The Wild Week

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Bret Stephens: The quotient of crazy in America, or slightly unhinged, has gone up. There is just a tone of “Everything is Permitted” in the United States. I think Trump is both a cause as well as a symptom of that climate.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network.

And this is our weekly podcast. We’re doing a, I guess for us, a more newsy special episode. We are recording this on Friday, July 19th, so be fairly warned that we are talking about the Republican convention and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and whether or not the Democratic nominee for the president is who we think it’s going to be or someone completely different or unknown by the time you’re listening to this, only you know. We don’t. We are not graced with foresight about what has happened between the time of this conversation and the time you’re listening to it.

And we thought it was important given that the assassination attempt certainly roiled people, snapped everybody to some sort of collective attention, that there was a life and death aspect to our political debates and political divisions, that we should be more attentive to literally playing with fire or literally life and death. And we thought it was important to attend to that topic.

So we’re gonna talk with someone who’s been dealing with these issues for a very long time and looking at them and analyzing them. Emma, who are we gonna talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today we’re gonna talk to Bret Stephens. He is an opinion columnist at the New York Times. Before that, he was at the Wall Street Journal and also editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post. So, as Zachary says, he’s been steeped in all kinds of issues, political, economic, and so on for many years. And he is here today to talk to us about the absolute wild week that we just had in American politics.

You ready to talk to Bret?

Zachary Karabell: I am. Let’s do it. So Bret Stephens, thank you for joining us today. Tumultuous week may in fact be tumultuous weeks, plural. We are, just so everyone knows, recording this the day after the Republican convention wrapped up in Milwaukee. So we’re recording this on the Friday after the convention and given the buzz of news around President Biden, who as of this recording is still President Biden, it’s a fluid situation and could continue to be ever more fluid. I want to give you a softball question that is also profoundly self serving.

So I did a column for my newly launched Edgy Optimist on Substack saying that the rush, not just to judgment, but the rush to assumptions about what a political assassination attempt means for our culture, and the facile, in my opinion, way in which we try to carve insta meaning of it, that this was a clear sign of our political divisions and the tip of a dysfunctional partisan society that has erupted into violence and we should have seen this coming.

Is that really true, right? I mean, we’ve had lots of violence in the past, some of which has been clearly indicative of cultural turmoil and some of which has been random and or indicative of the fact that there’s always some sort of base level cultural turmoil that occasionally percolates up in random acts.

So I’m just wondering, am I wrong in that? Should we in fact be saying, you know, this is the perfect metaphor for an imperfect time?

Bret Stephens: This act reminds me of the attempt on Congressman Lee Zeldin’s life a couple summers ago. Do you remember that?

Zachary Karabell: Mm hmm.

Bret Stephens: When some guy gets a knife, or the guy hanging around Brett Kavanaugh’s house in Washington, apparently an intention to kill the justice or the fellow from Indiana who took a rifle to a baseball game and nearly murdered Steve Scalise. If you actually put your mind to it, there have been a lot of these attempts. in the last few years. You can look back in history and say this has happened before.

I mean, the name that occurred to me after I heard about the attempt was Squeaky Fromme. Do you remember Squeaky Fromme?

Zachary Karabell: Squeaky Fromme and Gerald Ford.

Bret Stephens: The Manson Girl. Philip Roth once talked about the Indigenous American Berserk, and I think the Indigenous American Berserk is roaming the land, and that’s what happened in Pennsylvania on Saturday, I don’t think this, this young man had a political motive other than to go down in a blaze of infamy. But it, I think it says something about our time. I’m just not exactly sure what.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think this is one of the fears of Trump coming back into office, right? That if he comes back in, that this stuff is only going to ramp up, maybe not in the way where people talked about where it’s one side versus the other, like the new American Civil War, but just that you’re going to see things like this more often.

Bret Stephens: Trump is a guy who raises the cultural temperature. So I do think that he has an effect on this, even though it would be foolish to draw a line between that and what that young man in Pennsylvania was trying to do.

The quotient of crazy in America, or slightly unhinged, I think is, has gone up. There is just a tone of “Everything is Permitted” in the United States. I think Trump is both a cause as well as a symptom of that climate.

