The Opinions - ‘Donald Trump Will Not Be President Four Years Hence’

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

In a live event recorded at the Brooklyn Public Library on Tuesday, Opinion’s deputy editor, Patrick Healy, was joined by the columnists Michelle Goldberg, M. Gessen and Bret Stephens to discuss how President Trump’s second term has reshaped America in just 100 days.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Alison Bruzek. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur and Vishkaha Darbha. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. 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 Gregg Richards and the staff of the Brooklyn Public Library. 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. Today on The Opinions, something a little different. On Tuesday night, I hosted a conversation about President Trump's first hundred days. We did it in front of a live audience at the Brooklyn Public Library. I was joined by my colleagues Masha Gessen, Brett Stevens,

and Michelle Goldberg. And as you'll hear, we got into it. Here's our conversation. So I have the privilege of hosting this discussion with three of New York Times' opinions, most incisive columnists. Three people whose work for the last four years and beyond, including Masha's at The New Yorker,

have really challenged me and made me really question and debate some of my own assumptions. I wanted to bring them together at the 100-day mark to take stock of the Second Trump administration and better understand how Trump uses power and how he's changing America. Okay, so I want to start with a premise and a provocation to kick off our conversation.

My premise is this, that American voters knew last year exactly what Donald Trump was capable of as president, that Trump pretty much told us what he would do if reelected. It's prompted an editorial project by my Times opinion colleagues called Believe Him, that he told us, and that Trump won a free and fair election last November. Okay, so my provocation is this. America is getting the disruptive, destructive, bet the house, strongman presidency that millions of our fellow citizens wanted

and that Trump used these first hundred days to deliver on a mandate from November's plurality of voters. In other words, this is a presidency that more Americans voted for than voted against. And Michelle, I'm going to go to you first because you are a Brooklyn-based columnist in the House. Michelle, have the last three months been a president putting a mandate to work? Okay, so I would go back to your premise

and I would just add one word to it. You said Americans knew what they were getting. I think that you should have said Americans should have known what they were getting. If they read New York Times opinion in your columns, your columns, in your columns, they would have known. I mean, you can see just in the sort of incredulousness of these Wall Street traders that Trump

instituted these tariffs, that many people projected all kinds of ideas onto Donald Trump that were pretty divorced from what he said he was going to do. And in fact, it was sort of this eerie fog, I felt like, that had come over the country. There felt like there was this combination of mass amnesia or denial. I don't know what it was. but the mood leading up to the election felt so strange to me because there was just such a disconnect between what people thought they were voting for

and kind of what I thought they were voting for. So I think that you're right. And I would say this, whenever I write about, or whenever I would write about Donald Trump is going to do X, I would get two kinds of emails. One kind would say, you idiot, nobody thinks he's actually going to do that. And the other would be like, you idiot, of course, we know he's going to do that and you're the only one who doesn't like it.

So on the one hand, yes, I think you could argue that there is a certain amount of, there's the famous H.L. Megan quote, democracy is like that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. I might be mangling a little bit. It is exactly that. But I also think that you can already see that people, you know, again, they should have known, but they didn't. I mean, I think there was a poll today

that 52% of Americans think Donald Trump is a dangerous autocrat, right? Donald Trump is in polling underwater on every single issue because I think a lot of people either didn't know what it was going to look like or they convinced themselves that the people who were going to be hurt

were some other group of people that wasn't going to touch them. You know, you see this in, say, the people who are like, wait, how come, you know, my employer or my wife got deported. I thought he was only going to deport the bad people. And so I do think that whatever, that the democratic legitimacy that he has is eroding quickly. Brett, I want to come to you next on this because, you know, to Michelle's point,

I might disagree with that a little bit, only because we heard so much from Trump about tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, and my favorite word is tariffs last fall. How do you see this? Do you see this as a mandate at work or something else? No, not at all. And this is the point of my column that just was posted a couple of hours ago. I think Trump voters,

outside of maybe a very hard MAGA Corps, are shocked. You know, back in 2018, 19, before the pandemic, I was talking with a hedge fund guy who's kind of, I wouldn't call him a Trump supporter, but he was leaning in the president's favor. And he said, you know, when I listen to the president,

