The Charlie Kirk Show - 6 Presidents Who Tried to Drain the Swamp with Larry Schweikart

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Dragon Slayers. 0.97

00:00:02.000 What presidents have tried to take on the swamp and have they been successful before?

00:00:07.000 We talk about that and so much more on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show with Larry Schweikert, author of Dragon Slayers.

00:00:14.000 You guys can email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:18.000 Just email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:39.000 tpusa.com.

00:00:42.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:43.000 Here we go.

00:00:44.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:46.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:48.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:51.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:54.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:56.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:57.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

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00:01:28.000 I'm honored and excited to have a conversation with someone that I have followed on Twitter.

00:01:34.000 When I used to have Twitter for quite some time, he had the best Twitter feed going into the 2020 election.

00:01:41.000 He's a smart man, and it's an honor to have him on the show.

00:01:43.000 Larry Schweikert, author of Dragon Slayer, Six Presidents and Their War with the Swamp.

00:01:49.000 Larry, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:51.000 How are you doing, Charlie?

00:01:52.000 Yeah, those are the glory days when I had 130,000 Twitter followers.

00:01:58.000 Those were the glory days.

00:02:00.000 And forget the followers.

00:02:01.000 The wisdom you had was extraordinary.

00:02:03.000 I got to tell you, you were spot on.

00:02:06.000 You predicted Florida going landslide for Trump before anybody else.

00:02:10.000 You were on top of that thing.

00:02:11.000 You really were.

00:02:12.000 So, first, just tell our audience about your background.

00:02:15.000 And then I want to talk about your book, which I find to be super interesting.

00:02:18.000 Sure.

00:02:19.000 Well, I'm a native Arizonian and I went to Arizona State University and got a degree in political science, which I found totally useless.

00:02:28.000 And then I joined a rock band.

00:02:31.000 I'd been playing rock and roll all my time through college and high school.

00:02:34.000 And we went on the road and opened for groups like Steppenwolf and Savoy Brown and cut a couple of records that didn't go anywhere.

00:02:46.000 It was interesting.

00:02:47.000 Somebody brought up today the Who.

00:02:49.000 We played the Troubadour, which is the place that broke Delton John.

00:02:53.000 And we had one set on a Monday night.

00:02:56.000 And the Who came in just after we started our set and stayed through the whole set.

00:03:01.000 And when we got done, they walked off.

00:03:03.000 They slapped me on the back.

00:03:04.000 Pete Townsend slaps me on the back and goes, play good show, walk.

00:03:08.000 So they were totally drunk.

00:03:10.000 So I don't know what that said about our music.

00:03:12.000 Okay.

00:03:13.000 Well, so you're the author of this new book, Dragon Slayers.

00:03:17.000 So as Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, my man Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.

00:03:26.000 So, and thank you.

00:03:28.000 Please promote it.

00:03:29.000 It's a very interesting take.

00:03:31.000 It says, you basically six presidents and their war with the swamp.

00:03:35.000 So the way we define the swamp on this program is the fourth branch of government, the deep state, the unelected, right?

00:03:41.000 Kind of the German historicist model of infiltrating the constitutional order with a subversive, suppressive group of people that are always trying to have their agenda implemented.

00:03:52.000 How would you define it?

00:03:54.000 Well, I like Bannon's definition, which is the administrative state.

00:03:59.000 And it was started early on.

00:04:04.000 It really starts with Martin Van Buren, one of the people who came out more than almost anybody else in history because he was the eighth president.

00:04:16.000 Right.

00:04:18.000 And as I said, he stepped on the stage, just collapsed, had a massive financial panic the minute he became president.

00:04:26.000 But he had created a spoil system to protect slavery.

00:04:31.000 And this is why I try to insist to people, you know, the Democratic Party was created and founded and formed for one purpose only, and that was to protect and preserve slavery.

00:04:44.000 That was the entire basis for which Van Buren and Andrew Jackson create the party.

00:04:49.000 And to do so, they set up a system whereby loyalists to the party would be rewarded with jobs, what we call the spoil system or, you know, the administrative state, because you got to put these guys somewhere.

