TLP Weekend Edition (August 2-3, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
🎙️ “Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement,” interview of Yoram Hazony. On his podcast, NYT columnist Ezra Klein hosts a lengthy and interesting interview with one of the leaders of the “National Conservatism” movement. Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, is a go-to text for NatCon intellectuals and practitioners. In the interview, Klein explores Hazony’s conceptions of “family, tribe, and nation” and presses him to articulate the end goals of Trump and Vance and what people in the NatCon movement hope to achieve for the U.S.:
The way they’re acting now, to you, is evidence of tolerance?
No. The way they’re acting now, to me, is the evidence of the opposite. It’s the evidence of an extreme resentment and horror at a Republican Party that had become politically inactive and inert over an entire generation.
So they have to use the power of the state in what I would call an intolerant way to rebuild the center, in order to rebuild the national strength, such that we can be tolerant again?
That’s what they think they’re doing, yes. They are thinking: If you take aggressive actions to halt immigration and decrease the size of the illegal immigrant population; if you take aggressive actions to halt the hemorrhaging of American industry to other countries and reverse it through aggressive trade negotiations; if you take aggressive action to to withdraw primary American responsibility for security arrangements in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and put other people who are allies of ours in charge—those three things. I hope one day you’ll get to interview President Trump yourself, but my guess is that he would tell you if we can do these three things, then we’ll be so much stronger, and then we’ll be able to get to other things.
And he would say that then a beautiful America would be in range.
💬 "Is Epstein the new Russiagate?" by Nate Silver. Many Trump detractors have latched onto Trump's stumbles around the Jeffrey Epstein files, believing this may finally be the scandal that brings him down. Though the president's obfuscation around the files certainly raises questions, it's entirely possible that there is very little "there" there, as Democrats who pursued the "Russiagate" controversy in his first term ultimately discovered.
In his newsletter this week, polling analyst Nate Silver took a look at the extent to which the growing chatter around the issue has affected Trump politically, and the early returns suggest...it hasn't much—at least not yet.
The feeding frenzy around Epstein has caused some political junkies to forget that Trump is often impervious to consequences: that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t really cost him among his base. And although even Bannon has questioned that assumption in this case, so far the evidence that the broader public is greatly concerned about the details of Epstein is pretty thin…
But isn’t Trump’s approval rating plummeting again? You can find plenty of headlines to that effect. But the overall impact is pretty modest in our tracking. On July 7, Trump’s net approval rating was a −6.7, now, it’s −8.4. I don’t need to remind readers how easy it is to cherry-pick polling data to create a narrative that Trump is perpetually in a worsening crisis.
Despite all that, I don’t necessarily take for granted that Trump’s floor is as high as it was in his first term. He’s now a lame duck, and second-term approval ratings are generally lower. But almost by definition, this would require some erosion from his base—and so far, we aren’t really seeing that.
🇰🇭 Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short. Who was Pol Pot? And what was Pol Pot? If you didn’t get enough Khmer Rouge action from our early summer book recommendation, check out Philip Short’s definitive biography that places this terrifying figure in the context of Khmer history, the country’s geopolitical position, and the strange cultural and intellectual currents that made the Khmer Rouge, as a movement and regime, so different from other Communists—and they were very, very different. Read it and weep.
A gripping and definitive portrait of the man who headed one of the most enigmatic and terrifying regimes of modern times
In the three and a half years of Pol Pot's rule, more than a million Cambodians, a fifth of the country's population, were executed or died from hunger. An idealistic and reclusive figure, Pol Pot sought to instill in his people values of moral purity and self-abnegation through a revolution of radical egalitarianism. In the process his country descended into madness, becoming a concentration camp of the mind, a slave state in which obedience was enforced on the killing fields.How did a utopian dream of shared prosperity mutate into one of the worst nightmares humanity has ever known? To understand this almost inconceivable mystery, Philip Short explores Pol Pot's life from his early years to his death. Short spent four years traveling throughout Cambodia interviewing the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement, many of whom have never spoken before, including Pol Pot's brother-in-law and the former Khmer Rouge head of state. He also sifted through the previously closed archives of China, Russia, Vietnam, and Cambodia itself to trace the fate of one man and the nation that he led into ruin.
