In this conversation, Sam Kahn, Mike Pesca, Christine Rosen, and Yascha Mounk discuss what the election results mean for the direction of the Democrats, what the Heritage Foundation scandal shows about anti-Semitism on the right, and Dick Cheney’s mixed legacy.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
Mike is the host of The Gist, the longest-running daily news and analysis podcast in existence.
Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is also a monthly columnist for Commentary magazine, one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and senior editor at The New Atlantis.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: It is Wednesday, November 5th, and this is the 11th installment of The Good Fight Club. Today, I am delighted to be rejoined by my friend Mike Pesca, who is the host of the excellent daily podcast The Gist. I have, for the second time on the podcast but for the first time on The Good Fight Club, Christine Rosen, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and not the Heritage Foundation. I have, for the first time—in either The Good Fight Club or the podcast as a whole—my dear colleague Sam Kahn, who is a frequent voice in the pages of Persuasion, of which he is an editor, as well as the author of the Castalia Substack.
We are recording this on the morning after the mid-midterms of 2025, in which Democrats did very well across the board, winning all statewide races in Virginia and a very good result in the House of Delegates there. They also won, after some trepidation, the gubernatorial race in New Jersey, and of course the Democratic nominee, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, won the mayoral race in New York City. Mike, what do you make of these elections?
Mike Pesca: I think that though it was expected that the Democrats would win, perhaps we retroactively discredit some of the coverage beforehand. Well, the race looks close in New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli making inroads. Not really. The Harris–Walz ticket won by only six points in New Jersey in the presidential election, if you want to take that as a baseline, and Mikie Sherrill won by 13 against Ciattarelli. So maybe we could say, well, New Jersey is a Democratic state. Two days ago, you could come across dozens of stories about the supposedly close race. It was not close in Virginia, nor was it close in the Virginia down-ballot races that had some controversy.
Other races, like in Maine—which is a very purple state, as we know, with Susan Collins being the senator there—very roundly rejected a requirement to bring IDs to the polls. In California, with their Proposition 50, there will be redistricting. For someone like me, who, if I had to choose, would definitely say Democrat over Republican but is mostly a centrist, there was a veering away from pure radicalism when given the choice.
I will just say that although Mamdani has a mandate, it is a 10-point mandate. Around 10% was the margin of victory, so maybe that will rein him in a little rather than him thinking that he has all New Yorkers behind him. That is one data point.
The other I would point to did not get as much coverage, but I was interested—and concerned—by the Seattle mayor’s race, where a woman named Katie Wilson, not a governor or even a former state senator, was an activist. She has run a nonprofit organization with no employees. In the primary, she beat the incumbent Mayor Harrell by 10 points, and it looked like she, without any experience and with very left-wing ideas, was going to be mayor. But not so right now. Harrell has a pretty decent lead, and that could change, but it looks like for the first time—in, I think, four consecutive elections—the incumbent mayor of Seattle will win. He is not that popular, but the idea that the electorate, especially in very blue places, is going to react as resoundingly as it can in as firm an anti-Trump direction as possible, is not entirely true.
I do not care about centrism, but I do care about rationality and moderation, and there is hope for those two things.
Mounk: Christine, are Democrats in array to the extent that Mike is telling us? Should this make Democrats optimistic about their ability to make big inroads in the House of Representatives in the midterms and winning the presidential elections in 2028? Or could this be a Pyrrhic victory?
Christine Rosen: I think they do have reason to be optimistic, and the Republicans have reasons for concern, mainly because of two data points that struck me in these elections. One is that in places like New Jersey and Virginia, where a non-college-educated, nonwhite population had voted for Trump in 2024, they swung back to the Democrats this time. Those are the voters who told pollsters their key concern was not the culture war or foreign policy, but kitchen-table economic issues. Those were the things that I think Spanberger, in particular, spoke to on the campaign trail very effectively. That raises alarms for Republicans who think that with Trump not on the ballot next time—and that very fragile but interesting coalition he built in the last election—they have to win those voters back.
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The other thing that was really striking to me was the gender divide among young people. Young women were overwhelmingly voting blue in these elections, most remarkably in New York City, but also in Virginia and New Jersey. That suggests another thing: the Republican coalition is not reaching those women, and they should probably think about why. Both of those things, looking ahead to 2026 and then to 2028, are issues the Republican Party has to be concerned about.
