Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election.

My name's Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator.

And I'm joined by Daniel McCarthy, who's the editor of the American Conservative magazine,

and he's written an article in this week's spectator called The Intelligent Case for Trump

on why he and 130 other scholars and writers in America have signed a document in support of Donald Trump.

So, Dan, I suppose my first question is the Trumpophobia in Britain is so strong that I think very few people could see there is any intelligent case for supporting Donald Trump. So can you explain to a sort of an English, limey and probably very hostile audience why you think there's an intelligent case for voting for Donald Trump, an

intelligent conservative case for voting for Donald Trump? Well, I should say first that both at

the intellectual level and at the grassroots level, there has been a tremendous disappointment

among conservatives and Republicans in the performance of the Republican Party over the past 15 years.

That if you look at the George W. Bush administration, you look

at growth of government under it, you look at the Great Recession and the disaster in Iraq,

there is a tremendous feeling among intellectuals as well as the grassroots that we cannot

repeat these mistakes and that we have to have a profound change on the right in America.

So I think it begins with this dissatisfaction with the existing, you know,

sort of conservative approach, and the desire for something radically different and quite new.

And Donald Trump represents that. Donald Trump is very clearly someone who is a kind of national conservative.

He stands for America having a more restrained foreign policy.

He stands for a trade policy that would benefit American workers and that would look out for

the American public as a whole. And on immigration, he wants to preserve America's existing

culture and not use immigration as a tool of transforming the country economically or culturally.

But, I mean, how much do you think he actually means any of this?

Well, I actually think he does mean those three major themes.

...