From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, April 28th.

Yesterday we talked about President Biden's re-election campaign, which he officially launched this week and the road ahead for him, including

presumably his glide path to at least the nomination, with only RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson

challenging him and both considered very minor threats. The Republican primary field is more

interesting, despite the reality that Donald Trump remains the big dog,

at least so far. Quite a few pretty major Republicans are entering, and we'll talk mostly in

this segment about four of them who are not named Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. They are

Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Aza Hutchinson, and Vivek Ramoswamy.

And we're going to talk now mostly about their ideas, not so much polls, or whether they can

actually win the nomination. To help with this, we welcome back Amanda Carpenter from the

bulwark, the news and politics site founded after the 2016 election by some never-Trump

conservatives, we might call them. Amanda Carpenter herself is the author of the book, Gaslighting

America, why we love it when Trump lies to us. Her prior conservative and Republican Party

credentials are strong and many. She was Ted Cruz's

communications director and a speechwriter for South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. And before that,

she worked as a reporter for the conservative news organizations, human events, townhall.com,

and the Washington Times. Among her recent articles on the bulwark are ones called

Tim Scott, looks at Joe Biden and thanks civil war, and Nikki Haley wants to talk about abortion.

Just Talk, though. So we'll talk about those two candidates and the other two. Amanda,

we appreciate you doing this with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hey, thanks for having me. And let's start with Nikki Haley. She is the former governor of South

Carolina, and she was Trump's UN ambassador for people who don't know those bits of her background.

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