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cover of episode How Trump's Chaos Is Becoming Normal

How Trump's Chaos Is Becoming Normal

2025/6/2
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What A Day

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Jane Koston
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M. Gessen
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Jane Koston: 我是Jane Koston,这是《What A Day》节目。本节目将讨论特朗普政府暂时取消对大约50万移民的驱逐保护,以及爱荷华州共和党参议员Joni Ernst淡化了人们对医疗补助削减可能导致死亡的担忧。自从特朗普再次上任以来,发生了很多事情,感觉既像很久以前,又像昨天。特朗普政府在贸易、公民权、大学资助、联邦工人就业、移民和人道援助等方面采取了一系列行动,这些行动让人感到震惊和疲惫。人们可能已经找到了一些应对方法,比如减少新闻摄入,多花时间陪伴家人朋友,或者远离社交媒体。人们对华盛顿特区每天发生的疯狂事件感到不那么震惊,这是一种正常的现象,我们会适应新的常态,混乱变得熟悉。 M. Gessen: 我在俄罗斯生活和报道时,经历了普京巩固权力时期的类似现象。起初是震惊,然后随着时间的推移,越来越少的事情让我们感到惊讶。这种无法震惊的状态,一部分是因为事情的数量和速度,另一部分是因为特朗普同时在所有战线上发起攻击。这让我们适应了这种混乱,就像生活在一个战争国家。我们需要认识到,这种稳定感是一种错觉,它掩盖了日益增长的不稳定性。我们需要从俄罗斯的经验中吸取教训,认识到归属感的政治吸引力,以及极权主义领导人总是挥舞着稳定的胡萝卜,同时制造越来越大的不稳定,以便人们就范。我们需要继续报道加沙的苦难,即使没有人阅读,也要为历史留下记录,并试图打破这种熟悉感。我们必须认识到,适应这种混乱会让我们变得更糟,我们的目标是不失去一切,并抵制它,以便我们能够重新获得对未来的愿景、复杂性和自由空间。 Joni Ernst: 我对医疗补助的削减进行了辩护,认为这只是打击浪费、欺诈和滥用行为。对于那些担心医疗补助削减可能导致死亡的人,我回应说:‘我们都会死的。’ Howard Lutnick: 我为总统绕过国会并利用广泛的紧急权力征收关税的权利进行了辩护。即使法院最终在此案中做出对特朗普不利的裁决,他的政府也可以利用其他权力来代替。 Kevin Hassett: 我有信心法院会支持特朗普根据《国际紧急经济权力法》征收关税的权力。如果法官做出荒谬的声明,我们将有其他替代方案来确保我们再次使美国贸易公平。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter explores the normalization of chaos under the Trump administration, drawing parallels to Putin's Russia. It discusses the public's coping mechanisms and the implications of this normalization for American society.
  • Normalization of chaos under Trump administration
  • Parallels drawn to Putin's Russia
  • Public's coping mechanisms
  • Impact of normalization on American society

Shownotes Transcript

It's Monday, June 2nd. I'm Jane Koston. This is What A Day, the show that says Happy Pride Month and says it really, really, really loudly. On today's show, the Supreme Court says the Trump administration can temporarily lift deportation protections for around half a million migrants. And Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst downplays worries that her party's proposed cuts to Medicaid could kill people because we're all going to die.

But first, can you believe it's already June? And I don't mean that in the, like, very lame way people over the age of 30 try to make small talk at parties or with their coworkers. I mean genuinely. So much has happened since President Donald Trump took office again in January. It somehow feels like that was both a lifetime ago and just yesterday.

In that time, Trump has unilaterally thrown the global trading system into chaos. He's tried to end the constitutional right of birthright citizenship. His administration has attacked universities by stripping away billions in federal grants and also going after international students. It's put tens of thousands of federal workers out of jobs, defied court orders on immigration, eviscerated global humanitarian aid distribution. I could keep going, but...

I won't, because I'm honestly exhausted just thinking about it. And you probably are too. But by now, you've also probably figured out how to cope with it all to some extent. Maybe you've dialed back your news intakes to preserve your sanity. Or you're trying to spend more time with friends and family, or just off of social media because it just makes you angry.

