Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, a day later than usual on account of the holiday. In today’s email, my conversation with fellow TBTB author Tina Nguyen about the making of the modern, Trumpified G.O.P., her early days in the trenches of the conservative media machine, and her new memoir tracing her upbringing and exit from Koch world.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston with her latest dispatch on Capitol Hill…

None of this is normal, but it’s worth considering how contentious House primaries could contribute to an already unstable political environment. Here are the questions to watch in the new year:

• Where will the House primary conflicts happen?: Where these fights are waged matters immensely. If it’s a primary in a safe seat, it’s not a huge deal. But say it’s a primary to nominate a challenger in a seat that the party hopes to pick up next fall, like the Ohio 9th, currently occupied by Democrat Marcy Kaptur. A protracted, ugly primary on either side means that whoever wins the nomination will likely head into the general beaten up and broke.

  But the real escalation is when there’s an intraparty challenge to an incumbent, like Gaetz’s apparent intent to cause trouble for Mike Bost, or McCarthy’s allusion to ousting Nancy Mace, who voted to throw him out of the speakership in October. Members used to let colleagues they despised politically die by way of neglect. But endorsing and donating against colleagues is also happening more and more (see: Squad members going after Henry Cuellar twice). It’s a generational act of aggression against a colleague who may lie in wait for years to exact revenge. This is what Nancy Pelosi excelled at, and it’s also why those member-member intraparty primaries instigated by redistricting are so destructive.

• Do members pick sides?: Politics is a world of tribes, and members will instinctively follow leaders or rally behind friends in trouble. That’s why it’s risky for any member to donate or endorse in a competitive primary—betting on a loser is a quick way to make an enemy of the winner. In the past, the calculation over whether to help a candidate was often based on relationships as opposed to ideology or personal squabbles.
• Will this affect dues?: This is where civil wars can ripple through the rest of the party. Consider Bost, a typical rank-and-filer who is “helpful” in campaign committee nomenclature. Last cycle, he gave more than $200,000 to the N.R.C.C. and cut nearly $50,000 in checks to Republican challengers and vulnerable colleagues. But when incumbents are mired in fights for their own survival, their interest in helping others rapidly diminishes.

  On the other hand, not every member gives a damn about how the party fares in the general election. None of the Squad members potentially under threat from pro-Israel groups have given any money or time to the D.C.C.C., or to candidates who are gearing up to challenge Republican incumbents, or to vulnerable Democratic incumbents, according to the latest internal D.C.C.C. dues sheet.

• Who wins here?: Whenever incumbents feel threatened, political consultants salivate. At the first sign of trouble, politically wise incumbents are quick to bolster their teams: fundraisers are retained, polls are commissioned, direct mail is dropped, and six-figure advertising buys are reserved.

After all, long before her time at Vanity Fair and then Puck, Tina spent much of her youth in the trenches of conservative activism—a journey through the world of reactionary politics that she has chronicled in her new book, The MAGA Diaries: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right-Wing (And How I Got Out). At Claremont McKenna College, Tina was semi-indoctrinated in the ways of America First conservatism, attending think tank dinners and cocktail parties with the likes of Peter Thiel and John Bolton. She dated an ambitious conservative reb who would later become infamous in the Trump years. And, after college, having been recruited into the ranks of ideological journalism, she landed a gig at The Daily Caller under Tucker Carlson, at a time when conservatives were learning that anti-Obama clickbait was king.

With The MAGA Diaries debuting on January 16, I asked Tina if I could talk to her about the book—her views on how young conservatives have changed in the Trump era, what really happened to Tucker, and whether her old friends on the right are contemptuous of her pivot to mainstream journalism. It’s a well-timed conversation, too, because I know you Puck readers are itching to use that Amazon gift card you got in your Christmas stocking yesterday.

Tina: It’s such an evocative word, right? It makes you think of barnacles and dust, which is also the feeling I get whenever I think of people in that era, even the young ones. I’ll give the Gen Z conservative activists this: They may be less wonkish, but they are more fashionable and better groomed.

