What and who comes after President Trump? That’s the question behind America’s Next Story, a limited series from “The Opinions.” In this episode David Leonhardt, an editorial director in Times Opinion, talks to Gladden Pappin, a national conservative dedicated to furthering MAGA’s success in the United States. Pappin lays out his vision for the movement after Trump leaves office and argues with Leonhardt over whether the president and his imitators abroad present a worldwide threat to democracy.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: Gladden, thank you for being here.
Gladden Pappin: Great to be here, David.
Leonhardt: I want to start by asking about your own trajectory. After Trump launched his campaign in the summer of 2015, what was your first reaction and when did you start to think that he was onto something?
Pappin: When Trump came down the escalator in June of 2015, I think I shared the reaction that was pretty common throughout the country: Isn’t this the guy who was hosting “The Apprentice” and who’s been a political provocateur in the media from time to time? I didn’t see that there was something there.
It wasn’t until the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 that his initial constellation of proposals began to seem serious to me. I think people, at first, wanted to interpret Trump as an exception to a successful system.
We had built a modern economy on free trade, having a continually expanding base of immigration, and moving toward more socially progressive norms. And steadily, he seemed to be connecting with a segment of the American population which was conservative, but had been left behind by the Republican Party.
Now, in the years before Trump, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I had initially been sympathetic to some of the criticisms of the Republican Party that came from, say, Pat Buchanan, who warned against the negative consequences of free trade.
Audio clip of Pat Buchanan: We need our leaders to start looking out for the interest of American industries, American businesses and American workers, and stop going to these international conferences where they discuss what’s good for the globe.
It became clear in early 2016 that this was basically Trump’s set of issues. So, along with colleagues, we started this initially anonymous blog, The Journal of American Greatness. We felt we couldn’t even write with our real names because there was such a cloud of suspicion around Trump, particularly in the intellectual and political classes.
We said that everyone is treating this guy as though he’s the most unserious person. But what if the reverse is true? What if the continuation of the present norms is the biggest mistake? And what if it takes someone like Trump to break through them?
Leonhardt: Let’s go back to the 1990s and early 2000s. Since you were quite young, you’ve been part of the conservative movement, part of the conservative intellectual movement, but you’ve often been a little bit skeptical, as you were just talking about, of its trajectory.
Can you step outside that skepticism and describe what you think the Republican Party’s story about America was before Trump? What was the story that George W. Bush’s and Mitt Romney’s Republican Party was telling Americans about America?
Pappin: The Republican Party that came out of the Cold War had identified the winning features of America with the winning features on the anti-Soviet side. They’re the country of centralization; we’re the country of free markets. Socialism failed in the Soviet Union, and therefore, more radical free markets are needed here. That’s the economic layer.
In foreign policy, emerging from the end of the Cold War, was the thought that there’s only one political system in the world. It’s liberal democracy, and it needs to be spread everywhere in the world — this was the neoconservative interpretation. So by the late 1990s, and then with the war on terrorism in the early 2000s, these are unconstrained, and it morphed from being a successful and in many ways true story about America to being unable to respond to the situation that resulted.
By the late aughts, deindustrialization in the heartland is clear. After admitting China to the World Trade Organization, people begin to say: Are we creating a monster rival, which has all of our stuff? And the wars on terrorism look increasingly vexed. The Republican Party didn’t really have a way of correcting itself until a big explosion came through.
Leonhardt: That’s a really interesting way to put it. You’re basically arguing that the old conservative vision wasn’t wrong; it just became outdated. It couldn’t address the problems that grew up over time as the Cold War ended.
So far, we’ve been talking about Trump’s taking over of the Republican Party, but of course, he also then won the presidency, and he’s since won it again. Let’s talk about why his vision and the story he told about this country was appealing, not only to the Republican base, but to a broader set of people.
I think that there would be many people on what you described as the old left, the populist left, who would hear this and say that part of what Trump exposed is that the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism, their embrace of markets, wasn’t actually popular with a lot of working-class people. And that if the Democratic Party had instead nominated someone who also was skeptical of trade and globalism — say, Bernie Sanders — they could have channeled this energy and anxiety and won.
But I know that you also have a set of critiques of modern liberalism that is very different than just that it moved too far toward market economics that involves culture and involves patriotism. Why do you think that Trump’s vision was appealing to so many Americans who had voted Democratic in elections not too long before he came on the scene?
Pappin: In times past, the Democratic Party did include a broader swath of people whose lifestyle and way of living was more functionally conservative. I think what happened is that the liberal left became focused on issues that may be very important to it, but in the social sphere were not that important in the end to the vast majority of Americans.
This is true on the right as well. Abortion is a very powerful issue in many conservative communities, but not for everyone; same-sex marriage and further liberalization of sexual norms is an interest on the left — but which of those is going to bring the factory back?
I’m not saying that either of these social issues are unimportant or should be dismissed. After all, I’m a social conservative. But what Trump realized is that on the current list of priorities, those are a little bit lower for these communities that have been forgotten. We need to put America back together, or we need to stop the things that are tearing it apart — mass migration and deindustrialization. And then when we get those under control, when there’s law and order, then we’ll see.
Then the people can decide what kind of social norms they want to build around it — or it’s a country of 50 states. People can act a little bit differently in different places. But the point is that there was this stridency on the right about social conservative issues,and maybe that’s true on the left as well.
Leonhardt: I think there are also ways in which your critique is even sharper of liberalism and, it seems to me, not only when you think about Trump, but when you look at Europe as well — and you’re in Europe now — the No. 1 issue that has pushed more voters to the right than any other in the 21st century is immigration.
Why do you think that immigration has been so central to Trump’s campaigns, to the rise of the right in England and in Italy and in France and in Germany? What is it about immigration in the modern era that has bothered so many voters?
Pappin: Immigration, mass migration, mass immigration in the U.S. and Europe is different. The U.S. is a country which is built by people who arrive from elsewhere. But at some point, mass immigration became presented by those in favor of it as a moral obligation — like it is wrong to close and limit the country. The essence of our country is radical openness. That was one element that was maybe more the left flavor.
And then the right flavor was that this is economically rational. We will not survive on our own. This has been the engine of our prosperity. Everyone knows this, that you need cheap labor, but in the communities that voted for Trump, that hit hard. We’ve lost our industry, we have a huge amount of social dysfunction in these declining Midwest and industrial towns, and on top of that, you’re then going to tell us that we have a moral obligation to accept a lot of migrants. People felt not only enervated economically, but then rhetorically beaten down by the left.
In Europe, it’s a different situation. You have real countries with real historic multi-thousand-year identities. In some way, the injury to the national identity of France or Germany or England by suffering, in effect, uncontrolled mass migration and being told that it’s good, has led to a really, really deep social dysfunction. It’s like the loss of the city that you were in and your grandparents were in, which was French, is not so French anymore. That’s a huge shock to the system, and there’s been a reaction against that — and an increasing one.
Leonhardt: One of the things that I find really hard to think about with immigration is race, because clearly the concerns about immigration are not just about race. You really saw a substantial amount of concern about Biden’s immigration policy across racial groups in the U.S. And the election analysis suggested immigrants themselves were one of the groups that shifted most right in 2024.
So I don’t at all want to suggest this is all about race. But it’s certainly partly about race. Donald Trump himself has talked about immigration in what, I would argue, are some pretty racist ways. He’s used an expletive to talk about countries with dark-skinned people. He’s told lies about immigrants. I’m curious how you think about both the role that race does and doesn’t play in the immigration debate — because I assume you would acknowledge that race does play a role and that when the arrivals from another country are more different from most of the people in the country they’re coming to, immigration politics become trickier and harder.
Pappin: I’m a citizen of the Osage Tribal Nation from Oklahoma, where my dad was born and raised. So my joke at this point is that we’ve been dealing with mass migration from Europe for 500 years. But I think that the way that I would look at it is from the standpoint of political consent. Basically, the framework of a more national conservative orientation is that you don’t have any obligation to admit foreigners into your country as a pure moral obligation — except in the case of refugees or asylum.
In the case of modern immigration policy, I think many people who have become hostile to immigration are objecting to its illegality. They’re objecting to the idea that they have a moral and political obligation to accept mass flows of people into their country illegally. They have felt that the political system doesn’t allow them to respond to that. Many on the left accuse opponents of immigration of racism, whether or not that is the motivating factor.
Maybe it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and by constantly trying to delegitimize the immigration restrictionist standpoint as racist, then I think you’ve unfortunately begun to see the phenomenon where some young people’s response is: Yeah, you’re right. You’ve just been telling me my entire life that I have a moral obligation to accept mass immigration, and if I don’t accept it, then I’m ipso facto a racist — so, yeah, whatever.
And when people feel that the political option doesn’t exist, then they become radical. I feel that many ordinary people in the United States and Europe feel that somehow, even though they live in a democracy, they weren’t really consulted on this. They were berated into it. It was presented to them as rational.
The consequences were not what was expected, and now they’re not allowed to respond to those consequences. That’s definitely the case in Europe where, in the wake of Angela Merkel’s decisions in 2015, the line was: This is not only rational, but it’s going to be good. It’s a modern liberal society. You come, you become a modern liberal like everyone else. And we’ll rationally solve the declining birthrate through this, and we’re going to have a cheap labor force. And when it doesn’t work out, and you’re told that you’re not allowed to respond to that politically, well, then, what do you do? Of course that creates radicalization. So that’s how I would see it.
Leonhardt: You and I have been having a sort of polite conversation about policy matters, right? How much immigration should there be? Why did Trump appeal to so many voters? But there is something about this new right, this new populist right, that beyond policy I find really worrisome — which is a hostility in some significant ways to democracy. We saw this most tangibly in the United States with the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. Donald Trump is trying to change election rules.
You’re in Hungary, where Viktor Orban has changed election rules, and he’s gone after universities and media organizations. So I just want to put to you starkly: I get why parts of this new right, this populist right, are appealing to many people on populist grounds. But I worry that, actually, the new right doesn’t really have a confidence that it could win a fair election. And that’s why you see some of these more really tough political tactics that seem designed to shift the rules and win elections, even if public opinion isn’t on their side.
And I’m curious, when you look at Jan. 6, when you look at the changes Orban has made, when you look at what Trump is doing, do you share any of my concern about what seems to be the hostility to democracy from leaders whose policy views you share?
Pappin: No one seems to be worried that Marine Le Pen is not going to be allowed to run for president in France in 2027. No one seems to be worried in the international media that the Alternative für Deutschland party is basically threatened with closure and pretty much continuously harassed out of public life. They’re really great violations of democratic norms coming from liberal left governments in Europe today. During the Biden administration, those forms of Democratic backsliding — if we want to use that term — were never addressed. They were never concerned. In fact, they’re celebrated as essential to democracy.
So I think that we need to get back to an earlier form of democracy where there is legitimate and genuine debate on both sides that can lead to real political change — because the feeling that there is no political change possible is the greatest source of radicalization on both sides. I think that, of course, we’re always right to want to protect the institutions of democracy. But I think that the feeling on the new right is that the liberal democratic side — I’m using little “l” and little “d” — became not a neutral playing field but a heavily freighted ideology.
In the hands of the liberal left governments, particularly in Europe, it’s no longer a neutral playing field, where the right wing can win and the left wing can win. When Trump came on the scene, I think it’s entirely fair to say that pretty much the whole intellectual and political class sought to delegitimize him. And, of course, there’s been a reaction to that among some on the right — and that should always be concerning to us. But I think when you completely try to delegitimize one side, that’s where you get the phenomenon of polarization, as people call it.
I think both the Democrats and the Republicans before Trump shared a combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that led to trying to delegitimize every other opinion. It took a radical personality like Trump’s to break through it. I think the second Trump presidency has become really focused and mature, I would say, in its policy approach. So that’s a very positive development for American democracy. This is the state of play, as far as I see it.
Leonhardt: I think it’s absolutely fair to criticize the left for not being open to debate and fair to criticize the pre-Trump right for trying to delegitimize him. But I also think that people are responsible for their own actions and that that’s a nice conservative principle.
So, to me, the idea that we would excuse the people who violently attacked Congress, that we would excuse the lies about the 2020 election that Donald Trump and JD Vance still continue to traffic in, that we would excuse the way that Trump is really trying to target his political opponents with the power of the White House or excuse the way he’s using it to profit him and say: Well, that’s all OK because the left did some bad things — I just have a really hard time with that.
Pappin: Well, I think right now there’s a real competition for what, as your podcast says, the future of America is going to be like. And I don’t see the actions of the Trump administration in the way that you do. That’s a fair reading of them, from one perspective. If we look at the Trump administration, I think that there is a consistent question that it is asking instinctively of every American institution — whether it’s the Department of State or Harvard University, my alma mater, or major cultural institutions like the Smithsonian — it’s what is the American purpose that your institution is serving?
This hit me when the Trump administration engaged Harvard over its foreign student population. The Trump administration wanted more information about them as it was looking into questionable visas and things like that. And in The New York Times, there was an interview — I’ll have to paraphrase it — but there was a history professor at Harvard and she said: This is outrageous because Harvard University is a global research institution that happens to be located in the United States. I’m paraphrasing, so forgive me, professor, if I don’t have it quite right.
This is the core issue. That is the term in which liberal democracy, in the neoliberal view, was defined. To be a good liberal in the U.S., you have to support interpreting Harvard as a global institution that happens to be located here. And it’s the right, the new right and the Trump administration, that has tried to change the term of that. So, from my perspective, it’s not a horrific executive branch attack on all core American institutions by pursuing this. To me, it’s asking a question that has not been asked in a long time.
What’s the purpose of the Harvard Kennedy School? Why does it have such a big foreign population — could be good, could be bad, it might be wonderful, but what’s the American purpose that’s being served by that? Nobody asked that. And the Democratic Party has been in a little bit of disarray, but if it manages to put itself back together, it will also approach that term.
Leonhardt: Let’s end by looking forward in two ways. First of all, the who. Donald Trump will leave the political scene; this is his second term. Which figures in American politics today do you see as best embodying the ideas of this new national conservatism?
Pappin: There has been a lot of movement and growth in the Republican Party. I think when the president selected JD Vance as his running mate, that was the option that indicated that Trumpism or the new right or these themes were really important — because JD had become a key element in a whole network of institutions that were trying to build up this idea. It’s American Affairs, it’s American Compass, American Moment, American whatever —
Leonhardt: I see a theme there.
Pappin: And he did that, but, of course, he’s not the only one. The secretary of state, when he was a senator, was really one of the first senators who gave an interview to American Affairs, which was called, I think, “Common Good Capitalism.”
Leonhardt: Marco Rubio.
Pappin: Yeah. Marco Rubio’s office was publishing reports on Made in China 2025. How do we put a new industrial policy together? What we want to see is more Republican politicians tilling this field and working in this area, and that’s clearly happening. So, I think that there will be more growth in that area. The whole Republican way of thinking about defense has also changed. I alluded to it earlier, but the Defense Department is really masterminding a lot of this re-onshoring of the American industrial base.
There’s a lot of serious stuff happening that has been missed by focusing too much on the personality of the president. I mean, I love the President’s personality. I think it’s quite effective and just the thing that America needed. But I think people, or his critics, assumed for too long that it was just about the personality. I think with the selection of JD, with the building out of the new administration, it’s clear there’s a bench growing that’s going to be active in Republican politics for a very long time.
And when you go a layer below that and look at who’s joining the administration, who’s filling these Senate offices, who’s filling the departments, the mentality among the young people joining the administration is exactly in this vein. They all went through all those institutions and they have a mentality of creating a new policy, elite creating a new team in this orientation. And I think that it will succeed in changing the Republican Party for a long time, and that will lead to many good leaders.
Leonhardt: Trump rose to power as an insurgency, essentially telling a negative story about the country. If someone’s going to follow him who is similar to him, that person is going to have to tell a more positive story, I think. What is the positive story that someone who considers themselves a national conservative will tell about the decade after Donald Trump?
Pappin: If America succeeds in that project, then it will again become master of its own destiny. And that’s something that a lot of signs are pointing to on the right. Whether it’s Elon Musk posting pictures of going to Mars, which reaches very deep into the American spirit of adventure, or whether it’s restoring American shipbuilding and refocusing on the Western Hemisphere, this land in our own area, which has been forgotten as a key part of the American sphere of influence.
The loss of industry was not something anyone chose, so we failed to control our own future there. Similarly, from mass migration — again, if you control your borders, then you can open them, you can close them, you can do whatever you want, but you get to decide.
I think that loss of control is what led to a lot of excesses or a lot of radicalism here and there. That’s the key thing that has to be grasped in the upcoming 10 years. Now, the politicians will put that one way or the other — I’m not in that business — but I think that’s the core thought.
Leonhardt: Gladden Pappin, thank you very much.
Pappin: Thank you, sir.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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