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The Opinions
There’s a Reason Even ‘Smart’ People Surrender to Trump
00:28:59
M. Gessen and Patrick Healy try to reckon with the president’s whiplash authoritarianism.
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Patrick Healy
This podcast is supported by Oracle.
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Podcast Introduction
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.
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Patrick Healy
I'm Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is the First Hundred Days, a weekly series examining President Trump's use of power and his drive to change America. This week I've been thinking a lot about why people choose to give in to Donald Trump. From the Republicans in the Senate and House who've given up any semblance of independence for Congress, even confirming Trump Cabinet nominees who they privately oppose to the government institutions and business leaders and even Democratic Party officials who aren't putting up much fight where it counts. And so I wanted to talk with my colleague Masha Gessen. They've spent two decades writing about the rise of authoritarianism in their homeland of Russia and in Eastern Europe. Masha left Russia in 2013 after Putin's anti LGBTQ policies made life too dangerous for them and their family. Thanks for joining me, Masha.
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It's good to be here, Patrick.
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So, Masha, your columns last year pretty much predicted what a Trump presidency would be like. Just the lack of restraints, the trampling of a system of government, the demonizing of immigrants and other groups. And so I want to ask, is there anything so far that has surprised you about Trump or his administration or about other leaders in the country?
- [02:20]
You know, I don't want to take credit for predicting what the Trump presidency would be like, because really, it was all out there. He was spelling it out over and over again at rallies, very upfront. Yeah, there's Project 20, I think. I've been surprised, unpleasantly surprised, by the fact that even in his inaugural speech, he started going after trans people. Like I knew he was gonna go after trans people. But the inaugural speech like that one was unexpected even for me.
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Was it because that's the kind of speech where you think in terms of big themes or just that's the kind of speech where you don't Hear hate speech?
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Well, no, I mean, if you recall, eight years ago, it was American carnage. Right. So we knew not to expect a soaring vision of the future. Right. And we know that Trump can rarely restrain himself from engaging in bad blood and risk sentiment, sort of trafficking. I think just the definitive, there are only two sexes, male and female, and I can't quote it word for word, but the signal that it was good to be legislated immediately, I think the prominence, I was quite aware of the prominence of his anti trans rhetoric in the campaign, and it wouldn't have been illogical to expect it to be prominent in the presidency, but to be so front and center as to be part of the inaugural speech, that was even more sort of central than I expected it to be.
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Masha, I was so surprised after that speech, given how blunt he was, that more people weren't standing up and calling him out for what he was doing, that he was essentially erasing trans people, trying to define America based on two genders. And then quickly followed that up with attacks not just on trans people, on teachers who support transgender students, on issuing guidelines that hospitals have chosen to interpret a certain way. Why weren't and aren't institutions, hospitals, leaders, individuals speaking out more against this attack on a group of people who are one of the smallest, most vulnerable populations in the country?
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So I think there are two reasons to stand up to an attack. You have to have language and ideas to counter the attack. And that language and those ideas on any kind of scale would have come from the Democratic presidential campaign, which they didn't. The Democrats had chosen consciously not to engage with Trump's anti trans baiting somehow, I don't know, willing it away or thinking that if they don't say anything too pro trans, it will go unnoticed, that he is transbaiting them. A strategy that has never worked for anybody in the history of politics, but the Democrats keep stepping into over and over again. So I think that for people to sort of stand up, they needed the words. The way that people reacted so quickly during his last presidency to the travel ban, because we have the language to stand up for immigrants. We have the ideas to stand up for immigrants. And I think with trans issues, it's much trickier. Most people don't have the language on hand at all. And the other reason, the reason that hospitals, schools, other helping professions aren't standing up for trans people is because they are negotiating this thing, which is what I wrote about. You know, I wrote about this idea of obeying in advance, and it's not a new term, it's actually anticipatory obedience is something that Germans were talking about back in Nazi Germany and then Sovietologists talked about when they wrote about the Soviet Union. But in this country, Tim Snyder, the Yale historian, popularized it in his 2017 book, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, in which he wrote, Lesson number one, do not obey in advance. But what I think he didn't mention is that people obey in advance for very good reasons, and often they obey in advance in accordance with their values. So, for example, I spoke to a doctor or a healthcare provider who works with a lot of both trans and. And immigrant patients and a lot of undocumented trans patients, right? And this provider said to me, you know, I'm not going to talk to you on the record because I don't want to draw any attention to myself because I want to be able to provide care for as long as possible. So that's a perfectly clear example for you of somebody making a humane and rational decision, perfectly consistent with their decades of medical practice and decades of service that, on the whole, politically detracts from our possibilities.
