- [Narrator] Funding for
Overheard with Evan Smith
is provided in part
by Hillco Partners,
a Texas Government
Affairs consultancy,
and by Claire and Carl Stuart.
- I'm Evan Smith,
he's the publisher of
The Federalist, a
conservative online magazine,
and the host of its
popular podcast,
the Federalist Radio Hour.
He's Ben Domenech,
this is Overheard.
[Montage Opener]
Let's be honest, is
this about the ability
to learn, or is this
about the experience
of not having been
taught properly?
How have you avoided
what has befallen
other nations in Africa...
You could say that
he made his own bed,
but you caused him
to sleep in it.
You know, you saw a problem, and
over time, took it on...
Let's start with the sizzle
before we get to the steak.
Are you going to
run for president?
I think I just got an
F from you actually.
[Upbeat Music]
Ben Domenech, welcome.
- Good to be with you.
- Thank you for being here.
- Happy to be here.
- We spend a lot
of time, in the era
of Donald Trump, asking
the broad question,
"Is Donald Trump good
for the media business?"
Let me be specific and
ask you, if Donald Trump
is good for the
conservative media business?
- You know, he's a
challenge for the
conservative media business.
- Why is that?
Maybe cause he's
not a conservative?
- That has something
to do with it.
- Right.
(laughter)
- The reality is that,
over the course of the past
half century or so,
the conservative media
business and its flagship,
National Review Magazine
founded by William F.
Buckley, had a particular view
of conservatism that
they advocated for.
A view which actually won.
They were originally
founded as a magazine
that criticized
Eisenhower, that was
very critical at various
points of Richard Nixon,
but then saw their
fulfillment in Ronald Reagan.
- Ronald Reagan was
the apex, right?
- Everything that they
really wanted to see
in a candidate,
someone who rejected
the Kissingerian, Nixonian
view of the world,
who believed that the cold
war was something to be won.
In the wake of that, you
had this zombie Reaganism,
according to a lot of different
conservative thinkers,
which is basically
seeing the world
in the same 1980s frame
that allowed for fusionism
of social conservatism
and fiscal conservatism,
hawkish foreign policy
to dictate the direction
for the Republican Party.
A fusionism that really
maintained itself
all the way through the
George W. Bush years
with Islamic terrorism
and that force
as the substitute for the
cold war and the Soviets.
That fusionism though,
was really decaying,
and it was something that
Donald Trump exploited,
to great degree,
because it turned out
at the end of the
day that the cohort,
the coalition of the right
was not this Buckleyesque,
Reaganesque free trade,
importance of
maintaining global power,
of supporting our various allies
in all sorts of different ways.
That that was something
that actually was not
the animating focus
of so many people who
made up the Republican base.
Donald Trump exploited
that to great degree
and in part because
the Republican Party
deluded themselves
into thinking that
the war, the conflict
within their ranks was between
moderates, establishment,
Chamber of Commerce Republicans,
and conservative
Constitutionalists ideologues-
- Right, movement types.
- Ted Cruz and the like.
Ted Cruz ran for
President believing
that conservatives were angry,
and what he'd actually discover
and what Donald
Trump already knew
was that everyone was angry.
- Yeah, I'm tempted to
trot out the old adage
that you can't beat
somebody with nobody.
Trump showed up and
the conservative
movement in the main
did not really field
an adequate candidate
or any candidate to carry
the anti-Trump banner,
but you do point out Cruz.
The fact is, you can't get
more movement-y than Ted Cruz.
It's not that the
conservative wing
of the Republican Party or
the movement conservatives
didn't show up for the game.
They just got beat, right?
- Ideas don't run for
President, people do.
People have flaws
that can be exploited.
- Let's spend a
little bit of time.
I don't want you to go
all Al Franken on me,
but let's talk
about Cruz' flaws.
- Well, I think Ted Cruz
is a brilliant individual.
He's an extremely smart person.
But I also think that he is
someone who does not necessarily
have the gift for
the common touch,
the ability to connect-
(laughter)
- You don't say, you
don't think at Princeton
or Harvard, he learned
how to be a common person?
