Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Damon Linker discuss how Trump’s second term has exceeded even pessimistic expectations, why the “adults in the room” from Trump’s first administration were more effective than critics acknowledged, and whether Trump’s economic promises can survive contact with reality.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I think all of us expected, Damon, that Trump’s second term was going to be eventful. It felt, when he was re-elected, that it was the end of an era, that any hopes that political scientists and commentators had had for a long time, that the first Trump term was an aberration and that it would be expunged from American history, had clearly turned out to be wrong. But I dare say that this administration seems to be more impactful and more extreme than even the pessimists expected 12 months ago. What’s your overall assessment 365 days in?
Damon Linker: Well, that’s certainly the way it looks to me. As in a lot of my own Substack posts and in pieces that I wrote for Persuasion in the fall of 2024, I predicted that it would be crazier, more extreme, and more destructive than Trump 1.0, and, looking back on that, I can say that I got a lot of things right.
But even I was shocked by the sheer destructive energy with which he lunged out of the gate on January 20, a year ago, and by the sheer pent-up ambition of all the people that Trump had around him. It was really in the last year of his first administration that he and his advisors finally started to figure out how to wield power in the executive branch, and they were just starting to get their act together to get some rather extreme reformist right-wing stuff going. Then he lost, and we had the craziness surrounding January 6, including the lead-up and the aftermath.
There was then a short period when it looked like Trump was going to be history. He very quickly, over the next year or so, showed that he still controlled the base of his party and was going to be president again, or at least the nominee again if he wanted it. He did, and here we are. What happened over that intervening four years is that the people who had finally figured out how to break shit, if you will, coalesced around Trump. They figured out an agenda, figured out who would do what, and the second he was back in the White House, they hit the ground running, and they are still running.
If anything, there might have been a bit of a lull late in 2025, when his polls started to sink with the whole shutdown drama, which was very much a pre-Trump phenomenon. This was the recurring drama of Republicans shutting down the government because they did not want to pass any spending bills. This dates back to the Tea Party era of 2011 to ‘13. That happened a lot. In that period, he seemed to be sagging a little, but since the beginning of January this year, it has been a kind of manic return to the earliest months of the administration.
Mounk: Yeah, that’s a very interesting point. He obviously came into office with manic activity, with a record number of executive orders, with DOGE, with some of his announcements about foreign policy, with the intensification of funding and then action for deportation procedures, and security at the southern border. From perhaps June to November or December, it felt as though the administration was somewhat losing steam.
The courts were really gumming up some of what Trump wanted to do. The federal courts proved to be quite resistant to many of the Trump projects. I would argue that even the Supreme Court, on some key things, was at least slowing down the Trump agenda at some points, or overturning it. I do not know anybody in the Trump administration, but I know people who know people, and they gave me interesting reports that a lot of the mid-ranking and junior members of the Trump administration started to feel like they were actually losing. They started to feel frustrated about not transforming America to the extent that they wanted.
There was a moment, as recently as a month ago, when it would have been tempting to make the argument that the speed of this was starting to slow significantly, that Trump was very unpopular, that he was likely to lose the midterm elections, and that there were starting to be splits in the MAGA coalition. Perhaps he was even starting to feel a little bit like a lame duck.
Then this capacity he has, this manic activity, came back and took over. Over the last weeks, we have seen not just ICE agents in Minnesota coming to a head with the killing of Renee Good and the doubling down of ICE activity in Minnesota, but also this frenetic activity in foreign policy, from the capture of Nicolás Maduro to threats of strikes against Iran that were not carried out, amid the brutal crackdown of protesters there.
Now there has been a return to this relentless focus on Greenland, with this remarkable letter to the prime minister of Norway, basically saying that because Trump was not awarded the Nobel Prize, he is no longer all that interested in peace, and making these threats on Greenland, levying renewed tariffs on European partners. He held his inaugural address nearly a year ago, and two things strike me about that address. The first is that, on the surface level, he has done exactly what he promised. He said he would levy tariffs. He loved tariffs. He said he would be ruthless about immigration enforcement, and he has truly been ruthless about immigration enforcement. On a whole bunch of things, he has delivered exactly what he promised.
