← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
Will Iran Break Trumpism?
01:08:27
Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell is a prominent thinker on the right. He’s a contributing editor at the conservative publication the Claremont Review of Books,and he’s one of the people who’ve been trying to define, and even craft, a coherent Trumpism. So his recent article in The Spectator, “The End of Trumpism,” sparked a lot of debate on the right. At the core of this debate are some fundamental questions that I think remain unresolved, despite Trump’s decade-long dominance of the Republican Party: What is Trumpism? Is there Trumpism, or is there just Donald Trump? Caldwell is a contributing writer for Times Opinion and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.” In this conversation, he explains how he understood Trumpism as a movement of “democratic restoration” — and why he believes the Iran war betrays that. And I ask him why he sees the seams of Trump’s base fraying, despite poll...
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- [00:00]
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- [01:02]
Ezra Klein
Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran War? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell's on the right. He's a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books. He's one of these people who's been trying, I think, to define and even craft a coherent Trumpism, but he seems pretty dispirited. He recently wrote a piece in the Spectator magazine titled simply the End of Trumpism, where he wrote, the attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. The end of Trumpism as a project. It wasn't just Iran that had led Caldwell to that point. It was also Trump's brazen self dealing the waves of influence peddling the sense of that this man who was supposed to represent the will of the people in some way was doing something very different. But this has led to a debate on the right. Many noted a very obvious counterargument. Polls show Trump's bases largely sticking with him. So this gets to a question that I think is important and somehow still unsettled despite Trump's decade long dominance of American political life. What is Trumpism? Is there a Trumpism or is there just Donald Trump? Caldwell has also spent a long time writing about right wing populism in Europe, so he has a set of comparisons for what a program here might look like. And I think that's what he sees coming apart now. So I wanted to ask him why. Caldwell, as I mentioned, is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books. He's also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and the author of the Age of America since the 60s and reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Immigration, Islam and the West. As always, my email Ezra clanchonytimes.com. Chris Caldwell, welcome to the show.
- [03:08]
Christopher Caldwell
Well, thank you, Ezra.
- [03:09]
Ezra Klein
So you just wrote this piece for the Spectator, which created a lot of conversation called the End of Trumpism. Before we get to why you think it's ending, what do you think Trumpism was or is?
- [03:23]
Christopher Caldwell
Well, it's a good question, because when I talk about Trumpism, I'm not talking about maga. I'm not talking about the group of hardcore supporters who will back him whatever he does. You could call them orthodox Trumpians or something like that. I'm talking about the sort of a governing project that has a real chance of changing things and did so by picking up people outside of that kind of hardcore. And it's a hard thing to talk about because Trump is notoriously disinclined to really lay out a governing project in any kind of, let's say, programmatic way. So what was Trumpism? I think that at the heart of Trumpism were a few issues. One of them was inequality. I mean, the sense that the society was unfair. One element of the unfairness was just the working of the global economy, where the people who ran it were advancing and the people who built it at a lower level were falling behind. Another was certain government programs. You could talk about affirmative action, so there was unfairness. I think there were a lot of freedom of speech issues. I think that woke was a big part of what Trumpism was certainly in his second time around. And I think there were certain cultural issues, trans, for instance, just to take one, but kind of tying them all together was this issue of war. It's very interesting. I think, that in the last 20 years, we've had two presidents whose claim to the presidency was built very largely on their opposition to the Iraq war. And for some reason, it's really very important in our politics. And I think for Trump, it was especially important because as long as the president was committed to not going to war in a major way, there's a kind of a limit to how far you could expect him to take his program. And I think that having gone to war now, the limit is sort of off.
- [05:36]
Ezra Klein
So I have a couple of questions about this. So one is, when people try to extract a governing agenda out of Trumpism, there is a tendency to extract their governing agenda out of Trumpism. Is there actually this agenda that can be violated? Or as Donald Trump often says, there's just him. He is maga, he is Trumpism. That's why it's got Trump in the name. And the fact that his people follow him where he goes means that he's right about that.
- [06:13]
Christopher Caldwell
Well, a lot of the people who've criticized the piece have said, well, look, Trumpism's not ending, because if you poll people who call themselves MAGA about this recent war with Iran. 80 to 90% of them say they're all behind it. They really love Trump. The real question is, how big is maga? And I think if you look at polls that measure it, the people who've been asking that question for quite a while, like NBC has, it kind of peaked after the election at around 36%. So I think that gives him a lot less leeway to, let's just say, feel his base will follow him anywhere.
- [06:54]
Ezra Klein
In your essay, you give a different definition of what Trumpism was than you've given here. You describe it as a project of democratic restoration.
- [07:02]
Christopher Caldwell
Yes.
- [07:03]
Ezra Klein
What do you mean by that?
- [07:04]
Christopher Caldwell
I don't know that that's different from what I'm describing here. That is part of what I describe here as the inequality problem. There are many dimensions to inequality, as I said. There's the income inequality, there's the influence and things like that. But I think there's also the deep state. And this idea at the heart of Trumpism, which sounds a little bit occult, but it's a set of informal powers that kind of wind up claiming governing prerogatives and they sort of replace the literal democracy through which we like to believe we're led. You know, the one man, one vote. So, you know, you have the growing influence of elite universities where basically everyone on the Supreme Court has gone to either Harvard or Yale Law schools. I think you have the role of civil rights law in sort of circumscribing what people feel they can say and how they feel they can interact. And so I think that Trump sort of, again, this wasn't explicit, but I think that everyone felt it. Trump promised a country in which you'd get the stuff you voted for and not the permanent state. Do you know what I mean? He was sort of promising a return to a sort of a more 19th century state that you can criticize as being based on patronage. But what it means is when you vote for a president, he cleans out the whole, you know, executive branch and now the government is oriented around your voters wishes.
- [08:51]
Ezra Klein
So you're sounding very disenchanted with Trumpism. Is there a moment when you were more enchanted, you know, if we were sitting here talking about the success of Trumpism and the continuation of it, what story would you be telling me?
