Is Trump Losing? A Debate
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What is the debate about Trump's political strategy?
A question we talk about a lot amongst ourselves on the show right now is what timeline are we in and how will we know? Are we watching the fundamental erosion of American democracy, of its liberties, of its safeguards? Are we on a path that is quickly becoming irreversible? Or are we in the timeline where the Trump administration is doing a lot and where it is trying to arrogate new powers to itself. But to the extent it has a fundamental plan to reformat the way the American political system works, that it's simply running into too much opposition, and it has too little power to succeed. Two pieces recently came out that I thought created an interesting tension and interesting ways to look at this.
In Vox, Zach Beecham wrote this piece called, "'Trump is Losing.'" Beecham is an expert on competitive authoritarianism, the slide away from democracy and into something very different. His book, The Reactionary Spirit, looks at the way this has been happening worldwide. And his recent piece says, eh, it doesn't look like it's happening. That Trump is losing. That if you think that what he is trying to do is consolidate a certain kind of power to fundamentally change the nature of how America works, that he is facing the kind of opposition that does not look surmountable. In The New Yorker, Andrew Morantz wrote a similar piece, but from a very different place, from Hungary. where it already did happen.
And I've read a thousand pieces on Hungary at this point. But this one gave me this felt sense of the way in which when this kind of authoritarian breakthrough succeeds, it may not feel in the moment like it is succeeding. Even after it has succeeded, it may not feel the way you think. You can still be there in the opposition saying the things you want to say in a nice fancy cafe, drinking your Negroni, but the nature of your system is gone. This conversation is not an attempt to answer the question. We are not going to know what we are living through till long after it's over. But it is an effort to check in on the moment. Because what moment people think they are living through, even in the time they are living through it, matters for the decisions they make and for what ultimately happens. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Zach Beecham, Andrew Morantz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Thanks.
So Zach, you wrote this piece arguing that, at least from a certain perspective, Trump is losing. That he is not on track to achieve at least one version of his goals. Lay your case for me.
Is Trump failing to consolidate power?
So the argument is that Trump's central goal of his administration, he wouldn't put it in these terms, but I think that it's sort of pretty fair to say that this is what their policies indicate towards, is changing the American regime. Turning what was a democratic government and has long been a democratic government into some species of non-democratic government in which power is wielded primarily through the executive with basically few checks. And potentially, even down the line, the fairness of elections is compromised. That part's speculative. But we can say that there's an attempt to reconfigure the constitutional order without having to amend the Constitution. And that means not just Trump saying that he is doing things to consolidate power. but actually doing it. And so I think that you can use a series of benchmarks. It's a brief checklist, right? First is that I looked into sort of quantitatively the court rulings against Trump.
And I found that not only did he lose vastly more than he won whenever there was an actual decision, but in most situations, the administration has complied with the something like four to one ratio of court orders where they've lost. Look at the cases of the students that have been targeted, right? Courts have been consistently ruling in their favor.
How is media and civil society responding to Trump's actions?
They've issued statements publicly saying, we will never back off from defending what is right. And it looks most likely, based on the current legal trajectory, that they're going to be released. In fact, courts have ordered a significant number of student visas that have been taken away, restored. And the State Department has complied with that. So that's one thing, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the debate about Trump's political strategy?
0:32–3:21
2
Is Trump failing to consolidate power?
3:21–4:25
3
How is media and civil society responding to Trump's actions?
4:25–13:51
4
What is competitive authoritarianism and how does it relate to Trump?
13:51–22:04
5
How does anti-Semitism manifest in Trump's movement?
22:04–29:42
6
What is the significance of fear and resistance under Trump's administration?
29:42–40:54
7
Are American democratic institutions still strong?
40:54–47:34
8
What are the implications of Trump's popularity and political strategies?
47:34–1:13:21