If you enjoy our podcasts, why not subscribe to The Spectator too for more from your favourite podcast hosts and guests.

You can get three months of The Spectator for just £3 right now.

If you go to spectator.com.uk forward slash trial.

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

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year.

And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined once again in the Spectator offices by Chris Caldwell,

the Claremont Fellow and very distinguished author of a number of books, including most recently,

the age of entitlement, America since the 1960s. Chris, we had some rather big news in American

politics last night. It seems we're getting quite a lot of big news from America at the moment,

with the announcement that Donald Trump's vice-presidential night. It seems we're getting quite a lot of big news from America at the moment.

With the announcement that Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee is J.D. Vance, the senator from Ohio,

he was the bookie's favorite by the end. What did you make of it? Were you expecting it?

Well, I've been traveling. I'm in London now, so I'm not in a position to have really informed opinions about what's going on in Milwaukee. But certainly from what I know of J.D. Vance and what I've seen of him, it's a decision with a lot of logic behind it.

So to that extent, it's a, it's not a surprising decision at all.

However, it does break from a kind of a Republican tradition of using the vice presidential nomination to shore up what the president lacks.

And so it seems to make, Republicans have assumed that if they can name a person from a different region or a different political tendency than the president,

that they're going to harvest the votes from both of those tendencies.

I think what they've done in practice is, you know,

present the public with a ticket that is kind of incoherent.

And I think the kind of the original sin of this type of vice presidential

...