Camp Gagnon - Expert on Hunter Biden Pardon, Trump's 2nd Term, and Project 2025

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Andrew Polsky has been a member of the Hunter College faculty since 1984. He is the author of The Rise of the Therapeutic State and Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War, as well as numerous scholarly articles, and editor of The Eisenhower Presidency: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century. He's in the tent in today's live episode to discuss Hunter Biden's Pardon, Donald Trump's legacy and Project 2025. WELCOME TO CAMP! Shout out to our sponsors Huel, Morgan & Morgan, and Bluechew Huel: https://huel.com/camp 0:00 Intro 1:37 Meet Dr. Andrew Polsky 3:19 Hunter Biden Pardon + Past Pardons 11:28 Trump's Pardons 14:13 Trump’s Cabinet 20:27 Administrative Experience 25:00 Gaining Trust Of The People 37:02 What Are Tariffs?  52:41 Mass Deportations 1:01:40 Solution To The Problem 1:07:01 Harris Campaign + Male Voters 1:15:40 Joe Rogan Phenomenon 1:22:28 Trump’s NATO Plans 1:29:26 Differing Political Views 1:32:08 George Washington 1:34:58 John Adams 1:35:30 Thomas Jefferson 1:37:13 James Madison 1:37:46 James Monroe 1:38:30 John Quincy Adams 1:40:35 Andrew Jackson 1:44:30 Martin Van Buren 1:46:29 William Henry Harrison 1:47:12 Henry Tyler 1:48:15 James K. Polk 1:53:02 Zachary Taylor 1:55:01 Millard Fillmore + Franklin Pierce + James Buchanon 1:57:15 Abraham Linconln 1:58:03 Ulysses S. Grant 1:58:59 Teddy Roosevelt 2:01:08 William Howard Taft 2:01:39 Woodrow Wilson 2:03:13 Franklin D. Roosevelt 2:05:19 Dwight D. Eisenhower 2:06:22 John F. Kennedy 2:07:36 Lyndon B. Johnson 2:08:50 Richard Nixon 2:09:09 Jimmy Carter 2:10:35 Ronald Regan 2:11:45 George H.W. Bush 2:12:46 Bill Blinton 2:16:10 George W. Bush 2:17:15 Barack Obama 2:20:00 Donald Trump 2:23:17 Joe Biden

Hello, hello, hello, good people watching at home. Andy, how are you? I'm good. Thanks, Mark. Thank you so much for joining me in my cozy tent here. I really appreciate it. I'm really excited to chat today. There is a lot to discuss. And you're the guy for it.

You are a political science professor and former dean of art and sciences at Hunter College here in beautiful New York City. You've been a professor for, what do you say, 29 years? I've been at Hunter since 1984. Of the first 29 years, I was a professor. Wow. The last 11 years I was dean. That's, you've been a professor longer than I've been alive. That's awesome.

I hope that gives everyone at home confidence to say like, hey, you know what you're talking about. Yeah, so I think today I would love to basically just go through all my political questions. And perhaps we can answer them both through like kind of your personal opinion, but also kind of looking at them through like an unbiased kind of larger scope if there is, such a thing. But I think going through Project 2025, what Trump's second term will look like, if there's any predictions we can kind of make for that, going through his cabinet picks and which ones make sense and which ones perhaps don't and why they're being chosen and for what reason. And then kind of even going broader. You've written numerous books detailing specific

presidents, and I would love to just do a ranking of all the presidents. Again, just just off the cuff, all feelings, not too many details and facts, just how you feel about them. We're just going to rank them all. Yeah, I think there's a lot to discuss, specifically with this new administration kind of coming into the fray. But I would like to begin by, of course, discussing the most recent news that I think we've both seen. Our good friend Joe Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter Biden. And it's set the internet on fire. People have opinions left and right. I'm curious. What are your thoughts of seeing this pardoning and how do we evaluate this as American voters? We understand why Biden did it. It's his family. It's his son. He loves his son for all his son's problems. It was done as a very personal choice. I think Biden made a mistake by saying he wouldn't do it originally, insisting all along he wouldn't do it. And now he's simply a reversed course.

I think generally history is probably going to have mixed views of the Biden presidency, partly based on what happens next. Biden's failure to stop Trump from winning re-election will stand out if Trump's second term turns out to be damaging to the country. But the part in itself is probably not more than a one-week story because Biden's on the way out and presidents do the same. sort of thing on the way out. It's not something that's going to have much consequence. So, yeah, people get apoplectic about it just the way they get apoplectic these days about anything. And a week later, they're being apoplectic about something else. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. It seems like more people are upset with the hypocrisy than they are with the pardon, objectively. Because I look at the pardoned, and I'm like, I would have

pardon my kid. I have a son, right? He's two months old, actually, yesterday. I'm pretty stoked on that. And I don't know what a two-month-old could do, you know, criminally speaking. But let's say my two-month-old committed a felony. Let's say he was, you know, getting money from Russia's. I don't know what he gets involved with, okay? But I would pardon him almost immediately. I would be like, hey, you are getting out of there. You're not in timeout. You're coming home. Okay. Right. So on the one hand, I get it. But on the other hand, him saying, you know, no one is above the law. It seems more like they're using this as like a political apparatus to point out him, you know, holding Trump to, some certain standard, but then not holding his son to the same standard.

Yeah, and I think that's a very valid criticism of it. Right. And I understand why he did it. I'm going to understand the family feelings that led him to do it. This will taint his legacy in a small way, but only in a small way. Like I said, I think this generally, you know, passes fairly quickly. We've had some famous pardons in the past, and most of them are brief, cause a little ripple and they're gone.

So, for example, the example where it didn't happen, where it wasn't a brief thing, was when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after Watergate. And Ford pardoned everyone who had been evading the draft, people who had fled to Canada from the draft, and at the same time he pardoned Richard Nixon for any and all crimes that he might have committed. there were many people who felt that he denied the country the opportunity to impose justice on Nixon for his crimes. He had let Nixon off too easily. And in the following election, 1976, when Ford ran against Carter, and we looked at opinion polls afterwards, and it was a fairly close election, the pardon of Nixon figured prominently among the reasons people gave for voting against Ford.

it may have been enough to turn the election to Carter because it was that close. Other than that, and now notice here, Ford's pardon of Nixon happens during Ford's initial term in office. He's finishing Nixon's term. So Ford was running again. Many of the controversial pardons happened when presidents are on the way out, and they don't expect to run again. So Bill Clinton pardons his half-brother, as I recall, on his way out. there are no repercussions. People don't like it. You know, it has, you know, it has a taint to it. Donald Trump pardons Roger Stone, Paul Manafort on his way out. There's no indication that Trump's going to ever come back into office at that point.

So most of these things, most of these cases happen when people are on the way out. And it's a footnote in history. That's essentially all it is. I think Trump pardoned Kodak Black as well. The rapper. Are you familiar with this? Yeah, he pointed Trump. And most presidents pardoned a good number of people on their way out of office. And some of them are peculiar ones. I was looking at some of the historical examples as well. Patty Hurst was pardoned for her crimes, you know, as a bank robber working, you know,

with a left-wing organization, you know, several terms later. Some people are pardoned after they're dead. Oh, really? Yeah. Susan B. Anthony was pardoned. after her, long after her death, she had voted, as I recall, voted illegally in a presidential election when women weren't allowed to vote. And she had been convicted, and she was pardoned many decades later. Oh, wow. Who pardoned her? Do you remember? I don't remember who pardoned her.

It was fairly recent, though, that she was pardoned. Patty B. Hurst. I'm not familiar with Yeah, she was the granddaughter, you know, in the Hurst family. She was kidnapped by a left-wing organization. And during the process of kidnapping, during that time, she was brainwashed and she participated in some violent crime afterwards. And she was finally, she was arrested. She went to jail for a time. Then she was eventually pardoned. Wow. And then another example, Eugene Victor Debs, famous socialist in the early 20th century. He ran for president in 2012 and was one of the rare third party candidates to score significantly enough potentially to influence the election. It was a three-way election even without him, but he got close to a million votes.

And in 1912, that's a lot of votes. As a socialist? As a socialist? As a socialist. During World War I, he had been a draft. He had opposed the war. He had opposed the draft. And he had been sentenced.

He'd been tried and sentenced. He was in jail. And he ran for president again in 1920. He didn't do as well. And then when Warren G. Harding came into office, he decided to pardon Debs. So you've got there are some interesting cases along the line, but most of these are essentially historical footnotes without consequence other than, as I said at the start, the Gerald Ford

pardoning of Richard Nixon. It's an interesting thing, like the pardoning sort of thing that we have in America, the sort of, you know, almost tradition. It's like what is the function of it? Does it exist in any other countries? I don't know if it exists in other countries, but it's one of the constitutional powers of the president. It was in there from the beginning. And what was the original precedent for that?

What was the protection for? Miscarriage of justice, basically. If you wanted to always have some potential option when somebody, when there had been a miscarriage of justice, could conceivably be somebody who had been prosecuted for their political views. Any number of reasons. It's an unlimited. There's no restrictions on it. Nothing, no crimes are exempted from the pardon power of the president. It was an interesting question four years ago when Trump left office in the first place, whether he could pardon himself if he had wanted to.

Because there was the potential, as we've seen, the potential that Trump could be charged with crimes. Now, since some of the crimes he was charged with happened after he was out of office, it couldn't have applied to that. So the documents he took with him down to Marilago. If he had pardoned himself, it wouldn't have applied to that. Because he violated a statute after he left office. I see. Now, you had made a prediction that when Trump takes office, that he may make some pardons. Oh, it's quite possible.

I think what he will likely do, he basically said this. He intends to pardon anyone who was convicted of a federal crime who was involved in the January 6th insurrection. We fully expect, I think, that those people will all, or most of them will be let out of jail. I see. This is a list of his, this is his former pardons, right, Christos? Yes. I see. Okay.

So Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Bannon. Interesting. Yeah. Why do you think it's so important for Trump to pardon the January 6th, folks? He has declared that they are. political prisoners. He doesn't consider them to have committed any actual crimes. He thinks they're being punished for taking legitimate political action. He's never admitted that the election was properly resolved. He's never, he's always contained the election, insisted the election was stolen.

And so any actions taken by people to try to prevent the 2020 election results from being certified, he thinks were valid actions. I see. So they, and we're all. all of them effectively charged with the felony? Like anyone that had gone into the capital? Well, there are many different charges and a number of different felonies. He can't pardon anybody

if they were tried under any kind of state law. But most of them were prosecuted under federal statutes. Some of those prosecutions may still be ongoing. He will end all of that and he will essentially release from prison those who were primarily responsible. That's my expectation,

including people who were sentenced to long prison terms of up to 20 years, he will give them pardons. Wow. I mean, that's wild. I wonder if any of those people didn't even know what was happening. They just got swept up in the excitement. I wonder if there was like a tourist that was just like hanging out, taking pictures.

I don't think they were like, oh, we're going in. I'm quite sure there were no tourists, but I think many of them didn't realize, did get carried up. People in crowds do things like, you know, we'll get caught up with the emotions. Right. And while some people were doing it intentionally, I think others were caught up in the, you know, excitement of the moment. It doesn't mean it was any less of a crime. Doesn't mean that their actions could be justified. But I certainly don't think that they all went to Washington with the intention of breaching the capital. Right. But if you're like an 80 year old woman with a selfie stick and you're

like, oh, what's going on? I'd be like, all right, I can understand. Maybe that one I'm okay with. But the other guys, I mean, if you're breaking into a door, putting your feet up on the desk, you're like, all right, this is crossing a line here. This is too much. Yeah. So now Trump is going to Trump is going to take over and his administration will be set in and there's been some controversy over his cabinet picks. I'm curious, Chris says, would you mind pulling up some of the Trump cabinet picks and potential picks that I guess he's speculating here? Now, how does this process work? Like, I've heard different things where, you know, Trump's team and insiders will sort of leak information to the press to kind of like gauge interest and to kind of like, you know, see what people are thinking and then make decisions based off of that.

