A New American Century | Dr. Kevin Roberts

President Trump with the best intentions in 2016 and 2017 would just focus on the top 300 positions. But he learned like the rest of us, I've had to learn this too. You've got to be focused on all 4,500 politically appointed positions and you've got to be willing to play ball on civil service reform over a generation to make sure that these unelected bureaucrats just posit that they're great people, I'm willing to do that. They shouldn't have the authority they have.

We're not going to solve that over again. We're not going to solve that in one presidential term. I think we're going to be deep into the 2030s before we can look back and say, and this is if we have sustained power, before we can look back and say, we did it. Dr.

Kevin Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, conservative think tank, that plays a central role in hosting national public policy debates among the political right. Roberts is a lifelong educator with a career in building economic institutions, as well as a writer whose analysis has appeared in major outlets like the Wall Street Journal and National Review. Roberts also features spot leaders on his eponymous podcast where he sits down with everyone from senators to tech innovators and green berets. Roberts' latest book, Zoran's Early Light, offers a diagnosis of America's most urgent problems, as well as a series of policy prescriptions for a more prosperous future.

In today's episode, we discuss the trade-offs inherent in policymaking, why Republicans must not neglect fiscal conservatives many longer, and which executive agency he would reform first if he had a magic wand. Kevin Roberts also injects nuance into our foreign policy debates and explained why some institutions are not even worth overhauling. Dr. Kevin Roberts' combination of scholarly expertise and practical policy experience makes him a strong advocate for the broader conservative movement.

Stay tuned, and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special. Kevin Roberts, thank you so much for stopping by. I really appreciate it. It's a real pleasure, Ben.

Thanks for having me. So this has been an extraordinary period in American history and in conservative movement history. We're watching both a change in the conservative movement and also a historic victory for the conservative movement. So first, the broad question, where do you think things stand right now as far as conservatism goes?

I think we're in the first or second chapter, maybe second chapter, because Trump's election, re-election, I should say, so the second term is the first chapter, of a reformulation of the conservative movement. Sometimes people will hear that, even I as a lifelong movement and the conservative hear that and wonder, are we becoming untethered to our principles? No, what we're doing is, obviously we have no power over eternal principles. The power we have, hence the second chapter, is how we apply that, given the socioeconomic, political, cultural circumstances we find ourselves in.

And I think we're in the beginning of a re-founding of this country. By that, I mean a regeneration of institutions. And I think politically, this Trump-Vance coalition isn't just about the 2024 election. It's about what I call, in a recent book, the new conservative movement.

And I think that most of that is going to look familiar to us, but other aspects of it, for example, having a large support from Hispanics, large support from working-class Americans, is not necessarily new, it's not unprecedented. At least the latter, a working-class movement, was part of the founding of the Republican Party. But I think it's very exciting. And in short, I think this is the beginning of something that can not only reclaim this country, but perhaps reclaim the West, if we have the courage to seize it.

So, in a book, you talk about the reformulation of the conservative movement. Historically, the sort of rating conservative movement was predicated on three basic principles, free markets, strong national offensive, peace and strength, and a traditional family values sort of platform. Do you see any of those things changing, or is it more sort of the manifestation of those principles? I think there's a difference in the manifestation of that, given the political and economic circumstances.

I say only somewhat tongue-in-cheek in the book that the new three-lighted stool, the new fusionism, is mom, dad, and kids. Because the reframing that I'm arguing for, which is not going to be earth-shattering any conservative, is that we really see public policy and politics through the lens of the American family. We have historically low marriage rates and fertility rates. I think these are existential crises for us as a civil society.

And yet, I'm cautiously optimistic that our politics can help to solve that, partially, through good policy. And ultimately, when you think about national security conservatives, free market conservatives, social conservatives, we argue heritage and argue in the book, let's stop modifying conservatism and let's talk about a more holistic conservatism in which all of us not only have a seat at the table, but also are part of reformulating a new conservative set of policy programs that really puts the family first. If we do that, speaking to the sort of different manifestation, then I think those other priorities are going to fall in place. We're going to have an American foreign policy that is strong through peace, especially under President Trump.

We're going to have a free market conservatism that understands the free market is the healthy outgrowth of a healthy society. Right now, we not only put those out of order, but we don't even acknowledge that we don't really have a free market economy in the United States. And the social conservatives, who I think often have been the red-headed stepchildren at the table around D.C., have to be more boisterous about what we're after. And we have to explain that it isn't just about securing the lives of the unborn.

But going back to this family first fusionism, as I call it in the book, we have to talk about an aspirational vision for what family life and communities will look like in the next generation. So when it comes to the role of government and this sort of stuff, and this is, of course, where the rubber beats the road. You have some really interesting conversations happening within the conservative movement about what policy should be happening at the local level versus the state level versus the federal level. For myself, I tend to believe that most of the family building stuff happens at the local level.

And that if we're talking about the decline of birth rates, that you can give certainly economic incentives to people to have kids. They tried it in Hungary to some moderate success, sort of, at least shortly. But in reality, the thing that makes people have kids and you're a religious person and I'm a religious person tends to be a commitment to having kids. And it tends not to be.

You can make it certainly much harder for people to have kids and you should get rid of those barriers. Where do you think that policy should make? Is that a national level policy or is it more a matter of getting government out of the way by getting rid of the barriers to entry that exists now and having kids? Well, you and I agree 100% that this is mostly a local issue.

It's so local that it's in individual households and families. But that is a way of saying the first of three factors that I think are important, that faith is vital. And this is why in the three years I've been president of Heritage, when I go out and talk to Bruce's, as you do, I always emphasize the importance of faith. And that's important for us to emphasize right now as conservatives because part of this Trump fans coalition includes people who find religion less important to them than you and I do in our lives.

And very respectfully because all of our faith journeys are by definition or journeys that we still, both individually and institutionally, that is at the national level before politics and policy, I think have to have faith in order to make those decisions as husbands and wives. But the second factor would be getting rid of the disincentives that exist in our public policy toward marriage and toward childbirth inside marriage. And you know very well, and my colleagues at Heritage are talking about this in a family policy paper that's coming out soon that we have multiple disincentives in public policy toward marriage, just in tax policy. We ought to eliminate those immediately.

