A Conservative’s Take on the Chaotic State of the Republican Party

Republicans already hold tremendous power in America. They have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices. They have more state trifectas (control of both legislative houses, as well as the governor’s seat) than Democrats. And come 2023, they will also control the House of Representatives. But there’s a hollowness at the core of the modern G. O. P. It’s hard to identify any clear party leader, coherent policy agenda or concerted electoral strategy. The party didn’t bother putting forward a policy platform before the 2020 election or articulating an alternative policy vision in 2022. It has hardly reckoned with its under-performances in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. At this point, it’s unclear whether there’s any real party structure — or substrate of ideas — left at all. All of which raises the question: What exactly is the Republican Party at this point? What does it believe? What does it want to achieve? Whose lead does it follow? Those questions will need to be answered somehow over the next two years, as Republican politicians compete for their party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election and Republican House members wield the power of their new majority. Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We disagree on plenty, but I find him to be one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary Republican Party. So I invited him on the show for an inside-the-tent conversation on the chaotic state of the current G. O. P. and the choices it will have to make over the next two years. We discuss how the party is processing the 2022 midterms, why Dougherty thinks Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning the Republican nomination again in 2024, whether the G. O. P. leadership actually understands its own voters, how Ron DeSantis rose to become one of the party’s leading 2024 contenders, whether DeSantis — and the G. O. P. more broadly — actually have an economic agenda at this point, why Trump’s greatest strength in 2024 could be the economy he presided over in 2018 and 2019, why Dougherty doesn’t think Trump’s political appeal is transferable to anyone else in the Republican Party, what kind of House speaker Kevin McCarthy might be, which Republicans — other than Trump and DeSantis — to watch out for, and more. Mentioned: “The Question for DeSantis” by Michael Brendan Dougherty Book Recommendations: The German War by Nicholas Stargardt The Demon in Democracy by Ryszard Legutko The Face of God by Roger Scruton Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. (And if you’re reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion” in the subject line.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  All right, before we begin, we are doing an end of the year Ask Me Anything. If you have questions, challenges, whatever, something you would like to hear me talk about on the air, send it to [email protected] with AMA in the subject line. Again, send your questions to [email protected] with AMA in the subject line. We will only keep this open for another week or so. We get a lot of these. So if you've got a question, send it in now.

• 0:55Ezra Klein?

  So the story we're telling about the 2022 election, is it Republicans underperformed? They did much worse than people expected them to. And I think that's right. But again, that is compared to expectations. It's a weird way we process politics compared to stories we had in our heads of how things would go, as opposed to just the reality of how they did go. And the truth is that in 2023, Republicans are going to hold an enormous amount of power. They will control the House. They'll have appointed six of the nine members of the Supreme Court. More states are going to have Republican governing trifectas than Democratic governing trifectas. And the GOP's 2024 presidential primary, it has begun. Donald Trump officially announced he'll run again.

• 1:38Ezra Klein?

  Ron DeSantis has emerged as by far his clearest rival. And that, of course, won't be the only election in 2024. The 2024 Senate map, it is so much worse for Democrats than the 2022 map was. So if Republican wins the presidency in 2024, they're very likely to have control of Congress, too. This is not a party far from power. It is a party partially in power and not at all far from gaining a tremendous amount of policymaking, governing power.

• 2:09Ezra Klein?

  So what the Republican Party is, what it wants, who actually has influence in it and power to shape it, it matters enormously. As I wanted to have a post-election conversation with someone deeper inside the Republican tent than I am, about how the party is processing the last election, how it is preparing for the next one, what the factions are, what the structure is, and what a Kevin McCarthy speakership might look like in between. Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at The National Review. He's author of the book My Father Left Me Ireland. I've always found him a sharp observer of the Republican Party and all the more so when I disagree with him. So this one was a fun and, for me, quite interesting conversation. As always, my email is [email protected].

• 2:54Ezra Klein?

  Michael Brendan Dougherty, welcome to the show.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:57Ezra Klein?

  So let's begin with a big question. What's your model of the Republican Party right now? How would you describe what it is?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  It's not the Democratic Party.

• 3:10Ezra Klein?

  It's a good answer, actually.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I mean that both as a punt for a very complex question, but as a good starting point, which is, I view the Republican Party as a coalition of voters who, for whatever reason, object to democratic rule. By that, I mean rule by the Democratic Party, not by democracy. Although, we could get into those questions later, too. And it is a complex mix of older-line conservatives, populists, and what I would almost call dissenters from the "liberal establishment." It's actually always been something like this mix. I mean,

• 3:56Speaker 01

  you can see in previous Republican Party incarnations, like the Nixon coalition, a party like the one we have today. But that is what it is. It's just a coalition of voters. It's not the embodiment of a coherent philosophy. It is not the coherent...

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Representative of one particular class or class interest, although those are implicated in it, and it's not the voice of one ideology, like of capitalism or conservatism or national populism. It's just the collection of voters and it's a protean force and it will look like it has a different personality every time its leadership changes.

• 4:39Ezra Klein?

  I was going to ask about that leadership change because the Republican Party certainly looks and feels different to people, to me, than it did in 2004 or 2012. And I was curious if you think it is different as in compositionally, different people are in it, or they're in it in different proportions, or simply different parts of it that were always there and always as strong, have simply been able to win out to become the dominant expression of the party?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  So I think it is different proportions, and so it is different people. If we expand the scope a little bit larger than 2004, I mean, in 1992, when George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Republicans were still the party for college graduates in the United States. That's no longer the case. College graduates vote for Democrats in the simple majority. It fluctuates, you know, so like Glenn Youngkin wins 45% of college graduates in Virginia, whereas Donald Trump wins 38% nationwide. That shift of college graduates into the Democratic Party and maybe non-college whites

• 5:52Speaker 01

  going into the Republican Party, I mean, I think that is a consequence of the 1994 realignment, you know, just working itself out over decades. But you still have in the Republican Party today, and going back all the way to the 1920s, you know, you still have a class of individual business owners, people that Romney spoke to that where he said, you know, you built this. So there are some constants too, but it is a different party and we've even seen a shift during the last. Four or five years. I mean, I think in 2018, you see evidence of suburban women,

• 6:32Speaker 01

  particularly with some college or no college defecting from the Republican Party. And then you've seen during the COVID era, people that were skeptical of lockdowns or anti-vaxxers that were associated with the left coming into the Republican Party on the other side. So yeah, the shifts are still happening and I expect them to be a constant. The only thing is though, is that people have been talking about this idea of realignment for a long time. And it is a slower and more complicated process than a single election. And as I think we saw in 2022, Republicans can repel college

• 7:15Speaker 01

  educated whites faster than they can attract the Latino vote on the other side. You know, so their Latino vote share is growing, but not fast enough to stop the losses among college educated whites.

