Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2020

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2016, Julius Krein was one of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. In Trump’s critiques of the existing Republican and Democratic establishments, Krein saw the contours of a heterodox ideology he believed could reshape American politics for the better. So he established a pro-Trump blog and, later, a policy journal called American Affairs, which his critics claimed was an attempt to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.” Today Krein finds himself in an unusual position. Upon realizing Trump was not committed to any governing vision at all (but was as racist as his critics suggested), Krein disavowed the president in 2017. But as the editor of American Affairs, he’s still committed to building an intellectual superstructure around the ideas that were threaded through Trump’s 2016 campaign. This conversation is about the distance between Trump and the ideology so many tried to brand as Trumpism. We also discuss Krein’s view that the US has always functionally been a one-party system, the disconnect between Republican elites and voters, what a new bipartisan economic consensus could look like, whether Joe Biden and the Democrats take Trump’s ideas more seriously than Trump does, which direction the GOP will go if Trump loses in a landslide in November, why Republicans lost interest in governance, whether media coverage is the true aim of right-wing populists, why Krein thinks the true power lies with the technocrats, and more. References: “I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It." by Julius Krein "The Three Fusions" by Julius Krein Book recommendations: Innovation in Real Places by Dan Breznitz History has Begun by Bruno Maçães The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys Credits: Producer/Audio wizard - Jeff Geld Researcher - Roge Karma Please consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas. New to the show? Want to check out Ezra’s favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner’s guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere) Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:21.0	I don't know if Trump himself had an ideology for the most part his presidency is largely a conventional, bush-share-a-romney-rayon type Republican presidency in terms of policy with a bit more extreme provocations and worse in terms of rhetoric.
1:52.0	Hello and welcome to the Ezra Clancho on the Vox Media Podcast Network.
2:01.0	So, back when Donald Trump was running in the Republican primary in 2015 and 2016, and of course in the general, there was this effort to identify the thing that he represented, right?
2:14.0	The most politicians they represent, not just themselves, but an ideology, a party, Trump clearly didn't represent his party's establishment.
2:20.0	He was running against it, but an ideology maybe, Trumpism.
2:24.0	One of the people he's trying to define that was his guy Julius Crane, who is back then in finance, but he started a blog called the blog of American greatness, or the journal of American greatness.
2:35.0	And he was, along with contributors who he had recruited, trying to pull out of what Trump said, a bigger populist right ideology, something that could be understood as a coherent challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy or consensus had preceded it.
2:51.0	And Crane was, I think you would call him an ideologist.
2:54.0	He was trying to build the ideology that Trump was articulating.
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