The Constitutional Crisis Is Here (Neon Liberalism #74, with Robert Tracinski)

Join Samantha and Robert Tracinski, currently running for Congress in Virginia's fifth district, as they talk about the danger Donald Trump's corruption and lawlessness poses to the country, the continuing importance of the Constitution, and Robert's road from member of the Tea Party to staunch liberal.

Neon Liberalism can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

*Note that around 12 minutes, there is a mistake about what messaging David Shor's outfit, Blue Rose, has tested. Shor was testing populism vs. abundance messaging, not populism vs. corruption messaging.

Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [00:00]
Hey, welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I'm Samantha Hancox-Li. As you know, I'm interested in the fight going on right now to define the future of the Democratic Party, to define what this party stands for, what it's going to pursue, how or whether or in what way it's going to stand up to Trump, and the front lines of that fight aren't just on the internet, they're not just posts and posters, but they're being fought in real elections and real primaries. And so, previously we talked to Bethany Andrespeck, and now I'm really excited to welcome Robert Tracinski to the podcast. Yeah, Rob, you've been a political writer for 30 years, you are currently now running for Congress, actually in Virginia's fifth district, is that right?

**Robert Tracinski** [00:55]
Thanks for having me out, Sam. Correct, the fifth district is the area around Charlottesville, Virginia, but Charlottesville is very much an outlier in the district, in that it's like 90% Democrat, it's a university town, all that, but it goes down from Charlottesville to Lynchburg, and then all the way down to Danville, which is on the border with North Carolina, so it includes this huge stretch of very rural places, which includes where I live, which is Louisa County, sort of east of Charlottesville, between Charlottesville and Richmond, which is a very agricultural, very rural place. I'm broadcasting here from the cellar of an old house on a Civil War battlefield. Well, also, so we had redistricting, and then we had de-redistricting. When I first jumped into this race, which was like early December, I was planning on — Plan A was I was going to run in the existing fifth district, which is slightly Republican-leaning, but not so Republican-leaning that it is impossible, especially for someone like me, who is not a far-left guy, who's a little bit more — I was formerly in the Tea Party movement here in this area, so you know that I have the ability to talk to those people, to understand where independents and even Republicans are coming from and what their concerns are, while being a staunch liberal in the wider sense of liberal. But then we had — so that was the original plan. Plan A was run in the fifth district. Then there was the redistricting, and I didn't know what it was going to do, so they created a new sixth district that went from Charlottesville all the way down, sort of over the mountains and down the valley to Roanoke and to Blacksburg. So the idea is it connected UVA and Virginia Tech and grabbed a bunch of college towns in between, so this is how you get a small Democratic majority in Central Virginia, this otherwise agricultural and rural place. But then, you were there in Charlottesville, actually we were there at a conference, and during the first presentation at that conference, my phone blows up, and suddenly I realized that the Supreme Court has ruled. I didn't think they were going to do it, but they've ruled to get rid of the redistricting, so it's back to Plan A, which is running in the old fifth district — Charlottesville, Lynchburg, all the way down to Danville, and places like Appomattox County and Lunenburg County and Amelia County, these extremely rural places. And so it's an advantage to me, actually, that I'm from a rural county as well, so I have an idea of what that background looks like. And of course, the other big advantage I hope we have this year is Donald Trump is doing his best to give the shaft to farmers with high fuel prices, high fertilizer prices, destroying the overseas markets. So I'm hoping that will give a lot of purchase for people who want resistance to Trump and questioning of Trump, which they aren't getting from our current incumbent. I can give a whole spiel about our current incumbent, if you don't mind, but our current incumbent is a guy who's Mr. Rubber Stamp, and it's something you wouldn't know if you're not from this district, but it has to do with how he got the job. So, John McGuire, the current congressman from this district, is my former state senator. I've been following him for a while, and he had risen up to the state senate. He had ambitions to go higher, he wanted to run for Congress, and then the last redistricting we had, just the normal redistricting after the census, put him in the same district with a Republican incumbent, a guy named Bob Good. But Bob Good made the mistake — after January 6, when Trump seemed like he was down and out, Bob Good endorsed Ron DeSantis. Now, do you think Donald Trump's going to be magnanimous and forgiving about that? Yeah, no, of course he's not. So John McGuire trooped off to Mar-a-Lago, made his obeisance to the God King, and got Trump's endorsement, and Bob Good didn't. So they had this very bitterly fought primary, in which — you're gonna love this — Bob Good lost but claimed that the vote was rigged, and he wanted a recount, because that's the playbook on the Republican side these days. But anyway, so John McGuire got into this office basically because he had Donald Trump's support, because he was a loyalist to Donald Trump, so he's never going to come out and say anything or do anything that would oppose Donald Trump, and that's the basic problem. He doesn't even hold town halls — he holds these tele-town halls where he has a very carefully selected and controlled audience. He doesn't have to face the voters. So he's got a lot of weaknesses as a candidate, and I think a lot of my case in the general is going to be: this is a guy who isn't showing up, he isn't showing up for the district, he's got one constituent down in Mar-a-Lago, he doesn't care about any of the other constituents.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [06:12]
Yeah, so there's a lot there. I really want to come back — I want to ask you about redistricting, because this gerrymandering question seems really at the center of the future of politics in a lot of ways, but let me just put a pin in that for a moment. I kind of want to ask the very basic, simple question, which is: why are you running for office? Right, you were a political commentator for a long time, but you decided it's time to get off the couch, get on the field — how did this happen? Why are you running?

**Robert Tracinski** [06:40]
Well, that's a very good question, because it's a sort of unusual thing to make the leap from writing about politics to actually doing it, and by the way, there's a lot of interesting lessons I've learned, and however this ends, there's a great article I have to write about what I see from the inside. But the thing is that it's true — I've been very content over the years to throw brickbats at the politicians from the sidelines. And why did I get in? Actually, I got in trouble on this because when my wife and I got married, like 33 years ago, she knew I was writing about politics, she made me promise never to run for anything. I told her, "Oh, don't worry, it's much more fun to make fun of the guys who do." And then when I told her late last year, last fall, that I was thinking about this, she was mad at me for three days straight, legitimately mad for three days straight.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [07:30]
She was like, "Damn it, I should have gotten a prenup."

