President Trump has changed America — and the world — in ways both large and small in the first year of his second term. In a live event recorded at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles on Tuesday, Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, was joined by the Opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie and Ross Douthat to discuss those changes and what the year ahead might bring.
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.
Kathleen Kingsbury: Thank you all for being here tonight. I’m excited to be in Los Angeles for this live conversation with the Opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie and Ross Douthat.
It has been an eventful year, to say the least. Given what’s happened even in recent weeks, I wanted to start this discussion with how President Trump is reshaping the world and the United States’ role in it. Then we’re going to get into changes on the domestic front, how he’s changed the country. And finally, we’ll touch on the upcoming midterm elections.
But first, I want to start by asking you both for the most consequential decision President Trump has made in his first year back in office. Ross, do you want to kick us off?
Ross Douthat: I would be delighted. Thank you all for being here tonight. Hopefully, we’ll put on a fairly entertaining show. I’m going to cheat a little in answering the question and not pick a single decision, but instead a broad ——
Kingsbury: No cheating.
Douthat: No cheating? A broad strategic approach.
I think the most consequential strategic choice the Trump administration has made has been to not just double down, but triple down and quadruple down on a unilateralist style of executive governance. It has had two effects, and it’s way too soon to tell which is the most important one.
One effect is to both expand de facto presidential power, to discover new presidential power, to basically put Trump himself in a position of a certain kind of executive dominance that I don’t think we’ve seen since Franklin Roosevelt.
At the same time, that coexists with a failure to instantiate changes through legislation, which was certainly something that Roosevelt was pretty good at. That makes it really, really hard to tell how enduring 80 to 90 percent of the concrete policy changes of this hyperactive Trump year will be.
I think this extends everywhere from the budget cuts in DOGE to the Trump administration struggles with the major universities. You can go on through the list; you can encompass immigration policy. There’s been new spending on immigration enforcement, but there hasn’t been some dramatic overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.
It’s possible to imagine a world where Trump has just genuinely pioneered a new, more frankly Caesarsist form of presidential governance in America that will endure among his successors. It’s also possible to imagine a world where many of these frenetic acts and actions could just evaporate, even over the next three years. Some of them could be wiped away very, very quickly by a Democratic president. So in that balance is the fundamental uncertainty about the core significance of a lot of what we’ve been watching.
Kingsbury: Jamelle, what about you?
Jamelle Bouie: I was expecting a shorter answer, and now I feel like I have to respond to something.
First, thank you all for coming. It’s a real pleasure to be here. My answer actually plays off Ross’s answer, so to make my answer long as well [laughter], one of ——
Douthat: Lean into it.
Kingsbury: We’ve got a lot of material to get through.
Bouie: A lot of material.
When you break the presidency down to what the actual job is, it’s personnel management and then crisis management. Really, it’s personnel management. Much of what the president actually does is figure out who is going to handle things that come to him, such that the only things he really handles are things that are very important and very urgent.
There’s some art involved in a president figuring out what items go in what category. I think Trump’s most consequential decision is to abdicate that and instead delegate so much of his authority to various deputies. At the moment, it appears that Stephen Miller is the driving deputy. But at the beginning of his term, it was Russ Vought and Elon Musk as the chief deputies. When it comes to foreign policy, especially the issues in Latin America, it’s very clear that Marco Rubio is the driving force.
It’s this delegation of policy and political decisions to these deputies that, I think, shapes much of the administration, and it is responsible for much of the administration’s political difficulties. The thing about being president is that, although you don’t have any particular expertise, generally speaking, you can count the number of presidents with real subject matter expertise on one hand, and funnily enough, they’re not necessarily good presidents as a result.
Presidents are political experts. That’s inherent to the job. Abdicating, delegating your authority, including political decision-making, down to other people robs you of the ability to respond quickly and effectively to changes in the political wind.
Kingsbury: I would argue, and we can get into this a little bit, one of Trump’s strengths is his political expertise. So it’ll be interesting. Plenty of things to go deeper on.
But I want to start first with the question of foreign policy. For most of the past century, the United States has been counted on to help repel foreign aggression. Now, the president seems ready to be the aggressor in Greenland. Ross, you closely track the thinking inside this administration between your reporting and your podcast, “Interesting Times.” What’s your best understanding of what’s motivating the president here?
Douthat: My best understanding of what’s motivating the president is that he has always had an interest in acquiring Greenland. This came up in his first term. It was a subject of sport and jest, like a number of things that happened in his first term. But that has always existed. There is also a small but meaningful faction in the online right that is interested in the idea of territorial expansion as a signifier of a revived American spirit. So that’s floating around out there.
But basically, what I think has happened is that Trump always had an idea that he wanted to add some territory to the U.S. I think, if you were going to pick a place to add to the U.S., I could make a case that Greenland makes a certain kind of sense — a sparsely populated island that’s very important to our national security that’s in the Western Hemisphere. It’s not a crazy zone of interest.
And the Venezuela raid went so well from Trump’s perspective that he got very excited and decided that now is the moment to make the Greenland push. This is not based on deep or profound reporting, so don’t take that to the bank, but that is my best guess of why we’re dealing with this right now — that it’s a preexisting thing in Trump’s mind and has some marginal support in his coalition.
And suddenly, the idea was turbocharged by the Donroe Doctrine — I don’t know how we even pronounce that, the Donroe Doctrine — and Venezuela. It’s like, if we can do that, why can’t we just get Greenland, too?
Kingsbury: But how does the president’s position on Greenland square with “America first” philosophy?
Douthat: I mean, how does it not? That’s easy, right? “America first” means good parts of the world should become part of America. Greenland tomorrow, Alberta the next day, Cuba the day after that. I don’t think that’s hard.
When we talked about this event and I was thinking about foreign policy questions days or weeks ago, before Greenland became an issue, I was prepared to make an argument that there’s been more fundamental continuity amid all the chaos in Trump’s foreign policy than a lot of people think.
If you look at the overall arc of Middle East policy, Russia-Ukraine policy: The Trump administration has not, in fact, ended the war in Ukraine by surrendering to Vladimir Putin. It continues to arm Ukraine. It’s pushed Europe to do much more. It’s tried to negotiate with Putin, but it hasn’t overthrown the entirety of U.S. foreign policy.
The Trump administration pursued a cease-fire in the Middle East in a way that was probably more aggressive than a Biden administration might have. I could go on from there. I could make a pre-Greenland case for the relative stability and moderate success of Trump’s foreign policy. The Greenland gambit is, as far as I can tell, indefensible and destructive. And quite, quite different if followed through than how Trump has handled the Middle East, or even how he’s handled Russia-Ukraine.
Kingsbury: Jamelle, I think it’s worth discussing what this is doing to our alliances with Europe and our relationships there. But I also feel like, as one of our in-house history experts, I’d love to hear your thoughts. He’s clearly using the Monroe Doctrine as his model here. Can you tell us what the Monroe Doctrine meant back in the early 1800s, and what does it mean under Trump?
Bouie: Sure. Before I do, though, I want to say that I think the Greenland thing is at least 50 percent that Trump doesn’t understand that on a Mercator projection, Greenland looks really big.
Douthat: Now, wait — it’s still a really big island, Jamelle.
Bouie: Oh, certainly.
Douthat: Under any projection.
Bouie: It’s still quite large. It’s big, but ——
Douthat: And the number of U.F.O.s allegedly under the ice ——
Bouie: But I happen to think that it’s big on a map, and so the president, our big boy, wants it.
So, the Monroe Doctrine. We obviously discussed these questions. So I wrote down the relevant part of the Monroe Doctrine, issued by President James Monroe, written by the future president at the time, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.
I’m going to just read the relevant portion:
The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.
Now, the context for this is that Napoleon has been defeated in Europe. The monarchical powers in Europe are reasserting themselves, and they’re looking abroad to what is now Latin America and seeing that there are these revolutions happening. The Bourbons in particular are looking at Spanish possessions in Latin America and saying: What’s happening over there?
So the Monroe administration responds to this by taking a somewhat paternalistic stance and saying: We are the premier republic of this hemisphere. Stay out. Leave these people alone. If anyone’s going to mess around down there, it’s going to be us. You should stay out of the Western Hemisphere.
It’s also worth saying that when a European power really wanted to intervene in the Western Hemisphere, they just did it. But the concept of the Monroe Doctrine was kind of an anti-colonialist stance for which there would be continuity throughout American history.
Of course, Americans embraced the imperial fever in the late 19th century — and that’s actually where I think a lot of Trump’s inspiration comes from. But during World War II and afterward, there was real influence of Roosevelt’s own distaste for European colonialism. That is part of American foreign policymaking in World War II and afterward.
I think all of that’s necessary as a background — first, because Katie gave me an excuse to do it, and if I can talk to you about 19th-century American history, I will. But the second thing is that it puts the Donroe Doctrine — at least it’s alliterative — into stark contrast. Because the Donroe Doctrine is not about defending, even if it’s with your fingers crossed behind your back, independent nations in the Western Hemisphere from European colonization. The Donroe Doctrine is: We have to be European colonizers. And that is the difference.
Douthat: Well, in fairness, I think it is a more explicitly self-interested doctrine, but the core of the arguments made around the Venezuelan intervention is the fact that Venezuela had been a strong zone of interest for non-Western hemispheric powers that happened to be our biggest rivals: Russia and China.
The claims being made around Greenland similarly are, as far as I can tell, not so much about the pernicious influence of the Danish royal family, but are also about Russia and China right now.
I agree that Trump’s attitude toward Venezuelan oil resources is very much a late 19th-century colonial mind-set. But there is clearly a way in which critics of Trump will say he wants to divide the world up and give Xi his sphere of influence and Putin his sphere of influence and leave us the Western Hemisphere. I don’t think that’s right.
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I think Trump, to the extent that he thinks this stuff through, just wants the Western Hemisphere to be an exclusively American zone of interest. But then he also wants to have interest in Asia and Eastern Europe and so on. I think there is some continuity with the Monroe Doctrine — it’s a more cynical variant of the Monroe Doctrine.
Bouie: But I don’t know if I would call that continuity. If part of the basis of the Monroe Doctrine is not simply no outside intervention but a recognition that these countries are independent republics whose autonomy ought to be respected, then any kind of active colonial-style management of self-governing countries is a meaningful break. That’s not really in continuity with the Monroe Doctrine.
Kingsbury: We are going to leave it there and move to the home front.
Just a few days after the capture of Maduro and the invasion of Venezuela, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good in Minnesota. The agency has obviously come under harsh criticism in the weeks following it, but it’s also about to get a huge influx of cash. The budget reconciliation bill has dedicated $75 billion to ICE.
Jamelle, talk to us about what all that money will mean for President Trump’s immigration agenda in the years to come.
Bouie: I’ve been thinking about this because I’m not sure I have a firm answer. There’s a movie for kids — it’s not good — called “Blank Check.” It’s about a 10-year-old who gets a literal blank check, but it’s signed and he puts like a million dollars on it.
A 10-year-old mind, a million bucks, has all the money in the world and then goes on to have an insane spending spree, and it’s all like, “I want a McDonald’s in my mansion,” that kind of stuff. The point is that he had so much money and his imagination couldn’t meet the amount of money he had. I kind of feel that’s going to end up being the situation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — in part because they struggle, right? Even before this big influx of funding, they really struggled to hire people to do the job.
They can use some of this money, of course, for building detention facilities. They can try to hire more people, but I have this feeling that they are not going to know what to do with the money. Certainly, it’ll mean they’ll have money to give out bonuses. Certainly, it’ll mean that efforts to defund or resend funding through things like a budget showdown are going to be limited because it’s already there. It’s already in law and it’s not part of a continuing resolution of funding.
But in terms of what does this actually mean on the ground? I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that they’re sure. Given that this is just a huge amount of money to give to any agency.
Kingsbury: Yeah. Of course, we’ve actually already seen these issues with labor that you’re describing in terms of hiring new agents and officers. They’ve doubled the number of officers in the past year, but they’ve cut their training time in half for those officers. I think we’re seeing a little bit of that on display right now.
Bouie: And they’ve had the lower standard. I was reading not long ago that they were turning away people because part of the physical standards is you have to run a mile and a half in 14 minutes and then do situps and push-ups — and they couldn’t find people to do it.
I’ll say I saw that and I, of course, laughed about it and then I said, “Well, could I do it?” Then I went to the gym that morning and promptly did it.
Douthat: R.F.K. Jr. is proud of you.
Bouie: Yeah.
Douthat: The MAHA agenda in action.
Bouie: So, this is my ICE bonus check. I hope it will be in the mail soon.
Kingsbury: Fifty thousand dollars headed your way.
Ross, what do you make of all of this? Obviously, immigration and the border became huge political deficits for Biden. Do you see any risk for this administration in terms of a backlash from voters?
Douthat: I think there’s a substantial risk of a backlash. All that we can say for certain about the money is that ICE will be able to practically sustain the level of operations that they’ve had for this year into the future. The question then becomes: Is that scale of operations politically sustainable, given the way the polls have shifted against Trump’s immigration policy? Probably mostly, I think, just because of the shooting of Renee — I think those of us who follow the news really closely tend to assume that it’s this video and it’s that video and so on. But my perception is that it’s really the shooting that particularly broke through, as it should, as it’s understandable as a news story, and then in turn fed further coverage of and attention to Minneapolis in particular.
It’s a complicated political thing because you’ll see polls now where voters will say: I don’t approve of Trump’s immigration policy. Maybe I even support defunding ICE. But then you’re asked: Who do you trust more in immigration, Republicans or Democrats? And they still say Republicans.
The basic challenge for the Trump administration is they see themselves, reasonably, as having been elected on a promise to conduct mass deportations. I think you can make a case, and I would make a case, that with better training and different hiring practices and so on, you could reduce abuses and reduce some of the things that show up in everybody’s social media feed right now.
At the same time, there is a way in which ICE has always done raids in immigrant neighborhoods, they arrest sympathetic-seeming people or pick up people who don’t have infractions while going after someone who does have infractions.
What we’re seeing right now is just what ICE normally does, but times three or times four or times five. And a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with it. But it’s not clear to me that there’s some other way that the Trump administration can say to themselves: We’re pursuing this policy that would be vastly more popular, maybe somewhat more popular, but I don’t know.
Kingsbury: I would argue that the difference in what we’re seeing now, as a person who believes strongly that we need to have a strong immigration policy in this country, is the cruelty behind what they’re doing, which seems to be just endemic to the process of ICE today.
Bouie: I don’t know if there is a feasible way to do mass deportations that are somehow humane. I think the project of mass removals is necessarily both, just in terms of if everyone is being as humane as possible, being as decent as possible, it’s necessarily going to entail the disruption that makes people very uncomfortable and will produce the kinds of sympathetic stories that we’re seeing now.
I think that in practice, the kinds of people who would want to sign up for that job are going to be the kinds of people inclined to inflict cruelty, and I’m not sure what you can do about that. I will say, just in terms of the politics of all of this, that when you ask Americans about immigration, the existing immigration system, what they imagine is a very orderly system where there are lines that people get in and then there’s a process, and then you become a citizen.
And part of the anger and discontent with Biden-era immigration policy was a sense that Biden was allowing lots of people to cut this imaginary line. Of course, actual immigration policy does not work like that — the process for entering this country and becoming a permanent resident, becoming a citizen is convoluted and very difficult. Part of me thinks that if someone just said to the American public, “We’re going to get tough on immigration,” and then described an orderly system, that would be a major reform that would be quite popular.
I think that for the Trump administration, there is a world in which they do prioritize the removal of people in jails, removal of people convicted of crimes. This would not be mass deportation, but I think it would be more in line with what your marginal Trump voter, like the person who tipped the state, expected.
So, I think an engaged president might say: This is not working politically. Let’s scale this back. Let’s actually focus on people in jails and so on and so forth, and see if we can’t do something that is still in the direction of the things I promised, but much less politically unsustainable.
But since it’s just Miller, he is like: Let’s go full hog.
Douthat: But it’s not just Miller, right? I think Miller has a particular power and a particular focus and fixation on this issue. But there is a larger sense among conservatives that the Biden era was a revelation of what liberals and Democrats, or at least the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, really wants to do.
That, for a long time, you had liberals who were favorably disposed to immigration, but always said: Well, of course, we’re not for open borders. But finally they got the chance, and it effectively was open borders for two or three years. Then they felt like they needed to tie ——
I mean, you can say it’s not open borders. We can have this debate, but in fact, if you just look at a chart of the sheer number of people who came in in the first three years of the Biden administration, it was an unprecedented wave of immigration, unlike any basically in my lifetime. You don’t have to call it open borders, but if, imagine ——
Bouie: I just personally wouldn’t call it open borders.
Douthat: I’m just saying: Imagine yourself as a conservative skeptic of immigration watching this happen. And then you basically decide that when your party is in power, they can’t conduct substantial deportation, then you’re in a sucker’s game where the Democrats are in power and they let millions people in; the Republicans take power, they secure the borders for a while, don’t do anything about immigration; then the Democrats come into power and do it all over again.
So, behind Stephen Miller is this sense that we can’t let the Democrats get away with that. And again, the fact that Republicans still are slightly more trusted than Democrats suggests that this is not just a hard-right concern.
The other thing to note is that it is in fact true what the Department of Homeland Security keeps saying: that a policy that’s focused just on deporting people in jails and people with criminal records does yield some kind of conflict with sanctuary city laws and rules and liberal jurisdictions. They’re not making that up. They’re exaggerating it for effect while they go after other people as well. But even that more limited policy would still create clashes with states like California, states like Minnesota.
Kingsbury: OK. Let’s talk about Congress.
Jamelle, over the last year, you have written a lot about lawmakers’ response to President Trump’s second term. How would you rate Congress’s performance so far? What grade would you give them?
Douthat: A-plus? A-plus-plus?
Bouie: The thing about a grade is, what is my criteria? From my perspective, I look at the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate allowing DOGE to just do its thing — I look at that and I say: That’s you abdicating your Article I authority over spending.
I look at the administration, the impoundment of congressionally authorized funds, and Congress looking at that, and it doesn’t look like anything to me. I see a Congress really abdicating its Article I authority to the point that it’s rendering itself a nullity.
But from the perspective of a Republican in Congress — who are opposed to the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy, who want to let the White House just do it and not really put up a fight — they’re like, well, that’s the best of all worlds. Because we don’t have to take a vote on it. We don’t have to actually vote for massive cuts to cancer research. We don’t have to actually vote for massive cuts to the C.D.C. or any of these things — and we get it anyway. So from their perspective, this is the best of all worlds.
If you take a longer view, I think that the central dysfunction of American government is the receding influence of Congress across all fields, and that it’s very hard to push back on and come back from huge expansions of presidential authority. So, from just the institutional health of Congress and to looking at the broader health of the American Constitutional order, I would grade Congress with an F.
Douthat: F-plus.
Bouie: F-plus, just because it’s hard for me to envision a world post-Trump where we see any meaningful pushback on this kind of use of executive power.
Douthat: I think from a Republican perspective, maybe not an F-plus, but even from a Republican perspective Congress would get quite a low grade — in part because even the DOGE cuts, apart from some areas like U.S.A.I.D., where there’s sort of a semi-permanent dismantling, now that Congress is getting around to voting on omnibus legislation, that money’s coming back.
In the end, when it comes time to vote, they aren’t like: All right, I’ll just vote for the DOGE cuts. The National Endowment for Democracy is still getting funded. A bunch of basic science funding is coming back. So, even if you love DOGE as a Republican, you would still say that Congress wanted to let Elon do it, and then they still don’t have the guts to make cuts themselves.
But generally, as I said at the outset, the fact that there’s no congressional agenda for the Trump administration beyond the initial tax cuts, “big, beautiful bill” thing is just a really striking thing.
If you were a populist conservative, rooting for Trump to be an amazingly successful politician, again, you would not grade Congress highly. The tariffs have not led to a wave of new industrial policy legislation. There’s no entitlement reform. There’s no regulatory reform. There’s just nothing.
Kingsbury: OK, I want to turn to the midterms. We’re coming up on the midterm elections in November. I’d love for both of you to take the temperature of both parties. Maybe talk a little bit, Jamelle, in your answer about how you see the Democratic response so far and what you wish they would change and do going forward. But also just: How do you think the parties are feeling going into this election season?
Ross, let’s start with you.
Douthat: Midterms are almost always bad for the incumbent party. My sense is that in a way — again, this connects to Jamelle’s point about Trump abdicating a certain kind of political role — but the Trump coalition got quite big in the 2024 election. It added a lot of voters who had not voted for Trump in the past, who had not usually voted for Republicans.
And very little that the administration has done has been geared toward locking those voters in and catering to them. Whether they’re an anti-woke suburbanite or an immigration skeptic, a working-class Latino in Texas or whatever demographic group you want to pick — Trump hasn’t been focused on them, the administration hasn’t been focused on them, and I think a lot of those voters are still leery of Democrats, but they’re not going to be held by the Republicans in this midterm.
So then it just becomes a question of what happens in a few choice Senate seats, I think.
Bouie: My sense is that Democrats are feeling very confident about the House; they’re quite confident that the House is going to flip. It’s already quite a narrow Republican majority. Last year’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey suggest at least something like the rumblings of another blue wave, and if it’s anything like that, I think there’s a broad expectation that Democrats will win the House with no particular issue.
The question is the Senate, and there, I think Ross is right to note that the administration’s disinterest in trying to consolidate its electoral wins is really going to hurt it. There’s already been substantial erosion with the young men who flipped over to Trump, catastrophic erosion with Hispanic voters in the wake of the past six or seven months of activity.
The other thing is you have to ask the question: What can Trump do between now and then to make himself more popular? And if he doesn’t really do anything to accomplish that, and if Democrats can — and I think they’ve gotten pretty much all the recruits they’ve wanted for the major Senate races, like Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Mary Peltola in Alaska, Sherrod Brown is running in Ohio. They’re getting the recruits they want.
If the president’s political standing continues to decline, then you’re looking at a real chance of Democrats being able to, if not substantially narrow that Republican Senate advantage, then get to 50 Senate seats, which would be catastrophic for the Trump administration. That means no judicial confirmations, at the very least. It becomes very difficult.
Douthat: Fifty-one. They need to get to 51.
Bouie: Yeah, 51. It becomes very difficult for the next two years.
The thing is, I’m not even sure that Trump cares all that much. This to me has always been the problem from the perspective of Republicans of hanging everything with Trump: You are putting your fate in the hands of a guy who, on some level, doesn’t give a [EXPLETIVE] about the Republican Party inasmuch as it’s an independent and separate thing — you can’t impeach lawmakers. It’s impeachments for executive officers.
Douthat: Not in the Newsom administration, baby. He’s got big plans.
Bouie: The point is just that Trump doesn’t really care about the health of the Republican Party, and that is a real problem for dealing with the prospect of an upcoming midterm election.
Douthat: Right, Trump is this incredibly transformative, historically significant figure who has — no, he is, he absolutely is. I have come to accept that and internalize it without letting go of all of my many reasonable critiques of the man. He is an incredibly important figure. He is also someone who is incapable of achieving the kind of consolidation that we associate with presidents of similar importance.
Kingsbury: I want to ask a lighter question to wrap up. I know you both love movies; you love to watch them and to review them. So I want to end by asking you each for a movie recommendation — a film that’s helped you make sense of the political moment that we’re in right now.
Jamelle, you want to kick us off?
Bouie: Sure. I don’t really watch movies for political edification.
Kingsbury: Just pretend for the question.
Bouie: I know, I know. I’m just pretending. I recently rewatched “Citizen Kane,” a film about a vain, power-hungry man who is ultimately not able to build anything lasting or sustaining in his life. And that, to me, feels very appropriate for thinking about Donald Trump. So, “Citizen Kane.” It also stars noted Virginia actor Joseph Cotten. I always pay attention to who’s from Virginia.
Douthat: I only watch movies for political edification. So I will do something similar. How many people have seen “Marty Supreme”? [Applause.] OK. How many people like the main character in that movie? No. Yes. OK. I was hoping for more people saying that they liked the main character.
If you didn’t, then this won’t land as well. But “Marty Supreme” is a movie that I — I used to find Timothée Chalamet annoying, but now I have incredible respect for him as a man who is single-handedly willing the movies back to life in the face of cultural decadence. So, props to him here in Hollywood. If you’re listening, Timothée: Call me; we’ll do lunch.
But “Marty Supreme” is a movie about, like “Citizen Kane,” an obnoxious, arrogant, incredibly ambitious guy who’s constantly committing adultery and trying to lift money from other people in the service of his own ambitions and defrauding people and doing a bunch of terrible things. I think — maybe I’m alone in this — but I think the nature of the movie is that it makes you root for him to succeed because he’s pursuing a particular very American kind of personal ambition, a quest for greatness, all of these things.
And I think that if you watch it and have that feeling, even as you — as I think many people here tonight do — loathe and despise Donald Trump, it should give you some appreciation for why some Americans like him as a kind of peculiar representative — like Charles Foster Kane, like Marty Mauser, fictional characters — of, God help us, national character.
Kingsbury: Well, thank you, Jamelle and Ross, and thank you, all.
Douthat: Thank you.
Kingsbury: Thank you for coming out tonight. The New York Times and the Library Foundation of Los Angeles are grateful that you made us part of your day.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing and original music by Isaac Jones. Engineered by Daniel Ramirez. 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 the team at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
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