LM#55--Election 2024--The Case For Trump

0:01 Those are the drums of liberty and they are banging loudly this October of 2024. We have the most important election in my lifetime. America is standing in the cliff looking at a Democratic Party full of Marxism and radical, woke policies. Let's make the case for Trump on this Liberty Minute make the case for Trump on this Liberty Minute. Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, David Kaiser.

0:42 Hello, I am David and welcome back to this Theory to Action podcast and to this election 2024 edition of the Liberty Minute. And first let me say, with this up and coming election, which started a conservative counter-revolution from the crazy 1960s and 1970s, and let me also say, may we have a free and fair election, an election with complete integrity, like we did after all those previous elections and our American republics passed.

1:27 Like we covered last week in this podcast, we had good, free and fair elections. After the tumultuous 1800 election, we had a good, free, fair election in 1804. And again in 1828, after the 1824 corrupt bargain election, we had a good election in 1828. Again, we had a great election in 1864 after the US Civil War began. After the election of 1860. We even had a successful election in 1964. After 1960's very close election, and the latest was in the election of 2000, the hanging Chad election, we had a solid and an election full of integrity in 2004.

2:26 So let us pray that we have a free and fair election with complete integrity, with all the election shenanigans of 2020, we need, our American Republic needs, and let us pray that we have a successful, free and fair election and that Donald J Trump wins with a margin that is too big to rig. I know the radical Democratic Party will do anything, anything, especially this corrupt Department of Justice and these seven battleground states and their state governments.

3:09 There's not been as much corruption since the days of the Jim Crow South with some of these state governments and most especially with the Federal Department of Justice. So today we're going to make the case for Trump and we're going to kick this off with our first pull quote At home. The loud and sometimes crude Trump had bequeathed to his successor a secure border. Mexico and the cartels feared the unpredictable and volatile Trump and therefore a time they were deterred from sending millions of their citizens and transporting others through Mexico from countries around the world into the United States.

3:52 Yet upon inauguration, biden discarded to great acclaim almost all of Trump's prior executive orders and policies that had secured the border. The result was not so much a porous border as no border at all. For the first time in American history, over two million illegal aliens each year surged into the United States, correctly surmising that the Biden administration de facto welcomed their unlawful entrance. As collateral damage from an open border, american fentanyl deaths soared to nearly 100,000 per year. The Mexican cartels reap billions of dollars in profits from drug trafficking and transiting foreign nationals in the United States, an increasing number of them gang members and criminal records or gang members and criminals.

4:46 And just as an aside, we are going to feature as a separate election episode the overrun and the invasion that the Biden administration has allowed happen, has allowed happen and look the other way in a separate Liberty Minute later this week in our election 2024 specials. Going back to the book, biden inherited interest rates at near record lows, along with inflation dipping to 1.8% and low unemployment. Yet within a year of his inauguration, inflation had more than doubled to 4.7% and would quadruple to 8% by the end of 2022.

5:32 By 2023, 30-year mortgages had more than tripled. More importantly, prices for staples, key foods, shelter, fuel, healthcare, insurance, appliances and cars have soared by some 20 to 30 percent since Biden took office. Violent crime remained at near record lows under the volatile Trump, but soared under Biden. The supposedly racist Trump in his losing 2022 or 2020 bid had won larger percentages of Black and Latino votes than most Republican candidates in the post-war era, and by the spring of 2024, he was polling at record highs for a Republican among both constituencies.

6:18 Yet Trump achieved his remarkable record of governance. While being despised by the media, smeared daily as a racist, a dictator, a fascist by Democratic opponents, impeached twice and slandered by false accusations of Russian collusion, trump was certainly not polite. He campaigned and governed as he had run his businesses with animal cunning, basic instinct, exaggeration, flamboyance and unpredictability. He railed, he stormed, he crudely mocked, he used expletives promiscuously and publicly. He polarized neutrals, sometimes alienated his own allies and gave back as good as he got to his enemies.

7:05 Never had a president been so opposed by the establishment of his own party, so hated by his political opposition and so undermined by the bipartisan Washington elite and so sabotaged by the administrative state and so feared by the billionaire class and yet so cherished by his own fervent base. But by early 2024, a worried, traditional America was once more willing to turn loose that now ex-president, to convince the left of their dangerous folly and stop the damage of the Biden years from progressing any further.

7:48 And that quote comes to us from a absolutely fantastic book I read back in 2019, the Case for Trump, by Victor Davis, hanson and Hanson was absolutely right. By Victor Davis, hanson and Hanson was absolutely right. A worried and traditional America was willing to turn now to this ex-president and to stop and halt and turn away this evil of a cultural revolution that has been happening in our country since the Obama years. We have talked about this cultural revolution in prior podcasts years. We have talked about this cultural revolution in prior podcasts. Liberty Minute 35, titled the Most Radical Revolution in Over 160 Years.

8:31 We featured it In that episode. We highlighted and confronted the massive revolution that had gripped the United States in the early 21st century. We even shared as our guide none other than that same hardest working and most insightful historian in the world, the same Victor Davis Hanson, the author of the book the Case for Trump, which we are featuring today, and we shed his words. We put light on his words of an article called the Remaking of America. It came from a wonderful website. American Greatness and the main key nugget of wisdom from that podcast way back in 2023 was this was the most radical of revolutions our country has faced since the Civil War.

9:23 In addition, in that podcast back in March of that year, we offered a three-part series answering the question what happened to our country? In part one, we talked about the cultural revolution that blew in, or rather the cultural hurricane that blew in, and we used it as our guide, kevin Slack's incredible book the War on the American Republic. You can check out Kevin's free course Over at Hillsdale, one of the best courses I've ever taken To explain what's currently happening, I'll put a link in the show notes. And then in part two Of that three part series, we explained in piercing detail, with the help of our guide, the great one, mark Levin, how the Democratic Party hates America literally.

10:14 This was not an emotional romp with hyperbolic language like you're seeing from Kamala now saying Trump is Hitler, please. It's all rubbish. If anything, that's merely projection. Psychological point of fact that whatever they tell you is the problem is what they themselves are suffering from. And Mark Levin the great one, in over 300 pages, details just how much that party hates, especially the core of the Democratic Party hates Americans.

10:54 And he does so with some over 50 pages of footnotes. It's a great in-depth read and you can crush it on Audible if you want. And then in part three we drove home this notion of a literal cultural revolution happening before our very eyes, and we did so with the wonderful, young and intelligent journalist Chris Ruffo. We did so with his incredibly written book America's Cultural Revolution, and Ruffo gets to the roots of this modern day revolution and, in fact, names, names, who are and who were these revolutionaries. So please check out all three of those episodes. Because I say all of this?

11:35 Because Donald J Trump is the only guy who could stop this revolution. Now we have made the economic case in prior episodes from this microphone for Trump and for his success with supply-side economics and how he actually got the economy humming again in 2018 and 2019 before COVID happened. And I'm saying all this as a person who did not vote for Trump in 2016. I thought he was just another New York liberal who whitewashed all the GOP voters, who was a populist and who convinced them that he would fight for their cause and remember, I'm a political junkie their cause, and remember, I'm a political junkie.

12:29 So, staying up late at night on election night in 2016 and for sure, believing and thinking that Trump was going to get smoked by four or five points, but yet, as sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, trump won that surprising victory in 2016 over the dreadful Hillary Clinton. I didn't vote for her, certainly didn't vote for her. I just didn't vote for anybody for the top of the ticket and, even though I was happy that Trump won, I couldn't bear to watch him. I thought he was a fraud. I was waiting on him to step on so many rakes that his presidency would implode and we would just have to suffer.

13:09 But in fact, I was wrong. By the time of mid, say, 2018, I was so turned off because I believed that Russian collusion case. I believe what the major media was saying. I believed what every expert was saying, and then light bulbs began to go off, slowly but surely. First thing I did is I read the book the JFK and Reagan Revolution by Larry Kudlow. I talked about supply-side economics from JFK and then how Reagan looked back and saw what JFK did, and also saw what Calvin Coolidge did, and I connected the dots.