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I think these early weeks of the Trump administration, Masha, are so crucial. You know, in political coverage, we talk about the first hundred days, the first hundred days, but this first hundred days feels like nothing we've seen before. He is setting the stage for what you just talked about for years, if not decades, of a redefined America in which the consensus, not everyone, but the majority consensus, shifts toward one direction, where things that were seen as in anywhere from bad taste to being a violation of norms and values and standards somehow becomes either acceptable or. At least. Let's talk about it. Let's talk more about this, the normalization. It's all happening right now in front of us. Have you experienced anything like this before in your coverage of Russia or Eastern Europe, where it feels like we are literally in this moment and every day that goes by, where that language does not exist, that people don't have an ability to call this out or talk about it or make these rationalized choices, time runs out. It's too late eventually.
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Well, I definitely feel like I've experienced it. I haven't experienced it at this whiplash speed. I mean, this has really. I don't know if it's happened elsewhere in the world. It certainly has not happened in any part of the world that I have covered. But even when Putin came to power In Russia in 99, 2000, it was sort of, first he was prime minister, then he was president, and then when he was finally inaugurated as president, it did. At the time, I had no other frame of reference. It felt pretty fast because he immediately unleashed an attack on media, immediately unleashed an attack on business or trying to get the oligarchs to line up. And I felt like I was living in a chessboard and somebody was picking off pieces and I couldn't predict which piece was going to get picked off next. It felt like I would turn around to say something to somebody and they'd be like, oh, but I support him now, or oh, but we can't run that article because of all the good reasons. But in this country, it's faster and it's worse. I mean, we saw the big money line up in and genuflect before the inauguration.
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They were all going down to mar a lago. Million dollar check, million dollar check, million dollar check. The auto companies giving fleets of vehicles.
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Just falling all over themselves to be. To be first in line, to obey. And I think that those things are also done for very good reasons. And even there, I think you can probably see some kind of values that people are relying on, you know, that they have a responsibility to their shareholders, they have a responsibility to their. Trump has said what he was going to, the kind of pressure that he was going to exert on business. So they should get in his good graces ahead of time for the sake of, again, other people. The problem is that I watched a lot of very, very wealthy people try to play that game in Russia. And the regime is insatiable. Yes, you have to keep giving it more money. You have to keep ceding more power. And most people I know who fell in line are no longer living in Russia, despite all of their compromises. And those who are living in Russia, I think maybe wish that they weren't, but they have no choice.
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And Masha, that's the thing. The autocrat always knows when he has people just where he wants them. Every time someone rolls over or bends the knee, you can just imagine Donald Trump looking at them and saying, got him, got him, got her, got him. He would sort of pick and choose people based on really this kind of Trumpian genius for understanding human behavior and the way that people roll. And I think especially understanding the way that so many human beings obey and respond and rationalize against power. Most human beings don't have this kind of power that a Donald Trump or an autocrat has. And he has some sense of that, some understanding. And you wrote about particularly two ways of thinking about this that I thought were so important in thinking about this moment. And it's kind of the pragmatic argument for obeying and the zeitgeist argument for obeying. And what it comes down to is when we are living in Trump's America, so many people will take the pragmatic approach and the zeitgeist moment that this is what society is like today. And I keep coming back, back to the idea of why do people, including very smart people, just sort of shrug and go along to get along when they must know that doing so puts them, if not in Trump's pocket, at least makes him know that he has the upper hand?
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That's such a great question. So when you were talking about how Trump uses his particular genius to get people where he wants them, I felt a desire to object. I don't want to think of him as a psychological genius. He is kind of a one trick pony when it comes to people. He thrives in humiliation and he rewards loyalty. His assumption is that everybody is basically exactly like him. So you see it backfire sometimes when, for example, he says to Putin, come on, stop the stupid war. You're losing more than you stand to gain, without realizing that Putin actually is not like him. In some significant ways he is. In some significant ways he is not. But the logic is not going to work because Trump doesn't understand what Putin is after. But a lot of people, as it turns out, are a lot like Donald Trump. They think they're much smarter than they are. So they think that even though they're giving in to Trump, they are somehow going to engineer this whole situation in a way that will allow them to avoid the fate of all the idiots who are genufilating to Donald Trump. And I think that's where he really thrives, is in dealing with people who are reasoning exactly the way that he reasons. And he objectively has a lot more power than they do, and they're gonna lose.
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Masha. So many people in politics and government think of themselves as playing the long game. And so when we think about the pragmatic argument for obeying in advance, I just wanna drill down on one example, which is PBS recently announced that they are closing their DEI office so as not to lose federal funding. And you have to wonder, and now maybe I'm playing into the obey in advance. If the closing of the DEI office is just a step and effort to survive at all, isn't PBS the greater good of keeping PBS around worth it? You know, maybe the country is better with public broadcasting in some form. So the DEI office, you know, can go now, could reopen in five or 10 years. What's the counter to that?
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Well, tell me honestly, do you think PBS is going to exist in three years?
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I do. I do, but I'm not sure about the News Hour. I'm not sure about that.
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Right. I think that if we get a little bit of distance from this and try to sort of reason through it, as you said, PBS is in the crosshairs of this administration. Do we really think that abolishing DEI is going to get them out of the crosshairs? Like, what are they actually going to have to give in order to stay afloat? I think they're gonna have to have Ron DeSantis run PBS or something like that. That's the only thing that could possibly keep them alive. And so if we know that, then that small indignity, which is what it probably feels like to them, Right. The small indignity of abolishing the DAI office and probably reassuring the employees, which is what everybody is doing, and sort of saying, you know, we're not going to be worse for it. We're just giving them a little. But they're going to have to give a lot more, especially those organizations that, like pbs, are already targeted. And I think we're all in a prisoner's dilemma. And basically, unless we start acting collectively, and by we, I mean the most expansive we possible of us who don't want to live in Trump's autocracy, then we're just going to be making life worse for one another with every concession. And who if not organizations like pbs, which actually have a megaphone, would lead the charge for not conceding, for not obeying?
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You really make a case for collective action, because it feels like you over there, you give an inch, Trump will take a mile. You over there, you give an inch, Trump will take a mile. And over and over and over again, the question is, for most Americans, the way that they have thought about success and survival in this society, so much of it has been about pick your battles, live to fight another day. It's really the individual who I can count on as opposed to collective society. And that I feel like is kind of a struggle. And Trump realizes in some ways, we don't have the time to change our mindset as Americans.
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I think you're absolutely right. I think this is a pretty convenient country to pick for building an autocracy. We don't have a culture of collective action. We no longer have local media. I mean, we're not equipped to stand up to this. Some extraordinary leadership and some extraordinary organizing Efforts really, really soon would be needed to stave this off.
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Masha, let's dig down more into that point about opposition and resistance. You know, it's been less than a month since Trump's inauguration, and some Democrats, they're still scrambling and trying to figure out and talking about finding ways to deal with Trump, including working with Trump. You know, in those first couple weeks especially, we heard a lot about finding common ground with Trump. They just want to get things done. I'm thinking of everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Hakeem Jeffries, the House leader.
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Patrick Healy
Does this set a dangerous precedent? Or as elected officials, do they have some obligation, some role, to try to figure out how to work within the system that they're elected to help lead?
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Well, I think this is where we admit we're in totally uncharted territory. This country, as far as I know, hasn't been here before, certainly not sort of at this scale and at this rate. And I think there are a couple of ways to think about it. One is to ask. Now, those early statements about finding common ground really feel like ancient history, but I'm glad you're returning to them, because it makes me ask whether they were already abdicating their responsibility to their voters. Trump made no secret of who he was or what he was planning to do. And so for Democratic Congress members to say at the beginning of his administration, let's find common ground is, I think, to abdicate their responsibility to listen and look and protect the constitutional order that they were actually elected to protect. Then there's another question, which is, can it work as a strategy? I think we've already seen that no, it can't. And not only can it not work as a strategy, but it functions as a diversion. When we hear Democrats talking about, let's pick our battles and let's sacrifice USAID for the sake of something more popular. What they're doing is they're entirely allowing Trump to set the agenda. And we have this idea that's been in circulation for a long time, and that I think is still conventional wisdom, that Trump has no ideas and no ideology. And that is insane. Trump has an ideology, and Trump has a lot of ideas, and Trump's people have even more ideas. They're just very bad ideas. And when you respond to an administration that fills the ether with bad ideas in the sort of tactical way of picking our battles, what you're doing is allowing these bad ideas to completely dominate the politics and the society in which we live.
