Dictator from Day One

Foreign.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

This is yet another great episode of the

Secular Foxhole podcast.

Today, Martin and I have a great guest.

Robert Tracynski is back with us to discuss

his latest book,

Dictator From Day One.

Robert, how are you?

I'm doing as well as can be expected these days.

Yes, yes.

It's unfair for us guys who are a little bit older that our remaining hair has

to be coming out just from reading the news.

You know,

that's why I have my.

Cap on my finger cap.

Yes, it is.

But nonetheless, there are ways to perhaps not

to get our hair back, but to fight.

Fight the good fight.

Yes.

Lose a good cause.

That's. Well, that's true.

That's true.

And today I'd like to have Robert go into his book, which comes out, you said Wednesday, I

believe.

Yes, September 17th.

I aimed it for, you know, it could have gone

one way a day, one way or the other, but I aimed for September 17th because that's

constitution Day.

It's the anniversary of the ratification of the cost of the U.S. constitution.

And so that's seemed like the appropriate day to do something that's about an attack on the

Constitution.

So the book's called Dictator From Day One.

It's playing off of this thing that, you know, Donald Trump said like a year or so before he

got elected again for the second time for a second term.

He said, oh, I'll only be a dictator on day one.

Well, you know, who's ever become a dictator just for one day and decided, oh, I'm, I'm

done now.

Right.

And this is about how from day one he's, you know, and literally from day one, because I

talk about,

one of the main things I talk about is something some executive orders you put out on

his first day in his second term.

And from then he's been basically expanding

the, the, the power of the presidency, expanding his power,

creating the system of one man rule.

So the, the subtitle of the book is How Donald

Trump is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back.

Yes, yes, yes.

And I did,

I want to say I didn't get to finish the book, but I read the first chapter and a half and I

do like how you introduced the book.

As far as some history about the Constitution

and about the founding and America's first nation in history founded on ideas.

That's a really important thing that, you know, people don't, may not know the

detail.

That's sort of a cliche.

Oh, we're founded on an idea.

It's been said A lot.

But people don't need to know what specifically that means.

And it's something I've really gotten to appreciate in the last couple of years, is the

way the founders thought and argued about everything, is they would start with, okay,

you know,

the Parliament passed this bill putting a stamp tax,

and they would think about that always in terms of, well, let's go back to the deepest

issues.

And, you know, the detail I love, I've heard from a number of historians, is that, you

know, they're going through old newspaper debates and they said they'll find giant

chunks of John Locke from the First Second Treatise of Government.

You know, John Locke, this heavy political philosophy, talking about, well, why do we

have government in the first place and what function does it serve?

And there'll be these.

These chunks of excerpts from John Locke

reprinted in a colonial newspaper.

And it won't say, this is by John Locke.

There'll be no attribution.

It'll just be out there.

Because by that point, everybody knew who they were quoting.

You know, everybody had heard this stuff before.

They were just reminding you.

Because everybody was up to their eyeballs in

political philosophy and looking at this on that deepest philosophical level.

And it's such a contrast.

I think it's something we've lost today that,

you know, so the way I put it is, you know, when, when the Parliament, British Parliament,

put a tax on tea,

we didn't.

They didn't commission a study on the optimal

tax rate for beverages, right? They.

They talked about, well, what authority do they have to put a tax on us?

What, you know, what.

What is the stat?

What is our status relative to the Parliament? What is our status relative to Great Britain?

Why does government exist in the first place?

They go back to these deep fundamental issues and we tend to, even now, you know, with Trump

in office, tend to do things like, well,

he cut funding for this one particular programme over here.

We're really mad.

He cut funding for this programme and, you

know, not the question of, well,

who gives them the right to put.

To cut funding for this, decide what the

funding of this programme is, Shouldn't Congress be doing that?

Or what gives him the right to put tariffs.

To put tariffs on and take them off and then decide they're going to be higher and they're

going to be lower and it changes three times a day.

You know, what gave him the right to do that just by his own say so, as opposed to having

go through a process and go to Congress and ask for permission to do this.

Let me take that A little further.

I mean,

we should also go back to why is this programme What?

Why is this programme exist? What is its purpose?

Why, you know,

is it really needed?

So on and so forth,

instead of just, okay,

let's just slash everything.

We have no plan, we have no agenda, we have nothing.

We just wanted.

We just hate government, we hate bureaucrats.

And, you know,

isn't that a thing,

Blair, to have a plan to push the different buttons and see how people are reacting and

doing this back and forth, back and forth.

Right.

Yeah, you probably got.

You probably pegged it right there.

But again,

I guess your preface is wide awake,

which is what more people need to be about what's happening, because you're not getting

any of it or very, very little bit of it on the news.

And I think the left is so discredited and so disoriented.

There's something happens after every election that the vox populi has been rendered

and everybody and one side tends to be demoralised.

But I, I think even more so because, you know, Donald Trump,

part of it.

Tom Trump's a master gaslighter, right?

So he comes in and he gets 49.

Excuse me.

Yeah, 49.8% of the vote, I think it is, you

know, which is just under.

He wins.

It's enough to win the election,

but it's not a lot more than his competitor, and not even quite 50%, it's not a majority.

But he goes out and says, I have a mandate.

I speak with the voice of the people.

And so, you know, part of it is he just, you know, he knows, he hammers this stuff in.

He says this again and again and again, and eventually people start to just sort of go

along with it and.

But the other thing that happens is that I think because they didn't expect him to win

another time they thought, you know, after January 6, 2021, you know, we tried to stop

predecessor from being elected.

They thought, okay, he's a spent force, it's over.

The American people had enough with this guy.

They didn't really expect Trump to come back.

So I think it hits this, this extra kick of

demoralisation for the Democrats that, oh, you know, we didn't, we thought this was over, we

thought this was gone.

