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Episode: Where Will Trump 2.0 Take the GOP?

Author: The Free Press
Duration: 01:12:37

Episode Shownotes

Trump’s gains among working-class voters of all races—according to exit polls, he won the majority of Latino men at 55 percent—represent the ongoing realignment of the Republican Party. What was once Reagan’s party of free trade, low taxes, and limited government seems to be shifting toward a multiracial working-class party

that celebrates economic protectionism and credibly courts unions. But what will this shift mean for the future of the party. . . and American politics? Trump’s cabinet appointments so far don’t paint a clear picture. His nominee for secretary of state, Florida senator Marco Rubio, has some clear neoconservative instincts. But Trump also tapped as director of national intelligence former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who has thundered against the “neocon” influence on her new party. So what is this new Republican Party? Is it still the party of Reagan? Is it still even a party of conservatism? Here to discuss it all today are Sarah Isgur, Matthew Continetti, and Josh Hammer. Sarah Isgur is a columnist for The Dispatch. She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as Justice Department spokeswoman during the first Trump administration. Matthew Continetti is a columnist at Commentary, founding editor of The Free Beacon, and author of a new book: The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. And Josh Hammer is senior editor at large at Newsweek and host of The Josh Hammer Show. Today, they join Michael Moynihan to discuss Trump’s appointments, the significance of J.D. Vance, the roots of MAGA and where the movement fits into the history of the Republican Party, and the uncertain future of the American right. And if you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of 'Honestly with Bari Weiss', the discussion revolves around the Republican Party's transformation under Donald Trump's influence, particularly its shift toward a diverse, multiracial, working-class coalition that supports economic protectionism. Guests Sarah Isgur, Matthew Continetti, and Josh Hammer examine the implications of Trump's cabinet appointments and the ideological shifts within the GOP, questioning whether the party can retain conservatism or evolve into a new political force. They address historical roots, immigration, and the potential future direction of the party amidst ongoing political realignment.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Where Will Trump 2.0 Take the GOP?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Michael Moynihan. In the weeks leading up to the 2024 election, the polls were razor thin between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

00:00:43 Speaker_12
Esteemed poll analyst Nate Silver crunched all the available numbers and read 80,000 simulations. And the odds were pretty much 50-50. It was going to be a very close election, we were told. We might not know the results for weeks.

00:00:59 Speaker_12
But on November 5th, it became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that the election results would be known that night. Trump would end up winning all seven battleground states and the popular vote.

00:01:11 Speaker_12
And he even made significant inroads in deep blue states like New York and New Jersey.

00:01:16 Speaker_00
Trump's gains among working class voters of all races — — While a majority of Latinos voted for Kamala Harris, Trump was backed by a record 46% of Latino voters, even gaining support in Democratic strongholds.

00:01:29 Speaker_12
represent the ongoing realignment of the Republican Party.

00:01:32 Speaker_12
What was once Reagan's party of free trade, low taxes, and limited government seems to be shifting towards a multiracial, working-class party that celebrates economic protectionism and credibly courts unions.

00:01:45 Speaker_12
But what will this shift mean for the future of the party and for American politics? Trump's Cabinet appointments so far don't paint a clear picture.

00:01:53 Speaker_12
His nominee for Secretary of State, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, has some clear neoconservative instincts.

00:02:01 Speaker_12
But Trump also tapped former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, who has thundered against the neocon influence in her new party. While Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz recently said,

00:02:13 Speaker_05
She's considered to be, essentially, by most assessments, a Russian asset and would be the most dangerous... Is that how you consider her? Is that what you consider her? Oh yes. Oh yes. There's no question.

00:02:28 Speaker_12
Gabbard is not, in fact, considered to be a Russian asset by most assessments. So what is this new Republican Party? Is it still the party of Reagan? Is it still even a party of conservatism?

00:02:40 Speaker_12
Here to discuss it all today is Sarah Isker, Matthew Continetti, and Josh Hammer. Sarah is a columnist for the Dispatch.

00:02:47 Speaker_12
She clerked for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and served as the Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration.

00:02:54 Speaker_12
Matt is a columnist at Commentary, founding editor of The Free Beacon, and author of the new book, The Right, The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. And Josh is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek and host of The Josh Hammer Show.

00:03:08 Speaker_12
Today we discuss why the Trump campaign was successful, the significance of JD Vance, the roots of MAGA, and where the movement fits into the history of the Republican Party, and the uncertain future of the American right. We'll be right back.

00:03:28 Speaker_03
Today's episode was made possible by Ground News. America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline. especially over the last few years. If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot.

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Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or ignored, so you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind.

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Check it out at groundnews.com slash honestly to get 50% off the Ground News Vantage Plan for unlimited access. Ground News is subscriber funded. By subscribing, you're supporting transparency in media and our work in the meantime.

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00:05:36 Speaker_12
Matt Conetti, Sarah Isker, Josh Hammer, welcome to Honestly. Thank you.

00:05:41 Speaker_01
Thanks for having us.

00:05:43 Speaker_12
Matt, let me start with you. You are somebody who I think has been standing athwart the modern Republican Party yelling stop since 2016.

00:05:53 Speaker_12
Give me a sense of what the Republican Party is to you in where it should be going and sort of where it's failing at the moment.

00:06:02 Speaker_11
For me, the Republican Party has been the historical vessel of the American conservative movement, Michael. And for me, American conservatism is first and foremost about the promotion and extension of freedom and the Constitution.

00:06:18 Speaker_11
There are many parts of the Republican coalition, of Donald Trump's platform, that continue to advance that agenda.

00:06:27 Speaker_11
There are some divergences from the historical pattern of American conservatism, mainly on the issue of foreign and defense policy, where the Trump Republican Party

00:06:38 Speaker_11
has moved in the direction of restraint, and in some quarters of the Trump Republican Party, a suspicion of the very idea of American exceptionalism that, to the MAGA movement, often leads to overreach. So that's where I see the main divergence.

00:06:54 Speaker_11
There are some other divergences in parts of the Trump coalition about size of government questions, about the role of the government in the economy. As someone who is an American conservative, I want a limited government. I want less

00:07:08 Speaker_11
government intervention in the economy, because I don't think government planners can manage economies well. And I think the Biden administration proved that immensely.

00:07:17 Speaker_11
So when I look at the broad sweep of the movement, I see areas of commonality, but I also see some primary areas of divergence.

00:07:25 Speaker_11
That is, I think, the result of Donald Trump's transformation of the GOP into a more populist, more anti-establishment, more America first party than it was before.

00:07:37 Speaker_12
Sarah Isker, what do you make of the modern Republican Party? I mean, Matt says there's a Taftian tradition that it's kind of getting back to when it comes to foreign policy.

00:07:46 Speaker_12
I'm trying to figure out the economic vision of American conservatism these days. What is your kind of overall vision of where the Republican Party is in 2024?

00:07:57 Speaker_04
In some ways, I mean, all of us on this podcast were born and came of age in an era where the Republican Party was really either the party of Reagan or the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

00:08:11 Speaker_04
And so that brand of conservatism and the American conservative movement, as Matt was describing, overlapped so well with the Republican Party, yes, but politically being able to reach 51% in enough elections.

00:08:27 Speaker_04
And that's where I think things are really diverging right now internationally, right? There's a populist movement worldwide. The party in power lost in every election in Western democracies this year.

00:08:42 Speaker_04
So in some ways, I think you can really overread Donald Trump's win. I think Republicans will actually overread Donald Trump's win. Donald Trump is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Republicans winning was not a uniquely American phenomenon.

00:08:55 Speaker_04
And there's this sense that the winning campaign did everything right. The losing campaign did everything wrong, that Donald Trump won because

00:09:03 Speaker_04
51% of Americans agreed with everything that was in Donald Trump's platform and who he is and everything else.

00:09:10 Speaker_04
I would be far more interested in that theory if Donald Trump had improved with the very groups and demographics he was targeting with his campaign strategies, but that's not what we saw. Instead, he improved with every demographic group.

00:09:25 Speaker_04
That's not the sign of a winning campaign message or strategy. That's the sign of tectonic plates that are sort of outside either party's control that made this election, I think, a far more structural election, if you will.

00:09:41 Speaker_04
So what does that mean for the conservative movement? I don't really know, because I think it is divorced from the Republican Party, and the sooner conservatives accept that and sort of get over their mourning period, the better.

00:09:53 Speaker_04
Conservatives have sort of smirked at libertarians for the last 40 years as they were out in the wilderness. Welcome to the club, conservatives.

