Why Trump’s Blood-and-Guts Strategy Worked

Happy Independence Day! We’ll be back next week with a new episode, but today we’re sharing the episode that started us on the path to “Interesting Times.” Ross Douthat talks to Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Together they wrote the book “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

They review their George W. Bush-era prescriptions for the Republican Party to reclaim the working-class vote and the ways they were right (and wrong) about building a new Republican majority.

• 03:47 George W. Bush era
• 12:06 Rise and fall of the Tea Party
• 18:19 Trump’s 2016 “blood and guts” message
• 28:11 Trump’s effect on the right and left
• 35:48 Trump’s first term economic agenda
• 39:30 Elon Musk vs JD Vance
• 46:50 Imagining an activist, conservative government

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

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