Trump Explodes Out of the Gate
Bret Stephens: Gail, Donald Trump has been back in office for a week though it seems like a decade. Do you feel (a) outraged and ready to do battle; (b) disoriented and listless; (c) eager to read, finally, all 12 volumes of Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time'?
Gail Collins: Bret, my normal ritual when I've got a little bit of down time is to just call up a TV news channel to catch up on what's going on. Since the election, I've had so much trouble dealing with reality I call up the Game Show Network and listen to ordinary Americans trying to guess the name of the governor of Utah or which breeds of dog have no tail.
Bret: Who is Spencer Cox? And what is the English bulldog?
Gail: Bravo. You've put your finger on the challenge of American citizenship in 2025: Don't let Donald Trump push you into despair.
Bret: He isn't. Dirty little secret, Gail: I'm feeling mostly OK, even with Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon and threats of stupid trade wars with our allies. Trump may be a very blunt instrument, but we're a country in need of disruption. The important conversation we should have now is how to disrupt wisely, not how to defend norms for norms' sake in the face of Trump's norm bending.
Gail: Bret, if we'd elected some virtuous Republican like — oh, I don't know, it's your job to pick one — we would be talking about finding ways to improve education, health care, support for the needy that actually involved making services more efficient. But the folks we're watching here want to slash taxes, creating huge deficits that would, by design, increase pressure to slash services.
Bret: Slash taxes? Slash services? Gail, I think you're describing me.
Federal spending was just north of $4 trillion eight years ago, when I joined the Times. Now it's over $7 trillion. That's a 75 percent increase. Where does all that money go? Is all of it being well-spent? Do agencies that expect their budgets to grow year-in, year-out no matter how they perform have any incentive to manage costs or improve performance? Does anyone with a government job ever get laid off, as they do in the private sector, simply because a department has grown too bloated? Have people's needs really increased by that much in a few years — especially if the Biden economy was as terrific as Joe Biden claimed it was? Or is this just out-of-control spending and an establishment that refuses to apply the reins?
Gail: Ah, Bret, we're back to our oldest argument. The budget hikes are partly the effect of the Covid pandemic, and we can hope that'll fall off — if the economy continues to recover the way it did under Biden. People's needs are rising because the population is aging. A responsible administration would be obsessed with finding ways to pay for the inevitable increasing need for services.
Bret: I was in California over the weekend, where residents pay the highest state income taxes in the country and get mediocre services at best. Americans would rally to a serious Democrat — think of Gavin Newsom and then conjure the exact opposite — who acknowledges that incompetent government and exorbitant taxes are serious problems while also insisting there's a better way to tackle it than the blow-it-all-up approach that Trump seems to want to adopt.
Speaking of which, any thoughts on Trump's orders ending D.E.I. programming in the federal government?
Gail: The idea that government agencies should try to stress Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in hiring decisions was heir to the historic fight for desegregation in civil service. Reformers argued that Americans of all races tended to do well if they came from middle-class families with ties to their communities, and that the next step should be programs to open up educational and employment opportunities for everybody else.
Seems very appropriate that the administration pushing back is one that tends to regard political loyalty as the most important criteria for almost any job.
Bret: The central problem with D.E.I. is neither diversity nor inclusion. It's the word 'equity,' which in theory ought to mean simple fairness but in practice meant pervasive racial and gender gerrymandering based almost exclusively — and unconstitutionally — on considerations of group identity rather than individual qualifications. It also led to the creation of D.E.I. bureaucracies in thousands of institutions, from universities to corporations, whose employees too often acted as Soviet-style political commissars, enforcing all kinds of intrusive orthodoxies that tried to dictate not only how other employees or students were supposed to act, but also how they were supposed to think and speak.
Anyone who has sat through a D.E.I. training seminar — by turns saccharine and scolding, treacly and tendentious — knows what I mean. It just turned people off, including a lot of well-meaning people who are all for inclusivity as a value. Trump getting rid of it is the best thing he's done in office so far, as far as I'm concerned. What would you say is the worst?
