Trumpism After Trump, Revisited

Summary

History As It Happens: "Trumpism After Trump, Revisited"

Release Date: January 17, 2025
Host: Martin Di Caro
Guest: Damon Linker, Political Journalist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania

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Introduction: The Enduring Influence of Trumpism

In the episode "Trumpism After Trump, Revisited," host Martin Di Caro delves deep into the persistent legacy of Donald Trump’s political ideology despite his exit from the White House. The conversation explores whether Trumpism has truly concluded or if it continues to shape American politics in profound ways.

Historical Context: From Reagan to Trump

Damon Linker provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of conservatism in the United States. He traces the roots from Reagan-era conservatism, characterized by a strong federal presence and aggressive foreign policy, to the emergence of populist discontent that set the stage for Trump’s rise.

Damon Linker [02:09]: "It was not a fluke. We all know this guy. We know what he wants to do, we know how he is, we know his behavior."

Linker emphasizes that Trump's accumulation of over 14 million votes from 2016 to 2020 was a clear indicator of a shifting Republican Party, necessitating a reevaluation of traditional conservative strategies.

The Evolution of Conservatism and Populism

The discussion highlights how pre-World War II conservatism, with its isolationist and anti-federal government sentiments, never fully dissipated but remained dormant until it resurfaced through populist movements like the Tea Party and ultimately Trumpism. Linker argues that Trump tapped into a longstanding conservative undercurrent that prioritized skepticism of government and a focus on individual and state autonomy.

Damon Linker [15:56]: "We were in a period of relative placidity. Whereas the American norm from the pre-Civil War period... we were in a period of anomalous consent."

Trump’s Impact on the Republican Party

Trump’s presidency marked a significant departure from traditional Republican norms. His administration’s appointments, such as Russ Vaught to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), indicate a deliberate move to dismantle the existing administrative state and replace it with loyalists aimed at enacting radical libertarian reforms.

Damon Linker [50:44]: "He really wants to make this happen. He's kind of like David Stockman 2.0."

Linker draws parallels between Trump’s strategies and those of Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, noting Vaught’s ambitions to restructure federal agencies through initiatives like Schedule F, which aims to make federal employees more easily dismissable and replaceable.

Democratic Strategies in the Age of Trumpism

The conversation shifts to how the Democratic Party grapples with declining trust in public institutions and the challenge of countering Trumpism. Linker suggests that Democrats might need to adopt a populist rhetoric, focusing on demonizing elites and advocating for responsible reforms rather than expansive agendas like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal.

Damon Linker [28:56]: "The populist spirit is slightly different... it's actually like demonizing specific elites and running against them."

Martin Di Caro concurs, pointing out that Democrats must balance aspirational economic visions with rebuilding trust in government to effectively counter the populist allure of Trumpism.

Global Shifts and Trump’s Foreign Policy Vision

Linker discusses the transformation of global power dynamics from a unipolar to a multipolar world. He critiques Trump’s foreign policy as reminiscent of late 19th-century power politics, advocating for clear spheres of influence and minimal moral considerations in international dealings.

Donald Trump [36:06]: "We need them for economic security... Panama Canal is vital to our country."

Linker argues that Trump’s approach disregards alliances and moral frameworks established during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, favoring transactional relationships over strategic partnerships.

The Future of Trumpism: Potential Legacies and Policy Shifts

As Trump prepares for a potential second term, Linker examines the likelihood of a lasting Trumpist policy legacy. While acknowledging that Trump’s first term did not leave significant policy marks, he anticipates that the ongoing dismantling of federal structures and the promotion of radical libertarianism could have enduring impacts.

Damon Linker [53:14]: "It's nothing like that [Reagan]; it was a pretty close election, and yet it was not a fluke."

Linker notes that the second iteration of Trumpism might be more structured and coherent, with strategic appointments poised to implement sweeping changes through executive actions, despite the limited timeframe of a presidential term.

Conclusion: The Intangible Legacy of Trumpism

Martin Di Caro concludes by reflecting on the intangible legacy of Trumpism, comparing it to Reagan’s enduring influence. He suggests that Trumpism may leave behind a transformed mindset regarding the relationship between government and citizens, emphasizing a more adversarial and individualistic approach.

Martin Di Caro [48:23]: "His narrative was the stolen election, and that kept him around, really. I think that he built his comeback off of that idea that lie, among other things, the system out to get me."

The episode underscores the complex interplay between historical conservatism, populist movements, and the evolving landscape of American politics, questioning whether Trumpism represents a permanent shift or a transient phenomenon in the broader narrative of U.S. history.

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Notable Quotes:

• Damon Linker [02:09]: "It was not a fluke. We all know this guy. We know what he wants to do, we know how he is, we know his behavior."

• Donald Trump [36:06]: "We need them for economic security... Panama Canal is vital to our country."

• Damon Linker [50:44]: "He really wants to make this happen. He's kind of like David Stockman 2.0."

• Martin Di Caro [48:23]: "His narrative was the stolen election, and that kept him around, really. I think that he built his comeback off of that idea that lie, among other things, the system out to get me."

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Key Takeaways:

• Trumpism continues to exert significant influence over the Republican Party, reshaping its strategies and ideological foundations.

• The Democratic Party faces the challenge of regaining trust in public institutions while formulating responses to the populist tendencies of Trumpism.

• Global political dynamics are shifting towards a multipolar world, altering the strategic imperatives of U.S. foreign policy under Trump.

• The future legacy of Trumpism remains uncertain, with potential long-term impacts on the administrative state and the nature of political discourse in America.

