu.
00:20:13.000And that plan is to wait for it, draw down all American assistance, starting the MOU we have as a kind of ally or we don't really, we're not really an ally, but this kind of partnership.
00:20:27.000Outlining this memorandum of understanding runs out in 2028.
00:20:31.000And there had been talk before is that, oh, they're going to do, you know, one that's going to be a hundred billion dollars and it's going to last for 50 years.
00:20:38.000And, you know, the neocons are all upset that these populists are, you know, talking about Israel and not defensive Israel.
00:20:47.000This is not about the defense of Israel.
00:20:49.000As I said in that speech, this is about the greater Israel project and people that are Israel first.
00:20:58.000And now you see Netanyahu's governments responding to that.
00:21:03.000What they're doing is saying, hey, at the end of the MOU this time, instead of extending for 50 years with a two trillion dollar deal or whatever they were talking about a couple of weeks ago, we're actually going to draw down.
00:21:16.000We want to do a memorandum of understanding that actually draws down to no American assistance.
00:21:22.000So as Rabbi Walicki talked about that, they can have, you know, freedom of movement in places like Syria or even Iran.
00:21:31.000As I said before, an independent and sovereign Israel, if they want to take on Turkey and Syria, if they want to do if they want to go after the Persians, as long as they're not drawn, drawn us into it.
00:21:43.000And if we're not giving them five billion a year and that's the minimum we give them, there's all types of other support system.
00:21:49.000But if we don't and they're sovereign and independent, make their own decisions as they should, because they shouldn't be a protectorate of the United States.
00:21:56.000They don't need to be a protector of the United States, obviously, since the interest of both countries are going to go in different directions.
00:22:02.000What do I mean by that? Well, look, it's you know, the policy right now of the U.S. government is very much that it's a two state solution, something I fought against ever since I've kind of gotten involved in politics.
00:22:14.000You have a two state solution. You have it because of the overreach of the overreach, I think, of the Israel first crowd in this greater Israel project, which is to expand Israel out into Lebanon, into Syria, into Iraq, all the way to the two to Iran, into Egypt and the Sinai.
00:22:34.000And it's just not feasible and it can't be done. It certainly can't be done with American support because that would draw us into one conflict after the other. Netanyahu understands this.
00:22:44.000Now, I don't want to take credit for it. I don't want to take credit for it. I won't take full credit for it. But I've been hammering this one for a while and people have gone out of their way, particularly the Israel first crowd has gone out of their way to kind of, you know, change what the conversation is really about.
00:22:58.880This is what it's about. And now that you have Ron Dermer, who I think is one of the smartest strategic thinkers in Israel, and that you have Ron Dermer under the guidance of Netanyahu actually coming forward and going to put forward a proposal.
00:23:14.000To say we want Israel to be independent and sovereign. I think that's a step in the right direction. I want to bring in Larry Swiker. Larry, would you start, you really got interested in Trump as a, as kind of not just a person, but a force of history.
00:23:31.140Was it in 2014 or 2015? Because I remember when I was at Breitbart and then when I took over the campaign in, in August of 2016, you already had a pretty definitive outlook on, on, on, on the MAGA movement.
00:23:46.700What, what, what, give me your thoughts. When did you really start looking at Trump as someone that you thought would actually have an impact and was speaking totally differently than the traditional Republicans that you had covered so closely?
00:24:00.000In 2015, sometime early in 2015, I met Ted Cruz and talked to him a lot. And at that time I thought, and this is going to be the guy.
00:24:09.540But after I had conversations with him, I go, now there's something missing there. And it was about that time that I was on vacation in Arizona and I noticed that Trump was on TV and they had to move his speech from the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, which is good, but it's, it doesn't have a big auditorium, to the Arizona Convention Center in downtown Phoenix, which seats 10,000.
00:24:35.200And I thought there's something to this. You don't do this every day. This guy must have something. He must be saying something that people are responding to.
00:24:43.940Now, you know, as well as I do, that in 26, 2006, President Bush had attempted with this gang of eight, a illegal immigration reform that was going to be a basic form of amnesty.
00:24:58.040And people revolted at the time. Rush Limbaugh engaged in the only request he ever made for people to call into D.C. on an issue. And they shut that down.
00:25:08.740But no one between that time and the end of Obama's term was talking at all about illegal immigration except Donald Trump.
00:25:17.280And I thought this guy gets it. Now, if he has any other policies that are along with that one, he's going to be a force.
00:25:25.800And by the end of 2015, I was telling everybody who had listened he was going to win the Republican nomination.
00:25:35.320I won some famous bets that people welched on. But nevertheless, I predicted that.
00:25:39.720And then, you know, in 2016, I started to follow the voter registration patterns in about seven or eight key swing states.
00:25:48.580And they were all pointing toward a narrow Trump victory.
00:25:52.940And so I said in my book, why how Trump won, which came out came out after the election, but it was written before the election that Trump was going to win.
00:26:02.620And I said was between three hundred and three twenty electoral votes. And the final was three or four.
00:26:10.420What was it about? Because here, this is why I started off with the speech about you're going through you go through different times in American political history where the issues just things change.
00:26:21.900Right. The country or underlying forces. What was it about?
00:26:26.100Because you, correct me if I'm wrong, you you come at things very much as a classic limited government, maximum liberty, maybe not a libertarian, but small government, lower taxes, low involvement in your life.
00:26:43.580Conservative, which Israel was, you know, one of the central parts of the foreign policy, the Republican Party.
00:26:48.560But you came at things in a pretty standard, in a pretty classical way that the Ted Cruz was really in that vertical for that 16, 15, 16 primary.
00:26:59.480Ted Cruz was the guy for that vertical. Right. He was he was the guy that was running as that guy. Correct.
00:27:05.180Yeah. Yeah. The thing is, and I've written a biography of Reagan.
00:27:10.860Reagan, I don't think, foresaw what was going to happen with the open borders eventually with NAFTA, with that kind of stuff.
00:27:17.840I think he really believed in the 1980s that that that free total free trade, regardless of what our trade opponents were doing to us, that it would still carry the day.
00:27:28.840It's the old Milton Friedman argument that free trade will win no matter what.
00:27:33.140Well, that may be true if you can sustain yourself over a few hundred years.
00:27:36.780But as we was becoming clear by the end of the Reagan administration, there was a hollowing out of American business going overseas.
00:27:45.400And again, Trump in mid-2015 started to talk about that in ways nobody else was.
00:27:53.320And I said, well, yeah, I'm a free trader, but we don't have free trade with China and with much of Europe, because even though they may or may not have tariffs, some did, some didn't.
00:28:04.340Nevertheless, they were restricting trade on their shelves.
00:28:07.140So I began to see Trump as a transitional figure away from the classical Republican Party of a strong foreign policy,
00:28:24.060a very interventionist foreign policy, and one, a Republican Party that didn't pay any attention at all to the lower middle class or the blue collar,
00:28:35.480truly middle middle class, that they were really more of an upper middle class party.
00:28:41.220And I saw Trump hitting all of these buttons.
00:28:44.960And I said, well, you know, if the thesis doesn't fit the evidence, you better change your thesis.
00:28:52.000And so I started to see Trump's value, which Lenin would never do, by the way.
00:29:11.500I want to get more into this, because I want to talk about your books.
00:29:14.460You're one out now about the 21st century coming out.
00:29:18.660And it's a good way, I think, to have people collect their thoughts and think about things towards the end of the year as we get ready for what will be a quite intense year for MAGA 2026.
00:29:29.220Short commercial break, Larry Schweikert, the historian, co-author of The Patriot's History of the United States, a blockbuster bestseller.
00:30:27.780They sell a right off the debt to clear their books.
00:30:31.220That means if you have credit card debt and unpaid bills, lenders may be more open to negotiating and settling your account before you're in.
