Opinion | What Pete Buttigieg Learned Playing JD Vance - The New York Times

Pete Buttigieg on 2024 and the ‘Crank Realignment’

The politician discusses how Democrats can rebuild trust.

Sept. 24, 2024

What Pete Buttigieg Learned Playing JD Vance

“Pete Buttigieg has had had one of these fascinating rises in politics. He went from being mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a small but noble town —” “I’m convinced that we’re going to remember these years that we’re living through right now as some of the most pivotal and transformative and important in the life of our city.” — to an unexpectedly competitive presidential candidate, winning Iowa in 2020 — “Thank you, Iowa.” — to Secretary of Transportation — “America is building like we haven’t built in more than 70 years.” “and now this year, to the Democratic Party’s acknowledged best of class communicator.” “— trying to make people think that crime is up when crime is down under Joe Biden, and crime was up under Donald Trump. Now, I don’t know how often that gets reported on this network. So if you’re watching this at home, do yourself a favor and look up the data. And the big question, I think, for politics, for policy, for media, is who is going to help them versus who is going to use them. That is what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz represent. That is what Democrats represent. That is what awaits us when America decides to end Trump’s politics of darkness once and for all.” [CHEERING] “So with an opportunity to sit down with him, I wanted to ask him a bunch of questions I have of the Democratic Party. And they begin with a concept that he wrote a book about in 2020, which is ‘Trust.’ The Democratic Party has lost the trust of a lot of people who once supported it, and it is presided over, endured a sorting of Americans by trust. Donald Trump’s Republican Party is a party full of people who don’t trust the system, don’t trust the government, don’t trust Democrats. But it’s become much more than that. So how does he think about trust, and what does he think government has done to lose it? What does he think Democrats have done to lose it? And what can be done to gain it back? I should say there is a rule, a law called the Hatch Act that keeps members of the government from campaigning in their official guise, which is fine. The strange thing about the Hatch Act, though, is it goes the other way, too. When you’re in personal mode or the mode in which you can campaign, you cannot talk about your official job. And so in order to talk with Buttigieg more widely, I was not able to ask him a number of questions I would like to ask him about his work as Transportation Secretary. But given that, we had, I think, a pretty fascinating conversation. As always, my email is EzraKleinShow@nytimes.com. Pete Buttigieg, welcome to the show.” “Thanks for having me on.” “So back in 2020, you wrote a book on political trust, and there are a million ways to show that it has declined. But what’s your explanation for why it has declined?” “So one of the reasons I think it’s declined has been a kind of a feedback loop between public institutions letting people down and people then hesitating to empower those public institutions to solve their problems. So if you go back to the rise of Reaganism, one of the quotes he’s best known for, that the most frightening thing you can ever hear is somebody saying, I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to help. That generation of conservatives when they took power, didn’t just believe that government was the problem — his other famous saying, right, government isn’t the solution, government is the problem — but they also stripped away a lot of the capacity of government to solve problems. That becomes, I think, a feedback loop where if you’re looking around and you’re seeing crumbling infrastructure or widening inequality, you might think the government sucks at fixing these problems. And then the next time you’re being asked, for example, in the course of an election, to vote for a candidate who’s going to make sure there’s enough funding going to the government, you say, I’m not going to put tax money into the government. Government sucks. That too becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the next thing you know, these public institutions are less and less able to address things. You contrast that with what you have, for example, in Nordic countries — and I know it is always almost exhaustingly a go-to for liberals to point to a Nordic example —” “Ah, Sweden.” “But importantly, one of the many, many things that would be nice for us to have that they have in Sweden is a high perception of tax fairness. Partly that’s because I think they actually have a fairer tax code. But I also think there’s been a virtuous cycle there where public entities have done a reasonably good job of taking care of people. People, therefore, have a relatively high level of trust that their tax dollars will be used fairly and wisely, and therefore they allow those institutions to have the running room they need to try to solve things. I don’t mean to reduce all of this to a debate over the size of government. I think one of the things that we’ve gotten smarter about now is how — on the left — is that it’s not just how big or how small government is. But I do think that’s an example of one of the factors that was very corrosive. A more recent one, of course, is the way information moves around. There’s a lot of hope with the arrival of the internet that the democratization of reporting was going to be empowering. And in some ways, it was — some very important ways, like human rights abuses that were captured on smartphones could no longer be denied. On the other hand, what we didn’t think about was that the editorial function of identifying what is true or not true, what is newsworthy or not, is dissolved or nonexistent in those same online spaces, which meant that lots of different things, some true, some false, some worth attention, some questionable were all kind put into the same swirl and got imbibed as if they were all the same. And I think that’s another example of something that’s led to this world we’re in now where people don’t even trust that we’re in the same factual reality as one another.” “So let me take these explanations in turn. I would take the first one as a policy feedback theory. Bad policy creates negative trust. Good policy should create positive trust. I would say I believed something more like that at the beginning of the Biden era and watched a bunch of policies that I would have thought would have created, even just for themselves, feedback loops, like the child tax credit expansion, not quite work. I was thinking about this week because in the American Rescue Plan, the Teamsters got a big helping hand. And they just declined to make an endorsement in this election, declining to endorse Vice President Harris for the first time in modernity.” “And that’s putting it mildly. I mean, their pensions were saved by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” “So if you would have thought that policy feedback loops would work anywhere, you save the Teamsters, the Teamsters like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris better would have been about as tight a feedback loop as you could imagine. And it didn’t work. And the description or the reason the Teamsters gave for not making a national endorsement was that their membership is sort of heavily pro-Trump. So how does something like that fit with the theory that people are responding here to whether or not policy seems to be helping them?” “Well, part of it, an unsatisfying, but I think very true answer is time. These things don’t happen that quickly. The child tax credit can take effect very quickly. And the astonishing results in terms of the swift reduction of child poverty showed that some good policies can also work very quickly. But that doesn’t mean that it soaks in to where people award political credit for that very quickly or even embrace the policy that was helpful. And one good example, maybe the best example I can think of on this, on how there was in fact a policy feedback, but it wasn’t quick has to do with the Affordable Care Act. Now I cut my political teeth running for an obscure statewide office in 2010. I was running for state treasurer in Indiana, and that’s one of those races where your prospects pretty much depend on the generic rising or falling of your party. And believe it or not, it didn’t seem insane to run as a Democrat in Indiana in 2010 because in 2008, Barack Obama had carried Indiana.” “You had Evan Bayh as a Senator.” “Yeah, don’t get me wrong. I knew it was uphill even then. But of course, I got clobbered. Every Democrat just about in any even remotely competitive area, let alone a reddening state like Indiana, was clobbered because in 2010, the Affordable Care Act was absolutely toxic to us Democrats. It was the issue that cost many Democrats the election. By 2018, the ACA was actually the winning issue for Democrats, so much so that when Kamala Harris challenged Donald Trump over his attempts to destroy it, he was avoiding his own commitment to what was very much his own policy. He definitely wanted and tried to undo the Affordable Care Act and get rid of all that. But it is now politically dangerous for him to admit it. So eight years is a long time, and it’s not a long time. I think it’s not a long time for a major policy issue to flip its political valence. It’s not a long time for an important policy to bear enough fruit that people appreciate it and then are protective of it. But it’s also too slow for those who, including members of Congress, who helped get the ACA passed to live — politically live to tell the tale.” “Here’s a question that may seem unrelated on trust, but I think it’s actually related. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president this year. He dropped out and endorsed Donald Trump. What do you make of that run and of that endorsement?” “Well, weird doesn’t even begin to characterize how I view that campaign. I think the endorsement is less weird, actually, because there’s an appeal to — anybody who kind of wants to burn it all down is probably a crossover Trump-RFK Jr. voter. And a particular flavor of conspiratorial style that I see that they have in common, which is a conspiracy theory is introduced by somebody saying they won’t tell you this. Don’t trust them. They don’t want you to see this. They’re not reporting on this, but I’m going to tell you, which ironically, is saying you can’t trust anybody else, but you can sure trust me, which should make you skeptical immediately. But that style of saying, I know something that the establishment doesn’t, and they’re lying to you — in RFK’s case, most famously, about vaccines — and of course, again, there’s a lot of crossover here between his famous anti-vax stances and what you get in Trump world. But there’s that same kind of affect, and it is a little bit post-policy. I don’t know how much they align on policies really. Actually, with each of them for different reasons, it’s hard to pin them down on a policy, but I do think in that sense, it was natural.” “So I think that’s right. And it gets at this other dynamic. So two things, to me, have happened with trust over the last couple of decades. One is that it’s gone down, the kinds we’re talking about. The other is that it is sorted. So you used to have what I would call low trust in the system, voters in both parties. And RFK Jr. was a recognizably left-wing version of that. They don’t believe in vaccines, and GMOs, or corporations are taking everything over. Maybe you can cure cancer with vitamin C, that kind of thing. And you had the right-wing versions of this going