[Music] from New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein [Music] show I'm recording this on day three of the Republican National Convention which has not been like any Republican convention in recent memers recent Republican conventions and I've been at a number of them have been chaotic underplay Eastwood interviewing a chair in 2012 or the weirdly dark and disunited Republican conventions in 2016 and 2020 but this time this time Republicans have fallen in line fallen in line behind Donald Trump in line behind his vision of the party one thing I'm seeing up there something I think a lot of Liberals are missing is yes the Republican party has become a personality cult yes it has become the property of one man but that is allowing that one man to make changes to what the Republican party is that his predecessors could not it is presenting something different up there not entirely different but importantly so and maybe it wouldn't be that way if Trump seemed to be tumbling towards defeat and speaker after speaker were thinking they could be the one to pick up the p pieces but right now he's hurdling towards Victory or at least his campaign thinks that he is and so as far as I can tell does everybody else at that convention Tim Alberta is at that convention he's a staff writer at the Atlantic who just published a fantastic profile of Trump's two campaign managers and their theory of Victory he's also the author of American Carnage on the front lines of Republican Civil War and the rise of President Trump and the kingdom the power and the glory American evangelicals in the age of extremist both are important books if you want to understand this era in American politics as always my email as reclin show at NY [Music] times.com Tim Alberto welcome to the show hey Ezra good to talk to you again so you were embedded with the Trump campaign practically its campaign leads for months you came out of that thinking they believed they were headed towards the landslide victory now you're at the Republican convention what's the mood there I would say the mood feels like a very early election night Victory party and I've got to say Ezra I've been to a bunch of Republican conventions I've never seen anything even approaching the level of confidence Cockiness uh almost arrogance that that you're picking up here I I think in politics ICS when one side is winning you really feel it and you are feeling it here in Milwaukee I mean they the Republicans are winning and they know they're winning and I don't think the folks here are even entertaining the possibility that Biden could be reelected I mean this it just it really feels like it's a celebration of a second term rather than a celebration of trump being nominated yet again is that overconfidence yeah probably is because politics is crazy and I mean think back to 2016 in the space of a couple of months we have the Hillary investigation being closed and then we have Access Hollywood and then we have the investigation being reopened right I mean 2016 was we all thought the craziest election we'd ever lived through and then fast forward four years to 2020 and we've got covid and we've got suddenly he's hospitalized at Walter Reid and nearly dies uh which by the way talk about dodging a bullet I mean can you imagine the conspiracy theories had Trump died at Walter Reed under the watch of deep State doctors so 2020 took on its own like very surreal Twilight Zone feel and now here we are four years later and we've already had an assassination attempt and we have the sitting president appearing almost incapacitated at times during that first debate and the Democratic party trying to dump him and we're still four months out so it feels like there's an awful lot that can happen between now and November let's hold on the assassination attempt for a minute what role is the assassination attempt playing there I think to the degree that it has meaningfully changed anything in the Republican party at least it's that Trump who already had this sort of cult of personality command over the party over its officials over its Rank and file over its base there's now almost this added Aura of invincibility right we we've heard a number of speakers talk about this uh from the podium in prime time these last couple of nights about how clearly God has his hands on Donald Trump and how he's sort of been ordained for this moment and not even an Assassin's bullet can stop him from carrying out God's plan and and and I mean I think there's always been some of that sort of Messianic undertone around Trump but it's typically been found further toward the fringes of the party and a little bit more adjacent with some of the kind of populist Evangelical movement leaders who he surrounded himself with but now it's sort of getting mainstreamed in a way that is pretty noteworthy and that more than anything has been really the major at least the major rhetorical impact the vibe shift that you sense here is that people who were already crazy about Trump and were already going to be voting for Trump now they find themselves sort of in awe of trump and that does feel different Mike Donan who is President Biden's key strategist one of his sayings about politics and about elections is it the key question is always what an election is about fundamentally and political conventions are efforts by parties to frame what an election is about donalan has been saying from the beginning that 2024 is going to be about democracy it is going to be about in a way January that's how they started the Biden re-election campaign I would say it's pretty clear that that is not working from the Republican side from what you you're feeling in the convention from the themes that are running through the speakers what do Republicans believe this election is about it's a really simple concept Ezra and if you hear it and think wow that's kind of reductive it's because it is the key contrast in this campaign that the Trump people have been trying to engineer and optimize and operationalize from day one is strength versus weakness talking about the southern border talking about the world on fire and and Biden misplaying various geopolitical hands talking about the economy and inflation the Trump people believe even setting aside the question of Biden's age and visible decline in some of his fragilities they believe that in all the focus grouping they do the polling they do that the question of Biden being weak the notion of Biden being weak is time and time again the most effective line of attack on him and I should note that all of this what I'm describing it predates the debate it predates the assassination attempt so now you already had this existing theory of the case about what this election was going to be about from the Trump perspective and then you get into the debate and you get to Saturday with the assassination attempt and you recognize Ezra that political campaigns especially presidential campaigns really wind up being about a couple of key moments a couple of key images a couple of key exchanges or occurrences that sort of Pierce the fog of the campaign and sort of break through in a way that voters who are mostly disengaged otherwise they suddenly are attuned to what's happening in that moment and you would have to say that in this campaign the two moments that have done that are the debate and the assassination attempt and I think what's most problematic for Biden and his team at this point is that those two moments both are almost tailor made to fit the Trump campaign's key Narrative of strength versus weakness Biden looking like he had one foot in the grave at the debate and looking almost entirely incapable of executing on any of his strategy coming in against Trump and and just looking sort of lost and confused and pale and sounding very weak versus Trump surviving a bullet shot at his head and standing up and pumping his fist with blood running down his face I mean what could better from their perspective encapsulate the strength versus weakness argument so that's very much the world that they were already living in before these events and now I think that's why they believe they're in a position to win at a scale that none of us had even imagined this is something that stood out at me in your profile of the Trump campaign you wrote quote on a stretch of wall outside the conference room large black letters spelled out the campaign's Mantra Joe Biden is weak failed and dishonest something you WR about in that piece because you did a lot of the reporting before the debate and then you were publishing it in the aftermath is that the one thing that seemed to be troubling the confidence of Trump's campaign strategists was the idea that the Democrats might replace Joe Biden tell me about that yeah Ezra I think it's just really important to underscore that the Trump campaign from day one has been built not to run against a generic Democrat it's been built to run a very specific race against a very specific opponent in Joe Biden from the very earliest conversations I've had with Chris levita and Susie WS who are the co Architects the co-managers of Trump's campaign from our very earliest conversations almost every exchange we had every question I was asking about mechanics and strategy and tactics kept returning to the subject of Joe Biden and they weren't just sort of trying to use him as a Pata for fun in those conversations they were making points very specific points about how they were tailoring their operations everything from the young guys who work upstairs in their War Room cutting clips that they can turn into sort of quick viral memes and blast around their social networks and get Amplified by their allies on the outside to their microt targeting strategies that they were implementing to pursue very particular demographic groups who they had data to suggest were moving away from Biden in ways that they wouldn't have been moving away perhaps from another Democrat everything that they were engineering inside of this campaign going back months and months and months it was all all very specific to defeating Biden and so once you've done that work once you've built out this campaign that is in many ways quite sophisticated quite professionalized especially compared to Trump's previous two efforts which were sort of a joke in a lot of ways once you've done that work the only thing that could ruin your best laid plans is if that guy who you've been preparing to run against suddenly is on the ballot anymore and it's caused a bit of a freakout in Trump World over these last couple of weeks and as I write in the piece they are all but praying at this point that Democrats don't find an alternative because they really believe that if Biden stays on the ballot they're going to win the biggest Republican election since Reagan I want to pick up on that idea that this Trump campaign is professionalized in a way the others had not been let's begin with chryst sevita and and Susan WS who you profiled in this piece who are they what's their story and approach so Susie WS is a really interesting person uh her father was actually Pat Summerall the legendary play-by-play man uh who was in the booth with John Madden for so many years and suie has kept kind of a low profile over the years she's worked in Florida Republican politics for a very very long time has a great reput reputation but was never necessarily known at the national level until more recently I guess the best way to describe suie and and to sort of give a window into