**Robert Tracinski** [07:35]
But she came around because she saw the reasons why I was doing it, and the reason is pretty simple. I spent most of 2025 working for The Unpopulist, a magazine that I know you're aware of, and I was writing something called The Executive Watch, and it was a catalog of abuses of executive power as they came by, and it was just this unprecedented tsunami — five impeachable offenses a week, basically, for most of 2025. I think he's slowed down maybe to three or four impeachable offenses a week since then, but he's still pushing, he's still going, he's lost a little momentum, but he's not giving up. And having done this Executive Watch week after week, day after day, cataloging these items, in the summer I took some time to put them together into a book, because I thought somebody needs to draw this together into the big picture. A lot of people were reacting to these one at a time, but they were adding up. And so I did — I'm a writer, I have to plug my book, whatever else I'm doing, I got to plug the book. So I wrote this book, *Dictator from Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution, and How to Fight Back*. Again, my wife says I can keep these around the house as long as I turn them upside down, so she doesn't have to see that face. Because he's really glowering at you in a menacing way — that's his official White House portrait, and he's glowering at you like he intends to be Big Brother. It's really astonishing.

But having put together that big picture — and the big picture was, I mean, the word "dictatorship," people get all worked up over it, but the simplest definition of a dictator, or of dictatorship, is one person is making all the decisions, and that is the system that Donald Trump has been creating, that one person, the president himself, is the person making all the decisions. All the power is being taken out of the courts, is being taken out of civil society, is being taken out of even the free market economy — he's overruling that on everything, including what the Cracker Barrel logo looks like — and above all, it's being taken away from Congress. So I saw that pattern. I published this book, got it all laid out, published it in September, like a couple days before the thing with Jimmy Kimmel, where he tried to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air for criticizing him. And so I looked around to say, okay, well, what's the Democratic leadership in Congress doing? And I tune in, I see Chuck Schumer saying "we're focused like a laser on affordability." I'm like, that's fine, it's good to talk about affordability. Donald Trump clearly does not care about the economy, doesn't care about what's happening to the average person, but if you're not sparing maybe a little of that laser focus for the First Amendment, or for the Fourth Amendment, or for people being shot on the streets in Minneapolis — all these assaults on our basic constitutional system and our basic liberties — if you're not sparing some time for that, you're not really meeting the moment.

And so then I looked around at who's running for Congress in the fifth district, and it had a very similar feel to it. Some fine people, some nice people, some well-meaning people — I've met a number of them — but they were people who were running on sort of boilerplate. They were running as if — I like to say they're running as if Mitt Romney is president, right? If Mitt Romney were president, he'd have some bad ideas, you'd have some things you oppose, but you're not concerned about the whole system being destroyed. He's going to be bad within normal limits. He's going to have some bad ideas, but they're all going to be within normal limits. Politics will continue to be fought within the 40-yard lines. And that's not really meeting the moment of what Trump is doing. And I thought about it, and I said, I'm not in a position to run — the only skill I have is I can do a podcast, I can get in front of an audience and talk, I can write. I don't have a fundraising network, I don't have all these other things. But on the other hand, I couldn't stand the idea of another year sitting on the sidelines, shouting to Democrats, "You ought to do this, you ought to do that," and having none of them listen to me. I couldn't stand to see our democracy go without a fight, and so that's why I decided, against the odds — people have done this in long shots, who haven't been in politics, who come in, it's a doable thing. I have to put out the maximum effort I can to make sure that I do defend our political system.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [12:10]
Yeah, I mean, it was something I really admire, right? Getting off the sidelines and actually standing up and fighting for this American project, and that was something I was really struck by. I read your book — we reviewed it here at Liberal Currents. And there was something you said in it, which is that we shouldn't just focus on these issues one by one, but we should think philosophically. We should think like the founders, right? How did the founders think about the American republic? They cared about the general welfare, right? They cared about people's lives, but when they were writing the Constitution, they understood that it is a system that secures democratic governance, that secures individual liberties, that secures a free market. It is these political systems, including the separation of powers, including limited government, that ensure that everything else can even happen, can even be possible, right? For us to even have these debates — like you were saying, an argument between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, right? That's an intelligible kind of politics, you might have one side, you might have the other side, but it takes place within the limits of constitutional governance. And what we're seeing today really feels like a political party and a person, a very specific person, who does not care about the Constitution, right, who doesn't like the Constitution, who wants to try and get rid of it and just — why can't I just do everything myself, right? Why aren't all of my executive orders just laws? Why can't I personally decide who has which late-night TV broadcast slot? Why can't I personally decide which company imports what? And on and on and on.

I mean, that's something that I really believe, that Donald Trump is clearly a uniquely malignant actor, but there are constitutional issues, especially involving the atrophy of Congress, that have just been building up and building up for decades now, right? And we have to beat Donald Trump, but we have to fix this system as well. It's actually quite old, and it has to — from what I understand, it emerges in the context of post-World War Two, the Cold War, the nuclear — anyway, interesting stuff, but we can come back to that. What I want to ask you is, you've talked a little bit about why you are running for Congress. You've talked a little bit about who you're running against. I also know that you've been out on the campaign trail, right? You're driving up and down Virginia, you're doing town halls, you're talking to people. What are you hearing from the voters? What are voters telling you that they want?

**Robert Tracinski** [14:02]
Yeah, so that's something I talk about on the campaign trail. I talk about the fact that our system of government has already changed. We no longer live under the same system of government we did a year and a half ago, and I like to say that when I was a kid, a comedian could go on TV and make fun of the president, and just mock him without mercy, and nobody would even think that there'd be any consequences or punishment for him. That's his job — you're a comedian, your job is to make fun of the president, and the president is actually expected to take it in good sport. And the thing is that when I was a kid — it extends to age 56 because it extends to basically early 2025 — and now that's no longer the case. Trump just tried again, for like the third time, to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air, threatening the FCC. So it's already no longer the case that a comedian can go on TV and make fun of the president and everybody thinks that's normal and the way things are done.

And that's just one example. There's all sorts of ways across the board where we don't live under the same form of government we used to. And about thinking like the founders — that's a big point I make, because I like to say that when the British put a tax on tea, the founders didn't commission a study on the optimal tax rate for beverages. They asked the big question behind that, which is: does Parliament have a right to impose these taxes on us in the first place? What is our relationship with Parliament? What are our rights as self-governing colonies? They asked the big questions. They looked at the fundamental issues of what are our rights, what is the basis of our government, and they went back to the fundamentals, instead of reacting piecemeal to this thing here and this thing there.

But one point I want to make — I said I've learned a lot from running — one of the things I've learned sort of explains to me a lot of what's going on, which is that I've discovered that if you want to run for Congress, the best time to start is 15 years ago, because you have to build up name recognition, you have to make friends with all the party chairs and all the political insiders, you have to have people who owe you favors, you have to have a fundraising network. These are all the things that one of my opponents in the primary has, because he's run for various things before. These are the things that really prepare you to be in a good position to run for office, but the problem with that is that it means you got into politics for a reason that motivated you 15 or 20 years ago, and you built up your habits and your issues over 15 or 20 years, and you're not necessarily going to be the person who's meeting the moment of what's happening right now.

And I think that explains a lot — if you look at Chuck Schumer, and we like to complain about Chuck Schumer, but when you think about the fact that he's been in office almost as long as I've been alive, his political instincts and his habits, and all the things he was tremendously rewarded for doing, because he rose up in leadership — these were things he was doing in the '70s and the '80s. This is the environment in which he came up, in which moderation was important, and in which you didn't have to worry about the political system being fundamentally under attack. There would be encroachments here and there, but it wasn't this level of threat.

So I like to say, my main opponent in the primary is a guy named Tom Perriello. He served one term in Congress in this district about 16 years ago, and he's run for governor since, unsuccessfully. He's a well-meaning guy, but again, he's somebody who is in politics because he wants to be in politics. He's using the standard establishment playbook, where you talk about affordability, you talk about the price of eggs, and he's not really committing strongly to putting front and center these constitutional issues. And I think we can't really meet the moment. I'm not just concerned about Donald Trump — I'm concerned about who comes after Donald Trump. The guy who comes after him, and the guy who comes after him. Four or six or eight or ten years from now, when Don Jr. runs — I'm concerned that we've got to have the system prepared, so that if the American people make the mistake of putting him in office, he can't do as much damage, because we've reformed the system so that presidential power cannot be abused the way it has for the last year and a half.

**Robert Tracinski** [19:08]
Yeah, I'm trying to look up when the term "Imperial Presidency" originated, but it's at least 50 years old.

**Robert Tracinski** [19:50]
So what I've mostly been doing is meeting with — at this stage, because the primaries, the general voters are not as much engaged — I'm trying to do some things to change that. The next couple of weeks, some town halls that I hope will draw a larger audience. I've got some ideas, but not ready to announce them. But I've mostly been meeting with people who are Democrats, and the thing I find interesting is they like the message I have. I think there's a tremendous hunger for somebody saying, let's take on these constitutional issues and not just giving the usual boilerplate. I think what happened in Virginia, particularly, is late last year when Abigail Spanberger was running for governor, there was this very affordability-focused campaign, which I think was very appropriate for her running as governor of Virginia, because she's not running against Donald Trump. She's running to do things in Virginia politics. I'm fairly confident she will help support and oppose encroachments from Trump, but that's not the main thing you're doing as governor. So she ran this very affordability-focused campaign, and she won by a good margin, and I think a lot of Democrats took from that: okay, great, don't mention the constitutional issues. People's eyes will glaze over, they won't care, the average voter won't care. Talk about affordability, talk about the price of eggs. And like I said, that's not meeting the moment.

So I think there is a tremendous hunger, especially among Democrats, for somebody who is going to address those issues. And they're all connected to affordability. The Iran war is a great example, right? We're at war in Iran. Why? Because Donald Trump just decided one day we were going to be — didn't consult Congress, didn't get a declaration of war or authorization of force from Congress, which is a very basic constitutional requirement. You have to go to Congress to start a war. But he did it just on his own say-so, so we have a clear violation of the Constitution, abuse of executive power, the centralizing of all power on one person, and the immediate results are your price of gas is through the roof. For farmers out here, the price of diesel's up, so you can't run your tractor, the price of fertilizer's up, so you can't fertilize your fields, and your markets have disappeared because of his trade war. And the trade wars are another thing that he initiated on his own say-so, without Congress. So the balance of power between Congress and the president is something that really does affect the average person and affordability, but I think we can't deal with the affordability until we rein in the chaos.

Now, you asked what I've been hearing. The one thing that really jumped out to me — I was delivering yard signs to someone all the way down, I think in Amelia County, almost all the way to Lynchburg, and he thanked me and said, "You have my vote, and we need somebody to stop the chaos." And I thought, there's a campaign slogan if ever there was one. "Stop the chaos." Because I do think a lot of it is people — and I think this is going to go way beyond Democrats, I think independents especially, and even a lot of Republicans — stop the chaos. The idea that you have to wake up every morning wondering what did Donald Trump tweet at 3 o'clock in the morning, in a blitz of like 80 tweets, so he's up late and just falls asleep during the cabinet meeting the next day. What did he tweet last night that's going to turn my life upside down? And that's no way to live. Farmers can't plan because they don't know what their suppliers are going to cost. They don't know what their markets are going to be. Nobody can make plans. There's too much chaos, and the way to rein in that chaos is to go back to the system where you have this long, boring process of going through Congress to do things. My son tells me my slogan should actually be "Make Politics Boring Again." Even as a commentator on politics, I could not think about Joe Biden for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and it was because there'd be lots of other stuff going on, debates in Congress about what we're going to do, and that's the way the system is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be one guy making oracular pronouncements or tweeting or yelling at reporters, and that's all of politics. It's supposed to be going through other channels. The president is not supposed to be this constant presence in our lives.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [23:46]
Yeah, I think people got a little bored during the Biden years. It was just too boring, and they voted for the chaos candidate, and now we've got chaos. No, I agree with a lot of what you said, right? I think there's often this debate, like, "Oh, you can either talk about the price of eggs or you can talk about the Constitution," and one of them seems kind of empty, one of them seems kind of like pandering. But from what I understand, one of the classic populists, David Shor, he's done testing and basically said, yeah, we tested those messages — what beat out both of them was when you could tie them together. You could say it's the chaos and the corruption that is why gas is $5 a gallon. The chaos and corruption is why you don't know if you're going to be able to sell your soybeans this fall, right?