all the way back to the John Birch Society, but you had a bunch of them on both sides. And something that Donald Trump seems to have set off in politics is a realignment. My friend Matt Yglesias calls it the crank realignment. And so now you have RFK Jr. Moving over to the right. It’s not that he’s on policy a right winger. He doesn’t want to necessarily get rid of Medicaid. I guess I don’t really know his position on Medicaid. Maybe he does.” “Wouldn’t put it past him.” “Yeah, I’ve not asked him. It’s a fair point. But there is this clustering of higher trust voters in the Democratic Party, voters who believe in the system and lower trust in the Republican Party. What does that do to politics?” “I think that sorting is kind of unique to this moment. I don’t know that it’s durable. In one sense, it’s the most natural thing in the world for the more right of center party to be anti-government and therefore, if the establishment means government, for you to be skeptical. But when it becomes any institution, including your county-run election administration, which is literally being run by your neighbors, or to move outside of government, medical academia saying, hey, these vaccines are working, or anything else, then I think it becomes a lot more dangerous and corrosive. And again, I think it puts us back in this world where people kind of have their own realities or their own facts. And if there aren’t some agreed on trusted arbiters of some of this, whether it’s in the press or in the academy — it’s less likely to be in government — but one reason we have certain importantly, nonpartisan institutions in government like the judiciary is supposed to be is for this reason — you lose that, whether it has a partisan valence or not, it’s bad news.” “So this may be a good time to bring in your occasional foil, JD Vance. There’s just today, I guess, reporting that you are playing JD Vance in debate prep with Tim Walz. As you’ve spent time trying to get into his head and into his demeanor, what have you come to understand in him or believe about him that you didn’t before?” “Well, I think he’s somebody who is a product of the Midwest but after trading off of that Midwest identity is now, in my view, promoting policies in a ticket that would be really harmful for the industrial Midwest. And so I’m thinking a lot about this kind of what I consider to be a faux populism, this space he’s carved out where he achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties, saying that Democrats and Republicans in the past have gotten things wrong. But then all the prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for or act for are things like undercutting a right to choose or tax cuts for the rich or a lot of other things that I think are objectionable about just good old fashioned Republican policy. So I’m thinking a lot about how to penetrate that veneer.” “But that doesn’t let you play him. I guess one thing I’m curious — the reason he is a curiosity to me, I knew him a bit. He was on my show back in 2017, back in an earlier guise. I’ve watched a lot of politicians in the Republican Party go from being Trump haters to Trump supporters or something beyond Trump supporters. He’s really the only one who I’ve watched his whole temperament and personality and way of talking and being and moving through the world change. Ted Cruz had Ted Cruz’s personality in 2010 too. He was not well liked by his colleagues. Marco Rubio is much friendlier to Trump now, but same sort of guy temperamentally. JD Vance has — it’s like, went through a temperamental overhaul. He became angrier and resentful and contemptuous of people who disagreed with him. Also at the same time, things were going really well for him personally. It’s not like he was vastly rejected by — he was a bestseller. He was the toast of the town. How do you understand — as you are, one, trying to absorb his temperament — because I’m sure you’re trying to prepare Tim Walz for that — but you’re trying to understand it. How do you — what do you make of that?” “I’ve certainly seen a lot of Republicans, especially my generation’s Republicans, go through some version of this evolution. Although, you’re right. I think it’s more dramatic in his case. I think it means there’s a real contradiction in him because he is simultaneously the Republican who’s supposed to explain a new kind of conservatism to the world, including ‘The New York Times’ readers. And he’s supposed to embody this kind of angry populism and this kind of facts-don’t-matter nihilism of what Trump represents, even though he eloquently called it out before he got on board with it. But I think sometimes we make these things way more complicated than they are. I think there’s a bunch of people, including him, who know deep down how bad Donald Trump is for the country, realize that they could gain power by attaching themselves to him, and they did it. And that’s one thing that he has in common with a very different Midwesterner, Mike Pence. It worked out really poorly for Mike Pence, and that’s part of why it’s going to be JD Vance sitting on that stage.” “A big part of the JD Vance theory of the world now, a theory of politics — you see this in Project 2025, too — is that they — you — have captured the institutions, captured the government, particularly, and that the thing that the MAGA movement needs to do, which is now sort of laid out in much more detail in something like 2025 than it ever was in President Trump’s first term, is that they’re going to march through the institutions, break them, rid them of the deep state, of the liberals, of whatever, and get them back. JD Vance once called this de-baathification, working off of what America did after the invasion of Iraq — an interesting analogy. But this is their sort of promise to the low-trust voter. You think the system is against you. You don’t trust it. Don’t turn away from the system. We’re going to take it, break it, and wield its power for you and use that to bring corporations to heel, universities to heel, all the other institutions in American life you don’t trust anymore. That’s the sort of unified governing theory of MAGA. How do you take that?” “Well, the problem is what he’s saying is these institutions don’t work for you, the people. So we’re going to take them back on behalf of the people. But what he means is these institutions don’t work for me, a right-wing politician, and so we’re going to put them under the control of right-wing politicians. And if you look at something like what Project 2025 would do to the Civil Service and taking a lot of what are importantly nonpartisan roles and make them directly subject to political control, it is less than plausible that is going to benefit anyone but whoever’s controlling them. Now, of course, I think it’s completely upside down to have a political party that’s most associated with tax cuts for the rich and letting corporations have their way offer to be the ones that are going to make these institutions work better for you because it is precisely because we have had nonpartisan institutions handle things like regulation that we have some stability to the rule of law in this country and that it’s aligned not around the interests of any one person, political or financial interests of any one person, but around those of the public. You cannot have safety and peace and rule of law, let alone a healthy political system if there’s this sense that the government is personally controlled by one person. That’s not safe or good. And so I think what we have to do is see through that. Now, you are more susceptible to believe something like that if you feel like it has failed you so completely that anybody offering to just smash it is bringing you some kind of benefit, which is why these institutions really have to do a better job of delivering for people.” “I think sometimes one way you build trust with people is owning up to failure. And something you said I thought was interesting — you and I sort of come up in the same era of elite failure. The Iraq war is an elite failure. The financial crisis is an elite failure. There’s a lot that goes wrong in this period. What specifically, in your view, does the Democratic Party have to own up to? Where did the Democratic Party go wrong in this era, and what lessons either has it learned or does it still need to learn?” “Well, certainly I think the complicity of the Democratic Party in the run up to the Iraq War continues to be something that really helped set America onto the political trajectory that we’re on right now. And I think that you see, for example, another kind of flip in politics that’s very revealing is that I remember in 2002 as a college student volunteering on a Democratic Congressional campaign, the Democrats everywhere who were skeptical of the idea of the Iraq war were still kind of pretending to be O.K. with it because they thought they had to be politically.” “What campaign were you volunteering on?” “It was the local congressional race where I lived in South Bend, Indiana, and we did not win. But by 2016, Donald Trump, who was for the war, is pretending he was against it. So, again, it took a while, but things really shifted there, obviously, partly because of the disastrous consequences of the invasion. But I think that provoked or should have provoked a lot of introspection on the left or among Democrats, I should say, on how we allowed ourselves to go along with that. There’s a lot of introspection in our party, I think, over policies that may be making it harder to build things. Housing is the one that I know you’ve paid a lot of attention to and probably gets the most attention. But there’s lots of things from mining for materials needed for clean energy to infrastructure, which I won’t get into now because I’m here in my personal capacity. But a lot of things that it’s clear — it’s not as straightforwardly clear as I think the right thinks. Well, if you got rid of all these regulations and environmental protections, then we wouldn’t have this problem. But I do think we’ve got to be a little more serious about that. I could go on. I think we’re a party that loves to criticize ourselves.” “You can’t dangle that housing bait in front of me and not expect me to take it. Housing, expanding housing supply, which is not a thing Democrats are emphasizing 10 years ago, was the first thing on Kamala Harris’s first major set of policy proposals. She wants to build 3 million new houses over her first term. Barack Obama, when he was at the DNC, he brought that up first in his list of new ideas for the Democratic Party. Housing is a lot harder to build — I have done a lot of work on this — where Democrats govern. It’s a lot easier to build a home in Texas than it is in California. That is true today, Gavin Newsom is a governor of California and has passed a lot of pro-housing legislation. It is still harder to build in California than in Texas. Why? What did Democrats get wrong here?” “I don’t want to make this out to be just a Democratic thing. But it’s clear that out of a desire — part of which, by the way, is very well grounded — to make sure that bad things don’t happen, you wind up with a lot of measures put in place that stop anything from happening, including good things. But I also think it’s important in telling that she has led with this policy to expand housing supply because that’s clearly a problem. And one thing that I think is especially important about this moment, and I think also characterizes what I would think of as Biden-ism, is a willingness to meet a big problem with a lot of ambition and a belief that if you get it right, good government can be part of the solution.” “There’s been a tremendous amount of energy in the Democratic Party, in the Biden administration to build