Zachary Karabell: See, this is one of the great unanswered questions of our age, right? Which is, has it actually gone up or are we just acutely aware of it in a way that we never could have been before?

Because we have all these tools of communication where we can both speak and hear in a way that just didn’t exist before, and I think that’s more than an academic question, right, in that this idea of are we living through a particularly nutso time is disturbing to people because it’s predicated on a view that there was a more normal time, or a more stayed time, or a more together time, and I’m gonna keep pounding the pavement of A, we don’t really know, and B, if that’s true, it leads to one perception of societal health and what we should be doing.

But if it’s not true, it changes that arc and that equation, right? If it was always true, like people had this question, this is a big deal in 2020 around what happened with George Floyd, in that, is there more or less police violence or are we acutely aware of police violence because now we have cameras that can capture police violence in real time. And so it creates literally an optic of an increase or of an epidemic.

I don’t fully know the answer. I have my own suspicions that there was much more, as you just said, and the Philip Roth comment, kind of a baseline level in many societies that was actually probably higher in the United States because we’re a more multifarious culture.

Bret Stephens: It’s an unanswerable question, and I think a historian might say, point to the era between the assassination of James Garfield in 1881 and the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, a lot of political violence in that period. And so you can look at discrete historical eras and say, you see, it wasn’t all that different in periods that we otherwise consider sort of more halcyon eras of American history.

But I do notice a civic culture which does seem really degraded. Thanks to this modern technology called YouTube, I find myself watching Ronald Reagan press conferences. And sort of being reminded of the way in which he conducted the presidency versus the way in which Trump and actually to a great extent Biden conducts the presidency.

And it does feel like there has been a real degradation in the culture of civility, respect, a defining deviancy down to adapt or to borrow Moynihan’s phrase. Now, whether that diminished civility connects to increased violence or simply makes us more aware of a connection between the two, I, I think it’s an unanswerable question.

Emma Varvaloucas: Bret, can you say a little bit more about how you see Biden contributing to this? Because he was saying, you know, when he ran last time, he was speaking in front of the country, I don’t think he’s been perfect in how he’s gone about doing that, but he’s certainly no Trump, I would say.

Bret Stephens: No, that’s true. I mean, Trump is sui generis, but look, in September ’22, Biden gave a kind of a landmark speech for his presidency, which was a full throated attack on MAGA Republicans.

And if you watch or listen or read the speech, it’s very difficult to realize, to see whether he means a handful of Proud Boys and other sort of right wing Charlottesville type extremists, or the 70 odd million people who voted for Donald Trump. He then pursues this, along with allies of the Democratic Party, with the effort to criminalize his political opponent and to actually kick him off the ballot in some places.

It’s not always Biden, sometimes groups associated with Biden. Democratic affiliated PACs actually provided north of 40 million in funding for the Trumpiest Republicans in primary races. So they’ve had their own, I think, contribution to this, even though it doesn’t come with the sort of coarseness that a lot of MAGA comes with.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think the debate about how the Democrats have reacted to this and how they would have reacted perfectly, right, is, is really interesting because people made this argument with the various cases against Trump, right? And that’s not always connected to the Democratic Party, but it has this feel of like, it’s all the Democrats.

On the one hand, I can see the argument being made of, it would have been smarter just to go after Trump for the really important stuff, the election fraud stuff, and like let everything else fall by the wayside. But on the other hand, there’s the argument that if you don’t go after people when they break the law, or if you don’t kind of fight fire with fire, then you’re really not fighting at all.

Bret Stephens: I think many of the cases that were brought against him were bogus cases. Certainly when the Democrats point to his so called 34 felony convictions in the Manhattan case, and I feel that millions of Americans feel this way, they would struggle to understand what exactly he was convicted for and why he was in the dock for what is ordinarily a misdemeanor offense and why his personal life was exposed that way had he been some defendant other than Donald Trump.

And I think that offends the sense of justice and fairness of a lot of Americans. I think people feel the same way about the civil suit in which he was made to pay a half billion dollar fine allegedly for swindling banks as if those banks weren’t sophisticated customers who were happy to be quote unquote “swindled.”

