Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot: Jonathan Rauch & Peter Wehner on the Autumn of the American Patriarch

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, September 24, 2026, an interesting week. Probably publish this tomorrow on Friday. It's a week in which Donald Trump is greeting the Chinese leader at the White House where, at least according to The New York Times, pomp may mask tensions. It doesn't look so great for the autocrats these days. The foreign policy writer in the Washington Post, very good writer, David Ignatius, has a piece this week, which he calls the twilight of an autocratic age. It's not just Xi and Trump who's in trouble, but also a certain Vladimir Putin, to paraphrase the title of a wonderful 1975 novel by the great Gabriel García Márquez. We seem to be in the autumn of the patriarch, and that theme is supported by, an excellent op-ed, by two of my best friends in Washington, DC, Jon Rauch and Peter Wehner, who have a piece in the Times, this week. Trump has finally lost the plot. Some people might wonder whether he ever actually knew the plot. Jon and Pete are both joining me from Washington, DC. Jon, we're gonna start with you because you're the senior partner in this relationship as we were saying earlier. Are we finally in The Autumn of the Patriarch, to borrow García Márquez's title?

00:02:16 Jonathan Rauch: It's starting to look that way, Andrew. We'll know more firmly after the midterm elections, but it looks increasingly as if Trump is not only losing his support among independents, but that he's even losing significant support in his base. So Pete and I noticed that, but we noticed more broadly that he failed at what we thought was the most audacious and ambitious thing he wanted to do, and that's the plot that was alluded to in The Times' punning headline.

00:02:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We'll come to the idea of losing the plot. The polls look bad for Trump in The New York Times. His approval rating is really, in the toilet, so to speak. Jon, in the piece, which is always excellent, necessary reading by you and Pete, you talk about the frantic pace of the Trump presidency. It was only a few months ago, you announced, in The Atlantic, that not just, that, yes, it's fascism. We — you and I have talked about this before. So in the last six months, have we gone from fascism to Trump losing the plot? Is it just the pace of things, or did he get it wrong before?

00:03:39 Jonathan Rauch: The article about fascism actually is consistent with this piece because it — what it said is that Trump, but especially the people around him, you know, people like Stephen Miller and Bannon and Christopher Rufo and others, had not just a project to have conservative policies in the government, but they had a revolutionary agenda for society. And that article did not say America's become a fascist country. It said the opposite. It said Trump's a fascist type of leader or of some sort, but that he's failing at that, that he would be unlikely to succeed. And this article basically develops it without using the F-word, which, of course, is very controversial and not well loved by you. But it says, okay. It's over. His effort to rewire American culture in his image, that is failed.

00:04:38 Andrew Keen: In other words, Trump has lost the plot, and I looked that up on Gemini. It says, to become confused, to act irrationally, or completely lose touch with reality. Pete, you've been writing brilliantly about Donald Trump, for years. In fact, I mean, you're probably the most critical — I mean, hasn't that been going on for years? Hasn't he been acting irrationally, losing touch with reality and normal behavior ever since he walked down that staircase back in 2015.

00:05:17 Peter Wehner: Yeah. I'd say that is the case. I mean, I'd add a couple of, points, to it. I think the first, point is that there were more guardrails, in the first Trump term than there are in this one. I don't think anybody disputes that. I don't even think that the Trump world would dispute that. They'd say that that's a good thing. I and Jon would say it's a troubling thing. So his ambitions, were checked in some respects, not in all respects. It was pretty clear, I think, to a lot of us how dangerous Trump was and what his instincts were and remain. But you had people like John Kelly and, you know, Secretary of Defense Mattis and others who kept the worst, I think, from happening. So that's, I'd say number one. Number two is, I think there's now a fusion of a certain kind. It's Trump's sociopathic tendencies, which have always existed. I think they've gotten, somewhat worse, but that's also been, combined — fused with a cognitive decline, which is very obvious, I think, to most people who are watching. And so to the degree that he had any limitations in the past and to the degree that he did, they weren't much. But there's less now. His circle is much smaller than it has been, in the past, circle of advisors. And, so he's losing, I think, more and more, touch with reality and that's starting from a place where he wasn't really in touch with reality to begin with. So I don't think that we're seeing a fundamentally different Trump. I just think we're seeing a worse version of Trump and in a sense, more of the essence of who the man is.

