Brooks and Atkins Stohr on Trump's return and its impact on the country

William Brangham:

President Trump's return to the White House has seen several significant changes from his first term, turning this into a consequential year for the presidency and for the country.

So, to reflect on it all, we turn now to the analysis of Brooks and Atkins Stohr. That's David Brooks of The New York Times and Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe. Jonathan Capehart is away.

Welcome to you both. Thank you for being here.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr, The Boston Globe:

Good to be here.

William Brangham:

David, one of the biggest questions at the starting of this year is what Trump 2.0 was going to look like compared to the first version. And we have now seen a year of it, an incredibly aggressive flexing of executive authority.

When you look back on this year, what really stands out to you?

David Brooks:

Yes, I tell two stories.

The first is that since 1945, the American establishment, if you want to put it that way, has built a series of institutions, things like the Western alliance, NATO, the Department of Justice, USAID, and all of those things have been hollowed out over the last year.

And so we have seen a great decline in state capacity. You have to worry about if we're a nation in decline, because China is investing in science, they're investing in technologies, they're kicking our butts. And so they tell the decline. This has been a tragedy, an error of historic proportions.

The other story is that, since 1945, the American establishment has lost touch with American workers. And they have passed trade and immigration policies that immigration workers didn't like. They have -- frankly, in the cultural institutions, the media, the universities, they have kicked working-class and conservative voices out.

And so a lot of people feel, I'm invisible to these people. And then...

William Brangham:

And, ergo, we get Trump.

David Brooks:

And so we get Trump. And so I think both those stories are true.

And so, as much as we lament the horror of what's happened over the last year, it's much more horrible than I anticipated, for people like me, we have to ask ourselves, what do we do to bring this about? And I think both those stories are true.

William Brangham:

What do you think?

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

Yes, two things really jumped out at me. And one is the erosion of the rule of law.

And I see the Trumpification of the Department of Justice, for example, as a key role in that right alongside the White House. He came in pardoning the January 6 rioters, everyone who participated in that horrific day, but, at the same time, weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies.

I mean, just today, when he was posting on TRUTH Social about the Epstein files, he's directing people just to look at the Democrats that are in these files and not the Republicans, because everything about what the Democrats are tagging is a hoax, and that he has an attorney general now and an FBI director that are willing to go along with that.

As an attorney, this is not how I learned in law school that the rule of law is supposed to be implemented. Another thing I think you see a great through line, whether it's its immigration policies or the decimation of the federal government with the purging of workers to the attacks on universities, is a through line of race.

It is this idea that people within the country who are Black or Latino or also Muslim, the Islamophobic aspect of it, or immigrants, it's only those that are deemed the ones that are a danger to the country. We will open white South Africans -- open our arms to white South Africans, but at the same time, the denigration of other countries as Third World, as less than, as hellholes and worse.

You see this real idea that there is a white Christian nationalism that has taken over the federal government in a way that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.

William Brangham:

I mean, as you're both describing what we have been seeing unfolding, this is -- none of this should come as a surprise. I mean, this is what candidate Trump promised on so many different levels. I will be your retribution. I will -- I want my Roy Cohn in the Department of Justice.

I will deport, I mean, those signs that the rallies. To this question you were asking before, David, about how -- what we ought to look at as far as whether we got ourselves here, how do you answer that question?

David Brooks:

The surprise or how we got ourselves.

William Brangham:

Yes.

David Brooks:

I mean, my simple answer is that we live in a country where people with high school degrees die 10 years sooner than people with college degrees, where people with high school degrees are five times more likely to die of opioids, where people with high school degrees are much less likely to get married, much more likely to have kids out of wedlock.

People with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends. People with high school degrees are less likely to go to parks. And so we have created an inherited meritocratic system, an inherited caste system.

And if you tell successive generations that your kids are not going to have an equal shot because your kids by eighth grade have fallen five grades level below the educated class, well, if you know your kids are going to have no shot, they're going to flip the table.

And that's why it's always important to see this phenomenon as a global phenomenon. It's not just Donald Trump. It's Nigel Farage in Britain. It's the right in France. It's the AfD in Germany. It's in Poland.

William Brangham:

South and Central America.

David Brooks:

It's South and Central America, in Korea.

This is a global phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of the information age. That information age records people with money, with education, with money, and it creates this class system. And just as in the 1880s and 1890s, we screwed up responding to industrialization, we have over the last 20 or 30 years not adequately responded to the shifts that the information age has brought about us.

And so I look at this as a moment of rupture and repair, that it's ugly to live through. I hate what Donald Trump is doing, but every time America or any country or us personally, think of your own personal life, life moves forward through a process of rupture and repair. Something falls apart, something terrible happens, but you are strong enough as a nation to ask yourself honest questions, what part of this problem am I responsible for?

And when you do that, then repair begins to happen. And America's been through this so many times, 1830s, 1890s, 1860s, 1960s. I'm confident that America will go through this horrible period of rupture and something will come out the other end if we're creative enough to adjust.

William Brangham:

Kimberly, do you -- who do you see as the repairers that David is yearning for?

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

Well, I think that it's going to be many of the same repairs that we saw those periods that you talked about. We didn't just come through the rupture on our own. We came through with a sustained plan of how to get ourselves out of it.

After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction. That was meant to heal some of the wounds and bring up the formerly enslaved African Americans to a place where they can participate fully in society. And what did we get? We got a vicious blowback to it with Jim Crow, a rejection of it, this idea that politically people thought it was better to say, hey, these are people taking something that belongs to you,rather than saying, hey, let's look for a way to bring up everyone and to protect everyone's rights.

That's exactly what Donald Trump is doing. He could be talking to the people that you talked about being left behind, but instead he's saying that these immigrants or these Black folks or these other people are taking something that belongs to you.

And that's what's giving people the idea that this is unfair. But one thing that I think, this can't happen without institutions allowing it. And I think this year we saw the biggest institution, the Supreme Court, basically allowing Trump, before the actions that he has taken has even been deemed to be constitutional or legal, in the short term allowing them to go in place.

William Brangham:

On the shadow docket, all these emergency orders.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

On the shadow docket, these emergency orders, exactly.

And so by the time the legality or the constitutionality has decided, very little has been so far, the damage has already done. And USAID is already gone. The Education Department's right next to it. You're seeing people who have been deported to countries that they don't have family, they have never been to before. How do you make them whole?

That's too late. So the fact that the Supreme Court, as the unelected independent branch of our government, has basically been more often than not a rubber stamp for him is a real problem. We need our institutions to step up.

William Brangham:

I mean, earlier this spring, David, you will remember, you called for arguing that all of these little protests, pushbacks that are happening against the Trump administration were insufficient for what you're diagnosing.

And you called for a civic -- collective civic action. I don't think I'm breaking any news to you that I don't think that has happened in the country.

David Brooks:

Yes.

No, I mean, I was reading all these lefty revolutionaries and I'm like, yes, yes, let's go, get them.

(Laughter)

David Brooks:

I think it has not happened. It has not happened because people are intimidated, because they fear their organization will lose money.

But one of the reasons it has not happened, if you look at around the world where it has happened, where people rose up against authoritarianism, they had strong civic structures. Let's say in the Philippines in the 1980s, when they rose up, Ferdinand Marcos was elected, but then he tried to steal power.

And so what happened was, the students rose. The transportation workers arose. The business community arose. The Catholic Church rose. It happened with the institutions of civil society, through them. And our institutions of civil society may be too weak.

And so every institution, whether it's a university or a business or a law firm, faces a collective action problem. If I stick my head up, I'm going to get shot down. And without strong civic institutions where people can move as one, it's super hard for rare individuals to stand up.

And I'm afraid that's part of what's happened. The second thing that's happened is, there has been such a decay of moral norms that it's hard for any institution to say, no, we are going to stand up for this. You are not going to talk about Rob Reiner the way you did. You're not going to use the racial language that is omnipresent now.

And it's hard to articulate when the corrosion is not only in our laws, but in our minds, in our language. That's a hard thing to challenge. But I'm hopeful in the long term it will happen. In the 1890s, we had a civic renaissance. We had the creation of the Boys and Girls Clubs. We had the creation of the NAACP, the unions, the Sierra Club.

All these civic organizations were created by a group of people who said, we can't go on this way. And once you had the civic institutions, then, in around 1900, you had the progressive movement. You get a cultural shift, you get a civic renaissance, and then political reform.

We're still waiting for the civic renaissance.

William Brangham:

I mean, in just the last 30 seconds we have, Kimberly, the Democrats have been one of these institutions that seemingly have been kind of feckless in pushing back.

They have a midterm coming up. Do you think what we have seen in the recent elections will be echoed? You have hope that they will be there?

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

I hope so.

I mean, I think that it is imperative that they do. We are seeing an election that is going to be -- we always say it's the most consequential coming up. I'm afraid of the voter information gathering that the federal government is doing, trying to consolidate voter lists and be in charge of who gets purged from them.

I see that the obstacles are already being put up for a free and fair election. Democrats have to say clearly that this is not acceptable and put forward an agenda that Americans can get behind.

William Brangham:

Kimberly Atkins Stohr, David Brooks, so nice to see you both. Thank you very much.

David Brooks:

Thank you.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr:

Thank you.