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- [00:06]
A
Today this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to explain complicated ideas to folks who have better things to do than read white papers. But even dream jobs have not so dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work? That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. That way, you and your team can spend more time on what matters. Which for me is finding that one elusive stat that just makes everything click. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com the future of Trumpism it's always been interesting to me that Trump's popularity among Republican voters is like an immune system that can withstand assault from any kind of infection. Like no charge of hypocrisy seemed to stick, no policy promise broken seemed to cost him anything. Until now. Because something about this moment feels different. Trump's approval rating has fallen to its lowest point of either presidential term, despite a growing economy with a low unemployment rate and no external crisis pressing itself against the US Like a pandemic, the president's approval rating is now firmly in the 30s, near where George W. Bush's was in 2008 when the Republican Party got absolutely wiped out by the Obama coalition. The Iran war in particular seems to have exposed subterranean fissures in the GOP that have broken wide open, the conservative pollster Patrick Ruffini said recently. Something like every coalition that is large enough to win elections in a two party country must by definition be somewhat incoherent because there's only two parties in America. But there are like a hundred ideological tribes in American life. So to build a majority coalition requires wrangling groups that would otherwise want to be in open fight with each other. Today, the Republican Party, I think, is being torn apart by at least three such internal fights. The first fight is about the war. It pits the party's isolationist wing against pro interventionist Republicans who want to see America fight for its values and security abroad. The reports that the Trump administration was led into this war by a very compelling presentation by Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, has blown up a flank of the right that is virulently anti Israel and sometimes downright anti Semitic. The second divide on the right is about religion and virtue. The GOP is the party of Christianity. Christians vote for Republicans by double digit margins, but the president is to be generous A mediocre Christian, and to be exact, a morally careless libertine who openly trashes the Catholic Pope on his social media platform. I know that we have conservative listeners, but I hope my reputation for objectivity is not strained by observing that it is unusual for the most popular political figure among Christian voters to publicly drag the Holy Father. That was a weird day. The third divide in the GOP is about a particular view of health. In the last few weeks, several news stories have reported that the Make America Healthy Again movement has just about had it with this administration's reluctance to clamp down more harshly on vaccines. What's more, Trump recently signed an executive order to increase production of a key ingredient in Roundup, which contains a chemical that Maha moms despise. Good leaders bring together groups that don't belong together. You know leaders are starting to fail when those groups are starting to fight. And right now, these three coalitional pressures, isolationism versus interventionism, Christian faith versus libertine, barbarism, and MAGA versus Maha are all blowing up at once. Today's guest is Ross Douthit, the New York Times columnist who hosts the podcast Interesting Times. We discuss Trump, Trumpism, why the Iran war poses a unique threat to both and the future of the Republican Party at a moment when it seems like Donald Trump himself is coming apart. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain Eng. Ross Douthit. Welcome back to the show.
- [05:04]
B
Thanks for having me back, Derek. It's a pleasure.
- [05:07]
A
So for years I have been impressed by, that's one word, surprised by the resilience of Trump's popularity. This is a man who famously could cross any line, theoretically, shoot that man on Fifth Avenue. And he would retain the same level of popularity within his own party and among the commentariat of that party. But it feels to me like something has changed in the last few weeks, especially at the level of commentary. When I'm traveling and I'm in hotel gyms and I look at Fox News, the Fox News commentariat is defending the war, criticizing the war's critics. But when I get wind of Tucker Carlson's podcasts and Joe Rogan's podcasts and Megan's podcasts and Candace's podcasts, it seems like a sizable share of the anti liberal right wing commentariat has really turned against this administration in a way that has no precedent in Trump 2.0 and certainly not in Trump 1.0. Before we dig into why, I just want to make sure that you're seeing this premise as I am. Do you think something has changed here.
- [06:16]
B
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think the change is, as you said, more about a kind of distinctive part of the media ecosystem rather than saying, oh, now a third of Trump's base has left him or anything like that. I think if you look at Trump's overall popularity, there's just sort of a consistent downward movement that the Iran war has contributed to, but not like accelerated in some radical way. Right. So I just want to be clear. I agree, but I think we're talking right now about conservative and right wing sort of media culture. More than, you know, Republicans are abandoning Trump en masse. Although also some of the people you're talking about, Rogan especially, I think, have never spoken to the Republican base in the way that Fox News speaks to the Republican base. So there is something, you know, the people who, the voters who have left Trump or the voters who, you know, now disapprove of Trump, some of those voters might be Rogan types who weren't, you know, who weren't ever sort of core base Republican voters.
- [07:35]
A
I wonder why the Iran war did this. There's all sorts of opportunities that the right has had to break with or sharply criticize the president. This could have happened, I suppose, if you were a neoliberal supporter of the president over the tariffs. It could have happened if you were a free speech supporter of the president and saw some of the norms under this administration. Maybe if your number one curiosity was the Epstein files and you saw the way the DOJ under Trump was shooting the Epstein files, that would have been the breaking point. But for some reason, it seems to, to me, like the Iran war has been a unique kind of breaking point for the MAGA coalition. Why do you think Iran has been that breaking point?
- [08:16]
B
I think it's a combination of the nature of the thing itself and the scale. So the thing itself is a violation of Trump's promise to not be George W. Bush. And that's a promise that goes all the way back to the Republican primaries in 2016, when Trump famously criticized the Iraq war, I think, on the South Carolina debate stage. And people booed and people were shocked and his support was just fine. And it was a moment when he identified a sort of unspoken part of right wing politics, this sort of not yet articulated recoil against the Bush Doctrine, nation building, the Iraq occupation, all of these things. And I think especially for people who have sort of made their names as conservative influencers in the Trump era, or like Tucker Carlson, have reinvented themselves in some profound way that idea that Trump was not a candidate of military intervention. It's just been really important. And obviously other things have been important too. But I think that always tapped into something that was more profound and more important than, say, Trump's support for tariffs. Trump's support for tariffs was something that some conservatives went along with. They said, oh, yeah, Trump's gonna re industrialize America or the globalists have betrayed us, and so on. But I don't think it was ever quite as powerful as Trump's promise to be not a dove. Right? He's obviously not a dove, but not someone who gets into big overseas quagmires. And then two, the scale matters, right? So Trump can do things in the Middle east that some of his supporters and advocates don't like. There was, you know, Carlson was obviously incredibly against the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program last summer. But up till now, whenever Trump has done things like that, they have always been conspicuously limited with clear off ramps. And this is just a situation where right now, we don't know what the off ramp is. We're sitting here every day wondering what the off ramp is. I think that, too, changes the dynamic. It's like you can accept that Trump does something you disagree with. If the risks seem relatively low, it seems relatively contained. And this is. And this is different so far.
- [11:02]
A
Why do you think that promise to not repeat the errors of George W. Bush still feels like such a core central pillar of Trumpism in 2026? I mean, memories of the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, certainly among a lot of Trump voters, must have at least somewhat attenuated right now. So I'm interested in this claim that. And clearly it might be borne out by evidence, but I'm interested in this idea that a central pillar of this ideology, of this coalition was this original criticism of George W. Bush. Why would that be such a powerful part of the movement?
- [11:40]
B
I mean, I think it's a mixture of things happening inside conservatism and things happening again, let's say, in the Joe Rogan territory that's a little bit outside it. Right. George W. Bush's presidency now far, far in the rearview mirror, was, in a way, this incredible trauma for the American right. Where you had this president, who was president in the aftermath of 9 11, was raised to heights of popularity that no modern American president has seen, that sort of seemed to have the world at his feet. The Republican Party was destined for generational dominance. And then it all collapsed to the point where Barack Obama didn't just win the presidency, he won Indiana. Right. There are these Things that happened in 2008 that are sort of unfathomable outside the incredible unpopularity of Bush. And, of course, that was the financial crisis, too. It wasn't just Iraq, but Iraq was the thing that Bush did that conservatives supported, and that went badly in so many different ways. And, you know, I mean, Vietnam cast a long shadow, right? I don't think it should be surprising that Iraq cast a shadow. And it also. There was part of conservatism that was against the Iraq war, the Pat Buchanan part of conservatism. This was a really small part of conservatism in 2003 and 2004. But when conservatives went looking for a story, story about what had gone wrong, the Buchananite narrative, was there. A kind of isolationist narrative? Was there a more realist narrative? Was there. But I think there were a lot of people who had been Iraq's war supporters who sort of reached for that narrative, and then Trump was there to embody it, and it just sort of became important to their identity. But then also, Bush, Bush lost the confidence of conservatives, but he also just lost the country. Right? He lost swing voters. He lost moderates. Okay, how do you get them back? How do you get those voters back? Mitt Romney didn't get them back in 2012, or he didn't get enough of them back. And there was a way in which Trump's foreign policy shift, his promise of no more stupid wars, right? His attacks on neocons, his attacks on Liz Cheney, you know, whoever else, that was also part of how Trump moved to the center. It was how Trump became someone who could win 51, 52% of the vote. And so that's where the sort of Joe Rogan zone also becomes important. There really were a substantial number of people who backed Trump because they saw him as a more centrist candidate or a more moderate figure on foreign policy than both the Republican and kind of hawkish Democratic alternatives. The Biden presidency was seen by those voters as being sort of, you know, unsuccessful or disastrous in foreign policy. Trump's first term was seen as more successful. I think it was more successful, honestly. I could put myself in some of these categories to some degree, and I will. I'll just put myself in these categories. I was surprised by what Trump did on Iran. I thought. One of the things that I thought about Trump was that for all his bravado and fecklessness and everything else, that he didn't take big risks in foreign policy. He didn't take them in his first term. And I was surprised at the scale of the risk that he took with this war.
- [15:27]
A
Yeah. One thing your answer definitely reminded me of is I'm approaching this subject from the standpoint of being surprised to see the MAGA coalition start to crumble at all, because I'm used to thinking of it as this impregnable force on the right. But just looking at the last half century, last 70 years of American history, nothing more predictably breaks up political coalitions than the impression that they've gotten us into military quagmires overseas. This was Vietnam and the Democratic party of the 1960s. This was Iraq and the Republican Party of the 2000s and 2010. And now it's Trump, MAGA 2000 and 20s. But there's two other points here that I think really distinguish the Iran war from previous American interventions overseas. Number one is that the Vietnam War and the Iraq War did not clearly have an economic effect at home. As straightforward as we launch a war, the Strait of Hormuz closes, gas prices go up. So there's this materialist element as well. There's this economic pain that can be attributed to Trump's military decision. But this is the other thing that I wanna ask you about as well. So this question is gonna ask you to deal with the economics, but there's one other piece of this that I want you to comment on. One thing I think I hear in the commentary from Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens in particular, is this astonishment, this affront, about the degree to which it seems like Israel entreated the US into war. And that also seems to strike at a vulnerability in the MAGA coalition as well, the idea that Israel made us do this. And so I just like to get your response to the degree to which the economic consequences of this war are a major reason for why it's fractured the Republican Party and how significant you think Israel's involvement is in making Trump vulnerable to losing elements of his coalition.
- [17:29]
B
I think it's more the second than the first. I think the economic component is why the war, part of why the war is generally unpopular. But I don't think the sort of podcast world is primarily responsive to gas prices. And I don't think the economic damage has been large enough yet to be sort of the most important factor in the narrative. It's an important one. But the stock market is still high. You haven't had everyone sort of waiting for the price of oil to make another step change higher. Right. But I think some of the economic shocks that people expected have been somewhat delayed, and so it's affected Public opinion, but not on the scale that a collapsing stock market would have. I think Trump's tariffs, the Liberation Day tariffs, and the economic fallout from that did him more damage than the purely economic fallout of this war has done so far. Let's see where we are in a week. Israel. Yes, absolutely. This is the other piece of what's going on, which is that there is just a really clear internal division in the conservative coalition over the role of Israel over the US Relationship to Israel. And Trump had been able to basically finesse it for a long period of time by being, on the one hand, hawkish in certain ways that were more pro Israel or attuned to Israel's demands or desires than prior presidents. Certainly the bombing of Iran last summer was an example, while at the same time showing some capacity to sort of restrain Israel, maybe go a little further than Biden in restraining Israel in the Gaza war and elsewhere, and also, again, just not rolling the dice in this completely dramatic, high risk way. Right. This, yeah, this, this war is. It's unique and distinct from prior American military interventions in the Middle east, including the Iraq war, including the Libya war, including, you know, including a lot of smaller case studies in that, you know, it is something that was explicitly lobbied for by the Netanyahu government. And it was Trump's decision. It was not, you know, Netanyahu didn't make him do it. It was Trump's call. Trump wanted to do it. But it's a war that just feeds directly into skeptical, critical, paranoid, and frankly, anti Semitic accounts of Israeli influence in American politics. And it does in a way that sort of pushes, I think, certainly with Carlson, it's pushed him. He had this thing that he was doing for a stretch of time with the Middle east where as he became more and more anti Israel, he would attack and attack and attack people around Trump who were pro Israel, but always sort of find some way to let Trump himself off the hook. That was sort of the way he was navigating, certainly the way he was navigating, like the Iran strikes last, last summer. And I think just again, the scale of this intervention has made that untenable for him. And so he's still blaming people around Trump, he's still blaming Israel, obviously, but his sort of articulated sense of betrayal at Trump himself, his statement of like, I'm sorry, I supported the guy, and so on, that seems like a break from this attempt to be anti Israel and pro Trump that he had maintained for a long time. Owens is sort of further off, I would say. I mean, I don't know. Owens is like creating, she's participating in and creating a paranoid online drama that I don't even know exactly how to map it onto Trump's popularity.
- [21:47]
A
Well, that's unfortunate because I'm gonna ask you to attempt to map it onto Trump's popularity in just a second. I want to make sure I get the articulation of this question right. I'm thinking back to your description of the role that Trump played in 2015 when he first articulated this criticism of George W. Bush and neoconservatism that seem to give voice to a strain of Republican voters who previously were not spoken for. And in a way, and I hope this isn't too much of a stretch, you can almost see the role that Trump played here as being entrepreneurial. The same way that a startup discovers a demand in the marketplace not previously met by a product and invents a product that meets that need and then becomes a unicorn, a billion dollar company. Trump was similarly discovering in this messy combination of kingly braggadocious behavior, anti neoconservatism. And you mentioned this too, interestingly, moderate positions on ideas like Medicare and Social Security. This part of the Republican Party that was previously not spoken for. I wonder if you think Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, maybe even to a certain extent, a bit of Megyn Kelly are doing the same thing in 2026 that Trump was doing in 2015 and 2016, discovering and pointing to illuminating the size of and the presence of a constituency in the Republican Party that previously wasn't being served. Like, maybe there's this wing of Republican voters who are more anti Semitic, who are more isolationist, who are significantly more conspiratorial even than the president and his administration are providing for speaking for. Is there a way in which this emerging criticism of Trump and the Iran war might be an omen for where the Republican Party is going.
- [24:01]
B
So, yes, but you don't want to overstate what's happening. You know, you have a podcast, I have a podcast. Neither of our podcasts, to my knowledge, are as large as Tucker Carlson's podcast. I don't know what your current numbers are, so I don't know. I don't want to impute anything. Right. But you and I both have a sense of what it means to have a podcast audience. What it means to have a podcast audience is different from what it means to win the Republican primary in Iowa, which Trump didn't do actually originally, but let's say win the Republican primary in New Hampshire or South Carolina. Right. The Iowa caucuses are their own thing. And I think it's absolutely the case that the, you know, the sort of anti Trump Republican podcasters, right wing podcasters, have both developed and discovered an audience that is, as you describe it, more paranoid, conspiratorial, less like ideologically conservative in a traditional way, more open to anti Semitism, more skeptical of Israel, even if they aren't anti semitic. Absolutely, 100%. How big is that audience? That's a different question, right? Like, if you have a million fans for your podcast, you have a really successful podcast, but you do not have a coalition that's about to take over the Republican Party. And again, to go back to what I said to you at the outset, right, like, you don't see in the polls millions and millions of Republicans abandoning Trump over Iran. You see a drip, drip, drip downward in his support. And I think that goes back just to go back to what you were saying about him being entrepreneurial. Part of what Trump did was basically make it safe for a certain kind of normal mainstream Republican who had liked George W. Bush to embrace a critique of Bush without feeling like he was becoming a pacifist or a true isolationist, right? Like Trump was like, we're not gonna do any stupid wars, but we're gonna be the toughest people on the block. Right? And that combination, I think it's still holding some of his support, right? There's plenty of Republicans who, had Trump not gone into Iran, would have said, well, that was a good idea. But once he went into Iran, we're like, well, he must know what he's doing and let's hope he wins. Right? And those people are not all listening to Tucker and getting blackpilled on Trump. They're still sort of waiting it out, waiting to see what happens. Some of them could leave Trump if the economy tanks and so on, but they don't represent a constituency that's like, there for full bore, you know, full bore conspiracy theory world, let alone, again, like Candace Owens has constructed this kind of weekly daily running soap opera about, like, the internal realities of right wing podcasting, right? Where it's like, you know, Erica Kirk is this character. And, you know, I mean that again, that there's a lot of people who clearly enjoy listening to that. Is that a coalition that's going to take over the Republican Party? I'm skeptical now. Part of it also, though, depends on the last podcast I did besides my own before this interview was with Dan Senor, who's a longtime Jewish Republican, pro Israel, sort of very conventional George W. Bush era Republican is how I describe him. And to him, I wanted to convince him that anti Israel sentiment and anti Semitism on the right is real and a big deal. And I do think it's real, and I do think it's a big deal. So I want to stipulate that. I think that the turn on Israel among younger Republicans is real and substantial and important. But talking to you, I also want to convince you that Tucker Carlson hasn't discovered, necessarily, the thing that wins Republican primaries in the future, the sort of intensity of Carlson's commitment to, you know, chemtrails one week. Right. And, you know, vaccine skepticism the next, and anti Israel sentiment the next. Like that still seems like a narrower thing to me.
- [28:20]
A
It's a good. It's a good reminder. A riff that I sometimes go on to remind people about scales of popularity in culture is, if Your book sells 100,000 copies, it's a bestseller.
- [28:33]
B
You're amazing.
- [28:35]
A
If a movie sells 100,000 tickets, it's an unbelievable flop. That movie only makes barely over a million dollars a year. So a movie has to sell tens of millions of tickets to be popular. In order to win a presidency, you have to win 60, 70 million votes all at once. So the scale of popularity as you go from, say, books to mov to politics changes quite significantly. And podcasting as oppose is somewhere in there. The sort of second chapter of the conversation that I want to open up here is that I see several tensions within the MAGA coalition being stressed right now. I feel like the first half of this conversation is really focused on this tension between, say, a faith in Trump's isolationism, his critique of neoconservatism, and a faith in Trump as Trump. Right. A kind of cult of personality. Whatever you do, that's fine with me. If you want to invade Iran, that sounds great. If you want to express the idea that invading Iran is a betrayal of American interest, that also sounds fine with me. It's almost like there's a part of the Trump coalition that waits for him to act before deciding what is the public good. So that's one tension between the cult of personality and an ideology of isolationism. But there's other tensions that I want to talk about with you. The next tension, I think, is very much up your alley. It's the tension between the Republican Party being the Christian party in America and Trump being a barbarian president. And I think there's several levels at which you can analyze this. One level is, this was just breaking news from a few weeks ago. White Catholics side overwhelmingly with the Republican Party, I believe they're something like plus 25, plus 30 Republican voters. The president just openly feuded with the Catholic pope. And so that, I think, exposed attention within the party. But the tension also exists at the level of personnel. When you look at the administration or the spokespeople for this party, J.D. vance, Vice President, he's a Catholic convert, but Vance exists in tension with Trump, Musk, rfk. I mean, these gentlemen are not just ambivalently Christian. They are, like, staunchly paganist. They are barbarians. They are Nietzsche's blond beasts. And so I wonder how you see this tension. What is the state of this tension right now in the Republican Party between the party representing overwhelmingly Christian voters in America and the last few weeks where I see definitely some, you know, earthquake tremors in terms of the degree to which you can have a kind of pagan leader of a Christian party.
- [31:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, this is a tension that Republicans have been navigating throughout the Trump era. So it's not entirely new. Right. And I think you can see sort of different stages in it. You have sort of a stage where a lot of religious conservatives see themselves as supporting Trump in this kind of highly instrumental fashion, where it's like, look, we, you know, our influence is diminished. We are beset and beleaguered. Trump is presenting himself as our champion, and we have to make that bargain, even if Trump himself is a heathen figure in some way. And then over time, because people, it's hard to live with that kind of tension. Right. People sort of persuade themselves of the idea that Trump is more authentically religious or socially conservative than I think he really is. And at the same time, in Trump's first term especially, there is a lot of sort of conventional Republican social conservative priorities get pursued. Obviously, you have judicial appointments that lead to Roe v. Wade being overturned. When that happens, it's sort of seen as like this kind of confirmation of the conservative Christian bargain with Trump. Right. So there's this very powerful sort of ceiling, that sea. Right seal ceiling, that happens around that issue, especially judicial nominations, generally, culture war stuff. And so what we're seeing now is forces and personalities that are sort of peeling that back apart to some degree. And you see it in the administration's complete lack of interest in socially conservative causes and issues. You see it in the strangeness and complexity of figures like Musk as kind of avatars for cultural conservatism. You see it in divides over AI, I would say, where the administration is very, very pro AI and just sort of has the view that AI is just a normal technology that, you know, we want America to be a leader in and we want to invest in and so on. And meanwhile, there's lots of cultural and religious conservatives who have a lot of anxiety about Silicon Valley and AI culture for reasons that I think are probably obvious to both of us. But do they have a voice? Right. Who is their voice? Who's their voice? Maybe it's Steve Bannon, right? Like if you're looking for. Maybe it's Tucker Carlson, right? Like if you're. I guess what I'm saying is I don't think there's been some dramatic unraveling. It's more that the tensions are obvious. And it's unclear what happens to those tensions as we pass from the actual Trump era into whatever comes next.
- [34:19]
A
Two follow ups on this tension, the religious tension on the right, you mentioned that you're already seeing some fissures. Are these fissures deep enough, you think, that the right Democratic candidates locally or the right Democratic presidential candidate nationally might be able to take advantage of those fissures and bring more Christians into the Democratic Party, which would be quite a shift from the last two election cycles. I mean, when I just think about some of the rising figures in the Democratic Party, like James Talarico, and who knows what happens with his Senate campaign in Texas. There are some Democrats, I think, who are quite comfortable speaking openly about Christian values while nonetheless representing themselves as members of the Progressive Coalition. Are the fissures deep enough on the right, you think that some Democrats might be able to win more Christian conservatives in the next few election cycles?
- [35:20]
B
I mean, yes, to some degree I wouldn't, but partially just in the sense that you win more swing voters of every kind, to the extent that you have people who are right leaning, churchgoers who are not, but who are sort of moderate in certain ways, there's opportunities for Democrats to pick those voters up. I don't think that there is a Democratic appeal that is like, especially well calibrated to, let's say, someone who is sincerely pro life and anxious about AI and doesn't like that the Trump administration is so libertine. I don't think that the Talarico pitch, which basically says, you know, Jesus wants you to be a Democrat and not pay so much attention to abortion and sexuality. And by the way, Talarico has endless clips from the age of peak woke where he's like, God is transgender and so on. I don't think that's well calibrated to peel off people who are profoundly in the conservative world but are potentially alienated from Trump. I think it's more like people who are more loosely attached, who are like lukewarmly pro life. That's just sort of how these things go. You don't, you don't reach into your opponent's coalition and sort of pluck part of the heart out. You pull people from the edges. Could Democrats do better if their sort of Christian inflected candidates sounded a little friendlier to social conservatives than Talarico does? I think so. I think there's a constant illusion that Democrats have where it's like if we just, you know, you saw this with Tim Waltz, right. If we just nominate someone who has a certain affect or can, you know, knows the New Testament or something, then we'll win over some of the voters. We're losing. No, you actually have to move a little further on specific issues. But I think the wild card here is AI, though. I think, I think, you know.
- [37:27]
A
And that's my second follow up. Yeah, no, let me tee you up on this, because when you were describing the degree to which there is a divide in the religious community on AI, or maybe not even a divide, a fact that some religious Americans or religious leaders are uniquely critical of artificial intelligence because they don't think it's a, quote unquote, normal technology. They think it is an abnormal aberration from American economic history. This attempt to build a digital God is ungodly. Can you just pick up the thread here? Because I frankly am not familiar myself with like, the religious criticism of artificial intelligence or the religious take on artificial intelligence as you seem to see it.
- [38:11]
B
Yeah, I don't think it has sort of condensed into a definite worldview. I think it's more like there are a bunch of reasons for religious people to be skeptical or anxious about AI, and some of them are just connected to all the reasons that normal people might be skeptical or anxious. Right. Like if you have a scenario where AI is causing rapid technological, technologically mediated unemployment and you lose your job, and the Trump administration or the next Republican administration says AI is great and the Democrats are promising to regulate it, maybe that pulls you to the left in spite of a bunch of other issues. Right. So there's that, but then there's also. Yeah, I mean, there's a baseline reality that people in Silicon Valley have a range of really interesting, complex, strongly held views that are, you know, sort of utopian and apocalyptic in equal measure in ways that puts them in competition, I think, with the Christian perspective on the world. Certainly like the hardcore Promethean perspective on AI, which says that this is how we're creating minds that are going to be like our minds, but more awesome and more powerful. And in the process we're, you know, vindicating materialist understandings of the world. And by the way, building a machine God like that that has some tensions with Christian, with Christian beliefs. The. And yeah, I'm not entire. And then secondarily. Right, so what does AI get used for? Right. Like AI. Like right now, the people who are most freaked out about AI are left wing humanists in the academy who are sort of rediscovering a sense of human exceptionalism as their disciplines are confronted with artificial intelligence. There's a religious humanism that I think has a similar reaction to AI, a similarly skeptical and hostile reaction, a future of AI, of digital girlfriends and AI companions and so on. All of these things. Again, like, I think it's unstable and unclear how the culture war debate goes. You can imagine a world and you already see it where there are, you know, big mega churches that are happily making use of AI in a million different ways. And you get, you know, sort of Christians who just get used to AI in their everyday life and don't have objections to it. But I think it's pretty easy to see ways in which the philosophy behind AI, the sort of inherent hubris involved in it and the social and cultural effects of the technology of effectively like replacing human relationships with simulated relationships could totally inspire a religious backlash. And maybe it doesn't start in like the hardest core of the religious right. I mean, the Pope is, you know, is not really a right wing figure, but he's viewed favorably by conservative Catholics overall. His first encyclical is going to be about AI. It's not going to be super enthusiastic about AI. Right. So there's, I, I don't know. This is all very speculative, as with everything AI related. But I think there is certainly a world in which you could have a real divide inside the Republican coalition along religious lines over how enthusiastic to be about AI. And I think you can see that to some degree already if you pit, like the pro AI folks in the administration against the way that Bannon or Carlson talks about these things. Like there's a language of demonology. Right. That comes in, again, mostly from Carlson, because he likes to talk about demons. But that language is floating around out there.
- [42:09]
A
I think it's really interesting. I'm going to be thinking a lot about those tensions.
- [42:15]
B
Have you ever read, since You've been mentioning C.S. lewis and some of your, some of your tweets and writing. Have you ever read that Hideous Strength?
- [42:24]
A
No.
- [42:25]
B
So that Hideous Strength is part of Lewis's space trilogy, which is the, it's the lesser known of his fictional series relative to the Chronicles of Narnia. And it's sort of a weird mix of religion and science fiction and dystopia. It's like Orwell's 1984, filtered through, you know, a sort of Christian fantasy context. But that Hideous Strength is a book about in which the. The main characters are sort of brought into this kind of technocratic, bureaucratic institution that is dedicated to scientific research and the betterment of humankind. And the story is like this kind of onion peeling where you get to the center and you realize that the, you know, the scientific technologists are actually communicating with demons.
- [43:14]
A
Right.
- [43:15]
B
And I think that that perspective on AI that like, you know, you've got these technologists who claim to be, you know, summoning godlike creatures through technological portals, that perspective has a lot of purchase, I think, among potentially among religious people that maybe that maybe the heart of AI could be something very dark indeed.
- [43:40]
A
Interesting. That's a thread I want to pick up on, I think, sometime later. But the third tension that I want to ask you about, we talked about sort of isolationism versus cult of personality. We've now talked about the Republican Party as the Christian party versus Trump as the pagan barbarian leader, ironically, of the Christian party. And the third tension I want to talk about is MAGA versus Maha. There's been a lot of reports recently about how MAGA is losing its Make America Healthy Again moms. And this somewhat has to do with policy. And I think it also somewhat has to do with vibes on the policy front. I don't think RFK Jr. Has been able to create oversee quite the same level of anti vax policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, as some people hoped. I think liberals believe he's done quite enough damage. But a lot of Maha moms, I think, are upset that anti vax politics has not been featured enough in HHS policy. But there's also stories about how, for example, Trump, I think, just recently signed an executive order to increase production of Roundup, a critical ingredient in Roundup that Maha moms are extremely against because of its environmental or bodily effects. How do you see the relationship between MAGA and Maha in its current state?
- [45:08]
B
I think that there's just. There's a inherent tension between the Republican Party as the party of business and industry and corporate America. Which it, you know, has remained to a great degree, even as it has become more populist and working class and blue collar and a movement that is green, holistic and crunchy. And in a way, tensions have a way of seeming big and then seeming not as big. Right. They come and go, and people do, once they've sort of committed to a coalition, they often just remain in that coalition and find ways to live with and rationalize tensions. So I don't want to say like, oh, because RFK has lost to big agriculture or whatever in pesticide debates, right. Or has lost to big food in these ways that, you know, a bunch of the Maha, all the Maha people who voted for Trump after being crunchy lefties 20 years ago are just going to swing back and vote for, like, Gavin Newsom. I don't think that's exactly how the world works, but I, yeah, I do think you have some. You have alienation. I think, like, if I had been giving advice to Kennedy perished the thought, right. I would have said, you know, that actually he should have, that he would have done better politically to make pesticides sort of his. His zone of battle, because it's an area where you're basically, you're going up against corporate interests that have a lot of institutional power in the Republican Party but don't have as much popular support. But that isn't exactly. I mean, he's basically tried to do a little of everything, right? A little vaccine skepticism, a little changes to the food pyramid, a little this, a little that. But, yeah, I think certainly that alienation is real and it falls to some degree also into the same terrain as the Joe Rogan alienation we were talking about earlier, right, where the Maha stuff was, again, one of the ways that Trump built out his coalition and brought in voters who were not part of the conservative core. And he can. I mean, I also think there's an underrated way in which, like, politicians and coalitions can lose just by people sort of dropping out. Right. And not voting and not turning out right. And that we don't always have to be talking about, like, can the Democrats win back the Maha moms, or can the Democrats get more social conservatives to vote for them? Some of these tensions that you're describing can just be manifest and I think will be manifest in the midterms, right, in people just not showing up, people who voted for Trump twice, people who voted for Trump for the first time in 2024 and feeling disappointed. There's plenty of those people who are not ready to go back to A Democratic coalition that honestly has not really changed or adapted all that much from my point of view. But plenty of those people just won't vote. And that will be enough in a lot of races to make a big difference.
- [48:31]
A
I think a thesis argument that we've been circling in this conversation is that when Trumpism works, it's Trump acting as this kind of voodoo aura circus figure, overseeing rings of that circus that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other and shouldn't necessarily be in coalition with each other. To a certain extent, this is a movement that's three very different people in a trench coat that looks like one person. And it works when Trump is popular, but you really begin to see its inconsistencies, its incoherence when he's unpopular, when he's becoming unpopular. And this is where I want to ask you about where you think this movement goes, like what the future of Trumpism is. The future of Maggie is after Trump. And rather than make this question super open ended because I want to give you some purchase on this, let me offer three pathways. And those pathways are the very pathways we've just discussed. J.D. vance, Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr. So what do those represent for me? J.D. vance is kind of Christian nationalism. Tucker Carlson represents a kind of charismatic conspiratorialism that pulls together a lot of different constituencies underneath a vibe. And the vibe is the establishment is out to get you. Institutions are terrible and conspiracies are the future of this movement. And then RFK represents this sort of enlarged maha movement that is, yes, distrustful of the establishment, distrustful institutions, but is more grounded in a health orientation, certainly than Tucker Carlson. If those are the three paths forward, do you currently feel like one of them has the best odds for being the future of maga?
- [50:21]
B
I mean, the future of MAGA or the future of the Republican Party, because
- [50:25]
A
future of the Republican Party, that's what
- [50:26]
B
I mean, the future of the Republican Party. Of those three, only Vance could be a leader of the full Republican Party. And I would say if he were not vice president, I would say he might not be especially well positioned to be the leader because he's the vice president. He will probably be the Republican nominee if he wants it. But either way, Carlson is a factional figure, RFK is a factional figure. And the only scenario where either of them could ever be the Republican nominee is a world of such extreme fracture that they're running against 15 other candidates and they somehow slip through. Right. Vance represents a larger tendency, I wouldn't call it I think Christian nationalism, the way we use that term now is actually that's the wrong way to describe him. Pete Hegseth is Christian nationalism, whatever that means. Vance is sort of an attempt to sustain a kind of intellectual's version of Trumpism, right, Where it's like Trump but a little more serious. We're going to do re industrialization and immigration crackdowns and a restrained foreign policy and that's going to hold it all together. That is itself in tension with a lot of residual sort of old fashioned Republican politics that is hawkish and more pro Israel and more friendlier to free trade, friendlier to corporate America. And so the challenge for Vance is sort of holding that together. But I don't think that the, I don't think that the groups we're talking about are capable of ruling in the way that Trump was able to rule. Precisely like what you described about Trump. Yes, it was distinct to Trump himself. But in a way that's what all really successful politicians do. They hold a bunch of groups together that could be in profound tension with each other and then when they fail, those groups go flying apart and people say, oh, so it's over for this coalition. But then whether it's over or not depends on what the other coalition does. Right. And if Joe Biden had been, if there had been no inflation, no border surge and we had pulled out of Afghanistan more successfully and a few other things had happened, Trump wouldn't have put his coalition back together and we'd all be talking about how, oh, the Democrats have built this big successful coalition and the Republicans are trapped in their smaller coalition. So we're so, so much of what happens after Trump is just gonna depend on, you know, there's gonna be a big opportunity for Democrats to sort of build their own successful circus in which lots of people feel at home even if they don't like each other. If they do that, then Republicans will shrink, but if they don't, then you're looking for, you're looking for another right wing circus master. Basically. That's what you're looking for. You're not looking for the factional leader who turns the whole Republican Party into Tucker Carlson's audience or Maha moms or something. You're looking for the guy who makes again, Rogan Maha and conspiracy theorists feel at home with the normie Republicans who really do still exist.
- [54:00]
A
No, I do think you're right that something that's been very powerful about Trump, especially running as an outsider because he's not very good at maintaining popularity as president. He lost his one midterm so far. He lost his reelection campaign. He doesn't look like he's doing so hot for this 2026 midterm either. But his power as an outsider, I think, has always come from his ability to persuade people that he is ideologically plastic enough to serve as their instrument of change. Right, yes. Maha can see him as an instrument of anti tech, New Agey naturalism, even though this is a guy whose entire diet is like ultra processed foods. And nonetheless he can be your instrument like free market billionaires can say he can be our instrument of corporatism, even though this is someone who clearly does not like trade and adores tariffs and wants to govern like a late 19th century protectionist. Isolationists can see him as a champion, even though this is someone who clearly loves to bomb people if it makes them feel better. So there's something powerful about this idea, I think, that you're circling, or not just circling, putting your finger on that. To be a successful politician in a two party country requires a somewhat plastic ability to make many different people who should not necessarily be in one coalition feel like you can nonetheless be their political instrument.
- [55:21]
B
Right. And the truly successful politician is the one who does that and then is perceived to succeed in a way that makes people want to stick around even if they aren't getting everything that they want. And that is where Trump, that is where Reagan or FDR are successful. And Trump conspicuously has not been. But he's an odd figure in that he is able to put together what seem like they could be transformational coalitions to a greater degree than other politicians. You're like, oh, I see in Trump this new. A lot of people saw this after 2024, this new right of center coalition that lots of tensions and contradictions, but like he'd put it together. But then you actually have to like remain popular and be perceived to be governing successfully. And that is not happening at the moment. So it all starts to fly apart.
- [56:20]
A
Ross Douthit, thank you very much.
- [56:22]
B
Derek Thompson, it's a pleasure.
- [56:27]
A
Sam.