Paul Heideman

Trump and McCarthy have a lot in common in that they both, as you say, practiced this demagogic mode of far-right politics. And in doing so, they actually started to threaten some of the core interests of American capital. In McCarthy’s case, this really came through two means. First, among the more sophisticated anti-communists and state planners in the United States, there was always a wariness about McCarthy’s methods and a sense that he might go too far and really discredit anti-communism.

It wasn’t that they thought anti-communism was bad. Quite the contrary — it’s that they thought McCarthy might be bad for anti-communism, because he would overreach so far. And this became much, much more intense when McCarthy started going after the army, because, after all, this is the early 1950s. This is the period when the great postwar American empire is really getting built in the aftermath of World War II, at the start of the Korean War.

And so to be attacking the army at this time and to be plunging it into bureaucratic chaos as a result of these attacks was really a move that went much too far for much of the American corporate elite, and they really organized against him. That Joseph Welch line [“Have you no decency, sir, at long last?”], of course, made for great drama, but much of the real action was happening behind the scenes in groups like the Committee for Economic Development and the Business Council, which were essentially these organizations of American CEOs that went into action against McCarthy and started organizing other business leaders to move against him, pressuring the White House to really disavow McCarthy. Dwight D. Eisenhower and McCarthy had never been close, but these groups pushed for a much more active stand from the White House against McCarthy’s actions and for organizing the censure motion against him in the Senate that would ultimately seal his fate and leave him politically friendless and without influence after it passed.

In Trump’s case, business has always been mostly hostile to Trump. In all three of his elections, funds from business flowed massively to the Democrats because they were opposed to Trump. This then really reached its peak at the end of his first term, in the aftermath of January 6, when firms whose output represents about a quarter of American GDP announced a boycott of the Republican Party in response to January 6. So there was this effort to discipline him, but what is so striking, particularly in comparison with McCarthy, is how quickly it all fell apart. So by March of 2021, the boycott is already falling apart. Companies are issuing statements saying, “Well, we don’t have a blanket boycott on election deniers,” etc.

And very quickly they kind of resumed business as usual with the Republican Party under Joe Biden’s presidency. So it’s a comparison that sets up the question of what has changed between these two eras when business was able to successfully discipline a right-wing demagogue in the 1950s and when it really failed to do so seventy years later.

Paul Heideman

I think one of the big arguments of my book is that the relationship between capital and politics is often more complicated than we imagine on the Left. We often operate with a kind of mental model from the Communist Manifesto: “the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie.” But really, whether the bourgeoisie agree among themselves, their ability to act in concert, all of that stuff, varies quite a bit historically within a country and across countries as well. I think that’s really key to understanding what’s happened to the Republican Party, understanding some of those changes that have happened in the degree of capital’s organization in the United States.

Paul Heideman

Part of the reason is, as you said, it’s already quite well covered. There’s a lot of discussion of the intellectual and cultural history of the American right, much of it very, very interesting. But what I thought was really lacking was a look at the Republican Party as an institution. How does it operate as an institution, as a bureaucratic and organizational entity, and how is it related to other institutions in American life like the leading organizations of business groups like the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce?

It seemed to me there was a real hole in our understanding of the evolution of the Right. The Republican Party can be thought of as the most important institution of the American right. And as a party, I thought it was not very well understood yet, because this emphasis on ideas doesn’t really tell you what’s happening with the party itself. Some of the most important figures in the party aren’t necessarily important for their ideas. Newt Gingrich, for example, certainly fancied himself an intellectual, but if you look at his impact on the Republican Party, it’s not intellectual, it’s organizational.

Paul Heideman

There are a couple aspects to that. The internal divisions in the party, I think, have been quite consequential over the last decade and a half, let’s say. For example, the Tea Party insurgencies in various Senate campaigns absolutely did cost the Republican Party control of the Senate at times during the Obama administration, because they ran these absolute lunatics for various positions despite what most of the party leadership and party cadre wanted. So I think the chaos has had costs at points.

What I think is extraordinary since roughly 2018 is the degree to which Donald Trump’s authoritarian personality has been able to supersede so much of that chaos and keep it contained and at least kind of directed in a way that he wants. By making the party “the party of Trump,” he has kept it alive and strengthened it at various times. For example, Trump absolutely benefited in 2024, as he did in 2016, from his image as a successful businessman and all of that, and I think that really helped the Republican Party as a whole in the elections.

I do think there are aspects of the chaos in the party that do weaken it, but I think that, particularly in the Trump era, they have been able to hold things together and keep the chaos under control to an extent that has made the party much, much stronger. I think once Trump is off the scene, which one way or another he’s going to be soon, I do think that we’re going to see the chaos spill out in ways that are much, much more destructive for the party’s electoral fortunes. I think we might see a return to the kind of Tea Party dynamics of these people winning these primaries who just have absolutely no shot in a general election.

Paul Heideman

Probably the most concrete way to think about this is that, in the United States, parties don’t directly control who appears on their ballot line. And that’s maybe the main function of political parties, to produce candidates to run for office. And so the fact that in the United States that process is done through this primary system means that something like Zohran Mamdani’s win can happen even though most of Democratic Party officialdom in New York absolutely did not want that to happen. Similarly, with Trump’s victory in 2016, the Republican Party did not want Trump to win, but because of the institutional setup of American politics, they were really powerless to prevent it.

That’s a fundamental dimension of party weakness in the United States. If you compare it with the Labour Party in the UK, the Labour Party as an institution decides who is going to run in what constituency, who’s going to stand where, right? It’s impossible for someone to run on the Labour Party ballot against the will of the Labour Party leadership. There are elections within the Labour Party for leadership, but once the leadership is in place, they ultimately control who runs where. The party gets to decide.

In the United States, the party does not decide. And really it’s mandated by state law in most of the United States that, for state-level positions, the parties have to hold primaries. And that means that the party as an institution doesn’t get to control this most basic function of deciding who will represent it in an election. That’s part of why parties are weaker, and it means that parties are vulnerable to insurgencies in a way that parties elsewhere in the world are just much, much less vulnerable to.

Paul Heideman

Yeah, exactly right. Even if they had wanted to completely purge Sanders supporters from the party, they had no way to do it, because they can’t stop someone from running on their ballot line. And if that person does a good enough job of organizing, they can win. So that renders American parties more gelatinous, I think you could say, than parties elsewhere. The borders are not hard. They’re always vulnerable to people entering, mounting different kinds of campaigns, and I think that’s really key to what’s happened in the Republican Party over the last few decades as well: these insurgents coming up in the party challenging the leadership, and the leadership just having no kind of organizational resources in the party itself that can stop them.

