The Opinions - Trump Is a Totem For Wealth. What Happens If the Economy Crashes?

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

Three Opinion writers on Trump’s most recent power grabs. 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 Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for Times opinion. And this week, I am joined by my colleague, Jemel Bowie, and contributing opinion writer, Steve Ratner. Steve's also a longtime Wall Street financier and served in the Treasury Department during the Obama years. Jamel and Steve, welcome. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for having us, as always. Likewise. Okay, well, the White House wrecking ball just keeps on swing in the summer as President Trump pursues his passion for undermining key American institutions.

Just the past couple of weeks, we've seen the White House fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency responsible for providing unbiased info on the labor market because the president was displeased with a job. report. Meanwhile, and this is my personal obsession, Republican state lawmakers in Texas at Trump's command, redrew the state's congressional map to give the GOP five more House seats. Now, practically speaking, these moves don't seem to have much to do with each other, but they both spotlight just how far this president will go to destroy public trust in vital institutions. And that is what I want to talk about today. So once again, I feel the need to say that we are recording this on Thursday morning. So by the time you hear us, God knows where the chaos will have taken us. So let's go ahead and get into it. Guys, are these episodes part of a larger strategy to challenge

the norms of power and political dynamics in the U.S.? Jamel, why don't you just kick us off with Sure. I think it's always important not to attribute too much intentionality to the specific person of Donald Trump. Do I think Donald Trump is most interested in maintaining sort of maximum autonomy? He wants to be able to do whatever he wants, whenever he feels the need to do it. Yes. A byproduct of that is this assault on institutions. But I think it's worth remembering. or this is, I guess, my view, that him going after redistricting in the country, him being obsessed with tariffs, those, I think, in his mind, aren't, like, related to each other, right? There's no logical connection between them. He's obsessed with tariffs as he's been basically for 40 years, and he doesn't want to lose control of the House next year, knowing that losing control of the House not only puts an end to his legislative agenda such that it exists, but exposes him to political vulnerability.

So he wants to do both of these things. And in the process of doing both of these things, he has no real interest in regular procedures or, you know, democratic give and take or anything so he's demolishing institutions. And so they're related in that way. But that, like, relation is sort of, like, our interpretation. I don't think it's something that he himself, you know, envisions.

Steve, you think it's all just capriciousness? Well, I think it's, I think there's an element of capriciousness, but I think there's also an element of intentionality. And I think I'd certainly agree with everything Jamel said, but I'd put it also in this context, which is the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. Trump 1.0 operated within, you know, vaguely within some set of norms that were used to.

He didn't try to fire the head of the BLS or this or that. And Trump 2.0, he has this idea that he was elected with this extraordinary mandate, and he thinks it's empowered him to put anybody he wants in any job that he wants, And so far, of course, the Senate has gone along with him at virtually every respect. And he feels there are no guardrails and he can just do what he wants. And that's the way he's been operating.

So the way I look at it is obviously this is all about him getting to do whatever he wants without anybody saying no. But I also think that one of the things that he's worked on since he got into office, you know, even before, is undermining all other sources of authority. not just in terms of what kind of power they have, but also how people view them. You know, he wants everybody to distrust the Department of Justice or the courts or certainly the media because he wants them to be viewed as illegitimate,

which just makes him the only source that his people look to. And I do think that this kind of falls into the category. If you can make everything look super partisan and super sketchy, that's just in service of his greater power grab. So that's how I kind of think of in terms of more of a broad picture on this. But getting back to the Economic, you know, the Bureau of Labor of Statistics stuff, Steve, your economics guru here, what is your view on him booting the head of that agency? in, you know, what sure smells like the politicization of a department that's previously operated above the partisan fray. I mean, our colleague Tom Friedman, wrote that of all the terrible things Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday.

So what say you to what's going on here? We can debate whether it's the most dangerous thing that happened. It may well be, but it's certainly right up there. it's quite extraordinary that the Labor Department comes out with a set of statistics, that it compiles the same way it compiles them every month. It's important without getting too far into the weeds on this to explain to your viewers and listeners how this works. It is not the head of the BLS waking up in the morning and deciding, well, this is how many jobs

we created last month. This is a process that has gone on like this for 100 years in which two different sets of surveys are done compiled by career members of the BLS and then released to the public the same process every month forever and ever. And so it is beyond imagination that these statistics could have possibly been manipulated. There have been attacks on the BLS before. In 2012, Jack Welch, the well-lawed CEO of General Electric, claimed that in the run-up to Obama's re-election, the BLS had manipulated the unemployment number to show it going below 8 percent, and he didn't believe it had gone below 8 percent. So the BLS has had these kinds of attacks

before, but this is certainly one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen where the president literally just woke up and fired the head of the BLS and claimed all the numbers were made up, which, as I just said, not a single economist, not a single expert, not anybody who's ever known anything about the BLS would have ever suggested that that was possible. Steve, you're in touch with CEOs and business leaders. What are you hearing from them? What has them worried about all this? Well, with respect to the BLS specifically, they are appalled, taken back, shocked as everyone is. I was just at a conference with a lot of CEOs, economists, journalists, people like that, and everybody is scratching their head in amazement that this could go on.

But it's part of a broader picture that is worrying CEOs, which is simply the unpredictability, the lack of guardrails, the government by tweet, the tariffs are on, the tariffs are off. We're going to put a 50% tariff on Brazil because we don't like the way the former president's been treated. And it has really created a climate of uncertainty. and unhappiness in the business community, that's quite substantial. So you mentioned tariffs, too, what are the potential long-term, or at least longer-term effects? Because we're talking broadly about power, but you also have very specific, very concrete repercussions.

When it comes to the economy, what is the damage that's being done that will outlast kind of this moment, you think? Well, let's talk about the numbers that are actually released. before the head of the BLS got fired, they showed a substantial deceleration in job growth, not just for last month, but then they revised down the two prior months to show a very small amount of job growth over the last three months.

And that is worrisome. That suggests that the labor market is weakening significantly. And if you talk anecdotally to CEOs, they will tell you that their hiring plans have come down substantially. If you talk to any young, person who's out in the job market right now, they will probably tell you that the job market has gotten a lot tougher. But I think clearly, as I talk to CEOs, they have all cut back their

hiring plans in part because of the uncertainty around the tariffs and the damage that they believe that tariffs will ultimately do to the economy. And I'll make one last point about this, which is historically, and I'm not here to tell you, I know for sure that this time will be the same or different. Historically, when unemployment numbers have gotten revised, one way or the other, up or down, by a significant amount, it can often portend a trend. It can often be an early indicator of a trend. And so the fact that you've had such significant downward revisions for two prior months, as well as a poor number for the most recent month, has got a lot of people very, very nervous about the state of this economy.

It's also, I mean, the president doesn't understand this. His advisors are too sycophantic to really, I think, make the argument to him. But this is also detrimental to his own political interests. There's the phrase, the aphorism, the map is not the territory, right? You can change the numbers they report to make you look better. But that doesn't change the underlying reality of what's happening in the economy or the underlying reality of what's happening in anything, if you're going to change the number, to juke the stats, if you will. And so the president can put pressure on the nation's statisticians

to make him look good. But if the underlying conditions are actually on the downturn, if things are actually getting worse for people, then the only thing he's done is made it more difficult for his government to respond to whatever is bubbling up from the surface. Well, that's what I was going to ask you both, is that this move by Trump sort of spotlights his panic about what's happening, certainly how it will impact his party's fortunes and whether he keeps a death grip on the government going forward. I think our assumption has always been that no matter what the numbers say, if people start to feel some pain, it's going to come back and then you will start to see some pushback. I mean, do you think that the tariffs and what we've got coming and the softening job numbers are the beginning of what Trump has been worried about or at least what his party has been worried about in terms of people actually being able to see what's going on? I think that the perception of economic growth and prosperity is basically the thing that holds up Trump's public standing, right? People don't actually like Trump that much.

And you see this in the polling whenever he gets back into power. People really do not like his general thing. But what they accept in this sort of tradeoff is that, okay, Trump may be terrible in X, Y, or Z way, but he brings prosperity. He's like this totem for wealth, right? If it turns out that under Trump, there is a significant economic slowdown, if there is a recession even, I think that is a moment where the body. could really fall out from under his administration, this political standing, that in the absence of any other compelling thing outside of his particular cult of personality to keep him buoyed up with the rest of the public, he just doesn't have that much.

Well, I'd suggest that's actually already happening. In other words, if you look at the polling data, as you said, Jamel, he is unpopular himself. His job approval ratings are terrible, plus or minus 40%, depending upon which poll you look at. But people's perception of the state of the economy has not improved at all since Trump came back. His big, beautiful bill act, whatever you want to call it, polls very unpopular. Oh, that is not what I want to call it.

Yeah, I have many more names for it than that. All right. The big ugly bill, polls quite negative. I think, honestly, I would say on behalf of all of us who are journalists or opinion people or commentators on the situation, I think we've actually done a pretty good job of explaining to the American people

what's really going on in the Trump administration and what's not going on. And I think that's part of why he panics and does something like the BLS. But when you see polling data on that, I think you're going to find that even that has backfired on him and people are simply not going to believe

that the data is manipulated or that he did the right thing in firing the head of the BLS. Okay, so the topic of, political danger is a perfect segue into the second part of this, which is I have been following the Texas redistricting drama for weeks since well before the new congressional maps were posted. And this is all about Trump panicking about what's going to happen in the midterms. So asking state lawmakers in Texas, which is led by Republicans, to redraw him a congressional map that

finds the party five more seats before the midterms next year, which they've done. And they have put them out there and it has exploded. So this week's hot new development is that Republicans have drafted the FBI to help them track down and arrest Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled the state in an effort to bog down this power grab. Democrats at the national level are spoiling for a fight. They're looking to pushback. Blue states like California are threatening to redistrict in response. The Democrats I've been talking to, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, understand that they cannot take the so-called high road any longer, but are going to need to dig in and punch back hard. So I am very interested in where all this is going.

And I want Jamel for you to give us a little bit of context on this, because this is not the first time that Republican lawmakers have pulled this stunt. And your beloved North Carolina went through this in 2021. At the time, you had suggestions for how to deal with this? Do those still apply? What have you been thinking while you're watching all of this? I just want to put one gentle correction. I have no particular feelings for North Carolina. I'm a Virginian. I'm a resident of the Commonwealth. I'm sure the people down in North Carolina perfectly fine, perfectly lovely. For some reason, I thought you lived in North Carolina for a while.

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. I know you live where you live now, but I thought you lived in. Charlotte. I've never stepped foot in North Carolina. Charlotte, Charlottesville, it's all the same thing. Don't be hateful. Like, I love North Carolina. I got family North Carolina. All right.

So, Jamel, what have you been thinking watching all this? So my thought watching all of this, and I believe my suggestions way back when was just that Congress should pass bill ending partisan gerrymandering, which is well within Congress's power to do. And I still think that. I still think that there should be a national ban on partisan gerrymandering. I think that the country should move away from single-member districts which should necessitate gerrymandering and move towards multi-member districts, which could open the door to more viable third parties in the American system.

Having said that, I do think that one cannot bring a knife to a gunfight. And one of the things it's worth saying is that a-year-old. Cerrymandering is something of a gamble. So in Texas, if they're going to squeeze out five more Republican-leaning congressional districts, this necessarily means spreading Democratic voters across other already Republican-leaning districts. And these new districts may be only modestly or slightly Republican-leaning. And prior districts from which you're moving populations may become a little less Republican-leaning as well. And what you're counting on is a certain baseline level of partisan swing.

If you get above that, what can actually happen is that you lose all of those seats, right? A wave can wipe out a map in that way because you've sort of lowered the barrier. And so part of what's funny to me about all of this is that it's clear that Donald Trump has a vision of what gerrymandering is, which is just that it's a generic way to get more seats and there's no cost to it. So, of course, why wouldn't you do it? But the reality is that there is a cost to it. And the cost is that if you find yourself in a situation where there's a broad public swing against your party, you can lose all the seats that you may have gained with gerrymandering.

The other thing I'll say here just in terms of fighting fire with fire, whatever cliche you want to use, is that there aren't that many high population Republican states, right? Like the typical Republican state is population-wise a little smaller, a little more sparsely populated. And so, yes, in Texas, you can maybe net a few more seats. In Ohio, you might be able to net a seat or two. California, Illinois, New York have actually a lot of room to really severely gerrymandered their maps. And so if you do get into this game of tit for tat, you might end up in a situation where, in fact, what you've done is made the map lean a little more democratic than it otherwise would have been. And I would say that this is a response Democrats should have, and they should say openly as well, that we will stand down, if you stand down, and if you elect us into a majority, we will pass a bill outlawing partisan gerrymandering, which in addition to I think being smart politics is just the right thing to do.

Well, that is one thing that has popped up. Blue states have a lot of voters that could be redistricted in ways that disadvantaged Republicans, but so many of these. blue states have what now looks like unilaterally disarmed by having the redistricting process turned over to independent commissions. And what they're having to look at now is clawing back a process that was supposed to be going, you know, pushing the country in a less partisan, less polarizing, more good government direction. And in some places, there's a little bit of hesitation about this. But I mean, the people in Texas, if you talk to them, you know, are like, we can't afford to just stand down at this point because they have taken this fight national

and Republicans have no concerns about blowing through kind of good government guardrails or anything like this. So Jamel, it sounds like you think this is the right response from the Democrats, even if it's, you know, potentially leading to a kind of slippery slope acceleration problem with it. That's right. I mean, I think one thing you have to ask yourself is, like, how do you actually conceptualize the United States? Is it one country where all of our fates are linked, or can we all just silo ourselves

in their individual states? If you believe the latter, then I can understand the hesitation about wanting to abandon in nonpartisan redistricting commissions and that kind of thing, because it feels like a retreat from ideals of fairness and good government. But if you recognize that, yeah, what happens in Texas has relevance to my life in Virginia, what happens in North Carolina has relevance to someone in Wisconsin, this has national implications. And the only way to deal with this is in a national manner.

And if you recognize that fact, then I think it leads you inevitably to the conclusion that those people who are interested in actually fair elections have to do what it takes now to win the power to pass laws to ensure fair elections. But maintaining a position of, you know, we're going to fight for fairness in our state and we're not going to worry about what's happening elsewhere is ultimately a recipe for losing the war. You win a battle and you can lose the war. So what do you guys see is the best case scenario?

for this? Well, look, first of all, I agree completely that Texas started this fight, and New York and California and Illinois need to fight back, and the Democrats need to fight back. It would seem to me that on present course and speed, those legislators are eventually going to have to go back to Texas. They'll probably go ahead and get this done. And then I hope the big blue states will go ahead and do what they have to do. And then, hopefully, as Jamel said, if we Democrats, and I'm a Democrat, can

get back in power and can pass some laws to bring this to a better place, then that's the, that is the most optimistic scenario I can see. To build on that, I think that the best case scenario does involve Democrats nationally recognizing that the only way past this moment in our politics, past Trumpism, you might say, is there serious political reform? And that's going to include, I think, some kind of restriction on partisan gerrymandering. So the best case scenario is that. that Democrats nationwide recognize the fight that they're actually in

and build a consensus around the next time they hold power, we're going to begin this project of political reform. And again, I'll say this is something that's popular with voters. Voters don't like gerrymandering. They really do not like it. And so this is an opportunity to make a promise that you can deliver on and also a promise that you can deliver on that will, in the long run, make our politics better.

So I want to jump on that because I actually spent some time down in Austin and I've talked to a lot of the Democrats who've been watching this sort of thing down there for a long time. And they do have this situation where you need public pressure. You need public attention. It's not going to be the lawmakers alone that save you or some redistricting commission. This is one of those things that the Republicans are counting on people. sort of caring about, and let's be clear, for the hearings that they were holding on this, the people were lining up and in the Capitol to testify, in the other arenas where they were having these things, people were lining up online to testify, they had overflow rooms, there was a lot of local pressure. But what Republicans sort of count on in these situations is that people get really fired up, but then they don't really follow through or they don't press hard enough for Democratic lawmakers like Gavin Newsom or Kathy Hokel in New York to feel like it's a must do. So I just want to throw that out there because it does come down to kind of voter

priorities. And if even if people don't like gerrymandering, unless they make that really clear and kind of come up at these moments, nothing's going to get done about it. Well, I mean, you got to, I think it's worth saying that like public opinion is in a kind of dialectical relationship with actual politicians and that like the baseline state of public opinions they don't like gerrymandering, but it may not be the most salient thing. And so sort of the important thing for politicians to do is to make it salient, to enhance its salience and to connect it to other kinds of issues that voters care about and to use that to kind of create a cycle in which voters understand gerrymandering to be just one example of a kind of manipulation of the rules of unfairness that

affects other parts of their lives. Like that's the job of politics. That's the job of politics. And I think that if Democrats say to themselves, oh, well, I don't know if we can mobilize voters that care about this. I think they're just like not, they're not trying hard enough. I think it's a tough issue for the American people to understand and grasp. I think, you know, sure, there's a headline partisan gerrymandering. I suspect if you ask the average American, they probably think both parties do it. It's just part of the sort of seamy side of politics.

Eric Holder's been working on this issue since the end of the Obama administration. and obviously hasn't made a huge amount of progress. And I would have to say the Democrats don't come to this with absolutely clean hands because back in 2022, they redistricted in the state of New York, and the courts threw it out, claimed it was too partisan, and the court drew the boundaries for that election, and the Democrats ended up losing four seats as a result of it. So then they went back in and redistricted again in a way that was less overtly partisan,

and it got past the courts and got some of those seats back. So I think the American public finds all this really complicated, confusing, and has a hard time figuring out who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And so I certainly agree with both of you as to what we need to do, but I don't want to underestimate how tough a hill this is to climb. No, I think you're absolutely right. And I think the difference this time is that Trump has been so naked about it. And that's what's gotten a lot of attention. So like Jamel, I think this could be, you know, once they get through this immediate response and how to deal with Texas specifically, it would be nice if this could go back on the table as a nationwide issue of reform, but I am not super optimistic about it. So not to be the skunk at the Garden Party as well.

So we have an attack on the integrity of economic data and an attack on the integrity of the nation's electoral map. So the common thread here seems to be about who gets to define reality, whether it's the healthy economy or the will of the voters. Trump obviously thinks it should be him and only him. And many other Republicans seem content at this point to play along. But at what point do you guys expect to see any pushback or at least any serious pushback? And what do you think it will look like from within his own party? I have to say, I've been around this stuff. a pretty long time. I started my career at the Times in the Washington Bureau, and I have never seen a president have this kind of a hold on his party. I would have never predicted based on what congressman and senators said about the big ugly bill before it was passed that he would get that through Congress. It was just, I couldn't imagine it. You had people like Josh Hawley

saying, I'm never going to vote for these Medicaid cuts right before he voted for the Medicaid cuts. And he has this incredible control. This conference I mentioned, which was under Chatham House rules, so I can't identify the people, it was bipartisan. There were a number of very senior former Republican legislators there. And they basically think Trump owns this party and will own it for the foreseeable future. And remember, he's raised money that he will never need because he's not going to, I don't believe he's going to try to run for a third term. And we can debate that if you want. But he's holding, he can hold this over the heads of all of these legislators and essentially tell them he's going to primary them. I would have never predicted

that some of the nominees, some of the manifestly unqualified nominees that he put forward, Pete Heggseth, just to pick a name, would have gotten confirmed by the Senate, but they did. And so I think it's going to take an awful lot before this breaks, in my opinion. I think it would take probably a disastrous midterm election, and I'm not sure I see that. as likely. I think probably the Democrats will get the House back, but the Senate map is pretty tough for the Democrats, so I'm not sure that will flip. And so I think it would take a lot. A really major downturn in the economy, a disastrous midterm election, something like that. If the Republicans are willing to sit back and allow him to fire the head of the BLS,

allow him ironically to weaponize the Justice Department after attacking Biden for so-called weaponizing the Justice Department, then I'm not sure what short of one of those two things I mentioned is going to cause the Republicans to push back in any kind of major way. Yeah, we are an interesting moment. Usually what you look for is a bad midterm or some sort of electoral punishment. I do think the Democrats have such a brand problem that you're right. It would be surprising if it was a midterm wipeout. But even if it were a midterm wipeout, I think we're in this weird zone where Republican lawmakers are not just politically afraid of upsetting Trump, but they are physically afraid for their safety. I have talked to plenty of congressional members during the Trump years who are afraid for their families.

It has reached a very dark place, and I don't know how that plays out until he is an unfortunate memory. in this office, which kind of brings me to where I want to sort of wrap this up, which is that he is a lame doc president, as you point out, unless he totally blows up the Constitution, he'll be gone in another few years. Will that be enough to kind of halt this bad trajectory, the erosion of trust? What happens that outlasts Trump? That's a really interesting question, because, part of me thinks that Trump's own personality, his own particular force as an individual,

has such an important role to play in all of this, that if and when he goes, right, like if he just, you know, leaves office or whatever happens to him, I think his absence from the scene will, will, it won't like make, make, It won't, like, fix anything, but it will, like, transform. It will, like, change things, I think, in a measurable way. But then he's been on the, you know, if when this happens, he will have been on the scene for, you know, well over a decade. And that does shape and change American politics. It will be basically a generation of Republican politicians for him. Trump is, like, their, is their lodestar.

Republican voters, certainly for Trump is their load star. And if you buy that there's such a thing as, like, a moral ecology. to a society, then Trump has, like, influenced the moral ecology of American politics in such a way as to make the kind of, you know, open and explicit corruption and casual and open big tree, like all these things to make them common again in American political life. So I'm of this view that there be more tangible policy things in the Trump era that may not last beyond Trump, that may not last beyond the personnel associated with them. but there'll be maybe like an ethos that does survive. Yeah, cultural changes that does survive beyond him. To sound a little like the conservatives of my youth,

like culture matters and character matters and these things do shape a society in profound ways. Oh, that's so past A now in the Republican Party. I know, I mean, I have many thoughts and feelings about the way these things are passe these days. But I do think that that might be the thing that endures out of all of this. But it's hard to say.

It is hard to say, and it's really going to be interesting. It'd be more interesting if the consequences and the stakes weren't so great. But I started my career, as I said, at the Times Washington Bureau in June of 1974. And of course, in August of 1974, Nixon resigned. And Gerald Ford got on television and said, we are a nation of laws and not of men. But the pendulum swung back. And we went through a period of what I'll call good government, where a lot of norms were reestablished. and where we went on for a good while before we got to this place. So I don't really know what's going to happen. I like to think I'm an optimist. It's possible that whatever's left of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and I will absolutely grant you that he's driven most of them out of power and out of office, will reassert itself. I think it's a straw in the wind that could blow either way,

depending upon what happens in the next three and a half years. But I've not given up hope. I really do think our country's been through a lot of bad stuff over the last. last 250 years, civil war, certainly. I think we've endured it. And so I'd like to be optimistic and think we're going to find our way through this. Okay. Well, if you're going to be optimistic, I'm going to be optimistic right there with you. We're going to land this plane. Guys, thank you so much for coming in to talk through all of this. I hope you come back again very soon. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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