My interview with a Trump voter who regrets his choice.

Given the nature of Tangle, I’m drawn to people whose political views are organically evolving. That’s especially true when those people are public figures whose writing is widely read and influential.

Meet Richard Hanania.

Over the last few years, Hanania has become a well known conservative voice. Vice President JD Vance has called him a “friend,” Elon Musk has elevated his posts, and Hanania was even a contributor to Project 2025. 

But his story has been rife with controversy. In 2023, a HuffPost reporter discovered that, from 2008 through the 2010s, Hanania had written under the pseudonym Richard Hoste for a number of alt-right and white-supremacist publications. 

As Richard Hoste, he promoted a variety of extremist views: He identified himself as a “race realist,” said he supported eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people (which in his estimation, were most often black), opposed “race mixing,” argued that black people cannot govern themselves, and contributed to the The Occidental Observer — a site focused on “white identity and interests” that once published the claim that Jews were trying to exterminate white Americans. He even suggested — in 2022 under his real name — that if he ever owned Twitter, he would prevent “feminists, trans activists or socialists” from posting on the platform because they are “wrong about everything and bad for society.”

Hanania’s public image predictably cratered after his pseudonym was exposed. Initially, he framed himself as the victim, insisting he was the “target of a cancellation effort because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.” But then something interesting happened: His views began to publicly evolve. 

He started writing about how he went down the alt-right rabbit hole, how he came out of it, and what he learned from the experience. He had built up an entire decade of public writing he could point to that he claimed as evidence of a genuine evolution, and he remade his image as the guy who was once a white nationalist but came to a more contrarian brand of conservative politics. 

I reached out to Hanania for an interview based on this narrative alone. How often do you get the chance to talk to someone who could be genuinely described as a one-time white nationalist who had left the movement and now speaks candidly about his experience? Some Tangle readers objected to us interviewing Hanania — when we promoted this piece earlier in the week, they left comments saying they were unsubscribing or asking why we were “platforming” a racist.

The answer, of course, is that Hanania’s views matter. While I find much of his previous writing abhorrent, it’s undeniable that his recent work has been incredibly influential on the right. His writing influenced the current vice president and Elon Musk. Not only that, but Hanania himself is already platformed — he may well have a bigger audience and reach than Tangle or me. He’s been published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he has a book deal with HarperCollins. 

As always, our goal is to bring you a wide range of views. We’ve published interviews with guests who represent the far left and far right — people who could be credibly described as supporting Hamas or wanting to abolish the police or believing an embryo’s value is equal to an adult human’s — all radical positions to some, but also widely held positions in certain political groups. We welcome these views being expressed freely and standing on their own. Perhaps most interestingly, in our conversation, I don’t think Hanania expressed a single perspective that most moderate Americans would find objectionable.

All of this, combined with Hanania’s apparent evolution, his regular criticisms of conservatives despite being on the right, and his departure from extremism, was enough to make me interested in having a conversation with him.

But then something just as fascinating happened. In the weeks between scheduling our interview and the interview taking place, Hanania took to X to announce his latest political evolution: He officially regrets his vote for Trump in 2024.

So, in our nearly hour-long interview, I spoke to Hanania about his descent into white nationalism, how he came out the other side, his experience working on Project 2025, whether he was a career opportunist or genuinely evolving, what made him regret his vote for Trump, and how he now assesses the Republican and Democratic parties. 

Below, we’ve provided a transcript of our interview — edited for length and clarity. We’ve also provided a link to a YouTube version of the interview (below) and you can listen to the podcast version here.

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Isaac Saul: Richard Hanania, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Richard Hanania: Thanks for having me, Isaac.

Isaac Saul: To table-set, I'd love if you could tell our audience a little bit about your personal story. Can you tell us about what happened to you and how you landed here, sitting here talking to me?

Richard Hanania: I was an anonymous writer around 2009, 2010. I was part of the original alt-right 1.0. I wrote under a pseudonym. I stopped. I went off, and I became an academic. I got a law degree. I got a research fellowship at Columbia, then I was at the University of Texas. I started writing for the public 10 years later or so at that point — 2018, 2019 — under my own name and appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and I had my own Substack. I was always a right-leaning person. My views have evolved a lot since then. 

About the same time, the alt-right was taking over the conservative movement. Trump was their guy; immigration became an issue they were obsessed with, and there became a willingness to tolerate or even embrace openly racist or misogynistic ideas that people used to hide behind anonymity to talk about but now had become kind of a mainstream thing. 

I was mostly considered ‘on the right,’ although I had an independent streak. I wasn't afraid to say things that upset the right — for example, that January 6 was a coup attempt, 2020 was not stolen by the Democrats, the COVID vaccines were a great thing — but at the same time, I was very, very conservative. I believed in free markets. I believed wokeness was a major problem and wrote a book on wokeness and its relationship to civil rights law. I believed in being tough on crime and all that. 

And then, in 2023, my previous writing comes out. People are saying, “Oh, well, we knew he was a bad guy the whole time.” But I think if you looked at what I was writing before that story came out of the Huffington Post, I had already broken with the right on a lot of things. It wasn’t like I changed overnight because of that.

By 2024, I had endorsed Trump, but it's probably the most anti-Trump endorsement you can imagine. It was basically, “The liberals are completely right about this guy. He's corrupt. He lies all the time. The movement behind him, there's a lot of rawness there. But I'm still a conservative and we're going to get conservative policies.”

That's what we got in the first administration. It was within the normal range of what you'd expect a Republican president to do, despite some, you know, amazing stories that came out. So I was a reluctant Trump supporter in 2024. By the way, I was tweeting a lot of people who thought I was going in the Kamala direction, and I almost got there. I mean, I was kind of so fed up with what the right had become. 

But the worst-case scenario, basically what I thought the Trump presidency would be, came about even worse than I would have expected. These tariff rates — nobody thought that this was possible. I said explicitly at some point, “RFK won't be HHS secretary; he might get a commission or something,” because that's not something that would have happened in the first administration. I was over-indexing on what had happened before. I hadn’t, I think, paid enough attention to my own arguments that the Trump movement was becoming more and more of a cult of personality, and he was less and less restrained as time went on. And so something like RFK becoming the HHS secretary, or Trump just doing tariffs because he feels like it — it was foreseeable. I have to take blame. I understood this at the time and just calculated the odds wrong, and I'm here now.

Isaac Saul: I really want to hear about some of your evolving views on Trump or how the administration has not matched your expectations. Before we get there though, I want to stay in the past a little longer. 

A) What was it like for you when some of that past writing came out? 

And then B) how did you step into the more extreme online right, and then how did you get out of it? I think that's a fascinating story that we don't hear very much: somebody who goes down that rabbit hole and actually comes out on the other side.