Welcome back to the Libertarian podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host, Tom Church, and I'm joined as always by the libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's a Lawrence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Richard, the year is 2016. Donald Trump has won the presidency. Actually, scratch that. The year is 2024. Donald Trump has won the presidency. Actually scratch that. The year is

2024. Donald Trump has won re-election to the presidency for a non-consecutive term.

The first time that's happened since Grover Cleveland did it in the late 19th century. So, Richard,

how does deja vu feel to you? Well, I mean, it's a very different kind of victory. The first time around, it was a

nail-biter, and you had all sorts of arguments about the fact that he lost a popular vote. The

Electoral College is illegitimate and so forth. Hillary Clinton was saying is all kinds of ways

that it was all very illegitimate and so forth. He himself, I think, managed to bring a huge

amount of abuse about him because he would say all sorts of stupid and racist kinds of thing.

And it was the sort of thing in which people were genuinely crazy.

Though this time, well, think of the same issue. The electoral college, it's pretty clear that he's

one of very commanding majority.

My guess is it would be well over 300 votes by the time this thing is done.

In terms of popular vote, he's comfortably over the 50% mark, which gets rid of that particular element of stuff.

And the most important thing about the psychology of it is the guy, despite at the last moment the sense of human, which I think is absolutely decisive, given the bitterness of the attack against him. This was a man who got on top

of a garbage heat. This is a man who was flipping flap jacks at McDonald's or whatever

it was he was doing. And that's the side of Trump, which nobody knew. And what's so important

about is when you have a guy who has such an incredible record, it's so clear that the preconceptions are so strong, you don't think you could switch to them at all. But I think, in effect, those two maneuvers actually did save the day for him. I wish it had been on something having to do with foreign or domestic policy and so forth.

But what happened is the Democrats made, in my view, a terrible mistake.

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