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Feb. 10, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

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GOP 2024: Doubling Down on Populism—or Returning to the Establishment? | SYSTEM UPDATE #38

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	Good evening, it's Thursday, February 9th.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Tonight, is the Republican Party plotting to return to its decades-old establishment dogma on both foreign and economic policy?
	The dogma that prevailed before the emergence of Donald Trump will review just how radical many of Trump's rejections of bipartisan DC consensus were.
	Because many of those, by design, have been buried under a relentless orgy of hysteria about allegiance to the Kremlin and the insurrection and the circus that was created around Trump.
	But what Trump accomplished in the 2016 primary, winning while rejecting most long-standing Republican and Democratic orthodoxies on key issues, was quite stunning.
	And now the question is whether the GOP's embrace of him was done because of that ideological heresy or despite it.
	For our interview segment, we'll speak to Josh Hammer, the Opinion Page Editor of Newsweek, who has an important and provocative article this week asking that question, whether the GOP is preparing to move as far away from Trump as possible to ensure that its candidates, like the Democratic Party nominee Biden or whomever, supports the same establishment dogma that everyone in power in DC has always supported.
	As a reminder, System Update is now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple, and other popular podcast platforms.
	Just follow System Update on whichever platform you use and you'll be notified when the new episode is posted, which will always be the day following our live broadcast right here on Rumble.
	As we do every Tuesday and Thursday, as soon as we're done with our one-hour show here on Rumble, we'll move to Locals for an interactive aftershow to take your questions and comment on your feedback.
	To obtain access to that aftershow, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community.
	The red Join button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page.
	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	The Trump campaign of 2016 was full of consequential and surprising challenges to bipartisan orthodoxy.
	Much of that has been forgotten because his campaign and the first two years of his presidency were drowned by the CIA-manufactured Russiagate scandal and the accompanying Mueller investigation, while the latter part of his presidency and post-presidency have been dominated by the events of January 6th and various attempts to prosecute Trump or at least render him ineligible to run again.
	All of those scandals and that circus and those distractions served, I think at least partially by design, to obscure his very aberrational frontal attacks on the key prongs of bipartisan consensus.
	That two-party or unit party dogma that has ruled Washington for years.
	Trump's ability to deliver To the Mitch McConnell-led establishment wing of the Republican Party, their key priorities—tax cuts for large corporations and three solidly conservative Supreme Court judges—made them willing to go along with many of Trump's heterodox and sometimes threatening views, especially since they were often able to weaponize old-school establishment Republican figures from within.
	Such as Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley and John Bolton, along with a string of career military officers who ended up embedded in the administration, such as John Kelly, James Mattis and H.R.
	McMaster, all to subvert many of the policy goals Trump wanted that were anathema to that D.C.
	consensus.
	But we should not allow that year-long DC war to either distract from Trump's abandonment of GOP orthodoxy or actively to subvert it, to make us forget how unexpected Trump's 2016 victory really was and what a radical change it represented, not just stylistically, but to the long-standing prongs of core Republican ideology.
	Recall this now notorious clip of DC know-it-all insiders such as ABC News' George Stephanopoulos and the New York Times' Maggie Haberman just laughing in Keith Ellison's face after the Minnesota Democrat said he believed Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination.
	All I want to say is that anybody from the Democratic side of the fence who thinks that, who's terrified of the possibility of President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved because this man has got some momentum and we better be ready for the fact that he might be leaving the Republican ticket.
	I know you don't believe that but I want to go on.
	We had Jesse Ventura in Minnesota win the governorship.
	Nobody thought he was going to win.
	I'm telling you, stranger things have happened.
	Do you see how the people who are most authoritative and who are most smug about how in touch they are with the American voter, how much they know how the American political system works, just continuously are the people who are the most wrong?
	They couldn't even comprehend what Keith Ellison was saying, that people are so disgusted with the political system that they're being driven into the arms of people, unconventional candidates, Like Jesse Ventura and you could even put Barack Obama when he ran in 2008 who postured the same way into the arms of those people.
	They're so insulated and so entrenched in the idea that they understand how the rules of Washington work that they just couldn't even acknowledge the possibility that Donald Trump would end up winning the nomination.
	The same thing happened, exactly the same thing, over and over, including on Bill Maher's program, after Ann Coulter made a similar prediction.
	Not only Maher's audience, but the always-wrong MSNBC host, Joanne Reed, who's paid millions of dollars to talk about politics, regarded Coulter's prediction as evidence of insanity.
	Watch.
	Okay, here we are.
	Ann, which Republican candidate has the best chance of winning the general election?
	-Of the declared ones right now, Donald Trump.
	-I especially like the -- -Well, what about of all them?
	I mean, is Scott Walker... You think laughter from the audience.
	I mean, it's that same smug look, like she's insane, like they know everything, when they couldn't be more out of touch.
	Now, it wasn't just a handful of examples where that was illustrated, although those are some pretty representative shows I just showed you, not exactly obscure on the fringes.
	The consensus of the DC political and media class in both parties and on both sides of the ideological spectrum in 2015 and 2016 was that the rules of American democracy are simply rigged To ensure that the American presidency is available only to establishment figures like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John McCain, Mitt Romney, all of whom believe in and affirm the same fundamental ideological precepts about both foreign and economic policy.
	And that's why they really did believe that it was inherently impossible for Trump to ascend to the American presidency precisely because in so many ways he did not.
	Watch how many people reacted the same way.
	There's not going to be a President Donald Trump.
	That's not going to happen.
	Donald Trump will not become President!
	He's not going to be president.
	He is not.
	Donald Trump is not going to be president of the United States.
	Take it to the bank.
	I guarantee it.
	Alright, alright.
	I think if he becomes the president here, make it great because the States is already great.
	I think that man will be president of the United States right about the time that spaceships come down filled with dinosaurs and red capes.
	On that note, Tom.
	Take it from me.
	How about that?
	And then of course there's Donald Trump.
	Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.
	Donald Trump.
	Just last week, he confirmed to the National Review that he is again considering a run in 2016.
	Do it.
	Do it.
	Look at me.
	Do it.
	I will personally write you a campaign check now on behalf of this country, which does not want you to be president, but which badly wants you to run.
	So when you stand and deliver that State of the Union address, in no part of your mind or brain can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering a State of the Union address?
	Well, I can imagine it in a Saturday night skit.
	I can show you 10, 15, 20 minutes of similar things.
	Trump will not be president.
	He will never be president of the United States.
	I could show you 10, 15, 20 minutes of similar things.
	Now I found the most interesting and most amusing one, the example of John Oliver, a multimillion dollar British educated British citizen, British subject, who anointed himself explicitly spokesman for the American people.
