Born in Bengaluru, Sharma was the youngest ever chair of the Young Conservatives of Texas before he got inspired by an article written by now Republican vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, on the perils of globalisation for America to set up American Moment. Vance is listed as an emeritus figure on the outfit’s board of advisors. Earlier this summer, at his office a block away from Capitol Hill in Washington DC, Sharma spoke to HT about his personal beliefs and political socialisation and dived deep into the core ideological precepts of the MAGA movement on foreign policy, trade and immigration. Edited excerpts:

Q: You were born in India and moved here early. Take me through that journey, how you identify yourself, what you came to believe in and why you came to believe in what you came to believe in?

A: I moved here when I was three months old. We would visit once every two years or so to see my grandparents and it was always fun to go and see that. But I always very much felt America is my home. I was sort of exclusively American. I did not feel like I had some sort of dual identity. We actually moved back to India for three years, and lived in Gurgaon. And that really cemented that. It made me realise that I certainly was never going to be fully at home in India. My parents realised too as well, that they weren’t really quite like what they were 20 years ago when they left. A lot of young Indians who grew up in the US, first-generation immigrants, if they have only ever known the US, are always left enmeshed in that dilemma of identity. But I actually got to go back and try it out and realised that it’s not a good fit.

So, in a very conscious way, I said I am going to be American in my life. I am not going to move back to India in my adult life. A lot of Indian families here flirt with the idea of moving back. It’s not going to happen. My children will be exclusively American when I have them, mostly because I think that it can be deeply disruptive to grow up with these multiple identities.

I had always been sort of reflexively and temperamentally conservative on social issues. But it wasn’t particularly political until 2016 when I got very interested in the election and realised that my value is pretty neatly lined up with the Republican party and the conservative movement. And I think that there’s generally a fair amount of reticence for recent Indian immigrants to get involved in politics. I didn’t feel that and I got involved as quickly as I could.

Being exclusively American

Q: I am curious about that. Do you think that Indian and American identities are exclusive? Does being American require an explicit rejection of the Indian identity?

A: I don’t think it requires an explicit rejection of Indian identity. But I also don’t believe in hyphenated Americans. That kind of ethno-politics is destructive and it leads to ways of behaving that are ultimately not consonant with American values and American culture. For instance, ethnic nepotism. The more tightly a community identifies with hyphenated Americanism as opposed to just being American, the more likely they are to engage in ethnic nepotism that undermines the economy, undermines culture, and creates racial resentment.

Interestingly enough, the only way that a multi-ethnic society is possible is if people make an active choice to not hyphenate their identity in the nation that they live in. I don’t think there needs to be some sort of ritual denunciation and burning of birth certificates or anything like that. But I do think that a lot of people basically either tacitly or explicitly end up making a choice at some point about if they will choose to exclusively identify as American or always have a foot in both camps.

Q: You mentioned American values and American culture. Tell me what that means for you.

A: There are so many different levels of abstraction that I could talk about. The pioneer spirit is the most compelling thing to me that captures my romantic imagination. It ends up having all sorts of interesting implications for politics as well and public policy because the adage that the US is a nation of immigrants is very common. I just fundamentally disagree. It’s not a nation of immigrants. When people came over on the Mayflower, they weren’t immigrants, there were settlers. There is a difference between taming an untamed wilderness and building civilisation on top of it as opposed to coming to a place that already has a well-functioning society and civilisation.

So when I look at the truly great achievements that Americans have and America has made over the last 250 years, it’s that pioneer spirit that has all sorts of implications for how you construct a society, whether it’s limited government, free enterprise, federalism, the diffusion of power. But if there’s a central sort of cultural pillar to that, I think it’s that frontiersman pioneer spirit that leads people to create, to build new things and to explore new vistas that previously hadn’t been.

The past and present of American conservatism and MAGA

Q: The American conservative movement, as it existed in the 1990s and 2000s, was very different from the manner in which the conservative movement shaped up in 2016. What elements of conservative politics and ideological worldview attracted you?

A: The number one issue for me was always law and order. I grew up in middle class suburbs in the US. To be entirely frank, seeing some of the struggles that India still had with law and order, whether it was public corruption or even just petty crime, made me appreciate the level of development that we have in the US the most because, I think, that civilisation is eggshell thin and you mess with law and order at your peril. So when I see riots break out in the summer of 2020 or you read about the LA riots in the 90s. I think that it’s deeply destructive and dangerous because it’s not a very far slide from order and civilisation to anarchy and butchery. And so what undergirds my politics is law and order and that has implications for my view when it comes to immigration, criminal justice, all sorts of other issues.

I also have a sort of reflexive traditionalism. I am not a progressive. I don’t believe that everything that is from the past must be destroyed. I think that there’s ancient wisdom thousands of years old about how humans can best live with each other. Human nature has not changed. Technology has changed, the materials we build our buildings with have changed, the clothes we wear have changed, but human nature has not changed. And so there’s a lot of ancient wisdom to be had for how humans best organise themselves. And the idea that we are a new man and we can throw away all the old wisdom is just foolish to me. And so you combine a very visceral appreciation for law and order with interest in tradition and I think that is the core of any rightest politics anywhere in the world basically.

In the early days, I had a foot in both the camps. I was both interested in sort of the old school Republican party and in the America First MAGA movement. Since then, I have thought more and I have learned more. It’s become exclusively the latter. I see the movement that Trump started in 2016 has antecedents all across American history, most recently with the campaign of Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s. And it has its corollaries in all sorts of other countries. Nationalist populist movements exist in India, Israel, Hungary, UK and El Salvador. And so I firmly see myself in that tradition now, but definitely understand and appreciate some of the contributions of the old way of thinking, the Republican party, but also have significant appreciation for its errors.

MAGA’s foreign policy

Q: Among the four or five key precepts of the “America First” movement is foreign policy realism and restraint. What does it mean and how would that apply in the current global context with your specific positions on say Ukraine or on Israel and on China?

A: America’s foreign policy for the last 30 to 40 years has been systematically mismanaged. Basically we took our Cold War peace dividend and instead of using it to ensure domestic tranquility and prosperity, we completely wasted it abroad, with trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan and much more elsewhere.

Just to go region by region, America’s involvement in the Middle East has been highly destructive. It has created generations and generations of new terrorists, and we would be better off significantly reducing our involvement. I am a fan of the State of Israel. I think it’s built civilisation in a place where it’s very hard to do so. But there was a very interesting piece in Tablet magazine not too long ago from a Jewish commentator who is not even really Right-wing saying that actually it would be for the best, for Israel’s best interest, for the aid that it gets from the US to reduce so that there’s no excuse. They are defending themselves, they are looking out for their national interests. And so that’s basically my view. Israel is a good ally, but that most of the rest of the Middle East is a mess that the US should not be involved in. And actually by taking the hands off the wheels, things could be a little rickety for a little bit, but equilibrium finds a way and there would be new coalitions. It’s obvious that the Saudis, the Emiratis are interested in civilisation. So there would probably be some sort aligned interest that would form there.

On Ukraine, the US had assured Russia for the better part of the last quarter century saying, we are not going to add Ukraine into NATO. And then we say, well, we might add Ukraine into NATO. And so that kind of schizophrenia in our foreign policy led to the invasion. Does that mean it was justified? No. But does it mean it’s understandable? Absolutely. It’s very difficult to drill into the head of most practitioners in this town that other countries have a national interest, that they independently and rationally navigate that, that it is distinct from the American one, that there is no such thing as a global good. There’s just good in the eyes of each of these independently acting forces. And so I think that the US has made catastrophic mistakes spending all the money that it has. It’s led to an entire generation of Ukrainian men dying and Russian men dying for that sake. It’s severely injured the global economy and it’s pushed Russia into the arms of China.

Now on China, I am sort of in the middle when it comes to many of my peers. Many of my peers see China as an existential military threat to the US. And many of them see it as an exclusively economic threat to the US. I am somewhere in between. I don’t think there’s a million man swim coming to the port of Los Angeles to invade the US, but I also think that Chinese state actors are engaged in all sorts of monkeying around with American interest across the world. And here at home there’s cyber attacks, industrial espionage and other things. But a lot of the reason why China grew at the expense of the American economy for the last 20 years was not because of sinister behaviour on the part of China. It was because American elites saw there was a quick buck to be made and they proceeded to sell off the country’s industrial capacity to the highest bidder — in that case, China. And so in terms of my basic posture towards China, it probably skews slightly towards putting the onus on America for errors because that’s a problem that Americans could solve.

