← The Opinions
The Opinions
‘Donald Trump Will Not Be President Four Years Hence’
00:42:48
At least one Opinion columnist is confident about that.
Loading summary
Transcript93 lines
- [00:00]
Robert Vinlowen
Hey, I'm Robert Vinlowen. I'm from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to people about wordle and the wordle Archive. Do you all play wordle? I play it every day.
- [00:07]
Michelle Goldberg
All right.
- [00:07]
Robert Vinlowen
I have something exciting to show you. It's the wordle Archive.
- [00:10]
Brett Stevens
What? Okay, that's awesome.
- [00:13]
Robert Vinlowen
So now you can play every wordle that has ever existed. There's like a thousand puzzles.
- [00:17]
Michelle Goldberg
What?
- [00:18]
Brett Stevens
Wordle Archive.
- [00:19]
Michelle Goldberg
Oh, cool. Now you can do yesterday's wordle.
- [00:22]
Patrick Healy
If you missed it, New York Times game subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out more at nytimes.com games. Subscribe by May 11to get a special offer. This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
- [00:50]
Masha Gessen
I'm Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. Today on the Opinions, something a little different. On Tuesday night, I hosted a conversation about President Trump's first hundred days. We did it in front of of a live audience at the Brooklyn Public Library. I was joined by my colleagues Masha Gessen, Brett Stevens and Michelle Goldberg. And as you'll hear, we got into it. Here's our conversation.
- [01:24]
Moderator
So I have the privilege of hosting this discussion with three of New York Times Opinion's most incisive columnists. Three people whose work for the last four years and beyond, including Masha's at the New Yorker, have really challenged me and made me really question and debate some of my own assumptions. I wanted to bring them together at the hundred day mark to take stock of the second Trump administration and better understand how Trump uses power and how he's changing America. Okay, so I want to start with a premise and a provocation to kick off our conversation. My premise is this, that American voters knew last year exactly what Donald Trump was capable of as president. That Trump pretty much told us what he would do if reelected. It's prompted an editorial project by my Times Opinion colleagues called Believe him that he told us and that Trump won a free and fair election last November. Okay, so my provocation is this. America is getting the disruptive, destructive bet the House strongman presidency that millions of our fellow citizens wanted and that Trump used these first hundred days to deliver on a mandate from November's plurality of voters. In other words, this is a presidency that more Americans voted for than voted against. And Michelle, I'm going to go to you first because you are a Brooklyn based columnist in the House. Michelle, have the last three months been A president putting a mandate to work.
- [03:27]
Michelle Goldberg
Okay, so I would go back to your premise and I would just add one word to it. You said Americans knew what they were getting. I think that you should have said Americans should have known what they were getting.
- [03:40]
Moderator
If they read New York Times opinion and your columns, your columns and your columns, they would have known.
- [03:44]
Michelle Goldberg
I mean, you can see just in the sort of incredulousness of these Wall street traders that Trump instituted these tariffs, that many people projected all kinds of ideas onto Donald Trump that were pretty divorced from what he said he was going to do. And in fact, it was sort of this eerie fog I felt like that had come over the country. There felt like there was this combination of mass amnesia or denial. I don't know what it was, but the mood leading up to the election felt so strange to me because there was just such a disconnect between what people thought they were voting for and kind of what I thought they were voting for. So I think that you're right. And I would say this whenever I write about, or whenever I would write about Donald Trump is going to do X, I would get two kinds of emails. One kind would say, you idiot, nobody thinks he's actually gonna do that. And the other would be like, you idiot, of course we know he's gonna do that. And you're the only one who doesn't like it. So, on the one hand, yes, I think you could argue that there is a certain amount of. There's the famous H.L. mencken quote. Democracy is like that. The people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. I might be mangling a little bit.
- [05:02]
Brett Stevens
It is exactly that.
