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- [00:00]
A
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B
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C
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A
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D
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B
Remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that define some of today's most influential companies. Hosted by Sequoia's Roelof Botha, Crucible Moments Season three pulls back the curtain on the untold stories behind companies like Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Supercell and more. Hear about the make or break decisions, early stumbles and leaps of faith that turn scrappy star startups into market defining forces. Once you're caught up on season three, check out some of the episodes from seasons one and two. With guests like Steven Chen of YouTube, Tony Xu of Doordash, Steve Huffman of Reddit, Brian Chetzky of airbnb, and more. Tune in to Sequoia's new season of Crucible Moments to discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were built. Crucible Moments is available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com go listen to Crucible Moments today.
- [02:02]
A
Welcome to the to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. 2025 was a massive stress test of our institutions, the rule of law, American democracy, and what it felt like to be an American. So let's talk about all of this. What was lost, what was broken and how did we survive? This will be the first of a series of year in review shows. Stick around as we have a lot of work to do. And joining me in our first year in review show, our good friend Susan Glaser from the New Yorker. Susan, how are you? You made it. You made it to the end of the year.
- [02:43]
C
Well, exactly. Great to be with you, Charlie. Thank you so much.
- [02:46]
A
Well, we have a lot of ground to cover, so let's just talk about this this year. And there's so much to do, and I'm gonna try to keep it thematic because as opposed to the top 10 stories that happened this particular year. But give me your sense, because you've been covering this for a very long time. How would you compare 2025, the first year of Trump's second administration, with 2017, the first year of his first administration? Because we thought that 2017 was a wild and crazy ride, and now it seems, wow, much calmer in comparison. Give me a sense of what's different in 2025 versus 2017.
- [03:26]
C
Yeah, I mean, look, I think I'm glad to start with that, Charlie, because in many ways, I think part of the shock of 2025 is people having forgotten that this is not year one of the Trump era in our politics, but, you know, essentially year 10, if you go back to when he first rode down that golden escalator, you know, and so 10 years in, part of the story is that we become inward or that we've forgotten just all the disruption and upheaval that brought us to this moment. And so I think the reason a lot of people look back on 2017 and have this sense that somehow it wasn't as crazy or disruptive as 2025 is because institutions were still functioning in a way that they're not anymore, or that they've become significantly deteriorated. To me, the big story of Trump's first term, especially the beginning of his first term, was the unfinished business of fully taking over and consolidating his power over the Republican Party. And so Trump is still fighting the kind of rear guard action with. With holdout Republican establishment types who hadn't expected him to win in 2016. And it's all about the drama of forcing out the last remnants of the John McCain party, basically. And so that drama is an internal resistance which limits his ability to project force on the broader body politic in the way that now Republicans have long since fully rolled over for Donald Trump.
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A
And so not just Republicans.
- [05:16]
C
Yeah, exactly. So his focus was on expanding and consolidating his power and reach in the society at large.
- [05:23]
A
So if the year started with shock and awe, how did it end? What was the trajectory of the year? Because we look back at the beginning and Democrats were demoralized, you know, felt like they were on the back foot. We had one institution after, after another that was caving in. There had been so much capitulation in advance, even before the presidency began. Then you had the flurry of activity and the appointments and everything. So it did feel as if we had a good, what, you know, four, five, six months of just pure shock and awe. How did 2025, how do you feel? What was the arc of 2025?
- [06:03]
C
Yeah, it's a great question, I would say from shock and awe to anger and disbelief. And you know that that's where the year is ending. There's a lot of angry people, frankly, across the political spectrum, both as the full import of what Trump and his backers have done with and to the federal government. But also there's this anger within the Trump coalition and you know, then there's Donald Trump's, I think, disbelief and at the political situation he himself finds himself in at the end of the year. Right. He has, he has sunk very notably in the polls. He is, you know, really into the 30s in terms of public approval. His disapproval is pushing 60% or even more on certain issues. The economy is plagued by persistent inflation that he denies exists or claims is a Democratic problem. Is a nice trick, right? To both deny that it exists and also say the Democrats created it. But to me, that's the disbelief about where we are at as a country combined with just a pretty palpable sense of anger and rage across the political spectrum.
- [07:27]
D
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- [08:12]
B
We all remember the choices that shaped the course of our lives in business. World renowned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible moments. Their podcast brings you inside the pivotal decisions that define some of today's most influential companies. Hosted by Sequoia's Roloff Botha Crucible Moments Season three pulls back the curtain on the untold stories behind companies like Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Supercell, and more. Hear about the make or break decisions, early stumbles and leaps of faith that turn scrappy startups into market defining forces. Once you're caught up on season three, check out some of the episodes from seasons one and two with guests like Steven Shen of YouTube, Tony Hsu of DoorDash, Steve Huffman of Reddit, Brian Chetzky of Airbnb, and more. Tune in to Sequoia's new season of Crucible Moments to discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were built. Crucible Moments is available everywhere you get your podcasts and@CrucibleMoments.com go listen to Crucible Moments. Today.