Why was that case, which I think is a naked violation of the 8th amendment and its clause about excessive fines, why was that case brought? Democrats have played this sort of, played this sort of holier than thou game against Trump, but in many respects, I think they’ve debased themselves to his level and actually added fuel to his side.

I don’t think Trump would have accepted the nomination last week had it not been for many of those cases did for him because it offended the sense of justice that certainly a lot of Republican primary voters, but also people who oppose Trump, like me, have felt about them.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, there’s a whole other discussion to be had of this assumption of American justice, or at least of American prosecutors, of being neutral holders of the sword of justice.

Is it a problem? I mean, you pointed to the 34 felony counts that Trump was convicted of. That’s indicative of a prosecutorial culture in this country that has over the past couple of decades done the kitchen sink approach toward almost everybody, right? So every single count of X becomes a single offense, even if it was all done together, this kind of overzealous prosecution that you see in multiple states and in federal courthouses is a problem, right?

Whereas prosecutorial discretion used to be, used to be, I don’t know, I mean, Rudy Giuliani, Eliot Spitzer in New York state, both kind of rode to prominence as did Tom Dewey, frankly, in the 1930s on high profile cases that they could trumpet as their thing. So that’s always been part of the mix, but there’s a Trump factor and there’s also a justice industry factor that come to play here.

Bret Stephens: It’s just a partisan culture. This is true of the Trump side as well, that It’s forgotten the virtues of restraint. And I think that says something about the moment we’re in where everyone engaged in politics thinks they’re playing a zero sum game. I mean, I’ve criticized the Republican party, the Trumpian movement for this because they indulge this fantasy that somehow the left will be destroyed, defeated, owned, obliterated. A healthy civic culture exists when you accept the fact that there is going to be another side and you’re not going to destroy them. You’re going to win temporary victories in a culture, in a political culture, where you will never achieve all of your aims, period.

Emma Varvaloucas: Bret, I want to bring us back to the Trumps factor for a second. You had a recent column that was sort of aimed at like explaining the mystery of Trump’s resilience. The fact that Trump is still around. Certainly I think a lot of people on the left. It’s like a great mystery to that. I wonder if you could just, yeah, tell us, tell the basics of that column. So I think just to get a line from Zachary that he says a lot that I don’t think the left and some of our listeners have really reckoned with why Trump is so popular still now.

Bret Stephens: The kind of simplistic explanation for Trump and it has a measure of truth is that Trump essentially turned the Republican Party into a cult.

Cults don’t abandon their leaders. In fact, they see their leaders’ defeats as part of a kind of a mythic struggle, the mythic battle against the evil that they’re fighting. So a cult was definitely going to re nominate Trump, and Biden is a uniquely weak opponent, so therefore we are where we are. That’s the kind of dumber explanation.

What I was trying to point out in the column is that there are three additional factors to Trump’s resilience. First of all, there’s a kind of political genius to Trump, very different from what I think I grew up to think of as political genius, which is sort of more in the mold of classical Churchillian or Reagan esque or maybe Obama esque type statesmanship, but it’s a sort of genius.

He understands what his calling card is. And his calling card is defiance. Obama was about hope, right? Those four letters, hope. For Trump, it’s defiance, and it’s defiance of an establishment that, as the MAGA world sees it, and in many respects is, self dealing and self satisfied. And Trump goes at them without fear. And I think that aburnishes his brand as the sort of the fearless guy who will take the slings and arrows and continue unbowed. I think the second aspect was the catastrophic political blunders of Biden. First one being not honoring his promise to be a one term president, implicit promise, but really a promise to be a one term president.

And then the other one was the demonization of MAGA Republicans and the effort to weaponize the legal system against, against Trump and criminalize Trump. And reality, Democrats are telling America are basically, their message is that under Biden, it’s morning in America. And overwhelming majorities of Americans are saying it’s darkness at noon.