- [05:05]
Michelle Goldberg
But I also think that you can already see that people, again, they should have known, but they didn't. I mean, I think there was a poll today that 52% of Americans think Donald Trump is a dangerous autocrat. Right. Donald Trump is in polling underwater on every single issue. Because I think a lot of people either didn't know what it was going to look like, or they convinced themselves that the people who were going to be hurt were some other group of people that wasn't going to touch them. You know, you see this in. In, say, the people who are like, wait, how come my employer or my wife got deported? I thought he was only gonna deport the bad people. And so I do think that whatever, that the democratic legitimacy that he has is eroding quickly.
- [05:55]
Moderator
Brett, I wanna come to you next on this because to Michelle's point, I might disagree with it a Little bit. Only because we heard so much from Trump about tariffs. Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. And my favorite word is tariffs last fall. How do you see this? Do you see this as a mand. Something else?
- [06:11]
Brett Stevens
No, not at all. And this is the point of my column that just was posted a couple of hours ago. I think Trump voters outside of maybe a very hard MAGA core, are shocked. You know, back in 2018, 19, before the pandemic, I was talking with a hedge fund guy who's a kind of, I wouldn't call him a Trump supporter, but he was leaning in the president's favor. And he said, you know, when I listen to the president, I don't like it, but when I turn the volume down to zero, I like the policy that I'm getting. And that's because the policy that he was getting in the first term was largely kind of a Paul Ryan Republicanism, agree or disagree, but it's a kind of a known quantity in American politics. And it was also because Trump 1.0 surrounded himself with a set of figures who were familiar, reliable, reasonably competent, you know, guys like Gary Cohn for on economic policy and so on. And so I think Trump voters now and last year thought, well, it's going to be just like the last time. And this is a president who loves to stir the pot. He loves to say outrageous things, but at the end of the day, he's a fairly conventional Republican. And that's not what they're getting. And they are shocked that they're getting exactly what Trump promised.
- [07:36]
Moderator
I just challenge you on Brett on that, though, Brett, because last year I don't think that we were hearing from Trump, oh, this is just simple restoration of my first term. This was God has saved me. But they didn't believe in, they didn't.
- [07:52]
Michelle Goldberg
Believe what Trump wasn't saying. They just simply thought when you have a, I mean, I don't mean to interrupt, Rep. But when you have someone who just lies all the time and that's baked in then, and it's interesting that kind of the people who vote for Trump in a way depend on him lying and see that dishonesty as like a point in his favor. Like, yeah, he says he's gonna do all these crazy things, but he's just bullshitting and that's a good thing.
- [08:14]
Moderator
I would slightly disagree with that. And then I wanna go to Masha, only because we did all of these focus groups last year in Times Opinion. And one thing that we heard of time and again is people certainly on the right, some in the center Some on the left wanted to see serious, severe, even draconian action on immigration, on issues of safety, that I don't think we were hearing as much in the first term when it was a lot of, like, build the wall. Well, the wall didn't get built, but, you know, as long as our economy is good, I do think there was an expectation of a very dramatic action. But, Masha, I want to go to you next. How have you seen these first hundred days?
- [08:52]
Unnamed Speaker
Well, I actually want to pick up on what Michelle and Brett were talking about. I think that you can't argue in good faith that people were expecting the first Trump presidency, although I think in some sense they were, because there's a kind of chronic failure of the imagination that has followed Trump's political career for now, nine years, 10 years. But there's something that happened at the end of that term. It was January 6th. And so people who were voting for Trump were not voting for a president. They're voting for somebody who promised to destroy the American system of government as it's constituted. And in that sense, yes, that's the mandate. Because I think if we argue that they, yeah, they voted for policies, but they didn't really mean for him to, you know, start ignoring court decisions or send people to an offshore gulag with no due process. I think that's dishonest.
- [09:47]
Michelle Goldberg
I think about. I think that probably about 30% or not 30% of the country wants. Wants that, or a big chunk of his voters wants that. But there are also a lot of people who are just really checked out. I mean, I saw online today there was a thread for, like, Reddit, lovers of Temu or Shine, one of those two Chinese retailers, and people were like, wait, what's going on?
- [10:11]
Robert Vinlowen
What?
