This is the Guardian.

Welcome to Politics Weekly Extra. I'm Jonathan Friedland.

Earlier this month, and we talked about it here on the podcast,

Joe Biden notched up a big victory, passing his infrastructure bill,

some trillion dollars of spending on roads and bridges.

A big achievement, not least because he not only managed to unify his own troops,

getting all democratic wings to vote for it, but he also managed to bring over 13 Republican

members of the House of Representatives to vote for it too. Now, these were not the usual

suspect, liberals who were anti-Trump or critical of the former president. On the contrary,

these were down-the-line conservatives who voted to bring more roads and bridges to their own

districts. The response has been fierce. The entire wider Republican movement has come down

heavily on those dissenting 13 members, with the charge led by Donald Trump himself,

who has been quick and fast to denounce them for what many of those Republican hardliners have

built as a kind of betrayal. What does this tell us about where the Republicans are right now?

To figure that out, I spoke to Tara Setmeyer, who has been a guest on this podcast before,

and is a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, so she knows this landscape

really well. She's a political commentator who's been following closely the journey of her

former party, and I began by asking why it was spending on infrastructure of all things that had

triggered this huge battle inside the Republican Party. This is a fascinating conversation because

infrastructure has been one of the most elusive political prizes for the last few years,

and it became almost the butt of many jokes in America during the Trump administration that we

were finally getting infrastructure week. We're actually calling it infrastructure week in this

...