The Opinions - David Brooks on Why the Democrats Are Losing to Trump

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

The columnist David Brooks joins Patrick Healy to take stock of President Trump’s fifth address to Congress, to analyze the Democrats’ response, and to discuss where Americans who care about moral leadership should put their energies today. Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Opinions” at nytimes.com/column/the-opinions.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. Edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. The show’s production team also includes Derek Arthur and Vishakha Darbha. Original music by Aman Sahota, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times 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. Speaker Johnson, Vice President Vance. On Tuesday night, in his speech to Congress, Trump spun a narrative about a power. America that I think a lot of Americans are really going to like. The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation.

We must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president. He framed the country and his presidency as dominant, certain, optimistic. While the opposition party was reduced to waving, little placards. It reminded me a bit of Reagan in 1981. Trump looked strong on offense. The Democrats looked soft on defense. But Trump was also masking something. He was elected to fix inflation and bring order to America. He hasn't done it. And if he can't, no campaign style speech is going to trick Americans to forget how hard they have it. You can use rhetoric, but only

so far. This week, I wanted to talk to my colleague David Brooks, because he's captured the changes in society and America with such insight in recent years. David has also written about two things on my mind after Tuesday's speech. The Patriots in Ukraine, who once inspired so many Republicans, and about Trump as a populist pretender. How does Trump use power, language, rhetoric, to to exercise dominance, even if it's hollow. David, thanks for being here. Well, great to be with you, Patrick. David, so let's start with Trump's speech from Tuesday night.

What surprised you, if anything? He got a kid into West Point. I've never seen a president do that. Right? He was handing out gifts, you know, like it was Christmas. I was looking under my chair. Maybe I got something to. You know, I think a little of what surprised me is a bit of what you said.

I thought the word used and the word I used in response last night was dominant. It was a dominant speech. Politically, I thought it was a very good speech. Country wants change. Here's the guy who says, I'm doing this. I'm doing this. I'm doing this. And so, you know, people like me don't like a lot of the changes he's doing.

But for half the country, the sports Donald Trump, they're fine with it and they're happy with it. His approvals are up a tick since he won election. And then there were just so many dramatic personal moments. I mean, he is a TV performer. Yes. And, you know, the moment with that cute kid DJ, who wants to be a come-a-cop who is suffering from brain cancer, widows were recognized. And there were just a lot of dramatic moments for people to think, wow, that's a good guy. And then the Democrats, as you say, I thought they should have just sat there.

There's just no upside. And I thought some of the screaming and Algarians walking out, you know, when Marjorie Taylor Green behaved shamefully, a lot of progressive commentators were, you know, rightly offended. and you've got to have some intellectual consistency. You can't oppose Marjorie Taylor Green and then think what Al Green did was totally fine. I just thought the Democrats were losing their way until the response. Elizabeth Slotkin's response, I thought, was excellent.

Look, the president talked a big game on the economy, but it's always important to read the fine print. So, do his plans actually help Americans get ahead? Not even close. She spoke in a way that appeals to, like swing voters. It wasn't, she didn't talk like she was coming out of Washington, D.C. or some faculty club. She talked about the big issues in a big way, in a way that will appeal to people who are undecided. And that was a kind of message the Democratic Party can build on. David, it's so important

to underscore that with speeches like this, a lot of Americans aren't sitting there with a scorecard, just kind of like rating and fact checking and assessing policies. It is about how these speeches make people feel. And it's that moment that you touched on about the young boy who wanted to be a cop, who was kind of lifted up and sworn in the Secret Service. I mean, that is the moment when my phone blew up from both Republicans, Democrats, and people who I hear from in politics, because Trump made people feel something with moments like that. And again, it's not that people in America are sitting around doing a fact check on these speeches, they're looking to feel the impact of them. Yeah, and, you know, let's take for a couple other examples. He talked about all

the people allegedly getting social security benefits, even though they're 160 years old. Now, people like us, like we're a media obsessed, so we know that that was all disproven that there really are no 320-year-old people getting social security benefits. There are no 160-year-olds getting those benefits. That story has been shot down by Trump's own social. Social Security administrator. But when you're sitting there reading and you're just a normal person who pays normal attention to politics, you think, wow, that's ridiculous. I'm glad he's getting rid of this stuff.

If there's one through line in this administration so far, it's the amassing of power. And if there's another strategy through line through this administration, it's the destruction of anything that might restrain power. And so that's bureaucracy. He fired in the military. He fired the Jags. In the agencies, he fired the inspectors general. He goes off the media because we're a potential restraint on his power.