	He said, the American people don't want your candidacy, but I do.
	I'm the comedian.
	I would love it.
	It'll be entertaining.
	Of course, you're never going to win.
	The American people hate you.
	They have no sense at all of how out of touch they are, how insulated they are.
	In their elite culture, you can see it.
	Now, some of those examples may have been tactical, people insisting that Trump would never be president as a way to render him unpresidential.
	But I think most of it was sincere.
	American democracy has, in fact, all sorts of safeguards constructed to ensure that only those who affirm establishment power and perpetuate the status quo ascend to power.
	That's what it's designed to do.
	People who have been ensconced in Washington for decades understand that instinctively.
	They're like trained dogs who wear a shock collar that will inject them with pain if they wander outside the limits of the electrical fence outside their homes to make sure they don't wander away.
	At some point, quite quickly, those dogs learn where those limits are and they obsequiously obey them because they have been trained on an instinctive level to know that any attempts to transgress those limits that have been imposed on them will result in pain and punishment.
	And at some point, you don't even need the shock holler anymore.
	The dogs just internalize their limits and submit to them.
	And that's how people in Washington are, the ones we just showed you.
	They have been trained where the limits are.
	They know where they are.
	And they know in their bones that nobody is permitted to go outside of those limits and still be politically viable.
	In 2013, then-President Barack Obama spoke to the Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib, and he quite compellingly explained, Obama did, one of the key truths to understanding how Washington has functioned for decades.
	Namely, the idea that the two political parties are so radically different, can never agree on anything, are always at each other's throats, have fundamentally different ideological frameworks, is fiction.
	It's theater.
	It's a script to placate the masses and make them believe American democracy is a never-ending war between two radically different camps and that therefore you get to go and choose which of these fundamentally different camps will govern.
	Obama knew that the reality, at least before Trump, was the exact opposite.
	The establishment wings of both parties agree on most things.
	They're friends.
	There was just a clip Just a couple weeks ago of Nancy Pelosi's daughter, who did a documentary on Nancy Pelosi, going onto The View and talking about how basically she considers George Bush her surrogate father.
	Because even though they fight, her mother and George Bush fight in front of the cameras, in reality they're extremely close friends, basically family.
	That's how the American elites have always seen one another.
	Obviously Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi Or Chuck Schumer and Kevin McCarthy have more in common with one another as very wealthy, powerful Washington figures than they do with the vast majority of American people on whose behalf they claim to speak.
	They share the same fundamental framework for how the United States should be governed.
	Here's how Obama, I think, very compellingly explained it.
	This, by the way, Jerry, I think is a good example of something that's been striking me about our politics for a while.
	When you go to other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and wider.
	Here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans, we're fighting inside the 40-yard line.
	Maybe... You fooled most people on that in the last few months, I'd say.
	No, but... Well, no, no, no.
	I would distinguish between the rhetoric and the tactics versus the ideological differences.
	I mean, in most countries, you've got -- people call me a socialist sometimes, but no, you've got to meet real socialists.
	You'll have a sense of what a socialist is.
	I mean, I'm talking about lowering the corporate tax rate My health care reform is based on the private marketplace.
	Stock market's looking pretty good last time I checked.
	And, you know, it is true that I'm concerned about growing inequality in our system, but nobody questions the efficacy of market economies in terms of producing wealth and innovation and keeping us competitive.
	The establishment wings of both parties are just playing within the 40-yard lines, playing for a few yards of difference.
	The entire rest of the field is off limits from debate and challenge in Washington.
	They're out of bounds from the actual game and how it's played.
	And to the extent it looks different, because they're constantly hurling invective at one another, as Obama's explained, that's just theater.
	That's done for political rhetoric, for political advantage.
	But the reality is exactly what he said.
	And that was indeed true of American politics for many, many decades.
	Any figure who stepped even slightly outside the bounds of establishment thought, such as George McGovern in 1972 or Barry Goldwater in 1964, were crushed, destroyed.
	They had no chance.
	And because Trump was so far outside of the boundaries of what could be said, not necessarily what could be done, that's always different, but what could be said, the well-trained people in Washington saw him outside of that fence.
	They've all been trained to stay within, and they concluded, I think sincerely, that he could never win.
	The rules they were taught and that they obey make that impossible.
	Now we're less than two years in the 2024 election.
	We're never on this show no matter how close we get to the election.
	We're never going to do horse race punditry.
	I find it vacuous and boring and pointless.
	But it is vital to ask whether the Trump era really ushered in radical changes and ideological beliefs both on the level of leaders and voters Or whether Republican voters and leaders and even voters tolerated Trump despite those aberrations and now are eager to return to a more traditional establishment Republican who resides well within those 40 yard lines like John McCain and Mitt Romney did and like Mitch McConnell does.
	In a few minutes we're going to speak with Josh Hammer, the opinion page editor of Newsweek, who had a great column early this week designed to ask whether Republicans' Trump era changes in their views on foreign and economic policy were just a one-time only aberration dependent on Trump and his celebrity.
	And whether the Republican Party is now plotting to return to its pre-Trump establishment pieties by rejecting Trump in favor of a more traditional Republican candidate.
	But before doing that, I think it's vital to recall, before talking to Josh, just how heterodox was Trump's 2016 campaign.
	I remember the first time that I really paid a lot of attention to Donald Trump was when he came out and said he thought that the United States should be vastly more even-handed in how it mediates the dispute between Israel and Palestinians, that we shouldn't be so one-sided in favor of Israel because when we do so we lose credibility, that we should try and forge a peace because the ongoing conflict harms American interests, and we should be less pro-Israel and more neutral.
	I don't know if you agree with that, that was when neocons really started hating and distrusting Trump, that he would come out and say something that no one in either party would ever say.
	Not Bernie Sanders would say that, nobody would ever say that.
	Certainly he's considered a mainstream political candidate.
	That's what establishment mavens by definition fear most is unpredictability and a willingness to challenge the core prongs of American power that have been in place on both foreign and economic policy for decades.
	Now just as a reminder for how Widely afar.
	How far out of balance Trump was when it came to foreign policy, particularly for a Republican candidate.
	Let's remember that he ran in the 2016 campaign at least as much by denouncing the Bush-Cheney foreign policy and the neoconservative ideology as he did Democratic Party foreign policy.
	You wind up a Republican presidential candidate And they just start spouting about the need to be strong, to go to war, to fight everyone, to vanquish authoritarianism, to defend democracy.
	One of the very few candidates who didn't do that, Ron Paul, showed that in 2008 you could actually have success by challenging that.
	He went deep into Ohio, to Iowa and South Carolina and talked to the most conservative Republican voters and said things like, Why are we at endless war?
	Why are we fighting wars in these faraway places that have no bearing on your life?
	And he showed, I think, that there was an appetite, a growing appetite in the Republican Party for that kind of re-evaluation of typical American, neoconservative, Bush-Cheney foreign policy.
	And that was something that, a breach that Trump, with much more charisma and celebrity than Ron Paul had, was able to step into.
	Now, let's look at just a couple of examples with Trump on the campaign trail in 2016, where he said things that would have been completely unthinkable for a Republican nominee, let alone a viable one who ended up winning their nomination, to actually say on foreign policy.
	Here he is first in a 2015 interview with a Guardian editor.
	And you've talked a lot about Syria, and you talked a lot about your opposition to the war in Iraq in the beginning, and your concerns about the United States jumping in.
	A lot of these interventions have been motivated by the desire to spread democracy, to promote human rights.
	Is that an appropriate objective of foreign policy?
	We're nation building.
	We can't do it.
	We have to build our own nation.
	We're nation building.
	We're trying to tell people that have had dictators and worse for centuries how to run their countries.
	We have to build our own country.
	We have to rebuild the United States.
	And look what's happened in Iraq.
	We got rid of Saddam Hussein.
	I don't think that was a very helpful thing.
	Iraq is a disaster right now and it's going to be taken over by Iran and ISIS.
	Now, one of the things Josh did in his Newsweek article was examine the alternatives who have thus far materialized to be potential opponents to Trump and the Republican Party.
	They're people like Mark Pompeo and Nikki Haley, who's now announced Nikki Haley is, and even John Bolton.
	Can anyone imagine any of them saying any of that?
	This is completely the opposite of their world of view.
	They're always in favor of regime change and all the worse that Trump just got done announcing.
	And we'll see how Ron DeSantis thinks about these things.
	We haven't heard much from him on these questions over the last four years, for good reason.
	He's been governing the state of Florida.
	This has not been in his purview.
	He does have a record in the House of Representatives as a Republican member of Congress.
	Prior to that, that I would submit is more aligned with Republican orthodoxy on foreign and domestic policy.
	Although with some aberrations, he was opposed to the regime change war in Syria, for example, whereas Mike Pompeo was for it.
	And I'm very interested to see whether if Ron DeSantis runs, he'll emerge as a different kind of candidate on these issues, knowing that the Republican Party is at least willing to tolerate, if not demanding actively, a different way of thinking about the world.
	But this that Trump said, Was unimaginable for a Republican candidate, especially one who went on to win.
	Here's just one more example of Trump with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 debate where he's attacking her essentially for being a warmonger and for interfering in places around the world the United States has no interest in interfering in.
	Aleppo is a disaster.
	It's a humanitarian nightmare.
	But it has fallen from any standpoint.
	I mean, what, do you need a signed document?
	Take a look at Aleppo.
	It is so sad when you see what's happened.
	And a lot of this is because of Hillary Clinton.
	Because what's happened is, by fighting Assad, who turned out to be a lot tougher than she thought, and now she's going to say, oh, he loves Assad.
	He's just much tougher and much smarter than her and Obama.
	And everyone thought he was gone two years ago, three years ago.
	He aligned with Russia.
	He now also aligned with Iran, who we made very powerful.
	We gave them $150 billion back.
	We give them $1.7 billion in cash.
	I mean cash, bundles of cash as big as this stage.
	We gave them $1.7 billion.
	They have aligned.
	He has aligned with Russia and with Iran.
	They don't want ISIS, but they have other things because we're backing, we're backing rebels.
	We don't know who the rebels are.
	We're giving them lots of money, lots of everything.
	We don't know who the rebels are.
	And when and if, and it's not going to happen because you have Russia and you have Iran now, but if they ever did overthrow Assad, you might end up with, as bad as Assad is, and he's a bad guy, but you may very well end up with worse than Assad.
	So he was running against Hillary Clinton, who not only supported the Iraq War in 2003, but even after seeing the disaster that it wreaked in that region, creating incredible amounts of instability, putting a government in Baghdad that was more friendly to Iran than anybody else, strengthening supposedly our biggest adversary in the region, at the same time creating the vacuum that even Tony Blair admits gave rise to ISIS, which we then needed to go and fight another war to stop.
	She watched all that happen, and less than a decade later, she wanted to go do the same thing to Syria.
	She was angry, in fact, that Obama wasn't letting her and the CIA do more to overthrow Assad, even though he had authorized $1 billion in clandestine money to overthrow him.
	Of course, no vote in Congress.
	She also was behind the war in Libya and the attempt and a successful attempt to remove Gaddafi you may recall when she giggled and cackled upon learning that Gaddafi had died and then three weeks later the U.S.
	stopped caring and it turned into a place of extreme instability and cruelty and slavery and it created the migration crisis in Western Europe with tons and tons of refugees trying to Free the country?
	And even after every one of those disasters, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and most Republicans Trump had vanquished, were behind the same foreign policy.
	To this day, they are.
	He was the only one willing to stand up in either party and challenge that.
	He actually won because of it.
	So the question now is, is the Republican Party still aligned with this view?
	He's right now the only one saying we should stop supporting and fueling the war in Ukraine.
	Nikki Haley, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, DeSantis a little bit, seem on board with that.
	We'll see from DeSantis.
	But Trump again is the only one saying that.
	And the question is, does the Republican Party want a continuation of this rejection of old school Republicanism, or does it want to go back to that?
	Just to remind you just how aggressive Trump's challenges were, here from March of 2016 is, in the Washington Post, Trump even questioning the need for NATO, outlining non-interventionist foreign policy.
	Quote, Donald Trump outlined an unabashedly non-interventionist approach to World Affairs Monday, telling the Washington Post editorial board that he questions the need for NATO, which has formed the backbone of Western security policy since the Cold War.
	Speaking ahead of a major address on foreign policy later Monday in front of AIPAC, Trump said he advocates a light footprint in the world.
	In spite of unrest abroad, especially in the Middle East, Trump said the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding domestic infrastructure.
	In other words, stop protecting Western Europe, devoting all of our energy to this alliance and our resources to this alliance, and take care of America instead.
	That was radical at the time.
	Trump said that UN's involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years, breaking with nearly seven decades of consensus in Washington.
	Quote, we certainly can't afford to do this anymore, Trump said, adding later, quote, NATO is costing us a fortune.
	And yes, we're protecting Europe with NATO, but we're spending a lot of money.
	Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countless countries in NATO, and yet we're doing all of that lifting.
	They're not doing anything.
