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Can the G.O.P. Recover From the ‘Big Lie’? We Asked 2 Conservatives

A look at how Trump has shaped the Republican Party and where it goes next.

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jane coaston

Today on The Argument, two conservatives on what’s next for the GOP.

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I’m Jane Coaston. I’ve been reporting for years on conservatism and the American right, and thinking about it for even longer. I can tell you, there’s always been division and discord within the Republican Party. You should see the mail that William F. Buckley got.

The 2016 election just revealed where some of the deepest rifts lie. And then came January 6. Probably like a lot of you, I’m wondering, where does the Republican Party go from here? I don’t know, and I don’t think the GOP is sure, either.

For me, the Republican Party can be summed up in one word — no. They exist to push back on everything Democrats want to do because it’s easier to be against things than to be for them. But with midterms coming up, and, more importantly, with the 2024 election, they’re going to have to figure out what they want. And they’re going to have to figure out what the shadow of Trump means for them moving forward.

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Neither of my guests today like Trump, but they each see a different future for the GOP left in his wake.

charlie sykes

It is a party that, right now, at the moment, is held hostage by Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ about the election.

jane coaston

Our pessimist is Charlie Sykes, founder and editor at large of The Bulwark, a never Trump conservative publication, and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind. And here with the silver lining is Rich Lowry. He’s editor in chief of National Review, a conservative magazine, and author of The Case for Nationalism.

rich lowry

Obviously, Trump looms incredibly large. I think you can squint one way and say there’s a lot of positive developments. There’s a chance the GOP can forge a workable electoral majority. And then there’s a chance it’s going to follow Trump down another rabbit hole in 2024.

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jane coaston

Neither of you are huge Trump fans, and you both don’t want to see him on the Republican ticket in 2024. But I think you both have different ideas about what he did for the party and to the party, and where it goes next. According to an October Quinnipiac University poll, nearly 8 in 10 Republicans want Trump to run again as president in 2024. Why don’t you want Trump to run again? Rich, do you want to go first?

rich lowry

So I don’t want him to run again because I think he’s spouting falsehoods. He engaged in one of the most reckless and graceless acts in American history, in what he did post-election in 2020. And all that’s profoundly wrong. And I want the party to turn its back on him. And of course, it hasn’t. I still hold out some hope it might. There’s a chance that he’s kind of sort of imperceptibly, day by day, losing a little bit of his grip. But to believe that at the moment, you sort of have to have faith in things that are unseen.

And I also think that he pointed the way towards a new Republican Party that was positive, in some respects, and that can be taken up by more responsible figures who could come up with a synthesis that would be quite powerful and appealing. And a lot of people argued, 2016, he won. I thought at times, well, maybe we overemphasize the importance of character in presidents. Maybe we’re going to kind of dance through the raindrops of his various personal flaws. And at times through the four years, even though it was really rocky, it seemed like that was happening. And there were some important advances for the right, and then it all collapsed after the election.

charlie sykes

First of all, I agree with what Rich just said, except that here’s part of the problem, is that, with Trump, you get the whole package. And a lot of Republicans and conservatives made the Faustian bargain at some point, saying, OK, we’re going to look the other way at his lack of character, at his boorishness, at his authoritarianism, at his chronic lying and the fact that he has the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old, but you know, we’re willing to give him control over the federal government because we get things that we want. We get certain things that are, quote unquote, conservative. You got the judges. You got Supreme Court judges. You got tax cuts. I understand that.

But this is the thing about the Faustian bargain — it turns out to be too much. And I think the real test here is not just whether he runs and wins, but whether or not Republicans and conservatives will finally muster the ability to say we’re drawing the line on this. Now, Rich and National Review were absolutely right when they published the edition against Trump back in 2016. And then, like so many other conservatives, they decided, OK, we can go along with this. So you did the cover story, the case for Donald Trump, maybe Donald Trump.

So I’ve always been never Trump. Now I’m never again Trump. I think that there’s a large group of people who also understand that Trump is dangerous, but they decided they’re more comfortable in the conservative tribe taking the anti anti-Trump position, which is, OK, so Trump is terrible, but let me give you this dose of whataboutism. Let me give you this dose of rationalization.

rich lowry

To Charlie’s criticism, I mean, we were foursquare against him in the primaries, and then once he was president of the United States, there was nothing we can do to stop him being president of the United States, and there was no lie he told or idiocy he perpetrated that we didn’t squarely criticize. At least, no major one. I mean, it’s hard keeping up at times.

