‘An Emotional Torture Chamber for Liberals': 3 Writers on Trump's First Month

New York Times

28-02-2025

Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt and the author of 'Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,' and Tim Miller, the author of 'Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell,' to discuss President Trump's stunt politics and how Republicans leverage emotionally charged issues over a long horizon.
Frank Bruni: When President Trump issued that executive order on birthright citizenship on Day 1 — right out of the gate — I thought: Here we go again. Here's another emotionally charged gambit that is not meant to lead to any real change because it's patently unconstitutional and sure to be blocked by the courts but that gets gobs of attention and generates oodles of commentary. I also thought about the way Republicans used abortion in the past, about the party's particular genius for anger-juicing issues that are sure to go unresolved for years and about Trump's M.O. as the apotheosis of that. Tim, Nicole, am I onto something, or do I need more coffee?
Nicole Hemmer: I always recommend more coffee, but I do think there's something to that. Overturning birthright citizenship is an issue that serves as a kind of vice signaling, a way of indicating who the shared enemies are and how the president would hurt them if he had unchecked power.
Tim Miller: In this case I think this is a sincere policy goal they would like to effectuate. Yes, it is also a brazen P.R. stunt. But ending birthright citizenship has deep support among the MAGA intellectual set. And most MAGA voters would be for it.
Bruni: Damn you, Tim. I had the word 'stunt' in my shoulder bag and was all ready to yank it out with a great flourish and much self-congratulation, and now you've ruined that. I hear both of you on the fact that MAGA voters feel about an end to birthright citizenship the way sharks do about chum: They're all over it.
But I'm wondering if on some level Trump and Republicans like it that the proposal to end birthright citizenship, like the efforts to overturn Roe, might stick around for a very long and profitable while, might be a sustained source of anger and funds rather than a quick fix.
Hemmer: The idea of somehow rescinding birthright citizenship will remain a live issue and provides a new Supreme Court litmus test — which they need, since the Republican-nominated majority has already blazed past most of the existing litmus tests.
Miller: The weakest part of your argument, Frank, is the idea that Trump is thinking about the long term, when as far as I can tell, he thinks mostly about the pleasure and praise he is receiving on a minute-by-minute basis. Trump will wield anger-juicing issues that serve him in the moment and then toss them aside. Remember the cat-eating Haitians? What happened to them?
Hemmer: The Haitians are being stripped of temporary protected status.
Miller: Yes, that is important to mention. But has Trump talked about them or used them as a cudgel? Nah.
Bruni: Fair, Tim. My phraseology made this about Trump and granted him all the, um, strategy and agency here. But he's being fed advice and prompted by people who do think long term, by the Project 2025 architects, by a robust cast of troublemakers, and they know that if they encourage him to do something with long-term benefit that also gets him a big bunch of headlines and applause from the cheap seats in the short term — bingo! — he gets his candy; they get their meat.
Miller: I do think that the Stephen Millers of the world and the folks around him are employing these tactics with more consideration, and certainly they see the birthright citizenship issue as fruitful.
Hemmer: That has been the remarkable change with this second term: The long-term strategists are in place, have their 900-page guidebook and are moving forward with alarming speed while the president posts on social media.
Bruni: Yes, Nicole, that's exactly my point. And those strategists are cunning enough — merciless enough — to devise an alignment of short-term goodies for Trump and long-term goodies for them. It's a Candy Land in which everybody gets their preferred gumdrop.
Hemmer: I really should have eaten before this.
Miller: But if you gave Stephen Miller some kind of truth serum and asked him, 'Do you want this issue as a long-term cudgel and an emotional torture chamber for liberals, or do you want to ban all anchor babies yesterday with Supreme Court approval?' I think he'd take Door No. 2.
Hemmer: Totally agree there. And we're in a situation where there are so many wild propositions that can easily trigger a frenzy in the MAGA base that if they lost birthright citizenship as an issue because they achieved its revocation, they would have plenty more to feast on.
Bruni: Let's talk about all those wild propositions. Because you're right: There's a smorgasbord of them. See how I keep bringing it back to food? Telling.