I don't like it. but when I turned the volume down to zero, I like the policy that I'm getting. And that's because the policy that he was getting in the first term was largely kind of a Paul Ryan Republicanism, agree or disagree, but it's a kind of a known quantity in American politics. And it was also because Trump 1.0 surrounded himself

with a set of figures who were familiar, reliable, reasonably competent, you know, guys like Gary Cohn for on economic policy and so on. And so I think Trump voters now, last year, thought, well, it's going to be just like the last time. And this is a president who loves to stir the pot. He loves to say outrageous things. But at the end of the day, he's a fairly conventional Republican. And that's not what they're getting.

And they are shocked that they're getting exactly what Trump promised. I just challenge you on that. though, Brett, because last year I don't think that we were hearing from Trump, oh, this is just simple restoration of my first term. This was God has saved me.

They didn't believe it. They didn't believe what? They just said that Trump wasn't saying. They just simply thought it's just that when you have a, I mean, I don't mean an interrupt crap, but when you have someone who just lies all the time and that's baked in, then and it's interesting that kind of the people who vote for Trump in a way depend on him lying

and see that dishonesty as like a point. in his favor? Like, yeah, he says he's going to do all these crazy things, but he's just bullshitting, and that's a good thing. I would slightly disagree with that, and then I want to go to Masha, only because we did all of these focus groups last year in Times' opinion. And one thing that we heard of time and again is people, certainly on the right, some in the center, some on the left, wanted to see serious, severe,

even draconian action on immigration, on issues of safety, that I don't think we were hearing as much in the first term, when it was a lot of like, build the wall. Well, the wall didn't get built, but, you know, as long as our economy is good. I do think there was an expectation of a very dramatic action. But, Masha, I want to go to you next. How have you seen these first 100 days? Well, I actually want to pick up on what Michelle and Brett were talking about.

I think that you can't argue in good faith that people were expecting the first Trump presidency, although I think in some sense they were, because there's a kind of chronic failure of the imagination, that has followed Trump's political career for nine years, ten years. But there's something that happened at the end of that term. It was January 6th. And so people who were voting for Trump

were not voting for a president. They were voting for somebody who promised to destroy the American system of government as it's constituted. And in that sense, yes, that's the mandate. Because I think if we argued that they, yeah, they voted for policies,

but they didn't really mean for him to start ignoring court decisions or send people to an offshore gulag with no due process. I think that's dishonest. I think that probably about 30% or not 30% of the country wants that or a big chunk of his voters want that, but there are also a lot of people who are just really checked out. I mean, I saw online today there was a thread for like Reddit lovers of Timo or shine one of those two Chinese retailers.

And people were like, wait, what's going on? Right. What? You know, there's like just a lot of people who are really good. No, but I mean, you know, they want to live well while he also destroys the system of government that they really hate. But I want to pick up on the January 6th point that Masha's making. Maybe ask this to you, Brett.

People, yes, had different opinions about what happened on January 6th, perhaps. But it seems like the reaction to. January 6 and the willingness among many of our fellow citizens to reelect Donald Trump either in spite of January 6 or because of January 6th, to me, you can

draw a line from that to what feels like a degradation or even an end of due process in this country, sort of a willingness to trample on the rule of law. Just to be clear, I wasn't endorsing

these voters. I was just trying to describe what I was hearing from them. And in fact, in many conversations I had last year before the election and the year before, I would say, is in January 6th a deal breaker? And you'd get this kind of vague, well, that was bad, but it wasn't quite as bad as the mainstream media portrays it to be.

And then there was a kind of a what-aboutism on purported sins of the opposition. and after all, they're trying to throw Trump in jail, and how scrupulous is that when it comes to democratic norms, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, they found ways to talk themselves into a kind of political amnesia. And, you know, the point that I kept making to them is if you don't have a executive that believes in the rule of law, that believes in democratic process and procedure,

that believes in foundational rights, civil liberties, due process, and so on, then everything you're hoping for in terms of the business climate is going to fall apart because a president who won't respect the due process rights of someone who is wrongfully deported to a hellhole in El Salvador, doesn't really care that your company has just been tariffed with 145% tariffs.