00:05:01.000 So you put them in bureaus and agencies and so on and so forth.

00:05:06.000 And up till the time of the Civil War, this wasn't a very big deal because the Democrats more or less had total control of government for about 30 years.

00:05:15.000 But then Lincoln gets elected and everything changes because now it's sort of like Trump, the wrong guy's in charge of this giant apparatus that we built and could be a real threat with it.

00:05:27.000 So I deal with Lincoln's war with the slave swamp, which was also known as the slave power conspiracy.

00:05:35.000 And it was very real.

00:05:36.000 It was a real group.

00:05:38.000 And he was a genius in how he and the other Republicans of the day figured out, you know, slavery is not in the Constitution.

00:05:45.000 They don't mention the word slave.

00:05:47.000 They talk about unfree persons. 1.00

00:05:50.000 And they latched onto the personhood of black people to emancipate them.

00:05:55.000 Because if the Southerners had had their way, they would have been treated as property.

00:06:00.000 But nowhere in the Constitution are slaves mentioned as property.

00:06:04.000 They're always people.

00:06:06.000 So when we come out of Lincoln's time, we get to Grover Cleveland, whom I call the last good Democrat.

00:06:14.000 And he's faced with this giant spoil system now that Lincoln created to run the war.

00:06:22.000 And what you find is that people, especially in the Grand Army of the Republic and other veterans groups, are getting tons of money from the federal government, and they never even were in the war.

00:06:34.000 I mean, you got guys claiming pensions that fell out of a tree two years after the war, right?

00:06:39.000 And so Cleveland is amazing in that he steps in to attack this swamp.

00:06:47.000 And next to Lincoln is the most successful of all of our presidents in dealing with it because he really cuts it down.

00:06:54.000 They pass a bill called the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which, like most reforms, doesn't really fix the problem, just kind of shifts it to a different direction.

00:07:06.000 But at least Cleveland fixed the notion that Congress and the president would get tens of thousands of these requests for bailouts and personal money and pensions and all this kind of stuff.

00:07:21.000 So from Cleveland, we get to Teddy Roosevelt.

00:07:24.000 And Roosevelt has a different kind of swamp that's been growing the whole time Cleveland is dealing with the spoil swamp, and that is these giant corporations.

00:07:34.000 And it's very interesting.

00:07:36.000 Most people don't know this.

00:07:37.000 The reason Roosevelt was such a trust buster was that he felt he was protecting business in America from the media, the press, journalism, that he thought the journalism, the muckrakers were going to touch a war against business that they were going to burn down the whole capitalist system.

00:08:02.000 And Roosevelt, right or wrong, truly believed that he was saving capitalism from this group of muckrapers.

00:08:10.000 And of course, he was very successful in reining in the truly big corporations of the day.

00:08:16.000 What he didn't do was rein in the media.

00:08:20.000 And so we're going to pay a price for his failure today because he didn't put in place any measures to control the media, you know?

00:08:31.000 Mark that up to nobody's perfect and nobody can see everything.

00:08:36.000 So you don't have some of the other presidents I thought you would have.

00:08:41.000 You don't have Calvin Coolidge.

00:08:42.000 You don't have...

00:08:43.000 Well, Warren G. Harding had his own problems, but you don't have Calvin Coolidge and you kind of wait a little bit and then you get to Kennedy.

00:08:50.000 Sure, you have a lot on Kennedy.

00:08:51.000 And I mean, he tried to expose the CIA and many other agencies.

00:08:55.000 Tell us a little bit about that.

00:08:56.000 Kennedy's problem was that while he felt he was being controlled and manipulated by the CIA and wanted to expose them, he needed them too much.

00:09:05.000 He needed them in Cuba.

00:09:06.000 He needed them in Berlin.

00:09:08.000 And he needed them in Laos and Vietnam.

00:09:11.000 And so you end up with a kind of view of Kennedy that he had to almost lie to himself to perpetuate the CIA and keep them going when on many occasions he says, you know, I need to get rid of these guys.

00:09:27.000 But the bottom line is he did not.

00:09:31.000 Yeah.

00:09:31.000 And so there is a lot of different components to that.