more clean energy by creating subsidies, tax credits, making sure people know there will be a market for this if you build it, if you design it, creating innovation hubs. If you can spend money to create energy, we are doing it, and it’s having an effect, a big effect, and I support that hugely. This question of Democrats and maybe the government in general has made it too hard to do good things in an effort to stop bad things. Not a lot has happened on that side. There’s not been permitting reform passed. There’s not been major changes made to things like the National Environmental Policy Act. There’s a lot of housing talk, but there has not been much done on deregulating housing. This seems like a thing that is sort of winning intellectually much more than it is winning at a policy level. And when I report on it, it’s because people are inside, among Democrats, very uncomfortable with this still. They don’t want to unwind this. They are very worried, again, understandably, about bad things happening. So in terms of managing something, it has been a bit of a failure. What are the steps Harris could take if she were president or just that should be taken in your view as a private citizen?” “Well, I think part of it is resources matter. That’s why she’s proposed resources going into that. I don’t want to dismiss how fundamental that is. But yes, for that to work, you also have to have policies that accompany that. And part of it I think that’s important is empowering the local. And this might be another example of where — while I can give you all kinds of reasons why in my time as mayor, I thought Democrats tended to be better allies to my city than Republicans. I will still acknowledge that Democrats have sometimes been a little quick to look at a federal solution when we really need to recognize that a lot of our salvation socially and policy wise, I think, will come from the local. Part of that’s my bias probably as having been a mayor. But I’ve also seen many ways that that’s true, partly because things like misinformation and disinformation, while of course, crazy rumors happen at every level, they are less likely to dominate at the local level because when you’re closer to home, you can see through what’s real and what’s not, whether that’s threats being invoked about what bad thing would happen if you built this, or an example that’s live in the news right now, which is how the community of Springfield, Ohio, at a local level is handling itself in a much more dignified way than what is being said about them and done to them in their name by people like JD Vance.” “Yeah, I mean, we’ll talk about that in a minute. But just before we leave this, the empowering — what do you mean by empowering the local level? Because on the one hand, little sounds better. And I agree with you that local politics are typically more dignified and decent than national politics. And on the other, when you think about what makes it hard to cite transmission lines, what makes housing hard, it’s often decisions local governments are making fully rationally. Maybe you don’t want to be the city where the solar farm is placed. Maybe you don’t want to be the city where the transmission lines go through. Maybe you don’t want the big multifamily units going up near you. So you see in a lot of places, governors trying to take power up to the state level, trying to make more of the decision state decisions, rather than local decisions. So on the one hand, there’s this tendency in politics to want to empower local government. A lot of these decisions are local. And on the other, when I look at this, I often see the problem is that these decisions are extremely local. And so the governor of California, the governor of Maryland, might need for their state to have a lot more homes built or clean energy built. But for each individual city, they don’t want it in their city. They want it in the other city.” “Yeah, I mean, in that sense, it can seem like a classic collective action problem. I guess my point is if there is a local obstacle, there’s more choices on how to handle that than just to ram it down the local community’s throat. And one of them is to adequately set a table where mitigations or trade offs can be set so that a local community, if it’s really being asked of them to swallow something that’s difficult for them, on the one hand, can be made better off, on the other hand in a way that’s also consistent with the bigger thing getting done.” “Vice President Harris has said that what she wants to build is an opportunity economy. Opportunity is always one of the weird terms in American politics because you can’t find anybody who disagrees with it. You’re not going to — there’s no politician who says, look, I’m against opportunity. I do not want an opportunity economy. And so it’s been there with Bill Clinton, been there with Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, presumably Donald Trump. I don’t actually remember him talking about opportunity, but he might have. What is different about the theory at this time? If we’ve been pursuing this for so long across so many administrations, so many sessions of Congress, and we haven’t gotten to a thing where people can say, look, we’ve built the opportunity economy that you’ve been promised by administration after administration, what about either the definition of opportunity here or the policies under consideration here will make that different?” “Well, I’ll tell you the yardstick I would use to see if we’re getting to the thing. And it’s social mobility. The kind of mathematical definition of the American dream, if it can be reduced to that, is the likelihood that you’re going to wind up better off than you started. If you were born in 1945, there’s a 90 percent chance that would be true. For someone your age or my age, it’s a coin flip. Changing that is, I think, the best indicator that this is an opportunity economy, that this is an opportunity society. But I don’t know that I would accept the premise that we’re kind of still casting about for it. I’d say we’re very much underway in making it happen. There are some indications that we’re already trending toward more social mobility, economic mobility being available. I think this is especially important because I know in past political generations, opportunity has been basically a code for ideological centrism. That means that you’re going to see the kind of a neoliberal framework kind of playing out. But what’s different in the most last few years, I think, is a real level of investment — recognizing that opportunity isn’t just about deregulating some space where you’re hoping to open a small business, but also making sure that by the time you’re out to open a small business, you’re doing it on a foundation of education, the infrastructure, and whatever else you needed in life to get to that point. And so to me, it’s not kind of we’re wandering around looking for a solution. It’s that we’re trying to reverse 40 years, at least, 50 depending on what metric you’re looking at, of widening inequality and in some ways, diminishing opportunity. And the last three or four years, there’s been an incredible amount of headway toward that. Let’s see how far we can take it and also head off the threats to opportunity that we know are looming, most notably climate.” “So the other side of the race here — Donald Trump, his economic plan is, I guess, in a way straightforward. It’s a universal tariff of 10 percent or 20 percent depending on when he’s speaking on any imported goods from any country and a 60 percent tariff on goods imported from China. His argument made in the debate, made in different speeches, is that Americans won’t pay that as higher prices. That will be other countries, companies in other countries giving us money, sort of like a tax, that’ll fill our coffers. It’ll make sure more production happens here, and that is the way we will become more competitive. Polling shows 56 percent of Americans support the plan. What do you think of both it as actual policy and it as politics?” “I think it’s terrible policy. And I think that Americans will be less supportive of that as they do the math about the estimated $3,900 a year in cost that a typical family might face if he got a chance to implement that policy. But just as importantly, in results terms, we need to be talking about — my party needs to be talking about why it was that there was a manufacturing recession on his watch before COVID, by the way, and what it means that actually jobs are coming back to the United States in manufacturing right now. And that is because of industrial policy. That is a huge achievement of the Biden-Harris years. And it is just getting started. I can’t tell you how many places I have seen where — I mean, think about where I grew up, South Bend, Indiana, still in some ways trying to recover from the loss of the Studebaker Car Company in 1963. Our downtown was haunted by huge factories with broken windows. The biggest investment that I’m aware happening in my lifetime up until recently was about a $1 billion investment in a steel plant on the west edge of the county. That was such a big deal that even though it happened in 1990, people were still talking about it, and many economic development professionals were still kind of making their name on it 20 years later when I became mayor. Right now, there is a $3 to $4 billion investment in electric vehicle batteries going on right next to that steel facility. There is an $11 billion Amazon Web Services data center being built a few miles from there and another one going up that Microsoft’s putting in that I can’t even remember how much is being invested. So collectively, an order of magnitude beyond anything we had seen since the Kennedy administration. Those are the kinds of things that he is falsely saying would be delivered by his all tariffs, no investment strategy.” “So behind the all tariff strategy is a theory, and I think it’s consistent in Trump and deep in him, but now more broadly shared by the MAGA movement, which is a very zero-sum theory of how the economy works. We are in competition with other countries for factories, for jobs. And the way to win that competition is to tilt the field against them. The sort of trade theories of Trump, which go even beyond tariffs, kind of have a similar view of it. And so there’s a zero-sum competition between native-born workers and immigrants for jobs, for wages. When JD Vance is not just being racist about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, what he is saying is that they’re there, they’re taking away the jobs, they are raising housing prices. There’s a theory about the tariff, which is that — this is an old strain in economics and in politics. But I’m curious what you think about, I guess, it and its appeal because I do think it’s sort of intuitive to people that we’re in different kinds of competitions. People do look and they think, well, yeah, if an immigrant gets this job, I’m probably not getting it, or somebody else is not getting it. Or if another country gets a TSMC semiconductor factory, we’re not getting it. How do you answer the intuitive appeal of zero-sum economics? And so somebody who understands like this is a dog-eat-dog competition has the economy right.” “Well, look, two things can be true at the same time. One is that there is competition between us and other countries. And the other is that it isn’t zero-sum. And I do think another thing that really costs a lot of trust in places like where I grew up is we were told, look, just go along with all these things that are positive sum. The pie will get bigger. Don’t worry about your slice. It’ll definitely be bigger because the whole pie is going to get bigger. And only half of that promise came