02/23/16 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new e-book by long-time future freedom author Scott McPherson.
Freedom and Security.
The Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
This is the definitive principled case in favor of gun rights and against gun control.
America is exceptional.
Here the people come first, and we refuse to allow the state a monopoly on firearms.
Our liberty depends on it.
Get Scott McPherson's Freedom and Security.
The Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms on Kindle at Amazon.com today.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up, it's our friend Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine.
And, well, he's got a ton of great stuff there on the election, on the foreign policies.
Oh, the foreign policies.
And he proves that it's the Republicans, not necessarily the conservatives, who are completely brain dead.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
So I believe the latest, unless you just updated, is how the GOP failed to stop Trump in a nutshell.
I think they believe in themselves, and they just could not see the threat.
Is that the same thinking behind their championing of Marco Rubio as the most sellable establishment candidate to beat Hillary Clinton in the fall?
I think so.
I think a lot of Republicans are telling themselves a sort of fantasy story about how the election is supposed to go or how the nomination contest is supposed to go.
And a lot of them would very much like things to work according to the rules as they've become accustomed to in the past.
And what they've been finding this year is that the old rules where the party elites essentially get their candidate in the poll position and end up winning no longer seem to work.
Well, now, so the thing of it is, I think, well, I don't know about you.
I know I, I guess, agree just with the conventional wisdom that, well, come on, he's Trump.
He's a complete freak, and eventually power always wins, and they'll win, and he'll be gone.
He'll have his moment, but then he'll be gone.
But then I think, as you say in here, this was pretty clear by the end of last summer, by the fall at least, that, yeah, not so fast.
This is not his Herman Cain moment.
He owns this thing.
And, of course, the presumed frontrunner, the biggest establishment case, Jeb, Trump completely just nuked him off the face of the earth, made him basically irrelevant.
Maybe he already was on his own anyway, but Trump just completely blew him away from the very beginning.
But how come it took the people with the power so much longer than the rest of us to adjust to this reality that, hey, man, this guy Trump has a lot going for him in this election, that they're going to be hard-pressed to get out ahead of?
Well, I think for a long time they couldn't really believe that a candidate like this would continue to receive the same amount of support.
And so they missed that his support was actually very enduring and stable and actually quite broad, spread out across Republicans at many different times.
And so I think they sort of thought of him as a fringe or a protest candidate who would fade over time, as candidates like that have tended to do in the past.
And so they missed out on things that he was actually representing within their own coalition that they had been oblivious to or hostile to for decades.
Trade skepticism, obviously.
At least some skepticism about foreign intervention, although with Trump it's still sort of all over the map there.
And obviously criticism of the way that immigration has been handled by people in Washington.
And on those three issues in particular, Trump is speaking for a huge block of Republicans that have gone underrepresented or unrepresented at the national level for a long time.
And so I think party leaders were simply unaware that the threat was there.
And so they weren't prepared for it when it sprang on them.
Yeah, I mean, and what's funny is they had the whole Tea Party movement and this and that, which is basically the rank and file saying, we hate you Mitch McConnell types and wish you weren't our leaders.
And they should have, would have seen all that coming, but then I guess they didn't figure there was anyone to really grab a hold of that.
The conservative movement, the Republican rank and file, they were just going to have to settle for Jeb and that was going to be that.
And yet here comes the black swan coming in.
He's not a governor, he's not a senator, but he's got a billion dollars and he won't shut up.
And he just blew them all out of the water.
And, you know, the thing is, it seems like even if they'd taken him very seriously from the very beginning, there's still really nothing they could do about it, right?
Well, it would have been difficult because there's clearly a significant block of people that are very disaffected and disgusted with Republican leadership that aren't going to be interested in what they're selling no matter what.
And so I think they would have been hard pressed to beat it, even if they had somehow unified behind one candidate rather than spreading out their support among several.
But they certainly would have had a better chance of blocking him if they had recognized that he was a serious contender.
And in fairness, for many months, I didn't realize that he was as credible a contender for the nomination as he has turned out to be.
