The Sunday Interview: The New MAGA History: How Trump, JD Vance, and the Right Are Redefining What It Means to Be American

Annika Brockschmidt: Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview. I am Annika Brockschmidt, author of books like Die Brandstifter (The Arsonist), and host of podcasts Feminist Killjoy and Kreuz und Flagge. Today, I'm very happy to be speaking with Thomas Zimmer, and we're going to be talking about the right wing war on history and remembrance, and how this administration and its allies are trying to cement white nationalist talking points in their false retelling of history. And I thought, let me start with a heads up for transparency purposes. Thomas and I are friends and colleagues. We used to host the aforementioned German language podcast on the state of US democracy together while you were still living in the States. And I also camped out during, I think it was the last midterms, in your family's house in the basement for quite a while. So I might have some personal bias here, but you're also a very insightful commentator on the history and the current iteration of the American right, which is why you're here today. So welcome.

Thomas Zimmer: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I think it's the first time we've ever talked in English. Actually, it is. I don't think we also, you know, to all the listeners we should I feel like we need to apologize. You'll have, you'll have two Germans giving you their non native English. But I hope, I hope, you'll make it through.

Annika: You have our two vaguely continental accents to deal with in this episode, but yeah, so you're a historian by training, and you spent the last couple of years teaching at Georgetown, and now you are back in Germany. You're now in Hamburg, I believe. Before we dive in, might be an obvious question, because I already know the answer, but the listeners don't. Was the political change in the US one of the factors in you and your family's decision to move back to Europe, specifically back to Germany?

Thomas: I mean, the short answer is yes. There's always a bunch of factors going into a decision like this, uprooting your life, you know, not just for me, but for my family with two little kids. So a bunch of factors—personal, family ties, professional reasons—but yes, the political situation. I mean, as someone who has been intervening in the political discourse over the past few years, everyone knows that means you get a ton of abuse, broadly speaking, from people who don't like what you have to say. And that's always been the case, and it got more aggressive after Trump returned to the White House. It got more from the sort of "you're getting abuse" towards the "you're getting threats" kind of level. And I think there was a week sometime in March when people will remember this, when they saw the Turkish PhD student who got abducted from the street at Tufts University by sort of masked agents of the state. And now we're so used to these pictures of these masked goons—ICE, Border Patrol, whoever—just abducting people from the street. But that was really kind of the first time we saw it. And she was abducted by these people just for having written some op ed in some student newspaper. And then Marco Rubio, who I believe we will talk about later, also he came out and just flat out said, yeah, that's how it's going to be from now on. There's not going to be freedom of speech for, especially not for non natives, or for non Americans, for non citizens. That's over if you cause a ruckus. That was the direct quote that Rubio used, if you cause a ruckus, you're out. And I think that exact week I had written something for the Washington Post. It's funny, this is sort of when the Washington Post would still print something like this. And I got a ton of stuff like abuse and threats for that, and then the Rubio stuff. And I remember thinking, I had this thought, like, what am I doing here? Like, why? Can I keep doing this? Because I realized I was starting to think, you either have to start to self censor if you want to keep doing what you're doing, or you keep doing it, but that will make you a target over time, and who knows what that means. I mean, I don't know, like, as a straight, white German man, I'm not exactly the number one target for the regime. And I know this, but still, you do feel like, what if I do become a target for this kind of stuff? And I think in that situation, we just realized, I looked at my wife and we were thinking, hey, listen, we're both Germans. We have a third option between either self censoring or becoming a target for the regime. There's a third option. We can just go to Germany. And then my wife got a great job offer right around that same time from Germany, and so we decided, look, this is better for us right now as a family. I really want to say I'm not sitting here saying I am a victim. I had to flee from fascism. That's not how I want to present this case. Really, I'm in such a privileged position as a German citizen to be able to say, hey, my wife got a great job offer from Germany. Let's do it. But yes, I do think, yes, absolutely. The political situation played a big part in this and I do feel like there's been quite a few situations where I felt like, could I have said what I just said publicly if I still lived in DC, worked at Georgetown University, that sort of thing. So, yeah, so now we're in Hamburg.

Annika: And you know, we're both historians by training, and that's one of the reasons, apart from a couple of news stories we're going to talk about today, why I wanted to chat with you about the way that this administration and their proxies on the right are trying to rewrite US history. And you know, a lot has been said about this already. Brad and Dan have covered several news stories about this in the past year and how this ties back into the Christian nationalist project, but I think for us today, it makes sense to look at a specific way. I feel that has kind of started to creep into how this administration is talking about American history at the moment, or, as they would say, American greatness. And one example that kind of stood out to me, because I feel it didn't really get brought up in general media coverage as much was Trump's State of the Union. And of course, it was gory, it was racist, it was anti trans. It was largely incoherent. So not really news for Trump, but I think there was a part of the speech where he gave kind of a version of American history that I would say, if you first hear it, it kind of sounds very familiar. It kind of sounds like a very bog standard whitewash narrative about US history that we've all heard 1000 times. So maybe just to start with, I hope you chose better than to listen to the entire thing. Did you watch it?

