The Daily Signal - Historian Explains How 6 Presidents Fought Washington Swamp

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

From time to time, the American people elect a champion to take on the Washington swamp. Historian Larry Schweikart joins "The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his new book "Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and Their War With the Swamp." The six presidents Schweikart profiles are Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. They came from different backgrounds and different political parties, but all had their own unique tussles with the swamp during their time in office. The presidential historian lays out the almost cyclical nature of Americans electing swamp fighters. "I think also we see a pattern where these guys kind of knock the swamp back a little bit, and then it crawls back to life, like some horrible monster and 10, 15, 20 years later, somebody else has to step up and fight it again," Schweikart says. Schweikart is a historian of American political history and has written numerous books, including the best-selling "A Patriot's History of the United States." We also cover these stories: President Joe Biden on Monday called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal, and said evidence should be gathered in order to put him on trial. Biden says he is ending a COVID-19-era immigration-control policy. Title 42 was originally implemented by then-President Donald Trump. Three Republican state attorneys general are suing to block the Biden move. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that billionaire Elon Musk had purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc., making him the tech titan's single-biggest shareholder. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, April 5th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. From Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump, American presidents have fought the swamp and changed the trajectory of the country. Author Larry Schweikert has a new book titled Dragon Slayers, Six Presidents and Their War with the Swamp. He joins our colleagues Fred Lucas and Jarrett Stettman to explain how each of those

six presidents fought the swamp in their own times. But before we get to that conversation with Larry Schweigert, let's hit our top news stories of the day. President Biden on Monday called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal and said evidence should be gathered in order to put him on trial. The statement followed the release of a series of images showing what appeared to be mass graves, containing civilians killed by Russian forces in Bucca Ukraine. Russian has denied that it killed civilians. Here's Biden via Bloomberg. You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal. Well, the truth of the matter to show what happened to Bufca. This warrants him, he is a war criminal. But we have to

gather the information. We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue to fight. And we have to gather all the detail so this can be an actual, have a war crime trial. This guy is brutal. And what's happening in the Bucca is outrageous. While Biden did call Putin a war criminal, the president stopped short of claiming that Putin's actions in Ukraine represented genocide. President Joe Biden says he is ending a COVID-19 air immigration policy. The policy is known as Title 42 and was originally implemented by former President Trump. Title 42 gives Border Patrol the right to turn away immigrants claiming asylum on grounds of concerns over the spread of COVID-19. As Biden announced he was doing away with this policy,

three Republican states filed lawsuits against the Biden administration in an effort to keep the public health order in effect. The attorney generals from Arizona, Louisiana, and Missouri are all suing the Biden administration. They write in their complaint that the suit challenges an imminent man-made self-inflicted calamity. That calamity, they say, is the abrupt elimination of the only safety valve preventing this administration's disastrous border policies from devolved. into an unmitigated catastrophe. CDC director Rochelle Willinsky says immigrants crossing the southern border cease to be a serious danger to the public health. The concern of the three attorney generals who filed the lawsuit is that repealing the order will lead to an even greater spike in those seeking to cross the border. In February alone, Border Patrol encountered more than 164,000 immigrants at the southern border.

Over half of those immigrants were turned away under Title 42. The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says his department is taking steps to be able to handle that spike of those coming across the border, including by increasing personnel. Elon Musk just became Twitter's largest shareholder. On Monday, a filing from the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Musk had purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter Incorporated, making him the site's biggest shareholder. Following the revelation, Twitter stock prices increased by 25%. While Musk didn't announce any immediate plans for Twitter with the purchase,

Musk has previously criticized the platform for its perceived failure to uphold free speech. Many conservatives, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' press secretary, Christina Peshaw, and radio host Buck Sexton, encouraged Musk to buy Twitter, or at least to invest in a free speech-focused platform. Now stay tuned for Fred and Jared's conversation with Larry Schweikert as they discuss his new book, Dragon Slayers, six presidents in their war with the swamp. At the Heritage Foundation, we believe that every single policy issue discussed in D.C. tells a story. So we want to tell it well. On the Heritage Explains podcast, co-host Tim Desher and Michelle Cordero, take one policy issue a week,

mix in a creative blend of clips, narration, and hard-hitting interviews to equip you on crucial issues in under 20 minutes. So get your story straight. Subscribe to Heritage Explains wherever you listen to podcasts. We are very lucky to have with us today Larry Schweiker, who is a noted historian and author of the brand-new book, Dragon Slayers, Six Presidents, and Their War with the Swamp. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. So I guess one question. You look at six presidents here.

