This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ezra Klein: Welcome to the second-ever “Ask Me Anything” for subscribers.
If you’re here, that means you have subscribed and linked your subscription. We are doubly grateful. We received a truly astonishing number of amazing questions — of which we will not get through even the most minute fraction. But we will do what we can.
I’m joined today — as I am so often, both in front of the mic and behind the scenes — by our wonderful executive producer, Claire Gordon.
Claire Gordon: Great to be here again, Ezra, for our first A.M.A. of the Trump era.
Reading through the questions, I would say the temperature of the audience right now is quite high. There were a lot of questions about whether we will have fair elections in 2028.
Klein: Will we?
Gordon: That’s my first question.
Klein: That’s where we’re starting?
Gordon: How high is your internal temperature on this? What is the right temperature?
Klein: Your internal temperature should be feverish.
I think we’re going to have elections. But I also think we’re very likely going to have a constitutional crisis.
The Trump administration is gearing up to defy the courts. They’re not acting in a way that makes me think what they’re trying to do is create perfect-model test cases and a good chummy relationship with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to win at the Supreme Court. I think they’re getting ready for, at some point, a world where the Supreme Court rules against them, and they basically say: Will you enforce your ruling? And then we’ll be in very uncharted, dangerous territory.
When I say I think we’ll have elections — and I do — I’m not going to tell you that I’m not concerned with the control I see them trying to exert over the security apparatus very clearly. They’re putting loyalists like Kash Patel, Dan Bongino and Pete Hegseth in charge of the F.B.I. and the Pentagon. ICE agents have been unleashed to harass and at least temporarily disappear green card holders.
This is a very dark timeline. I don’t know another way to put it. Things are happening that are worse by a lot. I feel like I was one of the much more pessimistic people leading up to this — I was not on team “this is all going to be normal.” But the green card harassment is something I did not see coming.
And I think you have to see this as an exercise of state power, an unleashing of the security state’s ability and the creation of a habit in the security state to harass people on what are functionally political crimes: They found something on your phone that suggested you were at least not supportive of the Israeli side of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Or maybe they found nothing at all.
The way the government works is often a habit — a muscle, a sense of what is OK to do. And one way to think about this is that they’re figuring out who inside the government is willing to do their dirty work.
I wish this weren’t the question we started on. I don’t mean to start this in such a dark space —
Gordon: It’s so we can end hopefully.
Klein: But I think it would be a lie to not admit that’s where we are.
Gordon: The constitutional crisis that you think we might be heading toward — I feel like when that’s brought up, people say things like: And that would be uncharted territory! And then the screen goes black.
Do you have a picture at all in your head of what this looks like?
Klein: I don’t. It depends on how it happens.
It was interesting when they refused to abide by the judge’s order to turn that plane around — that they initially tried to say that it was a technicality: Oh, the plane is over international waters. Your verbal order doesn’t count — only a written order counts.
They were trying to say they weren’t defying the order. But then, of course, they moved to: He’s a radical, leftist judge. He should be impeached.
There is a kind of procedural gimmickry that is a little different than: We are simply saying that this other branch of government cannot contain us.
So I could imagine a world like that.
Gordon: Does that comfort you?
Klein: No. I mean, it would if we were to stay in that world — depending on what they did. You can do gimmickry to the point where nobody believes it’s a gimmick anymore, and now you’re just in the actual defiance world.
The courts have a number of remedies. You can hold people in contempt or do all kinds of things that are escalatory.
The other thing is: It matters when this happens. If this happens after the midterms, and Democrats control the House and — it seems unlikely they will control the Senate, given the map, but it’s not impossible. Then that also adds a lot of power to what the court does.
Because right now, the way Trump is getting the power of the purse is that congressional Republicans are letting him take it. But the House actually does control the money. And they could just cut off the money the Trump administration is using. So there’s a lot you could do if Democrats controlled the House.
And I don’t think they’re going to want to have this kind of fight before the midterms, because this kind of fight would not be popular. I think it’s more likely to happen after the midterms, when the walls start closing in on their authority. But at that point, they’re very likely to be weaker.
So this does make it very important that Democrats put themselves in a position to win back power in the midterms. And of course it makes it important that the elections are free and fair in the midterms.
As of yet, I have not seen anything that would make me think they wouldn’t be. But, again, we’re two months into this, and things are much worse than people on both sides thought they would be. So I wouldn’t be overly sanguine.
Gordon: I feel that almost every question follows from this. So having laid out how dark the picture seems to be, Graham F. had a question about how we got here: “I would appreciate it if Ezra could provide commentary on how we got to this political moment that is so defined by anger and resentment that people are willing to allow a system to crumble that was, by most standards, working.”
Graham goes on to qualify: There’s obviously deep inequality, and there’s a lot of pain, but relatively speaking — compared to other countries, compared to history — the U.S. is prosperous. And he says: “I can’t wrap my head around this disconnect other than to blame it on misinformation.”
Klein: How we got here is: One, the populist right is popular in a lot of different countries. That’s not just an American thing. This is just a fairly populist style of governance. Authoritarianism is often popular.
It’s just not the reality that human beings are innately tuned to favor liberal democracy. They’re not. And it’s not that they’re favorably tuned to something else instead. But they’re willing to accept quite a wide range of governments.
And it was a weird election in a bunch of different ways. Joe Biden was very old. His administration is very unpopular. There was a lot of inflation. People voted for Donald Trump quite narrowly. And now they’re getting something much more intense than what they necessarily voted for.
Additionally, Donald Trump is surrounded by Elon Musk and other people who are accelerating the disruptiveness of his reign.
So I think a lot of historical contingencies stacked up on each other. But the lesson of history is that a lot of different worlds are possible. The fact that you’re now in a dark world doesn’t mean you’re going to snap back to a moderate one.
Now I think, in a way, the thing that Donald Trump is doing to safeguard democracy in this country is crashing the economy. Because the real dangerous democratic backsliding world is a world where they’re doing incredibly competent macroeconomic management. A world in which, say, the stock market is booming, inflation is down, and they’ve given people a big tax cut, so Trump’s approval rating is 56 percent, and Republicans hold on in the midterms. But they’re also doing all of this work to corrupt and clamp down on the administrative state — turning it into a kleptocracy and paying off oligarchic friends.
Democratic backsliding is much more likely under conditions of executive popularity. Donald Trump speed-running his way to becoming unpopular again and creating mass mobilization against him is a terrible idea, from their perspective.
And then: Democrats have no power, but markets and the economy do have power. And even the things the Trump administration says they’re trying to target aren’t working.
If you look at the data set that is tracking the orders that manufacturers expect to be placed, if you look right when Trump is elected, they’re very optimistic. But it has just nose-dived. Because tariffs are really bad for manufacturers. It does not help manufacturing when you cannot import metals and timbers and so on.
So it’s not just the stock market. Expectations for inflation are going up. The labor market is softening. We’re talking about, in terms of their economic theory, companies making multibillion-dollar reinvestments — shuttering plants in other countries, where they have a huge amount of personnel and capital invested, and bringing them back here.
Those are decade-long planning decisions. But if you were a corporation, would you make a giant investment right now? Into what? Why?
It’s very hard to know what the situation will be here in a year.
Gordon: Moving on to the Democrats, who, while they don’t have much power, do have some power to possibly shut the government down. And they chose not to.
This question was from Gabriel J.: “Did Democrats in Congress have an obligation to reject the continuing budget resolution in resistance to Trump? Would shutting down the government have been a better political move?”
Klein: I have talked to a bunch of the people on both sides of this. I’ve talked to Senator Chuck Schumer. I’ve talked to key people in the House and in the Senate.
I think the first thing to say is that people who are extremely sure about what the right move was — that, to me, is a little discrediting. Because all the moves — and everybody will admit this — were a gamble in one direction or another. And you never quite know how the cards are going to play out.
Schumer came to the conclusion that a shutdown was not actually leverage for the Democrats. It was probably going to be leverage for the Republicans. And for a couple reasons.
The most obvious one is that Elon Musk, JD Vance, Russell Vought and Donald Trump are trying to destroy and remake the federal government. And in a shutdown, they would get to decide what is and wasn’t essential — and who is and isn’t essential. So the decisions they’re making right now that are lawless would actually develop a force of law.
And was there ever really going to be pressure on them to reopen the government? I think they would care a lot less about the government being closed for an extended period of time than the Democrats would. They’re much more sensitive to complaints that things are going poorly for people.
And Donald Trump has already proved himself quite inured to market reaction. He doesn’t care. If he cared about markets being upset about the things he is doing, he wouldn’t be doing the tariffs.
Did Democrats have the capacity to hold out on that? And would they even like what was there on the other end? So that was one set of problems.
Also, eventually you could see the courts shutting down. And then all these lawsuits would stop. And you’d have that problem.
On the other hand, the argument for a shutdown was twofold. One was that it was a way of getting attention for the Democrats. Maybe a shutdown wasn’t leverage, but it was attention. And all of a sudden what Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer were saying would really matter to people. There would be much more attention on the Democratic messaging.
The second argument is: Yes, it would be chaos, it would be uncertainty, and it might be bad for the markets. But in the long run, that’s good for Democrats. Ultimately, come the midterms, people are going to blame the incumbent party for chaos.
And the other issue is: When would the Democrats accept the chaos? If Trump does defy court orders, are they going to do anything about it?
I’ve talked to some members of the Senate who say: Well, then we’re going to need a general strike. But they don’t have a big red button that says “General Strike.” So I do think there’s that question. Demobilizing your own base is a real problem.
This is really hard. I’m glad it wasn’t my decision to make. I understand where Schumer came down, and one reason I understand it is that the markets have emerged as very strong opponents to Donald Trump. They are punishing him. He’s become unpopular.
There’s a real way in which the thing that Democrats would ideally want to do with Trump — which is deliver a message that turns him from popular to unpopular, weakening him and his party for the midterms, which are, to be fair, not for a long time — the markets are doing that for them.
If Democrats stepped into the middle of that and helped generate a shutdown, then this question of who’s responsible for the chaos we’re seeing would become more of a shared question. And it’s very hard for Donald Trump to make the markets his enemy, but he’s very capable of making the Democrats his enemy.
And would Democrats outmaneuver Donald Trump in a media fight over an extended period of time? Are you really sure Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries can outdo Trump, Vance, Musk and that whole world? I’m not.
The way a shutdown should have gone — which I was sort of saying, going back to the “Don’t Believe Him” essay: Democrats needed to be defining what Trump is doing as lawless, which I think they largely have been. But to get to a shutdown, they need to be very clear for a long time on: If you don’t do X, Y and Z, we are going to give you nothing.
But they never defined X, Y and Z. They didn’t spend a month saying: Well, you’ve got to restore U.S.A.I.D. — because I think they don’t believe, necessarily, that fighting for U.S.A.I.D. is that popular. But they didn’t have anything like that.
So when I was texting with the people in the Democratic Party who wanted a shutdown, and I asked what their demand was, they were like: Well, we need to have a bipartisan negotiation over the continuing resolution.
And I’m like: You’re going to shut down the government —
Gordon: Not a rallying cry.
Klein: You’re going to shut down the government with your demand being a bipartisan negotiation over a continuing resolution? Nobody’s going to give a [expletive].
So I think the Democrats didn’t do the work to get themselves into a position for a shutdown. To the extent I am angry at them, I’m more angry about that than the fact that — having not done the work — I don’t think they were in a good position the day they had to vote on the C.R.
Gordon: I was going to wait on this question, but since we have sort of touched on it here, Preston H. had a question about what you think the theory of attention for Democrats should be: How should Democratic candidates, activists, politicians capture attention during the next couple years? Do you see any Democrats who are doing a good job?
Klein: No, I don’t see any doing a good job. I think there are two theories you could take right now.
One is a theory where you should get a lot of attention. And that requires conflict and unexpected spectacle. Those are the two ways you can get attention.
You can create conflict that is meaningful to people. A shutdown, for instance, would be conflict that is meaningful and that would get you a lot of attention. And you can do things that create spectacle. Al Green standing up and shaking his cane and yelling at Trump during the joint session of Congress address got attention. It was a spectacle. But this approach makes you the topic of attention. And the big question is whether it makes you the topic of attention in a way that ends up being good for you.
Then there’s another argument — James Carville made a stronger version of it than I would: Democrats need to strategically retreat, play dead and just let Trump be the center of attention. It’s an adage in politics: When your opponent is drowning, don’t throw him a lifeline.
And from this perspective, Trump is drowning. He’s becoming more unpopular. The markets are upset. He’s losing court cases. So don’t throw him the lifeline of you jumping into the middle and saying: Look at me, look at me, look at me.
Now that’s not very emotionally satisfying, and it also assumes we are in a more normal political state, maybe, than we are — going back to the question of whether we will have elections.
But I think those are the two theories. One is that you want attention, but it’s going to be very hard to get the kind you want. The other is that midterms are typically a referendum on the incumbent, and the incumbent is doing a great job of making it a negative referendum on himself.
It’s unfortunate Democrats don’t have much power right now. The courts and the markets have some power, and they’re exercising it. So you wait.
And nobody’s going to be very happy about that. But it’s probably going to lead to a pretty strong midterm. And you’ll get more attention when you get near the midterms because then there’s an electoral conflict that’s more interesting to people.
Those are the two theories.
Gordon: The way you laid them out, it seems like you’re almost a little sold by the Carville message.
Klein: I think that this continuing resolution doesn’t go on forever. If I’m not wrong, I think until September?
Gordon: Six months.
Klein: Something like that. So there’s going to be another bite at this apple.
I don’t think Democrats can, in good conscience, just sit by and not exercise what leverage they have over the government. But I think they need to decide the red lines they’re arguing for having reversed in a shutdown. And the problem is it’s not worth doing this if you can’t win it. It really isn’t — particularly if Donald Trump will just keep the government shut down forever and gut it.
This has always been a problem Democrats have when facing down Republicans in these kinds of negotiations.
Gordon: Is it like when Nancy Pelosi talks about how it’s hard to negotiate with people who believe in nothing?
Klein: No, because they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in Donald Trump’s power. They believe in gutting the government.
What you’re doing with both the shutdown and possibly a debt ceiling is you’re taking the functioning of the government and holding it hostage. And only one side is really willing to shoot the hostage.
I had Democrats tell me: Well, we’re not doing the shutdown, but the debt ceiling is a lot of leverage.
And I was like: You’re not going to [expletive] do the debt ceiling. If you’re not willing to take the cost of a shutdown, you’re not going to take the cost of a debt ceiling.
And they’re like: You might be right about that. [Laughs.]
But there will be another bite at a shutdown. This happened pretty soon into Trump’s administration. We’re two months in. So the idea that maybe you wait to do the shutdown until eight or nine months in — it doesn’t strike me as completely crazy.
But I do think that Democrats have to decide: What is the message? Shut down if you don’t do X. But what is X?
X can’t be: “Have a bipartisan negotiation with us.” X has to be three or four things you repeat relentlessly that the public is on your side about.
X has to be: You’ve destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and we don’t think Americans should be getting scammed day in and day out.
X has to be: You destroyed the Department of Education, and we believe that when people call in because there’s a problem with their student loans, they should reach a person on the phone.
X has to be things that the public agrees on with you. You have to define them, and then you have to be willing to take the pain until you win them.
I just don’t know if Democrats are willing to do that. And of course, you can make a high-stakes play and lose. So I’m not convinced by Carville in the long run. But I do think you have to be strategic.
Gordon: Moving on to a positive vision of the future territory, a question from Ron M.: “Is there anything anywhere that you are aware of in the progressive universe that is vaguely as specific or ambitious as Project 2025 was? Is anyone even laying out the broad priorities or guiding principles for such a plan?”