Thomas: Not live. I cannot sit for this kind of stuff. I do wait until the next morning, and then I can sort of watch it on my own time, and I can maybe speed it up a little, read the transcript. But yeah, I mean, you have to sort of deal with it. It's such a deranged spectacle. And to some extent, I very much share what you said. Some extent, it was just sort of the deranged, delusional rantings of a bigoted wannabe authoritarian, just Trump doing his thing. But I do think when he came towards the end of his speech to this sort of white nationalist kind of presentation of America's story, what stood out to me there was that that wasn't just Trump being Trump. That was not Trump going off the rails, because that was actually totally in line with what we've heard from other members of the administration, from Republican elected officials, from sort of leading right wing intellectuals. Trump really was totally on message there. That was not sort of the other parts of the speech where he was just ranting, but in those instances, he was just presenting basically the same story that Marco Rubio presented to the world at the Munich Security Conference a few weeks ago. He was basically presenting the same story that reminded me—and I think maybe I'll sort of quote a few passages from that speech from this guy, honestly, I hope most of our listeners won't know who that is, because that means you're not that deep into this kind of nonsense. But if you've ever heard of Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican senator from Missouri who's like one of the most aggressive MAGA nationalists even among Republican elected officials. He gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference in September, and it was titled "What is an American?" And it was entirely exactly the same story about, again, this sort of white nationalist presentation of the American story, where we, quote unquote, "we" is entirely just white people conquering the frontier and this kind of thing. So that really stood out to me that this was Trump, not ranting, not going off the rails, but presenting precisely the kind of story that this administration is committed to, or the political project, because that's more important, right? It's the political project that they're committed to.

Annika: It's the story, the version of American history, the white nationalist version of American history that DHS and several other administration accounts have been posting AI generated videos, paintings about that we usually know from history books under the, you know, why the genocidal actions of the settlers in what Trump calls the unforgiving wilderness of the frontier in his State of the Union speech. You know why that was bad. And I thought that was quite interesting. You know, maybe there was a time when utterances like the ones that Trump made in his State of the Union would get a Rick Santorum fired from CNN. It's not that long ago. And I remembered that news story this morning when I went over my notes. And I really thought, man, that feels like ancient history, but it was really just a couple of years ago. And I think there's another point of the way that Trump or whoever wrote his speech, because it was definitely not Trump, talked about American history that I thought was, in a way, quite distinctive from sort of other whitewashed versions of American history. And I think Seth Cotlar, historian who I interviewed last month for the Sunday interview, pointed this out on Bluesky, because usually in these also, I would say, like standard Republican but not only limited to Republican retellings of American history, it's about the endurance of the idea of America as a nation, of what makes America great, of you know what makes America distinct, the whole idea of American exceptionalism, the shining city on a hill, etc. And I find it interesting that this administration seems to move away quite blatantly. And JD Vance has said as much in several speeches, of saying America is not an idea, right? It's about not just legacy, but specifically heritage. It's about blood and the land that the people of a specific blood line are. It's literally blood and soil.

