Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show MAGA Is Not as United as You Think About this episode I’ve been fascinated by the problem Donald Trump faces with Project 2025. Trump has been caught in an awkward position, disavowing the document itself, but unable to fully disavow the people behind it. So I wanted to do an episode not just on Trump, but on the unwieldy coalition that has formed around him — what is sometimes referred to as the “New Right.”
Emily Jashinsky is the D. C. correspondent and host of “Undercurrents” for UnHerd, a co-host of “Counter Points” with Ryan Grim, and a former editor at The Federalist, one of the most influential sites among conservatives today. She’s described herself as someone with “a foot in both camps” of the “Old Right” and the “New Right.” So I thought she’d be a great guide to understanding how the conservative movement has changed.
In this conversation, we discuss the key differences between the Old Right and the New Right; what the New Right wants; why New Right thinkers are so interested in the concepts of “modernity” and “virtue”; and what influence the New Right might have in a second Trump administration.
Mentioned:
The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony
Book Recommendations:
Primal Screams by Mary Eberstadt
The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Efim Shapiro.
Transcript 11,702 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? I've been fascinated by the problems that J.D. Vance and Project 2025 are posing for Donald Trump in this election. And the problem he's facing, I think, is that he does not want to manage the coalition that he actually owns. In 2016, he didn't have to. He was a challenger to the Republican Party. He conquered it by humiliating its leading politicians. But he wasn't of it. And when you ask what a Trump administration would do in 2016, you were taking into account a Republican Party he didn't control, a coalition he didn't build. That's not true in 2024. Now, he does run the Republican Party. Now, he is the owner of the MAGA coalition.
1:06 Ezra Klein? But the MAGA coalition is bigger than him. And the groups in it, the people in it, they have developed more views on more issues than Donald Trump has. They have drank from weirder ideological wells than he does. This, I think, is the problem that J.D. Vance has posed for him. Vance was explicitly chosen to be the future of MAGA. But Vance is much more ideological than Trump. He is much more woven into weird online MAGA subcultures than Trump. And he's much more woven into things like Project 2025 than Trump. And so Vance and Oy represents where MAGA is going. And that's creating all kinds of problems for Donald Trump's campaign because he can't really disavow his own movement. It's not credible.
1:48 Ezra Klein? And if he wins, he's going to need to govern with these people. There isn't another collection of people who are going to staff his administration and write his policy. So I wanted to do an episode not just on Trump, but on the coalition that is formed around him, what sometimes now gets called the new right. Every older Republican I talked to in Washington, they talk with some dismay about how the 25- and 30-year-olds are different now. They're listening to different people. They believe radically different things. So what do they believe? Emily Jashinsky is a DC correspondent and host of Undercurrents for Unheard, as well as a co-host of Counterpoints with Ryan Grim. Emily is a former editor for The Federalist, one of the most influential sites among conservatives today.
2:31 Ezra Klein? And I thought she'd be a good person to talk about what this sort of new right is that she covers, that she's in many ways part of. As always, my email, [email protected] .
2:48 Ezra Klein? Emily Jashinsky, welcome to the show.
2:50 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me.
2:51 Ezra Klein? So you've written that you consider yourself someone with a foot in both camps of the old right and the new right. How would you describe the difference between the old right and the new right, or what is now the new right?
3:06 Speaker 01 Azra, I actually meant to tell you this before we started taping, but I will say it publicly. I once gave you a Reagan Ranch calendar on the campus of George Washington University.
3:16 Ezra Klein? A Reagan Ranch calendar?
3:18 Speaker 01 A Reagan Ranch calendar.
3:19 Ezra Klein? A Reagan Ranch, okay.
3:21 Speaker 01 Right. So this must have been 2012. You were debating, I think it was Bay Buchanan, I think the GW College Democrats had you. And I was at a Young Americans Foundation table with Reagan Ranch calendars. And you came up and asked for a Reagan Ranch calendar, and I happily handed you a Reagan Ranch calendar. But that's relevant, I think, to your question about the difference between the old right and the new right, because Ronald Reagan was obviously the kind of culmination of what people on the right refer to as fusionism. The sort of three-legged stool of fusionism, which was social conservatives, it was libertarians on economics, and neoconservatives, roughly, on foreign policy. And that was intentionally crafted, what The Times itself has referred to as the seminal
4:05 Speaker 01 document of the conservative movement, it's called the Sharon Statement. It was the founding document of Young Americans for Freedom. It was very explicitly this fusionist formulation of what a conservative is. It was, we affirm that the primary threat to freedom in the United States is communism. And the way the conservative movement sought to bring these disparate coalitions together was by...
4:26 Speaker 01 Uniting in common interest over defeating world communism, essentially. And Ronald Reagan really was the figurehead of that. And that's where especially a lot of boomer conservatives cling to the Reagan legacy. Now, the new right will say, you know, Ronald Reagan overemphasized deregulation. Ronald Reagan overemphasized interventionism. But it's really a question of America first is probably how a lot of people would frame it. And basically, every single old conservative group, in addition to some of the new ones that have sprung up since 2016, were behind Project 2025, which was organized, obviously, under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation. So in DC, in sort of professional conservative spaces, not Republican spaces, but conservative
5:09 Speaker 01 spaces, there is now very little public dissent from this idea that we're doing something different and that we're doing something new.
5:19 Ezra Klein? So help me map out this new right. I want to do this on two levels. One is the sort of ideological factions, and then the next is the groups who are trying to sort of vie for supremacy or power or whatever they might want to win. But ideologically, what are the sort of factions you see making up the sort of rising right?
5:42 Speaker 01 When I think of the new right, I think of people like Orrin Cass, somebody who worked on the Romney campaign and over at American Compass, is sort of building the infrastructure of what the policy for a potential J.D. Vance administration would look like. But Freedom Works, for example, closed. This absolutely massive standard-bearing group backed by the Koch Brothers of the Tea Party movement folded because there was no more appetite for that kind of libertarian economic approach as they saw it in the conservative movement. So it's really, I mean, I would say the new right has really become the dominant voice in the conservative movement. So for example, I would think about, there was like Bronze Age pervert, like Curtis Yarvin, for example, was at the National Conservatism Conference just this last year.
6:27 Speaker 01 So that's sort of someone from the tech world. Peter Thiel has been involved with the National Conservatism Movement, somebody from the tech world. Basically, the only group that you don't see, and this is a huge problem for the new right, but the only group that you don't see mingling at things like the National Conservatism Conference or CPAC. It's the Barstool Conservatives. And that's a huge problem for the new right because the Barstool Conservatives are the electorate more broadly. The National Conservatives are not representative on most issues of a big chunk of the country. The Barstool Conservatives really are. And that's where you see this bitter fight, this internecine fight over abortion is roiling conservative spaces. There is so much infighting and so much bitter infighting over this right now.