true. The pie got bigger, but a lot of people’s slices in places like the industrial Midwest where I grew up didn’t. And so you got to understand why people have a level of receptivity to that. And at the same time, the idea that it’s zero-sum is just clearly not true. And again, that’s why I think stories like immigration are a lot more nuanced and less kind of fit to that narrative when you actually look at them at the local level, certainly in South Bend. Part of how we finally, finally became a growing city after being called a dying city had to do with immigration. And that was also tied up with economic growth that was happening. Jobs were growing, and people were growing. And it was not, people were coming in to compete for the same jobs. We wound up with more jobs and more people. That’s happening in Springfield, Ohio, right now. And it’s a complicated situation there. But one thing that’s definitely happening is way more jobs than they had before and way more people in a city that lost thousands and thousands of its people. But I also think this is a good example of the benefits of taking politics offline. And part of what I mean when I say that salvation will come from the local. Because even though obviously, these attitudes can prevail at the local level too, I think actually, people do have a richer understanding of how we benefit from what one another brings when it’s in the context of your own community.” “I’ve been thinking about this question with Vance because I’ve been going back and rereading ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’ And one of the striking things about that book is that Vance understands his own story as an immigration story, that his family is part of an immigration to Ohio for jobs that when they got there, they were looked down upon. He’s extremely explicit about this and extremely compassionate about it when it is about his people. And I’ve been reading a lot of the reporting from Springfield, and there’s a lot of decency there in it that the people who are in Springfield have been like trying to shout. Yeah, there are problems here. This has been tough in certain ways. There have been a lot of new immigrants to the community, and also our economy is doing well. And also people are not eating cats and dogs. The cat was in the basement, sort of famously now in one of the — and there is this sort of remarkable absence of the grace asked for your version of the same story playing out now that, I don’t know, I just find it hard for myself to track.” “Yeah, I think — look, I have very mixed feelings about even talking about this because my opinion, my strategic opinion is that when they do things like spreading rumors about people eating cats in Springfield, it’s not to help with the plight of Springfield, Ohio. It’s to make sure that we’re not talking about how Donald Trump dismantled the right to abortion in this country and the manufacturing recession that happened on his watch and his plans to do tax cuts for the rich and everything that’s in Project 2025. And we’re also not talking about how and why Kamala Harris won the debate and what she’s going to do to make sure we have a fairer tax code. So all of that is in the back of my head as I even take this up. And yet, I think it is worth dwelling on something you mentioned. I think one of the most interesting details to come out of this whole set of stories is that when that resident of Springfield realized the cat was in her basement, she didn’t just go dark. She reached out to her neighbor, if I understand the story right, used a smartphone translator app to help express regret to her neighbor. And as she’s telling the story, she’s still in a MAGA hat and a Trump shirt. It’s not that she suddenly flipped over to become a bleeding heart liberal Democrat, but that’s exactly the kind of grace that at our best we show. By the way, it takes a lot to do that, to make an apology, to acknowledge regret, exactly the thing that is literally anathema to Trump and Trumpism — never admit you were wrong, even when you were obviously wrong. Never back down, even if you’re obviously lying, that JD Vance has taken to its extreme level when he literally sat on CNN and said, if I have to create stories, I’ll do it. But I think what happened there, that grace, that humanity is incredibly important because in our actual lives, these things are complicated. It is true that Springfield is growing. It is true that their economy is growing. It is true that their population is growing. It is also true that with thousands of new arrivals there — not because they are immigrants, but because they are people — there are a lot of people going to the hospital and enrolling in schools that were not designed to take that big of a shift in a single year or a couple of years. It is not true that disease is up or crime is up. So it’s complicated. But what you didn’t hear from JD Vance is what I think an earnest politician would do, which is say people where I live, some of my constituents have this problem. So I went and got them help. I mean, this all originated supposedly with them saying we need more federal help. He’s their United States Senator. It’s literally his job to mobilize federal help for his constituents. I haven’t heard a peep out of him about anything he’s doing to solve the problem because, of course, his purpose is not to solve the problem. It’s to use the problem. And that’s a pattern we see again and again and again in how Trump, Vance deal with any issue from immigration to any of the others. And yet, that decency is there. And there’s even a part of me — and I admit that this sounds optimistic — but there’s a part of me that wonders when the breaking point will come, as it always does, when there is a vulnerable group set out to be targeted, set out to be hated, feared, discriminated against, subject to random violence. At various times, it’s been different groups. I mean, at one point it was the Irish. And then it was the Italians. Before it was Haitian immigrants’ turn, it was LGBTQ Americans, and maybe in the most parallel example in terms of the way it kind of looked and felt for the persecutors, people who were suspected of being communists. And then something happened, and it’s not really clear what exactly changed, except after years of everybody being on the hunt for communists, one day, Joe McCarthy’s out there sputtering about communists everywhere. And somebody says, at long last, have you no decency. And the whole thing fell apart. I don’t know whether that day is 10 years away, or whether the fact that this Ohio narrative coincides with Trump and Vance slipping in the polls this week means that it’s sooner than we think, or somewhere in between. But I do believe that day will come, and anybody who signed up for this nonsense will have a lot of explaining to do.” “It does sound optimistic, right? The reason I have trepidation talking about this is that I think the way the human mind works is even if the reason you’re hearing the words Haitians and eating dogs and cats in a sentence 40 times a week now is to be told it isn’t true, that there is in some limbic level associations begin to happen that then can be activated in negative ways. But one of the things it has put me in mind of, which was true, I guess, even before we got to this distilled point of hatred and libel, is in my lifetime, in my political lifetime, I have never felt the conversation about immigration as far right as it is now. The frame is border security. We don’t talk about comprehensive immigration reform. The frame is border crisis. And there is a genuine policy problem here. But it does seem like a lot of ground has been lost, that the discussion is almost entirely about how to get fewer people to show up and not what immigrants contribute, not even what the goals of American immigration policy should be, except to not have so many people showing up and claiming asylum. I’m curious how you track why those politics have moved and changed the way they have.” “Well, to come back to where we started, I think people are more susceptible to that message and that frame when they feel like they are being shorted, cheated, or left out, or failed. I think a lot of people feel that way. I think there are good reasons. Not — immigration isn’t necessarily one of them, but there are good reasons for people to feel shorted and left out and cheated. We’re doing something about that. And a lot of the Biden-Harris message has been about standing with workers, standing with consumers, people who are getting left out or treated unfairly. But if you feel like that’s been happening to you for a long time, it’s just going to be more fertile ground for that kind of thing. Doesn’t make it right, doesn’t make it O.K. But it’s one of many, many reasons why lots of different problems, including social and political problems, open up when you allow inequality to widen, as America has done for a half century. And perversely, in my opinion, sometimes that inequality leads to resentments that lead to politics that empower politicians like Donald Trump and JD Vance, whose policies will definitely make that inequality worse. And yet, it’s a clear result of allowing that corrosion to happen in the first place.” “Obama sort of reflected something. You saw it in Clinton in a different way, a view that you had to have credibility on border security first to have credibility in the rest of the conversation. So famously, Obama early in his first term really increased the pace of deportations. And there was a lot of anger at him later for that because there was a feeling that he did that to win credibility that didn’t lead to anything. They were not able to pass comprehensive immigration reform, even though it did pass out of the Senate in 2013. And Donald Trump obviously swung things very far in an anti-immigration direction. And then the border under the Biden administration did see a huge, huge influx. We did see record levels of encounters at the southern border. But I guess one of my questions is whether or not this sort of old theory of this was right, that in order to be credible on the compassionate side, as a Democrat, you had to first be able to say, look, we take seriously that a country needs to control its own border. We take seriously security here. We take seriously what is wrong in our own system. And because you know we will do that, you can trust us on this other piece. In some ways, it feels to me like what is happening now under Biden-Harris is an attempt with the Lankford Bill, with the executive actions, to win back that credibility, so a broader conversation can open again.” “Well, I think you do have to start by acknowledging a common sensical view, which is not wrong or xenophobic, that the border ought to be secure and that in a healthy system, you would have more lawful and less unlawful immigration. And generally, that’s been the equilibrium of public opinion as well as just kind of the bar room, slash, chamber of commerce conventional wisdom. We ought to have more legal and less illegal immigration. Now, lately, even that has shifted. But I don’t think that’s where the center of gravity of the American people are. I think generally, most of the time most Americans get that if it’s orderly, immigration is an important part of what can grow our economy. And I think that’s especially going to be true as we enter this stage, where it appears for, hopefully some time, will continue to be an economy that is less certain about where we’re going to find the workers to do all these good paying jobs than we are about how we’re going to find jobs for all the workers we have, which is the condition we were in just as recently as 10 or 15 years ago when I entered politics. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with recognizing that any border ought to be orderly and secure. And I do think we lose credibility if we look unserious about that, even as we’re making the case for broader, bigger immigration reform.” “I want to tap foreign policy for a bit here. I thought one of Harris’s strongest debate moments was around Ukraine and when she said, yeah, Donald Trump might end that war faster by ceding it to Vladimir Putin. That also got at a real change that is actually happening, seems to be happening in the Republican Party towards a much more isolationist strain than we’ve seen in a long time. I think with Trump, it’s sort of instinctual. With someone like Vance, it’s becoming more ideological. On Ukraine funding among young conservatives, there is a skepticism of different kinds of aid, including on Israel. There is a Chicago Council on World Affairs Survey. For the first time in nearly 50 years, a majority of Republicans prefer isolationism. What do you make this turn?” “Well, I think a lot of it is contingent. It’s a specific result of the roller coaster that Americans have been on when it comes to foreign policy, including the defining experiences that our generation would have seen of America’s involvement abroad, largely involving policy failure — the Iraq War, which I view as a failure in its conception, and then the experience in Afghanistan. That doesn’t change the fact that supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. And it’s especially concerning that in JD Vance, you really could not have found a running mate more visibly aligned with the anti-Ukraine, more or less, side of the party.” “He’s not just been isolation, he’s been contemptuous of Ukraine. It’s a different —” “That’s right.” “It’s a different emotional tone of it.” “That’s right. And it is jarring for those who remember as recently as 10 or 15 years ago, there being a sense that it was actually Republicans who were too stuck in views about Russia that had formed under the Soviet Union. Although, I think another thing for us to think about as Democrats is how naive we may have been about any Democratic tendencies in Putin’s Russia all along.” “There was a lot of mocking of Mitt Romney for saying Russia was our great geopolitical threat — not saying they — not saying I’d rank them first, but it doesn’t look, as crazy as it did when he said it.” “That’s true. It was only a few years after that that a Russian influence operation really affected and harmed our country. So I don’t know how to make sense of it other than to say that one of many things that I think might be possible if there’s a decisive defeat of Trump and importantly, a decisive defeat of many members of Congress who were aligned with him in swing districts, is the prospect — again, I don’t want to sound too optimistic — I know it could go many different directions — but at least the possibility of a normal Republican Party in the future, by which I mostly mean one that is no less committed to democracy than the Democratic Party, as we would have expected of both parties until a few years ago. But I also think that means one where we can debate exactly how America makes good on our values as well as our interests abroad but less disagreement over whether we should.” “Is there a danger in Democrats becoming too big a tent on this? I was thinking about this when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris and thinking about the same history you’re describing. I am not on that George W. Bush revisionism train. I think we’re still dealing with the wreckage of the policy failures and disasters that he and Dick Cheney created. But people — as you say, there is a widespread agreement. Iraq was a disaster. Afghanistan was ultimately something of a disaster and the obviously, withdrawal very, very difficult in part, for those reasons. And I think people feel very uneasy about what we can achieve in the world. We’re arming Ukraine, but is really a path to any kind of resolution there? Or are we just throwing money, dollars, weaponry into a stalemate? We have been behind Israel in Gaza, but people are mixed on what they want to see happen there, but not this. This does not look good to anybody. And I think there’s a feeling that what we’re doing abroad is just not working, that the world feels in disorder, that we’re funding it but don’t have a clear pathway through it. And then here comes Dick Cheney to endorse the Democratic nominee. So on the one hand yeah, I’m not where Donald Trump is. I’m not an isolationist. But I also wonder about whether or not Democrats are getting themselves into some trouble here by I don’t think not all that clearly articulating what stability looks like or what the goal is beyond we’re pro-democracy. What is Democratic foreign policy trying to achieve?” “Well, part of how I try to square the circle here is that a huge part of the problem with Bush-Cheney foreign policy was this idea that there was good and evil. We were good. The countries that they wanted to attack were evil, and that was how policy worked. And if we, the good, came in and blew away the evil, everything would be better. Obviously, that was a disastrous way to think about US foreign policy. What you have with Trumpism is not a reasoned response to that. It’s more saying basically, right and wrong don’t matter. At best, it’s right and wrong don’t matter. At worst, we should actually be doing the opposite of believing in democracy. We should be aligning ourselves with dictators or would-be dictators, or at least authoritarian and authoritarian light leaders. A commitment to democracy is wildly important for America at home and abroad. Without it, we are just another country out there. We’ve never been a perfect democracy, but democracy is the most important thing about us. And we remain the most important democracy. And I believe that continues to have to be at the core of how we engage around the world — doesn’t mean we get to dictate how other countries work. It does mean that we promote the values that go with that and a set of values that it turns out, even if you’re not a democracy, you can buy into in the name of some universal commitments, which is a rules-based international order where it matters if you follow the rules. That’s part of what’s at stake in Ukraine, the importance of standing up to the kind of aggression that is trying to change an international border through force in Europe. And the strategy that the Biden-Harris administration has been one of finding ways to stand up to that without a single American troop being sent into conflict, partly in the view that if we don’t, we might make it a more dangerous place where more American troops will be sent into conflict. So I think the answer isn’t to throw up your hands and run away screaming and say we can’t do any good by engaging, even if we’ve been humbled by foreign policy misadventures from Iraq back to Vietnam and more. But it also certainly can’t be one where we are amoral or worse, which is the direction that Trump has led us in.” “Going back to your theory, though, that you build trust by showing gain — I think that gain can be ideological. I don’t think everything in politics is material. One thing that has not been all that clearly articulated to me, in my view, is, well, in these two conflicts that the Biden administration has committed itself to, what are we looking to have happen here? We’re calibrating Ukraine very carefully — what kind of weapons we give them, and in their view, such that it is possible for them to survive in the war, but not necessarily possible for them to win the war. And similarly, in Israel, it’s a little hard to say what the end game is here. We’ve not demanded they do these ceasefires, or they don’t get our weaponry. We don’t have a pathway there to a two-state solution, and there’s none coming from their leadership. I think one reason support for some things is beginning to drain is people think, I don’t know what I’m even supposed to be hoping for here. This just seems like we are now in a grind. So when you think about that, what does success look like?” “I don’t think you can look at either of those or any of those in terms of a glorious victory. That’s not what this is about. Sometimes it’s about facing terrible things that are happening and preventing a bad outcome or preventing a worse outcome. And certainly, in the case of Ukraine, the right outcome is for Russia to go home and leave and leave Ukraine alone. What actually happens next depends first and foremost on the Ukrainians themselves. But also what happens there and in so many other places depends on whether a freedom-loving world stands with them, not because it will kind of easily or automatically lead to some simple outcome that anybody would have asked for. Remember, Ukrainians didn’t ask to be the symbol of world democracy. They actively worked to avoid the struggle that they are in. But the question is — it’s not how do we go out — this is not something that we created or wanted to create. It’s when that happens, what do you do, especially when it tests your values? There’s a test of our values. And we have to meet it.” “Well, as our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?” “I just read Jon Fosse, the Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize recently. He’s got a book, a really short book —” “You and the Scandinavians, man.” “I know somebody heard that I like Norwegian literature, asked me if I’d read this novel. This dude had become very famous with the Nobel Prize. I hadn’t. And then I picked up this very slim, almost a novella called ‘Morning Evening.’ And I’m sadly choosing a lot of books based on their size because I need books that can be read in one sitting sometimes the way travel works. And I cannot remember the last time I was more emotionally moved by a novel. The first few pages I almost gave up on it because a lot of Nordic writers, he’s not really into punctuation, and you have to commit to it a little bit. And then it wound up being this really affecting — it’s hard to describe, but it’s just this really powerful piece of fiction that really moved me. And it made me wonder if I would be moved in the same way if I read it when I was younger or if it’s because I’m a little older and have a family that it meant a lot to me. I recently read Masha Gessen’s book, ‘The Future is History.’ It’s the most helpful account I’ve seen of what happened in Russia and why Russia is now the way it is. And it’s built out of narratives of people who are about our age, which maybe is why I found it more intelligible than ‘Sovietology’ or just the kind of day-to-day reporting you read about what Putin is doing and who he is. Now on my nightstand, I’ve got a book called ‘Mr. Churchill in the White House’ by Bob Schmuhl, who’s a scholar of American Studies that I know from Notre Dame. And just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be another book about Churchill — I think somebody counted, and there’s literally like 1,000 — it’s actually a kind of interesting and sometimes fun read because it’s a book that’s specifically about the time he spent in Washington. So there’s an interesting psychodrama of how he related to Roosevelt and Eisenhower. There’s a fascinating description of just how executive power worked back then that’s really interesting to compare to how the interagency works today. And then you just try to transpose it to where we are. And you imagine — imagine if Zelenskyy was just moving to the White House for a while and kind of roaming the halls in his slippers. And you just think about how much time has changed. So I’m just getting into that, but it’s a pretty good read.” “Pete Buttigieg, Thank you very much.” “Thank you.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

