President Trump has deployed the National Guard to Memphis and Chicago and has his sights on Portland, Ore. It’s his latest effort to punish his enemies and provoke a response. In this episode, the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle, the Opinion columnist David French and the contributing Opinion writer E.J. Dionne Jr. discuss the state of a divided America and what history can tell us about this moment.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: Guys, welcome. How’s it going?
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Great. And joy to be with you both.
David French: Well, it’s great to be with you, Michelle. I missed you last week.
Cottle: Well, I am ready to dive back in and get all of the goodies that I missed. But I have to say, I leave town for a week to visit family, and you two let the government shut down and the National Guard invade Memphis and Chicago. I feel this is extremely irresponsible. It’s kind of inexcusable.
French: In a previous era of honor and duty, we would just resign in shame, Michelle. But we’re not in that era anymore, so we’re just plowing on through in spite of our failure.
Dionne: I always feel a sense of guilt about everything, Michelle, so now you’ve just added to my heavy burden.
Cottle: This is just another service that I provide. Thank you, E.J. So that said, both developments have me itching for us to talk about President Trump doubling down — or I guess at this point it’s more like quadrupling down on treating the U.S. like two different, disunited countries. There’s “Red America,” which are his friends and his fans, and then there’s “Blue America,” his enemies; the people who deserve retribution and the boot of his administration on their necks — metaphorically speaking, of course. At least so far.
For instance, the government shutdown where he has vowed to use this opening to target agencies and areas that Democrats favor. I mean, he’s already axed billions of dollars of energy projects, mostly located in blue states. E.J., what do you make of all this?
Dionne: There’s a terrible and kind of crazy irony to the fact that we’re having this conversation at a moment when the news has been dominated by a peace deal, or at least a cease-fire deal in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas and the release of the hostages. And if it comes off, it will be a major Trump achievement, and yet you have this talk of peace there, and then an escalation of the political war at home, as you suggest. It’s a very odd thing to be treating the outside world one way and our own country in another way.
I grew up in Massachusetts. I’m accustomed to political patronage — you try to help your side when you’re in power and all of that. But the degree of punishment happening here is very hard to find any precedent for in our history. It’s really antithetical to how you operate in a constitutional republic: not persuasion, but pressure; not conversation, but intimidation; and not even a little something for everyone, but a total “I win, you lose” approach. This bodes very badly, not just for how we get out of this shutdown, but also for how we’re going to govern ourselves going forward.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately reading about the 1850s, the period leading up to the Civil War, when we were really bifurcating as a nation. In this case, the leadership of the country clearly seems to be trying to deepen those divisions, which is really dangerous for a free republic.
French: It’s like you have the anti-Lincoln in the White House.
Dionne: Yes.
French: If you’re looking at Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, he very eloquently, eloquently sort of begged and pleaded that we must not be enemies, we must be friends. We must remain friends. And of course, that fell on deaf ears. But now you have the exact opposite going on right now in the White House. And I think if you’re wanting to look for historic parallels, you’re going to go to Red Scare One and Red Scare Two.
Red Scare One came after World War I, Red Scare Two after World War II. But this isn’t a “Red Scare.” That actually undersells it. This is a “Blue Scare.” In other words, what he’s essentially saying is that it’s not the Communists we’re after — it’s Blue America. It’s the entire superstructure of Blue America, which they are categorizing as the equivalent of Communist Marxists. They’ll use that language.
So they’re turning all the engines of government against political opponents, justifying it to their base by claiming these people are the ultimate threat to the American experiment. This is Stephen Miller’s constant rhetoric. In that way, it makes the Red Scare look tame; it’s worse than the Red Scare because it’s like the Red Scare metastasized.
Dionne: Yeah, I agree with that. To go back to the metaphor, in the pre-Civil War and Civil War eras, conservatives have always talked about limited government and states’ rights. But as our colleague Jamelle Bouie pointed out recently, if you look at the period around 1857, with the Dred Scott decision, you really see one part of the country — in this case, the South — trying to impose its regime on the entire nation. Northerners who didn’t want to cooperate with slavery at all were being forced, under the Fugitive Slave Act, to help return enslaved people to the South.
What we have now is a similar contradiction. Conservatives claim to believe in states’ rights and limited government, but what we’re seeing is unlimited executive power over all parts of the country they don’t like — simply because those parts don’t align with their views.
Cottle: So what are the states that are being targeted? What can they do and what should they at least attempt?
French: You’re raising a really good question.
Cottle: A heavy sigh. That was a very heavy sigh.
French: Very. And the reason for the heavy sigh is we are in a tough spot here in part because Congress — over generations — helped put us in this tough spot.
I wrote this piece before this Trump administration arguing that we have to reform America’s most dangerous law. And what is the most dangerous law in America? It’s the Insurrection Act. If you read this act carefully, you’ll see that it gives the president discretion to deploy troops into cities. This is an incredibly dangerous statute.
Cottle: What could go wrong?
French: What could possibly go wrong? This is the legacy of basic background trust placed in presidents — that they are going to be given authority that they’ll need in case of emergency — to “break glass in case of emergency” authority. And we just trust them not to abuse it.
There are a lot of reasons in years past for invoking the Insurrection Act. For example, the Reconstruction era to try to deal with neo-Confederate violence and militia violence in the South post-Reconstruction; to help federal troops — both under the Insurrection Act and non-Insurrection Act context — to help desegregate schools, and to prevent violence during the civil rights era.
But this is fundamentally different. This is the president deploying troops — and he has not invoked the Insurrection Act yet — but deploying troops under a different Title 10 authority, with the Insurrection Act in his back pocket, fully knowing that even if the courts block this use, he can pull out that trump card. It is deeply grievous that we did not do anything about the Insurrection Act before Trump came back into power. And we may very well pay for that.
So the answer to your question: What can governors do? There’s not a lot. Because for generations, the president of the United States has been given the authority to call out troops at his own discretion by the language of this statute. He hasn’t used that yet. He’s used other statutes, but that’s lurking back there. That means that the options that are available to governors, options that are available to state legislatures, are very limited. Congress right now should be rising up. Congress should be responding to this moment — and we know how that’s going.
Cottle: E.J., I would think that if we’re depending on this Congress to do anything to short-circuit this, we’re probably in a lot of trouble.
Dionne: That’s absolutely right. Since we’re going back into history, I think the biggest mistake the founders made — and they realized it pretty quickly because they’re the ones who started the first party system — they wrote a Constitution as if political parties didn’t exist. That was because in principle, they didn’t believe in them.
They thought the branches of government would be so jealous of their own rights and would have an “institutional patriotism” — a phrase my friend, Norm Ornstein, likes to use — that institutional conflict would be enough for one branch to check the other. In this circumstance, there is no institutional patriotism going on in Congress at all.
It’s a party spirit that, for the moment, seems prepared to support President Trump on everything. Maybe David will disagree with me on this, but I think that is clearly infecting the United States Supreme Court as well. And so you really have a party unity on the Republican side that allows Trump to do this.
And I just want to underscore that I agree with David. I think Democrats, when they controlled the Congress in ’21 and ’22 and had President Joe Biden in the White House, should have repealed, or at least clarified, the terms of the Insurrection Act and placed some limits on the president. And I suspect that there are a lot of members who deeply regret that they didn’t try to do that.
Cottle: David, there is a legal fight brewing over Trump’s attempts to send troops to Portland. Where do you see all this going? You traditionally are the voice of optimism about the courts.
French: Let me put it this way. There’s a shorthand way to make sense of the court’s jurisprudence. Where Trumpism intersects with traditional originalism, he tends to win. When it doesn’t, he tends to lose. It’s really that simple.
So what I would say is, let’s wait until the end of this term, because a lot of stuff got kicked into this term. We’ve got tariff cases, we’ve got the Federal Reserve, we have the extent of the president’s authority to fire employees without being blocked. We’ve got a lot of things coming and I think a lot of people over-read these emergency docket decisions.
But I’ll tell you right now what makes me very nervous: for years, Congress pushed a ton of power into the executive branch and tried to put limits on it. And if the theory is, you can’t put limits on the executive’s exercise of executive authority, then we’re in for a rocky ride, unless Congress can pull some of that authority back and, and so that’s ——
Cottle: They don’t seem inclined to do it, though.
French: Which they don’t seem inclined to do at all.
Dionne: I wish I could have David’s confidence in the Supreme Court. Maybe he doesn’t take this view, but I don’t see a shred of originalism in the immunity decision that the court issued. It went against understandings of presidential power and the limits on it going back to the beginning of the Republic. And every assumption we had is to summarize that the president is not above the law.
I think that immunity decision broke all sorts of new ground. The notion that the president could just tell the Justice Department to do this or do that, and it’s OK — thus we have the indictment of Jim Comey — I’m not sure I see that as originalism. Correct me if you think I’m wrong, David.
