This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. How do the Republican Party become the party of Trump?

That's the question that has led many Republicans to become former Republicans.

It's also the question that motivated the new book Insurgency,

how Republicans lost their party and got everything they ever wanted.

My guest, Jeremy Peters, wrote the book after reporting on many of the events that led to Trump.

He's a correspondent for The New York Times and has covered conservative media,

the rise of the Tea Party, right wing populism, and the last three presidential campaigns.

He's also an MSNBC contributor. He writes, Trump didn't bring anything inside the Republican Party

that wasn't already there. Jeremy Peters, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thanks for having me. What do you mean when you say Republicans lost their party

but got everything they ever wanted? What do you mean by they got everything they ever wanted?

So I thought that that was a really important way to think about why so many Republicans,

Republicans who had opposed Donald Trump insisted that they would never vote for him came along in the end.

And that's because Trump very strategically cut deals with his most important constituency

and that's the religious right. And if you look at the end game of the Trump presidency,

it's kind of hard not to see that the religious right and social conservatives got basically everything that they wanted.

We're looking at a Supreme Court right now with three Trump nominees who are poised to strike down Roe v. Wade.

And there has been no more galvanizing political effort for conservatives over the last 40 years

than striking down Roe v. Wade. So I think if you are one of those voters,

if you're one of those activists and I interviewed many of them for this book,

that allows them to see past the ugliness of Trumpism. It allows them to see past January 6th,

frankly. And I posed that question to a lot of these folks as I reported the book and its final phases.

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