00:10:03 Speaker_04
You know, now you don't have a set political party and you're going to have to work with both to get your policies moving. Will the Republican Party come back to be the party of conservatives at some point?

00:10:18 Speaker_04
I think it's probably a coin flip of whether that ends up being the Republican Party or the Democratic Party if we're having this podcast 20 years from now and saying, oh, right, of course.

00:10:28 Speaker_04
Because as that political realignment around the diploma divide happens, I just don't know that we have a great sense of where that ends.

00:10:38 Speaker_04
If the Democratic Party really sort of sloughs off its extreme base, the extreme left wing, and the Republican Party keeps moving into more tariffs, unions, government-based economic planning, you could see the full shift where the conservative party actually aligns with a totally different political party.

00:11:00 Speaker_12
Josh Hammer, you know, you're the, I would say, the most MAGA person here.

00:11:05 Speaker_12
Is this a permanent shift or at least a generational shift in the sense that, you know, I talked to a Republican the other day who knows a lot about this stuff, and he said, look, if you're looking for it to go back to

00:11:18 Speaker_12
sort of neo-conservative foreign policy or more libertarian economics, you're out of luck because, you know, this is the party that delivered Hispanics, that it delivered black male voters, it really shifted the demographics of the party.

00:11:31 Speaker_12
What do you make of that? I mean, do you suspect that this is Trump's party even long after Donald Trump?

00:11:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, there's so much to unpack here. I'm trying to think where to start.

00:11:40 Speaker_01
So look, I think after the 2016 election, there was a legitimate debate over whether Trumpism, so to speak, was about an individual personality, someone who has been a global icon for three to four decades, going back to the New York tabloid covers of the 1980s, someone who has the gilded Trump Tower.

00:11:58 Speaker_01
There was this whole debate as to whether the so-called Trumpism phenomenon was a personality-centric or actually was a substantive shift rooted in some ideological movements when it comes to three issues, namely immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

00:12:12 Speaker_01
There was this whole debate as to whether Hillary Clinton in 2016 was a uniquely and historically unpopular candidate or whether or not Trump actually punctured the blue wall of the Rust Belt states by talking about those three issues that I just mentioned.

00:12:24 Speaker_01
And I think as Sarah just alluded to,

00:12:28 Speaker_01
Now that we have multiple data points with both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris going down in both the blue wall and as the case may be now elsewhere, I think we're starting to get some more evidence that there's something more to this perhaps than just Donald Trump as a unique particular phenomenon.

00:12:43 Speaker_01
Now don't get me wrong, I think that Hillary Clinton and both Kamala Harris were bad candidates, but I also suspect there's something more going on than Donald Trump just essentially catching lightning in a bottle multiple times now.

00:12:56 Speaker_01
Now, another thing that I think is worth pointing out here, you know, a lot of these debates over what is conservatism, what should conservatives believe, I mean, this is as old as the modern American conservative movement itself.

00:13:07 Speaker_01
There have been these internecine disputes, these bitter disputes going all the way back to the 1950s and the founding of National Review and the founding of ISI and Heritage Foundation and various other legacy conservative institutions.

00:13:21 Speaker_01
So I happen to think that a lot of these debates actually are quite healthy.

00:13:25 Speaker_01
I guess kind of in closing, what I will simply say is that a lot of what Donald Trump is tapping into here when it comes to this renewed support for tariffs and a more protectionist trade policy, when it comes to a more sober, clear-minded foreign policy, I wouldn't say that Donald Trump's foreign policy is isolationist.

00:13:42 Speaker_01
I saw very little evidence of that in his first term. He certainly has some isolationist-minded people around him in his orbit, people like Tucker Carlson, but his actual policies I don't think were quite isolationist.

00:13:52 Speaker_01
But a lot of what he's getting at really is kind of a return to how a prior generation or two of capital or Republicans and or conservatives might have thought.

00:14:00 Speaker_01
I mean, there has been a strand of pro-industrial policy manufacturing thought on the broader right, I would argue, going back at least as far as Alexander Hamilton's 1791 opinion on the report of manufacturers.

00:14:12 Speaker_01
For instance, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln. I mean, the Republican Party was the party of tariffs, really, until the middle of the 20th century. That would just be one example there.

00:14:21 Speaker_01
The foreign policy, in my mind, is very much kind of a throwback to John Quincy Adams back when he was Secretary of State in 1821, when he gave his very famous speech about how America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

00:14:32 Speaker_01
It's very much kind of in that line of thought there. So I do see a lot of these trends as salutary. I do worry about throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak, when it comes to certain things like economic policy.

00:14:44 Speaker_01
I'm very much kind of an Irving Kristol two cheers for capitalism guy myself. Not one cheer, not three cheers either. So there's a lot of kind of

00:14:50 Speaker_01
fine-tuning that has to happen here, but overall, I do find myself fairly optimistic about the future of the party and the movement.

00:14:56 Speaker_12
You know, we have the perfect person here to respond to, Josh. I mean, the George Nash of his generation, Matthew Cottenatty, who wrote a fantastic book called The Right.

00:15:06 Speaker_12
Matt, how do we see this in the kind of historical context of the Republican Party? I mean, you see Buckley expelling the kooks in the John Birch Society, et cetera, and you see all these schisms over the years.

00:15:20 Speaker_12
But there seems to be something in, from my perspective, a little unique about, you know, let's purge the party of these people you see with these cabinet selections of the, I would say, isolationist, libertarian-ish wing, you know, communicating with Elon Musk and with Donald Trump Jr.

00:15:36 Speaker_12
saying, don't pick this person. No place for these people in the cabinet. I mean, is that a unique thing in the Republican Party, or is, as Josh is saying, this is just a cycle that we've been through in the past?

00:15:49 Speaker_11
Well, we didn't have X or Elon Musk in previous transitions when the Republican Party was more protectionist or more non-interventionist. I largely agree with Josh's view of the history of the right. There have always been different camps in the war.

00:16:08 Speaker_11
for American conservatism is a war between different groups for influence in partisan politics and then also in policy. And I also agree that when we look at the last century, the Republican Party, we see that today's Republican Party

00:16:24 Speaker_11
resembles pretty closely the pre-World War II Republican Party on the issue of non-intervention and foreign policy restraint, on the issue of trade and protection, on the issue of immigration.

00:16:37 Speaker_11
Of course, the major immigration restriction legislation was passed at a time of Republican power in Washington, D.C.

00:16:47 Speaker_11
I would also say that, you know, you can look at the history of the right and you can see that there are moments that are more populist.

00:16:52 Speaker_11
Of course, one of Buckley's most famous quotes is that he'd rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.

00:17:01 Speaker_11
I mean, that same sentiment clearly informs the Republican Party today, and I think informed the election. And then finally, what you point out, Michael, about conspiracists and the guardrails.

00:17:12 Speaker_11
So Buckley was very famous for saying that in his conservative movement,

00:17:17 Speaker_11
when he created the National Review in 1955, that there would be certain lines, and that if you did believe that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, which the leader of the John Birch Society believed, you would not be able to be a part of William F. Buckley Jr.

00:17:33 Speaker_11
's conservative movement. If you were a Nazi sympathizer, if you were someone who was an anti-Semite, you would not be permitted to write for Buckley's magazine. That came at a time when American culture, government, media was consolidated.

00:17:52 Speaker_11
Big institutions, big universities, big media, big government, big labor, all working together. You had four maximum television stations, and that's after LBJ created the public broadcasting system.

00:18:07 Speaker_11
You had one major national newspaper, the New York Times. And so it was important for Buckley and for his intellectual circle to create a conservatism that would be able to operate in that type of environment.

00:18:20 Speaker_11
And so you had to have a sort of intellectual credibility and authority for your arguments to take hold in this type of consolidated, top-down, everyone basically operating off the same page time. That's not the time we live in anymore.

00:18:40 Speaker_11
We live in a time of demassification. I think one of the big losers in the election was the legacy media. I think we can see the power of podcasts. We can see the power of newsletters. We can see the power of social media.

00:18:54 Speaker_11
And so the quest for respectability that informed the conservative movement of mid-20th century no longer applies.

00:19:03 Speaker_12
about the guardrails. I had a conversation with somebody last night who is a conservative and who is Jewish, and he was deeply concerned about the kind of conspiracist mentality and how it's been able to run wild.

00:19:16 Speaker_12
I mean, you talk about Buckley and the Birchers. I mean, that was an instinct that Buckley had for a long time, and he kind of

00:19:21 Speaker_12
wrote Pat Buchanan and a lesser-known person, Joe Sobran, who wrote for his magazine, out of the movement for flirting with anti-Semitism.

