In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama and Mona Charen discuss Trump’s latest actions, from demolishing the East Wing of the White House to demanding compensation from the Justice Department; whether the Trump administration’s bombing boats in Venezuela might lead to further military action; and the link between social media and populism.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and author, is Policy Editor of The Bulwark and host of two weekly podcasts: The Mona Charen Show and Just Between Us.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Welcome to the ninth installment of The Good Fight Club. Today I am joined by Mona Charen, as well as our regular co-host and panelist, Francis Fukuyama.
We thought we would talk about what Trump has done, then we decided to consolidate it all into a general Trump-palooza. We’ve seen the demolition of parts of the East Wing of the White House to make way for his ballroom. We’ve seen Trump demand hundreds of millions of dollars from the Department of Justice as compensation for his own prosecution by that department—one that may have been greenlit by his own political appointees.
We’re now seeing a number of Trump opponents being indicted one after another. Has the government been fully personalized and submitted to the will and whim of Donald Trump? Where are we at?
Mona Charen: I should start the discussion about the demolition of the East Wing with a little bit of personal history, because I actually worked in that building back in the Reagan administration for about six months. I worked for First Lady Nancy Reagan, so I was in that building quite a bit. It’s wounding to me for that reason, but not just for that reason.
I think many Americans are shocked by the images of bulldozers tearing down a part of the White House. Yes, it has only been in its current form since World War II, but that’s a long time, and a lot of history has transpired since then. It was the entrance through which tourists would begin their visit to the White House. They would see the garden Jacqueline Kennedy put in and the graceful colonnade. All of it was stately, proportional, and befitting a republic.
The White House was carefully designed not to be a palace, not to be a king’s residence, not to be monarchical, but to be stately and suited to this country. For this president to simply demolish it in favor of a gaudy monstrosity of a ballroom is appalling.
Yascha and Frank, to give you a sense of the scale—the current White House, including the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. That’s the entire structure, not counting the East Wing. The ballroom he proposes, which I’ve called Mar-a-White House, is 90,000 square feet. It will dwarf the existing White House.
Mounk: In its defence, the most important function of the government is surely to hold balls and parties.
Charen: Yes, exactly. You need an event space. It’s obscene to do this, and yet you can’t help it—the metaphor is screaming at all of us. This is the physical representation of what Trump is doing to the presidency and to the country. He is demolishing our history, demolishing our traditions, all in the name of erecting monuments to himself.
Mounk: I have to say it’s very hard to predict what images will appear in history books that commemorate this era of American politics. One of them may be the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. There are many other images one might imagine surviving in the history books, but a bulldozer taking down part of the White House surely must be one of the candidates for that.
Charen: They attempted to prevent Treasury Department employees from snapping photos, since the Treasury is just across the street, because they knew it would be a bad look.
Francis Fukuyama: Jonathan Van Last on The Bulwark suggested a couple of days ago that it should be on the agenda of the next president to tear down all of these monuments in the name of historical preservation and restore the old building. I’m fully supportive of that because I really don’t think elected American presidents ought to be allowed to raise monuments to themselves.
Mona’s exactly right—that’s what he’s doing. It’s also another illustration of his view of executive power. There is a process by which these architectural changes are vetted by people who care about the surroundings, the history, and everything else. He completely bypassed that. Even within his own administration, they didn’t talk about this. It was just his idea. Once again, it’s a complete abuse of executive power under this presidency.
Mounk: Yeah, one of the striking things in this moment is that there are fears about what the personalization of the government will do to the rule of law and the separation of powers. I think we’re in a bad place there, but it’s not yet the case that most Americans are afraid they’re going to be chucked in jail if they criticize the president or anything like that. But just the sheer personalization of the government in ways that were hard to imagine ten months ago is really striking.
This to me is what connects these two stories. The sitting president saying the Department of Justice owes me money and the Department of Justice apparently considering paying it back to him. I imagine the courts are going to have something to say about that, but it’s striking. A president wanting to make alterations to the White House is, in principle, an appropriate thing for a president to want to initiate. But there would have been some kind of process. There would have been some kind of way in which you would get in stakeholders and make decisions.