So I'm curious just, you know, broadly speaking, when these picks are made, what kind of political gaming is happening in D.C.? Well, first of all, the process is that the president will nominate, and for a number of senior positions, the Senate has to confirm people or they cannot serve. Senate confirmation is not, by any means, a certainty for cabinet nominees. And Many presidents, I think probably most presidents, have had at various times nominees turned down for cabinet positions. That's for other senior positions that require Senate confirmation. So that in and of itself is not unusual. The names, the people involved are people who are, many of them are in Trump's circle and were active in his campaign and supporting him in various ways,

showed up at his trial in New York, made it clear, you know, all the men were there and they're blue suits and red ties, which is apparently the uniform you have to wear, they all showed up there and to be seen and to be acknowledged as supporting Trump. Within Trump's circle, are there different factions of people? I think there probably are, and they don't necessarily agree on all of the appointments. You know, there's a Don Jr. faction. There's the, you know, Vance faction, the vice president's faction. But Trump's ultimately going to make these calls. He's made it very clear, based on his experience the first time when he wasn't satisfied with the degree of loyalty he received from some of his senior appointees right up to the end, that he wants unquestioned loyalty from everyone he appoints. And, you know, people who will say and do anything for Donald Trump.

Now, if you look at, let's take the one that was withdrawn, the Matt Gates nomination. Right. Okay. Now, there's no universe in which Matt Gates can be considered qualified to be the Attorney General of the United States. Very limited legal experience, no experience as a prosecutor. He was himself under investigation. So when you nominate a Matt Gates, and I think even Trump understands this, you don't really seriously expect confirmation. So the Matt Gates nomination I would describe as a raised middle finger to America.

Okay. This is, I can do and appoint anyone I want. I'm prepared to pick people who you think are grotesquely unqualified because I'm Donald Trump and I can do this. And if I have to withdraw the Matt Gates appointment or something like that, fine. You know, but I basically, and he got people overwrought immediate reactions. We, the term apoplectic, people, you know, got hysterical about Matt Gates, which deflected attention from any number of. as other appointees. Because there's a limited attention span, a limited space for attacking these appointees. You can't attack them all. So most of them are going to sail through with very little questioning going on. Pete Hegseth, the nominee for the Department of Defense, may very well not qualify. As we were chatting a little bit before, I said, Pete Hegseth has less administrative experience than I do by far. as a dean of a large school.

I'm more qualified to run the Department of Defense than Pete Hegset is, and I'm not qualified to run the Department of Defense. He has no business being nominated for that. But Trump's standard is loyalty, and so Hegset may not make it. Tulsi Gabbard may not make it. Patel may not make it for the FBI. Some of these people may not get through the confirmation process, but most of them will. And the ones who don't, let's be clear, if they don't get through, the people,

appointed after them will be every bit the loyalist to Trump that they are. That's his main criteria for picking people this time around. He said that before the election, and that's the way he's going. So will you knock off three or four of these people? Potentially yes. And you'll use an enormous amount of energy fighting them and deflect a lot of attention away from others. And I think as far as Trump is concerned, that's fine. Interesting. So, I mean, the smoke screen that you're talking about is interesting, like with someone like Gates to say, we'll put him in, this will take a lot of attention, and then we'll kind of put other people in that won't get as much attention. Is that done intentionally? Is there like a political precedent for that that's done in the past? Or is that maybe just a coincidence that's happening in those cases? We've seen something similar on occasion with Supreme Court nominees that somebody will be nominated who is a lightning rod for criticism. And the next nominee will have essentially. identical views, be the same kind of justice, but not create the same kind of blowback

that you got. So, yes, it does happen in some cases. I'm not sure that it's fully intentional if they could get the person through, they would, but they'll fall back on someone else who would be equally supportive of the president's agenda. Interesting. I'm not inside Trump's head. I don't want to be inside Trump's head. It's rather crowded in there as is. But I'm not sure if he thought he could get gates through. He may have thought he could get gates through because he may have bought into the idea that he has a mandate to do anything he wants

because of his victory in the election. Presidents sometimes do that. They interpret the result of the election as giving them the authority to do whatever they want. I see. Now, you bring up administrative experience. Why is that so important for these roles? Again, I know nothing about really

what most of these positions do. So why do you underscore administrative experience that way? A couple of reasons. First, these are complicated organizations. They're not easy to run. But also because if you don't trust the organization, and let's be clear that Trump and the people around him don't trust many agencies in the government,

actually changing their character requires a good deal of effort and a good deal of understanding of administration. I'll take you all the way back. The idea that the government is against you, that you can't trust the agencies, goes back at least as far as Richard Nixon. And Nixon and Ronald Reagan is another example. Both of them wanted to change the character of the federal government by replacing many of the people who were in the government with loyalists, with people who would pursue the president's agenda. they were thwarted in many cases because the bureaucrats understood that those people appointed at the top of the agency aren't going to be there very long, won't be able to, they can be confounded, they can be thwarted by delay, by obstruction, if they don't have cooperation from the organization, and it isn't easy to penetrate large organizations and change their character. Pete Hagsett doesn't know anything about this.

right, Donald Rumsfeld, who was a secretary of defense under George W. Bush during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Rumsfeld was determined to change the culture of the Defense Department, and he was much more experienced and savvy, and yet he struggled with it also. It is what MAGA calls the deep state consists mostly of career employees, people who've been in these organizations for a very long time who understand how they work and who do their jobs in a certain way. And the agencies are often imprinted with a character that dates back to when they were first created. So, for example, the Environmental Protection Administration EPA, created by Richard Nixon in that time period was originally staffed by people very much committed to the

enforcement environmental regulations, who in turn over the years recruited other people into the organization who shared the same values. Along comes a president who wants to change that, who wants to basically overturn the organization. That's a very formidable undertaking. You're not going to be able to do with all the organizations. So Trump and the people around them are going to focus, I think, on particular agencies and the people and the networks into which they are embedded and try to change some of those agencies. So they've made it clear they want to change the Justice Department to make it more directly answerable to the president. They want to change the intelligence community, the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI, they want to change

them and make them more responsive to the president. They are going to be trying to alter the character of the organizations that are responsible for public health at the national level. The Center for Disease Controls, Health and Human Services, this is what somebody like Bobby Kennedy Jr. is supposed to do. And some of the the people that, you know, Trump is trying to put in to deal with programs like Medicare and Medicaid and other health-related agencies, that's another area that he's determined to make changes in. He's focused on the agencies that he doesn't think served him well in his first term. And that's what he'll zero in on. I don't expect Marco Rubio, when he's confirmed as the Secretary of State,

to make big changes in the State Department along the same lines. And I think that's probably true of a lot of the other agencies. If you look at the list of people that Trump has appointed, some of them are basically mainstream Republicans, loyal to Trump and who will do his bidding. But Trump's, like any president, has limited time span, limited time available to him. And his detention span is limited to. So he's going to focus on some areas and leave the others to the people he appoints. I would not expect the same kind of turmoil across the board as in some of the agents. that are areas I just talked about. Right.

Now, when you talk about institutional trust and the desire to sort of, you know, change or maybe like, yeah, fundamentally overturned the way these institutions work, I kind of feel that way, where I feel like these institutions, I get largely skeptical. I think there's probably a lot of bureaucracy. You look at some of the things like, you know, the CIA and the FBI have done, you know, just even on the intelligence sector, behind the scenes, you know, through the 60s, even through to today. And you're like, wait, why, why are we doing this? And you kind of build up some distrust. So I'm curious, like, when did that distrust happen? And is there a way to

gain the American public's trust in these organizations back? Well, we've seen a long-term decline of people's trust in American institutions that goes all the way back to the late 1960s, early 1970s in the Vietnam era. The Vietnam War was extremely unpopular. And it caused people. to question really for the first time whether their leaders knew what they were doing. And we've seen significant decline of trust in American institutions pretty much across the board. It's hard today to identify an institution that the American people believe in. They don't believe in the presidency. They don't believe in Congress.

They haven't believed in Congress for a long time. They don't believe in the Supreme Court anymore, which they see is just a partisan organization. They used to think colleges did a good job. They don't think that anymore, especially if they were Republicans. So we've seen a really long-term decline of support for institutions. Each one probably there's an individual case story for each of these. But the broader picture, I think, across the board is that people don't trust institutions in the United States. They don't trust the establishment.

And one of Trump's gifts as a politician is to recognize the lack of Trump's. trust in American institutions and to build on that, to play on that. Basically, to say these institutions aren't trustworthy. That's why we have to throw them out. If we look at this presidential campaign, one of the things that Kamala Harris did was she spent a fair amount of time campaigning with Liz Cheney. That didn't work. The idea was to suggest that normal Republicans would listen to Liz Cheney, would agree

with Liz Cheney, that Trump represented a threat to American democracy. But what most people saw, I think, was the American establishment closing ranks at the time of the election. And in closing ranks, when you draw it together, Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, what people see is an establishment trying to protect itself against a strong external challenge. And that establishment is very vulnerable. Right. And I can see how that's attractive to people. You know, they see this establishment that they feel has done a disservice to them. And then this outsider, this exogenous force. And they say, oh, nice.

This is, you know, either you think this is like a savior that's going to come in and fix the problem or just a wrecking ball that will destroy it. Either is fine. And I think that a lot of people in the American public felt that. Yeah. I think that's clear. I think that the American, let me take this back a step. What is this election about?

We can take that big picture question. What's this election about? When I was teaching, I used to tell a story about elections, a parable, and I'll give you the current version of the parable, which is think of the – imagine every four years that America buys a new car. And it's given a choice of two models. It can choose an electric car or it can choose a pickup truck. pickup truck runs on gas. It has a gun rack on the back of the cab. There's a Bible in the glove compartment.

And the owner's manual says Project 2025. We don't know what that means, but it's in the glove compartment. And the electric car drives no more than 55 miles an hour. It has all of the safety features, and you can't disable them. And a special deal if you buy the electric car this year, if you're a first-time car buyer, we're going to give you $25,000 towards the purchase of that electric car. You choose every four years, one car or the other.

Oh, and by the way, you don't get to drive the car. It comes with a driver. The pickup truck comes with a, it's driven by a 77-year-old man with orange-colored hair and who's got a guy sitting next to him who tells him he can go anywhere he wants to go as fast as he wants to go. The electric car was going to be driven by an 81-year-old man who doesn't get out a lot. Can't drive at night. And his sense of direction was kind of shaky. So a couple of months before we had to make the decision about the car, the driver was replaced with a much younger woman.

But she was sitting next to him the whole time. So we weren't sure whether or not the car was going to go in a different direction. By the way, both cars are a lot more expensive now than they were four years ago. On election day, America chooses a car, right? And, and, you know, and This year, America chose the pickup truck with the driver. And the difference between buying a car and the election is everyone gets the same car. Okay. On election day, you get the same car, whether you wanted it or not. We're all getting the same car.

And we're all going to be driven by the same driver, whether we wanted him or not. We don't know where he's going to take the country. We have some ideas and more will become evident. But one of the reasons people are really unhappy with our elections is that half of us basically got the car we didn't want. Right. But we still have to live with that. Right. But that seems like every election, right?

Yes. Every election. And all of the cars that were forced to choose between all have features that many of us don't like. Even if we wanted that electric car, we wouldn't necessarily want it with those features that it comes with. But we don't have much choice because the features are being decided by people generally other than us. They may be decided by interest groups, by donors, et cetera. They're picking the features of the car. But we're still going to get that car.

Yeah. But that's going to leave a lot of people dissatisfied. Yeah. Absolutely. And the closer the election is, I think, the more dissatisfied people are. And also in some elections, in some cases, the difference between the two models you're choosing from is enormous. Right. Right.

And this year was one of those examples. I think going into this election, the Democrats faced some serious headwinds and it was clear. People were unhappy with the state of the country. And the Democrats were terrible of communicating any message that would cause people to feel differently about the state of the country. Right. You can talk about how inflation was going down. It didn't matter because people are still paying very high prices and they're confronted with high prices all the time.

Right. Yeah, it seems like that that type of rhetoric drives people crazy where they say, hey, things are kind of expensive. And they go, no, no, no, inflation's coming down. And they go, are you gaslighting me? Like I feel like things are more expensive. And they go, no, you're crazy. And it's like, oh, that's going to lose a lot of voters.

So, but also, let's take a further step back, big picture. I think we're at an inflection point in American politics where we could possibly go in a different direction. Some of my writing I've done is about party coalitions and what I call partisan regimes, which can dominate American politics for a long period of time. A good example would be Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt comes into office during the Great Depression, a crisis moment in American politics. And he tells a story, in effect, and the Democrats tell a story about the role of government and the power of government to make a difference in the economy. They make many mistakes, many of their policies are failures, but eventually they turn the economy around, and people come to accept that the government has a role to play in providing economic security for all Americans.

That's when social security is created. And we continue on that path. we expand that social safety net right through the 1960s. Even Richard Nixon expands the social safety net in many ways. That's American politics. That's what a party regime can do over a generation if it has a story to tell. Ronald Reagan becomes president in 1980, and he basically tells a very different story. He identifies government as the problem, not the solution.

And he talks about ways to scale back government, return more power to the states. And by the time Bill Clinton becomes president in 1992, he's talking about the era of big government being over. It's an overstatement. It isn't really over. Most of all of those social safety programs continue and some of them are expanded. But Bill Clinton basically is buying Ronald Reagan's story. And Ronald Reagan starts an era in American politics where we talk about issues a certain way. But that's 45 years ago, basically.

That's 40 plus years ago. And those stories don't last forever. So what's our story today? One of the things that happened in the 1990s was that the Democrats basically bought into this neoliberal idea of free trade, limited economic regulation, letting the market have more to do with the development of the economy, and especially in the area of trade, a lot of American jobs left. Now, did the economy overall prosper? Yes, but particular regions of the country suffered with the deindustrialization that occurred. Jobs left, they didn't come back.

And those parts of the country, a lot of them were left behind during this period of, during this neoliberal period. Both parties basically accepted this until Donald Trump comes along essentially and says, I don't believe in free trade. I think this is what this is hurting America. And so in 2016, I think we see the erosion of this neoliberal consensus, but there's not really a replacement for it. But basically, Trump has come back and he said, now, I believe in tariffs. I don't believe in free trade. I think tariffs can generate revenue for the government. He's saying things like people won't have to pay more.

The prices won't go up. The other countries will pay for it. it's an offer of a free lunch, which economists will tell you there is no such thing as a free lunch. But where are we going to go in American politics now? What's the story that somebody's going to tell? Trump's defeat of the Democrats, first defeating Hillary Clinton, then defeating Joe Biden, sets the Democrats back and creates an opportunity for him to tell a story about American politics, potentially to reframe American politics and to start a new era of partisan dominance and a new

era where we're dealing with politics according to the, if you will, the MAGA agenda. I don't think he'll do that. I'm saying it's a possibility. I think Trump doesn't think big enough to actually accomplish something like that. So now we come through this election and what can we expect to happen more generally in American politics? Tariffs are very likely. Could you just sort of underscore that? Like, I don't know people are hearing this term tariffs. I think people understand it's like, okay, you're basically regulating international trade. But could you just explain what a tariff is and how that will affect America?

You put a charge, you put a tariff on imports, particularly imports. America was a very heavily reliant on tariffs in the 19th century in the early 20th century. Actually, we've had tariffs going back to the beginning of the United States. The power to establish tariffs was there from the first. Originally, in the United States, tariffs were used to try and encourage American industry. Americans would buy products that were made primarily in England, in Great Britain. These were made inexpensively. They would be shipped to the United States, and American manufacturers originally couldn't compete with that.

So you put a tariff on to make the product thing you were bringing in from England cost more. By raising the cost, it became less expensive to make the same thing in the United States and to sell it in the United States. So eventually, American industries grew up, grew and became more efficient. Tariffs were still used as a way to raise revenues for the government. In the late 19th century, and this is what Trump likes to talk about when William McKinley was president of the United States and otherwise largely undistinguished presidency. We'll get to the ratings. He got Alaska, though, right? No, Seward's Folly was much earlier.

William Seward was Lincoln's Secretary of State, and Seward's Folly was the purchase of Alaska. Damn. But McKinley got Hawaii. That's what I meant. Okay, yeah. So that was good. We like that. Yeah.

Hell yeah. Yeah. Great vacation spot, right? It's beautiful. McKinley was thinking about our vacations long before we knew we were going to go there. I'm glad somebody's thinking about it. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, up until the 19th and the 19th, and the 19th.

the tariffs became more and more and more elaborate and complicated as domestic industries were trying to protect themselves against any kind of foreign competition. Tariff raises a price of an import. You make the same item in the United States. You're not as efficient, but you still can sell it for less, and you'll make a lot of money. We didn't begin to move away from that really seriously until Roosevelt was president and more than that, Franklin Roosevelt was president and then more so after World War II when we began to embrace, you know, a global agenda of lower tariffs and free trade. And we did that for our own economic advantage. The United States had an enormous industrial advantage at the end of World War II because we

were the only industrial economy that hadn't been devastated by the war. Our factories hadn't been bombed. You know, we hadn't been armies marching through and destroying things. So we have this great economic advantage after World War II. And for that reason, we think having free trade is great because our products will sell internationally. Other countries really can't compete, especially for the higher value items. Eventually, other countries reindustrialize and they catch up. And then our jobs begin to flee to other areas where things can be made for less organized labor in the United States starts to raise questions about free trade because they see jobs fleeing. But we continue our free trade approach up through basically the Clinton

presidency, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement and other agreements, right up until Trump's presidency when Trump begins to embrace tariffs. Specifically, he wants to target China in his first administration. But now he's talking more. more generally about using tariffs. And it's not clear exactly how he plans to use them. Is it a strategy that's designed to encourage domestic industry here in the United States? Are we going to try and bring back factories here? So we're going to pick areas where we want to raise the price of foreign imports so that Americans will make it?

Or is he going to use tariffs essentially as a club to achieve other foreign policy objectives? So he most recently said, I'm going to put tariffs on kids. Canada and Mexico. I'm going to do that if they can't stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States and the flow of fentanyl into the United States. And if they can't figure out how to do that, I'm going to put high tariffs on everything they make. That would be very damaging to their economies. And so it's a club that you can use potentially to achieve other foreign policy objectives. So I'm not sure if Trump has a clear concept of how he wants to use tariffs. Does he want to use it to basically promote American domestic industry or do you want to use it in general as a club and foreign policy to get other countries to do things on immigration and whatever that he wants to achieve?

Or both. I mean, is it possible it could be done simultaneously? Well, yes and no. If you're going to build American industry, you've got to keep the tariffs in place long enough for American industries to, to develop and revive and and compete effectively. But if you're using it as a negotiating tool, as soon as Canada or Mexico agree to what Trump wants, you've got to take the tariff down. I see. Interesting.

Now, as far as like an actual, just clear cut example of tariffs, because I'm always curious, like, okay, who fits the bill for this? So, like, if you were explaining this to, like, a high school freshman, like, what would be, like, a widget that's being produced in China that now has a tariff on it? and who would pay that tariff?

So let's suppose... Does the government pay it or does the person shipping it in pay it? Well, actually, ultimately it's going to be paid for by the consumer. So let's suppose electric car batteries. Let's suppose they're made in China. Because car parts can be made anywhere in the world. So you have car parts that are made abroad. And there's a tariff that has...

to be paid when that comes in of, let's say, 20%. So who's ever importing is going to have to pay that tariff or it's not going to clear customs. But now that I've sent something to, if I'm in China and I've sent a car battery to the United States, and I've had to pay that tariff, in order to get that money back, I've got to increase the price of my car battery in the United States by 20%, or more possibly. So I'm going to charge my American consumer who's a car manufacturer like General Motors who wants to put my batteries into their cars. I'm going to charge General Motors 20% more for this item. That means that when General Motors puts it in a car, they're going to have to charge, they're going to have to increase the cost of the battery in that car.

So to go back to my story about the pickup truck and the electronic vehicle, if I actually want to buy an electric car, the price will go up because I've had to, the cost of the inputs into manufacturing that car have gone up. Now, is it possible that the shipper or the car manufacturer in the United States that's receiving it could just eat the margin and they could just like, you know, make less money? Or is that outside of the realm of possibility? If we are in a market economy where companies are trying to make a profit, the answer is no, because they've got to pass costs along. A lot of the inflation we've had over the last couple of years occurs because people have been passing along the costs of whatever it is that they're producing. So housing costs keep going up because the inputs into housing have gone up substantially in recent years. That's, you know, inflation in general, the cost is going. gotten passed along, there's talk about price gouging and that sort of thing. I'm not sure

exactly how one defines price gouging. Right. Presumably, it's, what you're saying is that somebody's charging more money for something, even though it's not costing them anymore to produce. Right. But that's a very hard thing to actually document and to prove. So the answer is, to your question is, if there's a tariff and I'm using a lot of imported materials in, manufacturing something here in the United States, I'm going to pass that cost along to the consumer because that's the only way I'm going to be able to make money. Interesting. Is using a tariff as a political negotiation tool inherently bad?

Or is that been done before historically? Oh, it's been done before. Oh, it has? Yeah. Yeah, we have, I mean, both Trump in his first term and Biden, have used tariffs as ways to try to influence the behavior of China, for example. So it can be done. It's done more selectively on a limited scale.

Trump seemed to have during the campaign a vision that he could use tariffs as a way to raise significant revenues for the United States government. He even went so far as to say, if we have enough tariffs, we don't need to have income tax. Now, if you actually did, this was when Kamala Harris and the Democrats were saying that Donald Trump wants to raise your taxes by $4,000. Well, he wasn't actually proposing to directly raise their taxes by $4,000. But the argument was that if you put in a 20% tariff on the imports coming in from other countries, the cost to the average consumer would go up by $4,000 a year when you consider all the things that have, imports in them, both directly or they're made of things that are imported. So you, yes, so if you end up with $4,000 additional cost from the tariffs, you're not

actually, you're not paying the tax directly, but you are paying as $4,000 more to get the same things that you got before Trump became president. So we don't know whether or not Trump, how serious Trump is about using tariffs as a major source of revenue. But if you turn around and you promise that you're going to cut taxes, you want to keep the tax cuts that Trump passed during his first term, which added trillions to the national debt. And you want to keep those tax cuts. And then you want to add tax cuts. He promised various tax cuts. For example, he said we would no longer tax tips for people in food service industry so that they wouldn't have to pay tax on that. So if you keep

cutting taxes, eventually you're running up the deficit, you're running up the national debt. How far can you do that without grave economic consequences? If you have tariffs and you're raising a significant amount of money from tariffs, you potentially offset the loss of taxes from other sources. And then you don't necessarily raise the national debt by as much. but we are still paying that. Okay, you and I, if we're buying things that cost more, we're still going to end up paying that tariff.

Ultimately, it gets passed through to us. The interest is you either pay it on the tax side or you pay it in the cost of things you buy. Right. In the early 20th century, when Americans, when the United States had high tariffs before Franklin Roosevelt, we paid more. People paid more for goods. And a lot of, and the revenue flooded into the federal government and helped the, the federal government keep a balanced budget. Interesting.

Huh. When it's framed that way, I wonder how people feel if they think, oh, I can either automatically have this money taken from me by the IRS is how, you know, people might feel. This money is, you know, being seized. Or I can choose if this money goes away based off of, you know, the elasticity of demand of a certain product. That's right. And it almost gives more autonomy in a way.

I mean, assuming that there's, you know, elasticity. Yeah, if you can escape, there are maybe ways to escape paying the tariffs. Right. But it can have all sorts of effects on consumer behavior that nobody's really thought about, depending on what the tariffs are. And there's also, if Trump wants to also use this as a foreign policy club to essentially demand foreign, other countries change their behavior like stop immigrants from coming in over the border. If Trump wants to use it as a club, there's a great deal of uncertainty about. about how long such a tariff would be in effect. So then a manufacturer who might think of,

all right, I'll produce this in the United States, but I've got to be sure that it's not going to ever again be made for less money in Mexico. Am I prepared to take that risk, not knowing how long Trump plans to have that tariff in place? That's a question that's hard to answer in the abstract. That's an interesting point. Okay. I want to ask you about Project 2020, 2025, a couple of things.

Taking it out of the glove compartment. Yeah, exactly. Taking it out of the glove compartment. Trump seems that after saying to it, pay no attention to it in my glove compartment, but now potentially, yeah, I'm going to follow it. Yeah, I'm curious. People are so concerned about it, and I think there's a lot of things that people don't completely understand as far as where it comes from, how it'll be enacted, if all

or parts of it will actually get pushed through. And a bunch of other things about, you know, Trump's incoming administration, as well as, of course, ranking all the presidents. We still have to do that. But before we do that, just a quick word from our sponsor that make this show possible. Thank you guys so much for everyone that's watching. If you have questions for Dr. Polsky and anything you would like answered, by all means, please drop those in the comments. I will be checking them out during the break, and we will come back with a question from one of y'all.

Thank you so much. We'll be back in a sec. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick, because if you're anything like me, you're probably running late all the time. I am. I'm always leaving right when I'm supposed to be somewhere, and I never have time to sit down and grab. a nutritious meal. And that's why I want to talk to you about this little product right here called Hewle. Hewle is absolutely amazing. It's got everything you need, all the essential vitamins and minerals,

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Be on time, all right? Set an alarm. Let's get back to the show. And we are back. Thank you so much for the sponsors and make this show possible. We are here with Andy Polsky, political scientist. There's a question that came in. We can touch on this now, or we can go on what we were talking about during the break and circle back to this.

This comes from Jacob Kolb. He asks, does Dr. Polsky have a view on what will happen with mass deportations? I am a DACA recipient, and I'm worried about getting rounded up in January and deported. I'm 28, and I've been in America since 2000. So do you want to go on that first? or do you want to talk about that's a very important question and highly important in new york um in particular donald trump seems to care a lot about certain things immigration is one of them um just as he cares a lot about tariffs there are certain things he cares about that's scary if you're

an immigrant because this is not this is not a passing thing that you know don't Donald trump throws out an idea you know i don't is Donald trump serious about eliminating the income tax for the tariff? No, I don't think so. But is he serious about deportation? I think he's very serious about that. And I think Stephen Miller in his administration has made it clear that Trump is serious about it. And Miller is, nobody's fool. He's highly intelligent, persistent, and generally effective political actor. So I think mass deportation is, some form of significant deportation is likely to happen. Now, it could be primarily symbolic. It could be that, you know, there will be some camps formed and that they will find some, find people who clear, you know,

who don't have papers. But it's also remarkably inflammatory. It will provoke resistance. Again, I'm not sure that I don't think Trump cares particularly about that, but it will provoke resistance. And what we saw in his first administration was that the scenes, the videos of children separated from their parents, were very provocative and turned people against the harshness of Trump's immigration policy. When you form camps and there will be videos and the conditions will be poor, if you do any of that sort of thing, you're going to have, the media is going to turn against you, public opinion is going to turn against you quickly. It's one thing to say in the abstract, I don't think undocumented people should be allowed in the United States. It's another thing to

see people rounded up and put in camps and held there or deported without due process to involve them, you know, essentially concentration camps being formed with barbed wire enclosures and that sort of thing and poor conditions. All of those things tend to be really, really inflammatory. You do this, it blows up before the next congressional election. And the next thing you know, the Democrats are in control of Congress and fighting the policy and launching investigations. So while I think Trump is serious about it, I think that the political blowback from early steps could very easily turn people against the administration as it did in the past and make

it difficult, if not impossible, for Trump to follow through on those pledges. And I think that in general, public opinion could easily turn against him. One of the great mistakes made by Joe Biden was not to understand what immigration meant, what the borders mean to people in the United States. The question of immigrants and the question of borders are not the same. Immigrants are in the United States. they are performing very valuable services here. They're filling jobs that need to be filled and no one else wants to fill. Taking them out will cause economic dislocation, hardship. It will look bad. It will become visible. The issue of borders is different. And what Biden didn't appreciate is that what borders symbolize is a lack of control. If you don't control your borders, it seems as in general there's a loss of control over the country. And having caravans, and having people come over the borders in large numbers,

and then having the people who came over shipped to northern cities, et cetera, all of that demonstrated to many Americans a lack of respect for the integrity, territorial integrity of the United States and what it means to be an American. And I think that was what really hurt the Biden administration on immigration. It realized that eventually and clamped down. but probably at least a year, maybe two years too late, because it could have allowed that immigration issue to become a major issue in this campaign, which it need not have become. And I frankly think it made immigrants who are here, including the person who asked your question, vulnerable in a way that they need not have been vulnerable if you had actually had a better border policy and a more effective border policy from the outset. Interesting.

Yeah. It's a difficult thing to square, I think, because conceptually you could say, like, oh, should, you know, illegal immigrants that have committed violent crimes be deported? And people say, yeah, that seems like a pretty nonpartisan issue. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. I think most people are kind of on board with that. But then as far as, like, taking into practice, you know, mass deportations of people that have been here for a couple years, maybe getting put into some type of, you know, center or, you know, like a processing facility. will be difficult to watch. I think, you know, in the event that that happens, I think people will have some type of aversion to that because it's difficult to see. Even if people are here illegally and they've committed a crime, so to speak, coming into America, seeing, you know, children or, you know, women in a facility getting processed, I think it would be difficult. Well, many of the DACA people, we have many DACA students in CUNY and at Hunter College. they were brought here as infants and young children by their parents. They've never known any other country.

They have no other country that's their homeland. They're making their way through the educational system. They're getting college degrees. They're going to be productive tax-paying citizens eventually, if we let them. But they're certainly going to be tax-paying members of the community. America benefits from these people. benefits from having all of the contributions of immigrants. Let's take for a moment, Social Security and Medicare, these huge entitlement programs,

they are going to become unsustainable in the not that distant future because the number of working Americans is not keeping up with the number of people who are receiving the benefits. Most of us now, my generation, I'm soon to start collecting Social Security. Sorry about that. And let me take this opportunity to thank you for paying Social Security taxes that will assure my Social Security payments on into the future. But most of us far outlive now the amount of money that we paid into the system over the course of our lives. That's generally the trend. And so it's a transfer program like other transfer programs.

It's an intergenerational transfer program of wealth from those who are working to older people who have stopped working. And I think that's a civilized society ought to do that. But you've got to pay for it. And there's not enough money coming into the Social Security Trust Fund to continue indefinitely paying these benefits. And one of the things that immigrants do is they come in and they work and they help to pay for our benefits. It's not that alone won't keep the system solvent indefinitely, but it helps, you know, along the way. So if you take out the immigrants from the equation, we're going to have an even harder time covering the cost of Social Security and Medicare long term. We're going to have to figure out some other way to do that, which could take the form of raising the tax rate on all the rest of the working population who remain here.

and then you'll have a tax increase to pay for the Social Security benefits that your grandparents are receiving. All right, but what's going to happen 40 years down the road when you're the one or 50 years down the road when you're receiving Social Security benefits and there aren't going to be enough people paying into the system if we don't figure out some kind of a solution? So what would be a sensible solution either historically speaking or just in your opinion when kind of, you know, considering these two edges, right? violent criminals coming into America committing crime or bringing drugs is not good. I think everyone agrees on that. Those people should be arrested, deported, whatever that may be. But then on the other hand, part of the reason why America is so amazing is that we have

the craziest people around the world that are willing to dare to come into America, immigrants that come here, looking to make a better life, looking to buck the system. I mean, I think about my parents immigrated here, and they were in Canada and they were like, we don't like it here. We don't like the government. We don't like the policies. Let's go to a place where we can go be free and go do something. And here we are. I mean, even people, you know, like Elon Musk, who, you know, immigrate to America and, you know, forms massive companies and creates SpaceX and, you know, electric vehicles, you know, regardless of, you know, what people may or may not think about his political affiliation, certainly an impressive human being in terms of a

businessman. And I'm glad that he saw America as a fit place to pursue that dream. So, you know, ostensibly, we like immigrants coming here that are bringing great ideas. So how do we create a sensible border policy to bring in the hardest working, you know, most daring, most creative and clever and, you know, sort of mitigating the violent and, you know, criminal? We may see the revival of the bipartisan immigration bill that was moving through Congress earlier this year that Donald Trump basically said to the Republicans in Congress, I don't want to see this bill passed and they listened because the bipartisan bill was a fairly good solution to the problem of border control. It may come back again in some form similar to what we saw.

The problem for the Democrats was it was too late. They let it get too close to the election. It's not uncommon for parties, candidates as the election approaches to think about what they need to do to win. and if that means blocking some useful public policy initiative, so be it. And I'll just say that Donald Trump isn't – there have been other cases in history where presidents, after they were elected, refused to cooperate with their predecessor, even though there was a grave crisis facing the country. Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, and back then the inauguration of the president

didn't happen until March. So there was a fairly long period of time. and Herbert Hoover wanted Roosevelt to cooperate with him, and Roosevelt wanted no part of it. Even Abraham Lincoln in 1860, he wins the election, basically stays out of Washington and has no direct connection to the efforts to stop secession by southern states in the period between his election and inauguration.

So we have a long history year of people, basically acting politically in their own self-interest in ways that might not be in the best interest of the country. What was in that bipartisan bill? Like, what was the... Well, it was going to act, for example, to provide much quicker decisions on asylum hearings as a way of making sure that people weren't given either no date or a distant date to report for an asylum hearing, by which time they would have basically disappeared.

So one thing is you want, and is one of the reasons why the Border Patrol people all were involved in, you know, supporting this. You want to control your border, so you want to make sure that if people come to the border, you make a decision right away on whether they can come into the country or not. That was a key piece of it. So there are, I think the Trump administration might go back to something like this, but I do think that because of all the fuss they've made about deportations and mass deportations, they are going to take some steps in that direction until it becomes too politically inflammatory. And were there major changes in Trump's first term as far as mass deportation and things like that? Like people always point to sort of like the kids and cages at the border and things, which has happened in other administrations.

Yeah, it was they basically, they did the family separation. They separated children from their parents. It was very, that was very harsh. And they did curb the number of people coming over the border, which the Democratic. then relax those policies when they came in. And as I say, I regard that as one of the unforced errors of the Biden administration because I don't think there was any compelling political demand that they do that. And I think they failed to recognize the consequences, the negative publicity that would come out of that.

If you look at the reasons people gave for why they voted for Donald Trump, in the most recent, immigration did rank fairly high on that. The biggest thing that stands out about the polls on the election is that most people were dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Something like 70% of the people thought the country was headed in the wrong direction. It's really hard to win re-election when 70% of the people think the country is going in the wrong direction. Yeah.

Yeah. And I do also think the Harris campaign probably spent too much time focusing on, you know, very specific granular social issues and not looking at the economy holistically. And then also not distancing herself from, I guess, Biden's policies. I don't know what she could have done. You have 100 days to create a campaign. And you've been vice president for four years. Look, Joe Biden should not have run for reelection. Joe Biden should have decided long before 2024 that he wasn't going to run for reelection that people around Joe Biden who were shielding him were not doing him or the country any favors by shielding him from

essentially public scrutiny. He won, he did the country a service in his own view and the view of Democrats and many others. And I share this view. He did country as service by running in 2020 and defeating Donald Trump. And he should have made it clear early on that he didn't plan to run for re-election and given the Democrats a chance to decide who they wanted to have run. it still would have been potentially an uphill climb for any Democrat under the circumstances, but to try and do it in three months, it would be almost impossible for Harris to separate

herself from Joe Biden. Vice presidents can't really do that. Here's a case where one case I can think of where a vice president did a fairly good job separating himself. It goes back a long time. Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He was Lyndon Johnson's vice president. Johnson stepped out of that campaign, again, very late like Joe Biden, a little bit earlier, basically end of March of 1968.

And Humphrey jumps in. Robert Kennedy, Sr. is running. Humphrey is running. Eugene McCarthy is running for president. Humphrey gets the nomination, even though he doesn't run in any of the primaries because he gets in too late. And he gets the nomination because the rules are different then, and the Democrats nominate him. But Humphrey separates himself from Lyndon Johnson immediately on the Vietnam War. And he says, I'm going to end the war.

I'm going to withdraw from Vietnam. He made it a very close election that year. So it is possible to separate yourself if you act boldly. But it's not clear to me that Harris wanted to separate herself in any clear policy terms from Biden. I think she was supportive of Biden's policies in general. general. What did she then do to separate herself? Well, she finally woke up to the fact that young people can't buy houses. Housing is too expensive. And I'm sure your audience, many living in New York, understands if you're a young person in New York, you have almost no chance of being able to buy a house or being able to buy an apartment if your income doesn't support that. And this is true across the country more generally, housing has become prohibitively expensive.

In these days, young people, if their parents have money, they can buy a house thanks to their parents. But if their parents don't have money, it's really tough to buy a house. So she comes up with a suggestion, you know, a proposal to provide new first-time homebuyers with $25,000. It's not a good policy, but it's at least a reaction to the fact that young people can't afford. down payments and can't afford houses. Yeah, I'd barely heard about that. I feel like from listening to her campaign, that was, you know, the eighth most important issue she talked about.

Too little, too late. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like there was just so much focus on these social issues that, you know, perhaps are important, but I think affects such a disorderly small subset of the population that, you know, the average voter just goes like, I don't know. You know, like this specific niche issue that affects this very specific group just doesn't affect me. And so I just don't know if it compelled me.

many people. This is part of, I think, the Democrats not having a clear story about where they want to take American politics at this point. They have policies that hit benefit particular interests that the party wants to appeal to. So Joe Biden tries to approve the student loan forgiveness. So people who have student loans won't be burdened by those student loans. Or Kamala Harris comes up with an idea, $25,000 to buy, for people to buy a house for the first time. Policies are not stories. Policies are not visions. So if you have to have a story, a narrative about where you want to take the United States

as a nation that's compelling. And the Democrats have some of that, but it only doesn't reach. their audiences it's not reaching. Yeah, Trump told a story. We're going to make America great again. Whatever that means, you're like, right, that sounds. I think it's easier for people to jump on to that messaging, just in terms of, I guess, painting a picture. Compared to a very specific detailed policy.

You know, I think there was, there was, I don't want to be too hard on Kamala Harris because she was dealt a bad hand later. It was a death mission. I mean, it was hard. say that the notion that you should emphasize joy in your campaign doesn't work when 70% of the people think the country's going in the wrong direction. Right. I mean, that's just, that's kind of, that's tone deaf. Any more than saying to people, inflation's come down. It's now only 2% when every time you go into the grocery store, prices are still much higher than they were four years ago. Right. That's a, you're in a tough position. But I also would suggest you're in a

tough position because you're not telling a bigger story about the way, the country and about where you wanted to go. There are some pieces to that story, but there's not a compelling narrative there. How do you think that influenced young male voters in the United States? Because it seems like the voting, you know, the polling, but also the way that the actual votes were dispersed. This election were very different than what we had seen in the past. It's very striking.

It was a dramatic defection of young male voters from the Democratic Party. It was a swing of something like 19%. Yeah, significant. Across, you know, ethnic lines, religious lines, just across the board. So I'm curious, what do you chalk that up to? I mean, I think it's probably we're flirting around the idea now, but I'm curious if you want to expound on it. Well, first, I think we're going to be digging into the data for a while to understand it better. One thing to think about for an election, you have more than 150 million people voting in the United States.

And everyone has a different reason or set of reasons for their votes. So we're going to try and come up with some generalities and we're going to miss a lot. I think one of the things that's really important for the Democrats now is to go out and listen to voters, who they haven't necessarily listened to before. And don't tell the voter, when the voter tells you X, this is what I'm looking at, don't come back and say, but what about why? You know, we did this. you've got to listen to really hear what people are saying. So, you know, a couple of things about young male voters. It could be that they found Kamala Harris as a successful woman less relatable

because she's a woman because she's a woman of color and there's some piece of that there. There's one of the arguments that I've seen about this is that there's a cultural phenomenon going on where young women in general are getting more education. They're more likely to go to college. They're more likely to graduate. Their career prospects are better. And in a traditional way, they are looking for spouses for life partners who are at least as successful, if not more successful, than they are. But young men aren't tracking that way. They aren't going to college.

They aren't finding stable careers. They aren't finding jobs that are as lucrative as the women are finding. And so at the same rate. At the same rate. So some of them are disaffected from by that and feeling marginalized in this society as a result. That may be one piece of it. Second piece of it is that let's call it the Joe Rogan phenomenon, the famous podcast that he did with Donald. Trump that Kamala Harris didn't do.

Yeah, she should have done the podcast. I don't know why she didn't. Well, I think one phenomenon, every election cycle now, the way people are getting their information is changing. If one of the poll results show that people who got their news, information from mainstream media, from cable television, voted significant. particularly in favor of Harris. People who get very little information or people who get their information strictly from social media lean toward Trump. So the Harris campaign didn't fully,

clearly did not fully appreciate this, didn't develop a media strategy that was appropriate for the way people are getting information now and probably missed the, and missed some opportunities. Partly this is due to the lack of time. But, if you don't understand what Joe Rogan is and what podcasts like our conversation today are all about, you're going to miss audiences that you need to reach if you hope to communicate with them effectively. Absolutely. So that hasn't happened. So you've got a cultural shift that's working to the disadvantage of young men. You have media that the outlets that Trump under understands better.

I always say some things in praise of Donald Trump. Okay, this may mean... Yeah, out of character for you. Well, my friends and people in my circles may not, you know, like this. But Donald Trump has a great pulse, great feel for the pulse of American popular culture because of his place in American popular culture. And he may think too highly of the people he watches on Fox News. et cetera, you know, puts them in positions for which they're not qualified. But he feels,

he gets some things that I think conventional politicians don't get. You spend too much time in Washington talking to people who are policy experts and in those circles of people, you know, who have the right ideas and think the right way. You're not in touch with a good part of America. Right. You become echo chambered. Yeah. Yes. And Donald Trump may have his own echo chamber, but he connects to people, to a different set of people and connects in different ways, I think. And so he's got to feel for politics that many politicians don't have. And that serves him well. It's also why I don't think he would hesitate to retreat from unpopular policies that he doesn't think are going to serve him. Because I will also say, I don't think Donald Trump has

any core beliefs or principles or values whatsoever. I think he's a complete narcissist. I accept that view. I think Donald Trump is only thinking about how to make himself successful now as president of the United States, popular and successful, and get his way and do what he wants to do. He's not interested in the long-term future of the United States. He's not worried about the future of Social Security or Medicare. He's not worried about the national debt and how much it grows. I don't think those things matter to him at all. But as a somebody who has a strong sense of what is immediately beneficial, I think he has a keen sense of politics. And I think he recognizes that some of what the Democrats embraced in terms of their sort of inclusive culture, the DEI movement, et cetera, those things don't resonate well with a lot of Americans who feel affirmative action in college admissions, affirmative action that favored people of color worked very well for certain groups.

but other people who don't feel they have any advantages, working class, non-college-educated white people don't see any of these policies working for them, especially white males don't feel these policies working for them. They're attracted to, you know, Trump's basically thumbing his nose or raising his middle finger at those people and at those policies. There's a certain element of the MAGA movement of Trump, which is basically

people who are losing in the movements of American society, there's people who are falling by the wayside in this system, who aren't getting the education, who aren't getting the income in a society that increasingly rewards people who have higher education, the losers in this exchange. What can they do besides cheer for somebody who raises his middle finger? at those who are succeeding in the United States. Yeah. No, I get the feeling, you know, I understand, like,

having grown up in Florida, I grew up with a lot of folks that have that kind of sensibility where they say, like, oh, I'm getting denied this opportunity, or I'm not getting this kind of university scholarship, or I'm not even getting acceptance into the U.S. university because of my skin color. And I understand why sort of the affirmative action policies were put in place, but I just wonder if there is a more effective way, if it was done based off of an income level or a class. level if that would be more equitable and trying to make these policies based off of you know skin color

ethnicity it seems uh you know sort of inherently uh i don't know preclusionary to people that you could use the help like you had mentioned like you know someone that grows up in you know some area that's not uh doesn't have a ton of economic mobility they don't necessarily have access to uh colleges in the same way and they're you know poor and struggling and happen to be white i don't know if they should be, I don't know, I guess not given the same opportunity. It doesn't seem fair. I think there are now Democrats who have won elections in regions of the country where people, most people don't go to college. They've shown that the Democrats, there are ways the Democrats can do that. And I think the Democrats will turn in that direction in the next cycle of elections. They will try to do that.

the question for them will be how do you how do you add numbers to our voting totals how do you get people to vote democratic without alienating the people who already were voting democratic and that's a challenge that democrats i think are going to have to wrestle with interesting this is a question from uh uh no what is this steviagi i'm not sure i think they donated also so thank you to them um question what will trump do in regard to you? regards to Europe and specifically the European leader countries like Germany, France, and NATO as well. So how does he interact with these European leader countries? Well, so first thing is Trump is going to force the Ukrainians into what effectively will be a

humiliating settlement. I think he has little interest in Ukraine. He's shown that before. He respects Putin. And I think he will, he wants that. war to end, and he will end it on terms that Putin favors. I think that's coming down the road. He's already said in the past that he thinks essentially he thinks of NATO as an exchange in which the United States needs to get more or there's no reason for us to participate. He's not a globalist at all. He doesn't think in terms of the overall world position of the United States and the great advantages we've realized from NATO and our leadership of the industrialized democracies around the world.

I think he thinks much more in terms of quid pro quoes and exchanges. So basically the question I think is, what's in it for us? That's what Donald Trump is going to ask. What are we getting out of it? He made a big deal the last time around about how NATO countries weren't putting in as much of their gross national product into defense. defense as the United States and, you know, allegedly even claim to have told international leaders he wasn't prepared necessarily to honor the NATO agreement that requires all countries

step in if one of them is attacked. I think that was bluster. I think what he wants is the other countries to step up. And he will think in terms of these quid pro quos, what's in it for us? what do we get out of it in a very much more transactional way than American leaders have in the past? Is that bad? Because there's probably people listening to this being like, oh, yeah, what is in it for us? Finally.

Is it bad? I think it's a little bit, it's short-sighted. I don't think he recognizes the advantages America gains from its world leadership. I think he's, one vulnerability here is that other countries can take the same stance towards us. And that is what do we get? You want something from us. What are we getting out of this? And sometimes we may discover that we need more from them than they need from us.

Hmm. Interesting. Okay. I think we, I want to talk about ranking presidents. Yeah, sure. I want to go through. We can start with some of the ones that we're talking about, or we can even just go from some of the ones that you like the most.

But before we do that, I just want to take a quick break and just hear from another one of our sponsors and make the show possible. Again, thank you so much for everybody that's listening. We're here with Andy Polsky, political scientist. And if you guys have any questions for him, while we're going through this, we might be able to branch off on a couple other questions

while we are going through and wrapping up. So please, if you have any questions, comment them during the break and we'll be back in just a moment. Thank you very much. Seeing a sec. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick

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Check it out. Blue-choo. Let's get back to the show. Amazing. And we're back. Thank you guys so much. much. Appreciate y'all. And yeah, I think this conversation is really fun. A lot of people are enjoying it. It's interesting. There's some people that are that are somewhat annoyed by hearing

a perhaps, you could say left, a liberal perspective, a university perspective, which is interesting. But I just want to make the point that I'm interested in hearing a plurality of views. I think it's important for this show specifically to entertain, yeah, to entertain political ideas from, I guess, many sides. I think that by evaluating all the potential political perspectives, you know, people are able to kind of ascertain what they actually believe. And by staying within one specific channel or one specific political purview, I think people do a disservice to themselves when it comes to actually understanding the scope of American politics. It's interesting to hear you say this because, in fact, Americans overwhelmed. choose now media that gives them information that reinforces what they already believe. People do not look for disconfirming information.

People don't like it. They don't want to be unsettled. They don't want to be confused. They don't want to have doubts or questions. So there's a lot of evidence that people aren't mixing with people who have different views. Families tend to are breaking up about this. Yeah. People when they date are apparently choosing based on political sympathies, you know, among other things. So there's a lot of resistance to seeing things from another point of view. It feels like a shame to me. I don't know. Again, I think that in the scope of American politics, we need conservatism, but we also need liberalism. And I think that the two of them need to work together and that they need to talk to each other to create policy that is common sense for both sides that fit within this.

greater kind of overton window. And yeah, I think that's the function of this show and sort of my personal desire is talking to people that have, you know, political ideas similar to mine, but also different than mine and challenging what I believe and also reinforcing what I believe. And from a business decision, probably a bad idea. People are going to be pissed. But next week, I'll probably have, you know, some conservative political scientist on that'll have very different views than you. And people might like that. And then there'll be a lot of people that hate that also. So no one will be happy. It's kind of like American elections, you know, half the people will be pissed no matter what happens. And that's okay. Maybe I should just pick a side and just go all in

and just blindly just follow that to the end. No, I think we really have enough of that going on. You might be right. Okay, let's look at some of these presidents, all right. So while we're going through our presidential tier list, I don't know if you, again, just to get the audience up to speed here, we have S tier at the top. That is the best. That is, I mean, the, you these guys might be 10 out of 10. The superstars. The superstar. Some of the best presents we ever had.

And then A would be just below that. Still excellent, you know, but not S tier. And then following down the list. N.A., I don't really know what. It would just mean you wouldn't qualify. Maybe like the one dude that was only president for like two months. Maybe I forget his name. He got like pneumonia at his speech or something.

Yeah, William Henry Harrison. William Henry Harrison. Maybe he would be an N. Also, we only have the pictures of the presence here. So I really hope you remember who these people are based off their faces because I'm not going to be able to. Maybe we'll do some Googling. Okay, where do you want to start? Do you want to start? We start with George.

George W., George Washington. All right, George W., George Washington, let's go. What do you think of him? Where would he go? I'm going to put him at the top as a superstar. That's S-tier. Yeah, S-tier. And for what reason? He could have turned the position essentially into royalty, into a kingship.

He didn't. He stepped away. He not only stepped away, but he also, he respected the boundaries and he respected the boundaries of the presidency, he helped to establish the boundaries. He also, let's remember, there wasn't really a country when he became president. Under the Articles of Confederation, you had 13 separate states that effectively were 13 separate nations. They sent representatives to Congress who were effectively more like ambassadors to a foreign court than they were actually representatives to a government. they communicated with their state governments in codes so their messages couldn't be read.

Out of that, that constitutional convention had to form a government, a limited government, and Washington had to bring that to life. But he also had to become the country in some ways. He had his record during the Revolutionary War to help him. But he traveled widely around the country, allowing people to see him and identify him a war hero. their hero as the embodiment of the new constitution. It was by no means a sure thing that the country would survive, and he was instrumental in the beginning in doing that.

He also, by the way, gave a significant pardon to the rebels of the whiskey rebellion. So that was going back to our pardon issue. Yeah, interesting. So I think he asked whatever his flaws is a human being, and I'm not minimizing the fact that it's a slave owner, You know, he did some awful things, but I still think he deserves to be at the top. There we go. All right.

John Adams is number two. We'll give him a B, I think, you know, at best. He was pompous. He was full of himself. David McCullough has tried to revive Adams' reputation. So I'm going to say he's a B because he, he's. He allows for a certain amount of continuity, generally reasonable policies.

Okay. All right, that's B, it's solid. And then I'm literally pulling up a list here because I'm so bad with U.S. presence. Thomas Jefferson is next. Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to do them all, but I'm talking about it.

We'll go close. If there's any of you don't even know about it, we'll punt on this. Thomas Jefferson. So I'm going to, Thomas Jefferson, I'm going to give an A to. Okay. C is the first peaceful transition of power

in the United States where party control shifts. Jefferson brings a new coalition into office. The Louisiana Purchase is a good move. That was awesome. You know, adding to the territory of the United States, expanding the territory of the United States. That was a crazy deal, Louisiana Purchase. But, and in general, maintaining communication with the opposition as well,

not vilifying the opposition. It's during his administration that the international slave trade, the United States disallows the importation of additional slaves. That's a modestly positive step that was allowed under the Constitution. There were many things he bungled, including relations with Great Britain. Really tough time to be president of the United States for both Adams and Jefferson, the Napoleonic wars are underway, and they're global in scope, and the British Navy is relentless in its attempts to control the trade across the world and essentially limit who the United States can trade

with. So under difficult circumstances, I think Jefferson will rate fairly highly. Okay, okay. Madison, James Madison is next. Not so good. James Madison's great contributions to the United States come in the drafting of the Constitution not in his time in the White House. There's some territorial gain

that occurs then but there's not a lot to be said from Madison so we can put Madison down as a C, if you will. Okay, Madison's going C. Wow. I'm kind of surprised about it. I feel like I hear the name Madison.

You do, but not so much for being president. That's my point. Okay, James Monroe. James Monroe is an old fogey by the time he becomes president. He is president during the controversy over the Missouri compromise. There isn't a great, I mean, the Monroe doctrine that he declares that the United States won't allow other country, European nations to interfere in the Americas. It's a strong statement of the independence of the Western Hemisphere. But I can't think off, you know, off the top of him head, not a great.

deal, you know, to say about Monroe as a president. So, well, let's put him down as a C also. I guess I'm going to be a tough grader. Yeah, no, that's good. That's good. No, no free passes here. Okay. What about John Quincy? John Quincy Adams is an unusually decent human being is the first non-Virginia politician to be president of the United. Well, no, John Adams was also, but John Quincy Adams breaks the Virginia a stranglehold on the White House that had gone on for 24 years. But he comes into the White House under curious terms where he essentially made it. Generally, it's generally thought he made a deal to become president with John Calhoun of

South Carolina where Calhoun would have, he made Calhoun the vice president, I'm sorry, Secretary of State because that was the stepping stone into the White House up until that point. But Adams didn't have as many electoral votes as Andrew Jackson. So people felt that Adams becoming president, John Quincy Adams becoming president, was stealing from the will of the American people by making him president instead of Andrew Jackson. He did some, there isn't a great deal he did in the White House that comes to mind. He was very fair in his approach to Native Americans, something that Andrew Jackson quickly reverses, basically. But for example, John Quincy Adams was adamant that. that in the Alabama territory, the lands that had been promised to the Native Americans should,

in fact, be given to the Native Americans should keep that land. When Jackson becomes president, he supports the move by whites coming into Alabama to push Native Americans out, and then he engages in other horrible policies towards Native Americans. John Quincy Adams did not only that, but John Quincy Adams later on becomes a fairly forceful advocate, abolitionist advocate against slavery. So it's a little, you know, again, with some of these guys, you're weighing what their whole lives are rather than just what their presidency are. So I'm going to give John Quincy Adams a B. I'm going to... Oh. Okay. Okay. I mean, yeah, he seems like a pretty nice guy. You know what I mean?

Okay. Trying to help the natives. Then we have Andrew Jackson. And Andrew Jackson is a very controversial figure as a president. This is a wild guy. Yeah. He has a wild career. His approach to Native Americans is abominable. This is a trail of tears. Trail of tears, among other things.

So that's, you know, he's really awful where that's concerned. On the other hand, you know, he opens up the White House. He makes it a much more popular office. He becomes, he's part of a transition to the popularization of American democracy. So many more people vote by the middle of the 1820s. The franchise is expanding. He is a symbol of that. He fights the First Bank of the United States, which was a dominant, you know, that.

In some ways, he's fighting the establishment. It goes a little far to say he's the Donald Trump of his era, but there are some parallels. Doesn't Trump have a fondness? I don't want to put that there if it's not there. But I think he had made a mention that he liked Andrew. Jackson's sort of rebellion against the establishment. Yeah, I think that's true. So Jackson does rebel against the establishment.

He fights the Second Bank of the United States, which was a very much corrupt elite organization at the time. He also insists on the authority of the national government to enforce its laws. This is a time when South Carolina tries to nullify federal laws within South Carolina. Tariff, in fact. South Carolina did not want to collect tariffs because it felt that the tariffs were damaging the economy of South Carolina.

The southern economy depended very heavily on exports. If you rely on exports, tariffs are dangerous because tariffs other countries retaliate with their tariffs. So South Carolina feared the economic impact of tariffs. They wanted to nullify the tariff claiming it was unconstitutional, that the tariff could only be used in a limited way to secure revenues, it couldn't be used to promote industry, which was what they thought was being done by other political actors, like Henry Clay, for example.

So Jackson insists that the law be enforced. He passes a force bill, pushes a force bill through Congress that would have allowed him to send troops to South Carolina. And to collect the tariffs in South Carolina and essentially would have precipitated an early civil war of the United States government against just South Carolina because South Carolina was out there by itself. But even after he passed that bill, he then negotiated a reduction in the tariff rates, which gave South Carolina a way to save face and not have to push for nullification. That seems good. Yeah. And he hated John Calhoun, which I respect. Because Calhoun is one of the more venal figures

who come across in American politics. And he later said he wished he had hanged Calhoun during this controversy. So we're going to put, I'm going to give Jackson a controversial A grade here. Wow. I'm shocked. Not top, but a controversial A grade.

I'm shocked. That's how much you hate Calhoun. Wow. And he also is the craziest assassination story. that they attempted to assassinate him. Yeah. And this guy for his name, but his gun jammed. So then he had a second gun, pulled out a second gun, that one jammed.

And then basically, Andrew Jackson was like, let go of me so I can beat the shed of this guy with my cane. And he goes and canes the guy. I mean, he's an insane human being. Yeah, I mean, Jackson's a slave holder. But then again, most of the early American presidents are slave owners. Many of them were Southerners. So then after Jackson, we come to Martin Van Buren. and Martin Van Buren had basically helped Jackson win the presidency.

He had built the new Democratic Party. Parties had collapsed during the War of 1812. The federalists had basically disintegrated, leaving only the Jeffersonian Republican Party in existence. But you can't keep a party together if there's no opposition. So the Republicans factionalized and fell apart. Van Buren builds a new party. It's also very strong in the South, but it's a national political party.

So as a party builder, he struggles with a really bad economy because Jackson's banking policies turned out to be economic disasters in many cases. He eliminated the Second Bank of the United States. He didn't have anything sensible to replace it. So Van Buren, I'm going to give Van Buren a B here mostly because he's a successful party builder. He creates the Democratic Party, which is the dominant political party in the United States. By the time Van Buren leaves office, a Whig Party has been created as the opposition. One of the unfortunate things that Democratic Party did at the time was it required that you have to have two-thirds of the delegates at a nominating convention had to vote to nominate the presidential candidate. not a majority, but two-thirds had to vote to nominate a presidential candidate, which made it very hard to get nominated and meant you often had conventions that had multiple ballots before you picked somebody.

But what it really did was it gave the South an effective veto over any nominee for the Democratic Party in the period up to the Civil War. And I can see how that's creating some, probably some tension and forcing and giving the South a ton of power. Yeah, exactly. And the South already had plenty of power. So William Henry Harrison. That's his next. Who the heck is this guy? He, so the Whig Party basically runs these war heroes who have no political positions for office because the Whig Party has a really hard time agreeing on much of any kind of program. It's mostly agreed that it's anti-Jackson, but it doesn't have a strong party, you know, a party.

So William Henry Harrison is an old man by the time he becomes president. He was a war hero from the days of the war of 1812 and even before that. And he dies in office quickly. So we don't have much to say about Harrison. That's an N.A. That's an N.A. All right. Sorry, William.

All right, John Tyler. That's who's next. An odd case because, you know, Tyler is, the ticket balancing puts Tyler, you know, into office. he's essentially kind of a, he's a former Democrat. There's not too much to be said about him. This is a period of time when the main, some of the, there are still questions about the expansion of the United States, but some of the issues that the Whigs had been pushing for,

he's not a real interested in Whig policies. So they don't do much while Tyler's president. So we're going to give him, I'm going to give him a D. A D. Yeah, we've got to fill that, we'll fill that box. Oh, Chris says, yeah, yeah, he's a D, and then William Henry Harrison, the guy before, you can put him in a. Sorry, William. I mean, these poor guys.

I mean, you were crushing these dudes. I can't wait until we get another S. Polk. Yeah, we can go through it. There's a couple. We got Polk, Zachary Taylor. James K. Polk is a fascinating figure. We're going to give James K. Polk.

I go between a B and an A. Okay. I'm going to give him an A. Wow. No, I'm going to give him B. Oh, wow. You had me. You had me there for a second.

So Polk is one of the most important presidents in American history. Why is that? First, this is a period of time when there's major territorial acquisition. The annexation of Texas. So remember the Alamo? Texas gets its independence in the 1830. it's struggling as independent republic. There are pressures to annex Texas.

But there's also resistance to the annexation. Northern anti-slavery people, mostly Whigs, don't want to annex Texas because they don't want to bring in a slave state. But even more, Texas is huge. Texas could be subdivided into as many as four or even five slave states if slavery moves into Texas as expected. Little known fact, Mexico had outlawed slavery in 1829, but Texas, Americans coming into Texas had brought slaves with them. And one of the things they insisted upon when they broke away from Mexico was allowing slavery into the Texas Republic. So Texas was a future slave state or more than one slave state.

