It’s a given that any political party is going to have ideological factions around different issues. But what happens when the ostensible leader of a party has no real ideology? It’s a big question to consider in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election. Our guest this week has followed the inherent tensions, fissures and changes within the Republican Party. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic, an MSNBC contributor, and New York Times bestselling author of “Romney: A Reckoning.” He joins WITHpod to discuss his view of what conservatism is now at an ideological level, the rife contradictions amongst conservatives in this moment and what the Trump 2.0 years could mean for growing party incoherence.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
McKay Coppins, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I think that people are probably understandably but, like, overinterpreting like his “landslide victory,” quote-unquote, as like he’s going to have this mandate to just do whatever he wants.
And, like, to quote you, you’ve said this a bunch of times, “Politics still exist and politics within the Republican coalition still exists, and it’s pretty nasty.” And I think that this honeymoon period that he’s in now is not going to last, you know, the first a hundred days of his presidency.
Chris Hayes, MSNBC Host: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?,” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, the thing about any winning political coalition in America in a system that’s essentially a two-party system, right, so each of the parties themselves are kind of coalitions of different interests.You know, in Europe, in a parliamentary democracy, there might actually be like a bunch of smaller parties that cobble together to make a governing majority. In the U.S., you got two major parties. Each party has to build a coalition of different interests, different kinds of folks.
When you win, and if you win, it’s almost definitionally the case that your coalition is going to have all sorts of internal axes of disagreement and conflict, right, different ideological tendencies that war with each other, different material interests that might be at war with each other.
You know, you might be in the Democratic Party, you know, is both the party of labor and also has a lot of big business support. So, it’s got to figure out how to deal with that. There are different ideological factions in the Democratic Party around foreign policy, in particular.
You see how the issue of Israel and the Gaza war has split the coalition in all kinds of really, really intense ways. I mean, there are people who are on far ends of the ideological spectrum over Gaza and Israel that are both within ostensibly the Democratic coalition, right? So that’s the nature of two-party systems.
That is also true on the MAGA right, but it is exacerbated by a few things. One, I would say, a kind of ideological collapse at the center of modern conservatism that has been supplanted by Trump cult personality.
Two, the fact that the person at the top of the ticket, the sensible leader of the party has no actual, real ideological commitments other than a sort of bunch of instincts of, like, he’s, like, instinctually and viscerally a chauvinist, instinctually and viscerally a bigot, instinctually and viscerally, like a mercantilist weirdly, like truly to his bones, has a bunch of kind of gestural impulses but no actual, like, ideological vision.
And the changing demographic base of the Republican Party to become more working class, all this means that, like, I think, the level of inherent tension, conflict, ideological vortex, and also room for ideological war within the MAGA big tent is unlike anything I’ve ever seen for someone winning an election.
And so, I thought I want to talk about those fissures and take them seriously. And I thought a great person to do that is someone who I’ve read and admired for over a decade, is a fantastic journalist, you maybe seen him on my show, “All In With Chris Hayes” on MSNBC, because he’s an MSNBC contributor.
His name is McKay Coppins, he’s a staff writer at The Atlantic. Um, he wrote a bestselling biography of Mitt Romney, where he got incredible access to Mitt Romney, called “Romney: A Reckoning.”
And also, McKay, he’s Mormon and came up through journalism environment, which, I think, you just reported about conservatism for a very long time. He’s been sort of watching this movement. And so, I thought he would be a great person to talk to today. So, McKay, welcome to the program.
McKay Coppins: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be on.
Chris Hayes: Well, you start. I know a little bit about your upbringing, your background, but tell me, where were you born?
McKay Coppins: I was born in Utah. My parents were college students at BYU, but we moved —
Chris Hayes: Classic LDS trajectory.
McKay Coppins: Probably a very large percentage of Mormons have the exact same story. But we moved pretty quickly from Utah, and I grew up mainly in the Boston suburbs in Massachusetts, one of very few Mormons in my town in high school.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. What was that like? That must have been interesting because it’s not a place where, you know, if you’d stayed in Utah and you’d been in the Salt Lake City suburb or even places in Nevada and Phoenix, the huge Mormon communities where it would just be like everyone here is Mormon.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, totally.
Chris Hayes: That was not your experience?
McKay Coppins: No, and it’s funny because I think a lot of my experiences at the time, I’ve later come to realize, are pretty common in the kind of, like, minority religion, neurosis, you know, experience that a lot of people have had.
And as I’ve gotten to know, like, make Jewish friends and Muslim friends, you know, in D.C. and New York, like, they all talk about this same feeling of wanting to, like, represent your people well, but always feeling a little bit like an outsider, but wanting to be, like, seen as, like, the cool, you know, member of your community. And so, there was a lot of, you know, that going on.
Chris Hayes: I’m the cool Mormon.
McKay Coppins: Like, I wouldn’t drink, but I’ll be your, like, designated driver friend.
Chris Hayes: Right. Oh, yeah, totally.
McKay Coppins: And I’ll never knock on you and, like, you know, like —
Chris Hayes: Well, yeah, and that’s got to be pretty loaded in high school, I mean, in the high school —
McKay Coppins: Gosh.
Chris Hayes: — going to, like, you know, people that there was underage drinking and there was underage —
McKay Coppins: Yeah, of course.
Chris Hayes: — drug use and marijuana and, like, that was sort of part of it and —
McKay Coppins: Of course. And I always felt like I wanted to be, you know, able to hang out with my friends and then not to feel like judged by me, but also they kind of recognized that I wouldn’t do that, but I was cool. You know, like, it was kind of this performance that I was constantly doing.
I do think in retrospect, it also, like, kind of prepared me for life in journalism because I always felt a little bit like outside of the, whatever, like the in-group was, and it gave me, like, some observational skills that have come in handy as a journalist, I think.
Chris Hayes: Yes, Nick in The Great Gatsby at the party.
McKay Coppins: Totally. I mean, I would love it to be as, you know, eloquent as Nick, but, yes, I always kind of had that feeling growing up.
Chris Hayes: What was your political formation like?
