Does Trump Want to Lose the Midterms?

Hi, I'm Solana Pine. I'm the Director of Video at The New York Times. For years, my team has made videos that bring you closer to big news moments, videos by Times journalists that have the expertise to help you understand what's going on. Now, we're bringing those videos to you in the Watch tab in The New York Times app. It's a dedicated video feed where you know you can trust what you're seeing. All the videos there are free for anyone to watch. You don't have to be a subscriber. Download The New York Times app to start watching. My pet theory right now is that Donald Trump is not trying to win the midterm election. I'm not saying he's trying to lose it exactly. I just don't think he cares. What he cares about is controlling the Republican Party. The Republican Party is his power base. The Republican Party is his protection. The Republican Party is how he can wield power far into the future, long after his presidency. And so control of it is what he's prioritizing. I call this a theory, but it's more like a hypothesis. It is predictions. You can test them. Trump is more unpopular at this point in his second term than basically any of his modern predecessors. The midterm elections, they're less than six months away. He could easily lose the House. He could actually lose the Senate now. So what is he doing? Well, if you wanted to win the midterms, he'd be moving to the center. He'd be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He'd be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he possibly could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts. He is not doing even a little bit of that. Not even a bit. Instead, he's doing the opposite. He's announcing a $1.8 billion slush fund that appears designed to pay out to January 6th rioters. He endorsed the scandal-plagued, very controversial Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in Texas, giving Democrats a real chance at winning a seat that should be way out of reach for them. He helped primary Thomas Massey, the House Republican who released the Epstein files. He defeated Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana senator who voted to impeach him in his first term. He is attacking Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the very, very, very few House Republicans representing a district that voted for Kamala Harris. He's threatening to escalate the Iran war. And when asked whether he was worried about Americans' finances, about their pocketbooks, about their cost of living, here is what he said. Mr. President, to what extent are Americans' financial situations motivating you to make a deal? Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all. What a gift to Democratic ad makers that clip is. Donald Trump cares about control of his party, not of Congress. If he can win the election in a way that tightens his control over Republicans, like through redistricting, he'll take that. If not, he's busy. He's got other things to do. I'm not saying he wants Democrats to win, but I don't think he minds it if they do. A Democratic Congress gives him an enemy to fight. I think he gets a little lost without an enemy. It frees him from the tedious work of trying to pass legislation. It puts him back in the place he's most comfortable, which is not wielding power. It's claiming persecution. What Trump would mind, what he does fear, is a Republican party with a spine. He fears a Republican party where members of Congress begin to participate in the investigations of his scandals. Where they abandon him as his fortunes fall. And so he's made his choice. He is showing them that to oppose him, even from the right, is to light your political future on fire. The point isn't just to defeat Massey or Cassidy or Cornyn or any of them. It's to scare every Republican left in Congress. To make sure they know that Donald Trump would gladly destroy each and every one of them personally. That he would gladly burn the entire Republican party to the ground if that's what it took to save himself. I thought it would be interesting to hear how this looks to someone whose business has been winning elections for the Republican party, particularly Senate elections. Liam Donovan is a Republican strategist and a president at Targeted Victory, a Washington public affairs and digital marketing firm. He's worked on the National Republican Senatorial Committee and also for Texas Senator John Cornyn. And his political commentators appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Liam Donovan, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Thanks for having me, Ezra. So we're here. Trump is now under 40% in a bunch of different polls. More unpopular at this point in his term than basically any of his modern predecessors. Let's start with him. Why is he down there? I think if you think about the mood of the country that produced the comeback of Donald Trump, putting together the coalition that he did, that was predicated on a rejection of the status quo and the bet that Donald Trump would be able to return us to the economy and maybe the vibes of pre-COVID 2020. Of course, that's much harder to do than it is to talk about. And I think this is fundamentally about frustrations of how difficult some of these problems are to tackle. An electorate that is not really looking to be told that everything is going well. And then when you compound that with some of the policy choices that have been made that I think might prove to be wise in the longer run, but there are legacy-minded moves, not immediate-term electoral plays. Was it so much harder? I always feel like you could imagine a Trump administration, second term, that sealed the border, but didn't do the aggressive internal ICE and CBP enforcement so you didn't have things like the battle of