The State of the Union (Neon Liberalism #65, with Jamelle Bouie)

Samantha and returning guest Jamelle Bouie take a step back and assess the overall arc of the Trump administration. Bouie argues that Trump's theory of the case when he came into office was fundamentally based on speed: move fast, break things, and present American society with strongman rule as a fait accompli.

But instead of producing compliance and popularity, Trump's authoritarian policies have produced increasing backlash from numerous sectors of society. Now we see a presidency adrift, out of ideas and trapped in its own echo chamber. What comes next?

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Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:00]**
Welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I am Samantha Hancox-Li. We're recording this on the morning of February 25, 2026, the morning after Donald Trump's State of the Union speech. And the State of the Union is traditionally a moment for the President to look back over the past year and tout his accomplishments and to look ahead over the next year and maybe make some suggestions about where it's going. And I thought this was maybe a good occasion to do that ourselves, to take a step back from the day-to-day outrages and madnesses of the second Trump administration and take that longer view to ask: how is it going? What was Trump's theory of the case when he came into office? What has he tried to do, and how is it working for him?

And so to answer some of those questions, I'm very excited to have on Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist, returning guest and a friend of Liberal Currents. So yeah, Jamelle, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. First question, I guess, is: when Trump came into office back in January 2025, what do you think his theory of the case was?

**Jamelle Bouie [00:01:24]**
Thank you so much for having me.

I think so. The way I have understood this is that I think that Trump — and really the people around Trump, and I'm always wary of being like, what does Trump think? I'm not sure that Trump thinks in these terms. I think he mainly just wants to be able to act with impunity and steal money, and he'll follow any path that allows him to do those things. But the Trump administration, the White House, I think its theory of the case was first that the 2024 election was something like an enabling act, that they understood the result as being full endorsement of Donald Trump as almost like this avatar of the American people. And thus they saw their administration as license to fundamentally remake American society around Donald Trump. And this is something Liberal Currents has written a lot about, just sort of Trump as personalist authoritarian, and I think they saw the election as license for that.

And I believe that their theory of the case, how they were going to accomplish this, was basically through speed — to use the presumption of good faith that typically goes to new presidents, especially presidents who happen to win the popular vote, which Trump did, to use that to kind of beat the rest of society into submission, to force major institutions to submit to personalist rule, to essentially take advantage of Congress's — or the Republican Congress's — total subservience, to cut Congress out of meaningful policymaking, even questions of revenue raising and revenue spending. And to do this as quickly as possible. To move fast. To move fast to assemble a paramilitary to both do deportations but also to intimidate political opponents. This was the experiment in using the National Guard to occupy Democratic-run cities, right?

So the key here is just speed. And I've made this analogy in various places before, but it's of course the analogy I would make, as this is the stuff I'm obsessed with — the theory of the case is similar to the Confederacy's theory of victory, which isn't that they had to defeat or destroy the Union Army, but that they had to move quickly enough, strike fast enough and hard enough to basically force the Union public into submission, to make the Union public think it isn't worth it. I think that's basically what they intended to do.

Now, in both cases, the speed is kind of critical. In the Civil War, the speed is critical because by a certain point, if the Union public didn't submit, then the United States just had more natural advantages in terms of population and industry and the like. But also the Confederacy had this huge vulnerability, which is that any sufficiently long enough conflict was going to endanger slavery, and if slaves start escaping to Union lines, that is lost manpower, and that might potentially mean soldiers for your opponent, right? You're losing both critical home front resources and potentially reinforcing your enemies. So it's not that Union victory was inevitable, but by a certain point, Confederate victory became so much more difficult.

And a similar thing, I think, is true of the administration — that it needed to do this quickly, and it needed to hope that civil society would not start reacting. Because ultimately, the 2024 election wasn't an enabling act, and most Americans did not expect to be electing a dictator, or someone who viewed themselves basically as sovereign over the nation. And so given enough time, the public would itself, or at least elements of the public, begin to mobilize, even if political opposition wasn't particularly strong. And also those elements of the public would likely include parts of the Trump coalition, which wasn't and isn't all MAGA, right? There are elements of it that are very provisional — they voted for Trump for specific things, and if those things haven't happened, they're going to be dissatisfied.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:05:31]**
I think that's a largely accurate picture. Especially looking forward — the State of the Union is often a time to sell the public on a new agenda, or at least to preview a new idea, and there's nothing there, right? It's just, what's coming next? And it's just him playing the hits again, or they're not even hits at this point. So I think you're right that the administration is floundering a little bit.

I'm also struck, though, that there are some things they did succeed at, right? And you talked a little bit about moving fast, or in Silicon Valley language, moving fast and breaking things. And one of the big initiatives of the early Trump administration was DOGE, right — the Department of Government Efficiency under Elon Musk. What's your read on DOGE, and what it achieved or what it didn't, and how it fit into this strategy?

**Jamelle Bouie [00:06:06]**
I think that the year so far, year and some change, has borne out this idea that they tried to move quickly. For reasons related to their own capacities and ability to pull this off successfully — this strategy requires a high level of competence, and it is to everyone's great advantage that the administration is made up of flunkies and fail sons.

