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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. Our next guest on the line with us today, William Inboden, Executive Director and William Powers Jr. Chair at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin. Welcome to the program, William. Thank you. Great to be with you guys. William, you wrote a fantastic book that was just released called The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and The World on the Brink.
We have like what I like to call the foursome of the court set of malcontents. We have North Korea, Iran, Russia and China. And now we have Russia. It's almost a year now invaded Ukraine. What lessons could today's lawmakers and policymakers learn about how wrong Ronald Reagan and his staff and secretaries handled the Cold War?
Great question. I do think there certainly are some lessons for today. I'll just highlight two of them. The first, of course, is Reagan's defense policy was summed up in peace through strength. And he really did want to maintain and preserve peace. He wanted to keep the Cold War cold. Obviously, he didn't want it to get destroyed.
the world to get destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse. But he knew that the biggest obstacle to peace was Soviet communism, and that American weakness was provocative. And so in building up America's strength, and of course he was very focused on our military strength, but also our economic strength, the strength of our values, the strength of our international leadership, that's how he wanted to box the Soviets in and
pursue a negotiated solution, giving them no other choice, letting them know that their military power was not going to achieve their ends. And so thinking about our challenges with those four different countries today as different as they are, I do think that we would have a better hand in addressing them, a more Reagan-esque hand if we were putting more resources into our military, not just
not just more money, but helping to leverage America's technological edge with the next generation of weapon systems, and then doubling down on the strength of our values as the greatest free country in the world. And we could talk some more about those details. The second part of Reagan's playbook that I think really applies today is he saw the Cold War as a battle of ideas, not just ideas.
a rivalry between the powerful Soviet Union and the powerful United States. He thought fundamentally it was a battle of ideas and saw tyranny, Soviet tyranny, as an idea to be defeated. And I think, again, we've lost some of that dimension as well today. I mean, what's one commonality that Russia, China,
North Korea and Iran all have is they're all dictatorships. They're all vicious tyrannies, you know, seeking to impose their worldviews on other countries, on as much of the rest of the world as they can. And that's what Reagan, of course, saw was the threat with the Soviet Union, trying to impose, you know, communism, communist dictatorships on the rest of the world. And so seeing the
these threats as fundamentally about bad totalitarian ideas and that America should have confidence in our ideas and our values and waging our competition with these adversaries in that level.
How much – it seems to have changed quite a bit because I'm a Cold War baby. I grew up in that era. We all understood, everyone in this country understood that it was a battle of ideas, that we were facing real global adversaries. How much are we hampered right now by essentially the cultural inability? I mean it's kind of – you have people who would even call it racism if you're critical of China or other countries where the people who are different and don't look like us.
And there's really not a sense of national unity to fight back against these global forces now that we used to have. How critical is it that we start redeveloping some of that? Yeah.
It is fundamental. I think your diagnosis is exactly right. But again, I'll say that this was a challenge that President Reagan faced as well. As you mentioned being a Cold War baby, I am too. The 1970s were a lousy decade for our country. We were very demoralized from losing the first war in our history in Vietnam, and then the OPEC oil embargo, our stagnant economy with runaway inflation,
The Iran hostage crisis made us look weak. And so many Americans had just lost faith in our country, didn't believe in ourselves, had imbibed a lot of that narrative of American decline or blame America first. Particularly, we saw that with so much of the left in the 1970s. And
When I talked about Reagan's vision of peace through strength, part of the strength that he wanted to restore for America was just the strength of our national unity, of believing in ourselves again as a country, of knowing that we're the greatest country on earth and that we
we have a lot to be confident about. And so he wanted to restore that American spirit, remind us that we may not be a perfect country, but we're a very good country and the world is a better place when we are strong and united. So it takes political leadership. I'm afraid we're not seeing that right now from the Biden administration, but I think it's
possible to restore the American spirit and our sense of our country's greatness again, just as Reagan did in his own day.
As you were writing your book and you were going through files and FOIA requests and things of those natures, who is an unsung hero in the Reagan administration that doesn't get a lot of adulation or recognition? We always have Schultz, Weinberger, great men who were up for the task. But who was somebody, as you did your research, that really surprised you?
That really had Reagan's vision at heart.
