← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
Heritage, MAGA, Venezuela, Trump, and the Great Ben Sasse
00:35:19
This week, Walter and Jeremy unpack the Heritage Foundation’s unraveling, MAGA infighting at Turning Point, the Venezuela crisis, Trump’s foreign policy, and why Ben Sasse matters in 2026.
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- [00:00]
Walter Russell Mead
Foreign. Is running out. You only have a few more days. And if you would like to support the future of tablets podcasts, and of course you do, with an end of year gift before December 31st, visit tabletmag.com forward/donate before the year is over.
- [00:41]
Jeremy Stern
Welcome back everybody, to this year's final episode of what really Matters. I'm Jeremy Stern with you in Los Angeles. I'm here as always with Walter Russell Mead of tablet, the Wall Street Journal, Hudson Institute and the Hamilton center at the University of Florida. Let's start with this week's news. First story of the week. More than a dozen employees of the Heritage foundation, including several of its prominent leaders, walked away from their jobs this week as the right wing think tank struggles with allegations of antisemitism and as the conservative movement grapples with its post Trump future. Heritage has been wrapped in controversy for more than a month after the think tank's president, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who routinely espouses anti Semitic views. Around 15 of the heritage Foundation's now former employees, including the leaders of its legal and economic centers, are joining the Washington based group Advancing American Freedom, started by former Vice President Mike Pence in 2021. In an interview, Pence said the Heritage foundation had also fallen because it had embraced elements of isolationism, stopped backing Ukraine in the war with Russia, supported tariffs, and backed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As health and Human Services secretary, among other things. Walter in our second story of the week, I'll ask you about the Turning Point USA Festival, which will touch on some related themes of the MAGEV and conservative coalition writ large. So for this one, I'll ask you a bit more narrowly about the Heritage foundation in particular seeming to fall apart. Is that news or faux news?
- [02:15]
Walter Russell Mead
I think it's actually news. Heritage has been a really important voice and institution on the right for a very long time. It was the most radical voice that was also in the mainstream. And that gap had, you know, that, that line. So you could say it was the edgelord among Washington Republican think tanks. And that edge has been getting harder and harder to manage, as we see on the one hand, you know, on the one hand, the, the center of gravity in the Republican Party has definitely shifted away from the kind of, say, traditional Wall Street Journal writing that people like me do in the Wall Street Journal and to a kind of edgier, more, I won't say more nationalist because honestly, we're pretty nationalistic too, but, but certainly less global in its focus less concerned about free markets and somewhat more identitarian. The center of gravity has moved, but, but the fringe has moved even farther. And so neo Nazi views. There was a time when that wasn't even considered part of the Republican discourse universe. Now there are enough people, at least on social media repeating this kind of stuff that it would be hard to argue there aren't any Republicans who think that way. And so for an institution like Heritage, whose donors and whose fellows kind of go, you know, straddle that range, it gets harder and harder to maintain your unity without blowing up. And at that point it becomes a choice of do you want to blow up toward the center, you know, so that the fringe deserts you, or do you want to move toward, not to the fringe, but toward the fringe so that you keep your kind of connections over there. And I get the sense that for at least some of the folks around Heritage, the idea was that there's more energy. The party has been drifting rightward, the country has been drifting rightward. And so the trend of what was once on the fringe is now less fringy that that was the most important political trend. So that as they try to maneuver Heritage in this age, they have opted to keep their connections to the Tucker Carlson's of this world. It hasn't particularly worked in that for the, for the Tucker Carlson's and people, you know, in that zone, actually they, they don't want an establishment or even formally established think tank kind of floundering over to say, hi, my fellow kids, I am here to work, you know, lead you, you know, they don't want that. They're building their own movement with its own momentum. I'm not sure that Heritage has made the right choice regardless now of morality or patriotism or anything like that, but just simply on the institutional survival niche. But, you know, this is a very difficult call. Again, I am not talking about whether one should seal off anti Semitism from you, for example, in from your universe of civil discourse. I'm just talking about how does one with no other principles in mind try to navigate an institution in troubled waters myself? It's, you know, there are just some things that you can't do and one of them would be to let anybody think that there wasn't a bright, bright red line between you and racism and hate, but that, you know, that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about what am I doing. We're talking about what they are doing and what I think consequences are. I think it inevitably, you know, the Heritage people, I'm sure, are hoping they're going to have a kind of a J curve, that they'll lose supporters, they'll lose credibility with some people. But then the very fact that they've been ostracized and denounced and have paid a price that will actually serve to sort of further legitimate them out there and so that they can maybe they would hope, I think, to have some influence over what is a growing movement. And it's possible that some people, say close to Vice President Vance or some others would see that reincarnated Heritage as yet again the sort of, you know, where Heritage has been now, the frontier between or let's say the Overton window and the gap in the Overton window. So maybe that's maybe that's what they're thinking. We'll see how it works out.
