November 7, 2024 • 12 mins
As president-elect Donald Trump moves to build his second administration, will he follow the Reaganite path of smaller government and lower taxes, or will he instead break from traditional Republican doctrine to focus on industrial growth and pro-family policies? Will his national security team be hawkish or dovish? And just how serious is he about his proposed tariffs? In this episode, Jacob Heilbrunn speaks with Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. McCarthy is the author of a recent New York Times essay on the 2024 presidential election, “This Is Why Trump Won.”
Music by Aleksey Chistilin from Pixabay
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi, I'm Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest, and it is my great privilege
(00:29):
today to have as our guest Dan McCarthy, who is the editor of Modern Age and a contributing
editor at the American Conservative, which he previously edited for a number of years.
Dan is the author of an excellent piece in the New York Times yesterday about Donald
(00:50):
Trump's election.
And I'd like to begin by asking you, Dan, I was keenly intrigued by your conclusion
where you noted that Trump is an excellent demolitions expert, but that the question
mark that hovers over his new term as president is how he would govern and what he could construct.
(01:15):
Could you elaborate on that for us?
Yeah.
So Donald Trump, during his first administration, was willing to defer to Paul Ryan's Republican
Congress, and he pushed through a number of pieces of legislation.
He signed into law a number of pieces of legislation that were pretty conventionally Republican,
including a very substantial tax cut and tax reform.
(01:36):
I think some of that will continue in a second Trump administration, but you also have a
figure like J.D. Vance, who's now going to be the vice president, and who represents
some of the new waves of thinking on the American right that are perhaps less anti-government
and more interested in whether the power of government can be used to help American families
and American workers.
So it'll be very interesting to see to what extent Donald Trump tries very hard to have
(02:00):
an industrial strategy, to have a pro-family strategy, or to what extent he leans on the
more traditional Reaganite Republican approach of smaller government and lower taxes.
It's interesting you mention that because the Washington Post has a big story that just
came out that the people around Trump are saying full steam ahead when it comes to tax
(02:20):
cuts and that the Congress, if the GOP, it seems likely controls not just the Senate,
but also the House of Representatives, has sweeping plans for tax cuts.
So you see that as a sign of the old Republican Party.
I think Trump represents a fusion.
(02:41):
In fact, fusionism is this idea, going back to the 1950s and thereafter, of putting together
a traditionalist kind of conservatism, a social conservatism, with an economic libertarianism.
I think Trump himself represents a new kind of fusionism.
And there's not necessarily an opposition between this tax cut agenda and an agenda
(03:03):
that, for example, may provide more support for parents with children, more support for
family leave.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of balance is struck between those two poles.
But I don't think there necessarily has to be a contradiction between them.
Who do you see as the most important person in the Trump administration on these issues?
(03:23):
Is it J.D. Vance?
I think J.D. Vance is the one with the most comprehensive vision of what a new set of
priorities for the Republican Party will look like.
And I also think Vance is very capable of balancing that new vision with the traditional
bread and butter Ronald Reagan kind of issues of the Republican Party.
So yes, I think Vance is critically important, and of course, with Trump serving a second
(03:47):
term now, that means in 2028, Vance will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.
And so there's a sense in which this is Vance's future, which is on the line here.
So in a way, it's a dress rehearsal for his own presidency.
I wouldn't quite put it that way.
I think that Trump certainly is not just a dress rehearsal for anyone.
(04:07):
He's a main act unto himself.
But there is a combination here.
And it's going to be, you know, Republicans have a difficulty when it comes to handing
off from one kind of Republican to another.
We saw this with the transition from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush.
They had been opponents during the 1980 presidential campaign during the primaries.
And George H.W. Bush, even though he made himself into, at least for his campaign, a
(04:31):
kind of born again Reaganite, he really had a very different view of foreign policy and
of domestic policy and of taxes.
Now Vance, I think, even though he's had his differences with Donald Trump in the past,
I think Vance is a kind of synthesis and creator who is going to be able to take what Donald
Trump has done and refine it and turn it into a more marketable product in some ways.
(04:52):
So there's a chance here that Vance could be a transformative figure kind of completing
the Donald Trump revolution.
Is Vance in another way?
Obviously, he's not similar to him in age.
But I wonder if he will occupy to some degree the same kind of role that Dick Cheney exercised
(05:13):
in the George W. Bush administration, which is to say that he will play a prominent role
not in promoting neoconservatives, but younger national conservatives to key positions in
the administration, since he has an intimate familiarity with the conservative intellectual
movement.
(05:34):
That's very possible.
And I think that intimate familiarity with the conservative intellectual movement is
one of the great strengths that JD Vance has.
And I actually think it's going to be good for both Trump and Vance that they are working
together as a team.
For Trump, it's good to have someone who can present a kinder and gentler to channel a
bit of George H.W. Bush there, but a kinder and gentler version of populism, which I think
(05:55):
we saw Vance doing in the vice presidential debate with Tim Walz.
But I think Vance also benefits from having someone as pragmatic and someone as oriented
towards making deals as Donald Trump is.
And I think that helps to take off what might otherwise be excessively hard ideological
edges that came through perhaps in some of Vance's rhetoric as a Senate candidate a few
(06:16):
years ago.
The Democratic Party is beginning to go through the process of an agonizing reappraisal.
In your estimation, what was the greatest mistake that it has made in the 2024 campaign?
I'd actually say the greatest mistake goes back to the 2020 campaign, where Democrats
knew what they were getting with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
(06:38):
They knew that both of those nominees for president and vice president had limitations
that even if Joe Biden was the person best suited to win the 2020 election, at his age,
he was not going to be capable of serving a second term.
Nevertheless, they nominated him anyway.
Similarly, if he wasn't going to be able to serve a second term, then his vice president
(06:58):
would be the natural nominee of the party.
But they chose Kamala Harris, someone who was not even able to make it into the first
round of the Democratic primaries in 2020.
So I think the key mistake the Democrats made was choosing a ticket that looked very well
suited for 2020, but that in fact would let them down in 2024.
When Donald Trump talked during the campaign about the internal enemies in the United States
(07:23):
and resisted any attempts to deflect on that statement, including from Republican senators
and others who tried to reinterpret his remarks.
Now, he insisted there is an internal enemy that he would like that he felt that he would
need to tackle in his second term.
Do you think that Donald Trump will indeed focus on his own kind of lawfare, or do you
(07:47):
think he's going to move ahead?
I think Donald Trump has won a big enough victory here, both in the electoral college,
but also winning a popular majority, that he can afford to be magnanimous victory.
And I think he's probably looked back at his first administration and seen that he got
into tangles about the FBI investigating him and tangles about other spats that really
(08:08):
detracted from the momentum of his first term.
So I think he's in a position to be very confident now and will not feel the need to settle scores.
How much tension do you think there will be inside a Trump administration?
When Ronald Reagan came into power in 1980, he essentially had a mandate for leadership.
It was kind of a thunder on the right situation.
(08:31):
And liberal elites were shell shocked.
We have much the same scenario today.
However, the Reagan administration for a number of years was divided between establishment
conservatives and then the wing of the party that always said, let Reagan be Reagan.
Do you anticipate something similar occurring under Trump?
(08:54):
I don't.
But this interregnum represented by Joe Biden has allowed the Trump movement to kind of
clarify its personnel questions and clarify its policy directions.
So when Trump came into office in 2017, the first time he was using a lot of leftover
establishment Republicans from a previous era, he really didn't know necessarily what
(09:15):
personnel, what talents were out there to be pulled into his administration.
So he brought in a lot of people who were sort of a roll of the dice, people like Rex
Tillerson, for example, secretary of state.
Whereas now I think there's much more of a MAGA talent base.
They're not going to be pulling on bringing in as many establishment Republicans in the
second term as they did in the first.
There's going to be a lot less internal strife and there's going to be a lot more unified
(09:37):
direction I think from the administration.
Let's turn to foreign policy for our closing questions.
I wonder if you have someone like Tom Cotton as secretary of defense or Mike Pompeo in
that position, Robert O'Brien at the CIA.
(09:57):
Wouldn't you in fact though have some of the tensions that you had in the Reagan administration?
I mean, Pompeo and Cotton are more on the hawkish side as is O'Brien.
What do you think might occur there?
O'Brien is pretty sophisticated.
You know, I have been in discussions where he's held court and I find him to be someone
who's actually a lot more subtle than he might be expected to be.
(10:20):
The others, you know, they may have a tilt in a more hawkish direction, but I thought
it was very interesting during the campaign the way Donald Trump explained his decision
to have John Bolton in his first administration.
And he made it clear that he didn't really like John Bolton.
He thought that Bolton's foreign policy ideas were very bad ideas, but he thought that simply
having Bolton within his orbit was a good way of strengthening his negotiating hand
(10:45):
with the Chinese and with others by saying, look, I've got someone whispering in my ear
that I should bomb you or I should take some drastic steps against you.
Therefore you should probably be serious about negotiations.
I expect Trump to do the same thing in a second term.
He's going to have, you know, sort of tools and implements both, you know, to his left
and to his right, both in a more hawkish direction and a more dovish one.
(11:06):
Let's conclude with a question that unites foreign and domestic politics.
Tariffs.
Many in the business class are trembling at the prospect that Trump would institute sweeping
tariffs on China and Europe, perhaps on all goods coming into the United States.
And you alluded earlier to his failure to implement an industrial policy during his
(11:30):
first term, which then Joe Biden tried to do during his term as president.
Do you believe that Trump will indeed embark upon a sweeping program of tariffs or are
they intended more as a negotiating threat?
He will embark on a program, but I don't know if it'll be as sweeping as fearful people
(11:52):
on Wall Street might suspect.
So I think it's a combination of both.
There will be new tariffs, but also the more sweeping ideas are really for negotiation.
By the way, I think that actually, you know, the fact that Joe Biden wanted to continue
some of the industrial policy that Trump had started in his first administration is an
indication that both parties see this as being a necessary component of any future agenda.
(12:15):
Well, Dan, thank you for that excellent explication of Trump doctrine and thought.
And I hope we can do this again.
Thanks, Jacob.
Always a delight to talk to you.
Talk to you soon.
Hi, I'm Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest, and it is my great privilege
(00:29):
today to have as our guest Dan McCarthy, who is the editor of Modern Age and a contributing
editor at the American Conservative, which he previously edited for a number of years.
Dan is the author of an excellent piece in the New York Times yesterday about Donald
(00:50):
Trump's election.
And I'd like to begin by asking you, Dan, I was keenly intrigued by your conclusion
where you noted that Trump is an excellent demolitions expert, but that the question
mark that hovers over his new term as president is how he would govern and what he could construct.
(01:15):
Could you elaborate on that for us?
Yeah.
So Donald Trump, during his first administration, was willing to defer to Paul Ryan's Republican
Congress, and he pushed through a number of pieces of legislation.
He signed into law a number of pieces of legislation that were pretty conventionally Republican,
including a very substantial tax cut and tax reform.
(01:36):
I think some of that will continue in a second Trump administration, but you also have a
figure like J.D. Vance, who's now going to be the vice president, and who represents
some of the new waves of thinking on the American right that are perhaps less anti-government
and more interested in whether the power of government can be used to help American families
and American workers.
So it'll be very interesting to see to what extent Donald Trump tries very hard to have
(02:00):
an industrial strategy, to have a pro-family strategy, or to what extent he leans on the
more traditional Reaganite Republican approach of smaller government and lower taxes.
It's interesting you mention that because the Washington Post has a big story that just
came out that the people around Trump are saying full steam ahead when it comes to tax
(02:20):
cuts and that the Congress, if the GOP, it seems likely controls not just the Senate,
but also the House of Representatives, has sweeping plans for tax cuts.
So you see that as a sign of the old Republican Party.
I think Trump represents a fusion.
