The Opinions - Trump’s First Day: He is Exploiting ‘Civic Ignorance’

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Opinion's deputy editor, Patrick Healy, was joined by the columnists David French and Michelle Goldberg to makes sense of President Trump’s first day in office. We're learning “how much the American experiment has depended on the honor system,” French says. 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 the New York Times Opinion section. On his first day back in office, President Trump issued dozens of executive orders and pardon nearly all of the January 6 rioters, but he also set a new tone and pace for Washington, that he's going to do whatever he wants and fast. I'm joined by my colleagues, columnist Michelle Goldberg and David French, to talk about what Trump is changing and challenging in America.

David, Michelle, good to see you both. Hey, Patrick. Hi, Patrick. So before we dig into all these executive orders, I just got to ask, has anything surprised you in the past 24 hours? Anything stood out to you? Anything that was like, okay, I didn't see that coming. Honestly, Patrick, nothing surprised me. There had been so much hype before his inauguration that he was going to sort of do shock and awe when it came to executive orders. All of this was telegraphed. Nothing was surprising about the tone of his inaugural. And what was really interesting about that tone is if you're MAGA, you listen to that and you thought that was a morning in America optimistic speech. And if you were anyone but MAGA, this was the American carnage speech of the first election squared, cubed, that America was

circling the drain, that it had been betrayed by other Americans. And so for a lot of us, this was a very, very dark speech, but it showed the divide because the reaction to it on MAGA was mourning in America, because that's just how they talk about America now. And so they focused and zeroed in on the optimism. And I think to the extent anything surprised me at all was that a number of friends and neighbors heard what I thought was the American Carnage sequel speech and thought they were listening to Ronald Reagan. And that did surprise me a bit. Well, it just shows how effective it is to leave out the word carnage, the sound bite and substitute in decline. And suddenly it sounds really nice. Michelle, how about you? So I wouldn't say that anything necessarily surprised me because

As David said, he's been telegraphing this for months, if not more than that. But I guess two things that I found striking. First of all, in recent days, I mean, J.D. Vance was saying, you know, well, of course we're not going to pardon or we shouldn't pardon people who've committed violent acts. And you had a lot of Republicans maybe trying to play down the scope of the January 6 pardons, suggesting that they might be more limited. and they ended up being not limited at all. You know, some people, all kinds of people who have assaulted police officers committed really egregious acts of political violence are about to be freed. And what I think is a statement about the scale of impunity that Trump's allies are going to enjoy in this new world.

And then also the other thing that I thought was striking was the very direct. you can call it a threat or promise to retake the Panama Canal. Not if they do that, we're going to retake it. It wasn't conditional at all. It was we're going to take it back, which implies like a direct sign that there's going to be some kind of conflict in Central America. Michelle, you just identified what I thought was the most like audacious hypocrisy of Monday and the lead up to it, which was this Republican sort of shilly-shallying spin about violent offenders and non-violent offenders on January 6th, this sort of notion that there would be kind of thoughtful and nuanced approaches to who got pardons, who got communications. The reality is Trump wants to rewrite history. He wanted all these people out. He wants after years to take control of the narrative around January 6th.

And I guess I'm wondering, do you think he'll succeed on that? I mean, in terms of will he succeed on it in terms of history? I think that that's impossible to say right now. I think he's already succeeded for huge parts of the Republican Party. I mean, you can sort of see the Republican attempts to pretend that these pardons and commutations were going to be, you know, modest and targeted is of a piece with the entire rewriting and gaslighting around both what Trump's first term was like and what his plans for. Second term was like there's always this attempt to sort of retcon whatever he says into

something more reasonable and something less shocking and to pretend that anybody who is alarmed and is shocked is hysterical and suffering from, you know, as they often say, Trump derangement syndrome. And it's, again, I know that this is probably the most overused word of the last decade, but it's a kind of gaslighting. And it works on you after a while. You think, like, well, was it really as bad as all that? But no. And I think that this is a reminder that it was and is. David, what kind of precedent do you think these pardons and commutations set for our

democracy going forward. Well, it's a dreadful precedent, and I have to extend it beyond Donald Trump, right on the very eve of Trump's presidency, Joe Biden, pardoned a bunch of his family members, so this is sort of amplifying and moving beyond the Hunter Biden pardon. And so you already had this one, yet another example of many, many in American history where the pardon power has been abused. But then Trump does the classic Trump hold my beer thing and says, okay, well, if Biden abused it, watch what I can do. Watch this.

