Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're pleased to have Atlas Society senior scholar Richard Salzman to offer his personal reflections on the election, which I've been looking forward to. After Professor Salzman's opening comments, we'll take questions from you so you can request to speak if you have a question, and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible. Richard, reflections on the election.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Thank you, Scott. And I hope people appreciate the rhyming. I love rhyming.
I am going to, as usual, speak. We have an hour tonight for maybe 20, 25 minutes, and then open it up to comments, questions and critiques. And the structure I'm thinking of is four parts, not all equally allocated. First, I just want to give you the results of the election of November 5th. Some of the numbers, some of the data, just to give a foundation to this. I won't spend too much time on it, but just to know what the outcomes are which are more definitive now than they were. What is it now? Three weeks ago. But then I'm going to talk about the campaign, the Harris vs Trump campaign. What issues were raised, what issues seem important? In political science, we teach this is called salience. Salience or relevance.
A voter goes into the booth and has certain priorities. It's the border or it's inflation or it's abortion or it's a state of democracy. And then they assess the candidates accordingly. And so that becomes interesting. And you can only get those from exit polls. So there are numbers coming out on that, slicing and dicing by income, by gender, by party affiliation, things like that. So again, number one, the results to the campaign and the issues. I want to talk about three, the Cabinet picks. That's going on now. It's been going on for ever since the election. Who's he picking? Why is there controversy? Why? What are the chances of him getting people approved?
And then the future, assuming there's actually a peaceful transition of power to Trump, which I actually am skeptical of, actually, given the war stance of Biden Harris bombing Russia. We could talk about that later, maybe even in the Q amp A. But my fourth part would be what really won on November 5th? Is it just Trump, personally, you know, call it Trumpism. I don't think so, actually. Is that MAGA make American Great again as a movement, which even he speaks of as a movement, which suggests something that would survive him, that would still be a thing even when he exits stage left or right, whatever it is, four years from now, or is it a shift to the Right. And to the Republican Party, that requires a question of what the hell the future of the Republican Party will be. So I thought I would go, you know, it's basically inductive data. The election, the issues, the cabinet picks the future.
Now, some people call these things landslides. If you win a lot of the electoral votes, some of them call them mandates. I think some of that stuff's silly, but all you need for the electoral college is 270 votes.
And Trump Vance got 312 and Harris Waltz got 226. And so by most measures that's a landslide. That's not very close in terms of sheer numbers. There's 50 states and from last count it looks like Trump bands won 32 of them and lost 18 of them. Now, the 18 they lost are very populous, meaning there's a lot of people. California, New York, Illinois, all the New England states, there's a lot of people there. So it's going to make the elect, it's going to make the popular vote close. And in this case it was close. But Trump Vance won the popular vote as well, it looks like by about a percentage point. So something like 5149.
Now, historically, by the way, that is the first time, hard to believe this, but that is the first time in 20 years that the Republican ticket won the popular vote. And if you know the other side, which is much more Democratic and hates the Electoral College and thinks that the popular vote should govern, even though that's not the Constitution, have been berating the Republicans for 20 years saying you never win the popular vote, so you're not popular. Now this time they did and that has shut up Democrats a little bit. But the margin is so close that the Democrats are still complaining that why should the Republicans rule if they only have a 1 percentage point increase advantage on the popular vote.
Now here's the other thing that very interesting. Just on the eve of the election, the David Plouffe who was running the Harris Waltz campaign thought that they would win all seven quote, unquote swing states, six of which Trump lost in 2020 to Biden and Trump won all seven of them, which is really quite something. Now who, which are, which ones are they? Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.
Those are six of the seven. So those are flips. Those are major, major flips from Dem Biden to Trump, Republican from four years ago. So that's significant that those states are usually characterized especially in the upper regions, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, as quote, unquote, blue collar, more populist, more I Hate this phrase, working class Americans. And the fact that they got that is makes the Democrats nervous that they don't have that group anymore. But of course, they have not cultivated that group for many, many years. They've cultivated much more marginal groups like Green, New Deal, environmentalists, Bernie Sanders, Socialists, woke, Transgender, whatever. So they marginalized themselves and then were shocked, shocked, shocked to learn that they didn't win the election of 2024. Now, a couple of other things, kind of a side issue, but still important to note that in the Congress, the Republicans won the Senate. So they flipped the Senate. They did not control the senate prior to November 5th. They were down by one or two. So they were behind 51, 49.
And it looks like they'll be 53, 47, 53 is a fairly decent advantage.
And so that's a good thing. And as to the House, the House is a bit weird because they barely kept the House. They had already controlled the House of representatives by two or three, four seats.
So that would be like 220 to 215 or whatever. And that's about the same. Now, the reason that's weird is they won all these swing states and you would think they would get more House seats in certain interesting cases. They got more House seats in Democratic states like California, which is interesting. So there's light, there's some light still on Republican Party in California, believe it or not, but that's going to be a dicey thing. And the fact that, which I'll talk about later, Trump is picking Cabinet positions from the Senate, Marco Rubio and from the House Gates, who dropped out today, by the way.
He's already playing with a narrow margin. Now, in some cases, people like DeSantis will rename and pick a Republican to replace. So I assume the Trump team is aware of the fact that they should not be using, they should not be whittling down their House and Senate advantages by putting them in the Cabinet, but that remains to be seen. Also, the governors, none of the governors, of the 50 governors, none of them switched. There were some elections, but there was no switching. So now why that's relevant, 27 Republican governors remain and 23 Democrat governors remain. People usually do not focus on the governor races, but I think they're important because they're like the minor league of future presidents. Granted, some senators win the presidency, like JFK and Obama and, and Biden, but from the Republican side, some of the best presidents ever have been governors. So the fact that there's a farm team still and a dominant one by the Republicans I think is a good sign on the governor side. Now, I also wanted to mention briefly, even though I hate ballot measures, I don't like direct democracy, I don't like voters voting on rights and issues and things like that. The news there in terms of freedom, which is my standard tonight, I'm measuring this from the standpoint of are we going to get more or less liberty out of these results?
The ballot measures are 150 of them. You know what ballot measures are. First you vote for the reps and the presidency and then there's questions, usually state by state. There were 150 of them this time and 11 of them were on abortion.
19 of them were on election integrity. I think that's very interesting. Some were on immigration, a few on marijuana, one on marriage in California. Same sex marriage actually in California. And minimum wage, five of them. Now, here's what's interesting. On the abortion issue, the question really was, should we loosen state abortion laws? Why do they have these on the ballot? Because Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2023 by Dobbs. So I went through this case by case and for the most part, abortion laws were loosened.
So if you believe in a woman's right to choose on reproductive rights, this is a good outcome. Now, in Florida, it did not succeed, but not because there wasn't a majority support.
They had a threshold of 60%. So the only reason it didn't succeed, even in places like Florida, is only because they didn't get up to 60%. But it was still won by a majority vote. So I think that's very good news. And I think it's also related to what I'll talk about later. What were the issues in this campaign? I think in 2022, when the Republicans did so badly, the repealing of Roe v. Wade was fresh in people's minds and women were really angry at the gop. I think that has faded. We can talk about this in the Q and A if you want. I think, if anything, getting rid of Roe v. Wade, even though I was against this, actually turned over to the states the choice. And in at least 10 or 12 of them, women's right to choose expanded and loosened in places like California, Oregon and elsewhere. So that could have diminished the importance of this to women who voted three weeks ago. Election integrity won on the ballot in two thirds of the cases. So that usually meant things like should there be voter id?
In my state of North Carolina, there was a ballot measure saying, should the Constitution be changed to make sure that only citizens vote? That won by a Landslide. So questions like that, the issue of election integrity is still important to people.
Immigration came up a couple of times on ballot measures having to do with increased enforcement, and it mostly won. So that's a Trump issue. The idea of there should be more enforcement of immigration. That one in Arizona, for example, marijuana legalizing. That's interesting because it failed three times. Legalizing marijuana in Florida, North Carolina and South Dakota did not win. California. Stupid California, who in 2008 said same sex marriage is not allowed.
Obergefell and the Supreme Court overturned that in 2015. And last election, California finally said, I guess same sex marriage is okay. So they had a ballot measure there. Maybe more interesting in California is they reverse course on a Kamala Harris question in 2014, allowing shoplifting, loosening the penalties against shoplifting that passed in California in 2015 and the numbers went off the charts. So 2014, I should say, I forget it was question 67 or something like that. So that was just reversed. And the Californians are thinking, well now maybe that should be a felony again, not just a misdemeanor. So California is just crazy. They think they can vote on these issue by issue. Minimum wage, interestingly, it was half and half half the time states said, no, do not raise the minimum wage. So those are just some of the ballot measures. Now let me turn to the campaign and the questions that were raised.
I think for the most part, the Trump Vance GOP campaign was pretty decent from the standpoint of, you know, of course there was a lot of carnival aspects to it and a lot of histrionics, but the, it was basically an issues driven campaign. And you didn't, you either did not have that with Harris or if the issues came up, she couldn't speak to them. I mean, she literally could not articulate any position other than I don't think I'm going to change my approach. Reviews of V. Biden and the existing polls on the incumbents were negative. So if you hate the Republic, the incumbents a candidate who said, I'm not going to change anything as incumbent, you're not going to do very well. But Trump had things like, obviously, you know, this now border, the economy, inflation, crime, tariffs, a little bit on wars. I was actually surprised that this campaign did not, especially from the Republicans. I did not focus more, although he said it occasionally. Trump would say, they're getting us into World War Three. They absolutely are. And why that was not a top issue, I don't know. Other than the charge that if you say such a thing, you're being accused of being a Putin puppet.