- [10:11]
Michelle Goldberg
You know, there's like, so many people who are.
- [10:13]
Unnamed Speaker
No, but I mean, you know, they want. They want. They want to live well, while he also destroys the system of government that they really hate.
- [10:19]
Moderator
But I want to pick up on the January 6th point that mash is making. Maybe ask this to you, Bret. People, yes, had different opinions about what happened on January 6th, perhaps, but it seems like the reaction to January 6th and the willingness among many of our fellow citizens to reelect Donald Trump either in spite of January 6th or because of January 6th. To me, you can draw a line from that to what feels like a degradation or even an end of due process in this country, sort of a willingness to trample on the rule of law.
- [11:01]
Brett Stevens
Just to be clear, I wasn't endorsing these voters. I was just trying to describe what I was hearing from them. And in fact, in many conversations I had last year, before the election and the year before, I would say, isn't January 6th a deal breaker? And you get this kind of vague, well, that was bad, but it wasn't quite as bad as the mainstream media portrays it to be. And then there was a kind of a whataboutism on purported sins of the opposition. And after all, they're trying to throw Trump in jail. And how scrupulous is that when it comes to democratic norms, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, they found ways to talk themselves into a kind of political amnesia. And, you know, the point that I kept making to them is if you don't have a executive that believes in the rule of law, that believes in democratic process and procedure, that believes in foundational rights, civil liberties, due process and so on, then everything you're hoping for in terms of the business climate is going to fall apart because a president who won't respect the due process rights of someone who is wrongfully deported to a hellhole in El Salvador doesn't really care that your company has just been tariffed with 145% tariffs. There is a connection between the two. And those of us who have spent time outside of the United States know that just how intrinsic it is to have a basis in a rule of law if you're going to have a thriving capitalist, free market society in which contracts are honored and where there's sort of a sense of how things work. And this is, this, I think, is essentially the unforgivable sin of Trump's non maga supporters who are willing just to shield their eyes, cover their ears and say, we're going to get a good business policy. Everything else is noise. That was the not a mistake, a crime.
- [13:06]
Moderator
I want to go back in time to January of this year. How did each of you think President Trump's first hundred days would go back then? And then? How did it go by comparison? How did you think it was going to go, Michelle, on Inauguration Day? What did you think this period would be like? And then how does that align with, with what we've seen?
- [13:30]
Michelle Goldberg
So I think, I mean, I think I thought that a lot of, I think I thought it would be pretty much like this with a couple of exceptions. I mean, I thought it was going to be extraordinarily bad. I thought that there would be, you know, the sort of D list, Fox News weekend hosts running major cabinet agencies and that, you know, it would basically be the kind of thing would you.
- [13:51]
Brett Stevens
Have been happier with a list. Fox host. It's possible that Laura Ingram at Justice and Sean Hannity at Defense.
- [14:02]
Moderator
We almost got Matt Gaetz.
- [14:04]
Michelle Goldberg
We almost got, we almost got Matt Gaetz. Yes.
- [14:08]
Unnamed Speaker
There's something insulting about the mediocrity of it.
- [14:10]
Michelle Goldberg
There is. I mean, yeah, so I guess, you know, I kind of expected like kakistocracy and, and that's what we got. I've been, I think, surprised at a couple of things. I've been surprised at the same speed of it. I'm a pretty pessimistic and sort of anxious person. But I don't think that we would have, I don't know that I would have predicted that there would be judges being arrested within 100 days. And so the one thing that I had been saying that was my big fear about Trump all along is what happens if there are mass protests and he calls out the military. And so, you know, we're still kind of far from that. But just it was either today or yesterday. He signed an executive order sort of positioning military equipment to fight crime in various cities. Kind of getting ready, I think, for a scenario that could look very much like that. You know, I expected the Republican Party to be completely supine, I would say. I don't know that I expected, I think I expected tariffs. I expected tariffs of like 10% or, you know, basically what he said during the campaign. I don't know that I expected the level of kind of malevolent incompetence with which the tariffs were enacted. Because I think that the one thing that I, a mistake that I think I made and that a lot of people made was that there was this idea of like a Trump put right, that that Trump could only screw up the economy so much before there would be some countervailing force that would may come back down. I mean, we've seen that a little bit. We saw the kind of postponement of some of the Liberation Day tariffs.