- There's an anecdote
about Richard Nixon
pulling over on the
side of the road,
running up to a police officer
who's lying on the ground
after a car wreck that he
had been sort of affected by
and Nixon runs up to
him, puts out his hand,
shakes his hand and says,
"Well do you enjoy your job?"
Richard Nixon was
someone afflicted by-
- Empathy deficit.
- Exactly, an inability to
connect with common people.
I actually think that Ted
is a guy who's very smart,
and I think that he will
probably become someone,
a figure along the lines of
Jesse Helms in the Senate.
Ultimately, someone who-
- You mean that as a compliment?
- Well, I mean that
in terms of someone
who will have an out-sized
impact on the body.
- So I wanna understand Trump
not as a contrast to Cruz
or anybody else, but
Trump in his own way.
What is he about really?
Did we see in the
campaign the real Trump?
Did we see a reality show
version of the real guy,
essentially a hyped up
entertainment celebrity
masquerading as a real person?
I've wondered over the
last since whatever it is,
June of 2015 when he
descended that escalator
and talked about
Mexican rapists.
From that day
forward, I've wondered
who's the real Trump?
What is the real Trump?
Do you have a sense?
- The real Trump is a man
who is a traitor to his class
because he has a
chip on his shoulder
because he felt that
he was never accepted
by the New York elite.
There's an alternate history
that you could actually
consider within this realm.
The easy way to look at it
is actually to look at the
attempt by Donald Trump
to buy an NFL franchise.
He tried very hard to do that.
He was rejected by the owners,
they have the
ability to do that.
His response to that was
to buy a USFL franchise
and then sue the NFL
to try to force them
to essentially let him in.
He won that case but
because everyone on the jury
thought that he was
a very rich man,
they awarded him one dollar
plus interest in payment.
There is an alternate
universe in Earth Two
or what have you, Evan,
where Donald Trump
gets that franchise, is
accepted by the broader
immediate landscape
and New York elite,
and never runs for President
because he has something
else to take away his time.
I view Trump as someone who
is a very canny exploiter
of cultural trends.
That is what I
believe he has done
throughout his entire career.
I think that he did that in
this most recent election.
He picked certain things as
cultural signifiers to people.
He embraced them.
I think more important
than anything else,
what he actually did was he
changed something significant
about the way that politicians
relate to the media.
If you go back a
couple of years ago,
I remember this interview
that Marco Rubio
gave to BuzzFeed.
He went into the
BuzzFeed offices,
obviously this is
Marco Rubio post-2012,
setting up his, oh
I'm the new hip thing.
- Nascent.
- I have opinions about
rap, talk to me about that,
that sort of thing.
I can connect with the children.
- I'm the young candidate.
Yesterday's gone, tomorrow
is going, (crosstalk).
- Exactly, he goes into
the BuzzFeed offices
and within a few
questions of the beginning
of the interview, they
start asking him questions
about Christianity and
creationism and evolution
and all these other things.
Rubio being the
polite guy that he is,
is sort of trying to
be nice about things.
They're trying to
get him to say things
that basically dis
his supporters.
I remember sending that
around to a group of friends
and having a comment
from someone that said,
you know, I wish that his
response to this would have been
yes, I believe in a god
who created the world,
was born of a virgin,
and died for my sins.
Do you have a problem with that?
That's the kind of thing
that I think conservatives
wanted to see, they want
to see the rejection
of the premise of the question,
that just sort of says,
I should feel bad
about believing
what traditional Christians
believe about these things.
- Who prevented the
conservative movement
from fielding such a candidate
in the last election?
I seem to remember a guy
named Rubio, actually,
might have been
him, but there were
a bunch of other
people in there.
Again, you go down the
list of the 17 who ran.
Let's stipulate Trump is not
a traditional conservative,
or maybe even a Republican.
- Yes.
- But of the other 16,
there are a bunch in there
who seem like they could
have been that person.
- There's a connective thread
that runs through the past
several elections that I think
we didn't fully appreciate.
Pat Buchanan runs
for President in '92,
he runs for President in '96.
You have the surprising success
of Mike Huckabee in 2008.
You have the surprising success
of Rick Santorum in 2012.
What they had all in common
was a populist economic message
that broke with Republican
orthodoxy on trade,
on a number of other
issues related to that,
on unions, but what distracted
us about them, of course,
is that they were
all Bible-believing
Christians, Catholics,
evangelicals.
So the questions they
got asked on the trail
typically turned very quickly
to abortion, birth control,
all these other sort
of cultural issues.
But I think what we did
was we underestimated
the power and the appeal
of their protectionist,
pro-union, anti-free
trade message
within this Republican
(crosstalk).
- That was really the
gas in the engine.
- Exactly.
- It turns out.
- What Trump did was basically
he embraced that message
because it's not really
all that different from-
- Did he do that consciously?
I mean honestly, I'm
hearing you say this
and I'm thinking
that's pretty smart.
It's pretty canny
and pretty savvy
in a way that he's not been
given adequate credit for.
- I will just say, that
is probably the thing
he's been the most
consistent on.
If you go back and you read
what he was saying in the 1980s,
he was still saying
that same thing.
- And of course, who else
is carrying that flag
and running down the
field, Steve Bannon.
- Yes.
- So Steve Bannon comes aboard
and Steve Bannon is
affirming with his presence
and his words and deeds, the
same economic nationalism
message that Trump is himself
out there carrying the flag for.
It's a match made in heaven.
- Yeah, I mean, look, I do
not agree with this message.
I'm as absolutist on free trade
as I think you'd find anybody,
but I am also of the opinion
that the case for free trade
has been something that
Republican politicians
have failed to make with
their own base for decades.
It's one that I think
really caught up
with them in this election.
The truth is, if
you look at Bannon
and if you look at
this connective tissue,
there are a lot of things
he has in common
with Pat Buchanan.
It turned out that
that thread of populist
pro-union, anti-free
trade sort of things
really had a lot of power.
I remember being in
Cleveland and expecting
that there would be
all sorts of protests.
I was at the convention in 2008
and got tear gassed
along with some of
the anti-globalist protestors
that were outside
of that convention.
I expected something
along those lines.
- But it turns out that the
protests against globalism
were in the hall.
- Exactly, that's the thing.
What was so notable was
the unions weren't there.
There was no real
powerful (crosstalk).
- Let me ask you about
this idea of globalism.
Globalism is often viewed as
a code word for anti-Semitism.
So when Breitbart writes
about economic nationalism-
- It puts those little globes.
- They put little
globes around the name.
You know, they write
about Gary Cohn
and they write about other
people in the administration
in a way that causes
people, fairly or unfairly,
to think that it's a short
walk from economic nationalism
to globalism to anti-Semitism.
Is that a fair knock?
- I don't think
it's a fair knock
but I also understand
why people would see it.
I certainly don't
know the people
who are writing those
pieces well enough
to tell whether they actually
hold those views or not.
The fact is, that the
revolt against globalism
is not unique to America.
It's something that
we see in Brexit.
It's something that we
see in Spain right now
in the Catalonian
sort of difficulties.
It's something that we've
seen in the backlash
against the kind of EU project
that has led to a significant
degree of stability.
It's a little impolitic
but the fact is that the EU
is about allowing
Germany to run Europe
without actually fighting
a war (crosstalk).
- But Ben, is it
realistic though to expect
that in a world that's
increasingly global
and increasingly
inter-connected,
where borders are coming
down not going up,
that we're now going to retreat
like an old Italian town
behind high walls with
people atop and boiling oil
that they're going to pour
on the invading hordes.
We're turning into San
Gimignano (crosstalk).
I mean, we're really are.
It sounds like what we're doing
is going back to a time long ago
when the world was
a different place
and we were a different
piece of that puzzle.
That's the pushback
often against this view.
- The most powerful
motivation I think
in American life is nostalgia.
The truth is that
nostalgia fools you.
You forget the
fact that you know,
even if you had this sort
of false sense of stability,
when you were a child
in the 50s or 60s
and there was this trust
in great institutions
and corporations, et cetera.
You forget the fact
that your parents
had to save money for a
year to buy a refrigerator.
We live in a time
now where you cannot
unring that globalist bell.
- Or honestly, it's fake,
I refer to this as a
restoration hardware problem.
We're all nostalgic for a time
that never existed, right.