But there's nothing more important to a commander in chief and the presidency than the commander in chief position. And the issue of war. You can see this now because Biden and Harris being lame ducks, can do any damn thing they want regarding war. And they are. And so I'm surprised about that. However, since the Trump Maga Vance position is where we don't want these forever wars that put America last and make us lose these wars. That is clearly their position and I think I'm glad to see that. That's basically the American position. America first does not mean defending a corrupt autocracy like Ukraine, even if Russia is despicable, which I don't think it's despicable. But even so, I think the American people, the America first movement, is on the side of Trump here saying what the hell are we doing in Ukraine and why are we risking a wider war there? So it wasn't a major issue brought up in the campaign, but that was behind the scenes and I think it helped now on things like gender and men in women's sports and all that stuff, I think Trump, all the polls, all the exit polls show that Trump Vance won in that regard. American people are, for the most part, majority of them are sick and tired of that kind of woke crap trade I don't think was a major issue. That was one of the things that Biden Harris never changed. I mean they never did change the protectionist position of Trump. So there was no distinction there on crime. Some of the DAs, some of what are called the Soros DAs who are pro criminal. And this is Harris's position also, you know, no bail, let them out, let shoplifting go, half of them were defeated, which is interesting. So DAs all over the country, as you know, most of them I think are elected positions. And in the case of California, Louisiana, elsewhere, those people lost.
So that's a Republican thing in my view. The Republicans are more consistently for the rule of law, Democrats are not. And to the extent those DAs were thrown out on their ass, that is was a good sign and also helped the Republicans. Abortion, as I said earlier, I don't think was as big an issue.
Sanctuary cities I have on my list also closely related to border things. That's going to be an issue now, especially because he promised Trump Vance did promise deportations of illegals who are now in the country and there's probably, I don't know, 15 or 20 million of them. So that we can leave that to Q and A. If you want to ask more about that it's interesting that if you turn to questions from the left, when msnbc, CBS or ABC would ask voters, what are you most concerned about? For some crazy reason, the state of democracy would come up a lot from the left. I think that's totally goofy. But they were trying to play into the idea that Trump is Hitler. They were smearing him with that for the month prior to the election. I think that didn't go well with the American people. They know he's not Hitler. They know that's a smear job. They know it. Again, not all people, but a majority of them saw that as a desperate move on the part of Democrats to smear Trump. I mean, in this case particularly, they knew Trump governed for four years. So it's not as if they didn't. It's not as if they didn't know what the guy governed like. And in my own view, actually, of the four years that he governed, the year that he was most autocratic, if you want to characterize it that way, was the fourth year, the 2020 year, with COVID and COVID lockdowns and enabling Fauci and enabling all the authoritarians who told people to go to their basement or get arrested or get canceled. You know, no jab, no job, all that kind of. Now Trump enabled that and now he eventually relented and backed off and tried to reverse it, but it was too late. But the summer of 2020 and the whole, the whole 2020 year, which was an election year, was complete, if you remember, complete chaos, Violence in the streets, blm, antifa.
I think the elections were corrupted, if not stolen. So 2020 was a complete mess. And you could attribute that in part to Trump. However, here's the important thing. The Democrats didn't object to any of that. So they're so disingenuous because if they really think Trump is an autocrat and authoritarian and they look at his four year track record, they endorsed the one year that he was the most authoritarian. So they're not against authoritarianism. And I don't know, I assume the American people are smart enough to have figured that out. This reminds me, by the way, that I should go on record to say I did not predict this. So it's always easy in hindsight to say, here's why the Republicans did so well and here's how they won. And here's why on the eve of the election, I actually could not call it. I mean, I wanted Trump and the Republicans to win, but I could not tell whether they would. And as I said, to many people, it wasn't because I didn't think the campaign was decent. It's not because I didn't think the candidates were decent. It's not because I didn't think the issues were important. I have tend to have a very negative, dark view of the American people.
I think they're being indoctrinated into statism.
And I just braced myself for a Kamala Harris win, not because she's better, but because the American people have been so corroded and corrupted. So from. I just wanted to put that on the record. I don't want to be seen as someone who absolutely knew that this would happen. But as a result, since my expectations were negative and I'm happier than I would have been otherwise with the result.
So that's. As to campaign issues, I got about. I'll give you about five more minutes here. But as to the salience, I think it turns out that it was not the salience of the issues. It was not democracies under attack. That was not a top issue. The top issue seemed to be the economy, inflation and which they blamed on Biden.
And by the way, I was impressed by the fact that her call for price gouging regulations which amount to price controls were almost dismissed out of hand. Now, if you're old enough, I'm 65 now, so I remember when Carter, even when Nixon imposed price controls and all of us liberty lovers were shaking our heads saying, oh my God, the American people really do not know what price controls do.
