The Apotheosis of Donald Trump? Peter Wehner on Madness, Mayhem and How Trump Eludes Shakespearean Tragedy

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Sunday, June the twenty eighth twenty twenty six. Two weeks ago, of course, Donald Trump turned 80. What to make of it? We've done lots of shows about old age recently. Did one with Samuel Moyn, the historian at Yale, about gerontocracy in America. He has an important new book out, which is appropriately called How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth and What to Do About It, entitled Gerontocracy in America. And, not all old people, of course, are hoarding power and wealth. We had Sally Quinn on the show a few days ago, the great Washington writer, hostess, social butterfly. She seems, anything but 80. And I saw Bob Dylan a couple of weeks ago as well in Berkeley, and he was remarkably spry, for 85 years old. But, America's leader is less spry. And, one of his most critical but persistent observers, Peter Wehner, who's been on the show many times, had a piece out to mark, I wouldn't say celebrate, but certainly mark the president's eightieth birthday entitled the apotheosis of Donald Trump. Pete is joining us from Washington DC. Pete, is, Trump, do you think exhibit a in what Moyn calls gerontocracy in America?

00:02:07 Peter Wehner: Yeah. I do. I think that there has been a visible, decline in physically and mentally. And, I think it's a reminder of why you shouldn't elect leaders who, who are in their eighties. We saw that with Joe Biden. We're seeing it in a different way with Donald Trump. He brought his own problems that are intrinsic to who he is as a human being, elements and qualities that are that are they're not new. But I think what's happened is there's now an added complexity to it, an added layer to it. And that added layer is the, the decomposition that we're witnessing, mentally, in, in him. I think it's it's it's visible in all, all sorts of ways, and I think it's problematic even beyond where we've been.

00:02:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You put it politely, decomposition. I think that's a nice euphemism. In your Atlantic piece, you talk about the clear signs of his advancing age. Is this something that we should I mean, most of us, I think, are critics. I don't think many people will be watching this, certainly in our community, who are great fans of Donald Trump. Is this something to celebrate or be concerned with, Pete?

00:03:21 Peter Wehner: I think it's something to be to be concerned with, because it's it's not leading, to his removal from office. He doesn't seem inclined to, to walk away from this. And so I think what's happening is these problems that have existed with Trump, many of them are getting worse. The disinhibition, the impulsivity is more easily triggered. I think he's a more dangerous figure, than he's been in the past. And I think we're seeing that if you compare Trump, you know, two point o to Trump one point o. It is in all sorts of ways a more, dangerous, and unstable administration, and Trump one point o wasn't, wasn't a walk in the park exactly. So it's not anything to celebrate. I think it's something to notice. I think we need to be alert to it. I think it's it's true to reality, true to the facts, so we have to name that. But, but it's it's it's really worrisome.

00:04:18 Andrew Keen: More than worrisome, I guess, in many ways. You've been following Trump as closely as anyone. You warned us about him many years ago. You're a former, operative within the Republican party, so you're certainly not a man of the left. Do you see an arc in this narrative? There's a almost certainly in, in your Atlantic piece, there's a Shakespearean quality. I'm not sure quality is the right word. There's a Shakespearean narrative to what you call this apotheosis, this decline, this madness that could come out of a Shakespeare play.

00:04:54 Peter Wehner: Yeah. It could. I do think that there's an arc to it, and there's there's there's a drama to this, unfolding that it's hard to miss. It's interesting, you know, when I when I wrote the end of the essay and there's an allusion to King Lear, which, is hard to miss. But part of me was a little hesitant to use it because I don't think Trump is a kind of tragic figure in the Shakespearean sense that Lear was. I mean, Lear was a complicated figure and one you could have some empathy with. And, you know, in the end, he saw certain things that he didn't see earlier in his in his life, which created some of some of the empathy. Donald Trump actually is not like that. He's a person, as best I can tell, with no redeeming qualities if he has them. He hasn't he hasn't shown them. And he just seems to be a malicious, corrupt person from head to toe, a man of borderless corruption, and no real complexity either. Of course, that's what makes Shakespeare characters great, many of them, which is that kind of that complexity to them. I don't see that in Trump. He's much flatter, figure in that sense. Having said that, it's a it's a human life, and it's not simply the arc of an individual human life, but it's what is happening to a country and to a people and even in some respects to the world because of the arc and the journey that he's on and because the descent that, that he's now, he's now experiencing. His descent is in a sense our descent.

00:06:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I as I mentioned to you before we went live, I'm just back from Europe. I spent some time in Poland. In fact, I ran some interviews with very prominent historians and journalists in Poland, and they were all united by their concern and outrage and shock and misunderstanding or just complete sort of mystery about Trump. I'm guessing and I've always was also, in Europe. I was in The UK and Austria and Germany. I think all over the world, people are mystified by this narrative. Is that your sense?

00:07:18 Peter Wehner: Oh, for sure. They are mystified by it. And it's understandable why they're mystified by it. I mean, he's sui generis. We just haven't had, a leader like him before. These even rare in the constellation of, you know, leaders from the twentieth and twenty first century. I mean, there's some parallels to different authoritarian leaders, along the way, but he's unique in some ways as, as well. And whatever issues that The United States and Europe and the rest of the world have had over the decades, even now over the centuries. There's not been anything quite like Trump and certainly from the post war period, you know, let's say by the mid part of the twentieth century until now, countries, especially European countries, had a certain view of America. And even though there were there were there were differences, sometimes, you know, conflicts, that were real. You remember them, for example, with Ronald Reagan, and his deployment of missiles in Europe and, and other matters. They felt like he was too hawkish on the Soviet Union. But those kind of things are our norms. They're normative in international affairs. With Trump, it's entirely different. And European countries, and you could speak to this better than I could, but European countries on some level had a trust in America. They felt like we were a backstop. They didn't feel like America would be an enemy or that we would knife them in the back or that we would withdraw from NATO or that we would actively try and sabotage the, the North American Treaty Organization, the Atlantic Alliance. And with Trump, we are. The other thing that I think is really difficult for, leaders of other countries to, to factor in and to deal with is the, the impulsivity of Trump. Even if you're dealing with a with a malicious, malevolent leader, if there's a consistency, you can organize your foreign policy, national security, and overall approach to them. With Trump, it's one thing one day and something else the next, and he's so volatile. And that kind of, incoherence makes it, I think, doubly difficult for, for leaders in, in other countries to deal with us. And I think they're also, mystified that the American people would vote for him not just once where you could maybe excuse it, but come around and, do it twice. I think for that, is something they don't understand. And that, I think, is a real inflection point as it relates to other countries in The United States because they could have said, look. This is a one off. Trump is a parenthesis to the American story. When it happens twice, that breaks trust, and they're basically saying, look. Even if you elect somebody who's sane and rational next time around, there's no, guarantee that this that continues.

00:10:22 Andrew Keen: Of course, not everyone elected Trump. Mostly Republicans, not all Republicans, but the majority of them. You're a former Republican. You broke with the party, but you, inspired by Ronald Reagan. You worked in, I think, both Bush administrations. How, Pete, is what you see as this decline, a kind of madness and malevolence, in his eightieth year? How is this being treated within the Republican party or certainly on the right? You're in DC. I know you're you're you're no longer really a Republican insider, but you talk to a lot of prominent Republicans. Yeah. Is the penny finally, so to speak, dropping on the right in America?

00:11:16 Peter Wehner: Yeah. It is. It is. Cult the cult like grip that Trump had on the party and his base, the MAGA base, that's no longer there. And he still has high support in the Republican party and within, the MAGA universe, so I don't I don't wanna overstate that. But there's an undoubtedly a crack up that is that is that is happening. His approval rating Trump's approval rating has markedly gone down among Republicans. It's it's still, you know, in the 70% range, but that's down from where it was in the nineties. And, of course, you're seeing and you've talked about this with other guests, and I'm happy to talk about it. But you're seeing this crack up of MAGA world, which is really extraordinary. You know, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens versus Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, you know, going after Trump.

00:12:19 Andrew Keen: Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course.

