The Opinions - Bret Stephens on What Trump Gets Right, Wrong and Really, Really Wrong

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

On this First 100 Days episode, the deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, and the columnist Bret Stephens discuss the nuance of being a conservative and critical of President Trump.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Aman Sahota. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Patrick Healy, Deputy Editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is the first hundred days, a weekly series examining President Trump's use of power and his drive to change America. So this week, I wanted to talk to my colleague, columnist Brett Stevens. Brett is a conservative who occupies this really interesting, position. He's a Trump critic who thinks the administration is succeeding on some fronts, and he's an American who wants strong leadership in his country, but finds both political parties

really lacking. So what's it like to agree with Trump on a bunch of issues, but also kind of hate him? I'm curious how Brett wrestles with that dichotomy and how he thinks Americans should see the next four years. Brett, thanks for joining me. Such a pleasure to be here. Brett, I really love talking to you because you push me on ideas and you push readers and listeners, and you don't let anyone off the hook.

You're self-included. So I want to start with something you've been candid about. You've been tough on Trump from the get-go, but you also generally approve of how he's used power to secure the southern border and how Trump is pushed to get rid of DEI. the Department of Education, and his support for Israel. So what's your starting point with Trump?

Is it being open-minded about his agenda? Is it disliking him personally? And can you talk a bit about how you've been processing the past couple months? Well, you know, Patrick, I think your intro maybe 24 hours out of date because my feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Marianas trench. And so the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful, and bad, not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement. So it is true that I give him credit for getting control over the southern border. It was a colossal folly of the Biden administration not to get a better grip on that.

I thought DEI had gotten out of hand and I was happy to see the administration's orders about it. But I have two large, maybe three large objections to what is going on. One of them is that even when the administration does what I think is the right thing. It does it in the wrong way. The second thing is that some of what it is doing, I'm thinking of the case of Rego Garcia, the migrant who was unlawfully deported and whom the administration refuses to bring back in compliance with the court order, I think, is unconstitutional and un-American. And I think that there is a mean-spiritedness of vulgarity that just sits outside of the spirit of the America that I love. Yeah.

So those three things together do a lot to obscure the increasingly sort of dwindling number of policy decisions of which I say, okay, yeah, that's what I might have done or what I wish would have seen done by another administration. Let me bear down on this because I think you've pushed me and others to remember, you know, this is a president of the United States that to start on day one in a posture of, you know, resistance and oppose, oppose, oppose, oppose everything, you know, can be a limited way of thinking about it. But what was the turning point for you? And I'm not saying you're now Mr. Resistance, but was there kind of a moment recently where things really changed for you?

or did he somehow, you know, reveal himself just that much more to be the person he is? One of the things I've come to appreciate is the extent to which the first Trump administration was helped by Republican opposition to some of what Trump was trying to do, which kept him from going off the rails. And when the administration resumed in January, I probably had it too much in my mind, that this administration would look a lot like the previous one. And it turns out it looks nothing like it at all because there are no Republicans who are willing publicly or even it seems privately to push back against Trump's worst impulses

and ideas of which there are so many. So the turning point for me was Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky's visit to the Oval Office where a person that the United States ought to consider a vital ally, not to mention a heroic figure, was publicly humiliated and treated with the most incredible kind of discourtesy by the president and the vice president basically kicked out of the White House. And as the saying goes, it was worse than a crime. It was a mistake. A crime because America should never treat an ally that way. Certainly not one who is braided. fighting a common enemy. But it was also a mistake because nothing could have delighted Vladimir Putin more than the sight of that public humiliation. It merely emboldened Putin to press the war harder. So if Trump's goal is actually to end the war, it put that goal further out of reach. And it's this kind of combination in the administration of a kind of a malice and

idiocy that is almost unique in American history. And the presidents we've had, I think, of Richard Nixon, who sometimes acted with malice, were usually pretty clever. But here, it's like a face-plant presidency. It's doing terrible things and screwing up even in its own maliciousness. Brett, let's talk more about that, that malice, that humiliation you were talking about with Zelensky, the way that Trump approaches people and institutions and even policy, what do you think he wants America to be? I think he wants a nation of toadies. Yeah.

