The columnist David Brooks’s 22-year tenure at The New York Times is coming to an end, and so the Conversation trio of Robert Siegel, E.J. Dionne Jr. and Brooks gather one last time to discuss President Trump’s latest upsets and reflect on the departing columnist’s lengthy career and evolving views.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Robert Siegel: Hi, I’m Robert Siegel in conversation about politics with two of the smartest guys I know when it comes to politics. E.J. Dionne — a longtime columnist, the author of a great many books and now an Opinion contributor to The New York Times — good to see you, E.J.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Always good to be with you, Robert.
Robert Siegel: And the equally prolific David Brooks, who joins us for the last time, as of this hour. Are you still a New York Times columnist?
David Brooks: I am still a New York Times columnist, but this is my final act of journalism with The New York Times, which is great for me and even greater for the future of The New York Times.
Siegel: Well, I will hear more about that later. I don’t think either of you will be surprised to know that we’re starting with Donald Trump. We’re almost a month into the second year of his second term as president, and both of you in recent weeks have written columns in which you found some important change or some important landmark that this presidency has passed.
In a moment we’ll hear from David about why he foresees a coming Trump crackup, but we’re going to begin with E.J., with what you call — when we look at all of the attempts to expand executive authority and other abuses — regime change.
Dionne: Yeah, and I think that overlooking how much he is actually trying to fundamentally change and destroy, really, the traditional American system is something we have to face up to. I think the country as a whole really did after the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. There have been police killings, and there have been mishaps, but the country has never seen an entity like ICE operate completely outside the law in this way.
There was a whole series of other things that happened — a series of corrupt pardons, building on the extraordinary pardons he gave to all of the people involved in Jan. 6, the Justice Department really being destroyed and used for investigations of political enemies, from the chair of the Federal Reserve to Governor Walz in Minnesota to Mayor Frey. And we can go on and on — tariffs, by fiat, on our allies.
The weirdness over Greenland and, again, threatening our allies with tariffs, just by fiat. I think that what we saw in what Russell Vought has written about radical constitutionalism, before he became the head of O.M.B. for Trump, was a real desire to fundamentally alter the regime. I think the country has really started to come to terms with that danger because of the acceleration of events over the last month and a half.
Siegel: “Regime change” has a very permanent ring to it, don’t you think?
Dionne: It does. And if you’re asking me, “Will he succeed?” I think that the good news over the last month is the rising opposition that this has called forth from the country.
I know of two recent special elections in Texas and last Saturday in Louisiana, where, in Trump districts, there were 30-plus point swings away from the Republicans. He is throwing away all of the constituencies, the swing constituencies, who came to him in the last election. I’m not saying he will succeed at this, but I think he has become more and more aggressive at it and we need to face that this is not just some guy doing one random thing after another. This is somebody who is setting about — in a systematic way — to destroy institutions.
Siegel: David, you wrote a couple of weeks ago that we are in the midst of multiple unravelings and heading for a coming Trump crackup. What does that mean?
Brooks: There are four unravelings. First, the unraveling of the Western alliance, the post-Cold War alliance. Second, the unraveling that E.J. just described, our democratic order. Third, the unraveling of our domestic security, the sense that we live in a relatively free — at least free of state violence, and we can no longer be sure of that. And then the fourth — and to me, the most important and the primary one — is the unraveling of Trump’s mind, if you want to put it that way.
I’ve never met a president who wasn’t more full of himself at the end of his term than at the beginning. They all become a little egotistical. If you start with Donald Trump’s ego, you’re really going places. If you look through history at the minds of people who are driven by a lust for power and who have tyrannical tendencies, the arc of history bends toward degradation. There’s just not many cases where somebody was becoming more and more power hungry, more and more tyrannical, and they said, “Oh, I better put on the brakes here and become more moderate.” That just doesn’t happen. You get this process of mental deterioration that’s, in part, caused by the way the lust for power makes you drunk on power and is insatiable.
Partly because, as you’re driven by the lust for power, the environment you create around you becomes more sycophantic and has less checks, partly because the people in this country have a tendency to lose the habits of democratic self-government. I was looking at these classical historians, Tacitus and people like Sallust and then later ones like Plutarch, Edward Gibbon — they had a front-row seat at tyranny, and so they really understood it pretty well.
They talk about the fact that citizens lose the capacity for persuasion, for compromise, for interpersonal trust — the very fabric of democratic society. And when that is torn away, as Edward Gibbon writes, you get what he calls “every page of history is stained with civil blood.” I think we’re heading toward that kind of decay.
Siegel: To hear the two of you talk about an insatiable lust for power and regime change, it makes me feel obliged to ask you both a short-answer question, which is: Are you confident there will be elections in November and that the elections will go on as elections typically do?
Dionne: At the very least, that’s not clear, and I think it’s something that people began to worry about even more over the last several weeks when the F.B.I. raided the Board of Elections down in Georgia, in Fulton County. People said: Well, this is about Trump’s obsession with the fact that he falsely claims over and over again that he won the 2020 election.
But especially when they discovered that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was there, I think a lot of people saw this as an attempt to affect the election. Then Trump himself spoke of nationalizing the rules of the election — he then said in 15 places, which sounded like Democratic states. The beginning of that statement he made was: Republicans should take over the elections.
I’ve spoken in the last couple of weeks to a lot of lawyers — anti-Trump-administration lawyers, I would say — who are genuinely concerned about basic things like: Will there be ICE agents at the polls as Steve Bannon has threatened? Will he call out troops? Will this be about reducing turnout?
I still like to hope that our decentralized system of elections makes it more difficult for him to disrupt them in this way. But everything he’s done so far, I think, is maybe by design to make us more and more uneasy about whether these elections will be on the level.
Siegel: David, do you have more than a hope?
Brooks: Yeah, I have every confidence that we’ll have an election. I think he’s internalized that we are a democracy and that he needs to step down in 2028, and I say that for two reasons. One, historical. I was really moved in 2020 — I read a book by Samuel Huntington, the late great political scientist from Harvard. The subtitle of the book was “The Promise of Disharmony.” He argues that every couple of decades, America goes through what he calls a moral convulsion, where people want to burn everything down, people get disgusted and social trust collapses — a passionate generation comes on the scene, a new form of communications technology.
He said this happened in the 1770s, with the Revolutionary period, and happened in the 1830s, with Andrew Jackson. Populism in the 1890s, where you get these economic depressions, racial terrorism, political corruption, poverty. And it happened in the 1960s, with bombings, assassinations and so on. In 1981 he said that he doesn’t know if he believes in these cycles, but if the cycle holds, sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, we’ll go through another moral convulsion. And I’m like, “Well done, Professor Huntington.” The good news is: You come out of them, that the society reacts and we have a culture change. We don’t go back, and in this case, we should not go back to the pre-Trump era, but we go forward.
And the second reason; I just have tremendous faith in the power of the people manning our institutions, in the military, in the election officials on the state level and Republicans on the state level. So I think we’ll hold.
Dionne: There’s one convulsion you didn’t have on your list, David, and that was the Civil War.
Brooks: We had elections then, I should point out, though.
Dionne: And I think you’ve done the same — I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the past few years on the 1850s to 1860s, about the nature of the polarization, the anger, the violence, the threats against elected officials, the depth of the mistrust. And I find this period much closer to that than to some of these other periods when, yes, we’ve had a lot of fierce arguments in our history.
Again, I share your confidence in the people running elections at the local level. I still have real worries that this administration will be willing to override so many of the rules that we have taken for granted. And so I hope you’re right. I believe in disharmony. I think disharmony is part of freedom, but I don’t think the administration believes disharmony is part of freedom.
Brooks: Yeah. The one difference there is, we had a major issue that really did divide the nation, and now we have Donald Trump, who’s a force for chaos. But I don’t think we’re as ideologically divided over some major issue as they were over slavery.
Siegel: One more go-round about Donald Trump — but not that Trump would usurp tariff authority from Congress or terrify Greenlanders with the news that they must become part of the United States. I’m thinking more of the Trump minions, who, after taking over the Kennedy Center, rename it for him and release a horrible, racist video that caricatures the Obamas as apes, without any apology. These have nothing to do with being president. I mean, the Greenland thing and the tariffs — that has to do with policy and the executive branch of government.