- [09:03]
Christopher Caldwell
Yeah, you know, I don't. I really try not to be enchanted or disenchanted with any politician. It's not a good way to look at things. If you have to write about it. I think there are certain really promising things that he did in terms of his own agenda where he seemed to be really delivering to those who voted for him. One is that whole series of executive orders that took apart the DEI state and sort of removed affirmative action from American life. I think were very. They really brought a palpable change in the lives of the people who voted for him. Although it was a change, it was an absence. And you don't notice when you go from a presence to an absence the
- [09:56]
Ezra Klein
way you do, what was the palpable change they brought.
- [09:58]
Christopher Caldwell
What was the palpable change?
- [09:59]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, you're saying in the lives of the people who voted for.
- [10:00]
Christopher Caldwell
It's just like less. There's just less talk about. There was less talk about ethnic categories, gender, that sort of thing, the culture of the country. I think it changed quite a lot. You know what I mean? That, I think, is part.
- [10:16]
Ezra Klein
I do a bit. Although I guess it's interesting for me to hear you describe it in terms of inequality, because here you have a president with billions of dollars, whose major signature legislative achievements are very unpopular tax cuts that redistributed money upwards, who was elected with the help of the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who seems to you note this in your piece, be enriching himself rapidly to the tune of. In one count, I've seen over a billion dollars. In another count, billions of dollars since being in office. And also seems to exist to many as a response to. To efforts at equality. You have a dimmer view of efforts at diversity and equity and inclusion than I do. But when you say wokeness was a big part of it, the sense that there was a progressive push to rectify old inequalities, and Trump came in and said, we're going to stop all that, and has been, I will say, very successful at stopping that. That. This question, then, of course, what is inequality and who is it harming? But also, is Trump an agent of it or is he an agent against it? Seems at least contestable.
- [11:34]
Christopher Caldwell
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, he wouldn't be the first populist who's been rich, and many populists have got rich practicing populism as well.
- [11:45]
Ezra Klein
It's a good business.
- [11:46]
Christopher Caldwell
Yes, it's a good business. I agree that there's been something in this second term that's a change of emphasis, and I would agree that it's hurting him. I mean, you. I don't know if you saw the Kennedy center press conference that he had the other week where he Was, you know, it was just a whole bunch of shout outs to the billionaire donors in the audience.
- [12:12]
Donald Trump
I'm looking at Mr. Steve Wynn, who's over there. He built a spectacular building, and he knows Trump builds a spectacular building. I built better buildings than him. I don't care what he said. It's like Bob Kraft, if a football player doesn't perform well, typically you will fire him immediately. Bob, do you ever let them stay around for four or five years if they're bad? Not too many times. Right. Under the leadership of this exceptionally talented and rich board. It's a very rich board. Not everybody, but most of you. Loaded. Ike Perlmutter's got so much money. Look at Ike Perlmutter. He ended up being the largest owner of Disney. Started with, was it $100 or less? It was a little less, Ike.
- [12:52]
Ezra Klein
Right.
- [12:53]
Donald Trump
He didn't speak English and he became the largest owner of Disney. Right.
- [13:00]
Christopher Caldwell
And I just can't imagine it. It played terribly well. So, yeah, that's there. But.
- [13:07]
Ezra Klein
So I want to then zoom in on what you're describing here as Democratic. What you're saying, as I understand it, is that at least un. Appeal of Trumpism is that we are governed in practice by institutions we do not have control over for some definition of. We call it the electorate. And the appeal of Trump, of maybe doge, at a certain point to you, is that it is by ripping all of that out, you are restoring the possibility that the public gets what they vote for.
- [13:42]
Christopher Caldwell
Yeah, I think that that's part of Trump's theory, and I think that that's something that no one put this on the platform or anything, but I would say that probably most Trump followers believe a version of that.
- [13:55]
Ezra Klein
So one reason I was interested in both the piece you wrote about Trump and more broadly talking to you about this, is that you've been tracking these kinds of movements for some time. You've written a lot about Europe, and you wrote a piece in 2018 that I think connects to this conversation we're having about what populism is. And the final sentences of that piece were, liberalism and democracy have come into conflict. Populist is what those loyal to the former call those loyal to the latter. So populism, you're saying, is what those loyal to liberalism call those loyal to democracy. Describe what you're saying there. Describe your definition of populism, which is maybe different than the way you feel the media or the broad conversation defines populism.
- [14:38]
Christopher Caldwell
Yeah, I think that if we take progressivism, if we start with the idea of progressivism, I.e. early 20th century scientific recognition or claim that the ordinary working of government creates inefficiencies and injustices even in government, and that there's certain ways that you can just predictably make it run better and more responsibly. That's progressivism. So the way you carry it out is you create inviolable rules at the heart of government. You create protections for the people who are enforcing those rules through a sort of a permanent professional civil service. You create probably a larger role for the judiciary, inevitably. And it does a lot of good things. I mean, it gives us sort of product safety laws and stuff like that. But it means that when you vote for things, the government is not as responsive as it was back in the old days of 19th century mob democracy. So Trump seemed to be a solution to the sort of like, opacity and the bureaucratic complication and the obfuscation of the way we were ruled. Here's a guy that we elect, he's going to be the boss, and then we're going to have a country that's more congruent with our wishes. And so, I mean, when I say liberalism, I mean progressivism. I mean the rule making instinct versus the popular sovereignty instinct.
- [16:21]
Ezra Klein
So you mentioned that the administrative state is an alternative to 19th century mob democracy. How do you understand what it was? What was 19th century mob democracy? And what problems do you understand that state is trying to solve?
- [16:33]
Christopher Caldwell
You know, my understanding of it comes probably directly out of a history book I read like 30 years ago by a guy named Robert Wiebe, who was a great champion of the. The drunken political parties carrying banners through cities. And you might even call it a Tammany type democracy, but big mass movement type democracy, which had maybe less in the way of individual rights than we have, but a lot more in the way of popular will.
- [17:06]
Ezra Klein
So then why to you is Iran such a particular threat to this vision of Trumpism? You write in this piece the attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. You've already mentioned that in polls, at least what we might describe as a base is not breaking over this. If you look at overall Trump approval polling, if you did not know there was a war in Iran, you would not know something unusual was happening. He's at about 40% now in the New York Times average. He was at 41% a little bit ago. So what about this to you is such a rupture.
