Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie, “Vindicating Trump,” opens in theaters nationwide Friday.
D’Souza spoke with The Daily Signal about the film, offering behind-the-scenes insights from his exclusive interview with former President Donald Trump, which was conducted just days after the July 13 assassination attempt.
“I noticed that Trump was somewhat more measured,” D’Souza recalled from their time together in Florida. “He seemed somewhat more reflective in the sense of now seeing his own life as maybe having some sort of a directed purpose.”
The movie is D’Souza’s eighth film. His goal for “Vindicating Trump” is to present a different view of Trump’s character and presidency—a perspective he hopes more Americans will come to appreciate.
“I think Trump is aware that he represents something bigger than himself. He is conscious of that,” D’Souza said. “I think he feels that his destiny is, in a sense, incomplete, and that’s part of what’s driving him.”
Read an abridged and lightly edited transcript of our conversation below or watch the full interview above.
Rob Bluey: You have called this your most urgent and important piece of work. Now, that’s saying quite a lot, given the extensive body of filmmaking that you’ve done. Why?
Dinesh D’Souza: It’s partly a reflection of the precarious state of the country. It’s partly because we have this larger-than-life figure, Trump, and not only is he someone that inspires this kind of antagonism on the other side, but he also brings out ambivalence among some conservatives and Republicans. And so often people say to me things like, “Well, I don’t really like the guy, but I like his policies,” or, “He needs to keep his mouth shut.”
What they’re really getting at is they want a new and different Trump. They want to remake Trump in some way. Now, first of all, leaving aside the impracticality of trying to do that, I don’t think we need to do it. And the reason is that Trump is a package, and he’s a kind of a coherent package. And it’s kind of like saying, in the Civil War, the same qualities that made General Grant a good fighter on the battlefield made him cuss a lot and made him a heavy drinker. So you can’t say, “Pull him off the battlefield. He cusses. He’s a heavy drinker,” because that’s part of what makes him effective.
Similarly with Trump, even the things that we think of as his bad qualities, like his massive egotism, which he admits to, in fact, he’s one of the few people I’ve ever seen who’s made an actual defense of egotism. Egotism is really necessary to do anything great. He goes, “If you don’t have an ego, you’re going to be discouraged and give up halfway down the track.”
Trump is a unique character. I wanted to bring out aspects of Trump in this film that are not often seen in the public stage, and the reason they’re not seen is Trump is conditioned out of kind of manly strength to not exhibit feelings, never show vulnerability, and in some ways not even reveal his thought process. So I was eager to set him up in such a way that people could see the tumblers of his mind working and understand how he processes information.
Rob Bluey: One of the things that struck me was the beginning. You show a series of clips, a montage, beginning with Jay Leno and other appearances that Trump made prior to entering politics, so going back to his time as a New York businessman, a celebrity, a host of “The Apprentice,” things of that nature. But you say that there was that fateful moment when he crossed the political Rubicon, I believe was your language, in June of 2015, descending from those escalator steps at Trump Tower. What was it about that moment that changed in people’s minds about Trump?
Dinesh D’Souza: Let’s think of that iconic moment. Of course, it’s in the film, but most people know it. Trump is at the top of the escalator, and imagine that up there is the cultural elite. Trump, himself, is probably the biggest brand of them all, but there he is with Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres and Charlie Rose and Larry King, and he’s one of them, and the rappers aspire to be like him. So he’s almost the embodiment of American success, Trump. And then he does something very striking, and that is he descends, he goes down. Now where does he go down to?
Try to imagine at the bottom of the escalator the forgotten American, so not the guy who’s doing real well, but the guy who feels like the economy’s bypassed me, my jobs have all gone abroad, no one cares about me, neither party’s paying enough attention to me. Trump basically says, “OK, I’m going to take up your cause. I’m going to join your team.”
So you can understand, just in this little image, the fact that all these people go, “Wow!” Well, you know what? He didn’t have to do that. He’s a billionaire. He’s actually not one of us, but he’s taking up our cause, so that’s why they’re so loyal to him. At the same time, think of it now from the point of view of the cultural elite. This guy used to be on our team. He’s now joined with the pitchfork people down there, he’s taking up their cause against us. So here we see in a nutshell how the same people that once revered him turned against him. They see him as a traitor to their class, a traitor to their group, and they’ll never forgive him.
Rob Bluey: And your film goes from that moment where Trump is descending, and then you depict what it’s like to be a news executive. And their reactions, you show what the scene may have been like at the Democratic National Committee, what it might’ve been like at the attorney general’s office. So why was it important for you to reenact these moments, going back to 2015 and other moments throughout Trump’s time in the spotlight?
Dinesh D’Souza: We have reenactments running through the film, and they’re a distinctive aspect of my filmmaking, because there is a documentary style that is, I would call it super basic. And that is, you do some interviews, you pull some stock footage, you string it together and you’ve got a film, but you can’t put that kind of film in the theater.
A movie is an experience, and a good documentary film will have a lot of the elements of a feature film. It will have characters, humor, suspense, kind of a narrative arc, a climax, all of that. And now, so I said to myself, what is the thing that many of us know is happening but we never see? We never see what actually happens in the intelligence agencies. We never see what happens, for example, at the New York Times or CNN.
Imagine the scene where they’re announcing that Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, right? Do the reporters of the New York Times watch this with a kind of equanimity and go, “That’s an important news story I’ve got to cover tomorrow,” or are they high-fiving each other, “We got him! We got him! Maggie Haberman, great job!” So what we do is we imaginatively recreate these Democratic National Committee, the sort of voter activism, the media, the intelligence agencies. Nick Searcy, who’s a very accomplished character actor, plays kind of the head of the intelligence apparatus. And all of this allows people to see the story of Trump told within the context of a movie.
It’s also the kind of thing, by the way, that Trump himself appreciates, because I remember at the premiere for 2000 Mules at Mar-a-Lago, he had seen the film before. So he actually knew the content of the film, he had sort of digested that. But the second time he saw it, he was constantly commenting on the film itself, like, “The music, Dinesh, where do you get music from? Do you buy music? Do you have a guy who composes the music?”
And he’d be like, “Your voice, Dinesh,” he’s like, “you have a movie voice. Did anyone ever tell you that? You have a movie voice, and it’s a good thing you have a movie voice, because if you didn’t have a movie voice, you’d have to hire someone else to narrate your films,” so stuff that makes me chuckle, but I realize, wow, this guy is a cultural figure and he’s interested in the way that cultural products and artifacts, like movies, are made.
Rob Bluey: That’s very true. And I think one of the things that you’ve obviously experienced in your interactions with him is getting to know him and who he is as a person, and you attempt to bring that out in the film. I do like that unique style that you do bring to your documentaries. I think it sets you apart and you’ve proven that in your body of work.
In addition to interviewing Trump for this film, you also spoke to his daughter-in-law and one of his attorneys. What can you tell us about Donald Trump that we might not know after all of these years, and including the last decade, basically, in the public spotlight?
Dinesh D’Souza: I’ll tell you an anecdote that is true and was sort of the inspiration for the way I interviewed Trump. And in fact, my wife, Debbie, warned me. She’s like, “You have 45 minutes with Trump, Dinesh, but you realize you’re going to get two questions in, right, because this guy’s going to take off and he’s just going to do a monologue.” And I said, “No, I can’t have that happen. I’m not going to allow that to happen. I have to structure it in such a way that it doesn’t happen like that.”
And why? Well, when I got my presidential pardon, this was obviously after my campaign finance troubles with the Obama administration, I met Trump for the first time. I didn’t know Trump. I’m not like a long-time, early Trumpster or anything like that, 2019, in the Oval Office. And Debbie, my wife, said to Trump, she goes, “I don’t understand you. You get flayed on every platform, every moment of every day. A normal person couldn’t take that. Does it get to you?”
Now, quite honestly, Debbie and I both expected Trump to go, “Ha ha ha. No, it doesn’t get to me. These people are idiots, they’re crazy. I enjoy it,” that kind of thing. But he paused and he goes, “Well, guys, I have to admit that there are times it really gets to me.” He, goes, “I’m doing this for the country.” He goes, “I got al-Baghdadi,” and he goes, “and even on that, they won’t give me any credit for that.”
We sensed a vulnerability in Trump, and as we left, we said to ourselves, and my wife said, she said, “It’s a pity that Trump doesn’t put that aspect of himself on display for the American people to see,” but I think Trump is such a man’s man that he doesn’t like to do that. Even when Dr. Phil interviewed him, Dr. Phil tried, as a psychologist, you know, “The assassination, how did it make you feel?” Well, Trump hates that kind of question and absolutely refused to go there.
But I wanted to bring out some aspects of Trump’s personality, the kind of normalcy of the man, which the press, I think, willfully misunderstands. Trump is a bit of a jokester. So, when he says, “I’m going to be a dictator for a day,” I mean, who can actually take that seriously, being a dictator, and yet it’s used as exhibit A in the evidence that he really will be a dictator and will never leave.
I put those sorts of questions to Trump. I go, “You troll people with these memes, Trump ’28, Trump ’32, Trump ’36,” I go, “Well, are you going to leave? Are you going to be like the guy in the Western who takes care of the gangsters and then rides off into the sunset, or are you planning to kind of stay?” And having Trump respond to these things, I think, will be very interesting and engaging for the audience.
Rob Bluey: I agree. You saw some of this on display at the Republican National Convention when there was a big effort to introduce his extended family, the grandkids, to the American people, but you said that Trump being a man’s man doesn’t necessarily gravitate toward that approach.
Do you think that that might benefit him, though, with some of those voters who remain skeptical about him as a person?
Dinesh D’Souza: I was trying to think to myself who has been a figure, that I can think of, that on the one hand has people who are so loyal to him they would take a bullet for him, and on the other hand, have people who at least secretly wish that somebody else would put a bullet in him, right? That’s not a normal situation. You wouldn’t say that that would be true of Reagan, even of Jimmy Carter.
You have to go all the way back to Abraham Lincoln to find that kind of divide. Now, the difference between Lincoln and Trump is that in Lincoln’s case, the divide was not over him, it was not over the man. It was over the issue, it was over slavery, it was over the divide in the country, over that. With Trump, it is over the man, and therefore, in this movie, I realized we need to bring out Trump the man. I cannot duck that issue. This is not just about policy.
Even Republicans who are reluctant about Trump, their hesitation is based on Trump the man, and on a kind of, I think, very one-sided and limited perception of his character. So let’s talk about that for a moment, because I’ll hear people say things like, “Well, he’s a playboy.” And I say to myself, well, he was a playboy in his younger days, I think he actually admits this, but no one’s saying he’s a playboy now. So the most you can say about him, the worst, he’s a reformed playboy. Okay, what else? “He’s an egomaniac.” Also true.
Trump loves praise, he loves public praise. Interestingly, in private, he’s more self-deprecating. If you saw him on Gutfeld recently, you see this kind of whimsical Trump. He’s not somebody who you have to keep kissing his feet and flattering the dauphin or the prince in a courtier style, not at all, not in person, but he does like public praise.
But in a way, I think with Trump, his egotism is a sort of protection. It’s a wall. It insulates him because, again, a normal person would be just destroyed by the kind of attack that Trump gets. And then Trump’s virtues, he’s magnanimous.