If you gave me what I call the policy magic wand, then that'd be the first thing that I do. And then I do believe, moving on to the third part, which is conservatives understanding there might be a role for federal policy here, that we need to embrace this concept that Hungary has to some extent Israel and Singapore have with mixed results, admittedly. I don't think tanks. We're always going to call reality as we see it.

But that we ought to consider spending as much on incentivizing family formation as we do on defense. And that's in no way to relegate defense to be a secondary. In fact, I think we can have what we're trying to do in this family policy paper where I try to argue in the book is that having this conversation doesn't mean that we're heterodox conservatives. In fact, it means we're staying very true to our principles and trying to apply them with this headwind that we have.

The entire West has. I think ultimately, and you know that I'm an optimist, by the end of the century, if we don't change our public policy, if we don't change individual decisions we're making about faith, if we don't experiment at the state level with family policy, that we're going to have a republic, we're going to have a society that's very neat. And one of the things that's really interesting about public policy, obviously, is that it's just a series of trade-offs. Whenever you're trying to figure out what you can get through a Congress or what you can get through a state legislature, it's going to be a conversation about what you're looking for ideally and then also what's possible.

And so I can say ideologically that in an ideal world, what I would like to see is, for example, the welfare standard paid back because it actually crowds out all of the intermediate institutions that used to form community. It used to be that one of the reasons you had a lot of kids is because you went to a church and the reason you went to a church is because actually that's where your safety net was, that's where your support network was. And so the way that you testified to other members of your church that you were a member of the church and thus deserving of the safety net is you engaged in the same set of values as people who were in that church. When government came in and crowded that out by essentially just handing people welfare checks or entitlement checks, what that ended up doing was basically getting rid of the duty half that comes along with the entitlement.

If you're a member of a synagogue, like a synagogue, for example, if you get charity from the other members of the synagogue, you understand that the other half of that is you have to be a good due-paying member of the synagogue, you have to put in somebody else's problem, you have to help them out. When you take away all of that and you just have government there with a check from some random person, then you don't feel that same sense of obligation. And so again, the set of values that comes along with the church goes away. It's just government pretending to be neutral when it's anything but.

Now, I can say all of that, but when it comes to public policy, who's willing to go welfare? When it comes to public policy, who's willing to actually take a look at the entitlement programs? This is one of the shifts that's happened inside the Republican Party and the conservative movement in my time. It's sort of the shift away from even talking about some of the big drivers of debt, for example, in the United States and it drives toward the idea that maximizing growth is willing to allow us to outgrow those things.

What do you think conservatives should be looking at with regards to that sort of stuff? Well, you know, I'm fond of the metaphor or the imagery of the Overton window in policy and we've moved the Overton window Hope Heritage has on family policy. That's one factor. When you talk about an Overton window that's also moved in the wrong direction, in my opinion, and that is the Overton window where as conservatives we talk less about debt reduction and deficit reduction.

You know, probably my best friend in the U.S. House, Chip Roy, has sort of cut his teeth in addition to being right on everything else on fiscal restraint, not because Chip is somehow squishy on foreign policy or isn't a dedicated social conservative because he understands the fiscal liberalism, the lack of restraint in Washington, D.C. is a threat to all of those other things. So we have to ultimately take a multi-pronged approach and therefore I think this is the impact that Elon and Vivek will have the single most important lesson here about the welfare state crowding out these local institutions, intermediating institutions, intermediary institutions is the report of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 on the black family.

I was a young historian when I read that and it inspired me both to a love of African-American history as well as a love for understanding public policy's correct application and incorrect application. And what Moynihan argued in the middle of the LBJ administration, as you know, was that bringing in government programs, however well-intentioned they are, let's just posit that they are, and let's just posit for a moment that everyone behind them is behind the war on poverty and great misnomer had great intentions. What Moynihan presaged was that doing that would begin to undercut what African-American families, in spite of all the terrible segregation, the legacy of slavery, something I'd studied as an academic, had actually been able to overcome. And his argument was, and it's precedent 60 years later, is that if you went too far using the federal government to correct these wrongs, that you would in fact undermine the ability of individuals and families of communities to be the intermediary institutions in all of these transactions, if you will.

And so I think we need to resurrect that. And what I'm hopeful about is from the Doge Commission or the Doge Department to the Department of Agriculture, where a lot of these safety net programs exist, to Health and Human Services, that the approach that the Trump administration takes is an understanding of that. That the very first thing we need to do You see, as Americans and humans, as you sometimes talk about, it isn't that we're making these decisions on behalf of rugged individualism, we're actually making them in a spirit of community, just perfectly congruous with being a conservative in the United States. I think we can get to that, that's the recipe, but what I just described and what you laid the foundation for is a lifetime worth of work.

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It sort of suggests that we have the willy-nilly ability to wave a magic wand and turn a rock into Connecticut or something. But the reality is that I think that if Bill Clinton suggested that everyone is a small government person now, I think actually everyone on conservative side is a realist now. It's just a question of what brand of realism they are pursuing. And so a lot of the talk about well, this person's an isolationist or this person's an interventionist, I think some of that's misplaced because I struggle to think of there might be a couple of minutes out of anyone who has been totally in favor of every conflict in which the United States has engaged over the course of the last, say, 20 years.

Part of what I've been trying to do at Heritage on this issue three years in is eliminate the usage of that false dichotomy. And two and a half years ago when the first Ukraine military aid package came up, Heritage posed that. Not because we were post-Ukraine winning, not because we're isolationists, but because we developed over many decades of analyzing American foreign policy a healthy realism about what's possible, but also, very importantly, what's proper regarding the process by which Congress should make these decisions. And if we wanted to be as unfair to the members of the House and Senate as they and their legacy media outlet friends were to us and calling us isolationists, we would have called them all interventionists.

