Liam Donovan

Good to be here.

Thanks for having me.

I think if you think about the mood of the country that produced the comeback of Donald Trump, putting together the coalition that he did, that was predicated on a rejection of the status quo and the bet that Donald Trump will be able to return us to the economy and maybe the vibes of pre-COVID 2020.

Of course, that's much harder to do than it is to talk about.

And I think this is fundamentally about frustrations of how difficult some of these problems are to tackle, an electorate that is not really looking to be told that everything is going well.

And then when you compound that with some of the policy choices that have been made,

that I think might prove to be wise in the longer run, but there are legacy-minded moves, not immediate-term electoral plays.

I think the way you have to think about this is the mythology of the Trump first term as understood by Donald Trump versus as it was understood by other – the electorate included.

Trump, looking back, the reason he lost, the reason he wasn't as successful as he might have been was –

that he was held back from his impulses and his policy preferences by the deep state, by never Trumpers, by the sort of Bush era Republicans that don't reflect or respect his version of how the country should look.

You know, at some level, you could argue he was saved politically by that layer of insulation.

And if you think about what's changed, it's that he is absolutely installed politically

There is a threshold question of are you absolutely committed to this project?

And I think, therefore, he's feeling for the first time what it looks like to get what you're asking for.

And that's.

The electorate that reelected him just wanted to go back to the way it was.

So I do think there's a disconnect there.

But to your point, there's an easy mode that he might have done, but it wouldn't have necessarily been his vision for what America First or MAGA looks like.

I think there are layers to it.

I mean, you have to think about there's now a ceiling in a way that there didn't used to be.