McKay Coppins: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think growing up as a Latter-day Saint, who are overwhelmingly Republican traditionally, that’s started to change in the Trump years, but in Massachusetts, I think part of my outsiderness also manifested in like an annoying teenage reflexive contrarianism. And so, I was never like a super right-winger, but I definitely like pushed back against the predominant liberal politics of my high school, right?
Chris Hayes: Which I could totally understand. I mean, I’ve spent some time with, when I was, like, 25, I wrote a cover story for the Chicago Reader about a 19-year-old campus, conservative Northwestern, a guy named Guy Benson who would go on to have like a —
McKay Coppins: Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.
Chris Hayes: — career in conservative news and talk shows and stuff. And one of the things that is striking is, like, it really is the case that, you know, if you’re a conservative and you’re in these certain environments, you just aren’t constantly always surrounded by people that have different views than you.
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: And it’s its own kind of tax on your, you know, mentally, emotionally, whatever.
McKay Coppins: It is. Although it’s funny because, I think it does two things, it can sharpen your ability to, like, argue and —
Chris Hayes: Absolutely.
McKay Coppins: — to kind of like explore your ideas and ideology. It also is the case. And maybe this is only true of a certain personality type, but it’s also the case that, like, if you live among 95% liberal Democrats, like, a lot of the most annoying people you know are liberal Democrats.
Chris Hayes: Correct.
McKay Coppins: And so, you —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — have, like, the most annoying aspects of this political coalition that you’re constantly confronting. And I actually feel like a lot of politics in the last, like, 10 years, especially, has been driven by this, like, impulse —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — that people have.
Chris Hayes: Including sort of elite disdain for a lot of things.
McKay Coppins: One hundred percent.
Chris Hayes: I’m just like, I don’t like these people online who social media say these like annoying things and ergo —
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: — that stands in for the entire American left.
McKay Coppins: Totally. And, and I think that like one of the best things that happened to me was I ended up going to BYU. So I moved to Utah, which is a —
Chris Hayes: Oh, wow, yeah.
McKay Coppins: — very conservative state on a very conservative campus and was immediately kind of like thrown into the, like, other side of this, which is, like, oh, wait, there are a lot of annoying conservatives too. (LAUGHTER) And it turns out that, like, you know, one party rule is also bad when it’s Republicans.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: You know? (LAUGH)
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yes.
McKay Coppins: And so, I found myself like voting for Democratic state legislature candidates in Utah because I felt like we needed to, like, break the one-party monopoly in the state, right? And I ended up serving a Mormon mission in the Bible belt in Dallas, Texas, so was —
Chris Hayes: Oh, you didn’t go abroad, you did it here?
McKay Coppins: No, you don’t get to choose.
Chris Hayes: Right, no, no, yeah.
McKay Coppins: I very much wanted to go abroad. I was such —
Chris Hayes: You get the envelope, right?
McKay Coppins: Exactly. But another thing that was kind of important to my political formation is that I was sent to Texas but assigned to learn Spanish and speak Spanish, which meant that I was spending most of my time with the immigrant community in the kind of Dallas area.
Most of the people who went to church with us and who I was working with, teaching English to, you know, whatever, were undocumented or at least a lot of them were. And kind of my eyes were open to their experience and also to kind of what it was like for them to be surrounded by like White conservatives, many of whom were very kind of disdainful of them and mistrusting of them. And that also kind of like evolved my politics. And so, I think by the time I got out of college, I had, like, a totally incoherent politics.
Chris Hayes: That’s fascinating, yeah.
McKay Coppins: My kind of like teenage conservatism had kind of been complicated quite a bit by the time I was in my 20s.
Chris Hayes: It’s interesting you say that because I think about, well, first of all, just that point about working with immigrant communities and being close. I mean, growing up in the Bronx, it’s like —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — it’s a majority Hispanic district, it’s a majority Hispanic borough. You’re constantly in contact with folks that are newly arrived or families of immigrants. You know, one of the things I find really difficult, just an emotional level with the current discourse, is just how disgustingly dehumanizing it is —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — about —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — these folks. And separate from a question of like, is, you know, what should asylum policy be at the border? Like there are policy questions that are pressing and real and can be discussed in ways that are not just like viciously racist —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — and dehumanizing, but the way that the discourse has taken a turn. And it is really hard for me —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — to hear the way that people talk about immigrants, I got to say.
McKay Coppins: It is the worst thing about the immigration debate, is that, like, the actual people who are here and who, by the way, like, come here for reasons that literally anyone else in their position would understand completely, but most people refuse to acknowledge on at least one side of the debate. Like they just become pawns, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — in this debate. And, like, I mean, literally we had a point a couple years ago where ambitious Republican politicians were literally shipping them off, you know, and ushering them into planes and sending them to other places as political stuff (ph).
Chris Hayes: Under false pre-sentence (ph), like, lying.
McKay Coppins: Yes, exactly.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
McKay Coppins: Like the fact that —
Chris Hayes: Like a frat prank.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, and these are humans.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, correct.
McKay Coppins: Like these are human people. And like that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — was one of those things, like, you know, as a journalist, I try to always, like, keep my, like, indignation and outrage and check with like trying to, you know, understand where people —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
McKay Coppins: Like, that was one of those episodes where I, like, was just so, like, incandescently mad that, like, it was actually hard for me to write about a report —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
McKay Coppins: — on because it was just so, like, just, you know, inhumane.
Chris Hayes: The other thing to say about immigrant communities is an obvious cliche, which is that they’re, you know, not a monolith. And, you know, as I’m sure you encountered in talking to Mormon immigrants, right, in your church, like, one of my favorite election day dispatches was a reporter, I think, for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who went to an ICE facility, I believe in Savannah, Georgia, if I’m not mistaken, I may be getting the city wrong, where he was standing online with folks that are in some asylum status waiting for meetings.
And he’s interviewing them about the possibility of Trump. And most of them are pretty freaked out, but three people on the line are like, “Well, I would vote for him, you know, if I get through this process.” (LAUGH) “I would vote for him.” And it’s like, right, because, like, people have all kinds of different politics that come to the country. And this idea —
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — that there’s this great replacement theory, this racist idea that, like, they’re being shipped in, I mean, and I’m sure you saw this in the Dallas suburbs —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — with the folks you talked to, like —
McKay Coppins: Of course.
Chris Hayes: — it’s not like everyone that comes from Latin America is a lib.
McKay Coppins: No, not at all.
Chris Hayes: It’s just, like, obviously —
McKay Coppins: I mean, no
Chris Hayes: — clearly not true.
McKay Coppins: Well, and, yeah, like, that is the thing, I mean, if you grew up in a place like the Bronx or if you spent time in a place like the kind of Dallas, you know, excerpts, suburbs, like. you just realize, like, people are complicated and, like, no demographic group is a monolith, of course.
But, like, they have all kinds of experiences that they had before they even came to this country and encountered the democratic and Republican parties that inform how they would vote if they could vote.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: And, like, that’s why it was not, like, wildly shocking to me that we saw this movement among, like, Latino voters in the U.S., like, it is maybe kind of inevitable that Latinos are going to end up becoming pretty, you know, politically diverse in this country.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And, you know, we saw this with other immigrant communities. I mean, I’m a Northeastern Italian-Irish person. Those are my, you know, main sort of ethnic inheritances, which is a real common Northeastern type —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — because, you know, the different Catholic and groups —
McKay Coppins: Almost everyone I went to high school with, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right. So, you know, the Catholics would sort of marry —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — the Catholics. And, you know, what happened with both Irish Americans and Italian Americans to a certain extent was that they came to the city, they were working class, they were tended to be parts of democratic machines. They moved out of the suburbs, they became Republicans.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like this is the process.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And so, the point about immigration is a good place though to sort of segue into sort of central theme here, which is what is conservatism in the year of our Lord 2024 under the god king, Donald Trump, said tongue-in-cheek.
Immigration is one place where I think you can say, you know, if you go back and you look at, I think Reagan is probably the last foundational ideological figure —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — to be president in the Republican Party. Reagan had famously this kind of stool, three-legged stool, conservatism, evangelical religious conservatives, economic conservatives, Milton Friedman, free markets, deregulation, tax cuts, and national security conservatives, virulently anti-communist, pro-massive defense spending and aggressive American hegemony basically.
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: On immigration, Reagan was pretty squishy. He famously granted amnesty. There’s an incredible exchange between him and George H.W. Bush when they were debating in 1980 where they talked about how important immigrants are. Some of the stuff he did with Cuban migrants would just be completely off the table today.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: So, immigration is one place where you’ve got, I think, probably the clearest and least ambiguous ideological story. Like to me, it’s at the center of the ideological bullseye for what conservatism is now, which is, if it’s defined by anything, the core commitment is to opposition immigration.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Do you think, is that fair?
McKay Coppins: No, I think it is and I think it is helpful here to take like a global perspective because I think that part —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — of what’s happened in our kind of, like, attempts to analyze the ideological shifts in the GOP is that we’re constantly just looking through our American prism at, like, how has — how things changed since Goldwater, since Reagan, since Bush, et cetera? Like, I’ve spent a lot of time reporting in Europe this year. And to them, like, Trump is no great mystery, like he, as a character, is kind of ridiculous and, you know, like —
Chris Hayes: Not to the Italians —
McKay Coppins: — repulsive to a lot of them.
Chris Hayes: — who had Berlusconi. Well, he’s very familiar to them.
McKay Coppins: But even, like, in France and the U.K. certainly, like, he represents a brand of xenophobic, right-wing populism —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — formed in opposition to waves of migration or in backlash —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — to waves of migration that’s been upending European politics this whole century, right?
Chris Hayes: Correct.
McKay Coppins: And so, like —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — to them, Trump is not like a black swan event. It’s like, “Oh, this kind of brand of politics finally crossed. The Atlantic is now taking over America,” right?
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point. And I think one of the big — one of the big differences, and one of the things that I think is an interesting thing to contemplate here as well when you think about the force of nationalism or, you know, America first conservatism or nationalist conservatism, there’s a bunch of terms they throw around —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know, to the extent there’s an ideological Vanguard around this movement, which is like seven people.
McKay Coppins: Yeah. (LAUGHTER)
Chris Hayes: I mean, truth be told. Yeah, some of whom I read. But that in the same way that America has a different story about what the American nation is than French nations, that we were more insulated from this kind of politics because there, you know, France is not founded as a multicultural —
McKay Coppins: Yes, that’s exactly like this is the people.
Chris Hayes: — Republic, a pluralistic place —
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: — like, you know, nor is Italy really, I mean, which is not to say there’s not internal fissures regionally in terms of language, in terms of things like that, but the notion of, like, the U.S. is this creedal nation where everyone’s coming and —
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: — pluralism is baked into the whole project. They don’t have that there. And so, the sort of like —
McKay Coppins: No.
Chris Hayes: — these strangers don’t belong, politics is just —
McKay Coppins: One, it’s why a lot of Europeans were like, at least hoping that America would somehow be kind of like inoculated against that kind of —
Chris Hayes: Right.
McKay Coppins: — virulent nationalism because the U.S. was supposed to be founded on these kind of like liberal, Democratic pluralistic ideas. And because like, you know, not to be overly naive here, but for a long time, America was seen by a lot of people in Europe as kind of, like, the aspirational democracy that they were building their democracies around. Now, obviously, you know, they would argue they improved on our system —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
McKay Coppins: — the parliamentary system, et cetera, et cetera. But, like, in terms of, like, core Democratic values and pluralistic values, America was supposed to be the city on the hill, right?
Chris Hayes: And particularly is a place that was pluralistic and multicultural and took in immigrants and integrated them into Americanness —
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know, with the big experiment that starts, you know, before the civil war and runs through, you know, basically the 1924 Klan act, you know, which closes —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — the door. And, of course, there’s the Chinese Exclusion Act, there’s the Klan act then there’s the law in ‘65. But, like, this idea, which is not to say, like, American history, there weren’t anti-immigrant movements, there’s a whole party devoted to it. There’s a Martin Scorsese movie about it. But that we had run this experiment before and kind of tried to work it out.
McKay Coppins: Well, and there is just kind of no even logical foundation for blood and soil nationalism in America to the point you were making earlier, like —
Chris Hayes: Except J.D. Vance’s whole speech was like trying to like retcon some blood and soil nationalism.
McKay Coppins: Like whose blood and what soil?
Chris Hayes: The Scotts, Irish and Appalachia apparently.
McKay Coppins: I mean, but this is why it was always —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — like an incoherent argument and —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — it continues to be.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: But you’re right that as the Republican Party, at least people in the kind of NatCon Vanguard try to kind of, like, you know, adopt this as their philosophy. This is the thing they’re going to keep running into, like, there is no, like, historical president in the U.S. for this idea. There is arguably in France and Italy —
Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean —
McKay Coppins: — and Spain and all these countries.
Chris Hayes: Yes, if you’re in Tuscany and you go to a guy’s vineyard and he says, “This has been my family since 1300.”
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, there is actual soil and blood —
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like mixed together at that site.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Now, it doesn’t mean that, like, it’s a good idea to have blood and soil nationalism in Italy.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, obviously not.
Chris Hayes: It just is, like, there is actual, like, physical historical line of continuity —
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: — that is just completely absent here. But for indigenous folks, of course, who were here before and —
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: — are still here and are profoundly politically marginalized and are not —
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — like, driving force of this version masters (ph).
McKay Coppins: Have no influence in really either party.
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah, yes.
McKay Coppins: Yes. So, I do think though that, like, the point you’re making is important because, you know, part of the kind of like complication of figuring out an ideology now is that to your point, Trump is this kind of like blackhole of ideology.
And where we use to understand the kind of range of Republican ideology on a left/right spectrum., you had basically centrist to very far right-wing. I don’t think the left/right spectrum is actually that useful anymore —
Chris Hayes: No.
McKay Coppins: — in understanding the ideology.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
McKay Coppins: Maybe American politics in general, but certainly, Republican politics. Because it really has for at least the last decade just been about this one guy, like the access is pro-Trump to Trump skeptical to anti-Trump and where you fall on that spectrum is really the only relevant measurement politically of where you are on the party.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
One of the great attributes he has as a politician, and I think it’s counterintuitive, but I think it’s core is that everyone knows he’s a liar, everyone.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: No one has any doubt —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that the guy is lying. And because everything he says is a lie, you can choose to believe what you want to or not believe. So, he says —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — “I am for capping interest rates on credit card companies. I am for cutting taxes for rich people. I am for cutting taxes on TIPS (ph). I am for a national mandatory IVF provision written into law that every insurance company has to cover IVF. I am for peace in the Middle East. I am for war in the Middle East.”
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, I don’t know. And so, because none of it means anything, people are just so easily able to discount when he says something like, “I’m going to deport 10 million people,” or “I’m going to impose a national sales tax on all imported goods of 20%.”
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Which is a completely insane and utterly unpopular idea if people understood it. And so, the reason I’m saying all this is, it’s actually very useful for bringing a political coalition together because everything is it itself in its opposite at all times right now.
McKay Coppins: Yeah. He’s a blank canvas that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — every element of the coalition —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — can project their own views onto.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: Right? This, though, I think is where it would be helpful to think about where the Republican Party was when he came onto the scene in 2015 because I think the ideological incoherence in the coalition and kind of the collapse of the three-legged stool or at least the infighting among the different factions was kind of reaching a fever point —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — a fever pitch 2010 to 2014, right? Like, you had the Tea Pparty where you had like very conservative voting record, you know, establishment, incumbents getting beaten in primaries by these, like, populist upstarts, but there was no kind of ideological true line that connected all of them. And what was happening is, like, Republican-elected officials were kind of panicking because all the old litmus tests were like vanishing, right, like there was no clear path.
Chris Hayes: They checked him all off and it wasn’t enough.
McKay Coppins: And it wasn’t enough and they were like —
Chris Hayes: Right.
McKay Coppins: — “Okay, so what is the path to getting reelected? How do we keep these voters on our side?” And, like, the people just genuinely didn’t understand it. And then Trump appears, immediately becomes the dominant figure in Republican politics. And I have to imagine that it almost came as a relief to a lot of these Republican politicians that were like, “Oh, all I have to do is say, pledge my field to this one guy.”
Chris Hayes: I don’t have to work anything out ideologically.
McKay Coppins: Right. And it doesn’t matter (LAUGHTER) if his orders are contradictory and like don’t make —
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point.
McKay Coppins: — sense. And if he, like, waffles from one position to the next, it’s fine, like all that matters is that like, I’m on his side and then he’ll help me keep getting reelected.
Chris Hayes: That is very clarifying, I think. And, correct, I mean, I think there’s a famous Thomas Massie quote, Thomas Massie is a far right Republican Congress member, but who sort of in the tradition of Ron Paul, I would say, like, has a genuine principle at ideology. He’ll often be like the one vote against a thing —
McKay Coppins: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — because he doesn’t believe the government should be doing it. And he had some line about, like, “We all thought in the Tea Party, they were voting for us, because we’re the most conservative, but they just wanted the biggest asshole”–
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — or something like that.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It was something along those lines. And then realizing when Trump came along, it was like, “Oh, they just want the person who’s like the biggest shock to the system.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: It has nothing to do with like what we would understand as the ideological spectrum.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, it’s funny. You know, I wrote this book about Mitt Romney and, as part of it, I was reading his journals from his presidential campaigns. He gave me his journals. And in the journals, there is some, like, funny entries where he is out there meeting with Tea Party voters and pitching them in the 2012 primaries.
And he’s like not the best candidate to be pitching them. He’s obviously like this, you know, well-bred establishment moderate from Massachusetts, but he has this theory that he’s going to be able to connect with them on fiscal policy. And he’s like, “I care about reducing the deficit, they care about reducing the deficit, like, it’ll be great, like I’ll just hammer the deficit with them.”
And then, like, he finds as he’s like on these stages that they, like, don’t care about anything he’s saying about the deficit and they don’t want to hear his 59-point plan to fix the economy.
And, like, he’s literally writing in his journal, like, “Oh, they don’t really seem to care about this stuff. They just want me to be mad. And I’m, like, not as mad as some of the other candidates and therefore they’re not going to vote for me,” right? And it was like this clarifying moment for him.
