In this week’s conversation, Ed Luce, Russ Muirhead, Lauren Harper Pope, and Yascha Mounk discuss the recent Saudi visit and what it says about Donald Trump’s broader foreign policy, the direction of the MAGA movement, and the fallout in the Democratic Party from Marie Gluesenkamp Perez challenging Chuy Garcia’s succession scheme.
Edward Luce is the U.S. national editor and a columnist at the Financial Times, and the author of Zbig: The life of Zbig Brzezinski: America’s Great Power Prophet.
Russell Muirhead teaches Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author, with Nancy Rosenblum, of Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos. He serves in the New Hampshire House of Representatives where he focuses on election law.
Lauren Harper Pope is a Welcome Co-Founder working to depolarize American politics and strengthen a centrist faction of the Democratic Party that wins and governs responsibly through work with The Welcome Party (c4), WelcomePAC, and The Welcome Democracy Institute (c3). Lauren leads the coordinated (hard side) program for WelcomePAC, and she writes at WelcomeStack.org.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Welcome to the twelfth installment of the Good Fight Club. I have an extra special panel for you today. We have Edward Luce, who is the U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times and the author of Zbig, an excellent new biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski. We have Russell Muirhead, who teaches political theory and politics at Dartmouth College. He serves in the New Hampshire Legislature and is the co-author, with one of my thesis advisors, Nancy Rosenblum, of the book Un-Governing. Last but not least, we have Lauren Harper Pope, who is the co-founder of Welcome, an organization fighting for a more moderate, centrist Democratic Party capable of winning elections.
Russ, we have had yet one more round of indignity from the Oval Office. The visit of MBS, the leader of Saudi Arabia, was welcomed very warmly to the White House. Donald Trump even became angry about journalists asking questions about Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered a number of years ago.
Russell Muirhead: We should not be surprised anymore. On the other hand, it is essential to maintain an ability to be shocked because it is the only thing that allows us to maintain elemental values. I was shocked again when Donald Trump dismissed any concern about the brutal murder of the journalist, Washington Post columnist Khashoggi, in 2018 by the Saudi regime. When asked about it by an ABC reporter, he was indignant. He attacked ABC and the reporter, and he brushed off the whole event, saying, things happen. There are a lot of people who did not like this guy. It was a complete rejection of any value of a free press or of the freedom of reporters to ask questions.
We all understand that in the international world you have to be willing to sit down with unsavory characters. The United States has to do business at some level with Saudi Arabia. We are not too pure for that. It is possible to do that and also maintain some elemental sense of what makes us who we are. That is what we saw once again fed into the wood chipper.
Edward Luce: I could not agree more. I would add to Russell’s point about what makes us who we are. What we have become, I think, was reflected in the guest list for the state dinner that Trump hosted for MBS. Elon Musk is now back in favor, but Donald Jr. was there. Most of the plutocracy was there. Like any deals the Trump administration does with other patrimonial regimes, this is driven by business. The distinction between public and private has been obliterated. Trump is really like, l’état, c’est moi. If you want to do deals with him, you have to operate in the same way.
We are in the strange phenomenon of regimes that are run by ruling families finding it far easier to do business with the Trump administration than regimes that follow the rule of law. Mark Carney cannot offer to buy two billion dollars’ worth of stablecoin and push it through the Trump and Wyckoff kids’ crypto vehicle. The Qataris can do that. The Saudis can do that. The Pakistanis can do that. The Indians cannot. The regimes that get on well with Trump are the ones where l’état, c’est them. That is not who we were, but for the time being that is who we are.
Muirhead: This is the thing. It is the obliteration of what you could call a state. A state is an impersonal thing that you serve, and it has its own interests independent of any individual. It is the recreation of a realm, a personal realm. You think it is all about one person, the president. If that president is displaced, then we will go back to normal politics where we have a state again. We may never have a state like the one we used to have. It is very likely that whoever succeeds this president will inherit this realm and perhaps a mentality of the realm. There is no guarantee that if a Democrat were president, they would bring back a sense of the state.
