Tangle - The National Review's David Harsanyi on Biden, guns and how Republicans can win

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

On today's podcast, we sit down with the nationally syndicated columnist David Harsanyi. He is an author, a senior writer at The National Review and a columnist at The New York Post.Harsanyi spoke with us about his view of the Biden administration, reflected on the state of the Republican party, shared his thoughts about the latest conversations around gun control and offered his view of how conservatives can win in the upcoming elections.To follow David you can check him on Twitter here.Be sure to subscribe to the Tangle newsletter: https://www.readtangle.com--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some reasonable debate, and independent thinking without the hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and in today's episode, we are sitting down with the nationally syndicated columnist David Harsanyi. David's work is most commonly seen in the National Review. He is a writer with the New York Post as well. He is a former senior editor at the Federalist, editor of Human Events, opinion columnist of the Denver Post. His writings have appeared in pretty much every

newspaper you can name or think of. David, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. So you write about pretty much everything under the sun in the political world. And I feel like we could go in a million different directions here, but there are a few things that I really want to make sure I touch on. And I feel like the most obvious place to start is just the Biden administration and where things are right now. We are a few months into this new presidency, and I gather from your writing, it's not a presidency you're particularly happy about at the moment. And before President Biden was inaugurated, there was a lot of conversation and a lot of talk in the punditry world about what kind of president he would be. There was sort of this debate,

whether he would be a radical leftist, whether he would play to the progressive wing of the party, whether he would be old moderate Joe and more the Joe Biden we maybe have seen in the Senate. And so I feel like it might be a good place to start to sort of take your temperature on how you grade where this Joe Biden is. I mean, how are you viewing this presidency? Are you viewing it as a very radical leftist presidency? Are you viewing it as moderate? Where has it fallen in terms of what you've been expecting? I would say, yeah, radical leftist, but I view it as pretty far left, certainly farther left than Joe Biden ever was in the Senate,

and perhaps even farther to the left than the Obama administration was on most of the things that they've covered. Obviously, the stimulus bill, which I didn't like and most conservatives didn't like, was popular and a victory for his presidency. But since that moment, I think he's essentially taken on a lot of issues that will create the perception, at least, I think the reality that he is going to govern from the left. And a lot of them, like the gun issue, for instance, is sort of needless in the sense that his executive order won't have much bite. There's nothing that's going to pass. So he just is sort of riling up the right wing, I think, in ways that he doesn't really have to, especially if he was honestly

trying to govern from the center. But I guess we'll see when it comes to the infrastructure bill, things like that, if he has something to offer for Republicans. So I don't know what grade I'd give him. Obviously, from my perspective, it's a very low grade. But to be fair, I don't think any, I'm not a fan or have not been a fan of basically any presidency. So he, I think, falls exactly where I expected him to be. I think his whole career, when you look at it, he's always sort of positioned himself in the middle of where the Democratic Party is. He's malleable as far as his principles go, I think. So I think he's exactly where I expect him to be, which is pretty far left. Yeah. One of the responses that he's sort of given to the accusation that he is basically acting as a partisan president has been that he's almost giving up on winning over Republicans in Congress and instead is sort of reframing the conversation around him doing things that are going to be supported by Republican voters.

are going to be supported by Republican voters. It's hard to read too much into some of these polls, but there are certain issues, obviously, like you send every American $1,400 stimulus checks, you're going to pick up a good amount of Republican support from Republican voters on a bill like that. And I'm wondering what your feeling is or what your sense is about how he is being received by the conservative base right now. I mean, do you think there's any merit to that, that he is going to be able to drive a wedge between elected Republicans and the Republican voters that he says he's trying to appease instead?