But the choice in front of us was, OK, he cut taxes in a way that we’ve supported for 40 years, or whatever it is. So are we going to say that’s bad or shouldn’t have happened or we regret it because Donald Trump did it? No. He appoints three great Supreme Court justices. Are we going to just turn our backs and say, gosh, this is nothing, let’s minimize it, even though this has been a cause of our movement for 50 years? No.

And once he was president, we praised him for doing things that we liked and supported, and always have supported for sincere and good reasons. And we’re going to criticize him quite harshly when he lies or conducts himself in an appalling way or goes down policy avenues that we oppose. I’m not sure anyone wrote anything harsher about the idea of having the Taliban to Camp David to negotiate a drawdown in Afghanistan than we did. And there are many instances of that sort of thing.

jane coaston

National Review covers aside, Charlie, I also want to ask you about the cultural aspect of Trump’s presidency. I think some people saw Donald Trump as a stopgap to cultural change, but that seems impossible to me. Trump didn’t stop Pride parades. And if you voted for Trump because you thought he might stick it to people who want to share their pronouns, it didn’t work, and it couldn’t work. Why did people think that was something Trump could do or solve?

charlie sykes

Well, I don’t think that anybody expected he’s going to solve the problem because that’s not the point, because this is not about policies or about actually accomplishing anything. It’s about making a statement. It’s about striking a pose. Let me quote Rich Lowry. Rich, you had a great column right before the election —

rich lowry

I know this isn’t going to be good. Whatever it is, Charlie —

charlie sykes

No, no —

rich lowry

— if you’re quoting me back to myself, it’s never good.

charlie sykes

— no, no, this was the one where you said basically that voting for Donald Trump was the way for a lot of voters to give a big middle finger to the political world, you know? And that’s what it was. It was this sort of bark of outrage and dissent. And I think it’s very important to understand that.

I mean, one of the things that I think we’ve learned about our politics is that some of us had been under the impression that this was about principles and about policies, and we hung around with think tanks and we read journals and we thought it was about fiscal conservatism. And then we really realized that, after 2016, and I think it’s accelerated, that that part of the movement was really kind of paper-thin.

It was like this thin crust over this molten lava of what the conservative movement was. And Donald Trump understood that at a visceral level. So there is this divorce from actually solving problems or policy, and simply basically saying — and I apologize for this — fuck you to the elites and to all the people that we don’t like. And I think there is a lot of all of that.

And I also think that you’re starting to see a little bit of a separation between Donald Trump and Trumpism. And you saw this with the vaccines, when he said he had the vaccines and he got booed, that he’s given birth to or permission to certain attitudes and styles of politics that are not really in his control anymore. And it may be part of the personality cult, but he also is kind of a prisoner of things that he’s let loose. There’s a little bit of the sorcerer’s apprentice thing going on here.

It takes on a life of its own. And I think this is the real concern, is that even if Donald Trump disappeared from the political stage tomorrow, things would not go back to normal. I’m not sure there ever was a normal, but clearly there’s something that’s been let loose in our body politic.

jane coaston

I think that gets to something else I’ve been thinking about, which is whether or not Trump was an attitude or a policy, because if you go back to 2015, 2016, there’s this idea of, if Trump really is how he talks during the 2016 campaign, then he’s this populist who wants, quote unquote, health care for everyone. And he’s not conservative, he’s like this different person.

He’s an isolationist. He’s all these other things. And there’s Donald Trump as a policy, as Trumpism, as this thing that is supposed to be this version of conservatism, and then there is Trump the attitude, which is just being a Republican who’s really mean all the time. Do you think, Charlie, that Trump gave the Republican Party a directional change or an attitudinal change?

charlie sykes

I think both. I think, first of all, you have to understand that Donald Trump is a man without any fixed principles whatsoever. But in terms of policy, Rich is running through the various things that conservatives got from him. And I would point out, number one, that the reason that he got the tax cuts and a variety of other things, he owes that to people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, both of whom he has decided to excommunicate. He hates the people that have actually accomplished the conservative agenda.

