All right. Welcome listeners to episode 86 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your

podcast co-host and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam Heather Bell.

Hey Sam, hi Matt. I'm excited for this episode as I always am because we're getting to talk about

a really excellent piece you wrote this month January 10th that was out online in the New York Times

titled what the shadow war to determine the next Trump administration

bam bam bam bam right very ominous and it is an ominous topic or it's at least often

discussed in an ominous way which is the efforts underway by groups like

the America First Policy Institute, the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Project,

Conservative Partnership Institute is in the mix a little bit.

Basically these efforts underway to identify credential, train the next Trump administration,

who will staff it, who will man these positions, who will be his loyal foot soldiers because as we discuss in the

episode that was like one theory of why Trump wasn't more effective in his first term from the

conservative perspective from the conservative perspective. From the conservative

perspective, yes. All the clowns, the hangars on, the people who weren't

real true MAGA believers, the people who weren't loyal to Trump. They're trying to

fix that and Sam wrote a really excellent article about it.

And so that's kind of our jumping off point.

Yeah, but we get into a lot of other stuff,

including a conversation I love was talking about your internship at the Heritage Foundation in 2004 and sort of a difference between how the conservative movement's intellectual organizations related to the White House and to conservative campaigns in the past and what might be different about it now.

It's a great episode. It was really fun. It's just the two of us. And it's a sort of a model I think for how we're going to try to when we have

to cover the campaign which is really getting into full swing you know Trump is

really the presumptive nominee sorry if there's any

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