David Stockman says Donald Trump 'is part of the swamp'; Jon Ronson explains Covid craziness.

Reagan's legendary budget director makes a convincing case that the reality TV star was bad for prosperity and a great podcaster explains why things fell apart in 2020.

I’ve got a new Reason Interview up, this time with David Stockman.

As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, the former two-term Michigan congressman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, is a legendary account of how libertarian principles got sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

Stockman's new book is Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch to the former president's time in office. "When it comes to what the GOP's core mission should be…standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, personal liberty, and small government at home and non-intervention abroad," he writes, "Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues."

I spoke with him at a Reason Speakeasy event in New York City about his political journey from being a member of Students for a Democratic Society who protested the Vietnam War to being one of Reagan's main advisers to his denunciation of Donald Trump and his hope that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy helps throw the 2024 election into the House of Representatives.

Stockman also tells me how Trump led the charge on COVID lockdowns, got rolled by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve, and why his nativist views on immigration are inimical both to freedom and economic growth.

I don’t agree with Stockman on everything. For instance, I don’t share his warmth toward RFK, Jr. (go here for the interview my Reason colleague Zach Weissmueller and I did with Kennedy last June) and it’s not clear to me that Biden is in any significant way better than Trump. But his book is worth reading, as it documents all the ways in which our economy has been pumped up by deficit spending and Federal Reserve shenanigans for decades now. As important, Stockman is a link to a very different sort of politics that seem to have gone missing over the past half-century. Despite having become a very successful investor who lives in New York and Florida, he remains very much a Midwestern libertarian who is truly socially liberal and fiscally conservative; he delivers equally impassioned diatribes against the drug war and indiscriminate military interventionism. I wish there were many more people (and voters) like him.

If you want to read a transcript of the interview, go here.

Below are video and podcast links.

I also recently interviewed one of my favorite writers: Jon Ronson, best known as the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, an account of a U.S. Army unit that tried to perfect paranormal powers like walking through walls, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which helped define cancel culture just as it was becoming widespread via social media.

Ronson recently dropped the second season of his amazing podcast Things Fell Apart, which explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago. I talked with him about why he believes the creation of a fake medical condition called "excited delirium" in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020; how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; and how the director of the massively influential Plandemic documentaries was actually rewriting the script of  Star Wars.

Talking with Ronson reminds me of the saying, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

Here are links to the video and audio versions of that conversation.