PBS NEWSHOUR: David Brooks of The Atlantic and Jonathan Capehart of MS NOW join Amna Nawaz to discuss the week in politics, including the GOP’s midterm convention and the identity of the party.

AMNA NAWAZ, PBS NEWSHOUR: I want to put two things together this week and get your take on it. We saw this week Republicans holding their midterm convention in Texas essentially built around President Trump, who asked people to take a pledge to him while on stage and promised $ 5,000 for every adult if Republicans win the midterms. This week also marks one year since Charlie Kirk’s assassination. This is someone who was sort of a bridge to the young conservative movement, hailed as the future of the Republican Party, a party now somewhat fractured on foreign policy and economic pressures, but really united around the president. David, I want to ask you, if you put those two things together, what does it tell you about the identity of the party today? DAVID BROOKS, THE ATLANTIC: Yes, I thought the most important and, frankly, impressive speech, surprisingly for me, was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech. He really tried to describe why so many working-class voters who voted for his uncle and his dad in the ’60s, then became Reagan Democrats under — in the ’80s, and then became Trump Republicans in 2016. And I certainly didn’t agree with everything in that speech, but it was — it was a very persuasive and to my Republican friends a very compelling story. And that is the foundational strength of the modern Republican Party, that working-class shift. Now, as for the contemporary party, and Kennedy explicitly thanked — why am I blanking out Turning Point USA guy? NAWAZ: Charlie Kirk. DAVID BROOKS: Charlie Kirk. NAWAZ: Sorry. BROOKS: Brain freeze. For brokering the deal between Trump and him. And I would say we’re seeing in the Republican Party first on the influencer side a crack-up. And so you got Candace going over to here, Tucker Carlson go over to here, Ben Shapiro trying to play William F. Buckley and police the movement and failing, by the way, though I admire him for trying. And so on that level, there’s just like — and that’s like show business. Among the Trump supporters I know, I would say there’s exhaustion, disappointment, some sense of betrayal, but they’re not turning Democrat. But they but they are — they’re flatter. They’re emotionally flatter. And then I think the long-term thing is, Donald Trump has — with the exception of tariffs and immigration, he’s undercut the intellectual consistency of the party, because he’s all over the place on everything, including these $ 5,000, which is like super Keynesian pump priming at a time of inflation, which is like the worst thing you want to do. So it’s just intellectually incoherent. So that’s a little complicated to say that the Republican still has a good story to tell. They’re cracking up on the ideological level, and then they’re sort of adrift intellectually.

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