At some point during my video call with Jonathan Rauch on April 9th, 2025, it began to dawn on me that my planned release date for this episode would be on or around the 100th day of the second Trump Administration. It also occurred to me that I could not be speaking with someone better qualified to throw into vivid relief some of the dimensions of what this means. An expert on government, Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has written nine books and hundreds of articles and essays—often on policy, but also on topics ranging from gay marriage to agriculture to animal rights to height discrimination.

I have wanted to speak with Jonathan Rauch since 2021, when I first read his masterful book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. The first half of our conversation centers on this book, with special attention to the propaganda and other cognitive warfare tactics Trump has adapted from the likes of Roy Cohn and Vladimir Putin. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss Rauch’s 2025 book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, which marks a profound shift in Rauch’s own thinking, and makes the case, based on arguments advanced by the Founders as well as contemporary events, that the U.S. requires a healthier relationship with the kind of religious practice Jesus himself embodied in order to endure.

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