Byron York is chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. York has covered national politics from a conservative lens for over two decades and is the author of two books: “The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy,” and “Obsession.” This spring, he is a resident fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, leading a study group on the development of the modern Republican Party. York joined the HPR for a deep dive into the past, present, and future of the Republican Party.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: The conservative movement has changed substantially since you started covering politics in the Clinton White House, moving from free market politics to more protectionist policies, from interventionism to isolationism. Many people think that Trump is an anomaly in that process, or at least saw him as an anomaly when he first came onto the scene. When did you feel that shift start?
Byron York: First of all, we didn’t know it, but one of the things that was going to drive that was the Iraq War, which a lot of Republicans supported. Some didn’t; somebody like George Will was very skeptical about it. And then, basically, the economy collapses at the end of George W. Bush’s second term. So these things represent an enormous failure on the part of the Republican Party governance because they’d all been created in those eight years of George W. Bush.
At the same time — you have to check the dates on it — but the group called Reformicons was a group of conservative writers, fairly young, who wanted to move the party past Reagan. The problem with the party’s reverence for Reagan was that some people just hadn’t moved on from Reagan. So you could always cite Reagan as a model of approach to government, conservative principles, all this stuff — but you don’t have to look at the exact things he did and say, we must do these exact things now. I don’t think the term zombie Reaganism existed at that point, but that’s what it was. Ross Douthat was one; he and Reihan Salam wrote a book called “Grand New Party.” I think Ramesh Ponnuru was writing some stuff for National Review. And they wanted to move the party past that to be more friendly to the middle class because what had happened was the American standard of living for the middle class had just not gone up for decades. And so the feeling was to get elected from now on, 2008 and beyond, you really need to appeal to people. You need to improve their quality of life. So you knew something was going on a little bit in writing circles.
I think when you really saw something going on was with the Tea Party in 2010, and the Republican Party decided to sort of throw its body in front of Obamacare and try to stop Obama. It didn’t work because Democrats had 60 seats in the Senate for about a minute and a half, very short, but they used it to pass this without any Republican votes over a filibuster. But you began to hear this talk among more populist-minded conservatives. So that’s when I kind of felt something was going on.
Also in the 2012 election — and by the way, this is most of my study group — the Republican primary was kind of wilder than I had seen before. Obviously, there wasn’t an incumbent. Romney was the guy who had finished second in the 2008 primaries. But if you looked at the polls, probably like six guys led the Republican primary race at one point: Rick Perry led it for a while, Newt Gingrich led it for a while, Rick Santorum led it for a while, Herman Cain led it. There was a debate in Greenville, South Carolina, in 2012; it was so ridiculous. The big, big issue of the debate — Romney didn’t go — the big issue was whether Tim Pawlenty would climb into the top tier of candidates. What a waste of time. But anyway, there was a focus group afterwards, and they asked people who won the debate, and they all said Herman Cain. I hadn’t given him any thought. So I changed plans and went down to Atlanta the next day and spent the day with him.
Something was happening then, especially with Santorum. He was sort of markedly populist. I mean, Mitt Romney would go in front of an audience, and he’d say he had helped create this store called Staples, and created these jobs, and we need somebody in office who signed the front of a paycheck. And Santorum would come out and say, “How many of you work and make your living in companies that you founded and run?” Nobody. They’re all working for somebody. So you saw that populism in 2012, and basically what happened was that they were waiting. They didn’t know they were waiting for Donald Trump. Maybe it didn’t have to specifically be Donald Trump. But something was going to happen.
So in 2016, when the establishment had the temerity to run another Bush, I think it kind of reached a critical mass, and Trump was getting so much attention. So, I would say early on, with the Reformicons in maybe ‘06-‘07, certainly with the Tea Party in ‘10 and ‘11, and by 2015, Trump was getting a huge amount of attention.
HPR: Your answer focused on the economic side of the shift. Immigration was also a central aspect of Trump’s first campaign, and has continued to be central in the present. Where do you think that factors in?
BY: Well, that’s the big thing. I happened to have covered a lot of this. There had been an attempt to reform immigration in the Senate in 2006 and 2007, and they had something called the Secure Fence Act, which was what it sounded like. It was supposed to be a fence, and it was going to cover — I think the border is about two thousand miles long, and about 800 to one thousand of it is kind of impassable — so they were going to build a fence on the one thousand passable miles on the border. And then they passed a bill the next year saying you don’t have to build a fence, and they never did. Bush had been very, very pro immigration, and basically did not enforce the laws very strenuously. Democrats were divided. Bernie Sanders voted against immigration reform, and a couple of other progressives voted against it because of the old union job argument, and the Democratic Party had not done the full flip at that point.
So in 2013, there was an effort called the Gang of Eight in the Senate, and the four on the Republican side — it was McCain, Rubio, Graham, and somebody — were the four Republicans. This was the biggest attempt to really reform immigration. It was going to lead to a path to citizenship for everybody who was here illegally, and there were all sorts of tough requirements and all this stuff. It became a very, very contentious event, and I covered it pretty closely. Leading the opposition was Jeff Sessions, who was a senator from Alabama at the time. The Senate ended up passing it. They passed the Gang of Eight bill. I think there were 64 votes. But it hadn’t passed in the House. Clearly, if that many Republicans came over and voted for it in the House, it would have been law, etcetera. But John Boehner actually stopped it in the House, and this became a huge issue. Rubio decided to run for president in 2016, and he didn’t disavow what he had done with the Gang of Eight, but he said that it wouldn’t work. We did the Gang of Eight, and we found out what can’t pass, so it won’t work.
By the time Trump came along with the “build a wall” thing, and you know, he started with building a wall. Trump is always doing market research, and all of his rallies are market research in the sense that he tests out ideas, and if it gets a really big response, he’ll use them on the next rally. And if he gets a really big response, it’ll become part of his program. And if you test it out and nobody cares — they’re like walking around going to get a hamburger — then he won’t use it the next time. So he found that “build a wall” got a huge response. I think by that time, the sort of pro-immigrant, pro-comprehensive immigration reform Republicans were in retreat and pretty much over.
HPR: The current state of immigration enforcement, especially in Minnesota, has been very polarizing. There’s currently a proposal on the table in Congress to place certain restrictions on ICE: masking restrictions, body cams on all ICE agents, and a requirement of judicial warrants. Where do you see this fight winding up in the next few weeks?
BY: Well, for those three: yes, yes, and no. This is just my opinion; I mean, I certainly would have body cams. Body cams came into use among police forces years ago. There was a huge argument, and basically it was the left — and conservatives would call them the pro-criminal left — who wanted the body cams because they felt that body cams would expose all this terrible police misbehavior. In fact, when they started going around, they started actually confirming police stories most of the time. So I think body cams have a huge percentage of approval. So clearly, the ICE people, the ones who are engaging in police activity, should be wearing body cams.
Now I heard somewhere that in the Alex Pretti shooting, I think I heard somebody say that four of the guys were wearing body cams. So clearly, we need to see those. In the Renee Good situation, he was carrying the thing, and he didn’t have a bodycam — I don’t know why. He should have been wearing a body cam. I don’t know if he was required to or not. So body cams, yes.
The masks, I don’t like the masks. I just don’t like the optics of an armed masked force. The ICE people say that they’ll be doxed. I don’t really know how to weigh those two things. But I don’t think the masks are going to be super popular either.
It’s the warrants that Republicans and the White House are going to dig in to oppose, because they think, and I think they’re correct, that it would be something that would basically paralyze enforcement if every single case had to go to a judge. Trump is winning these cases. And this is just my opinion again. Obviously, there’s been a tactic among Democrats and the immigration groups — LULAC [The League of United Latin American Citizens], MALDEF [Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund], and all these groups that support Democrats — they’re using the courts to fight this. I understand they’re doing this, and they’re winning a lot at the district level, but ultimately, they’re going to lose because if you read our immigration law, the Immigration and Naturalization Nationality Act of 1952, that’s the big law that’s still in existence. All immigration reform efforts are amendments to that law. And it gives the government an enormous amount of authority over people who are in the United States illegally. It’s just all there is to it. So you can fight it, but you’re gonna lose at some point.
HPR: We’re in Trump’s second term now. He’s term-limited, so we expect that there will have to be one or many inheritors to the Trump movement. The extreme right, with Nick Fuentes, has been gaining ground within the party. Do you see this as a challenge to the future of the conservative movement and its ability to have mass appeal, given that these far-right voices have gained larger platforms?
BY: I’ve been trying to figure this out, but have not had much luck. One of the things that I think has been really unfortunate in all the reporting the last few months about the MAGA civil war has been my sense that it’s — no, it’s a MAGA podcaster civil war. It’s Nick [Fuentes], Tucker [Carlson], Candace [Owens], Megan [Kelly], Mark [Levin], and Ben [Shapiro], and they’re all, you know, it’s kind of the thing that was at Turning Point USA, where they all spoke kind of consecutively and bashed each other.
So, you’re still going to have to prove to me that Fuentes has real electoral power. Obviously, I don’t want to believe that he does, and I don’t believe that he does. Now, does he? I mean, if he does now, obviously I’ll recognize the reality in front of my face. I just don’t think so.
So I thought you were going to go to a Vance versus Rubio versus somebody else question of 2028. And that’ll be more conventional. I mean, kind of like fighting over the crown. But as far as those other voices, I don’t know. I don’t think they were that influential in 2024. They were nowhere near as influential as inflation and the fact that Biden was a million years old.
HPR: There’s a stated feeling in some conservative circles that Harvard, as an institution, is hostile to conservatism. Four days ago, Secretary Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense is going to be discontinuing its graduate programs at the Kennedy School. You’re a fellow here this semester and have been on campus for about a week or so. What has been your impression so far of Harvard, of the Institute of Politics, and what do you hope to bring to this campus, or potentially change about it?
BY: Well, I can’t say much because I haven’t been here long. But everybody has been extraordinarily nice and easy to deal with and helpful. You just couldn’t have asked for a better welcome. I’m not coming here saying I’m going to change Harvard in some sort of way. I am going to do the study group based on my own reporting for the last 10 or 15 years, and what I think. I obviously have been writing for conservative publications for a long time. So I’m not coming here saying, “Oh, I’m going to change things.” I just want to do a quick study group about a really important period in our politics.
HPR: What do you hope students come away from your study group understanding better?
BY: I hope they’ll come out of it with a better feel for the complexity of the change. I think the most devoted partisans on both sides, anti-Trump and Trump, not really partisans, but anti-Trump and pro-Trump, make the explanation a little simpler than it should be about what happened from 2008 to 2016. And I hope we get a little deeper.
