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By: Rob Bluey–DailySignal.com
(Continued from last week)
Rob Bluey: 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?
Dinesh D’Souza: 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, 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.
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 acknowledgment of his role on the larger, historical stage. I think he feels that his destiny is, in a sense, incomplete, and that’s part of what’s driving him.
Because think of it, if you and I were billionaires, we had eight, 10 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, two 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.
Rob Bluey: You talk about how he was coasting to reelection 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?
Dinesh D’Souza: 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.
We all know that the media is left-wing, Hollywood’s left-wing, academia is left-wing, but I never thought the FBI was left-wing, and 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. 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.”
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 serpents are more numerous and their dens are deeper than we had previously suspected.
Rob Bluey: I suspect that you’ll see a much-heightened focus on the people who get those political jobs, whom he entrusts to carry out his agenda, based on his experiences. We’re talking to Dinesh D’Souza, who has a new film out called “Vindicating Trump.”
Dinesh, you talked earlier about how in our country you have an alarming number of opponents of Trump. A 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?
Dinesh D’Souza: 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 nonstop 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 they’re anti-Trump.
So as a result, one is forgiven, because think about it, when you’re an intelligent person, how do 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 see it in Barnes and Noble in a book, and then there it is on PBS, there it is on the history channel, there it is and Michael Moore made a film about it, Rachel Maddow’s talking about it, and 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 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.
Now imagine I show you a video. I say, “That’s me as a kid, and that was my room, and 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 would’ve 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 spit up your popcorn.
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 grumbling, anti-Trump relative or that buddy of yours, you’re like, “Hey, I’ll buy your ticket,” I think it will have a tremendous effect.
Rob Bluey: Getting the Democrats and independents 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. You’ve given them a relatively easy way, through the 90-minute film, to get a sense of who the man really is.
Dinesh D’Souza: 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, the liberals do not think in a cognitively rational way, they appeal to emotion. There’s no question that with Kamala Harris they’re doing that. They’re basically saying, “Don’t trust your lying eyes.”
They’re telling the American people, “Don’t trust your pocketbook, don’t trust the prices you pay in the 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.
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.
Rob Bluey: Let’s talk about your interview with Trump. 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?
Dinesh D’Souza: I did. I noticed that Trump was somewhat more measured. He seemed somewhat more reflective in the sense of now seeing his own life as maybe having some sort of a directed purpose.
He’s reluctant, and to be honest, even Reagan was. Reagan would say things like, “Well, the man upstairs,” that was his reference to God. “The man upstairs may not like that,” things like that. And Trump, too, talks about 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 and Lincoln believed that the country is part of a providential narrative.
And so I posed this question directly to Trump, and I think I posed it to him at the right time. If I posed it to him at another time, he might’ve 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? 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. That’s an obstruction to the golf course over there. 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 Charlie Rose interviewed Trump when he was facing a downturn. And Charlie Rose asked him, 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, “Any other guy facing three criminal charges would be, first of all, emotionally undone, but probably would’ve 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’re doing your legal rope-a-dope.”
And Trump goes, and I think this struck me, he goes, “I will just not 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.
