The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Vindicating Trump - My Chat with Dinesh D'Souza (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

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00:01:16.580 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad. Today I have a repeat guest. I know that I've been on his show a few

00:01:21.960 times and I think this may be the second or third time. I've got Dinesh D'Souza with me. How are you

00:01:28.140 doing, sir? Hey, I'm doing well. Thank you. Okay, I wanted to just read a brief bio for the three or

00:01:34.640 four people that might not know who you are. So you are a best-selling author. Now here it's surprising

00:01:39.880 because in the bio that your people sent me, they gave me sort of a stochastic number. He's written

00:01:45.840 nearly 20 books, approximately. Can't we just know what the damn number is? Is it 20 books? Is it 15

00:01:52.880 books? Why is it unsure how many books you've written? Well, it's somewhere in that range. And

00:01:58.460 the reason I say that is because typically with authors, you publish a couple of books before you

00:02:03.840 get a mainstream trade book that gets out into the stores. So that's why it's a little bit of an

00:02:09.680 ambiguous count. But yeah, the number is somewhere between 15 and 20. And unfortunately, and by the

00:02:16.000 way, with this new project, the new film, there is also an accompanying book of the same title. So I'm

00:02:21.940 adding to the roster. I will get to that in a second. So two of your documentaries, 2016 Obama's

00:02:30.340 America and America Imagine a World Without Her, people should check these out, are among the highest

00:02:35.980 grossing political films of all time. You served as a domestic policy analyst at the Reagan White

00:02:42.200 House. Maybe you've seen the recent Reagan movie that came out. I actually watched an early preview

00:02:48.040 of it in Austin, Texas a couple of years ago. You were also a scholar at think tanks such as the

00:02:54.120 American Enterprise Institute and excuse me, the Hoover Institution at Stanford. You've got a new

00:03:01.500 documentary coming out on September 27th called Vindicating Trump. And then the book is coming

00:03:08.720 out on October 8th. I think it will be released, but people can pre-order it. Did I miss anything?

00:03:14.680 You want to add anything before we drill down into your book? I mean, all I want to add is that

00:03:18.840 there is a movie website. It's vindicatingtrump.com. And that's like a one-stop shop. The cool thing is

00:03:26.120 that the movie is opening in a lot of theaters, 850 theaters. So you can just plug in your city or

00:03:32.500 your zip code and it pulls up all the theaters around you so you can buy tickets right there.

00:03:37.720 So it's like a one-stop shop to pre-order the book, yes, but also to see the movie.

00:03:42.480 Okay. So let's just get down into some of the key premises of the book. Take it away. What's the book

00:03:49.140 about? I mean, I guess the title says it, but give us a bit more details.

00:03:52.500 Well, the way that the book is framed is it is sort of built around a problem that was foreseen

00:04:01.500 by, of all people, Abraham Lincoln in his so-called Lyceum speech. Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in his

00:04:07.080 late 20s, not his best-known speeches because he's best known for the Gettysburg Address and, of course,

00:04:12.800 the second inaugural. But in his younger days, Lincoln gave a speech where he warned that America

00:04:19.680 America is not going to be ever destroyed by an attack from outside the country. He says that if

00:04:27.020 the country is subverted, if the constitutional republic is overthrown, it is likely to be from

00:04:32.280 within. And he predicted that the way it would happen, if it ever did happen, is that there would

00:04:38.020 be a rampant lawlessness that would begin to creep into the society. And then he says a kind of a

00:04:45.800 dictator, a Caesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander the Great, would seize upon this lawlessness,

00:04:52.540 manipulate it, and the combination of the lawlessness and then the appropriation of it

00:04:57.800 by some sort of a dictator, and Lincoln doesn't name who it is, is going to be the biggest threat

00:05:03.380 that the country faces. Now, what's interesting is, in our own day, there are people, smart guys,

00:05:09.060 who look at this Lyceum speech and go, oh, well, Lincoln was really prophetic. He was predicting the

00:05:14.000 dictator, and here we have him. His name is Donald J. Trump. So, the book and the film take this

00:05:21.000 premise seriously. In other words, I agree that the threat of dictatorship is real. I raised the

00:05:26.860 question, is it coming from Trump? Is it coming from somewhere else? Where is the threat really

00:05:33.100 coming from? And the movie takes off from there.

00:05:35.740 Got it. Now, I've discussed this in the past, and I've weighed in on this matter more recently. I

00:05:42.600 wrote a Newsweek opinion piece where I was talking about the difference between emotional-based

00:05:49.980 processing versus cognitive-based processing. The idea being that, for example, in advertising,

00:05:55.940 if you're trying to sell a hedonic product like perfumes, then you might activate your affective-based

00:06:01.220 processing, right? You simply show a beautiful girl on a horse with her hair flowing,

00:06:05.000 and you put a cool brand name, Mystère, and that's how you sell perfumes. On the other hand,

00:06:10.260 if I want to sell you reverse mortgages, I don't put a pretty girl on a horse. I have to tell you,

00:06:15.140 here are the six reasons why you should invest in reverse mortgages. Now, when it comes to choosing

00:06:20.600 a president, you'd like to think that people are going to use their cognitive-based system.