And the fact that he won a second time was like extra special demoralising for them

because they didn't expect it was possible.

But, you know, they got to pick themselves up off the floor.

I mean,

I, of all people, you know, I've criticised the Democrats forever.

You know,

I'm in this odd position of wanting them to get their act together and be effective, which

is I've, you know, I've never wanted, I never wanted Nancy Pelosi to get her act together

and be effective.

And now suddenly, you know, I'm wishing Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and these people

could actually do that.

And what you're doing, Robert, is with this, find the real classical liberal and this

could really hammer it down in a positive way.

Maybe this will be the wake up call after, you know, we're gonna have.

To get the classical liberals the sort of, the more free market,

the more,

you know, old fashioned liberals.

But you know, a part of it too is that, and I

talk about this later, in later chapters of the book that you may not have gotten to yet.

I talk about how we do need a,

a kind of a united front.

So, you know, I said we're gonna have to heave

a sigh and, and sort of find some allies who are people farther to the left than, than we

would like and temporarily find,

find common cause for them on this issue of we should have a democracy.

We should have, you know, we should have a representative government.

We should have that.

We should maintain the rules of the

Constitution and the checks and balances in the Constitution.

You know, I kind of give the example of going back to the founders again that Jefferson and

Adams worked together very closely.

And then of course, you know, after the

revolution,

they went hammer and tongs at each other for a while and they got to be friends again later.

But, you know, they didn't talk for like 10 years after,

after Adams lost the, the 1800 election.

It took, it took a while for them to bury the hatchet over that.

But, you know, so that they work closely together, they were allies and they fight

themselves afterwards once, once they actually have established the government that they're

trying to create.

Well, yeah, that's true.

I mean,

I still, I mean,

so my,

in my mind, okay,

democracy is such a.

Because we were supposed to be, or started as a constitutionally limited republic,

a limit on the government, not on the people.

And then we've just slid into a democracy and now we're sliding into autocracy,

going back to a democracy.

Let's do the, let's leap over that, back to the constitutional limited Republic.

Blair, wasn't it a publication back in the day with that headline, Is it Worth

Defending a Constitutional Republic? Wasn't you involved in that, Robert?

No, I, I published one very, very long ago called the American Republic Republic.

If you can Keep it.

Well, so one of the things, one of the things

how he evolved on over the years is the terminological issue of, you know, we're not a

democracy or a republic.

One of the things that, that sort of broke me down on this is finding out that a bunch of

Jeffersonians in the 1790s were already using the word democratic.

And they, they, they were, they were the Democratic Republican Party.

So I realised that terminologically the, the, the strong.

The sharp difference between democracy and republic has, has never been as, well, you

know, there hasn't been as, as stark a piece of terminology,

a distinction as, as we might have thought.

But the other thing, and I partly do it just because in, in today's parlance, when people

talk about democracy, they are talking about the parts of democracy that I like.

You know, the, the, the meaning of democracy that I like, which is, you know, that, that

the people are in control of their own government.

And so the other thing I've observed is, you know, I said, I wrote something a while back

says,

you know, I'm a big fan of Thomas Jefferson.

So I'm taking off of his,

when his inauguration, that he gave his first inauguration after this bitter election

between the Federalists and the Republicans that he said, he gave this,

this inaugurate inaugural address, we said, set out the olive branch and said we are all

Federalists, we are all Republicans.

Is it pointing that, you know, we all believe

that we should have a federal government, so we're all Federalists and we all believe it

should be a limited government,

it should be in a Republican form, it should have representative government to answer to

the people.

So we're all Republicans.

Such are appealing to what we all have in common.

And I think there's something too that the case against using the term democracy is the

democracy refers to unlimited majority rule.

The majority can vote for whatever it wants

and you know, can vote to be oppressive, can vote to take away your rights.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that everybody is a Republican in the sense of

wanting, wanting government to be limited by certain things on the issues, on certain

issues.

They all, everybody discovers, oh, we do have fundamental rights that, that,

that the government can't really touch no matter how big a majority.

And everybody becomes like a majoritarian,

accrued majoritarian on issues where they think they can get away with it.

Right.

If you're on the left and you're probably in favour of abortion rights,

then abortion rights suddenly becomes the issue in which.

Well, that's a fundamental right.

Government no matter how big a majority, the

government can't take that away from you.

And if you're a,

or conservative or, you know, Republican on abortion, you're the one saying, oh no, that

should be up for a majority vote at the state level.

You know, that's what they're going to be.

That should be up for a Democratic vote so that, so that Missouri and Florida and places

like that can vote to ban abortion.

So again, everybody, you know, sort of, we're all Democrats and we're all Republicans in the

sense that everybody wants an unlimited democracy who are the majority can vote for

whatever they like on the issues where they think they can maybe win.

And everybody thinks, oh no, government has to be limited.

There are certain things they can't do on the issue where they're afraid that they might not

be in the majority or at least might not be in the majority in the majority at a particular,

at a particular time.

Isn't that the case especially have been here in Europe and now I wonder if, you

know, America is caught up in this, that they don't,

they have forgotten the history and as you said about the ideas.

Yeah,

yeah.

Again,

progressives have dominated universities in every level of education for a century and

it's no wonder several generations have no,

no respect for America's founding or you know,

and things like that.

But getting back to the book,

I still like you.

You outline five main prongs, if you will.

Do you want to go into those?

Right.

So, so one of the things I would mention

you're talking about, you know, all the different causes and what the progressives

have done and what the conservatives have done.

So one of the things that this book doesn't try to get into is it doesn't try to get into

all the causes and all the problems that have led us.

Sure. And that's a huge topic because that's a whole other.

And I think there's,

you know, the conservatives also, I think, you know, it's really emerging.

The conservatives,

they weren't really trying to conserve what America really was.

