Bill O'Reilly | How Presidential Legacies Shape America: An In-depth Look at U.S. Leaders

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1:27I'm really interested in the history of the presidents of the United States because these are the guys that have basically not only shaped the country, but to some extent have shaped the world. I say these are the guys because it's been all men. You know, there's a woman running for president, Kamala Harris. In fact, I will have a upcoming prediction podcast about who I think will win. A few weeks ago, I had on David Rubenstein to discuss his book on presidential history. But today we have Bill O 'Reilly with his new book, Confronting the Presidents, No Spin Assessments from Washington Biden. I would say Bill O 'Reilly is one of the world's experts on presidential history.

2:09I mean, he's interviewed a bunch of presidents. He's written, in addition to this book, Confronting the Presidents, he's written in books like Killing Reagan, Killing Kennedy, The United States of Trump. He's written all these books on, Killing Lincoln was his most popular book. He's written all these books about the presidents. This book, his latest book, Confronting the Presidents, really is an in-your-face, like, what was good and what was bad about each of these presidents. I learned so much stuff, a lot of scandalous stuff, actually, about well-known private, you know, like the private lives of these presidents, these presidents that we revere.

2:47And it's just fascinating. Also fascinating to talk to Bill, not only about the book and who the most underrated presidents are and all that kind of stuff, but also what's going on with the current election and what does he think of the candidates and the economy and inflation. So here's Bill O 'Reilly on confronting the presidents, but also what's going on right now.

3:15This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

3:32So in all this research, and you uncover all these things I didn't know about any of these presidents, but in all this research, who would you say your opinion changed the most about in terms of the quality of their presidency? well a guy like uh james k polk nobody knows who he is you go out on the street you go hey how about that james k polk they go oh he's a rapper right yeah oh nobody knows anything about him but he was in the top 10 of presidents because he was able to expand america from ocean to ocean and he was president during the mexican-american war again i mean people have no idea but the guy had a really solid vision of what America should be in the future.

4:16Much, much developed, more developed than his contemporaries. So he's one. Actually, can I ask you about him? Because he was critically important. He made the largest, he brought in the most land of any other president. Like people usually think, oh, Thomas Jefferson with the Louisiana Purchase. But according to your book, he basically got that whole, you know, all the kind of states around Mexico, plus the whole Northwest region, like what, you know, and the other thing about him, which I learned in your book, he only, he promised to stay only one term and he did. I don't know of any other president who was like that.

4:56Um, there was, um, uh, there were a few Rutherford Hayes, uh, another guy, nobody knows anything about. But Polk got all this territory for the United States. And remember, Great Britain and France and Spain, they wanted the Western part of what is now the United States. So this wasn't like a layup. And Polk got it essentially free because we kicked the butt of the Mexican government, which was corrupt and didn't know what they were doing. and when we defeated them and they had to sign the Treaty of Hidalgo, we got all that land. And if they didn't sign a treaty, the United States would have Mexico.

5:41Mexico would be part of our country now, so they had to sign it. So the reason Polk was a one-termer was that he knew he was going to die. And he died just a few months after he left office. He got one tour of the USA and then he was down because this guy had horrendous, horrendous health problems. But there were a few presidents, Rutherford Hayes, I mentioned, who didn't really want, they didn't revere the power. OK, so like today, these politicians, all of them across the board, they love the power, James. They're in it for power. Many of our presidents in the past weren't that way. And, you know, when you're not in it for the power, it's much easier to walk away.

6:29you know it seems like a bygone tradition to not be in it for the power like you look at like Calvin Coolidge or uh or or Polk or some of these earlier presidents they seem to have they seem to have a real agenda about what they wanted to accomplish they accomplished it they left and you know Calvin Coolidge is another under valued president I think in in history what what do you like you know a billion years old why do they cling to power because fun fun it's fun ride around in air force one have every whim everything taken care of um you know everybody kissing your butt it's fun they like it and what's the alternative you know so that's why they cling to power.

7:24It's not looking out for the folks, I'll tell you that. Most of these politicians today, not only in the presidency, but in the Congress and in state legislatures, they're looking out for themselves, not the folks. Yeah. And so, I mean, again, what other presidents do you think actually came into office and did good? Because it's hard to recount the accomplishments of any recent president, maybe because history is too close? Well, let's start with JFK. So that's 1960. And JFK had a vision. He wasn't a particularly courageous man. His brother, Bobby Kennedy, is much more courageous, took on the mafia and was willing to do things that JFK was not.

