Larry Schweikert

It reads as a narrative story, and you've got all the personalities and personages.

But most time you read a history book, you can tell the professor is a political scientist or he's a professor of political history.

So you get the politics with it.

so deeply.

But as I can tell you, and I think Trump's the perfect example of that, unless you understand the economics and the underlying economic milieu and the forces, particularly the forces driving the economics and where it's taking you, it's very hard to understand

the real meaning of politics, besides just counting up who, what party was running and what were their issues and what was the outcomes.

That's one of the reasons I, I, I love it.

Uh, we got about a minute here and of course you're going to be with us the rest of the time, but in thinking through the book on the 21st century, how did you use, what framework did you use for this?

Well, as I said, I thought that there was a great deal of irony in so many of the accepted memes that we were seeing at the time, the accepted themes that, um,

that Obama was the transformative president of the early 21st century.

Bush committed us to a war.

I'm convinced that if he had gone into Iraq, looked for WMDs after six or eight months, going, nope, not there, and just left,

that in fact he probably would have ended up a much more popular president than he was.

And then, of course, you have this final third of the period, kind of the last eight years, where you had this struggle between the Trump populist forces and the forces of

the elite, something that I think historian Richard Hofstadter would have loved, except he would have looked at it the wrong way.

The elites now are all entirely on the side of, not entirely, but mostly on the side of the Democrat Party.

And the other groups, as we saw in the last election, are starting to move over onto the side of the MAGA movement and the populist movement.

Larry, hang on for a second.

We'll take a short commercial break.

Birch Gold.