**Robert Tracinski** [25:09]
Well, I mean, the biggest favor Donald Trump did to us is building the damn ballroom, because it's just such a symbol. When was the last time you were in a tuxedo? I think the last time for me was at my brother-in-law's wedding, and let's put it this way — I'm going up to Minneapolis in a couple of months for his daughter's wedding, so that gives you an idea of how long ago that was. Most of us are not people who dress up in a tuxedo and go to a ballroom on a regular basis. We go to fundraisers at our kids' school and things like that, but we don't live that kind of lifestyle. But here, Donald Trump — the top priority, the thing he's put above everything else — he can't stop talking about it, when he has meetings on totally different topics he wanders off and talks about his ballroom. He's obsessed with this idea of this vast gilded ballroom where he and his rich friends will get dressed in tuxedos and trade favors with each other, and that's just such a symbol for the way he views the world and the way he views his role as president. It has nothing to do with anyone else.

And then, of course, he just said — yesterday, I think yesterday or the day before — they asked him, "When you're negotiating with Iran, how much are you thinking about the impact on the finances of the average American?" "Oh, I'm not thinking about that at all." Well yeah, we can tell, because you're building the ballroom. So the ballroom is going to be a constant fixture on the campaign trail. That's something you just hang around the neck of every Republican. Because originally he said they were going to raise $200 million to build the ballroom, then he says no, it's going to be $400 million, probably raise it by basically shaking down Jeff Bezos and all these other rich people, and now they're saying Congress is going to allocate a billion dollars for the ballroom — a billion dollars of taxpayer money, our money, to build the ballroom. That's something we hang around the neck of every Republican in Congress, but especially a guy who's as much of a rubber stamp as we have here.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [27:13]
Yeah, I mean, the scale of corruption that we've seen from Trump is just unbelievable. We could just go on and on, right? The ballroom alone, right? This is so stupid, but I'm so fixated on it — the steel to build the ballroom is being donated by ArcelorMittal, which is this European steel conglomerate, in exchange for tariff relief for Canadian automobiles, right? Everything is corruption with this guy.

Yeah, that's where we're going with this. I really want to hear about the Tea Party, because if you had told young Samantha that she'd be sitting down with a Tea Partier, talking about being a staunch liberal and opposing Donald Trump, she'd be a little shocked. So I'm curious — what's your story? How did you get involved with the Tea Party? How did you get to be where you are now?

**Robert Tracinski** [27:45]
Everything's a corrupt, everything's a backroom deal to get special favors, and by the way, that's the thing I mentioned before — I used to be with the Tea Party movement here in Charlottesville.

**Robert Tracinski** [28:20]
Right, so the real origin story of this is me back in college being the guy who explains to everybody what a classical liberal is. Nobody wants to hear it, but "well, actually, classical liberals were people who were for free markets and also for individual freedom" — and going on about John Stuart Mill and all that sort of thing. So my background is I am a classical liberal, meaning I'm generally in favor of free markets.

And that's where I was going with the thing about the corruption — if you're for free markets, you have to be against Donald Trump, because my line that I'm using is: I think free markets are a good idea, and maybe we should try them someday. Because what we often have, and especially under Trump — when the right talks about free markets, what they mean is "me and my friends should get government contracts." Look at Peter Thiel, right? This big right-wing guy — if you look at what his business is, he's basically a government contractor. Or Elon Musk — so much of his business between Tesla and SpaceX is based on government contracts and government subsidies for electric cars. So you have these guys who are tough big capitalists, but their businesses are actually tremendously dependent on favors and positive treatment and actual taxpayer money going into their businesses through government contracts. What we're creating is not a capitalist economy under Trump. What we're creating is — I like to say it's not socialist, it's what came before capitalism. It's a neo-feudalist society, where if you want to create a business, if you want to buy or sell anything, you have to go to some big strongman, a nobleman, a person in a position of authority, and you have to get his permission, and you have to give him a cut. That's the system that came before — even Marx praised capitalism for overthrowing that more primitive system. Well, that's the more primitive system that Donald Trump wants to bring us back to, with him as the king in the center being the ultimate guy who collects the bribes.

So that brings me back to my history in the Tea Party. I come from the background of being a classical liberal, meaning pro-free-market, but also in favor of individual liberties, constitutional rights. I've worked for conservative publications — I used to work for The Federalist. Now, it was back when Tom Nichols wrote for The Federalist, so it was a different thing in its early days, before it became total rage bait, clickbait, pro-Trump. And there's a whole interesting story of being on the front lines and watching all the conservatives working there, except for me and Tom, watching them all transmogrify themselves and make the choice to give up everything to become loyal to Trump, because I got an interesting front-row seat at that. But I've worked for conservative publications — I've never been a conservative, because I never defined myself as wanting to go back to some idealized and often fictionalized version of the past. Especially from having a front-row seat at the conservatives — a lot of them were people who basically wanted to go back to when there was no gay marriage, when gays were still in the closet, when there were no trans people, or trans people were very rarely talked about, or they were shoved off where they never had to encounter anything that was a challenge to traditional American Christian morality and sensibilities. So I was never a conservative because I couldn't define myself in those terms.

When I got involved in the Tea Party movement — I like to point out to people that the early days, the earliest days of the Tea Party movement, like late 2008 when George W. Bush was still in office — it was protests against the bank bailouts, against the idea that our tax money was going to bail out these banks who made the bad bets, and this idea of the government coming in, and this revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury that's been going on since Hamilton. He actually orchestrated the first Treasury bailout of Wall Street. They didn't put that in the musical. I'm a big fan — this is getting geeky — but I'm a big fan of Albert Gallatin, who was Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, who came in and actually undid a bunch of the stuff that Hamilton did, but that's — I'm working on my musical *Gallatin*, look out for that someday.

