Welcome to the First Things podcast.

On this episode, we'll discuss the new Trump administration and how it came to be.

What are the vibes and why did they shift?

What are the prospects for the pro-life movement?

Does the Catholic vote exist?

I'm joined by editor Rusty Reno and senior editor Dan Hitchens.

And I'm senior editor Julia Yost.

So we're rebooting our flagship podcast in the same week that we reboot our website,

the sparkling new first things.com. And Donald Trump reboots his presidency. All pure coincidence. Rusty and Dan,

what has happened in American culture? Something has happened. It's not just the quiet death

of the resistance. It's tech billionaires flying to Mar-a-Lago, corporations rescinding their

DEI policies, media organizations shifting their staffs to the right,

humanities and social science departments at elite universities, looking suddenly to hire some

conservative faculty. So in all these ways, we see the ruling class kind of performing its

conformity with the popular sentiment that it thinks was expressed by Trump's reelection.

Obviously, this is night and day from Trump 16, the reaction to that, but also people with

longer memories than I have are calling it unprecedented. The Reagan landslide of 84 did not trigger,

I think, the same kind of cultural stampede. And Trump's electoral margin,

after all, was clear but not overwhelming. It was 1.5 points or a couple million votes.

So how is it that Trump has won a cultural victory so greatly in excess of his electoral victory?

I would say that it's the fact that he triumphed in the

face of nearly unified. You gave the example of the tech billionaires. They broke ranks,

...