Yeah, great question. And the answer is Bill Clark. He's a name that unfortunately is too much forgotten these days. I hope my book can help revive his historical memory. But he was Reagan's, probably Reagan's closest friend other than the First Lady Nancy Reagan. Clark had been Reagan's chief of staff when Reagan was governor of California, and then had been on the California Supreme Court. And President Reagan made Clark his second national security advisor.
and while clark was national security advisor he's the one who really took reagan strategic vision of pursuing victory in the cold war rather than just coexistence or containing communism he took a strategic vision and translated into a number of very sophisticated national security strategies and please
These documents were, you know, Reagan and his team spent months working on them. They were highly classified at the time, but they were the guidance for, you know, our military, our intelligence services, even the State Department on how to implement Reagan's vision of a peaceful victory in the Cold War.
wouldn't have happened without Bill Clark. And so he was a very humble man. He never wrote his own memoir. He wasn't linking to the press all the time about how great he was. He was just there to faithfully serve Reagan and his vision. And looking back, I think we owe a lot of the success of Reagan's policies to having Bill Clark as his national security advisor. All right. So you brought up an issue that Sam and I talk about a lot. It seems like great leaders are
Have close friends who could tell them they're out of line that no, no, no. You got to look at this way and it's not adversarial. But for someone like Reagan, I'm sure when Bill Clark came to him, he listened. It got due respect and they were able to go back and forth. Is that part of the leadership that you think is missing? For example, I don't think Donald Trump ever had that.
And I think they are a good moderator. They're a good leash to say, hey, hey, hey, you're getting way out of bounds there. And also they're loyal to these people at the same time. So like you said, Bill Clark did not write his own memoirs. He was loyal to Ronald Reagan, loyal to his vision, which made the world a better place. As being a professor and studying, do you see that a lot in leadership? Sure.
You're right. It's an essential attribute. Great leaders have to have enough of that balance of confidence in themselves and humility to have other strong, capable people around them who can shoot straight with them.
yeah who can tell them you know mr president mr chairman you know general you know whatever the title is pay uh... you know me i'm loyal to you have got your best interest at heart i've got our mission's best interest at heart i got a level with you this isn't working you're out of line you're missing this you know whatever it is
and reagan absolutely had that your clark was certainly one of them um... george shultz he mentioned earlier who you know i'd portrayed very favorably in the book as a great sector of state we also had that with reagan he was very loyal to reagan throughout his channeling reagan division but he also had enough of an open door in candor with reagan he could uh... again tell him when uh... he thought you know president reagan needed to hear something differently uh... in the first lady nancy reagan she was
careful to stay out of policy stuff, and Reagan made sure that she stayed out of policy stuff. But when it came to things like the overall dignity of the office, or even a few staff who were not loyal to Reagan or didn't have his best interest at heart, she would shoot straight with him as well on that, on things he needed to come clean and fix. Jim Baker, another one, very effective as Secretary of State. Again, he was
a little more personally moderate than Reagan as a conservative. But as White House Chief of Staff, Baker was really effective in running and managing the White House, managing relations with Congress, and helping get Reagan's agenda implemented. And there's a good case to be made that the Iran-Contra scandal wouldn't have happened if Baker had still been there as Chief of Staff, helping to watch Reagan's back with a few other people who were freelancing without his authorization.
We're with William Imboden. He is the author of The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, The Cold War and The World on the Brink. Do you feel America is missing these wise old men? We'll say wise old men and women today that would really help us with these policy struggles that we're having as a nation?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, this was another thing that really came out in the course of researching and writing this book is Reagan just had a phenomenally capable team around him. You know, they were very strong-willed. They often didn't agree with each other, but they were all quite loyal to him and his overall vision and just tremendously accomplished people, you know, tremendously.
george shultz being one that we mentioned uh... uh... jim baker being another bill casey the c_i_a_ director jean kirkpatrick uh... the reagan's ambassador the u_n_ the first woman hold that role brilliant uh... fierce very committed to advancing freedom and opposing communism incredibly capable uh... device president bush uh... you know very capable pedigree pedigree there there as well um... so is a really it was uh...
remarkable team, team of rivals at times, but remarkably capable people. And a collection of that kind of talent and experiences would be much, much welcome today. We just don't have that near as much in public life anymore, and it's a real shame, and it's to the detriment of our country.
William, before we have just about a minute before we go to our break here and then you're going to be coming back and joining us for our next segment. I assume folks can get your book on Amazon, but do you have a website or other social media you'd like people to be able to follow you at?
I'm not personally on social media, but – Oh, it's a smart man. Yeah, probably better for my sanity, but not as good for book promotion, right? We'll do that for you. We'll do that for you. Okay, yeah. But the Clements Center for National Security that I run at the University of Texas, we have pretty active social media. So it's at Clements Center is our Twitter account. ClementsCenter.org is our website. And there's quite a bit of material in my book that can be found there.
Fantastic. Folks, we're going to be coming right back with William Inboden, Executive Director and William Powers Jr. Chair at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas Austin. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. On the line with us right now, William Inboden, Executive Director and William Powers Jr. Chair at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Austin, Texas. He is also the author of The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and The World on a Brink, which you can get at Amazon.com. We highly recommend you check out that book. Obviously,
As someone in my mid-40s, Reagan is by far the best president still of my lifetime with all respect to people who might now say otherwise. William, as you were doing this book, is there a personal characteristic or trait, something Reagan had that really helped separate him and made him such an effective leader and able to communicate to people who maybe didn't share his views?
Yeah, I will mention two things. The first is, while he had very strong convictions and strategic vision about the vulnerabilities of the Soviet Union and how American power could really help crack it apart and yet still maintain a peaceful victory in the Cold War...
he also had what you can call strategic empathy where he was good about seeing the world through the eyes of others including trying to see the world to the eyes of soviet leaders did mean he agreed with them at all right uh... but that made him a much more effective negotiator he knew where some of their vulnerable points were he knew how far he could be could push them so
you know in june of nineteen eighty seven when he goes to berlin and stands there at the brandenburg a_t_s_ mister gorbachev tear down this wall such iconic moment in the cold war all of his staff at reagan staff don't say that don't say it's gonna be too provocative but because he had already spent a lot of time with gorbachev because he was kind of inside gorbachev's head in some ways
He had a sense that he could push Gorbachev that far with that demand, and it wouldn't backfire. Then one other attribute that really came out of the course of my research is Reagan had a very strong Christian faith. And he was often quiet about it. He wasn't a regular churchgoer. But this comes out in his diaries, in his letters, in some of his private meetings, and
that was really a source of strength for him especially after he survived the assassination attempt uh... and he really felt like god had spared him for the purpose of winning the cold war and ending the threat of nuclear destruction that they gave him a lot of uh... i think
both serenity but also confidence when critics were fiercely denouncing him, when the media was turning against him, when Congress was giving him a hard time. That gave him, I think, the strength to stay the course and feel like he was serving a higher calling there. How much is that ability to get inside your opponents or other people's head to
When you said that, I really started thinking about the buildup to the invasion of Ukraine and the fact that we made and the world made a bunch of fairly significant strategic blunders in their interaction with Vladimir Putin leading up to that. And it just seems like there aren't any world leaders in the West who truly understand Putin the way you're talking about Reagan having understood Gorbachev.
Yeah, I think that's really been missing. Yeah, and we've misjudged Putin for a couple of decades now. And to be clear, as I said earlier with Reagan, getting inside the head of a foreign leader, especially a more adversarial one, doesn't mean you're agreeing with him or being an apologist for him. Sometimes it can make you more effective in knowing what he's up to, knowing what his vulnerabilities are, but also coming up with offences.