Or maybe you find that you feel less shocked by the day-in, day-out insanity emanating from Washington, D.C. And that's a normal thing for human beings to do. We're a resilient species. We learn how to cope with a new normal. The chaos becomes familiar in a way. Man recedes into just background noise in our brains as we go about school pickups, making dinner, walking the dog, you know, life. New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen knows this phenomenon of normalization intimately because they saw it happen in Russia.

Gessen was born in Russia. Their family fled in the 80s when Gessen was a teenager. They were living in and reporting in the country when President Vladimir Putin consolidated power starting in the early 2000s. And they're seeing a lot of parallels here in the U.S. to that time period in Russia. Not in how Trump is necessarily transforming the American government, but in how the public is responding to it all. First, there's shock. And then over time, fewer and fewer things surprise us. Just another Monday in America.

So I had to speak to M. Gessen about this, about how the Trump administration is counting on all of us normalizing their actions and how we can fight back. M. Gessen, welcome to What Today.

Good to be here. So I wanted to talk to you about your most recent piece for the New York Times opinion section. You start that piece writing about all the times you were shocked living in Russia and reporting on Vladimir Putin's early years in power. But then you talk about how that shock wears off and the rise of autocracy can feel routine. Have you been feeling a lot of deja vu recently?

Oh, where do I begin? Yes. You know, it's always hard to write about recognizing something that you've experienced before, but most of your readers haven't. And so I was trying to capture that feeling. And even at the very beginning of Trump's second term, I was actually sitting down with my best friend who is also living in exile in New York, hasn't been here that long. And she was kind of going, well, how are we going to live?

And I said, well, I guess we're kind of going to live the way we did in Moscow, you know, see a lot of each other, do what we can, prioritize people who are close to us.

And she's like, are you just saying we're going to get used to it? And in a way, I guess that's what I was saying. What do you think it means to get used to autocracy, where you have a moment in which things are taking place all the time, but at the same time, you are going to the grocery store? It feels like there's a dissonance inherent to that moment.

There's a huge dissonance inherent to that moment. And, you know, back when I was living in Russia and Putin's autocracy was first taking hold, I remember talking to somebody who said something like, how can things be so bad when we're living so well?

And I actually think it's kind of the human condition to, we want to stabilize. We will adjust to anything. That's part of what makes us kind of great because we're, as a species, we're survivors. But it also is our huge downfall because just when we're capable of action, just when we emerge from that initial state of shock,

So instead of mobilizing and actually securing whatever freedoms we can secure, we kind of go, oh, this is okay. I can live with this. Right. I think people have a normalcy bias where we will normalize things that are not normal just so we can make sense of it. Just so we feel like we can work through things.

everyday life. And I think something a lot of Americans have talked about is that we have unintentionally and maybe even intentionally become inoculated against the shock of his unpredictability. It's either you lose your mind or you just kind of gain this general inability to be shocked. How does that inability to be shocked serve his government and his interests?

So I think there are two things happening that render us unable to feel shocked. One is just the sheer amount of stuff and the speed at which he's moving. But another is that he started attacking on all the fronts at the same time, which actually isn't familiar to me from anything I've ever seen. Every other autocracy that I've written about has been kind of gradual attacks.

and very sequential. But this is like everything all at once. And that creates a situation in which nothing is new. In that sense, it's like living in a country at war. And if you've ever reported on wars, something really crazy happens, which is in the first few days, like literally in the first few days,

people just kind of get accustomed to living the way they're living. Whether it's without gas and running water and cooking on the sidewalks, the adjustments that they make to this completely unthinkable new situation become totally rudinized. And then after a minute, the only people looking at how the front line is shifting are the military analysts. And I feel like that analogy holds for Trump's America as

Because all the fronts are open. And so the front line is shifting a little bit forward, a little bit back. Somebody gets released. Another hundred people get deported. That's just details, right? And so inside this ever-shrinking space between and among all the front lines, we just kind of go on living.

I'm curious as to what, first, what you think, what lessons Americans can take from Russian history, but also what can Americans do in this moment, in this political climate to stay sane, to stay shocked? But what is it that we can't learn from Russia and from Russia's experiences?

Wow, that's such an interesting question. I think there's like this larger point of Russians are always, as a culture, ready for sacrifice and ready to say, "Okay, let's tighten our belts and get through this period of hardship." That's a really easy thing for Russian autocrats to use because that sentiment of "we need to sacrifice for the greater good" is really ingrained in the culture.

But I actually think it exists in this country. And I think Trump, with his really excellent political instincts, is tapping into that when he says, well, you know, we may have to live through a period of hardship and things may get tougher because of tariffs and girls may have to have fewer dolls, but then things will get better. That's super familiar to me. And that, I think, taps into what is probably not so culturally specific.

which is this tendency of people to substitute a sense of belonging to something great for their personal sense of happiness and well-being and private connectedness. So I think with all the differences in culture, this is actually something that Americans could learn from Russians, like to recognize the political appeal

of belonging to something great. And the really age-old trick of totalitarian leaders who are always dangling the carrot of stability while creating greater and greater instability so that people fall into line following this ever-dangling carrot.

I want to talk about Gaza and how you write that Gaza is an example of something that once shocked us, but we're now becoming numb to the horrors after 19 months of war.

Suffering in Gaza is still in the headlines. We've been talking about the atrocities taking place there on our show. The New York Times is covering it. Does it make a difference if readers aren't receptive to this coverage, if readers aren't the people who are asking for this? What is the role of journalists here, do you think?

Oh, that's a million-dollar question. And, you know, as somebody who's reported both on Israel-Palestine and on Ukraine, like, I know this. The Times is very nice to me, and they still let me write about Ukraine, and nobody reads it. And yes, the Times has been very committed to covering, on the news side, to covering both Gaza and Ukraine.

And I suspect that on the news side, nobody reads it either. So the role of journalists, I think we have two challenges. I think one is to create a record. Even if nobody reads past the headline, if people literally see another entire family wiped out in Gaza,

and move on to the next story. At least they can't ever claim that they didn't know. And the other challenge is to try to break through this sense of disconnection and of familiarity. One thing that I was talking to a colleague the other day about this, Al Jazeera continues to cover Gaza in a passionate way that finds its viewers every day, even though every day the exact same thing happens.

And Israeli television continues to cover October 7th, 19 months after the fact. And still it finds viewers. And that's because the viewers of both Al Jazeera on the one hand and Israeli television on the other feel a deep emotional connection to what they're covering. And so we just need to try to create those connections to tell that one story that will break through this sense of familiarity.

You write in your column that we are stability-seeking creatures, and it can feel like an accomplishment to adjust to things. But do you think that in our efforts to seek stability, we are giving in to this administration in some way? Yes, in some way we are. And I think it's inevitable. And I think we have to figure out a way to think about this complexity. This administration, however long it lasts, is going to make us all worse as individuals and as society.

and as journalists, because in some way we're going to normalize this stuff because it's becoming normal. And as humans, we're going to become stupider and more simplistic.

Because our entire society, under the influence of this kind of autocracy, and this happens everywhere in these kinds of regimes, it becomes stupider because we're constantly engaged with bad ideas. So we know this. We're going to lose some. The goal is to not lose everything and to resist it so that we're able to reclaim a vision of the future and a kind of complexity and a space of freedom. Em, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you. This was great. That was my conversation with Em Gessen, opinion columnist for The New York Times. We'll link to their piece in our show notes. We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.

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Terms and conditions apply. Here's what else we're following today. Headlines. Russia has confirmed multiple air bases have come under drone attack in the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions. According to local witnesses, explosions were heard near the base in Murmansk and fires began in several places.

Ukraine claimed it destroyed dozens of Russian military bombers in a massive drone attack deep inside Russian territory over the weekend. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the attack in a post on Twitter Sunday.

Zelensky said the attack, dubbed Operation Spider's Web, required the use of more than 100 drones and took more than a year and a half to plan. Here's more of Al Jazeera's analysis of the attack. Now, this is the single largest attack that we've seen in one day across multiple military air bases inside Russia since the war began in February of 2022. What we do know is that these air bases are home to Russia's strategic military

air bombers that have been involved in launching attacks across Ukraine over the past three years.

Zelenskyy noted the operation's base was located inside Russia, next to an FSB, or Russian Security, regional headquarters. An unnamed Ukrainian security source described the operation to the Associated Press. They said the country's forces smuggled the drones inside mobile wooden houses, which were then driven onto trucks into Russian territory. The drones were hidden under the roofs of the houses. The official said Zelenskyy personally supervised the attack.

Just hours earlier, Zelensky said Ukraine would be sending a delegation to peace talks with Russia in Istanbul scheduled for today. Russia also continued its attacks on Ukraine over the weekend, and last week launched its largest airstrike in the three-year war. News Nation confirmed that President Trump was not aware of Ukraine's attack plan. At the time of our taping late Sunday, President Trump had yet to comment on the strike. The president's going to win like he always does, but rest assured, tariffs are not going away.

Always wins? Sure.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick defended the president's right to bypass Congress and levy tariffs using broad emergency powers during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Last week, the U.S. Court of International Trade struck down most of the tariffs President Trump announced in April on virtually every foreign nation. The panel of judges wrote that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEPA, does not grant the president the authority to impose those tariffs, but a federal appeals court blocked the ruling the next day.

During his appearance on Fox, Lutnick claimed even if the courts ultimately rule against Trump in this case, his administration could just leverage, quote, "another or another or another authority instead."

Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, also expressed confidence the courts would uphold Trump's authority to impose tariffs under IEPA during an interview with ABC Sunday. That's plan A, and we're very, very confident that plan A is all we're ever going to need. But if for some reason some judge were to say that it's not a national emergency when more Americans die from fentanyl than have ever died in all American wars combined, that's not an emergency that the president has authority over.

If that ludicrous statement is made by a judge somewhere, then we'll have other alternatives that we can pursue as well to make sure that we make America trade fair again.

Quick fact check: Hassett is wrong about his figure. Yes, a lot of people have died from a fentanyl overdose, but not more than all American wars combined. And also, this is like the fifth reason we've been given for these tariffs. All the while, President Donald Trump keeps threatening new tariffs. On Friday, he announced plans to double existing tariffs on aluminum and steel from 25% to 50%. On Truth Social, Trump added that he expected the tariffs to take effect Wednesday.

The Supreme Court Friday allowed the Trump administration to end temporary legal status for roughly half a million migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for now. The ruling applies to migrants from the four countries living in the U.S. under a Biden-era expansion of an immigration program called humanitarian parole. It allows certain people fleeing unstable countries to temporarily enter the U.S. and stay here legally. The Trump administration attempted to end it in April.

The court's order was unsigned, though liberal justices Katonji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. It's also not the final say in the case. The decision just ends deportation protections for these migrants while the case makes its way through the lower courts. In her dissent, Jackson wrote that her colleagues failed to consider, quote, "...the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million non-citizens while their legal claims are pending."

People are not... Well, we all are going to die. So, for the persons...

Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa gave a masterclass on how not to show empathy Friday during a town hall in her home state. Ernst's constituents pressed her about the massive spending package House Republicans passed last month, a.k.a. President Trump's big, beautiful bill. Many voiced concerns about the hundreds of billions of dollars in proposed cuts to Medicaid in the legislation. Ernst defended them as merely cracking down on waste, fraud and abuse.

As you can imagine, the we are all going to die response did not go over well. But Ernst didn't seem to care. The senator took to Instagram the next day to post a sarcastic apology video, a video she seems to have recorded at a cemetery. People are going to die. And I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.

So I apologize. She continued. And I'm really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Get it? She brought up the tooth fairy because she thinks that the people who are mad at her didn't know death exists because they're dumb and also believe in the tooth fairy? I don't. To be clear, the government's own independent analysis says millions of Americans will lose access to health insurance under the proposed cuts. And what happens when millions of people lose health care coverage? Well, they don't get visited by the tooth fairy. And that's the news.

Before we go, what is stagflation anyway? On the newest episode of Inside 2025, Alyssa Mastromonaco sits down with Cecilia Rouse, economist, Princeton professor, and former chair of Biden's Council of Economic Advisors, for a conversation that's basically Econ 101 without the pop quiz. They break down the big questions. How worried should we be about the national debt? What are tariffs actually for? And what kind of long-term consequences could today's economic policies create?

If you've ever pretended to understand the economy at brunch, this one's for you. Listen to Inside 2025 now and get access to even more exclusive content. Just subscribe at crooked.com slash friends. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Contemplate that we live in a world in which the rapper 50 Cent might be the only person standing in the way of a ditty pardon and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're into reading, and not just about how seriously, 50 Cent said that he's going to reach out to Donald Trump to tell him Diddy said mean things about him, like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston and what a time!

Waterday is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fore. Our producer is Michelle Alloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gillyard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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