If there is some kind of reptilian cunning to what he does to his entire approach, it's to turn everyone into a supplicant. I'm thinking of the way in which he went after law firms so that they had to kind of bend the knee. Even the tariff scheme, when you think about it, by imposing these tariffs, it means that the Tim Cooks of the world, the tech people, have to go begging to the White House to carve out exemptions. And I think that's essentially the way in which Trump operates.

He gets the most satisfaction when he sees that he's managed to turn someone into a dependent on him. I mean, think of the people who are now in his inner circle. Lindsey Graham was a vociferous opponent turned into a toady. J.D. Vance, another vociferous opponent, now a toady. Marco Rubio, you'll remember the 2016 debates, another toady. That's how Trump likes it. He likes the feeling that he is conquered and humiliated another person

and that they are now paying him court. Brett, yes. People have talked about it as an imperial presidency. People talk about it as a dictatorial one. I just think he loves signing executive orders. I think he loves sitting at that desk and exerting a kind of leverage that doesn't need Congress, that doesn't necessarily need the bureaucracy. It's him dominating people.

And the aesthetic of it, of him sitting at this desk with no papers, no evidence that he is busying himself, except to be handed a decree, which he then signs in that ostentatious signature. of his, that iconography clearly flatters some deep part of his vanity or his ego. But it's also so contrary to the spirit of the presidency. It's so contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, you know, a co-equal branch of government working through respect and negotiation, looking for win-win solutions. And Trump is incapable of thinking beyond a zero sum. That's what's so corrosive and troubling for me. And by the way, I actually think that those of us who are critics of

Trump, who find him at some level vomitous, are better critics when we concede from time to time that he has accomplished something, that not everything is dreadful, idiotic. You have to keep your brain on. And I think the danger for a lot of Trump critics, and one of the reasons I resist the term resistance, is that once you join the resistance, your brain goes off and you have a hard time understanding the deeper sources of his appeal or the ways in which even if he's not entirely right, he's at least half right. And I think that's an important way in which I think Trump needs to be approached, because I think one thing everyone can agree on, Trump supporters and critics alike, is that so far, the efforts to stop him have so obviously failed.

What's an example of half-right that is illuminating or revealing Brett about what Trump is really up to, do you think? Well, let's take the universities, for example. When the list of demands for a Columbia University came down, I know that privately, many university president said, well, this is what we should have done. Banning face covering masks, having a disciplinary process that's meaningful, ensuring that Jewish students feel safe on campus, all perfectly fine. And to the extent that if he had limited, if the administration had limited itself to those sorts of demands, it would have been hard to make the case against them. But what clearly is now

happening, what we've learned over the last 10 days, is this is a an effort not to curb or reduce anti-Semitism. It's an effort to destroy academic freedom. So he latched on to the question of the issue of anti-Semitism on campus, which is real, which is right, which I think the left was in denial about to a great extent. But he's using it for an agenda, which is destructive to American liberty. Not just destructive to American liberty, Brett, but you've been such a powerful voice and thinker on anti-Semitism. How much does it bother you that Trump has used anti-Semitism in such a, frankly, Brett, exploitative way to get the ends that he wants? So this is a column that I really need to write because it really rankles. I'm a you Chicago person. I have a fundamental commitment to concepts of academic freedom, which include the right of

students and professors to espouse views, which I find mistaken, wrong, and even loathsome. And so what Trump has now done is turned a legitimate grievance, and a specifically Jewish grievance, into a tool to undermine and potentially destroy a value, which is, I think, a core Jewish value, which is the value of debate, dissent, reason, inquiry, criticism and so on. The one mistake we cannot make is we cannot get on the side of illiberalism. We cannot get on the side of people who pretend to be our friends but seek to undermine a political order centered on the notion of the freedom of conscience and thought, the freedom and the dignity of the individual. I don't mean liberalism in the kind of progressive sense. I mean liberalism in the classic Jefferson. and John Stuart Mill sense of the word. I think it's dangerous because it means that it puts the

Jewish population sort of as a protected class of the ruler. And that's happened historically for Jews over the centuries. We keep hoping the next king is not going to expel us or put us to the torch. But the whole purpose of liberalism is that Jews enjoy the same kind of rights and privileges and freedoms as everyone else as equal citizens. That's the promise of Washington's letter to the Newport congregation. You know, he says, we no longer speak of mere tolerance because Jews are every bit as American as everyone else. And so there is a side of the Jewish population that's sort of cheering Trump because he seems to have the same enemies or many of the same enemies that we do. But the methods he's using to oppose those enemies are methods we ought to fear.

