Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections
2022-08-30 · Guest: Dick Morris and John Giadjopoulos (Political Advisor and Podcast Host) · 52:42
American Politics and the 2024 Trump Comeback
Bob Zadek and guests Dick Morris and John Giadjopoulos discuss the shifting landscape of American politics leading into the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election. Dick Morris argues that the Democratic Party has moved toward a judicial strategy to disqualify Donald Trump, while the group explores the libertarian tension between Trump’s policies and his volatile character.
Topics: 2022 Midterms, 2024 Election, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Moore v. Harper, Election Integrity, Polling, Libertarianism, Ron DeSantis, Judicial Strategy
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Dick Morris: Republican Political Advisor and Author
- John Giadjopoulos: Host of the Sports Grumblings Podcast
Introduction and Dick Morris’s New Book [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running libertarian talk radio show on all of radio and podcasting. We offer in-depth and focused content concerning specific social, political, and economic issues, always with the ideal guest, accessible and entertaining. Today’s show embodies that standard.
Our guest, Dick Morris, is a Republican political advisor who joined the Clinton administration and, against formidable odds, enabled Clinton to earn his second term. Clinton has told others that, “Over the course of the first nine months of 1995, no single person had more power over the president.” The lives of Dick Morris and Donald Trump have been intertwined since Trump’s early years as a New York City real estate developer and through Trump’s 2016 campaign, and they have been in close contact since the 2020 election.
Dick has co-authored with his wife, Eileen McGann, over 20 books, 13 of which have been New York Times bestsellers. He has just published The Return: Trump’s Big 2024 Comeback, offering insights into former President Trump never before available to the reading public, as well as insights into political America from its most effective and insightful participant. After my interview with Dick, I’ll be joined by John Giadjopoulos, fellow libertarian, founder and host of the Sports Grumblings podcast, to discuss what we’ve learned from Dick.
Now, Dick Morris. Dick, welcome to the show this morning.
Dick Morris: That was a hell of an introduction. Thank you.
Bob Zadek: Well deserved. Dick, Bill Clinton and now Donald Trump—you seem to be developing a political niche, creating every decade or so a new “comeback kid.” Is that some specialization you have developed as a political consultant?
Dick Morris: No, not really. I haven’t changed my ideas much. The Democratic Party has changed. I used to be on the 50-yard line; now it’s all the way in the end zone. The party’s moved so far to the left. And really, some of the policies I most like about Trump were policies that Clinton did. He built a wall, he made welfare recipients work, he had mandatory minimum sentences, he balanced the budget—a whole lot of stuff that Biden never heard of and Trump is doing.
The Judicial Strategy to Stop Trump [02:31]
Dick Morris: But the purpose of my book, The Return, is that I want people who are supporting Trump to understand what we’re up against, what’s going to happen. I believe that the Democrats have largely abandoned the thought that they can defeat Trump at the polls. They’ve basically decided that he’s going to run, which he is; that he’s going to be the Republican nominee, which he is; that none of their alternatives will be able to face him in the primary—DeSantis and the others aren’t going to run, they see how Trump dominates the Republican primary. And they think with this economy, there’s a pretty good chance the Republican can win.
So, they’ve decided to resort to judicial means, not political means, to keep him from the White House. And that’s what the Mar-a-Lago raid is all about. It’s an attempt to find evidence to indict Trump with the hope that this knocks him out of the race or even makes it illegal for him to run for president. And that’s the strategy they’re resorting to to try to stop Donald Trump—indicting him for no reason at all.
The purpose of the raid was to get in the front door using probable cause about the archives, which are not very important, in the hope that they could find documents implicating him in the January 6th riot and saying that this was an insurrection against the American government, and invoke the 14th Amendment that says that if you were engaged in an insurrection against the government, you can’t hold public office. And I think that’s their game. And it’s a terrifying game because it really means that we can’t select our president by democratic means; it has to be a battle in court and an attempt to frame him for things that he didn’t do. So, that’s really why I wrote the book.
