Re-release of Robert Kagan on Trump 2.0: A Global Nightmare?
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Good night and good luck.

Hi folks, and welcome back to the Lincoln Project Podcast. I'm your host, Rick Wilson. We are joined today by Robert Kagan. Robert is a brilliant writer and a great thinker. He has a terrific new book out called Rebellion, How Anti-Liberalism is Tearing America Apart Again. Robert, thank you so much for coming on the show. And I want to ask you about the origin story of why you...

decided to write this book, you have always been involved in thinking about America's role in the world and our, sort of the propositional nature of America and what we are, and how that plays out not only in the foreign but domestic stage. Talk to us about how you came to write this book and give us an overview of this anti-liberal movement that's out there. And explain to folks why the word anti-liberalism doesn't necessarily mean

an attack on progressivism. That's a big assignment, but let's get started. I'll try to take a few pieces of that. I mean, the reason I wrote the book is because I was trying to answer the question, and I think many of us have tried to answer, which is,

what is making what seem like normally sensible Americans support someone like Donald Trump, who's so clearly someone who should not be president of the United States on many grounds, but not least of the which the things that he says about how little he respects the Constitution, how obviously his willingness to overthrow the government, which he tried to do in 2020. And I think, you know, I'm a historian, so I tend to look for historical explanations for things. And

And what I discovered, I thought I would discover it, but I discovered it in a way that was even more compelling than I expected, is that what we're really seeing is the resurgence of a movement that has existed since the beginning, since the revolution, since the founding of the republic.

the founders established a system based on a very rare, unique concept, the idea of universal individual rights. And while we sort of take that for granted, it's worth remembering that no government in history had ever been based on such things, and that the very principles themselves are in some way contrary to human nature. I mean, most

Throughout history, people have clung to their tribes. They stick with people who look like them, who talk like them, who believe what they believe, and they don't think that other people have the same rights that they do. So it was a real innovation.

And what the founders knew at the time, and certainly it's apparent in retrospect, is that even when the country was founded, a significant portion of the population did not agree with those principles. At the time, those were slaveholders. Sure.

but not just slaveholders, people who were virulently anti-Catholic. And so we have a set of ideals that has been placed on top of what is a nevertheless normal human society. And in a way, the story...

of America since then has been trying to get more and more people to sort of buy in to the basic premise of the Declaration of Independence. But there has always been resistance. There was resistance from the slaveholding South. Right. Prior to the Civil War, there was resistance from the South during Reconstruction. There's been resistance from white Christian Protestants to the arrival of immigrants of different nationalities, of different religions, etc.,

And what then all of that was sort of submerged by by sort of circumstances, by the Depression, by World War Two, which created a huge sort of reestablishment of the founders original principles. And what we're seeing today is.

and have been seeing for quite some years now, is a growing rebellion again against those basic principles. And I think it's very hard for Americans to accept the idea that many millions of their fellow Americans simply do not believe

in the fundamental principles of the Declaration, and today see an opportunity to change the system in such a way that would undo what the Founders created. So the liberalism that I'm talking about is the liberalism of the Founding. It's the liberalism of the Declaration of Independence. It's not about progressivism. It's about...

protection of individual rights and liberties against government, against community. And that is, I think, what people are fighting against right now in the person of Donald Trump, who is a very odd person to be leading this movement. But nevertheless, he is the person leading it. You know, I think you say in the book that there's a sort of a through line from the slaveholding South to the current

sort of pendant autocratic movement that has replaced the old Republican Party. And I'm struck how crisply you articulated this because it is something I think a lot of people have kind of walked around the issue. They've sort of hidden away from the issue. My friend Stuart Stevens wrote a great book called It Was All a Lie about a lot of the racial underpinnings of where we ended up.

in this country. And the original operating system of the United States had its three-fifths flaw, the big bug in the system, that was the only way it was going to be made acceptable to Southern slaveholders at the time. And I wonder how much the folks who are so quick to embrace Trump and this sort of amorphous idea of Trumpism as the personality cult

Understand that they're part of a tradition that almost killed America once in the Civil War, tore America apart again during the Civil Rights Movement. And and that there's a inherent, you know, racial and religious and ethnic set of prejudices that are driving this movement.