Whether we're talking about Trump himself or the broader Team Trump, I sometimes find it easy but other times find it hard to separate spectacle from substance, provocation from policy, empty bids for attention from actual stabs at change. That confusion extends to Elon Musk, whom I've come to think of as Trump's twitchy appendage, his restless leg syndrome. Let's examine some of the greatest recent hits, and you two tell me what's merely theatrical and what's genuinely meaningful.
The stiff-horizontal-arm gesture that has now traveled from Musk on the day of Trump's inauguration to, more recently, maybe Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference — ignorable obnoxiousness or terrifying omen?
Hemmer: There's nothing to be gained by ignoring powerful political figures who make what look like Nazi salutes, particularly when they're spending the rest of their time trying to maximize presidential power and harm specific groups of people.
Miller: For the 'Roman salute,' as some on the right have called it, I fall closer to the side of ignorable obnoxiousness. Bannon is desperate to maintain outsider status. Now, don't get me wrong: They have some really scary ideas, but I think the salute was an attempt to trigger you, not signal to the Nazis. The Nazis already know whose side they are on.
Bruni: Color me triggered. Speaking of color, what about annexing Greenland?
Hemmer: Greenland gets us closer to the crux of the issue. While it's important to point out that annexation would be an unlawful act of aggression, to my mind, it's more useful to think about the proposed annexations of Greenland, Canada and Panama as pushing the limits of what is imaginable for a president if he is unleashed from constitutional constraints. Which is more important to focus on — the specifics of annexing Greenland or that broader effort to imagine an aggressive, expansionist United States? I'd say the latter.
Miller: Let's focus on Panama, because it provides a more tangible example of where the silliness meets cold, hard reality. First, Panama doesn't have a standing army, for complicated historical reasons. My guess is that Panama is revisiting that. Second, The Times had a really affecting piece the other day about how Panama is now housing asylees we deported because it doesn't want to anger us. So right now there is a refugee camp being built in Panama for Iranian Christians and others fleeing persecution just because Trump might have heard at the golf club that the canal charges too-high fees and that China controls it and he decided to bleat about it. That is dead serious.
Hemmer: Yes, the Panama example strikes me as especially important, because it reminds us to focus on the real-world consequences, not just the political strategizing.
Bruni: The piece you just mentioned, Tim, gutted me. And not just the particulars of it — the fact that this is who we, America, are right now and how we choose to act on the world stage. The values of it or lack thereof. Is there a chance that all this thumping of Trump's and JD Vance's chests and all this stomping on people's hearts backfires as it settles in? As Americans fully absorb it and behold a staggering amount of it?
Miller: There is a chance, but man, it is hard to see a lot of evidence for hope on that front at this point.
Hemmer: You might have come to the wrong people if you're looking for hope.
Miller: I am liking Nicole more and more.
Hemmer: I do think — or, rather, hope — that at some point the immiseration of vast numbers of Americans and people around the world will rip people away from the circus and focus attention on the very real dangers and damage of this administration. But we all lived through Covid, and even with people's lives on the line, the fire hose of conspiracy theories kept blasting away, with devastating consequences.
Miller: I've been trying in vain to steer pundit round tables away from guessing the political implications of all this, because we are a long way from more voting and it is impossible to know what will be salient in two years and which house they are going to burn down with their willy-nilly attempts to arson the government, our institutions and the international order.
Bruni: Well, we are a pundit round table, and you are steering, and that's great. And now I worry that my next question will be like some taking back of the wheel and turning down a road you don't want to travel, but I'm not sure, so here goes: The competition for attention in our chaotic, overwhelming information environment keeps getting more and more, er, attention. It's a subject of the journalist Chris Hayes's most recent book, 'The Sirens' Call,' and it has come up repeatedly on my colleague Ezra Klein's podcast, including in the episode this week. And there's sometimes a suggestion that he who monopolizes attention shall inherit the earth.
