Reihan Salam

In February 2019, it was announced that he had been selected to become the new president of the Manhattan Institute. He succeeded Larry Mone, who retired after leading the Institute for 24 years.

Salam and Douthat argued that the Republican Party had lost touch with its own base and that its Bush-era, big-government policies were "an evolutionary dead end." They instead advocated "tak[ing] the 'big-government conservatism' vision" of Bush and giving it "coherence and sustainability" by vigorously serving the interests of the less affluent voters, who had become the party's base. The platform would include "an economic policy that places the two-parent family—the institution best capable of providing cultural stability and economic security—at the heart of the GOP agenda."

In May 2014, he suggested that while the War on Drugs had failed, the time had come for governments to curb alcohol consumption by higher alcohol taxes.

In April 2014, he suggested that nonparents should be taxed more than parents so that the parenting burden would be shared by society.

In 2008 Salam co-authored Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with Ross Douthat. The book grew from a cover story for The Weekly Standard, which called for a reinvention of Republican domestic policy.

Reihan Morshed Salam (/ˈ r aɪ h ɑː n s ə ˈ l ɑː m / ; born 29 December 1979) is a conservative American political commentator, columnist, and author who since 2019 has been president of the Manhattan Institute, and was previously executive editor of National Review, a columnist for Slate, a contributing editor at National Affairs, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, an interviewer for VICE and a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. He has appeared on a number of radio and television shows, including NPR's Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Tell Me More, on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, NBCUniversal's The Chris Matthews Show, WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, BBC's Newsnight, ABC's This Week, CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, American Public Media's Marketplace, Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight, and The News Hour from PBS. In 2018, Salam released the book Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders.

Salam was born in Brooklyn. His parents are Bangladeshi-born immigrants who arrived in New York in 1976; his father is an accountant and his mother is a dietician. Salam attended Stuyvesant High School and Cornell University before transferring to Harvard University, where he was a member of the Signet Society and lived in Pforzheimer House. He graduated from Harvard in 2001 with an A.B. degree in Social Studies. He grew up in a Muslim household.