7:12 Speaker 01 Meanwhile, though, at the National Conservatism Conference with all of these groups in the hallways of the Heritage Foundation, you are not going to hear any dissent on abortion.
7:23 Ezra Klein? This seems like a pretty big ideological difference. So when I think about reactions to the left over the past, you know, five, 10 years, which I think is one of the driving forces here, there was a view, I don't think it was founded on nothing, that the left had become censorious, politically correct. It wanted to police what you could say. It was drawing these tight boundaries. You had to wear a mask. And so one response to that is the sort of Trumpian and Barstool conservative response, which is, leave us alone. We want to be in the political party that knows how to laugh and have a good time and says anything, right? This is more Joe Rogan conservatism, if you think of that as a thing.
8:06 Ezra Klein? But then a lot of what appears to be emerging in the MAGA movement, and I would associate somebody like J.D. Vance more in this world, is much more interested in using the government to reshape people's virtue, right? Like, I think their critique of the left is it abandoned a lot of, or Democrats abandoned a lot of communities, allowed neoliberalism to rip through the economy, people's families fell apart, their sort of social bonds fell apart. And now there's a view, I think you hold some of this view, you talked at the National Conservatism Conference about banning pornography, but it's not just you. On the first page of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts says, quote, "Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned,
8:51 Ezra Klein? and educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classified as registered sex offenders." So there is, it seems to be, this pretty big division between is the point of all this to get the left off your back? Or is it to go way further than the left has even imagined in reshaping the public life around views of what it means to be virtuous and decent?
9:16 Speaker 01 I think this touches on the central principle dividing people in the new right at this moment, actually, because Yoram Hazony is the godfather of the national conservative movement. He was the head of the Edmund Burke Foundation when they started doing the national conservatism conferences. This happened in the shadow of him publishing a book called The Virtue of Nationalism that a lot of people in the early Trump circles were passing around and were big fans of. And Yoram writes in his most recent book that America privatized virtue. And the obvious implication of that is we need to make public laws, once again, that create incentives to live virtuous lives.
9:55 Speaker 01 But that is so broad. That could mean something like criminalizing the creation of pornography. Or it could be keeping it out of the hands of minors or requiring companies to jump through a lot more hoops in order to publish pornography, in order to make money off of pornography. So there's just a vast, vast spectrum. I would be completely uncomfortable with going as far as what Kevin Roberts says there. And I actually think it would be a big mistake for the conservative movement to go that far, not just for political reasons, but for moral reasons of what the purpose of government is, tackling those issues. Is one thing, and I think a lot of us agree on that one point, on the new right. Like pornography is way more of a cultural emergency as we see it than a lot of people are willing to admit.
10:40 Speaker 01 But then the next step is where it gets hard because this idea of having a new right means a lot of people are newly comfortable with using tools of government to un-privatize virtue, to make virtue a public incentive system again. But that could be bringing back blue light laws, or that could be, you know, having more gentle incentives like a child tax credit. So there's just a huge gulf. While we're kind of rebuilding from the ashes of what people would say is the con, Inc., all of that opportunity means it can go in so many different directions. And I don't think people on the new right are fully aware of how vast the gulf is between people in the movement as of right now.
11:25 Ezra Klein? Is Donald Trump aware of how vast the movement is between possibly even him and the movement? He is in the command of? And I see this in some ways as a Trump Vance question. The story people told about Donald Trump picking J.D. Vance as his vice president was that J.D. Vance was being named the heir to the MAGA movement. He was the most committed and brilliant ideologist in elected office, working on behalf of Donald Trump and putting a policy agenda together around what Donald Trump had intuited in the electorate and in the world. And so in that way Vance is the continuation, right? He is the expansion of.
12:10 Ezra Klein? But when I look at Trump and Vance, I think Trump in his heart disagrees that pornography should be banned for anybody. I mean, this is a guy who's been criminally convicted for financial crimes. Related to sleeping with a porn star outside of his marriage.
12:26 Speaker 01 He's on the cover of Playboy.
12:27 Ezra Klein? Right. And J.D. Vance, on the other side, when I look at what he says and who he listens to and reads, I think in his heart, he's basically fundamentally sympathetic to that. I mean, he wrote the foreword to Kevin Roberts's forthcoming book. Like, this, to me, is why Donald Trump is having so much trouble with Project 2025 and, in a different way, J.D. Vance, because he can't disown them, like he could the Republican Party in 2016. But on the other hand, it seems to me to have gone in a direction that is more ideological, more religious, more concerned with reshaping the character of particularly young American men than he is.
13:04 Speaker 01 100%. Absolutely, that is all true. And when Donald Trump came in and bulldozed the Republican Party, he didn't have a particular stake beyond his own candidacy in the Republican Party. And that was kind of the point. I mean, the man at the time, a lot of people were more comfortable saying this, could basically have run as a Democrat because he was saying, you know, Caitlyn Jenner could use whatever restroom at Trump Tower and that he had this long history of palling around with a lot of very high-profile Democrats, giving to both parties. And he really didn't have a stake, certainly in the conservative movement, let alone the Republican Party.
13:44 Speaker 01 And so when you successfully bulldoze something like that, it was such a tempting opportunity, especially after 2020, for so many people in the Republican Party who said, "Our culture is in chaos, and we now need to take these sort of emergency measures." You sort of need this emergency robustness from conservative policymakers in order to get the country back on track. But what that didn't mean is the country suddenly wanted to have extremely conservative abortion laws. And the tension between those two fundamentally different directions is an undercurrent of the party right now.
14:25 Ezra Klein? So you give a speech at the NACON conference about how the right needs to be more centrally concerned with the problem of modernity.
14:35 Speaker 01 It's worth pausing for a thought experiment. Could you explain what would happen on September 11th, 2001, to someone on September 11th, 1901? Offices 1,400 feet in the air, commercial jets, that some people were alive in both years is the disorientation of modernity in a nutshell. We must re-center our politics around these challenges.
14:56 Ezra Klein? This, to me, feels like a very big difference between the way the right talks today and the way it talked under, say, George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. So give me a bit of that flavor. What is wrong with modernity?
15:07 Speaker 01 Let me put it this way. Just last night, I was moderating a debate between the great David Leonhardt of the New York Times and Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute on whether the American dream is dead. And Michael Strain, who's very much in the "American dream is alive and thriving" camp, said, you know, "Today, people wouldn't want to trade places with an American in the 1970s." And where I disagree with Michael, because on economic measures, you can absolutely make that case, but do you know what Gen Z is binging hours of on YouTube? It's camcorder videos from the 1980s and 1990s of high schoolers. It's the most boring camcorder videos on your old Sony that you could possibly imagine
15:50 Speaker 01 of people just at their lockers, no phones, just living in the moment. And Gen Z is binging these hard. And it goes beyond just sort of the curiosity of these historical artifacts. I think actually, if you asked a 22-year-old that question, and it was through the lens of what your everyday life would look like and not just explicitly economic, I actually think a lot of them, a lot of them, would take the deal. Not all of them, but the level of exhaustion with smartphones and social media is, you know, the Wi-Fi is like oxygen, and they've never known a world without it.
16:30 Speaker 01 So there's at least this curiosity and yearning for, we have such proximity to when life was so different. I don't know if that's ever happened in human history, maybe before and after we discovered fire.
16:42 Speaker 01 But when you're living in such close proximity to people who lived so fundamentally different lives before the oxygen was also wifi, it is really hard for them to say, no, I am very content with what this is. I think smartphones are affecting kids in bad ways. I think the internet is affecting kids in bad ways. I think internet pornography is affecting kids in bad ways. I think, though, they don't necessarily have to be, the outcomes don't have to be bad. Modernity doesn't have to be bad. I think of ourselves, though, as the frog in the proverbial boiling pot. We've let them go bad because we weren't used to the rate of change.
17:21 Ezra Klein? How much of the critique of modernity is digital modernity? And one thing I notice on these sort of rising figures on the right is that a lot of the newfound willingness to at least talk about using regulation in a way that conservatives, you know, 20 years ago might have been horrified by, has to do with how to regulate the internet. You heard J.D. Vance talk about how great Lena Khan is doing around antitrust. She, of course, being known for, you know, really very much wanting to break up some of the very big internet giants. There's talk about pornography, about online gambling. There's certainly a lot of talk about social media companies. It hasn't gone anywhere at the national
18:05 Ezra Klein? level, at least, although there have been pretty interesting state policies in places like Utah. But how much is there a rupture between the young right that is growing up in the internet era and as much as it it sort of is terminally online, it thinks something has gone terribly wrong online and the sort of older right that is less online and is less likely to see this is a place where government should be using a heavy hand?
18:31 Speaker 01 That's an interesting question.
18:34 Speaker 01 Because Lena Kahn, as a flashpoint here, will get support, which is seen as very remarkable. I think it is genuinely remarkable from somebody like J.D. Vance. There is basically a think tank right now, an American compass, which we've talked about, that is fairly influential on the right and is supportive of Lena Kahn. Again, kind of unthinkable just 10 years ago, but at the same time, Lena Kahn is getting smacked down by Ted Cruz all of the time. You cannot get Ted Cruz, even if he's pro-Trump and even if he's as MAGA as possible, to come around on Lena Kahn because business interests in the Republican Party, and there's a lot of ideological alignment still with those business issues, if the fault line is antitrust and the FTC.
19:19 Speaker 01 So this stuff is really, is very real, but it's so unfortunate that you have, or let me put it this way, the policy discussion in professional Washington is not one that your sort of young conservatives, and especially like a young Barstool conservative, on the question of Lena Kahn, is going to have an extremely strong reaction to, but they will have an extremely strong reaction to Google and to the, I guess, excesses of Google. At the same time, they will have a really strong reaction to things like, let's say, COVID lockdowns. I mean, that was the central animating force for so many young right-of-center kids in
20:03 Speaker 01 politics that I meet over the last, you know, couple of years. Every time I talk to them, it's basically like COVID lockdowns, where their central animating moment, it's like what got them interested in starting to follow politics. So on the one hand, they have this deep instinct against government intervention, and on the other hand, they want the government to do something about Google and about the proliferation of some of these other trends. All of this stuff has happened really quickly. Abortion has been around for as long as babies have been around, basically. But the level that it exists at now, or the type of abortion that exists at now, we're talking about mifepristone and all of this. It's a very different form than it had taken in the past, and it all happened really quickly. It's the same thing with online pornography.
20:48 Speaker 01 If you were young in the early aughts, when smartphones started to come about, it was all over high schools, especially before it was banned. I mean, this was everywhere. It was totally normalized. It happened so fast. OnlyFans happened so fast, and people started to see it as a way to make money. And they were sort of being cheered on by feminists, the sort of question of empowerment. We went back to the great Andrew Dwork and Camille Paglia debates of the early 90s about sex positivity and sex negativity. And it's all happening so quickly. And that's why some of these questions, I just think we've assumed are settled way earlier than they are. It doesn't mean that I have all the answers, but I do think the sort of political incentives
21:33 Speaker 01 right now have led a lot of people into black and white territory when it really isn't like that.
21:38 Ezra Klein? I've been trying to think about how all this differs from the social conservatives of the 90s, who were a powerful force. And people like William Bennett wanted to have more of a government role, pushing pornography out of public life. And one thing that I notice-
21:53 Speaker 01 Or Tipper Gore, by the way.
21:54 Ezra Klein? Or Tipper Gore, right. One thing that I notice is that it is not that a lot of the people we're talking about aren't religious. I mean, JD Vance, a convert recently to Catholicism. A lot of these people have religious grounding. But it does feel like the arguments being made are less self-consciously religious, and the people making them are less often leaders of churches than at that other time. Are we seeing a sort of shift in not the existence of cultural conservatism, but it's sort of taken a less religious and more- Populist, classicist flavor because we're in a more secular country now? This is a little bit of a half-formed thought, but I'm curious if there's something to it.
22:38 Speaker 01 You're completely correct that it's not so much the moral majority is rising from the grave as it is the left sort of overstepped on some cultural issues that were even too far for secular independents and Democrats, and it made them start to align themselves with the right. It happened with parents during COVID, I think, a lot on what was being taught about gender in schools and what was being taught about race in schools. We did see at the school board level a real, I think, awakening of parents that weren't just sort of right-wing Moms for Liberty. But, you know, there was a real boost in homeschooling, and there have been real boosts for podcasts
23:22 Speaker 01 that kind of confound the average political divide. That's where you see RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard has been very outspoken about women's sports, for example. And we do see that there are women in Tulsi Gabbard's camp who just thought, this is it for me. You know, I am voting Republican to stop this. I'm not saying it's everyone, but that is definitely a very, very real thing, that it just felt too far, even to secular independents and Democrats.
24:13 Ezra Klein? When you spend a bunch of time, as I have been recently, reading the sort of thinkers associated with the new right, I mean, Michael Anton being one of them, Jorma Zoni, you mentioned, being another, you end up reading a lot right now about virtue. So I'd like you to describe as best you can what virtue means in this context.