But might that not be so? The political scientist John Sides recently wrote that Trump's command of attention may not be his 'true superpower' and is unsure that it is even helping him, at least all the time. Could Sides be right? Could the volume of noise repel people or the carnival become so grotesque that it no longer seems or feels serious? I'm looking for a contrarian take, which is to say that I'm looking, again, for hope.
Miller: I don't think it is as simple as saying that more attention is good for Trump. Sides is right about that. Attention didn't help Kari Lake against Katie Hobbs. And the attention that Musk is bringing could certainly end up being bad attention if he continues to wreck things that affect real people's lives.
Trump, in my view, is strongest when he is dominating the attention but not really doing anything. If he just bleated all day while golfing and not really doing that much substantively, that would be his sweet spot. The ray of hope — if you want to call it that — I have is that these unpopular Project 2025 policies begin to sink in and negatively affect people and that's what actually blows back on these guys. The downside of this 'hope' is that real people will have to suffer first.
Bruni: Nicole, your earlier mention of the 'immiseration of vast numbers of Americans' falls into the thinking that Trump and his cabinet minions will be judged in the final analysis by results or lack thereof. Because that's how things work. Reality bites and bites hard. But in an information environment this corrupted and fragmented, with a leader this ruthless about exploiting that corruption to invent realities and shift blame, can we trust that?
Hemmer: Yes, it's been a bad run for rationalists. One reason I'm a bad person to come to for hope is that the absolutely poisoned information environment makes it very, very difficult to play on the field of reason or even cause and effect. I wish I had an easy solution for that. But it is one of the most crucial and most intractable parts of the current crisis.
Miller: I do think that certain things break through. Remember, the Trump win this time was not just on the backs of the people who consume Newsmax. He did really well with people who don't consume much news at all. They are probably getting some trickle-down disinformation but aren't swimming in this stuff. These guys are talking about cutting Medicaid, and 32 percent of Louisiana is on Medicaid.
Hemmer: Look! I turned Tim into the optimist of the group.
Bruni: He was never going to get any competition from me.
Miller: I am getting uncomfortable now.
Bruni: Also among these pundit-round-table flaws is the tendency to discuss Trump and his tactics as something utterly new — the word 'unprecedented' gets a sweaty workout. But Tim, you worked for years in the Republican Party. And Nicole, you've studied and written about it across time and about early stunt-meisters like Newt Gingrich. In what ways is Trump an elongation and amplification of that flamboyantly provocative and gleefully pugnacious style, and in what ways, in terms of his messaging and his bids for public attention, is he indeed new?
Miller: There are elements of Trump in Spiro Agnew and Ronald Reagan, for sure. But what Republican from 2004 to '16 had the personality to do what Trump does? And even if they did have the aura, the platforms weren't there. People were consuming Rush Limbaugh, yes, but they also watched Tom Brokaw. Count me closer to the 'unprecedented' side of the equation, even if there are some tactical similarities.
Hemmer: The entertainer-turned-politician model is not new. I always point to 1992, when you had Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in the presidential race. Americans knew the two men mainly through television, not politics. Neither had run for political office. But I agree with Tim that the new platforms — and the fact that Musk and Trump own their own platforms — mean we're talking about something entirely different from hosting 'Crossfire' or appearing regularly on 'Larry King Live.'
Bruni: Let's turn to Democrats. Who among them has the personality and the communication skills to emerge as an effective leader, an effective agenda setter, in this moment? Is anyone among them showing at least the glimmers of a promising groove and a transformative voice?
Hemmer: Tim and I will probably name the same people, because there are so few of them.
Miller: Let's hear it. Because I am struggling to come up with one.
Hemmer: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows how to use new media. Jasmine Crockett has broken through on several occasions. And JB Pritzker won some attention for his response to Trump in recent weeks. People are probably also thinking of Pete Buttigieg, though I'm not sure how well he translates from cable news into new media spaces like TikTok.
Miller: Maybe some of the governors will emerge. Wes Moore of Maryland and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania are OK at this. Buttigieg is pretty good but might have a ceiling on the types of people he appeals to — the champagne track, if you will. But the gap between any of these people, besides Ocasio-Cortez, and Trump on the attention question is cavernous. So what that means for me is that someone will emerge from the outside or grow into it or Trump will be such a disaster that another Biden-like figure will succeed by basically just selling people on some kind of normalcy.