her competency Ezra is you may have noticed this year that we are not talking about Florida the great Tim russer of course used to always joke Florida Florida Florida like that's all the election was going to be about was Florida but this year we're not talking about Florida why the simply answer to that is Susie WS uh Susie has over the past decade or so so effectively increased the Republican party's vote share among non-white traditionally left-leaning demographic groups that Democrats have now cried uncle and conceeded the state let's hold there because I keep hearing this about Wilds but it never comes with very much in the way of detail about what she did like what did she do how did Florida politicians under her tutelage reposition or offer something different that changed the Dynamics of Florida politics what Suzie has really been adamant about doing in recent years because she ran the Trump 2016 Florida operation and then ran the Trump 2020 Florida operation and in both of those campaigns what suie was really insistent on was we are not just going to sort of make a symbolic show of engaging these communities we're not just going to go open some office in a Latino neighborhood and do a ribbon cutting and hope for a couple of friendly headlines and then go away Susie has been insistent on we are going to make a sustained engagement of these voters we're going to knock on their doors we're going to call them we're going to Target them with advertising that's going to cost money and by the way when we target them we're not going to Target them the same way that we reach out to wealthy white Republicans in buaron or or Jacksonville or wherever what Susie and some of her Allied Republicans in Florida have been able to do is figure out ways to message very specific things to very specific groups and by the way this is not Reinventing the wheel Ezra like some of this in different ways has been done before uh including by the Obama folks but Republicans had really never done it well suie figured out a formula in Florida to try when they're in Miami Dade County targeting Latino voters particularly first and second generation immigrants they're airing ads talking about the Democratic party is trying to import socialism from Venezuela or Cuba or Colombia or wherever to the United States so it's been a a really tightly targeted engagement strategy that has paid great dividends for the party down in Florida so then tell me about Chris LV so Chris is more of your sort of throwback like hatchet man style Republican operative and I think he would um wear that label with pride Chris is best known Ezra rather famously known for having spearheaded this campaign in 2004 this is called Swift boo Veterans for truth which in many ways was responsible many people think for John KY ultimately losing that election to George W bush and of course it should be noted that the Swift boo veterans campaign was dirty it was deceptive it was in many ways sort of representative of the very worst of political practitioners and the dark arts just for younger listeners so John KY ran in 2004 in a national security as a war hero which George W bush very much was not and the Swift booat Veterans for truth campaign against him was built on people who had served either with him or on boats like his questioning both his War heroism and whether he had betrayed people like them in becoming maybe the most prominent anti-war activist as a veteran in that era and it was built on a lot of BS that was you know did not survive any kind of factchecking but it muddied the central contrast that he was drawing between his patriotism and his willingness to serve and put himself in danger and build on that into a presidential campaign and George W Bush's tendency to launch Wars that that he had no sense of what it would mean to fight in them that's exactly right and I would even take it a step further Ezra he executed brilliantly I mean deviously but brilliantly on the classic Art of War strategy that you take your opponent's great strength which for Carrie was his decorated service in the Vietnam War and you turn it into a vulnerability you turn it into a weakness and that's what I think Chris tries to do in his campaigns Chris is an operative who is always on the attack and it comes back to bite him at times Chris has made some enemies in in politics Chris is a guy who plays for Keeps and he plays to win and doesn't make any apologies for it he is a very sort of hard charging always on offense type I think what's interesting is that when he joined forces with Susie WS there were a lot of Republicans who thought there is no way this partnership is going to work there's no way it's going to last because they're just very very very different people suie is very quiet very self-possessed she's a grandmother she never raises her voice Chris is this big former Marine wounded in combat in the Gulf War he curses a lot he is loud and sort of boisterous and the two of them would seem to just be the oddest of couples on paper and yet somehow some way the two of them together have been able to not just professionalize a political operation that had been pretty disorganized and and and in some ways just sort of downright clownish over the years but they've also been able to I don't want to say tame Donald Trump because nobody can tame Donald Trump but they've been able to reach him and sort of bring him along in evolving in some pretty important ways that have made him much more effective as a political candidate [Music] [Music] you've talked about how lasv and Wilds have managed not to tame Trump but at times to channel him and I wanted to look at this in in two directions one where it seems to me they've really failed and submitted him and one where they've succeeded