Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists David Brooks, Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg about Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday and the first 100 days of the new Trump administration.
Patrick Healy: We’re at a historical moment that Americans have experienced only once before — the inauguration of a president who previously held the office and was turned out, only to win election again four years later. None of us were alive in 1893, so I want to explore how you’re making sense of it now. First, what do you remember thinking or feeling about Trump when his presidency began eight years ago?
Ross Douthat: What was the supposed George W. Bush line, upon hearing Trump’s Inaugural Address? “That was some weird [expletive]”? I think the weirdness was important, the fundamental surrealism, the sense that this was just not how normal American politics worked — something that was felt quite widely. And with it, the sense that if you just pulled the right political lever or legal maneuver, you could get back to the normal world and leave Trump world behind.
Michelle Goldberg: I went to that rally in Columbus Circle where Bill DeBlasio and stars like Cher and Robert DeNiro spoke. I remember feeling true terror about what was coming, but also a lot of solidarity with my fellow New Yorkers.
David Brooks: I was mostly morally appalled. It was like watching Larry Flynt get elected pope.
Healy: And when Trump’s first term ended four years ago, did you think your initial feelings and expectations about his presidency had been proven correct, incorrect or something in between?
Douthat: Part of me thought that there would have been some quick way out of the weirdness — when the Trump White House was in its maximal early chaos, I wrote a column (very popular with our readers at the time!) suggesting that he might be removed via the 25th Amendment. At the same time, I felt like I had a decent instinct for why he had won in 2016 and where the reaction to him might overreach or go astray or simply fail. That proved more prescient: There was no quick path back to normal; there were only failed attempts at restoration that have yielded to our own moment, when it’s Trumpism that’s normal, a central feature of a changed world.
Healy: Ross, do you think Trump learned anything from that first term? If he has, he could have a more effective second term, like it or not.
Douthat: To the extent that the second term ends up being more effective — and we don’t know if it will be yet — I suspect the crucial difference will be that more elites (in places like Silicon Valley, as well as Washington, D.C., and New York City) now accept Trumpism as normal, and so they’re more willing to try to work with the grain of populism and Trump’s personality, or try to subtly bend both to their purposes, rather than obstructing or just refusing to cooperate. Trump has more people working for him this time who are both capable and onboard with the idea that he ought to be president.
Goldberg: I thought Trump was an authoritarian thug and an avaricious con man, and nothing about his presidency changed that impression. But in retrospect, even though I thought I had a low opinion of Republican politicians, I overestimated their decency and was shocked by the near totality of their capitulation. It’s hard to remember, but there was a moment when some of us expected Lindsey Graham, of all people, to be a check on Trump.
Brooks: I was right about his essential character. But I don’t think I appreciated how much our system of government depends on unspoken norms. The whole office of the presidency is a public trust for the common good, not some princeling’s piece of personal property. Trump smashed all that. That’s important; the moral ecology of the nation is fundamental, and gets powerfully influenced by the person at the top.
Healy: Why didn’t more people know or realize that at the time, David? Or care?
Brooks: The whole point of norms is that they are largely invisible: This is how we do things here, and therefore, this is what I will continue to do. Trump is unrestrained by that — one of the products of gross narcissism is the belief that rules don’t apply to you.
Nonetheless, I think we all paid too much attention to Trump’s superficial and theatrical moral failings. He would do something appalling and we’d clutch our pearls. By the end of the term, I thought we were all just being played.
Healy: OK, so now we are on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration. What are your expectations for his second term in office? And how — if at all — are your expectations influenced or tempered by whether you were right or wrong about how Trump’s first term would play out?
Goldberg: There’s a quote by Milan Kundera, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I have been flabbergasted by the mass amnesia about what Trump’s first term was like — the chaos, incompetence, cruelty and degrading fusillade of lies. It’s an open question, I think, whether the public recoils when they’re faced with all this again, or whether we’ve all become too numb and cynical.
I expect Trump’s second term to be more effective than the first, and thus more dangerous. If Trump orders the military to help with mass deportations or to crack down on protesters, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would certainly not defy him. Corporate America, and especially Big Tech, is fully onboard in a way they weren’t before. It makes me crazy when Trump apologists point out how often he was thwarted in his first term to argue that we shouldn’t take all his crazy threats seriously, when all the people who thwarted him are gone.