It’s both the popular appeal but also the way in which this administration is going to really lose the patience of the American people by saying, I can just do stuff. If I think the East Wing sucks and we should have a big, beautiful ballroom, I’m just going to do it. Who’s the architect, even? Like who came up with these plans, by what process? It’s really striking that nothing seems to be able to stop Trump from doing this. Nothing seems to be able to stop him from the tariffs, for I guess the Supreme Court is going to eventually rule on that. Nothing seems to be able to stop him from bringing a bunch of dodgy indictments against his political enemies, even though perhaps they’re not going to end up being actually sentenced to prison terms.
Charen: First of all, Yascha, I think your idea that the image of the bulldozer will go down in history is a good one because it is such a perfect metaphor. Yes, he is bulldozing all of the traditional checks that have restrained presidential whims in the past.
Just on this topic—to make changes in the White House, you would normally have to go through the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. You would get notice and comment from the public, and you would discuss it with Congress. None of that happened. He is bulldozing not just this part of the building, but all of the normal procedures that would have governed this kind of thing.
There was an idea to build a federal building in New York a few years back, and they discovered that it had been a burial ground for black slaves in the seventeenth century. All construction was halted. In the name of historic preservation, the project was suspended. That is the way things normally work. Here, where it is a far more important historical building—a symbol of the country—it is simply bulldozed.
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But also, Yascha, if I may, I’d like to push back a little on something you said a second ago, which is that people aren’t afraid of the president coming after them. I think you’re underestimating that. Some people are continuing to vigorously express their views, but many are holding back. Many are saying they chose to remain anonymous “for fear of retribution.” Read any story about what Trump is doing and you will see that quote repeated constantly—that people are afraid of retribution, they are afraid of being targeted.
That certainly applies even to members of the press. One more thing: look at the list of companies that have contributed to this ballroom—companies giving money directly into Trump’s pocket—Amazon, Apple, Coinbase, Comcast, Google, HP, Union Pacific Railroad. It is amazing the degree to which all of these corporate titans are lining up to “bend the knee,” to “pay the Danegeld.” It’s a different country.
Mounk: You have to wonder whether he’s going to give one of those companies naming rights—whether the biggest donor will be able to make it the “OpenAI at the White House Ballroom” or the “Amazon Ballroom.”
Charen: I think the name has already been chosen. It’s the Donald J. Trump ballroom.
Mounk: Frank, what do you think the import of the personalization of the American government is—beyond the sadness of this historical building being altered in this way, with its resident symbolism? In terms of the impact this is actually going to have on the functioning of the American government, what are the elements you’re most worried about? What are you watching to see whether we’re reaching yet another stage of escalation?
Fukuyama: Well, domestically, the main focus has been on these prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James. By the way, I actually think both of those are going to fall apart. They’re probably going to disqualify Lindsey Halligan as a prosecutor, and there’s simply not going to be a case. Something very similar could happen with Letitia James. Bolton, I think, is in bigger trouble because it sounds like that’s a much more serious indictment. But I actually think the system will work in terms of the other two frivolous attacks on Trump’s enemies.
The personalization, I think, is most visible in foreign policy. There is no such thing as a “Trump Doctrine.” There’s no consistent set of principles that explain his foreign policy. He’s not an isolationist; he’s perfectly happy to use American power to interfere in the internal politics of Brazil, India, and a lot of other places. The thing that binds everything together is Donald Trump’s fragile ego.
He’s against attacking Iran until he’s handed an opportunity on a silver platter to do it quickly—in and out—and declare victory. He’s offended by the fact that Prime Minister Modi doesn’t want to support his bid for a Nobel Prize, and so he throws forty years of cultivating good U.S.–Indian relations into the toilet. The only thing binding all of this together is his ego.
These days, a lot of countries around the world are trying to calculate how they can use his expressed desire for a Nobel Peace Prize to manipulate American foreign policy. The thinking goes, if we make the right moves, maybe Trump will think he can get a prize for dealing with us, and we’ll get what we want. That’s the epitome of personalization. There’s no Trump Doctrine—there’s just Trump’s self-interest driving all of it.
Mounk: That leads us naturally into the second set of topics we’re going to talk about, which is foreign policy. Frank, I know that you’ve been very interested and concerned about some of the Trump administration’s actions in bombing Venezuelan boats that are supposedly carrying drugs and operated by drug gangs. You think this might actually be the prelude to a more robust set of actions against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, even some kind of ground invasion.
Tell us about what the Trump administration has been doing in that part of the world, and why you think a president who promised in his inaugural speech and his campaign that he was not going to get America into new wars—who did bomb Iran, but in a kind of very quick blitz that allowed him to tell Americans, this is the first war America has won in a long time, and it wasn’t a real war, and nobody really felt it, and it was over after a day—might now get embroiled in a military adventure that is probably going to be of much longer duration, much more perilous to American lives and treasure, and a much more substantial operation than the one we’ve previously seen.
Fukuyama: I think some military action is going to happen because they’ve sent a ton of equipment down there. There are probably ten or a dozen American warships in the area. They’ve sent F-35s, drones, and lots of equipment. For them to back away from an actual military incursion after that kind of buildup is going to be pretty hard.
They backgrounded the press. I don’t know who did it, but there was a story in The New York Times that the CIA is making plans to try to overthrow the Maduro regime. That’s not something leaked by a dissident voice in the administration to prevent it from happening—they obviously wanted people to know.
The most optimistic construction you can put on all of this is that it’s basically a game of chicken. They’re hoping that Maduro—who is really not popular in Venezuela and not popular among the lower ranks of his own military—might actually be intimidated into seeking an out and stepping down. Then they get a quick win; they don’t actually have to do anything militarily, but they can claim a scalp by getting rid of him.
By the way, that would be great if that could happen. All of my friends in the Venezuelan democratic opposition are just so frustrated at this point because in July 2024, they had an election in which the opposition candidate won by 30 or 40 points, and the regime still overturned it. They’ve kind of given up on peaceful ways of getting rid of Maduro. So the goal is fine.
What I fear, though, is Trump’s psychology. He’s already gotten these foreign policy “wins.” In Gaza, he got the ceasefire—which is a genuine achievement because Netanyahu handed him that golden opportunity. Netanyahu also gave him an opportunity with bombing Iran, and he’s gotten away with both of those. So I think, in his mind, he’s thinking, I’m actually pretty good at this stuff. I don’t have to observe any of the limits that prior presidents thought they had to respect. I can get another easy win in Venezuela.
What I don’t think he’s considering is the next step: What if we really do get rid of Maduro? Because if that requires putting boots on the ground in Caracas, he might actually go ahead and do that. Obviously, the big worry is that even if you do get rid of Maduro, you’re going to have the same problem as in Iraq—you don’t have a plan for replacing him with a more reasonable regime. That leads to an internal dynamic where you get sucked in deeper and deeper because you don’t want to be responsible for leaving Venezuela in chaos, where all these gangs and narco-traffickers take over. That’s a formula for getting the United States involved much more deeply on the ground.
Mounk: One of the genuine strengths that Trump has as a political leader is that he can somehow say he’s going to do things and then desist from them with less damage to him politically than other people would suffer. If other presidents had gone back and forth on what they were doing to a third or even a fifth of the extent that Trump has, they would be known as weak and as flip-floppers. Because Trump is such a bully and full of bluster, it actually buys him the ability to look like he’s going to do X, then stop doing X, sell that with the same gusto with which he sold doing X, and walk away politically unscathed.
Perhaps you’re right that the gambit here is to put all of this pressure on Venezuela and hope that Maduro will somehow fall. If he does, that’s an amazing outcome, and I think we all agree that it would be. The vast majority of Venezuelans would agree as well. That would give Trump a third big policy win.
I don’t think that’s likely. With dictatorships, it’s always very hard to know when they will fall, and Maduro is certainly unpopular. There must be people even within his regime who would love an opportunity to oust him. At the same time, he has proven to be very resilient. He has bought the loyalty of much of the officer class with bribes of enormous proportion. The officers are basically drug cartels, profiting very handsomely off it. As long as they continue to make those profits, they’re likely to remain loyal to the Maduro regime.
Perhaps they now worry that a ground invasion by the United States would be the end of their trade and that it would be better to depose Maduro and install some other figure who continues the same basic record. It’s imaginable, but it doesn’t seem very likely.
Fukuyama: No, I don’t think it’s likely at all. One of the interesting facts about Venezuela is that they have about ten times the number of flag officers—generals and admirals—that the United States does per number of enlisted people because Maduro has created this gigantic corps of people who are basically leeches. They’re all sucking off the drug revenues that the country can generate, and they have no future if Maduro falls. There’s no legitimate way for them to continue funding their villas in Miami or wherever.
So, yes, I think the regime is going to be much more resilient. I do think that there is probably going to be some kind of overt military action that will escalate and maybe try to scare them a little bit more. But it’s very hard to see a really positive outcome from this.
Mounk: Mona, what do you think is the game plan here? Are they hoping that Maduro will just vanish into thin air, or what are they up to?
Charen: So there are a few ways to look at this. One is that Trump does have a style. You can compare his threats and escalation against Venezuela with his use of tariffs, where he will threaten, I will impose 100% tariffs on you. It’s a way to use shock and awe, then extract concessions, and finally back down from that original so-called bargaining position.
So yours and Frank’s supposition that this is an attempt to bully and scare Maduro out of power—maybe that’s right, maybe that’s an extension of the same tactic. But it’s important to recognize a few things in terms of foreign policy. First of all, the attacks on Venezuela—which I think we all agree is a terrible regime, and the world would be far better off if it were replaced by something democratic and rights-respecting—have been based on lies and pretexts.
The notion that Tren de Aragua is a paramilitary force that reports to Maduro and has been infiltrated into the United States is not true. The idea that the United States should take unilateral action, blowing up boats off the Venezuelan shore on the grounds that they may be smuggling drugs, is patently a violation of international law. It’s a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It’s a complete departure from the way the United States has conducted itself.
There’s also the fact that if Trump actually makes war—kinetic war—on Venezuela by using some of those many military assets moving into the region, he will have a problem with parts of the MAGA base who were sold on “no more wars,” “no more forever wars,” “no more any wars.” They were already stirring a bit when he attacked Iran. This would be much larger than that.
Finally, I would endorse everything Frank said about the risks of such an undertaking. There is absolutely no evidence that Trump or the people around him—certainly not Hegseth—are capable of thinking beyond a one-week time horizon. What comes next? What if you do attack? Have you considered all of the fallout that may happen? What if an even more vicious leader arises to take Maduro’s place from within the Maduro circle? There are all kinds of negative possibilities that I have no confidence this administration has thought through.
Fukuyama: One concern I have is actually for María Corina Machado, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, who is a wonderful person and a very strong leader. She guided the Venezuelan opposition through this whole process. She wasn’t allowed to run herself, so she supported the campaign of Edmundo González, who did win the election.
She’s now in a very difficult position because she can’t alienate Trump. She did this clever thing after receiving the Nobel Prize—she called him and said, “I think you should have won it.” She understands how to play that game. But there’s already criticism of her from progressives, many of whom call her a fascist, which is a ridiculous label but it feeds into the broader Latin American strain of anti-Americanism.
She faces very unpalatable choices. If she’s put in power by the Trump administration, that’s going to taint her, and it will taint her with many Americans too, since a lot of Americans can’t stand anything associated with Trump. Installing a regime in another country will naturally provoke disgust, and she doesn’t deserve that. She truly deserves to be the legitimate democratic leader of Venezuela.
On the other hand, if there’s a failed attempt at regime change, that will also rebound on the heads of all our friends in Venezuela who are genuinely fighting for democracy. I’m really worried about this situation and how it will play out in domestic American politics as well.
Mounk: I want to take this beyond Venezuela for a moment. One way that both of you seem to be thinking about what Trump is up to is that he’s taking these big foreign policy gambles. Sometimes they may be gambles where the likely outcome is positive, but there’s a very bad negative outcome at the tail end that he’s not considering.
When you think of something like the bombing of Iran or, going back to the first Trump administration, the assassination of a key Iranian general—perhaps the likely outcome was that it would go okay. But there was a small, significant chance that Iran would decide to avenge itself on the United States in ways that would be truly terrible. It’s too early to rule out that this is what they are, in some way, planning—placing a dirty bomb somewhere in the United States or something else the Iranian regime would certainly be morally capable of doing.
When things have that kind of structure, the likely outcome is that things will go well, so the first few times you try it, they do. But that success emboldens you to keep doing it everywhere. Eventually, you hit the negative jackpot. Eventually, you stumble across the mine that explodes.
What we’re seeing with the Trump administration is a president who promised—and had a lot of electoral appeal by saying—that he would make America less active in the world, that he would pull back the extension of the American empire, that he would focus on bread-and-butter national self-interest. Instead, he’s now driven by a mix of hyperactivity and personal self-aggrandizement to go on this series of small-scale military adventures.
These are not the one big adventure of a Bush-style invasion of Iraq but a pattern of smaller military or foreign policy gambits. Perhaps he gets lucky and we all get lucky, and none of them go badly wrong. But if we have to expect another ten of these over the next three years, what happens when he gets bored of Venezuela? Whether he manages to have a huge success and Maduro is ousted—unlikely as that seems—or whether he pulls back at the last moment, what then? Do they go on to Panama? Greenland? All these other dogs that didn’t bark? What else are we to expect in the next three years?
Fukuyama: Well, I think you have to understand that the only way to analyze Trump’s policy, either domestic or foreign is through personal psychology, not principles or policy positions. The domestic and foreign policies are of a piece. He came in believing, from the first term, that Article Two says I can do anything I want, but he was stopped from doing a lot of what he wanted to do.
Now, in the second term, he’s saying to himself, Yeah, actually, I can go after political opponents. I can go after the prosecutors who went after me. I can bomb Iran. I can do all sorts of things. And look, he hasn’t suffered any consequences. All those people who told him he couldn’t—H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson—he thinks he’s proved them wrong.
So this is just going to escalate, and unfortunately, one of these initiatives is going to end in a big disaster that everyone can see. It’s not going to be good for the country, and really, that’s the only thing that’s going to stop him. He’s like a ten-year-old with a flamethrower saying, wow, look, I can set this house on fire—that’s great! Nobody’s going to stop me.
Charen: I’m old enough to remember when we had a Congress that did oversight. It used to hold the president’s feet to the fire. It used to call the secretaries of defense and state for public grilling. Congress is still the first branch. The notion of three coequal branches, as has been rightly said, is a myth. The founders intended—and thought, wrongly—that Congress would be the most powerful branch. Congress still has inherently tremendous power. But now that the Republican Party has chosen to sacrifice all of its power to the president, it makes it all the more pressing that the other party gain control of at least one house.
We haven’t yet seen the Democratic Party come out of its low approval ratings, although it’s improving a little bit. So it is up to the voters. It shouldn’t have been up to the voters to do this. It should have been the major institutions that held fast, starting with Congress, against this usurpation and personalization of power, which was exactly what we fought a revolution to get away from. But that hasn’t happened. So now it really does fall to the people. The “No Kings” rallies were at least a sign of spirit and life out there in the electorate.
Mounk: I’m sure we’ll come back to both the state of the Democrats and their likely fate in the midterms many times over upcoming Good Fight Clubs. For the final segment of this conversation, I want to do something that I think is important in these regular discussions: go beyond the political moment to some broader questions that help explain it.
One of the key questions we should ask ourselves right now is, why is populism rising—not just in the United States, but seemingly everywhere? I’m in Switzerland as I’m recording this, speaking at an event. The comparatively moderate far-right populist party here is top of the polls and stronger than ever. In Britain, France, and Germany, populists are leading in the polls or at least tied. We see political figures who have won power in India and Turkey, and others who were in power but are now out, waiting to return in Brazil and Poland, among others.
I’ve tried in the past to explain why that is, as have many others. One obvious explanation has always been the internet and social media—but it was usually listed alongside other possible causes. Frank, you recently published an article called “It’s the Internet, Stupid.” It’s one of the most-read pieces in the history of Persuasion. In it, you argue that while other causes may matter somewhat, the one truly convincing explanation is technological—the internet and social media.
Why did you change your mind about that? Why do you now think the technological dimension is the key to understanding and explaining this phenomenon?
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha, Francis, and Mona explore how social media has led to a surge in populism, the link with political violence, and why the threat is greater than for previous technological revolutions. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