I think they're trying to, they're trying to conserve a version of America as they would

prefer it should have been,

which is more religious and more authoritarian and more, you know, it's more, it's really

more.

They're trying to go back to a European style

conservatism.

Right.

Well, the Puritans and New England throne and alter conservatism.

Right.

That you're trying to preserve the traditional

power of the state and the church Nationalist.

Yeah, yeah, very Nationalist. And America has never been based on nationalist principles.

So there's lots of things in terms of what went wrong with the conservatives, what went

wrong on the left that sort of got us to this point.

And one of them, by the way, one of the sub themes of this book is that, you know,

I'll give you the five prongs in a moment.

But one of the things, each of them,

in practically every one of them,

I find some area in which, well, there's lots of precedent that's been set right, that, that

he found all sorts of places in which government already, and especially the

presidency, that, where the executive already had this excessive amount of power and certain

limits on the presidency had already been knocked down.

And he found ways to say, okay, let's take that and let's take it to 11.

Let's, let's, you know, take this, you know, where the, the presidency's been given too

much power.

Let's use it and take all the power.

Let's, let's, let's lift all the restraints

and go be what anybody's done before.

So the five prongs are.

So first one is I call the power of the purse.

And so it's the idea that, you know, the, the

Congress is supposed to control spending.

And this is a key part of, so each one of

these prongs, by the way, is about some aspect of our system of checks and balances.

Because the way you could, the way you keep government limited, the way you keep a free

society is no one person gets to decide everything.

Everybody has to go through.

You have multiple institutions with their own powers, and they're all sort of there to check

and block each other and keep them, keep themselves limited.

And so in each one of these things,

Trump is knocking down some sort of check against his power as chief executive.

So the first one is Congress as the power of the verse, Congress having power over the

money, over the spending.

And this is what I talk about with, with the

Doge thing that, that, that Elon Musk was doing for a while and it's outgoing without

him.

And this was a major aspect of that, is that,

you know, Doge was billed as, oh, we're going to cut costs, we're going to be for government

efficiency.

They didn't actually cut anything.

And that's the amazing thing about it, is if you look at the details,

there are people, there are experts out there whose job is to go through these numbers and

see what's going on with federal spending.

And you follow those people as I do, and you

find out had no impact whatsoever on the actual total amount of government spending.

So there's a graph somebody did of, you know, government spending last year and then

government spending this year.

And it's the same curve.

There's like a few little wiggles that are different.

It's the same curve, just a little bit higher.

We're spending more than last year.

So all this budget cutting that happened, somebody called it budget cut theatre, right?

It was a theatre of budget cutting, but they didn't actually cut any federal spending.

What did they actually do instead? Well, what they did instead is they said,

well,

you know, Elon Musk and a couple of 19 year old tech guys that he brought in,

they're going to be the ones literally going into the back end, the tech, the technical

computer back end of the system and manually approving or not approving things that are,

that are spending based on what their prior, based on what they think we ought to spend.

And in disregard of the fact that Congress has passed bills saying you can spend this, you

can't spend that.

And so it's really an attempt to grab that

power of spending from the Congress and put it into the executive.

So that's why I see as the fundamental thing.

And then this includes also things like taking

over the Library of Congress.

So Trump came in and said he fired the Library

into Congress.

I'm going to, I'm going to put a new library into Congress and I'm going to assert control

over this.

And you know, the thing about the Library of Congress is, you know, who controls the

Library of Congress is kind of in the name.

It's the Library of Congress, right?

It is, it is the branch of the United States Congress.

And but he's basically saying, anywhere I can assert executive power,

and if he can exert executive power over basically the back end working of the US

Congress,

he's, he's imposing a kind of power over the Congress.

And we see that too in that during this Doge thing, there was a case where there were a

bunch of Congressmen complaining, hey, you've cut funding for this programme in my district.

And Elon Musk goes to Congress and he says, okay, here's my number, you can call me.

And I asked me to help reverse this.

And I pointed out how that's so opposite of the way it's supposed to work, that the

executive is supposed to go to Congress and beg them for money.

And here you have Congressman having to go to the executive and beg him for money.

In this case, it was Elon Musk as sort of co president for a while there.

All right, so that's the first prong.

The second prong is on immigration.

And again, this is one where the, the foundation was laid.

Before that there was this,

there's been this sort of background where immigration and, and the status of foreigners

in the US has been considered almost like an exception to the Constitution.

Right.

That they don't have the same rights against

search and seizure and, and you know, the right of habeas corpus and all these things

that they didn't have the same rights constitutionally that,

that citizens have.

And that's not found grounded in the

Constitution.

By the way, if you go to the fifth Amendment,

it says no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of

law.

It doesn't say no citizen, it says no person.

It's very broad.

But they've taken this and, and so Donald Trump has been in this mass deportation push.

He did what I expected he was going to do because,

you know, when you start saying we're going to deport a million people, we're going to

appoint 10 million people,

you are in, you know, the only way that's going to be implemented is you basically

creating,

you know, jackbooted secret police going door to door, you know, rounding people up and

doing it without due process, without proper procedure, without any legal process and

tramp, you know, really trampling on the rights of all Americans doing this,

you know,

and, and so what he's done is he's built up what I sort of call a, literally a secret

police because you have these,

these guys from ice, the Immigration and Custom Enforcement, going around with masks

and wintest of time we've ever had masked law enforcement in this country.

I mean, that is just like, that's, that's the thing that should really creep you out more

than anything else is law enforcement.

People go around with no badges,

no regular uniforms, masks over their faces.

It is literally, literally a secret police.

And then he has his case where, like, for example, he took 238 guys that they rounded

up.

They claimed, oh, these are terrible, horrible

gangsters.

They had no evidence for this.

And they sent them with, with no process at all,

avoiding the courts.