00:07:19 Andrew Keen: Pete, I don't wanna turn this into a seminar on Latin American magical realist literature. But is he becoming — and it's ironic, given his obsession with Latin America from Venezuela to Cuba — is he becoming just another crazy despot?

00:07:39 Peter Wehner: Well, I mean, in some respects, yes. As it happens, I did an essay a month or two ago citing The Autumn of the Patriarch. So I do think it's relevant. I guess I'd call it the autumn of the sociopath if I were to update the title. But in any event, yeah, I think that's the case. I do think what's different here is that we're talking about the president of the United States. So it's not that Trump is categorically different than other leaders in history or even other leaders in the world stage today. I mean, you're talking about 185 countries [ed.: there are roughly 195 countries], so you're gonna get a lot of different people. Some good, some great, some awful. I think what's different is that we've never had a president approaching this level of depravity, whether it's psychological kind of madness, that characterizes Trump or just the sheer cruelty and crudity and, you know, the detachment from reality, the sort of nihilistic ethic that you and I have talked about in the past. So I don't think it's him as a human being that's different. I think it's to have that kind of person, as president of the most powerful country in the world and, therefore, the most powerful person in the world. That's what puts us in a different place and I think a more dangerous place.

00:09:07 Andrew Keen: You and I have talked about this before. Is he still playing a kind of role? One thinks of some of the great Hollywood movies about this sort of thing, Being There, for example, about, a rather, unthinking character who spent his whole time looking at television, who became the president of the United States. There's some things rather prescient about that movie, also the kind of Hollywood movies that speak of anger [unclear]. Is Trump aware of the role he's playing? Has he changed his role over the last few months, or is he still the crazy guy who is obsessed with his own image, the, psychopathic narcissist?

00:09:52 Peter Wehner: Yeah. I think it's probably a bit of the latter. I think we're just seeing a, I don't know what, a constricted and more essential version of Donald Trump. I'd It's not only that his capacity — restraint, internal restraints, again, which has never been very, very strong to begin with. I think those have been worn down. But you really see him and, I mean, if you could — if you're at all able to parse out the damage that he's doing to the country and to human lives, if that's at all possible, there's something poignant and pathetic about watching this sort of old man wandering around, getting up from meetings, you know, opining on his obsessions, the ballroom, grass out in the White House. It's just — there's — yeah. As I say, I'd say it's almost like a Shakespearean tragedy. Although Trump is not an interesting enough figure, complicated enough figure to be at least a great, you know, Shakespearean tragic figure like Lear. There are characters in Shakespeare who were tragic more in the Trumpian sense. But I think he's sort of increasingly becoming a doddering old fool, but he's a doddering old fool with a tremendous amount of power and advisers who don't seem inclined to check him and in some respects even want to go apropos of the essay Jon and I did beyond what he might. So that's what I think characterizes this moment.

00:11:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. He's lost the plot. You know, the Kennedy Center episode seems to summarize that. Jon, whereas Pete's always been the great moral critic of Trump, I think your work tends to focus more on, if not, the rational, certainly, the more secular side of Trump, or the — you've written extensively on patrimonialism. You wrote an excellent Atlantic piece a couple of years ago. We've also been on a show with Jeff Kopstein and Steve Hanson, who came up with the original book about patrimonialism. In the Times piece, you talk about Trump too and patrimonialism. Is that a distinctive part of him losing the plot? Doesn't seem as if he's lost the plot when it comes to patrimonialism. He's still self-interested. In fact, if anything, he seems to be more self-interested in terms of the overtness of his patrimonialism.

00:12:40 Jonathan Rauch: Well, that's part of the plot that he won, Andrew. In this article, we are not saying that Trump is a defeated force, that we're out of the woods, that we can all go out and celebrate. We spend the first third or so of the article on the parts of the plot that succeeded. And the most important of those elements to Donald Trump himself personally, as distinct from, you know, the Stephen Millers of the world, was patrimonial. And patrimonialism is that organization of government in which the state is the personal property and family business of the leader. That's how he runs his presidency. It's how he runs the Justice Department and trade policy and the Pentagon and the architecture of Washington to himself with a lot of complicity, unfortunately, by the Congress. So that part, he's won.