In February of 2020, when just before the pandemic, 45 percent of Americans said they were happy with the direction of the country. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s the highest number that had been in 15 years, including all of the Obama years. Now it’s 21%. And if you listen to sort of left leaning or democratic pundits, they’ll tell you that America’s discontent is an illusion, a fantasy, something fueled by Fox News, no basis in reality, right?

I don’t think that’s the case. And I think that Americans have genuine reasons for alarm about the direction of the country, the quality of the leadership, and the state of their affairs. And I think someone who’s struggling to pay credit card bills or pay their mortgage has a better sense of the economy than an economist just looking, you know, looking up charts from the St. Louis Fed.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I wonder about that too, in that the numbers are the numbers and they’ve been the numbers. There’s no change in how we measure whatever we measure, and they’ve been deeply flawed. I wrote a book about this 10 years ago. They’ve been deeply flawed forever.

They, you know, big macro numbers are not meant to, nor do they adequately reflect the immense variety of lived experience of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people in the United States and billions of people around the world. They’re just big aggregate numbers that are like a dashboard for macroeconomic policymaking.

They’re not really about whether or not the entire city of Toledo can afford their mortgage, right? I mean, that’s, I mean, the mayor may know that, but that’s not what our dashboard is designed to do or meant to do. What’s weird about the present is the complete disjuncture between what those numbers say and what public attitudes are.

Because at other periods of time, there was more coherence, even with this sort of partisan lens that a lot of people have talked about. If you’re a Republican and there’s a Democrat in the White House, you think the economy sucks. If you’re a Democrat with a Republican in the White House, you think the economy sucks.

So I don’t know that the economy, whatever the hell that even means, you know, the economy is a pretty amorphous thing under the best of circumstances, is nearly as bad as people feel, nor was it necessarily nearly as good as people thought per se in 2019.

Bret Stephens: I have some personal experience with hyperinflation because I remember Mexico in the 1980s.

Obviously the United States didn’t experience hyperinflation in the two years when it hit particularly hard. I think that if you haven’t lived through a really inflationary period, you just don’t appreciate how enraging and destabilizing, even an aggregate of, say, 20%, not the rate, but the increase in prices, what that means. First of all, obviously it hits you on both ends, because first you deal with higher prices, and then you deal with higher interest rates, which aren’t part of the measure of inflation, but are certainly part of the measure of money or spending that you’re used to. It also changes your perception of what virtuous economic behavior is. Virtuous behavior in a non-inflationary period is spend later, and in an inflationary period it’s spend now, because the money’s only going to be worth less. So, a majority of Americans had no real memory of what past inflationary periods looked like. Now they do. And I think that explains the anger because we had roughly 40 years of stable prices and we had roughly 20 years of declining rates of crime. The crime issue is a kind of a mystery to me because it’s disorienting to be told on the one hand that crime is way down and then just simply walk yourself into the subway and see National Guardsmen in the New York City subway.

What are they doing there? Why did the governor order the National Guard into the subway if crime is down? So something about the way in which we are collecting statistics about crime and people’s experience of safety is out of sync. I mean, one thing that I wonder about, and I’d love to hear a good answer to this is, is the following.

Crime rates, as police departments report them, have been falling, but the self reported rate of crime as collected by the FBI’s National Crime Victimization report, I can’t quite remember the name, has gone way up. And my hypothesis is that a lot of low level crime is simply going unreported, but it’s happening.

People have just kind of given up on the idea of reporting a burglary or an assault to the cops, but if someone calls them on the phone and says, have you been burglarized, burgled, or assaulted? They’ll say, yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: Why would they have given up on reporting to the cops given that these days there’s better policing than there has been in the past, more surveillance cameras?

Bret Stephens: I’m not sure that’s true because I think in many jurisdictions across the U. S., especially urban jurisdictions, DAs have stopped prosecuting certain types of crime, like, for example, shoplifting. By the way, shoplifting is another perfect example because the state of California effectively decriminalized shoplifting for theft that came under, I forgot the number, $900 or something like that, and so we all know if you live in the United States, there is a tremendous increase in shoplifting.