They sent them to this prison in El Salvador,

to this very brutal prison where they were mistreated and, and beaten and,

and, and treated very badly in, in El Salvador.

And again, there's no process at all.

Anybody could be grabbed.

And as some people point out, you know, they've got a great,

there's a scholar of Soviet economic History, who had a great line.

He brought an old Russian joke to describe why you need due process.

And the joke is that there's a bunch of foxes are running away and leaving the Soviet Union.

And somebody asked them, why.

Why are you leaving? They say, well,

there's a new law that, that the Soviet Union has outlawed.

Camels says, but why are you running your foxes, not camels?

He says, look, you try proving to the NKVD you're not a camel.

Yeah.

So,

you know, if you can't, if you can't, if you don't have a process of law, if you don't have

people being able to go into courts and have the regular operation of the courts, you know,

try proving you're not a camel.

Try proving you're not.

Try proving that you're a citizen, try proving

that you're not a criminal, that you're not a gang member,

if there's no process at all.

And you could just be sent off to a brutal

foreign prison based on the.

Just the whim of somebody who works for,

for ICE or for Border patrol.

All right, so that's.

The second prong, is creating this sort of,

this police force that has,

is not bound by due process.

The third prong is various attacks he's made

on the courts trying to limit the power of the courts and lie to the courts, deceive the

courts,

the courts.

Unfortunately, I think the Supreme Court's

been cooperating in this, in, in oftentimes overruling lower courts in order to give more

power to the executive.

And the most ominous part of that prong, though, is that he's gone after.

Trump has gone after big law firms,

and he's had these retaliatory executive orders where he's like, denying them security

clearances that they used to have lawyers for these firms,

denying them federal contracts, sometimes denying them the ability even to step foot on

government property to be able to, you know, so if you're a big law firm and you have,

you're, you're representing corporate clients and you have to go work with regulators, if

you can't set foot on government property,

you, you can't represent your clients.

And it's something he's been doing and

basically in order to, to beat down the big law firms and make them basically tell them,

don't take places we don't want you to take.

And so, you know, because Donald Trump wins 100 of the lawsuits that, that people won't

dare file against him.

Right.

So it's his attempt to sort of rig the courts by depriving people of the right to, to

representation against him.

Now the fourth one particular talk about more is, is the power he has over the economy and

he's done, you know, it's his tariffs, but it's also a lot of other stuff.

You know, taking a 10 stake in intel, that's one I think is really interesting we can go

into.

And then the fifth one is civil society

society.

So he's done various things to try to sort of co opt the press,

the political press and also just insert himself in every aspect of,

of our public life.

You know there's, I found some wonderful

quotes from Tocqueville who's sort of the man on this Tocqueville talking about how, you

know, he says in, in, in any big thing you see going on in Europe,

behind it you'll find, in France you'll find it, you'll find the government.

If there's a big thing that's going on,

the government will be behind it.

It'll be leading the charge.

In England, if you go look at it, there'll be a great lord who is behind it, who is the sort

of aristocratic sponsor this is in America you go, you find some big activity and you find

that there's a private association of private individuals who just all decided to get

together to do this.

And these associations are what's behind everything.

And I think it's really important that, you know, if you don't want government or a great

lord to be in charge of everything,

you need to have this, this term we use now is civil society.

You need to have these private organisations.

And Trump is sort of like inserting himself

out there in every aspect of that.

Like what he's done with, with the Kennedy

Centre in D.C.

where he's,

you know, he's, it's supposed to be this sort of cultural centre that's nonpartisan and he's

basically taken it over and made it partisan and now he's saying, oh, maybe I should be

getting an award from the Kennedy Centre because I've, you know, I've waited for years

for one.

They never called me.

Maybe I should give it a word to myself.

That assess sort of way of putting himself in the centre of everything, even things that

aren't even politics.

Let me.

You just made me think of something, didn't.

Isn't he like PO'd at the.

Is it India or Brazil? Yeah, Brazilian Premier.

Because he didn't vote for, you know, Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize or something.

That, that's India.

So.

Yeah, so There was this, like, there was this little conflict between India and Pakistan a

couple months back.

And this has happened before many times.

And you know, they're, they're sort of

constantly like at the brink of war, but never quite over.

And, and so Trump came in and maybe played some kind of role in tamping this down, though

not as big a role as he thinks he did.

And then the Prime Minister, Pakistan said, I'm gonna nominate you.

You know, sucking up to Trump says, I'm gonna nominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize.

And so he apparently got really mad at Narendra Modi, the, the Prime Minister of,

of India,

because Modi was like,

you know, this, you have this pro.

First of all, this problem isn't even solved.

We're still in high state of tensions with Pakistan and, and probably will be for many

decades to come.

And you know, for second of all, you didn't really do all that much.

But, you know, here Trump is basically pushing him, you should nominate me.

Because he really, you know, I think it's, I think it said, it said Obama got a Nobel Peace

Prize.

So where's mine?

Where's my Peace Prize?

Yeah, he even, this was, even in his first term, he was campaigning for one for

some nefarious reason.

But anyway.

He reminds me a little bit that the old standing example of this was Idi Amin.

He was the dictator in Uganda in the 70s, I think it was where he like had all sorts of,

he was like,

you know, if you look at his official title, had all these ridiculous superlatives piled on

top of.

And he was like the nation's top soccer star.

And yeah, because nobody, he would, you know, he would play these games where he could score

every goal because nobody dared to stop him because they get killed.

Right.

Yes.

There was something similar to that recently where this is when I knew we were in trouble

in Ukraine because this is right before Trump invaded, not Trump, right before Putin invaded

Ukraine.

And people were saying, oh no, he wouldn't do that.

He's, you know, that would be crazy.

It would be a disaster.

He wouldn't do that.

Right before that, he and Lukashenko, who's the dictator of Belarus,

had this thing where they played a hockey game and they were playing hockey against like

these top level professional hockey players and they score and, and Putin scored like

seven goals.

