DNYUZ
  • Home
  • News
    • U.S.
    • World
    • Politics
    • Opinion
    • Business
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Science
  • Entertainment
    • Culture
    • Music
    • Movie
    • Television
    • Theater
    • Gaming
    • Sports
  • Tech
    • Apps
    • Autos
    • Gear
    • Mobile
    • Startup
  • Lifestyle
    • Arts
    • Fashion
    • Food
    • Health
    • Travel
No Result
View All Result
DNYUZ
No Result
View All Result
Home News

Trump Has a Religion. What Do Democrats Have?

October 23, 2025
in News
Trump Has a Religion. What Do Democrats Have?
495
SHARES
1.4k
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

The Conversation convenes this week with the Opinion columnist David Brooks, the contributing Opinion writer E.J. Dionne Jr. and the former host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” Robert Siegel to discuss and debate Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run, gerrymandering and what the No Kings protests achieved.

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Robert Siegel: I’m Robert Siegel, now a contributor to Times Opinion. I’m in conversation with two old friends, both of The New York Times. Columnist David Brooks: How are you?

David Brooks: How are you?

Robert Siegel: And contributing Opinion writer E.J. Dionne.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Great to be with you, always.

Siegel: Once again, we’re together to talk about politics — and there is no shortage of things to talk about. Last month we started off with the question of authoritarianism. Do all the various claims of new presidential powers amount to a loss of fundamental liberties? Well, it seems that several million Americans think so.

They turned out all around the country to protest against kings. So let’s start there.

E.J., what did you make of the No Kings protests? What did you see in it? And what did you make of the reactions to it?

Dionne: Well, I went down to the one here in D.C., and what I saw was patriotism.

The symbol that was most on offer everywhere along the march route was the American flag. There was even one part of the march where a bunch of people respectfully held out a very large American flag, and little kids were running underneath the flag — because there were a lot of kids there with their parents. It was a very, if I may say so of a march in D.C., a Middle American march.

I think you saw that in a lot of parts of the country. And I think it put the lie to something that I found really disturbing from Speaker Mike Johnson — and others on the Republican side said this — they referred to it as the Hate America rally. It couldn’t have been more different than that.

Since we are on authoritarian watch here, I think it was such a disturbing thing for him to say, because if you are opposed to his party or opposed to the president he supports, that means you hate America. One party, one leader, one country is something that our soldiers fought against in many wars. That’s not a conception of Americanism.

A lot of those people who were marching were very aware of the acceleration of the move toward authoritarianism. You think of the prosecution, the indictments of James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton — the first two utterly without reason, except that the president hates them.

I think the people at this march weren’t ideological. They were just deeply concerned about the direction of the country.

Siegel: Well, David, you called for a national movement as what we need — first in a column back in the spring, and most recently in a longer piece in The Atlantic. Is the No Kings movement the movement you had in mind? Does it fit the bill?

Brooks: It’s getting there. It’s weird for me; I’m not a movement guy — I’m more conservative than not, and now I find myself reading Saul Alinsky and all these lefties. I’m going, “Yeah, power to the people.” So I’m going total revolutionary here.

Dionne: It’s about time, David. [Laughs.]

Brooks: What I liked about No Kings rallies was just what E.J. mentioned: that people like me, who are kind of center right, would feel completely at home there.

If it starts looking like Occupy Wall Street, then I think: Good for you people, but it’s not for me. I’m hanging around Occupy and my hair starts falling out. But around No Kings, I just feel it’s pro-American. It’s basically in line with the cultural DNA of this country. So I’m very impressed by it.

I think a couple of reservations I have — not criticisms, but things that are not yet there — if you look back at social movements that have succeeded, they’re decentralized. They happen all over, but there are always central collaborating committees. You look at the civil rights movement and they had the N.A.A.C.P., all these acronyms of all these organizations who were leading.

Second, I do think you need leaders, and I think sometimes, like Occupy, people are averse to having one person at the top. But without that, you can’t control your message. You can’t really conduct a strategy.

The civil rights movement conducted a soap opera every day. They told the story every day about segregation, and through that repeated storytelling, you really built the movement. You gave the segregators an unwinnable proposition. When you control the streets, either they cede the streets to you or they crack down on you and look like monsters. And that’s a way to achieve civic power.

The final thing that I think No Kings is so far not making is a vision. Donald Trump has a vision. Trump is a culture. He has a core story: The elites have betrayed you. But he doesn’t only have that story. He has a culture of MAGA, a culture of what a man looks like, what a woman looks like. He has a religion, basically, if you looked at the Charlie Kirk memorial service. He gives you identity. He gives you belonging.