You can’t go into a CVS and buy goods you used to be able to buy just grabbing them from the shelf. They’re now under lock and key. You have to call a store clerk to have them open a plastic container to get toothpaste or whatever it is that you’re looking for. That’s happening because essentially what used to be a felony has been decriminalized.

So if you are simply going to say, well, there’s less crime because we’ve declared that what certain classes of crime aren’t really criminal, then that’s going to change what the government counts as crime. It’s not going to change what you, Emma, think of as crime.

Emma Varvaloucas: Sure. I mean, that’s California though, right?

Like, I don’t know if that’s a good stand in for like the vibe all over the country. I feel the same way when I, I mean, I’m not in the States anymore, so I’m curious to hear what you guys say. Well, you’re both in New York. When I come into New York, I get exactly the vibe that you’re talking about, Bret, right?

Like the subway’s kind of wild, although to be fair, Hochul did get a lot of pushback from the left about sending the National Guard in. Something we say about going into a CVS or a Walgreens or whatever, but is it really like that in Kansas? Is it like that in Nebraska? Is it like that in Louisiana?

Bret Stephens: Well, it’s definitely like that in Chicago and probably St. Louis. It was certainly like that in New Orleans. I don’t, I mean, I’m now relaying data that’s, I last looked at this about two years ago, so I don’t want to misinform your, your audience. But I do think that there is a disconnect between the reported rates of crime and what people are actually experiencing.

There’s a type of analysis that is so wedded to the idea that the only good data is government data, that it refuses to see the evidence before their own eyes.

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s fair.

Bret Stephens: Ultimately, people are not voting on what the St. Louis fed says about the price of goods or what the FBI is saying about the crime, they’re voting on what they experience in a grocery store or how they feel in the subway.

That’s the perception that, for political purposes, matters. And I don’t think it’s simply the effect of Fox News, because actually not that many people watch Fox News.

Zachary Karabell: Right, but you are in the reality of individual anecdotal, I’m not saying that pejoratively, just individual anecdotal experiences are so variegated and so many.

We created these things called statistics in multiple arenas from health to crime to economics, you name it, as a way of trying to get some aggregate picture that clarifies all the huge variety, and obviously leaves out lots of individual lived experiences, but kind of to your point about hyperinflation, we start with our set point, right?

In economics, there’s always been a thing of, or in markets, that people remember when they look back at their economic fortunes over time, they remember their highest income and their lowest costs. The set points we create matter, and we very easily reset to higher set points. So in 2019, where there was incredibly low crime, statistically, whether or not those statistics have changed and how people report over the past five years, I don’t know. I know that theory is out there.

And a very low inflationary environment, low interest rate. And you kind of develop a normative, like this is, this is my new normal. Therefore, any shift from that is perceived accurately as downward, even if the downward only gets you a little bit downward back in time.

But it also means you’re remarkably less resilient to what earlier times would have found totally normal and totally acceptable and totally legitimate. We do need to acknowledge that. I mean, I agree that you’re saying that people’s lived experience have to have some sort of purchase and not just be invalidated by and ignored and dismissed because the numbers don’t “justify it,” quote unquote.

I agree, that’s both ridiculous, and arrogant, and short sighted, and politically disastrous. But, you do have this other reality of, We do have to recognize that people reset, and they usually reset to a high point, right?

Bret Stephens: Mm hmm. Sure. What does that get you in terms of how people experience their lives?

Zachary Karabell: Having a narrative that explains we went through this pandemic, we had a period of riots, we had an extraordinarily divisive 2020 election, and the pandemic in particular, you could say there’s a global element of this too.

It feels like it’s been inadequately factored into the equation of If not traumatized publics, then very, very disoriented publics by a two year period where many of the assumptions of what the present and the future were going to be were completely upended in a very radical way that affected everybody.

We’re still acting as if that was just sort of a weird, like a bad hair day. There’s a lot more than that.

Bret Stephens: I’m having a bad hair day right now, but we had a bad hair decade.

Emma Varvaloucas: Bret, I have not quite wrapped my head around the union support. Or to Trump. Like, I understand that they’re pushing an economic populism, but on the same token, having the head of Teamsters via the RNC is such a strange and new development, especially when Biden did put a lot of effort into, you know, talking pro union, talking pro working class, talking pro blue collar.

