What Is Going on With Trump?

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.

0:20I'm Aaron Redica, an editor in NYT Opinion. I'm here with one of our columnists, Brett Stevens, and one of our contributing writers, Frank Bruni. Hello to you both. Hello, hello, hello. Hey, Frank, how are you doing? Hey, how are you guys? Great to see you. Good to see you, Aaron. How was your Thanksgiving? Mine was very nice. Turkey was well done. The politics were only slightly underdone. Let's just say we got through it. Frank, what about you? I was with, I think we had a headcount of more than 30 Brunis. And we have learned when we reach those numbers not to go near politics. Although since we're Italian, the food is political.

0:59You know, whether the host made enough pasta to go with the various turkeys is a quasi-political question for us because we're Italian. Right. I'm also Italian, so I understand it well. I'm the son of an Italian Jew, so it's the same story. We only had 15 at our table, but it was actually delightfully apolitical. I don't know why. Maybe because we all know we agree about everything, so there was no need to talk about it. Speaking of political, in the last column, we included a call-out for readers to ask the questions that they have for Brett and Frank, and we're going to get to some of those in a minute.

1:33But first, I wanted to just talk about what seems to be on the mind of a lot of people insofar as they pay attention to politics at all, and that's what's going on with the president, who's a bit all over the place these days, but he's spending a lot of his time focusing on foreign policy. Americans, of course, never, you know, foreign policy, even with wars, is never at the heart of how they're living day to day, and affordability is a much bigger issue, and it's certainly a huge issue now. Frank, let me start with you because you're in North Carolina. What are you seeing in terms of how people are reacting to Trump, what they're thinking about Trump, what role he's playing in their lives?

2:13I hear people expressing disappointment and concern that the price of living is not coming down, the cost of living is not coming down. I think they have some serious questions about whether the blame for that belongs with President Trump and they definitely notice the contradiction between what he promised them and what he's delivered. But I also get the sense that the jury's not out. I say this as someone who obviously is rooting for a successful Democratic performance in the midterms next year. But I think there is plenty of time for Trump and his administration to try to right that ship, because I don't get the sense that the people who were kindly inclined toward him, who wanted to give him a chance, or who were fans, I don't get the feeling that they have closed the door on him henceforth.

3:01Yeah, I think that's right. I think Trump is, first of all, the beneficiary of an opposition that is still kind of broadly pathetic, a fact that was, I think, vividly illustrated to all sides by the shutdown and then the capitulation towards the shutdown. I also think that Trump has the ability to create problems for himself and then solve them. One very good way of solving the affordability crisis, which is still very much, I think, on people's minds, is by lifting the very tariffs or many of the same tariffs that he has unilaterally imposed. So I don't think this moment in time necessarily tells us very much about where we'll be in, say, 11 months and one week.

3:52That's to say, at the midterms. I want to echo what Brett said. I think that's completely true. And I think we all need to remember, the three of us, all of our colleagues, we think in sort of three-minute increments. We're taking the pulse of the situation every three days or every three hours or every three minutes. I think voters think in longer increments of time. And some of the stuff that we're so surprised at in Trump and that we criticize him for, the way he, you know, reverses what he says he's going to do, doesn't follow through, goes back on his word, et cetera, and his executive overreach.

4:23Those things could be his greatest tools before the midterms in terms of finally reckoning with the fact that he's not delivered on his economic promises, finally reckoning with the fact that he has not brought down the cost of living. We could see him doing very sweeping and unilateral and emphatic things that reverse what he's done before and to a certain, from a certain perspective, look ridiculous, but actually end up, for his political purposes, being very efficacious. Let's not forget Donald Trump is a second-term president, operating in many respects as second-term presidents do. They turn away from domestic politics, quite typically, and focus on foreign policy where they feel they have more control.

5:09They're looking for a global legacy because they've already secured, essentially, their political vindication through their re-election. And at some level, they just don't care, right? I mean, that's just a theme in a lot of second terms. that they're just no longer as concerned with, say, what the daily poll numbers are telling them because they know that they're lame ducks and they're playing for an entirely different audience. And I think we're seeing a little bit of that also with President Trump right now. That is a perfect takeaway, actually, to the thing I wanted to get into next, which is what Trumpism after Trump, what you imagine it to be.

