Hello, Greenland. Goodbye, Checks and Balances.

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.

0:32Thank you all for being here tonight. I'm excited to be in Los Angeles for this live conversation with opinion columnists Jamel Bowie and Ross Douthat. It has been an eventful year, to say the least. Given what's happened even in recent weeks, I wanted to start this discussion with how President Trump is reshaping the world and the U.S.'s role in it. Then we're going to get into changes on the domestic front, how he's changed the country. And finally, we'll touch on the upcoming midterm elections. But first, I want to start by asking you both for the most consequential decision President Trump has made in his first year back in office.

1:14Ross, you want to kick us off? I would be delighted. Thank you all for being here tonight. Hopefully we'll put on a fairly entertaining show. I'm going to cheat a little in answering the question and not pick a single decision, but instead a broad... No cheating. No cheating. A broad strategic approach. I think the most consequential strategic choice the Trump administration has made has been to not just double down, but triple down and quadruple down on a kind of unilateralist style of executive governance, which has had two effects. And it's way too soon to tell which is the most important one.

1:54One effect is to both expand de facto presidential power, to discover new presidential power, to basically put Trump himself in a position of a certain kind of executive dominance that I don't think we've seen since Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, that coexists with a failure to instantiate changes through legislation, which was certainly something that FDR was pretty good at, right? That makes it really, really hard to tell how enduring, you know, 80 to 90 percent of the concrete policy changes of this hyperactive Trump year will be. And I think this extends everywhere from, you know, the budget cuts in Doge to the Trump administration struggles with the major universities.

2:48You can go on through the list. You can encompass immigration policy. There's been new spending on immigration enforcement, but there hasn't been some dramatic overhaul of the nation's immigration laws. And it's possible to imagine a world where Trump has just genuinely pioneered a new, more frankly, Caesarist form of presidential governance in America that will endure among his successors. It's also possible to imagine a world where many of these sort of frenetic acts and actions, some of them could just sort of evaporate even over the next three years. Some of them could be wiped away very, very quickly by a Democratic president.

3:30So in that balance is sort of the fundamental uncertainty about the core significance of a lot of what we've been watching. Jamal, what about you? I was expecting a shorter answer.

3:43now i feel like i have to respond to something um no first thank you uh thank you all for coming it's a real pleasure to be here my answer actually plays off of ross's answer so to to make my answer long as well one of one of lean into it we've got a lot of material to get a lot of material I look at the presidency, when you break the presidency down to what the actual job is, is it's personnel management and then crisis management, and really it's personnel management. Much of what the president actually does is figure out who is going to handle things that come to him such that the only things he really handles are things that are very important and very urgent.

4:29And there's some art involved in a president figuring out what items goes in what category. I think Trump's most consequential decision is to kind of abdicate that and instead delegate so much of his authority to various deputies. At the moment, it appears that Stephen Miller appears to be the driving deputy. But at the beginning of his term, it was Russ Vogt and Elon Musk as sort of the chief deputies. When it comes to foreign policy, especially the issues in Latin America, very clearly Marco Rubio has sort of the driving force. And it's this delegation of policy and political decisions to these deputies that I think shapes much of the administration and is responsible for much of the administration's political difficulties.

5:17Because the thing about being president is that although you don't have any particular expertise, generally speaking, you can count the number of presidents with like real subject matter expertise on like one hand. And like, funny enough, they're not necessarily good presidents. As a result, presidents are political experts. That's sort of like inherent to the job. and abdicating, delegating your authority, including political decision-making, down to other people, robs you of the ability to respond quickly and effectively to changes in the political wind. I would argue, and we can get into this a little bit, one of Trump's strengths is his political expertise.

5:58So it's interesting. And plenty of things to go deeper on, but I want to start first with the question of foreign policy. For most of the past century, the United States has been counted on to help repel foreign aggression. Now the president seems ready to be the aggressor in Greenland. Ross, you closely track the thinking inside this administration between your reporting and your podcast, Interesting Times. What's your best understanding of what's motivating the president here?

6:36my my best understanding of what's motivating the president is that he has always had an interest in acquiring greenland this came up in his first term it was a subject of sport and jest like a number of things that happened in his first term but that that has always existed there is also a small but meaningful faction in the online right that is interested in the idea of territorial expansion as a kind of signifier of a revived American spirit. So that's sort of floating around out there. But basically what I think has happened is that Trump always had an idea that he wanted to add some territory to the U.S.

7:23I think if you were going to pick a place to add to the U.S., I could make a case that Greenland makes a certain kind of sense, a sparsely populated island that's very important to our national security that's in the Western Hemisphere, like it's on a crazy zone of interest. And the Venezuela raid went so well from Trump's perspective that he got very excited and decided that now is the moment to make the Greenland push. This is not based on deep or profound reporting, so don't take that to the bank. But that is my best guess of why we're dealing with this right now, that it's a pre-existing thing in Trump's mind, has some marginal support in his coalition, and suddenly the idea was turbocharged by the Donro Doctrine.

8:12I don't know how we even pronounce that, the Donro Doctrine, you know, Venezuela. And it's like, you know, well, if we can do that, why can't we just get Greenland too. But how does the president's position on Greenland square with America first philosophy? Oh, well, I mean, how does it not? That's easy, right? I mean, America first means, you know, good parts of the world should become part of America, right? Greenland tomorrow, Alberta the next day, Cuba the day after that. I think that's, I don't think that's hard. I think, you know, when we talked about this event, and I was thinking about foreign policy questions, days or weeks ago before Greenland became an issue, I was prepared to make an argument that there's been more fundamental continuity amid all the chaos in Trump's foreign policy than a lot of people think.

9:03I think if you look at sort of the overall arc of Middle East policy, Russia-Ukraine policy, like, you know, the Trump administration, for instance, has not, in fact, ended the war in Ukraine by surrendering to Vladimir Putin. It continues to arm Ukraine. You know, it's pushed Europe to do much more. It's tried to negotiate with Putin, but it hasn't like overthrown the entirety of U.S. foreign policy. Trump administration pursued a ceasefire in the Middle East in a way that was in some ways probably more aggressively than a Biden administration might have. You know, I could go on from there. I could make a sort of pre-Greenland case for the relative stability and moderate success of Trump's foreign policy, the Greenland gambit is, as far as I can tell, indefensible and destructive and quite different if followed through than how Trump has handled the Middle East or even how he's handled Russia, Ukraine.

10:04I mean, Jamal, I think it's worth discussing what this is doing with our alliances with Europe and our relationships there. But I also feel like as one of our in-house history experts. I'd love to hear, you know, he is clearly using the Monroe Doctrine as his model here. Can you tell us what the Monroe Doctrine meant back in the early 1800s and what does it mean under Trump? Sure. Before I do, though, I want to say that I think the Greenland thing is at least 50 percent. Trump doesn't understand on a Mercator projection. Greenland looks really big. now wait it's it's still it's still a really big island jamel under any projection it's still quite large right it's it's it's it's big and the number of ufos allegedly under the ice but i i happen to think that it's it's big on a map into the president uh our big boy the president wants it.

11:10So Monroe Doctrine, we obviously discussed these questions. So I wrote down the relevant part of the Monroe Doctrine issued by President James Monroe, written by future president at the time, Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. So the quote, I'm going to just read the relevant portion. The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the U.S. are involved, that the American continents, by free and independent condition, which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

11:46Now, the context for this is that Napoleon has been defeated in Europe, the monarchical powers in Europe are reasserting themselves, and they're looking abroad to what is now Latin America and seeing that there are these revolutions happening. The Bourbons in particular are looking at Spanish possessions in Latin America and saying, what's happening over there? And so the Monroe administration responds to this by saying, and kind of taking a somewhat paternalistic, we are the premier republic of this hemisphere, saying, stay out, stay out. Like, leave these people alone. If anyone's going to mess around down there, it's going to be us.

12:31and you should stay out of the Western Hemisphere. It's also worth saying that when a European power really wanted to intervene in the Western Hemisphere, they just did it. But the concept of the Monroe Doctrine was a kind of anti-colonialist stance for which there would be continuity throughout American history. Of course, Americans sort of embraced the imperial fever in the late 19th century, And that's actually where I think a lot of Trump's inspiration comes from. But after the Second World War or during the Second World War and afterwards, there was real influence of Roosevelt's own kind of distaste for European colonialism.

13:13And that is part of like American foreign policymaking in the Second World War and afterwards. I think all of that's necessary as a background first because Katie gave me an excuse to do it. And if I can talk to you about 19th century American history, I will. but the second thing is that it puts the the Don Roe doctrine at least it's alliterative the Don Roe doctrine into you know provides a stark contrast right because the Don Roe doctrine is not about defending even if it's sort of like with your fingers crossed behind your back defending independent nations in the western hemisphere from European colonization the Don road doctrine is we got to be European colonizers.

13:59And that is the difference. Well, well, in, in, in fairness, in fairness, I mean, I think it is a more explicitly self-interested doctrine, but the core of the arguments made around the Venezuelan intervention is the fact that Venezuela had been a strong zone of interest for non-Western hemispheric powers that happened to be our biggest rivals, right? Russia and China. And the claims being made around Greenland, similarly, are, as far as I can tell, not so much about the pernicious influence of the Danish royal family, but is also about Russia and China, right? Now, obviously, there is, I agree that Trump's attitude towards, like, Venezuelan oil resources is very much a kind of late 19th century colonial mindset.

14:52But there is clearly a way in which, like, there are critics of Trump who will say he wants to divide the world up, you know, and give Xi his sphere of influence and Putin his sphere of influence and leave us the Western Hemisphere. I don't think that's right. I think Trump, to the extent that he thinks this stuff through, just wants, he does want the Western Hemisphere to be an exclusively American zone of interest. But then he also wants to have interests in Asia and Eastern Europe and so on. But I think there is some continuity with, it's a more cynical variant of the Monroe Doctrine. But I don't know if I would call that continuity, right?

15:29Like if part of the basis of the Monroe Doctrine is not simply no outside intervention, but a recognition that these countries are independent, right? They're independent republics whose autonomy is independent republics ought to be respected than any kind of active colonial style management of what are self-governing countries, then that's like a meaningful break, right? Like that's not really in continuity with the Monroe Doctrine. All right. I think we are. We're going to leave it there and move to the home front. So obviously, just a few days after the capture of Maduro and the invasion of Venezuela, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota.

16:17The agency has obviously come under harsh criticism in the weeks following it, but it's also about to get a huge influx of cash. The budget reconciliation bill has dedicated$75 billion to ICE. Yeah. Jamel, talk to us about what all that money will mean for President Trump's immigration agenda in the years to come. Yeah. I've been thinking about this because I'm not sure I have a firm answer. There's like a movie, it's not good, for kids called Blank Check. And it's about like a 10 year old who gets a literal blank check, but it's signed. And he puts like a million dollars on it, like, you know, 10 year old mind a million bucks is all the money in the world.

17:04And then goes on to sort of like have an insane spending spree. And it's all right. Like, it's like, I want to McDonald's in my mansion, that kind of stuff. The point is that he had so much money and like his imagination couldn't meet the amount of money he had. And I kind of feel that's going to end up being the situation with immigration and customs enforcement, in part because they struggle, right? Even before this big influx of funding, they really struggled to get people, to hire people to do the job. They can use some of this money, of course, for building detention facilities. They can try to hire more people.

17:41But I have this feeling that they are not going to know what to do with the money. And certainly it'll mean they'll have money to give out bonuses. Certainly it'll mean that efforts to, say, defund or resend funding through things like a budget showdown are going to be limited because it's already there. Like there's no – you can't – it's already in law and it's not part of a continuing resolution of funding. but in terms of like actual, what does this mean on the ground? I'm not sure. And I'm not sure that they're sure given that this is just like a huge amount of money to give to any, to any agency.

18:17Yeah. Of course we've actually already seen these issues with labor that you're describing in terms of hiring new agents and officers and they've doubled the number of officers in the past year, but they've cut their training time in half for those officers. And I think we're seeing a little bit of that on display right now. And they've had the lower standard. I was reading not long ago that they had to, they were turning away people because part of the physical standards is you have to run like a mile and a half in 14 minutes and then do like 20 sit-ups and 20 push-ups and they couldn't find people to do it.

18:48Which I'll say, I saw that and I of course laughed about it. And then I said, well, could I do it? And then went to the gym that morning and then did it, like promptly did it. RFK Jr. is proud of you. You know, this is the Maha agenda in action. My ICE bonus check, I hope, will be in the mail soon. $50 ,000 headed your way. Roth, what do you make of all of this? And, you know, obviously immigration and the border became hugely political deficits for Biden. Do you, like, see any risk for this administration in terms of a backlash from voters? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a substantial risk of a backlash.

19:33I think the money, all that we can say for certain about the money is that ICE will be able to practically sustain the level of operations that they've had for this year into the future. The question then becomes, is that scale of operations politically sustainable, given the way the polls have shifted against Trump's immigration policy? Probably mostly, I think, just because of the shooting of Rene. Like, I think those of us who follow the news really closely tend to assume that it's, you know, well, it's this video and it's that video and so on. But my perception is that it's really the shooting that particularly broke through as, you know, as it should, as is understandable as a news story.

20:21And then in turn sort of fed further coverage of and attention to Minneapolis in particular. It's a complicated political thing because, you know, you'll see polls now where voters will say, I don't approve of Trump's immigration policy. Maybe I even support defunding ICE. But then you're asked, who do you trust more in immigration, Republicans or Democrats? And they still say Republicans. Right. But I think the basic challenge for the Trump administration is they see themselves, I think, reasonably as having been elected on a promise to conduct mass deportations. I think you can make a case and I would make a case that with better training and different hiring practices and so on, you could reduce abuses and reduce, you know, some of the things that show up in everybody's social media feed right now.

21:14At the same time, there is a way in which ICE has always done raids in immigrant neighborhoods that, you know, arrest sympathetic seeming people or, you know, pick up people who don't have infractions while going after someone who does have infractions. It's like what we're seeing right now is just what ICE normally does, but times three or times four or times five. And a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with it. But it's not clear to me that there's some other way that the Trump administration can say to themselves, we're pursuing this policy that would be vastly more popular, maybe somewhat more popular.

21:54I actually think I would argue that the difference in what we're seeing now as a person who believes strongly that we need to have a strong. immigration policy in this country is the cruelty behind what they're doing, which seems to be just endemic to the process of ICE today. Yeah. I mean, I sort of, I don't know how, if there is a feasible way to do like mass deportations that are somehow humane. I think the project of mass removals is necessarily both just in terms of if everyone is, you know, being as humane as possible, being as decent as possible, I think it's necessarily going to entail the kind of disruption that makes people very uncomfortable and will produce the kinds of sympathetic stories that we're seeing now.

22:44I think that in practice, the kinds of people who would want to sign up for that job are going to be the kinds of people inclined to inflict cruelty, and I'm not sure what you can do about that. I will say, just in terms of the politics of all of this, that, you know, Americans, when you ask them about immigration, the existing immigration system, what they imagine is a very orderly system where there are lines that people get in, and then there's a process, and then you become a citizen. And part of the anger and discontent with Biden-era immigration policy was a sense that Biden was allowing lots of people to cut this imaginary line.

23:21Of course, actual immigration policy does not work like that, that the process for entering this country and becoming a permanent resident, becoming a citizen, is convoluted and very difficult. And part of me thinks that if someone just said to the American public, we're going to get tough on immigration, and then describe an orderly system, that would be a major reform that would be quite popular. I think that for the Trump administration, there is a world in which they do prioritize the removal of people in jails, removal of people convicted of crimes. This would not be mass deportation, but I think it would be more in line with what your marginal Trump voter, like the person who tipped the state, expected.

24:06And so I think an engaged president might say, this is not working politically. Let's scale this back. Let's actually focus on people in jails and so on and so forth and see if we can't do something that is still in line in the direction of the things I promised, but like much less politically unsustainable. But since it's just Miller, he's like, you know, let's let's go full hog. But it's not it's not just Miller, right? It's it's I think Miller has a particular power and a particular focus and fixation on this issue. But there is a larger sense among conservatives, basically, that the Biden era was a kind of revelation of what liberals and Democrats, or at least the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, really wants to do, right?

24:56That for a long time, you had liberals who were favorably disposed to immigration, but always said, well, of course, we're not for open borders. But finally, they got the chance, and it effectively was open borders for two or three years. And then they sort of felt like they needed to tie. I mean, you can say it's not open borders, we can have this debate. But in fact, if you just look at a chart of the sheer number of people who came in in the first three years of the Biden administration, it was an unprecedented wave of immigration, unlike any basically in my lifetime. You don't have to call it open borders, but...

25:33I personally wouldn't call it open borders. I'm just saying, imagine yourself as a conservative skeptic of immigration watching this happen. And then you basically decide that if you, when your party is in power, can't conduct substantial deportation, then you're in a kind of sucker's game where the Democrats are in power, they let 5 million people in, the Republicans take power, they secure the borders for a while, don't do anything about immigration, then the Democrats come into power and do it all over again. So behind Stephen Miller is this sense that like, we can't let the Democrats get away with that.

26:10And again, the fact that Republicans still are slightly more trusted than Democrats suggests that this is not just a kind of hard right concern. And the other thing to note is that it is in fact true what the Department of Homeland Security keeps saying, that a policy that's focused just on deporting people in jails and people with criminal records does yield some kind of conflict with sanctuary city laws and rules in liberal jurisdictions. Like, they're not making that up. They're exaggerating it for effect while they go after other people as well. But that even that more limited policy would still create clashes with states like California, states like Minnesota.

26:50Okay, let's talk about Congress. Jamal, over the last year, you have written a lot about lawmakers response to President Trump's second term. How would you rate Congress's performance so far? What grade would you give them? A plus, A plus plus, like... I mean, the thing about a grade is it's sort of like, what is my criteria? For me, from my perspective, right, I look at the Republican majorities in the House in the Senate allowing doge to just do its thing, I look at that and I say, that's you abdicating your Article 1 authority over spending, right? I look at the administration. It wasn't necessarily an applause line, but thank you.

27:44I look at the administration, you know, the impoundment of congressionally authorized funds and Congress sort of like looking at that and being like, doesn't look like anything to me. And I see a Congress really abdicating its Article I authority to the point that it's like rendering itself a nullity. But from the perspective of Republicans in Congress, right, who are opposed to the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy, who want – and I've talked for many years about making these kinds of cuts. From their perspective, yeah, letting the White House just do it and not really putting up a fight, they're like, well, that's the best of all worlds because we don't have to take a vote on it.

28:25We don't have to actually vote for massive cuts to cancer research. We don't have to actually vote for massive cuts to the CDC or any of these things. And we get it anyway. So from their perspective, this is the best of all worlds. If you take a longer view, I think that the central dysfunction of American government is the receding influence of Congress across all fields and that it's very hard to push back on and come back from huge expansion to presidential authority. And so from just the institutional health of Congress and to looking at the broader health of the American constitutional order, like I would grade Congress with an F because – F plus.