00:13:50 Andrew Keen: Couple of weeks ago, we did a show with Jacob Weisberg, who has a book out new book out called Profiles in Cowardice, which is, of course, a remix of the famous JFK book, in which he suggests that the patrimonialism you talked about has been enabled by congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and many other figures in DC. Do you think that's true? And what's happened, Jon, if indeed we are in an age where Trump has finally lost the plot and losing power, what happens to these cowards who have enabled him?

00:14:28 Jonathan Rauch: Well, we'll be thinking about that for a generation, and Pete really has thought more than I have about cowardice and where it comes from even in people who can otherwise be quite brave. But I think it's safe to say that a few things happened. First, his control of the Republican base meant that Republicans who defied him were primaried and often defeated, and they didn't wanna lose their jobs. Second, it meant that Republicans swim in a media environment and a political environment in which 90-plus percent of the people they encounter every day judge them by their fidelity to Donald Trump, and they don't wanna be cast out. And then third, not to be underrated, they're physically fearful. They get death threats from, Trump supporters in many cases if, he fingers them on social media. They get other kinds of threats, and these are not wealthy people. They don't get round-the-clock security. Their homes are in known locations, and a lot of them just don't wanna deal with the hassle of the threats.

00:15:34 Andrew Keen: Pete, in terms of Trump losing the plot, is there a synergy, almost a symbiosis whereas he's losing the plot and America is rediscovering it in the piece you write about, the tide turning in Minneapolis? Has America rediscovered the plot in certainly in a moral sense in terms of the willingness, maybe not of the elites of Washington insiders like Mitch McConnell or wealthy people like Jeff Bezos, but have Americans found their ethical spine when it comes to standing up to this man, and did they rediscover it on the streets of Minneapolis?

00:16:16 Peter Wehner: Well, I do think that the streets of Minneapolis made a big difference, and I've all honor and praise to those people, because they did stand up. And, I think it was a really important — Jon and I both think it was a really important moment, in the arc of the Trump presidency. In part, I must say, Andrew, because I sensed prior to that, feelings of powerlessness, and some measure of despair, the loss of human agency, among the critics of Trump. A feeling of, like, what can we do? He has the power. He has the Congress, and they were just kinda worn down. And seeing the people in Minneapolis rise up the way they did with courage, without violence, very well coordinated in freezing temperatures, and then seeing Trump and his acolytes, back down, ICE pull out. I think that gave energy, to people and said, you know, you can prove the possible by the actual, and we saw something actual in Minneapolis. So I think that that was important. In terms of your broader question about the public regaining its moral sensibilities, I'd say to some extent, but with a caveat. So let me first — well, deal with them in order. You know, I do have a sense, a hope — but a hope I think rooted in some measure of reality that in the life of a nation, much like the life of an individual, you can begin to take for granted certain qualities, that, are essential. Virtues, qualities of courage, honor, decency, compassion. Those things matter. But you can't take those kinds of things for granted, not pay attention to them, and you can even lose them. And I think in the process of losing them in the life of a nation, like, life of an individual, you can become aware of why they mattered in the first place, why life fulfillment, and dignity, matter, and why when those things are lost, you lose something essential, not just in terms of ideals, but who you as an individual or you as a country want to be. And I do think that the Trump era has shown that. It's shown that, you know, a life could be nasty, brutish, and short, and a country can be that way too. And I think that some people, a lot of Americans, are looking at that and saying, this is just not what I want anymore. And I and I've had conversations just a week or ten days ago with somebody who voted for Trump three times. It was at a coffee shop, here in McLean. And, I wasn't prosecuting. I was really inquisitive. And I just said, you know, if you knew now, if you knew then, here being 2024, what you know now about Donald Trump, would you have voted for him? And he said no. He'd voted again for him three times, and I asked him why. He sort of went through the litany. I'm hearing more and more of that kind of thing. As to the caveat, what matters a great deal is that the country is not doing well. Economically, we're in this debacle in Iran. You know, interest rates are going up. Inflation is going up. Just the damage that Trump has done in people's everyday lives, gas prices are the most obvious, but not the only thing — grocery prices, that's kicking in too. And so it, honestly, I think for a lot of Americans, it took what they consider to be some measure of pain in their own life to rediscover virtue, and the importance of virtue. It is not as if Americans had this kind of wellspring of interest in qualities that I think they should have seen all along. I mean, you know, when you're dealing with a man who inspires an insurrection, violent insurrection against the Capitol and tries to overturn a free election, I don't think you have to go too much further than that to say, I can't vote for this man. And 77 million-plus Americans did. And if the economy was growing at 4% and inflation was at one and a half percent, then, they may not give a damn. And that's an indictment of who they are. That said, that is those aren't the conditions. And if people are finding virtue, even driven out of self-interest, I'll take it because we've seen worse, including in the last ten years.

00:21:15 Andrew Keen: Is there a danger — a Palestinian writer wrote a book [ed.: Omar El Akkad, who is Egyptian-Canadian; the book is One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025)]. I'm not sure the exact title, but something like, in the future, everyone will be against this. Is there a danger, Pete, in the next few years that everyone will conveniently forget that they once supported him and write him off as an idiot tyrant?

00:21:35 Peter Wehner: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, those there'll be different manifestations of that. Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal had an essay a few days ago where that's beginning. He's now saying that he's suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. But, yes, they're gonna find ways to excuse themselves. You know, some of it will be rewriting history, their own role in history. Saw that, for example, with Laura Ingraham, that she's been all along against the Iran war, except that there's tape that shows that she wasn't. So that's a normal human impulse. Some people will say, well, you know, the first term was really — went marvelously well, but the second term is the reason I've turned on him. Some people will downplay that they were ever supportive as they were. So that will happen. People will distance themselves. But, you know, history is what history is, and it usually gets it right. Of course, it depends on who writes the history. But —

00:22:36 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, that's why it's good to have somebody like Jacob Weisberg, whose eight cowards are actually all people who were very critical of Trump in his first term and for one reason or other have been sympathetic in the second. So as you said, it's good to have all this stuff on record. Jon, you write in the piece about the universities and the law firms and the media. There's a story this week of Trump banning Politico and CNN and then some of the other media firms coming out in sympathy. What is your analysis both, in the piece Trump has finally lost the plot and more generally about the role of the universities and law firms and media, the American elites in terms of either standing up to Trump or rolling over? They don't have quite as a heroic narrative as perhaps the people on the streets of Minnesota, do they?

00:23:37 Jonathan Rauch: No. They don't. Although some of them were heroic enough, which is the point of Pete and my article. So the thesis we pursue in this particular article is that the most ambitious thing that Trump's — really the people around him — were determined to try to do is they thought the left is winning the culture war. It's winning the commanding heights of society. And they were going to use the full force of the presidency and the US government to go through the private sector domain by domain and rout the left, drive it out, and change the culture and values of the country before it was too late. And they did that. They went after universities. They attempted really extralegally to commandeer them. They went after law firms again extralegally. They tried to drive them out of their, for example, pro bono practices. We go through all these domains in our article. And, initially, a substantial number of law firms and universities submitted. I'd argue the law firms didn't need to. The universities, boy, they were really he had them by the short hairs. But the interesting thing was that it took some time, but over time, civil society pushed back. It reorganized. There was a whole series of lawsuits. Judges at the district court level did a remarkably good job of standing up for law even sometimes with an element of personal risk. And the result of that is that what looked like a bulldozer just rushing — running over institutions in the first six months. By today, looks like people are much less scared of it. He's still trying. You know, he's still renaming the lake, you know, Lake Ontario, and he's still trying to muscle the press by excluding three networks from the press pool and so on and so forth. But the atmosphere of fear is mostly gone. The momentum behind that movement is mostly gone.