00:12:21 Peter Wehner: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Carlson saying that they've left now the Republican party. And then beyond that, you're seeing Republican senators, speak up against Trump, especially ones that lost primaries because he endorsed their opponents, people like Bill Cassidy, Tom Tillis, and others. But even beyond them, Ted Cruz, is has been torching Trump because the Iran deal, and that Iran war and now the Iran deal has really, really hurt Trump because he's gotten crosswise with essentially both factions. There was a very strong antiwar faction, the people who considered themselves authentic MAGA, American firsters. And they were really drawn to Trump because he pledged almost every other day, it seemed like, during the campaign that he was not gonna get us in any new wars. He was gonna end the forever wars. Nation building was for other people, all of that. So those people were immediately turned off by the war. And now the people who supported him, the hawks in the party, and there are fewer hawks than non hawks in the current Republican party, they're extremely upset, because they think that the deal that Trump is cutting with Iran helps Iran, hurts America. Trump lost interest in the war. It didn't go as well as he wanted. He's just decided to get out, and the terms that he's he's he's surrendering to Iran on, are extraordinary. And the deal that Trump seems to be on the verge of signing is much weaker than the deal that Barack Obama signed with Iran, you know, more than a decade ago. And you had to be a Republican at the time to understand how critical Republicans and conservatives were of at Obama over the Iran deal. And now Trump comes along and signs a deal that makes Obama look Churchillian.

00:14:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I don't think he would necessarily, agree with that. What about within the evangelical community, Pete? You're, a man of faith. You spend a lot of your life writing about it. You have a major fellowship in that area. How is this apotheosis of Donald Trump that you describe in this powerful Atlantic, please, How is this going down within the evangelical community? Of course, who are the hardcore loyalists of the MAGA movement?

00:14:51 Peter Wehner: Yeah. It's it's a it's an interesting question. It's a good question. It's seeping in. I mean, it's having an effect. There's not a break. We're not close to a break. And you have to understand the contemporary evangelical and fundamentalist mind to appreciate why, that is that they will always revert to the existential threat on the other side. It's it I think it's creating real moral cognitive dissonance with them. A couple of things have are happening. One is that Trump's decomposition is so obvious. It just gets harder and harder to deny. Second is that his crudity, his cruelty, his immorality, his corruptions, They're becoming more difficult to deny even though evangelicals have found a way for ten years more or less to deny them or to or to downplay them. And then beyond that, it's just that he's entering, you know, the winter of his political career. He's 80 years old. His opinion of, approval opinion in The United States is sinking fast. And so there's a tendency when that happens to try and get off get off the boat and to and to look to look elsewhere. What's interesting psychologically is to see how people process that. Do they get to the point in which they say, you know, I really did make a mistake. I had blinded myself. These things were obvious about Donald Trump, and yet I either jettisoned my faith or I, more likely, I supported and subordinated my faith. I was in fact my core identity was not as a Christian, not as a follower of Jesus, but as a conservative, as a right winger, as a culture warrior, as an ideologue, that's really what drove this, and I just tacked on faith. That's really hard for a lot of them to admit. It'll be a long time before they do, and many of them won't. So they've got to try and navigate some way, out of, out of this, and, and they'll they'll find a way, I think, to do it to try and mitigate the cognitive dissonance. But, yeah, there's there's not the there's not the energy that there was for Trump that there was, you know, a couple of years ago. You'd you don't get the insistent argument of what a great figure he is. I just you can see the energy dissipating and some questions beginning to seep in.

00:17:26 Andrew Keen: I was in DC a couple of weeks ago, and there's something not a little absurd, it seems, about some of the things that's happening. There was, of course, the cage fighting to celebrate, his birthday a couple of weeks ago, which you write about, the first and hopefully the last time at the White House. You're a DC based guy. Is there a sense of an absurd spectacle that this ape what you call this apotheosis of Trump, this end of him, is absurd? We had, two or three weeks ago, the writer a writer on the show has written a book called Rasputin on the Potomac, a very absurd treatment of American politics. Is this really America the Absurd, Dean?

00:18:20 Peter Wehner: For sure, it is America the Absurd, and there is a spectacle quality to this that is pretty amazing to watch. I mean, it has elements in a kind of, you know, Roman Colosseum bread and circuses. There's just a depravity to the spectacle, and an absurdity to the spectacle. I mean, you really, you know, I'm I'm not being facetious. If you would have put this in a in a in a play or in a in a movie, a lot of this stuff would have been cut because it just would have seemed too preposterous. There are these, you know, obvious things like The U UFC fight that is that is happening, but there but there's something else too that I think plays, you know, plays into this, which is, you know, the meandering soliloquies that Trump has at the at the cabinet meetings, this kind of unplanned strolls on the White House roof. He's he gets up and he wanders, during meetings with oil executives. He begins to wander to the window and, dilate on the White House Ballroom of which he has a fixation. You see the fury, even in the second term that you didn't see in the first term when he walks out, Kristen Welker, and meet the press. So all of that is happening as, you know, as well. And then there's there's the sheer incompetence and the almost comical buffoonery that we're seeing. So all of those things are kind of coming, you know, coming together. And so, yeah, it is like a spectacle, and, you know, it would really be interesting to know what people make a hundred and five hundred years from now when they look back at this and say, you know, what happened? And, of course, it'll also be an interesting question, which is, was this, just a dark period of time which America comes out of? Or was this in fact, the beginning of a long decline and Donald Trump really was a kind of marker inflection point of when it when it, when it began.

00:20:38 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wanna come to that question in a minute because, of course, it's it's terribly important. But could one argue, Pete, that you're right, of course, on the surreal, the absurd quality of Trump's, behavior and many of his policies? But there are still a couple of grown ups in control on the economy when it comes to foreign policy. Marco Rubio seems to be doing a relatively competent job, at least dealing with Trump. And even JD Vance, who's been sent to negotiate the deal on Iran, appears, certainly compared to Trump, to be a grown up. So in a sense, for all his bizarre behavior, for all the psychosis, you wrote a piece two or three months ago in the times with another old friend of the show, Jonathan Rauch, about the psychotic state of the administration. It's more Trump being psychotic, and there still remains, a relatively functional administration. Or am I wrong? Am I being too kind?

00:21:46 Peter Wehner: Yeah. I think you've been too kind. I wouldn't doubt that, you know, Marco Rubio being involved is better than others that you could conceive of. But the fact is that Donald Trump drives this administration, and the best that you can hope for from someone like, like a Rubio is to try and sort of sand off the roughest and worst edges of it. But the Iran situation is just classic. I mean, if there are our fingerprints of an adult, in the room, they're not obvious to anybody how we got into the war, how it was executed, and how we've gotten out. And the other thing I'd I'd say, Andrew, is, you know, people like Marco Rubio are the rarity. You have people like Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and RFK Jr, and, he. I mean, you just you just go through it, you know, Bongino before the person that Trump wanted, is at the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, at the CIA. I mean, these people are kooks and not some conspiracy theorists. And it's the entire administration at very senior levels, at the most senior levels, are just filled with these people. Now you find once in a while, you know, somebody, chief of staff, Susie Wiles here or Rubio there, but they're the exception. And the degree to which they're limiting the damage is not very apparent. Trump has surrounded himself in the second term, unlike his first term, with people where, obsequiousness is the coin of the realm. You see it in these cabinet meetings where, you know, they put the North Korean show to shame, just in terms of the way they're bootlicky they're licking the boots of Trump and, and ass kissing and, you know, the extravagant praise. I mean, it's just ludicrous. So he is a sick person, and he's getting sicker. And there are fewer people, fewer use the analogy. There are fewer doctors around, you know, to deal with it. So, I you know? And I would also say just to bring this fuller circle. I mean, there was Elon Musk. Look what they did to USAID and PEPFAR. This what Musk did with the Doge effort was about as bad as it could have been, right, which is the argument was we're going to cut programs to save spending. And you could have made the argument, well, we saved spending, but it wasn't worth it because the programs we cut did too much damage. But they succeeded in doing two things at once. There was no net decrease in spending overall based on what Doge did. But what they did succeed is to either destroy or to cripple two of the greatest humanitarian efforts The United States has been involved with, USAID and PEPFAR. PEPFAR saved more than twenty five million lives. And so this is this is what is happening. This is repeating itself over and over and over again. And when you have somebody like RFK Junior, who's who's a lunatic, in a position in which there's just gutting medical research. If you talk to people as I have who have spent their life in medical research and healing people, Some of the greatest medical and scientific minds, you know, in generations, even in centuries, and they can cite chapter and verse what they are doing, to medical research just to take one part. So, this is this is this is bad, and there don't seem to be many breaks on it.

00:25:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting you bring up Musk and Doge. I mean, since then, it seems an eternity ago that the Doge fiasco, which it was on every level, politically as well. Now, of course Yeah.

00:26:04 Peter Wehner: I just wanna say you're you're absolutely right. I just wanna say that people are still dying because of what they did. The story moves on, but the human carnage doesn't. The human carnage piles up. And, why they went out of their way to do so much malicious harm, why they decided that they had to put as a priority, to let the weakest and the poorest and the most vulnerable people in the world die. What kind of person, what kind of administration does that? I'll tell you. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Trump administration.

00:26:44 Andrew Keen: Now even after July 4, there's still couple of years, little more than two years left of the administration. I mean, the best case spin, I guess, Peter Pete, we could put on it is that Trump maintains a degree of reason. I mean, his behavior over Iran, while absurd in the beginning with this invasion, clearly, he's come to his senses in a way by, making this piece, which, as you know, makes, the Obama piece look very, very diplomatic. But could one make the argument that even if he is a little crazy and he's clearly in his twilight years politically and otherwise, that he still maintains a degree of reason that we shouldn't have any existential concerns for the next two years?

00:27:40 Peter Wehner: Yeah. It may be that situation or it may not be. I think that's the thing with Donald Trump a little bit back to what I was saying earlier in terms of how difficult it is for our allies around the world to deal with him, which is the capriciousness, the arbitrariness of it of it all. If Trump is not a figure like a Mao or Stalin in the sense that he's just an evil person who knows what he wants to do and knows the harm that he wants to inflict. He's a different category than those people are. And so you get something on Wednesday, you know, one day and something else on Friday and then and then there's Sunday. And he's not a reasonable person. I think it's just a matter of where his, his irrationality focuses itself. You could make the argument that he's gonna spend an awful lot of the next two years trying to find variations of getting his name on the Kennedy Center, and obsessing about the ballroom and, you know, sending out truth social posts at 3AM that no sane person can make sense of. That's not ideal, but it's not catastrophic. Or you could say that he just kinda loses interest and he doesn't really care about governing. And, so the country is hurt. The civic culture for sure is damaged. Real policy is hurt, but it's not something that The United States can't recover from or the wounds are so deep, you know, as it relates to the world. That's one thing. But it you could just as easily come up with a scenario in which the decomposition advances. He acts irrationally. He decides to declare martial law. He gets into another war, this time with a country bigger than Iran and more serious than Iran. He could just completely break down, and he could be issuing orders that, that are insane. And then the question becomes, well, who stops him? Does the military follow certain orders? Does the supreme court intervene? If the supreme court intervenes, what happens if he decides, well, I don't care. It's not worth the paper. It's written on this opinion. I'm not predicting any of them because I can't predict it, you can't predict it, his followers can't predict it, and he can't predict it. It's the nature of his psychosis, of his of his personality disorder, of his narcissistic personality disorder, that there's no way that you can you can, you know, do trajectories of where this is gonna end. It he may enter as a whimper, or he may go out in what he thinks is a blaze of glory. And the fact is that none of us know, and so we have to live with that uncertainty between now and when he finally leaves, leaves office.

00:30:42 Andrew Keen: How important could the midterms be? I mean, if the midterms are as disastrous for the Republicans as some analysts are predicting, could that essentially end the administration?

00:30:57 Peter Wehner: I don't think so. I don't think the main danger from Trump, can be can be stopped or even to a large extent mitigated by congress, because it's not a policy dispute so much that's that's dangerous. It's it's that he just flips out and that he begins to act irrationally in a way that you're not talking about, you know, HR one twenty three up or down. You know, how many votes do you do you, do you get? If the Democrats take control of the senate, there's more oversight, same with the house. Does the oversight really matter? I'm not sure. Are we gonna learn anything about the level of his depravity or his corruption that we don't know? No. Is it gonna be impeached and convicted? Absolutely not. That's you know, it's just not gonna happen because you need in this country, you know, a 100 senators, 67 would have to vote to convict. I don't think, by the way, that he much cares about the midterms. He's certainly not acting like he Yeah.

00:32:00 Andrew Keen: He certainly doesn't seem to care about the Republican Party. That's for sure.

00:32:04 Peter Wehner: Yeah. And I and I think well, what number one is he has no loyalty to anything other than himself, you know, from his wife to the party that he's a part of to, apparently, to his, you know, to his children as well. So he there doesn't seem to be within his more frame of reference anything that matters beyond him himself so that the party would be very, very low on that list anyway. But beyond that, I just think that he thinks that he has unchecked powers. I mean, he said as much. He said it any number of times. And that, I think, is the issue, which is if he thinks that he has the power to do anything he wants and he really presses it and he has people in his administration that do his bidding, Can a Democratic, house or a Democratic senate or a Democratic house and senate together stop him? In some respects, they might, but in some respects, they may not. And in the most important and dangerous realm, I'm not sure that they have the levers to, to put the brakes on this guy.

00:33:08 Andrew Keen: My sense, Pete, is that America's bored with him now. The I mean, you're out outraged, and there are many others in DC who remain outraged. But most ordinary Americans outside DC are just bored by all this. It's it's a repeat to speak of television series, and we've seen it all before.

00:33:35 Peter Wehner: Yeah. No. I agree with you a 100100%. You know, there's a there's a phrase in The United States sort of the fat Elvis phase when Elvis Presley, who was a great singer and gentleman. And in his later years, I mean, he died when he was in his forties, so he was relatively young man. But he was fat. He couldn't perform like he used to. And, you know, Trump is in the fat Elvis phase of this

00:33:55 Andrew Keen: That's that's our headline, Pete. Is Donald Trump fat Elvis?

00:34:00 Peter Wehner: Yeah. Yeah. And, he's he is in that in that, in that air. Look. I've grown bored of Trump as well. I don't follow him in the second term as closely as I did in the first term for a whole variety of reasons. But one of it is the absurdity of it. I'll tell you, Andrew, one of the ways that I actually monitor the news these days I don't I don't know if you do this, but, I actually watch a fair amount of the comedians. You know, the late night Colbert before he was off the air and, Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart and Seth Meyers. And the reason I do that is they actually run clips and give a narrative of what's happening, but they do it in a way that's funny. And you actually have to watch or at least I need to watch Trump through a lens that includes that absurdity to it, just so you don't get overwhelmed by it. You know? There's so much an individual who cares about this country, who cares about morality, who cares about Christianity that you could just get upset and outraged, you know, every day. And that's not a good place to be. It's not a good place to live. So you have to create distance from it while not becoming indifferent to it or not becoming inured to it. It's not an easy line to walk, and different people will walk it in different ways. But I do take your point that he's just a buffoon at this point and an almost comical figure,

00:35:36 Andrew Keen: And it and it would be more common. More than almost comical. He is comical, or he's most comical. He's absurd.

00:35:44 Peter Wehner: He is. The trouble is he's also president.

00:35:47 Andrew Keen: Right. He's a parody of a comic.

00:35:49 Peter Wehner: You

00:35:50 Andrew Keen: Know, there's there's two ways, I guess, Pete, of thinking about the aftermath of Trump. On the one hand, one could imagine, perhaps, like after apartheid in South Africa, peace and reconciliation committees and all sorts of ways of coming to terms with what's happened. On the other hand, America will just move on. It will be an absurd chapter. Everyone will acknowledge it. He will disappear, finally. His people will go away, and perhaps the Republicans will come back to, quote, unquote, normal. Which of those two aftermaths are more likely?

00:36:29 Peter Wehner: I really don't know what the aftermath is gonna be, and I don't know what is likely. My suspicion is that the country itself will begin to rebalance overall. You know, I have a view on this, and it goes something like this that, sometimes in the life of an individual, in the life of a nation, certain qualities that at one time you cherished, things like honor and integrity and decency, and compassion. You begin to take those things for granted. You don't pay attention to them. You don't attend to them. You don't cultivate them. You don't the cultivation of character is something you don't really pay attention to. And then one day, those things are lost. And at some point, when you lose those things, there's a price to it. There's a price to it to you as an individual. There's a price to it as a country. And all of a sudden, you realize that we need those things after all. We actually have to attend to those things. We have to cultivate them. We have to learn what it means to live a life of honor and to value people who live honorable lives. I think the country is going to go through that. I hope it does. I suspect it will because I think they are seeing in real terms as that's part of the reason why there's this collapse of Trump across the board that this has real cost. Now for a lot of Americans, what's the trigger is not because of the of moral depravity. It's because gas prices are too high. So that's I wish it weren't that, but that's part of the equation. So I do think that Americans will probably learn a lesson. To me, the more interesting question, is what happens to the Republican Party and the movement that Trump created. They're not gonna go gently into the good night. I think this crack up that you're seeing, this fracturing that you're seeing is a preview of coming attractions. And when Trump finally leaves the scene, whenever that is, there isn't gonna be any kind of parameters, to it. And I think that the conflict, the antipathy, the hatred that you're that you're seeing if you if you look at the level of discourse between, you know, radio talk show host and Fox contributor, Mark Levin, and Megyn Kelly, who's a popular podcaster. I mean, you don't see this kind of thing on a playground at an elementary school. And that's just gonna get that's gonna get worse. I don't think there's gonna be a snapback to conservatism. There's not gonna be a snapback to the Republican Party pre Trump. What follows, I think, will not be known for a long time, but I do suspect that there's going to be a good deal more chaos in the Republican party before it finally begins to settle on what a post Trump movement, post Trump Republican party looks like. But I think we're looking at something, you know, maybe a generation down the, down the road. It's not gonna happen immediately.

00:39:40 Andrew Keen: Still two years to go. So, Pete, you and I will talk about Trump some more before his before he leaves office. But what have you learned yourself over these, what, sixteen years or eight to twelve years since he's been involved in American politics? I've often described you as the conscience of America. In your writing in the New York Times and the Atlantic as a former Republican, you bring a serious morality, a spirituality to this question. I actually didn't know you really before Trump. Have you changed yourself? Have you become, more serious, more credible? Or you're you're one of the few people who has not given in to cynicism. We had David Frum on the show a couple of weeks ago, another conservative like you. It seems as if Trump has brought out the best in American certain tradition of American conservatism. Well, I

00:40:48 Peter Wehner: Think that's certainly the case with David. David's been a great a great a great voice, you know, during

00:40:54 Andrew Keen: And Jonathan Rauch, of course, as well. And John

00:40:56 Peter Wehner: Rauch, and Jonathan Rauch. From Exactly. And David French and Russell Moore. I mean, there have been a whole number of people who have really risen to the to the moment, and it's come at real cost to them in, you know, in different and varying ways. In terms of, you know, how am I different, it's it's a good question, and I'm not sure that I know, and I'm not sure I'm in the best position to know what I've what I've learned from it, I would say, some of what I've learned from it is that, you know, that we came, as Americans, maybe to believe a little bit too much in the romanticized view of America. And America was not inoculated in ways that I think we thought it would to some of the really malicious and malevolent movements that we've seen in other countries throughout history. We've seen, how a carnival barker and a conspiracy theorist and a showman can reshape not just American politics, but American culture. We've seen how a social and cultural crisis that predated Trump, gave him the opening that he's had. We've seen, how, fragile truth and reality as concepts of histomology can be. We've learned that you really have to, as I said earlier, you have to attend to them, that virtues are hard and they and you have to you have to pay attention to them. And we've learned that you can't be cynical. You can't give up. And that as individuals, the most that you can do in a given life is to act faithfully. You may not be successful. You'd prefer to be faithful and successful. But in many ways, you can't control, success. It that depends on contingencies that you don't control. But you there's a large measure of control that you have in terms of how faithful you are, to the virtues that you that you, care for and the values that you that you pledge allegiance to. You know? And, and that matters. I would say as a Christian, I haven't learned anything new, but it's become more acute, that, that the gap between what the faith proclaims and what those who say they follow the faith act is, is enormous, and it's gotten larger as it relates to American Christianity. And I've also come to believe and see that the people who really are genuine followers of Jesus, are, are inspiring people, and we need them, because the faith has taken enormous blows over these ten years. And we do need people who take their faith seriously and, and act faithfully, as, you know, as a, as a counter, counter example.

