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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website. I'm joined today by John Rick

MacArthur, who is president of Harper's Magazine, and we're going to be talking about Elizabeth Warren.

Now, Rick, Elizabeth Warren has enjoyed something of a bump in the polls recently.

Her campaign seems to have a little bit of momentum.

How big a threat do you think she is as far as the Democratic nomination is concerned?

Well, I'm not sure because I can't tell how much of her candidacy is self-propelled

and how much of it is a bubble being created by the party establishment to block Bernie Sanders.

Right now, the three top candidates, according to the polls, are Joe Biden, very much the Obama-Clinton wing of the party,

Warren, who represents a regulatory reformist position, which looks increasingly left-wing,

and Sanders, who's been consistently left wing, but also outside the

party. He sits with the Democrats, but he is officially an independent, whereas Warren has been more

of a reliable party member since she entered the Senate. It's the theory then that she will be as left-wing as she possibly can to

eat into the Sanders vote until he's destroyed. And then as soon as he drops out the race,

she can go back to being a centrist like she perhaps was in around 2016. Right. And the way,

or actually earlier, and the way to gauge this is by reading the people who are booming her, who are promoting her, including the anti-Trump conservative Republican, David Brooks, who's a columnist for the New York Times.

Last month, or earlier this month, he wrote a column pointing out that Warren

used to be closer in her politics to Betsy DeVos

who's the hated secretary of education because she favors charter schools

...