I'm Ross Douthat, and this is the argument for. It's been a little while since I've said that intro, I'm back from my brief time away from the show and, oh, how I've missed all of you.

In my absence, Michelle and the redoubtable Erin Ritika have been taking a closer look at what President elect Biden might accomplish in his first 100 days. It's a series we've been calling the forty six today. We're going to continue that series with a look across the aisle and argue about what might happen with Republicans in the Biden era. Later in the episode, Sean Trendy of Real Clear Politics will join me to talk about where Trump ism came from and whether it might outlast Trump himself if any of us outlast Trump.

But first, I'm joined by my new colleague, Jane Kostin. Hey, Jane. Hey, Ross. Thanks for having me. Jane just came to the Times from Fox, where, among other things, she cohosted their policy podcast, The Weeds. And sometime in the New Year, she'll be joining this show not just as a guest, but as a host. So we figured we should have her on now. So she doesn't feel incredibly intimidated when the time comes to take the mic from me.

Do you feel intimidated now, Jane?

Mildly. Somewhat. That's good. That's good. Fear is the beginning of wisdom. Or is the mind killer one of the one of the two. One of the two. So let's just get into the show. There are plenty of long term questions about what Republicans might do, how the party might change or not during a Biden presidency. But right now, the most immediate force shaping the GOP is obviously a denial that Biden was even elected president at all.

And I have my own ideas, various ideas about the roots of this voter fraud, paranoia. But I want to start with your take, Jane, because along with your podcasting duties, you spent years writing about conservatism and the American right over at Vox. And I think it was always guaranteed that Donald Trump would claim that this election was stolen. But have you been surprised at just how many Republicans believe him?

Not at all. I think that it's worth getting at just from the top, that this is perhaps the ideal position in many ways, even without the conspiracy theorizing for Republicans, because Republicans are now in their absolute favorite position, which is disloyal opposition. There is no expectation that Republicans will have to develop a replacement for Obamacare. There's no understanding that Republicans will have to really do anything but be the opposite of whatever is taking place right now. But I also I'm not at all surprised that there are so many people who purportedly believe in the conspiracy theories.

And I say purportedly very much on purpose, because I don't think that Senator Ted Cruz is really convinced that this election was, quote unquote, stolen, especially with the very complex use of dominion and conspiracy theories that somehow only works in certain states, even though many of the states where these conspiracy theorists have taken hold didn't use those voting systems. I think Senator Ted Cruz or Senator Josh Holloway are all of these people have in many ways political and I would argue financial reasons for making these arguments.

And I know that that sounds cynical, but we live in a very cynical time and it's important this show is a cynicism free zone.

So I just want I just want to warn you about that. It's very it's sort of achingly sincere, like like I said, what kind of Wes Anderson moment?

So just before the podcast. No, I think that there very much is a sense that because Trump is an effective driver within the Republican Party, though, notably he drives people both towards the Republican Party and drives them screaming, fleeing away from the Republican Party. But he's a driver. Either way, it is extremely important to Republicans to go along with whatever he is saying, not necessarily for their own vote totals, but for fundraising and for reducing the instance of getting primaried by somebody who's perhaps more Trumpy than they are, as we saw happen in 2017 and 2018.

Well, so let's talk about some different kinds of voter fraud belief. Right? Because when you're talking about figures like Ted Cruz, who is not actually, I think, come out and said that he believes in voter fraud, he's just said these are very important constitutional issues and he'd be happy to argue a case before the Supreme Court about them. Right. And Ted Cruz had the very much you know, well, if you need me, I'm right here that anyone who has ever offered to do anything after, say, a large dinner would say, look, if you need me to do the dishes, I'm here.

But you'd really prefer no one call on you to do after I mentioned dishes. And when you're confident that even Samuel Alito is not actually interested in any kind of dishwashing to know the metaphore, it's a pretty safe thing to say. So that's you know, that's the Cruz. And then you have, I think, as you say, a large number of Republican officeholders who fear Trump rely on Trump, some combination thereof, and so aren't going to get on the wrong side of his voter fraud claims, especially, you know, as long as there's litigation pending.