and and moved him the one where it seems to me from your story that they have submitted to something really weird with him is in agreeing to shift their and the rnc's priorities away from get out the vote and towards this thing called election Integrity which I would like you to describe what they understand election Integrity to be but then one where they seem to have moved him is on vote by mail so can you talk about those two examples and and what they maybe reveal sure so to the first one Trump has this expression that he's said more and more over these last few years and he said it to Chris and Susie when they sort of officially stepped in to take over the campaign for 2024 Trump said to them listen I'll turn out the vote you guys just spend that money protecting it in other words Trump believes that he is a one-man mobilization machine that that he supplies the energy he supplies the intensity that he's the one who is ultimately going to be responsible for turning out voters come election day and what he's much more interested in because it obviously helps to save face from the last election helps to stroke his ego about continuing to insist that the last election was stolen from him and I should add it gives him and his party an early foothold on being able to contest results if in in fact this fall things are very tight or if things go against him by some narrow margin somewhere Trump has basically diverted much of those previously earmarked resources that the Republican Party had for ground operations and he sent all that money to create this massive new election Integrity unit which is in its simplest explanation Ezra a network of thousands and thousands of lawyers and volunteers all around the country who are in real time going to be monitoring every voting Precinct every tabulation Center even every Dropbox you're going to have physically eyes on those places from the Trump World and they are going to be able to document as it happens any sort of confusion any irregularity anything that seems a the Republican party is going to be on it in real time that is an enormously expensive proposition and for a trump campaign that was already bleeding you know 25 cents on the dollar that they were raising going to Trump's legal fees for him to suddenly insist on this massive election Integrity unit Chris and Susie are looking around saying well there's only so many dollars that we have we can't do this election Integrity thing that you're in insisting upon and run a traditional ground game and that's where Trump basically said well forget about the ground game just do the election Integrity thing and Ezra I just can't overstate what an enormous risk this poses not even necessarily to Trump himself but to a lot of down ballot Republicans who are in really tight races who are accustomed to having some sort of a organized footprint on the ground in their communities that can help them to knock doors and to phone bank and to raise some more money these Republicans are looking around right now realizing that the Cavalry isn't coming and it's really freaking them out and then the vote by maale side so on the vote by maale side this probably represents the most significant tactical evolution in Trump's political world over the past eight years and when you think back to 2020 Ezra this was an election decided by 42918 votes spread across three states he might have won if he had encouraged his supporters to vote by mail I mean I think he almost certainly would have I mean it's of course a counterfactual but it's one thing to just remain sort of neutral on the vote by mail thing but Donald Trump went out of his way to forbid people for voting for him by mail I mean that's it's a pretty extraordinary thing and so it's funny because suie WS had really led the charge over a period of months to get Trump to see the light on this and she talked to him about Florida she talked to him about how the Republican party in Florida had really mastered the vote by mail operation and it was a huge part of their success and how it was safe and secure and not fraudulent and she had some success and she was kind of working him working him working him over a long period of time this spring into the summer and really though she told me what happened was that Trump was having this kind of offthe cuff serendipitous conversation with somebody who made this just kind of random out of left field remark about why he enjoyed voting by mail and why he thought it was a good idea and Trump said oh okay all right good I'm on board let's do it and so that was that and you have to think Ezra if Trump winds up winning this fall and especially if he wins by a narrow margin and vote by mail makes the difference this random person who made this off the cuff from to Trump is going to go down as a pretty consequential figure in our political history but Trump has not just embraced it rhetorically his campaign now is building out a very sophisticated apparatus that is able to create sort of a customizable engagement program for anyone who makes any sort of contact with the Trump people digitally physically by mail whatever those people are now given personalized deeply cust instructions on how they should vote where they should vote what their different options are so the Trump people again have not just gotten him to a better place sort of mentally or rhetorically but they're actually operationalizing it in a way that is going to help him at The Ballot Box right now if you listen to the Biden campaign's best argument for itself what they will tell you is that they do better than a lot of the polling suggests among the kinds of Voters who turn out very reliably it's why Democrats have been doing better than expected in midterms why they've been doing better