Chris Hayes: And I think I want to talk about fiscal conservatism or economic conservatism, but just to stay on this, I think there’s sort of three defining things that happen pre-Trump that sort of create the vacuum into which he entered.
The election of Barack Obama and the fear that this sort of rising, you know, multiracial coalition has inherited the future.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So that’s scary to a lot of people. The sort of seeming ratification idea in 2012 when Mitt Romney loses, and particularly the fact that he loses running on 1980 Reagan —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — Heritage Foundation, the old Heritage Foundation, classic sort of like free market conservative Paul Ryan ideas, like we’re going to cut the deficit and cut taxes for rich people and deregulate. And we want to, like, release the job creators. And all —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — said in a popularly accessible rhetoric that flowed from an ideological vision of the relationship between the market and the state as articulated, you know, by Milton Friedman and a bunch of other folks.
That doesn’t work. And part of the reason I think it doesn’t work, and this, to me, is the core, is that I think the great financial crisis basically discredits that entire ideological project. I think it blows it up. I don’t think people understand it that way.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But I truly think the seismic shock of it, the fact that, like, all the smart people got it wrong and then the banks got bailed out and all these markets talk seems totally incoherent, like you just wrote the banks this huge check, what are you —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — talking about? I think that basically collapses, like, truly, really collapses the appeal of that.
McKay Coppins: Not to, like you know, the shower you would praise here, but like your book, “Twilight of the Elites,” really got at this, I think. And I think you’re right, like, voters, I don’t think really were like making these —
Chris Hayes: No, no.
McKay Coppins: — determinations based on, like, “Oh, like, you know, free market economics has clearly failed. I will therefore,” but I do think that, like, there was a general sense that, like, all the, like, smart people who were supposed to be in charge of this and who keep telling me that we need to unleash the job creators, that we need to, you know, like cut taxes for the corporations, like, I feel like there was just a general on both the left and the right backlash against that idea, like a very populist —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — backlash that manifested in both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: And then a lot of just normal people in the middle who are like, no, like that —
Chris Hayes: “This sucks. What are you talking about?”
McKay Coppins: — doesn’t make any sense at all to me. And, you know, Mitt Romney, like, just even esthetically, and Paul Ryan, that was the ticket, right, like there were these two, like, good looking, like, White guys who looked like they came right out of the boardroom and are saying like, “Hey.”
Chris Hayes: You’re fired.
McKay Coppins: “Trust us. We’re going to” —
Chris Hayes: You’re laid off this.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, but like —
Chris Hayes: Yes, yeah, totally.
McKay Coppins: — that it just didn’t work. And Romney now even recognizes, like, he was, like, “All of my stump speeches and all of my messaging was about job creators.” And he’s like, “And now, you know, what I realize later is, like, most people aren’t job creators.”
Chris Hayes: No, exactly.
McKay Coppins: Most people just have jobs and, like, they hate the job.
Chris Hayes: And they don’t like the job creators. Yeah.
McKay Coppins: They don’t like their bosses, like they don’t want like to elect the guy who’s like, “I’m going to help your bosses out,” you know?.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. No. And so, I think that, and I think it has this profound implication too because it kicks out part of the stool because —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — one of the things really interesting is, note how little Donald Trump talks about freedom compared to an earlier generation of Republican politicians.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Freedom became a semantic signifier of conservatism, young Americans for freedom, like all the stuff that Heritage is all freedom. And the freedom meant freedom from regulation, freedom from government interference, free markets.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Free minds, free people, all that stuff. Donald Trump never uses the word.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Never. The people that now in this last campaign, freedom was the word of the Kamala Harris campaign.
McKay Coppins: The Harris campaign, yeah, exactly.
Chris Hayes: The complete ideological inversion of the valence of the term.
McKay Coppins: I would also add though that freedom was also co-opted by the national security wing of the Republican Party as, especially among the intervention as who were —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — arguing that we need to go —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — you know, build democracies abroad, like that was the rallying cry of the Iraq war proponents, right, like we need to give freedom to the Iraqi people. And like, again, it is so interesting that that word was completely co-opted by the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign in this election.
I remember going to Harris’ closing argument speech in D.C. on the White House Ellipse, and, like, the rhetoric, the esthetics of it, people were waving flags that said freedom, it looked like a Republican —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — rally.
Chris Hayes: Reagan.
McKay Coppins: — you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — circa 1980s, ‘90s, early 2000s.
Chris Hayes: And, in fact, you know, that campaign won a lot of those constituencies. If you look at, you know, the places Reagan won and versus places Harris won —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like this is part of the realignment. But your point there about the interventionist, right, so if you’ve got the three stools, the religious conservatives, the economic conservatives, the economic conservatives tool, it doesn’t get knocked out in terms of who is part of the coalition, but the rhetoric around it.
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The ideological project gets vastly discredited.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Then the Iraq war and the war on terror knocked out the other leg. So, all the hawks and the neocons and the interventionists that had been running the party get really discredited.
I mean, remember that part of the reason Trump won that primary was he ran to the left of everyone else on issues of war and peace and on the Iraq war particularly against Jeb Bush. And also was like, your brother shouldn’t have let 911 happen, (LAUGHTER) which is like, I think a perfectly fair shot actually, generally, just to be, like, if you’re the sitting president, you have the worst attack in history.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, you own what happens to your country, that’s sure.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. But it’s not a thing that, like, any liberal or Democratic politician could say without, like, basically being like run out of town.
McKay Coppins: Right. Well, and up until then, certainly, no Republican would’ve even considered talking about it.
Chris Hayes: No, no.
McKay Coppins: It was totally outside of the mainstream, and then he won, right? And, like, I don’t know if this is what you’re building to, but I think this is an interesting point. You’re basically saying the national security wing, the neocons were discredited after, you know, 10 years of kind of foreign adventurism and war in the Middle East. Then you have the fiscal crisis, the financial crisis that discredits the kind of —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — economic conservatives. So, what’s left is the social conservatives. And what’s interesting about this moment now is that I don’t think anyone would look at the Trump era GOP and be like, “This is a socially conservative party.”
