Today on the argument, populism won Trump the presidency, but will it destroy the Republican Party?

And the Republican Party is not the party just of the country clubs. The Republican Party is the party of steel workers, and construction workers, and pipeline workers, and taxi cab drivers, and cops, and firefighters, and waiters, and waiters, and waiters, and

the men and women with dialysis on their hands who are working for this country. That is our party!

If you thought GOP-style populist rhetoric died with Trump's electoral defeat, look no further than this weekend's conservative political action conference.

Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and former President Donald Trump himself used all the right buzzwords to signal a populist platform for the GOP.

But populism is an idea that so vague and so easily manipulated, it's more of a style of politicking than a coherent political philosophy.

I'm Jane Kostin, and for years, I've been reporting and thinking about where conservatism in the American right has been, and where it's going.

I watched the rest of Trump and wondered if our last president was a bug or a feature of today's Republican Party.

Has Trumpism taken the GOP hostage? Or is this what movement conservatism was like the whole time, and I just didn't see it?

It seems like the party itself is still trying to figure that out, and so are my guests.

Michael Brendan Doherty is a senior writer at National Review, and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington.

Ross Douthet is your favorite conservative columnist in the New York Times' opinion section.

To get us started, Michael, what brand of conservatism would you say that you adhere to?

You know, my background has been in what it used to be called in the fine gradations of the right paleoconservatism, which was skeptical of foreign intervention, skeptical of free trade.

I don't know if the term paleoconservative is used much anymore, but it's often been that phenomenon was pointed to a lot during the rise of Donald Trump to kind of locate and explain where he was coming from.

Right. And Ross, what kind of conservatism do you adhere to, or what kind of conservative would you consider yourself?

I consider myself a social conservative and economic populist, which means that in certain ways I actually identify not so much with paleoconservatism, but with the original neo conservatism, not the Iraq war invading American Empire,

sort that Michael wrote against vehemently 10 or 15 years ago, but the mix of Catholic and Jewish intellectuals who moved from being liberals to being some kind of conservative in the 1970s and had the idea that the task of conservatives was to accept and reform the welfare state rather than abolishing the New Deal.

Well, my brand is extremely suspicious libertarian who does not trust either of you, especially when we're on together.

It is. It's very warm here now, but I'm suspicious precisely of the ideas we're going to talk about today, because we're going to be talking about what effect Trumpism and populism is going to have on the GOP.

So President Trump was impeached twice the second time with seven Senate Republicans voting guilty. The Republican Party seemingly has a lot of options for what direction it could go in.

Does it shun Trump and returns the party of George W. Bush? I doubt it. Does it pick Trump again in 2024? Does it support a purported populist like Josh Hawley?

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