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Opinion|MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-james-pogue.html
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The Ezra Klein Show
Jan. 28, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
The journalist James Pogue explicates the strange tensions between big tech and the new right.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Second terms are usually intellectually exhausted. And maybe if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, that’s how it would be. But he wasn’t. So between 2021 and 2025, the ferment driving MAGA’s ideas deepened quite a bit. The nature of its coalition expanded quite a bit.
I’m not sure Trump himself cares much about this fight over ideas, these visions of the future. But the people who are staffing his administration — both at the top and, much more than that, the 20- and 30-somethings who actually do the work of presidencies — they do care. Ideas do matter. The intellectual cultures that form political parties matter.
James Pogue is a contributing writer at New York Times Opinion, and he’s been covering the New Right at Vanity Fair. Over the past few years he has published great piece after piece on the MAGA intellectual scene and the various factions and ideas and people within it.
So I wanted to talk with him about the ideas that hold MAGA together, the factional fights that threaten to tear it apart — and whether any of this actually affects what President Donald Trump does or thinks.
Ezra Klein: James Pogue, welcome to the show.
James Pogue: Thanks for having me. So honored.
You’ve been covering the New Right for a while now. How would you describe the thing you’ve been covering? Is it a coalition? Is it a scene? What’s the term for it?
