The columnist David Brooks joins Times Opinion’s deputy editor, Patrick Healy, to take stock of President Trump’s fifth address to Congress, to analyze the Democrats’ response and to discuss where Americans who care about moral leadership should put their energy today.
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Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is the First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
Audio clip of Trump: “Speaker Johnson, Vice President Vance …”
On Tuesday night in his speech to Congress, Trump spun a narrative about a powerful America that I think a lot of Americans are really going to like.
Audio clip of Trump: “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. We must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
Healy: He framed the country and his presidency as dominant. Certain. Optimistic. While the opposition party was reduced to waving little placards. It reminded me a bit of Reagan in 1981. Trump looked strong on offense. The Democrats looked soft on defense.
But Trump was also masking something. He was elected to fix inflation and bring order to America. He hasn’t done it. And if he can’t, no campaign-style speech is going to trick Americans into forgetting how hard they have it. You can use rhetoric, but that only goes so far.
This week I wanted to talk to my colleague David Brooks because he’s captured the changes in American society with such insight in recent years, and how Trump uses power, language and rhetoric to exercise dominance — even if it’s hollow.
David, thanks for being here.
David Brooks: Well, great to be with you, Patrick.
Healy: Let’s start with Trump’s speech from Tuesday night. What surprised you, if anything?
Brooks: I think part of what surprised me is a bit of what you said. The word you used and the word I used in response last night was “dominant.” It was a dominant speech. It was, I thought, politically a very good speech. The country wants change. Here’s a guy who says: “I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this.” And people like me don’t like a lot of the changes he’s making, but for the half of the country that supports Donald Trump, they’re fine with it. They’re happy with it.
His approvals are up a tick since he won election, and then there were just so many dramatic personal moments. He is a TV performer.
Healy: Yes he is.
Brooks: There were a lot of dramatic moments for people to think: Wow, that’s a good guy. The moment with that cute kid, DJ, who wants to become a cop and who is suffering from brain cancer. Widows were recognized.
And I thought the Democrats should have just sat there. When Marjorie Taylor Greene behaved shamefully, a lot of progressive commentators were rightly offended. Then last night you had the screaming and Al Green’s removal. You have to have some intellectual consistency. You can’t oppose Marjorie Taylor Greene and then think what Al Green did was totally fine.
I thought the Democrats were losing their way until the response. I thought Elissa Slotkin’s response was excellent.
Clip of Slotkin: “Look, the president talked a big game on the economy, but it’s always important to read the fine print. So, do his plans actually help Americans get ahead? Not even close.”
Brooks: She spoke in a way that appeals to swing voters. She didn’t talk like she was coming out of Washington, D.C., or some faculty club. She talked about the big issues in a big way, in a way that appeals to people who are undecided. That was the kind of message the Democratic Party can build on.
Healy: David, it’s so important to underscore that with speeches like this, a lot of Americans aren’t sitting there with a scorecard, rating and fact-checking and assessing policies. It is about how these speeches make people feel.
That moment that you touched on about the young boy who wanted to be a cop. That is the moment when my phone blew up from both Republicans and Democrats. People who I hear from in politics. Trump made people feel something with moments like that. And again, it’s not that people in America are sitting around doing a fact-check on these speeches. They’re looking to feel the impact of them.
Brooks: Well, take a couple other examples. He talked about all the people allegedly getting Social Security benefits, even though they’re 160 years old. Now, people like us, we’re media obsessed, so we know that was all disproved, that there really are no 320-year-old people getting Social Security benefits. There are no 160-year-olds getting those benefits. That has been shot down by Trump’s own Social Security administrator. But when you’re sitting there reading and you’re just a normal person who pays normal attention to politics, you think: “Wow, that’s ridiculous. I’m glad he’s getting rid of this stuff.”
Healy: Yep.
Brooks: If there’s one through line in this administration so far, it’s the amassing of power. And if there’s another through line, it’s the destruction of anything that might restrain power, and that’s bureaucracy.
