In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Amanda Ripley, and George Packer examine the Trump administration’s capture of Nicolás Maduro and the chaotic aftermath in Venezuela, whether Trump’s foreign policy represents a coherent “shock and awe” strategy or a dangerous overreach, and the political outlook for 2026.
Amanda Ripley is the co-founder of Good Conflict and author of High Conflict.
George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Emergency.
Note: This episode was recorded on January 7, 2026.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I woke up on Sunday morning to a rather baffling request from a journalist I know in Italy asking me whether I would give her an interview about Nicolás Maduro. I thought, why do they want me to talk about Nicolas Maduro? Though he’s an interesting figure, what’s going on? So I opened The New York Times app and realized why that request might have been made.
Maduro had been kidnapped in a rather Indiana Jones-esque expedition in the night from Saturday to Sunday. He is now in the Brooklyn Correctional Facility. Brooklyn Correctional Facility I had mixed feelings about this. I’m very concerned about Trump’s foreign policy in general, and this seemed to be in keeping with a lot of its worst traditions. At the same time, of course, Nicolas Maduro was a terrible and brutal dictator who certainly deserves to be in a prison cell about as much as any other political leader in the world.
The problem is that the administration doesn’t really seem to have a plan for what’s next in Venezuela, and it doesn’t look like things are getting better. In fact, they may be getting worse. What’s your read of this rather confusing situation?
George Packer: Yeah, it is pure confusion, because I think as far as we can tell from reports, the Trump administration did not go through the usual policymaking process in arriving at this action. It seems to have been something that was in the works for a long time, but there was absolutely no consultation with Congress, no preparation of the American people.
I lived through the Iraq War and I remember a year-long public relations campaign by the Bush administration to prepare Americans for an invasion that was still quite confusing because the rationale for it was confusing. In this case, the rationale is utterly baffling because there are so many contradictory justifications being given by top people in the administration. There was no public relations campaign at all.
There was a long campaign of bombing of alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela, threats, a large American military presence in the region, in the Caribbean, but no explanation. So we’ve had drug interdiction. We’ve had the enforcement of an indictment of a suspected narco trafficker. We’ve had oil that was supposedly stolen from the United States. We’ve had a new updated Monroe Doctrine that says that whatever we want to do in the Western Hemisphere, we will do. There seems to be a personal animus toward Maduro on the part of Trump. One New York Times reporter said when he kept seeing Maduro dancing on video, which Maduro was doing in the very last days as a sort of a middle finger, that was the final straw. It was a taunt that Trump wouldn’t take. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be true. That’s the alarming thing—the mess of justifications and the total lack of any explanation that the American people could at least think about means that they haven’t thought about this hard and they haven’t planned for after Maduro.
They were making it up as they went along. The press conferences were improv acts: We’re going to run it. Well, we’re not going to run it. We’re going to run the policy while those three guys behind me are going to run it. There was something comic and frightening about how little planning seemed to have been done.
That’s all to say that I am extremely concerned and alarmed, and I share your utter revulsion toward Maduro. I’m shedding no tears over his now being immured in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park a couple miles south of you and me.
Mounk: The thing that I find striking is less the confusion about what the justification is. You’re right that it’s amazing they couldn’t get on the same page about it. It’s not that hard to tell some story that is coherent about why they wanted to do this, given the brutality of the regime. As well as—I think the country that has declined the most in affluence over the last 20 years, its GDP has just been decimated. In a relatively small country, eight million people have fled the regime both because of political repression—a thousand political prisoners by the way that nobody is talking about—as well as the economic devastation. People just couldn’t make a living. Anything that brings better leadership to that country would be welcome.
The thing that most struck me is that they seem to have just as much confusion about what to do next as they do about the sources of this. By the looks of it, they seem to have persuaded themselves that they can somehow cut a deal with the new president, who was the vice president of Maduro, Rodriguez. There’s just no indication that there’s any daylight between her and Maduro. Her father was a communist radical. Her brother is a high ranking member of a regime renowned for his brutality. She has held every top position in this regime other than president until yesterday. She is renowned for her brutality as well.