A lot of people might look at these six guys and think that they're very different in a lot of ways, but they have this very common thread. Four Republicans, two Democrats. Tell us why you looked at these four presidents in terms of their mission and take on the Washington Swamp. Well, when I started this, I thought I had six different topics, all related to six. different swamps. And so I was looking at Lincoln with the slave swamp, Grover Cleveland with a spoil swamp, Teddy Roosevelt with a trust swamp, JFK with the CIA swamp, Reagan with a bureaucracy swamp, and of course, Trump with the deep state swamp. But as I got into the research, the more I looked at it, the more intertwined these six were. And I could have possibly added James Garfield,

who was killed for his attack on the swamp, and Chester Arthur, who could only serve one term because of his disease, they clearly were also swamp fighters. So these guys represented six people who were making an effort to not just reform, a word I hate, reform things in Washington, but actually make a fundamental change in American life. And, of course, Lincoln was killed, And Teddy Roosevelt had an assassination attempt on his life.

JFK was killed. Reagan had an assassination attempt on his life. And I don't know if you recall this, but a guy scaled the stage in Ohio to attack Trump. And so you could argue that five of the six were either killed or attacked for their attempts to overturn the swamp. Larry, this is Jared Stetman. I think it's really interesting, especially highlighting these presidents. It almost seems like they come in regular intervals as far as presidents that have to kind of step in and drain the swamp. Is there something to that?

Is there something to the fact that, you know, every once in a while, things get calcified in Washington, D.C. is a part of our system that it's really necessary to have a president who's willing to take that on? Is this just a symptom of having a Republican system? Yeah, I think there is a great deal to that. But you've got to also remember that Lincoln's war against the slave swamp really involved the spoil swamp. Only he needed the spoil system. He needed his people in office to help deal with the slave swamp. And later we see that JFK needed the CIA to, you know, affect his activities in both Cuba and Laos and Vietnam.

So while there is there is some of that, I think also. we see a pattern where these guys kind of knock the swamp back a little bit, and then it crawls back to life like some horrible monster. And, you know, 10, 15, 20 years later, somebody else has to step up and find it again. This is Fred. I did want to ask you about the Lincoln and taking on the slave power conspiracy. And I want to preface this by saying, you know, nothing quite reaches the immoral level of slavery. But at the same time, much of that was about expanding the number of seats in Congress and so forth, adding states and so forth. And today we're seeing efforts by Democrats to change districting system, adding states and so forth, trying to expand their majorities.

Do you think there's some similarities to what the bonus were then and now? Oh, yeah, sure. And again, I want to reiterate this point. that the spoils swamp was created by Martin Van Buren long before Lincoln, it's created about 30 years before Lincoln, for one purpose and one purpose only. I talked about this in another my book, Seven Events of Made America, America. And people need to remember the Democratic Party was founded for one reason to protect, preserve, and expand slavery.

And so, you know, yeah, there's a lot of those efforts today, going on, they're kind of typical political efforts to expand your base. And, you know, if you want to get into modern politics, I think that they're dramatically and horribly overreaching and they're going to pay a serious price for it. Yeah, I think one thing I noticed, too, is with a lot of the successful efforts to kind of contain the swamp, a lot of times the swamp fights back. And as you said, it sometimes grows. And sometimes In some cases, it's actually necessary. You talk about JFK's fight against the CIA.

It seems like today in America, there's maybe an additional problem, especially with a lot of intelligence agencies that have maybe gone off their original mission, which is what they were originally created for. They've kind of gone beyond that. Can you talk about that, especially in relation to President Donald Trump, who I think did have some issues with the intelligence services? Sure, absolutely. Let me clarify this. After Kennedy, or during Johnson and Nixon, the swamp made a significant change, and that was that Congress more or less abdicated any authority over the swamp or what Steve Bannon likes to call the administrative state, all these bureaucracies. And as a result, when Congress, the presidents had long since lost control after Kennedy,

but after Congress gave up control, it fell to the courts to control these agencies. And the courts tended to say, well, they're established, Congress established and therefore they get to kind of define their own mission and scope, which of course is outrageous. Well, so we fast forward to Donald Trump and the CIA and the defense intelligence agency and the FBI and all these groups. And nobody wants to take these guys on. I was speaking with a very high-ranking House member. And I said, do you think that the whole FBI is corrupt? And he said, absolutely.

He said, but before we can take it out, we've got to figure out a way to replace it because there are functions that need to be done by a federal cop agency, but he says the whole thing is corrupt right now. And this is not somebody you normally think of as a as a flamethrower. So the next guy who comes in better come in with a flamethrower at these agencies, because if we don't stop now, we'll never get control of them. That's a very good point. And I, you know, maybe to follow up on that, I think what's interesting, especially highlighting these presidents is, you know, what role will Congress have in that as well? I mean, it seems like a lot of the effective swamp fighters were able to work with Congress to kind of push their agenda. You know, how does that interplay with, you know, these presidents, especially the six you mentioned here,

how did they effectively get Congress essentially to get on board with what they were doing? Or did they not get that going? Or was it something that they did more independently? No, you're right. Look at Lincoln. Lincoln never had a majority of abolitionists, but he did have a majority of Republicans. and they were able to pull along enough what we would today call moderates to get anti-slavery legislation, the 13th Amendment and other things passed.

When you look at Grover Cleveland, he was able to work with Congress to get the Pendleton Civil Service Act passed, which is very important because it limited the number of direct appointees, a president had. Let me quickly explain this. Prior to Pendleton, a president appointed virtually all of the federal appointees. And this meant that Lincoln, while he's in the middle of fighting a war, have lines of job seekers down the street, literally coming inside the White House, bugging him for jobs. And of course, you know that Garfield was killed by one of these people who didn't get a job. So they had to fix this. The Pendleton Act took about 10% of those appointees out of the hands of the president put them in the hands of a civil service

exam. So I look at Cleveland as being partially successful in his battle with the swamp, but not entirely. Because what happened after you got the Pendleton Civil Service Act that took all of the appointment powers out of the hands of a president was that instead of appointing just a few people to get elected, by few, I mean a few thousand. Now presidents had to campaign to lobbying groups and special interest groups in terms of tens and then hundreds of thousands of members and in our day millions of members when you're talking about unions. So the victories over the swamp, except for slavery, the victories over the swamp are not

really long-lived, as I say, it keeps changing and, and, evolving into different beasts that have to be put down at different times. Swamp creature keeps a morphing into something else. Yeah, that was actually, I'm glad you had actually addressed that because I was going to bring up the spoil system versus the civil service system, which in some ways was an improvement, but in some ways led to this massive beast of an administrative state that we have now. Yes.

One question I did want to ask about Reagan, who was an enormously successful president in terms of winning the Cold War and bringing economic prosperity. But, of course, he could win the Cold War, defeat the Soviet Union, but he couldn't really beat the bureaucracy. Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I had a previous book about two years ago called Reagan, the American president. and I spent an extraordinary amount of time in the Reagan archives and the Reagan papers. And one of the things I found was correspondence from his cabinet levels and from the bureaucracy. And basically what happened was even people who were put in to, quote, control government,

to reduce the size of government, even those people found themselves captives of it within a year. For example, I saw a memo from one department head when David Stockman said, what's going on? You know, why aren't you reducing your department? And he said, well, we've already spent this year's budget in part of next years, right? So you made a really good point that Reagan came in with three main goals to defeat Soviet Union, to rebuild the American economy, and to control government. And what he found was that there's only so much time and so much political capital that any president has. And achieving two of those was monumental.