But what I was going to say is that the Tea Party began as this protest against the special dealing for the big banks, and then also we rallied under the Gadsden flag, this sort of yellow flag with the coiled snake and the motto "Don't Tread on Me." And I think that's the real central thing, because I interpreted that as meaning don't tread on anyone. There's actually a bunch of libertarians who created a T-shirt version that has the Gadsden flag but changed to "Don't Tread on Anyone," and I viewed that as the thing — the government should not be overbearing and oppressive.

And what I found out is that for some people — and I think this is the appeal that Donald Trump made — for some people, what they actually meant was "Don't tread on *me*." The operative word was "me." Don't tread on me, but tread on those people over there, and I'll cheer you on while you tread on the people that I don't like. Tread on the immigrants, tread on the Black people, tread on the LGBT people. Tread on the people that I find icky and disgusting, or don't like, or view as rivals for status or money. And that's, I think, the way that Donald Trump corrupted — now the Tea Party had kind of petered out by the time Donald Trump came along, by 2014, 2015, and partly it petered out because they got a bunch of Republicans elected, so suddenly Republicans were in power, and partly because the Republicans kept promising "we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare, just vote for us in one more election," and we kept doing it, and they never did it, and they never even came up with a plausible replacement. "Yeah, we're repealing and replacing" — well, with what? They never came up with a plausible idea.

So the Tea Party had petered out, but I think the real corrupting influence that Donald Trump did, to grab not all of those people but some of them, was this idea: "I will tread on the people you don't like." And so I'm the person who still stayed with the idea "don't tread on anyone" — that we should be protecting the rights and dignity of everybody in the country, rather than having a politics that's motivated by hate or by wanting to feel like you're a victim and you're oppressed, and then wanting to impose that on other people in revenge.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [29:51]
Yeah, it's a mobster economy. Yeah, so this is an interesting view of the Tea Party, right? If you were going to ask — well, no, I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm not saying your perspective is wrong here, but when I look back on that era, what do I remember the Tea Party as? I often see it as part and parcel with Mitch McConnell saying, "Our goal is for Obama to be a one-term president," right? What's our plan? We're going to obstruct everything, good for the country, bad for the country, we don't care — maximal obstruction. We're not going to let him even seat a Supreme Court justice, right? I see the Tea Party as really ushering in this wave of more radical, more reactionary Republicans, and indeed also — and this is relevant to some things we've touched on already — the Tea Party is relevant to the big 2010 wave of Republicans, the big midterm wipeout for Democrats, which ushered in one of the big modern gerrymandering pushes, a program that they called REDMAP back in the day, to rejigger a lot of different congressional districts and try to lock in Republican advantage. So to me, I see the Tea Party as the precursor of this turn against democracy and in favor of a more reactionary Republican party.

**Robert Tracinski** [36:44]
Well, see, I didn't have that experience from the inside, but I know exactly why you think that. So, for one thing, Mitch McConnell was never the avatar of the Tea Party, because the Tea Party was very much "we hate the Republican Party establishment, the GOP establishment," and who was more Mr. Establishment than Mitch McConnell, right?

By the way, that's one thing I'm very much on about — the idea of people who cling to power for so long. I've told my kids, if I get elected, if I'm still in office when I'm 80, you are authorized to assume that I've lost my marbles and put me in a home, because I've clearly lost the plot if I stay in Congress anywhere near that long.

But what I was going to say is that Mitch McConnell was never the avatar. What I saw was that the Tea Party actually was a grassroots thing — some people say it was astroturfed, all done from above, but it actually was a grassroots thing. I saw ordinary people who got engaged in politics and volunteered, and there's some real almost Norman Rockwell stuff. We had a meeting once — I remember we were deciding whether the Tea Party was going to officially endorse a candidate for the fifth district in 2010, and we had this meeting in a guy's barn sitting on hay bales, going back and forth debating the pros and cons of whether we should do this. And it was this real Norman Rockwell kind of stuff — ordinary citizens getting together to have this debate.

So that was the good part of the Tea Party movement, this grassroots, anti-establishment thing, and also a moment of rapprochement between the libertarian wing of the party and the conservatives, the pro-free-market, more rights-respecting, small-government side. And then what happened — and this happened at several different levels — the more conservative side, the more culture-war side, saw all this energy and said, "Let's co-opt that."

One way that happened is there was this blooming of a million scam PACs. Part of the reason the Tea Party lost momentum is it literally got bled dry. You had people form these political action committees that were going to help elect Tea Party candidates, and what they were actually doing with the money is a little bit went to the Tea Party candidates, and most of it — 80, 90% of the money they raised — went to buy houses and nice cars for the people running the PACs. It was just totally — they were rubes to be fleeced, as these people saw it.

But ideologically, there was also something going on. I think the evolution of the House Freedom Caucus is a great example. The House Freedom Caucus hasn't had anything to do with the concept of freedom for a long time. It originally bloomed and grew as this idea: we're for free markets, we're for small government. And over time it morphed into simply: we are the craziest people, we're the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and the Matt Gaetzes, the craziest, most radical, biggest weirdos in Congress who were going to obstruct everything.

And part of it came from the fact that a lot of people got engaged with the Tea Party with the idea that we're going to get engaged, Congress is going to respond, we've had all these rallies, Congress is going to respond, we're going to get some of the things we want. And then we didn't. And rather than realizing politics is a long, difficult slog — you have to keep chipping away, I've been doing this 30 years, and you succeed sometimes, and you fail a lot, and you just keep going — I think they got frustrated by that long slog and looked for an end run around it. And I think they became so bitter and consumed by hatred — it's the Democrats, it's the establishment, they want to keep us down — they started, instead of looking for a constructive agenda, being open to just looking for a wrecking ball, and Donald Trump comes on, and he's the ultimate wrecking ball.

I actually wrote a piece a number of years ago in which I used Yoda from Star Wars, his famous — he describes in one of the prequels the path to the dark side. I'll try to do the voice: "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to suffering." I used that to explain that conservatives have been following the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to suffering. They got defined more by what they're against, and who they fear, and who they hate defined them more than any positive thing that they were for. And that's part of the corrupting process, but Donald Trump really came in and completed that.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [41:57]
Yeah, I mean, I agree with a lot of that, and I kind of want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, right? You've had a ringside seat on a lot of this stuff. I've read David Frum talk about this. I don't agree with David Frum on policy a lot of the time, have a lot of disagreements with him on policy, but he's written about being inside these conservative institutions where he thought "we're for free markets, we're for small government, we're for the rule of law," and this really disconcerting moment when he'd be sitting across the table from somebody and he realized they didn't care about that at all, they would sell out all of it in a heartbeat, and they were looking at him like he was the crazy one, right?

**Robert Tracinski** [42:44]
Well, the most galling thing I've gotten is people saying, "How did you — why did you change?" I wrote about this a year or so ago, because I said, well, here's how I've changed, and I described some things. But the thing is, I prefaced it by saying, well, I haven't changed, I've barely changed at all compared to the change going on among a lot of the people I know. I think a lot of people thought "how have I changed" means "why aren't you yelling at Democrats all the time and never yelling at Republicans?" — because that's what they thought I was supposed to be doing, that I was supposed to be a partisan hammer for their party.

I was for free trade — I'm still for free trade. I was for the government not asking you for your papers on the street — I'm still for that. I was opposed to Vladimir Putin and Russia, I thought we should stand up to them — I still think we should stand up to Vladimir Putin and Russia. All these things where I haven't changed at all, and everybody else has flipped.

So I did get an inside view of this. The big moment actually was something that locally has a lot of relevance here, which is the white nationalist rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, right? This comes to my backyard, and I'm watching TV, and these guys with torches marching on — I wasn't there because I didn't know what was going to happen — but I'm watching TV and seeing these guys marching with torches on the UVA campus and shouting "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us," and thinking these people are trying to start a war, these people are trying to destroy the whole country. And then it was the moment, a couple days later, and it was really, I think, a key turning point where Donald Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides" — and one side was the guys shouting "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us." Those were the "very fine people."

And that was a turning point, because I actually saw — in the internal chat groups and things like that with various conservatives — it was like me and Tom Nichols going like this: what the hell is going on, what's wrong with you people? And they were all in this process of talking themselves into "well, they didn't really mean that" and "well, actually this" and "actually that," making themselves accept it.

And partly, I think there's the ideological corruption — there's what you might call an ideological sunk-cost fallacy, right? We've gone along so far, we've invested so much in Donald Trump, we have to keep going, even when it becomes clear that this investment is disastrous. But also, there was an element of just pure ambition. It's hard to make a living as a writer or as a commentator. My whole career has basically corresponded with the collapse of the traditional media, the rise of online media, and it's created certain opportunities, but it also has certain disadvantages. It can be difficult to make money. One of the ways that you can do it, though, is to find some cause for which you are a reliable foot soldier and a reliable excuse maker. I think a lot of them saw Donald Trump as a way to rise up and get that Fox News contributorship by being somebody who will wake up every morning, find out what Donald Trump tweeted at 3 a.m., go find a way to defend it on the morning shows, and then when he changes his mind halfway through the day and says the opposite thing, you go find a way to defend that on the evening shows. I've seen people do that, trust me, it happens.

But the other aspect — this goes back to, when I hear people say, "You used to be in the Tea Party and you've moved" — there were people who say, "How come you didn't see the conservative movement like this all along?" Well, there's a debate, because I think, yes, it was like this all along in some respects, but it actually wasn't — it was very different. I think, in retrospect, there were two big strains. There was an actual ideological strain in the movement — there were people who cared about certain basic ideas, and they were in there because of those ideas. Those of us who read Hayek and read Ayn Rand and read various philosophers and economists, or even people — not my strain, but people who read Chesterton, or more traditional conservative sources — they had basic ideas as to what they stood for, and they were there because they stood for ideas.

And some of those people are still around. I have a lot of respect for David French, who took a huge amount of abuse. He actually became this talisman — "David Frenchism" became this enemy. I asked him once, "Do you ever think you'd become an 'ism'?" And he's an evangelical Christian, I don't share his views on certain things, but he has stayed true to his ideas.

So there were people for whom there were ideas. But I also think there were a lot of people — a disturbingly large number — for whom the ideas were in fact just an excuse for something else. An excuse for personal ambition, but also, I think, the other strain in conservatism. The reason I've never been conservative is I've never had this longing for a mythologized and fictionalized Leave It to Beaver past in the 1950s when everything was perfect. I think there were people who were conservative not in an ideological sense, but in that sense of: things should be like I imagine they were in the 1950s. And that means — I called it "TV Land economics." You may not be the right age, but at a certain point in the '90s, there was TV Land and Nick at Nite that showed these old TV shows from the 1950s like *Leave It to Beaver*, *Ozzie and Harriet*, *Father Knows Best*, and there's this idealized TV version of the 1950s with the father as the breadwinner who comes home and June Cleaver is back at home vacuuming in pearls. You're too young to have grown up on this, but it was a presence in my life. There's this idealized view of the past — the single male breadwinner, Black people didn't really appear at all, women weren't in the workplace — this idealized version of how glamorous and how much better life was back in that era. And I think that became the corrupting influence — the idea of simply wanting to return to this actually nonexistent version of the past.

And if you go back to the 1950s — fun fact. You know anything about *Leave It to Beaver*? So it's one of these 1950s TV shows with the family, and the Beaver is the kid, and he has a father, Ward Cleaver, this sort of all-wise father who's always giving wise fatherly advice. He's used by conservatives as this model of the blue-collar breadwinner supporting a family on a single income. Well, it's actually kind of vague what he does for a living, but it's something vaguely having to do with marketing. But I was tickled pink — I found out there is one episode in which he mentions that he went to college and got a degree in philosophy. So here's Ward Cleaver, philosophy major, which as a philosophy major just pleased me to no end.

But the actual 1950s were actually a lot more like that — somebody like Ward Cleaver would actually probably have been a heck of a lot more liberal than any of the people who were using these 1950s nostalgic things as their model. It's sort of like The Onion had an old gag: "Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines the Constitution to Be." I think also a lot of people are passionate defenders of what they imagine the 1950s to be, or what they imagine Western civilization to be, when the actual truth is this was a much more liberal era in a lot of the ways that are important today.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [46:20]
There's just been so much debasement, so much abject groveling, right? From people who present as very respectable, right? They look like normal people, but they're just willing to say anything, they'll say anything, do anything, doesn't matter.

I have heard of it. Oh yeah, I mean — whatever, a lot to respond to there, but we are running short on time, so I want to come back to something that I put a pin in right at the start of this episode, which is this question of gerrymandering.

I suppose that is kind of like people who want to wind the clock back to the 1950s — before the Voting Rights Act. Yeah, I mean, after the recent *Kelley* decision from the Supreme Court, it basically seems like the Voting Rights Act is just smoke in the wind. Anything we want to do is going to involve a war with the Supreme Court.

**Robert Tracinski** [47:00]
Oh yeah, before the Voting Rights Act — and we are now back before the Voting Rights Act, because it's basically dead. Yeah, well, I think we absolutely are going to need a national anti-gerrymandering law. I think it's one of the first things Democrats should do. Even if President Trump won't sign it, they should pass it and make him veto it, because we really should put this issue front and center. A national anti-gerrymandering law should include partisan gerrymandering, but should also absolutely include basically saying, no, we meant this — we're going to put the Voting Rights Act back, you can't do racial gerrymandering, and find a strong way to defend that, and push. Now, of course, that might mean a war with the Supreme Court, and I think we need a war with the Supreme Court.

Yeah, well, a lot depends on what happens in November. I like to say, when people ask me what I want to do in Congress — well, there's a couple different things. There's what Democrats can do now without a majority in Congress, which is not much, but it's more than what they're doing right now. There's what we can do with a simple majority, and there's lots of interesting things we can do with a simple majority. And then there's what we can do if we can get two-thirds — either two-thirds outright, or two-thirds plus a blue wave so big that a bunch of Republicans become terrified and realize — if Republicans become more afraid of the voters than they are of Trump. Maybe that'll happen, maybe it won't.

But anyway, I'm looking mostly at the stuff that happens if we have a majority in Congress, so a national anti-gerrymandering law that includes a ban on racial gerrymandering, and just fight and intimidate the Supreme Court — impeach people, whatever you need to do to try to push that through, and at the very least make them vote against it, so they can be punished even harder, because people hate gerrymandering.

And that's the problem with the gerrymandering — I call it the "partisan revenge gerrymandering" that we had in Virginia. There are two big problems from my perspective. One is that it kind of backfired. I kind of saw the argument for it. I described it as Cold War deterrence theory, right? If the other side escalates, you have to escalate, and then eventually, hopefully —

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [53:55]
I mean, we tried disarmament, right? We tried — a bunch of Democratic states passed nonpartisan anti-gerrymandering laws, and the response from Republicans was, "Thank you so much for putting your weapons down. We are going to gerrymander even harder now."

Right, so I mean, I understand why people are mad about gerrymandering, or at least Democrats are mad about it. It's because it demonstrates how this is not a democracy, right? If you can change the lines on the map and go from a 5-6 state to a 10-1 state, and everybody votes the same — the exact same partisan breakdown, the exact same vote totals, everyone stays Democrat, everyone stays Republican — and you can have that much of a shift in actual representation, then it's clear people aren't voting, lines on maps are voting, right? And we're seeing Republicans exploit this. They thought about trying to just remove Clyburn's seat, right? They could just easily remove it — they don't think they're going to do it, but they thought about doing it. I understand why people are frustrated about it. What's your vision of a national anti-gerrymandering solution? Because there's a bunch of possibilities out there. I'm curious where you're at on that.

**Robert Tracinski** [54:08]
Yeah, so you need to re-establish deterrence. I'm again, as a child of the '80s, I think of the movie *WarGames* — "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." That was with regard to nuclear war, and I think we have to convince them again: the only winning move is not to play. If you start this, we will respond, and you won't gain much by it. But on the other hand, it did backfire in Virginia for two reasons.

One is that it actually mobilized and angered a lot of independent, Democrat, and Republican voters, and at the same time, it split the Democratic voters — people who were on our side were very uncomfortable with the idea of embracing gerrymandering.

The other way it hurt us, and I've experienced this very directly, is it pushed the primary back. The primary really just began this last week, because before that all the oxygen — I'm meeting groups, I'm talking to people, but all the oxygen was getting sucked up by redistricting. People weren't really focused on the primary yet, and there's been a real change in the last couple weeks that suddenly people are focused on the primary. I'm now getting invitations, there's more stuff going on with candidate forums, because people are focused on that. But it means all that gets pushed off to June, July, August — early voting begins in June, the primary official date is August 4. It pushes it back there, and then it means we've got like three months between that and the general election, so it's really scrunched the general election. There's been a lot of costs to doing this, which is unfortunate. I had very mixed feelings about it.

Thirty years as a freelance writer has at least prepared me to deal with an environment of total uncertainty. I've been like six months now running in a district that I don't know what it's going to be. My background is philosophy — there was an ancient Greek philosopher, one of the Stoics, who said sometimes you're like a dog whose leash is tied to an ox cart, and when the cart moves, you're going with it, whether you like it or not. At least you can do is trot along as happily as you can alongside the cart, and that's basically been my approach to this whole redistricting thing. The cart's moving, it's moving whether I want it or not, and so I'm just going to trot along behind, and I can trot along this way and then trot along back that way, depending on how things move.

**Robert Tracinski** [57:33]
I haven't decided between the very — I'm still, because this has just happened, so I was still looking, okay, let's look at the various — I was still hoping that we could cobble together, get them to stand down in Texas, maybe cobble together a state-by-state answer with this sort of gerrymandering war, but it's now become clear — it was just the last week that it became this all-out war with the *Kelley* decision, that the *Kelley* decision loosened the last bonds. So I haven't decided on a specific plan, but I think there are — I actually had a fascinating discussion with a UVA mathematician the other day who has done work on mathematically defining what gerrymandering is, because you can find ways to mathematically do it. But I think we need to create some clear criteria of what is illegal gerrymandering. Both partisan gerrymandering and racial gerrymandering should be off the table, and we need to find clear ways to create criteria for judging that. I think Congress needs to reassert itself simply in taking more — taking discretion away to some extent from the courts and from the executive by defining things very clearly with objective criteria, so that the courts don't have leeway to reinterpret it, and the executive doesn't have leeway.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [58:44]
No, I mean, I think the 14th Amendment says the federal government can guarantee that each state has a republican form of government. I think that's a pretty powerful license right there. Yeah, I'm curious what you think about — so there's the way to try and define gerrymandering, define partisan lean and such, but there's also the move to try and just go to a proportional system, right, multi-member proportional districts. I'm curious what you think about that.

**Robert Tracinski** [58:50]
Well, and even before that, the Constitution has a clause saying states run the elections, but Congress can set election rules. It doesn't say anything about the president having any role — he has no role at all — but Congress explicitly has a role in setting rules. I used to sort of turn my nose up at this proportional European parliamentary thing. I'm seeing the merits a little bit more, but I think that's going to be a much, much heavier lift, because for one thing, it's an amendment to the Constitution. It could be done statewide, I don't know — you could argue there are ways to do it through simple majority legislation. I prefer, for something that big, an amendment to the Constitution, because it is such a radical change. I think it's going to be a much heavier lift. I want us to focus first — we've got a lot of priorities. I want to focus first on some things that are easier to do, more central, and more important. I think if we had some kind of anti-gerrymandering law, you get rid of the situation we have right now, where Democrats have to win the vote by four percentage points — we have to get 54% of the vote in order to get a majority in Congress. That's the kind of rigging — that's always kind of been the case in the Senate, but that it's happening in the House now is a real distortion. I think we have to be careful about going for a few key things, because it's gonna be hard to get anything, and I think, unfortunately, we're going to have to do it over resistance to some extent from the Democratic leadership, which has been overly cautious.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [1:00:39]
Yeah, so that's something else I wanted to ask you about — really coming up on the end of time here — but this Virginia case, right? We had districts, then there was redistricting, and now there's un-redistricting, because the Virginia Supreme Court has overridden the referendum based on basically a technicality. And Jamelle Bouie has argued that this is a case wrongly decided by the court, that a statewide referendum on a constitutional issue is basically an exercise of the sovereign power of the people, and that the courts don't have any business saying that was wrong on a technicality, and that the legislature should just ignore it. Say, "This ruling is invalid, we are going to go ahead with the new districts." And that's a kind of constitutional hardball we haven't really seen very much from Democrats. I'm curious what you think about that as an illustration of where you're at on how hard and how much we should fight.

**Robert Tracinski** [1:00:51]
De-redistricting, I'm calling it.

**Robert Tracinski** [1:01:35]
Yeah, I have very mixed feelings about that idea, because for one thing, I think actually that the technicality was known beforehand. I think part of the problem was — in retrospect, I think what was going on is the General Assembly was playing chicken with the Supreme Court of Virginia. They knew this technicality was there. They knew it was a real substantive issue, because this was supposed to be passed before the previous election. It was passed during the middle of voting, because of early voting these days. They knew that constitutional weakness was there in the whole redistricting push. I think they were hoping: if we get 55, 60% of the people to vote for redistricting, the Supreme Court of Virginia won't dare to overturn it. And then it turned out, well, we got 51% — we won 51-48. It was close enough that they would dare to do it. So they were playing chicken with the Supreme Court of Virginia, and they lost. I think that was partly a little bit of overconfidence on the part of the General Assembly about what constitutional power they actually had.

But also, from my perspective as a candidate, I just want this to be over, because I do think we have that problem of how do you run candidates when the candidates have no time to campaign, because you're turning the districts up and down one after another. And I think they had a worry that the more we do what seems like inside-politics games in Richmond, the more it alienates the voters that we need to win over in the election. I might — we can go back and forth on what they should do or could do — but I am very much, as somebody in the position of running, like, let's have this be over, because I've got stuff planned, making events, I have to decide whether I'm going to Roanoke or whether I'm going to Danville, because one's in the fifth district, in the old fifth, one's not in the new sixth. We need to be doing this.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [1:02:30]
Okay, so yeah, that's an understandable perspective. Last question — what's your closing message to the voters? What's your message here to the people of Virginia?

**Robert Tracinski** [1:03:00]
Well, I do think this issue of — like you said — the combination of it's the Constitution and it's the affordability, and those things are combined. There's a reason we have representative government, there's a reason we have a Congress that's in charge of things, there's a reason we have these guarantees of constitutional rights, and it's to keep the government from going off the rails. When you have one person making all the decisions, you have things like this Iran war, where he can't win the war, he doesn't know even what he's trying to accomplish, and it's causing a global economic catastrophe and probably a recession in the U.S. The reason we have Congress with the power to declare war is so they can ask questions before something like this happens and keep these disasters from happening — so they can say, "No, you can't build your giant gilded ballroom, you have to pay attention to the concerns of the people." Those two things are intimately connected. The founders understood that, and that's what I'm running to restore — that outlook that all these parts of our constitutional system exist for a reason.

I think there's some fixes we could make. You've been calling it reconstruction — I call it a restoration, because it's like restoring an old house, like the one I'm in right now, where you want to keep the idea, you want to preserve the house, but you're also going to update the plumbing — because in this house, the original plumbing was an outhouse — so you're going to update the plumbing, you're going to take advantage of things that you've learned in the years since this thing was built, you're going to modernize a few things, but you're still going to keep the spirit and character of the original. I think that's what we need to do with our constitutional system — we need to fix the things that are broken, we need to make a few improvements, a few reforms, like the pardon power is a major one — but at the same time, we're doing it to preserve the basic idea and the basic character of the original, which is that people govern through their representatives in Congress, and the president is not an elected dictator.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [1:05:39]
All right, that's a good note to end on. Robert Tracinski, running for Virginia's fifth district for Congress. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

**Robert Tracinski** [1:05:51]
It's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.