David Graham On Project 2025

David Graham is a political journalist. He’s a long-time staff writer at The Atlantic and one of the authors of the Atlantic Daily newsletter. His new book is The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America. We go through the agenda and hash out the good and the bad.

For two clips of our convo — on whether SCOTUS will stop Trump, and what a Project 2029 for Dems might look like — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in Akron; his dad the history prof and his mom the hospital chaplain; aspiring to be a journo since reading Russell Baker as a kid; the origins of Project 2025; its director Paul Dans; Heritage and Claremont; the unitary executive; the New Deal; the odd nature of independent agencies; Dominic Cummings’ reform efforts in the UK; Birtherism; Reaganites in Trump 1.0 tempering him; Russiagate; the BLM riots vs Jan 6; equity under Biden; Russell Vought and Christian nationalism; faith-based orgs; Bostock; the trans EO by Trump; our “post-constitutional moment”; lawfare; the souped-up Bragg case; Liberation Day and its reversal; Biden’s industrial policy; the border crisis; Trump ignoring E-Verify; Labour’s new shift on migration; Obama and the Dreamers; Trump’s “emergencies”; habeas corpus; the Ozturk case; the Laken Riley Act; the abundance agenda; the national debt; DOGE; impoundment and Nixon; trans women in sports; Seth Moulton; national injunctions; judge shopping; and trying to stay sane during Trump 2.0 and the woke resistance.

This week Truman was in the studio as usual, and another pet joined the convo:

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden years, Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Tara Zahra on the last revolt against globalization after WWI, NS Lyons on the Trump era, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Here’s a fan of last week’s pod with Claire Lehmann:

Claire is awesome! Thank you for yet another wonderful conversation!

Claire just rebooted her own substack after more than a year of dormancy: “Feelings, Facts, and Our Crisis of Truth.”

On the Byron York debate over Trump’s first 100 days, a listener writes:

I didn’t vote for Trump, and I certainly don’t regret that decision, even though it meant throwing my vote to a candidate for whom I had absolutely no enthusiasm. Still, after listening to your conversation with Byron York, I can’t help thinking that it may not be quite accurate to describe Trump as crazy — which is different from saying that he’s a deeply flawed character (and in fact has nothing resembling character in the classical sense). Crazy like a fox?

Trump’s way of operating strikes me as more like the sort of approach characteristic of a certain kind of chess player — Alexander Alekhine being the classic example. Alekhine often played without any particular strategy, aiming instead to create positions so thorny and complex that his opponents would make unforced errors, which he was always confident he would be able to exploit. Of course, Alekhine lost the world title to Max Euwe, whose game was famously balanced and lucid. I have no idea how far the analogy between politics and chess is going to hold up.

Me neither. Another writes:

Here’s where I might help you out on why so many Republicans despised Clinton and Obama: they were successful; and in Clinton’s case, he defeated an incumbent Republican (the same reason Republicans hated FDR for decades).

Many hated Obama even before he became successful, because of racism. Whatever complaints the Tea Party had about him were just cover for the fact that they really couldn’t accept a Black man as president. Not everyone opposing Obama was racist, but they were willing to use the Tea Party any way they could.

I thought Obama was a better choice than Hillary in 2008 — not because their policies were substantially different, but because I was certain that after Republicans demonized her for 20 years, Obama had better chance of winning. And if Hillary won, the Republicans would try to destroy her presidency from the start. I naively believed the Republicans would temper their opposition to Obama in order to not appear racist. I was wrong about that.

Another listener remarks that the following chart “highlights the hypocrisy and double standards in the criticism of Trump’s deportations”:

The crowd that says “Trump’s deportations are an unprecedented attack on civility” has been successful in pushing the narrative that Obama’s deportations mostly happened at the border, so they were not as “cruel” as Trump’s interior deportations. But as you can see in this chart, that narrative is false: Obama did indeed carry out massive numbers of interior removals — far more than Trump did in his first term.

But I missed the horror stories. Were there any? Or was the press covering it up as usual?

Here’s a chunk of the episode where Byron and I discuss Trump’s current priorities on immigration:

A listener dissents:

While it wasn’t a main focus of your conversation with Byron York, I have to admit I was frustrated by your constant criticism of Elon Musk’s work at DOGE. You’ll never hear me defend the way he goes about things, as I’m starting to believe he’s even more mentally unstable than his boss. But where else is there any serious attempt at tackling out-of-control spending?

