Yes, I had an everything bagel with sausage, egg and cheese. That's decadent. Delicious. That's a that's a young man's breakfast. I need a full breakfast. I had a cashew bar. It's a great line.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Weets and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Matthew Glacias. Joining me today we've got a Dylan Matthews who has been on the show before, but we are banning from talking about universal basic income. Nobody will be given money for any reason.

Under any of the topics we talk about, but thanks for being here. Also, a colleague Andrew Procop covers the White House and political matters here at Vox.com. Glad to have you on.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's going to be great. The big news this week, in terms of substance, is Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

This was announced yesterday as we're recording by the time he announced it. I think it had come to be expected. There were sort of enough leaks. He built a little drama that just said, like, I'm going to do an announcement on my decision, but it was pretty clear that that meant he was pulling out.

But relative to where we were a few months ago, or even a few weeks ago, I do think it's something of a surprise. There had been considerable support from his administration for the idea of staying in a lot of the business community wanted to stay in.

And a big part of the reason is that the agreement itself did not include a lot of binding action on the United States. Barack Obama put this thing together diplomatically, but relatively late in his administration when he could not credibly promise dramatic new policy initiatives.

And so he didn't. And it just sort of said the US would continue on its same kind of course. But from a diplomatic standpoint, the agreement can now unravel. Other countries might retaliate. There seems to be a lot of foreign leaders dunking on Twitter on Donald Trump, which is a strange new phenomenon.

But Andrew had an interesting piece on the site. And you're making the case that this is basically an example of Donald Trump being just a pretty standard issue Republican.

I would say maybe not a standard issue Republican, but definitely sort of where the conservative base is and where a pretty significant portion of the conservative institutional actors in the Republican party.

Whether that's think tanks, whether that's elected officials, whether that's big donors, activist groups.

I think that some of the coverage of this has sort of portrayed it as an idiosyncratic, weird decision by Donald Trump or perhaps Steve Bannon, who is pushing this kind of anti-globalist agenda.

But I think what we have to keep in mind here is that, you know, a Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republican senators sent Trump a letter calling on him to do this.

Most major conservative activist groups did the same, whether it's Americans for prosperity, which is the Koch Brothers Group or the Heritage Foundation.

They were all behind this. And then you can see it in the conservative media outlets too, and not just the people who are usually in Trump's corner like Fox News and Breitbart, but even National Review, which has had that pretty skeptical.

Yeah, take the anti-Trump stance. And I actually saw David French, who was considering actually running for president against Trump as an independent.

He wrote an article praising Trump's pulling out of Paris as like the right thing for the Constitution.

So I do think it's important to keep in mind here that there is a spectrum of opinion in the Republican Party on whether they should outwardly say they don't believe in climate science, global warming either isn't happening or humans aren't contributing to it, or whether they should sort of acknowledge the science but contrive reasons to oppose proposals to do very much about it.

I mean, something I do wonder about this is how much of conservative support for this move is driven by the fact that it's the move Trump decided to make versus the other way around that, you know, if Trump had gone on a different course and had said, you know, look, we're doing whatever with the EPA and changing whatever in the domestic funding, but as a foreign policy matter, we are staying inside this global climate framework.

Climate framework, you know, as Bob Corker said we should, as Mitt Romney said we should, would David French have been denouncing Trump?

Because I feel like the never-trumper intellectuals are like in this weird place where you can go like Bill Crystal and David from have totally marginalized themselves or else you need to every once in a while write this like, I criticize Trump when he's wrong, but you know, he's doing the right thing here kind of takes.

Like I'm not an expert in the collected works of David French, my guess would be that he would criticize Trump for not going far enough on that, but like I think one of the relevant things is like what would Republican based voters do in response to this and what would sort of media institutions like Fox News do and I think we have a lot of compelling evidence, both sort of from political science and from just experience with Russia in the last election that people take their cues from senior elites among whom the president of the United States.

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