Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg and contributing Opinion writer Frank Bruni join Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, at the halfway mark of President Trump’s first 100 days in office, to reflect on how he is changing the country.
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Patrick Healy: This is the First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
Michelle, Frank, I’d love to hear from each of you about an issue or person or moment that you think defines how Trump has used power during his first 50 days. Michelle, do you want to start?
Michelle Goldberg: Sure. There’s a few, but one that stands out for me is the gutting of U.S.A.I.D., because it’s illegal and because it’s so flagrantly immoral and utterly self-destructive.
During the first Trump term, I would sometimes have to catch myself because even though I thought and think that Trump is uniquely despicable and dangerous, the fact remains that if you just want to look at the number of lives lost and global damage done, George W. Bush really outstripped him. Trump is maybe a worse person, but the damage that he did in his first term was much more contained.
I think that in the second Trump term he’s changed that very quickly. Not just by taking America’s soft power and setting it on fire in all sorts of ways, but really making these abrupt decisions that are going to kill hundreds of thousands and maybe more than a million people and he’s doing it in this incredibly arbitrary, careless way.
And I just want to say something really quick before we get to Frank: I have a 12-year-old son who, as he learns more about various kinds of dark chapters in American history, can get really down on this country. So I often find myself in the strange position of trying to talk up American greatness because I don’t want him to feel despair about the country that he’s growing up in. It’s occurred to me that every single thing that I have pointed out to him as a sign of American greatness or goodness, whether that be foreign aid, whether that be our support for Ukraine, our success in welcoming immigrants and refugees, or scientific pre-eminence, everything that I thought was best about America Trump has either destroyed or tried to destroy in less than two months.
Frank Bruni: It’s really interesting to hear you talk about that, Michelle, because I don’t have children and I feel so much despair and fear and heartache about what’s going on, and I often wonder, what do you say to children at this time? How do you maintain their optimism and their belief that they do live in a special country? So that’s fascinating for me to hear. The two things that stand out to me from the first 50 days or so are related and they have to do with a culture of intimidation that President Trump has created. I think among all that’s happened these two things seem like the clearest baby steps — or not even baby steps — toward something like autocracy.
I think first of what happened on Day 1 — and I worry that because it happened on Day 1 in such a blizzard of activity that it’s gotten lost — but granting pardons and clemency of various kinds to the defendants in the Jan. 6 cases, that was an extraordinary and chilling thing. And what it said to those who steadfastly support him is there will be a reward to being on Team Trump. At the same time, another thing that’s been forgotten is his withdrawal of the security details from Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and from a few others. These were people who were facing credible death threats from Iran because of their service to the United States ——
Goldberg: Because of their service to Donald Trump!
Bruni: Correct. That was so extraordinary.
I remember I was here at Duke, where I teach, and Maggie Haberman came down to do a panel, and when I asked her the question about what has surprised her, the only thing that had really surprised her, she said, and had chilled her to the bone, was the withdrawal of the security details. Because it was such an exercise of brute power.
I mentioned those two things because they’re entwined and it’s about a system of rewards and punishments that says, if you counter me, if you contradict me, if you speak against me, there will be consequences. But if you go along with me, if you do as I please, there will be rewards.
Healy: Michelle, this makes me think of your great column this week about what’s happening at Columbia University. Are Americans only safe if we’re on Donald Trump’s side?
Goldberg: I think that there’s probably a scale of exposure. Mahmoud Khalil is someone who has a green card, he’s married to an American, he’s expecting a baby soon. He was also a leader in the Columbia protests against Israel last year. I think that his arrest, the idea that someone can be taken away arbitrarily, certainly means that people with green cards — there are about 13 million in America — have fewer protections than they did a few months ago.
Until very recently, it was sort of settled law that if you were inside the country, and particularly if you were somebody who had a green card, you had the same constitutional protections as American citizens. That is clearly no longer the case. And so you might think, well, I’m safe because I’m an American citizen. But I think what this shows is that a government that is this willing to ignore free speech protections for one group obviously can’t be counted on to uphold them for the rest of us.
Healy: Frank, do you think that Trump actually cares about any of this destruction that he’s undertaking, or is the destruction the point? By which I mean, I’m not sure if Donald Trump really cares about foreign aid and soft power and I’m not sure he really cares if he’s putting John Bolton at risk or not.
I feel like he entered his second term wanting to be a doer. It’s the action that’s the thing.
Bruni: I could not agree with you more. I don’t think he has a coherent value structure as most of us understand it. I think we’re seeing a president who’s operating without anything any of us would recognize as a conscience. Truly.
It is about showing what he can get away with. It’s about showing his enemies that what they support, he can tear down. It is all about displays of brute strength. He gets off on that, and in that sense, it seems not so much an autocracy but a flexocracy. Let me show you how I can flex my bicep as I use it to power my fist coming into your face.
And building on what Michelle said, we’re seeing clear violations of free speech. We’re in that territory when Ann Coulter, who — as she said in a social media post, she’s for almost every deportation, but what’s happening with Mahmoud Khalil feels like a clear violation of the First Amendment. When Ann Coulter’s raising that point in this context, you know we’ve strayed onto some very, very interesting and dangerous territory.
What’s so fascinating to me, Patrick and Michelle, is that many of Trump’s supporters in the middle, for lack of a better word, said we want free speech, we’re tired of cancel culture, we’re tired of the language policing from the left. And there are legitimate complaints there for sure, but what we’re getting in return is not free speech. We’re getting a different kind of censorship, and we’re getting a different kind of approved speech, which goes back to your question, Patrick.
It’s not about any coherent values. It’s not about any North Star. It’s about showing that you can turn the boat 180 degrees around and that you can do whatever you want and you can bring the people who opposed you to their knees.
Goldberg: I also think free speech means something different for someone like Elon Musk than it does for a civil libertarian. It means that he gets to say whatever he wants without restriction and you have to listen and you have to take it. And he’s the one who has the power to redefine terms, not you. And so there’s this kind of glorying in seizing the power that they felt the left was exercising unfairly. And for some people, that’s what free speech was really about, a system of social norms that provided maximum grace toward the most powerful people in society. At the same time, when you talk about people in the middle, there’s also just a lot of people in this country who do not like being told what to say.
Healy: Michelle, I want to pick up on your point about Elon Musk. I have been more guilty than most in commissioning guest essays and columns on Musk in the last 50 days, but I really think he has been the story. He’s my pick for this first halfway point, and it’s not just his chain saw for the government.
I think Musk is bad disruption personified and I think more than anyone, he set the tone for this administration in throwing out crazy ideas to provoke and change America. I think he is at war with America as we know it and I think he sees the government, the media and academia as proxies for the Democratic Party. He wants to break them. He wants to redefine society as a two-gender deal. He doesn’t like NATO. He doesn’t like the U.N. He’s all for grabbing natural resources like those in Greenland and earth minerals in Ukraine. He doesn’t care about allies because he’s a unilateral-mind-set type of person. I get the sense he wants to break the back of America to rebuild it to his specs.
Goldberg: In some ways the person who best understands this, as I hate to say it, is Steve Bannon. He has talked about Musk as being a technofeudalist, and I do think that is a pretty accurate picture of where he wants to take us. I also think that’s one reason why this administration has been so different in some ways. Trump, for all his hyperactivity, is also sort of lazy and hands-off.
The people who are actually running a lot of the government day to day in the first Trump administration were normal Republicans who thought of themselves as people who were protecting the government from Donald Trump. At the time I thought that they were doing us a disservice by propping him up and shielding the country from the consequences of electing someone like Donald Trump as president. It made people very complacent about putting such an erratic figure in charge of the most powerful country in the world. And so now, instead of them running the day-to-day operations of the government, it’s both a bunch of Project 2025 ideologues and Elon Musk and his band of feral children.
Healy: Everyone keeps talking about the feral children, Michelle, but I see it differently. I think of them as world builders. I think of them as these Tolkienian-loving kids who want to rebuild a world in the shape of Musk, and they’re willing to drive the economy into a ditch if they need to.
The notion that it’s all just kids who don’t know what they’re doing running around accessing our data? I’m a little worried that they do actually know what they’re doing.
Goldberg: I think that maybe they know what they’re doing in terms of wanting to cripple the “deep state,” but I don’t think they understand why these systems exist in the first place. You see that with Musk being like: Oh, we made a mistake. We fired the people who were trying to halt the spread of Ebola. But then we hired them back.
Of course, he didn’t. None of that has been reconstructed. So actually, I don’t think that in many cases they know what they’re doing.
Healy: Frank, can I ask you about where Trump fits into this? I think of Trump as someone who is so hyperconfident, so narcissistic. But I think he’s also taken with the idea of world building. I think he very much wants Greenland and he’s going to try to manifest that into being, but what I don’t understand is whether he is a lazy, half checked-out guy who’s happy to sit back and watch Elon and Rubio get into it or watch Elon smash and grab and just see where it takes us, even if it takes us into an economic ditch.
Bruni: Well, it’s a little bit of both. He likes to sit back and watch Musk and Rubio tangle. But he sits back knowing that they’re tangling because they’re both in his good graces for the time being. They’re tangling because he put them in positions where they have power and agency. To him so much of it is a show. At the end of that disgraceful, shocking meeting in the Oval Office with him, Vance and Zelensky, one of his final comments was he turned to someone and said, that will make great television, huh?
The significance of that comment is immense. He sees so much of this as a spectacle. He’s staging a spectacle for Americans. He’s staging a spectacle for his own amusement. And I think it’s interesting, Patrick, that you keyed in on Musk. I think where he and Trump are complete doppelgängers is in their understanding of power and what should be done with it. One of the fundamental changes here is that historically in America we saw the measure of power as being our grace. Our stature was reflected in how big and generous a player we could be on the world stage.
To Trump and Musk, power is acquisition, power is bringing people who disagree with you into submission. Power is basically concentrating as much influence and wealth around you as you can. That is diametrically opposed to the story we used to tell ourselves about America and power.
Healy: I find myself nodding along and yet also feeling like we lack the language to talk about Trump. I hear Democrats talk about him as an authoritarian or an autocrat, making comparisons to Putin, and I wonder if that is adequate to the moment. Does this man defy historical comparison? Does that language even capture it? Or is the language that I’m kind of groping for a language about a country where so many people just may not care?
Goldberg: I think there are two different levels. On the one hand, is the language accurate? And on the other hand, does the language meet the moment or communicate to people the danger that we’re in? I think that in terms of historical parallels, obviously, none are exact. But there are a lot. And I really need to ration my Hannah Arendt references because otherwise I would just be constantly larding my columns with citations from the origins of totalitarianism.
It is true that there is a sense of profound apathy and one of the right-wing views that I’ve come around to in the course of the last abominable decade is that we do need more classical civic education because without it, it’s very hard to communicate to people why these various limitations on the government and the separation of powers are worth preserving and why it is worth being alarmed about when they are destroyed.
Bruni: I don’t think there are tidy comparisons. I think it’s the overwhelming nature of this all that has so many people sort of numb and tuned out and feeling sort of helpless. To begin to really look hard at Trump’s indecencies, at his overreach, at his defiance of the law, at his contempt for norms is to end up in a black hole from which you can never escape. I bet all three of us feel that emotionally after years of writing and talking about this.
So I do think there are many Americans who, because it’s so impossible to comprehend the immensity of the departure from the American past, just really end up concentrating all their worries on the price of eggs.
One of our greatest shortcomings as people in the media who are paid to spend time thinking about and analyzing all of this is that we forget how many Americans have these overstuffed stressful days in which they have a half an hour to follow the news. I mentioned Steve Bannon because he’s the big proponent of the flood-the-zone strategy. They’re counting on people tuning out.
Healy: Yes, I think that’s right. And they know that a lot of those people aren’t sitting around debating the finer points of what a constitutional crisis is. I do wonder, though, in terms of that numbing, maybe what’s going on with the economy will start shaking some more people out of it.
Goldberg: I think it already has to some degree around the edges. You already see Trump’s approval rating, which was positive for the first couple of weeks of his administration, is already underwater, although only slightly. His numbers in polls on the economy are pretty bad. But the information environment is so bad that it’s not clear to me how much people are making the connection between, say, Trump saying that he can’t rule out a recession and the value of their retirement portfolio crashing. I thought it was a remarkable moment when Trump retweeted — or retruthed ——
Healy: Retruthed, Michelle! [Laughs]
Goldberg: He shared on Truth Social this post from Charlie Kirk that said shut up about the price of eggs, and Donald Trump is saving you money in so many other ways.
Imagine if Joe Biden had posted “shut up about the price of eggs” at a time when egg prices were increasing?
Healy: We’re hearing more and more from C.E.O.s privately that they’re not investing in their firms and they’re playing it safe. It’s not just the markets, but the sense of this chaotic tariff policy.
And we know that Trump pays attention to numbers. He’s obsessed with his poll numbers and he’s obsessed with markets. But again, we were talking about that desire to break America down ——
Bruni: That’s Trump’s idea of power. If I can destroy, if I can defile and march on relatively unscathed and unpunished, that makes me powerful. Other people can’t get away with it, but that’s how dominant and superior I am.
Michelle made a really important reference a moment ago to the information environment. What I think is so fascinating to watch right now — and potentially deeply troubling — is that the markets are not doing well and the price of eggs is not coming down. There’s a widespread belief that will be his reckoning, that Americans are going to see that and they’re going to say, no, we need to change just like we felt we needed to change from Joe Biden.
But with such a corrupted information environment and with such a committed demagogue in the White House, can Trump succeed in weaving a different narrative? In shifting the blame? Is he going to usher us into something that looks like a post-accountability era?
Healy: Frank, I think the answer is yes. He does defy, in so many ways, any normal holding to account.
I just never underestimate Donald Trump. It’s a rule of thumb of mine. Never underestimate the man. And part of that is because there are so many Americans who just want leadership. Right now, they look at the Democratic Party, they see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and they didn’t see what they felt they needed to see to meet the moment politically.
What do you want to see from Democrats right now? What does leadership look like in this moment? What would be effective in countering Trump?
Bruni: I can give you one very short, easy answer: I want to see Elissa Slotkin’s response to Trump’s remarks to Congress. They were brief. They were to the point. They did not indulge in the sort of hysteria that characterizes Trump’s approach to everything. They provided a contrast.
That is key, I think. There’s an ongoing intense argument in the Democratic Party. Do we match his tactics with those sorts of tactics of our own? Do we fight fire with even more fire? And I think the way you win elections is to provide a contrast. Most of the responses to Trump’s address to Congress have been pretty lame and disappointing, but I thought the way Elissa Slotkin boiled it down to three fundamental American concerns was effective. She talked about those concerns in language that was plain, saying here is what is not being done correctly, and we care as much about those issues, but we’d approach them in a much more effective and common-sensical way. I think she gave us the answer for how to respond to Trump. And I think maybe we’re doing too much hand-wringing and not looking at the obvious.
Goldberg: I think her response was very good. Elissa Slotkin is very impressive. But I also think that there has to be a measure of leadership and authenticity that comes from responding to where people actually are.
Right now you have millions and millions of people who are so horrified or so aghast by what’s happening. I talk to them all the time. And they feel like they have no leadership. They feel like nobody is articulating what they’re feeling and they feel like nobody is doing anything about it and telling them where we go from here. Those people need and deserve leadership.
We don’t really have an opposition party.
Healy: Michelle. I want to read you a letter that we got last week after our episode with David Brooks, where David and I were talking about Trump’s address to Congress, Elissa Slotkin’s response, but also pieces like the James Carville guest essay that we published about Democrats’ needing to wait it out. I heard from a lawyer in Ithaca who wrote this:
“Democrats should wait it out? You guys apparently have no idea how angry and upset we regular citizen Democrats are at the lack of action by our elected officials. We are beside ourselves out here. We are watching what’s happening and seeing no one in Congress doing anything significant to stop it.”
And she went on and conveyed what you were getting at, Michelle. That sense of wanting someone to lead, having someone take some kind of action, or at least lay out a plan for how we’re going to meet the moment and get through the moment.
Can any one leader meet it, Michelle? Do you think that’s possible? One person, like a Bernie Sanders or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Goldberg: It’s probably not going to just be one person, but at the same time there is this political mantle out there that just as a matter of political entrepreneurship, you would think more people would be trying to grab.
Bruni: I feel the letter writer’s pain in terms of agreeing that this country is in a dire place and it’s scary as hell and the appetite for action that would take us out of this as fast as possible. I share that appetite.
I think Democrats don’t have a lot of cards to play right now. One of the things that Democrats aren’t doing is fighting in courts, and some of the most hopeful things that we’ve seen happen are courts saying, “wait a second, let’s put the brakes on this. Maybe we can’t let this happen.”
Democrats do not have a majority in Congress. And I think a lot of the frustration gets translated into: Where is our inspiring, charismatic, spectacularly articulate leader? When really what’s wrong is that there aren’t a lot of cards to play.
Healy: Michelle, Frank, thanks so much for joining me.
Goldberg: Thank you.
Bruni: Thank you.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Aman Sahota, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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