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For more insightful discussions and historical analyses, tune into "History As It Happens" every Tuesday and Friday, and subscribe to the weekly newsletter at historyasithappens.com.

Transcript

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[Martin DeCaro]

History as it happens January 17, 2025 TRUMPISM AFTER TRUMP revisited that extremism in.

[Damon Linker]

The defense of liberty is no vice.

[Donald Trump]

It's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work. Work with us, not over us. To stand by our side, not ride on the establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

[Martin DeCaro]

On the eve of Donald Trump's second inauguration, many Americans are struggling with how we got here again. Is our past failing to help us understand the present? The history of conservatism or illiberalism may provide some answers for this new age of American politics, this post, post Cold war period that is upending everything we may have assumed about the march of progress. That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.

[Donald Trump]

Let's have trial by combat.

[Advertiser]

President elect Donald Trump engaged in a, quote, unprecedented criminal effort to stay in after losing.

[Damon Linker]

Smith says he believes that had Mr.

[Martin DeCaro]

Trump not won, the 2024 election would.

[Advertiser]

Have been convicted if he was not.

[Martin DeCaro]

Reelected because they had enough evidence.

[Damon Linker]

It was not a fluke. We all know this guy. We know what he wants to do, we know how he is, we know his behavior. And yet he's gained, you know, well over, I think it was slightly over 14 million votes from 2016 to today. This is what the Republican Party now is and it can win election in that new form. And that forces a lot of rethinking.

[Martin DeCaro]

You ever have a memory pop into your head, you know, like randomly when you're thinking about something? This happened to me as I was preparing for this episode. How should I try to encapsulate Trumpism? So the memory March 2020. The nation gripped in fear by an accelerating pandemic. Healthcare workers are describing an increasingly dire situation around personal protective equipment, even basic surgical mas Masks like this, they say, are harder and harder to get. As thousands of New Yorkers were dying and hospitals were desperate for protective equipment, President Trump suggested hospital personnel were stealing masks to deflect criticism of his inept handling of the emergency.

[Donald Trump]

Something's going on, and you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door?

[Advertiser]

Were you suggesting there has been inappropriate.

[Damon Linker]

Use of masks or improper conduct with supplies? No.

[Donald Trump]

I want the people in New York to check, Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, that when a hospital that's getting 10,000 masks goes to 300,000 masks during the same period, people should check that because there's something going on.

[Martin DeCaro]

Why this memory popped into my head, I can't say, except that it's one of countless examples of Donald Trump's complete lack of character and competence.

[Damon Linker]

New York might need, might not need 30,000. You said it on Sean Hannity's Fox News. You said, you know, why don't you people act? Let me ask you, you said, why.

[Donald Trump]

Don'T you act in a little more positive. It's always trying to.

[Damon Linker]

My question to you get you.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, now President Elect Trump is about to return to the White House for four more years. Despite everything his deranged lies, cruelty, incompetence and criminality, the man most responsible for the January six insurrection will never stand trial for it.

[Donald Trump]

There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible. What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.

[Martin DeCaro]

Now, obviously, what I'm saying here was not a deal breaker for the 77.3 million Americans who chose Trump over Kamala Harris. So why then is this episode titled After Trump Revisited? There is no After Trump is still here. Well, you'll know the answer if you've been listening to the podcast since the very beginning. My second episode in January 2021, as the stench of January 6 still wafted in the air here in Washington, I assumed, wrongly, that was it for Donald Trump, except for the possibility that his narrative of a stolen election might provide the fuel for Trumpism to endure. And endure it has. Nothing endures like a story. What we assumed about the progress of history, what we know about the history of conservatism in America. These things have been on my mind a lot lately. If you've been listening to the show the past couple of months, you know, I've spent a lot of time revisiting the early 1990s, the end of the Cold War, the end of history, the triumph of free markets, free trade, and liberal democracy. Or so we believed. My guest in this episode's been thinking and writing about these matters, too, political journalist Damon Linker. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the mind behind Notes from the Middle Ground on Substack, which is a must read. In a post titled the Movements of, Linker dissects different theories or philosophies of history that attempt to explain our story how society develops and changes, what influences politics and political movements. He writes, when such speculations are proposed with a requisite dose of humility, as one of many possible stories the human mind can impose on the otherwise shapeless stream of facts and events, they have real value. Hence my efforts, he says, over the past few months to propose multiple stories to make better sense of where we've ended up politically in the early days of 2025 than we've been able to achieve over the past nine years or so. Which of those stories will stick in my mind? He says, helping me to orient myself on a deep level over the coming months and and which will fall by the wayside, disregarded for failing to make adequate sense of what's going on around us, he says. I know of no way to answer that question beyond telling you to stop back here six months or a year or four years or ten years from now to have a look around and see which stories I'm using to orient myself in the world. Maybe that's just a way of saying I'm hard at work attempting to construct a usable past. Well, same here. And I will share links to Linker's work in my weekly newsletter. You can sign [e-mail] or don't wait for me. Me just go to Notes from the Middle Ground on Substack and subscribe. So are we overthinking things? You know, maybe it's not so complicated. If inflation hadn't been so intense, or if Joe Biden hadn't been so old, Democrats would have won and Trump would have been retired. Well, that's possible, but I would say it's the wrong way to look at things right now. The better questions are why is it that millions of Americans take Donald Trump seriously at all? Where does he fall in the line of transformative presidents? Fdr? Reagan? Is Trump transformative? Well, in some ways, yes. Our politics have changed. Whether Trumpism leaves a more tangible policy or governing legacy, we will see. Damon Lenker welcome back.