- This is true, but think-
- But that fake nostalgia
actually is nonetheless fueling
these decisions that
we make politically.
- But think about the experience
of someone in America today.
We have more working-age
males in America
who are out of the workforce
then at any time since the
end of the Great Depression.
Okay, these are people who have
more than anything else, gotten
onto the disability system
as a substitute
for unemployment.
They are subsisting on
essentially $1200 a month,
which gives you the
ability to self-medicate
with either alcohol or
opioids or something else.
You sit on a couch
and you watch TV,
and this golden-haired
man comes on.
He tells you it's not your
fault that your life sucks.
It's not your fault that
you're sitting there
and you're viewing
all these celebrities
whose lives you can
never aspire to.
It's the fault of immigrants,
it's the fault of politicians,
it's the fault of bad trade
deals and wars based on lies.
He says, that's
okay, I can fix it.
I alone can fix it,
okay, and you listen.
- I want to walk over
from economic nationalism
to white nationalism,
because to the degree
that economic nationalism
has been a narrative thread
of the last nine months,
so in a more recent sense
has white nationalism been.
Do you think that the country
has suddenly become racist,
or that elements of the
country have become racist,
you know, as the knock,
or that it was always
there sub rosa,
and that Donald Trump
through his actions and words
has given license for
those who believe things
that were not said out loud,
to now say them out loud
and so we're more aware of it?
- I think as, first
off let me just say,
I'm Puerto Rican and
I've written in public
for quite some time,
and if you are Hispanic
or you have any
Hispanic tendencies,
then you are very familiar
with the racists on the right.
So I knew about Richard Spencer
and all these other folks
10 years ago, because that was
when they were writing about
me and my family and the
Hispanic employees that I have
in ways that were
nasty and awful.
I think we just frankly pay a
lot more attention to it now.
I think they were always there.
It's just that before
we never connected it
to a broader movement
that was having an impact
on the way that we lived,
or certainly who was
in the White House.
I think that instead,
now people are saying,
well this is of the same,
or this is the same piece.
The danger of course
there, is the fact is
that Donald Trump has more than
60 million people
who voted for him.
Those people are not
white supremacists.
They are not all
white supremacists,
they are not all
white nationalists.
They did not vote for
him for that reason.
White college-educated women
did not vote for
him for that reason.
The fact is that he won votes
from more black Americans
and more Hispanic Americans
than Mitt Romney did,
but he didn't do that
because of the appeal
of white nationalism.
I think the fact is that these
people were always there,
but now we're connecting them
with a broader trend
in American society,
which is very dangerous,
and which I think
deserves the kind of
criticism that it's getting.
But then it's leading us to
make the false conclusion
that those people are connected
with the rest of
the President's base
in a way that I
think unfortunately,
smears a lot of Americans.
- It's a subset, but
it's a subset over here.
It's not co-mingled
with (crosstalk).
- It's an extremist subset.
I mean, I connected
him to Pat Buchanan
and certainly there's a
subset of anti-Semites
who supported Pat Buchanan.
- You remember the
old Molly Ivins line
about the Buchanan
speech in '92,
it was better in the original
German, remember that?
- I do remember that line.
I do remember that line,
but I would also urge you
to go back and watch
that speech again.
Because I would suggest to
you that what he is actually
sort of saying is
something that played out
over the next two decades.
- It was the lead up, the
run up to the culture war
which was then the
run up to this.
- Yes, and what both he
and Huckabee to a degree,
but Santorum certainly, argued
through their whole careers
was we are on the slippery slope
that is going to lead us to
a point where America rejects
Christianity and the
founding and our history
and views them all
as being affected by
an original sin of
racism and bigotry
and all of these other things.
That's going to lead people
to try to destroy the past,
knock down monuments, and
rip up the Constitution.
Basically, that's the subset
of what they've been arguing.
- And like hey.
- And they feel vindicated now.
They feel vindicated.
- On the subject of race,
a question very
much of the moment,
is Colin Kaepernick
is a son of a bitch?
- (laughs) No, I think he
has a very nice family.
- Well, you know, Mrs.
Kaepernick objected enormously
to the President's
characterization.