00:09:34.000 But if I remember correctly, he also kind of waged war on the fiat currency model as well, which was a whole separate issue of how kind of the banking system was going to be rigged against regular everyday Americans.

00:09:47.000 So, and then you have Reagan and Trump.

00:09:48.000 I want to get into both of those.

00:09:49.000 But I think that the thesis you're getting into is, you know, these six presidents more than any others, they made great attempts to actually rein in the unelected power structure.

00:10:01.000 And I guess the question is how successful were they?

00:10:03.000 Because you look at some of them.

00:10:06.000 You know, Reagan was shot.

00:10:08.000 Kennedy was shot and killed.

00:10:10.000 Lincoln was shot and killed. 0.71

00:10:11.000 Trump was spied on.

00:10:14.000 You know, Teddy Roosevelt, was Tony Roosevelt ever shot at?

00:10:17.000 I'm sure he was.

00:10:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:10:19.000 And don't forget that Cleveland's predecessor, Chester Arthur, became president only because the president Garfield was shot and killed.

00:10:31.000 He had two predecessors, because he served non-consecutive terms.

00:10:36.000 We will dive into that.

00:10:37.000 And I love the book, Dragon Slayers by Larry Schweikert.

00:10:41.000 I'm so excited to be talking to you.

00:10:43.000 I've followed you for years.

00:10:47.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

00:10:48.000 You should be very concerned about today's headlines.

00:10:51.000 I am too.

00:10:52.000 It's not looking good.

00:10:53.000 So here's the thing.

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00:11:45.000 What are you doing?

00:11:45.000 Preparewithkirk.com.

00:11:50.000 So talk to us about Reagan.

00:11:52.000 Sure.

00:11:53.000 I do want to mention Coolidge because you like Coolidge, and I have him as my fourth best president, Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, Coolidge, Trump.

00:12:04.000 And Trump is not for only because he's so far only served one term.

00:12:07.000 If he serves two terms, he'll be moved up to number four position.

00:12:12.000 But the reason Coolidge didn't make the book is that, first of all, Harding did a lot of the heavy lifting when he came in.

00:12:21.000 He dramatically scaled down the size of government, got rid of a lot of these agencies, cut a lot of government personnel, ended government-owned and run railroads and shipbuilding.

00:12:34.000 So Coolidge, in a lot of ways, coasted on Harding's already very good record.

00:12:41.000 He didn't need to do a lot when he came in.

00:12:44.000 So after Kennedy's death, there was a major transformation in the swamp.

00:12:50.000 And it was this.

00:12:52.000 The administrative agencies, the bureaucracy, had previously been more or less regulated by Congress.

00:13:01.000 It was Congress's authority to oversee them.

00:13:04.000 And in the late 60s under Johnson, early 70s under Nixon, the Congress stopped doing that.

00:13:13.000 And they basically handed off that authority to the courts.

00:13:18.000 And the problem there was that the courts were more or less lazy. 0.98

00:13:22.000 And they said, well, if Congress authorized this agency, this bureaucracy, Congress must know what it's doing.

00:13:29.000 So we will let the agency or bureaucracy kind of define itself in its own rules and its own regulations, which, of course, is a disaster.

00:13:37.000 I mean, you're letting the people who are supposed to be regulated regulate themselves.

00:13:42.000 And so that's when it really started to get out of the control of either Congress or president or the courts.

00:13:50.000 And it's been almost impossible to rein in.

00:13:53.000 And Reagan tried his best.

00:13:55.000 I will say he did philosophically do the best job in the modern era till Trump of framing government as a problem.

00:14:04.000 He was very good at messaging that.

00:14:06.000 I wouldn't say that he was technically as effective as we would have liked, far better than George H.W. Bush.

00:14:12.000 H.W. Bush loved the era of big government and unelected bureaucracies.

00:14:17.000 He ran the CIA, for goodness sake, for years.

00:14:20.000 So he knows all about that.

00:14:22.000 But unfortunately, you know, Reagan, he lost plenty of battles, even though he won some, especially towards the later years in his presidency.

00:14:31.000 And then finally, Trump.

00:14:33.000 So you have a PhD.

00:14:34.000 You're supposed to hate Trump.

