Extremists are in Control of the Republican Party

 

Originally aired on Amanpour and Company, October 22, 2021. A recent poll suggests that nearly 80% of Republicans want former President Trump to run in the 2024 election. Washington Post columnist and former conservative Republican Max Boot blames Trump for leading the growing extremism within the party. Boot speaks with Walter Isaacson about why so many Republicans are in Trump’s thrall and whether it will help or harm the GOP in upcoming elections.

Walter Isaacson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He has been the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, he attended Harvard University and the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar at Pembroke College. Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.

Max Boot is a Russian-American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot’s “ideological journey from a ‘movement’ conservative to a man without a party” in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.