- [17:49]
Christopher Caldwell
I think that the promise of no wars was a sort of a kind of a ruling out. And Trump has a particular need to make this as a campaign promise. You know, I mean, there are certain things that you have to commit to not doing. So I think that people thought that, yeah, he's gonna do a lot of crazy stuff. I think people know him, but he's not gonna do that. He's not going to bring the country into a war lasting years. You know, there are limits somewhere, but once he does that, once he turns around and does that, then your sense of the limits is gone. And then suddenly being a Trump supporter is a whole different proposition.
- [18:36]
Ezra Klein
So one thing that that brings up is who the base is. And you'd mentioned before this distinction you're making between the people who will follow Trump anywhere and the people who maybe represent the way Trump's appeal or his coalition was expanding into something that had enduring majority potential. And so you wrote that those with claims to speak for Trumpism, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, have reacted to the invasion with incredulity. Tell me about why you see those three as avatars of Trumpism.
- [19:14]
Christopher Caldwell
I don't know that there's anything particularly qualitative about them. They're just really famous and.
- [19:19]
Ezra Klein
No, but I mean, which actually in a weird way does reflect something about Trumpism.
- [19:22]
Christopher Caldwell
Oh, well, I don't know. I mean, it just sort of like I was just struck by the way all three of them were saying. I can't believe it. I mean, incredulity is really what I meant.
- [19:33]
Ezra Klein
Well, maybe let me suggest something that I thought about when reading that and trying to think through it, because many in the Republican Party are perfectly comfortable with this move by Donald Trump. And if you go and watch Fox News and Donald Trump is a big Fox News watcher, Fox News has been, I would say, beaten the shield for a war with Iran for a very long time. Whether they started there as Joe Rogan did, or ended up there as Megyn Kelly did, or got further along there as Tucker Carlson did, all three of those people are very anti institutional figures. Their politics have become very, very skeptical of what you call the deep state and institutions in American life more broadly. And a lot of the angriest and most unnerved commentary from the right towards Trump has been this feeling of, has taken the form at least of, wait, who's really in charge here? And so it feels to me like there's this question of, does Donald Trump now Represent the institutions, and as such what he does is fine because he leads the institutions? Or is there still a lingering sense that Trump himself can be turned by the institutions, talked into something by Benjamin Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham, and as such, now even Trump himself cannot be fully trusted?
- [20:56]
Christopher Caldwell
I don't know. I don't think any of those people has really turned on Trump, but I could be mistaken. I mean, I don't think it's brought a wholesale distrust of him on their part, I think. But they are incredulous about the Iran war.
- [21:13]
Ezra Klein
But why then do you think they're incredulous about it?
- [21:16]
Christopher Caldwell
I don't really know.
- [21:17]
Ezra Klein
I feel like you're offering a softer critique here than in your piece.
- [21:20]
Christopher Caldwell
You do?
- [21:21]
Ezra Klein
I do. I think the idea that this was going to break Trumpism is a pretty bold claim. So your thing is just that the costs of the war will get higher over time?
- [21:32]
Christopher Caldwell
No. Did I say the costs would get higher over time? I think there's a lot in my piece, I think that you're. Yeah, I don't really understand how this is softer. There's other things that I say in the piece about. Self enrichment and kleptocracy and that type of rule in the piece.
- [22:00]
Ezra Klein
Tell me a bit about that set of arguments and how they relate to this broader concern.
- [22:05]
Christopher Caldwell
Well, I mean, so you have the. It has again to do with our populism, progressivism. I mean, one thing that progressivism does is it protects these offices against certain kind of malfeasance. So what did we do before progressivism? We only elected people of really sterling moral character. Okay. You're supposed to be a worthy inheritor to what Abraham Lincoln was and that sort of thing. It didn't always work. Right. We got people like Warren Harding. But that, that was one thing. And the other thing was there were elements of the Constitution that you had to follow. That is, you had to nominate people for positions in a certain way and they had to be checked out by the Senate. None of that is happening with Trump. And with the Iran war, we get a really clear sense of what the problems with that can be. Because it seems to me that a great deal of the preparation for the war was done by Trump's son in law and by one of Trump's close business associates, both of which have a lot of business dealings in the Middle east and others that are at least potentially compromising, such as with crypto and that sort of thing.
- [23:56]
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- [24:58]
Christopher Caldwell
in theory, I knew that this kind of
- [25:00]
Ezra Klein
thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to
- [25:04]
Christopher Caldwell
be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan. Murder me. What the hell was Alan thinking?
- [25:18]
Ezra Klein
From Serial Productions and the New York
- [25:20]
Christopher Caldwell
Times, I'm Em Gessen and this is the Idiot out March 26th. Wherever you get your podcasts,
- [25:28]
Ezra Klein
a point you make that has, I think, been interestingly undercovered in the conversation. There's a lot of focus on the role of Israel and I think quite understandably because they're the other main partner in the attack. But there's quite a bit of reporting, including new reporting by the Times, that Saudi Arabia has been pushing for this. And broadly speaking, you note that there has been a lot of investment from the Gulf states into Trump related enterprises. Saudi Arabia investing in Jared Kushner's fund, the UAE and others putting a lot of money into Trump related crypto projects. Now, it's not at all clear to me. All the Gulf states wanted this war in the way that they got it, and in fact many of them are suffering quite badly inside of it. But the question of who is wielding influence and how has, I think, become, among other things, at the very least, opaque.
- [26:29]
Christopher Caldwell
Yeah, and that's like if they're just sitting around enriching themselves, that's probably a problem that the people who really wanted to see a change in American life can put up with. But if it goes so Far as bringing the country into a war, it might be giving too much responsibility to people who've been brought to power in such an irregular way.