Bob Zadek: What’s most interesting in your commentary that you just said was the Democrats are resorting to the courts because they cannot get what they want through the democratic system of government—the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Well, the Republicans had identified the court as the branch of government most valuable to capture, and that policy goes back to the 1970s with the Federalist Society. So, the Democrats probably, or perhaps, observed with envy how effective the Republicans had been.
Dick Morris: Yes, but it’s more than a question of whether the court leans left or right. It’s a question of what you’re using it for. It’s one thing to litigate stuff that ought to be litigated, like abortion or reapportionment or criminal justice, but to attempt to use the courts and manipulate the law to try to stop a former president from running again and deny to almost 100 million people the man they voted for for president is just outrageous. And it’s what they’re trying to do.
The 14th Amendment was passed right after the Civil War because in the year after the Civil War, in the first elections, congressional races, the Southern states that were readmitted to the Union sent delegations filled with Confederate officers and generals and vice presidents of the Confederacy, like the senator from Georgia. And they didn’t want that, so they passed an amendment saying that if you’re in an insurrection against the US, you can’t hold public office. And they are trying to say that this riot on January 6th was the first unarmed insurrection in world history—that these folks were not just venting steam, they were actually trying to take over the American government without a gun, without a rifle, without a cannon. And it is just horrible. It’s outrageous. It represents a serious threat to our democracy. And that’s the key point that I make in The Return.
Secretaries of State and Moore v. Harper [06:31]
Bob Zadek: Now, in The Return, you make it quite clear that you are not—the phrase is often used—relitigating. You are not relitigating whether or not the election was stolen. We’re not going to discuss that very much on the show. You acknowledge, as I guess one must, that by a count, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But you do make a very interesting point that I’d like you to share with our friends for just a few moments on the more subtle strategy of the importance of this almost invisible state, often elected office, Secretaries of State, and the clever, perhaps sinister, strategy that the Democrats effectively used in so far as the states managing the elections as they have the power to do under the Constitution.
Dick Morris: Right. Well, this is an office, Secretary of State, that nobody pays any attention to. It doesn’t do anything interesting. It keeps corporate records in most states, it keeps the great seal of the state, it gets filings from charities and stuff like that. But its only important thing is that it supervises elections. And in 2018, the Democratic Party made sure to overthrow Republican Secretaries of State in the swing states, particularly Arizona and Michigan. And they elected real leftists to those jobs who believed that the dominant problem we faced was voter suppression—that minority voters couldn’t get photo IDs, that it was too much of a hassle to do that, that signature verification was simply a method of excluding people from voting, and in my view, opened the door wide to voter fraud.
I believe that it is crucial that in the 2022 elections, which we’re going through now, particularly in states like Arizona and Michigan, that we make sure that we elect people, Republican Secretaries of State, who are committed to ballot integrity. There’s one other thing that’s happening, and let me just tell your listeners about it. It’s a case called Moore v. Harper, which is working its way to the Supreme Court and will be in the court in the fall term, October and November. And it would hold that only the state legislatures can control the election procedures—to quote the Constitution, “the times, manner, and places of holding elections for Congress shall be determined by the state legislatures.”
So, we have five states, the swing states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Minnesota—where the Republican legislatures have passed very good laws, identical to the ones that are now in effect in Georgia and Florida and Arizona, that prohibit drop boxes, require signature verification, require photo identification to register and to vote. And the Democratic governors in those states have vetoed those bills. And the Moore v. Harper case would strip the governors of the right to veto those bills, and the legislature alone would make that determination. And that will basically eliminate the problem of electoral fraud in the ‘24 election.
The Hybrid Candidate and Trump’s Record [11:31]
Bob Zadek: In your book, you create a phrase, a concept, which to me explained so much and it showed to me the pathway of Trump towards victory in 2024. And the phrase I’d like you to explain is “hybrid candidate.” What makes Trump unique as the first hybrid candidate, and why is that concept so important in the 2024 election?