But certainly by the fall, and with his numbers not going anywhere, you had to figure that he was going to stick around for a long time.
And so he has.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was just that reality pretty quick.
And then once I read a little bit of Scott Adams from the Dilbert blog there about the master persuader techniques and all that, that was when I finally adjusted to the reality that he really is going to wrap this thing up.
And I don't expect Hillary to stand the slightest chance against him whatsoever when it comes to the general election, which, of course, raises the question, Daniel, of just what kind of president is Donald Trump going to be, do you think?
Well, I'm not sure.
I'm hopeful that a lot of the things that are being said about him, that he is interested in reducing U.S. involvement overseas, that he is interested in keeping us out of wars.
I hope that that part of what people are saying about him is true and that we can possibly look forward to a foreign policy that is less meddlesome, less active.
On the other hand, I don't know that that will actually come to pass based on a lot of the people that Trump talks to or seems to talk to.
For instance, there's a report out that he's been consulting closely with Giuliani, of all people.
That's very concerning that he would take seriously anything that Giuliani has to say.
So there are reasons for worry as well as possibly some hope.
I think the trouble with Trump is that his policies are so unformed or so undercooked that there's really no way of knowing which side he's going to land on on any of these debates.
And so that is something to be concerned about.
Even on something that he seemed to really understand, sounded like nothing but was in fact a big deal, is Hillary's safe zone project in Syria.
And I guess it was just one week ago where he told the press in that press conference that, oh yeah, safe zone, yeah, we can do a safe zone.
And, you know, I don't know if that's just politics, it's just statements, this, that, but it kind of rang to me like this is how his policies are going to be made.
That thing where we go to war with the state in Damascus that we're not doing, yeah, let's go ahead and do it with a shrug.
And the entire policy changes on its head and now we're nose to nose with Putin over nothing or no real interest of ours anyway.
Right.
Well, again, that's the worry that he is sort of making it up on the fly and will end up being pushed into making the wrong decisions.
That's certainly something to be very worried about.
I don't know that he will have as much of a chance of winning the general election as all that, but it certainly seems like we shouldn't be underestimating him anymore.
That's where people keep going wrong and assuming that he can't possibly achieve certain things when clearly he's been much more successful than anybody imagined he would be.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, again, I hate to just completely beat a dead horse about that Scott Adams blog, but he just makes such a great point.
It has nothing to do with policies or reason or anything.
It's all just about persuasion and argument and analogy beats reason and identity beats analogy.
And Trump is not running as the true conservative like Ted Cruz or the the new feminist hero like Hillary Clinton.
He's running as the leader of all Americans and this kind of thing.
And and he's willing to throw such barbs unprecedented on that level in a long, long time, at least, where I just think Hillary has so many weaknesses and he will be so ruthless in exploiting them the way he was against Jeb.
I think I can predict a massacre.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Anyway, hold tight right there.
More with the great Daniel Larrison right after this.
He's from the American conservative dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for Wall Street Window dot com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all the stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at Wall Street Window dot com and get real time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wall Street Window dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that once you keep at least some of your savings and precious metals is a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by our RBI dot co.
OK, guys, welcome back.
It's me, Scott.
Yeah, I'm hosting the show.
I'm talking with Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative magazine.
He writes, well, these days mostly about the campaign and, of course, always the wars, the many wars and the politics of them.
So now I kind of plead guilty to you all that I've been neglecting Marco Rubio because, well, people call Donald Trump a clown.
I don't know what that makes Rubio, but I just don't take him seriously.
I never have.
You know, everyone laughed.
I was shocked but not surprised when he had his big gaffe where he repeated the same line over and over again.
I never thought there was really much going on there besides memorized talking points.
And I think even Republicans are capable of learning the lesson of George W. Bush that if your president is that stupid and unsure of himself, then he's going to need a Cheney to tell him what to do.
And I may even be plagiarizing you there, Daniel.
Something you wrote, I forget.
But that's something we don't want anymore as a president that dim.
On the other hand, though, I shouldn't be neglecting him because he is running for president and he is one of the top three anyway.