Minnesota. That did not, say, go to war in Iran. That did not do the tariffs. And could then draft on what was a fairly strong and certainly well-recovering economy coming out of Biden and was getting a bunch of AI investment and doesn't make a bunch of what seemed to me to be errors. And maybe he's in a really different place. I think the way you have to think about this is the mythology of the Trump first term as understood by Donald Trump versus as it was understood by other, the electorate included. Trump looking back, the reason he lost, the reason he wasn't as successful as he might have been was that he was held back from his impulses and his policy preferences by the deep state, by never-Trumpers, by the sort of Bush-era Republicans that don't reflect or respect his version of how the country should look. You know, at some level, you could argue he was saved politically by that layer of insulation. And if you think about what's changed, it's that he has absolutely installed loyalists. There is a threshold question of, are you absolutely committed to this project? And I think therefore, he's feeling for the first time what it looks like to get what you're asking for. And the electorate that re-elected him just wanted to go back to the way it was. So I do think there's a disconnect there. But to your point, there's an easy mode that he might have done, but it wouldn't have necessarily been his vision for what America first or MAGA looks like. Yeah, this was very striking to me when I looked at the poll numbers on it. So at this point in his first term, he had a plus 10 net disapproval. He's now at plus 21. So he is, you know, more than twice as unpopular at this point in his second term as in his first. But it all goes to this question, I think, which is whether or not you understand the sort of weakened political state he's in as a function of the mood of the country or actually as a function of the country's reactions to Donald Trump's policies. Like, is it just dyspeptic or does it not want this? I think there are layers to it. I mean, you have to think about, there's no ceiling in a way that there didn't used to be, but I think we've seen this over the last 20 years, maybe since the Obama era, since our coalitions have shifted, the parties have, the country's polarized. It's very, very difficult to imagine a president getting above, say, 48 percent, something like that. The coalition that got him there. So in that sense, it's a hard cap. And so like you need to almost grade on a little bit of a curve in terms of where these things are. That said, the president's approval rating, I don't care which party you're from, wants to be above 40. You know, it wants to be at 42, 43. That is your firm base. What we're seeing here is that there are elements of the Republican coalition that consider themselves Republican who are disillusioned for one reason or another. Either they are anti-war or skeptical of foreign entanglements. Maybe they are simply upset about the cost of living. They don't like tariffs, what have you. They just don't like the way things are going. I think that is the layer that is the easiest to imagine getting back. And if we're looking forward to, okay, how does this get back to a place where Republicans stand to have an okay or like just a par midterm? It's that he floats back up above 40 because that's kind of where these people want to be. They want to be given a reason to like Donald Trump. They want to be given a reason to vote for Republicans. But why doesn't Donald Trump want to give them that reason? This is where I wanted to get A step with the state. But that there is then this separate thing that happens of Trump going to punish and purge specific candidates who he feels were disloyal to him. And so it's more notable, but it's not the macro story. I think that's right. Each state, there's an interesting story we can get into. In Louisiana, the most obvious. But the fact that he is understanding that in Maine, Susan Collins is the only Republican who can win there and should win there. And he's not mucking around there in the way that he is in, say, Louisiana. Texas, I think, is a unique one in that it became a bargaining chip. And in some ways, Senator Cornyn became collateral in this broader tug of war. You know that one well. You used to work for Cornyn. I did. What happened there between Trump and Cornyn? I think in the White House's ideal timeline, Ken Paxton doesn't get in. I don't think there were entreaties from the White House or from the Trump operation to get him in to challenge Cornyn. The problem is that he did it anyway, and it created a really difficult dynamic. Why did it create a difficult dynamic? Why doesn't Trump just say Cornyn's our guy? What are you doing here? Because Paxton was his guy too. So he's got people competing for his affections in a way that the president obviously likes a great deal. And maybe it's worth it for people who maybe don't know that much about Paxton for you to describe a bit who he is in Texas politics. So who's Paxton and why did Trump decide in the final moments of that primary to endorse him over John Cornyn, possibly risking that seat? So Ken Paxton is the sitting attorney general of Texas. He's been elected statewide a number of times. So it's important to get out there. It's not the Senate. It's not the governor. But he has been statewide elected. And he has been statewide elected since carrying some of the political baggage that he does. To the extent that he's known, it's largely because he has gotten into hot water a number of different times. There was actually an impeachment effort. But there have been efforts at the state level to be rid of him. He has prevailed. He has prevailed in part by aligning himself with Donald Trump, being a leader on a number of the initiatives that the president cares a lot about from the 2020 election standpoint and otherwise. So he has boosted his brand by wrapping himself in MAGA and donning the hat. He threw himself into this race. You have to think John Cornyn, who I adore, is a longtime incumbent, is very much of the flavor of the George W. Bush, Rick Perry era Texas Republican Party, which is not necessarily the vanguard here. He spent a decade plus in Senate leadership in ways that tie into the national party, in ways that can be complicated in these sorts of primary efforts. Why does Donald Trump get involved? Look, like I said, I think Cornyn became a bargaining chip for Trump with John Thune at a time when he wanted the Senate to do certain things. In the Senate at that point, there was this big push to get the Save America Act across to nuke the filibuster, to do so. All these complicated things. When that didn't happen, it became clear that there did not seem to be an inclination from the president to to to back Cornyn. When I heard that he was going to endorse, that gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach because I had a feeling that wasn't going to be for Cornyn. I question the idea that Paxton loses this seat. I think the real problem for Republicans is, I mean, twofold. Number one, it's always easier, cheaper, more straightforward to get an incumbent reelected than it is to have an open seat. The more complicated the candidate is, the more expensive it is. I think that's the real problem. This is this is a massive state with a huge number of expensive media markets. The amount of resources that will be expended here and the marginal reason it was going to be expensive for Cornyn. It's going to be insanely expensive for Paxton. Tellarico has raised an insane amount of money. He has. And I think that will be costly. So I felt this point you still haven't quite answered my question about Donald Trump, which is, look, he did not have to come in and endorse Paxton. Cornyn was not an anti-Trump Republican. If you look at Polymarket, the odds of Republicans holding the seat have gone from 75% in January to 55% now. So they're favored. And I think you have to still see Ken Paxton as a favorite. But it's more narrow. It could look something more like the Doug Jones, you know, victory in Alabama over a very, very, very flawed candidate a couple years back. I take your point that there are places where they didn't do a bunch of stupid things. But there's a world where they wake up after the election and James Tellerico won in Texas and that made Chuck Schumer majority leader. And that's purely on Donald Trump's table. Like he chose that outcome. Are they mad about that? Or does he actually, on some level, not care that much because fighting with the Democratic Congress is in some ways a pleasure for him? I don't think that's what it is. I think a couple of things. Number one, you asked the question of why didn't why did he choose Paxton? Why didn't he choose Cornyn? I think this is a bet of being for what's going to happen. If you thought in a vacuum that Paxton probably wins and you're Donald Trump thinking, I want to flex my muscles and and look like I'm the reason that that is a to me, the logic of that kind of a pick at a time when, again, this has become a proxy match with the Senate Republican establishment. I'd also suggest to you, I don't see a universe where Texas goes blue and it does and it stops there. Right. Like I don't think Texas is the marginal fourth seat where Democrats get to 51 and that's it. So it's much more likely to me that on a night where Tellerico wins, it's just lights out because it was such a bad night. I don't think it's going to be scrappy and clawing to 51 and it's Tellerico that puts them over the top. And do you think that's how Trump thinks about it? Oh, no, that's just how Liam thinks about it. OK, but I'm asking how Trump thinks about it. Like, like, go a little bit further, because I think that the question I, like the big question I am struggling with Donald Trump is I struggle with many questions about him. So what does this guy want? What is his actual play here? And maybe it's not that strategic, but to me, I think there is a strategy here, which is I think he wants control of the Republican Party. I think he cares about that more than he cares about control of Congress. I mean, his fury at Thomas Massey was obviously part of this. He took out Bill Cassidy, which is not, I think, the Louisiana senator, which is not, I think, a seat Democrats have any chance of picking up. But I see something that is consistent here and goes a ways back, which is that Donald Trump sees his power base as the Republican Party itself. I think that he is less worried about a world where Democrats have power than he is about a world where as his numbers go down, as he is a lame duck, Republicans feel empowered to oppose him, to join in investigations of him. And the danger is not that Democrats lose elections. It's that Republicans ever feel empowered to abandon him. And that's also Donald Trump maybe controls the Republican Party into the future. I'm not a person who believes he's going to run for a third term, but could he continue to exert enormous power over the Republican Party by continuing to intervene in primaries all over the country? I think he absolutely could. And you can be the kingmaker even when you're not the king. But I'm curious if you disagree with that. Well, I think if we agree on the predicate that he doesn't generally, in general, the future fortunes, the present and future fortunes of the Republican Party in and of themselves are not significant concern, then the next layer below that is, well, what does he care about it? I think he certainly cares about, you know, the fealty to to him. Just his impulses are to flex his muscles and have Republicans do what he wants. And as it looks less likely that the House stays or whatever, then then, yes, you begin to start thinking about, OK, well, if I can't have that, what can I have? And I think there's kind of, you know, sort of a decision tree there. But but I just think once we establish, does he does he care about doing the sorts of things that make it easier for people to win elections when he's not on the ballot? He cares a little bit. But when that's in tension with his control over the party, I certainly think that that shapes his decision making. Hi, this is Ashley. I live in San Francisco with my boyfriend. We would love to officially share my New York Times subscription with separate logins. We both love cooking, love being in the kitchen, but I'm a 30 minute and under efficient dinner girly. I want a sheet pan meal. He is very elaborate. He wants to get into the storytelling. I want to be able to save my easy meals and check off the ones that I've completed. And I think him having his own profile would be great. Ashley, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times family subscription. You get your own login and Mr. Elaborate gets his plus room for two others. Find out more at NYT.com slash family. Let's zoom out a little bit here just to A Harris-voting Democrat vote for Republican for Senate, well, because Graham Plattner is a different kind of Democrat. They might have voted for Janet Mills, but they wouldn't vote for Graham Plattner. So I think that's one. I wouldn't say it's number two, but it's the most obvious kind of target. What do you make of the polling has kind of consistently shown Plattner as a more competitive against Collins compared to Mills? Yeah, I mean, I think this is... I don't have a good answer on the point. I think the value of Plattner is he’s the high variance candidate at a time when having lost with a Syria Gideon type, variance is your friend. So that's the logic of a Plattner pick. I'm not quite sure what's happening at the point, except that Janet Mills ran kind of a somnambulent campaign. It was just... What do you see? 77th. And by the way, I think this is relevant on Collins, too. Collins is a lot older and seems it in a way that I think is more difficult for her as a campaigner. I would argue, as a Susan Collins or been around her for 20 years, like I think she's sharper than, as sharp as ever. I don't want to over... I don't want to turn it into Joe Biden stuff. But like, no, I actually think that she's, she's strong and sharp. And whether her brand is still what the people of Maine want, I mean, I hope they do, but we'll have to see. It's a stark contrast there. But I think the dynamic of Plattner versus Mills, one of these guys has energy, one of the guys out there, you know, doing things that's at least interesting. You might not like him, but it's at least interesting. She seemed to have to be pulled into the race. She got in late. So like that differential, I guess at some level makes sense to me. I don't think that's the same question as when we go through a general campaign, do they perform the same way on election night? And, you know, we'll have to see. But this is really, this becomes a strong question of like, is it just shirts and skins? Is it just D versus R? And are people willing to say, okay, an independent minded Republican that that, you know, took big stands against Donald Trump, but has enough respect from this White House that she's not getting torpedoed for it. Do people still want that? And I think it remains to be seen. And I think the hope among sort of the Plattner fans is that he brings in voters who don't normally like Democrats. And I think Democrats continuously have this question of if we ran people more in the Bernie Sanders mold, if you ran people who did not seem like they came out of the same institutions, can you pick up some of these people who liked Trump because he's an outsider, not people who, you know, will naturally always vote for Democrats? Well, I'll say a couple of things. Number one, I think there's something to that and that you want to serve up something that's differentiated. But I think the flavor that makes the most sense to me, I don't need to be giving advice to the Democratic Party of Maine, but to me, that looks like a Jared Golden, right? Who's instead, who's the House member who represents the reddest district of any Democrat and for a bunch of reasons, but also he's getting primaried by another Democrat. He's now retiring, which I think is a real loss for Democrats. Right. And I think he succeeds potentially in cutting a different image. He manages to check to me. He's a combat vet and Marine, you know, but he's not a, he's not associated himself with with Bernie, right? Like, I raised that only to say I think that the problem for Plattner may not prove to be a problem, but the risk for Plattner is, oh, I mean, it's a fascinating interview with, with with your New York Times colleagues. I mean, I found that very interesting as they probe some of like how much of this is superficial, how, how much of that, you know, that blue collar affect is, is real and legitimate. And I mean, there's, there's some holes that can be poked in here that are that do not hold up to scrutiny. This is still a fascinating state with two districts, one of which is the conservative sort of, you know, up in Aroostook and Presque Isle. And then there's the coast. And I think for whatever many voters that Plattner can, can get from, you know, the Golden district, how many is he turning off on the coast notwithstanding his oysterman background? Is that going to, you know, hold up with some of the people that actually know and have liked Susan Collins in the past? So I hear all that, but for Democrats to have any chance here, they're going to need North Carolina. They're going to need Maine. Then what? I think Maine's the easiest kind of threshold quote. Like I think there is a path. There is a path independent of Maine, but that just tells you, okay, there there's the one state where she's still got it right. But after those first two, it gets really difficult. And there is a leap to, I mean, you can take your pick, but I think the Ohio race is probably where Democrats have the best shot. You know, Sherrod Brown is somebody who lost in the previous election to Bernie Moreno, who I don't think Democrats expected to lose for Sherrod Brown to lose to. He'd been in elective office for the previous 50 years or so. He's coming back. He's able to raise a lot of money, but I think it's hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. When, when, when you were an incumbent and your strength is predicated on being the guy who can win and then you're trying to pull yourself off the mat, it's a little bit tougher. You have an incumbent, but an appointed incumbent in John Husted. You know, the, the ticket there with him and Vivek has, has been, the polling has been okay, but Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor. Vivek Ramaswamy. Husted's not done anything particularly offensive. He's going to have the resources there on a night where Sherrod Brown beats John Husted and withstands the, I mean, the amount of money that's going to come into that race from the outside, particularly from like the crypto minded groups and that kind of thing. It's going to be astonishing. If that happens, it was a really, really good night for Democrats. So let's put actually numbers on that. So if I am remembering this right, I think that Brown, who was a very strong candidate, lost that election by three and a half points. I think that's right. So in, you know, you were saying about Bernie Moreno, who I think was in many ways a weak candidate, a sort of car dealer who had settled a lot of wage theft lawsuits and people talk about populism, but was not obviously a great icon of populism. But Sherrod Brown lost to Donald Trump and he lost to the Democratic Party's reputation in Ohio. Right. He could not over, he overperformed Kamala Harris by quite a bit. I think it's the last part that matters. I mean, yes, Donald Trump was on the ticket, but I mean, we've, we've keep doing this, right? I think we had the same argument when it was Tim Ryan against JD Vance. Like at a certain point when you're saying like, there's like special pleading of like, oh, these are bad candidates. Well, like when the bad, when you say these are bad, I would argue. I'm not saying Sherrod Brown's a bad candidate. No, no, no, not Sherrod Brown. Oh. No, no, no. I'm saying Bernie Moreno and JD Vance. Yeah, I'm just saying, right. I think that in a, yes, I'm saying, I think that candidate quality wise, and you could disagree with me if you want, but I think Sherrod Brown is a better candidate quality wise and Bernie Moreno is, but the Democratic Party's brand in Ohio is such trash that he could not overcome that as Tim Ryan couldn't overcome it as basically no Democrats in Ohio can now overcome it. So the question with Sherrod Brown, it seems to me, is, you know, let's say 2024 is an environment where, you know, Democrats are minus two or three, right? It's a, it's a little bit of a better environment for Republicans. If this is a plus six or plus seven Democratic environment, maybe that overwhelms the problems of the Democratic Party brand and, and, and Brown can win. If it's not, if it's plus two, if it's plus three, then probably Brown can't win. It really seems to me there, you're looking at a, like a pretty straightforward, how big is the Democratic wave? Like what is, like how much has Trumpism cost Republicans in this year? I totally agree with that. I just, on the Ohio front, I do think there's been a tendency to underrate the Republican candidate in this case, again, like however you thought of Vance or, or Moreno, Husted is completely inoffensive. He was the Lieutenant Governor. I just think that matchup is worse for Brown. But if you're trying to count to three, like that probably should be the third. And it's not going to get any easier in terms of the different states. Like the, the pool of states that we're talking about, and we talked enough about, about Texas, but like I put that in that, that tier where to your, to your point about like how good is the environment for Democrats. It needs to be Dem plus six or seven to just an eerily similar situation to what Republicans have lived for a decade and a half. This experience of Democrats putting up candidates that are probably objectively weaker and more susceptible to lose. I don't know that it will come back to bite them, but it's so clear that if you put up somebody that's not fit for the state and remember, this is something that Democrats have used to their benefit in, you know, Arizona. I think back to Arizona where like both Kyrsten Sinema in one instance and then Mark Kelly in the other, they just got to wait around, had a field of themselves stockpiling cash while Republicans, you know, spent money and beat each other up and divided the party. Like the longer this goes in Michigan, the more divided they are. It's an August primary. It's not happening for a little while. So just for people who don't know this, the primary there in the Democratic side between Abdullah Sayad, who's a more progressive candidate, then Mallory McMorrow and Haley Stevens, who are sort of both more, you know, McMorrow, a little bit between the two. Stevens definitely more the establishment Democratic candidate. And they seem to be splitting a vote between them. And also El-Sayed has like wrapped them around the axle of Gaza, which has become a pretty potent issue