He fired in the military, he fired the judge advocate generals in the agencies. He fired the inspectors general. He goes off on the media because we’re a potential restraint on his power. Really, so far, it’s just the amassing of power and the destruction of anything that would restrain power.
That I do think is the through line.
Healy: I wanted to bear down on the point you made about the Democrats on Tuesday night and how they looked to you. What does effective opposition look like for Democrats? What should they have done, not only Tuesday night, but right now dealing with the Trump fire hose?
Brooks: I would advise Democrats to take some time off. They’re not in control. They don’t have power. But mostly a lot of the categories Democrats have used to understand reality don’t describe actual reality.
I don’t think Democrats have coped with the fact that they’re more the party of the elites now than the party of the working class. I don’t think they expected so many Black and brown voters to go for Donald Trump, and it just takes an intellectual revolution to adjust.
And they have to make some fundamental decisions. Do they want to work really hard to once again become the party of the working class? Is that even possible? Joe Biden tried with good economic policies — a large percentage of his policies helped working-class voters. It did him no political good because you can’t solve with economics a problem that’s fundamentally about culture and respect.
Or, maybe they should accept the fact that they’re the party of the college educated and urban classes, and that’s who they are, and they’re going to represent those people and hopefully build some majorities around those people.
Going back to the 19th century, Andrew Jackson — who’s the closest politician we’ve ever had to Donald Trump. He was a narcissist, he was power hungry, and didn’t fundamentally know what he was doing to screw up. And lo and behold, Andrew Jackson made a terrible decision to close the Second Bank of the United States and the end result was, basically, a decadelong depression.
So Democrats right now have to wait for Donald Trump to screw up. I think the tariffs may be that screw-up. The policy toward Ukraine may be that screw-up. I’m assuming that a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing will make some major errors and then the Democrats will see some opportunities.
Healy: David, what about the Democrats who care less about strategy and seeming savvy, but instead feel like: “I have values, I have morals, I want to stick up for trans kids playing sports in school.” What do they do when they feel like they’re left in the political wilderness?
Brooks: I’ll go back to Abraham Lincoln. He hated slavery and wanted to get rid of it, but he knew he could only move at the speed of the country. And that speed was not fast enough for Frederick Douglass and people like him. But in my view, moving at the speed of the country was the only way to do it. You couldn’t say we’re fighting this war to end slavery in 1861. You could say it by 1865, but you had to be patient in order to bring people along.
Healy: Yes.
Brooks: And I would say if you’re a Democrat with progressive values, there are some ways you’ve won the country over: on gay marriage, on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. But the high school sports thing is probably a step too far right now, and it may, frankly, forever be a step too far.
And so my advice is to focus on the values that really help win elections. If you’re running in a political campaign, be true to your values in ways that win elections.
I wrote a column last week about our friend Ezra Klein. He’s got a book coming out with Derek Thompson on the abundance agenda. And what really impresses me about that agenda is that it’s not only the specific policies that Ezra and Derek are talking about, but it’s the values. It’s the idea that we’re a country on the move. We’re a dynamic country. We can do big things.
And to me, we’re in such an atmosphere of depression, despair and negativity, that to have politicians come along and say: “Hey, don’t give up hope. We can do big things.”
That’s a faith in America that Ronald Reagan or Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed. And so to me, these are some values that are out there for Democrats to seize on.
Healy: A successful president knows how to read the country. He doesn’t try to get ahead of the country. He doesn’t try to tell the country solely how to be and to catch up with him. I think Bill Clinton understood that. Obama understood that. To your point about Lincoln, I do think Trump has a pretty canny sense about what the country, if not wants, what it responds to viscerally. The ad “Kamala Harris Is for They/Them, Donald Trump Is for You” still rings as a message that I think a lot of Americans intuitively understand.
Brooks: Yeah, I think he has two fundamental things that are on his side. One is the sense that we all need a secure base in our lives. One of my favorite sayings in psychology is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. And our secure base, for most of us, is a secure family. It’s a secure home. A community that is prospering. But it’s also a moral order, the idea that we all have a common set of values. And so Trump says: “You have no secure base. Your families are fragile. The moral order has been shredded and I’m going to give you a secure base.” And that’s a really foundational thing he argues.
The second thing is, in my view, the highly educated people have created a caste system in America over the last 70 years. People with high school degrees die eight years sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees, their children fall four grade levels behind kids from other families by sixth grade. They’re four grade levels lower. And Trump says: “I’m with you guys, the working class.”
And Democrats have gotten on the wrong side of both those gigantic issues. And those are epochal issues. And he builds on that in a lot of different ways. And he did so Tuesday night just by celebrating the kid who wants to become a cop. He’s not celebrating the kid who wants to become a neuroscientist.
Healy: Or a college professor.
Brooks: Right. He sends those cultural signals very successfully and very insistently.
Healy: I want to go back to your point about the moral order in society, which you’ve written so powerfully about. I want to reference two columns of yours — a powerful column in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, where you talked about that sense of inspiration that a lot of Americans felt, and then more recently, a piece about Trump as a faux populist, someone who in language and policy and aesthetics trades in a certain kind of man-of-the-people politics and yet, doesn’t govern as a populist.
How do you define fake populism? And more broadly, how has this swing happened so quickly where what once inspired so many Americans now seems to be something that in Congress, on Tuesday night, you had so many members seeming to kind of thumb their nose at spending any more money on Ukraine?
Brooks: When I was a young journalist, I worked for The Wall Street Journal, and I was a foreign correspondent. I lived in Europe, and I covered the end of the Soviet Union, the independence of Ukraine, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the end of apartheid, the creation of the Maastricht Treaty, really the European Union. And the ethos in those days was one of convergence. Walls were falling, barriers were falling, the world was coming together. Even our political system seemed to be coming together. China and Russia in those days seemed to be coming closer to democratic capitalism. That was the heyday of the liberal world order.
And pretty much for the first 25 years of this century, the age of convergence has gone into reverse. We’re now in the age of building walls. Countries are separating and Donald Trump is the essence of a wall builder.
In 2016, he said: “Let’s build a wall on the southern border.” But now we’re building a wall between us and Canada. We’re building a wall between us and Europe. We’re even building a wall internally. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a president explicitly call out the opposing party and attack them for not applauding and being far-left radicals or whatever he called them. He’s erecting walls. And so I think a lot of us still believe in liberal values, we believe in convergence. We like to have friends like Canada and France and the U.K. But Trump is a true isolationist and is building a wall around America. And so that is the shift in values.
As for the faux populism, I’ve been around these people all my life. I graduated from college in 1983, I worked in National Review in 1984, and my first encounter with Trumpians was way back then, though we didn’t know it at the time. There was a group at Dartmouth, called the Dartmouth Review. Famous people have emerged from there — Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza — but they were very different from us. We were earnest. We read Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. They were like, “Let’s take on the left.”
And the classic Dartmouth Review action took place in 1986. A group of progressive students had erected a shanty on the quad at Dartmouth to protest apartheid, a thing very much worth opposing. And the Dartmouth Review guys, in the middle of the night, used sledgehammers and broke it all down. And I remember thinking that’s appalling. First, apartheid really is terrible. We should not be defending it. But also, coming in with sledgehammers, that’s more Gestapo than Edmund Burke.
And yet, that kind of person who’s in the elite universities, but who is a dissenter in the elite universities, who’s fed up with the progressive orthodoxy that dominates those universities — you get Elon Musk who went to Penn, Vivek Ramaswamy who went to Harvard and Yale, Stephen Miller went to Duke — these are elite dissenters from the university culture. They are not populists.
As a result, when they come to power, they don’t really do all that much to help the working class. I would love it if the Trump administration would take on the health disparities, the education disparities, the family disparities that make it hard to be working class right now. But they don’t do that. They go after N.I.H. They go after the Department of Education. They go after U.S.A.I.D. They go after the places where they think elite liberals live.
Healy: You’re making me think about an idea that I want to run by you about Trump: Trump has the wrong answers, but is asking some of the right questions. For instance: How do we end the war in Ukraine? How do we get Arab leaders to do more with Gaza? How do we deal with a weak Europe? How do we reform the federal government? How do we fix inflation?
I’m wondering if you think there’s anything to that. Is Trump forcing us to confront questions that American leaders have been ignoring for too long?
Brooks: I 1,000 percent agree with that. It’s the wrong answer to the right question.
For example, we had education policies by Republicans and Democrats starting with George H.W. Bush and straight through to Obama, which said the way to succeed in this world is to get a college degree and get a white-collar job. And all the education reforms were geared toward getting people into college. A lot of people don’t want to go to college. They don’t think it’s right for them. It’s not right for their skill set. And yet, there was no policy for them.
So Donald Trump identified that problem. Did he solve it? Of course not. But he did identify a core problem. And I find this is true again and again and again. That there’s always some element of truth in what Trump is saying. Is there inefficiency in the federal government? Of course there is. Is Donald Trump the right solution to it? No.
And one of my big questions — I don’t know what you think of this — is, how much actual change is going to happen? How much is it just churn? How much of this stuff is going to be blocked by the courts? How much of DOGE is show business, but no actual spending cuts? In terms of spending cuts, Trump did not talk about Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security last night, except for the Social Security fraud. And if you don’t talk about that, you’re not really talking about spending cuts. So I just don’t know how much we’re looking at just a circus and how much we’re looking at a policy revolution.
Healy: The thing that worries me about that is that we’re going to end up with this giant security blanket called America that has all these little holes in it, with no normal pattern. There’s no tightly knitted whole. Instead, there are just little pockmarks that leave it weakened.
I’m thinking of a piece our colleague David Wallace-Wells wrote, about the fifth anniversary of Covid, and you come away thinking that the 2020s are the disaster decade.
Brooks: I guess I would say — I read a lot of history. What decade is better than ours? Every decade has its thing. In the 1880s, there was severe economic depression. There were savage inequalities. We were doing industrialization terribly. In the 1960s, assassinations and riots. Every generation has its World War II, has its Civil War, has whatever. We’re no different.
We are going through a very hard time, but I guess the question I would ask is, is it really the world coming to an end? Or are we catastrophizing? There’s no decade in history except maybe the 1990s, I would like to go back to. I really like Snow Patrol and they were big in the 1990s.
But most historical eras had their gigantic challenges. I wasn’t alive for the depths of the Cold War, but that must have been a pretty terrifying time.
Healy: Terrifying time. David, this is why I love talking to you. Even in the 1980s, which are remembered as a Reagan golden age, the end of the Soviet Union — I remember that fear I felt about the idea of a nuclear holocaust, that it was a different kind of fear than I’ve ever felt in my life. And you’re right. There is no perfect decade. I remember the hair spray and the bad movies in the ’90s, so I don’t necessarily want to go back to that.
I want to end with this: This Trump moment just has so many people on edge, from Washington, D.C., to farmers and workers in red states who are seeing the system freeze up on them. There’s a kind of casual cruelty at work with all of this “momentum” of Trump’s. You published a book that was a guide to fostering human connection. What has been on your mind over the last several weeks, watching where things are heading, not just in the White House but in the country itself, in terms of that sense of human connection?
Brooks: Yeah, it’s funny. There’s a Bruce Springsteen song from 2012 called “We Take Care of Our Own.” That song has a brilliant double message which is, “We love our people and we take care of our own.” But it’s also, “We only take care of our own.” And Trump does this. It’s all about the in group and the out group. “We take care of our own, but those people in the out group, they’re the enemy.”
And I travel a lot. In my travels, most people are just incredibly generous, in red and blue states, and so I find on a local level people go out of their way for each other. But it’s at the national level, and when you’re dealing with strangers, and especially when you’re dealing with the world through the prism of the media, then the nastiness becomes so easy. Trump plays on an abstracted negativity or an abstracted hatred that I don’t think shows up all that often — it does obviously sometimes, but in day-to-day life.
Healy: David, thanks so much for joining me.
Brooks: Oh, it’s a pleasure.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Aman Sahota, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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