	And I say, quote, why is it that Germany's not dealing with NATO on Ukraine?
	Why is it that other countries that are in the vicinity of Ukraine, why aren't they dealing?
	Why are we always the one that's leading?
	Potentially the third world with Russia?
	I do think it's a different world today.
	And I don't think we should be nation building anymore, Trump said.
	I think it's proven not to work.
	And we have a different country than we did then.
	We have $19 trillion in debt.
	We're sitting probably on a bubble.
	And it's a bubble that if it breaks, it's going to be very nasty.
	I just think we have to rebuild our country.
	He added, I watch as we build schools in Iraq and they're blown up.
	We build another one, we get blown up.
	We rebuild it three times and we can't build a school in Brooklyn.
	We have no money for education because we can't build in our own country.
	At what point do you say, hey, we got to take care of ourselves?
	What Republican challenger That's viable to run against Trump?
	Or what viable Democratic Party candidate is going to say any of that?
	If that resonates to you, as it does to me, the question is, who, if not Donald Trump, is going to be willing to actually not just pay lip service to it, but try and follow through on it?
	Now, it wasn't only just on foreign policy, but domestic policy as well.
	Donald Trump gave a speech in 2016, as Politico reported, in which he, quote, declared America's economic independence.
	He said, the article says, quote, our politicians aggressively pursued a policy of globalization, moving our jobs, our wealth, and our factories to Mexico and overseas.
	Globalization has made the financial elite, who donate to politicians, very wealthy.
	But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.
	When subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our markets, threatening our factories, the politicians do nothing.
	For years, they watched on the sidelines as our jobs vanished and our communities were plunged into depression-level unemployment.
	America has lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997.
	Even as the country has increased its population by 50 million people, he went on to essentially vow that he would leave NAFTA.
	Only Bernie Sanders is willing to say anything similar to that.
	And when Bernie Sanders got close to power in the Democratic Party, they cheated and made sure Hillary Clinton won.
	That's what this system of rules in Washington is designed to ensure.
	It just failed in the case of Trump.
	And that's why they're so desperate to render him ineligible.
	They're petrified he's going to be able to win again.
	Now, I think people have forgotten just how radical Trump's administration could have been if he had followed through on the populists who were advising him.
	Steve Bannon, in particular, had a very radical vision that ended up not working because Jared Kushner won the power battle with Steve Bannon, and Bannon was out after a few months, and Jared Kushner, a much more traditional Republican, was able to get Trump to instead of what Steve Bannon was suggesting, namely raising taxes on the rich.
	Doing a bipartisan infrastructure deal with the Democrats to build back American roads and infrastructure and only then building the wall?
	Instead, Trump got, Kushner got Trump to cut taxes on the wealthy and on corporations and follow a much more traditionalist GOP economic approach.
	But here's what Steve Bannon was saying when he was Trump's campaign manager that won the election that they were actually going to do.
	says Trump is pushing for tax reform to include a new 44% top marginal tax rate, raising taxes on the rich, hitting people who earn more than $5 million a year.
	Quote, top White House advisor Steve Bannon is pushing for tax reform to include a new 44% top marginal tax rate, hitting people who earn more than $5 million a year with the revenue paying for tax cuts for the rest, according to three people who have spoken to him recently.
	Axios previously reported that...
	...the revenue that we have in the past, according to the previous year, is the revenue that we have.
	We have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for, and we have a lot of revenue that we have.
	We have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for, and we have a lot of revenue that we have.
	And we have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for, and we have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for.
	And we have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for.
	And we have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for.
	We have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for.
	And we have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for.
	And we have to pay for.
	And we have a lot of revenue that we have to pay for.
	And we have to pay for.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Bannon has described himself as a, quote, an economic nationalist.
	And he's pushed a populist agenda through his previous outlet at Breitbart News as an advisor to Trump.
	That contrasts with what Bannon calls the, quote, globalist wing of the party, made up by people like economic advisor Gary Cohn, though Cohn and Bannon come from Goldman Sachs.
	Trump proposes five-year ban on economic, on executive branch officials and lawmakers who want to be lobbyists.
	That was according to The Washington Post.
	That was according to the Washington Post.
	He wanted a ban on executive branch officials and lawmakers to become lobbyists.
	That was part of his draining the swamp proposal.
	None of this ended up happening because, again, the actual economic populist, Steve Bannon, lost his power, struggled with Jared Kushner, a much more traditional Republican.
	But that was what Trump ran on, and that was the plan.
	And I'm asking whether or not there's anyone who might run against Trump who would Affirm any of these challenges to Republican orthodoxy.
	Now, Trump knows this.
	Trump believes that he didn't win despite these challenges to Republican orthodoxy, but because of them.
	And that's why, according to Politico, just this week, Trump's 24-game plan is to be the dove among the hawks, to basically attack all Republican opponents like Nikki Haley, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, all of whom, by the way, he appointed to his administration.
	He's going to have to explain that.
	And probably Ron DeSantis as warmongers and as globalists, people who share Republican establishment orthodoxy of Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell rather than reject it.
	Quote, "Donald Trump is settling on a simple foreign policy pitch in his second bid for the White House.
	Want World War III?
	Vote for the other guy.
	Because remember, Trump, for whatever else is true, he escalated some of the bombing campaigns he inherited from Obama, but he's the first American president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war.
	And he wants to run on that.
	Over the past week, Trump has assailed President Joe Biden's handling of Afghanistan.
	He has said he could end the almost year-long conflict in Ukraine within 24 hours, but without any indication how, and suggested sending tanks to the country could spark nuclear war.
	He has railed against China and called Florida Governor Ron DeSantis a, quote, globalist.
	Those close to Trump's campaign operations said he plans to try and paint himself as an anti-war dove amongst the hawks.
	They believe doing so will resonate with Republican voters who are divided on, but are growing wary of, continued support for Ukraine and its war with Russia.
	Quote, Trump is the peace president and he's the first president in two generations to not start a war.
	Whereas if you look at DeSantis' congressional record, he's voted for more engagement, more military engagement overseas than a person close to the Trump campaign who spoke on anonymity.
	Remember, this is the Trump campaign trying to show its strategy against DeSantis.
	Quote, "Trump is the only person who has said no more funding for the Iraq war." That is true.
	I haven't heard the Nikki Haley say anything like that.
	Pompeo or Pence, where do they stand on Ukraine?
	In fact, Haley, Pence, and Pompeo have all, to varying degrees, called for the US to fund Ukrainians and even, on occasion, criticized the Biden administration for not doing more.
	That's really the framework that we have.
	A whole variety of very aggressive challenges to Republican orthodoxy in the 2016 campaign.
	Some, but by no means all of which, ended up manifesting in the actual Trump presidency.
	Some he abandoned.
	Some he was maneuvered out of by Jared Kushner.
	Others were able to successfully subvert his devotion to those policy aims, either because he wasn't interested enough or disciplined enough to carry them through.
	But clearly there's an appetite in the Republican Party, an ongoing one, for both foreign policy, America first, isolationism or anti-interventionism, I should use that phrase, that's much better, and economic populism of the kind Steve Bannon described, a rejection of Reaganomics, that the goal is to and economic populism of the kind Steve Bannon described, a rejection of Reaganomics, that the goal is to always reduce taxes on the rich and that'll help everybody, on corporations, even if that was true in the '80s, that's archaic, say right-wing populist, and especially this challenge to foreign policy
	say right-wing populist, and especially this challenge to foreign policy orthodoxy that we can't continue to be in a posture of endless war that benefits nobody in the United States.
	Whether the Republican Party is actually going to try and succeed in moving away from that, or whether either through Trump or a challenger who molds himself to Trump's ideology, I think is one of the most important questions in American politics, especially as it looks I think is one of the most important questions in American politics, especially as it looks increasingly likely that Biden will run again so the Democratic And the question is, will the Republican Party, yet again,
	Just represent that same ideology, or will they actually do something different like happened in 2016?
	That is the overarching question.
	Thank you.
	Josh Hammer is the opinion page editor of Newsweekly.
	Like many on the right, he has had a somewhat turbulent ideological trajectory, coming to realize that many of the right-wing doctrines on economic and foreign policy he was taught to cheer are in fact beneficial not to most Americans, but only a tiny sliver of inside Washington elites.
	He is thus very interested, as am I, in the question we just examined, namely whether the GOP is maneuvering to return to its old establishment dogma.
	He has a new article entitled, quote, The 24 Tasks for the New American Right.
	It's an excellent examination of that question.
	We sat down with him yesterday for a discussion about it, and we're delighted to show it to you now.
	Josh, good evening.
	Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us tonight.
	Glenn, thanks for having me.
	It's a pleasure.
	Yeah, me too.
	So one of the reasons I was so interested in talking to you is because I found your article to raise questions that for me are both very important but also very interesting, meaning I don't really have a lot of answers to some of the questions you raise.
	So rather than have me summarize your own article in front of you, why don't you tell us what you regard as sort of the most important questions you were trying to raise and what prompted you to do that?
	Sure, so the prompt for writing a 2024-themed column, for me personally, was the announcement that Nikki Haley apparently is set to announce her own presidential run coming up on February the 15th.
	John Bolton kind of sort of announced his run to a British publication.
	Now he's not saying whether he's going to run.
	It's not clear, but he has no chance either way.
	But the point is that now that Nikki Haley is set to run, we are live.
	I mean, there's going to be a contested primary for 2024.
	Governor DeSantis in Florida, where I live, has not announced yet, but all indications are that he probably will do so.
	So now that Nikki Haley is about to run, this thing's probably about to pick up momentum.
	And as I looked at 2024, putting on my political commentator, political prognosticator hat, to me, the big question, the big question, Glenn, which I think is kind of what piqued your interest in the column, is whether the Republican Party is going to take the substance, the substantive changes to the Republican or conservative status quo ante that Trump made sizable changes to, whether they will take that substance and carry that torch forward,
	or whether they will simply return to the pre-Trump, pre-2016 status quo ante, the likes of which a candidate like Larry Hogan or perhaps Nikki Haley herself might actually embody.
	So that is really what I am going to start to pay very close attention to now moving forward.
	So one of the questions that I'm struggling with is exactly what those changes were, at least the ones that were most significant, these changes that you're referencing.
	Clearly Trump ran in 2016 explicitly, overtly, as a presidential candidate running not only against Democratic orthodoxy but also Republican orthodoxy.
	And if you try and figure out exactly why he, very unexpectedly, won that 2016 primary, I think you can just kind of check some boxes without a lot of dispute.
	He had the celebrity status, he has a lot of charisma in front of a camera, kind of natural charisma he always has.
	He was very, very strong, much stronger than people usually are in terms of the rhetoric on issues like immigration.
	But when it comes to challenging sort of the neocon Bush-Cheney foreign policy, which he did very assertively during that campaign, and even kind of the Reaganomics doctrine, it's always best to cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations and kind of supply-side economics that he also ran against.
	Do you think that for most Republican voters who voted for him, they voted for him because of those specific changes, despite those changes, or kind of independent of them?
	Well, that is the million-dollar question, obviously.
	I mean, the million-dollar question is, did he simply win because he is this universal kind of global celebrity name, kind of akin to a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods?
	He has got the Trump-branded everything.
	Actually, Glenn, I'm recording... Funny enough, I'm recording this with you from a hotel room in downtown Chicago, literally across the river from the Trump Hotel.
	There's no escaping it!
	Yeah, literally, it's ubiquitous.
	It's no matter where you go.
	So that is the question, right, as to whether he won, whether he dominated Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, all those other candidates because of this or because of what he spoke to.
	And I guess one data point that I look to, to at least give me signs of hope that it was at least partially substantive, is if you look at the coalition, the actual state-by-state electoral college winning a coalition that ultimately gave him the victory.
	He broke through the infamous blue wall.
	He broke through the Rust Belt blue wall.
	He obviously won states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
	And, you know, what kind of holds those states together?
	Well, it is being left behind by globalization.
	It was being left behind by the World Trade Organization, by NAFTA, kind of that great sucking sound going back to those debates from the 1990s.
	Immigration, you know, think about entitlements.
	I mean, Trump ran to the popular center on the entitlement issue.
	Even now that we are kind of approaching this dead ceiling fight, he has been very vocal in urging his fellow Republicans not to do anything when it comes to Medicare and Social Security.
	That was the diametric opposite, of course, of Paul Ryan, who was the vice presidential running mate only four years prior back in 2012 there.
	So, you know, but to your point, Glenn, I don't actually want to kind of be here and be an apologist for Donald Trump.
	I am very far from that, in fact.
	And if you look at his four years in office, he made a lot of mistakes and a lot of times he often did not live up to his own word.
	So when it comes to kind of supply side economics in general, you know, his first piece of signature legislation, the 2017 tax cut, that was a very, very standard issue, Wall Street Journal style kind of tax cut.
	There was nothing particularly exciting about that at all.
	I personally actually strongly disagreed with his other major domestic bill, the First Step Act, the criminal justice reform, so to speak, bill.
	I strongly oppose that bill as well.
	So I am not an apologist for his domestic agenda, necessarily.