The reaction of Trump to this election was also notable. First, he claimed that the California ballot initiative might have been fraudulent. Then he stamped his feet and said, “Well, the reason you lost is that I wasn’t on the ballot,” which actually is true as a matter of politics but very disheartening if you are a Republican looking at next year. His demands for loyalty, his continuing government shutdown, and some of the statements he has made about that suggest to me that Republicans are going to have to start thinking about whether to treat this man who has dominated their politics for the last decade as a lame duck—and what the risks of that might be—or whether to continue on the loyalty train, and what that will do in the midterms.
Mounk: Sam, you wrote a pretty downcast piece about Zohran Mamdani a few days ago, published in Persuasion. You then said that his victory speech reconciled you to him somewhat, you told me earlier today. What are we to make of Mamdani? What will his mayoralty mean for New York City? Is he, as so many media outlets in the United States and especially in Europe are saying, the future of the Democratic Party?
Sam Kahn: I have jumped on the bandwagon a little bit since writing my anti-Mamdani piece. I really have two minds about him. First, he is really charismatic. I was very impressed by the victory speech; it hit all the right notes. He probably did that throughout the campaign. In this era, what matters far more than anything else—more than policy—is personality politics. To some extent, Trump and Obama proved it in different ways. If you have the gift for this, then you kind of deserve to be the standard-bearer for your party in some way, and he has that gift. It is very hard to take that away from him.
On the other hand, for one thing, I am like the last Andrew Cuomo fan. I thought he was an excellent governor. I thought he really proved something in 2020 when he took the national stage from Trump at a critical moment. I understand that he is kind of damaged goods now, but basically, I felt that New York City would be lucky to have him. I was surprised that he did as poorly as he did. If he had won, that would have really sent a message that the Democrats had gotten over the woke era, that they were back to the center, that they had a guy who really radiates authority, knows what he is doing, and has managerial experience.
Unfortunately, with Mamdani, I am sure he will be fine as a mayor. New York City is ungovernable anyway, so he will be no worse than his predecessors. But he is really a target, and being mayor of New York is actually the worst possible position to be that target because it means he cannot really speak to a national audience, while the Fox News crowd can focus on him. So I think it is a real liability for 2026, unfortunately.
Mounk: I have to say that I have been of two minds about this election in New York and the broader election over the last few days. I am very glad the Democrats are in array. It is very important for them to be in a good position to take back the House of Representatives and at least make inroads in the Senate in the general midterms next year. I also worry that they may take the wrong lesson from this election and think that they are on a better path than they might be.
Mamdani is somebody with whom I am predisposed to have deep disagreements on policy and other things. I do not think that a rent-freeze in New York is actually going to accomplish anything. You already have deep underinvestment in those apartments and that housing because it is not financially rewarding to landlords. So we basically leave a lot of these apartments languishing, and people live under very poor conditions in many of them. I do not think that Citibank grocery stores are going to improve on the many supermarkets and bodegas in New York City. I roll my eyes at many proclamations that he is the genuine voice of the marginalized and underserved in New York.
It is very striking that he did extremely well in neighborhoods like Prospect Heights, where I am based. He did extremely well in Morningside Heights, where I lived for many years, close to Columbia University. He did much worse in many of the outlying boroughs. There is an incredible cross-tab from the exit poll in which he does better among New Yorkers who make more than $100,000 a year than among New Yorkers who make less than $100,000 a year. He does better among New Yorkers who rent in the private market than among those who live in rent-stabilized housing, who would actually have the most immediate benefit from some of his proposals.
So I really am not predisposed to think that he is a wonderful thing. I have to say, though, conversely, when I look at someone like Abigail Spanberger, who is a center-left moderate holding many of the views that I hold, I wish her every success as governor of Virginia. Having said that, if you watch the victory speech of Abigail Spanberger and her debate performance, and then you watch Zohran Mamdani’s debate performance and victory speech, it is very hard not to think that Mamdani is onto something. There is something so lifeless and bloodless in the moderates in the Democratic Party—so scared of their own shadow, so incapable of clearly stating their positions on important issues, speaking in consultant-led platitudes—that it is very hard to cheer them on.
Mamdani, who stands for a lot of things I do not agree with, has an authenticity and a charm that, despite my disagreements with him, speaks to me. I am worried that Democrats seem to be stuck between candidates like Mamdani and AOC, and others who are far too far to the left to be credible national candidates. They can do well in a city like New York, but they are not going to be a good brand for Democrats in the midterms next year or in 2028. Moderates like Spanberger, with whom I agree on a lot, just do not seem to be compelling candidates and are going to be weak for other reasons. Mike, am I talking myself into too much pessimism here?
Pesca: I think that Mamdani has charm but not authenticity. In fact, he has so much charm that he has convinced a smart guy like you that he might have authenticity. There was a phrase you used that told me a lot about whether he is the future of the Democratic Party: “In Europe, they think so.” I would look at that as a somewhat negative indicator. Why would Mamdani be the future? He got a million votes; Spanberger got two million votes. No one is saying that Spanberger is going to run for president or be the future, but we think that she has a good chance to govern well. I do not think that Mamdani is going to get most of his proposals through, or that the ones he gets through will be particularly sound. City-run grocery stores—one in each borough—might sell a melon to consumers for three dollars, but it will cost taxpayers twelve.
Mamdani is great at speeches, ideas, smiling, and, to give him credit, putting his finger on the mood of the electorate and how communication works now. But as you said, he has the misfortune of being in a role where he actually has to deliver governance. This is one of the things about AOC. She is great at what she does, but what she does is not governing. Since Mamdani will be asked to govern, I think that will hurt his overall standing.
I do think you are right: this is where American politics are. The man or woman who speaks well, performs well on vertical videos, and understands color schemes and presentation will often thrive. But in terms of delivering actual policies—and this is not just wonkery—that still correlates with appeal, not just talking about ideas but implementing them. Do you not think that one of the reasons soaring rhetoric connects so easily is that it is directly correlated with the impossibility of many of those programs working? That cannot be overstated. A politician gets much credit if they never have to put their policies into practice, as Bernie Sanders has not had to. But now that Mamdani has to, we will get a little bit of a taste of the pudding.
Rosen: I think that, plus Sam’s earlier point about well-done performative politics, shows that the right and the left have now both experienced this. There is a vast middle in this country, and I think you saw them turn out in the Virginia election in particular. Even though you have this milquetoast consultant-speak coming out of Spanberger’s mouth, they want that because, after the experience of the last two decades, they have started to say, we just want things to work again. Just make things work.
Mamdani will have a huge challenge with that. He already has Kathy Hochul on the record saying that most of the things he is promising are not going to happen. She is not going to raise taxes to give him the money to do many of those schemes. In the rest of the country, people just want things to get done. They are worried about how much their groceries cost and what the tariff regime is going to do, which is before the court today as we are recording this.
The inconsistency and capriciousness of so many political leaders on the left and the right these days only go so far. That is where I think both Mike and Sam are onto something about performativeness being initially appealing, but voters are very swiftly judging on results. That is as our system should work, I think.
Kahn: Yeah, I think the results, in a way, do not matter too much. There are a few things that we kind of know are going to happen. One is that he will be okay. He will not be able to deliver on many of the things he promised, but whatever. De Blasio was a weak mayor. Eric Adams was a weak mayor. These things do not really spread that far beyond New York. There was a mayor in the forties who, I think at one point, kind of walked off and sought asylum in Mexico because it was such a difficult job. That is mostly a true story. It was after he had finished his term.
Mamdani is savvy enough that he will walk back from some of it. What matters with him is going to be crime. I think everybody is going to be looking to see whether crime spikes in New York City. If he does anything in the direction of abolishing the police or some of the decriminalization policies that happened on the West Coast, that will be a huge target for MAGA to go after.
I think we know how he is going to play out nationally. It will be, as Mike said, basically the same thing as AOC. It will rile up the left, he will get his soundbites out there, but there will also be a lot from the other side that will make him an easy target.
There are a couple of really interesting things with this. I think there is a kind of schism coming within the Democratic Party. Spanberger versus Mamdani is a good way to talk about it. It feels like the Democrats are giving up on the Third Way in a sense, going back to the politics of the seventies or eighties. I heard a lot of that in Mamdani’s speech—forget about caution, return to this socialist-tinged, working-class ideal. That is pretty interesting.