- [09:14]
A
At this time of year we go through the exercise what was, you know, the biggest story of the year? And you know, as I was jotting a number of things down, it occurred to me that the biggest stories of 2020 are actually hangovers from 2024. I mean, the obvious one being Donald Trump's return to power, but just the impact of the Supreme Court decision from last year immunizing him and then all of the premature capitulation of all of the institutions. You know, I think back to that moment when ABC decided it was going to pay him off, which then started. It felt like a domino effect, a cascading effect of, you know, law firms and universities and other media outlet. So give me your sense. It feels as if the shock of 2025 is not merely that Donald Trump did what he said he was going to do, it's just the collapse of all of those institutions and all of the guardrails that we thought might restrain him. And a lot of that goes back to 2024, doesn't it?
- [10:16]
C
Yeah, that's a really interesting insight. You know, I'm still getting over and struggling with my frustration at how many people who are critics of Donald Trump who were aware on some level of the risks that his return to office posed. Their lack of preparedness, lack of real clear eyed understanding of the nature of the threats posed by him. I'm sure you've encountered this a lot in the last few weeks, Charlie, but for me, you know, listening to people who I respect tell me again and again, well, you know, I had no idea it would be this bad. And it's, you know, that it's a very hard thing at the end of a year that when so much damage you know, has been done to think about what does that mean? Does that mean that you had a whole 2024 campaign in which many Democrats simply did not believe the existential rhetoric that they were espousing publicly? Right. You know, they, they're claiming in the 2024 campaign that Donald Trump poses this, you know, terrible threat to American democracy, but yet in their own hearts and minds, they couldn't accept it and they weren't prepared. I mean, you know, it's really, it's a very frustrating thing from the point of view of people who, you know, try to be as clear eyed as possible, recognizing it's very hard to know exactly what to do. Right. You know, that analysis in some level is, understanding the problem is a hell of a lot easier than knowing exactly what to do about it. But still, I find it difficult to process what it tells us about the weakness of American political institutions, including the Democratic Party, including independent writers, thinkers and commentators, that they couldn't quite believe their own analysis, it seems to me about it. So, sure, you can say it's a hangover from 2024, and yet I would say that the, the thing we learned about 2025 was that a hell of a lot of opponents of Donald Trump actually weren't really prepared to do anything about Donald Trump. That's number one. Number two, the weakness of people in power in our society far outside of just, you know, the Republican leaders in Congress who quite predictably, you know, kind of caved to Trump. Although you could say, you know, was it predictable or was it actually shocking that Congress decided not even to stand up for itself when it came to its most basic constitutional power of the power of the purse. I thought maybe that was a line that would be drawn, like to literally have Donald Trump close down agencies authorized by Congress and for Congress not to say a damn thing like, you know, that.
- [13:02]
A
That was remarkable.
- [13:03]
C
It was remarkable. I think Elon Musk's assault, and I think assault is the right word on the federal government and the extent to which he was allowed to do that is remarkable. And I don't think we fully, I did not fully anticipate that he would execute the U.S. agency for International Development and all foreign aid within months or weeks, really, of coming into office. No, I didn't anticipate that because I didn't anticipate that courts and the Congress which authorized this agency for decades.
- [13:39]
A
Yes.
- [13:40]
C
Would let someone get away with an illegal action like this. This is an illegal action. You know, it is.
- [13:47]
A
You say illegal as if it means something anymore.
- [13:50]
C
I Know, like, come on, like, you know, what the hell is the point of Congress if they pass laws and the president can ignore them, then we don't live in a rule of law society. I'm sorry, Like, I literally don't understand. You know, you can say, and I wouldn't agree with it necessarily, but I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but certainly I understand that when it comes to, like, Trump's first impeachment, you could make some kind of a legal argument in the courts that, you know, this amount of money could be reprogrammed due to national security, whatever, and that the president's national security powers are very vast. I might not agree with that, but I certainly would respect it if, you know, our constitutional system came to that conclusion. But pulling out, when you look at the really striking events of 2025, even with the Supreme Court's immunity decision in 2024, I would argue, and I don't know what you would say, that the notion that Congress can pass multiple laws over decades authorizing the existence of federal agencies, that the President and his agent Elon Musk, can simply shut those agencies down, fire all the people, again, who have been authorized, whose jobs have been paid for by acts of Congress. Those are laws. Acts of Congress are laws. And that that would not be stopped is at its biggest picture sense, an illegal act.
- [15:25]
A
It's an illegal theory of the renaming the Kennedy center, blowing up boats in the Caribbe, and to which the Trump administration basically says, yeah, what are you gonna do about it? So this is really an interesting question because I agree with your analysis completely here. And, you know, part of it is, you know, I mean, look, the warnings about Trump were so clear, were so, I mean, obvious. If you paid attention to him, if you listened to him, one of the big lies of 2024 was that he had nothing to do with Project 2025. It was the blueprint. But I think there was a certain complacency or naivete. And the conversations that I've had were not that Trump wouldn't try to do stuff. It's like, well, you know, he would never get away with that. There's no way that you would be able to do these things, because I think that there was a certain maybe nostalgic, naive view that the institutions and the guardrails were still in place and they would still hold. And so when they started crumbling, you know, when the billionaire oligarchs began, you know, bending the knee, when the corporate media began bending the knee, when law firms began caving in, when you know, corporate media began caving in, and then when Congress basically said, yeah, you know what? We're comfortable being a complete potted plant, and the Supreme Court essentially kind of shrugged at many of these abuses. That I think was kind of the shock to realize how much not just the rules of politics have changed, but the rules of government. And, again, I wasn't shocked by what Trump did. I guess maybe I was shocked by the speed with which he acted and. And the nakedness with which he acted. But I think the real shock was the lack of resistance, was the lack of. So what do you do? Do you go to court? Do you have votes in Congress? And, again, this is something that the Founding Fathers just simply did not envision, let's be honest. But these were not naive men. These were very, very savvy in many ways, cynical about human nature, but they assumed that there would be a jealousy that would keep the checks and balances in our government intact. And all of them seem to just dissolve early in the year. And I think that that's what accounts for this. Wait, there's a specific law. How do you do that? And now, even at the end of the year, when things, I think are not going so well, there is kind of that shrugging. It's illegal, but what are you gonna do about it? He's got the power in three more years in office.
- [17:57]
C
Yeah, no, I do agree with that, Charlie. I think going back to this notion of the guardrails and that fallacy that so many people seem to have held, that's a particularly painful one for me, because I feel like that was one of the reasons that Peter and I wrote our book, the Divider, is to understand what had happened in Trump's first term. And the conclusion that we came to was very clearly that people were deluding themselves, and this book was published in September 22, that people were deluding themselves if they believed that the story of Trump 1.0 was the story of guardrails holding. And, in fact, by especially doing a deep dive on what happened in 2020, and with not only the election and Trump's effort to overturn it, but even what led up to was very clear, even to us several years ago, that the story there was the story of how we were only one Attorney General and one vice president and one chairman of the Joint Chiefs away from a very, very different outcome in 2020. And that was just very clear. If you looked very closely at what actually unfolded in Trump's first term, it was not a story of institutional norms and guardrails being upheld, quite the opposite. It was a story about individuals, a few individuals, many of them very flawed, by the way, many of them who were both enablers of Donald Trump and in the end, resistors to him, like William Power, good example. He was an enabler of Donald Trump who did many things to politicize the Justice Department, many things that we might disagree with or that are now happening on a kind of super sized scale in Pam Bondi's Justice Department. And yet even Barr had a line he wouldn't cross. And for him, that was the line of Trump's effort to delegitimize the 2020 election based on no facts and evidence. And Bill Barr made a public statement to that effect in December of 2020 and then resigned when he thought he had. Finally, in late December, when he thought he had contained the problem, the acting Attorney general that he left in place was then challenged by Donald Trump who sought to co opt him. And it turned out that he also had that as a red line and wouldn't go along with it. What if he had? What if he had? We'd have been in a different world. What if Mike Pence was JD Vance and not Mike Pence? We'd have been in a different world. And so I hear you about the guardrails, but it makes me very frustrated because I think what the hell was the Democratic leadership of this country doing for the last few years that they did not pay attention to this? I think, certainly if you want to look at, you know, if you were a historian, you know, and had the benefit of hindsight, looking at what happened in the interregnum period between Trump's first term and his second term, One of the things you'd want to interrogate is what could a Democratic Congress have done that they did not do to protect America's institutions more? That's one thing, another set of questions. And again, historians will be digging through this for a long time, would be what could have been done to prepare civil society more? The leadership of big institutions, the leadership of academia and law firms. You could say that the attacks on academia were both shocking, right? Like, did you really predict that Donald Trump was going to cancel cancer research grants because of, quote, dei? No, probably not. But at the same time, it was predictable that the far right has been wanting to go after big brand name academic institutions for a long time and that people like J.D. vance, you know, if empowered, would go after the institution. So, you know, what could those places have done to be better prepared? And I have a lot of Questions without answer so far on all these fronts.
- [22:14]
A
You know, this is a really important point because. And the more I think back on that four year interregnum, it feels like a lost opportunity, it feels like a failure. It feels like just a failure to come to grips with what the actual threat was. I mean, the prime directive of the Biden administration, I think, was to prevent the return of Donald Trump to power and to somehow batten down the hatches. And they obviously did not do that. In part, it goes back to this complacency, naivete or delusion that somehow the fever had broken, that it was something that we no longer needed to worry about, that these threats had been contained, that the problem had been solved when it had not. And so I think that history is going to ask exactly those kinds of questions. You know, and you look back at this year and some of the other things that, I mean, you know, the year begins 2025. I think one of the most consequential things happened, happened on the first day of Trump's presidency, the pardon of all the January 6th defendants, which we knew was coming. But what was extraordinary was how sweeping it was that he pardoned the ones who had been engaged in actual acts of violence against police officers, the ones who had been convict of sedition. And I think that that was a real, you know, prologue to what's happened. You know, the cronies, the allies, the drug kingpins, you know, the crypto crooks, the attacks on the courts. If there was any doubt that this was going to be an administration of retribution, in which really a lot of the, you know, moral verities that we had counted on were going to be turned on their heads. Probably we got the answer the first day, and then it was just swept away by everything else. You know, how much time can we even devote to the corruption that followed that? The corruption on a scale never before seen? I mean, we were warned about authoritarianism, and we got something worse, perhaps an oligarchy and an absolutely imperial presidency. Your husband, Peter Baker, had a great piece in the New York Times talking about how basically in just a few months, Donald Trump has personalized the presidency in a way that we haven't seen since we had kings in this country. So really, almost whatever category you pick, the change happened so quickly and was so fundamental. And I do think it always comes back to this unpreparedness or unwillingness to push back, this sense of being caught by surprise by something that we'd been warned about for a decade.
- [25:07]
C
Yeah, I mean, to the point about unchecked executive authority being a signature of this Trump second term. You know, first of all, we never had kings in this country. You know, it's founding and its identity were premised on the idea that we never could. That is incompatible with the very notion of individuals having a role in shaping their own destiny. Right. And by the way, you know, look at the constitutional monarchy that exists in Great Britain today. Let's just say that King Charles doesn't have anywhere near the power that Donald Trump has ceded to himself essentially over the last nine months with the implicit and tacit encouragement of the Supreme Court of the United States and Republican leaders in both the U.S. house of Representatives and the U.S. senate. But actually, Donald Trump is ruling with more power than King Charles could ever aspire to in the system that exists in Great Britain today. Ask our friends in Canada whether they would prefer their actual king to our wannabe king, and you know what the answer to that is gonna be. But more seriously, Charlie, I do think this sweeping executive overreach, it's like a lot of the trends with Trump. He didn't invent the accretion of power in the executive branch. What he's done is to kind of blow up any sense of context or moderation that would go along with it. Right. So it's been a long term thing over both your and my adult lifetime in many ways, actually, I think that Donald Trump is sort of like Richard Nixon's fever dream come to life. You know, all the things that in the privacy of the Oval Office, Richard Nixon dreamed about doing. You know, from persecuting his enemies to being as kind of racist and hateful as he wanted to be, to having unchecked power to do exactly what he wanted in foreign affairs. That Richard Nixon was the guy who said out loud publicly what probably many presidents, but certainly this president dreams of, which is in his famous interview after he left the White House in disgrace, where he said, basically, it's not illegal if the president does it. You know, that might as well be a motto for our time, unfortunately.
- [27:44]
A
So, I mean, you would hope that at some point maybe, you know, the Trump presidency will be this cautionary tale. This is what we meant when we warned you about the accretion of power in the presidency. This is why we don't want an imperial presidency, because I think that people kind of shrugged it off and they objected to an imperial presidency when the other party had it, but when they had it, they had no problem. But I don't know. So I think of like signature moments from the last year. And I don't think this was a year of moments, because it feels like more of a just kind of the themes. But, you know, if you had to pick like one moment, I think that that scene in the Oval Office was it in February where Trump and J.D. vance beat up on Volodymyr Zelensky. And that was also part of when, you know, the United States cast its vote with Russia and the United nations. And you got the sense that America was switching sides, that, that, that the Donald Trump was taking, was dismantling the entire architecture of the post, you know, World War II Western order. And I think there's also been a lot of denial about that. Like, no, we'll be able to put things together. But in terms of, you know, looking back on the year, the transformation of America's place in the world and its foreign policy, which is now they put in writing, is truly extraordinary. Now, some of us worried and warned about that he would want to pull us out of NATO, and yet he's done something more fundamental than that. He's just reoriented our entire relationship to the world and the world's democracies. And, you know, that. Just talk to me a little bit about that, because that seems to be fundamentally important, but also is gonna have a lasting effect. It feels like we're gonna have a hangover from that for decades, if not generations.
- [29:38]
C
Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, in Donald Trump's first term, we think we understood pretty clearly his preference for America's adversaries and preference to sort of berate our allies, that that was one of the main shocking things about Trump 1.0. The difference is, with completely supine advisors like Susie Wiles or Marco Rubio, he's had a free hand to sort of operationalize that in a way that has turned out to be far more radical than many people understood, in part because what he's done is he's not just sucking up to the Vladimir Putin's and Xi Jinping's of the world anymore. He's adopted their worldview as a version of America's foreign policy. He has now said and codified in the national security strategy that you referenced, basically a world of great power, spheres of influence that harkens back to the late 19th century and essentially says, leave us to do as we will unchecked in the Western Hemisphere. And we're done with being the world's lone superpower. We're done with the burden of global leadership. And so, you know, bring on the tyranny and the anarchy. And to the extent we are engaged elsewhere in the world, it is in a very transactional, you know, essentially almost extortionate way. We'll use our might and our power at will, and you can pay us off and be a part of our umbrella or not. But what we really care about is creating a new definition of national security threat, which involves us sending massive armadas of the most powerful navy that the world has seen into the Caribbean, along with a bunch of cruise ships to fight ghosts and demons of little tiny drug smuggling boats, while also having a view of national security as being about attacking the enemies within. And for me, this is probably the most worrisome aspect of Trump's transformation. Rather than thinking about our actual adversaries like Russia and China as adversaries, what Donald Trump is doing is saying that or other Americans are his enemies, we are the enemies. He wants to use the full powers of the national security state and the Pentagon to go after fellow Americans and people within our borders. And, you know, that is if Joseph McCarthy had become the President of the United States, which, thank God, he never did. That is a Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn vision of national security in which you are using these weapons against your fellow Americans.
- [32:37]
A
Well, we've gone through these periods. I mean, we had the Red Scare under Wilson, we had the McCarthy era. But as you pointed out, he was not the President of the United States. But I think this is actually one of the more undercovered stories, to be quite honest. I mean, nothing's undercovered, really. But, you know, when Pam Bondi came out with her memo about the domestic terrorists and domestic extremists and the way she defined dissent, I mean, the irony, they campaign on we are the party of free expression. And now they really are turning their attention to fellow Americans, you know, cracking down on them. And I think that's going to escalate. I mean, they've made no secret of the fact that they're going to use the full power of the legal system to go after liberal progressive organizations, they're going to go after their tax exempt status. You've seen the pressure they put on the universities. I mean, what was that document, how it defined domestic extremism? If you criticized traditional views of the family, if you criticized, you know, basically immigration crackdowns, all of those things. So, again, this is something that I don't think a lot of Americans thought that you would have this frontal an attack, not just on your political enemies, but on all sorts of dissent. And they, they are serious about it. And I Do Wonder what those 10,000 extra ICE agents are going to do when they. When they run out of bad people to catch you. We're pumping $150 billion in the next four years into this sort of private police force. What do we expect that that's going to be doing?
- [34:08]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. If you create a war department, then the next thing is you need a war to fight. And since Donald Trump has no intention of fighting the war for Ukraine, you know, the war that he wants to fight is the war here at home and in our hemisphere. And I think, you know, again, this is something that it's painful to recognize, but people just were deluding themselves and with their heads in the sand about this. Because, Charlie, this is another example where Donald Trump fully communicated this before the 2024 election. In fact, I have repeatedly quoted this year an interview that he gave to Bloomberg In October of 2024, before the election, in which he was asked about his second term national security policy. And he said, well, we have enemies like in Russia and China, and then we have the enemy within. And of those, the enemy within is the greatest threat. And that was in October of 2020.
- [35:09]
A
He said that numerous times. Yeah.
- [35:10]
C
Yeah. I just wanted to answer your question because it is important about that sort of iconic moment when it was clear that Trump was switching sides in the war between Russia and Ukraine and the beating up of Zelensky, followed by months and months of pointless and damaging efforts to force him to concede land to Russia that Russia has not gained on the battlefield. I would kind of combine this with another iconic moment of 2025 that I do think will live on in the sort of hall of Shame of this year, which is the image of Donald Trump greeting the war criminal Vladimir Putin at an American air base in Alaska on a red carpet, and that this was America's response to the man who, unprovoked, initiated the deadliest war in Europe since the end of World War II with an unprovoked invasion of his neighbor. Again, one that the policy of the United States and its allies up until that very moment when Donald Trump greeted Putin on the red carpet, was to stand with Ukraine as long as it takes to end this aggression. And so I think this is a national shame and humiliation. And by the way, I did write that at the time. And I think we should go back and look at all the people, many of them critics of Donald Trump, not just supporters who kept wanting to defy experience and evidence and pretend that Donald Trump was engaged in any kind of legitimate or on the level diplomacy with Vladimir Putin. And that just wasn't the case. And I was shocked frankly at the time, Charlie, that more people were not just saying in a very straightforward way in August, again, sure, we would love for the war to end, but why can't. Donald Trump is still succeeding with so many people in setting the terms of, on which he's covered even by his critics, that I was couldn't believe how many people didn't just look at that event and say, okay, the news here is that America has shamefully abandoned Ukraine and greeted Vladimir Putin on a frickin red carpet in Alaska.
- [37:45]
A
There were so many shameful moments like that. So among the things that are surprises and again, you know, going back to, we shouldn't have been surprised by a lot of things. And I want to get your sense of whether there were any turning points or any, you know, shines, you know, light at the end of the tunnel type things. Actually that's. Take that out. I don't mean, you know, I mean cracks, cracks of light. So the one issue that he had really going for him himself, and I think that he had a tremendous advantage on was on immigration. And he made no secret of the fact that they were gonna have mass deportations. They actually had signs back in Milwaukee at the convention, mass deportations. And of course we started the year with the renditions, you know, stories of the people who were being put on the planes and sent to the Salvadoran Gulag, a story that we, we may or may not ever see on 60 Minutes on CBS under, under Barry Weiss, we've had the troops in the street. But what's interesting has been that, and by the way, you could certainly make the case that this was one of the Biden administration's greatest failings, that they failed to control the border, that they didn't understand the potency of that issue. And, and yet Donald Trump seems to have squandered that. I think that he and Stephen Miller thought that putting troops on the street was going to be a winner. They thought that this harsh crackdown, it does appear that there is a backlash to that, that they have overplayed their cards. Do you sense a shift in this? Because this is one that I would have assumed that Donald Trump would feel that he rode to power with this kind of thing. Right. That the wind would be at his back. Is this an issue that's breaking bad for him in any way, do you think?
- [39:28]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that Donald Trump sees immigration as core to why he won the presidency both in 2016 and in 2024. And those mass deportation now signs definitely remain for me, one of the most sort of powerful visuals of that campaign, in part because you and I both saw in Milwaukee that it was one of the driving issues for the MAGA faithful that, you know, when there were applause lines at that Republican Convention in 2024, this was really one of the only ones, aside from Donald Trump's name itself, that really motivated people. What I noticed was it was the mass deportation now was what they were cheering for, and then anything having to do with getting men out of women's sports or anti trans, you know, that those were the two kind of culture war issues that really, viscerally were motivating that electorate that came out to vote for Donald Trump in 2024. If anything, the surprise to me was that these horror images that we now are kind of inflicted on almost a daily basis, you know, these videos of the ICE agents dragging somebody, woman out of her car, attacking minivans that are dropping children off at school, you know, military like, raids in the apartment houses in Chicago, that I thought that would happen Sooner, actually in 2025. And I was surprised that at least initially, that didn't really happen. Now that it is happening, and we're kind of all living in this, this world where it's very hard to avoid these very traumatic and traumatizing and upsetting images of, you know, obviously peaceful, non violent, non criminal type people being subjected to, you know, massed armed thugs attacking them. Like, you know, that just, it seems very disturbing. And I think that's fueling some of the political backlash to Trump's immigration policies that, you know, I think so too, that people might think, well, even if I supported closing the border or sending violent criminals out of the country, I wasn't supporting this. Now, to me, it's an inevitable consequence of needing to drive up the numbers as high as you can and also unleashing this kind of militarized force on the country and essentially telling them the gloves are off. Trump always is urging them on in an unrestrained way that I think is resulting in some of these abusive situations that we see. But I find it one of the most upsetting aspects of this time we're living in. Frankly, you can't just totally ignore it, it seems to me, Charlie, because to do so is to willfully, you know, pretend that these abuses are not being done by the way, in your name and my name. I know, but at the same time, you can't just marinate in these awful videos either, because it's just so disturbing, but it's antithetical to what many people believe about what this country stands for. And, you know, we're all the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren of immigrants. And, and it's not that hard for Americans, whatever their policy views, to imagine, you know, this being done to their own families at the point in which they began their American story.
- [43:12]
A
Well, and I think, you know, one of the things that's always hard to figure out is what breaks through. As, you know, we live in these alternative reality, you know, the things that, you know, get everybody excited. You know, hair on fire in the MSNBC green room are, you know, completely, you know, unknown for, you know, much of the rest of the country. But some things do break through. I think these videos have broken through. I think they. And you tell me whether you agree. I think the tearing down of the East Wing kind of broke through. Clearly, the Epstein files has broken through. I think that his crude response to Rob Reiner, all of these things seem to have crossed the line. And I just want to get your sense because. But Donald Trump in 2025, you know, he starts off, starts off the year, you know, feeling like he was invincible and strong. But, you know, as the years gone on, he feels less inhibited. Less inhibited, less disciplined, little more just, I mean, willing to say things like, yeah, I did call them shithole countries. I am willing to say these things. Feels a little bit like things are a little shakier ground. So give me your sense of. You're a long, long time Trump observer.
- [44:28]
C
Not an honor I aspired to in my life, Charlie.
- [44:31]
A
Well, I mean, I mean, I had the knee jerk reaction when he attacked Rob Reiner. Like, we learned nothing. This is who he's always been. But the reality is, is that it does feel as if Trump is, well, he's all out of bleeps to give or whatever, just, I mean, you know, just completely unrestrained. And as we have things like that speech to the nation, which was just a complete clusterfuck. It was embarrassing and everything. So give me your sense of his arc, the Donald Trump arc in 2025.
- [45:04]
C
Yeah, no, thank you for. I think this is really important. Look, you have a president pushing 80 who is clearly less able than he was before, not only to project the physical strength and vigor that is so core to who he wants to be to the public. Right. You know, he literally, the word strong is his favorite word in his vocabulary. And so the weaker and older that he becomes, the more I think unhinged he'll be as a result of, you know, no longer being able to project himself in the way that he wants to. You know, and that is always the risk factor of electing a man who at the time he was elected, is the oldest ever to be elected to a second term. So, you know, that is inherently a destabilizing and I think major risk factor in the Trump second term because the more Trump faces adversity, we've all seen what happens. He's an escalator. He tends to go more and more over the top. And I think he's less able to restrain himself, as you pointed out. You know, Peter, my husband did an analysis last year during the 2024 campaign where he looked at the difference in Trump's speeches and things like that for signs of aging from his 2016 campaign. And first of all, the evidence is right before your eyes. Go look at a clip of Donald Trump speaking at a rally in 2016 versus Donald Trump speaking at a rally in 2024, 2025, and you'll immediately notice the difference. He's much older. He's much less structured and disciplined. This is a man who really no longer even pretends to find a noun and a verb and a period in his sentences. And in fact, the amount of time that he was speaking more than doubled from the 2016 campaign to the 2024 campaign. I'm mindful of that when he went back on the road recently to try to persuade Americans that there's just an affordability hoax rather than an affordability crisis. And he spoke at the rally for 97 minutes. So this is, I think, a sign of where we're headed with him. Sort of late stage incontinence, dictator, basically. Verbal incontinence, increasing grandiosity. He's clearly got kind of legacy on the brain. He's talked openly at various points throughout the year about going to heaven and how he's not going to get into heaven and thinking about that. Like when you have an almost 80 year old talking about stuff like that while also knocking down the east Wing of the White House, slapping your name on the US Institute of Peace, slapping your name on the John F. Kennedy center for the Performing Arts. This is a dangerous combination of aging and narcissism that we're seeing here. That's likely to only become a more salient aspect of the Trump presidency over the next three years.
- [48:13]
D
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C
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- [49:15]
A
Okay, so let's talk about some positive developments this year. And again, we've been doing this for a decade and we've. I guess I still suffer from post traumatic stress disorder from playing Lucy with the football like, well, this. The walls are closing in on Donald Trump now. Well, this will be the end of Donald Trump. So no irrational exuberance. But we had these midterm elections which were extremely bad news for Republicans, followed by an increasing willingness of Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, to break with the President. You mentioned the polls, which are gone from a week to close to horrific. We had the election of the first American Pope who seems to be very aggressively going after Donald Trump and Donald Trump's policies. I also think that is one of the undercovered stories of the year. And then we had just a couple of these things where, you know, the FCC bullied ABC and Disney into getting rid of Jimmy Kimmel. They brought Jimmy Kimmel back on. I don't know whether you follow him. I talk about Jimmy Kimmel all the time. Not what impresses me is that here's a guy who lost his job over politics. He's utterly fearless. He's got his contract back, he's back on the air. He's basically kind of modeling like I am not holding anything back. So the elections, the polls, you know, the kinds of things you're seeing, the kind of crack up, you know, the MAGA crack up. We saw last week where you had Ben Shapiro going after Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Are there any of these green shoots that you think that at the end of 2025 indicate that? I don't know that we've hit a turning point. Keeping in mind that we still have three years of a term presidency in front of us. Can you grasp onto some green shoot of hope here for me, Susan?
- [51:07]
C
Yeah, look, Charlie, I mean, people are going to put a lot on these 2026 elections, history and recent history at that suggests strongly that Democrats are going to be in a good position to take back one House of Congress at least, although the Senate remains a very uphill struggle. You know, I look at those poll numbers and I definitely, they do remind me of Joe Biden's poll numbers from August of 2021 on. They never recovered. You know, after that disastrous pullout from Afghanistan and the realization that Biden's pledge of a return to normalcy and the end of the pandemic were not happening in the way that people hoped and expected they would, Biden never really recovered. And it looks to me like Donald Trump is going to have a hard time doing that as well. You know, he already was almost historically divisive and unpopular president, and you know, what, what could possibly he do to bring back the people who he's lost, who were, by the way, the people responsible for putting him back into power? Because it's not enough for him to have just his hardcore MAGA base that wouldn't be enough for him to have won the 2024 election as he did. He was able to convince enough wavering Republicans and Republican leaning independents in six key battleground states in 2024 to vote for him, probably despite their qualms about who he was personally and largely on the basis of his claims to have been such a great president for the economy. And again, it's very, very hard for me to see those polls recovering in some really meaningful way. So that's, that's number one. Number two, the obviousness of Trump's lame duck status will begin to become more and more evident. That will lead to more and more infighting among the Republicans as they inevitably move on and begin jockeying for power in the post Trump gop. Now, I also think that's a risk factor for the country because Trump will escalate and he's not gonna take kindly to being a lame duck, especially when he realizes how quickly power can ebb in Washington, D.C. so, you know, I don't know that that fits your green shoe test, but I do think Democrats, you know, are likely to have the wind at their backs going into the 2026 midterm elections. And more importantly, I hope and I see the evidence that people are figuring out about the need to defend their own institutions and the need to live their values. And that I think, you know, as much as you and I might be dismayed that they weren't more prepared for that at the beginning. You know, if ICE comes to your community and, you know, drags people out of their cars, you know, you gotta but give props to the people in Chicago who decided they're gonna have a relay system at their school to make sure that kids can go to school. You've gotta recognize my alma mater, Harvard, has taken a huge financial hit to stand up to Donald Trump. I mean, they've had to lay off employees and, you know, really change a lot of how their programs are being run. I know people who had to, you know, change their work or who lost their scientific research grant, but, you know, so far, we'll see they have stood up to Trump in a way. I think that has inspired not only people there, but across American academia. And, you know, there are many, many other examples of people realizing, you know, that we have to hold hands and join together here. I wish they'd done it sooner, but I think, you know, maybe they're learning that nobody else is going to, you know, play the role that you're supposed to play in a democracy, which is to stand up for things and to, you know, do the right thing yourself and hope that that on a big scale makes a difference.
- [55:38]
A
I hope you're right. And one of the things that I've thought about is that this has been a year of clarification where a lot of the things that we had taken for granted, like why is due process an important thing? Why do we have checks and balances? Why do we have separation of powers? What is the importance of civil liberties? All of those things that I think we had taken for granted, now we have to relearn and recommit to some of those things. So if that is the consequence that we actually go, okay, this is what, what the point of liberal democracy was always about. This is why we believe these things as opposed to these other things which again, had become kind of these, you know, the white noise in the background, the cliches that we, you know, had gotten maybe bored or, you know, as I said, complacent about. I hope that that's the answer, as opposed to the fact that people give up on all of this, that we go into some sort of, you know, dark, you know, you know, dark rabbit holes of cynicism. But let's stick with that more hopeful message going into 2026. So, Susan, to you and your family, happy New Year, and against all odds, let's hope that 2026 is better than 2025. So thank you for joining me.
- [56:52]
C
Absolutely. Here's to that, Charlie. And thank you so much for everything that you do every day. We're really grateful.
- [56:58]
A
Well, thank you and we'll continue to do this. This is the first of a series of end of the year Euro and review shows that we're doing here on the to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlay Sykes. We do this because at the end of the year it is more important than ever to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
- [57:28]
C
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A
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