00:14:35.000 Why would you put him on your list of presidents you like?

00:14:38.000 No, I think Trump is the epitome of what an American president should be.

00:14:43.000 People don't understand.

00:14:44.000 He is probably the most federalist of all of our presidents going back to Washington.

00:14:51.000 If you go back to all the debates, whether it's over the wall, whether it's over almost any of the policy issues, Trump would always say to Congress, pass a law.

00:15:02.000 This is your bailiwick.

00:15:03.000 You need to handle this.

00:15:04.000 But if you don't, I will.

00:15:07.000 And the problem was, of course, Congress had no interest in solving these problems.

00:15:13.000 And so, but Trump was constantly trying to hand over control to the legislative body, and they simply wouldn't take it.

00:15:21.000 Now, the really horrible thing, and I think I came to some of this conclusion with new research after the book came out, but it was in the Chinavirus management.

00:15:35.000 I'm convinced that Mike Pence and his deputy got to Trump and fed him a line about federalism.

00:15:45.000 Mr. President, you're into federalism.

00:15:48.000 You believe in federalism.

00:15:50.000 Let the states handle the China virus.

00:15:53.000 Let the states handle it.

00:15:54.000 And to Trump, that sounded good.

00:15:56.000 It sounds reasonable, but you've got to go one step further and say, what does that mean?

00:16:00.000 And what that meant was no state had a medical examiner or a head of medical policy within the state who could in any way compete with the CDC.

00:16:12.000 So what that did, the quote, federalist approach to the China virus, was to hand authority of the China virus over to Dr. Fallacy.

00:16:23.000 I'm going to ask you about that then, because in the longer segment, I want to ask how effective were these dragon slayers?

00:16:29.000 Because I'm a friend of Trump.

00:16:32.000 I support him 100%.

00:16:33.000 He's terrific.

00:16:34.000 But I think, you know, the dragon slayer against the dragon, Fauci, did Fauci win?

00:16:40.000 Don't answer it now.

00:16:40.000 That's a question, though, right?

00:16:42.000 Because in some ways, you know, Trump's instincts were like, who is this serpent?

00:16:48.000 Why is he here?

00:16:49.000 And Fauci kind of ran our government for the most critical year.

00:16:56.000 Look, there's so much political pressure out there from the left and the woke mob, and it's from the Democrat Party.

00:17:01.000 Our society has ultimately been controlled by cancel cultural elites.

00:17:05.000 Look, we talk openly on this program about what you need to do.

00:17:10.000 And so I am involved.

00:17:12.000 I am invested personally and also through the Charlie Kirk show to try to do everything we possibly can to try and push back against these Democrats and their lies.

00:17:22.000 And so look, you can get a signed picture by President Trump himself.

00:17:24.000 Look, I vetted this.

00:17:26.000 It's terrific.

00:17:27.000 And not only will you be taking a stand against the radical left, you'll be entering the Winnipeg history itself.

00:17:33.000 All you have to do is text the word victory to 55404 today to enter.

00:17:38.000 That's V-I-C-T-O-R-Y to 55404.

00:17:42.000 Join me in standing up for President Trump and canceling the radical left.

00:17:46.000 Look, here's what we're really doing, though.

00:17:47.000 We're building a grassroots army to push back to try to win the Senate race in Georgia, try to win the Senate race in Arizona.

00:17:53.000 This is paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

00:17:56.000 And I could tell you this, we have got to retire Chuck Schumer.

00:17:59.000 So text right now to win a signed picture with President Trump, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y 55404.

00:18:06.000 Take out your phone right now, free of charge, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y 55404.

00:18:16.000 So let me ask you, how successful or how effective was Trump in particular being a dragon slayer?

00:18:24.000 Well, Trump came in wanting to drain the swamp, as he said, multiple times.

00:18:30.000 What people missed was his definition of draining the swamp at that time was to get rid of the K-Street lobbyists. 0.79

00:18:38.000 He wanted to get rid of the lobbying influence on DC.

00:18:43.000 And, you know, I was pretty close at that time with Steve Bannon.

00:18:47.000 I had worked with him in the 2016 campaign quite a bit.