But we became very careful about not using that word because it's as inaccurate in almost every case as it would be to call me or anyone in Heritage or most conservatives who are realists isolationists. And to your point, the good news is that we're now having the intellectually honest conversation two and a half years later that we should have had two and a half years ago. But at least we're having it now. And I think what that's going to do is not only bring peace to Ukraine, unfortunately, and unfortunately and tragically they're going to have to lose the territory, but hopefully looking ahead both in Eastern Europe and around the world, it's going to bring a realism and intellectual honesty to the conversation among conservatives about foreign policy.

And I actually think we're in a good spot. Two years ago, it was very frustrating for those of us and I know you were in this camp too just a matter of degree, which I think is what it is. But if you think about the Trump administration, from states to defense to the president, vice president himself, they're all realists. But there isn't a unanimity of opinion there on what that exactly means.

We get the opportunity following their lead as the primary policy makers to define that. And it's both exciting, but more importantly, it's urgent for the world because I travel the world waving the heritage and American conservative banner. The most common thing that I hear from centrist, from conservatives, from liberals is we just want clarity. Not just from Americans, but from American conservatives about what peace-free strength in the 2020s and 2030s means.

Well, I think this is one of the benefits of President Trump. So the fact that everyone's been trying to weave a Trumpism around Trump. The reality is that Donald Trump is a singular figure, he's the most transformative American political figure of this century. I mean, really the only two possible candidates to weave Barack Obama on the left and President Trump on the right without a doubt.

But because of that, I think the attempt to weave the philosophy around him is a mistake in the sense that the philosophy is basically just a pragmatic winning attitude toward all these issues and that allows for a pretty rich debate to happen underneath the surface. You can have a big debate over what exactly the final sort of settlement looks like in Ukraine. The one thing you know is that Trump does not want on the one hand, Russia to walk through Ukraine. He's not going to tolerate some sort of ending in which Vladimir Putin is strolling through the streets of Kiev.

That's just not something I think President Trump wants on the front pages of the New York Times. And on the other hand, he doesn't want an unending American commitment to Ukraine that's open-ended and has no actual final goal. Between those two goalposts, there's a lot of room to put a football between those two goalposts. Yeah, it's true.

And I think about the designee, Mike Waltz, to be the National Security Advisor. When the first Ukraine military package came up, this is directly relevant to your point about President Trump, he and Heritage were on different sides of that debate. Totally as friends. I mean, that never threatened our friendship, our desire to work together, not just on the other things on which we agreed, but even on that issue.

And a story here I think is very relevant to your point. About a year or so ago, Congressman Waltz was doing a radio interview on WML in D.C. and he was talking about this wide gap between whatever it takes from America for Ukraine to win and what is being incorrectly framed as isolationism. And I sent him a text and I said, the way you describe that is where the movement needs to go and how we talk about it.

And he says, yes, we have to remind people that there's a lot of options between those two. And the more we're intellectually honest about what the reality is on the ground, how the United States is limited and being able to change that reality if we ourselves know we're not going to send as a country our own servicemen and women, then we can have a real debate. And since that time, what has happened is that basically the movement, because of President Trump largely, because of Vice President-elect Vance, I would say too as well, there's a little bit different slot than where President Trump is. And that's not only okay, but good.

But it's gravitated to this rhetoric that both Congressman Walls and my colleagues at Heritage and you and others have used. And it's very natural because the conservative movement in the United States is much more comfortable having conversations within itself than the left is. But it's also vitally important because as you know better than anyone, the hot spots, the potential hot spots around the world exist in part because of a vacuum of leadership under President Biden. And I think the minute, and this is the day, the minute Donald Trump is sworn back into office, a lot of that goes away.

Yeah, it's remarkable. It's historically remarkable. Because everybody is seeing him coming down the pike and they're already starting to figure, okay, what kind of deal do I think about Biden so that I don't have to deal with President Trump? Or what do I know is coming down the pike about an ally, which means that I'm going to be able to hold a stronger position on this particular issue.

I mean, everything is formulating around President Trump pretty clearly in foreign policy terms well before he takes office, partially because Joe Biden is dead and partially because President Trump is coming into office. But one of the things that's really interesting about the modern conservative movement, I think you could describe it as an attitude, no, but it actually isn't in some ways, is that if conservatism, traditionally speaking, has been about preserving institutions, conservatives tend to be institutionalists. We tend to be very careful about removing the Chestertonian fence. We don't want to remove the fence, we want to know why it's there, but there's been something that's happened over the course of the last half century in the United States, which is that these institutions, I'm talking about everything from government institutions to campuses, have basically been hollowed out to such an extent that they're not Potomacan villages, they're just facades.

And I think that what you're seeing from President Trump particularly and the left's reaction to him is that it's become clear what facades they are. So even people like me, who I would say 10 years ago I had a baseline respect for the DOJ and the FBI, and over the course of the last 10 years, I think it's fair to say that's been pretty well shaken. And I think that's true that they knew what they were doing, we figured they had degrees, they studied this stuff for years, they really should know, but instead of making themselves politically answerable, they insulated themselves from any sort of political blowback, they lied, they used media as their Praetorian guard, and now it's the position of conservatism in the Trump era that many of these institutions need to be leveled. It's not about just going in and making a few fixes here or there, and that is the difference between conservatism historically and sort of the revolutionary conservatism that you're seeing right now.

What do you make of that? Well, I'm on the same journey that you are. Every conservative, I think, by definition, is an institutionalist, and over the last 10 years, like you, I have realized that so much of these institutions that I might have been slightly wary of but certainly respected, and I respected the people who led them even if they were on the other side politically, are rotten to the core. And you just need to take this image, wonderful, very apt image of a hollowed out tree.

In my book, I talk about the idea of a controlled burn where our Forest Service used to very frequently go into forests, especially in the West, and they would do these controlled burns that they would initiate to eliminate the hollowed out trees, to eliminate the dead wood. For what reason? Two things. Let the healthy growth become even larger, but also to eliminate the risk of forest fire.