00:19:29 Speaker_12
You have the president-elect having dinner with, and people say Nick Fuentes, and he didn't know that Nick Fuentes was coming to Mar-a-Lago, but he nevertheless was having dinner with Kanye West. who likes to praise Hitler and things like this.

00:19:41 Speaker_12
Tucker Carlson, a person I think we all know, who has flirted with some pretty odious figures. Do we have no guardrails anymore? Is there no William F. Buckley to keep some of these more sinister people out of the conservative movement?

00:19:55 Speaker_11
Well, there's certainly no one figure to the degree that there is a figure who dominates American politics and dominates much of the political right. It's Trump himself. And so people want to make sure that Trump is on their side.

00:20:09 Speaker_11
And Trump is very good at rewarding people who he deems are on his side. Just a note on conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. One reason for American Jews to be leery of conspiracy theories is that the ultimate conspiracy theory is anti-Semitism.

00:20:24 Speaker_11
And when you adopt a conspiracist mentality, there aren't many steps more you need to take before you begin blaming world Jewry for all of the world's problems. That's dangerous, and that ought to be opposed.

00:20:38 Speaker_11
I do think when you look at Trump the man and Trump the president, you also have to see what he has done. for the state of Israel and for combating anti-Semitism worldwide.

00:20:50 Speaker_11
And there, I think, many Jews are very excited about what's in store for the next four years.

00:20:56 Speaker_11
When you look at some of the shifts in the Jewish vote, especially religiously observant Jews, pro-Israel Jews, you can see that whatever associations Trump may have had or people in his circle may have had are overweighted by the actual thrust of his presidency

00:21:14 Speaker_11
in the first four years and almost certainly in the second.

00:21:18 Speaker_12
Sarah, I would go to you, but I have to go to Josh because he's wearing a kippah. And I mean, how could I exclude him from this conversation? Josh, I mean, Matt's right here, obviously. I mean, you have the Abraham Accords.

00:21:28 Speaker_12
I mean, you have a Jewish son-in-law, a Jewish convert daughter. But there is this kind of muddied, you know, these anti-Semites and these weirdos that come into the movement, often pointed out by Trump's enemies.

00:21:41 Speaker_12
Like, is it a kind of conspiratorial party now? I mean, Tulsi Gabbard just got the nod for,

00:21:48 Speaker_11
DNI.

00:21:48 Speaker_12
DNI, yeah. It's so funny, I just thought myself, because I was going to say DEI, that's how- And just for listeners, Director of National Intelligence, all of it. It has nothing to do with the Irmex candy. I'm sorry, my brain is addled by this stuff.

00:22:01 Speaker_12
But Josh, what do you make of those complaints that the modern Republican Party has embraced conspiracism while at the same time being good on Israel and good on certain issues?

00:22:14 Speaker_01
So look, a few specific data points have been mentioned here. The Fuentes Kanye West dinner at Mar-a-Lago in the fall of 2022. I mean, I was vociferously over-the-top critical of that. I did at least one, maybe multiple podcast episodes on it.

00:22:28 Speaker_01
It was disgusting, and there was no world in which it should have happened. Candace Owens is an absolute trainwreck. She is a Nazi-esque anti-Semite. I have enormously critical words for her in my forthcoming book in March.

00:22:39 Speaker_01
Tucker Carlson, I had been extraordinarily critical of, too, including when he had the Holocaust revisionist Daryl Cooper on his show in September. I actually was on a baby moon, so to speak, with my wife in Hawaii.

00:22:51 Speaker_01
And I literally stopped what I was doing because I was so disturbed at this and like ran to record an episode. So I am very attuned to this, I think, is the point that I'm trying to make here.

00:22:59 Speaker_01
I was very disturbed when I saw Dr. Carlson sit next to Byron Donalds and Donald Trump on, I think it was night one of the RNC in Milwaukee. On the other hand,

00:23:07 Speaker_01
On the other hand here, I do think it is most important to look at what Donald Trump and his movement actually does, as opposed to some of the irksome figures who are kind of lurking there in the shadows and don't seem to actually have any kind of influence.

00:23:21 Speaker_01
And look, I could do the whole, like, here's all the things that Donald Trump did for Israel for the Jews thing. I think the listeners of this show probably have a firm grasp of that, so I don't feel a need to rehash all those details.

00:23:30 Speaker_01
But I guess what I will briefly say

00:23:31 Speaker_01
is even looking at a personnel perspective just over the past week, week and a half since Trump won the election here, the Tucker Carlson wing has gotten basically nothing other than you might be able to argue Tulsi Gabbard for DNI.

00:23:44 Speaker_01
But other than that, Marco Rubio at Secretary of State, Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Pete Hegseth who has literally said that Americanism and Zionism are the two front lines for Western civilization. Mike Huckabee for U.S.

00:23:57 Speaker_01
Ambassador to Israel. Are you kidding me? I don't think I could possibly name a more overtly philo-Semitic, pro-Israel, pro-Judean Samaria Ambassador to Israel there. And, you know, you mentioned that I'm here wearing a kippah.

00:24:08 Speaker_01
I guess what I can tell you is, at least in my bubble here in South Florida where I live, I mean, at the last Shabbat that I went to in my synagogue before the election, you saw multiple Kippah America Great Again red synagogues.

00:24:19 Speaker_01
Someone who actually went to the Torah for his aliyah, to actually read the Torah, he put in a mishaberach, which is actually the prayer that we do to wish someone success. He put in a mishaberach for Donald Trump.

00:24:29 Speaker_01
I would estimate in my community down here, probably 90 to 95% of people voted for Donald Trump, because again, We are attuned to a lot of the bad actors here, but we're also focused first and foremost on policy.

00:24:41 Speaker_12
Sarah, let's talk a little bit about immigration. I mean, this is something that when, you know, the autopsies are coming from people on the left, a lot of people talking about immigration.

00:24:52 Speaker_12
I mean, Ezra Klein talking about this in ways that I was wondering why he didn't speak like this prior to the election.

00:24:59 Speaker_10
The thing that surprised me least about the election was the sharp red shift in these big cities. Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious.

00:25:08 Speaker_10
And this idea that like, oh no, the economy is actually good or crime is actually down. This is all just Fox News. Like, shut the fuck up with that. Like, talk to some people who live near you.

00:25:19 Speaker_10
The rage I just hear from people in New York, this is partially Greg Abbott busing huge amounts of migrants here. But that does mean, by the way, there are enough migrants that Greg Abbott could bus actual human bodies to New York City.

00:25:32 Speaker_10
And it was a big enough problem that New York City was not able to effectively deal with it, right? It does show that What was going on on the border was much worse. I think the Democrats were letting themselves accept.

00:25:42 Speaker_12
When you have issues like immigration, look, I mean, as Matt and Josh and we all know, there was the kind of Jeb Bush vision of immigration. You know, there was. the Reagan amnesty.

00:25:57 Speaker_12
Is this the kind of future of the Republican Party is just essentially a restrictionist party?

00:26:01 Speaker_12
And what do you make of all of these ideas that we're going to deport five million people, which of course people in the MSNBC universe say is going to be camps and it's going to be this horrible thing.

00:26:12 Speaker_12
What do you make of the kind of immigration debate sort of after the election and how that kind of, you know, works in modern Republican politics?

00:26:21 Speaker_04
So again, I go back to this idea that the winning campaign didn't do everything right. I think there were, I would say, three main themes to Trump's campaign. The economy, obviously. Immigration, I think, is a standalone.

00:26:37 Speaker_04
But I'll also, sort of with immigration, I'll just put government competency. This idea that, like, y'all just couldn't do anything.

00:26:44 Speaker_04
you couldn't even have a functioning immigration system, let alone closing the border, but like the immigration system you even envisioned was not a functional one.

00:26:52 Speaker_04
And then the third category I would put in is the sort of identity politics, what I thought was Donald Trump's most effective ad, you know, he's for you, she's for they, them, which the left of course thought was transphobic, but I think was actually far more about language and cancel culture in the sense that if you don't have pronouns in your signature block on your email, you're going to get fired,

00:27:13 Speaker_04
That sort of policing was the third category. Here's my point in using those three buckets. Take away one of them and then ask yourself whether you think Donald Trump would have won.

00:27:23 Speaker_04
If inflation hadn't happened, would immigration and the they them ad have been enough for Donald Trump to win? I don't have the answer to that. But it's a good thought experiment when you're then focusing on the other two buckets.

