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I'm recording this on day three of the Republican National Convention, which has not been like any Republican convention in recent memory. Recent Republican conventions, and I've been at a number of them, have been chaotic, underplanned affairs. You remember Clint Eastwood interviewing a chair in 2012? Or the weirdly dark and disunited Republican conventions in 2016 and 2020?
But this time, this time, Republicans have fallen in line, fallen in line behind Donald Trump, in line behind his vision of the party. One thing I'm seeing up there, something I think a lot of liberals are missing, is yes, the Republican Party has become a personality cult. Yes, it has become the property of one man. But that is allowing that one man to make changes to what the Republican Party is that his predecessors could not.
it is presenting something different up there. Not entirely different, but importantly so. And maybe it wouldn't be that way if Trump seemed to be tumbling towards defeat and speaker after speaker were thinking they could be the one to pick up the pieces. But right now he's hurtling towards victory, or at least his campaign thinks that he is. And so as far as I can tell, it is everybody else at that convention.
Tim Alberta is at that convention. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic who just published a fantastic profile of Trump's two campaign managers and their theory of victory. He's also the author of American Carnage, On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, and The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, American Evangelicals in the Age of Extremism. Both are important books if you want to understand this era in American politics. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
Tim Alberto, welcome to the show. Hey, Ezra. Good to talk to you again. So you were embedded with the Trump campaign, particularly its campaign leads for months. You came out of that thinking they believed they were headed towards a landslide victory. Now you're at the Republican convention. What's the mood there? I would say the mood feels like...
A very early election night victory party. And I've got to say, Ezra, I've been to a bunch of Republican conventions. I've never seen anything even approaching the level of confidence, cockiness, almost arrogance that you're picking up here, I think,
In politics, when one side is winning, you really feel it, and you are feeling it here in Milwaukee. I mean, the Republicans are winning, and they know they're winning, and I don't think the folks here...
Is that overconfidence?
Yeah, probably is because politics is crazy. And I mean, think back to 2016. In the space of a couple of months, we have the Hillary investigation being closed, and then we have Access Hollywood, and then we have the investigation being reopened, right? I mean, 2016 was, we all thought, the craziest election we'd ever lived through. And then fast forward four years to 2020, and we've got COVID, and we've got
Suddenly he's hospitalized at Walter Reed and nearly dies, which, by the way, talk about dodging a bullet. I mean, can you imagine the conspiracy theories had Trump died at Walter Reed under the watch of deep state doctors? So 2020 took on its own like very surreal Twilight Zone feel. And now here we are four years later and we've already had an assassination attempt and we have the sitting president dead.
appearing almost incapacitated at times during that first debate and the Democratic Party trying to dump him. And we're still four months out. So it feels like there's an awful lot that can happen between now and November. Let's hold on the assassination attempt for a minute. What role is the assassination attempt playing there?
I think to the degree that it has meaningfully changed anything, in the Republican Party at least, it's that Trump, who already had this sort of cult of personality command over the party, over its officials, over its rank and file, over its base, there's now almost this added aura of invincibility, right? We've heard...
A number of speakers talk about this from the podium in prime time these last couple of nights about how clearly God has his hands on Donald Trump and how he's sort of been ordained for this moment and not even an assassin's bullet can stop him from carrying out God's plan. And I think there's always been some of that sort of messianic undertone around Trump, but it's typically been found frequently.
further toward the fringes of the party and a little bit more adjacent with some of the kind of populist evangelical movement leaders who he's surrounded himself with. But now it's sort of getting mainstreamed in a way that is pretty noteworthy. And that, more than anything, has been really the major, at least the major rhetorical impact, the vibe shift that you sense here is that
People who were already crazy about Trump and were already going to be voting for Trump, now they find themselves sort of in awe of Trump. And that does feel different. Mike Donilon, who is President Biden's key strategist, one of his sayings about politics and about elections is that the key question is always what an election is about fundamentally.
And political conventions are efforts by parties to frame what an election is about. Donilon has been saying from the beginning that 2024 is going to be about democracy. It is going to be about, in a way, January 6th. That's how they started the Biden re-election campaign. I would say it's pretty clear that that is not working. From the Republican side, from what you're feeling in the convention, from the themes that are running through the speakers...
