Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections.
I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling.
I go to games always.
Doing the mini, doing the wordle.
I loved how much content it exposed me to. Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for.
This app is essential.
The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app.
As long as it may have felt, we are one year into Donald Trump's second term as president. To follow the Trump administration in the news is to be exposed to the full muzzle velocity of this presidency, the overwhelming procession of news stories, wild statements, like spectacular, outrageous, sometimes terrifying events. It feels like so much more is happening.
than the human mind, than the entire media, than the country can absorb. But how much has actually changed? How much has Trump actually gotten done? How many of these stories that were so spectacular when they began have followed through into durable difference in how the government works or what it does or how we live?
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Chapter 2: What has Trump accomplished in his second term?
Well, this is one of the striking things is we spent the first six months of the year watching Doge take all kinds of actions intended to reduce federal spending and restructure the government. But at the end of the day, because there was no legislative action to change spending, there was no real change in spending.
The government was on a continuing resolution on two of them for the entire year so that we're still at Biden spending levels. And overall, because the Big Beautiful Bill spent a little more on immigration enforcement and on defense, and because appropriations were even for the year, the federal government actually spent 4% more in 2025 than in 2024.
And so a lot of times when you see claims and descriptions and assertions of what's about to happen, it's worth kind of making a note for yourself and saying, I should come back to this in six weeks and ask, did this actually happen? And a lot of the things that everybody got very worked up over this year – not all of them, to be clear.
There's a lot going on, and it's especially true in immigration and trade and a few other areas. But on the whole, it's important to see that the way the administration is acting, which is more narrowcast and focused on specific news cycles and specific instances –
means they have not gotten nearly as much accomplished as they say, and they've not gotten as much accomplished as most presidents do in the first year of a new presidency.
One example of this is the National Institutes of Health, which people might have heard about them gutting spending for early in 2025. What happened there?
The story of NIH spending is very interesting because in most areas of government, if you track it month by month – and this is the way to track federal spending. There are a lot of ways to chop up the numbers, but there's a monthly treasury statement that just reports how much money went out the door. And I think that's the number to look at. It's public. It's on the internet.
It's very easy to read. In most departments, those numbers looked identical in 2025 to 2024. Appropriations were the same, and so spending out the door was the same. There was a long government shutdown, but at the end of it, all the money went out, and so in the end, it looks the same. NIH looks very different.
In the first six months of the year, NIH spending was far behind its 2024 levels, and there seemed to have been a decision made to withhold spending, to redirect spending, and I would argue even to force a confrontation over impoundment, the president just ignoring Congress and not spending appropriated money on NIH money.
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Chapter 3: How does Yuval Levin assess Trump's presidency?
to bring them more into line with what the Trump administration wanted them to be. What has that achieved? How do you see its status now? I think people are seeing less from it. What did it all amount to?
I think that's really an instance where policy by dealmaking shows some of its limits. The administration has had a lot of influence on a small number of universities that it chose as targets and which it forced into some governance changes, some of which will be good for those universities and some not, but which the administration wanted. It forced them into them by individual deals.
the administration tried to broaden that out into something more like policy. It put out a compact for higher education, which it wanted all universities to sign on to. And the response that compact received from a number of elite universities right away was basically, well, no, let's do one-on-one deals.
There's a fascinating letter to the administration from Brown University's administration, which basically said, no, the way to do this is just let's have an arrangement between you and us that helps us figure out what you want and what we can do out of that. The compact basically fell apart. It did not succeed. No university signed on.
And the administration returned to a process of deal-making. And what you find there is that the universities prefer these individual deals to changes in the Higher Education Act or changes in the regulatory structure of the government's relationship with them because they see the deals as more manageable. They have some more negotiating leverage.
I think that some of what the administration is trying to do would be much better achieved by legislation. And I actually think it's possible to imagine a legislative change to the Higher Education Act that would get some Democratic votes. It wouldn't do everything the administration wants, but it would do some important things. The White House has shown no interest in that.
And the universities, in acting defensively in this moment, seem to prefer those deals too, which I think tells us a lot.
There's an interesting dynamic where retail deal-making fits the bandwidth of the news, and legislation doesn't. Exactly. People do not know a tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, the big, beautiful bill, for that matter, that in legislation, often much more change is happening than than people realize, but you cannot fit it into the size of a news story.
You cannot even fit it into the size of a dozen. And people's attention spans, and particularly as we've gone down to social media, things are just flying by really quickly. Whereas these deals, they kind of deal with NVIDIA. They cut a deal with Japan. They actually fit, not maybe everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable, right?
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Chapter 4: What stories highlight Trump's administration's actions?
But it was also a message to everyone else in the civil service, as firings were, as everything was, to... either shut up or get on board, right? You can be cowed, you can be on the team, but otherwise they're going to come for you. And that might've changed things at a cultural level, which would matter. Do you think that's happened?
Absolutely. This is what I mean when I say that they've used the power of the presidency as leverage to drive behavioral change, attitude change. They've used the weight of the government as a kind of cudgel to push people around. And that's no small thing. And I think it does create cultural changes.
I do think that if you take a longer term view, and I don't mean a generational view, but a kind of medium term, five, 10 year view, this way of doing things does achieve less than it seems to in the news cycle. But absolutely, they're changing the attitude of people who work for the government.
They're changing the attitude of people who rely on the government for funding or just for a stable relationship that makes business possible. I would say that the effect that's having, is to undermine people's sense of the American federal government as a predictable, reliable player in various arenas at home and abroad.
And so it's not the specifics of what the administration is driving people to do. I don't think it's actually going to be possible to go back to to the pre-Trump attitude toward the federal government.
A university president who was forced by the administration's actions in the first half of the year to reckon with just how dependent that university is on federal funding and just how dependent that funding is on the president's personal priorities is never going to look at his budget the same way again.
Even if the next president is very friendly to whatever that university president wants to do or be, it will always be in the back of his mind that this can change, that this could go away, and I shouldn't make long-term plans that assume I think that's true about a lot of other countries thinking about the United States, too, after the past year.
The assumption that the United States would just play a kind of stabilizing role in various environments is no longer tenable. And, yeah, I think a lot of people who have depended on the government without thinking about it too much now have to think about it more. Now, I'd say there's some good in this.
Some of that dependence was really, as the president likes to say, abusing the government or using it. Universities should depend on the federal government less than they do. But the downside of this, the cost of it is much higher than the upside because the sheer stability made possible by a predictable, reliable federal government was a massive invisible subsidy of American life.
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Chapter 5: How has Trump's approach affected federal law enforcement?
Is that the way you understand what is happening? So you take a normal White House, right? The George W. Bush White House, the Barack Obama White House. I would even say this is how the Joe Biden White House worked, despite, I think, people later being less sure of that.
And there is a policy process that ladders up and there are briefs delivered and then it goes all the way up and you have meetings with the chief of staff and the domestic policy director and the president and the president is making decisions. And one thing that constrains how much happens in a day is that the policy process for significant decisions can only absorb so much.
Is that what you understand to be happening in the Trump White House, a complex policy process laddering up to the president? Is it something different? How do you see the actual management structure of all this activity?
I think this has been very different, but the effect has not quite been what you suggest there. I think in some ways it's actually made it narrower, not broader. But if you think about what the White House generally does in modern presidencies, the work has been to organize and facilitate presidential decision making. That's what most people in the White House do.
Their job is to organize information and structure policy questions so that when it's necessary, they can reach the president as a discrete question for the president to decide. Many policy questions get resolved before that, and there isn't really a need for a presidential decision. That's part of the job, too.
When I started working at the Bush White House at the beginning of Bush's second term, the The chief of staff basically told me, you work on domestic policy. We're in the middle of two wars that need to take the president's attention. And if you're in the Oval Office driving a decision, it probably means something has gone wrong. That was the attitude in the second term.
That's part of how the White House works. In this White House, the basic logic of the operation is that it moves decisions down into the bureaucracy. The president decides or sets priorities or has already said something for years or on Twitter last night. And what happens is we do it.
There are not a lot of people around the president who are there to complicate decisions, which is what a lot of people in the White House normally do, or to bring in other sources of information. Things really are driven a lot by a fairly narrow range of priorities that are known to be the president's priorities and goals.