And the reason, bear with me for a little bit on this, the reason that that is so important is because we've got all of these forest fires as a result of not doing controlled burn, not the so-called climate change, right? Whatever someone thinks about that, it's really the controlled burn that's the issue. I've taken that idea and applied it to this institutional regeneration that you're getting at, that Trump's already started and even before he's been sworn back into office, right? This is the point though, then, going back to your wonderful Birkin point earlier.

We have to do this not just in D.C., with institutions like the FBI, the DOJ, my pet favorites, the Department of Education, which ought to be eliminated entirely, but we have to do this in our local lives and the decisions in our individual lives in our local communities. The decisions we make about where we send our kids to school, the decisions about where they go to university, whether we give money to our alma maters. These are all very important decisions regarding the regeneration of American institutions. As a fifth generation educator, only on public schools, I think public schools are one of the noble promises of the United States, but they're rotten.

They're rotten from the top. They're not rotten from the bottom because those are our fellow Americans who get it regardless of their politics. We have to have the spirit. We want to capture the political power of Trump advanced winning.

We want to capture that in our individual lives. We have to have the same verve and spirit of recapturing those local institutions or figuratively applying a controlled burn and starting new institutions. I've done that myself in starting a K-12 school and running an upstart college. Thousands of examples like that exist in the United States.

I'm as excited about that as I am about the Trump one. I'm very excited. That's certainly the case down here in Florida. In Florida, we have universal school vouchers and it's been an enormous difference.

The number of people who come into Florida to bring their families with them specifically because they now have the option to take more control of their kids' education is an amazing thing. Universal school choice nationally would be an incredible thing, although as you say, whether the federal government should be involved in this issue at all is, I think, an open question. So when you talk about cleaning out these institutions, obviously President Trump's nominees are designed to do just that. These are all outsiders.

Many of them are victims of the very institutions that they're now going to be chosen to lead. My favorite example is Jay Bhattacharya over at NIH, which I just love. Of course. I mean, it's hilarious.

The fact that Anthony Fauci was personally from NIH targeting Jay Bhattacharya over the Great Barrington's declaration and his supposed evil in proclaiming that, hey, maybe full-scale lockdowns and universal masking and vaccine mandates weren't the way. He was targeted by Fauci that now gets to lead that institution and clean out the deadwood. Whether you're talking about that, whether you're talking about fast-forward FBI, who is, again, targeted by a lot of the intel community. These are moves that President Trump is making specifically with the hope that the motivation is going to be there for people to clear out the deadwood.

But it takes two things, right? It takes the motive, and then it takes the actual ability to do it. Because it actually is quite complex to clean out institutions. It's easy for somebody like me to say, yeah, clean out the FBI.

But the FBI has thousands and thousands of employees trying to figure out who can be fired, who should be fired, what procedures need to change. That's a pretty complex process. How quick is that? How much does staffing matter here?

We have to be prepared for this to take a generation. And by that, I don't want to be discouraging. In fact, quite yop is it. I think that from realism, great encouragement can come.

I'll talk about the FBI specifically. But just think about one example not far from here, and that's the new College of Florida. You have all of the ingredients for institutional regeneration. You have political will from the top, Governor DeSantis.

You have an institution that's worthy of being saved, and that's true. But you have all of the, and you've got financial support, which the legislature has re-upped. But you've got all of the radical left arrayed against it. Now, they're not going to succeed in taking out that reform, best as I can tell, thus far.

But they've made it more difficult. Put that, you know, multiply those factors of opposition by a thousand as it relates to the FBI or to some outdated munitions program at the Department of Defense. And therefore, to your question about staffing, not only do you have to have a wonderful cabinet secretary or agency head, but his or her deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries. But very importantly, and the X factor we were trying to solve for in our own transition project at Heritage are those levels three, four, five, six, seven down, which our movement has never paid attention to.

And President Trump, with the best of intentions in 2016 and 17, would just focus on the top 300 positions. But he learned, like the rest of us, I've learned this too, you've got to be focused on all 4,500 politically appointed positions, and you've got to be willing to play ball on civil service reform over a generation to make sure that these unelected bureaucrats, just positive they're great people, I'm willing to do that, they shouldn't have the authority they have. But we're not going to solve it overnight. We're not going to solve that in one presidential term.

I think we're going to be deep into the 2030s before we can look back and say, this is if we have sustained power, before we can look back and say, we did it. We have to have that resolve, that fortitude, not just in Washington, not just in our state capitals, but our local communities, because this is just as big a problem as it is in our county commissions and school boards. First, let's talk about something that affects all of us responsible, hardworking Americans. Taxes, that October 15th deadline, long gone, are you prepared for what's coming next?

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That's 1-800-958-1000 or visit TNUSA.com slash Shapiro today. So let the IRS take an interview to help you need with Tax Network USA. So when you talk about that, that long-term project, obviously that means holding power for long-term. One of the things that I think is a danger for conservatives, it is for pretty much everybody else who gets elected, is the minute you win an election, you think that every future election will go in the same direction.

We saw this with Democrats after 2012. They thought they could simply replicate the Obama coalition and win in 2016. After 2020, they could replicate the Biden coalition and win in 2024. It doesn't work that way.

I remember in 2004 when George W. Bush won and he actually did really well in the Congress as well and his immediate first move was to try and restructure entitlement programs. By the way, he happened to be right about that. If we'd actually done what we suggested about Social Security, everybody's 401k would have been enormous.

We'd have done way better in terms of what your Social Security would have been worth today as opposed to what it's actually worth today. Turns out the stock market is now $45,000. It was actually a good idea. But regardless of that, the tendency of any winning party is to believe that this is the new status quo and then to push just a little too hard and the other side swings into action.

Now, I think the right has been, President Trump has been good and also the right has been lucky. Both of those things are true. President Trump has actually run an incredibly smart campaign. I think he actually ran quite a centrist campaign.

He actually occupied the middle of the political spectrum on pretty much every issue, including on abortion, where he said the federal government should not get involved in abortion policy making. We also got very lucky because the left decided to lose its ever-loving mind and decided to run on the proposition that boys can be girls and that riots were fine and that we should open the southern border. It turns out that that's actually really unpopular with Americans. Where are your fears in terms of conservative overreach?

How incremental should conservatives be? Or is it, you know, make hay while the sun shines? What's the strategic project? I think it's a matter of priority.

In other words, what I mean by that, Ben, is on two or three issues you've got to make hay now, both because of the urgency, the inherent importance of those particular issues. I think the OJ is there. I think the economy broadly defined but that involves a lot of factors. I would submit to you that while we've got the political capital, we ought to take action on the Department of Education.

But you have to be able to message that. And I think one of the great attributes of all of the appointees to senior positions in the Trump administration thus far is that they are capable of communicating why they're doing what they're doing, how they're going to go about it, what it's going to look like, what the timeline is. That's essential to sustaining the political power, the popular will, in order to get it done. But having just come back from the United Kingdom trying to draw some lessons of what's going on with the small c conservative movement there, it's apparent to me that if you go too slow, that especially in Washington, D.C., it's sort of like a law of physics that, and we've seen this more often in Washington with Republicans, that they're going to be drawn back into not just the political center, but the sclerosis that is the Washington administrative state.

So it is going to require very artful leadership, not just bold leadership, but artful leadership. I think Trump clearly possesses the ability to do this over the first hundred days, over the next two years. I think the rubber will meet the road, not just for the second half of the 2020s, but for the 2030s and beyond, with what conservatives are talking about in the term elections. Not even for whatever the political consequences are, but for the long-term priorities of our movement.

If we're still talking about the first steps of government efficiency, the first steps of reducing debt and deficit, even if those plans are long-term, if we're still hemming and hoging about what it looks like to dismantle the Department of Education, then we have missed this moment. And yet, to your point, we can't have as a priority every single agency with the most ambitious conservative reform, because it's just impossible to get that done. I would love that as a conservative, but the reality is this is a very complex, pluralistic republic, and God bless Donald Trump for winning the popular vote, but it's not as if it was a spread of 10 or 15 or 20 points. So he's got to be very disciplined about where the priorities are.

The movement has to be both bold, but also very understanding and patient about what we're able to do. Because one thing we haven't even introduced in this equation is you have only 53 seats in the Senate. They're not all reliable votes to be charitable, and you've got an extraordinarily slim majority in the House, even though you've got a speaker who's one of us. He's a lifelong conservative.

You might have one seat majority in the House, which is patently insane. I tell Mike Johnson often, and I believe you do too. God bless you, brother. You've got the toughest job in D.C.

Absolutely. It also means that no one can ever get sick or go home for their kids' play. They're worried about that. Yes, absolutely.

Again, I love a lot of President Trump's picks, but as I said, on the air and off the air. Grabbing nominees from the House comes with the inherent danger that you're losing votes in the House. There'll be special elections in these places, but unfortunately, unlike the Senate, it's not like a governor just picks somebody to fill that seat. It might take a few months for all that material.

I think this sort of timeline that you're laying out is one of the reasons why the left decided they're going to target Project 25 in particular. It wasn't even the contents of Project 25, which reads them. It's very, very long. Maybe you've read the whole thing because you're the head of the Heritage Foundation, but I think you're the only one who's read the whole thing.

There are about four or five of those. Exactly. It's a very select list that he was used as a brick bat against everyone on the right. But it was mainly, I think, because what it essentially says is here's the Chinese menu of conservative policy.

Some of these will get done, some of these will not. I'm sure there'll be some crossover with what President Trump will do. I'm sure there'll be other places. There's no crossover with what President Trump will do.

But because it was an actual, well-thought-out list of things, I think that's what scared the hell out of the lefts and why they started using it as a boogie man was specifically because what they're afraid of is that President Trump will do what he appears to be doing, which is hitting the ground running on day one. What they really wanted him doing was fussing around looking for policy proposals a year in, 18 months in. Because that's kind of how the first administration went. It took a while from the finance.

He'd never held public office before. He was coming in this time knowing where the bodies are buried in various agencies and knowing what his policy in general is going to look like. I think that's what scares people out. It scares the daylights out of them.

And the conservative movement has never before been disorganized both in the policies and evidence by our mandate for leadership component of our project, nor the thing I think equally scared them, which is the personnel database, which saw the number of people submitting their resumes to that jump from 10,000 to 20,000 once the left started all these scare tactics. The left was used to the right being sort of institutionally immature. Not that the organizations or people were immature, but just in terms of the intellectual history of our movement in terms of national politics not being nearly as well-developed, nearly as deep or as broad as the left has been. And we've not only caught up to them, we have surpassed them because if we get this right, starting with President Trump, Vice President Vance, and they do a good job as I expect them to do of prioritizing what the reforms are going to be, probably the economy, energy, immigration obviously, then they're going to be able to build on that popular will that will allow us as a movement to go deeper into that Chinese menu as you say.

And I think that our side more or less will be in power for most of the next generation. There'll be some elections that we lose, I think most of them will be congressional. I think if we play our cards right politically, intellectually, we're honest with the American people about what the obstacles are, I think between now and 2040 that conservatives are going to be in power at the federal, state, and local level most of those years. We've got to be realistic about what happens when, for example, if the Democrats were to win the House in 2026, not see it as the end of the world, particularly if they're starting to sound as they do today, like the Republicans.

What are they talking about? We've got to close the border. We've lost track of how we should maintain public safety. We do have to think about this woke transgender ideology.

If they're running sounding like conservatives and they win a few elections, we've moved the Overton window to our field of play. And as you know better than anybody, conservatives have had to exist on the radical left field of play really since the 1930s. Reagan was a wonderful interregnist there, but only that. And now we get to set the terms of the debate.