	But as we get closer to this primary picking up steam there, I think you're going to see that, you know, that kind of cultural, kind of conservative, kind of anti-woke, but more kind of centrist economics kind of sweet spot.
	I think you're going to see that there's a real kind of base for that within the Republican electorate.
	I found it notable that in the State of the Union Address, which took place after your article was written, that Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared to get angriest when Biden insinuated that the Republicans were looking to cut Social Security and Medicare.
	I know she is adamant that that not be done.
	There seems to be a significant base in the kind of Trump adjacent wing of the Republican Party.
	Josh Hawley would probably be pretty opposed to that as well.
	Um, which is, you know, for someone growing up in the 80s and 90s, the idea that a Republican would be angry because you insinuate that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare is almost kind of surreal.
	Of course, Republicans and a lot of Democrats as well.
	It was a dream of Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama to do that grand compromise with that.
	But to me, it seems like if Donald Trump did actually represent either an ideological change that he ushered in or that was already taking place that he saw and capitalized on, you know, You would see evidence of that, not just with Trump and his campaign rhetoric, you would see evidence of it before Trump ran, you would see evidence of it in terms of what other Republican Party leaders are saying and doing independent of Trump.
	Do you see any of that evidence in either of those two categories?
	So there certainly are some promising candidates turned into young officeholders.
	I'm thinking here of people like J.D.
	Vance, obviously from Ohio, who I think is kind of probably the single best position.
	You mentioned Josh Hawley.
	He is very much kind of in this same vein as well, someone who is much more pragmatic when it comes to matters of kind of antitrust enforcements, protecting entitlements, things of that nature there.
	So I definitely do see some signs of it.
	One other thing that I have given a lot of thought to over the past number of years, so in the aftermath of the 2016 election, there was a political scientist by the name of Robert Drutman, if I have his name correctly, and he did this basic two-by-two quadrant, X-Y scatterplot, where he just basically mass-surveyed a lot of 2016 voters, Hillary, Trump voters, Ron Johnson, whoever you voted for, and he basically was trying to kind of plot where you were on a traditional economic conservative, economic liberal, social conservative, social liberal axis.
	And the key takeaways, if I remember this correctly, was that everyone who was, broadly speaking, an economic conservative, defined as kind of, you know, more laissez-faire, Wall Street Journal editorial board style, was roughly a quarter of the entire electorate.
	So folks who were kind of more populist in economics or even outright left on economics were together a massive majority of the electorate.
	And look, as someone who was trying to kind of, you know, make conservatism viable when it comes to, you know, electorally, politically speaking, that is frankly just impossible to ignore.
	I mean, there is just simply not a massive constituency outside of Greenwich, Connecticut or Palm Beach, Florida, perhaps, when it comes to kind of, you know, carry interest, capital gains, tax cuts.
	I mean, even free trade absolutism, Glenn.
	I mean, you know, free trade, obviously, that is an issue that Trump, more than anyone else, has personified.
	He was a traitor.
	Trump has been a traitor to his economic class on the trade issue going back decades.
	That is the one issue that he has been remarkably consistent on when it comes to trade in China, going back to when he was on the Playboy magazine cover back in the '80s, '90s.
	Yeah, back then he was like ranting about Japan, right?
	He would say, Japan gets to come into our markets.
	We don't get to come into theirs.
	This is not free trade.
	You're right.
	That is one of the few consistent issues that appeared throughout the decades.
	And I think, like, if you look at in 2016, you know, there were a lot of people, a lot more people than people realize, who were saying things like, my two favorite candidates are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
	People who were kind of scrambling the ideological profile, often in very similar ways.
	But I want to ask you, you go through some of these alternatives.
	You just mentioned John Bolton and Nikki Haley as people who are possible contenders against him, who clearly are, especially in foreign policy, economic policy, kind of traditionalist.
	You could put, I think, Mike Pompeo into that mix.
	And whenever I try and convince people that Trump actually represented something new in terms of Republican Party ideology or American ideology, they'll point to the fact that all three of those people are viable candidates now because they occupied very senior positions in the last administration because Donald Trump gave it to them.
	So how is it, on the one hand, that someone can argue Trump is this aberrational leader, he doesn't believe in traditional Republican ideology on foreign and economic policy, and then you look at so many of the people he empowered, including those three who now might run against him, and you see this kind of clash.
	How do you explain that?
	So the foreign policy piece of this is very interesting to me.
	If you look at Donald Trump's foreign policy, you know, he explicitly rejected kind of the old John McCain, kind of Lindsey Graham moralistic, kind of crusading, nation-building crusades.
	But he wasn't exactly, you know, a Ron Paul isolationist either.
	You know, rather, I think the best way to describe Trump's foreign policy would be Jacksonian is a term that I've seen used.
	I mean, he was not an interventionist, but he was not afraid to kind of vociferously defend American interests when he felt it was undercover.
	Now, interestingly, Trump's foreign policy instincts on certain issues I thought were exactly right and were actually kind of undercut by those around him.
	I'm actually thinking here of kind of a niche issue in particular.
	I'm thinking of kind of the Saudi-Qatari issue going back to 2017, where I think his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, kind of undercut him.
	But Trump's instincts fundamentally, you know, think about NATO.
	Think about when he told the European countries to spend 2% of the GDP on NATO.
	That is a common sense sentiment that probably 80 to 90% of Americans would get behind.
	But too many elites in both parties were just...
	You know, they were trying so hard to mollycoddle the Europeans, this whole kind of vestigial notion of the transatlantic relationship.
	Oh, you can't touch NATO, you can't touch the Europeans.
	But Trump went there.
	So part of it was not just substantive.
	Part of it was just his willingness to say and do things that others did not do.
	Now, I basically think that Trump's foreign policy is going to be kind of the center of gravity of the 2024 presidential campaign.
	So I think the Republican Party foreign policy future will not be interventionist, but it will not be isolationist.
	And, you know, Daniel McCarthy, who is very much kind of a more restrained kind of paleoconservative school of thought, he had a nice piece for Compact Magazine recently where he said, DeSantis, the realist.
	And he was doing his best to predict what a possible President DeSantis' foreign policy might be based on his congressional record.
	record.
	And he ultimately came away kind of saying exactly what I said, that DeSantis would be kind of somewhere in the middle there.
	He's not going to be an isolationist.
	I mean, he will be largely speaking, for example, kind of pro-Israel, anti-Iran, but he is not going to be into toppling regimes.
	He's not going to be kind of moralistic.
	So, you know, in that respect, I think someone like Nikki Haley very much kind of speaks for yesterday's Republican Party, not necessarily its future.
	But what about the fact that Trump empowered them?
