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US POLITICAL ORGANIZATION PROJECT 2025 ... IHEARTRADIO iHeartRadio: Project 2025: The History Of How Trumpism Radicalized PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeJDSrKOpNE Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess
Project 2025: The History Of How Trumpism Radicalized >br> iHeartRadio >br> Jul 19, 2024 >br> 1.27M subscribers ... 70,549 views ... 4.6K likes >br> Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast >br> If You're New Subscribe ► http://bit.ly/1Jy0DbO >br> DESC: Molly Jong-Fast converses with Harvard sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol about Project 2025, an initiative by the Heritage Foundation outlining a potential future Trump administration. They discuss the drastic policy changes proposed, including increased presidential power and radical socio-political shifts. Skocpol provides insights on the historical and organizational evolution of the Republican Party, the role of grassroots movements like the Tea Party, and the implications of authoritarianism in American politics. They also touch on the impact of these changes on federal agencies and the potential consequences for American democracy. 00:00 Introduction to Project 2025 04:53 Theda Skocpol on the Origins of Project 2025 05:29 The Tea Party's Role in Shaping Modern Conservatism 11:21 Trump's Influence and the Rise of Authoritarianism 14:14 The Republican Party's Shift Towards Authoritarianism 17:40 Potential Consequences of a Second Trump Term 22:41 The Threat to American Democracy Listen to more episodes of Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast at the link below! https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-f... Listen Free to More of Your Favorite Artists on Your Phone! ♥ Download Our App for Free in Google Play: http://bit.ly/1Jooo4M ♥ Download Our App for Free on iTunes: http://apple.co/1EJpwuA Stay on the Pulse of Music & Entertainment! ♥ Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1F1TcFX ♥ Instagram: http://bit.ly/1e1AOUS ♥ Twitter: http://bit.ly/1HZk5KQ ♥ Blog: http://bit.ly/1GiT59D Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast ... iHeartRadio Transcript 0:00 Hello, and welcome to Project 2025, a warning. I'm Molly Johnfast, a writer, a podcaster, and a person you occasionally see on cable news. And today I'm talking to Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University sociologist and political scientist who is the author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. But before we start that conversation, let's get you up to speed. Last year, the influential right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation, unveiled Project 2025. It is a roadmap for what another Trump administration would look like. It instructs independent agencies or agencies that would have been independent under other administrations, such as the Department of Justice, to be placed under direct presidential control. This basically gives the president a lot more power than a president has ever had before. And I know right now you may be thinking that this sounds a little crazy, like something one of your friends who reads a little too much Facebook sends you. But The Heritage Foundation developed and then linked the Project 2025 mission statement right from their website. 1:07 The plan is titled Mandate for Leadership 2025, the conservative promise they are not trying to hide it. In fact, they go on television and brag about it. And what they brag about is a plan to reshape America into the craziest conservative dystopia possible. Some of their plans include ending no-fault divorce, ending the Affordable Care Act, additional tax breaks for corporations and the 1%, a complete ban on abortions, cuts to Social Security, the end of climate protections, cutting Medicare, defunding the FBI and Homeland Security, banning sexual orientation and gender identity education, strictly limiting contraceptives and regulating in vitro fertilization, banning pornography and imprisoning anyone who disobeys, banning Muslims from entering the country, elimination of union and worker protections, raising the retirement age, raising prescription 2:02 drug prices, eliminating the Department of Education, banning African American and gender studies at all levels of education, banning books and curriculum about slavery, use of the military to break up domestic protests, ending birthright citizenship, eliminating federal agencies like the FDA, EPA and NOAA. And despite how crazy that sounds, it's only the tip of the iceberg. Now, you may be thinking, the Heritage Foundation isn't Donald Trump. It isn't his presidential campaign or the Republican Party. But the Heritage Foundation has been the laboratory for many of the conservative policies of the last half century. But don't take my word for it. Here's Senator Marco Rubio from the state of Florida. And it's good to see you. And thank you to Heritage for inviting us here, giving us this opportunity and for all the scholarship that they do here that really serves as a guidepost for a lot of the public policy we choose to make. These policies are wildly unpopular, and Trump has tried to cover up his ties to them, namely Russ Vought and John McEntee. 