[Damon Linker]

Thanks for having me, Martin. Great to be here.

[Martin DeCaro]

From one Ithaca College alum, Or is it alumnus Alumna? I'm embarrassing myself here.

[Damon Linker]

Alum. Alum. That sounds fine.

[Martin DeCaro]

We'll just say that from one to another. Hello and happy New Year. Year.

[Damon Linker]

Thanks. Same to you.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, I guess if you're on the liberal side of things, politically, it's not a happy new year. But that's what we're going to talk about today. You and I have been thinking about some of the same things. I've spent a lot of time on my podcast discussing, debating this seemingly new period of history we've entered into, reflecting on the early 1990s and the expectations for Democratic capitalism, liberalism in our country and across the globe. So before I get into a really long preamble here, just tell us generally what you've been thinking about along those lines.

[Damon Linker]

I think like so many others who were shocked and surprised by Donald Trump's first victory in taking over the Republican party in the 2016 Republican primaries and then his seemingly implausible, bizarre win against Hillary Clinton later that year, I think, you know, I worked more than maybe some others to really drill down into that and its meaning in a kind of global context with the rise of right wing populism. And yet at a certain level, I, like many other liberals, thought this was kind of a fluke. You know, the line you would often hear is that he pulled an inside straight. So like an implausible, the confluence of things, a little Russian meddling, a little James Comey idiocy. In the last two weeks before the election, you know, reopening the email investigation of Hillary Clinton, very, very narrow wins in a series of upper Midwestern states, and then combining with the vagaries of our quirky Electoral College system, you know, where else in the world would the guy who lost the election by nearly 3 million vot actually win it in the end? All of these things together led me to think, well, you know, this could be a big change. But it also looks like, you know, if you had sneezed in a different direction that morning of election day in 2016, it would have gone to Hillary Clinton and we would have written off Donald Trump as a bizarre footnote. But no, he did win. He governed for four years. It was a kind of rocky, jittery roller coaster of a four year. And then it ended in the crazy way it did, with him refusing to accept the election results and the insurrectionary riot on Capitol Hill and, and, you know, a pretty decisive, ambiguously decisive Biden victory. I say that because, although he won the popular vote by 7 million. He came pretty close to losing anyway in. In several very, very close swing states.

[Martin DeCaro]

But during a pandemic. During a pandemic.

[Damon Linker]

During the pandemic, which was its itself a very sui generis context in which to be running a presidential campaign so early in the Biden administration, it was still possible to think, well, Trump was this weird, fluky, quirky thing. Maybe it didn't mean that much. Maybe we're back to normal now. But fairly quickly, it became clear that, no, Trump isn't going anywhere. He's going to keep doing this, this kind of stuff, and the Republican voters are going to keep wanting him as their Tribune. And we all know how this has now ended up. And I think that it is the case. Yes, the election was not a landslide. Biggest example of that would be 1932, which some, I think, very delusional Republicans like to look back to. This is like the new FDR for the right. No, not even remotely close. It's not even remotely like 1980, let alone 85. 4. It's nothing like that. It was a pretty close election, and yet it was not a fluke. We all know this guy. We know what he wants to do. We know how he is. We know his behavior. And yet he's gained, you know, well over, I think it was slightly over 14 million votes from 2016 to today. He won the popular vote. He came out in 1/10 of a percentage point from actually winning a majority outright. He won every swing state, not by huge amounts, but comfortably such that there was no need for recounts and so forth. You put it all together and you have to say, this is what the Republican Party now is, and it can win the election in that new form. And that forces a lot of rethinking.

[Martin DeCaro]

You've been writing about the history of conservatism and whether that can help us explain how we got to this point. I would say yes and no. Well, I've had the editors of the National Review on my show. They say Trump is not a conservative. I mean, there's so many layers to peel away here, but we'll stay at 30,000ft for now. The history of conservatism, I mean, yes and no. It kind of helps us explain Trump. I don't consider him a William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan conservative.

[Damon Linker]

No. But it is. It is too pat to go with the NR editors and just say, I mean, they have a proprietary stake in saying he's not a conservative. Because what conservatism came to mean from the pages of national review, founded in 1950, five on down to Reagan's victory in 1980 was Reaganite conservatism.

[Martin DeCaro]

Ideas are not static. Right. So they've changed. Changed.

[Damon Linker]

Right. And, and what conservatism was prior to that, including when William F. Buckley was a young man prior to World War II. I guess he was a young child then, but still in the, in his whole family in milieu. Growing up, conservatism meant something very different. It was much more isolationist, much less interested in the attempts at synthesizing kind of dynamic capitalism with an aggressive forward leaning foreign policy that we got with National Review and the rise of Reagan and so forth. There are all kinds of ways in which things shifted after World War II, and Buckley's National Review helped to formulate what a conservatism in the Cold War context could be. But the earlier pre World War II versions of conservatism never went away. They remained partly dormant, partly as I. The formulation I often use in my writing is that they, they were junior partners in the conservative electoral coalition. From Reagan on, they'd show up to vote very often. They weren't always thrilled with the party's choice, but they figured it's better than the Democrats in any version of the left. So we'll show up to vote, but we'll sort of grumble about it. But then you have these bubbling up of populist discontent from the right. With Pat Buchanan's primary challenge to George H.W. bush in 1992 that was surprisingly potent. We won roughly 38% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary that year.