So that's sort of the political side of things. And then there's the sort of grifts side of things in the sense that there are obviously people who see an opportunity. You know, Chris Ruddy, who runs Newsmax, you know, when he gives interviews about what he's doing with his network and their competition with Fox, he's basically saying, well, we're giving the people what they want. Right. He's not avowing fierce belief in voter fraud narratives, but his his network, it's there for what the audience wants.

But then there's the audience itself. Right. And so I will say that I have been surprised just by how many people I know personally who are in a pretty broad range from, you know, people I only know online, people I only know by their anonymous Twitter handles to people I know in real life, people who you'd go to church with, people who are, you know, the parents of college roommates, etc., just sort of extending out through social networks who seem totally sincere in their conviction that the election was stolen, who don't seem to me to be sort of doing a kind of performative partisanship, really.

Right. I I think it's important, though, that conspiratorial beliefs or conspiratorial belief systems of any kind, there is a reason why they are so tempting and they are attempting not just because they tell you something that you want to believe. And for in this case, the idea that Joe Biden, who was perceived and repeatedly the messaging from conservative media was that Joe Biden was somehow barely alive, but somehow this barely alive person got 80 million votes and won the presidential election.

That would be too deeply challenging for a lot of people. So it's far easier to find another source of this understanding. But also the temptation of conspiracy theories is not just telling people things that make life seem better or more understandable, but it's also the allure of insider knowledge, which I think that something you get at in your column a little bit and I try I really appreciated, is that the idea of questioning and doubting official forms of knowledge has been something that's been a part of movement conservatism for decades.

This idea that what you are being told or by official entities is untrue and historically it often has been. But movement conservatism has long prided itself on both doubting official forms of knowledge and on the benefits of what I would argue to be purity spirals, which I think gets into the grifting element of this. Right.

It's interesting you mention Louise Mensch, and last night on Twitter, somebody went and dug up one of her peers, this guy who ran something called the Palmer Report, which was also, you know, briefly big online in the aftermath of Trump's victory in 2016. And it was not surprising, but totally striking how exactly his coverage of 2016 matched a lot of what you see in the coverage of twenty twenty on the right. So, you know, a headline will say, Donald Trump's impossibly strong support in Wisconsin counties that used electronic voting.

Researchers find alarming Wisconsin pattern even when adjusted for demographics or rigged election to Wisconsin. Voting blocks had more ballots cast than registered voters. These are being applied to 2016 and the argument being that the election was rigged for Trump. And now exactly the same arguments are being made in twenty twenty. And I mean, so one one question is like how? How different is this fundamentally right than the pattern of conspiracy theories that's attended almost every American election in my lifetime?

They were pretty mild after 2012, the Obama Romney race. But, you know, the theories that John Kerry lost Ohio because of voting machines were very potent in 2004. You have clear patterns among Democrats. There's no reason to think that this stuff is confined to Republicans. But you also have under Trump a situation where the leader of the party is encouraging it and driving it on a scale that doesn't have you know, there isn't actually a comparison between this and, you know, Hillary Clinton saying, oh, it was an illegitimate election.

Trump is going a lot further, a lot faster, and has prepared the ground for this to, you know, sort of set up the argument that this would be a rigged election from the start. But does this then change anything? Is the Republican Party in Congress going to behave differently because of this stuff in twenty, twenty one than they did with Obama in 2013?

No, no, not at all.

And I want to go back to something which I think is important. I think that it is worth noting, if you if you read the Twitter accounts and read the pieces that are written by people who I think are not the only one would ask grittiest grifters within this movement, but are I think in some ways aligned with this movement. There is a repeat, a repeated phrase of, well, this isn't any crazier than your accusations regarding the Russia hoax, which I think kind of gives the entire game away.

The implication that we don't actually believe this. But this is our response to that. This is our response to what we believe to be your false allegations. We're just going to come up with our series of false allegations. But I don't think it changes anything. I think that the Republican Party will be as obstructionist as it was in 2013 or 2009 or any series of events, because I think that, again, the obstructionism in some ways is the point, because the ideal is that things do not get done, that the grinding gears of of Congress are thrown into disarray because government doing things is not necessarily the point of conservatism, not necessarily because of a evil, vindictive sentiment against the American people, but a real genuine and I think in some ways good faith, belief that government doing things is generally bad.

When the government works well and does things effectively, things happen that conservatives do not like.

And many of those things might be a mandatory 15 dollar minimum wage or UBI or Medicare for all. I think that that understanding for me that this conspiracy theorizing had that none of this happened had Donald Trump said, you know what I lost? Moving on, going back to Mar a Lago, see you guys in four years, whatever, I think that you still would have seen this level of obstructionism, the same obstructionism that you saw in 2009, the same obstructionism that you saw in 2013, the same obstructionism that I think has become part and parcel of what the Republican Party has looked like since the Contract with America back during the Republican revolution of 1994.

So let me try and qualify that argument a little bit, because I I agree with a lot of it. But I think there are a couple places where the power of the voter fraud narrative could make a difference to start out. Even though I'm not a government governs best that governs least libertarian, I am personally one of the people who's perfectly happy with a style of divided government in which Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Joe Manchin hold the balance of power in the Senate.

That seems to me to be a totally fine scenario for America at the moment. And I and I think that those people who I just named, particularly Collins and Romney, to the extent that they're willing to work with Democrats. Right. To the extent that there are a couple of Republican senators who are interested in sort of forcing some small scale legislative compromises as an exception to the pattern of obstruction you're describing, I don't think that changes because of this narrative.

What I do think maybe it changes is two things. One, there's a group of Republicans in the Senate who have ambitions to lead the party someday, who have sort of ambitions to be slightly Trump like figures after Trump and who have in various ways been critics of the kind of strict, you know, government action, bad kind of narrative. Right, that you describing these, you know, figures as various as Marco Rubio, Josh Haley, Tom Cotton to some extent.

Right. And those are guys who I think I think there's a world where there are a few things that. A Biden administration could do that, they would be supportive of as part of their attempt to sort of build a portfolio that's a little distinct from strict small government conservatism, I think in this world of, you know, a sort of pre delegitimized Biden that gets a lot harder for them and their incentives become more obstructionist than they would be, certainly, if Biden had not had such a narrow victory in the key Electoral College states.

Right. And then the other thing that I think this affects is just the power of Donald Trump as sort of permanent leader of the opposition himself. Right. Like, the more this narrative isn't just sort of a brief post-election thing, but sort of takes permanent hold. The idea that this was, you know, a genuinely stolen election, the easier it is for Trump to say I'm the leader of the party. I'm running again in twenty, twenty four and I deserve to be the nominee because, you know, the Democrats stole the election from me.

And I think that does also change. It changes incentives for Republicans who want to run in twenty twenty four. It changes incentives in twenty, twenty two. I think it has certain effects that go beyond the kind of. Will Mitch McConnell obstruct question? What do you think about that?

So my thought is what exact motivation do any of the people who think of themselves as potential future leaders of the party have to make deals? Perhaps I'm too cynical for any program, but dealmaking serves very little political purpose, because at a certain point, if you saw how Republicans have used Mitt Romney as a cudgel against other Republicans for being a RINO, a squish, someone who is willing to do bipartisan deal making. So I think that what leadership of the Republican Party will look like will be can you be the most obstructionist?

Can you be the person who stands athwart whatever Democrats are attempting to do, even if it's something you would normally agree with? I think what we're I've been joking repeatedly that we're going to start seeing a lot of deficit hawk in about, oh, a month or so, about a month and a half.

And you're going to start seeing the return of small government libertarianism when populism was so popular just a few months ago.

I think it's a reasonable point that the incentive structure for for dealmaking for people who want to lead the Republican Party in the future would be crappy no matter how Biden didn't want or what the narrative is. But what about Trump himself? Like, you know, Mitt Romney lost a presidential election and obviously hasn't gone away, flirted with a run in 2016, but was not an important political figure in American life. In 2013 or 2014. John Kerry lost an election in 2004, and Democrats were so eager to show him the door that, you know, they wouldn't even acknowledge that he had over performed the fundamentals and built an electoral college optimises coalition, as your old colleague Matt Yglesias would say.

So you know, there is not a recent history in either political party of someone losing a presidential election and then remaining sort of William Jennings Bryan Aske as the figure you expect the party to nominate next time. Right. Like, is Trump actually cementing his position as leader of the opposition or does he fade in some sense once he's no longer able to literally own the libs from the White House itself?

Donald Trump has never really shown exactly a great deal of interest in the act of governing. I was very interested that there was a conservative outlet that argued that perhaps he should run and become House speaker, which remained. I see that as not being a thing that's going to happen because the act of governing is extremely boring. It is extremely uninteresting and requires the type of dealmaking that does not make for positional statements or acts of pique, which is really what Donald Trump enjoys most.

And so I could see him becoming a figurehead, namely an understanding of what it means to be Trumpy and rather than being Trump himself. And I'll explain what I mean by that. So much of the messaging around this is not really based on Trump doing anything. And so I think that the idea of Trump is so much more powerful than Trump himself. And you'll even see Trump's support of conservatives making a similar argument, saying Trump, the person who fights on the Internet and says the wrong things.

It's far more challenging to deal with than the Trump, who they recognize as being a figurehead, the Trump behind which they can get all the judges they want, that he will approve of basically all popular conservative legislation, the. Understanding that he would just do whatever it is that he wanted them to do. All he required was their undying support. And even if you read any number of National Review pieces that are making the argument against what Trump is currently doing about judicial nominations, and he killed ISIS, which is arguable, you know, of any number of things that are like this list of achievements that no other Republican had put forward.

And it's just that Trump, the person, keeps getting in the way of all of that.

Yeah, I guess I think, though, that there's a distinction between what elite conservatives will want to do in the next four years, which I think would mostly be moved beyond Trump and find a new leader and what the narratives within their party will permit them to do. So that's a great place to stop because we're going to talk in the next segment about the future of populism and whether Trump ism as an ism could ever be more than just owning the Libs.

So we'll be right back. And we're back, so we've been talking about the ways in which Republican attitudes towards the election result have veered into conspiracy theories and what that might mean moving forward. And obviously, as Jane was just saying, that kind of paranoia is part and parcel of whatever one calls Trump ism. But now I want to take a broader look at what Trump ism might mean, how Trump has changed the GOP and how Trump, if you will, the party might remain.

And to discuss that, Sean Trendy of Real Clear Politics has kindly agreed to join me. And Jane, Sean, welcome to the argument. Oh, thanks for having me. I'm excited. It's a pleasure. I've been reading you for a very long time, and it's actually a privilege to have you on here. So please don't disappoint me. And I say that in part because in many ways you were one of the most important profits of the Trump phenomenon in the sense that way back in 2012 and 2013, after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama, when everybody else in the media was talking about how the Republicans needed to become a moderate, business friendly and very pro immigration party in order to woo Hispanic voters, you were arguing and doing a lot of election analysis and data analysis to back this up, that there were actually lots and lots of white working class voters, especially in the Midwest, who didn't turn out for Mitt Romney, but who could turn out for the GOP and that there was a totally plausible future where to woo them and maybe also to woo some minority voters.

The GOP would become more populist and nationalist rather than more moderate and Chamber of Commerce. And that's what's happened or has it right. So just before the 2012 election, you wrote a piece saying the future of the GOP is Trump. So tell us what that means. I know Jane has some thoughts on whether Trump ism is a real thing, but you're the prophet. Tell us your working definition of Trump, Venus and Trump ism and why you think they're here to stay.

I take the idea of Trump is, as you suggested, is a sort of abstract idea, a skepticism towards trade, skepticism towards immigration. The truth of the matter is, you know, the GOP has had this seed for a very long time. The Republican Party has always been kind of an uneasy alliance between upscale suburbanites and white working class voters going back to Nixon, sometimes less uneasy than other times. But you look at candidacies like Mike Huckabee's and Rick Santorum's in 2008 and 2012, even Pat Buchanan back in 1996.

And you can see the seeds of what ultimately became Trump ism. And so I think to succeed a Republican candidate in the future is going to have to latch on to some aspects of that. Now, do I think they have to go after Gold Star families and claim that judges of Mexican descent can't judge them fairly? No, I actually think that's counterproductive and was counterproductive for Trump. But I think, you know, the Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan economic libertarian and, you know, pretend like we care about social conservatism and everyone knows we really don't.

So we get the worst of both worlds. I think that GOP is just kind of a dead end. What are the core issues of a Trump GOP to the extent that if you imagine that Donald Trump disappeared tomorrow, which is very, very unlikely to happen, but you were sitting around with a bunch of Republican politicians, none of whom were celebrity businessmen, but all of whom were trying to figure out how are you responsive to the things that Trump has exposed and revealed?

You know, what are the twenty, twenty to twenty, twenty four issues that they would be fastening on? Would it just be trade and immigration? Would it be something else like what is the policy correlative of the kind of populism that Trump has may be pursued?

Look, I think part of Trump ism is Trump's celebrity. And a lot of ways Trump this is going to come here, hear me out on this full sentence. In some ways, Trump is like Barack Obama. No, you can't say anymore you're done. The sentence is done now. He's a singular person with singular appeal that is difficult to replicate Trump's status as a celebrity, as someone who's been a fixture in American life for 40 years now, I think bought him some loyalty among some parts of the GOP and allowed him to get away with things like, I don't think you can win as a Republican anymore.

Certainly not the nomination, but probably difficulty in the general with a path to citizenship is the core of your platform, the way George W. Bush did in 2004, and I think being unabashedly. Free trade is a tough pill for the modern Republican coalition, for better or for worse, judges are now litmus test probably for both parties. And I should step back and say, look, this is not what I want necessarily. I'm fairly pro immigrant and like free trade.

This is just kind of looking at the way the parties are shifting. I just don't see how you can be a party that depends on the Mahoning River Valley, you know, around Youngstown to win Ohio and be the Mitt Romney Paul Ryan unabashedly pro free trade party, regardless of of what the economics of it actually are.

Here's the thing here, because I think that, Sean, you have an understanding of Trump ism as Trump ism, meaning something. And I have an understanding of Trump ism as Trump is being the collection of ideas that have been projected on to Donald Trump. And the reason why I am dubious about what Trump ism will look like in the future is that every candidate who has thought of themselves as being the inheritor of Trump ism has picked up on one element or another element of what they believe Trump ism to be, but never on a cohesive whole.

And especially because you mentioned Pat Buchanan, you mentioned his run for office. But I think it's interesting. There's a terrific piece that I reference all the time from Matthew Walther about the history of social conservatism that Pat Buchanan ism or even what a social conservative understanding of politics before Trump looked like necessitated doing something about it. Pat Buchanan would have been in support of a effort by Congress to in some way bar abortion access. Further, George W. Bush attempted to put a constitutional amendment against same sex marriage in the Constitution, and that was very popular among social conservatives.

And as Rothhaar makes the point, Donald Trump just tweets about stuff a lot. And so I think that that has widened his appeal. But this understanding of Trump ism that has made it so effective also, I think limits its future because it can be anything to anyone. You can have an understanding of Trump ism that is opposed to free trade, but somehow you can set up a organization or an agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States that was a different free trade agreement than the other free trade agreement.

I would not be surprised if Ted Trump won another term. We would see essentially a TPP just have a different name. And so what all of this to me looks like is a haggling over semantics and requiring that these ideas be put in a very specific way rather than an actual political platform. So I think that what the inheritors of Trump ism who, let's be clear, look far better than they did when it was just Corey Stewart.

That was a rough time for all of us.

But what that looks like, I think it's really indicative of Trump isms future, that there is no one person who appears to be willing to take on the entire mantle because there is no one to mantle. Trump is Trump ism. And even you see that the people who have and we've seen over the last couple of weeks, the people who have attempted to be the most supportive of Donald Trump or of Trump ism are the people he is willing to cast off earliest.

We saw that with Jeff Sessions. And even now we're starting to see that with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who Donald Trump now loathes beyond all reasoning because he lost Georgia.

I agree that Donald Trump's kind of a singular figure and to be Trumpy without Trump is tricky. But I think that's true of all the kind of singular figures we have in American politics. If you look at Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, one of the problems she had with she was trying to run Barack Obama's, she even had some of the same tics, like her advisers would go online and say, like, hey, we knocked on two million doors today and made three million voter contacts, the exact same stuff that Barack Obama's campaign was saying in 2008 and 2012.

And Barack Obama's campaign just wasn't going to work for her. I think Joe Biden, you know, won with what we might call Obama ism, broadly speaking. But I mean, obviously, he had to run a different campaign. The trick for Republicans is going to be kind of the same as it was for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. And it's the same as Republicans trying to take on the mantle of Reaganism without being Ronald Reagan. You have to kind of find something that works for you as a candidate while keeping the broad contours.

Now, what are the broad contours of Trump ism? You look towards the coalition that he put together how it was different than other Republican coalitions, and it had a lot of the same core. Obviously, you know, it's not like we suddenly saw a world where California and Colorado were voting Republican and Alabama shifted towards the Democrats. The whole genesis of my missing whites idea was. Looking at 2012 returns from Ohio and people thought that Romney and Ryan had a very good chance of winning here in Ohio.

And you look at where things didn't go according to plans for them, and it was it was Appalachia and eastern Ohio and kind of the old decaying industrial steel areas of northeastern Ohio. And you ask yourself or I asked myself, at least, why did that happen? And I don't think you have to look much further than two things, like Mitt Romney had car elevators and he put someone who looked like a stockbroker on the ticket with him, which then opened up the door for Barack Obama to run a series of ads here in Ohio hitting Romney on being a vulture capitalist and, you know, taking away people's health care and destroying their companies, all of which was true to a certain extent.

But it ended with the tagline, Mitt Romney, he's not one of us. It just very powerful commercials that kind of drove the point home to white blue collar voters. Like you can't trust this guy. When I wrote that missing white voters piece, I certainly didn't have Donald Trump in mind. So I don't know that you have to have the exact Donald Trump argument, whatever that is. I think you need. If you're going to try to even make that path for the GOP, you need to back off the economic libertarianism.

So in our first segment, Jane and I talked a little bit about to what extent this deficit hawkishness make a comeback for Republicans in the next four years. And clearly, to some extent, it will. Right. Joe Biden will propose doing something or spending some amount of money in a large number of Republicans will suddenly once again discover that the budget deficit is way too high and we can't possibly afford it. But what I don't expect to see is a return of something like the Paul Ryan blueprint for transforming Medicare.

Maybe there'll be some Medicaid reform proposals. But there was this moment running from George W. Bush's Social Security reform push through the Romney Ryan campaign, where the Republican Party really committed over and over again to transforming entitlement programs. And to me, if Trump ism cashes out on any sort of macro policy change, like, it's probably that, you know, at least until something dramatically changes in the interest rate environment or something, you're just not going to see Republicans putting forward those kind of long term deficit cutting ideas.

And that that, to me, is a signal that there is a policy transformation here, not just a sort of personality shift.

Yeah, I think that what we're going to see is that part of the Trump ism of 2015, 2016 was making those promises based on an understanding that Donald Trump didn't particularly care about deficits and said so repeatedly. And you even have seen numerous Republicans over the last year saying like, oh, we'll get to caring about the deficit again. And that's something we're still worried about, even though they weren't so worried about it. The issue with the even the entire conceit of entitlement reform is that it has been posited that there are certain good entitlements and certain bad entitlements.

So what will happen, I think, is an understanding that Social Security is untouchable, but that Medicare and Medicaid reflect something else or that other entitlements that benefit other people. I think those might likely be on the chopping block, especially when it gives Republicans the opportunity to grandstand about how they alone are standing up for small government, especially as we're still in the midst of a pandemic that is likely going to require the spending of billions of dollars in increased health care output.

One of the other things here is that so much of this is done, not necessarily out of a deeply held belief on any of these Republicans, but on the understanding of what is proven politically effective. Donald Trump wasn't politically effective until he was politically effective, and there is every likelihood that he could be politically ineffective again. I think that one of the challenges we face is a deep recency bias in which we see our politics shaped so much so by Trump as a man, by Donald Trump, that we think that that is what it is going to look like in the future, where in two years there's every likelihood that we could see a completely different political calculus that sees the re-emergence of the libertarian moment that seems to happen every four to five years.

Whereas while a working class populism and an increased social safety net may remain popular, it will still be that voters are heterodox. Voters can support Donald Trump, but also support marijuana legalization and want better oversight for police and that same heterodox viewpoints among voters. I think are going to be deeply impactful on what the future looks like, especially because the shifts and changes are very likely to be unexpected and perhaps less contingent on a version of Trump ism that exists now or even one that is entirely reliant on Donald Trump.

Let me ask you, one of the recurring themes on the show, as in many places, is a sense of sort of America's ungovernability and the sort of permanence of gridlock and coalitions having this kind of dynamic where, you know, as one coalition grows, it loses voters and suddenly you're back to a fifty one forty eight fifty forty nine politics. And this is something you've written about a lot. You wrote a book about it to some extent called The Lost Majority.

It seems to me that American politics historically has assumed that you can have presidents who are elected with 55 percent of the vote, not that their coalitions will last forever, but that you can have these windows for governance where you have very powerful chief executives who win landslide elections, who can therefore either build big constituencies for their agenda in Congress or just bully the opposition party into going along with it. And part of what's happened under polarization, it seems to me, is that that possibility has been foreclosed.

But with it, we've lost sort of the way that America used to be governed. Right. Do you think that this sort of thermostatic or balloon dynamic is just have we reached a point of sort of electoral efficiency where it's just impossible to build a fifty five percent coalition anymore?

So I'm still trying to take 20, 20 in, because if you had asked me that two years ago, I would say no. American politics is basically how it's always been. And what's changed is that we don't have this universe where, you know, Richard Nixon runs for reelection in 72 with seven percent growth since growth has seemingly tapered off in the last couple of decades. That's why you're getting these close elections, because it's hard to make the case to members of the other side's coalition.

Yeah, you might not like everything I do, but look how awesome things indisputably are.

What was the LBJ line in 64? It was like, these are the best times since Christ was born in Bethlehem or something. Yeah, in a lot of ways they were in the like it was a straight-faced argument, Straight-faced argument and seventy two point eighty four, not a straight faced argument in two thousand for 2012. So you got close elections 20, 20 has really you know, I'm trying to decide how much I've shifted on this, but under that theory of how elections were the world where we had a thirty three percent contraction in the second quarter and two hundred and fifty thousand Americans die of a plague, this should not have been a universe where the popular vote should have gone Democratic by just four points, like Donald Trump should have gotten clubbed and Republicans should not have gained 15 seats in the House and held serve in the Senate, more or less.

So I hate to pin myself down because I haven't 100 percent thought this through, but I'm starting to come around to that viewpoint that, yeah, we're just really polarized right now, that America is a collection of so many different factions with countervailing interests that it is just really, really difficult to put together that coalition that appeals to more than 51 or 52 percent of the country.

I want to ask you to foretell the future. I've become, as I said in the first segment, more convince fearful that Trump himself will just persist as the leader of the opposition and the de facto nominee to be in twenty, twenty four. Do you think that's right? And if not, how how does how does any other Republican leader in this environment emerge, you know, assuming that Trump does not pass away or, you know, give up politics and move to New Zealand if he wants it, it's his you know, I think if he is if he had, in fact, lost this like some of the polls are on.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, I agree. I agree. I agree. I was just I just it's just a quite a it's just quite a thought.

If some of the polls had been right and he had lost by like 10 or 12 points and gotten blown out and lost Texas, maybe he would have had such the stink of a loser on him that it would have hurt him because part of his appeal is I win. But it was close enough that he could convince people wrongly. I will put the editorialising in there that he was a victim of a voter fraud, gave him something to believe that didn't cause them to change their mind about him and he will move forward.

I think the things that could change it is if he decides, no, I'd rather make a million dollars running my own TV network, join up with CNN or Newsmax or something and go out of. That way, or if Cy Vance follows through on what he has said he is going to do and Donald Trump is is not available to run.

No, no, but he can run. See, this is I get I've had this diversion of this argument or with with Michel, but I think legal persecution helps it. I mean, unless he's literally at a maximum security prison and even then it does not hurt him in his day if he wants to be the nominee. Twenty, twenty four. So if we really want to go down this road, like the best thing that could happen to Republicans is that he is in jail because that's that solves their problems.

They have an excuse for not supporting Donald Trump because he's unavailable. Can you run for president from jail?

You probably I mean, Eugene Debs did, but you can't tweet from jail.

And so, I mean, yeah, I'm sure that if anyone can find a way to tweet from jail would be Donald Trump. Yeah, that that is like, you know, you would have the persecution narrative that would keep his supporters on board while not having him running around insulting suburban voters and whatnot. From the Democratic side, the kind of slow drip from Cy Vance would probably be the best thing, like, OK, we have these new findings and you publish it, but you never quite get to the prosecution until maybe like right before the election.

I hate to talk about this purely through the lens of politics, because I think there's a very real chance there's something very bad and illegal in there. But since we do have our political hats on, that's the way I'm going to look at. Yeah, yeah. Like the political kind of as you put a persecution narrative probably helps him within the Republican Party, but I think is is very difficult for a general election. All right, Sean, there's much more to say, but for now.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks, John. So, Jane, before we go, since this is your argument debut, in order to haze you, I have to ask you for a recommendation for our listeners this week.

What do you have for us? So I've taken up bike commuting. I started this a couple of months ago where I just bike everywhere and I live in Washington, D.C., which, if you don't know, is about five feet across and six feet wide.

But bike commuting has really been an awesome part of my life. There are a lot of really good trails to go on. So my spouse and I, we took the Mount Vernon Trail last weekend and the weekend before we bike to Bethesda, Maryland, which is the hip hop in place that is in Bethesda, Maryland. If you know anything about that area. It describing it as hip hop agonist is probably the worst thing anyone has ever said about Bethesda.

But it's been great and I've become one of those bike people. I turned into Calvin's dad from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip where I started. I bike in terrible weather and I'm like, oh yes, my character is building and I think more people should bike. Excellent.

All right, Jane. Hywel. And that's our show for the week. Thanks so much for listening and I'll be back here next week when I finally reunite with Michelle. The argument is, as always, a production of The New York Times opinion section. Our team includes Allison Brusic, The Dhaba, Alyssa Gutierrez, Phoebe Lett, Isaac Jones, Paula Schoeman, Kate Sinclair and Kathy, too. Special thanks to Corey SREP and Michelle Harris. See you next week.

I don't know what twenty twenty four will look like if we are seeing Donald Trump running against Donald Trump Jr., who knows? Now, I have spoken that into the universe and I will reap the whirlwind.

It's Tiffany who's going to run the the the campaign against her father, actually.