Hemmer: If and when Trump exits the national stage, it will be interesting to see if someone emerges.
Bruni: A few beats ago, one of you mentioned Trump's personality as being a key new dynamic for Republicans. My belief is that his shamelessness has mattered more than his personality. He has a truly unusual willingness to be as dishonest, disloyal and vulgar as necessary to get what he wants. I wonder if Democrats are crippled by inadequate shamelessness or if their salvation will be the contrast of greater dignity. I hear this debated furiously by Democrats all the time: They need to fight dirtier! No, they need to take Michelle Obama's high road! And I just don't know the answer. Your thoughts and advice?
Miller: Democrats are so agreeable. This is a massive limitation. Here's a great example: the Musk baby mama drama. Musk has 12 children by three mothers, and recently another woman said that he is the father of her baby. Democrats refused to touch it with a 10-foot pole. That one example does not really matter, but in the aggregate, it does limit the attention Democrats can get and also — probably more important — limits who they can reach.
Hemmer: Am I being too agreeable if I say I agree with Tim? That agreeableness — starting every criticism of Trump and Musk with 'You've got to hand it to them' — is insufficient in the face of the threat this administration poses. There is real unrest among the Democratic base for precisely this reason. They want a fight, and instead they're getting the opening strains of 'Kumbaya.' To be less agreeable, they should absolutely be making clear that the Republican Party is not a valid governing partner as long as the administration continues with its lawless power grab.
Bruni: I think Republicans are not only better at shamelessness — a phrase that feels like the saddest oxymoron ever — but also better at the stunts we were discussing before. Is there a stunt issue or a stunt-adjacent issue that might work well for Democrats?
Miller: Going after billionaires is the obvious en vogue answer to that question. But my honest answer is that I don't think anyone has cracked the nut yet. I'd like to see a bunch of different Democrats try a bunch of different stunts in 2025. Some will be cringeworthy. But some might hit.
Hemmer: When Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for office in 1932, he promised 'bold, persistent experimentation.' The Democrats could use some of that energy in their opposition to Trump. Fling it all at the wall and see what sticks.
Bruni: Let's finish with a lightning round. Short answers, top of mind. What will be Trump's approval rating in one month?
Hemmer: I'm a historian, not a prognosticator.
Miller: Good answer, Nicole. I'm a hack, so … 47 percent.
Bruni: Describe Trump's first month in the presidency in one word or phrase, adverbs definitely permitted.
Hemmer: Chaotic boundary testing, like raptors flinging themselves against an electric fence.
Miller: Pandemonium.
Bruni: If you'll indulge me another challenge to your prognostication aversion, Nicole, what are the percentage odds that we need to be concerned about some scheming, some political and constitutional jujitsu, by which there's a danger or prospect of a third Trump term?
Miller: Way too high. Maybe 25 percent? But anything over 0 is too high.
Hemmer: I'm with Tim. It's probably in the teens or 20s, but what are we even talking about? A third term is dictatorship territory, so if we're above zero, the alarms should be going off.
Bruni: Nicole, a history question, sort of: In a sentence, how will history remember and judge Mitch McConnell?
Hemmer: McConnell will be remembered as the man who enabled all of this, first in 2016 by blocking Merrick Garland and making the Supreme Court a key issue and then in 2021 by not holding Trump responsible for the insurrection.
Miller: We do a pretty great job of whitewashing powerful people in our history books, so probably better than I would wish. As a strong Senate leader whose failure in January 2021 brought about whatever happens the next four years.
Bruni: Lastly, while it makes me queasy to speak of a MAGA mantle, who's the most likely person to take and carry that mantle after Trump?
Hemmer: Donald Trump Jr.
Miller: JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Barron Trump and Donald Trump Jr., in that order.
Bruni: Thank you, both. Neither of you provided the hope I sought. But cocktail hour is almost here.