Lauren Harper Pope: Yeah, I appreciate Russell’s comments about states and statesmanship. One of my buddies, Daniel Stead, was heading up an effort called Leading to Govern. He is working with local legislators like Future Caucus and New Deal Leaders to reestablish what it means to govern and to have a sense of statesmanship within political parties and government. When the left has a tendency to completely cancel people, and the right tends to completely overlook people’s genuine shortcomings and actual offenses and illegitimacies, we forsake balance. That produces not only political polarization, but statesmanship-based political polarization. You either completely let someone go or you embrace them fully. There needs to be a restoration of balance in how we approach these sad and delicate situations.
Muirhead: I’m with you, Lauren. I didn’t know Dan Stead was working on that. That sounds really cool. It is also the idea of a public—something that not just statesmen but ordinary politicians serve, something they put themselves into the service of, as opposed to a person who issues decrees. When I look at young people today, the only politics they have ever seen is a politics of decree, a politics of the strongman. That is why I say there is no guarantee that we get all of this back: a sense of the public, a sense of what a state is, an idea of what governing means.
Mounk: How do we make sense of Trump’s foreign policy more broadly? It feels like at the beginning there were a bunch of initiatives from Trump. He seemed to have this idea of taking over the Panama Canal and Greenland. All of that has been slightly forgotten now. He has vacillated a bunch on things like Ukraine. As we’re recording this on Thursday morning US time, it looks as though the US may force Ukraine to sign up to a rather unfavorable peace deal, but details are sparse and it’s unclear exactly what’s going to happen. A lot seems rather reactive. Is there a coherent Trump policy here? Is it all just in the interest of Trump’s political standing and his personal wealth? Is it just driven by the desire to overturn the foreign policy consensus in every possible way? What is actually going on here?
Muirhead: What we see in foreign policy is, on the one hand, a policy revolution. America First is a genuine change from the commitment to a kind of liberal international order. It obviously elevates the idea of zero-sum relations. We’re either winning or losing in all of our relations with every other country as opposed to the liberal idea that the entire world can become more prosperous, more free, and more secure simultaneously. So we’re getting something really different there.
On the other hand, we’re also getting a degradation of the policy state. It’s not clear we have a foreign policy at all. What we have is a very powerful person, the most powerful person in the world, issuing a set of decrees, entering into a range of ad hoc deals, whether it’s Cambodia and Thailand, Rwanda and the Congo, whether it’s Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Israel or Ukraine and Russia. It’s not clear that any of these deals hold, that they reflect any set of principles, or that there’s any institution that will maintain the enforcement of them.
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Donald Trump’s getting very high marks for foreign policy. This is where he’s succeeding in the eyes of the public in the most definitive way. His approval ratings are very high. So I think we’re going to see a lot more ambition and action. He’s aching for a Nobel Prize. The question is whether the United States of America has any kind of genuine policy with respect to the international world or whether we have decrees that reflect the latest needs and moods of the great leader.
Mounk: Do you see any coherence in Trump’s foreign policy, anything that we can make sense of? I had different theories at different times. Over the first nine months, I used to argue, for example, that one way of making sense of it is that he sees the world in terms of spheres of influence. He wants to let other people do whatever they want in their sphere of influence, but he feels that the United States should take advantage of its own sphere of influence much more so than it has done historically. I certainly think that that is part of it and perhaps that explains why he doesn’t really care about what MBS does in Saudi Arabia, certainly, and the region more broadly, as long as he doesn’t interfere with American interests. I’m not sure that these attempts to try and make sense of it in a coherent way really work that well.
Luce: They call it “sane washing.” To a certain extent, I agree. There is a very crude “Kissinger spheres of interest” about Trump. But tariffs are not just his key economic policy. Tariffs are at the heart of his foreign policy, and tariffs are a tool of leverage to get transactional deals.
Those deals make no distinction between public and private. The family is being enriched. That is a constant. We have no China policy. There is no coherent China policy, but the most significant foreign policy event of 2025, in my view, was Trump’s de facto surrender in this truce that he agreed with Xi Jinping in Busan at the G20 in South Korea.
It was an acknowledgement that, at least for the time being, that China has a bigger bazooka, namely its stranglehold on rare earth, than the United States, namely its ability to cut off access to the American domestic market. That was a watershed moment that does not cast much light on what Trump’s foreign policy philosophy is. I do not think he has a foreign policy philosophy. The one thing I would ask Russell—I agree with everything you’ve said, Russell—is whether there is some degree of continuity in terms of the break from free trade, in terms of not liking forever wars, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. There is some continuity with Biden.
Muirhead: Trump has in many respects George McGovern’s foreign policy. He hates being engaged in foreign wars. He doesn’t mind green lighting an attack on Tehran, but he doesn’t want to be in foreign wars. He is very skeptical about the international footprint of the American military. He is much more comfortable deploying the American military in Charlotte, North Carolina than deploying it in Europe. I don’t know if it’s proper to call him on the right or on the left. He is certainly authoritarian, but wherever he is, there is a kind of alignment with certain left views of American foreign policy over the last 50 years and the left’s criticism of America’s imperialistic international footprint.
His tariff policy has more in common with Bernie Sanders’ economic policies than with Larry Summers or the traditional policies of the Republican Party. That is where there is sometimes a bewildering aspect to the policy revolution that we’re witnessing, alongside the degradation of a policy state and elemental institutions of government.
One other element is massive increases in defense spending. Thirteen percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget, which is not insignificant, alongside a purging of generals. Twenty-four generals have been fired or sidelined, often without any explanation. Sometimes there is a story that goes up on right-wing social media and Hegseth fires a general. Anyone who worked in the office of former General Mark Milley has had their career stalled or has been fired.
The phrase he used in his first term was “my generals.” It was a locution then. Now that is being put into practice. You have to factor that into the idea that there is not necessarily foreign policy when this military instrument of foreign policy is being rendered into an instrument of personal command.
Mounk: All of this is happening against the background of an increasingly open debate about the direction of the MAGA movement and perhaps who might become the successor of Donald J. Trump. There is a feeling, some people are saying, of Trump becoming a lame duck. I think that is vastly overstated, but at least people are starting to position themselves and position the movement for what might come once he is longer in office.
Ed, talk us through this rollicking and at times rather scary debate about what the Republican Party might become after Trump.
Luce: There are many strands to it, but the key shift here that we have seen since the off-year elections in New York and Virginia and elsewhere is that for a full decade the Republican line has been whatever Trump says goes. He has an iron grip over this party. The party is essentially a Trump cult. If you oppose Trump, Trump will vaporize you like a boat in the Caribbean.
That has changed quite dramatically. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tom Massie, Lauren Boebert, and Laura Ingraham as an interviewer on Fox News are asking much tougher questions than the mainstream media. We are seeing Republicans take on Trump not from the old party, not from the Rob Portman, Mitt Romney portion of the party, which is defunct, but from the MAGA perspective, saying he is departing from MAGA. One of their criticisms is you have not released the Epstein files. Another is you are becoming a globalist. Another is you are hanging out with foreigners, and you seem to like their company more than your own rally goers and your own base.
The fact that in order to try to stop the discharge petition from passing to release the Epstein files he brings in Lauren Boebert to the Situation Room as one of the four Republican votes, trying to get her to reverse her position, and fails, is significant. That is as intimidating and awe-inspiring a setting as a president can ask a lone legislator to face, and she stuck to her guns. I am no fan of Lauren Boebert, and I am no fan of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the courage they have displayed has paid off. That dispelled a certain dark magical Trump grip over the party, and it is very hard to restore what he had before. They have shown you can take him on, and you can make him climb down.
At the same time there is a much more foreboding and troubling debate in the Republican Party about whether anti-Semitism is acceptable. That is essentially what it is. Is neo-Nazism acceptable? Are the Groypers acceptable? Tucker Carlson having Nick Fuentes on legitimizes a voice that was previously unhygienic. The fact that JD Vance, who is probably the favorite in this battle for the MAGA succession, has not repudiated Nick Fuentes’ heritage, of course, is in turmoil over the same issue. This is the culmination of many years in which MAGA has said you can hate brown people, you can hate women, you can hate gays, you can hate others, but stop at Jews. There is a certain logic that says why should we stop at Jews? The great replacement theory says Jews are the liberal puppet masters who are creating the multiculturalism we hate. There is a logic to that within MAGA thinking. It is a troubling direction precisely because there is a MAGA logic to it. But the overarching theme here is that Trump’s grip, his stranglehold over this party, is broken. I do not think it can be reestablished in the form that it was before.
Mounk: Lauren, are we at one day going to be in the deeply horrible and paradoxical situation of being nostalgic for the relatively sane and calm Republican Party of Donald Trump? Is that something we have to start being able to imagine?
Harper Pope: I actually think about this often. To Ed’s point, not necessarily about the anti-Semitism piece but in general, we kind of lucked out in some ways with a Trump who did not have that more maniacal strategy of someone who is more white nationalist and far right in a lot of ways. I think that the Democratic Party in particular has shown it is completely ill-equipped to combat something that Edward was referencing.
I think that when it comes to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, it is fascinating to be in this political moment where Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are defecting from Trump and saying, hey, look, we are taking back our power to show that we have a piece of this Republican Party puzzle as well. It is an interesting dynamic, and I am interested to see how it unfolds because I was reading a piece this morning about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district. It was asking in man-on-the-street interviews, are you okay with Marjorie Taylor Greene wanting to release Epstein files and being this voice to try to return the priorities of the Republican Party to things like cost of living?
They were saying, yes, we are okay with that. The general population of America can be very anti-establishment in itself anyway. That is where populism comes into play. When you think about the voters in her district, and granted, Trump overperformed Marjorie Taylor Greene by about four points this past election cycle, when you think about her response in this political moment, people appreciate her courage. They appreciate her trying to refocus the president on the cost of living and healthcare and things that are deeply important to the voters in her district, which is a largely rural district. It is interesting to see how it plays out, but I commend those two Republicans for having the guts to do it. I want to see what happens next.
Mounk: I have a little bit of trouble letting pass, for I agree with much of what you said, the words of comment on Wilbert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. This may be one of those cases where people are so nuts that they disagree with somebody who is nuts in a different way, and two minuses make a temporary plus. I certainly do not think that they are principled or sensible in any deep way. It is interesting to see that coalition fracturing.
Russ, you deal with Republicans not every day but many days of the week as a legislator in New Hampshire. I know that you try very hard to be collegial with many of them and have some good working relationships with some of them. I also know that you find some of them to be deeply frustrating. From the perspective of New Hampshire, where do you think the Republican Party might go?
Muirhead: I think what we are seeing in every state and in the country is a kind of movement between the more traditional politics that are interest-based and principle-based that have roots in institutions where people meet face to face, like unions for the Democratic Party and churches for the Republican Party. You could call that traditional politics. There is a movement between that and a more movement-based politics. The MAGA movement is this breeze, this wind that nobody can control. There are no local chapters, there are no buildings, there are no chapter presidents or officers, and there are no monthly meetings of MAGA.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is intuiting the movement. She is intuiting the movement as it exists in her district. So is Donald Trump. Donald Trump has had brilliant intuitions for what is necessary to cohere this movement and gather its force behind him. He is the sail, and he catches this wind. This movement is a force that no one can control. It is hard to know when it is going to stop, when it is going to change directions, or when its velocity is going to change. It is hard to use it in any predictable way.
A principle-based politics like the conservatism of Ronald Reagan is a much more sedate, settled, and predictable kind of party politics and interstate politics, where you say we are going to serve, even on social issues, the interests that traditional Christians have with respect to family structure or whatever. That is a much more settled and policy-based politics. What we are seeing is the very difficult efforts by intuitively brilliant people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump to master movement politics, and it is not easy.
Lauren, you mentioned the inability of the Democratic Party. I am curious to hear more about that. How do you see the skills or lack of skills in the Democratic Party?
Harper Pope: I find it frustrating. One of the major criticisms that I and even Welcome have sometimes of the left is that the left in general, the Democratic Party, is very much into anti-Trump rhetoric of saying, we have to fight, we have to protest, and it has become predictable. It is a lazy talking point in a lot of ways because American voters want the Democratic Party to focus on and prioritize the issues that are closest to home for them. This past election cycle Democrats were prioritizing abortion and democracy, and voters wanted them to focus on immigration, inflation, and the economy. Those are the things that the Republican Party was focused on.
More in Common even released a report about the priorities gap. Voters perceive Democrats to be prioritizing certain issues when they want Democrats to prioritize issues that matter to them. When it comes to anti-Trump rhetoric, yes, we should have some level of animosity or resistance toward this administration, but when you make it the talking point of every person in power and talk about it in every vein, the American voter already knows what Trump is doing and where he stands on issues. He is not the new guy coming down the escalator from ten years ago. When you talk about anti-Trumpism, you have to transition as a party to talking about what voters want you to prioritize.
To your point, Russ, the party has become a predictable entity that is always going to resist Trump on everything. Why do we not have more strategy in our opposition to show people that we are not only focused on the median voter’s priorities, but that we also have our own compelling vision for the future? I am in the centrist faction of the party. Many people criticize centrism by saying you are moderates who do not believe in anything. It is not that. Our friend Yair Zivan talks about having centrism as an actual vision for the future. It is not just the non-extremes. It has its own value system and case for what governance should look like.
When you think about Democrats being in power, we need to do a better job of framing what we would be doing if we were in power at this point. We have regained ground on healthcare. Blue Rose put out research recently showing that healthcare is regaining trust among voters. But we still do not have the high ground on immigration, Social Security or the economy. How do we reframe our narrative to show that we are not just talking about Trump, but talking about what we would be doing if we were in power at this moment?
Muirhead: Lauren, what would you think about a Democratic party that spoke the language of fiscal conservatism or balanced budgets for the sake of maintaining Social Security? Is that something you’d recommend to the party?
Harper Pope: Uttering the words fiscal responsibility would be nice every once in a while. Democrats do not prioritize national debt. Americans know what that is like. Marigold Sinclair-Prez talks about this. Americans do not like being in debt themselves. They do not like the country being in debt either. The party has forsaken this responsibility to govern and to be able to pass budgets that are trying to be balanced.
Clinton had a balanced budget thirty years ago. Why can we not talk about our aspirations to regain that sense for the country’s credit? To your point, we do not talk about fiscal responsibility. We talk about raising taxes, and we talk about what we can do with all that new tax money, but we do not talk about ways to balance the budget, which is a completely missed opportunity.
Muirhead: If you do not like Medicare, if you never liked Medicare, if you do not like Social Security from the very beginning of Social Security and wished it had never come around, if you hate nutritional support and would rather have Americans eating dog food than having them be well nourished, if you want to get rid of SNAP, the best way to do all three of those things is to bankrupt the country. That is what we are seeing. We are seeing the bankruptcy, the fiscal bankruptcy, not just of the government but of the country, with deficits that are beyond description. It seems like it is going to fall to the Democratic Party to fix it. If anyone defends fiscal responsibility for the sake of maintaining these essential things, it is going to have to be the Democrats.
Mounk: There are big differences between the left and the right. Even though I have warned both about right-wing populism and left-wing identitarianism, I do not think that the threats are of equal moral stature. There does seem to be one interesting parallel, which is that the conservative movement and the values of the tripartite coalition that made up the traditional Republican Party are genuinely different from Donald Trump, and they are generally different from Nick Fuentes and others who are growing their influence over the right-wing social media ecosystem. Those generally different ideals have had trouble withstanding that hostile takeover from the further right, trying to explain that these are values of our own that are different, that are distinctive, and that we should stick by.
They have been tarnished with the word “RINO,” Republican in name only, with “sellouts,” in such a way that they have been forced to surrender or have been pushed out of the coalition. It is striking to me that this dynamic is somewhat similar on the left. In writing about identity politics and other things, I have repeatedly argued that we should not fall for what I call not-too-farism. There is a way to look at some of those successes and say, they want the right thing, they are just going a little bit too far. As Lauren points out, the kind of values for which I stand are different in a principled way. They have different goals. They think about the world in different ways. They have a completely different theory about how you make political change and how we have been able to overcome many of the deepest injustices in our nation’s history.
It often seems on the left as well that the perception of moderate Democrats is, you are just less good left-wingers, just ones that do not have the courage of your conviction. There is a danger of a similar kind of hostile takeover. Why is this happening? Is this just the dynamics of social media? What is going on such that it is impossible at the moment to defend a philosophically liberal left-wing tradition or a philosophically liberal conservative tradition against those hostile attacks?
Luce: I take a slightly different view about left-right Democrats. I think it depends on what you define as left-wing and what you define as right-wing. If you define left-wing as identity politics, then there has been a more robust pushback against that, and it is necessary and overdue. The degree to which Berkeley liberalism has been wrecking the Democratic brand across the country should be well understood. We saw signs in those off-year elections with Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and other campaigns that changing the subject is needed. This moral hectoring, this search for heretics as opposed to converts, is not a politics that serves the Democratic Party well, and we should know that by now.
I am a foreigner, not a Democrat, but I would like to see the Democratic Party rebound and continue to rebound. There is a new phenomenon of left-wing young people on economics. There is a rebound of Marxism going on, and Mamdani has not been written off as a flash in the pan or a purely New York phenomenon. That understates the degree to which young Americans under 30 are, on economics, more left-wing than we have seen in the last generation. They are a deeply cynical generation. They are deeply cynical and quite anti-American. There is a lot of Chomsky in their worldview. There is a lot of them discussing the Communist Manifesto in their perspective, and Mamdani spoke to that.
If you asked Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill whether we should have the American definition of socialism, which is socialized healthcare, basically single payer, they would say yes. It would not just be Mamdani. That is backed up by public opinion polls. I do not know what we mean by left-right anymore within the Democratic Party or across the political spectrum. Identity politics is a losing track for the Democrats, and I am encouraged to see that its peak may have passed.
Muirhead: I think on so-called identitarianism or identity politics, it is both a matter of integrity and political prudence. The Democratic Party has to stand for non-discrimination and has to stand against the humiliation of minorities, whether they are minorities because of their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their race, small religions, or anything. This is absolutely essential. We cannot be liberals without standing against discrimination and humiliation. We have to be uncompromising on that.
Imposing controversial conceptions of identity on the community via bureaucratic rules is not necessary, and that is alienating. There is a core that Democrats have to stand true to. I am with you, Lauren, on the fundamentals. This is a party that should be talking about the stuff that everybody wants, which is that everybody wants to be able to aspire to own their home. It is maybe not realistic to think every adult is going to succeed at that. We need to take that aspiration seriously and make it a real aspiration that those who, as Clinton said, work hard and play by the rules can realistically hope to attain.
Everyone needs to be educated, whether it is vocational education or a more intellectual liberal arts education, without being bankrupted. Kids are taking on so much debt. It costs so much to go to a state university. It costs so much to go to a community college. Access not just to basic healthcare but to healthcare generally, is fundamental. Housing, education, healthcare—this is not identitarianism; it is the promise of American life. I think what I hear you say, Lauren, is that this is what the Democratic Party has to be about.
Harper Pope: Welcome recently published a product called Deciding to Win. We actually have a tangible hardback book authored by Simon Bazelon. Long story short, Deciding to Win is that it is an effort based on Nancy Pelosi’s quote about deciding to win. Welcome Fest this past year had the theme of responsibility, taking responsibility to win.
When we talk about the issues, we need to move the Democratic Party back to the center of the country, not back to the center of the party. If we are looking to regain the love and support of the median D.C. voter, that is easy. When we want to talk about actually competing in states like Iowa and Ohio and other states where we used to have a Democratic senator representing us, we have to be willing to come to the center on these issues.
One thing about moderation and centrism is that it is not just talking about the priorities of voters, which is very important. It is being willing to avoid the absolutism of the extremism that the progressive faction has been championing. We do not need to have open borders. We need moderation on immigration.
You mentioned Mamdani earlier. Mamdani moderated his positions, and it helped him have a victory. He was talking about defunding the police, and then for his mayoral campaign, he walked that back, saying, we do not need to defund the police, I apologize for that. The Democratic Party as a whole has failed to apologize and to show that it is evolving.
I said this earlier this week on C-SPAN: we do not need to save this version of the Democratic Party. We need to evolve this party. We need to come back to the center of the country on issues and prioritize the things that voters want us to be prioritizing.
Muirhead: I haven’t heard other people say that. It is a really astute observation that Mamdani moved to the center.
Harper Pope: I would not say he moved to the center on everything, but he moderated his defund the police position, and we give kudos to him for that. Trump moderated last cycle. Trump was being talked about as doing a national abortion ban, and he said no. Trump moderated his abortion stance to be able to win last cycle. We do not talk about the people on the extremes moderating to show that moderation does give you victories.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Edward, Russell, and Lauren discuss the criticisms of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez from within the Democratic Party after she called out Chuy Garcia’s plan to choose his successor. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
