In a live event recorded at the Brooklyn Public Library on Tuesday, Opinion’s deputy editor, Patrick Healy, was joined by the columnists Michelle Goldberg, M. Gessen and Bret Stephens to discuss how President Trump’s second term has reshaped America in just 100 days.
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 NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Healy: I want to start with a premise and a provocation to kick off our conversation. My premise is this: American voters knew last year exactly what Donald Trump was capable of as president, that Trump pretty much told us what he would do if re-elected. It prompted an editorial project by my Times Opinion colleagues called “Believe Him,” and that Trump won a free and fair election last November.
So my provocation is this: America is getting the disruptive, destructive strongman presidency that millions of our fellow citizens wanted, and that Trump used these first 100 days to deliver on a mandate from November’s plurality of voters. In other words, this is a presidency that more Americans voted for than voted against.
And Michelle, I’m going to go to you first because you are a Brooklyn-based columnist in the house. Michelle, have the last three months been a president putting a mandate to work?
Goldberg: I would go back to your premise, and I would just add one word to it. You said, “Americans knew what they were getting.” I think that you should have said, “Americans should have known what they were getting.”
Healy: If they read New York Times Opinion and your columns, they would’ve known.
Goldberg: You can see in the sort of incredulousness of these Wall Street traders that Trump instituted these tariffs, that many people projected all kinds of ideas onto Donald Trump that were pretty divorced from what he said he was going to do. And, in fact, it was sort of this eerie fog, I felt, had come over the country.
There felt like there was this combination of mass amnesia or denial. I don’t know what it was, but the mood leading up to the election felt so strange to me because there was such a disconnect between what people thought they were voting for and what I thought they were voting for. So, I think that you’re right, and I will say this: Whenever I would write about, Donald Trump is going to do X, I would get two kinds of emails. One kind would say, “You idiot; nobody thinks he’s actually going to do that,” and the other would be like, “You idiot; of course we know he’s going to do that, and you’re the only one who doesn’t like it.”
So on the one hand, yes, I think you could argue that there is a certain amount of — I mean, there’s the famous H.L. Mencken quote, “Democracy is when the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” I might be mangling it a little bit ——
Healy: Exactly that.
Stephens: It’s exactly that. [laughter]
Goldberg: But I also think that you can already see that people, again, they should have known, but they didn’t. I think there was a poll today that 52 percent of Americans think Donald Trump is a dangerous dictator.
In polling, Donald Trump is underwater on every single issue because I think a lot of people either didn’t know what it was going to look like, or they convinced themselves that the people who were going to be hurt were some other group of people that wasn’t going to touch them. You see this in, say, the people who are like: “Wait, how come my employee or my wife got deported? I thought Trump was only going to deport the bad people.”
I do think that the democratic legitimacy that he has is eroding quickly.
Healy: Bret, I want to come to you next on this because, to Michelle’s point, I might disagree a little bit, only because we heard so much from Trump about tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs last fall. How do you see this? Do you see this as a mandate at work or something else?
Stephens: No, not at all. This is the point of my recent column; I think Trump voters, outside of maybe a very hard MAGA core, are shocked. Back in 2018, ’19, before the pandemic, I was talking with a hedge fund guy who — I wouldn’t call him a Trump supporter, but he was leaning in the president’s favor. And he said: When I listen to the president, I don’t like it; but when I turn the volume down to zero, I like the policy that I’m getting. And that’s because the policy that he was getting in the first term was largely kind of a Paul Ryan Republicanism. Agree or disagree, but it’s a known quantity in American politics.
It was also because Trump 1.0 surrounded himself with a set of figures who were familiar, reliable, reasonably competent — guys like Gary Cohn on economic policy and so on. And so I think Trump voters now, and last year, thought, well, it’s going to be just like the last time. This is a president who loves to stir the pot. He loves to say outrageous things. But at the end of the day, he’s a fairly conventional Republican, and that’s not what they’re getting. And they are shocked that they’re getting exactly what Trump promised.
Healy: I want to challenge you on that, though, because last year I don’t think that we were hearing from Trump, “Oh, this is just a simple restoration of my first term.” This was, “God has saved ——”
Goldberg: Right, but they didn’t believe him. It’s not that Trump wasn’t saying that he should — all these things.
I don’t mean to interrupt, but when you have someone who just lies all the time and that’s baked in then, and it’s interesting that, in a way, people who vote for Trump depend on him lying and see that dishonesty as a point in his favor. He says he is going to do all these crazy things, but he’s just [expletive], and that’s a good thing.
Healy: I would slightly disagree with that — and then I want to go to Masha — only because we did all of these focus groups last year in Times Opinion, and one thing that we heard time and again is people, certainly on the right, some in the center, some on the left, wanted to see serious, severe, even draconian action on immigration, on issues of safety that I don’t think we were hearing as much in the first term when it was a lot like, “Build the wall.” Well, the wall didn’t get built, but as long as our economy’s good.
I do think there was an expectation of a very dramatic action. But, Masha, I want to go to you next. How have you seen these first 100 days?
M. Gessen: I actually want to pick up on what Michelle and Bret were talking about.
I think that you can’t argue in good faith that people were expecting the first Trump presidency. Although I think some, in some sense, were because there’s a kind of chronic failure of the imagination that has followed Trump’s political career for nine years, 10 years.
But there’s something that happened at the end of that term. It was Jan. 6. And so people who were voting for Trump were not voting for a president. They were voting for somebody who promised to destroy the American system of government as it’s constituted. And in that sense, yes, that’s the mandate. Because I think if we argue that yes, they voted for policies, but they didn’t really mean for him to start ignoring court decisions, or send people to an offshore gulag with no due process. I think that’s dishonest.
Goldberg: I think probably about 30 percent of the country wants that, or a big chunk of his voters wants that. But there are also a lot of people who are really checked out. I saw online today there was a thread for Reddit lovers of TEMU or Shein, one of those two Chinese retailers, and people were like, “Wait, what’s going on?”
Gessen: No, but I mean they want to live well while he also destroys the system of government that they really hate.
Healy: I want to pick up on the Jan. 6 point that Masha is making. Maybe I’ll ask this to you, Bret. People, yes, had different opinions about what happened on Jan. 6, perhaps, but it seems like the reaction to Jan. 6 and the willingness among many of our fellow citizens to re-elect Donald Trump, either in spite of Jan. 6 or because of Jan. 6 — to me, you can draw a line from that to what feels like a degradation or even an end of due process in this country, sort of a willingness to trample on the rule of law.
Stephens: Just to be clear: I wasn’t endorsing these voters. I was just trying to describe what I was hearing ——
Healy: Yeah.
Stephens: In many conversations I had last year before the election and the year before, I would say, isn’t Jan. 6 a deal breaker? And you’d get this kind of vague, “Well, that was bad, but it wasn’t quite as bad as the mainstream media portrays it to be.”
And then there was a kind of a whataboutism on purported sins of the opposition, and, after all, they’re trying to throw Trump in jail, and how unscrupulous is that when it comes to democratic norms, et cetera. Anyway, they found ways to talk themselves into a kind of political amnesia.
The point that I kept making to them is, if you don’t have an executive that believes in the rule of law, that believes in democratic process and procedure, that believes in foundational rights, civil liberties due process and so on, then everything you’re hoping for in terms of the business climate is going to fall apart. Because a president who won’t respect the due process rights of someone who is wrongfully deported to a hellhole in El Salvador doesn’t really care that your company has just been tariffed with 145 percent tariffs. There is a connection between the two.
And those of us who have spent time outside of the United States know just how intrinsic it is to have a basis in a rule of law if you’re going to have a thriving, capitalist free-market society in which contracts are ordered, contracts are honored and where there’s a sense of how things work.
This is, I think, an essentially unforgivable sin of Trump’s non-MAGA supporters who were willing to shield their eyes, cover their ears and say, “We’re going to get a good business policy; everything else is noise.” That was not just a mistake, but a crime.
Healy: I want to go back in time to January of this year. How did each of you think President Trump’s first 100 days would go back then? And then how did it go by comparison? How did you think it was going to go, Michelle, on Inauguration Day? What did you think this period would be like, and then how does that align with what we’ve seen?
Goldberg: I think I thought it would be pretty much like this with a couple of exceptions. I mean, I thought it was going to be extraordinarily bad. I thought that there would be the sort of D-list Fox News weekend hosts running major cabinet agencies and that it would basically be the kind of ——
Stephens: Would you have been happier with A-list Fox hosts?
Goldberg: It’s possible that I would be.
Stephens: Laura Ingraham at Justice and Sean Hannity at Defense.
Healy: We almost got Matt Gaetz.
Gessen: There is something insulting about the mediocrity of it.
Goldberg: There is. I mean, I guess I kind of expected like a hackistocracy, and that’s what we got. I’ve been surprised at a couple of things. I’ve been surprised at the speed of it. I didn’t — I mean, I’m a pretty pessimistic and anxious person, but I don’t know that I would’ve predicted that there would be judges being arrested within a hundred days.
So the one thing that I had been saying that was my big fear about Trump all along is what happens if there are mass protests and he calls out the military? We’re still kind of far from that, but it was either today or yesterday, he signed an executive order, sort of positioning military equipment to fight crime in various cities, kind of getting ready, I think, for a scenario that could look very much like that.
I expected the Republican Party to be completely supine. I would say, I don’t know what I expected — I think tariffs of like 10 percent or basically what he said during the campaign. I don’t know that I expected the level of malevolent incompetence with which the tariffs were enacted. Because a mistake that I think I made — and that a lot of people made — was that there was this idea of a “Trump put.” That Trump could only screw up the economy so much before there would be some countervailing force that would make him back down. I mean, we’ve seen that a little bit; we saw the kind of postponement of some of the Liberation Day tariffs.
But it is still kind of amazing that we are lurching toward this completely self-inflicted recession. We’re in this game of chicken and so far we do not seem to be swerving.
Healy: Masha, how about you? How did you sort of see what was coming in January, and how does it align with what’s happened?
Gessen: I actually wrote a column in November predicting that he would move much faster than during his first term, and that all his primary moves would be against institutions. So destroying the judiciary, destroying higher education, destroying social welfare. That’s all happened faster and more blatantly, I think, than I imagined.
If there’s one thing that has surprised me, it’s the obscenity of it. It’s just the sense that we’re watching something that we really shouldn’t be looking at. It shouldn’t be happening, but also it shouldn’t be so blatant.
Stephens: Can I offer a provocation just for fun?
Healy: Go for it.
Stephens: I’m, on balance, relieved about the first hundred days, and I’ll explain.
Gessen: That’s funny.
Stephens: Well, just give me a second. If you look at dictatorships like Erdogan’s, democratic dictatorships, that is to say, regimes that began democratically and then slid into authoritarianism — Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Chavez in Venezuela — what made their dictatorship so insidious and so long-lasting was that the first few years were successful. The first few years delivered, particularly when it came to improving the economy to some extent. That was due to an upswing in commodity prices, at least for Caracas and for Moscow.
But for a variety of reasons, you look at the early reporting about Putin’s regime and the other two, and it’s a miracle: They’ve saved the economy. People feel relatively good. The insults to civil liberties seem to be: They’re there if you’re paying attention, but if you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to forget about them.
This has been so flagrantly awful that it has actually, I think, awakened in a lot of people who might not otherwise have felt a motivation to oppose this presidency.
This piece I published was about a guy who makes board games; he’s sort of business-minded, calls himself independent. Basically, a Republican voter who voted for Trump in ’24, and he is beside himself. And if it took 145 percent tariffs and economic chaos to get a voter like him to suddenly go, “Ah, I see the problem,” then we might, in retrospect, actually think, well, you know ——
Goldberg: I agree. I was rooting for the tariffs for this reason, I have to say. But then it puts you in a kind of perverse position because — the worse, the better.
Gessen: I’m afraid you’re misinformed about Putin. I remember sitting in the office of a leading sociologist in Russia, and he was showing me a graph, and the bottom line on the graph was subjective economic well-being. It had dropped off the cliff, and the top line was Putin’s popularity, and it was climbing. And he was like, this shouldn’t be happening. A graph cannot look like this. But, actually, Putin’s ratings consistently looked like that.
And what’s even more upsetting is that for the first 14 years of Putin’s presidency — of which four he was not formally president — he was underwater in every job performance, polling question. People liked him. They thought that he was Russia’s great promise, that he was going to eventually deliver stability.
But asked: Do you think he’s doing a good job, settling the conflict in Chechnya? Do you think he’s doing a good job with the economy? Do you think he is doing a good job on democratic reforms? They would consistently say no. So the worse is not the better.
Stephens: Can I ask Masha a follow-up question? One thing that Putin projected — as I saw it in those early years — was an aura of competence and intelligence and purpose that contrasted very sharply with the Yeltsin years of raging alcoholism and all the other problems of the Yeltsin era in the Kremlin.
I mean, Trump is very different, which is that the aura that he projects, at least in these first 100 days, is of a completely erratic, incompetent, will-of-the-wisp type of managerial style. I don’t think to the average American he is looking like, this is a guy who knows what he’s doing. It’s 145 percent tariffs in the morning, a 60-day reprieve by afternoon. It’s one thing after another. Doesn’t look like a guy who is, with that Putin-esque sinister quality, playing a long game.
Healy: I disagree with that in part. Bret, to go back to your point about the people who turned down the volume on the television, I think that they still have this sense of energy and action and enthusiasm. And even some people, like in one of our recent focus groups, talked about the sense that Trump had shown them that the presidency could still be an active agent in their life, unlike the Biden experience.
Goldberg: But, Patrick, in the most recent focus group, how many people were in it?
Healy: It was 12.
Goldberg: Right, so 12, and I believe that three regretted their votes.
Healy: Right.
Goldberg: So, he won by like — I mean, I understand that you can’t do a one-to-one comparison, but we’re 100 days in. If you’re already losing a quarter of the people who voted for you, that’s a lot, right?
I don’t think that everybody expected there to suddenly be a consensus that this is an erratic monster. A lot of people have convinced themselves that there’s some sort of hidden genius, that he’s playing 5-D chess, that he’s crashing the economy on purpose to drive down interest rates so that you can finally afford a house.
So, I think that, yes, there will always be the people who are like, “I think we should shake things up.” It’s important to remember that the effects of tariffs have not really hit. I mean, they’ve hit your friend because he’s planning in advance. They haven’t hit most people yet. I think most estimates are that you’ll start to see some empty shelves in a couple weeks and that these things are going to be rolling. So you already see his base of support eroding. And again, it’s only been — I mean, it feels like it’s been eight million years — but it’s only been 100 days.
Stephens: This administration has not yet had the kind of administration defining crisis that beset, say, hostages with Jimmy Carter, or one thing or another with other presidencies. So far, actually, there’s been no event to upset Trump. I mean, this is all a self-driven disaster.
It’s hard for me to imagine when that event comes, and it will come — the fall of Kyiv, China taking advantage to seize Taiwan, some other kind of defining and potentially humiliating episode — that Trump is going to suddenly rise to the occasion with Churchillian statesmanship and finally impress us with that hidden five-dimensional brilliance that Michelle was alluding to.
Gessen: I actually don’t think we’re going to notice that event in the cacophony that he’s quite intentionally creating. I mean, any one of the things that we’ve mentioned could have been that event, except it wasn’t because something else happened the next day.
Stephens: No, I would disagree here. I think when the event comes, we will know it.
Healy: I want to pick up on something Masha was saying earlier about the kind of surprise, or some elements of the first 100 days, and that has been the focus on institutions.
In the first term, Trump was so consumed by individuals, by James Comey, by Robert Mueller, by Hillary Clinton, and this time around the focus has been on some individuals, but the focus is on institutions themselves.
Goldberg: I think that’s a function of who is in the administration. Trump is not like a super-involved executive; he plays golf a lot, he watches TV a lot. He has a few things he really cares about, but Gary Cohn and Dina Powell and all those people — they are all patting themselves on the back for kind of keeping the peace for a lot of years, but they deserve a huge amount of blame for blinding people to what Trump is actually like.
So now we have these kinds of weirdos and creeps and lowlifes and they each have different portfolios. You’ve got Stephen Miller running immigration the way he’s always dreamed. You’ve got people meddling in the Department of Education who have this lifelong desire to take down the Ivy Leagues and cut their teeth on the destruction of New College in Florida. You just have people with these different fights.
The same with DOGE. That was another thing that actually surprised me. I kind of thought that Elon would have his little advisory board, but no, Trump has just let him go nuts on the bureaucracy. That’s not really coming from Trump. Trump’s instinct is not to cut budgets; it’s to spend more. But he’s given him carte blanche, and he’s been able to transform the federal government.
Gessen: Yeah, I think that’s part of the story, but I think it’s not the whole story. There’s no reason why Trump couldn’t have had Stephen Miller running immigration in the first administration, but it was a profoundly different administration.
One of the biggest differences is that Trump 2.0 cannot afford to lose power. If he’s no longer president, he’s going to go to jail. So he’s acting like somebody who will never lose power. We’ve seen a couple of those guys around the world. That’s where the attacks on institutions come in.
Healy: But Masha, don’t you think that ship has sailed in terms of Trump going to jail? Do you think that actually bothers him anymore?
Gessen: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s why he so desperately needed to become president again.
Healy: I’m thinking the man has beaten the rap, so to speak, so many times that I’m not sure he sees himself in that level of vulnerability.
Stephens: Here I disagree on both counts. I think one of the biggest surprises — and actually a hallmark of this version of Trump’s incompetence is that he seems to get himself involved in everything. But part of the reason is we forget he is a second-term lame-duck president. He doesn’t care. He absolutely doesn’t care.
I am certain he’s not thinking that jail is in his future. He’s convinced that Democrats learned the lesson, that the effort to prosecute him backfired spectacularly. He understands that part of his appeal is being the outlaw president who is fighting the efforts of censorious woke liberals to put him behind bars. Again, I’m describing, not endorsing.
Gessen: So every time he talks about a third term, he’s kidding?
Stephens: He might be kidding or not kidding, but he’s not going to have a third term as president.
Healy: Why do you say that? With confidence, high confidence, low confidence, medium?
Stephens: I’m going to make a — here goes — statement I will come to regret.
Goldberg: Oh, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Monkey’s paw.
Stephens: I am going to make a high-confidence prediction that Donald Trump will not be president four years hence.
Audience: Why?
Stephens: Because I don’t think we’re in Yeltsin’s Russia, and I don’t think we’re the Weimar Republic. I think the institutions in this country are much stronger than we sometimes give them credit for, and they’re getting stronger by the day because they’re finding their nerve, which they had lost for at least part of the last 100 days.
Gessen: I do agree we’re not Russia, we’re not the Weimar Republic. But we’re not any other thing, either, right? And we have never been here before, and we cannot confidently make a prediction about the system being able to withstand this kind of frontal attack.
I regard his plans for a third term with utter seriousness and kind of despair. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have to be as dramatic as declaring a state of emergency and canceling elections. He and his Republican Party have been hard at work undermining the vote for many years. And now, his executive order on elections — if that actually is allowed to stand in whole or in part — that is a huge blow to any possibility of a free and fair election.
His attack on the media — it’s frightening to think about how much it can escalate in the next four years. And so if we come to a point, four years from now, where there are elections, what are these elections going to be like? Are they going to be more like American elections past, which have been hugely imperfect, but have probably, to a significant degree, reflected the will of the people? Or are they going to be more like Russian elections?
Healy: Michelle, we’re coming out of this 100-day period. What concerns you most as you look ahead to — deep breath — 1,000-day-plus of what’s coming in terms of either what we’ve seen or what we haven’t seen?
Goldberg: I would presume that we’ll see a ratcheting up of the things that we’ve seen so far. So we’ve seen one judge arrested. I think that we could see more judges arrested, and Pam Bondi has pretty much promised that.
And so, on the one hand, I do take a lot of comfort in his growing unpopularity. And I think we’ve already seen some pretty large demonstrations. I would suspect that we’re going to see more. But you also have an administration that is extraordinarily paranoid about the idea and kind of obsessed with the idea of color revolutions.
One of the reasons that they dismantled U.S.A.I.D. was because they believe that U.S.A.I.D. has fomented all of these color revolutions in Ukraine and other countries. They think that any — or at least any organized opposition here — can be presented as some sort of subversive plot, which they then believe gives them the right to use kind of extraordinary means against it.
So far, there hasn’t been, for most people, that much of a cost to standing up to Donald Trump. Certainly there’s people from his first administration who are facing prosecution. There’s people who have seen their political careers tanked.
When there was a big protest, I asked my kids if they wanted to come and they didn’t. My husband was going, and I was going to report on it, and my husband asked, “ Do you guys want to come?” It wouldn’t occur to me to say that it’s not safe for you to come. But I think that eventually you could get to a point where more courage is going to be required from people.
Stephens: You’re provoking some thinking — I think Trump’s critics have to make a decision about the nature of this administration, regime, whatever, which is: Are we dealing with a kind of a sinister genius or a bullying schmuck? To me it’s an open question. You look at Putin, you’re like, look at the K.G.B. background, sinister genius; Erdogan, sinister genius; Orban, the same. Is that actually the Trump administration? And is the evidence of the last 100 days a sinister genius? I don’t think so. I think it’s bullying schmuck.
Now I don’t like bullying schmuck, but it relieves some of those darker fears. Like, I can assure you of one thing: If you say “color revolution” to the president, he might turn to his wife and say, “Is this some kind of fashion state?” Like, he would have no idea.
Goldberg: I absolutely guarantee you that lower-level people in the administration talk about that all the time.
Healy: There are true believers in ways that I don’t think there were in the first term, Bret. I do think there’s evidence of a lot of roads leading back to Stephen Miller and to Russell Vought and sort of ——
Stephens: But the guy who I think of as a true believer is our catastrophically inept secretary of defense or whatever he now wants to call himself.
Gessen: Well, that’s a relief. [laughter]
Stephens: No, I mean listen, it is in fact a relief because I would be far more worried if a guy who I know is smart, Josh Hawley, were the president of the United States. And then we would be dealing with a much more difficult set of questions. I think, to me, it gives me a sense of confidence that we’ll be somewhere else in four years, that I think we’re dealing with bullying schmuck.
Goldberg: I don’t know if I understand — what is it that stops the bullying schmuck from calling out the military against protesters?
Stephens: Nothing. The point is, I don’t think he would do it well.
Goldberg: But you can do it badly and still shoot down a lot of people.
Stephens: It does matter because if you look at the way in which other democratic autocrats came to power, there was a great deal of method and care that was taken. There was a kind of subtlety to what they did. They were like the evil geniuses in the Bond films, not the muscle guys. And we’re dealing here with something not quite on the order of evil genius.
Gessen: When I wrote a biography of Putin, which was published in 2012, the reviewers generally reviewed it fairly well, but generally said, the one thing that’s hard to believe in this book is that Putin is so uninformed, uneducated and just basically stupid. Well, he is, and in retrospect, you can trace his steps and ascribe to them some kind of evil genius. But you’d be wrong. He was a bullying schmuck. [laughter]
Healy: I’d just like to ask each of you briefly, as we wrap up, what have you learned about America over the last 100 days that maybe either you didn’t know or you didn’t see as clearly — either for good or not so much. What have you learned about America?
Stephens: I hate to be the optimist on this panel and spoil the mood, but I’m going to take the position that when Trump won the election on Nov. 5, the day after, he was at the pinnacle of political power. It has eroded every day since because more and more of America is beginning — belatedly, but beginning — to see exactly who he is and what he represents and what he’s doing. And that this country, this democracy that’s 250 years old, will not dissolve in a vat of Trumpian acid, that it will find its footing and its nerve and find its good judgment. And the democratic experiment is going to continue.
We have had periods in our history of even greater ugliness than the present. In fact, far greater ugliness. The things that we have been able to surmount are astounding. And I always like this line that’s in Bill Clinton’s first Inaugural Address. I know maybe it’s Pollyanna or an excessively positive basis. He said something to the effect that: There’s nothing wrong in America that can’t be fixed by what’s right in America. And I’m going to hold to that view.
Gessen: It’s been a hard 100 days, but I think for most of us — for me and a lot of my friends here — it’s been particularly hard because we feel like we’ve lived through this before. And the first time we lived through it, at least there was America, and now we are here.
At the same time, I try to correct myself and sort of say: But there is all of this that is very different about this country than about the country where I grew up. There is the most robust, wealthiest civil society in the world. There’s a free press. People do seem to find it offensive when the rule of law is assaulted, even if they don’t necessarily agree with either party. So I try to find this balance between seeing the possibility of the worst and also remembering that nothing is preordained until it’s actually happened.
Goldberg: Maybe this will come as a surprise to Bret, who probably already thinks of me as somewhat radical, but I feel like I’ve been radicalized by the utter fecklessness of our elites.
To see the cravenness of these billionaires, all of these businessmen who are completely willing to bend the knee, people who you would think have enough money to at least buy themselves some self-respect, but nevertheless, are sort of unwilling to. …
This has been really shocking to me, and it brings home in a very visceral way the kind of democratic corruption inherent in profound inequality. At the same time, I do think if I have some degree of optimism, it is in the fact that it’s hard for me to imagine a situation in which the majority of Americans, or at least an active large plurality of Americans, sit down and take it as Trump ravages what I think a lot of people consider to be their birthright.
On my own block, which is in Brooklyn — which I know isn’t “real America” — but my neighbors have just started meeting every week to talk about what they can do: what kind of activism, what they should be calling our Congress person about, what marches are coming up. Asking: Does everybody want to get together and make signs? Can we go down to the migrant shelter and be there if people are getting rounded up to take their immigrant ID numbers so that there’s somebody tracking them in the system? And I think that this is happening in a lot of different places.
And I hope that kind of thick community engagement will eventually build the backbone of something that can stand up to this.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Alison Bruzek. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. 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. Special thanks to Gregg Richards and the staff of the Brooklyn Public Library.
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M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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