- [26:55]
Ezra Klein
I guess one then explanation that would cut through some of this is simply to say Trump is a decider and this is what he wants. So the conservative writer Matthew Schmitz had put together this long list of Trump quotes on Iran, and I was actually surprised by the specificity of some of these. So in 1988, Trump told the Guardian, I'd be harsh on Iran. They've been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I do a number on Carg Island. So I probably would not have guessed Trump was talking about Carg island in 1988. Most people weren't. But I think this gets to a bigger question about Trump, which is the way you just put it a second ago. You elect this guy and he's the boss, unrestrained by the bureaucracy, the process of factions, unrestrained by going to Congress for a declaration of war, the UN for a Security Council resolution.
- [27:50]
Christopher Caldwell
Well, I'm not talking about that kind of lack of restraint. When I say he's the boss, I mean, this is the missing piece, maybe that voters didn't see, okay, that they expected him to be a boss within constitutional limits.
- [28:04]
Ezra Klein
You see, and you feel that's what they're not getting from him, that they actually would have wanted him to go to Congress just to slow things down, to make sure things got worked through.
- [28:14]
Christopher Caldwell
I don't know if. To slow things. I don't think they wanted this war. I think until he gives them an explanation what the war is for, it's kind of unlikely that their support for it is going to grow.
- [28:26]
Ezra Klein
But I think with Trump, he always framed himself so much as the boss. I mean, his distaste for his impatience with the processes and the niceties, his desire. I mean, certainly from the more liberal or progressive standpoint, the idea that Trump wanted to be a ruler, wanted to be a strongman, envied in some ways, what Putin or Xi could do has been a standard issue view of him.
- [28:55]
Christopher Caldwell
I'm not sure I accept it. I'm not sure I accept that progressive view of Trump as a sort of. I don't really know that there's a populist template into which you can fit Putin and Xi and Trump. They're about specific things. I mean, Xi is son of a Chinese Maoist revolutionary who was badly treated, and he has a lot to prove. He's A builder. And Putin is a guy who rose through the bureaucracy of a defeated and humiliated country and sort of wants to restore something of that greatness to it. And Trump is a person with just a tremendous ego who kind of blossomed in New York in the 19th century, 80s. I think that their idea of being the big man is quite different psychologically. And so what you can expect of them is going to be different.
- [29:57]
Ezra Klein
Let me ask you more about your theory of Trump and this kind of movement as fundamentally democratic. I mean, so you're dealing with Trump with someone who lost the popular vote his first time running, lost the election his second time running has very rarely been popular. His big tax cut bills have been unpopular. He did try to overturn a legitimate election after 2020. He's not seemed like a person who is either himself committed to democratic will, but also who represents it. And something threaded through your writing and other people's writing like this has been that he represents democratic will. When people like me look at him and think, he tends to be very unpopular. His biggest electoral win is a point and a half in the popular vote. How is this an answer to a problem of democracy?
- [30:51]
Christopher Caldwell
I think that he was democratically elected by a lot of people who care about democracy and who speak about democracy a lot. That's what I think that a lot of those people at those rallies were doing, and that's what I think they were voting for. But I have a hard time distinguishing different presidents as symbolizing democracy more than others. They're all elected. But he was chosen by people who cared a lot about, who felt, let's say, excluded from the decision making process and picked him for that reason.
- [31:29]
Ezra Klein
I agree that they felt that he was an answer to making sure their will was done. I think the tension I'm trying to get you to sort of think through here with me is if what you see before you is a country where the will of the people is not being done, how is this president who tends to be either voted for or approved of by certainly less than majorities, never won a popular vote majority. How is he an answer to that?
- [32:02]
Christopher Caldwell
I'm sorry, I just don't think that's a problem at all. I think that we have a system which is a republic. The executive is elected by a sort of a majoritarian, let's say a filtered majoritarian, filtered through the electoral college. And sometimes that system produces presidents who only have a plurality, and sometimes it produces presidents who have lost the popular vote. Clinton from 1992-96 had 42 or 43. He too, I mean, was in very difficult straits up until, I would say, the Oklahoma city bombings of 1995. That is, he was really underwater for the first three years of his life.
- [32:50]
Ezra Klein
I'm not saying.
- [32:50]
Christopher Caldwell
But no one said he wasn't democratically illegitimate.
- [32:54]
Ezra Klein
I'm not saying he's illegitimate. That's not my view. The thing that interested me about the piece was to lay out my theory of you. Oh, you have a long running argument that the forms of right wing populism we are seeing here and across Europe are efforts at democratic small d, democratic restoration. And so I saw you and tell me which part of this I have wrong because I'm genuinely interested. I saw you as basically saying in this piece, the reason this will break what Trumpism is or means, or could mean, is that Trump is supposed to be an element of the popular will, but he is pursuing this unpopular war that nobody in this country really in any broad sense has asked for. And on the one hand, I sort of agree with that. And on the other hand, not because he's illegitimate, but because he is typically unpopular and his major initiatives have often been quite unpopular, I find it strange to understand him as an instrument of popular will. He's a very divisive person and president and leader who represents some people very well and others very, very poorly. But in your vision of populism as sort of small d Democratic, he seems an awkward fit.
- [34:16]
Christopher Caldwell
I mean, I think that we unfortunately are passing through a period when presidents have a hard time pleasing everybody. I mean, there are a few broadly popular presidents. But I think that what I said was that this was the end of Trumpism. I mean, of this coalition as something that really had an opportunity to sort of shift the conversation or the direction of the country. It really had nothing to do with thinking that he symbolizes something democratic for the whole country, although I think he probably does for his followers.
- [34:57]
Ezra Klein
You've described Trump as a populist. I think that the Democratic view of Trump is he's a wannabe authoritarian posing as a populist. I'm curious what you think of that.
- [35:08]
Christopher Caldwell
He's certainly shown more of that affect lately, but he's so shaped by a totally different industry than politics that I have a hard time seeing it. And in fact, I'm always struck looking at Trump, by the way, a lot of his actions are not those of a rule maker, but those of a guy who still thinks that the rules are actually being made somewhere else and that he needs to get something out of it. Like, I'm gonna get something out of the UAE on this deal. I'm gonna get something out of Qatar. It's gonna. You can sell it as saving the country money, but it's gonna get me a plane and things like it's not. He often seems more like someone ringing concessions out of someone than like someone ordering things, someone around.