than expected in special elections so their argument is look in the general election we are relying on the voters who turn out Donald Trump is relying on the voters who don't turn out and he doesn't have a great get out the vote operation and that's going to work in our favor and and might be the way we win this thing and in a way Trump is saying something not so dissimilar or his campaign leads are saying something not so dissimilar but with a different expected outcome which is that Trump is making huge gains if you look at polling among the kinds of Voters you would not expect to turn after Trump younger voters black men that kind of thing and they believe that at the end of the day not only can they turn out but by the way if they do turn out it's very likely the polling is not going to captured this correctly and they might have a significantly bigger win than polls currently suggest which by the way we've seen with Donald Trump before so tell me how you think about this question of the low prop ensity Trump voters what we've seen from them in the primary and how you rate the arguments or theories of the the two campaigns here yeah so okay let me put it into two different buckets if I can Ezra I think in the first bucket when the Trump campaign talks about locating identifying and ultimately mobilizing low propensity magga sympathetic voters they in that context are primarily talking about white ex urban/rural men or women who have stayed on the sidelines who have for whatever reason been unwilling to actually get out and vote for Trump even though they are in fundamental ways sympathetic to him and the Trump campaign did spend some time and some money trying to pressure test this idea in Iowa this idea that some of these people believe it or not do still exist because I think for a lot of us Ezra we really did look at 2020 and the massive turnout that we saw and we figured okay well Trump base is pretty well maxed out now there's not a lot of people who like Trump who are still on the sidelines but his campaign disagrees and so this first bucket that they've really been focusing on since Iowa and that they're investing their sort of new version of a ground game from the Trump campaign in partnership with the Republican National Committee is is primarily focused on identifying some of these people who have not voted for Trump before but that if they can be found and if they can be engaged on the ground at their doors on their front porches that they will vote in this election for Trump the second bucket of the low propensity voters are actually people who have in the past voted but they've been reliably Democratic so here's where we're talking about young people where we're talking about black men ages 18 to 34 Latino men potentially even Latino women to some degree again depending on the modeling that they're looking at and I think what's interesting in this second bucket is that the Trump folks are not going to spend a dime on a traditional ground game trying to build a field operation around finding these people and getting them to the polls uh they believe that that's a waste of money they think that ultimately the much more effective way to reach these people is with the sort of narrowly tailored micr targeting approach that ws had done so effectively in Florida to reach some of these same non-traditional constituencies and convince them not even so much that the Republican party is their friend but that the Democratic party is their enemy and to fuel a disillusionment with Democratic politics that they think is already pretty ripe in those areas in those communities so this I think is probably going to be the first election in our lifetimes if you believe the polling Dave waserman at the cook political report has written extensively about this based on the polling project that they've been doing that this is probably going to be the first election where the low engagement low propensity voters are overwhelmingly breaking towards the Republican party and that really could represent sort of a sea change in our politics we've been talking about this in terms of campaign mechanics but I want to bring it back to what we're seeing at the convention because the most powerful tool a campaign has is not its gov effort it is how it is seen overall it is what the election is understood to be about what the parties are understood to be representing and it does feel to me as somebody who's watched a lot of Republican conventions who has attended Republican conventions that Trump is trying even more so than he really did in 2016 or 2020 to reposition the Republican party that the JD Vance pick is part of this that having the teamster president in a keynote speaking slot on the first night of the RNC is part of this having Amber Rose up there that it feels like I am watching the Republican Party tur into the YouTube version of itself from the Fox News version of itself but you're there you're feeling it you're also seeing how people are reacting in in the stands what feels different to you from 2016 substantively and in terms of Messengers this year you know Ezra a lot has changed since 2016 I can vividly remember being on the convention floor there in Cleveland and it was probably about half of all the delegates who were there to ultimately nominate Donald Trump were not happy about doing so there were you know really intense factional fights there between the never trumpers and the prot trumpers and then a lot of people were sort of caught in the middle and feeling like well he did win and we are here to nominate him but I think this guy's kind of a scoundrel and I'm not sure he's a republican you saw very few Maga hats back in 2016 um there was not at all a sense that this was his party I think at best some