Bret Stephens: Hi Gail. You may or may not be happy to hear this, but once again I feel completely nauseated by Donald Trump. That took all of four weeks.
Gail Collins: Bret, what’s left for us to talk about? Except taxes and government spending and diversity programs and …
OK, tell me your Trump Trauma and I suspect we will find common ground.
Bret Stephens: Vladimir Putin being invited to the United States is the equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt receiving Adolf Hitler in Hyde Park sometime after Hitler marched into the Sudetenland. Trump’s style is to be brutal with our allies — Canada, Mexico, Panama, Denmark, Europe in general — but obsequious toward our enemies. The betrayal this represents for Ukraine, which apparently will now have to pay us in minerals for our tepid support for its right to live free, will be a mark of shame for the United States for decades to come.
Gail: We don’t argue foreign affairs, but I suspect if we did I’d agree.
Bret: On the domestic front, I’m appalled by the decision to drop the criminal case against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, apparently in exchange for him changing his tune on immigration policy. The only silver lining is that the episode has made a star of Danielle Sassoon, the once and former acting U.S. attorney for the southern district and a former clerk for Antonin Scalia, who resigned on principle over the matter after just a few weeks on the job. The MAGA crowd will surely go after her, but she’s a reminder, along with people like Liz Cheney, of what principled conservatism looks like.
Gail: You think it’s a coincidence that these two sterling stand-for-principle conservatives are women?
Bret: Surely not. Do you have a theory as to why?
Gail: Well, women are often growing up now with the same advantages and expectations of men. But I think there’s still a feeling of … being a little separate for many who come into the hard-charging world of work and politics. Men are still three-quarters of the members of Congress, and despite the many wonderful American husband-fathers, women still tend to have more responsibility for child-rearing. While making, on average, lower wages.
It’s just often harder for them to fight their way up. So when one makes a particularly brave and principled stand in the public eye, I’m always … kinda proud.
Bret: I’m sure her family is kvelling. The problem for the rest of us is that if we have another three years and 11 months of this, there won’t be a rule of law left in the United States. And that’s not even the worst of my fears.
Gail: I truly admire your ability to obsess about Trump at a point when I’m blocking him out of my mind way too much. Do you think his power comes from the ability to make his multitudinous millions of non-fans feel the need to go home and put their head under a pillow?
Bret: The Scylla and Charybdis of the Trump phenomenon is that he drives part of his opposition to obsession and derangement and another part into apathy and impotence. Sailing between the two ain’t easy. The trick, I think, is to be able to acknowledge that not everything Trump does is evil, stupid or wrong — in fact, sometimes he’s even right, like when it comes to getting rid of pennies and paper straws — while never forgetting the morally corrosive quality of his being. This is what so confounds the Democrats. They need to learn to pick their spots, laugh at Trump rather than jeer him, and develop a set of policy ideas that respond to middle-of-the-road concerns.
Suggestions welcome.
Gail: Don’t know anybody who feels the Democrats are really running with the ball. Maybe bouncing it on the sidelines.
What they need to do isn’t so much acknowledging when Trump is right — particularly when the moments of reason are so overshadowed by the glare of nuttiness. It’s pointing out the errors in the Republican political agenda he’s pressing. Massive, massive tax cuts that benefit mainly the rich, raising the debt ceiling by four trillion dollars, leading both to a soaring national debt and sweeping cuts in programs that start with a crash in services to the neediest people on the planet. Even the old Trump strategist Steve Bannon is against the Medicaid cuts they appear to be planning.
You more or less into that agenda?
Bret: Democrats aren’t going to win by being the nattering nabobs of negativism, to borrow a phrase.
Gail: Love it when you quote Spiro Agnew. Sorry, go on.
Bret: Bill Safire, actually!
They’re not going to win by trying to resuscitate “The Resistance,” which just comes across as self-important and futile. And they’re definitely not going to win unless they have a clear idea of where they went wrong in the past few years: veering too far left on cultural issues like transgenderism and D.E.I.; living in denial about the immigration and inflation crises; mindlessly supporting blowout government spending; misleading the American people about the state of Joe Biden’s health; screwing up royally at the level of local and state governance with harebrained ideas like Oregon’s hard-drug decriminalization scheme.
Gail: Quite a range there. Think we can blame the disaster over Joe Biden’s age on Joe Biden. Got past it, but not in time to hold proper primaries for a new nominee.
Oregon’s experiment with decriminalizing drugs didn’t work, but one of the points of state government is making it possible to try out new ideas on a smaller scale. They’re really the laboratories for American democracy. So, to the degree that we learned something, it was actually a success.
Bret: A catastrophic success.
Gail: While it’s true that the Democrats didn’t solve the immigration crisis, they definitely did come out looking better than the Trump side, with its theory of ignoring the Constitution and just tossing many of the children who are born here out of the citizenship equation.
Bret: Yes, except that illegal border crossings have plummeted.
My advice to Democrats is to adopt smarter versions of Trump’s more popular policies, like cutting wasteful spending and dumb regulations; pick a few fights with the extreme left, particularly when it comes to Israel, and take Ruben Gallego’s excellent advice in his interview with our news-side colleague Lulu Garcia-Navarro and sit down with Trump voters, especially those who have previously voted for Democrats. Listen to them for a change, instead of trying to shame or lecture them.
Gail: That was a great interview. And it takes us, once again, to the bottom line that most Americans aren’t special interests — they’re looking for a better economy, lower housing prices, safe streets and educational opportunities for their children.
I’m just saying the best way to tackle those issues is to forget about stupid, greedy tax cuts for the rich and juice up the economy with efficient government, targeted spending on services like quality child care, good schools and health care for people who can’t afford it on their own.
Bret: I wish I could think of a single recent example of “efficient government”; the two words belong together like “energetic sloth” and “ferocious Chihuahua.” That’s why I think Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is going to stay fairly popular with most of the public, even as it does a lot of damage to government operations and wrecks the careers of honorable civil servants.
Gail: You may be right, but I’m predicting popular revulsion, sooner or later.
Bret: A better motto for Democrats, I think, is “effective government,” which is primarily about delivering the services people need or expect, and not just about saving money, which seems to be the central criterion of “efficiency.” For instance, if Trump keeps pursuing his tariff mania, it’s going to disrupt supply chains and drive up prices. If the Department of Education is essentially shut down without a good plan to replace its essential functions, especially when it comes to all the money that goes to special ed, it’s going to disrupt the lives of a lot of families without a clear Plan B. If Trump takes a hatchet to the Food and Drug Administration, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keeps droning on about the fictitious link between vaccines and autism, and then there are more measles outbreaks like the one that’s underway in Texas, that’s also going to remind people of the government they need.
We’ll see. So what’s keeping you optimistic these days?
Gail: Well, on the political front I am comforted by what appears to be a general ineptitude among the Republicans’ teeny-tiny majority in Congress — especially in the House. I’m also gonna soothe myself with giving donations to some charities I follow — it’s always a pleasure to be reminded that while we’re stuck with a lot of repulsive people on top, we’ve got squadrons quietly volunteering their time to tutor kids, plant trees in the park, read to the blind … the list goes on and on.
Your turn.
Bret: I can’t speak highly enough for the Hunts Point Alliance for Children, to which my dear friends Paul Healy and Didier Malaquin introduced me. Hunts Point, in the Bronx, is among the poorest neighborhoods in New York City; it also produces some of the most inspiring and ambitious young people I’ve ever met. The Alliance helps structure the kids’ time, underwrites their scholarships, introduces them to Shakespeare and does dozens of other things to set them on a solid, upward path.
Incredible things are happening all over America, at least outside Washington. It’s worth keeping faith that good things will happen there, too. Eventually.
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