Thomas: Yeah, no, it's ancestry, ancestry and soil. I mean, it's straight up textbook blood and soil nationalism. It is quite interesting how this sort of whitewashed glorifying, triumphalist tale in a more traditional, kind of mainstream conservative Republican telling that was always still tied to America as a story of, you know, spreading democracy and freedom and defined by this sort of creedal nationalism, by sort of founding, uniting ideas. I mean, if you listen to Reagan, Reagan at the end of his term, in his farewell address, it's still sort of, again, it's rhetorical, of course, and there's a great deal of hypocrisy, but it's still a commitment to America as a creedal nation, defined by certain ideas, a kind of civic nationalism, whereas what they're doing now is an open, aggressive affirmation of "America is not an idea." That's literally the theme of every JD Vance speech. That was also the theme of the speech he gave at the Republican National Convention in 2024 where he presented himself as Trump's running mate, or Trump's choice for the VP, where he flat out, that was the theme. "America is not an idea." It's actually defined by sort of blood and the soil. And I think again, this sort of aggressive affirmation of white male Christian, sort of Western supremacy that comes with this, that is not just the same thing that we've heard from the mainstream right. And this is where, again, I want to just give you at least a little bit of a quote from this Eric Schmitt speech, because that, to me, is one of the core texts of Trumpism that have come out over the past few years, because it's so aggressive. To their credit, there's no reading in between the lines. They're not trying to hide it. As a matter of fact, they're sort of trying to aggressively tell us what's going on. And I find that quite interesting. So again, Eric Schmitt is Senator from Missouri, so he goes to a national conservative conference, and of course, the speech is called "What is an American?" And he rages against the libs and the globalists and all those insidious forces who want to destroy our, quote unquote, "western heritage," another one of those terms that they now use everywhere and all the time. So he says, and this is a quote: "The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It's our birthright, our heritage, our destiny." End of quote. So let me go through the groups that Schmitt lists as "us" who built this country, right, and think about who's not included. So not included in this "us" is Native Americans, who explicitly are the savages that had to be overcome. That's the savage enemy. You had to take this land away from enslaved black people struggling for freedom, immigrants of color coming from all over the world, building this country. No, none of these groups are part of the "us." And so instead, he keeps on going about, and again, this is totally what Trump was all about in his State of the Union, he talks about America as the most western of all civilizations. Quote, "The heights of political, intellectual and technological achievement unmatched by any other civilization in human history." Quote, "Every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints." So this is, again, yes, we've had versions of triumphalist tales, but this is such an aggressive affirmation of Western supremacy, where the boundaries of who gets to belong is so clearly, narrowly defined as white, Western ancestry. Everyone else doesn't get to belong, and we are just better than everyone else. We have the right to dominate, not just here at home, but also in the global sphere, across the world, against these other civilizations who are sort of lesser, inferior. And then, just like Trump in this State of the Union, he ends on, "We are done being ashamed." Again, this is a quote. "We are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it." Again, this is not just Trump. It is Republican elected officials. It's Rubio at the Munich Security Conference. It's JD Vance in all his "America is not an idea" speeches. This is the manifestation of a worldview defined by white nationalism as its organizing principles. And it is tied to this broader what I would say is the defining political project of Trumpism, or the core of Trumpism as a political project, this attempt to reconceptualize national identity and drastically narrow the boundaries of who gets to belong. And that is, again, that's behind all these attempts to roll back any progress towards egalitarian pluralism, to vanquish the idea that America should aspire, should even aspire, not just that it's not a reality, should even aspire to be a nation defined by equal citizenship in a kind of pluralistic, multiracial society. That is the idea that is behind the assault on birthright citizenship. No, we're done with all of this.

Annika: It's un-American, right?

Thomas: Oh yes, yes, absolutely, which is strictly hierarchical. This is an assault on the God given natural order where white, heterosexual Christian men stand on top of the pecking order and in the global sense, America's representatives, who, of course, are only members of this group, stand at the top of the international pecking order and have the God given birthright to be there. And there was another quote from the State of the Union that I thought was quite interesting, because, again, it carries echoes of retellings of this triumphalist version of American greatness that we've heard before. But there is a very distinct edge to it, even when he's talking about Americans, that kind of echoes this discourse on the right that's been going on for a couple of years now, that is very clearly distilling that having American citizenship is not enough to count as being an American, as being part of the American project. Because he says, after this list of why America is the pinnacle of, quote unquote, "Western civilization," Trump said, "All of this and so much more is the enduring legacy, unmatched glory of the hard working patriots who built and defended this country and who still carry the hopes and freedoms on all of humanity's backs. For years, they were forgotten, betrayed and cast aside, but that great betrayal is over, and they will never be forgotten again." And Seth Cotlar noted about this, and I thought this was putting it really well. He wrote on Bluesky, the greatness of America is associated with the actions of individuals whose actions are attributed to their patriotism, not as the GOP line usually goes, because their individual private aspirations were unleashed by the climate of freedom created in the US. And that, I think, really drills it down. It's not enough to be an American and to be connected to the ideas, like the idealized ideas of what America should be, even if that's not the case at the moment. You have to have the literal connection to the land. I remember I was at NatCon, I think in 2024, and that was about two weeks, I think, before JD Vance got confirmed as the running mate. And he actually tried out a whole paragraph of the speech that he gave at the party convention later at NatCon, and it was the bizarre part, the blood and soil part of the speech, where he talks about, "I want my children to be buried in the Kentucky soil their forefathers bled into." And that what really strikes me is the recurring motif of blood. It's literally, this is the soil sanctified by the blood of our forefathers, and therefore this is our divine birthright to dominate this soil and to expel others from it.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, it has become consensus among the right wing thinkers of the right wing, the reactionary intellectual scene. They are all in on this idea that forget legal status. Forget, you know, whatever. You can be legally an American citizen, or whatever. Or you can be here in the United States legally. It doesn't matter. What matters is their definition of who actually gets to belong and who gets to be a patriot, who gets to be counted as, and they will call it either "real American," or they use the term "authentic."

