They won. They won all the supply side fights. They privatized everything. They'd be privatized. They deregulated everything they could deregulate.

And now here we are and it's like, what is your project? The only project they have less is to cut corporate taxes. There's nothing left for them to do.

They have picked every cherry off the tree and it stands their bear.

My argument is that the reason why the right is so weak today is because they won. That's because they won.

Welcome to Why Is This Happening With Me Your Host Chris Hays.

I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump confuses a lot of people. Maybe confuses a weird word but bear with me here.

I think he confuses people because it doesn't make sense that he's able to do what he does.

And he doesn't fit into a lot of the preconceived notions people have about what a politician is and particularly what a conservative is.

You've seen this rhetoric around him from the very first month and he comes down the escalator through after winning the election.

Through all the ways we've had first year of all kinds of people wrestling with what is Donald Trump politically? Is he really conservative?

He's not really conservative. You see conservatives trying to write him out of the conservative movement. The never Trump are saying no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

We're the good conservatives. We're the people who have these principles. That guy over there, Donald Trump, who just happens to helm the conservative coalition in America.

He's just an accident. He's a fluke. He has nothing to do with us. And you see a lot of analysts, writers, observers wrestling with us all the time.

And it feels a lot of times like they're trying to jam this square peg into a round hole to make sense of who Donald Trump is.

So today I'm going to talk to someone who has made sense of Donald Trump from the very beginning, who's got an entire theory, a total apparatus for understanding conservatism stretching back through the centuries.

In which Donald Trump makes perfect sense. If you read his book about conservatism that stretches all the way back to Edmund Burke, we'll talk about in a second.

You already knew that Donald Trump was conservative. You understood why he was a conservative.

Quir Robbins, a professor of political science, and he's someone who wrote this book called the reactionary mind about conservatism.

Originally it was about conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which was kind of a cheeky title. Like, oh, Sarah Palin Edmund Burke, Edmund Burke is elevated philosopher, Sarah Palin, this ridiculous figure.

The point of the subtitle is, no, no, no, no, no, there's a through line there. Then he reissued the book with the subtitle Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.

He's a scholar. He does close readings of texts. He talks about Edmund Burke, who's someone that gets invoked more than he gets read and thought about as the father of modern conservatism, someone who opposed the French Revolution, who basically was a kind of upstanding dude who just liked things to be orderly.

Quir Robbins shows that's not really the case of Edmund Burke. In fact, he was kind of more Trumpian than anyone remembers that really he liked to kind of f-shit up if that makes sense.

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