00:18:50.000 And they had no idea coming in that the Intel communities, the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ were so incredibly politicized.

00:19:04.000 They really thought they were going to make inroads in attacking some of these problems.

00:19:08.000 And they were, I think, taken a little bit aback by the fact that, first of all, Sessions' recusal just floored them.

00:19:18.000 Don't let me go off on sessions because I could be here all hour on how he so damaged the country, not just in failing to oppose the Ma Russia thing, but he did nothing against sanctuary city mayors. 0.88

00:19:32.000 He did nothing against governors who were opposing immigration laws.

00:19:40.000 He did nothing about the protests by Antifa, nothing at all.

00:19:44.000 In a dozen ways, even if you exclude the Russia hoax, Sessions was probably our worst attorney general ever.

00:19:52.000 So I think all of that just really, I think that knocked him off guard for a good six or eight months before they figured out we're going to have to take a flamethrower to this.

00:20:03.000 We're not going to be able to just replace people.

00:20:05.000 This is an infestation that's going to require, you know, the Terminex people come out. 1.00

00:20:11.000 Yes, yes.

00:20:12.000 So let me ask you, it's an interesting premise, your book, because it's very focused, right?

00:20:18.000 It's very focused on trying to take the power away from the unelected and back to the people.

00:20:26.000 And so if you had to rank these six people, who was the most effective president who was a dragon slayer?

00:20:33.000 Who really was able to win against these institutional forces?

00:20:39.000 Was it Lincoln, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, or Trump?

00:20:44.000 Well, the book is actually divided into two parts, winners and losers.

00:20:48.000 Oh, there you go.

00:20:48.000 And the first three, Lincoln, Cleveland, and Teddy Roosevelt, to one degree or another, one.

00:20:53.000 Lincoln was the most successful because he had a whole half of the country geographically and regionally aligned with him.

00:21:03.000 And of course, they fought a war.

00:21:05.000 And it is easier to accomplish your goals in wartime when you can just by fiat say, you know, you people are terrorists.

00:21:12.000 We're not going to let you vote again until you ratify the 13th Amendment or whatever it is.

00:21:17.000 Cleveland was very effective, but the Pendleton Act just shifted the spoil system away from individual jobs. 0.76

00:21:28.000 Here, I'll make you customs commissioner.

00:21:30.000 I'll make you federal marshal and moved it toward lobbying interest groups.

00:21:35.000 And Cleveland didn't see that.

00:21:37.000 Like I say, you can't expect these guys to be prophets and see everything.

00:21:41.000 TR was extremely effective against big business, except when it came to the media and the power of the press, which is the entire reason he attacks big business.

00:21:52.000 The latter three were largely ineffective.

00:21:55.000 JFK needed the swamp too much.

00:21:59.000 He needed the CIA too much to achieve his foreign policy goals to really do anything about it.

00:22:05.000 Reagan, let me put in a plug for my book from two years ago, Reagan, the American president.

00:22:10.000 I spent a lot of time in the Reagan papers in Simi Valley, a lot of time.

00:22:17.000 And Reagan started off.

00:22:20.000 One of his three main things was to reduce the size of government.

00:22:24.000 What you'll notice is that after about 1983, he quit even mentioning that.

00:22:28.000 And one of the reasons I found in some of the papers was the agencies themselves, surprise, surprise, were pushing back.

00:22:36.000 They said, oh, we can't cut our budget.

00:22:38.000 We've already spent all of it.

00:22:40.000 You know, I get this from one department that said, how am I going to cut my budget?

00:22:44.000 I've already spent all of it.

00:22:46.000 And then Trump comes in.

00:22:47.000 And like I say, I think his idea of what the swamp was when he came in was much different than when he left.

00:22:54.000 And as Bannon said, I expect when he comes back, he's coming back with a flamethrower.

00:22:59.000 So I suppose let's just focus on Lincoln in particular.

00:23:03.000 You know, he was able to kind of marshal half the country together.

00:23:08.000 What else, like tactically, can a second term Trump do to learn from Lincoln or these other presidents to remove this infestation?

00:23:17.000 I mean, going at the flamethrower, I understand what that means, sort of, but how would you do it?

00:23:22.000 I mean, like, you can't fire Fauci, or can you?

00:23:25.000 I mean, what wisdom from the people that have fought these battles before can a future president apply to not just say it, but to actually win this fight?

00:23:35.000 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:23:36.000 And, you know, it's interesting you mentioned Dr. Fallacy again because Bannon told me that when they went in, they were instructed.

00:23:45.000 He didn't tell me by who.

00:23:46.000 I know it was Yertle, and I know it was RuPaul.

00:23:50.000 That would be McConnell and Paul Ryan if you don't follow Larry's nicknames list.

00:23:54.000 Okay.

00:23:55.000 So Yertle told him, keep your hands off Francis Collins and keep your hands off Dr. Fallacy, right?

00:24:03.000 And Bannon said they were prohibited from the get-go and that going after these guys.

00:24:08.000 Come on.

00:24:09.000 No, I'm laughing at the nicknames.

00:24:11.000 You want Nancy Pelosi, Botoxic? 1.00

00:24:13.000 No, I love that.

00:24:14.000 I need them all.

00:24:15.000 I'm laughing at you.

00:24:18.000 Okay, so five days a week, I do a news column: today's news on uncovereddc.com, and right at the bottom are all of the nicknames.

00:24:26.000 And I've started using nicknames for cities like San Francisco is New Mogadishu, and Chicago has been ghazy by the lake, right?

00:24:37.000 So, but what you could learn is that Trump has to go in next time, understanding he's going to need allies in the Senate and in the House.

00:24:47.000 And I think he'll have far more this time than he had before. 0.89

00:24:50.000 We got rid of, you know, McCain's gone and we got rid of a lot of these guys that Wicker and some of these people just were useless.

00:24:58.000 But we've got to replace him in this Senate race and in 24 with MAGA people who are going to go in and support Trump.

00:25:07.000 And by that, I mean not impeach him when he kicks out Christopher Wright and says, I'm sorry, we're going to put a head of the FBI in who's actually going to do something.

00:25:16.000 So that's incredibly important.

00:25:19.000 Let me ask you, you said something interesting.

00:25:20.000 You said he was the most federalist president.

00:25:24.000 You're an authority on that.

00:25:25.000 I won't challenge that.

00:25:26.000 So let's just take it as is.

00:25:28.000 But should he have been more embracing of executive power?

00:25:33.000 Well, that's a good point because he would have followed everybody from FDR on in terms of embracing that power.

00:25:42.000 With Trump, though, the problem was always he was walking this tightwire where if he stepped a little bit too far to one side, he was going to get impeached.

00:25:52.000 And I don't mean just from Botoxic and her ilk. 0.96

00:25:55.000 I mean from the Rhino Republicans and the Senate that was there. 1.00

00:26:00.000 He could have been removed.

00:26:01.000 And so he had to walk a very fine line so as not to get removed from office by the Senate.

00:26:08.000 And I think if we get five or 10 more MAGA people in in the next two years, that won't even be a consideration.

00:26:16.000 And he will have considerable more authority to do as you say, to be more of a less of a federalist president and more of a TR type, which I wouldn't like to see, but different times call for different measures.

00:26:32.000 Yeah, I mean, I philosophically agree with you for sure, but I'm more open-minded to using executive power to get us back into alignment with constitutional principles than ever before.

00:26:44.000 And I think that it's a dangerous precedent, but we're already kind of in wartime.

00:26:49.000 You know that.

00:26:49.000 We're already in a not-so-cold civil war happening.

00:26:53.000 It's not kinetic, but definitely is heating up.

00:26:57.000 Where, you know, when Trump actually started to embrace this, though, was when all of a sudden he realized he could get parts of the border wall in the Yuma sector by using the reappropriation of national defense funds, right?

00:27:09.000 I think that Trump was embracing some of the, let's say, more Aggressive interpretations of Article II, you know, as he lost both chambers of Congress.

00:27:21.000 And, you know, the left, they've always been willing to push, you know, boundaries that.

00:27:26.000 But I want to ask you, with just a couple minutes remaining, wasn't Teddy Roosevelt a little bit embracing of that?