off-ramps or ways to avoid an even worse conflict. Yeah, and that's been, you know, widely missing among Western leaders, you know, European leaders and American leaders. Interestingly, I will give Zelensky some credit here. I think he actually understands what's in Putin's head a little bit more, you know, as we look at how effective he's been as a leader of the Ukrainian people, but also not just in inspiring and rallying the Ukrainians, but also, you
the way they've designed so many of their battlefield tactics and even their social media. I mean, so he's really put Putin on his back heels, partly because I think he understands Putin very well. With William and Bowdoin, he is the author of The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and The World on the Brink. Don't be lazy. Go out and buy it for your loved ones for Christmas. William, in the 1980s, most experts believed the Soviet Union was strong, it was stable, it would last forever. I remember watching as a
teenager see it you know 60 minutes about how great their missile system was and all of this again these are the same type of experts that just misjudge russia going into ukraine these are same experts that seem to misjudge every foreign adversary we have in some ways not that we should take them lightly why do they keep missing the mark about russia and some of these other countries
Yeah, it's a great question. And this was, like I said, the source of Reagan's, I think, strategic genius is that he was among the very few leaders who saw the Soviet Union's vulnerabilities. When all the Soviet experts at the time thought that the Soviet economy was strong and durable, that their military was so formidable that the Soviet people still believed in their system. And I think part of
uh... reagan's insights there was because he had some core convictions about uh... the uh... the superiority of free markets and just knowing that you know command economies you run by the states that violate private property rights and all the penalties of communism just can't sustain themselves he believes the virtues of free societies of people having political freedom and religious freedom and your freedom to choose their own leaders and he just
knew from his meeting with soviet dissidents and other critics of the regime and your former political prisoners that but people don't don't believe in the system and so what problem is when we're only focused on the leaders and whatever official statistics they may be putting out we've seen this with china right for decades we believed all the official statistics of the chinese economy but you've got to be having some sort of channels of connection to ordinary people these societies were living under these tyrannical systems
who sometimes will have a very, very different view of what the reality is. I mean, for Reagan, just a common sense thing was he realized the Soviet Union couldn't feed its own people. That's why it kept on having to buy wheat from the West. He thought, wait a minute, this is the largest country in the world. They've got millions of acres of what should be fertile farmland.
And yet this backward oppressive system can't even grow enough wheat to feed its own people. That's just not sustainable. So – and we – I can't believe you used common sense. I can't believe you used common sense, right? I mean it's sort of like when you – it's sort of like today when people say, well, we're not in a recession. And by economic metrics, we aren't. But then you hear food banks –
the requests for food banks are up 76%. People are cutting back seeing mom and dad to save on gas. I mean, and that seems like something Ronald Reagan, because he practiced common sense, would pick up that a lot of leaders don't pick up.
Yeah, exactly. And that's where he did not only want to trust the experts and the official statistics laying out on his desk. He really wanted to talk to ordinary people living in these different societies, whether it was ordinary Americans about the suffering they had had under Jimmy Carter's disastrous economy, or talking to ordinary Soviets who'd been able to escape from the Soviet Union, escape from behind the Iron Curtain and tell him what life was really like.
Fantastic. We have just about a minute left here. We're with William Inboden, executive director and William Powers Jr. chair at the Clements Center. You can follow them at clementscenter.org or at Clements Center on Twitter. You can also get his book right now. It's available on Amazon and at your local bookstore. And folks, take the trip to your local bookstore. Support your local bookstore and get this man's book, The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, the Cold War and the World on the Brink.
Any last words, William, before we wrap up for today? Yeah, one final thing I'll say. It just was so much fun to work on with the book is Reagan's speeches. He was called the great communicator for a reason. I would encourage your listeners to go back and watch his speeches on YouTube or read about them in the book.
And he personally wrote a lot of his greatest speeches. You know, he had some helpful speechwriters working for him, but he was really the main craftsman of his own speeches. So the Westminster Address on Marxism, Leninism, ending up on the ash heap of history, evil empire, tear down this wall, the boys at Pointe du Hoc. The best communicator of my lifetime. Breaking Battlegrounds will be coming back in just a moment.
Welcome back.
To Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Chuck Warren, I'm Sam Stone. On the line with us, our next guest, Chris Steyer-Walt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute with a focus on American politics, voting trends, public opinions, and the media. Boy, that means we got a lot to talk about this week, Chris. Chris, first question. Did you run out and buy all your family and friends a $99 Trump digital trading card?
Well, you know, I find it, you know, obviously ridiculous. But I will say this. You know, Trump says he made almost $4.4 million selling 44,000 of those things in basically a day. I believe it. And the thing is,
You know, we can look at polls that say that Rob DeSantis beats Trump in a head to head matchup. We can look at polls that say that Republicans are increasingly hoping that someone else will be their nominee in 2024. But Trump has a I hate to say it, but like a.
religious or messianic kind of hold on what looks to be like a quarter of the Republican Party. And that's worth a lot. And not just in terms of Griff's kind of stuff about selling pictures of himself dressed up like Iron Man, but in terms of you need people to go vote, you need people to care. And you can certainly see a scenario in which the Republican Party repeats
the mistakes that it's made in 2016 and has a crowded field against Trump who has the fanatical support of a core group. Yeah, absolutely. Personally, I actually might have bought those as an investment if they were actual physical cards, but I'm just not down with this NFT thing. I'm not, I'm not buying this. Well, I mean, his, his audience, his audience, his audience is almost like the grateful dead followers. It's really amazing.