00:44:02 Andrew Keen: Any regrets, Pete, in retrospect about even your affiliation with the Republican Party?

00:44:11 Peter Wehner: You know, I think I was blind to some of the things that I should have seen. I've asked myself that question, and I've I've tried to answer it in a way that's, you know, reasonably objective. There's no way you can you know, you're always a judge in your own in your own in your own trial. That's that's that's always kind of dangerous and difficult. I felt like at the Republican party that I was a part of, I don't feel like I made a mistake at those moments. I think it was probably had more problems, more defects, than I was aware of. It's probably natural when you're I was too tribalistic. I'm I'm much more independent now, and I think that's good. And I wish I were more independent when I were was part of the Republican party. But even as a Republican, if you go back to my writings pre Trump, I was actually calling out the Republican party on a lot of things, you know, whether it was on race or Newt Gingrich or, you know, just a lot of other things, but I probably should not have done it as much as I as I did. I think in real time, if I had to do it over again because I am a philosophical, conservative that the Republican Party was the place was the place to, to be. And I got off when I felt like I couldn't in good conscience stay. I was speaking out about Trump in 2015, 2016. Leaving him, leaving the Republican Party was pretty easy for me, because it seemed to be so obvious the threat that he was on so many different, different, different levels. So, you know, I mean, I'm I'm an imperfect sojourner in, in this in this, in this journey. And I'm sure if I go back and look at the things that I wrote, you know, over the decades, there are things that I did miss, some things I should have said more of, probably some things I should have been less critical on. But you do the best you can, and then you take a person's life in the totality of its acts. And, you know, where my life ends up in that as a as a writer is, a, not many people are gonna really pay attention to it. But to the degree they do, they're gonna have a judgment that, that, is gonna be, you know, potentially different than minors, potentially the same as mine. And, I don't know how that's that's gonna end up. I'm just trying to do it a step at a time, a day at a time, and I'm I'm really trying to write as honestly as I can at the moment. And I do ask myself, when I think about the people I've most admired in my life, the faith, intellectually, writers, and so forth, it's not infrequently, Andrew, that I ask myself, you know, what would they think about where I am and what I'm saying and what I'm what I'm called to be? I fall short of it, but at least it's a question that I that I entertain.

00:47:13 Andrew Keen: Well, finally, Pete, less than a week, six days to the big day, two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Independence Day on the fourth. What are you gonna be doing?

00:47:25 Peter Wehner: My wife and I might be going down to Monticello. A friend of ours has, has invited us. There's gonna be, an event in which they welcome new immigrants, and, and so we may we may be doing that. We haven't finalized the plans exactly, but I imagine that's where I'm, I'm gonna be. It's it's it's going to be

00:47:47 Andrew Keen: Monticello, in Charlottesville. Exactly. Jefferson's old place. God knows what Jefferson would be thinking of Trump.

00:47:56 Peter Wehner: Yeah. Yeah. I can, I can assume it wouldn't be terribly favorable, but that's it's probably true? I'm not we

00:48:03 Andrew Keen: Can always assume that.

00:48:04 Peter Wehner: Most of the, of the founders. So it'll it'll be a birthday that, that will, will, will recognize, but it's not gonna be like it's been in the past, and it's not going to be untainted by some sadness even as there will also be hope of what can happen too.

00:48:23 Andrew Keen: Well, Peter Wehner, the author of the apotheosis of Donald Trump, one of, classic powerful piece, a couple of weeks ago in The Atlantic where you write, including the new you also write The New York Times. You had an excellent piece in The Times on the psychotic state of the Trump administration and another piece on the spectacle of Trump at 80. As I've often said, the conscience of American conservatism. Unfortunately, this will probably not be our last conversation on Trump, but we've only got two more years to go, Pete, and then we'll have somebody else to kick around. Thank you so much, and a happy Independence Day.

00:49:05 Peter Wehner: Thanks so much, Andrew. Thanks for, for your voice and, and your friendship, and, we'll we'll we'll do this again.