Dick Morris: Well, it’s a little bit like a Toyota. It’s half one thing and half the other. He’s half incumbent and he’s half challenger. And like a challenger, he’ll go around complaining about high gas prices and inflation and the open border and all that stuff. But the normal response of an incumbent to a challenger is he comes back and he says, “How do we know you can do any better? How do we know you can improve on this?” And Trump’s response is, “I did it already.” And that’s the half of him that’s a former incumbent. He can say, “Look at my record and compare it with Biden’s record. And if you doubt we can hold down gas prices, they were a buck eighty when I was president. And if you doubt that I can hold down inflation, it was under 2%. And if you doubt we can seal the border, I did it and we had almost no illegal immigration.” By that hybrid, that ability to say “I did it already,” to be part incumbent and part challenger, it gives Trump a unique thing to say to the voters.
Bob Zadek: When Trump runs in 2024—and you have indicated in your book and in your other interviews, there’s no doubt at least in your mind that Trump will run in 2024—how will his 2024 campaign be different than his 2020 campaign? And will he have a challenge, or will he even attempt to separate the man from the message? Because as you have observed and acknowledged, Trump as an individual is a lightning rod, and it wasn’t clear whether he was a net plus or a net minus as that lightning rod. So, how will his 2024 campaign be better—and by better, I mean not just different, but how will he learn from mistakes, if there were any, in 2020?
Dick Morris: Well, I think the key thing is that he has Joe Biden to help him out. For those who feel that Trump was too acerbic, his tweets were offensive, he took people on and fomented unnecessary fights, you have Joe Biden to compare him to. Which would you rather have: 10% inflation and five-dollar gas and mounting unemployment and Russia invading Ukraine and China threatening Taiwan, Iran about to develop nuclear weapons unless we pay them one trillion dollars over the course of the next decade? What would you rather have, that or somebody that gives offensive tweets? And I think we dwarf it by comparison when you can see in real time the difference between the records of these two presidents.
And let me say this, which is the other point I make: you can’t pocket the results of Trump’s persona and dismiss the “gotcha” there. If Trump were not as he is, he never could have accomplished everything he’s done. Washington is a tough place, and nice guys don’t hack it there. Nice guys finish last, as Leo Durocher said. And I think that he understands that. Take Kim Jong-un. First couple of months of the presidency, of Trump’s presidency, Kim Jong-un said, “I have a button that can blow up America.” And then Trump shot back, “Hey Buster, I have a bigger button than you do.” And that intimidated Kim and he never said a word for three and a half years. Then as soon as Trump leaves office, he begins testing missiles and bombs again. Putin didn’t dare invade Ukraine because of Trump’s personality and what he knew Trump could do. And that’s a necessary ingredient in being Donald Trump.
Listen, I have a problem. I have a radio show that I do, my own, in New York City that starts in half an hour. So, I did not realize that this would go on for a little while. So, I need to stop now, but let me offer to come back if that’s okay with you.
Bob Zadek: You’re welcome back at any time. So, thank you very much for your insights, Dick, and I’d love to have you back. The show would welcome that.
Dick Morris: Thanks a lot.
Libertarian Perspectives on Trump and Character [16:53]
Bob Zadek: Thanks a lot. Now, my friends, we are going to have a second guest here. I knew that Dick only had a half hour to give us, and he was quite generous with his time. I’ve asked another guest to join me to help me unpack what Dick Morris has said and his enthusiastic belief that Trump will be victorious in 2024. I’d like to welcome back to the show John Giadjopoulos. John is a fellow libertarian, founder and host of the Sports Grumblings podcast. I’d like John to join me in discussing Dick Morris’s book, Trump’s campaign in 2020, and whether Trump will be able to—and whether he should—separate the man from the message in 2024, or whether he even has to. So, John, thank you so much for joining us this morning.
John Giadjopoulos: Oh, my pleasure, Bob. Always glad to join the show with you.
Bob Zadek: Now, John, you and I are both libertarians, and you are obviously competent too, and I will invite you in a second to speak for yourself. But as libertarians, we often find ourselves either despising half of the platform of the two major political parties or loving half of the platform of the other two major political parties. So, when I listen to Dick Morris, who knows better than anybody else who knows the Republican Party and knows Donald Trump, and Dick Morris is unbelievably enthusiastic about Trump’s prospects in 2024, I don’t know if it makes me feel fearful or relieved. And you, John?
John Giadjopoulos: Well, I happen to agree with Mr. Morris in the sense that I think that if Donald Trump runs, he’ll probably win, things being what they are. As to whether that leaves me relieved or not, I have to tell you that probably not. I don’t view Trump as being very libertarian at all. That’s not to say that I think Biden or anyone the Democrats would put up would be very libertarian. So, for me as a libertarian, I can honestly say I don’t have a horse in the next race, probably.
Bob Zadek: What’s interesting is when you say Trump is clearly not a libertarian. If I had to describe, put a label on Trump’s belief systems, I’m not so sure I can do that. I don’t find that other than “Trump is Trump,” I couldn’t really describe the central core of his belief system. So, like politics in gross in the United States, I find myself happy sometimes and depressed in other times irrespective of who’s in office. And I felt the same way with Trump. So, I can’t tell. I guess if it’s Trump versus Biden and I’m asked to pull down a lever—nobody even knows what pulling down a lever means anymore, but I’ll use the phrase—it’ll be Trump, but with some fear and a bit of a heavy heart. So, the prospects for libertarians if Trump wins, the likelihood that we will wake up more mornings with a spring in our step—what do you think, John?
John Giadjopoulos: That’s always tough to say for me because to give him his due, Trump did do some things that I agreed with. For example, some criminal reform, the concept that you could try any drug without necessarily decades of waiting for FDA approval—these are positives. But as a libertarian myself personally, there’s economic issues that I hold more valuable, which I feel Trump is in no way near a free marketeer. He doesn’t believe in the free market at all. When it comes to economic matters, you might describe him more as a new monetary theorist or some sort of weird Keynesian. But I don’t necessarily view him as an overall positive because you also have to take the character of the person into account to some extent. And Trump is very volatile to me. Whereas Biden is very confused, if that’s a kind word to use, Trump is very volatile. I give him credit at his age being that vital and that vibrant—kudos for that—but at the same time, his volatility makes him a non-starter for me. I’m almost kind of hoping that the Republican Party might get a “Trump-lite” candidate in Ron DeSantis instead of Trump personally. I think that might be, if you’re a Republican, that might be a better choice for both the party and the country. Biden, on the other hand, should just retire as soon as possible and let them try to figure out what they’re going to do next.
The Role of Character in Politics [22:53]
Bob Zadek: When we talk about separating character or identifying character as being an important quality, there’s an interesting mind game that in those instances when I am, like for example right now, speaking with somebody who is as immersed in the political process as I am, I will ask my buddy or an audience: list, if you will, the qualities that you look for in voting for a candidate. For example, honesty. Would you be more supportive of a president who said, “Above all, I must be honest with the American people. That’s one of my guiding principles. I will never, as Nixon deceitfully said, I will never lie to you.” Well, what if the best tactic in that office is to not tell the truth because it’s bad for the country?
So, there’s honesty. And then there is: what are the core governing principles—conservative, progressive, libertarian, in between? What are the core principles, and do principles and belief systems trump honesty? What about manner? What about character? And no matter how much I discuss this with others, they give lip service to character, but when the rubber hits the road, it’s always voting for the candidate who, irrespective of character, is more likely to further this other person’s belief system in politics. So, I wonder how important character is. Is it better to have somebody with, dare I say, questionable character but one who will be true to, let’s say, progressive or conservative or libertarian values? Or is it better to have somebody with exemplary character who is far less faithful to values? So, you mentioned character; I wonder how important it really is. It’s unpleasant to have somebody with bad character, but does that bad character lose your vote?
John Giadjopoulos: It would. So, it’s an interesting way you kind of phrased the question there, Bob, but to me, I’ll tolerate someone who is unpleasant if they align with my principles—if they truly align with my principles. If you’re a Republican or a conservative, I’m not even sure that Donald Trump aligns with your principles. Now, I’m using “Republican” and “conservative” in the way that you and I use that word coming up. So, if people think Trump is a Reagan conservative, he’s not. If people think Trump is a Goldwater conservative or a William Buckley conservative, or even to some extent a Milton Friedman type of conservative if you wanted to use that, he’s not. He was a Democrat until it was unpopular for him to be so. I don’t know anything in his core beliefs that changed that would justify him going from Democrat to Republican, say in the way that Ronald Reagan converted from Democrat to Republicanism. When you talk to Reagan about it, he laid out philosophical ideals that would explain his conversion from left to right. I don’t know that Trump ever did that.
So, when you combine the fact that as a Republican or a conservative, Trump doesn’t really align with your ideals, but he is charismatic, he is charming to those that agree with him, he is electable—that’s been proven. So, the question I think I would flip the question around and ask Republicans: at what cost winning an election? We have that in the Libertarian Party, Bob, with the Mises Caucus. And I’m not sure if you’ve seen the latest hubbub in the LP, but the New Hampshire Libertarian Party started tweeting out some pretty aggressive imagery to denigrate John McCain. It was terrible. However, you have a very vocal swath of supporters in the LP that say, “That’s what’s needed. That’s what we have to do. We have to get aggressive. We have to let people know we’re not messing around when we’re talking about our libertarian ideals.” Now, Bob, the Mises Caucus probably aligns with you and I more so than any other political faction on our core beliefs, I would guarantee you. They believe in free markets, they believe in maximum individual liberty, they don’t believe in interventionist wars. But you and I, I would venture, found that tweet to be horribly offensive and probably not a good idea, correct? So, I think for each of us, we have our own line as to when character becomes an issue regardless of alignment with ideals.
The Polling Problem and Media Influence [28:39]
Bob Zadek: What’s so interesting to me is often decisions are made and the media loves to focus on the latest poll, and political operatives are influenced by polls and they change their positions based upon polling data. And not much attention is placed upon the exaggerated importance of polling data. To me, to ask the public in a poll about, let’s say, relationships in Afghanistan, or let’s say Taiwan, or let’s say inflation tools to limit inflation—to ask the public their opinion on those issues is utterly insane because no participant in that poll has studied the issue. Let’s accept that. They haven’t studied the issue in any sense of the word. They are uninformed, as they have to be if they want to have a life. So, let’s say the average American who does her best to stay plugged in will know only what’s going on on the surface. Therefore, when they respond to a poll, that poll is not the collective opinion of America. It’s the collective opinion of Americans who have formed their opinion based upon the media they listen to. Therefore, the poll is not a poll on the public; it’s a poll testing the media—how persuasive the media was in making a sale to the public. So, the opinion of the public is so irrelevant in so far as what’s a healthy position for the country because it’s nothing other than a poll on the media as expressed through the mouths of the public. Am I exaggerating that?
John Giadjopoulos: No, I think you’re absolutely right. Because what’s interesting is, first of all, polls—people tend to distrust them. And as a statistician myself, people tend to distrust polls because they’ll see like the total number of respondents and they’ll say, “Well, how can 500 people determine mathematically the opinion, represent the opinion of the country?” The correct answer is mathematically, you don’t need more than 300 or 500 people to represent 300 million. It’s a mathematical function. The problem with polls is the way they’re worded and, to your point, Bob, the way they represent what the media thinks is important.
Interestingly, if you polled people on their belief system and you stripped away current events—like for example, the question wouldn’t be, “Do you believe in Austrian economics or do you believe in Keynesian economics?” The question would be, “Do you feel the government should tell you how to run your private business?” If you ask those types of questions, the largest identifiable group in the United States is libertarian. They believe in maximum freedom, they believe in the government not being in your business, your bedroom, or anywhere else, or your classroom. And they only view the government as sort of an umpire: “Let’s call timeout if someone breaks the law, let’s enforce the laws,” but that’s it. They don’t want the government involved in their lives by and large. The problem—so then how do you go from that to polls that would then indicate either a Democrat or a Republican whose only mission in life is to increase the role of government in your life? So, you’re absolutely right. Polls are, I think, a deceptive way to govern. If you govern by polling, which is interesting you had Dick Morris on because what was the Clinton administration famous for? Governing by polls, right? So, it’s interesting that you tied that in.
Bob Zadek: Well, there was that famous anecdote when the Monica Lewinsky affair surfaced. President Clinton asked Dick Morris, my guest, to poll as to whether he’s better off telling the truth or lying. And he didn’t—that was what taught him what to do is the poll, not his own moral compass. So, you’re quite right about that. And that anecdote, which maybe has been forgotten over the course of time, and it did involve Dick Morris. I didn’t get a chance to discuss that with him because we were not interested in Clinton’s presidency but rather in the Trump presidency.
John Giadjopoulos: That’s true. That’s true. But looking to Trump, I think, look, he—if anything, he’s probably a populist, some weird mix of populism, nationalism, and mercantilism, to your earlier question. And if he runs, I do think he will win. I think there’s enough—even though I don’t think Biden is solely responsible for inflation, obviously inflation is the result of federal monetary policy, so the more you spend, the higher inflation will get eventually, which is what we’re seeing now. But it’s all about the economy, right? For the most part. So, I think if Trump does end up running, if he gets by whatever these criminal investigations are potentially for him, if he gets through that unscathed legally, then my guess is he’ll run and he’ll probably win very easily in 2024.
2022 Midterms and the Primary System [34:53]
Bob Zadek: Hard to say because it’s not at all clear who he will be running against. Also, in Dick’s book, he didn’t discuss 2022 very much at all other than urging—and this is sort of he’s speaking now to Republican leadership, the party leadership—pay attention to Secretaries of State and fight to win those offices as hard as you fight to win higher state offices, because under the Constitution, the states have exclusive control of the time, place, and manner of running elections, and Secretaries of State control that. The Democrats have found that Achilles’ heel and exploited it.
And I fear—and I’m not so sure if “fear” is the right word, I’ll just say I suspect—that because the Trump candidates for Senate appear to be weak, they appear to be weak because the primary system is a horrible way to select candidates, and maybe we’ll have time this morning to discuss the primary system, which I despise. But the primary system, such as it is, has given the Republicans a very weak slate. And if the Republican candidates for the Senate lose big time in a few months from now, that will severely weaken the Trump brand, and Trump will then be wounded and it’ll invite more or other candidates who look for that office, DeSantis being at the head of the pack, to be encouraged and enable DeSantis to raise money. And there will be a primary battle for the presidency in 2024, and that will be ugly. Look what happened in 2016 when there were 17 fairly highly qualified Republican presidential candidates in a debate. Utter nonsense. And a lot of those candidates were quality candidates, and their careers were either ended or impaired by that primary. And if Trump’s senatorial candidates don’t do well—and I don’t think they will—if they don’t do well in 2022, we’re looking at another bloody primary, maybe on both parties, but certainly for the Republicans. Am I too fearful?
John Giadjopoulos: I don’t know that I’m fearful, but it is interesting because I’ve been saying recently, look, the curveball that was thrown into the midterm elections was the ruling by the Supreme Court re: abortion rights. I think that re-energized the left. Prior to that, for the most part, I would have said, yeah, it’s going to be a red wave. But I think the abortion issue is bubbled up. The Democrats would be wise to jump on that so that they could elect state-level candidates who would put in pro-abortion rights in their particular state. So, I think now it’s a little more complicated in general. I still think the Republicans overall will gain in 2022, as is usually the case for the opposition party. How much now is in question.