In a lot of ways. And the other thing with Trump, though, is he is like a lot of those old acts and his his his events are like concerts. They're like Grateful Dead shows or whatever they call it dead again now or Jimmy Buffett or something else. The oldsters come out and what do they want to hear? They want to hear the hits.
They want to hear the, you know, Elton John on his 50th farewell tour. They don't want to hear new material. They want to hear Tiny Dancer. So, right. I think for Trump, his problem is and, you know, I just chronicled the advantages that he has. But the problem that he has is that he's now sort of I call him mega Jeb Bush.
He's got he has baggage. He has a record. He's not interesting. He's not new. And now he has prior and he's got to continue to say that the 2020 election was stolen. He's got to continue to stick up for people who are unpopular, but who are part of his universe. He's got all of this stuff like talking about the issues, talking about what happened is harder for him. So he is not nearly as nimble.
as he was eight years ago.
Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think that those rallies of his are kind of an underrated fundamental part of his popularity and the sort of cult of personality that's been built around him. Because you look at what a political rally looked like pre-Trump. You know, you have 10 politicians coming up to stage for 10 minutes each to speak. Halfway through, there's no one in the crowd who isn't ready to pass out and go to sleep. And then he put on these rock shows. And there's an audience for that.
Well, I think these days there's a huge audience for meet space connection. Right. And what MAGA has offered in a lot of ways is a special degree of intense connection in a strongly dislocated society. We are a highly alienated place.
That is a great comment. I don't know if you've read the book The Great Degeneration, but it was one that had an impact on me some years ago, reading it and the lack of connection in American society with people. And I would also recommend my colleague Tim Carney's book Alienated America. The social science there, the research is clear there.
We have what Blaise Pascal called the God shaped void inside of us. But whatever it is, the yearning for connection, the yearning for being part of something bigger than ourselves and more important than us and all of those things and the commonalities and friendships that it brings.
You're very right. An overlooked part of MAGA was that people have fun at the shows, right? People enjoy it. They like it. They buy the merch. They see their friends. They go. And in a time where we are sort of digitized and we've become NFTs ourselves, that offers something special.
Yeah, absolutely. You can really see the connection when you're out at one of those events or at the Cary Lake events that we had here in Arizona. We're going to be coming back for another segment here just momentarily with Chris Stierwalt, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This is Breaking Battlegrounds. Coming back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone. On the line with us right now, Chris Stierwalt, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the author of Every Man a King, A Short Colorful History of American Populists. Chris, how do folks follow you and your work and the work that the American Enterprise Institute is doing?
Well, they should first, before they do anything, they should buy Breaking News, the bestselling book that I wrote about the unholy alliances and distortions that have occurred in politics because of –
the atomization of the media landscape. It's a, it's a history. Uh, if there are jokes, uh, there's some philosophy in it. Uh, there's some of my own story in it and, uh, it's great. Uh, I, I, I find, I find the best that I can say about books that I write very often is that it is, I'm not embarrassed, uh,
that I wrote it, and I'm definitely not embarrassed about broken news. And you can follow me on Instagram, because I actually post on Instagram at C. Stierwald, but I am tweeted for at Chris Stierwald, so some stuff appears there. But I'm around, man. You can watch me on News Nation. You can read me at the Dispatch.
I am not fat because I'm not working. I'm fat because I eat too much. I resemble that remark.
Chris, I want to talk about your book a little bit, but tell us about News Nation. When News Nation came out, Simon and I were talking, they may really hit the jackpot if they just give both sides. If they just, you know, just the facts, man. Like the old Drag News line. How's that going? It's going really well. I think the...
the way to think about media and politics is that the parties got very very weak part of the reason that partisanship is so strong is that the parties became very weak probably the single worst piece of legislation enacted in my adult lifetime uh where the campaign finance reform changes at the turn of the century uh really really bad
And as we have watched, Super PACs, and the timing was really bad because, of course, they were trying to solve a problem that didn't really exist in the way that they thought it did, but was also about to be obliterated by technology. The old days of having capture, well, maybe think about it this way.