Right.

Which is an enormously high amount for any

sock, any, any, any, any hockey game.

But especially, you know, this 58 year old guy

against a bunch of young pro players.

There's no, he's going to Get a single goal if, if they're playing and it's clear that,

you know, they're letting him win because he's the big guy.

And that's when I realised, you know,

it may be totally irrational for Putin to evade Ukraine, but this is the guy who,

everywhere he goes, everybody's telling him, yes, you are the greatest, you are a genius,

you are the best.

You are the best hockey player in Russia.

8 year old guy, you're the best hockey player.

Or he may be older than that, you're the best

hockey player in Russia.

This is the, the sort of thing where he's,

he's got,

again, it's the, it's classic dictator kind of stuff that, that and this is very much Trump's

mindset as well.

I'm the big guy.

Everybody should be flattering me and sucking up to me at all times.

All these dictators all have the same.

Type of mental personality traits.

Yeah, Familiarities or whatever.

Well, I think you have to, to want to be a strong man, to want to gain power, to

want to, like, make that the focus of your life.

You have to have this obsessive psychological need for attention and validation from

everybody else.

You have to cut, you have to have this thing

like I,

you know, in, in some of these cases, it's like if people stop paying attention to me, I

will literally cease to exist.

I will die.

Right? And so if, if you feel like you need to be the

centre of attention at all times,

you need to be the centre of everything that will give you that obsessive energy to gather

to, to gather the power, to pull the power, pull it together and focus on that to the

exclusion of literally everything else in your life.

And so that's how you get to be the sort of person who's able to get that power.

But it's also why you want the power.

It's like it's, and what you want to do with

it.

You want to, you know, you may tell people,

oh, I'm doing this to make America great again, or to rebuild the Russian empire or,

you know,

restore traditional morality, whatever excuse you give for it.

Right.

Or maybe the work.

So, so I can do this for the praise sake of

the workers of the world,

the older version of it.

So they always have an excuse, but always the

motivation is I want to be at the centre of everything.

I want everybody else paying attention, to be constantly hanging on my every word, always

telling me how great I am and that you have to have that deep sort of pathological

psychological need for that to have that.

That's why they all have the same very.

They all fall into the same kind of

psychological profile.

Yeah.

We will see the TV show, the reality show, when later on, you know, he has been

that a small detail.

What's up with changing from defence to war?

Well, that's.

And doing it so it.

On the sign is not.

It doesn't centre.

How do you see?

It looks very sketchy.

So when they cut it off and then put W a R and

it.

It doesn't look right.

Right now, by the way, that.

That's one thing where he's been.

That's one where.

So he doesn't actually have the authority to

change the name of the department.

Right. Because that.

The. Just as the various departments of

government are funded by Congress, they're created by Congress and they are named by

Congress, so there's a piece of legislation creating the Department of Defence.

So what Trump did is because he likes to pretend to have more power than he has, so he

put out this executive order saying, well, I'm renaming it to the Department of War,

but he hasn't actually renamed it.

What he said is, I created a secondary name,

the Department of War, and we can use that as a secondary name.

So the official name of the Department of Defence is still the Department of Defence,

because he can't change that.

But what he's done is saying, but I've by

executive order said we could use this as a secondary name for it.

And then that's what we're going to put on the signs and we're going to make play, act that

we've changed the name,

but it also has to do with this sort of.

This is again, strongman 101.

They want to appear tough, they want to appear active, they want to appear like they're doing

stuff.

And so constantly changing things.

Constantly.

And also changing things in a way that creates

this more sort of belligerent and bombastic and aggressive appearance.

You know,

Trump is a guy.

He came out of professional.

You know, if you look at his history, it's like we came out of real estate, which is

oftentimes there's a high element of flimflam in the real estate business.

You're always hyping up your latest property and tabloid gossip columns and professional

wrestling.

He did a bunch of stuff from professional

wrestling and reality tv.

Right.

So this is a guy who is.

His whole thing is showmanship.

His whole thing is.

Is the image.

I mean, from the very beginning, when he was

starting out in real estate in New York City, he was never the biggest real estate guy in

New York City.

He's, it's actually relatively small scale real estate player in New York City.

But he always had this big print blitz.

You know, the biggest guys in real estate in

New York City are guys say whose names you don't know because they don't care whether you

know their name.

Right.

People in, the people in the industry, people in New York City, the people who are in the

building industry, they know those people's names.

The general public, they don't care.

I don't need the publicity.

But Donald Trump was the guy who always had this, from the very beginning, had this

massive PR thing because he didn't just want to build buildings, he wanted to be famous.

He wanted to have the PR and wanted to be famous as a great deal maker.

And so this was what he's been doing from the beginning.

The theatricality of everything was hugely important.

But this is another thing.

You look back, I mean, Mussolini,

all of these people, they had that, the pageantry of it.

It was always part of,

it's always part of any authoritarian regime.

Okay, okay, okay.

Did we cover the five prongs or are we still one?

Number four, what did we get to?

So, but the five prongs were taking power from Congress.

Second one is using immigration to create a police state.

The third one was lawyers in the court attacking lawyers in the courts.

The fourth was power over the economy.

And the fifth was civil society.

It was branching out into all these other

areas.

Like universities and the press.

Yeah, the universities, the press.

One of the examples I leave with is.

Now, you may have missed this, Martin, but because it's kind of a us thing.

But there's a, there's a chain here called Cracker Barrel.

Yeah, I've seen, I've seen that thing changing the logotype.

And so like a couple months ago, they didn't improve the service.

What's that?

They didn't improve the service, but they changed the logotype.

Right? They changed the logo.

You know, and it's,

it's kind of a,

it wasn't a great logo change.

It's kind of, they call it bland.

Blanding, you know, is it branding? But meeting it bland.

It was a blander version of the existing one.

But Donald Trump has to weigh in on this and he has to be the guy who comes in.

I got them to, I convinced them to change the logo back to the traditional old fashioned

logo.

And you know the funny thing about Cracker Barrel, I did some research on this,

confirming my suspicions.

And you Know, it's all total false nostalgia.

You know, there's a lot of things when you

talk about, when you find people who are conservatives who are very much into

tradition,

like 80% of the time you'll find this great long ancient tradition that goes back a

thousand years that they're trying to defend is like from 1940.

Right.

It's actually like really recent in this case.

The cracker barrel chain was started in 19.

It's supposed to, it's supposed to look like an old timey country store, but it was started

in 1969.

All the, it's a corporate chain.

They were all built along the interstates

because this is at a time in which 1969, a time which the old country stores in all the

little towns, they had all gone out of business.

They had, you know, the traffic had gone away.

All the traffic had gone to the interstates.

So this is like saying, well, we're going to

build a fake old timey country store.

We're going to put it on the interstate.

It's going to be a corporate chain and it's,

you know, it's going to be this totally complete fake thing.

It's this, you know, it's kind of like, you know, if you go to, if you go to Disney World,

you can go to a fake version of Paris in Disney World,

but it's not Paris.

It's this, it's this little replica of Paris.

Right?

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's very much like that.

Yeah.

But again, this is Trump putting himself into

everything.

That's sad.

I'm telling you, I'm sad.

Well, rounding up that,

those horrible, the five prongs, as you say,

you, you end the book with what, what we can do about it.

And yeah,

let's, let's start, let's start talking about that,

please.

Well, a lot, a lot of my, my conclusion on what to do about it is simply

sort of shaking people, grabbing people like lapels and them to try to wake them up to

this.

That's my wide awake thing too, at the beginning,

aside from being a reference to an obscure US Historical political movement is also there

to, you know,

the idea of waking people up to make them realist.

I guess.

I think people are you especially if you don't

follow politics closely or even a lot of people do follow politics closely, but they've

been in politics for so long.

I think it's a lot of the Democratic leadership,

this is their problem.

They've been into politics so long, they've

got all their habits are built up they have a certain habitual way of doing things and

they're thinking, well, that'll just continue.

So, like, I think a lot of the Democrats in Congress are saying, well,

look, you know,

another party gets into office, they do a bunch of stuff, but they do a bunch of stuff

that some of it becomes unpopular.

And if we could find one issue, an issue here

and there that, that people don't like and hammer them on, that they'll be unpopular and

then,

you know, the next election things will go back our way.

And so it's, you know, no reason to panic.

It's take things calmly and steadily and, and,

and don't get too worked up over anything.

And that, I think that's why they have.

Having this sort of very muted reaction is if, you know, if you've been around in politics

for, like, probably 50 years, like, like someone like Chuck Schumer has been.

Schumer.

Yeah. This is, this is what you have programmed into you, right, as, as your way of

doing things.

And I'm sort of trying to wake people up to

say, no, we need to.

You don't wait to the next election.

You don't wait to 2028, you don't even wait to

2026, the next congressional election.

You need to start resisting on this now and you need to sort of d. You know, and you need

to fight.

The other big piece of advice I have is you need to fight a lot of losing battles, because

right now Democrats don't.

They don't have a lot of battles they can win.

And, you know, even if, if you're a regular citizen and you're opposing this, you don't

have a lot of battles you can win because,

you know, the Republicans do have a majority in Congress and the,

and over the last eight to 10 years, Donald Trump has basically purged anyone from the

Republican Party who would actually be willing to oppose him in any substantive way.

You know, they're, they're like Lynchaney people like that.

They're, they're all out.

The people who were able to say,

look, you know, because there's always been a.

You know,

very few presidents have had this much control over their own party.

Even in Congress, you know, George W. Bush came up with a plan for partial privatisation

of Social Security and the whole thing died immediately because his own party looked, took

one look at it and said, no, we're not touching this.

You know, they did.

He. I think he actually had a pretty decent

plan, but his own party said, no, we're.

We have no courage on this issue,

you know,

this is 20 years.

Social Security is going to go bankrupt 20 years from now.

That doesn't affect us now.

We have no courage on this issue.

We're not going to touch it.

They let the thing die.

So there's been always been cases where you have a president who has certain things he

wants to do, do, and his own party just says, nope, we're out, we're not going to do this.

And Donald Trump, to an unusual extent, has this dominant, such dominant power over his

own party because.

Yeah, I think it's because there are millions

of voters who know who Donald Trump is.

They don't necessarily even know who their own representative is in Congress.

So if Donald Trump comes out and endorses their guy, then they'll vote for him.

If Donald Trump goes against their guy, he's out.

We actually had this happen in my district,

the fifth district in Virginia.

They did a redistricting a couple of years ago that put two Republicans up against each

other.

So John McGuire versus a guy named Bob Good.

And Bob Good was the sitting congressman, but he had been sceptical or critical of Trump.

I think he endorsed the DeSantis in Florida.

And so he was on Trump's bad side.

And John McGuire got the, got the endorsement.

And so they went head to head in a, in a

primary, and the guy who had Trump's endorsement won.

And the guy, even though he was a sitting congressman, even though he's extremely

conservative, extreme, you know, ideologically aligned,

he didn't bend the knee enough.

He was, didn't sufficiently suck up to Donald

Trump and he didn't.

So this is the way he's, he's consolidated this kind of control over the party.

So didn't he do that even in the mayor election in New York?

Isn't that, oh, he's been trying to do that in the mayor's election for the

Republican.

Do, do you have any scoop on that? The Republican candidates there, what he's

been.

Trying to do is he's been actually going for the Democrat, but the Democrat who's

just as corrupt as he is,

which actually, unfortunately, though, there are two people who fit that description.

So there's,

there's the, the former governor Andrew Cuomo, and then there's the sitting mayor who's,

what's his name? Eric Adams.

Adams, yeah, yeah, Eric Adams.

And Eric Adams was actually in a caught and

FBI was investigating for bribery.

And Donald Trump said, oh, we're going to drop

the charges,

basically because he wants Eric Adams to owe him one.

He wants Eric Adams, to be beholden to him.

And I see that I, I could put the charges back

on and you go to jail for bribery or I take them off.

I'm your buddy.

I'm your sponsor.

You will.

This is very typical strongman politics,

right? Machine politics.

And Andrew Cuomo was also a really corrupt guy.

So those are the two, two of the candidates.

But I was talking about how, you know, because Donald Trump has such, even with a, not a very

big majority and for his party, he has such a death grip on Congress, there's not many

battles that Democrats or other people in the opposition to Trump can win.

But I talk, I have a whole section about the benefits of fighting losing battles that, you

know,

but this really gets into the brains of politicians because they don't like to lose,

fight losing battles.

They want to say, let's find a battle we can

win.

And I say, no. There's a whole lot of point to fighting a lot of different battles, including

ones that you lose.

And one of them is, you know, you, you at least flag that issue as important to the

voters, right? You may not win, but you draw attention to it.

And, you know, if you don't fight it at all,

people get the impression, well, you must not care.

It must not be that important.

So if Donald Trump is, you know, defying the power of Congress,

we have coming up right now, a, a,

a thing where they need the votes of Democrats in order to extend government spending beyond

a certain period.

And if they don't approve to it government

spending, there's no approval for further government spending.

There could be a government shutdown.

And I think they should do it because, look,

you know, if, if the power of the purse, the power, control spending is the only power you

have,

you have to use it as the opposition.

You have to use it.

You have to use this to draw attention to the fact that he's been trying to take that power

away from you.

But, you know, so there's a case where you might lose that battle, but you will draw the

public's attention to it.

And if you don't fight,

then the public gets the intention.

Oh, this is no big deal.

It must not be a problem.

You know, the more normal you are, the more you convince everybody else this is just

normal and it's nothing to worry about.

So sometimes you fight just to draw attention to the issue, just so people know what's

happening.

And the other reason you other, one of the other reasons you fight is that you,

well, for one thing, sometimes you win, right?

Sometimes you actually Start a fight that you're not sure you can win, and you actually

find a way to,

to,

to get your, to, to, to push your point across.

For example, great example of that that's still working its way through is.

Well, actually, one example of this is, like I said, Trump round up these people, sent them

out with no due process to this prison in El Salvador.

Well, he since have released them.

He released them to Venezuela, of all places,

but he released them.

But he did that because he was getting so much

pressure on that, and he was losing so many cases in the courts over this.

So it's another case where you challenge him in the courts, even though it seems like you

can't win,

if you challenge him enough, he will actually eventually, at some point, be forced to back

down on it.

And by the way, in the process, there's

another reason you do fight on these things, is in the process of backing down on that

issue.

He,

he burned through a bunch of lawyers at the Justice Department.

They're including one guy who was like the lead lawyer on a bunch of these cases who, who

they fired.

And then he became a whistleblower against the administration,

saying, look, you know, I was in these meetings and they talked about lying to

judges.

You know, they planned out how they're going to lie to judges and withhold information from

judges.

Well, a bunch of these guys who were in the Justice Department, this guy was in the

justice department for like, 14 years.

A lot of these guys who were there pre Trump,

they don't like what's going on here.

This isn't the standards of professionalism they've been, were expected to live up to.

And so you're going to basically burn through a bunch of those guys and you end up with

your, you know, your D team of whoever's left who's just, you know, whose only qualification

is super loyal to Trump.

You end up with a smaller number of those guys, and you have fewer lawyers that you can

use to fight any other legal battle that you're fighting.

And so that's another way or another reason why you fight a lot of these things that you

don't think you're necessarily going to win,

because sometimes you do win them.

And even if you lose them, you're using up

time, using up resources, you're, you're, you're using up energy until the point where,

you know, he becomes less capable of imposing his will.

The last thing this isn't really in my book, but it's one thing I'm planning to write about

is I am Also telling people consider running for office even if just on the local level.

Because one of the things that happens is when somebody's trying to impose this sort of one

man rule on the federal level in America.

The great thing about the American system is,

you know, the division of power, the checks and balances isn't just Congress versus the

courts versus the presidency.

It's also federal versus state and state versus local.

Right.

Because the power is very diffused in America.

It's very spread out down to the, down to the, down to the very lowest level of, you know,

running for dog catcher,

that maybe dog catcher won't make as much difference but run for the local school board.

Run for.

So you know, if the, if the, if, if or edict

comes down about how, oh, we, we mandate patriotic education, you can't teach certain

things that you can't have certain books.

If you're on the school board, you can say, you know what,

as a school board,

we're not, you know, we're going to fight that and we're going to, we're gonna, you know,

we're not going to comply.

We're going to make you sue us, we're going to

sue you.

Or you can simply say, look, the mandate has come down, but we're going to be really slow.

And there's all sorts of passive resistance you can do where it's like we're not in a

hurry to implement this because, you know, we don't, we don't think this should be done.

Yes, minister.

TV series and the book.

Yes. Oh,

well, it's, but it's also, you know, there, it's the bureaucracy that it has to go

through.

But here it's also the local level.

There's so much power at the local level in American politics.

And it's also a great thing where you as the average person have much more ability to

actually accomplish something because you know, if you want to run for president, you

know, you can't.

There's no realistic way you, Joe Average could run for president.

It'd be very difficult to run for Congress.

But I mean, I know some people who have actually done this.

