When those come up in a particular piece that you're working on, do you try to work that into the essay, or is it something, um, that you try to find, uh, the overlapping, uh, a-and, and focus on that, you know? Or, or is there another way to, to deal with those differences in your writing?

Yeah.

I'd say, Corey, that we have not had really too many differences that I can think of in the pieces that we've written, um, together.

Um, uh, so if we have differences, for example, on, on, uh, on faith, I mean, those are enormously rich conversations.

And I imagine John and I could actually probably write something, an essay on faith, where we would both be comfortable with it.

It'd be a little awkward to read an essay like that, uh, though, because you'd have a little bit of a, of a ping-pong effect.

So I'm not sure that that would, that would work.

Pete, this is your department.

Has America rediscovered the plot, certainly in a moral sense, in terms of the willingness, maybe not of the elites of Washington insiders like Mitch McConnell or wealthy people like Jeff Bezos, but have Americans found their ethical spine when it comes to standing up to this man? And did they rediscover it on the streets of Minneapolis?

Well, I do think that the streets of Minneapolis made a big difference.

And I all honor and praise to those people because they did stand up.

And I think it was a really important, John and I both think it was really important moment in the arc of the Trump presidency.

In part, I must say, Andrew, because I sensed prior to that, of feelings of powerlessness and some measure of despair and loss of human agency among the critics of Trump, a feeling of like, what can we do? He has the power.

He has the Congress.

And they were just kind of worn down.

You

Your thoughts.

Yeah, I agree with you.

I agree with you.

I think part of what made this one sting a little bit, uh, more, uh, was that these guys are leaving the Senate.

Um, so it, it's not as if their political careers or future political careers are, are, are gonna be in jeopardy because of this or the life is gonna be particularly difficult, you know, in the next term or that they need to keep, uh, the, the, the lines to power, which is part of the justification.

It's bad, but it would be worse if, if I weren't advising t- Trump or if I weren't close to Trump.

And in the case of, of Cassidy and, and, and Cornyn and some of the others, I mean, they're, they're, they're leaving the Senate.

G- give me your thoughts on that.

passages straight out of the bible that justify something that feels completely opposite

yeah that's a great question aubrey um that's right i mean and there are particular people within the trump administration that invoke the bible more than others donald trump tends not to but there are figures like pete hagseth the secretary of defense self-described secretary of war um who um who is part of a, a branch of reform theology, uh, that a person named Doug Wilson is, is, is the head of that, of that, uh, that reforms movement.

And Hexeth is best.

I can tell his drawn back, uh, to faith or drawn himself toward faith.

Um, Probably, I'm guessing, because he's lived a dissolute life.

It's not a state secret, exactly.

It's pretty much in the open.

But I've pulled back some from following what's going on.

know, or Kuyper more recently, right, if you're part of that stream, Abraham Kuyper.

Yeah, no, Kuyper would be part of that.

And there are any number of other figures that are within that tradition.

So Wesleyans, right, so Methodists were drawn on John Wesley.

So there are those traditions that exist.

But even those traditions themselves can be narrow-typed, telescoped, and you can begin to get trapped within traditions, which actually prevents you from escaping traditions when you need to, right? There is this tension.

You're talking about Sola Scriptura, right? Yeah.

Pete, bring us home from this long conversation by comparing the political visions of these two figures, J.D. Vance and Pope Leo XIV.

Hegseth

...

Pete Hegseth.

I mean, you just, you just go, go through it.

Uh, you know, Bongino befo- before the, the, the person that Trump wanted, uh, uh, as, as, uh, at the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, at the CIA.

I mean, the, these, these people are, are kooks and nuts and conspiracy theorists.

And it's the entire administration at very senior levels, at the most senior levels, are just filled with these people.

Uh, his people will go away, and perhaps the Republicans will come back to, quote-unquote, "normal." Which of those two aftermaths are more likely?

Was that what you were trying to say?

Yeah, I mean, essentially, I was alluding to King Lear at the end, kind of raging against the wind, raging into the night.

