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Home » Transcript: Why MAGA Is At War With Itself – Dinesh D’Souza on TRIGGERnometry

Transcript: Why MAGA Is At War With Itself – Dinesh D’Souza on TRIGGERnometry

Read the full transcript of author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s interview on TRIGGERnometry Podcast with hosts Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, October 27, 2025.

Welcome to TRIGGERnometry

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Dinesh D’Souza, welcome to TRIGGERnometry.

DINESH D’SOUZA: Thank you. Great to be here.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s great to have you. The question we really want to ask you is what the hell is going on in America? That’s going to be a fascinating conversation. I mean, you know, New York, your financial hub, looks like it’s about to elect someone who’s very far left. Equally on the other side of the political spectrum, things are moving in a far rightward direction. Looks like from the outside you might disagree. We’ll talk about that. But before we get into all of that, tell us about you. How are you here? What’s been your journey through life?

From Bombay to the White House

DINESH D’SOUZA: I was born in Bombay, India. My dad was an engineer. I grew up in a middle class family, speaking English, by the way, at home. And I came to The United States 1978, as a rotary youth exchange student. I lived in Arizona, kind of on the Mexican border for a year with four different families. I went to the 12th grade of high school. So I came to America at an impressionable time.

And then a year later I got into Dartmouth, so I went to Ivy League school in New Hampshire. And then I became a kind of young Reaganite. I came to Washington in the last part of the Reagan administration. I worked in the White House with people like Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, people like that.

And then I’ve spent about 20 years subsequent to that in conservative think tanks. The American Enterprise Institute about a decade, and then the Hoover Institution at Stanford about a decade. And then in that period, mostly I wrote books. I was also kind of a Charlie Kirk of a younger generation. I spoke on campuses, hundreds of them, all through the 90s and the 2000s, obviously at a safer time in America and where you never had to worry about that kind of thing.

And then I started making documentary films about a decade ago. Kind of wandered into that almost accidentally, but discovered that our culture is moving in that direction. And so, although I keep up with the books and I still do some speaking, I’m also now a filmmaker who never went to film school. But it is a way to reach more people that would not be in a line at Barnes and Noble to have your book signed. So for that reason, I think it’s a powerful vehicle for expressing ideas.

The Outsider’s Perspective

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So it sounds a little bit like you were an outsider who’s now become part of the country. You’ve moved here, you’re an American. But I think people who’ve come from other countries, like me and Francis, to a lesser extent in Britain, they always have a slightly better perspective on how things evolve over time because they know that a different world exists. So what have you observed in America over your lifetime here? What do you see as kind of the pattern and how we’ve ended up to where we ended up?

DINESH D’SOUZA: I moved almost naturally into the Reaganite conservative orbit because I was exposed to conservative ideas at Dartmouth. I kind of fell in with a young gang of rebel right wingers. And I realized they’re talking about stuff. They have answers to things I didn’t even know were questions. They were discussing Burke and Hayek and Solzhenitsyn. And I’m like, who are these people and why are they important?

So I plunged myself into these ideas, Burke. And I realized, it’s not that I’m becoming a conservative, I already am. This is kind of intelligent articulation of things I’ve already believed. And so it, as I say, was a kind of a natural fit.

Also, Reagan conservatism was very cosmopolitan. It emphasized the universality of American principles. So there was no awkwardness for me. And in a way, I would say I grew into it. Remember, I came to America by myself. A lot of people move with their families. Most Indians in this country, for example, their families moved in the 60s, and they were either born here or they moved. And not to mention that they typically move into Indian neighborhoods, like in New Jersey. And so they remain in a kind of Indian subculture.

This is not my experience at all. I came alone. I lived in places where, when I was at Dartmouth, I was hard pressed to see an Indian for six months. There were very few on the campus. A lot more now.

From Reagan to Trump: A Conservative Evolution

So I think the big shift is from the Reagan conservatism to Trump and MAGA. And of course, that occurred over the speed bump of the Bushes. The Bush experience dislocated American conservatism, and it was sort of reborn in a bit of a new tone.

Now, I’ve been on board with all that, and I say that because a lot of my former colleagues at AEI and Hoover became dedicated Never Trumpers. They still are, people like Bill Kristol. So I know these people well. I wrote for their magazines. I was really part of their orbit. But Trump became a fork in the road. They went one way, I went a different way.

And they also interpreted the fact that I was making films as a kind of intellectual sellout. They kept saying things like, “Well, Dinesh has just gone for the big audience.” But really what I realized was that people are reading less and that I was trying in my earlier career to convince the kind of hypothetical man on the fence, you could call it like Michael Kinsley at the New Republic or Fred Barnes, someone like that.

And I realized that those guys are not worth the time, really.