Just talked to Denver Riggleman, who was our former congressman in the fifth district,

who was just a businessman, he was running a business and he got mad at the way things were

working and he ran for Congress and he got in after failing a couple other, at a couple

other, you know, he had to fail at a couple elections and then got,

got in for a term.

But he maybe, you know, so, but it's It's.

It might be a bit of a stretch to say, okay,

I'm going to run for Congress,

but it's much easier to say I'm going to run for mayor, or I'm going to run for the Board

of Supervisors in my county, or I'm going to run for school board, where these are much

smaller local things.

And I know people.

One of the teachers at my.

At my son's school just got.

Won the nomination for the elections this November, won the nomination for the City

Council in Charlottesville.

So,

you know, these are just.

Ordinary people can go out and do this where

the numbers and the geographic area you're taking in, if you have a presence in your

community,

you have a chance of getting elected to these things.

And that can make a difference because you can then be somebody setting an example and

providing resistance when something that's illegitimate is being done.

And, you know, providing that base at the low level, the local level,

where there's still a lot of power, just.

It comes from the fact that you are elected by

the people.

That's brilliant.

Yeah, that's very.

That's very.

Now, you know, not everybody had time to do this, but you could also find somebody.

I think one of the things that's happened in this country that is a problem in the US that

is a problem is that the media industry is.

What's happened to the media industry with the age of the Internet is it basically killed off

all the local newspapers and all the local.

And a lot of the local media.

And so a lot of people.

The example I always use with this is I got a flyer in the mail a couple of years ago and on

the flyers picked it as the opponents we need to defeat are Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and

Alexandria Acacia Cortez.

And I'm looking at, well, what.

What race is this for?

And I look and it says Virginia House of Delegates.

Well, none of these people are in the Virginia House of Delegates.

None of these people are.

That's right.

You know, is within a thousand miles of the Virginia House of Deleg.

That's, it's, you know, but it's the nationalisation of everything, right?

That, that if you know that, you know, that people know who these people are and they

hate, they don't like them.

So I could say I am running against Nancy Pelosi.

You're running against, you know, somebody locally that people don't know and they don't

know who you are.

And it's what happens when people aren't

paying attention to the local politics and everything become.

Everything gets swallowed by national politics.

I'm highly in favour of reviving that interest in local politics and I have.

An idea here now when we're talking about on a podcast, a hyperlocal podcast,

because you can still do the freedom of expression, you can't be censored,

de platformed.

If you have your own RSS feed and could

control that,

you could go very.

A lot of national issues do eventually filter down.

Like we.

We have a whole thing.

In my county,

we have a whole thing of like there's some people protesting because they don't.

People who are angry because they don't want solar farms here.

And. And there's a lot of.

We've.

Suddenly I'm in a rural county where I've never had to deal with this before, but now we

have NIMBYs who don't want anybody to be able to build a house and all that, you know,

because they're.

People are building too much.

The current honey won't be rural anymore.

So a lot of these national issues that you think of as happening, you know, NIMBYism,

that's happening out in San Francisco.

No, it's happening in Louisa County, Virginia, in the middle of nowhere, you know, this rural

county.

So a lot of that stuff comes down to the local level.

And you know, there is somebody actually who's doing something here.

I wouldn't know anything about what's going on in my local politics if not for the.

For a lady who runs a newsletter who.

And she basically just goes to all the county

board meetings and reports on what's going on.

And she's got a subsec newsletter and it's free and you sign up.

And that's how I know what's going on in the local town here in the county and what the

debates are that are happening.

And it's because somebody just decided I need.

Somebody needs to do this, so I'm going to do

it.

And I think we need more of that.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

Well, Robert,

sadly my battery is almost drained and I.

So tell us,

tell us where the people can find you on the Internet.

And please mention again the publication date of your book.

So the main thing is to go to traczynskiletter.com that's my last name,

Tracynski.

T R A C-I N S K-I letter dot com.

That's my main newsletter.

You can sign up there, be on my free list.

And that's where everything I do, I do a lot of write a lot of other things elsewhere, but

it's always announced there.

And direct.

I direct you out to that.

And then the book,

Dictator from day one, how Donald Trump is overthrowing the Constitution, how to fight

back.

Got the image here, if you guys can use it.

Right.

This is the proof.

The proof that I've got here,

and that's coming out on Amazon,

available on September 17th.

So a couple days from the time we're recording

this, probably maybe about the same time that people are listening to it.

What about.

What about the book on cognition? Are you still working on that?

Is that so? You know, this is.

This is my emergency book.

I wrote this in like five weeks.

I've been tracking.

I've been tracking abuses of pres.

So I've been doing this thing called the Executive Watch for the Unpopulist,

where I'm.

And doing that since February, where I'm

tracking abuses of executive power as they come along.

And it keeps me very busy.

And that was like.

Gave me this base of.

Of research.

And then I decided we.

I need to do a book.

I need to pull together the big picture, really, so people know what's going on,

because people aren't aware of what's going on.

They don't.

They don't.

Aren't seeing the big picture.

They're reacting to things here and there.

They aren't seeing how it all comes together.

People need to be much more alarmed about this

than they are.

So I wrote the book in about five weeks now.

In doing so, I interrupted, of course, my previous book projects.

I have one called the Prophet of Causation, which is like a representation of Ayn Rand's

philosophy from the perspective of the central role of the idea of cause and effect as it

goes through there.

That's still in process.

Right.

That I have draughts of.

I've got about half the chapters written.

I've got draughts to work from for the other half that got put on hold because of this sort

of temporary emergency.

I will get back to it.

Philosophical issues operate on a timescale of centuries and millennia.

This operates, you know, the news operates on a timescale of days and weeks and months.

Days, days and weeks.

Right, yeah.

All right.

Well, listen, Robert, thanks for manning the

foxhole with us today.

Always a pleasure.

Thank you very much.