So they moved quickly, but they couldn't quite consolidate. The brain trust — administration guys like Stephen Miller — really appear to be fully high on their own supply and kind of cannot modulate or make strategic or tactical retreats or do anything to maybe save some political standing, to recover somewhat with their own base. And then Trump's own obsessions have been directly detrimental. The tariffs have been a fatal political mistake and have really eroded the president's standing with voters who otherwise might be with them. So I think at this point, the theory of the case — that we could do this quickly and consolidate — was wrong, and they have failed at that objective. And now I think it's really clear that the presidency is sort of adrift and not entirely sure of what it's going to be doing for the next three years.

So DOGE. DOGE is an interesting wrinkle here. If you think of the Trump administration as comprising basically three actors who represent three priorities: you have Stephen Miller, who is like, I want to ethnically cleanse the United States, and I'm going to turn the resources of the federal government towards that end. There is Russell Vought, who's like, I think that it is immoral that government does anything other than siphon money to the rich, so I'm going to do everything in my capacity to destroy the administrative state and the federal bureaucracy and basically make it totally subservient to Trump. And Vought has this sort of insane anti-constitutional vision of presidential power. And then Marco Rubio, who really appears to just want to get rid of Castro.

And I'd say Rubio and Hegseth, who sort of want to use American military power in very aggressive ways to satisfy, in Rubio's case, a set of ideological goals. I think he believes in the kind of domino theory for Latin America, where you knock out Maduro and then you can get Castro and you kind of wipe left-wing regimes out of Latin America. And then Hegseth, who — this is sort of vulgar psychologizing, but who really seems to actualize his manhood through the application of violence and so wants to use American military power for that reason.

Elon Musk, who basically buys himself a place in the White House — he doesn't quite fit this. I suppose DOGE is a bit coterminous with Vought's agenda. But the thing about DOGE is it was so haphazard and destructive that it was ultimately counterproductive for the administration. To gut large parts of the executive branch, fire tons of employees — in some areas, you could say, oh, well, this was just slashing government, as Republicans have always wanted to do. But if you're also trying to consolidate an authoritarian state, then there's a tension there.

So for example, there were hundreds, I would say thousands, of lawyers in the DOJ who were DOGEd. This is now a problem, right? Because the DOJ has to deal with legal challenges to the president's policies, especially immigration policies. So much of the president's efforts have incurred legal challenges, and they need lawyers to defend the administration in court. They need competent lawyers — lawyers who can maintain the presumption of regularity with district court judges, lawyers who can make good arguments, who can win cases. And DOGE has directly impeded the ability of the Department of Justice — this Department of Justice that's fully subservient to the president's political interests — has eroded its ability to defend those interests. DOGE has eroded the ability of various parts of the executive branch to carry out what the president wants to accomplish.

And so DOGE is interesting because it feels like, or it appears to be, this: Elon Musk spent $400 million to help Trump get elected, and Trump was like, congratulations, you can be kind of a de facto head of the cabinet. I was always struck by those early cabinet meetings where Elon Musk was just sort of, basically, lecturing the rest of the cabinet, almost occupying the position of the president.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:12:38]**
I mean, the photos are just so striking.

**Jamelle Bouie [00:12:40]**
Right? Yeah. So there was one photo in particular with Musk. He's in the Oval Office, and he's the focal point of the photo, and Trump is off to the side, and it's like — oh, it's his government right now.

But that was at odds with what the administration's sort of signal goal was. And it's interesting, right, that after about two months, there's this real backlash against DOGE, both in the public and the press, but also, I think, within the administration, as figures begin to realize that this guy is causing us a lot of headaches and is making it difficult to do what we want to accomplish.

So yeah, I think DOGE was successful for Elon Musk, insofar as he was able to kind of gut a bunch of the American science and technology establishment and clear competitors for his business interests. And so in a very narrow sense, DOGE was successful for Musk. But as a part of the Trump project, it actually feels like a false start. If you're like, Jamelle, you want to consolidate an authoritarian regime in the United States — I would get Elon Musk as far away from there as possible, right? That would be first on the agenda.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:13:47]**
Yeah, I mean, this is something that's come up both at Liberal Currents and on this podcast — this tension between the kind of administrative state that you need to get stuff done in society versus this destruction of elite competitors that personalist regimes are prone to. And I kind of want to ask you a little bit more about that aspect of capacity, and something specific you mentioned — which is that you need a lot of lawyers to get anything done. Which I think is interesting. There are times in history when you would not think, okay, well, I need thousands of lawyers, that's the most important thing I need to get anything done. But in the American system, you do, right?

And this was kind of — I mean, you talked a little bit about Vought. I don't know how to say that.

**Jamelle Bouie [00:14:51]**
It's Vought. I was saying "bought" for a long, long time, and then my editors were like, it's Vought. Yeah.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:14:58]**
Okay, well, my apologies to Mr. Vought for getting your name wrong. Anyways, he has this theory that it's really just the presidency and the courts, and Congress is like, okay, whatever. And I think there's something to that as a de facto description of how the system is operating — we have an increasingly imperial presidency, and we have a court system that's doing its own thing. And I think a lot of people at the start of the Trump administration were like, well, I guess law doesn't matter anymore, right? That's all out the window. Trump can do anything. What's your read on how that's gone? How has Trump's struggle with the courts worked?