What do Republicans believe this election is about? It's a really simple concept, Ezra. And if you hear it and think, wow, that's kind of reductive, it's because it is. The key contrast in this campaign that the Trump people have been trying to engineer and optimize and operationalize from day one is strength versus weakness.
talking about the southern border, talking about the world on fire and Biden misplaying various geopolitical hands, talking about the economy and inflation. The Trump people believe, even setting aside the question of Biden's age and visible decline in some of his fragilities, they believe that
in all the focus grouping they do, the polling they do, that the question of Biden being weak, the notion of Biden being weak, is time and time again the most effective line of attack on him. And I should note that all of this, what I'm describing, it predates the debate. It predates the assassination attempt. So now...
you already had this existing theory of the case about what this election was going to be about from the Trump perspective. And then you get into the debate and you get to Saturday with the assassination attempt. And you recognize, Ezra, that
Political campaigns, especially presidential campaigns, really wind up being about a couple of key moments, a couple of key images, a couple of key exchanges or occurrences that sort of pierce the fog of the campaign and sort of break through in a way that voters who are mostly disengaged otherwise, they suddenly are attuned to what's happening in that moment. And you would have to say that in this campaign,
The two moments that have done that are the debate and the assassination attempt. And I think what's most problematic for Biden and his team at this point is that those two moments both...
are almost tailor-made to fit the Trump campaign's key narrative of strength versus weakness. Biden looking like he had one foot in the grave at the debate and looking almost entirely incapable of executing on any of his strategy coming in against Trump and just looking sort of lost and confused and pale and sounding very weak versus Trump looking
surviving a bullet shot at his head and standing up and pumping his fist with blood running down his face. I mean, what could better...
from their perspective, encapsulate the strength versus weakness argument. So that's very much the world that they were already living in before these events. And now I think that's why they believe they're in a position to win at a scale that none of us had even imagined. This is something that stood out at me in your profile of the Trump campaign. You wrote, quote, on a stretch of wall outside the conference room, large black letters spelled out the campaign's mantra.
Joe Biden is weak, failed, and dishonest. Something you write about in that piece, because you did a lot of the reporting before the debate, and then you were publishing it in the aftermath, is that the one thing that seemed to be troubling the confidence of Trump's campaign strategists was the idea that the Democrats might replace Joe Biden. Tell me about that.
Yeah, Ezra, I think it's just really important to underscore that the Trump campaign from day one has been built not to run against a generic Democrat. It's been built to run a very specific race against a very specific opponent in Joe Biden.
From the very earliest conversations I've had with Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are the co-architects, the co-managers of Trump's campaign, from our very earliest conversations, almost every exchange we had, every question I was asking about mechanics and strategy and tactics kept returning to the subject of Joe Biden. And they weren't just...
trying to use him as a pinata for fun in those conversations. They were making points, very specific points, about how they were tailoring their operations. Everything from the young guys who work upstairs in their war room cutting video clips that they can turn into sort of quick viral memes and blast around their social networks and get amplified by their allies on the outside to
to their micro-targeting strategies that they were implementing to pursue very particular demographic groups who they had data to suggest were moving away from Biden in ways that they wouldn't have been moving away, perhaps from another Democrat. Everything that they were engineering inside of this campaign, going back months and months and months, it was all very specific to defeating Biden.
And so once you've done that work, once you've built out this campaign that is in many ways quite sophisticated, quite professionalized, especially compared to Trump's previous two efforts, which were sort of a joke in a lot of ways.
Once you've done that work, the only thing that could ruin your best laid plans is if that guy who you've been preparing to run against suddenly isn't on the ballot anymore. And it's caused a bit of a freak out in Trump world over these last couple of weeks. And as I write in the piece, they are all but praying at this point that Democrats don't
find an alternative because they really believe that if Biden stays on the ballot, they're going to win the biggest Republican election since Reagan. I want to pick up on that idea that this Trump campaign is professionalized in a way the others had not been. Let's begin with Chris LaCivita and Susan Wiles, who you profiled in this piece.
Who are they? What's their story and approach? So Susie Wiles is a really interesting person. Her father was actually Pat Summerall, the legendary play-by-play man who was in the booth with John Madden for so many years.
And Susie has kept kind of a low profile over the years. She's worked in Florida Republican politics for a very, very long time, has a great reputation, but was never necessarily known at the national level until more recently. I guess the best way to describe Susie and to sort of give a window into her competency, Ezra, is you may have noticed this year that we are not talking about Florida.