- [07:20]
Jeremy Stern
All right. Our second and related story. The stars of MAGA conservatism converged for the Four Day America Fest conference in Phoenix this week amid reports that the cohesion of the right a year into Donald Trump's second presidential term is showing signs of stress. The sold out Turning Point USA event brought together figures from the right, including Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr. Vivek Ramaswamy, Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck to kick around the dominant themes of conservatism. It marked Turning Point USA's first annual gathering since its leader, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed on a college campus in Utah in September. September the unification seen in previous years at the festival was challenged this year by interpersonal gripes and disagreement over how big the big tent of conservatism should be and what brands of conservative thinking it can be expected to hold. Shapiro set the tone when he condemned Carlson for hosting the white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his streaming show, as well as others he depicted as charlatans and grifters. Carlson later took the stage and dismissed Shapiro's attempt to quote de platform and denounce people. Ramaswamy, who is currently running for Ohio governor, said in his speech that pockets of the online right had become fixated on the idea of a right based on, quote, genetic heritage rather than one based on conservative ideals. The preeminent split among Turning Point's young conservatives, according to several reports, was mainly over distrust of Israel, over its war with Hamas, and the embrace of figures like Fuentes, a Holocaust denier. WALTER so this touches on similar themes, but the wider apparent split among the MAGA or Trump coalition and the question of who inherited it. What do you think? Is this news or faux News.
- [09:05]
Walter Russell Mead
It is news, but not surprising news in the sense that just as for in the MAGA world writ large, the unifying force is Donald Trump. There is no other unifying force. And without Trump's presence, it falls apart into all kinds of squabbling factions. TP USA turns out to be something similar on a smaller scale that Charlie Kirk was the unifying force. And without Kirk, there is no coherent movement. There's no there there. And it heightens the importance of leadership and charismatic leadership. This is actually, you know, sociologically active, angry young men are a big part of both movements. And as we're seeing increasing as the evidence comes out, they've got a right to be angry. They've been cheated on, discriminated against, betrayed. They absolutely have a right to be angry. And some of them may not get back what's been taken from them. But that's a group that very, very often does respond to strong leadership. Without Trump or without Charlie Kirk, you sort of go back almost to this kind of chaotic state of nature of a sort of restless swirl of elements looking for that lightning strike towering figure that pulls it all into some kind of an order. And what you see is a lot of different people competing to be that figure. You know, I think Tucker Carlson looks at himself in the mirror and sees the leader of a movement. Nick Fuentes probably sees himself. He's a leader of a smaller, more niche, but still very powerful movement, et cetera. And the competition among these leaders, until somebody emerges, actually accentuates the disunity of the movement as a whole, because you don't just have the kind of arguments over ideas and principles among people whose philosophical views may not have gelled or not fully cohered or whatever, but you've got the lieutenants of the aspiring leaders of the new world each fighting each other. So, you know, I think people used to say, talking about crime scene, you know, the criminal murder rates in some cities, that when you. When you have a struggle between various drug cartels, that's when you have the murders. And then when one cartel emerges, the murders stop or they drop down to a very low level. I think I'm not trying to compare the online right to drug cartels, but what I am saying is that we are likely to see some real infighting, prolonged infighting, until the movement starts to crystallize, until somebody rises up and pulls people together again. We'll see it as Trump approaches the end of his second term with this. When and if this happens, as Trump appears to lose the kind of vitality to be Trump because you can't really, you can't be Trump, you know, from the icu. You know, you, you got to be, you got to be out there, you got to be doing things. You got to be leading. So whether it's biological time clock or political time clock, if Trump's son starts being perceived to be setting, and obviously some people think it is already, then you're going to see a lot of creatures coming out in the twilight.
- [12:48]
Jeremy Stern
Just one follow up. I mean, I, it's too soon to tell and it's hard to make predictions about Donald Trump. But assuming he does kind of, you know, maintain his, his vitality long enough to, you know, participate and be a player in who gets the nomination, what role do you expect him to play? Is he going to enjoy kind of playing the kingmaker and withholding his support for a particular candidate until the last moment? Do you expect him to just kind of step aside and let the party kind of infighting and civil war and implosion take place while he enjoys everyone talking about how much they miss him? What do you anticipate?
