Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I'm Michelle Cottle, politics writer for New York Times Opinion, and I am here today with my fantastic colleagues, columnists David French and Carlos Lozada. Happy New Year, guys. Happy New Year, Michelle. Happy New Year. I was going to ask if you weren't happy, David. Come on, step up. No, I'm happy. I'm happy.
Well, President Trump decided to ring in the new year with a very special project of invading a sovereign country and capturing its leader. So we're going to dig into Venezuela and what it says about Trump's future foreign policy. But before we do, we are recording this on Thursday. And just yesterday, an ICE agent in Minneapolis fired a gun into Renee Nicole Good's car and killed her.
I've seen the videos. They're circulating. But the moments leading up to her death and the shooting, it is awful. It is horrific. The Trump administration has claimed that the agent was acting in defense, that Goode was about to ram him with her vehicle. But, of course, there's video. There's always video.
And a New York Times analysis concluded that Goode was driving away from the officer, not toward him. So, like, on the one hand, this is classic Trump, don't believe your eyes and ears, believe only what I tell you. But the sheer speed and scope of the rewriting of history here really strikes me as impressive.
I feel like it probably took at least a day or two for the Trumpists to spin the January 6th riots into some kind of patriotic love fest. But this was almost instantaneous. I continue to think that the fracturing of reality is a problem we're going to be dealing with long after this particular pack of liars is out of power.
But David, you've spoken before about the many problems you see with deploying ICE agents en masse on American streets. Have you considered something as awful as this maybe happening? Or did you expect this response from the administration? How are you looking at this? Yeah, I didn't consider this a possibility. I considered something like this a near inevitability.
Because what you've done is you put a situation where you are training ice agents for sort of maximum aggression. You are putting them in places where you don't typically have ice agents. You are doing it in a way that's deliberately inflammatory. You're trying to stoke up rage. You're trying to stoke up anger. And let's remember, these are ice agents. These are not... beat cops, for example.
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Chapter 2: What incident involving ICE in Minneapolis is discussed?
That's one of the, I think, legacies of the way that this president or this movement deals with matters of truth and falsity. It's about loyalty. It's not actually about believing what you see with your eyes. Yeah, I was going to say that we have seen with this an immediate split in how people react and what their definition of reality is.
And as you point out, if you look back at the January 6th stuff, the administration this week has put up an official White House report. web page claiming that the Democrats staged the real insurrection and that the January 6th defendants were unfairly targeted.
So it's just kind of this commitment to generating fracturing of reality that, I mean, strikes me as troubling beyond any particular incident that we're dealing with here.
But David, for people who don't follow the news very closely, who don't see themselves as having a particular political allegiance, Trump, anti-Trump, do you have a gut sense of how they're going to perceive this episode, this shooting? I mean, I realize it's hard to analyze, but. Yeah.
So I think this is a situation where his bluster and his lies, because they're going to be so easily and immediately rebuttable, this is one of those rare instances where they might work against him. Because I think there's a couple of ways to frame this incident that really can affect public opinion.
Framing number one is the one the administration chose, which is domestic terrorist attempts to ram and kill officers. Well, as soon as you watch that, you're like, what are you talking about? There is zero evidence from this tape that there is any effort to intentionally kill these officers.
If, however, the framing was confusing situation, officer had to make a tough call because it looked like a car was heading for him. Then people would look at that and say, oh, that was confused. Where was the officer? It makes it much more sort of difficult to analyze in a way that's inflammatory. It makes it much more technical and legal.
But by going with the domestic terrorist angle right away, going with just gross lies right away, this might be, this could be one of those instances where the Trump administration actually does shoot itself in the foot through its own dishonesty. Yeah, they really locked themselves into a very kind of particular structure here. Yeah.
But I want to shift from this toward another really big reality splitting, shaking action that I think took almost everybody by surprise, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. So lame duck presidents often decide to start playing abroad and making big moves as they feel like their power is waning at home. But
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Chapter 3: How does the shooting reflect on Trump's administration?
That's how they see it. And that actually connects to your question, Michelle. I've just been struck by the kind of chess beating from the administration over what is, in effect, a kind of regional retrenchment, right?
You know, when he had his first press conference announcing the Venezuela operation or explaining it, Trump said, you know, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned, right? And then the State Department tweeted on its official website account on X. You know, this is our hemisphere.
You know, it sounded like a like a football coach, you know, like getting the team like no one comes into our house and pushes us around. And that's usually what a football coach who loses some some away games tends to say. But the the notion to me is that they're they're hunkering down around North and South America, you know, going from America first to, well, the Americas first. Right.
That is that is where we are. And in a sense, I owning up to kind of the sphere of influence model of the world. Like, you know, let China have its stuff, let Russia have its stuff. This is our hemisphere. This is what we are doing.
At the end of the Cold War, you know, when America is sort of like strutting around the world, basking in the unipolar moment, it would have been absurd to imagine that we would be so proud about limiting our sphere of influence to this hemisphere. And so I keep thinking, you know, how is...
You know, how is Beijing or Moscow going to react when they see Washington sort of busy and satisfied with the duties of sort of merely regional hegemony when you've abdicated being the leader of the West and instead you're the leader of the Western Hemisphere? Carlos, I think you hit the nail on the head there, chest beating over decline. That's what they're chest beating over.
Because if you're talking about, well, NATO isn't that critical anymore, we're going to pivot to the Far East, but we're not going to be doing so in a way that's projecting strength in any real, truly substantial way. And so you're talking about really this diminished American influence that is accompanied, as you said, by chest beating. And it feels like, are you conning me?
Are you punking me here? Because really what you are talking about is not make America great again. It is recognize America's limitations now is sort of one of the ways that you would, maybe a sympathetic way you would actually even encapsulate or talk about Trump policy that way. Maybe what's actually happening is that some people in the Trump orbit believe we're just overtaxed.
We can't do all that we've done. We can't do that going forward in the future. And so therefore retrenchment is necessary. How do we sell retrenchment? How do we sell being less to the American people? In a weird way, you sell being less by pretending it's more, by pretending you've got some sort of empire or domination plan.
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Chapter 4: How does the administration's narrative shape public perception?
I don't know. There's just that moment. It sounds sappy, but for me, it kind of like broke something in my mind that's like, I need a lot more of this and a lot less of this. And so, yeah, so that's what I'm trying to leave behind. I feel you can go with that. You can go with that.
I'm going to go with a sort of pet peeve of what we're doing now, of the podcasting world, of the opinion-mongering world. There's a question that folks always ask on podcasts and in panels and in these kinds of conversations. And it sounds so thoughtful and kind of like chin-stroking. And it's, how did we get here? And I'm so sick of how did we get here, right?
Because it purports to be this kind of big dot connecting moment. But really, how did we get here just depends on your own personal beliefs about the world. And you can just go back and pick whatever moment makes sense to prove the point that you actually have. How did we get here is not about dispassionately assessing the past. It's about subjectively
dissecting the present and it just you know proximate causes proliferate you can always go back and find the one thing that leads to your particular silo your particular vantage point right now and i think the real question is not how did we get here but what is here Like, where are we? What is actually happening?
Once we have a consensus, even a basic agreement on on the present, then let's go back and talk about and talk about the dots. So that what did we get here always bothers me. And I see it everywhere. I see it. I was reading an article yesterday. I was on a flight. I was catching up on an old New York review of books and like, boom, how did we get here? Like, it's just it's everywhere.
And I'm done with it. Very philosophical Andy Rooney rant for you. I like this. I love this. I like it. Okay, so I'm going to go really personal. I'm going really personal and everybody can just... I gave this a lot of thought and I think I have to leave behind in 2025 lecturing my children
which is easy enough because they don't pay, like they're 20 and 22, they don't pay attention anyway, but also lecturing my 79-year-old mother. This is something, like if you find yourself dealing with parents whose health are fading, who are like sliding into some golden year issues, I just, my sister and I are terrible about this and I have vowed to stop this.
Now, that, of course, means as my methadone, I'm going to start lecturing you, too. So or if you'd like me to call your parents and do it, I can. But I got to stop doing it to my poor mother or she's just going to stop speaking to me. That's it. I got that. And balloon jeans. No balloon jeans, people. Let them go. One thing, though, I have to put a pin in.
Before I saw our prompt for this week, I was fired up and ready to unleash on all the haters against the Stranger Things finale. So I got to put a pin in that. At some point, that's just got to happen. I have to mount my vigorous defense. We can do a whole episode on that. Whole episode on that. All right, guys, that's it. Thank you. Great to see you guys. Thank you, Michelle.
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