David Graham On Project 2025

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com

David Graham is a political journalist. He’s a long-time staff writer at The Atlantic and one of the authors of the Atlantic Daily newsletter. His new book is The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. We go through the agenda and hash out the good and the bad.

For two clips of our convo — on whether SCOTUS will stop Trump, and what a Project 2029 for Dems might look like — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in Akron; his dad the history prof and his mom the hospital chaplain; aspiring to be a journo since reading Russell Baker as a kid; the origins of Project 2025; its director Paul Dans; Heritage and Claremont; the unitary executive; the New Deal; the odd nature of independent agencies; Dominic Cummings’ reform efforts in the UK; Birtherism; Reaganites in Trump 1.0 tempering him; Russiagate; the BLM riots vs Jan 6; equity under Biden; Russell Vought and Christian nationalism; faith-based orgs; Bostock; the trans EO by Trump; our “post-constitutional moment”; lawfare; the souped-up Bragg case; Liberation Day and its reversal; Biden’s industrial policy; the border crisis; Trump ignoring E-Verify; Labour’s new shift on migration; Obama and the Dreamers; Trump’s “emergencies”; habeas corpus; the Ozturk case; the Laken Riley Act; the abundance agenda; the national debt; DOGE; impoundment and Nixon; trans women in sports; Seth Moulton; national injunctions; judge shopping; and trying to stay sane during Trump 2.0 and the woke resistance.

Coming up: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Tara Zahra on the last revolt against globalization after WWI, NS Lyons on the Trump era, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Hi there. Welcome back to the dishcast. I guess you never went away. But we did. We took a week off. Chris and I, I was supposed to be in England, as you may or may not remember, and then got completely paranoid about Trump's immigration policies and decided to stay here. Only being a naturalized citizen, at this point, I don't know who's at risk. So, and so I thought, oh, great, a staycation. And of course, Friday before, I suddenly start
0:55.2	feeling exhausted, and by Monday I have phallon bronchitis, and I've been in bed a week.
1:01.1	Anyway, I'm getting better. I'm on meds, and I'm trying to rest, but, and it's, it's been
1:06.7	stressful. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a difficult time. I might as well just be confess, I am emotionally drained
1:17.1	and by all this. It's difficult. My position is at this point has always been a little weird
1:26.4	because I'm not really a member of either
1:28.2	tribe, but the pressures of both tribes right now are so intense that it's extremely hard to
1:36.8	just function and not get upset and not get angry and not get emotional, which I'm, you know,
1:42.8	my temperament is not exactly the most, is not the current popes, the new get emotional, which I'm, you know, my temperament is not exactly the most,
1:45.4	is not the current popes, the new popes, which you seem wonderfully serene and with great
1:51.5	equanimity. So I pray to achieve that, but I think we're all where we are, I think. And I'm,
1:57.7	I hope here we can be honest about that and also have some honest discussions.
2:04.9	It's the only way through this.
2:06.2	We may never get through it.
2:07.6	I'm increasingly doubtful whether liberal democracy has a future at all in this country,
2:12.4	but we can keep trying.
2:14.7	For us, there is only the trying, as someone once said. Thank you for
2:18.9	subscribing. Thanks for all you do. We've just about hit 200,000 total subs, and we're usually
2:28.6	well over our 20,000. And you know, that's great. I don't want more than that, to be honest with you.
2:34.4	It'd be nice to have more, but it's always the right people you want.
2:38.0	It's not the quantity.
2:39.3	It's the quantity.
	...

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