It takes a counterculture to best the culture that Donald Trump is leading. And so far, the Democrats don’t have that; they have a bunch of tax credits. And so far, the No Kings movement doesn’t have that.

Dionne: There was a lot of stuff in your piece I appreciate. I particularly like the line where you said Trumpism is seeking “to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, science and the pursuit of justice, and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego and appetite.”

There’s some very good stuff here.

But I’ll tell you where I take issue with you. You talked about a miasma of passivity that seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that you’ve seen this movement grow.

I think that what is making things difficult is, in our history, I think it’s fair to say that we have never confronted a government that was willing to break the law as freely — not just break norms, which they haven’t cared about for a long time, but break the law as freely.

We haven’t seen a situation where all of the institutions of government are behaving in a partisan way. The Congress is behaving in a partisan way. And on many of these cases, most so far, the Supreme Court is behaving in a partisan way.

So people are trying to find purchase here. Where we partly agree is on this need for a strong movement across the country.

I read a very good book this week by Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown called “Rural Versus Urban.”

I think that you need to revisit organizing all the way down in the country, and you need to put pressure on Republicans. Because until some of the Republicans who clearly know better are willing to say so, it’s going to be very hard to break this power that Trump is amassing.

Brooks: Well, he has the core story that people believe in: The elites have betrayed you. The passivity I was talking about was not so much at the bottom, though. I do think it’s there. It’s at the top.

Dionne: There, I agree with you.

Brooks: It’s the head of the companies, it’s the head of universities, the head of law firms. They’re just lying low — in part because they’re intimidated, in part just because of the collective action problem. Who’s going to step out first?

I had a friend, a business leader, who went to Europe and he said, “We’ve lost faith in the United States forever.” And I said, “It’s like Taylor Swift: ‘We are never getting back together.’”

And the European said something interesting: It’s not because you elected Trump. We all have Trumps in our countries, so any country could do that. It’s because you didn’t rise up.

He’s looking at his business leaders, and he’s seeing them say something in private about how awful things are going, and then in public speaking a very different language. And you can measure the amount of authoritarianism in a country by how high the price is to oppose it.

Dionne: Totally agree about a lot of business leaders, but let’s look at some real pushback. Some law firms went over to Trump, but a whole lot of law firms said: We are not going there.

They went after Jimmy Kimmel, a whole lot of people protested, and Jimmy Kimmel was put back on the air.

A lot of universities are saying no to what Trump is doing. So I totally agree with you that I want more pushback from people at the very top of the economy, but I think you’re seeing seeds of revolt that are very useful.

Siegel: But let me ask you both this: David, your article made me think back to the civil rights movement and my extremely minute role as a onetime member of the Stuyvesant High School Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Dionne: God bless you.

Siegel: The civil rights movement achieved a major Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, constitutional amendment against poll taxes. After the restoration of the Medicaid tax break, I don’t know what the agenda of the No Kings movement is. I assume they can’t enact it now, but I don’t even know what would be on the wish list.

Brooks: I think that’s the wrong way to think about it, with all due respect to my friend. You went to Stuyvesant High School. That shows you’re smarter. [Laughs.]

But I don’t think the anti-Trump forces understand the nature of the fight, which is that Trumpism didn’t emerge overnight. It started, in some ways, back in the 19th century, with Know Nothing.

But it really started with people like Sam Francis and Christopher Lasch with his book “The Revolt of the Elites.” There was a big intellectual movement, and Trump just picked up everything Christopher Lasch wrote in that book in 1995. So what you need is a whole movement and a vision, and it has to be intellectual first.

What I think Democrats need to do is understand that they can’t go back to their core narratives. Democrats have had some great narratives. The New Deal: We’re going to soften capitalism and make it more humane. In the 1960s: We’re going to take people who’ve been marginalized and we’re going to give them respect. Those are great narratives, but they’re not narratives right now.

The final thing I’d say is there’s a Bulgarian political scientist who made the observation that once the revolution happens, everybody changes. So, it’s not just the Republican Party. He makes a point that the Democratic Party is going to change just as much as the Republican Party. And then he makes the point that once the revolution happens, you can’t go back to who you were.

He phrases it this way: “You can have Kerensky before Lenin, but you can’t have Kerensky after Lenin.” And Kerensky, for those who didn’t go to City College in the 1930s, was a sort of a Democrat before the Russian Revolution. Once Lenin comes along and creates the revolution, you’re not going to go back to the moderate Kerensky.

