Brian Lair on WNYC, now Orrin Kass, who's been on with us from time to time since 2015 after being the top domestic policy advisor to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.

But for those of you who don't watch Republican Party politics and economics closely,

you may not know that Oren Cass has since become a force,

a very different in his orientation person from what you might think of as Mitt Romney economics.

Five years ago, Orrin founded a think tank called American Compass,

which is now central to the kind of populist conservative economics

that is driving some of the Trump agenda.

But it's complicated.

Orrin is very pro-tariffs, but he's also a big critic of some of the things Trump and Elon Musk have

done this year. He wrote an article in February called Why Doge will fail. On the Trump budget,

what Trump calls his big, beautiful bill, Orrin Cass described it in Politico as, quote,

a death march through a series of choices that nobody wants to make.

In general, Cass is trying to reinvent conservative economics to better serve the working class.

And yes, that's different from the way Democrats think economic policy can serve the working class. But Cass feels like he is pushing against Republican orthodoxy as a central mission, and he's got the

ear of the administration enough that Politico calls him the GOP's leading economic populist.

Oren Kess also has a new book, a collection of writings from the first five years of his

American Compass think tank.

It's called the New Conservatives, Restoring America's

commitment to family, community, and industry. Oran, thanks for coming on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

It's so great to be talking with you again. You call your book The Definitive Explanation of the New Rights

Economic Thinking. So for people just getting engaged in this, how would you begin

to distinguish the new right from the old right on economics? I think a lot of it comes down to

...