Chris Hayes: Totally.
McKay Coppins: But the cultural conservatives have a lot of sway in the Trump era. Like, that it’s funny, because I remember in 2016, writing a lot of pieces that were, like, very skeptical of this falsity (ph) and bargain that the religious right was making with Trump.
Chris Hayes: And I talked to them. I mean, I talked to religious conservatives who, in the early parts of that primary, it was an inoculation against Trumpism was being Mormon —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — or attending weekly evangelical churches.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I talked to people on the campaign trail who were like, “I can’t. I just –“
McKay Coppins: Yeah, totally. And, I mean, for all of the reasons, you know, his character, the vulgarity, the adultery, all that stuff. But the thing is, like, he did kind of make good on a lot of his promises to the religious, right, like he appointed the justices that overturned Roe. He, like, appointed a lot of social conservatives to his administration, you know, religious freedom issues, all this stuff.
I would argue and this is kind of a tangential point that the tradeoff is that Trump’s dominance of conservative politics for a decade, and now, it’ll be longer in American life has alienated a lot of younger religious people and has actually made, like, and I’ve heard this from, you know, religious leaders, pastors, Latter-day Saint leaders, who are like, “This guy is making it so much harder for us to retain younger people of faith because they feel like seeing their parents and grandparents gravitate toward him and rationalize supporting him is just like shattering to their faith.”
And so, I don’t know if that tradeoff —
Chris Hayes: Wow, that’s intense.
McKay Coppins: — was worth it. But, like, politically, he has empowered the cultural conservatives in a way that I don’t think any Republican president before him except arguably Bush, but even maybe more than Bush has.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And so, right, so you’ve got this weird thing where, sort of, you lose the kind of ideological project at least rhetorically on national security and on economics. The sort of culturally conservative, religious conservative folks, they don’t lose, but they feel like they kept losing —
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — because they don’t get what they want.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And so, maybe if this guy is the vessel to give us and then he delivers, I mean, Roe, he delivers Roe.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So, to me, the core ideological tension of the first Trump term is that when it was time to hire people, the people to hire that populate hirable people in a Republican administration are all the people who are all the people that signed up for the economic conservatism of —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the people, the natsec people are the natsec people that signed up —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — for the natsec project of the neocons. You got —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — John Bolton as your, you know, national security guy. This contradiction plays out in all sorts of ways. So, what you get is, “Yes, he does some tariffs. Yes, he sort of does some stuff at the wall. He does child separation, he does some stuff on immigration, for sure.”
But, like, you get the big corporate tax cut, you get the huge deregulation in all the agencies, you know, you put people on the NLRB who don’t like union, you know, everything you get with a Republican president, and then you get like some tariff stuff, you got some real weird incoherence around national security informed policy —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like, he’s just all over the place. So, now, here we are. And the idea is that this ideological tension has been resolved in favor of full Trumpism, that we’re not having any of these old school apparatus. And I just don’t buy it. I think those ideological fights are closer to the surface and are going to be more vicious than the first term.
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And here’s an example. One of the most popular parts of Donald Trump is that not a cell in his body cares about the deficit or anything having to do with, like, fiscal rectitude or austerity. He does not care.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: He would write everyone tomorrow $10,000 checks to vote for him if he could.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And send them out in the government. He doesn’t care about free market, he doesn’t care about any of that.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That’s very appealing, because most voters don’t. And cutting the government and imposing austerity and kicking people off Medicaid and things like that are really unpopular, as he learned with the ACA.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Now, he’s got the world’s richest man as his co-president who says, he wants to shred the thing to pieces and then he’s got this other part of the ideological coalition represented by J.D. Vance who are sort of making their piece with the welfare state because they understand that their working class voters rely on it. And like there’s no way out of this contradiction.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like they’re going to do one thing or another, right?
McKay Coppins: Well, absolutely, that, like, everything I have heard so far about the department of government efficiency, the Elon Musk —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
McKay Coppins: — Vivek Ramaswamy project, like literally sounds like it’s out of like a 1980s fantasy of —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — like, you know, right-wing Reaganite.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: So we’re like we’re going to finally get in there and just pull the government apart and rebuild —
Chris Hayes: No, it’s totally throwback. It’s totally throwback to all the stuff we were talking about before.
McKay Coppins: It has nothing to do with like anything that Donald Trump has run on at any point. He’s never talked about government efficiency really, like that was never part of his message.
In 2016, one of his best lines was that, when he was asked about entitlement programs, like, because that was still one of the litmus tests on the right, he would say, “No, no, no, we’re not going to cut any entitlement programs. We’re just going to make the country so rich that we don’t have to,” right? And like people would applaud, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes, his childcare answer, the famous childcare answer, we got the answer on childcare, was basically, “We are going to be drowning in money because of all the tariffs, so we’ll just pay for everyone’s childcare.”
McKay Coppins: Yeah. So, how do you square that with Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk kind of going through federal agencies and looking for layoffs and cuts, like, it doesn’t square, right? J.D. Vance, to your point, is the actual kind of, like, next-gen, like, creation of the Trump era, right? Like, he has re-made himself as an ideolog of Trumpism —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — in a way that actually Donald Trump isn’t really. And —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
McKay Coppins: — you know, a lot of people assume that JD Vance is going to have a lot of influence in the Trump presidency because Trump has shown no ability to govern, but that will depend on who else is appointed to the administration, right?
Chris Hayes: And who wins these fights? Like —
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you’re going to have to have a budget. There’s going to be a big spending bill. Like the only thing I know is that rich people’s taxes are getting cut, that’s all I know. Corporate taxes are getting cut, people are going to get deported, there’s going to be huge deportation, and there’s going to be tariffs.
But even those things, like, there are people on the other side of those tariffs, I mean, even the thing with, like, RFK, which is so fascinating to watch this ideological thing. Okay, we brought off game (ph) to the tent because he’s anti-establishment and populist and the people that are low trust voters that are skeptically establishment like him and they like us and we got him. Now, he’s going to go to war with big pharma in the entire —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — industrial food system. And it’s like —
McKay Coppins: Big ag, yeah, like what —
Chris Hayes: I think I know how this ends, like, oh, yes, he’s going to be the one that finally reigns in big ag, like give me a bark (ph).
