This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you’re excited to be back from Thanksgiving break. I’m honored to be joined this afternoon by Moira Donegan. She’s a great columnist at The Guardian and writes a lot of really interesting pieces about what’s happening with Trump and the Republican Party, as well as the Democrats.
She’s a great overall analyst of what’s happening in American politics, so thanks for joining me.
Moira Donegan: Thank you, Perry. That’s very kind to you. It’s good to be here.
Bacon: Great to see you. I want to start with this: If you’d asked me in August—when the National Guard seemed like it was being deployed everywhere and universities and other institutions were folding a lot—where I felt American democracy was on a scale of one to ten, how worried I was, I might have said a nine. It felt like things were really, really bad, and I might be down to a seven right now. It feels like there are more constraints on Trump than there were, and that more people—Democrats, members of Congress, judges—feel like they’re opposing him than before. But tell me how you feel. Are we in a better place than we were in August, or maybe not?
Donegan: I think some of the weaknesses that are inherent to Trump in his second term are becoming a little more obvious. Now, that does not mean we are out of the woods, right? I think the Trump era has ushered in a slow but real set of changes to the constitutional paradigm and an empowerment of the executive that is not going to be eliminated just because Trump seems to be in a degree of personal decline. But that decline is becoming hard to ignore.
I think the government shutdown was actually quite damaging for Donald Trump. I think the persistence of high prices—particularly now, exacerbated as some of his tariffs go into effect—has been bad for Trump. The very cynical reception that the Supreme Court case about those tariffs got at oral argument fractured the notion that all of these Republican politicians and political operatives—among which I do count the Supreme Court justices, or at least the majority of them—are in a state of permanent and absolute obedience to Donald Trump. That’s beginning to crack.
And I think in the two weeks or so since the elections this year—they’re off-year elections, and the party out of power tends to be a great deal more motivated—I will give the responsible caveat that we are limited in what we can deduce from what happened a couple of weeks ago. But those were real Democratic wipeouts, and that has been partnered with some real internal fracturing within the MAGA coalition in the ranks below Donald Trump, as the contradictions of that coalition are forced into the light. And as some of these more ambitious MAGA Republicans start to look toward their own post-Trump future, they’re beginning to position themselves to be best situated to ascend further after the old man exits the stage.
Bacon: I’ll ask a couple of things there. You’re not required to give a one-to-ten, but on that scale, would you want to give a number?
Donegan: I think I’m with you. I think I’m about a seven or an eight. I think this is still pretty bad, right? And the effort to rebuild something like a liberal democracy—or something beyond a liberal democracy that has similar aspirations toward a pluralist society of equals—is going to be a generational fight. And I really don’t want to be like, oh, it’s fine that he’s a doddering old idiot; his advisers are turning on him, it’s all over. I don’t think that’s really true.
And I think we could still see Donald Trump reconsolidate his control over the Republican Party, but you can’t really look at the past month or two and think that he has as much control now as he did in, say, February, or those moments in the months following the 2024 election when there was this fantasy—among a lot of Republicans and a lot of media commentators and people with institutional power—that Trump represented this mass sort of will of the volk that couldn’t be contradicted. Now it seems like contradicting him is much more possible.
Bacon: If he could reconsolidate power in the Republican Party—assuming, as is now suggested, that he does not have total power in that party—you’d say that right now.
Donegan: Yeah. I think Donald Trump is a little bit out to lunch. As the president, he is really showing his age. Reports—like a very interesting piece that came out in The Atlantic today—indicate that he is personally isolated. He is not doing the kind of big rallies that he did throughout his first term. He’s not appearing in public as often, and when he does appear in public, he looks old—he looks like a much older man than he did in 2016, 2017, right? The stress of the presidency and the passage of time have had visible effects on a man who was never very robustly physically healthy to begin with, right?
So I think what you have is a president who is occupying a kind of figurehead position, and then some very powerful but not very accountable people within his administration who are doing the actual work of governing. I’m thinking particularly of people like Russ Vought and Stephen Miller.
You have a really, for lack of a better term, castrated Congress who are not getting the kind of handouts and favors that would make it easy for them to remain loyal to Trump, even at political cost. We’re seeing a lot of scandals that are damaging Donald Trump, even within his own coalition. And among those, I’m thinking of continued high prices and cost-of-living issues. It’s an old song, but it’s a good one: it’s true that people do not like feeling as though they can’t afford a comfortable life or the life they aspire to, right? And that’s something he ran on in 2024 and has not delivered on.
But also, Jeffrey Epstein is not staying dead—that guy is really haunting the Trump presidency. And that 2024 campaign really relied on these forces of paranoia and conspiracists, on this harnessed anti-elite energy that Donald Trump no longer seems like a credible avatar for. And you have people who I do not think you have to hand it to, people who are, like—
Bacon: Not to stop you. Are we talking about one crazy woman from Georgia?
Donegan: I’m talking about the crazy lady from Georgia and the crazy lady from Colorado. I’m talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who have both broken with the president on Epstein, and Greene very dramatically. Greene is a complicated figure who now seems, quite robustly, no longer to understand her own interests as being in alignment with President Trump, right? But I also think it’s a trick to ask about these people—are they genuinely crazy, or are they cynical?
Bacon: Because we’ll never know and it doesn’t really matter. Both, right?
Donegan: Yeah, it’s often both. But I think you do have some of these people who got elected to Congress who are true believers in QAnon—true believers in the idea of Donald Trump in 2020, 2019 as this quasi-messianic figure. And his physical decline and the mounting evidence of his, at minimum, cooperation with or blithe acceptance of Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct has really given some of them not only a moment of cynical reevaluation of their own self-interest, but a genuine crisis of faith in some cases, right?
And I don’t think that’s just happening in the strange minds of the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert. I think that’s happening to a lot of people who were radicalized on Facebook during the pandemic, who are now wondering, Well, this belief system that was very morally animating to me has continued to be contradicted by facts in ways that are accumulating to the extent that I can no longer ignore it.
So I think his base is fracturing, his coalition is fracturing, and he’s spending a lot of time doing stuff that doesn’t seem to be helping. He’s throwing Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago during the government shutdown. He seems to spend a majority of his time on the ballroom build. And the destruction of the East Wing did have a symbolic hit in a way that maybe some people didn’t expect it to.
He seems to be interested in old-man projects—retiree stuff—that seems to be his personal preoccupation. So the question of who is actually in control of policy is another matter, because it doesn’t seem to be the elected representatives in Congress, and it doesn’t seem to be personally Donald Trump. It seems to be this set of people in the Trump administration.
Bacon: Marco Rubio does foreign policy. Stephen Miller does immigration. Russ Vought does domestic. Yeah. It does seem like we’re in a place where the president is not in charge of much and doesn’t seem to be engaged—which was maybe true the whole five years. But it seems more pronounced now, as though we’re getting at here.
Donegan: Yeah. I think it’s just hard for these people who really invested a lot of hope and a lot of symbolism in Donald Trump the man—in the figure of Donald Trump as this person who could deliver restored greatness and prosperity to white America. They are not getting that. And it’s harder to believe in that when you see this doddering old man who’s playing golf and talking about his home renovation.
Bacon: When I was at The Washington Post, I wrote a lot of columns. I was the sort of Democrat who was critical of the Democrats. You would often write something similar to me, but a little better, in terms of making those critiques. But one thing you said was that I have found a lot of the Democratic Party’s strategy over the last four years, ten years, and earlier this year to be pretty bad and pretty ineffective.
But we think that the government shutdown—even though we all criticized it for ending too early—you seem to say just a minute ago the government shutdown seemed to drive his poll numbers down. Do we think that the Democratic Party, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, did something smart? Are we going to have to say that?
Donegan: Don’t make me hand it to Hakeem Jeffries.
Bacon: Yeah, you might have to think about it.
Donegan: Genuine change is happening very slowly inside the Democratic Party, where they are beginning to reassess some of their former approaches to Trump, which were much more like, Let him hang himself, right? We’re going to step back. We’re going to let him be a distracting mess in front of the public, and the public will understand him to be incompetent and unworthy of his office, and then they will restore us to power. That hasn’t really played out great. The Democrats do best when they affirmatively attack Trump and when they press on his weaknesses. I criticized them at the time for ending the shutdown within a week of those elections. I thought it looked cynical.
I thought it looked weak. I thought they could have extended their time, but I do think what you have to hand it to them on is reviving—especially in the House—the Epstein issue as soon as they got back into session. It is dark that we are talking about the rape of girls as a political football. This is a symbol of our own moral degradation, I think. And at the same time, it was very strategically useful, because that is an issue that genuinely fractures his coalition and genuinely makes a lot of Donald Trump supporters—including some very important supporters in this alternative media sphere and in Congress—think differently about him and wonder if they can trust him. And that was smart of them. They changed and controlled the media narrative in that first week after the end of the shutdown in a way that they had not done in quite some time.
Perry Bacon: So his approval rating, I think, is in the 35 percent range in some polls. The average is in the low forties. I guess now the question is: Do we think this is a permanent situation? Is it going to keep going? Because I think that’s part of what people are perceiving. One of my colleagues used the phrase lame duck in a piece, and he’s president for three years—so he’s not a lame duck, policy-wise. But is he? Do we see this continuing?
George W. Bush ended up in the high twenties, I think. Do we think that’s possible anymore, or do we think he’s got a floor of 38 percent—people who are very MAGA?
Donegan: I think about a third of the country is pretty firmly MAGA, right? That has been eroding. I think it is genuinely eroding. The real problem for MAGA right now is that they do not have a clear successor. The logical next candidate in 2028—aside from Trump himself, which seems to be something not many Republicans are really biting on—I actually think that Mike Johnson’s…
Bacon: They do have a line. This is the line they will not cross. Thankfully.
Donegan: I think they’re kind of done with it, honestly. They’re exhausted. He’s not treating them well. If he was giving them more treats and more rewards…
Bacon: Or if he were sitting higher in the polls, I think that’d also be different. If he were clearly very popular, that would help too. But anyway…
Donegan: The next in line is JD Vance. And JD Vance does not have the charisma that Donald Trump has. I’ll hand it to Donald Trump. He’s funny. At his peak, he really knew how to work a crowd. He has an instinct for how to channel and weaponize grievance.
JD Vance lacks this—he is not charming. He’s not particularly likable. He is preternaturally unfunny. It’s like watching JD Vance try to make a joke; it’s like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. It’s unnatural. And his unlikability is combined with the fact that he has chosen sides, I think with a degree of plausible deniability but pretty legibly, in an internal MAGA fight over the parameters of the white supremacy they want to advance.
Something else that happened over the past couple of months that I think has weakened the MAGA coalition is the fight inside the Heritage Foundation and inside the MAGA movement more broadly over the extent to which they should integrate Nick Fuentes and open antisemitism. Antisemitism is its own intellectual tradition on the right, but I think it opens up a particular vulnerability within a MAGA-style white supremacist coalition. Because if you can do what the Nick Fuenteses and the Tucker Carlsons want to do, and exclude Jews from whiteness, that exposes whiteness itself not as the solid promise the MAGA movement wants to extend to white people, but as a contingent thing that has internal contradictions.
So if Jews aren’t white anymore, why not the Italians? Why not the Irish? These interethnic, intra-white grievances and rivalries can come back to the fore in a way that I think is really weakening for a white supremacist coalition. You can start pulling on that thread in the sweater and unravel the whole thing pretty quickly.
It also means that you lose a lot of the Jewish intellectuals who have been at the forefront of the neocon movement that’s trying to reassert itself now, right? You lose a lot of people who, I guess to their credit, are actually morally repulsed by antisemitism. You lose this older guard of people who are trying to maintain a sheen of patrician decency on the right in the Trump era when you bring in these Nazi kids from the internet. And it’s distasteful, it’s gross. They don’t want to do it.
And JD Vance has really chosen a side—he’s on the Groyper side. And that stuff, I don’t know that they can win an election on it. I’m a pretty cynical person in terms of the ID of the American electorate, but I think people are put off by it. I don’t think they can really build a governing coalition on the Groyper idea.
Bacon: I think I’m going to stop there because I’m beginning to think he’s maybe not the person to be the candidate in the first place, and therefore I don’t want to spend too much time. We’re going to probably have a whole primary. Is JD Vance going to win the primary? I have no idea. It seems there’s an opening for somebody else. In 2013, I did not think Donald Trump would. The point being, there might be more of an opening because the Republican Party may reassess. JD Vance is not overly popular either.
Let me switch to the Democrats. We’ve had this interesting discourse on the Democratic side post-election: there’s a big panic, and therefore a lot of openness to new ideas, many of which—prominently stated by people in various books and at various conferences—have been, more or less, punching left. Democrats are too woke, et cetera. That’s been a lot of it, which I have not loved.
But to connect this to what we were saying a little earlier: is it the case that the Democratic Party needs to be reformed from the left, from the bottom up? I think Hakeem Jeffries might be more centrist than me, but I think more than anything else, he wants to change as little as possible about the party. And I wonder: Is the reckoning in the party over, to some extent, because Donald Trump is now unpopular and they can sort of plug and play as they usually do?
