Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: We are going to talk about this unnerving week in A.I.-related news. But first, as our reality seems more and more like science fiction, our president seems less and less tethered to it — which I feel like requires some unpacking. Recently, President Donald Trump and his team have been spending an awful lot of time on social media, firing off A.I.-generated pictures and videos of the president in truly bonkers self-aggrandizing situations.
I think we’ve had Trump as the Green Lantern, Trump beating Hulk Hogan in arm wrestling, those kinds of things. And then, of course, the president just makes up stuff about his world-historic accomplishments pretty much all the time. So David, how would you describe Trump’s connection to reality at this point? You’ve been watching him closely for a decade. What’s going on?
David French: Well, let’s back up just a minute. My grandmother — my beloved grandmother, who’s like a third parent to me — had a saying that when somebody gets older, they don’t really change; they just become more so. In other words, whatever is their disposition — kind, they become kinder. Cantankerous, they become more ornery. And you just see this progression with Trump. He is just becoming more of what he’s been for a long time. And at some point, you become so much more, you almost tip over into alternate realities. And this is one thing that will never cease to amaze me: the independent standard by which he is judged. If anyone else in politics was doing any of this, you would really start to wonder, are they OK? I mean, is this person OK, right?
Cottle: Right.
French: If you watched your uncle do it — and a lot of people have that crazy uncle, or that crazy aunt, who’s out there believing all the A.I. stuff that they see, chasing every rumor that they see on social media, and you realize that’s the guy in the Oval Office.
That’s sort of genuinely who he is. He is drawn to fake stories. He is drawn to anything that’s going to puff him up as a great man, and that’s just getting worse and worse and worse. And so, what we’re looking at is just Donald Trump becoming Donald Trump. He’s just becoming more and more and more of what he’s always been.
Cottle: Michelle?
Michelle Goldberg: Yeah, I’m actually not sure how much of a difference this is from the Donald Trump of either the first term or four years ago, right? Sometimes people write to me and they say: “Why isn’t The New York Times focusing on Donald Trump’s decline the way they focus so intently on Joe Biden’s?” And I think there’s a couple of different answers to that.
One is just that there’s only so much room, and scandal expands to fit the space available. But at the same time, I don’t know that I see a marked untethering. I think it’s just — the way you put it is right — kind of more so. But the A.I. memes are not new.
There was the one in which he compared himself to Jesus, or a doctor. And so, part of the difficulty, I think — and this has been the difficulty writing about Trump all along — is that it is very difficult to maintain the appropriate level of shock, because you just cannot help but get inured to this over the last 10 years. And it’s a kind of constant struggle to try and maintain some connection to the frame of reference we had, for what was considered acceptable or decent, a decade ago.
And also, the fact that this is the man who was re-elected, right? It’s not a situation like John Fetterman, right? Where there was almost a sort of bait-and-switch. People thought that they were electing one man, and then he became someone totally different.
This is Trump. It’s always been Trump. It’s maybe more visible to more people, because there was, at least for Republicans, this kind of scrim of great-man inevitability — as if he might have been some kind of mad genius instead of just mad. So as his poll numbers go down, and as his catastrophes metastasize, that mythos that once surrounded him becomes more and more threadbare. But this is the same person that bankrupted casinos, and this is the same person that caused me to cry my eyes out in terror when he was elected in 2016.
Cottle: My question is always: What’s the line between, is he entering some kind of reality of his own creation ——
Goldberg: He’s always been in a reality of his own creation.
Cottle: How much is he just an egregious, inveterate liar, who has gradually discovered that he can lie about everything?
Goldberg: But can I just say, because ——
Cottle: As many times as he can handle it?
Goldberg: I think that it’s the alternative reality, only because the weird thing about Donald Trump is that he’s both an inveterate liar but also has a hard time saying things that he doesn’t believe — which is why he sometimes has this kind of disarming and weird sort of frankness, right? So he will say whatever he thinks is happening. It’s just that what he thinks is happening is entirely dictated by his ego, as opposed to any connection to external events.
French: One thing that when you litigate for a long time and you see people lie at volume and at length on very important matters, is you realize that the line between serial liar and alternate reality is very blurry. Because what I’ve seen is, a person will lie so much and create such a cognitive dissonance that, over time, they morph into the alternate reality. They start to believe their own lies. The tension of just overtly saying false things becomes so great that they just start to believe it.
And Michelle raises a great point — and it’s a question I get a lot too, because I wrote about Biden’s age and the problems with Biden’s age, and people write to me and they say: “Why are you not on that beat with Trump?” And I think one of the differences that’s very interesting, and I think that we’re all having trouble processing, is how the aging process in Biden and Trump presents itself differently. Now, there are some circumstances where it’s similar, when you see Trump apparently nodding off during meetings and things like that — that’s very familiar.
Cottle: Napping is very important, David.
French: It’s very important.
Goldberg: But can I just say quickly — I think one difference is that it’s not as if we necessarily, or at least I necessarily, think that Trump would be doing a better job if he was awake.
French: Right, but ——
Cottle: Oh, that’s so harsh.
French: But the other thing is, some of this transformation in Trump is presenting itself with frenetic activity; the all-night posting, things that it looks like he’s ——
Cottle: Yeah, he’s your frenetic, grumpy, cantankerous uncle, as opposed to your fading, frail grandpa.
French: Right. But the other thing is — look, one thing that I knew, when he was elected, was that as opaque as the Biden team was about Biden’s health in ways that we’re still dealing with and still uncovering, they were going to ultimately end up being a model of transparency, compared to however Trump would be.
Think of it this way: Whatever grifting Hunter Biden did, the Donald Trump Jr., world is like: “Heh, amateur. Let a pro have a go.” And then, whatever concealment around age and infirmity that the Biden team had — and it was substantial and serious — do any of us think that this MAGA cult of personality will be open and transparent, or is being open and transparent, about the actual condition of the president of the United States?
Cottle: Well, one of the things you see with his people, though, is a little bit like what you’re talking about seeing with the president, which is that his people — and I’m talking about MAGA voters more than the actual handlers in the White House — they will excuse anything he says as clever and funny, as opposed to signs of cognitive slippage. So they are absolutely reinforcing his alternative reality for him.
Goldberg: Right. The one thing I would say — and this maybe contradicts what I said before about him not being all that different than he was — is that his political instincts are clearly fading, right? He’s even more in a bubble. He’s not doing as many rallies, and so he’s not doing this real-time crowd work that lets him see what hits and what doesn’t.
I think we’re going to talk about A.I., but you see that with his instincts on A.I. I think if he tested that in a room with his supporters, he might be sounding different. Instead, he just put something — his most recent all-gas-no-brakes statements about A.I. on Truth Social, and there’s the story in The Times about how his fans responded. They were like, “Absolutely not.”
Cottle: Well, there was a New York Times/Siena poll earlier this week that showed Trump definitely dragging down the party. Democrats are trusted more than Republicans on the very issues that brought Trump back to the White House, like immigration and the economy. Now, far be it from me to put too much stock in polling in these matters, but in my midterm reporting, traveling around, I’ve been hearing a lot of grumbling on these topics, including in some extremely red places.
Michelle, you’ve been out there as well. Does this jibe with what you’re hearing from people in these areas, about their happiness, or lack thereof, with the president’s job?
Goldberg: I think more of what I’ve seen is just that the huge energy there is around getting rid of him, right? The huge amount of energy that there is to replace Republicans, right? I mean, it’s why you’re seeing competitive races, not just in Texas, but places like Kansas. That would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.
I was in Maine on vacation, and while I was there, I went to Troy Jackson’s first town hall, and I was really curious to see what the energy would be like, because people there have been sort of whipsawed. There are still a faction of Graham Platner dead-enders, who feel like this thing was stolen from him.
And I won’t say that the energy was as electric as it was for him, but I went to this rally in Lewiston, and there were hundreds of people there, right? There is so much anger and terror out there, and a sense that the adults in the room have completely disappeared. And so, you hear over and over again: “Nobody’s coming to save us.”
Cottle: One of the things that we touched on earlier is that the president seems particularly and aggressively disconnected of late, on a very hot topic that has popped up as a central campaign issue, and that’s A.I. Last weekend, a bunch of leading A.I. C.E.O.s came out ringing alarm bells and saying that the government really needs to regulate their creations — which is definitely something you don’t usually hear within an industry, “Please, please come regulate us.”
And Trump was just like, psh, who cares? He dismissed their concerns. He dismissed the widespread public anxiety about this. In fact, he said that A.I. skeptics are backwards, and that the only guardrail you need on A.I. is a smart, strong, high-I.Q. president — which, of course, should terrify everybody. What do you make, Michelle, of his complete disconnect on A.I. in particular, and where that’s going?
Goldberg: I mean, on a very deep level — although one that I don’t think he’s articulated to himself — I don’t think that he is particularly concerned with the world outliving him, you know? And in some ways, it would probably be satisfying to him if ——
Cottle: Thank you, I think you’re so right.
Goldberg: Right?
Cottle: Why do I care?!
Goldberg: If the end of Trump was the end of all of us. But more than that, it’s just — look, he’s definitely in a billionaire bubble, right? Those are the people that he talks to most, right? Like Steve Bannon, who’s out there with Bernie Sanders and arguing for an A.I. slowdown, is not in the inner circle. The inner circle is people like David Sacks. And so, I think that that’s part of it. Those are the people he talks to. And then, the other thing is that Donald Trump cares much more about short-term economic boom than he does about long-term risks, right? And right now, it is the A.I. industry that is holding up so much of the economy and ——
Cottle: Well, the stock market. And he loves that stock market. Whatever is holding up the stock market’s all he cares about.
Goldberg: Right, so, A.I. accelerationism might be an existential risk to the rest of us, but an A.I. slowdown is maybe an existential risk to his donors in the midterm.
Cottle: David?
French: A couple of things: First, I think Michelle’s completely right about the stock market. I mean, this is a guy who, I think, at some level knows many of his policies, in the absence of this massive A.I. spending boom — and it is just massive, from the data center constructions. It’s an insane amount of money being pumped into the economy in the A.I. arena.
But for that, we would be looking at a very different economic reality, and probably a very different stock market. But also, one of the great achievements of the MAGA movement has been bringing the tech lords to heel, and he loves being the Zeus of the tech lords.
He loves that he had all those guys behind him at his second inaugural, that all of a sudden, you have Silicon Valley — which with the rise of Barack Obama was seen as this bastion of progressive, tech-oriented utopianism — has now become a much more mercenary culture, a much more Nietzschean culture in some ways, as we’ll talk about here in a minute.
And he loves being the overlord of that. And I think that one of the things that has allowed him to be the overlord of that is that he’s been all in with the crypto industry and A.I industry. What do you need? What do you want? We’re going to give it to you. And so ——
Goldberg: And also, we can’t overlook how much money he’s made from ——
Cottle: Oh, the family’s making bank on crypto. It’s insane. It’s one of the great grifts of our time.
French: Oh, yeah. As I’ve said before, this is the kind of grift and corruption that the Gilded Age guys are going like, “I was totally born in the wrong era.”
Goldberg: Or that, Mobutu Sese Seko is like ——
French: Exactly.
Cottle: Out of control. OK, it’s a little bit of a tangent maybe, but Michelle, I want to continue on this theme with the overlord of this tech industry that itself seems to be going in a weird direction. You had a great piece, last week, about the doomsday scenarios many of these tech C.E.O.s are forecasting and how they plan to just ride it all out somewhere else — whether they’ve uploaded their brains to the cloud or they’re on an island bunker somewhere. Just take a minute and walk us through this weird new quasi religion they’re following.
Goldberg: So I think that it’s important to understand these philosophical currents to understand the fundamental question of why it is that people in this industry keep saying: We think that there is a substantial chance that it’s going to annihilate humanity, and we need to go full speed ahead.
And I think the most common explanation for that is China. If we don’t do it, China does. And I’m sure that’s part of the story, but I just don’t think it is the whole story. And to know that, all you have to do is listen to their own words — I mean, if you go back and listen, for example, to the interview that Peter Thiel did with our former colleague Ross Douthat last year, Peter Thiel has been going around giving these speeches about the Antichrist.
And you’ve probably seen the headlines, right? That he has his candidates for the Antichrist or embodiments of the Antichrist spirit. He often mentions Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And people, I think, roll their eyes at this. I just saw you, David, roll your eyes at this.
And it’s ridiculous, but he also means it seriously. And the way that he means it is that he has this conception of technology as being almost holy, right? As embodying this spirit of human achievement and creation and dynamism and possibility. And what stands against it — what is in his view, like, demonic — are forces of ——
Cottle: The Luddites.
Goldberg: Of stagnation and restraint. And so, the other question about this theology is then, what does its apotheosis look like, right? And he also makes that clear. Ross asked him, you do want humanity to survive, right? And he sort of pauses for a while, like an uncomfortably long time, and then he finally, after some prodding, says, “Yes,” — but then his next word is “but,” and then he starts talking about transhumanism.
They consider an ordinary life on Earth, an ordinary life span, to be mediocre and almost meaningless. You can see this in Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist. In his “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” — which, by the way, kind of approvingly borrows language from Italian futurist and fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti — he talks about how there’s no more physical frontiers to explore, and the conquering of the frontier is what gives human life meaning, but there are technological frontiers. You see it with Elon Musk and his desperation to go to Mars.
Jacob Weisberg has a new book, called “Profiles in Cowardice,” about looking at various people and their capitulations to Trump. And if you look at the Jeff Bezos chapter in that book and try to understand this bizarre turnaround by Bezos — somebody who clearly has “screw you” money — it’s weird to be that rich and that willing to abase yourself. But his ultimate frame of reference is his competition with Elon Musk and his own desire to go to space, which is, again, I think, buttressed by the fact that he has said that the real danger, if we stay on Earth, is that it equals stagnation.
Cottle: Oh my God, I’m sorry. I just have to jump in and say, this is just the latest iteration of men who think they have almost touched godhood. Like, they’re so convinced of their own importance.
Goldberg: And can I just tell you, what’s so bizarre is that these are all people — not all of them — who are often talking about the need to preserve Western culture and the Western canon, and the Judeo-Christian tradition; and they seem wholly oblivious to pretty foundational stories, like the myth of Icarus, just for a start.
French: Tower of Babel. I mean, look ——
Cottle: Like, David, come on here. Like, the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of this are sketchy at best, right?
Goldberg: Dr. Faust.
French: Let me just say this: What is the difference between somebody who’s quirky, weird and eccentric and somebody who is bold, original and provocative? $1 billion.
Cottle: It’s all money.
French: Yes, exactly. So when it comes to the actual philosophy here — when it comes to the actual intellectual rigor of what they’re spewing out — the emperors are butt-naked. There is nothing — I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.
Cottle: Scarring.
French: You listen to Peter Thiel talk about the Antichrist, and as a Christian who’s, I’ll confess, I’ve read more than one book about the ——
Cottle: As have I, seen so many movies.
French: Interpretations of the Antichrist. You’re just like, “What are you talking about? What is this?” And you really realize that it is something that is very deeply embedded in human nature. It is when people achieve enormous amounts of power, it is never enough. They want to create something that makes them echo throughout history. It’s like Maximus, in the opening of “Gladiator”: “What we do in life echoes in eternity.”
And that takes low forms and tawdry forms — like Trump’s obsession with the ballroom and his arch, and the Kennedy Center is going to go to the ground unless he can have his name on it — turns into other areas where you see people actually trying to imagine a way to extend life into the indefinite future.
And so, you just have these visions of grandeur, combined with this very weird and eccentric worldview that’s often one dash of something Christianity-adjacent — another sprinkling of weird interpretations of “The Lord of the Rings,” a few sci-fi books that they’ve read and some philosophy they picked up on the way, and more than a little bit of reading of Curtis Yarvin tweets. And next thing you know, you have some sort of bold, provocative, new worldview out there, and it’s just so weird. Can we just say it’s so weird?
Goldberg: But it also, I think, helps explain why they are willing to risk the future of humanity, because the alternative to them seems so intolerable. There’s a famous exchange between the podcaster and writer Tyler Cowen and Sam Bankman-Fried, where Sam Bankman-Fried is asked about a wager: Would he accept a 49 percent chance of human extinction for a 51 percent chance of doubling the Earth? He says that he would.
Clip of Tyler Cowen: You’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.
Clip of Sam Bankman-Fried: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical. Yeah. Yeah.
And so, I mean, it’s a kind of sociopathic utilitarianism. Not even really utilitarianism, but it’s the idea that, again, this apotheosis is so important that it’s worth it to risk these absolutely catastrophic outcomes. And the willingness to risk those outcomes is also tied, I think, to a sense that they will have a place to ride out whatever they bring about if it goes bad.
Cottle: Well, look, I am sorry they are suffering from existential ennui. Boo-hoo freakin’ hoo. But speaking on behalf of the rest of us, who will not get to upload our brains to the cloud or hide in their bunkers under some strange island or whatever — like, this is not how most of America feels. And it is a big issue that’s popped up in the midterms, even if it’s late in the game.
What opportunity do we think this presents the Democrats at this moment? Or if you want to take the flip side, how do Republicans who aren’t named Trump deal with this? David, you go first.
French: I’m going to go with the old promise-and-peril formulation. So here’s what’s promising: I look at A.I., and I see promise and I see peril.
Just like with nuclear power, other transformative moments. We’re Cold War kids. We know what it’s like to live under the threat of an almost instantaneous extinction-level event, where we were putting an enormous amount of trust in governmental leaders — not just here, but also in the Soviet Union — to manage this catastrophic conflict in a responsible way.
So some of us are starting to get déjà vu when we hear about this extinction-level stuff. But at a time when a lot of the leader class in the world seems to be heedless, reckless, thoughtless, deeply populist — so if you can be an adult in the room, there’s an enormous amount of, I think, political promise, an enormous blue-ocean opportunity for good governance.
Now, here’s the peril: I do think that we’re going too far in the anti-data center movement in some of these regulatory ideas that are, in essence, trying to put a hard stop to the technological development that does have a lot of promise. And so, we’re on the cusp of a technology — and I’ll use the nuclear analogy, even though it’s very imperfect ——
Goldberg: Well, and also wasn’t owned by Elon Musk.
French: Right. You didn’t have a bunch of nukes in the hands of a collection of billionaires, right? One of the problems we have with A.I. is that we see who’s developing it. And there’s zero trust in the leadership of these institutions — zero trust for good reason. So it’s a technology that we don’t fully understand, in the hands of people accountable often to really nobody, whom we also don’t trust for good reasons. And so, that makes this feel different, even from the nuclear age, which was much more immediately dangerous at its height than A.I. is. But the difference is who’s in charge.
Goldberg: I also think that, so far, what people have seen of A.I. — at least many people — is something that might provide some marginal conveniences. It’s a better search engine. But that also, in a lot of ways, is making life worse. It makes life worse for parents who have to worry about A.I. in education.
The people who are championing this technology often, in the next breath, will warn that it’s going to take your job, that it’s going to cause massive job losses. It has, I think, a pretty deleterious effect on the culture, which is now polluted with A.I. slop. It has negative consequences for our sense of a shared reality.
And so, people feel like they’re being asked to take these giant risks for benefits that may or may not come, but that, at least at the moment, are illusory, when the things that they see of A.I. are often just a nuisance at best. And for that, they’re supposed to accept these data centers that blight the landscape, that are really loud when you’re near one. I wouldn’t want one anywhere near me, and so I understand why other people don’t want one anywhere near them. And then, finally, about the distrust: I mean, I’ve written about this in the past, but there’s a reason why distrust in A.I. is particularly acute in the United States, and it’s because we suspect that there is not a government capable of harnessing these technologies and ameliorating the downsides.
So China — people in China are much more optimistic about A.I. because you cannot fire someone just because you’re going to replace them with an A.I. agent, right? Similarly, in Scandinavia, people are willing to accept these technologies because there are mechanisms in place to make sure that they share in whatever gains come.
Whereas here, it just seems like a mechanism to establish some kind of technofeudalism. And even if trying to ban data centers is like a blunt instrument, it’s kind of one of the few instruments that ordinary people actually have.
Cottle: Yeah, I totally agree. I think one of the reasons that data centers popped up as such a huge issue is that it’s something that is physical, that people actually can understand and get their arms around. A little bit like Trump’s obsession with building a wall as the way to address any kind of immigration crisis.
French: Has there ever been an industry rollout, from a P.R. perspective, worse than A.I.? It has sort of been: It’s coming, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. It might end the world. It could very well destroy your job. But you know, as a consolation, this chatbot will help you describe how to commit suicide.
Cottle: Oh my God, David.
French: The rollout has been one of — and this is a phrase I picked up on a great HBO show, the comedy “Hacks” that lapsed into seriousness for like nine seconds for an A.I. segment, where one of the characters used a phrase that I loved, called “forced inevitability.”
In other words, what the industry has basically said is essentially that there’s nothing you can do. When you tell people, in a democratic society, there is nothing you can do, you know what the people will start to do — especially in America, which has a multihundred-year history of saying, “Don’t tell me I can’t do this” — they’ll say, “Oh yeah? Watch us.”
Cottle: Watch us. And fortunately, we have a strong, high-I.Q. president to protect us all, right?
French: That is the saving grace.
Cottle: All right, I think we’re going to need to leave it there. Although we could do this all day. I could definitely see us doing an extended series on this, but it’s time for recs. What do you got for me, Dave?
French: Jamelle isn’t here, so I thought somebody needs to fill in the slot of high-level literature; and so, I’m going to recommend a book series called “Dungeon Crawler Carl.”
Cottle: That doesn’t — have you read that, Michelle? Because I’m going to be impressed.
Goldberg: I thought, for a minute, my son was reading it, but I’m not sure.
French: Your son should be reading it, Michelle. So the premise of this literature is that an alien race comes and essentially flattens Earth, wipes us out, all but a few million; and to live, those few million have to enter into a game that is essentially a giant version of Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft, or whatever.
Goldberg: Yeah, my son is reading this. Yes, my son is reading this book.
French: It is a hoot. You cannot put it down. I think I laugh out loud six times an hour when I’m reading it. And as I’m progressing through, and you just buy into the premise and everything, the books are getting sort of more poignant. And it’s just a delight.
Cottle: OK, now Michelle? Tell me you got something slightly different.
Goldberg: I’m going to recommend a less fun book by Emily St. John Mandel, called “Exit Party.” I’m a huge fan of Emily St. John Mandel. She wrote “Station Eleven,” which — I think the book is better than the series, but the series was fantastic.
And it’s a book that basically — since 2016, I’m sure you’ve heard people say, “We’re on the bad timeline,” right? There was this sense that there was this sort of, like, rupture ——
Cottle: Oh, the darkest timeline. Yeah.
Goldberg: Right. And it’s a book that almost takes that and runs with it. And so it begins in Los Angeles, in which there has been a civil war. There’s now a Republic of California, and all of these characters are situated in that world. But then there’s also a sort of alternative universe within the book, and in that universe, there has not been a civil war.
Instead, there’s been this authoritarian consolidation, and America is a very technologically advanced, totalitarian surveillance state. Although I’ve just kind of emphasized the current-events framing, it’s not didactic. It’s not really meant to be a political parable. It’s often, like, really moving just on its own terms.
Cottle: If I put those two recs together, my weekend is set for me. OK, I’m going with a listen. I have been digging into a country rock group called the Red Clay Strays, which are straight out of Mobile, Ala. They got a heavy dose of soul and gospel in there. And they came out with their third album in June, so they have been on tour.
I am very sad that when I was in Nebraska for campaign travel, I just missed them, but they’re making the rounds, and you can obviously just get a listen on whatever streaming service you like. But the Red Clay Strays. That’s it. And with that, we’re going to land this plane. Guys, as always, a pleasure. Thank you.
Goldberg: Thank you so much.
Cottle: We’ll have to do it again soon.
French: Thanks, Michelles.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Gautam Srikishan. Video editing by Brandon Belk-Yee and Kristen Williamson. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski with help from Kristin Lin. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Trump’s Political Instincts ‘Are Clearly Fading’ appeared first on New York Times.