Annika: Authentic, yes.

Thomas: So all of these composite terms where forget about your legal status. That's, at best, provisional. And I always sort of bring up this piece that this guy, Glenn Ellmers, wrote, who's another one of these right wing thinkers in the Claremont, broadly speaking, Claremont Institute realm. So Claremont basically is kind of the institutional home for the most outright, most MAGA, most aggressively sort of MAGA camp among the right wing intellectual scene. And he wrote this piece, "Conservatism is No Longer Enough," shortly after the 2020 election, where he flat out says, like, look, to me, like only the, quote unquote, "authentic Americans" count, and that's like half the population, because everyone who voted for Biden, because these people, supposedly, in his understanding, voted for a fundamentally un-American project of sort of leftism, wokeness, globalism, undermining the nation. And so all of these people, everyone who voted for Joe Biden, has forfeited their right to be counted as a member of the body politic, and so they should all be expelled, or they should all be ostracized, and only half of the population actually count as real Americans, or authentic Americans, as he calls it. And that type of thinking has, I mean, that's just consensus on the right. That's just everywhere. It's just completely dominates their thinking amongst these right wing circles. That's not a controversial thing to say anymore, and everything else, including the assault on birthright citizenship, follows from such ideas.

Annika: And what would you say when we look at the history of the largely speaking conservative movement or right wing movement. What are the places where you could find this sort of blood and soil thinking a couple of decades ago? So when we look at the trajectory of where has this thinking moved from to make its way into the mainstream?

Thomas: I mean, look, broadly speaking, this is the oldest conflict in American history. It's fundamentally about two competing forms of nationalism or national identity, because that's what it's all about. So there's always been one tradition, one kind of political or intellectual tradition that defined America as a creedal nation, so anyone can be American, as long as they subscribe to certain ideals and aspirations, freedom, liberty, whatever, all men are created equal. And we all know that was never the actual reality of American life, but it always has been a sort of political tradition in American history that was also there, but then from the start, there was this other form of nationalism that completely rejected the aspirational creed as the basis of the nation and instead defined America in racial and religious terms, as kind of an ethno state in which wealthy white Christians deserve to rule and have a right to draw the boundaries of who gets to be American. And I think, to me, what is interesting is that, I think everyone understands that before the Civil War, obviously, the egalitarian principles were not in charge in American history. But the thing is, this conflict between, like, what is America supposed to be? Is it supposed to be this kind of egalitarian, pluralistic, kind of democratic society, or is it supposed to be a white Christian homeland? That conflict wasn't solved in 1865 either, and it wasn't solved in 1965 either. And I think that is where even sort of mainstream liberals kind of, I think, were too willing to accept this idea that maybe with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s we finally solved this conflict. Haven't we finally, in the 1960s, come to an agreement that henceforth, we all agree, from now on, we'll try to do this egalitarian pluralism thing? And what you see on the right, what you see now on the right is that is just not true. There was never a consensus in the 1960s. There was never a consensus reached. And these forces on the right that just were not on board with this kind of egalitarian pluralism vision, they immediately started organizing and started a counter mobilization against the civil rights revolution, against this idea of democratic pluralism. And I think what's happened over the past few decades is that these forces on the right that were always part of the broader right wing coalition, this broader right wing coalition that ranged from moderates of Republicanism all the way to the extremist fringes. And I think what we've seen over the past few decades is these more openly, aggressively rejecting the idea of democratic pluralism, those corners of the right, they have just moved towards the center of right wing politics, and to the point where today, the consensus on the right, and I'm not talking about hardcore MAGA, I'm not talking about the rabid Trumpist base. I'm talking about people who have gigs as opinion writers or guest writers for the New York Times, like Christopher Caldwell, for instance, who is broadly accepted as a very respectable conservative thinker, but the guy flat out wrote a whole book about why the civil rights legislation was a mistake, and why this whole democratic pluralism thing is a mistake. So in this understanding, it is consensus on the right today, on the mainstream right today, it is a consensus that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was not the culmination of a noble aspiration of egalitarianism, but actually it was a mistake. It was a point where America took the wrong turn, and it needs to be rolled back. That's just the consensus on the mainstream right today. And I think that is the thing that we need to grapple with here, that what Trump is channeling here in his State of the Union, and what Eric Schmitt and JD Vance and what they're also putting out there is not some fringe rabid MAGA stuff that's just everywhere on the right, that's what they agree on.