That's the thing I don't understand, Brett. Why do some Jews, why do so many conservatives throw in with Trump's illiberalism? Is it that the ends justify the means? Is it something different? Do they not see America? First of all, I mean, I'd have to look back at the exit polling, but I think Harris won an overwhelming share of the Jewish vote. She did.

Including this Jewish voter, my vote, precisely with the same fears that I have. Look, I mean, this is a uniquely vulnerable time. I think the answer is that for many Jews, including Jews who voted for Trump, did so through with immense reluctance because they see him for who he is. I mean, I'm sure that there's some number

who are enthusiastically MAGA, but I don't actually know any of them. I think the ones that I know who voted reluctantly for Trump said, the Jewish people faces a kind of a state of emergency. Israel is under a unique kind of threat. The eruption of anti-Semitism is something the world hasn't witnessed

since the 1930s in extreme times call for extreme measures. Sometimes you need to summon the bully to fight back the furies, right? I'm trying to do justice to the thinking of a minority of Jewish voters who, I think, for understandable reasons, said, this guy's on our side and we can't be choosy at a moment of existential peril. And I want to be clear, this is not just, you know, Jewish Americans. This is many Americans who I think saw a version of a national emergency, that America had kind of lost the plot, that the country had turned into something over the last five or ten years

that was different than what they knew. And there were a lot of people who saw Trump, who still see Trump, as essentially a strong figure, as someone who was going to take stands that might be deeply unpopular, might get him called illiberal by New York Times columnists, but who see him as having his back against a wall for America. Am I puffing him up, or does that speak to you? I don't think you can explain Trump's rise

without fully taking account the extent to which the Democratic Party as exemplified by Biden and Harris. And Biden was the ostensible moderate, but I'm talking about President Biden, not candidate Biden. simply lost the confidence of the American people for exactly the kinds of reasons that you just illustrated. It became a party that seemed to represent an alphabet soup of Americans rather than America itself.

It became a party wedded to a set of ideas that profoundly alienated a lot of Americans. And actually, for all the talk about inclusion, very exclusionary of those of us who just thought, well, I'm an American. You know, that's the foremost aspect of my social identity or my political identity. And then the gaslighting of the United States through the pretense that Joe Biden was fit to run for president, the high-handedness of an an incompetent candidate, in my view, in the space of a day. There's a segment of the readership that is always angry that I was sort of slow to publicly,

endorse Kamala, which always amuses me because it sort of so puffs up my importance. The idea that, you know, my reluctance to vote for Kamala was a reason for her defeat is hilarious to me. But what I spent the entire time, the political season, doing before I endorsed Harris, is first begging Biden to get out of the race. I started begging him in 2021. And then saying, please, let's have an open primary. Don't anoint Kamala as your candidate, because, judging by her performance in 2019. She never even made it to 2020. And the Democrats couldn't rise to that.

I think there's now, I'm thinking of people like Seth Moulton, Ro Kana, Richie Torres, John Federman, Alyssa Slotkin, Josh Shapiro. There's much more intellectual ferment in the Democratic Party, more of an effort to reckon with their mistakes. So that gives me some hope. What is all of this cruelty and overreach by Trump? due to the conservative movement, to Republicans,

to people who believe in the rule of law and identify themselves as conservatives. I mean, to some extent, folks like you who've described a sense of being politically homeless right now, but also there are ideas that you believe in. You can sort of see Trump's point in some ways, and yet it can kind of muffle the record and the agenda and what he's doing.

you know, at some level, my only standard is I try to maintain a sense of intellectual honesty and humility. If Trump is going to do something that I've advocated for years long before, you know, he came on the political scene, let's say moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, I'm going to praise it. What else can I do? Oh, Trump did it, so therefore it's corrupt because it's dress. downed out by his cruelty and his otherwise, you know, general terribleness. And I don't think that occasionally finding areas of agreement diminishes the power of my fundamental criticism of the guy.

I think it enhances it. If you can point to the fact that you're not just sort of suffering from what the Republicans like to call Trump derangement syndrome, that you are capable of seeing areas of agreement, that you're not willing to abandon your former point of view, simply because Trump's position coincides with your own. It just strikes me that you are maintaining a sense of intellectual honesty. I mean, I've kind of watched the way in which the never-Trump movement,

you know, that I was a charter member of back in 2015, the way in which it has gone. And, of course, some never-Trumpers, like J.D. Vance, just became ardent Trumpers. Some never-Trumpers just kind of adopted a George Costanza do-the-office frame of mind. they effectively became indistinguishable from the leftists they used to oppose. But I also think, and this is maybe the key point, Patrick, the United States needs a healthy conservative movement. The United States needs a conservative movement that is grounded in its foundational,

liberal, classically liberal principles. And the way I see my role is to express the conservatism, which I think is essential for a healthy democracy. I mean, every society is going to have a conservative side. There's never been a society in history that doesn't have a kind of conservative leaning people. I think it's psychological. And the question is, does that conservatism express itself in a Reagan-esque fashion, George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, those, John McCain, those types of conservatives? Or does it kind of tilt into an illiberalism that Trump represents?

And what I'm trying to do is uphold the idea, however lonely it is, of a conservative movement that seeks to have an honorable place in a liberal democratic order. That resonates for me, and I might put it a slightly different way. I always thought that a really strong Democratic Party would be the greatest threat to conservatism in this country. But now I think it's Trump. Trump's in ways the greatest threat to conservatism. Do you agree? Yeah, because he presents himself as a quintessential conservative and a generation of young conservative-minded people are coming to see his brand of the right as being the real brand, the real version of the right.

And I think one of the things that I now find really worrying among my kids' generation is meeting young right-wingers, whose idea of what a conservative is is Victor Orban. And I just part, I just completely part company with them. I mean, I do my best to say, no. You know, in the spirit of Gladiator, there was a dream that was Rome, and this is not it. I mean, Brett, you wrote a really powerful column recently about the idea of democratic nobility, sort of small D Democrat. And I, what you're saying kind of resonates with that.

But it also makes me think of the introduction to this episode where, I think what is special about the work that you do are those values about openness and inquiry. I wasn't trying to say that you're somehow a Trump hugger, but you're someone who approaches these issues from a fundamental point of openness and sort of asking, you know, what is the intent? I think what a lot of readers and listeners of yours

and myself included as kind of a colleague, do wonder, what path do you see America on right now? What do you see Trump leading us toward, if not democratic nobility and as someone who tries to, frankly, model kind of openness in the way that you think about this guy? Well, I mean, I think his aspiration is what Victor Orban called a liberal democracy, which isn't quite autocracy, but resembles not only Orban's, Hungary, but Erdogan's Turkey, for instance. On the other hand, I am not a pessimist about the

United States, and I think this is important to say. America has endured other presidents who exceeded by a lot the bounds of the Constitution in pursuit of their agendas. And the country tended again to find its balance. I mean, if we were having this conversation in 1973, 1974, we would be saying the same thing about Richard Nixon. The United States is a 250-year-old next year, 250-year-old republic, and we have seen worse. And what I think is actually happening now is in some ways healthy, which is that Trump's aggressiveness, his overreach, is changing the conversation in the United States. We used to be saying the vibe shift was to the right. It doesn't seem like that right now. That's the nature of a free society. And democracies that are

constantly attentive to the ways in which things are going wrong tend to be more adaptive and more flexible and ultimately more resilient than states like China, which pursue the path of the leader and then find themselves running into trouble. So I have to, actually think that a lot of Americans are going to learn from these four years of Trump, and we might come out of the other end of a better country. I mean, I know that sounds a little Pollyanna right now, but I think history in this sense is on my side, and there have been other periods of deep pessimism and in some ways seemingly justified pessimism about the direction of the country. And we've surmounted and survived them and learned from those episodes, just as we did,

I don't know, the Red Scare, the McCarthy period. So I'm not completely doom and gloom yet, although sometimes it's hard to shake it. Thanks a lot, Brett. Patrick, it's a pleasure. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez-Boid, Veshawc, Dr. Giacke Darba, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Brzeck, and Annie Roos.

Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The executive producer of Times' opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.