• 7:29Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, and I want to come back to that because that's I think a really interesting dynamic. But I want to pull out something embedded in these answers, which is when I ask you about the Republican Party, and I think this is probably how I would answer too. You describe the people in it, not any kind of organization, right? You're not describing really a party structure where there are people who have influence and can chart a course. And you remember, I mean, we came up in journalism around the same time. And it used to be a very common line about politics that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:03Ezra Klein?

  Right? There's this idea that the Republican Party, you can always predict what they were going to do. They would nominate the runner up, the next person in line. And Democrats, who knew what the hell Democrats were going to do?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:13Ezra Klein?

  And it really seems to be the reverse to me now, right? Democrats really fall in line. You know, if you look at who they've nominated for president, they make much more strategically oriented decisions where they'll sort of knock off this flank in order to appeal to a voter set. They're worried about losing. And Republicans, it's more all over the place. Why do you think the Republican Party's structure has diminished in influence so much?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I think it's partly a story of that realignment that's happening from below. There was a very famous story in the 2015 cycle where Byron New York goes up to New Hampshire and talks to the local Republican Party apparatus there.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And the local Republican Party apparatus in a small state crucial for the primaries says, we have no idea who these people are that are voting for Donald Trump. We've never met these people. So yeah, I mean, there's a story of literally the Republican Party is collecting voters who are not attached to institutions, right? I mean, some of these non-college whites, their grandparents might have been in unions that helped organize and channel their political activity. Now they are not, so they don't have that. They are maybe politically activated and organized by Fox News or talk radio or the websites

• 9:37Speaker 01

  they go to, or just the chatter around the break room over copies of the New York Post. So yeah, the Republican Party is an organization is almost incidental. Like, it does not, you know, the RNC is not making strategic decisions that matter. And that's why I think you're seeing some hope among some Republicans that if they could put maybe Lee Zeldin, the New York Republican gubernatorial candidate who did pretty well in a losing effort, I think there's some hope, oh, if we put him in there, maybe we could rebuild as an organization and make choices again. Not that they could rebuild the smoke-filled rooms of the 1930s

• 10:18Speaker 01

  and 40s, but at least impose some control. But I don't see it coming up in time for the next presidential cycle. I think it's going to be another clown rodeo where 30 people are pouring out of a minibus, uh, competing for attention.

• 10:35Ezra Klein?

  So I think it's fair to say Republicans didn't have the election night they'd wanted to have a couple of weeks back. How is that being processed? What are the dominant theories of why?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Well, listen, I'm at National Review, and I think the predominant answer among my colleagues would be Trump was an electoral anchor on Republicans for the third election in a row. The Republican Party underperformed in 2018, in 2020, and in 2022, all because there is a voter who is highly motivated to vote against Donald Trump. And if the Republican candidate in the races they can vote in is a proxy for Donald Trump, there is a huge penalty for that candidate.

• 11:21Ezra Klein?

  It arguably underperformed in 2016.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  I would argue that as well, yes, that in a sense like Hillary Clinton united just enough of the traditional Republican Party, add on Trump's rural votes, and you get the four Brexit state disaster for Democrats, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which again, a few score thousands of votes changes the outcome. So that's one narrative. There's another one I would propose too, that the Republican Party is neither fish nor fowl. That is, it's neither populist enough to unite the Trump coalition without Trump, and it's not traditionally conservative enough to unite the 2012 Romney coalition anymore either.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And it's sort of falling between two different versions of itself, whereas Democrats are still held together partly out of total fear of Donald Trump. So I think that's another thing to look at, and a lot of us are also processing the role that the Dobbs decision played. We're curious if it's going to be an ongoing ordeal for Republicans, or whether it is a kind of one-year penalty while all states are putting their state laws in, which should reflect the majority views of their state and whether the issue will settle in the long term. But it was obviously highly motivating for Democrats to get out there and punish a

• 12:47Speaker 01

  party that, in effect, was able to change the status quo through its judicial appointments, even while it's out of power in the two elected branches.

• 12:58Ezra Klein?

  One thing I find a little bit odd about the modern Republican Party is how Personality driven, it's strategic discussions appear to be. So you have 2016, which is a trauma for Democrats. And they talk a lot about Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or whomever. But there's a much broader debate about the white working class and whether Democrats are losing touch with the white working class and rural voters and anti establishment voters. And there's a kind of argument, it's about broad positioning, that a lot of different kind of candidates could fit into. And it's something I don't really hear on the Republican side. I hear a lot about Donald Trump.

• 13:42Ezra Klein?

  I hear a lot about Ron DeSantis, who we'll talk about as an answer to Donald Trump. But the party seems very distinctively channeled through its standard bearers or its potential standard bearers in a way that I think people are coming into politics now might find normal. But I feel like it didn't used to be the way parties process defeat. I mean, there's Republican autopsy in 2012, where they started thinking about needing to appeal more to multi ethnic voters and change the nature of their coalition. There's Democrats after 04 and heartland voters. I mean, it kind of used to be about the voters you needed to win back. And now it's about who might be the person who wins the primary. Does that feel right to you? So why do you think it is?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I think it is partly because that attempt in the 2012 autopsy proved such a disaster. For one, their party then lurched in the exact opposite direction of the recommendations, which is we're going to nominate a candidate who seems to be calling Mexicans rapists and murderers and saying they're not sending their best. And yet, he's going to improve the party's share among Hispanics over the lifetime of his presidency in a way that would have been totally unthinkable in 2012. If you'd suggested you're going to get the most anti immigrant campaign in 100 years

• 15:10Speaker 01

  in the United States, possibly ever, and you're going to improve among Hispanics. That's not what anyone would have predicted in 2012, least of all me. So yeah, there's a feeling that, again, going back to Byron York, we don't know who these voters are. We don't identify them well. The Republican Party doesn't organize its voters well outside of Florida, where it actually seems like the Republican Party has, since the Jeb Bush era, consciously tried to take itself seriously as an organization that identifies potential new blocks of voters and tests strategies for appealing to them and adding them to their coalition. And now you're seeing partly, I think, the success of that in Florida,

• 15:54Speaker 01

  which was experienced the red tsunami that landed nowhere else. But nationally, I think Republican leaders just don't know where they are.

• 16:04Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk about Florida, where you say the red tsunami showed up. Let's start with this about Ron DeSantis, because I think my audience probably mostly gets Ron DeSantis filtered through more liberal media and then also filtered through like stunts and messaging Ron DeSantis does to provoke them. So how would you describe who or politically what Ron DeSantis is?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  So Ron DeSantis was a conventional conservative in Congress before he ran for governor, who was sort of where the trend lines were in his party. You know, so before he ran for governor, he was a little bit more, you know, associated with the Club for Growth and the Tea Party causes. Then he runs for governor and tacks really hard for the Trump endorsement and the Trump vote, which solidified his image nationally in those famous and somewhat cringey commercials, where he's like reading The Art of the Deal to his infant child.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And at that point, I think he became a punchline for liberals going forward. This is mini-Trump. This is what is going to happen to Republicans now in the Trump era. Is they're going to become these doltish figures? But it turns out Ron DeSantis is a bit of a nerd and confident, and he took a calculated risk during the COVID era. And I think the COVID era transformed him politically into something entirely different. And he is not. Conventional conservative still, but he made Florida into this alternative where he took basically almost the Great Barrington Declaration approach to COVID, which is we're

• 17:52Speaker 01

  going to focus a lot of resources on nursing homes and elder care facilities, but otherwise we're going to open up everything else as soon as possible and let people make their own decisions about their risk levels. I want to totally abstract whether he was right to do that or wrong to do that. There was a big demand for that among people and it showed in Florida tourism, both nationally and from internationally, that a lot of people wanted this, at least temporarily. And hundreds of thousands of people moved into Florida in the last couple of years. I don't think all of them would consider themselves conservatives,

• 18:32Speaker 01

  but many of them moved for that approach. And I think that calculated risk and the way he put himself out front even more so than Brian Kemp in Georgia, made him a kind of conservative hero, right? He was also standing up to the media, standing up to Fauci in a way that Donald Trump wasn't standing up to Dr. Fauci. And I think the thing that really has driven DeSantis to the top of alternatives to Donald Trump in the Republican Party is that he is identifiably bringing people into the Republican Party, right? We've seen exodus of people from the Republican Party under Trump. In Florida, when Ron DeSantis

• 19:17Speaker 01

  was elected, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 270,000 in registrations in Florida. In the summer of this year, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by over 300,000 on the registries in Florida. That's from in migration, that's from the Florida GOP working hard to register new people. There's a little bit of role clearing too, which I will acknowledge, probably pushed some Democrats off the registered roles. He's brought in people that were skeptical of the COVID era.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Guidelines and many of them have made a political transformation, right? They no longer identify with their previous, maybe center-left politics or maybe far crunchy left politics. And they've come over to the Republicans as like an anti-establishment alternative. And I think that is what puts him so far ahead of like a Brian Kemp or Greg Abbott in these past couple of years and why he's polling as high as he is.

• 20:19Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, so there are a couple of things there I want to try to unpack. So one about COVID and how he remade himself around that. I am not a deep expert on specifically Florida's policies compared to other states, but I covered COVID and had a had a general sense. And when I looked at it at that time, he didn't look very different to me than Texas, didn't look very different to me than Georgia, didn't look very different to me actually than a lot of the Southwest, which took this sort of approach. What did seem different about DeSantis was his level of identifying that the out-group to those policies, the antagonist to them, was somewhere in between the public health

• 21:03Ezra Klein?

  establishment, the CDC, Anthony Fauci, and the media, the liberal media. And that in a way that was not true for some of the other governors who took very similar stances to him on COVID, he used COVID as a ground upon which to create a conflict that he's then tried to extend in other areas like this immigration stunt, but where he wants himself to be in opposition to the media, to certain kinds of expert bureaucrats. And what makes him different, it often appears to me, is not dramatically different policies,

• 21:44Ezra Klein?

  but a mastery of the antagonisms and resentments and a sense of who the fight is actually between that some of his gubernatorial colleagues who are, you know, just out there fighting with Democrats or Joe Biden or whatever, they don't really get in the way he does.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  I think that's right, but I think you might be underestimating how.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Florida became a focus precisely because DeSantis was seen as this mini Trump or more Trump than Trump. And he was also seen by Democrats as electorally vulnerable. He'd, he'd won a squeaker of an election against Andrew Gillum to become governor. So he seemed more vulnerable than maybe a Greg Abbott. And Florida became a kind of obsession in media about like, oh my gosh, look at them. They're on the beaches. This is disgusting. Everyone's gonna die under Death Santas, right? Like, there's no nickname for Brian Kemp or Greg Abbott, like Death Santas.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And so he used that, like, he used the, the energy that was thrown at him and used it like a good martial artist, right? I'm gonna take the punch you're throwing at me and use that energy for my own purpose. So, yeah, he wasn't that different from others, but he benefited from this kind of Eye of Sauron-like attention that was put on Florida in particular. And, you know, it was a mix of things. It was the idea that he was seen as more Trump than Trump. It was also a little bit the kind of Florida man reputation, right? That Florida is this kind of strange swamp at the bottom of our country, where all the weird stories come from. He has benefited from it, though, for sure.

• 23:34Ezra Klein?

  It's funny, I wonder now, listening to that, if some of this is geographic? Because I, just in California, always heard much more about Texas.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 23:42Ezra Klein?

  And you're up in New York and you clearly hear much more about Florida. And when Californians leave, they go to Texas, not to, as often Florida.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  That's right. And when New Yorkers leave, they go to Florida.

• 23:52Ezra Klein?

  Exactly. So I wonder how much this is actually a geographic thing. But let me ask about his election night, because I've been genuinely somewhat puzzled. By how unique his victory has been treated as. Mike DeWine won Ohio by more than DeSantis won Florida. He won in Ohio by about 25 points. Chris Sununu won New Hampshire, which is a much more purple state, a closer state than Florida is, by 16 points. Phil Scott, the Republican in Vermont, I mean, he had a very weak opponent. But he's a Republican in Vermont and he wins by almost 50 points.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:27Ezra Klein?

  But all anybody will talk about out of this is Ron DeSantis. And I'm curious why the DeWines, the Sununu's, like, why other big Republican wins are getting so little attention?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  You know, it's a case by case basis. DeWine, because he didn't face a very strong opponent, and this is his 10th race, right? So it's like, this is a 10 time office holder in Ohio, very known quantity against a not very well-funded opponent. Now, the fact is Charlie Crist was a weak opponent for DeSantis. So DeSantis should have been expected to run up the score. I think one of the reasons he got a lot of attention is he ran up the score larger than the polls suggested, right? The polls looked like you were going to get a 12, maybe 15 point DeSantis victory, which would have been impressive. But it ended up coming out much larger than that.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  And with him winning certain counties in Florida, like Miami Dade or Osceola, that are typically out of reach for Republicans. He had deeper reach with Puerto Rican voters, with Cuban voters than anticipated as well. But yeah, there was, in a way, like Marco Rubio's 17 point victory over Val Demings is kind of almost more impressive because Val Demings was a really good candidate, a really serious figure in the Democratic Party, arguably should have been Vice President, and Marco Rubio, trounced her. But yeah, I think it was funding disparities. But again, Ron DeSantis, I think the reason he's treated as the big winner that night

• 26:04Speaker 01

  is he gets a lot of support from Trumpy voters in the Republican Party. He's not necessarily a turnoff to them. And so he's seen as a potential viable. Successor or bridge from Trump to the future. And further, I mean, one of the reasons DeSantis did so well is his fundraising in the party was beyond everyone else's, even Donald Trump's in the last year. And like I said, I think that's because he became this national anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine mandate figure in the party.

• 26:37Ezra Klein?

  Let's say I buy your take on DeSantis and COVID. That actually seems in a way to open up a pretty profound question about him because it seems unlikely to me that 2024 is going to be about COVID. I mean, I could prove wrong. There could be a more lethal variant. Terrible things can happen, right? I don't want to predict the future, but extrapolating from where we are right now, that doesn't strike me as likely to be the dominant issue. He's obviously jumped on a bunch of culture worry issues, you know, with sort of various bills about sexual identity and trying to send

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Education.

• 27:13Ezra Klein?

  Education, immigrant, you know, sending immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, which we can talk about. But what does he believe? I mean, what is his profile on the sort of traditional bread and butter issues? I'm one of many liberals who keeps looking at him, trying to understand what is his actual economic views. I know what they were when he was in the house and finding him both hard and vague to place.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's another reason for that obscurity or that seeming obscurity in your part, which is that Florida's Republican legislature and governors have actually removed from the political discussion lots of policy options on taxes and spending that would potentially give you clues. So like, DeSantis doesn't even have room for maneuver in Florida to depart from the kind of low tax, low regulation environment that he's in. And I've written the same column saying like, what is DeSantis going to say to voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, right?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Like those four states that gave Donald Trump the victory in 2016. Are not growing, experiencing the economic growth that Florida is seeing. And in fact, you could argue that Florida is in a sense creaming off the good stuff from other parts of the country that are in decline. And Ron DeSantis, if he's going to make the big jump from a state to a national campaign, he has to speak to the whole country's fate. And we just don't know where he is on America's economic model and whether it needs serious alteration. I actually think this is a huge problem for both parties going forward because the

• 29:03Speaker 01

  numbers are pretty forbidding on the federal budget as far as debt, interest payments, our previous commitments, our military budget. And I think both parties are going to face this problem of how can we solve issues for our voters and keep our coalitions together without a lot more economic growth than we've seen the past two decades and that we expect to see. And I'm not sure anyone has the answer there.

• 29:33Ezra Klein?

  Do Republicans care about economic issues at this point? I mean, something that really struck me about the election, one reason I thought Democrats were going to get creamed this year was inflation that high is a disaster for the governing party, or at least I thought it would be a disaster for the governing party. And I watched month after month after month as Republicans did not really emphasize, did not develop a coherent, in my view, message on inflation, a sense of why we're the party you should turn to to fix inflation. Like, I understood why they're the party you should turn to to make sure that various insurance policies weren't going to include surgeries for children who want to switch gender identity.

• 30:17Ezra Klein?

  But I did not really ever know what it was Republicans were saying on inflation. Healthcare is a little bit of the same issue. Florida never expanded Medicaid. I guess Ron DeSantis doesn't think you should, but I don't know what Ron DeSantis thinks you should do about healthcare for the country. And I think it's going to be a problem, but it maybe just isn't a problem in Republican primaries if that's not where the energy is. And he's correct about that. Do Republicans actually have to have views on these issues anymore to be successful within their own party?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Probably not. I mean, listen, I am a conservative writer at National Review. I'm not a Republican Party strategist or even an advocate. But yeah, Republicans have been almost policy phobic for the last decade. They don't know how to agree on... Some of these have been perennial issues among Republicans. Like, do we care about deficits? Or do we care about overall government commitments? Or do we care about fiscal rectitude at all? Right? And I know many Democratic commentators and voters are like, this is a party that runs against debts and deficits when Democrats are in charge and then spends like crazy when they're in charge to please their voters.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  I mean, there was no party platform in 2020, and there was no even attempt at a coherent policy message on inflation other than, you know, the stickers on gas stations saying Biden did this, which in fact wasn't even entirely true itself, right? I mean, the whole issue of inflation was, is a global issue that's an after effect of COVID. Maybe you can make a case that the last spending bill that Biden passed, that I think Donald Trump would have passed if he were president too, something like it contributed a little bit more. But overall, they didn't have a theory for blaming Biden other than he's in charge and it's happening. And they didn't have a theory for how to overcome it either.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they were hoping there would be a red tsunami and the Fed would have solved the problem by the time Republicans showed up in January.

• 32:27Ezra Klein?

  You know, I think that answer just made me pretty radically revise upwards my view of how strong a candidate Donald Trump is. I'm going to put a pin in why I think that is, but... The other big thing that happens right after the midterm, of course, is that Trump announces, which not a huge surprise, but was interesting. What did you think of the announcement itself? What did you hear in what Trump said that was the same or different or telling? And what did you see in how it was covered that was the same or different or telling?

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Oh, well, there was a lot, actually. And the fact that there was a lot surprised me. One, the drama of it was strange. Mar-a-Lago is like the closest thing America's ever had to a court of exile for a royal, right? I mean, it's literally like this gilded ballroom that he announces to his like court, literally to the people who live in and around Donald Trump's life since he became president. And what was so funny was on Fox News, they didn't even show the whole speech live. They showed the meat of the speech where he kind of stuck to the teleprompter and then immediately cut to Mike Huckabee, who was

• 33:42Speaker 01

  saying like, if he sticks with this message, he's unstoppable. And it's like, oh, my gosh, if there's an unstoppable political message on my television, show it to me, like, show me the whole thing. But it was almost like Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee were in a sense, like, in this weird way that Fox News has done for years, trying to communicate back to Donald Trump, saying, good, you know, just focus on the Biden economy and the economy under Trump until 2019, and don't talk about the 2020 election, right? Like, it was like, that was the subliminal message back to Trump, which is like, good job, stick to the teleprompter. And I actually think this is a mistake, and I'm going to say something

• 34:27Speaker 01

  that might sound upsetting, but part of the speech they cut away from, which was the part of the speech that I think had the most political dynamite in it. And it's awful to say this, but is when he talked about basically executing drug dealers the way China does. That was not a policy I advocate at all, but it was the sort of thing that actually propelled Trump in 2015 and 2016, which was picking an issue that is under discussed in American politics, the fentanyl epidemic, and proposing an absolutely radical solution that is far

• 35:09Speaker 01

  outside of the political imagination of our ruling class. The idea of instituting Chinese-style justice in the United States, of course, is hateful, but it's the sort of thing that I think actually worked for him politically, is that like, I'm going to highlight to you how much I care about an issue that isn't being talked about by saying the most outrageous thing imaginable about it. But Fox News had cut away, and so most people never saw that, and they only would have heard it if they had been on C-SPAN, or if they're a political addict that listens to podcasts like this, or to the editors on National Review.

• 36:10Ezra Klein?

  Something about Trump as a political orator is that he talks. He doesn't orate. He doesn't give speeches. He talks. And he says stuff that you may not think is wise, but that accords with a lot of people's intuitions. I mean, if you ever talk to normal people who don't do politics professionally, like a lot of ideas that make sense to people, political professionals find worrying, problematic, maybe wouldn't work all that well. But Trump just works with these passions. And I think you might have written about this, but I thought Chappelle, in a SNL monologue that has become controversial for other reasons we don't need to go into, had this good point when he said that the thing that is appealing about Trump is that he's an honest liar.

• 36:55Ezra Klein?

  Can you talk a bit about that idea?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely true, which is that Donald Trump's appeal is

• 37:06Speaker 01

  The way Chappelle said it is Donald Trump came out and said, "The system is rigged." And I know because I used the system, which again is like this deep, hits a deep strain in American politics of, you know, the FDR traitor to his class politics. And Trump also communicates in a way that feels, can often feel authentic and more connected emotionally to an audience than his Republican rivals who are used to speaking with nerds like us, journalists and people that write policy white papers. There were moments in the 2016 campaign where he described with obvious physical and moral

• 37:49Speaker 01

  disgust what a late-term abortion was. Like, that had never been done before by a Republican, and it made a huge connection with pro-lifers for whom that kind of description was part of their political cause and culture for four decades. Or when he talked about solemnly and with evident sadness in his voice about the waste of the Iraq war. Or if you have a slightly different opinion on the war, which he'll share with you as well later in the debate, when he speaks with evident anger that we didn't take the oil, you know, got nothing out of it.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  And I do think Trump's great strength as a candidate then and even now is that he understands politics is not just about policy, it is about these deep moral passions. And a ton of voters will connect with that if they're expressed in that way. And I think that's also why DeSantis sometimes is still learning that vocabulary. So for instance, when DeSantis defends some of his kind of culture war-style bills about education in Florida, DeSantis will obscure his own role and agency in them. He'll just say something like, "I don't think Florida parents will stand for that."

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Okay, like, that's a C-plus line, right? But it's much more effective if he says, like, "Florida parents know it's wrong, I know it's wrong," right? It makes it personal and expresses some emotion. But Trump is the master of that.

• 39:34Ezra Klein?

  It reminds me of something the journalist Molly Ball said about Trump in 2016, which I always thought was very smart, where she said, all the other candidates to get up on the stage, and I'm paraphrasing her here, of course, and they say, voters are angry, and I understand that. And Trump gets up on the stage, and he says, I'm angry.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's exactly, that's exactly it.

• 39:54Ezra Klein?

  Now, let me actually, I never liked the cut between policy and passion, because I don't think people think about policy and morality and politics and personality experience. It's a whole, like a jumble. It's all stew of stuff. And I want to get to what you said that made me more optimistic about Trump's shot than I probably was coming into this conversation, which is, if you think the economy is actually going to be a major issue, if you think Republican sort of party and media strategists are a little wrong about the power of some of these cultural issues, if you look at 2022 and say, maybe that's evidence they were a bit wrong about this. The thing about Trump is that whether you want to give him credit for it or not, as president, he has a very, very strong economic

• 40:39Ezra Klein?

  record. And that backs up the fact that he's always had this appeal, which people like me will question and poke at and pull apart, but doesn't matter that we do that, that he's a businessman who knows how to get things done. And if you got a bunch of people running who have no real communication chops on the economy, and you have Trump, who has always known how to speak the language of at least the public's idea of a businessman, of a builder, and now actually of an ex-president who drove unemployment very low and didn't have, at that point, the inflationary boom period that we're going through now, I mean,

• 41:19Ezra Klein?

  that gives him an actual lane of substance that I don't think he's going to communicate on through white papers and deep analyses of pricing decisions in the economy. But I don't know, actually strikes me as a genuine advantage to him, because I'm somebody who thinks that, that the economy and how politicians are able to communicate about it actually still matters hugely.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's going to have this. I mean, this is, now Ferguson made a version of this argument in the Daily Mail, that if, as Niall suspects, we're headed for a recession, right, where maybe inflation goes down, but unemployment goes up. Donald Trump will have a nostalgia message of like, do you remember what it was like in 2018 and 2019, where before COVID, right? Because in a sense, there was, there was an economic disaster late in Trump's presidency, but no one blames him for it because it's literally blamed on an act of God, blamed on a Chinese Communist Party, or gourmand in the, in the meat markets of China. You know, so COVID isn't his fault. So that people

• 42:22Speaker 01

  will credit him with the hot economy. And remember, like, he believed the Fed to try to keep running things hot. He wanted a hot to run the machine hot, which in a way aligns a little bit with where I think the center left has been drifting intellectually, too. So he was kind of at the forefront of a couple of major trends in thinking about economics. And yeah, he has that fantasy power of, hey, a businessman was in charge. That's been a Republican fantasy and a populist fantasy for decades, going back to Ross Perot and his candidacies for president. So yeah, I do think he has potentially that advantage.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  And again, like, you know, we'll see what the vibes are like, you know, maybe inflation doesn't hurt Joe Biden or Democrats as much, partly maybe it's the COVID exceptional era extending longer. Partly it's also, it's, there is low unemployment and there are jobs available and people have been getting raises slowly. But in two years, you know, if unemployment is up, if there's going to be thousands of people who made financial decisions in their life, like maybe they're looking for a mortgage now and they're looking at the interest rates, you know, there may be a lot of reasons to dislike the economy in a year that will make Trump a more attractive figure.

• 43:45Ezra Klein?

  Something I find genuinely weird about the Republican Party's continuing interest in or affection for Trump. Is it, as you said, he's just presided over loss after loss. I mean, they lose the House, they have a disastrous midterm in 2018, they lose the presidency in 2020. I know he says that he didn't really lose, and I know some portion of Republicans believe him, although I'm always a little skeptical on how sincere I kind of think that belief is among a lot of people. I think a lot of people are- They just give an answer to identify themselves with one party or the other. Yeah, it's always hard for me to decompose what people are saying in that answer. But anyway,

• 44:30Ezra Klein?

  so obviously, a lot of Republicans believe there was things wrong with the 2020 election, and Donald Trump has tried to shift blame onto that lie. But nevertheless, he lost in 2022. His candidates don't do well. I think people believe that that he was part of why Republicans didn't succeed more. And certainly, you can't make an argument that Trump had a magic touch, and anybody he touched outperformed other kinds of candidates. You go back to 2016, and the Democrats, and they just become obsessed with winning. All they want to do is win. And that eventually leads them to Joe Biden, this candidate who most factions of the party feel is fine. But what they feel about him is that maybe the kind of voters who they need to win

• 45:13Ezra Klein?

  back also feel like Joe Biden is fine, right? You have this very strategic Democratic Party that emerges out of 2016. And I just don't know, it's a weird thing to me about Republicans, particularly given Donald Trump's constant obsession with winning and turning that into like, the only thing you need to be in life, that it isn't seen as more of an obvious vulnerability, or even disqualifier for him, that he's such a modest electoral performer. Whereas like, there are Republicans who apparently in these terrible rigged elections, win by overwhelming margins even so.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, one, he's always had a temptation to exaggerate the scale of his victories like, or even exaggerate the crowd size on inauguration day. So he makes, he tries to make his victories even bigger. I mean, I do think the 2016 victory was big. I mean, he was a popular vote loser. But it was big in that he really did outperform polls. He really did outperform expectations. And it was revealed that his campaign really did have some sense of who his potential voters were and targeted them with messaging that appealed to them and got them out to vote.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  People didn't think he had that kind of skill as an operator or would have that skill as a machine in the Republican Party. But yeah, the thing is, is that Trump's success is not transferable to anyone else in the Republican Party. Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, is not a billionaire real estate developer who's been on television for decades and Howard Stern Show for a decade. And he doesn't have buildings with his name on them all over the country and golf courses all over the world, right? Like, I mean, it's just, he's not cited in rap songs the way Donald Trump is. Like, Donald Trump is a huge figure, a Titanic figure in our culture.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And so I think Donald Trump can argue with some credibility that, yeah, okay, my candidates, you know, like, I can't make Blake Masters into gold. I can't make Don Bolduc into an electoral winner. But that's because the magic is me and you need me to turn out these rural voters. You need me to turn out the left behind. You need me to continue growing. And that might not be wrong. I mean, he really energized Democrats to vote against him in 2020. Will they again? I don't know.

• 47:47Ezra Klein?

  So we so far have been talking about the governor of Florida. The ex-president of the United States. Normally, after a midterm in which one party takes the House and takes the speakership back, the pretty much sure to be next speaker, I think, would be a more central topic of political conversation and fascination than Kevin McCarthy has in fact been. There's a very real way in which McCarthy seems very overshadowed to me by other players in the Republican Party, but but he will, in a way, have the most institutional power of any Republican coming out of this election and decisions he makes about, say, whether to actually have a big debt ceiling showdown or,

• 48:32Ezra Klein?

  you know, what to do with investigations and impeachments will create the context in which 2024 happens. How do you understand who Kevin McCarthy is and what kind of speaker he's likely to be?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Kevin McCarthy is, if you could imagine a cat herder, but all the cats are on fire. This is a thankless job, I think, being majority leader in such a slim majority. He doesn't have the institutional pull or weight that like Nancy Pelosi had in her party to kind of keep things running smoothly. He's not particularly liked, so we don't know. I mean, he he has shown a little bit of ability to let some Republican committees start experimenting with policy ideas. You know, so he's not showing the kind of iron grip that the

• 49:31Speaker 01

  leadership has in both houses over legislation. So that I'm kind of hopeful for, that elected Republican legislators will have a little bit more to say about legislation, even if it's not going to go anywhere in the next two years. But the big question is like, what kind of investigations or oversight are Republicans going to launch and whether they're substantive or whether they are show trials?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  And what they produce and you don't know what they're going to produce. I think a lot of people had a very low opinion of the Benghazi hearings and yet they ended up being very consequential for the 2016 election. When Anthony Weiner's laptop sort of spills out in the end and forces Comey's hand late in the cycle. That's not something that you can design to happen. That was a little bit of a, you know, like the butterfly effect in action with Democrats watching in horror the whole way. But again, those hearings could matter. So far, of course, they've picked the Hunter Biden laptop as like the juicy target to focus on.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  And that makes sense because Joe Biden is president. But it is questionable whether Republicans even understand the politics of this. Joe Biden has shown a remarkable ability to deflect anything scandalous about this story by pointing out to the fact that his son is a drug addict who is suffering and that he himself, his father loves his son and wants to support him. In fact, like Joe Biden turns it into an asset because there are hundreds of thousands of families who have one troubled member in it, who may cause trouble for the family, but who is still beloved.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  And Republicans can misplay this to look like they're persecuting a man who is not in control of himself.

• 51:30Ezra Klein?

  So I want to note something in that answer, which is it very quickly Kevin McCarthy vanished into complete nothingness at the center of it.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that's right.

• 51:39Ezra Klein?

  There's a sense of him as smoke. I mean, I've, I've heard this before. People start talking about him and very quickly they'll just be talking about something else.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  That's a, yeah, no, that's a great observation.

• 51:48Ezra Klein?

  Who is Kevin McCarthy? What does he believe? What kind of speaker does he, he want to be? I mean, he's going to be a very powerful Republican and speakers do have, I mean, as much as I like your metaphor there that heard in cats on fire. I mean, nobody envies him, his job, but that job would be, can be done in very different ways and always is by different speakers. Like, who is he?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  I literally just think he is an ambitious member of the House who wants to be. Where the center of gravity is in the party. And it's been harder and harder to figure out where exactly that is. And it matters a huge amount how many seats they have in the majority. Right. Because, you know, the Republican Party, the difference between their majority and minority could be like the seats in New York or the seats in California, or it could be Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert on any particular issue. And in fact, I just would not be surprised if any of these factions, whether more moderate or more radical and populist,

• 52:53Speaker 01

  are willing to give him more trouble than like the Squad or the Progressive House Caucus was ever willing to give Pelosi.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And again, like you said, he disappeared from that answer, too. I said, all the actors are going to be on the fringe. The theme of our conversation is that there is nothing in the center, that like the Republican Party is kind of donut hole, where the outer edge determines everything. And there's literally a vacuum in the middle, a vacuum of authority.

• 53:48Ezra Klein?

  So the more I think about what you've said, the more I think it is all kind of the same argument, which is there isn't really a Republican Party right now. There are a lot of Republicans and a bunch of them hold power. But that's kind of it. And that actually strikes me as sort of a problem for a political system in which you're supposed to have on some level, parties organizing the preferences of voters and then in constant, not just competition with each other, but in a way that I think we've a little bit forgotten, negotiation with each other. This is a thing that top Democrats complain to journalists about all the time, have been since Obama and Boehner. But this idea that

• 54:30Ezra Klein?

  there's nobody to call on the Republican side, there's nobody to negotiate with, nobody who can make a deal happen, even if they've agreed to that deal before. At some points, even including Donald Trump, where Pelosi would think they made a deal on immigration, and then Trump would get a bunch of criticism and flip on it the next morning.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:48Ezra Klein?

  This is actually a problem for our system of government.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Right, right. And the problem goes back to this problem of the Republican Party not knowing its own voter base very well. Like, on a practical level, when you're covering a Republican campaign event, it's been a couple of years since I've been out on the hustings, but like, you're often seeing a candidate who's been brought in in a black SUV from a gated community to somewhere else with people he never hangs out with, with people he doesn't intuitively understand, and he's saying slogans that he sort of believes in, and some of them he sort of doesn't, and it's plainly obvious which are which. And then he goes back to the gated community, maybe holds a fundraiser in the gated community,

• 55:35Speaker 01

  and then tries to get to work. And there's been an institutional failure on the Republican side to translate the instincts and aspirations of the Republican base into policy. Now, you might be, I hate Republican base voter aspirations and say like, well, that's great, or that they can't be translated into policy because it's just some kind of cultural resentment, or just the belch of the angry party. But that failure is how Donald Trump stepped in and smashed the party and affected his hostile takeover of it in 2016. Is that this connection had been lost, the kind of essential connection in a representative

• 56:20Speaker 01

  democracy between voters and representatives. And until Republicans restore that, I think you are going to see this kind of mix of populist versus establishment sniping with very little policy substance to the party at all. So you would need politicians who are intelligent enough and sensitive enough to speak passionately about things that their constituents actually care about and translate that into policy. That is what would restore trust in the Republican Party as an institution, rather than as just

• 56:59Speaker 01

  like a platform vehicle on which to like run up on the stage and perform slam poetry on the culture war.

• 57:08Ezra Klein?

  Let me offer a contrary thought to that that goes back to your very first answer to me, which is that the Republican Party is not the Democratic Party. Because in a way, I have a little bit of trouble buying this. I don't think Republicans, Republican voters are all that more diffuse or complex in terms of what they want in policy or what kind of country they want than Democrats are. I mean, I like the polling, I sit in on focus groups, nothing is perfect, but Democrats are a complex coalition too. They're always disappointed in their politicians and so on and so on. I actually think the problem for Republicans for a long time in terms of being a party

• 57:49Ezra Klein?

  is that the level of, I think at this point, actually apocalyptic sentiment towards the Democrats more broadly, towards a kind of sense of liberal woke establishment-ism that is out there, then through Donald Trump in particular, towards elections and some of the more basic kind of machinery of government. At some point, if you don't have full power yourself, right? If Ron DeSantis is president and he's got Kevin McCarthy as speaker and Mitch McConnell as majority leader in the Senate, he could just pass bills. And I think they'll do that. But if you have to work with the rest of the system and the other party, but you and your media establishment made the other party too toxic to work with, it's too easy to

• 58:34Ezra Klein?

  take you apart in a primary, as happened with the Tea Party and then happened around Donald Trump, if you're seen as too much of a compromiser, then you kind of can't translate what people want into policy because the act of the compromise is more loathed than the possible benefits it could bring. And I don't want to say there's no, none of this dynamic on the Democratic side. I think by the end of Donald Trump's presidency, you did see some bipartisan work happen around COVID and some big bills happen in that emergency scenario. But I think Democratic views on Trump are quite apocalyptic, too. And so he'd be very hard for Democrats to compromise with. But I think there's something about Republican hatred of the liberal elites that has made

• 59:18Ezra Klein?

  it very hard for them to then turn around and say, okay, but we've made a deal with the liberal elites and it's going to get you more of what you want and you should support it. And it's like that particular bridge over the rushing waters that Republican leader after leader keeps falling into.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and some of it is burnt trust from before, which is like, it's almost legendary in conservative circles that, oh, Ronald Reagan made a deal on immigration, which was amnesty now, and we're going to get enforcement at the border later. And then the enforcement never really came or kind of fell apart over time. And so Democrats got what they wanted out of the deal, or liberal leaning voters on immigration got what they wanted out of the deal, amnesty, and Republicans were left holding the bag. And a lot of people felt, I think justifiably, that that was likely what was going to happen with immigration reform in 2006 or under Boehner in the 20 teens. And so, yeah, there's definitely a feeling that.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  And this is, I think, actually a broader problem of conservative parties in the West, is that as establishment liberals kind of consolidate control over a lot of other institutions and in national life, whether it's universities, media, as they set the tone more and more in corporate life, there's a sense in which all Republican political action or all actions by conservative governments are against the grain of society and are always felt as like rough and almost feel violent, whereas Democratic actions are kind of smoothed over because the institutions accept them and sort of internalize and metabolize them much more

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  easily. And I think that's going to be a characteristic going forward and it's going to make in like future Republican administrations, I think a lot of Democrats will feel like, oh, this is much more like Viktor Orban now because it's like the executive is attacking the institutions of social life in the country in order to get what they want done.

• 1:01:21Ezra Klein?

  One reality, I think, of a lot of the institutions, the civil servants we're talking about, the media to some degree, is that they would be so relieved by any Republican who seemed just modestly less conflict oriented and antagonistic than the sort of Trump DeSantis axis now, that I think there'd be a weird level of sort of calm and openness to people who maybe a couple of years ago would have been understood by these same organizations as, you know, very, very, very conservative. And now, you know, a Mike DeWine or something just looks completely normal. And I have wondered whether or not Trump, DeSantis,

• 1:02:06Ezra Klein?

  being at war in a primary, doesn't create room for...

• 1:02:12Ezra Klein?

  A Nikki Haley, a Mike Pence, a Tim Scott, you know, you can kind of name your Republican. I don't think it's going to be a sort of real moderate like a Larry Hogan, but there are plenty of fairly conservative Republicans who seem like a quite different kind of Republican right now than those two do. And you can imagine, you know, one of them winning New Hampshire when people are tired of the Trump DeSantis battle and then getting a lot of momentum. When you look at the party, are there people you see as dark horses or other players, you know, who you think are getting enough attention?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know if it's Nikki Haley. I've seen her work relatively friendly crowds and not do all that well. I didn't think she translated from South Carolina to the national stage perfectly well. Tim Scott is sort of has this appeal. There is a Republican and I think global conservative appeal, of course, to say like, hey, we're going to show you our principles are not just, you know, white supremacy because look, we have a person of color as our candidate. You know, I've seen that latent desire since the first CPAC I went to with where I saw buttons for Condoleezza Rice for president. And we've seen that in the Tory party, right? And highlighting how many women or people of

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  color they're raising up into cabinet. That same impulse exists in the Republican Party and they'll want to find diverse candidates in the future. However, I gotta say, I am on the team, put all your, your eggs in the DeSantis basket. And I am that way for the reason that I think he has brought in voters into the Republican coalition in Florida and nationally. And he still appeals to a lot of Trumpy voters, even if in a selection straight up between the two of them, there's a lot of voters who still prefer Trump now. And I just don't see any other figure uniting.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  The whole of the Republican Party and presenting opportunities for expansion, the way I do in DeSantis, I think everyone else is a little bit too uncreative and probably keeps too much of the old counsel. And I am declaring very early that I think DeSantis is a special figure in the Republican Party right now.

• 1:04:36Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a place to end then. So always our final question, Michael, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  To the audience? So, and I can recommend them like with a full sentence? Can I explain why?

• 1:04:48Ezra Klein?

  You can talk as much as you want about them.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  All right. So for the first hour. So one history book I've loved reading in the last couple of years and returning to is The German War by Nicholas Stargardt. It is a history of World War II, kind of told from the perspective of German people, from common people all the way up to archbishops and how they experienced World War II. It is a really haunting and frightening book in a lot of ways, more effective than I think a lot of Hannah Arendt essays, just in how people metabolized dictatorship and genocide in their own borders and slightly beyond them. Another book, which I think captures

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  a little bit of conservative fears about the direction of history, at the end of history, is this book, The Demon in Democracy by Ryszard Legutko, who's a Polish philosopher and minister in the European Parliament. And it's just a brilliant book about how a lot of partisans of liberal democracy in our era effectively have a communist worldview horizon, which is that the direction of history goes in one direction, and that's towards people who no longer have states, national loyalties, religious differences, that we kind of all meld into one global humanity. And then

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  I want to recommend this book by probably my favorite conservative thinker, Roger Scruton. It's called "The Face of God." It's a very interesting book in that I don't think Roger Scruton believed in God, or I'm not sure. And yet, this series of essays takes the reader on a journey through thinking about the idea of God in a secular world. And I think it has a unique ability to show people who don't believe in God, what the rest of us kind of see. This idea of a source and grounding for all of our gratitude and affection for the world.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  And the way that God can rationalize the gift that we make to each other of self-sacrifice. It's a very profound work, and it's not like some triply Christian apologetic like from Max Lucado. And I think it appeals to people who are immune to C.S. Lewis and other kind of traditional apologists.

• 1:07:23Ezra Klein?

  Michael Brendan Dougherty, thank you very much.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:07:38Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Emma F. Agaw, Kristen Lynn, Emmy Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Rishi Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Katie Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta.