Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experience Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDRLST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is presidential historian Tevy Troy. Tevy is
author of several books, including Shall We Wake the President?
Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office, and
his latest The Power and the Money, The epic clashes
between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry. Debbie, thanks
so much for joining us in this edition of the
Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Hey, Matt, thanks for having me. I'm real excited to
talk about The Power and the Money.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, I kind of want to start
with your previous book, Shall We Wake the President, because
I want to begin here. I think it's a question
a lot of Americans are asking, do we have a
president of the United States right now? It seems after
the disastrous debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in
late June and what I like to call the quiet Coup.
It seems like we don't have an active president of
the United States right now for many reasons. I wanted
to get your thoughts and starting there in this conversation.
Speaker 2: Well, it is a great point, and it raises all
kinds of questions. I mean, if Joe Biden was not
capable of running for president again, is the table of
being president? Now? Did Kamala Harris know about Biden's problems
and his infirmities, and if so, why didn't she say anything?
If not, why was she not aware? So, yeah, there's
a lot of issues. And then it also raises the
question of what are our enemies thinking they're watching. China
has been stepping up military exercises outside Taiwan, obviously, Iran
has attacked Israel twice. Russia is continuing to prosecute its
war against Ukraine. So everybody's watching, and it's kind of
worrisome to not really have someone who's in charge.
Speaker 1: It appears, and I think the emphasis is on appeers
that Joe Biden is at least they woke him up
long enough to appear that he is in front of
and in charge of hurricane disaster response from the federal
government FEMA. There have been all kinds of questions and
concerns about FEMA not necessarily getting to places in western
North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. We've reported on that extensively
at the Federalist and every president, of course, to be fair,
is going to be criticized, certainly by the other party
about responses to disasters. But in your book, you talk
about two hundred plus years nearly two hundred and fifty
years of disasters in this country and the response to
those disasters. How does this president in this administration compare
to others. Is that a fair question?
Speaker 2: Well, it's a perfect question. And look in my book
The Shabwaight the President, where I talk about the history
of disaster response. I'm glad I'm on the Federalist Radio
are talking about this because we used to have a
federalist approach to how we deal with disasters. The states
were in charge, the states are supposed to handle these
kinds of things. And now the expectations upon the federal
government get greater and greater and greater. And you think
that anytime there's a storm, the federal government is going
to come in, and that means that THEMA is super
overstretched and also sometimes acting in areas where it's not
supposed to be, and that limits its capacities when you
do have a massive storm like we've recently had. So
I think we need to rethink how we approach disaster
management in this country in general. I don't think that
the federal job government did a horrific job compared to
some of the other disasters screw ups in the past,
but they weren't complete on the ball either.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no doubt about it. It's interesting to see kind
of the dichotomy just exactly what you're talking about, the
federalist system with states supposed to be in charge of this,
with the federal government playing a backup or ancillary role.
You have in Florid a governor who absolutely seems to
have taken charge in fact, when political politics started to
be in fused into all of this. That is to say,
Vice President and Democrat President nominee Kamala Harris through kind
of a fit about Ron DeSantis, Gon Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis not returning his calls during this. He told her
straight out, you have no role in this. Not only that,
with all of the other hurricanes that have hit Florida
over the years, all of the disasters that have happened,
she never once reached out to Governor Ron DeSantis about this.
Now she's running for president, she wants the appearance of
being an active executive active vice president. Do you do
you find that curious the difference between what is happening
at the federal response what is happening, for instance, in
Florida with the governors.
Speaker 2: Well, I think Governor Desantez clearly understands the proper role
of the states, and that's why he has such a
terrific disaster response mechanism going there in Florida. And you
need it in Florida because Florida always has these types
of stories, and they're ready for it, and they're good
at it. And it was weird to have the vice
president try and interject herself in the process. There have
been times in presidential history, and I talk about this
in shadow Wick the President, where vice presidents have been
assigned by the president to look into these matters. So,
for example, when Nixon was president, he sent Vice President's
Bureau agnew to go investigate what happened in a hurricane,
and how could we do it better? And as a
result of that, we got the five stage hurricane warning
system that we have today. You know, when you hear
about a category one, category two, category three storm, that
came from Agnew's investigations when he was sent down to
look at a hurricane by Nixon. But we clearly don't
have that in this case. We don't have any sense
that President Biden was making Vice President Harris the disasters are,
the hurricanes are like she was supposedly the immigrations are.
So it's just a different, very different situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is interesting. You know, the borders are notion.
I guess if Vice President Harris really wanted to be
in charge of this. It gives me the sense of
al Haig speaking of the Reagan years, or after the
assassination attempt on President Reagan, you had al Haig saying,
you know, I'm in charge here. You kind of get
that with the vice president who is now running for president.
Let's turn to your latest book. I'm interested in this
because of what is happening between the relation the relationship
between large portions of business in America, their relationship with
the executive branch of government at the federal level. Again,
the book, the new book is called The Power and
the Money Clashes between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.
I think about those titans of industry now as opposed
to what they were saying, you know, during the you know,
the early twentieth century, and how those titans of industry
now are in big tech, media, conglomerates, data delivery, all
of those sorts of things, and the relationship over the
last nearly four years with the big tech giants and
the role that they've played in assisting the executive branch
ofment government at the federal level. Particularly, I think of
the Googles of the world and the facebooks or now
shall we say, the metas and the Twitters at the
time actively involved in suppressing speech. We know that, we
know that through multiple congressional investigations, and we know that
by the words of these corporate giants. Has it gotten
more cozy for some of these big tech industries, big
industries with this White House more than ever? Or how
does that stand up to history?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if it's more cozy. The government
and big business are more intertwined in many ways, because
business knows that it has to comply with all kinds
of government requests, regulations, demands in order to be able
to exist, survive, and even thrive in this country. But
there's also a lot of hostility. I mean you look
at President Biden's FTC chair lately, Na Khan, very hostile
to business, and they have all kinds of impositions they
want to impose on business. They want new corporate taxes,
so it's not like their buddy buddy. But at the
same time they do work together. I mean you mentioned
some of the COVID suppressions of speech that the tech
companies carried out from them. So it's almost like the
business is there to do the bidding of the federal government,
and sometimes the federal government will also let them innovate
and make profits at the same time, and sometimes they will.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see what's happening with Elon Musk in so
many different areas now, And you know the latest is
California and their move to overregulate and stop the advancement
of technologies that Elon Musk is on the forefront. How
dangerous is that now? And moving forward?
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, it's the California thing's problem. But there's
other things. In the Wall Street Journal recently, Brendan Carr,
who's an SEC commissioner, wrote about how they voted down
an effort to allow Elon Musk to provide more broadly
access just because of the Elon Musk and they don't
like his politics, which is truly insane. I mean, why
would you. Apparently, according to Commissioner Car, this wasn't there
was no merit on the facts, there was no merit
on the law. It was just because they don't like
Elon Musk, and that's just not the way you should
be running a government. Now. On the other hand, it
should be said that Musk needs to be careful because
government has so much power that if you go too
far in the one political direction, then if a government
wins or a party wins that doesn't like you, then
they can take it out on you. And I think
that's a little bit of what Musk is experiencing.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: He did get his start in the Obama administration, which
was very good to him. President Obama went down to
visit SpaceX. President Obama's energy incentives helped lead to the
rise of Tesla. But then Musk became this big free
speech advocate and critic of what he calls the woke
mind virus, and suddenly he's persona on Grada on the left,
and he guests to see the negative implications of that
when the Democrats have controlled regulatory bodies.
Speaker 1: So, by that token, does Taylor Swift have anything to
worry about if Donald Trump is elected president? She's her
own kind of co operation of course.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know about Taylor Swift, but yeah, I
think it's a problem that whoever you are, you have
to worry whether the government has a D or an
R after its name, what they could potentially do to you.
I just don't think that threat. Government shouldn't have that power.
I mean, obviously there are regulations on let's say, health
and safety that should exist for good reasons, but they
shouldn't be enforced with the discretion based on what party
you're in. So I think that's going far away from
what our forefathers and the founding fathers envisioned in our
constitutional system.
Speaker 1: Well, I think what we lose sight of, and you
do not because you are a presidential historian. You're a historian,
and you understand appreciate the history of all of this
and again I think it goes without saying, but I
think we need to. We all need to be reminded
that those who fail to remember history are doomed to
repeat it. And I think we are constantly at the
past as prologue sort of situation now as we've we've
always been there. So your book lays out, you know,
the history of all of these sorts of battles that
have gone on between a big capital, between big businesses
and the government business in general. You know, we look
back to the Roosevelt and I'm not talking about the
FDR years. I'm talking about Republican Theodore Roosevelt. You know,
the sorts of progressive movements that he led in terms
of the regulatory state. And then you go on to
Woodrow Wilson, who massively expanded the federal government, and then
to FDR and then to LBJ over the years. And
it's not just a Democrat thing, it's a Republican thing too.
We have this massive deep state. How much is that
playing into the experience and what you have written about?
Speaker 2: Sure, Look, I talk about the extensively about the Theatore
Roosevelt period and how when Roosevelt went after John D.
Rockefeller and his company's standard oil. He was directing it
from the White House. I talk about late night meetings
in the White House where they were saying, let's do
this to Rockefeller and then do that. By the time
Bill Clinton comes around and his administration goes after Bill
Gates and Microsoft, Clinton is paling around with Gates. He goes,
he plays golf with him, he goes to dinner with him.
But his Justice Department, which is kind of separate and
removed from Clinton to some degree, and they're doing the investigation,
so Clinton doesn't have to be bothered with the messy details.
He gets to make a friendship with Gates and pal
around with him even as the government is investigating Gates. So, yeah,
there is a big shift over the one hundred and
fifty years that I described in the Power of the Money.
Speaker 1: How much more are we seeing And you've touched upon
this before, but the regulatory climate for for business, And
when I think about that, we have comparisons recently between
the two administrations. You know, we have what happened during
the Trump years. Not to say that there wasn't burdens
regulations certainly for all kinds of businesses, but what we
saw over the last three and a half plus years
nearly four years in the Biden administration, and there are
a lot of businesses who can attest to how oppressive
those regulations have been. Yet we still have a number
of businesses pouring in a lot of money into the
first the Biden reelection campaign and then into the Harris campaign.
Why is that, I guess, well.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of complex reasons why businesses
make decisions. Sometimes they think that if they build a
good tie with an administration, they won't be enforced gens in
the same way. I call this selective enforcement. There's so
many regulations and so many ways to go after a
company if you so choose, the federal government can't possibly
enforce every one of them. So what they do is
they select who they're going to go after based on
who's politically disfavored at the moment. So that's one reason.
Another reason is that Republicans are increasingly critics of big business.
So big business says, well, if the Democrats are going
to criticize me, and the Republicans are going to criticize me,
let me just go and hang out with the people
who are most like me, and you think about it,
Big tech CEOs have a lot in common with Democrats
and Democratic voters these days because the Democrats are the
parties of the blue state bubbles and the elite. So
I think there's a whole bunch of complex factors that
go into why you see business leaders making different decisions
about who they endorse. It's not just as simple as saying, well,
i'm a businessman, I'm going to be a Republican.
Speaker 3: If you haven't learned your lesson yet, never rely on
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After another theme of fallout, while my York is shopped
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Speaker 1: Be informed.
Speaker 3: Check out the watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Our guest today is presidential historian Tevy Troy Tevy is
author of several books, including Shall We Wake the President?
Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office, and
his latest. As we're talking about the Power and the Money,
the epic clashes between commanders in chief in Titans of Industry,
just a final question on that, what are some of
the more epic clashes that you note in your book.
Speaker 2: Oh, the classes in the book are legion. That's what
makes the Power of the Money such good reading. But
in addition to Rockefeller versus Roosevelt, you've got Henry Ford
versus Franklin Roosevelt. Also Henry loose the founder of Time magazine,
goes up against Roosevelt. So those are some really big ones.
In previous days I mentioned Bill Gates against Bill Clinton,
or at least Bill Clinton's administration. And now today we
have Rupert Murdoch. You've had two administrations, both the Obama
administration and the Biden administration have kind of set up
anti Rupert Murdoch or anti Fox News war rooms. So
and then the same person that needed done seems to
be running both of them. So, yeah, these classes are
endless and legion. And as long as federal government has
all this power over business, you're going to see these
classes continue.
Speaker 1: You've made a study of presidential history by living it inside.
I mean that's you have a lot of historians who
do great work, but they do a lot of research
from the outside. You served as Deputy Secretary of the
US Department of Health and Human Services in President George W.
