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Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat and this is “Interesting Times.” What does the second Trump administration really stand for? How different is Trumpism from past forms of conservatism?
This past week has felt like a pivotal moment to tackle those questions. The break with Elon Musk has seemingly brought an end to the great experiment with having Silicon Valley’s tech right try to run Washington.
The protests in Los Angeles and the president’s militarized response highlight just how important immigration politics has become for American conservatism. And the battle in Congress over the “big, beautiful bill” has brought back the ghosts of the Tea Party era. So it’s a good time to talk about what Trumpism 2.0 actually represents, and my guest this week is the perfect person for that conversation.
Matthew Continetti is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and he’s the author of a recent book called “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism,” which is, in my opinion, the best recent intellectual history of the American right.
So, Matthew Continetti, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Matthew Continetti: Ross, thank you. It’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to our discussion of “Andor.”
Douthat: [laughter] Oh, did we schedule you for the wrong week?
Continetti: Well, I was told ——
Douthat: That’s how we lure everyone in. We’re like: Come for the “Star Wars” discussion.
Continetti: I enjoyed that episode very much, so it is a pleasure to be here.
Douthat: You’re very kind. Well, there can be a science fiction element here as well, because I wanted to start with Elon Musk, a science fiction figure if there ever was one, and the great Trump-Musk schism, which sort of put an exclamation point on Elon’s departure from the White House, or from government. I want you to talk about what you think the Musk experiment represented in the realm of ideas. What was that all about?
Continetti: Well, I think the way to approach this question is to look at the shape of the coalition that Donald Trump brought into being in his re-election last year. A large part of that coalition — certainly a lot of the intellectual energy, a lot of the fund-raising — came from what’s been called the tech right. But there were also other parts of the coalition. There was MAHA, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, disaffected Democrats over foreign policy. There were, of course, the minority working-class voters that we’ve talked so much about in the aftermath of the election. And so Musk is often associated with this tech right. But I actually think he overlaps several of these categories.
He was someone who had been very friendly to the left and then, over the period of the Biden administration, really moved right. Now, what does it mean in the realm of ideas? Well, I think he shares with the tech right a vision of dynamism, a vision of technological progress, a sense that the federal government under Biden, in particular, was too heavy-handed in its regulation of key technologies.
And Musk has this future orientation; he wants us to become a multiplanet species. He wants to go to Mars, occupy Mars. He wants us to repopulate the species. Also in the realm of ideas, over the past several years, he’s focused on the woke ideology, wokeism as something that is corrupting Western societies and civilization.
Douthat: I think that’s compelling, but it raises the question: How did it end up being the case that Musk spent almost all of his time and public rhetoric in Washington, D.C., talking about the budget deficit and how DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, was going to save at least a trillion dollars? This, to me, was one of the most striking and surprising things about the last six months — the extent to which Musk, who was sort of a figure out of these ranks of disaffected centrist Democrats, suddenly sounded like a Tea Partier.
Continetti: Well, on his journey right, he did start raising concerns over our mounting federal deficits in debt. And he did come from a place which is especially common in Silicon Valley during the 1990s, where he was a free marketer. He was a libertarian. He would post on the social media site X, Milton Friedman videos, which is not normally associated with the populist wing of the MAGA coalition. So he did have that framework.
When we first heard about DOGE, I think a lot of us were saying: Oh, it’s going to be another Simpson-Bowles commission. He and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to really get a bunch of pencil necks together and accountants and they’re going to propose this plan for deep spending cuts.
But what I didn’t quite understand is that no, Ramaswamy’s out, Musk is in charge, and he’s going to actually focus heavily and I think quite successfully on gutting the federal work force. That’s what he knows, that’s what he does when he takes over a company, or even when he treats one of his companies he founded; he’s always trying to cut personnel because he thinks that cutting is the only way you’ll find out what’s actually necessary.
