The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1174: The Trump Negotiation Style w/ Ron Dodson

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

74 MinutesPG-13Ron Dodson is Principal Owner & Portfolio Manager of a Texas hedge fund.Ron and Pete discuss the latest developments surrounding the Trump administration. They begin by discussing how Trump's experience in the New York real estate market influences his negotiating style.Ron at the American ReformerRon's SubstackRon on TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnano show for the first time. Ron Dodson's here. How are you doing, Ron? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Of course, tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Well, I'm an evil hedge fund manager in Dallas, Texas. I do statistical volatility arbitrage and I have a family office, but I've been into the classics and biblical theology for a long time and right. And life's giving me the opportunity now. I've got both kids out of the house. I get to do the things I'm really passionate about, which is a lot of this and discussing things that. matter. So I've been married for almost 26 years and just very happy, very happy with that and very happy with the direction we've seen things go here in the last little bit. Yeah, that's, I guess that's something we'll talk about today. A lot of people who claim the right are either, you know, really excited right now. cautious or absolutely black pilling and the last one I don't really I can't understand that I can't get with them too old to be black pilling at this point but it's also one of the

things we wanted to talk about so one of the things I brought up to you was Trump's negotiating techniques and you brought up you know people just really most people know Trump from the apprentice and since he became political. But someone like myself who grew up in New York, I've known who Donald Trump was since I was a kid. And you talked about Trump's early dealings in his business. So just using as an example, when Trump says something that seems completely outrageous, like we're just going to buy Greenland. or we're going to annex Canada.

We're taking the Panama Canal back. We'll get to the one that he did recently. We'll eventually get to the one that he did recently and get your opinions on that. But from what you know of Trump's history, especially in his business dealings, how do you see Trump? How do you interpret the thing? How do you interpret Trump when he's saying stuff like that? I think he, I don't, while I don't think,

that he's sitting around reading game theory literature. I think he has a very natural in his gut understanding of how that works. In other words, how do you maneuver on the battlefield of negotiation in such a way that, number one, you understand the enemy better than he does. And it doesn't even have to be an enemy, just the guy who's across the table from you. How do you understand what he wants, maybe even better than he does, so that you're able to offer that carrot? Because carrots work usually better than the stick is costly to everyone. But you've got to be able to threaten to use it in order to, in order for the carrot to be credible.

In what I saw and family business background was in multifamily real estate. And we did a lot of business with a large New York City investment bank that is no longer with us. And our lending team was Trump's lending team on some of the projects he did. Without going into too much detail, there were, you know, we had some visibility into how he would negotiate. It would always be to the great frustration of the lending team because they just wanted everything to be very, very straightforward. But, you know, when you were trying to do a development in the New York, New Jersey, you know, Northeast Corridor, you're dealing a lot with unions, which the perception was that there were some corruption

and you had to, you know, you had to do certain things in order to get your deal done. So it was very different from down here where it's a right to work state. and you just you bid out everything. So Trump would often would realize that, you know, there would be these ovations made by the other side that, well, you know, you just want to screw the little guy. And we, you know, we don't get to participate in the bounty of this development project. And so Trump would often get them on the deal. And what that means is they ended up being participants in the risk of the deal.

and he was able to offload much of his development risk onto the contractors on the deal, which is incredibly stupid from a rational perspective because he's in the position to take that developmental risk. They are not because they just, you know, if the deal went somewhat sideways, he would just reorg, wipe them out and then have a lower cost. And that happened more than once. I'll put it that way. But eventually, he stopped getting, you know, he got his, his ultimate goal was just from the get-go to get fair bids from these union contractors. And he got that. But so you saw an ability to what was the goal of the other side. Well, we want to participate in the deal. Oh, well, I want to offload risk. And he's just very naturally. good at baiting the other side into revealing by saying there are no goalposts on the other

side. He baits the other side into revealing exactly where the goalposts are. And it's brilliant. We'd go through some of these, you know, with Greenland, which is, I mean, the real game there is access to the Arctic and to the polls, which if current trends go, and I'm I'm very skeptical about, you know, the human, you know, human being a major factor in global warming, but the earth does warm and cool, and it seems to be in a warming trend. Those, that northern access is incredibly important. So that's Trump's goal. He's pulled, he's

pulled, you know, the Greenland side completely offside. In other words, you've now see where the local, how much power do the locals have, how much power is European, and it's just brilliant. And I think that's been the case in all of these. The Panama Canal, very, very similar. Obviously, the Panamanians, the elite there, want U.S. access. And so that's immediately what he took away. And, the the Chinese were immediately kicked out of the of their contracts and and they're deciding as to who as to which ships get priority through the locks. So it's so far been very, very good and I think just shows an incredible natural ability to again have the other side reveal where their true goals are without the, you know, all the smoke screen.

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Trump on Dunebiog, Kush Farage. It's one of the problems that people just, they're not aware that this is the way business works. So behind the scenes, we know, you know, I grew up in a union family, and I heard all the stories. I even, you know, I had relatives in the Teamsters when they were a little more,

they're a little more than gangsters who would actually drop bodies if they had to. Right. But when you see these negotiations that happen behind the scenes, I think this is really what you're seeing is this is the first time that most people are witnessing this happen out in the open. And they just don't know what to do with it because, sure, it's, it's, it's, unseemly from a simple morality point of view, but this is the way power politics and power business works. Well, you're making the, you hit on it right there. This is the return of true politics. And as with metaphysics and biblical theology, politics has been out, the myth of the 20th century is the days of politics were over. and they're not.

You can only subdue it for so long. But you're exactly right. This is a politics ultimately is, and I'm quite Schmidian in this, is a battle over way of life. And you can't always solve that with endless debate. You know, Schmidt, the crisis of parliamentary democracy makes, I think, a very good argument as to the facetiousness of that entire endeavor. You have to, you want this, I want this, but I have the upper hand. So we're going to meet my demands first. And then we'll see if we can meet any of yours. And that's, and whatever it is you want, it can't impinge on my ability to live the way I want to live.

And that's what a leader ultimately does, is protects the way of life for, you know, his people. And I think Trump really does see himself as a champion for the American way of life. And that seems unseemly. And he's willing to do or say whatever it takes to get there, especially in the second iteration. Less so in the first. But in this second iteration, I think he really sees himself as that. And that's unseemly because, again, in the 20th century, we were fed this lie that that is, that's not how, you know, everything is consensus. Well, tell that to the guys who were, you know, who fought in all the wars and ended up dead.

I mean, it's, consensus is a, is kind of like self-determination. It's, it's, there's a lot of lie built into that. And I think when you, when people start to realize that this is the way the game is actually played, just like in any union where you have, you have people who are just in the union because they have to be in the union. You have people who are in the union who are there because, you know, it's like, well, they're protecting me. They're getting, they're making sure I get a good wage. they're making sure that our health insurance, all of our insurance is proper. Then you have the group that is like would be throwing bombs in the haymarket in the 19th century.

And those are the ones who don't know how these things are played. And I think one of the problems with that group is that group is still ideological. And they don't realize we're not in an ideological war. We're in a power war where you're just. just trying to get, you're trying, everybody's trying to get what they want. And the only way you're going to do that is you're going to have to play the game. Right. Yeah, the whole, moving from an ideological construct to a way of life or power politics or Schmidian construct is there's, there's a lot of friction there at the edges. And it's going to, I mean, I think the, the boomer

set is just almost completely. it's one of the reasons they're completely irrelevant now because they can't make that adjustment. Everything was about ideology. But ideology ultimately is kind of a scam in the sense that it's a distraction from, you know, it's pretty nice. I lived in a part of Dallas, an internal suburb, you know, that's kind of a contradiction. But a part of Dallas when I was growing up, and I'm in my late. 50s where we never had to lock. I didn't even own a key to my house. We never locked the door.

You didn't worry about anything getting stolen. That's a luxury. But that kind of should be the norm, right? And so what's more important? Returning to that type of reality or some Platonic idea. I say platonic. I shouldn't say that. I'm a big fan of Plato. But But this ethereal ideal that you're constantly chasing that you never get through. And what does it do for you anyway? We're about people. But again, that change is very, I still talk to it. And it's not just the boomers.

A lot of guys my age, it's all about ideology, you know, and making that change to where, no, it's about the people. is hard. That's a difficult deal. You see it with, I mean, to really think about it, should people have the right to gather together and exert a level of power for a collective good, which is what the unions are?

Well, certainly. Is that, does that have follow on after they've done that, are there later on costs, externalities, of that that are often detrimental to society as a whole. Well, that's absolutely true too. So it just takes wisdom to sort these things out. You can't have an ideology that flattens everything out for everybody at all times. It just reality doesn't work that way. Well, then I guess you can make the argument that one of the reasons why unions today would even be a necessity is because there are so many different interest groups because of multiculturalism, there are,

are vying for power. And in a society that is not multicultural in a homogenous society, the need for unions doesn't, if people really were to stop and think about that, the most, the strong, the person who's the most pro-union, if they were still in like 1930 Sweden, what are you forming a union to protect yourself against. That's right. You haven't been invaded yet. So, but then, but then that also, I mean, that almost seems like a kind of ideology now of, well, until we basically get the United States back to being just heritage Americans whose families have been here since the founding, we're not going to, we're not going to.

And when I hear that, I hear a narco-capitalist saying, we're not going to. going to have, we're not going to have free markets until we end the, until the government goes away kind of thing. Yeah, that's, you know, I was, I was a huge fan of, in my, in the late 80s, early 90s, spent a lot of time with Ledwig von Mises Institute, Luehellen Rockwell, all those, read a ton, back when, you know, it wasn't cool, was reading a lot of Papa. And when, when, it went hardcore and cap because in the in the old days people don't realize the libertarian movement was kind of a paleo con kind of thing it was it it it assumed an ins that that that the social institutions were taking care of a lot of the things that they wanted to move off of the state's

plate and not realizing that those institutions for the most part were all corrupt and gone right And so when it went hardcore ANCAP, I kind of lost, I lost my taste for it. But I have a lot of appreciation for a lot of those guys. You know, the question now, I think, comes to the, and often you don't know what the real opponent is until in hindsight. It's like the generals always want to fight, you know, prepare for the last war. right now, it seems to me, and I can be wrong on this, that corporate personhood is and the lack of the political will to limit corporate power when its collective ends up being contra to the power of the state to do what's good for the citizens. Now, that sounds complicated. What am I talking about?

well, for instance, we're getting to a point now where Amazon is what kind of power. And, you know, Bezos seems to be kind of rolling over and playing nice right now. But just from an employer standpoint, the power that Amazon holds over an immense swath of employees is alarming if you just look at the numbers. and the fact that, you know, it's run a lot of small businesses out. Now, maybe we needed a new paradigm. Maybe we needed a new model. But I question, you know, so is the union the right tool to fight that? Maybe not.

Maybe it's we need to think about what does corporate personhood really mean? Should if we grant corporate personhood, then maybe that person should owe the same loyalty. that a citizen would. And maybe that's a better way to think about it. I don't know the answers, but I do know that when you get to a point where some of these, some of these, some of these corporations end up being de facto states

within and of themselves, I don't know if that's beneficial. Again, it's all about the state owes its first loyalty. I'm going to sound like Hobbs here. It owes its loyalty to the citizen. It's and and I think we've completely lost that. And we're hopefully getting a little bit of that back, but, but that's the paradigm, which we need to be working in. And so some of these old tools, unionism, trust busting, maybe we need, you know, we need to be really thinking wisely about what's the, what's, what's the best way to deal with these issues now. I don't, I don't. know that the ANCAPs or the Libertarians or the Paleocons, any of them really have it because everything's changing. I don't know. You know, you and I have kind of very similar reading lists

in our past. What do you think about? How do you, how would you deal with Amazon? Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. Home Essentials to seasonal must-habs. When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

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with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbioghush Farage. I... They'd probably need to be... Well, I think the first thing you have to do is you have to revoke Citizens United. That has to go away. Yeah.

When you look at the amount of convictions, quote unquote, let's use the term convictions that corporations have against them, many of these CEOs would be in jail. Right. I mean, you have these 1020 life laws, or not 1020 life, but a third strike in your outlaw. and you you know so once you have your third conviction you go to jail for life these corporations can pretty much kill people at will that's right with with their products with whatever they do denying service things like that you know Luigi Mangeone is a psychopath I mean it's obvious that he's meant he's

mentally ill but if you put that aside And you look at like the person that he killed, this is, this is somebody who is, would probably be in jail if it wasn't for Citizens United. Or he would have been, after the first conviction, he would have been, he had been fired. They would get rid of these people. They don't have to because there's no, there's no liability upon, upon persons. Right. officers of a corporation cannot be held liable for things that they do. Right.

I think that basically the corporate liability shields need to be removed and they need to be treated like any other business. Maybe there's, and you see this in financial management as well. So, you know, how big is BlackRock? Golly, what's their assets under management now? I mean, it's, it's, you know, there just needs to be a rethink about, you get to this too big to fail thing with the banks. And that's a whole other topic we could talk about endlessly about the debtor, the debtor nation of our, of our culture and society. And whether that's, you know, a Christian presupposition. But that really is another topic.

Well, you can't have debtor as prison when you're government. government is $34 trillion in debt. Exactly. And when you allow usury, what amounts to usury. And I see Trump has really has floated a pretty interesting trial balloon about capping interest rates at 10%. That's a, that's pretty ballsy. Well, getting rid of, getting rid of LIBOR was probably the easiest,

was probably the easiest stepping stone to do that and go into so-for. Because LIBOR was just having our interest rates being controlled by a foreign, by a foreign entity. Yeah. No, that's absolutely true. So wait a minute. Where were we? You know, again, you're kind of talking about the same thing I am, that if you're going to have corporate personhood, then you have to, then you have to treat these corporations as if they were citizens with all the same issues. But I'm with you as far as the corporate, you know, shield. Should somebody have the right to as an, that original, that original, that original, of liability was for the sake of, hey, if I wanted to invest in this Indian trading company

that's going to be, you know, growing tea and I have no control over the captains of the ships who, you know, have to fight off pirates and everything, I'm limited in my liability to the investment. And that's fine. For the guy who's just owns share, I'm okay with that. But there comes a point in time in the management of that entity. If you're taking, you know, we call it in tax law, you have active versus passive investment. If you're active in that investment, then yeah, you absolutely should have liability. If that means it's a board level or a C-suite level or a VP level, whatever it is,

it's it's clearly we're dealing with some uh some moral hazard here writ very large well i guess the the term that kept coming to mind and i don't think it's a term it's a term that needs to be reinterpreted for modern day as no bless a liege the oh yeah oh yeah we're so far from there though i mean sadly uh but if I don't know that any of these new people who are in charge, even understand the concept of it, understand the concept of patronage networks. The left understands the concept of patronage networks. They probably don't understand.

They probably couldn't tell you what a patronage network is, but they live in that reality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I've taken to saying that the left gets their radicals elected. and gets them, you know, six-figure no-show jobs, and the right cancels their radicals. The right can, you know, if you, you've mentioned Carl Schmidt a few times now,

no one talking about Carl Schmidt openly is taken seriously. Is they're actually, you're suppressed. You're a radical if you're talking about Carl Schmidt, because, you know, there was a certain German painter who allegedly, they were like buddy buddy which is a complete no that's a farce you know Schmidt was detained because he wasn't he wasn't down with the final solution stuff anyway we could go all into that

but that's way too complicated for people because the average normie can't hold two things in tension and that's what we're really talking about oh so a person who is is incredibly wealthy and and and and and has been blessed by their citizenship owes this obligation to bless those around this idea of noblesse oblige. But that's a very aristocratic ideal. And we've spent the last however many years since Wilson saying that, you know, an aristocracy

is in and of itself evil as opposed to, well, there might be, there's always abuses. where, you know, if you believe in a sin nature, and I'm a, I'm a Trinitarian Christian, I do. People need to be governed. But that's a very, that's that aristocratic ideal that those who have been born with gifts, abilities, material blessing, use that for the betterment of society as a whole. And that's, you don't do that through, you know, that's where inheritance. taxes came from and everything, which are an incredible blight on this country because they end up, they end up destroying. Oh, well, I'm going to pay my taxes. I know, I know, I owe nothing to

anyone because what you're, you're just going to take it by force. Anyway, now I am sounding like my, I'm sounding like Hoppa and my libertarian buddies. But, but it's true, you know, Ron Paul has been, by the way, you know, you know, do you ever read? any Gary North by any chance? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So, you know, Gary wrote was the ghost writer for Ron's newsletter all those years when Ron got elected to Congress. And anyway, brilliant.

Go read. Go read something. Gary died several years ago, but well worth perusing. If you're a Christian and interested in kind of applying some of the stuff, pretty interesting guy. Yeah, we were, I was doing my little, my little get together with my buddies for the thought crime syndicate recently. And one of the things that, one of the things that D said was he said, you know, we, on the right, we should have no problem having like a think tank, which is like the John C. Calhoun. What did he say? The John C. Calhoun Center for Political Thought.

He goes, and we have, we have people who, we have single people who could finance it. it. And we don't. We don't. No one is doing it. And every once in a while when we talk about patronage and it's like, okay, so a lot of our guys, including myself, can do this full time out of the generosity of the listeners who, you know, provide for us and allow me to put out as much material as I do. And hopefully it's, uh, it's all quality. It's good. I try real, I try real hard for that. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, there's no, there's no reason why there are people out there on our side who could be, who could just start an institute and all the, all the podcasters they like can be under, you know, paid through that and take and taking care of and wouldn't have to rely on

people but it's where the left sees the benefit in that sees the benefit in their people having a voice saying things that may go a little too far just to push the Overton window a little bit and we can talk about the Overton window too because we were talking about that it doesn't seem like the right wants that and I think that a lot of that has to do with the spirit of the age it has to do with the post-war consensus is everyone scared of the accusations of going to going too far right. But yeah, I mean, our guys are, a lot of our guys are honestly inspiring the change, inspired the change that's happening now. Yeah. Well, you mean, the patronage deal, I think, is, you know, that's Roman Catholics still to a large degree

practice this. And, and they're great at, you know, My two daughters both went to conservative Catholic all-girls school here in Dallas. I'm conservative Presbyterian, Reformed. But I saw that with the Roman Catholics that church wasn't just where you went and got your spiritual fix once a week. But you actually, that there was a family, we're in this together. And if somebody, you know, oh, hey, did you hear about John? Yeah, they reorg them out. Well, hey, we got to figure out a way to get John a job. And that aspect of patronage in Protestant land has been lost. Part of that is the, is the, you know, kind of the mega church deal where it's a very consumer model. But we treat politics and we treat spirituality, which are two sides of the. same coin. You know, it's funny, when Paul, Paul uses this interesting word, his, the apostle Paul uses this word all throughout his letters when speaking of righteousness. It's Dicayosune.