Economists from across the political spectrum are warning that we are facing a massive debt crisis. We are currently spending about $1.8 trillion more per year than we are taking in, and we’re approaching the point of having to borrow just to pay the interest on our debt.

You rightly note that non-defense discretionary spending is only about 14% of the budget, so there will be no real progress unless we reform entitlements. If you know how to make that happen, please enlighten us. When George W Bush tried to implement some reforms to Social Security, it effectively marked the end of his second term. And when Paul Ryan proposed reforms to flatten the growth of entitlements, your hero Obama’s reelection campaign (and the media that loved him) accused Ryan of wanting to throw grandma off a cliff.

The only other serious major proposal I recall hearing was from the Simpson-Bowles commission — slow the growth curve of entitlements, lower tax rates, but broaden and flatten the code by eliminating almost all loopholes — which Obama and most of Congress completely ignored. The result of Obama’s own much-touted promise to cut the budget by going “line by line” was savings of … $100 million. Be still, my heart.

We couldn’t even maintain the microscopic cuts from the 2012-13 sequester, which wasn’t even a “cut” but a decrease in expected growth (the 2013 budget was still higher than 2012’s, yet the media labeled the puny cuts “draconian”). I like to think that if I were president, I would propose something similar to Simpson-Bowles. How many Congressional representatives would support me? 10? 5?

If all Musk and his team accomplish is reducing spending by $200 billion, it’s woefully inadequate and far short of what was promised — but it’s still $200 billion more than what I see anyone else doing. The fact that his team has made so many errors is to be expected in light of a gargantuan federal government, for which no one can be an expert on every single nook and cranny. How much staff is actually needed in the Office of Orphan Products, for example?

In my support for Obama, Biden, and Harris, I had no illusions about controlling the debt. Maybe I should have written more consistently about it, but I’m strongly in agreement with my reader. I opposed the Bush tax cut for this reason; and, for the record, I constantly backed Simpson-Bowles on the Dish back in 2010. I find DOGE both dumb and trivial, although I have no problem at all stripping a lot of waste and excess from government spending line by line. We need to allow the Trump tax cuts on the wealthy to expire, and we need to tackle Medicare and the Pentagon. No other way to do this.

A Dishcast rec:

I noticed you recently “restacked” an interview with Professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School. If you haven’t considered him already, I think he would make a great guest for your podcast! He’s a conservative with a ton of integrity, a brilliant legal mind, and as one of his former students, I can attest that he’s one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. He’s also led a fascinating life and, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, is a committed Christian (one of the classes I took from him was a reading group called “Christian Conceptions of Justice and Mercy”).

Great idea. Next up, a reader on Pope Leo and President Trump:

I’m not, nor have ever been, Catholic, but I certainly consider myself a long-time interested observer of the Church and its leadership. So I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time to share my initial thoughts on the papal selection.

First, the externals: When Pope Francis first appeared on the balcony, he told all of us (on first sight) what to expect from him. The selection of an unused papal name communicated that we would see something new, and his simple dress implied a pope whose authority would be exercised through a place of humility. On the basis of these same two observables, Cardinal Prevost’s choice of name (Pope Leo XIV) and dress made me feel a bit queasy. It first appeared to me that taking an ancient name and a return to papal couture signaled that he would be moving the Church backwards.

Upon further reflection of recent Church history, though, I’m knowing a bit more hope.

I began to think about what happened in 1978. Although John Paul II was, to me, dreadfully conservative, it wasn’t his theological views that mattered in the end. What mattered was that he was a Pole, and that a lot of his papal authority emanated from his place of birth. That year the Cold War was still a big thing, and the Soviet regime was under pressure by the very real challenge posed by the Solidarity movement in Poland. The presence of a Polish pope added to that pressure, and the Soviets may have held back on responding with a severe crackdown simply because of the likely revolt of the Polish faithful due to the implied support of Solidarity by John Paul II.

While decades of bipartisan US foreign policy is usually given the major credit for the downfall of Communism, I have long believed that more than any other single person, John Paul II was responsible for the end of Soviet Communism.

And who did the cardinals select this time? An American!