 Has the Republican Party lost its mind and its way in its slavish devotion to Donald Trump, who insists that the 2020 election was stolen from him through extensive voter fraud? That's the question that journalist Robert Draper investigates in his new book, Weapons of Mass Delusion, which looks at rising Republican stars such as Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Carrie Lake, who are diehard Trump loyalists and established party leaders such as likely Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who is openly terrified to cross the former president. Reason spoke with Draper shortly after the midterm elections in which the GOP had an unexpectedly poor showing against a massively unpopular Joe Biden. Is this a sign that Trump's hold on his party and the country is weakening? And is there any reason to believe that the party of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater may return to its small government roots? Draper also reflects on his 2014 New York Times Magazine cover story, Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived, which prominently featured reasons Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. Robert Draper, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having me on, Nick. All right, well, let's start with the elevator pitch of weapons of mass delusion when the Republican Party lost its mind. Sure. This is not a history book. It is a book about a snapshot in time that I believe is of historical significance. And that is a roughly 16 to 18 month period that began with January the 6th, 2021, when I was inside the Capitol that day. And that moment of madness, it would have seemed to me would have would have been the moment for the Republican Party to descend into a kind of humble meditation, take stock of their role in the insurrection and their upon endeavor to purge the corrosive elements in their party that led to the insurrection. Instead, what they did, of course, was something very different. They doubled down on it and the MAGA movement and the disinformation that propelled it became the gravitational center, basically, of the Republican Party. This book had me doing a deep, repertorial dive into the Republican Party during that period. Can I, do you have a politics? Are you a Republican or a Democrat or an independent? I'm a registered independent and I've been that way since I've been an adult. And generally speaking, my politics aren't terribly interesting. I'm not really an ideologue. I'm more anthropological. I vote, but I've voted for Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians with equal levels of remorse and recrimination. And in effectiveness, I assume, at least if you're voted for. So let me ask, or let's start with, you talk about, and the book is richly reported. You're obviously a stylist without parallel or with few peers writing in long-farm journalism today. So it's great to read on just on that level, but I think it's page 195 or thereabouts. You talk about three lies and within weeks of the insurrection of the riot at the Capitol building, you say the chain of lies had come to form a perfect circle. The first lie, the big lie, was that the election was stolen. The second lie was that the steal could be un-stolen on January 6, whether through legal or extra-legal means. And the third and final lie was that those who attempted to un-steal it were, in fact, not Trump supporters. And I kind of want to walk through those real quick, and then I want to talk about some of the characters because the subtitle of your book is When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. We are dealing with a lack of engagement with reality on the part of this party or at least a significant portion of it. Let's start with the big lie that the election was stolen. And that starts even before the 2020 election, right? But how did that come into being? And that is mostly Trump kind of promoting that front and center. It is with a buck that comes after that, but first to address the Trump aspect of it. I mean, we're talking about a guy who simply stated has been a sore loser all his life, and whenever he has lost it, sometimes he's dead. He's a sore winner as well. I mean, yeah. True. Yeah, yeah. There's no grace to the guy. But whenever he has lost, he's tended to blame someone else. The very first political contest he was in, you'll recall Nick was the Iowa Caucus of 2016. He lost to Ted Cruz. He claimed that Cruz had rigged it. He subsequently did that with Wyoming and Colorado caucuses. And in the run-up to the 2016 election, said, Hillary's going to try to rig it against me, even as you point out, when he did win. He still said he would have won New Hampshire, but for the rigging that supposedly took place. So that's been Trump's gang for a while, but it played into two things. And it took me a while to appreciate these two other elements. One was that this lie, the notion that if the Democrats win in 2020, it would only be because they stole it, played into a longstanding view amongst Republicans that Democrats steal. They cheat all the time. And you can talk to run-of-the-mill Republicans throughout the decades. And this is what they've been told. And they accept it the way they casually accept that Hillary Clinton is a crook. And so calling her crook at Hillary may not have been a polite company way to say it, but it just been widely assumed absent, however, any indictment, much less a conviction that Clinton was a crook. So that's one thing that Trump was tapping into, whether he was aware of it or not at the time. But the broader thing that Trump tapped into with his stolen election claims was a sense of loss, a sense of forfeiture on the part of large swaths of non-college educated white working class Americans who believed that America as they knew it was being stolen from them bit by bit. And so their champion had been, that his victory had been thwarted through ill-gotten gains, fed metaphorically and in all other meaningful ways into this notion that the rightful owners of America were having their America stolen from them. So those are the subtexts of Trump's outrageous claims and I think why it is the 10 domains of people bought into those claims. Because I was in preparation for this, I was looking up, it's still, they're not asking, pollsters aren't asking this question as much as they used to, but going back to earlier this year, something like 70% of Republicans still say that Joe Biden was not fairly elected and that could mean a lot of things. But it's also true that it wasn't just Trump in the 2016 election, I can recall both Hillary and Trump saying, you know what, the system is rigged, the system isn't working, the system is rigged. Bernie Sanders would say that in a more, particularly in 2016, it was more in a class thing that the capitalists or the fat cats, the 1%, the system is rigged against you, the normal working class person. Trump's version of that is much more overblown and more, seems more targeted or was more targeted towards this kind of sense of dispossessed white people, mostly men, not always increasing, I guess in 2020, less white than previously, right? I mean, so it's part, I mean, and I think that's important and you kind of touch on that in the book, this sense of being dispossessed by large overarching conspiracies is kind of not quite the right word, but systems that don't give a shit about you and you're done and, you know, Trump taps into that, right? That's part of what he's speaking to. That's right. I mean, of course, it was ironic that, you know, it always seemed a bit dubious from the outset that this billionaire real estate developer from Manhattan could be the champion of the working class, but the way he sold himself to people who lived in states like South Carolina and Georgia that Trump only knew from the golf courses there was by sharing the same enemies with him. That's how I think he wetted their appetite for him by talking about how China had screwed them over, how the government had basically given away the store and these trade deals, how the border was wide open and people were taking these things from them. And so after a while, they loved that language that Trump was speaking. They loved as well how he would say it and take whatever slings and arrows came his way. And so I think those were the two overlapping elements that made Trump the guy when it seemed so unlikely that he would be that individual. Yeah. But then there comes this moment on election night. I mean, because part of it is, you know, Trump in 2020, you know, when the election, when the poll shut down because of, you know, it's late in the night, he's kind of ahead the popular voter, whatever. But everybody knows