That said, there’s a pretty broad range of bad outcomes we could be facing. There are some genuine ideological differences between the populist nationalists, like Steve Bannon, and the tech oligarchs, like Elon Musk, so there will be some unpredictable policy fights about things like H-1B visas. We don’t yet know what the balance between Big Tech feudalism and the politics of protectionism and rabid provincialism is going to look like.
Douthat: You should never underestimate the Republican capacity to just do “deregulation and tax cuts” in response to any political eventuality. We have a very different mixture of forces in Trump’s orbit this time, from the much more fleshed-out populism of his vice president to the new entrants into conservative politics, Musk and the rest of the so-called tech right. But Musk seems to have drunk deep from the elixirs of Paul Ryanism on budgetary matters, congressional Republicans are still congressional Republicans, and so there will be … deregulation and tax cuts, or the extension of the last round of Trump tax cuts, at the very least. (Whether Musk can magically make deep spending cuts happen as well — there one should be skeptical.)
On other fronts, though, the changed landscape matters. Trump has more room to conduct mass deportations not just because corporate America and Big Tech are more on his side, but also because the Biden administration presided over such an extraordinary run-up in illegal immigration that deportations are more popular than in the past, and there are a lot of people who arrived very recently, who don’t have deep ties to their communities, who are plausible targets for such an effort. That doesn’t mean his administration won’t overreach and reap a backlash — it’s perfectly possible. But the last four years have shifted the politics of immigration further to the right than where it was after Trump’s last victory.
Goldberg: I agree with Ross that deregulation and tax cuts will likely be the central accomplishment, if you want to call it that, of the new administration. It’s fascinating to me that, after all the talk about Trump dethroning Paul Ryanism, his movement is now full of people dreaming about even more aggressive forms of economic austerity.
Brooks: I’m going to try to pay less attention to the Trump circus and more on what policies get enacted. In retrospect, Trump’s Middle East policy was pretty good. His defense policy, especially in regards to boosting our Navy, was pretty good. His policy toward China was pretty good and was mostly embraced by the Biden administration. His regulatory policy was in many ways better than President Biden’s. The Biden folks attached so many rules to their policies that it’s become hard to build anything from the money that was appropriated, like electric vehicle chargers.
On the other hand, Trump’s immigration policy was mostly monstrous, and his tax cuts were mostly idiotic. When I started doing this work, I felt I spent 80 percent of my time on policy analysis — is Obamacare good policy or not? — and now I spend 80 percent of my time on moral umbrage and campaign strategy. I’m going to try to reverse that, if only for my own sanity. Basically, I’m going to try to focus on incompetence, not sleaziness.
Douthat: I agree with David that Trump’s first-term foreign policy was both more effective than expected and clearly more effective than what followed under Biden, and I think we should regard the cease-fire in the Middle East as an early example of why there were voters who were inclined toward Trump in 2024 because they thought he’d make America more effective on the world stage.
Healy: But will Trump make it safer, Ross?
Douthat: I think the world is manifestly more dangerous today than it was in 2016, and there are many ways in which Trump’s instincts and impulses could lead to disaster. But there’s also clearly a way in which just having a president with energy and intentionality and purpose, which Biden, in his decrepitude, was not, can help America pressure allies and induce concessions from enemies. So here’s hoping for more of that.
Healy: I framed the opening of our conversation because history will reckon with Trump’s first term and second term in a way we don’t usually see — it’s not a traditional two-term consecutive presidency. It’s a disrupted presidency in an era of disruption. I’m curious how you think disruption, as a force in politics and policy or as a leadership style or something else, will be a factor in the second Trump term.
Brooks: Trump’s second victory underlines the point that, love him or hate him, Trump is the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan. He does represent a fundamental shift in our national politics. It’s a turn away from rule by the educated class to rule by people who think the educated class is self-serving and incompetent. It’s a turn away from the postwar internationalism and back toward mercantilist nationalism. It’s a turn away from classical liberalism toward something semi-post-liberal.
Disruption is clearly the point for Trump.I don’t believe Trump or the people around him understand much about how government operates; I don’t think they understand how hard it is to create effective change. I think they will destroy or degrade the institutions they mean to disrupt.
Douthat: I’m sure events will make this prediction look premature, but I think the sense of disruption that’s very specific to Trump himself — the alteration of America’s political normal, the rattling of Washington, D.C. — was much more potent from 2016 to 2020 than it is right now, when Trumpism has been normalized to a substantial degree. But the world as a whole, from technology to geopolitics, is more unstable and open and weird today than it was when he first entered office — I’ve written about this, and our colleague Ezra Klein wrote a good column on similar themes last week. So there’s more likelihood of disruption from non-Trump forces, from artificial intelligence breakthroughs to Chinese or Russian power plays, than just from Trump alone.
Goldberg: In retrospect — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — we’d have been better off if Trump won in 2020. He’d have entered his second term in a much weaker position than he’s in now. Instead, the last four years have given the country the chance to memory-hole many of the worst failures of his first four years.
Douthat: He would have been weaker, the cultural conflagration would have been more intense, there would have been no “peak woke,” liberalism would have radicalized even further. Whether that would have taken us to a better place is, I would say, a very open question.
Healy: I think you’re right, Michelle — and I still think Trump would have won if not for the pandemic and its knock-on consequences, including so much mail-in voting. Let’s turn to the first 100 days of Trump. From reporting by The Times and others, it sounds like the new administration will begin with a flurry of executive orders as Trump tries to show and enact major change and seize operational control of government quickly. What’s the most disruptive or transformative or substantial executive order or other move by Trump that you are expecting, and does it worry you, does it encourage you, or something else?
Goldberg: I’m not going to lie: I’m hoping he follows through on tariffs. It’s what Trump promised; if they’re an economic shock to people who thought they were voting for lower grocery prices, well, elections have consequences. All the people who saved Trump from himself during his first term only ended up strengthening him by making it seem like his threats don’t need to be taken seriously.
The plan to purge the Civil Service scares me, but also seems inevitable. I’ll be really frightened if they go after birthright citizenship, an audaciously unconstitutional move that will suggest we’re in for one of the worst-case versions of Trump 2.0.
Brooks: The people running the Department of Government Efficiency talk a big game, but the odds of them enacting real change is minuscule, in my view. But suppose the Trump folks really are serious about changing Schedule F so they can fire career people. If that happens, they really can do damage to the departments. Even the threat of doing that has already reduced the resistance career people might put up to Trump policies. I have a lot of faith in the military’s ability to refuse illegal orders, but not so much in the other departments.
Douthat: I would like an executive order mandating classical (and Art Deco!) architecture for civic buildings, though I doubt we’ll get a civic architecture order in the first wave. I think an executive order trying to suspend birthright citizenship would be a polarizing, pointless-legal-battle-inducing mistake. I think the scope of executive orders on tariffs will tell us a lot about whether Trump is being ideological or strategic in how he’s approaching trade policy. And I think the executive orders trying to increase energy production will be a good thing for the country.
Healy: Do you think any of these moves by Trump will have a lasting impact on America for better or for worse? Presidents make a lot of moves and noise in the first 100 days, but change is often incremental or relatively isolated to individuals or demographic groups. I suppose I am trying to set expectations about how disruptive Trump really will be.
Goldberg: At the beginning of last year, I went to Poland to write about a country that was trying to unwind the damage done to its institutions, particularly the courts, by years of lawless authoritarian governance. What I saw is that it is extraordinarily difficult.
The things Trump breaks will not easily be repaired. For example, I’d expect him to end the independence of the Justice Department, and I don’t think a future Democratic president would restore it, especially after seeing how Merrick Garland’s fastidious devotion to norms turned into a kind of fecklessness.
Brooks: My gut instinct tells me that this will be a foreign policy presidency, and will revolve around China. If China goes ahead and invades Taiwan, that will change everything. The good news is that I think Trump scares the Chinese more than any other American politician. As a power-hungry thug, I think he understands Xi better than most politicians. So maybe he will be effective against China. On the other hand, foreign policy is complicated. Confronting one of your leading trading partners is complicated. It all takes decades of experience and relationships. Who’s going to do that in the Trump administration? Pete Hegseth? We’re in the most dangerous security moment in 80 years, and we’ve never had a group of leaders so unprepared for what’s about to hit them.
Douthat: I don’t think any executive orders, almost by definition, can be all that transformative. I’m confident that Trump will find a way to strain (the illusion of) Justice Department independence, though if that leads to a lot of dubious prosecutions that get smacked down in the courts I’m not sure his successors will be eager to imitate them. I think what Musk wants to do with what he has called DOGE would be transformative; I’m just very skeptical that it will produce more than some regulatory changes and spending cuts at the margin. Wokeness and D.E.I. are in retreat, and that’s a big deal culturally, but I’m not sure how far that retreat will go before thermostatic public opinion turns against the right.
But my guess is that we’ll look back and say that many of Trump’s biggest transformative effects have already happened — the G.O.P.’s populist transformation, the tech right’s emergence, the new nationalism and realism in foreign policy — and that the biggest further transformations will come from other forces, technological and geopolitical or both, acting upon the Trump White House and the country.
Healy: What is the major disruption that you think America needs right now?
Brooks: I’ll revert to my core theory of the last decade. Trump is the wrong answer to the right question. He became president because over the last many decades we in the educated class built a system that is rigged. The children of affluent parents have advantages at every step of the way — from preschool through college and the job market. And we passed a series of immigration, trade and education policies that benefit us, and hurt those without our degrees. High-school-educated people die eight years sooner. They have many fewer friends. They marry less and divorce more. The education gap between the rich and the poor is now greater than the education gap between whites and Blacks in the age of Jim Crow.
In short, if you build a system in which the same people win every time, the people who have been losing will eventually flip over the table. That’s why Trump the victor happened. The Biden administration was built on the theory that if you redistribute huge amounts of money to people and places left behind, they will return to the Democratic fold. It didn’t happen because you can’t use money to solve a problem primarily about recognition and respect.
It would be nice if Trump found a way to end our caste system. But with that guy, it’s mostly marketing.
Douthat: The disruption we need is a big, social-cultural adaptation to the landscape of very online life and related social liberations (legal drugs, legal gambling, etc.), in which so many people are currently adrift. We need a big shift that helps people stabilize their personal lives, solidify and save predigital institutions, and figure out how to mate and marry and create successful adult life scripts in this new dispensation.
Right now, the biggest problem for ordinary people is the extent to which we’re able to float through a virtualized culture, entertained and digitally immersed but also anxious and stressed out and unable to settle down and do the things that yield a rich adulthood and carry an inheritance forward. Politics can’t really give us the response we need to that reality. But we need one.
Goldberg: It’s an understatement to say that we’re in a new Gilded Age; the power of the tech barons dwarfs that of the railroad tycoons. If we’re going to continue to have a functioning democracy — which seems to me very much an open question — their power needs to be curtailed. We need much higher taxes on the rich and much more aggressive action on monopolies. We’re going to get exactly the opposite.
Healy: A lot of focus will be on Trump and the Republicans, but Biden is also leaving office and the Democratic Party finds itself with a really badly damaged brand. Faiz Shakir, a Democratic strategist running to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said last week that the Democratic brand was fundamentally “tarnished” and “broken,” and added, “We are rebuilding trust with people who don’t believe the Democratic Party has been there when it matters most to them.” What do you see as the core problem for Democrats?
Goldberg: Part of the difficulty in answering this question is that the center-left is in crisis all over the world. An analysis by The Telegraph — granted, a conservative paper — looked at recent elections globally and found that “left-wing parties are more unpopular now than at any time since the end of the Cold War.” I have plenty of criticism of the Democrats; among other things, Biden should have dropped out of the election earlier and put far more pressure on Israel to make a cease-fire deal months ago. But there’s a deeper and broader disconnect between the modern left and many people’s aspirations, at least outside of Latin America.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of this disconnect. Some of it might just stem from people’s longing for order at a time of chaos and upheaval. There’s been a breakdown in the alliance between the working class and the bohemian intelligentsia that’s undergirded the left for decades. And at a time when incremental change seems insufficient, progressives lack a utopian vision of the society they want to create.
Douthat: The Democrats seem more defeated in the vibes than they really were in the election. Yes, there are deep problems afflicting center-left parties all over the world, but for a Democratic officeholder right now I think the prescription is actually pretty simple. You need to figure out how to put some real distance, with concrete and substantive critiques, not just rhetorical shifts, between yourself and the party’s progressive-academic power centers. And then you need to wait for the next economic crisis or downturn, and build your economic critique of Trumpism around whatever isn’t working then. The rest is commentary.
Brooks: The question for Democrats is, do they work hard to win back the working class or do they just accept the fact that they are the party of the college-educated cities and move on from there? I think Democrats have no choice but to try to win back the working classes. MAGA’s core weakness is that it’s fear- and resentment-based, and that its thinking is essentially zero-sum. I believe there is a person out there who shares the traditional values but also has a dynamic view of the world, a view that welcomes pluralism, growth and internationalism. After years of American carnage and retribution, I believe there’s room for a Democratic Reagan, who is one-third resentment and two-thirds social mobility and opportunity.
Healy: A final lightning round of questions. Do you think Trump will reprise the same language of confrontation as he did in his first Inaugural Address? A reprise of “this American carnage?”
Brooks: I expect that. Generating new ideas is not exactly one of his gifts. I watched Laura Ingraham on TV at the gym the other night, and she maintained a look of disgust and contempt for pretty much the whole hour. That’s the MAGA vibe.
Douthat: There will be language of confrontation, yes. All Trumpian pivots to unity must be matched and exceeded by pivots back to enmity.
Healy: Do you foresee Trump trying to reach out to Democratic moderates, women, Black leaders? Will JD Vance try to find bipartisan work with Elizabeth Warren, like they did in the Senate on clawing back failed bank executive pay?
Goldberg: He’ll reach out to Democrats who he can co-opt in some way, like John Fetterman and Eric Adams. But no, I don’t expect serious collaboration. The last thing Vance’s Silicon Valley patrons want is to see him working with Elizabeth Warren when they’re expecting a new age of unfettered plunder.
Douthat: I predict that there will be at least one battle economic policy where the G.O.P. populists make common cause with some Democrats — but maybe not in the first round of legislative battles. And I predict that Trump will continue his attempted cultivation of Fetterman for at least, I dunno, the next six months.
Brooks: No. There is always a burst of promised bipartisanship at the start of every administration. But not so much once everybody’s emotions get riled up.
Healy: Will any of Trump’s cabinet nominees be rejected by the Senate? If so, who?
Brooks: I suspect Hegseth is in. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is probably in. Tulsi Gabbard may get rejected. The people who do intelligence work on Capitol Hill are serious people.
Douthat: I would bet on them being confirmed at this point, but there will be moments when both Gabbard and Kennedy seem in danger. Hegseth will be confirmed.
Goldberg: I agree with Ross. I have no faith in the willingness of Republican senators to put the country above their fear of Trump’s vengeance.
Healy: What is something that Trump has said or promised he would do that you think he will not do, for whatever reason?
Brooks: Impose big tariffs on Canada and Mexico. He’ll settle for some symbolic things. The economic effects of those tariffs would just be too self-destructive. He’s definitely invading Greenland, though.
Douthat: I predict that most of the threats he made against figures like Liz Cheney will be empty.
Goldberg: Well, he’s not going to make America great again.
Healy: Final question. What do you think the country will be like after the first 100 days of Trump? Feel free to answer this question in any way you like!
Brooks: We’ll get through this. We had pretty terrible leadership through much of the late 19th century. There was rampant corruption up and down the political system. What happened after that? The American Century. We still have the world’s most dynamic economy and among the world’s most talented and productive people. That matters.
Douthat: Much less fixated on politics than it was after Trump’s first 100 days in 2016.
Goldberg: I honestly have no idea. Right now I’m expecting persecution, sickening corruption and a claustrophobic sense of helplessness. But the thermostatic nature of American politics means that the one thing you can always count on is that the vibes are going to shift.
The post ‘We’d Have Been Better Off if Trump Won in 2020’: Three Columnists Brace for the First 100 Days appeared first on New York Times.