- [15:54]
Moderator
The yippee bond market got down.
- [15:56]
Michelle Goldberg
But it is still kind of amazing that we're like lurching towards this completely self inflicted recession. And so far nobody seems to be, you know, we're in this game of chicken and so far we do not seem to be swerving.
- [16:11]
Moderator
Masha, how about you? How did you sort of see what was coming in January and how does it align with what's happened?
- [16:17]
Unnamed Speaker
Well, I actually wrote a column in November predicting that he would move much faster than during his first term and that all his primary moves would be against institutions. So it would be destroying the judiciary destroying higher education, destroying social welfare. That's all happened faster and more blatantly, I think, than I imagined. I think if there's one thing that has surprised me, it's the obscenity event. It's just that sense that we're watching something that we really shouldn't be looking at, it shouldn't be happening. But also it shouldn't be so blatant.
- [16:57]
Brett Stevens
Can I just offer a provocation just for fun?
- [17:00]
Moderator
Go for it. You, Brett, you.
- [17:03]
Brett Stevens
I'm on balance, relieved about the first hundred days and I'll explain. Well, just give me a second. If you look at dictatorships like Erdogan's, democratic dictatorships, that is to say, regimes that began democratically and then slid into authoritarianism, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Chavez in Venezuela, what made their dictatorship so insidious and so long lasting was that the first few years were successful. The first few years delivered, particularly when it came to improving the economy. To some extent, that was due to upswing in commodity prices, at least for Caracas and for Moscow, but for a variety of reasons. You look at the early reporting about Putin's regime and the other two, and, you know, a miracle they've saved the economy. People feel relatively good. The insults to civil liberties seem to be. They're there if you're paying attention, but if you're not paying attention, it's easy to forget about Politkovskaya. Meets a terrible end. But, okay, well, you know, who knows, right? This has been so flagrantly awful, right? That it is actually, I think, awakened in a lot of people who might not otherwise have felt a motivation to oppose this presidency. Genuine motivation. And I can't, you know, just this piece I had today was about a guy who makes board games, sort of business minded, calls himself independent, basically a Republican voter, voted for Trump in 24, and he is beside himself. And if it took 145% tariffs and economic chaos to get a voter like him to suddenly go, ah, I see the problem, then we might, in retrospect, actually think, well, you know, could be worse.
- [19:01]
Michelle Goldberg
I was rooting for the terrorists for this reason, I have to say. Like I was, you know, but then it puts you in a kind of perverse position because you don't always, you know, the worst, the better.
- [19:09]
Brett Stevens
Right?
- [19:11]
Unnamed Speaker
I'm afraid you're misinformed about Putin, though. So I remember sitting in the office of the leading sociologist in Russia and he was showing me a graph, and the bottom line on the graph was subjective economic well being. And it had Dropped off the cliff. And the top line was Putin's popularity and it was climbing. And he was like, this shouldn't be happening. A graph cannot look like this. But actually Putin's ratings consistently look like that. And what's even more upsetting is that for the first 14 years of Putin's presidency, of which for he was not formally president, he was underwater in every job performance polling question. People liked him. They thought that he was Russia's great promise, he was going to eventually deliver stability. But asked, do you think he's doing a good job settling the conflict in Chechnya? Do you think he's doing a good job with the economy? Do you think he's doing a good job on democratic reforms? They would consistently say no. So the worse is not the better.
- [20:30]
Brett Stevens
Can I ask Masha a follow on question? One thing that Putin, as I saw it in those early years projected was an aura of competence and intelligence and purpose that contrasted very sharply with the Yeltsin years of raging alcoholism and all the other problems of the Yeltsin era in the Kremlin. I mean, Trump is very different, which is that the aura that he projects is, at least in these first hundred days, is of a completely erratic, incompetent will of the wisp type of managerial style. I don't think to an average American, he is looking like this is a guy who knows what he's doing. It's 145% tariffs in the morning, a 60 day reprieve by afternoon. I mean, it's one thing after another. Doesn't look like a guy who is with that Putinesque sinister quality, you know, playing a long game.
