David Brooks, E.J. Dionne and Robert Siegel Take Stock of 2025

0:01This 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.

0:18Hi, I'm Robert Siegel. It's been a couple of months since I got to hear what my two old friends have to say about politics. And a lot has happened since then. The longest government shutdown ever, the elections, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, and hints that public support for Donald Trump, who led the Republicans to a sweep of both houses of Congress and the White House, might be weakening. Lots to talk about with New York Times columnist David Brooks. Good to be with you, Robert. Good to see you again. And Times opinion contributor, writer E.J. Dionne. Great to be with you both.

0:52Thank you. And let's start with an appraisal of where Donald Trump stands nearly a year into his second administration. David, why don't you start us off? We're at the 532nd episode of Donald Trump is finished. And so I think a lot of people are seeing some things that are really bad for Donald Trump. His polls are down slightly. The Republicans have lost every major election in the last year. There was the Indiana representative standing up to him with impunity, hanging together. And to me, one of the most interesting facts is that 20 % of Trump voters think Donald Trump is responsible for the economy.

1:26And so EJ is about to talk more about this, if he's consistent with his column in The Times the other day. But - I think I'll contradict myself. But there are people who are flaking off. But is it something pivotal? Are we at a pivotal moment? Yeah. Don't think so. If you ask people a couple months ago, who was a better president, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, there was still a healthy majority that said Donald Trump. And finally, is Donald Trump is not a man to be inhibited by opposition or by rules. And so he is the president of my lifetime, I think all our lifetimes, who has exercised power more freely while ignoring restraints.

2:02And I think he'll continue to do that. But flaking off is a measured statement. So decay, but not fracture. Not fracture. E.J., you have written about Donald Trump losing what you call the reasonable majority. Right. Is there a reasonable majority? I think there is a reasonable majority in the country. One of the reasons I use that phrase is because a lot of people out there who voted for Trump were not part of the MAGA base, were not kind of fooled, in quotes, by Donald Trump. There were people who were mad about the cost of living, in some cases angry about immigration, particularly what was happening at the southern border.

2:38They weren't necessarily sold on Trump. And most of those people have taken a look at what has happened in the last year, and they have just moved away. They've said this is not what we voted for. He ignores the primary issue that pushed him their way, which is the cost of living. And a billionaire regularly mocking affordability and, by the way, surrounding himself with billionaires is not someone who's going to appeal to that constituency. They seem distracted by personal obsessions. You mentioned even the destruction of the East Wing of the White House and overreach, where even when they agreed with him on immigration, huge majorities dislike many aspects of what he's doing.

3:22So I think people looked at this, reasoned their way to opposition. And I think this is a little bigger than David's analysis suggests. You know, some of the polls, Gallup, AP Nork, have him down at 36 percent. And that up to a quarter of his own voters, if the high measures are right, have moved away from him. And the last couple of months feel like that Afghanistan moment for Joe Biden. If you remember, Biden, after the chaos in Afghanistan, Biden never recovered from the sharp drop in the polls he had then. Now, David's right. He could come back. And it's certainly true that Trump is willing to exercise power in a way, in many cases, in the view of some of us, illegally, in a way no other president has been willing to.

4:13And so he's going to keep doing that. But I think there's pushback. And, you know, I just don't think those Indiana Republicans are a one-off. There are a lot of reasons to think there was something special about that state. You're speaking of the Republicans who would not do a redistricting that Trump won. Right, who refused. A majority of Senate Republicans in Indiana. State senators. State senators rejected the midterm redistricting. And I just think something is happening. There's a shift here. And we'll find out in a few months which one of us is right about that. I just say one thing actually to pile on for EJ's case to be for it, which is I think Donald Trump's reaction to last months have been pretty terrible.

4:52Yeah. Symptomatic of that is when he says, well, you should get by with two pencils. You don't need$32. You only need$2. That is demonstrating a casual indifference to the economic pain people feel. And one thing people really detest is that. But the second point I'd like to make, this goes back to something we talked about in one of our earlier conversations about my pet peeve, about hating the way the word fight is used in politics. We need to fight, fight. To me, that's, you know, we need to scream louder and pump up our base. But politics is about persuasion, not fighting. And I think EJ's numbers demonstrate that Trump voters, like all voters, are basically reasonable.

5:26And you can persuade them if you're willing to meet them where they are. There have been presidents who, by virtue of personality or the way their political message is framed, fill people with optimism and excitement. I think of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as people who had that power. This optimism and excitement are not words I would use to describe the mood of the country right now. The more common word is anxiety. Yes? No, I think that's right. It's interesting you say that. A friend of mine was talking to a CEO he works with, and the CEO said, you know, besides Trump, of course, giving himself a plus, plus, plus, plus on the economy, he doesn't inspire people to feel that things are great, that things are good.

6:08He tends to have very angry, negative rhetoric that I think actually hurts. I think there's enormous anxiety in the country and some of it, and David has written about this quite a lot, there's a lot of loneliness, social isolation in the country. But I also think that there's an economic component. David Wallace Wells of the Times wrote a really excellent piece, I thought, back in July about where did Mamdani come from? And it wasn't about the proletariat. He talked about an emergent coalition of the precariat, which I think is going to be one of those words along with affordability, a word of the year.

6:48And these are folks who, yes, definitely weren't class people, but really can extend higher up the income class. They're mad about affordability. They're enraged about inequality, corruption, and what they see as the entitlement and impunity, as David put it, of the very wealthy. And I think there is just an unease. And lastly, there's technology. Rahm Emanuel can be very quippy, the former mayor of Chicago. And he said a lot of Americans are going to have to choose. Do they want their kids to be raised by parents or an algorithm? And I think that's one of the kinds of anxieties, along with anxieties about employment, that technology is raising.

7:26To be fair, Donald Trump built his career on American carnage, on darkness. He didn't invent it. He played on what was already out there. there's a thing called Google Ngrams, which measures all the words and usage in the English language across newspapers, magazines, and books. And you can go to databases stretching all the way back to the 1850s and discover what words were used. Most of the words used in the English language were positive words, words of positive emotion. We were an optimistic people. And that stretched through the Civil War. It stretched through the World Wars. It stretched through the Great Depression.

7:59And now negative words are used much more often than positive words. So we're in the most pessimistic, darkest cultural atmosphere in American history, at least stretching back to 1850. And so I will say this level of disgust with the future, I think is very alien to the American cultural DNA. And it's important in history terms, people reject the old, they get sick of the old show and they want a new show. So if you had run for president 2020 or 2024, 2016 on Reagan-esque optimism, you would get crushed. But maybe by 2028, 2032, I would not be surprised if this cycle has been - Just for a quick point, you mentioned the elections in the fall.

8:42And it struck me after the elections that when you looked at Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, the Democratic elected governor, if you look at Mikey Sherrill in New Jersey, who got elected, and to a significant degree, Mamdani in New York, Azran Mamdani, they all ran on anger at the status quo and prices, but they all conveyed a kind of a sense of empathy, solidarity, mutual respect. And I think if I were to guess the kind of Democrat who is going to win the nomination is someone who can play on two tracks at the same time to express certainly the anger Democrats feel about Trump and inequality and all those problems, but marry that to a sense of a hopeful future.

9:27And I think there's still a big market for empathy and solidarity out there. I'd just like to note before we move on to talking about the economy more broadly, the strange situation we're in with respect to artificial intelligence. We're waiting for this technology to mature and to be adapted. It's the most ballyhooed technological change I can think of in my life, unless we go back to atomic energy in the 1950s. It's going to change everything. We're paying huge electricity bills because of it. And we're also seeing the stock market being supported by it. And yet, it's not clear whether people are hopeful about this, want us to be the nation that scores the best with artificial intelligence, or whether they're terrified of it.

10:16Well, I've interviewed dozens of AI experts and engineers, and some of them are doomers. They think it's going to turn us into paperclips and destroy civilization. And some of them think it's the greatest thing. We're going to expand GDP by 600 ,000 % and productivity by... And their view has nothing to do with the evidence in front of them. Their view has entirely to do with the nature of their temperament. It's their DNA. And so optimistic people think it's going to be great, and pessimistic people think it's going to be terrible. I think it's going to be like the railroads. It's a very powerful technology which will produce a short-term series of bubbles as everybody leaps into it, and then the long-term, it'll be okay.

10:53I think we should ask AI what the future is going to be under AI, and then maybe AI will tell us. I think both views are there, and I think both views are true. That's the problem with talking about AI. I think the wonder and the fear are sort of twins in a way. They're part of a sensible reaction to AI. Well, moving on to the economy more broadly, something you've both alluded to, there's an unusual political divide in the country right now, which is the Democrats acknowledge an affordability crisis, and they have lots of schemes to deal with it, to do away with Trump's tariffs, to restore these subsidies for health care, health insurance you buy on the exchanges.

11:37And the Republicans, rather than having a competing agenda to cope with the crisis. President Trump says there is no crisis. It's a hoax. It's a Democratic con job. Is he reenacting Joe Biden's mistake of telling people who are hurting, who are experiencing, in that case, inflation for the first time in their lives, most of them? It's all in your head? Yes, he's doing exactly the same thing. You're sitting there on the Oval Office. Your advisors are saying, look at the data, Mr. President. And the data is there. They're not wrong. Median wages at their highest point now than at any point in American history.

12:12Inflation's around 3%. Real wages are wising, which means people are getting, things overall are getting more affordable. You look at the data, it looks pretty good. And then you look at what's unaffordable. Most things are getting more affordable. Most material products like TVs are getting more affordable. What's getting less affordable? The biggies are healthcare and housing, and especially housing in blue areas. and so it's hitting people in the housing piece of their lives which is a major piece of their life and so the thing I'd tell Donald Trump if I had to talk to him was something I heard from a CEO and he said I have customers coming to me with complaints and then I go to my team and say are these complaints valid and the team says no not valid we have the data and the CEO said to me when that happens I believe the anecdote and I don't believe the data and I think that's right I think Because people are not fools about their own circumstance.

13:07I believe Newt Gingrich said of the question of the affordability crisis, if the public thinks there's an affordability crisis, there's an affordability crisis. That's the way you have to do it. The customer is never wrong. But I do think there are some real things. You mentioned the data centers driving up the cost of electricity. Cheryl in New Jersey ran on a promise to freeze electricity prices for a while while they get a handle on it. That's real. I think housing, especially in the big metros, which tend to be blue, is a real problem. But child care, health care, and in some cases, transportation, that is a real problem.

13:44The price of cars is a real problem. Higher education. And higher ed has been. And so I think that while it's true that we had high inflation for about a year and then it started to dissipate, but prices tend not to go down on a lot of things. And so these are real concerns. And they are things that I think are potentially responsive to policy and to political arguments. And you're seeing, you know, as I say, Cheryl talking about putting a freeze on. You're talking about these fights over the data centers, which I think is going to be a really big issue in American politics. Spanberg is talking about using alternative energy, which can actually bring down prices.

14:26So I think we're going to have actually a real debate over what might plausibly be done about affordability. Of course, you know, what's interesting is that what you're both saying is that the iconic costs of the last election, which were a dozen eggs and a gallon of gasoline, just aren't what we're talking about when we're talking about an affordability crisis. We were discussing consumer prices is what we were discussing. Right. And that was real inflation on things like eggs. But housing is like it is a central thing. And one of the things that's happened over the last generation or two is that people's standards have changed.

15:01And so Matt Iglesias wrote a good substack on this, which is the median income, as I said, is now about$88 ,000 a year. And if you take that median income and put it in the median city, that family of four, say, can afford to buy the home that families of four were content to buy in 1965. And so it might have one bathroom and people are sharing bedrooms. But nobody wants to live that way anymore. And furthermore, many fewer people are married. Many fewer people are living alone. And so that puts up demand on housing, especially in the big metros where people are more likely to be single. And so there's been a creep in our expectations of how we're going to live.

15:41And I think that has added to some of the unhappiness because people are not living up to their expectations. There's a flip side to that as well, which is people aren't getting married and aren't having children because they are anxious about being able to afford them. And more than that, putting aside money, Bill Galston in the Wall Street Journal wrote a couple of weeks ago about this whole natalism argument. Our birth rates tend to go up when people are broadly optimistic about the future. And we certainly, we baby boomers exist because of that optimism. And that is quite the opposite of what people are feeling now.

16:18And, you know, Dave Winston, the Republican pollster, had a good piece. I think looking forward, you're going to have to look at both the prices and whether wages are rising to meet them. And, you know, a lot of people sense that compared to the very rich, there's a lot of sense of relative deprivation. Their wages still haven't risen compared to what's happened at the very top. And I think that's on people's minds. Well, let's turn to foreign policy right now. And in particular, the remarkable document issued by the Trump administration, it's National Security Strategy. I was struck most by what it said about Europe.

16:54Usually in the past, when people said, I think Europe ought to be spending more on its own defense, it was in the context of they're rich. You know, it's no longer the post-war 1948 in Europe. These countries are thriving, especially Germany, and they can do more and pay for their own defense. This analysis more or less described Europe as so rotten as not being worth defending. It described the Europeans facing, quote, the stark prospect of civilizational erasure, which it attributes to immigration and the encroachment of the EU on national government. What's going on here, David? I mean, this document could have called for reducing U.S.

17:34commitments to Europe or expecting the Europeans to do more without insulting them all as being a civilization in rotten decline. Yeah, the Trump people say they were attacking the EU and the ruling elites, but not the parties that are actually leading in the polls, which are the AFD and the French conservatives and Nigel Farage in the UK. But I think what was interesting to me about the document is that it's a foreign policy document written as if culture matters more than Realpolitik. And there's a study that has haunted me for years. It's done by the World Values Survey, and they survey people all around the world on their values.

18:14And it turns out most people around the world. And the key factor is, are you an individualistic culture or are you a communal culture? And then they draw a helpful map to help you visualize the results. And on this map, most of the cultures of the world, Confucianism, Africa, Southeast Asia, they're all in a clump. And then there's a little thing like Florida or Italy sticking out. And that thing sticking out is America and Western Europe. Our cultures are vastly more individualistic than cultures of any place else around the world. Our cultures are vastly less traditionalist than everywhere around the world.

18:53And along comes Trump, and they feel this. I'm not sure they've seen the World Values Survey. And they think those modernists are destroying traditional values. And we're going to be for traditional values, whether it's Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, and not those commies in Stockholm. And so it's a weird document in that it's culture first, but it does point to a real problem that there's a culture gap between us and a lot of parts of the world. You know, I think my friend David gives it a lot more credit when he says culture, because I read that thing very carefully. I agree, it's a weird document and an interesting document.

19:30Business matters more than culture there. What was really striking going through it was how much this was about a fairly narrow view of business interests. Yes, some nice stuff about the working class here and there, but it was really about making deals. But the other thing that was so disconcerting is in the Cold War, the United States sub-Rosa, they didn't really want it to be explicit, supported parties of the center-left and center-right in Europe. We were on the side of democracy. You see, this document explicitly is supporting parties of the far right in Europe. And yeah, some of that's about culture.

20:08It's an obsession with immigration and identity. It's a deeply identitarian document. And there's something just so odd to me about the United States of America, which was built on immigration. All three of us at this table are here because we were an immigrant welcoming country. And this document says Europe is falling apart now because it is welcoming immigrants. And of course, there are subtexts here. It's really about race. Europe is becoming less European. What exactly does that mean? That sounds like it's about the immigration of Muslims to Europe and it has something to do with race. But it's a very disconcerting view compared to how we have thought.

20:51And I don't mean we elites. I mean, we Americans have thought of ourselves. We are talking today after some horrible shootings over the weekend. Two students were killed and nine injured at Brown University. And overseas, at least 15 people were killed at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. As of now, the motive behind the Brown shooting is unclear, as of the time when we sat down to record this conversation. But in Australia, there's no lack of clarity. The point of the shooting was to kill Jews. I'm curious, since this is in keeping with a trend, which is a trend of rising anti-Semitism and rising anti-Semitic violence in the world, what you make of it?

21:35I mean, whatever you, however you react to it. Yeah, I mean, first, one part of it is not a trend, these two shootings. It is not true that mass shootings are rising. So in 2025, we, at least with a few weeks left, have the lowest number of mass shootings in 20 years. So that's a good sign. And I'm not sure how we explain that, but maybe just random distribution. But what is the trend, as you say, is rising anti-Semitism? And I think that's been true in all our lives who are Jews. It's in true and direct experience. And I think the troubling thing, there's a piece in The Atlantic by Yair Rosenberg quoting a guy named Tim Miller who says, the more I'm around young people, the more terrified I get.

22:12And there's a fair bit of evidence that we used to think bigotry is on, old people are bigoted. But now there's more gigatry among young people. 25 % of young adults say they have an unfavorable opinion of Jewish people. 20 % say that Jews have too much power. And this is not about Israel. They're not saying Israelis have too much power. And so they're saying Jews have too much power. So somehow they're in online spaces, and my son tells me about this all the time, that are just rabidly anti-Semitic. And it becomes a norm. And that's become a norm. And I think just about the Bondi Beach shooting, I think a lot of people, and this is controversial, have said, well, you use the phrase globalize the Intifada.

22:56That's what it looks like. And I have to say I agree with that. Some words take on historical baggage. If you use the word states' rights, and when you're running for office in the South, that has historical baggage. When people say they don't believe the Holocaust happened, it's not they didn't believe big bonfires didn't happen. They mean explicit genocide. And to me, the word Antifada has taken on the baggage, and I was there for the second Antifada in Israel covering it. Baggage of using terrorism to advance the Palestinian cause. And so I think that phrase, people should be careful about that phrase.

23:29H.J., any thoughts? Well, I think that the vast majority of people out there who are critical of Israeli policy after October 7th, who hated October 7th, it was an evil act, but really intensely opposed how long the war lasted and the damage it did in Gaza, most of the people opposed to that policy are not anti-Semites. And I think it's very important to make that clear. And I know you're not saying that, but I think it's important to say that at the outset. I got to say, I was just very, very upset by this. And I was struck by a beautiful piece that Rabbi Sharon Brous wrote in The Times. It went up just shortly before we started talking.

24:11And it is particularly horrible that this happens on Hanukkah, which, as she writes, is the miracle of the persistence of light in dark times. And she does lift up a fruit vendor named Ahmed El Ahmed, who risked his own life to tackle one of the gunmen and probably save lives on that beach. But, you know, I was shot. I guess I was shot. He survived, but he took an enormous risk. Bigotry and hatred are the enemies of every free society. And anti-Semitism is one of the most one of the oldest and most destructive forms. I think there is evidence of rising anti-Semitism, and I think that it needs to be fought.

24:53And I think the more we can disentangle it from the politics of the Middle East and just face up to the fact that this is a form of bigotry, the better off we'll be. Hear, hear. We have made a practice in these conversations of concluding on a note of joy, literally three notes of joy, one from each of us. What's brought some joy into life since last we met? David, you go first. I hope I haven't talked about the New York Mets in these joy conversations. Probably not because they don't really bring joy. Well, there's joy. Many sports teams are doing really well, but I won't bring them up. There's joy in being between seasons.

25:28Well, they're dismantling their team. And all the players I love are being traded and let go. And the entire fan base is having conniptions. But I find it kind of amusing. And so I'm always thinking, well, they'll figure this one out. So I'm enjoying joy in the tumult. And the tumult. EJ? So two things, if I may, real quick. One, this season, I am a sucker for the season wearing Christmas trees, menorahs, nutcracker statues, music from Galway to Sinatra to Taylor Swift. I'm a sucker for it all. But one thing has brought me great joy the last couple of weeks that I want to shout out. I am a mystery addict.