So when we look at DOGE, we see a combination first of Musk’s general libertarian background and approach to markets and business, but also his own entrepreneurial history. He tried to treat the federal government as though it was one of his businesses.
Douthat: But certainly it seems like parts of the tech right were not happy with what they got from DOGE. If you’d asked me to describe the views of the tech right six to 12 months ago, I would’ve said a lot of people in that world are libertarian. They like Milton Friedman. They really like deregulation. But they also want a federal government that’s very active in certain areas, that’s spending money on tech, scientific research, defense and all of these things. They aren’t stringent government cutters in those areas. I’m curious where that kind of vision is left by Musk riding through Washington, slashing head count. And then we’ll see what happens next, but is there a tech right now, beyond what Elon did?
Continetti: Yeah, I think there’s a tech right now. I think the tech right, they were really interested in deregulation. They were really interested in freeing A.I. research and development. When you look at the energy demands of A.I., you see many people in the tech industry demanding or asking the federal government to loosen the restrictions on nuclear energy. The tech community very much wanted less regulation on crypto. And Trump himself and his administration at large are big fans of crypto.
Douthat: Big fans, they love it.
Continetti: There’s also one piece of the tech right we talk about a little, and that’s the new weapons manufacturers — Palantirs, the Andurils — and of course, they’re focused on expanding, revitalizing America’s defense industrial base. The jury’s still out on that, I think, but that’s not really what DOGE was all about. And then there’s space, too, and of course that is intimately connected to Elon Musk because of SpaceX. But all these things are parts of the tech right that still exist.
And then you have the more cultural dimension, not just economic, but cultural. I do think that many people in the tech community became alarmed and even radicalized by the growth of the progressive ideologies during the Biden administration wokeism, D.E.I., even gender ideology. And so that continues, even though Elon Musk has left DOGE as well.
Douthat: Yeah. The first interview I did for the show was with Mark Andreessen, who’s seen as a defining figure of the tech right, and the issues you just listed, crypto and AI regulation and wokeness, were clearly sort of the center of his worldview. And it may be that a lot of other things that have left some people disappointed in what DOGE did or didn’t do, or what the Trump administration isn’t doing, are fundamentally peripheral to those core issues that pushed core figures in the tech world rightward.
But I’m also interested in the persistence of ideas within American political coalitions, even during times of fundamental change. So the fact that Musk ended up spending so much of his time in Washington, D.C., sounding a bit like a newly elected Tea Party congressman in the days when you and I were young in Washington, D.C., a long, time ago — like, that to me was very striking. And yes you can draw it out of his pro-Milton Friedman posts on X.But it also suggests this fascinating resilience in right-wing politics because you have this G.O.P. coalition that, by general agreement, has transformed into way more working-class voters, Hispanic men, fewer college-educated professionals by far than in the Reagan era.
There’s all this talk about a new right, and yet you still end up with a Republican House passing a bill that cuts taxes and tries to cut spending. And then the grass roots are complaining that it doesn’t cut spending enough, and that could have been 2012, that could have been 1984, 1986.
So I wonder if you can explore your thoughts on that kind of consistency and persistence. Why doesn’t the right change more?
Continetti: Well, I don’t know if we would’ve seen this bill in a pre-Trump Republican Party. It maintains the current tax rates and then it adds these more populist tax cuts — really, holes in the tax code that are being created: the no taxes on tips and no taxes on overtime, the tax deduction for your car interest. These are meant to appeal to the new coalition that brought Trump into power.
The child tax credits expanded; there have been a whole bunch of debates over the size of the child tax credit over the years. The Wall Street Journal editorial page sees it as another form of spending. It’s in this bill, it’s expanded. And those are just the fiscal parts of the tax parts — forget about the immigration parts of “the one big, beautiful bill.” Codifying the Trump approach to immigration is something that would not have happened prior to his rise in 2016.
So I see this reconciliation bill — we call it “the one big, beautiful bill,” another example of Trump’s marketing genius — but it really is writing into law the Trump view of so many issues that have been dominant in American politics now for a decade.