00:30:39.680That means right now, and I mean right now, you may actually have leverage.
00:30:45.520And Dumb with Debt knows how to use this to your advantage.
00:30:48.620They monitor lender trends and understand the year-end pressure on creditors.
00:30:53.760They use that timing to negotiate hard on your behalf.
00:30:58.200Now's the time to get out from under crushing debt and interest payments without bankruptcy or taking on new loans.
00:31:05.700Dumb with Debt goes to work for you month one with one clear goal, to reduce your total debt and leave you with more money every month.
00:31:15.000Get started now, because your leverage may disappear at the end of the year.
00:31:22.080Chat with a Done With Debt specialist at donewithdebt.com.
00:31:41.060In 2015, Chris Cruz was going to be that guy for the classical limited government conservatives.
00:31:48.040And I was running Breitbart at the time, so I knew it took a lot of incoming from those, as Ben Shapiro accuses me of turning Breitbart into Trump Pravda.
00:31:57.000When did you know, back in 2015, when did you know that, hey, Trump really is, I know it was about the Phoenix thing, which I think was the first big rally he had, I think it was right after he announced in June, late June of, before the first debate that Fox had, late June of 2015.
00:32:15.180But what did your friends, you're incredibly well-known.
00:32:17.680I've done a ton of stuff with you before where you teach at all these groups that try to bring in youth, right?
00:32:26.880I guess you and Peter Schweitzer, you always teach.
00:32:30.100You were very involved in the classical conservative side of Republican politics.
00:32:36.060What kind of blowback did you get from people that respect you?
00:32:40.000And plus, you were a huge name because you had done the blockbuster that I think Glenn Beck had talked about and sent it to number one.
00:32:48.320I believe it's the most published history book in the history of the country, the Patriots' history of the United States.
00:32:55.480You were kind of a conservative celebrity.
00:32:58.660When you became an apostate, how were you treated?
00:33:01.260Yeah, I lost some friends, or there's a number of people I can't discuss politics with on the right.
00:33:11.440A number of people, especially a lot of those at NRO that I used to correspond with, to me just simply went nuts.
00:33:22.260That's the national review that I did a four-hour, in fact, just playing over the holidays, I did a four-hour and one-hour segments interview with Sam Tannenhaus that wrote the biography of Buckley.
00:33:36.400People love, but Buckley's national review is not the national review today.
00:33:40.240In fact, in the spring, in March of 2016, they put up the Never Trump or Against Trump, which had all the names on the front of people that were prominent conservatives that were going to oppose Trump under any circumstances.
00:33:57.040So national reviews of the traditional – a lot of people, I'm sure, on that cover were guys saying, hey, Larry, you're one of us.
00:34:04.320What are you doing here with a populist nationalist?
00:34:07.080You know, I had the privilege of introducing William F. Buckley at a speech in Santa Barbara, and me and the female president of the Young Republicans there.
00:34:19.840And Buckley came on stage, and he said, well, Mr. Schweikart proves that the term young intellectual conservative is not an oxymoron.
00:34:30.140And people, of course, are flipping through their dictionaries to figure out what he meant.
00:34:34.220But, yeah, there were a number of people who I thought surely they would just look at the evidence.
00:34:41.260And it wasn't whether or not you agreed with Trump's policies, which I did, but I was trying to convince them, look, all you have to do is look at the polling.
00:34:51.320Look at the voter registration, and you'll see he's going to be the candidate.
00:34:55.700I said this over and over in 2015, and even when Trump took the lead there, I think it was in June or so, and never gave it up except for one two- or three-week period to Ben Carson in October.
00:35:09.840He never lost the lead in the entire Republican primary the rest of that time, and it was usually a very big lead.
00:35:15.380And they refused to believe that he was going to be the nominee.
00:35:19.380I said, no, easily he's going to be the nominee.
00:35:21.600And I believed at that time most Republicans could have beaten Hillary Clinton.
00:35:26.460But I came to change my mind, and I came to understand that politics had changed a great deal from Ronald Reagan's day to Donald Trump's day.