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Masha, all of this makes me think of all people, of Mitch McConnell who had such a clear strategy for the Republicans against President Barack Obama. It was to say no to everything, to obstruct, to make him essentially a one term president. He was quite clear about that. And I listened to you. And I find myself thinking about the Democrats and whether they have the courage and the clarity of mind to be the party of no when it's called for. Are the Democrats just not good at being the party of no or are they such the party of government that they may feel the need to find accommodation to wait the guy out as opposed to obstructing and making him not a three term president? Or is it something else?
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I think that's exactly the right diagnosis, that they're the party of government and, and that's probably not what the moment calls for. But I think there's also the eternal problem of fighting the last war. And here I want to acknowledge their dilemma. Going into the certification of the vote and going into the inauguration they had to hold January 6 in their rearview mirror and sort of model a behavior that doesn't delegitimize the vote and the peaceful transfer of power. The problem is that I don't think it's that intellectually difficult to separate respect for the process from addressing the actual statements and behavior of this particular president. You don't have to be Mitch McConnell and act as though Barack Obama is fundamentally illegitimate. You can actually say no, this is a legitimately elected president who is engaging in illegitimate and illegal action and it is broadly illegitimate. We're not going to pick our battles by hoping that the judicial branch takes care of things that are actually illegal. We're going to look at the broader legitimacy of an effort to break government and we're going to lay our bodies down on the tracks for all of that. And that's where I think they're failing. They're failing to take that pretty obvious but intellectually courageous step.
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And meanwhile Trump and Elon Musk and Stephen Miller are just moving at this very fast clip to destabilize the government and remake America in the image of MAGA and not the Constitution. You know, you ended your column on what I found to be a pretty hopeful note and I hung onto it that people can maintain a sense of facts and values and not just obey in advance. Have you seen examples so far of people or institutions pushing back, not giving in? Whether they're large or small.
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So, yeah, I think it's actually really important to remember that even though it feels catastrophic, and it is catastrophic, what's happening? We haven't lost the war yet. We haven't even lost the battle. This particular battle that's happening in the early weeks of the second Trump presidency, where he's trying to break the Constitution over his knee, like, we haven't lost that battle yet. It is still possible to stop him. And I can't believe I'm about to say this, but the example would be the FBI. From what I understand, the FBI is really resisting the broad effort to fire agents. I mean, it's a huge attack on the.
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Based on loyalty and being tagged as part of these investigations.
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And it seems, for now that it is possible to mount such an effort.
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For me, in terms of speaking out. There was a rally recently where trans children and trans teenagers spoke out about what's happening with Trump and hospitals and the government. And I just found myself watching it and thinking, you know, if the youngest and least powerful among us can say these things, you know, can find a way to have a megaphone as big or small as possible, why can't the rest of us?
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That's a great point, and I'm afraid I have an answer. And the answer is the humanistic reasons, whatever reasons to be in advance, those are not available to the people who are being directly targeted. Trans people at this moment. In this country, trans people and immigrants, the effort is really to make them completely invisible in the society, in any kind of public space. In a sense, it's even more noticeable with trans people because with immigrants, the effect has been to make people stay home and not open the door, literally. But for now, unlike a lot of immigrants, trans people can stay in public space for a minute and say something, and that's what we're seeing.
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Trans Activist
I moved here from Florida because it's unsafe there. Now I am up safe again because Trump is president. I just want to live my life and be me. Thank you for supporting me, and please keep fighting for me.
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Patrick Healy
Masha, thanks so much for joining me.
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Thank you, Patrick.
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Podcast Introduction
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sofia Alvarez, Boyd, Vishaka Durba, Phoebe Lett, Christina Samulewski and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison 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, Christina Samulewski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.