Paul Heideman

I think that’s absolutely right, and I think those two facts are deeply related. The primary system in the United States creates these weak parties, and at the same time it creates a strong party system in which the two parties are extraordinarily secure in their places. In the UK, the party system is kind of disintegrating right now. That’s not happening at all in the United States despite many predictions that something like that would come to pass. One reason for that is simply that, if you want to challenge the Democratic Party leadership, you have a choice: Do you do that as a third party, or do you do that within the party? Which one looks like it’s going to have more of a route to success? Over the last decade, the verdict is pretty clear that you can have a tremendous amount of success actually challenging the party from within.

Insurgents in the Republican Party have faced the same choice and have come to a similar conclusion for most of the last century: if you want to pull the Republican Party further right, the way to do it is to run in the Republican primary. If you want a new right-wing pole in American politics, the way to do it is to run in Republican Party primaries and try and pull that party further right. The other part of the equation is that the United States has all kinds of laws that make it almost impossible to run as a third party. So, for example, restrictions on ballot access: in the United States, if you want to get on the ballot, in some places you have to collect signatures equal to around 5 percent of the electorate in a region. In most other democratic countries, those kinds of laws are considered authoritarian. They are explicitly banned by the European Union.

So you have these ballot access laws, and then the fact that elections in the United States are privately financed means that if you want to raise money to run for office, and you want to do that as a third-party candidate, good luck! The resources that are available to someone running in a Democratic primary in terms of fundraising and all of that kind of stuff are absolutely massive — just things like ActBlue, access to fundraising platforms like that.

The kinds of instruments that allow insurgent candidates to overcome the advantages of big money are themselves partially linked to running within Democratic Party primaries. I do think that the weakness of American parties and the corresponding strength of the American party system is a major influence on what has led the American left over the last decade to, as you say, largely choose the path of running insurgent campaigns in the Democratic Party.

Paul Heideman

For most of American history, American political parties have not really been these cohesive organizations promoting a given ideological worldview. Instead, they’ve been coalitions of different regional elites who have come together out of common interest and to try and find a common program but have not been linked to a more all-encompassing worldview of any sort.

A great exception to this is, of course, the Republican Party of the Civil War era, which was united by this ideological antislavery, free labor vision. Though after the party abandons Reconstruction, they move away from that and you get a return to these more nonideological politics. And by 1900 or so, a lot of observers are looking at American politics and being like, “The parties just don’t really believe in anything.” Max Weber, the Prussian social scientist, is watching from across the Atlantic, and he’s like, “In the United States, the parties are just gangs of office seekers. They’re just rival gangs. It’s not like they’re united by different interpretations of the Constitution, grand ideological visions, or anything like that.” And this pattern really continues up to the New Deal. At the same time, parties were incredibly organizationally strong for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Voting in the late nineteenth century was something of a combination between Mardi Gras and a gang fight where the parties organized these giant parades to march people down to the polls. And participation rates were north of 70 or 80 percent in elections in these years. So the parties were organizationally extremely strong, even as they were ideologically indistinct. The New Deal begins a process of transformation of this when you get this social democratic pole created in American politics. At the same time, that was congenitally deformed because the Democrats, at the same time that they’re the party of social democracy in the United States, and socialists in Europe are looking at the New Deal being like, “this is what we should do,” the party is also the party of Jim Crow. So it becomes increasingly clear over the course of the 1930s that the Democratic Party has become an unstable amalgam of the most progressive people in the country, these northern liberals, the most left-wing in mainstream politics at least, and the most reactionary: the Dixiecrats in the Jim Crow South.

And so the next thirty years are, within the Democratic Party, an attempt to resolve that coalition or that contradiction, or to preserve it and to stabilize it. And that basically ends in the 1960s with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which demolishes Jim Crow in the South, and, on the other hand, begins this process of realignment of Southern white voters.

And there’s a corresponding process happening in the Republican Party at this time, too. There was a large branch of the Republican Party that was really quite liberal in some ways, going back to Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Progressives, that whole wing of the party. So western Republicans in the 1910s and ’20s were often quite progressive. And going forward, you have people like Earl Warren, who was governor of California and then on the Warren Court. He was a Republican governor. People like Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, who are really these liberal Republicans who attached themselves to New Deal institutions and often said, “Look, we don’t want a big expansion of the New Deal, but we also don’t want to roll it back.”

And from the 1930s to the 1960s, this is the fight going on in the Republican Party, between “Are we the party of rolling back the New Deal?” or “Are we the party of just stopping further growth?” And in some ways, Barry Goldwater’s victory in the 1960s marks the victory of the rollback faction. Richard Nixon is something of an interregnum there, but that faction really wins, and that victory is, of course, consolidated when Ronald Reagan wins the presidency in the 1980s.

In 1932, about 70 percent of black Americans voted for Herbert Hoover. Why? Because he was a Republican. It’s the party of Abraham Lincoln. It’s who black Americans in the North, where black Americans could vote, had voted for since the Civil War. In 1936, two-thirds of black Americans voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That’s one of the biggest shifts in voting in American history. And it happens in four years, extraordinarily quickly. Why? Because the New Deal did a huge amount for black Americans.

Paul Heideman

So, in both parties, there are people who political scientist Sam Rosenfeld calls the polarizers, the people who say, “No, no, no, we want the parties to be coherent. This is the fight we’re fighting.” And that’s happening in both parties in different ways. In the Democratic Party, a huge battle is the battle against seniority in Congress, because these Southern Democrats preside over one-party dictatorships, and so they have the most seniority, because they’re basically never voted out of office. The Northern liberals who want to pass civil rights legislation realize that if they want to do so, they have to get the Dixiecrats out of leadership. And to do that, they have to dethrone seniority.

This was a big battle in the 1950s and ’60s, to get rid of the seniority principle, and it was replaced with a stronger congressional leadership. Now committee membership is based on what the congressional leadership decides, right? What the majority leader or the minority leader really wants. And you can say this is strengthening that party leadership, and that’s how it was perceived at the time. But in the 1970s, this really interacts with an absolutely staggering rise in campaign costs, as political campaigns really start to embrace television and radio advertising as a primary means of campaigning.

Before the 1970s, the most important input in campaigns is labor. It’s volunteers and party workers. That’s who wins campaigns. In the 1970s, it shifts to advertising, and that means a huge, huge increase in costs. Now the most important input is money. This combines with this more open approach to selecting party leadership to create a situation that really consolidates by the 1990s. Gingrich is the one who really pioneers this, in making it so that whoever raises the most money is now the de facto leader of the party.

Nancy Pelosi’s reign as head of House Democrats was really undergirded by her incredible success as a fundraiser. She raised and redistributed throughout the party massive, massive amounts of money. And so this effort to produce a more coherent party by dethroning seniority and getting rid of the Dixiecrats interacted with the changed campaign finance environment to create a situation where now, actually, money just rules the day in the party.

And actually, the party as an autonomous institution able to make decisions of its own has been diminished. Because now it’s just, well, whatever the funders decide is what’s going to happen. Who they’re giving money to is going to be the leader. In the Republican Party, you get a very different but analogous development in that, in the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, there was a huge fight in the party over which direction it would go.