McKay Coppins: Let’s also add, like, another wrinkle to this, which is that throughout Trump’s whole first term, one of the most persuasive things in getting him to change his mind about something was the Dow dropping like —
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
McKay Coppins: — you know, 5% to 10%.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
McKay Coppins: Like if the markets don’t like something that he does, he’s going to back off it so quickly, right? And so, like, again, like, how do you square that with any of these supposed like reformers who are coming in?
Like, I mean, maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but, like, so far, Trump has shown that more than anything else, he wants to make sure that his, like, rich guy friends don’t turn on him, like, those people are very important to him. He wants their approval. He wants their respect.
It’s deeply embedded in his psychology in a way that I’ve been writing about for a long time. Like, he is not just going to let, like, you know, RFK and J.D. Vance make him like unpopular on the golf course with —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — like Wall Street billionaires, you know?
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. I mean, this is the great contradiction. And, again, all this stuff will cash out somehow. I mean —
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know, there’s a certain Autopilot you can do, like the DOGE thing just becomes a side project and nothing comes of it. And to be honest, the best thing for him politically would be Autopilot, like he could be sworn on January 20th and be, like, “The two things I promised to fix for you, fixed. The border basically is at an all-time lows and crossings (ph) and inflations come down.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then just, like, hit cruise (ph) control, hit the golf course, but they’re not going to do that —
McKay Coppins: Sure, no.
Chris Hayes: — because they’re all ready to pursue this campaign of, like, vengeance and then the, like, real freaks, like Stephen Miller who are like genuine ideologs —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like true —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — believers in their project are going to use the resources of the government and the power they have to pursue those aims. But they are intention with each other across a whole bunch of lines.
Like, there’s this kind of, I don’t want to be overly sanguine, there’s genuinely things to plan for and worry about, but I just feel like there’s a kind of, like, we’re in this phase now where, like, no one’s really zooming in on the inherent contradictions in this entire project —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that can’t be just avoided the entire time.
McKay Coppins: The other thing that complicates this, and this has actually surprised me a little bit and maybe it shouldn’t have, but, like, I remember a year ago reporting on the personnel decisions Trump might make if he wins reelection, like, you know, talking to people in —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: — Trump world, who’s going to get these big cabinet positions and, like, inevitably, you would get kind of names of famous people, like famous politicians, whatever.
Chris Hayes: I saw this guy.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I saw that guy.
McKay Coppins: And I remember like some of my more, like, savvy Republican sources when I would float those names to them would be like, “No, no, that’s liberal, like, you know, fantasy hysteria, like he’s not going to make, you know, some, like, you know, Josh Hawley, the AG or whatever.
Chris Hayes: Right.
McKay Coppins: Like you would never do something that crazy. Well, you chose Matt Gaetz, who’s, like, even crazier, right? But, like, the point is I am surprised by the degree, and maybe I shouldn’t be, but by the degree to which he has staffed his administration with, like, characters as though he’s casting a reality TV show, like —
Chris Hayes: Well, absolutely.
McKay Coppins: — he didn’t just choose, like, loyalists or he didn’t choose, like, you know, people who, like, the Heritage Foundation vetted in Project 2025. He’s choosing like big egos who have their own brands to manage and their own futures to think about.
And, like, that’s going to further, like, exacerbate these tensions because, like, RFK Junior is going to buttheads with, you know, J.D. Vance or who’s going to buttheads with Kristi Noem, who’s going to buttheads with Stephen Miller, by the way, who also has his own thing.
Like, these people are not just like, you know, functionaries, they’re not just bureaucrats. They’re all like see themselves as stars in this TV show and like, that’s going to become a problem.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
We have not sworn in a second term president since 1885. And here’s the other thing I think people are really taking for granted. Now, I know he likes to joke about how he’s just going to run rough shot over the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution.
But the guy’s 78 years old and I just don’t see it. Maybe it will happen, I don’t know. It’s obviously constitutionally barred. I think it’s also constitutionally barred in the sense of the man’s constitution, would be my guess. So, let’s just say he’s a lame duck essentially on day one, which we haven’t had, you know, we really haven’t had. Like all of these big egos are figuring out who’s next.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, right.
Chris Hayes: And who who’s going to be —
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: — the inheritor?
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And who —
McKay Coppins: That’s exactly right.
Chris Hayes: It’s like King Lear, man.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s like —
McKay Coppins: That’s exactly right.
Chris Hayes: — here’s the old man as they fight over the kingdom and who’s going to inherit it. And, again, I don’t want to be overly sanguine. I just think if this were a Democratic administration or one that I was, like, rooting for the political success of the progressive one, I would be like, “Whew.” There are a lot of problems we’re looking at. And I feel like those are not being acknowledged right now.
McKay Coppins: Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, think about just, like, in two years, the entire Republican Party is going to be running for president again, right, including probably people in these —
Chris Hayes: The entire administration. The entire administration.
McKay Coppins: I was going to say, all the most high profile people he appoints to is cabinet if they haven’t detonated their careers in the first two years of his presidency, which is very possible as well, by the way.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. A bunch of them aren’t going to last six months.
McKay Coppins: Kristi Noem, I think, was insane to take this Homeland Security position. Like, I mean, just set aside whatever you think of the substance of it, becoming the face of this incredibly complicated, incredibly controversial mass deportation program that almost certainly will not work as well as a lot of Republicans want and that will alienate everybody else, like, seems like not the savviest move if you want to run for president one day, which, by all accounts, she does.
So, you know, I think a lot of people are going to struggle politically in these first two years, but then everyone’s going to start running for president and everyone’s going to be choosing their horse and Trump is going to become even more irrelevant.
An, yeah, I think that people are probably understandably but, like, overinterpreting, like, his “landslide victory,” quote-unquote, as like, he’s going to have this mandate to just do whatever he wants.
And like, to quote you, you’ve said this a bunch of times, politics still exist and politics within the Republican coalition still exists and it’s pretty nasty. And I think that this honeymoon period that he’s in now is not going to last, you know, the first 100 days of his presidency.
