Tech billionaire Elon Musk is testing a new frontier in politics. In this episode, Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Rafael Mangual, and Daniel Di Martino explore Musk’s proposed America Party—what it means for the right, why it’s gaining traction across conservative media, and whether it’s more than X posturing.
They also tackle the One Big Beautiful Bill—a trillion-dollar effort to rein in spending without touching Social Security or Medicare. Is it serious reform, or just another political stunt? Plus: July Fourth, national identity, and the conservative fight to reclaim America’s founding story.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
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Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. You know me, I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, senior editor at City Journal, blah, blah. Joining me on the panel today are long-time panelists, Jesse Arm, Rafael Mangual, Daniel Di Martino. Thank you, gentlemen, as always for joining us.
I want to take us right into the big news at the end of last week, which was President Donald Trump’s signature on The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. Listeners, regular listeners will recall that we’ve talked about it, I think on Thursday. It was still in the Senate when we recorded it. It had already come out of the Senate, it was back in the House when we recorded, and by the time the podcast dropped they had gotten it through the House, which is pretty remarkable speed. I’m not sure everyone was so sanguine that that was going to happen. We went a little bit back and forth, but now it’s made it to the President’s desk. He signed it. It’s the big legislative initiative of his first year. What do people think? Are we surprised that they managed to get it through so quickly? What do we make of this passage?
Daniel Di Martino: Why don’t we also ask what are our favorite and least favorite parts of the bill?
Charles Fain Lehman: Free, free, free discussion, go for it.
Daniel Di Martino: Okay, well, my favorite parts of the bill are permanent expensing. That’s one thing, know, it’s permanent. Businesses can deduct all their equipment, some of the structures, that’s going to be really good for investment is the most pro-growth part of it. And it’s not time-limited, right? It’s forever.
Then the other favorite parties, the old immigration provisions. I mean, they are giving $3.33 billion for immigration courts, which is going to reduce the backlog, allow to deport a lot more people, but also give asylum to people who really deserve it. And they’re charging fees to humanitarian migrants, which before it was all the other illegal immigrants were paying for the border crisis. That’s not going to happen anymore. So I’m very happy about that. The least favorite party is perhaps actually the most Trumpian in that he really promoted like, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. I think it’s inefficient. The senior benefits. It’s like the seniors already get too much money. We’re spending way too much. I know. Why would a construction worker making $40,000 pay more in taxes than a waiter making $40,000? Right? Like it makes not much sense to me.
Charles Fain Lehman: It was going to happen, right? It was going to be necessary enough.
Jesse Arm: Well, we can go into the specifics, but I think maybe some framing for the audience is helpful. Let’s talk a little bit about what’s in the bill and what I think it really means for our politics. So the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill marks the high point of President Trump’s second term. It’s a real demarcation of what, not a Di Martino, but a demarcation of what. I heard that as I said it out loud and I had to interrupt myself.
Daniel Di Martino: One day, one day you’ll be a hero.
Jesse Arm: No, it’s an opportunity for the president to set sort of a governing vision for his brand of conservative populism and what it looks like. So the bill locks in the tax cuts from Trump’s first term to make them permanent. And it shifts the axis of GOP policy toward these priorities of common-sense Americans. And whether or not… sorry.
Charles Fain Lehman: It’s also notable that his first big legislative initiative the first time around failed. It was the attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare that collapsed. And so it’s a significant sign that the first big push, they got it through. His relative power and standing, I think, it significantly changed there.
Jesse Arm: Exactly, so it’s like wherever you stand on every fiscal austerity question, lower taxes on work and family, restored work requirements in Medicaid, a crackdown on the border chaos and the largest investment in military readiness since the Cold War, this is delivering on promises that cut across party lines. Yeah, no tax on tips, overtime or social security, but there’s also protections for family farms and the estate tax changes, a child tax credit expansion that’s going to reach over 40 million households. It also launches the school, a school choice program, a national pilot program for parents who want more control and financial relief for their children’s education. I do think what sort of makes this moment stand out is that it’s reflecting a governing coalition that knows what it wants and how to deliver. It’s got the votes to make those things happen. And after weeks now, foreign policy wins, including crippling Iran’s nuclear program and legal victories that are reigning in some of these district courts and the overreach that they’ve been engaged in. This is a bill that adds a domestic policy pillar to Trump’s outstanding second term record thus far and kind of keeps the win train going.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, look, there’s no question that this is a massive win for the Trump administration, especially as you noted, Charles, given that in his first term, the kind of big piece of legislation that he really wanted to frame his presidency around was a bust. I think a lot of Americans are going to understand this in relatively simple terms, right? No one’s going to take the time to read the nearly thousand pages of this bill. And they’re to come away with a few things. Tax cuts, good, right? Everyone needs more money in their pocket. Everyone wants more money in their pocket. There’s not going to be a very big constituency saying, you know, outside of the handful of socialists that hate whenever billionaires get anything beneficial, right, there’s not going to be a big constituency for pushing back on that. More spending on border security and on national defense, those are two very good things. The latter, extremely long past due. I mean, our military has been in dire need of an upgrade, particularly our Navy. So really happy to see more spending on that. I think a lot of Americans, particularly Trump supporters, are also absolutely thrilled about the spending on the border because that was the central issue of his campaign both times, right? I mean, border security really is one of the things that he ran on.
I do like the spending cuts. They’re going to be unpopular with the people that this bill is already going to be unpopular with, right? So there’s no real political cost to Trump there. They’re just going to have to read it and weep on that front. But the one thing that I do think is missing from this, which is the thing that we all know and choose not to talk about, which is the fact that it’s adding what, three and a half trillion dollars to the national deficit. Republicans used to be the party of criticizing that.
Charles Fain Lehman: Sort of, sort of. When we’re out of power.
Rafael Mangual: Sort of. But I’m old enough to remember the Tea Party and the idea was we’re fed up with all of this government spending. We don’t want to saddle future generations with the responsibility of handling a massive national debt that’s only going to balloon, and what I don’t see in this is anything that is likely to rein in spending, or at least set the stage for reining in spending. Like I said, there are some spending cuts.
Jesse Arm: That’s not fair. They’re adding work requirements to Medicaid. I mean, they’re doing things that Democrats wouldn’t have come within sniffing distance of. This is a move toward an America that cares more about its fiscal future. And I think that the kind of panicking response to say that because it doesn’t do everything all at the same time.
Rafael Mangual: Fair enough, but… Yeah, no, no, no, I don’t think it’s, it’s not a panic response in that.
Daniel Di Martino: No, no, no, no. Well, they certainly have done more at the same time than has ever been done of pairing spending cuts with tax cuts. And I will also say that, you your initial question, Charles, was what do we think of it passing so fast? I mean, part of it, I think Trump really put pressure because he really wanted to sign it on 4th of July. And so they’re like, I don’t care anymore about the details. This has to pass. Like screw the SALT deduction. We need to pass this. But I think it also shows that they understood that what unites the GOP are tax cuts and military spending. And that was the central point of this bill.
Charles Fain Lehman: And border enforcement. Yeah. And border enforcement.
Daniel Di Martino: And border enforcement, you’re right. Think about it. That’s why health care reform failed.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. I mean, I think part of what went on there is that, part of what got piled on top was, and that led to the large top line deficit number, is the relatively narrower size of the coalition in the House, that on the one hand, there are uniform priorities here. On the other hand, they had to hold different sides of the coalition together. I still don’t know how they managed to get the Freedom Caucus guys on board. I mean, I do, the answer is Donald Trump. He is very good at it. But you look on the other side of the distribution, the SALT agreement that they finally came to is because New York’s Republican members have as their sole priority dealing with the SALT cap, and so you should like, they needed to manage the coalition in that way, and I think that will like necessarily lead to a top-line number that is less than ideal. I do think that the Medicaid movement is a step in the right direction. I remember when I was a reporter at the Free Beacon when they tried to impose more aggressive work requirements in Medicaid than like 2018, 2019, one of the farm bills back then, and they couldn’t even get it off the ground. So again, this is like a good example of how they’ve actually made the legislative machine kind of work. It’s remarkable.
Daniel Di Martino: Very important. And remember, it’s not just work requirements.
It’s not just work requirements. They’re limiting the capacity of the states to scam the federal government through Medicare provider taxes. This is something that has been tried to do bipartisan ways in the past. It never happened. Trump did it. The immigration court expansion, the military spending, the reforms, even some reforms, expansion of HSAs. I mean, so many things are in this bill that are really good.
Rafael Mangual: 100 percent. But I do think we’re just kicking the can down the road, right? Without touching not Medicaid, but Medicare and Social Security, we are just leaving this massive hole. And there’s going to come a time in which that bill comes due. And unless we conquer another country, I don’t really see a world in which that’s just not going be paid.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, look, there’s a lot of wealth in the 51st state.
Jesse Arm: I genuinely mean this without joking, that has never seemed more real in at least recent history than right now. Not to say it’s actually going to happen, but I do think Trump kind of breaks the entire political system in the sense that things that would have been previously considered impossible, whether it be on foreign policy, domestic policy, the courts, otherwise, he completely shifts the Overton window. He talks about things, people freak out, and then the tide kind of levels out and we end up in a remarkable place. I mean, one piece of trivia worth kind of consulting here is when, comparatively speaking, during the Obama and Biden presidencies, when these big bills got passed, or even the first Trump presidency for that matter, these big stopgap spending pre-midterm bills got passed, Trump has gotten it done a lot earlier by meeting this 4th of July deadline. So there’s far more wiggle room now and voters are going to see the consequences of this passage and you know, my suspicion, once some of this, energy prices gets cheaper, once some of these tax incentives and cuts kick in and people start seeing the results in their paychecks, they continue to see the immigration program humming along once they continue to see that you know so much of this stuff is really going to result in better fiscal results for their own bottom line you may see some of the bleeding that Republicans or the in-party usually have to deal with in the midterms following their president’s election you may see some of that stopped or…
Daniel Di Martino: Well, my concern is that voters will actually underappreciate the achievements of the OBB. And the reason is, remember the tax cuts, the tax rates are simply going to stay the same. But if nothing had happened, they would have gone up. And so a lot of people are not going to perceive that they’re actually saving thousands of dollars in taxes. And they’re doing so thanks to this bill, but they’re like not going to give the deserved credit. So I do think that the results that they will see is in the business investment portions, right, because thanks to the expensing provisions that are permanent now, businesses can make long-term investments that they know will be profitable. There won’t be a Democrat administration that’s going to take away their benefits. So I’m very optimistic about that. And what leaves me wondering is, what is the next step? Okay, we got done the tax stuff, we got done the border security, military. What is the next issue? Is it going to be healthcare? Is it going to be immigration enforcement?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. So I want to actually focus in on that. And this will get us to, I want to ask our exit question early to give us time to discuss it. Because to me, that’s the big question is like, you know, let’s assume maybe they keep the house. Maybe Jesse is right. They get a much larger house margin. They install Trump as president forever. We’ve passed the Constitutional amendment. That would be great. But let’s assume that they don’t keep the house in November 2026. They lose the house in November 2026. There are going to be limited options for legislative action going forward. And I think there’s some model that says this is what they want to do and why they’ve done so much in the executive so far is they’re just like, what can we do without Congress? That said, they probably have one to two more bites of the legislative apple between now and then. How do we think they are going to use them? And how would we like to see them use them? My exit question is, how do we want to see them use them? But I’ll kick that up as a general discussion. What do we think is left on the legislative table between now and when they maybe lose the lower chamber.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s got to be some kind of follow through on the DOGE initiative, right? I mean, what I would like to see here, you know, is legislation setting some sunset provisions and building that into a lot of our domestic spending so that a lot of these programs are automatically coming to an end, you know, and requiring congressional approval to keep them going. You know, don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know that we’re going to get that. But, you know, I do think that that would be the most logical and on-brand thing to do to follow this effort up.
Jesse Arm: It’s a point fairly taken by Daniel that the tax cuts may not feel like tax cuts in the same sense because they’re actually an extension of tax cuts that were set to expire. But you have to take that in the context of all of the fiscal doom and gloom that was promised and sort of prophesied by all of the pundits in the earlier part of this year, especially when the tariff program was kicking out. Revenues are kind of beginning to pour in. Trade deals are being articulated and worked out with other countries and the United States. To some extent, if there’s not the calamitous collapse that was sort of promised to voters by all the pundits and all the experts, they’re going to give the credit for the absence of that collapse to the president. I believe that’s one possibility.
What should they take the next legislative bite at the apple on? I think they should continue doing it on things that save the voters money and win broad popular support. To me, there’s low hanging fruit on that branch, which is in the form of racial favoritism and government contracting. Senator Mike Lee had a bill on this out at the end of 2024. It’s already written. The Trump administration has done a lot of great work to root out DEI and root out the waste associated with it in government programs. But still, federal government contracts in some sense still take race into account. There is more that can be done. This is the most expensive, corrupt, egregious piece of DEI, of the DEI industrial complex in America. It’s worse than much of what is happening on college campuses. And these are race-based set-asides that cost taxpayers billions and reward fraud and sideline merit in critical industries like national defense and infrastructure. So that’s where I’d like to see them put some legislative muscle. I believe it’s a winner.
Daniel Di Martino: You know, and they could actually include that in reconciliation next year, right? Remember, they can do another reconciliation process next year before the new Congress sets in. The question is, what is it going to include? Because this is government contracting, they could do that. So the question I think that the Republicans need to answer is, whether they’re big legislative push between now and the midterms or even in between the midterms and the new Congress, is it going to be a partisan agenda or or something that needs 60 votes in the Senate, right?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, that’s the core question.
Daniel Di Martino: Because they control what gets voted on in the Senate. They can put the Democrats on record to vote against it. They have the majority. They could take something perhaps on government contracting and perhaps some Democrats like Fetterman say, yeah, we don’t want racism in government contracting. This is a small enough bill. I’ll vote yes to keep my Senate seat, right? So that’s one avenue.
The other avenue is saying we’re going to do it through reconciliation, and we’ll do the DOGE cuts that Rafa was mentioning. I think there’s a lot of appetite for that. If you ask me what my preferred option is, I think Trump should just go ahead with some sort of immigration reform of the legal system. That is what he wants. The issue I see with that is that it’s much less likely that Democrats will support that.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. I mean, who, I mean, you know, the, counter argument is that like the reason that prior comprehensive immigration reform efforts failed is that the base of the Republican party said, we don’t want this. We’re opposed to this. We think it is too soft on illegal immigration, not dealing with the problem. The one politician in our collective lifetimes who has had the credibility to do something on this front is Donald Trump, who was elected by all of those people.
Daniel Di Martino: He actually secured the border. have the least illegal immigration in history, because…
Charles Fain Lehman: Right. Right. The illegal immigrant population actually has declined over the past six months, which is remarkable.
All right. Yeah, I think it’s a good place to leave that conversation. I will see, we’ll see. That’d be great. Hopefully they will not try to pass the second Step Act. That was what they did the last time around. They had three shots and they went, yeah.
Daniel Di Martino: Or the Second Big Beautiful Bill.
Charles Fain Lehman: As long as it’s not more criminal justice reform. That’s all I’m asking for.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, that would be a disaster. If anything, they should just build more prisons and hire more cops.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right, right. Do comprehensive skills-based immigration reform, get rid of racism in federal hiring, and hire more cops. It’s the MI platform.
Daniel Di Martino: Wait, Rafa, what do you think all these billions for immigration detention centers are going to go for after the deportations are done? The centers are built. We have new prisons right there.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’ll see. We talked about how to get our aquapads last week.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right. All right. I want to move on.
Jesse Arm: Prison and deportation abundance. Prison and deportation abundance. Those sound great to me.
Charles Fain Lehman: Deportation abundance. That’s what we’ve been saying.
All right, I want to move on to the other topic of the day. As I was saying before we started recording, I have a fond affection for third parties in American life. I think they’re just sort of like charmingly Tocquevillian. They don’t do anything, but they’re like, all the people who work on them are so motivated. And so I watched with interest the development that there’s a new, maybe going to be a new third party. It’s really not clear. Elon Musk thinks he’s starting the “America Party.” Which is not the American Party, I will note, because the American Party is a white nationalist party. It’s the America Party. It’s unclear if he’s doing it or what it will look like. It does seem like he’s very upset about the deficits incurred by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But what do we make of the Elon Musk? I mean, is this going to happen? And if so, will it matter? Is sort of the big question for the panel.
Rafael Mangual: I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t think this is going to matter. And I think for a lot of the people listening to this, we’re essentially breaking news because no one’s really heard about it. That’s how little of a splash it made. And that’s not to, to lob a shot at Elon. It’s just to say that, you know, the way that our politics are structured right now, a third party just isn’t a viable option. And I say that because the distinction between the disputes that sort of differentiate the Republican and the Democratic Party, our two major parties in our political system are so large and so existential that it becomes almost impossible for someone not to identify, at least in some significant way, with one of the two major parties, just based on whatever the issues are that they care about. I mean, there’s so much distance between left and right on issues like taxing and spending, on race questions, immigration questions, rule of law.
When the degrees of separation between members of the two major parties are so big, the tents of each of those major parties get bigger because the questions become a lot more seemingly existential. I don’t think a lot of people are going to fool around with third parties when they’re worried about Democrats promising to pack the Supreme Court or, you know, if you’re a Democrat with the Republicans, you know, promising to close the border, whatever the issue is that matters to you. And so I think third parties become more risky in that world. And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t see that in our future anytime soon.
Jesse Arm: From a purely legal standpoint, Musk has filed a statement of organization for the America Party with the FEC. In some sense, this has happened. Practically speaking, what comes of it remains an open question. I’ll push back on Ralph a little bit. I do think the idea of an America Party might sound unserious at first, but it lands because it taps into something real. The center of American politics is collapsing. Joe Manchin, Krysten Sinema, Mitt Romney, Thom Tillis, and many more like them are gone or on their way out. The institutions that once held up a viable center in American life, local papers, business-aligned civic groups, establishment gatekeepers, don’t have the influence they once did.
That vacuum arguably might not stay empty. A third party might not succeed though if it’s on Elon Musk’s exact policy preferences because he’s arguably too aggressively focused on austerity, too online, too reactive to whatever’s the issue of the day on Twitter at a given moment or X. But I do think the brand proposition of something that is “post-partisan,” so to speak, outsider-led, anti-establishment, but also kind of pro-new establishment reasserting itself, has more market power than a lot of political analysts want to admit. Musk is right to point out that something to be appropriately disruptive in our politics would not need to win or even be remotely competitive for 270 electoral college votes to matter.
It just needs to grab 10 to 15 percent in the right places to throw a wrench into a system that is already very brittle and possibly launch a new ideological identity in the process. Like I said, I just don’t think this is something that necessarily has to be exactly reflective of even a coherent ideological position to have some staying power and shake things up a bit.
Charles Fain Lehman: The trick, so like, you know, at a political science level, it’s not accidental that we have two parties, right? It’s a function of the dynamics of “first past the post” and the way that we elect people to Congress. It ends up being the most efficient allocation. So it’s like, it’s not surprising that the system cashes out that way.
Where you see, to Jesse’s point, where you see success for third parties, insofar as they can be described as successful, is basically where you have one party highly dominant such that it contains within itself two coalitions, coalitions of disparate interests. If you can carve one of those interests off, often that becomes an influential third party. Like the canonical example, there are the Fusion parties in New York, which sometimes have influence. The Vermont Progressive Party, which has actually elected people to the legislature, sorry, I think it was attorney general, I forget. They’ve been successful. There was a Moderate Party in Rhode Island for a little while. The Minnesota Reform Party that sent Jesse Ventura to the governor’s mansion. And what you end up doing is basically like it’s not, know, the Musk thesis of there’s a broad American middle is not a coherent one because basically if you can efficiently select people at the margins and appeal to your base, you will end up doing it. That’s how you end up in the 50-50 split. But it can be the case that if you have dominance in one area, can sort of like, such that part of the coalition controlled by one party is unsatisfied with it, you can pull them out and then having influence there. The other canonical example, last point, is that, so do people know about the affiliations of Democrats in North Dakota and Minnesota? So.
Jesse Arm: I don’t, so I can almost guarantee our listeners don’t.
Daniel Di Martino: I know Minnesota has like, the Farmers Labor Party.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, so it’s the Democratic Farmer Labor Party and the North Dakota Democratic Nonpartisan League. What happened in late 19th and early 20th century is that there were these separate populist parties that basically just like emerged out of, I mean, they emerged out of farmers’ movements and they so successfully cannibalized the farmer vote in those states that the local and state Democratic Party just ceased to exist. And they subsequently get absorbed back into the Democratic Party infrastructure.
But it’s a legacy of that successful strategy of going like, we’re going to focus on an underserved clientele. The question, by the way, that was a long discourse on third parties in America. I apologize to our listeners if you didn’t sign up for that. But I think that gets to the point about, sorry.
Daniel Di Martino: Thanks, I just learned something. I just learned something.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, there you go. But that gets back to the point about Musk actually can’t win by appealing to 80 percent of the voters, but he could win by appealing… So here’s an interesting question. There’s a real split in California democratic politics, right? It’s a one-party state, but half the party is like sort of moderate Silicon Valley business Democrats and half the state is like lunatics, right? We just saw this fight happen in San Francisco, the moderate wing versus the progressive wing. Is there room for a third party in San Francisco that carved off those votes? I don’t know, but like maybe.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, I don’t think that’s where Musk is headed. I think Musk is headed for something that perhaps obtains 1 percent of the vote. The issue is, know, Jesse, you were saying that maybe 15, 10 percent that would be really impactful. I actually think 1 percent of the vote would be very impactful because elections are so close in the United States. Now, the question is, where does Musk have more influence? Does Musk have more influence by remaining part of the Republican coalition or by exacting himself out of the coalition and then being hated. I think that even though he could have a tiny electoral impact that probably would harm the GOP, I think it would be on net bad for him. And I think this is going to backfire. This is going to lead to Trump being worse to him. This is going to be bad for his businesses. And I don’t think he should be doing any of these business of creating a new party.
Rafael Mangual: Not only do I think this could potentially backfire on Elon insofar as he’d lose influence on net in American politics, but I also am not confident that Elon himself will be able to resist the pull of a viable major party when it comes to fights that he really cares about. if you are like me, and I like to think that there are a lot of Americans who are like me, who were you know on X last night and in the last 24 hours watching this account stew. I forget what the what his handle is but he was basically just putting up these video clips from the Socialism 2025 conference a,nd you had all of these Ivy League professors saying obscene and crazy things about overthrowing the United States of America and brainwashing the kids, and dismantling universities from the inside and racial liberation politics. It was, my blood pressure must have been through the roof for a good hour as I scroll through that.
When you see that as an American who cares about the future of this country, you become much less likely to risk going with a new third party to try and fight that. What you’re going to do is you’re going to go to the party that is explicitly saying we’re against this and we have a track record and we can actually win. You know, ultimately that’s where I think our politics are right now. I think that the questions are so big and so anger-inducing that people just aren’t going to waste time messing around. And again, that’s not like, I don’t mean that to be as dismissive as it sounds, but, I think the pull of the major party system is…
Daniel Di Martino: No, I think you’re absolutely right, Rafa. And I actually would be willing to assign high probability that Musk will end up endorsing the Democratic candidate for president in 2028. I think he’s so unstable and like changes so much in the issues that that is a very high likelihood.
Jesse Arm: I would take that bet. I don’t think that’s going to happen. But let me say this. think, Rafael, you are correct in your assessment that most independents are people who are hesitant to associate themselves with one party in America, are actually, practically speaking, more frequently voters for the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. However, they still, the point that you’re not addressing is the fact that they still don’t want to be associated with the Republican or Democratic Party.
Numbers of people who categorize themselves as independents are at, I believe, close to an all-time high level at this point.
Rafael Mangual: I think that goes away with Trump,
Jesse Arm: We actually had one of our most exciting flirtations. We had one of our closest flirtations with a real large third-party ticket for the presidency just in this past election cycle. The infrastructure was there and built out for this No Labels group to draft and run a non-Biden nor Trump ticket. They ultimately didn’t build a trigger because the names that I think frequently where they were tossing around, yeah, no one’s going to vote for a Dean Phillips-Larry Hogan unity ticket for president of the United States. But I do think, you know, if Musk or anyone else were serious and wise about the key to doing this effectively, you wouldn’t do it anchored around a specific policy platform. You wouldn’t burn credibility out of the gate deploying millions upon millions of dollars to protect a legislative terrorist like Congressman Thomas Massie from being primaried out of office in Kentucky. You wouldn’t do it that way.
Daniel Di Martino: I like the new term, legislative terror.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.
Jesse Arm: You would look at casting rather than policy, right? You would need someone like Musk, right? You would need someone, or at least like Musk a year ago, someone high-favorability, perceived as a largely apolitical star, but who has a cultural authority, name ID, and a reputation for seriousness, and an independent wealth to make things happen politically.
Daniel Di Martino: Who are those people? Well, they don’t even need wealth because Musk has the biggest wealth to back.
Jesse Arm: You need wealth, you need wealth. A part of Donald Trump’s success was his wealth. The fact that he was credibly someone who had succeeded in America. And Trump, in many ways, was like a third-party figure. Sorry.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, it depends. Is the goal to win the presidency here? Is the goal to win the presidency or is it just to cannibalize one party?
Jesse Arm: Well, I don’t think the goal is necessarily to win the presidency out of the gate, but honestly, all of this conversation is leading me less to a place of thinking about third party viability and more to a place of who’s the next Donald Trump in American politics, who was his own kind of third, look, and this is giving away my answer to the exit question that I know Charles is about to ask. So I’m just going to, I’m just going to cut ahead and say.
Charles Fain Lehman: The exit question is, what is your favorite third party in American politics, past, present, or future? Jesse, go ahead. I’ll let you have it.
Jesse Arm: In 2000, Donald Trump ran for president with the Reform Party.
Charles Fain Lehman: This is my favorite counterfactual. What if he had won? What if Donald Trump had been president on 9/11?
Jesse Arm: He did! The point is he did. He did it a few years later through a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. So Musk’s point remains the same. Whether or not you build some new infrastructure, which is a bigger lift, or you engage in a hostile takeover of one of the two existing political parties, the key point to understand here is, and this actually extends back to the first topic we were talking about as well, MAGA populism, or Donald Trump populism, is less about policy specifics and more about who can bring to our politics a sort of disruptive spirit that shifts the way everything works with an individual who is telegenic, compelling, controversial to many, but trustworthy to another good many. Who’s going to do that in the next four years? I don’t know, it could be…
Rafael Mangual: I think.
Jesse Arm: It could be someone in the Democratic Party. It could be somebody like Jon Stewart there. It could be someone like Stephen A. Smith there. It could be someone in the Republican Party like a Tucker Carlson or a Dave Portnoy. I mean, this is not to say any of these people are going to be president per se, but they are the kinds of personalities and people who could really change what our politics or at least one of our major parties is about.
Rafael Mangual: I think the fact that Donald Trump has done what he’s done and is the only one to have done it, it’s an answer to your question, which is nobody. There is nobody like him. He is unique. The timing for his announcement was unique. The circumstances that allowed someone like him to rise were unique. I don’t see that being reproduced again. I mean, I’m perfectly happy to be proven wrong on this, but I think when Trump leaves American politics, it just reverts back to the normal, the pre-existing normal. I agree with Jesse in that what’s going to be required is somebody who has all of those boxes checked. And there are so few people in the world, let alone in this country, who not only check those boxes, but are willing to deviate from their lives and ambitions to, you know, run for office, that it just strikes me as incredibly unlikely.
Daniel Di Martino: I will just say that
Charles Fain Lehman: Last thought, then I’m Ralph and Daniel the next question. Go ahead.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, just, it is about charisma. It is just said, it’s not about the policies or the charisma. It’s why Ronald Reagan was so successful even before he was governor of California is because he gave a speech and everybody was hooked to his charisma. It’s not necessarily because everybody was a free market, social conservative Reaganomics gu,y nor is it because everybody’s a Trumpian, know, America First, whatever. It is just about people like the leader. And so, who comes next? There will be someone next, maybe 40 years later, maybe very soon. I don’t know who will come next, but I think it is all about the charisma. And that is good and bad. It is bad because it means somebody who is really bad could use charisma to rise to power. And that is actually my concern. My concern is that there will be in the future a socialist that will rise to power that way. I’m reading and I tweeted this recently, Lord of the World. This is a book that was written in 1907 recommended by every one of the recent popes, including Pope Leo and Pope Francis and Benedict. And it essentially, you know, it’s obviously this is not going to happen, I think. I hope. But like the Antichrist is like an American socialist politician who rises to power. And this is 1907.
Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, alright, alright, alright, I’m going to ask, I’m going to take us to the exit question.
Daniel Di Martino: I went too far, too deep. It’s an exaggeration, okay? But it’s a really good book.
Charles Fain Lehman: Ralph, do you have a favorite American third party, past, present, future?
Rafael Mangual: I do, and it might surprise you because we just spent an evening debating two members of that party, but it’s the LP.
Charles Fain Lehman: The LP? I’m sure they’re not in the LP, they work for Reason, come on. They’re crazy.
Rafael Mangual: I do like the Libertarians. I thought they were always on to something. I do think they’re crazy and kooky and unlikely to win, but you put me in a room with Libertarians for a few hours and we’re going to find a lot to agree on.
Charles Fain Lehman: Daniel?
Daniel Di Martino: I like the person of Ross Perot. I think it’s really cool, you know, a businessman, like a lot of achievements. I didn’t like a lot of what his platform or whatever he stood for, but especially like on trade. But yeah, but I would just say that, you know, he was a really good guy and very successful and I like him. So I think he was my favorite.
Charles Fain Lehman: “Great sucking sound.”
Jesse Arm: Can I just leave listeners with one last thought, Charles, in this? Folks should go online and look, you can find it on YouTube, Donald Trump in 2016 or ’15, when he was running for president gave a talk at the No Labels Summit town hall thing in New Hampshire. And I really think American centrists or independents missed an opportunity to claim this guy as their figure. Other forces in American public life claimed him instead. He became a different figure as a result. But the truth is that brashness alone is not a reason for the sensible middle, so to speak, to disassociate themselves from political figures. Sometimes, and especially in the two-party system in America as it’s currently constructed, a disruptor in the vein of Donald Trump or Elon Musk is exactly who you need to force a little responsible centrism on everybody.
Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, my… I’m going to last word on third parties, which is my favorite third party remains America’s third oldest continually existing party, for whom I have voted in election as a write-in, which is the American Prohibition Party. They’re still around, there are like six of them, but they are still around. I have, I have voted for them, you know…
Daniel Di Martino: That is the most Charles thing ever.
Rafael Mangual: That’s so on brand.
Charles Fain Lehman: Nice guys. I don’t think they would take me as a member. It’s a whole thing. They elected one guy, he’s like a tax assessor in small town Pennsylvania in the 21st century, but they are still around. On that note, before we go, this is July 4th weekend. We talked about this last week, but you know, we love America here at City Journal. We just did a great, last Friday we published a great piece by six separate contributors about why they love America, including Daniel and Ralph. Thank you both.
Before we go, I want to ask everyone how they patriotically celebrated July 4th this weekend. Ralph, why don’t start with you?
Rafael Mangual: Pool with the kids. We wanted to just kind of keep it low-key. My wife and I spent the prior week in Puerto Rico on vacation, so just needed to kind of decompress. So pool, kids, hamburgers, hot dogs, all the good stuff. It was a lot of fun.
Charles Fain Lehman: Nice. Daniel.
Daniel Di Martino: I went to two rooftops, two rooftop events on July 4th. And then the next day I went to the beach with some friends here from the Manhattan Institute.
Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse?
Jesse Arm: I was on a boat in Michigan. Where else? It’s the best place to be on the 4th of July.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. Well, I on July 4th, we had friends over to grill. then yesterday with the real all-American day in the morning, we went to a college league baseball game. And, you know, my kid got to watch baseball. And then in the afternoon, he rode a real bike for the first time. So that was very, very all-American experience.
Daniel Di Martino: That’s awesome.
Rafael Mangual: Mid-Atlantic League?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, he could do it. It was great. On that cheery note, that’s about all the time that we have. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you as always to our producer Isabella Redjai. Listeners, you’ve been this episode, even if you didn’t, don’t forget to like and subscribe, comment, ring the bell, do all the other things you have to do on YouTube and all the other platforms where you listen to us. Comments and questions always are welcome. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
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