3:02 Let's discuss these guys. Christian nationalist Russ Vought, an author of Project 2025, serves as the policy director of the Republican Party platform writing committee for the RNC. You know the organization that Trump's daughter-in-law runs that pays many of his legal fees. And you may remember right-wing dating app entrepreneur John McEntee, who was Trump's body man and nicknamed deputy president, joined Project 2025 to write the database for who the Trump administration should hire. And Trump's own insiders say he will be a big part of the next Trump administration. But a clear sign of Trump's tether to Project 2025 is that Trump's name appears in the document 312 times. They are indeed one in the same. And if you don't take this seriously, here's Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, and he's going to show you just how serious they are. We are going to win. We're in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience 4:01 should be despairing. No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which of course friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve, know we are going to prevail. Well, that sounds threatening. We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. I'm starting to think that these people may actually be very serious about making this happen. Kevin Roberts also said that he saw Heritage's role as institutionalizing Trumpism, adding that the Trump administration with the best of intentions simply got off to a slow start. Heritage and its allies in Project 2025 believe that that slow start should never be repeated. And contrary to what some audience members may think, the Heritage Foundation and the radical movement it reflects did not start when Trump was elected. And that's why I am Theda Skocpol on the Origins of Project 2025 delighted to welcome Theda Skocpol on the origins of Project 2025. I think of you as like one of the 5:01 smartest people on all of this, the state of America. So can you talk us through a little bit of how we got here? Right. Well, you know, I've been looking at American politics, big picture and also small details for quite some time. And since the Obama presidency, I had a chance to look closely at what was going on on the right. And I guess what made my work a little different from The Tea Party's Role in Shaping Modern Conservatism other people is that I didn't just look at the big picture and the national organizations on the right that I'll talk about in just a minute that pulled the Republican Party from in the 2000s, really in a direction that's unpopular, even with a lot of their own supporters. But I also had a chance to study the Tea Party from the grassroots up. And so what I've been trying to do as we've moved into this amazing Trump era is look at how top down and bottom up forces have come together 6:03 to remake the Republican Party in a way that is startling, even from where it was in 2008, when John McCain ran against Barack Obama for the presidency. A lot of people would say, and I think correctly so, that the Republican Party had been moving very far to the right for a long time, especially on issues about whether government could be used to enforce equal rights, solve climate issues, regulate the market economy to spread security and opportunity. Those are kind of classic moderate liberal, even moderate conservative goals. And that's right. But starting in the early 2000s, things have pushed the Republican Party in a direction that we can now say it is committed to authoritarianism in two ways that I'll discuss later. How is the Republican Party less dangerous, pre-McCain? Well, it certainly was dangerous to the New Deal liberal order, to the idea of using government 7:06 to promote equality and a moderate degree of greater economic equality. Those are long-standing liberal goals from the New Deal through the Great Society and the Civil Rights Revolution. So I'm not saying that the Republican Party wasn't pushing increasingly hard against that. Certainly from the Reagan era on, and certainly from the era in which Newt Gingrich did everything he could to derail what was essentially a middle-of-the-road approach to national healthcare guarantees, not provision, just guarantees. Starting in the 2000s, you first had a rebellion from what I would call the multi-billionaire far-right against the George Bush version of the Republican Party that was already very conservative in the policy ways I've just outlined. So is that Koch brothers versus Bush? The Koch brothers network was at the heart of it. And here, let me tell you why. I study things 8:06 organizationally, and the tools that conservatives have used for a long time are giving money to candidates and parties, forming special issue advocacy groups to work against Medicare, Social Security, Obamacare, climate policies. All of those had been used by the people that the Kochs eventually rounded up into their network of ultimately 400 millionaire-billionaire families on the right. But the Kochs, David and at that time Charles, David is now deceased, but Charles and David together, from about 2004 created an innovation, which is a kind of political party-like organization to the right of the Republican Party centered on Americans for Prosperity that could operate on Congress at the national level, state legislatures, and local politics in a lot of 9:02 places that provided year-round advocacy, voter mobilization, what they would call policy education from the right. And they used that apparatus more and more generously funding, so generously funding that our research showed that it was more funded than the Republican Party committees for a time. They used that apparatus to induce Republican legislators and candidates to espouse pure anti-government free market positions, to oppose any kind of market regulation, to push for destroying the rights of public sector unions and other labor unions, and to force tax cuts tilted toward the very, very wealthy. Well, they were quite successful at that, and you saw a lot of that come to fruition in the Bush Jr presidency, and certainly in the Congress of the United States under Mitch McConnell and the various House leaders. But the thing is, those policies weren't 10:06 popular with most Americans. They weren't even popular with a lot of Republican voters, and sometimes not even popular with business associations that would want public spending on things like roads, for example, you know, kind of common sense things. And so that opened the door, especially when Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee, for a much more populist version of far right politics. And although the Kochs were players in the Tea Party universe, they were mainly kind of riding it. The real energy was at the grassroots, in not just demonstrations against taxes, which got a lot of media attention, but up to 2,000 local tea parties that were spread all over the country. And whose top issues my colleagues and I found when we went out and interviewed grassroots people, actually talked with them, were much more opposition to immigration, to racial 11:00 change, to generational change. And they were angry at even the Koch Republicans, let alone the Bush Republicans. They were disillusioned with the Republican Party establishment as they saw it, as well as terrified of the kinds of changes that Obama-era Democrats represented. Trump's Influence and the Rise of Authoritarianism And so from that, we got a continuing kind of grassroots pressures that first registered through the House of Representatives, that prevented any kind of sensible immigration reforms, and that paved the way in my understanding of things for Donald Trump to come forward and provide what the Tea Party did not have, which was a unifying figure who could espouse ethno-nationalist hatred and fear and resentment of social changes in the United States in a much more distilled and media-ready way. Did they really even believe in tax cuts at the end of the day? Well, we know that 12:01 when Donald Trump became president, neither he nor congressional Republicans were interested in controlling budget deficits. They certainly will deliver tax cuts for the wealthy. That's the one thing they passed, really, in the way of major legislation during Trump's presidency that benefits Trump, his friends. But I mean, were the people who were protesting at the grassroots level? They were against public spending on student loans, Obamacare, which they saw as a benefit for lower-income people. Many of them believed or came to believe that it benefited immigrants, as well as African Americans and Hispanic people already in the country. But when it came to cutting the big-ticket items that the federal government spends money on and taxes to pay for, military veterans' benefits, Social Security for the retirees, and Medicare, in our research, we found that practically no tea partiers at the grassroots actually supported those goals. So those 13:03 weren't their priorities. And I think one of the things people don't understand about the Tea Party is that it was a top-down, bottom-up phenomenon. The top was out there claiming on television this is what I call the New York Times version of the Tea Party. That it was all about fiscal responsibility? No, it wasn't. That's not where the energy was. And we saw that by as early as 2012 and 2014. And of course, Donald Trump understood. The one thing you can say about the man is he's very savvy about the kinds of resentments and popular angers he can play on. And it's no coincidence that he, yes, he gives tax cuts to the rich when he's in office and when he needs to, he goes and promises things to oil executives and wealthy donors when he wants them to give him some money, personally. But his policy priorities that he's touting in elections are anti-immigrant, removing immigrants. He was promising to do that in 2016, and he's only 14:00 doubled on that ever since. And of course, he demonizes Democrats and liberals. Do you think that Trump-ism is bottom-up, top-down, just like the Tea Party? Because it does strike me as a The Republican Party's Shift Towards Authoritarianism similar dynamic. Yes, and I think what we've seen under Donald Trump in practice, let me put it this way. Donald Trump personally is what social scientists call an intervening variable. He didn't cause the various tensions in society and politics that he has known how to maximize and exploit. And if he, for example, becomes president a second time, it's very clear he's going to be obsessed a hundred times more from what he was always obsessed with, which is what can I personally and my family milk out of the federal government in the way of wealth? And how can I use the federal government to put on a show and play out my angers and resentments against people I consider 15:03 to be enemies? But he has assembled around him a set of forces. I would say he plays a personal role and has always in kind of signaling to large numbers of grassroots people, some of whom came out of the Tea Party networks, some of whom are very conservative Christian right people, others of whom are gun people. These are networks, some of which have an organizational base to them, and he knew how to knit them together and to highlight their issues and their angers and to tell them that he would be the enemy of the people he says are their enemies. So his ability to communicate with and create a kind of resonance with a lot of angry and fearful people is a potent political ingredient that he personally has brought to it, and now he's wielding in the form 16:02 of threats of humiliation and violence against people. So I'm not saying that's not crucial, but I am saying that it's incomplete because the real issue isn't Donald Trump so much as the entire Republican Party and sets of organized elite groups that believe they can ride this tiger to the goals they want without the tiger consuming them. Yeah, that sounds totally right to me, and I'm curious, this idea that Trump is an intervening variable, right? Yes. And that things were primed for him. Oh yes. Right, and he came along, it was like a perfect storm. It's a perfect storm in that he put together the top down and the bottom up. Remember when he first came into the presidency, he adopted some of the top priorities of the Koch network, even though the Kochs had not endorsed him. I mean, the Kochs are always saying, oh, not us. We don't support this. They just pour money into all the Republican races and turn the same voters out. But he delivered for them so much that after the first year of his presidency, Charles Koch was smiling. 17:09 I have a slide that I show in my docs on that and said this was just great because of that huge tax cut and of course, eviscerating a lot of regulations that these people don't like. But on the other hand, you know, he has become more and more determined to capture control of the justice apparatus, the homeland security system. And I think that in that case, Trump's personal hatreds wind up pretty well with what he is selling to some of his popular supporters, both in the form of regulating women's conduct and reproductive capacities and in the form of excluding immigrants, blocking them. So the Heritage Foundation has always been, 18:00 I think of it as like having been more Koch brothers-y, like we'll disavow that, but secretly give you a check. And this is feels like a radical departure to me. Yes, they've been taken over by radical authoritarian national nationalists for quite some time. And not all right wing think tanks have gone the same way. Cato and A.E.I. are somewhat off on different paths. I would say that Heritage is trying to position itself to channel Hungarian-like ideas about how once you take power, you remake the federal bureaucracy and the justice system to realize the will of an autocrat. Hungary, Russia, Turkey, these are their kind of dream societies. The right has a history of loving autocrats. This is not totally new, right? I think it's pretty new. I would not say that Reagan was into, I mean, if we want to go far back, we can certainly find 19:00 fascist loving right wingers in America, of course. But I think this is a departure both from Eisenhower republicanism and even Reagan republicanism in a lot of ways on the international level. And I mean, we haven't even talked about that, but Trump is definitely threatening to undo. I just spent two days watching The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan. And you cannot watch those and not realize that we are at a moment of repudiating what those people died for. And in some ways, that's going to be the big surprise for Trump supporters. I think they think the popular ones, and maybe even some of the elite ones, oh, this won't be a big deal. But undoing NATO, having tasks that quid pro quos with Putin, which Trump is openly doing and has been for a long time, will destabilize a world order in which the United States has gained great advantages and world peace has prevailed for all the injustices 20:03 that have existed in that world order. There are nothing compared to what's going to unfold if it all comes apart. And so, I mean, you know, I'm not an expert in that area. I think the Hungary example is I taught with Daniel Ziblatt this spring and we worked our way through Hungary and Weimar Germany. So, and thought about how they compared to the United States, both in the period after the Civil War and now. So it was quite an exercise. It was fascinating. And I just think the Hungarian example tells us what people like the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Miller and his crew who are getting ready to remake immigration policy, and various Christian nationalist forces who would like to use government power to enforce a new old version of family roles. And we can't underestimate how much they want to put up any women like you and 21:00 I. No, I know. Yeah, yeah, no, we are up at the end. These are real things that have really changed that they want to reverse. So I think that the Hungarian example is the inspiration for that. But remember, Hungary is a highly centralized country. And Orbán was able to take it over because there were a whole series of things in the post communist constitution that made it very easy for him to, without any violence, just not even a lot of threats, just use state power to remake both his own political party and the government there and then reshape the electorate so that he could get majorities. So they do, that is what many of the elites around Trump to the degree that they have an intellectual, he doesn't have any intellectual anything, he probably doesn't even know where Hungary is, but they find that appealing. But remember, the United States is a federated political system. And the big contradiction that lies behind all this is that the 22:02 parts of the United States that are older, whiter, and more to the point, not so economically dynamic and not the big sources of federal tax revenue, want to use the economic dynamism of the country as a whole and the tax revenues that the people of Massachusetts, New York, California, Minnesota pay to tell us what to do. Well, that's a bit of a contradiction. There are going to be state governments and governors who will be in a position to articulate alternatives, even if Trump has take over the entire federal government. And that I think is the terrifying reality of The Threat to American Democracy Trumpism is that scenario is the fundamental problem here. And again, this will feel tangential, but I think it's relevant that America is too big to govern that it shouldn't that there's just too 23:00 many different interests. You know, we're not the biggest country, we're not too big to govern. But there are a lot of different ways of life in America, a lot of different viewpoints. And so being able to work out bargains and compromise, which we could do for all kinds of reasons we could go into for some decades is pretty important in keeping the place successful. And, and accepting of a range of views. And one of the key ingredients is the very simple view that if you lose one election, you can come back and fight and perhaps win the next one. And I think, let me just come back to what I think has happened to the Republican Party. The key to this entire thing is the remaking of the Republican Party from even a pretty tough minded conservative party into a party promoting minority authoritarianism in two distinct ways that are now piled on top of each other and interacting. One way is what I call McConnellism, or you could call it coquism. 24:01 That's maximizing the use of all legal tools such as the appointment of judges, their approval of state level gerrymanders, the Senate filibuster that so many have written about, using those tools to the max to win elections and impose policies that the majority does not want. That's what my colleagues would call legal hardball. And that's challenging enough. And there are plenty of reasons why that was on a roll. But now with Trumpism, we have the rise of a kind of movement and a takeover of the Republican Party that says, well, when those fall short or threaten to fall short, we'll turn to violence, threatened threats of violence, and the illegitimate imposition of central state power. So those two are interacting. We'll get both if we get a sweep of all the remaining three branches of government. 25:04 They already controlled the Supreme Court. Right. Hi, I just want to stop for one second. The reason we put this on YouTube for free is because we wanted to spread it to as many people as possible. It would really help us if you comment, click like and send this to a friend or three. Also, if you enjoyed this, subscribe to our podcast, Fast Politics on your favorite podcast app. Thank you so much. Now back to the interview. After January 6, a lot of Trump's supporters were punished for their part in the Capitol. Right. No members of Congress, no one, you know, above a certain level. But people, you know, oath keepers, people charged with seditious conspiracy. I noticed a shift with Trump supporters. My sense is, and again, you know, I don't have, I'm not the FBI. I don't know everything that's going on. But my sense is that that did actually quell some of Trump supporters violence. Do you think that's correct? 26:03 And what do you think about that? I don't think it's it's threatened. It's quelled individuals making threats online and and spreading information that facilitates threats online. And I think those are being used to target election workers, including Republicans who don't go along. And that's pretty scary. And to and obviously people in the judicial system. Sure. I think there has been you don't see a lot of crowds turning out. I personally think the idea that people are going to overrun state houses, courthouses or Congress again is just not right. But the minute it looks like Trump can win and it already does, you're going to see people trying to hold out to get those pardons. He will issue masses of pardons. And that will embolden the organized threateners of violence above and beyond the guy sitting at his computer firing off nasty 27:01 Twitters or whatever they're called now. And I would not underestimate, though, the public humiliation threatening thing. I think a lot of people of goodwill on the center left in this country melt into a puddle of butter when threatened by that kind of thing. And we have not seen an adequate standing firm or moving quickly. And on the center right, too. I mean, that's how Trump took hold of the Republican Party, right? Yeah. And how he continues to. And I mean, you know, I think those of us in kind of settings where these things seem mostly like nasty words and I've been dealing with nasty words my whole life. So you can't really get anywhere with me on that. But I think it's more than that. If you're a local election worker, even a Republican election worker, I've been startled to some of the people that I met during my field work who helped turn counties toward Trump have been threatened from the Malga right 28:01 for things like cooperating with Democrats to run fair elections. I think we're beyond the insurrection phase into the attempt to prevent votes from being counted fairly. Oh, that's really scary. And, you know, there really are a lot of things that are very decentralized system dependent on underpaid public servants and volunteers. You can withhold the reporting of votes in ways that make it hard for states to certify. I think a lot of these people are thinking of trying to turn an election, throw an election into the House of Representatives. So, you know, that minority authoritarian hardball interacts with this new rise of the kind of 28:41 threats of violence or threats of humiliation. Threats of humiliation may be even more important. 28:48 And those two things play off each other. That's why we're seeing the Republican Party amazingly, it's amazing, has become an authoritarian party. 28:59 Yeah. So you think there's a scenario where Biden gets the votes, but they don't get counted? 29:05 Yeah, not only do I think that, that's what there are various groups out there working to achieve. That seems really bad. It is. This series is about Project 2025. And the Heritage Foundation has a certain kind of vision for America. In my mind, this attack on these federal workers, and to partisan up the federal government strikes me as kind of the scariest part. But we've already sort of seen this with them trying to partisan up schools, right? They had a war on the schools, them trying to partisan up medicine, right? They've had a war on doctors with. So, I mean, does this fit? And if so, can you just speak to it a little bit? Well, we should remember that 19th century American politics was all partisan patronage. 30:03 It was a clash of partisan patronage parties, and people were expected to sweep in and out and do what was good for their party in terms of using federal resources. Now, back then, there were far fewer federal resources, more than people think, but I've written about that in the past. So now we have a gargantuan federal government, but it doesn't operate directly. It often operates by using regulations or subsidies to get other actors to do things. So to the degree that you could get your hands on that, I think you could look to some key states like Florida and Texas, where this sort of thing already exists. And it creates a situation that American business people should not be complacent about, although they are, because what they're going to get is patronage. And they're going to get punishment for people who don't go along with basically paying vig to the Trump machine. They're already seeing that. 31:00 Yeah. DeSantis tried to do it in Florida. Yeah, he did. And Abbott is doing exactly that kind of thing in Texas. Now, it's easy in states that don't have professionalized legislatures, that have complicit court systems. They're trying to do a version of that in the United States. Now, I've heard different versions from various experts. There are some people who think that the plans being laid out will make it pretty easy to use acting officials and changes in the civil service rules to take over large swatches of the federal bureaucracy very quickly for quasi-illegal goals. There are others who think, well, it's going to be a lot harder than they think because there's so many. I think they'll concentrate on key agencies. They'll concentrate on the ones that Trump feels can carry out what he wants, which is to enrich himself and his family and get rid of the legal cases, and that organized groups led by the likes of Stephen Miller want to pursue, which is to purge immigrants. They know, surely, 32:05 what we should all keep in mind, which is immigrants are not neatly sorted into documented versus undocumented. They come in families, hard-working families that have some members who are in one category, some in another. Entire families will leave, move, either in the United States or even leave the United States. They'll leave the dairy industry in the Midwest. They'll leave the construction industry in Florida, which is already happening. Healthcare for old people will suffer terribly. All of these things will not be popular as their economic implications play out, but of course, the other part of the plan here is to make it impossible for voters to vote these folks out. Right. Can you explain that a little bit? A combination of it's a huge tool to have captured one of the two major political parties because, and I would say the organizational control, which my people are studying now, we're studying this, 33:00 is now much more pervasive. Most state parties have been either taken over or disorganized, and that means that you can offer the Republican brand again and again when it's really the MAGA brand. But the other thing is all these techniques that we've talked about that have to do with changing the rules about voter registration and ballot access, but I think we're now into the frontier of changing the rules of which votes get counted and reported. And there would be a lot more that could be done on that if the courts go along. And I have very little faith that the traditional liberal techniques of protesting these kinds of things, which is to pour into the streets and file lawsuits, I don't think either one will work. And they didn't work in 2000, right? Well, they did. They energized voluntary groups of resistors across the country led by older women. I wrote about those and researched them, and they have remade the Democratic Party and they have been very responsible for adding to the Democratic Electoral Coalition enough so that it 34:06 could win midterm elections that it was using before. So I'm not saying that organized resistance, especially if it doesn't take the form of providing an easy excuse for calling in the National Guard, I think that's important. It's just that the reliance on lawsuits, which seems to be ingrained in American liberalism in our era, is just not working. And it really wouldn't work, I don't think. I've been astonished to see the Supreme Court, how far it's prepared to go. Yeah, it's mind blowing. I mean, I don't think we've seen anything