00:27:31.000 Didn't he push the boundaries for executive power?

00:27:34.000 Yeah, very much so, which is which is why he's not in my top five favorite presidents.

00:27:39.000 I think he went too far.

00:27:40.000 And you can attribute all of Roosevelt's weakness in terms of his over-aggressiveness sometimes in going after business to the fact that of all the things TR did in his life, he never ran a business.

00:27:55.000 He had this cattle ranch out there, but he never ran it.

00:27:59.000 He never met a payroll.

00:28:01.000 He never had to deal with balancing the books in a downtime.

00:28:05.000 It was just a playground to him.

00:28:08.000 I wanted to mention one thing to you, though.

00:28:10.000 I raised the issue of the FBI to a rather powerful member of the House.

00:28:17.000 I'm not going to give you his name, but you just have to trust me.

00:28:21.000 This guy's up there.

00:28:22.000 And he agreed.

00:28:23.000 He said the FBI is out of control and the whole institution needs to be taken down to the studs.

00:28:29.000 He said, but finding the right people who will do that is another thing.

00:28:35.000 And it's not something you go around saying openly in Washington, but he says it is totally out of control.

00:28:42.000 And we need MAGA people in who are going to look at it like, we don't just need a new FBI director.

00:28:49.000 We need a new FBI.

00:28:51.000 And so I've taken to calling them the fine people at the FBI for that Charlottesville slander that they use on Trump all the time.

00:28:58.000 So, Charlie, anytime you refer to the FBI, it's always the fine people.

00:29:02.000 There you go.

00:29:03.000 That's why I think Trump could do, or whomever is president in the future that believes in the Constitution.

00:29:11.000 There is a fair amount that an executive can do.

00:29:14.000 I mean, Lincoln, he was willing to use executive power, suspension of habeas corpus, amongst many other things, even without congressional approval at times.

00:29:25.000 And so that's something that I want to explore with you a little bit.

00:29:29.000 And I also have to ask you about a couple presidents you don't have on your list.

00:29:35.000 One in particular that is one of my favorite presidents, and we might totally disagree on this.

00:29:39.000 And you're the historian, so you're going to win the argument, but that's okay.

00:29:42.000 I'll still believe it, which is someone who I think sent out one of the most clear, clarion calls of warning against a swamp or a deep state.

00:29:52.000 You probably already might know who it is.

00:29:53.000 Don't say it yet.

00:29:54.000 Someone I have a great admiration for, and someone who I think actually had a lot in common with Donald Trump and why he didn't make your list and whether or not he was successful.

00:30:04.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:31:08.000 Okay, I got to ask you, dragon slayers.

00:31:11.000 The man who tried to warn us about the military-industrial complex and the scientific industrial complex was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

00:31:19.000 Was he not a dragon slayer?

00:31:21.000 Well, I thought you were going to say Andrew Jackson.

00:31:23.000 Boy, I was ready to unload on Jackson.

00:31:25.000 No.

00:31:26.000 But Eisenhower was a pretty good president, but he just was a little bit ambivalent.

00:31:35.000 He didn't push anything.

00:31:37.000 He sort of is one of these go-along to get along presidents.

00:31:40.000 I know my co-author Mike Allen disagrees.

00:31:42.000 Mike Allen is a very, very big Ike fan.

00:31:47.000 And I attribute a lot of that to the fact that Eisenhower had terrible health after 1955.

00:31:53.000 But, you know, he might make the second 10, you know, a draft pick to be named later.

00:31:58.000 Yeah.

00:31:59.000 So, I mean, Eisenhower used executive power as well.

00:32:02.000 You know, he mobilized the National Guard to Little Rock.

00:32:06.000 He was willing to challenge this whole idea of the military-industrial complex.

00:32:11.000 But you're right.

00:32:11.000 I mean, he's really not known for many domestic wins.

00:32:15.000 I mean, the National Highway program, the Interstate Highway Program was one of them.

00:32:19.000 Let me ask you about a couple other presidents.

00:32:21.000 So, you know, you kind of look at going up.