(02:41):
In fact, fusionism is this idea, going back to the 1950s and thereafter, of putting together
a traditionalist kind of conservatism, a social conservatism, with an economic libertarianism.
I think Trump himself represents a new kind of fusionism.
And there's not necessarily an opposition between this tax cut agenda and an agenda
(03:03):
that, for example, may provide more support for parents with children, more support for
family leave.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of balance is struck between those two poles.
But I don't think there necessarily has to be a contradiction between them.
Who do you see as the most important person in the Trump administration on these issues?
(03:23):
Is it J.D. Vance?
I think J.D. Vance is the one with the most comprehensive vision of what a new set of
priorities for the Republican Party will look like.
And I also think Vance is very capable of balancing that new vision with the traditional
bread and butter Ronald Reagan kind of issues of the Republican Party.
So yes, I think Vance is critically important, and of course, with Trump serving a second
(03:47):
term now, that means in 2028, Vance will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.
And so there's a sense in which this is Vance's future, which is on the line here.
So in a way, it's a dress rehearsal for his own presidency.
I wouldn't quite put it that way.
I think that Trump certainly is not just a dress rehearsal for anyone.
(04:07):
He's a main act unto himself.
But there is a combination here.
And it's going to be, you know, Republicans have a difficulty when it comes to handing
off from one kind of Republican to another.
We saw this with the transition from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush.
They had been opponents during the 1980 presidential campaign during the primaries.
And George H.W. Bush, even though he made himself into, at least for his campaign, a
(04:31):
kind of born again Reaganite, he really had a very different view of foreign policy and
of domestic policy and of taxes.
Now Vance, I think, even though he's had his differences with Donald Trump in the past,
I think Vance is a kind of synthesis and creator who is going to be able to take what Donald
Trump has done and refine it and turn it into a more marketable product in some ways.
(04:52):
So there's a chance here that Vance could be a transformative figure kind of completing
the Donald Trump revolution.
Is Vance in another way?
Obviously, he's not similar to him in age.
But I wonder if he will occupy to some degree the same kind of role that Dick Cheney exercised
(05:13):
in the George W. Bush administration, which is to say that he will play a prominent role
not in promoting neoconservatives, but younger national conservatives to key positions in
the administration, since he has an intimate familiarity with the conservative intellectual
movement.
(05:34):
That's very possible.
And I think that intimate familiarity with the conservative intellectual movement is
one of the great strengths that JD Vance has.
And I actually think it's going to be good for both Trump and Vance that they are working
together as a team.
For Trump, it's good to have someone who can present a kinder and gentler to channel a
bit of George H.W. Bush there, but a kinder and gentler version of populism, which I think
(05:55):
we saw Vance doing in the vice presidential debate with Tim Walz.
But I think Vance also benefits from having someone as pragmatic and someone as oriented
towards making deals as Donald Trump is.
And I think that helps to take off what might otherwise be excessively hard ideological
edges that came through perhaps in some of Vance's rhetoric as a Senate candidate a few
(06:16):
years ago.
The Democratic Party is beginning to go through the process of an agonizing reappraisal.
In your estimation, what was the greatest mistake that it has made in the 2024 campaign?
I'd actually say the greatest mistake goes back to the 2020 campaign, where Democrats
knew what they were getting with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
(06:38):
They knew that both of those nominees for president and vice president had limitations
that even if Joe Biden was the person best suited to win the 2020 election, at his age,
he was not going to be capable of serving a second term.
Nevertheless, they nominated him anyway.
Similarly, if he wasn't going to be able to serve a second term, then his vice president
(06:58):
would be the natural nominee of the party.
But they chose Kamala Harris, someone who was not even able to make it into the first
round of the Democratic primaries in 2020.
So I think the key mistake the Democrats made was choosing a ticket that looked very well
suited for 2020, but that in fact would let them down in 2024.
When Donald Trump talked during the campaign about the internal enemies in the United States
(07:23):
and resisted any attempts to deflect on that statement, including from Republican senators
and others who tried to reinterpret his remarks.
Now, he insisted there is an internal enemy that he would like that he felt that he would
need to tackle in his second term.