Of course, he also made grandiose claims in that speech about the wonderful paradise that would follow from that, about the great prosperity it would bring America, and so on. On all of those things, he has not delivered. I do not believe that tariffs, for example, have actually improved the state of the American economy. On the contrary, they have not.
It is striking that, though we are shocked by the radicalism of what he has done, especially when it comes to the rule of law, the politicization of the Department of Justice, the prosecution of Jim Comey, the investigation of Jay Powell, and so on, you can go back to the inaugural address and see that he told us exactly what he was going to do. He is a man of his word in that sense. For the great promises he made, however, he is certainly not living up to them. Are we wrong to be surprised? Should this all have been more obvious than perhaps it felt a year ago?
Linker: Well, again, I think we’re largely talking about intensity, a kind of manic energy. So it’s true that if you just list the things he said he was going to do, he’s done them, and we shouldn’t be surprised. But he also speaks in such a hyperbolic way that you always assume that he’s exaggerating, puffing himself up, living in a world of rhetoric rather than action. What has been surprising is the extent to which the administration has actually been willing to follow through on some of the more outlandish promises that it was very easy to assume were just hyperbole.
It’s one thing to bring up taking Greenland from Denmark and confronting NATO over that, or sabre-rattling, and then actually acting against Maduro and Venezuela. It’s one thing to say we’re going to send ICE all over the country and round up people in the interior, but it’s another to actually see it happen. Not that it’s being done very competently; it’s often very sloppy and done in a way almost as if it’s designed to antagonize people rather than build any kind of consensus in favor of it.
But it’s the energy behind it, the drive to do it, and the fact that they now know in the White House what levers to pull to get things to happen within a day or two. When someone in the White House makes a call, it actually takes place, as opposed to the norm in the first Trump administration. In that first administration, Trump would have a meeting and he’d say, I want to withdraw troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible, and he would say that in 2017. Then, in mid-2020, it still hadn’t happened yet, because every time he would say it, the players in the room would say, oh, yes, yes, Mr. President, and then they’d leave. In the hallway outside, they’d say, we’re not going to do that because that’s crazy, and then it would just get dropped, and they’d hope that he’d forget about it.
Six months later, he’d say, wait a minute, where are we on that withdrawal from Afghanistan? They’d say, yeah, yeah, we’re working on it, sir, and he’d leave, and they’d say, no, we’re not going to do that. That kind of bureaucratic obstructionism, in what Trump dubs the “deep state,” has disappeared for the most part. I think there is still some of it in some places.
Mounk: Just on this point, Damon, it strikes me there are two ways of glossing this. One is that we owe an apology to the “adults in the room.” I feel like during the first Trump administration there was a lot of mockery and a lot of scorn, somewhat understandably, of the senior officials who stayed in their comfortable positions and continued to serve under Trump, and then briefed the press saying that, behind the scenes, they were stopping all the crazy stuff from happening.
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When you compare the first Trump administration with the second Trump administration, there probably was more to that than I gave credit for at the time. Clearly, they were very effective at stopping those things. Of course, the other way of glossing this is that Trump’s fury at that obstructionism has some basis in reality. Trump at the time claimed that he was the elected president and that all of these people were running interference and stopping him from doing what he wanted to do. This was the deep state in action. Now, that also preserved us from some very bad outcomes that I think we are probably steering toward right now. But it is a strange kind of double-edged thing, and it is not obvious how to think about it.
Linker: I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and I think it’s important to think about it in those terms. There’s a way in which the first of those scenarios, where we credit the so-called deep state for stopping Trump in the first administration, shows that a lot of the people who did that gumming up the works to keep his craziest instincts from actually breaking stuff were drawing on something that Republicans had been pretty comfortable with, to some extent since Reagan, but especially since the 1990s.
There has been this dynamic on the right where the thought is that, to win elections, we have to feed red meat to the masses, the Republican electorate, because they’re angry and they want to hear all this nasty stuff attacking the left and liberals and so forth. But then, when we get into office, we’ll be the adults and we’ll govern responsibly.
So you had this kind of two-step going on at all times. One way of telling the story of the past almost half century is that this rhetorical whipping up of the masses ends up breaking free of its leash, and then you get the tiger eating the face, all these metaphors and so forth. In a way, we’ve recapitulated that very story between the first Trump administration and the second.
It’s as if, in the second, he came back with his supporters and with those who voted for him, at least the MAGA masses among Republicans, not the crossover voters who just didn’t like inflation and so voted for him this time, but the die-hard MAGA types on the right. They actually believed him, not just the old line about how you have to take him seriously but not literally. They believed him seriously and literally, and they want this stuff.
They came in and saw that obstructionism from the first Trump administration as even more reason to be ruthless this time, to say, in effect, if Trump says we’re going to do X, we’re going to do X as soon as possible, because that’s what the people voted for, that’s what they expect, and we’re going to get it done.
Now the problem, which maybe we want to pivot to a little bit on the economy, is that he made some promises there that were never going to happen. He’s not going to lower grocery prices. The only way to do that is deflation, which would actually be worse than inflation for the macroeconomy. There’s nothing the president can really do. You can do things to try to decrease inflation, and inflation itself is not that high.
Mounk: The funny thing is that his conflict with Jay Powell is all about the fact that Trump wants to lower interest rates faster than Powell does. There is a partisan political logic to that, which is that lower interest rates juice the markets. If you want the economy to feel roaring hot while you are in office, there is a reason to want really low interest rates.
Of course, low interest rates lead to inflation rather than deflation. So the pressure he is putting on Powell to change monetary policy goes directly against the promise, which was also core to that inaugural address that we talked about earlier, that he is going to lower grocery prices. All these different parts of his economic policy are therefore at cross purposes in a slightly confusing way.
Linker: I often think Trump would not pass a macroeconomics 101 course in college. He sees everything through the lens of the fact that he is a real estate developer. When you are a real estate developer, the thing you want most of all is low interest rates, because that decreases your costs.
Of course, it is also true that, for a lot of voters, when they complain about prices, they are not picking up The Wall Street Journal and saying, look at the actual inflation rate from week to week or month to month. That is not what they are talking about. They just mean that everything is more expensive now, and one of those things is credit card interest rates, car loan interest rates, and mortgage interest rates.
Those do make life more expensive, and so Trump is thinking that he might not be able to make grocery prices go down, but he can force Jay Powell to lower interest rates. That would lower all of those rates that consumers are seeing in their daily, weekly, and monthly budgets and would make them happier with him.
Mounk: That’s a fair point. There are some genuine economic problems with relatively high interest rates for mortgages, for example. Part of that is that if you have a low mortgage rate from the time when those were available, you are locked into whatever property you are in. If you wanted to move at this point and interest rates are significantly higher, the effective cost would be much greater. A lot of people are basically stuck in houses and apartments that may be in localities where they would not actually want to live. They might want to move to a different part of the country, but relatively high interest rates make that difficult. So that is a fair point.
While we are talking about the economy, to what extent have we already reached what the fear has been for the last twelve months, which is a real destruction of the world trading order? I am struck by the fact that there are new unhinged announcements about tariffs all the time for all kinds of reasons. The latest is this extra ten percent on a bunch of European countries as a punitive tariff because Europeans will not just hand over Greenland to Trump.
At the same time, it feels like international trade is still happening, and we have not seen a collapse of globalization, at least over this timeframe. Will all of this just take a long time to show its pain? Is it that in five, ten, or twenty years our GDP is going to be much lower than it otherwise would have been? Is the process of deglobalization, of countries no longer trading with each other, just going to take a long time as supply chains adjust and so on? Why is it that some of the imminent economic Armageddon that was predicted by top economists before “liberation day” has not yet arrived?
Linker: On economics, I am not a great expert, so I often defer to those I consider to know more. When it comes to longer-term predictions, I really can’t say. I would have assumed that after the trade apocalypse of last April, when Trump unilaterally slapped tariffs on almost every country in the world, some of them extraordinarily steep and beyond the range of anything that anyone would consider reasonable, this could lead to a depression. Of course, the stock market tanked, bond rates surged, and it looked for about two weeks like we could be plunging the global trading order into a depression.
But then Trump backed down. He raised tariffs, he lowered them, he went up and down, and already you have seen the markets appear to have learned from that experience to just not pay attention to what he says. It has effectively no consequence on markets, including the bond market, which, inevitably, is going to trend upward given our enormous deficits and the indifference in Washington to doing anything about them. The longer-term trajectory for that is not great, but I do not see exactly how we can really predict what is going to happen. You would think that if we live in a world with more walls, where there is more friction between trading partners, both bilaterally and in the global system as a whole, that would make all of us poorer than we otherwise would have been in a high-growth, high-trade environment.
I guess I would say that, but then again, we do not get to live the alternative timeline where we kept a more free trade regime and enjoyed those higher growth rates. The question is really what we settle in at, whether it is something like 1.5 percent annual average growth rather than 2.5 percent, and whether we notice it. We also have the fact that the dollar is down. That definitely makes it more expensive for us to purchase goods from abroad, but it also makes our products cheaper in the global order, and therefore it might balance out, and we will not really notice some of these things.
The last thing I will say on this is that I really am surprised that the economy is doing as well as it is. It is not great, but we have not really entered a recession. We continue to have positive growth overall. I think we might have had one month where we dipped into negative growth last fall, but it was a momentary glitch and may even have been revised the following month. We are continuing to avoid a recession.
Even after all of the incredibly unpredictable and insane announcements from the president, this makes long-term planning for businesses that have any kind of international trade—either on the selling end or on the end of needing parts from other countries in the supply chain to build products—extremely difficult. Calculations of what all this is going to cost, what products are going to cost, and how much can be sold based on those prices become almost impossible to make. I would have assumed that, given that huge injection of uncertainty into the system, the economy would be hobbled a lot more than it has been.
Mounk: Another element where that happened was the investigation of Jay Powell. There is research in political science that shows that the election of a populist is very bad for economic performance. If it is a left-wing populist like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, it has an immediate negative effect because businesses are scared of those left-wing populists. They realize that it is going to be very hard to do business there, so they pull out investments and stop projects they were going to undertake, and so on.
It then gets worse as these left-wing populists really concentrate power in their own hands, take control of monetary policy, often to help inflation, and so on. When you look at right-wing populists, economic performance often goes up a little bit in the first couple of years because businesses say that regulation is going to be cut and that it is going to be a more pro-business environment. Perhaps taxes are going to go down. But on a ten- or fifteen-year timeline, it ends up being very bad as well because of some of the same threats to the independence of economic policymaking.
Turkey is a good example of that. Erdoğan was reasonably business-friendly at first. In the first years he was in office, the Turkish economy did quite well. Over time, that changed as Erdoğan and his circle took charge of a lot of economic policy in Turkey, and as the central bank wanted to juice the economy to make sure that Erdoğan’s popularity ratings did not fall too much. They ended up with very high levels of inflation that ate away at a lot of the wealth in Turkey.
I would guess that people in financial markets know enough about this kind of thing that when they see the head of the Fed announcing that he is under investigation for purely political reasons, they would think that if the independence of the Fed is no longer assured, that is an important thing to take into account. I expected the markets to be down the next day. I forget now whether they were down half a point or whether they were up.
I want to shift the terrain a little bit because we have a lot to cover. Another area where you could say everything has changed, or you could say that remarkably little has changed, is foreign policy. When I grew up in Europe, the hard left was always anti-American. The center left was quite ambivalent. In a place like Germany, they were not exactly anti-American, but they had reservations about the United States and did not want to be too close to America. They wanted to hedge and balance a little bit. The center right was fully pro-American.
Now the entire landscape has shifted. The center left is sounding like the hard left, and the center right is sounding at least like the center left. When you listen to conservative politicians in Germany like Friedrich Merz, or centrist politicians like Emmanuel Macron, or some of the leaders of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, it is very hard to find a center-right leader in an earlier period who was so suspicious of the United States and so unsure of the long-term alliance.
That has very obvious reasons, such as tariff policies, repeated threats against Greenland, the national security strategy, and JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. This feels like a sea change. The nature of the transatlantic relationship feels further transformed.
On the other hand, Europe has limited options. European countries still need the United States for the war in Ukraine. They are still not able to defend their own continent, even though military expenditure is now going up quite significantly, particularly in Germany. They also have little of a plan for a world in which the alternatives to Washington are Putin and the Kremlin or Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
For all the rhetoric, Europe and America continue to be allied, more or less as they were. That would change if American soldiers suddenly showed up in Greenland. That really would mark the end of a seventy-five-year historical epoch. For now, it feels like the old order is over, but for lack of an alternative, everyone continues to act as though we are still in the old order. I am having trouble making sense of this. How should we think about it, Damon?
Linker: I think if you take a longer-term view, this relationship has been fraying for a very long time, from Bush, the second Bush, and the Iraq War and all the tensions with Europe over that, to Obama coming in. He is given the Nobel Peace Prize, which of course is part of what is contributing to Trump insisting he deserves his own Nobel Peace Prize now.
Obama comes in and wants to reverse what Bush did. He has the open hand to the Muslim world and wants much more of a revival of multilateralism with Europe to address common problems. Then the first Trump comes in and seems to have contempt for European allies and no use for NATO, but does not really do anything permanent to change it. Then Biden comes in and it is a reset. We are back to the way it was. We are back in charge. Everything is great. Then comes the second Trump.
First of all, our behavior as a country appears to be that of someone suffering from multiple personality disorder. Once again, this raises the question of long-term planning, as I was saying when it comes to the economy. How do you plan long term for the future of the NATO alliance when the lead partner, which has the overwhelming bulk of the military backing for the alliance, is involved in this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine that has been going on for a couple of decades?
Then there is the fact that Trump, people stupidly I think, tried to think about Trump and foreign policy in terms of isolationism. He is a peacemaker. He wants peace. He is anti-war. I do not think that is the right axis for thinking about this at all. He simply has not one shred of concern for democracy promotion, the liberal international order, rules-based policymaking, or international law. That entire dimension is at the very core of how Europe thinks about these things.
In the United States, especially for Republicans, this has always been more a matter of lip service. Republicans have always opposed the International Criminal Court, for example, and have always been willing to set aside international law considerations if there is something they want to do that would conflict with them. Trump has truly blown up that whole level of thinking about foreign policy in favor of the crudest realpolitik calculation, where the interests of the country are viewed entirely through the lens of Trump’s conception of his personal interests, collapsed into the national interest.
From the point of view of Europe, I can understand why they are simply flummoxed by what they are confronting. In some respects, Trump seems more hesitant to use force. On the other hand, he is quite quick to use force, but only in these little pinprick ways. You had a very smart piece a week or so ago where you talked about what is behind this acting out on the world stage, and you attributed it largely to two things: that he is very risk-averse and that he loves big, splashy headlines.
Translated into concrete terms, that means that if you can grab someone with a high-tech SEAL invasion, put him on trial, and get headlines about how the president of a foreign country was snatched in the night without anyone dying, then that is great. There are no troops on the ground and nothing to worry about. He gets a good headline.
Democracy promotion in Venezuela, however, gets no consideration whatsoever. We put in an alternative government that is no better than Maduro’s. The only difference is that it is willing to work with Trump and give him free oil tankers to sell on the world market, then stash the money in an account for him to use for his own purposes. That is insane by any reasonable standard of post-1945 foreign policy behavior, but that seems to be where we are.
Mounk: I feel like over time I have built up a grand unified theory of Trump’s foreign policy, and I would say that it has three constitutive elements. The first is a zero-sum worldview, which obviously started with The Art of the Deal and has pervaded Trump’s thinking on every aspect of life since then. It is summed up by the old line about poker that if you do not know who the sucker at the table is, then it must be you. Trump thinks that there cannot be two winners in an agreement or a contract, and so you have to inflict pain on the other side, because if you are not, then it must mean that they are inflicting pain on you and that you just have not realized that you are the idiot who is being had.
The second thing is that he clearly thinks about the world in terms of spheres of influence. Why is Trump so keen to exert control over the Panama Canal, a dog that has not really barked, that he talked about a lot at the beginning of his term but that might come back at any time, and Greenland? It is because those are in the Western Hemisphere. They are parts of what Trump considers to be America’s sphere of influence, and he feels that America should be able to do whatever it wants in that part of the world.
By the same token, that is also why he does not care about Ukraine and why he does not seem to care much about Taiwan or perhaps other parts of East Asia. He feels that Ukraine is naturally Russia’s sphere of influence and that Taiwan is China’s sphere of influence, so why should we care all that much about what is going on there, other than perhaps needing some chips from TSMC? Other than that, he thinks it is natural that those places should be under the control of other powers.
The third piece is the confusion around his claim that he wants to be measured by the wars that did not start. He is such a deep critic of the Iraq War, so why does he now do something like capturing Nicolás Maduro, and why is he talking about Greenland? I think the answer is that he has a playbook for the kinds of military operations he supports and the ones he does not.
Something like the Iraq War, which takes hundreds of thousands of American troops on foreign territory, is extremely expensive and poses significant risks to American lives. Many American and Iraqi lives were lost, and that is not worth doing. But if you can have a spectacular action that is a surprise, that suddenly happens so that the American public wakes up and it is already over, that is different. Perhaps there is a risk of a couple of service members tragically dying, but it could be pulled off without a single casualty. Even if there are casualties, the number is on the digits of one hand. It shows strength and the ability to use superior military force, so why not?
If you take these three things together, the zero-sum worldview, spheres-of-influence thinking, and this playbook that favors spectacular action when the long-term risk to American troops and the cost to the American military are low, you get what Trump has been doing.
That means he could go on all kinds of adventures. It could involve sending soldiers to Nuuk and to Greenland, which I do not think we can rule out. It could involve occupying the Panama Canal at some point over the next three years. It could involve other spectacular strikes on real or perceived adversaries of the United States.
What I do not think is going to happen is a conventional invasion of a country. Trump would not do that. Greenland is a slightly special case. It is a territory with fewer than one hundred thousand inhabitants and a vast landmass with basically no military fortifications. You could imagine him going for military conquest there because the risk of it turning into an Iraq-style quagmire is objectively very low, and so it does not go against his playbook in the same way.
Linker: I assume he is going to get it and that no one is going to fire a shot. I think he believes it is in his interest for Europe to think that he would be willing to actually invade using military force, in quotes, because it is kind of absurd. We could conquer it in an afternoon by simply landing troops there. I do not think there would be any fight.
I think he is going to combine things like that crazy letter he sent to the Norwegian prime minister, which a lot of people were freaking out about on Monday morning, with madman-theory-style threats. People say, my gosh, he is crazy, he actually wants to do this. He will combine that with maybe moving some military forces in the general area of the North Atlantic, as if he is going to invade, combined with trade war threats and new tariffs, with even bigger tariffs coming up in June.
I assume that Europe is going to back down, and I think he could actually get Greenland. I do not think he would invade, but it is a bluff. We will have to see how it plays out.
The other thing I would add to your schema, which I think is quite smart and right on most things, especially the part about spheres of influence, which I have written about in relation to Trump’s foreign policy thinking for a couple of years now, is the weird wild card of the Middle East.
That region is not really in anyone’s immediate sphere of influence when it comes to the United States, Russia, and China. It is this other part of the world, and Africa is similar, of course. Trump could not care less about what goes on in Africa, even though, demographically, Africa is the future of the world in many ways, and what happens there is going to matter enormously over the next half century. He cannot think in those terms. His mind was forged in the 1980s and cannot go beyond that.
The Middle East is different. All three of those major global powers in this Trumpian multipolar world have a stake in what happens there. I would say the Middle East is the most likely flash point for a very serious great power competition and conflict over the next few years.
That is precisely because Trump has friends in the Emirates with whom he is deeply involved, and they have their interests vis-à-vis Iran. Trump despises the Iranian government and has threatened to bomb Iran, but he has also backed off from that.
Strangely, and fitting very well with your analysis, it seems most likely that the United States would bomb only if it looked like the Iranian regime were already on its way out anyway. If the protests there had succeeded, or were half a day from succeeding, then bombing might have happened so that he could claim credit.
The fact that they severely cracked down and killed thousands of protesters actually made him less likely to intervene, which is the diametric opposite of the liberal international approach. We went into Libya precisely when Gaddafi started bombing people who were protesting his regime. Trump does the opposite.
Historically speaking, and even today, Russia has a lot at stake in various theaters of the Middle East. China also feels that what happens there matters to them. That is a place where you cannot simply rely on the logic of the near abroad and say, all right, Russia gets Ukraine, China gets Taiwan, we get Greenland, the Panama Canal, Venezuela, and anyone else unlucky enough to be in our neighborhood, because we are going to throw our weight around and use our enormous military advantages to bully everybody, including Canada. The Middle East is a kind of no man’s land that everyone wants to be their land, so I am nervous about that as a potential theater of conflict.
Mounk: One thing I should say is that I do not think Trump is going to start a war of choice in the way that George W. Bush did in Iraq. Given how reckless many of his actions are internationally, it is sadly imaginable that he gets embroiled in a major war, whether in the Middle East or somewhere else.
Those are two different things. I have worried from the start that his anti-war stance, coupled with his military foreign policy adventurism and its general ruthlessness, does not necessarily make it less likely that we will have a major armed conflict. The Middle East is one area where that might happen, but there are many others as well.
Linker: Anytime you have someone who is behaving so unpredictably and recklessly, there is always the possibility that you get sucked into a war because of misunderstanding, mistakes, or miscalculations by others or by other powers. But when Trump is behaving the way he is, he is very much counting on this madman approach to keep everyone in line. That makes a lot of assumptions about everybody else not being as mad as he is.
Mounk: I want to bring it back home to the United States for a little bit. We are in this weird place where there were a bunch of elections a few months ago and, as best we can tell, they were counted perfectly normally and ordinarily. In fact, Democrats had big victories, and it does not seem as though there was any kind of concerted attempt to undermine the outcome of those elections.
A lot of our courts work perfectly normally. In fact, the rate at which the Trump administration has lost cases in federal courts is astonishing. It seems likely that the Supreme Court will rule against the Trump administration on some major things, and on some big things the Supreme Court has already ruled against Trump. There is still some amount of resistance to the politicization of the judiciary.
The attempts to prosecute Jim Comey and Letitia James showed the extent to which prosecutors can be appointed to do the dirty job of going after political ends, and the extent to which the Department of Justice has deeply broken with its historical norms. At the same time, those lawsuits were thrown out by the courts as obviously frivolous, and neither Jim Comey nor Letitia James is in jail or even in the process of being prosecuted at the moment.
At the same time, you have areas of American life that feel like laboratories in which the rule of law is starting to be suspended. First, you have the Department of Justice going after people, and even if those suits are eventually dropped, that has an incredibly intimidating and chilling effect. If you become a sufficiently high-profile critic of Donald Trump, you might have to contend with a criminal investigation, even if it is ultimately thrown out by the courts after many sleepless nights and considerable legal expenses that you will not get back.
We have seen freedom of speech rights for U.S. citizens broadly respected, in the sense that nobody is in jail because of things they have said, or almost nobody. But for people who are in the United States on student visas, it looks very different. If they say something that the administration dislikes, the government can simply cancel their visa and send them home without any due process and without any reasonable case that they pose a threat to national security.
Now, as you have written about vividly in your pages and in the pages of Persuasion, it looks like ICE is being deployed as an agency that is effectively putting parts of Minneapolis outside the rule of law. Is there still the rule of law in the United States? How bad have things gotten in this respect? How do we maneuver between these different facts that I have just recited?
Linker: Well, my assessment of it is that it is a mixed bag, as you were just indicating in that list of things. But in general, it is bad. The trajectory is quite bad. I think that ICE is a menace. It is a kind of proto-secret police, sort of like an American Gestapo in the making. Its budget is going off the charts. I believe the coming year’s budget for ICE is larger than the budget for the FBI, the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau, and a bunch of other federal law enforcement agencies combined. This is enormous. This is huge. They are hiring tons of people. As has been reported, they are hiring people often without proper vetting and then putting them out in the field without proper training.
Then, as we saw with the shooting of Renee Good, when a terrible altercation like that happens, the administration, within hours, circumvents the possibility of any kind of investigation and announces ahead of time that there will be no federal investigation. The interest of local and state authorities in conducting their own investigations immediately gets stymied because the federal government refuses to comply with or cooperate in any such investigation. As you noted with the Justice Department, it has really been terribly damaged. The Justice Department has been shredded in its norms and is going to be the part of the federal government that will be hardest to fix after this, if it is even possible. The real thing we are seeing is that over the weekend it was announced that the Justice Department is looking into investigations of the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, simply because they are supposedly obstructing the movements of ICE in Minneapolis.
Over the weekend, there were reports, and I do not know because we are always in a weird funhouse mirror of social media reporting, and I have not yet seen independent reporting on it, of some anti-ICE protesters breaking into a church and disrupting a Baptist church service while looking for evidence that the pastor there was working for ICE. There were also images of people standing in their driveways with semi-automatic weapons, trying to protect themselves against ICE. Looking at those images, you would think America is going the way of the Irish Troubles. This looks like the beginning of a breakdown of law and order, which Trump has been looking for a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act to address almost from day one. There is some noise right now that he is going to do it soon, maybe even today. There is talk of 1,500 troops being flown in from Alaska, potentially.
It is all bad. It is really bad. At the macro level of the country as a whole, however, not everything has broken down. The courts are functioning. It is true that Trump has had some setbacks at the Supreme Court, although I would say that on the whole it has been pretty positive for him, especially on the front of unitary executive theory. He has basically been winning on that. We have not yet seen the tariff ruling. We will see. I suspect the Court will try to have it both ways, saying that the way he went about it was unconstitutional, but that the fact that the House voted to let him do it means he can get away with it for now, or something like that. So I think it is very much a mixed bag so far.
Part of that is that at the highest level, the Supreme Court, even when it does not agree with Trump, can choose to rule very narrowly and give him a backhanded win. Many of the ways in which it has stood up to him have involved intermediary steps, such as lower court rulings, where the Court allows an injunction to stand while the case winds its way through the courts for the next year. There has not really been a Supreme Court decision ending a line of cases that flatly says, no, Trump, you cannot do this. Whether that eventually happens, and whether Trump accepts it or defies the Court, is still an open question that we have not yet seen answered. Thank goodness for that, but I suspect it will happen at some point.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Damon discuss recent changes to the media landscape, what Donald Trump will do next, and whether the Democrats can turn things around. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