You are not allowed to plug your book. [Laughs.] Oh, plug your book.
Klein: Well, I will say that my colleague Astead Herndon had a tweet about this. And Representative Ritchie Torres just tweeted out the cover of “Abundance,” by me and Derek Thompson.
So in terms of the guiding principles, the book could help inform a plan. We’re trying to do that.
But look, Project 2025 came about in the third year of Biden’s presidency. It was an effort to create a coalition of groups and a menu of policy options to inform campaigns. I just don’t think this is the moment for a Democratic version of Project 2025.
I think it’s a moment for big-idea books that can help Democrats think about the world in a different way and reconceptualize how they approach their own failures and why people don’t like them and don’t trust them.
I think it’s also really important to say this: Project 2025, as a political document, was a huge disaster that Donald Trump and his ticket ran away from. They are using it. But the time for Project 2025 is when you’ve won the election and you’re handing policy ideas to the winner. It’s not —
Gordon: But it was energizing to conservative —
Klein: I don’t believe it was.
Gordon: No?
Klein: No. I think it created infighting. I think it made the president of the Heritage Foundation extremely unpopular in Republican circles for a long time. Donald Trump was mad about it. Chris LaCivita, one of his campaign managers, was tweeting about how they were mad about it. It was not a helpful political document. It just wasn’t. That’s a crazy retcon if anybody believes otherwise.
Project 2025 was a political failure and a policy success. Yes, the next Democrat who runs for president should have a big-policy menu. But the idea that you should have a bunch of groups lay out a bunch of hugely unpopular positions — I think you should have the Democratic candidate for president try to run on popular positions and not have people think in the background they’re going to decriminalize illegal border migration or something.
Gordon: But it feels like conservatives have been fantasizing about shutting down the Department of Education for decades. Do you see anything that liberals have been fantasizing about that could be part of a policy agenda?
Klein: I do, but they’re things everybody knows about. It’s universal pre-K. It’s expanding health insurance — even quite dramatically from where it is. It’s expanding what Medicare covers. Medicare doesn’t cover all kinds of things people need. It is —
Gordon: Normal, good stuff. [Laughs.]
Klein: Yes, things people would enjoy: It’s building enough housing so that 25-year-olds can own a home on the median wage in a big city. It’s building enough energy so that energy is cheaper at a time when artificial intelligence is going to slurp up more and more of it. The idea that Democrats don’t, in the back of their minds, have a bunch of big things to do —
Shutting down the Department of Education — the Republicans haven’t done it time after time because it’s a bad idea. It’s unpopular. It’s going to cause chaos.
I would like to see Democrats come out with a great health care vision — but not a terribly unpopular health care vision that’s the Democratic version of shutting down the Department of Education or making it illegal to get Plan B.
Project 2025 begins with banning porn. [Laughs.] It is a very weird document that did not do the G.O.P. any favors.
Gordon: Education is one policy area that does seem ripe for the picking.
This is a question from Jen G. She writes: “I have a 5-year-old daughter. Whenever I get together in a group of parents, we typically start talking about education. Everyone is concerned about the trajectory of educational outcomes in the U.S. I teach college students, and many are unable to focus for a sustained period, read a 20-page article or write coherently. Yet neither political party seems to be talking about our educational crisis beyond culture-war issues. Why is no one seizing on this, and how can we make it a priority for Democrats to address?”
Klein: I think this is a very good point.
By the way, Rahm Emanuel seems to be planning to run for president, and this is a big thing he keeps saying — that education is the issue sitting in plain sight that the Democrats need to grab again.
One reason Democrats don’t do that much on education anymore is they got exhausted by the intraparty fighting they set off in their last round of education reform. There’s a big faction of the Democratic Party that wants to modernize schooling in certain ways — make it more flexible, pay teachers for performance, do all these different things.
And then there’s the teacher’s union wing of the party, which wants to increase teachers’ pay and worries about — I mean, both sides worry about child poverty.
But there’s a big fight over how to do the schooling. It was never fully settled in the Democratic Party. But it causes them a lot of problems. Intercoalitionally, education has tended to be a pretty hard fight for Democrats.
I think the questions are also becoming very different. When Jake Auchincloss was on the show, one of the things he talked about was: Could we make tutoring a much more central part of education?
Maybe that’s partially human tutoring. But A.I. tutoring is getting very good very quickly. A.I. tutoring is more than good enough to tutor an 8-year-old.
How do we make that central to the experience? Because we know tutoring is an incredibly potent form of learning, but we actually don’t really know how A.I. tutoring will work and whether it will have the same effects. I saw some early evidence that maybe A.I. tutoring is really good while people are using it, but if you take away the A.I. tutor, students have a big regression.
So education policy can be pretty hard — which is part of the problem. But being mad about education not going well — our literacy rates are declining and test scores are not doing well — being mad about how the education system isn’t working — that’s very good politics.
The problem for Democrats is having a clear vision of what they think you should do.
Gordon: This question I thought was interesting and you might have interesting thoughts on. It’s about elites and how part of the MAGA project right now, as we’ve discussed on the show, wants to create a counterelite or a new class of elites.
Sarah C. wrote in and asked: “Is the existence of elites in a democracy necessarily a contradiction, or does effective democratic governance require a class of political, economic and intellectual elites to function properly?”
Your thoughts on elites?
Klein: In the narrow question: No, it’s not a contradiction.
By its nature, democracy leads to voting for people. Or even if you’re doing very direct democracy, somebody has to administer the programs you voted into existence. So the idea that there are going to be some people in charge of some things — there’s no way around that.
Then there’s the question of: How do you have a capable elite formation? How do you get a good class of elites? And I think that’s harder.
We have really rested a lot of our theorizing about elites on winning the meritocracy, which I think people, at this point, consider to be fairly rigged and also narrow and achievement oriented. I think the view that our institutions produce conformists is not crazy. We really have created a system that rewards the organization kid.
And I think the idea that elites lost a sense that pluralism — the capacity to hold contrasting sides of America within you and within your work — was important for their legitimacy — I really buy that.
I’m not here to tell anybody what their views should be, from very far left to even quite far right. But in a lot of places of power in political or intellectual life, I think you need to be able to hold within you the parts of the country that are not your own. If you can’t, then your institution and the way you’ve been governing and approaching things can be very vulnerable when your precise slice of the electorate loses power.
Something Jonathan Haidt has been saying for many years is that the sharp turn of the universities to the left was very bad for the universities. And the fact that the university faculties, when you did surveys, had vanishingly few Republicans was very bad for the universities.
And over time, I think the ideological monoculture — well, maybe that’s too strong. Because it’s not a monoculture — you had liberals, Marxists, democratic socialists, anarchists of certain kinds. But what you didn’t have were conservatives. That made —
Gordon: I quibble with that a little bit. But I agree they’re in the minority for sure.
Klein: I’m not saying you never had a conservative. But I’ve looked at a lot of the surveys.
I went to University of California, Santa Cruz. I was in the class of 2006, so I was there in 2002. And when I attended, U.C. Santa Cruz was understood to be like the hippie left edge of the University of California system.
So when a lot of the stories were coming out from other places, I was like: Well, that just sounds like where I went to school. And that seemed fine. [Laughs.]
I don’t think I realized until later that for the climate of U.C. Santa Cruz to become the median of what other places were was actually a huge shift in the bell curve of what was represented on campus. And over time that came with real consequences: Ideological trends and movements swept through with very little resistance.
And part of that is also the Republican Party’s fault. The party became more and more hostile to expertise. When it turned on climate change, that was going to really upset people who believed in evidence. So it’s a feedback loop with polarization and other things. And it’s a problem.
But the problem for universities right now is not that the administrators are too weak in response to whatever the fad of the moment is. It is that the Trump administration is trying to break the universities over its knee and heavily politicize them and heavily police their speech.
So now you have this thing where you need this kind of elite you haven’t had there — which is a courageous kind of elite. Not just a courageous kind of elite on behalf of left-wing causes but on behalf of the revitalization and protection of the university itself. Which has to balance, at the same time, the fact that the university needs to be a pluralistic institution and also that it cannot, in fact, give in to what the Trump administration is demanding of it. It can’t turn on its students, and it does have to protect the right to protest — all these things that are part of academic freedom and are part of a healthy culture of inquiry.
But I do think it became a fragile internal culture. And it wasn’t the students’ fault. And I really feel this is important to emphasize: It was the work of the faculty and the administrators to allow students to have radical politics without completely collapsing in the face of that politics.
Gordon: So to make this concrete: Does that mean, if you’re a university president, resisting the demands of the Trump administration, even if it means losing your federal funding?
Klein: Yes. If you have an endowment, you should be resisting the demands of the Trump administration. I believe that strongly.
What are these endowments for? What are all these billions and billions and billions of dollars for? Do what you think is right.
If you think some of the demands being made on you are the right thing to do, you should do them. Not everything that anybody in the Trump administration thinks is wrong.
But if you’re one of these places with a $10 billion or $20 billion endowment, then, yes, you should have some independence. That’s what that endowment is for.
Gordon: Well, I think we’re seeing that the Trump administration is basically stress-testing a lot of the system right now. Who do you think is doing the best, and where are the bright spots?
Klein: I think the courts are doing a good job. We will see what happens when the Trump administration’s defiance turns up and becomes unignorable. We will see how the Supreme Court performs under that pressure. But right now, the courts are acting as the courts should.
I don’t want to call the market an institution. It’s just people making, buying and selling decisions based on their sense of future earnings and the future state of the economy. But at least the market isn’t closing its eyes to reality at the moment.
And by the way, I think the media is doing a good job. The media is under a lot of threat from Donald Trump — lawsuits, all kinds of pressure on corporate parents, pressure on the people who own it. And I think we all worry about what the security state could eventually become and the ways it could be weaponized against us.
But I see reporters doing great reporting — being out there, really trying to understand what is happening, trying to balance curiosity and some kind of transpartisan moral framework. The publishers of a lot of these places have done terribly. But I think that the reporters and the editors of a lot of them are doing a good job.
I think business leaders have been unbelievable cowards. I think they’ve been bending their knee to something that they, at this point, know is bad. These same people who were so up in arms and in high dudgeon in the first administration — they didn’t change all their views from the first to the second. But they’ve all gone into complicity mode. Not literally all of them, but so many of them.
It is important that the people at the peaks of civil society speak. You don’t have to become a member of the resistance, but you also shouldn’t be cowed. Civil society matters.
The pope coming out and saying some of the things he did early on — that was important. Religious leaders are going to be important here. The Democrats don’t have power. They’re not an opposition that has a point of leverage. It matters — as signals people get from other parts of society.
So I’ll say it again: I think the part of society that has been weakest has been businesses that know better, and they don’t want to get crosswise with the Trump administration because they might get hit on tariffs. They might get bad regulatory rulings.
The state is being run as a tool for reward and punishment, but that’s not only true for them — it’s true for everybody. And there were a lot of people who I think showed a lot more courage the first time and seemed to have given up on that as either cringe or just not useful the second.
But that’s dangerous for society. And part of being rich and powerful is you’re supposed to have bought yourself a measure of independence. It would be nice if more of them used it.
Gordon: And then, for regular people, do you have a theory of what the most effective form of activism or resistance is? Protesting? Calling your congressperson?
Klein: I don’t think I have any one. It depends on who you are and where you live, and it depends on the timing. When we’re closer to the midterms, things will be different than they are right now, in terms of where you should put your time.
But I think it’s easy to underestimate how effective mass protest is. I do think this is different in part because of the absence of the visible, big resistance marches and the energy that you had in the first Trump administration. The more that resistance builds, the more it has an effect.
Look, even the people showing up to the town halls had a big effect. Now Republicans are afraid of doing town halls, and everybody knows it. I think things like that matter.
Gordon: I think that’s a good place to end. Thanks, Ezra.
Klein: Claire Gordon, thank you very much.
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