00:06:25.760 Here are six substantive reasons why I think Kamala Harris is better or Donald Trump is better.

00:06:30.820 Regrettably, as I repeatedly keep pounding on the table, people use their emotional-based processing.

00:06:37.520 She's joyful. She's fun. She's exciting. Is there a way for us to get people to move away from the

00:06:46.180 natural inclination to use a shortcut heuristic, such as my emotions, and actually get them to focus on

00:06:53.900 foundational, substantive issues? Because many of my colleagues in academia, as you might imagine,

00:07:00.240 they probably support more Donald Trump's policies, but their emotional system says,

00:07:05.340 he's disgusting. I revile him.

00:07:08.660 I think this is actually the key difference between a book and a film. And I'll put it this way,

00:07:15.420 that a book is, in fact, an intellectual product. It appeals to the mind. It is framed in,

00:07:21.560 I would say, loosely as a legal brief. It makes an argument, and the argument has components,

00:07:28.500 and it lays it out. It's got references. It's got footnotes. So, I have all of that in the book.

00:07:33.160 I recognize the moment I start to make a movie, I'm in a different territory. You notice that movies,

00:07:39.360 documentary films, and feature films always have a musical score. What does the musical score do?

00:07:44.900 That is, in fact, the emotional undercurrent of a movie. So, the point I want to make is that I don't

00:07:51.580 think that one can say to people, hey, listen, do not use your emotional apparatus. Merely let me engage

00:07:59.920 your brain. What a movie will do is, in a very subtle way, it will engage both. In fact, the primary

00:08:07.280 engagement of a film is always emotional. There can be, you can put intellectual content into a movie,

00:08:13.780 but it can never be primary. If it is primary, the movie becomes dull. It becomes boring.

00:08:19.120 So, I will say that if you watch this film, Vindicating Trump, it makes the emotional case

00:08:26.300 for Trump. And not only that, I would say it makes the character defense of Trump. This is important

00:08:30.720 because there are Republicans who will say things like, well, I don't like the guy, but, you know,

00:08:35.160 I like his policies. Or, he needs to keep his mouth shut. Or, what they're really saying is they

00:08:40.100 want to remake Trump. They want, like, a new and different Trump. And I make a counter-argument

00:08:45.320 to them. And I say, listen, Trump is a package in the same way that General Grant was a package.

00:08:51.260 And the same package that made him a good fighter on the battlefield also made him cuss a lot and

00:08:55.680 drink a lot. And so, you can't say, hey, he needs to cut out the drinking. He needs to cut out the

00:09:01.680 cussing. Otherwise, you need to yank him off the battlefield. Lincoln would never dream of doing

00:09:06.380 that because General Grant knew how to fight. And I think the same is true with Trump. He has some

00:09:12.080 vices, but he also has some quite magnificent and underrated virtues. And those need to be not only

00:09:19.720 noted, but they need to be experienced. And in a movie, I try to bring you the experience of that.

00:09:26.680 I also try to do something else that I think that Trump himself makes it hard to do. And that is to show

00:09:32.600 you the private side of Trump. Trump himself does not like to talk about feelings. He doesn't like

00:09:38.540 to talk about emotions. When poor Dr. Phil kept trying to psychologize him, well, how did the

00:09:43.640 assassination attempt make you feel? You notice that Trump just ran away from that. He refused to go

00:09:48.380 there. He's been raised in this manly reluctance to put your feelings out front. But I tried very hard

00:09:54.540 in this film, and I think succeeded in having a one-on-one conversation with him where he allowed me

00:10:00.020 to control the conversation and bring out some aspects of him that he otherwise doesn't, he certainly

00:10:06.080 doesn't easily show. I love your answer about, you know, movies triggering our emotional system, because

00:10:11.900 I've argued exactly to your point that it's silly to argue that humans are either reasoning animals or

00:10:18.940 feeling animals, where, of course, both the key challenge is to know when to evoke the right, invoke the

00:10:24.600 right system, right? But to your point about, you know, the fact that he can be funny and, quote,

00:10:31.080 non-presidential and, you know, maybe bombastic, you're exactly right that that's part of his

00:10:36.500 appeal. And if I can analogize to my own reality, before we began and I pressed the record button,

00:10:43.200 you said something very kind to me. You said, oh, I love reading your sarcastic tweets and so on,

00:10:48.080 right? Well, it turns out, Dinesh, that many of the people that approach me on the street won't

00:10:54.460 approach me to say, oh, I loved your application of evolutionary biology in studying the increase in

00:11:02.300 testosterone that met, right? They will respond to, oh, my God, I was in stitches watching your satirical

00:11:09.640 clip where you were making fun of progressives. And so the reason I'm drawing this analogy is that

00:11:15.280 if you are in the game of trying to persuade people, you will use your entire arsenal of

00:11:22.240 persuasion strategies to try to get to people, specifically to your point about a book versus

00:11:27.200 a movie. In some cases, I stand up in front of the Stanford Business School crowd and I'm extremely

00:11:33.080 professorial. That's why Stanford invites me. In other cases, when I'm trying to reach other people,

00:11:38.920 I will now put on my, quote, buffoonish hat. But actually, it's not at all buffoonish because it

00:11:45.020 takes a very unique skill to be able to be a satirist. That's why dictators will kill off the

00:11:50.440 satirists first before they kill off the guys with the big muscles because they are the guys who are a

00:11:56.740 threat to the authoritarian regime. So I can't, for the life of me, understand why supposedly my smart

00:12:04.100 colleagues can't appreciate that the fact that Trump is unique in his personhood is precisely what

00:12:11.980 makes him so effective. Maybe you could talk a bit about that.