Who would you rather your elected officials be captured by? Would you rather them be captured by large dollar donors or small dollar donors, assuming that they're going to be captured? And I'm not saying everybody gets captured or whatever, and it's a matter of degree. But if you have to choose between people who are going to be captured by large donors or captured by small donors, it sounds like it would be better to be captured by small donors. But that
That creates different incentives, too. Right. And those incentives relate to performative outrage and jackassery. Right. It relates to goofball conduct that is designed to palpate the fear and anger gland. Chris, as someone who's running for office and gathering those checks, I got to tell you, it relates very clearly to absolutism.
Yeah, I have never collected a check from anyone, a large check from anyone who's absolutely said, I need you to do all of these things for me to support you and laid out a huge list. They're generally looking for just good leadership. The small dollar donors, I've had a lot of them come up and go through a whole litany of questions. And if you don't support everyone, they're they're gone.
And how do we get to the next thing? And by the way, what are you running for? I'm running for the Phoenix City Council. So I've got a runoff that now goes into March.
That's wild. That's got to be wild. I love Arizona politics. It's crazy out there. So good luck. It is insanity, and I'm enjoying every minute of it. So that brings a point here. Chris and Sam, that brings a point up. Chris, I like your opinion. You wrote a fantastic piece on the pearls of giving up on persuasion. Why have politics?
politicians and parties given up on trying to persuade people they just keep thinking i'm gonna turn out my base and that will solve it and that was half of republicans problem in arizona they just thought i'd turn out my base which they did but it's not enough sam and i would tell people over and over you cannot win in arizona unless you get mccain and ducey voters that's just the math
Did you all read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables? Yes. Yes. Long ago. So the problem was that if the penalty for stealing a loaf of bread is the same as the penalty for murder,
What would you do to prevent being caught stealing a loaf of bread? Right. Exactly. Right. So we have a problem with input on our politicians, which is.
You can only lose once. And the sanction that primary voters have, which is this is 15 to 20 percent of the electorate, the sanction that they can deliver is exactly the same that the sanction that 60 percent of the electorate can deliver in November. The penalty for losing a primary and losing in general are the same, which is that you are not elected or reelected.
So that gives 15% of the electorate the same amount of authority that 60% of the electorate does. And that's messed up. We have had a 40-year, 40, 50-year experiment with primaries, and it's just been a disaster. And it keeps getting worse. And cycle after cycle, it keeps delivering these punishing head blows to the United States of America. If you have to win a primary...
in which those kinds of small dollar voters, small dollar donors, we're talking about these activists, that 15 to 20 percent of the electorate, if you have to satisfy them first, you by no means can
can get caught reaching out to the other side across the aisle in the general election or when you get to office. When you get to office, you have to go hate the other people in order to prove to the people who hold you hostage in the primary that you will absolutely never do anything when you are elected. The only thing that you'll do when you're elected is generate buzzy clips and
and sell NFTs, and you absolutely positively will not do anything to govern the country. Chris, I have to ask because I thought that was a really – it's sort of an interesting point, and see what you think about this. I think one of the mistakes that the larger money donors are making is that they're often jumping in and getting behind a candidate basically before the primaries begin and labeling that that's our person. I think they would be much smarter to wait –
Into not not through the primary, but into the primary process and see who emerges first, because I think there's a real kickback from the base of going, you're trying to stuff these people down our throats. So who's our list right now? Right. If we look at the Republican side, what's on the list? So Trump being weak.
looking weak. You can see it. You can smell blood in the water. You can tell that Trump, as I call him, the mega Jeb Bush, you can see that it's not working. And NFT proceeds aside, the polls demonstrate the problem. And why is Ron DeSantis leading him by more than a dozen points in two polls? Why is this happening? Because Republicans want something else. Okay, so that's Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. But
But it's not going to be Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. It's going to be Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Glenn Youngkin and Tim Scott, Larry Hogan and Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz and on and on and on. And the whole swell gang of guys and gals will show up. Part of the reason that they will show up is because we have a lot of very successful people in America.
And when people come to them, when these when these those who yearn for power come to them and say, if you could just get me a little super PAC, I don't need a big super PAC. Just, you know, come on. Where's 10 million bucks between friends? Can you and some other billionaires throw some cash in here? Like take Ted Cruz.
Nobody wants Ted Cruz to run for president, probably even including Ted Cruz. Right. On some level. I'm guessing Ted's family is an absolute no on this one. I don't know. It gets him out of the house. I'm not sure. So I don't know. I kid. I kid. I kid. I kid. But there's no there's no like yearning in America. The Ted Cruz moment is not here.