**Jamelle Bouie [00:15:44]**
Yeah, it's interesting. The supposition that the legislature doesn't matter — I think it's true insofar as the legislature has chosen not to get involved, which is the story of the past year. It's not so much that Congress does not have this power, it's that Republicans in Congress don't give a shit, and so they're like, yeah, we'll let you do whatever you want. You could imagine a Congress that suddenly gives a shit, and then all of a sudden all this does come to a halt, right? If Congress decides to act, if it doesn't come to a halt, then at least it forces the issue and forces constitutional conflict into the open in a way that would still be useful.

But anyway — they don't really need the law. They can kind of do what they want to do through just pure executive decree. And again, it's interesting how much their theory of the election shapes their exercise of power. They really did seem to view Trump as the actual sovereign in the United States. He issued an executive order — it was promptly ignored, but he issued it — and it was essentially saying K-through-12 institutions in the United States can't have DEI anymore. And it's like, all right, but you don't have any say over that, right? And I don't mean that in the kind of facile, the Constitution doesn't let you do that. I mean that in the very literal sense — if Trump issues an executive order saying to Charlottesville specifically, you can't have DEI in your schools anymore, the superintendent can be like, okay, and go about his day, because there's nothing the president can do. There's no lever or mechanism for authority the president can exercise in that case.

But in the mind space and the imagination of the administration, because he is king of America, the way this is supposed to work is that he tells a law firm, you have to stop your DEI or we'll go after you, and the law firm has to say, okay, Mr. President, because you're the boss. I mean, it makes sense for Trump, given that his main experience is as the owner of a closely held enterprise where that's how that works, right?

And it's interesting — the capitalists most receptive to Trump are those in a similar kind of position. They're not the ones answerable to boards or to any kind of shareholder governance, but the ones who own the company outright, almost like a family business. This has been an observation that's been made a bunch, but I think it's actually a really important one for thinking about why some elements of the capitalist class are much more Trump-friendly than others.

They have this view of executive power that you can kind of govern by decree. But you can't, and you can't in large part because, although the executive branch is Trump's, the courts are still quite ideologically and politically diverse. And more importantly, at the level of the Supreme Court — where, and this is my cynical legal realism, but it's all just political and ideological preference going on up there — and at the level of the appeals courts, where it's partly factual determination, partly just ideological preference. No one's guessing how James Ho on the Fifth Circuit is ruling, because the guy's a maniac. So we kind of know.

But at the level of the district courts, for the most part, those are people whose job it is to look at the facts and come to a ruling based on existing law. And so if you are an administration that is pushing past the boundaries of the law and violating people's rights and claiming authority you don't have, district courts are actually going to be the ones who are most likely to be like, you can't do that.

And that has been an obstacle that they just didn't anticipate whatsoever. And it slowed them down a bunch. Obviously, they can move so quickly that all the district court rulings in the world can't stop certain things, but it has tied them up, it's tied up their resources, and it's forced appeals courts and the Supreme Court to basically intervene.

And that's to me the story of the courts in this administration: district courts are applying the law quite reasonably, and then Trump-friendly appeals courts and a Trump-friendly Supreme Court have to create these boutique exceptions to allow the administration to do what it wants to do, because what it wants to do kind of straightforwardly runs counter to what the law says.

But to get to your point, Samantha — the fact that the administration seemed to discount the importance of having a fully staffed legal team on their side, I think, has been a real problem for them. And it might have been unavoidable, because even the conservative lawyers at the DOJ are there — I mean, these are mission-driven people, and the mission is sort of upholding the laws of the United States. And I think one of the things the Trump brain trust maybe didn't anticipate — and this is, I think, based on their experience with elected Republicans who themselves are responsive to primary voters — but conservative and Republican-leaning people in the federal bureaucracy, they're still mission-driven, they're still job-driven. They still usually adhere to professional ethics. And doing things that are blatantly illegal or unconstitutional has led those people, if they haven't been DOGEd, to just leave. And that too has been real attrition in the administration.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:19:14]**
Yeah, there's this famous line — I can't remember if it's Stalin or Mussolini — and he says, the Pope, how many divisions has he got? To express the fact, okay, the Pope said whatever, but who cares? Because we're just counting armed men right now. And I think they kind of had that view of the courts. It's like, okay, the courts, whatever, how many divisions have they got? And the answer is, it turns out, a lot, right? The courts issue a ruling, and the administration tries to dodge it or finagle around it or find some little exception, but in large part, the courts issue an order and the orders are obeyed.

One of the cases that I found most striking was Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He's snatched up, he's deported, he's sent to this mega prison in El Salvador that nobody ever returns from, and the administration's position is, well, he's out of our hands, right? He's in a totally sovereign foreign country. There's literally nothing we can possibly do about it right now. And the courts are like, no, but seriously, you're going to go get him back. And they do. They actually went and they got him out of the prison and they brought him back to America. And they're still trying to do various legal proceedings against him — they're not going very well, because the level of competence in government lawyers appears to be going down.

And I mean, that's something that we see in a lot of these cases — some really extraordinary cases of lawyers showing up to argue whatever immigration case before some federal judge and having a breakdown, basically. Being like, Your Honor, I don't know what's going on, I showed up here yesterday, I'm supposed to argue this case or something. And the judge is like, yes, you're at a court, you just got sworn in, argue the case. And these lawyers are struggling to do it.

So I think you're right that they've really gotten held up at especially the lower courts level. But the courts in America are a very strongly hierarchical system, right? There's one court right at the top that nominally has authority over all the other ones. And maybe we have a slightly different view of how that's working for Trump, because it's mostly Republicans on the court. So what's your view on the administration's ability to work with or against or through the Supreme Court?

**Jamelle Bouie [00:24:14]**
So I think there's a view that I disagree with. The view that I disagree with is that when you look at how the administration has fared with the merits docket of the Supreme Court — which is basically where the court picks a case, there's oral arguments, and then the court disappears for a couple months to come to a decision — on the merits docket, you can make a case that the court has actually shown a bit of resistance to the administration.

So earlier this year, there's Illinois v. Trump, where the Court held that the administration's use of the National Guard was unlawful — that it has no legal authority to just sort of unilaterally commandeer the National Guard for basically crime-fighting, but really kind of political intimidation. There's the recent ruling — we're a little less than a week ago from when we're recording — the Court struck down as unlawful the president's tariffs, saying that the six-three majority, the six justices in the majority, three held the major questions doctrine says that this is too big of a policy issue for the president to do unilaterally, so it's unlawful. And the three liberals were like, we think the major questions doctrine is fake and made up, but the statute clearly doesn't allow the president to do this, so it's unlawful.

And those are two major rulings, right? Killing the National Guard stuff, knocking out the president's chief domestic policy priority. The equivalent would have been had the Sebelius case under Obama gone for the conservatives and they chucked out the Affordable Care Act entirely — that's kind of the equivalent level of damage to the president's domestic policy agenda.

So that's one view — on the merits docket, the court has pushed back on Trump. But then there is what's called, depending on your view, the shadow docket, the emergency docket, the interim docket, the equities docket — a lot of names for it. But this is all the stuff that comes to the court that they don't have time to deal with in the merits docket but actually have to issue a ruling on. Typically with the past year, the administration has been doing things, it's been sued, the district courts have rendered a judgment against the administration, and then the administration appeals that judgment directly to the Supreme Court and says, we need you to issue a stay of the injunction because we need to be able to do our jobs.

And I think I prefer "shadow docket" — not because it sounds sinister, which, good — but also because it kind of captures the lack of transparency here. Usually these rulings don't involve any explanation, don't involve any reasoning. It's just sort of the court says this.

On the shadow docket, the administration has done quite well. When it wants to rendition people to third countries without due process, even if eventually the court says you can't do that — true story — even when the court gets there, it'll still allow the administration to do what it wants to do while it handles the merits. When the administration revoked temporary protected status from a bunch of Venezuelan immigrants — district court judge blocked it, and the Supreme Court said, hey, you can let that through.

So on the shadow docket, the administration's had a lot of luck. And interestingly, the Supreme Court will issue these decisions in the shadow docket and then, in at least one case, chastise district courts for ruling against the administration in similar cases, which isn't the way that should work, right? There isn't a merits decision here. So essentially, the law hasn't actually changed, but the court is treating its shadow docket decisions as if they've changed the law. This has been the case with allowing the president to fire heads of independent agencies and rejecting the idea that Congress can mandate that those officers can only be removed for cause. The court is very skeptical of that and essentially is demanding the district courts treat its stays of injunctions as a change to the law.

I think that on the balance, looking at the shadow docket decisions gets you a clearer picture of what's happening here, and that's simply because those are places where there is less scrutiny, and so the court has a bit of a freer hand. And by allowing the administration to move forward with its actions, it is creating a situation where the balance of the equities, as a law nerd might say, favors the White House. Meaning, in other words, the court doesn't maintain a status quo — the court changes the status quo. The court shows no particular interest in how a change to the status quo affects the particular parties.

How this is supposed to work is: a court says, well, if we allow this to happen, the change to the status quo for one party might be so drastic that it cannot be recovered. And so we're going to maintain the injunction, because the damage is just too dramatic to allow the defendant to move forward. The court doesn't even give a shit. So they allow the administration to fire thousands of federal workers, to rendition people to third countries, to deport otherwise legal immigrants. And then when they finally get around to the merits case and are like, oh, turns out maybe you can't do that — it's kind of too late. Doesn't really matter. The effect's already been had.

And I think that is a much better way of looking at the administration's relationship to the Supreme Court. Maybe you could say that on whether or not the president has actually claimed all these new powers, the Supreme Court says, no, not so much. But can the administration effectively do the things it wants to do, regardless of whether or not the president has those powers? And the court says, basically, yes, it can. And for me, that's kind of the more important thing in the mix.