Then, in addition to the annexation of Texas, Polk arranged for the annexation of Oregon, although not as much of Oregon as he had originally said. He precipitates, he provokes a war with Mexico, basically by sending American troops across the border, the traditional border of Texas, into what was Mexico, claiming that it was part of the United States and therefore part of the United States. The Mexicans fight, there's a little, there's a short, small skirmish or small battle there. The war, they fight a war. The Americans defeat the Mexicans quickly in 1846 and begin to negotiate to acquire all of the territory that is now New Mexico, Arizona, California, and part more northern than that. I don't have the exact boundaries of mine. So this annexation is an expression of the idea of manifest destiny. C to C.C.

Right. Right. A continental empire and many people at the time are in favor of seeing the American borders expand, although there are those who are opposed to it. Because notice that all this territory or much of this territory that's been acquired is southern, in the southern United States, and therefore the question is, what's going to happen to slavery? So this is one of my favorite little anecdotes.

A man named David Wilmot, Pennsylvania representative of a Democrat in the last day of the congressional session in 1846 stands up. They're debating a bill about giving President Polk money to buy land from Mexico, California, New Mexico, et cetera, in a treaty. that money. And Wilmot, a first-term Democrat, stands up, and he's recognized that Democrats control the House of Representatives, and they don't expect any trouble from Wilmot. The wigs, they won't let the wigs speak. They recognize Wilmot, and he proposes his proviso, which is that there would be no slavery allowed in any of the territory purchased from Mexico. Hmm. And he blows up, essentially blows up American politics with that one act because the

Wilmot proviso will antagonize the South, turn them against, you know, ferociously against the wigs and against any anti-slavery Democrat. And Polk himself is basically discombobulated by this because he can't understand. Why are people talking about slavery in this area? Nobody's ever going to bring slaves here. You can't grow cotton in New Mexico. You can't, there's no basis for slaves to come into this territory. So why are we even debating this?

Nevertheless, so Polk basically, he has already said he's not running for another term. The parties make their nominations. We then get the election of Zachary Taylor. Oh, wow. And Taylor, I'm going to give a seat. to teller a b actually which may be rating him highly for what reason so taylor is a southerner he's never voted he's never taken a political position he um the southerners believe that because he's a southerner he'll be in favor of um he'll be opposed to wilmot proviso and he'll be in

favor of admitting uh eventually having areas like new mexico and californ California become slave territories and slave states. Turns out he doesn't think that way at all. He gets into office and he announces he wants to admit New Mexico and California immediately as free states, no slavery. He surprises everyone. And where does this come from, this turn of heart? We don't know if it was a turn of heart because he'd never taken a political position or voted before he became president. So you see, a non-voter like you could become president of the United States.

Oh, hell yeah. I wasn't born in America, though. Oh, okay, you're out of luck. So while they're debating whether or not to admit California, Taylor dies in office. How does he die? I don't remember the exact circumstances. He was sick for a while, but it was fairly sudden.

Oh, wow. I'm going to, I'm looking right here. see how he dies. He dies in office. Is he the first? No, Harrison had died in office. Ah, okay. Okay. Curious fact, all the Whig presidents died in office. Really? There were only two of them and they died in office. Oh, that's funny. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay, so that's Zachary Taylor. Right. So then Fillmore, Millard Fillmore, becomes president. And Fillmore, although he's a New Yorker, is much more, turns out to be much more pro-southern.

and they adopt, they approve what is known as the compromise of 1850, which is legislation, a series of bills in time, not actually one bill, but a series of bills that allow California to be admitted as a free state, but not New Mexico. They set the boundary between Texas and New Mexico. They strengthen the fugitive slave law that it basically forces northern states to cooperate in the return of, fugitive enslaved people to the south. It ends the slave trade in Washington, D.C. Up until then, slaves could be bought and sold on the streets of Washington, D.C., which was offensive to many people. Banning the slave trade in Washington, which is not the same thing as eliminating slavery in Washington, you could still own slaves there. But it has almost no effect because basically you just have to go across the Potomac River and you can buy slaves

in Virginia, so it has very little effect. But the compromise of 1850, de facto, eliminates the Missouri compromise. The Missouri compromise back in 1820 had drawn a line across the country at the southern border of Missouri, drawn all the way to the Pacific. Above that line, there could no longer be slave, I'm sorry, no slave states above the southern border of Missouri. Below that, there would be slave states.

So this is, proved during film war's term in office. The Whig Party collapses after 1852 and there's no opposition party there, but basically there's no opposition party to the Democrats, no organized opposition. They win in 1852 and then they do a bunch of stupid things, short-sided things going forward. So you have Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan and we'll give them both Fs. They both get Fs. Yeah. I don't know. Do we grade, I don't think we graded. Fillmore, I'm going to give Philmore a D.

Okay. So if we have film or if we may have... And then just in the interest of time, can we just skip to Lincoln? Sure. I'm so curious where we're going to put Lincoln. Lincoln's going to be on the superstar. Hell yeah. Okay, cool.

I'm glad that's where he's going. Because I like Lincoln, but I'm also like, oh, free the slaves. That's awesome. But that's basically, you know, that's my only criteria. Right. So after, I mean, Lincoln, it's a remarkably successful president. only have a country because Lincoln is successful. I mean, if he, if he loses the civil war, there is no modern United States. Period. We're fragmented. Yeah. Yeah. So I've, I've, you know,

elsewhere written a great deal about Lincoln. He's also a very effective wartime president, remarkably effective in most respects. So he will be a, he will be a superstar. Let's, if you want, we can jump ahead. We can pick, you can pick anyone you want. Okay. Okay. Maybe Ulysses S. Grant. I like him. Great general. That's such a great president. You'll give him a C. Oh, really?

Why? Well, first of all, he allowed an enormous amount of corruption around him. He was bad judge of character when it came to people around him, too trusting, too willing to let people do what they wanted to do. He did do some good enforcement of reconstruct. that was valuable and important, but not nearly as much as he might have. So I'll say on balance, not the disaster he was at one point thought to be, but a C is probably a fair grade. Okay. What about Teddy Roosevelt?

I mean, put Teddy up high in the A group, not a superstar. But you put him in A? Yeah. Okay. And why that for old Ted? The old bold moose himself. So a couple of things. First of all, he embraces the idea of a strong act of president as a figure who can make a difference in policy and politics. In between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, you have a series of presidents who preside over the dramatic weakening of the presidency in the late 19th century and only bit by bit do they begin to strengthen it again.

William McKinley, you might give him, you know, a decent grade because he did some significant territorial acquisition for the United States and helped establish United States as a global power. Teddy Roosevelt contributions include a significant increase in the role of the federal government in regulating the economy. He's more vigorous and active in that area. Sees a responsibility for the government to be actively trying to pursue. the welfare of ordinary citizens. There's not a lot he actually can do, but where the opportunity arises, he tries to make

sure the government is not just acting on behalf of the wealthiest and corporations. So he's a more balanced candidate. As a progressive Republican, he stands apart from the old guard of his own party. So he, and also internationally, he does a lot to establish the presence of the United States as an actor on the global scene, wins the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the peace between Russia and Japan after their war in 1900, 1901. So he's helps establish United States as a significant naval power going forward. So I'll give him, you know, a solid, a solid A.

Taft, who follows him, mediocrity, will give him a C. Yeah, too fat, huh? He was big. I'm pretty sure he got a custom bathtub in the White House for his large size. Is that true? I don't remember that particular detail. Leonard, he becomes a Supreme Court justice after that. Taft does?

Yeah. Oh, wow. It's quite unusual. He's got a good career. I mean, president of Supreme Court justice? Who appoints him? Is that Woodrow Wilson? It may have been Wilson. It must have been Wilson.

All right. What about Woodrow Wilson? We got to have a World War I, right? I'm not a Wilson person. Oh, really? I would be generous to give. I'm going to give Wilson a D. Wow. And for what reason? A couple of reasons. First, he completely mismanaged the United States entry into World War I. That was the first big thing that he did. I've written about this, but essentially he allowed the United States to be.

be drawn into the war on terms of the United States didn't really control. The second thing was in his fighting of the war, he didn't really have established very clear political objectives that he made, that he communicated to his military very carefully. And then after the war, he completely bungled the peace negotiations, the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of the War. League of Nations. League of Nations. It's a nightmare.

There's nothing he did right there. Yeah, in a time where we could have become like a real great political player. And he was one of the more racist presidents the United States has had. And he brought segregation big time into the national government into Washington, D.C. Yeah, that's hard to do to be the most because there's presidents that own slaves. And Woodrow Wilson still somehow was top tier racist. Yeah. And so I'm very little good to say, I know he was progressive.

He did some things. in terms of economic management in his first term that probably earn him some credit, but I'm sticking him down there with the D. Fair enough. What about FDR? Franklin Dillano. Well, we've got to put him at the top.

He's going all the way. Yeah, he's going all the way to the top. Yes. Talk to me about the new deal. Why do you like FDR? He was willing to experiment and try things even if he wasn't necessarily right about them. He made it clear that the national government

had the responsibility to lift the United States out of the Depression, even if he didn't really know how to do that. A lot of his early initiatives were avoided by the Supreme Court, which was still very, very conservative. He had to threaten to pack the Supreme Court by adding more justices. His proposal for court packing, which he came up with after his reelection in 1936, backfired on him badly. He wanted to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court for every justice on the court. for every justice on the court who is 70 years older older.

Oh, wow. A new justice? An additional justice. Right. So, you know, we've been set at nine justices since the 19th century, and his proposal would have added justices essentially temporarily. And after that, the Supreme Court began to approve his New Deal actions. So the expression, a switch in time saves nine.

dates back to Roosevelt's court packing scheme. Oh, interesting. Then eventually he got the United States out of the Depression. It took a long time, but he did that because basically he finally appreciated the need to spend money to get ready for World War II, to revive the, to build a defense industry. And he did that just in the nick of time. And then he's a successful president during World War II. because he effectively accomplishes most of the United States's political objectives,

including the unconditional surrender of Germany, the defeat of Japan, and establishes the United States as the global superpower. Yeah, I mean, that sounds pretty good to me. Yeah. You should mention Eisenhower. Yeah. You wrote a whole book on Eisenhower. Well, I edited a book on Eisenhower.

I've written a good deal about him. And Eisenhower, he's one of these people who's come up in the rankings. He was originally seen as a mediocre president. And now we probably give Eisenhower an A. Why does Eisenhower get an A because he really understood the political time he was in and what the limits of the office were and what he could do as a president effectively that would keep his options open so he could do more. He was effective.

There were no wars during Eisenhower's term. He got out of Korea. There were no additional wars. And it was a very dangerous time. there were multiple times when nuclear war could have started. So Eisenhower navigated a very tense Cold War environment. And he also, in terms of civil rights domestically, was at least as good as Truman and probably better than he's often given credit for.

Okay. What about JFK? Give him a B. I'm almost tempted to give him an incomplete. Literally, that seems a little callous. Okay, well, this is one of those exercises where one can, we can be as free as we want. Exactly. You know, he's rhetorically, he's very good.

He brings energy into the White House. Managed, the Cuban Missile Crisis could have been the end of the world, basically, and he manages to get the United States through the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as, you know, there's crises in Berlin. There's the Bay of Pigs invasion, which he totally botched. But didn't he hate the Bay of Pigs? I thought that was done by... Eisenhower had set the planning in motion, but Kennedy didn't have the brains to stop it. I see.

He was too inexperienced. He was a very inexperienced person coming into the White House. It was pretty young. He was like 30s, right? On civil rights, cautious, but made some progress. His brother, as Attorney General, did some good things. So there was movement there. And so I think we give him a B, give Kennedy a B, I would say.

What about LBJ? This is a wild guy too, huh? One of the toughest to evaluate. And why is that? Because his presidency domestically and foreign policy are two entirely different things. Vietnam is a disaster. Right. Lenton Johnson deserves an F for Vietnam.

But he's also tremendously progressive on voting rights and civil rights. He does things that are remarkably courageous for an American president to do. We have the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 64, major legislation on civil rights, major expansion of the federal role in trying to, in urban development, in housing. A lot of, you know, essentially, he is the quintessential big government president. reckless in foreign policy doesn't understand the limits that the United States should have. So I would give him, I could give him an A domestically and an F on foreign policy, so that's an average of a C. You know, sometimes during the semester you might have write two papers and you've got to average them.

So I'm treating him as a college professor, you know. That's fair. Okay. That's fair. Okay. What about Nixon? This will be a controversial one. No, we're going to give him an F.