The politician discusses how Democrats can rebuild trust.

Pete Buttigieg has had a fascinating rise in politics. He went from being the mayor of South Bend, Ind., a small but noble town, to an unexpectedly competitive presidential candidate, winning Iowa in 2020, to secretary of transportation. This year, he’s also proven to be one of the best communicators in the Democratic Party.

So with an opportunity to sit down with him, I wanted to ask him a bunch of questions I have about the Democratic Party. And they begin with a concept that he wrote a book about in 2020 — trust. The Democratic Party has lost the trust of a lot of people who once supported it. And it has endured a sorting of Americans by trust. Donald Trump’s Republican Party is a party full of people who don’t trust the system, don’t trust the government, don’t trust Democrats. But it’s become much more than that.

So how does Buttigieg think about trust? What does he think government — and particularly the Democratic Party — has done to lose it? What can be done to gain it back?

I should say there’s a law called the Hatch Act that keeps members of the government from campaigning in their official guise, which is fine. So, in order to talk with Buttigieg more widely, I was not able to ask him a number of questions I would have liked to ask him about his work as transportation secretary. But, given the circumstances, we had, I think, a pretty fascinating conversation.

This is an edited excerpt from the conversation. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show” or watch the video at the top of this page.

Pete Buttigieg on 2024 and the ‘Crank Realignment’

The politician discusses how Democrats can rebuild trust.

Ezra Klein: Back in 2020, you wrote a book on political trust. There are a million ways to show that it has declined, but what’s your explanation?

Pete Buttigieg: One of the reasons I think it’s declined has been a kind of a feedback loop between public institutions letting people down and people then hesitating to empower those public institutions to solve their problems.

If you go back to the rise of Reaganism, one of the quotes Ronald Reagan’s best known for is that the most frightening thing you can ever hear is somebody saying, “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.” That generation of conservatives, when they took power, didn’t just believe that government was the problem. They also stripped away a lot of the capacity of government to solve problems.

That becomes a feedback loop, where if you’re looking around and you’re seeing crumbling infrastructure or widening inequality, you might think, oh, the government sucks at fixing these problems. And then the next time you’re being asked, for example, to vote for a candidate who’s going to make sure there’s enough funding going to the government, you say, “I’m not going to put tax money into the government. Government sucks.” That, too, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the next thing you know, these public institutions are less and less able to address things.

You contrast that with what you have, for example, in Nordic countries. And I know it is almost exhaustingly a go-to for liberals to point to a Nordic example. But importantly, one of the many, many things that would be nice for us to have — that they have in Sweden — is a high perception of tax fairness. Partly that’s because I think they actually have a fairer tax code, but I also think there’s been a virtuous cycle there, where public entities have done a reasonably good job of taking care of people. People therefore have a relatively high level of trust that their tax dollars will be used fairly and wisely. And therefore they allow those institutions to have the running room they need to try to solve things.

I don’t mean to reduce all of this to a debate over the size of government. I think one of the things that we’ve gotten smarter about now on the left is that it’s not just how big or how small government is. But I do think that’s an example of one of the factors that was very corrosive.

A more recent one, of course, is the way information moves around. There was a lot of hope with the arrival of the internet that the democratization of reporting was going to be empowering. And in some ways it was — some very important ways, like human rights abuses that were captured on smartphones could no longer be denied. On the other hand, what we didn’t think about was that the editorial function of identifying what is true or not true, what is newsworthy or not, is dissolved or nonexistent in those same online spaces, which meant that lots of different things — some true, some false, some worth attention, some questionable — were all kind of put into the same swirl and got imbibed as if they were all the same. And I think that’s another example of something that’s led to this world we’re in now, where people don’t even trust that we’re in the same factual reality as one another.

I would take the first explanation as a policy feedback theory — bad policy creates negative trust, good policy should create positive trust. I would say I believed something more like that at the beginning of the Biden era. But then I watched a bunch of policies that I thought would’ve created feedback loops, like the child tax credit expansion, not quite work. I was thinking about this because the Teamsters got a big helping hand in the American Rescue Plan, but they just declined to endorse a Democrat, Kamala Harris, for the first time in modernity.

And that’s putting it mildly. Their pensions were saved by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

So if you would have thought that policy feedback loops work anywhere, “You save the Teamsters, the Teamsters like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris better” would have been about as tight a feedback loop as you could imagine. And it didn’t work. And the reason the Teamsters gave for not making a national endorsement was that their membership is heavily pro-Trump. So how does something like that fit with your theory?

An unsatisfying — but I think very true — answer is time. The child tax credit can take effect very quickly. And the astonishing results, in terms of the swift reduction of child poverty, showed that some good policies can also work very quickly. But that doesn’t mean that it soaks into where people award political credit for that very quickly. Or even embrace the policy that was helpful.

One good example on how there was, in fact, a policy feedback, but it wasn’t quick, has to do with the Affordable Care Act. I cut my political teeth running for an obscure statewide office in 2010. I was running for state treasurer in Indiana. And that’s one of those races where your prospects pretty much depend on the generic rising or falling of your party. And, believe it or not, it didn’t seem insane to run as a Democrat in Indiana in 2010, because in 2008, Barack Obama had carried Indiana.

Yeah, you had Evan Bayh as a senator.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was uphill even then. But of course I got clobbered. Every Democrat just about in any even remotely competitive area, let alone a reddening state like Indiana, was clobbered. Because in 2010, the Affordable Care Act was absolutely toxic to us Democrats. It was the issue that cost many Democrats the election. By 2018, the A.C.A. was actually the winning issue for Democrats, so much so that when Kamala Harris challenged Donald Trump in the debate over his attempts to destroy it, he was avoiding his own commitment to what was very much his own policy. He definitely wanted and tried to undo the Affordable Care Act and get rid of all that. But it is now politically dangerous for him to admit it.

So eight years is a long time, and it’s not a long time. I think it’s not a long time for a major policy issue to flip its political valence. It’s not a long time for an important policy to bear enough fruit that people appreciate it and then are protective of it. But it’s also too slow for those — including members of Congress who helped get the A.C.A. passed — to, politically, live to tell the tale.

Here’s a question that may not seem related to trust but actually is: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president this year. He dropped out and endorsed Donald Trump. What do you make of that?

“Weird” doesn’t even begin to characterize how I view that campaign. I think the endorsement is less weird, actually, because anybody who wants to burn it all down is probably a crossover Trump-R.F.K. Jr. voter. There’s a particular flavor of conspiratorial style that I see that they have in common, which is, a conspiracy theory is introduced by somebody saying, “They won’t tell you this. Don’t trust them. They don’t want you to see this. They’re not reporting on this, but I’m going to tell you.” Which, ironically, is saying, “You can’t trust anybody else, but you can sure trust me.” Which should make you skeptical immediately. But that style of saying, “I know something that the establishment doesn’t, and they’re lying to you” — in R.F.K.’s case, most famously about vaccines. And there’s a lot of crossover between his famous anti-vax stances and what you get in Trumpworld, but there’s that same kind of affect, and it is a little bit post-policy. I don’t know how much they align on policies really. With each of them, for different reasons, it’s hard to pin them down on policy. But I do think in that sense, it was natural.

Two things have happened with trust over the last couple of decades. One is that it’s gone down. The other is that it has sorted.

You used to have what I would call “low trust in the system” voters in both parties. R.F.K. Jr. was a recognizably left-wing version of that — they don’t believe in vaccines and G.M.O.s, corporations are taking everything over, maybe you can cure cancer with vitamin C, that kind of thing. And you had the right-wing versions of this, going all the way back to the John Birch Society. But you had a bunch of them on both sides.

Donald Trump seems to have set off a realignment. My friend Matt Yglesias calls it the “crank realignment.” Now you have R.F.K. Jr. moving over to the right. It’s not necessarily that he’s a right-winger on policy. But there is this clustering of higher-trust voters in the Democratic Party — voters who believe in the system — and lower trust in the Republican Party. What does that do to politics?