00:27:37 Speaker_04
And this is what happened to Democrats in 2020. That was a narrow win, a very, very narrow win. And they're like, we have a mandate for everything we ran on. No, you don't. You have a mandate for normalcy and competency. That's it.

00:27:50 Speaker_04
And I think Republicans have a mandate for normalcy and competency. And that's probably about it. There are a lot of people in this country who want a functioning immigration system.

00:28:00 Speaker_04
That means different things perhaps to different people, but I think if Republicans try to have some huge overhaul to what the overall plan is here, that could end up not working very well.

00:28:12 Speaker_04
Normalcy and competency first, then you get to go through your Christmas list. Okay, so then to your question about the mass deportation issue, my first question's always, How? You know, our current immigration laws mandate asylum.

00:28:26 Speaker_04
This, by the way, comes from post-World War II, turning away Jews and the international embarrassment that we all should feel about what our country did. My ancestors, by the way, were turned away at New York. They'd reached their Jew limit.

00:28:41 Speaker_04
So you have to either change the law and stop having asylum laws or you will need to still have individual hearings for the vast majority of people who are here illegally.

00:28:53 Speaker_04
So this idea that you just like put people on planes and send them back to where they came from just isn't legally an option. And so I'm curious what the Republican plan is at this point for something that even looks like mass deportation.

00:29:08 Speaker_04
I'm not saying they can't get it done, but I think the first thing Republicans should do is the normalcy and competency that is certainly you know, an 80% issue for most Americans.

00:29:19 Speaker_04
And that includes issues like immigration, it includes issues like crime, like, you know, that things should be crimes again, like shoplifting and assault.

00:29:28 Speaker_04
So start with the basics, get those down, get them right and get them functioning, then go to your wishlist.

00:29:34 Speaker_11
Can I interject here on the immigration question? I agree, competence matters, but I think that addressing illegal immigration is part of that restoration of competence and normalcy.

00:29:46 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:29:46 Speaker_11
you know, something that happened. in the four years between the Trump terms, it's very significant, is that public opinion at large has shifted toward a more restrictionist view. That is not the case during Trump's first term.

00:30:00 Speaker_11
In Trump's first term, there was opposition to the southern border wall. There was opposition to deportations. You now look at public polling, and you see majority support for the completion of the wall. You see support for mass deportations.

00:30:12 Speaker_11
They use that language, and people support it. Independents support it. So I think what this does is give the incoming Trump administration a way to approach this issue with public support that was lacking in the first term. What does that mean?

00:30:28 Speaker_11
Well, I think it means, first of all, stopping the policies that have given us the two million entries over the course of Biden's term. And that's not including the gotaways who were not accounted for.

00:30:43 Speaker_04
I just want to clarify, when I say competency, I mean, yes, the competency of having a border. So like, yes, you should start with competency in immigration.

00:30:51 Speaker_11
I'm saying there's a mandate for that.

00:30:53 Speaker_04
Yes, you can go too far.

00:30:54 Speaker_11
I just think, I think Sarah, that some people have gone too far in saying Donald Trump just won this ridiculous comeback. We haven't seen anything like it since Nixon's comeback in 68, and even that kind of pales in comparison.

00:31:06 Speaker_11
But he has no mandate to do anything that he ran on. I mean, I think obviously people misread mandates, and if you go too far, you're going to get a thermostatic reaction.

00:31:15 Speaker_04
Yeah, I'm saying the mandate is to enforce criminal laws, enforce our immigration laws, stop illegal immigration.

00:31:21 Speaker_11
And I think it goes beyond that.

00:31:22 Speaker_11
And I think that what you're going to see with this new immigration team that's been appointed in the White House and at DHS is a return to the Trump policies that also cut down on legal avenues to immigration in the first term as well.

00:31:35 Speaker_11
And I think that they'll have public support for that, too.

00:31:38 Speaker_12
Matt, you know, there was a joke that when Kamala Harris became the nominee, that we were living through a vibes election, right? There's no policies, vibes. And I think that was ultimately true, but in a way that people didn't really understand.

00:31:52 Speaker_12
You know, Josh Barrow, kind of centrist writer, wrote something really interesting about, you know, it was in the Atlantic about how Democrats should look at their loss. And I'll tell you what. what he wrote about I had yesterday.

00:32:04 Speaker_12
I live in New York City. I was getting on the subway. No one paid except for me. Everyone jumped the turnstile. I went into CVS when I got off. Everything was behind glass. It took me 20 minutes to find people to get a thing of deodorant.

00:32:18 Speaker_12
And then also, you know, I was a couple blocks away from the Pennsylvania Hotel and there were just migrants just hanging around outside. This is the vibe. So when people say to you, The numbers are going down. It's drying up at the border.

00:32:33 Speaker_12
Inflation is on the decrease. Crime isn't what you think it is, right? Americans have a conservative disposition in the sense that the number of people that I talk to say, well, it's illegal to walk across the border. They should just be sent home.

00:32:47 Speaker_12
There's just a big disconnect. I mean, Republicans seem to have kind of exploited that in the way that Joe Scarborough says the day after the election, yeah, we shouldn't have

00:32:56 Speaker_12
you know, biological males competing in female sports, like 85% of Americans believe this. It's like, you didn't say that before.

00:33:03 Speaker_12
But they're kind of coming to this idea that dispositionally, Americans tend to be more on the right on a lot of these issues. And I mean, it doesn't even, I mean, the Republican Party almost doesn't even have to do anything.

00:33:16 Speaker_12
It's just the Democratic Party has to go too far in another direction.

00:33:19 Speaker_11
I think that's right.

00:33:20 Speaker_11
My colleague at AEI, Rui Teixeira, someone who writes as a Democrat, coined the phrase the Fox News fallacy to describe the mentality among many on the left that if something appears or is stated on Fox News, it cannot be true in any way.

00:33:36 Speaker_11
That fallacy is what led, I think, much of the Democratic establishment, much of the legacy media to say, oh, no, no, the economy is doing much better than people say. Or no, no, no, the migration, look, it's coming under control now.

00:33:49 Speaker_11
And really, it was Republican opposition that prevented Biden from doing anything to address the southern border. That's clearly not what people felt. And I think that the most important figure in this election

00:34:01 Speaker_11
is the number of Americans who felt dissatisfied with the direction of the country. In these exit polls, always to be taken with a grain of salt, it is in the stratosphere.

00:34:11 Speaker_11
And the number of people who felt that Donald Trump would be an effective agent of change. Again, high, high margins for Trump. That is why he won.

00:34:22 Speaker_11
Widespread dissatisfaction with four years of Biden-Harris and the belief that Donald Trump is a change agent.

00:34:33 Speaker_12
After the break, what do Trump's cabinet picks tell us about how his second presidency will shake out? Stay with us.

00:34:47 Speaker_03
Today's episode was made possible by Ground News. America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline. especially over the last few years. If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot.

00:35:02 Speaker_03
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00:35:15 Speaker_03
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00:35:53 Speaker_03
Hey, Honestly listeners, I want to let you know about an amazing podcast called Unpacking Israeli History. If you read the headlines about what's going on in Israel, you're only getting a very tiny slice of a very long story.

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00:36:12 Speaker_03
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00:36:58 Speaker_03
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00:37:09 Speaker_12
Josh, the Republican Party going forward, what is the vision and is that vision durable? So for instance, becoming the party of the working class, the party of tariffs, Josh Hawley's, you know, hanging out with union bosses now.

00:37:22 Speaker_12
It's a very different party. This is not the right to work party that one expected 25 years ago. But you got to deliver on this stuff.

00:37:29 Speaker_12
And obviously globalization is not a force that you can just, you know, stop and you say, look, there's a couple of policies we're going to stop globalization, factories are going to come home.

00:37:37 Speaker_12
Do you imagine that that's something that can be a Republican Party line for many years to come? Or is that promises that can't be kept? Because a lot of this economic policy, I worry about being kind of voodoo economics.

00:37:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, so let me just first come back to what we're just talking about, and then I'll answer your very astute question as well.

00:37:55 Speaker_01
So I think part of what is currently holding the Republican Party coalition together is that the Democrats are frankly just in a very, very, very dark place.

00:38:05 Speaker_01
And yeah, it's nice that Joe Scarborough, like the day after the election is saying, oh, yeah, of course, 85% of people think that biological males should not compete against biological women. But

00:38:14 Speaker_01
You know, you guys were not saying that for the past few years. And for every Joe Scarborough, there's a sunny host on The View who two days after the election was saying the reason that Kamala Harris lost was sexism and misogyny.