And so the comparison was there.

Yeah, I mean, I think we're in a really dangerous moment.

I think that two things are happening with Donald Trump at the same time, one of which has been relatively consistent, the other one, which is relatively new.

The consistent thing with Donald Trump has been the sociopathy, the narcissistic personality disorder, the disordered personality.

I mean, we've seen that for his entire adult life.

But it's a very different situation because

And, uh, you, you've offered, uh, as a response, uh, to, to that phenomenon, uh, a turn to Christian humanism, a tradition that, uh, uh, joins, uh, the pursuit of, uh, of human reason and, uh, the classics with, with tradition and faith.

Yeah, I, I, I did.

I did an essay in, in The Atlantic on, on Christian humanism, um, 'cause I wanted to think about what might be a, a pathway out for, for what I think is, is a kind of wreckage that American Christians have created.

And I would say E.J. would know it very well as, as a Catholic, because I think it, it mirrors a lot of, of, of, um, Catholic thought, social thought.

This pope's most recent encyclical mentions, um, Christian humanism.

Essentially, it- it's the notion that everyone bears the image, um, of God, and so they therefore have inherent dignity and, uh, uh, and equal worth.

So that's one.

[laughs]

A couple questions I have about that is, w- where does his worldview come from in, in your, in your reporting?

I think he has, he has reached for faith to try and put meaning into his life.

And it's, it's no secret that he's had something of a dissolute life.

Um, and I think he's gone to faith to try and, and bring it together.

Now, a lot of people do that.

I think in, in this case with Hegseth, a couple of things are going on.

One is that, um, he's found himself under the influence of a, of a pastor named Doug Wilson, who is with a g- a reformed tradition, uh, tw- within, within the Protestant world, uh, that I think deeply misunderstands, uh, Christianity and, and, and corrupts and, and distorts, you know, the scriptural, uh, the scriptural teaching.

Mm-hmm.

So what was your reaction to this, um?

Yeah, it, it was both.

Um, I, I agree.

It's, it's, it is incredibly stupid, um, and it is ominous as, as, as well.

I think what we're seeing, Charlie, when we kind of pull back is one old thing and one new thing.

I would say the old thing is the sociopathy that, that, that has really marked Donald Trump for his entire adult life, as best we can tell, and the narcissistic personality disorder that, that, uh, that he almost certainly is, is struggling with.

That's been a constant, and we've seen it manifest itself in all sorts of ways, uh, over the course of his life and over the course of, of his two terms in office.

Talk to me about that.

But I thought that conservatives were traditionally always on the watch for the temperature rising, that that was part of what it meant to be a conservative, was to prize moderation and to avoid extremes.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right.

You describe it well.

I think what's happened is that people who claim to be conservatives, in fact, were not conservatives or they've broken with conservatism.

Conservatism as a philosophy I think still holds, and the things that you described, epistemic humility, the insight really that we saw in the founders so beautifully, which was the importance of taming the darker passions, setting a system of government of checks and balances, and the dangers of destroying institutions and norms that are built up over hundreds and thousands of years.

I mean, that's always been what I refer to as the conservative sensibility, which is different than a governing philosophy, right? There are public policies, there's sort of philosophical views of government, and then there are dispositions and temperaments.

I think that the dispositions and temperaments are the most important because I think they can often drive those other things.

What do you think that would look like?

Um, how would you compare Hegseth and this current administration's use of scripture versus what you experienced when you were in the White House?

Yeah, I mean, and from my perspective, I, I think his is very, very problematic, and I, I think he's wrestling with it in a way that's, um, to be charitable, thin, and that leads, uh, to really an ethic that's antithetical to Christianity and the ethic of Jesus.

In terms of, of, uh, how it operated itself in, in the administration which I served or the, the White House in which I served, which is George W. Bush and the administrations, which was Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and this is true I think of, of Obama and, and Clinton.

I mean, I think that there were people, uh, certainly there were people who, who, uh, grappled with these, with these issues, which is what does the Bible teach and, and, and, uh, what does that mean for, for the very concrete and particular decisions that we face.

Now in, in the case of the Bush administration, that manifests itself in different ways.

When it came to war, uh, you know, there was, there was that element too, and, uh, you know, one can argue for sure whether...

Well, one is there's a debate on, on pacifism versus just war, right? That's a very rich debate.

So Pete, how have you been disturbed by the texts, and what have you done with that disturbance?

Why would you say MAGA is not just against conservatism, but actively opposed to it?

Yeah, I'd say for a couple of reasons.

I mean, I'd say partly because of what MAGA is, what it represents, um, ideologically, uh, which is, I think, much more of a populist, ethnic nationalist movement than a conservative movement, and, uh, what I consider to be conservatism, at least authentic conservatism, conservatism rightly understood.

And, you know, I became a conservative was- when I was a young man.

I still consider myself to be a conservative.

The reason I became a member of the Republican Party and served in three Republican administrations, including in, in, in the, um, George W. Bush White House, was because the Republican Party was an imperfect repository, political party repository of conservatism.

It's not a perfect match.

Mm-hmm

[chuckles]

... on, like, how, how, how does, you know, how does, how does this happen? I think one important thing to understand, and people who are not in the evangelical fundamentalist world probably don't understand it, it's precisely because they're not in, in that world, is that, you know, Donald Trump never sold himself as a Christian.

Um, he was smart enough as a marketing person to know that that just wasn't gonna work.

So what he did is he sold himself as, as an avenging, kind of ruthless warrior on their behalf, and that created a connection, and then you had people like Robert Jeffress, uh, and, uh, Tony Perkins, and Franklin Graham, uh, and, and Jerry Falwell Jr. at the time, you know, cheering him on, saying, "You know, we want the meanest SOB we can find.

Uh, we don't want a pastor.

We want a, you know, we want a tough-minded president." And he fit that bill, and so they view him n- not as one of their own, but a defender of their own, and even to the point in which I think it felt like he uses means and methods that we're not fully comfortable with, but, God, are we glad that he's using them on our behalf.

So I think that was, that was the entry point.

The church is the conscience of the state, and that's kind of the challenge, isn't it?

When you look at Christian support for Trump, how do you understand that in the day and age that we live in right now?

In one sense, it's just rank hypocrisy, and the most obvious example of that would be many of the same people who lacerated Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky on an almost daily basis in the nineteen nineties have now become huge Trump supporters.

And we've seen in the polling data that morality as a feature in political leadership really mattered a lot to, uh, evangelicals in the nineties, and once Trump came into power, it flipped.

So there's obviously hypocrisy, uh, going on, but I don't think that's sufficient answer, certainly not the whole answer, what's gone on.

I, I think in some respects, it's more complicated than that, more psychologically complicated than that.

And one way that I explain it is that I think that a lot of Christians who ended up voting for Trump in twenty twenty-six viewed his immorality, his cruelty, his crudity, as a bug, not a feature.

He was not the overwhelming choice even during the primary.

I'm not gonna risk myself in these ways."

Why is that not happening?

Yeah, it's, it's such a good question, Charlie.

Essentially, what you, what you're asking churches to do is a version of what the Confessional Church in Nazi Germany did, which was to rise up.

It was a minority within Germany at the time because there was a, a movement, Deutsche Christen, as, as they referred to it, German Christians, in which the church had been, uh, captive, uh, made captive by the Nazi Party and supported it.

And there was a Confessional Church led by Martin Niemöller and, and particularly Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that, that, that stood up and said, "We can't, we can't allow that." Why is some version of that not happening in the United States right, right now? Uh, first thing I'd say is, is actually apropos what you said earlier.

Uh, in the last week, the Catholic Church is beginning, uh, to speak out.

There were three bishops who released a statement, which clearly had the blessing of Pope Leo, uh, in the context of international affairs and the, and the acidic erosion of moral foundation of American foreign policy.

Yes

What do we need to know?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

I mean, there's memoranda that he signed early on, and he essentially, uh, said, and his people have said, um, that, uh, he will be, as you said, the final arbiter of what's legal and what's not.

And that worries me for- for a lot of reasons.

One of which is, uh, y- you know, when we really get to a constitutional crisis will be, I think, if the S- Supreme Court makes a ruling, and he just decides, uh, to ignore it, and that i- would be such a violation both of American history and- and the norms.

But we don't know what would happen, all right? If- if- if the Supreme Court says one thing and he says, "Well, that's an interesting opinion, uh, and I don't believe it," who arbitrates that? Uh, who decides? Uh, and we don't know, because it hasn't happened, it hasn't happened before.

The other thing I'd say about- about Trump is that, um, I mean, there's a record here.

What happens if essentially no one or few push back on him in a real way?

What did you find as you talked to faith leaders about why everyone is so quiet when it seems like the need is so great and so emergent and immediate?

I heard from just about 30 ministers, people of faith, uh, including Russell who was, who was good enough to go on the record with his quotes.

There was a lot of people w- went off the record because they were understandably nervous about some of the comments that they made, but there, there were six or seven reasons that came up, if I were to categorize them.

The first is just sheer ignorance and I don't mean it in a derogatory way.

I just mean that a lot of pastors and probably more congregants just don't know about PEPFAR.

A second, and this is understandable, I heard from pastors, for example, a good friend of mine, Scott Dudley at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, who talked about the commitments that his own church already had with refugees and immigrants and orphans and the homeless and they had...

they didn't have much bandwidth for doing something new and I understand that and I, and I accept that.

We have to be working the other direction from that.

Yeah.

... which, um, you know, would have had, uh, an uprising against the slightest, um, a- act against, uh, the pro-life cause in- from their perception.

And now what do you have? A person as head of HHS, which is the most important federal agency when it comes to abortion, who as ear- recently as last year didn't believe in any restrictions at any point with abortion.

Trump himself is de facto pro, um, pro-choice, um, and you see it with America's, uh, role, uh, in- in th- the- uh, the world.

Um, so you've seen a complete flip ideologically.

This is not a conservative party.

It's a nativist, populist, nihilistic party, and it al- also underscores just what a cult of personality it is.

Right.

So, anyway, talk about that.

Yeah, I mean, it's tyrannic hypocrisy.

We've seen it for so many years that in a sense, as, as you were suggesting earlier, you kinda shrug your shoulders because we've gotten used to it.

I will say this, Tim, when, when I hear that kind of thing, it is, to me, a kind of CAT scan into who these people are and what drives them, and what a fraud so much of their lives have been, and in a, in a sense, how much of a fraud a lot of Republican politics, uh, a lot of Republican politicians have been.

And I'm saying this as somebody who, who obviously spent my life, you can tell from my biography, in the Republican Party.

I entered politics because I had a pretty high view of politics.

I felt like it was a noble profession.

Yeah.

And on the other hand, I think there's a reaction towards the hostility of the academy towards Israel and towards Jews in particular, that I think has a lot of popular support from Americans who are tired of seeing anti-Semitism on campus.

There's no question that on elite universities and not just Harvard's and Yale's and the private universities, Columbia, but others as well, that there is a very strong tropism against Israel and some measure of anti-Semitism, I think, in terms of trying to understand it.

I think that the frame that it's fitting in is the oppressor-oppressed paradigm that's very strong on the left and on university campuses.

And they have decided that Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians are the oppressed.

And in my experience, when you listen to the people who have that view, There's virtually nothing that the oppressor quote unquote can do that they think will cross any moral lines.

And there's virtually nothing that the so-called oppressor can do, which will win them sympathy.

I think that's not the case here.

with your recent interview in The New York Times with Nicholas Woltersdorf, who is a professor emeritus of philosophical theology at Yale, because this conversation seems to be just as much about the First Amendment rights and anti-Semitism as it is about the genuine spirit of inquiry and curiosity that I am convinced, as a Christian, is divinely embedded in humanity.