And if you read Plato's, if you read the Republic, Socrates is always talking about justice. You know what word it is? In the Greek, it's Dicayosune. There's politics and, and, and righteousness and justice are two sides of the same coin. But anyway, we've lost that with this consumer aspect that we've embraced in the Protestant churches with regards to how we do this. And because of that, I think this idea of patronage networks has gone away. But you absolutely should have. And with it, the old social clubs that were around that, again, the Catholics did it great. Knights of Columbus and so on and so forth. We don't have that. We've lost that in the Protestant world, and we need to gain it back. But I think pastors have in embracing the church

growth movement of just marketing to as many people as possible, I think they've lost that ideal, but we need to get it back. I think it really grows out of, out of that. And then I'm a leader in a, in a private fraternal organization that has chapters all over the country that's been written up in the Guardian and so on and so forth. And that's one of our goals is, hey, we absolutely are a patronage network for our members that if we get persecuted for, something we say or do or, you know, not for the guy who does something wrong and deserves it, but if you, if you've, if you've just are getting persecuted because you actually are, you know, are too far to the right or a believing Christian or whatever, that we're going to band together

and take care of you. And that absolutely needs to return. But I think it's, for me, at least, I think it's it's it's it's broken down because it's broken down in the churches. I don't know what your thoughts are on on that. Yeah, I mean, it, you know, growing up in a in a Catholic diocese going to Catholic, going to Catholic high school, altar boy, I mean, you know, everything, baptized when I was 45 days old on just on Christmas Eve in Germany. Really? Yeah.

My dad was in the, my dad was in the military. sorry, he was stationed over there, my mom. It was at that time where pretty much wives traveled with their soldier. Do you mind saying? I think I said it the other day. It's the one in Heidelberg. I think it was the 120th hospital. It's the one that Patton died in.

Oh, you're going to draw me outside and get talking about that. Let's not do that. which is interesting because Patton and I also share a birthday. Really? Wow. Yeah. Are you Neil Stevenson fan? I've read,

I mean, I've write Snowcrash, yeah. Yeah, well, his latest that just came out, Polostan, Patton is a,

is a more than minor figure in that novel. So worth checking out. Anyway, sorry to get, side track. Yeah, no, no problem.

And, you know, something that we talk about is the fact that if the church was stronger, you know, I mean, I came after Vatican 2, and Vatican 2 did a great job of weakening. It seemed like it weakened a lot of diocese. And in New York City, of all places, you would think, and it was like I was supposed to grow up there. I was supposed to meet a girl at Parish. I was supposed to get married there. I was supposed to stay in that neighborhood. I was supposed to get a job in New York. But that just, that went away. And you see the weakness

in so many in so many denominations in where it's just it's not the same anymore. It's basically they've embraced modernity. And I think you're seeing, you're actually seeing, and the reason I'm talking about this is obviously the most obvious patronage networks and most page is churches. And they were weakened. and they were targeted. You know, I call Vatican to Catholicism's Nuremberg.

They had to go through their own Nuremberg trials so that they could be weakened and they could be destroyed just as any right-wing thought would be in the future. Real right-wing thought, not, you know, free markets, which is leftism. Sorry. It is. Well, it's funny.

You mentioned free market. Mark, it's Adam Smith assumed Christendom for that model to work. You know, it didn't work if you're going, you're trading with people who don't share your presuppositions. You're just asking to, you know, get shot in the back. But anyway, you're absolutely right with the weakening of the church and taking true right-wing thought with it because that's the, I mean, I think that's the source. I don't think right versus left comes from maybe the terminology comes.

from France, the French Revolution, but it, it's, this is a, this is a battle that's as old as, as humans are, you know, as humanity itself of order versus disorder of beauty versus ugliness of, of, of, of, you know, high trust versus absolute and utter individualism. this is the that that is that is not a 200 and some odd year old struggle this is an eternal struggle uh at least the way i see it you know i've told this story before that you know i think it what certain societies get to the point where it's not left or right anymore it's people who want you dead and people who don't and i remember jeff dies to formerly president of the Mises Institute. That's how we met. He, I think it was like February 2021. We're still going through

COVID stuff. I mean, now they're rolling out the vaccines. And he said it's not about left or right anymore. It's not about libertarianism anymore. It's about people who want you dead and people who don't. And that's hopefully, well, we'll see is what happened with the election of of Trump, is that a reaction to that? People, even if they can't articulate it, is it like, well, we're at the point where there are people who want to kill each other. And maybe we need to stop that. Maybe we need someone to come in and try to fix that or maybe someone to destroy the people who want to kill. Because just as in the Spanish Civil War, it's very obvious who the bloodthirsty murderers are. And they're the same, they're the same people from the Spanish Civil War.

They're the same people who won World War II, spiritually. Yeah. When nuns start getting lit on fire, you know who the bad guys are, right? You know who the bad guys are. And that was, I remember, you know, I was a young idiot and, and, and was, oh, you know, I guess Franco is bad and all that. Somebody showed me a picture of a nun getting lit up. And I was like, oh, that happened? You know, I didn't know. This is when I was in, oh, freshman sophomore in college.

And I had a, it's not important. But anyway, yeah, I remember being absolutely red-pilled on that very quickly. But, you know, it gets to the point where you start, you start recognizing all of those tendencies with your, within your own society. And, well, what do you do? And because of the society we live in, because the way we've been structured,

and because we've imported so many people who either hate us or are completely, their culture is antithetical to ours. It's, you know, you wouldn't even know how to begin to do what they had to do then. So it becomes a, political solution. And it seems like the political solution was people were just like, okay, we're going to vote for Trump and cross our fingers. And I guess the only thing that, I guess what a lot of

people are hanging their hats on, or at least not hang, not, not, I don't think anybody has a hundred percent confidence that Trump's going to fix all this. Right. But, you know, I think, but they're getting a champion. Yeah, yeah. They just, they're getting a, champion, it's, it's, it's, it's very hobbsian that, oh, you're going to protect me. Somebody's finally going to bear, you know, is, is going to stand up and protect me and keep me from getting killed or harmed or my way of life being destroyed. It's, it's not that complicated. And we can talk about theory cell stuff when I love to, but, but even a six-year-old can understand, oh, that guy's going to protect me. That guy's going to stand up and, and, and, and, and,

And not, you know, my sweet dad, you know, lifelong Republican and, you know, just can't stand Trump. And I was like, he kept saying, why do you like Trump? And I go, you know why I like Trump? Dad? Because he doesn't hate me. He's willing. He looks at my way of life and says, yeah, I'm willing to fight for that. it's really, you know, that's not, that's not, you don't have to read Leviathan or

political theology to understand that basic truth. And Trump's never read any of that stuff. Of course not. Trump just knows, Trump just knows what he knows. Right. And, you know, I'm sure you and Trump could, you being in hedge funds, you and Trump could have a lot in comment and be able to talk. But Trump could also, it seems like he finds something in common to talk with everyone he encounters. Everyone, with everyone. That Roma Barrett. And we don't do that. We, we,

while we're, while we're judging Trump, we don't do that. Right. No, you're, that's a great point, Pete. You know, that Rona Barrett interview from back in, what is it, 84, 85, something like that, that you can find on YouTube. It, he's the same guy. Actually, he's best. He's, he's best. He's better now, but he, but the basis of that knowledge in his bones of all this. Again, do I think Trump is eating a Big Mac and reading de Maestra? No, I don't. But some guys just, just get it, you know, and God bless him. I don't expect everybody to be that way, but thank God for him. Yeah, it's, it's like my in-laws. My in-laws are, I hope they don't know a lot of the things that I read and that I talk about and everything.

But they're just genuinely good people. Yeah. They're just genuinely good people. If they do, these are the kind of people that if they do something, if they vote in a certain way, or they have an opinion that in some way affects your life. If they vote, end up voting for somebody that affects your life in a negative way, they didn't do it on purpose. Right. They, they, they, they, they, they, they, they're just feeling their way through life. And here's the thing.

This, what we know is not for everybody. Right. You see that, you see that online, you know, somebody can get a, you know, somebody can pick up a book like Israel, Shah, Hoc's, um, Jewish history, Jewish religion. or Solzheny since 200 years together. And they read that and they can't handle it. They can't handle the information that's in there because they immediately go, they immediately fly all the way over to one side and have an opinion. And now they become ideological again.

Right. And their ideology is never going to manifest into reality. Yeah. That's hard. I've got some friends who are great folks, but, you know, have come across, you know, have started noticing and to try to keep them from getting ideological about it, as opposed to, you know, again, as a Christian, I think we've got answers for these things. Yeah, humanity is sinful. It's just flawed. And you need wise. you need to, first of all, look outside yourself, that truth isn't something that bubbles up from within you. It's outside of you. Even Plato spoke of, you know, justice being alien to yourself.

You have to understand that laws, truth is discovered, not made, right? We reject positivism. but but this ideology is always that is always that uh that beckoning apple you know oh if i just had the right if i had the right rules i could fix everything right if i could i don't because people are flawed that's that's the that's the temptation because how can i rely on a person to be wise when it's people who are flawed. Yet, look at, you know, managerialism or, you know, Talmudism or all these things where you try to regulate life to the end. It doesn't work. I do, again, you can have first principles. You can have things that are true. You know,

multiplication tables are true. But it seems to be eternally. But when you make that leap to this governing rubric of ideology that's going to determine every response to every situation, it doesn't work. It never has. You're going to ultimately, you've got to have wise, mature, virtuous people. And that's just uncomfortable while we're still living in the myth of the 20th century. Well, what it comes down to is, is that most people, the overwhelming majority of people should, they shouldn't even be concerned with politics. Politics shouldn't be something they think about, you know. But, you know, Yaki wrote in Imperium, he said, you know, we're in the age of absolute politics for the whole form of our life is now a function of power. And it almost seems like if you're living in the age of absolute politics, it demands that people become political. I said one of the one of the things that I noticed yeah one of the things that I noticed from like the first Trump campaign the 2015 and 16 was you had a lot of people who became who started following Trump who had never been political before never been openly political never been like yeah this is my candidate I'm just going to sit back and vote for whoever I think you know who I think I should vote for but people actually came became political

And there's a problem when you have the internet and anyone can go out there and be political and anyone can start spewing. And they have no political background. They have never read a book on political theory. They don't know how politics works. They think politics works. Their politics is the politics of the post-war consensus. Right. And it's a lie.

So you're adopting politics. It's a lie. And hopefully, I think what we're seeing at least, now so far is that there are people who are going in there who know who understand have figured out how politics works and they're like okay well we need to strip away politics only works if we don't have this insane bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is funding our enemies public and private Yeah. So how do you, you know, so what do we do? How do we take them down? And the problem is, is things have been so bad. And there are people who are of an age where all they've known is internet politics for so long. They don't think that anything can change. They don't think change is possible. They see Buckelly in El Salvador and they still don't think change is possible. They see what Malay is doing in Argentina. And they still don't, they don't think change is possible. Right. it takes will.

It takes will. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It turns out you can just do things, as a friend of mine says. You know, you mentioned, and, you know, Trump's really, really dealing with it now with this concept of impoundment that as the chief executive, and I'm a big article to guy. I think, you know, the chief executive should run the executive branch. That's his job.

And the whole thing serves at his pleasure. But in doing so, you know, he has chosen to practice impoundment of any mandated spending by the executive. And, you know, there was a in 1970, because Nixon tried to do the exact same thing. And there was the 1974 impoundment Act where Congress basically said, no, we can choose to tell the executive what to do by law. And Trump's basically saying, uh-uh, that's an unconstitutional law. And so now you have, you have two big concepts that are going to really be the interesting, I mean, I'm making, I'm talking about, you know, application is trying to bring it down to current events right now, but is, does the, does the chief executive have the final say over how the, how the, you know, that the executive branch spends, spends its dollars? Can it practice impoundment?

Similarly, it's kind of similar to can the state's practice nullification? Kind of similar, but in the executive. And then so you've had two judges now come out. One is this Engelmeyer, Paul Engelmeyer, and then I can't remember the name of the other one. It was in the Hill today in Rhode Island, John McConnell. So you've had these two district judges attempt to enjoin the entire executive branch and say no, the president doesn't have the ability to impound these, these congressionally ordered expenses that are expended by the, by the executive. So the two things are, is impoundment as a concept, does the, does the president have the

ability to do that? And that's, that's going to be a SCOTUS decision. And I not, I don't have a ton of a, man, that's a big thing to go against. for Roberts. That may be a bridge too far, even in its Roberts and, oh gosh, I can't remember the other judge's name. Those are the two that are, they're big on Star Decisus on precedent. But the bigger issue, I think, is does a district judge have the ability to enjoin the entire country? When they are, their authority just exists. In other words, you know, if a district judge says, I enjoin the administration to spend these dollars in my district, there may be some constitutional authority there.

But for the entire country, and this question has never come up before the court. And I think it's very interesting. So that is one to really look for. And I think that will rise quickly to the Supreme Court level. So those are two very interesting things. I was actually emailing with John Yu, who is kind of the. probably the preeminent constitutional, he teaches at Berkeley, but he's a conservative, probably the preeminent constitutional theorist on these things.

And anyway, I'm really looking forward to see how, you know, and it's really up to Kavanaugh and Roberts on that. I don't have a ton of hope for Roberts, but we'll see. Or you can just go to the Andrew Jackson rap. Yeah, you can. Just defy them. And I mean, he could start looking to have them removed. Well, and that's the thing too. I think we're at that point.

I'm just going to say we're at that point. We're at the point where if a president who wants to make drastic change, who wants to leave a legacy of fixing what's been broken for 100 years, then they're going to have to, they're going to have to cross. they're going to have to go to the cross the Rubicon and not swim on the other side. They're going to have to keep going. Yeah. No, I think that's true.

I just think these are the steps that are going to lead up to that. I think he'll defy them until, you know, but you're going to have these. Because the question becomes, you know, you and I both know that the Constitution has written as, you know, we are in a post-constitutional state, but there is still the, as Yarvin talks about, there's this informal versus formal power. And the informal, the question is how do you best, how do you best challenge those if you're going to get across the Rubicon? And I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. I think this two-pronged approach, which is defy, but also go the other, fight the battle on two fronts.

Because honestly, as long as he's president, he owns the biggest army. And I don't mean the actual army, but the, he sits at the, you know, he has the pulpit of the nation, so to speak. And he's riding a wave of popularity. You know, I was just saw that today, the Democrats, the way they're, they're fighting back on this, Senator Andy Kim, who's. from New Jersey said that the way they're going to fight back is they're threatening a government shutdown. And I mean, Trump should, Trump should go on TV tonight and say, bring it on.

I love it. Let's shut it down. Let's see how long you want to shut it down. If you want to shut it down, great. You know, that's kind of what we're looking for. Yeah, shut, but this time shut everything down. Shut every payment going, shut every payment going out and see how long people who are on Social Security and people who are on all the entitlements. That's exactly right. And all you do is take control. You take to the airwaves and you say this is the Democrats who are doing this to you. That's right.

I mean, it's with these judges. Okay, a judge made a ruling. Let's see you enforce it. You in what army? Yeah, exactly. You in what army? That's exactly right. But it is a Rubicon.

It is a Rubicon. But I think, you know, Stephen Miller, everybody talks about the power that Elon has. And that's true. But Stephen Miller is really swinging a big stick up there. So if you want to kind of know some of the thoughts behind this, I would suggest your viewers go kind of look at the stuff Stephen has said and has written. And then Anton has a pretty big,

I don't want to overstate Michael's authority, but I think the intellectual heft is there as far as in, you know, Anton's a Claire monster, which might frighten some of your guys. But I'm friends with all those guys. And I really like Michael. And so that I, or we don't always agree on everything. I, that excites me because those guys absolutely have the intestinal fortitude to say, yeah, Yeah, we're getting in the river. We're going. Do you have, how much more time do you have? How much you need? This is fun. I'm loving.

All right, let's get into this. Okay. Let's circle back to the beginning. Okay. What's, how are you reading Trump's strategy on everything he said about Gaza? Well, I think there's an absolute, what would the game theory be, the madman, madman, you know, madman theory there. And that sounds like I'm saying Trump's acting crazy. No, you just, you practice unpredictability. Like, if you saw Netanyahu's face when he was saying that,

Netanyahu had no clue what he was being hit with. Okay. So, so I, madman theory is just the idea, a strategy where a leader cultivates an image of unpredictability to intimidate adversaries or opponents into concessions. I think there is a, there is part of that. Again, I think, do I think Trump's studying madman theory? No, I just think he has it in his in his gut. But there is an absolute rational explanation for this. Now, in my heart of hearts, do I wish we could wash our hands and be this pure, you know, just be worried about our own borders.