But also, Republicans had to — you think back on pre-Trump Republicans and conservatives, the reversal on the whole concept of free markets and free trade, the positions on the deficit, the complete flip-flop on attitude towards Russia or American exceptionalism. It would have been inconceivable to imagine Republicans looking the other way when you had a president who was basically saying, yeah, I’m not sure that I want to be part of NATO.

Also on immigration. This was a Republican Party that had been trending toward, at least rhetorically toward, inclusion, being open to the idea of legal immigration, drawing a bright line between legal and illegal immigration. That was changed. And also, fundamentally, a party that said that character matters had to abandon all of that.

So the question was, which policies were they willing to jettison to get which policies? I mean, right now, if you don’t accept Donald Trump’s big lie about the election or his bizarre attempts to overturn it, you’re committing political suicide in Donald Trump’s political party. And this didn’t just happen overnight. This is what happens when the lie becomes acceptable and everybody decides, looks at each other and go, are you going to call it out? Are you going to call it out? No, we’re not. And here we are.

jane coaston

I would say, though, that what I think, in some parts, Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, not his victory in the general election, but his victory in the primary over people who people would think of as being conservative stalwarts, you wind up there because, in my view, the Republican Party had been missing something. Rich, what do you think that Trump taught you about what the Republican Party was missing and where it should go forward?

rich lowry

Well, it’s clearly a sign that the social conservatism was much stronger than the fiscal conservatism. And at NR, we’ve kind of tried to make this point for a long time, that after every election loss, it used to be conventional wisdom, oh, it’s because of pro-lifers, it’s because of the pro-life position that Republicans lost, which I say, no, among working class people, that’s more appealing than our economics. And Trump really brought that home in a big way.

And just in terms of his consistency, China is ripping us off, we’re getting ripped off by trade, and these foreign interventions are bad and a debacle. He’s been completely consistent about those. And those ended up kind of overlapping with the concerns of more Republican voters than I would have thought when we started out in 2015. Trade, I think Trump was too comprehensively anti-trade, but on China, I think he was right. And I think folks like me were wrong. And then on immigration, I just think the elite consensus on that in the Republican Party I think was wrong for a very long time. I thought it was wrong. I was in vain against it.

And then final point, this has been a tension within the party going back — Matt Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute has a book making this case that comes out in a couple of months — for 100 years, literally, between the populace, kind of more elemental conservatism, and a more classical liberal approach. And you need both. You need both of those to have a winning Republican majority in this country, but for most of the time, that classical liberal element of it has been in the ascendancy. And what we’ve seen over the last four or five years is the populist element being in the ascendancy. And that’s something new. And it’s been very hard for a lot of people to take.

jane coaston

And how do you hold together a party where the rallying cry is that elections that you lose aren’t real? You see all this in down-ballot races. If you’re running in a local election, right now it seems like, if you’re a Republican running in a primary, you cannot lose. Any loss is actually a win, because you didn’t lose because you can’t lose. How do you hold together a party where that’s how it works, Charlie?

charlie sykes

Well, that’s the real danger. The real dystopian scenario is we’ve completely delegitimized elections, which means we’ve delegitimized democracy. Look, I’ll be honest — and I might get some pushback on this, but I wonder whether or not this sets off a spiral where let’s imagine, in 2024, Donald Trump is reelected, gets a second term. Will Democrats simply accept the legitimacy of that result, or have we created a spiral where no one will accept defeat? Well —

rich lowry

They didn’t the first time around, Charlie.

charlie sykes

Well, I —

rich lowry

It was all Russia.

charlie sykes

Well, look, Rich, I understand the equivalence you’re trying to draw, but what happened post-2020 seems to me to be categorically different than the normal griping.

rich lowry

No, that’s not what I was saying. But if they didn’t accept it the first time around, why would they accept it the second time around? I mean, they thought it was a vast conspiracy. And there wasn’t a Capitol riot, and a unique disgrace. What’s that?

charlie sykes

Well, I mean, that’s a small detail, that we didn’t have the insurrection and the coup and the riot and —

rich lowry

Yeah, but I’m just saying they didn’t accept it the first time around.

charlie sykes

No.

rich lowry

It wasn’t as extreme and stark as what happened in 2020, so of course they’re not going to accept it. And I do think— not to be alarmist — if Trump actually wins, I think there’ll be serious political violence. And it’s not going to be from the alt right.