[Pat Buchanan]

So today we call for a new patriotism where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first, to make America first again in manufacturing industry business the way we once were. Now seriously friends, neither Beltway party is going to drain this swamp because to them it isn't a swamp, it's a protected wetland. To take my party back and to take our country back, I am today declaring my candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

[Damon Linker]

Then you have have Tea Party rebellion against Obama in 2009, 2010, 2011, the clown car primaries that follow that in 2012, where you have this series of sort of right populist rebellions that end up being suppressed finally out of the kind of the urge to just coalesce around a nominee who ends up being Romney, who I think really was the very last of the Reaganite options. And the fact that he lost and could not defeat Obama, I think left that restive junior partner faction of people who are kind of the descendants of the Pre World War II Conservative dispensation, searching actively for someone to come on the scene who could champion their alternative. And it so happens that Donald Trump wandered in to do exactly that. Not intentionally really, but he discerned that there was a hunger for something more like that kind of message.

[Martin DeCaro]

I'm glad you mentioned Romney in 2012, because there was a Republican primary debate actually held at the Reagan Library out in California that year where they mentioned Ronald Reagan's name about a thousand times. Well, it makes sense to invoke him at his library, but still, all the candidates are talking about Reagan would have done this. I'll do this like Reagan. Reagan did that. I'll repeat Reagan during the Reagan camp.

[Damon Linker]

Campaign with people like Jack Campenard Laffer. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan.

[Martin DeCaro]

President Reagan.

[Damon Linker]

President Reagan. President Reagan.

[Advertiser]

Ronald Reagan.

[Damon Linker]

I'm with President Reagan.

[Martin DeCaro]

The age of Reagan was over by then, long over by then, in part because one of its raison d'etre, pardon my French, was the confrontation with the Soviet Union and anti communism, Soviet Union is gone. So Reaganism again loses one of its reasons for being. But something has lasted and endured. And when I study presidential administrations, I try to look at consequences. And something that is very consequential about the Reagan era that endures to this day, that does help us explain Trump, and that is this idea that still animates politics on the right. As you said, it was there under Reagan that Buchananite strain. And that is our government is the enemy, to put it simply. To put it simply. Right.

[Damon Linker]

Clearly, conservatism in this country has always had this kind of hard libertarian edge. And there's a way in which you could even tell a story of American history going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. I actually taught a course last semester at Penn in political science, a kind of first year seminar. And one thing that became very clear is that early on, in both during the founding period, revolutionary period, and then the early national period, it is not really possible to find conservatism. Not because there wasn't any, but because almost every faction was expressing one aspect of a sort of conservative sensibility, Whether it was assumptions about human nature, skepticism about federal power, a kind of populist anger at bigness, whether it's, you know, the central bank, economic bigness, the looming power and fear of a federal government above the states, you know, and then it intertwines, of course, with Southern defense of slavery and wanting to defend states rights. It's interesting that in some ways we think of the United States as like one of the first, if not the first liberal democracy in. In the world. But there's a kind of duck rabbit, gestalt, flip way of reading that same history and seeing that the country has always been deeply conservative. If we define conservatism, as you sort of suggested a minute ago, as a kind of reflexive skepticism about the government and a belief that reality, the kind of baseline judgment for evaluating politics, is a kind of apolit, just average, everyday American attempt to live a life, worship God, make a living and so forth, that that sort of happens apart from politics. And then we in the sort of Lockean fantasy, get together and reluctantly agree to empower a minimal state over us to sort of keep the peace and enforce contracts. But other than that, politics sort of of isn't the main goal of anything. It's. It's the freedom of individuals and their families sort of eking out an existence without anything over them.

[Martin DeCaro]

What I think you're explaining there is the history of liberalism in conflict and coexistence with illiberalism right from the early days of our republic. And that conflict flows out of a question, what kind of country do we want to have? Freedom for whom? Rights for whom? Who gets to take a seat at the. The great big barbecue of the American experiment and partake in the feast in context of what you've been writing about lately, the progress of history, or whether history moves in cycles and the history of ideas. Conservatism. Right, populism. We're trying to place Trump in some kind of historical context. Maybe that's it. This is nothing really that new. Matter of fact, the liberal democratic moment in world history takes up about a minute on the face of a clock, a revolution of one hour. The first 59 minutes of human experience was not liberal democracy. And this is only a recent. A recent thing, if you know what I mean.

[Damon Linker]