- I will just say-
- Because everyone's on
Twitter, she tweeted it.
- I actually like
Colin Kaepernick.
I paid a lot of attention
to him coming out
because I actually
wanted my own home team,
the Washington
R-Words, to draft him.
But I think that the truth
is, when I look at Kaepernick,
I see a guy who I think has
made an error of judgment.
The reason is that I think
that his expression of protest
sends a message that he
doesn't intend it to send.
I think that he wants to
protest because of what he sees
as a problem of police
action and violence
and danger to black Americans.
- Are you sympathetic to that?
- I am sympathetic.
- You're a criminal justice guy.
This is of particular
interest, yeah.
- I think the truth is
that the cops we have,
I think try to do a good job
but many of them are not trained
to the degree they need to be.
They certainly do not
practice with their weapons
to the degree they need to be,
and are way too quick to pull
I think on a lot of people,
that otherwise might
survive if they behaved
with more of an approach to
trying to de-escalate
a situation.
I also think frankly, we
have far too many laws.
There's too much
opportunity for a cop
to come in conflict
with someone today.
I think particularly
of the situation
in Baltimore with Freddie Gray.
I happen to carry a knife
typically in my pocket.
- Well it's good because
here in Texas now,
as of September 1st, you
can open-carry knives.
Just take it out, just
put it on the table.
- It's in my bag unfortunately
because I didn't expect
to have this out but
I was very upset to
learn that frankly,
that the type of
knife that I carry
was very close to the
same type of knife
that Freddie Gray carried.
He should not have even been
arrested for carrying that.
It was actually legal
for him to carry.
But because it was carried-
- So you're sympathetic
in a general sense
to the Kaepernick
argument that (crosstalk).
- The problem is, and
I think particularly
you can look at Martin
Luther King's speech on this.
MLK's speech did not
criticize America
for its founding or
for its principles.
What it said is,
America is great.
I would like to be
included in that
and I have not
been to this point.
I think that is a
much more convincing,
and if you look back at
most civil rights leaders,
the ones who've been
most successful,
have been the ones who don't
say America is a bad place,
it's terrible, that you need
to feel guilty about it,
et cetera, and there's
nothing that can be done
to really assuage that.
Instead they say, we want
to be fully included in it.
I think that's something
that Kaepernick
could have done in a
lot of different ways.
Instead, it reads to so
many different NFL fans
who don't pay attention
to what he says
or what he does off the field.
They just look at it and say,
why does this guy
hate my country?
- Well there is of course
this additional question
of conservatives being in
favor of small government
and leaving business alone.
The President deciding
that because of the offense
he's taken at Colin Kaepernick,
saying on Twitter and elsewhere,
I think that the NFL
owners should fire players
who take a knee, and
who dishonor our flag,
and I think that this
person should be fired.
In the same way that
a couple weeks ago,
we had an ESPN
on-air personality
who made comments that were
disparaging of the President,
in response to
comments that he made
disparaging of her
race, she believed.
The Press Secretary
for the White House,
Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
came out and said,
we believe that ESPN
should fire this person.
Is there a conflict, you're a
small government conservative.
Do you want the President
and the White House
dictating to private
businesses who they can employ?
- Of course not.
- The First Amendment gives
you the right to be wrong
or to be a jackass, doesn't it.
- Of course it does.
I will just say I'm not
a big fan of Jemele Hill,
not because of what she
said about the President
in her view being a
white supremacist,
but simply that her hour
is down 20% in the ratings.
That's I think the
bigger problem for ESPN.
- In the end, it's
all about the ratings.
To that point, let
me take a short walk
over to the President's
own ratings.
There's a Washington
Post/ABC News poll
out this very day
that has the President
at 39% approval, which is
the lowest point in 71 years
for a President at this
point in his presidency.
And yet.
- And yet.
- And yet, there's
absolutely no sign
that the base that elected him
is deserting him in droves.
There's no sign that
the members of Congress,
particularly of his party,
are in any way
empowered to thwart him.
In fact, if anything,
they seem to be cowering.
He's making deals
with Chuck and Nancy.
- Yes, well he likes Chuck.
They're from the boroughs.
- America's fun couple.
- He gave Chuck money for years.
- Right, they're from the
crappy boroughs, in fact, right.
It's even better, and as someone
who is from a crappy
borough, I can say that.
I'm a self-hating
crappy borough native.
(laughter)
No, no, but the point
is, I mean really,
what's remarkable is the
polls are as bad as they are,
and everyone's mad at
him and up in his grill,
and he's just blithely
doing his thing.
- You know, the
funny thing is, Evan,
and I don't know that this
was actually his rating
in the Washington Post/ABC poll,
but his rating in a
number of other polls
on election day was 39%, in
terms of his own approval.
- So maybe that's the
low end of his base.
- So here's the
thing that I think
is very interesting
about this moment.
Imagine if the Russia
investigation had not
created a toxic environment
for Donald Trump from day one.
Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan,
they come into the White House
and they had told him,
they know according
to multiple reports,
they said, you will have
a repeal bill by Easter,
you will have a
tax bill by August,
and you will have
an infrastructure
bill by Christmas.
That's what they said to him.
Donald Trump has no
experience in politics,
this is new to him
he says okay, fine.
- He believes it,
He's like, great.
- He believes it.
And then August rolls around,
he's got nothing,
okay, and he says,
I trusted you, I gave you,
I said I would sign anything
you pass, and you
haven't passed it.
So now, here's what's
going to happen.
I'm going to start dealing
with the other side.
He has the ability to reach
to Chuck Schumer in particular
and say, I will give you
this in exchange for this.
I know there will be
enough feckless Republicans
who just come along with me
because I am their party,
and they still have
this illusion that
I'm the leader of it.
(laughter)
To go along with it.
Here's the very interesting
thing that he could do.
I wrote a piece back in May
saying that Trump
needed to pivot
to working with the Democrats
in order to forestall
an impeachment
election, effectively.
Here's the type-
- Let me stop you.
Impeachment election in the
sense that if you don't work
with Democrats, you're
going to get nothing done.
- Yes.
- 2018's going to come around,
Democrats take back the House,
and the pre-condition
to impeachment
is the Democrats
taking back the House.
So you hold off the possibility
by virtue of accomplishments
that the Democrats take it back.
- Imagine that tomorrow
Donald Trump proposes
to the folks on Capitol Hill,
I will pass, I will sign
a minimum wage increase
in exchange for work
requirements for
every welfare policy.
How do Republicans
vote against that?
- [Together] How do
Democrats vote against that?
- I'm thinking how do
Democrats vote against that.
- That's the thing,
what you end up with is,
Donald Trump, he's
basically with Democrats
on the minimum wage.
He said all sorts of things
about raising the minimum
wage over his career.
He is the only Republican
you could effectively have
in that job that would
say, sure, 15 bucks.
- This gets back, we're
just about out of time,
this gets back to this idea
that he's somehow figured out
that the
Buchanan/Santorum/Huckabee
version
of economic nationalism was
the right course to pursue.
This gives Trump
a ton of credit.
If Trump is smart enough
to figure this out,
then maybe he's smart
enough to get re-elected
or hold off being removed.
- He uses the country's
tribalism to his benefit
over and over and over again.
- It's amazing.
- Because he has the
capability to sort of
look at these things
and not behave
like the polite politician,
instead to just wrap his
arms around these things.
- Well, we're done.
We're going to wrap our arms
around the end of our show.
Ben Domenech, so much
fun to talk to you
and learn so much,
thank you very much.
- Great to be here.
- Ben Domenech, thank you.
(applause)
We'd love to have you
join us in the studio.
Visit our website at
klru.org/overheard
to find invitations
to interviews,
Q and As with our
audience and guests,
and an archive of past episodes.
- I will concede that
I'm an emphatic supporter
of significant reform to
our educational system.
I think it's actually
the biggest problem
that we've had in
the United States
for the past decade and a half,
and perhaps even beyond that.
We have not devoted the kind,
I actually think that one
of the biggest travesties
of the Bush administration
was No Child Left Behind.
I think it did not work the
way they intended it to work.
- [Narrator] Funding for
Overheard with Evan Smith
is provided in part
by Hillco Partners,
a Texas Government
Affairs consultancy,
and by Claire and Carl Stuart.