And part of the way this played out was over who would be head of the Republican National Committee. And they basically nominated a compromise candidate whose outlook was, “Look, the job of the party is not to take a side in ideological disputes within the party.” It’s to provide services to whomever the candidate would ultimately be. And this became known as the service model of politics.

And so this nomination comes as a result of a stalemate in the party. Goldwater’s been defeated. There are all of these Republican liberals and moderates who want to get rid of Goldwater but aren’t quite strong enough to push the Right all the way out of the party. And so you get this service party conception, which again weakens the party. Now the party doesn’t decide questions of policy, of politics, anything like that. The party only provides services to candidates. And then the Democrats actually start copying this from the Republican Party, and both parties really adopt this service party model, which is really the party model that continues to reign to this day, where parties are networks of campaign service providers and channels through which money flows.

And that’s what the party as an institution really is. It’s not making any kind of decisions about policy and politics.

Paul Heideman

Yes, and the 2024 election is actually a perfect example of this. The 2024 election was the first time a major party’s campaign has been primarily funded by super PACs rather than through the candidate committee that is registered with the Federal Election Commission and associated with the party.

Most of Trump’s money didn’t flow through his official candidate committee. It flowed through super PACs like Elon Musk’s super PAC or various other groups. And so most of the money isn’t even going through the party now. Now most of the money is going outside of the party as well.

And so on questions about campaign strategy, the party increasingly doesn’t have a major say over it. Elon Musk spends $250 million; he can decide what the main public-relations, advertising, and geographic focus of the campaign is going to be.

So yeah, I wrote that section before the election, but parties are increasingly becoming bit players.

Paul Heideman

I think the way to think about it is that it is precisely because capital has been so dominant in American history that it hasn’t needed to be as organized as capital elsewhere.

In the United States, as listeners will know, movements of the Left have generally been weaker, unions have been weaker and smaller than elsewhere. The United States has never produced an electorally viable socialist party, unlike most of the rest of Western Europe. All of that has meant that capital in the United States has not faced the same scale of challenges as elsewhere, and, because of that, capital hasn’t really needed to organize on the same scale as elsewhere.

They’ve —

Paul Heideman

They’ve had it too easy. Exactly. They haven’t been disciplined. It’s a little bit like a monopolist in the market. Monopolists don’t face the discipline of competition, and so they can afford to be wasteful in various ways and slothful.

American capital is much the same. They don’t face the political competition of a highly organized and combative working class outside of a few really specific moments. And so going back to the early twentieth century, the weakness of American labor has meant that capital can get what it wants for the most part without really needing to be highly organized.

They can defeat their workers, they can get the policy they want without these big class-wide organizations of the kind that you really see emerging in force in Western Europe after World War II, when you have socialist parties or labor parties at least on the verge of power in much of Western Europe.

You have these labor movements that are much, much bigger than in the United States. In those countries, capital needed to figure out what its class-wide demands for contesting with labor as a class were going to be. Not what individual businesses might want here or there, but how they can organize the class as a whole to make sure that they win what were almost existential battles at the time.

In the United States, capital has really not faced those kinds of stakes most of the time, and so the organization of capital has correspondingly been more sectional and partial. Businesses has often been more focused on their narrow interests as individual firms or industries rather than as a class. They’ve been focused on what they can get for themselves, not what they can all agree is needed vis-à-vis labor.

Paul Heideman

If you wanted to boil the book down to the essence, it would be that American exceptionalism and a weak American working class are ultimately responsible for the insanity of the Republican Party today.

Paul Heideman

I think it’s helpful to think about the post–World War II United States to understand this. In the postwar United States, there were a number of prominent organizations of American business. There was the Committee for Economic Development, which I mentioned earlier. There was the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce.

And essentially, the Committee for Economic Development was an organization of some of the CEOs of a lot of the biggest, most profitable corporations in the United States, the really big multinational companies that were emerging or reaching new heights after World War II.

And these were companies that thought, “Okay, the New Deal has been established. We don’t want it to go further, but we also don’t think it’s worth the fight of trying to roll it back. We think that could be chaotic, messy, and really could cost us more than it’s worth. So we really don’t want that.”

So they represented the moderate wing of capital. The Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers were interlinked with the John Birch Society in these years, and they were the ones who were like, “No, the New Deal is communism. We need to roll it back. And in fact, Committee for Economic Development, you guys are probably communists too if you don’t want to roll it back.”

And the Committee for Economic Development was very politically powerful in these years. So again, it’s not that capital lacked influence. It’s just that that influence was not representing capital as a class, but was mostly representing the biggest firms, the most powerful firms, and what they wanted.

In Europe, capital is organized, but their power is more constrained, because they’re contending with a very powerful labor movement, with very powerful electoral socialist movements. And so they have to be organized to kind of tread water, in some sense.

In the United States, they’re so completely dominant that they’re able to get along quite well without any kind of class-wide perspective, and sometimes that means that some small capitalists are losers. So in the post–World War II era, when free trade is really in the ascendance in the United States and big capital loves free trade, well, a lot of small and medium-sized capital loses out from that.

And that was actually a major force in the Goldwater campaign. The Goldwater campaign represented an eruption of protectionism from small and medium-sized businesses who were defecting from the free trade consensus. So in that sense, the fact that there’s not a class-wide perspective within capital means that the less powerful bits of capital might get the shaft a little harder here than elsewhere, because there’s not a class-wide movement trying to create a consensual political agenda.

Instead the big capitalists are often able to set the agenda.

Paul Heideman

As you said, Gingrich comes into Congress, he’s very ambitious. He wants to distinguish himself, and there are two avenues for him. First, he launches this campaign against the Democrats, constantly accusing them of ethics violations and things like that, not really directly challenging them on policy so much, but this warfare of being like “They’re cheating, they’re not doing things right,” all of that kind of stuff.

And his star rises with that. At the same time, he’s really going after the Reagan administration quite a bit for not being right-wing enough, not being confrontational enough with the USSR, not cutting the welfare state enough. So really, from Gingrich’s perspective, the whole problem with Reagan is that there never was a Reagan revolution, right?

Gingrich would say there wasn’t a revolution. We actually still need that revolution to happen. But the thing that’s really decisive for him is that he grasps the new importance of money in politics in a way that almost no one else did. And so, in the mid and late 1980s, Gingrich builds this fundraising network inside of the GOP that is separate from the official party.

He uses a PAC that he controls to do this, that is basically about hooking Republican politicians up with potential funders all over the country. This apparatus becomes really central to the Republicans who are elected into Congress in 1988, 1990, and 1992. All of them come to really depend on this redistribution of money that is all going through Gingrich and happening through his PAC in various ways.

Some political scientists call it a shadow National Republican Congressional Committee. That’s the scale that it was operating at. And what Gingrich figured out is that if he can be the man that the money flows through, then he can win leadership. And this is what propels him to leadership within the House Republicans.