there are tons of votes to be counted because of early voting, mail-in voting, all of that kind of stuff. And then, I mean, Trump obviously goes with this, but so do a lot of people who should know better to say that, you know, if Trump, you know, he's the winner on election night when not all the votes have been counted because a lot of them have been cast weeks ahead of time and won't be counted until weeks after. But if he's not declared the winner, then it's fraud. Right. Who, you know, who are the progenitors of that kind of mindset? And, you know, that seems to take over in a big way too. Sure. And I think it's hard to say who's the absolute first to came up with that notion. But we do know some people who acted on that notion, some people who are the great amplifiers of that notion. And, you know, for example, a right-wing congressman from Arizona named Paul Gosar who had hosted the first Stop the Steel rally, which happened to be in Phoenix, the day after the election, Gosar, like a lot of Republicans, was relying entirely on experience. And, Nick, I feel like you and I have had conversations more or less around this before about the big sort and about how people have become isolated and not only geographically, but also in terms of the information they gravitate towards that there is basically an information outlet that fits anyone's biases. And so what this would mean for a poem, Gosar, is that all they knew were Republicans and that when Gosar actually went door-to-door canvassing in Arizona to get people to vote for Trump, he would say, and his chief of staff told me about this, that, you know, I didn't meet any Biden voters. They just simply didn't exist. So it just simply made no sense that this guy could come up with so many votes and flash forward to a person we'll likely get to in a few minutes, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. I was having dinner with Greene month ago, something like this. And she said to me, Robert, I had said to her that she was delusional about the 2020 election. And she said, Robert, you need to tell me, do you really believe that Joe Biden got 81 million votes? And I said, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's what you got. That's the organizing principle of your conspiracy theory, that because you can't imagine this, but in fact, that played a big role in it. Everyone she knew was a Trump supporter every time, especially in 2020, that there was a crowd. It was a crowd for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Biden and other people weren't campaigning because of COVID and it just was too stupefying an ocean for them. But then at the same time, they would say, but Trump got 74 million votes. He got more votes than he had the first time. He had to have won if his vote totals went up, but then we were not going to count. I mean, there's so much magical thinking that the same system that seems to tabulate Trump's votes doesn't count when it's counting up Biden's votes. It also fails to recognize that Trump was a walking anomaly anyway. In 2016, he came seemingly out of nowhere. He didn't win the popular vote, but he won a lot in defiance of what pollsters and pundits had imagined he would do, but that was because a lot of people couldn't stand Hillary Clinton and were willing to take a chance on this disruptor. Why that would be so bizarre for them to recognize the possibility that this same anomaly, the independence and other swing voters would ultimately find that experiment to be a bad one, would find it to be distasteful. It would move away towards this very boring guy because they decided to go for operation boring over operation chaos. And that the anomaly worked for them before and didn't work for the second time doesn't erase the fact that Trump was going to live and die by his own anomalous characteristics. The second part then, the second lie is that the vote, the stolen election could be turned back. That leads us to January 6. I tend to call it a riot, not an insurrection. Your depiction of it from inside and using different sources is really amazing and powerful. People don't read the full book, read that because it's a really vivid account of the violence that was going on. It's a mob, it's a mob generally without weapons. They're not shooting guns, but there's a lot of violence there. For people who took seriously riots that came out of Black Lives Matter marches or other kinds of things, you really got to read this part of the book and take this seriously. But talk about where the idea came that if somehow, if Mike Pence said magic words or that there was, because did anybody really believe that the QAnon shaman was going to take over the Capitol building and then Trump would somehow become president. Where did that theory, which is totally fabulous, or it's just fantastical that you could stop the election of Joe Biden by doing something with the Capitol building on January 6? Yeah. I think to the extent that there is a unifying theory in all of this, Nick, that the unifying theory was in MAGA world, Trump is our champion. He won. Victory was stolen from him. He has said come to DC, will be wild. He has done everything for us. The only things he's asked for us is two things, first to vote and now to come to Washington and fight like hell, as he would say on January the 6th. But I think beyond that kind of consensus view, they then get to be when you disaggregate it. There are certainly people who showed up believing and probably this constitutes the majority of people who just showed up saying, we want to support our president. And when I was there and outside the Capitol, there were a lot of elements that looked like standard issue, MAGA rally, of which I've attended 15 or something like that. There was another group of people, smaller but still pretty large, who believed that we need to do something beyond support. We need to take our country back. And if you believed, as these people did, that democracy had been thwarted, had been weaponized against them, then you'd want to take action. And I think most of those people came to the Capitol, not entirely sure what form that would take. But they were the ones who constitute the real mob, where the third smallest subsection of all are the violent actors who came with the intent, with insurrection on the brain, the oath keepers of 5%, etc. But they couldn't have done it without a mob. And those were the people that I heard outside the Capitol, once I got outside the building. And who were like this guy I heard talking to his teenage son saying, you know, son's freedom isn't free. Sometimes you have to fight for it like our forefathers did. And I think now is that time. And I disappeared towards the building. I don't know what the hell happened to them after that. But as I was among this kind of pulsing mob, the sense that I had was, this is absolutely out of control. And violence, once there is an obvious target, is the obvious conclusion of this. They've turned out not to be an obvious target. But had there been a Mike Pence nearby, had there been a Nancy Pelosi, an AOC or anything, I mean, God help them, you know, and it is a miracle, in fact, you know, and also a feat of capital security that there was not more bloodshed that day. But then kind of the larger legal theories and stuff like that. Because you still hear, you know, and I mean, a variety of not a variety, a majority of Republicans did not certify the elections, right? The election results. Did they, I mean, do those people think, you know, by not signing on that they're going to change the election result? Or are they just kind of showing solidarity with, you know, Il Supremo, Donald Trump or? Right, well, so absent, you know, absent a thorough survey of all of them, no such survey exists, I can only conjecture based on the interviews that I've done. And that's that there were some who truly believed funny business was afoot and absolute minimum, there needed to be a pause on the process so that we could look into all of this stuff. But I would say a significant majority of Republicans who voted to not to certify were ones who were scared shitless, frankly. And who were they scared of? They were scared of their constituents, you know, and in real time, and I mentioned this in my book, a freshman from Michigan named Peter Meyer, who would subsequently vote to impeach and would subsequently be successfully primary and bounced from office, you know, after one term was getting these texts from donors and other constituents saying, hey, don't wimp out, you know, don't let a few broken windows scare you from doing the right thing here. And that is when we ask the question, so why did, you know, all these Republicans who seem