On this week’s episode of The Milo Yiannopoulos Show, Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos was joined by Jeff Lord, a former member of the Ronald Reagan administration who served as a White House associate political director between 1987 and 1988. Lord has been called “Donald Trump’s favorite pundit” by Vox and recently engaged in a debate with Van Jones on CNN over Trump’s disavowment of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.
On the podcast, Lord shared his favorite memories of Ronald Reagan, recalling Reagan’s half-hour long commercial entitled “A Time For Choosing,” that was made in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid against Lyndon Johnson. Although the speech didn’t motivate voters to elect Goldwater, it invigorated Reagan’s political career and allowed him to be elected Governor of California in 1967.
Although political correctness wasn’t a commonly-used term during the beginning of Reagan’s career, Lord held that Reagan was staunchly against political correctness. He claimed that Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” speech was a firm rejection of what was deemed politically acceptable for Republicans at the time. Lord and Yiannopoulos drew parallels between Reagan and Donald Trump with regards to their rejection of party establishment values.
Yiannopoulos called for Trump to begin to act more like a statesman as we move towards November and asked Lord to suggest ways in which Trump could ensure his victory against Clinton. Lord claimed that it would be in Trump’s best interest to continue giving speeches like the one he gave at AIPAC, where he discussed the Iran Deal, the United Nations, and Israel. Lord also claimed that Trump is likely to publish a list of individuals he is likely to pick as Supreme Court nominees if he were to be elected president. Yiannopoulos recalled a 2015 Trump statement where he expressed interest in choosing media mogul Oprah Winfrey as a potential running mate.
Yiannopoulos brought up a recent Vox column, which called Lord “Donald Trump’s favorite pundit” and detailed how Trump hand-selected Lord to appear on CNN to defend him against other panelists.
Lord addressed the concern of Trump’s disavowment of former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke: “I honestly think that [Trump] believes that the Ku Klux Klan is so irrelevant, that when presented with the opportunity he said, ‘I disavow him’ three or four times.” Lord also pointed out that the last time that someone associated with the KKK was quoted in media as an authority figure was when Duke endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.
Lord and Yiannopoulos agreed that Trump is “a politician in the key of those old conservatives, who believe that a country should be founded on principles and not a clutch of identities.”
Tom Ciccotta writes about Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity for Breitbart. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or on Facebook. You can email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com