And really, Gingrich was very much an insurgent in this respect, in that the Democrats had controlled the House for fifty years. Republicans in the House were used to being in the minority. They were not used to fighting hard, because what on earth was the point? And so Gingrich’s ascent was really a contested one, and it was powered by money the whole way.

Then when Gingrich wins the House majority in 1994 in the Republican revolution, he institutionalizes this fundraising model throughout the party. Now all Republican House members are required to fundraise. They have quotas that they need to meet. And leadership of House committees, membership of House committees now come with fundraising requirements.

So by the end of the 1990s, there are posted prices for membership on various committees. If you want to get a plum House committee assignment, you have to raise so many hundreds of thousands of dollars and redistribute them throughout the party. Gingrich really restructures the entire House Republican Party around fundraising.

It propels his leadership and totally transforms the party. It’s very quickly copied by the Democrats, and then Republicans and Democrats in the Senate as well. And it really amounts to a profound transformation of how the party operated.

Paul Heideman

Yeah, I think so. I think he is, more than anyone else, the kind of person who inaugurates this dynamic. And the representatives in the House that were really close to Gingrich, there’s a reputation, like the class of 1994. The freshmen of 1994, as they were called, the people who come in on the back of the Gingrich revolution, are known as being out of control in the House.

There’s a great book about them that goes into all the craziness, and how many of them really turned on Gingrich himself quite quickly and were willing to give him the shiv. So I do think Gingrich is the one who sets this kind of pattern in motion, and I think that the whole fundraising model that he puts in enables his own displacement.

Because it means, okay, now Gingrich is the speaker of the House. Well, if you can raise money, you can challenge Newt Gingrich. And in some ways, that’s what Tom DeLay does. Now, Tom DeLay eventually works with Gingrich, but he was not one of Gingrich’s guys. He was not who Gingrich wanted.

He rises in the House by being a great fundraiser and forces Gingrich to accept him as part of his leadership team.

Paul Heideman

I think Gingrich accomplished quite a bit in that regard. Just in winning the House, he made it so that business was now free to donate way more money to Republicans. When Democrats always had the House, business needed to donate a good amount to Democrats because they’ were going to be the incumbents, and they’re who you want access to.

Now that Republicans ruled the roost, the money could really start flowing to Republicans in a huge way. And Gingrich’s agenda in the House was one that had a huge amount of support from business. Things like welfare reform, which low-wage employers across the country absolutely loved, because it basically pushed a lot of poor women into the labor market whom welfare had allowed to stay out of it to varying degrees.

That was loved by business. The war against Bill Clinton’s health care reform, which is not really remembered that much today, but was really much more radical than Obamacare, actually — the war against that, business really supported very, very strongly. And Gingrich was an important leader of that.

In fact, even Gingrich’s government shutdowns to try and force budget cuts and austerity in 1995 and early 1996, even that business was supporting, even as government shutdowns can be quite chaotic and costly for business. But if you read the Chamber of Commerce’s magazine during and after the shutdowns, they’re like, “The Republicans fought a great fight on this. It’s really important that they took this stand even if they lost.”

So business was really behind the Gingrich agenda. Now, the fact that Gingrich loses the government shutdown fight and Clinton wins, that tarnishes his star quite a bit. And his reputation in the country as a whole really goes down as he’s kind of tarred as someone who wants to slash the social safety net and throw old people and children to the wolves.

So Gingrich is hurt by that. At the same time, Clinton, going into 1996 and his second term, moves quite sharply to the right and embraces a whole host of policies that are extraordinarily friendly to business, from telecommunications reform, which loosens ownership regulations — and is why we have things like Fox News today — to really wholehearted support for free trade and globalization.

Even as Gingrich has done quite a bit that business loves, he’s lost this really central fight, and at the same time, Clinton is moving to the right and winning huge support from business in doing so. And so the fight over Clinton’s second-term impeachment happens at a time when business was actually really happy with the Clinton administration and saw the Clinton administration as a really reliable friend of their agenda.

Clinton in his second term is talking about privatizing Social Security, which is a huge giveaway to the financial services industry, because now they would manage all of these accounts and charge fees for them, etc. So yeah, business loved Bill Clinton in his second term, and that’s why they looked with some trepidation at the Republican effort to impeach him.

Impeachment had kind of started for Richard Nixon. Andrew Johnson had been impeached. The effort to impeach Bill Clinton did not seem on the same scale, and business was really not convinced that it was worth it. If you read the business press at the time, they say, “Look, this is going to crowd out other things we want. We’re not going to be able to get our agenda passed. This is going to slow everything down, muck everything up.”

And that’s exactly what happened. When Clinton starts to be impeached, his support for Social Security privatization disappears, because he needs the liberal Democrats to defend him and knows they’re not going to be on board for that in the slightest.

So business was absolutely right about the effect of impeachment on their agenda.

Paul Heideman

Exactly.

Paul Heideman

Tobacco prior to the 1990s was a bipartisan industry that donated to both Democrats and Republicans.

There are plenty of Southern Democrats who represented tobacco districts. It was not a super political industry. At the same time, it’s important to remember it was a massive industry. Some of the biggest companies in the country were the tobacco companies.

So it was really a huge, huge industry in the 1990s. What Clinton did to piss them off was that he allowed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to classify nicotine as a drug that needed regulation under their auspices. Prior to that, nicotine was not regulated as a drug. And Clinton’s surgeon general, who actually had been appointed by George H. W. Bush, really made this push, showing Clinton all of these papers and all of this research demonstrating what the tobacco industry knew about the addictiveness of nicotine as well as their efforts to market it to children, things like that. And when Clinton read this stuff, he said, “I wanted to kill them. I just wanted to kill the tobacco companies.”

After he gave the FDA the go-ahead to classify nicotine as an addictive chemical, they wanted to kill him too. And if you look at donations from the tobacco industry after 1994, suddenly nothing is going to Democrats and everything is going to Republicans.

There’s this massive shift. So in Bill Clinton’s second term, if the question is who in the business community was really unhappy with Bill Clinton’s performance, the answer is the tobacco industry. Then if you actually look a little more closely at the impeachment proceedings, suddenly you see tobacco’s footprint and fingerprints absolutely everywhere.

Kenneth Starr, who was the special counsel who investigated Clinton, is working representing tobacco companies as an attorney at the same time that he is special counsel. He’s actively representing tobacco companies in lawsuits. A number of the other attorneys who worked investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair were also actively representing tobacco clients at the time.

The person who pushed it in the House most strenuously was Tom DeLay, representative from Texas. DeLay was one of the biggest recipients of tobacco money in Congress at the time. And perhaps most importantly, the decision to appoint Ken Starr was taken by judges who were appointed to a panel by senators from North Carolina.

There’s a lunch with the Republican senators from North Carolina the day before this crucial panel to appoint the independent counsel convenes, in which it sure seems like they’re saying, “We want to appoint someone who’s going to go get Clinton.”

So you see the tobacco industry just absolutely everywhere in the impeachment proceedings. They’re funding the people who are really going after Clinton, and they’re also the part of American capital that, in the late 1990s at least, had the most reason to want to see Clinton removed from office.

Paul Heideman

Yeah, I think that’s exactly the sentiment from them. And yes, in the business press, some of them are like, “Well, this really sucks for us” and “This circus is totally a distraction from the important work we want to get done, like privatizing Social Security and making sure we have free trade with China.”

But since the 1970s, the ability of capital to act as a class and produce this kind of class-wide understanding and class-wide action in defense of their interests had really gone down. And so you have this situation where you have a lot of firms that have a diffuse interest in impeachment not happening, and then you have this group of firms that have a very intense, concentrated interest in impeachment happening.

And when you don’t have well-developed institutions that build collective action, that concentrated, intense interest will beat the diffuse kind of widespread interest every time.

Paul Heideman

Crypto.

Paul Heideman

There’s unfortunately a long history in the United States of individual firms or individual industries being able to really shape American politics in decisive ways, going back to the way that the silver mines took over the Populist Party in the 1890s and reduced a radical-populist economic program to nothing but free silver coinage, which would of course be a huge boon to the silver miners.

So yeah, it’s dispiriting just how dominant capital has often been in American history and how that’s allowed even small pieces of it to exert their agenda in massive ways.

Paul Heideman

To appreciate this, I think it’s helpful to think about what was going on with the Republican Party in the 1990s. On the one hand, you have the real failure of Gingrichism. Gingrich ends up being quite bad for the Republican Party. Bob Dole adopts much of Gingrich’s agenda in 1996 and loses.

After the debacle of impeachment, the Republican Party had this image of being kind of fanatical, priggish, and not very oriented on what most Americans thought were the most important problems. And George W. Bush comes to be seen as an alternative to all of this. The slogan that he runs on, “Compassionate Conservatism,” was crafted to signify that this is not Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party anymore.

He had been a successful governor of Texas, often working in a very bipartisan manner with Democrats. He had really spurned the xenophobia that was surfacing in the Republican Party at the time. And actually when he was reelected in Texas, I think in 1998, he won a majority of Latino votes in Texas.

So a lot of Republican Party leaders are looking at this and being like, “This guy can be the future of the party. He’s allowing us to rebrand, and he can win with Latinos,” after this rise in Republican xenophobia had really driven them away. At the same time, however, Bush is an evangelical Christian who speaks the language of the Republican right; he’s very, very comfortable talking with them about abortion, things like that.

And so Bush manages to achieve this kind of unity between two wings of the party, his father’s corporate-moderate wing and the Gingrich wing with which it had really been at war for much of the 1990s. He’s able to bring them together in a way that seems successful and durable. During his first term, people like Karl Rove were talking about a permanent Republican majority under the Bush model, that we’re going to get thirty years of Republican dominance, with George W. Bush’s politics as the foundation of it. So I do think that Bush manages to create this unity in the party, and then, after 9/11, the project of American imperialism cements that even further, because both wings of the party were in complete agreement on the need to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

Bush really does achieve something impressive in the early 2000s in hammering out this kind of peace accord in the party. And at the same time, what he’s doing is bringing business back to the Republicans, despite the alienation of the late 1990s, with an agenda of tax cuts, deregulations, attacks on workplace organization, etc, and assembles this absolutely massive corporate coalition behind him in 2000 and 2004.

And the Democrats are really reduced to begging for scraps from groups like trial lawyers, who are the only source of big money for Democrats in much of this period.

Paul Heideman

Yeah, and there are two places where you really see this dynamic. The first is Bush’s big tax cut. He had campaigned on a massive tax cut. There was a government surplus, a budget surplus at the time, and Bush’s line was that “We should have a huge tax cut.” And at the start of his administration, he gathers all of these CEOs in a room and says, “You guys actually aren’t getting anything from this tax cut. All of it is going to personal tax cuts. None of it is going to corporate tax cuts.” And he says, “This will kind of produce a base of popular support for me, and then I’ll be able to take care of your agenda.” And they say, “Okay, sounds good.” He coheres them around this, and it’s exactly what he does.

The Bush tax cuts are these massive cuts to personal income taxes, and they’re followed up over the next few years by a series of cuts to corporate taxes that take care of the corporations. And the second area where you really see this is in the invasion of Iraq, which has often been talked about as done at the behest of the oil companies.

They’re the ones who really pushed the administration into it. But when you really look into the decision-making process, you see something very similar. It’s true that they gather all the oil companies together and say, “Okay, here’s our line of march. What do you guys need from that?”

They want to solicit the interests and the support of the oil companies. But at the same time, the policy is very clearly not being made by the oil companies. And you see this because, if you look in the broader foreign policy think tank world at the time, you really see a consensus on the need to invade Iraq, the need to remove Saddam Hussein.

So it seems very unlikely that the Bush administration was simply taking orders from the oil companies when there’s a much broader consensus at the time, even among the liberal sections of the foreign policy think tanks, on the need to remove Saddam Hussein. Instead, there was certainly kind of a . . . 

They solicited the advice and the needs of the oil companies, but they were not acting at their behest.

Paul Heideman

I think part of it is just that Gingrichism, and DeLayism had really crashed and burned by the end of the 1990s.

Like I said, the impeachment process was just a massive failure for the Republicans. Their gains in the 1998 midterms, right in the thick of impeachment, were minimal. And actually, Gingrich ends up getting forced out of office over ethics concerns, and the person who was going to replace him ended up having to resign because Hustler Magazine exposed that he had affairs as well.

The Republican Party is weakened by this. And so on one level, I think that that had really discredited much of the Republican right. And at the same time, the Republican right was never very good at producing presidential candidates. They never produced presidential candidates who’d been in the top tier in the Republican primaries.

And so Bush is able to move forward with that. But I do think the fact that he was a genuine evangelical, really connected to the evangelical churches, that allowed him to bring that section of the party with him. And then, like I said, I do think that September 11 and the subsequent imperial reaction also played a big role in Bush’s success in holding the party together during his first term.

And it’s when that project begins to unravel, really in 2005–2006, that you see that unity start to splinter.

Paul Heideman

The first step of that is the debate over immigration reform in the Republican Party.

George W. Bush wants to push a very kind of pro-corporate expansion of guest worker programs, combined with some kind of path to citizenship for undocumented people living in the United States. And this sets off a furious reaction from the Republican right, who absolutely refuse any kind of accommodation on immigration reform and just want a totally draconian enforcement-only agenda.

The party really splits over this, and Bush is ultimately unable to pass immigration reform. He had come to power in the Republican Party as the kind of antidote to Republican xenophobia, but he proves unable to subdue it. In fact, I think there’s a strong case that September 11, and the militarization and securitization of immigration as an issue played a role in the revival of Republican xenophobia.

If you look at the House Immigration Reform Caucus that Tom Tancredo, the real chieftain of anti-immigrant politics in the party at this time, starts in the late 1990s, and before September 11, I think it has around twelve members, and then, two years later, it has around sixty.

So I think, in some ways, Bush’s success in militarism and that kind of thing undermined his agenda with immigration. But you see a big split in the party at that point, and that split becomes even wider when the financial crisis hits. And when the financial crisis hits, when it really explodes in the fall of 2008 and the bailout is needed, that’s when all of a sudden Republicans are voting down George W. Bush’s bank bailout. In the wake of them voting that down, the stock market crashes, just a massive stock market crash. There’s a huge push from corporate America to push the bailout, to get it passed. George W. Bush personally calls every member of the Texas delegation to the House and asks them to vote for the bill, and not one of them changes their vote as a result.

It is kind of the ultimate illustration of a lame-duck president. And so eventually they’re able to pass the bill. It limps across the finish line mostly relying on Democratic votes. A majority of Republicans still vote against it, and this is a sign that that kind of corporate-consensus Republicanism that Bush had achieved in his first term is dead.

Now you have a majority of the Republican Party voting to tank Wall Street in the most savage way, in its greatest moment of crisis.

Paul Heideman

Yeah. So the Koch brothers had been involved really in Libertarian Party politics and think tanks prior to this moment.

In the 2000s, during the George W. Bush presidency, they had started to play footsie with the Republican Party, to get involved with some Republican funding. And in the immediate aftermath of 2008, they emerge as the locus of this network of funders, various kind of billionaires and sectors of the ultrarich who are all pushing for a much more combative Republican politics that will not compromise with the Democrats, that will go back to a kind of Gingrich, burn-it-all-down style of politics.

They establish themselves very quickly on the scale of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Republican Congressional Committee in terms of fundraising. They’re raising absolutely huge amounts of money, and, of course, they’re enabled in all of this by the Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNow v. FEC decisions by the Supreme Court that established super PACs, so that now all of this money can remain under their control rather than just being given to the party, which may or may not do what they want with it.

And this becomes the foundation for this insurgency within the Republican Party. The year 2010 sees a record number of primary challenges in the Republican Party as all of these Tea Party candidates are challenging Republicans in the House and Senate, often backed up by aspects of the Koch network.

And at the same time that this is happening, establishment Republicans are responding with a super PAC network of their own anchored by Karl Rove and his group, American Crossroads, which seeks to raise huge amounts of money and spend it on behalf of continuing the George W. Bush Republican agenda. So from 2010 up until 2016, the Republican Party is basically consumed by a civil war between these two groups, as the Tea Party wing and the Karl Rove wing are both contending. What’s kind of extraordinary about it is that both of them are operating mainly through these super PACs that are institutionally separate from the party itself.

So the battle over the future of the party is largely happening outside of the party rather than within it.

Paul Heideman

During these years, John Boehner is the leader of the House Republicans, for example. He was a Gingrich guy. He was one of Gingrich’s insurgents in the 1990s. Now he’s the establishment, and he’s the piñata for all of the Tea Party insurgents who see him as the ultimate sellout, do-nothing Republican who doesn’t really want to fight the Democrats.

And so they’re pushing for these government shutdowns, these fiscal-cliff fights. They’re contesting his speaker nomination when the Republicans win back the House, all of this kind of stuff. So yeah, this moment is really when that first generation of insurgents now find themselves really out-positioned to the right by a new generation who see them as the new establishment that needs to be taken down.

And the way that this plays out is not just in the politics of the House itself, it’s in all of these primaries that, in many cases, lead to Republican candidates winning the primary who have no hope of winning the general. And the Tea Party probably cost the Republicans control of the Senate, at least early in the Obama administration, because they’re nominating people like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, who’s the woman who runs a campaign ad that starts off explaining why she’s not a witch.

Paul Heideman

Yeah.

Paul Heideman

It’s a great one.

Paul Heideman

I think one thing you could say has changed in the Democratic Party from then to today is that then, people like Obama really believed that they could find ground for cooperation with the Republican Party and that the Republicans could be brought around in some sense. I always think of Obama going to the House Republican retreat in like 2009, maybe early 2010, when the House Republicans have their retreat to talk strategy.

And Obama goes and addresses them, and then spends an hour taking unscripted questions from them. And if you watch it — you can watch it on YouTube — it’s incredible, because he’s so smooth and so good, and they’re taking swings at him, and they just have nothing. They don’t land a single blow on him.

It’s like watching Muhammad Ali. They don’t land a single hit. It’s one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen a politician do. Personally impressive. But politically, it represented this belief that if he went and talked to them and made a reasonable case and showed them how . . .  Part of what he says is, “Look, you’re voting down all these bills. If you can work with me on this stuff, I’ll give stuff for your districts in these bills. We can give you things. We can find ground for compromise. We can work together.” And none of them go for it. So, for example, Obama’s stimulus bill, which they pack full of tax cuts.

A third of the bill is tax cuts, which most economists at the time were like, “This is really not a very efficient way to spend this money in terms of the amount of economic stimulus you’ll get from it.” But he loads it with tax cuts in order to get Republican votes. He doesn’t get a single Republican vote for it.

Similarly, with Obamacare, there are all these compromises that are made in the hopes that you can get some Republican support for it. It’s based on Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts. It’s very far from Medicare for All. Republicans don’t vote for it. So I think the Democrats couldn’t see what was happening in Republican politics, and couldn’t appreciate the fact that there was just no chance of winning any Republican support for anything Obama was going to do.

And I do think the Democratic Party has at least learned that today. Hakeem Jeffries may not be a very good leader, but I don’t think he expects to get Republican support for anything Democrats do when they’re in a majority.

Paul Heideman

Here you really start to see the split in business as well. So the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, the big organizations of business, they’re all completely behind the stimulus bill. They’re like, “This is really needed. We really need to pass this.” The Koch network is totally against it. And so that’s part of what’s happening in the Republican Party, this kind of splintering of business.

But if you look at the rest of Obama’s agenda, you also see something kind of similar. So Obamacare, for example, is supported by, again, the Business Roundtable. The Chamber of Commerce really opposes it. And in order to understand that, you have to understand some of the transformation of the Chamber of Commerce over the previous decades.

In the 1990s, the Chamber of Commerce really adopts a new business model where instead of trying to find consensus among their members, instead of trying to produce this agenda that all of the companies could get behind, they start renting out their services to various companies, where the companies might risk a PR hit if they themselves were lobbying for a given bill or a given position.

But the Chamber of Commerce itself would do that for them and provide some reputational cover for them. And that’s basically what happens under Obamacare: the Chamber of Commerce goes to war against the policy, and it comes out that they’ve just gotten massive donations from some of the health insurance companies that opposed Obamacare to carry this out.

They weren’t in any sense representing a consensus position among American business. The Business Roundtable was something similar. What happens then with Obama’s financial reform with the Dodd-Frank Bill is that Wall Street is totally against this bill, and this brings the Republicans back a little bit closer to more of a mainstream business position.

In their campaign against Dodd-Frank, they’re able to reunite with some of the sectors of big business that they had really alienated along the bailout in particular. So the Republican war on Obama’s policy agenda reflects some of the splits among business and the way that manifests in the Republican Party, but also is an opportunity for the Republicans to rebuild some bridges at various points.

Paul Heideman

Romney’s nomination reflects part of what I alluded to earlier, in that the right wing of the GOP was never very good at producing presidential candidates.

In 2012, they didn’t really have a strong candidate. There wasn’t a good Tea Party candidate for the presidency. So you get Romney, who had massive support from business, and, in the general election, business just goes massively for Romney. They really don’t support Obama in big numbers at all.

Except for some firms, some industries like tech, really stay with Obama. But on the whole, the business class goes for Romney. They lose partially because Obama had built such an incredible fundraising machine that was able to harness all these small donors in 2012. And so Romney’s support from business doesn’t translate into electoral victory.

At the same time, his defeat really opens the floodgates for the Republican right, in that it’s a really decisive discrediting of the Republican establishment. They had really expected to win that election. Paul Ryan famously had to explain to his crying children that they weren’t going to be moving to Washington, DC, after all.

The Republicans really thought they had 2012 in the bag. And when they lose it, it’s kind of the Republican establishment’s last stand.

Paul Heideman

Trump comes in as a creature of neither side. He’s not a Tea Party guy at all.

In fact, he’s famously against cutting Social Security and Medicare. He runs as really an economic moderate who’s not going to be a budget cutter. At the same time, he’s very much not one of the establishment. He runs on this insane xenophobia and anti-immigrant politics that the establishment, particularly after 2012, had really been trying to jettison.

They saw that xenophobia as a weakness for the Republican Party and said, “We have to go back to George W. Bush and try to be more pro-Latino.” So he wrong-foots both sides, because he’s not from either of them. And at the same time, it turns out that the audience among the Republican primary electorate for this combination of economic moderation with really intense culture-war politics was quite large.

There was a large audience for that sort of politics. And because the Republicans had been locked into trench warfare within the party, the party’s electoral base was not really listening to the cues that were coming from elite Republicans anymore, because the party had been so divided.

There wasn’t any kind of consensus within the party anymore. So when Trump comes in, he’s able to sidestep this battle, and both sides thought Trump would be to their advantage. Jeb Bush is like, “He’s going to split the far-right vote with Ted Cruz, and that’s going to be great for me. That’s going to make it easier for me to win the primary.”

Ted Cruz says, “Trump is going to rile up all these voters and make these kind of culture-war issues more salient in this election, but ultimately those voters will come to me, because I’m the person who can present those most effectively. I can do it better than Trump, so actually it’s good for me that Trump is in the race.”

So both camps also were like, “We don’t really want to spend that much time attacking Trump, because we think his presence in the race will be to our advantage.” So that’s what enables Trump to win. Without the kind of division of the party in the 2010s and the factional warfare that had developed, I don’t think there would’ve been an opportunity for Trump to come in and win in the same way that he was ultimately able to do.

So I think Trump is very much a creature of the divisions in the party even as he’s not associated with either side of them.

Paul Heideman

Trump has the ability to finance his own campaign in the primaries. And so even though basically all of business is against Trump in the primaries, he’s able to raise so much money just from himself that it doesn’t hurt him that much. And then once he wins, business really deserts the Republican Party.

A lot of traditional Republican funders, some of the party’s biggest donors, refuse to open their wallets to Trump. And by August of 2016, Trump is having to lay off campaign staff. His campaign is on the verge of disintegrating. And he’s finally able then to convince a couple of key Republican billionaires, like the Mercers, a very rich finance family from Long Island, to fund his campaign in a major way.

And they are able to allow his campaign to limp through the rest of the fall. But basically everybody is operating with the assumption that Trump is going to lose in 2016. It’s going to be a disaster, and then the party will move on. That’s the operating assumption of everyone.

Trump’s campaign team is telling him, “Look, you’re going to lose this election.” And as a result, in 2016 in November, Trump doesn’t have a victory speech written on election day. He has to write one on the spot. He had actually been trying to fuel up the plane to go to Monte Carlo with Melania Trump after they lost.

He had conceived of his race as what he called the “greatest infomercial in the history of the world.” He’s like, “This’ll just be a great opportunity to present my brand and to do something next after The Apprentice,” basically.

Paul Heideman

Yeah, exactly. So he wins the presidency, which is a real surprise, and this leads to this kind of situation where the Republican establishment is now coming in and saying, “Okay, we have to work with him. Maybe we can contain him.” And for most of his first term, they are able to contain Trump in various ways.

I mean, just the turnover of staff in his first administration is extraordinary, as all of these people just keep resigning, and it leads to bureaucratic paralysis, and they’re just not able to get that much done. The things they are able to get done are basically traditional Republican policy proposals like tax cuts and a more aggressive foreign policy toward Russia.

If you just look at the policy outputs of Trump’s first term, in a lot of ways it looks like a generic Republican first term, but that’s because he was constrained in all of these ways. What is happening at the same time as that, though, is that Trump is steadily remaking the party, and the people that oppose him, that don’t stand with him, are getting pushed out.

And that process just continues over the next eight years really, up until today. And really, by 2024, he has taken over the party so completely that there’s no opposition in any organized fashion left. There’s an attempt to mount the Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley primary campaigns in 2024, but once those lose, and lose quite badly, there’s nothing left.

Paul Heideman

I think he’s aided by his media presence and his status as this charismatic figure in various media environments, as well as the image of him as this successful businessman. All of that kind of stuff contributes to this cult of Trump in the party that results in a situation where, by 2020, the party doesn’t even write a platform in the election.

They just say, “Whatever Trump says, that’s what we believe.” And in 2024, when Trump says, “You gotta drop the pro-life plank from the platform,” the Republicans drop it. Something that had been unimaginable in the Bush years, that the Republican Party would drop a plank on abortion.

But by 2024, Trump says it, and it goes.

Paul Heideman

Yes, that’s right. There’s a massive move to the Democratic Party in 2020, from finance to whatever sector you want to look at, basically. Trump had very little support from business, and that is repeated in 2024. Trump has very, very little support from business in 2024.

The Democrats out-fundraised the Republicans in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024. The thing that’s really different in 2024 is that Trump is able to count on financing from a couple of extremely ideological far-right billionaires. Elon Musk, the Uihlein family, a handful of others donate just an incredible amount of money.

Elon Musk donates $250 million. So Trump’s business support in 2024 has shrunk considerably. It’s narrowed quite a bit compared to someone like George W. Bush, who had very broad business support. But it’s very, very deep. These people are willing to spend on a level that’s basically unprecedented in American politics, and that allows Trump to have enough of a campaign operation in order to win in 2024, combined, of course, with the weaknesses of the Biden administration and the Kamala Harris campaign.

Paul Heideman

I think there are a couple things. First, there was always a sector of tech capital that was far right, that bought into various kinds of ideologies about the end of democracy and the rise of philosopher kings and all this kind of nonsense. There was always a sector of tech that was invested in those kind of politics, and they moved to Trump very quickly.

There was also, I think it’s worth remembering, this wave of abor activism and workplace activism more broadly in tech in the late 2010s and early 2020s that I think led a lot of tech executives to say, “Yeah, we have to get these guys under control.”

Paul Heideman

Exactly. And I think that led a number of people to kind of embrace Trump and this new reactionary politics as well. And then the third tendency there is people like Mark Zuckerberg, who were really not terribly ideological and actually had been Democrats for much of the preceding decade.

But once Trump wins in 2024, I think a huge sector of tech capital and capital more broadly says, “Okay, the way to negotiate this is to cut individual deals with Trump, not to try and oppose him or organize opposition to him or anything like that. Instead, we’re going to cut individual deals.”

And they realize that, actually, if you just flatter Trump and give him something shiny, he’s willing to do huge favors for your company.So we’ve seen that again and again. They all line up to kiss the ring, to fund the inauguration, to go in and talk about what a great president and a great leader Donald Trump is.

And in return, they get various forms of clientelist handouts from the White House that are more or less openly corrupt quid pro quos. And I think that this has served to further disorganize capital, because now it’s every man for himself with Trump. Every firm goes and is trying to cut their own deal with Donald Trump rather than organizing any kind of common agenda.

So with the tariffs, for example, rather than companies saying really strongly, “This is a terrible agenda. You need to roll this back. This is hurting us,” they’re all trying to cut individual deals to get their products exempted in various ways. “Oh, no, no, actually, the tariffs aren’t appropriate for my product, Mr President. I think the tariffs are fantastic in general. They’re a great idea. But just for my product, they don’t really work, so can we please have an exemption? And by the way, here’s this donation, and here’s a gold square that can sit on your desk,” or something like that. That’s been what’s happening in business.

If you look at the Supreme Court case with the tariffs, it’s all companies you’ve never heard of, because they’re the ones that don’t have the juice to get an individual deal with Trump. So for them, forthright opposition to the policy is the only avenue left.

Interestingly, since the tariffs have been overturned, you have seen more of the really big companies in the United States starting to launch lawsuits to recover their lost tariff revenue. So I do think that now that that policy has lost, you are seeing more business opposition to it emerge.

Paul Heideman

Marxists like to talk about the relative autonomy of the state and the idea that there’s a certain distance between the state and capital. It’s not a one-to-one relationship. And I think Trump is a great study in this concept, in that, when you have someone who has attained as much power as he has, where he has this party that’s totally subordinate to him that runs all the branches of government, his individual psychology does actually start to be more important in explaining things.

And I think fundamentally what Trump loves is getting to be the decider and the dealmaker. That’s what he loves. That’s the most important kind of image of himself. And so something like the tariffs set him up to do that. He’s like, “I’m going to do this tariff war against the entire world and then everyone’s got to come beg me for favors and I get to decide who the winner and who the loser is.”

He kind of wants the presidency to be The Apprentice, where people have to come and compete for his favor. And I think there’s something similar with Iran. I think Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis said, “You just did such a great job with Venezuela. You can do the same thing with Iran and then you get to pick who the new leadership will be and they’ll be totally dependent on you. Won’t that be great?”

So I do think that element of his psychology is important to understanding why he doesn’t care about electability, affordability, any of these things. The people around him — like Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, whose job it is to say, “Well, is this going to be good for the midterms?” — I think they have a very difficult job, frankly. So yeah, I think that understanding Trump’s psychology is important. I’m accordingly very resistant to some of the strain of thought you see on the Left that says, “Well, actually, Trump is really being rational about all of this, and actually there’s a real logic to all of this. He might be evil, but he’s not stupid.”

I just think that with everything we’ve seen over the past year and a half or so, it’s very hard to reconcile that argument with reality. This war was clearly launched with no plan whatsoever, is a total disaster in every way, and is probably going to end with Trump basically pulling out in defeat in one sense or another.

He won’t call it that. He won’t talk in those terms, but that is looking like the most likely end at this point. So I do think that attempts to kind of “sane-wash” Trump, as some have called it, are deeply unconvincing in this moment.

Paul Heideman

I think one lesson of the first Trump administration is Trump is the only one who gets out alive. Everyone else’s career gets destroyed by it. If you just go through the first Trump administration and look at who served in it, they’re all out to pasture now. None of them are really political players anymore, with the exception of someone like Stephen Miller, who’s kind of a lamprey attached to the shark.

I think we’re likely to see something similar play out with this administration, that the people in the administration are political goners. I think J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio are the two most likely to try and inherit the party. They’re the Donald and Eric Trumps in the cabinet.

And I think that they are just going to be so attached to all of the disasters of the administration that it’s going to be really, really hard for them, just as it would be really hard for anyone attached to the George W. Bush administration to succeed him in 2008. So I think we’re going to see some real Republican knife fighting over the next few years as people try to position themselves.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone like Thomas Massie makes a halfway credible run for the nomination in 2028. I doubt he’ll win, but I think he could easily be one of the top three. And if you told someone in 2020 that Thomas Massie might be a top three Republican candidate, they’d look at you like you’re insane.

But I think someone like him or Carlson. And I really think that whoever it is who rises to the top will be someone who can distance themself most effectively from the administration and from the disasters that it’s creating. I think that’s going to be an increasing trend, particularly after the midterms this year; we’re going to see Trump’s hold on the party really start to splinter and look a lot more fragile than it has.

Paul Heideman

Yeah. I do think that the diminished capacities of the Republican Party for forging consensus between its different constituent elements are going to make things harder for them electorally, in the near term at least.

At the same time, if it is a race between Gavin Newsom and Tucker Carlson in 2028, I think that’s a real nightmare for the Left, for the country, and for human civilization, basically. But I also think you’re right that we are going to see an increasing radicalization of the Republican Party.

I think open antisemitism is going to become much more common in the Republican Party. And I think a total discarding of adherence to elements of kind of American civic religion around morality, multiculturalism, etc., are likely to grow even more intense in the party over the coming years, and we’re going to see some stuff that might have been unimaginable in the Bush years, for example, for prominent Republican politicians to embrace.

So yeah, I don’t see any end to this cycle of radicalization in the party, just an increasingly chaotic and turbulent manifestation of it in the near term.