00:12:15.180 Yeah, Trump is, well, first of all, he is a wannabe comedian and he's a pretty good one.

00:12:24.320 He certainly is a very creative divisor of one-liners, very memorable one-liners. Think about his,

00:12:34.900 even his insults are quite creative because they stick to people. Now, there's a downside to this

00:12:39.760 because if you put a label on somebody and it sticks to them and they can never get out of it,

00:12:45.780 they will hate you for the rest of your life because you have tagged them and they are stuck.

00:12:53.120 Notice that the left has never been that successful in doing the same to Trump. They've

00:12:57.060 applied enormous creative energy to doing it. The best they are, Mango Mussolini, Orange Man. I mean,

00:13:03.840 this is very weak stuff compared to Trump's own labels, which are really very crushing.

00:13:09.320 Trump also does another thing, which is that he taunts the other side. You know,

00:13:13.720 I'll be a dictator for a day. Or he puts out Trump 28, Trump 32, Trump 36. Now, the left,

00:13:21.480 you know, pretends to misunderstand him because then they'll say, well, look, this guy is obviously

00:13:27.060 planning to be a dictator. Well, real dictators don't joke about being dictator for a day,

00:13:33.120 you know, and not to mention the fact that Trump has, of course, been in office,

00:13:36.740 so you can observe his conduct. He might have been somewhat egregious, maybe even irresponsible

00:13:42.440 in encouraging shouts of lock her up in the campaign. But did he lock her up? No, he didn't.

00:13:47.940 In fact, they didn't even initiate criminal proceedings against Hillary. And arguably, there

00:13:52.220 were plenty of reasons to be able to do so. In other words, it's not like she didn't violate any of

00:13:57.040 the federal statutes. So they could have brought charges, but they chose not to. I think, you

00:14:02.920 know, when Debbie, my wife, and I first met Trump, this was in 2019. He had given me a pardon for a

00:14:09.920 weird campaign finance offense that the Obama administration had gotten me on. And he invited

00:14:14.880 me to come and have a chat in the Oval Office. Now, my wife asked him a very interesting question.

00:14:20.920 She said to him, she goes, you know, you're a billionaire, you've got Mar-a-Lago, you are

00:14:26.060 flayed and attacked on every platform every second of every day. Like, why do you do it? How do you

00:14:32.240 do it? How do you even put up with it? And we expected Trump to laugh and say, ha, ha, ha, these

00:14:38.120 people are idiots. You know, I enjoy it. You know, I'm like, you know, I'm like a pig in slop and so

00:14:43.000 on. But he didn't say that. He stepped back and he goes, well, he goes, I have to admit that at times

00:14:48.880 it does get to me. He goes, you know, I don't really need it. I'm doing it for the country. I just, you know,

00:14:56.060 here they are, they're piling on me even for that. And when Debbie and I left that meeting,

00:15:01.280 we said to ourselves, we said, you know, that remark showed a vulnerability that you very rarely

00:15:06.660 see on Trump. And Debbie goes, if he would show more of that part of himself to the American people,

00:15:12.340 they would warm to him immediately. And so when I sat down with Trump, and this was after the

00:15:18.180 assassination attempt, the first assassination attempt, I thought to myself, I should try very hard

00:15:24.060 to draw out that aspect of Trump. And I think I did.

00:15:29.220 And I want to talk about your personal interaction with him. But exactly to your point, when Debbie

00:15:33.940 asked him those questions, and it showed vulnerability, I recently watched snippets of his

00:15:39.180 appearance on Greg Gutfeld's show, which, and I got the exact same feeling as the one that you just

00:15:48.120 described, which where he was understated, he was allowing other people the space to actually speak

00:15:55.340 because, you know, Trump is a larger than life character, right? And so you wonder, so for example,

00:16:00.120 if I'm thinking, would I get along with him when we're sitting and having a coffee, my feeling is

00:16:05.540 absolutely yes. But I wonder if I would ever have the opportunity to utter a single syllable,

00:16:11.800 because the whole room, the oxygen might be completely sucked up by him. But when I watched

00:16:18.280 him on Gutfeld, I didn't get that at all. I saw in a sense, I mean, I think it wouldn't be the right

00:16:23.640 word to say vulnerability, but he was a lot less monopolistic in taking over. So in your personal

00:16:30.800 interactions, what I just said, did that hold true? Absolutely. And I'll tell you a little vignette