There is a connection between the two. And those of us who have spent, time outside of the United States know just how intrinsic it is to have a basis in a rule of law if you're going to have a thriving capitalist free market society in which contracts are honored and where there's sort of a sense of how things work. And this is, this I think, is essentially the unforgivable sin of Trump's non-Maga supporters who are willing just to shield their eyes, cover their ears, and say, we're going to get a good business policy, all, everything else is noise.

That was not a mistake, a crime. I want to go back in time to January of this year. How did each of you think President Trump's first hundred days would go back then? And then how did it go by comparison? How did you think it was going to go, Michelle, on inauguration day? What did you think this period would be like? And then how does that align with what we've seen? So I think, I mean, I think I thought that a lot of, I think I thought it would be pretty much like this with a couple of exceptions. I mean, I thought it was going to be extraordinarily bad. I thought that there would be, you know, the sort of D-list Fox News Weekend hosts running major cabinet agencies and that, you know, it would basically be the kind of...

Would you have been happier with A-list Fox hosts? It's possible that I would be. Laura Ingram and Justice and Sean Hannity at defense. We almost got Matt Gates. We almost got Matt Gates, yes. There is something insulting about the mediocrity of it. There is. I mean, yeah.

So I guess, you know, I kind of expected, like, cacistocracy, and that's what we got. I've been, I think, surprised at a couple of things. I've been surprised at the speed of it. I'm a pretty pessimistic and sort of. anxious person, but I don't think that we would have, I don't know that I would have predicted that there would be judges being arrested within a hundred days. And so the one thing that I had been saying that was my big fear about Trump all along is what happens if there are mass protests and he calls out the military. And so, you know, we're still kind of far from that, but just,

it was either today or yesterday, he signed an executive order sort of positioning military equipment to fight crime in various cities, kind of getting ready, I think, for a scenario that could look very much like that. You know, I expected the Republican Party to be completely supine. I would say, I don't know that I expected, I think I expected tariffs, I expected tariffs of like 10%, or, you know, basically what he said during the campaign. I don't know that I expected the level of kind of malevolent incompetence with which the tariffs were enacted. Because I think that the one thing that I, a mistake that I think I made and that a lot of people made was that there was this idea of like a Trump put, right, that Trump could only

screw up the economy so much before there would be some countervailing force that would make him back down. I mean, we've seen that a little bit. We saw the kind of postponement of some of the Liberation Day tariffs. The yippie bond market got me. But it is still kind of amazing that we're like lurching towards this completely self-inflicted recession and so far nobody seems to be, you know, we're in this game of chicken and so far we do not seem to be swerving. Masha, how about you?

How did you sort of see what was coming in January and how does it align with what's happened? Well, I actually wrote a column in November predicting that he would move much faster than during his first term and that all his primary moves would be against institutions. So it would be destroying the judiciary, destroying higher education, destroying social welfare. That's all happened faster and more blatantly, I think, than I imagined. I think if there's one thing that has surprised me, it's the obscenity of it. It's just that sense that we're watching something that we really shouldn't be looking at. It shouldn't be happening,

but also it shouldn't be so blatant. Can I just offer a provocation just for fun? Go for it. You, Brad? I'm on balance relieved about the first hundred days. And I'll explain. Well, just give me a second. If you look at dictatorships like Erdogan's,

democratic dictatorships, that is to say regimes that began democratically and then slid into authoritarianism. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Chavez and Venezuela. What made their dictatorship so insidious and so long-lasting was that the first few years were successful. The first few years delivered, particularly when it came to improving the economy. To some extent that was due to upswing in commodity prices, at least for Caracas and for Moscow. But for a variety of reasons, you look at the early reporting about Putin's regime and the other two. And, you know, a miracle, they've saved the economy.