of the trumpers then thought that had a chance to make it his party but a lot of us felt like well maybe this is just sort of a blip and kind of a a freak Black Swan thing that he won the nomination and he's going to lose in November and then he'll go away and things will go back to normal well fast forward to 2024 this is the third time that Trump has been nominated I mean you if you go back through American history and look there's not a lot of people who capture a party's presidential nomination three times I think we have to recognize that this is entire in every way Donald Trump's party and the message this week supposedly has been Unity but it almost feels more like surrender in a lot of ways Ezra uh if you think about Nikki Haley's speech even Ronda sanz's speech I mean these are people who like so many who came before them had really passionately made the case that this guy really isn't fit to be president and certainly isn't fit to be the leader of their party and yet here they are sort of falling in line and standing and saluting and ultimately pledging their allegiance to Trump so something has changed in the party obviously just in terms of its image in terms of its makeup even at the delegate level at the risk of getting too far into the weeds Ezra I would just say that I've covered the Republican National Committee for a long time I've been to a number of conventions there are so many people here who I just don't recognize and I think it's in part because because the forces of Donald Trump have remade the party literally down to the precinct level I mean when you think about local Republican groups County Republican groups State Republican commissions and conventions these institutions of the party have just been completely overhauled by Trump and by his allies and so that change to the party is very apparent and I think the other change that you were referencing in the first part of your question that is at the heart part of what Chris levita and Susie WS are envisioning when they talk about this being a realignment election and an election that could potentially really change the ways in which the Republican party is perceived they think about the Republican Party moving forward as a populist workingclass multi-racial Coalition that is no longer the party of the Wall Street Journal torial page and of the sort of old stuffy Heritage Foundation with its policy white papers they want to create a party that is both sort of edgier and also more inclusive but a party that is frankly not beholden to some of the conventional pieces of the Republican Coalition I.E the evangelicals as we saw at the platform fight or even some of the traditional defense Hawks as we see with the JD Vance pick because the calculus made by Trump and by Chris and suie running the campaign is that those people are ultimately going to fall in line and vote anyway they just believe that these Republican voters are never going to defect and vote for Joe Biden and so that they have this opportunity to sort of play with house money and see if they can't expand the Coalition and bring in all sorts of people who would have never thought to be attainable in in previous [Music] elections well let's try to look at this through JD Vance I find a number of my liberal friends are so focused on who he was that they have trouble asking the question of of who he now is how do you read the thinking behind Trump's thinking behind and then to the extent that it is different the meaning or importance of Vance being the Vice Presidential nominee the best way I can answer that Ezra is to explain how for many months inside of Trump World there have been parallel tracks of thinking about Trump picking a vice president on the one track is the idea that you pick someone who is safe and vanilla and non-controversial and older so this was where Trump had really become quite enamored with Doug bergham who sort of checked all the boxes and he's independently wealthy and he's handsome and he's got a beautiful wife and you know there's and he's not going to offend anyone and he might reassure people yes exactly he might reassure people uh sort of like Mike Pence did back in 2016 that okay there there's going to be a responsible adult in the room with Donald Trump at all times like Doug bergham is a kind of person who would certify the 2020 election that's right and Ezra that first argument that sort of bergam argument was really carrying the day for much of the past six months I think if you had asked people all throughout that period people close to Trump would have gone to Vegas and put their money on Doug bergham or if not bergam then certainly on a bergam type if for no other reason Ezra than the fact that they all recognize everyone recognizes that Donald Trump does not like to have competition he does not like to be upstaged he does not like the idea that anyone could be seen as potentially usurping him and yet the second Track Running parallel this idea of picking an era parent to the Maga Empire of sort of hand selecting his successor to lead the movement and the party going forward that was always seen as kind of a Longshot most of the people around Trump just did not believe that that was ultimately what he would decide to do and it's really remarkable that not only did Trump come around and warm up to this idea but that he really came around and warmed up to a guy who was sort of the unlikeliest era parent as your colleagues uh Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman wrote in their piece yesterday there there's been some real tension going back to the very first time that Trump ever met with JD Vance and basically told him hey you've been saying some nasty stuff about me except he didn't say stuff and for Trump to do such a 180 