to believe, because they experienced it firsthand, that something terrible had taken place, that we as a democracy needed to turn away from, why did they turn away from that notion? The short answer is they went home, they went home and listened to their constituents. But even in those days leading up to January the 6th, you know, their belief then and later was, and I heard this, I can't count how many times I heard this, Nick, from Republicans who would say, look, you know, if I object, then I'll get primary. If I get primary to the right of me, I'll probably lose. If I lose, that person who comes to office will be Marjorie Taylor Greene. Do you want another one of those? Yeah, we're in Myers district and he replaced Justin Amash, who, you know, the Republican, who became an independent, voted to impeach Trump, became libertarian before not running for re-election because he knew he was going to be primaried, that time by Peter Meyer, who then got primaried by a Trump candidate who, yeah, who was, you know, just ridiculous and now that district is gone, right? Yeah. So it's not even like you get a Trump person. Yeah, it's very peculiar. So then the final part of this lie, which, and this is where reality really takes kind of a permanent vacation, which is, you have many of the people who were implicated in January 6th and some, you know, some politician saying, well, you know what, like January 6th was a bad thing, but it wasn't Trump supporters and Donald Trump didn't have anything to do with it because it was Antifa, where it was a false flag operation by the FBI and the CIA and, you know, the, you know, the PTA or something. Where is that coming from? And is, does that have serious legs or is that just the worst kind of people who know they're guilty of something, even if it's just bad thinking, you know, just want to try and make something go away? Well, I think that where it really comes from is a right-wing media ecosystem that knows that this stuff sells and has become a cottage industry. The whole January 6th political persecution is itself, you know, a cottage industry, but you're referring that specifically, you know, to this guy, Alan Hostetter, who interesting story, a guy who had been a police chief in a town in Orange County, California, ultimately left, became a yoga instructor, not very political at all. Then the pandemic hits, he becomes radicalized by all that and becomes a big stop, the steel proponent. When Trump does his, you know, come to Washington, will be wild, Hostetter starts recruiting people to this task and on social media saying that violence is the likely outcome and he's here for it, you know, time to string people up, time to execute the treasonous people. He participates in January the 6th. He's ultimately indicted for that and is still awaiting trial. But in the interim, before he was actually indicted, he started a podcast in which he calls the insurrection the fake-surrection and says that this was all an FBI setup and possibly using violent actors like Antifa. Here he is like just elaborately contradicting everything that he had stood for and espoused very vocally and immoralized on social media. And flash forward later, there are still some detainees in the DC jail awaiting trial for January 6th related offenses and they are all now being cast as politically persecuted and the cut agendas through supporting that movement. There are all these offshoot groups as well as the gateway pundit types are now saying that take your pick. It was either Antifa who did all this or it was the FBI. The latter becomes a little complicated because the FBI did have informants inside there. But none of that's the likelier OCam's razor explanation is that the FBI, as the FBI's want to do, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. And because the evidence is fairly clear that these guys were astonishingly flat-footed when January the 6th arose. But there's enough doubt in what's facing. Almost every conspiracy theory begins with some kernel of truth or some question that does beg answering, but maybe not in such a delusional way. Yeah. And I mean, in a lot of ways, I feel like we're living in a Thomas Pinshaw novel like The Crying of Lot 49 or something where we know the FBI is a terrible agency, both the left and the right and increasingly the mainstream can agree on that. FBI informants were somehow involved in the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. If you read anything about the FBI history, you know, they're terrible. But we now have gotten to a point where it's like reality is so fungible to people's needs and desires in a given moment. And I think it's worth going back to that larger point that you made at the beginning, that one of the reasons why Trump spoke to so many people. And he got 46% of the popular vote into presidential elections. That's a large chunk of people is there are people who feel in desperate straits, they feel left behind, they feel, you know, unseen. And, you know, and these kinds of stories bubble out when there aren't good explanations or nobody's reaching out. Let's talk about, you know, if your book has three characters in Trump, and I guess I, you know, for all five of The Crying of Lot 49 readers who might be out there, if Trump is kind of the pierce invirority of this, of your book, he's kind of the looming, shadowy overlord who every makes everything happen, but is not really seen very much. The three main villains, I would argue are the characters in your book are Paul Gosar, who you've mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Kevin McCarthy. And I want to go through each of them a little bit. You mentioned Gosar, he is a dentist who's a congressman from Arizona. And it was funny when you were talking about him writing, and I, you know, I knew the name and everything, but then when I looked him up, I was expecting somebody who was 95 years old and, you know, had been a bircher, like when the Birch Society started, etc. He's born in 1958, he's got, you know, he's got his hair still has color in it, and he looks kind of normal. But who is Paul Gosar, and why is he so central to what you're writing about in weapons of mass delusion? Sure. My interest in Gosar precedes this book because he came in with a Tea Party class in 2010. And I wrote a book about that class. I interviewed Gosar in 2011, just shortly after he took office. And I found him to be just breathtakingly uninteresting and figured that here's a guy we'll never hear from again, he'll probably, you know, be a one or two term or maximum through flu redistricting, etc. He managed to last, but he became significant on a couple of levels to me. First, because as mentioned, as unremarkable a character as he was, he not only started the South Steel movement, vis-a-vis the rallies, but he also played this rather remarkable moment in being the first congressman who joined with a US senator to formally object to the certification of electoral votes of a particular state, in this case, his own state, Arizona, which led to this debate that then was interrupted by the rioters. The second thing, though, is that Gosar is, you mentioned a John Bircher, and that's a really apt characterization. I think that in an earlier era that's precisely what he would have been, and he would have been purged from the party as a result, but we see instead, we'll get to Kevin McCarthy in a minute, but leadership's utter inability to punish someone like Gosar, and in fact to defend Gosar. And the reason that McCarthy and others defended Gosar was not because they liked him, they didn't, but because if they didn't defend him, they would incur the wrath of the MAGA movement that essentially is the base of the Republican Party. And the other thing interesting about Gosar is that for all of Gosar's weirdness, he's also tried to be a real legislator begging the question, can you say all this crazy shit and then be taken seriously when you're trying to get bills passed? And the question probably answers itself, but the reporting that I do shows how people who might have even been sympathetic to some of his signer legislative initiatives basically aren't going to sign on and be a cosponsor with a guy who refuses to call Joe Biden President Biden because he says he's illegitimate and calls it Mr. Biden said. Are there echoes in that just very briefly in terms of refusing to recognize Biden as president? Is there a line to be drawn that's meaningful from when George W. Bush was selected as president by the Supreme Court or by a few hundred or a thousand voters in Florida? And there was a period when Democrats refused to, I mean they accepted that it was president, but they pushed on that, that he wasn't legitimate in the way that Bill Clinton had been or that Barack Obama would be. Well certainly that's a line, a connective tissue that a lot of Republicans would like to see us all accept, but I do think that scattered protests, disgruntlements and sword losing is not the same thing as refusing to recognize the legitimacy of a president. I mean being pissed off about it, saying that voters were suppressed, saying that your brother helped fix the election in Florida is one thing, but being steadfast in your insistence that this guy doesn't belong in the White House and should never be addressed by his title is I think something else. Yeah and with Gosar you talk about how he in a way that is emblematic of something, I mean he was playing footsie with white nationalists in a way that certainly under George W. Bush, that would have been grounds for being canned from the Republican Party or whatnot, but talk about Gosar's connections to kind of white nationalists, white supremacists and how that is being tolerated in a way that it wouldn't have been 20 years ago. Sure. Well I mean it starts with the fact that whether anyone likes it or not and a lot of Republicans don't like it, a lot of Republican you know responsible Republicans, white nationalists are not insignificant part of the Republican base, that's just a fact. I'm not saying their majority but I'm saying that that's you know when you're trying to amass a following amongst the base there is the temptation amongst those on the right to court white nationalists or at least wink, you know wink and nudge at them. But the the Gosar explanation for speaking to the America First PAC led by Nick Fuentes who is just an unapologetic white supremacist and very very anti-Semitic among other you know other things one can say about Fuentes is that this was a this was a group of young conservatives who were in search of a leader basically. Margie Taylor Greene would say the same thing to me too. These were a bunch of mainly you know white males who represented in a sense the next generation of conservatism and you want to cultivate those people. You don't necessarily want to humor some of their baser notions but you also don't want to condemn them either. So that was Gosar's rationale for doing this and that and a certain amount of ignorance that oh I had no idea that Fuentes said these things. Also he's Gosar's chief of staff Tom Van Fline said to me you know he's a kid you know I did a lot of stupid things when I was 25 years old too but you know I would hope that those didn't include saying you know the numbers don't add up about six million Jews being you know executed in Nazi Germany for example. Well let's talk about Margie Taylor Greene because she I mean in a lot of ways part of the argument of your book on on some level is that Margie Taylor Greene is not a fringe element of the Republican Party. She represents quite possibly the future of the Republican Party. Who is Margie Taylor Greene and why is she important in talking about when the Republican Party lost its mind. Yeah I mean three and a half years ago if you asked me those questions yeah we would wonder why we're having a conversation about her at all. She was she and her husband owned a successful family construction business in and the suburbs of Atlanta. She was a conservative but not politically active until 2018 when she embraced the Q and on conspiracy theory and around that time became a right-wing social media influencer. She started going to Washington in 2019 to harass Democrats to increase her social media following but also to implore Republicans to pass to block gun safety legislation. She couldn't get an audience with any of these Republicans she wanted to see it really pissed her off and so here's this you know millionaire conservative who's saying hey I'm a taxpayer and these people refuse to even grant me an audience screw them I'm gonna run and she ran a kind of what seemed like a flukish campaign. They people took her seriously because she had enough money to self fund but then through the luck of the draw a new district opened up in Georgia when the Republican incumbent decided to retire she moved in there super conservative rural northwestern Georgia district and she won convincingly but along the way all of these Q and on and other racially and in many other ways offensive posts came to light and the assumption Nick was when she arrived in Washington that the Republicans would kick her to the curb she would be at the Star Wars bar where Steve King of Iowa had once been and she'd be out after a term or so instead the most remarkable opposing trajectories occurred of two female Republicans Liz Cheney the most prominent Republican woman in American politics her her career spiraled and she became exiled from the party where Marjorie Taylor Green without changing any of her views became as you're saying you know in a lot of ways central to the party in one of its most potent messengers what are the you know what are two or three of the most insane things that Marjorie Taylor Green has publicly said or believes so you're talking about pre congressional career or since she's become let's do one before and one or two after yeah certainly I mean the you know the Q and on stuff that included that California wildfires were the result of a space laser shot from the skies by a company owned by the wealthy Jewish billionaire Rothschild family that one's pretty out there but also just casual stuff like she would say in in one of her posts that you know I don't know why black Americans get so bent on a shape looking to these Confederate statues or you know or you know statues of slaveholders I mean if I'd be proud to walk past them because that would just show me how far I've come I mean that those kinds of things but but since she has come in office her her claims that members of the Democratic members such as Jamie Raskin are card-carrying communists that they're and her saying as well that Republicans want Republicans dead and the killings have already begun are themselves kind of straight out of Q and on viewing the other side as incorrigibly evil so that's a thumbnail sketch but we can go on and on and I mean you mentioned that you had dinner with her you know is she when you're talking to her and you're saying like hey you know pass the butter is she like that or is I mean how much of this is an act how much of this is real maybe that doesn't matter but I mean like what what you like to to share a cab yeah two overlapping questions you you posed there so first as to you know sort of what she's like and then we'll get to what she believes right as to what she's like fairly normal you know at first blush if you saw her and didn't know who she was and just were conversing with her about you know the weather or football or something like that you'd find her to be instantly recognizable as a standard issue southern conservative woman you know that's of a certain influence and and and and I must say in the many times now that I spent with Green she I think has made a concerted effort to impress upon me that she's normal that her views are much more mainstream than I think and and by the way I should say that kind of works both ways because her the first member of the mainstream media to spend time with her and certainly you may well be the last as well yeah actually you'd be so you would be surprised I mean I think that that I mean we can get to the topic if you want but as she you know this is the kind of psychic you know bridge that she had to cross the psychic Rubicon that that because her assumption was that we were all evil you know that we're like you know we're but she failed to detect any sulfur fumes I think when she sat down and met with me I have a southern accent like her and and the the seeming normalcy you know kind of plays both ways as to what she believes the short answer to the question how much of this does she believe is she believes enough of it she she also willfully hyperboleizes she knows that that that's what sells that's what gets you attention and this is an attention economy and what she's playing but at her core yes she does believe that Democrats are if they're not Luciferian then they're basically they're destroying America she does believe that and and and I think you know when it comes to this sort of existential situation that she embraces that that really you know we're in a war for the soul of America you know what's a little exaggeration even a little outright lying when the stakes are so great yeah and you know this is probably beyond your expertise but you know fuck it answer it if you would like anyway I mean she's interesting also because you mentioned QAnon and QAnon among other things and this is the idea that a deep state actor is kind of speaking truth about all of the horrors that are in the government including the idea that many Democrats and other world leaders are pedophiles cannibals I mean like it's not simply you know the Bilderbergers run everything behind the scenes or you know that Jews control the media or anything like that I mean it's like that plus a serious dose of you know kind of where it comes from I don't know pedophilia like fears are you know of that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a former Catholic who says the Catholic Church is a pedophile organization you know there you one can understand that that comes out of you know the churches the the pre scandals and things like that but do you have a sense of in MAGA world it does seem that you know that charge of pedophilia I mean which is you know it's one thing to call your you know to call Nancy Pelosi evil or you know John Podesta evil and I'm now starting to wonder if this is maybe it's had something to do with them being Catholic and Italian but not just that they're evil but that they're pedophiles and that they are tormenting and killing and sexually abusing children and then eating them what I mean does that make sense when you go through MAGA world why the turn to pedophilia yeah yeah so I'll say by the way the green I think not only renounces Q and on but is genuinely ashamed that she took it as far as she did but as to how she got sucked into it to begin with it it it helped make vivid for people like her who who didn't understand why Democrats were so dismissive so heedless so contentious that they were in fact evil you know it's just that's a rather bizarre you know and garish manifestation of it but at least it would explain why don't you care enough about children the other thing too that Q and on I think was how it became so appealing to so many people was the opposite was the other side of the ledger which is the heroism of not just their fearless leader Donald Trump valiantly fighting this pedophilia ring but how everyone who supported Donald Trump was a patriot and and this conferred on them a real goodness a warrior status and you know and an unqualified rightness and so to cast the stakes in this comic book you know this garish comic book fashion and becomes if not more sensible at least just irresistible for individuals who want to feel of themselves that way and and green said to me you know did she she said look you'd you'd be surprised how you know the people who are involved in Q and on like lots of affluent people lots of successful people and you know Jeffrey Epstein and the whole you know everybody at MIT and Harvard and you know flying to his island and all of that no sure and and and she you know when I asked her why did you keep all that stuff up you know your social media stuff the crazy shit from the past when you're running for office why did you scrub all this and she I remember I'll never forget her response it was like I didn't think it would hurt hurt me in fact I thought it would help me and like that's that was a mind blower to me but I have to say she was onto something you know it's um like even people who you know weren't into Q and on could still sympathize with the fundamental views right the the opposite side was evil and their side was locked in this you know kind of clash of good versus evil and carry like you know said that out loud this is about good versus evil yeah and I I mean I guess this stage you know one of the things I'm trying to understand in a larger context is someone who I just don't viscerally understand republicans or democrats you know and I mean it's not it's a it's a lack in me but on the on the liberal or democratic sides you you see people use the idea that the world is about to end you know like what was it in 2018 we were told we have you know 12 years to fix global warming otherwise the world is over but you know both sides in different ways and I'm not making you know false equivalencies here but like both sides are you know and it reminds me of growing up in the 70s the world is about to end you know whether through you know fire or ice but and on the right it has taken this form of like this is a cataclysm and it's almost like you know Jesus is coming back and you know have you do you have the mark of the beast on you or not like have did you stand up are you going to be raptured or are you going to be okay and it just you know where those stakes come from is kind of yeah I'm still trying to figure that out in a way well it's well so it's you know Nick you and I you know for the sake of your listeners met each other in 2014 when I was doing a story about libertarianism and you know when we and we talked a lot about whether or not the libertarian moment had arrived in 2014 short answer no but but it made it to the cover that question has the libertarian movement finally arrived written by you that story made it to the New York Times magazine cover and I and I never answered the question yeah no and and you know the joke is that when a trend hits the New York Times it's officially over so I guess that's what happened to the libertarian it's kind of like the sports illustrated you know when when you're a tennis on sports illustrated you're going to lose and it's a hand or get an ACL or something but but yeah I but but in pondering so what happened to whatever libertarian energy there was and that was like a a healthy distrust of government and a belief that you know that the less government the better which has a spectrum of of quasi you know anarchy to you know Rand Paul or something that that something happened and the evangelical movement explained some of this and I think conspiracy theorizing is an overlap because when you and I were talking jade helm was happening it's operation jade helm which was you know briefly a real military operation a military exercise taking place in a bunch of southern and western states that through a series of circumstances some people on the right began to believe was a military a true military operation being conducted by Obama to cease people's guns to kill off conservatives etc and and so there is a fundamental difference between thinking you know government's not good and government is evil government is lucifering and and something happened that whatever libertarian energy there was was overtaken by this eschatological notion of government and of course the end of the world yeah and and they overlap because Ron Paul who certainly you know provided a ton of the libertarian energy was a big jade helm guy and he always has trafficked in conspiracy theories that NAFTA was going to lead to you know and it's confusing I mean conspiracy theories rarely kind of are are succinct or stable but NAFTA was going to lead to a super highway from Mexico to Canada which somehow would lead to more immigrants coming here even though you could drive from you know Juarez to Ottawa or something in like 10 hours you know but so that you know the conspiracy theory the religious fervor and the belief of end times are all kind of wrapped up and I have to say you know you'd be you know much more adapted at figuring this out than me but but the reality that I've stumbled upon in my reporting is that there that a lot of these more anti-democratic hard right people in places like Arizona and Georgia were originally Ron Paul followers and you know for example Marjorie Taylor Greene's top strategist this guy named Isaiah Wartman was a Ron Paul person and in Arizona people who and this is also true in Wyoming too the people who came out you know very widely against Liz Cheney the movement the anti-democratic movement on the far right in Arizona and Wyoming again these people were for whatever reason they first found their home in Ron Paul and they migrated over to the anti-democratic climes of this other movement so let's and I want to talk about Kevin McCarthy because I think he's the true problem in many ways because he's you know kind of the adult in the room who is just like the worst most absentee parent one could imagine but I just want to dilate on this a little bit you know you have Georgia which is an interesting state where it you know it was red for a long time it is now you know it's a mix of red and bloom we're seeing something interesting happen there Arizona you know on the other side of the country also in the southern region is kind of similar where you know Arizona defined a kind of goldwater conservatism or you know goldwater defined Arizona as in such a place and now you're seeing in Arizona you know this same kind of thing where it's it's not really purple but there are hardcore blue people and hardcore red people and they're clashing like they're not mixing they're clashing what's going on in Arizona and this you know well we can talk about the midterms kind of along the way but it's you wrote a fantastic piece for the New York Times about the Arizona GOP and it was built this came out in August it was about Cary Lake talk a little bit about her and where she comes from and if Marjorie Taylor Greene is one you know future face of the Republican Party is Cary Lake another one even though that she lost the governor race in Arizona yeah so both Greene and Cary Lake were made possible by Donald Trump I mean they very much followed the template that he set of sort of performative right-wing politics Cary Lake is in many ways the apotheosis of that as a person who'd been in media for two decades and then used that much in a way of a I'm just thinking about this now of like a you know a some guy who you know was an incorrigible drunk and beat his wife and all that suddenly repenting and then becoming a pastor and essentially using his bedrock of sin to claim that he understands the beast better than anyone else Cary Lake is that person now to briefly answer your question about Lake's future I still think she has one and I think people who I mean for someone who as someone who saw her at close range she's on a certain level mesmerizing just on a performative level I mean no one kind of hits the mark quite like she does but Arizona you're right Nick is I mean it's a it is it's a subject of fascination to me because it's now it's lost the governorship to the Democratic Party both of its senators are Democratic the legislature is barely in control of the Republicans by literally like a couple of legislators and so with those trends in mind you'd think that the Republican Party there would do well to take stock of them and and endeavor to you know expand the 10th as a war they've done the opposite they've doubled down on right-wing extremism and as you mentioned though the very Goldwater and then later John McCain had been viewed as kind of the faces of the Republican Party it's always been a little more complicated than that I mean it's you know Goldwater's wife was a co-founder of one of the chapters of Planned Parenthood but there were a lot of people on the right who didn't cotton to that they just didn't have a kind of coherent movement going on they couldn't stand McCain for saying for referring to members of you know the right-wing religious movement those agents of intolerance they couldn't stand his immigration policies but they also couldn't quite get their power together now they've managed to do so and we'll see how long it lasts there but it's but I but that was the other reason why I was interested in Gosar and Green because I happen to be you know faces on two of these states that were quasi-determinative in 2020 and states where clearly the trends are moving at least somewhat away from the Republican Party but you wouldn't know what to see to see the Republican and in Arizona it's amazing too because you have a very successful and popular two-term governor Doug Ducey who you know he's not a libertarian but he's he's a kind of centrist Republican for sure and he could have won that Senate race that Blake Masters lost he could have won by double digits without breaking a sweat but he couldn't be the candidate because Donald Trump hated him because Doug Ducey like an adult human being refused to say things that were obviously false about the election and things like that and so that gets to you know in a way I mean Kevin McCarthy who is likely to become the next speaker of the House who is Kevin McCarthy and why does he matter so much in weapons of mass delusion? Sure Kevin McCarthy was elected to office in 2006 to Congress from Bakersfield, California previous to that he had been a staff aide to Bill Thomas who had helped that seat for a very long time McCarthy utterly non-ideological not much of a belief system at all very ambitious fellow seething with ambition as I say in the book so he doesn't have time for ideology or policy because he yeah it's like I'm taken over by ambition right but also you know has a head the way you know some data geeks have a head for baseball statistics has a head for precinct by precinct politics and and had from his early 20s been infatuated with Donald Trump and so he has risen in the ranks he was I covered him during the the tea party period when he was the majority whip in the house and he was one of the so-called young guns right young Paul Ryan Eric Cantor Eric Cantor that's right yeah but they're all gone okay yeah yeah yeah they're all gone and McCarthy's been the survivor and this has been his moment in fact he said to a confidant you know recognizing how the historical trends tend to favor the party out of power in the the party with power in their first term of president's first term of office you know he said to a confidant you know the upside the bind winning is now I have a pretty good shot of being speaker and now that appears to be the case though with a absolute razor thin majority why is he salient not just because of that but also because of as you say he would seem to be the face of the adult in the room republican and yet really is the face of the enabling of the MAGA movement because he made the determination after January the 6th that as much as he was literally frightened for his life actually said to Trump on the phone they're fucking trying to kill me as I report my book that that that the Republicans couldn't exist the House Republicans could not prosper without the blessings of Trump because of his his hold over the base and so he very famously went to Mar-a-Lago and and been to the knee and in other ways has coddled Marjorie Taylor Green Paul Gosar and and really behaved himself like if not a right-wing extremist himself one who was far more approving of them than of say Liz Cheney everybody else's idea of a you know solid conservative who nonetheless was outraged by Trump's conduct and and how he had enabled what happened on January the 6th so McCarthy basically when I describe you know Marjorie Taylor Green going up Liz Cheney going down yeah there was McCarthy very much kind of like the matador with the cake you know letting each of them happen what does it say that you know let's assume he becomes Speaker of the House in the 21st century the least objectionable Republican Speaker might be a convicted child molester Dennis Haster you know that or or most effective I mean it's it's bizarre and insane and obviously it's weird because I'm not a fan of Nancy Pelosi but she is an effective Speaker of the House like obviously that job is one of the worst jobs to have and she's able to do it in a way you know that traditionally there have been a couple of others like that but that's yeah yeah of course we'll see what happens once she vacates leadership and I have no you know intel as to when that will occur but whether the more extreme elements in the Democratic Party begin to create the kind of havoc that the Marjorie Taylor Greene's and Paul Gosar's and Matt Gaetz's have done in a Republican Party but it certainly is the case as you're indicating that she has tamped us down Pelosi has whatever one thinks of her belief system she has wielded power very formatively right and she has kept you know kind of AOC and her posse and some of the more progressive Democrats in a pen I mean she's corralled them in a way and there were a lot of stories when they first started rising about the way that she kind of backhanded them but she's a short term or whether it's because they go into the minority or you know there are a lot of reports she'll be leaving to become ambassador to the Vatican or whatever you know I mean she's 80 you know these people you know I realize if you're in the Bay Area you have blood boys and stuff like that so you know but eventually they give up right um do you do you do you uh let's talk a little bit about how the midterms affect what you're talking about in the book because you know by all accounts the Republican should have won between 30 and 60 seats in the House they should have picked up five or 10 seats in the Senate that didn't happen but you know the House is going to be Republican the Senate is almost certainly going to be Democrat but it's going to be very tight um how does this and Trump has just as you know just a few hours before we talk whenever this goes out Trump announced that he's running for president in 2024 his guys lost in a pretty significant way across the board I mean there were the secretaries of states who denied the 2020 election they all lost with one exception the guy in Wyoming um his preferred candidates a senate candidate somebody like Blake Masters somebody like Herschel Walker somebody like Mehmet Oz these are people who lost or you know Walker may still leak out of victory but they it's clear his chosen people the bigger the race the bigger the bomb that they were um you know JD Vance and Ohio won and you know after spectacularly kissing you know Trump's ass and and being humiliated by him at public rallies as a former critic now etc but it seems that Trump you know he may you know in terms of the midterm elections like he can't be coming out of this uh more powerful and does that change the calculus of what you're writing about in the book the short answer is no so that's um I mean uh as my book makes clear um Trump and Trumpism have never been popular and and never popular across the board to a general electorate and given the opportunity to express that distaste for Trump and Trumpism the general electorate will do so it has done so time and again right did so yet again yeah we know we know definitively you know and again I'm an election believer I guess but that he can get about 46 percent of the popular vote that's what he did in two you know uh you know consecutive elections like he's not going to get 54 percent the next time out that's right yeah so so you know the the question with Trump and Trumpism has always been um uh what effect they have on the republican party there is an there is an additional question perhaps you know just a significant which is that um as long as Trump and Trumpism have a hold on the republican party what kind of damage can they do to the country even in the face of defeat right and and so January the 6th being one you know expression of that one manifestation but you know and the other um sort of more lingering one is the tens of millions of people who believe these delusions who believe these lies um not just relating to um stolen elections not just relating to January the 6th but also relating to uh COVID relating to um uh the great replacement theory you know and what's happening on the border or what's not happening uh and um but you know I I do think speaking directly to you know what the midterms tell us about Trump well I mean I um uh people are now you know saying to santhus is you know that um has got the inside track and that may well be so but I also well remember and you do too that um when you and I were talking about Rand Paul in the context of libertarianism and presidential politics a lot of other people were talking about Scott Walker as the great hope of the republican party because he also uh the um conservatives loved him for how he stood up to the press how he stood up to the unions and busted them uh did everything a conservative you'd want a conservative to do except campaign well and he was a dud we really have no sense whatsoever how desantis will do even as a standalone proposition but it's an altogether different thing to cease desantis against the human wrecking ball that is Donald Trump and Donald Trump cleared out what I mean it was amazing I mean yeah he had like 16 or 17 you know plausible republicans there were not it wasn't a bunch of clowns on the show I mean it was you know jeb bush to Rand Paul to Ted Cruz etc yeah and and people forget that they think they you know today it's it's thought that they all must have been a bunch of weak sisters no or not I mean those were that that was really a dream slate of you know the deepest bench yeah um yeah and I think of desantis I mean it remains to be seen and I'm not sure actually how much I care about this but he also reminds me of Chris Christie who also was very effective in New Jersey stood up to unions publicly played well in New York and New Jersey and you know I'm from that area and I was a columnist for time at the time and I wrote about how Christie plays great in that area but there's no way like once you cross the Delaware River West these people are going to be like who is this fat fuck loudmouth I don't know if but the thing is like after the after Trump's announcement speech I mean so much focus perhaps unsurprisingly in the media where oh the people in the room were bored oh it was the same thing over and over they're missing the point yeah the point being that for the MAGA constituents the same old song is exactly what they want to hear it's the greatest they don't want to hear the slightest dph right um so let me so that will play out what is the effect of Trump or MAGA you know for as a as a shorthand for a broader movement what is the effect of that on the democratic party because you know and it's weird because Biden uh the the Washington Post and I think they were accurate about this when they they said that Joe Biden's presidential platform was the most liberal a democrat had ever run on he was talking about 11 trillion dollars in new spending he seemed normal because he was running against Trump but he's not just a kind of big government democrat but he and he got a lot of what he wanted he is not popular he is also being you know attacked from the left in the democratic party I mean you know the the younger generation of democrats they hate MAGA but they're also sick of you know of of Joe Biden and of Nancy Pelosi and of you know a centrist senate stuff you know they like Bernie Sanders yeah do you think how does that play out particularly after the midterm so the democrats you know is there going to be do you think there'll be an insurgency on the progressive side of democrats to say this is our moment because this isn't cutting it what we're seeing going on now yeah I mean I'm interesting to hear you ask that question because I've talked to some progressive leaders who do believe that they're making inroads right now with the Biden administration and I mean in a way they are they're getting a lot of spending and a lot of the things that they want but not quite the belief is that you know this will benefit the public but even if the public doesn't come to see it they're aversion to Trump is so deep in abiding that that will overcome whatever deficiencies they may see in Biden I mean meanwhile you know it's it's not entirely clear that Biden will run again I mean I did happen to notice you know the day after the midterm when Biden kind of did his victory lap of a speech that when asked he said on at least two occasions my intention is to run which is very different from just saying declaratively I'm running you know mofo and and uh and that kind of language you know you and I have heard in Washington forever and it's it's wiggle room for a reason and leads me to believe that maybe over the holidays he and his family will discuss all this I mean he's on top of whatever else you know we've been talking about regarding Biden he's quite old and yeah so is Nancy Pelosi but Nancy Pelosi seems to be quite you know vigorous and quite effective and Mitch Mitch McConnell also ancient by political say I mean I keep thinking back to those pictures of you know Soviet you know apparatchiks in the in the 70s and 80s and you're like god they were so old and it's like you know Brezhnev was in his 50s and it's like people 30 years older than him running the country um if I may also um you know uh what do you think that this rhetoric of stolen elections and rigged systems etc and again I think back to 2016 Hilary was saying a version of it Bernie Sanders was Trump was and again not to make them all equivalent but there's a palpable sense throughout much of America and this this undergirded and powered the Black Lives Matter movement right that you know like it doesn't matter if you're Black and American you work hard and you play by the rules you're still going to be killed by cops you're not going to get ahead there's racism you know and then there's a kind of deindustrialized midwestern version of that there's a latino version of there's you know uh as we speak there's a supreme court case about Asians Asian Americans being kept out of Harvard and University of North Carolina and elite institutions there's a real palpable sense that the system is broken or the systems are broken and Hilary Clinton who I guess doesn't really have many divisions anymore but she in a recent fundraising appeal for a group called Indivisible talked about how you know in the pitch she says extreme right-wing conservatives have a plan to disallow the you know to win the 2024 election to steal the election and we need to crush the coup that's the actual language for this fundraising appeal do you think that kind of election denialism is going to go kind of mainstream or ubiquitous or and more and more disintegration of belief or cynicism towards any kind of major institution major undertaking over the next few years yeah I mean I will say you know first I think that you know crush the coup is is at minimum really really ill advised you know that rhetorically but but I do recognize because as a reporter as a citizen who follows the news you can hear republican state legislators say out loud that their intention is in fact to make it more difficult for certain constituencies to vote and some of them have said explicitly because of our efforts to do these kinds of things we republicans are going to win more and so they're they themselves are casting it as a partisan effort regardless of whether you know this is um a you know systematized um carefully orchestrating thing here and there it's certainly the truth I mean you know what you're referring to Nick is is a is a larger distrust you know the distrust of institutions goes back to Vietnam obviously you know then and then Watergate but it has gotten to a point now where the view is is not just that uh institutions are horny and and have their own kind of inertia um but that they act at minimum um are uh dismissive of of ordinary americans and at maximum are contentious of and and deceptive towards and are killing them and eating them I mean in some cases I mean literally right right exactly yeah and it's and I don't know where and how that ends I mean it's interesting you know to referring to Marjorie Taylor Green to see her now and she has expressed to me that she actually wishes to be taken more seriously and to govern seriously dude she's willing to like let her actions speak for themselves um and there she was uh you know uh standing with Kevin McCarthy the other day um saying how you know um Republicans need to get in line and back him for speaker something I wouldn't have expected her to do before but when the rubber meets the road the question will be um you know are you gonna like try to govern responsibly while at the same time um having endless investigations of your political enemies and um uh so uh uh so we'll you know we'll see if you know someone like Green tries to reform the institutions from within or continually cast them as demon figures as a kind of final uh point to this conversation you're a texas guy and you open the book with I think particularly uh important and and moving but you know important um discussion of your father who died I guess during COVID right yeah he died in November 2019 just before COVID and just before code but and was a lifelong Republican in a kind of Texas way which I take to be um that you know is a kind of uh you know smaller government uh you know a small government kind of live and let live kind of Republican right uh an older style um who was contemptuous of Trump but you know is there do you think like the the kind of politics his politics that emerge which seem to be you know broadly speaking you know kind of socially tolerant fiscally responsible um I don't know that that actually adds up to being libertarian in any meaningful way and I don't really care about that but that idea um where you know you you have a government that you don't want to do everything but you want it to do certain things and you believe that it can do those and you'll support that and you also think that people and businesses should mostly be left to their own devices um you know that immigration is good that free trade is good that movement is good and you know and people need to change and grow is there um is there a path forward for that kind of politics given what we're seeing emerging kind of on an extreme right where you know national conservatives or you know somebody like a blank master's said libertarianism doesn't work and that the government really needs to be controlling things Ron DeSantis says we need to use the power of the state to go after our enemies the way the left does uh people on the progressive caucus are talking about taking over nationalizing social media and platforms like that is you know is the the country that your father lived in is that gone forever or is that a viable kind of synthesis of what comes out of these moments of madness of the past half dozen years or so I do think that um maybe even the majority of republican office holders embrace the views that my dad did which yeah I think distill them they'll distill themselves down to um you know healthy distrust of government less government lower taxes emphasis on personal responsibility um uh and um uh and would love to see that the beast that they have at least implicitly if not explicitly fed for years will uh will eat itself the the one you know important ingredient to my father that I mentioned in the preface of my book is that um he uh personal responsibility to him meant um never making excuses never um uh uh being a professional victim and certainly never um demonizing the other side after all that would have made it very difficult for him to stay happily married like he was um for 64 years to my mother who was a democrat and who cheerfully you know cancelled his vote out every election cycle and uh and you know the Ron DeSantis becomes more of um my father's kind of republican but only um if he divests himself of this rhetoric that casts um uh wokeism as you know the liberals has possessed by wokeism possessed by radical socialist ideas and basically people who must be punished who must be ground to dust and and uh uh you know my dad was always out of the view and republicans were really for a very long time until trump showed them a different way of um of trying to persuade people that that their way was a better way now i'm not in you know i'm not in any way idealizing um conservatism back in my father's day since it was a table around which sat almost exclusively you know white men and uh and and you've written more than one book on on the bush is particularly george w bush as incurious and in in profound ways have failed presidents i mean you're not a republican apologist by any so no no and it's and um uh and and i think that you know they it was the um you know the group think um in the confirmation bias uh uh in the very very limited worldview that george w bush had that was a big contributor to the disaster that was the iraq war and um my father loved george w bush but came over the years to believe that he had been led astray by his own biases and his own incuriosity and i think that informed in turn how my father you know came to seek an alternative point of view too so i don't i'm by nature not a very prescriptive person and and uh um and so i don't know how one comes back to that but do i think that you know the um that the opportunity is there and that the numbers are there amongst republicans yes my greater concern is that when you have so many millions of people who um are possessed by delusions of the and that underpinning those delusions is the belief that the other side is is satanic um then i don't know how you come back to well we know look we still need to work across the aisles with those people we disagree with i mean that's you you don't work across the aisle with them and margie taylor green was actually quite honest when she was asked as as a candidate uh running for uh congress uh if she would ever work across the aisle and and she basically said no she said no that's um because uh we just had to defeat them we can't persuade them uh they're they're for things we abhor and um that was a kind of zero-sum language that just didn't exist during my father's era of republican politics do you think though then maybe it is a little bit heartening and for god's sake nobody wants to you know pin the hopes of the republic on margie taylor green but the fact that she seems to be more accommodating um particularly if she becomes part of a majority that is very small um and actually to do anything we'll have to actually work with other people i have a way to see the attitude about green because it depends on whether i mean it's um to to try to govern a certain way but still to be tweeting and and on right wing media saying uh these kinds of things about you know the killings i've already begun i don't care if she wants to you know raise the debt ceiling i mean i do care but if she's saying that kind of stuff too then she's feeding delusions and feeding this apocalyptic you know fever uh so um i understand that one reason she does that is to get attention and to get attention means to get online donations and to get online donations means to become a national figure um but at a certain point she has a choice to make because those two come in conflict and paul gozar is one case in point of how they come in conflict all right we're going to leave it there the book is weapons of mass delusion when the republican party lost its mind the author is robert draper robert thanks so much for talking it was really a pleasure thanks for having me on nick