Dinesh D'Souza: Trump Better Suited for Times Than Reagan Would Have Been
Dinesh D’Souza believes Donald Trump is better suited to be president during the current political environment than the conservative commentator’s old boss, former President Ronald Reagan, would have been.
“Reagan lived in a different time, and a different tone was appropriate,” D’Souza says in his new documentary film “Trump Card.”
“If Trump appears to be a mud wrestler, it’s not because he created all this chaos and division, it created him,” the former Reagan White House policy adviser adds.
“Trump’s fighting spirit goes way back. He doesn’t run from problems, he runs toward them.”
D’Souza told The Western Journal that the U.S. is in the midst of “immoderate” time. To those NeverTrump Republicans who pine for the days of a more congenial Reagan, he says: “When you are in an immoderate situation, you cannot act the same way as Reagan acted in 1980.”
“So the old strategy doesn’t work anymore,” D’Souza argued. “You need to respond differently. I think to understand that it is to begin to understand Trump.”
The filmmaker likened the current political atmosphere to the 1860s, when Republicans and Democrats advocated for two very divergent futures for America.
The Republicans, under Abraham Lincoln, wanted to end the growth of slavery and put it on path to extinction, while the Democrats wanted to preserve and grow the institution.
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Today, the battle is between capitalism and socialism, which D’Souza finds bizarre given one major lesson from the 20th century: Socialism does not work.
“Ronald Reagan led America and the world in defeating socialist totalitarianism,” D’Souza says in “Trump Card.”
It did not just fail in the Soviet Union and its former Eastern European satellite states. Even China, while still retaining its communist political structure, gave up on socialism as an economic system by the end of the 1990s.
“Socialism is the most discredited idea in the world after slavery,” D’Souza contends in “Trump Card.”
“We don’t have a major party, certainly not in the United States, that says: ‘You know the thing about slavery, guys, was it was a really good idea, the implementation was poor. This time we’re going to do slavery right,’” D’Souza explains.
“Nobody says that. You can’t say that. You would be immediately carried out in a straitjacket, but with socialism people do say that.”
Just as Reagan was committed to fighting Soviet socialism in his day, Trump is fighting the discredited economic system on our shores now, according to the conservative commentator.
In response to the rise of democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Trump famously promised during his State of the Union Address in February 2019: “America will never be a socialist country.”
“America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”
Borrowing a phrase from one of Reagan’s most well-known addresses, D’Souza says in his film: “With Trump as our leader, we will leave socialism on the ash heap of history.”
D’Souza told The Western Journal that Trump winning a second term is crucial to making this happen.
“I would say the three transformational presidents of our lifetime are, in fact, Reagan, [Barack] Obama and Trump,” he said.
“And the reason the left is so eager to prevent a Trump second term is because you can really change the country in eight years,” D’Souza continued.
“I mean, Reagan did. Obama did. For the worse, in Obama’s case. Trump has undone much of what Obama did, but he hasn’t been able to rebuild the American fabric yet. I mean, that’s the whole ‘Make America Great Again’ project.”
D’Souza believes it will take a minimum of two terms to consolidate and build on the gains of Trump’s first.
“So the stakes are high, and not just in the generic sense that every election is sort of the American dream hangs in the balance,” he said, “but it’s really that if Trump loses, the left will do its best to eradicate every stain of MAGA from American public life.”
“Trump Card” is available for pre-order exclusively through Western Journal Movies until Oct. 6. Click here to watch the trailer and purchase a copy of the DVD or digital download of the film today.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