00:16:37.220 that actually comes out of 2000 Mules, my earlier film, because Trump, he had watched the film in

00:16:42.660 advance. So he was very curious about the findings connected to election fraud, cell phone geo tracking

00:16:50.660 and all of that. But at the premiere, he watched the film a second time and he was sitting right next

00:16:55.940 to me. And I noticed that he was doing a very Trumpian thing. He was giving a sort of a running

00:17:00.680 commentary as the film was going on. But the commentary was not about the content of the

00:17:07.140 film. It was actually about the technical aspects of the film. So he would say things like,

00:17:12.380 Dinesh, I really like the music. He'd go, where do you get that music? Do you buy the music? Do you

00:17:17.200 have someone compose the music? And then he would say, Dinesh, he goes, your voice. He goes, you have

00:17:23.060 a movie voice. I don't know if anyone's ever told you that. And it's a really good thing you have a

00:17:27.000 movie voice. He goes, because if you didn't, you'd have to hire somebody else to narrate your films.

00:17:31.720 And so I was being subjected to this guy. And then I realized, you know what, this guy was on the

00:17:37.020 apprentice. This guy has a great interest in popular culture. He's also, he's not an academic,

00:17:42.920 you know, he's a doer. So when he sees a film, he thinks about how did that film get made?

00:17:48.040 Where does the soundtrack come from? So he is interested in the mechanical aspects of getting

00:17:54.780 things done, not just in a sense, in the theoretical. Very interesting. Did you speak to him

00:18:00.800 about non-political issues? What are some things that you love to do when you're trying to turn

00:18:07.660 off, which seems to me almost impossible for a guy in his position? What kind of books do you read?

00:18:14.160 And so did you get that level of intimacy or was it very much restricted to his political life?

00:18:20.780 In the interview, in the film, I focus on the political side because I got 45 minutes with him.

00:18:27.300 There's about probably 25 minutes in the film. But ever since my first meeting with Trump, I've had

00:18:34.200 quite a bit of interaction with him. And it's always kind of funny because my son-in-law, for example,

00:18:41.660 is running for Congress. In fact, very likely to be the next congressman in the northern suburbs of

00:18:47.000 Dallas. So I had texted Trump and then talked to him about endorsing my son-in-law. And the funny

00:18:54.960 thing about it was he goes, yeah, he goes, I'll do it, Dinesh. He goes, but don't forget me. Don't forget

00:18:59.940 me. And I realized I felt like I was in the opening scene of The Godfather where, you know, I'm asking

00:19:06.340 him to do me a favor, but he's taking note of it and going, I might be calling on you to do me a

00:19:11.740 service one of these days. And then later he was talking to my son-in-law after my son-in-law won his

00:19:18.100 primary. And he goes, he goes, put Dinesh on. I want to talk to the master. And then obviously my

00:19:24.380 son-in-law and my daughter are howling with laughter. They're going, he calls you the master,

00:19:28.460 you know? And so Trump is a, he's a character and quite an amusing fellow. I don't see him as

00:19:35.560 a kind of a deep reader, but he has a kind of foraging and curious intellect and it moves from

00:19:43.320 ideas to getting things done. And it has a great deal of curiosity in people. He has a remarkable

00:19:49.500 memory. He can meet you after years. And not only does he remember you, he remembers where he met

00:19:55.660 you. So that kind of thing, I think has a very striking impact on people. Beautiful. Do you think

00:20:02.300 there has ever been a president that has faced anywhere near the amount of animus, whether it be

00:20:10.700 the legal stuff or the actual assassination attempts or the smearing? Is there anyone else

00:20:16.540 that comes to mind that's even close to the magnitude of animus that this guy receives?

00:20:21.280 I would say that the only person I can think of is Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, like Trump,

00:20:28.380 had people who would take a bullet for him and then had people who would cheer when somebody else

00:20:33.300 put a bullet in him. In other words, when John Wilkes Booth actually assassinated Lincoln.

00:20:37.920 But here's the key difference. With Lincoln, it wasn't really over the man, right? With Lincoln,

00:20:43.960 it was over the issue. It was over slavery. That's what produced the opposite reactions. But with Trump,

00:20:51.780 it is over the man. And in some ways, I've tried to come to grips and understand why this is so.

00:20:59.140 Why is there an animus against Trump that, for example, exceeds that of any other Republican?

00:21:04.340 I can say Trump is not a dictator and didn't govern as a dictator, but I still have to ask myself,

00:21:11.160 well, why did they apply that particular epithet to him? Nobody called Reagan a dictator. They would

00:21:16.600 say, he's a washed up movie actor. He's a buffoon. He doesn't really understand the world. But they

00:21:21.640 didn't say he's trying to subvert out among... Why do they say that about Trump? And that, I think,

00:21:28.520 is one of the central enigmas of the film. And I try to resolve it in the movie and, of course,

00:21:34.360 in the book. Are you willing to give us a bit of a hint of what your answer is or you don't want to...

