Trump and the Death of Shared Morality in America

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.

0:17Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics with two of the smartest guys I know when it comes to politics. E.J. Dionne, longtime columnist, author of a great many books, and now an opinion contributor to The New York Times. Good to see you, E.J. Always good to be with you. and the equally prolific David Brooks, who joins us for the last time. As of this hour, are you still a New York Times columnist? I am still a New York Times columnist, but this is my final act of journalism with the New York Times, which is great for me and even greater for the future of the New York Times. Well, I will hear more about that later.

0:52I don't think either of you will be surprised to know that we're starting with Donald Trump. We're almost a month into the second year of his second term as president. And both of you in recent weeks have written columns in which you found some important change or some important landmark that this presidency has passed. And in a little while, I'd like to hear from you, David, about the coming Trump crack up that you've written. We're going to begin with E.J., with you and what you've called, when we look at all of the attempts to expand executive authority and other abuses, you call it regime change.

1:32Yeah. And I think that overlooking that, overlooking how much he is actually trying to fundamentally change and destroy, really, the traditional American system is something we have to face up to. And I think the country as a whole really did after the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Preddy. There have been police killings. There have been mishaps. But the country has never seen an entity like ICE operate completely outside the law in this way. And there were a whole series of other things that happened, a series of corrupt pardons building on the extraordinary pardons he gave to all of the people involved in January 6th.

2:14Justice Department really being destroyed and using it for investigations of political enemies from the chair of the Federal Reserve to Governor Walz in Minnesota to Mayor Fry. And we can go on and on. Tariffs by fiat on our allies, the weirdness over Greenland and threatening, again, our allies with tariffs just by fiat. I think that we saw in what Russell Vaught has written about radical constitutionalism before he became the head of OMB for Trump, a real desire to fundamentally alter the regime. I think that the country has really started to come to terms with that danger because of the acceleration of events over the last month and a half.

3:06Regime change has a very permanent ring to it, don't you think? It does. And I think if you're asking me, will he succeed? I think that the good news over the last month is the rising opposition that this is called forth from the country. I know two recent special elections in Texas and last Saturday in Louisiana where there were these were Trump districts. There were 30 plus point swings away from the Republicans. He is throwing away all of the constituencies, the swing constituencies who came to him in the last election. So I'm not saying he will succeed at this, but I think he has become more and more aggressive at it.

3:48And we need to face up that this is not just some guy doing one random thing after another. This is somebody who is setting about in a systematic way to destroy institutions. David, you wrote a couple of weeks ago that we are in the midst of multiple unravelings and heading for a coming Trump crack-up, which means? Yeah, well, those four unravelings. First, the unraveling of the Western alliance, the post-Cold War alliance. Second, the unraveling that E.J. just described, our democratic order. Third, the unraveling of our domestic security, the sense that we live in a relatively free, at least free of state violence, and we can no longer be sure of that.

4:30And then the fourth, and to me the most important and the primary one, is the unraveling of Trump's mind, if you want to put it that way. I do think, you know, I've never met a president who wasn't more full of himself at the end of his term than at the beginning. They all become a little egotistical. If you start with Donald Trump's ego, you're really going places. And so, you know, if you look through history at the minds of people who are driven by a lust for power and who have tyrannical tendencies, the arc of history bends toward degradation. There's just not many cases where somebody was becoming more and more power-hungry, more and more tyrannical, and they said, oh, I better put on the brakes here and become more moderate.

5:07That just doesn't happen. You get this process of mental deterioration that's in part caused by the way the lust for power makes you drunk on power, really, and is insatiable, partly because as you're driven by the lust for power, the environment you create around you becomes more sycophantic and has less checks, and partly because the people in this country have a tendency to lose the habits of democratic self-government. And so I was looking at these classical historians, Tacitus and people like that, Salas, and then later ones, Plutarch, Edward Gibbon. They had a front row seat at tyranny, and so they really understood it pretty well.

5:46And they talk about the fact that citizens lose the capacity for persuasion, for compromise, for interpersonal trust, the very fabric of democratic society. And when that is torn away, as Edward Gibbon writes, you get what he calls every page of history is stained with civil blood. And I think we're heading toward that kind of decay. You know, to hear the two of you talk about an insatiable lust for power and regime change, it makes me feel obliged to ask you, you know, both a short answer question, which is, Are you confident there will be elections in November and that the elections will go on as elections typically do?

6:27At the very least, that's not clear. And I think it's something that people began to worry about even more again over the last several weeks. When the FBI raided the Board of Elections down in Georgia, in Fulton County, people said, well, this is about Trump's obsession with the fact that he falsely claims over and over again that he won the 2020 election. But I think a lot of people, especially when they discovered that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was there, I think a lot of people saw this as an attempt to affect the election. And then Trump himself spoke of nationalizing the rules of the election.

7:11And then he said in 15 places, which sounded like Democratic states. And the beginning of that statement he made was Republicans should take over the elections. So I've spoken in the last couple of weeks to a lot of lawyers, anti-Trump administration lawyers, I would say, who are genuinely concerned about basic things like, will there be ICE agents at the polls as Steve Bannon has threatened? Will he call out troops? Will this be about reducing turnout? I still like to hope that our decentralized system of elections makes it more difficult for him to disrupt them in this way. But everything he's done so far, I think is, and maybe by design, is to make us more and more uneasy about whether these elections will be on the level.

8:00David, you have more than a hope? Yeah, I have every confidence that we'll have an election. I think he's internalized that we are a democracy and that he needs to step down in 2028. And I say that for two reasons. One, historical. I was really moved in 2020. I read a book by Samuel Huntington, the late great political scientist from Harvard. And the subtitle of the book was The Promise of Disharmony. And he argues that every couple decades, America goes through what he calls a moral convulsion, where people want to burn everything down, people get disgusted, social distrust collapses, a passionate generation comes on the seen, new form of communications technology.

8:35He said this happens in the 1770s with the revolutionary period, happened in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson, populism in the 1890s, where you get these economic depressions, racial terrorism, mask, political corruption, poverty. And it happened in the 1960s with bombings, assassinations, and so on. And writing in 1981, he says, you know, I don't know if I believe in these cycles, but if the cycle holds sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, we'll go through another moral convulsion. And I'm like, well done, Professor Huntington. And the good news is you come out of them. That the society reacts and we have a culture change.

9:13We don't go back. And in this case, we should not go back to the pre-Trump era, but we go forward. And the second reason, I just have tremendous faith in the power of the people manning our institutions in the military, in the election officials on the state level, Republicans on the state level. So I think we'll hold. You know, there's one convulsion you didn't have on your list, David, and that was the Civil War. We had elections then, I should point out. And I think you've done the same. I've been doing a lot of reading over the recent years of the 1850s into the 1860s, both the nature of the polarization, the anger, the violence, the threats against elected officials, the depth of the mistrust.

9:54And I find this period much closer to that than to some of these other periods where, yes, we've had a lot of fierce arguments in our history. Again, I share your confidence in the people running elections at the local level. I still have real worries that this administration will be willing to override so many of the rules that we have taken for granted. And so, you know, I hope you're right. I believe in disharmony. I think disharmony is part of freedom. But I don't think the administration believes disharmony is part of freedom. Just quickly, the one difference there is we had a major issue that really did divide the nation.

10:34And now we have Donald Trump, who's a force for chaos. But I don't think we're as ideologically divided over some major issue as they were over slavery. One more go around about Donald Trump. But not the Trump who would usurp the tariff authority from Congress or terrify Greenlanders with the news that they must become part of the United States. But I'm thinking more of the Trump whose minions, after taking over the Kennedy Center, rename it for him, and who releases a video, a horrible racist video that caricatures the Obamas as apes without any apology. these have nothing to do with being president.

11:13I mean, the Greenland thing and the tariffs, that has to do with policy and the executive branch of government. What is this? And how do you think Americans are learning to cope with this person who seems to think that making America great again isn't even a work in progress? It's a fait accompli, and we should all be a grateful people that we now live in a great society. Say an intern released that video by accident or whatever, you take even their version. A normal person said, America has a whole history in racism. What that video showed was abominable. And I denounce it. Like, how hard is that?

11:48And so, but, you know, this is a president who, A, needs to be the center of attention. That's part of tyranny, by the way. The need to constantly be the center of attention every second of every day. But second, simply lack where the moral backbone would normally be, or even the moral sentiment wouldn't normally be. And he stands for nihilism, a belief in nothing. that, you know, he stands for the idea, as Stephen Miller sort of put it, or Thucydides, if I'm going back from the Romans to the Greeks, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. And he's tried to create a world, not only domestically, but internationally, where gangsters can thrive without any sense of internal restraint.

12:26And to me, the interesting question is, what the hell happened to us? Why do 77 million people last election took a look Donald Trump and didn't see anything morally disqualifying. And I do not think that would have happened in America 50 years ago. I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump's arrival on the scene. And my quick story about that is, for all of American history, we had some sense of a shared moral order. There's a historian, George Marsden, I'll paraphrase what he wrote, that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such force was the idea that moral law was written into the fabric of the universe, that slavery and segregation were not just wrong sometimes, they're always wrong.

13:06And over the last 50 years, in my view, we've sort of privatized morality. We said there are no shared moral values. There's no ultimate truth, but everybody gets to come up with their own values. To each his own narrative. Yeah, you do you. It's your truth. And if you do that, A, unless your name is Aristotle, you probably can't come up with your own moral philosophy. I mean, most of us can't do that. But second, we have no shared morality on which to decide what's right and wrong. And with that, just basic shared standards of how a person should behave. And there's been that loss of just assumptions of this is what a president does, this is what a president doesn't do.

13:41But does that mean, E.J., that Trump is getting a pass on anything from racism to megalomania? No, you've put a bunch of things on the table here. And I'll begin where you ended, which is, I think it's a mistake to look at Trump's election as a failure because of this complicated breakdown of any morality, I think there is still a strong moral sense among Americans. And you're seeing it in the backlash against the killings of Rene Good and Alex Petty. You're seeing it in a lot of backlash out there where his approval rating has taken a real pounding. There is a solid base of support of about 30, 35 percent of Americans who believe that Trump is against their enemies and they're going to be because he opposes those whom they oppose.

14:29They will be with him. But Trump wasn't elected because all these Americans lost their moral sense. He was elected partly because of partisanship that a lot of people who thought of themselves as Republican still preferred the Republican Donald Trump over someone like Kamala Harris, and partly because they couldn't believe that he would behave like this. And then a bunch of other Americans voted for him because they were mad about prices and disorder at the southern border and just thought from the first term, well, he'll have some folks around him who will restrain him. He wasn't quite this wild.

15:05And they are regretting that now is what it looks like. But in terms of Trump himself, I think it does go back to something David said, which is that if you believe in yourself as an absolute power, if you claim absolute power, that you stop surrounding yourself with people who will question you and only surround yourself with people who will say whatever you do is right, and you have the kind of, I think, deterioration we're seeing in Trump himself, then you do have somebody who can't apologize for a racist video like that and who continues to act in this way. And, you know, there was some Republican pushback against that video, but what's really striking is Republicans are still petrified of opposing this.

15:53And what you haven't seen is enough of the center right in the United States, David's an exception, God bless him, but enough of the center right in politics in the United States that's willing to say enough of this. And maybe that's a product of a two-party system, but it's a real problem. And so we have a president who might have a sign behind him that says, the buck stops with the intern. Harry Truman would be very upset. So David mentioned that this is his last day doing something journalistic for the New York Times. You've been a columnist here for 22 years. And I just want to take a moment before we continue discussing to tell you how important your work has been over those 22 years.

16:39how I think you really expanded what a newspaper column might be about and what we have to expect whenever we read the same columnist could be very different from day to day. You've sampled the world of academe and found interesting sources for material without turning into an academic writer in the process. I have the greatest respect for you, and I am very proud of my reassociation with you, as small as it may be. What I just wanted to say, I brought a prop in today, David. It's your second book, I believe, On Paradise Drive. And I brought it in partly because of the inscription you wrote. This was published back in 2004, so 22 years ago.

17:25And we have been talking about politics together in various venues, but mostly with Robert, thank goodness, for a long time. And you inscribed it to my good friend EJ. say, someday in the future, we will agree on everything you said. And I contemplated this. And the fact is, we do agree on more now than we did 22 years ago. I think that's true. We had certain fundamentals in common. We both love Reinhold Niebuhr. And I think that's a tribute to the fact that you have responded to events, and that's why we agree on more. Now, thank goodness, and we're probably both happy about this, we do not agree on everything and we still like to argue with each other.

18:10And I'm very sad that this reunion that we've had recently is going to come to such a quick end. But if I may cite a musical source, The Beach Boys, I still hope that we can get back together and do this again, again. So I'll miss you, David. Thank you. And thank you, gentlemen. We've been doing this for long times, back to the 20th century we were doing this. That's right. Viewers may not know that Robert and I are third cousins. We learned from a DNA test. And we grew up in the same housing projects, Dyson Town in Lower Manhattan. That's right. And EJ and I have been joined at the hip for many decades.

18:48And, you know, one of the things that I was a lucky break for me, a lot of things were lucky breaks. One, I had a grandfather who knew how to write. And as I mentioned, my final column, love to write letters to the New York Times. It was just so moving when I got this job to go from the kid he was in Lower East Side, going to City College, Free College in New York, to working in the New York Times. That's a great American story. Another lucky break was I found my heroes early on. And I think both of you may share a bit of this if you haven't put it this way. I realized that in the 1950s and 1960s, there were a group of writers who were slightly above normal journalism and below academia.

19:26and they were people like Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson and Digby Bultsell and Daniel Bell. Vance Packard. Vance Packard. Your role model originally. And so I said, that's where I want to be. And so I think I've tried to do that for the rest of my career and I will continue to do that at the end. You have done it very, very well. Now, here's the question. Ready? Okay. 22 years. Let's think about that span of time for a moment. When you think back on the days when you began writing the column and today, what's different? What's most different about the work or the world that we live in, the country?

20:03What would you say? Well, it hasn't gotten any easier to write. I can tell you that. I think I've changed an enormous amount. My wife and I have been married for nine years. And when she looks at a video of me from like 20 years ago, she says, well, I wouldn't have married that guy. And so I think I've become a little more emotionally open and emotionally vulnerable. And I think what's changed has not been good. As I said in my final column, we were a more hopeful country. We had faith in institutions that was greater. We had faith in America's role in the world. We had faith in our alliances.

20:33Barack Obama could run that 2008 campaign filled with idealism and hope. And he can run against a guy, John McCain, filled with a sense of honor. And we've lost faith in institutions. We've lost faith in ourselves. And we've lost faith in each other. And so to me, one of the reasons, you know, I want to devote more of my life to academia and to teaching young and to writing longer essays is just I think we have a spiritual and relational and moral crisis we're dealing with. And I figured I could make some little contribution over there. When we were talking, Robert, you said we were going to look over this 22-year period.

21:09I think the two times in that period that David and I came, we weren't close to coming to blows, but when we were really angry at each other in a way that was unusual for the way we talked about this. One was during the recount in Florida, where I actually remember having to join all things considered stopping at the side of the road on the beltway. I was on my way to somewhere, and the Supreme Court ruled that we're just going to stop counting the votes in Florida. And then the other, some during the Iraq war, those were two really difficult periods. But when you think about, you know, David talks about correctly a certain loss of confidence, a loss of ability to argue about real things in a way where argument is seen as leading you somewhere as opposed to just continuing on indefinitely.

21:58Think about what people in their 30s or 20s lived through in that period. We came out of a period of enormous prosperity. We thought peace would last forever. The Berlin Wall was down. And quickly, we had 9-11 and then endless wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq that went on and on. Then we had the economic collapse of 2008. So the country itself has gone through a lot of trauma. For the pandemic. And then we had the pandemic. And so I think that there are a lot of reasons why we are where we are. But I think that trauma, we still have not fully come to terms with or come out the other side of.

22:38And we've got to get there at some point. One measure of change for me is that I remember covering first from Washington from a distance and then down New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina. And, of course, one of the great solutions to the problem of 9-11 was to create a single department, a single agency that would bring together virtually every disaster we could possibly experience as a country. would be the work of the Secretary of Homeland Security, who was Mike Chertoff at that time. And I remember wondering in New Orleans, was it really such a great idea to have every threat facing our country on one man's desk?

23:17I'm really glad you raised that. I'm curious what David thinks about this. Ben Rhodes had a very good piece in The Times about a week or so ago. And, you know, people talk about abolish ICE. And I heard Jim McGovern, the progressive Democrat from Massachusetts, put it the same but different. He said, let's scrap it and start over. And I think this is the time to rethink the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Does the Coast Guard belong in there? Does FEMA belong in there? That agency was put together. And by the way, homeland is just not much of an American word. Yeah, no, it's not a word we ever used as a nation.

23:58And so I think this is a time to, you know, let's use that sort of battle cry, abolish ICE, and let's take it in the direction of rethinking how we created this agency under a lot of pressure. The country was scared, legitimately so. And you don't always do your best work in government when you're scared. And I think DHS is an example of that. You know, I was once at a dinner that Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, had with a bunch of journalists. And he said, every reform I initiated in my first term turned out exactly backwards from how I expected it to. And he said, I'm an anti-reform reformer now because it never works.

24:35And that's why I'm a conservative. And to quote Edmund Burke, you should operate on society the way you would operate on your father, as humbly, as incrementally, and as delicately as possible. So I would be for reforming DHS, not tearing it down. Okay. On that note, our final question has been the same in every one of these, which is what's been some source of joy that you've experienced? E.J., we start with you. I just want to say I thought that bad bunny performance at the Super Bowl, I didn't like the outcome. I'm an ardent patriots fan. But that was an extraordinary thing.

25:14And I came at a particular time after, you know, with a reckoning in the country about what ICE is doing. But he was incredibly political by being less directly political. He reminded us of the depth of how much Latino music matters to Americans going way back. I was thinking of Richie Valance and La Bamba, which, you know, is one of the most covered hits of all time. But also the sense of community and love. That was a real marriage that happened, a real wedding that happened in the middle of that.

25:54It was a beautiful tribute to a very important piece of our tradition. My source of joy involved going to New York, in part to celebrate our older daughter's 50th birthday. I'm contacting the hospital asking for a recount. I think there must be something wrong with that, for that to be. But we also saw our other daughter in something called Diaspora, an immersive dramatic experience of which she was a singer and the music director, Leah Siegel. and it was just a wonderful evening about women's stories fleeing from their native lands. David, you have the final word. Well, leaving the New York Times is not joyous.