And so really, it's just so far the amassing of power and the destruction of anything that would restrain power. That I do think is the through line. So, David, I wanted to bear down on the point you made about the Democrats on Tuesday night and how they look to you. I guess what I'm wondering, David, is what does effective opposition look like for Democrats? What should they have done not only Tuesday night, but just right now in dealing with the Trump fire hose? Yeah, I would advise Democrats to take some time off. They're not in control. They don't have power.

But mostly a lot of the categories Democrats have used to understand reality don't describe actual reality. I don't think Democrats have coped with the fact that they're more of the party of the elites now than the party of the working class. I don't think they expected so many black and brown voters to go for Donald Trump. And it just takes an intellectual revolution to adjust. and they have to make some fundamental decisions. Do they want to work really hard to once again become the party of the working class? Is that even possible? Joe Biden tried with good economic policies.

You know, large percentage of his benefits from all his various actions went to working class voters. It did him no political benefit because you can't solve with economics a problem that's fundamentally about culture and respect. And so maybe they should do that. Or maybe they should accept the fact we're the party of the College of Education. and urban classes. And that's who we are, and we're going to represent those people, and hopefully we'll build some majorities around those people. And going back to the 19th century, Andrew Jackson, the 1830s, who's the closest politician we've ever had to Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson, who, like Trump, was a narcissist, was power-hungry, and didn't fundamentally

know what he was doing to screw up. And lo and behold, Andrew Jackson made a terrible decision to close the Second Bank of the United States, and the end result was basically a, basically a decade-long depression. And so Democrats right now, I think, have to wait for Donald Trump to screw up. And I think the tariffs maybe that screw up. Maybe the policy toward Ukraine will be that screw up. But I'm assuming that a guy who doesn't know what he's doing will make some major errors, and then the Democrats will see some opportunities. Yeah. David, what about the Democrats who care less about strategy and seeming savvy, but instead feel like, you know what, I have values. I have

morals. I want to stick up for trans kids playing sports in school. What did they do when they feel like they're left kind of in the political wilderness, that they're leaderless, that they have values, but somehow they need to put them on the

shelf for a while because they're not in power? I'll go back to Abraham Lincoln. You know, the guy hated slavery and wanted to get rid of slavery, but he knew he could only move at the speed of the country. And that speed was not fast enough for Frederick Douglass and people like that. But in my view, it was, you know, it was the only way to do it.

You couldn't say we're fighting this word end slavery in 1861. You could say it by 1865, but you had to bring people along. Yes. And I would say if you're a Democrat with progressive values, there are some ways you've won the country over on gay marriage, on LGBTQ rights. But the high school sports thing is probably right now a step too far, and it may, frankly, forever be a step too far. Yeah.

And so focus on. the values that really, you know, help win elections. If you're running in a political campaign, be true to your values, but in ways that win elections. I wrote a column last week about our friend Desra Klein, and he's got a book coming out with Derek Thompson on this abundance agenda. And what really impresses me about that agenda is not only the specific policies that Ezra and Derek are talking about, making housing more affordable and things like that. But it's the values. It's the idea that we're a country on the move or a dynamic country. we can do big things.

And to me, we're in such an atmosphere of depression, despair, negativity to have politicians come along and say, hey, don't give up hope. We can do big things. That's a faith in America that, you know, Ronald Reagan showed. That's a faith in America that Franklin, Dylan Roosevelt showed. And so to me, these are some values that are out there for Democrats to seize on. I think that's right. A successful president knows how to read.

read the country. He knows how to read the country. He doesn't try to get ahead of the country. He doesn't try to tell the country, you know, solely how to be and to catch up with him. I think Bill Clinton understood that. Obama understood that, to your point about Lincoln, very much understanding it. I do think Trump, in his use of power, has a pretty canny sense about what the country, if not wants, what it responds to viscerally, emotionally. You know, Kamala Harris is. for they, them, Donald Trump is for you. You know, it still kind of rings as a message that I think, at least like a lot of Americans intuitively understand. Yeah, I think he has two fundamental things that are on his side. The one is the sense that, you know, we all need a secure base in our lives. One of my favorite things in psychology is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. And our secure base for most of us is like a secure family. It's a secure home, a community that is prospering, but it's also a moral order, the idea that we're all have a common set of values. And so Trump says you have no secure base. Your families are fragile.

The moral order has been shredded, and I'm going to give you a secure base. So that's a really foundational thing, he argues. The second thing is, in my view, the highly educated people have created a caste system in America over the last 70 years so that, you know, people with high school degrees die eight years sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees, their children fall four grade levels behind kids from other families by sixth grade. They're four grade levels lower. And so we have a caste system. And Trump says, I'm, I'm with you guys, the working class. And Democrats have gotten on the wrong side of both those gigantic issues, and those are epical issues. And he builds on that in a lot of different ways. And so he did so

last night just by celebrating the kid who wants to become a cop. He's not celebrating the kid who wants to become a, you know, a neuroscientist. Right, or a college professor. Right. And so he sends those cultural signals very successfully and very insistently. David, I want to go back to your point about the moral order and society, which you've written so powerfully about. And what I had in mind was these two columns of yours, this powerful column in 2002 after Russia invaded Ukraine. where you talked about that sense of inspiration that a lot of Americans felt, regardless of party, seeing a people fighting for their country,

standing up for what they saw as their values, their future, their liberty, and how inspiring that was for so many Americans. And then more recently, a piece about Trump as kind of a faux populist, someone who, in language, in policy, in aesthetics, kind of trades in a certain kind of man of the people, and yet doesn't govern as a populist.

How do you define fake populism? And more broadly, how has this swing happened so quickly where what once inspired so many Americans now seems to be something that, you know, in Congress on Tuesday night, you had so many members seeming to kind of thumb their nose spending any more money on Ukraine? Yeah, when I was a young journalist, I worked for the Wall Street Journal, and I was a foreign

correspondent. I lived in Europe, and I covered the end of the Soviet Union, the independence of Ukraine, the fall of Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the end of apartheid, the creating the Maastricht Treaty, really the European Union. And the ethos in those days was one of convergence, that walls were falling, barriers were falling, the world was coming together. Even our political system seemed to be coming together. China and Russia in those days seemed to be coming closer to democratic capitalism. So convergence. And that was sort of the heyday of the liberal world order. And pretty much since the first 25 years of this century, since 9-11, the age of convergence has gone into reverse. And we're now in the age of building walls.

And countries are separating. And Donald Trump is the essence of a wall builder. He came to 2016, let's build a wall on the southern border. But now we're building a wall between us and Canada. We're building a wall between us in Europe. We're even building a wall internally. I'm not sure I've ever seen the president explicitly call out the opposing party and attack them for not applauding and being far left radicals or whatever he called them. But he's erecting walls.

And so I think a lot of us still believe in liberal values. We live in convergence. We like to have friends like Canada and France and the UK. Like, you know, friends are valuable things to have. But Trump is a true isolationist and is building wall around America. And so that, that I think is the shift in values. As for the faux populism, you know, I've been around these people all my life. I graduated from college in 1983.

I worked in National Review in 1984. And my first encounter with Trumpians was way back then, though we didn't know it at the time. There was a group at Dartmouth, a nice Ivy League, called the Dartmouth Review. And famous people who've emerged from there, Laura Ingram, who's, on Fox and Dinesh DeSuzza, who's off in the swamped lands of ideology somewhere, but they were very different than us. We were like Ernest, we read Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. They were like, let's take on the left. And the classic Dartmouth Review action took place in 1986. A group of progressive students had erected a shanty on the quad at Dartmouth to protest apartheid,

a thing very much worth opposing. And the Dartmouth Review guys, in the middle of the night, with sledgehammers broke it all down. And I remember I think that's appalling. Hey, apartheid really is terrible. We should not be defending it. But B, coming in with sledgehammers, like that's more Gestapo than Edmund Burke. And yet that kind of person who's in the elite universities,

but it was a dissenter in the elite universities, who's fed up with the progressive orthodoxy that dominates those universities. So you get Elon Musk going to Penn. You get Vivek Ramoswamy who went to Harvard in Yale. You go down the list. Steve Miller went to do. And these are elite dissenters from the university culture.

They are not populists. And as a result, when they come to power, you know, they don't really do all that much to help the working class. Like I talked about the health disparities, the education disparities, the family disparities. I would love it if the Trump administration would take on those substantive disparities that make it hard to be working class right now. But they don't do that. They go after NIH. They go after the Department of Education. They go after USAID.

They go after the places where they think elite. liberals live. David, you're making me think about an idea that I want to run by you about Trump. It's that Trump has the wrong answers, but is asking some of the right questions. You know, the right questions being, how do we end the war in Ukraine? How do we get Arab leaders to do more with Gaza? How do we deal with a weak Europe? How do we reform the federal government?

And then how do we fix inflation? And I'm wondering if you think there's anything to that. I mean, is Trump forcing us to confront questions that American leaders have been ignoring for too long? Yeah, I thousand percent agree with that is the wrong answer to the right question. And so, you know, take, for example, we had education policies by Republicans and Democrats, starting with really George H.W. Bush and straight through to Obama, which said the way to succeed in this world is to get a college degree and get a white college job. and all the education reforms were geared toward getting people into college. Well, a lot of people don't want to go to college. They don't think it's right for them.

It's not right for their skill set. And yet there was no policy to them. So Donald Trump identified that problem. Did he solve it? Of course not. But he did identify a core problem. And I find this is true again and again and again that there's always some element of truth in what Trump is saying. Is there inefficiency in the federal government?

Of course. Of course there is. Is that Donald Trump have the right solution to it? No. And one of my big questions, I don't know what you think of this, is like how much actual change is going to happen? How much is it just churn? How much is this stuff that's going to be blocked by the courts?

How much it is doge-like sort of show business, but no actual spending cuts? I mean, Trump did not talk about Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security last night, except for the Social Security fraud. And if you don't talk about that, you're not really talking about spending cuts. Yeah. So I just don't know how much. we're looking at just a circus and how much we're looking at a policy revolution. The thing that worries me about that, David, is that we're going to end up with this

giant security blanket called America that has all these little holes in it, like that there's no, there's no normal pattern, there's no tightly knitted hole, W-H-O-L-E. Instead, there are just these little kind of like pockmarks that leave it weakened. I don't know what the plan is. two months in. It just seems like it's Trump telling us we're in a golden age and, hey, he's better than George Washington. You know, George Washington's now number two. But where does it leave us? I think for a lot of Americans, every day is a scary day to wake up to. I mean, I'm just thinking of a piece our colleague, David Wallace Wells, wrote about the fifth anniversary of COVID. And you read it And you just come away thinking that the 2020s are the disaster decade.

Yeah, I guess I would say, like, I read a lot of history. What decade is better than ours? Every decade has their thing. Like the 1880s, there was severe economic depressions. There was savage inequalities. We were doing industrialization terribly. 1960s, assassinations, riots. Every generation has their World War II, has their civil war,

has whatever. And so we're no different. And we are going through a very hard time. But I guess the question I would ask, is it really the world is coming to an end or are we catastrophizing? And there's no decade in history except maybe the 1990s I would like to go back to. And that's just because I really like Snow Patrol and they were big in the 1990s. But no, I mean, most historical errors have their gigantic challenges. I wasn't alive for the depth of the Cold War, but that must have been a pretty terrifying time. Terrifying time.

David, this is why I love talking to you. No, but you think about it. I mean, even in the 1980s, which are, you know, remembered as kind of a Reagan golden age the end of the Soviet Union, I remember that fear I felt about the idea of a nuclear Holocaust that it was a different kind of fear than I've ever felt in my life.

And you're right. There's no, there is no perfect. decade. I mean, I remember the hairspray and the bad movies in the 90s, David, so I don't necessarily want to go back to that. But to that point, David, I mean, you write about culture and

feelings as well. And I want to end with this. This Trump moment, just has so many people on edge, you know, from Washington, D.C. and the mood there, to farmers and workers, you know, in red states who are seeing the system

freeze up on them. And there's just this kind of casual cruelty at work with all of this, quote-unquote, momentum of Trump's. You published a book that was a guide to fostering human connection. What has been on your mind just over the last several weeks watching where things are heading, not just in the White House, but in the country itself, in terms of that sense of kind of human connection? Yeah, it's funny. There's a Bruce Springsteen song from 2012 called We Take Care of Our Own. And that song has a brilliant double message, which is we love our people and we take care of our own.

But it's also like, we only take care of our own. And Trump does this. He's like, it's all about the end group and the out group. Yeah. And we take care of our own. But those people in the out group, they're the enemy. And I have to say, I travel a lot. And my travels, people are nice.

Like most people are just incredibly generous in a red or blue. And so I find on a local level, people go out of their way for each other. But it's in the national level. And when you're dealing with strangers and especially when you're dealing with the world through the prism of the media that you don't directly encounter, then the nastiness becomes so easy. And so Trump plays on an abstracted negativity and abstracted hatred that I don't think shows up all that often. It does, obviously, sometimes, but in day-to-day life. Totally. David, thanks so much for joining me.

Oh, it's a pleasure. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Bischakad, Bishaka, Phoebe, Phoebe, Feebillette, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabarrow, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota.

The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samueluski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.