Annika: And it's also something that, you know, Charlie Kirk, for example, in the last years of his life, very aggressively pushed, because he very much understood which way the wind was blowing. And you know, Brad and Dan have talked about this at length in this pod. That was part of why he rebranded as a white Christian nationalist, because that's where the power was going in the party. And I think this is very obvious at this point. I want to hone in on before we go to the second part, the topics that we want to discuss today, I want to spend a little bit of time, even though it was a while ago now, on the speech that Marco Rubio gave in Munich. And I promised myself I wouldn't go on a rant about the German media reaction, because this is a podcast, I recognize that, for not only an American audience, but with a large American audience. So you might not be interested in my personal grievances with German media discourse, or grievances we, I think, probably share. However, maybe just as context. So last year, JD Vance gave a speech in Munich that I'm sure you probably all remember that kind of shocked the European national security, national security policy apparatus to their core, because it kind of took a baseball bat to any delusions of the endurance of the, quote unquote, "old transatlantic alliance." Whether that alliance was still in place in the way that it is being retold is another question, but that was sort of a shock and awe speech. Marco Rubio essentially gave a speech that I would say there's not much daylight between the two in the content, but he kind of ran the Stephen Miller version of the speech, or the Darren Beattie version of the speech through the national security policy thesaurus, and that led to—

Thomas: And he was smiling so nice.

Annika: He was so nice while he delivered white nationalist talking points, which led to the three highest ranking German government members in attendance jumping up and delivering a standing ovation. So we're not leaving that out here. But because we're talking about memory, culture and history and the way history is remembered, I wanted to just give a quote here from the speech, because it really ties into what we've been talking about, and it also, I would say, gives a pretty, not really a hint, just like a blaring signal to who this administration and whose rhetoric on the German right this administration is quite fond of. So he said, "For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding. Its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers, pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires, extending out across the globe. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins." Just little aside from me, interestingly, he doesn't mention why Europe was in ruins, but who knows? Nobody knows what happened. "Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain, and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The Great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across the map," etc, etc, etc. That's quite on the nose.

Thomas: I find it astonishing, really, how open and aggressive this sort of affirmation of racial and religious superiority is, of white Christian Western supremacism and chauvinism really. I mean, "colonialism was good, actually" is quite a take, you know. It is remarkable how it was not that long ago that you only got that kind of rhetoric from really the extremist fringes of the political discourse, and now he's standing there and he's doing it. But because he did it in a conciliatory tone, or whatever, people kind of weren't even listening or not getting what he was actually saying. Or maybe, great, yeah, that's right, and we all agree. And the Beatles and The Rolling Stones and so on. I mean, look, I think what I will say is that, by the way, I do think that since that speech, it's been a few weeks now. I think most people have in the German discourse, my sense is that most people now understand what he was actually saying, and have gotten a little more critical.

Annika: True, but I would say in response, yes, however, the German ministers, so our foreign secretary and Secretary of Defense have defended their applause and their standing ovations saying that, while they don't agree on everything, our Secretary of Defense said that, yes, we are on board with curbing migration. It's a real problem, and the cultural similarities and cultural heritage is very important. So that was a polite affirmation, actually, of those white nationalist talking points as "it's a good thing actually," which, to be honest, again, this might be a little bit inside baseball for an American audience, but we're already here. We're already two Germans talking in English. So we might as well. In Germany, we actually do have a current minister, another great German word called Beauftragter für Kultur, who's a minister of culture who in his conservative manifesto, which is available on Kindle Unlimited, please don't read it, it's horrible, he says that it's actually a shame that colonialism after World War Two was relegated to, and he says, which is a real choice of words, was relegated into the ovens of history and basically burned. So I think this government has some members who might not have really heard or listened to what Rubio said or understood it, and some other members who are like, yeah, colonialism had good points really.

Thomas: I mean, "colonialism good actually" is obviously a long standing thing in the more reactionary intellectual circles. By the way, not just in Germany, there's a whole big discussion, a big revisionist attempt to make colonialism great again in the UK, in Britain, there's this whole thing. What I will say, what is so frustrating to me is that I think the transatlantic policy community, this transatlantic think tank bubble, has been particularly reluctant to learn and kind of, I'm trying to be charitable here, unwilling or unable to grapple with who is now in charge in the United States. So they latch onto this, "Oh, but he talked about shared values," as if he was talking about a shared love for democracy.

Annika: Our foreign minister claimed that there's a shared love for democracy that Rubio praised in this speech, right?

Thomas: Well, it was actually a shared heritage of Western supremacy that he was praising. I mean, look, I think the Rubio speech, to me, was very interesting, because it really was the foreign policy version of the kind of blood and soil nationalism at home. And I think what is perhaps a little maybe not confusing, but maybe kind of hard to put together for some people, is, how does a program of ethno religious nationalism translate into a foreign policy? What is the relationship between sort of "America First" at home, or white nationalism at home, and then this, what is "America first" foreign policy? And I think it has been too often translated as isolationism. "America first" means isolationism or whatever. And then they're surprised when Rubio goes to Munich and does not give an isolationist speech, because that was not isolationism. And here's the thing, "America first" never meant isolationism. It meant we refuse to accept any responsibilities, any kind of international commitments or any restraints on our power. We reserve the right to use American power as we see fit, to defend our sovereignty. That's the key term here, really. Another term that came up prominently in Rubio's speech, and that was really the key term in the national security strategy that they released, a new national security strategy that they released in the fall. And so again, it means forget all restraint, forget the rules based international order. We're not going to go along with that anymore. We will do as we see fit, and we will intervene on behalf of, quote unquote, "Western civilization," because that is how this administration defines its national interest, which is supposedly being undermined by the EU and the globalists and the leftist movements that want to defeat the, quote unquote, "West." And so the idea here is, look, we will intervene, not on behalf of specific countries, but we will intervene into the domestic politics in Europe, for instance, on behalf of these nationalist right wing movements and parties, because that is in defense of, quote unquote, "Western civilization," and that is the national interest of the United States. And there you have it, a foreign policy agenda that combines white Christian nationalism and "America first" with an aggressive, interventionist policy in defense of Western civilization abroad. It's kind of an international alliance of right wing nationalists. And that is, I think only on the surface is that kind of paradoxical, because on the surface you think, well, if they're nationalists, how can they be an international alliance? But it's not a new thing, really. I mean, we had kind of a fascist international alliance in the 1930s and the interwar period. And so that's what it is. It's like this kind of, it's a right wing nationalist international is what they're trying to create.

Annika: Also, the Rubio speech also included some very clear signaling that I think didn't receive a lot of traction in US media discourse. It included a not exactly veiled endorsement, I would say, to the right wing extremist movement in Germany that wants to essentially end remembrance of the Holocaust, of Nazi crimes in general. And this is a movement that basically argues that guilt has been placed wrongly on the German nation to sort of stymie and shackle it and prevent it from full throatedly embracing nationalism by falsely tethering it to some, in their view, made up guilt, because either they minimize Nazi crimes or they think what they did was good, actually. And I pulled out the portion of the speech, so the German term for this that has been used by AfD politicians increasingly in the last couple of years, it's a term that comes out of the neo Nazi scene. But again, like the movement to minimize Nazi crimes is not in German history has not been limited to only right wing extremists. However, the term is Schuldkult, so a cult of shame, a cult of guilt. And what Rubio says is, "We want allies who can defend themselves, so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength." That is the nationalist international that you talked about. "This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization," etc, etc, etc. That's, again, not subtle. I would say.

Thomas: No, no. I mean not at all. And it makes sense. It makes total sense, because the movement that is currently in charge of the American government, the movement that controls the levers of state power in the United States, pursues exactly the same sort of political project, sort of ethno nationalist political project as the far right AfD in Germany. I mean, it is, there's no misunderstanding there on the part of Rubio. I mean, what he's saying makes total sense. And to pretend that he's not saying what he's saying, that's the stupid part. That this Trump government would send either Vance last year or Rubio this year to Munich and say, "Hey guys, by the way, we're not actually on board with this whole pluralism thing. We think that's like, stupid leftist multicultural globalism. That's the enemy. What we think is cool is, like ethno religious nationalism and white supremacy. How about it?" That's just the whole thing. And then every time it happens, the commentariat over here on this side of the Atlantic, the European side of the Atlantic, is like, "Oh my goodness, they're taking the side of the AfD." Like, yeah. I mean, yes, yes. That's the whole point.

Annika: From everything they have been doing. It would be bizarre for them strategically if they weren't. But I want to stay and we're now elegantly going to pivot into the second part of our conversation. And we're going to use Marco Rubio to do it because, I mean, Marco Rubio, maybe I'm interpreting too much into it, but whenever I see Trump talking at a podium, and there's always people standing behind him, and quite often it's Rubio, I tend to, I don't want to say I like to look at Rubio's face while Trump is talking, but I do find it an interesting psychological study of the human psyche and the depths humans can be willing to sink to to cling to power. Because, I mean, if we look at Rubio's trajectory, his political career. He's one of the stars of the Tea Party. He then becomes part of the GOP establishment. He becomes sort of this neocon hawk. And he warned of Trump in, I think it was in 2015, as a fraud. And said, you know, "friends warn their friends when they're about to vote for a fraudster," or whatever the quote was. He basically, it's not that dissimilar to the way that JD Vance was speaking about Trump at the time. And now they are both parroting white nationalist talking points at the behest of the Dear Leader. And I know that you wrote a piece on basically looking back on the last 10 years of the trajectory of reactionary or conservative thinkers and politicians who were against Trump when he first appeared on the political stage, and then did a 180 and kind of you basically did a surgical intellectual procedure of parsing out what happened. So tell us what happened.

Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think to me, one of the key questions that we all need to ask ourselves is, how do these people give themselves permission to go along with something that they themselves said not that long ago was unacceptable? Because, I mean, remember, every human being, if they look in the mirror in the morning, they're not going to say, "Man, I'm a cynical piece of"—I don't know if I'm allowed to swear, it's podcast. "I'm a cynical piece of work, so look at me. Wow, I'm so evil." No one says that. Everyone has to find a way to make sense of their own actions in a way that aligns with their stated values or understanding of themselves. So I think to me, what was interesting for me was to just look back, because exactly 10 years ago, we have this 10 year anniversary of this moment at the start of the Republican primaries in 2016 when it looked like for a moment, perhaps maybe the Republican establishment or the conservative elites were standing up to say, "enough, enough with this guy," and Rubio was one of them. So Rubio went really hard after Trump in the 2016 primaries. Again, you already said it. He called him a fraud, and that kind of thing. And there was also on the more conservative intellectual side, there was National Review, this sort of flagship, or self identifying flagship of respectable kind of conservative thought. They came out with this special issue that was called "Against Trump." So where they brought together, I think, 22 sort of leading conservative thinkers, activists, media personalities, and they all made their case against Trump, just like Rubio did in the primaries. And then within a very short span of time, almost all of them, not all of them, we should say there were some in the "Against Trump" National Review issue, like Bill Kristol was in there, for instance. And whatever else you want to say about Bill Kristol, he certainly stuck with his anti Trump stance. That's for sure. But most of them went either "anti anti Trump." That's this weird thing where you always preface everything you say with "to be sure, I don't like him either, but," and then after the "but," it's like, okay, everything else is way worse. So we totally have to support Trump. Or they go full on embrace of MAGA, which is more like the Rubio trajectory. And I think, look, obviously part of this is careerism, totally. I mean Rubio, for instance, he made a choice to not be ostracized from the party, which is what happened to everyone who actually stood up to Trump, but rise with Trump. And I think also in Rubio's case, specifically, this administration is letting him work towards something that he has always wanted, which is regime change in Cuba. So there's that thing. There was also a big deal of opportunism, like many of these people who claimed to oppose Trump out of principle were just concerned that he would lose the general election to Hillary Clinton. And when it became clear that was not the case, they were like, "Okay, awesome. We like him now." So there's all this going on, but what I wanted to investigate also, on top of all of that, is that this is not just a story of people ignoring their principles, like conservatives ignoring their principles for opportunist, careerist reasons. But it's also something about people, about the inherent defining principles of modern conservatism itself, a movement defined from the beginning in the 1950s or so, not as small c conservatism in the colloquial sense of the word, as in, like, you know, conserving and preserving and that sort of thing. But don't be confused by the name. Modern conservatism was never predominantly conservative in the small c sense, but a reactionary movement fueled by their disdain for the left and liberalism and all that kind of stuff. And what you see amongst all these people who came out in early 2016 against Trump, or went after Trump, all of these conservative thought leaders and intellectuals and all these people, I think what they ultimately decided was that, you know, modern conservatism is first and foremost an anti liberal, anti left kind of movement. It's a coalition of people who came together in the middle decades of the 20th century because they decided that leftism, liberalism, whatever, for them, it's all the same, socialism, communism, leftism, liberalism. They specifically use those all those terms interchangeably and as synonyms. So they decided, look, that is definitely the greater evil. And so whatever else Trump is, once it became clear that he was not some secret liberal, which is the concern that some of them had, or "what if he's actually not one of us? What if he's actually liberal?" Once it became clear that Trump was entirely fueled by grievance, by anti left, anti woke, anti liberal grievance, they realized that he was not a break or an aberration from the modern conservative project, that he was actually doing what this project was always centered around, which is this fight against liberalism and leftism and whatever. And so I think what happened there is that they decided, you know, "Trump, we don't have to betray our principles to support Trump. Actually, Trumpism is just a kind of radicalized version of what modern conservatism was always supposed to be," which is this ultimate fight against the left. And most of them actually decided that the kind of rabid Trumpist radicalism was precisely what was needed, because leftism liberalism in this understanding had been allowed to advance way too far into American life, had been allowed to become way too powerful, and that it was finally time to take off the gloves. And this is the kind of rhetoric that you read in 2016, "take off the gloves. We need a bruiser. We need a brawler." And so I think the case that I was trying to make is to say, look, it may look like these people kind of betrayed their conservative principles. And maybe if you understand conservatism as small c conservatism, that would be the case. But they didn't betray the mission of modern conservatism, capital M, capital C as a political project, because that was always about fighting against the left by whatever means necessary. And if that means, hey, maybe we need Trumpist extremism, then so be it.

Annika: Yeah, and how would you say that's been going for them so far?

Thomas: I mean, look, well, first of all, they're in power, so they're in power. But I would say the interesting thing about this movement, modern conservatism, is that they've always felt under siege. They've always had this sort of sense of being on the defensive and being under siege from these forces of liberalism. And what is interesting is that that feeling has not gone away at all. So they control the government, they control the Supreme Court, and yet somehow they're still like, "Oh no, we're losing." And they get all upset about the Super Bowl halftime show.

Annika: What makes all of this so incoherent, I think that was also part of the, at least to people who are not immersed in this, because it's "we can't stop winning," but "we're also losing" because we have this powerful enemy who's also losing all the time.

Thomas: Yeah, although I think again, this is totally in keeping with the modern conservative tradition, because they have always been very much obsessed with culture, broadly speaking, culture. They basically have this understanding of politics and political power being downstream from culture. And I think this is why the end of the Reagan era, or the early 90s, was such a key moment. So they come off this 12 year period of being in power. So they had Reagan for eight years, and then George H.W. Bush. But you would think that a conservative movement that just managed to get one of their own, Reagan was the first president they considered properly conservative. So they come off this period, and you would think, "Hey, you guys should be happy. You were in power for 12 years. What's happening?" And they're like, "Oh no, we're so not happy. We're totally depressed." Because what they realized, I think, in the Reagan period, was that, well, first of all, Reagan wasn't governing as radically as they wanted. But they also realized that the instrument of democratic politics, the instrument of democratic power, are just not well suited to this kind of culture war that they actually want to wage. And so American culture broadly defined, the public sphere and what television looks like and all of a sudden you have Super Bowl halftime performers who are not white, that sort of thing. It all moved away from them, even though they were in power. And I think that is a really key thing to understand about these people. They don't think it's enough that they control the Supreme Court. They don't think it's enough that they control the government. They want to control culture, national identity. They believe they have, they believe it is their prerogative to look out into the world and have their own image reflected back at them, because half of the public square, for lack of a better word, looks like them. And that's just not the case in the United States. The public square is looking a little less white and a little less Christian and a little more colorful and multicultural, multiracial, multi ethnic, multicultural. And that has kind of been moving away from them, and that is the level. That is why they have decided that maybe democratic politics is just not enough. Maybe just using political power in a kind of small d democratic way is just not enough. Maybe we need an open embrace of authoritarianism to kind of shape and impose our vision of what America is supposed to look like, what the public sphere is supposed to look like, what the public square is supposed to look like. To impose that on the country, you can't do this with normal, quote unquote, normal democratic politics. I think that is fueling their radicalization towards an open embrace of authoritarianism, fueled by this realization, "Oh no, we had the presidency, we have the Supreme Court, and it's still not enough to make this country look like us."

Annika: Adhere to what we think it should look like.

Thomas: Yes, they're still not going to let Kid Rock play the halftime show. And so the only thing we can do from here is to leave the grounds of democratic politics and embrace a more authoritarian use of power. And I think that is the trajectory that they have all been on.

Annika: And that's what we're seeing with, you know, the weaponization of the FCC. That's the mission Brendan Carr has been on. And I think that's definitely going to ramp up as we go on and as we keep watching this second Trump administration. Well, this was, well, fun. It always feels weird to say this was fun when we talk about these topics, but I really loved having you on. Before we finish up, can you tell us where listeners can connect with you and your work? Where can they find you?

Thomas: Yeah, so I mean, I am on social media that's mostly Bluesky these days. So if you want to know what I think about stuff, you find me on Bluesky. But most importantly, I write a newsletter about American history and politics. It is called Democracy Americana, and I try to provide a kind of big picture lens on the current political conflict, put it in perspective, reflect a little bit on where we are in this broader struggle over how much democracy and for whom there should be in this country. And so, yeah, that's called Democracy Americana, and that comes out every week with long form essays about the kinds of questions that we have been discussing today.

Annika: All right, I'm going to ask Thomas one more question about Christopher Rufo, creator of the critical race theory moral panic. Subscribers stick around, and if you are not a subscriber, today is the best time to sign up. See the show notes to get access. Thomas, thanks so much for being on the pod. Thanks to all the listeners, and we'll speak again soon.

Thomas: Thank you. Bye bye.

Annika: Thank you for listening to The Sunday Interview at Straight White American Jesus. I'm Annika Brockschmidt, author of books like Die Brandstifter, The Arsonist. You can find me on Bluesky. Check our website for the content schedule, and make sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with everything on Straight White American Jesus and Axis Mundi.