00:25:42 Andrew Keen: Pete, when you have a two-person article, it's sometimes hard to know who writes. Well, I'm not sure how you go about these —

00:25:47 Peter Wehner: The best methods — just the rule of —

00:25:53 Andrew Keen: — the stuff is from you, and the bad stuff is from Jon, I'm guessing.

00:25:56 Peter Wehner: Exactly.

00:25:56 Jonathan Rauch: Unfortunately, that's quite true.

00:25:59 Andrew Keen: But in all seriousness, one of the characters that you focus on in the piece, and you've written about him before, both of you have written about Patrick Deneen, the radical conservative, the professor of political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Has it been a failure ultimately in retrospect now when we look back at Trump losing the plot about Deneen's philosophical revolution, this reaction against classical liberalism?

00:26:28 Peter Wehner: Go ahead, Jon.

00:26:30 Andrew Keen: Well, I was thinking of you. I mean, who wrote the bit on Deneen? Who has the strongest feelings on Deneen?

00:26:37 Jonathan Rauch: So I wrote the bit about Deneen specifically, but, of course, Pete was very much involved in the broader argument. So I'll take that up unless someone objects.

00:26:49 Andrew Keen: Deneen will probably object, but he's not on the show.

00:26:52 Jonathan Rauch: Yeah. Well, maybe you can get him. He's an interesting guy. He wrote a book in 2023 called Regime Change, and it basically theorized what Trump would later try to do. And it says you've gotta use the power of government not just to constrain the elites who run American society, but you gotta replace them. You gotta go through it and put in conservatives, and that's in effect what they tried to do. But there's a whole bunch of people beyond Patrick Deneen, who's a political theorist. You had folks like Christopher Rufo, who's the architect of the campaign, for example, against universities, and you have outsiders like Steve Bannon. You have think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. You had this whole constellation of people who thought this is the moment to retake the culture. It's Flight 93. It's now or never. If we don't win this in the next two years, it's going to be political correctness and wokeness for all time to come. So that's what they thought they were doing. In my opinion, Pete can weigh in, but I think they misunderstood the nature of the American project. You know, the idea that someone can win an election on a razor-thin majority, which is what he got, actually. He didn't even get a majority, but a razor-thin margin, and then come in and bulldoze the Democratic Party, bulldoze the liberal establishment, and simply in two years remake society is a fundamentally revolutionary idea in a country which is fundamentally not revolutionary. And that's what they ultimately ran into, I think, in Minnesota.

00:28:23 Andrew Keen: Pete, this sort of Leninism, I guess, of Deneen is also reflected in Steve Bannon who's been more explicit on that kind of conservative Leninism. Seems as if Bannon's moved on. He's more critical now of Trump. And, actually, he's created a front with Bernie Sanders in terms of attacking AI. Has the — is the circus just moved on in terms of this culture war? Has Trump just been left behind as an old man? Now guys like Bannon are obsessed with AI. Have they learned anything? Are they in any way culpable? Is there any accountability here?

00:29:05 Peter Wehner: Well, they are culpable for sure. Is there accountability? You know, time will tell. There definitely should be accountability. I suspect, that some measure of accountability depending on the individuals, will happen. But, yeah, I think the circus is moving on, but the circus is also fracturing, you know. I mean, the acrobats are going in one direction. The clowns are going in another. And in fact, to some extent, they're fighting amongst themselves. So it's a really interesting thing if you pull back, just in terms of politically and sociologically to see this crack-up of the MAGA right, these sort of ferocious, intramural fights between, you know, Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. So that I should say also is the result, I would venture to guess, in part to certain cast of mind that they're in. There's a certain, pattern of thinking, and pattern of emotions, psychological dispositions that have been shaped during the Trump era. And one of those things is the need and desire, thirst to fight, to be in conflict. I think for a lot of these people, it's vivifying. I think that's why they're in search of it. They want to make themselves heroes in a self-created drama. Maybe because they feel like the rest of their lives or life in general is too flat. But there's no question that there is a distancing, of the MAGA base and as Jon alluded to earlier, Republican members of Congress from Trump. And, so he's losing power. He's becoming more deranged. And he's in his, you know, getting near the second half of his second term, so there's a natural entropy that happens and a natural moving on to other people, to other causes. The other thing that I just wanna circle back to, Andrew, is a phrase that you used, and just to pause on how ludicrous, not from you, but from what it says about this moment, and that was the phrase conservative Leninism. Some of us who were and remain conservative, I mean, pretty high up on the list of things of why we were conservative is conservative temperament, not policy issues. I mean, those change depending on facts and circumstances. But the conservative temperament was precisely what the two of you were talking about earlier, which is it's anti-revolutionary at its nature. Right? I mean, this was the great divide between the American and the French Revolution. You know, the Reign of Terror. And we had Washington, and we had Madison, and we had others.

00:32:10 Andrew Keen: And they had Robespierre who now has reappeared as a sort of combination of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon. Maybe their — that marriage is a longer-term one. Jon, should we be in any way worried? I mean, it's one thing to talk about the decline of Trump and all the rest of it, and now he's more — I mean, he's always a bit of a laughing stock. As you know, I've never taken him perhaps as seriously as I should have. Others have taken him more seriously. This week, he made a speech at the United Nations saying that either he would make peace or annihilate Iran. The Atlantic, borrowing from your title, had a piece, on Trump losing the plot in Iran, which seems fairly self-evident. Should we be concerned that this mad old guy's threat to annihilate Iran might not be quite as imaginary as some people think?

00:33:08 Jonathan Rauch: Oh, boy, Andrew. I wish I knew the answer to that because it's a contest. On the one hand, his — for the reasons that Pete mentioned earlier — his already unstable personality being exacerbated by the lack of external restraints and by his own cognitive decline and by his anger and malevolence and grandiosity. All of those things are making him more dangerous, not less so. And if he loses the midterms, I think he'll figure he has two years left to just unleash as much of his personality on the world as he possibly can. On the other hand, his power gets more constrained by the day. People are less and less afraid of him. His polls are in — I think the best polls are in the thirties. I don't recall seeing any in the forties. Congress is — members of Congress are starting to abandon him. We saw the senators —

00:33:59 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We got an approval rating according to the New York Times of 37%. Not very good.

00:34:04 Jonathan Rauch: Yeah. In my world, we noticed that Senator John Curtis of Utah, who is a conservative and has been pretty quiet since he was first inaugurated, last year, came out calling for an investigation of Trump's son's wedding, which is, you know, that's a dagger to the heart of his patrimonial style. So his intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. And it looks like the next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.

00:34:31 Andrew Keen: Yeah. My guess is if he started really being serious about destroying Iran, that there'd be, if not a military coup, some sort of military intervention, but we will see on that one. You end the piece noting that, and then it comes back, Pete, to what you're talking about, Deneen. Conservatives have every right to influence and change the culture as progressives assuredly have done, but they should do it Ronald Reagan's way by moral inspiration and persuasion, not force majeure. What have you learned, Pete, about these last twelve years or ten years of Trump? Is it just that Reagan was right? You used to work for Reagan. You were a Republican. You no longer are. But have you learned anything new, or is it just a nostalgia for Reagan? I'm not sure who wrote that conclusion whether you both agree with that. Presumably, you do. But have you rethought some of your — has this whole Trump nightmare — has it forced you to rethink any of your conservative principles?

00:35:41 Peter Wehner: Yeah. It's a good — it's a really good question, Andrew. I mean, it's caused me to rethink a lot. I mean, I'm really on different levels. It's caused me to rethink to some degree, my view certainly of the Republican Party, of conservative movement, of my faith, of the evangelical faith, that I was a part of. I'm still a Christian, but I don't consider myself an evangelical for a combination of reasons, but part of it is the last ten years. So I've done a lot of rethinking, I'd say, in the last ten years. I would say that in terms of my conservative principles, probably not much. My own view, and, of course, I may be wrong on this, is that in many ways, Trump and the Trump moment and the MAGA movement are antithetical to conservatism, at least conservatism as I understood it. The conservatism, you know, if you go back to Burke or to Oakeshott within the realm of philosophy or people in the — seventies and eighties, like James Q. Wilson and Irving Kristol and people like that. So I feel like conservatism itself, I still feel pretty comfortable with, at least on these registers that I was talking about, disposition and so forth. Certainly, I've rethought about the Republican Party. I didn't anticipate that it would, pre-Trump ever go in a direction like this. I think I was pretty alert in the very early days of the Trump moment just to say that this is where the Republican Party was heading. And, you know, I was shouting until I was blue in the face, don't go there, but they kept going there. And very early on, it became clear to me that they had made their inner peace with Trump. Do I think back to, you know, politically in my own associations? Yeah. I mean, I do rethink that, and I'll continue to do so. And, as I said, it's also caused me to reevaluate faith, my own understanding of faith, my faith community, what happened to it, you know, my role in these things. Did I speak out early enough and often enough? What I said and when I said it is a matter of public record. I'm relatively comfortable with it, but could I have done better? Should I have seen certain things that, back in the day that I didn't? I think for sure. So, yeah, it's been a time of some measure of introspection.