The great Tim Russert, of course, used to always joke, Florida, Florida, Florida. Like that's all the election was going to be about was Florida. But this year we're not talking about Florida. Why? The simplest answer to that is Susie Wiles. Susie has over the past decade or so
so effectively increased the Republican Party's vote share among non-white, traditionally left-leaning demographic groups that Democrats have now cried uncle and conceded the state. Let's hold there because I keep hearing this about Wiles, but it never comes with very much in the way of detail about what she did. Like, what did she do? How did Florida politicians under her tutelage
reposition or offer something different that changed the dynamics of Florida politics. What Susie has really been adamant about doing in recent years, because she ran the Trump 2016 Florida operation and then ran the Trump 2020 Florida operation. And in both of those campaigns, what Susie was really insistent on was we are not just going to sort of make a
symbolic show of engaging these communities. We're not just going to go open some office in a Latino neighborhood and do a ribbon cutting and hope for a couple of friendly headlines and then go away. Susie has been insistent on, we are going to make a sustained engagement of these voters. We're going to knock on their doors. We're going to call them. We're going to target them with advertising that's going to cost money. And by the way, we're
When we target them, we're not going to target them the same way that we reach out to wealthy white Republicans in Boca Raton or Jacksonville or wherever. What Susie and some of her allied Republicans in Florida have been able to do is figure out ways to
to message very specific things to very specific groups. And by the way, this is not reinventing the wheel, Ezra. Like some of this in different ways has been done before, including by the Obama folks, but Republicans had really never done it well. Susie figured out a formula in Florida to try when they're in Miami-Dade County, to
targeting Latino voters, particularly first and second generation immigrants. They're airing ads talking about the Democratic Party is trying to import socialism from Venezuela or Cuba or Colombia or wherever to the United States. So it's been a really tightly targeted engagement strategy that has paid great dividends for the party down in Florida. So then tell me about Chris LaCivita. So Chris is more of your...
sort of throwback, like hatchet man style Republican operative. And I think he would wear that label with pride. Chris is best known, Ezra, rather famously known for having spearheaded this campaign in 2004. This is called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which is
in many ways, was responsible, many people think, for John Kerry ultimately losing that election to George W. Bush. And...
Of course, it should be noted that the Swift Boat Veterans campaign was dirty. It was deceptive. It was, in many ways, sort of representative of the very worst of political practitioners and the dark arts. Just for younger listeners, so John Kerry ran in 2004 in a national security election as a war hero, which George W. Bush very much was not.
And the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against him was built on people who had served either with him or on boats like his, questioning both his war heroism and whether he had betrayed people like them in becoming maybe the most prominent anti-war activist as well.
That's exactly right. And I would even take it a step further, Ezra, because
Yeah.
He executed brilliantly, I mean deviously, but brilliantly on the classic art of war strategy that you take your opponent's great strength, which for Kerry was his decorated service in the Vietnam War, and you turn it into a vulnerability. You turn it into a weakness. And that's what I think Chris tries to do in his campaigns. Chris is an operative who is always on the attack. And
And it comes back to bite him at times. Chris has made some enemies in politics. Chris is a guy who plays for keeps and he plays to win and doesn't make any apologies for it. He is a very sort of hard-charging, always-on-offense type. I think what's interesting is that when he joined forces with Susie Wiles—
There were a lot of Republicans who thought there is no way this partnership is going to work. There's no way it's going to last because they're just very, very, very different people. Susie is very quiet, very self-possessed. She's a grandmother. She never raises her voice. Chris is this big former Marine wounded in combat in the Gulf War. He curses a lot. He is loud and sort of boisterous. And
the two of them would seem to just be the oddest of couples on paper. And yet, somehow, some way, the two of them together have been able to not just professionalize a political operation that had been pretty disorganized and in some ways just sort of downright clownish over the years, but they've also been able to
I don't want to say tame Donald Trump because nobody can tame Donald Trump, but they've been able to reach him and sort of bring him along in evolving in some pretty important ways that have made him much more effective as a political candidate.
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You've talked about how LaCivita and Wiles have managed not to tame Trump, but at times to channel him. And I wanted to look at this in two directions, one where it seems to me they've really failed and submitted him and one where they've succeeded and moved him.
The one where it seems to me from your story that they have submitted to something really weird with him is in agreeing to shift their and the RNC's priorities away from get out the vote and towards this thing called election integrity, which I would like you to describe what they understand election integrity to be. But then one where they seem to have moved him is on vote by mail. So can you talk about those two examples and what they maybe reveal?