Gail: So many options. But for something whose awfulness transcends regular partisan politics, I'd have to go for pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters, some of who assaulted police officers and brought guns into the Capitol. You?
Bret: You're right, the list is so long. The Jan. 6 pardons were awful. So was the pardon of Ross Ulbricht, founder of an online drug market. Withdrawing Secret Service protections for Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and other former members of his administration is disgraceful and will haunt him if Iran makes good on its efforts to kill them. The sale of Trump crypto tokens is tawdry and unethical at best, though very much on brand for the purveyor of Trump Steaks.
Gail: Love that one …
Bret: The effort to revoke birthright citizenship and overturn 160 years of jurisprudence on the 14th Amendment is abominable — though I was glad to see a Reagan-appointed federal judge immediately denounce the move as 'blatantly unconstitutional' and temporarily block it. Looking forward to the Supreme Court following the judge's lead, 9-0.
Gail: Yes! Yes!
Bret: We should not have Hegseth as defense secretary; in fact, we should never have a defense secretary who can't get a single member of the opposing party to vote for him. And the idea that Elon Musk has an office in the White House when he has billions of dollars of business before the federal government is appalling.
I'm probably forgetting something but, yeah, there's a lot not to like. And yet ….
Gail: Oh no, don't 'and yet' me.
Bret: Two things about that 'and yet…':
First, I don't think everything Trump has done is terrible by any stretch. As I said, I'm happy to see D.E.I. done for in government. I'm glad he'll do more to support domestic energy production. (Among other good effects, it hurts Vladimir Putin.) I think Marco Rubio is going to be an effective secretary of state. I'll cheer if the Trump administration sanctions the kangaroo court known as the I.C.C. If the Department of Government Efficiency gets rid of failing government agencies, so much the better. And if Trump can ensure American dominance of the artificial intelligence industry — and the energy we need to supply it — great. I want to be open to the possibility of good things.
Gail: We're gonna be fighting about the energy thing forever, but I continue to be sure that future generations, trapped in an overheated, air-polluted, water-short world, will look back with horror on the time an American president said he didn't believe in global warming and ginned up oil drilling.
I suspect you have a second …
Bret: Second, I just don't think all the po-faced disapproval of Trump achieves anything. Like it or not, you and I and the rest of America are locked into this movie theater for the next four years. Pass the popcorn.
Gail: We may be stuck with him, but we've got to keep fighting the good fight. Have to admit I've started just going off to movies on my own, in the middle of the afternoon, to avoid Trump-think. Watching the Bob Dylan biopic was a great distraction from the cabinet nominees.
Seen anything good lately? Yes, I'm trying to change the subject.
Bret: On the flight to California I made myself watch 'Reagan,' a biopic starring Dennis Quaid as the 40th president. The film was so cringingly conceived, so badly acted, so imbecilically scripted and so moronically executed that it briefly turned me, a Reagan fan, into a communist. But I am keen to see the Dylan biopic, along with 'The Brutalist,' which I hear is terrific.
And speaking of terrific, Gail, be sure to read Andy Webster's obituary for Jules Feiffer, the great Village Voice cartoonist who died earlier this month at 95. I can't say I was always in tune with Feiffer's politics, but I always loved his honesty, his originality, his artfulness and playfulness. He captured my kind of people: smart, neurotic, concerned, confused, unmistakably Jewish New Yorkers. And he never quit. When he was asked last year after the publication of a graphic novel for middle-schoolers whether he had a new project, he replied: 'What a foolish question. Of course.'
Gail: Oh Bret, I have to tell you — when I was named Opinion editor back in the day, Feiffer sent me a drawing of a very happy Feifferesque ballerina with the title 'A Dance to Gail.' Not sure we had ever even met in person, but that picture has been on my wall ever since.
Thanks so much for letting me finish with 'A Tribute to Jules.'
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