8:13But JFK had a vision. He wanted to get out of Vietnam before it blew up in our face, which it did. And I think that he wanted the plight of African Americans to be better. So I would give him a plus category in that. LBJ was unbelievably corrupt, incredibly corrupt. And while he did have some sympathies for downtrodden people, what he did was just massively incompetent. So he's a ridiculous guy. Nixon obviously broke the law. But Nixon's vision, particularly overseas, was good. And he got a lot of things done, which is why he won his second term in a landslide, because the American people knew that he was a pretty smart guy.

8:59But then, of course, he went off the rails. Then Ford, well, very well-intentioned. All right. Not a brilliant man, but I think Ford essentially wanted to do good things. Carter comes in after Ford beats him in 1976. And Carter was very well-intentioned. He really wanted to help people, but he was so in over his head. He just couldn't do the job. I mean, you've got a guy from Georgia at that point, not a sophisticated state. And you're popping him into the most powerful position in the world. And he was clueless. He was clueless economically. He was clueless foreign policy. Nobody respected him overseas.

9:42disaster. Reagan came in, and Reagan was the opposite of Carter. Reagan had a very tunnel vision guy. This is the way countries should be run. And Reagan's presidency was successful, even though it was in and it was out. He almost died because the assassin almost killed him. Okay. Very successful. George Bush, the elder, he was a machine guy, all right, Republican machine guy. I liked him. I thought he was, I don't know, a decent man. I guess that's the word you want to use. But he wasn't a crusader or anything like that. Clinton came in. Clinton was a technician. And Clinton did some good for the country.

10:25And then he fouled it all up with Lewinsky stuff. But Clinton was smart. Then after Clinton, you got into the modern era here. Bush the Younger, 9-11 blows up his entire presidency and leads to catastrophe in Iraq. But Bush the Younger, again, like his father, decent man. I mean, he wasn't conniving and he wasn't evil in any way at all. But he didn't manage the economy well, and he just got buried in the jihad and all that. That led to Barack Obama. Now, I reassess my opinion of Barack Obama because I know him pretty well. I interviewed him three times and I work with him on Brothers Keeper, which is a project that is tremendous, which never really rose to where it should.

11:13Part of that was Obama's fault because he didn't embrace what I suggested he would do to make this mentoring. You know, Brothers Keeper is mentoring inner city African-American youth. Tremendous program still exists. But Obama, you know, got hammered by conservatives, beat McCain, beat Romney. And Obamacare was really. But if you look at Obamacare now down the road, Obamacare has helped a lot of Americans. And there's no doubt about that. All right. It has. So that assessment changes. Obama made a huge mistake in Iraq, pulling all U.S. troops. ISIS then rose up. Obama recognized the mistake and then went back in and tried.

11:58But Trump is the guy who really wiped out ISIS. And Obama's eight years led to Trump. Because Americans are kind of fed up with the whole establishment. They didn't like the end of the Obama era. And then Trump comes in. Trump himself is a dealmaker. He wants what's best for America, but it's not a personal thing as far as the folks are concerned. He loves his supporters. He loves the MAGA people. But Trump is like, I'm going to make the best deals for the country. It kind of worked. And he was hit with COVID and all that. And then Biden came in a disaster. an absolute disaster, second worst president ever, because he created the problems.

12:40The bad presidents like Herbert Hoover, for example, he inherited the terrible economy, the Great Depression. Hoover was clueless, couldn't get us out of it. FDR had to. Hoover couldn't. His vision was so limited. Bad president. But Biden created the open border by himself. No Congress, nobody else, him, and then ignited inflation from 1.4 when Trump left to more than 9%. How painful is that?

13:15Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

13:36Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

14:19And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altature. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

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16:10Plus, new members will receive a welcome bonus after minimum qualifying purchases. Just go to Rakuten.com, download the app, or install the browser extension. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Terms and conditions apply. You know, there were there were multi-trillion dollar bailouts in 2020. I almost you know, you can't say whether it was Congress, whether it was president. It was it was the increase in the money supply in 2020 that ultimately led to inflation, although it did occur under Biden's term, the actual inflation. I will disagree with your assessment a bit. After COVID hit, you had to, the federal government had to go in and prop up both people and companies.

16:58They had to. And they did it fairly successfully. But then the private economy kicked in pretty fast under Trump. And when Trump left, the employment was going up, the production was going up, and inflation was 1-4. All Biden had to do was ride that wave. But instead, he goes, Inflation Reduction Act, totally absurd, not needed. And that blew up the printing of the dollar. But the worst thing Biden did, you can almost forgive him that mistake, was attacking the fossil fuel industry by slapping on all these regulations that made it much more difficult to harvest oil and other energy from the ground fracking.

17:48Okay. And then the en masse companies that deal in fossil fuels raised all the prices. And then the truckers had to raise all their prices. And then the grocery store had to raise all their prices. That was the lighted fused, that combination of printing all these dollars. And the American people know nothing about that. And Biden signed executive order after executive order after executive order under the banner of global warming that strangled the American energy industry. And of course, backtracked, once the prices got out of control, Essentials up 20 percent. Then now Biden's, you know, pushing production oil, but he's still not allowing ANWR drilling or the Keystone Pipeline still because he wants to placate the global warming progressive left.

18:40So Biden is a disaster top to bottom. I asked my Democrat friends, give me one thing that Joe Biden did that's helped this country. One, crickets. You got one, James? Let me think. Okay, you got to think. It's not easy. Yeah, I mean, and that's my point a little in general is that the presidency doesn't really have, from a constitutional perspective, that many responsibilities, right? They can't make laws. They're just like a police force that enforces laws. They could veto laws, but that's rare. And they can propose laws, but again, some laws get passed, some don't. So it's hard to really – that's why inflation and economy, I always think it's a mixed bag.

19:26It's hard to pinpoint where these things actually start. But I see your point on the oil. Like normally, demand-side inflation, oh, if the price of apples go up, then people switch to peaches. But with oil, you have to use oil as part of almost every aspect of our lives so that you can't ignore the demand-side inflation there, as opposed to money supply-related inflation that happened. And that's what happened. And you might be underestimating the power of the executive branch in 2024 because in the last 10 years the executive orders coming out of the white house have been unbelievable i mean speaking of which like now we have this election it's very polarizing obviously but you know in your book there are times even more polarizing particularly like right before the civil war and in the presidencies before then and then maybe in the events leading up to 1968 with with vietnam and and and everything going on then.

20:21Do you think this is, what era of our past would you say this type of polarization is similar to? Well, this is second. Civil War, obviously, is first. You got a million Americans dead from the war, from wounds and disease and all that. So that was the biggest catastrophe ever to hit this country. And now is second. Dwarfs, what happened in Vietnam. We had polarization in Vietnam, obviously. But it wasn't fundamentals. It was policy. Vietnam policy, engineered by Lyndon Johnson, was a disaster. And some people wouldn't acknowledge that, but it was. Now you have hatred, personal hatred, between the progressives and the traditionals.

21:10Not so much Democrat Republic. It's the progressive movement that drives the Biden White House. And it's the traditional movement that doesn't want to pay for gender altering surgery. They don't want to pay for that. Okay. And there's no detente between the progressives and the traditionalists. None. They hate each other. And that's why you're seeing the political rhetoric coming out of Trump and harris is so hot i mean they shook hands in front of the debate but i don't know if that was a real sincere hey good luck no but you know what's interesting about that is i sort of feel like everything is a strategy now so even kamala going up to trump right at the beginning of the debate and shaking his hand it's like she and her team had a meeting about it and decided yeah sure And Trump probably had a similar meeting.

22:06Right. So how do you know now? Like, okay, so for instance, Kamala says, oh, there's price gouging from grocers. But as you said, you have to look at what, okay, if oil prices are raised, trucking prices are raised, healthcare prices are raised, the grocers don't even control what they charge for products. So all of this economics coming out of the candidates like that is just stupid. So how do you know what these people even believe in? Well, you watch the No Spin News, my news broadcasts and radio broadcasts every day because I'll tell you what their motivations are, what's true and what isn't true.

22:42And we don't do the ideological thing here. We don't do the party thing here. I'm registered independent. But I do see a tremendous amount of danger on the far left because they want to change every part of our country, including the economy. They want to centralize federal government controlling the marketplace. And you can't do that. It's never worked in history. But Americans are partially at fault, James, because of this, because you make a nice living off this. So they spend the majority of their leisure time when they're not working staring at this rather than trying to read and trying to learn.

23:22That's why I wrote Confronting the President. It's just absolutely relevant today what happened with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and on and on. It's relevant to today. Well, and actually it's so interesting. I didn't even know until I read your book how much their friendship had dissolved so that they were enemies. Like Thomas Jefferson planting stuff in the media about George Washington. It's crazy to think about. Well, Jefferson didn't like the strong central government that Washington and Alexander Hamilton and John Adams espoused. And Jefferson was kind of a sneaky guy. I mean, you know, he's on the tent, but he was a kind of a sneaky guy, Jefferson.

24:03And, you know, he's brilliant and he helped every American in the freedom realm. There's no doubt Thomas Jefferson did that. But as a personal guy, very dubious. Yeah. And so, and so again, like, I don't understand how much of it is for show. Like when, when, when someone like the progressive left or like Kamala appeasing the progressive left says, oh, we've got to tax unrealized capital gains. Just economically, doesn't she realize that brings the economy to zero, basically? She doesn't understand, doesn't want to understand. It's not really germane to her pursuit of power. This is what the progressive left wants.

24:40This is what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want. She's going to go along with it. It's with the money people in Hollywood. She's a front person. That's what she is. I mean, look, James, I don't want to sound really conceited here, but can you imagine me interviewing Kamala Harris one-on-one? Can you really picture that? And I say that being a big admirer of how you interviewed Barack Obama, and you always, it was considerate from both sides. I remember the very first interview, I was expecting fireworks. This was before he was elected. I was expecting fireworks. there weren't any you guys seem like best friends by the end of it and I learned a lot about both of you from watching that interview yeah and that's my job that you learn about these people so when Kamala Harris gives an interview to a Philadelphia reporter and the reporter asks a very good question how would you bring down inflation you don't get more simple than that it's a simple question and then she launches for two and a half minutes about her upbringing in Oakland, California.

25:43I mean, you don't get away with that with me. I would say, Madam Vice President, with all due respect, you're not even close to answering this question. I'll pose it again. How would you bring down inflation? That's how you do it. But unfortunately, the journalism industry has collapsed in America. And they've got people who won't do that because they don't want to get in trouble. They're happy with their paycheck coming in. They're told what to say, many of them and they say it they're getting well paid to be parents and yeah i've been in the business 50 years i know i know mike wallace tim russert i know dan rather all these people okay here's a little bit though like like here's the problem is that you you get if you take a side if you're on a team you get 80 million people like you if you're not on a team if you try to be unbiased.

26:37You already have a platform, Bill, but if you're starting out in news and you try to be unbiased, no one's going to like you. Both sides will hate you. Well, you don't have to be unbiased. See, that's the key to success. All you have to be is fair and state your case to the audience, whoever your audience is. This is why I believe what I believe, and here's why I back it up. But I'm going to interview Shirley over here, and she sees it differently. But I'm not going to hate Shirley. I'm not going to try to make Shirley look poor or bad, but I am going to press Shirley to answer my questions. The audience will respect that.

27:19I mean, look, my audience is not ideological. It's all over the place, and it's worldwide now thanks to YouTube. I don't even know what YouTube was. And my people coming in and go, hey, you have 50 million views on YouTube. I go, what? I mean, 10 times more people watch me on the social media now than watch me at Fox. 10 times more. It's crazy. It's a new world. But I haven't changed. I'm the same. I'm in your face. If I ask a question, I want an answer. But what's changed is the other people in my business, most of them don't do that. They let these politicians go off on tangents. And Trump gets that treatment, too.

28:03I mean, Trump goes, you know, my question to Trump, and I asked this to J.D. Vance a couple of weeks ago when he was on the Notes of the News. How are you going to deport 10 million migrants? How are you going to do it? Courts are going to block you. You must know that. How's that going to happen? And Vance really didn't have any answer for it because it isn't going to happen. And that's my job, to make Americans understand what's real and what's BS. So if this election comes in close, which it looks like obviously it will, it seems like it's down to a few swing states and all those swing states are like almost dead even right now in the polls.