No. I do think, however, he's right that sending people money is usually a pretty popular thing to do. The problem with that is that it's only popular until you spend your check. So I think when you look, for instance, at Barack Obama's presidency and his initial stimulus with Republicans, which Republicans didn't vote for at all, I don't believe, in the Senate, it was very popular as well. But by the 2010 rolled around, it was not popular because it fades, the effect of it fades. So I think that he's right about that. But you can't, this idea that you're passing a bipartisan bill without Republicans is kind of ridiculous because people are fickle. A lot of broad questions on polls like, do you want to make, do you want more gun safety or do you want to fight climate change or do you want to stimulate the economy? Of course, people do. It's the specifics that matter. And so in the long run, I'm not sure that this victory certainly will be viewed as something, some kind of bipartisan victory. But again, I'm not saying the stimulus wasn't popular. I will say this, though, and I mean, I'm a big critic of the media right now.

I think that most people didn't really know what was in it. And that's problematic. And that's something Republicans have to do a better job of explaining. I've written a bit about this conflict and the friction between what has gotten a lot of attention in the Biden administration and a lot of the pork that's come up in both the infrastructure bill and the first COVID relief bill. And I agree. I don't think Republicans have successfully really messaged that. I don't think a lot of conservative or liberal voters are receiving that. I'm curious, though, if there's been anything two or three months in that has maybe surprised you in a positive way. Has the Biden administration pursued any initiatives or done anything or maybe not done anything

that you find yourself supportive of? No, actually. I mean, I can't offhand think of anything. It's been a short period of time, but I sense that this is sort of rolling out in the way the Obama administration rolled out, where he, you know, it was kind of a lot of top heavy sort of signing bonus stuff, you know, where you got to pass Obamacare barely, and then that was it. So I feel like maybe Biden feels the same thing. Obviously, you know, I think Republicans are around, I forget how many seats away from taking the

majority in the House. It's a 50-50 set. Things could really go the other way very easily, especially with redistricting. I think the Republicans get a head start, six seats maybe. So I feel like he's trying to get as much as he can get done within the first two years. So now I forgot your initial question, but the point is, I think that just as Obama sort of tried to hit a few home runs early on, I think that's what Biden is doing. And I don't feel like he needs Republicans. I think he knows he can't really overcome a

filibuster in any of the big things that he wants. So he's going to pass as many spending bills as he can. So I'm not exactly sure what that entails, because a lot of things can be snuck in that way, or if you have reconciliation bills. But I think that that's what he's trying to do. And it might be successful, but I sense that the midterms might not go Democrats' way if the public feels like they are overstepping their mandate, which is a very slim one, frankly, right now. I mean, that doesn't really mean anything. I realize the president is the president, Congress makes laws, etc. But there is a perception out there when you have a very

slim majority that you're maybe trying to do too much. You mentioned the filibuster. This has obviously been brewing for a little while. And I mean, as a political observer, my perception is that things feel like they're coming to a head and that we're going to have the moment pretty soon where either they're going to do it or they won't in terms of abolishing it. And obviously, Senator Joe Manchin has drawn his line in the sand, which to me is pretty much seems like the end of the conversation for now. But I know a lot of democratic activists and politicians are still pushing them. You've written in defense of the filibuster. I have also written in defense of the filibuster, although I think my position has been a little bit flimsier in my writing recently than it has in the past. And I'd be interested to hear your perspective on

in this moment, why you think it's important and if possible, how you can defend it while staying sort of divorced from the outcome that you want, which is, I do think it's a legitimate criticism that right now it clearly benefits Republicans, though a year ago it was benefiting Democrats. If you're going to pass, and most of the legislation we see today coming out of Congress is big, right? It's a big reform. It's, in my estimation, undermining federalism. If you're going to do that sort of thing, you should have a consensus. You should have a big majority to do it.

If you're going to change how people vote and nationalize voting, for instance, it's something you should need a filibuster for. In my view, filibuster, though it's not in the Constitution, is one of the few things that still sort of hold things together for federalism and for how the United States works. I wrote a whole book in 2013 about my problems with democracy and people think that I'm against freedom of voting. It's not about that. It's about having a centralized government forcing itself on local states, on local communities. I think we thrive because of actual diversity, meaning of how we run our communities, et cetera. So I'm a big fan of the filibuster. I think destroying it or getting rid of it is a disaster for this country in the long run. On top of that, as a contemporary view of it, we're talking about it like it's coming to

a head, but why is it coming to a head? There's no bill right now in the docket that has even 50 votes that they need to break the filibuster on. Manchin doesn't support gun control measures. Manchin doesn't support the infrastructure bill right now. Manchin doesn't support H.R. 1. Either does Sinema. So I'm not exactly sure. I don't even know about the others because no one's asked a lot of these senators in red states, you know, Democratic senators in red states. Now, that's how you govern. You have moderate, there's Susan Collins and there's Manchin, right? So I don't understand why it's coming to a head. I think they want it to come to a head. I think they want to get rid of it. I think they're looking for an excuse to do it, but I don't think it's there right now. I don't see where or why that would happen. And so as a philosophical and sort of just broader issue matter, I'm a very big fan of the filibuster, but also I don't understand

why we keep talking about it when there's no bill that would even precipitate it having to be used right now, even if you were a progressive. Yeah, that's a great point. And it seems to be something overlooked in the conversation, I think, that we do talk about it in sort of the punditry class often as if abolishing the filibuster would suddenly usher in these bills that are in front of the public right now when they're still short, even of 50 votes on some of the major priorities they want to get through. I do want to pick at it a little bit to just, you said that you believe it would be a disaster for the country. I've written, I think for me personally, my greatest fear about abolishing the filibuster is just that we would have sort of this back and forth, huge swing of major legislation that would just, you know, think about like healthcare, how it could just destroy and complicate so many systems that our country relies on by having the law change every two years or whenever the Senate flips. I'd be curious, you know, if that is one of

the big concerns for you or what sort of is at the top of your list? Absolutely. That's a big concern as well. It's destabilizing to have, because essentially without the filibuster and just having a bare majority to pass things, you're not incentivized to build consensus. You're not incentivized to work with the other side. Now, I'm not a big guy who says, oh, you have to have bipartisan bills. But if you want to pass a national bill where the majorities of L.A. and New York and Chicago tell people how to live in Oklahoma, you need to bring other people aboard. Now, my problem, of course, is that I don't like those kinds of centralized bills to begin with. But if you're going to do it, then the country needs to be on board.

I totally believe also what you're saying. And I think that that would happen as well, where it's almost like executive orders. Well, you have one administration comes in, they join the Paris Accords without going to the Senate, they do all these things. And then the other one comes in and, you know, reverses it. And the other comes in, you know, is back at it with Iran or whatever it is. Obamacare, for instance, basically, Trump rolled back most of Obama's sort of executive, you know, unilateral actions, except he couldn't do that. Republicans could never do it with Obamacare because it passed the right way through legislation.

You know, when you have, as you say, no filibuster, it's going to make it a lot easier for partisans just to, you know, push things through back and forth. It's messy. It's not the way the United States' governance is built or, you know, envisioned. So I think that that's a good point. You mentioned some of the gun control reform that's coming down the pike. You have written quite a few articles recently about gun control. I actually listened to you on Brad Palumbo's podcast. He's a friend and you guys sort of went along on the gun control issue. We have some news I guess we could discuss now, given that it's sort of happened in the last 24 hours, which is that Biden has unveiled his first few big executive actions he's been teasing around gun control. One of them is about the

quote unquote ghost guns, the firearms that are assembled at home. I'm curious, you know, he also named David Chipman as his pick to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which is a pretty big deal. I'd love to get your reaction. I know this is fairly fresh news, but I'm interested to hear your thinking about that pick and some of these executive orders. Well, I'm against basically any more gun control at all, frankly. I mean, that might sound radical to people, but I think there are

40,000 laws already in the books. Plenty of them are not enforced in the way they should be. None of the things that we're talking about right now would help stop the bloodshed that is the most dramatic or even the ones we don't talk about every day shooting. So I don't see any reason for those things. I mean, if you'd like to go further into the specifics, I would. As for the executive order, yes, or whenever it was this week, it's pretty toothless stuff. I mean, if you'd like to go further into the specifics, I would. As for the executive order, yes, or whenever it was this week, it's pretty toothless stuff. I mean, ghost guns. You know, someone asked, I'm not sure if they asked Biden, who they asked, but someone, you know, asked, why ghost guns? What's going on with ghost guns? Have there been many ghost gun murders? No, it's just this scary sounding thing that has very little to do with the problems of mass shootings or even

just common criminality. Most murders in the United States, most gun homicides are perpetrated by people with handguns. And if you want to stop that, there are things that we can do, for instance, prosecute people who lie on their background checks, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that none of that's going to pass probably in Congress because Sinema's not going to do it. And Manchin's not going to do it. I'll probably repeat that a bunch of times this whole podcast. But an executive order will do nothing because if he goes, let's say he has an executive

order next week where he tries to ban AR-15s, it's simply unconstitutional for him to do, even if it was an unconstitutional period. But the things he wants to do will do very little. So I don't really understand why he is riling up the right, which actually cares about this issue more than people believe, for really very little gain. So I don't really get why he did it or what's going on. David Chipman is just an anti-gun fanatic. I mean, he wants to create things like a registered list of all owners of AR-15s. It would be a disaster politically, I think, for the left to even try to engage in doing something like that. I don't even think it's

constitutional. So I'm not sure why he picked him, probably because he's trying to, you know, I mean, he wants to make it look like he's doing something and that's fine. He's the president. He made these promises. I get that. But I just, I think he could have done a better job on this. I have written about this and I feel torn about some of the gun issues that have come up. I felt like the bill that passed the House a few weeks ago or came up again was... I didn't feel like it was a huge infringement on people's rights. I also wasn't convinced it was going to do a bunch to reduce the amount of gun violence in the country. It struck me as, I didn't feel particularly moved either way. I do have this personal sense of that, you know, the totality of gun violence in the country, the homicides, the suicides, the mass shootings as a whole feels

like it shouldn't be acceptable. We shouldn't be taking a position that there's nothing we can do or nothing we should do. And it leaves me feeling stuck. I mean, I agree with you. I think handguns are most shootings. There's more suicides than homicides. The AR-15s are like people are hunting hogs in Florida with them. I don't think they're a particularly dangerous weapon for the public because even then, you know, while they're used sometimes in mass shootings, it's just the math of it, as horrible as it is to say, is just a really small fraction of the violence that we're trying to address. addressed. And I don't know, I mean, from your perspective, if we're both working from a position where our gun violence is worse than most other nations in the developed world, and we want to do something about it, what can we do? What should we do? What should we be thinking about? Well, I would say that doing nothing, of course, we can do things, but doing something that doesn't do anything, but looks like it's doing something is even worse.

I think I guess I'm much more cynical about the gun control folks because I think that they're just incrementally moving. They're just trying to incrementally move forward to much bigger things. You know, I follow this very closely. I've written a book about the history of guns in America. And I just believe I just don't think their intentions are right because then we'd be talking about in a very different way about the problems that... Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season?

Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCcellvax.ca. Lead to mass shootings. And I think that has a lot to do, you know, with, you know, mental health issues for one, the, the way that we, the way that, um, schools and parents and others, you know, I'm talking about real societal things where

schools and parents have to be honest with themselves about some of the kids that are not doing well. And I'm not an expert on mental health issues, but most of these shootings, these mass shootings, which are horrific and really, you know, bring gun control to the fore. You know, it's not the, again, the common criminality that does it's this kind of thing. And it is just horrifying. You know, I have kids. It's just a horrifying thing to think fore. It's not, again, the common criminality that does it. It's this kind of thing. And it is just horrifying. I have kids. It's just a horrifying thing to think about. Those are issues that we need to deal with. And when you look at them specifically, let's say Parkland or others, you're dealing with people in their early 20s who obviously have mental problems. And there's something we need to be able to do to help those people,

I think. For the regular violence we see, it's never okay, but sometimes there aren't great answers. There is more gun violence in this country than European countries, let's say, not than all other countries. People sometimes think like Brazil or Middle East, there's plenty of gun violence around, but that's a discussion that's a little more complicated. My point is that none of the laws that come forward, like the Charleston loophole law that the House recently passed, these laws don't do anything to help criminality. They just inhibit the ability of normal, average people who want to have weapons to have them. It's a constitutional right. If people don't believe it should be, they need to overturn the Second Amendment. But right now, it exists. So it's a difficult conversation, but I can't,

you asked a broad question, which is very good, but I think we have to specifically speak about whatever laws there are that people want to pass and talk about them and see if they'll help. But most of the time they don't. You mentioned your book on the history of guns. And I think that's something that comes up with my readers and readers who question the right's position on this. sort of bastardizing the meaning of the second amendment and turning it into every American has a right to own any weapon they want when we should have limits on what kinds of firearms and weapons civilians can carry. I get a lot of emails that are basically amount to, do you think your neighbor should be able to have a grenade launcher? Of course not. So why can't we discuss limits on something like a machine gun or the quote unquote assault weapon, which obviously how to define that or what that even means is a very squishy thing. It's not really a technical thing if you're a firearm owner. You know, what's the case from, I mean, obviously you've written a whole book about this, so it's hard to give just the cliff notes, but what's the historical case that actually

we do have this right or that Americans do have this right? I mean, let's put it this way. There's zero historical case that we don't. I mean, there were state constitutions with more explicitly laid out the individual right to own firearms. The individual right to own firearms has never even... There's so little case history in the Supreme Court over guns because no one ever... It wasn't until the 1930s. Until the 1930s, the very idea of domestic gun policy would have been alien to everyone. I mean, it simply would not have been in their minds. No type of gun has ever been banned in this country until 1986, I

think, with the effective ban of fully automatic rifles and guns. What you said before about how we need to have limits on guns, we have no other right is limited as much as gun ownership. No right. No right. Imagine having to get a background check to speak. I mean, about politics. It would be unacceptable to most people. So fully automatic rifles, machine guns are effectively

banned. You can't walk into a store and buy them. People have to get background checks when they buy semi-automatic weapons. If you want to ban semi-automatic weapons, you're banning basically every gun. So the history is clear. All the founding fathers, virtually every single one of them made specific arguments about the inherent right to defend yourself, your family, your home, your country. And when they said country, they didn't mean the United States. They meant your freedoms. If the United States protects them, that's great. If they don't and you have weapons, I mean, the idea that the Minutemen, you know, that someone would have told them,

you can't have a musket, it's just insanity. Or that they joined a militia and then they returned their rifle as they left the field of practice, you know, of training. I mean, it's just, it's not how it was. There's a huge amount of literature and writing and quotes and speeches about the importance of self-defense. And some gun folks, and I consider myself very pro-Second Amendment, don't grapple enough with the fact that we are a little more violent because of these guns. It is true. Guns are easy. It's easier to kill yourself if you grab a gun. It's easier to shoot someone or kill someone, I mean, when you have a gun in the house. And that's something we have to deal with. Most gun folks I know, meaning NRA types,

are very serious about the safety of their guns. They're not some slack-jawed yokels like these people make them out to be or a bunch of Gadsden flag-waving militia guys. Nothing's wrong with the Gadsden flag or militias, actually. But they take their rights very seriously. There's always people who don't, unfortunately. And those are the people we should deal with, not continually inhibiting the ability

of people who follow the law and want to follow the law to make it harder on them. It makes no sense, I don't think. That'll be plenty to provoke some emails and feedback on the issue of guns. emails and feedback on the issue of guns. But I do, while I have you, I really want to pivot briefly into kind of the state of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, which I think you as a prominent writer at the New York Post and at the National Review are a really essential part of. And we talked sort of at the top of the show about this narrow majority Democrats have in the House, the split Senate, the moderates on the Democratic side, holding up some Democratic policies. And there are similar fissures on the right right now. I mean, we are in the post-Trump world now. We are seeing kind of like the Matt Gaetz's and the Marjorie Taylor Greene's dominate some of

the headlines while, you know, a lot of Republican politicians like Mitt Romney are sort of hard at work at the Senate, either trying to bring up some moderate policy to win Biden's approval or holding the line on things they deem too far left. And I'm wondering in this sort of push and pull between the Trump Republican Party and maybe the more traditional establishment Republican Party, where you see things going from here in the next couple of years. I mean, it strikes me that it's easy to be unified right now in opposition to Democrats, but that opposition isn't going to exist forever because there's a good chance Republicans win back majorities either in the House or the Senate, or they win the presidency in four years. And

I'd love to hear your thoughts about what wing of that conservative movement feels like it has the strength or the momentum or might win. I think you make a very good point about being, you know, unity is easy when you're in the opposition. So even if you win back the Senate and House, if Biden's president, I think unity will be somewhat easy because you're not really going to pass any major conservative legislation that's going to be signed or anything like that. I consider myself outside, I guess, of the modern Republican Party in the sense that I'm a big free market guy, not a populist. I don't really like populism very much. I don't know how many people there are like me. I would say

probably fewer and fewer. So I think that the Republicans need to get behind a candidate that can bring together sort of the populist wing and the more establishment sort types, not maybe even Mitt Romney, but people are still pro-capitalistic institutions and pro-free speech even, where there are a lot of people on the right who are sort of sick or they feel like they're oppressed by big tech and stuff like that. And I actually sympathize with many of their grievances, but the things they want to do, I don't particularly like. But whatever the case, I think when you look at DeSantis in Florida, that might be the sort of guy who can bridge together that gap. I can't really think of many other people who might be able to do that. It's a little early to say he's going to be some great presidential candidate. I've done that too many times in my life and been

wrong from Giuliani to Fred Thompson to who knows who. So I think that they can find someone to bring the Trump folks together with more establishment Republicans. But there's a lot of hatred there. And you know, a lot of times your hatred for your own side is stronger than the hatred for the other side for some reason. And Trump Republicans and Trump himself ran against the Republican Party when he was in the primary. So that might happen again. Maybe Trump will run again. And that would, I think, be a pretty big problem for the Republican Party. But there's a real split there. I think it's real. I think it's problematic in many ways, because I think there are some issues on economics or other sort of issues. I can't think right now.

Mostly economic trade, things like that, where you're going to have a real split within the Republican Party. At some point, you're going to have to deal with that either in two years or four years or eight years. I want to follow up briefly on the Ron DeSantis because he is sort of, I mean, for me, top of my mind. I think if I had to bet on a successful Republican candidate who's not Trump in 2024 today, he would be the guy. And I'm interested to just have you maybe flesh that out a little bit about why you think he is successfully holding support from Republicans who might be your more establishment Republicans while also continuing to win the favor of people who were diehard Trump supporters? Because it seems like that's an increasingly hard place to be as a Republican. And I'm sure some of it is just that

he's successfully rebuffed a hit job from 60 Minutes and been kind of the counterpuncher that Trump was. But what do you see that sort of unifies those two groups in him as a politician? Well, first of all, it's good to have the right enemies. And the media obviously is not a fan of his. And the hit job now is just part of a year-long effort to, for some reason, which I can't fully understand, try to make him look like some kind of failed, incompetent governor when the opposite is true. He's been a really good governor. And that brings me to my second point. I think that you have senators do a lot of talking. People might like what they say,

they might not. But when you have a governor, you have someone who's actually usually either accomplishing something or not, and he's done a really good job. The guy sounds like a populist, but he governs like a conservative. I think he went to both Yale and Harvard. I think it was Harvard Law. He's sharp. And I've seen him numerous times. And I haven't seen him enough to say, wow, he's going to be a great candidate.

Because I'm from New York, right? And sometimes the people who connect with me and I like don't connect with people in Alabama or in California or wherever. So you never know. I'm often surprised at how people hate certain politicians who I think are fine. But right now, I think you're right. I think he is, I can't think of another Republican that is not only as successful and has done as much to generate goodwill towards him among Republicans than he and someone who can bring together both

sides of the divide. So right now, I think he's a clear, you know, if Trump doesn't run, he's a clear front runner right now. One last question, and I will wrap this up. I'm conscious of the fact that these sort of tenuous majorities Democrats have are, historically speaking, going to fall in the next year and a half. The midterm elections typically go to the party that is not in the White House. And I imagine with some of these action, the executive action on gun control legislation, things like that, Republicans are not going to have an extremely difficult time riling up the base to get out there. But I wonder from your perspective, in order to take back the House, in order to take back

the Senate, what are the two or three key issues you think conservatives should be focused on in the next few years? What are the winning issues right now for Republicans in America? Because I think Trump lost on COVID, and I think he lost on COVID and I think he lost on personality. I think people just didn't like him anymore. I think a lot of people were just so exhausted by him as a president. And he won in 2016, I think, on immigration and this sort of image of an economically successful guy who could turn the economy around. The dynamics have changed a lot since then. So I'm curious to

hear what you think the right should be hammering going forward. Well, I think immigration, who knows what it's going to be three years from now. But right now, immigration, I think is a seriously dangerous issue for the president because he has done many things, I think, to create a crisis on the southern border. Now I'm pro-immigration, but you can't have anarchy. I don't think Americans like lawlessness. And there's a feel of that down there. I don't exactly know how it's going to play out, but you have a real surge. I think it's historic right now. I think there's a bigger surge of people hitting the border than ever before. And that's a problem. I think Americans are more conservative on immigration than people believe.

Not to say that they're all like, let's build a wall and let no one in. But I don't think they like lawbreaking and just lawlessness. So I think that that's one of the issues. The other issues, of course, will be, I think, economic issues. Are things going well? Is the economy continued to grow, we're obviously going to, in my opinion, or it seems like where economists say, you know, there's going to be a big bounce back from last year, a lot of pent up, you know, a lot of money

saved, a lot of pent up, whatever it is, we're going to have probably a good rebound. So he's going to have a good economy. But if he starts taxing people, breaking promises on taxes, I think that's going to be problematic for him. And a thing that I've changed my mind on over the past 10 years is the culture war. I think the culture war matters to people, even if it doesn't directly affect them. Issues that don't, like the way governors are dealing with the transgender girls and playing with genetic girls, born girls. I don't even know what I'm going to, how to say it without getting in trouble. But so I think that those kinds of culture issues matter as well. The woke stuff, the corporate, you know, the corporate, like the thing that

happened in Atlanta with the baseball all-star game, I think just the corporate wokeism, it offends a lot of, a lot on the people on the right. They don't like to be lectured game. I think just the corporate woke-ism, it offends a lot of people on the right. They don't like to be lectured to. I think they feel like the whole of the corporate world and the political world are turning against them and undermining them. And quite often, I think they have a good point on that. So I think that just the sort of vague culture stuff, if that makes sense, I think matters more than I used to think. In the old days, one policy, let's say during the Reagan administration, you could have a policy that turns millions of people because they like this policy or that policy, but it's

much more tribal today. People don't belong to a party simply because of one or two policies. They belong to a party because of a cultural feeling or either they're religious or they're secular or whatever it is, matters much more. So I think the culture issues and attacks on religious liberty or whatever, I think those are going to matter as well, if that makes any sense. It does. David, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it. If people want to keep up with your work, where's the best place to do it? Probably on Twitter, David Harsanyi. I post everything I write up there. Awesome.

Thank you so much, David. I appreciate the time and hopefully get to do this again soon. Sure. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Today's podcast was produced by Tangle Media in partnership with our friends over at Impostor Radio. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to give it a five-star rating, share it with your

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