13:57 It was like, hey, wait a minute, I just saw Larry Kudlow on TV. I just saw that he had joined the Trump team as part of the economic shop in March of 2018. This was in the summer when I was reading the book and I thought maybe after a year, trump was finally getting some solid people around him. And I went back and I started to do some research and the economic shop did, in fact, have some solid people in it, actually Stephen Moore, the great art laugher from Reagan's fame. I thought, ok, maybe, just maybe Trump won't be an idiot or as much of an idiot as I thought.

14:41 He was OK, and I would turn on the TV in 2018 and 2019, and I still could not stomach watching him give speeches. But but I was happy his economic team was doing some good stuff. So I started quietly, slowly supporting him grudgingly, had to admit, had to be intellectually honest with myself and say, yeah, secretary of State, not so much Secretary of Defense, not great, but the economic team, the economy, was getting stronger. We had the data to back it quarter after quarter.

15:21 It's always a great thing for all Americans. We want all Americans to prosper and flourish here. And then this book came along in March of 2019, the Case for Trump, by one of the most respected and hardest working historians in the business, victor Davis Hanson, vdh, as we like to call him here from this microphone. In fact, let's go back to VDH's book, the Case for Trump. The Case for Trump made several arguments about the phenomenon of Donald J Trump, covering the period from his first appearance on the political scene in 2015 to his subsequent election to the presidency and his first years of governance.

16:08 Yet they are roughly derived from one central theme, that of Trump as a modern version of the classical tragic hero. I charted the tragic hero archetype from Homer's Achilles in the Iliad and the Athenian playwright Sophocles' brilliant characterizations in his tragedies Antigon and Ajax. Though Western literature and the culture to the classic Western cinema of the 20th century, recent tragic heroes most notably appeared in Western classics such as High Noon Chain, the Magnificent Seven, the Wild Bunch and especially John Ford's the Searchers.

16:52 Later on, we read often these tragic heroes appear as exuberant characters who cannot control their appetites, their arrogance, their egos or their innate hubris. Thus, eventually, they descend into surfeit and with it an ostracism and occasionally self-destruction when, in the case of the two survivors of the film the Magnificent Seven, after ostensibly ending the outlaw threat to the farmers they defended, they sigh and say we lose. We always lose. Usually there are no second acts for such figures, a reality that now clouds the current rebirth of Trump's political career.

17:38 In the case for Trump, I suggested some six years ago that Trump would suffer from just these dilemmas of the tragic or anti-hero. He had been elected as an invitation to make America great again. A populist, nationalist, conservative message, antithetical to the incumbent Obama's vision of a transformed America, but also often incompatible with the orthodox Republican agenda of the iconic Bush family and of the recent losing Republican standard bearers like John McCain and Mitt Romney. But Trump advocated a stronger military, but not optional ground wars abroad.

18:20 He would deter Iran, kill Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian terrorist force, and he would destroy ISIS, but not re-enter the Middle East quagmire. Instead a Jacksonian, don't tread on me foreign policy for four years or more kept the peace. Vladimir Putin's Russia had staged invasions of its neighbors in three of the last four American presidential administrations, but not under the supposed reckless and uncouth Trump. China had seriously threatened to invade Taiwan during the Biden presidency, but had not done so. During the purportedly chaotic Trump years, nato's members bristled at Trump's crude bullying and badgering for greater arms investments, but more nations finally agreed to carry out their long-promised increases in military spending and were later glad they had during the subsequent, far more perilous years of the Biden era and the war in Ukraine.

19:26 So, yes, I was no Trump fan from 2015 to mid-2018, but then my political winds were shifting with the help of this book, the Case for Trump, which I read in 2019. I saw Trump in a different light, fighting a different battle. I still couldn't watch him give a speech, but I started to understand what VDH was saying. Trump was sort of a brawler on a playground taking out bullies and, frankly, I was late to that party, the party that started in 2015 and 16. But I could understand somewhat.

20:06 This is what the country needed at this time. A brawler, I wanted someone to go win the argument, but sometimes you can't reason on the playground, you just need to go brawl it out, you just need to go fight it out. So I was kind of reluctantly happy. So I was kind of reluctantly happy. And then came 2020 and the COVID lockdowns. Trump did not manage COVID well. I thought he should have fired Fauci early, once DeSantis was getting the same information from Scott Atlas that Trump was getting and I've talked about this in previous podcasts, so I will not belabor the point.