00:38:25 Speaker_01
And, you know, the audience there is clapping like a bunch of seals. I mean, have you guys actually learned any lessons or not. I think that very much remains to be seen.

00:38:34 Speaker_01
I thus far have seen very little evidence that anyone in the Democratic party establishment, anyone in the left-leaning media has actually learned any of the relevant lessons. And one proxy for that that I'm going to be closely watching is

00:38:47 Speaker_01
Is Barack Obama himself going to continue to be a larger-than-life superstar on the American left? Barack Obama put his legacy, put his coalition, he just put a lot on the line.

00:38:58 Speaker_01
With the speaking gig of the DNC in Chicago, he was probably Kamala Harris's number one surrogate trying to capture the old 2008, let's fundamentally transform America, change hope, all that. And he came up drastically short.

00:39:11 Speaker_01
So that I think is one good proxy issue to see whether Democrats have actually learned anything.

00:39:15 Speaker_01
And unless and until they indicate that they have learned anything and they stop being the party of what I refer to as the party of civilizational arson, trying to basically burn it down when it comes to crime, when it comes to the border, when it comes to basic quality of life concerns, unless until they learn some very basic lessons that the American people care first and foremost about living a decent quality of life,

00:39:35 Speaker_01
I don't think Republicans necessarily even need to have a particularly substantive forward facing agenda. They should, but I'm not saying they probably even need to because they will probably be the majority party in our election simply by default.

00:39:46 Speaker_01
But I will answer your question as well about the political economy piece of the puzzle here.

00:39:50 Speaker_01
So I think during the Trump administration, the first time we saw the Trump administration, there was kind of this schizophrenic disconnect to an extent where Trump did run a lot of similar blue collar working class themes back in 2016.

00:40:03 Speaker_01
He ran on even more of those themes this time around. But the policy didn't always match the first time around. Yes, the tariffs on China were probably part and parcel of that.

00:40:10 Speaker_01
But his first major piece of legislation that he got passing to law, the tax cut of 2017, essentially that could have been written by Stephen Moore and the Wall Street Journal editorial board. And I thought it was a perfectly fine bill.

00:40:21 Speaker_01
I would have voted for myself. But the point is, that was not exactly a MAGA proposal or anything like that. So, you know, we're going to have to see. I mean, who's he going to tap as his treasury secretary? Who's going to be the Fed chairman?

00:40:31 Speaker_01
Is he going to be a hard money guy, a soft money guy when it comes to interest rates? You know, these are very real questions.

00:40:36 Speaker_01
It's very nice that Sean O'Brien, the teamsters guy, speaks at the union, but is that going to translate into any policy there? Again, these are very, very open questions. I just don't really exactly know what the answer is.

00:40:47 Speaker_01
Again, I hope that we can find some sweet spot between throwing out the entire baby with the bathwater and going to kind of a full status party, which certainly I would not be happy with.

00:40:57 Speaker_01
On the other hand, I do like this realignment, as I said earlier, towards kind of a more kind of sober-minded, clear-minded, two cheers for capitalism mentality.

00:41:06 Speaker_12
Sarah, appointments. A lot of stuff that's coming across the transom now, horrifying some people, delighting others. Let's stop on Matt Gaetz.

00:41:15 Speaker_06
Matt's a colleague and he's someone who's worked really hard against the weaponization of government, the lawfare that's happened at DOJ. He'd be an instant reformer if given the position and I understand the picks.

00:41:26 Speaker_02
I don't think there's a single Republican senator who actually thinks that this is the right choice and a qualified choice and somebody of the moral character to be Attorney General.

00:41:35 Speaker_12
What do you think of these appointments? Does it worry you? And kind of what does it say to you about what this version of Trump's Republican Party is, Trump 2.0?

00:41:45 Speaker_04
So one, I think you will be shocked, but I'm actually quite bullish on Matt Gaetz. I hope the Senate confirms him. There's a few reasons for that. One, Could have been a lot worse. Matt Gaetz, you may think he's a buffoon or reckless.

00:42:00 Speaker_04
You know, he's obviously been accused of doing illegal drugs with underage prostitutes, which makes for a lot of punchlines.

00:42:07 Speaker_12
Yeah, that's not a good thing, by the way. Not what I expected from the Republican Party maybe 20 years ago, but okay. Fair enough. Yes, we can dismiss those.

00:42:16 Speaker_04
But the other names that were in the mix were far more concerning to me. And I would be concerned that if the Senate turned away Matt Gaetz, that they would get something worse.

00:42:27 Speaker_04
So be careful when you think things can't get worse, because they absolutely can. And some of those names in the mix are truly corrupt people who would use the power of the Justice Department for really bad stuff.

00:42:40 Speaker_04
I mean, self-enrichment being the least of the bad things. Second, The Department of Justice is very specific in how it works. There's an attorney general. That person is usually the figurehead, right? They set broad brush policy.

00:42:54 Speaker_04
And then the deputy attorney general, the DAG, is the COO of the department and actually moves to get stuff done. As of our taping this podcast, the word is that that will be Todd Blanche.

00:43:04 Speaker_04
I think if Matt Gaetz is attorney general, it makes Todd Blanche a very powerful deputy attorney general, since Matt Gaetz doesn't actually know how the building works, where the sort of levers of power are. Todd Blanche does.

00:43:15 Speaker_04
He has a lot of experience as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Obviously, most recently was defending Donald Trump in several of his cases. You know, Bill Barr was kind of an exception to that general way that DOJ works.

00:43:28 Speaker_04
He really was doing a lot of the day-to-day work of the Department of Justice out of the AG's office. That's the exception, though, and it's because Bill Barr has an odd background for that. He'd been attorney general before. He's an in-the-weeds guy.

00:43:40 Speaker_04
So he was doing some of both of that in a lot of ways. Matt Gaetz won't. The last reason

00:43:47 Speaker_04
that I'm bullish on Matt Gaetz is that I actually think it is a problem from the first Trump term that Trump didn't have his own people in a lot of these positions.

00:43:58 Speaker_04
And I think it both hampered Donald Trump from doing a lot of the things he wanted to. A lot of people slow rolled stuff, kept stuff off his desk.

00:44:07 Speaker_04
kept trying to convince him not to do things, and then patted themselves on the back as the guardrails for democracy.

00:44:13 Speaker_04
And what that did was, I think, deeply frustrated Donald Trump, and so he acted out in other ways, but far more important than that, it didn't show the American people what they actually voted for.

00:44:24 Speaker_04
Now, maybe they actually wanted all the things that Donald Trump said, But maybe they didn't. We'll never know because instead they got sort of a weird amalgamation.

00:44:34 Speaker_04
I'm someone who thinks that generally compromise is the worst outcome in a lot of conversations because you end up losing what actually makes the idea work. Compromise in the legislature is good. Compromise in the executive can be quite bad.

00:44:48 Speaker_04
And so people look back at the Trump term and they'll name all these things that they liked from the first Trump term. three quarters of them were the things that Donald Trump didn't want to have happen.

00:44:58 Speaker_04
So the people elected Donald Trump, give the man the tools he wants, let him have the term he wants, and then let the American people make their decision based on that. So yes, I'm for Matt Gaetz at this point, because that's who Donald Trump wants.

00:45:09 Speaker_04
It wouldn't be the attorney general I'd pick, because I'd want someone to actually be able to put in place my vision for the Department of Justice, which I don't think he'll be able to do.

00:45:19 Speaker_04
But there's this fallacy that four years is somehow 40 years, that what is now will always be.

00:45:24 Speaker_04
Executive branch employees who think that they write a guidance letter and that that will be policy forever are stunned when four years later the next administration flips it.

00:45:33 Speaker_04
The now fallacy is just running wild around our politics, and it is dead wrong.

00:45:39 Speaker_11
Sarah's right, I am shocked that she's bullish on Matt Gaetz.

00:45:42 Speaker_12
Hold on, can we all just process our shock that Sarah Isker is a Matt Gaetz fangirl? Matthew Cognetti, go ahead.

00:45:50 Speaker_11
Sorry. I'm taking it all in. I think Sarah makes some good points. I do think that there will be concerns about the Gaetz nomination. The Republicans will have 53 seats in the Senate, and that means that Gaetz

00:46:06 Speaker_11
really can lose three people and still win on J.D. Vance's tie-breaking vote.

00:46:13 Speaker_04
And you're not even including a recess appointment.

00:46:15 Speaker_11
Well, that's a whole separate issue, right?

00:46:17 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:46:18 Speaker_11
A couple of things about Gates. I think what we saw in the leadership election in the Senate, one factor that matters a lot in these nominations and selections is likability.

