Yeah, ready? I'm ready. All right, we're going to start. The name of the father,

Holy Spirit, here we go. From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthit, and this is matter of opinion.

And this week, I'm striking out on my own to talk about the future of the Republican Party.

Because the second election of Donald Trump didn't just win a majority for Trump himself.

It also solidified a remarkable transformation in the Republican Party,

which has gone from being a party associated with the wealthy and the white suburban upper middle class to being a party that represents a much more diverse coalition, more blue collar with

fewer college-educated voters, and in this election with a much more multiracial

coalition as well. So that's quite a shift, and it's quite remarkable that Trump himself

would be the one to accomplish it. So to map out the recent history that brought us to this moment

and some of the arguments that Republicans and conservatives have

been having about their changing coalition, I've brought on a very special guest.

Nowadays, Rihon Salam is best known as the distinguished president of the storied right-of-center

think tank, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. But I knew Rihon once upon a time as my fellow

somewhat disheveled junior varsity pundit in Washington, D.C., where we shared a somewhat shabby

row house, somewhere in the northwestern part of the city, I won't say exactly where to protect both the innocent and the

guilty, and where we were both deeply involved in arguments about where the Republican Party was

going to go late in the presidency of George W. Bush, which led eventually to the publication of our

jointly authored book, Grand New Party,

how Republicans can win the working class and save the American dream.

An argument that is now almost 20 years old,

but in the things that got right and the things that got wrong,

still, I think, has some relevance for debates about the future of conservatism.

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