- [36:03]
Ezra Klein
I think there's some truth to that, that more than he wants to engage in a structured, deliberate effort to cohere power around him, he wants to have people paying him tribute. He sort of acts like he has more power than he has, but in acting that way, he's able to wring a lot out of the system, out of people who might be engaging in business deals, at least with his family and around him and from other countries in the way he has pursued his tariffs. He's not setting up a bunch of complex bilateral trade deals and passing them through Congress. He's just coming to a deal with the country and then announcing the deal. In his attacks on universities, he's not pushed a comprehensive higher ed reform through the House and the Senate. He is coming to individual deals with individual universities. Yuval Levin, the conservative intellectual who, I'm sure, you know, he has this line that I like, where he says that Trump governs retail, not wholesale. And I think there's real truth to that.
- [37:11]
Christopher Caldwell
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Obama's deal with Iran, I believe, was done in a similar way. It was just you go and you bargain with the leaders and you come back and here's the deal. I don't think that was ever ratified as a treaty. So Trump is not alone in that. But I think that the instance you mention of the universities, he really got a lot of results out of that a year ago. But I think that that strategy is really reaching its limits. I mean, I think the universities that have stood up to him have fared fairly well.
- [37:46]
Ezra Klein
But I also think one reason it's appealing to Trump is that it allows him to act, as opposed to having to wait on all these other institutions to act. I mean, you sort of frame the broader state, what can get called the deep state, as its issue is that it is undemocratic. Whereas I think Trump's issue with it is that it is restraining slow. I mean, I wrote a book called Abundance, which is very much about the way this kind of state often holds Democrats back from doing things, because they get caught up in proceduralism that they themselves might even support, but they still are not getting what they want done. And I think you see this tendency with Trump Quite a bit after the sort of 12 day bombing of Iran last summer when he was getting criticized from some of these figures we've been talking about in maga, he said, well, considering that I'm the one that developed America first, and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that, that being what it actually means. And I think Trump's tendency to not want to have complex frameworks around him instead to just be the decider himself, on the one hand, does not feel like, I mean, and I think you're agreeing with this democratic restoration to me, and on the other hand feels very intrinsic to who he is and who he has been.
- [39:05]
Christopher Caldwell
Yes, I think that when Trump brought the United States into that war, it seems like nothing now. And the United States was famously, the United States was only in that war for 40 minutes, you know, but none of us, or at least certainly not me, I don't assume that you can enter a war and then get out at will. I think that's why you don't go into a war, because they're really, really much more complex to get out of than anyone ever thinks. But he ended that war and said, okay, we're done, we're done. And it seemed like a kind of a magical thing. You know, if he hadn't been able to do that, we could have had this whole conversation a year ago, but he was able to do that. The worrisome thing, though, at the time was that was the second episode where he made the whole decision for the whole world himself. But it was really an illusion that that decision was in all in his hands, because at that moment, at that end of 12 days, Israel was kind of reaching the point that it's reaching now, or it seems to be, if it's not running out of anti rocket suppressant ammunition, it's at least conserving them. And so it's getting very vulnerable to Iranian attacks. And so they could have kept going if someone had been of a mind to. And I think the same is true of the Chinese with the Liberation Day tariffs. The threat to cut off its trade of rare earths with us was really perceived as quite a grave threat in Washington. It's nothing you'd want to try if you weren't 100% sure it was going to work. And so that was the worrisome thing about Trump in 2025, that he was a little bit overconfident in his ability to do this kind of unilateral governing without placing the country's fate in someone else's hands.
- [41:00]
Ezra Klein
I think this gets to a sort of philosophically quite complicated place, which is, I take seriously the conservative critique and sometimes the liberal critique that the administrative state comes at some cost of democratic oversight. And on the other hand, the world operates at a sufficient level of complexity and vastness that it is hard to imagine how you would effectively apprehend it without these deep reservoirs of experience that persist across administrations that are not meant to be wholly political and whose advice is partially there and whose procedures are partially there to keep presidents and countries from getting into trouble they did not necessarily want to be in.
- [41:52]
Christopher Caldwell
Yeah. And there is a certain tendency to take things for granted. If they persist for too long, there's a tendency to take them as laws of nature. Like we sort of thought that this expertise was something that was inherent in American government, and it's inherent in the administrative state. Part of the.
- [42:13]
Ezra Klein
So is there some part of you that is feeling more warmly towards that state than you were two years ago?
- [42:18]
Christopher Caldwell
I don't think I ever feel totally warmly or totally coldly towards anything. I recognize the virtues of the administrative state, although I share the sense that it had been developed to the point where a lot of ordinary Americans felt that it was maybe futile to try and influence the direction of the state.
- [42:39]
Ezra Klein
I mean, I had seen a roundtable you did with Chris Ruffo and Curtis Yarvin around Doge. Doge was ill defined from the beginning. Vaguely defined, certainly, but people latched on particular hopes to Doge. And you all were higher at that moment on sort of taking the administrative state apart, or at least that's the impression I got. And you said then that efficiency was a necessary smokescreen for Doge because the
- [43:08]
Christopher Caldwell
only alternative was to say that this operation is an ideological purge.
- [43:13]
Ezra Klein
That's what it was.
- [43:14]
Donald Trump
Which is what it was.
- [43:14]
Ezra Klein
That's what it was.
- [43:16]
Christopher Caldwell
It's a much less acceptable story to present to the public. You have to save money. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I said that in any kind of collusive way, but I don't think Doge was primarily about efficiency, do you? I mean, I don't think the savings.
- [43:31]
Ezra Klein
I don't think Doge was about efficiency at all.
- [43:33]
Christopher Caldwell
I don't think the savings were significant.
- [43:36]
Ezra Klein
Well, the savings weren't significant. What I understood Doge as in real time, and what I still understand it as now, was an effort to break the will of the administrative state to resist Donald Trump. I think Russ Vote talked about it as traumatizing the civil servants. And I understood the arguments that people around Trump made for doing this. Their feeling that they were slowed down in the first term, that there were things that they were elected to do that they were not able to do. And on the other hand, the way it was done and the ideology behind it came with such a almost dismissal of the idea that there was expertise, procedure, knowledge that was needed and necessary and maybe in fact had stopped terrible things from happening in the first term. And I think we're sort of living through some of the aftermath of that now.