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jane coaston

What about you? If you’re a Republican, tell me what you think of the party right now, and where it should go next. Unlike Rich and Charlie, would you be excited to vote for Trump in 2024? Why or why not? Or if you’re a former Republican, I want to know why you left the party. What was the nail in the coffin, and who would you rather vote for instead? And either way, what’s the one big issue you want the GOP to focus on next? Leave me a voicemail by calling 347-915-4324, and we’ll share some of your responses later this month.

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So we’ve done a sort of autopsy of the GOP after the 2016 election. Looking ahead now, if we’re thinking about the goal of the Republican Party being to expand the Republican electorate, does Trump help that effort or hurt that effort?

rich lowry

I think it hurts. You know, the obvious play — this doesn’t mean that this is going to happen, and what you’d write down on paper if you want Republicans to win — is you hold the Trump voters, you hold this kind of new working class voters that have come to the party — and not just through Trump, this has been kind of a long-term trend, you’ve had the separation of the two party coalitions by education going on for a long time — but you hold those working class, non-college-educated voters, and you make yourself less repellent to the suburbs.

And this is exactly what Glenn Youngkin did in the Virginia gubernatorial race, overperforming in the suburbs and then winning in a purplish, bluish state. Youngkin shows how you do this, right? You’re not afraid of the cultural issues. You lean into CRT unapologetically, but you also say, hey, let’s pay teachers more, and here’s my cost of living agenda.

So on the one hand, you’re showing the conservatives and the right you’re willing to fight. On the other hand, you’re showing the center that you’re acceptable to them. And if you could replicate that in the national level in 2024, Republicans are going to look really, really good.

But Trump can’t do that. He’s too repellent in the suburbs. Maybe he can gin up the base enough to squeak through again, the way he did in 2016. Maybe it would help if Biden’s running again. If Biden still in the low 40s, it becomes more plausible. But it’s an extremely narrow path.

jane coaston

If you’re a Republican candidate running in a local election right now, Charlie, do you want Trump to endorse you?

charlie sykes

Well, it depends where you are. I mean, this is part of the problem of America as a whole doesn’t actually exist. You know, I live in a suburb in Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee called Mequon. We used to be very, very heavily Republican. There was a big anti-CRT recall campaign against the school board here, and it was defeated 60-40. So would you want Donald Trump to come in here right now? No, I don’t think you would.

But to Rich’s point about the electorate, I agree with everything that he said there, but I think that a lot of us have to be very humble, and this is a time for humility about some of these demographic changes. I think if you want to expand the Republican vote, alienating in a fundamental way young people, women, Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans and others is not the formula. After the 2012 election, you remember that Reince Priebus presided over that autopsy that said we have to grow the party. Obviously, the Republican Party looked at that and said we’re going to go do the exact opposite to all of this. So I do think that there’s a demographic time bomb in all of this.

Beyond that, though, I just don’t sense that the Trumpist Republican Party is interested in persuasion. I think we are living through this period where the formula has generally been to gin up your own base, maximize the return of the turnout of white, rural Wisconsinites, and that’s how we’re going to counter Democrats in the rest of the state. So we’re not in an era of persuasion. And I would also say that one of the great triumphs of Trumpism is also its Achilles heel, the creation of an alternative reality media ecosystem that insulates them from the influence of the rest of the media and the population. This, of course, makes them bulletproof, in many ways, or they think of it, but it also, I think, cuts them off from the electorate that perhaps is going to be determining elections in the future.

Now, we’ve been focusing on the Republicans. I don’t think you can have this discussion without also just at least mentioning the problems the Democrats have. One of the reasons a lot of this has been happening is because — and I’m looking at a state like Wisconsin — how Democrats really did abandon much of their own constituency. There are areas in this state that used to be overwhelmingly Democratic, and they are non-college-educated, working class, rural areas that now are overwhelmingly Republican.

And it’s not that Republicans were so brilliant that they seized it. They walked into a constituency that had really been alienated by Democrats. So again, this is a push-pull that you’re seeing, as well. And if Democrats continue to alienate those parts of the electorate, it might counter some of the things that Rich was talking about about the alienation of the voters that Trump alienates.

rich lowry

Now, let me disagree with Charlie, though, on one thing. And that’s Latino voters. I’ve gotten a lot of things wrong the last five years. This was one thing I was right about. I’ve been saying for years now, actually, despite Trump, how radioactive some of the stuff he says is, the kind of Trump-style populist Republican Party has more potential for cross-racial appeal than a stereotypical Mitt Romney Republican Party. And that’s because, if you’re appealing to working class people, you know what? There are a lot of Black and Latino working class people. And we saw this in 2020. And it wasn’t just in Florida. It wasn’t just among Cubans. It was in the Rio Grande Valley. And now, we’re seeing it all over the place, showing up in polling.

And I take Charlie’s point, you know, Trump is not a master of persuasion, but that doesn’t mean that the Republican Party overall is not interested in trying to sway voters. The effort that was put into winning Hispanics in Florida was massive. It was really intelligent and shrewd. And it opened a door that I hope the party keeps going down.

jane coaston

I want to jump in here because I do want to note one thing, that when we’re talking about African-Americans and Latinos within the working class, we are largely, to be clear, talking about African-Americans and Latino men. Exit polling from the 2016 election shows that 13 percent of Black men voted for Donald Trump. 4 percent of Black women did. And in Pennsylvania, that number dropped to 1 percent, which I think, in Pennsylvania, if you’re talking about 1 percent of Black women, you are talking about what, like, 15 people.

We’ve been talking a lot about how it’s not just Trump reshaping the GOP, but in some ways, it’s continuing to be him. So there’s someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, which I think it’s important to note that she has no power whatsoever. She’s not on any committee, but she brings in a ton of money. Is that what the future of the GOP, especially kind of House GOP, looks like, someone who’s more of a social media influencer than someone who wants to do things or write bills?

rich lowry

Well, it’s definitely a model. And when we talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rest of that clack, there have always been fringe members of Congress. And what’s different now is the guardrails are down. There are really no limits on what anyone can say or do. And it’s very hard for any institution to impose such limits. I cite this example a lot. If you remember Milo Yiannopoulos, this guy that came out of Breitbart who was the hottest thing in right wing politics for a period. And National Review, we denounced him. We published him zero times.

And it didn’t matter, right. And it turned out that the guy who had the most influence on the trajectory of Milo’s career was Jack Dorsey. And he was banned from Twitter, and basically he never heard of them again. Social media has just been a hugely empowering factor for these fringe politicians. It not only empowers a certain crude form of expression, it positively encourages it and rewards it.

So Marjorie Taylor Greenes have more impact than they did in the past. They’ve always existed. But they have more of an imprint than they do now. And we hope voters in her district will actually say, we’d really like to have a congresswoman instead of a symbol and a fundraising machine. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

jane coaston

Part of the thing that gets me about the social media era of Republicans is that, yes, it drives a lot of ire. And they get the response that they want. They trigger the libs. But my question is, once you have ginned up the people who see this so much and then you become a member of the Senate where you do not have the power to do any of the things that you talk about — it’s basically like getting on Twitter and promising that you’re going to give everyone in America a pizza party and then you’re elected to be a House Representative, and it turns out you can’t do the thing you promised. And you have all these people being like, where is our, I don’t know, Reichstag fire or our day of judgment?

rich lowry

You just keep ginning people up as a House member or as a member of the Senate — the line between being a pundit and being a senator, I think, is fuzzier than it’s ever been. So the thing that I think about Twitter — I get how irked conservatives are by the arbitrariness of the anti-so-called-misinformation enforcement of social media. I think it’s totally arbitrary and totally one-sided.

But even given that, I think it’s been an enormous boon for right-wing opinion. There are all sorts of people we never would have heard of before that we discuss, that we argue about, whose views have an impact on us solely because of Twitter. And this will be something interesting. We’ll get a road test of this in the Ohio Republican Senate primary. We have Josh Mandel and J.D. Vance. They’re the most famous candidates. There are a couple of others that I wouldn’t count out. But Twitter’s a huge part of their game. But how much does that matter when rubber hits the road with actual primary voters in Ohio will be interesting to see.

jane coaston

Charlie, I am curious thinking about the future of the Republican Party — the people who aren’t just tweeting. Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik — all Trump supporters. How deeply do you think that their allegiance to Trump runs, and do you think that they could exist in a post-Trump Republican Party?

charlie sykes

Yes, they could. I mean, I keep coming back to the fact that Liz Cheney was in Republican leadership. A solid conservative. Remains a solid conservative. Voted with Trump 90 percent of the time. Broke with him on the attempted coup and his lies about the election. She has been cast into outer darkness. She is a complete pariah within the Republican Party. And Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn and Paul Gosar and Louie Gohmert and folks like this are rock stars.