At her inauguration, she very warmly greeted the Chinese and Russian ambassadors. I just really don’t understand how the Trump administration seems to have convinced themselves that they can simply take out the top guy and the second in command is gonna deliver what they want. Amanda, can you make sense of any of this?
Amanda Ripley: Particularly because it was so humiliating for Venezuela and its most powerful leaders. There is something deeply humiliating about what happened there from their point of view. Generally speaking, when people feel humiliated, it escalates conflict. Particularly people who operate through power and coercion. We’ve seen that with Trump and we will see it again here, it would be my prediction.
So there does not seem to be a plan. I think it is really always very interesting to ask what is the story Trump and his entourage are telling themselves. Like what is the story they are telling themselves? It’s not coherent, as George said, it’s not consistent. But it is another example of the administration normalizing violence and the use of force without any attempt to sugarcoat it.
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You see this in domestic politics, you see it in foreign policy. My best guess, and obviously there’s an infinite amount I don’t know, is that Trump is someone who enjoys the rush of power. He has had a couple of successful military precision campaigns. So that is seductive. Then we will probably see more of that until it starts to really brazenly fail.
Packer: I think he’s put a lot of faith in just sheer force. Usually it’s Stephen Miller who gives the clearest account of the thinking of the Trump White House because he is the real ideologue there. He’s not a political figure. He’s not going to be running for office as far as we can tell. So he is the one who says what they’re really thinking. What he said to Jake Tapper the other morning was that this is the real world. I’m paraphrasing a bit. It is a world in which power and strength and force win. That is an iron law of history since the beginning of time.
So it seems as if they have convinced themselves that the sheer might of the American military will be enough to coerce Delcy Rodriguez or whoever they have to go to after her to do their will because they don’t want to see thousands of American troops in Venezuela. They don’t want to go through allies. They don’t want to go through regional partners. They simply want it done. They want our will to be imposed.
If you want that without all the complications and tragedies of the forever wars, you have to have a kind of wishful, almost magical thinking about the way in which power can coerce a foreign country to simply collapse, to cave in. We’re seeing already that that’s just not happening. So it’s a kind of foreign policy vision, magical vision, brutal vision with no moral value. It’s simply based on what we want. We are strong. We will do it. Might makes right. But we’re already seeing how that can blow up in your face or at least fail to do what you want. Then you have to ask yourself, what do we do next?
Mounk: It seems there’s two vantage points from which to analyze this. From one vantage point, it doesn’t make any sense. From the other vantage point, it actually makes perfect sense. So from the vantage point of achieving real, tangible, long-term results in the world, I think it doesn’t make sense.
Effectively, the United States now faces a dilemma where either they’ve done this spectacular action to extract Nicolas Maduro, and they leave it at that and simply pretend that they can deal with Delcy Rodriguez and perhaps for a year or two she cuts certain kinds of minor deals with the United States in order to keep them off her back. But effectively nothing changes.
We’re already seeing headlines as we’re recording this morning that the repression in Venezuela has actually stepped up over the last days, that there’s new rounds of people being rounded up and so on. So nothing is going to get better for people in Venezuela. Perhaps there’ll be some minor deals with the United States that allow the Trump administration to claim some kind of minor victory, but really nothing’s happened.
Or the next step probably would be something like boots on the ground, which both obviously would be highly risky and could go wrong for the people of Venezuela in a million ways and would be extremely unpopular with the MAGA base because what they don’t want is forever wars. What they don’t want is to risk American treasure and lives to go abroad. So there’s a fundamental dilemma about what’s going to happen next in Venezuela, which makes me very pessimistic.
Packer: Not just the MAGA base, Yascha, the American people. There’s been absolutely no attempt to convince the public that this is in our national security interest to have troops in Venezuela.
Mounk: I agree with you, George. I just mean the piece that’s relevant to the deliberations of the White House is probably that it would be unpopular with the MAGA base.
There’s another logic where I think you can squint and you can start seeing a real modus operandi of the Trump administration. Look, it’s an administration that’s so chaotic and it has such different instincts and there’s different factions. I don’t want to overstate this, but if you look at what Trump did in Iran and what he did in Venezuela, and you extract that line out, you get a kind of coherence to it.
What you do is you use massive American power for short-term actions that are spectacular, where we wake up and we go, whoa, this just happened. By the time we see it, it’s already over. It allows Trump to claim a great victory. I bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities and they’re obliterated, they’re gone—great media moment, everybody’s talking about it, I look strong. Look at this, Maduro in chains, in Sunset Park, in downtown Manhattan, look at what I did. And then you move on.
The intelligence analysis seemed to suggest that the bombing of the Iranian nuclear facilities sadly did not lastingly damage the nuclear ambitions, or at least not nearly as much as the Trump administration claimed. Most likely capturing Maduro is not going to do anything for the country of Venezuela. But from a purely domestic political perspective, perhaps that doesn’t matter because Trump looks strong, he’s done something spectacular that nobody else would dare do, and then the topic moves on to whatever he does next week.
Ripley: I think that’s a pretty good theory and it would be what a reality TV producer would do. You just need to jerk from one high visual to the next. You don’t actually need lasting, enduring change. So that’s an interesting theory.
Packer: I agree, it makes psychological sense. This is how a malignant narcissist would conduct military actions. The problem for them is, first of all, I don’t think it has wowed and impressed the public so much as confused and maybe even frightened the public. I don’t think if there were instant polling on this, I don’t think it would show the vast majority of Americans behind this the way they were behind the initial invasion of Iraq, because again, there’s been absolutely no attempt to convince the public that Venezuela is any kind of threat to the United States.
There is now this 25-year history of forever wars, which has made Americans extremely nervous about getting involved in regime change of any kind in other countries. Second, their level of hubris is extraordinary right now. They seem to be on a kind of military violence drug high. That, I think, is very likely to lead them to make serious mistakes. Who knows where it’ll be. Maybe it’ll be in Greenland. Maybe it’ll be against a NATO ally. Maybe it’ll be against a neighbor to the north.
But I don’t trust that they see it as simply a little bit of a Broadway hit. I think they see it as world historical and as a new era that has left behind all the self-imposed restraints of the post-war decades. Now it’s America unrestrained. What could that lead to? Well, a hell of a lot, because we have a lot of power, more power than we’ve been willing to use because there’s been self-imposed restraints that don’t apply to them. So this is all kinds of ways in which they can overreach.
Ripley: It’s a good point. And George, to your point, the day—literally Sunday, the day after this happened—there were protests in DC that I saw against it. So that’s very different from Iraq, right? In some ways, a perverse blessing that they didn’t spend a year bamboozling us with a PR campaign to convince us that this was our lifelong enemy, because I don’t think the American people are going to buy it. Of course, I’ve thought that about other things and been wrong. So we’ll see.
Mounk: Yeah, we’ll see about that. I think most likely people have such strong opinions about Trump that unless he really ends up in a quagmire in Venezuela where suddenly there are tens of thousands of American soldiers in harm’s way, it’s not going to make a big difference to assessments of Trump one way or the other.
But with the bombing of Iran, I think there was this moment. I remember all of the questions I was getting in media interviews at the time—is the MAGA base going to turn on him because of that and so on? I thought, well, no, if this is it, if he’s just like, hey, I bombed them, look at me, how strong I am, and that’s it, then nobody’s going to be upset with him about it in a few months. Perhaps the same is true in Venezuela, right? They’re going to be able to say, look, we kept this dictator, and then move on, and the fact that people are suffering and that nothing’s gotten better there probably doesn’t matter as much as we would hope to the American public.
Packer: Can I answer that, Yascha? The MAGA base was a lot stronger six months ago than it is now in terms of its unity. I’m not saying that’s because of the bombing of Iran or because of the extraction of Maduro, but some of the hardcore base has turned against Trump, or at least is asking questions they weren’t asking six months ago.