Donegan: Yeah, the stakes have become lower for the Democratic party’s like ongoing identity crisis as Donald Trump’s unpopularity grows and the reality of his government becomes more like politically salient, right?
So I think the Democrats are going to do what they were always going to do, which is adopt policy positions that fit the districts in which their candidates are running, right? And I think there are some commonalities you can find between the two poles of this spectrum that you hear talked about lately—Zohran Mamdani in New York and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. The sort of right-wing white woman from the national security establishment—right-wing as far as the Democrats go, a centrist, an accommodationist sort of politician—both ran against Donald Trump pretty specifically, right? Both campaigned on his unpopularity, both talked about affordability, and both were significantly younger than some of the major figures of the party.
I think part of what’s happening is a generational shift. You saw a real unwillingness of the centrist boomer coalition that came to political maturity during the first Clinton administration to retire, to let go of their coalitions, and time has sort of forced their hand, right? Biden was forced out of the race. Nancy Pelosi finally retired.
I think Chuck Schumer is really showing his age and might not seek another six-year term, so I think there is finally room being made for a newer face of the party and for newer talents to emerge and try to find their lane. I do think there is a left energy in the Democratic Party, particularly among people under 40, that is going to be reflected in that generational change and is going to be harnessed in specific districts to some success.
The Zohran Mamdani victory in New York City—particularly that primary victory—is a victory of the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. That is a group it was very easy to write off as internally fractious and a little bit useless a couple of years ago, and they seem to have matured enough at least to pull off a real political coup.
And that was something that—I don’t know if you’ll see them do that again—but they might begin to flex a little more muscle at the local level in specific cities. You’re not going to get a DSA Duluth, probably—although if you’re in the DSA Duluth, don’t yell at me. But there are pockets where the far left will begin to come into greater political maturity, right?
I think the boomer leftists—your Elizabeth Warrens, Bernie Sanders—I think we can maybe see them almost in a John the Baptist kind of role. They were laying the groundwork for what’s going to come and be a more mature political movement. The American left has been decimated for a long time. It’s going to be a slow rebuild.
Bacon: There was a piece right before Thanksgiving in The Times—about how Warren and Sanders and Van Hollen are setting up some kind of “fight harder” caucus and they’re going to push for Platner, who I’m with you in not loving. There’s a woman, a candidate in Minnesota who is more progressive and without the scandals—I think her name is Flanagan. There are a couple more progressive candidates in Michigan running against the more moderate candidates.
I think there are going to be these intraparty ideological fights. And if you had asked me about this in March or April, I would have thought these fights are over: where the party should go, and so on. And now it feels like those fights are much less of an indication of where Democrats are going, because they can just run against Trump in every place. They can win a lot of places just that way, right?
Donegan: Yeah. I think there’s a degree to which they certainly ran against Trump and won by saying, We’re not Trump, and Trump is making your life harder, and we’ll try and stop him in 2025.
Bacon: Moderates and progressives can run on that platform and there’s not really much difference there.
Donegan: I’ll also say that some of what has encouraged me is that in 2025 you didn’t really see Democrats doing what they normally do, which is fight the last war. I think if they had followed the playbook they were being encouraged to follow in 2025, you would’ve seen a bunch of Democratic candidates running ads like, I won’t let boys on your daughter’s field hockey team, or whatever.
Bacon: Oh, you’re saying that Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill did not run the most popular, whatever, Third Way populist line. There was a lot of room they could have run on that, and they did not go as far as you and I might have feared last December.
Donegan: I think also something that I’ve taken is that when culture-war issues play for the Republicans, they play in a very specific way. So that ad that Trump did—which was kind of a devastatingly effective ad, Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you—that was a culture-war grievance. That was a sexual-difference and bigotry grievance wielded as a material concern. It was us versus them as an evocation of the elites.
Bacon: Right. They don’t care about high prices. They care about helping their elite friends.
Donegan: For you means he’s going to lower your grocery bill—he’s not going to do this supposedly silly trans stuff, and he’s going to focus on what really matters. You could actually read that ad, bigoted as it was—and I do not want to understate that—as mocking Democrats for the supposed triviality of their culture-war issues.
I just don’t think there are that many people—clearly they’re out there and they’re dangerous—but I don’t think there are that many people who are motivated day to day by contempt for trans Americans. And I do not think you can win people over just by moving to where you think they are on culture-war stuff. That thermostatic instinct—the trying to chase the middle on the culture-war stuff—makes you look cynical. It makes you look like you don’t believe in anything, right?
When Spanberger and Mamdani and these winning candidates refused to do that, it looked more like they had a sense of principles but really had a sense of priorities. I’m focused on affordability was Mamdani’s answer to every single question he was asked. And so I think one way Democrats have begun to evolve, and that I’m encouraged by, is choosing the questions they want to answer—choosing their own messaging priorities as opposed to constantly chasing whatever the Republican attack was, being on the defensive, and fighting on the territory that has been given to them rather than the territory they chose.
Bacon: My worry was that they were going to move to the right on cultural issues. And it seems to me that they’ve kept their same positions while leading with economics. And that’s probably a better—that may have been a better course. And maybe Kamala, to be fair, did some of that herself, but the context may be different now.
Donegan: Yeah. I think Kamala got kind of screwed.
Bacon: I was going to say that.
Donegan: I don’t think she had a real opportunity in the very short amount of time she had to campaign to carve out a separate identity from Joe Biden. She also was not willing to break from Joe Biden on several important issues. But I don’t know exactly how much of a chance she had. I think her political career is over. I do not think she should try to run again. I think she should make a lot of money giving speeches to Goldman Sachs or whatever people do after they’ve been the vice president.
Bacon: And you don’t really mean Goldman Sachs, but I get the point.
Donegan: Well, she should exit electoral politics. but that’s because she’s tainted by the unpopularity of somebody else.
Bacon: It’s a good place to finish—actually, one more question, and I’ll let you go. If you’d asked me in mid-2024, I was a big hyping-for-Gretchen person. She would be a great candidate to run; someone like that would be great. She’s a woman, she’s appealing. If you had asked me who should replace Biden, I would’ve said Harris is dragged down by the ticket—maybe you pick somebody like Andy Beshear. I could pick a few other people.
But I have to confess, I’m curious where you stand now, because having this whole year finished, Gavin Newsom—who is not somebody I normally like—has been better than I thought and has led more than I thought. And Whitmer has spent a lot of the year doing the Let me show you how bipartisan I am stuff. Shapiro is in that box too: let me show you how much I reach the other side while they destroy the country.
So, in other words, who do you like? Anybody you’ve been impressed by for 2028? Anybody you’ve been disappointed by? Because Whitmer’s on my list of people I wanted to be excited by and am not. And Newsom and Pritzker are on my list of people who have led this year and made me feel better about them.
Donegan: Yeah. I’m going to be honest with you, Perry: when I think about another Democratic primary, I just want to put my head in my hands and hide until late 2028.
I think you have Democrats trying to square their local obligations with their national reputations, right? I think you’re right that Pritzker has been an interesting leader. I think the way he got Donald Trump to back down on a more aggressive National Guard deployment to Chicago is very impressive. Pritzker is also the leader of a very blue state.
Gavin Newsom has his finger in the air trying to see which way the wind is blowing, and sometimes that blows him in directions that I like and sometimes it doesn’t. But I don’t really totally trust him to have a core set of principles, which I think is symptomatic of an older Democratic problem.
Bacon: But he’s also not that old, right? He’s in his fifties. He’s not actually old. He just sort of thinks old. He’s been around for a while, but I don’t think he’s actually that old.
Donegan: He’s a Gen X guy with a boomer mentality. But he is the leader of a very blue state. He is being more aggressive because he has the leeway to do that within his state.
Whitmer really disappointed me in the first six, eight months of the Trump presidency. She was an excellent, aggressive, progressive leader of Michigan during the first Trump and Biden terms. She was, I thought, really skillful in handling the post-Dobbs fallout in her state…
Bacon: I’ll come back to her. I’m not going to rule her out.
Donegan: But she made the mistake a lot of people made in that post-2024 era, where she thought Trump represented something really significant and overestimated his power. She’s also responding to her state, which is not very blue. And so this is something where everybody is accumulating liabilities as they go.
And I don’t have a pick right now. I think it’s kind of an open field. I will say there’s basically nobody who seems like a viable candidate for that nomination who I would be thrilled with right now. They’ve got a couple of years to fix that, and I hope they try.
Bacon: Okay. And with that, that’s a great place to end. Thanks for joining me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Be in touch.
Donegan: Thank you so much, Perry. It was a blast.
