Yuval Levin
speaker
343 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Jan
Yuval Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And a lot of Democrats voted for that bill because they were involved in negotiating it and they got some things they wanted in it. And at the end of the day, we call it Ronald Reagan's tax bill anyway because we remember our presidents for the legislative achievements that their leadership makes possible. And often that leadership is a kind of careful direction from a distance.
I think this gets at actually a very deep point about the lesson to be learned from Trump's first time around. I think the people around President Trump and Trump himself have come to the conclusion that what didn't work last time had to do with Trump being restrained. That where they failed was because they had kind of traditional Republicans in various places.
And their sense that they walked away with was when he was restrained, he didn't succeed. And if he could just be himself, he would do a lot better. I think that's exactly the wrong lesson to draw from the successes and failures of Trump's first time around. And that where he actually did well was where he pressed those traditional kind of Republicans and they pressed him.
And you ended up in a place where some of his distinctly populist approach was able to influence their more traditional conservative approach, and the result landed in a place that worked. I think that's what the tax bill looks like. That's what some of his foreign policy moves look like. But their sense is we just have to have a purer Trumpism.
And so this time around, the insistence on loyalty, on being part of the team, is really intense. You see that in their hiring. You see that in their senior appointments. They're really placing an enormous premium not on having the experience to run this department but on never saying no to Donald Trump.
I think they're going to pay a heavy price for that because nobody's always right and certainly Donald Trump's not always right. The sense that if I step up and say, I don't know, this one's not a good idea, that I'm going to be treated like a traitor and ultimately I'll be out of here is very bad for decision making in any institution, in any situation.
But it's certainly very bad in a presidential administration. So, for example, let's think again about the effects of the order to suspend all federal grants. Think about that guy who runs that Medicaid portal. And he's sitting there thinking, does this mean I should shut down Medicaid payments? That can't be right. That guy should call somebody and say, is this what it means?
I don't think that's a good idea. But if that guy thinks, well, they're just going to call me a wimp, they're going to call me a squish and fire me, then he's not going to do it. And you've lost the ability to administer well by hearing from people on the ground. I think that's going to repeat itself over and over in an administration that doesn't value hearing from outsiders.
And again, the assertion of strength creates weakness. And the sense that what's required to succeed is pushing people around isn't really how any good decision-making can work. It certainly isn't how our system can work. And I think it's going to create a lot of problems.
Republicanism is a very hard term for us to define now. A lot of what it used to mean has been taken over by other terms like democracy and liberalism. But the element of republicanism that's distinct to it is the element of ownership. How do we take ownership of a set of problems rather than who's going to show up and fix this problem for me?
And a citizenship that thinks that way is going to think about the kinds of leaders it selects in terms of the sorts of offices we're asking them to fill. And that means that we think about whether we should elect this person based on some judgment of whether this person can do this particular job. That means we need to know the Constitution a little bit. We need to know what the job is.
We need to know what we expect of them. I think Americans have generally been fairly good at this, but that it is a skill, a knack we've tended to lose. For the reason you pointed to earlier, which is we just think as partisans now. We think, is this guy on my team or not? Rather than, can this person really be president or not or a senator or not?
Yeah, I think it's absolutely central. Character is destiny. I think there's no getting away from character. And the basic reason, especially in the president, the basic reason is that every presidential administration ends up having the personality and character of the president. There is a way in which the Bush administration just had George Bush's personality.
The Obama administration had the kind of feel of Barack Obama at every level. And it's very hard to avoid that. That was certainly true of the Trump administration the first time around. The chaos, the impulsivity, the kind of gruffness was everywhere. It wasn't just him. And it will be again because there's no getting around that. You know, the presidency is a one-person branch of government.
And that means that ultimately the character of the president matters enormously. The character of Congress is a kind of average of 535 people. The character of the president is one person's character. And that means that we need in our presidents the kind of character that we want from the executive branch. This isn't an ideological thing.
There are conservative and progressive ways to have the right character to be our president. But it is really a matter of character. And so to my mind, look, there are a lot of things that the Trump administration did the first time and will do this time that I agree with as a matter of policy. But the fundamental problem of character cannot be gotten over. It is not ignorable.
And I think that it therefore is a permanent problem with Donald Trump being president. There's no way around it. I think that insight also goes to decision making.
I think this actually also gets to the character of presidential strength in an important way. And it was a problem for Biden and for Trump. A president is strong internally within the executive branch when the second tier political appointee knows what the president would do if he were in his job.
The president doesn't want to think about what the undersecretary for blah, blah, blah in the Department of Labor is thinking about that day. But that person needs to have a sense that if the president were in this room, I basically know what he would say. And if you don't have that sense, it's very, very hard to make those small decisions that are essential to the big things working.
I think both Trump and Biden had enormous trouble helping those people know what they would say. It wasn't that hard in the Obama years. It wasn't that hard in the Bush years. If you're sitting in some secondary office at HHS, and I had this experience myself in the Bush years, you kind of know if the president was here, he would go this way, not that way.
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