on JD Vance and to really come to view him as not just an ally not just as a kindred spirit but as someone who was almost supernaturally attuned to this visceral populist impulse that kind of animates Trump's political thinking it's quite remarkable and Vance I think was able to impress upon Trump in a sort of diplomatic way that all of those raw visceral populist impuls is that you feel Donald Trump you aren't always able to articulate them you're not always able to sort of present them in a coherent organized fashion I can do that for you I can help you actually put meat on those bones I can help you to craft a governing Vision that is not going to be derailed by the Rhinos like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnel and the others who were in your cabinet during that first term if you want to really remake the country then you need someone who can help you translate those sort of abstract ideas into something real and I think that's that was really compelling to Trump but two things can be true here one is that there's this other strain of both Trump and and Vance it feels to me like it connects which is this populist aesthetic populist resentment populist anger strain right the main thing Vance did I think is in his own political makeover was go from a softspoken openhearted temperamentally gentle person to somebody who was the most contemptuous the most conflictual the most antagonistic figure towards liberals in his public speaking that functionally there really even is in the Republican party so on the one hand I think he is much more in the populist aesthetic than a Rubio than a bergam and that is something I think Trump has deeply understood the power of even as I wonder how much the people saying this is an ideological pick which is something even I have said because I mean it is a much more ideological pick than I was expecting how much that may or may not actually prove to be true in Trump's presidency because Trump listens to a lot of people and ultimately goes wherever he goes and goes in different directions at the same time the reason Trump is confusing in many ways to cover is that he'll say something and then say something that points in the opposite direction in the same answer I think think it's very funny that at the same time he is naming JD Vance this sort of angry populist figure and Maga political thinker who's railing against the globalists to be his vice presidential pick he's musing to Bloomberg about making Jamie Diamond the head of JB Morgan and like the icon of the globalist banker class his treasury secretary so there's this weird way to me in which Vance's populist aesthetic is is a very clear uh through here and the ideological dimension of him the guy who can create a governing philosophy I don't know I wonder if that's more legible to people like me because it's how we think about politics but that's a mistake we keep making about thinking uh that we can predict Donald Trump it's a totally fair question and and we could be making that mistake Ezra you know with with JD Vance you do just get a sense I I was just having this conversation with a very plugged in Republican couple of days ago and this is someone who spent a lot of time with Trump also spent time with Vance knows them both and this person said to me he said look don't underestimate the degree to which Trump and the people around Trump are thinking to themselves especially now that they really know that they're winning like if it wasn't clear a few weeks ago it's really clear now they're they're winning they think that they're cruising they think there's nothing that can stop them and he said don't underestimate the degree to which they're all looking around now and saying okay the revolution is on and if the revolution is on then you have to have the True Believers on the inside starting with the vice president who are going to from day one be all in on executing whatever the the the X's and O's wind up looking like of a sort of populist America first start rebuilding at home and and get us out of these foreign entanglements whatever the policy actually winds up looking like that from day one it's going to be coherent and it's going to be cohesive and it's going to be effective in ways that Trump could never be effective in his first term because as I mean I've reported on this at length but like even before Trump was sworn in he was basically shuffled into conference rooms where Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were going over entire flowcharts of what they were going to do and when they were going to do it and Trump was just sort of sitting there nodding and saying yeah okay sure okay whatever you guys want right like if you believe that they are this time around really intent on trying to deliver policy that actually aligns itself with that populist aesthetic then Vance makes all the sense in the world and you can expect him to be really in many ways the sort of intellectual architect of a second Trump term so Chris rufo the the right-wing activist had a tweet that that I thought was quite Sharp where he said the difference between Trump 2016 and Trump 2024 is that there is now an emerging right-wing counter Elite with sufficient knowledge wealth power and Prestige to advance the president's agenda through the institutions Trump 2.0 will be an order of magnitude more effective and if you think of administrations as fractious as having different Power bases within them Mike Pence's vice presidency was a power base of the traditional Republican party inside the Trump Administration I mean Mike Pence was a choice Donald Trump made to comfort Fox News and Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation and all these figures who in his view had power and Evangelical