French: I think the immunity case was not originalism and I wrote about that. I think the headline was: What Happened to the Originalism of the Originalists? I absolutely think that.
Dionne: Thank you for that.
French: But I will say the immunity case is a rounding error on a rounding error compared to the magnitude of the problems that we’re facing.
Cottle: Before we go too far down the Supreme Court path, I want to shift us in a different direction with questions about these deployments.
Texas National Guard troops have been sent into Chicago, which has led to some pretty nasty exchanges between the governors of Texas and Illinois. And at least as of Thursday, when we’re taping this, the situation is still pretty tense.
What does this do to the psyche of the country? What impact does this have on voters and the way the Americans think about the country?
Dionne: It’s very troubling, especially if you’ve spent time abroad and when you were in certain other countries and you saw troops on the streets routinely, you said, “Well, this is the way things work here, thank God it doesn’t work like that in the United States.” You’re not accustomed to seeing troops on the ground.
And it’s hard to escape the notion that this isn’t an effort to routinize and get us accustomed to people on the streets. Gov. JB Pritzker in Illinois is very worried that this is a prelude to having troops on the streets during the 2026 election and maybe on Election Day. We don’t know if that’s true yet. But I think that that statement — a year ago, someone would say, “That’s a kind of paranoid statement.” I don’t think it looks so paranoid now.
I think it’s the idea of having troops on the streets routinely to solve problems that are incredibly ill-defined, and at a moment when actually crime rates are going down in almost all the places he is sending troops to.
French: Chicago had the lowest murder rates since, I believe 1965, before the troops came.
No one would say that everything is fine here in Chicago. And one mistake that people make is to try to argue that National Guard troops are descending on some sort of utopia. No. Chicago has problems, there’s no question about it, but many of them have been on the mend. And I don’t think it’s hard to discern what is happening.
Cottle: It’s not subtle.
French: Nothing about this is subtle. Especially when you look at the conduct of some of these federal officials and the conduct, in particular, of a lot of these I.C.E. officers and agents. They’re being deliberately provocative. In some cases, they’re committing outright assault on camera: Someone’s talking to them and they’ll spray tear gas straight into their face. This is the kind of thing I guarantee you, if I was walking down the street and you were arguing with me, Michelle, and I just pulled out some bear spray and put it in your face, you know what? I just assaulted you. I should be arrested.
I think what you’re seeing here is the use of the military as a deliberate provocation. I think you’re seeing the aggressive use of I.C.E., like having I.C.E. agents walking in shows of force. I can literally see out of my window where they were walking several days ago.
What you’re looking at here is a provocation and in many ways it feels as if the desired end state here is conflict, so that conflict can be met with a harsher response and a harsher response. And it’s being sustained, in part, by the fact that a lot of people in red America, through a lot of years of rhetoric, literally believe when someone says cities are burning or Portland is a war zone.
That’s not to say that there aren’t parts of Portland where there hasn’t been violence. But the picture that is being painted is of Falluja or Gaza or Mosul or conflict zones and it’s just remarkable.
Cottle: You have red state America being told that blue cities are a hellscape and blue state America is told that red areas are marching toward fascism under MAGA, or whatever. And this has to have an imprint on America, right? When you have primed your populace not to view each other as disagreeing so much as evil, that’s going to linger after Trump is gone.
French: Oh! Trump arose in part because of it. In other words when Trump came down the escalator in 2015, he did not come down into a harmonious political society. He came into one where negative polarization had already become a big part of American politics. And then he just came in and made it all so much worse. It’s to the point where for an awful lot of Americans, you’re viewed with suspicion and anger if you don’t hate the other side.
I know that our politicians get this all the time. When they go home to their home districts, they’re exposed to a constant barrage from the most radicalized members of their community saying, “Fight, fight, fight. I hate them.” And so there’s this sense of mutual hatred. If you interview committed partisans on either side, the amount of hatred they have for each other is very terrifying.
Going back to some of the dysfunction about Congress — Madison thought that a Mike Johnson would say: Hey, I’m the speaker of the House. I’m not a potted plant. I’m not Donald Trump’s subordinate. But even if he had that thought, he also knows that even the speaker of the House will lose his primary if he defies the president. And that’s how committed partisans are to this level of combat.
And in Republican land where I’m most familiar, if you are not opposing the Democrats 100 percent of the time and supporting Trump 100 percent of the time, your electoral track record over the last 10 years is abysmal. And that long process has purged the G.O.P. of almost anyone who, at least for the time being, is willing to resist Trump and stand up for the humanity of their political opponents. It’s a very dark time and very dark place.
Cottle: E.J., play out that tape. What happens if Trump keeps polarizing us for the next three years?
Dionne: I agree, obviously, with a lot of what David has just said about what’s happened inside the Republican Party. But would you both forgive me if I brought up at least some positive news, or at least some moderating news?
Cottle: Please.
Dionne: One of the striking things about the polling that you’re seeing is even among Americans who may agree with some of Trump’s objectives, they consistently think he’s gone too far. They don’t like these methods.
You see that in attitudes on immigration, where people are happy the southern border is essentially closed, but they say negative things about his immigration policy. They don’t like troops in the cities. So you’ve got substantial majorities. You’ve only got about 25 percent who strongly approve of Trump. What that tells you is that out in the country, there is this real uneasiness with the radicalism of many of these steps that Trump is engaged in.
And I think that’s why you’re seeing governors like Pritzker taking a very strong stand against what Trump is doing in Chicago, because I think he knows, sure, the MAGA base will denounce him. But I think there are a lot of Americans who, when he says that these troops don’t belong here, they’re quietly nodding their heads. Even if they’re not Democrats. I don’t know what price the president will pay for this and whether the price will not be paid until 2026, if then. But I think he is paying a price in public opinion for the radicalism.
Cottle: Here’s what I worry about because I am consistently the skunk at the garden party: The partisans are really engaged. But that big mushy group that tunes out politics and doesn’t really pay attention — the nastier it gets, the more likely they are to just tune out the noise altogether and stay home. So that just leaves the entire country at the mercy of the extremists.
French: Michelle, you’re exactly right. There is such a thing as the exhausted majority, a super majority of Americans, more than 60 percent of Americans, who are disgusted with politics as they exist.
The problem is they’re very hard to mobilize because the key word in the phrase “exhausted majority” is “exhausted.” And the current moment only makes them more exhausted and more willing to step back.
Cottle: I feel their pain.
French: Oh, I totally do as well. But what that means is the highly partisan wings essentially dominate all discourse until each election cycle.
And I think that MAGA is going to learn something that the far-left learned in the late 2010s moving in the early 2020s: A lot of your success and online aggression and shaming and mobbing and attacking and intolerance is very temporary and illusory.
Because the majority of people don’t like those kinds of tactics. And they’re going to, over time, punish a side that they see as bullying people and as being extremely cruel and intolerant.
And a lot of MAGA looks at some of the cancel culture heyday of the late 2010s and says: Oh, we can do that and we’ll do it better, and we’ll do it more effectively, and we’ll do it from the Oval Office down.
But the pro-free speech position over the long term in American history is a very majority position. Any given individual moment, you might be cutting against the grain, but over time the pro-free speech position is a majority American position. And I think MAGA is making a giant mistake in taking the whole cancel culture discourse of 2019, 2020, and saying: Oh, we’ll just do this more and more aggressively, and that’s going to work for us.
Dionne: I am joining you from a conference on national service where a lot of good people, including people from both parties — Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah’s here, the Denver mayor, Mike Johnston, a Democrat, is here — and they reflect a kind of civic life in the country; people who do good things in local communities and in neighborhoods.
And the idea is to try to revive the service movement and to have more people engaged in solving local problems and lifting people up around the country. And that’s why I think the notion that all our discourse will inevitably be dominated only by people with very extreme views will turn out to be wrong. And it’s even turning out to be wrong right now. Sure, if you go on parts of social media, that is what you’ll see. But thank God we are not yet at the point where real life is like social media.
I think there is civic life out there in the country that is trying to figure out how do you make some progress in this awful climate? I hate being like this ’cause you sound Pollyannaish. I am as worried as I’ve ever been in my life. But I haven’t given up on the civic sense that exists among an awful lot of Americans across a lot of our political lines. Not all, but a lot of them.
Cottle: You brought up Spencer Cox in Utah, and we’ve talked about some other governors, and I am an enduring cheerleader for governors who I always think have to be a little bit more pragmatic and bipartisan than their colleagues in Washington. But it sounds like you guys are hopeful that with the next president, whether it’s a governor or some unknown, the Washington players can knit us back together and that this is not an irretrievably broken situation.
Dionne: Well, now I’m going dark on you real quick to say we need to make sure that we have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028.
We’ve got a lot of work to do now to keep the democratic Republic intact so those options exist and so President Trump doesn’t run for a third term as some of his people have floated.
So I would put that on the table, but then my answer is yes, I think there are a lot of people out there thinking, how do we not only repair the damage, but to use a phrase that I wish we could use more — it was used by President Biden — build back better. That really should be the theme for what happens after 2028.
French: We should be comforted by history, but not too much. So what would comfort us about history? It’s that we’ve had snap-backs. We’ve bounced back after repressive periods in American history.
Who was the next president elected after Richard Nixon’s corrupt imperial presidency? A Baptist Sunday school teacher. That’s a big zag away from the zig of Richard Nixon.
Cottle: Love that thermostatic electorate.
French: We have had snap-back times throughout American history. That’s one of the reasons America is in a much better place right now, even with all of our problems, than it was in 1925 or what it was in 1825. But we can’t presume from the fact that we always survived before, that we will always survive in the future.
Think about the Civil War. Arguably, if Joshua Chamberlain doesn’t fix bayonets on Day 2 of Gettysburg on Little Round Top, it’s a whole different history. The American experiment is a closely run thing.
There was a snap-back after Woodrow Wilson jailed hundreds of political opponents. And even though you wouldn’t put F.D.R. anywhere in the category of a Woodrow Wilson, people were so worried after he won four presidential elections that they amended the Constitution to term-limit presidents. We do have snap-back moments. I do think we will have one if we can hang on.
Dionne: I believe in those too. I also think we usually end up taking more steps forward than back. But sometimes the snap-back can take a very long time. The one that comes to mind is Jim Crow. We had enormous progress toward racial equality during Reconstruction that ended in 1877.
Jim Crow was dominant for about 80 years before we finally successfully pushed it back in the civil rights movement. So yeah, I think we need hope in our ability to snap back and remember that we may have to fight real hard if we’re going to snap back quickly.
Cottle: On that cautionary note, let’s land this plane. Before we go, I need everybody’s recommendations for the week. E.J., you were warned to come packing. Do you have a recommendation for us?
Dionne: I do indeed. I have been completely transfixed by a 19-year-old jazz pianist, named Brandon Goldberg, who plays as if he is an old master of the genre. If you want to check him out, he did an album at Dizzy’s Club, here in New York where I am today. But listening to someone — and there are a bunch of young people out there — who are doing great things in jazz makes me happy.
French: So I fear I’m going to let listeners down, Michelle, because I’m normally your streaming guru. I’ve got a television suggestion every week because I’m a power consumer. But this week I’ve got a book recommendation.
I’m a sci-fi nerd. I’ve been looking for a good sci-fi series to take my attention after “The Expanse” ended, which was also, by the way, a great television show on Amazon Prime. And the same folks who brought you “The Expanse,” which is a near-future sci-fi series set in the solar system, have brought you a new series.
Book one is called “The Mercy of Gods.” It’s set in a human-settled planet with overwhelmingly powerful alien intelligence. It’s just really good. It’s great world building. It’s great character building. I know there’s a subset of our audience that is sci-fi nerds. I hear from them and they ask me for suggestions. This is my suggestion: “The Mercy of Gods.”
Cottle: I’ll wait for the series because I do not read sci-fi. I watch sci-fi, but reading sci-fi is a bridge too far. I’m going in a different direction and I’m going with a food recommendation. I think people should dip a toe into the Dubai chocolate craze. You guys know what this is?
French: No clue.
Cottle: No clue?! I am a particular snob about chocolate and I have to say this is something that I was late to. In 2021, a company in the United Arab Emirates came up with a chocolate bar. It is like this chunky candy bar with chocolate coating and an inside mush of pistachios and crispy shredded pastries. Within two years it had gone viral on social media and has taken off everywhere. Now you can get it at Trader Joe’s and Walmart. And it started spreading out into other foods.
IHOP introduced these as pancakes. There are croissants, apparently they were all the rage — Dubai-style Russian Easter cakes. They have caused a pistachio shortage according to some pistachio companies. And because this is how committed I am to this show, I bought several different brands. My research is taking that bullet and eating tons of Dubai chocolate. But I want people to get in on this before it jumps the shark and goes all pumpkin spice, where you’ve got Dubai chocolate hummus and —
French: Dubai chocolate Starbucks coffee.
Cottle: Skip the Starbucks coffee and the IHOP pancakes and just go out and savor the moment.
Dionne: As you were talking, Michelle, I remember I saw those stories and I stopped reading them because I feared — and now you’ve proven it — that I would run out and eat way too many of those things. But thank you for your dedication to our listeners.
Cottle: I’ve taken that bullet so you don’t have to.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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