yet. If Trump loses, what do you think happens then? Well, that's a very good inflection point, just the way the inflection point in 2016 was tragic. I mean, there's no other word for it, because it would mean that he didn't control some of these levers, judicial and executive, that we've been discussing. Republicans in Congress and the state 35:09 legislature would begin what might be a very long process of, and here I'm going to use a technical term, 'ooching' away from him. But there are a lot of MAGA politicians now. There's a whole kind of Ivy League trained cohort. Elise Stefanik, JD Vance, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, and they will try to reinvent the formula with a little bit less disorganized personal narcissism. Which could be really dangerous, though has not provided so much success for DeSantis in Florida. Because none of these people have it. There's something about Donald Trump that makes him 36:03 thrilling to his ordinary supporters. And I've seen this. I know people, I interviewed them, and I've seen it. And you know, when Ron DeSantis came on the scene, I said to myself, 'Boy, if I were a MAGA minded person, would I prefer Trump or the Ron DeSantis who comes across like kind of mid-level Soviet bureaucrat?' And you know, a lot of these Ivy League MAGAs are the kinds of people who went to elite colleges and felled out of it on campus. So they're obsessed with this anti-woke stuff, which I don't think grassroots MAGA people really are particularly interested in that. They're very cynical about liberal professors, of course, but they just think these colleges have little to do with them and their family. And they're right about that. Yeah, I mean, the idea that we have 37:01 now really just one party that believes in American democracy and one party that believes that they should get power is significantly worse than it was in 2016. I mean, there are no more Jeff Flakes, right? Look at this latest twist where one of the remaining supposed moderates, Susan Collins, projects an outright lie about Alvin Bragg, an outright lie. One of the things that Heritage is obsessed with is this embryonic personhood, regulating IVF, regulating birth control, regulating it's abortion, but it's ten times, it's a Pandora's box that I never even saw coming. Wildly unpopular, but sort of a central thesis to this. Yes, because here, I mean, this is something that I realized a few years ago when I went to talk to the Harvard Federalist Society. I'm one of these people who believes in debating. I'm not into 38:00 squelching speech. And Charles Murray was there, and Charles Murray is somebody that I've known for quite a long time, and I think he's dead wrong about a lot of things, but I'm willing to talk with them and debate with him. And it was during his presentation to the young men, you know, kind of sneering over their chicken at lunch, that I realized that hatred of professional women and the fact that they have reduced fertility is a major theme for these people. What ties together ethno-nationalism across many countries, even though it has to play out in different forms and different institutional and party systems, is one, urban-rural tensions that can be exploited. And of course, those are especially potent in the United States because the non-metropolitan areas have disproportionate power in our rules of the game. But the other one is the piling on of three great revolutions that have occurred in the United States, the racial civil rights revolution, then the changing roles of women and of responsibilities in family and work, 39:07 and even gender identities, which is deeply disquieting to a lot of people, it really is. And then there's, of course, immigration and the idea that new immigrants could change the cultural tone. That's an old theme in America, it's played out again and again. But I don't think we talk enough about the fear of women's changed roles. Many years ago, Kristin Luca wrote a book called Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, and that's exactly what all this is about. It's not just abortion, it's IVF, it's birth control, it's the idea that women are giving up their natural and important role in having babies and raising children. And there's some truth to it, making families work, making communities work. Well, those women, all those years, they were doing things that were important, that that has gone away. And it's all because we've got too many women who are controlling their fertility, having a lot of sex in college, but not having babies and aborting things that they don't want. And by the way, telling us men 40:10 what to do at work. That's a potent set of themes and they really do believe it. They want to reverse it. They can't, but they want to. - Theda, thank you so much. I'm such a fan of yours and it's always so, I mean, you're just one of the smartest people out there and to get to have some time with you. - I don't know about that. I wish I could not know the things I know at this point, but anyway. - I know. Thank you so much for watching this episode. We made this series so that you can educate others in your life about the very real threat to America that Trump's second term would pose. Project 2025 will remake the federal government. And it's really important that you share this with a friend. Click like on the video and comment so it spreads to more people on YouTube. If you want more interviews like this, subscribe to Fast Politics on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for watching.

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