	Do you just check that off as, attribute that to kind of Trump's very well-known character flaw that whoever flatters him, he ends up liking?
	Or do you see that that's reflective of something small, More substantive, that it was Mike Pompeo who ran his CIA and his State Department, and Nikki Haley was at the UN as his representative, and John Bolton was, you know, an advisor in various capacities until Trump fired him.
	Is that just that personal quirk of Trump, or is that something that still appeals to Trump instinctively, this kind of neoconservative foreign policy, at least in terms of the style of it, kind of posturing as tough and strong and aggressive?
	How do you see that?
	So he definitely values kind of a personal kind of demonstration, a show of strength.
	I mean, if there's one thing that Donald Trump loves, it is someone who kind of evinces kind of, you know, virility and masculinity and strength and, you know, all the kind of traditional things that go along with that.
	Look, Trump has very well-known personnel issues.
	I mean, the guy who said that he would drain the swamp did anything but that.
	The swamp very much devoured him, as we saw time and time again, when it comes to the Deep State, when it comes to Russiagate.
	I mean, the guy who got famous in part by saying, you're fired, did not necessarily do a great job of firing those who need to be fired.
	You know, when it comes to Mike Pompeo in particular, I very much disagree with much of what former Secretary Pompeo has said since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.
	That's largely what I criticized him for in my column.
	I basically said that, you know, you sound like Lindsey Graham.
	You're trying to kind of expedite World War III on this issue.
	But, you know, to Mike Pompeo's credit, it is worth noting that the U.S.
	did not get further entrenched in any massive military conflicts or anything like that when he was secretary of state.
	I think his tenure as secretary of state was a largely productive one, actually.
	I mean, I think, you know, I think by the time that he was over, by the time that Trump's presidency was over, America was certainly in a much better place then than it is today.
	But, you know, you combine kind of this show of strength with Trump's kind of well-known personnel issues.
	I mean, the reality, Glenn, as you and I know, Trump is not operating at kind of like a read through the magazines and think through this intellectually kind of way.
	That's just not how the guy operates.
	Right, right.
	I mean, he wants to get a feel for you.
	If he feels good with you, if you pass that Oval Office test, then you're going to get hired.
	But I do think that The kind of primary challenger to Trump, if you look at polls, if you look at the consensus of the pundit class, Ron DeSantis, is very much that way.
	Namely, he is kind of, he does approach things through this theorist lens.
	He doesn't use his gut and intuition as much as he uses his intellect and his kind of being steeped in political theory, although he's obviously proven himself shrewd on cultural issues.
	But let's leave those to the side for a second.
	You suggested that DeSantis has some kind of heterodox politics in him when it comes to foreign and economic policy, that he's not this traditionalist Republican, establishment Republican figure.
	I looked at his house record.
	I can't say I've seen a lot of evidence of that.
	We haven't heard much from him on these issues over the last four years, which makes sense.
	He was running Florida.
	But give me your best case that makes you convinced that he's actually more in the middle than a traditional Marco Rubio or John McCain or Lindsey Graham type Republican.
	Well, I think that there are legitimate questions to be asked.
	I mean, I can't hear and convincingly tell you that I know for certain where Ron DeSantis, for example, stands on every issue under the sun.
	You know, trade would be a good example.
	I mean, I haven't poured through his congressional record, but to be very candid with you, I just don't know exactly where he stands on that issue.
	certainly his rhetoric on China would lead me to believe that he is definitely skeptical of quote-unquote free trade with China, which is a Nazi-moronic proposition, of course.
	When it comes to foreign policy, you know, I mentioned Daniel McCarthy's piece for Compact magazine on DeSantis' foreign policy.
	He was able to kind of point to an earlier vote that then-Congressman DeSantis had where he opposed military intervention in Syria back around the time that that was being debated.
	He was a vocal opponent of that.
	Mike Pompeo, he took the opposite stance when he was a congressman at the time.
	He actually supported going in there and striking Assad.
	So that would be one possible example there.
	DeSantis has really not said a whole lot when it comes to Ukraine.
	When it comes to political economy in general, DeSantis obviously has whacked corporations over the head.
	He has shown that he is completely willing to go in there and criticize corporations and to retaliate- On cultural grounds, right?
	Like the big It typically has been these clashes fueled by the culture war rather than economic orthodoxy.
	maybe T-Law, what the liberal class is calling the don't say gay law.
	I mean, it typically has been these clashes fueled by the culture war rather than economic orthodoxy.
	Would you agree with that? - Yeah, I think that's fair.
	I mean, look, again, I would be lying to you if I said that I knew for certain that Ron DeSantis' views on political economy are the exact same as Josh Fowler or J.D.
	Bass.
	I cannot tell you that.
	I mean, I think that that is a legitimate question.
	And, you know, in the primary campaign, hopefully these questions come up there.
	But when it comes to a willingness to kind of take on the Fortune 500 to, you know, frankly, if I say this, just to piss off like the Wall Street Journal editorial board and people like that and basically trying to expedite the Republican Party's divorce from the Chamber of Commerce, you know, I think that he's on very solid grounds.
	And on one other issue when it comes to antitrust in particular, you know, after Elon Musk took over Twitter, there was a lot of chatter as to whether Apple or Google would then kick Twitter off of their app stores.
	DeSantis had a fairly fiery answer to a journalist question, where he basically said that that would be a flagrant kind of antitrust violation that Congress should enforce.
	So, you know, antitrust, which is an issue that I actually write and talk about a lot, he's shown some major indications that he's actually very, I think, kind of forward looking on that issue as well.
	I'll share with you my fear about the 2024 election and just American politics in general, just kind of as one of the last questions here as we're running out of time, which is, you know, you saw this week there was this performance at the Grammys or whatever, the Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards by Sam Smith, who's you saw this week there was this performance at the Grammys or whatever, the Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards by Sam Smith, who's an incredibly uncharismatic but talented singer, and so he's being told to do provocative things, to draw attention to
	It's like a cheap Lucifer costume with, like, this plastic hat and these horns, and a lot of conservatives fell right into the trap and started attacking him, and suddenly everybody was talking about Sam Smith when ordinarily people wouldn't be.
	It's so easy to fight culture wars, and it's actually tempting as well.
	I don't mean to say that it's trivial.
	I see on both sides why it matters to people.
	But the concern I always have is that the more the culture war predominates, the less we're talking about how power is dispersed in American politics, who's benefiting from economic policy and who's being trampled upon, who's benefiting from globalism and foreign policy, internationalism and who isn't.
	And sometimes I get the sense that people on both sides are kind of exhausted from trying to change these permanent power structures in Washington and fighting over gender ideology and what books on race we allow into the public schools is a lot easier of a fight.