Do you think that Donald Trump will indeed focus on his own kind of lawfare, or do you
(07:47):
think he's going to move ahead?
I think Donald Trump has won a big enough victory here, both in the electoral college,
but also winning a popular majority, that he can afford to be magnanimous victory.
And I think he's probably looked back at his first administration and seen that he got
into tangles about the FBI investigating him and tangles about other spats that really
(08:08):
detracted from the momentum of his first term.
So I think he's in a position to be very confident now and will not feel the need to settle scores.
How much tension do you think there will be inside a Trump administration?
When Ronald Reagan came into power in 1980, he essentially had a mandate for leadership.
It was kind of a thunder on the right situation.
(08:31):
And liberal elites were shell shocked.
We have much the same scenario today.
However, the Reagan administration for a number of years was divided between establishment
conservatives and then the wing of the party that always said, let Reagan be Reagan.
Do you anticipate something similar occurring under Trump?
(08:54):
I don't.
But this interregnum represented by Joe Biden has allowed the Trump movement to kind of
clarify its personnel questions and clarify its policy directions.
So when Trump came into office in 2017, the first time he was using a lot of leftover
establishment Republicans from a previous era, he really didn't know necessarily what
(09:15):
personnel, what talents were out there to be pulled into his administration.
So he brought in a lot of people who were sort of a roll of the dice, people like Rex
Tillerson, for example, secretary of state.
Whereas now I think there's much more of a MAGA talent base.
They're not going to be pulling on bringing in as many establishment Republicans in the
second term as they did in the first.
There's going to be a lot less internal strife and there's going to be a lot more unified
(09:37):
direction I think from the administration.
Let's turn to foreign policy for our closing questions.
I wonder if you have someone like Tom Cotton as secretary of defense or Mike Pompeo in
that position, Robert O'Brien at the CIA.
(09:57):
Wouldn't you in fact though have some of the tensions that you had in the Reagan administration?
I mean, Pompeo and Cotton are more on the hawkish side as is O'Brien.
What do you think might occur there?
O'Brien is pretty sophisticated.
You know, I have been in discussions where he's held court and I find him to be someone
who's actually a lot more subtle than he might be expected to be.
(10:20):
The others, you know, they may have a tilt in a more hawkish direction, but I thought
it was very interesting during the campaign the way Donald Trump explained his decision
to have John Bolton in his first administration.
And he made it clear that he didn't really like John Bolton.
He thought that Bolton's foreign policy ideas were very bad ideas, but he thought that simply
having Bolton within his orbit was a good way of strengthening his negotiating hand
(10:45):
with the Chinese and with others by saying, look, I've got someone whispering in my ear
that I should bomb you or I should take some drastic steps against you.
Therefore you should probably be serious about negotiations.
I expect Trump to do the same thing in a second term.
He's going to have, you know, sort of tools and implements both, you know, to his left
and to his right, both in a more hawkish direction and a more dovish one.
(11:06):
Let's conclude with a question that unites foreign and domestic politics.
Tariffs.
Many in the business class are trembling at the prospect that Trump would institute sweeping
tariffs on China and Europe, perhaps on all goods coming into the United States.
And you alluded earlier to his failure to implement an industrial policy during his
(11:30):
first term, which then Joe Biden tried to do during his term as president.
Do you believe that Trump will indeed embark upon a sweeping program of tariffs or are
they intended more as a negotiating threat?
He will embark on a program, but I don't know if it'll be as sweeping as fearful people
(11:52):
on Wall Street might suspect.
So I think it's a combination of both.
There will be new tariffs, but also the more sweeping ideas are really for negotiation.
By the way, I think that actually, you know, the fact that Joe Biden wanted to continue
some of the industrial policy that Trump had started in his first administration is an
indication that both parties see this as being a necessary component of any future agenda.
(12:15):
Well, Dan, thank you for that excellent explication of Trump doctrine and thought.
And I hope we can do this again.
Thanks, Jacob.
Always a delight to talk to you.
Talk to you soon.
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