20:50 But we fast forward to the election of Joe Biden. And then we get Trump 2.0 and his resurrection after hitting rock bottom on January 6th 2021. Let's go back to the book, because this is where BDH gets even better, and even though this book was first written and published in 2019, this preface is from a new edition written for the 2024 election, and it's fantastic. If you haven't gotten the book, get the 2024 election edition, because it is just great political analysis.

21:30 Going back to the book, the first stage of Trump's political resurrection was the generally unexpected rapid disintegration of the Biden administration by late summer 2021. Joe Biden had resuscitated his once morbid 2020 Democratic primary candidacy by rebranding himself as a working class guy from Pennsylvania and an old fashioned Democratic senator who had represented Delaware for some 36 years in office. Thus, old good old Joe Biden from Scranton would return America to moderation and to normalcy after the roller coaster of the melodramatic Trump years.

22:13 His purported even-handedness would ostensibly save the Democrats in 2020 from their own unelectable radical fringe which in truth was no longer the fringe and thus might scare voters off into reelecting Donald Trump. And here is where we get a solid series of political nuggets Political nuggets you're not going to get anywhere else. Let's go back to the book. After Biden revived to win the 2020 South Carolina and Nevada Democratic primaries, almost all his once ascendant competitors on the left on cue dropped out of the primary races.

22:57 Unspoken was that an increasingly cognitively challenged 76-year-old Biden had entered a Faustian bargain of sorts with the now predominant Democratic left wing. Accordingly, biden would provide the needed moderation and moderate veneer necessary to defeat Trump, but otherwise would de facto cede much of his agenda to the left wing party activists, who would populate his administration. Wing party activist who would populate his administration. And what followed in 2021 and afterward proved the most radical left-wing administration since the early new deal years of franklin delano roosevelt, complete with the inflationary spending, restrictive fossil fuel policies in an open southern border, a soft on crime policy evocative of the 1970s, and eventually, simultaneous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, along with increased tensions over Taiwan.

23:53 Moreover, as the country emerged from the COVID-19 lockdowns, as supply chains still remained disrupted and as trillions of stimulus daughters were continuously infused in the economy, biden advisors chose to run up further deficits in a spread-the-wealth fashion. Not content to allow the economy to self-correct and rebound after the quarantines, the Biden administration borrowed and spent trillions of dollars on social programs in the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act Sidebar. Kamala Harris was the one who led and gave the tie-breaking vote in the Senate Back to the book.

24:40 Spiking pent-up consumer demand with easy government money at precisely the time supplies had not yet returned to pre-COVID levels meant money. At precisely the time, supplies had not yet returned to pre-COVID levels. The result was the worst inflation in 40 years, as prices for staples like food, fuel power, health care, appliances and cars, plus rent and home prices, eventually skyrocketed to over some 30% higher than in Trump's last year in office. In answer, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. 30-year home mortgages soared from a 2020 level of less than 2% to 7% and higher. Amid popular criticism that saw Biden's polls nosedive to below 50% approval, biden's leftist Cartier reacted by only doubling down and moving further leftward.

25:30 This was not the Bill Clinton years by chance. The worst humiliation in modern military history followed as the United States fled abruptly from Afghanistan. The military left behind over 50 billion that's 50 billion with a B and munitions and supplies, a new billion-dollar embassy, a huge, secure and refitted air base and hundreds of its NATO allies, thousands of American contractors and well over 100,000 Afghan supporters. Worse the skedaddle resulted in an unnecessary loss of some 13 Marines to a terrorist bombing in an impossible effort to secure a non-securable corridor to the airport.

26:19 We're watching, and what we have been watching for the last four years is a complete nosedive of the Biden administration and taking the country in the most radical abyss of woke policies since the New Deal, and I would say all the way back to the James Buchanan administration. Joe Biden has most certainly been a worst president, the worst president in the 21st century, and I would frankly make the claim, in the 21st century, I think he passes Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon yes, the Richard Nixon. Now, the case for Trump is an economic one, which we have laid out, like I said, from this microphone before, but some other elements that I'm very excited to see Trump go after is to take down the GOP establishment.

27:11 Thank God Mitch McConnell is leaving the Senate. He also needs to completely gut the deep state in our federal government. We need civil service reform in a much radical fashion, much like happened in the 1880s. Our deep state and our federal government is way out of control, beyond control, and we've seen this with a clear example of Fauci and those goons over at NIH. Birx and Fauci need to be tried in a federal court. Even more so, most especially, with Trump wanting to appoint Elon Musk over the government accountability office and get rid of some of this waste, fraud and abuse in our federal government.

27:56 I think Musk said it at the Madison Square Garden event. He believes he could take out $2 trillion of a $6.5 trillion budget. Trillion dollar budget, let's say. Let's say Musk is completely off base and he can only take out half of that one trillion. Let's say he's even off base of that. Maybe he can only take a quarter of it 500 million it's. It's still fantastic. I mean, we need to reign in our federal government. My Lord, it's in every nook and cranny of our lives.

28:38 It's long overdue, so long overdue. It was overdue in the 1960s. So we are 75 years late on this stuff. So we are 75 years late on this stuff. Now, some of you don't know this, but this got my fist pumping. So Trump asked Elon Musk to take on this focused role of government efficiency and cost cutting. If Trump was elected, and specifically Trump said he was going to suggest creating a new position for us called the.

29:19 I think he called the secretary of cost cutting. He went to put him in charge of this government efficiency commission and he laid out four points from the speech. He wanted him to conduct a complete financial performance audit of the entire federal government. Hoo-yah, he wanted to make recommendations for drastic reforms to improve efficiency. Yes. Develop an action plan to eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months. Yes, cut government costs without negatively impacting services. Yes. And Trump praise Musk as well as I would praise Musk as a great business guy. He highlighted his cost cutting experience.

30:00 I think Trump said he's a cost cutter and you've seen that. So this is, this is right up our alley. This is yes, this is perfect. As the great Rush Limbaugh used to say hubba, hubba right on, right on. Now Trump has made ambitious claims about the potential of Musk in this role. He suggested he could save trillions of dollars and it would cut the incredible fat in our government spending. And do you remember that we talked about this very thing in Israel? We talked about it in an episode called Fat man, thin man, with BB Netanyahu.

30:44 I'll put a link in the show notes for that episode, but this is very close to that. Same ideas, same principles. We need to get the fat out of government. We are extremely overweight as a government. And what was Musk's response? Musk has shown total openness to this idea. He even posted on social media I look forward to serving the America If the opportunity arises. He doesn't want any pay, he wants no title and he wants no recognition if needed. That was his exact quote. Now I will say it's important to note that this proposed role could potentially create significant conflicts of interest, given that Musk's leads companies like Tesla and SpaceX, which have government contracts and are subject to federal investigations.

31:36 But Musk might have to step aside for four years from his companies, just put them in a trusteeship. But I believe Musk's aggressive, cost-cutting approach, like we saw with him at Twitter and much other places, would translate very effectively to reining in government operations in its out-of-control spending. This would be my version of cutting up the teenager's credit card. You know there's going to be gnashing of teeth and moaning and wailing, but our country is going to be better off for it and every parent who cuts up the teenager's credit card knows it it's good for their own good.

32:18 So with Musk's cost cutting and most especially with Trump's tax reform proposals, I believe we can grow our way out of the bad debt which we have accumulated over the last 25 years, especially by getting the old band back together. You know the supply siders Larry Kudlow, stephen Moore, art Laffer, robert Lighthizer as trade rep and, in addition, what made me really want to vote for Trump, even though I don't like him, is this Musk cost-cutting approach. It's badly needed. I think Musk is the right guy to do it. He can take the flack, he can answer the questions.