I also think Israel is going to become a real schismatic point for the Democrats because of Mamdani globalizing the Intifada and saying he is going to arrest Netanyahu if he shows up in New York. It has not yet been so nationally divisive for the party, but I feel like that is coming in the next few years, and it may be hugely disruptive for them.
Mounk: Look, I think perhaps our disagreement is less about Mamdani than it is about the state of the moderates in the Democratic Party. How you feel about that depends a little on what you think the goal is. To me, the goal is that you see Donald Trump and his followers, who I think represent a serious danger to the American Republic. You see that this is not a unique American moment; if you look at the polls right now, you have right-wing populist movements—many less extreme than Trump, some more extreme than Trump—leading in the polls in Britain, France, Germany, and many other countries across Europe.
To me, the question is: what does it take to get out of this not just political moment, but political era? To do that, you need a set of moderate politicians who are able to do two things at the same time: have some authentic, broad appeal that makes people excited about them, and distance themselves from extreme positions that will drive many swing voters into the hands of these authoritarian populists.
Mamdani, for all your complaints about his lack of genuine authenticity and its somewhat manufactured nature, has something. You look at the victory speech—I was surprised by how much he, I think quite consciously, emulated Obama in various ways. You can say that it is all a smart, clever trick or whatever, but I get through that speech without boredom. Even as my brain tells me I do not agree, I think, all right, here is something. I try to watch Spanberger’s speech all the way through—it is a challenge.
Then there are other people who have a set of policy positions that work, or that work somewhat better at least, and have that moderation. Spanberger is not going to scare anybody, but that may be enough in 2028, and that is not nothing. I do not mean Spanberger personally, but some candidate like her. Trump is doing enough crazy stuff that people are going to be really tired, and you see key voting blocs coming back to the Democratic Party, at least on a temporary basis. Younger voters, Latinos, and others who made Trump president in 2024 are not as enchanted by him. It may not end up being that hard to win the 2028 election for Democrats.
Rosen: Trump will not be on the ballot in 2028. In 2026, I think you are right. Democratic turnout in all these elections was massive for an off-year, odd-year election—and it bodes well for them for 2026. The anti-Trump message will remain. They will look at the nominee, JD Vance, and obviously label him Trump 2.0. But there is a need there, and that struggle between the Spanberger’s “I will govern reasonably” message and the charisma of a Mamdani is real—he invoked Eugene Debs too.
I am sure that sent lots of people to check who Eugene Debs was. He was unabashed about being a socialist, but he is not in a socialist country, and he cannot make this country socialist. Eugene Debs learned that over and over again running for president and in prison. How Mamdani will think about how to tone that message, we will see. He is a little like Obama in the sense of charisma and the ability to draw and keep a crowd, but I think he is much less savvy politically in the long term in thinking about how to hone his message going forward.
Pesca: Yascha, Spanberger is not a great moderate communicator or an inspiring person, but moderates who are plausibly on the short list of people who could be the Democratic nominee do this well, depending on your taste. Buttigieg at least strikes chords in me, and Jon Ossoff, and, talking about Obama, Josh Shapiro—there is talent there, people who can communicate. I just think that it used to be more true that delivering for a politician was a pathway to success. Now I think that when we elect politicians, we essentially elect people who are critics.
Trump always does this. He criticizes as if he is an outsider when he is the most powerful man in the world and actually runs the agencies he seems to be nitpicking. But we reward someone who best describes the problem these days. If you have a track record of having had to deal with the problem, it is going to hurt you.
Look at Gavin Newsom. If Gavin Newsom did not have a state to run but had a PR shop to run, or had a Senate seat where we do not expect results—especially if your party is not in power—if Gavin Newsom were just a guy with a lot of access to social media and the camera, he would be doing much better than he does, because he is saddled with the actual facts of misgovernance to a large degree in that state. That, I think, is the position Mamdani is going to be in.
I just need to say this: I too was a Cuomo backer in terms of his tenure as governor being good. He ran such a bad campaign. He ran out of things to say. Articulate the three ideas he had—you could not do that. He tried to beat something with nothing, although the nothing was, “I’ll add 5,000 more cops,” at a time when crime is not bad and people rank it as a low concern.
The Cuomo of governing, when he was the first governor to see gay marriage passed, clearly has lost many miles off his fastball. Now I guess he is moving to Florida, or at least that is what he says he is going to do.
Mounk: I am going to end this segment with the stupidest thing you can do as a commentator, which is to make a point estimate about what is going to happen in American politics. Obviously, I do not actually think this precise scenario is going to play out, but if I had to give you one scenario of how the next ten years are going to unfold right now, I would say that we end up with Democratic nominee and running mate Gavin Newsom and Abigail Spanberger in 2028. They narrowly win against JD Vance, become quite unpopular relatively quickly, and Donald Trump Jr. becomes president in 2032. That is why I am pessimistic, and hopefully I am wrong. I am sure to be wrong about this. I think that is a 10% likelihood, but I think it is as likely as any other scenario I can think of right now.
Christine, a lot of people have been biting their tongues at a rival think tank to yours in Washington, D.C. There was a complicated series of events in which Tucker Carlson—who, as Damon Linker argued in Persuasion, has become the main conduit for antisemites to become semi-respectable in American life—invited Nick Fuentes, the leader of the Groyper movement and someone with openly racist and antisemitic views, onto his show. He gave him a very friendly interview and received some criticism for it. At that point, the head of the Heritage Foundation—the most influential think tank on the American right today, certainly within the Trump movement—defended Carlson’s choice to do so.
Heritage has a one-voice policy, which makes it very difficult for employees of the think tank to publicly disagree with the president or other members of Heritage. A few fellows and board members have subtly undercut the president of Heritage by posting memes such as one showing a person standing up courageously to say an obvious truth, captioned “Nazis are bad.” Robert George, the distinguished political philosopher at Princeton and a board member of Heritage, wrote a social media post that was reprinted by National Review, which implicitly but quite clearly distanced himself from this defense of Carlson.
What is going on at Heritage, and what does that tell us about the mainstreaming of antisemitism and other kinds of sewer ideologies on the American right and far right today?
Rosen: A couple of thoughts. First, I have never been more grateful that my employer has never had a one-voice policy. I argue with my colleagues publicly and privately almost daily, and I appreciate that. We have a lot more freewheeling discussion and debate. I think a lot of our work is, in that sense, more trusted. The Heritage policy has been around a long time, but it has been enforced in a particular way since Kevin Roberts became the president.
A lot of people left when he first came on because of how that policy was starting to be enforced with regard to the first Trump administration. What has broken out into the open here is, I think, a really overdue but necessary bit of hygiene on the right. Antisemitism among what is now called the Groyper movement—but basically the online right—has been going on for quite some time. I can recall emails I received during the first Trump administration because I write for a Jewish conservative magazine that contained absolutely toxic antisemitism.
What Kevin Roberts did was to endorse Tucker Carlson, and this is why I think he should no longer be the leader of a major conservative institution. I hope the board removes him. He is giving an endorsement to Tucker Carlson, who is the preeminent launderer of toxic ideas now—not just on the right, but in general. He is not just antisemitic; he is anti-American. He is pro-Russia and pro-Iran. The people he has on his show and the ideas he is trying to mainstream are toxic. These are bad ideas. He has every right to have these people on—he has every right to have Fuentes on. I am, as you know, a free speech absolutist on this.
But what is happening here is a conservative institution endorsing him for doing that. It is not about deplatforming, however much Kevin Roberts of Heritage wants to claim it is. It is about signaling very loudly to everyone on the right that they want to mainstream these figures because they think they need them in their coalition. They believe they need all these angry, racist, antisemitic, misogynistic people on their side. A lot of people on the right quickly and loudly said no. Not enough, although I will point out that the Speaker of the House, the leader of the Senate, and many other elected officials on the right—Josh Hawley recently said something, too—stated that this is not politics. Ted Cruz did as well. You know who did not say anything? The president or the vice president.
I do think, especially around Vance, there is a strange sort of winking and nodding to that group, and there has been since the last election. But I would not say it is just a problem on the right. Antisemitism is also a serious problem on the left. The irony is that I do not think it would be unusual at all to see someone like Tucker Carlson have someone like Mamdani on his show to talk about, say, government-run grocery stores. Tucker liked them in Russia; maybe he would like them there.
The point is that this has been a clarifying moment for many on the right who did not want to see that problem for a long time, and now they have to speak out. I think Robbie George’s statement was very effective. I wish he had actually called out Tucker Carlson in that statement. Tucker is someone many of us used to work with back in The Weekly Standard days. His journey is something that many have pretended not to see for a very long time, but it is past time to call out what he is doing, what he is saying, and the people he is platforming and promoting, and to say that these ideas do not belong anywhere in tolerable conservative movements.
The fact that a president of a conservative institution like Heritage did not seem to think it was a big deal to endorse that makes me appalled, though I am heartened by the fact that this is what everyone on the right has been arguing about for the last few weeks. That shows me there is still a line that cannot be crossed, and I hope we police that line. Not a free speech line, not a deplatforming or cancellation line—that is not what this is about. This is about ideas that are so far outside the mainstream, they should not be tolerated by anyone.
Pesca: I think a one-voice policy for a think tank makes about as much sense as a one-voice policy for an opera company. You necessarily get a degraded product. You cannot even be or call yourself a think tank if you have a one-voice policy, right? You are just a megaphone. If the megaphone gets wrangled away by the most odious elements in our society, you are spewing garbage, which is exactly the case.
So these are my thoughts on it. I totally echo Christine’s being appalled by all this. As far as analysis, I will just talk about two things. One is Richard Hanania—he was or is a heterodox, interesting thinker. He had some scandals in his past and used to be quite right wing. He had an interesting observation, which is maybe something to consider. Democrats once made their entire moral universe center around oppressed minorities, so one could not expect them to stand up to pushy black trans activists around the year 2020. The equivalent for the right now is the young male who is racist, angry, and sexually frustrated—the Groyper. People like Trump and Vance cannot denounce him. That argument suggests that the way the parties and ideological movements are structured allows this stuff to happen.
The other thing I would say is that when you have a “no enemies to the right” or “no enemies to the left” policy, it is fine to have that secretly and not to announce it. But once it is known, it becomes an incentive. Everyone on the right will know there will be no opposition to them, or everyone on the far left will think the same. There are no immunities in the body to stop it, and inevitably we will get the outpouring of the worst, most radical ideology once we have told the world that we will do nothing to stop it. Some of that phenomenon is playing out now.
Kahn: I am just shocked that there is a line. I really am. I do not know why it would be this as opposed to anything else that Trump has been doing. My sense, looking at it from basically the other side of the aisle, is that there are these fantasies on the left, among liberals, of MAGA pulling itself apart. I think that is what is happening with the Epstein files. This seems to be one of those moments where people think there will be some third rail they will hit and the whole thing will disintegrate. I just do not think it will.
I think the Republicans have united so completely behind Trump. He is, in terms of handling the mass media side of it, the Putin of this. He is so on point. He has everybody with him. I would be very surprised if this turns into anything more than an intramural scrimmage.
Mounk: I do not think this is a question about whether Republicans or conservatives are going to draw a line between themselves and Trump. That boat has sailed. I think the question is how far Trump and Vance, importantly, are going to go in incorporating the far end of the right into their coalition. They seem to be on the fence about that.
We have seen some people whom Christine mentioned, including elected officials, probably at some cost to themselves, say that this is not where they are willing to go. Who knew that Ted Cruz was a man of principle? In many cases he is not, but on this particular issue, he at least for now appears to have said that it is not where he is willing to go.
I do not think that Trump himself is there. He has always played with racism in various ways and sometimes with antisemitic tropes, but he is not himself a Groyper. The question is whether, in a year or two or three, Trump or Vance will actually talk like a Groyper. Are they going to campaign with somebody like Nick Fuentes? I know that Trump, I believe, had dinner with Fuentes at some point at Mar-a-Lago. There is a difference between playing footsie with that part of the right and fully embracing them in the way that Tucker Carlson has. That, to me, is the real stake of this moment.
Rosen: Some partial hints as to what the answer to that question might be had already come before this Heritage scandal. The young Republicans who were trading antisemitic and Nazi memes all around their chat rooms and saying “ha ha ha, isn’t this funny”—when that was exposed, J.D. Vance said, “It’s just kids being kids.” These were men in their thirties, men and women, I should say, in this chat group. These were adults, many of them in positions of political responsibility.
I really mark that as a moment where he failed in his position as a leader. Because if he is the next generation, if he is the one to carry MAGA forward and somehow make this a real political movement rather than just a cult of personality around Trump, then he has to start drawing lines all the time. He drew a very clear line there—and that line was to downplay it and call it a joke, to say, aren’t you in on the joke? That is exactly how all these Groypers talk about anything when they are exposed for their racism and antisemitism. That younger generation is the one he is courting right now, and it worries me that he has not drawn that line.
Mounk: There may be an important structural difference between Trump and Vance. The scary thing about Trump is the tremendous personal loyalty that a part of the American population has to him. That is what allows him to be tremendously corrupt and to attack American institutions with abandon. There is also one positive side to that, which is that it makes him very flexible. Since the loyalty people have to him is a personal bond, they will go along with him.
I think it actually makes it easier for Trump, if he chooses, to say, these people are a little nuts. They are not really part of our coalition. Vance does not have that personal connection to the voters. Perhaps he will be able to build it. I am not sure that he ever will. If he does not, then he will need to function as a kind of coalitional political leader who is very worried about any one voice or influential media figure he might lose.
With very few exceptions, the biggest influencers on the right know they can never go against Trump because their audiences have such tremendous personal loyalty to him. They can absolutely go against J.D. Vance. So he is going to be afraid of losing Tucker Carlson, of losing Nick Fuentes. That might make Vance more susceptible to those disgusting calculations.
Rosen: He’ll push out of his coalition people who would have stayed had he not invited those guys in. He’ll lose; there’s a subtraction problem here too.
Pesca: That’s always the question. We saw that with Tucker Carlson, when he and Trump got into the spat about the definition of making America great and putting America first. Trump shut that down and said, I invented that. I get to define what putting America first is. Trump has always had the calculation that if you stand with him, he will not criticize you. That may be instinct, but it has served him well. It really has.
You could point to one or two cases, such as when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” His future actions do show that he likes having a quasi–Brown Shirt military organization at his beck and call. It is true that Trump has always said, I’m not going to have enemies from within. I’m not going to cast out people who support me. That works for Trump for the reasons that you articulated.
Then you talked about why that might not work for Vance, but your calculation was, isn’t it the case that if you allow the Groypers in, Fuentes in, you will appall other people? I don’t know if that is the case. It’s not the case with Trump, because he has the cult of personality. It’s easy for people of our mindset and morals to think that an association with Nick Fuentes is going to hurt you. But look at the million-plus people who follow him. They may see him as a couple of things: a truth-teller on this dangerous issue of Israel where no one is allowed to tell the truth, a plain speaker, and someone who, like Trump, says offensive things. That alone is seen as funny or gives credibility or appeals to a portion of the coalition—very young guys who are online and otherwise ungettable. I’m not 100% sure that even for a non-Trump politician, toe-touching with these horrible people is a net negative, given where Republicans are today.
Kahn: It feels like a microcosm of the whole thing that we still can’t figure out whether Trump in aggregate is an edgelord or serious about what he’s doing. That’s the whole thing with Fuentes. It’s all edgelord stuff. It’s all a big joke. Damon Linker’s piece was very good about that. Then there’s this moment when you see the bottom of the pool, and it feels like this cosplaying, retro Nazi stuff.
We spent basically eight years trying to figure it out. I think Russians, in a similar case, spent sixteen or twenty years trying to figure it out with Putin—what was going on, whether it was all about tweaking the opposition, holding onto power, getting as many yachts as you could, or whether one day you’re suddenly going to invade Ukraine. I think with Trump, we’re starting to see that he is more serious than we thought at the beginning. Maybe this is one of these moments when these guys really are willing to go there, even if they’re sort of joking, but they’re also sort of not.
Rosen: To that point, there’s a big mistake on the right. They’re mistaking saying outrageous, unspeakable things as acts of courage. It’s like, as Mike said, “No one else can talk about this, but I am brave and bold and courageous enough to say it.” It’s not courage that these people are exhibiting. You’re just saying something horrible, and you shouldn’t be doing that.
Mounk: That seems like a fitting conclusion to this part of the conversation. This is one of the topics where I find it really hard to know where we’re going to be in two or three years. I’m dreading where we might be in two or three years, but we’ll have to follow this story in future Good Fight Clubs.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Christine, Sam, and Mike reflect on Dick Cheney’s legacy and the impact of the Iraq War. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
