C (3:36)

Regime change has a very permanent ring to it, don't you think?

E (3:39)

It does. And I think if you're asking me, will he succeed, I think that the good news over the last month is the rising opposition that this is called forth from the country. I know two recent special elections in Texas and last Saturday in Louisiana, where there were, these were Trump districts, there were 30 plus point swings away from the Republicans. He is throwing away all of the constituencies, the swing constituencies who came to him in the last election. So I'm not saying he will succeed at this, but I think he has become more and more aggressive at it. And we need to face up that this is not just some guy doing one random thing after another. This is somebody who is setting about in a systematic way to destroy institutions.

C (4:29)

David, you wrote a couple of weeks ago that we are in the midst of multiple unravelings and heading for a coming Trump crackup, which means.

B (4:40)

Yeah, well, those four unravelings. First, the unraveling of the Western alliance, the post Cold War alliance. Second, the unraveling that EJ Just described, our democratic order. Third, the unraveling of our domestic security, the sense that we live in a relatively free, at least free of state violence and we can no longer be sure of that. And then the fourth, and to me, the most important and the primary one, is the unraveling of Trump's mind, if you want to put it that way. I do think, you know, I've never met a president who wasn't more full of himself at the end of his term than at the beginning. They all become a little egotistical. If you start with Donald Trump's ego, you're really going places. And so if you look through history at the minds of people who are driven by a lust for power and who have tyrannical tendencies, the arc of history bends toward degradation. There's just not many cases where somebody was becoming more and more power hungry, more and more tyrannical, and they said, oh, I better put on the brakes here and become more moderate. That just doesn't happen. You get this process of mental deterioration that's in part caused by the way the lust for power makes you drunk on power, really, and is insatiable, partly because as you're driven by the lust for power, the environment you create around you becomes more sycophantic and has less checks, and partly because the people in this country have a tendency to lose the habits of democratic self government. And so I was looking at these classical historians, Tacitus and people like that Sallust and then later ones, Plutarch, Edward Gibbon, they had a front row seat at tyranny. And so they really understood it pretty well. And they talk about the fact that citizens lose the capacity for persuasion, for compromise, for interpersonal trust, the very fabric of democratic society. And when that is torn away, as Edward Gibbon write, you get what he calls every page of history is stained with civil blood. And I think we're heading toward that kind of decay.

C (6:36)

You know, to hear the two of you talk about an insatiable lust for power and regime change, it makes me feel obliged to ask you both a short answer question, which is, are you confident there will be elections in November and that the elections will go on as elections typically do?

D (6:58)

At the very least, that's not clear. And I think it's something that people began to worry about even more again over the last several weeks. When the FBI raided the Board of Elections down in Georgia in Fulton county, people said, well, this is about Trump's obsession with the fact that he falsely claims over and over again that he won the 2020 election. But I think a lot of people, especially when they discovered that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard was there, I think a lot of people saw this as an attempt to affect the election. And then Trump himself spoke of nationalizing the rules of the election, and then he said in 15 places, which sounded like Democratic states. And the beginning of that statement he made was, republicans should take over the elections. So I've spoken in the last couple of weeks to a lot of lawyers, lawyers anti Trump administration lawyers, I would say, who are genuinely concerned about basic things like will there be ICE agents at the polls, as Steve Bannon has threatened? Will he call out troops? Will this be about reducing turnout? I still like to hope that our decentralized system of elections makes it more difficult for him to disrupt them in this way. But everything he's done so far, I think, is, and maybe by design, is to make us more and more uneasy about whether these elections will be on the level.

C (8:30)

David, you have more than a hope.

B (8:32)

Yeah, I Have every confidence that we'll have an election. I think he's internalized that we are a democracy and that he needs to step down in 2028. And I say that for two reasons. One, historical. I was really moved. In 2020, I read a book by Samuel Huntington, the late great political scientist from Harvard, and the subtitle of the book was the Promise of Disharmony. And he argues that every couple decades, America goes through what he calls a moral convulsion, where people want to burn everything down. People get disgusted, social distrust collapses, a passionate generation comes on the scene, new form of communications technology. He said, this happens in the 1770s with the revolutionary period, happened in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson populism, 1890s, where you get these economic depressions, racial terrorism, mass political corruption, poverty. And it happened in the 1960s with bombings, assassinations, and so on. And writing in 1981, he says, I don't know if I believe in these cycles, but if the cycle holds, Sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, we'll go through another moral convulsion. And I'm like, well done, Professor Huntington. And the good news is you come out of them, that the society reacts and we have a culture change. We don't go back. And in this case, we should not go back to the pre Trump era, but we go forward. And the second reason, I just have tremendous faith in the power of the people manning our institutions, in the military, in the election officials on the state level, Republicans on the state level. So I think we'll hold one convulsion.

D (10:00)

You didn't have on your list, David, and that was the Civil War.

B (10:03)

We had elections then. I should point out that.

D (10:07)

And I think you've done the same. I've been doing a lot of reading over the recent years, in the 1850s into the 1860s, both the nature of the polarization, the anger, the violence, the threats against elected officials, the depth of the mistrust. And I find this period much closer to that than to some of these other periods where, yes, we've had a lot of fierce arguments in our history. Again, I share your confidence in the people running elections at the local level. I still have real worries that this administration will be willing to override so many of the rules that we have taken for granted. And so, you know, I hope you're right. I believe in disharmony. I think disharmony is part of freedom. But I don't think the administration believes disharmony is part.

B (11:00)

Just quickly, the one difference there is we had a major issue that really did divide the nation, and now we have Donald Trump, who's a force for chaos. But I don't think we're as ideologically divided over some major issue as they were over slavery.

C (11:11)

One more go around about Donald Trump, but not the Trump who would usurp the tariff authority from Congress or terrify Greenlanders with the news that they must become part of the United States. But I'm thinking more of the Trump whose minions, after taking over the Kennedy center, rename it for him, and who releases a video, a horrible racist video that caricatures the Obamas as apes without any apology. These have nothing to do with being president. I mean, the Greenland thing and the tariffs, that has to do with policy and the executive branch of government. What is this? And how do you think Americans are learning to cope with this person who seems to think that making America great again isn't even a work in progress, it's a fait accompli, and we should all be a grateful people that we now live in a great society.

B (12:04)

Say an intern released that video by accident or whatever. You take even their version, a normal person said America has a oral history and racism. What that video showed was abominable, and I denounce it. How hard is that? But this is a president who a needs to be the center of attention. That's part of tyranny, by the way. The need to constantly be the center of attention every second of every day. But second simply lack where the moral backbone would normally be or even the moral sentiment wouldn't normally be. And he stands for nihilism, a belief in nothing, that he stands for the idea, as Stephen Miller sort of put it, or Thucydides, if I'm going back from the Romans to the Greeks, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. And he's tried to create a world, not only domestically but international, where gangsters can thrive without any sense of internal restraint. And to me, the interesting question is, what the hell happened to us? Why do 77 million people last election took a look at Donald Trump and didn't see anything morally disqualifying? And I do not think that would have happened in America 50 years ago. I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump's arrival on the scene. And my quick story about that is, for all of American history, we had some sense of a shared moral order. There's a historian, George Marsden, I'll paraphrase what he wrote that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such force was the idea that moral law was written into the fabric of the universe, that slavery and segregation were not just wrong. Sometimes they're always wrong. And over the last 50 years, in my view, we've sort of privatized morality. We said there are no shared moral values, there's no ultimate truth. But everybody gets to come up with their own values.

C (13:47)

To each his own narrative.

B (13:48)

Yeah, you do, you, it's your truth. And if you do that, a, unless your name is Aristotle, you probably can't come with your own moral philosophy. I mean, most of us can't do that. But second, we have no shared morality on which to decide what's right and wrong. And with that, just basic shared standards of how a person should behave. And there's been that loss of just assumptions of this is what a president does, this is what a president doesn't do.

C (14:11)

But does that mean, EJ that Trump is getting a pass on anything from racism to megalomania?

D (14:17)

No. You've put a bunch of things on the table here, and I'll begin where you ended, which is, I think it's a mistake to look at Trump's election as a failure because of this complicated breakdown of any morality. I think there is still a strong moral sense among Americans. And you're seeing it in the backlash against the killings of Renee Good and Alex Preddy. You're seeing it in a lot of backlash out there where his approval rating has taken a real pounding. There is a solid base of support of about 30, 35% of Americans who believe that Trump against their enemies. And they're gonna be because he opposes those whom they oppose, they will be with him. But Trump wasn't elected because all these Americans lost their moral sense. He was elected partly because of partisanship that a lot of people who thought of themselves as Republican still preferred the Republican Donald Trump over someone like Kamala Harris. And partly because they couldn't believe that he would behave like this. And then a bunch of other Americans voted for him cuz they were mad about prices and disorder at the southern border. And just thought from the first term, well, he'll have some folks around him who will restrain him. He wasn't quite this wild. And they are regretting that now is what it looks like. But in terms of Trump himself, I think it does go back to something David said, which is that if you believe in yourself as an absolute power, if you claim absolute power, that you stop surrounding yourself with people who will question you and only surround yourself with people who will say whatever you do is right. And you have the kind of, I think, deterioration we're seeing in Trump himself. Then you do have somebody who can't apologize for a racist video like that and who continues to act in this way. And, you know, there was some Republican pushback against that video. But what's really striking is Republicans are still petrified of opposing this. And what you haven't seen is enough of the center right in the United United States. David's an exception, God bless him. But enough of the center right in politics in the United States is willing to say enough of this. And maybe that's a product of a two party system, but it's a real problem.

C (16:39)

And so we have a president who might have a sign behind him that says the buck stops with the intern.

D (16:47)

Harry Truman would be very upset.

C (16:50)

So David mentioned that this is his last day doing something journalistic for the New York Times. You've been a columnist here for 22 years and I just want to take a moment before we continue discussing to tell you how important your work has been over those 22 years, how I think you really expanded what a newspaper column might be about and what we have to expect whenever we read the same columnist could be very different from day to day. You've sampled the world of academe and found interesting sources for material without turning into an academic writer in the process. I have the greatest respect for you and I am very proud of my reassociation with you, as small as it may be.

D (17:37)

What I just wanted to say I brought a prop in today, David. It's your second book, I believe, on Paradise Drive. And I brought it in partly because of the inscription you wrote. This was published back in 2004, so 22 years ago. And we have been talking about politics together in various venues, but mostly with Robert. Thank goodness. For a long time. And you inscribed it to my good friend EJ Someday in the future we will agree on everything you said. And I contemplated this and the fact is we do agree on more now than we did 22 years ago. I think that's true. We had certain fundamentals in common. We both love Reinhold Niebuhr and I think that's a tribute to the fact that you have responded to events and that's why we agree on more now. Thank goodness. We're probably both happy about this. We do not agree on everything and we still like to argue with each other. And I'm very sad that this reunion that we've had recently is Going to come to such a quick end. But if I may cite a musical source, the Beach Boys. I still hope that we can get back together and do this again, again, again. So I'll miss you, David.

B (18:57)

Thank you. And thank you, gentlemen. We've been doing this for long times. Back to the 20th century, we were doing this.

C (19:04)

That's right.

B (19:05)

Viewers may not know that Robert and I are third cousins. We learned from a DNA test, and we grew up in the same housing project, Stivers in town in lower Manhattan. And E.J. and I have been joined at the hip for many decades. And, you know, one of the things that I was a lucky break. For me, a lot of things were lucky breaks. One, I had a grandfather who knew how to write. And as I mentioned, my final column, loved to write letters to the editor of the New York Times. And it was just so moving when I got this job to go from the kid, he was in Lower east side, going to City College, free college in New York, to working in the New York Times. That's a great American story. Another lucky break was I found my heroes early on. And I think both of you may share a bit of this if you haven't put it this way. I realized that in the 1950s and 1960s, there were a group of writers who were slightly above, like, normal journalism and below academia. And they were people like Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson and Digby Belsell and Daniel Bell.

C (20:03)

Vance Packard.

B (20:03)

Vance Packard.

D (20:05)

You're a role model. Originally.

B (20:06)

And so I said, that's where I want to be. And so I think I've tried to do that for the rest of my career, and I will continue to do that at the.

C (20:15)

You have done it very, very well. Now, here's the question. Ready? Okay. 22 years. Let's think about that span of time for a moment. When you think back on the days when you began writing the column and today, what's different? What's most different about the work or the world that we live in, the country? What would you say?

B (20:35)

Well, it hasn't gotten any easier to write. I can tell you that. I think I've changed an enormous amount. My wife and I have been married for nine years, and when she looks at a video of me from, like, 20 years ago, she says, well, I wouldn't have married that guy. And so I think I've become a little more emotionally open and emotionally vulnerable. And I think what's changed has not been good. As I said in my final column, we were a more hopeful country. We had faith in Institutions that was greater. We had faith in America's role in the world. We had faith in our alliances. Barack Obama could run that, that 2008 campaign filled with idealism and hope, and you can run against a guy, John McCain, filled with a sense of honor. And we've lost faith in institutions, we've lost faith in ourselves, and we've lost faith in each other. And so to me, one of the reasons I want to devote more of my life to academia and to teaching young and to writing longer essays is just I think we have a spiritual and relational and moral crisis we're dealing with. And I figured I could make some little contribution over there.

D (21:34)

When we were talking, Robert, you said we were gonna look over this 22 year period. I think the two times in that period that David and I came as we weren't close to coming to blows, but when we were really angry at each other in a way that was unusual for the way we talked about this. One was during the recount in Florida, where I actually remember having to join All Things Considered. So stopping at the side of the road on the Beltway, I was on my way to somewhere and the Supreme Court ruled that we're just gonna stop counting the votes in Florida. And then the other some during the Iraq war. Those were two really difficult periods. But when you think about, you know, David talks about correctly, a certain loss of confidence, a loss of ability to argue about real things in a way where argument is seen as leading you somewhere as opposed to just continuing on indefinitely. Think about what people in their 30s or 20s lived through in that period. We came out of a period of enormous prosperity. We thought peace would last forever. The Berlin Wall was down, and quickly we had 911 and then endless wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.

E (22:46)

That went on and on.

D (22:47)

Then we had the economic collapse of 2008. So the country itself has gone through a lot of trauma. We had the pandemic. And so I think that there are a lot of reasons why we are where we are, but I think that trauma we still have not fully come to terms with or come out the other side of. And we've got to get there at some point.

C (23:11)

One measure of change for me is that I remember covering first from Washington from a distance, and then down New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina. And of course, one of the great solutions to the problem of 911 was to create a single department, a single agency that would bring together virtually every design we could possibly experience as a country would be the work of the Secretary of Homeland Security, who Was Mike Chertoff at that time? And I remember wondering in New Orleans, was it really such a great idea to have every threat facing our country on one man's desk?

D (23:47)

I'm really glad you raised that. I'm curious what David thinks about this. Ben Rhodes had a very good piece in the Times about a week or so ago, and people talk about, abolish ICE. And I heard Jim McGovern, progressive Democrat from Massachusetts, put it the same, but different. He said, let's scrap it and start over. And I think this is the time to rethink the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Does the Coast Guard belong in there? Does FEMA belong in there? That agency was put together. And by the way, homeland is just not much of an American word. Yeah, no, it's a terror. It's not a word we ever used as a nation. And so I think this is a time to, you know, let's use that. That sort of battle cry, abolish ice. And let's take it in the direction of rethinking how we created this agency under a lot of pressure. The country was scared, legitimately so. And you don't always do your best work in government when you're scared. And I think DHS is an example of that.

B (24:49)

You know, I was once at a dinner that Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, had with a bunch of journalists, and he said, every reform I initiated my first term turned out exactly backwards from how I expected it to. And he said, I'm an anti reform reformer now because it never works. And that's why I'm a conservative. And to quote Edmund Burke, you should operate on society the way you would operate on your father, as humbly, as incrementally, and as delicately as possible. So I would be for reforming dhs, not tearing it down.

C (25:20)

Okay, on that note, our final question has been the same in every one of these, which is what's been some source of joy that you've experienced? Ej, we start with, I just want.

D (25:30)

To say I thought that Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl, I didn't like the outcome. I'm an ardent Patriots fan. But that was an extraordinary thing. And I came at a particular time after, you know, with a reckoning in the country about what ICE is doing. But he was incredibly political. By being less directly political, he reminded us of the depth of how Latino music matters to Americans. Going way back, I was thinking of Ritchie Valance and La Bamba, which, you know, is one of the most covered hits of all time, but also the sense of community and love. That was a real marriage that happened, a real wedding that happened in the middle of that. It was a beautiful tribute to a very important piece of our tradition.

C (26:33)

My source of joy involved going to New York in part to celebrate our older daughter's 50th birthday. I'm contacting the hospital asking for a recount. I think there's some. There must be something wrong with that for that to be. But we also saw our other daughter in something called Diaspora, an immersive, dramatic experience of which she was a singer. And the music director, Leah Segal. And it was just a wonderful evening about women's stories fleeing from their native lands. David, you have the final word.

B (27:04)

Well, leaving the New York Times is not joyous. I'm filled with intense gratitude and entrenched terror because I had to do something new. But I had a weird moment where sometimes you run to a great teacher. And this is gonna sound trivial, but it produced tremendous joy for me. In the last week, I've played tennis off and on my whole life. My backhand is okay. My forehand has been terrible since I was 14, which is terrible. And I had this French guy named Justin give me a lesson, and he told me exactly how to do beforehand. And I can't tell you how much pleasure it now gives me to walk on the court knowing I don't have to run around my forehand forever and just getting competent at something or semi competent at something. I think we all have the desire to get semi competent at something. And for some kids, you're like, you watch them skate down a stairway and they're falling, falling, falling until they can pull the trick. And now I'm semi competent in having a forehand. I don't know why that gives me such pleasure, but it does.

C (28:01)

Well, congratulations on both your forehand and also whatever lies ahead instead of being a columnist. David. E.J. thanks to both of you.

B (28:13)

Thank you.

D (28:14)

Thank you.

A (28:33)

If you like this show, follow it on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishaka Darba and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Allison Bruzick. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro, Efim Shapiro and Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. The head of operations is Shannon Busta. Audience support by Christina Samuluski. The director of Opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.