00:21:39.260 Yeah. I'll do it in a brief way by way of an analogy because I think you'll really like this

00:21:45.880 one. Before I came to America, I didn't know anything about America. I'd never met a white person

00:21:51.260 before. My main exposure was through movies, war movies and Westerns. So, I've thought a lot about

00:21:58.860 the American Western. I have, of course, my own favorites. But I realized upon reflection that all

00:22:05.080 the Western movies have sort of the same plot. And in the plot, you've got a very harmonious town.

00:22:11.160 Call it Shinbone or call it Pleasantville. It's going really well. There's an old sheriff with a

00:22:16.600 toothbrush, mustache, and an old rifle. I'm going to call that guy the GOP establishment.

00:22:21.380 But then some gangsters come in, right? Some really ruthless bad guys. And they shoot up the

00:22:26.180 town. They subdue the sheriff. They take over the saloon and the provision store. And they're running

00:22:31.420 the place. And the point is that Shinbone is no longer Shinbone. It's another country now. It's

00:22:36.560 another town. The old Shinbone is kind of gone. But then, over the mountain comes an outsider.

00:22:42.500 So, this is Trump. Not a lot is known about him. He appears to be a sort of shady character in some

00:22:48.840 ways. Sorry to interrupt you. Clint Eastwood in Spaghetti Westerns. That's who he is. That's it.

00:22:53.160 That's what I'm talking about. And the point is that when he comes over the mountain, the gangsters,

00:22:58.760 in a way, understand him better than the townspeople. Because the townspeople are like,

00:23:02.360 who is this guy? We don't really get him. He needs to give some explanation of where he's coming

00:23:07.800 from. There's a rumor that he may have murdered a guy 30 years ago. But the gangsters know this is

00:23:13.740 the guy we have to fear. This is the one guy who can take down our whole operation. We need to

00:23:20.040 mobilize all our efforts to buy him off, to brutalize him, to kill him. And the plot takes

00:23:25.700 off from there. So, I see, in some ways, America as sort of living within the framework of a Western

00:23:31.520 with the only difference that we don't really know the ending.

00:23:34.080 Yeah, no, I love that analogy. And I think Victor Davis Hanson often will draw on similar

00:23:40.240 Western analogies. So, I love it. Now, I understand. So, in the analogy that you set up,

00:23:47.740 the establishment doesn't want the outsider to come and drain the swamp, right, as he says.

00:23:55.540 But how do you explain, even before I get you to answer it, I'm going to offer an answer and then

00:24:00.160 you could maybe add to it or correct me if I'm wrong. How do you explain why the people who are

00:24:05.300 not in the swamp exhibit equal animus, if not even greater animus towards him? So, for example,

00:24:12.320 all of my academic colleagues who are not operating within the scam of the swamp are just as much,

00:24:21.080 you know, emboldened in hating him, right? Now, so let me give you my explanation for why they hate him.

00:24:27.820 And then you could tell me. So, I argued actually in the parasitic mind that Trump is an aesthetic

00:24:34.380 injury to them, right? So, here is the proper way that you ascend in polite society. You have to speak

00:24:43.280 with a progressive lisp. You have to hold your pinky when you sip a particular way. That's how you are

00:24:48.640 presidential. That's how you become a professor. Now, here comes this guy that doesn't seem to adhere

00:24:55.000 to any of our metrics of what constitutes aesthetic elegance, speaking with the correct

00:25:01.960 elocution. Therefore, if he could ascend to the highest political office, it invalidates the entire

00:25:10.380 edifice of what constitutes why we are the anointed one, to use Thomas Sowell's term. Do you think it

00:25:18.140 could be as simple as that? Or is there anything else that you would add as to why all of my colleagues

00:25:23.520 also think that he's indistinguishable from Hitler?

00:25:26.980 So, I'd like to give a complimentary explanation that, complimentary in the sense of running alongside

00:25:33.180 yours. It's different than yours, but I think you'll see that it, the two together actually are stronger

00:25:38.540 than one. And this is it. Let's say that there's a bully in a schoolyard, and he's terrorizing all the

00:25:46.860 kids in the schoolyard. The kids now, on the other hand, are not only being subdued, but their pride is

00:25:54.020 wounded. Their pride is wounded because they are under the thumb of the bully, and they do not have

00:26:00.260 the ability or the courage to fight back against the bully. And so, what they do as a form of coping with

00:26:07.320 that is they pretend that the situation is not as dire as they think. And when another bully shows up,

00:26:16.920 a counter-bully, let's call it, and that's Trump. Let's remember, Trump never bullies people who are

00:26:22.020 beneath him. He's the best guy to take on the big bully and become the bigger bully. He actually knows

00:26:28.440 how to deal with bullies. He deals with them in their own language. He's a little bit like Coriolanus

00:26:33.020 in Shakespeare. Coriolanus takes the full measure of Ophidius. They are both warriors, and they have

00:26:38.560 something in common. So, Trump is our 800-pound gorilla against their 800-pound gorilla. Now,

00:26:44.080 their 800-pound gorilla is not an individual, but as you know, it's the concatenation of multiple

00:26:48.960 institutions. Theirs is a regime, but they have a gorilla. We have a gorilla. Now, here's the thing.

00:26:54.800 I think that for a lot of people who don't have Trump's supreme virtue of courage, aren't willing to

00:27:02.100 fight that kind of fight and don't even know how to, they have turned their own cowardice into a

00:27:07.940 virtue. And by that I mean is they declare, we don't like bullies. We don't even like bullies on

00:27:13.920 our own side. We are too virtuous to be bullies ourselves. We want Trump to fight the way we do.

00:27:21.280 Now, this is not a serious argument, because if Trump fought the way that we do, he'd be in the

00:27:26.700 same miserable position that the other Republicans are, where they are totally subservient to an

00:27:31.800 emerging police state regime. So, the argument, and here I'm drawing a little bit on the philosopher

00:27:37.140 Nietzsche, is he talks about the fact that cowards don't like to look in the mirror and say,

00:27:43.160 there stands a coward. And so, what they do is they turn their own weakness into a virtue,

00:27:51.000 and they declare that on principle, the reason that they're not fighting like Trump is on principle

00:27:57.560 they are better than that. They are too good to do that kind of thing. I think this is less an

00:28:01.960 explanation of the academic sector, but it's a good explanation of why there are Republicans and

00:28:07.740 members of the Republican establishment that recognize the danger posed by the sort of Biden-Harris

00:28:14.200 regime. But nevertheless, they point the finger at Trump, basically saying, you're fighting

00:28:20.120 in the wrong way. Go ahead, finish your point, yeah. No, that is the point. And there's even a

00:28:27.400 biblical analogy. It's kind of like the Israelites saying to David, you know, hey, David, you know,

00:28:33.620 we do want you to take on Goliath, but like, put down your slingshot, man. That's not the way that we

00:28:38.340 fight, or either that, or we can't use David because there was all this Bathsheba business. He doesn't

00:28:44.320 even deserve to be one of us. You know, he doesn't have the moral standing to represent. This is the

00:28:49.280 kind of nonsense we're dealing with, very often from people, I think, who lack the kind of resolve

00:28:55.540 that Trump shows almost instinctively. I love your explanation. I wholeheartedly agree with it.

00:29:01.760 And to demonstrate how much I think you're vertical, I'm going to draw an analogy to my own life. So I

00:29:09.660 talked at one point in the parasitic mind about going to speak at Stanford Business School, and the host,

00:29:16.100 who was a fellow consumer psychologist who took me out to dinner the night before our the next day when

00:29:22.220 I was giving a talk, looks at me and says, Oh, I, I, you know, I found out I did some Google searches

00:29:28.840 that you know, whatever your your friends with Joe Rogan, and that you've been on a show. I said,

00:29:33.300 Yeah, actually, I'm probably going to be going on a show again, pretty soon. And then in a very,

00:29:38.740 very smug way, exactly to your point about the cowardice and so on. He says, Well, you know,

00:29:43.780 we don't condone that here at Stanford. I said, You don't condone what at Stanford? He goes, Well,

00:29:48.840 we don't do our research so that it could be sexy enough so that we can appear on Joe Rogan. I said,

00:29:54.860 Well, I don't do my research either to appear on Joe Rogan. But isn't it much better to be able to

00:29:59.860 write a peer reviewed article in a top scientific journal and appear on Joe Rogan? Isn't it the case

00:30:06.680 that if you can excite 1020 million people about whatever it is the ideas that you are writing about

00:30:13.840 in your academic journals, wouldn't that be better? But he was very smug about it precisely because

00:30:19.400 from his perspective, he has mastered the medium of communication of peer reviewed journals. Now this

00:30:27.140 other guy who can also go on the number one show in the world, you would think professors are in the

00:30:32.540 business of creating knowledge and disseminating knowledge. Without the dissemination, there's no

00:30:38.440 point to the knowledge you create. But he looked down at it because he can't do it. Therefore,

00:30:43.360 he's got to bring you down. I think it exactly fits with the explanation that you gave.

00:30:48.240 And resonates with me enormously. You know, God, when I was at the American Enterprise Institute at the

00:30:53.540 Hoover Institution, I was known but only in small precincts because there's a sort of an intellectual

00:30:59.660 conservative world. It's today a little fragmented, but it certainly existed in the early 2000s. And I

00:31:06.440 was very much part of that. And I was respected even by the liberals because in a sense, we talked

00:31:11.540 the same language. We went to the same conferences. I'd go to Trover Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

00:31:16.560 There was E.J. Dionne of the New York Times. Now, the moment I made my first film, which was 2016,

00:31:22.040 Obama's America, it was in 2000 theaters. It made $33 million in the box office, right? Now, here's my point.

00:31:29.360 That number like reverberated across Washington, D.C. And sure enough, like three weeks later or four

00:31:35.900 weeks later, an article appears in the Atlantic Monthly. Whatever happened to Dinesh D'Souza?

00:31:41.080 The theme of the article was that I had sort of sold out for money, that somehow that I had cut my

00:31:47.380 teeth in the intellectual world. And now I was I'd become a populist. Now I was, in a sense,

00:31:52.660 making movies that were appealing to the ordinary American. So it's very similar to your experience.

00:32:00.120 And again, it's coming out of envy. It's coming out of people who say, I don't know how to do that.

00:32:06.220 Therefore, that thing must not be a worthwhile thing to do.

00:32:09.340 Exactly. I call it the garage band effect. If I am a starving artist that plays in my garage in front of

00:32:16.340 my mom and my girlfriend, it's really cool. It's really romantic. If we then make it to number one

00:32:23.180 on the billboard and we play Wembley Stadium, we sold out exactly to your point. All right. So what

00:32:30.100 are some things going into your chat with Trump that you didn't expect and somehow surprise you,

00:32:39.040 whether it be on the personal level, anything that he said, an anecdote, anything that you could

00:32:44.280 share that would make us say, wow, I didn't know that about Trump?

00:32:48.860 I'll just give a single example and really frame it more as a question than rather Trump's answer.

00:32:54.200 Here's why. I wanted to surprise Trump in the interview. I wanted to let people see the tumblers

00:33:01.600 falling inside of Trump's brain while he processes something that he hasn't really quite heard.

00:33:07.420 So he hears certain type of stock questions. And as you might expect, since he gives interviews,

00:33:13.020 he's got stock answers that are kind of ready made. So I say to Trump this, I said, in fact,

00:33:19.020 I almost started the interview this way. I said, you know, you've been repeatedly accused of calling

00:33:24.260 for an insurrection. I said, as far as I can see, you didn't actually do that. You didn't ask people

00:33:31.460 to go in the Capitol. You didn't ask them to take over the place. You didn't ask them to stop the

00:33:35.480 counting. You didn't do that. I said, but guess what? Had you called for an insurrection on January 6th,

00:33:42.460 there probably would have been one. And I said, and there will be probably will be one today

00:33:47.560 if you were to call for one today. In other words, are you aware that you have that kind of power

00:33:55.980 and how does that make you feel? Now, that's the kind of question where I could see Trump,

00:34:03.460 in a sense, taking stock of that because I don't think it quite heard it put that way.

00:34:07.280 Anyway, he recognized that it was true, but he also recognized that he was in a bit of a minefield

00:34:13.700 because really what I was saying to him, to put it slightly differently and put it in the context of

00:34:18.400 the Lincoln problem I said before, is I was sort of saying to him, you know what? You're not a

00:34:23.780 dictator. You didn't govern as a dictator, but you do have some of those larger than life dimensions

00:34:29.580 of a Caesar. I can kind of see why the left always accuses you of being that because you are a larger

00:34:37.840 than life figure. If there's a room with 500 people, you know, and the typical Republican enters the

00:34:42.900 room, nobody's heads turned. He's just one of the crowd. But if Trump walks in the room,

00:34:49.680 there's an immediate electricity. And I've seen it happen more than once. By the way, it happened with

00:34:53.400 Reagan. Trump is not unique in this regard, but not many people have that magnetic quality where the

00:34:59.400 whole room turns simultaneously. And Trump's answer becomes very interesting because he's now forced

00:35:06.920 to consider, do I have those dimensions? Do I want that kind of power? What would I do with it if I

00:35:12.540 had it? So the engagement becomes very interesting because Trump is thinking on his feet.

00:35:17.880 Wow. I don't know if you're ready to make these kinds of predictions, but today, if I ask you,

00:35:25.900 Dinesh, how are you feeling about Kamala versus Trump? Are you willing to offer us your prognosis?

00:35:34.180 Yeah, I feel pretty good about it. But my feeling pretty good about it is based upon an assumption that

00:35:40.200 is going to be tested in November. And that assumption is essentially the level of savviness

00:35:47.780 or awareness of the American people, right? I mean, that's always the test in a democracy. So

00:35:52.960 I think what's going on is that the American people have already made certain conclusions.

00:35:58.160 They don't like the way things are going. They think the economy is not in good shape.

00:36:02.520 They think we're a bit of a disaster in the foreign policy zone. They want a change. They want... Now,

00:36:09.260 there's an iron rule in American politics that when the population feels this way,

00:36:13.380 they're going to throw the bums out. That's all that they know how to do. And that's all they have

00:36:17.940 the power to do in an election. However, we have now a uniform media, a mainstream media that is

00:36:25.000 coming before these same people and saying, do not believe your eyes. Do not believe your lying eyes.

00:36:30.680 Do not believe your pocketbook. Do not believe your retirement account. Do not even believe the

00:36:35.720 things that you have directly seen and observed about Kamala Harris. We have created for you a new and

00:36:41.820 different Kamala Harris. Here she is. Believe this picture. Now, it takes a great deal of naivete and

00:36:49.120 buffoonery to go for this. And yet, we're going to find out if the American people will go for it.

00:36:54.860 And if they go for it, I think it'll be a very negative reflection on the judgment of the American

00:37:00.740 people. Now, the reason I think that people aren't that dumb and won't go for it is because I find

00:37:06.680 even, and a movie analogy here is kind of helpful. You take an ordinary American who's even not that

00:37:12.040 bright. You put him in a movie. You show him a kind of complex whodunit. And there's obviously

00:37:17.400 some usual suspects. But the ordinary guy is pretty shrewd about saying, you know, it can't be that

00:37:22.340 guy. And you know what? They want us to think it's this guy, but I don't think it's this guy. I

00:37:26.760 actually think it's that woman over there that nobody suspects. And here's why I think that. So,

00:37:31.020 people are actually, you put them in a dark room and turn the lights out, and they're able to figure

00:37:35.920 things out that are not only intellectual propositions, but involve a shrewd understanding

00:37:42.360 of human nature and of the situation as it is. If people apply that kind of intelligence to what's

00:37:47.760 going on in the country, I think we'll be fine. Well, let's hope. Now, since you mentioned a movie

00:37:53.320 analogy, do you remember the movie Dinesh in 1979 being there starring Peter Sellers?

00:38:01.880 I remember it very well. So, do you know where I'm going with this?

00:38:05.940 Go for it. I'm eager to hear what you say about it.

00:38:08.680 I mean, I wish I was the one who had had that brilliant insight, but I heard it on

00:38:14.040 Megyn Kelly's show. I can't remember the name of the guest who made that point.

00:38:19.220 But coincidentally, I had just watched the movie for the first time coming back from a flight,

00:38:26.980 some speaking engagement. And I remember from my childhood, I think I must have been maybe 14 when

00:38:31.240 the movie came out, that it was really, it became sort of a classic. And I said, okay, I'm just going

00:38:36.660 to spend the next two hours watching this movie. And then here comes Kamala Harris. So, the movie,

00:38:41.400 for those of you who don't know of being there, is this somewhat mentally challenged man who's been

00:38:47.880 completely sheltered as a gardener within this enclave of a compound house. The guy who's been

00:38:56.240 taking care of him passes away. He's catapulted into the world. And through a bunch of serendipitous

00:39:03.460 situations, he ends up being sort of this guru that has the ear of the president of the United

00:39:09.820 States. It's really quite a brilliant movie. And then that person on Megyn Kelly's show said,

00:39:16.000 well, Kamala Harris is Peter Sellers in being there. And as I heard that, I said,

00:39:22.760 oh my God, yes, it is. So, maybe you could talk a bit about that.

00:39:27.360 Well, the analogy, I think, works to a point. But there is an element of difference that's worth

00:39:34.160 noting. Because if you notice what makes the movie so ingenious and makes it also very funny,

00:39:39.260 is that the gardener, Peter Sellers, will say things that are absolutely blasé, right? At one

00:39:47.220 point, one of these finance guys says to him, well, you know, he's referring to a balance sheet.

00:39:53.060 And Peter Sellers says, what's a balance sheet? And the guy goes, exactly. Now, what the finance guy

00:40:00.820 means is that balance sheets don't tell you a true picture of the company. But of course,

00:40:05.180 that's not what Peter Sellers means. He means he genuinely doesn't know what a balance sheet is.

00:40:09.520 And so, the audience is sort of in the know. We know. And so, we laugh. Now, with Kamala Harris,

00:40:15.860 what's going on is, yes, she utters Peter Sellers like banalities, absolute idiocies. But what's

00:40:25.140 happening is, I think knowingly, the press will then take her statements and attribute enormous

00:40:31.920 profundity to them. And also, psychological qualities that are simply not there. Like,

00:40:38.260 this statement indicates emotional warmth. Or this statement indicates a shrewd appreciation

00:40:44.840 of human nature. No, it doesn't. So, what's happening is that in the Peter Sellers movie,

00:40:50.520 in Being There, the audience is expected to be smart and be in the joke. But I think with Kamala

00:40:56.040 Harris, the press is counting, and the Democrats are counting on the audience to be super dumb

00:41:01.480 and not realize that Kamala Harris is, in fact, dumb, but to take her as smart. So, yeah, I think

00:41:07.920 it's actually a very interesting reference point to compare because Kamala Harris really does,

00:41:14.920 she really is, in a way, in a kind of zone of silliness that we really haven't seen, at least not in my

00:41:21.240 lifetime. I mean, we've had candidates that were kind of comical, like Michael Dukakis,

00:41:25.840 but Michael Dukakis fundamentally was not a silly man. Right. Yeah. I mean, I know that you are a

00:41:33.860 voracious reader of the Classics period. Let us hope that on November 5th, Plato is not proven right

00:41:43.700 when he argued that democracy is basically, should be governed by philosopher kings and not by the

00:41:51.300 populace. So, let's keep our fingers crossed. Dinesh, it is such a pleasure having you on.

00:41:56.440 Again, people, the book, Vindicating Trump, comes out on October 8th, but you can pre-order it right

00:42:01.960 now. And the documentary, the movie, comes out in a couple of days, September 27th. Make sure to go see

00:42:08.100 it. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline. Thank you so much for coming on, Dinesh,

00:42:12.020 and best of luck with this project. My pleasure. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 25, 2024

Vindicating Trump - My Chat with Dinesh D'Souza (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_714)

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