Siegel: But Tim, let me ask you: What you’re saying is that there really isn’t — there’s Donald Trump, but there really isn’t, in MAGA, a Trumpism that can be defined. I would think that there is this aggressive anti-immigrant policy, and there is the approach to tariffs as the most important instrument of economic policy. Those are real approaches.
Carney: Yes. But part of the way I look at why Trump was able to take over the Republican Party is that if, again, we go back to 2015 — both parties before that point, on the question of nationalism versus internationalism, the elites of both parties were internationalists. They were pretty interventionist on war. I mean, you had the Iraq war — you go back, Bosnia, George H.W. Bush; Barack Obama did his Libya war — interventionists on war, pretty basically free trade and pretty close to not open borders, but let’s get a lot of immigrants in here while enforcing the law. And I think a huge swath of the public was not aligned with the elites of either party.
A huge swath of the public thought there was too much immigration, was skeptical of free trade, and was very skeptical of this sort of humanitarian interventionism that we were doing. And Trump was the only guy who would stand up, on either stage, and be a nationalist. And then the Biden administration comes in, and does, basically, an open borders experiment, and the Democrats have learned from that. So I think, actually, both parties on immigration are going to be a lot more restrictionist than the Democrats were recently, or than either party was in the past. So I do agree that, to the degree that MAGA is a coherent policy, it’s: Be a little more nationalist at least, especially on immigration, and be a lot less internationalist.
Dionne: Here’s the problem for MAGA. One: Tariffs, the way Trump did them, are discredited. I know Democrats — and I grew up in a mill town. Where I grew up, “protectionism” was not a bad word. So there was a constituency for tariffs, and there still is to some degree. But tariffs, the way Trump has done them, he utterly discredited this. And many, many Republican constituencies, particularly farmers, large parts of business, really don’t like tariffs. Immigration, he has spoiled it. I think that, yes, people wanted the border tightened up. They did not want these inhumane roundups that are taking citizens, legal people, people who are here illegally but have broken no laws. But people don’t like this. So he has taken two of the biggest MAGA issues off the table, and then there’s a third, which is non-interventionism. No wars in the Middle East — and here we are in Iran. So you wonder, what is left of this? This MAGA flag is in tatters.
Carney: Can you have Trumpism without Trump? And I think JD Vance is the one who’s trying to say: We’re going to reindustrialize.