And as you write in this article here, Daniel, at the American Conservative magazine, he is the establishment favorite.
And that ain't nothing, although it amounted to nothing when it came to Jeb Bush.
But overall, it ain't nothing.
So tell us about him.
What do we need to know, you think?
Well, he is certainly the candidate favored by a lot of party elites and donors.
He is rapidly becoming the favorite of if he wasn't always the favorite of D.C.
Republicans.
And a major reason for that, at least among D.C.
Republicans, is foreign policy, which is extremely hawkish, extremely interventionist, reflexively so, in fact, where he cannot refrain from wanting to commit the U.S. to almost every crisis and conflict around the world.
And as we've seen in his opposition to the nuclear deal and normalization of Cuba, he also vehemently hates any kind of diplomatic engagement with hostile or rival states, even when that kind of engagement may be useful for advancing U.S. goals.
So it's wrongly named as a candidate of omnidirectional belligerence, as someone once called him back in the last election.
Rubio is very much in the same mold, but is much more of a true believer than Romney ever was, I think.
Yeah, I mean, that certainly seems sure enough.
Romney, you say a whole lot of things about him, but at least he had lived in the world enough that he had some of his own opinions to think and stuff like that, his own experience to rely on.
But Rubio seems to just basically be a vessel.
Am I overstating that?
And I guess, well, the truth of it, and am I also overstating the appearance of that?
Is that just me that sees him that way?
Well, certainly the way he appears to a lot of people, but he's simply repeating things that he's been told or the things that he knows that he's supposed to say in order to get approval from party and movement elite.
But I think there is a level on which he has genuinely come to believe this stuff and is really committed to it in a way that's much stronger than any of the other candidates.
A lot of them, except maybe Lindsey Graham back when he was running, with a lot of them, they're paying lip service to a lot of these ideas.
But with Rubio, it seems to me he's really quite passionately committed to them in a way that's very unnerving and frightening.
Well, so now, I mean, he says things like he wants to rip up the deal with Iran on the first day.
You think there'd be a real risk of war with Iran if Rubio was the president?
The risk would certainly increase.
I don't know that he would actually be willing to go through with that, but he would be surrounded and is surrounded by people that have been advocating for something like that for a long time.
One of his top advisors is Max Boot, who has never seen a foreign war that the U.S. has fought that he didn't like.
And there are quite a few more that he would like us to fight.
And I think that's representative of the kind of thinking in Rubio's camp and in Rubio's own mind.
Yeah.
Now, yeah, as far as the foreign policy teams, that's an important point.
The whole John Hay Institute, and I forget the name of this consulting firm that was, I believe, coaching Rubio and Hillary both, according to The Intercept, if I remember that story right.
Global Strategies, something.
Isn't it always just Elliott Abrams?
They name the think tank all different things, but it's just Elliott Abrams all the time.
He's one of them, yeah.
But now, so you mentioned Giuliani there when it comes to Donald Trump.
I saw him refuse to answer about his foreign policy because he said he was about to announce his team in about a week, which I think that week's almost up here.
And, you know, I'd heard him mentioned before he likes John Bolton.
I don't know how well they know each other.
And then I'm sorry, I just had on the tip of my tongue, but you had mentioned, oh, Giuliani.
He was running around with Giuliani, which, you know, is probably even worse than John Bolton, if that's possible.
But then again, he seems to be like, yeah, I don't care about your neocon line that I'm supposed to tow on Syria, Russia, or anything else.
I'll do what I kind of feel like.
So I wonder if you think maybe there will be some surprises in there and he'll, I don't know, find at least some Colin Powell Republicans instead of just all Richard Perls, or what do you think?
Well, it's possible that there could be some surprises.
I think in keeping with the way that Trump is all over the map on foreign policy, I imagine if he does actually produce a list of advisors, the list would be kind of eclectic and would include people from lots of different backgrounds.
I don't know how many people who would end up on that list would be people that we would recognize, because I think a lot of Republican foreign policy professionals view Trump with extreme distaste.
And so they wouldn't want to be part of his campaign.
So to a large extent, if he can put together a list of advisors, it's going to be mostly people that are not coming out of those professional circles.
He's going to be drawing on maybe former military officers, people from the business community.
I'm not sure who he would draw on, but it would not be the usual cast of suspects.
Yeah.
Well, I guess I can maybe see Bolton telling the rest of the neocons, like, I got this, you know, I'll go talk to him, kind of thing.
Because after all, he's not a former Trotskyite, right?
He's just a Goldwater conservative from way back.
And he's very sure of himself, John Bolton, right?
I think he'd be willing.
I'm not promoting the idea.
I'm terrified by it.
But I just, like you're saying, I don't know who else he's going to go to.
I'd like to see him ask Andrew Bacevich, but I don't think Andrew Bacevich is going to give him the time of day either, right?
I would be very surprised if he did.
Yeah, I'm sure he wouldn't bother, but yeah, either way, on either side there.
So, yeah, that'll be interesting to see, because he did say he's announcing his team.
So, yeah, I guess it'll probably be former military guys who are not so much tied directly to the think tanks.
And by the way, do you make much of Trump's, I guess, repeated denunciations of the military-industrial complex and the economics of, you know, Pentagon purchasing and all that?
There's something to it, in that I think he's fitting that into his larger complaints about cronyism or corrupt interests working in and through the political system.
I don't know how committed he would be to rooting out any of that.
But he's certainly shining a light on it more than any of the others.
Yeah, it's amazing to hear him talk like that at all.
But, yeah, again, trying to forge a higher-on-the-ladder, I guess, identity than just conservative-Republican, but somebody for everybody along those lines.
Which, by the way, speaking of which, the exact opposite of that is Ted Cruz saying, I am the candidate of the most hardcore Reaganites who are left, and screw everybody else.
And so I've also kind of written him off and not paid enough attention to really what he's about.
Do you think, politically speaking, first of all, that he's much of a danger to actually get the nomination?
Well, I don't, because he has the knack for alienating even people that should be on his side, just in the way that he deals with other people, the way that he tends to denounce people if they deviate even a little bit from his script.
So I tend to think his support is pretty limited.
And that's been borne out in the results we've seen so far, where he gets a very decent chunk of very conservative voters, but he doesn't get anybody outside of that group.
And so that's going to hamper him, especially as we get later on into April and May, as we get into the Northeast and the Midwest with their primaries.
And I guess he basically takes the Rand Paul line on Syria, right?
Bomb the East but not the West?
Pretty much, yes, although obviously he will amp that up and talk about carpet bombing or whatever he thinks he means by that by pushing for much more aggressive measures in the way that the war on ISIS is fought.
But, yes, he has been pretty clear about not going to war with the Syrian government and not trying to fight both sides of the civil war at the same time.
Yeah, well, and it's funny the way people talk about the sand glowing as though that's just a reference to the carpet bombs, but I thought that was a pretty clear reference to gamma radiation, no?
Well, that's certainly what he meant to conjure up in people's minds.
He wanted people to think that he was talking about using dukes, which even as a rhetorical source is nuts.
But you have to assume that he's not really serious about doing something like that.
Right.
Yeah, just trying to prove that, hey, he's willing to, which I guess is to his credit to some people, but then there's the rest of us.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I really appreciate you coming back on the show, Daniel.
Great stuff as always.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Daniel Larrison.
He's at TheAmericanConservative.com slash Larrison.
A great blog there.
Lots of coverage of the wars and the politicians as well.
And that's it.
We're over time.
See y'all tomorrow.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren'sCoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world.
All specialty, premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for MPV Engineering.
This isn't for all of you, but for high-end contractors specializing in industrial construction and end users who own and operate industrial equipment.
MPV offers licensed professional consulting on chemical and mechanical engineering for your projects.
Tanks, pressure vessels, piping, heat exchangers, HVAC equipment, chemical reactors for oil companies or manufacturing facilities, as well as project management support and troubleshooting for those implementing designs.
MPV will get your industrial project up and running.
Head over to MPVEngineering.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.