I think a lot of it has to do with the sense that he is not holding to his America First mantra, which has been the defining principle of his entire political career. Instead, he seems to be getting distracted by whether it’s Iran, whether it’s Ukraine, whether it’s Venezuela, whether it’s gonna be Greenland next, who knows? So I don’t think he’s as solid with his base as he has been, and I think foreign adventures are the main reason.
Mounk: That’s interesting. I think it’s one of the reasons. I wouldn’t have put it as the main reason, but it’s interesting that that’s your assessment. I’d have thought there were other strong reasons.
Let’s talk for a moment about what’s next on foreign policy. Greenland is an interesting thing. It’s something that the administration talked about a lot about a year ago. There are real concerns about it. I wrote an article at the time saying they really might in theory do this—we can’t just dismiss this as trolling, but it would be premature to dismiss this. Then it kind of went quiet for the last five or six months. I haven’t really heard much about it. It felt like one of those things from the fever dream of the first month of the administration when they seemed to be doing everything at once that sort of fell by the wayside.
Packer: They suddenly talk about it again. Stephen Miller’s wife posted a map of Greenland with American flag colors on Twitter. As these things go, that caused the flurry. Then I think the flurry made the administration think, yeah, we kind of forgot about that. Why do we keep pushing on this?
Should we take that seriously? Is there a real possibility that before the end of this term, which we still have a little over three years to go, that’s just going to be American troops in Greenland? It wouldn’t be hard to do in military terms. It would be an incredible rupture with America’s historic allies in Europe. And is anybody prepared for that?
Do we think that leaders in Europe have thought through what on earth happens if tomorrow there’s American troops in Greenland? Are they just hoping this won’t happen? Is the world prepared for the level of crazy that might still be coming down the pike in terms of foreign policy from this administration?
I think anyone who hasn’t learned the lesson that Trump loves to do what no one thinks he’ll do, that no one thinks anyone would do because it isn’t done, has just not absorbed the lesson of the Trump era. It’s quite possible. Look at the national security strategy, which they made a big deal of and which they seem to have been putting into practice within weeks in Venezuela. It just came out in November.
It essentially says this slice of the globe, the Western Hemisphere, is ours. Because we are the strongest power here, we will do what we want for our own interests. Our own interests can be defined so broadly that if there are Russian and Chinese ships in the Arctic Circle, Greenland is essential to our self-defense. They’ve already begun to lay out that argument.
So I honestly don’t see why we should imagine they won’t do it and we should be prepared for them to do it and prepared for how Europe should respond. Yascha, you know Europe a lot better than I do, but whenever I go there, I have this feeling of, are you still in shock? Haven’t you absorbed this yet? Don’t you see what’s happening? Don’t you understand what he’s trying to do to you?
The National Security Strategy made it so clear. He hates you. He hates your democracies. He hates your weakness and your dependence on us. If seizing Greenland is a way to push that into your face, the chances are greater that he’ll do it than that he won’t because this is what floats his boat. It’s what makes him tick.
Europe keeps saying, yes, we must be prepared. We must begin to mount our own collective defense policy. We must increase defense spending. We must. Yet there’s still this shock because it is hard to get over 80 years of history in a couple of months. But that’s where we are. It’s where I think we’ll continue to be.
Mounk: To be fair, it’s not been a couple of months, it’s been a decade that the Europeans should have and could have grappled with it.
Ripley: I’m nervous about saying that he hates Europe. I think if we set this up as an existential crisis, it tends to lead to more rash, fear-based decisions. I don’t know that he certainly hates weakness and is quite frightened by his own weakness. That I think we can say for sure.