As for the Republican Senate candidates, they’re in a tough spot because we’ve seen how Republicans who stood up to Trump or to the wave of Trumpism, I should say, how they fared—generally speaking, not too well. It’s Trump’s party for better or for worse. The question is, will Republican leaders be able to stand up to that wave of Trumpism in order to put someone that I think is probably better off in the long run for the party, which would be a Ron DeSantis? Even though I don’t necessarily have love for him, I think he’s a better political candidate than Donald Trump. DeSantis is younger, he’s been a governor, he’s had experience. It’s always been weird to me how people think that lack of experience is somehow a positive when you go into politics. It seems to be the only profession where people say, “You know what? I want someone with no experience in the job.” We don’t do that for anything else, Bob. We don’t do it for our lawyers, we don’t do it for our doctors, we don’t ask of that in a car mechanic, but for some reason, we want it in a politician. So, I think for me, being a chief executive in the political realm is a positive, and it should be a positive for someone like Ron DeSantis. So, it’d be interesting. I still think Trump comes out on top. He’s got way too much popular support. So, I think the Republicans would have to—as a party, the Republican establishment would have to work very hard throughout the primary season if they didn’t want Trump to come out on top. They would have to somehow choke off his funding and things like that, but I think it would be very difficult to do.
The Paradox of Political Skill and Governance [40:42]
Bob Zadek: The strange—when you mentioned experience, that reminds me of an observation I have often shared, and that is that whenever this type of polling is done, the least respected profession in the country, least respected, is always politician. Always. Below lawyers—lawyers unfairly are ranked low-ish—but the lowest is a politician. Now, if we stipulate, as we must, that the individual who gets elected president is probably elected because that candidate is the best politician, we appoint somebody to the highest office in the world for the sole reason that that individual is the best at the most despised occupation. How bizarre is that? That’s like the best extortionist. I mean, it makes no sense.
In other words, to express the same point perhaps at a higher level: the skills you need to be elected have nothing whatever to do with the skills you need to be president, to be an effective president. Or to be a good human being. Exactly right. So, it’s really weird is we have an HR department, the presidential election, which the person who is the best interviewer and who makes the best appearance is the one who will get the job, not the person who is shown to be the best—has the best skill set to actually be the president. And not only that, but the skill set you need to be president cannot be predicted because it depends upon what is the center of gravity while you’re in office. If it’s foreign policy and if you’re a peanut farmer, you bring little to the table about foreign policy. So, therefore, we are hiring somebody to do a job with no real understanding of what that job is going to entail until after they’re in office. So, the process of selecting a president is as irrational as a process can be.
John Giadjopoulos: You’re right. And in those situations, or in most of any sort of electoral situations, I kind of harken back to what our founding fathers said about the Constitution, which was: it’s less about specific rules, specific laws, and more about first principles. Because at the end of the day, your principles should be able to guide you when you have novel or unique situations presented to you. To your point, I don’t know what a president is going to face over, say, his term or her term. I don’t know if it’s going to be foreign policy-centric, economic-centric, or whatever, a little bit of everything. But I would like to think that we have a candidate in office who is able to use those first principles to arrive at good conclusions.
So, one of the things I always say on my show is I think most of our problems today could be solved if we just pulled up YouTube clips of Milton Friedman giving answers to questions. What to do about healthcare? Go see what Milton Friedman had to say about healthcare. The fact that it was 30 years ago is almost irrelevant. The technologies have changed, but his first principles have not. Or about free markets, or about tariffs, or about price fixing, or anything like that that people are arguing about today. Go back and see what those first principles are, Bob. Because to your point, which I agree 100%, we don’t know what a president is going to face in office. That’s why, and I’m tying it back to my earlier point, I think character does matter because if a person’s volatile, you don’t want a volatile person necessarily making decisions. If you have someone who is too nice, too timid—you mentioned a peanut farmer, President Carter. A lot of people would say his administration was a horrible disaster because he was a horrible president, but at the same time, who has been a better human being than Jimmy Carter? Everything he’s done post-his presidency, Habitat for Humanity and being just a good person and a good man. As a human being, you would say Jimmy Carter is exemplary. As a president, he was a horrible failure. So, you do have to try to take the whole ball of wax into account.
Bob Zadek: My goodness, there are so many—I’m so glad you jumped on my passing reference to Jimmy Carter. And you said he was a failed presidency. Yes, I guess that’s correct overall. But remember, he did more for deregulation, much more than Reagan, much more than, of course, Nixon. So, he deregulated the airlines and deregulated rail transit. They were big deals. It never could have happened. So, Carter is not given sufficient credit, if the credit goes to him, for those monumental steps that we still enjoy the benefits of today. But there he was, he failed in Iran and he failed in dealing with the manufactured shortage of gasoline—remember the gas lines if you’re old enough. So, even Carter—he’s a peanut farmer, he didn’t get elected because he was a deregulator, nor did he get elected because he was skillful in foreign policy. So, he had the skills to be elected, he got elected, but not necessarily the skills to govern.
And then he leaves the presidency and he takes those same character qualities that you identified and has a rich, full life that made a meaningful contribution to many, many people through the force of his drive, his beliefs, and his character. So, it seems so random in how we select a president, the only exception being perhaps Reagan. Reagan brought a belief system to the country exactly when we needed it, and he together with Margaret Thatcher in the UK, they changed the world for the better, and then he left. So, there was an example where everybody who voted for Reagan knew what they were going to get, and they pretty much got it, and they pretty much were right. But there aren’t many examples of that happening.
And so here we are talking about Donald Trump’s prospective candidacy in 2024, and we know a lot about Donald Trump. He’s been our president, he’s been in the news every tiresome day after every tiresome day. Everybody in the country has Trump fatigue. And yet you and I, who spend far too much of our time thinking about these issues, cannot really be enthusiastic in favor of him or hoping he loses or whatever else. And that’s how we pick the presidency. How—so if you and I, who spend far too much time—we are sick as turtles, far too much time worrying about this stuff—and we can’t figure it out, then what do elections tell us?
John Giadjopoulos: Elections basically at this point tell us that it really is an election of who has the best sound bites, who has an increasingly, obviously with the advent of social media, who is the best person who could put up the best meme, whose team can put up the best meme, right? I will say I am very concerned that the one thing I see in general in the United States is the lack of critical thinking on behalf of the people, Bob. Because as libertarians, I am 100% behind the concept of “live and let live” as long as you let me do the same. If you let me live my life as I see fit, I agree to let you live your life as you see fit. However, I am disturbed by the lack of critical thinking, how everything comes down to “link-splaining.” How did you arrive at your opinion? Well, here’s the link where I got my opinion. Nobody critically thought about their opinion, by the way. They just referred to a link that came from a source that they identify with. So, if you’re a Republican, the link came from Breitbart or from The Blaze or Fox News. If you’re a Democrat, the link came from The New York Times or The Washington Post.
Bob Zadek: And I just want to—I want to interrupt only because I want to have time to have our audience be able to follow your podcast and your show. But I am less critical of Americans for the absence of critical thinking because they only can do so much. And to expect people to spend time studying issues when how they vote on the individual basis cannot possibly change their life in any way, they are behaving more rationally than you and I, John, in devoting only passing time. Now, John, how do our friends out there follow and become avid fans as I am of your podcast? Tell us about the podcast and what you focus on and how people can find it.
John Giadjopoulos: Sure. Well, the podcast, which Bob was graciously a guest on recently, is called The Big Questions with Big John. You can find it on all the existing podcasting platforms, on YouTube, on Rumble. But very easy: go to sportsgrumblings.com, sportsgrumblings.com. Myself and my partner, William Del Pilar, the Conservative Latino, we attack all these issues in sports, pop culture, politics, and just the news overall. So, sportsgrumblings.com.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, John, for helping me sort out and slice and dice the upcoming 2024 election. I’m sure all our friends now understand and have formed an opinion exactly how to vote in the primaries and in the general. We have saved them countless hours of studying the issue. So, thank you so much. Thank you, John, and thank you to my friends out there for giving us an hour of your time.