Even though a lot of billionaires kind of secede from the middle class, Trump doesn’t do that. There’s an ordinariness to him. He has a curiosity about people. You’ll never get someone who’s a doorman or someone who works as a waiter in one of his hotels ever say a bad word about him. He’s very nice to them. He knows their family, he asks about how their kids are doing, he’s that kind of a guy. He’s obviously very kind and good to his family, they adore him.
But above all, one virtue that he has, that I want to stress, is his supreme virtue of courage, because that is a rare virtue. Aristotle says it’s the highest virtue, and it’s in fact the virtue that makes all the other virtues possible, because courage gives you the strength to do all the other virtues, so it’s an active virtue. Trump has it in spades. I think it is a virtue somewhat lacking, by and large, in the Republican party, particularly when we’re facing people who want to take away our basic liberties.
It’s almost like we need a tough guy on our side to take on the tough-guy regime that has been mobilized against us. Trump’s willing to do it, and for this reason, I think that in this hour of our country’s history, he is not only the best man, in some ways he’s the perfect guy.
Rob Bluey: I’m so glad you brought up the point about courage, because it is lacking among so many in the political class, I’d say on both sides of the aisle, not just exclusively Republicans, but maybe that’s where we tend to see it more often on display. And I think that probably makes some of those Republican lawmakers uncomfortable, because of the things that Trump wants to do.
I’m glad you brought up Lincoln. You have a reenactment of Lincoln in the film. You also referenced Lincoln in your interview with Trump. Does he recognize his place in history, and did he react at all to that comparison?
Dinesh D’Souza: Yeah, he does. I think he recognizes that, and this is rare for someone who has served one term, there have been a few, well, I can think of a couple of consequential one-term presidents. So, Polk, Democrat, was a president who almost single-handedly doubled the size of the country in the middle of the 19th century. Turned out it was a very consequential presidency, and so that was the case.
I think Trump is aware that he represents something bigger than himself. He is conscious of that. He’s not the kind of person who does historical analogies, comparisons, but what he likes is he likes an acknowledgment of his role on the larger, historical stage. I think he feels that his destiny is, in a sense, incomplete, and that’s part of what’s driving him.
Because think of it, if you and I were billionaires, we had eight, 10 years to live, we have grandchildren, we have Mar-a-Lago, and on the other side, we’re facing a shotgun of 91 criminal charges, two assassination attempts, with potentially more to come, no normal person would go for that. You’d be like, I’m out of here, I don’t need any of this, so something must be pushing this man forward, and I think, in that sense, it’s love of country and it’s a sense of destiny.
Rob Bluey: You talk about how he was coasting to reelection in 2020 when COVID hit. Did you sense from him that there’s unfinished business that he would like to accomplish in a second term that he was not able to do as a result of what was essentially foisted upon him by China in the spring of 2020?
Dinesh D’Souza: Trump has done a lot to expose, to peel the layers off the onion, to expose the corruption in the institutions of government that we didn’t know to be looking for it over there. So in fact, these are institutions that have traditionally been considered conservative.
We all know that the media is left-wing, Hollywood’s left-wing, academia is left-wing, but I never thought the FBI was left-wing, and I never thought the CIA was left-wing, the military is left-wing, no. But nevertheless, starting, I think, in the Obama years, there was a conscious effort to remake those institutions, certainly at the top, but it affects the bottom because the people at the top recreate an incentive structure that filters all the way down.
I think with Trump, when he came in, he thought he could trust the military. That’s why he brought in John Kelly as a general. I’ll bring in a general. Generals are straight shooters. He’ll give it to me straight. I think Trump also thought he could trust the people in the white lab coats. I mean, we all do, right?
You go to the doctor, “I’m going to take your appendix out. Come in next week.” You never go, “Well, prove it to me that my appendix is defective. Show me some pictures so I can just make up,” no. You’re like, “Well, I agree. Yeah, I’ll take these tests. Yeah, you can go ahead and do this.”
This implicit trust in the health authorities, I don’t think any of us really dreamed that that could be ideologically manipulated, but now we know that it blatantly was. I think Trump knows also, and I think Trump realizes that, in the second term, he’s got to realize that the serpents are more numerous and their dens are deeper than we had previously suspected.
Rob Bluey: I suspect that you’ll see a much-heightened focus on the people who get those political jobs, whom he entrusts to carry out his agenda, based on his experiences. We’re talking to Dinesh D’Souza, who has a new film out this Friday called Vindicating Trump.
Dinesh, you talked earlier about how in our country you have an alarming number of opponents of Trump. A recent poll put it at 28% of Democrats said the country would be better off if Trump had been assassinated after the second attempt. On the other side, you have many MAGA Republicans or other conservatives who believe he’s the only hope that we have to save our constitutional republic.
How can we live in a country where people hold such diametrically opposing views?
Dinesh D’Souza: I think the problem is serious, but it is not quite as bad as we think for this reason. The people on the Trump side, on the Republican side, are making a balanced judgment about Trump because they’re exposed to Trump, they’re exposed to the defenses of Trump, and they’re also exposed to the criticism of Trump, because none of us can avoid the mainstream media in our lives.
We see it. We know about it. But now look at the other side, and I’m talking here about the rank-and-file Democrat. The rank-and-file Democrat does not actually know a lot about Trump. They do not get the pro-Trump side at all. They get a nonstop propagandistic diet of anti-Trump polemic. If CNN has a panel of 17 people, they’re all anti-Trump. There may be two or three Republicans, but they’re selected because they’re anti-Trump.
So as a result, one is forgiven, because think about it, when you’re an intelligent person, how do discover a fact, right? You discover a fact when you see that fact appear in multiple sources, sources that you admittedly cannot check for yourself, but you think to yourself, well, if I see it in Barnes and Noble in a book, and then there it is on PBS, there it is on the history channel, there it is and Michael Moore made a film about it, Rachel Maddow’s talking about it, and here it is in the New York Times, well, it must be true, because why would all these independent people have made this up, the same thing?
They don’t realize that it’s actually more like the same bullet ricocheting off multiple walls and coming at you from different directions. You think that you’re getting independent sources of information, not realizing that all these people, not that they are conspiring together, but they’re more like birds in a flying formation going to Florida, all flying side by side in the same pattern.
So that’s what I’m getting at, is I think that a film like this would be very startling for an independent or a Democrat because most of what they see about it. And the nice thing about a film is a book and an argument is about something. I’m going to tell you, let’s say for example, about my life in India, but it won’t give you a good idea of what that’s like.
Now imagine I show you a video. I say, “That’s me as a kid, and that was my room, and that’s the vendor outside my door selling bananas, and there’s the guy with the monkey, and he’s doing tricks on the street,” you’d be like, oh, wow, I get a real feeling of what it would’ve been like to grow up in India, let’s say in the 1970s, and that’s what a movie can do.
So the movie is like you’ve heard all this stuff about Trump, now here’s Trump. And we’re going to talk, and you’re going to listen, and you’re going to see stuff that runs so counter to everything you’ve heard about Trump that you almost want to spit up your popcorn.
I’m thinking of ways to try to bring people who are independents, and of course for people watching, if you can go watch the movie, by the way, the website is vindicatingtrump.com. You can put your city in, it’ll pull up all the theaters. There’s also a book of the same title you can pre-order. But my point is, if you can bring along that grumbling, anti-Trump relative or that buddy of yours, you’re like, “Hey, I’ll buy your ticket,” I think it will have a tremendous effect.
Rob Bluey: Getting the Democrats and independents to go see your movie, I think not only might change their perspective, because they haven’t been exposed to that Donald Trump that you feature in the film, but up until now, maybe they just don’t have any desire to. You’ve given them a relatively easy way, through the 90-minute film, to get a sense of who the man really is.
Dinesh D’Souza: A film appeals to the head and the heart, and that’s part of the power of a film, because I often will hear conservatives say something to the effect of, “Well, the liberals do not think in a cognitively rational way, they appeal to emotion. There’s no question that with Kamala Harris they’re doing that. They’re basically saying, “Don’t trust your lying eyes.”
They’re telling the American people, “Don’t trust your pocketbook, don’t trust the prices you pay in the grocery store, don’t trust your retirement account, don’t even trust what you’ve seen and heard about Kamala Harris, because that’s made you dislike her. We have a new, manufactured Kamala Harris for you right here. You should believe in our mythology about Kamala Harris.”
It’s really based upon the presumption that the ordinary guy is a real buffoon, but it’s also based on the idea that the ordinary guy reacts only emotionally and not rationally. Well, the nice thing about a film is that a film operates primarily on the emotional medium, for sure.
That’s why films have a score. If you want to know what that music is doing under the film, it is regulating your emotions as you watch the film.
The good news is that if you do a good job with the emotional narrative, you can pack a lot of genuine, thoughtful information in a film, but if you make the mistake of making a film that has lots of thoughtful information but doesn’t have the emotional component, the film will not succeed.
Rob Bluey: Let’s talk about your interview with Trump. I would imagine something like this is scheduled in advance. You had no way of knowing that you were going to sit down with him one week after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. What was it like talking to him so close to that experience? Did you notice any changes from your previous interactions with him?
Dinesh D’Souza: I did. I noticed that Trump was somewhat more measured. He seemed somewhat more reflective in the sense of now seeing his own life as maybe having some sort of a directed purpose.
He’s reluctant, and to be honest, even Reagan was. Reagan would say things like, “Well, the man upstairs,” that was his reference to God. “The man upstairs may not like that,” things like that. And Trump, too, talks about providence in a roundabout way, but I do ask him those things, because I mean, it’s not just that Lincoln, for example, had, in the second inaugural, this very powerful providential sense that you don’t get in the early Lincoln, but it’s that Washington and Lincoln believed that the country is part of a providential narrative.
And so I posed this question directly to Trump, and I think I posed it to him at the right time. If I posed it to him at another time, he might’ve looked at me with a funny look like, why are you asking me that, what kind of a question is that?
Trump normally is not in the contemplative mode. He’s a doer. I mean, think of it, this is a guy who’s built a big part of the New York skyline. Trump thinks operationally, like how do we get this done? Trump was at his golf course, the Doral in Miami, the thing about Trump is when he walks into the, he looks and he’s like, “We need to take that palm tree down. That’s an obstruction to the golf course over there. I want people to be able to see people playing on the course.” And so he’s constantly thinking of how do I make this property better, more attractive, and that’s very different than, for example, an academic way of thinking.
And Charlie Rose interviewed Trump when he was facing a downturn. And Charlie Rose asked him, he goes, “You’ve come out of this, and it was a real doldrums, and not only were you bankrupt, you owed a large amount of money. Did you ever have any doubts?” Trump goes, “No.” He goes, “Never?” Trump goes, “No.”
Now, see, to an academic, that is not only abnormal, that is objectionable, because the academic thinks, well, that just shows a total lack of introspection, that just shows a man who has no self-consciousness, aren’t you even aware of your situation? But for Trump, if he was that way, it would shut him down.
I think the same with the criminal trials, because I asked Trump about the criminal trials. I go, “Any other guy facing three criminal charges would be, first of all, emotionally undone, but probably would’ve exited the race. And you not only don’t exit it, but you’re out there the day of your hearings and you’re under a gag order, but you’re having a press conference, you’re lambasting the judge. You’re doing your legal rope-a-dope.”
And Trump goes, and I think this struck me, he goes, “I will just not allow myself to be bothered by it.” So think about the level of self-control it takes to do that. I will not allow myself to be bothered by the fact that I’m facing multiple criminal charges that could put me in prison for life.