00:35:36.840You know, I make a point to my students that Abraham Lincoln, with his high, screechy voice and his long-winded speeches, would never have made it on radio because his voice wouldn't have been a voice for radio.
00:35:50.620But Franklin Roosevelt had a perfect voice for radio, but he never would have made it in the age of television in the 60s or 70s because there was still a bias against handicapped people.
00:36:01.300So Ronald Reagan was perfect for television in the 70s and 80s because he was so photogenic.
00:36:08.400He memorized the lines easily, didn't have to use a teleprompter, really.
00:36:12.860But I don't think Reagan would make it today because our politics have become much harder-edged, you know, elbow-swinging, if you will.
00:36:22.400It's the difference between, I don't know, the Boston Celtics of Bill Russell and the Detroit Pistons of Bill Ambeer.
00:36:30.000It's just a totally different political world that Trump was particularly attuned to navigating because he didn't mince words.
00:37:03.520Because so many people I knew at the time, the Dave Bosses, really people, close friends who were starting to become Trump people, really their ideal was Ronald Reagan.
00:37:13.660And Trump's a lot of things, but he's not Ronald Reagan.
00:37:15.600What were the forces at work that from the end of the kind of Reagan era in 88, not even taking the Bush, you know, Reagan's third term, what were the forces that drove it that a populist nationalist with a celebrity with zero political experience?
00:37:33.940And not just political experience, but at the time he wasn't, you know, he he he wasn't on the Council of Foreign Relations.
00:37:41.060He hadn't he had any military experience.
00:37:43.320He didn't really go out of his way to be try to be a public intellectual.
00:37:47.740He was truly an entrepreneur and a business guy.
00:37:51.380But what were the underlying forces that you said made it harder edge and made that made the issues different than the 15?
00:38:01.000Because the Republican Party have spent billions of dollars getting each one of the candidates ready in the 15 and 16 primary.
00:38:09.520You know, you had the Libertarians with Rand Paul.
00:38:11.320You had kind of the the broader tent people with Ben Carson.
00:38:15.860You had the corporate people with, you know, some of the corporate candidates.
00:38:20.040You had the Bush, you know, the Bush regime.
00:38:23.680You had Marco Rubio that had kind of been picture perfect.
00:38:55.280You know, Obama said all those jobs are never coming back again.
00:38:59.020What's he going to do? Wave a magic wand.
00:39:01.400Well, actually, you change a few policies and you do have a a magic wand.
00:39:06.420Trump was speaking to all of those people that had been let down both by Bush and by Obama.
00:39:13.760And when you go through books that that have traced the 2016 election, they're very clear on the number of people who voted for Obama twice and then who turned around and voted for Trump, particularly in the key swing counties of Ohio and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania.
00:39:36.220So there was the economic factor, but also there was a cultural factor at work.
00:39:43.620Our society has moved now very, very fast.
00:39:46.860It is the whole society is moving fast.
00:39:49.220Our communication networks are much faster with cell phones.
00:39:53.040And that put a premium on personality and on celebrity status, whereby you didn't have to spend five years building up a political name that people would recognize.
00:40:07.240Trump walked into politics, even though he'd never been in politics before, as a well-known figure because he was on television so much.
00:40:18.840And then lastly, this idea of speaking very clearly about issues without going into, on the other hand, you know, Ronald Reagan had that great saying that he wanted to meet a one-armed economist.
00:40:33.060So he would never say, but on the other hand, and Trump would do that.
00:40:37.600And he was coarse and he was he was often profane in various ways.
00:40:41.820And he would say things that many people wouldn't say.
00:40:46.540What he did say was the very stuff that average people say all the time.
00:40:51.660And so let me segue to what just happened here over the last three months.
00:40:55.840Over the last three months, we have seen the media, or as I like to call it, the hoax news media, consumed by the Kennedy Center renaming, by a tweet or a truth post that Trump made about Rob Reiner, and then before that about the ballroom.
