This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.

Thanks for listening.

This episode is sponsored by Zbiotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink.

More on them later in the show, including a great 15% off discount code.

My guest today is Ronald Reagan's first budget director, the former Michigan Congressman

David Stockman, who led the charge to cut the size scope and spending of the federal

government in the early 1980s.

He made enemies among Democrats back then 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 that era is called the triumph of politics why the Reagan Revolution failed,

and it's a legendary account of how libertarian principle got sacrificed on the altar of political expedients.

Stockman's new book is called Trump's War on Capitalism, and it takes a blowtorch toward the former president's time in office.

When it comes time to what the GOP's core mission

should be, says Stockman standing up for the free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money,

personal liberty and small government at home and non-intervention abroad, Stockman writes,

Donald Trump has overwhelmingly come down on the wrong side of the issues.

At a live interview in New York City, as part of the Reason Speak Easy series, I talked with

David Stockman about his political journey from being a member of students for a Democratic

society in the 1960s who protested the Vietnam War

to being one of Reagan's main advisors to his current denunciation of Donald Trump and the Republican Party

and his hopes, get this, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy will throw the 2024 election

into the House of Representatives

...