in Democratic Party politics, and neither of them have been able to navigate in an effective way. So I think that's when it is a fascinating race. I absolutely think this is, and this is another case in point where the White House actually did a really good job of rallying behind Mike Rogers early, cleared that field in a way that I think there's an opportunity to sneak a seat right there. Like on a night where all these things that we're talking about are in play, Republicans have no business winning in Michigan, but we're actually looking at a situation where this race will be on the board unless something changes. Because even if Haley Stevens ekes it out, this is not the kind of primary that yields a candidate with the resources and unity that puts the race away. It'll, I think it'll be competitive heading into election night. So something you see in Michigan, and I think you also just saw in the Kentucky House primary where Thomas Massey lost, is a way that views about Israel, views about Palestinians, views about the war in Iran, are actually splitting both parties in complicated ways. So Massey, of course, is a big Trump critic, although it didn't used to be, you know, but was key in the Epstein files coming out. And he got, he was defeated. But he was a, you know, a favorite of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson in his concession speech. He said, I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gelleran, who beat him in Tel Aviv. AIPAC spent a lot of money against Massey. Massey said that he thinks he would have won if not for the sort of fights over Israel. And Massey, by the way, did much, much, much better among young Republicans than among old Republicans. Huge generational divide in that primary. So something is happening here that I think is going to like really flower in, or fracture, I should say, maybe more precisely in 2028 for both sides, which is that I think that Israel, Iran, Gaza have become very, very difficult for both parties to navigate. That their bases are internally split on these issues. Yeah, I think the Massey one is really interesting because he's been a gadfly throughout his career. That's been his old brand all along. And I actually, it reminded me on primary night, he had one of the best quotes I've heard of the Trump era. I think it was a 2017 interview that he had with the Washington Examiner. I think his line was, you know, for the longest time, I thought they were voting for me and for Ron Paul and for Rand Paul because we were the most conservative or maybe he said libertarian. And he said, and then Donald Trump comes along and I realized they're just voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump was, was first in class. It's just a great kind of summation of all these things, but it goes to, it gives you a sensitive flavor for like who Massey is. And I do think he was a, a thorn in the side of this White House and of the party for the longest time. But I think to your point, he was able to take issues that get a particular premium online. If you can, if you can take some of these polemical issues that get a lot of, you know, engagement and make that your issue. Like that's not really what we were talking about, but he was able to wrap himself in it in a way that I think got a lot of attention and, and was able to, in some ways, benefit him. He was able to fight a pretty close race. And I think that is a valuable way of getting attention. If you were a candidate, particularly an insurgent candidate, if you tried to make races about these issues, you can find an audience for it and whether or not it pays electoral dividends. I think that's something to watch for. One thing we're seeing in a bunch of different places is a schism, maybe between what I would think of as the Fox News Republicans and the YouTube Republicans. You see this in the Florida gubernatorial primaries on the right, where you have a very, very radical and I would say quite anti-Semitic candidate, but who's been very popular among young Republicans in that state. And there's Trump has kind of been on both sides of this line. He sort of united, at least in the 2024 election, like the podcast Republican world and the Fox News Republican world. But those feel to me like they're splitting apart. I mean, you could call it like the Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro split, right. You see it over and over and over again. Obviously Democrats have their own you know, fractures around these issues, but I'm curious in a broad way, how you see the, you know, it seemed to be very different politics among young Republicans than among old Republicans right now. I think that's right. I mean, I think it's, I think it's much easier to synthesize who knows where it goes, but I think Republicans have an easier time containing this and sorting it out. And you're watching, I'm watching Vice President Vance as the one who is kind of the, he has spoken up on this and I think is trying to sort that out because it's, there is, there is a generational divide. There's, there's certain politics that have been imprinted on. What makes it easier to sort it out on the Republican side? I don't think that as a. Like, how are you going to hold Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson together in one party? Well, I don't think, I don't think Tucker Carlson wants to be involved in any party right now. I mean, he endorses Republicans. He spoke at the RNC in 2024. Unless and until Tucker Carlson runs in, in 2028, like he is, he has deliberately marginalized himself in a way that has, I think been very successful in, you know, getting a grip around a certain audience. Let me push you on this because I'm really curious to hear, hear you say this, because what it looks to me like is happening is that Carlson