Here's the good side. I think they might know by now that that is a goofy, stupid, punitive thing. I think something has happened where the American people generally believe that if there's inflation, it's caused by the government, which is a good thing because 20, 25, 40, 50 years ago, they used to assume it was the corporations that caused inflation. So, so that worked and I think border worked. Now let me just talk about the. The Cabinet pick. Oh, oh, by the way, just quickly, if you slice and dice the data, one of the more remarkable things about this election was on things like blacks. I hate to like look at things like this, but the numbers come out and people care about these things and actually both parties and target these people, whether it was income or race or gender, Trump and Vance did much better than anyone expected. They got, they didn't win necessarily the percentage of these votes, but in every case they got more Hispanic percentage votes than ever. They got more black votes than ever. They got more. This by income. If you break it down by High, middle, low. Harris won the high income people and Trump won the low income people. So all this crap about Trump is just, you know, tax cuts for billionaires and he's a plutocrat. The American people seem to have realized that the script has been flipped and the Democrats are the party of the plutocrats and the wealthy people and the crazy people and the marginal people. And, and somehow the Republican Party has transformed itself into this more populist party of, quote, the working class and the people of, quote, common sense and people who distrust experts and want to drain the swamp. And in terms of sheer numbers, that does seem to be more people than the Democrats got. So I just wanted to mention that because you can find, again, those come from exit polls where people are asked, why did you vote for this person? And why? And then they categorize people. Now, quickly, on the Cabinet, I don't want to go cabinet position by cabinet position. I think I'm a bit worried. They have not picked a Treasury secretary yet. That's usually the first one you pick. But at least two dozen either agencies or cabinet positions have been picked and I would classify them generally in the following way. Younger, inexperienced, inexperienced in the sense of not having been in Washington, not inexperienced lifewise. Someone like Pete Hedzick, who was announced as the nominee for defense, has it has a long, a stellar life record and is a total patriot and is smart enough to run the Defense Department, I think, although it's a huge enterprise. But they don't have experience. And that's the whole point. The whole point is they aren't swamp creatures. They aren't people who have spent all this time in Washington. So they're, as you can imagine, they're getting enormous pushback from the swamp creatures, saying, hey, you don't have experience like I do. Well, yeah, the I do is you've been in office all these years and you're ruining the place. So I like, for the most part, I like the picks that Trump has made. I think if you characterize them as younger, smart, energetic, more principled, I would say, than pragmatic, that's a good sign. And I think this time around, Trump is not only aware that policy is personnel, as they say, if you don't get the right people in place, you're not going to get your policies enacted. But he's relying, I think, more on his son, Don Jr. And on Vance. And of course, he picked Vance. And Vance is very different, whether you like him or not. He's very different from Pence the first time around because Pens was what a conventional, I thought, rhino and very religious. And in this case he went with a guy, Vance, who could be seen as someone who takes the baton four years from now and actually does something with it, whereas you never could think of Pence that way. So I just wanted to say that briefly about the Cabinet. If you have particular questions about the Cabinet, we can talk about it. But for the most part, the challenge now, of course would be to get them approved. And I'm very disappointed here to hear today that Gates dropped out. I think he's been smeared. He was supposed to be attorney General and I think the other side knew that he would expose all the lawfare and all the outrageous law rule of lawlessness that has occurred in the doj, targeting Trump, targeting political opponents, and he just would have uncovered that whole thing. So who they put in place there afterwards, I don't know. But I think they should not have given up on Gates and I don't know why they did. I have to look into the details. This was just reported today. Finally, I just want to say something more futuristic and philosophical.
As I said in the description of this session, there's a question as to whether the November 5th result was just a win for, let's call it Trump 2.0, whether it's Trumpism or whether it's a triumph for MAGA, Make America Great again, Quam movement, whatever that means. And then I guess you could go still broader and say for the gop, to the extent as I've argued that the GOP is the only viable party, needs vast improvement, but it's the only viable party to bring us more toward capitalism than away from it.
By the way, in the last couple sessions on spaces, I devoted an entire session to the Democrats, their history, Democrat theory, and I was very negative about it. Then I had a subsequent follow up session on the GOP history of the gop, the philosophic principles of Republicanism and where that's going. So I come down foursquare as a Republican, as a constitutionalist, as an enemy of mob rule and the whole Democratic Party approach. And for those of you who want to explore this in the Q and A, that is not a given within Objectivism. There are schisms within Objectivism on the politics of this and there are what I call Democratic Objectivists and Republican Objectivists. I am definitely four square or Republicans Objectivists. And I think the Democratic Objectivists are terrible and very dangerous. And it's somewhat of an intramural issue because it's just on the right. But it's very important to get what's on the right right and not wrong. So my own estimate is that this is not just Trumpism. This is not just the personality of Trump.
And this is partly to his doing that. He's not saying this is Trumpism like Peronism or Hitlerism or Stalinism. He himself is pitching it as maga. That's his tagline, not anyone else's. And it came from Reagan, by the way. The Reagan Bush team in 1980 had the adage, let's make America great Again. Trump just dropped the let's and has the adage make America great again. So I think he's hoping, and I admire him for this, I think he's hoping that there's a movement that survives him, that is a movement called make America great Again. Patriots, lovers of America, lovers of the rule of law, lovers of constitutionalism, haters of forever wars abroad that we lose to people who live in caves. I mean, the whole thing now, I don't like the protectionism of it. I think that should not be something that the Republicans carry forward. But I think this is a broader, call it, message or signal than those who, whether they like him or hate them, attribute this to just Trump for the him. If you think it's just Trumpism, you got to admit that it's over in four years because he has to leave.
And that's not going to, that's no more surviving than if you called Reaganomics Reaganomics and said, well, once Reagan leaves, we won't have that economic policy anymore. So I, I think that's worth, I think that's the jury's still out on this again, whether it's Trump, MAGA or the Republicans who've won here. But my advice to the party would be you need to broaden this as much as possible. Obviously, Trump is going to leave the stage. This needs to be broadened into something where for the next four years, if they actually allow a transition of power two months from now, that the Republican Party rebuilds itself, that it gives all these young bucks experience and resoluteness and a resume that can carry them forward starting in 2028. So I'll stop there, Scott. I hope that helps.