What is this? And how do you think Americans are learning to cope with this person who seems to think that making America great again isn’t even a work in progress, that it’s a fait accompli and we should all be a grateful people, that we now live in a great society.
Brooks: Say an intern released that video by accident or whatever — even taking their version, a normal person would say, “America has a horrible history of racism. What that video showed was abominable, and I denounce it.” Like, how hard is that?
This is a president who, first, needs to be the center of attention. That’s part of tyranny, by the way — the need to constantly be the center of attention every second of every day. But second, there is simply a lack where the moral backbone would normally be or even where the moral sentiment would normally be. And he stands for nihilism, a belief in nothing. He stands for the idea — as Stephen Miller sort of put it or, if I’m going back from the Romans to the Greeks, Thucydides — that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
And he’s tried to create a world not only domestically but internationally where gangsters can thrive without any sense of internal restraint.
And to me, the interesting question is: What the hell happened to us? Why did 77 million people last election take a look at Donald Trump and didn’t see anything morally disqualifying? I do not think that would’ve happened in America 50 years ago. I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene.
My quick story about that is, for all of American history, we had a sense of a shared moral order. There’s a historian, George Marsden, I’ll paraphrase what he wrote — that what gave Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetoric such force was the idea that moral law was written into the fabric of the universe, that slavery and segregation were not just wrong sometimes, that they’re always wrong. And over the last 50 years, in my view, we’ve sort of privatized morality. We said there are no shared moral values. There’s no ultimate truth, but everybody gets to come up with their own values.
Siegel: To each his own narrative.
Brooks: Yeah: It’s your truth. And if you do that, unless your name is Aristotle, you probably can’t come up with your own moral philosophy. I mean, most of us can’t do that. Second, we have no shared morality on which to decide what’s right and wrong and, with that, just basic shared standards of how a person should behave. There’s been that loss of assumptions of “This is what a president does. This is what a president doesn’t do.”
Siegel: But does that mean, E.J., that Trump is getting a pass on anything from racism to megalomania?
Dionne: No. You put a bunch of things on the table here, and I’ll begin where you ended, which is: I think it’s a mistake to look at Trump’s election as a failure because of this complicated breakdown of any morality. I think there is still a strong moral sense among Americans, and you’re seeing it in the backlash against the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. You’re seeing it in a lot of backlash out there, where Trump’s approval rating has taken a real pounding. There is a solid base of about 30, 35 percent of Americans who believe that Trump is against their enemies, and because he opposes those whom they oppose, they will be with him.
But Trump wasn’t elected because all these Americans lost their moral sense. He was elected partly because of partisanship — that a lot of people who thought of themselves as Republican still preferred the Republican Donald Trump over someone like Kamala Harris — and partly because they couldn’t believe that he would behave like this. And then a bunch of other Americans voted for him because they were mad about prices and disorder at the southern border and just thought from the first term, “Well, he’ll have some folks around him who will restrain him. He wasn’t quite this wild.” And they are regretting that now is what it looks like.
But in terms of Trump himself, I think it does go back to something David said, which is that if you believe in yourself as an absolute power, if you claim absolute power, then you stop surrounding yourself with people who will question you and only surround yourself with people who will say whatever you do is right. And if you have the kind of deterioration we’re seeing in Trump himself, then you do have somebody who can’t apologize for a racist video like that and who continues to act in this way.
There was some Republican pushback against that video, but what’s really striking is Republicans are still petrified of opposing this. And what you haven’t seen is enough of the center-right in the United States. David’s an exception, God bless him, but not enough of the center-right in politics in the United States is willing to say, “Enough of this.” And maybe that’s a product of a two-party system, but it’s a real problem.
Siegel: We have a president who might have a sign behind him that says, “The buck stops with the intern.”
Dionne: Yeah. Harry Truman would be very upset.
Siegel: David mentioned that this is his last day doing something journalistic for The New York Times. You’ve been a columnist here for 22 years, and I just want to take a moment, before we continue the discussion, to tell you how important your work has been over those 22 years — how I think you really expanded what a newspaper column might be about and what we have to expect, knowing that whenever we read the same columnist, it could be very different from day to day. You’ve sampled the world of academia and found interesting sources for material without turning into an academic writer in the process.
I have the greatest respect for you, and I’m very proud of my reassociation with you, small as it may be.
Brooks: Oh, well, thank you, Robert.
Dionne: I brought a prop today, David. It’s your second book, I believe, “On Paradise Drive,” and I brought it in partly because of the inscription you wrote. This was published back in 2004, so 22 years ago.
We’ve been talking about politics together in various venues — but mostly with Robert, thank goodness — for a long time. And you inscribed it, “To my good friend E.J., someday in the future we will agree on everything.” I’ve contemplated this, and the fact is, we do agree on more now than we did 22 years ago. I think that’s true. We had certain fundamentals in common. We both love Reinhold Niebuhr. I think that’s a tribute to the fact that you have responded to events and that’s why we agree on more now — thank goodness — and we’re probably both happy about this.
We do not agree on everything, and we still like to argue with each other. And I’m very sad that this reunion we’ve had recently is going to come to such a quick end. But if I may cite a musical source, the Beach Boys, I still hope that we can get back together and do this again. So I’ll miss you, David.
Brooks: Thank you. And thank you, gentlemen. We’ve been doing this for a long time — back to the 20th century we were doing this. Viewers may not know that Robert and I are third cousins. We learned from a DNA test, and we grew up in the same housing project, Stuyvesant Town in Lower Manhattan. E.J. and I have been joined at the hip for many decades.
One of the things that was a lucky break for me — a lot of things were lucky breaks. One, I had a grandfather who knew how to write and, as I mentioned in my final column, loved to write letters to the editor of The New York Times. It was just so moving when I got this job to go from the kid on the Lower East Side, my grandfather going to City College — free college in New York — to me working at The New York Times. That’s a great American story.
Another lucky break was I found my heroes early on, and I think both of you, may share a bit of this, if you haven’t put it this way. I realized that in the 1950s and 1960s there was a group of writers who were slightly above normal journalism and below academia. They were people like Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson and E. Digby Baltzell and Daniel Bell and Vance Packard —
Dionne: Your role model originally.
Brooks: Yeah. And so I said, “That’s where I want to be.” I think I’ve tried to do that for the rest of my career, and I will continue to do that at The Atlantic.
Siegel: Done it. You have done it very, very well. Now here’s the question. Ready? OK, 22 years — let’s think about that span of time for a moment.
When you think back on the days when you began writing the column and today, what’s different? What’s most different about the work or the world that we live in, the country? What would you say?
Brooks: It hasn’t gotten any easier to write, I can tell you that. I think I’ve changed an enormous amount. My wife and I have been married for nine years, and when she looks at a video of me from, like, 20 years ago, she says, “Well, I wouldn’t have married that guy.” And so I think I’ve become a little more emotionally open and emotionally vulnerable.
I think what’s changed has not been good. As I said in my final column, we were a more hopeful country. We had faith in institutions that were greater. We had faith in America’s role in the world. We had faith in our alliances. Barack Obama could run that 2008 campaign filled with idealism and hope, and he can run against a guy, John McCain, filled with a sense of honor.
And we’ve lost faith in institutions. We’ve lost faith in ourselves, and we’ve lost faith in each other. So to me, one of the reasons I want to devote more of my life to academia and to teaching young people and to writing longer essays is that I think we have a spiritual and relational and moral crisis we’re dealing with. And I figured I could make some little contribution over there.
Dionne: When we were talking, Robert, you said we were going to look back over this 22-year period. I think the two times in that period when David and I came — we weren’t close to coming to blows, but when we were really angry at each other in a way that was unusual for how we talked — one was during the recount in Florida. I actually remember having to join “All Things Considered,” stopping at the side of the road on the Beltway. I was on my way somewhere, and the Supreme Court ruled that we were just going to stop counting the votes in Florida. And then the other was during the Iraq war.
Those were two really difficult periods. But when you think about what David talks about, correctly — a certain loss of confidence, a loss of the ability to argue about real things in a way where argument is seen as leading you somewhere, as opposed to just continuing indefinitely — it really stands out.
Think about what people in their 20s or 30s lived through in that period. We came out of a period of enormous prosperity. We thought peace would last forever. The Berlin Wall was down, and quickly, we had 9/11 and then endless wars, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, that went on and on. Then we had the economic collapse of 2008. The country itself has gone through a lot of trauma. And then we had the pandemic. So I think that there are a lot of reasons for why we are where we are, but I think that trauma — we still have not fully come to terms with or come out the other side of it. We have to get there at some point.
Siegel: One measure of change for me is that I remember covering — first from Washington from a distance and then down in New Orleans — Hurricane Katrina. One of the great solutions to the problem of 9/11 was to create a single department, a single agency that would bring together virtually every disaster we could possibly experience as a country, would be the work of the secretary of homeland security, who was Michael Chertoff at that time.
I remember wondering in New Orleans, “Was it really such a great idea to have every threat facing our country on one man’s desk?”
Dionne: I’m really glad you raised that. I’m curious what David thinks about this. Ben Rhodes had a very good piece in The Times about a week or so ago. People talk about “abolish ICE,” and I heard Jim McGovern, the progressive Democrat from Massachusetts, put it in the same way, but differently. He said: Let’s scrap it and start over.
I think this is the time to rethink the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Does the Coast Guard belong in there? Does FEMA belong in there? And by the way, “homeland” is just not much of an American word. It’s not a word we ever used as a nation. So I think this is a time to use that sort of battle cry, “abolish ICE,” and take it in the direction of rethinking how we created this agency under a lot of pressure. The country was scared, legitimately so. And you don’t always do your best work in government when you’re scared. I think D.H.S. is an example of that.
Brooks: I was once at a dinner that Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, had with a bunch of journalists. He said that every reform he initiated in his first term turned out exactly backward from how he expected it. And he said: I’m an anti-reform reformer now because it never works, and that’s why I’m a conservative. To quote Edmund Burke: You should operate on society the way you would operate on your father — as humbly, as incrementally and as delicately as possible.
So I would be for reforming D.H.S., not tearing it down.
Siegel: On that note, our final question has been the same in every one of these, which is: What’s been some source of joy that you’ve experienced? E.J., we’ll start with you.
Dionne: I just want to say I thought that Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl — I didn’t like the outcome; I’m an ardent Patriots fan — but that was an extraordinary thing. It came at a particular time with the reckoning in the country about what ICE is doing, but he was incredibly political by being less directly political. He reminded us of the depth of how much Latino music just matters to Americans. Going way back, I was thinking of Ritchie Valens and “La Bamba,” which is one of the most covered hits of all time. But also the sense of community and love. That was a real marriage that happened, a real wedding that happened in the middle of that. It was a beautiful tribute to a very important piece of our tradition.
Siegel: My source of joy involved going to New York, in part to celebrate our older daughter’s 50th birthday. I’m contacting the hospital asking for a recount. I think there must be something wrong with that, but we also saw our other daughter in something called “Diaspora,” an immersive dramatic experience of which she was a singer and the music director. Leah Siegel. It was a wonderful evening about women’s stories, fleeing from their native lands.
David, the final word?
Brooks: Leaving The New York Times is not joyous. I’m filled with intense gratitude and real terror because I have to do something new. But I had a weird moment when sometimes you run into a great teacher, and this is going to sound trivial, but it produced tremendous joy for me in the last week. I played tennis off and on my whole life, and my backhand is OK. My forehand has been terrible since I was 14. I had this French guy named Justin give me a lesson. He told me exactly how to do forehand, and I can’t tell you how much pleasure it now gives me to walk on the court knowing I don’t have to run around my forehand forever and just get competent at something or semicompetent at something.
I think we all have the desire to get semicompetent at something. And for some kids — you watch them skate down a stairway, and they’re falling, falling, falling, until they can pull the trick. And now I’m semicompetent in having a forehand. I don’t know why that gives me such pleasure, but it does.
Siegel: Well, congratulations, both on your forehand and also on whatever lies ahead instead of being a columnist.
David, E.J., thanks to both of you.
Dionne: Thank you.
Brooks: Thank you.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Video editing by Arpita Aneja. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. 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.
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