00:41:15.560Now, relatively speaking, these are utterly irrelevant things in the lives of most Americans, yet that's what not only X and Twitter and all these places were spending all their time on, talking about how horrible it was, what Trump was doing.
00:41:29.460But in the meanwhile, Trump was just getting rid of 2.5 million illegal aliens.
00:41:35.800He basically reorganized all of Latin America, except for Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina, into a kind of MAGA version of Latin America.
00:41:46.960And he negotiated about four or five ceasefires around the world.
00:41:51.100And my point has been that Trump now is moving at light speed, and he's moving way too fast for Congress.
00:42:02.240They got done one bill last year, one bill.
00:42:06.060Now, by nature, the American House and Senate, going all the way back, were meant to be slow.
00:42:11.920They didn't want a lot of quick change.
00:42:14.700So the Congress as it is now constituted is totally out of step with what Trump is doing and how fast he's moving.
00:42:23.300And I believe, I can't prove it, but I believe that that is what is responsible for 30 House Republicans saying they'll step down and 22 House Democrats saying they'll step down.
00:42:35.680And just yesterday, Cynthia Loomis, a senator of Wyoming, said she's not going to run, even though she was only elected in 2020, because of, and I quote,
00:42:43.880quote, exhaustion, and she said, I feel like a sprinter in a marathon.
00:42:54.580Is it, from the historical point of view, was the, one thing President Trump ran against, really as a populist nationalist, was this, you know, Gore Vidal called it the Uniparty, I think, first, back in the 60s or 70s.
00:43:09.360But that the official Washington, D.C. has a perspective that they look at things through, and they're Atlanticist, they're globalist, and they really are not, and they're elitist.
00:43:22.340They're not really interested in the common working man, you can tell this by the policies, and they're not really interested in what the common man or woman, working class or middle class, actually think.
00:43:35.140Why did no one pick, why was it Trump that kind of picked that up?
00:43:39.360You know, that's a tough one, is to, he's always had these views.
00:43:44.340You go back and listen to his testimony before Congress, to what he would say to Oprah Winfrey, read his books.
00:43:50.600He's always had these views that were, in many ways, more aligned with the middle class and lower middle class than they ever were with the elites.
00:44:00.080He's just sort of a blue-collar guy that happened to grow up a millionaire, which isn't unusual in American history.
00:44:07.860We have a lot of those guys who, like Theodore Roosevelt for a long time, was very much attuned to working class people and kind of the middle classes.
00:44:17.080What it was that Trump saw, I think, has, in fact, changed over the last six or seven years.
00:44:27.300I think when he came in, he still believed that there was a class of professional politicians that could be reasoned with.
00:44:34.600That they really did love America and that if he just gave them the right programs, showed them how it would benefit Americans, that he would get support and his programs would sail right through.
00:44:45.480And I think what he learned in his first term was that most of these people, not all, but most of them are, in fact, there to make sure nothing ever changes.
00:44:57.220Their goal is to keep the gravy train flowing, especially as you get, like, military kickbacks or whatever.
00:45:04.480And I'm a strong defense guy, but let's not play games.
00:45:08.640A lot of these people have major defense portfolios.
00:45:11.540Larry, hang on, Larry, hang on, hang on, hang on one second.
00:45:14.580We're going to take a short commercial break.
00:45:17.880America's populist historian and conservative.
00:45:49.260And what we promised to do and committed to, and this is why we work with Birch, was to not talk, you know, it's not about the price, because the price is going to fluctuate, but it's the forces that drive value.
00:46:01.620You know, understanding fiat currency, understanding the dollar as the prime reserve currency, understanding the world's financial system and how dependent upon it is upon the dollar, understanding the forces against the dollar.
00:46:13.880You know, these massive debt, huge deficits, interest payments, you know, up to $2 trillion, I think, in 2035, $2 trillion per year in interest alone.
00:46:24.120And what the force is against the dollar, and make sure you understand why central banks were going to commence buying gold at record rates, which is what's happened over the last three years.
