I am Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today for a second conversation with Dan Balls, long time political reporter.

Now chief correspondent, I like that title, with the Washington Post, chief of a lot of correspondence there, and also a senior fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School, where we've done a little work together, and really one of America's leading political reporters, but also analysts and commentators and rare combination, I would say, to be honest, honestly, of real in-depth reporting and kind of granular understanding of what's happening in the areas you do report on, but also you can step back, obviously, and have many times to take a

broader look, so it's really a pleasure to have you with me again, Dan. Bill, thank you. We did this a few years ago, and I think longer than we realized how many years ago it was, but it's nice to be back with you.

Yeah, I know it's December 1917, this shows how far back I'm going. December 2017, and I actually look back at what you said then, and you just look back to see if there's anything particular to decide, but it was a very good conversation, and you were a pression really on a couple of very big things, and I don't usually do it this way, but I'm going to begin by reading you a couple of sentences, as you said, and I ask you to comment, and then we'll talk about politics today, we'll talk about, but also the media.

It's something you've been part of and thought a ton about and talked about for a long, long time, and the relation of the two in this new moment we're in in 2023, I think we both agreed that it's not, this is not the politics or the media that we both grew up with, right?

Not by a long shot, no.

So in December 2017, so this is less than a year into the Trump presidency, you stressed, I asked sort of what's the impact of Trump likely to be on the public party and work broadly, and you stressed, I don't think you can re, you say, I don't think you can reverse the tape and say, okay, we're now back to June 15th, 2015, I think that's the day before Trump came down the escalator there.

Trump's going to have an impact on the future of the party, no matter whether he's there as president in 2021 or not.

If he's not, there's going to be a piece of the party that will blame others in the party for his failure to get re-elected, that they didn't do enough for him, or they weren't strong enough in their support of him, or they did things to undermine him.

That would be a potentially factors debate, there are going to be leaders, people who want to be leaders in the future who will have supported him, what do they do, do they disavow him or not, how do they distance themselves from Trump or not.

Things happen over a four-year period that you can't unwind.

I really think the glimpse, you didn't quite see January 6th, but the glimpse into the fact that Trump would be so important, even if he lost in November of 2020, that was contrary.

I think the conventional wisdom and certainly wishful thinking when Republicans salvage from types way back in 2017, and that wishful thinking continued anyway.

So here we are, April 19th, 2023, and just talk a little bit about the state of the party and Trump and Trumpism and how we're not back in 2015, I guess.

Yeah, I think a lot about this and the degree to which, really from the very start of Trump's presidential campaign in 2016 or 2015, there was this hope-slash belief-slash fantasy that in one way or another, he would be a transitory figure.

First of all, as well, he's not going to last very long in the fight for the nomination, and then, well, okay, he's at the top of the polls, but he's not going to be the nominee.

Well, he's the nominee, but he probably will lose. Well, no, he won, and then it was, well, the presidency will change him because it changes everybody.

And that no matter kind of how he acted as a candidate in 2015 and 2016, he would become a more responsible figure.

And a lot of Republicans, I think, hope that, and some believed it. And here we are today, and all of those hopes and dreams, aspirations, fantasies have come to pass.

Donald Trump is who Donald Trump is and was, and everything that we see is an extension and a continuation of what we saw from the moment he came down that escalator in 2015.

And the Republican establishment to the degree that is even a meaningful term anymore still doesn't quite know what to do.

And they want him to go away. They don't have the power to make him go away. They didn't have the power, you know, in 2016 to deny him the nomination.

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