is making a bet. I'm not saying it's not sincere. It might be sincere for him. But that the Republican Party is moving. That in the same way that, you know, Donald Trump once was a strange, eccentric vanity candidate, but is now the dominant figure in Republican Party politics. you know, what Carlson sees and is maybe also helping to shape is that young Republicans have very, very different views on a bunch of these issues. We live in a very, very attentionally thick society now. And yes, him, Candace Owens. I'm not saying that they are, you know, donating to the Republican Senate campaign committee, but they're on the right. I mean, I don't think that is arguable. They're endorsing candidates in Republican primaries. They both endorsed Massey, for instance. And yeah, maybe they're losing some of the fights now, but I think their view is that the only thing holding this together is Donald Trump himself. And that J.D. Vance can't hold it together. Marco Rubio can't hold it together. And so they're betting that after Donald Trump, like doesn't have an iron grip around the Republican Party, that what's going to be growing is their side of it. And in fact, picking some of these losing battles is good for them right now. Well, I think what's good for Don, what's good for Tucker, this is the attention economy, right? What's good for Tucker is getting attention to how he can, including right now, picking fights with Donald Trump because there is an appetite for that in a way that there wasn't a couple years ago. But I don't know that that's his project. I don't know that his is a, is an electoral proposition. I think he's trying to build his own platform. He's trying to build his own audience. And I think he genuinely has a lot of these positions that he's sorting out in real time. But I think the layers to this, I mean, the question of why do I think it's easier for Republicans? Well, I think for Democrats, this is like literally like a litmus test issue in a way that is going to be on full display in 2028 to the point where like, literally like the most obviously talented politician in the race. Like, I don't even know if, I mean, I'd love to know, like Josh Shapiro, does he have any chance of, it just seems like the kind of issue, just proximity to it, that would be Second-term president. And so I agree that right now, if you, in the Republican Party, decide to pivot towards the more chaotic Carlson, Owens, populist online, Epstein files, et cetera, energy, that, you know, Trump harnessed a fair amount of it in 2024, and now he's doing a bunch of things people from that part of the, you know, coalition didn't expect him to do. You still can't beat Trump. When he says, I am MAGA, he is right. But Donald Trump won't be there forever. And so can J.D. Vance put these things back in the bottle? Can he resist them? Or is Massey just early? Is, you know, are these the people who are telling you where the ball is going? And, you know, once it's not Donald Trump and like he is like the single dimensional litmus test of the entire Republican Party, it's all going to like fracture into chaos. And these things that seem to have the energy right now, but that he can put a stop to, well, there's going to be nobody to put a stop to them. Yeah, I think he's been able to, through sheer force of nature, kind of hold together some of these contradictions within the party. But I think so much of it is, you know, attitudinal, right? Like it's not even necessarily about what the issue is. It's not necessarily about what the policies are. And his gift was being able to like be all things to all people and have like being a walking contradiction in ways that kind of worked. I think that's really tough for anyone to do in either party. But just like anything else, and the Democrats are, you know, running into this too, like at the end of the day, you can have these conversations, but you need a vehicle and a vessel to harness all these things and resolve them in a way that at least gets you over the hump to 48, 49 percent of the vote that is able to overcome the other side. So I think can, whether it's JD or whether it's somebody else, I think a lot of that will be this ramp toward twenty twenty eight. What does the president choose to do? He obviously has a ton of power institutionally. And to me, it obviously seems like the orderly path is to hand it off to his vice president and successor. You know, I do think that whatever happens next, it's going to be based on how to how Republicans deal with the fact that the old version of the party is not what the voters wanted. It's not coming back and it may not be in the form that we currently see it. But you need to find something that appeals to your voters and that that does not get stuck trying to solve the problems of the 80s and 90s, because that seems to be the tendency. Like we've had the tug of war between Donald Trump or like Nikki Haley. Like that, that it just can't be that there has to be something different and there has to be something that acknowledges Trump's appeal and what he's figured out while also, you know, making it less personality based. And I think that's that's going to be the challenge for anybody, whether it's JD or anybody else. Are there Republicans, and I don't mean here just people who might compete in 2028, but just Republicans who are, you know, elected and are coming up in the party who you think represent or are trying to fashion interesting versions of that future? You know, I think Democrats have an idea of who their sort of young like bench is, but Trump is such a huge figure. And then you have obviously the sort of Rubio, J.D. Vance expected succession race. But as somebody who watches the Republican Party more closely, who do you watch in it as bellwethers or, you know, signals of where it's