Right. I mean, that's been the really hard question because, you know, friends of mine are Trump supporters, you know, and they don't want to be told that there's a racist element to that. And I, as far as I know, they're not particularly racist. So the question is, you know, why are they going along with this? I think it's important to break up the Trump support into at least two categories. One category is what I consider to be the the

beating heart of this movement, which is white Christian nationalism. That is how people forget, either willfully or unwillfully, that Trump introduced himself to the American public as a political figure in 2011 with the birther controversy, which was a straight white supremacist. Our first black president is not a legitimate president. He knew exactly what he was doing. His advisor at the time, Roger Stone...

told him not to do it because he was going to get hammered, and he did it anyway. And someday somebody will tell me, how is it that Donald Trump, who doesn't believe in anything, I think, how did he pick that issue to summon this group of people to him? It's a very interesting question. I don't know if anybody's come up with the answer yet. You know...

I've done some writing about that particular moment in Trump's evolution. In part, he was talking to some people at Fox who were around Roger and the brain room. And I think it also came down to, and yeah, the irony of Roger Stone saying, whoa, back on that boss. Don't go that far. Yeah, that's too crazy. That's a moment right there all by itself. Right. But,

But he has always had a kind of feral cunning about him about certain populist issues. You know, why did he come out against the Central Park Five? Well, it wasn't because he believed they were actually guilty. It's because there was a sense in the city in that moment that he could... that that was...

that everybody outside of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side was feeling anxious and terrified about crime. I mean, that was a moment where you saw the origin story of Giuliani as mayor sort of taking off, even though they were not guilty. So he's, I think he's always had a kind of skill set there. He's always had a kind of radar for these hyper-populist issues. Right.

And ironically, I should have seen the end of my career as a Republican roaring up toward me because when I wrote a memo in 2008 and said, this is the dumbest issue I've ever heard. Please stop talking about this. And I got a tremendous amount of static for it from rank and file Republicans who didn't believe Barack Obama was from Kenya. This is a great issue for us.

In what way? Right. But the point, just to get back to the argument, so then, so the...

He set himself up that way. That is the beating heart of his movement. That is what he is playing to in this campaign in a way that is much more directed than it was in 2016, which is it's the poison the blood campaign. He's running a race-oriented, ethnic-oriented, religious-oriented campaign with the Bible and everything.

So that is the heart of his movement. I think that is the part of the movement that scares people into acquiescing, et cetera, because that represents a very large chunk of the Republican electorate. And so then the question is, what about all the other people? What about the people who were very happy voting for Mitt Romney, where they were very happy voting for John McCain, and now they're very happy voting for Donald Trump? How do they not... Why do they not tell the difference? And I got to tell you, Mike,

My initial instinct is they don't get it and they really don't see it. But over time, I've become convinced that it's impossible for them not to see it. And therefore, ultimately, what I've decided is they just don't care that much. And I think what we're really suffering from is

and I talk about this in the book, is something that Jefferson worried about, Lincoln warned about, which is just basically a general apathy about the liberal principles, the principles of the Declaration, which are, again, hard to implement, they require a real commitment,

And who's to say that Americans, like every other people in the world, ultimately don't care that much? And I think that is the crisis at REN right now. It's a crisis of belief. And I think that for whatever reason, whether it's education or whether it's just historical reality,

Too many people no longer care about preserving these principles against sort of basic racial, religious, et cetera, tendencies. And by the way, it's just an accident that many Democrats are right on this issue. I'm not sure they would necessarily be right if it weren't their party that was at stake. So we may have an, you know, who knows how many people beyond the Republican Party don't care that much about

about these principles. I think that's the crisis that we're really facing right now. The NFL playoffs are better with FanDuel because right now new customers can bet $5 and get $300 in bonus bets if you win. That's $300 in bonus bets if you win your first $5 bet. FanDuel, an official sportsbook partner of the NFL.

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I think one of the other sort of thrusts of this crisis moment that we're in is that there are people in the Republican world, and I use that phrase very loosely now, just the branding, not the ideals, who do believe in authoritarianism, who do believe in that phrase I keep seeing pop up about Trump. We need a red Caesar who do believe in the strongman theory of leadership. Yeah.

That to my mind, that goes beyond apathy. There is an, there's an intellectual way, use the term with some air quotes, but, but they're not stupid people. There's an intellectual movement inside some of the, of the MAGA world. Um,

that really believe that the American system needs to be fundamentally replaced. It's not just that they're letting it die on the vine or that apathy will kill it by externalities and circumstances. They want to kill it. Steve Bannon wants to kill it. He

He wants the end of an America that has a role in the world. He wants to reduce it to the blood and soil nationalism, the kinder Kucha Karcha sort of idea of families and all that stuff. It fascinates me that more people haven't sort of seen that in the way I think you have.

And, you know, I don't know when it's happening, but I think they're having another one of their annual national conservative conferences coming up. And that is a straight ethno-religious doctrine. That is saying, you know, the guy who's the intellectual godfather of that movement, Yoram Hazzoni, explicitly says that the United States should no longer be based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

but should become a white Protestant country. And then it can let all the other people live there, but it is still a white Protestant country. And you see people involved in that movement, like Chris DeMuth, who was the president of the American Enterprise Institute for decades. I thought, again, this is like, who are these people? I thought he was a perfectly reasonable person, and now he is selling ethno-religious nationalism as his doctrine. And

So I think that it's pretty clear if you look at the Republican intellectual world, the conservative intellectual world, I think it turns out that conservative...

doctrine has turned out to be either more bankrupt than we thought or more absolutely contrary to the fundamental principles that the United States was founded on than anyone has been willing to admit. And people have sort of maybe come home to where they always were but couldn't say for many decades, you know? I mean, the irony of it is that as a jaded political hack,

I still grew up in the conservative movement with, you know, Burke and Kirk and Russell and, and Buckley and all those things. And none of it in the end seemed to have any permanence with people who talked about the importance of the permanence of conservative ideas. Yeah. In the end, the, the, the, I mean,

There are a tiny number of holdouts here and there, but mostly I feel like we're the last priests of a dying religion sometimes because that idea of white ethno-nationalism is something... Protestant ethno-nationalism, to be clear, is something that I...

When my great-grandfather, a Bavarian Catholic, somehow ended up in Florida in 1905 or whatever it was, he faced from the Klan, they hated the blacks and the Jews and the Catholics with equal vigor in the South back then. But this idea, this Protestant-driven, evangelically-driven nationalism, I mean...

I know where it comes from, but what's the countervailing force there? I have yet to sort out how you, even cutting the head off the snake, we beat Trump and drive him into humiliation. I still don't think it kills this movement at a level that would save the country from it.

Well, that's an interesting question. I think, obviously, the movement has... What's shocking about our present moment is that the movement is so much more virulent than we thought. It still is so virulent, you know? Right. I think we shouldn't have been shocked, but nevertheless, that's the way that maybe the nature of being human. But, you know, when...

A hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the issue of desegregation came up. The South stood up united in opposition and pretty much was ready to leave the country again. You know, Eisenhower had to send, you know, a military force to Arkansas to enforce, which is, you know, once again, it was simply military power in a sense that convinced the

So if these people after a hundred years had not changed an iota in their attitude towards race, why should we assume that they have now changed? And I think that what Trump revealed by sort of empowering these people and sort of making it okay for them to express their real views, it revealed how strong and wide this movement still is. So you're absolutely right.

However, my sense of it is that demographically they're in trouble. Sure.

And my hope is that if we get past this election, if we were to survive this election without Donald Trump coming into power and bringing all these people in in a way that they've never been before. And this is the thing that drives me crazy about Republicans who compare the first term to what a second term was like. The people who are going to be running the show under Trump in this term are completely different from the kind of people who were running the show in the first term.

And it's going to be a very different movement. But in any case, I think that if once Trump is gone from the scene, the movement will still be there. But will it really have the capacity? Has it captured the Republican Party permanently? That's an interesting question. And I wonder whether I would actually think that after Trump is gone, the Republican Party may split and cease to be a viable political party, because I don't think in the absence of Trump,

all these other like friends of ours are still going to be lined up with white Christian nationalists in the same way that they are now. So yeah, I you mentioned Chris DeMuth at AEI. Would you look at where how how transformative it's been for what were think tanks in the Republican space, AEI and Heritage and a lot of these a lot of these

uh, what I called the gentry conservatives who were, you know, never Trump in the beginning and who have now, you know, with the passion of the converted, believe that any opposition to Trump is a sign of, you know, uh, that you're a globalist, socialist, communist George. So I love how they mad lib all the words together every time. But, but,