Straight up. Yeah. Vietnam, he took too long to get out of Vietnam. On domestic policy, he did many things that were positive, but then Watergate just basically destroys his reputation. Okay. Can we jump to Jimmy Carter? Yeah. Carter's a B.

Yeah. He gets, the world is sort of slipping out of American control at that time. And he's at the very tail end of that New Deal era. So he's more of a technocrat than an ideologue. He believes if you run government well, his background was as a nuclear engineer, and he kind of had an engineer's approach to the world, do things, you know, competently and good results will occur. So you don't get any, there's no vision that's associated with Carter.

And the whole idea of an activist government is beginning to fall into disrepute. he doesn't have a good way to deal with the high inflation of his period of his era he struggles in some ways he's the joe biden of the era where inflation kind of thwarts him um and internationally this is when the iranian revolution occurs there's a hostage taking there that that he struggles with um so there are pluses and minuses overall when was the yeah iranian revolution was 79 right yeah Ah, I see. And the hostage crisis that's created by the seizure of the U.S. embassy lasts into Reagan's term. Ah, okay. So now where do you put Reagan? Reagan, I'm going to give him a B, but this probably reflects my predisposition to liking Democrats more than Republicans. Reagan's a very effective president.

Well, let's give him an A. I mean, let's just for the taking discussion. Let's give him an A. Because he changes the trajectory of a more. American politics significantly. The whole debate, the whole discourse of American politics is different after Ronald Reagan. We're not talking about expanding the power of the national government. And it's also a period when we see the beginning of the end of the Cold War. He's willing to, you know, he, although he talks tough to the Russians, to the Soviets,

he's really more interested in trying to negotiate with them and find ways to step down from conflict. And I think those were down to his credit. I'm less happy about his domestic policy, but if you step back from the ideology and you think, is this someone who has a clear agenda and knows how to do it, the answer is, yeah, he does have a vision and he's effective in putting that vision in place. All right. That seems like a pretty unbiased ranking. All right. What about George H.W? A B. Because he completes the one. down from the Cold War. He's quite effective. And internationally, this is the time when there's the Persian Gulf War, you know, with Iraq invading Kuwait, he puts together a very

effective international coalition to deal with that, quite striking. It's a period of essentially American supremacy on the global scene, so he's able to do things that other presidents before him probably couldn't do it. Those are the positives about H-Doh. about HW. The negatives, he has no feel for domestic issues whatsoever. His background is entirely in the CIA and foreign affairs. So the economy basically tanks late in his term. And he's ham-handed in his way of dealing with that.

Okay. And so wait, where did you put him? You put him out a B? Yeah. Okay. And now Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, another B. Hmm.

This is the time when the American. American economy is really humming along. You get the budget into a surplus, something we haven't seen since, basically. And that was his monetary policy. Well, he was, sometimes presidents get credit for things. The economy was going along very strongly during Clinton's presidency. But I thought H.T.W. kind of tanked it. Yeah.

But it came back. I don't think Clinton had much to do with that. I see. The president's, there are recessions that presidents have little to do with creating or curing. The economy comes back. You're in a budget surplus. Globally, he's managing the transition out of the Cold War. He's actually quite effective in reducing defense spending, taking advantage of the, if you will, the Cold War bonus. These are good things. NAFTA was popular at the time where NAFTA seemed like a good idea. The North American Free Trade Agreement

that we discussed briefly earlier, NAFTA was The idea behind that is the United States will benefit in a global economy where we do the things we're best at, which tend to be brain activities, higher level, higher order, not simple manufacturing. We can do some of that, but we can do other things, financial services and all the rest on a global scale. And we can be dominant in the world in that way. and will hand off lesser, lower-skill economic functions. And that seemed like a good idea that was a man named Ross Perrault, who ran as a third-party candidate, who referred to the great sucking sound of jobs leaving the United States under NAFTA.

Well, Perra was right about that. The problem with NAFTA was not NAFTA itself, but the fact that no one, Clinton especially, was thinking about what do you do for the people whose lives are being dislocated when those factories are moving to Mexico or elsewhere. What happens to those parts of the country where those jobs were concentrated?

You know, and back, I'll just say, this is when Ohio is a democratic state. Ohio is a heavy manufacturing state. Well, look at Ohio today. A lot of those jobs have left, and Ohio has become a red state. And I think Clinton did not appreciate, the need to have some response to the dislocations that would be caused by the embrace of the neoliberal economy.

Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting. That as the jobs left Ohio, you could feel the political climate changing. That's one of the factors, you know, I think. And what happens in states like Ohio is young people who grow up and go to college don't go back home after that. They leave Ohio and they go to places where there are. economic opportunities for people with the kinds of skills that they have. Yeah, Ross Perot also gained a lot of support, right?

He was a... He didn't win states, but he pulled something close to 20% of the voters, I recall. It's a lot for a third party candidate. I mean, the most ever for a third party? I don't recall. That's pretty significant, though. Okay. So now what about George W?

We're going to give George W and F. A full F. A full F. Have you seen his paintings, though? He's a great painter. You know, we're not rating them on their artistic talents, but I'm going to give him an F. The Iraq War was a disaster. Afghanistan turned out to be a disaster.

He had no serious – he was a poor leader during wartime. He let things happen without seizing control of it. His idea – essentially Winston Churchill was his hero. He thought that he was like Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain. You have to have a stiff upper lip, and he was. You have to get through it. This is not a policy. That's not real leadership.

And he didn't take any leadership that would have allowed us to have exited or dealt with those wars in a more satisfactory way. And the whole Iraq war was just totally unnecessary. Yeah, I mean, Hitler's aggression. I don't think you compare it to, you know, phony WMDs in Iraq. And then you had the Hurricane Katrina Fiasco. And it was just a bad presidency. Yeah. I think that's probably reasonable.

All right. Barrio, Barack Obama. So I'm going to give them an A because just being the first African-American president in a country there where racial prejudice still runs deep. And breaking through that barrier was quite significant. He had a tough time as president because he lost his congressional majority very early on. But Obamacare has been a significant policy benefit to many, many Americans, so much so that despite Trump's talk about. about having a concept of how we'd like to replace Obamacare is not going to get replaced by anything that I can see.

And I think, I hope Trump is smarter to realize there's no upside for him to get involved in this issue. So those are pluses. But just as Bill Clinton didn't respond to the economic shifts happening under a neoliberal economy, I don't think Obama appreciated what, what that was doing to people's lives either, which meant that when basically Hillary Clinton runs in 2016

to be a continuation of the neoliberal consensus, she's not prepared to suggest, she doesn't recognize and appreciate what the limits of that neoliberal consensus are and who it's leaving behind and how those people are going to respond. So you see when Clinton is running for president, traditionally democratic states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin are slipping all away from the Democratic Party because the party isn't recognizing many of the things that are happening on the ground. Now, what about Obama dealing with the recession, the housing crisis?

He's okay in terms of dealing with the great financial collapse of the banks, et cetera, in that 2008 period. he's effective in helping to bring financial stability to the country. Coming out of the recession, there's far too little federal spending to boost the economy as quickly as it might have been boosted. In some ways, if Biden did too much, potentially spent too much money bringing us out of the recession in 2020, Obama's the reverse. He does too little to bring us out of the recession in 2008. neither one hit the happy medium, if you will. So Biden gets us an overheated economy in some ways in inflation, and Obama gets us a very sluggish response to the recession that occurred during that financial collapse. Okay.

All right. Donald Trump, first term. Well, I'm going to give him an F for a couple of reasons. one, I think January 6th cast the cloud over the whole thing. And he surrounds himself with hangers-on and sycophants who basically don't belong anywhere in government. I don't think the tax cut that he pushed through was unnecessary in economic terms. It blows up the national debt again, adds trillions to the national. debt that your generation is going to end up having to figure out how to deal with that.

So there aren't a lot of positives in terms of policy achievements. If an F, it's the only thing to offset that, I would say, is he understood he needed to bring an end to the forever wars. He wasn't sure how to do that, and he didn't actually achieve that in Afghanistan. But for all the bluster, he had in his 2016 campaign, you may remember. remember, he campaigned with the theme of, we're going to win so much, you're going to get tired of winning. We don't win anymore. But the reality was he had no intention of getting the United States involved in any further military conflicts because he saw that as a losing proposition, at least for his presidency.

But the – That's good, right? Not getting involved in foreign wars. But the general lowering of the tone of American politics, you know, the aggressive in your face. constant social media tweets and all the rest. Yeah, it's a little exhausting. Yeah, the rhetoric. Exhausting.

We don't really, America doesn't need to have a president in our face every day. Now, we may have think Joe Biden may have gone too far in the other direction. Yeah, it would be nice to see him. He disappeared. Where is Joe Biden? I mean, there are some bizarre things about Biden's invisibility that attribute, I mean, we can attribute that to his age. But, you know, Trump, the in-your-face style of politics, you know, that, you know, that we didn't, we didn't need that. And then finally, he bungles the early stages of the COVID pandemic.

Yes, he gets a, he gets a vaccine going pretty early on. But many of the things he said during the early period of COVID were ridiculous, you know, and didn't. It was to him, it almost seemed, and he said this, you know, early on he said, you know, we're going to have fewer and fewer cases. and eventually it's just going to go away. That was one of the things he said early on in the pandemic. That's not a policy. That's an expression of a hope. And what it really is an expression of,

this isn't what I signed on to be president for. And I don't really want to have to deal with this. And I think that was a big part of the problem that Trump had early on. Yeah. I mean, the fact that his presidency was cut short by COVID is a bummer. I can see his perspective. If I was him, I'd be like, dang it, dude. Mark, crises come with the job.

Yeah. You know, they come in all different shapes and forms. So they come with their job. That's fair. All right, what about Biden? Oh, we give Biden a C, which I think is generous, but I'm going to give him a C. Okay. And the reason I'm going to give him a C for a couple of reasons.

First, there's some policies that he adopted that I think were very constructive policies. although he was, I think we've learned probably that we kept the COVID restrictions in place for too long. He did oversee a quick rebound from the COVID recession and spent money that needed to be spent to get people back to work and back to jobs. He also had a very good policy on climate change. His investments in infrastructure were very positive. and I think we will look back and recognize that one of the things about climate change that makes it so hard to deal with is it's a long-term problem with limited immediate consequences. But if you don't act on the long-term problem now, it's going to be much, much harder to do it later. By the time we get around, by the time it becomes an actual problem, we may not be able to solve it at all.

So what he did with Build Back Better, if I'm remembering correctly, was invested a lot in renewable energy technology and the kinds of things we're going to need to have to be effective, to deal with climate change effectively. He coupled an immediate policy investment with a long-term as a response to a long-term problem. coupling an immediate response with a long-term issue is an effective way to address a long-term issue. And I think Biden will probably get recognized for having done that more effectively than any president up until this point. Negatives, multiple negatives, running for reelection, big negative. The border policies, big negative. Unforced errors. Afghanistan, unforced error, the way that he chose to exit.

Afghanistan, I acknowledged there was no winning way to get out of there, but it was badly done. And it probably invited hostile powers to take actions, including Putin to take action that they might not otherwise have taken if the United States seemed more stable in terms of its willingness to invest abroad. Positive standing up with Ukraine. I think that although in ways not necessarily the most effective way but in general the policy of standing by Ukraine. So it's a mixed record. And I think that's why the C grade is probably deserved.

Well, Dr. Polsky, thank you so much for your time. I think we covered all the big ones. There's a couple we missed, but maybe at a different time we can revisit some of these. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective. It's been my pleasure. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to chat. with you and say some things and maybe stimulate some thinking, including, you know, angry responses on the part of people in the audience who can, you know, fill in their comments.

Sure. Anybody wants to write to me and further engage. I'm at Hunter College, and I'll try to answer my emails. Amazing. Well, Dr. Polsky, I really appreciate you. And let's do this again soon. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody that watched. Thank you for everyone that commented. I appreciate you all. We'll be doing more of these lives. If you're enjoying them, please let me know. Please reach out to me on Instagram or even in the comments. comments right here. And yeah, I'm enjoying the immediacy. It's more fun, I find, to just kind of be just,

you know, in the moment reacting to things in real time. So if you guys are enjoying it, please let me know if you have any adjustments or addendums to the process. We're all ears here at camp. Thank you for joining us once again, and we'll see y'all soon.