Chris Hayes: I think you’re right. And again, I don’t want to say this to minimize, like, the harm, cruelty, danger of a lot of stuff, like, I think, I mean, they’re going to try to do wild stuff.
McKay Coppins: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like —
McKay Coppins: Well —
Chris Hayes: — if anyone had any question about that, when they said, “We’re going to put Matt Gaetz at AG —
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: — you know, Pete Hegseth is going to run the most powerful bureaucracy —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — ever created in the history of human civilization on the planet.
McKay Coppins: Right. And, oh, by the way, like, there are a lot of victims of chaos. Remember that, like —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — first term was not very effective from like a, you know, policy standpoint, but, like, it was very chaotic and a lot of people were hurt as a result.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
McKay Coppins: So, like, I agree. I also want to be a little humble about these predictions because the —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I have no idea, it’s zero.
McKay Coppins: — volatile nature of —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — the coalition of the people he’s appointing, the point is just that —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
McKay Coppins: — there is a lot of coalitional infighting. It could shake out many different ways. And I worry about, I’ve written about this, like, in the lead up to the election, because there was so much talk about democracy being on the ballot, I think, too many people internalized the idea that once Trump won, like democracy lost and was over, right?
Chris Hayes: And you wrote a piece about this, and I did —
McKay Coppins: Yes. You talked about it as well.
Chris Hayes: — my own version of it —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — commentary before the election on exactly this point.
McKay Coppins: And, like, I just think, like, this kind of Democratic fatalism, small de-Democratic fatalism is something we need to avoid and, like, really ward off.
Chris Hayes: To be self-fulfilling, yeah.
McKay Coppins: Because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: Exactly. And, like, the reality is, like, the politics are very fragile, like, this coalition is fragile. Donald Trump is even, you know, less on the ball than he was when he won eight years ago. And there’s no reason to believe that he’s going to be able to, like, ruthlessly usher in a Putin-style autocracy in the next four years without any significant pushback.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I think the way that I think about it is, I think he may want to do that, and I think there are people —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — around him who aren’t actually committed to that. It’s just not clear they’ll succeed.
McKay Coppins: Right.
Chris Hayes: And I think the reason that they might not succeed is because a lot of them are idiots, and a lot of them are incompetent cronies (ph) and some of them are quite bright but also have, you know, their own political —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — fights to age. And then, you know, the only thing I’ll say, like, great, like I want to be really humble about the future. I don’t know, like the only thing I feel confidently in saying is, I’m basically certain, it wouldn’t all go to plan.
McKay Coppins: Yes. (LAUGH)
Chris Hayes: Like I just don’t think, like, I don’t know what it will be.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But the idea that, like, they’re going to drop a plan and then just smoothly execute said plan, I don’t think is going to happen. Now, it could go sideways in ways that are better for the country, it can go sideways in ways that are even worse for the country. There’s lots of ways, but even the most incredibly competent individuals, I mean, Eisenhower once said, “I find plans are worthless but planning essential.”
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You know, nothing ever goes to plan. You know, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face,” as Mike Tyson said.
McKay Coppins: Well, and since we’re, we’re quoting now Tyson and —
Chris Hayes: And Eisenhower.
McKay Coppins: –Eisenhower, I’ll just add, I think it was Lincoln that said that, like, “You realize once you’ve become president,” I’m paraphrasing, “that you’re a victim of circumstance.”
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: “You’re a victim of events more than anything.” And, like, the reality is, nobody saw that a pandemic would be the defining event of Trump’s first term.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
McKay Coppins: And it really was. Like, we have no idea what will be the defining event that he’s responding to. That could be really bad, right? It could be a, you know, full blown war with Russia or in North East —
Chris Hayes: Or a terrorist attack on American soil.
McKay Coppins: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Which is the thing I worry about a lot.
McKay Coppins: Totally. And so, like, we have no idea. We know that the people he’s putting in have pretty different agendas to kind of bring the conversation in full circle in pretty different projects in a lot of ways.
And so, like, I think that trying to, you know, just say that he’s got like this detailed roadmap to, you know, authoritarian takeover that he’s going to be able to seamlessly execute, I think, it’s very unlikely.
Chris Hayes: The last point, I guess, here is, like, may we’ll do another conversation. We’ll check back in, you know, the first 100 days, because the question about how these ideological questions get resolved within the party is still a really open question to me. And in some ways —
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — Trump dissolves them through cults of personality. I mean, that’s really what it does.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s the connection to the charismatic demagogue, that is what is the ideology overall of the party.
McKay Coppins: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I don’t know if anyone can replicate that same performance. I haven’t seen anyone who will. And, like, faction is a fact of life. It’s conflict and endemic to human life and endemic to democracy. And, you know, so there will be life after Trump and a Republican Party presumably after Trump. And like a lot of the stuff that’s been subsumed is not going to stay subsumed.
McKay Coppins: Yeah. It goes back to this idea that, like, all the kind of ideological infighting that was happening in the Republican Party in 2014, 2015, that Trump basically pressed pause on by becoming the one figure that everything in the party orbited around for now, over a decade, like eventually, he goes away and that infighting resumes, right, that debate resumes.
And, like, I have no predictions about who wins. I do think that he’s given the kind of nationalists and right-wing populists, like, a head start in some ways. I don’t think that those people had the same cache in Republican politics 10 years ago, but we just have no idea who’s going to end up winning this fight. But the fight will absolutely resume and it’s going to probably resume while he’s still president.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
McKay Coppins: And certainly, once he’s gone, there’s going to be, you know, a wilderness period for the party at some point.
Chris Hayes: McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic and MSNBC contributor. He’s the New York Times bestselling author of “Romney: A Reckoning.” McKay, that was a great joy, thank you.
McKay Coppins: Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to McKay Coppins. You can read his writing at The Atlantic and you can see him on our air on MSNBC. You can email us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can also follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod, and you can follow me across various social media platforms, including Threads, what used to be called Twitter, and the new Hop on Bluesky. I am Chris L. Hayes on all three. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Fernando Arruda and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening?