MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Second terms are usually intellectually exhausted. And maybe if Trump had been reelected in 2020, that's how it would be. But he wasn't. And so between 2021 and 2025, the ferment driving MAGA's ideas deepened quite a bit. The nature of its coalition expanded quite a bit. How much does Trump himself care about this fight over ideas, these visions of the future? I'm not sure he does. But the people who are staffing his administration, both people at the top, but much more than that, the 20 and 30-somethings who actually do the work of presidencies, they do care. Ideas do matter. The intellectual cultures that form political parties, they matter.
James Pogue is a contributing writer at Times Opinion, and he's been covering the new right at Vanity Fair. And over the past few years, he has published piece after great piece on the MAGA intellectual scene and the various factions and ideas and people within it. And so I wanted to talk with him about the ideas that hold MAGA together, the factional fights that threaten to tear it apart, and whether any of this actually affects what President Donald Trump does or thinks. As always, my email is reclineshow at NYTimes.com. James Pogue, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
I'm so honored.
So you've been covering the new right for a while now. How would you describe the thing you've been covering? Is it a coalition? Is it a scene? What's the term for it?
It's a coalition now. I think what we have seen over the time that I've been paying attention to this stuff is which goes back to the first time I met J.D. Vance at a diner in our mutual hometown. At that point... I had never heard these words that are sort of the buzzwords of the whole movement. The regime, you know, elite replacement, this attempt to essentially, like, reshape not just American politics in the way that elections always do, but actually reshape the ruling oligarchy of the United States. I didn't know anything about this stuff. And now, you know, suddenly this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's often... Somewhat exaggeratedly, but often described as sort of the dark lord, intellectual godfather of this whole thing. Suddenly he's mainstream. And so we're seeing like a true political coalition having to navigate very, very big questions about how to keep themselves together.
Well, let's go back a couple of years. It's 2022. Donald Trump is not yet officially running for president again. He'll announce very, very late towards the end of that year. GD Vance is certainly not the vice presidential candidate. And you're covering these people. You're going to their parties. You're, you know, outside having your smokes with them. If I had asked you then what ideas bound them together, what would you have told me?
It would be... I mean, J.D. is the perfect person. J.D. is the sort of unifying figure within the coalition. He is for this intellectual wing, like, as they would say, their guy, which is a term that comes up a lot in these worlds. And what that means is not just he shares some politics with us. It means he's formed by the same forces as them, which is largely derived from Twitter and old neo-reactionary blogs and things like that. But so with J.D., You know, he had a conversion to a worldview that is, I would say, now pretty general amongst magospheres, but wasn't in 2022. He had a conversion towards a politics where he saw a global empire deriving from the imperial seat here in Washington, D.C., that was run by people who were actively engaging in politics detrimental to and plundering the wealth and essentially value systems of the people he came from.
And he describes them as my people in a way that, you know, when you hear it, you go, what is the subtext of that word? And you could sort of argue that J.D. Vance is, in the modern era, the first type of politician to use phrases like my people with the subtext of possibly that means... you know, Anglo-Saxons and Scots-Irish people living in middle America and building a politics around them.
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