- [21:27]
Moderator
I disagree with that in part, Bret, to go back to your point about the people who turned down the volume on the television, I think that they still have this sense of energy and action and enthusiasm. And even some people, you know, in one of our recent focus groups talked about the sense that Trump had shown them that the presidency could still be an active age in their life. Unlike, you know, the Biden experience.
- [21:53]
Michelle Goldberg
The most recent focus group, how many people was in it?
- [21:55]
Unnamed Speaker
It was 12.
- [21:56]
Michelle Goldberg
Right. So 12. And I believe that three regretted their vote.
- [21:59]
Moderator
Right.
- [21:59]
Michelle Goldberg
So he won by like. I mean, I understand that you can't do a one to one comparison, but if you already are, we're 100 days in, if you're already losing a quarter of the people who voted for you or, you know, that's, that's a lot. Right. I mean, I don't think that everybody expected there to suddenly be A consensus that this is an erratic monster. You know, a lot of people have convinced themselves that there's some sort of hidden genius, that he's playing, you know, 5D chess, that he's crashing the economy on purpose to drive down interest rates so that you can finally afford a house. So I think that, yes, there will always be the people who's like, well, yeah, I think, you know, we should shake things up and blah, blah. It's important to remember that like, the effects of tariffs have not really hit. I mean, they've hit your friend because he's planning in advance. They haven't hit most people yet. I think most estimates are that you'll start to see some empty shelves in a couple of weeks and that these things are going to be rolling. But so you already see his base of support eroding. And again, it's only been, I mean, it feels like it's been 8 million years, but it's only been 100 days.
- [23:01]
Brett Stevens
One of the things about this administration, it has not yet had the kind of administration defining crisis that beset, you know, hostages with Jimmy Carter or one thing or another with other presidencies. So far actually, there's been no event that to upset Trump. I mean, this is all a self driven disaster. It's hard for me to imagine that when that event comes, and it will come, the fall of Kyiv, China taking advantage to seize Taiwan, some other kind of defining and potentially humiliating episode, that Trump is gonna suddenly rise to the occasion with Churchillian statesmanship and finally impress us with that hidden five dimensional brilliance that Michel was alluding to.
- [23:54]
Unnamed Speaker
I actually don't think we're going to notice that event in the cacophony that he's quite intentionally creating. I mean, any one of the things that we've mentioned could have been that event, except it wasn't because something else happened the next day.
- [24:07]
Moderator
I mean, he was so.
- [24:08]
Brett Stevens
No, I would disagree here. I think when the event comes, we will know it.
- [24:12]
Moderator
Okay, I want to pick up on something Masha was saying earlier about the kind of, the surprise, some elements of the first hundred days. And that has been the focus on institutions. In the first term, Trump was so consumed by individuals, by James Comey, by Robert Mueller, by Hillary Clinton. And this time around, the focus, there's been some on individuals, but the focus on institutions themselves does seem like there's a method to the madness.
- [24:45]
Michelle Goldberg
I'm curious how you see that function of who is in the administration. I mean, Trump is not like a super involved executive, right? He plays golf a lot. He watches TV a lot. He has a few things he really cares about. But, you know, Gary Cohen and Dina Powell and all those people, like, they are all patting themselves on the back for kind of keeping the peace for a lot of years, but they deserve a huge amount of blame for blinding people to what Trump is actually like. Right. So now we have these, you know, kind of weirdos and creeps and lowlifes, and they each have different portfolios. And so you basically have, you know, you've got Stephen Miller running immigration the way he's always dreamed. You've got people in the Department of Education who have this kind of lifelong desire to take down the Ivy Leagues and, you know, kind of cut their teeth on the destruction of New College in Florida and sort of learned how to do that and now want to replicate that model on a large scale. You just have people with these different fights. The same with Doge. I mean, that was another thing that actually surprised me. I kind of thought that Elon would have his little advisory board, but, no, he's just kind of let him go nuts on the bureaucracy. That's not really coming from Trump. Trump's instinct is not to cut budgets, it's to spend more. But he's given him carte blanche, and he's been able to kind of transform the federal government.
