Adam Tooze

He appreciates good guilt work and he knows you can't get it in the US and they have it in spades in Paris.

And his mate Macron, who's a bit of a player, actually kind of digs him, which is why he's saying like, Donald, what's wrong?

What are you doing in Greenland?

I don't understand.

But I think there is a faction in the Trump, which is really down the East European, Hungarian side.

It was so interesting hearing the Chinese vice premier today who gave the Chinese calm and they have these extraordinarily technocratic senior politicians.

I literally sat and took a note, Yvonne, which was they have this idea of the flow and the tide of history.

And the Chinese have this intact, coherent, modernist kind of vision.

And if you do Trumpy things, the real problem with them is not that they're bad or wrong.

It's just they're out of keeping with the time and history will punish you.

And this obviously is just completely disintegrated in the Trump camps.

I do think the race, I don't want to play these off against each other, but I think the race as an organizing category is more powerful than woke in general.

Because historically, I think the form of conservatism and rightism that has clustered around Trump comes out of the backlash against civil rights.

I mean, if you think about the American polity as going through a series of convulsive major changes, one is the New Deal.

And another one is the Civil Rights Revolution and then the Civil War and Reconstruction before that.

And immigration happens at the same time, 65, right?

So Trump has a solid track record as a standard racist, an anti-black racist.

In his party days, he was...

Notably, he's not a standard conservative on sexuality, including on homosexuality.

I think the line, this idea of great displacement, the savagery of ICE, the casual anti-black, anti-Chinese, just the comprehensive white power vision, that rings true to me as an organizing idea of a conservatism.