- [13:29]
Walter Russell Mead
I think he'd want to control the succession. It would be foolish not to. And given his experience after the first term, I think he'd certainly want to turn over the Republican Party to someone who would guarantee pardons for him and his family. Because unfortunately, in the decline of our republic, we're at this phase now. I do think he won't want to formally designate an heir in any irrevocable way until quite late, because once you do that, then you've already your self marginalization process has begun. He doesn't want to become a lame duck one single nanosecond. So sooner than is necessary. So even if you know you've lost, even if everybody knows you're not going to be president in, in nine more months, they still know that you can decide who's going to be at least the next Republican nominee. So he will want to hold that power, I think.
- [14:30]
Jeremy Stern
All right, final story of the week. As the US Coast Guard continued to pursue an oil tanker in the Atlantic Ocean on Monday, following two separate attempted interdictions on Saturday, the Trump administration made clear that its targeting of ships carrying Venezuel Venezuelan oil was intended to push Nicolas Maduro, the country's president, from power. The campaign to intercept oil tankers is now reverberating beyond the Caribbean, drawing criticism from foreign governments warning about threats to global energy markets and pushback inside the United States over the risk of escalation. China, which is the Biggest importer of Venezuelan oil condemned the continued seizure of ships in the Caribbean, calling it a serious violation of international law. President Lula of Brazil also warned against escalation, saying at a summit Saturday that a, quote, armed intervention in Venezuela would be a humanitarian catastrophe. US Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, meanwhile, said Sunday on ABC that he viewed the tanker operations as a, quote, provocation and a prelude to war. President Trump told reporters on Monday that the U.S. intended to keep the 2 million barrels of oil that were on the first tanker that was seized, as well as the ships themselves. Walter, is this news or fo news?
- [15:37]
Walter Russell Mead
Well, we're clearly in a Venezuela crisis. I would say none of that is news in that it's all dependent on stuff that was already out there last week and doesn't tell us very much new, if anything at all about what might be happening next week. So this is more like pot still boiling kind of story. You know, the Chinese, Chinese saying something, you know, kind of so what. In a way, it underlines the fact they can't really do very much. And Trump has been careful to do a lot of things where people can yell and scream at him, but can't. Talking about foreign governments now can't really change or challenge his decisions or his actions. It's hard to see how he. How he intends to resolve the. The crisis or whether he even has is. Very often Trump jumps into things without a specific end state in mind. He just kind of moves into something, makes his move, see what other people do, makes his next move, see what they do, makes his next move. So he has a general vision of the sorts of things he wants to see happen. But is combines that with a total tactical flexibility. And that, I think, is what we're seeing in Venezuela. And nothing in the story that you were just sharing suggests anything different is happening. He doesn't want to. He does not want to send US Ground troops into Venezuela, barring perhaps if there was a surgical extraction of Maduro, maybe that would be a good thing from his point of view. Lula is unhappy. You know, Brazil condemns US armed intervention in Western Hemisphere. That's like headlines from 1835. So not a lot of news there, but it's certainly an interesting little crisis as it bubbles along.
- [17:47]
Jeremy Stern
All right, that does it for the news this week.
- [17:48]
Walter Russell Mead
Week.
- [17:48]
Jeremy Stern
Let's have the big conversation. So as we approach the end of the first year of Trump's second term, Walter, you took a look back at his foreign policy and asked whether, on balance, it's making the world worse or better off and you concluded that even taking into account the recklessness and obsequiousness of certain China and Russia policies, the chaotic nature of the tariff regime, the rush to collect often shallow or short lived peace agreements, and crucially, as you put it, the miasma of corruption and suspicion that hangs over it all. So even taking all those critiques together at face value, that the overall global geopolitical situation is, from an American standpoint, actually possibly in better shape than it was a year ago. So please explain what you have in mind.
- [18:41]
Walter Russell Mead
Let's begin by saying he's lucky that the geopolitical situation was as bad as it was a year ago. So we're not sort of comparing him to 1990 or 1945 or something like that. What it seems to me are the, you know, was America's most daunting and important problem a year ago was that our two most important alliances are our NATO alliance in Europe and our alliance with Japan in Asia. They're both basically dying. Not dying because we were writing mean notes to each other or anything, but because both the Europeans and the Japanese were still practicing politics of denial and avoidance and still committed to free riding on the United States as the foundation of their foreign policies. The Japanese, less the Chinese threat has grown more acutely, has been, you know, has been kind of powerful longer, and China has been made no secrets of its views of Japan. So they've been a little bit ahead. And I think they've managed the transition to Trump better than the Europeans did. But in a sense, both Europe and Japan, once the centers of global economic dynamism, have kind of gone to sleep economically as well as geopolitically. It's not just that they're, you know, not spending anything on defense. It's that they've allowed themselves to, you know, fall back from positions of leadership in industry, in technology. They've kind of been captured by, to a certain degree, by sort of not only welfare state spending, cutting into defense spending, but also sort of fantasies about energy or fantasies about soft power. They've stopped making policy in and for the real world and have sort of lost themselves in a maze of we're setting a moral example for the world and that will be transformational, etc. Etc. Etc. You know, how do you get them? How do you get them out of that? Because at the same time, the United States actually it would be very bad for us if China took over the Far east and forced Japan to become a satrap of China. And it would be bad for us if Russia overran Europe and, you know, sort of did if Putin were able to do what Stalin dreamed of doing. So we, you know, we do have an interest in their defense, and that's real. And people who don't see that are just missing the big picture. But at the same time, what Trump saw more clearly, I think, than. Than certainly the. The Biden people, was that the status quo ante, Trump, not anti Trump, was actually not sustainable, was, you know, that the Europe was falling further behind, it was becoming less coherent, it was fragmenting politically. I haven't even talked about the immigration stuff, but just considered as a sort of entity, the EU was less and less capable of managing security in its own region, much less being some kind of exporter of security in a global system. And that US Public opinion was not going to indefinitely stand by while Europe and Japan were less and less able to carry out their responsibilities. In essence, the rise of isolationism in America isn't simply a kind of a return to 1920. Know nothing Geopolitics as much as it is, in part, at least a reaction of anger at free riding. I think we've talked about this before. The Europeans, who first don't spend anything on defense, then spend more on welfare, then lecture us for being so mean to poor people because we don't have as beautiful a welfare state as the Europeans, and then because they feel sheltered by our military shield, make really great deals with Russia, so they're sort of making money off us back and forth while vaunting themselves all the time with their moral superiority, their greater dedication to freedom ideals and fighting climate change. It's beautiful, right? If only the world were that kind of a world. So it had to change. And if you. You can go back and you see that Bill Clinton asked them nicely, George W. Bush asked them nicely, Barack Obama asked them nicely, Joe Biden asked them. They blew them all away. They did not care. Really did not care. The status quo was working and they wanted to keep the status quo. So Trump's problem is, how do you make them, you know, they can't go on like this. How do you make things change? And what he has done is put on the table the possibility that if they continue with these ways, the United States might not always be there for them. It's a very destabilizing thing to do. It makes people angry with you. And you can see a lot of people in Europe are now like, you know, say, yeah, we need a strong Europe because we hate Trump and we hate America. It's not like, yeah, we need a Strong Europe to fight Putin. We need a strong Europe to fight America. And believe me, there are a lot of people in France. This is what they've been. You know, this is like Charles de Gaulle rising from the grave in glory and joy at last. And that's where some of my concerns about, you know, doing the right thing without as much suavity as you could have done may make things worse. But you can't argue. You had to get them really mad to get them to do anything at all. They. They wouldn't have done these things if they didn't believe that really there was a penalty for not doing them. I think maybe Greenland was a bit of an unnecessary provocation, which I see he has returned to today. The big picture here is that Europe and Japan are now, for the first time in a generation, actually thinking seriously about their own defense and actually coming to terms with the reality that without American support, they cannot survive, but then also understanding that if they take American support for granted, they cannot be assured that it will continue indefinitely. That's where they need to be for America's sake and also for their sake and for the sake of peace in the world. The. They need to be living in the actual world. And Trump has done this. There are other things, I think, you know, things are safer standing by Israel and enabling it to defeat Iran and its network of proxies. You can argue about tactics, you can argue about priorities, all kinds of things you can argue about. But, you know, two years ago, a year ago, Iran was a much stronger power. Iran was two years ago, certainly running the table in the Middle East. And the Biden people didn't really seem to have a lot of answers to that. They also, to give them fair credit, backed Israel after October 7 against a lot of political firestorm in their own party. Nevertheless, you know, Trump saw it through and did some of the really hard stuff. And as a result, what we see is that two big friends of China and Russia, that is to say, Assad in Syria and the Iranian regime are not where they were. Assad is now in Moscow. Again. This, you know, Trump, you know, that's not a Trump achievement, but it's an achievement, and it's the right direction. And Trump has continued in this. So the Middle east is in a different place now. We have new problems there. The Middle east doesn't. The problems in the Middle east are not going away anytime soon, but it's in a better state from an American perspective now. And, you know, yeah, we can talk about the costs, the human costs, and all these things in this real. But just standing back and kind of taking a Machiavelli eye view worked out okay for the United States Western Hemisphere. We don't know what's going to happen in Venezuela. As we were saying earlier, you know, how all that works out is anybody's guess. But Trump is absolutely right. And American presidents, in the prioritizing the Western Hemisphere is the right decision. People are acting as if it's an either or. You deal with China or you deal with the Western Hemisphere, you deal with Russia, or you deal with the Western Hemisphere. Historically, whenever things have gotten tough globally, that's when America actually pays the most attention to the Western Hemisphere. Not in order to avoid some sort of global political entanglement by concentrating on our own hemisphere, but by making sure that things are safe closer to home so that we don't have, you know, sort of problems close by at a time when we need our energy and our efforts to be active in a global sense. So this is. This is actually. Well, again, being Trump, the methods are somewhat unconventional. The speeches are extremely unconventional. The tactical flexibility is, as usual, mind blowing. But this is actually what the kind of thing a Roosevelt or an Eisenhower would do in this situation is. Take a good hard look which countries in our hemisphere are aligning themselves with our enemies, are actively seeking to undermine our security in this hemisphere, and let's make sure they stop.
- [29:27]
Jeremy Stern
One final question, speaking of Roosevelt and Eisenhower. So there's plenty of Trump administration left, but now that we've had five cumulative years of it, would you, at this point, still place Trump squarely in the Jacksonian tradition, or do you see other traditions of American foreign policy having emerged? Is Trump a tradition at this point unto himself? What would you say?
- [29:50]
Walter Russell Mead
I'd say, again, Andrew Jackson remains the kind of marker, let's not forget. Andrew Jackson mobilized the fleet against France, and he actually shelled the island of Sumatra in the 1830s, I think. So we should not have this picture of ourselves of an Andrew Jackson who was an isolationist. That is not what Jackson was. And so, yeah, I would say that Trump continues to make noises of Trump's sort of policy toward financial institutions in the financial system. Very much like Andrew Jackson's. Trump's sense of unconstrained American sovereignty, very much like Andrew Jackson's. Trump's attack on entitled civil servants and a desire to put the entire government, you know, under his personal authority. Andrew Jackson is right there. Actually. Trump's hatred of the sanctuary city laws is. Is like Jackson's hatred of South Carolina's nullification law cannot, you know, mayor of New York, you know, mayor of San Francisco. You cannot veto a national law. Shut up. Get out of the way. All right, so there are many, many ways that, that the kind of Jacksonian spirit continues to animate the Trump movement. I think Jackson had some pretty nice quotes under his portrait now that we're were putting cheat notes under presidential portraits in the White House. And Jackson came out pretty well.
- [31:34]
Jeremy Stern
All right, that does it for the big conversation. Let's end on the tip of the week. Walter, do you have a New year's resolution for 2026?
- [31:42]
Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, I kind of do. Today is the day that the news broke again. We're talking the Tuesday before Christmas. The news broke that my friend Ben Sass told the world that he has advanced pancreatic cancer and. And probably not a very long time left. And as I've looked at the responses that have been flooding in, both from people I know by emails and phone calls and from what I see on social media out there. But he sees this amazing thing. All kinds of people who really did not like Ben Sasse's politics. Some of the decisions that he made are kind of spontaneously coming in to say, he is a great man. He is a good man. I liked him. I like working with him. It's amazing, actually. I think Gavin Newsom is one of the people who has done this. We need more people like that in American life. Ben absolutely has principles that he will not budge on at whatever cost. But he also has a deep regard for the humanity of everybody and a. And a clear sense of his own fallibility. And he combines this with a dedication to the public interest as he sees it, a desire to serve, a willingness not, you know, not to do this by trying to claim the highest place for himself, but by finding the place where he can be useful and doing the best he can in that place. I want to be more like Ben Sasse. And so my New Year's resolution, my new New Year's resolution is to see if there aren't some ways I can't be a little bit more like ben Sasse in 2026.
- [33:48]
Jeremy Stern
All right, sad but beautiful way to wrap up 2025. Thanks to our producer Josh Cross, thanks to Alex Vitana of AT Hudson, and my co host, Walter Russell Mead. I'm Jeremy Stern. We'll see you in 2026. And until then, we wish all our listeners a merry and meaningful Christmas and a healthy and happy new year.