going? It's a great question. I mean, I worry about being generalist in the last war. You know, I think people have been trying to figure out what Trumpism without Trump looks like for the past, you know, really the past decade because there was there was an expectation that he'd he'd be a flash in the pan. And so you'd have to figure out how to take the good and ingest the rest. You know, I think the different flavors have certainly been there's I mean, Rubio's I think Rubio's transformation has been fascinating and quite effective in a lot of ways. I think, I mean, that's that's too easy. You know, J.D. came by this. This has kind of been his his vision of things since he entered entered politics. But the ones that have been playing with the congressional level like Josh Hawley, I don't think he's necessarily the guy, but watching him, Jim Banks similarly, like these guys are all like the entrepreneurship happening, trying to feel out like, let me see what I can do that can, whether it's harness attention or whether that's something the White House picks up in ways that are don't fit the orthodoxy of the old party. I think those guys have been really interesting. But I think at the end of the day, the insight of Trump is like so much of this isn't about policy. It's about it's about attitude. It's about how you position yourself against the left. And I've yet see somebody that has figured that aspect of it out. I think there's a tendency to over index to interesting political ideas that excite you or me. And that's not necessarily what excites a primary electorate in 2027 and 2028. If you're advising Republican candidates in some of these states we've talked about, there's obviously the specific qualities of the Democratic candidates they're running against. But broadly speaking, how would you tell them to run against the Democratic Party right now? I think you do need to tie your candidate, whatever their eccentricities are, to the national party, which is seen even by Democrats as as weak and feckless and in some ways, you know, tied to unpopular positions. I do think there is a body of evidence for anyone that was in politics in the twenty twenty to twenty twenty to moment. There's, you know, deep trove of of, you know, hits that are in there. We're starting to see that with Talrico, but I think that exists for most people. Put them on the defensive and make them account for the things that they said and did way back when. Because I think under the light of day six years later, it looks and sounds like a dispatch from another planet. And I think seeing where they were on Harris, seeing where they were on Biden, trying to tie them back to, you know, places where there's already been a verdict rendered. But I mean, it's just like good old fashioned opposition research, good old fashioned message and ad making and going back to that point about attention, like finding ways for this to break through and to almost mummify them in otherwise them like going back to Blake Masters being a weirdo. Like you've got to figure that out and crack that because some people maybe they'll grok it just because it's so obvious. But like you need to you need to paint a picture that's compelling. I mean, I don't know, maybe Spencer Pratt's the future. I don't know. Maybe we're going to get some some good AI video content. But I think that that's the sort of thing that needs to break through in this kind of attention economy. So as a final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Three books to your audience. I'm thinking of one that probably hasn't been read by most of your audience, but I think Should be. Matt Conteney wrote a history of the right called The Right, he's been he's been here for the show. Well, he didn't recommend his own books. But but I really think it did the best job that I've seen of reminding us that that not only did history not start in 2016, it didn't start in 1990 either. The iterations and evolutions of the Republican Party over a hundred years, I think, are important and instructive in terms of the current moment and how it maps on to the party at the time. There's always been this populist anti-establishment, often more conspiratorial wing. And in interesting ways, kind of full circle. But but yes, I think it's the fact of how fluid some of these things are, I think is just it's worth for the perspective of where this all came from. And obviously there's other layers that that are complicated, but I think it's a really good, really good book and a good read. Another one that I think, especially in this moment, you know, has a new significance now that we're talking about AI and all data centers and all these things. Patrick McGee's Apple in China, I found just very interesting from industrial policy standpoint, from a foreign policy standpoint, from a national security standpoint. Really, really good and worth reading for your audience. I'll go I'll go abundance. I think the frackers is really interesting for understanding our energy dominance, you know, evolution and revolution. I think the watching us go from a scarcity mindset in the 2000s when I started my career to being the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, that's not something that the elites saw coming. It's not something that really smart people saw coming. It's not what we indexed our, our policy and our politics to. And I think it still hasn't fully set in how revolutionary that it was. I think it's an important one for, for your folks to, to read. Liam Donovan, thank you very much. Thanks, Ezra. This episode of Ezra Crunch is produced by Jack McCormick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Julie Beer, and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Kristen Lin, Emma Kellebeck, Marina King, and Jan Cobol. Original music by Aman