[00:30:44] Speaker A: Yes, great opening comments. I do want to invite people that have questions to click request to speak. We'll bring you up. I have questions myself.
I mean, you know, I wouldn't call you a dove on Ukraine, but you certainly question, question the policy. I have two thoughts on Biden escalating the conflict in his last two months.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: Yeah. So what your question is whether I'm a dove and what I think of Biden?
[00:31:16] Speaker A: Not necessarily. Just you've been, you know, someone who questioned blank checks to Ukraine from the beginning.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's. I would put it this way. I do have an entire session I've done on the egoism of an American first foreign policy. And within that context, I critiqued the whole Ukraine thing.
It's hard to summarize this quickly, but in sum, this is my view that American foreign policy should be egoistic, meaning it should be driven by what is in America's national self interest. And although that sounds maybe collectivist and nationalistic to a libertarian ear or an objectivist ear, I look to the essence of America, which is constitutional, individual rights. The Constitution includes nothing about providing national defense to other countries. So just on that basis alone, if you're a constitutionalist, you're not in NATO. You're not providing national defense to 32 other countries and bankrupting yourself. You're not in NATO. It could have been argued that that was okay during the Cold War to offset the Warsaw Pact of the Soviet Union and 14 other satellite states. Maybe. I'm not sure I even would have supported it then. That's not what kept America free. But to retain that after the Cold war ended in 1991 is just insane. And not just to retain it, but to triple the membership from 12 to 32 and not just triple the membership of NATO, but to move it eastward toward the border of Russia is totally antagonistic, totally antagonistic toward Russia. And so that's what I oppose. Ukraine is being used as a doormat. And by the way, more than a million Ukrainians have been used as cannon fodder by the Pentagon to basically prod and poke the Russian bear because the Democrats blame Russia for Hillary losing. I mean, it's literally that petty. It's literally that insane. And it's not in America's self interest. It's bad for America. And this is showing Biden Harris lose the election. They're lame ducks. Do they slink away and go away and leave us alone? No, they spend the next. Apparently they're going to spend the next 60 days trying to get us into World War Three. They're literally launching missiles into Russia. They're getting Poland and Britain to launch missiles into Russia. That happened two days ago.
I need to contain myself here before I lose it. I am totally. It's thoroughly disgusting and morally obscene that these warmongers, these Zelensky zombies are starting a war Against Russia.
Everyone knows that Russia has allied with China and North Korea. And is that smarmy and is that ridiculous? Yes, it is. But I don't blame Russia. Russia's view is you're an existential threat to us. We didn't threaten you. We didn't go to war against America. It's America who overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014.
It's Obama and the CIA and Victoria Nuland at the State Department that literally overthrew the duly elected governor government of Ukraine in 2014.
That is what started Russia's pushback. Russia said, that's outrageous. You installed an anti Russian autocrat. That's what I mean. Nobody knows any of this history, but that's the origin of this. And for the last, for the last 10 years, Obama and Biden combined, either in and out of office, have pushed and pushed and pushed for the US to go to war against Russia. And it's actually risking a nuclear exchange now. And the fact that there's any objectivists in our myths that actually support this, which they do, is even more ridiculous. It's even more disgusting.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Well, the argument I've heard is that, you know, they know it's not going to escalate into World War Three.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: And who knows? Who knows? Who says? Who knows that?
[00:35:18] Speaker A: I've heard that from some of the mainstream leadership.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: So isn't that exactly what's happening? Two years ago, I said this could become World War Three. That's exactly what it's becoming. Now, Trump has evidence, the evidence is overwhelming that people are literally launching missiles at each other. Russia said yesterday it will launch missiles in Poland, which is a NATO member, at a US Base if this keeps up. So these people who keep saying he's a paper tiger, he's drawn red lines before, Putin is nothing. Let's keep bombing him. These people are maniacal. They're war criminals.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: I mean, Trump hasn't been banging the drum that loudly against it. Is it possible that. Yes, he has talked about it.
[00:36:05] Speaker B: That's not true.
He and Vance have said on the campaign trail that the Democrats are trying to start World War Three. Right. But since. And they're against it. Since he met with Biden, they're against it. They're clearly against it. And they said, we're going to end it when we take office.
They're clearly on record.
They've actually conversed with Putin.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: But maybe it could be a strategy to get more at the negotiating table when Trump does go for peace.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: Well, negotiating table is different than missiles flying left and Right.
That's what's happening now. Missiles are literally being launched left and right with Biden's approval.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: So the fact that that's that people would not see that as different from the Trump Vance position. It's so different that Biden's doing this because he knows he has to leave in 60 days.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Well, let's bring David in here. Dr. Kelly, our founder has joined us. You'll have to unmute yourself.
