Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot: Jonathan Rauch & Peter Wehner on the Autumn of the American Patriarch

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, the 24th of September, 2026, an interesting week. I'll probably publish this tomorrow, on Friday. It's a week in which Donald Trump is greeting the Chinese leader at the White House, where, at least according to The New York Times, pomp may mask tensions. It doesn't look so great for the autocrats these days. The foreign policy writer in The Washington Post, very good writer, David Ignatius, has a piece this week which he calls The Twilight of an Autocratic Age. It's not just Xi and Trump who's in trouble, but also a certain Vladimir Putin. To paraphrase the title of a wonderful 1975 novel by the great Gabriel García Márquez, we seem to be in the autumn of the Patriarch, and that theme is supported by an excellent op-ed by two of my best friends in Washington DC, John Rauch and Peter Wehner, who have a piece in The Times this week. Trump has finally lost the plot. Some people might wonder whether he ever actually knew the plot. John and Peter both joining me from Washington DC. John, we're going to start with you because you're the senior partner in this relationship, as we were saying earlier.

Are we finally in the autumn of the Patriarch, to borrow García Márquez's title?

Jonathan Rauch (2:14)

It's starting to look that way, Andrew. We'll know more firmly after the midterm elections, but it looks increasingly as if Trump is not only losing his support among independents, but that he's even losing significant support in his base.

So Pete and I noticed that, but we noticed more broadly that he failed at what we thought was the most audacious and ambitious thing he wanted to do. And that's the plot that was alluded to in The Times' punning headline.

Andrew Keen (2:49)

Yeah. We'll come to the idea of losing the plot. The polls look bad for Trump on the, in The New York Times, his approval rating is really in the, in the toilet, so to speak.

John, in the piece, which is always excellent, necessary reading by you and Pete, you talk about the frantic pace of the Trump presidency. It was only a few months ago, you announced in The Atlantic that not just that, yes, it's fascism. You and I have talked about this before. So in the last six months, have we gone from fascism to Trump losing the plot? Is it just the pace of things or did you get it wrong before?

Jonathan Rauch (3:40)

The article about fascism actually is consistent with this piece because it, what it said is that Trump, but especially the people around him, people like Stephen Miller and Bannon and Christopher Rufo and others had not just a project to have conservative policies in the government, but they had a revolutionary agenda for society. That article did not say America has become a fascist country. It said the opposite. It said Trump's a fascist type of leader of some sort, but that he's failing at that, that he would be unlikely to succeed. And this article basically develops it without using the F word, which of course is very controversial and not well loved by you.

But it says, okay, it's over. His effort to rewire American culture in his image, that is failed.

Andrew Keen (4:37)

In other words, Trump has lost the plot, and I look that up on Gemini. It says to become confused, to act irrationally, or completely lose touch with reality. Pete, you've been writing brilliantly about Donald Trump for years. In fact, I think you're probably the most authoritative figure, certainly in terms of a moral critique.

I mean, hasn't that been going on for years? Hasn't he been acting irrationally, losing touch with reality and normal behavior ever since he walked down that staircase back in 2015?

Peter Wehner (5:16)

Yeah, I'd say that is the case. I mean, I'd add a couple of points to it. I think the first point is that there were more guardrails in the first Trump term than there is in this one. I don't think anybody disputes that. I don't even think that the Trump world would dispute that. They say that that's a good thing. I and John would say it's a troubling thing.

So his ambitions were checked in some respects, not in all respects. It was pretty clear, I think, to a lot of us how dangerous Trump was and what his instincts were and remain. But you had people like John Kelly and Secretary of Defense Mattis and others who kept the worst, I think, from happening. So that's, I'd say number one. Number two is I think there's now a fusion of a certain kind. It's Trump's sociopathic tendencies, which have always existed. I think they've gotten somewhat worse. But that's also been combined, fused with a cognitive decline, which is very obvious, I think, to most people who are watching. And so to the degree that he had any limitations in the past and to the degree that he did, they weren't much. But there's less now. His circle is much smaller than it has been in the past, circle of advisors.