⚾️ The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball, by John W. Miller. As the Baltimore office of TLP continues to process the implications of Mike Elias trading away one quarter of the team for many prospects, this biography of the legendary “heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, umpire-baiting terror” Orioles manager makes for excellent nostalgia reading. The WSJ’s review of the book includes interesting backstories on both Miller (a former Orioles scout) and Weaver:
Mr. Miller was a reporter for this newspaper when, in 2013, an editor asked him to write an obituary of Weaver, who had died at age 82. That assignment led to this book, which captures baseball’s working-class roots. Weaver, born in 1930, was the product of a gritty St. Louis neighborhood and part of a family that drank, gambled and scraped by during the Great Depression. He was close to his Uncle Bud, a bookie who taught him how to dissect baseball games for profit and instilled in him a combative disrespect for authority. His father, Earl Sr., ran a dry-cleaning business that washed the baseball uniforms of the Cardinals and the Browns, giving the boy access to the tobacco-stained sanctum of Sportsman’s Park. He was hooked.
His dream to play in the majors was not outlandish. A standout infielder in high school, Weaver was signed by the Cardinals in 1948 to begin his career in the minors. Though he was only 5-foot-7 and had a weak arm, his daring and hustle helped him win three team MVP awards and earned him the nicknames “Mighty Mite” and “Omaha Flash.”
Weaver’s failure to reach the majors sent him into a downward spiral fueled by apathy and alcohol. His career in the minors was winding down when, in 1956, while playing for the Knoxville Smokies, the manager was fired midseason and Weaver was named to take his place. He found his new calling. Weaver was later hired by the Baltimore Orioles; he ascended the ranks in the minors and made it to the big leagues as the first-base coach for the 1968 season. When the manager was fired in July, the Orioles elevated the hard-driving, chain-smoking 37-year-old to take the helm.
The organization was quickly rewarded, as the Orioles went to three World Series in Weaver’s first four years, winning in 1970. He preached fundamentals, defense and pitching, and made throwing strikes his highest priority. Weaver also recognized the value of the walk long before on-base percentage was popularized in Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball” (2003). He gathered statistics on individual players to exploit matchups and scorned bunts as a surrender of a precious out. And he did this without computers, which, Mr. Miller writes, was “an illustrative example of the last great leap forward of the human artisan without the assistance of the silicon chip.”
🎸 Acetone, by Acetone. Speaking of nostalgia, summertime regularly sparks Gen X memories of this criminally underrated ‘90s outfit from Los Angeles. This track, “Might As Well,” from their self-titled 1997 album, encapsulates Acetone’s laid-back, SoCal, psychedelic-country vibe perfectly. If you’re on the East Coast, enjoy some good music and reading along with the Cali-like weather this weekend!
Weekend Edition usually makes for a good wind-down for the workweek. Including Nate Silver excerpts doesn’t.
Maybe our biggest current problem as a society / culture / nation is the way people like Silver can casually lie, tell half truths, personally malign, and draw false conclusions from his elite perch of party approval . . and then have those lies, etc. spread (without question or comment) by others, such as TLP. The lies, etc., get so tiresome.
Other than Ruy Teixeira, Ezra Klein is the only podcast I listen to or rather watch the video. It takes time, but I watched yesterday, and thought Ezra was pushing the envelope a little further than called for in his characterization of Vance.
There's a portion of the right called Heritage Americans who are probably a little too nativist for most of our tastes, and Vance is proud of his and America's heritage, but the two things are not interchangeable. Vance is also married to an immigrant of a different ethnicity and does celebrate her heritage. Their children, like most second gen kids will grow up very American, like most second gens who are often enough as much as, or more American than those of us who take nationality for granted.