Bush's administration. You have been in the White House. You
have been in the know and connected to a lot
of policy, a lot of issues. You served as a
policy director for then Senator John Ashcroft from nineteen ninety
six to nineteen ninety eight. I wanted to talk to
you about some of your experiences dealing with presidents, dealing
with administrations, particularly in your time as a Deputy Secretary
of Health and Human Services. The experiences then, did you
ever fully expect with what you experienced there to see
the kind of pandemic that we saw in twenty twenty
in this country, but more so the response to it.
Speaker 2: So you bring up a lot of interesting things with
that question. First of all, you have the fact that
the federal government sphysically. The Bush administration where I served,
did a lot of work on pandemic preparedness so that
we wouldn't have that kind of problem, and we set
up multiple barriers to protect the country from this kind
of disease, and those barriers did not work in the
case of the pandemic. There were a number of reasons
for that. One it was built on trust of international
institutions and other countries to report what was happening that
Chinese didn't do.
Speaker 1: That.
Speaker 2: One was built on our capacity to build tests and
then be able to use infection controls to track, trace,
isolate people who have the disease. That failed because CDC
arrogantly said they were the only ones who could make
the test and they failed to do so. And then
the strategic National stockpile, which is the third line of defense,
didn't have anything for coronavirus, even though in that book,
in Shall We Wake the President of twenty sixteen, I
warned that we had no counter measures for coronavirus, and
so that was four years before coronavirus hit our shore.
So we definitely built defenses, and the defenses, for a
variety of reasons, did work. The second thing, and I
appreciate you mentioning this is just my own experience. I mean,
I worked on the endemic defenses, but my experience in
the White House, I think helps sharpen my insights as
a historian looking at the presidency. There's a lot of
presidential historians out there. There's a lot of people served
to the White House, but not a lot of people
have that combination of both. And that's what I bring
to the table in all of my books, including The
Latest Power of the Money.
Speaker 1: The history of pandemics in this country is interesting. I mean,
we take a look at what was then known as
the Spanish Flu. Of course, twenty twenty arrives and all
of a sudden, people are revising the name of it
because they think it's some sort of insult on the
Spanish or something, just as you know the characterizations of
the coronavirus coming from China, the China Flu or however
it has been described by the former president or others.
But it was amazing to me to see the reaction.
Obviously living in real time, but the Spanish Flu of
nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty was a horrendous event in the
United States and globally historically speaking. Did this government and
the administrations involved with it too, the Trump administration and
the Biden administration, did we handle the COVID virus, the
COVID like they did in two thousand, excuse me, nineteen nineteen,
nineteen twenty with the Spanish flu. How did those two things,
the response to those two pandemics, how did they compare.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot in that question. So first of all,
Row Wilson, who was president at the time of the
Spanish flu, did nothing. So whatever we did was better
than that. I think the development of the vaccine in
record time was something that was worthing. But that said,
I think we also made a lot of mistakes. There
are a lot of screw ups along the way. I
think the way we handled the masking situation was not right.
I think all the school closures for as long as
they were were very problematic. But also even the naming
things are issue. You talked about how they had a
renamed Spanish flu. In retrospect, it wasn't called the Spanish
flu because it came from Spain. It was called Spanish
flu because it hit the Spanish royal family. It actually
probably came from America from a military base at Camp Funston.
But to calling the recent COVID outbreak that China flu
actually would have been more accurate. I know people didn't
want to do it. But this one pretty clearly did
come from China. Whether the Chinese government had something to
do with it or not, it's a different ques question,
but it definitely came from China. And so a failure
to name something, to call it what it is, is
often a challenged because it makes it hard for her
to address the thing. And I think we were slow
to deal with the fact with how big a problem
this was from China, because the Chinese were telling, oh,
it's not such a big problem, and then anything that
was directed at China in terms of countermeasure or response,
we've seen somehow as racist towards China or Chinese people,
which it wasn't. So I think when it comes to
matters of science, you just have to call things as
they are. You have to be accurate with your nomenclature
so that you can actually address the problem.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't that. One of the big problems is
that the science kind of changed and it was deified
for some reason. We were supposed to follow the experts,
that's what they kept saying. And there's nothing wrong with
putting trust in experts if the experts earn and deserve
your trust. But what we have found over the last
several years is the experts were abusing are trust. How
much do you think, as someone who worked at the
Department of Health and Human Services, how much has that
negatively impacted how we are able to deal with these
kinds of crises moving forward.
Speaker 2: Yeah, look, in that book, shall we the President I
specifically talk about this issue of trust and how trust
is the number one resource the federal government has in
a disaster, and if you blow that resource, that is
going to make it that much harder to deal with
the issue at hand. And so I'm a fan of experts,
But when experts get their views from politics, or they
politicize what they're providing to you, or you have someone
like doctor Fauci, whom I know and whom I worked with,
when he was saying privately that we have to tell
people not to wear a mask because we want to
limit the number of masks that people purchase in that
really changes the trust equation. And so yeah, I'm for experts,
but I'm not for exs to politicize it.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that Woodrow Wilson did nothing during the Spanish
flu outbreak. He was also incapacitated through much of that,
which brings me back to where we began with this conversation.
We have had instances in this country where presidents have
been incapacitated, not able to do their job, certainly not
able to do their job in the way that they
are expected to do their job. It's a very demanding,
a very difficult job. And when Woodrow Wilson had what
was it a stroke, incapacitating, you know, ailment, we know
that other people, particularly his wife, were running the day
to day affairs of the administration. How different is that
than what we're seeing with Joe Biden in October of
twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, it's possible and perhaps even likely,
that Wilson was incapacitated by the Spanish flu or may
may have brought on his stroke. So it's not that
he did nothing because of his incapacitation. It was perhaps
his doing nothing that led to the spread of the
disease and then his incapacitation. And he was told that
troop transports going to Europe were spreading the disease and
killing American troops. One hundred and sixteen thousand American troops
died in World War One forty three thousand of them
died from the Spanish flu. Wow, So they could have
been a lot better about protecting our boys in uniform
from the spread of this dread disease, and Wilson chose
to do nothing about it even when he was warned
about it. He also had a what was called a
Committee on Public Integrity or the CPI, which is basically
the propaganda arm of the United States government, that limited
discussion of the Spanish flu so it is not to
detract from the war effort. So Wilson's Wilson's response really
has to go down as one of the worst responses
to any disaster ever. Obviously, I don't think we're as
bad in twenty twenty with the coronavirus, but there was
too much politicization and there was a sense that we
really can't necessarily trust the experts, and I think that
has not only harmed our ability to respond to the
Spanish flu, but it has harmed our ability to deal
with disasters going forward.
Speaker 1: Seems like the more things change, the more they stay
the same. And we're talking about Woodrow Wilson over one
hundred years ago, suppressing speech for political reasons for his
agenda and we've certainly seen that. Well, we've seen that,
to be honest, from most, if not all presidents. And
so I want to get your take on the last administration.
I know that time and it is the ultimate teacher.
When it comes to history. You need context, you need perspective.
But this current administration, this current president, how do you
think he compares as a historian to presidents over the
history of this great nation.
Speaker 2: You're driving about this current president, right, President Biden?
Speaker 1: Exactly?
Speaker 2: Not great? One term. Usually the great presidents are seen
as people who do more than one term. With the
example the exception perhaps with James K. Polk, who's one
of my favorite presidents, who served for one term, said
what who's going to do? Did it, and then left.
Speaker 1: And then died. Right he worked himself to death.
Speaker 2: Yes, true, But look, I think Biden's lack of honesty
about his condition, I think is going to be a
mark against him. I think the huge inflation is going
to be a marked inst and I think the fact
that we saw the rise of Islamic terror and the
attack on our ally Israel, the attack by the Russians
against Ukraine. There's a sense that he just wasn't monitoring
or managing world affairs. And he also tried to be
hyperpartisan in his legislative attempts. I mean, he tried to
be Lyndon Johnson or FDR with narrow majorities. They both
had big majorities when they passed the Great Society or
the New Deal legislation, and Biden did not have that.
So I don't think he's going to get great marks
in history.
Speaker 1: You have a little more time. Of course, with the
first administration you have a few years. Again, it takes
some time to really view things in context and see
what policies actually worked or didn't work in policies or
things that happen over time. How do you rate former
President Donald Trump, who is in an interesting position historically
speaking of becoming the second Grover Cleveland, if you will.
Speaker 2: I think that whether he wins the election or not,
we'll have something to do with how I mean, if
he gets the special Grover Cleveland status, I think he'll
be remembered in that in the way that Cleveland is
as a person came back twice the economy was doing well.
You have to remember that liberal historians make the usually
make the judgments or do the ranking. So I think
he's gonna mark poorly of that. Obviously, his legal challenges
are a problem as well. He's divisive in some ways,
I think, so, I think he's going to have certainly
a mixed record, but it was mostly a period of
peace and prosperity also, so I think that gets baked
into the equation as well.
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code federalist. Well, we have the current administration going against
the former administration, an interesting battle as well politically speaking,
and I guess as you've looked over time and presidential campaigns,
there's been a lot of talk about this being an
existential campaign for the country or the republic. How do
you view this campaign?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't buy that because as a historian, I
know that in every single election they say this is
the most important election of our lifetimes. If you ask me,
the most important election in American history was the one
between Jefferson and Adams. Adams loses after one term to Jefferson,
and what he does in response to losing is he
leaves town. He gives up the reigns of government peacefully.
And I think that is the measure of a democracy. Now, Trump,
I think in some ways failed that test in terms
of the way he responded to the election, but ultimately
he did leave down and that allows us to maintain
this system of the peaceful transfer of power, or what
happened on January sixth, And I think he should have
recognized earlier that he had lost the election. But at
the end of the day, we have a peaceful transfer
of power. And I think that is the transition that
was started by our founding fathers, specifically Adams Jefferson in
a very tight run race, and I think that is
that was an existential race. I don't think this race
is existential, even though we will go in different policy
directions based on who wins. And I really don't think
that any election that where they say it is the
most poor election of our lifetime, it generally isn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we have heard that at nauseum, and
so it gets to the point where you say, how
seriously do you take that. I do agree that this
is a critical election. I do worry about the future
of this republic given where we stand today in America.
I do believe that this is a battle of federalism
versus big government, massive government, the swamp as it has
been called. Bureaucrats massive amounts of bureaucrats, and apologies to
you because you served in administrations you were labeled a
bureaucrat at one time. I'm not saying there aren't good
people who work in government, but it has gotten so
massive and so big that there is no sense of
self governance anymore, a very little sense of self governance anymore.
And I do worry about that. How do you feel
about the future of this republic as a historian?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, first of all, I'm not offended by the
bureaucrat of disignation because I wasn't bureacraut. I was a
political appointee. That's how I get around that problem.
Speaker 1: True, true, Yeah.
Speaker 2: But the other thing is that I think our base
problem is thirty five million dollars in debt without any
plan to pay it off. And I don't think either
posdential candidate is seriously addressing that issue. And I think
that the potential existential threat on the horizon that if
we somehow have to declare bankruptcy or sell off national
assets or stop not meet our obligations to future generations,
and that could lead to political unrest. So I think
that's what I worry about most I don't see either
administration or either candidate taking that on, and I think
at some point we're going to have to. Unfortunately, I
think it's going to be a some kind of economic
shock to the system that is going to force us
to do it.
Speaker 1: As we move forward and think about where we are today,
what informs you as a historian in terms of policy,
in terms of executive policy, in terms of the most
or more successful presidential administrations, and is there is there
the possibility that we will see more of that anytime soon.
Speaker 2: Well, again, I try and take a sober rational approach
to this kind of thing and look back at history
to make my judgments, and also recognizing I worked for
George W. Bush, as we've talked about, and he used
to say, they're still writing books about the first George W.
So I'll wait and let see what the historians write
about me. And if you don't think about it, George W.
Bush has looked better in history. A lot of people
who were saying horrific things about him between the years
two thousand and one and two thousand and nine and
now saying, oh, why can't we have Republicans like that anymore?
So I do think over time, traditions change, reputations change.
Woodward Wilson, for example, I think skated by on having
a D after his name for way too long, and
now I think both parties recognized what a bad president
he was. John F. Kennedy obviously tragic assassination, but if
you think about it, he didn't do that much as president,
and I think his reputation has gone down in recent years.
And then obviously people learn about all his sexual shenanigans also,
So I think the time in history sorts this out.
And that's why I love presidential history, because even though
all this stuff has happened already, it's still new to
readers who haven't read it about it. For him, I
see something that Harry Truman once said, which is the
only thing to new is this world is the history
you haven't read yet. So I'm going to keep diving
into presidential history, learn more and more, and try and
share with the world what I learned via my books
on the subject.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the old NBC slogan when they used
to run reruns. If you haven't seen it, it's new
to you, And that contemplates that question of history as well.
You brought up something that I think is interesting, and
I as we close out our conversation, appreciate the generosity
of your time today. But you mentioned Kennedy. John F.
Kennedy an abridged tenure in office, of course for obvious
reasons that we will note coming up next month. But
you're right. I mean, history shows he didn't do a lot.
He was an aspirational president. Aspirations really, I think in
many ways to find that presidency, at least through the
prism of how the public viewedom, how the media viewed them,
the whole camelot stuff. But that's what we have. I
think that Kamala Harris is trying to replicate, not that
John F. Kennedy was the first to talk about aspirations,
but you keep hearing this over and over from Kamala
Harris about aspirations, Americans aspirations. What happens though, when you
have all kinds of aspirational themes and campaign slogans, but
it appears you have nothing to back up the how
to get to the aspirations?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I appear to have just Kennedy a little
bit a moment ago, So let me defend him as well.
I mean, Kennedy was very quick on his feet. He
was the first president to do live, uncut press conferences
with reporters, regularly had the reporters laughing. He was on
top of things. He was very good in that setting.
And I think that's the star contrast to Vice President Harris,
who I don't think is good in any interview format,
even when they find her the most favorable possible interviewer,
interviewers like Colbert who are kind of putting the tea
on the ball of the key over and over again
trying to get her to get the answer right, and
she can't do it. So I actually think that's very different.
You know, Kennedy again deserves some dings for Bay of Pigs, definitely.
I mean, he should not have let that go forward.
And I think so Vietnam trajectory was in part set
by him, although Johnson worsened it. But I think he
still was good at the aspiration stuff, good at articulating
what he thought, good at inspiring the American people. So
let me give some points to Kennedy, even as I
note that he didn't get that much in part because
of the tragic assassination. So I just don't think it's
fair to compare the two, and I think he was
just a much greater political talent than she is.
Speaker 1: I certainly understand and agree with you on that point.
It all makes me long for the days of the
great communicator that I'm showing my age. Of course in that,
can I.
Speaker 2: Think something about the great communicator?
Speaker 1: Just absolutely yes.
Speaker 2: I'm Ronald Reagan, one of my favorite presidents. He used
to say, liberty binds us together, four words that are
incredibly powerful and that we should think about when everyone's
trying to divide us by race, or by gender or nationality.
People who come to this great country, you live in
this great country, want to live in a system of liberty,
and that is what brings us together as Americans. Not
where you're from, now, where your ancestors are from, but
do you believe in this shared project of liberty? And
I think Ronald Reagan and those four words really encapsulated
what it's about all about to be an American. I
would love to have a present going forward who doesn't
focus on the divisions. But the unification, and the unification
is not about whether you can cobble together fifty one
percent on election day a year that's divide by four
but whether you can articulate a vision of what brings
us together as Americans, and I think Reacan did that well.
Speaker 1: I agree with you. I think he did that. You're
absolutely right, and he did at a time that was difficult,
faced zone set of challenges as well. But I also
do believe I'm not a unification or die kind of guy.
I also believe there is division for a reason. There
is a division in this country because of the absolute
daily threat on liberty. And I think what we're seeing
in this election, as we've seen in the past, are
people standing up and saying enough is enough. Our liberties
have absolutely been eroded in a very short period of time.
We saw that, as we talked about with COVID the
government's response to that. We've seen that in terms of
weaponized justice. And we can argue about the merits of
you know, probes into the former president and his allies,
but a lot of the stuff is not based on justice.
It's not based on liberty. It's based on politics. And
I think people have grown very tired of that. And indeed,
the ties that bind our liberty were we just happened
to be losing ours. And I think that's why this
election is very important as well. Thanks to my guest today,
presidential historian Tevy Troy, you've been listening to another edition
of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior correspondent
at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
Speaker 2: On a Lesile check up.
Speaker 1: MAS come without Blacklomp