Trump wasn’t particularly great for unions and blue collar work, and yet you see something, like a response that, to me, seems to defy logic.

Bret Stephens: It doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, we want to go and take the long view, think of the way the sympathy of many hard hats for the Nixon administration, especially during the Vietnam period.

It’s not, I don’t think it’s economic, it’s cultural. And Trump speaks the language of Teamsters and other union people, I think much more fluently than Scranton Joe and certainly Kamala Harris. There’s a sense of relatability, maybe because he spent most of his working life dealing with construction workers in one form or another, even though obviously he was on the management, management side.

Some of it has to do with the fact that despite outreach to unions, in many respects, the Democratic Party has become an enemy of Unionized labor. It’s become an ally of environmental causes. So I mean, the Keystone XL Project, which Obama administration cancelled, or, you know, it was very hesitant about, I mean, that was thousands of union jobs when President Biden essentially ordered a moratorium on exports of liquefied LNG, right?

That’s factory work. The effort to move to electric vehicles, I think, has an effect on union work in the Michigan area. So, the Democratic Party, I mean, it’s a sort of interesting phenomenon in American politics, but every 50 or so years, the parties basically switch places. And I think we’re in the middle of one of those great switching moments when the Republican Party, which used to be the party of the college educated elites is becoming quite self consciously or quite consciously a working man’s party or working class party.

And the Democratic Party, which used to be all about blue collar America, is the party of Martha’s Vineyard. And Shubley and cocktail parties. That’s a caricature and an exaggeration, but I think it contains enough proof that it defines perceptions of the respective parties.

Zachary Karabell: As I said before, we’re recording this on the 19th of July.

We have no idea whether by the time people are listening to this, Biden will or will not be the nominee of the Democratic Party, which will matter significantly in how the arc of the November election goes, although it will not matter significantly for, I guess, 45 of 50 states, right? You could just do Democrat X and Republican Y in multiple states.

Bret Stephens: I would say 44 at this point. Maybe even 43, but yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Do you think, regardless of who the Democratic nominee is, that this election, as most people are now, at least at this moment in time, are acting as if it’s a done deal? Do you perceive that?

Bret Stephens: It’s been such a wild ride that I think making a prediction is totally crazy.

If you ask me to place a modest bet, I would imagine Trump winning against most of his conceivable democratic rivals with one, maybe two exceptions, but I’m not sure. But if the nomination ends up going to Kamala Harris, I would be very surprised if she could win. She has all of Biden’s negatives. She carries the full weight of the administration’s mistakes, and she’s not a particularly skilled politician.

She’s compos mentis in the way that the president apparently isn’t. But other than that, she’s not a gifted politician. She also, by the way, has access to all the money that has gone to Biden Harris, which is a war chest of what I’m told is some 300 million dollars. So, to the extent that any other rivals are thinking in terms of the fundraising possibilities, she comes out of the gate ahead of all her potential rivals.

Now, is there some kind of conceivable Democratic ticket of say, Whitmer and Shapiro? A pair of states that are must wins for Trump, yeah, that could be. And so that, I think, could tilt the race. But I think that one of the problems that the Democrats have now is they are more wedded to identity politics, or more committed to it, that they are committed to a desire to actually win in November.

If they had to choose between being seen as betraying those first commitments as against a second Donald Trump presidency. I think they’d accept a second Donald Trump presidency. And I hear this again and again, people say, you cannot say no to the first black woman who stands a chance of being the president.

My answer is, well, if she’s probably going to lose, or she’s your least effective candidate, maybe you should be able to say no to her. But I’m not a Democrat, so.

Emma Varvaloucas: I want to ask you also about JD Vance, since we’re on the topic of VPs. I think this was one of your columns. I think you said that you had met him on Fareed Zakaria’s show in 2016, back when he was a never Trumper.

You hear different explanations about why he has gone the way that he has gone. Maybe it’s just naked ambition, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that, or whether there’s actually like, he really believes in the stuff that he’s telling.

