Ross Douthat
Appearances
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. One of the defining features of the second Trump administration has been the aggressive use of executive power over the administrative state, over the global economy, and potentially over and against the other branches of government.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. I want to pull back from this just for a second and talk about the larger... Well, it's...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
There's a moral question here, and I'm curious how much of a legal and constitutional question it is, which is that a big part of why these deportations have become so understandably controversial is not just about whether they are following the precise procedures involved, whether there have been mistakes made, all of these things, right? It's because we're deporting people to a prison. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And a bad prison. And a prison that advertises itself as a bad prison. And the Trump administration has explicitly said, we are glad we're sending bad people to this tough, tough prison.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. Right. So, one, I mean, to me, politically, in the realm that I mostly write about and talk about, I think clearly the Trump administration came in with a political mandate to increase deportations. The Biden administration's immigration policy was, I think, widely acknowledged to be at least somewhat disastrous. I would say generally disastrous. The Trump administration, I think, is...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
understandably impatient with realities like in the case of Garcia, where you have someone who he's been in the United States illegally for many years, and yet you can't deport him to his home country because of a judicial order, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
When I've talked to people who are sympathetic to the administration's position, they've said, look, if you're doing this for every illegal alien, we're never going to be able to achieve anything. And my response generally is, That's fine to say, but you're sending people to prison, right? How much does that enter into the legal and or constitutional side of this debate? Maybe it doesn't, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Maybe we're just saying, well, we deported them to El Salvador. That's a sovereign country. And by coincidence, the government of El Salvador put them in prison, right? I mean, what's the legal...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. A shortcut, though, for a pretty, I mean, even if the Supreme Court blesses it, right? It's narrow. It's still just talking about a particular gang from Venezuela.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So are you asking me, does the moral argument... I'm asking you, are there any particular legal issues raised by deporting people to foreign prisons that would not obtain if you were just deporting them and, you know, leaving them at the border of El Salvador and waving goodbye?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
How about the citizen-noncitizen distinction here? Let's say that after this podcast airs, you know, someone comes up and puts us into custody and we get sent to El Salvador together. Hopefully we share a cell. Yeah. And and the government says, oh, we're very sorry. We meant to remove two illegal aliens who are also in the New York Times building at that time.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
We accidentally took Jack Goldsmith and Ross Douthat. Unfortunately, they are in custody. a foreign country under the government of El Salvador sovereignty. And, you know, we can negotiate, but we can't guarantee we'll get them back. Is that a different legal issue than the one the Garcia case presents?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And obviously, this is a... That seems like a problematic argument.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Would there be any distinction in, let's say, the legal exposure of, you know, the agency that did the deportation? I'm just, you know, my lawyer, I'm talking to my lawyer from El Salvador, right? And I'm saying, who are you- Can you sue the government? Yeah. Who are you going to go after? Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
That sounds good. I'd like to sue for that. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Okay. So it seems like the Supreme Court has a very, very strong interest in figuring out how to get the Trump administration to get Garcia back to the U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Who would the sanctions be on?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Are you familiar with Gödel's loophole? No. Okay, so this is the idea that the famous Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel. Oh, yeah, okay. Right, who supposedly told friends that he had studied the U.S. Constitution and discovered the loophole whereby a president could become a dictator. And the story goes that, you know, he found it, but essentially...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
He knew what it was, but no one else knew what it was, and the secret died with him. And listening to you describe these scenarios, it does sound a little bit like Gödel's loophole, right, where essentially the president can do whatever he wants as long as he manages to remove his enemies to foreign soil, right? Yep.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
To the extent that this is a suddenly discovered loophole, what would be the remedy for it? So let me back up.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So this would be a case where if this practice continued, you would need congressional legislation basically saying, You know, we are imposing penalties for removing American citizens from the country without trial.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
All right. I'm going to leave our hypothetical selves in Central America then for the moment. And when we come back, we'll talk about Trump's assertions of executive power over other areas of government, in particular over federal spending.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Now I want to turn to a different area, which we've already previewed a little bit, which is President Trump's claims of power over the administrative state, but then beyond that over federal spending as a whole. So these categories include all of the attempted firings of federal employees, the restructuring of agencies like USAID and others.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
At the baseline, this to me seems like both the place where a conservative-leaning Supreme Court is most likely to be sympathetic to the president, and also the area where at a baseline, I think the administration just has the strongest case. You mentioned already the unitary executive theory, which is a sort of right-leaning theory of constitutional power.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Why don't you just talk for a minute about that theory and how it shapes this debate? Sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
In practice, though, they have been trying to fire within administrative law. Right. Like they've this is why they've tried to fire people who are provisional or people who've been newly hired or I think, you know, idiotically, but people who are on track for a promotion. Right. And therefore fall into this category that is legally vulnerable to firing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And then the end game here, it's not just the place where they seem to have the strongest constitutional argument. It's also the place to me as an observer of American politics where they seem to have the strongest political argument. And I just spent the weekend reading in our own newspaper.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
accounts from the Biden administration of how impossible it is for the executive, the actual executive, the president of the United States to effectuate policy through the system of government that we have built up. And the roadblocks are not obviously all just within the administrative state. There's lots of different roadblocks. But it does seem to me that the system as we have it is one
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
where we elect a president, the president has incredibly broad powers in theory, and then in practice, the inability to exert control over the government is a big problem for American governance. And I can certainly see why Liberals and Democrats would not want the Trump administration in particular to exert that kind of control.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But it also seems to me like an endgame where there's a bunch of Supreme Court decisions favorable to executive power and presidents just have a little more direct control over who is hired and fired. in their agencies and administrations is something that in the long run could be good for the workings of American government.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I know this is a political question and not a legal question, but I'm curious.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Well, then let's talk about sort of what seems to me like the furthest extent of this argument and the place where my own sympathy for it starts to break down, which is the question of presidential control broadly over how congressionally appropriated funding is spent and ultimately whether it's spent at all.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And so there's a couple of questions here where I think, again, we're going to have Supreme Court cases on all of these things, right? But first you have the question of, Congress, you know, appropriates money for USAID. Question is, how much control can the executive exert over how that money is spent?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So we're going to get into each of those areas or try to. But just at the outset, you know, we expected something like this. I think it was clear from the beginning that Trump back in power was going to be a more aggressive figure. What in this area has surprised you the most, I guess, given that anticipation?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Can it take that money and say, okay, Congress appropriated this money for foreign aid, but we think the interests of the US government are served if we define foreign aid to mean... Subsidies for conservative podcasters in, you know, East Asia, you know, Singaporean podcasters instead of humanitarian aid or something. Right. To take an imaginary example. So that's you're still spending the money.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But then there's also the more potentially sweeping claim, which I'm interested in because it seems like it would push executive power basically as far as it can go, which is the claim that the president has what's called impoundment power. over federal spending. Can you just describe what that argument is? Sure.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And this was passed under Nixon, under Richard Nixon.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So your perspective is first that the Supreme Court would probably say that the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Because a war could end, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. So those were just just to be clear, because I think it's a useful thing. The Obama administration, in my view, essentially tried to change U.S. immigration policy in a pretty sweeping way in its second term by saying we are going to carve out big enforcement discretion, discretion exemptions. Yeah.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And by the way... Neither did the Supreme Court. Right. And...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And now- Right, no, I mean my own. I wrote a couple of columns that I referred to it as Caesarism.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. I mean, so this is what I don't understand about that argument. And maybe it's connected to the practice of the past prior to the Impoundment Control Act. But if you took that argument to its logical conclusion, wouldn't it mean that Congress could create Medicare by statute and a Republican president could just say, we're not going to run Medicare? Yes. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But if this kind of argument came before the Supreme Court and you were a lawyer for the administration... And the Supreme Court said, okay, well, what is the limiting principle on this claim? Do you think they would come up with a limiting principle? Would they say, well, of course, all this means is we can cancel discretionary spending but not entitlements or something?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And this relates to the work that you did under George W. Bush.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. I'm interested in this both because I think it's a terrain where they have signaled potential for litigation, but it is also the place where if you were imagining a total constitutional revolution as the outcome of the Trump administration, this would take you to a total subordination of the legislative to the executive, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Yeah, well, and then obviously, in certain ways, the biggest dimension that it's happening on is the economic policy of the United States. And the tariff debate, I think, has not been framed as much as these other debates that we're talking about as a kind of legal constitutional issue, right? But the scale of the Trump tariffs has prompted lawsuits, or at least one lawsuit, I think, and threats.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Yeah. of further lawsuits. Again, as a layman, I read through some of the claims and arguments that Trump is exceeding his authority, that nothing in the tariff delegation power allows for these kind of moves at this scale with this kind of duration. What do you think?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Well, it's had – I mean, in fairness to the conservatives, it has had – These are my friends, by the way. Right. It has had immediate and dramatic effects on conservatives. The global economy has, you know, has threatened. I mean, there are principles at work in legal debates, but there's also policy scale matters. And the scale of this policy seems quite substantial.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But those tricky legal issues also matter because the framing for this entire conversation, right, is not just what the Constitution says, but the political context and the political climate. Yes. And the Supreme Court clearly doesn't want to be in 17 different direct collisions with an aggressive administration. And so if you tell me, I think the administration has a pretty good case here.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Plausible case. Plausible case. What I hear is that. John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh and maybe Amy Coney Barrett are going to want to pick their fight somewhere else.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
All right. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk a little more about potential conflicts at the place where all of these debates are heading, the Supreme Court. All right, Jack, we were just talking about how the court might rule or how the court might think about a ruling on tariffs and presidential power over tariffs.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I offered a kind of political framing for that decision where the court might be calibrating. how it rules and also which cases it takes and which battles it picks to a difficult political moment. So making decisions based on politics as well as just a straightforward interpretation of the law. Do you think that's a good way of thinking about these issues?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Like how much in this highly politicized moment is the court thinking to itself, we are dealing with a difficult administration with threats of, you know, at least threats of something that someone would call, could call constitutional crisis, maybe not you, right? And therefore we are really self-consciously picking our battles.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Yeah, fair point. It's Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And you've written about this. You don't think that they're ducking fights.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Okay. Then let's just push a little further from that into actual worst case scenarios. And I'm going to try and force you. We were talking earlier, right, about the case of Garcia sent to El Salvador, right? That's sort of, in a way, the clearest point of tension right now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Your argument there is that that's a case where you could effectively have a kind of collision between the executive and the courts. But in the end, you know, the executive doesn't do what the courts want, but there isn't sort of. a formal constitutional argument that they have to, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. So that would be one set of cases where the court just decides that it has some constitutional limits on what it can force the executive to do, even if it thinks the executive is doing the wrong thing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But you could imagine then a situation where the court would pick a fight. Your view right now that you've expressed elsewhere is you don't think the administration, in a case where the Supreme Court was on pretty strong constitutional ground, would want to defy or be seen as publicly defying the court.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
You've said that. You can say something different now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Okay. But now I'm going to force you to give me in a scenario where you get such a Supreme Court ruling that is clear what compliance means and what noncompliance means. And the Trump administration straightforwardly is not in compliance. And this is my curiosity. If you're John Roberts in that situation, what tools does the court have to
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
in a situation of clear noncompliance to use besides its moral authority and so on?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Ultimately, I mean, you know... It does have, you know, it has marshals, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And do you think, again, going back to the hypothetical calculations of the Supreme Court, do you think then that their calculations change after 2000 and where are we now? 2026, right? So suppose you have a Democratic House after 2026. Does that make the court feel more confident in how it pushes against the White House?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Certainly, you'd have mass protest and so on. I think, to me, the question in that case is, what does John Thune do? Yeah, exactly. What do the embodiments of Senate Republican legitimacy do in that situation? You're the political expert.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
You noticed I took a delaying sip of coffee. I mean, I think it depends, you know, to use the hedge that you've availed yourself of on what the case is and what the circumstances are. I guess my sort of running question is, what kind of conversations are people like Thune having? having around those kind of issues and what kind of conversations are they having with the White House and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I have a certain amount of confidence that is not universally shared in American democracy as an actual check on a rogue president. And
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
I had this confidence when the positions was reversed and I had a lot of conservative friends who looked at sort of the convergence of unified democratic control of Congress with unified progressive control of Silicon Valley institutions and these kinds of things and said, oh, you know. We're headed for a world where no Republican can win the presidency again.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I think it's clear that that assessment was wrong and that American democracy was resilient to a certain kind of left wing consolidation of power. Trump is a very different kind of figure, but. Yeah, I'm hopeful that American democracy is the interest, and the interests it creates for Republican senators in swing states, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So let's say there is no worst case scenario. There's no explicit conflict between Trump and the Supreme Court. There's wins and losses. But overall, the court blesses a lot of what the administration wants. The administration accepts whatever curbs it offers. So this is sort of The best case scenario for a Trump executive power revolution, what does that look like going forward?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
How would you describe the post-2028 constitutional landscape that that would usher in? Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So it's... So this is places where they could lose and it could weaken the presidency's powers relative to Bush and Obama.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. And so connected to that point, there's been a lot of talk just in the first few months from critics and skeptics of the administration looking at these kind of things and saying we're already in a constitutional crisis that, you know, the administration is messing with the courts. It's being disrespectful to the courts. It's not following congressional statute and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
On the abuses, without getting into all the details, maybe let's end by imagining a future democratic president or a future democratic control of government, right? Yeah. Two related questions, right? One, Democrats win and have a trifecta in 2028 after a period where there's been a consolidation of executive power, but there've also been a lot of abuses.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Do you imagine the Democratic Party taking up some of the ideas that you advocated for after the first Trump administration and saying, we are going to limit our own, you know, we're looking at what Trump did and we think he went too far in all these ways and we are going to, through statute, put in new limits on presidential power?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Obviously, if things are decided constitutionally, they can't, you know, they can't limit it. But can you imagine executive power limits as an issue reemerging the way it was in the 1970s, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
All right. It gets worse in the next round. On that note, Jack Goldsmith, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you very much, Ross. And if you enjoyed the conversation, please recommend us to your friends and leave a review. Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan. It's edited by Jordana Hochman and Alison Bruzek.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
In your view, what is a constitutional crisis and how will we know we're in one?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Donald Trump is attempting a revolution in executive power arguably unseen since the time of Franklin Roosevelt and one that whatever happens will probably leave the executive branch dramatically changed. So we're going to talk today about where this push is meeting the most resistance, but also where and how it might succeed.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So let's get into some of the specifics. We're not going to tackle all 1,233 pieces of standing litigation, but I'm going to pick up on some of the categories you talked about and I guess give them my own spin for a minute and say I'm interested in talking about Issues of deportation, especially deportation to El Salvador, in particular, to a Salvadoran prison, especially.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
There's power over the federal bureaucracy, and you've been talking about that. And then I think we should mention power over economic policy and tariffs. And then we'll get we'll circle back, I guess, to crisis scenarios and also non-crisis scenarios at the end. So let's start with power over non-citizens.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
You've had visa and green card holders have been detained and people have had their visas canceled over political activism, participation in campus protests. There's some debate about the specifics. In one case, it appears that a woman had her visa canceled because of an op-ed she wrote. So there's that terrain.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And then the administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law dating to 1798, giving the president broad wartime powers to detain and deport non-citizens and use that as a justification for the deportations to El Salvador in particular. Right. So first, just to continue what we were saying before, just how radical do you think this set of actions are?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And I'm joined today by a man with a lot of direct experience working on questions of executive power as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, a president not known for taking a minimalist view of executive power. Jack is now a professor at Harvard Law School, and he's been writing eloquently about executive power throughout the entire Trump era.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And that was the precedent, right? That even in cases like World War II, that if you, you know, detained someone and deported them because they were German or you had suspicions of Nazi sympathy, right? The precedent suggested that they still got a hearing, right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So in this case, you would be able to contest whether you are actually a member of the Venezuelan gang.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. And that's the claim that's being made on behalf of the people who have already been sent to El Salvador, that they were not actually in the gang, that they were misidentified as gang members based on tattoos and so on.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. But that would be litigated, I mean, like most of these things, all the way to the Supreme Court, right? Yes. In the end, the Supreme Court is going to issue, presumably, a ruling on whether you can apply the Alien Enemies Act... To this gang. To this gang. Yes. But for a little while, was the administration formally arguing... that its power here was unreviewable?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
But then they walked part of that back, right? By the time it had reached the Supreme Court, they were saying, well, of course we concede that people get some kind of review.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So let's talk about probably what is now the highest profile case involving law. an illegal alien remanded to El Salvador. And that is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was deported to the Salvadoran prison. He is presumably held there at the moment. And there was essentially a stay of removal. Is that right?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Jack Goldsmith, welcome to Interesting Times.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
And something may change with this case between the time we're having this conversation and when the podcast actually appears. But right now, what is the state of play in terms of – because the Supreme Court has actually spoken on this case to some extent. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
So, let's dive right in. In a recent essay just a few days ago, you wrote that Donald Trump is, quote, taking a moonshot on executive power. So, let's start generally. What does that mean, and how is this administration different from all other administrations?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
Right. And the government's claim, just to be clear, is that they made a mistake. But now he's in a foreign country under foreign sovereignty. The foreign sovereign, as of this taping, has said they're not going to return him. And then presumably you could argue that it's not in the interests of U.S.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
What if There’s No Way to Stop Trump’s Approach to Power?
foreign policy to force that foreign country to return him, which is, you know, a not entirely plausible argument, given that El Salvador is a client state of the United States.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. Just in time for the debut of this show, almost as if he planned it that way, Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the global economy, as his new tariff regime yields crashing stock markets, rising global uncertainty, and widespread fears of a recession.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
This Instability May Be Worth It. Here's Why.
But there isn't really, from the age of globalization, I concede that relative to how the U.S. economy was doing in the immediate post-war period, the age of globalization has been a disappointment. But it's not like there is some counterexample where you say, you know, oh, the French practice more protectionism or the Germans or the Japanese and their economies are in much better shape.
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Isn't the U.S. economy still in the best shape of any developed nation, of any big, rich, developed nation right now? And doesn't that suggest something about the potential scenarios on the table?
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economy, where the tariff debate centers in, before we get into the Trump tariffs themselves, so that hopefully the conversation will still be of use, even in a future in which the audience knows more about how all this plays out than we do. So that's the plan. And I want to start with a big picture question.
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Okay, let's take a quick break there, and we'll be right back. So what do you make of other arguments for tariffs? We've been focused on manufacturing, but in the swirl around President Trump's tariffs, you've had a lot of other cases made, right? One is pretty clearly linked to the rebuild manufacturing case. It's a national security case. It says that
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Look, you know, China is a great power competitor. It's possible that a global pandemic originated in certainly it originated in China. It could have originated in one of their own laboratories. They could invade Taiwan. There's all kinds of ways where we could have to. We already did briefly decouple and could have to decouple from them.
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And so therefore, again, it's worth a little bit off GDP to have more of our supply chain domestically and so on. I assume that you find that argument somewhat convincing as well.
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When Donald Trump was reelected and entered office, a lot of people thought he had gotten very lucky, that he had inherited an economy that was in really good shape, with low unemployment, with inflation finally coming down after the Biden era, with a high stock market, and with a sense of big technological breakthroughs potentially on the horizon.
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But isn't that partially just a case for industrial policy of the kind that, for instance, the Biden administration tried to pursue? I'm sort of looking for substitutionary policies that serve the same kind of goals without taking the growth hit from tariffs. It seems like you could argue, well, we have a certain set of industries that aren't technically part of the defense industry.
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budget, but that we want more of in America. We want more chips and so forth manufactured in America. Why not just make that part of our spending program, right? And support those industries because we know the specific things that we want instead of putting up general barriers around the world that slow growth.
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So, Oren, to begin with, what's wrong with that narrative from your perspective? What is wrong with the American economy in the year 2025 that could make anyone interested in any kind of radical or dramatic restructuring?
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And what about deficits? One of the arguments that, again, has floated around in the last few weeks is that tariffs are a way to raise revenue, right? Which they obviously are. The U.S. has a big deficit problem. And the deficit problem is itself taxable. connected to the global trading order. And it has to do with the strength, in part, the strength of the dollar relative to other currencies.
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So you have people arguing, one, tariffs will raise revenue directly, helps cut the deficit, and you don't have to do some kind of grand bargain between Democrats and Republicans. That's very difficult. The president can just go ahead and do it. It's the only way a Republican president can ever raise taxes. I've heard people say that.
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And then maybe people say it can also be linked to some global negotiation where countries come to the table and all agree to change sort of how their currencies work or accept lower rates on U.S. debt or something that – helps us deal with our budget deficits.
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The difficulty there, right, is that, especially in the first case, if tariffs do what you want them to do and lead to the reshoring of manufacturing, over time they raise less and less revenue. So a successful tariff that helps reindustrialize America is not going to be a big revenue generator. So where do you see the deficit-cutting stuff fitting into this?
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And do you buy the idea that you could do some sort of grand renegotiation of U.S. debt?
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budgeting process has been known to do that.
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All right, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about what the Trump administration is actually doing. Okay, so this you have brought us to the actual tariffs, not the theoretical tariffs. And I'm going to put words in your mouth and say briefly that the Oren Cass preferred tariff program is one that specifically tries to isolate China.
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generally imposes a 10 percent global tariff that is sort of stable, persistent and compatible with global trade and maybe include some other country specific tariffs related to negotiations. Now, you could argue that is what Trump has done. The tariffs on China are quite high. There is a flat 10 percent tariff.
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And then there are these country by country tariffs that people have been arguing about. But I want you to tell me because I read your take on the tariffs and it seemed like it was very general praise wrapped around a pretty actually specific critique. So I want you to tell me what you think is wrong with what Trump is doing on tariffs.
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And what about the country by country tariffs as they exist right now? Because there was the Trump administration used the rhetoric of reciprocal tariffs, which implied to most people that essentially we were saying, if you have X tariff on our goods, we will have the same tariff on your goods. And we want to mutually then negotiate down from there.
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In practice, instead, the Trump administration has a formula seemingly that's just designed around trade deficits with other countries, where if you have a trade deficit with us, we are putting a big tariff on you. And it seems to me pretty obvious that in a global economy, we're going to have lots of countries that we have trade deficits with.
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Maybe we want to have trade surpluses with more countries. Fair enough. And that's what we're working towards. But it seems completely bizarre to say, you know, any random country that has a completely different economy from ours, if you're not importing exactly as many American goods as you're exporting to us, we're going to tariff you. Isn't that just daft?
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One is— You can say it's just daft. You can just say it's daft.
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But you were just telling me in the case against industrial policy from the right that the conservative, the free market oriented conservative would say, you know, we're not going to be able to micromanage. you know, which factories to build exactly, which industries to support. We want to set something low and flat in tariff policy that just encourages domestic manufacturing in general, right?
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It seems to me like the same has to be true with this country by country stuff, that you're not the idea that we're going to be micromanaging the trade balance with, you know, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, India, Bangladesh to figure out like, you know, how do we get them all back in balance? One, that seems unworkable. And two, And this is something that just hangs over this whole conversation.
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It just seems like a way to fit in with the president of the United States' particular obsession with the idea that, from his perspective, all trade deficits seem to be bad, at least in the way he talks about it. So everyone who's designing these policies in the White House is sort of working around a core Trumpian perception that probably is wrong. Thank you.
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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching.
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So let's be a little more specific about those broader challenges, because as you mentioned, U.S. GDP has continued going up throughout this period. And in fact, so has, to some extent, middle class incomes, not just middle income, but working class incomes. They went up in Trump's presidency. They went up in Biden's presidency, even though then inflation ate into them.
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And overall, middle class Americans, just in terms of the numbers, are meaningfully better off than they were in the 1970s. But you don't think that captures something really important, right? There's something those numbers are missing?
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So to try and understand where this radical policy came from and where it might be taking us, our 401ks, our unemployment rate, I'm joined by Oren Kass, who's the founder of American Compass, a populist conservative think tank that has for a while now been arguing for tariffs and for some kind of dramatic change in America's relationship to global trade.
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Okay, so stipulating that there is a big debate about all these numbers, as you mentioned, the American Compass Index of Human Flourishing is hotly contested and much argued over. Stipulate for the sake of argument that there is some kind of stagnation here, especially for young men. What does trade have to do with it?
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Okay, but so is the issue that we've lost manufacturing or that we've lost manufacturing jobs? Because one of the arguments that you often hear is that American manufacturing in terms of how much stuff we produce is still roughly where it's been for decades now. We've lost ground in comparison to China because China has become such a powerhouse.
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But the American manufacturing sector has not collapsed. What's collapsed is the number of Americans who work in jobs in that sector. Do you agree with that?
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So what is so special about a manufacturing job as opposed to a service sector job? Because someone might say, look, yes, the U.S. economy has fewer people working in factories than it did in the heyday. of, you know, Detroit and the big three auto manufacturers and all the rest. But America is also a lot richer than it was back then.
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And I think most people argue that global trade has led to lower prices in at least some areas for some goods. So what's wrong with a world where someone works in a service sector job instead of a manufacturing job? enjoys lower prices. And then beyond that, presumably the richer U.S.
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economy can pay for under an income tax credit or a larger child tax credit to essentially increase wages and give a kind of premium based on the surplus of a wealthy society. Why is that not just as good as a world with many more manufacturing jobs?
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So, Oren Kass, welcome to Interesting Times.
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But suppose you had a resurgence of manufacturing jobs right now. Wouldn't they look quite different from manufacturing jobs in 1985 or even just before the China shock? Because yes, manufacturing jobs have even now have some of the features you describe, but we have passed through an age of automation and robotics. We are entering some kind of age of AI driven automation.
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I hope it is. So, a podcast, like everything, is a moment in time. And the moment in time in which you and I are speaking is Monday morning. The markets are open and down so far for the third day since Donald Trump announced the great liberation of America from the foreign yoke.
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And when I hear people talk about the factory jobs of the future, even people who are bullish on there being good factory jobs, it's sort of taken for granted that these are not actually the kind of jobs that, you know, a blue collar steel worker would have had in 1977, right? The argument is, well, these are actually better jobs, they're less backbreaking, they require more skills, and so on.
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But then, if that's the case, and maybe it's not the case, aren't they not filling in the same niche in the economy, right?
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So when I interviewed the vice president before he became the vice president, and we talked a little bit about this issue, and he talked about the idea of, you know, the six or seven million American men who have dropped out of the workforce, who are particularly vulnerable to opioid addiction and family breakdown and all of these things.
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Are those the kind of workers who are likely to be hired in the factory of the future that is highly, highly automated?
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Right. But do you think that there is a cost to overall GDP from using tariffs, essentially to wildly oversimplify the argument for tariffs that is implied by what you're saying is that you raise the cost of importing from factories outside the United States. So it becomes more economically viable to build factories inside the U.S.,
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And this podcast, therefore, may not cover events that transpire between now and Thursday morning when it's released, but we're going to try and have a fairly high-level discussion about the condition of the U.S.
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The typical economist responds, that may be true, and you do get some potentially specific benefits, although they would have doubts about how all this works. We'll get into in a minute. But they would say, but look, your overall, the overall society is going to be somewhat poorer.
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And is that a tradeoff we should be willing to make some points or fraction of a point off GDP to have more people working in upstate New York and central Ohio?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Like there's sort of an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers, who are sinful in various ways, but maybe in a way like I've been describing, sort of advance God's cause despite their sins and failings.
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I don't really think of Trump that way, but he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity. And To me, the bargain with Trump has always been, for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support, a transactional bargain, and then more recently, a kind of hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can sort of bring
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religion itself back with it, which I will say is a hope that I have indulged in myself, that it's like, OK, you have different varieties of post-Christianity out there and you don't want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have sort of big hopes for the future rather than a woke progressivism that just seems sort of inflected with cultural despair.
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That would be an argument that I think a Christian who was trying to sort of explain to themselves how they find themselves in alliance with Elon Musk
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might say, you know, better Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a sort of more dynamic future, better that than pure pessimism, that climate change is going to kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it kind of perspective. That would be the argument.
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Yeah. I mean, I know the meek will inherit the earth is a famous, I would say renunciation more than meekness.
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Yeah, I mean, I think the... aspect of populism, conservative populism, right-wing populism, whatever you want to call it, that does see itself in clear continuity with Christian ideas and Christian views, basically holds
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that it is speaking on behalf of the weak and the oppressed, people who don't have a voice in society, and those people are the native-born working class of the Western world who have been asked to bear inappropriate burdens, beginning with economic... I'm just framing the case, right? Beginning with the economic burdens imposed by...
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free trade regimes that sent their jobs overseas and continuing with the burden of, again, this is the argument of sort of social disorder and breakdown associated with the drug trade in a globalized world, the free movement of peoples that sort of transforms cities and neighborhoods and in ways that, again, fall most heavily on
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lower middle class Americans and are sort of avoided and evaded by the upper class. The narrative is basically that the beneficiaries of globalization are the equivalent of the rich person in various of Jesus's parables. And certainly Jesus does not hesitate at various moments in the Gospels to say pretty harsh things about people who have betrayed their leadership role.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, there were other passages in that column that are worth emphasizing. But yeah, I stand by that reading of the Trump phenomenon. I think one of the ways in which my sense of politics generally has changed over the course of the Trump era is just I have more appreciation for weird forces that are outside, certainly outside the control of people who write about politics.
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One reason I pushed back on meekness is, yes, Jesus uses the word meek, but Jesus himself is not a meek figure. You can go through the New Testament and find plenty of cases where Jesus says incredibly harsh things, mostly about powerful people, about sinners, where Jesus cleanses the temple and drives the money lenders out. and curses the fig tree that doesn't bear fruit.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, and I think, as I said before, you have what you're describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that not all but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a... pagan sensibility than the Christian one.
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But I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian, anti-Christian. And I think the forces, you know, I mean, I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs.
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But I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. And the core motivations there were just different from the motivations, the evangelical motivations of the Bush era and reflected, frankly, just overall the decline of Christianity. Christianity in American life since then.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I will just say, though, since, you know, we're taking a pretty hard line of critique, I think you watch this happen all the time on the left in different ways over the last five or 10 years, where people who I considered sensible, good, well-meaning, moderate people were in a coalition with
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
with people who had more intensity, more passion, more zeal, who made a certain set of demands on them that led people I knew and admired and respected to, I think, compromise their own values in ways that also had sort of real-world material consequences.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I don't want to, like, re-litigate... I don't want to re-litigate wokeness, but part of the nature of politics in a landscape where there's no kind of religious consensus, there's no kind of moral consensus, right, is that... forces that appear to have energy behind them.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Again, to go back to where we started, world historical energy, perhaps, will sort of draw people who have convictions that should put them in tension with those views into certain kinds of compromises. But I agree.
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I absolutely think, I do not admire the way that the Trump administration approaches any of the policies that you're talking about, from humanitarian aid to the deportations to El Salvador.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You can't have lived through the Trump era without As a conservative columnist or newspaper writer and not have the sense of how fundamentally unimportant columnists are, what happens in American politics. It is a consistent exercise in humility. It is. Well, but even beyond that, you and I both grew up in a period that was, I think, reasonably described as a kind of timeout period.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right. So, well, two things. One is that, yes, you are describing the story of both Judaism and Christianity's engagement with history and fallen human nature.
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And this is something that is, in fact, advertised in both the Old Testament and the New Testament and all of history since, is that the story of the Jewish people in the Old Testament is not a story of people who were chosen by God and given a bunch of commandments and then obeyed them all. It's a story of people who remained the chosen people despite failing in every possible way, including
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
to fit our conversation, repeated flirtations with heathenism and paganism and idolatry. And then you can obviously tell a similar story, you know, the New Testament, Christians don't have political power, but the apostles are always screwing up and messing up. And then, of course, the history of Christianity's entanglement with political power is filled with sins and failings that, again, like...
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
This era's set are, you know, are sort of not atypical, I guess. But then the second point that I want to push you on is like, what kind of argument is this that you think you're going to win with religious believers who disagree with you? You're like, well, I don't believe in your religion. But I really wish that you would follow your religion so that your politics were more aligned with mine.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Like, that's just not much of an argument at all. And to the extent that all of liberalism, the ideology that you subscribe to, trades on inherited ideas from Christianity about morality and equality and so on, while you've jettisoned the portrait of the universe, the metaphysical structure that gives them meaning.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think it's really hard from that point of view for you to get anywhere in arguments with people who still believe in that structure because you're essentially saying, I've stripped away the conceptual framework that makes your moral ideas make sense, but now I'm going to complain that you're not living up to your moral ideas. I just think that's a really weak argument.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Oh, but I'm not arguing it. Well, you're saying it to me. I'm right here.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You're arguing. You're expressing sorrowful disappointment that Christians are not living up to a worldview that you think is false. Well, I think parts of it are.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Ezra, does anything about our long relationship suggest that you could possibly offend me? I've known you long enough to know when you're getting a bit heated. That's totally different. Heatedness, I mean, as I was saying, the New Testament is filled with heated encounters.
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Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self-interested conquest of various kinds and so on.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
from grand historical dramas. It was not the end of history in the totalizing sense, but the kind of Francis Fukuyama view of the post-Cold War era as one that had a certain kind of predictability and order and stability. History felt under control. History felt under control, right? And the reality is that much of human history is just not under control in that way.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety. So if you look at something like, to take the most famous example maybe, the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
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In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, you can find plenty of terrible crimes that you, Ezra Klein, would say, well, you know, what good is your religion if your civilization commits these kind of crimes?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But from the very beginning, in Spain itself, in the heart of super Catholic, like, you know, counter-Reformation era Spain, there's an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high-level philosophical theological debate that
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that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique and leads to, at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain and ultimately
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
builds out and influences everything from the anti-slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that's ultimately successful down to contemporary ideas about human rights and international law that, again, today's secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture. All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
historical temptation and constant sinfulness to sort of generate from within the resources of their religion and i think you know if you take the trump administration for instance it's not as though you cannot find christian critiques of trump administration cruelty they just are not at the moment the primary thing i would expect i mean we'll find out right we're
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
three months into a kind of shock and awe administration. And people have been sort of, I think people have been sort of baffled and surprised by some of the turns that things have taken. But certainly people I take seriously within conservative Christianity have spoken out against things like the cuts to humanitarian aid or anything like that.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But again, I completely agree with you that history supplies constant tests of what your religion is for. And there's no end until the end to the testing. And sometimes you succeed. More often you fail, but hopefully you do something that has good effects down the road. And sometimes you fail entirely, and then maybe God... sifts you and finds you wanting. I'm not kidding here, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
This is actually like, it is important to see every moment as a potential moral test that you might well be failing. I'm a conservative Christian, you could say. I'm a member of the Christian right for your purposes, right? As Christianity has weakened in American life, a really hard question has become like, who is the most dangerous of your different enemies?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Or who is most threatening to the Christian view of the good society? Is it a woke progressivism that wants to, again, this would just be the narrative, right? I think it has, you know, wants to abolish basic ideas about differences between the sexes. It supports, you know, abortion at any stage in pregnancy.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
That's hostile to the basic religious liberties of Christians, again, from the conservative Christian point of view. Is it Donald Trump's populism with its heathen cruelties? Is it transhumanism? Like, is the final boss of this era that religious believers will have to confront actually Silicon Valley? And if it is, like, can you make alliances within Silicon Valley?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And there are forces that move through history, generally forces that move through history that are sort of hard to predict and assess. But I do think often they are connected to specific personalities. And there is some kind of marriage between particular personalities and particular moments.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Is it better to be with Elon Musk and his 117 children than to be with some other people involved?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It's pushing transhumanism forward very fast, if it can. Well, but there's also different transhumanisms, like, which, you know, what... Anyway, all I'm... No, these are actually... These are things that I, myself, am profoundly uncertain about in this moment. Like, what is the greatest danger from a Christian perspective to the future of the human race? I'm not entirely sure.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, one can use the word materialist in different ways. Sure.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I mean the view that all of existence, life, the universe, and everything is finally reducible to matter in motion. That matter is primary and mind is secondary rather than the other way around. I don't mean materialism in terms of Madonna's material girl or something like that, although the two can be connected.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So one of the various arguments in my book is that disenchantment is fake, fundamentally. The idea that you can enter a secular age where once upon a time people had wild religious experiences, but now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity and all of those are off the table, that just doesn't describe reality.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
mystical experience religious experience it's not just the impulse like i think secular liberals are very comfortable saying oh well there's always a religious impulse but it's more than that it's that people have encounters with god whatever god may be some kind of higher reality that enters them and transforms them and gives them visions and gives them intense experiences or maybe they have them on the verge of death and come back to tell about them you know this is just a feature of human life it's a very profound and important feature of human life
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And the idea of a man of destiny, a great man of history, is a useful way of thinking about that when it happens, as I think it has happened with Donald Trump, the rise of populism, the crackup of the liberal order, and so on. The reason I laughed at the outset is that it's important to stress that someone can be a man of destiny and be bad.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Maybe it can be explained in non-religious terms. Maybe there's some reductive explanation, but there isn't a good one on offer right now. And so the persistence of that means that religion always regenerates itself because even under conditions where almost nobody is committed to a particular church or creed, people are going to go on having, you know, dramatic encounters, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Like someone like, you know, Barbara Ehrenreich, who's famous. I had her on for this book. Right, famous left liberal writer, wrote a whole book called- And a famous atheist. Yes, famous atheist called Living with a Wild God, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And it was just a book about a very secular person who had a lot of religious experiences, like experiences that if you went and read William James or read like a medieval Catholic mystic or something would be totally familiar. And she, you know, didn't have sort of a framework, a conceptual framework to fully process them and wrote a great book, really interesting book about it.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right. So this is Michael Shermer, who is one of the more famous professional skeptical debunkers of religious claims, supernatural things, and so on. And in one of his books, but he's told this story several times to his great credit, he was getting married and his wife had, I'm going to butcher this slightly, but had a great uncle named
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
who had been very close to her and was the kind of person who would have given her away at the wedding, but had passed away. So she was feeling sort of lonely and isolated, and they had a radio that had come from him. And the radio was broken, didn't work, had never worked. Shermer had tried to fix it. It just didn't work. It was broken, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And at the end of the wedding, during the reception, they heard music from the back of the house and went back into a back room, and there was the radio playing a love song. And I think it like transitioned from that to some kind of classical music for the late later in the evening and then shut off and never worked again.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And this experience, you know, affected Schirmer again to his credit, right? It was like evidence against interest. And I think, again, you have to sort of trust, as always with these stories, right, you have to sort of trust his general reliability and so on, that it wasn't just that, like, there was a battery that was jiggled or something.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The radio really didn't work and really never worked again. There really was no obvious material way that this could have happened. Shermer, in the end, works out a theory of the multiverse where in some different timeline, much like in the movie Interstellar, His wife's great uncle is capable of accessing our timeline. And to Shermer, this is sort of an escape from like supernatural explanations.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But one reason to just tell that story is that, as I think you know, because I was joking about your show being the epitome of secularization, the apogee, whatever, people have experiences like this all the time. This is why I'm not a materialist. Right. This is a very commonplace kind of experience. Not super commonplace. You're not going to have one tomorrow, probably.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But like this stuff just is part of the warp and woof of reality. And so to finally long-windedly answer your original question, I think what happens in conditions when you have weak institutional religions and a secular expert class that is not militantly atheistic, but sort of says, you know, officially these things don't happen, is that people feel like they can't really go all the way up to
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Someone can be a great man of history and be worth opposing. You can look back at Napoleon and say, man, he was sort of above and beyond in terms of historical forces and also root for Wellington at Waterloo. That's okay.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
the creator god, Yahweh, Jehovah, outside of time and space. And they start looking for sort of intermediate powers to become a kind of locus for their own spiritual impulses. You know, stuff with psychedelics, stuff with literal paganism, including stuff on the right.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And then the interesting zone, in a way, is AI, which is the place where sort of scientific ideas meet a kind of, you know, slightly... supernaturalist sense of like the machine God as this power that is into which we are going to commend ourselves. But yeah, and I think that tendency, and this is what Christians would say, but that tendency is bad.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It's not that secondary spiritual powers don't exist in the universe. There are, in fact, angels and demons and things like that, saints and other powers, perhaps more mysterious still. But not all those powers have human good in mind, and it's better to approach them through one of the big old traditional religions that tries to subject them to a kind of higher ordering.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Let me hold you there, because we'll get to this.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, a couple things. So first of all, I don't think that the case for not being a materialist is a case for sort of total unruliness. To the contrary, I think part of the case for not being a materialist is precisely the order of of the universe.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
One of the problems that materialism has, that you sort of gestured at, is accounting for the specific ways in which the universe is ordered, the beauty and precision and symmetry involved, and also, as far as we can tell, the extreme unlikeliness that this particular order would be selected for unless Whoever selected it were interested in listening to lots of podcasts.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, you know, creating planets, stars, and conscious beings. So you have the religious argument is an argument for overarching structure. And then the ways in which it is weird are not themselves entirely random. Like there are patterns in spiritual experience. There's no sort of predictability to it overall, right? But the kinds of experiences that people have have a certain kind of consistency.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You can track different kinds of spiritual experiences across different cultures. You can track them in near-death experiences. You can track them in terms of, like, studies of what appear to be miraculous healings and so on.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And, again, there just seems to be a way in which you have this overarching order, you have some sort of mysterious relationship between our consciousness and that overarching order, and then you have a lot of religious experiences that seem like higher forces trying to be in touch with us and have some kind of relationship with us.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
That's the basic picture that, again, most of the big religions offer, allowing for all their differences. Buddhism and Christianity have pretty substantial differences, but they each describe a universe that's generally like that.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Arguably, from your premises, you should probably be Hindu.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think that it is very hard to go through the kind of drama that Trump himself personally went through in... We can go back further, but let's just say the world that ran from January 6th through his return to power. And if you're on his side through that story, not come away with the feeling that you were sort of moving with the wave of history. For people in Trump's circle, this sense of...
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think that there's a balance that you have to strike in looking for a particular religious tradition as opposed to just being a kind of open-ended seeker. And you want, I think, a religious tradition that has a set of sort of core views that make sense of a lot of what you've described.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
and also a certain degree of flexibility and uncertainty about some of the things that don't fit into exactly its world picture. But yeah, the wide array of religious experiences, the data on its own would make you a kind of, like the term I use in the book is perennialist, right? This is the theory that all the great religions encode some of the truth about reality.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You kind of can't go wrong, right? with any of them, as long as they're big enough and old enough, but none of them are like the fieffulness of truth. I would say, though, just as a Roman Catholic, that Roman Catholicism, again, one of the things that I appreciate about it is that it has a certain kind of supernatural Not in terms of all its formal doctrines.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It's not like you open up the Catechism of the Catholic Church and they're like, well, here's what we think about aliens. I mean, it's in there. It's on. But the pages are taped.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
In the Vatican, there is some stuff about that stuff. But, you know, if you look at actual the history of Catholic cultures, for instance, in terms of like the afterlife, right, zones like purgatory and limbo and so on. have some kind of connection to people's arguments about ghosts and hauntings and that form of the supernatural.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Catholic cultures have always been pretty hospitable to ideas about fairies. I don't know how I've ended up on Nice New York Times podcast talking about the good people, but... the idea of sort of like there are angels and demons and then there are these sort of weird like trickster beings. If you ask me to like make a case for Catholicism's capaciousness, I could make that case.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But then the other thing is, and this is, I'm curious what you think about this, right? Is that one of the things I argue in the book, it's not an approvable assertion, right? But it's the idea that if there is this overall belief structure and order to the universe.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And if there seem to be sort of higher powers interested in talking to human beings, then maybe you should assume that like God is not out to trick you. The universe is not a trick. Like, it's not actually presenting you with this sort of impossible open-ended question. It's basically, there's a certain number of big religions. They've stood the test of time.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
They've had a pretty powerful shaping influence on human history. Why wouldn't you go in for one of them rather than saying, you know, in good California style, like I just have to remain perfectly open. I think that if you can accept that the universe might have been created with us in mind, then you should give deference. So I want to say that I loved the book.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It doesn't matter what the polls say or the naysayers say. Certainly doesn't matter what squishy New York Times conservatives say, right? They saw the bottom. Trump was disgraced and ruined and persecuted, and he was going to be sent to jail.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You know that as well. Right. I guess—see, I think you're making actually precisely the case for, in different ways, both Judaism and Christianity as probably divinely founded, which is to say these religions have survived and persisted across centuries. multiple different kinds of cultures, multiple different kinds of regimes in each era, exactly as you say.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Elements of these religions have made compromises, have intertwined themselves in profound ways, right? Like, you couldn't get more intertwined than medieval Catholicism and medieval feudalism. And I think if you are a secular historian looking at that intertwinement, you'd say probably whenever feudalism breaks up, Christianity is going to go away too. Or Judaism, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Judaism is a, you know, religion of temple prayer, religion that's centered on the temple and the Holy of Holies and everything else. You look at that as a secular historian, you're like, well, obviously, you know, if some empire, we'll call it the Romans, comes along and destroys that, then, you know, Judaism is going to disappear too. That's not what happens.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And then the next thing you know, assassins' bullets were missing him by a hair's breadth, and he was making this incredible, unprecedented historical comeback. And having lived through that, I think it's hard to be swayed by people saying, hey, guys, you know, your poll numbers are not looking so great. You know, this tariff rollout, not that well thought out.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Instead, you have these periods of intertwinement that are then shattered in some way. And in each case, I mean, the first thing to say is that the radicalism that you describe persists in those eras as well. And again, to go back to the point I was making earlier, this is something the religions themselves advertise.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, right, is a story where the Jews are failing your tests, the tests that you, Ezra Klein, are setting. You're like, well, if this religion was really from God, they probably wouldn't all become idolaters. And they're like, Ezra, here's our holy book. It's all about how we became idolaters. But guess what?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Then God did something new and people did something new and the story changed. And I mean, I just think what you're offering, I think you think it's, I don't want to, I think, yeah, I think you think you're setting God free a bit from what you see as the corruptions of Trump era Christianity or medieval Inquisition era Christianity. And you're like, no, God is bigger than that. Therefore, no.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
A religion that is always getting entangled with worldly power, that can't be where God is. But what you end up with is a council of despair where you're like, well, the only religion that would be worthy of God is one that would be exterminated within like 50 years of its founding by the cruel state. You're ending up saying that a religion good enough to join could not exist on the earth.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I'm not trying to be too aggressive, Ezra. I think that, as you know from reading the book, I think that the intuition that a lot of modern people have about that even if you can see that materialism is too limited, there is just this fundamental unknowability hanging over everything. I think that intuition is mistaken. I think it is correct about certain ideas
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
aspects of religion i think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved i'm not here to tell you i've resolved the problem of evil problem of evil is a real problem it's a real issue again i think it's an issue that's sort of there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the old and new testament but i don't think you're going to sit down and just reason your way into a solution to that problem i do think though that you can get a little bit further like just even in the example
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that you cited. I don't know what your sort of metaphysical perspectives as a kid were, but I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins, right, and believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
What are the implications of, you know, sending people to El Salvador without due process? Like, those are sort of normal, quotidian-sounding objections to administration policy. And I think at least for some people... caught up in the Trump phenomenon, they just seem sort of incommensurate to the reality that you're like riding a historical wave.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I just think it is, in fact, more probable than not that after you die, you will meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life and so on. And that's not inherently comforting.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But I think it is—that's quite terrifying. But I think that it is something that is— reasonable to believe that should give you a little bit more than just a sense of mystery. And more than that, I think it is what God himself in his infinite mystery and power wants you to believe, which is why he has me here. talking to you. Heaven sent. I've often thought of you in my life as heaven sent, Ross.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, I don't think you should take on faith that the major world religions are providential. And I think you could imagine yourself, if you lived in a world where the dominant set of religions all practiced human sacrifice, and, you know, I mean, you can imagine that kind of situation. I think the case for taking the big religion seriously, therefore, you've push me on this effectively.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, can't just rest on their size and scale alone. You do also have to think that in the aggregate, they've had what you as someone who has, you know, particular moral intuitions given by God, one hopes at some level. have had a positive impact on the world and shaped it in positive ways. And also that they have, and this is also sort of important to my argument, that they do have real overlaps.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think that they do. I think the major world religions, if you look at them just and sort of analyze the ethical perspective of the major world religions, you do see a certain kind of overlap. It is not enough to say these things are big and present and you have to take it on faith that they're where God wants you to be.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
You do also have to actually look at them and pass some kind of judgment on them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
One of the other arguments you make is that the organized— We should call them the good—you don't want to attract too much of their attention, so why don't you call them the good people?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Openness to the occult is not what I want to advertise. That's not how you want to talk about it? Well, I mean, the reality is that, like, you know, in the book, as you know, I have an entire chapter on sort of supernatural experience and weirdness. And I actually debated with myself how much to write about things that are explicitly demonic. Catholicism obviously has its special...
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
focus on this through the Office of the Exorcist. There's lots of literature on the demonic and demonic possession. And I ended up feeling quite uncomfortable writing about it too much. And so there's a couple paragraphs and some footnotes and people who are interested in it can follow that material. But there is a kind of, yeah, there's a kind of
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
balance that you want to strike as just an observer or a writer between sort of acknowledging those kind of weirder and darker and more disturbing realities, but not like focusing too much attention on them. And maybe the joke, or is it about saying the good people, right, is sort of part of that, part of that, hey, now, part of that perspective is
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But I mean, this is one thing I'm absolutely certain about is that if there is a realm of supernatural experience that is real, that is not just your brain chemistry, you can access it maybe through altering your brain chemistry and taking ayahuasca and whatever. But if that reality is real, it is 100% dangerous. dangerous.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I don't mean like every aspect of it is dangerous, but I mean it is certainly dangerous. There are dangers within it. There are serious dangers within it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So I have never taken psychedelics. I've never been at an ayahuasca retreat. This is entirely based on reading and conversations. My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with non-human spiritual entities and that they do so in a way that is different from other forms of spiritual experience in that, again, not in every case, but it can be sort of a shortcut.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
but that shortcut means that you're entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions, but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon, right, or wherever they use it, would say is necessary for these kind of encounters.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And there's, you know, a Twitter joke or a social media joke, right, about, you know, getting one-shotted by a six-dimensional Mesoamerican demon or something like that that
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
people make about these kind of drugs and that's a joke but I don't think it's entirely a joke and so yeah I think that that possibility is real and it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can't take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just sort of convince them that there's more to reality than just the material and That is a correct view.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So in that sense, the drugs teach you something real about the world. But it can be like anything in human life. And one of the points I try and stress is that religion is not like out there in some compartment where it's totally different from every other thing and you can't argue about it the way you argue about other things and so on.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, like in other aspects of human life, dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural. There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities, and you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for. But I haven't done it, and you have, or have you? Say what? Have you? Yes.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So you have, you know, immediate information that I may not have. But, you know, one could argue that,
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
doing those kind of drugs and coming back from it, not with a sense that you've been possessed by a Mesoamerican demon, but coming back with a sense that, man, there's more to the universe than I thought, but I can never possibly figure out the truth, also could be a deception that has been imposed upon you.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Can you give me a bit more? No.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I've done a lot of these conversations, right? And this is not the first time. when someone in a conversation who is officially sort of a mysterian, as you are, has said, oh, but by the way, I did have that one experience where it did sound like God was talking to me. I've had a few conversations like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But why, I guess, why isn't that, so again, without like over-describing your own experience to you, Like, why isn't that enough to say, okay, the God of my fathers in some way gave me a glimpse of what, you know, why we're Jews and not Mysterians. And I'm just going to go to my—I mean, you need to pick a politically appropriate synagogue and so on, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And there are all kinds of issues with that. But I'm just going to go—I'm going to go to synagogue even if I don't feel— Gnosis? Like, I mean, I don't feel gnosis from Sunday Mass with my oversupply of children, right? I mean, occasionally, maybe— You seem more comfortable with that than I am. Yeah, a lot—well, this is an interesting psychological thing that I've found in these discussions.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think part of it is— having been around other people who had spiritual experiences, right, and sort of observed them and therefore accepted that, like, okay, some people have profound experiences. I don't. Maybe I would if I took ayahuasca, but it's okay for me to be a person who isn't getting gnosis all the time but is, like... I feel good at Mass, not always, but most of the time.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But it just seems to me that, like, you know, when you're called before the throne of, you know, the Most High, and the cherubim and seraphim are there, and you're like, well, I wanted some gnosis, and God is like, I gave you gnosis. I gave you the big dose, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, that's fair. And honestly, we had, I mean, as a kid, we had experiences like that in my own family where my parents, especially my mother, we were Episcopalian, which is, you know, a very anti-mystical part of Christianity overall. And my mother had these intense experiences in a context of like charismatic healing services. And then we wanted a church to go to.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And it was hard to find, starting in mainline Protestantism, a church where it seemed like the thing that she had encountered was also there in some way. And I think in the end, you know, we went through a lot of places and ended up as Catholics in part because I do think Catholicism does a good job of saying, look, we're not expecting the Holy Spirit to descend constantly all the time.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
We have, you know, it's a ritual religion and the sacraments work whether or not you're feeling a blast of God's presence, but it is a reasonable desire to feel like the encounter you have has some relationship to what is being done on the altar or done in the rituals. I think that's completely understandable.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, I think there's also a way in which the kind of mystic drama of his return to power is also sort of projected back onto his first term, where The experience of Trump's first term, not just for liberals and Democrats, but for a lot of Republicans, was obviously sort of chaotic and bizarre and difficult and so on.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, I think that's a fair question. And I think one answer is that they, like all things that operate in reality, from a Christian perspective, they must have some providential expression. And the Catholic view basically is that you're not supposed to try and commune with spirits
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
speak to the dead in certain ways like you shouldn't go to a seance like there's a certain set of supernatural experiences that catholics are not supposed to seek out and there's some biblical warrant for this and there's sort of the the explicit teaching teaching of the church and the simplest way to express why that is maybe is to say that the church thinks there's a certain set of things that we know god is present in
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And then there's a certain set of things that are just like opening doors. And God and his providence can certainly be there when you open the door, but we don't have any kind of guarantee of that. And by opening the door, you are opening yourself in a way that is fundamentally unsafe. Now, again, does that mean that someone can't come to God by taking a psychedelic?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, absolutely someone can under this theory. But for the church itself or for Christians in general, there is a sense, I think, that like, well, once you are in, then you aren't supposed to go looking in those places anymore because we just don't know what the potential dangers are there.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But there were ways in which the results of that term were better than people anticipated. I think certainly they were better than I anticipated. I expected, as like a columnist observer, economic crisis and foreign policy crisis to sort of define Trump's first four years in office. And prior to COVID, they didn't. The economy was in good shape.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right, and to be clear, I don't think... that one should ever rest the case for the existence of God or the supernatural on psychedelic experiences alone, anything like that.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think what one should take seriously is the fact that clearly our minds exist in a dynamic relationship to our bodies and to physical reality. And religious experience, again, to take the Barbara Ehrenreich example, there is the kind of religious experience that falls on people unbidden. In some way. And I have seen this happen.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think it's a little bit hard to tell a brain chemistry story where it's like, why do human beings suddenly have this God apprehension thing that just sort of turns on? Like, where did this apprehension device come from? All our other apprehension devices are evolved to meet some sort of actual reality.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But we do. Yes, but religious experience and spiritual experience are at the very least in a distinct category from mental illness in that people who have religious experiences are very often entirely sane and entirely aware of the strangeness of the experience they've had and so on. Again, which doesn't, I take your point about the Oliver Sacks stuff, like you could just say, okay, well,
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
people's brains can misfire in this way and it yields mental illness and they misfire in that way and they think they're encountering the numinous or something like that. I don't think that's an impossible view to hold. All I'm saying is that the religious world pictures already takes it for granted
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that your body, the physicality of your body, has some kind of connection to your apprehension of the divine. And most of the time, you are not supposed to be apprehending the divine. And this goes to your, you know, to go back to your vision, right? The idea that, like, religion is a scaffolding. Okay, like, reality itself is kind of... The Silicon Valley guys would say it's a simulation, right?
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Okay, well, it's a world that you're supposed to be in. You're supposed to be in this world. Whatever God is up to doesn't work if we're not in this world most of the time. And having a spiritual experience is getting our mind a little bit out of this material world. But it's not the way things are supposed to work all the time. We're here as material embodied creatures for a reason.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think you can make a case that his foreign policy in the first term worked better than Biden's. You can make a strong case, actually, that it worked better than Biden's foreign policy.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But yeah, I don't think there's anything...
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yeah, that's just the idea that whatever the mind or soul or consciousness is, is capable of this much wider apprehension of reality, including divine realities, whatever those may be, that aren't really fully compatible with being an embodied creature in the world. And so to be an embodied creature in the world...
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
your mind's capacities and experiences need to be reduced, funneled down to the sensory inputs being processed by your eyes and nose and mouth and ears. And so that's why when you have moments when you shake up the brain, when you put the brain in extreme circumstances via fasting and these kind of things, or when you reach the threshold of death,
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
the mind's experience doesn't actually seem to contract. It seems to expand. And one of the challenges in explaining something like near-death experiences from the materialist perspective is that they are described not as fragmentary hallucinations, dreamlike experiences, random, chaotic. They are described as more real than real, incredibly intense. They carry back into people's
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think what's happened now is that not just people around him in the White House, but also congressional Republicans, people who, you know, would have doubts about the tariffs and so on, have sort of combined the mystical drama of
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
post near death experience lives. They cause big changes to people's near death experience lives. And it really is a little bit hard to tell an evolutionary just so story about why the brain is wired for some Darwinian reason to generate its most intense experiences at a time when for most people, you're just going to die. You talk in the book about something you call official knowledge.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Official knowledge is the knowledge about the world that is considered normal and respectable in publications like the New York Times, Ivy League universities, most Wikipedia entries. You can find very strange things on Wikipedia. You can, but to their credit, in a certain way, the editors of Wikipedia try to impose some of the same assumptions
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
about the world that are shared by most of the formal institutions of knowledge creation out there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
with the surprisingly successful first-term record, put them together and said, it's both that Trump has some sort of mystic intuition about what to do, and it's also that we doubted him before, but it all worked out okay. Now, obviously, the problem with that is that
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yes. No, I mean, that is the feeling that you have, right? And so I had, still have to some degree, but I'm much better, a chronic illness that is not officially recognized by the Centers for Disease Control. And indeed, to say that you have the chronic form of Lyme disease is to identify yourself in some way with... just the world of everyone from RFK Jr.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
to, you know, holistic wellness practitioners, and so on, a whole world that is held in severe disrepute by official knowledge, official medical knowledge. You say kind of pointing at me. Pointing... No, no, no. I mean, I think at the, you know, this conversation has been the most serious blow to official knowledge since... No, I don't know. Yeah, and so that obviously... Like, I really was sick.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I really did get better using a combination of really strong antibiotics and other stranger things that are not recommended by the CDC. But it really did work, and I am morally certain both that chronic Lyme disease absolutely exists and the CDC's recommendations are absolutely wrong. So then the challenge is you've seen that the pillar of official truth has a hole in it.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
How many holes does that mean that there are? And something that I have very self-consciously tried to do in my own thinking about this, and this applies to arguments about religion and religious belief as well, is to not assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, it's wrong about everything. That seems like a big mistake. And two, not to assume that
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
because official knowledge is wrong about one thing, one important thing that really affected my life, that all evidentiary standards should be thrown out or anything like that. But that's clearly a really hard psychological balance to strike. I think you just see this. I saw it myself.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I spent a lot of time in worlds of chronic illness and alternative medicine, and people just, for totally understandable reasons, became full spectrum skeptics about anything the government said, anything that the American Medical Association said. It was just, if they're wrong about my illness and my experience, they must be wrong about The pull of that is incredibly strong.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And in the case of religion, right? Like, I think one of the things, understandably, that nice, secular, agnostic people fear about going too far with, like, my arguments is that the next thing you know, we're going to be... throwing out all of modern science and progress and locking up Galileo and so on, all of these things. And I don't want to say that that's not a legitimate fear.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
One of the reasons it worked out okay was precisely that there were a bunch of people in the White House the first time around who didn't have a mystical sense of Trump's perspective or his goals or anything like that. And that is, I think, very clearly what is missing this time around. There are people in the White House who could play that role.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
There clearly are ways in which religious belief and religious doctrine can end up being an impediment to finding out what is true about the world. I'm interested in what is true about the world in the end. That is my goal. And your goal, right? Hopefully, right? All of our goal as journalists is to figure out what is true about the world.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And I think, to my mind, very clearly, certain things are true about the world that have to do with God and the possibility of the supernatural that are not encompassed by current official knowledge. And I think the modern liberal project is correct that there are just limits to the kind of certainty you can have and how that certainty should cash out. Certainly, in politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So there is a balance. And yeah, anytime you're trying to correct an official consensus, you are looking for a balance where the correction doesn't become an overcorrection.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
No, no, I absolutely do. Although, yeah, I mean, I would, on your last point. Yes, you would. Well, I would push harder on, I think one reason that Donald Trump is president again is precisely that the party of official knowledge is, seem to do a lot of really crazy things and that made people more sympathetic to the party of outsider knowledge.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But look, now the party of outsider knowledge is in power.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think a lot of people expected Scott Besant, the Secretary of the Treasury, or Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, to play the the kind of role that Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and H.R. McMaster played in the first term. But no one is actually playing that role as far as anyone can sort of see.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Yes. And I think one of my disappointments about the Trump administration in the first three months is just how pure and uncut its outsiderism seems to be. And, you know, I think it was an open question when Trump was reelected. Would RFK Jr. be running HHS or would he be running the president's counsel on making America healthy again? Right. And
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
We got the timeline where he's running HHS, and you can multiply examples. And I think in many of those examples, you can see a version of the problem that I identified to you just now, which is that you can see it in the trade and tariffs debate, this assumption that the experts got something big wrong, and therefore, Peter Navarro should make trade policy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The second does not follow from the first. The huge challenge for conservatism, right now, is to figure out how you generate some kind of stability of actual expertise in a party that is now temperamentally completely anti-establishment, populist, and so on.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I think there was a hope that the sort of Silicon Valley faction that migrated into the Republican camp, in part in reaction to some of the failures of expertise that you just acknowledged, would sort of play a version of that role. And I think definitely Elon Musk has not played a version of that role to date.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So the Republican Party is a party in search of a stable system of official knowledge generation besides whatever Donald Trump decides, right? And it doesn't have one at the moment for the foreseeable future.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
So I'm going to give three books on religion that connect to my attempt to sort of shift what official knowledge or the official knowledge of New York Times podcast listeners think about religion. The first one is a book called from about 20 years ago by a physicist named Stephen Barr called Ancient Physics and Modern Faith.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
that is, I think, despite being a little bit dated, is still really the best overall survey of sort of where arguments in modern physics that relate to religion stand and how a reasonable person might think about it. It's not a dogmatic book. It's a very open-minded and interesting book. So that's book one. Since we were talking about near-death experiences,
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And so in an odd way, the very success of sort of Trump as man of destiny is unmaking the conditions that made his first term a success. But that is itself a dramatic arc. You know, if you're writing the novel of the story of sort of hubris and nemesis, that would be a characteristic way that hubris and nemesis would manifest themselves.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
There's a million books about near-death experiences, many of them bad. I think people who are interested in this subject, interested in the conversation, one recommendation would be a book called After by Bruce Grayson, who's a, I think, psychiatrist or neuroscientist from the University of Virginia, who just has a good overview, I would say, from a perspective of a practicing physician.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
of why people take these strange stories seriously and why it might unsettle a materialist worldview.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
And the third book, I mean, honestly, Ezra, since you've, you know, maybe this is unnecessary since you conceded so much ground to the Mysterians, but I think a final book that's useful to people who listen to this show and are like, what are these two guys smoking talking about consciousness like this is a book that was very controversial in the philosophical community when it came out.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But a book called Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel, who's a famous philosopher, not religious, but arguing for the fundamental limits and problems with a materialist framework on the world. And it is a very short book. book, which is why I don't hesitate to recommend it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
A lot of books about consciousness are not short, but this one I think you can read and get a sense of why intelligent people might at least be inclined towards an Ezra Klein-style mysterianism, if not quite towards the militant Catholicism of Ross Douthat. Ross, I enjoyed it a ton. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it as well, Ezra. Thank you so much.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Right. Well, I mean, I think a mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person's side directly. But in fact, if you read, let's say, the Old Testament, there's all kinds of moments when God
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world or to move history or the drama, the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms, in a particular direction. But it doesn't mean that the instrument that God is working through is in fact the Messiah or the chosen one. If God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked kings of Israel,
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
It doesn't mean that you're supposed to necessarily say, oh, hail Nebuchadnezzar. You know, you are the chosen one. Sometimes I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he's a man of destiny and therefore he is bringing about in some weird way that we didn't see coming the new American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people on the center right think.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he's a great man of history who's unlocking some sort of change that was necessary, but bringing chaos in order to do it. I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence, this idea that the West, the developed world, was sort of stuck in these kind of cycles and needed to break out somehow.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
But the reality is you often can't break out of decadence without decadence. a big, big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess. Doesn't mean he's a good person. Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. All are punished, as Shakespeare said. I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon.
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Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I remember it, but the League of Shadows, right? Destroying Gotham.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
Well, and I've carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue, I guess. And one is with people on the right who have a sort of League of Shadows view of the overall situation, right? It's like things are so bad. that you might as well unleash chaos. You saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
People mostly on social media, real politicians don't say this, but people on social media who are like, fine, we need a 10-year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad and so on. And I've spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill, but I've also spent time disagreeing with
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
The kind of liberals and sometimes, you know, never Trump Republican critics of Trump who I feel like don't quite grasp why he's successful and what you need to do in response. Because I don't think he could be this successful if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix our problem.
The Ezra Klein Show
Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics
I mean, honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt. just sort of observing his comments a little bit. But I think of Trump as just sort of persistently as a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is a Christian figure, notwithstanding the attempts to sort of claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine, right?