Sure. So to the first one, Trump has this expression that he's said more and more over these last few years. And he said it to Chris and Susie when they sort of officially stepped in to take over the campaign for 2024. Trump said to them, listen—
I'll turn out the vote. You guys just spend that money protecting it. In other words, Trump believes that he is a one-man mobilization machine, that he supplies the energy, he supplies the intensity, that he's the one who is ultimately going to be responsible for turning out voters come election day. And what he's much more interested in
because it obviously helps to save face from the last election, helps to stroke his ego about continuing to insist that the last election was stolen from him. And I should add, it gives him and his party an early foothold on being able to contest results in
If, in fact, this fall things are very tight or if things go against him by some narrow margin somewhere, Trump has basically diverted much of those opportunities
previously earmarked resources that the Republican Party had for ground operations. And he sent all that money to create this massive new election integrity unit, which is in its simplest explanation, Ezra, a network of thousands and thousands of lawyers and volunteers.
volunteers all around the country who are in real time going to be monitoring every voting precinct, every tabulation center, even every drop box. You're going to have physically eyes on those places from the Trump world, and they are going to be able to document, as it happens, any sort of confusion, any irregularity,
Anything that seems amiss, the Republican Party is going to be on it in real time. That is an enormously expensive proposition. And for a Trump campaign that was already bleeding, you know, 25 cents on the dollar that they were raising going to Trump's legal fees, for him to suddenly insist on this massive election integrity unit...
Chris and Susie are looking around saying, well, there's only so many dollars that we have. We can't do this election integrity thing that you're insisting upon and run a traditional ground game. And that's where Trump basically said, well, forget about the ground game. Just do the election integrity thing. And Ezra, I just can't overstate what...
an enormous risk this poses, not even necessarily to Trump himself, but to a lot of down-ballot Republicans who are in really tight races, who are accustomed to having some sort of a...
organized footprint on the ground in their communities that can help them to knock doors and to phone bank and to raise some more money. These Republicans are looking around right now, realizing that the cavalry isn't coming, and it's really freaking them out. And then the vote-by-mail side? So on the vote-by-mail side, this probably represents the most significant tactical evolution in Trump's political world over the past eight years. And
When you think back to 2020, Ezra, this was an election decided by 42,918 votes spread across three states. He might have won if he had encouraged his supporters to vote by mail. I mean, I think he almost certainly would have. I mean, it's, of course, a counterfactual, but it's one thing to just remain sort of neutral on the vote by mail thing. But Donald Trump went out of his way to forbid that.
for voting for him by mail. I mean, it's a pretty extraordinary thing. And so it's funny because Susie Wiles had really led the charge over a period of months to get Trump to see the light on this. And she talked to him about Florida. She talked to him about how the Republican Party in Florida had really mastered the vote-by-mail operation and it was a huge part of their success and how it was safe and secure and not fraudulent. And...
She had some success, and she was kind of working him, working him, working him over a long period of time this spring into the summer. And really, though, she told me what happened was that Trump was having this kind of off-the-cuff, serendipitous conversation with somebody who made this just kind of random, out-of-left-field remark about why he enjoyed voting by mail and why he thought it was a good idea. And Trump said...
oh, okay, all right, good. I'm on board. Let's do it. And so that was that. And you have to think, Ezra, if Trump winds up winning this fall, and especially if he wins by a narrow margin and vote by mail makes the difference, this random person who made this off-the-cuff remark to Trump is going to go down as a pretty consequential figure in our political history. But Trump has not just...
embraced it rhetorically, his campaign now is building out a very sophisticated apparatus that is able to create sort of a customizable engagement program for anyone who makes any sort of contact with the Trump people digitally, physically, by mail, whatever,
Those people are now given personalized, deeply customized instructions on how they should vote, where they should vote, what their different options are. So the Trump people, again, have not just gotten him to a better place sort of mentally or rhetorically, but they're actually operationalizing it in a way that is going to help him at the ballot box. Right now, if you listen to the Biden campaign's best argument for itself, what they will tell you is,
is that they do better than a lot of the polling suggests among the kinds of voters who turn out very reliably. It's why Democrats have been doing better than expected in midterms, why they've been doing better than expected in special elections. So their argument is, look, in the general election, we are relying on the voters who turn out. Donald Trump is relying on the voters who don't turn out, and he doesn't have a great get-out-the-vote operation. And that's going to work in our favor and might be the way we win this thing.
And in a way, Trump is saying something not so dissimilar, or his campaign leads are saying something not so dissimilar, but with a different expected outcome, which is that Trump is making huge gains, if you look at polling, among the kinds of voters you would not expect to turn out for Trump, younger voters, Black men, that kind of thing. And they believe that at the end of the day, not only can they turn out, but by the way, if they do turn out...
It's very likely the polling is not going to capture this correctly, and they might have a significantly bigger win than polls currently suggest, which, by the way, we've seen with Donald Trump before. So tell me how you think about this question of the low propensity Trump voters, what we've seen from them in the primary, and how you rate the arguments or theories of the two campaigns here.
Yeah, so, okay, let me put it into two different buckets, if I can, Ezra. I think in the first bucket, when the Trump campaign talks about locating, identifying, and ultimately mobilizing low-propensity, maga-sympathetic voters, they, in that context, are primarily talking about white, ex-urban-slash-rural men or women who have...
stayed on the sidelines, who have, for whatever reason, been unwilling to actually get out and vote for Trump, even though they are in fundamental ways sympathetic to him.
And the Trump campaign did spend some time and some money trying to pressure test this idea in Iowa, this idea that some of these people, believe it or not, do still exist. Because I think for a lot of us, Ezra, we really did look at 2020 and the massive turnout that we saw, and we figured, okay, well, Trump's base is pretty well maxed out now. There's not a lot of people who like Trump who are still on the sidelines. But his campaign disagrees.
And so this first bucket that they've really been focusing on since Iowa and that they're investing their sort of new version of a ground game from the Trump campaign in partnership with the Republican National Committee.
is primarily focused on identifying some of these people who have not voted for Trump before, but that if they can be found and if they can be engaged on the ground, at their doors, on their front porches, that they will vote in this election for Trump.
The second bucket of the low propensity voters are actually people who have in the past voted, but they've been reliably Democratic. So here's where we're talking about young people, where we're talking about Black men ages 18 to 34, Latino men, potentially even Latino women to some degree, again, depending on the modeling that they're looking at. And I think what's interesting in this second bucket is that the Trump folks are
are not going to spend a dime on a traditional ground game trying to build a field operation around finding these people and getting them to the polls. They believe that that's a waste of money. They think that ultimately the much more effective way to reach these people is with the sort of narrowly tailored micro-targeting approach that Wiles has.
had done so effectively in Florida to reach some of these same non-traditional constituencies and convince them not even so much that the Republican Party is their friend, but that the Democratic Party is their enemy and to fuel a disillusionment with Democratic politics that they think is already pretty ripe in those areas, in those communities.
So this, I think, is probably going to be the first election in our lifetimes. If you believe the polling, Dave Wasserman at the Cook Political Report has written extensively about this based on the polling project that they've been doing, that this is probably going to be the first election where the low engagement, low propensity voters are overwhelmingly breaking towards the Republican Party. And that really could represent sort of a sea change in our politics.
We've been talking about this in terms of campaign mechanics, but I want to bring it back to what we're seeing at the convention, because the most powerful tool a campaign has is not its GOTV effort. It is how it is seen overall. It is what the election is understood to be about, what the parties are understood to be representing. And it does feel to me, as somebody who has watched a lot of Republican conventions, who has attended Republican conventions, that Trump is trying to
even more so than he really did in 2016 or 2020, to reposition the Republican Party. That the J.D. Vance pick is part of this, that having the Teamster president in a keynote speaking slot on the first night of the RNC is part of this, having Amber Rose up there. It feels like I am watching the Republican Party turn into the YouTube version of itself.
from the Fox News version of itself. But you're there, you're feeling it, you're also seeing how people are reacting in the stands. What feels different to you from 2016, substantively, and in terms of messengers this year?
You know, Ezra, a lot has changed since 2016. I can vividly remember being on the convention floor there in Cleveland, and it was probably about half of all the delegates who were there to ultimately nominate Donald Trump were not happy about doing so. There were, you
you know, really intense factional fights there between the never Trumpers and the pro Trumpers. And then a lot of people were sort of caught in the middle and feeling like, well, he did win and we are here to nominate him. But I think this guy's kind of a scoundrel and I'm not sure he's a Republican. You saw very few MAGA hats back in 2016. There was not at all a sense that this was his party. I think at best,
some of the Trumpers then thought that they had a chance to make it his party. But a lot of us felt like, well, maybe this is just sort of a blip and kind of a freak black swan thing that he won the nomination and he's going to lose in November and then he'll go away and things will go back to normal.
Well, fast forward to 2024. This is the third time that Trump has been nominated. I mean, if you go back through American history and look, there's not a lot of people who capture a party's presidential nomination three times. I think we have to recognize that this is entirely, in every way, Donald Trump's party. And...
The message this week supposedly has been unity, but it almost feels more like surrender in a lot of ways, Ezra. If you think about Nikki Haley's speech, even Ron DeSantis' speech, I mean—
These are people who, like so many who came before them, had really passionately made the case that this guy really isn't fit to be president and certainly isn't fit to be the leader of their party. And yet here they are sort of falling in line and standing and saluting and ultimately pledging their allegiance to Trump. So something has changed.
changed in the party, obviously, just in terms of its image, in terms of its makeup, even at the delegate level, at the risk of getting too far into the weeds, Ezra, I would just say that I've covered the Republican National Committee for a long time. I've been to a number of conventions. I've
There are so many people here who I just don't recognize. And I think it's in part because the forces of Donald Trump have remade the party literally down to the precinct level. I mean, when you think about local Republican groups, county Republican groups, state Republican commissions and conventions, these institutions of the party have just been completely overhauled by Trump and by his allies.
And so that change to the party is very apparent. And I think the other change that you were referencing in the first part of your question, that is at the heart of what Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles are envisioning. When they talk about this being a realignment election and an election that could potentially really change the ways in which the Republican Party is perceived, they think about
the Republican Party moving forward as a populist, working-class, multiracial coalition that is no longer the party of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and of the sort of old, stuffy Heritage Foundation with its policy white papers. They want to create a party that is both sort of edgier and
and also more inclusive, but a party that is frankly not beholden to some of the conventional
pieces of the Republican coalition, i.e. the evangelicals, as we saw at the platform fight, or even some of the traditional defense hawks, as we see with the J.D. Vance pick, because the calculus made by Trump and by Chris and Susie running the campaign is that those people are ultimately going to fall in line and vote anyways.
They just believe that these Republican voters are never going to defect and vote for Joe Biden. And so that they have this opportunity to sort of play with House money and see if they can't expand the coalition and bring in all sorts of people who would have never thought to be attainable in previous elections.
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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Well, let's try to look at this through J.D. Vance. I find a number of my liberal friends are so focused on who he was that they have trouble asking the question of who he now is. How do you read the thinking behind, Trump's thinking behind, and then to the extent that it is different, the meaning or importance of Vance being the vice presidential nominee?
The best way I can answer that, Ezra, is to explain how for many months inside of Trump world, there have been parallel tracks of thinking about Trump picking a vice president. On the one track is the idea that you pick someone who is safe and vanilla and non-controversial and older. So this was where Trump had really become
quite enamored with Doug Burgum, who sort of checked all the boxes and he's independently wealthy and he's handsome and he's got a beautiful wife and, you know, there's and he's not going to offend anyone. And he might reassure people. Yes, exactly. He might reassure people sort of like Mike Pence did back in 2016 that, OK, there's going to be a responsible adult in the room with Donald Trump at all times. Like Doug Burgum is the kind of person who would certify the 2020 election.
That's right. And Ezra, that first argument, that sort of Burgum argument, was really carrying the day for much of the past six months. I think if you had asked people all throughout that period, people close to Trump would have gone to Vegas and put their money on Doug Burgum, or if not Burgum, then certainly on a Burgum type. If for no other reason, Ezra, than the fact that
They all recognize, everyone recognizes that Donald Trump does not like to have competition. He does not like to be upstaged. He does not like the idea that anyone could be seen as potentially usurping him. And yet, the second track running parallel, this idea of picking an heir apparent to the MAGA empire, of sort of hand-selecting his successor to lead the movement and the party going forward—
That was always seen as kind of a long shot. Most of the people around Trump just did not believe that that was ultimately what he would decide to do.
And it's really remarkable that not only did Trump come around and warm up to this idea, but that he really came around and warmed up to a guy who was sort of the unlikeliest heir apparent. As your colleagues, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, wrote in their piece yesterday, there's been some real tension going back to the very first time that Trump
ever met with J.D. Vance and basically told him, hey, you've been saying some nasty stuff about me, except he didn't say stuff. And for Trump to...
do such a 180 on J.D. Vance and to really come to view him as not just an ally, not just as a kindred spirit, but as someone who is almost supernaturally attuned to this visceral populist impulse that kind of animates Trump's political thinking, it's quite remarkable. And Vance, I think, was able to impress upon Trump
in a sort of diplomatic way that all of those raw, visceral populist impulses that you feel, Donald Trump, you aren't always able to articulate them. You're not always able to sort of present them in a coherent or
organized fashion. I can do that for you. I can help you actually put meat on those bones. I can help you to craft a governing vision that is not going to be derailed by the rhinos like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and the others who were in your cabinet during that first term. If you want to really remake the country, then you need someone who can help you translate those sort of
abstract ideas into something real. And I think that was really compelling to Trump. But two things can be true here.
One is that there is this other strain of both Trump and Vance. It feels to me like it connects, which is this populist aesthetic, populist resentment, populist anger strain, right? The main thing Vance did, I think, in his own political makeover was go from a soft-spoken, open-hearted, temperamentally gentle person to somebody who was the most contemptuous person
the most conflictual, the most antagonistic figure towards liberals in his public speaking that functionally there really even is in the Republican Party. So on the one hand, I think he is much more in the populist aesthetic than a Rubio, than a Burgum. And that is something I think Trump has deeply understood the power of. Even as I wonder how much the people saying this is an ideological pick, which is something even I have said, because, I mean, it is a much more ideological pick than I was expecting, that
How much that may or may not actually prove to be true in Trump's presidency, because Trump listens to a lot of people and ultimately goes wherever he goes and goes in different directions at the same time. The reason Trump is confusing in many ways to cover is that he'll say something and then say something that points in the opposite direction in the same answer. I think it's very funny that at the same time he is naming J.D. Vance this sort of angry populist figure and MAGA political thinker who's railing against the globalists.
to be his vice presidential pick, he's musing to Bloomberg about making Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan, and like the icon of the globalist banker class, his treasury secretary. So there's this weird way to me in which Vance's populist aesthetic is a very clear through line here. And the ideological dimension of him, the guy who can create a governing philosophy is
I don't know. I wonder if that's more legible to people like me because it's how we think about politics, but that's a mistake we keep making about thinking that we can predict Donald Trump. It's a totally fair question, and we could be making that mistake, Ezra. You know, with J.D. Vance, you do just get a sense. I was just having this conversation with a very plugged-in Republican a couple of days ago, and...
This is someone who spent a lot of time with Trump, also spent time with Vance, knows them both. And this person said to me, he said, look, don't underestimate the degree to which Trump and the people around Trump are thinking to themselves, especially now that they really know that they're winning. Like if it wasn't clear a few weeks ago, it's really clear now. They're winning. They think that they're cruising. They think there's nothing that can stop them.
And he said, don't underestimate the degree to which they're all looking around now and saying, okay, the revolution is on. And if the revolution is on, then you have to have the true believers on the inside, starting with the vice president, who are going to, from day one, be...
on executing whatever the X's and O's wind up looking like of a sort of populist America first, start rebuilding at home and get us out of these foreign entanglements, whatever the policy actually winds up looking like, that's what we're going to do.
That from day one, it's going to be coherent and it's going to be cohesive and it's going to be effective in ways that Trump could never be effective in his first term. Because as I mean, I've reported on this at length, but like even before Trump was sworn in.
He was basically shuffled into conference rooms where Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were going over entire flow charts of what they were going to do and when they were going to do it. And Trump was just sort of sitting there nodding and saying, yeah, okay, sure. Okay, whatever you guys want, right? Like, if you believe that they are this time around really intent on trying to deliver policy that actually aligns itself with that populist aesthetic—
then Vance makes all the sense in the world. And you can expect him to be really in many ways, the sort of intellectual architect of a second Trump term.
So Chris Ruffo, the right-wing activist, had a tweet that I thought was quite sharp, where he said, "...the difference between Trump 2016 and Trump 2024 is that there is now an emerging right-wing counter-elite with sufficient knowledge, wealth, power, and prestige to advance the president's agenda through the institutions. Trump 2.0 will be an order of magnitude more effective."
And if you think of administrations as fractious, as having different power bases within them, Mike Pence's vice presidency was a power base of the traditional Republican Party inside the Trump administration. I mean, Mike Pence was a choice Donald Trump made to comfort Fox News and Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation and all these figures who, in his view, had power.
and evangelical voters and and so on but might not trust him and in choosing vance he's shown he does not need to kowtow to any of them you know for a competent democratic ticket that say had a standard bearer who could clearly make an argument against republicans jd vance opens up a lot of lines of attack he's not a graceful politician in the way marco rubio tries to be he really opens himself to counter-mobilization
I'm not sure if the Democratic ticket is going to be able to do what it needs to do here. But there is both the possibilities for Trump of coherence and the problems of coherence because he's not left himself a lot of outs either as a governing force or as a campaigning figure.
That's exactly right, Ezra. I think what you just said there is really important because, let's face it, a lot of us have spent our time and spilled our ink on this notion of a second Trump administration being staffed by characters out of the Star Wars bar scene and how it would be sort of chaotic and
And it would be sort of one catastrophe after the next because gone are the establishment friendly figures like, you know, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell. But then even in the cab, you know, Reince Priebus as chief of staff and Betsy DeVos as education secretary and, you know, all down the line. And that this time around, it's just going to be the true believers. Therefore, it's going to be that much more chaotic. Yeah.
And I'm not sure that that's necessarily true. It could be, sure. But I actually think that if we've learned something from this campaign, it's that if you put people around Trump who sort of better understand his gut instincts and who are able to sort of build out around those instincts rather than trying to tame them, sort of trying to weaponize them and trying to best...
operationalize them and then build something out from them that works. What you could see to the point of Rufo's tweet is
a lot of people in Trump's second administration who share his vision, broadly speaking, share, if not his impulses, then certainly some of his gut-level disdain for the left and for some of his opponents in the Democratic Party, and who are therefore able to work much more efficiently, much more effectively, and actually get a lot more done. I think that's a
a very likely scenario that we haven't spent nearly as much time thinking about. This time around, you could have sort of all oars rowing in the same direction, and that could make for a very, very different administration from the one that some of us have been, I think, conceptualizing. And then always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
So the first book I'd recommend is from my friend Jonathan Karl over at ABC News. And it's the final book that he wrote about Donald Trump, the most recent book. It's called Tired of Winning. And it's a book that I've been reading for a long time.
It's just a terrific psychological window into Donald Trump in exile after January 6th, after leaving office, when he'd become a pariah and was sort of toxic and nobody in the party really wanted anything to do with him.
And Jonathan really, in a compelling way, chronicles Trump in those months between leaving office and before he actually begins to regain some of his old political power and moves toward another run in 2024. I think that was a very formative and inspiring
in some ways, deeply impactful period for Trump as he thought about his own future, about the party's future, about what had gone wrong and how he might try to fix it. So Jonathan's book is the best thing I've read on that period.
The second book, especially in light of what we saw on Saturday with the assassination attempt, is a book by Elizabeth Newman called Kingdom of Rage. And Elizabeth, who's a former counterterrorism official, she writes really beautifully and eloquently about the threat of domestic terrorism and specifically looking at right-wing Christian nationalism and the ways that
some of the more militant blood and soil, God and country rhetoric from the religious right has gone beyond just unsettling to the church and disruptive to American Christianity, but has actually manifested in a clear and present danger to the country. And that religious extremism being on the rise is a threat to both parties. So Elizabeth's book is fantastic. Um,
And my third book is actually by a colleague of mine at The Atlantic, McKay Coppins. He wrote this biography called Romney, A Reckoning, and spent...
a ton of time with Mitt Romney, really had amazing access to him and his family and his journals and everything else. And I think for anyone trying to understand the transformation we were discussing earlier from the convention in 2016 to the convention in 2024, and what exactly has happened inside the Republican Party and how Donald Trump has
effectively steamrolled any opposition that got in the way of his remaking of the GOP. McKay's book is a great resource just to understand through the eyes of one man who prophesied
probably knows that story better than anyone, Romney being the nominee and becoming sort of the foil to Trump in those years and now on his way out as Trump is potentially set to return to the White House. So that's another terrific read that gives you a great perspective on this moment we're in. Tim Alberta, thank you for taking time away from the convention floor to talk with us. I really appreciate it. Hey, Ezra. It's my pleasure, man. Thanks for having me.
And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.