And there's a very centralized policymaking structure, centralized in Stephen Miller, who's the deputy chief of staff for policy, That job, deputy chief for policy, was created first in the Clinton administration. It's existed ever since. But it works very differently this time. Stephen Miller, I would say, is the most powerful policy staffer in the history of the modern White House.
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Chapter 6: How does Trump's governing style differ from traditional presidents?
But they do know which code words and intuitions and ideas excite him. And he moves towards his own excitement. There's something very intentional. He's like his own Twitter algorithm. And, you know, he brings conversations back to his victories or to, you know, renovating, you know, the East Wing of the White House.
There was reporting on how once Rubio figured out he could describe Maduro as a drug lord, like a crime kingpin, that seemed to trigger for Donald Trump. And so you look at the way people in the White House and in the administration tweet, and sometimes it feels to me like a lot of people vying for the king's attention as much as anything else.
And yes, they're doing it based off of a theory of what he wants. But he doesn't pay attention to dull, drab things. You got to do something big to get his notice.
Well, I agree with that, but I think it feeds into a fundamental difference about the understanding of the president's role, where a lot of recent White Houses have thought of the president's role as making difficult decisions. The Trump White House sees it as advancing tough change. And those are different ways of thinking. So it's true. Donald Trump is all over the place.
He says a lot of things. But all those things are about a fairly narrow range of subjects. And it's reasonably clear to the people around him the direction that might appeal to him or that he might want to take. And so I think there's more contending with what's on Trump's mind and less contending with what's happening in the world than there ought to be in the White House.
A simple example, normally senior appointed officials, say cabinet members, play a kind of dual role where they represent the president's views to the bureaucracy that they run in their department, but they also represent that bureaucracy to the president. They bring the expertise that's only available at the FDA or at the State Department into the decision-making process at the White House.
And so the Secretary of State just kind of ends up being a champion for diplomacy and the Secretary of Defense for military action because they're kind of speaking for different parts of the government. That's not happening now at all. As far as I can see, there are not debates happening in front of Donald Trump in the Oval Office or in front of Stephen Miller.
The process doesn't land on an internal debate within the administration about policy direction. Decisions aren't structured that way. The process here, the structure of decision making is very different from what I can see.
I did a conversation with my colleague at Times Opinion, Masha Gessen, and their frame of reference is Russia under Vladimir Putin and the turn to autocracy there. And something they said to me is that there are democratic metrics for what is happening in a country and a system, and there are autocratic metrics for what is happening in a country and a system.
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Chapter 7: What impact have tariffs and immigration policies had under Trump?
were filed. About 230 of them are still in process. But of the ones that have been decided, the administration has lost 57%. That's a very, very poor record for the federal government in federal court. And a very small number of those losses were then appealed to the Supreme Court. The administration's had an interesting strategy here of appealing only cases that the
They've appealed only about 25 cases, having lost something like 200 cases. And so the courts have restrained the administration quite a bit. And what we haven't seen in either case is the kind of confrontations that I certainly was worried about last year, a year ago. We haven't seen a big fight over impoundment. I thought that would happen, and it hasn't.
And we haven't seen the administration openly defying the Supreme Court. Now, that could happen. The tariff case is an example of an issue that the president really cares about, for example. But it hasn't. And that's worth seeing, too.
What do you make of the criminal probe that got opened into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and his response?
Yeah, I think it's bizarre. It's an example of the first and most significant problem we've confronted this year, which is the deformation of federal law enforcement in the service of the president's own grudges and whims. I don't know yet, and I think we will know, where this decision came from. The president said that he didn't know anything about it. That's possible.
But I think somebody at DOJ certainly thought that it would please him if there was a case started against the Fed chairman. And I think it did please him.
Does the head of the mafia always know who's going to get whacked?
Right. There's a certain amount of plausible deniability here. But what we're seeing here is the deformation of federal law enforcement. I thought it was both right and impressive that Chairman Powell came out and said this is just political. They're trying to get us to change monetary policy and that's not going to happen. I think it's a case that won't go that far.
I think Powell will easily win that case. But look, it's a form of intimidation. There's no way around it. And they've used federal law enforcement that way to provide favors on the one hand and to intimidate opponents on the other hand all year to a degree that we have not seen before.
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