But he's got these rich people that have supported him and he's got an organization and he's got people around. Do you know the story about why Tom Selleck wasn't a bigger movie star? Tom Selleck had all of his friends working with him on Magnum P.I. And when movies would come along, he would have to pass because he didn't want to give up the show.
And so it ran for eight seasons instead of what should have happened for Tom Selleck, which is it should have run for four or five seasons. And then he should have said, OK, now I'm going to go to Hollywood. Now we're going to do the real thing. And I'm going to have to leave Higgins and TC and Rick behind with Ice Pick and Honolulu. But he didn't do that because too many people were looking at him. It's real pressure. It really happens in politics. And when you have billionaires who go
who give you lots of money, then you don't want to say, well, actually, I decided I'm kind of a lame-o and people don't really like me and I actually don't like doing it either, so peace, love, and booty grease. I'm out of here. I'll see you later. You can't do that. So you end up running and you slog through. And you guys have seen...
The joyless, awful presidential campaigns of people like Jeb Bush, terrible dragging themselves through the work of like, I guess I have to do this. I guess I have to do that. And we're going to have in the Republican side this cycle. Lots of those folks, because the weaker Trump looks, the more enticing the chance to run will be and the more crowded the field will get.
That makes sense. And unfortunately, it makes too much sense. And I think you're right. That's what's going to happen. And that's exactly how you open the door for Trump to win the nomination. Yes. And look, I OK, so that's OK. So thing one is.
The quadrennial cycle, the environment for the quadrennial cycle is substantially set by what happens in the midterms. What happened for the Democrats in 2018, they thought the bold Democratic progressive moment had arrived. Democratic socialism and Bernie Sanders, rah, rah, this, bah, bah. Everybody runs left in the Democratic primaries, which, by the way, helps Joe Biden in the long run because he was alone over there with Amy Klobuchar throwing staplers at people.
And nobody else was competing with Joe Biden for the mainstream Democratic moderate vote except for Klobuchar. By the end, all the survivors had migrated back over. Pete Buttigieg went from radical insurgent to comforting mainstreamer by the end of his run.
The Republicans have concluded correctly that Donald Trump is a boat anchor for their party. Right. And that this national populistic quasi conservative, whatever argyle bargyle they've come up with is a loser with voters. Republicans have lost three cycles in a row, 2018, 2020 and now 2022. So technically a win was a was the worst miss ever.
that I have seen worse in its own way than what Hillary Clinton managed to do in 2016. So you have all of those inputs for Republicans. So they're going to reject Trumpism and all of its works and start to migrate the other way. Then the seesaw will get out of balance. And about the time we roll into Iowa, they'll start running back. They'll migrate back the other way. And that's a very, very long way of saying
As Winston Churchill said, you know, for Republicans, the only way out is through it. They're going to just have to do it. There's no hack for this about like, well, we'll change this and change that. And then we won't really have to deal with Donald Trump and we won't have to do this other stuff. Donald Trump will have to be defeated if the Republicans want to get rid of him. They're
They're going to have to beat them. They're not going to be able to avoid it. I think that is absolutely true. But one of the things you talk about when we roll back into Iowa and those Trump rallies, one of the lessons for other candidates should be not to campaign in a buttoned down state manner, one. And two, and I think this was a legitimate challenge.
part of the Donald Trump phenomenon movement, whatever you want to call it, that mainline Republicans have been missing for years is the real focus on the working class, on blue collar voters. Well, yes, but Tim Pawlenty tried. Lots of people tried to wear their church sleeves rolled up. And Jack Kemp,
cared deeply about the plight of working class Americans. Lots of people cared a lot about a lot of things. But there's two things that you can't fool a kid. Well, three things, a kid, a dog or a primary election voter. They know they can tell. And they saw Trump and they were like, that's my man. That is my guy. And people who act like Donald Trump look like idiots worse than Donald Trump looks like an idiot. Wow. Well,
Excellent commentary. Chris Stierwald, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Thank you so much for joining us on Breaking Battlegrounds today. We really appreciate your time. We'd love to have you back on again in the future. Merry Christmas. Have a great weekend. Good to talk to you. You as well. Chuck, great program today. Folks, definitely make sure you tune in and catch all of our episodes. Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast. Subscribe and download the podcast, folks.
That'll do it for this week. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. All that good stuff to all of you. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back next week. The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it.
