On this First 100 Days episode of “The Opinions,” the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, and the columnist Bret Stephens discuss the nuance of being a conservative critical of President Trump.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America. This week, I wanted to talk to my colleague the columnist Bret Stephens.
Bret is a conservative who occupies this really interesting position: He’s a Trump critic who thinks the administration is succeeding on some fronts, and he’s an American who wants strong leadership in his country, but finds both political parties really lacking. So what’s it like to agree with Trump on a bunch of issues, but also kind of hate him? I’m curious how Bret wrestles with that dichotomy and how he thinks Americans should see the next four years.
Bret, thanks for joining me.
Bret Stephens: It’s such a pleasure to be here.
Healy: Bret, I really love talking to you because you push me on ideas and you push readers and listeners, and you don’t let anyone off the hook, yourself included.
So I want to start with something you’ve been candid about. You’ve been tough on Trump from the get-go, but you also generally approve of how he’s used power to secure the southern border and how Trump has pushed to get rid of D.E.I. and the Department of Education and his support for Israel. So what’s your starting point with Trump? Is it being open-minded about his agenda? Is it disliking him personally? And can you talk a bit about how you’ve been processing the past couple months?
Stephens: Well, I think your intro is maybe 24 hours out of date because my feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad — not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.
So it is true that I give him credit for getting control over the southern border. It was a colossal folly of the Biden administration to not get a better grip on that. I thought D.E.I. had gotten out of hand, and I was happy to see the administration’s orders about it. But I have two large — maybe three large — objections to what is going on.
One of them is that even when the administration does what I think is the right thing, it does it in the wrong way. The second thing is that some of what it is doing — I’m thinking of the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the migrant who was unlawfully deported, and whom the administration refuses to bring back in compliance with the court order — I think is unconstitutional and un-American.
And I think that there is a meanspiritedness of vulgarity that sits outside of the spirit of the America that I love. So those three things together do a lot to obscure the increasingly dwindling number of policy decisions of which I say: OK, yeah, that’s what I might’ve done, or what I wish I would’ve seen done by another administration.
Healy: Let me bear down on this because I think you’ve pushed me and others to remember, this is a president of the United States that to start on Day 1 in a posture of resistance and to oppose, oppose, oppose, oppose everything can be a limited way of thinking about it.
But what was the turning point for you? And I’m not saying you’re now Mr. Resistance, but was there a moment recently where things really changed for you? Or did he somehow reveal himself, just that much more, to be the person he is?
Stephens: One of the things I’ve come to appreciate is the extent to which the first Trump administration was helped by Republican opposition to some of what Trump was trying to do, which kept him from going off the rails. When the administration resumed in January, I probably had it too much in my mind that this administration would look a lot like the previous one. And it turns out, it looks nothing like it at all because there are no Republicans who are willing — publicly or even, it seems, privately — to push back against Trump’s worst impulses and ideas, of which there are so many.
So the turning point, for me, was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the Oval Office, where a person that the United States ought to consider a vital ally — not to mention a heroic figure — was publicly humiliated and treated with the most incredible kind of discourtesy by the president and the vice president. Zelensky was basically kicked out of the White House. And as the saying goes, it was worse than a crime; it was a mistake, because America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy.
But it was also a mistake because nothing could have delighted Vladimir Putin more than the sight of that public humiliation. It merely emboldened Putin to press the war harder. So if Trump’s goal is actually to end the war, it puts that goal further out of reach. And it’s this kind of combination — the administration of malice and idiocy is almost unique in American history.
The presidents we’ve had — I think of Richard Nixon, who sometimes acted with malice — they were usually pretty clever. But here it’s like a face-plant presidency. It’s doing terrible things and screwing up, even in its own maliciousness.
Healy: Let’s talk more about that malice, that humiliation you were talking about with Zelensky, the way that Trump approaches people and institutions and even policy. What do you think he wants America to be?
Stephens: I think he wants a nation of toadies. If there is some kind of reptilian cunning to what he does to his entire approach, it is to turn everyone into a supplicant. I’m thinking of the way in which he went after law firms so that they had to bend the knee.
Even the tariff scheme. By imposing these tariffs, it means that the Tim Cooks of the world, the tech people, have to go begging to the White House to carve out exemptions. And I think that’s essentially the way in which Trump operates. He gets the most satisfaction when he sees that he’s managed to turn someone into a dependent on him.
Think of the people who are now in his inner circle. Lindsey Graham was a vociferous opponent, turned into a toady. JD Vance, another vociferous opponent, now a toady. Marco Rubio — you’ll remember the 2016 debates — another toady.
That’s how Trump likes it. He likes the feeling that he has conquered and humiliated another person, and that they are now paying him court.
Healy: Yes. People have talked about it as an imperial presidency, a dictatorial one. I just think he loves signing executive orders. I think he loves sitting at that desk and exerting a kind of leverage that doesn’t need Congress, that doesn’t necessarily need the bureaucracy. It’s him dominating people.
Stephens: And the aesthetic of it, of him sitting at this desk with no papers, no evidence that he is busying himself except to be handed a decree, which he then signs in that ostentatious signature of his. That iconography clearly flatters some deep part of his vanity or his ego.
But it’s also so contrary to the spirit of the presidency. It’s so contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, you know, a coequal branch of government working through respect and negotiation, looking for win-win solutions. And Trump is incapable of thinking beyond a zero-sum. That’s what’s so corrosive and troubling for me.
And I actually think that those of us who are critics of Trump, who find him at some level vomitous, are better critics when we concede from time to time that he has accomplished something. That not everything is dreadful or idiotic. You have to keep your brain on. And I think that’s the danger for a lot of Trump critics. One of the reasons I resist the term resistance is that once you join the resistance, your brain goes off and you have a hard time understanding the deeper sources of his appeal or the ways in which even if he’s not entirely right, he’s at least half right.
And I think that’s an important way in which I think Trump needs to be approached because I think one thing everyone can agree on, Trump supporters and critics alike, is that so far the efforts to stop him have so obviously failed.
Healy: What’s an example of Trump being half-right that is illuminating or revealing about what Trump is really up to?
Stephens: Well, let’s take the universities, for example. When the list of demands for Columbia University came down, I know that privately many university presidents said well, this is what we should have done: banning face-covering masks, having a disciplinary process that’s meaningful, ensuring that Jewish students feel safe on campus. All perfectly fine. And to the extent that if the administration had limited itself to those demands, it would have been hard to make the case against them.
But what clearly is now happening, what we’ve learned over the last 10 days is, this is an effort not to curb or reduce antisemitism; it’s an effort to destroy academic freedom. So he latched onto the question of the issue of antisemitism on campus, which is real, which is right and which I think the left was in denial about to a great extent. But he’s using it for an agenda, which is destructive to American liberty.
Healy: Not just destructive to American liberty, Bret. But, you’ve been such a powerful voice and thinker on antisemitism. How much does it bother you that Trump has used antisemitism in such a, frankly, exploitative way to get the ends that he wants?
Stephens: So this is a column that I really need to write because it really rankles — I’m a U-Chicago person. I have a fundamental commitment to concepts of academic freedom, which include the right of students and professors to espouse views, which I find mistaken, wrong and even loathsome.
And so what Trump has now done is turned a legitimate grievance — and specifically Jewish grievance — into a tool to undermine and potentially destroy a value, which I think is a core Jewish value, which is the value of debate, dissent, reason, inquiry, criticism and so on. The one mistake we cannot make is we cannot get on the side of Illiberalism. We cannot get on the side of people who pretend to be our friends but seek to undermine a political order centered on the notion of the freedom of conscience and thought, the freedom of and the dignity of the individual.
I don’t mean liberalism in the kind of progressive sense. I mean liberalism in the classic Jeffersonian and John Stuart Mill sense of the word. I think it’s dangerous because it puts the Jewish population sort of as a protected class of the ruler, and that’s happened historically for Jews over the centuries.
We keep hoping the next king won’t expel us or put us to the torch. But the whole purpose of liberalism is that Jews enjoy the same kind of rights and privileges and freedoms as everyone else, as equal citizens. That’s the promise of Washington’s letter to the Newport congregation. He says: We no longer speak of mere tolerance because Jews are every bit as American as everyone else.
And so there is a side of the Jewish population that’s sort of cheering Trump because he seems to have the same enemies, or many of the same enemies, that we do. But the methods he’s using to oppose those enemies, we ought to fear.
Healy: That’s the thing I don’t understand, Bret. Why do some Jews and so many conservatives throw in with Trump’s illiberalism? Is it that the ends justify the means? Is it something different? Do they not see ——
Stephens: I mean, I’d have to look back at the exit polling but I think Harris won an overwhelming share of the vote ——
Healy: She did.
Stephens: Including this Jewish voter. My vote, precisely with the same fears that I have. Look, this is a uniquely vulnerable time. I think the answer is that many Jews, including Jews who voted for Trump, did so with immense reluctance, because they see him for who he is. I’m sure there are some who are enthusiastically MAGA, but I don’t actually know any of them. I think the ones that I know who voted reluctantly for Trump said the Jewish people are facing a state of emergency. Israel is under a unique kind of threat. The eruption of antisemitism is something the world hasn’t witnessed since the 1930s. And extreme times call for extreme measures. Sometimes you need to summon the bully to fight back the furies, right?
I’m trying to do justice to the thinking of a minority of Jewish voters who I think, for understandable reasons, said: This guy’s on our side and we can’t be choosy at a moment of existential peril.
Healy: I want to be clear — this is not just Jewish Americans; this is many Americans who I think saw a version of a national emergency that America had kind of lost the plot. That the country had turned into something over the last five or 10 years that was different than what they knew.
There were a lot of people who saw Trump, who still see Trump, essentially, as a strong figure. As someone who is going to take stands that might be deeply unpopular, might get him called illiberal by New York Times columnists, but who see him as having his back against a wall for America. Am I puffing him up, or does that speak to you?
Stephens: I don’t think you can explain Trump’s rise without fully taking account of the extent to which the Democratic Party, as exemplified by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — Biden was the ostensible moderate, but he simply lost the confidence of the American people for exactly the kinds of reasons that you just illustrated.
It became a party that seemed to represent an alphabet soup of Americans rather than America itself. It became a party wedded to a set of ideas that profoundly alienated a lot of Americans. And, actually, for all the talk about inclusion, it was very exclusionary for those of us who just thought: Well, I’m an American. You know, that’s the foremost aspect of my social identity or my political identity.
And then the gaslighting of the United States through the pretense that Joe Biden was fit to run for president and the highhandedness of anointing Kamala Harris, an incompetent candidate in my view, in the space of a day. There’s a segment of the readership that is always angry that I was sort of slow to publicly endorse Kamala, which always amuses me because it sort of puffs up my importance. The idea that my reluctance to vote for Kamala was a reason for her defeat is hilarious to me. But I spent the entire political season before I endorsed Harris begging Biden to get out of the race.
I started begging him in 2021 and then saying: Please, let’s have an open primary. Don’t anoint Kamala Harris as your candidate, because judging by her performance in 2019, she never even made it to 2020.
And the Democrats couldn’t rise to that. Now I’m thinking of people like Seth Moulton, Ritchie Torres, John Fetterman, Elissa Slotkin, Josh Shapiro. There’s much more intellectual ferment in the Democratic Party, more of an effort to reckon with their mistakes. So that gives me some hope.
Healy: What does all of this cruelty and overreach, even by Trump, do to the conservative movement? To Republicans? To people who believe in the rule of law and identify themselves as conservatives? To some extent folks like you who have described a sense of being politically homeless right now, but also there are still ideas that you believe in. And yet, it can kind of muffle the record and the agenda and what he’s doing.
Stephens: You know, at some level, my only standard is that I try to maintain a sense of intellectual honesty and humility. If Trump is going to do something that I’ve advocated for years long before he came on the political scene — let’s say moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem — I’m going to praise it. What else can I do? Oh, Trump did it, so therefore it’s corrupt because it’s drowned out by his cruelty and his otherwise general terribleness?
And I don’t think that occasionally finding areas of agreement diminishes the power of my fundamental criticism of the guy. I think it enhances it. If you can point to the fact that you’re not suffering from what the Republicans like to call Trump derangement syndrome, that you are capable of seeing areas of agreement and that you’re not willing to abandon your former point of view simply because Trump’s position coincides with your own, it just strikes me that you are maintaining a sense of intellectual honesty.
I’ve watched the way in which the Never Trump movement — that I was a charter member of back in 2015 — has gone, and, of course, some Never Trumpers like JD Vance just became ardent Trumpers. Some Never Trumpers just kind of adopted a George Costanza do-the-opposite frame of mind where they effectively became indistinguishable from the leftists they used to oppose.
But I also think, and this is the key point, Patrick, the United States needs a healthy conservative movement. It needs a conservative movement that is grounded in its foundational liberal principles. And the way I see my role is to express conservatism, which I think is essential for a healthy democracy. I mean, every society is going to have a conservative side. There’s never been a society in history that doesn’t have conservative-leaning people. I think it’s psychological.
And the question is: Does that conservatism express itself as a Reaganesque, George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain types of conservatives? Or does it tilt into the illiberalism that Trump represents? What I’m trying to do is uphold the idea, however lonely it is, of a conservative movement that seeks to have an honorable place in a liberal democratic order.
Healy: That resonates for me, and I might put it a slightly different way. I always thought that a really strong Democratic Party would be the greatest threat to conservatism in this country. But now I think it’s Trump that is the greatest threat to conservatism. Do you agree?
Stephens: Yes, because he presents himself as a quintessential conservative, and he and a generation of young, conservative-minded people are coming to see his brand of right-wing politics as being the real brand, the real version of the right.
And I think one of the things that I now find really worrying among my kids’ generation is meeting young right-wingers whose idea of a conservative is Viktor Orban. And I just completely part company with them. I do my best to say no. In the spirit of Gladiator, there was a dream that was Rome and this is not it.
Healy: You wrote a really powerful column recently about the idea of democratic nobility, and what you’re saying kind of resonates with that. And it also makes me think of the introduction to this episode. I think what is special about the work that you do are those values about openness and inquiry. I wasn’t trying to say that you are some sort of Trump hugger, but you’re someone who approaches these issues from a fundamental point of openness and sort of asking: What is the intent?
I think what a lot of readers and listeners of yours, myself included, do wonder is: What path do you see America on right now? What do you see Trump leading us toward, if not democratic nobility? And as someone who tries to frankly model a kind of openness in the way that you think about this guy.
Stephens: I think his aspiration is what Viktor Orban called an illiberal democracy, which isn’t quite autocracy, but resembles not only Orban’s Hungry, but Erdogan’s Turkey as well. On the other hand, I am not a pessimist about the United States. I think it’s important to say: America has endured other presidents who exceeded, by a lot, the balance of the Constitution in pursuit of their agendas. And the country tended again to find its balance. If we were having this conversation in 1973 or 1974, we would be saying the same thing about Richard Nixon.
The United States is, next year, a 250-year-old Republic, and we have seen worse. And what I think is actually happening now is in some ways healthy. Trump’s aggressiveness and his overreach are changing the conversation in the U.S. We used to say the vibe shift was to the right. It doesn’t seem like that right now, and that’s the nature of a free society.
Democracies that are constantly attentive to the ways in which things are going wrong tend to be more adaptive, more flexible and ultimately more resilient than states like China, which pursue the path of the leader and then, and then find themselves running into trouble.
So I actually think that a lot of Americans are going to learn from these four years of Trump, and we might come out of the other end of a better country. I mean, I know that sounds a little Pollyanna right now, but I think history in this sense is on my side. And there have been other periods of deep pessimism, and in some ways seemingly justified pessimism, about the direction of the country, and we’ve surmounted and survived them and learned from those episodes just as we did, I don’t know, the Red Scare, the McCarthy period. So I’m not completely doom-and-gloom yet, although sometimes it’s hard to shake
Healy: Thanks a lot, Bret.
Stephens: Thanks, Patrick. It’s a pleasure.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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