Will Iran Break Trumpism?

Produced by Jack McCordick

Will Iran Break Trumpism?

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks.

Caldwell is on the right. He’s a contributing editor at Claremont Review of Books.

Caldwell has been trying to define and, even, craft a coherent Trumpism. But in a recent piece in The Spectator titled “The End of Trumpism,” he seems pretty dispirited. He writes: “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”

It wasn’t just Iran that led Caldwell to that point. It was also Trump’s brazen self-dealing, the waves of influence peddling, the sense that this man who was supposed to represent the will of the people in some way was doing something very different.

This has led to a debate on the right. Many noted a very obvious counterargument: Polls show that Trump’s base is largely sticking with him.

So this gets to questions that I think are important yet somehow still unsettled — despite Trump’s decade-long dominance in American political life: What is Trumpism? Is there a Trumpism — or is there just Donald Trump?

Caldwell has also spent a long time writing about right-wing populism in Europe. So he has a set of comparisons for what a program for that might look like here, and I think that’s what he sees coming apart now. So I wanted to ask him why.

Caldwell is a contributing writer for the New York Times Opinion section. He’s also the author of the book “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

Ezra Klein: Chris Caldwell, welcome to the show.

Christopher Caldwell: Well, thank you, Ezra.

So you just wrote this piece for The Spectator that created a lot of conversation called “The End of Trumpism.” Before we get to why you think it’s ending, what do you think Trumpism was or is?

Well, it’s a good question. When I talk about Trumpism, I’m not talking about MAGA. I’m not talking about the group of hard-core supporters who will back him, whatever he does. You could call them orthodox Trumpians or something like that.

I’m talking about the governing project that has a real chance of changing things and did so by picking up people outside of that hard core. And it’s a hard thing to talk about because Trump is notoriously disinclined to really lay out a governing project in any kind of, let’s say, programmatic way.

So what was Trumpism? I think at the heart of Trumpism were a few issues. One of them was inequality — the sense that the society was unfair. One element of the unfairness was just the working of the global economy, where the people who ran it were advancing, and the people who built it at a lower level were falling behind.

Another was certain government programs — you could talk about affirmative action. So there was unfairness.

I think there were a lot of freedom of speech issues. I think that “woke” was a big part of what Trumpism was, certainly his second time around. And I think there were certain cultural issues — trans, for instance, just to take one.

But tying them all together was this issue of war. It’s very interesting, I think, that in the last 20 years we’ve had two presidents whose claim to the presidency was built very largely on their opposition to the Iraq war. And for some reason, it’s really very important in our politics.

I think for Trump, it was especially important. Because as long as the president was committed to not going to war in a major way, there’s a kind of limit to how far you could expect him to take his program. And I think that, having gone to war now, the limit is sort of off.

When people try to extract a governing agenda out of Trumpism, there’s a tendency to extract their governing agenda out of Trumpism. Is there actually this agenda that can be violated? Or as Donald Trump often says: There’s just him?

He is MAGA. He is Trumpism. That’s why it’s got Trump in the name. And the fact that his people follow him where he goes means that he’s right about that.

Well, a lot of the people who have criticized the piece have said: Well, look, Trumpism is not ending. Because if you poll people who call themselves MAGA about this recent war with Iran, 80 to 90 percent of them say they’re all behind it. They really love Trump.

The real question is: How big is MAGA? If you look at polls that measure it, or the people who have been asking that question for quite a while, like NBC has, it kind of peaked after the election at around 36 percent. So I think that gives him a lot less leeway to, let’s just say, feel that his base will follow him anywhere.

In your essay, you give a different definition of what Trumpism was than you’ve given here. You describe it as a project of democratic restoration.

What do you mean by that?

I don’t know that’s different from what I’m describing here. That is part of what I describe here as the inequality problem.

There are many dimensions to inequality, as I said. There’s the income inequality, there’s the influence, and things like that. But I think there’s also the deep state.

This idea at the heart of Trumpism, which sounds a little bit occult, but it is a set of informal powers that kind of winds up claiming governing prerogatives, and they sort of replace the literal democracy through which we would like to believe we’re led — you know: One man, one vote.

So you have the growing influence of elite universities — where basically everyone on the Supreme Court has gone to either Harvard or Yale law schools. I think you have the role of civil rights law in circumscribing what people feel they can say and how they feel they can interact.

This wasn’t explicit, but I think that everyone felt it: Trump promised a country in which you’d get the stuff you voted for and not the permanent state. He was sort of promising a return to a more 19th-century state that you can criticize as being based on patronage. But what it means is when you vote for a president, he cleans out the whole executive branch, and now the government is oriented around your voters’ wishes.

So you’re sounding very disenchanted with Trumpism. Is there a moment when you were more enchanted? If we were sitting here talking about the success of Trumpism and the continuation of it, what story would you be telling me?

I really try not to be enchanted or disenchanted with any politician. It’s not a good way to look at things if you have to write about it.

But I think there are certain really promising things that he did in terms of his own agenda, where he seemed to be really delivering to those who had voted for him. One is that whole series of executive orders that sort of took apart the D.E.I. state and removed affirmative action from American life.

I think they really brought a palpable change in the lives of the people who had voted for him. Although it wasn’t a change — it was an absence. And you don’t notice when you go from a presence to an absence the way you do when ——

What was the palpable change that they brought?

What was the palpable change?

There was just less talk about ethnic categories, gender — that sort of thing. The culture of the country, I think, has changed quite a lot. You know what I mean?

I do a bit. Although, I guess it’s interesting for me to hear you describe it in terms of inequality.

Here you have a billionaire whose major, signature legislative achievements are very unpopular tax cuts that redistributed money upward; who was elected with the help of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk; who seems to be, you note this in your piece, enriching himself, rapidly, to the tune of, in one count I’ve seen, over $1 billion, and another count, billions of dollars, since being in office — and who also seems to exist to many as a response to efforts at equality.

You have a dimmer view of efforts at diversity and equity and inclusion than I do. But when you say wokeness was a big part of it: There was a progressive push to rectify old inequalities, and Trump came in and said: We’re going to stop all that — and has been, I will say, very successful at stopping that.

But what is inequality — and who is it harming? And also: Is Trump an agent of it, or is he an agent against it? These questions seem at least contestable.

Oh, absolutely. He wouldn’t be the first populist who has been rich. And many populists have gotten rich practicing populism, as well.

It’s a good business.

Yes, yes. It’s a good business. But yes, I agree that there’s been something in the second term that’s really a change of emphasis. And I would agree that it’s hurting him.

I don’t know if you saw the Kennedy Center press conference that he had the other week where it was just a whole bunch of shoutouts to the billionaire donors in the audience.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: I’m looking at Mr. Steve Wynn, who’s over there. He built a spectacular building, and he knows Trump builds a spectacular building. I built better buildings than him. I don’t care what he said.Archival clip of Trump: It’s like Bob Kraft. If a football player doesn’t perform well, typically you will fire him immediately. Bob, do you ever let them stay around for four or five years if they’re bad? Not too many times, right?Archival clip of Trump: Under the leadership of this exceptionally talented and rich board — it’s a very rich board. Not everybody, but most of you are loaded. Ike Perlmutter has got so much money. Look at Ike Perlmutter. He ended up being the largest owner of Disney. Started with — was it a $100 or less? It was a little less Ike, right? He didn’t speak English, and he became the largest owner of Disney, right?

Archival clip of Donald Trump: I’m looking at Mr. Steve Wynn, who’s over there. He built a spectacular building, and he knows Trump builds a spectacular building. I built better buildings than him. I don’t care what he said.

Archival clip of Trump: It’s like Bob Kraft. If a football player doesn’t perform well, typically you will fire him immediately. Bob, do you ever let them stay around for four or five years if they’re bad? Not too many times, right?

Archival clip of Trump: Under the leadership of this exceptionally talented and rich board — it’s a very rich board. Not everybody, but most of you are loaded. Ike Perlmutter has got so much money. Look at Ike Perlmutter. He ended up being the largest owner of Disney. Started with — was it a $100 or less? It was a little less Ike, right? He didn’t speak English, and he became the largest owner of Disney, right?

And I just can’t imagine it played terribly well. So, yes, that’s there.

I want to zoom in on what you’re describing here as democratic. What you’re saying, as I understand it, is that at least an appeal of Trumpism is that we are governed in practice by institutions we do not have control over. For some definition of “we,” call it the electorate.

And the appeal of Trump, of maybe DOGE, at a certain point, to you, is that, by ripping all of that out, you are restoring the possibility that the public gets what they vote for?

Yes, I think that’s part of Trump’s theory. And no one put this on the platform or anything, but I would say that, probably, most Trump followers believe a version of that.

So one reason I was interested in both the piece you wrote about Trump and more broadly talking to you about this, is that you’ve been tracking these kinds of movements for some time. You’ve written a lot about Europe. And you wrote a piece in 2018 that I think connects to this conversation we’re having about what populism is.

And the final sentences of that piece were: “Liberalism and democracy have come into conflict. ‘Populist’ is what those loyal to the former call those loyal to the latter.”

So populism, you’re saying, is what those loyal to liberalism call those loyal to democracy.

Describe what you’re saying there. Describe your definition of “populism,” which is maybe different than the way you feel the media or the broader conversation defines populism.

Yes. I think that if we start with the idea of progressivism — that is, the early 20th-century scientific recognition or claim that the ordinary working of government creates inefficiencies and injustices, even in government — that there are certain ways that you can just predictably make it run better and more responsibly. That’s progressivism.

So the way you carry it out is you create inviolable rules at the heart of government. You create protections for the people who are enforcing those rules through sort of a permanent professional civil service. You probably create a larger role for the judiciary, inevitably.

It does a lot of good things. It gives us product-safety laws and stuff like that. But it means that when you vote for things, the government is not as responsive as it was back in the old days of 19th-century mob democracy.

So Trump seemed to be a solution to the opacity and the bureaucratic complication and the obfuscation of the way we were ruled. Here’s a guy whom we elect, he’s going to be the boss, and then we’re going to have a country that’s more congruent with our wishes.

When I say liberalism, I mean progressivism. I mean the rule-making instinct versus the popular-sovereignty instinct.

So you mentioned that the administrative state is an alternative to 19th-century mob democracy.

How do you understand what it was? What was 19th-century mob democracy, and what problems do you understand that the state is trying to solve?

My understanding of it comes probably directly out of a history book I read, like, 30 years ago by a guy named Robert Wiebe, a great champion of the drunken political parties carrying banners through cities, a big mass-movement–type democracy — you might even call it a Tammany-type democracy — which had maybe less in the way of individual rights than we have but a lot more in the way of popular will.

So then why is Iran such a particular threat to this vision of Trumpism? You write in this piece: “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.”

You’ve already mentioned that in polls, at least, what we might describe as a base is not breaking over this. If you look at the overall Trump approval polling, if you did not know there was a war in Iran, you would not know something unusual was happening.

He’s at about 40 percent now in the New York Times approval polls. He was at 41 percent a little bit ago. So what about this to you is such a rupture?

I think that the promise of no wars was a kind of ruling out. And Trump has a particular need to make this a campaign promise. There are certain things........

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