America's Next Story: Sarah Isgur

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:14I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. And this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union... Ask not what your country can do for you. ask what you can do for your country. America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you.

0:54My guest today is Sarah Isger, an editor at The Dispatch, the conservative news site. Once upon a time, Sarah was emblematic of the Republican Party. She led her law school's chapter of the Federalist Society, and she worked on both of Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns. In 2017, she joined the first Trump administration, until the president fired her. These days, Sarah doesn't really fit into the Republican Party. She's a small C conservative who's deeply worried about President Trump's overreach. This podcast series is about America's future direction. And I've already talked with several Democrats.

1:34as well as with a Trump-style conservative. I invited Sarah to join me so I could hear a vision for the country that is both conservative and fundamentally different from Trumpism. In the conversation that follows, Sarah unpacks her own mix of optimism and pessimism, and she urges Americans to spend less time on their phones and more time engaging in local politics.

2:03Sarah, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I always like to know how people came to the politics that they have. So what is the story of how you became a conservative originally? I grew up in a very conservative part of Texas where I was considered a raging liberal. This was back in like the Beanie Baby era. And I remember my friends getting me the donkey Beanie Baby from McDonald's. And I just accepted that, right? Like, I was the kid who complained about prayer before the orchestra concerts or a student who didn't want to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. And so that's how I went to college, thinking that I was, like, a crazy left-winger.

2:41Did you think of yourself as a left-winger or you thought of yourself as conservative but less conservative than your milieu? No, everyone told me I was a crazy left-winger and I was like, I must be. Like, I didn't come from a political family. I had no political reference. So I went to college in Chicago at Northwestern, and all of a sudden now, they were telling me I was a right-wing lunatic. And I was in a class with all liberal students. And what views marked you as a right-wing lunatic at Northwestern? So this was in the midst of the 2000 election, before the recount, like we're, you know, the fall of 2000.

3:19And it was all the things that were defining the Republican Party at that point, but probably most of all, am I kind of libertarian-ish, limited government? Why is the government telling me what to do? I mean, as you can probably tell, I really just didn't like people telling me what to do. Or maybe I just liked arguing with all the other students. My first campaign was John Cornyn's 2002 race down in Texas for Senate. When he was running for Senate. That was his first Senate race. Yeah. And it was a fun race. And so you eventually, I assume, get to the point where you think of yourself as a fairly standard Republican.

3:49Is that fair? You work for both of Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns. Yeah. You know, it's funny. You know, I have brown curly hair. I wear sort of funky clothes. You know, I eat tofu. So I never was a perfect Republican by any stretch. I didn't have the pearls and the Ann Taylor dresses. But that's what I think attracted me to Mitt Romney, is that he wasn't a Bush Republican, quote unquote, either. I think he always was a little bit on the outside as well. Yeah. In part because of his religion, in part because he came from Massachusetts. Yeah. And so in 2016, Donald Trump is elected and you decide to go into the Trump administration, not just the Trump administration, but you go to the Justice Department where you're working for Jeff Sessions.

4:34And let's start with what your diagnosis was of why was it that Donald Trump, taking a bunch of ideas that had been fringe in the party that kind of only Jeff Sessions talked about. How did you diagnose what was it that Trump and Sessions were offering that was different and more appealing to these voters that you thought you knew? There's a macro and a micro answer to that. I was running Carly Fiorina's campaign for the 2016 primary. And so I was seeing things super up close from a tactical level. So I'll answer the micro question first, which is an enormous, endless amount of earned media because he was a reality TV star.

5:18He had universal name ID and a lot of money. And just for our listeners who may not be familiar with the term earned media, it's basically the term that people like you and I use to describe essentially just free media coverage. CNN was putting Donald Trump on for hours on end. Remember the empty podiums that all of the cable news networks would show just waiting for Donald Trump to come out because that itself was compelling enough TV and also on this micro level, the Democratic Party wanted Donald Trump to be the nominee because they thought he would be easier to beat in the general election.

5:50That's the micro answer. The macro answer, I think, is more interesting in a lot of ways because Donald Trump, I think, is really the first candidate to come out of the 2008 financial crisis. You can't explain why Donald Trump wins without looking at the worldwide phenomenon of similar candidates winning in a lot of Western democracies. you have people really seethingly angry coming out of the 2008 financial crisis and the feeling that there are the haves and the have-nots, the gets-it and the left-behinds. And Donald Trump spoke to that in two ways. I think his policies, to some extent, especially on immigration, were important for that.

6:28But also there was simply an authenticity that he didn't sound like other politicians. He wasn't willing to play their games. he wasn't willing to say the things that the elites, that the haves wanted him to say, that was incredibly attractive to people. So I think it's both. It's the micro and the macro. Now, you had worked for figures who were very much not like Donald Trump, Mitt Romney and Carly Fiorina. I mean, some of my in-laws had her campaign stuff on their fridge. Aw, thanks. They didn't. There weren't that many of them in the end. So how did you think about your decision to go into the Trump administration?

7:06Because I imagine it wasn't just an obvious thing for you to do. I think that campaigns are very different than government service. Campaigns are about convincing voters that they should vote the way you are going to vote, and that this is the right person to represent them. Government is about serving the American people the best you can. They've made their choice. And it's a very different calculus to me. I'd worked in the Department of Justice several times, and it seemed like an important thing to do. Also, I remember my dad telling me, the presidency changes people. He's president of the United States now.

7:43It's just going to be different, and he needs the best people around him. You have a duty to serve. And then what happens? The presidency does change everyone, but maybe not the way you thought. So my first full day at the office This was the day that Attorney General Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. So, like, press conference on my first day and, like, one of the biggest press conferences of the entire administration, really. I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.

8:23Donald Trump still hasn't gotten over it. Definitely not. I'm on Kash Patel's list. Probably for that. Although he doesn't say why you're on the enemies list. I don't actually know for what that's worth. I mean, I think that's probably inherent to enemies lists, right? Which is that the people who keep them want a little vagueness. Yeah, yeah. It lets you move around a little. And how today do you judge President Trump's approach to government? And let's sort of separate it into two things. I'm guessing the first is going to be a longer list, But what are the parts of what he's doing that you just consider to be beyond the pale, inappropriate, regardless of what party someone comes from?

9:05You know what? A lot of them, though, fall into one more philosophical principled bucket, which is this idea that the president has the power to do things alone without Congress. We see this in executive orders. We see this in tariffs, in immigration. We saw this during the Biden administration. We saw it during the Obama administration. Trump, in that sense, isn't new, except he's just turned the volume up to 11 like he does with everything. And, I mean, this is a subtle difference, but I would argue he's turned up the volume so much that it is qualitatively different from what Biden and Obama did.

9:42Do you disagree with that? We spend so much time in law school on the difference in degree versus difference in kind. you're saying it's such a difference in degree it has become a difference in kind I don't know it's somewhere it's somewhere in there okay and so overall I think it's fair to think of you as a Trump critic I think that's fair yeah and so what is the essence of your Trump criticism that he's not a conservative I mean that's the essence right we no longer have a conservative party in the United States we have two parties that just differ in how they want to use the levers of government.

10:18And that's just, again, fundamentally, I'm a, you know, don't tell me what to do girl. And I don't have a political party anymore. The idea behind this series of conversations is to imagine what America's next story will be. And one of the things that we've heard from some listeners is, are we really going to have a next story? Or is this always going to be Donald Trump's story? And he flirts with the idea of talking about running for a third term, and then he says, no, I don't mean it. And my guess is he'll do this again, back and forth a few times. How do you think about him in terms of American democracy, setting aside his policy views?

10:56Do you worry that he's not going to leave office? Or do you think of him more like a very different but still normal president, maybe someone like Reagan or FDR, who really changes politics, but who doesn't fundamentally undermine American democracy? So it's interesting to think about our greatest presidents. Define that how you want to. But surely in the top of the, quote, greatest presidents list are going to be Lincoln, Jackson, Wilson, FDR, Fair, right? Right. Those have been the presidents that have presented the greatest challenges to our constitutional order. They have all, not coincidentally, particularly challenged the institution of the Supreme Court of the United States.

11:45And I don't think that's a coincidence that they're also considered our greatest presidents because they sort of did the most with the office of the presidency, which, of course, in our constitutional order is really, you know, we say it's co-equal branches. it's not. It's supposed to be Congress first. But those are the presidents that kind of shove Congress and the court out of the way to become famous on their own for that power. And I say all that because I am not sure that Donald Trump, when we really look back in 50 years, will feel like a difference in kind. I think he will feel like a difference in degree.

12:19That's not to say he's not going to change the constitutional order a bit. So did FDR. I mean, FDR massively did the entire administrative state that I think has really perverted our constitutional order, has created a fourth branch of government that's accountable to nobody, is FDR. And that's why you think it's perverted the constitutional order, because essentially we now have much of American government that doesn't answer to a duly elected president or a duly elected Congress. Right. I mean, how funny we spend all this time talking about the most important election of our lifetime and all these things a president's going to do.

12:52There's large swaths of the economy that he has no say over. Yeah. Because it's in these independent agencies. If I hate what the Securities and Exchange Commission's doing or the Federal Trade Commission or name your alphabet, what do I do about that? I can't go to Congress. I can't elect a different president. They're not accountable to anyone. And that just isn't the way a self-governing republic works. And I think that's important to note because while Donald Trump, I think, has been a hurricane against many of our institutions and some of them will topple from that, Some of them needed to be rebuilt.

13:27Some of the institutions in higher education or even in corporations, we may look back and say they are now better than they were before. Let me just push you on one part of that, which is I take the argument that maybe this alphabet soup of agencies should be more accountable and that actually it's not even clear whether that's better for Democrats or Republicans, for liberals or conservatives. It might be better for liberals. If you care about climate change, for instance, this every four years, we totally switch what we're doing on climate change. That's no way to run a railroad. You want that pressure back on Congress.

14:01Right. But the ways in which Donald Trump is trying to change government aren't simply about interesting intellectual conversations over how much power an independent agency should or shouldn't have. Oh, no, he has no idea what we're talking about. And not just that, but he's using the Justice Department to get indictments against people he doesn't like. He's using the power of the presidency to make probably hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and his family. Let's not forget the pardons. Let's not forget the pardons of people who violently attacked Congress on January 6th. And you and I could keep this list going.

14:35So I guess I'm just a little bit worried that sometimes when I talk to conservatives, even conservatives who are skeptical of Trump, we end up talking about the more reasonable parts of what he's doing. And it's a little bit like, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how is the play? Absolutely agree. It's just that those other parts aren't very interesting to talk about because, yeah, they're bad. What else is there to say? The DOJ stuff in particular, the sort of show me the man, I'll show you the crime aspect to this is really bad. And I just have to hope that the next president has a real plan for how to rebuild a Department of Justice with credibility that is not partisan.

15:20Though, worth noting, I have said this a lot, this whole like independent Department of Justice thing I think is absolute crap. It's not an independent agency. It shouldn't be independent of the president. Of course, the president should set priorities. But for instance, it is fine to me for a president to say mortgage fraud is derailing the real estate values of this country, and we are going to move resources, our limited federal resources, to go after mortgage fraud. And a very different thing to say, I hate Adam Schiff. Go find me some mortgage fraud on him. Very different. And one of those is an appropriate, not independent Department of Justice, and one of them is just obviously not okay.

16:02Yeah, one of them is small d Democratic. But you both, you just said, well, what else is there to say about Donald Trump's actions other than they're bad? I guess the question is, do they fundamentally undermine American government? And neither you nor I can predict the future, but you were just saying you think they're unlikely to do that. You think American democracy is likely to emerge from the Trump era looking, being changed, but looking fundamentally similar in some ways to what it was before. And I'm curious about how you square the circle in terms of what he's doing is terrible, but we're going to be okay.

16:38Which, by the way, I'd very much like to believe. Yeah, right? Wouldn't we all? I am heartened by the fact that America survived the Buchanan presidency. I mean, that's like the worst presidency, I think, in America. Which is all to say, we've had bad presidents. Wilson threw people in jail because they criticized him. Jefferson ignored the law. Jackson obviously had some really bad ideas. So there's very little that Trump is doing that I hate, that hasn't existed in some form or another from some previous president, where we don't look back on that and say that it was so altering, so ending, that we couldn't repair it.

17:19And again, there were plenty of things in the Obama administration's and Biden administration that got us to this point. As in like they, this sounds childish, they started it. They started at a much lesser level, but it's all been building on this. Joe Biden told social media platforms to take down speech he didn't like that he thought was critical of his administration's policies on COVID or the origins of COVID. So Donald Trump says take Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Neither of those are good. I mean, if there's one thing that I'm an absolutist on, it's free speech. Though that's probably the area that I'm most concerned on just because we see so many young people now, 33 percent, according to the latest FIRE survey of 65 ,000 college students, who think violence is an acceptable way to shut down speech.

18:08Well, that brings us really nicely to what I think is the core question that I have for you, which is, I do think Trump will leave office. And let's start with what you'd like to see. We'll get to what American voters might like afterwards. But what would you like to see about a post-Trump conservatism that lives up to the word in ways that Donald Trump does not? I think that there is a critical number of people in this country who see the problem, right? If it's a war of all against all, my tribe against their tribe, we just can't move forward. It's not that we're always going to agree on everything.

18:49That's never been the American way. My God, we're connected by nothing, not race, not creed, not religion. This is what we do, though, is that we say we're going to, first of all, have decisions made at the most local level so that the person making that decision is most responsive and most represents their own constituents. And we are also going to separate out the powers at the federal government. Congress is the only one who can make laws. The president fully controls his executive branch. And both of those have to be true, as in you get rid of the independent agencies, but then you also can't let presidents run the country by executive order just because Congress isn't doing enough.

19:32Congress isn't doing enough because they know the president will run the country by executive order. So if you're going to allow the president full control of all those alphabet agencies, you also have to limit his power. And I would think after, again, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, really no matter which side you're on, to paraphrase, Ronald Reagan used to say the scariest words in the English language are, I'm the government and I'm here to help. My new political party, my new conservative political party would be something like the scariest words in the English language are, I'm the president, I'm here to run the country.

20:05Yeah. And so it is a vision that is that harkens back to the American tradition of skepticism of big institutions and big government power and all of those things. Yeah. And, you know, we also live in an era where your member of Congress doesn't really even care what their constituents think very much when so much of their time is spent on social media or cable news because God knows they're not legislating. And so we basically have 535 Instagram influencers over there and making them more responsive to their constituents instead of people getting mad at the Supreme Court when they strike down student loan debt forgiveness or the eviction moratorium or anything else that they may do.

20:49Instead saying, I blame Congress. I would love to see sort of a party of extreme separation of powers. One of the people I talked to earlier in this series was Gladden Pappin. And I asked him, why is it he had gone from being a fairly traditional Republican to a Trump-friendly Republican? And he said, in essence, that he thought that the diagnosis that Reagan conservatism and Romney conservatism offered was appropriate for older problems, but not for our problems today. And I do wonder how much of the kind of more freedom-centric argument that you are making, how much would it address the problems that we have today?

21:33Would it address stagnant living standards for huge numbers of working-class people? And so if part of what you're talking about is a vision that is meant to replace populism, Trumpist populism, how do you think about how a more libertarian, small government, freedom-oriented conservatism would address some of the problems that have led to the rise of Donald Trump? I love this question because I'm fighting against a straw man, basically, that they've set up. If they were in power forever and there were never any more elections, okay, maybe their system works pretty well. The problem with their idea is that they have to hand over power, and so they're only getting to do this in four-year, maybe eight-year segments.

22:23And when you do it all by presidential executive order, the other guy comes in, and on the first day, he erases everything you did and replaces it with what he wants. And surely we have proved over the four years of Biden and now the whatever it's been couple hundred days of Trump that that's not working. Their system isn't working. The other side's system isn't working. This idea of like unlocking more and more power to get what you want without having to go through those messy compromises isn't getting them what they want. So what are the solutions to stagnant wages? Well, first of all, I'm not sure the government can fix all those things.

23:00Some of them are going to be inherent to a global economy that we can't opt out of, like AI, for instance. A lot of the layoffs at Amazon or otherwise, the government isn't going to be able to fix. That's a really interesting problem that I would love to spend time digging in on, but it's not a problem that populism solves. And my system provides stability so people actually know what to expect. It will last over the long term. And it answers the problem of this like pendulum swing four years after another where the minority of each side gets to try it their way. And so you're imagining a system where Congress is at the center of American government, which is what the founders also imagined.

23:44It's why it's Article 1. And you're saying that kind of system is more responsive to what people want. It also doesn't go back and forth in ways that are destructive, probably to national interest, right? I mean, it's easier for our rivals to do long-term planning than us, in part because of the reasons you're talking about. At worst, destructive. At best, nothing. What's interesting to me about this is that you're not describing a vision that is we're going to have this view on that policy and this view on this other policy. You're describing something structural, which is American government doesn't work.

24:20It's how we've ended up the way we've ended up with a destructive figure like Trump. And the fix to that needs to be radical in the literal sense of radical. It needs to go to the root and say, why is an American government working and how do we make it work again? Yeah. And this is why my vision won't be very good on the stump. Like, you know, yelling at people with crazy hand gestures, process, we need better process, hasn't really rallied a lot of people so far. But I know you've worked as a political operative, but that's OK in some ways, right? When you look back at the history of how America has accomplished big changes, if it's often people putting ideas into the country's intellectual bloodstream and then eventually someone might come along and figure out a way to sell them or figure out a way to take those ideas and make them part of a winning campaign.

25:15I mean, Milton Friedman has this fantastic line, our job, I'm going to get it slightly wrong, but our job is to imagine a different world. And one day there may be a crisis and it will be possible for that world to happen. And there was a crisis, the 1970s, and his world, to a large extent, did happen. And in a way, you're talking about a very different vision substantively, but one that borrows on that same idea. You know, maybe it's the quote, America always does the right thing after they've tried everything else. We've tried it Biden's way. We've tried it Trump's way. Those aren't working.