Douthat: You can make the case certainly that what Trump has done has shifted the G.O.P. substantially, relative to where things stood at the peak of the Tea Party. At the same time, it is still, seen from 30,000 feet: a bill that codifies what were temporary and now are extended lower tax rates that benefit upper brackets more. And that does make real cuts in social spending — not the cuts that the party’s libertarian wing would like to see, but real cuts nonetheless. So maybe it is this hybrid piece of where the party would’ve gone.
I guess what strikes me, though, is there are still places that the populist Republican Party or the officially populist Republican Party can’t go. For instance, actually raising taxes. While Trump is willing to float it, let people talk about it, bat it around, but in the end, that still is a limiting principle. You can’t raise taxes — you can’t raise income taxes, at least — and therefore, you have to find your savings in cuts. That seems to be a thing that’s preserved.
Continetti: Well, I think that’s an important point, and I’d like to spend a little more time on it. The first thing to note is that Trump did not campaign on raising taxes on the rich. Instead, he campaigned on a no tax increase for anybody and these special tax breaks, and he won.
The second point is that even in a presidential system — which, you and I agree, we live in now — Congress still is powerful. And this question was put to Congress during the debates over the writing of the “one big, beautiful bill”: Do you want to increase taxes on upper incomes? And there were advocates in the White House for this position and maybe a few people sotto voce in Congress. But Congress wasn’t going to have it. So Congress still has a role in writing this legislation and Congress is responsive, I think, to its electorates.
Now, you could argue those electorates are gerrymandered and whatnot, but not all of them. So I think that there are many populists in the media and in the MAGA intellectuals cohort, but we always have to distinguish between the intellectuals in the communicators and the actual politicians. And so when you say the word “hybrid,” that is Donald Trump. He knows it. He has to cater to all of the pieces of his coalition, not one part of it.
Douthat: What do you think is the biggest break, though? Two or three months ago, it seemed to me like you would say that Liberation Day, the tariffs and everything associated with them, was the fullest triumph of the populist spirit over the older forms of Reagan-era conservatism, right?
Yes, Ronald Reagan supported some tariffs, George W. Bush supported some tariffs, but never before had a Republican president ——
Continetti: No president!
Douthat: Gone so hard on this issue, or seemingly gambled his entire administration on something that almost no expert would endorse: the essence of populist instinct against expert opinion. That was my view then. Now we’ve walked things back, we’ve sort of tap-danced around. Where do you see that issue, in terms of populism triumphant or not?
Continetti: You mean the tariffs?
Douthat: Yeah.
Continetti: When you look at the three main ways that Trump challenged the conservative mainstream in 2016, there was no entitlement reform, and we haven’t gotten any entitlement reform. There was build the wall and have Mexico pay for it. So the whole revolution involving the government’s approach to illegal immigration, and we’re in the midst of that now as we can see by turning on the news. And then there was the trade piece. This is one idea he has held for all of his public life. The idea that trade is a zero-sum game and America has been losing for decades.
I would say that in the first term, he made some progress on immigration. Not what he wanted, but pretty good progress. He avoided entanglement in entitlement politics, but on trade, though, he didn’t really get what he wanted.
Now we have Trump 2.0. Trump is unbound. Trump is surrounded by his handpicked loyalists. And trade is where he’s made huge progress, from his point of view. And even with the walkback from Liberation Day, America still now has the highest protective wall since the Great Depression, going back to F.D.R.
So I see this trade part as where Trump has actually done the most in continuing his revolution of conservative dogma and the Republican Party’s political economy. He hasn’t done it in the way that, say, an Oren Cass would recommend. He’s done it in his way, and so it’s improvisatory, it’s piecemeal, and there are fits and starts. But I think ——
Douthat: Relatively few people want to come on podcasts and defend the policy in detail.
Continetti: Did you notice that? Yes, exactly right. It’s hard to get some people to talk and defend it. But I think, from Trump’s point of view, it’s all going according to plan.
Douthat: So the reference to the Great Depression, let’s pick up on that. One of the points that you make in your book about conservatism is that you could really see some of the clearest continuities between the things that Trump has done that seem different from modern American conservatism, Reagan-era American conservatism.
You can see them as connected to what conservatism in America looked like before Franklin Roosevelt. That’s true of protectionism on trade, industrial policy, arguably, and foreign policy as well. Talk a little bit about that, Trump as a man of the 1890s through the 1920s.
Continetti: Yeah. When I was writing my history of the right, I came up against the problem: How does one explain Donald Trump? Where did Trump come from? Where did MAGA come from?
And I think many people and many conservatives had trouble answering that question because the narrative we had been taught always began at the end of World War II. It always began with the beginning of the Cold War and the creation of modern American movement conservatism as an anti-communist enterprise. And so when we looked at Trump talking about protection, illegal immigration and immigration more broadly, and “America First” and foreign policy and the national interest, it all seemed a little strange.
But if you actually went back before World War II, you saw that the American right then closely resembles the American right now, along those three axes of immigration, trade and foreign policy. Now, how did Trump get there? I think it might just be the case of the man meeting the moment. Trump was never connected to modern American movement conservatism.
He’s been a Democrat, he’s been an independent, he’s been a Republican. He’s all over the place. But he has always had these views that post-World War II American policy was flawed. And he wanted to be in a position where he could revise all of these institutional arrangements that he believed ill served America and America’s middle and working classes in particular.
And that’s what he’s done. Now it’s in his second term where he’s in a position to actually move toward his goals that we’re seeing it play out, in foreign policy in particular. When we were just talking about: Where’s the biggest change? There’s a change in Trump foreign policy, not just from Trump vis-à-vis the pre-Trump Republicans, there’s a change in Trump foreign policy from Trump 2 vis-à-vis Trump 1.
And we see in his foreign policy a real turn toward noninterventionism. He has clearly defined himself in these early months of his second administration as a peacemaker — someone who wants to extend olive branches before he turns to war. But a testing, because sometimes his administration is conflicted, as we saw in the “Signalgate” episode, and I think, frankly, Trump is conflicted sometimes.
Trump, as much as he wants to be a peacemaker, also wants to be strong. I think, as you and I are having this conversation, his patience is running thin with Iran and, even though it doesn’t seem like it most days, Vladimir Putin.
Douthat: He also has a coalition where, I think, the transformation that you’ve described, the return to the 1920s, is less complete than if it was just Trump himself.
He is personally conflicted. His administration still contains a lot of different factions that are contesting with one another. I think the internal contestation on foreign policy is in some ways an undercovered aspect of this presidency. And then if you turn to Congress, the Senate is full of Republicans who would very happily triple sanctions on Russia tomorrow if they could.
I think the House is full of members who would be very uncomfortable with certain potential deals that Trump could cut with Iran. So it seems to me there’s both uncertainty in Trump himself and a lot of different factions are in play within the Republican coalition, notwithstanding Trump’s overall power.
Continetti: Yeah. It’s similar to the debates we were talking about regarding economic policy.
Congress’s role can’t be dismissed here. It is still powerful, and you see this in the foreign policy. I agree. You look at the Lindsey Graham-Blumenthal proposed secondary sanction bill on Russia. It has supermajority support in the Senate.
That is, to me, reflective of the overall opinion of the Republican Party, because it comes from so many voices, and Trump understands that. He knows that.
And what I think it gets to, which we’ve kind of been circling around, is that the jury is still out on how lasting the new right is. There was this sense when Trump appeared in 2015: Trump is an aberration. Trump will probably lose in 2016; when he loses, he will go away, MAGA will go away. We’ll be back to Romney, Ryan, McConnell. That will be the Republican Party.
Now, of course, that did not happen. Trump won. And he changed the party and the movement. But when I look at these debates happening today, I sometimes wonder: Without Trump, without his personality, his charisma, his gargantuan power within the Republican Party, where will this new right be?
And when you look at Congress, what you’ll find is that the new right will be there, but it might not be as powerful as it thinks it is today.
Douthat: So in all the issues we’ve talked about, we’ve been emphasizing a mixture of continuity with the Republican past and Trump era change. But is there one place where you think the Trump era change has been radical and complete? Continetti: Immigration, without a doubt.
Douthat: Thank you for giving me the answer that I was seeking.
Continetti: That’s our telepathy that you and I have.
Douthat: “The Telepathy Tapes” is actually a tried but discarded title for this podcast.
Continetti: There’s no question. I mean, just to think about where MAGA came from, it was in opposition to the Republican Party’s approach to immigration.
You have Romney losing in 2012. You have the G.O.P. autopsy coming out the next year. What does the G.O.P. autopsy say? It says Republicans must amnesty illegal immigrants in order to have any viability as a political institution. Marco Rubio then begins negotiations for a bill in the Senate that would do exactly that: achieve comprehensive immigration reform, as it’s called. Public outrage at that, along with long-simmering outrage at the G.O.P. establishment in Washington, manifests itself and stops that bill from ever happening. Trump makes immigration his signature issue; he wins. The transformation is total.
There’s one other player I want to mention in this story, though, before you respond. And that is Joe Biden. I don’t think we would be where we are today if President Biden had not decided that the mounting concerns on the Southern border in the spring of 2021 were either temporary or nothing to worry about.
It was the effects of the immigration crisis over the last four years that has flipped public opinion on its head, to the point where Trump has carte blanche to do what he deems necessary to seal the border and to deport illegal immigrants.
Douthat: I want to test a hypothesis on you, which I think you’ll agree with.
We’re sitting here watching the immigration-related protests and riots in Los Angeles. We’re watching the federal crackdown, though it’s more a soft federal intervention designed to highlight the tensions between the White House and the governor of California, or at least that’s how it seems. The National Guard and federal troops are not doing all that much, as far as I can tell. But there’s a signal of what you just described — the White House and Trump’s confidence in their position.
But I think what we’re seeing here is a world where ever since the end of the Cold War, there’s been talk about what is the thing that unites the right the way anticommunism did. And for a little while in the early 2000s, it seemed to be the War on Terror. And I think very clearly at this point it’s immigration.
This is the thing that unites the American right with other forms of conservatism in Western Europe. But the idea that to be conservative is to be opposed to mass migration, opposed to open borders, and in favor of deportation seems as close to a consensus definition of what it means to be on the right and to be a Republican as there’s been in my entire lifetime.
Continetti: Yeah. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, gave a very interesting speech at the CPAC Hungary in recent weeks. He talked about what it meant to be a conservative in 2025, and of course, borders were a huge part of it. And then he mentioned antiwokeism.
I would come at it from a slightly different angle than you. I think antiwokeism is the umbrella issue. But woke encompasses immigration as well, right? I think the writer Mary Harrington calls it the “Omnicause” that motivates the left: One day it’s global warming and net zero and the Green New Deal; the next day it’s pro-Gaza activism. The day after that, it’s stop ICE, stop the deportations, open borders, it’s all one thing. I put it under the category of woke. And I think if you were against those things, if you’re against woke, you’re conservative.
Douthat: Watching the politics of the last couple of years and the focus of the Trump administration a year or two ago, I would’ve put antiwokeness above all else and folded immigration politics under it.
But, again, this is not a provable observation, but when I look at how people online talk about politics, what people in the Trump administration seem to care the most about and where the energy lies, wokeness is felt to have in certain ways been beaten back.
But the energy around immigration and the assumption that this is going to be the organic defining issue for years or decades to come, seems to me to loom, at the very least, larger than other fights within the constellation of woke causes ——
Continetti: Well, part of that might ——
Douthat: Versus climate change or anything like that.
Continetti: Yeah. Part of that might be the administration’s stealth success at repealing the bureaucratic foundations of wokeism. Trump’s executive order essentially ending affirmative action in the federal government did not get the attention it deserved. The recent Supreme Court case saying that, yes, white people can suffer from discrimination, too — that was kind of undercovered, considering all that is going on.
I do think that the Trump administration has made huge strides against wokeism, as you say, but it’s still out there and it’s still very controversial, especially when we look at what’s happening between the government and the universities.
But there’s no question borders are ——
Douthat: I just feel like what you’ve described there is partially ground that liberals and progressives — or maybe liberals but not progressives — have, maybe to their own surprise, been willing to give up.
Douthat: Like, all right, I guess we’re not going to fight to the death over affirmative action, these kind of things.
Continetti: Yeah. Could be.
Douthat: But in a way, it’s partially because deportation requires the government to do something material and punitive, and it requires the use of police powers and so on. Maybe that’s part of what it is: It’s the point of most natural resistance for progressivism, and so it heightens its salience and importance for conservatism, and maybe that’s the dynamic we’re witnessing now.
Continetti: I do think that borders are key to a conservative worldview. If you’re a conservative, you’re attached to certain institutions that predate you: the family, the church, your local community, going up the ladder to your country.
I also think that illegal immigration is essential to the viability of the Democratic Party as a political entity. I’ve been struck by the debates surrounding Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Chris Van Hollen, the senator from Maryland, kept referring to Garcia as his constituent. He’s not his constituent; he’s an illegal immigrant in Maryland. It’s a weird kind of dislocation of who our elected representatives represent, to me. They should be representing American citizens.
And then, when you look at the way that the Democratic officials in California are talking about the ICE actions that led to these huge protests, again, there’s no distinction made between “illegal immigrant” and/or “citizen.” I think, when you look at the understanding of the Democratic Party among its elites about its future, which is that this coalition of the ascendant is eventually going to swamp the Republican Party’s coalition and we will win. And how will we do that as a Democrat? We’ll do it by legalizing the status of everyone in the country.
So I think you’re right: Immigration is the issue of our time. I do believe that. I think that’s why we’re seeing Los Angeles play out as it’s happening. I think it goes to the heart of the two-party coalitions, in addition to these greater geopolitical issues involving sovereignty and such.
Douthat: So to swing back a little bit to where we started, one place where — at various moments during the presidential transition — Elon Musk seemed to be out of step with the impulses of grass-roots conservatism was on immigration. He had sort of become a harsh critic of illegal immigration, low-skilled immigration, but retained a kind of traditional Silicon Valley support for H-1B visas and other programs that bring officially higher-skilled immigrants to work for American companies.
And that was not just a Silicon Valley thing, but a continuing echo of what had been a potent constituency in the Republican Party for a long time, which had been business conservatives who favored immigration, legal, or illegal for reasons related to their work forces.
Do you think that kind of Republican politics is dead?
Continetti: Well, it’s important to note that the H-1B visa issuance hasn’t been resolved in either direction, it seems to me. I don’t think there’s been any changes made to the H-1B program, so it’s neither been expanded nor reduced. So neither wing of the coalition has a victory there. To the broader issue, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s one of those places where probably the congressional sentiment is more open to high-skilled immigration than the intellectuals and media figures and MAGA.
But I look at Trump here, and it’s interesting to see what he’s up to. He’s militarized the Southern border. He closed the border. He’s staging this kind of federal intervention in order to quell the protests over ICE’s actions in California. He’s trying to deport as many people as possible. But he’s also talking about his gold card — the special visa that people will be able to pay a lot of money for. He goes back and forth on global talent to the United States. Some days he’s like: We want the best people in the world. We’re going to staple your green card to your college diploma. Then, of course, the administration’s ——
Douthat: Well, he made that promise, I think, on a leading tech right podcast during the election.
Continetti: Yes. Well, he’s always aware of his audience. But then, of course, we say: Well, no more Chinese students. But even then, whether we’re not going to have Chinese students in the United States is now a card that the administration is playing in its trade negotiations with China.
So I think the legal immigrant piece of this puzzle — the laws pertaining to legal immigration in the United States, there is not the same consensus toward them that there is toward illegal immigration. Illegal immigration, if you’re a conservative, you’re opposed to it. You want to take as strong measures as possible to stop and reverse it. However, legal migration, that is still kind of up in the air, not only in Congress but also, I think, within the administration.
Douthat: To some degree. But it does seem to me like this is a place where, I agree with you that Trump himself, if you were the last person to talk with him, hypothetically, you could talk him into certain pro-global talent measures. But he also has a really strong intuitive sense, always has, of where his coalition is, where the base is and so on. And it just seems to me that there, he’s been carried along to some degree.
For instance, right now, Stephen Miller and the Vice President JD Vance, who are more immigration restrictionist than the president, are also more where the party’s center of gravity actually is, than Trump, the slightly more pro-legal immigration president.
Continetti: Could be. I noticed just the other day that Charlie Kirk, a hugely important figure on the right these days, said we should have an immigration moratorium, full stop. And that is also called for in the manifesto of the national conservative movement, which was published several years ago, saying no more immigration for some period of time, illegal or legal.
Trump’s not there yet. I don’t think JD Vance is there publicly, either. But in 2028, you never know.
Douthat: And it would be a very, very 1920s Republican Party ——
Continetti: It would, wouldn’t it?
Douthat: To support such a thing. Last question. We’ve had a long conversation analyzing Trump and his Republican Party in terms of ideology, worldview policy and so on. And I can imagine some listeners, especially liberal listeners, saying: Isn’t this all kind of a category error? Isn’t analyzing Trump himself mostly a matter of analyzing him just in terms of power?
This is the idea that essentially Trump has an authoritarian temperament and personality. So whether it’s his impulse to play the dealmaker with dictatorships around the world or his impulse to militarize the Southern border and send troops into California, the primary way to understand all of this is what gives Trump himself the most power, sort of independent of ideas and ideology.
I’m curious what you think of that line of argument. What would you say to it? Why are the ideas relevant as opposed to just Trump, the self-aggrandizing, would-be Caesar.
Continetti: Sure. The first thing I’d say is the ideas will outlast Trump. They’re important in that regard. As Keynes said, we are moved by ideas long ago even if we don’t recognize them. So the type of issues that Trump emphasizes, the kind of deep concepts of identity, citizenship, loyalty, strength that he plays upon, all of those will be elements in our politics, even after Trump.
And one day, there will be a day after Trump, though many people can’t imagine such a day. I’d say Trump the man clearly does like the trappings of power. He wants to be a strongman. He wants to make these deals with other strongmen. That’s how he views the world, between strength and weakness. And so he needs to be the strongman and the winner in every transaction in order to sustain his enterprise.
But I also believe that the next three and a half years will be rocky. There are going to be a lot of clashes. The system will be put to the test. But I don’t see us turning into even a soft authoritarian society. I think that one lesson of the Trump era, which we’ve been in now for a decade, is that the guardrails do remain in place. And at the end of the day, as you’ve pointed out in your column, one reason Trump has sustained himself as a political figure for so long is he knows when to pull back and when to modify and change.
So to the liberals who have put up with me to this point in the conversation, I would say that it’s not going to be fun, but there will be an America that is still recognizable to us at the end.
Douthat: All right. On that optimistic note, assuming that you like the America that is recognizable to us today. Matt Continetti, thanks so much for joining me.
Continetti: Thanks, Ross.
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This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Betanzos and Katherine Sullivan. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Marina King, Nathan Shinholdt and Nick Midwig. Video editing by Jan Kobal and Dani Dillon. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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