00:46:28 Speaker_11
I think that Gaetz is going to have to do some charm offensive with some of these Republican senators, some of whom served with him in the House and may not have liked him, and others who have heard a lot about him.

00:46:40 Speaker_11
And the likability factor didn't help Rick Scott, who was MAGA's pick for Senate leader, and it might not help Matt Gaetz. I do agree, though, with Sarah, that Gaetz is underestimated. He clearly has a very polarizing public persona.

00:46:57 Speaker_11
And if you're not on his side on a given issue, you're going to come in for a lot of abuse. I mean, he's going to fight to win.

00:47:04 Speaker_11
There's only one person of whom it can be said that he orchestrated the downfall of a sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States. And that is Matt Gaetz.

00:47:15 Speaker_11
And the fact also that he has created a relationship with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they actually get along, that to me suggests there's this whole other dimension to his personality that we haven't really been exposed to, those of us who just watch, you know, kind of the stage play of our politics take place.

00:47:33 Speaker_11
So while I think that it's not a done deal, I do think that he has some potential for being underestimated.

00:47:41 Speaker_12
I spoke to somebody last night at dinner who's very, very clued into this stuff and knows Matt Gaetz, and he's not a Republican, he's not a conservative, and he said the exact same thing that Matt Continetti said.

00:47:52 Speaker_12
Do not in any way underestimate Matt Gaetz. Josh. You know, we're talking about the future of the Republican Party. Donald Trump says a lot. You know, watch what Donald Trump does, not what he says.

00:48:04 Speaker_12
And obviously, these appointments are kind of filling out a lot of what Donald Trump's vision for his next administration will be. You wrote a piece defending Pete Hegseth and his appointment as Secretary of Defense.

00:48:18 Speaker_12
You know, and as Matt points out, the MAGA types, the Tucker Carlsons of the world, wanted Rick Scott. didn't happen. What do you make of this? I mean, what does this say about who Donald Trump is going to be in his second term?

00:48:30 Speaker_12
And in that sense, I mean, what the Republican Party is going to be for the next four years.

00:48:34 Speaker_01
I mean, I'm not sure that anyone benefits more from the Matt Gaetz nomination than Pete Hegsef.

00:48:40 Speaker_01
I mean, literally on Tuesday evening, after Donald Trump announces Pete Hegsef as Secretary of Defense, people are like, oh my God, they named the Fox and Friends co-host. So like, this is an insult to the military.

00:48:51 Speaker_01
And then, you know, the very next day, less than 24 hours later, Donald Trump says, hold my beer and nominates Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General of the United States. And now everyone has completely forgotten about Pete Hegsef.

00:49:01 Speaker_01
I think PDHF is an inspired pick, actually, to lead the Pentagon. Not on my bingo card, not something I saw coming. I think it came together fairly last minute, but I very much like it.

00:49:12 Speaker_01
The United States military has had double-digit percentage declines in recruitment. They are falling very, very short of meeting their recruitment goals over the past few years.

00:49:20 Speaker_01
That goes across all the branch of government, if I'm not mistaken, Army, Navy, Air Force, you name it there. I think you need someone at the top, and let's be very clear, the Secretary of Defense is just as much

00:49:30 Speaker_01
a forward facing public facing symbol than he is actually the command of the bureaucracy if you want to encourage people to recruit to join the military you need someone who I think is more in touch from a generational perspective with those young recruits be texted to someone who is served in both of our.

00:49:46 Speaker_01
recent wars overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. He won multiple bronze stars there. He has been very outspoken about reform of the military when it comes to things like the noxious dissemination of wokeism, the whole Mark Milley white rage thing.

00:49:58 Speaker_01
He'd accept that's been on top of that. I think if you actually want to get more young men and women inspired to join the United States military, I think that he is basically a perfect figure there.

00:50:09 Speaker_01
More generally speaking, you know, looking at a lot of these nominees so far, you're looking at a lot of very young people. I mean, that very much is kind of the number one thing that stands out to me.

00:50:17 Speaker_01
I get the impression looking at that, especially combined with the fact that JD Vance just turned 40 years old a few months ago. And it looks to me like Donald Trump is making a generational play.

00:50:26 Speaker_01
I think that he is trying to lock in his view, not merely for this generation, but for the generations that will follow.

00:50:33 Speaker_01
That to me is kind of what I'm implicitly reading in the tea leaves as to what I'm seeing out there from a lot of these appointments. He's trying to fundamentally change the American right.

00:50:42 Speaker_01
And I think that he broadly is already succeeding, likely is going to continue to succeed in that.

00:50:47 Speaker_01
Again, the question is exactly what specifically nuts and bolts that entails beyond kind of the broader outlines of a more nationalist, populist approach to immigration, trade, foreign policy, et cetera.

00:50:59 Speaker_01
But I am quite bullish on the Pete Hegseth pick. It's actually one of my absolute favorite picks he's made thus far. By the way, I broadly agree with what Sarah and Matt have said about Matt Gaetz. The only thing that I will add

00:51:10 Speaker_01
Is that I just don't think the votes are literally there. I literally do not see him getting 50 votes.

00:51:15 Speaker_01
So one of the two things is going to have to happen is going to have to be a tremendous assertion of political capital to try to get this nomination across the finish line in a traditional Senate Judiciary Committee conference. hearing sort of thing.

00:51:27 Speaker_01
That's going to require a lot of airing of dirty laundry when it comes to a lot of the skeletons in Matt Gaetz's closet that may or may not exist. I make no claim as to the veracity of that.

00:51:35 Speaker_01
Or the alternative, which a lot of people are chattering about, is this recess appointments issue there, which would be another road to go down there, but certainly would make a lot of people upset, that's for sure.

00:51:44 Speaker_12
Let's talk about this. I mean, at the end of this campaign, obviously a panicked democratic establishment tried to convince the American people that we were trundling down the path towards fascism, right?

00:51:57 Speaker_12
As somebody told me on the live stream that we did on election night that Matt Continetti participated in, the Madison Square Garden rally, if that was a fascist rally, it was the most Jewish fascist rally I've ever seen in my life.

00:52:07 Speaker_12
So it wasn't really, you know, people weren't really accepting this as an argument.

00:52:11 Speaker_12
But look, there's a lot of people in our universe, people that we know, people that we respect, that worry about this and say, you know, not democracy's on the line, but there's a kind of chipping away at democratic norms, and we worry that this will happen again.

00:52:23 Speaker_12
Ed Whalen, a conservative over at National Review, wrote a long piece about recess appointments, saying not that they're unconstitutional, but they're anti-constitutional in a lot of ways. So what do you make of this argument that

00:52:35 Speaker_12
Look, Donald Trump is better than, you know, the alternative in Kamala Harris, but we really have to worry about some of these democratic norms being subverted by the MAGA movement.

00:52:46 Speaker_11
This issue of recess appointments that has surfaced, and it was tied to the election of the new Senate majority leader. You know, most people don't know that the Senate hasn't gone into recess for years.

00:53:00 Speaker_11
as a consequence of a Supreme Court decision stemming out of the Obama administration, which limited the president's ability to make recess appointments.

00:53:09 Speaker_11
That reality, I think, caused Donald Trump a lot of frustration in his first term, when instead of being able to make recess appointments, he made temporary appointments to run cabinet agencies. As you remember, toward the end,

00:53:24 Speaker_11
Trump would often say that he loves temporary, because he's able to move people around much more quickly and get around the confirmation machinery. There are some 1,200 Senate-approved positions.

00:53:37 Speaker_11
And so the Trump administration, which wants to hit the ground running, and which I think understands what Sarah has called the now fallacy, that things can change and may well change just two years from now,

00:53:48 Speaker_11
are looking at this recess appointment play as a way to fully staff the administration pretty early on in the next year.

00:53:56 Speaker_11
However, I think that there's going to be great resistance amongst the senators to it, and I think that the election of John Thune, a Mitch McConnell protege, to lead the Senate Republican conference means that the recess appointment strategy will be resisted.

00:54:11 Speaker_11
What does this mean for democratic norms? You know, I think that many of the people who are

00:54:17 Speaker_11
Talking about the importance of norms in our politics are again in a very different position today than they were at the outset of the first Trump presidency in 2017. Two reasons.

00:54:28 Speaker_11
One, Donald Trump is kind of a known quantity to the American public now. It's not just the kind of cultural figure that Josh talked about earlier. He was also known as the president.

00:54:39 Speaker_11
And one of the things that we can see reading the exit polls is that the voters felt that they were better off under Donald Trump than they were under four years. of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

00:54:51 Speaker_11
And what that does is give Trump quite a bit of leeway, I think, in the eyes of the American public in order to restore the conditions that prevailed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

00:55:02 Speaker_11
The second reason things are a little bit different in the norms debate.

00:55:05 Speaker_11
is that it's very hard, I think, for people who are affiliated or associated with the Biden administration to portray themselves as the champions of norms after four years where things were not normal.

00:55:18 Speaker_11
When you think about, well, prosecuting a former president for the first time in American history, when you think about

00:55:25 Speaker_11
the ways in which free speech was treated by the Biden administration, when you think about the vaccine mandate that Biden tried to impose on employers, and when you think about some of the cultural topics that we've already discussed.

00:55:40 Speaker_11
So I think there's been a shift on what constitutes norms, and this shift benefits Trump at the outset of his term.

00:55:50 Speaker_12
And let me add one thing to this question of democratic norms. I was on a TV show where someone said to me, Donald Trump's going to run a freight train through Washington. He controls both houses of Congress.

00:56:01 Speaker_12
He has broad immunity to do whatever he wants to do. So add that to the mix.

00:56:06 Speaker_12
I mean, is this something that you worry about and this idea of the Republican Party, the modern Republican Party, being a party that is kind of authoritarian or undemocratic in its general disposition?

00:56:19 Speaker_04
Oh, you triggered me. Oh my goodness.

00:56:21 Speaker_12
I was trying.

00:56:23 Speaker_04
Next hour of the podcast. Okay. So again, this now fallacy, right?

00:56:27 Speaker_04
I just saw this so much in the first administration, executive branch officials patting themselves on the back for getting all this stuff done by executive order, by guidance letter, by administrative action. And it was all gone.

00:56:40 Speaker_04
within six months of the Biden administration. So if you actually want to make change, and again, my point is the Republican mandate right now is for normalcy and competency. Actually arrest criminals, then charge them with the crimes.

00:56:54 Speaker_04
Actually prevent people from coming into the country here illegally before you do other stuff. So all of that, The way you do that is legislation. You have both houses of Congress.

00:57:08 Speaker_04
If you want to actually make real change in the country, lasting change, you must do it legislatively. And I am curious to see how much a Trump

00:57:20 Speaker_04
second term, and these cabinet officials understand that, or if they just sort of go giddy with executive power that's like a sugar high that doesn't do anything and Congress continues to be a group of 535 cable news pundits with really no power, even though they are supposed to be.

00:57:39 Speaker_04
the first branch of government, the place where these things start and are supposed to happen, where that compromise and longevity is built.

00:57:46 Speaker_04
It is the progressive movement that wanted to build the large administrative state and executive power because they thought the legislative branch was too slow and too moderating an influence.

00:57:56 Speaker_04
And that was frustrating because you couldn't fix all the problems right away. Well, here we are living in their world in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and it's not working.

00:58:06 Speaker_04
So make Congress great again before you do anything else on the immunity issue. That's not what the Supreme Court said. And it's like someone is wrong on the Internet and I must correct them.

00:58:17 Speaker_04
So after the Supreme Court's decision, Jack Smith refiled his charges against Trump in the January 6 case. It had the same number of charges and it had the same statutory charges.

00:58:28 Speaker_04
What the Supreme Court said was that you need to distinguish between official conduct and unofficial conduct. And Jack Smith waited too long to bring the charges, and they were a hot mess of charges, which I said from the beginning.

00:58:42 Speaker_04
So then he filed narrow charges that actually framed the charges against Trump as unofficial conduct when he was a candidate for president, not official conduct as president. I think they would have gone forward, no problem. So,

00:58:57 Speaker_04
Beware, executive branch employees, because if you buy into the headlines of what that Supreme Court decision supposedly said, you will find yourself on the wrong end of a federal prosecutor at some point. So no, I'm not concerned about that.

00:59:12 Speaker_04
I do have lots of concerns, but they fall far more into misunderstanding the mandate, over-reading the mandate, and these lower-level

00:59:24 Speaker_04
officials being giddy with the power, like the nerds who weren't invited to sit at the popular kids table in seventh grade, acting out their revenge fantasies on the cheerleading squad.

00:59:36 Speaker_04
That's not Donald Trump, but I think it is very possible that it could be some of these lower level officials, not cabinet level, where, yeah, they could do some pretty scary stuff. And there's a whole bunch of Republicans in town who seem

00:59:51 Speaker_04
more keen on keeping their power than on using it for good. Welcome to the United States Congress.

00:59:58 Speaker_12
Is there anything better than an animated and irritated Sarah Isker? I don't think so. Josh, do you want to add something to this question about democratic norms and the fear of Donald Trump riding roughshod over the Constitution?

01:00:16 Speaker_01
Sure. So, I mean, there were so many different ways that this was just always a completely silly and banal campaign talking point. The most obvious reason is because Donald Trump was literally president of the United States.

01:00:27 Speaker_01
Look, I mean, like many others, I was actually quite skeptical of Donald Trump back at that time. And one of the many reasons was that he did not have a track record. And at that time, he was talking about openly nominating his sister to the U.S.

01:00:38 Speaker_01
Supreme Court and doing a lot of very kooky things.

01:00:41 Speaker_01
After his four years in office, a four years in office that was marked by, as Sarah alluded to when she was discussing Matt Gaetz earlier, that was marked by an internal deep state coup within certain malfactors within the DOJ and other facets of the government.

01:00:55 Speaker_01
A four years in office that was marked by at times, I would argue actually an over-deference to various courts from the lowest federal courts all the way up to the US Supreme Court. That's a conversation perhaps for another day.

01:01:05 Speaker_01
But the point is that he was actually very deferential in many ways as president. even including to his cabinet members.

01:01:11 Speaker_01
So for instance, to give a very concrete example, back in 2017, one of the first international crises that Donald Trump faced was when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and I think Bahrain decided to institute an embargo on Qatar for Al Jazeera and all the Islamism that they were disseminating.

01:01:28 Speaker_01
Donald Trump's instincts were to stand with the Saudis and Emiratis. He had just gotten back from Riyadh. There was that very funny image with him with MBS and the orb. And then Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, actually talked him out of it.

01:01:39 Speaker_01
So, you know, there's a lot of examples like this, but Trump was actually very deferential. So that was one of the most obvious reasons.

01:01:45 Speaker_01
I've been just talking to one that he was just going to rule with an iron fist and be an authoritarian, which is totally out to lunch. But the other obvious reason, as you guys have alluded to, is I mean, who can possibly take this

01:02:10 Speaker_01
They're trying to put in an unconstitutional recusal requirement that would get some consortium of lower court judges to demand that a Supreme Court justice must recuse from a case. What could possibly go wrong?

01:02:21 Speaker_01
By the way, that's probably also unconstitutional because it undermines the judicial power of which Article 3 vesting clause actually speaks there.

01:02:28 Speaker_01
It's the same party, as you guys have said, that took upon itself to, for the very first time, prosecute a former president of the United States.

01:02:34 Speaker_01
Once upon a time in America, I think we viewed trying to put your political opposition in jail as the kind of thing that a sub-Saharan Africa tin pot dictatorship would do.

01:02:42 Speaker_01
But no, it's actually the very quote unquote norms preserving Democratic Party that made that dystopian reality very much part of our 21st century American way of life as well there.

01:02:52 Speaker_01
So look, I could go on, but those to me are really the main reasons why this talking point failed and why no one frankly just ended up buying it.

01:02:58 Speaker_04
Here's my word of warning, though. Whichever side you're listening to this podcast, and that's what I love about this podcast, is that I can't guess what your political beliefs are, dear listener.

01:03:08 Speaker_04
Whatever side you find yourself on, when you are cheering for shortcuts, whether they're, we don't need legislation, we'll do it through executive order,

01:03:15 Speaker_04
whether they're, we don't need Senate confirmation, we'll do it through recess appointments, or various ways to not have to acknowledge the other side, not have to work with them, not have to engage with them. They're evil.

01:03:29 Speaker_04
They're not just wrong, they're evil. So we can do this some other way. In four years, it will be them that has that power. So be very careful what you're cheering for right now and what you're booing for right now.

01:03:41 Speaker_04
Because again, the fallacy of now, this idea that you will only be the ones in power forever and ever, is simply not going to be true.

01:03:48 Speaker_12
Is the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, of Cold War foreign policy, not to say interventionist foreign policy, but a more active American foreign policy, one of tax cuts and free markets, is that party dead?

01:04:05 Speaker_11
Yes, I think it is. And I think for some good reasons and some bad reasons. The Cold War ended a long time ago, and we're no longer in the post-Cold War era.

01:04:15 Speaker_11
I mean, the post-Cold War era ran from the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now we're in a new era. I don't know, it hasn't gotten a name yet. Maybe it's Cold War II, maybe it's the Age of Nations. What is it?

01:04:31 Speaker_11
So things have to change. What are some of the bad reasons? Well, I think that kind of the deterioration of American society and culture and the collapse and trust of our institutions has made a lot of Americans, and Americans on the right as well,

01:04:47 Speaker_11
skeptical of American ideals of freedom. I want to see those ideals reasserted and strengthened.

01:04:52 Speaker_11
I think you can see some of that in today's Republican Party, but I would like a stronger emphasis and also recognition that economic freedom is part of political freedom and religious freedom as well.

01:05:03 Speaker_11
At the same time, I'd just say, I think that there are some broad similarities. The idea of peace through strength, that was a Reagan line. Law and order, that was a Reagan line. Make America great again? Reagan line.

01:05:16 Speaker_11
So even though it's not the same party, you can still see a general kind of belief in American strength, in American freedom, American patriotism, and forms the Trump party as well as the old Reagan party.

01:05:32 Speaker_12
And Matt, to put back to neoconservatism, which is used as a slur all the time, these no more neocons, please don't nominate neocons.

01:05:41 Speaker_12
I mean, in the original sense, in the domestic sense of neoconservatism, it seems to me that neoconservatism is again ascendant.

01:05:50 Speaker_11
That's right.

01:05:51 Speaker_12
In the public interest way.

01:05:53 Speaker_11
Well, if you just read it as a hawk, which is how many people use the phrase now. Neocon means a hawk. You're for American assistance to Ukraine, or you're for American intervention abroad. That, I think, has become a term of derision.

01:06:07 Speaker_11
However, in the original sense, as you say, Mike, The neocons were Democrats who left their party because it had gone too radical and joined what would become the Reagan coalition.

01:06:18 Speaker_11
And so the new neocons are people like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk. They're the new neocons. Are they the same as the old ones?

01:06:30 Speaker_11
I mean, they're not pointy-headed intellectuals like myself who like to write for little magazines and talk about Marxism and debates, but they're neocons.

01:06:40 Speaker_12
And Josh the same question to you and add one thing to make clear that you know It is also true that the Trump administration and Donald Trump and the people around him do want more deregulation They are a tax-cutting party still obviously the focus has changed towards more working-class economic policies But is that Reagan vision of the Republican Party?

01:07:02 Speaker_12
Is that kind of gone? I

01:07:04 Speaker_01
I think it's been more of an incremental shift than I think many realize. I mean, it's not like the old party is dead and the new party is here. There has been a shift, no doubt about it whatsoever, on a lot of these issues.

01:07:17 Speaker_01
But I think that we oftentimes overstate that shift. So I'll give just one very concrete example. When it comes to tariffs and industrial policy,

01:07:24 Speaker_01
You know, a lot of people forget this, but Ronald Reagan actually instituted very high tariffs on the Japanese auto industry in a bid to preserve the big three auto manufacturers in Detroit.

01:07:33 Speaker_01
A bid, by the way, which best as I can tell, was actually highly successful, was one of his more successful ventures into getting a little more hands on in economics. But, you know, Ronald Reagan, I mean, Henry Olson wrote a whole book on this.

01:07:44 Speaker_01
Ronald Reagan actually was in many ways kind of a working class Republican at his core. I mean, He had that one line where he said that the heart and core of conservatism is libertarianism. I'm paraphrasing. That's not exactly what he said.

01:07:56 Speaker_01
But, you know, in many ways, his policies actually were a little more pragmatic oftentimes. And look, the tax cutting imperative is not going anywhere. I mean, Donald Trump is nothing if not a populist in the Jacksonian mold.

01:08:07 Speaker_01
A populist is oftentimes going to deliver to the people what the people say they want, and the people don't particularly like high taxes. Which maybe is one of the reasons that you got the 2017 tax cut act.

01:08:17 Speaker_01
I would expect something somewhat similar to that this time around as well. Again, I think the political economy piece of the puzzle really remains to be seen.

01:08:25 Speaker_01
This is actually one of the reasons why I'm somewhat more bullish as well on the Matt Gaetz nomination. Matt Gaetz actually has been very outspoken when it comes to big tech, antitrust, a lot of these more kind of Trump era

01:08:35 Speaker_01
populist issues that I myself have also been outspoken on as well there. So we'll see just how much that continues.

01:08:40 Speaker_01
But I think for sure, when it comes to foreign policy and immigration, maybe even more so than kind of domestic political economy, I think that we've seen a notable shift on those issues there.

01:08:51 Speaker_01
But again, I don't want to overstate that either, because Marco Rubio is still Secretary of State, right? So I mean, the shift has happened, but we're not just totally getting rid of the past 40, 50 years of Republican Party history either.

01:09:02 Speaker_12
And George W. Bush implemented steel tariffs in 2002. I mean, they lasted about a year and a half because they failed, but everyone tries it in some way. Sarah, same question to you.

01:09:13 Speaker_12
Is that old coalition of the kind of Reagan Republicans, is that kind of gone and dead?

01:09:20 Speaker_04
Yes, but I do not think that the Trump coalition is repeatable without Donald Trump. And so in 2028, you will have a different Republican Party because this is another relatively modern phenomenon, but it is solidified at this point.

01:09:36 Speaker_04
The political parties stand for whatever their standard bearer says they stand for. Donald Trump can't run again. He's a lame duck. The fight begins today over what that Republican Party is and means moving forward. It will be decided by the person,

01:09:49 Speaker_04
that wins that, not the movement that wins it. And because I don't think that the Trump coalition can be put back together by any other person on the horizon that I see right now, I think you'll have a very different Republican party.

01:10:03 Speaker_04
I think if they try to mimic the Trump coalition with someone who is not Donald Trump, Democrats will win the White House in 2028.

01:10:11 Speaker_12
With a lame duck president like Donald Trump, does that loosen the grip that he has on people in the House and the Senate who slavishly follow the Donald Trump mandates because they're afraid of being primaried?

01:10:24 Speaker_12
Is it, you know, more likely to fracture because he has less time in office?

01:10:29 Speaker_11
I don't think it does. I think Donald Trump is the most powerful force in American politics and has been. on the right now for about a decade. And yes, he's term limited, but I think he's going to have a pretty strong hand in who succeeds him.

01:10:44 Speaker_11
And I think that informed his decision to put J.D. Vance as his vice president. And so, yes, I mean, the time horizons differ.

01:10:52 Speaker_11
And you might have more slack, say, to oppose some of these appointments if the senator's not up until long after Donald Trump is out of office.

01:11:01 Speaker_11
But I think we, while recognizing the unique nature of Donald Trump the man, have to also remember that he's part of a movement.

01:11:09 Speaker_11
We've talked somewhat about the global aspects of this movement, but the MAGA movement, you can see its roots in the post-financial crisis moment in the Tea Party and the anti-establishment mentality.

01:11:22 Speaker_11
that carried on over to Trump, he still has many cards to play. He's a different sort of lame duck because I think of his role in this much broader, much more longer lasting popular movement.

01:11:36 Speaker_01
Just real quick, if I can, actually, because I'll just add one thing as well. I agree with Matt that I don't think Trump's power is diminished. And one of those reasons is his vice president, J.D.

01:11:44 Speaker_01
Vance, who just turned 40 years old, is already the frontrunner for the 2028 Republican nomination.

01:11:49 Speaker_01
So for that very, very simple reason, I don't think you're going to see a lot of congressmen and senators that want to go necessarily at loggerheads with the Trump-Vance administration, so to speak.

01:11:59 Speaker_12
All right, thank you guys. And I think you're right, Matt. I mean, this is obviously a movement in Europe that predates Donald Trump and has been quite successful in Europe with economic populism and ideas about immigration.

01:12:11 Speaker_12
Matthew Contenetti, Josh Hammer, Sarah Isker, thanks for joining us on Honestly.

01:12:16 Speaker_04
Thanks.

01:12:17 Speaker_01
Thanks for having me. Thank you.

01:12:23 Speaker_12
Thanks for listening, and thanks so much to Sarah Isker, Matthew Continetti, and Josh Hammer for coming on the show today.

01:12:29 Speaker_12
If you liked this conversation, please share this episode with your friends and family, and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support the work we do here, go to thefp.com and become a free press subscriber today.

01:12:41 Speaker_12
See you next time.