Bret Stephens: I don’t live in his brain, and so from external appearances, it looks like naked ambition.

The material was always there in terms of his life experience. And even what he was saying in 2016 about that kind of the left behind Appalachia side of America that would have inclined him anyway in a more Trumpian direction. When I first heard that Trump had picked Vance, I thought, oh, that’s a mistake.

He should have gone for someone like Rubio, who might have made large inroads of the Hispanic community. He could have gone to Nikki Haley, which would have upset the MAGA base, but on the other hand, kind of sends a signal of reassurance to the kind of more independent minded, centrist leaning voters, but JD seemed like doubling down on the hardcore of the MAGA base.

On the other hand, Vance comes with some unquestionable virtues. First of all, an incredible life story, which he tells very well, very convincingly. It’s not like Pete Buttigieg selling himself as a war veteran. It’s a much more authentic story. Secondly, Vance is very bright. He’s a very bright guy. And that’s a useful asset in any walk of life, including politics.

I thought he gave a powerful speech that was authentic and relatable. He did well in his campaign in Ohio. People say, okay, well, he didn’t do as well as Mike DeWine, but Mike DeWine has been a figure in Ohio politics for decades. Vance had a tougher race and he still won by a convincing margin. So I actually think he’s going to be an asset in the states that Trump really needs to win.

It’s really Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. He emphasizes that the story that Trump is telling about his campaign and about his movement has a figure who’s obviously a future leader who walks the talk. It’s a good choice.

Zachary Karabell: All right, so final question, Bret. And more just about you as you reflect on your time, you’ve been doing this for a while, are you feeling jaded, cynical, hopeful, depressed, things are going downhill, end of days, been there, done that, seen it before, as just kind of life goes on and you observe the scene, and one of the advantages of having observed a lot of scenes is a little less likely to jump into it as, oh my god, this is all, you know, new, different, terrible, great.

But I’m just wondering, like, what your personal mood is about all of this. Again, are you just, uh, or are you feeling surprised? I’m just curious, where does your mood go as these times evolve?

Bret Stephens: My mood is the sun will rise tomorrow, and we will deal with whatever we’re dealing with. And the wrong way of thinking about a potential second Trump term is end of days.

I guess my mood is I’m exhausted with the end of days thinking about everything. We will hopefully, if our health holds up, live to vote in 2028 or in 2026 and democracy will continue and Trump will do things if he becomes president that I don’t like and he’ll do a few things I do like. It would be the same if a Democrat were elected.

I don’t know if this is just a reflection of having firmly settled into middle age and being a little more equanimity in the face of political phenomena, but that’s kind of where I am. You know, we were talking about Vance a second ago, and I was thinking about the intriguing and very different trajectories of the people who once formed the kind of the Never Trump movement.

JD was a Never Trumper. I was one. Max Boot was one. Jennifer Rubin. I don’t know if you were one.

Zachary Karabell: Well, no, cause I was never a Republican, so I couldn’t have been a never.

Bret Stephens: Trump was like an ast-, one of those gigantic asteroids that slams into a planet that actually breaks it into pieces and the pieces never quite coalesced around a gravitational center, so they all went flying into different directions into, into space, but I, I’m just trying to keep my feet grounded in observable reality and write as critically and intelligently as I can about politics and just not feel an obligation to pick a team.

That’s where I am. I just, The team I want to pick is my own conscience and to the extent I have it, intelligence.

Zachary Karabell: That’s very well put. Well, we want to thank you, Bret, for your end of days be gone. We share the same, I think, general view of both exhaustion and waning patience with the view of we are on the precipice of an abyss.

You know, maybe we are, maybe we’re not, but it’s enough with the Uh! And I want to salute the work you’ve been doing as a gadfly, a provocateur, an unpredictable voice who seems to follow your own conscience. As you just said, indeed you do, or at least that comes through in your writing in ways that at times enliven, I’m sure at other times enrage people, you know, it’s always deeply thought provoking and important.

So I want to thank you for the work you do and we will keep having the conversation.

Bret Stephens: It’s an honor to have this conversation with the two of you. Enjoy the day.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Brett. You too!

Zachary Karabell: So, Emma, I was actually struck as we were beginning the conversation, and again, we have no idea what the political landscape is going to be when everyone is now listening to this particular podcast, but this feels like one of these more unclear what the climate’s going to be in a week than I’ve ever felt in recording a specific set of topics.

I mean, maybe there were times in like at the worst of COVID where it just was completely unpredictable what the arc was going to be about disease and political responses, where everything felt provisional. So whatever you said today could be completely invalidated by something that happens tomorrow.

And yes, I am referring to the Biden question, which may be answered by the time you’re listening to this, and may not be. But it speaks to, we are in a particularly fluid moment politically, which I have to say is I think healthy. I know most people don’t experience this present moment as politically healthy.

But I think in a democracy when things are not set, and when the unexpected happens, that can be very positive. I’m not suggesting that an assassination attempt is a positive. I’m saying that a fluid climate where your assumptions are constantly challenged, where people and events surprise you, and where new information and new trends or strains come to the fore, that that’s a healthy reflection of what, particularly in a very large multi ethnic democracy, which the United States is, kind of should be there, right? There shouldn’t be a steady state state, because if there’s a steady state state, it’s likely because a lot of things are being suppressed. Personally, I find that these moments of foment, which are, seem to be increasing, and may, in fact, just be our new normal, right? That just might be the reality for the foreseeable future, is indicative of what it means to be a large society with a lot of voices, and that unpredictability then becomes, to me, a constructive thing because it belays this view of A, we know what’s going to happen, and B, if we think it’s going to be bad, then we’re certain about it.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean, I like that take. I think that it’s a breath of fresh air for people that are looking at the fluidity that you’re describing and generally just feeling exhaustion. I think that is the prevailing mood, whether you’re on the right or the left or somewhere in between or somewhere else. I think people are tired and if they could look at it as like, okay, like things are happening.

I didn’t feel that way to be honest. I was in the exhaustive camp until I believe it was yesterday morning European time that I saw that Biden seemed to be dropping hints that I actually think he’s going to drop out. I’ll put myself on the line here. By the time this comes out, I might be a prophet or completely wrong, but I think he’s going to drop out very soon.

People view that as a kind of like chaotic decision. And I am with you where I feel like, you know, people forget that the election season in the United States is extremely long. It’s not nearly as long in other democracies.

And, you know, in Senegal, I mean, it’s not a great comparison in some respects because Senegal really was going through a really strong constitutional crisis, but they decided to reverse course. The current president released all of his political opponents from jail six weeks before the election. They like did the election and the, uh, the opposition was voted in. I think we have time. Like, I think that three months is plenty of time actually. Maybe the United States isn’t used to that, but well, other countries certainly are.

Britain certainly is another one of those where the campaign period is much shorter. And that to me was the first time I felt like, okay, this could actually be fluid in a, not exhausting way, but in a, okay, like, maybe what’s coming next can be good for everyone in a way.

Zachary Karabell: Let’s see how it goes. I certainly agree, well clearly I agree because I’ve given voice to similar ideas. This is not to say that if you’re feeling exhaustion about all this, that that’s not to be honored and real and you know, as Emma has frequently reminded all of us, you need to take little, little breaks in your news diet.

Not gorge, not overdo it. This is in fact likely to be our new normal for a long time because it’s been our normal for a while now. So this idea of when’s it going to stop, it may be time to recognize that a very likely answer is never. It’s, it’s never going to stop. This is just how we are going to be in a noisy, technology, communication fueled world of a lot of people with a lot of ideas and a lot of opinions, many of which none of us want to hear.

Emma Varvaloucas: That was so not What Could Go Right, Zachary, but no I agree with you. I think people need to build their distress tolerance. I think that we need to adjust to the new normal. And I wrote this last week’s newsletter that people need to build their distress tolerance a little bit.

Zachary Karabell: So there you go. Thank you for listening.

We’ll be back with you next week. Sign up for the What Could Go Right newsletter at theprogressnetwork. org. And I hope you’ve enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, Emma. We’ll talk to you all soon.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone. Thanks, Zachary.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right, the Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.