It is interesting that the institutional basis of it does seem fragile. Like the America first policy Institute will disappear like a soap bubble when Trump is gone. It's not that, that doesn't have permanence. I think some of the voters, I think you're right. There may end up being a, uh,

a schism inside the party because we do still see, you know, Nikki Haley pulling 22% on average of the Republican vote in her primary. Even despite her betrayal of her own voters, yeah. Which blows me away. We see out in Utah this week an anti-Trump statewide candidate in one of the most conservative states in the country.

who ran as a conservative, not as a Trump candidate. I think, by the way, a lot of this has to do with groups who still feel themselves somewhat under pressure in our system will tend to be more worried about anti-liberalism. So I feel like, I don't know this for a fact, but I think that since the history of Mormons in America is as a persecuted minority, they sense that

you know, having this kind of government is not good for them. But anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I've spent a lot of time in Utah and I've spent, and I've done a lot of work out there. And I will tell you, I met some of the people out there who were the most conservative people in the world, in every dimension about faith, family, beliefs, fiscal, foreign policy. And yet they are unbelievably welcoming of immigrants and

Right. They share that sense that they were once the hated, despised refugees of the world. Right. And so I think you're right. I think there's a through line there of people who have been through some sort of oppression in their history who understand that what the direction right now of the GOP is not a healthy direction. It's not a salutary direction as we go forward.

Draw this out for me for a second, because you did mention this. A lot of the people that would come in in a second Trump administration are not what they were vaunted. In the first administration, there was this vaunted thing like, oh, the grownups are in the room. There are guardrails. There are institutions. The courts will protect us. The smart people are not going to allow the yahoos and the weirdos to come into government. And you and I both know that government is its people.

Draw that out a little further for us, what you see a Trump administration would look like, both from the staffing and the policy perspective in the future.

Well, we can all see it. I mean, it obviously there's the whole Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation. But when you there are people who are named as likely chiefs of staff, for instance, there's a man who I don't really know, but I guess he was Trump's OMB in the first term, Russell Vaught.

Uh, if you listen to what he says, he is a Christian nationalist. Oh yes. A hundred percent. And his, and he would like to see America be a Christian America. Uh, and that would be our chief of staff. You know, that is a big difference, uh, from the kind of chief of staff that he had in his, right. In his first term. Uh,

if you look at the fact that they are i think they would be able to put people in place in the top ranks of government everywhere they this will be the kind of people that they're going to be put in charge sure because trump you know you have to take seriously what people say on the campaign trail there there is even for donald trump and he has made it very clear that supporting christians

is going to be a big part of what the government is. He's going to set up something to look for anti-Christian activities in the Justice Department, as if the biggest problem in America right now is anti-Christian bias. Those poor, oppressed, evangelical Christians. And so I think that we have to understand that this is...

This group that has existed throughout history, they were the John Birch Society, they were the McCarthy movement, they were the Klan in the 20s when the Klan was a national movement of relative respectability, it's worth remembering, back in the day. Politicians were not embarrassed about speaking at Klan rallies back in that day. Correct.

Those people have not had a shot at any power at any point since World War II. Even in the Reagan administration, they got crumbs from the table. They ended the Reagan administration feeling that they'd been shut out. And that's why people like Josh Hawley talk about the uniparty. They've been left out of both parties. Here they will be finally in power. And this is something that I just think

so many what we used to refer to as normal Republicans are either blind to or willfully blind to, which is that it's not going to be them running the show. It's not going to be the Wall Street editorial page. It's not going to be the editors of National Review. It's going to be these people who famously Bill Buckley kicked out of the party, kicked out of the conservative movement, and who now are back in in force. Right.

including the descendants of Bill Buckley, who have now bought into this. Which is maddening. That is where we are today. That's why the second term... Now, there's also the fact that Donald Trump is going to be a different president than he was in the first time. He is going to be...

I've never had somebody try to put me in jail, but if I had had somebody try to put me in jail, I would be very angry at them. And Trump is going to be the anger presidency. Rage. And here's the thing that I just don't think people understand. Why will he be able to be a dictator? It's not because he's a brilliant dictator in the making. He's not brilliant at anything.

It is the people who support him who are going to allow him to be a dictator because they're going to overlook or apologize for everything that he does. When he does cross the guardrails, the guardrails require, as you say, people to stand up to it. Who is going to do that? A Republican-controlled Congress?

that will be completely stripped of any opposition to Donald Trump. A Supreme Court, which we can see, has got at least three insurrectionists on it and others who are willing to go along with that. And is the Wall Street Journal editorial page going to attack Trump every time he does something wrong, or are they going to attack his attackers?

as they have been doing consistently. So the reason Trump will be able to do this is not because he's a brilliant dictator, but because his supporters both want him to be a dictator or will allow him to be a dictator. That's the crisis that we're facing.

I think that's right. And I think that one of the reasons this book is so valuable is because it does address this sort of the implications of what happens here. And if you let this movement continue to play out. One of the things that's concerned me the most about a future Trump administration is that we're at an inflection point in the world right now where...

Ukraine is now finally getting a little bit of, getting rearmed a bit. But if we end up with a Trump administration, my view is that he withdraws from supporting Ukraine, he withdraws from NATO effectively, or at least notionally, breaks the

the European sort of structure, the North Atlantic Europeans version of the structure. Putin becomes, for as long as he survives, a much more powerful figure. You enable this sort of autocratic axis of Putin and Xi and Iran and North Korea, and

So talk to me about what you see the implications would be for the global order if we end up with that sort of withdrawal scenario, because that seems to be heart and soul of a lot of what they want is a smaller, less dominant America in the world.

You know, Rick, I wish I could just say I have a very confident feeling about what foreign policy would be in a second Trump term. I just don't for a variety of reasons. One is I find it interesting that the one issue

that Republicans of many stripes were willing to buck Trump on was on Ukraine. Right. You know, he lost that argument. He didn't make a concession. He was just losing. I think, you know, I think Mike Johnson just said, you're going to lose, so let's reposition here. Right.

The fact that that's true indicates to me that there is still in the Republican Party enough sense that the United States has this very important role to play that it may not be so easy for him to do all those things, not to mention events will occur. You know, the day he... By the way, I think, you know,

even on our current trajectory with the Biden administration, we are not in a good place in Ukraine over the long haul. And I'm not sure that we won't face a crisis even if Biden is elected. But the day that Kiev falls will be, you know, Munich times 20, I think, in terms of its effect on everybody. And I think it would be hard even for a Donald Trump

to say, well, we don't care. I think it's going to be tough. So I, and I, or he might, I mean, you know, he is his own bit of lunacy, so who knows? Exactly. But I, you know, it's just hard to, it's not easy to steer the American ship 180 degrees in the other direction overnight. And I'm not sure that the American people want to do that. So I think it's,

And Trump may not want to be the guy who looks like he surrendered American power to the rest of the world. And so it's just, it's a little bit hard to predict. There's no question that a lot of the core support of his is basically isolationist. I think that's true. But polls suggest that the party, even under Trump, polls suggest that the party as a whole is not isolationist. No, that's very true. There's a big, a band of people we call in our polling research,

at Lincoln, the Red Dawn conservatives. They are conservative on guns, taxes, abortion, everything else. And they're like, what is wrong with Trump? Why is he with Putin? We don't get it. They're millennials, late boomers, millennials and Xers who, you know, like we grew up with the Soviet Union still, guys. We know who the bad guys are in this dance. Right.

Now, by the way, he will link up with all the right-wing forces in Europe, as he also tried to do in his first term. So he'll be Mr. Buddies with Orban. He'll be buddies with whoever, whatever Le Pen or whatever form Le Pen takes in France. He's a Farage guy in England, et cetera, et cetera. Like Rick Grinnell in the first administration was playing footsie with AFD.

And so he will erode European sort of what we would consider a sort of center-right, center-left democracy, and that'll be bad, I think, for sure. But this is one of those cases where I feel much more confident about what is going to happen here at home than I am about what the international ramifications of it. And by the way, should the United States slip into either

some form of dictatorship or certainly a turn away from its traditional liberalism, that is going to have a big impact on the world because the world is divided by ideology. Ideology is a big organizing factor in international affairs.

And if America is no longer the leader of the liberal side of the international community, that will have an effect. But I just, in terms of specifics, I just am a little bit more reluctant to know, to feel like I know for sure what's going to happen. Right, right. Well, Robert Kagan, I want to thank you so much for coming on the Lincoln Project podcast today. Folks, the book is Rebellion, How Anti-Liberalism is Tearing America Apart Again. Thanks again, Robert. Thank you, Rick.