00:38:24 Andrew Keen: Jon, you're less associated than Pete with the Republican Party. We've joked in the past about you being a gay Jewish atheist. Certainly a defiant centrist, not really associated with either party. What have you learned over the last ten or twelve years in terms of politics and your association with the republic?

00:38:48 Jonathan Rauch: Well, that's a question that, we could ruminate a lot about. I'll answer first by saying what's not changed, which is my belief that the founders and the system they created basically had it right. I have always thought that the populist and authoritarian and for that matter communist and fascist and theocratic proposed alternatives were bad alternatives, and that conviction has only been deepened by watching the mayhem of policy, the destruction of institutions, the cruelty and bigotry, and the pointlessness of what Trump has done. So that's actually been reaffirmed. One thing that I was wrong about, I think Pete will agree with me on this, is I misjudged the character of the American people. I thought that they had both more understanding of and more commitment to our core institutions. It never dawned on me that after a leader attempted an insurrection to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, that that person would be a viable candidate for office, much less reelected president. One of the founders, Roger Sherman, one of the very few people to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution, said at the Constitutional Convention, the people are poorly informed and easily misled and should be kept as far away from the business of government as possible. And, unfortunately, I've been reminded that democracy, it's not always safe in the hands of the people, and I worry about that. I'm not sure what to do about it. Another thing is that like a lot of people, I missed a lot of signals of distress that were coming from people who felt they'd been left behind economically, culturally, people in rural places who felt that the world was sort of becoming a cosmopolitan conspiracy of the Davos crowd. [They] were not 100% wrong. I wasn't quick enough to pick up on the fact that inequality was causing the anger that it did. So I plead guilty to complacency, too much complacency. And I still plead guilty to that because I haven't figured out what the next agenda really looks like. I've come to see that a lot of the grievances are based in reality. How to address them in a way that is constructive, that is harder, and I have to admit that.

00:41:27 Andrew Keen: Well, you guys are quite prescient in that sense. You wrote an excellent piece back in July of last year, more than a year ago, entitled "The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown" — more on the Democratic Party than American democracy. You wrote, now is an agonizing time for Democrats. Some days are dominated by feelings of despair, others by recriminations. But in fact, the Democratic Party is on the cusp of a renaissance if it plays its cards right. A year on or almost, fifteen months on, Pete, how has the Democratic Party played its cards?

00:42:09 Peter Wehner: I think it's played its cards reasonably, well. I think, you know, the main card in this game is Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and that makes complete sense. He's president, and they have all the levers of power. So in one respect, the Democratic Party doing nothing at all, that would redound to their credit. You know, it's the line about if your opposition is in the process of destroying itself, don't get in the way. So that's working to the favor of Democrats. I don't think that they've been particularly outrageous. I do think that the Democratic Socialists of America movement, some of the things that they advocate, well, certainly in their platform, and some of the things that are said can be problematic, but that's isolated, I'd say, still, among Democrats. What will really matter, Andrew, is who the nominee is. I mean, that always matters most of all. This is kinda noise. It's positioning. To some extent, what's happening now gives an indication of what could happen when the nomination, process begins for Democrats. But that is what will define the Democratic Party. First, it'll be who is the nominee, and then, of course, if that nominee wins the presidency, then the Democratic Party almost by definition begins to align itself with who that individual is. And nobody knows right now. It's completely up in the air. I mean, usually, elections are at this time, but given this constellation of factors that we're dealing with, this is as up in the air as I can almost remember in my lifetime. And so, you know, that remains to be determined.