5:47This is a very hard question, actually, right? Because there's so many different forms of MAGA. I mean, we've learned over the past 10 years, there's the national conservative people. There's the post-liberals. There's the traditional Republicans who are willing to live with it, like Rubio or whatever. But they're also connected to a whole set of ideas about making Republican Party work as a working class party. There's other taxonomies that could do. So, Brad, let me start with you. Trumpism without Trump. Is that possible? What's it going to look like? Who's going to lead it? What shape will it take?

6:22Well, first of all, don't forget there are a lot of Trumps. Eric and Don and Ivanka and Lara Trump and a whole line of succession there that don't discount them. They will be politically relevant, I think, for a long time after their father is out of office. I think Trumpism without Trump is going to move in different directions because Trumpism was always a somewhat amorphous set of half-baked ideas connected to a singularly charismatic, in my view, odious, but odiously charismatic figure. I think one side of it is kind of the J.D. Vance version, much more isolationist, truculent, illiberal in many of its core instincts.

7:10Another side of it could be sort of a quasi-restoration of what we used to call, you know, normie republicanism. You mentioned Marco Rubio combined with, you know, a slightly more populist tinge, but a return to sort of the Republican Party that we used to know. A third aspect of it, a third possible direction, and the one that terrifies me most, is the one that's embodied by Tucker Carlson and the more aggressively bigoted, anti-Semitic, wildly illiberal streak that looks like an American version of the AfD party from Germany or other very far right-wing parties in Europe that kind of openly incorporate and celebrate fascistic elements in their lives.

7:56core thinking. So one of those three futures is possible. In fact, all three futures is possible. Well, I mean, what's interesting listening to Brett talk about that, because everything he said is wholly accurate, is we spend so much time talking about how untenable the Democratic coalition can be, and left versus center and Democrats, and just how does that party stay together. What Brett is describing are so many different ideological tribes of different temperature within the Republican Party that are being held together and have been held together for a while now, really, by Trump's force of personality.

8:32And I think the question is, once he's gone, all of these things we describe as fissures, do they become something much wider, much more jagged, much more destructive? And do you have a sort of chaos within what was once referred to as the Republican Party and has already changed so much? I don't know. But I think it's possible, and I think if our democratic institutions have not been totally corrupted and enfeebled by the time that happens, it could really be a disaster for the so-called Republican Party and an extraordinary opportunity for today's Democratic Party. Okay, so a question that is always on your mind, you guys have brought it up already, that I definitely want to get at and that are readers we're very interested in.

9:15I'm going to read a reader question about this in a second. It's about centrism, its power, maybe not its power, right? So let me just read to you from this question. In the conversation, Frank said, Democrats need to reclaim the dead center of American politics. In some ways, that's going to require a considerable shift to the right. I think I said that, no. Oh, I don't know. Okay, well, this person said it was you. But the rest of the question is fabulous. I'm going to take that mistake as a compliment. Exactly. Please go deeper into this. How is it that being more conservative is going to help the Democratic Party?

9:53How does it help Americans? I'd prefer, I'm still in the voice of the reader here, but it's not untrue of me either. I'd prefer to see the Democratic Party a little left of center on many issues, such as health care. Why do you think that it doesn't work politically? Why can't Americans have the safety net that European countries provide so well for their citizens so that, you know, the countries that have, you know, other countries that are top of a happiness list? I want to add to the question, though, to make it even harder or make it a little harder. I want to divide the centrisms, right? Because there's a identity politics eschewing centrism that potentially is maybe a very electorally effective.

10:36But if it's a centrism that doesn't change any of the economic arrangements that are currently obtaining, I'm not sure that would work, no matter how much it pushed back against the loonier elements of the coalition. Brad, I know this is a subject dear to your heart, so why don't I start with you? Well, first of all, I just have a theory of politics, which is that politics are really still won in the middle of the electorate. And the reason Donald Trump was improbably reelected for a non-consecutive term is that he won a lot of voters who had shifted toward Biden four years earlier. And he was able to do so because people had memories of prosperity under Trump, at least until the pandemic hit.

11:24And I just think you look at not just in terms of the national elections, but in terms of the congressional elections, when you see Democrats who are winning in purple areas. I think The New York Times had a very excellent editorial on this subject. Time and again, the people who are going to win, who are going to give you the governing majorities are not the Elizabeth Warrens. They're the Joe Manchins. So wherever the Democratic Party can find those Joe Manchins, right, who are going to win difficult seats in purple states, they need to recognize their value. That's just a political reality. The second thing is the most successful Democratic president of my life was Bill Clinton.

12:06And Bill Clinton learned the lesson that when the Democratic Party had, according to broad perception, shifted too far to the left, it became unelectable. And it became electable again when he pushed the party way back to the center of politics in both senses. I mean, this was a president who was pro-death penalty and acted on that as governor of Arkansas. And he was culturally much more at the center of American politics. You remember he had the famous Sister Soldier moment back in 1992. He talked about abortion being safe, legal, and rare. This was a president who understood that Americans didn't particularly like the kind of the radical touches of the Democratic Party from the 1970s and 1980s.

12:55And Americans don't like the radical touches from the last decade either. So one of the things that I think a successful Democratic nominee is going to have to do is he's going to have to take the cultural issues off the table in order to win by not appearing to be as Kamala Harris, you know, was essentially a progressive in the clothes of a of a centrist. Final, final point. You know, Democrats have a big problem because in too many places, cities, at least at the municipal level, cities run by progressive Democrats are exactly what Americans do not want. And states run by progressive Democrats, I'm thinking of Governor Pritzker in Illinois or Gavin Newsom in California, are also what Americans do not want, right?

13:45The Democratic Party needs to lean into its Andy Beshears. It needs to lean into its Josh Shapiros. It has maybe Wes Moore will be the guy. I don't know. But it needs to lean into that side. Roy Cooper from North Carolina might be another figure who will speak to that middle of American politics that wants sanity, not another four years of radicalism to one side or the other. So, Frank, before you start, let me just push back against that a little bit and show how we can do it civilly. Democrats at their greatest, though, at least to my mind, right, the FDR coalition, the New Deal, the LBJ coalition, the Great Society, much of which I presume you don't love, but some of which you probably do at least like or tolerate.

14:31That was a much more ambitious, dreamier, liberal left coalition, bringing in actual critiques, people who were critiques of capitalism all the way to the centrists and the farmers and a much broader coalition. And what I worry about with what you're talking about is that that center is narrower than—I'm not saying it's not electorally viable for the House, but I worry a little bit that if the Democrats have a problem where they're seen as equivocators, as not dreaming big, as not really thinking about people's lives, that if they simply tack toward, you know, what political scientists call the median voter, they'll actually end up seeming more wishy-washy than they do now.

15:18My memories of the LBJ administration are admittedly vague, Aaron, since I was minus five years. Yeah, but you heard about it. At least from the history books, I seem to recall that the final term of the Johnson administration was not a very happy one, and that the guy who became president was someone named Richard Nixon. Is that a name familiar to you? Oh, I've heard of him. Yeah. He had a rough presidency, no? And I also, well, not the first term, but the second term was less glorious. And I remember Joe Biden coming to office campaigning as a centrist and then governing as progressive and being a one-term, widely despised president.

16:02I mean, not just for his policies, but also in part for those policies. So I'm not quite sure. I guess you have to go back to FDR to find an example that confirms your theory. So I'm not—I just don't see that happening. But here's the problem, Aaron. The problem is that when you get to the center of politics, typically speaking, charisma leaves the house, right? Charisma lives at the margins of politics. Mamdani was a charismatic politician, is a charismatic politician, to take one extant example. The trick is how do you create a charismatic center? And again, I go back to Bill Clinton. And it was that unique personality of his that got personal charisma tied to centrist politics and got a broad coalition of Americans behind him.

16:57Remember, he left office, despite all the scandals, with what, a 63 % approval rating or something equally stratospheric? So my question to you, or maybe to Frank, I don't know, is what does this left liberal coalition support? And can it run more successfully than, say, Harris did last year? I don't think so. And frankly, I actually want you to center it a little bit on North Carolina, because North Carolina has to be part of any emerging democratic coalition, right? Obama won it the first time, and he lost it the second time. Yeah, Romney won it the next time. And Romney won it the next time.

17:30So North Carolina is a really actually very interesting bellwether for the future of America for a million reasons. It's got all the research universities, which you're now part of. So talk to us about Brett's question, but actually let's talk about North Carolina at the same time. Well, North Carolina was also Biden's narrowest loss in 2020. You know, when I look at North Carolina, I do not think a Democrat who was identified primarily as a social progressive, who had laid himself, herself, or their self open to the kind of ad that if you were living in North Carolina during the last election, as I was, you saw in perpetuity the transgender inmate ad that ended with that, in terms of its political effect, brilliant line, Donald Trump is for you, Kamala Harris is for they, them, right?

18:22My point is, if you're a Democrat with a record or are emphasizing things in the fashion where you can be identified that way, as far to the left on, you know, for lack of a better shorthand, social, cultural issues, then I think you're in trouble. Where I think there is space and possibility, perhaps, is a Democrat who is pretty far to the left on economic issues, but does not go all the way there on social and cultural issues. At least in a state like North Carolina, I could see that combination winning. And it goes back to, I think you said one of the most important things at the beginning of this chapter of our discussion, Aaron, which is there are many centrisms.

19:03I would put it a different way. When we talk about a candidate being tenable because that candidate is in the center, do we mean in the center on every issue, on every kind of spectrum that you could establish? Or do we mean when you add it all together, the way it comes out in the wash is as kind of centrist? I think that is a more realistic thing, and I agree that only a centrist candidate can prevail. But one last thing, Brett, you made a great point about how much more difficult charisma is in the center or for a centrist than it is for someone else. I think there may be an opportunity right now for that to be not true.

19:43I think Americans, those who are not spending all their lives on social media, are so tired of the temperature of our political discourse, are so tired of the melodrama of American political life, that I think a centrist who was poetic and charismatic about the desire to heal, the desire to turn down the temperature, the desire to create a space that may not match everybody's political preferences, but that is a space in which we can actually live amicably and get some minor stuff done, find some compromises so that we have incremental progress as opposed to utter sclerosis, I think that could be a charismatic pitch.

20:24We were talking about how presidents pivot to foreign policy in their second terms, and I want to do that too because it's critical to what's happening in the news. To start with Venezuela, we're recording this on Monday. and there is a meeting going on later today, so who knows what will be happening by the time this comes out, but a lot has already happened. And there has not been a ton of stirring in the American public about what's happening in Venezuela, but there is starting to be some pushback in Congress. Let me start with Frank, actually. On the ground in North Carolina or in your conversations or anything like that, are you seeing any kind of tremors from what's happening with Venezuela?

21:06People ignore it completely. Are people talking about it at all? Is it, you know, and I'm also curious. I hear my friends in academia talking about it, and I do not hear my neighbors talking about it who are not in academia. And while not representative, many of them are physicians and health care workers. I don't hear them talking about it. I think what Pete Hegseth stands accused of, according to that Washington Post report as we speak, I think is crucially and vitally important. Let's say what that is for people who don't know what we're talking about. Sure. I'm going to perhaps mischaracterize it, but he is accused by the story in The Washington Post of essentially giving orders, I mean, at a remove, to strike and kill any survivors of an attack on an allegedly drug smuggling boat.

21:50I'm using really sloppy shorthands, even though the mission of essentially sinking that boat, taking that boat out of action, even though that was accomplished, and these people were mere survivors clinging to the wreckage to go ahead and kill everyone anyway. That is, by many definitions, a war crime. I'm hedging it just because are we at war? There are all sorts of intricacies here. I think that accusation is profoundly important. I think figuring out what happened and responding in a forceful way is incredible. I mean, I don't mean militarily forceful. I mean, in terms of what happens to Pete Hegseth, I think is incredibly important.

22:29And yet it is one of those things, if we're being realistic, that I don't think you're going to hear voters talking a ton about because it's not something that is entering their daily lives in a way that they can feel. Now, who knows? It's still very early. It's still very young. And I love that you've made me the voice of North Carolina and the sort of weatherman in North Carolina. But most of my time— I couldn't resist, sorry. But I also believe in this. You went to college there? Yeah, and I went to UNC Chapel Hill, so I went to a public university. But I also believe in total transparency.

23:01And most of my time is spent either walking in the woods with my beloved dog, Regan, or commuting between my upper-middle-class kind of suburban neighborhood and an elite university. So I do not have my finger on the pulse of North Carolina quite in the way I wish I did. Brett, let me give you a chance to talk about Venezuela. I do want you to take into this a little bit, like, what happened to America first, though, right? I mean, you have your own thoughts about what we should be doing in Venezuela, which you should outline. But let's start with the Hegset situation, and then you talk more broadly about Maduro and what's happening overall and the threats that the government is making.

23:37I'm in the peculiar position in that the administration is pursuing or seems to be pursuing a policy I broadly support, but they're pursuing it in ways that I find not just objectionable, but in this case, you know, the one we're speaking about, if indeed that report is correct, despicable, because there's no question. And I guess we should say that the administration has denied that that is the case. So if that is in fact the case, it is unmistakably a war crime and it is absolutely shameful. With respect to Venezuela, look, the jury is very much out. I'm old enough to remember the first Bush administration invading Panama to get rid of a drug-running dictator there, Manuel Noriega.

24:23And it was, I think even most Panamanians would agree, was a necessary act of regional hygiene that did Panama a great deal of good. was good for the United States. And I think that if the U.S. is able to accomplish the same with the Maduro regime, it will be remembered the same way. If it ends up being some kind of long-running quagmire for American forces in Venezuela, then it's obviously a very different story. I happen to believe that I think it will look much more like the U.S. invasion of Panama than it will like the U.S. invasion of Iraq. but I've been wrong before and I could be wrong again.

25:04This is all caught up in some ways with what has been a bit of a surprise in the second Trump administration which is this you know McKinley-ite obsession with or Monroe Doctrine however you want to think about it with the Western Hemisphere and like our what's our space and like I wasn't expecting anything to happen with I mean they weren't talking about Venezuela on the campaign trail obviously and yet somehow it seems to have become very important to to him. I think Trump is obsessed with potency, or at the very least, the appearance thereof. I think these notions of territorial expansion, these notions of bringing other lands to heal and that sort of thing, I think it's so consistent with his psychological needs.

25:47And I'm not sure it's about a whole lot more than that, but Brett is much smarter on this. I will say, I don't think it's just psychological. I actually think that the Venezuela issue plays to a lot of important themes in the Trump administration. There is a massive refugee crisis that is the result of the misgovernance of the Chavez and Maduro regimes. I think the question of foreign meddling in the Western Hemisphere matters, and Venezuela is an ally of China, Russia, Cuba, and also of Iran. So that's another issue. It is, in fact, the case that The Maduro government essentially supports itself thanks to looking at a minimum looking the other way at the narco traffic that goes through its borders.

26:38So all of these are actually highly legitimate issues. And by the way, the Maduro government is one of the worst dictatorships in this hemisphere, and it stole an election last year. And so for Trump, if Trump were to get rid of the Maduro government and bring back the guy who won last year's elections and have him in office, it would put Democrats in a quandary because this would hardly be a matter of an American-led coup. It would be the restoration of Democratic leadership in what was once Latin America's richest state. I just have to amicably push back and note a few ironies. I don't think Trump is hugely concerned about the stealing of elections.

27:16I don't know where I get that, but that's just my feeling. Touché, touché. I don't know that Trump is usually concerned about the world's worst dictators. He exchanged love letters with the leader of North Korea, and he seems awfully eager to please Vladimir Putin. My third point, and if he's so concerned about narco-trafficking, why did he just extend a pardon to the former president of Honduras? My theory is he kind of likes to make a statement that presidents should be able to do whatever the hell they want with impunity. And I think he just likes to show that he has the muscle to do these things.