00:46:34.720Birchgold.com, end of the dollar empire.
00:46:37.400It's not that we want the dollar empire to end.
00:46:39.460I think we have to have a national debate on that.
00:46:41.900There's many, many benefits of being the prime reserve currency.
00:46:44.740There's also, comes with tremendous responsibilities.
00:46:48.060And that ought to be part of a national discussion on both our fiscal and monetary policies.
00:46:53.400But go get it today, and you will understand why gold has been a hedge for, I don't know, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years of man's history, and why it's a central hedge for the world's financial system today.
00:47:26.120Every dream you've ever had is in that home.
00:47:28.300If you're lucky enough to own one, the average age of a first-time buyer is 40 years old.
00:47:35.000That's one of the underlying dynamics of the modern age that drove Donald Trump to be a populist nationalist candidate and to win the presidency, as we say here in the war room, three times.
00:47:54.000You get a 14-day free trial now on their $1 million triple lock protection, so you can try it and see if it fits your needs or not.
00:48:02.240I guarantee you it will take away the angst and anxiety of whether it's, you know, cyber attack, AI, rogue lawyer, rogue accountant, rogue relative.
00:48:13.900Talk to Natalie Dominguez's name, HomeTitleLock.com, promo code Steve.
00:48:18.280Larry, that was, you know, you come across as very scholarly, you know, historian with all these kind of bestsellers.
00:48:27.240But that's a pretty radical statement you made to end that segment.
00:48:32.000You said, hey, Trump came in and he was kind of idealistic in the way that he had a bunch of politicians there, even guys in his own party.
00:48:39.340You know, the Mitch McConnell's on Paul Ryan, all he had to do is put forward the case of why his policies make sense and everything would be nirvana.
00:48:46.840He didn't realize that the system is actually kind of ossified that they're working against the interests of the American people.
00:48:52.640And you basically implied or said knowingly working against the interests of the American people to basically feather their own beds, increase their power and make more money.
00:49:02.420Do you honestly – is that your current beliefs?
00:49:05.560And if so, given when I read your books on history, I don't come away with that that's – you've had individual bad actors, but you didn't have systemic problems.
00:49:19.740It's been occurring – you know, Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex for a lot of reasons.
00:49:26.700This was one of them, that there would be feedback loops set up in which people in Congress would approve weapons systems because their portfolios had various weapons contractors in them north or, you know, general dynamics, whatever it is.
00:49:43.480I hate to use the term corrupt, but I would say I think a majority, not all, but a majority of the actors in the House and in the Senate are in fact tied into one lobby or another in such a way so that rationally they say, well, we shouldn't allow this to happen.
00:50:13.700I see that as a pivotal moment in the minimizing and what I think will be the ultimate loss of almost all power in the House and in the Senate.
00:50:25.080In 1995, Newt Gingrich and the class of 94, the freshman class that had all these great names in it, went up against Clinton and had a government shutdown.
00:50:36.620And after a few months of bad media, Newt caved.
00:50:41.560And he never had the same kind of power after that at all.
00:50:44.980Well, what has happened since then is that Congress increasingly has been unable to force a showdown over a budget.
00:50:55.520And either you're going to, you know, shut down the government until somebody agrees to have a budget or you're going to have to impeach whoever is in there.
00:51:04.180And that's not going to work because you can never convict them.
00:51:08.000So when you get up to Obama, he spent his entire term really on Obamacare.
00:51:48.680So for all intents and purposes, unless Mike Johnson puts on some jets here, there wouldn't be a whole lot of difference between a Democrat Congress in 2027 and what we have now.
00:52:02.120But the investigative power and the ability to send subpoenas and slow everything down, Larry, hang on.
00:52:11.300We're going to discuss this for the whole second hour.
00:52:13.040And I want to put your writings, because the amazing thing about you that I find is not only you're one of our best historians, that you really got Trump early and you're quite practical and pragmatic when it comes to actually understand the basic mechanics of national politics.