Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator.

I'm delighted today to be joined by Michael Lind, who is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of several books,

including an economic history of the United States. And we're going to be talking about the

effect that Donald Trump is having on the left, the right and the center of American politics.

Donald Trump is speaking at CPAC this week, which is a quite strange but nonetheless

quite important

gathering of conservatives in Washington. I was wondering if I could ask you, first of all,

will his speech go down very well? Has he re-energized the conservative movement in America,

or is he merely walking on its corpse? Well, to begin with, CPAC is not that important.

It's always been kind of a collection of fringe groups

and even conservative presidents like Ronald Reagan

did not spend that much attention to it.

But with respect to your question...

But they all, I mean, they all go and speak at it, didn't it?

Reagan spoke at it, Bush or...

That's right.

But historically, it was kind of fringe populist groups and libertarians and anti-tax people,

and it wasn't even representative of mainstream conservative voters.

I think the bigger story is what we learned from the election is that most Republican voters, including people who

are thought to be conservative voters, are not very conservative.

That is, they really don't care about what were the historic priorities of the Buckley-Goldwater

...