There just wasn't enough time, energy, or political capital to cut down government when that was over. Yeah, that seems like a big part of this is that simply to reduce the swamp, it takes almost multiple presidency. Right. And, you know, Steve Bannon has a very good suggestion. I think there are two really good ways to cut down the swamp. The first is what Trump started to do while he was in office, and that was to move offices out of Washington, D.C., put them in Nebraska, put them in New Mexico, put them in Idaho, get them out of D.C. So you eliminate that swamp mentality of the cocktail circuit. You start working on it from that angle.

The second thing, which was Bannon's suggestion, is you buy these people out. You begin to start an early retirement system. It'll cost some money, but pay these people to retire, then eliminate the job once the people are gone. And Bannon's reasoning is very good. It's incredibly hard to eliminate positions when people are still in them. But it's not too hard to get rid of a position that nobody's holding at the time. So I think that's going to be a good start. The third thing that has to happen is what Trump began to do, which is to put in place judges who will begin to control the administrative state.

And I was told that this, in fact, was the rationale behind Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrick. It was not necessarily that they were social liberals. It was based, especially on their take on the Exxon case, that it was thought, These three would really work to control the size of the bureaucracy. And we've yet to see cases come before them in that vein, but that was the feeling behind why those were chosen. Yeah, very interesting. It seems like there's a lot of work ahead.

It's a president's legacy that goes beyond his presidency itself. I mean, I think that's really interesting. And especially laying down those judgeships and how much that's going to change our system, not just now, but many, many years from now. I think that's an important aspect of this. One thing I'd like to ask, especially because you highlighted six, I think, very different men and very different presidents, is there a personality type? Is there a kind of person who is liable to want to take on the swamp in Washington? Is this a character type? Is this just simply different men seeing a problem as it was? How do you explain these men who came from

different parties, different backgrounds, and different eras in their kind of role in how they took on the swamp in their own time. Yeah, that's a very good question. I think you're right. I think there is these guys are much more activist. They're much more, if you want to say, male. They aren't bureaucrats. They aren't managers. They see themselves as leaders, not somebody. For example, it's why I didn't include Calvin Coolidge, who's one of my favorite presidents, But he very much was more of an administrator. The ship's going in the right direction. I'm just going to keep my hands off the wheel kind of guy.

Whereas you look at TR, TR, while I disagree with many of his policy positions, he was a very activist guy, just as a man. He was somebody who favored action over just kind of management. And one important point I wanted to make about TR, and it shows you how you can think you're making inroads against the swamp in one area and you're ignoring something else, TR and his antitrust work saw the corporations not as inherently evil, but he saw them as in a position where they were fostering

such discontent, especially with the media, especially the newspapers of the day. Roosevelt himself said on many occasions, in essence, I'm not quoting, I'm paraphrasing, He said on many occasions, I've got to control these corporations or there will be a grassroots rebellion across the country that will get rid of all businesses, all capitalism. And he saw himself, ironically, as kind of a champion of capitalism, kind of the way FDR did in terms of saving it from itself. And what TR missed was that the one industry that he left out of this was journalism. This is one of the big swamp creatures we have to deal with today. Well, that's probably a decent point. Yeah, I'm going to probably stir up maybe a little trouble here.

Jared's a big fan of Andrew Jackson, one guy who's not mentioned in this. He is often blamed for the spoil system, of course. But when you think of presidents, he was probably the first president in terms of sheer personality that said, I'm going to take on this Washington machine when he first ran in 1824 and then again in 1828, this corrupt, the corruption all around Washington, which is sort of the sense of a lot of people compare Trump to Andrew Jackson. I wanted to ask you just why he wasn't part of what you included here. Okay, A, I'm not a Jackson fan. You've read a Patriots history of the United States, you know that we see Jackson, first of all, his mentor,

and the guy who put him in the presidency, was Martin Van Buren, who creates the swamp. He creates the spoil system under which Jackson acts. Second of all, Jackson did not do a single thing to cut the size of government. If you look at either employment of government, employment per population, it doesn't grow, but it certainly doesn't shrink under Jackson. People point to the war on the Bank of the United States. Well, folks, the Bank of the United States, the four-fifths private. And most bankers in the country, this was the focus of my doctoral dissertation,

and all of my early work was on Jacksonian banking and pre-Civil War banking. The bankers around the country, the little banks, the guys who didn't have much money, they all loved the Bank of the United States. And so Jackson, if anything, grew the bank. the size of the presidency if by no other means and the fact that he flex the presidency's muscles all over the place, even in a negative way. And you know, if you work out, you know, negative reps are just as important as positive reps. So, no, I'm not, I'm not a Jackson fan, and I don't think in any way he really attacked the swamp. The only swamp he attacked was a private sector

bank that he then in a very Biden-esque way turned around, handed all that money off to the pet. makes. So kind of bringing things a little bit back to the modern day to a certain extent, especially I thought it was interesting. You mentioned TR Roosevelt's kind of war on big business, so to speak, that he wasn't doing so out of a hatred of business, but more of a, first of all, worried that maybe things like socialism would become common to this country and that business itself had moved into an improper place in America. It does make me think of some of the battle, especially on the right, you talk about the rise of big tech in America that has grown to enormous amount of power in this country when you look at not just the social media,

Facebook and Twitter, but just across the board, especially how they ward with President Donald Trump. And then, you know, after his presidency literally almost uniformly got basically disappeared him from their platforms. It does seem like we're kind of having this same kind of battle and debate. And I think similar fault lines. I mean, there are many on the right who think that, no, it's not good to regulate big tech. And there are many saying that no, we need to do that. Do you see some similarities between how Trump and TR took on Big Tech and maybe some future battles that are looming in that regard? Yeah, sure.

Let me point out with TR. And one reason I give him a little bit of slack in some of his antitrust work is of all the things. things TR did. Remember, this is a guy who made himself into a physical presence. He did something almost nobody in Washington would do today. When a war started, he left a cushy job in Washington as assistant secretary of the Navy and formed a combat regiment of cavalry. Nobody would do that today. But his one weakness was that in his entire life, he never actually ran a business. People say, well, it's cattle ranch. TR did not run that ranch.

He handed it off to a manager. He never met a payroll. He never had to worry about employees or about government regulations. He just went off and hunted and fished, right? So I think had he ever filled in that one hole in his resume and actually run a business, which he would have done very well, I think his approach to antitrust would have been a little bit different. Now, I'm not a fan of antitrust.

but the very purpose of antitrust is to allow competition to take place. And so from that perspective, you have to say that today antitrust is failing monstrously because there is no competition whatsoever with some of the big techs with Google, with Yahoo, with Twitter, with Facebook, any of these things. They've all got 70, 80 percent market share, which under North Carolina, normal circumstances, if you're doing that with gasoline or food or anything else, you'd face antitrust suits. I thought it was interesting. When you think about, I think, establishment Washington, it was in some ways surprising that JFK is part of this list because he's often, his father was part of

the Roosevelt administration and so forth. I guess if you could talk a little bit more about him and why, in a lot of ways, it seems like maybe he was, his problem with the intelligence agencies, he seems was closest to what Trump had. Right. And, you know, that is an interesting point. Isn't he an insider? In some ways, yes. In some ways, no, you know, he's a Catholic, so he's not blending in with a lot of established Washington. His dad was something of a rogue and a renegade who, although he wasn't.

in Roosevelt's administration still had a lot of that kind of old corrupt Boston taint around him. JFK's problem was that when he came into office, he was already, through Eisenhower, committed to destabilizing Cuba, and then he took it further. And, you know, we have plenty of records of him and Bobby basically telling CIA, get rid of Castro, kill him, do whatever you need to do. And And later, of course, they pay $85,000 to the CIA to give to these generals to eliminate Xiam in Vietnam. So when you had the CIA doing work like that, it's hard to turn around and say, man, these guys are corrupt.

We need to get rid of them. Yeah, it does seem a particular challenge when dealing with the intelligence services in particular, because, you know, of course, they do provide a significant function to the country, to the Republic, especially in foreign policy. But at the same time, you know, where does their role kind of end? You know, in the case, you know, I think more recently thinking that, you know, they actually step into American electoral politics, I think, becomes very much concerning for the American people, especially agencies where, look, I think by their very nature, there isn't a lot of public

accountability. Is this why it takes a president who's very hands-on with these agencies? Is that kind of the way this is dealt with? Or is there some other manner in which presidents can actually keep them on their job as it's supposed to be and not into other things? No, it's going to fall to a president to be Uber hands-on, and he's going to have to appoint an FBI director and a CIA director who aren't afraid to clean house. There is a story out today of this guy, John Seifer, who was bragging. He said he was extremely proud of his work in keeping the Hunter Biden laptop out of the public debate in the election and that he helped swing the election. I mean, stuff like this should have people behind bars, but you've got,

you've got this smarmy guy Ray in charge of the FBI. I mean, every time I see that guy, I just want to slap him, sort of do a Will Smith episode on this guy. And you've got people in charge of the CIA who have no intention whatsoever of controlling these agencies. And like I said before, when you've got major congressional figures saying, no, the whole FBI is corrupt. The whole FBI, it's not one or two guys that it's not just Comey. It's not just McCabe or Maccabra, as I call them. It's not just these guys. It's all the way down the line or somebody is a whistleblower.

would have stepped up a long time ago and said, this is wrong. Here's what's going on here, folk. Not a peep out of these guys. In fact, my congressional source says that when they are talking with just kind of run-of-the-mill lower-level FBI officers, that their attitude is one of sheer arrogance, that they don't need to report to Congress. They don't need to give any account of themselves. And so I think that actually draining the swamp to use that term, and by the way,

Let me say this. Trump did not mean going after the CIA and FBI when he used the term, drain the swamp in 2015 and early 16. He meant get rid of K Street and the lobbyists. But later, it came to his attention that the swamp was really much deeper and much worse than just a bunch of lobbyists. So it is going to take a dedicated president with a cadre, maybe 30 or 40 key people who have this one, one goal of reducing the size and influence of government on our elections and on our daily lives. Ever would throw in there. Jared had an excellent piece on the Hunter Biden situation just a couple days ago on the daily signal. Yeah. Thanks for it. Yeah. If I could follow up on what you just said, though, is this going to take sort of a modern-day Pendleton Act that would address what all the shortcomings of the other civil service?

Act in the past? I mean, basically a civil service reform that's really going to address the bureaucracy, the unaccountability in the bureaucracy? Well, you know as well as I do. Every time we, quote, reform something in Washington, it gets worse. So I would say to stay away from any more acts. And let's just get people in who will enforce the laws we have. I mean, Reagan was always fond of saying we don't need more laws, we just need to enforce the laws we have. And I think that's very much the case here. It can be done by dedicated and patriotic people, but I think we're really short of that in D.C. today. And that seems to be part of the problem that we have is that, you know, there's a kind of class that's been built up, a kind of managerial class

that existed, not just Washington, but through the elites in American society that have kind of one purpose, one goal, and it's very different from the American people. I think that seems to be the case that a lot of these men that you've highlighted, you know, understood the problems that existed in Washington, D.C., especially if there was an elite class, it was calcified, but understood really the heart of the American people and really kind of brought that in their efforts to contain this, as you call it, the swamp that never quite goes away, but it changes forms or once in a while, but it's something that we're always going to have to deal with and always have to have presidents, patriotic presidents, willing to step in the breach on behalf of the

American people. Well, you know, it's funny that just prior to the Pendleton Act, one of the authors I read said, contemporary, right, somebody from the 1870s said, this is, this is the time when an administration changes from one party to another, and he would say you would see all the hotels empty out and all these people would go back home, the trains would be full, and the incoming trains would be full of different people coming in to take over the administration. That's a great story. Well, Larry, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

We really appreciate this, and we absolutely encourage the listeners to pick up the book, which is called Dragon Slayer Six Presidents and Their War with the Swamp. Excellent stuff. Thank you, Larry. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast.

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