Pardon my optimism for the rest of the century. So when it comes to personnel, one of the questions is, it's very difficult that there's sort of this principle regarding the federal judiciary. If you're not pretty outspokenly originalists, you'll end up on the left end of the bench pretty quickly, right? And if you decide to pick this candidate like David Suter, he's going to end up being not the David Suter you thought you were getting, but the other David Suter.

Or if you pick Justice Roberts, I may be the only Republican in the country who opposed Justice Roberts to his nomination at the time. But that was basically the case I was making is I don't know who this guy is, you don't know who this guy is. that he makes a decision, some people make a decision, but you have to say that because, you know, media matters will have a few. Apparently, Heritage Foundation, 501c3, that's an affiliate with the Trump administration is actually the Trump administration.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that ultimately what we're looking for, and really for the movement, we do a lot of candidate briefings and we're looking for this in candidates for various offices, is someone who knows what time this. I mean, I know that phrase has fallen out of favor, but as a proud generation Xer, a member of the only generation to vote, a majority of which voted for President Trump, I will continue to use it for this reason. They have to understand that this republic has its days numbered.

If when conservatives are in power, they don't use it. I don't mean using it illegally or certainly unethically, I mean using it. That too often, we've been caught in the Bush trap. With all due respect to the two presidents I admire personally, George H.W.

Bush and George W. Bush, they were largely afraid to wield the power that the American people gave them. And I think it's one of the reasons that we're in the predicament we're in. And now we understand evidence by Governor DeSantis here in Florida, Donald Trump, chief among all of our conservative leaders, that when our men and women win, they need to wield that power.

So we're looking for personnel who understand that, who have the relevant competence and expertise to get that done. And we believe that not all of that competence and expertise comes from inside the federal government. In fact, we think that one of the ways you can regenerate the institution that is the U.S. administrative state is by bringing in a certain percentage of people from the outside.

Maybe they work in state government. Maybe they bring a fresh perspective from industry. Maybe there's a generational diversity there. Having younger people starting out, we've not really built our pension in terms of the conservative movement.

I think all of that is not only going to happen, but already is happening with the appointments that I've seen. We have more on this in a moment. First, you know that the radical left will never understand the profound unshakable bond between the Christian and Jewish communities in the United States. While the secular left pushes their anti-religious agenda.

Christians and Jews stood together defending our shared values and religious liberties. That's why I'm proud to partner with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. For over 40 years, they've been doing something remarkable, building bridges between our communities through faith, shared values, and mutual respect. And the fellowship doesn't just talk, they act.

Right now they're on the ground buying real help to vulnerable Jewish families and elderly around the globe. We're talking about food, medical care, emergency assistance, and security to people who need it most. Like somebody who spent years talking about Judeo-Christian values, I can tell you, this organization represents exactly what makes our line so powerful. It's about Christians and Jews coming together to do our faith's command, that kind of personnel cleaning that you're talking about inside the executive branch.

And then there's a matter of legislation. We mentioned briefly, the Republicans have an unbelievably narrow majority in the House. They have a very slow majority in the Senate. And because Republicans are institutionalists, they don't want to blow up the filibuster.

I made a suggestion to Senator Thune and to other members of the United States Senate that it's a suggestion that comes courtesy of my business partner, which I think is actually a great suggestion, which is that if you believe that the filibuster ought to be retained, which I do, but apparently Democrats situationally believe ought to be retained. If they are in power, it should be blown up. If we are in power, then it should be maintained. And the suggestion that Jeremy made for my business partner is that we should effectively say that we want a constitutional amendment approved through normal processes done one year from now to enshrine the filibuster in the Constitution of the United States.

And if not, we're going to nuke it. We're going to do it with police because we're not going to wait around for you guys to come on in and nuke the filibuster if you gain control of all three elected branches of the government. What do you make of that and what institutions should we be seeking to shore up in that way? Well, knowing of this idea for about 30 minutes.

I love it. No, I love it actually. This is precisely the kind of new ideas adhering to conservative principles that our movement is just now beginning to learn to do. And so I hope this gets legs and heritage to participate in that.

Your question though is also about what particular institutions, agencies and so on should we have this mindset about? I think that we need to take this mindset of this filibuster idea and apply it not just to the cabinet level agencies, but we actually need to pay attention to those third, fourth, fifth level agencies. This goes back to personnel. Things that, and even as I sit here as a so-called policy leader, I can't think of more than six or seven of their names, but they control not just billions of dollars of our federal budget, but more importantly, they are part of that problem of beginning to suffocate the ability of individual Americans, people in their local communities to regenerate these institutions.

To the extent that we can apply or use our political power to eliminate tear out Reuben Branch, the sort of sub-agencies, I think we're better off. And we need to understand that so doing is not violating our conservative principle of wanting to maintain institutions. We're actually tearing out the weeds. We're actually making institutions healthier as your idea of the filibuster reform suggests.

So let's talk for a second about what you think needs to be done inside that first year. You say, by the time we get to midterms, there needs to be a record of accomplishment. It is President Trump's record of accomplishment that won him in the second term. It is really that simple.

President Trump ran on, here's what my term looked like, here's what Biden's term looked like, do you want second Biden or do you want second Trump? It's that simple. And that is really the argument I think that won him election in the end, that people had more nostalgia after 2019 than they had for 2024, obviously. So what do you think are the big things that can get done in those first two years that Republicans should be able to point out and say these are wins, again, considering the incredibly narrow majority that are held in the House and Senate?

I'll be specific and go in chronological order. The first, literally the first, but as soon as his hand comes down from taking the oath, someone needs to be at the White House as he's giving his, what I'm sure will be a great second inaugural, and we need to close the Senate order. As we sit here, there's already progress being made because the mere appointment of my friend and heritage colleague, Tom Homan, the boarders are the best. He's just the best.

I'm not supposed to have favorites in this. I have a lot of friends who've been appointed and they know I'm going to slight to them, but he's just the best because he's the best at what he does. I heard President Trump last night refer to Tom Homan as from central casting for this role. He's a bulldog.

He's a bulldog. And he is a bulldog, yes. And he's a great man. But the point of his policy is he's already had a disincentivizing effect on the nation states, the cartels that are complicit in all of this.

And so that is going to happen. And what that's going to do is tell the American electorate, yeah, I knew Trump would get this done. It's nice to have it confirmed on the first day. But the second thing that needs to happen is the economy writ large.

I'm very high on Scott Besant, who's a friend as Treasury Secretary. His three by three by three agenda is very smart. I think we're going to get three percent annual growth. I think we're going to be able to cut three percent of the federal budget as well.

And very important, this energy is vital to this. I think we're going to get three million barrels of oil a day. Let's say someone doesn't like oil. Let's say someone's listening or watching this and say, oh, Kevin, I really wish we could get away from fossil fuels with more time and explain why this is a bad idea.

But let's just posit that's OK. In the near term, if you want to end inflation and you want American national security, you do that. Congress has to play ball on that. And there's a little bit of heterodoxy even with some House Republicans on some of these questions.

But I think Trump and Besant will have the ability to close the deal on these things. Then they've got a decision to make. What's the third priority you want to take on? You build popular will by addressing the border, beginning to address the economy.

And simultaneous to this, as we were talking about earlier, there's already peace being established across the world. And that's where the rubber will be the road. Will it be education? Will it be the FBI?

Will it be something else? You can probably do more than one, but that one that you decide next is going to be vital for what the electorate, the conclusion the electorate draws from how willing you are to play ball for the rest of your administration. And I'm high on whatever they choose. If they were asking me about which to choose, I would pick education.

As much as the FBI needs to be reformed, cash is going to get confirmed, he's going to do a great job, I think the Department of Defense will be reformed. But if you want to use political will to completely cement this mandate for disruption across our institutions, it's getting rid of this top-down, top-heavy nonsense of the Department of Education. And there's a bunch of things done in education, ranging from exploring the Qatari contributions to higher universities to defunding universities if they're in violation of the Civil Rights Act. All those things ought to be on the table.

One of the big things that's obviously going to come up pretty quickly is the re-enspriming of the Trump tax cuts. I can remember those Trump tax cuts and there's a little bit of dyspepsia, I noticed, among some of the Republicans about what exactly that looks like, whether it's just kind of rubber sample was before or they're going to try to go for more. What do you think that looks like? Well, there's more dyspepsia than there ought to be.

This ought to be really simple. It's a clean renewal of the tax cuts. Given the small majorities in the House and Senate, I think that's the way to go. that any proposal that is anything other than just a clean renewal of the Trump tax cuts is a bad idea.

Are there, in a perfect world, some even bolder ideas that we at Heritage would love to attach to that? Of course, yes, exactly. We would love to do that. And if we do that and eliminate the tax code as it currently exists, we'd love to talk about a universal tariff.

That's not going to happen next year. And so politics, policy, it's harder than possible. Just renew a clean tax bill. And the other benefit of that is you have more time.

And a legislative calendar is a real issue. Senator Thun understands this. He's got this radical proposal that senators work five days a week rather than just three. They need the time to figure out to open up China again.

We're trying to be very friendly to China. The President Trump came in. He said, these people are opponents of the United States. We should be viewing them with a sort of dimlet eye.

We should be very harsh with regard to how we view their interference. China's been interfering, obviously, not only in East Asia. They've also been interfering all over the world. In Africa, in South America.

They're beginning to have a real impact in a lot of countries in South America trying to take control of trade routes. But what do you see as the first moves that the administration should make with regard to China? Obviously, the President talks about tariffs, but I assume there'll be more than that as well. Well, God bless him for his clear-eyed understanding about China going back decades.

In fact, I'm one of those many conservatives who was first convinced by Donald Trump in 2016 and 17 that our good intentions about turning China into America actually were only good intentions. The opposite of what's happening. I think he's got a swipe of tariff on them first day. And there are going to be people who talk about it, including on our side.

But the reality is that the tariff is a vital tool for negotiation and for national security. I also have to think that you're able to do some other things economically that it becomes a very good economic tool. I'm very much Hamiltonian in that regard. But the second thing is he needs to use the bully pulpit he has in not just with the tariff, but leading the effort in Congress to eliminate the ability to make illegal that K Street lobbying firms can lobby on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

The fact that this exists shocks most Americans. You know why? Because most Americans just didn't hear common sense. It makes no sense that the greatest adversary to the United States in the history of our country, greater than even the Soviet Union, is allowed to pay at least $100 million to lobbying firms on K Street.

And then the third thing is, and this is a real pet focus of President Trump's rightly, is the investment by the Chinese and American military companies. Part of the huge reform that's needed at the Department of Defense to make it a more lethal, less woke fighting force is the elimination of that because it is a real national security risk. And there's so many things that need to be done inside DOD. One of them needs to be a dramatic refocus on the weapons tech that we've been funding.

We're still building aircraft carriers in a time when those aircraft carriers can be targeted by drones forms. Mike Gallagher, a former congressperson from Wisconsin who obviously has tremendous knowledge on both China and military tech, he suggested that we need to radically reshift our thinking about how to, for example, create technologies capable of turning the Taiwan straight into what's called the boiling mode to make it very difficult for China to actually invade Taiwan. That's going to take some real commitment and it runs directly into the teeth of entrenched interests that want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems that are no longer nearly as effective as they used to be. Well, what the Republican establishment in Washington still led by Mitch McConnell wants you to believe is that you have to continue spending money on those outdated weapons systems.

I'll lead to your audience how they draw the conclusions of why that continues to be the issue. But let's just impute the purest of motives there. They're dead wrong. They're 100% wrong.

Just as I was 100% wrong 10 years ago that China would be turned into America because of the American free market system. And so acknowledging that we're wrong not only is okay, it's a good thing. And what we have to understand is that the big three or four defense companies, and God bless them, and the people who work for them are crowding out innovators in the space. I mean, the best thing the Secretary of Defense can do on day one is actually, this sounds so boring coming from a thing tank guy, is to update procurement procedures because you're just, you're going to allow in innovators.

And these are innovators who are ready to fight the next war as opposed to what most people at the Pentagon do today, unfortunately, and with all due respect to the military service, which is still fighting the last war. The way the innovation inside the United States military has been broken for a generation at least. I mean, it really is amazing. If you visit smaller nations, whether you're in Ukraine or Israel, for example, because they have to constantly bootstrap and jerry-rig things in order to make them work for actual battle, that means the innovative process is really shortcut.

There's an author named Edwin Lidbach who's written specifically about innovation in the Israeli military and he talks about how you basically have to put things together on the fly directed at the problem of today as opposed to the problem of yesterday. But in the American military, everything has to go through 25 different layers of tracks that are specifically designed to wipe out the innovative process. As you say, opening up the procurement efforts, opening up to different firms, like, for example, Palantir, these are firms that need to be given much more of a broad hand in innovating. Well, it's true.

As I travel the world, I hear from allies about procurement. When I first heard about that because of my own ignorance, I thought, well, that's kind of boring. And you realize, no, they've been given, they've been given the United States money through Congress for weapons systems. They still don't have.

And so in addition to the procurement process as it relates to our own direct benefit, the arms sales that we make very appropriately to our allies who want to step up and sort of be models for what we do, those are slow because of an outdated system. And the problem is both the Republican and Democrat problem. The problem is that members of Congress, too few members of Congress, are willing to take the hard votes because some of those munitions programs are based in their district. And this is where I think have to spend some political capital.

The Secretary of Defense will have to do the same. Speaker Johnson, Senator Thun, and say, this is actually about improving our military. And you know who will benefit the most? Who will be the most excited about this?

Are our rank and file, American servicemen and women, who I can tell you firsthand are decidedly frustrated with military leadership in this country. I think the American people can not only get behind that, but remain focused on that because, again, it's a common sense issue. When it comes to deregulation, which obviously is a big focus of yours and people of your heritage, that is going to be, I think, the biggest thing the President Trump can do on his own is he's made a proposal that we ought to be removing what is it, three regulations for everyone that we have in the books. Now there's two, I think, in the last administration.

Now he's increased the number, I believe, to three. That's going to be enormous. I think one of the most important things the President Trump has said in the recent past is during his victory speech on that wonderful night in November, he had what a lot of people perceived to be a throwaway line about Elon Musk. So we have to protect our geniuses.

And I thought to myself, that's not a throwaway line. That's an actual philosophy of economics. I mean, that's a very sort of Joseph Schumpeter, protector entrepreneur, protector innovator's philosophy of economics because it's those people who are going to grow the next brand, the next industry that is going to revolutionize the American economy. And that seems precisely to be what President Trump is doing.

I think the reason you've seen crypto take a jump is because this administration is going to be very much oriented toward loosening up restrictions on business so that innovators can actually innovate. The guys that I know in Silicon Valley, they're pumped up beyond imagination about the administration. Yes, it's both common sense. It is a core part of American conservatism, perhaps best personified in the early Republic by Treasury Secretary Hamilton.

And it is also, in the modern context, something that I think is one of the definitive characteristics of Trumpian conservatism. And it isn't just because he's an entrepreneur. It's because at the core, I think this actually is the core principle of Trumpian conservatism, the education system by starting with the elimination of the carbon education. So, you know, we've been very positive throughout this conversation.

I'm not used to that. I know, that's why I apologize. I'm having some trouble here. And so now I'm going to drag you into my side of the tracks.

Good luck. Tell me, here's the open-ended question. Tell me the things that you're worried about going wrong. So you've talked about the things that can go right here.

Where do you think the dangers lie, the pitfalls that need to be avoided in order to allow for this possible success? The first and most obvious is top of mind for me as we sit here because the swamp is doing the swamp thing going after cabinet appointees. It's not just a Democrat problem, it's a Republican problem. And so my first worry is that conservative leaders, I think President Trump understands but other conservative leaders don't understand to the extent I've come to understand in three years I've learned heritage what an obstacle the establishment is.

And that's a handful of Republican senators. It's a handful of House Republicans. Their political power is greased by K-3. And we have to understand as conservatives Until we figuratively break the political backs of these establishment leaders, the promise of Trump's victory in restoring the American dream is impossible.

And that's why Heritage and Heritage Action are spending a bundle of money focused on these Senate Republicans who are really obstinate when it comes to the president implementing as well. The second is perhaps a little more obvious to people paying attention, and that is very related to the first point. The legacy media, in spite of great exceptions and rivals to that, starting with you and Daily Wire, will continue to hold sway over the American people. And so what I've been saying for months since the nonsense of mischaracterizing our project is if people aren't canceling their subscriptions to all the legacy outlets, then you're participating in regime nonsense.

And I worry that people will forget that lesson that we learned from. Most of the pollsters being wrong, most of the prognosticators being wrong. And then the third thing I worry about is that all of us, there's a little bit of self-reflection for us in Heritage too, but all of us in the conservative movement will get the priorities wrong. Not that we will misread the mandate for disruption, that clearly exists, but that we will put the policy priorities in the wrong order.

And some of that's just a little bit of intuition, and Trump's mastered intuition. And that's why over the next weeks and months, I think it's very important, particularly for those of us who have the ears of policymakers, to be listening to them, but also to be appropriately forceful about what we think the right priority is, and that there ought to be a conversation about that. Because this isn't just about President Trump being successful as much as we want it to be. This isn't just about the conservative movement being as much as we want that to happen.

This is our last best chance, speaking to your pessimism, to save the American public. We can't let it go. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for stopping by. Heritage is doing an amazing job, and everybody should look at the book on the early light.

You can hear much more about these ideas and much more depth in that book. Kevin, again, I appreciate what you're doing. Ben, thanks for everything you do. Take care.

Ben Shapiro's Sunday special is produced by Jessica Krant and Matt Kemp. Associate producers are Jake Hollick and John Craig. Editing is by Olivia Stewart. Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

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