- [44:30]
Christopher Caldwell
I would say just probably the way they primarily looked at it was as sort of a source of permanent political advantage for their opponents, as a place where progressives could be parked when Democrats were out of power. And I think that that's the way they looked at it. I'm not sure they had a theory of expertise, but they may. Well,
- [45:16]
Robin
I'm Robin and I am excited to open my Crossplay app. I'm challenging John, my colleague at the New York Times.
- [45:23]
Ezra Klein
Robin played the word grunge, which has a G, which is four points. She got that triple word multiplier.
- [45:29]
Robin
I am going to take facts and make it faxes for 30 points.
- [45:33]
Ezra Klein
I might just take another two letter word here with whoa gets me at 23. I think this will put me back in the lead if my maths are mathing.
- [45:40]
Robin
I like to play it more from a strategic point of view and see where I can block the other player from scoring high.
- [45:47]
Ezra Klein
I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and coworkers and also you get to learn new words. Crossplay the first two player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today.
- [45:58]
Robin
I think he thinks he has this in the bag, but I'm not so sure.
- [46:05]
Ezra Klein
Let me ask you, as somebody who's done a lot of work on European right wing movements, how you think Trump and MAGA or the Republican Party under Trump, how it is similar and how it is different to what gets called the populist right in Europe. A sort of mistake we often make here, I think, is to see Trump as a one of one. But there are other movements that have echoes and have predated him and have changed since him. And you've done a lot of work writing about them. So how do you see Trump as being similar and how do you see him as being different than his analogues in Europe?
- [46:41]
Christopher Caldwell
I think the German case is very interesting to look at the AfD because that really is a populist party. They have a different system right the populist wing of their right is a separate party. It's not a two party system.
- [46:54]
Ezra Klein
But it would be like if MAGA here was not part of the Republican Party, it was its own party.
- [46:59]
Christopher Caldwell
That's right. So the one thing that struck me as very similar about Germany is that Germany has a. They have a whole set of constraints on democracy that have come down as a result of World War II and of the Holocaust more than anything, just as a lot of our constraints on free association and things come from our experience with slavery and segregation. One thing that struck me in studying Germany is that we have a tendency, because their misdeeds are not ours and we can face them more squarely, we have a tendency to look at them at the AfD as being a more radical party than Trump. I would say if I had to name the main Impulse behind the AfD, it would be something that I've heard Donald Trump say a lot, which is, can't we talk about the good part of our country too? I mean, we produced a lot of great composers, et cetera, et cetera. So I do think that that is something culturally that the Germans have in common with Donald Trump. France is sort of the opposite issue. Everyone in France, because fascism is sort of like such a horrifying proposition to them, and because they did have a collaborationist movement During World War II, everyone tends to call there anyone they think is unduly conservative, a fascist. But I don't see the National Front really as fascist at all. They have very few fascist traits. They've never called for coming to power through anything except elective democracy. What's really motivating them is immigration. That's the heart and soul of their movement. In a way. I think that's true of maybe not in every state, Trump's movement, but that's true of Trump too. And then Brexit is Nigel Farage's Reform Party. Even though it seems like we have no analogy to the European Union, we actually do. The European Union plays the same role, I think, in European thinking about populism that our administrative state does. It's a kind of outside authority to which decisions which we formally think should be decided through democracy get shunted off onto experts.
- [49:41]
Ezra Klein
When you look at these movements and you look at these arguments, do you see them as fundamentally procedural? It's about democracy, it's about the administrative state, it's about the deep state. Or do you see them as trying to achieve an end? That it's really about what goals you can achieve? Maybe in some of The European cases, and actually here, too, it's about immigration. It's about the demographic composition of the country. It's about the religious composition of the country. And the feeling is that there is a will that is maybe not even majoritarian, but maybe it is stronger among the people who traditionally. Or the majority in a state or in a country, and that it is about their feeling of being foiled and being up against a force that they cannot quite vote out of office, but is leading to a country they no longer recognize.
- [50:40]
Christopher Caldwell
Yeah. And it comes up particularly with nationalism and immigration and things like that. You know, Post World War II, people tend to look at things very procedurally, as you say. And so, yeah, I do tend to look for procedural commonalities in these movements. And to the extent that these movements are made up of baby boomers and Gen Xers, I think they tend to be procedural, too. So, in fact, when you talk to people in the national front about sort of like how they want to restrict immigration and you say what, you mean you want to restrict immigration from Africa or something. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And they're very defensive and as you say, procedural. There used to be a whole variety of goals that you wanted your country to achieve. Right. There was sort of like, you know, to the greater glory of God or whatever. Now they tend to be. People tend to look at them only as nationalistic. But there are two exceptions to this, I think, where people are less procedural. Okay. And one is in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, you don't. Because people didn't have as much control over the political system at all. They haven't acquired the habit of thinking about politics in terms of political procedure the way we have. And the other is among young people, the people who are too young to have drawn big benefits from just obeying the rules and following the order the way boomers and Xers did.
- [52:25]
Ezra Klein
One thing that struck me about that is that Trump is, by his nature, very un procedural, and I know less about the European context than you do, but he's been very straightforward. At least part of his immigration goals is where people come from. He's talked about not wanting people from shithole countries, and that whether Gen X and the boomers are procedural, it has seemed to me that one of the things that many of Trump's supporters at the very least, like about him is that he is an answer procedure. I don't think that what appeals to people about him is that they think he is small d Democratic. I think what appeals to people about him is that he just does things and he tells you what he thinks. He doesn't seem to be talking to you in the language of media training or bureaucracy or the sort of institutional grammar that you hear from both Democrats and Republicans, actually. And in his second term, much more than in his first, that the way he understands it is he's in charge and he's going to do what he thinks is best. And there is not for all. For some it's repellent. But for others, there is something very compelling about that action oriented, power oriented leadership that feels in a very deep way like a throwback to another time. You actually mentioned in, I think it was this piece, a piece about Trump as a kind of Hegelian, great man of history.