He has a lot of impulses, we can say that for sure. He had this impulse in his first term, but it was checked by the people around him who were not there. His impulses change from day to day. I think, and this is easy to say, hard to do, I think the wise response to someone like this is to do the opposite of your first instinct. If Trump is normalizing naked raw power and violence, everyone else has to denormalize it. That includes American politicians, American voters, institutions, and the same goes in Europe. This is very hard to do. But this is the antidote to this kind of behavior.
If you just meet him in kind, first of all, you can’t succeed because of the asymmetry in power right now. But also, you then are playing the same game and this dynamic never ends as we’ve seen. So I hope that Europe has been preparing for this for a long time and that those relationships are strong enough to act as a collective because that is the only good option here.
Mounk: I think I agree with you largely, Amanda. I also have a slightly more complicated read of the national security strategy, which I think actually is testament to a political civil war that exists both within the United States and within Europe. It places the United States under the leadership of Donald Trump unsurprisingly on the side of that debate, which in Europe is represented by Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage and the AFD.
But that debate exists within Europe just as much as it does within the United States. I think one of the things that that strategy made clear is that Europe matters to the Trump administration more than other places because they actually care about it. They think whatever happens in Saudi Arabia, we don’t care. That’s outside of our sphere of influence, but also, we just don’t have any cultural links with Saudi Arabia. Europe is actually our civilizational ally. The problem is that our civilizational ally is destroying itself.
That’s why we have to care about how they’re governing themselves. That’s why we have to care that all of those moderate governments are screwing up and the only people who are its potential salvation are those forces on the far right. But of course, and I’ve said this in this podcast before, it’s imaginable that in 2029, we’re going to have a G7 in which the European nations are represented by Giorgia Meloni for Italy, who’s already the prime minister, by Jordan Bardella or perhaps Marine Le Pen if she’s allowed to run, who are leading by quite a lot in the polls for the presidency in France, by Nigel Farage, who is leading the polls to be prime minister of the United Kingdom, and then by Gavin Newsom or AOC in the United States.
Then we’d have, in a way, the same ideological debate just with points reversed. The other point I agree with is that Europe has no alternative other than to try and somehow get through these three years because it’s been so weak for self-imposed reasons, because it still doesn’t have the military strength to defend itself. It’s starting to change that, but it’s not there because it’s economically so weak. Because if you don’t want to be dependent on Washington, realistically right now for Europe, that means being dependent on Moscow and Beijing, and that sure isn’t any better.
Now, I think all of that goes out of the window if the United States invades Greenland. I do hope that somebody in the administration realizes that. If the United States annexes by force, a complicated territory with a complicated history, but a territory of one of the core European nations—at that point, that is just conflict. You can think about how to get out of high conflict five years down the line.
But whatever you’re trying to do to get through this period and hope that somebody else can be in office in three years and muddle through and realize that you have to make the relationship with the United States work, because what are the alternatives? The day after there’s American troops in Greenland, that just goes out of the window. I don’t see how you can sustain that at that point.
Packer: I don’t disagree with anything either of you said. It’s not just true, it’s obvious that Europe itself is divided and that part of the national security strategy was an attempt to enforce, empower one side of that division for these sort of grand civilizational reasons that you’re saying, Yascha. The sense that Europe is committing suicide. They’ve let in all these Muslim refugees. They are abandoning their Christian heritage. They’re allowing wokeness and progressivism to weaken their society, to weaken the state. Yes, all true.
None of that tells me, though, why Trump wouldn’t follow his instincts to continue to use force, which seems to have succeeded twice in a very short period of time in Iran and in Venezuela.
Mounk: I agree. I don’t think that’s a reason to preclude that possibility at all, sadly. I want to make sure that in a way we’ve been talking about Trump and the MAGA movement throughout this conversation, that we have just followed the strange new fixed point in editorial calendars, January 6th. It’s the five-year anniversary of the assault on the Capitol.
I’m struck by the fact that in the first year and the second year after that event, there was a lot of coverage in newspapers on the anniversary, but it had an optimistic bent, not about the event itself, but about the fact that it seemed like the closing chapter of a nightmare that’s now firmly behind us. Of course, looking at it from the vantage points of five years on rather than one or two years on, it seems rather like a prelude to other things to come. Indeed, the people who committed violence on that day are now out of jail because of a presidential pardon. Amanda, what were your reflections on the fifth anniversary of January 6th?
Ripley: It’s funny, January 6th in a lot of ways is like the pandemic. It’s like this unhealed wound that we have not begun to reckon with in the United States. It keeps coming up in different ways. Some are obvious. When the president pardons 1,600 people who were involved in violence, political violence, it sends a very clear message about what is allowed and what is encouraged. We know that at least 33 of those people have now faced charges for additional crimes since they stormed the Capitol, including one offender who was rearrested for threatening to kill the House minority leader.
This is not surprising because we know that what motivates political violence is not typically ideology. So Trump being back in office doesn’t solve any of these problems. If you look at the people who have perpetrated acts of violence recently, and I’m talking about everything from the Brown University shootings to the Minnesota assassinations, you see again and again that the perpetrators do not have a consistent ideology, that ideology is the last spark in a chain of fires. Often, unfortunately, violence is the seduction. It’s violent empowerment that is pulling people into these acts. This is very easy to fall into online right now.
Again, this brings me back to this point that if you want to stop this, you have got to start denormalizing violence. There are some attempts to do this among politicians, among voters. I don’t think they’re getting enough attention or traction yet that you would need to see. But when polarization and violence becomes a political strategy, as Rachel Kleinfeld says, it takes politicians in part to unravel it. People look to the governors, to politicians. Mayors are a very useful, very important group here to say what’s acceptable. We need to make violence abnormal again in this country. So it’s very hard to do when the president is actively encouraging violence and contempt day after day after day. You are, though, seeing more and more politicians, especially Republicans, but also Democrats, very publicly reject this ideology and resign as a response.
I think Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments about polarization, her apology for her role in it, whatever you may think about her, were genuine. This is someone who was rattled to her core and she has faced up something like 700 death threats. She’s worried about her kids. This is when you typically see people defect from high conflict, when they are worried about their kids and when they experience such a shock to their system. That is horrible and it is an opportunity because the more people who stand up and say what she said, the less lonely it is to defect.
I’ve said a lot of things, but I just want to pause there because I think the anniversary is deeply unsettling this year for many, many reasons. You saw a few dozen of those who had been pardoned on the mall yesterday protesting because, of course, they want more. They want reparations. They want Trump to reveal that the Democrats were behind it all because this kind of thing never ends. This kind of blame seeking and grievance religion. So the only answer to that is to do something quite starkly different. I think there are opportunities for that in a perverse way that there were not a year or two ago.
Mounk: I want to hear what George has to say about this in one second, but I just want to ask you about one thing that surprised me in what you were saying, Amanda. I think we often have very similar instincts. I certainly welcome that Marjorie Taylor Greene is resigning, is criticizing the Trump administration in some ways. I have real trouble getting myself to be open-minded about her and about the motives behind her action. I just find that she has been such a toxic actor for the last years that in some ways she’s criticizing Trump.
In some ways, she’s criticizing him from a kind of moderate-ish position. In some ways, she’s criticizing him from a more extreme position on some issues. It’s not clear to me whether she really has decided, you know what, I hate what I’ve become through this conflict, the kind of themes of your book and your work, and perhaps I need to extract myself from this conflict to have a better life. Or whether she’s just setting up a presidential run in 2028 in case people sour on Trump and there’s some weird lane for somebody who’s holier than the Pope in some complicated way.
I was part of a private political discussion where people were saying, we have to embrace Marjorie Taylor Greene and this is how the coalition splinters. I said, look, if we wanted to vote for some bill before she resigns Congress that does some good in the world, sure, let’s try to get her to vote for that bill. But the idea that we should now embrace Marjorie Taylor Greene of all people just seems so loathsome to me. I’m so profoundly skeptical. Anyway, help me out of this confusion. Then I want to go back to the bigger themes and hear what George has to say on this.
Ripley: You are correct to feel that way. She has not decided. She is not clear. She’s in a state of confusion and vacillation. That’s what you always see when people attempt to leave high conflict. Most of the time, they go back. So the betting odds are that she will go back to the conflict entrepreneur role that she has long played.
That said, there is a huge opportunity here not to embrace her. Not to trust her, but to invite her to prove to us that she is a different person. That is gonna take years. That is a long play. But you need people like this to normalize standing up to Trump, to normalize talking about the mistakes they have made in the past. That is very difficult to do. Whatever else you may think about her, what she has done is quite risky and courageous and I promise you, extremely isolating and discombobulating.
Packer: I’d like to pin a lot of hope on Marjorie Taylor Greene. It seems like waiting years for her to come all the way around from the toxic role she’s played in our politics is maybe something we can’t afford. What I’m thinking is January 6th led to a consensus that lasted three or four news cycles that this was a terrible day in American history, unprecedented, something never to be repeated, and that it was Trump’s fault.
That consensus began to break down maybe by January 8th. By the end of January, you could just see that the Republican Party was going to fall silent on it and then was going to line up behind Trump, which is what happened. One reason we later learned from reporting was Republicans were afraid. They were afraid of violence. They were afraid of MAGA violence coming after them. Mitt Romney has said that to my colleague at the Atlantic, McKay Coppins.
So what I see far more than any denormalization of January 6th, is a profound normalization on the side of half of our politics. The entire Republican Party for years has fallen at Trump’s feet. In some ways, not in spite of January 6th, but because of it, because that’s become a rallying cry. It’s become a false cause, a kind of lost cause that justified the most hateful rhetoric of the 2024 campaign and the utter corruption and weaponization of our judicial system in 2025.
So the long term effect of January 6th has been obviously to deepen polarization and the loudest voices, the ones who get the most attention on it now are not the Liz Cheneys, the Adam Kinzingers, the Jamie Raskins, but instead the right and the Republicans who want to use it as a justification for any abuse of power, including, as Trump just did yesterday on January 6th, sort of threatening to corrupt the upcoming midterms because our elections are totally rigged. He said that to a Republican gathering and he said it on January 6th as a sort of vindication of January 6th and as a threat, I think, that the upcoming elections are going to be no safer from his willingness to break rules and break laws than the last one.
So to me, January 6th has become a pall that hangs over our entire politics and has, as I think Amanda was suggesting, led to a kind of justification of violence on both sides. Let’s not forget Charlie Kirk. Let’s not forget the attempts on Trump’s life. Yes, usually the shooters do not have a clear ideology. They’re not going to say I’m doing this to avenge January 6th, but it’s in the air. It’s far more thinkable now. It’s far more thinkable than it was. How we purify the air—that’s something I don’t have an answer to as long as one half of our politics is committed to a lie that leads to violence.
Ripley: Well, it’s interesting because we’ve talked about one threat, which is the normalization of violence and force. But another threat that is just as dangerous is the sense of powerlessness that people have, the sense that this kind of violence is inevitable. I’m glad you asked that because I do want to talk about that. I think that is very dangerous. The way that traditional news outlets cover these things makes most of us feel even more hopeless and powerless.
So I’ve been spending a lot of time recently at Good Conflict trying to interview people who study violence and political violence in particular to understand how we could cover this differently to give people a fuller picture. Because there’s this weird irony happening—Trump and others are normalizing violence. We are seeing a spike in threats against elected officials, particularly women and people of color and Democrats. We are seeing a chilling effect that is having on both Republicans, as George said, and on Democrats.
At the same time, America is on track to have the lowest homicide rate since the Flintstones premiered on TV. So we have this very interesting duality where we as a society are getting less violent than we have been in a very long time. That should be cause for huge celebration. I don’t know why I don’t see investigative pieces in The Atlantic and The New York Times every day about how that happened, what it means, what we can learn from it, the outliers on both ends, different states, different cities. That is some interesting stuff right there. We don’t cover it with anywhere near the attention that we cover the hypotheticals in Greenland, for example.
We are talking about millions of Americans who have not suffered the agony of losing a loved one to murder this year and last year that would have otherwise been if we’d stayed where we were. So that’s a very big deal. When it comes to helping cover the acts of violence that are real and important—just January 5th, Vice President Vance said that someone had tried to break into his home in Ohio by hammering on the windows. This is real.
We have these two things happening at the same time. Homicide is way down and political and targeted violence and anti-Semitism are way up. How do we cover it? Well, one thing that Bill Braniff, who works on this issue of terrorism and extremism told me is that every time we cover these acts of political violence or school shootings, we should incomplete thought
Mounk: Amanda, that’s a question that in many ways you’re well positioned to answer. You’ve studied all kinds of conflicts in small personal contexts, but also in big political contexts that seemed completely intractable and where there was a real reduction in that. Of course, we’ve gone through that in American history. We had a civil war and after that, the union came back together in some kind of way. 1968 felt like the country might be falling apart. Then in the years after that, there was a lowering of political temperature.
What would have to happen in the air, as George puts it, or in the constellation for us to step down from the high conflict that we’re engaged in at the moment? I imagine one precondition is probably Donald Trump leaving the political scene. But what beyond that do you think it would take?
Ripley: Point out what the risk factors are because we know a lot now about these shooters. We know quite a bit and one thing we know is they almost always, especially school shooters, tell someone about what they’re gonna do. They almost always are people who have recently experienced a loss of status. Maybe they lost a job, maybe they’re being bullied. They almost always are socially isolated.
Maybe they don’t have a relationship with a caring adult. Very often, increasingly, they have found dark corners on the internet, which by the way, any young boy can find in under 10 minutes, that glorify previous perpetrators. We have deep fakes that have previous school shooters doing things they didn’t even do that are creating a kind of environment called the true crime community where you have people admiring and glorifying this behavior, right?
So there’s lots of opportunities here for AI regulation and other things that could happen. But in the meantime, it is very important that the public knows this. If someone you know and care about is talking about doing harm to themselves or others, you need to ask them some caring questions. You need to ask what they have in mind. You are not overreacting.
It really matters if you do this. We have a lot of evidence now that you can interrupt this behavior. What people need most of all is to feel like someone gives a shit about them. Especially the men, and it’s mostly men perpetrating these acts. Doesn’t make it okay, I’m not excusing it, but I am saying there are things that all of us need to know about how to interrupt this.
In the meantime, we need to focus on the politicians who are not doing what Trump is doing, including Republicans. There’s something called the Oklahoma City Declaration, which was written by Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt shortly after Charlie Kirk’s murder. 230 mayors have signed this thing, 41 states in Puerto Rico. This is a pledge that vows to condemn political violence in any form, to use restraint on social media, to refrain from dehumanizing other Americans or referring to them as evil or enemies, and to resist apocalyptic rhetoric. It is not perfect, but it is quite impressive. It is something that he has worked on. He and others, including many Democrats, are working to try to normalize the opposite of what Trump is doing. The National Governors Association, same thing. It’s not an accident that it is led by Oklahoma governor, Republican governor, Stitt. Oklahoma has muscle memory for political violence, being the site of the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history. So Utah is another interesting place to watch. There is a lot happening at the mayor and governor level. It is not happening in Congress, unfortunately, yet. But they are offering us a path.
Packer: Amanda, that’s all incredibly inspiring and good. I really appreciate your bringing that to our listeners’ attention. So my question is, is it too late for Trump? Is there someone who can let him know that they give a shit about him before he attacks Greenland? Can we stop this next act of violence from happening before it’s too late? What do we have to do? Or is it too late?
Ripley: Someone needs to hug that man right away. It’s an emergency.
Mounk: I think that’s about 60 years too late.
In the rest of this conversation, Amanda, George, and Yascha discuss predictions for 2026, from the upcoming midterms to the future of the Democrats. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