And before I finish — all of this has to happen against the backdrop of Trump v. United States. So in summer 2024, the court issues its ruling declaring that criminal immunity from prosecution exists for the president in the Constitution, as long as the president is performing his core duties. And even if you want to be highly legalistic and narrow, this isn't a ruling that gives total immunity to the president. In theory, there are things a president could do that would fall outside of his core duties and thus be subject to criminal prosecution after he leaves office. In practice, when the Supreme Court hands out a ruling saying the president has criminal immunity for core duties, Donald Trump is going to be like, oh, that means I'm above the law now.

And so I actually don't think — there's been this effort among more center and right-leaning legal analysts to try to present the Supreme Court as actually quite hostile. And I will say some liberal legal analysts as well sort of present the Supreme Court as hostile to Trump. But I think you can't — you have to start the story with Trump v. Anderson and Trump v. United States. Trump v. Anderson was the ruling that held that Section Three of the 14th Amendment doesn't apply if Congress doesn't affirmatively pass a law — so rewriting that section and allowing Trump on the ballot. And those two rulings are the backdrop for all of this.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:32:55]**
So I might actually have a slightly different view here, and to me, what I see the Supreme Court doing is kind of like the classic John Roberts move, which is hedging. Where he wants to deliver de facto victories to Trump — and you've noted that's gone through the shadow docket, that's gone through some big rulings — but he wants to hedge, right? He's not prostrate the way that Republicans in Congress are just prostrate in front of Trump. He wants to occasionally bloody the president's nose a little bit — that might be tariffs, that might be the Federal Reserve case, the National Guard case — that he kind of wants to maintain that institutional power and credibility on the chance that maybe some day someone who's not Donald Trump is president, right?

So I see this as a way of both giving him what he wants, trying not to pick some fights, picking some other fights. And I kind of want to spin this into a larger question about what institutions have made themselves prostrate before Trump, and which have defied him, and which have hedged a little bit. And this gets back to some of the stuff you talked about right at the top of the episode — that Trump's theory, his plan, was to make this kind of assault on civil society, to remake civil society, right? You talked about him issuing these orders to preschools or whatever to not do DEI, which is totally above the president's authority. But he did a lot of stuff, right? It's not just schools, it's not just DEI. There are a lot of other cases where he's tried to exert pressure on institutions, not just in the government but outside of the government, right? And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that campaign and how it's gone for him.

**Jamelle Bouie [00:35:00]**
I've been thinking about this in terms of — it's clearly been successful in some cases, right? There have been universities that have fully been like, yeah, we're cutting our DEI offices, and we are changing our admissions and all these things. There are hospital systems that have been like, yeah, we're ending gender-affirming care because the president doesn't like it anymore. There are law firms, or at least a couple law firms, that were like, yeah sure, we will bend to your demands and sign up. University of Virginia is down the street — University of Virginia signed on to some agreement about admissions and the like, basically like, there's too many Black people here. It's a 6% Black school, but that's too many in a 19% Black state, so we got to get back to merit and do something about that.

So you have these institutions that, I think you can fairly say, their leaders are doing things that they wanted to do anyway. They are using — and this is, I think, part of the administration's calculation at the start — that they did have a lot of sympathy towards them in the upper echelons of society. Sympathy towards anti-MeToo backlash and anti-2020 backlash. Sympathy for a retrenchment with regards to gender equality and gender expression. So I think part of their calculation was, we can push this, and we're obviously going to try to coerce, but we'll find some receptive voices. Some institutions will want to be coerced, if that makes sense.

I think that's been true in some cases, and it hasn't been true in other cases. Notably, Harvard has basically tried to hold out as much as possible. And Harvard was sort of the big prize that the administration wanted, in terms of universities. You have various corporations that have more or less ignored the White House when it comes to threats and pressure regarding hiring and the like.

So my sense is that it's kind of a wash, to an extent. Especially in the first six months, the White House scored real victories among some institutions in pressuring them, and those institutions just deciding to roll over. And as the president got less popular, as the actions being taken got more egregiously tyrannical, there's been much less of a willingness to bend. In part because there's backlash. And I actually think — and I don't think anyone's written about this, I think it'll probably require a business study even if nothing else — but the backlash to Target early on, I think, really had an impact, especially in the corporate world, on leaders determining to what extent they're going to play ball. Because Target immediately was like, yeah, we're going to kill all the DEI stuff. And they've kind of just entered terminal decline since then. It's a business that is really struggling to get customers, and I think it's very much a product of their early capitulation to the administration.

So yeah, I think it's a combination of a bunch of institutions and actors being like, yep, it's MAGA America, and we just have to bend to it. And then others who, in a Roberts-esque way, were like, oh, let's wait and see what happens.

And let me say — I will extend this to not just institutions but to the political media. I work in the media, and to me, it was really clear early on there was a kind of, there's been a vibe shift, MAGA America, and we have to accommodate ourselves to that. And there are plenty of voices who have backtracked since then but who were fully willing to kind of get on board early on, under this presumption that the 2024 election represented some sea change in American attitudes. Which it didn't.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:39:29]**
Yeah, I mean, I just remember how scary it was, right, those first couple months after he came into the presidency. And it looked like he was attacking on every front, and all of the elite law firms were caving, and there were these questions like, okay, you can sue the government, but who's going to represent you if everybody's afraid? And this fear of bandwagoning effects — that if you can get enough of the important institutions of civil society on your side, suddenly no one wants to be alone, right? No one wants to be alone when the government comes knocking, and that's going to create this snowballing effect for government power. And that mostly hasn't happened, or at least has not happened to the extent that I think we feared at the start. I think the Target example is a really good one. There was the Jimmy Kimmel example, which caused a huge dip in subscription numbers for Disney. And Disney was like, we don't like it when the line goes down.

**Jamelle Bouie [00:41:05]**
Everyone — the line goes down dramatically.

But I mean, the Jimmy Kimmel example I think is so interesting because it gets to the mentality of the administration too, which is they just seem to have this view that you can hit a button and everyone will submit. And then when that doesn't happen, they have no strategy for moving forward. So they were like, yeah, well, obviously we'll threaten Jimmy Kimmel and everyone will fall in line. And when they didn't — I mean, you could see it in Brendan Carr. He's like, I don't know what to do next. I just thought everyone's gonna follow the demand.

And the extent to which the administration really did buy its own propaganda about its standing with the public and just did not understand what they were elected to do — and I'll say, it's not that I think the American public — I'll put it this way: if the first thing Trump had done was sent a bunch of inflationary checks to Americans, they could have accomplished most of what they wanted to do. Every American gets big $2,000 Trump checks, which is what a lot of people were anticipating, and Trump gets free rein to do basically whatever he wants. And there'd be a backlash, but I think it'd be much more muted, because there'd be much more goodwill amongst the typical American. So it's not as if there wasn't a path to this. But I think they really bought their own propaganda and thought that, oh, there is a silent majority, 80% of Americans want this, and if we kill USAID and yell at law firms and universities, the left will cease to exist, and we will have established ourselves as the rulers of America.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:43:12]**
I think that's exactly right. And it gets to something that I've been wanting to ask about from the start, which is not just the theory of how are we going to break elite institutions or change the law or do all this stuff in government, but how do we bring the people on side? And you talked about this theory of the silent majority — the sense that they're high on their own supply. These are guys who are really weird crypto-Nazi, crypto-Austro-fascists or whatever. They all have their favorite weird thinker, and they're constantly trying to hide their power level in public or whatever. And they think, well, that's the average American. The average American just wants to see deportations as Americana. And they want to see military guys in the street shooting people. That's what the average American wants. And we're going to bring people on side through the politics of spectacle, right? Not necessarily through a careful, big administrative agency that is going to carefully bureaucratize all the changes we want in the world, but we're going to create spectacle, and that's going to bring people on side. We're going to deliver them the content that they want.

And I'm curious if you think that's an accurate read of how they were trying to proceed in terms of mass opinion, and if so, how it's worked for them.

**Jamelle Bouie [00:44:52]**
I think that's exactly right. Part of what I kind of struggle with here when just trying to describe any of this is it does sound very stupid. And what especially sounds stupid is that the relevant actors — the staffers in the various agencies, even some of the principals — they seem to think that the former Twitter, X, represents the public. That what they see on there is what Americans think. And so they're producing content geared towards basically bots or Nazis on the internet. And they think that's how they're reaching out to the public.

So when Stephen Miller does one of his Sephiroth rants on X, I think Stephen Miller genuinely thinks that he is expressing the view of a typical American as he sees it on that website. And whenever I say that out loud, it sounds idiotic. Because why would you think that? I can forgive a random person thinking that what they see on social media represents some sort of unmediated access to the public. But a person engaged in politics ought to know that what you see on any social media is a tightly controlled and unrepresentative sample of the larger public, and that to understand the larger public, you either have to rely on scientific surveys or you have to get out there and talk to people and be in environments unlike your own.

But they don't do that. They do the opposite of that. And I think it does inform their approach. The best example of this, and this was a very tragic event, was the reaction to the shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. And I'll say Renée Good, right? Because with that one, at least they had a quasi-plausible story to tell — oh, this woman was trying to attack an officer with the car. But on X, of course, they can be like, Renée Good, terrible lib white woman, she's the enemy, she was trying to attack our glorious ICE agents. But a normal human being in America looks at that situation and sees a regular-ass white woman like they might see anywhere else in their life, like they might know, like they might be. And they see a paramilitary-looking dude with guns and a mask, and they see her in a minivan or a hatchback SUV, and they think to themselves, what the fuck is happening here? And accordingly, in the polling, solid majorities were like, yeah, this shouldn't happen, she shouldn't have been shot.

For a typical, regular person who's not particularly political but just sees the images, their thought is something is wrong here. And the administration's inability to access that is just a huge vulnerability for them. Because what it means is that when they go to the State of the Union — the State of the Union is the perfect example — when they want to try to recover, they aim their messaging at basically a small slice of their own base, and they seem to have no capacity to speak to ordinary Americans.

There's been lots of talk over the years of how the political left in this country is too online, too influenced by social media. But I've always thought that this is just as true, if not more true, of the political right, which just seems to not be able to even access what a regular person thinks about all of this. And I find it very strange.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:49:00]**
I mean, I agree with what you said at the outset, which is that it can be difficult to talk about this stuff because it sounds so dumb. It sounds so crazy, right? If you try to tell somebody, yeah, the Secretary of Defense is killing people for content because of some weirdo, some anonymous weirdo who follows him on social media. But we've seen it happen, right? We just at Liberal Currents ran a piece by Samuel Nagahisa called "Killing for Content." And he just documents — when we were doing the Maduro operation, the President and the Secretary of Defense were monitoring Twitter as they did it, right? That was one of the things in their little makeshift Situation Room — watching the Twitter reaction to their own operation. And in the boat strikes leading up to this, Hegseth is constantly posting these images of boat strikes in the Caribbean and then the Pacific to Twitter and being like, we just killed another narco-terrorist. And one of these online right-wing weirdos will post something like, every time you kill one of these guys, it makes the libs unhappy, so you should do it more. And Hegseth replies to this guy from the official Secretary of Defense account and says, boom, we just killed another one, and he posts another video.

There's this level of feedback going on here between their own craziest base online and what they're doing in office, right? What we call audience capture, if this was just an influencer rather than a politician. And I think it's really interesting, because this isn't necessarily even just an American phenomenon, right? President Yoon in South Korea, who was recently sentenced to life in prison after attempting to do an auto-golpe and destroy democracy in South Korea — some of what looks like happened there is that he stopped trusting his own security services to have an accurate read, to report to him honestly what's going on in South Korea. And he's trusting these weirdos that he's following on Twitter in various private chats more — about how actually there are North Korean spies everywhere and there's total North Korean infiltration, and if we just declare martial law, we'll solve that problem, right? That he cooked his own brain on right-wing social media, basically.

So yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I think that is totally real and totally a problem, and it is really impeding their ability to accurately understand America in a way that's kind of shocking to watch.

**Jamelle Bouie [00:51:40]**
Yeah, I feel like at this point — I'm 38, and so this is my fourth presidency as a journalist, but my fifth as just a citizen observing politics. I was a little nerd as a teenager — big shock. So I feel like I've seen enough of the cycle of a presidency, and the same thing from reading historical presidencies in the past. I've witnessed enough of the cycle of a presidency — things kind of happen. Ambitious president comes in, first year, tries to do a lot. There's kind of a thermostatic reaction from the public. The opposition gets a footing. And typically in the second year, the beginning of the second year is a last-ditch effort to finish the business of the first year, and then it's just a bunch of trying to maneuver back to the center of American politics.

So Obama in 2010 — the beginning of 2010 is passing the Affordable Care Act, getting the last bit of agenda items on the board. Dodd-Frank, I think, is passed that summer, the last of the big stuff. They try to get the cap-and-trade bill through. It doesn't work. And then summer 2010 going into the election is Democrats trying to tout their accomplishments but also really trying to hammer home that they're in the center of American politics. Obviously backlash sets in, big loss in 2010. And then 2011 is lots of bipartisan stuff from the Obama administration, partly by necessity, partly because, yeah, you gotta reposition yourself. The public thinks we were moving too fast, we got to slow down.

Clinton, famously, had basically the exact same thing happen to him, except worse. Even George W. Bush — Bush was heading on that path. People forget this, but before 9/11, there was a lot of discontent with Bush, and he looked like he was heading on the path to 2002, finishing up the rest of the agenda items and then trying to reposition himself in the center, maybe do some bipartisan tax cut stuff. And then 9/11 happens, and that ends up being a big boost and they can really dominate. But the 2002 midterms were a bit touch-and-go heading up to it. It wasn't a guarantee that Republicans would succeed. And certainly the second term — things collapsed very quickly. By the end of 2005, that cake had been baked, right? It was done. And it was just a long decline from there.

So there's just this rhythm to presidencies. And what I'm struck by in Trump — and I think it's because of just the utterly poisoned information environment of the White House, and then Trump's own indifference to public opinion — he cares about it insofar as it reflects on his ego, but he does not give a shit when it comes to managing the administration. And the lack of political leadership from Trump — this, to me, is one of the big stories of this administration: the president does not exercise political leadership, which means that the White House is confused, and it's everyone doing everything, everyone doing what they want to do. Which means that it can't really course-correct, because there's no one to force a course correction.

And that's what's happening. There's no one to force a course correction, so it's just like, yeah, the past year didn't work, we don't know what else to do, so we're just gonna do more of it. And more of the past year is just gonna make people even more pissed off.

Even the Supreme Court gives the president basically an off-ramp for the tariffs. And he's like, I love them so much, I'm a tariff otaku, I'm going to keep doing tariffs. And it's like, all right, this is going to be bad for Republicans in Congress. This might mean the difference between a Republican-controlled Senate and a Democratic-controlled Senate. And he doesn't care. He doesn't know to care, either. And that's the other thing.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:56:10]**
No, I think that's right. He does seem, in some ways, kind of checked out, kind of just returning to his personal obsessions. We're coming up on the end of time here, and there are two big things that I really wanted to ask you about that I think are going to be especially relevant not just to what has happened but to what is going to come.

And that is ICE, mass deportations, the deportation apparatus that is still very much getting spun up, right? ICE is out there trying to buy up enormous prison camps. They have an enormous amount of funding that just came through the One Big Beautiful Bill. Stephen Miller is still in the White House trying to run stuff, so maybe that's still happening.

And we also see — foreign policy still seems quite unsettled, right? The Venezuela raid happened out of nowhere, or not quite out of nowhere, but felt like it. He's made these aggressive moves with regard to Greenland, with regard to Canada, with regard to Iran. And so it seems like foreign policy is a place where, traditionally, the president has a lot of discretion, where the system allows him a lot of discretion. And so I worry that something might happen there.

So we're running short on time, so I'll ask you to pick one of those two big buckets — what do you see the future holding in those areas?

**Jamelle Bouie [00:57:39]**
I think I can talk about them both pretty quickly.

On ICE and such — it's been remarkable to see the public turnaround against that agency. People don't like seeing videos of masked men executing Americans in the street. They don't like seeing pictures of five-year-old children being thrown into white vans. They don't like the idea — even people who are like, get all the illegals. When they say that, in their mind they're picturing — they're picturing a character Lou Diamond Phillips would have played in a 90s hood movie that took place in the barrio. I watch a lot of those kinds of — I watch a lot of trash from the 90s involving very accomplished Latino actors having to slum it. So that's what people have in their minds.

What they aren't imagining is the nice woman who runs a taqueria in their downtown. They're not imagining the contractors who built their driveway. They're not imagining those people. Or at least most Americans aren't. Obviously, there are chuds who imagine, yeah, we gotta get them all out. But I think the typical person isn't imagining that. So they see those people getting arrested and rounded up — people who are just law-abiding, maybe they don't have their papers, but their viewers are like, who gives a shit? And most Americans imagine that the immigration system is coherent and makes sense. They think, oh, you just don't have your papers, but you can just have a meeting, get that sorted out, no big deal. And they don't realize that it's not like that at all, and those people are really quite vulnerable.

So there's been this big public turn against these agencies. And the thing I am paying attention to is this effort, community to community, to try to block the acquisition and construction of warehouses. And it's happening in blue states and red states, right — in Tennessee and Mississippi — people for reasons both good and self-interested don't want those things around them.

This DHS shutdown may end up forcing these agencies, forcing ICE to rely on its expanded funding to do ordinary operations, which will degrade its ability to do more stuff. So I'm in this camp where they have all these resources and they're still spinning stuff up, but there's enough real friction — both in terms of localities, states and localities beginning to do what they can to impede the ability of ICE to act, and then congressional Democrats putting real obstacles in the way and just slowing things down. And I think right now, the game is: how much can you slow it down before the next budget? Because ideally, what will happen is Democrats win control of Congress, and then just take back all that ICE funding. Just take it back.

And you can already see them messaging this. I think Ruben Gallego was saying on CNN yesterday that they took $75 billion from Medicaid to put it in ICE. And that's the message right there. So I'm actually somewhat optimistic that you can at least roll things back to the status quo ante. The question is going to be, can you just get rid of these agencies altogether and really reconfigure what it is we're even doing with immigration enforcement? That's the tougher political lift. But there's enough ambient anti-ICE sentiment in the society that I think you can go a long way in just halting it.

I'm much less optimistic with the foreign policy stuff, precisely because the president has so much leeway. And it seems to me that we're seeing a version of what happens in a lot of presidencies, which is your domestic agenda slows to a halt, and so you're like, I still want to feel like a man, and so I'm gonna do foreign policy stuff. Sometimes this is good and advantageous, as in Jimmy Carter's, I want to try to see if I can broker peace in the Middle East. Bill Clinton, I want to see if I can broker peace in the Middle East.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:01:57]**
Donald Trump wants to broker peace in the Middle East.

**Jamelle Bouie [01:02:00]**
But in Trump's case — he also seems to have become really enamored of the destructive force of the US government, and seems to want to fulfill himself through just inflicting violence on foreign others. Insofar as what's happening in the country is an internalization of things that we have inflicted on other countries, that is being reflected back on other countries. It's sort of this horrible ouroboros of violence.

And so the Iran strike last year, the bizarre Nigeria strikes over Christmas, the kidnapping of Maduro, and this military buildup targeted at Iran — all seems to me to be the president saying, well, I can't do what I want domestically, so I'm just gonna play with my toys internationally. And that, for him, means going to war. So I'm quite pessimistic about that.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:03:08]**
I agree with you that he seems to have become very enamored of the American military. I think the one thing I try to take solace — question mark — in is that he's terrified of Iraq. He is terrified of getting his hands stuck in the briar patch. And the stuff we've seen him do has the character of raids, where he's like, if I think I can do this crazy military operation with the crazy capacities of the American military complex, I'm going to do that. But he does not want to put boots on the ground and start an invasion that's going to tie him up. I think he just saw it happen to George W. and he's afraid of it on a personal level.

But the thing is, sometimes these raids don't come off quite so cleanly, so we might just wind up in that situation anyways.

**Jamelle Bouie [01:04:05]**
Yeah. The thing we have going for us is that he is a coward. So that's the big thing we got going for us.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:04:17]**
Could be worse notes to end on. So yeah, this has been a really, really interesting conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Jamelle Bouie [01:04:29]**
Thank you for having me, as always. Bye.