And we have two oceans and a failed state and an incompetent state on our borders. And we just want to maximize the advantages of what God has given us geopolitically in a geographic way. Sure, that ain't reality. Because Egypt, and this is, I'm. I haven't heard a lot of people talk about this. Stormy might have mentioned it once or twice, but Egypt is the problem over there. First of all, there's zero political will to do anything that is directly against Israel. I am not a Zionist. I think Zionism has caused more problems than it

it attempted to fix, but that's neither here or there. We're in the world that's created, okay? We're in a post-1948 world, and we do not have the political will to just say, hey, Israel, figure it out and of yourselves. Because Israel figuring it out in and of themselves, here's what that looks like. If we were to just not have any foreign giving whatsoever, because of the peace accords, you know, Sadat and Begin, Camp David Accords, we give Egypt so much foreign aid. Because of that, now, do they technically, do we pay for their food? Not directly, but they use that foreign aid to buy grain from Russia. Their GDP is no way. Do you see the news today that Russia has record grain exports?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, and this is all tied together. But we basically have been buying Egypt off for the last 45 years or so, 50 years. But because of that, they now have a population that's grown way. We've subsidized this population growth that's far beyond their ability to support. Well, where's the-

$113 million and pretty much. 90% of the country is uninhabitable. Uninhabitable and their biggest slums are right across the street from where their seat of government is. The elite have all moved out into the desert and all that kind of thing. But Cairo is a disaster. But anyway, the point being is where's the release valve? Where's all the food grown right nearby? It's sitting up there in Israel. Now, Israel's nuclear, we could go through, and I did this for some folks, you can go through all the balance of power things with Israel versus Egypt. But Egypt's got a lot more people and a lot more tanks and way more reserve forces. Israel's got nukes.

And Egypt's sitting on the Suez Canal. So do we want, if we, what happens if we abandon that is China is going to come in, big and hard, and Russia is going to come in big and hard to Egypt. And do they stay being? I mean, I don't know what the answer to that is, but do we want a nuclear war with China and Russia being part and parcel to the parties in the Middle East? Because we get drug into that very fast. Because, again, we don't have the political will to let Israel be off on its own.

We just don't. Do I wish we would? Sure, but it's not happening. So I think there's a, the understanding that there has to be, just like Ukraine has to be a buffer state for Russia. Why? Because it's flatland. Russia's surrounded by planes. There's no, you know, full the gap.

Ukraine, Ukraine just means frontier. The Ukrainian frontier. Russia needs buffer states. Well, Israel and Egypt need a buffer. between them. So there is a there is a this game theory that says we weren't going to Trump really doesn't want to say, oh, you're going to genocide all the, you're going to genocide all the Palestinians and then we're just going to help you bulldoze Gaza and you get to take it, Bibi. That wasn't happening, not especially after Bibi played nice with Biden after, you know, and Bibi gets the intel

reports. He knew what happened with 2020. So that wasn't happening. So I think there is some, there is actually some practical, they're going to try to negotiate something that looks like a prosperous buffer state that neither Egypt nor Israel wants to encroach upon. What that ends up looking like, I don't know. Does it look like a U.S. exclave? Maybe.

I don't know. But they can't just allow Israel. to move all the way down the coast to Egypt's border. That's not going to happen. In my opinion. Yeah, basically, the way it's been explained to me is that the money that we give to Egypt and that $3.8 million that we give to Israel that we're never going to stop giving to Israel is a bribe that they don't kill each other.

That's right. A hundred percent. 100%. That was the secret to the Camp David, of course. And people will say, well, what do we have to do with this? What do we have to do with this is the fact that basically anything Israel does gets blown back on us. So in many ways, you're going to have to negotiate with Israel. You're going to have to at least play the game of doing everything you can to control them so they don't do something.

something that is so far outside the realm of Cairo. Yeah, that it's going to blow back on us. I mean, people are like, oh, well, what happened? I mean, there are people out there who will be, who are so anti-Israel that they'll say, well, what do we care if they knew Cairo? Okay. Yeah. Cairo by that point is a Russian and it probably has dual alliances with Russia and China.

and so they just they just they just they just they just imported how many jets and anti-anty aircraft systems did they just get from China oh did they get didn't they get j20s I mean something pretty sophisticated yeah so I mean if yeah j they got j10 Cs and PL 15s okay well okay so the PL 15, go look up, you know, go on if your viewers aren't familiar with the war zone, which sounds, it's a cheesy name, but it's some of the absolute best open, open source intelligence on the web. And go read about the PL 15. And that means they're in line for the PL16, which is also in production, but not being let out. outside of China at this point.

Very capable weapon systems. Very capable. And again, you just can't, again, you can play this ideological game that the U.S. is going to wash its hands and we're going to be over here. But the problem is because of communication, because of travel, because of commerce, And a certain amounts of all those things are just necessary for life. Not globalist, not homogenization, not cosmopolitanism, but a certain amount of those things. Because of the reality of those things, it's an interconnected world and you just got to live in reality.

Again, can we move towards a more nationalist standpoint where we're more concerned about our own citizens in our own backyard. I mean, heck, let's deal with, how are we going to deal with Mexico, Venezuela, and Cuba? I would like that to be a priority. But you can't leave, you can't just, you can't just, you can't just carte blanche, leave the, leave that mess that we created behind. And I would love that. And I would love for our interest in this to not be happening at the same time that APEC pretty much owns every politician in the country. But it just, it is what it is. Well, you've got, you just got a huge, you've got a huge population of Jews here.

And so you're going to have to, now, do the two and a half to 2.7%, whatever it is, somewhere in that area. do they exercise way too much political clout compared to the Christian majority or the, you know, the rest of the people? Absolutely. A lot of the Christian, the majority of Christians are 100% behind them. Yeah, my friend Jeremy, my friend Jeremy R. Hammond, who wrote Obstacle to Peace, which is a great book on Israel, Gaza, said that when it comes down to it, you don't even need APEC. You just need all these Christians who've bought into this false theology of the last 200 years. Yeah, dispensational framework. Yeah.

We can, yeah. Now you're getting in my wheelhouse. But it is, you know, and Whitney, you're familiar with Whitney Webb. I'm sure you are. You know, Whitney wrote a great article a couple of years ago that really focused on Pompeo and that crowd. really stoking a lot of that to really nasty kind of stuff. There's a, you know, Bagby does a great reading. I think that's on YouTube of Whitney's.

Yeah, Jay. Bird has played that on his, on his channel. Has Jay? Okay. Well, I love Jay. What a great. Jay's a dear friend. Doesn't surprise me.

But anyway, you know, these are all of these. questions that we're talking about demand leadership wisdom and a certain amount of vanguardian noose, so to speak, that you're not going to, you need the decision maker. You need the person who's going to rule the exception and do so in a way where the people just see that they're being, again, being protected, being provided, being blessed by. And that's how, I mean, that's what FDR did. And I don't, you know, FDR, I have no time for. But you, but there was your, you know, again, speaking of Anton, who talks about red versus

blue Caesar, there was your blue Caesar. You know, FDR remade the nation in his image. And we're still dealing with it. So it's not like this hasn't been done before. It's just a matter of exerting the political will to do. so. Yeah, and it does all come back to Will. You know, I immediately, when I started learning about Buceli, I tried to find out everything I could about him. And it's remarkable how they tried to keep him out of office and tried to keep him from running for president. And he was able to, like, form a party

at the last minute. And it was, it's absolutely crazy. That's Will. And I think what you're seeing now is will. And I don't know that Trump has the will to do everything that he's doing. I think he is the executive. But I think like all good executives, he is deferring to people around him. And it's the people around him who have the will to do this. And I think, you know, one of the great, one of the great things about this is, if you remember in the last 10 years, the term weaponized autism has been out there. And what Musk has done is he's weaponized autism.

He's brought in all of these kids who are, they're probably not ideological in the least. Well, maybe Big Balls is considering some of his tweets. But the, So beautiful. So beautiful. Yeah, just having, just getting leftists to have to say that on TV. Or even the normie conservatives that I, you know, I have to swim through a lot of that. It's hilarious. But he's brought all these kids in who, you know, are just like, okay, show us what we need to do and we will get the job done. We will root all of this out, you know, and, you know, the leftists are just, they're great, you know, like a 19 year old or a,

22-year-old or a 24-year-old should have nothing to do with national politics, yet like a five-year-old can choose what gender they are and whether they can start, you know, basically castrating themselves. I mean, these people are just utter scum and they need to be defeated. And I don't know that that is a goal, but I think as this goes on more and more, and the reaction becomes more of what it is, I think maybe people who are in there are going to start to realize that. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, just even among the populace, among the Hoy-Polloy, you're seeing a huge, this, the popular popularity of Trump is growing daily. People, again, people love a champion.

people love a winner, but people love the guy who they know is on their side. So, again, I'm very encouraged. I know that there will be, you know, things could go sideways. He might do something out of his gut that is hackneyed or a little off or not quite thought through or even against some of the things we think are good and right. Hopefully he's earned to be viewed, to be given the benefit of the doubt and be given great grace because the fortitude he's shown to do,

I mean, the affirmative action executive order alone, I'm surprised that's not being, That's not leading every podcast almost because nobody, you know, Reagan thought about it for about five minutes. And everybody's like, no, no, no, you're not touching that. So the fortitude to do that is pretty impressive. But the list just goes on and on and on. You know, functionally, we've got our say back with the Panama Canal. functionally. We don't, and we don't have to have soldiers down there protecting it. You're going to do what we're going to tell you to do. I mean, we've created a satrappy down there. May that, you know, may that strategy, again, extend to the rest of at least Central America, if not all of, get to a lot of Latin America on the same page. It'd be good.

I think it's interesting that really their only fight now is that either democracy is being destroyed or the rule of law is being destroyed. And James Kirkpatrick, Greg Hood, I thought his, he had the best tweet about it. He said the rule of law ended about 20 million illegal immigrants ago. We're not doing this anymore. Yeah. And it's it's always the rule of men. you know, it just is. Law can help if you've discovered as opposed to created good law.

You can have it guide you. It functions the same way a lock on your door, front door does. It keeps, hopefully, you know, keeps honest people honest. But it doesn't do a whole lot more than that. You still got to have, again, I'm sounding like Aristotle here, but you need you need virtue maturity morality all those things that or you're you're up a really bad creek I'm about I'm about running out I'm gonna have I'm gonna have to I don't want to bail but probably another five minutes oh no problem no problem I'll let you get out

here. Yeah, it's just interesting that Aristotle was telling, saying that you have to have a Christian society before, before Christ walk here. Okay. Let's finish with this because this is, I've got a, I've got a huge, this is awesome, Pete. Okay, I've got a huge, so I write for American reform or not just for American reformer, they just happen to pick up all my, most of my stuff. Got about a 30 page. It's kind of a scholarly bit on, on the Intertestamental period. But, you know, Plato and Eric Aristotle were always on the run. And why? Well, again, look at the use of we mentioned earlier, this strange term, this Dekaiusune, that they use the same language that the Apostle Paul used in the New Testament. They were rejecting the, they were rejecting the pantheon and on the run because of it,

because it was the pantheon that kind of helped that, in the view of the old timers, held that society together. And they were both realizing that there was this unmoved mover, this one source, this alien source of truth that was that was behind all things. You know, we don't have Aristotle's exoteric writings anymore. Those are all lost. But we have quotations from them. And Cicero quotes Aristotle in this straight, in this beautiful passage where he talks about the farmer going up and looking at the sky and comprehending its beauty at night with all the stars and being humbled, knowing that something much greater than him personally created all that and being convicted by the beauty of it, that there was, in a sense, a holiness there.

And so I think Plato and Aristotle were in a sense some kind of, you know, Gentile prophets that were pointing the way. look, Aristotle inspired Alexander in some way to conquer the entirety of the known world at that point in time, give them a common language. And it was by that common language that this gospel of this Nazarene King spread all throughout the world. And what's really interesting, so Alexander obviously from Macedonia, his son of Philip of Mass. Macedon. Paul has this interesting vision in the book of Acts where he has a dream and the man, a man from Macedonia appears in his dream and beckons and says, come bring this gospel and gospel, this Greek word, Eanglion, which literally means a royal announcement. Come bring this to my people.

Now in the ancient world, there would have been only one man who the readers would have understood that being. So was it allegation? Alexander himself appearing in a dream to the Apostle Paul as a result of the teaching of Plato and Aristotle. Something interesting to think about. So you mentioned Aristotle preaching these Christian things before they were ever written or thought of. I think you're on to something there. All right, Ron. You mentioned American Reformers.

Is that where people can read your stuff? I can read me an American Reformer. I also have a substack. I'm on Twitter and do the, occasional podcast as well. But yeah, American Reformer and that latest piece that discusses those things, it should be coming out in the next, oh, month or so. It's going through editorial. It's long, so it needs it. Awesome. Awesome. Well, going to have you back real soon. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it.