- [54:00]
Christopher Caldwell
Yes. I mentioned in a tremendous essay by John Judice, who talks about Trump as
- [54:08]
Ezra Klein
a historic catalyst and as a sort of a rupture between orders.
- [54:13]
Christopher Caldwell
Yes.
- [54:13]
Ezra Klein
And as a rupture of this kind of liberal institutionalist order into something else.
- [54:18]
Christopher Caldwell
Right. By which he does not mean to say that Trump necessarily knows he's playing this role or understands the transformation he's bringing about.
- [54:29]
Ezra Klein
What do you take from that? What do you think he's a rupture into?
- [54:34]
Christopher Caldwell
Goodness gracious. I mean, these are the things that seem to be sometimes forming before our eyes. Sometimes you get the impression that there's an actual shift of power from governments to corporations and things like that. Like there was an article in the Times about how more and more tech companies are producing their own power. They're not on the grid. They're sort of like they're owning a grid. They're taking on yet another attribute of a government. So it's been possible to imagine that we're going from states to corporations. So I don't know things form and unform. And I don't really see the final version of where we're heading yet.
- [55:21]
Ezra Klein
There's another piece that you wrote in 2021, working off of a book by a French political theorist that I think maybe offers another dimension of this. The argument of that piece was that America and the west were repaganizing. Walk me through some of that argument.
- [55:36]
Christopher Caldwell
I think that was Chantal Del Sol's book, which was a very provocative essay. She's a Catholic philosopher, but her basic way of proceeding is, look, we had all these institutions that were built around religion and specifically Christianity and in France, specifically Catholicism. They're now being undone. What does this mean to a civilization? She said, well, the best way to look at it is the last time this happened, which is when these institutions were being constructed out through the undoing of the pagan institutions. And so that was basically a typological comparative history of like, let's say, the 4th century AD to the 21st century. And I confess, I forget what I drew from that.
- [56:29]
Ezra Klein
I'll read you the paragraph in it,
- [56:30]
Christopher Caldwell
but I'm interested in such arguments.
- [56:32]
Ezra Klein
I'll read you the paragraph that caught my eye. You wrote Mistel Sowl's ingenious approach is to examine the civilizational change underway in light of that last one. 1600 years ago, Christians brought what she calls a normative inversion to pagan Rome. That is a prized much that the Romans held in contempt and condemned, much that the Romans prized, particularly matters related to sex and family. Today, the Christian overlay on Western cultural life is being removed, revealing a lot of the pagan urges that it covered up. I don't know about the whole. I'll leave scholars of paganism and Christianity to debate if these are the right terms. And I'm not thinking about things 1600 years ago, but to me, that actually describes a lot of what Trump is, this normative inversion of the values that dominated before him. He's this sort of return to this much more highly masculine patrimonial. The great man takes what he wants and grabs what he want and says what he wants and all these sort of post war institutions and ways of talking and niceties that when he violates them, that's very much part of his appeal. He's this kind of inversion. And every time he violates them, he is proving himself free of them. But to me, one thing about Trump and when he talks about his ability to shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters, when he says it's sort of I am maga. And what I say goes is I do think part of his appeal is that we have sort of push down in American politics the desire for a certain kind of strongman leader. And we've tamed many of those ideas in institutions and rules and this beautiful constitution. And part of what Trump both is able to do and part of his appeal, certainly to his most hardcore supporters, why I don't think they break with him over this issue or that issue is, is that he's more about a form of leadership and will and strength and impulse that he is representative of on an almost like mythopoetic level than he is about any kind of individual set of policies.
- [58:49]
Christopher Caldwell
It's interesting, but I see where you're going with it, and I think he does like to be strong. He has an idea of strength. I tend not to agree with you that that's what his followers are looking for from him. And I think that it costs him followers slowly but surely. And I think that if you're going to, you know, as Bob Dylan said, you know, to live outside the law, you must be honest. And in fact, to live as a sort of like roving, sort of like man who makes his own rules, you have to have a kind of a code. And so when Trump does things like say what he said about Rob Reiner,
- [59:31]
Robin
A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away together with his wife Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, sometimes referred to as tds. He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump. With his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness. And with the golden age of America upon, upon us perhaps like never before, may Rob and Michelle rest in peace.
- [60:22]
Christopher Caldwell
A number of Republicans have denounced your statement on Truth Social after the murder of Rob Reiner. Do you stand by that post?
- [60:29]
Donald Trump
Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned, he said, which
- [60:36]
Christopher Caldwell
I actually think might be the hinge moment of his entire presidency. If that's your idea of life and death, if that's your idea of how much respect human life deserves, then the public kind of has to reassess its idea of where it can follow you in matters that involve life and death, including war. And I mean, the fact that he's done this again and again. He did it second time with Reiner. He did it with Robert Mueller over the past weekend when he died. That's really transgressive. I don't, I don't think it's clicking with anybody, but it doesn't seem to
- [61:12]
Ezra Klein
cost him much support. And it has always felt like part of him. I remember the things he said about Gold Star families when one opposed him at the Democratic National Convention, Talking about John McCain and saying he prefers heroes who weren't captured. I mean, the transgression. Look, I think what Donald Trump says routinely and certainly what he said about Reiner was vicious and repulsive, but I have to admit, I cannot see on a poll that it changed anything for him.
- [61:40]
Christopher Caldwell
But it's so interesting.
- [61:41]
Ezra Klein
So why for you is it such a hinge?
- [61:43]
Christopher Caldwell
Because I say it's interesting because I have talked to progressive friends about this too, and they don't see it. They just think Trump is saying crazy things all the time. I think this is very different than the Gold Star family sort of thing had to do with the Democratic national convention in 2016, where the Democrats brought up a family and they were trying to use the death of this family's son to run down Trump. And it was kind of a political trick, the way the Trump campaign did the same thing with the deaths in the Benghazi consulate in Libya. But that was very different. I think that was just Trump standing up to a political trick. This is actually a kind of an irreverence. Do you know what I mean?
