David Frum

For now, we have the problem that the people who are carrying out these acts against the wishes of the great majority of Americans, with the support of a minority of Americans, they remain in power.

Now, I think we all know, we all know MAGA people and we all know that most people who supported for Donald Trump, many of the people who supported Donald Trump did not begin as bad people, but they are justifying bad things and things that are getting worse and worse and worse at an accelerating rate.

It is sobering to consider if this is what has happened in year one of the Trump administration.

As Trump and his people come closer to whatever kind of reckoning is available in November of 2026, what will the year ahead look like?

What does 2026 hold?

It looks like it will hold more abuses, more offenses, more attacks, more contempt for basic American values and law.

And we all have to find our way to come up with some kind of effective collective response.

We appear to be heading to a government shutdown as Democrats in the Senate say they will not vote to fund ICE if it continues the kind of operations it's been doing.

This may be quite a long government shutdown because there's going to be a lot at stake for everybody involved.

We are facing a kind of crisis in American democracy that is worse than anything that even people who are really worried about it, as I was, predicted a year ago, never mind at the very beginning of the Trump experiment in 2016, 2017, 2015, when Trump declared for office.

We've been kind of walking a path to moral degradation, and we're trying to stay away from the finale of moral ruin.

I don't know what's ahead.

I'm terribly worried.

I hope we find a way out together, that there can become some kind of collective American agreement on what it means to hold the rights that American citizens should hold, on what it means that American citizens are being gunned down

in the streets of their cities, on the sidewalk, in their cars, that American citizens, naturalized citizens, but American as anybody else, being hauled from their houses without a warrant, and that important people in American government insist that no warrant is due because the provisions of 1776, which listed abuses of the search power as one of the causes of separation of the United States from Great Britain, that those principles no longer apply, at least they don't apply to Americans of certain kinds of last names and certain kind of accents.

and uh certain kinds of backgrounds and personal stories and certain kind of skin colors that other americans have got them you know the truck that mega people carry guns at their events and of course don't expect to be executed for but other americans don't have those rights mega people expect to be served with warrants in their homes if someone needs to search their homes for something but other people don't have those rights they don't extend to others the rights they claim for themselves how we find a way from this impasse

Well, David and I will talk about it, and I hope you will stick around to watch a more normal-looking version of this program.

And now, my dialogue with David Brooks.

But first, a quick break.

David Brooks is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.