Yeah, I mean, I guess the way I've been trying to piece it together in very tentative terms, like most of my posts on the sub stack are continuous with like the habit of blogging, you know, like 20 years ago, in the sense that each post is a take, like, all right, well, maybe it makes sense like this. Let me think this through and then I'll do another post on a similar theme from a different perspective. And it sort of overlaps, but it also is different in some ways, as I'm trying to make sense of stuff in real time. But the way I'm tentatively trying to make sense of it is to think I Don't know if it's just a minute on the clock, because it did go on for many decades, but I do think 1945 represented a real moment, a big moment, Capital M moment in American history in the sense that the great surge of federal building that began with the New Deal and was still quite tentative and it wasn't clear like what its fate would be once the Depression finally faded and we moved beyond the crisis, the economic crisis that justified this growth of federal power under FDR, the fact that it then intersected with World War II and we won and ended up not only triumphant in the war with all of the kind of industrial might that ended up being created in order to fight and win it, but that we ended up in terms of foreign policy, responsible for the defense of a war, destroyed, decimated Western Europe and Japan that could not defend themselves apart from our efforts to do it for them in the face of the Soviet Union. That situation that sets up the Cold War led to the period that historians have long called kind of the period of consensus liberalism. And I've used that phraseology for a long time because I do think it gets at a lot. But it's only recently, in light of the Trump saga over the last three cycles of presidential elections, that I've begun now to look back and realize that maybe it's the case that we were living in a period of sort of anomalous consent, kind of consensual government, abnormally narrow disagreements, even though at times they seemed enormous while we were living through them. Civil rights revolutions, McCarthyism and then the rise of like the Great Society and the civil rights revolution, Reagan revolution at just looks, it looked, while we were living through it, like these big swings. But now in retrospect, I think you can see that not necessarily all of the Reaganite policies or rhetoric, but like, it is possible to say like Reagan was a right liberal in a lot of ways, and the Great Society did push into new areas of federal involvement, but it was continuous with the New Deal. It just took it a few steps further and there was a reaction to that and that fuels Reagan. But again, if Reagan is a center right figure, then it might be the case that for a long time, decades, we were in a period of relative placidity. Whereas the American norm from the pre Civil War period with Jackson and then the run up to the war that goes on for decades, it of course, the Civil War itself, Reconstruction, the post Reconstruction period, which was very tumultuous, lots of turbulence, very closely divided elections that often got quite Dangerous, like how we have a lot of violence, anti union violence, riots and violence against blacks and Indians. It was a very rough period. And this to some extent in some areas continues into the early 20th century. And what we probably are living through now is a kind of reversion to something more like that, which was sort of more of the American norm until the somewhat unusual, again anomalous, somewhat different, abnormally placid period that began with the emergence of the Cold War after World War II. Just me trying to think through what that means for a country of approaching 350 million people, incredibly diverse, incredibly spread across this country with differences. What does it mean for other to try to govern ourselves in a situation where we're sort of like the 1880s when we were so much smaller and blacks in large parts of the country couldn't even vote safely. And like all the things that have changed to revert to something that turbulent as the political norm and what that looks like. So that those are the kind of things I been thinking a lot about.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah. As I mentioned at the top, I've been discussing the 1990s, post Reagan, post Cold War Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and all the optimism that attended. And not all of that optimism was misplaced. We can overstate how bad things are today, 35 years later. Eastern Europe, the former Soviet bloc, is still mostly democratic. Economies are strong, integrated with Europe. They're part of the eu, they're part of NATO. Of course, Hungary is probably not a democracy anymore. But that idea that liberalism and democracy had to go hand in hand, it's also been upended in China. Right. Not to digress about China, but China has economically liberalized without political democratization. But about this new period that we may be entering into, and I agree that we are, the possibility that the election may swing back to the Democrats in four years, there may be a Democrat in the White House if the election goes a point or two in the other way, or that Congress will change control again in a couple of years. I don't think those small shifts contradict what you and I are saying here. I think we have entered into a new period. It's not just Reaganite anti government attitudes. We're looking at anti establishments across the board, a lack of trust in our institutions because they failed.

[Damon Linker]

I think there are a few dimensions to that. You know, when we talk about how are the Democrats gonna respond to the fact that they now lost to Donald Trump after they thought they had beaten him for good in 2020, and here they had to fight it again and they lost. I think what you saw with the Harris campaign was an attempt to beat Trump definitively finally by truly trying to become the system party. We are the party of continuing the status quo. We're sort of a popular front stretching from Bernie Sanders and AOC on the left over to like Dick and Liz Cheney on the right. And, and basically only the kooks and anti system lunatics that Trump is trying to reach are the only people who aren't welcome here. And it turned out there are slightly more people in that other coalition than there are.

[Martin DeCaro]

Are you saying. Yeah. Are you saying the Cheneys are not popular with ordinary. I'm stunned by that, but go ahead.

[Damon Linker]

I mean, I, yeah, I certainly don't that clearly they're popular with some more conservative Democrats and, and you know, and that even includes me. Not that I love the Cheney's. I very much oppose the Iraq war and all kinds of things that they have and still do support. But in the context of the Harris campaign, I liked the DNC this year, I thought, or last year. I thought it was a good pitch for the general election and I was wrong. It turned out it did not work. So I think we talk a lot about Democrats, like how are they going to adjust? Are they going to move to the right on what issues? And that is a conversation that needs to happen. But I think at a different level there's this other issue of all right, are they going to try to grab some populist energy and not just in again, a policy oriented way like Bernie, you know, screw those billionaires who got to raise taxes and have universal health care. But the populist spirit is slightly different than that. It's actually like demonizing specific elites and running against them. You know, with that weird moment we had just after the election of the lunatic Maggione killing the, the CEO for United Healthcare, the spontaneous outpouring of kind of empathy for that act, like, yeah, get the big guys who cut our health insurance and become multimillionaires while doing it. I hate that stuff because I'm not a populist in sensibility at all. But yet I'm also a realist in my analysis. And I think one direction the Democrats totally could go and will be very tempted to go is to try to play around with some of that rhetoric, inject it into the party so that it doesn't seem so much like the Democrats are now kind of the party of, of CEOs and generals and got to be Max. Basically the elites in every segment of American life, defense defending those institutions and those elites against the barbarians at the gates who range from Trump to RFK to Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet. I mean, I say that with a more than a dose of irony because calling Elon Musk a populist is hilarious, given that he's like richer than anyone on the planet and has these are funny, believable power. But it's true, true that he's trying to align himself with tear it all down populist energy. And that shows the Democrats could do something similar and I suspect they will try to.

[Martin DeCaro]

As we've discussed in the past, this is phony populism. But yeah, I mean, if Democrats want to tap into the, the populist bloodstream, that's fine, but has to be matched with an aspirational economic vision for ordinary people. I just want to share something with you because I want to go back to the 1990s and all of our expectations about where we were headed. I'll share something that you actually wrote. You wrote, I was politically content during the 90s. The apparent inevitabilities of the end of history. That's the Fukuyama phrase, end as in means to an end, history as in development. So we were developing along a certain. Well, there was a competition between two ways of ordering society and ours one. So as you say, the apparent inevitabilities of the end of history, in which every country in the world was presumed to be oriented teleologically toward liberal democracy, with political competition within each country confined to within 10 yards of the 50 yard line, felt very right.

[Damon Linker]

That is exactly how it felt to me. And I do think that my line about going Back to the 1880s, another dimension of that is I do think that in terms of the globe geopolitics, this is in the process. And it's a long, ugly process that could get vastly uglier. We are moving into the long prophesied multipolar era.

[Martin DeCaro]

The unipolar moment's been over.

[Damon Linker]

Yeah, there's no, there was a brief period that could accurately be described as unipolar or immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, basically until like 9, 11 slash the Iraq war in that period where it first got shattered and has been slowly crumbling ever since. And what that means, the Democrats, especially under Biden, have really emphasized like, no, that's not over. We're still the leader. We're going to prop up NATO, we're going to fight Russia, at least in a proxy war in Ukraine, we're going to take on China. We're going to do this, we're going to basically be everywhere in the world. And I really don't think one, this is possible at this point given our relative decline, meaning relative to the rise of China, India, Russia's refusal to accept accepted status as a second order power, you know, and then also the rise of some of the other BRICs, countries like Brazil, Turkey is flexing its muscles and so forth. So on the one hand, it isn't realistic just in its own terms. Secondly, I don't think there's sufficient support in American public opinion to continue and attempt to keep a unipolar moment together. And third, as a result of number two, they elected Donald Trump again and Donald Trump actively opposes it. And I think the way to understand where Trump is coming from and increasing people over the last month have been writing this in various fora in response to his more general outlook, but also his more recent, you know, tweets and statements in press conferences about Greenland and Canada and Panama Canal and so forth. What is the strategy?

[Donald Trump]

I can't assure you. You're talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can't assure you on either of those two. But I can say this. We need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military. I'm not going to commit to that now. It might be that you'll have to do something. Look, the Panama Canal is vital to our country. It's being operated by China.

[Damon Linker]

He thinks about the world like a late 19th century power politics, sphere of influence guy. Essentially. I think he thinks China is fine being what it is. It should get Asia mostly, get Asia for itself. Russia should get its near abroad, stretching partway into Europe. And Europe should take care of defending itself in figuring out where that line is going to be. Where the new Iron Curtain will be, you might say. And then the United States gets the Monroe Doctrine. We're like we're back to our hemisphere and we'll, you know, we'll also have a big say in the Middle east for some reason that I don't fully comprehend. But Trump seems to still want us to be really involved there on Israel's side, kind of allied with the rich Sunni governments of the Gulf so that he and his family can get kickbacks from the Princes and so forth for various development projects. He doesn't care about alliances. He wants basically a sort of free for all. And what I just described is roughly three world powers divvying up the world for themselves. And that is such a completely contrary vision of foreign policy that you and I reared in and shaped by the categories and assumptions of the Cold War and the post Cold War period, which was in large part continuous with the latter Cold War. It fries our brains because this is simply. It has no real place for moral considerations. It does not make judgments about the internal moral condition of individual regimes. It doesn't care whether we're dealing with a brutal authoritarian government or a democracy. In fact, Trump himself, if you put a ruthless authoritarian system against a kind of messy liberal democracy, he'd much rather deal with the authoritarian because he knows it's one guy he, he needs to talk to. And he can just think, he thinks, cut a deal with them. Whereas, you know, Angela Merkel or Macron in France. Like, he could try to make a deal with that person, but they're going to be a squish and then maybe their legislature won't approve the deal. And then, then he's back to square one. So he just finds the latter kind of annoying. Then in that case, we really are in a completely different world where the way the United States comports itself in the world, the way it understands itself and what it's doing in the world is really different than what I've been used to assuming.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, it raises the question, what is Trumpism? And what might last out of it, or what might endure from it? I should say I want to return to that Trumpism. But something else first. Before we wrap up here, again, back to the 1990s, building on what you wrote. I'm gonna share something that I wrote. Cause you'll remember, obviously, the 2000 election, a low turnout election. You'll remember how people said there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Gore and Bush. We were still living in kind of that consensus moment. Doesn't mean the 1990s didn't have a lot of nasty partisanship. They did Monica Lewinsky stuff and Newt Gingrich scorched earth politics. But that 2000 election was still part of that consensus moment where Gore and Bush are debating how best to spend a federal budget surplus.

[Damon Linker]

Now, for every dollar that I propose to spend on education, he spends $5 on a tax cut for the wealthiest 1%. Those are very clear differences.

[Donald Trump]

Governor, one minute man's practicing fuzzy math again.

[Martin DeCaro]

There's differences, but I wrote something about Nelson Lichtenstein's great book, a Fabulous Failure, about the transformation of American capitalism, global capitalism, capitalism in the 1990s, the Clinton presidency espousing tough on crime, anti welfare politics, the free flow of capital into and out of emerging markets. Despite the often disastrous consequences and the wholesale deregulation of financial markets cheered on by Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers that brought us the 08 crash. Lichtenstein reminded us of the important warnings that were ignored or downplayed to the eventual detriment of blue collar voters who would then flock to the populous banners of Trump and Sanders a generation later. That prosperous decade built on sand. I think we'll find the origins of this moment in those years. Just bear with me for another moment. Damon. If you were born in the 1920s, say 1920, on the nose by the time you were 10, you'd be old enough to have memories that will last in your head of the start of the Great Depression and everything you went through and how the government came to your assistance to help you get through that. Then World War II, maybe you fought in World War II, you'd be about 21 years old during Pearl Harbor. The government was indispensable to fighting and winning World War II. The United States comes out of that 1945. You're now 25 years old. Your whole life, your memories are the government is something that works with me that we need. Then the post war period, the GI Bill, you get a cheap mortgage or a free college tuition, et cetera. Compare that mindset to someone born in the mid-1990s. Maybe their father was sent off to fight and die in Iraq in the mid 2000s. Then they get the 08 crash, the fallout of free trade and deindustrialization, which of course is started in the 1970s, really, maybe even before that in the heartland of our country. So that person has a much different experience with institutions and government than somebody, say, born in the 1920s. And we're living in that moment now. That person's experience, that wasn't really a question, but I think you know what I'm getting at.

[Damon Linker]

I've written quite a bit actually in a couple of New York Times op EDS over the last year about that context of the present, a context in which confidence and faith in America's public institutions has been falling precipitously for now, decades. If you go back and look at public opinion polls over time, you see that pretty much things were riding pretty high still in the 90s, as you said, during that consensus period, things begin to really buckle in the mid 2000s. So after 9 11, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, the Iraq War beginning for reasons that end up not being validated once we got there, no weapons of mass destruction and the fact that mission accomplished becomes a punchline that we end up having to stay there year after year and sort of first referee and insurgency and then actually fight in on one side or on multiple sides of a bloody civil war for years. Then you get 2008 with the financial crisis. By the time you get through the financial crisis, these numbers are in a free fall. And you see them kind of like go down, up, recover a little bit, but then down again. They were actually starting to recover, recover toward the end of the Trump administration, I think partly because finally the slow growth through the Obama years picked up steam under Trump. And you know, we had actually wages rising for the first time pretty robustly. But then you hit the COVID 19 pandemic and they fall off a cliff again and they haven't really recovered through Biden because of inflation that people got angry about all of this together. Now, let me say as a caveat, that I do think one complication in looking at things like this always has to be there's another sort of side of the equation that has to be incorporated, which is expectations. I think American expectations for competence from public institutions has gone higher and higher and higher such that for instance, when you have like the California disaster, the fires of the last week out there, could there be blame placed on Newsom and the mayor of LA and other officials who failed to adequately prepare? Sure, probably we should look into it. That's all fair. On the other hand, when a natural disaster happens, it's not always 100% the fault of the people who are in office at the time. It happens because bad stuff is always going, going to happen. And if we, if we assume our elected officials have to make it so that we're completely insulated from bad consequences in life and anytime a bad thing happens, they get blamed for it, then we're in a dynamic where no one can ever win and no one can build up a positive reservoir of goodwill. And that's itself like a no win situation. It's a complicated story story, but it is undeniably true, as you say, that one problem the Democrats and liberals and progressives have going forward is how do you come up with a more, a more ambitious agenda to do what you want to do when there is so little trust that government can even do the things that already is empowered to do competently. I think it's a sort of trap. Now where so my, my, you know, very briefly, my takeaway in the OP EDS dimension that I've written has been that the Democrats should rebrand themselves the party of responsible reform rather than say we need to do, like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, some huge new expansion of federal agenda. You instead say, I hear you. You don't think we're doing things well enough, we're going to fix it. And Trump is doing his own version of that, of course, but it's far more reckless, in my view, far more radically libertarian in the sense of basically just wanting to gut as much of the administrative state as it possibly can and send things back to states and individuals.

[Martin DeCaro]

Exactly. And we'll wrap up now, but yeah, that person born in the 1920s, they get Social Security and unemployment insurance and the GI Bill and all the other institutions that came after 1945. NATO got the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, or Tariffs and Trade, which is now the World Trade Organization. You know, though, that liberal internationalism, liberalism, New Deal liberalism, versus the person born in 1995, where their institutions, what do you get out of them? The 08 crash, where maybe your family, your dad, your mom lost their home, and you'll remember that forever. And the opioid epidemic, another failure of institutions. I could go on and on and on. We do need to wrap up. So about Trumpism, one of the very first episodes I ever produced of this podcast, matter of fact, it was. The second one was called Trumpism. After Trump, I spoke to historian Ed Ayers about what would Trumpism look like now that he's off? He's exited the stage. Well, we were wrong. He didn't exit the stage. But after January 6th, we all assumed, or I assumed, that he'd be done at that point. It was the strength of his narrative. That's an intangible thing. I don't know if you can leave a legacy with that. But his narrative was the stolen election, and that kept him around, really. I think that he built his comeback off of that idea that lie, among other things, the system out to get me his policy legacy or what's going to endure from Trumpism once this next term is over. That's really hard to say at this time, but he might leave something intangible as Reaganism did, and that's an attitude or a mindset about the proper relationship between the government and its people. Asking you to predict the future here, bud.

[Damon Linker]

Yeah, I mean, especially just as where we are today, which is just before the inauguration. It's really hard to say, although I guess I would take as hints the people he's nominated to head up, the various departments and agencies of the executive branch. And I would say looking at them, they are much more radically sort of tear down the structure than, than we had eight years ago when he was coming in the first time. And so this interminable, incoherent in a lot of ways debate that we've had on the right for eight years of like, well, is Trumpism actually like sort of right wing version of the New Deal? Like it's a pro worker party. We're actually kind of, that's the sort of Bannonite position. Like Soab Amari, the writer on the right is always writing along those lines. And like you look at first of all like the love of the right for what's going on down in Argentina. They needed to gut a lot of things because Peronism isn't particularly good for the economy. But like there's a love for that kind of agenda. But then you also see the people Trump is appointing. You see the people surrounding him like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are on the other side. They are on the we're actually going to do libertarianism finally here, which is not just cut taxes. It's partly that, but it's again, deconstructing the administrative state. And the person, I guess I would say I don't know about predictions specifically right now other than that it's going to be in that general direction. And I would say to your listeners, the person to watch is Russ Vaught, who Trump has nominated to be OMB director, the Office of Management and Budget. He is a smart guy and he is a radical guy. He really wants to make this happen. He's kind of like David Stockman 2.0. He's David Stockman. It was of course there's Reagan's budget director who tried to do this kind of thing and failed and was very vocally angry about it.

[Martin DeCaro]

They gave an interview while he was still in the administration saying that trickle down economics is not working.

[Damon Linker]

Right.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah.

[Damon Linker]

To William Greider and who's on the left. And it was this like 20,000 word essay and it was a huge embarrassment for the administration. So he got thrown under the bus. But then he stayed in office until he finally quit, I think after the reelection and in 84. And then he wrote a book in which he complained that I tried to institute Reaganism and it was an utter failure. Well, Russ Vaught has learned those lessons and I've, he had a very long interview with Tucker Carlson on his loopy show a few weeks ago. And I've listened to the whole thing. And, and this guy Vaught no knows what he is doing. He's the guy behind Schedule F this attempt to redesignate federal employees as being fireable at will rather than having civil service protections. He wants to fire tens of thousands of people in the executive branch both to save money, but then also so that Trump can then hire. He or Trump or whoever's the head of different departments can hire partisans and yes men and lackeys in these positions and actually use that power to institute the right wing dream, which is just loyalists trying to make a kind of pro business environment.

[Martin DeCaro]

Now, I was going to ask to what ends?

[Donald Trump]

Right.

[Martin DeCaro]

What's the end here?

[Damon Linker]

To the end of making America great again by allowing people like Elon Musk and to personally enrich themselves, Zuckerberg and Bezos, who are all donating to Trump and bowing down before him. We will have a new Gilded Age. We're back once again to the 1880s. That's the path. You talk to certain libertarians who are not Frederick Hayek post war libertarians, but ones who see their roots in the late 19th century, the laissez faire account of it that sort of predates World War II. And their case is effectively, we can have unbelievable growth again, like in that takeoff period after the Civil War, if we let the billionaires run the show and try to get as rich as possible, you know, higher and fire at will, and we're going to create a juggernaut and we're going to conquer the world and our economy. That's their vision.

[Martin DeCaro]

We'll see if there is a policy legacy with Trumpism, because from term one, not really not a lot endured from his first term in terms of policy, because I know I said we'd wrap up the Clinton, Gore, Bob Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers Libertarian, Silicon Valley End of history vision was paired with a faith in technology in the 1990s and the personal computer and the Internet and we didn't really need an actual activist state or a large social safety net anymore. That was the idea coming out of the 1990s. Not just tear down the government, but this will do it for us. Technology as a solution. I don't see the Trumpist vision except enrich, you know, enrich himself and his buddies that you referred to.

[Damon Linker]

Well, we will have to see. I mean, most of the appointees in the first Trump administration, as well as most of the White House staffers, were just sort of of run of the mill, average GOP operatics because he was such an anomaly. There was no think tank base of people to draw on to staff these positions. Unlike Reagan, you had 10 years of kind of neocon policy wonkism going on in the 70s, the public interest and at the American Enterprise Institute. So there was a reservoir war, heritage, people who and heritage. But now you have, you know, neo heritage, which is totally Trumpified. You do have think tanks and people who've been sitting around for the last four years chomping at the bit, waiting to get in power again. And they are people who Trump has actually hired this time. So assuming they get confirmed by the Senate, you will have people who are trying to do concrete stuff and have ideas. Given how narrowly divided the Congress is, there's going to be a lot of emphasis once again on executive orders, which can often be reversed fairly easily or that end up embroiled in court fights for years. Four years isn't that long to really make a revolution. The first Trump administration, as you said, didn't really have much of a legacy. So we're sort of starting again. That's why I think it does fit to call it Trump 2.0. It's the second attempt to try Trumpism as a thing. And I do think, though we don't know all of its shape, it will have more of a shape than it did the first time.

[Martin DeCaro]

President Trump will give you a minute here to respond.

[Donald Trump]

Number one, I have nothing to do, as you know, and as she knows better than anyone, I have nothing to do with Project 2025 that's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas, I guess some good, some bad, but it makes no difference. I have nothing to do. Everybody knows I'm an open book. Everybody knows what I'm going to do. Cut taxes very substantially and create a great economy like I did before.

[Martin DeCaro]

On the next episode of History as it happens, Joseph Biden's presidency is coming to an end. It began during a time of crisis, a pandemic. And like so many presidencies that take off during troubled times, there was hope that new leadership would clear a new way for our country. His presidency is ending in humiliating fashion. Biden in history next, as we report history as it happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign [e-mail].