24:37 Speaker 01 It's so interesting because when you listen to Yoram and Michael Anton and there are many others who talk about virtue, they really are so heavily influenced by the same thinkers that the founding fathers were reverent of and looking to as they constructed the republic. And virtue, I think, in the new rights intellectual space has to fundamentally be understood through the lens of lowercase r republicanism, because that is how they all look at it. This harkening back to the Roman Republic, to the earliest sort of designs of what democratic governance could look like, always placed heavy emphasis on the privilege and the obligation
25:21 Speaker 01 of individual citizens to sort of be members of their community, of their society, in ways that are more meaningful than many of us see it now. So kind of the norms shifting, that you hear the John Adams quote all the time, that ours is a constitution made for a wholly moral and religious people and is unfit for any other kind. And so that is fundamentally this idea that citizenship is something we don't take seriously enough at all anymore. It's just sort of like a natural title that's bestowed on us, but we don't have to do anything to get it back. That's something that really is prominent in these circles, a prominent strain of thought in these circles. And then, of course, they would see it in a Judeo-Christian context, that you're someone
26:05 Speaker 01 who pursues a virtuous life, meaning you are married and have children and procreate the species as a norm, and then pursuing education and bettering your community so that you can better the space for your descendants who will take over the republic after you pass away.
26:27 Ezra Klein? I have found the virtue discourse.
26:31 Ezra Klein? Possessed of an intolerable level of contradiction is maybe the way I would put it. And I think I'm pretty good as a person at holding contradiction. But I'll give an example. J.D. Vance seems to me to be well aware of and well engaged in this virtue conversation. And you made the connection, which I've seen made a lot, to virtue and immigration. One reason to be very skeptical of immigration is there you need a virtuous citizenry to make a democracy work. And so we should be very, very cautious about who we are letting in. And the left is not being cautious with that, even as they pose as defenders of liberal democracy. And then I watch J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, and Donald Trump strikes me as one of the less virtuous people I've ever seen. But I watched J.D.
27:16 Ezra Klein? Vance and Donald Trump lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, kind of saying like the lie is OK, almost, because maybe there's a larger truth here that there's too much immigration. And there's something about this movement that I think the people in it believe that they are fighting this war to bring virtue back into the public sphere, using some of the least virtuous means I could possibly imagine. I mean, I try to take people at their word and take their thinking as real to them. But it sort of blows apart for me. And I guess I'd ask you what I'm missing.
27:55 Speaker 01 I don't think you're missing anything, to be honest. I think this is actually a huge battle. We've talked about sort of the tug of war of policy, but this tug of war over style and messaging is, to your point about is it intention with virtue? There are people who would look at that and say, absolutely, it's very clearly intention with virtue. But there are also so many people on the so-called new right who will say there is and J.D. Vance crept towards this argument in his interview where it was with Dana Bash, I believe, talking about it did get clipped a little bit out of context, but saying, you know, if I have to make up a story about people eating cats and dogs in Springfield to get the media to pay attention, then I'll do it.
28:35 Speaker 02 He just said Haitians are eating dogs and cats. Can you affirmatively say now that that is a rumor that has no basis with evidence?
28:50 Speaker 03 Dana, the evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened. And by the way, I've been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months, and the American media ignored it. There was a congressional hearing just last week of angel moms who lost children because Kamala Harris let criminal migrants into this country who then murdered their children. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to- But it wasn't just memes- If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm gonna do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.
29:32 Speaker 01 It's this impasse that a lot of people on the new right feel like they're at, where if they don't talk about these issues in outrageous tones, this is very much a lesson of Donald Trump, very much a lesson of Donald Trump, who started his campaign by saying, "They're rapists, they're criminals, there's no mainstream Republican politician in years" who had talked about immigrants in that way. And it shifted, a lot of people in the Republican Party saw, the focus to immigration in a way that they just could not get the media to do in years of trying. Like, there's a point to the people who are so frustrated that they are resorting to these outrageous, and I would say unethical, memes. I don't agree with that at all, but their frustration is sourced in something very
30:16 Speaker 01 real, which is, it is very hard to have a conversation about immigration without being called by some fairly mainstream spaces, or criticized in some fairly mainstream spaces for being bigoted in any number of different ways. So that frustration, I think, is rooted in something very real, it's just being channeled into something, I think, really dangerous.
30:39 Ezra Klein? One way I would take the realization that you can't get anybody to pay attention to this point you're making unless you make a really, really bad argument. Is it maybe the point isn't good, right? Maybe the reason you're having trouble getting people to see things the way you're seeing them is it it's not the way they are. And I mean, we can sort of zoom in on the Springfield example where, I mean, I thought it was very striking to see Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, who has endorsed the Trump Vance ticket, write a New York Times opinion piece saying they're functionally libeling Springfield, like this is not the Springfield he knows. And I read what people in Springfield are saying and saying, look, these people are
31:21 Ezra Klein? here to work, they're working really hard, there are problems with driving and cultural friction, but they don't need to be demonized, they're not eating our cats and dogs. But that going all the way back to Trump on the golden escalator, that part of the reason he has had to make the arguments about immigration he's had to make is that the reality of immigration is not the reality that he wants to convince people of. And if you try to tell them the reality of it, the reality they see around them, which is immigration brings some challenges, but it's good for economic growth, it brings in a lot of people who start businesses, it brings in a lot of people who have done something very dangerous to try to make their family's life better. It connects to an old and deep tradition in American life of welcoming, or at least
32:05 Ezra Klein? having an ambivalent welcoming spirit to immigrants, that it just doesn't end up in this clear cut immigration is terrible for the country way that the right seems to have decided it needs to persuade people of. I mean, I think the reason so many of the arguments are lies is because that they're pointing towards a view of reality that is also itself not true.
32:30 Speaker 01 We might disagree on this because I think-
32:32 Ezra Klein? Yeah, that's what I'm trying to elaborate.
32:33 Speaker 01 No, we might disagree on this because under the Trump administration, there'd be some caravans coming and suddenly I would see an MSNBC reporter in the field following the caravan and framing it, for example, as a matter of, you know, Trump's cruelty towards migrants, these migrants just trying to have a better life, which many of them are, I've talked to them in Mexico, in fact, and they have incredible and inspiring stories. But at the same time, the frustration with the storyline- That gets created when the administration is different. I mean, we had the the numbers over the course of the Biden administration. They have gotten great media coverage. I would say eventually they did, but they were happening without a lot of media coverage for a long time. And Republicans basically felt like they were throwing their hands up in the air and screaming
33:17 Speaker 01 to try to get media coverage. And I think that frustration is rooted in something absolutely real. And that's what frustrates me so much about the American media right now is that it's counterproductive not to take some of these criticisms seriously.
33:31 Ezra Klein? I mean, I think there is serious things to take in that. I mean, I guess it strikes me a couple of ways. I think it's useful to to go where Trump begins, which is the end of the Obama administration. And as you know, Obama's administration was in many ways quite tough on immigrants. I mean, very famously, early in his administration, he substantially increased the pace of deportations. And he did that in part because he was trying to buy credibility to come to some larger deal, which is something that immigration rights groups ultimately ended up quite angry with him for. But at the end of Obama's administration, you did not have unusually high levels of border encounters. In fact, you had significantly lower levels than under George W. Bush.
34:13 Ezra Klein? And Donald Trump emerges in that moment to say immigration is destroying this country. And the right makes its turn on immigration in that moment. I mean, look, I would actually understand that. We just did an episode with Secretary Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary about this.
34:29 Speaker 01 It was excellent. Yes, your questions were fantastic.
34:31 Ezra Klein? The the numbers went wildly up under Biden. So if Donald Trump and the right's turn on immigration followed Joe Biden, I could get that, like, I would understand that. But it didn't. It it followed Barack Obama. And that's why I'm saying that sometimes I think that there is this, there is this argument I hear on the right that these.
34:51 Ezra Klein? Not true. Arguments need to be made because they get at a deeper truth, right? That you're using the lie to grasp a truth. But I think that sometimes you're, they're just using the lie to grasp the lie. And so I guess that gets to an actual policy question I have for you, which is, what is the problem here that people want to address? Is it a problem in the economy or in the crime rates? Or is it just a sense of who should be in the American community?
35:21 Speaker 01 It's so interesting because I think back to the Tea Party days. And I'm trying to remember what really animated conservatives towards the end of the Obama administration about immigration in particular. And I think a lot of it was DACA. I mean, I was in college at the time and the frenzy over Obama's executive actions on immigration felt to a lot of people on the right like a norm had been violated, that Barack Obama was coming in and violating these constitutional ideals in order to facilitate mass immigration. I kind of see that as the genesis of this contemporary battle.
36:02 Speaker 01 Because that was, I mean, it's sort of easy to forget, but that was pitched and very bitter. And I think Trump saw that and started responding to that. So, and also, it does resonate especially, this question of fairness, which one thing I think the left does miss is that for a lot of average Americans, it's not even a question of whether their community has personally been impacted by this. And so even if it's, you know, why does this voter in Nebraska, you know, whose community hasn't been totally affected like Springfield has? Why are they voting, you know, after a country? Why are they voting on immigration? Or why is immigration their top issue? Because they feel like it's unfair. And I think a lot of people felt like DACA was unfair. And that was really animating.
36:48 Ezra Klein? I don't know that I agree with it on DACA, but I do think that one of the deep political problems for the left is that it doesn't take How poisonous a sense of unfairness is, seriously. People feeling like others are cutting in line and not paying for it. That creates a real poisonous sense that the government is creating a situation that harms you.
37:11 Speaker 01 And I think that was really potent during the Obama administration because of the financial crisis. I think there were so many people around the country who just had this sense that they got a raw deal. And the immigration debate was very animated. And whether or not they agree with Trump on different policies, he spoke fundamentally to that. And there was something about that, I think, that took off, especially in the Rust Belt. And I still think that's a decent chunk of Trump's appeal in the Rust Belt is he speaks to that in ways that other lawmakers haven't quite figured out yet.
37:46 Ezra Klein? I take the point that the financial crisis is part of the genesis of all this. And this is a place where it's very hard to make the argument I'm about to make. Because you don't want to say the economy is great, and I don't believe it's great in a bunch of different ways. But when I go back to 2000, Europe and the Eurozone were in this sort of period of rising economic strength. There are a bunch of books written in the early 2000s about how the Eurozone economy is going to eclipse ours. It doesn't, we pull far ahead, we're like this incredible productivity success story compared to Europe now. Like, UK looks quite poor compared to America. China looked much stronger a decade ago than it does now. America had by far the fastest growth rate coming out of the pandemic.
38:30 Ezra Klein? There are problems in the American economy, some of them are very severe, there always are. Something I do not hear the new right grapple with at all, though, is that there are successes and trends that need to be protected, or at least why they happen needs to be theorized a little bit. And that, you know, slapping a 20% tariff on any incoming good or having huge new trade wars might upend it. I mean, it does seem to me there's this new consensus that economic management has been an absolute catastrophe over the past 25 years. But when I sort of go back through the debates of that 25 years and look at who kept being framed as our competitors,
39:13 Ezra Klein? we just have pulled ahead of one of them after the other. And I'm all for making things better, but I'm curious if you, like, what the grappling is with what we've actually done well.
39:24 Speaker 01 I love this question because it's a source of my own frustration with a lot of people in the new right, which is the reason a lot of Americans have this economic malaise, this sense of economic malaise. Some of those reasons, the right is not even trying to have answers to the question. So I agree that I think probably a lot of Republicans right now are trying to out sprint each other on this question of tariffs. I mean, Trump has just gone to lengths that in his mind and in the mind of some of his maybe intellectual allies on the right will make a point. And you even would hear that from some farmers who would get interviewed by journalists. They would say, we are with
40:09 Speaker 01 Donald Trump because the point needs to be made. So I agree. I think some of it, they would even admit is rhetorical, but at the same time, they're completely missing how important healthcare, student loan debt, and debt in general. We did see Josh Hawley introduce a bill at one point that would cap usury, I think is how he put it. I forget what the number was, but he wanted to actually cap what credit card companies could do. And that's basically been the only part of this conversation on that front that's materialized into policy. There's virtually no discussion about healthcare. And if you ask Americans why they feel uncertain about the economy, why they feel scared about the economy, why
40:53 Speaker 01 they feel like they're living paycheck to paycheck, healthcare is arguably the biggest part of that conversation. Student debt is a huge part of the conversation. Student debt, we know, according to polling, affects marriage rates, which is something that the new right is extremely concerned about. You know, people say they wait to have children until they can own a home. So these are huge, huge policies, huge, concrete, specific issues. Those are just two of them. But you can talk about homeownership. We are starting to see the left and the right suddenly pay attention to this because the spike has become almost impossible to ignore. And that's where the new right's going to have to grapple with this question of yimbyism, which I know that you cover very closely, Ezra, and I'm Fascinated to see how this plays out, particularly on the right, because it's
41:37 Speaker 01 this old confrontation between the libertarian branch and the new right that has all of these ideas about how government can be re-engineered in ways that previously would have been considered heavy-handed. So you see it come up sometimes. But healthcare is the best example. I mean, J.D. Vance gave a totally different healthcare answer than what Trump gave reportedly just in the last week than what Trump believes in, to the point where it's being given to the press that Trump wasn't necessarily on board with what J.D. Vance said their healthcare policy would be. And this is one of the most important issues repeatedly that voters are making up their minds on. And there's just crickets. There's nothing.