People feel relatively good. The insults to civil liberties seem to be they're there if you're paying attention. But if you're not paying attention, it's easy to forget about it. So, you know, a Polikovskaya meets a terrible end. but okay, well, you know, who knows, right? This has been so flagrantly awful, right, that it is actually, I think, awakened in a lot of people who might not otherwise have felt a motivation

to oppose this presidency, genuine motivation. And I can't, you know, just this piece I had today was about a guy who makes board games. Sort of business-minded, calls himself independent, basically a Republican voter, voted for Trump in 24, and he is beside himself. And if it took 145% tariffs and economic chaos to get a voter like him to suddenly go,

ah, I see the problem, then we might, in retrospect, actually think, well, you know, could be worse. I was rooting for the tariffs for this reason, I have to say. Like, I was, you know, but then it puts you in a kind of perverse position because you don't always, you know, the worse the better. I'm afraid you're not being a lot of it. I'm afraid you're misinformed about Putin, though.

So I remember sitting in the office of the leading sociologist in Russia, and he was showing me a graph, and the bottom line on the graph was subjective economic well-being. And it had dropped off the cliff. And the top line was Putin's popularity, and it was climbing. And he was like, this shouldn't be happening. A graph cannot look like this. But actually, Putin's ratings consistently looked like that.

And what's even more upsetting is that for the first 14 years of Putin's presidency, of which for he was not formally president, he was underwater in every job performance polling question. People liked him. They thought that he was Russia's great promise. He was going to eventually deliver stability, but asked, you know, do you think he's doing a good job settling the conflict in Chechnya? Do you think he's doing a good job with the economy? Do you think he's doing a good job on democratic reforms?

They would consistently say no. So the worse is not, the better. But can ask, can ask Masha a follow-on question? And one thing that Putin, as I saw it in those early years projected, was an aura of competence and intelligence and purpose that contrasted very sharply with the Yeltsin years of, you know, raging alcoholism and all the other problems of the Yeltsin era in the Kremlin, I mean. Trump is very different, which is that the aura that he projects is of, at least in these first 100 days, is of a completely erratic, incompetent will of the way. type of managerial style. I don't think to an average American, he is looking like this is a guy who knows what he's doing.

It's 145% tariffs in the morning, a 60-day reprieve by afternoon. I mean, it's one thing after another. It doesn't look like a guy who is with that Putin-esque sinister quality, you know, playing a long game. I disagree with that in part, Brad, to go back to your point about the people who turn down the vote. volume on the television, I think that they still have this sense of energy and action and

enthusiasm. And even some people, you know, in one of our recent focus groups talked about the sense that Trump had shown them that the presidency could still be an active age in their life, unlike, you know, the Biden experience. The most recent focus group, how many people was in it? It was 12. Right. So 12. And I believe that three regretted their vote. Right. So he won by like, I mean, I understand that you can't do a one-to-one.

comparison. But if you're already, we're 100 days in. If you're already losing a quarter of the people who voted for you or a court, you know, that's, that's a lot, right? I mean, I don't think that everybody expected there to suddenly be a consensus that this is an erratic monster. You know, a lot of people have convinced themselves that there's some sort of hidden genius that he's playing, you know, 5D chess, that he's crashing the economy on purpose to drive down interest rates so that you can finally afford a house. So I think that, yes, there will always be the people who's like, well, yeah, I think, you know, we should shake things up and blah, blah, blah. It's important to remember that, like, the effects of tariffs have not really hit.

I mean, they've hit your friend because he's planning in advance. They haven't hit most people yet. I think most estimates are that you'll start to see some empty shelves in a couple of weeks and that these things are going to be rolling. But so you already see his base of support eroding. And again, it's only been, I mean, it feels like it's been eight million years, but it's only been 100 days. One of the things about this administration, it has not yet had the kind of administration-defining crisis that beset, you know, hostages with Jimmy Carter or one thing or another with other presidencies. So far, actually, there's been no event to upset Trump. I mean, this is all a self-driven disaster. it's hard for me to imagine that when that event comes,

and it will come, the fall of Kiev, China taking advantage to seize Taiwan, some other kind of defining and potentially humiliating episode that Trump is going to suddenly rise to the occasion with Churchillian statesmanship and finally impress us with that hidden five-dimensional brilliance that Michelle was alluding to. I actually don't think we're going to notice that event

in the cacophony that he's quite intentionally creating. I mean, any one of the things that we've mentioned could have been that event, except it wasn't because something else happened the next day. I mean, he was so... No, I would disagree here. I think when the event comes, we will know it. Okay.

I want to pick up on something Masha was saying earlier about the kind of the surprise of some elements of the first 100 days, and that has been the focus on institutions. In the first term, Trump was so consumed, by individuals, by James Comey, by Robert Mueller, by Hillary Clinton. And this time around, the focus, there's been some on individuals, but the focus on institutions themselves does seem like there's a method to the matter.

I think that's a function of who is in the administration. I mean, Trump is not like a super involved executive, right? He plays golf a lot. He watches TV a lot. He has a few things he really can. cares about. But you know, Gary Cohen and Dina Powell and all those people, like, they are all patting themselves in the back for kind of keeping the peace for a lot of years, but they deserve a huge amount of blame for blinding people to what Trump is actually like, right? So now we have

these, you know, kind of weirdos and creeps and lowlifes, and they're each have different portfolios. And so you basically have, you know, you've got Stephen Miller running immigration, the way he's always dreamed. You've got people in the Department of Education who have this kind of lifelong desire to take down the Ivy League's and, you know, who kind of cut their teeth on the destruction of new college in Florida

and sort of learned how to do that and now want to replicate that model on a large scale. You just have people with these different fiefs. The same with Doge. I mean, that was another thing that actually surprised me. I kind of thought that Elon would have his little, advisory board. But no, he's just kind of let him go

nuts on the bureaucracy. That's not really coming from Trump. Trump's instinct is not to cut budgets. It's to spend more. But he's given him carte blanche and he's been able to you know, kind of transform the federal government.

Yeah, I think that's part of the story, but I think it's not the whole story. And one thing is there's no reason why Trump couldn't have had Stephen Miller running immigration in the first administration. But it was a profoundly different administration. And one of the biggest differences is that Trump 2.0

cannot afford to lose power. If he's no longer president, he's going to go to jail. So he's acting like somebody who will never lose power. We've seen a couple of those guys around the world. that's where the attacks and institutions come from. But, Masha, don't you think the ship has sailed in terms of Trump going to jail? Do you think that actually bothers him anymore?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's why he's so desperately needed to become president again. And that's why he, I mean, after all of this, what is going to be? I'm thinking the man has beaten the rap, so to speak, so many times that I'm not sure he sees himself at level of vulnerability. That's all. Here I disagree on both counts. I think one of the biggest surprises and actually a hallmark of this Trump's

version of Trump's incompetence is that he seems to get himself involved in everything. And I think the reason, well, part of the reason is psychosis. I'm not a psychiatrist, but that's how it seems to be. But part of the reason is we forget. He is a second term lame duck president. He doesn't care. He absolutely doesn't care.

I am certain he is not thinking that jail is in his future. He is convinced that Democrats learn the lesson that the effort to prosecute him backfired spectacularly. He understands that part of his appeal is being the outlaw president who is fighting the efforts of censorious woke liberals to put him behind bars. Again, I'm describing, not endorsing.

So every time he talks about a third, term, is kidding? Well, I don't, well, he might be kidding or not kidding, but he's not going to have a third term as president. Why do you say that with, yeah, why do you say that with confidence, high confidence, low confidence, medium confidence? I'm going to make a, here goes, statements. I will come to regret. Don't do it. Don't do it. Monkey's paw. Like, I am going to make a high confidence prediction that Donald Trump will not be president four years hence. Okay. Masha, you have seen, the crowd has acquired, the audience is a question. Why confidence? Because I don't think we're Yeltsin's Russia and I don't think we're the Weimar Republic. I think the institutions

in this country are much stronger than we sometimes give them credit for and they're getting stronger by the day because they're finding their nerve, which they had lost for at least part of the last hundred days. So first of all, I do agree we're not Russia. We're not the We're Republic, but we're not any other thing either, right? Like we can, and we have never been here before. And we cannot confidently make a prediction about the system being able to withstand this kind of frontal attack. I regard his plans for a third term with utter seriousness and kind of despair.

And I, you know, unfortunately, it doesn't have to be. as dramatic as, I don't know, declaring it as a state of emergency and canceling elections. He and his Republican Party have been hard at work undermining the vote for many years, and now he, you know, his executive order on elections, if that actually is allowed to stand in whole or in part, that is a huge blow to any possibility of a free and fairer, election. His attack on the media, it's frightening to think about how much it can escalate in the next four years. And so if we come to a point four years from now, where there are elections, what are these elections going to be like? Are they going to be more like American elections

past, which have been hugely imperfect, but have probably, to a significant degree, reflected the will of the people? Or are they going to be more like Russian elections? Russians vote? Michelle, we're coming out of this 100-day period. What concerns you most as you kind of look ahead to deep breath, you know, a thousand-day plus of what's coming, you know, in terms of either what we've seen or what we haven't seen, the kind of the known unknowns? I would presume that we'll see a ratcheting up of the things that we've seen so far. So we've seen one judge arrested.

I think that we could see more judges arrested. And Pam Bondi has pretty much promised that. And so, you know, on the one hand, I do take a lot of comfort in his growing unpopularity. And I think, you know, we've already seen some pretty large demonstrations. I would suspect that we're going to see more. But you also have an administration that is extraordinarily paranoid. about the idea and kind of obsessed with the idea of color revolutions.

You know, one of the reasons that they dismantled USAID was because they believe that USAID has fomented all of these color revolutions in Ukraine and other countries and think that any, or at least present organized opposition here

as some sort of subversive plot that they have the right to use, you know, kind of extraordinary means against. So I do think, that people, that, you know, so far, there hasn't been for, I think, most people, that much of a cost to standing up to Donald Trump. I mean, certainly there's people from his first administration who are facing prosecution. There's, you know, people who, you know, kind of, people who have seen their political careers, tanks, people who have to have private security. But, you know, I don't, like, when there was a big protest, I asked my kids if they wanted to come and they didn't, you know, because my husband was going and I was going to report on it. And I, you know, and my husband was like, do you want, do you guys want to come? It wouldn't occur to me to say that it's not safe for you to come. But I think that eventually you could get to a point where kind of more courage is going to be required from people.

Can I, I mean, you're just provoking some thinking, and this is kind of, I think Trump's critics have to make a decision about the nature of this administration, regime, whatever, which is, are we dealing with a kind of a sinister genius or a bullying schmuck? No, I mean, to me, it's an open question. But you kind of look at Putin, you're like, look at the KGB background, sinister genius. Erdogan Sinister Genius, Orban, the same. Is that actually the Trump administration, and is the evidence of the last 100 days sinister genius? I don't think so. I think it's bullying Schmach.

Now, I don't like bullying Schmach. I'm opposed to bullying Schmach. But it relieves some of those dark affairs. Like, I can assure you of one thing. If you say color revolution to the president, he might turn to his wife and say, Is this some kind of like fashion state? Like, he would have no idea.

I absolutely can guarantee you that there's lower level people and the administration talk about that all the time. There are true believers in ways that I don't think there were in the first term, Brad. I mean, I do think there's evidence of a lot of roads leading back to Stephen Miller and to Russ Vaught and sort of plans in place. But the guy who I think of as a true believer is our catastrophically inept Secretary of Defense, or whatever he now wants to call himself. Well, that's a relief.

No, I mean, listen, it is, it is, in fact, it is in fact a relief because I would be far more worried if a guy who I know is smart, Josh Hawley were the president of the United States, and then we would be dealing with a much more difficult set of questions.

I think it's, to me, it gives me a sense like maybe, you know, my confidence that will be somewhere else in four years that I think we're dealing with bullying schmach. But does bull, I mean, I guess I don't understand, I don't know if I understand why, you know, what is it that stops the bullying schmuck from calling out the military against protesters? I just, nothing, the point is, I don't think you would do it well, right? And I don't think anything in this situation matters. But you have to make me do it badly and still shoot down a lot of people.

It does matter because if you look at the way in which other Democratic autocrats, came to power, there was a great deal of sort of method and care that was taken. It was, there was a kind of a subtlety to what they did. They were like the evil geniuses in the Bond films, not the muscle guys. And we're dealing here with, you know, something not quite on the order of evil genius. You know, when I wrote a biography of Putin, which was published in 2012, the reviewers generally said, reviewed it fairly well, but generally said, you know, And the one thing that's hard to believe in this book is that Putin is so uninformed, uneducated,

and just basically stupid. Well, he is. Right? And in retrospect, you can trace his steps and ascribe to them some kind of evil genius. But you'd be wrong. He was a bullying schmuck. I'd just like to ask each of you briefly as we wrap up. What have you learned about America over the last hundred days that made you.

Maybe you didn't know or you didn't see as clearly, either for good or not so much. What have you learned about America? Brett, can I start with you on that? Look, I hate to be the optimist on this panel. And spoil the mood. But I'm going to take the position that when, Trump won the election on November 5th, the day after he was at the pinnacle of political power.

It has eroded every day since because more and more of America is beginning belatedly, but beginning to see exactly who he is and what he represents and what he's doing. And that this country, this democracy that's 250 years old, will not be. dissolve in a vat of Trumpian acid, that it will find its footing and its nerve, and it find its good judgment, and the democratic experiment is going to continue. We've had periods in our history

of even greater ugliness than the present. In fact, far greater ugliness. The things that we have been able to surmount are astounding. And I always like this line that's in Bill Clinton's first inaugural. I know maybe it's Pollyanna or excessively positive, but he says, He said something to the fact that there is nothing wrong in America that can't be fixed by what's right in America.

And I'm going to hold to that view. Masha, what have you learned? Well, it's been a hard 100 days, I think, for most of us. But for me and a lot of my friends here, it's been particularly hard because we feel like we've lived through this before. And the first time we lived through it, at least there was America, and now we're here. And at the same time, you know, I try to correct myself, but there is all of this that is very different about this country than about the country where I grew up. There is the most robust, wealthiest civil society in the world. There's a free press, right?

People do seem to find it offensive when rule of law is assaulted, even if they don't necessarily agree with either. party. So I try to find those balance between seeing the possibility of the worst and also remembering that nothing is preordained until it's actually happened. Michelle? I have been, I mean, maybe this will come as a surprise to Brett who probably already thinks of me as somewhat radical, but I feel like I've been radicalized by the utter fecklessness of our elites and this, you know, to see like, A, the cravenness of these billionaires, the, um, the, um, the, um, you know, the sort of all of these businessmen who are completely willing to bend the knee, you know, people who you would think have enough money to at least buy themselves some self-respect,

but nevertheless, you know, are sort of unwilling to. Right, this has been like really shocking to me and actually really, to me, does, brings home in a very visceral way the kind of democratic. corruption inherent in profound inequality. You know, at the same time, I do, I think if I have some degree of optimism, it is in the fact that, like, it's hard for me to imagine a situation in which the majority of Americans, or at least an active, large plurality of Americans, kind of sit down and take it as Trump, you know, kind of ravages what people, what I think a lot of people consider.

to be their birthright. On my own block, which is in Brooklyn, which I know isn't real America, but on my own block, my neighbors have just started meeting every week to talk about like what they can do, what kind of activism, what they should be calling our congressperson about,

what marches are coming up, does everybody want to get together and make signs, you know, can we go down to the migrant shelter and be there if people are getting, rounded up to take their immigrant ID numbers so that there's somebody tracking them the system. And I think that this is happening in a lot of different places. And again, I think and I hope that that kind of like thick community engagement will eventually build the backbone of something that can stand up to this. Thank you, Michelle. Before we go, I just want to quickly thank

Brooklyn Public Library and Linda Johnson for hosting the event tonight. And I want to thank New York Times opinion editor, Katie Kingsbury, Times Opinion Managing Editor, Brian Zettel, Beth Weinstein, the executive director of event planning at the Times, and of course, Michelle Goldberg, Masha Gessen, Brett Stevens, all for making this event possible. Thank you all for coming. Have a good night. this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez-Boid, Vesacaa, 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 Sabro, 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 and Christina Samuelski. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.