I think that the sorting is unique to this moment. I don’t know that it’s durable. In one sense, it’s the most natural thing in the world for the more right-of-center party to be anti-government and, therefore, if the establishment means government, for you to be skeptical. But when it becomes any institution, including your county-run election administration, which is literally being run by your neighbors or — to move outside of government — medical academia saying, hey, these vaccines are working, or anything else, then I think it becomes a lot more dangerous and corrosive.

And, again, I think it puts us back in this world where people have their own realities or their own facts. And if there aren’t some agreed-on, trusted arbiters of some of this, whether it’s in the press or in the academy. It’s less likely to be in government, but one reason we have certain importantly nonpartisan institutions in government, like the judiciary is supposed to be, is for this reason. If you lose that — whether it has a partisan valence or not — it’s bad news.

This may be a good time to bring in your occasional foil, JD Vance. There’s reporting that you are playing JD Vance in debate prep with Tim Walz. As you spend time trying to get into his head and into his demeanor, what have you come to understand in him or believe about him that you didn’t before?

He’s somebody who is a product of the Midwest but, after trading off of that Midwest identity, is now, in my view, promoting policies and a ticket that would be really harmful for the industrial Midwest. And so I’m thinking a lot about what I consider to be a faux populism. This space he’s carved out, where he achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties, saying that Democrats and Republicans in the past have gotten things wrong, but then all the prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for or act for are things like undercutting your right to choose or tax cuts for the rich or a lot of other things that I think are objectionable about good old-fashioned Republican policy. I’m just thinking a lot about how to penetrate that veneer.

But that doesn’t let you play him. The reason he’s a curiosity to me is I knew him a bit. He was on my show back in 2017, back in an earlier guise. I’ve watched a lot of politicians in the Republican Party go from being Trump haters to Trump supporters or something beyond Trump supporters. He’s really the only one who I’ve watched his whole temperament and personality and way of talking and being and moving through the world change. Ted Cruz had Ted Cruz’s personality in 2013. He was shutting down the government. He was not well liked by his colleagues. Marco Rubio is much friendlier to Trump now, but the same guy temperamentally.

JD Vance went through a temperamental overhaul. He became angrier and resentful and contemptuous of people who disagree with him — at the same time that things were going really well for him personally. It’s not like he was vastly rejected. His book was a best-seller. He was the toast of the town. As you’re trying to absorb his temperament — because I’m sure you’re trying to prepare Tim Walz for that — what do you make of that?

I’ve certainly seen a lot of Republicans, especially my generation’s Republicans, go through some version of this evolution. Although you’re right, I think it’s more dramatic in his case. I think it means there’s a real contradiction in him, because he is simultaneously the Republican who’s supposed to explain a new kind of conservatism to the world, including New York Times readers, and he’s supposed to embody this kind of angry populism and this facts-don’t-matter nihilism of what Trump represents, even though he eloquently called it out before he got on board with it.

But I think sometimes we make these things way more complicated than they are. I think there’s a bunch of people, including him, who know deep down how bad Donald Trump is for the country but realize that they could gain power by attaching themselves to him, and they did it. And that’s one thing that he has in common with a very different Midwesterner, Mike Pence. It worked out really poorly for Mike Pence. And that’s part of why it’s going to be JD Vance sitting on that stage.

A big part of the JD Vance theory of politics is that the liberal elite has captured the institutions and government particularly. And the thing that the MAGA movement needs to do — which is now laid out in much more detail on something like 2025 than it ever was in President Trump’s first term — is that they’re going to march through the institutions, break them, rid them of the deep state, of the liberals, of whatever, and get them back.

JD Vance once called this “debathification,” working off of what America did after the invasion of Iraq — an interesting analogy. But this is their promise to the low-trust voter. You think the system is against you. You don’t trust it. Don’t turn away from the system. We’re going to take it, break it and wield its power for you, and use that to bring corporations to heel, universities to heel — all the other institutions in American life you don’t trust anymore. That’s the unified governing theory of MAGA. How do you take it?

The problem is, what he’s saying is, “These institutions don’t work for you, the people. So we’re going to take them back on behalf of the people.” But what he means is, “These institutions don’t work for me, a right-wing politician. And so we’re going to put them under the control of right wing politicians.”

And if you look at something like what Project 2025 would do to the civil service, taking a lot of what are, importantly, nonpartisan roles, and make them directly subject to political control, it is less than plausible that is going to benefit anyone but whoever’s controlling them. Now, of course, I think it’s completely upside-down to have a political party that’s most associated with tax cuts for the rich and letting corporations have their way offer to be the ones that are going to make these institutions work better for you, precisely because we have had nonpartisan institutions handle things like regulation that we have some stability to the rule of law in this country and that it’s aligned not around the interests of any one person — political or financial interests of any one person — but around those of the public. You cannot have safety and peace and rule of law, let alone a healthy political system, if there’s this sense that the government is personally controlled by one person. That’s not safe or good. And so, I think what we have to do is see through that.

Now, you are more susceptible to believe something like that if you feel like it has failed you so completely that anybody offering to just smash it is bringing you some kind of benefit. Which is why these institutions really have to do a better job of delivering for people.

I think sometimes one way you build trust with people is owning up to failure. You and I came up in the same era of elite failure. The Iraq war is an elite failure. The financial crisis is an elite failure. There’s a lot that goes wrong in this period. What, specifically, in your view, does the Democratic Party have to own up to? Where did the Democratic Party go wrong in this era? And what lessons either has it learned or does it still need to learn?

Certainly, I think the complicity of the Democratic Party in the run-up to the Iraq war continues to be something that really helped set America onto the political trajectory that we’re on right now. Another flip in politics that’s very revealing is that I remember in 2002, as a college student, volunteering on a Democratic congressional campaign. The Democrats everywhere who were skeptical of the idea of the Iraq War were still kind of pretending to be OK with it, because they thought they had to be.

What campaign were you volunteering on?

The local congressional race where I lived in South Bend, Indiana. And we did not win. But by 2016, Donald Trump, who was for the war, is pretending he was against it. So again, it took a while, but things really shifted there, obviously partly because of the disastrous consequences of the invasion. But I think that provoked, or should have provoked, a lot of introspection on the left — or among Democrats, I should say — on how we allowed ourselves to go along with that.

There’s a lot of introspection in our party, I think, over policies that may be making it harder to build things. Housing is the one that I know you’ve paid a lot of attention to and probably gets the most attention. But there’s lots of things, from mining for materials needed for clean energy to infrastructure — which I won’t get into now because I’m here in my personal capacity — but a lot of things that — it’s not as straightforwardly clear. I think the right thinks that, well, if you got rid of all these regulations and environmental protections, then we wouldn’t have this problem. But I do think we’ve got to be a little more serious about that. I could go on. We’re a party that loves to criticize ourselves.

You can’t dangle that housing bait in front of me and not expect me to take it. Expanding housing supply, which is not a thing Democrats were emphasizing 10 years ago, was the first thing on Kamala Harris’s first major set of policy proposals. She wants to build 3 million new houses over her first term. Barack Obama, when he was at the Democratic National Convention, brought that up first in his list of new ideas for a Democratic Party. I have done a lot of work on how housing is harder to build where Democrats govern. It’s a lot easier to build a home in Texas than it is in California. That is true today. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has passed a lot of pro-housing legislation, but it is still harder to build in California than in Texas. Why? What did Democrats get wrong here?

I don’t want to make this out to be just a Democratic thing. But it’s clear that out of a desire — part of which, by the way, is very well-rounded — to make sure that bad things don’t happen, you wind up with a lot of measures put into place that stop anything from happening, including good things. But I also think it’s important and telling that she has led with this policy to expand housing supply, because that’s clearly a problem. And one thing that I think is especially important about this moment, and also characterizes what I would think of as, as Bidenism, is a willingness to meet a big problem with a lot of ambition and a belief that, if you get it right, good government can be part of the solution.

There’s been a tremendous amount of energy in the Democratic Party, in the Biden administration, to build more clean energy by creating subsidies, tax credits. And it’s having a big effect, and I support that hugely.

But not a lot has happened on the regulatory side to address the concern that Democrats, and maybe the government in general, has made it too hard to do good work in an effort to stop bad things like climate change. There’s not been permitting reform passed. There’s not been major changes made to things like the National Environmental Policy Act. There’s a lot of housing talk, but there’s not been much done on deregulating housing.

This seems like a thing that is sort of winning intellectually much more than it is winning at a policy level. And when I report on it, it’s because many Democrats are still very uncomfortable with this. They don’t want to unwind this. They are very worried — again, understandably — about bad things happening.

So in terms of managing something, it has been a bit of a failure. What are the ideas here that might work? In your view, what are the steps Harris could take if she were president?

Part of it is resources matter, right? That’s why she’s proposed resources going into that. I don’t want to dismiss how fundamental that is.

But yes, for that to work, you also have to have policies that accompany that. And part of it, I think that’s important, is empowering the local. And this might be another example of where, while I can give you all kinds of reasons why, in my time as mayor, I thought Democrats tended to be better allies to my city than Republicans, I will still acknowledge that Democrats have sometimes been a little quick to look at a federal solution when we really need to recognize that a lot of our salvation, socially and policy-wise, will come from the local.

Part of that is my bias, having been a mayor. But I’ve also seen many ways that that’s true. Partly because things like misinformation and disinformation — while, of course, crazy rumors happen at every level, they are less likely to dominate at the local level, because when you’re closer to home, you can see through what’s real and what’s not, whether that’s threats being invoked about what bad thing would happen if you built this. Or an example that’s live in the news right now, which is how the community of Springfield, Ohio, at a local level, is handling itself in a much more dignified way than what is being said about them and done to them in their name by people like JD Vance.

What do you mean by empowering the local level? Because on the one hand, I agree that the local politics are typically more dignified and decent than national politics. And on the other hand, when you think about what makes it hard to site transmission lines, what makes housing hard, it’s often decisions local governments are making fully rationally. Maybe you don’t want to be the city where the solar farm is placed. Maybe you don’t want to be the city where the transmission lines go through. Maybe you don’t want the big multifamily units going up. So you see, in a lot of places, governors trying to take power up to the state level.

So on the one hand, there’s this tendency in politics to want to empower local government. A lot of these decisions are local. And on the other, when I look at this, I often see the problem is that these decisions are extremely local. And so the governor of California, the governor of Maryland might need for their state to have a lot more homes built or clean energy built. But for each individual city, they don’t want it in their city, they want it in the other city.

Yeah, in that sense, it can seem like a classic collective-action problem. I guess my point is, if there is a local obstacle, there’s more choices on how to handle that than just to ram it down the local community’s throat, and one of them is to adequately set a table where mitigations or trade-offs can be set so that a local community, if it’s really being asked to swallow something that’s difficult for it on the one hand, can be made better off on the other hand in a way that’s also consistent with the bigger thing getting done.

Vice President Harris has said that she wants to build an opportunity economy. Opportunity is always one of the weird terms in American politics because you can’t find anybody who disagrees with it. What is different about the theory of it this time? If we’ve been pursuing this for so long, across so many administrations, so many sessions of Congress, and we haven’t got into a thing where people can say, look, we’ve built the opportunity economy that you’ve been promised by administration after administration, what about either the definition of opportunity here or the policies under consideration here will make that different?

I’ll tell you the yardstick I would use to see if we’re getting to the thing: social mobility. The kind of mathematical definition of the American dream, if it can be reduced to that, is the likelihood that you’re going to wind up better off than you started. If you were born in 1945, there’s a 90 percent chance that would be true. For someone your age or my age, it’s a coin flip. Changing that is, I think, the best indicator that this is an opportunity economy, that this is an opportunity society.

But I don’t know that I would accept the premise that we’re kind of still casting about for it. I’d say we’re very much underway in making it happen. There are some indications that we’re already trending toward more social mobility and economic mobility being available. I think this is especially important because I know in past political generations, opportunity has been basically a code for ideological centrism that means that you’re going to see the neoliberal framework kind of playing out. But what’s been different in the last few years, I think, is a real level of investment, recognizing that opportunity isn’t just about deregulating some space where you’re hoping to open a small business, but also making sure that by the time you’re out to open a small business, you’re doing it on a foundation of education, the infrastructure, whatever else you needed in life to get to that point.

And so to me, it’s not that we’re wandering around looking for a solution. It’s that we’re trying to reverse 40 to 50 years — depending on what metric you’re looking at — of widening inequality and, in some ways, diminishing opportunity. And in the last three or four years, there’s been an incredible amount of headway toward that. Let’s see how far we can take it. And also head off the threats to opportunity that we know are looming, most notably climate.

Donald Trump’s economic plan is, I guess in a way, straightforward. Depending on the day you hear him talking about it, it’s a 10 or 20 percent tax on all goods imported from any country and a 60 percent tax on goods imported from China. His argument is that Americans won’t pay that as higher prices, that it will be companies in other countries giving us money, sort of like a tax, that’ll fill our coffers. It’ll make sure more production happens here, and that is the way we will become more competitive. Polling shows 56 percent of Americans support the plan. What do you think of both it as actual policy and it as politics?

I think it’s terrible policy, and I think that Americans will be less supportive of that as they do the math about the estimated $3,900 a year in cost that a typical family might face if he got a chance to implement that policy.

But just as importantly, in results terms, my party needs to be talking about why it was that there was a manufacturing recession on Trump’s watch — before Covid, by the way — and what it means that actually jobs are coming back to the United States in manufacturing right now. And that is because of industrial policy. That is a huge achievement of the Biden-Harris years, and it is just getting started.

Think about where I grew up, South Bend, Ind. Still, in some ways, trying to recover from the loss of the Studebaker car company in 1963. Our downtown was haunted by huge factories with broken windows, much of which we were able to finally do something about during my time as mayor, which I’m very proud of. But we had then, and still do have, a long way to go there.

The biggest investment that I’m aware of happening in my lifetime up until recently was about $1 billion investment in a steel plant on the west edge of the county. That was such a big deal that even though it happened in 1990, people were still talking about it, and many economic development professionals were still kind of making their name on it, 20 years later when I became mayor.

Right now, there is a $3-4 billion investment in electric vehicle batteries going on right next to that steel facility. There is an $11 billion Amazon Web Services data center being built a few miles from there, and another one going up that Microsoft’s putting in that I can’t even remember how much is being invested. So, collectively, in order of magnitude beyond anything we had seen since the Kennedy administration, those are the kinds of things that Trump is falsely saying would be delivered by his all-tariffs, no-investments strategy.

Behind the all-tariff strategy is a very zero-sum theory of how the economy works: We are in competition with other countries for factories, for jobs, and the way to win that competition is to tilt the field against them. The trade theories of Trump, which go even beyond tariffs, kind of have a similar view of it, including the idea that there’s a zero-sum competition between native-born workers and immigrants for jobs, for wages. When JD Vance is not just being racist about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, what he is saying is that they’re taking away the jobs, they are raising housing prices.

This is an old strain in economics and in politics, but I’m curious what you think about it and its appeal, because I do think it’s sort of intuitive to people that we’re in different kinds of competitions, and people do look and they think, “Well, yeah, if an immigrant gets a job, I’m probably not getting it, or somebody else is not getting it,” or “If another country gets a TSMC semiconductor factory, we’re not getting it.” How do you answer the intuitive appeal of zero-sum economics?

Two things can be true at the same time. One is that there is competition between us and other countries. And the other is that it isn’t zero-sum. And I do think another thing that really costs a lot of trust in places like where I grew up is we were told, just go along with all these things that are positive-sum. The pie will get bigger. Don’t worry about your slice. It’ll definitely be bigger because the whole pie is going to get bigger. And only half of that promise came true. The pie got bigger. But a lot of people’s slices in places like the industrial Midwest didn’t. You’ve got to understand why people have a level of receptivity to that.

And at the same time, the idea that it’s zero-sum is just clearly not true. And again, that’s why I think stories like immigration are a lot more nuanced and less fit into that narrative. When you actually look at the local level, certainly in South Bend, part of how we finally became a growing city after being called a dying city had to do with immigration. And that was also tied up with economic growth that was happening. Jobs were growing and population was growing. And it was not people were coming in to compete for the same jobs. We wound up with more jobs and more people. That’s happening in Springfield, Ohio, right now. And it’s a complicated situation there, but one thing that’s definitely happening is way more jobs than they had before and way more people in a city that had lost thousands and thousands of its people.

But I also think this is a good example of the benefits of taking politics offline. And that’s part of what I mean when I say that salvation will come from the local. Because even though obviously these attitudes can prevail at a local level too, I think actually people do have a richer understanding of how we benefit from what another person brings when it’s in the context of your own community.

This is an excerpt from my conversation with Pete Buttigieg for “The Ezra Klein Show.” In the rest of the conversation, we discuss how the conversation about immigration policy has shifted, and why the “crisis” narrative seems to resonate; what Democrats’ affirmative vision for foreign policy should look like; and more.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Elliot deBruyn and Selcuk Karaoglan.

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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads. 

Opinion | What Pete Buttigieg Learned Playing JD Vance - The New York Times