00:32:24.000 You said that Van Buren was kind of the creation of the deep state swamp.

00:32:27.000 Would you say that is about right?

00:32:29.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:32:30.000 So prior to that, you know, whether it be Washington, Adams, Jefferson, you know, Madison, Monroe, and the kind of, you know, ramping up, we do get to Jackson.

00:32:40.000 You're not a fan?

00:32:42.000 Not a fan.

00:32:44.000 He caused government to grow.

00:32:45.000 I did a study that I never published on the size of population of government, the number of offices.

00:32:51.000 So he caused government to grow, number one.

00:32:53.000 Number two, he destroyed a perfectly good private institution called the Bank of the United States, only one-fifth public, and he divvied the money up among all of his pet bank cronies.

00:33:06.000 Number three, he crushed the Indians, contrary to what the Supreme Court said.

00:33:11.000 And, you know, he's a slave owner, and he's the part and parcel of that Democrat elite, the slave swamp that Lincoln's trying to fix. 0.73

00:33:22.000 Well, that sounds pretty convincing.

00:33:24.000 Trump liked Jackson, though.

00:33:25.000 He had a picture of Jackson.

00:33:27.000 Why did Trump like him?

00:33:28.000 I don't know.

00:33:29.000 I've got to talk to him about that.

00:33:31.000 I haven't had a chance to sit down with Trump.

00:33:33.000 I've missed him two times, both at Trump Tower and then later in Florida.

00:33:40.000 You hang with us.

00:33:41.000 We'll get him with you.

00:33:41.000 He'll sign a copy of your book.

00:33:43.000 So in closing, average person reads this book, they hear our interview.

00:33:47.000 What's the takeaway?

00:33:48.000 Can the dragon be slayed?

00:33:50.000 Can self-government be restored?

00:33:52.000 Yes, but it's going to take an executive with vision and energy and a desire to reduce it.

00:33:59.000 It will take not necessarily a legislature that's in tune with him to help him.

00:34:05.000 All they have to do is not oppose him.

00:34:08.000 And then third, and most important, it'll take a public which is ready to embrace these ideas.

00:34:13.000 And I think we're getting there.

00:34:15.000 Are you starting to see that?

00:34:16.000 Historically, let me ask you with the six dragon slayers outside of Trump, is there usually a correlated grassroots populist movement alongside of it of people that are demanding it?

00:34:24.000 Not populists, but you know what I mean.

00:34:26.000 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:34:27.000 I mean, the Republicans and the free soilers in the North vastly outnumbered the slave owners in the South. 1.00

00:34:34.000 I could go through each one of them, but yeah, there is a popular movement that helps mobilize everyone.

00:34:40.000 And, you know, I think we're getting there.

00:34:45.000 I mean, the tide has definitely turned since 2018 in a way I've never seen in American politics.

00:34:52.000 I think the Democrats are in for a massive bloodbath in 20, only held back by the fact that we won 20 seats or so back in 2020.

00:35:03.000 If not for that, you'd be looking at a shift of 60 or 80 seats.

00:35:07.000 Yeah, I think it's a near-extinction event that the Democrats could be looking at.

00:35:11.000 I think it could be a seismic generational change where they have to totally rebrand and reintroduce themselves to the American public over the next couple decades.

00:35:22.000 That's what Dannon says.

00:35:23.000 And there's an article today about how they've already totally lost the rural areas.

00:35:27.000 Yeah, it's basically extinct, gone forever.

00:35:30.000 There is no coming back.

00:35:31.000 But we got to fix our elections, which is part of the deep state as well.

00:35:34.000 That's a separate issue.

00:35:35.000 Thank you so much, Larry, for joining us.

00:35:37.000 Dragon Slayer is the name of the book.

00:35:39.000 Check it out right now.

00:35:40.000 It is terrific.

00:35:41.000 And the winners and the losers, it's a two-part book.

00:35:44.000 And we'll have to have you back on.

00:35:45.000 Really appreciate it.

00:35:46.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:35:48.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:49.000 Email us your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:52.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:35:53.000 God bless.

00:35:57.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 18, 2022

6 Presidents Who Tried to Drain the Swamp with Larry Schweikart

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