voters and and so on but might not trust him and in choosing fance he's shown he does not need to count out to any of them you know for a competent Democratic ticket that say had a standard bear who could clearly make an argument against the Republicans JD Vance opens up a lot of lines of attack he's not a graceful politician in the way Marco Rubio tries to be he really opens himself to uh countermobilization I'm not sure if the Democratic ticket is going to be able to do what it needs to do here but there is both the the possibilities for Trump of coherence and the problems of coherence um because he's not left himself a lot of a lot of outs either as a governing force or as a campaigning figure that's exactly right Ezra I think what you just said there is really important because let's face it a lot of us have spent our time and Spilled our ink on this notion of a second Trump Administration being staffed by characters out of the Star Wars bar scene and and how it would be sort of chaotic and it would be sort of one uh catastrophe after the next uh because gone are the establishment friendly figures like you know Paul Ryan Mitch McConnell but then even in the C you know Ry Prius as chief of staff and Betsy DeVos as education secretary and you know all down the line and that this time around it's just going to be the True Believers therefore it's going to be that much more chaotic and I'm not sure that that's necessarily true it could be sure but I actually think that if we've learned something from this campaign it's that if you put people around Trump who sort of better understand his gut instincts and who are able to sort of build out around those instincts rather than trying to tame them sort of trying to weaponize them and trying to uh best operationalize them and then build something out from them that works what you could see to the point of rufo's tweet is a lot of people in Trump's second Administration who share his vision broadly speaking share if not his impulses then certainly some of his gut level disdain for the left and for some of his opponents in the Democratic party and who are therefore able to work much more efficiently much more effectively and actually get a lot more done I think that's a a very likely scenario that we haven't spent nearly as much time thinking about this time around you could have sort of all rowing in the same direction and that could make for a very very different Administration from the one that some of us have been I think conceptualizing and then always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience so the first book I'd recommend is from my friend Jonathan Carl over at ABC News and it's the final book that he wrote about Donald Trump the most recent book it's called tired of winning and it's just a terrific psychological window into Donald Trump in Exile after January 6th after leaving office when he'd become a pariah and was sort of toxic and nobody in the party really wanted anything to do with him and Jonathan really in a compelling way Chronicles Trump in those months between leaving office and before he actually begins to regain some of his old political power and moves toward another run in 2024 I think that was a very formative and in some ways deeply impactful period for Trump as he thought about his own future about the party's future about what had gone wrong and how he might try to fix it so Jonathan's book is the best thing I've read on that period the second book especially in light of what we saw on Saturday with the assassination attempt is a book by Elizabeth Newman called Kingdom of rage and Elizabeth who's a former counterterrorism official she writes really beautifully and eloquently about the threat of domestic terrorism and specifically looking at right-wing Christian nationalism and the ways that some of the more militant blood and soil God and Country rhetoric from the religious right has gone beyond just unsettling to the church and disruptive to American Christianity but has actually manifested in a clear and present danger to the country and that religious extremism being on the rise is a threat to both parties so Elizabeth's book is fantastic um and my third book is actually by a colleague of mine at the Atlantic McKay cins he wrote this biography called Romney a reckoning and spent a ton of time with Mitt Romney really had amazing access to him and his family and his journals and everything else and I think for anyone trying to understand the transformation we were discussing earlier from the convention in 2016 to the convention in 2024 and what exactly has happened inside the Republican party and how Donald Trump has effectively steamrolled any opposition that got in the way of his remaking of the GOP McKay's book is a great resource just to understand Through The Eyes of one man who probably knows that story better than anyone Romney being the nominee and becoming sort of the foil to Trump in those years and now on his way out as Trump is potentially set to return to the White House so that's another terrific read that gives you a great perspective on this moment we're in Tim Alberta thank you for taking time away from the convention floor to talk with us I really appreciate it hey Ezra it's my pleasure man thanks for having me [Music] this episode of the E kin show is produced by Roland who factchecking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker our senior engineer is Jeff G with additional mixing by almen sahota our senior editor is Claire Gordon the show's production team also includes Annie Galvin Elias iswith and Christen Lynn we have original music by Isaac Jones Audi and strategy by Christina Sami and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose ster and special thanks to Sonia Herrero [Music]