[00:37:08] Speaker C: Thanks, Scott. I'm going to stay away from Ukraine because this is a hot flash point even within TAs, let alone objectivists. And you know, I so I'm not even going to say which side I'm on but I have another question. Unfortunately, the Richard, the part that of your presentation I was most interested in was the people at the cabinet appointments and unfortunately X went down at just that moment. So I heard only the last part about gets but I don't want you have to repeat for the and for everyone else but can you there's definitely been an impression in what I read even in the Wall Street Journal that these, a lot of these appointments don't seem to have much or if any experience in the agencies managing the Defense secretary. I forget his name and the Lisa gets because he withdrew but which I had questions about but the would you say that these were strong appointments and should be approved by Congress?
[00:38:31] Speaker B: Well, what I said, David, the answer is yes, I think they should be approved.
And the way I put it earlier was they don't have experience in the sense of being part of the bureaucracy and the swamp.
But that is exactly what Trump has campaigned on, that there is an establishment which is anti American, which is ensconced, which is entrenched, which basically invalidates the election that the Republicans win it. That's what happened to Trump in his first term.
He was new to this. And the list of people he appointed were basically Obama people. He either kept them in place or didn't have replacements. Now this time is very, very different. He knows what was coming. He got a list of alternatives. And I would put it this way, David. These people are I've looked at all of them. These people are very experienced in life. They have credentials in the private sector or elsewhere. And what they're being criticized for is not having been at the Pentagon before 45 years or at HHS for 45 years. So the swamp is using their own swampness as an argument for saying you can't replace us. But that is everyone knows that is exactly what Trump campaigned on. And I do not see him as putting up complete neophytes. That's not what's happening. And the whole process of advising consent, which is in the Constitution. That word's in the Constitution. And the fact that the Senate is mostly responsible for vetting these people, the long history has been that the procedure is not to oppose the president's picks and push forth your own picks because you didn't win the election, he did. The tradition has been just make sure they're not complete buffoons, make sure they're not criminals, make sure they're not enemies of the state, and otherwise the president gets his priorities. So I think that's what's going on. I like the picks from the standpoint of they are not part of the swamp, they are still experienced, they're young and they're pugnacious, they're combative. In other words, they're willing to fight for their positions. So that's why I like them.
Great.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: I did mute you, David, for the traffic sounds behind you, but feel free to pipe in if you've got another one. But I do follow up. Go ahead.
[00:41:13] Speaker C: This is on a different subject, but Richard, what is your expectation about what I consider to be the two things Trump did well in his first term? Reduce taxes and deregulate.
Those didn't seem to be such major issues in this campaign. Did I miss something or. I mean, what do you expect from Trump's return?
[00:41:40] Speaker B: No, you didn't miss something. That was definitely part of the list. I actually kept that off my list. I shouldn't have the reduced. It's not reduced taxes, it's extend. You might want to mute that. Again, Scott, it's to extend the existing tax cuts that he put in place in the end of 2017. So that is very important. And there does not seem to be in the House or Senate any objection to extending the Trump tax rate cuts. And they do expire in a year, so it is relevant. Had Harris and Walz won, there would have been massive tax hikes on everyone, by the way, not just on the rich in January of 2026. So that is important and I do think it'll get approved. So that's a very big thing. And yet I agree with you, David. That is one of the better things he did. Now, on the other hand, I must say, even though I'm a supply sider and even though I believe in the rights of property and income and especially rich people, I want tax rate cuts.
I am bothered that the Republican Party still remains to be reluctant to cut government spending. They're still reluctant to cut major programs. And the ones that are bankrupting the country, they don't touch. So they've totally caved into that. But it kind of, you know, Goldwater and Reagan kind of caved into it as well. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
Trump, even in 2016 said, I'm not running against any of those things. So to the extent that's true, we're still in fiscal hell. We're still on a fiscal path which is going to bankrupt the country. So now. So I don't necessarily blame the Republicans or the Democrats for that. I blame the Democrats because they always come up with more spending. I don't blame the Republicans for wanting to minimize the tax burden because to me, that's a rights based issue. But it does all else equal, raise the deficit if you're not willing to raise the revenues. You mentioned deregulation. I went and checked, by the way, there was very minimal deregulation actually under Trump, 1.0. But I don't necessarily blame it on him. What I did notice is the regulations flattened out in the first three years of his presidency. So they didn't get cut, but they didn't grow. And you know, David, they grow every year. So. And this happened under Reagan too. For three or four years, the Register, Federal Register account of regulation didn't grow. But what we need is deregulation would mean there's fewer regulations and fewer, you know, quantitatively substantive ones. What happened under Trump is it went sideways for three years and then it skyrocketed under Covid.
So it ended up that at the end of his first term, there were more regulations and more burdensome regulations than when he began. But yes, he did definitely run this time on deregulation. And so if they succeed at that. I don't know if they'll succeed at that. I think they have to. Here's the problem. They have to eliminate whole agencies.
It's not enough just to say we're going to keep all the acronym agencies. By the acronyms, I mean, sec, ftc, fda, fc, everybody knows these. They're the ones who issue regulations all the time. And it's hard to restrain them unless you get rid of them. Unless you get rid of the agencies. And that just never happens. The last regulatory agency that was eliminated was under Jimmy Carter. It was a Civil Aeronautics board which used to regulate airline ticket prices. I mean, just crazy and gate access. They just tend not to ever get rid of agencies. And then they, of course, they add agencies to the list. So I'm, I'm A little worried about that, although. But I'm glad that that's their commitment. And that's, by the way, what the swamp is. I mean, everybody asks, what the hell does he mean by the swamp? He means what's called the fourth branch of government. And to a libertarian or objectivist ear or Founding Fathers, yet fourth branch sounds very bad. And it is bad because there should be only three branches checking each other. Executive, legislative and Judicial. This fourth branch, this regulatory behemoth, all these acronym agencies write their own laws, they call them regulations, they execute the laws, they fine people and jail them for not obeying them. And then they even adjudicate them. If you challenge the irs, you go to tax court. There's a tax court. So that if the founders were right, which they were, that the only way to secure liberty is to have a separation of powers, rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights and elsewhere, and checks and balances, then this swamp, this regulatory state that Trump, Vance and others. And by the way, one of the best on this is Ramaswamy, who says we need to get rid of whole agencies. They are onto something by saying that is why we're losing our liberty. We're losing our liberty in part because the government's spending too much and redistributing wealth. But another aspect of this is they're regulating so much. And I said just the other night that this is the essence of fascism, who they accuse Trump of being. Fascism isn't nationalization of property, it isn't owning things, it's letting you own things, but telling you in minute detail what to do with those things, how to treat those things, what wages to charge, what people to hire or not. And that is the essence of fascism. It's a hybrid system between the two. And that is just beyond belief. I mean, that is just growing leaps and bounds. And that is one of the main reasons the American people are losing, losing their liberty. So that's a long winded way of saying you're right, that reducing taxes or keeping the tax rate reductions, he would do it. I think it's going to happen.
The deregulation, I'm not sure will happen. And the Doge, by the way, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is supposed to be headed by Elon and Vivek, I like the fact that that will identify how ridiculous and expansive the government has become.
But the essence of the government problem is not what they call waste, fraud and abuse. Waste, fraud and abuse is a kind of like a marginal issue. It is maybe 10% of government spending would Be my estimate. So the government spends 7 trillion a year. Waste, fraud and abuse is probably 700 billion or so. It's a lot of money. But the real problem is we have 16 cabinet agencies, you know, like Transportation, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor. We have 16, 17 cabinet agencies now and there should only be four. There should only be State, Defense, treasury and Justice. So that's the real problem. You need to, you need to hack out whole agencies, not just look for savings on paperclips.
[00:49:03] Speaker C: Great, thank you. Thank you, Richard. I'll mute now. That's great.
[00:49:08] Speaker A: Great.
We have Holden here. You know, how much of an impact did Elon have on the election? I mean, he was out there in Pennsylvania every day giving away a million dollars. I mean, did he make a difference?
[00:49:24] Speaker B: I think he did make a difference. And one of the things that intrigued me about Elon was he represented. Even though he's a unique figure, obviously he's a multi billionaire and one of the richest guys. And one of these Tony Stark is a Stark. Tony Stark type figures.
What's interesting about him is he looked to Democrats, he looked like them in the sense of they thought Elon was a Democrat, actually they thought Donald Trump was a Democrat back in the old days in New York. And these Democrats who today are so dissatisfied with the state of the Democrat Party. I'm thinking of people like Alan Dershowitz and Bill Maher and others who said, I'm not a Democrat anymore because you guys are crazy and you left me. I didn't leave you.
That is their impression of Elon. So I think he attracted not just Republicans and MAGA people, I think he attracted certain Democrats who said, hey, I like elon. He does EVs and he does this and that. And he's kind of a swashbuckling radical change maker. And he doesn't fit the image of the country club Republican who doesn't want to change anything. And I think that's one of the wonderful things about the Republican Party. It's becoming younger, more overtly entrepreneurial, but cool, radical. We're going to Mars and we have SpaceX and we're doing this and that. And that was clearly a shift and noticed. I think they also noticed that when he took over Twitter and got rid of Jack Dorsey and What was it, 60% of the workforce. That was bold. That was bold and ballsy stuff. And the American people are looking and they're saying, my God, look at that. He went in there and he routed the left wing wackos at Twitter and turned it into a free Speech freewheeling. So I like all that. And I think they see the same thing about Trump. Here's Trump, he's a billionaire, Elon's a billionaire. Usually billionaires are despised and hated. Why are Trump, Elon and similar ones loved? Because they can be seen as actual creators of wealth, creators of skyscrapers, creators of missiles going up to Mars and shit like that. It's very interesting because if it's visceral and tangible in a way that say Mitt Romney was not. If you ask the American people how did Mitt Romney make his money, they would say at Bain Capital doing venture capital, they think he's a fraud. He's not. He not. He earned his money as well. But they, they, the American people tend to like radical maverick types who build stuff that they can see.
So I think it helped enormously. I don't think the money, he did spend some money and that helped. But I do want to say something about the money. Scott, I am worried.
Remember I said earlier that I think this is more than just a victory for Trumpism, I think it's a victory for maga. What however people define that, I am worried that four years from now when Trump leaves, whoever steps up for the Republican Party will not be self funding. So one of the values of Trump is people know he spends his own money on his own campaign.
So in other words, he doesn't have to run around asking for donors.
And as a result he's not beholden to donors to do stupid shit.
And I worry because when he leaves, someone like J.D. vance or even Nikki Haley or Rhonda Sant, whoever you can imagine as a potential replacement is not going to be self funded. And I think that's the under told story of what's going on in American politics now that, that someone like Trump who has his own money or someone like Elon actually who has his own money, is actually more independent, can be more politically independent. I guess they call it FU money. I have so much money I could say whatever I want and the American people still like that kind of thing.
So there's the good and the bad of it. I'm answering your question in terms of I think Elon definitely helped the campaign. I think he's actually helping in the transition because he's either contributing to the list of who Trump picks from, which means he's there with Don Jr. He's there with Eric, he's there with Vivek, he's there with Vance. These are all young guys telling Trump himself pick from this list and this list is combative and they're ideological and they're energetic and they're young. So that's. I've looked at some of Elon's put. He has pushed a Treasury secretary, which is no good, but thankfully the guy didn't get the job. So it's not that all his picks are great, but his energy and his loyalty to the MAGA movement, I think is unquestioned now.
[00:54:41] Speaker A: Sure. Well, I do want to get to Holden with the few minutes we have left. Thanks for joining us. You'll have to unmute.
Holden, are you.
[00:54:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm here. Yeah. Well, I don't really have anything to say about that.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's see. What about. You know, he also did win over some younger issues. I know it's not philosophical, but how much did things like McDonald's, the trash man, even, you know, Peanut the squirrel, did that play a role?
[00:55:18] Speaker B: Well, I think it did. I think first of all, the reaction, his response to being assassinated, the attempted assassination was really critical. Of course, he didn't plan that. But as many people have said, including Zuckerberg, including Elon and others, you really see the metal of a person, not just the metal of a man, but the. In cases like that. And he didn't cower and he didn't crumble. His reaction to that on, what was it, July 13th was amazing. I think when I saw that, I think I might have thought for the first time he's going to win no matter what, because this is an amazing performance.
And then showing up at the RNC now, the other things like McDonald's, these were just brilliant moves. They were very populist moves, to be sure. But that's the world we live in today. You need to get a bunch of people paying attention to you and voting the Republicans, if they're going to win. They can't be the country club Republicans anymore. But thankfully they haven't been. I think they haven't been since Reagan, since Jack Kemp from Buffalo, who used to say, we should go to the Barrios and look for votes. He did that as well. Trump, you know, went to Harlem, he went to Barbershop, he went to Joe Rogan. None of these things Kamala Harris would do. The McDonald thing was brilliant because she claims she lied. She claims she worked at McDonald's. And so the first time I heard her lie about that, I thought Trump should go to McDonald's and flip burgers. And so he finally did the trash thing, too. You guys think we're trash? I'm going to drive around in a trash truck. It was brilliant and actually not obvious, because if you're old enough to remember, Michael Dukakis, who was seen as a dove, not a hawk, in the 1988 campaign against George W. Bush, rode around in a tank with a stupid helmet on. And it totally. And it was so. It was a visual, you know, and it totally ruined his reputation because it didn't fit. It did. It had nothing to do with who Dukakis was. The reason these Trump visuals work is that people know that he loves McDonald's. I mean, people think he's too fat because he eats McDonald's. So he loves McDonald's. He loves entrepreneurs, he loves people who work. He loves what Mike Rowe calls dirty jobs. And, you know, he's been in the construction business forever. And even though he's a billionaire and even though he's. He's the brains behind the Trump successes, he's never been a guy who does not realize who works for him and how to motivate them. And by the way, the same thing was true on women. So one of the final things that brought him over, I think, was when Mark Cuban accused him of not surrounding himself with smart, strong women.
That is so ridiculous. If you know Donald Trump's history of who works in the Trump Organization, of the women he married, like Ivanka, like Ivana and Melania, and his kids. His kids who are. Who are clean as a whistle and smart as a whip.
He is personally way more moral and inspiring, I think, than his critics give him credit for. And let me name one last thing that I think is very interesting about Trump that I've just begun to notice.
He's masculine.
He's a bit bombastic, obviously, and a bit narcissistic. But the thing that always is true of him, unlike Jimmy Carter or even George W.
Or Mitt Romney, Donald Trump is very masculine. He's very macho man type stuff. And in a world today where the left is calling it toxic masculinity and the left is pushing genital mutilation and the Democrats are pushing women and men, you know, having no distinction, I think it actually helps, although I don't think he intended it, I think it actually helps Trump that he's masculine and manly. And if there's any indication that the country's going in the direction of, again, not as a sexist thing, but more as we need people who know their masculinity and femininity and they're not faking things is a very important thing. So I'll just leave it at that.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: Great. Well, thank you. I'm sorry we ran out of time, Holden, but thanks so much for doing this, Richard. We could have talked about it for much longer.
[01:00:11] Speaker B: Thank you, Scott.
[01:00:12] Speaker A: Thanks to all of you joined us. If you enjoyed this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible donation at atlasesociety.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: Org.
[01:00:20] Speaker A: Take care, everybody.