Peter: I’ll get into more details from your story in a moment, but a major throughline in the book is your relationship with Tucker Carlson—from your brief time working under him at The Daily Caller, and later as something of a mentor who helped with career advice from time to time. You touch on something I’ve heard from CNN friends back in the day, when he was on Crossfire—that Tucker was actually a fun hang. He was good company when you knew him, right?

Tina: Oh, Tucker was an incredible hang. He has this maniacal high-pitched laugh that makes you feel like mischief is afoot, and quite often, there would be. Two of my core memories from that period were the times he’d come out of the office to practice his fly-fishing catches, or the time he grabbed my bike, which I’d brought up to the office, and rode it around the newsroom (in a button-down and khakis, no less). People at the Caller would tell me about this infamous party bus he hired for a company outing. (Tucker is sober, but he had no problem buying people drinks—or, for that matter, approving a permanent kegerator and full bar for the office.) And you’d know that you’d be able to play along with him, too: We once came up with a convoluted plan to throw him into a pool at another company party. We succeeded. And he loved it.

D.C. is a horrifically stuffy place, especially at conservative organizations, and Tucker was determined to prevent the Caller’s culture from becoming that way. To be quite honest, I still carry some of that anarchical instinct from those early days, and I think it makes me better at covering MAGA stuff: Being an anti-establishment populist means you can’t take Washington’s self-professed seriousness at face value.

Peter: You write about a conversation you had with him just last year, before he was fired from Fox News. He had gone from the charming Tucker you knew a decade ago to the Tucker everyone knows today—the angry nationalism, the conspiracy theories, MAGA to the core. How much has he changed, and how do you evaluate his transformation?

Tina: I recently watched a TED Talk from Peter McIndoe, the political performance artist who created the satirical “Birds Aren’t Real” movement. He spoke about how he found himself becoming immediately defensive whenever people tried to get him to give up the (fake) conspiracy theory, even though he knew himself that the whole thing was a joke. It reminded me of a story I’d heard about a piece of advice that the late Christopher Hitchens was said to have dispensed at a Weekly Standard party Tucker attended: “Don’t ever do television. It’ll bring out the worst in you.”

I don’t think Tucker’s core characteristics have changed, especially the ones that once made him a fantastic magazine journalist: He’s instinctively suspicious of the establishment, and willing to entertain wacky ideas to get a fuller picture. He deeply loathes hypocrites and people he believes have wronged him. He’s always leaned right of center when it comes to civil liberties and the influence of foreign cultures on what he views as the American way of life. (He’s personally not some sort of skull-measuring eugenicist, but he’d probably talk to a guy who is.)

But I think fame, influence, and Washington society’s rejection of his politics drove him straight into the world of MAGA—which has its own rules and information ecology and incentives—and amplified them to the extreme. He literally told me that one of the reasons that he left Washington in 2020 was that his neighbors in his wealthy neighborhood started hanging Black Lives Matter flags in their windows: “It was only about, ‘I’m a good person’; it was almost like going to SoulCycle for them.”

I’m sure he’s not happy that I’ve extrapolated these characteristics from these episodes. But I also don’t know if anyone from my current side of the political divide has spent enough time with him, or understands the environment of conservatism, to get a full sense of his character. I occasionally feel like when people ask me what Tucker was like, they wish that I’d respond that he was a white nationalist from the very beginning. The answer, unfortunately for them, is that it’s much more complicated than that.

Peter: The book is called The MAGA Diaries, but your time in the belly of the conservative movement really predated Trump, mostly during the Bush and Obama years. Can you give readers a sense of what the conservative movement—the youth-recruiting pipeline you swam in—looked like at the time?

Tina: I entered the movement in 2008 when two pivotal events happened: First, the Ron Paul revolution, which kicked off in the G.O.P. presidential primaries. Prior to him, partisanship meant that being pro-America meant being pro-Iraq war. But then here came this guy who was upholding our love of country while sticking it to the Republican establishment for dragging America into a senseless war. Ron Paul was articulating a contradiction that a lot of Americans were feeling, and beginning to formulate a response.

Second, the financial crisis plunged the college-educated millennial generation into an existential crisis: It felt highly unlikely that we would have jobs after graduating, much less a future, and so why was it that the Democrats wanted to borrow against our earnings to fund government bailouts, universal healthcare, and social programs?

I think the conservative movement prior to 2008 had the same mechanisms as it still has now. From a cynical point of view, the movement switched from being pro-war to being pro-Tea Party in order to remain relevant. But at its core, conservatism is about slowing the pace of societal change, if not stopping it altogether, and, if necessary, dragging it backward in time. What “standing athwart history” looks like, to paraphrase William F. Buckley, just shifts from generation to generation: Yesterday’s “stopping Obamacare” is today’s “stopping wokeism.”

Peter: I feel like your experiences at least had some ideological architecture to them. You were schooled in the tenets of classical liberalism, libertarianism, hawkish foreign policy. But young conservatives today aren’t really devouring Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, are they?

Tina: For this new generation, Friedman and Mises are irrelevant thinkers: Classical liberal virtues like free markets, limited government, and civil liberties are now so cringe. In the context of today’s right, those principles failed them: Free trade led to NAFTA and the TPP, which led to American jobs and manufacturing being exported to China, which led to the growing dominance of the Chinese Communist Party. Freedom of expression meant that corporations began using their money as woke speech.

But I want to point out that the reason we were reading those authors in the first place was because the Koch network literally dropped them on our heads as required reading. And conservatism these days is almost purely reactionary, so the intellectual drivers of today’s movement aren’t Seminal Texts, but podcasts. They’re inevitably better suited to react to what’s happening today—sort of like conservative talk radio was in the ’90s. Once you get off Twitter and onto the hourlong streaming platforms, the right-wing ecosphere is quite sophisticated: Michael Knowles, Charlie Kirk, Megyn Kelly, Tucker. They set the agenda—and the reading lists.

Peter: And how has the world of young conservatism changed since you left? The opening scene of your book is from a rowdy Turning Point USA conference. Not exactly a cocktail party at the Claremont Institute.

Tina: I think one of the innovations that TPUSA brought to conservatism is that they’re meeting young people where they are, in terms of messaging, packaging, who they’re targeting, etcetera. Prior to them, the conservative movement was looking for miniature adults who weren’t part of the college scene, and for some reason they’d end up being the person I’d describe as that guy who wore suits to 8 a.m. classes. Maybe the clothes weren’t ironed, and they might have smelled a bit, but the point was that they wore a suit because they were that much more serious than other students. On the flip side, though, they were loser dweebs—and what young person would want to hang out with loser dweebs?

But Turning Point stuff is fun, and it’s relevant to what young kids are doing. They play the hottest music at their events. They have photo booths with ring lights. The influencers aren’t just well-groomed and wearing fashionable clothes, they’re also good at Instagram and social media. They love memes—I’ve interviewed young students and they’ll just casually name-drop online personalities they follow who are just good at memes. And this, I think, is crucial to their success: There’s an element of intellectual training and professional networking attached to it, but first and foremost, the brand looks cool as hell for a certain kind of young person who might be opposed to campus liberalism (and “blue-haired chicks,” as one student put it) but repulsed by the fustiness of being an old-school conservative. Ain’t no one smoking cigars for fun here. (This is shallow to admit, but as someone with a weakness for fashion and makeup, I think I’d have had a harder time leaving if TPUSA had been around.)

Peter: Originally, you were a product of a well-funded, decades-old right-wing machine—the Claremont Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Leadership Institute, so many institutes!—that was created to recruit and develop right-leaning writers, thinkers, editors, and television pundits who could rival the mainstream media. Is that pipeline still going strong? Or has social media eliminated the need for those sorts of institutions? Today, you can get famous as a meme-maker or podcaster. You don’t have to apply to some Koch-funded outfit to get your toes wet as a young conservative.

Tina: It depends where you want your career to go. Not everyone wants to be on social media or become a public-facing, talking-head influencer, and there’s something to be said about learning to shape a message from behind the scenes in a structured environment or in a mentorship program. One of the most coveted fellowships on the right, for instance, is the Claremont Institute Speechwriters Fellowship: It’s very selective, and draws early-career professionals who want to take conservative, pro-Founding ideas and package them in modern political rhetoric. It’s such a career-boosting fellowship—the alumni often end up running comms for Republican officials—that I’ve run into 25-year-olds on the Hill who have told me straight-up that they hope they get it.

At the same time, the Koch network is becoming notably uncool among this next generation. After all, it’s funded by a billionaire who’s anti-Trump and anti-MAGA. I can’t see the network maintaining influence in the populist right, which is ironic considering it actively cultivated the anti-establishment Tea Party.

Peter: We both know plenty of mainstream journalists who used to work for Democrats or Republicans. But I really don’t know many who came out of the bowels of the conservative movement. Does it give you access to certain sources? It certainly feels like it, reading some of your reporting on the campaigns of Trump and Ron DeSantis.

Tina: I wouldn’t say it gives me a direct line because I personally know everyone in the gang, so much as it’s made me fluent in a second language that reporters generally don’t speak. The way I recently described it was like this: If you were to go to Japan and wanted to discuss current affairs, it’s easier if you know the culture, history, and societal quirks of Japan, the major players and influencers in Japanese politics, and so forth, than if you’ve just entered the country and are going, Wait, people eat raw fish here?!

Being a professional conservative is having an entirely different approach to civic and cultural values, intellectualism, the political process, and American history that isn’t generally taught at universities other than Hillsdale, Liberty, or Claremont. It also helps that I am genuinely passionate about discussing these things—I wouldn’t have gone to Claremont McKenna all those years ago if I wasn’t. The moment I say something like, I once took a semester to study how the founders and various presidents drew from their specific Christian denominations to inform their approach to governance, and the next semester with Charles Kesler studying natural law, it’s like I skipped 12 levels of right-wing Duolingo. The response is always, Oh, you get it.

Peter: On the flip-side, have you lost any old friends during your journey? Is anyone out there going to read this book and see it as betrayal?

Tina: I don’t think I lost friends until 2016, when I started reporting on the movement and immediately got frozen out by people who used to be quite kind to me. Admittedly, everyone on the right will be suspicious of me because I left the movement and work in what’s best described as East Coast mainstream media—in their eyes, the industry is its own partisan camp. But my exit from the movement was well before the Trump era began in 2016, when I was quite young and didn’t have a career and financial incentive to become a publicly declared Ex-Republican. (In fact, it made me even more broke, but a 22-year-old can better absorb that risk.)

And if there’s anything they can take away from The MAGA Diaries, I make it clear that I have severe emotional hang-ups over it. I don’t go into this in the book, but I had one very close friend inside the movement who refused to talk to me if I attempted to use them as a source. They would have been a really good source, but I just can’t betray them like that. So now we don’t talk about anything politics-related at all. I’d rather preserve that friendship.

Everything in this book relates to facts and phenomena that were already out in the open and that I’ve reported on for eight years. It’s just organized in the format of a coming-of-age memoir. That’s a risky format for a journalist, and my personal story could suggest that I’m biased against the right because I’m someone who rejected it. That perception alone is a good enough reason to make conservatives angry. But sometimes, it’s better to follow someone’s journey through a world in order to understand it intimately than to look at it from a distance and make assumptions about their motivations. And I hope that people on the right will read this and think: Well, she may not believe in what we do, but by golly, she got our world right.