Title: Assessing the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here we are at the Trump administration's Day 100. You've probably been hearing about the many polls. The Fox News poll included showing Trump at historically low approval numbers for a president at 100 days and with majority disapproval on every issue except sealing the border, but those polls also show most people who voted for Trump still approve of almost everything he's doing. CNN analyzed their poll that came out yesterday as saying, "Yes, Trump's approval on the economy tanked by many points, but voters in that poll still said they trusted Republicans more than Democrats when it comes to economic management," and it's only 100 days, right?

Other presidents, Bill Clinton, for example, have bounced back from a very rocky public opinion start, so we'll see. On this show, we've been covering many first hundred days issues, but emphasizing two areas, a climate and health section of the show on Tuesdays, which we will get to, and a focus on democracy versus authoritarianism basically every day. We will do one of each here on Day 100, democracy versus authoritarianism first. David Remnick is with us, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on the station.

In a First Hundred Days article he wrote for The New Yorker, David's premise is that Trump's first term attempt, at what David calls authoritarian primacy, was amateur hour, a fitful rehearsal, he wrote. It may surprise you that the title of the article about this term is Hundred Days of Ineptitude. Certainly many Americans on the receiving end of the Trump and Elon Musk wrecking ball may beg to differ, but let's see what he has in mind. Hi, David. Welcome back to the weekday WNYC. It's always great of you to come on. Good morning.

David Remnick: I'm delighted to be here. I would say that, just to start right out of the box, ineptitude is one of the characteristics of the first hundred days, but at the same time, paradoxically, this is immensely more organized and prepared for than the first term, there's just no question, the first term I don't think Trump thought he was going to win and he threw together a completely discombobulated cabinet and board of advisors, as it were, that were at loggerheads for not just the first hundred days, but for years.

Here you've got the Project 2025 and Fox News All-Stars dominating, and all apostates have been banished. What I mean by ineptitude is the rollout of tariffs, the chaotic attempt to trim and instead butcher the federal government bureaucracy and so many other areas. It's some weird combination of a kind of demonic unanimity of purpose, but also constant screw-ups on the path toward an attempted Trumpian authoritarian style government.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I guess it depends on how you define ineptitude versus success, because in each case, and you were kind of--

David Remnick: Which is worse.

Brian Lehrer: In many instances, and you were kind of just referring to this, they're succeeding in moving fast and breaking things, as the expression goes, which may be the end in itself in many ways, since they think the old order needed to be smashed, then they'll try to figure out how to put a new order back together, even if, you know, courts have overturned a lot of the indiscriminate firings and all of that stuff.

David Remnick: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: In a certain respect, success and competency at the project of breaking things, which serves the goal of authoritarianism. No?

David Remnick: I think that's right. There's a piece that I'd really commend your listeners to read, and [unintelligible 00:04:22], but the one that, this week in The New Yorker, I'd really hope that listeners would read is Andrew Marantz's piece called "Is It Happening Here?" Andrew did a lot of reporting not only in Washington and in the United States but also in Hungary, which is at least a model for Trump and his colleagues. You remember that Orbán was somebody that was pro-democracy in his youth.

He was in the 1989 generation of people building a post-Soviet Hungary, but his politics radicalized in an authoritarian direction. Andrew writes that both in Hungary and the United States, it's not like 1917. It's not a revolution that's happening in which politics happens and the revolution happens overnight. If I could read just a short passage from--

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

David Remnick: I think it's very salient. He writes, "In a Hollywood disaster movie, when the big one arrives, the characters don't have to waste time debating whether it's happening. There is an abrupt, cataclysmic tremor, a deafening roar; the survivors, suddenly transformed, stagger through a charred, unrecognizable landscape. In the real world, though, the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet. The tremors can be so muffled and distant that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies. You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if, still go on feeling as if, the big one is not yet here."

In other words, what can happen over the next not just 100 days but four years is that certain institutions and principles can be hollowed out day after day and our lives go on. It may not affect us individuals directly. That's for somebody down the street, maybe, but suddenly we wake up after four years and we are transformed. Authoritarianism, Andrew is arguing, can come in on cat's feet rather than as an earthquake that happens in the course of five minutes.

Brian Lehrer: Or to take another animal analogy, it's the frog boiling slowly in the pot of water and not realizing it. Right?

David Remnick: That's fair enough.

Brian Lehrer: To that point and to Andrew's point, I want to play a clip from The Radio Hour of you with Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut. You'll recognize this immediately because his take on the state of democracy was so dire.

Senator Chris Murphy: Is this a normal moment where you can just keep on punching Donald Trump and pushing down his approval ratings and eventually win the 2026 election and set up a potential win in 2028? Or is there a pretty good chance that we're not going to have a free election in 2026?

David Remnick: You believe that's a possibility?

Senator Chris Murphy: 100%. Oh, every single day I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.

Brian Lehrer: David, I'll bet you thought about that Chris Murphy interview a lot since you did it.

David Remnick: I do. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: What are you thinking hearing that again?

David Remnick: Well, sometimes people like me get accused of being alarmist, and I'm sure Chris Murphy has gotten that criticism from that interview and many other public statements he has made. I would say that alarmism in defense of democracy, of a liberal democratic constitutional society, when the evidence is all around us that it's in jeopardy, is a necessity. I've made many mistakes of judgment in life and in politics over time. There's no question-- We all have, but I've been saying since 2015 that Donald Trump's ascendancy represents an emergency. Decent-minded people thought that was alarmist, foolish, "He's only some guy with funny hair and he doesn't really mean what he's saying."

Then the next thing you know, he's President of the United States and he's enacting a Muslim ban and so much else. I think he represents, and the MAGA movement represents a challenge to democratic values and constitutionalism, just as the enemies of Reconstruction did in the 19th century or authoritarian movements did in the '30s and in other areas. It's not exactly the same. The parameters are not the same, the details are not the same. It's a different time in history. Trump sugarcoats his efforts with a kind of insult comedian patina, which people enjoy when they're not being disgusted by it, but it represents an emergency.

Brian Lehrer: One way Trump is consolidating power is by getting the Republican Congress to lay down and not assert its constitutional prerogatives, but I wonder if the public continues to disapprove of Trump's policies to the degree that we're seeing in the hundred-day polls and that disapproval continues to grow, whether the pushback will come from the people.

To that point, I want to play a clip of Senator Cory Booker on this show, I know you've had him too, that was a great interview, addressing this scenario, that scenario as he hopes to help move it forward. He's talking here about the praise he has gotten from supporters since his 25-hour record-breaking Senate speech of alarm and dissent.

Senator Cory Booker: What I was trying to do and what I feel as I walk around New Jersey and see the kind of reaction people had last weekend is to try to let people know that in a democracy, the power of the people is always greater than the people in power, but the most common way people give up their power is not realizing they have it in the first place. This is a time to understand that each of us, as powerful as Donald Trump is, he's the most powerful man in the world; as rich as Elon Musk is, he's the richest man in the world, but we still live in a democracy. This is still the United States of America, and we can still control its destiny if we do something, as John Lewis says, if we're willing to get into good trouble.

Brian Lehrer: Cory Booker there, channeling John Lewis on this show. David, in your article, you quote Frederick Douglass in that context. Why Frederick Douglass?

David Remnick: I think Frederick Douglass is one of the great symbols of American possibility, here was somebody born into slavery, escaped, became free, became one of the great spokesman not only for abolitionism but for American possibility, and not only for Black men and women but also for Chinese immigrants, for women, for all kinds of groups that did not have their civil and human rights at that time. He made it very plain in his political circumstances in the 19th century that tyrants would continue to push the boundaries of their power until they felt the resistance, the hard resistance of the people.

In this case, the people means people on the street, people in civic groups, people at the ballot box, Republican politicians potentially, although we've yet to see it, and Democratic Party politicians where we've only seen it in fairly isolated incidents-- instances, I'd have to say. If in fact there is a strong opposition growing to Trump, it's growing awfully slowly and it's not making the noise that it could. I'm just reporting here, not doing anything more than that.

Cory Booker has tried to make some noise, so has Chris Murphy, so has AOC, Bernie Sanders, and a number of others. Lisa Murkowski, who's a Republican senator, of course, from Alaska, said in Anchorage recently that there's a lot of fear of any kind of opposition. You have to sympathize with somebody like that who's a center-right politician from a conservative state who's getting social media threats all the time on her life. On the other hand, I don't know that that represents the epitome of courage to say that we're scared and therefore we continue to vote with Donald Trump.

This is, as I say, an emergency, and it demands courage from all kinds of people. It would not have taken that much courage for a law firm to say, "You know what? We get 7 million bucks a year for the partners. This year we're going to take a haircut of a few million dollars so that we can stand up for the principles of our independence." Paul Weiss chose not to do that. Harvard University, buttressed by its enormous endowment, chose to stand up tall. You know, you can make fun of it because Harvard is easy to make fun of and there's a lot of flaws there, but they did the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing, and sooner or later, that's going to be demanded of so many of us.

Brian Lehrer: Yet I wonder if the ineptitude, as you call it, that you write about in your New Yorker article, starts to turn members of the public in meaningful ways. There's, of course, the tariffs, and you referred to that in your article as the worst own goal in history, borrowing a phrase about ineptitude from soccer. An own goal, when you score against your own team, the own goal of destabilizing the global economy in a flash is the way you put it. Although, David, an own goal is an accident in soccer. Trump is doing this on purpose, isn't he?

David Remnick: That's true. You'd be a very good editor at The New Yorker.

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Brian Lehrer: I have a job. [laughs]

David Remnick: Yes, but you can come later in the afternoon. You can even Zoom in. I think the thing is that a lot of the damage has been done. I mean, this was such a bizarre, careless, performative act that in one afternoon not only did he tank the stock market, he unnerved every economic entity on the globe. I mean, such is the power of the most powerful and biggest economy in the history of humanity. By doing this-- He can't put the genie back in the bottle. Yes, they've softened some of the-- they've made certain exceptions.

They've cranked back some of the tariffs, but even if they cranked all of it back, economic behavior has been such--, and "I run a business, I go to business meetings." It's not just all pouring over manuscripts. Spending has slowed down. The places that make predictions about a recession-- The prediction before the tariff announcement, the possibility was 20% of a coming recession.

Now places are predicting anywhere from 60% to 90% possibility of a recession. I think for a lot of voters who may have been, "Yes, let's seal the southern border. We're tired of that." "Okay, we don't like wokeness" or whatever, various cultural issues that certain people have issues--, but nobody bargained for, even on the right, the stupidity of kicking the ball deliberately into your own goal and setting off a national and a global recession. That will affect people's livelihoods, their rent, inflation, prices, everything that supposedly Donald Trump was devoted to helping [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Even the authoritarian project in its most explicit forms may be starting to prompt backlash. That some of the defiance, or borderline defiance of the courts have not played well in these hundred days poll. I think we had an indication on the show last week of how it may already be playing out in some swing districts. We had Republican Congressman Mike Lawler from the Hudson Valley in what was, in part, a "100 days" interview, and he was careful not to support Trump defying the Supreme Court. Listen to this clip.

Congressman Mike Lawler: In the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, for instance, you have a court ruling 9-0 from the Supreme Court. I think the administration and the president should abide by that, which would allow them to facilitate his return and go through the deportation process.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Lawler is in a swing district. Not every district is a swing district, but it's the swing district that would turn control of Congress next year, so I don't know if Mike Lawler is a bellwether for anything, and he supported Trump on some other things that you might call authoritarian, but even being as explicit as he was in that clip, maybe it's an indication of something.

David Remnick: I think it's not only a matter of fear of authoritarianism. It's not wanting to be associated with the morally repugnant. We've now had instances in the last couple of days where we know that a mother who was undocumented had children, including one 4 years old with stage IV cancer, and they were deported. That kid was an American citizen. Now, [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Right. Trump says the mother was deported and she had the choice of taking the child or leaving the child.

David Remnick: Well, I don't [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: They're arguing the child was not deported. I'm just saying.

David Remnick: That's correct, but I don't think the American people in their majority can stomach the notion of deporting, forcing, essentially forcing a [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Putting a mother in that position.

David Remnick: Correct, and much less the child. I don't think the American people in their majority find the spectacle of deporting people in the middle of the night without any due process, without any consideration, and lumping them all as gang members, when 90% of them were not, to a foreign gulag in Salvador. I don't know that the American people find this something they want to be associated with in the end, events and the polls are starting to show that they don't.

Yes, yes, that there is an immigration problem. It has been for years, and blame can be cast in a number of directions, by the way, not least the Republican Party preceding Trump. You can argue as you will with the Biden administration as well, but this kind of moral action, which the press has covered, I think well and admirably, and there'll be more and more instances as this goes on, is not something that most people, including Trump voters, want to be associated with. It's sickening.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, weekends here on WNYC. In case, listeners, you're not in the habit yet of listening to the station on the weekends, but you are in the habit of listening to this show in the 10 o'clock hour, tune in on Saturday mornings at this same 10 o'clock hour. It's the perfect extension of what we do here, except a little better. The New Yorker Radio Hour, Saturdays, and then later on Sundays here on the station, hosted by David. David, thank you very much.

David Remnick: It's wonderful to be with you and just a wonder to be your colleague at WNYC. Thanks so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks again.

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