- [62:29]
Ezra Klein
So your argument is not so much that these things are hurting him in the polls now, because they're clearly not with his own base in any significant way. I mean, if you look from Rob Reiner to now, his polling is extremely similar. You're saying, though, that there is some set of moral policy corruption transgressions, that in some accumulative way that you feel he is building a pressure and that at some point, and maybe it's doing so in a slow way, he is going down slowly, but there is like the real possibility of a crack up, that people don't want this. That his people don't want this?
- [63:10]
Christopher Caldwell
Yes, I think that his people don't want this.
- [63:13]
Ezra Klein
And so just because I know I'm a weird, polling obsessed former Washingtonian, why do you think then we don't see
- [63:21]
Christopher Caldwell
it there in the polls, in the Pulse? Well, I think there's maybe a qualitative realignment and we do live in a kind of a polarized country. And so where are they going to go? To what other tendency in the Republican Party or outside the Republican Party are people going to go? It's very hard for people to move along an ideological spectrum the way they could in the older days. There's a big gap between different visions of politics now that no one represents. And so I think it'll be more of a quantum movement when that movement makes itself apparent.
- [63:59]
Ezra Klein
I also wonder, as Trump kind of pulls at the bonds of this movement, that I think he is able to hold quite a lot together through people's personal commitment to him, their personal fear of him to some degree in the Republican Party. But the question of what America first is, when it ranges now from Tucker Carlson to Marco Rubio to Mark Levine to all the Other people who in some level claim to speak for it, or who Trump at some point has allowed to speak for it. You did a very interesting profile of J.D. vance when he was running for Senate in Ohio. I wonder, as somebody who is more on the intellectual side of the new Right, if you think this is something anybody else can hold together outside of this one leader.
- [64:52]
Christopher Caldwell
A lot of politicians are really helped by having no resume whatsoever and to arrive in politics without owing anyone anything, or without having stepped on anybody's toes or without having accumulated resentments from voters. And Obama is an obvious example of that. Trump, I think, lucked out in landing on the Republican Party when it was brought into such crisis by George W. Bush. But I don't really see the principle on which the party is being held together. And an interesting thing, it's a much larger subject probably than we have time to deal with it. But there doesn't seem to be a replacement for the economic theory that kept a lot of largely apolitical middle class people attached to the Republican Party throughout the Reagan years. So, no, I don't see the replacement ideology because I don't really see the replacement system quite yet. I don't see what the system is going to look like after this transformation.
- [65:53]
Ezra Klein
This, to me is a way that if you told me by October Trump had really fallen, that he was at 34 or 32%, this to me is where it would come from that. I do think among the many parts of Trump's appeal was that he was understood to be a businessman, understood to be somebody who could work within a system that he told you and you believed was corrupt. And I mean, after losing in 2020, Joe Biden came in and inflation went up and people were furious and they remembered the Trump economy so the pre pandemic one as pretty good, and we'll see what happens. But if this war keeps going on and we get to oil at $175 a barrel and things begin breaking, I don't think people are willing to pay a cost for Trump's impulse here. And to have him create a surge of inflation and scarcity I'm not sure is survivable for a war that very, very few people were asking for.
- [67:06]
Christopher Caldwell
I think that's right and I think that that's why he's been moving so gingerly and trying to sweet talk the markets so much. I think we'll know a lot more in a couple of weeks about whether we're heading to that point that you described.
- [67:18]
Ezra Klein
What would recovery look like to you if In a year we're sitting here and it turns out that Trumpism is very much not over either. What do you think you will have seen, or what would be the signals of revived health?
- [67:32]
Christopher Caldwell
What I think a revival would look like. It would be an economic thing. That is the economic part of the closed border type. Politics would click for some reason that it hasn't already. And that is you would have a tight labor market, you would have dramatic wage growth in the lower part of the lower quintiles of the labor market. And you might even have a tariff regime where tariffs were being used to collect a certain amount of the national revenue that they were creating a slight preference for manufacturing in America, but without distorting international trade unduly. And that would probably mean that they would have to return to something like a uniform tariff. I mean, I'm not suggesting this as a policy, but I'm saying that if you had a Trump revival, that would be a big part of it, probably.
- [68:28]
Ezra Klein
I think that's a good place to end then. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
- [68:34]
Christopher Caldwell
I think everyone should read the Gulag Archipelago. I think that that is such a wonderful book. This is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's a story of his time in a Soviet prison camp. But it's so much more than that. It's three volumes. It's got a history of Russia, it's got a history of the Soviet Union, it's got poetry. It's really a very capacious book in the way that, say, Boswell's Life of Johnson is. Since we're talking about politics, I think if you asked me to name the best political book, it would probably be J. Anthony Lucas Common Ground, which is a book about busing in Boston, which is kind of the first political event that I have any memory of from being a child. And then I guess if I could recommend a baseball book, a book that really sort of changed the way, I don't know, look at both sports and writing, is Ball Four by Jim Bouton. I don't know if you know that book.
- [69:32]
Ezra Klein
I don't.
- [69:33]
Christopher Caldwell
Jim Bouton was a 20 game winner with the Yankees in the early 60s and he had two great years, went into the World Series, blew his arm out, and six years later he fought and tried to make a comeback. He taught himself the knuckleball and he came back with an expansion team, the Seattle Pilots, which are now the Milwaukee Brewers. And he kept a diary. And he was a very, very weird guy and kind of an intellectual and an an opponent to the Vietnam War. And he sort of wrote about the drugs that the players were taking. The it was a very kind of salacious book, but it's a really beautifully written book with a kind of great plot at the heart of it, actually, even though it's just a baseball season diary.
- [70:16]
Ezra Klein
Chris Caldwell, thank you very much.
- [70:18]
Christopher Caldwell
Thank you, Ezra.
- [70:30]
Ezra Klein
This episode of the israel client show is produced by jack mccordick. Fact checking by michelle harris with kate sinclair and mary march locker. Our senior audio engineers, jeff geld with additional mixing by amin sauda. Our executive producer is claire gordon. The show's production team also includes annie galvin, marie cassion, marina king, roland hu, kristin lin, emma kelbeck and jan kobel. Original music by aman sahota and pat mccusker. Audience strategy by grassini semilski and shannon busta. The director of new york times opinion audio is annie rose strasser sa.