00:44:00 Andrew Keen: Crown jewels are still — I mean, you deal with this in the piece, Pete. The family crown jewels are still together. I mean, American democracy's survived pretty well out of this, hasn't it?

00:44:15 Peter Wehner: Well, yeah, I mean, it survived. I'm not sure it survived really well. There's been a lot of damage. And Jon and I, despite the hopefulness, I think the legitimate hopefulness of our essay as he was talking about earlier, you know, tried to be honest in our assessment of the damage done. And I think some of the damage is deeper than we realize, and it'll take time once we get away from this moment to see it. But, yes — you know, so far, American democracy has survived. And I would just echo what Jon said. I mean, I think this is a great tribute to the wisdom of the founders. I mean, those of us, Jon and myself and others, who've always respected what the American project was, you know, the separation of powers, the diffusion of power, all of the elements that the founders saw, their fears of populism and Lincoln, when he was 28 years old, in his Young Men's Lyceum speech talking about the passions of the people, how those can be unleashed. That's one of the things the founders understood.

00:45:20 Andrew Keen: And it's the Madisonian side of the founders' family maybe rather than the Jeffersonian side.

00:45:26 Peter Wehner: Yes. And that before, it was a slightly more theoretical argument. Now it's actually been tested, and you can see the separation of powers by the courts. And I'd say of the three branches of government, the courts have been the best, and it matters. And in other countries with other constitutions, other forms of government, you know, this would've been over by now.

00:45:49 Andrew Keen: Well, that is interesting that, and I'm not sure if you've seen the Weisberg book in his hall of shame, his eight cowards. He includes John Roberts too. So I'm not sure everyone's quite as convinced of the role of the courts. Jon, you have never been, as I said, associated with the Republican Party, not like Pete. Is this the moment, though, for you to throw away or to throw off the mantle of defiant centrism and become a Democrat and fight for the soul of that party, for its liberal soul? What do you see in terms of, the Democratic Party? As I suggested, a year ago, you guys wrote a piece about the revival of the Democratic Party. But, of course, it's riven with a left. Some people see as an anti-liberal left and a centrist, part of the party. Is this the moment for guys like you, defiant centrists, to throw your hats into the Democratic Party?

00:47:02 Jonathan Rauch: Well, I retain my identity as a journalist, which is, you know, Andrew, since you also are one, entails being careful about throwing my lot in with a party. That said, way back in, I think it was March 2018 in The Atlantic during Trump's first term, I coauthored a piece saying, although I've never been partisan in my life, I am now a functional Democrat. I will vote only for Democrats and boycott Republicans until the Republican Party rejoins the camp of liberal democracy. And so functionally, I know which side I'm on, which is whichever party it is that will support our fundamental constitutional norms. And right now, that's not the right —

00:47:50 Andrew Keen: And is the danger then in that sense, and I couldn't agree with you more, that America is, in reality, a one-party state when it comes to its democracy.

00:48:02 Jonathan Rauch: How do you mean?

00:48:03 Andrew Keen: Well, there's only one party. I mean, lots of Democrats —

00:48:05 Jonathan Rauch: When it comes — unfortunately, I think at the moment, that is probably true. I could add hedges and caveats, but I think it's probably true.

00:48:19 Andrew Keen: Maybe then I should reverse the argument. It's time for you, Pete, to rejoin the Republicans, and maybe, Jon, you should even become a Republican. We will see. Anyway, when it comes to losing the plot, I'm thrilled to announce that Donald Trump has finally lost it. But two guys who never lose the plot and I love having on the show, Pete Wehner, Jon Rauch. As always, a real pleasure. Your New York Times piece this week, as always, is essential reading, and you have kept us sane over these last few years, and you will continue to do so. Thank you so much.

00:48:54 Peter Wehner: Thanks a lot, Andrew. Great being with you. Great being with Jon.