33:00 But then also and I've stated this before is this lawfare that has happened to Trump, as they've gone after him all the way since he announced his re-election. The lawfare that this administration has done to Donald J Trump was sickening. It's completely un-American, third world country stuff. It was disgusting. And the top of the mountain was the insurrection, without an insurrection case, by the fraud federal counsel, jack Smith, that he brought because that narrative and storyline completely breaks down, was completely false and the January 6th committee should be reviewed because we might need to impeach all of those congressional members.

33:46 We cannot have a congressional committee just lying over and over to the American people and not allowing the other side to present its case. We don't allow that in criminal cases. We don't allow it in civil cases and that thing was a Russian show trial big time. And as a side note, the Cheneys oh the Cheneys, that family is quite rich. What a bunch of total hypocrites. I'm ashamed, very ashamed, completely ashamed, that I ever defended Dick Cheney for so many years, from 1994 onward to 2008,. I defended him over and over. I'm very ashamed.

34:36 He lacks any character and his daughter is complete. She was never a conservative. Everybody wanted to make her a conservative, but her father, dick Cheney, has lost his mind. And Trump? You know, trump has taken on the good old GOP establishment and boy, oh boy is he winning and I hope he wins big. I hope he wins so big. It's too big to rig because the Democrats are desperate. They're very, very desperate. You may not like Donald Trump like I, can't watch him give a speech but his policies spot on Exactly what the country needs. In addition, the Democratic Party has literally gone insane, and just two policies highlight this Abortion up to birth and beyond folks.

35:24 Frankly, that's murder, just plain and simple. It's murder. Frankly, that's murder, just plain and simple, it's murder. And the second issue they support men playing in women's sports. Where, how, in what world do these people live in? Are they anywhere close to reality? Where are all the feminists on the Democratic Party? That is so radical a thought, let alone a public policy, that I believe it just comes straight from the pit of hell. We're going to support men playing in women's sports, like that's ninth level of hell stuff, super radical.

36:05 Let's go back to the case for Trump, our book of the day, for just one more quote. Trump finished his successful first term in 2021, defeated at the polls. In the ensuing months, he was widely discredited and detested by the country's elite media and political and academic classes. Trump then was supposedly exiled permanently into the political wilderness. Yet Trump was also confident that his successful four years of governance, his nonstop war with the political establishment and his promises of still more reforms on his envisioned return would eventually earn him re-election and perhaps even eventual recognition and reward for what his talents had achieved.

36:58 However, given much of his character, flaws had robbed him of such deserved credit. Given the achievements of his first term and the continued implosion of the Biden administration, the greatest challenge to the 2024 Trump candidacy, aside from ensuring ballot integrity, is Trump himself, that is, can Trump reassure millions of former Biden voters who desire a return to the Trump agenda that his upsides of his policies far outweigh the downsides of his mercurial personality? In that sense, trump's political future now belongs, as it should be, to the judgment of the electorate, and indeed that is how it should be in our american republic.

37:54 So in today's liberty minute, may we have a free, fair, an election with complete integrity, like we did with all those previous elections, namely like the ones we covered in this podcast last week. 1800 to 1804, had a good one in 1804. 1828 after 1824, good, solid election, free, fair and one with integrity. 1864 after 1860, good, successful election. 1960 had a close call. 1964 had a successful election. 1960 had a close call. 1964 had a successful election and the latest one was the 2024 or the 2000 election that was very close, the hanging chat election, and in 2004, we had a good, free, fair election.

38:47 Let us pray we have a free and fair election with I like to always say complete integrity. Everything has to be on the up and up Now, hopefully, we have made the case for Donald Trump, for you to elect Donald Trump. He might just be the most consequential president in the first half of the 20th century If he implements the reforms he's promising number one. If he gets elected in a free and fair election on the up and up, and if he does implement the reforms, he's promising the takedown of the GOP establishment.

39:28 Reform the deep state in our federal government. You know that civil service reform needs to be radically changed. Let's put Elon Musk over the government accountability office and with those tax reforms that Trump did in 2017, 2018, and 2019, if he can implement those again with the House and the Senate and help us grow our way out of this bad debt we have accumulated over the last 25 years, he will indeed make America great again. And this is indeed the case for Trump, and we hope you agree with us and, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight.

40:12 Thank you for joining us and, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight.