Patrick Healy: On his first day back in office, President Trump issued dozens of executive orders and pardoned nearly all of the Jan. 6 rioters. He also set a new tone and pace for Washington: He’s going to do whatever he wants, and fast.
I’m joined by my colleagues Michelle Goldberg and David French to talk about what Trump is changing and challenging in America.
Before we dig into all these executive orders, has anything surprised you in the past 24 hours? Has anything stood out to you?
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
David French: Honestly, Patrick, nothing surprised me. There had been so much hype before his inauguration that he was going to do “shock and awe” when it came to executive orders. All of this was telegraphed. Nothing was surprising about the tone of his Inaugural Address.
What was really interesting about that tone is, if you’re MAGA, you listened to that, and you thought that was a “morning in America” optimistic speech. And if you were anyone but MAGA, this was the “American carnage” speech of the first Trump presidency — that America was circling the drain, that it had been betrayed by other Americans. For a lot of us, this was a very dark speech. It showed the divide.
The reaction to it on the MAGA side was “morning in America” because that’s just how they talk about America now. They zeroed in on the optimism. And I think, to the extent anything surprised me at all, it was that a number of friends and neighbors heard what I thought was the “American carnage” sequel speech and they thought they were listening to Ronald Reagan. That did surprise me a bit.
Healy: It shows how effective it is to leave out the word “carnage” and substitute “in decline.” Suddenly it sounds really nice. Michelle, how about you?
Michelle Goldberg: I wouldn’t say that anything necessarily surprised me, because as David said, he’s been telegraphing this, if not more than this, for months.
Two things that I found striking: In recent days, JD Vance was saying: Well, of course we’re not going to pardon or we shouldn’t pardon people who’ve committed violent acts. And you had a lot of Republicans trying to play down the Jan. 6 pardons, suggesting that they might be more limited. They ended up being not limited at all.
All kinds of people who have assaulted police officers — committed really egregious acts of political violence — are about to be freed in what I think is a statement about the scale of impunity that Trump’s allies are going to enjoy in this new world.
And then the other thing that I thought was striking — you can call it a threat or promise to retake the Panama Canal. It wasn’t conditional at all. It was: We’re going to take it back. Which implies a direct sign that there’s going to be some kind of conflict in Central America.
Healy: Michelle, you just identified what I thought was the most audacious hypocrisy of Monday and the lead-up to it, which was this Republican spin about violent offenders and nonviolent offenders on Jan. 6 — this notion that there would be thoughtful and nuanced approaches to who got pardons and who got commutations.
The reality is Trump wants to rewrite history. He wanted all these people out. He wants, after years, to take control of the narrative around Jan. 6.
I’m wondering, do you think he’ll succeed?
Goldberg: Will he succeed, in terms of history? I think that it’s impossible to say right now. I think he’s already succeeded in the eyes of huge parts of the Republican Party. You can see the Republican attempts to pretend that these pardons and commutations were going to be modest and targeted. It’s of a piece with the entire rewriting and gaslighting around what Trump’s first term was like and what his plans for a second term are like.
There’s always this attempt to sort of retcon whatever he says into something more reasonable and something less shocking and to pretend that anybody who is alarmed and is shocked is hysterical and suffering from as they often say, Trump derangement syndrome.
I know that this is probably the most overused word of the last decade, but it’s a kind of gaslighting, and it works on you after a while. You think, “Well, was it really as bad as all that?” I think that this is a reminder that it was and is.
Healy: David, what kind of precedent do you think these pardons and commutations set for our democracy?
French: It’s a dreadful precedent, and I have to extend it beyond Donald Trump. Right on the very eve of Trump’s presidency, Joe Biden pardoned a bunch of his family members. So this is sort of amplifying and moving beyond the Hunter Biden pardon.
And so you already had yet another example — of many in American history — where pardon power has been abused. But then Trump does the classic Trump “hold my beer” thing and says: OK, well if Biden abused it, watch what I can do.
Goldberg: But David, doesn’t that suggest a sort of causality? Like, he was going to do this anyway.
French: Oh, of course he was going to do this anyway. But I do think if we’re going to talk about pardon power abuse, we can’t just leave it with Trump. What Trump did was inexcusable. He was going to do it anyway.
What Biden did, I think, was inexcusable, though less serious and less consequential but also inexcusable.
I think at this point, when or if American politics returns to sanity, pardon power reform should be on the agenda. If you look at history, this is one of the only vestiges of royalty that was remaining in the American constitutional structure, and it was a mistake.
The founders did not trust power but then handed this immense power to the president without any check, and we are now reaping the consequences of that at a level we have never seen. I think the short-term consequence of this is that if you are a Trump fan, if you are a Trump sycophant, it is a real calculus to think that the rule of law will not apply to you while Trump wields power.
Let’s just suppose you’re an Elon Musk and you may commit serial securities violations. Is a Trump Justice Department going to prosecute Trump’s No. 1 fan? Or donor? What he raised here with these prosecutions — as brazen and as widespread as they are, they really did raise the possibility that for four years, federal law enforcement will be meaningless if you are sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.
Goldberg: I think this applies both at these very high levels to all of these tech oligarchs who were in the front at the inauguration, even in front of the members of the cabinet.
But it also applies to the thugs, the Proud Boys who were marching through the streets of D.C. and who have now been given — “carte blanche” is maybe too strong of a word — but have now been given very strong signals that if you attack Trump’s enemies, you can do it with impunity.
It makes me physically scared.
Healy: David, what concerns me is that I think pardon reform, while a nice idea, is up there with term limits for Supreme Court justices: It’s not going to happen. Presidents aren’t going to want to give away that power or change it. I’m not sure I see any kind of path forward beyond discipline and self-control by presidents, and I think the barn doors are open on that.
But I find myself wondering, do people care? Do they look at Trump and see a king who does whatever he wants, and there’s no pushback, no limits there?
French: I think within MAGA, people do not care. But there’s another factor, Patrick, that I really wish those of us who follow politics very closely understood more, because there’s a another question besides “Do people care?” and that is “Do people know?”
For the bulk of the American people, the level of ignorance about current affairs is really shocking. It’s really shocking.
Goldberg: And I think that part of what makes this even more alarming is to see all of the social media magnates, the people who control the channels by which more and more people get their information, lined up behind Trump.
And so I think what’s terrifying and what’s so different this time around, as opposed to in the first Trump administration, is the extent to which Trump now controls a lot of the media.
French: And one thing, Michelle, that I think is a little different for Trump from other presidents is the extent to which he has weaponized and exploited civic ignorance.
One of the things that I think we’re learning is how much the American experiment has depended on the honor system. That presidents of both parties, with varying degrees of truthfulness and honor, by and large, maintained American norms and did not explicitly weaponize American ignorance in the way that Trump has.
I think what Trump and the people around him have realized is that he can do wild things, like some of the executive orders that will thrill MAGA and, of course, enrage his opposition. But then outside MAGA, there won’t be a ripple that any of this occurred at all.
Healy: David, I want to ask you about Trump’s approach to immigration, because it’s a big change we’ve all been watching out for. He wants to end birthright citizenship. That is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
It’s already being challenged by the A.C.L.U. Can Trump use an executive order to, if not change the Constitution, start a ball rolling where this could actually end up in his favor? Or is this just bluster, and he’s really just trying to throw a lot of rhetoric at a wall?
French: I think it’s at a point in between bluster and real-world effect. And what I mean by that is, a lot of presidents before Trump, including Trump before this term, have tried to use executive orders and unilateral executive authority to transform the situation at the border.
And what all of these presidents find is, yeah, they have some flexibility with executive orders, especially the ability to achieve temporary results before courts intervene and roll back policies. But what they find is that you just can’t control and establish a comprehensive immigration plan through executive action. That’s just not legally possible in the long term. It absolutely has short-to-medium-term effects. No question. But all of these things have to ultimately be tested in court because our system is designed for congressionally passed laws for governing the border. Executive actions often simply can’t do it.
And with the birthright citizenship executive order, there is really no Supreme Court precedent. This is an attempt to amend the Constitution by executive fiat, and it’s almost certainly going to fail — and start to fail quickly in the courts. But at that point, it’s still a kind of a no-lose proposition for him with his core base. The pattern he established in his first term was if he did something lawless and it got blocked, that’s not on him, in the eyes of MAGA. That’s on the courts. That’s how the “deep state” or “out-of-control judges” block Donald Trump’s agenda.
So for him politically, at least for now, these kinds of things are no-lose because he gets to blame somebody else when his obviously unlawful, unconstitutional actions get blocked.
Goldberg: David, I hope you’re right about it being an obvious loser in the courts. I have maybe less faith in the Supreme Court than you do.
The other part of this is that it seems you could be setting up an early constitutional crisis in that even if the courts rule that this is illegitimate, it’s still the federal government that’s going to issue Social Security cards and passports. And if you have Trump officials saying, “Don’t do it,” who’s going to make them?
Healy: Chaos. It just feels like, if I’m a family member, what does this do to me in that regard?
French: Well, I’m glad you raised that. It brings us to what the ultimate test of the rule of law in Trump Version 2 is going to be: Will he comply with adverse rulings from the Supreme Court? That is going to be the real test of how much of the rule of law we have left.
And there’s the potential — as in the possibly apocryphal Andrew Jackson statement that “the court has made its ruling, now let it come enforce it” — where he defies the Supreme Court. There’s a sense in which it’s a very real possibility that the next step in the attack on the rule of law is just outright defiance of the Supreme Court.
Now — to provide some degree of comfort — lower federal officials can still be held liable, and injunctions can still be issued against lower federal officials, but again, if you combine all this with the pardon power, we’re circling back to the beginning of this discussion.
Goldberg: And also with Schedule F, right? With the desire to fire all of these career people and replace them with political apparatchiks.
French: We could very well see a situation in which you have federal courts issuing injunctions and Trump instructing people to defy injunctions. Courts issue contempt orders, where you otherwise would imprison somebody for failing to comply with court orders. Then Trump issues pardons in those circumstances.
You can paint a picture where the combination of Trump’s obstinance, the total unyielding loyalty of MAGA, plus the abuse of the pardon power — which he’s established as of right now as having no real limits in his mind — create a situation of absolutely sustained and profound lawlessness.
Healy: David, how confident are you that there’s a majority on the Supreme Court that would uphold birthright citizenship?
French: I’m very confident of that. Although at no point would I say I’m certain.
If you look at text, history and tradition, the Supreme Court is really moving in the direction of looking at the text first, looking at history first, and then, to some extent, tradition, although that element of it is very contested right now.
But if you look at the text, the text very clearly would command that individuals born in the United States are citizens, so long as they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. And guess what. Illegal immigrants and children of illegal immigrants are absolutely subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
What you’re left with is to try to get around a superstrained, ahistoric and illogical argument that the illegal immigrants who are coming here are effectively invaders, like a hostile army. And that’s just not true under international law. It’s not true under any conception of what the word “invasion” means.
And so if you’re looking at it from that text, history or originalist mind-set, the overwhelming argument is for the traditional interpretation of birthright citizenship.
Goldberg: But David, if you reject that premise, which obviously I think that the court should, that migrants constitute an invading force, it’s not just Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship that they would have to reject, right?
The whole legal architecture of a lot of Trump’s deportation regime, the justification for deploying the military on American soil — a lot of this hinges on his classification of migrants as invaders. And so it seems to me at least possible that the court will let some of this stuff stand and that will create its own justification.
French: You’re right, Michelle, that a lot of the legal architecture that he bases many of his executive orders on is very vulnerable to court challenge.
And look, I’m not naïve about the Supreme Court. I saw what they did with the immunity decision. I saw the way they approach the 14th Amendment eligibility decisions. So I do not sit there and think that the Supreme Court is always getting it right. But the record shows that they have turned back MAGA legal arguments again and again.
Goldberg: But that was a very different Supreme Court. It was different people on the court. I mean, not all of them, but it was a different majority.
French: Well, yes, but the current Supreme Court has turned back MAGA legal arguments many, many times. And in fact, it was a Republican-nominated majority in his first term, and he had one of the worst records at the Supreme Court of any president in modern history. Since that time, even with the 6-to-3 court, with three justices appointed by him, they have rejected MAGA legal arguments multiple times.
So the legal architecture he has constructed is very, very vulnerable. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see what happens, but if I were walking into this current Supreme Court making the Trump birthright citizenship argument, I would feel as if I’m walking into a losing case.
Healy: As part of Trump’s moves on immigration, he declared this national emergency at the southern border. The big question for me is what Trump means when he directs the military to become newly involved in protecting the “sovereignty” and “security of the United States” from illegal immigration.
David, do you think Trump will use the military in previously unseen ways? And will any of this be challenged in court?
French: So I can answer the latter part. Yes, you’re going to see a lot of court challenges. This is the area where I really feel like we will see the most effective early resistance to Trump in court.
On the first part of your question, about what we will see from the military, I don’t know. There’s a big difference between deploying the military, for example, to use the Army Corps of Engineers or to use military labor to build barriers and to help strengthen the existing wall versus using the military in a more law-enforcement, border-enforcement capacity, which again raises real legal issues. We have the posse comitatus issues, where the American military is not supposed to be engaging in domestic law enforcement. So you’ve got a very real issue there.
And whenever you put people who are armed in situations that are very tense and they’re not trained for, that’s when you begin to have the real possibility of unintended violent consequences. And so one of the questions I have is: Are the troops who are going to be at the border going to be armed?
Goldberg: Of course they are, right?
French: Well not necessarily. I could see a very smart commander saying, “You’re here to build a fence. You’re not going to have an M4 with live ammunition.”
Goldberg: But really, a smart commander under Pete Hegseth?
French: That’s the question. We’re in a situation where we have no assurance that Donald Trump will do anything in a reasonable manner, and at the same time, we have not yet seen the worst-case scenarios play out. So there is room for reason — potentially. It’s just that we don’t have confidence that reason will prevail and we should not have confidence that reason will prevail.
Healy: Michelle, where is the external resistance? We saw the A.C.L.U. suing over birthright citizenship, but Monday the anger in the streets and online was relatively tepid.
It certainly felt different from eight years ago.
Do you think we’re going to see resistance?
Goldberg: I think we will see it. I think that it will just be in response to something more tangible.
When Trump was first elected, it was a shock because he didn’t win the popular vote and it had this aura of democratic illegitimacy. It just seemed like this kind of freak occurrence that the American people at large hadn’t actually chosen.
There was this sense that we could sort of make it right, that we could get past it and that we could reject this aberration. Obviously that sense is gone. This was who the American people — if not a majority, a plurality — chose.
It’s hard to find that same sort of rationale to protest his inauguration. People are exhausted. They’re dispirited. They’re overwhelmed. They’re in despair. And I share a lot of that despair. It’s very hard to organize in the absence of hope.
And there are not that many leaders out there right now who are imbuing people with hope or pointing a way forward. Not just through the next four years but also a path for America that doesn’t feel, frankly, dystopian to those who oppose the MAGA agenda.
All that said, I think it’s important to remember that in some polls he’s as unpopular as he was in 2017. He’s certainly more unpopular entering the presidency than, say, Joe Biden was in 2021. So there is this potential of latent resistance. I don’t think we know yet what is going to be the thing that ignites it, but I feel pretty confident that something will.
Healy: In the absence of that hope you’re talking about, Michelle, or at least a clear alternate path forward, what would each of you like to see American citizens do in the coming months? Or how you would like to see them think about this moment or about Trump generally?
Goldberg: I think there’s going to be a physical resistance if they start really trying to round up migrants. I’m already on WhatsApp groups and Signal groups filled with people kind of organizing for what they’re going to do if ICE comes into our neighborhoods or into the shelters near where we live.
And so I think there’ll be maybe human chains or various sorts of physical protests and standoffs. That’s obviously small scale, but it mattered when people rushed to the airports in 2017 during the Muslim ban. People see that there’s something they can do, and it kind of snaps them out of their sense of helplessness.
Then more broadly, we saw a huge influx of people entering into the political system after 2017, and I suspect that some of that will happen again. I do think that when you have a political vacuum on the scale that we have, some kind of entrepreneurial soul is going to see their shot and try to fill it.
French: I’ve had concerns that I’ve expressed, so let me turn the page and offer some hope here. I think there’s a good case to be made that right now Trump is at his high-water mark. This is not the first time that we have seen a winning political movement overread its victory. In fact, not long ago, I did some research on the rhetoric from each party after each cycle of victory.
In 2004 you had this sense that Karl Rove had cracked the code and they were talking about an enduring majority, and sometimes they used the phrase “permanent majority.” Well, that all evaporated by 2006.
The “permanent majority” lasted all of two years. And then after 2008 there was a lot of talk that this coalition of the ascendant had really cracked the code, and that lasted until 2010.
You get the idea. We have gone through a period in which there has been a triumphalism, an overreading of a victory, and that overreach is often followed by an electoral backlash.
The one thing that I do think that Trump has is a loyal base, unlike anything I’ve ever seen in politics. But it is still a minority of the United States of America.
This is still not the most popular politician in America. There is a real chance, especially as we’ve already seen him overreach, that you’ll see a backlash.
And there’s this interesting phenomenon with Trump. When he gets out there in front of the American people and displays rally Trump to people on a consistent basis, it tends not to work out well for him. That’s something we saw during the pandemic, for example, when he was out there every day and he got weirder and stranger and more bizarre. You saw a real slide in support.
Then the other thing is I’ve never seen a politician immune from the negative effects of inflation. If he does carry through with the tariffs and with mass deportations, one of the most likely effects will be an increase in inflation. He’s already demonstrating that he hasn’t learned one of the cardinal rules of his own victory.
So there is ample reason to believe that we are right now at the high-water mark of MAGA. But even a MAGA in decline can do immense damage. But if he does sort of crack a code where he can abuse power, even punitive actions that increase prices, and still skates through, well, then we really are in a different world at that point.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.