republican party shifts

The 2024 Republican presidential primary is officially underway, and Donald Trump is dominating the field. But this is a very different contest than it was in 2016. Back then, the Republican Party was the party of foreign policy interventionism, free trade and cutting entitlements, and Trump was the insurgent outsider unafraid to buck the consensus. Today, Trump and his views have become the consensus.

The primary, then, raises some important questions: How has Donald Trump changed the Republican Party over the past eight years? Is Trumpism an actual set of policy views or just a political aesthetic? And if Trump does become the nominee again, where does the party go from here?

Ben Domenech is a longtime conservative writer who served as a speechwriter in George W. Bush’s administration and co-founded several right-leaning outlets, including RedState and The Federalist. He’s currently a Fox News contributor, an editor at large at The Spectator and the author of the newsletter The Transom. From these different perches, he has closely traced the various ways the Republican Party has and, crucially, has not changed over the past decade.

This conversation explores whether Donald Trump really did break open a G.O.P. policy consensus in 2016, the legacy of what Domenech calls “boomer Republicanism,” how to reconcile Trump’s continued dominance with his surprisingly poor electoral record, the rise of “Barstool conservatism” and other new cultural strands on the right, whether conservatives actually want “National Review conservatism policy” with a “Breitbart conservatism attitude,” what Domenech thinks a G.O.P. candidate would need to do to outperform Trump and more.

This episode contains strong language.

This episode was hosted by Jane Coaston, a staff writer for Times Opinion. Previously, she hosted “The Argument,” a New York Times Opinion podcast. Before that she was the senior politics reporter at Vox, with a focus on conservatism and the G.O.P.

Mentioned:

The Revolution with Steve Kornacki

Book Recommendations:

The War on the West by Douglas Murray

The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver

Running the Light by Sam Tallent

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

On Monday, Fox News abruptly announced that the network and its star primetime host, Tucker Carlson, “have agreed to part ways” after more than a decade. The announcement came less than a week after Fox agreed to pay $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit that prominently featured Carlson’s show and its role in spreading misinformation about the 2020 election. 

The news is just the latest instantiation of a broader story: In recent years, the Republican Party has morphed from a coherent institution into a fractured movement at war with itself. Conservative media, and Fox News in particular, played a central role in that shift. And now those same dynamics are tearing the conservative media ecosystem apart as well. 

How did we get here? How did the Tucker Carlsons of the world take over the G.O.P? And what comes next as these dynamics continue to play out? 

There are few scholars who have studied these kinds of questions as closely as Nicole Hemmer. Hemmer is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of two books about the conservative movement and media ecosystem, “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” and “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s”. We released this conversation a few months ago, in January of this year, but it remains as relevant as ever.

We discuss why the Cold War bonded Republicans as a party, how the 1994 Republican congressional victory inaugurated a new era of intraparty fighting, how Rush Limbaugh’s rise created a new market for far-out ideas and new pressures on conservative politicians, why conservative media has had so much more sway than liberal media over grass-roots voters, how the business model of Fox News differs from that of MSNBC and what kinds of political ideas those businesses produce, how the G.O.P. is now caught between the pincers of the donor class and the grass roots, when the chief Republican enemy became the Democratic Party, why more moderate conservatives have become so weak and more.

Book Recommendations:

Fit Nation by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Dreamland by Carly Goodman

Freedom’s Dominion by Jefferson Cowie

Thoughts? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. (And if you're reaching out to recommend a guest, please write  “Guest Suggestion" in the subject line.)

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski.