Learn English with Donald Trump. President Donald Trump's wife, Nidia Trump, was diagnosed with a rare heart condition, and doctors initially misdiagnosed it as an undiagnosed heart condition. Her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, rushed her to the hospital and learned that she had a rare genetic condition called idiopathic cardiomyopathy.
00:20:22.580And, you know, growing up, I bought into what was and unfortunately continues to be the conventional wisdom about Richard Nixon's presidency.
00:20:30.860But as I dug deeper and read the history, and this is, of course, something that, you know, from your own firsthand experience and relationship with the former president,
00:20:41.580The reality was very different than the narrative.
00:20:44.700And one thing I learned studying Nixon is that all of the great political questions and dramas and archetypes that we're grappling with today really first emerged in the first and, you know, the first part of the second term of President Nixon.
00:21:02.360And in fact, he anticipated many of these questions.
00:21:05.580He had some wisdom on how to potentially address some of these questions.
00:21:10.040And I think that he really is the kind of skeleton key to modern politics and should be reappraised for those of us, especially on the right.
00:21:22.460I think one of the great tragedies, of course, is that many of his great accomplishments, a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviets,
00:21:32.200the desegregation of the public school system without bloodshed or incident, the saving of Israel unilaterally in the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
00:21:44.380federal revenue sharing where public monies are best spent at the local level, the war on cancer,
00:21:52.920bringing China in out of the cold at a time that China was a dirt poor agrarian society with little technology without a strong military.
00:22:07.320Most of the Chinese did not have indoor plumbing.
00:23:35.480But in your new book called America's Cultural Revolution, you talk more about the parallels between how the Chinese and American institutions have been conquered by communists.
00:23:54.260And I think, look, President Trump has really outlined this in his very unique and colorful way.
00:23:59.980He talks about the radical left lunatics at Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and other elite universities.
00:24:06.680And the ideologies that are really manufactured within those universities have now extended outwards.
00:24:13.340And, you know, what I found particularly fascinating is that the Black Panther ideology, the Weather Underground ideology, the new left ideologies that were really at the fringes of that time,
00:24:25.660suddenly after 2020 became proliferating throughout our institutions, universities, corporations, schools, government agencies.
00:24:35.400And really what Nixon feared came to pass.
00:24:41.760And the tactics and techniques that he had contemplated then, unfortunately, were not implemented at that time.
00:24:49.920And now we're going to have to take much more dramatic action.
00:24:52.880That's why I think we've seen in the first almost 100 days of the Trump presidency, this really brutal, you know, drag out, knock down fight with the Ivy Leagues.
00:25:03.400And I think that is targeting exactly the heart of the problem.
00:25:08.020He's kind of lifted up the rock and finding all of the, you know, the critters that are hiding under these, in the dirt.
00:25:16.220And it's really time to take these ideologies, these ideas that have baked in these places for so long, and to actually try to mount a proper and true defense.
00:26:59.340But we're going to see if the conventional wisdom holds or whether Trump, who arrives at these questions intuitively rather than purely intellectually, is actually right.
00:27:41.640And from that moment, when I really understood the president's humor and wit was really when I really understood him as a president, as a public figure.
00:27:55.520And I mean, I'll tell you my favorite line of his.
00:27:59.740You know, during the 2020 debates, they were questioning him, you know, basically saying, oh, you're racist.
00:28:05.500And he's in this big debate hall, and he shields his eyes from the Klieg lights, and he says, you know, I can't see all the way in the back, but I'm pretty sure I am the least racist person in this room right now.
00:28:19.320And it's just the outrageous, you know, totally off the wall.
00:29:55.020However, when he's using the teleprompter, you can always tell when he goes off a teleprompter into one of his rhetorical cul-de-sacs that are always pretty funny.
00:30:08.260And then he'll come back to his main topic.
00:30:18.760Which American institutions that have been captured by the hard left are most crucial for the American people to reclaim in order to preserve the country?
00:30:28.960Well, look, I think you have to start with the universities.
00:30:35.520You have to then continue to the schools.
00:30:39.040And then you have to burrow into, you know, the civil rights regime.
00:30:43.960So, HR, legal, and other professional class institutions.
00:30:50.320And I think that that will go a long ways.
00:30:53.120And, you know, what President Nixon saw the beginning of, and we're really arriving to this in mature form.
00:30:59.840And he talked about what was known then as the Eastern Establishment.
00:31:03.440But I think now it's really a nationwide, kind of bi-coastal, professional managerial establishment.
00:31:10.360And as much as we may disagree with the popular ideologies within that establishment, that really is where policy gets made, how the narratives that circulate through the country get made, and where politics is shaped and formed.
00:31:26.700And I think conservatives are going to really have to think in the next, you know, three and a half years, how can we influence that sector of society?
00:31:36.040Because what I see right now in President Trump's second term is that you have a charismatic leader at the top who really is a force of nature.
00:31:45.180And you have the MAGA base at the bottom, kind of working class, middle class, you know, a lot of, especially working class men, massive support across racial demographics.
00:31:57.840But what we need is a kind of middle layer of professionals, institutions, and administrators that can take the raw democratic power of the base and the charismatic leadership of the president, and then translate it through these captured institutions so that we can start to arrive at significant reforms.
00:32:18.340Yeah, I think, I guess the answer to my question is kind of obvious.
00:32:21.280We have to, we have to take back the schools.
00:32:23.400If we don't take back the schools, then we lose the youth.
00:32:28.380And if we lose the youth, well, we lose the country.
00:32:33.380I also think people don't understand that Trumpism is far, far broader and far, far deeper than the Republican Party.
00:32:43.540There are people who voted for Donald Trump, who voted for Jimmy Carter and voted for Barack Obama.
00:32:49.460The appeal of the MAGA movement, the America First movement, far more, far broader than the Republican Party.
00:33:00.700And now when you add to it what I call the common sense Democrats, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like Tulsi Gabbard, who's now a former Democrat, like Rod Blagojevich, like the mayor of Dallas, for example.
00:33:16.740You have a realignment, very similar to the realignment that was fashioned by Richard Nixon in 1968, in which white Southern conservatives, working class blue collar Catholics in the Northeast, combined with traditional Republicans in the country to form a new majority.
00:33:37.040That coalition may have been frozen temporarily by Watergate, but by 1979, it was flowing again.
00:34:34.860If you're just tuning in, first of all, I'm happy to share the good news of my wife's recovery and her rebound and the fact that she's headed back to robust health after a horrific health scare.
00:34:52.040But we're talking to Chris Ruffo, American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist.
00:34:59.340Chris, I ask this question of virtually every guest.
00:35:04.180If you had to give one piece of advice to Donald J. Trump, who, by the way, does ask a lot of people for advice.
00:35:11.660In the end, he makes the decisions, but he works the phones hard for advice.
00:35:17.400If you had to give him one piece of advice, what would it be?
00:35:19.600The president should hold the line with the Ivy League universities, and I think that he needs to actually follow through on his promise to defund at least one of them.
00:35:32.180So he can make a dramatic example of what happens if these universities don't comply with American civil rights law, and we can watch in dramatic and spectacular form one of these universities implode, which I think will accomplish his broader goal of reforming the universities as a whole.
00:36:18.460You can follow me on Twitter at RealChrisRuffo.
00:36:20.760You can visit my sub stack at ChristopherRuffo.com, and I'll be really tackling some of these issues related to higher education in the coming weeks and months.
00:36:31.440I'll be right back to you on social media, and I'll be right back to you on social media platform.
00:36:51.400I'd hope to have time to get to it, but I appreciate this lively conversation.
00:36:55.440And I want to invite you to come back again when we have a bit more time.
00:37:01.380Again, my thanks to Chris Ruffo, our guest.
00:37:05.340Yes, this weekend I am going to make my famous Sunday gravy one-third beef, one-third pork, one-third veal, San Marzano tomatoes, one can of tomato paste,
00:37:18.680all the appropriate spices, garlic, onions, parsley, and, of course, lots of oregano.
00:37:28.460On Monday, there will still be some left, but Sunday, Marron.
00:37:33.140I also want to thank everybody out there listening to The Stone Zone.
00:37:37.180It has been a tumultuous week in the Stone family, as I told you earlier, and we are grateful for your listening and very grateful for your prayers.
00:37:49.500Until we meet again, God bless you, and Godspeed.
00:37:53.500Thanks for listening to The Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
00:37:57.720You can hear The Stone Zone with Roger Stone weeknights at 8 on 77 WABC.
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00:38:21.600See you next time for a new episode so you never have to wonder.