So I just emphasize how radically different people have to think about where we’re going to be in five years.

Siegel: Well, on that note, let’s turn to the races that are on the ballot in November. The odd-numbered year after the presidential election always draws our attention to New Jersey and Virginia, which elect a governor in that year, and of course New York City, which elects a mayor in that year.

And this year, there’s a special interest in a California referendum on congressional redistricting. David, which of these races do you find especially interesting?

Brooks: I’m going to go to where E.J. wants to go, because I am a good friend: Mamdani.

I’m profoundly impressed by how much the Democrats want to be the party of rich people. If you look at how Mamdani did against Cuomo in the primary, Cuomo did very well among working-class voters and Mamdani did very well among workers making $200,000 a year.

He is a perfect candidate for educated elites. His dad is a professor. His mom’s a filmmaker. Nothing wrong with that. My dad was a professor. He has the cultural values and progressive politics that go over well in Prospect Heights or in Park Slope — these are neighborhoods in New York — and would go over well in Santa Monica, would go over well in various affluent places.

But to me, the core problem for the Democrats is they need to win the working class back. And if he’s their face, which he is about to be, I just think that’s a setback to the core problem for the Democratic Party.

Siegel: But isn’t he running against the high cost of living? No one can afford an apartment at the rate things are going.

Brooks: Yeah, but he’s doing things that are outside the mainstream. Our colleagues on the editorial board produced a data-strewn editorial, and it was basically about something called the center voter theory — that you run to the center and you win by running to the center.

That may not be true in New York, because New York has a lot of rich progressives, but it’s generally true. So running to the center is probably a smart thing to do.

Do Mamdani’s ideas appeal to me? No. I don’t think government knows how to run a grocery store. New York already has a lot of great family grocery stores. That’s one of the beauties of New York: There are bodegas everywhere. His ideas sound good if you haven’t lived through socialism, but socialism is still socialism.

Dionne: I find it amazing, David, that you’re saying that the richest people in New York support Mamdani.

I wish I could do a really good Bernie, but “the millionaires and the billionaires” are all supporting Andrew Cuomo over Mamdani. I looked at the great map The New York Times had of the primary — every precinct facing Central Park except one little one way up in the northwestern corner.

Brooks: I didn’t say the millionaires and billionaires. I said $200,000. That’s his sweet spot.

Dionne: It’s sort of $50,000 to $200,000. And I think that what’s interesting about Mamdani — two things.

One, let’s celebrate the paperback of your new book, “How to Know a Person,” and Mamdani acts like he read your book.

How did he start his campaign? He went to the Bronx when he was at 1 percent in the polls and went to precincts where Donald Trump did well or better than a Republican had done in a long time and he asked people: Why did you vote for Trump? Or: Why didn’t you vote at all?

What did they tell him? They said they were worried about the cost of living. How did he orient his campaign?

You can argue with this or that proposal, but the entire campaign has been oriented around not cultural issues — he’s a cultural progressive, but that’s not what he talks about. He talks about the high cost of housing, he talks about the high cost of child care, the high cost of groceries, the high cost of transportation. He has run an economically based campaign to say New York should be affordable to everybody.

And I wrote a column in The Times saying that he was a “sewer socialist,” which to many people might sound like I’m running him down, but I was actually building him up. Because the kinds of socialists who have succeeded in American history — there was a big movement for municipal socialism; Dan Hoan was mayor of Milwaukee for 24 years as a socialist — focused on fixing problems: fixing the sewers, which are making people sick in working-class neighborhoods.

Bernie Sanders, who was a mayor, talked about making sure the snow was picked up in working-class neighborhoods. So, it’s snow socialism to sewer socialism. I think he is very grounded and down to earth, and he is running, in an odd way, a campaign that’s quite related to that New York Times editorial that you referenced, even though its underlying message was rather different from Mamdani’s.

Brooks: Look, I love pragmatic leaders. Mike Bloomberg, he was my version. I think New York worked a lot better after Mike Bloomberg.

There was a guy in Detroit — Duggan I think was his name, Mayor Duggan. And he was the least charismatic guy on Earth. But he said: If you want your streetlights to work, I’m your guy. He was just a boring administrator. I love those guys. And so if Mamdani was like that, I’d be all for it.

And I should say he’s a great campaigner. He’s one of the more interesting people in American politics right now. So I don’t take that away from him. But he is an ideological person. There’s a reason he’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has gone further left. A lot of the people I’d like to run the D.S.A. have all quit.

Then the final thing to be said is he’s got to explain why New York is so unaffordable.

Houston doesn’t have this problem. If you look at where people are moving, almost every fast-growing state is a Republican state with low taxes and low housing regulations. So people are moving to Tennessee, to Texas, to Florida, to South Carolina, because they create a positive business climate.

New York has spent all of our lifetimes — and I grew up there like you; we were in the same housing project — it’s had the rent control. It’s had horrible zoning regulations. It’s just super hard to build. I think the vacancy rate in New York apartments is like minus zero, so there’s just not enough housing.

This is something I think about all the time. I love a book called “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs. Growing up, we were all told she was a hero. She saved the West Village, and that guy Robert Moses, who was putting in all these highways, he was the villain. But now it’s looking like Jane Jacobs taught everybody that if you block the government, you can stop them from doing anything.

Siegel: This is to block the Lower Manhattan Expressway from going through.

Brooks: Suddenly, the story looks a little more complicated, because we’ve had 50 years of blocking all development. And this is the point our colleague Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make in their book “Abundance,” or Yoni Appelbaum in a book named “Stuck.”

The abundance movement is an effort to get some of the zoning regulations reduced, not out of some Reaganite policy, but just because we need to be able to build things anymore. And I have my doubts that somebody that ideological is going to reduce the grip that the government has on the housing market.

Siegel: E.J.?

Dionne: What’s ironic is that Mamdani actually did an interview with Derek Thompson where he endorsed some of the core principles of abundance, and argued that you judge a government by whether it can deliver, and that he thinks that abundance raises questions that people who want government to work and want government to work on behalf of working people need to address.

Siegel: OK, one other question about Election Day coming up, which is about the California referendum. My question to each of you is: Is gerrymandering OK if the other guy did it first?

Dionne: Well, I think the answer is — the logic of what I’m going to say is yes.

Siegel: Yes is what you’ll say.

Dionne: I’ll give you the answer straight up and then get there. I am, like a lot of people who are for the commissions like the one California cast, I think it would be better ——

Siegel: You’re against politicians selecting their voters rather than voters selecting their politicians.

Dionne: Yes. And so, if you had a commission system or some sort of nonpartisan plan of making districts in every state of the country, that would be great. That’s what I’m for.

In the absence of that, when one party — on the order of the president or the request of the president — goes and redraws its district lines in Texas to say “We’re going to arbitrarily create five more congressional districts” and then other states start following and say, “Well, we’ll create more Republican districts,” then the other side can either say, “Gee, this is terrible, but we’re still for commissions,” or they can do what the Democrats and Governor Newsom did in California, which is say, “We’re still for commissions, but we’re going to draw lines to offset those five so we have a fighting chance in the election.”

And Barack Obama — who is somebody who’s been fighting partisan redistricting and is one of the most effective advocates out for Prop 50 in California precisely because he liked nonpartisan redistricting — in this circumstance, he regards it as an emergency.

Brooks: You know, there was an essay written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan years ago — I’m hitting all your sweet spots — that was called “Defining Deviancy Down.”

This is what it looks like: Donald Trump defines deviancy down. We’re redistricting. We’re just going to pick our voters. And then Gavin Newsom matches them.

And the people who should be offended, by the way, are the voters of California and Texas. If you live in those two states, you are basically being disenfranchised because you will be living in a district where the election outcome is predetermined.

There should be outrage about this. People fought for their vote, to have the right to vote, and now people don’t care. To me, the worst example of defining deviancy down is what we’ve come to tolerate, just in how our politicians speak and in the crooked ways they rig the map, and suddenly nobody’s bothered by this. Where’s your dignity, people?

Then the question I would ask E.J. is: Who was right, Obama or Newsom? And I mean Michelle Obama.

She had this famous comment years and years ago: “When they go low, we go high.” Gavin Newsom, maybe it’s unfair to him, but the other alternative is: When they go low, we go lower. Put aside morality. What’s the smart thing for Democrats to do? It’s not obvious to me that sinking to the moral level of MAGA is the right answer here.

It seems to me, if people want to turn the page on this moment, they’re going to want to turn the page in the way — and this is not a great example — of Jimmy Carter after Watergate. They’re going to want to say: I want somebody so clean, somebody who respects government, somebody who plays by the rules, who will uphold the norms that I remember. And it seems to me that’s actually a smarter play for Democrats.

Now, I understand the temptation. You can’t hand away the House in 2026. So I understand the temptation. But it seems to me the long-term play here is to go high when they go low.

Dionne: Just for the record — in Texas, the State Legislature is imposing those districts on the people of Texas. In California, they are going to the voters. The voters of California themselves are going to decide in this referendum whether they think this is a necessary thing to do now or not.

My friend here, of course, always quotes Moynihan for his purposes, but I think that what Moynihan counseled very much throughout his career was political realism. This is not about some abstract argument of who goes lower or higher.

Of course, there’s stuff Trump does that no one should do. But in a straight-up political fight where power is at stake and where the authoritarianism we talked about earlier in our conversation really needs somebody to check it, winning that next fight really matters.

And again, this proposal they put in California acknowledges that this is not the ideal way to do it. It’s a temporary expedient.

Brooks: If I could just say, I’ve heard this argument that in California the voters get to decide — and I just don’t understand it. There are multiple forms of democracy. We happen to live in a republic, where we elect people to make decisions for us.

California has this system of referendum where it’s a direct democracy. I happen to think that’s an inferior form of democracy than electing people who get to make decisions. But it strikes me that Texas is not undemocratic. They’re both versions of democracy.

Dionne: You started talking about the people, and the people here — individual voters in California — will have a say on this question in a way they didn’t in Texas. I agree we need a mixed system.

Brooks: We elect congressmen; do I have no say in what my congressman does? No, we elect people.

Siegel: Well, I think we’ll just have to accept you guys differ.

Dionne: Would you vote for Prop 50?

Brooks: No comment. [Laughs] I would be sorely tempted, to be honest, just in this one case.

Siegel: A great many people cast their votes, not on the basis of either foreign policy or culture war battles but on kitchen table issues — what’s happening with the price of food, price of groceries, with the price of gasoline at the pump.

Life is pretty rough for a lot of Americans right now, and yet the stock market stays in record territory. It keeps setting records. Is the U.S. riding for a fall, and if not, why not?

Dionne: It’s funny, we were talking this weekend — transparency for our listeners and viewers — about the fact that we wanted to talk about this. And right after I hung up the phone, I looked at my email and I had an email from Adam Roberts, an editor at The Economist. It was a newsletter which begins with the words “You are probably more exposed to a looming market crash than you think.”

I think there are a lot of people who are extremely nervous. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the market. I’m a congenital bear who’s predicted 10 of the last two downturns. But I do know that there is a real disconnect between what the market has been telling us and the experience of Americans.

Two really good stories in The Times this week, Sydney Ember wrote a story with the headline “Lower-Income Americans Are Missing Car Payments,” and she points out that this is one of the clearest indications that low- and middle-income families — the economy’s foundation — could be starting to buckle.

The day before that, Ben Casselman and Colby Smith had a really good piece about how wealthier Americans, buoyed by the stock market, have continued to spend freely, while lower-income households are hit by inflation and weakening of the job market are pulling back.

So I don’t think you can have a successful economy if the middle and the bottom are falling out. The wealthy alone cannot prop up an economy.

Call me nervous, not just about the economy itself. I, again, don’t know what’s going to happen in the stock market, but this is a very unhealthy situation that explains why so many Americans are discontent.

Brooks: I don’t believe in timing the market, but I have been tempted for the past year to call my broker ——

Siegel: Go to cash [laughs] ——

Brooks: And pull the vast Brooks fortune out of the market. It’ll hurt the market when you lose that much money [laughs]. But I haven’t done it, and I’m glad I haven’t done it because I’ve been wrong.

There are some really solid fundamentals. G.D.P. growth is about 3, unemployment around 4, wage growth around 4, rent inflation is going down. So, there’s some good things in the economy. And yet, partly for the reasons E.J. said, and then the economic numbers, and then you look at consumer sentiment — consumer sentiment is in the basement because people feel rotten about the country.

Then the big issue here, which is that everybody is suddenly talking about if we’re on the verge of an A.I. bubble. The reason for thinking we’re on the verge of an A.I. bubble are pretty damn obvious: the combined bill. All these big companies, Meta and OpenAI, they’re spending on the order of $400 billion or $500 billion a year. The total consumer spending on A.I. is $12 billion.

What? You’re spending $500 billion next year. And where’s the revenue? Then you add the fact that you can’t just build a chip plant the way you built a Ford plant, where you can use the machinery for 10 years. It’s obsolete in 10 months.

So you think: Wow, they’re just vastly overspending, as they did in the railways, as they did in the early car. We’re going to have a big crash, and then A.I. will be fine.

The counterargument to that is that A.I. revenues, while small, are really going up fast. The second thing is, A.I. is not like any other technology. It’s not like the railroads. It’s like inventing omniscience. And maybe this is a remarkable opportunity. They all think so, because they’re all investing zillions of dollars, but it feels a little bubble-ish to me.

Siegel: Well, I’ve heard comparisons to the 2000s and the dot-com crash, the bubble. In an article in The Economist, the Harvard professor Gita Gopinath writes that a stock market decline comparable to the 2000 dot-com crash would wipe out, she estimates, $20 trillion in wealth for American households. That’s the equivalent of about 70 percent of last year’s gross domestic product, and there’s just a lot of money out.

Brooks: I am going to call my broker after. [Laughs.]

Dionne: Tell him Robert told you to.

Siegel: Well, look, I think we should wrap up, as we did last time, by finding in the midst of all of this angst some joy, some experience that each of us has had recently, that might be a good antidote to stuff we follow in the news. David?

Brooks: Because my wife likes people, we entertain a lot. I’ve actually found not as many people have people over anymore. We’ll have three or four dinner parties a week sometimes, and I’m exhausted by it. I do a lot of dishes. But I found hospitality is maybe my hobby.

It’s certainly a great pleasure to me, and one of the things we do is — she has a lot of friends who are musicians. And one of my golden rules of life is never turn up the opportunity to hang around with musicians. So we’ve had a ton of music in the house, and it’s been great — and exhausting. [Laughs.]

Siegel: E.J.?

Dionne: I agree with David on all of that.

Two things. One, this a great time of year for sports fans. You’ve got the World Series, the N.B.A. starts, middle of football season. That’s fun.

But this weekend I’m going up to New York, and our youngest daughter — not the one I mentioned the last time — I’m going to go up to celebrate her birthday, and also walk with her when she early votes in that election in New York that we talked about. And when you can bring together love and democracy, that’s utopia for me.

Siegel: I spent Saturday in New York at my grandson’s bar mitzvah. I am, to use a technical term, still kvelling. And what added to the joy, actually, were other things that happened to be happening at that synagogue that same morning: the welcoming of two people who just converted to Judaism, and the naming of a newborn. I thought it was a celebration of life at some of its richest moments, and I felt very enriched.

Dionne: Mazel tov, that’s great.

Siegel: I also feel enriched by hearing from you guys again. E.J. Dionne, David Brooks, Thanks so much.

Dionne: Thank you.

Brooks: Thank you.

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing and original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.

David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks

The post Trump Has a Religion. What Do Democrats Have? appeared first on New York Times.

Share198Tweet124Share
Why The World Can’t Stop Talking About Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
News

Why The World Can’t Stop Talking About Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS

by International Business Times
October 23, 2025

Ever since the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was first spotted this summer, social media feeds have been flooded with speculation, memes, ...

Read more
Crime

Wacko stabs roommate to death in fight over ‘living situation’ in NYC project: cops

October 23, 2025
News

Death of chess champ Daniel Naroditsky investigated as possible suicide or overdose, police say

October 23, 2025
News

Stephen A. Smith Ominously Warns Trump ‘Coming’ for Sports

October 23, 2025
News

Trump pardons Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng Zhao

October 23, 2025
Fox News Politics Newsletter: Adams to back Cuomo in NYC mayoral race

Fox News Politics Newsletter: Adams to back Cuomo in NYC mayoral race

October 23, 2025
After Ordering a Record Cannabis Recall, N.Y. Regulators Go Quiet

After Ordering a Record Cannabis Recall, N.Y. Regulators Go Quiet

October 23, 2025
The college-to-pro move for coaches has a mixed history, from Jerry Tarkanian to Jimmy Johnson

The college-to-pro move for coaches has a mixed history, from Jerry Tarkanian to Jimmy Johnson

October 23, 2025

Copyright © 2025.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • U.S.
    • World
    • Politics
    • Opinion
    • Business
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Science
  • Entertainment
    • Culture
    • Gaming
    • Music
    • Movie
    • Sports
    • Television
    • Theater
  • Tech
    • Apps
    • Autos
    • Gear
    • Mobile
    • Startup
  • Lifestyle
    • Arts
    • Fashion
    • Food
    • Health
    • Travel

Copyright © 2025.