But David, doesn't that suggest a sort of causality? Like, he was going to do this anyway. Oh, of course he was going to do this anyway. But I do think if we're going to talk about pardon power abuse, we can't just leave it with Trump. What Trump did was inexcusable. he was going to do it anyway. What Biden did, I think, was inexcusable, though less serious and less consequential, but was also inexcusable. And I think at this point, when or if American politics returns to sanity and the pardon power reform should be on the agenda, if you look at the history of

this, this is one of the only vestiges of royalty that was sort of remaining in the American constitutional structure. And it was a mistake. It was a mistake. And so the founders had a view of power that they did not trust power, but then handed this immense power to the president without any check. And we are now reaping the consequences of that. At a level, we have never seen. And I think the short-term consequence of this is that if you are a Trump fan, if you are a Trump sycophant, it is a real calculus to think that the rule of law will not apply to you while Trump wields power. So if you're an Elon Musk and you may commit serial securities violations, is a Trump Justice Department going to prosecute Trump's number one fan or donor? You know, these kinds of things, what he raised here with these prosecutions as brazen and as widespread as they are, they really did raise the possibility that for four years,

law enforcement will be meaningless if you are sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. I mean, I think this applies both at these very high levels to all of these, you know, tech oligarchs who were in the front of the members of the cabinet. But it also applies to the thugs, the proud boys who were marching through the streets of D.C. and who have now been given, you know, I mean, Car Blanche is maybe too strong of a word, but have now been given very strong signals that if you attack Trump's enemies, you can do it with impunity, right? I mean, it makes me, like, physically scared. David, what concerns me is that I think pardon reform, while a nice idea is up there with, like, term limits for Supreme Court justices, like,

it's not going to happen. Presidents aren't going to want to give out, give away that power or sort of change it. I'm not sure I see any kind of path forward beyond, you know, discipline and self-control by presidents, which I think the barn door is sort of open on that. But I find myself wondering, do people care? Like, do they look at Trump and do they see a king who does whatever he wants? And there's no pushback. There's no limits there. Well, I think within MAGA, people do not care. But there's another factor, Patrick, that I really wish those of us who follow politics very closely understood more? Because there's a whole another question besides, do people care? And that is, do people know? And the American people,

the bulk of the American people, the level of ignorance about current affairs is really shocking. It's really shocking. Right. And I think that can I, I, I don't mean to interrupt, but I think that part of, and part of what makes this even more alarming is to see all of the social media magnates, the people who control the channels by which more and more people get their information lined up behind Trump. And so what's terrifying and what's so different this time around as opposed to in the first Trump administration is the extent to which Trump has now controls a lot of the media. Well, and one thing, Michelle, that I think is a little is different from Trump from other presidents is the extent to which he has weaponized and exploited civic ignorance.

And one of the things that I think we're learning is how much the American experiment has depended on the honor system, that presidents of both parties with varying degrees of sort of truthfulness and honor, by and large, maintained American norms and did not explicitly sort of weaponize American ignorance in the way that Trump has. because I think what Trump and the people around him have realized is that he can do wild things like some of the executive orders I expect we'll talk about. And that will thrill MAGA. And then outside of MAGA, and of course enrage his opposition, but then outside of MAGA won't even make a ripple that any of this occurred at all. David, I want to ask you about Trump's approach to immigration because it's a bit of, big change we've all been watching out for. He wants to end birthright citizenship. And that's guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. It's already being challenged by the ACLU. And I want to ask, and I want to hear from Michelle as well, can Trump use an executive order to, if not, change the

constitution, start a ball rolling where this could actually in some way end up in his favor, or is this really part of bluster, that this is a guy who wants to get rid of every incentive someone might have for coming to the United States illegally, in some cases, to have children here, and he's just really trying to throw a lot of rhetoric at a wall? You know, I think it's at a point in between bluster and real world effect. And what I mean by that is, look, a lot of people. presidents before Trump, including Trump before this term, have tried to use executive orders and unilateral executive authority to transform the situation at the border. And what all of these

presidents find is, yeah, there is some flexibility they have with executive orders. There are some, especially the ability to achieve temporary results before courts intervene and rollback policies. but what they are finding is that you just can't control and establish a comprehensive immigration plan through executive action. That's just not legally possible in the long term. Absolutely has short to medium term effects, no question. But all of these things have to ultimately be tested in court because our system is designed for congressionally passed laws for governing the border. Executive actions often simply can't do it. And the birthright citizens, citizenship executive order, there is just really no Supreme Court precedent. This is an attempt to amend

the Constitution by executive fiat, and it's almost certainly going to fail and start to fail quickly in the courts. But at that point, it's still a kind of a no-lose proposition for him with his core base. That the pattern he established in his first term was if he did something lawless and it got blocked that's not on him for MAGA. That's on the courts. That's how the deep state or out of control judges block Donald Trump's agenda. So for him politically, at least for now, these kinds of things are no lose because he gets to blame somebody else when his obviously unlawful, obviously unconstitutional actions get blocked. And, you know, David, I hope you're right about it being an obvious loser in the courts. I have maybe. less faith in this Supreme Court than you do. But the other part of this is that it seems like you could be setting up an early constitutional crisis and that even if the courts rule that this is illegitimate, it's still the federal government that's going to issue Social Security cards

that issues passports, right? And if you have Trump officials saying don't do it, who's going to make them? Yeah, chaos, right, Michelle? I mean, it just feels like if I'm a family member or I'm a I'm a young person. What does this do to me in that regard? Well, I'm glad you raised that because that brings us to a point, which is sort of the the ultimate test of the rule of law in Trump version two is going to be, will he comply with adverse rulings from the Supreme Court? That is going to be the real test of how much of the rule of law we have left. And, you know, there's the potentially apocryphal Andrew Jackson statement that, you know, the court has made its ruling, now let it come and force it, where he

defies the Supreme Court. There's a sense in which it's a very real possibility that the next step in the attack on the rule of law is just outright defiance of the Supreme Court. Now, to provide some degree of comfort, lower federal officials can still be held liable, and injunctions can still issue against lower federal officials. But he can, you can, Again, now, if you combine all this with the pardon power, we're circling back to the beginning of this discussion. And also with Schedule F, right, with the desire to kind of fire all these career people and replace them with political apparatchiks. And so we could very well see a situation in which you have, you know, federal courts issuing injunctions. You have Trump instructing people to defy injunctions with courts issue contempt orders to where you otherwise would imprison.

in somebody for failing to comply with court orders that Trump issues, pardons in those circumstances. And you can paint a picture where the combination of Trump's obstinence, the total unyielding loyalty of MAGA, plus the abuse of the pardon power, which he's established as of right now as having no real limits in his mind, create a situation of absolutely sustained and profound lawlessness. David, how confident are you that there's a majority on the Supreme Court that would uphold birthright citizenship? I would say I'm very confident of that, although at no point would I say I'm certain of that. If you look at text, history, and tradition.

So these are the Supreme Court's really moving in the direction of, okay, look at the text first, look at history first. And then to some extent tradition, although that element of it is very contested right now. But if you look at the text, the text very clearly, just by the plain meanings of the words, the text would command that individuals born in the United States are citizens so long as they are subject to the jurisdiction in the United States. And guess what? Illegal immigrants and children of illegal immigrants are absolutely subject to the jurisdiction in the United States. And then what you're left with is to try to get around that a super strained, a historical, illogical argument that essentially the illegal, the aliens who are coming here and the migrants who are coming here are effectively invaders, like a hostile army. And that's just not true under international law.

It's not true under any conception of what the word invasion means. And so there's just, you know, if you're looking at it from, from that text history originalist mindset, the overwhelming argument is for the traditional interpretation of birthright citizenship. But if you kind of reject that premise, which obviously, you know, I think that the court should, that migrants constitute an invading force, it's not just Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship that they would have to reject, right? The whole kind of legal architecture of a lot of Trump's deportation regime, you know, the justification for deploying the military on American soil. A lot of

this hinges on his classification of migrants as invaders. And so it just seems to me at least possible that the court will let, having let some of this stuff stand, will create its own justification. Well, and you're right, Michelle, that a lot of his, a lot of the legal archivales, that he bases many of his executive orders on, it's very vulnerable to court challenge. It's extremely vulnerable, as it was in his first term. I mean, one of the interesting things about his first term is that the Supreme Court, and look, I'm not naive about the Supreme Court. I saw what they did with the immunity decision. I saw the way they approached the 14th Amendment eligibility decision. So I do not sit there and think that the Supreme Court is always getting it right.

But the record shows that they have turned back MAGA legal arguments again and again and again. Right, but that was a very different Supreme Court. It was like literally different people on the Supreme Court. I mean, not all of them, but it was a different majority. Well, yes, but the current Supreme Court has turned back MAGA legal arguments many, many times. And in fact, you know, it was a Republican-nominated majority in his first term. And he had one of the worst records at the Supreme Court. of any president in modern history. And then since that time, even with the 6th 3 court with three justices appointed by him, they have rejected MAGA legal arguments multiple times. And so the MAGA legal movement has a bad record

at the Supreme Court. It has a bad record. And so the legal architecture he has constructed is very, very vulnerable. Now, of course, we'll have to wait and see what happens. But if I were walking into this current Supreme Court making the Trump birthright citizenship argument, I would feel as if I'm walking into a losing case. So as part of Trump's moves on immigration, he declared this national emergency at the southern border. And the big question for me is what Trump means when he directs the military to become newly involved in protecting the, quote, sovereignty and,

security of the United States and quote from illegal immigration. I mean, David, do you think Trump will use the military in previously unseen ways? And will any of this be challenged in court? So I can answer the latter part very easily. Yes, you're going to see court challenges. I mean, you're going to see a lot of court challenges. And this is the area where, you know, I really feel like we will see the most effective early resistance to Trump is in court. Now, on the first part of your question about what will we see from the military, I don't know because, you know, there's a big difference between deploying the military, for example, to use the Army Corps of Engineers or to use military labor to help build barriers and to help strengthen existing wall versus using the military in a more law. enforcement border enforcement capacity, which again raises real legal issues because we have the posse comitatis issues where American military is not supposed to be engaging in domestic law

enforcement. So you've got a very real issue there. And so whenever you put people who are armed in situations that are very tense for which they're not trained for, that's when you begin to have the real possibility of unintended violent consequences. And so, you know, one of the questions I have is, are the troops who are going to be at the border? Are they going to be even armed in the first place? I can easily see that's— I mean, of course they are, right? Well, I could—not necessarily. I could see a very smart commander saying, you know, you're here to build a fence where you're not going to have an M4 with live ammunition. You're not—that's not—you're not going to have that. really a smart commander under Pete Hegseth?

Well, that's the question. And we're in a situation where, A, we have no assurance that Donald Trump will do anything in a reasonable manner. But B, at the same time, we have not yet seen the worst case scenarios play out. So there is room for reason, potentially. It's just that we don't have confidence that reason will prevail and should not have confidence that reason will prevail. Michelle, where is the external resistance?

I mean, we saw, yes, the ACLU suing over birthright citizenship, but yesterday, the anger in the streets online, it was relatively tepid. It certainly felt different from eight years ago. Do you think we're going to see external resistance? No, I think we will see it. I think that it will just be in response to something more tangible, right? When Trump was first elected, A, it was a shock. B, because he didn't win the popular vote, it had this aura of democratic illegitimacy,

that it just seemed like this contingent kind of freak occurrence that the American people were at large hadn't actually chosen. And so there was this sense that we could sort of make it right, right? that we could get past, that we could reject this aberration. And obviously that sense is gone, right? This was who the American people, I mean, if not a majority, a plurality of the American people chose. It's hard to kind of find the same sort of rationale to protest his inauguration. You know, and people are exhausted, they're dispirited, they're overwhelmed, they're in despair. I share a lot of that despair. It's kind of very hard to organize in the absence of hope. And there's not that many leaders out there right now who are imbuing people with hope who are pointing a way forward, you know, not just through the next four years, but also a path for America that doesn't feel, you know, frankly, dystopian to those who oppose the MAGA agenda.

All that said, you know, I think it's important to remember that in some polls he's as unpopular as he was coming in in 2017, right? He's certainly more unpopular entering the presidency than, say, Joe Biden was in 2021. And so there is this potential, this kind of latent potential resistance. And I don't think we know yet what is going to be the thing that ignites it, but I feel pretty confident that something will. In the absence of that hope you're talking about Michelle, or at least kind of a clear alternate path forward, what would each of you like to see American citizens do in the coming months or how you would like to see them think about this moment or about Trump? generally? Well, I think that, I mean, a couple of things. I think that there's going to be physical resistance if they start really trying to round up migrants and mass. You know, I'm already on WhatsApp groups and signal groups, people kind of organizing for what they're going to do

if ICE comes into our neighborhoods or into the shelters near where we live. And, And so, you know, I think there'll be, you know, maybe human chains or various sorts of physical protests and standoffs. You know, that's obviously kind of small scale. That's not, you know, but it mattered. I mean, it mattered when people rushed to the airports in 2017 during the Muslim ban. And it's additive. People see that there's something they can do and it kind of snaps them out of their sense of helplessness. And then more broadly, you know, we saw a huge influx of people into the political system after 2017.

I suspect that some of that will happen again. I mean, I do think that when you have a political void on the scale that we have, someone is, or if not a political void, a political vacuum. someone is going to some kind of, you know, entrepreneurial soul is going to see their shot and try to fill it. Yeah, so I've had a lot of concerns that I've expressed. So let me turn the page and offer some hope here. Look, I think there's a good case to me made that right now Trump is at his high watermark. We have seen that this is not the first time that we have seen a winning political movement overreed its victory. In fact, not long ago, I did some research on the rhetoric from each

party after each cycle of victory. So you had an 04, this sort of sense that Carl Rove had cracked the code. And they were talking about an enduring majority. And sometimes they used the phrase permanent majority. Well, that all evaporated by 2006. So the permanent majority. So the permanent majority lasted all of two years. And then, you know, after 08, the majority that Obama achieved in the Senate, there was a lot of talk that this coalition of the ascendant had really cracked the code. And that lasted in 2010. And you get the idea. We have gone through a period of time in which there has been a triumphalism, an overreeding of a victory, and an overreach often followed by an electoral back. And the one thing that I think that Trump has, that even Obama, for all the loyalty that he had,

Trump has a loyal base unlike anything I've ever seen in politics. But at the same time, it is still a minority of the United States of America. This is still not the most popular politician in America. And so there is a real chance, especially as we've already seen him overreach, that you'll see a backlash. And there's this interesting phenomenon with Trump, and that is, when he gets out there in front of the American people and sort of displays rally Trump to people on a consistent basis, it tends not to work out well for him. And that's something we saw during the pandemic, for example, after sort of a burst of rally around the flag when he was

out there every day and he got weirder and stranger and more bizarre, you saw a real slide in support. And then the other thing is, I've never seen a politician immune from the negative effects of inflation. And if he does carry through with the tariffs, if he does carry through with mass deportation, one of the most likely effects of that is an increase in inflation. And so he's already demonstrating that he hasn't learned when the cardinal rules of his own victory. So there is ample reason to believe that we are right now at the high water mark of Mexico. But even a MAGA in decline can do immense damage. It's just going to be more time limited. But MAGA ascendant, if he does sort of crack a code where he can abuse power, he can even engage in punitive

actions that increase prices maybe for a time and still skates through, then we're, we really are in a different world at that point. Michelle, David, thanks so much for talking this through with me. I appreciate it. Oh, thanks so much, Patrick. Thank you, Patrick. 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, Vichaka, Fiby Lett, 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 Saburo, 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 Samuelski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.