- [26:13]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah, I think that's part of the story, but I think it's not the whole story. And one thing is there's no reason why Trump couldn't have had Stephen Miller running immigration in the first administration, but it was a profoundly different administration. And one of the biggest differences is that Trump 2.0 cannot afford to lose power. If he's no longer president, he's going to go to jail. So he's acting like somebody who will never lose power. We've seen a couple of those guys around the world. That's where the attacks on institutions come from.
- [26:55]
Moderator
But, Masha, don't you think that ship has sailed in terms of Trump going to jail? Do you think that actually bothers him anymore?
- [27:02]
Unnamed Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's why he so desperately needed to become president again, and that's why he. I mean, after all of this, what is.
- [27:12]
Moderator
I'm thinking the man has beaten the rap, so to speak, so many times that I'm not sure he sees himself at that level of vulnerability.
- [27:19]
Brett Stevens
That's all here. I disagree on both counts. I think one of the biggest surprises, and actually a hallmark of this Trump's version of Trump's incompetence, is that he Seems to get himself involved in everything. And I think the reason, well, part of the reason is psychosis. I'm not a psychiatrist, but that's how it seems to be. But part of the reason is we forget he is a second term lame duck president. He doesn't care. He absolutely doesn't care. I have, I am certain he is not thinking that jail is in his future. He is convinced that Democrats learned the lesson that the effort to prosecute him backfired spectacularly. He understands that part of his appeal is being the outlaw president who is fighting the efforts of censorious woke liberals to, you know, put him behind bars. Again, I'm describing not endorsing.
- [28:17]
Unnamed Speaker
So wait, so every time he talks about a third term, he's kidding?
- [28:20]
Brett Stevens
Well, I don't think, well, he might be kidding or not kidding, but he's not going to have a third term as president.
- [28:27]
Moderator
Why do you say that?
- [28:28]
Unnamed Speaker
With.
- [28:29]
Moderator
Yeah, why do you say that? With confidence. High confidence, low confidence, medium confidence.
- [28:33]
Brett Stevens
I'm going to make a here goes statements I will come to regret monkey's paw. I am going to make a high confidence prediction that Donald Trump will not be president four years hence.
- [28:46]
Moderator
Okay, Masha, you have seen the crowd has a question. The audience has a question. Why confidence?
- [28:57]
Brett Stevens
Because I don't think we're Yeltsin's Russia and I don't think we're the Weimar Republic. I think the institutions in this country are much stronger than we sometimes give them credit for and they're getting stronger by the day because they're finding their nerve which they had lost for at least part of the last hundred days.
- [29:13]
Michelle Goldberg
Yeah.
- [29:13]
Unnamed Speaker
So first of all, I do agree we're not Russia, we're not the Weimar Republic, but we're not any other thing either. Right. Like we can and we have never been here before. And we cannot confidently make a prediction about the system being able to withstand this kind of frontal attack. I regard his plans for a third term with utter seriousness and kind of despair. And I, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't have to be as dramatic as, I don't know, declaring a state of emergency and canceling elections. He and his Republican Party have been hard at work undermining the vote for many years. And now he, you know, his executive order on elections, if that actually is allowed to stand in whole or in part, that is a huge blow to any possibility of a free and fair election. His attack on the media, it's frightening to think about how much it can escalate in the next four years. And so if we come to a point four years from now where there are elections, what are these elections going to be like? Are they going to be more like American elections past, which have been hugely imperfect but have probably to a significant degree reflected the will of the people? Or are they going to be more like Russian elections? Russians vote.
- [30:44]
Moderator
Michelle, we're coming out of this hundred day period. What, what concerns you most as you kind of look ahead to deep breath, you know, a thousand day plus of what's coming, you know, in terms of either what we've seen or what we haven't seen, the kind of the known.
- [31:04]
Michelle Goldberg
Unknowns, I would presume that we'll see a ratcheting up of the things that we've seen so far. So we've seen, seen one judge arrested. I think that we could see more judges arrested. I mean, Pam Bondi has pretty much promised that. And so, you know, on the one hand, I do take a lot of comfort in his growing unpopularity. And I think, you know, we've already seen some pretty large demonstrations. I would suspect that we're going to see more. But you also have an administration that is extraordinarily paranoid about the idea and kind of obsessed with the idea of color revolutions. You know, one of the reasons that they dismantled USAID was because they believe that USAID has fomented all of these color revolutions in Ukraine and other countries and think that any or at least present organized opposition here as some sort of subversive plot that they have the right to use, you know, kind of extraordinary means against. And so I do think that people that, you know, so far there hasn't been for, I think most people that much of a cost to standing up to Donald Trump. I mean, certainly there's people from his first administration who are facing prosecution. There's people who kind of people have seen their political careers tanked, people who have to have private security. But I don't. When there was a big protest, I asked my kids if they wanted to come and they didn't because my husband was going and I was going to report on it and my husband was like, do you guys want to come? It wouldn't occur to me to say that it's not safe, safe for you to come. But I think that eventually you could get to a point where kind of more courage is going to be required.
- [33:03]
Brett Stevens
I mean, you're just provoking some thinking. And this is kind of, I think Trump's critics have to make a decision about the nature of this administration, regime, whatever, which is, are we dealing With a kind of a sinister genius or a bullying schmuck? No, I mean, to me, it's an open question. You kind of look at Putin, you're like, look at the KGB background. Sinister genius, Erdogan, sinister genius. Orban, the same. Is that actually the Trump administration? And is the evidence of the last hundred days sinister genius? I don't think so. I think it's bullying schmuck. Now, I don't like bullying schmuck. I'm opposed to bullying schmuck, but how does it feel? But it relieves some of my of those darker fears. Like, I can assure you of one thing. If you say color revolution to the President, he might turn to his wife and say, is this some kind of like fashion state? Like, he would have no idea.
- [34:07]
Michelle Goldberg
I absolutely can guarantee you that there's lower level people in the administration talk about that all the time.
- [34:13]
Moderator
There are true believers in ways that I don't think there were in the first term, Brad. I mean, I do think there's evidence of a lot of roads leading back to Stephen Miller and to Russ Vaughan and sort of.
- [34:24]
Brett Stevens
But the guy who I think of as a true believer is our catastrophically inept Secretary of Defense, or whatever he now wants to call himself.
- [34:33]
Unnamed Speaker
Well, that's a relief.
- [34:35]
Brett Stevens
No, I mean, listen, it is in fact. It is, in fact a relief because I would be far more worried if a guy who I know is smart, Josh Hawley, were the President of the United States, and then we would be dealing with a much more difficult set of questions. I think it's. To me, it gives me a sense like maybe, you know, my confidence that we'll be somewhere else in four years, that I think we're dealing with bullying schmuck.
- [35:06]
Michelle Goldberg
But just, I mean, I guess I don't understand. I don't know if I understand why, you know, what is it that stops the bullying schmuck from calling out the military against protesters?
- [35:15]
Brett Stevens
I just. Nothing. The point is, I don't think he would do it well. Right. And I don't think anything in this.
- [35:22]
Michelle Goldberg
Matter still shoot down.
- [35:25]
Brett Stevens
It does matter, because if you look at the way in which other Democratic autocrats came to power, there was a great deal of sort of method and care that was taken. It was. There was a kind of a subtlety to what they did. They were like the evil geniuses in the Bond films, not the muscle guys. And we're dealing here with, you know, something not quite on the order of evil genius.
- [35:50]
Unnamed Speaker
You know, when I wrote a biography of Putin which was published in 2012. The reviewers generally said that reviewed it fairly well, but generally said, you know, the one thing that's hard to believe in this book is that Putin is so uninformed, uneducated and just basically stupid. Well, he is right. And in retrospect, you can trace his steps and ascribe to them some kind of evil genius. But you'd be wrong. He was a bullying schmuck.
- [36:20]
Moderator
I'd just like to ask each of you briefly as we wrap up, what have you learned about America over the last hundred days that maybe either you didn't know or you didn't see as clearly, either for good or not so much? What have you learned about America? Brett, can I start with you on that?
- [36:44]
Brett Stevens
Look, I hate to be the optimist on this panel and sp spoil the mood, but I'm going to take the position that the, you know, when Trump won the election on November 5, the day after he was at the pinnacle of political power, it has eroded every day since because more and more of America is beginning belatedly, but beginning to see exactly who he is and what he represents and what he's doing, and that this country, this democracy that's 250 years old will not dissolve in a vat of Trumpian acid, that it will find its footing and its nerve and find its good judgment. And the democratic experiment is going to continue. We've had periods in our history of even greater ugliness than the present. In fact, far greater ugliness. The things that we have been able to surmount are astounding. And I always like this line that's in Bill Clinton's first inaugural. I know maybe it's Pollyanna or excessively positive, but he says he said something to the effect that there is nothing wrong in America that can't be fixed by what's right in America. And I'm going to hold to that view.
- [38:13]
Moderator
Masha, what have you learned?
- [38:16]
Unnamed Speaker
Well, it's been a hard 100 days, I think, for most of us. But for me and a lot of my friends here, it's been particularly hard because we feel like we've lived through this before. And the first time we lived through it, at least there was America. And now we're here. And at the same time, you know, I tried to correct myself, but there is all of this that is very different about this country than about the country where I grew up. There is the most robust, wealthiest civil society in the world. There's a free press. Right. People do seem to find it offensive when rule of law is assaulted, even if they don't necessarily agree with either party. So I try to find this balance between seeing the possibility of the worst and also remembering that nothing is preordained until it's actually happened.
- [39:15]
Michelle Goldberg
Michelle, I have been, I mean, maybe this will come as a surprise to Brett, who probably already thinks of me as somewhat radical, but I feel like I've been radicalized by the utter fecklessness of our elites and to see a, the cravenness of these billionaires, the, you know, the sort of all of these businessmen who are completely willing to bend the knee, you know, people who you would think have enough money to at least buy themselves some self respect, but nevertheless, you know, are sort of unwilling to. Right. This has been like really shocking to me and actually really to me does brings home in a very visceral way the kind of democratic corruption inherent in profound inequality. You know, at the same time, I do, I think if I have some degree of optimism, it is in the fact that, like, I, it's hard for me to imagine a situation in which the majority of Americans, or at least an active large plurality of Americans, kind of sit down and take it as Trump, you know, kind of ravages what people, what I think a lot of people consider to be their birthright. On my own block, which is in Brooklyn, which I know isn't real America, but, you know, on my own block, my neighbors have just started meeting every week to talk about, like, what they, you know, what they can do, what kind of activism, you know, what they should be calling our congressperson about what marches are coming up. Does everybody want to get together and make signs? Can we go down to the migrant shelter and be there if people are getting rounded up to take their immigrant ID numbers so that there's somebody tracking them through the system? And I think that this is happening in a lot of different places. And again, I think, and I hope that that kind of like thick community engagement will eventually build the backbone of something that can stand up to this.
- [41:28]
Moderator
Thank you, Michelle. Before we go, I just want to quickly thank Brooklyn Public Library and Lynda Johnson for hosting the event tonight. And I want to thank New York Times Opinion editor Katie Kingsbury, Times Opinion Managing Editor Brian Zittel, Beth Weinstein, the executive director of Event planning at the Times, and of course, Michelle Goldberg, Masha Gessen, Brett Stevens, all for making this event possible. Thank you all for coming. Have a good night.
- [42:28]
Patrick Healy
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Sofia Alvarez Boyd Vishaka Darba, Christina Samulewski and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Allison Bruzek and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary, Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.