	It's easier to win those fights.
	And power centers are kind of happy when we're at each other's throats over cultural issues and especially with this DeSantis candidacy where he has become so popular, my concern is largely due to culture war issues.
	What do you think about that concern that we're going to kind of fall into that culture war trap where nothing else gets paid much attention to?
	You know, I'm not sure about DeSantis personally, again, and hopefully these issues come up, but I think that the broader concern that you are talking about here is a very legitimate concern.
	You know, my good friend Sourabh Amari, who is the editor and founder of Compact Magazine, which I mentioned earlier, he has been very outspoken on this.
	And, you know, Sourabh is probably slightly to my left when it comes to issues of political economy, but, you know, there's a ton of daylight between us.
	And I think Sourabh is manifestly correct when he says that there are very, very powerful interests you know, in kind of the hedge fund class, perhaps in particular there, that are trying to kind of exploit woke capital as a boogeyman.
	So that way kind of Republican politicians can just slay woke capital while ignoring real genuine issues of economic inequality and instability and things like that.
	That is a real concern.
	I mean, I very much share that concern.
	You know, I'm just not entirely sure exactly, to be honest with you, just how much Governor DeSantis sees that as a concern as well.
	But again, like, what I can tell you there is that he has spoken at least a little bit when it comes to workers being exploited.
	I've heard that rhetoric a little bit, at least in the context of Disney.
	I haven't heard a ton of that.
	I don't want to exaggerate there.
	But, you know, there have been some indications, again, that he is kind of viewing a lot of this.
	And, you know, the final thing that I guess I'll say about Governor DeSantis You know, I think when he was a congressman from Florida, he was very much kind of a part of kind of the Tea Party era, 2010, 2020.
	You know, I think empirically speaking, he has kind of just observed what has happened on the world, both foreign and domestically, and probably, to be very candid, has changed his views on a lot of this stuff.
	I'll be the first one to admit that I have changed my views on some of these issues.
	You know, years ago I years ago I would have been called a club for growth toting free trader and my thoughts on trade are actually quite different today based on what I have literally physically seen and observed.
	So, you know, I expect that to probably come up in a hypothetical primary as well, but there's really nothing wrong necessarily with changing your mind as long as it's for the right reasons.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And if you talk to the dissenters, people, they will, you know, kind of insist when you ask these questions that you at least give him a fair hearing and approach it with an open mind, which I think is the right way to do it.
	I agree with you that four years is a huge amount of time with the Trump whirlwind, with so many people, especially I think on the Republican and conservative side, starting to look at things differently, question these orthodoxies that they've long been inculcated with, whether or not that actually is serving The purpose is that they've been told they serve.
	So I'm definitely willing to give Governor DeSantis a fair hearing and not assume that the 2012 version of Ron DeSantis is the same version as we're going to get in 2020.
	But I do think he has a lot of work to do to kind of address these questions and fill in these gaps that I think we don't have a lot of evidence on.
	So Josh, I think this discussion kind of illustrates why I'm so interested in this.
	I think there is the real potential for meaningful change within the Republican Party.
	I just don't want it to be a kind of one-time-only 2016-dependent-on-Trump dynamic as opposed to something more enduring.
	And I also just want to take the opportunity to really recommend that people look at Compact Magazine too, which I think is dealing with these questions better than anyone.
	This kind of internal debate among the American right, conservatism, and how it can connect to a kind of broader array of voters on questions of foreign policy and economic policy.
	Just as the last question, where do you think that the Republican Party over the next two years is going to try and position itself with this House majority but still being in the minority in terms of the government?
	How do you see their approach just in the first couple of weeks?
	What does that indicate to you about where their focus is going to be?
	I mean, there's certainly been a major effort placed so far, at least, on kind of getting these Hunter Biden investigations going.
	I'll be totally honest with you, I have a hard time myself getting too excited about that.
	I mean, you know, it's true that there's probably not going to be a ton of legislation So I guess if you're in the majority, only one house, you might as well use your subpoena power.
	I understand that and that's fine.
	And to be clear, it does seem to me that, between the documents and Wilmington, Delaware and Hunter and all this, that there is a lot here, that should be investigated.
	I don't wanna sell that short, but I'm kind of a substance guy.
	I'm a policy guy.
	That's really what kind of gets me going personally, a little bit more than kind of all these investigations.
	So one issue that I guess I will flag that I would love, love, love, and I teased this already earlier, actually, I would love to see some action on antitrust.
	So, you know, one area actually, probably the single area that I have actually been most supportive of the Biden administration has been in the area of antitrust.
	So Lena Khan, who I supported, I supported her for FTC Chair.
	Jonathan Cantor, who's the head of the antitrust division of the DOJ, he has this massive new enforcement action against Google's digital advertising business.
	You know, there are some Republicans who have been trying to kind of push antitrust into a more hands-on aggressive direction.
	Ken Block in Colorado is probably the best example of that.
	Yeah, we interviewed him last night, actually.
	We interviewed him about exactly these questions.
	He's really singing your tune more than I've ever heard him, including being supportive of this opportunity for bipartisan consensus on the fact that big tech has just gotten way too strong.
	He's very supportive of the Biden-DOJ lawsuit against Google.
	We talked about that last night, as well as Lena Kahn's work.
	So yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity, not just to posture, but to get things done there.
	Yeah, exactly right.
	I actually didn't even know that Congressman Buck was on with you, but what he said is what I would say.
	That is probably the single area policy that I would be most personally invested in, and probably most cautiously optimistic in, in trying to see some sort of legislation passed.
	Because antitrust enforcement historically was really not a particularly staunch partisan issue.
	It was only kind of in the 1980s into the 1990s that it became more of a partisan issue.
	But the Republican Party is actually traditionally speaking the party of antitrust enforcement.
	So the Sherman Act was named after Sherman, a Republican from Ohio, Teddy Roosevelt Republican.
	Josh Hawley wrote a biography about Teddy Roosevelt, of course.
	So, you know, I would like to see some bipartisan push on that particular issue.
	Well, Josh, I'm really happy that you raised this issue already.
	I really see these as kind of the $1 million question in American politics, as well as where is the Republican Party going?
	I think there's a lot more stagnancy among Democrats.
	And I think that article did a great job of kind of setting the scene for getting these answers.
	So I appreciate your taking the time to talk to us, and I'm sure we'll be harassing you to come back on the show to talk more about this as we get more answers.
	Glenn, I look forward to it.
	Thanks for having me.
	Yep.
	Have a great night.
	So that concludes our show for this evening.
	Thanks so much to those of you who watched.
	We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble.

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