Solving complicated geopolitical things needs to be done. But you focus on your own backyard, you make your own bed before you try to do that kind of thing. For instance, in every diplomatic venue in the world today, the American State Department diplomat and the Chinese diplomat are competing for the attention and alliance of all sorts of second and third world countries. And I think we’re poised to lose 95% of those, mostly because we don’t have any sense of what projecting an authentic American interest abroad even looks like because that’s not how American elite are trained to think. They don’t think in terms of the American national interest.

Q: Let me distill that into specifics. So, if I understand it right, it would mean that there should be some kind of broad US-Russia understanding on the future of Ukraine, which means territorial tradeoffs? And on China, does it mean you are worried about Taiwan or not? Do you think that US must bolster its presence in the Indo-Pacific so that China cannot do what it wants to or the US should retreat and focus on only its core interests?

A: Ukraine is functionally operating as a client state of the US and much less of the UK. And so at the end of the day, no settlement here is going to exist unless Russia and the US come to the table either explicitly or implicitly. So yes, there needs to be a settlement and I imagine the settlement will probably end up being something very similar to what it could have been two years ago on some parts of Donbas and the Crimea and maybe a couple of other things. The difference is that several hundred thousand lives have been lost in the intervening time, and hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent.

Am I worried about Taiwan? Yes. But I also recognise that the Chinese are 1000 times more worried about Taiwan than any American could ever be. It is in their backyard. Think about the tectonic risk that the Cuban missile crisis posed to the US. I think Taiwan’s even closer to China than Cuba is to the US. And so that matters and we need to recognise that it’s extremely important to them, and we should be de-risking the global economy from a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan as quickly as possible. And that means making sure that we have robust semiconductor manufacturing ability here at home.

Q: Should the US double down on institutions like Quad, support allies and partners, strengthen strategic partnership with India?

A: I think that the US should improve its diplomatic relationships with every party in Asia because they are the ones most structurally invested in containing Chinese aggression. I don’t think that China’s playbook for the next 50 years is to go on an invasion spree with its neighbours. There will be territorial disputes on the edges of borders, which are always fuzzy. But I think they look at the British empire’s experience, all the European colonial empires, they look at the American imperial experience and they say, that doesn’t seem like a lot of fun. And instead, we can be the Middle Kingdom again, which is the conduit of world commerce through commercial infrastructure across the globe and reap massive benefits for our population that way without many of the downsides.

But to the extent that there is militaristic or even economic concerns there, absolutely the US should dramatically improve its partnership with India and with a bunch of other countries in the region because they would be most motivated to ensure their sovereignty vis-a-vis China. It just matters more to them.

MAGA’s economic world

Q: On trade, which seems to be the second pillar of the movement in some ways, explain to me how globalisation — which the US pushed for 30 years — has suddenly ended up being an issue on which now there is almost a bipartisan consensus that the US needs to manufacture in America and impose tariffs on China. How has the common sense on trade changed in the last six years? Do you think that besides the semiconductor de-risking that you mentioned, there should be de-risking from China in general?

A: The neoliberal consensus in American economic policy was a very tasty drug for our bipartisan elites. And they have faced the consequences. I think Covid was a very nasty wake up call when you realise you can’t even make masks here. I think it woke up the corporate sector and made Wall Street start to price the risk of highly diffused supply chains much more accurately.

I can understand why it might be frustrating for other countries in the world. It’s like, but you guys were talking about this for 30 years. Well, it was stupid. There were always voices speaking out on this, but not nearly powerful enough voices.

Look, the US is not going to return every heavy polluting dirty industry to the US. It’s just not going to happen. There are just different expectations that come out of a highly developed economy, but there is a lot of value added manufacturing, basic industrial capacity, defence production, energy production that it can bring back. The US is blessed with immense natural resources that are basically incomparable across the world in terms of the sheer diversity of statistically significant amounts of almost every basic industrial input. It’s amazing. To the extent that we don’t have any, it’s more of a matter of when are we going to find the secret deposits that we have, not if we have them. Lithium is a great example of this. There is all this lithium that exists under the US core, but what we don’t have is the refining capacity. We need to create that and much more.

For those heavier industries that Americans really aren’t particularly interested in having in the US, there is an entire super continent that goes from the north of Canada to the south of Chile that has plenty of surface area to have all sorts of industries. The best way to help ameliorate a lot of the turmoil in South America would be if good jobs in these heavy industries were friendshored to South America as opposed to having them in far flung places across the world. You could probably have an entirely self-contained supply chain from Canada down to Chile in the North Americas. Who cares what happens elsewhere in the world? I don’t think that’s necessarily what’s going to happen, but there is significant opportunity there that would help ameliorate the migrant crises that would help bring political stability, economic stability to the continent.

So that’s what I would like to see. There all sorts of reasons to do it. One is security. One is because it’s what serious countries do, they make things. And then third is that it helps employ people in high-skill, but low advanced education industries. College is not for everyone. We should not be a college-first economy. It’s just not born out by the statistics that most people should be going to it. Most people should be employed in trades, in blue collar work, and the white collar population should probably be about 30% of the workforce, maybe a little bit more than that.

The Immigration question

Q: I assume you have got this question. I feel it’s a slightly unfair question, but I’ll still ask it. As the son of immigrant parents, what’s your view on legal immigration and then illegal immigration? And how have you come to the position that you come to?

A: Sure. The macro picture of how I see this is that I am an American. So built into that is that my immigration views should, if I am an American, be exclusively-oriented around what is in America’s best interest. And what is in America’s best interest is not necessarily aligned with the interests of every well-meaning hardworking Indian family that wants to move to the US. So that’s the macro picture.

I will say a couple of things. You look at the course of American history, it seems like the high end of the capacity of the American nation for a foreign-born population is about 20%. The last time that the US foreign born population hit 20% was in the 1910s. And there was immigration restriction passed under Calvin Coolidge that basically resulted in net zero migration for 50 years between 1915 and 1965. That’s when the Immigration Act was passed. That was very, very good for the US. Some of the most cohesive national identity, strong American industry, enormous prosperity that was had through that period of time. Then percentage of the foreign born obviously grew and kept climbing up. We are reaching a new local maximum. In fact, we are at a new local maximum and it’s right around 20% foreign-born in the US. If we are even remotely interested in the idea of history being somewhat cyclical, it’s not ridiculous that there are now emergent political pressures to seriously control migration.

Legal immigration is a policy lever that countries have a sacrosanct right to adjust according to their national interest. There is no moral requirement to allow any immigration on behalf of any nation, and it doesn’t apply to the US either. We let in a million people a year or 1.1 million people a year. The idea that there is something inherently moral about it being 1.1 million and that it would be racist and bigoted to have 800,000 instead or 400,000 or zero for a period of time doesn’t pass muster to me ideologically or principally. And whether it’s pressure on American housing supply, competition for jobs, or when there is a high amount of foreign born agglomeration in a certain area, assimilation becomes difficult because ethnic communities will pop up, commerce is conducted in their home language, and there’s not really any way for people to enter that community. You see this in Dearborn in Michigan with the Muslim community.

There are all sorts of consideration that every country has a right to make when it comes to immigration. Does the US probably have a greater caring capacity for migration than most countries? Yes. Has it exceeded its carrying capacity right now also? Yes. And so I think it’s very appropriate for there to be a cooling-down period. The reality is that America is the largest wealthy country in the world, and there will always be billions more people who would give up everything to move here than there is capacity to let them move here. And it is very reasonable to have a dispassionate view that that has to be acknowledged. And I think that it’s morally incumbent on Indian immigrants who end up taking the oath of citizenship to take that dispassionate view because that’s what the oath of citizenship is saying, that my loyalty is to this country and this country only.

Q: The argument from the other side is that, at the higher end of the professional ladder, immigrants have served a huge role in actually enhancing American capabilities. Silicon Valley is a great example of that in terms of talent and innovation. And at the lower end, to some extent, legal and to a larger extent, illegal, migrants, are doing the kind of work that Americans are unwilling to do, don’t want to do, or have attained a degree of material needs where they don’t need to do. And so it’s taking care of the labour market, that’s actually kept prices down and it has not led to the kind of social unrest that the Right fears. So on both the higher end and the lower end, what would be your response to that?

A: On the higher end, there is this sleight of hand that immigration advocates like to play where they will say, well, you couldn’t possibly oppose Elon Musk or Albert Einstein coming to the US. And so many reasonable people are like, of course I could never oppose Einstein and Musk coming to the US. And then that justification is used for an extremely porous and very different definition of what counts as high skilled labour in say the H1B program.

Your average H1B employee makes $70,000-80,000 a year working in a coding job. And there are all sorts of stories of systemic abuse by American corporations where they basically use that programme as a way to cut costs and make their native workforce train their replacements. And it has created a form of indentured servitude that I think is antithetical to the way that Americans think about the sort of business labour relationship where these workers basically have to do anything that these companies say. They don’t actually have any competitive market power in the labour force because they are so reliant on their H1B sponsors.

Let’s say we were talking about high-skill immigration from Taiwan. What the immigration advocates would say is, well, don’t you want to make semiconductors here? And I say, of course I do. There are probably 50 people that have 95% of the semiconductor manufacturing knowledge, let’s bring them over. And they’ll say, oh, no, no, you have to bring 50,000 people. When we talk about billionaire company founders, and really you talk about fourth, fifth standard deviation talents, a 10th of a a percent of the population, not all of whom want to come to the US by the way, I am more than willing to have conversations on that. But that’s not where the conversation actually is. Very frequently, it’s used for sort of generic first standard deviation white collar work that’s just more convenient for companies because they get a more pliant workforce

Q: To understand this right, are you for capped legal immigration or for a very carefully curated case by case selective legal migration?

A: Both. I think that having, just in terms of policy lever, a yearly cap of the amount of migrants admitted is as good a away as any in order to restrain the overall number. And then within that, I want there to be very, very critical assessments of what is actually value added to the American economy. Where are there actual deficiencies in the American educational system or in the American workforce? And then that should be assessed accordingly.

But the other thing I will say is that both high-skill migration and free trade are tools that corporate America has been able to lean on in the context of the extreme deficiencies of the American educational system. And so part of the reason why there has been such stagnation in the quality of American education is because corporate America, which is an important political force in American life, does not have any pressure to actually solve our educational problems. Because if there is an educational issue, they can just bring in someone from a different educational system that has the skills they need, or they can just leave the country and go elsewhere and outsource an industry. So it actually speaks to chronic deficiencies in American state capacity and the quality of our governance that one of the richest countries in the world with a pretty intelligent population and massive amounts of people isn’t able to create the number of computer scientists it needs. That’s actually a huge problem that needs to be solved. And in politics, nothing moves unless force acts upon it. And so if you don’t get immigration under control, that system will never have any reason to reform itself.

On the lower end, there’s this fantastic essay by a friend of mine Oren Cass called Jobs Americans Would Do. Here are a couple of the threads that are important here. Mass migration on the lower end is a spigot used by corporate America to avoid actually innovating. So for instance, just take agriculture, which is the most common industry people talk about. In Australia, strawberries are harvested by these highly automated, truly excellent machines. In the US, they are picked by hand. There are other countries in the world that have a higher level of automation, technological development, because American illegal immigration is so profitable for companies that they would rather invest in that than a capital expenditure on automation. In terms of pressure, a tight labour market is the pressure that would cause companies to innovate. The US, being one of the most developed countries in the world, has a global responsibility to be constantly innovating because that innovation trickles down into the rest of the world. And so the quality of global technological development is hampered by the existence of mass illegal migration into the US because in so many labour-intensive industries, there is significant automation and technological progress that could be happening that isn’t because these companies don’t have to. And so that’s one element of it.

The second is jobs Americans won’t do at what price. The American people are extremely fair-minded. If you told them that you have to pay 10 cents more for bread in order to employ your fellow Americans, that’s a trade that they would be willing to do. Americans are willing to pay higher prices when it feels like it is in service of the national interest. What they don’t tolerate is Joe Biden’s inflation. That’s for no reason. We can find an equilibrium in the US where for relatively reasonable prices, with a high degree of automation and increased technological progress, low skilled migration be severely reduced.

Q: Would it mean that those who are already here should be should be deported?

A: The illegal migrants. Absolutely. Absolutely. We just have to do that.

MAGA and race

Q: The third set concerns that animate the movement are what can be termed broadly culture wars. Let me ask this bluntly. The perception about the MAGA movement is that there is a strong, either explicit or implicit, element of White racism and White supremacist politics driving it, and that this is driven by resentment at migration or by a bunch of factors. Do you see that?

A: The most anti-racist political force in American life is the Republican party, is the conservative movement. There’s nothing that Republicans love more than a minority Republican. It’s their favorite thing in the world, almost to the point of embarrassment.

Q: Because there are so few right.

A: There is not that few. Look, President Trump is going to get between 40-50% of the Hispanic vote, and that’s the largest minority group in America. There’s specific historically contingent reasons that Blacks vote very heavily for the Democratic party, but even there his margins there are going to increase. I think that I have never once experienced racism in conservative politics, and I have been doing it now for close to a decade.

I think that we have created a currency value for racism in American life that has driven everyone insane. So take an example that’s very important to the Indian community. When you are applying to college, you need an admissions essay and the basic cultural zeitgeist is you need to talk about what makes you special. And usually that’s in the context of why you have overcome severe adversity in order to come to where you are today. Because a lot of people have the same amount of grades, you have to distinguish yourself in some way. We have created the cultural incentives in the US for Indians specifically, but basically every other minority community, to catastrophise even the tiniest slights against them and, where none can be found, to invent them.

Now, fourth graders will tease each other, they tease each other in India, they tease each other here, they tease each other in Timbuktu. That is a given. And so was I teased in fourth grade? Sure. If I had lived in India in fourth grade, I probably would’ve been teased there. Suppose the kind of teasing that I got here was you are Indian and they were making some joke about it. If I was in India, it just would be something else. And so children look to find what’s different in each other and people in conflict look to find what’s different about each other. And sometimes the terms of that is race or ethnicity, but it doesn’t mean there’s some sort of specific epidemic of racism in American life. If you get into a bar fight, someone might call you fat, they might call you Indian, they might say, look at your dumb glasses. They can say anything, it doesn’t matter. But we’ve created a specific currency around racism in the US where elevating perceived racial slights to the sort of totemic and central role is very profitable and very, very important.

Q: I think the reason why it’s also suggested is because MAGA appears invested in the pedagogy around racism and an effort to maybe airbrush some of the darker elements of American history.

A: The US and Western European countries are the only countries in the world that are supposed to prostrate themselves in regret for their history. There is no great mass movement to say that Tajikistan needs to reckon with what tribal leaders six centuries ago did in common warfare. There is a fundamental asymmetry here that is deeply inappropriate and it basically is a form of grievance politics directed against the most recent winners in global life. Western Europe and the US were very much the winners of global competition in the 20th century. And so there is, to be cynical about it, an effort to bring them down a peg because of those victories. I have no problem with acknowledging all of the warts and bugs and features of history, but I am also very clear that this is a profound double standard that very few countries in the world are subjected to. And there’s certainly never any of the potential upside of American or British or any of these other countries influence brought up. Take Japan for instance. There are still controversies every single day. You hear about these specific elements of conflicts between Koreans and Japan about various issues that happened during wars. This is stuff countries rightly do not want to teach to their own citizenry. They want to inculcate national loyalty to their country, not a hatred of the country in its past. And that’s completely reasonable.

Q: If identity or racial identity has been the basis of discrimination till not so long back, if racial identity ends up defining where you are on the development ladder to a large extent because of that generational disadvantage, should racial identity be a factor in policy making to redress that inequality?

A: Racial identity should not be a factor in policymaking. There’s just no way. It’s a path to civilization decline and anarchy. There’s no good way to do it. At leads to Rwanda.

The politics of Donald Trump

Q: What do you think of President Trump’s political evolution over the last eight years?

A: I think instinctually he is very much where he always has been, and that’s part of the reason he was so different than the rest of the Republican Party. You go back and watch his television appearances going back to the 2000s. He always said that Iraq was a mistake or very soon after said Iraq was a mistake. He always believed what he did on trade. He always believed what he did on immigration. He has always had very sound political instincts and those are intact to this day. I think what’s exciting is that he now has more political experience that is able to buttress with those instincts and actually provides a framework for him to understand how he would comprehensively take on challenges as President again.

But I also think that, unfortunately, there was definitely a kind of almost joyous attitude that he was able to infuse the 2016 campaign because it was against all odds. But unfortunately because of the decisions that the Left has made, there is now an existential aspect to politics for President Trump and his family where this regime has made it very clear that it will not rest until it puts him in jail along with everyone who has ever worked with him. And so that’s unfortunate. Again, that’s the difference between civilization and barbarism.

Q: Do you think he made a mistake in not accepting the legitimacy of the 2020 election results?

A: I think he made a mistake in not making sure that his lawyers were protecting the traditional conception of how elections should be run in all 50 states before the election happened. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be had of how the election was run. And I do think that delaying certification until many election results were audited was an eminently reasonable stance for him to take. So I think he was right to be critical of how the election was run in many states.

Q: Do you think he should not have encouraged the crowd to come to the US Capitol on January 6?

A: He didn’t encourage the crowd to come to the Capitol. He didn’t do that. It’s just not true. He encouraged everyone to be peaceful. He didn’t tell them to go inside the building. You actually look at his remarks that day. It’s completely different than what the media said now is what happened. Regrettable, absolutely, but it has been blown wildly out of proportion by the media who saw it as an opportunity to criminalise its political enemies.

Q: But should he be held accountable for the kind of violence that we did see inside the Capitol? Because there is a certain chain of command..

A: There is no chain of command

Q: A political responsibility

A: If that standard existed, then Kamala Harris should be in prison because she was giving bail funds that were supporting people who were burning down CVSs in American cities during 2020..If that were the standard that American life operated off of, maybe that is the standard that American life should operate off of, then there would be a profound asymmetry in the amount of prosecutions that would happen accordingly, because that kind of, again, I’m not even saying that President Trump used that kind of rhetoric, but there’s much more aggressive rhetoric on the Left side of the aisle when it comes to these kind of things that there ever is on the Right. (Note: The interview was conducted before the assasination attempts on Trump; his supporters have attributed it to the Left’s rhetoric against him.)

Q: Are you worried that the moderate Republican vote is against Trump or that they will not turn up? Is that a weakness in the campaign?

A: No, I don’t think so. The funny thing is that the most unifying figure in the modern Republican party is Donald Trump. It’s just that moderate Republicans tend to be very politically empowered people either because of their financial situation or because their proximity to powerful institutions. So everyone has to hear about their grievances a lot more often than they have to hear about if a moderate is nominated. So no, I don’t think it’s a problem. Trump is probably the savviest elected Republican in America when it comes to having appeals beyond the four corners of the Republican party and certainly the four corners of the conservative movement. He makes the map bigger every time he runs. And so I’m not worried about it.

Preparing for a future Trump administration

Q: Give us a sense of what you have done with American Moment, the kind of staffing pool that you have created and what you would like to do if a Trump administration is?

A: We have basically identified, educated and credentialed a universe of about 1200 to 1300 staff at this point (note: this number was from early summer, since then it has in all likelihood increased). Not all of those are people that I brought to DC for the first time, but a lot of them are. They are highly ideologically aligned with this America First agenda on trade, foreign policy, integration. They are very competent and they are of good character and prepared to go into government, whether it’s in congressional offices, future presidential administrations, or in think tanks and other important political roles in order to make sure what happened to Trump last time never happens again. That’s the goal.

Q: And what happened to him last time?

A: He was undermined by people within his administration. The overlapping Venn diagram of people that were MAGA and competent in the Trump administration was probably less than 200 people, if that, in a political appointment pool of 4,800.

There weren’t very many loyal hired to begin with. And so this is a pipeline problem. It needs to be solved. The American Right has historically been very bad at cultivating the bureaucratic core that it needs in order to govern. Well, most of the American Right wants to have families and live out in the country or start businesses there. They don’t want to be participating in government, but they have to, at least a small portion have to.

So we are curating the population of people that will, over the course of the next two decades, slowly but surely, take over the personnel pipeline, the universe of 4,800 political appointees that President Trump will nominate. And subsequent presidents will. And 8,000 or so congressional staff on Capitol Hill and the couple of thousand think tank positions. The Right jokes about this conspiracy of 15,000 people governing the country. We will put a dent in that over the course of the next 10 years.

Q: And what do you want to do?

A: I just want to be useful. I love this country. I want to see America continue to thrive. And I have become convinced that in order for that to happen, the American Right needs to thrive and also be useful to the country. And so that’s why I do what I do.