Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot || with Jonathan Rauch & Peter Wehner
For ten years, Pete Wehner's email subject line for every new outrage was "No bottom means no bottom." Now he and Jon Rauch think they may have found one.
Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner join Corey to talk about their New York Times essay, "Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot." They lay out where Trump succeeded, where his effort to remake American society failed, and why Minneapolis, the courts, and his falling approval numbers made the difference. Jon stayed for some bonus time to talk about when to keep a hard conversation going and when to walk away.
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Key takeaways
- Rauch and Wehner put Trump's agenda into three buckets: lowering the country's norms, running the government as a family business (Max Weber's "patrimonialism"), and using federal power to rewire civil society. He mostly succeeded at the first two and failed at the third.
- They credit the people of Minneapolis, the lower courts, and approval ratings in the 30s with forcing the administration to retreat.
- Drawing on a sermon by Rabbi Michael Holtzman, Rauch says walking away from someone is sometimes fine. Walking away with contempt is the problem.
About Jonathan Rauch
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institute, a contributing writer at the New York Times and The Atlantic, and the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
About Peter Wehner
Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at The Trinity Forum and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times and The Atlantic. He served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations and is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.
Links
- "Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot," The New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/19/opinion/trump-vance-turning-point-minneapolis.html
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Turns out there's a bottom after all.
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