And people like Kevin McCarthy are OK with this. I mean, Kevin McCarthy wants more than anything in the world to be the Speaker. And yet, you wonder how strong a Speaker he will be when the man is terrified of somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene and her power, though.

jane coaston

Why? Why would you want that job?

charlie sykes

This is the longer term trend here. It is the dominance of the entertainment wing of the Republican Party over the policy wing. The fact that Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene have no interest in legislating is irrelevant to their power in the media universe. And the entire incentive structure of the Republican Party has changed. The power is no longer where it used to be in the party.

So all of this, I think, gets worse before it gets better, because people are looking at the model. And they’re seeing who is rising and who is being cast. I mean, think of the people who are leaving right now. The people like Representative Gonzalez from home state of Ohio. These used to be the rising stars. And yet, let’s be honest about it, you know that if Republicans take control, the Matt Gaetzs of the world and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes will be holding some gavels, perhaps.

jane coaston

Rich, what do you think of the future of the Republican Party? Because I think that you see promise in people on the state level. People like Ron DeSantis, who is not afraid of putting forward legislation that’s clearly red meat to the base, particularly on social media. But does actual political things. Does political things I’m not a huge fan of, but he does things.

rich lowry

Yeah, so let me back into DeSantis, responding a little bit, bouncing off what Charlie was just saying. One, this is not a phenomenon that you have a fringe that is running out of control. The leadership that’s just exclusive to the Republican Party. You see it among the Democrats as well. And Kevin McCarthy — Kevin’s always been a political operative, basically. And there’s a role for political operatives. The practical politician who’s my model and I think has gotten it right.

I think Mitch McConnell has played the whole thing pretty well throughout the Trump era. He got what he wanted out of Trump. He didn’t want Trump to win the nomination. Wasn’t his ideal. But once he was president, he had the option of totally blowing up their relationship and getting nothing done, or actually achieving important goals. He did that. Once the post-election happened, he had nothing to do with it. He gave Trump some leeway to pursue these court challenges. And then finally, pull the plug and said it was wrong.

Didn’t actually vote to impeach, because that might have been the end of his career. But severely denounced the president. Doesn’t obsess over it, but whenever it comes up, it’s clear that he wants nothing to do with the guy and he thinks the party should go into a different direction. Now DeSantis — an example. Practical politician. A lot of people cringed the way he pandered to Trump in the Florida gubernatorial primary.

There’s some people that just want that endorsement because they’re genuine Trumpists, or they want the endorsement out of just sheer ambition, have no idea what they’re going to do with it. He knew what he was going to do with it. He was going to become governor of Florida and pursue a very substantive conservative agenda, which is what he’s done. He obviously plays symbolic based politics. He has an eye on the potential of 2024.

But I think this key dividing line — where are you on DeSantis? If you’re anti-Trump, I totally get that. I’m in the same place. But if you’re anti-DeSantis, I think you have a deeper problem with the Republican Party.

charlie sykes

Well then, I have obviously a much deeper problem with the Republican Party. And I think this, again, is part of what Donald Trump has done, that you have people like Ron DeSantis, who — let’s talk about conservative ideas. How it’s not surprising that Republicans would be against government mandates of something. Yeah, true. But Ron DeSantis has turned it around. He’s passing legislation that would ban private companies from having these policies. Telling cruise lines that they can’t do these things.

This is, in fact, a reversal of most conservative principle, that you allow businesses to make these decisions. That you allow local governments to make these decisions. Not to mention the fact that he is an unusually, I think, crude culture warrior. The problem with Ron DeSantis is that he’s one of those figures — you wonder like, what would he have been like had the Republican Party not insisted that you be this Trumpy? And I think that Ron DeSantis’s heavy-handed bullying of local government and private individuals who are trying to save lives is not something that we should be applauding.

So I know that you think that they all deserve apologies. And maybe it’s a fact that I have a much deeper problem with the Republican Party, because not coming from me.

jane coaston

Rich, you talked about Mitch McConnell, and you said that he had played this perfectly. And that he gave Trump the time to do his court challenges — court challenges that were flagrantly stupid. And then when it was clear those weren’t going to work, he pulled the plug on them. He didn’t vote to impeach, because that would have ended his political career. I do have to ask, what’s the point of all of that? What is it that Mitch McConnell wants to do? What’s the end game? When —

rich lowry

Conservative governance.

jane coaston

That’s it? Just no matter how that has to happen?

rich lowry

I mean, he’s a conservative, and he thinks that these policies and ideas are good for the country. So that’s what’s behind it. And as a politician, you have to be aware of where your voters are. Doesn’t mean that you pander to them or play to their worst instincts or always say yes to anything they want. But to live is to maneuver. Especially if you’re a politician. So if I said perfect, that’s overstating it. But I think he played it about right.

And look, Liz Cheney, I admire her integrity. She is a woman of principle. And she’s headed on a one-way road to a CNN contract. And that’s a price she’s willing to pay, and I respect that. But I’m not sure in terms of getting the Republican Party in a better place, whether that course actually helps.

jane coaston

Charlie, do you want to respond?

charlie sykes

I think it helps. Yeah, I do. The suggestion that she should have done what other Republicans have done, which is to go silent to appease Donald Trump in order to keep their position — this is how we got to where we are. This is why the Republican Party is now a cult of personality and why it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump. It’s because people say, OK, you know what? I know that it’s wrong. I know that what happened was wrong. But if you speak out about it, you will lose your number three position in the House caucus.

Well at a certain point, who gives a fuck whether you’re in number three position in the House caucus? In the larger scope of history, it is important for people to speak the truth, to stand up for something. And I think this is the danger of getting caught up in that inside game where, well if you do this, you might lose your position. Well, OK, so you might have to go on and do something else with your life.

But the fact that the right wing punditocracy is saying, you know, it would have been better for Liz Cheney to have kept her mouth shut. Because then, she would have been able to be on this one committee. I understand it, but there does come a time when you hope that people ignore that advice.

jane coaston

Me in 2007 is very surprised at where the Cheney discourse has gone. It is a strange time in America. And I don’t get it. But you both have been very helpful in helping me to maybe almost understand. Rich, Charlie, thank you so much for doing this conversation with me. I appreciate your time so much.

charlie sykes

Thank you.

rich lowry

Thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thanks, Charlie.

charlie sykes

Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

jane coaston

Charlie Sykes is founder and editor at large of The Bulwark and author of How the Right Lost its Mind. Rich Lowry editor in chief of National Review. He’s the author of The Case for Nationalism. I’ve written a lot about the GOP and Trump. And I stand by the vast majority of it. OK, there was a piece I wrote in 2016 where I said he couldn’t win, but, well, I was wrong.

You can read my piece, Trump was supposed to change the GOP, but the GOP changed him, or my conversation with Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner called, What Trump Got Right About White America at Vox. And you can hear my debate with Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat and conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty about Trump and populism. You can find links to all of these in our episode notes.

The Argument is a production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Guiterrez, and Vishakha Darbha. Edited by Alison Bruzek and Anabel Bacon. With original music and sound design by Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks this week to Kristin Lin.

There’s a divide in the Republican Party between those who believe the “Big Lie” — that the election was stolen from President Donald Trump — and those who don’t. But which side is ultimately the future of the party?

That’s the question Jane Coaston poses to Charlie Sykes, a founder and editor at large of The Bulwark, and Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify or Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Sykes and Lowry discuss what the G.O.P. has learned from Donald Trump’s tenure as president and what Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in Virginia might mean for the Republican midterms playbook. They also debate whether it’s Representative Liz Cheney or Marjorie Taylor Greene who’s a harbinger of the party to come.

Also, if you’re a Republican, we want to hear from you. What do you think of the party right now and where it should go next? Would you be excited to vote for Trump in 2024? Or if you’re a former Republican, why did you leave the party? And who would you rather vote for instead? Leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324 and we’ll share some of your responses later this month.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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Credit...Photo by Damon Winter/ The New York Times

Thoughts? Email us at argument@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)

By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.

“The Argument” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez and Vishakha Darbha and edited by Anabel Bacon and Alison Bruzek; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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