The Daily Signal - 'Vindicating Trump': Dinesh D'Souza's Most Urgent and Important Film Yet

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza sits down with The Daily Signal to discuss his provocative new documentary, "Vindicating Trump," which opens in theaters Friday, Sept. 27. D'Souza shares behind-the-scenes insights from his exclusive interview with former President Donald Trump, conducted shortly after the July 13 assassination attempt. The film aims to present a more nuanced view of Trump's character and presidency, challenging media narratives. D'Souza also discusses the movie's exploration of election integrity issues and Trump's unique leadership style. Listen to learn why D'Souza believes Trump may be "the perfect guy" for America's current challenges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trump is a unique character. I wanted to bring out aspects of Trump in this film that are not often seen on the public stage. And the reason they're not seen is Trump is conditioned out of kind of manly strength to not exhibit feelings, never show vulnerability, and in some ways not even reveal his thought process. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, September 27th. I'm your host, Rob Louis. And those were the words of Dinesh D'Souza, his new film, Vindicating Trump. opens in theaters today. This is DeSuzza's eighth movie, and he calls Vindicating Trump his most urgent and important film yet. The movie features interviews with people who see Trump from a different perspective than most Americans. DeSuzza spoke with the former president's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and attorney Alina Haba. But the biggest and most revealing conversation takes place

with Trump himself. You can find the location of the theater closest to you by visiting vindicatingtrump.com. Stay tuned for our interview right after this. Looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues from America's outpost here in Washington? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. You'll get top conservative research, a rundown of important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online and hot takes from our experts. Sign up at heritage.org slash agenda or at the link in the show notes. Dinesh D'Souza's new movie, Vindicating Trump, is in theaters this Friday, and he joins us today in Washington to tell us all about it.

Dinesh, welcome. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. As you know, this was my first job coming into Washington, D.C., and I'm thrilled to be back here at Heritage. Absolutely. Well, you have called this your most urgent and important piece of work. Now, that's saying quite a lot, given the extensive body of filmmaking that you've done. Why would you say that?

It's partly a reflection of the precarious state of the country. It's partly because we have this larger-than-life figure, Trump, and not only is he someone that inspires this kind of antagonism on the other side, but he also brings out ambivalence among some conservatives and Republicans, and so often people say to me things like, well, I don't really like the guy, but I like his policies, or he needs to keep his mouth shut, or what they're really getting at is they want a new and different Trump.

They want to remake Trump in some way. Now, first of all, leaving aside the impracticality of trying to do that, I don't think we need to do it. And the reason is that Trump is a package, and he's kind of a coherent package. And it's kind of like saying, you know, in the Civil War, the same qualities that made General Grant a good fighter on the battlefield made him cuss a lot and made him a heavy drinker.

So you can't say, pull him off the battlefield. he cusses he's a heavy drinker because that's part of what makes him effective. Similarly with Trump, even the things that we think of as his bad qualities, like his massive egotism, which he admits to. In fact, he's one of the few people have ever seen who's made an actual defense of egotism. Egotism is really necessary to do anything great. He goes, if you don't have an ego, you're going to be discouraged and give up halfway down the track. So Trump is a unique character.

I wanted to bring out aspects of Trump in this film that are not all. often seen on the public stage. And the reason they're not seen is Trump is conditioned out of kind of manly strength to not exhibit feelings, never show vulnerability, and in some ways not even reveal his thought process. So I was eager to set him up in such a way that people could see the tumblers of his mind working and understand how he processes information. Well, I would say you accomplished that. Thank you for giving me an advanced copy and a chance to review the film prior to its release on Friday. One of the things that struck me was the beginning. You show a series of clips, a montage, beginning with Jay Leno and other appearances that Trump made prior to entering

politics. So going back to his time as a New York businessman, a celebrity, a host of the apprentice, things of that nature. But you say that there was that fateful moment when he crossed the political Rubicon, I believe was your language, in June of 2015, descending from those escalator steps at Trump Tower. What was it about that moment that changed in people's minds about Trump? So let's think of that iconic moment. Of course, it's in the film, but most people know it. Trump is at the top of the escalator.

And imagine that up there is the cultural elite. So Trump himself is probably the biggest brand of them all. But there he is with Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres and Charlie Rose and Larry King. and he's one of them. And the rappers aspire to be like him. So he's almost the embodiment of American success, Trump. And then he does something very striking. And that is he descends. He goes down. Now, where does he go down to? Well, try to imagine at the bottom of the escalator like the forgotten American. So not the guy who's doing real well, but the guy who feels like the economies bypass me, my jobs have all gone abroad. No one cares about me. Neither party's paying enough attention to me. Trump basically says, okay, I'm going to take up your cause. I'm going to join your team. So you can understand just in this little image, the fact that all these people go, wow, well, you know what? He didn't have to do that.

He's a billionaire. He's actually not one of us, but he's taking up our cause. So that's why they're so loyal to him. At the same time, think of it from now from the point of view of the cultural elite. This guy used to be on our team. He's now joined with the pitchfork people down there. he's taking up their cause against us. So here we see in a nutshell how the same people that once revered him turned against him.

They see him as a traitor to their class, a traitor to their group, and they'll never forgive him. And your film goes from from that moment where Trump is descending and then you depict what it's like to be a news executive and their reactions. You show what the scene may have been like at the Democratic National Committee, what it might have been like at the Democratic National Committee, what it might. might have been like at the Attorney General's office. So why was it important for you to reenact these moments going back to 2015 and other moments throughout Trump's time in the spotlight? We have reenactments, as you know, running through the film. And there are a distinctive aspect of my filmmaking because there is a documentary style that is, I would call it super basic. And that is you do some interviews, you pull some stock footage, you string it together,

you got a film. But you can't put that kind of film in the theater. A movie is an experience. and a good documentary film will have a lot of the elements of a feature film. It will have characters, humor, suspense, a kind of a narrative arc, a climax, all of that. And now, so I said to myself, what is the thing that many of us know is happening, but we never see? We never see what actually happens in the intelligence agencies. We never see what happens, for example, at the New York Times or CNN. Imagine the scene where Trump, they're announcing that Trump is convicted of multiple fellow. Right? Do the reporters of the New York Times watch this with a kind of equanimity and go, that's an

important news story I got to cover tomorrow. Or are they high-fiving each other? We got them. We got them. You know, Maggie Haberman, great job. So what we do is we imaginatively recreate these Democratic National Committee, the sort of voter activism, the media, the intelligence agencies, Nick Searsie, who's a very accomplished character actor, plays kind of the head of our intelligence of the intelligence apparatus. And all of this allows people to see the story of Trump told within the context of a movie. It's also the kind of thing, by the way, that Trump himself appreciates, because I remember at the premiere for 2000 Mules at Marlago, he had seen the film before.

So he actually knew the content of the film. He had sort of digested that. But the second time he saw it, he was constantly commenting on the film. film itself. Like, the music to Nash. Like, where do you get music from? Do you buy music? Do you have a guy who composes the music? And who he'd be like, your voice to Nash? He's like, you have a movie voice. Did anyone ever tell you that? You have a movie voice. And it's a good thing you have a movie voice because if you didn't have a movie voice, you'd have to hire someone else to narrate your films. So stuff that makes me chuckle, but I realize, wow, you know, this guy is

a cultural figure. And he's interested in the way that cultural products and artifacts like movies are made. Well, that's very true. And I think one of the things that you've obviously experienced in your interactions with him is getting to know him and who he is as a person and you attempt to bring that out in the film. I do like that unique style that you do bring to your documentaries. I think it sets you apart and you've proven that in your body of work. In addition to interviewing Trump for this film, you also spoke to his daughter-in-law and one of his attorneys. What can you tell us about Donald Trump that we might not know after all of these years,

including the last decade, basically, in the public spotlight. I'll tell you an anecdote that is true, and it was sort of the inspiration for the way I interviewed Trump. And in fact, my wife, Debbie, kind of warned me. She's like, you know, you have 45 minutes with Trump, Dinesh, but, you know, you realize you're going to get like two questions in, right? Because this guy is going to take off and he's just going to do a monologue. And I said, no, I can't have that happen.

I'm not going to allow that to happen. I have to structure it in such a way that it doesn't happen like that. And why? Well, when I got my presidential pardon, this was obviously after my campaign finance troubles with the Obama administration, I met Trump for the first time. I didn't know Trump. I'm not like a long time early Trumpster or anything like that. 2019 in the Oval Office.

And Debbie, my wife said to Trump, she goes, you know, she goes, I don't understand you. You get flayed on every platform, every moment of every day. like a normal person couldn't take that. How do you, like, does it get to you? Now, quite honestly, Debbie and I both expected Trump to go, ha, ha, ha, no, it doesn't get to me. These people are idiots. They're crazy.

I enjoy it, that kind of thing. But he was like, no, you know, he paused. And he goes, he goes, well, guys, I have to admit that there are times it really gets to me. He goes, I, you know, I'm doing this for the country. He goes, I just got, you know, I got El Baghdaddy. And he goes, and even on that, they won't give me any credit for that. So we sensed a vulnerability in Trump. And as we left, we said to ourselves, and my wife said, she said, you know, it's a pity

that Trump doesn't put that aspect of himself on display for the American people to see. But I think Trump is such a man's man that he doesn't like to do that. Even when Dr. Phil interviewed him, Dr. Phil tried, you know, as a psychologist, you know, the assassination, like, how did it make you feel? Well, Trump hates that kind of question and absolutely refuse to go there. but I wanted to bring out some aspects of Trump's personality, the way that he, the kind of normalcy of the man, which the press, I think, willfully misunderstands. Trump is a bit of a jokester. So when he says, I'm going to be a dictator for a day, I mean, who can actually

take that seriously being a dictator? And yet it's used as sort of Exhibit A in the evidence that he really will be a dictator and will never leave. So I put those sorts of questions to Trump. I go, you know, you troll people with these memes, Trump 28, Trump 32, Trump 36. I go, well, are you going to leave? Aren't you? Are you going to be like the guy in the Western who sort of takes care of the gangsters and then rides off into the sunset? Or are you planning to kind of stay?

And having Trump respond to these things, I think will be very interesting and engaging for the audience. Oh, I agree. I agree. I mean, you saw some of this on display at the Republican National Convention when there was a big effort to introduce his family, his extended family, the grandkids, to the American people. But you said that Trump being a man's man doesn't necessarily gravitate toward that approach. Do you think that that might benefit him, though, with some of those voters who remain skeptical

about him as a person? Yeah, because I think that, look, I was trying to think to myself, who has been a figure that I can think of, that on the one hand has people who would. are so loyal to him, they would take a bullet for him. And on the other hand, have people who, at least secretly, wish that somebody else would put a bullet in him, right? That's not a normal situation. You wouldn't say that that would be true of Reagan, even of Jimmy Carter. You have to go all the way back to Abraham Lincoln to find that kind of divide. Now, the difference between Lincoln and Trump is that in Lincoln's case, the divide was not over him. It was not over the man. It was over

the issue. It was over slavery. It was over the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the in the country over that. With Trump, it is over the man. And therefore, in this movie, I realize Trump, we need to bring out Trump the man. I cannot duck that issue. This is not just about policy. Even Republicans who are reluctant about Trump, their hesitation is based on Trump the man. And on a kind of, I think, very one-sided and limited perception of his character. So let's talk about that for a moment, because they'll say things like, I'll hear people, say things like, well, you know, he's a playboy. And I say to myself, well, he was a playboy in his younger days. I think he actually admits this. But no one's saying he's a playboy now. So the most you can say about him

the worst, he's a reformed playboy. Okay. What else? He's an egomaniac. Also true. Trump loves praise. He loves public praise. Interestingly, in private, he's more self-deprecating. If you saw him on Gutfeld recently, you see this kind of whimsical Trump. He's not somebody who you have to to keep kissing his feet and flattering the Dauphin or the prince, like in a courtier style, not at all, not in person. But he does like public praise, but in a way, I think with Trump, his egotism is a sort of protection. It's a wall.

It insulates him because, again, a normal person would be just destroyed by the kind of attack that Trump gets. And then Trump's virtues. He's magnanimous. He even though a lot of billionaires kind of secede from the middle of the military. class. Trump doesn't do that. He has an ordinariness to him. He has a curiosity about people. You'll never get someone who's a doorman or someone who works as a waiter in one of his hotels, ever say a bad word about him. He's very nice to them. He knows their family. He asks about how

their kids are doing. He's that kind of a guy. He's obviously very kind and good to his family. They adore him. But above and all, the one virtue that he has that I want to stress is his supreme virtue of courage, because that is a rare virtue. Aristotle says it's the highest virtue, and it's in fact the virtue that makes all the other virtues possible, because courage gives you the strength to do all the other virtues. So it's an active virtue. Trump has it in spades. I think it is a virtue somewhat lacking, by and large, in the Republican Party,

particularly when we're facing people who want to take away our basic liberties. It's almost like we need a tough guy on our side to take on the tough guy regime that has been mobilized against us. Trump's willing to do it. And for this reason, I think that in this hour of our country's history, he is not only the best man. In some ways, he's the perfect guy. Well, and I'm so glad you brought up the point about courage because it is lacking among so many in the political class.

I'd say on both sides of the aisle, not just exclusively Republicans, but maybe that's where we tend to see it more often on display. And I think that probably makes some of those Republican lawmakers uncomfortable, because of the things that Trump wants to do. I'm glad you brought up Lincoln. You have a reenactment of Lincoln in the film. You also referenced Lincoln in your interview with Trump. Does he recognize his place in history,

and did he react at all to that comparison? Yeah, he does. I think he recognizes that, and this is rare for someone who has served one term. There have been a few, well, I can think of a couple, of consequential one-term presidents. So a Polk, Democrat, was a president who almost single-handedly doubled the size of the country in the middle of the 19th century.

Turned out it was a very consequential presidency. And so that was the case. But I think Trump is aware that he represents something bigger than himself. He is conscious of that. He's not the kind of person who does historical analogies, comparisons. But what he likes is he likes an acknowledgement of his sort of role on the larger historical stage. And I think he feels that his destiny is in a sense incomplete. And that's part of what's driving.

And because think of it, if you and I were billionaires, we had, you know, eight, ten years to live. We have grandchildren. We have Mar-a-Lago. And on the other side, we're facing a shotgun of 91 criminal charges to assassination attempts with potentially more to come, no normal person would go for that. You'd be like, I'm out of here. I don't need any of this. So something must be pushing this man forward.

And I think in that sense, it's love of country and it's a sense of destiny. Yeah. And you talk about how he was coasting to re-election in 2020 when COVID hit. Did you sense from him that there's unfinished business that he would like to accomplish in a second term that he was not able to do as a result of, what was essentially foisted upon him by China in the spring of 2020. Well, Trump has done a lot to expose, to peel the layers off the onion, to expose the corruption in the institutions of government that we didn't know to be looking for it over there. So, in fact, these are institutions that have traditionally been considered conservative.

So we all know that the media is left wing, Hollywood's left wing, academia's left wing. But I never thought the FBI was left wing. I never thought the CIA was left wing. The military is left wing. No. But nevertheless, starting, I think, in the Obama years, there was a conscious effort to remake those institutions. Certainly at the top, but it affects the bottom because the people at the top recreate an incentive structure that filters all the way down. I think with Trump, when he came in, he thought he could trust the military.

He thought that's why he brought in John Kelly as a general. I'll bring in a general. Generals are straight shooters. He'll give it to me straight. I think Trump also thought he could trust the people in the white lab coats. I mean, we all do, right? You go to the doctor. I'm going to take your appendix out.

Come in next week. You never go, well, prove it to me that my appendix is defective. Show me some pictures so I can just make up. No, you're like, well, I agree. Yeah, I'll take these tests. Yeah, you can go ahead and do this. So this implicit trust in the health authorities, I don't think any of us really dreamed that that could be ideologically manipulated. But now we know that it blatantly was.

I think Trump knows also. And I think Trump realizes that in the second term, he's got to realize that the, you know, the serpents are more numerous and their dens are deeper than we had previously suspected. I suspect that you'll see a much heightened focus on the people who get those political jobs and whom he entrusts. to carry out his agenda based on his experiences. We're talking to Dinesh D'Souza, who is a new film out this Friday called Vindicating Trump. Dinesh, you talked earlier about how in our country, you have an alarming number of opponents of Trump. Recent poll put it at 28% of Democrats said the country would be better off if Trump had been assassinated after the second attempt. On the other side, you have many MAGA-Republicans.

or other conservatives who believe he's the only hope that we have to save our constitutional republic. How can we live in a country where people hold such diametrically opposing views? I think the problem is serious, but it is not quite as bad as we think for this reason. The people on the Trump side, on the Republican side, are making a balanced judgment about Trump because they're exposed to Trump. They're exposed to the defenses of Trump, and they're also exposed to the criticism of Trump, because none of us can avoid the mainstream media in our lives.

We see it, we know about it. But now look at the other side. And I'm talking here about the rank and file Democrat. The rank and file Democrat does not actually know a lot about Trump. They do not get the pro-Trump side at all. They get a non-stop propagandistic diet of anti-Trump. polemic. If CNN has a panel of 17 people, they're all anti-Trump. There may be two or three Republicans, but they're selected because of their anti-Trump. So as a result, one is forgiven,

because think about it, when you're an intelligent person, how do you discover a fact, right? You discover a fact when you see that fact appear in multiple sources, sources that you admittedly cannot check for yourself, but you think to yourself, well, if I'm, if I see it in Barnes & Noble in a book. And then there it is on PBS. There it is on the History Channel. There it is. Michael Moore made a film about it. Rachel Maddow's talking about it. Here it is in the New York Times. Well, it must be true because why would all these independent people have made this up? The same thing. They don't realize that it's actually more like the same bullet ricocheting off multiple walls and coming at you from different directions. You think that you're getting

independent sources of information, not realizing that all these people, not that they are conspiring together, but they're more like birds in a flying formation going to Florida, all flying side by side in the same pattern. So that's what I'm getting at, is I think that a film like this would be very startling for an independent or a Democrat because most of what they see about it. And the nice thing about a film is, you know, a book and an argument is about something. I'm going to tell you, let's say, for example, about my life in India, but it won't give you a good idea of what that's like. But now imagine I show you a video.

I say, that's me as a kid. And that was my room. And that's the little, that's the vendor outside my door selling bananas. And there's the guy with the monkey and he's doing tricks on the street. You'd be like, oh, wow, I get a real feeling of what it's like, what it would have been like to grow up in India, let's say, in the 1970s. And that's what a movie can do. So the movie is like, you've heard all this stuff about Trump.

Now, here's Trump. And we're going to talk, and you're going to listen, and you're going to see stuff. that runs so counter to everything you've heard about Trump that you almost want to like spit up your popcorn, you know? So I'm thinking of ways to try to bring people who are independents. And of course, for people watching, if you can go watch the movie, by the way, the website is vindicatingtrump.com.

You can put your city in, it'll pull up all the theaters. There's also a book of the same title you can pre-order. But my point is if you can bring along that sort of, that grumbling anti-Trump relative or that buddy of yours, you're like, hey, I'll buy your ticket, you know. I think it will have a tremendous effect. I agree. I was going to pose a challenge to you.

It's getting the Democrats in independence to go see your movie, I think, not only might change their perspective because they haven't been exposed to that Donald Trump that you feature in the film, but up until now, maybe they just don't have any desire to. So you've given them a relatively easy way through 90 minutes, a 90-minute film, to get a sense of who the man really is. A film appeals to the head and the heart, and that's part of the power of a film, because I often will hear conservatives say something to the effect of, well, you know, the liberals do not think in a sort of cognitively rational way. They appeal to emotion. There's no question that with Kamala Harris, they're doing that. They're basically saying, you know, don't trust your eyes, your lying eyes. They're telling the American people, don't trust your pocketbook. Don't trust the prices you pay and the growth. grocery store, don't trust your retirement account. Don't even trust what you've seen and heard

about Kamala Harris because that's made you dislike her. We have a new manufactured Kamala Harris for you right here. You should believe in our mythology about Kamala Harris. It's really based upon the presumption that the ordinary guy is a real buffoon. But it's also based on the idea that the ordinary guy reacts only emotionally and not rationally. Well, the nice thing about a film is that a film operates primarily on the emotional medium, for sure. That's why films have a score. If you want to know what that music is doing under the film, it is regulating your emotions as you watch the film. But the good news is that if you do a good job with the emotional narrative, you can pack a lot of genuine, thoughtful information in a film. But if you make

the mistake of making a film that has lots of thoughtful information but doesn't have the emotional component, the film will not succeed. Let's talk about your interview with Trump. So, I would imagine something like this is scheduled in advance. You had no way of knowing that you were going to sit down with him one week after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. What was it like talking to him so close to that experience? Did you notice any changes from your previous interactions with him? I did. I noticed that Trump was somewhat more measured. He seemed somewhat more reflective in a in the sense of now seeing his own life as as maybe having some sort of a directed purpose. He's reluctant to be honest, even Reagan was. You know, Reagan was reluctant to say, well,

Reagan would say things like, well, the man upstairs. That was his reference to God. The man upstairs may not like that, you know, things like that. And Trump, too, talks about sort of providence in a roundabout way. But I do ask him those things, because, I mean, it's not just that Lincoln, for example, had in the second inaugural this very powerful providential sense that you don't get in the early Lincoln. But it's that Washington, Lincoln believed that the country is part of a providential narrative. And so I pose this question directly to Trump. And I think I pose this question directly to Trump. and I think I pose it to him at the right time. If I pose it to him at another time, he might have looked at me with a funny look like,

why are you asking me that? What kind of a question is that? Trump normally is not in the contemplative mode. He's a doer. I mean, think of it. This is a guy who's built a big part of the New York skyline. Trump thinks operationally. Like, how do we get this done?

You see Trump, Trump was at his golf course, the Doral in Miami. The thing about Trump is when he walks. into the, he looks and he's like, we need to take that palm tree down. You know, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that's an obstruction to the golf course over there. I, I want people to be able to see people playing on the course. And so he's constantly thinking of how do I make this property better, more attractive. And that's very different than, for example, an academic way of thinking. And, um, Charlie Rose interviewed Trump, uh, when he was facing a downturn. And Charlie Rose, uh, asked, him, he goes, you know, he goes, you've come out of this, and it was a real doldrums, and not only

were you bankrupt, you owed a large amount of money, did you ever have any doubts? Trump goes, no. He goes, never? Trump goes, no. Now, see, to an academic, that is not only abnormal, that is objectionable, because the academic thinks, well, that just shows a total lack of introspection. That just shows a man who has no self-consciousness. Aren't you even aware of your situation?

but for Trump, if he was that way, it would shut him down. I think the same with the criminal trials, because I asked Trump about the criminal trials. I go, you know, any other guy facing like three criminal charges would be, first of all, emotionally undone, but probably would have exited the race. And you not only don't exit it, but you're out there the day of your hearings and you're under a gag order, but you're having a press conference, you're lambasting the judge. You know, you're doing your legal rope-a-dope. And Trump goes, well, you know, he goes, I think this struck me.

He goes, I will just not allow myself, allow myself to be bothered by it. So think about the level of self-control it takes to do that. I will not allow myself to be bothered by the fact that I'm facing multiple criminal charges that could put me in prison for life. You heard that from his daughter-in-law and the attorney as well in the fifth. So in the interview, you pose to Trump some of the criticism that he faces from the left, including that he's a tyrant or a dictator. And his response was something to the effect of similar to what you said about the palm tree

on the golf course. He just wants to make the country better. Why? Curious to get your reaction to that, but also why should, if you're a Democrat or an independent, why should you believe him and not what you're being fed by those liberal media networks. I think that with Trump, we've had the great benefit of having seen him in the job, in the same job that he's trying to get. And that becomes an excellent sort of reference point because the things that they say about Trump could be more believable if he never took office.

Let's say, for example, they say, Trump is going to take office and like Hitler in 1933, he's going to suspend everybody's civil liberties, right? Now, that would make people could be scared by that, but since Trump has been in office, this would be kind of like saying, well, Hitler had a first term, and he was actually pretty good. Economy was really good. Hitler proved to be pretty nice guy. Yeah, there was all the controversy and so on. But he didn't do anything until he was re-elected and then he suspended everybody's civil liberties. Well, that makes no sense, Either someone has that cesarian or tyrannical ambition. And usually those people come to power by force.

They don't come to power by election. And even if they do, the moment they get in, the game is over. And we've seen that in places like Venezuela. The moment Hugo Chavez comes in, there's never going to be a free election again. And there hasn't been in 25 years. But with Trump, you saw that even though he thought he won the 2020 election, when he saw the court cases didn't go his way, like, okay, I accede. We need rule of law. And that's what the rule of law says. And so I

gracefully exit the scene. Now, I still continue to protest that I think the election was stolen, but I don't refuse to evacuate the office. So I think that these things, when, it's not that people don't know them, but they need to be recalled because then you can put them up against the things that you're hearing about Trump and you realize, well, those things really don't sound quite so believable after all. Well, and it's exactly the reason that I say when you are going to judge the candidates, you have, obviously, Vice President Harris is not calling all of the shots, but when you look at the economic record of a Trump versus a Biden Harris administration, there's quite a clear contrast between the two. They can roll out all sorts of plans of what they do in the future, but you can also judge them based on their past performance. Exactly. And with Trump, he's, you know, he's a transactional guy, but it's forced me to think back a little bit because I think that some of the neocons who don't like Trump think that Trump is no Reagan. You know, Trump thinks that you can solve world problems by having a relationship with, you know, let's say Putin, that you can call him on the phone. And from the neocon point of view, this is delusional, this is foolish. But now let's look at Reagan for a minute. Because, and I remember this very well, I've written a book about Reagan. In the first term, Reagan was very ideological.

He, the MX missile, defense spending, strategic defense initiative, missile shield. But in 1985, Gorbachev comes in. And suddenly, Reagan starts acting not only differently, the opposite. Reagan now wants to sign defense limitation treaties. He wants, he's very gentle with Gorbachev. In fact, he even tells him jokes, things like that. And the neocons go crazy. They go, Reagan is.

being fooled. It's a trap. Gorbachev is exactly the same as Andropov and Chernanko and Brezhnev and Khrushchev before him. But no, he was not. Reagan recognized that. And Reagan was like, listen, there is a time. It's kind of like you're on a ship. Right. If the ship is tilting on this side, you'd throw your weight over here. If it tilts the other way, you'd throw your weight over here. This is not inconsistency. This is actually maintaining a consistent purpose. And so I think there is a transactional element to Reagan that has gone not fully noticed and that is compatible with the way that Trump sees. Trump is not an isolationist.

Trump is not a guy who says, never get involved abroad. Trump just goes, listen, if there's a bad guy out there, it's much easier to take him out than to go sort of occupy the country, try to then arrange, you know, meetings of the tribesmen, try to organize democratic incidents. Those things are really hard to do. We do not know how to do those things. So even if they're desirable, we don't know how to do them. Trump, in that sense, is pragmatic.

Yeah. Well, and I think he's a student of history. He's looked at what happened with Afghanistan and Iraq, and he's recognized that that's not the direction that he wants to go. Dinesh, let me ask you, was there anything unexpected that he said in the interview that maybe you were going into it not necessarily expecting to hear it? I ask him some stuff about election fraud. And I took him into a little bit of new territory here because I was not talking about the kind of fraud that he's talked about in the past. In fact, a lot of times people, Trump included, will say the solution to our problems is paper ballots. But we discovered in the film and through the film there's a vulnerability even with the paper ballots.

And the vulnerability is that ballots can in fact be made. We have a section in the film called The Ballot Makers. And I brought this to the attention of Laura Trump because of her role as co-chair of the RNC. I also mentioned it to Trump because what this is really a way of saying is that, look, there are vulnerabilities in our system. There are ways of robbing Fort Knox. And we don't just have to think about the ways that they've already done it. We've got to think about the ways that they could do it in the future because you can't

always cheat the same way. You need to be constantly sort of improvising in your cheating techniques. We expose this kind of new potential form of cheating. And the purpose of exposing is that when you expose, suppose something in a film and people know about it, you then can't do it. So if I say, for example, you know, you can rob the store, they left the back door open, but by me saying that and people now finding out about it, it becomes harder to show up at the back door, because at the very least, even if the back door isn't locked, there are people looking for that and you can't

get away with it anymore. So that, I think, is an interesting thing. The most interesting thing for me about Trump was that kind of for a change, he allowed me to sort of run the interview. And he agreed to, I won't say play a passive role, that's never Trump, but he allowed me to move the direction of the questions in a manner that fit the themes of the movie, which actually makes the movie a lot better. Because if I had 45 minutes of Trump, let's just say from a rally doing the Trump rally thing, number one, that wouldn't be original. You could get it at a rally. You don't need to go to a movie. But number two, the movie would be jumpy because we would have a narrative thrust and then there would be this sort of stuck.

Trampe just weighing in with, you know, MS-13 and gang members and we're going to shut the border down. And it wouldn't harmonize with the themes of the movie. So I think he was both generous and in a way more contemplative, maybe more thoughtful in a way. And I think for these reasons, the people who see the movie will be, I'm not trying to give you like a different Trump. I'm just trying to give you to round out the picture where you're. like, wow, that's an element of Trump I haven't really quite seen that way.

Well, and I think you do a good job. Again, we're talking to Dinesh D'Souza. The movie is called Vindicating Trump. Vindicating Trump.com is the website where you can go and find a theater where it's playing. Dinesh, you obviously began work on this long before July 13th. And so how did that first assassination attempt and even the second assassination attempt impact production and you're thinking about making the film? We've gotten pretty good.

Now, this is my eighth documentary. So we've gotten pretty good at being able to parachute information into a film kind of up to the last minute. And when you watch this film, it literally feels like I made it yesterday. You know, it's so fresh. Now, we had a little bit of luck in that we were supposed to interview Trump about two and a half weeks before the first assassination attempt. It fell through. I was a little frustrated because the movie, of course, was all coming together. And I was like, you know, I'm going to have to like parachute Trump.

into this. But the interview, as it turns out, came a week or a few days after the Republican National Convention. So after the first assassination attempt. And so all of that is in the movie. Now, the second assassination attempt is not. But it's interesting that in the second attempt, as in the first, Trump shows the same kind of unbelievable coolness and bravery. He's annoyed after the second attempt that his golf game is interrupted. He's like, I was about to make an amazing shot. You know, that's the way he, and then he posts on social media, zero for two. I mean, talk about the ultimate like up yours.

Zero for two, guys. He's taunting would-be assassins, you know? And combined with the first assassin, Hemp, you see right there just in those two episodes that you cannot and I cannot think of anybody we know, anybody, beyond who we know, anyone on the scene who would react in that way. Trump is in that sense, as they say, sweet genre, he's a unique individual, and I think his uniqueness is suited to our time. You have had a tremendous success with your previous movies, not only in theaters, but also

just distributing them directly to consumers. How has the reception been from theaters for this movie, given the controversial nature of Trump? I was worried about that. because Trump is, Trump's name is radioactive in the movie, certainly in Hollywood. Now, the movie distributors are different than Hollywood. These are the theater chains. We've had very good relationship with the theater chains in part because I've done seven movies.

You know, the movies have done well in the box office. The theaters recognize, they sort of see me as a right-leaning Michael Moore. And so as a result, they're like, okay, well, this is a move. This is a guy with a brand, and there are people who like to see his movies. And, but nevertheless, a movie called Vindicating Trump in an election year, right before the election. I was concerned about it. And the other problem we've had is that after COVID, the theaters were not in a normal state. So we would do these buyouts. We'd buy out a theater, but typically then we'd say, you know, the movie is going to be showing two nights, like Monday

and Wednesday at 7 p.m. That's it. And then people were like, well, if I can't go, then I'm not going to be able to have that theatrical experience. The good news about this movie is it's back to my old model, namely 850 theaters, multiple showings per day. So just for, for example, this coming weekend, there will be showing Friday, Saturday, Sunday, multiple showings and then through the next week. So it's very important for us for a movie to do well in the opening weekend. If you go in the opening weekend, the movie does well, we then explode into more theaters. Hollywood gets the message. This film is a success. So if you can, if you want to support Trump and you want to send a message to Hollywood, round up your friends and family,

go see it opening weekend. Seeing it opening weekend is, is, worth about five times, let's say, going to see it the middle of the next week. That's good to know. That's good to know. And as you said earlier, bring a Democrat and independent with you. Absolutely. You may have to promise to buy him dinner or her dinner afterward, but nevertheless, you know, I would just, the nice thing about a film is, is films are not heavy-handed. They show you things and they let you, they sort of draw you in and they allow you you to make up your own mind. And so a movie is show, not tell. And that's why I think people who see the films, even people who saw 2,000 mules, they were quite disarmed by it. Because,

again, there's so much video. You know, there's using cell phone data. It's all put up on the screen. You can look at it and you can make up your own mind. If you think there's no big deal, I don't see anything problematic about this guy showing up at 2 a.m. in the morning, you know, getting out of his car, looking left and right with a backpack full of ballots. If you don't think that's a big deal, okay. But most people do think it's a big deal. And they think that even if my interpretation of it is somehow wrong, something fishy is going on here for sure. This needs to be looked at. Dinesh D'Souza, thanks for making the film. Again, it's called Vindicating Trump. The website is

VindicatingTrump.com where you can find a list of the theaters where it is showing. Appreciate you spending time with the Daily Signal today. My pleasure. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. Be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed. We help you cut through the clutter and bring you the top news at 5 p.m. each day. Also, please subscribe to The Daily Signal wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts and help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We appreciate your feedback. Thanks again for listening. Make it a great day or not. The Choice is yours. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible

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