42:15 Ezra Klein? I mean, when I try to work my way through new right economic thinking, and I've had Orrin Castle on the show and spent a lot of time reading American Compass work as part of that, I guess the theory I've come away with is that the new right has developed a view that the point of economic policy is to strengthen families and communities, which strikes me as a completely reasonable view, right? What is, I mean, the economy should be subordinate to something. But there's not actually, as far as I can tell, good analytical work being done on what policies would strengthen communities and families. Like, it often seems to me that there's a sort of nostalgic economics, a sense that, well, if we could put on enough tariffs and bring back industrial production, maybe even
43:00 Ezra Klein? some of the unions could come back, maybe you would get something more like the communities of the 1950s, at least for white people, and then you'd have better family formation, you know, and marriage survival rates, and maybe people would have more kids. And I just know economic research fairly well, and this stuff isn't going to work. And it doesn't have much evidence it'll work, and nobody's sort of providing any.
43:25 Ezra Klein? I guess I am puzzled by whether there is an economic theory here that has taken hold, or whether there is, for lack of a better term, like an economic aesthetic that has taken hold. A lot of things on the new right, sort of the obsession, you know, we can talk about this, but with more classical aesthetics, some of the virtue talk strikes me as related to this, Bronze Age pervert stuff strikes me as related to this. Michael Anton's long essay about Machiavelli and Montesquieu strikes me as related to this. Sometimes it feels to me like it's about an aesthetic, that things were better before, right? And sometimes before is way back, and sometimes before is like the 1950s, maybe the 1960s, without all the social upheaval. Maybe it's like the late 1980s.
44:08 Ezra Klein? But if we could just sort of turn the clock back to something that looks more like that, we would get there. I guess let me stop on that. Does that, like, that feels to me like I'm saying something unfair, but it is what I actually think. So does it sound to you like I'm saying something unfair?
44:21 Speaker 01 No, not at all, because there's this new focus on aesthetics. You hear this all the time on the right, it's huge. And it's funny you mention the late 80s, because I'm remembering some of the DeSantis campaign videos that were seen by a lot of sort of very online Team DeSantis. And I'm speaking as somebody who at the time was fairly supportive of the kind of agenda that Ron DeSantis had started to look at in Florida. And, oh my gosh, it was like Patrick Bateman. It was literally the villain of American Psycho. And it was irony poisoned, it was way too online. But fundamentally, to your point,
45:03 Speaker 01 it was about the aesthetic. It was not about the substance, it was about the aesthetic. They were not saying that Ron DeSantis was in any way this Machiavellian serial killer. But what they were saying is something so dumb and superficial, which is that this guy looks cool, Ron DeSantis is going to look cool if we flash him on the screen right next to Patrick. And so it's especially with young conservatives, sometimes very difficult to see the difference between the aesthetic and the substance. There are groups on the right that are focused on aesthetics in ways you would never, ever, ever see before. You get a lot of like comic sans on conservative websites until 2016. And some of it is good. Not all of it is,
45:46 Speaker 01 but some of it is, you can see that they're actually like starting to get people involved in the movement that are genuinely from the art world. And so is that vibe shift, though, something that can be durable after Trump, when Trump is no longer the aesthetic standard bearer? Because I'll tell you what, Ron DeSantis is not going to be the aesthetic standard bearer for those right wing artists. And I don't know who else possibly could be.
46:14 Ezra Klein? I always felt that Donald Trump's implicit view was that America was great in like 1950. And then I'll read a bunch of the people that I'm told are the rising intellectuals, your Michael Anton's, your, I God, I hate this sentence, your Bronze Age perverts. And I can't exactly place where they think it went wrong, but it seems like maybe the 10th century, the 7th century, the 2nd century, right? It's a whole different thing. There's this intense focus on antiquity that has become an aesthetic, but also is clearly a view. The problem is not a couple decades of bad policy. The problem is a complete departure
46:54 Ezra Klein? from classical notions of virtue, the soul, what composes a good human being. I almost like don't know the question here, but this seems to be a pretty big chasm opening up between like this movement's intellectuals and I think most people who might vote for Donald Trump, who are like not trying to overturn all of modernity?
47:16 Speaker 01 Oh, no, it's, I mean, I don't know if you saw what Michael Knowles said about, this was about a year ago, Michael said on his show, and I like Michael a lot, but he said something like, I would go back to the 7th century. He like fully just said what you said.
47:30 Speaker 01 You know, Ezra, I've been thinking over the course of this conversation, how often I'm agreeing with you. And I know some of my friends on the new right will be irked by that. But I agree with them on so many of these issues. You know, abortion, immigration, Ukraine. I'm broadly in agreement. I even think the federal bureaucracy is too big and that there should be something to trim the size of the federal government. Of course, at the same time, though, if I sound like I'm agreeing with you a lot, it's because I am so frustrated with some of these important distinctions that have gotten totally papered over. Like classical liberalism and post-liberalism are so different. But because you have a lot of people who are actually just classical liberals that
48:14 Speaker 01 are aligned now with post-liberals, we're just not talking about some of these distinctions as much as we can because everyone wants to kind of signal that they're not with the old right. And I get that. The old right was dominated, I would argue, by corporate interests in a way that was totally unhealthy and was dominated by people who were spending way too much time in, you know, super zips, as social scientists have come to call the areas around Washington DC and New York and Los Angeles. So I get all of that. But what you hear a lot now is pining and actually planning for a new elite. People are trying to build a new elite, a better elite.
48:56 Speaker 01 And for me, it's like, I'm from Wisconsin and I got into politics because like I actually thought the cultural snobbery was, that was like my animating thing. It just drove me crazy as like a kid who was raised in this Christian conservative, hunting, fishing house. And that was like very animating for me. And now I see them doing the same damn thing and acting like there isn't any contradiction. It just drives me insane.
49:20 Ezra Klein? Does some of that help explain some of the rhetoric from someone like Vance? I mean, I've always taken the you're all miserable cat ladies dynamic of him as trying to instantiate something that was sort of floating around the right for a while. Like, I was associated with Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart. And one of the arguments Murray makes towards the end of that book is that the elite needs to get back to yelling at the non-elite about how they're not living elite enough lives. That sort of one of Murray's arguments then is you have this elite who lives in a way more traditional lives, their marriages are lasting longer, you know, they're getting educated, they're going to, you know, they're more civically involved.
50:03 Ezra Klein? And then you have these lower classes, again, in his argument, who are diverging from that. And that's a hard problem to fix, and you can't always fix it with policy. But one thing that I think he viewed as a problem, and I sort of take people like Patrick De Nain as viewing as a problem, and now J.D. Vance is viewing as a problem, is the idea that the elite became individualist, and that individualism worked out great for them, you know, for us, if you want to say it that way, but that as a result, you have marriages coming apart and people not having enough kids, and you need to go back to an elite who are exercising aggressive moral leadership and trying to scold and shame people into following more virtuous social pathways.
50:45 Ezra Klein? I mean, this is my best rendering of this argument, and the thing that makes some of where J.D. Vance has gone makes some sense to me, that if you believe that and you are a leading politician, then being contemptuous and mocking of people making life choices you don't like is sort of the point.
51:02 Speaker 01 What I think is happening is there's this instinct to throw the classically liberal baby out with the bathwater of 20th century conservatism, and then, of course, a little bit of 21st century conservatism. And it's just so easy to fall into that for a political movement, because you are necessarily getting rid of some of that bathwater. You're necessarily tossing some of the adventurism, some of the radical libertarianism that was
51:29 Speaker 01 A part of this fusionist experiment, and as you're tossing out that bathwater, sometimes you're scooping out things. And I think January 6th is a really good example of this. You're scooping out things that are absolutely essential to lowercase r republicanism and virtue. So to me, again, even when I agree with my friends on so much of this, that's the one thing. If it sounds like I'm agreeing with you on some of these criticisms, you and I would probably disagree on most of the substance on the new right. But I do really, the style question is a huge one. And so I can't pretend that I don't have these very real disagreements about tactic, because personnel is policy, tactic is policy at the end of the day. And there does seem to be a worrying trend of
52:12 Speaker 01 just tossing the classically liberal baby out with the 20th century conservative bathwater. And it's easy to do.
52:42 Ezra Klein? So let's ground this a little bit in Donald Trump. So if he wins in 2024, which seems very possible, he's got to govern with some kind of coalition. And I think one of the problems he's had this year is that Project 2025 stepped in to try to describe what that would look like for him, and he's, I think, wishes they had not. But he's not identified an alternative way he would govern. If it's not going to be these groups who are vetting all these people to work with him, and all these people who already did work with him, like, who's it going to be? So when you think about a next Trump administration, and when you report on it, how do you think it would differ in its coalition or its priorities than the first Trump administration?
53:28 Speaker 01 The genesis of Project 2025, and you've probably picked up on this, Ezra, but even just talking to people who were involved in it journalistically, you hear them, and it was this idea that Donald Trump, just, he's not a man of the conservative movement. He doesn't come in with the infrastructure. That was part of the reason that conservatives pushed him to pick Mike Pence, because Mike Pence as VP knew all of the heads of the conservative movement groups, where you would tap personnel and staff from, where you would tap the white papers from. He kind of knew where to look to get people and policies. And because Trump's orbit hadn't become substantially more cohesive or policy centric, people really started to say, all right, we need something like a Project 2025.
54:11 Speaker 01 This ultimately became Project 2025 because this isn't organized. And that's why Project 2025 and Heritage also have something called, I think it's called like the 100 Day Agenda that hasn't been made public yet. It's internal. I've never seen it, but it's the executive orders that should be ready to go on day one. It was this idea that there's nothing, like, we're having all of these debates, but we're not putting any of it into sort of a hard agenda. A lot of Project 2025, this is something that hasn't been reported, but a lot of it is like debates internally. There's one policy that's outlined about a child tax credit, and then another policy that's outlined about a child tax credit. People said, none of this is even being facilitated. And that, because Project 2025 has become such a lightning rod,
54:56 Speaker 01 the ball has not moved further down the field on that question. The Trump campaign sort of haphazardly tried to put out its own policy agenda. Trump still is Trump, though, and goes back and forth. And this is probably the central problem of the new right that we keep coming back to time and again, is that he doesn't have a cohesive ideology. And in a way, he's more similar to a lot of average Americans than the ideologues in the conservative movement, or the progressive movement, or the Republican or Democratic establishments. But it makes it very hard for ideologues to anticipate where he's going to go with it. And this, then, is the second big problem for them, which is personnel. I heard during the Trump administration covering it, people who didn't get hired at the end of their job process. Because five years ago, or four years ago,
55:38 Speaker 01 they had tweeted something or liked a tweet that was critical of Donald Trump. That is not going to change. And so you already have this smaller pool of professional conservatives that are on board with Trumpism. That has not changed. Heritage has a database. Other conservative groups have created databases where they're trying to vet potential people to serve in the Trump administration. There are not enough professional conservatives who can pass those vetting tests. So the truth that I don't think the Trump campaign wants people to know, and I think there's been a lot of fear mongering over Project 2025, but in the absence of a lot of serious policy suggestions outside of Project 2025, I do think ultimately people in the Trump administration
56:23 Speaker 01 are going to be looking at Project 2025 because really, there's not much else.
56:26 Ezra Klein? I mean, this is going to be my question. The suspicion on the left or of Democrats is that this guy can disavow all he wants. But in office, he and the people around him would pick this up because it's what's there. And so the view is that, yeah, Donald Trump sees this as bad in an election year. But it actually is the right guide to look at because if he wins the election, he's not going to worry about it being bad in an election year or whoever he deputizes in his administration to do the annoying work of finding, you know, 4,000 political appointees, or if they use Schedule, 50,000 political appointees. They're going to need to work with something. Is that basically how you see it too?
57:08 Speaker 01 Absolutely, absolutely. They're going to be relying on a lot of the same people because those are the people that could pass the litmus test to begin with. No matter what, there just aren't enough people, period. It's not like the bureaucrat, the career, who serves in the Department of, let's say, Education and has for 20 years, 30 years. They can work with a George W. Bush. They can work with a Joe Biden or an Obama. They could work with a Mitt Romney. They can't work with a Donald Trump. And they absolutely will try to thwart, they'll quit, or they'll try to thwart an agenda that seeks to close the Department of Education. So there aren't enough people to carry that out in the world, let alone professional conservative circles.
57:53 Ezra Klein? One of the views a lot of people have had about a possible second Trump term is it will be much more effective, much more agile, much more capable of doing the things that Trump and the people around him want. You know, J.D. Vance is much more loyal in a way than than Mike Pence was in Congress. It's much more Trumpist, right? They have all these plans. They have these vetted people. And I guess I've started to wonder if it doesn't possibly go the other way, too, that I guess I've wondered whether you think that a second Trump term would be more effective than the first because it's more ideologically united and has had more time to plan, or if actually the fact that it can be more ideologically united is sort of a danger and the fact that they're so
58:36 Ezra Klein? afraid of Project 2025 on the campaign trail is a signal that governing with this coalition is going to go poorly.
58:43 Speaker 01 You know, it's interesting because I was thinking the other day about what a cabinet meeting with Mike Pompeo and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would look like. They are people who have such deep ideological differences and personal differences because of those ideological differences. J.D. Vance is a true post-liberal. People make mistakes in thinking he's just an opportunist who's going MAGA because he sees it as his ticket. I mean, if you read his like 1,000-plus-word essay in The Lamp, which is a Catholic magazine, you see this is a very fully fleshed out and sincere post-liberal approach to American politics. On the other
59:24 Speaker 01 hand, I have a hard time seeing a world in which Jared Kushner is not still in the administration and is not still a significant driver of policy in another Trump administration. So to some extent, it's true. There's going to be more loyalty in key positions. People see in Donald Trump, they sort of project onto him, if immigration is your priority, Donald Trump becomes a champion. But that's, I mean, it might help him electorally. It doesn't help in terms of of governance. So, well, I think there's definitely a concerted effort to fill key positions with loyalists. I don't know that we actually have an idea
1:00:06 Speaker 01 of what people's loyalty to Donald Trump is like until it's tested because a whole lot of people didn't expect Donald Trump to do what he did, to go as far as he did. You would hear this in conservative circles, "Is he really gonna, you're really gonna do this?" And he did.
1:00:21 Ezra Klein? There's a theory, and I don't totally buy this, but I would like to indulge it as a speculation, that in a second Trump term, what would happen is Donald Trump would function to be head of state, which many people think is really what he would like to be,
1:00:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:00:34 Ezra Klein? The king and doing a lot of ceremonial things and having parades. And J.D. Vance would be the prime minister. If that were to be true, if he became the ideological conciliere that Trump has never quite had or trusted, what do you think a Trump administration would look like in that condition?
1:00:53 Speaker 01 It's an interesting question because J.D. Vance, since he's joined the ticket, I mean, when he was in consideration for the ticket, he walked back some of his really hardline positions on abortion. And that was a red flag for a lot of people in the pro-life movement, who said, whoa, what's going on with J.D. Vance? And so the political context is hard to imagine. I can imagine J.D. Vance in a post-liberal fantasy world where he has a mandate from the voters. He's president himself, and he has a mandate from the voters. You would see a lot of intense executive action on the border. Let's just speak outside of Congress and what would happen legislatively. There would absolutely be an effort with executive power
1:01:37 Speaker 01 to rein in abortion. There's no question about it. That would be a priority. So immigration, abortion. He would govern like a realist on foreign policy, very hawkish on China. You're not going to have a John Bolton in the administration, that's for sure. It would definitely be staffed with people who are fully in opposition to the neoconservative foreign policy of the old GOP. So foreign policy, I think, would look totally, totally different. Just in terms of personnel, there would be an effort to get rid of the Department of Education. The Heritage Foundation was criticizing Ronald Reagan for not doing that in the 1980s. So I think if you have the post-liberal fantasy situation, that is on the chopping block right away,
1:02:20 Speaker 01 maybe even day one, that's on the chopping block. So those are some of the things off the top of my head. Trade would be very Trumpian. But off the top of my head, those are some of the same things. A big question for me is what would happen to the FTC or the NRLB or the CFPB, all of the alphabet soup agencies, if you had the fantasy land, post-liberal buffet of options in front of J.D. Vance? I actually don't know the answer to those questions.
1:02:46 Ezra Klein? How about on the question of power and institutions? One thing where I think Vance and Kevin Roberts of Heritage and others have done more thinking than is always totally apparent to liberals is on this idea, and DeSantis had this vision as well, that the right has lost the major institutions of American life, one after the other, from woke business to academia, to the scientific institutions, to the media, to culture, anything you might want to look at. It's all become part of the left. And what you need to do is take the state back over, which requires purging the bureaucracy and filling it with your people.
1:03:27 Ezra Klein? And then you use the power of the state to try to take back these institutions, or at least bring them to heel. DeSantis did versions of this, and it's a very big part of what you've heard J.D. Vance talk about. It's a very big part of this book that Kevin Roberts wanted to publish and is now delayed until after the election because he is afraid of becoming more of a problem for the Trump campaign. But it seems to me they have a, more even than they have a fleshed out policy agenda. They have a sort of, if not fleshed out, at least a theoretically complete institutional control agenda, and that more than policy unites this crowd, this belief that you have to use a state to win back power unites this crowd. Like, one, do you think that's sort of fair as a theory of how they think about governing?
1:04:12 Ezra Klein? But two, what do you think they would do on that?
1:04:14 Speaker 01 I would say the way they see this is because they still have to raise money. They're still going to fundraisers with billionaires. In fact, billionaires are becoming some of the big backers of the Trump Vance campaign at this point, especially from Silicon Valley. And that's true of both political parties, obviously. But there's still this reflex to be pro-entrepreneur, pro-enterprise, and pro-individualism, rugged individualism among Republicans. So on the one hand, even new right Republicans, so I think they see it as this, when there's tension between businesses and families and communities.
1:04:51 Speaker 01 We err on the side of families and communities. And that can be interpreted in a lot of really different ways. But that is the prism through which they're seeing some of these big questions. And the reason I still say the jury's out on what the new right becomes is sort of what you're talking about, the Trump of it all, in that we really don't know how Donald Trump governs. He's so hard to predict. He was talking at one point about doing a deal with Nancy Pelosi on DACA. I don't know how the Republican Party, I don't know which faction wins control of the Republican Party when, because I don't know how Donald Trump either leaves office, leaves politics. To me, that is the central, so much of this, so much of the momentum politically is attached
1:05:34 Speaker 01 to him, and he is so politically nebulous, that it's just so hard for me to imagine 10 years from now, what the Republican Party looks like, because I don't know what happens to him. And that is a very strange place to be.
1:05:46 Ezra Klein? I think it's a good place to end. So is our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?
1:05:51 Speaker 01 So I recommend Primal Screams by Mary Ebersat. I recommend Devil's Chessboard, and I recommend The Screw Tape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
1:06:00 Ezra Klein? Emily Jocinski, thank you very much.
1:06:02 Speaker 01 Thank you, Ezra.
1:06:09 Ezra Klein? This episode of the Ezra Klontz Show is produced by Elias Siswiff. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gelled, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Semilowsky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Afim Shapiro.
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