King Trump
41:54 Share

Hello, gentlemen. Hello. Oh, Carlos, you have a mustache. Oh, wait, is this a grief mustache in Notre Dame? Well, it is related to Notre Dame's playoff run. What happened is I was just going to I was going to keep it until Notre Dame lost. And then, of course, I went to the national championship game in Atlanta. Oh, you were there. I didn't even realize you were there. I was there. I was there. Oh, I did. Of course, we lost. And now my kids hate it, which is an incentive to keep it. What I tell them in my constant sort of dad joke form is that I wasn't sure about it, but it's kind of growing on me.

Oh, boy. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Carlos Lozada. And I'm Ross Douthat. And this is Matter of Opinion, where thoughts are always allowed. Do-do-do-do.

So, Michelle couldn't join us this week, but never fear, our forever friend of the pod and founding musketeer, Lydia Polgreen, is joining us today. Welcome back, Lydia. Hi, Lydia. Guys. Ah, so nice to see you both. Good to see you back. Yeah. Well, this is the first week in office for our 45th and now 47th HOTUS event.

Donald Trump took the oath of office on Monday and gave his inaugural address and then got busy issuing

What's the proper journalism word? A flurry of executive orders. We would also accept a raft, a slew, or a barrage. I think a blizzard. I've actually read a blitz that may have been somewhere in the Times. Blitz. That's a martial law. I can see what people are trying to evoke there. And of course, he issued some pardons too, which we can get into. I want us to unpack what we know of this first week. What you think are the most significant actions Trump has taken so far, where we're seeing continuity,

from a first term where we're seeing a break. I also hope we can figure out what week one might tell us about year one and where we think the administration is going in the months ahead. Let's do it. You're in control. So, you know, wherever we go, you will take us there. I'm never in control. But for the moment, then, let's stay in this week and rewind to Trump's inaugural address on Monday.

I don't know. What stood out to you? Was this American Carnage the sequel or are you already basking in this golden age and all the sunlight pouring over you? Lydia, why don't you kick us off? I actually read rather than watch Trump's speech in preparation for this conversation.

And I could sort of juxtapose that with the images that I've seen. And, you know, one of the things that really struck me was this invocation of a radical and corrupt establishment that has extracted power and wealth. That was one of the early lines in the speech. And that's quite a thing to say when you have, you know, the wealthiest men in America standing in

right behind your family, but in front of your cabinet. And so I think it's been an interesting week of dissonance in that regard. I think we'll obviously talk about this huge number of executive actions and things like that. But I guess the question that I have overall is, who's this for? And is this actually responding to what the voters want? There's just been a lot of action and a lot of it seems, I don't know, strange.

So the speech itself, which I did watch, and I agree with Lydia that the atmospherics sent a distinctive signal that was different from the speech itself. Speech itself was sort of mostly teleprompter Trump, right? Like controlled, slightly sing-song, not, you know, not that entertaining. I think, you know, it was clear enough.

who voted for what Trump was selling. The promise was, we're going to whip inflation, we're going to end illegal immigration, and, you know, we're going to roll back some form of the excesses of wokeness. All of that was there. Trump talked a lot about being a peacemaker, right? The idea that his presidency would sort of re-stabilize the world. I think stitch all those together and you basically have the narrative that he won the presidency on.

It's notable that while he did sort of offer a foretaste of the executive orders to come, some of the most controversial and aggressive moves were not in the speech. There was no mention to undue birthright citizenship. There was no mention of the fact that he was planning to pardon everyone convicted after January 6th. So in a sense, there was a sort of

between what you can regard the speech as kind of general public salesmanship and the executive order action as containing a lot more different kinds of Trumpist tendencies. I mean, I think it's an interesting question whether you read the people around Trump as

Trump presenting himself as the man of the people, even as he is captured and controlled by these oligarchs. I think that's one narrative that Democrats have been fastening on. To me, it seemed a bit more like a Roman triumph kind of scenario where Trump is like parading the guys who tried to ban him from the Internet four years ago. Right. And I

I think you can read it, and I certainly think many of Trump's supporters will read it, not as, oh, look, this guy is captured by the oligarchs, but, oh, look, this guy, you know, Silicon Valley tried to cancel him, but guess what? They're here to kiss the ring, too. So...

I watched the speech ahead of the national championship game in Atlanta, sitting in my car on my phone. But then later I went back and watched the 2017 inaugural address by Trump. And I was struck by some real similarities and some differences. The corrupt establishment riff is one he gave also in 2017. He also, in both speeches, he declares America first as his organizing principle. In both, he says we're in serious trouble, but the trouble is going to end right away.

In the first speech, it's the American carnage stops right here and right now. And now it's from this moment on that America's decline is over. The differences that struck me, first, the specificity of the speech, even though I agree with Ross, there were things he left out. This was a far more detailed policy outline than you tend to get in an inaugural address. It was more like a State of the Union in that sense. It's not just...

protecting the border and fighting terrorism, which he said in the first speech. Now it's like, we're going to designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. You know, we're going to declare a national emergency at the border, a national energy emergency, despite the peacemaking Russ talks about. It's also, we're going to take back the Panama Canal, right? That sort of thing. For peace, Carlos, for peace. It's a Monroe Doctrine. I know that one well. Restabilizing the Western Hemisphere. The other difference I thought was a little bit more subtle.

In the 2017 speech, he talks about transferring power, not from one party to another, but from Washington to the people. This latest speech was more about him, about sort of all the things he's going to do, how God saved him from the assassin's bullet so he could live to make America great again. If the first inaugural I thought was more kind of pure Trumpism, the second felt like it was much more about Trump. So that was just my impression of the address.

Of course, as Ross mentioned, there were many things that did not make it into the address that in fact made it into the executive orders. So let's move into that for a moment. There have been so, so many. In 2017, Trump issued 33 orders in his first 100 days. Now he had more than two dozen on day one alone. So again, this seems like a more prepared administration this time around. You guys have had now a few days to reflect on the executive actions. Are there one or two that you've each been thinking about

the most. I mean, one of the interesting things about this Trump administration versus the last is in the last one, there was basically nobody there, right? There were some establishment Republicans who didn't ever like Trump, who ended up working for him. There was Stephen Miller and a few true believers, but there were not a lot of different constituencies that were sort of ready, participating in the administration, sort of eager to be served.

In this administration, it's quite different. Trumpism now contains all kinds of different factions that have very specific demands and ideas about what his administration ought to stand for. There's hawks and doves and foreign policy and on domestic policy, just to actually answer your question, Carlos, and draw a contrast. I think it's really striking that you have, on the one hand, a

set of executive orders around permitting and environmental review

And basically reforms to how America builds things and does things and gets projects off the ground that are, I'm sure, things that sort of the tech right, the Silicon Valley people support. But they're also in the wheelhouse of, you know, some of our center left colleagues at this newspaper. Right. And then you have the birthright citizenship move, which is, you know, you can I mean, it's interesting to try and make these ideas compatible. But there is, I think, a

a pretty clear tension between we're building everything, we're doing new things, we're opening America up, and, you know, we're changing the citizenship rules because America is effectively full, which is not, you know, that's not the view of everybody who supports an anti-birthright citizenship. But the kind of animating impulse of the birthright citizenship move is

Isn't an interesting kind of tension with the abundance and growth oriented aspects of the regulatory reform that I think reflects a real and important tension that's just going to run through this administration.

Yeah, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about migration across the globe and, you know, looking comparatively at different countries and how they handle citizenship and residency and visas and all of these kinds of things for, you know, skilled or desirable immigrants. And the birthright citizenship thing, I think, really does go right to the heart of what's at the tension here.

You know, you've got someone like Stephen Miller, who really believes that we should just stop all immigration and that we don't want any more people. And people like Elon Musk and, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, who, of course, is a person of Indian origin, are.

who are very strong advocates. And Trump himself is a strong advocate of, you know, visas for employment. You know, he, I think, keeps confusing the program that he uses to get seasonal workers to, you know, wait tables and wash dishes at his resorts with the visas that computer engineers from India and other countries get. But,

You know, there's a very real tension between those things, as Ross points out. I think it gets at this sort of tension about the story that you're telling about America. You know, is America the land of the future and abundance with a kind of limitless frontier?

Or are we emulating Hungary, basically saying we don't need any immigrants, we don't want any immigrants? We'll just accept the fact that our economy is going to decline as a result of that? Or we'll make a deal with China to come and build electric cars in our territory in order to kind of goose our employment numbers, and then we'll quietly let in guest workers? And I think that those are the sort of competing visions of like what the future could look like. The one I've been thinking about isn't

It's a little bit more boring. It's more boring than permitting reform, Carlos. I find permitting reform fascinating. You know, really, this is the second coming of Jimmy Carter, right, who was the great deregulatory president. Not, you know, never gets enough credit for that.

You heard it here first, the first comparison. Listen, whenever Carlos mentions Jimmy Carter, drink. But let me mention a couple of things. First, on birthright citizenship, what's interesting is the very concept of birthright itself. Because I think birthright citizenship in the United States upends birthright.

how I usually think of a quote-unquote birthright. Historically, birthright is an exclusionary idea. It's a title of nobility that's passed to the firstborn male. It's a privilege that by definition belongs to someone at the expense of someone else. It's not shared.

And America's birthright citizenship runs counter to that. It's by definition, it's for all. That's the first line of the 14th Amendment, like all people born or naturalized in the United States. And the interpretation of the next line, which is going to be at issue, right, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, has also been interpreted exercise in very expansive terms as well. Trump is wrong when he says that we're the only country who does this.

But I think he's right that the practice does make America distinct. Birthright citizenship has been this essential part of the American character and the American story for a long time. It's a source of equality before the law. What makes his interpretation so tragic to my mind is that now illegality is the birthright.

If your parents violated a law to come here, their actions are passed on to you automatically at birth. The sins of the father are laid upon the children. You're no longer stamped with the opportunity that citizenship gives you at birth. You're stamped with illegality. Well, but it's not even just illegality, right? I mean, it's student visas. Right. Potentially people on H-1B, you know, work visas. It's a lot of people. I think it was more likely designed to try and give the Supreme Court an opportunity to

uphold part of it and strike down part of it, which I don't think I knew you guys can, you know, hold me to this because we will come back to this again. I think it would be it's both very unlikely and would be very unconservative along a bunch of different dimensions from textualism to stare decisis and precedent for the Supreme Court to agree with this executive order. It has a kind of extremely expansive perspective.

claim that encompasses student visas and other other things like that in the hopes that the Supreme Court will say, well, obviously that goes too far. But, you know, maybe it's OK about people who are explicitly here illegally that that would be my guess. I mean, on this issue, I am much more of a, you know, a lib than than on some things. And I

basically agree with Carlos's argument. I think that the challenge here is that we are, and especially in the Biden presidency, have been in a pretty novel situation in terms of ease of migration globally and just the scale and numbers of people arriving without legal status, right? Other countries are having these same debates because of those trends, right? But the appeal of

ending or limiting birthright citizenship right now, I think, is clearly linked to the changing way in which

migration is happening. And the birthright citizenship itself is not what's driving that migration. Obviously, it has some effect, but it's not the main thing. It's people coming for work and opportunity. I also think, and this connects to the, you know, the oligarchs and so on question, right? There's also maybe a way in which the Trump administration would rather make a move like this, have it get knocked down by the courts than actually get into like,

E-Verify and other policies that would limit the ability of American firms to hire illegal workers. That would be my very cynical read on this, that in an odd way, anti-immigration people could end up being played by this. They get the sweeping gesture that goes nowhere, but then there's less of a crackdown in the end. But we'll see.

I think the notion of this being a test case for the court is spot on, and it just feels like a similar long game as happened with Roe, which took 50 years.

But you had Casey in, I guess, the early 90s that did exactly what you're saying, Ross, that sort of limited the scope of, you know, preserve the constitutional right, but created more limits around it. But I think far more likely is that they want to get it on the agenda. They want the court to have to

specify what this is and perhaps start building limits around it. The only other thing that I'm thinking about in terms of these early actions is, you know, because I work here in Washington, D.C., what's happening to the federal workforce? Trump made a lot of noise about that this week. First of all, a federal hiring freeze. Second, you know, bringing back the idea of Schedule F, which gives fewer protections to career civil servants, makes them easier to fire.

terminating DI programs across the federal government, and reviewing all actions by the Biden administration related to the weaponization of law enforcement and weaponization of the intelligence community. Basically, start hunting for things that are wrong.

And this is the attack on the deep state. This is what Trump has been complaining about for so long. J.D. Vance has spoken about this, right? He once called for firing every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state and replace them with our people.

Maybe this produces a leaner, more efficient government. I worry it will drain expertise, produce a government of loyalists and encourage witch hunts throughout the federal government. In that sense, it's very consistent with my reading of what was in Project 2025. But that's the other one that I want to follow as we move forward.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of what we're seeing does feel like chapter and verse from Project 2025. There are elements of it that are that have not yet come to the fore. But absolutely, this seems like the sort of the promised the promised rollout that was disavowed and then now kind of re-embraced, which is really striking that, you know, Trump felt the need to disavow it and then now seems to be, you know, following the blueprint.

I mean, I think that's partially just because Project 2025, this great, like, liberal bugaboo was basically just, you know, it included some things that aren't going to happen. And it included a bunch of things that were just like what conservatives always want. Right. And so there's inevitably going to be some Project 2025 in the Trump administration because it was a conservative document. Right.

I think on the federal workforce question, we just have to see exactly how far this kind of effort goes. And I tend to have a lot of confidence in the federal bureaucracy's ability to sort of swallow up all such efforts. I'm sure there will be prominent cases of people removed for ideological reasons, but

I think we should check back with this in six months to a year just to sort of see exactly how it's cashing out. So the last thing I want to ask you about in terms of week one is the

pardon-palooza that we got coming from both the outgoing and new presidents. Trump issued pardons to more than 1,500 people charged with crimes related to January 6th, commuted sentences for others. There were folks who thought he would do a sort of a more contained version of this, but it was pretty far-reaching. So what do you make of this exercise of the pardon power, both by Biden and by Trump?

Well, I mean, clearly it's awful, right? I mean, I think that the place that we've gotten to of preemptive pardons for Biden's family and, you know, I'm never really that interested in games of who started it. But obviously, you know, this is payback for Russiagate, for all of the various sort of prosecutions, investigations that Trump underwent.

My question is, like, who actually cares about this? I understand that there is among Trump's core faithful base a sense that, you know, these people have been wronged and also that the Justice Department has been weaponized. I just don't know that that's, like, actually that important to many Americans. It seems, you know, to the contrary that most Americans would think, like, if you assault a police officer, you should probably, you know, pay

consequences. I also think that there's a real risk for Republicans for ending up in some strange cul-de-sacs in the same way that the Democrats did after 2020 when Trump lost, which is you spend a lot of time investigating things and going back over the past like they did with Russiagate and

And you sort of squander a lot of momentum on doing things that actually, like, people want. And so I sort of—it sounds like we're going to have another January 6th commission that I guess is going to investigate the overreach, or I don't know the details, but—

It seems a little foolhardy given the past history here. Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with Lydia's last point. I think in terms of the question of who cares about it, the answer is that, you know, an important part of Trump's base cared deeply about this issue. And Trump himself obviously cares about it as well. I think what you're seeing here is, you know, the pardon power is very expansive and on paper, right? So it's always just been constrained by people.

you know, norms, right? You know, these things that we talk about, this sort of sense of propriety and so on. And the more that sense of propriety drops away, the easier it becomes to just sort of, you know, for not the president himself, but just like people around him to sort of push a little harder. And it's like, well, why worry our heads about figuring out which of these four people should be pardoned? We'll just pardon all four.

And that seems to be where Trump ended up with the January 6th stuff, right? That you had, you know, J.D. Vance went out, prominent Republicans went out before the inauguration and said, look, we're going to do pardons for, you know, nonviolent protesters, but not for people who committed violence against cops. And then it seems like Trump was like, we're not going to get into the nitty gritty of, you know, whether to pardon person X or person Y, we're just going to pardon everybody because that's what people were asking him for. And, you

That's a bad it seems like a bad system to have, but I don't know how we get out of it. I don't quite buy the notion that Trump just didn't want to get into the nitty gritty of like who deserved it or who doesn't. It had to be everyone, right, including those who committed acts of violence against, say, the Capitol Police, because saying that even some of it was bad.

Even some of it was wrong. Undercuts the whole day of love carried out by true heroes story that Trump has been selling about January 6th, right? It undercuts the goodness of the actions and the story of the great victory that was taken away from him. So it had to be everyone. I agree that the pardon power in general feels like this kind of monarchical vestige that is more of a problem than it is a solution, the way it's being exercised.

I think it's nice if it can be contained by norms and propriety. Having this kind of monarchical vestige, I think, is actually kind of a nice thing. It's like there is this sort of last place of appeal and so on. Right. But by pardoning all 1500 tells you that it's not being exercised in the way that I think if men were angels, government, et cetera, et cetera. All right.

Let's take a quick break there. When we come back, we'll try to look beyond week one and see where all of these early actions might take us in the year ahead. I want us to cast forward a little bit more and try to figure out what week one tells us about what we can expect next.

In year one, in the months leading up to both the election and the inauguration, there are three stories that we've been hearing about what a second Trump term might be like. And I want us just to keep them in mind as we look ahead. First is about Trump himself. Now he knows more, right? He didn't know how to govern last time. Now he's better able to pull and push the levers of government. Second is about the Trump administration.

There are no more adults in the room, quote unquote, who are going to challenge him or even question him in any meaningful way. His new team has been selected for loyalty and compliance. And third, it's about resistance. Whether political or popular resistance, that's going to be far more muted. Instead of resistance, you're seeing resignation or even fear.

Now, if these are true, all these trends are pointing in the same direction to a more empowered, a more unencumbered Trump who will be able to accomplish more or, depending on how you look at it, get away with more. Like, is that right? Or is there something that could complicate that story as we move from week one and think about, say, year one? Well, I think that, you know, there are a couple of obstacles in Trump's way. I mean, he has a very, very, very narrow majority in the House.

So there's not a lot of room for error. You know, he has surprisingly a bigger margin in the Senate, but it's certainly not 60 votes. And, you know, Lake and Riley Act notwithstanding, his ability to get 60 votes on some of the very, very, you know, what I would think of as extreme things that he's seeking to do in terms of tax cuts and so on, it's hard to see how that goes.

To me, the big question that's looming out there is the relationship that the Trump administration is going to have to the Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed. If he gets rulings that he doesn't like, is Trump going to defy the court? Is he going to respect those rulings? You know, these are the bulwarks of our system, of the checks and balances. And I think so much will depend on how they perform. But there's, I think, actually surprisingly a lot of roadblocks in the way. Yeah.

Yeah, I think what we see now is that there is going to be more, at least for a while, more effectiveness of

in the things that presidents do actually have direct power over or can claim some kind of direct power over. Like, you know, these executive orders, it's not just that there were a lot of them. They were obviously written by competent lawyers or by people who actually know something about any PA review processes and so on, right? All of those were not things that you would take for granted or expect in the first Trump administration. So to the extent that the president can affect

how the culture war is fought through the bureaucracy, Trump will be more effective than he was before. To the extent that the president can drive deregulatory processes, Trump will be more effective than he was before. In terms of legislative effectiveness, I agree with Lydia that, especially in the House, the narrowness of the majorities that Trump has to work with just impose really, really big constraints. Like we're going to get a big tax fight

you know, where just the different constituencies within the Republican Party are just going to be at each other's throats. There's, you know, the people who want a corporate tax cut, the people who want a family tax cut, raise his hand, you know, the people who want the state and local tax deduction restored. Put down my hand. Right. Put down your hand. Yeah. There's just like, and that's before you get to the need to bring along some Democratic votes. So Congress

and the courts, I think, both present strong checks on how far Trump can take his general empowerment.

And then the other check, even internally, right, is going to be the reality that I started with at the beginning, which is that the Trump coalition is now big and contains multitudes in a way that it did not before. And conflicts between the tech right and the Stephen Miller right or between pro-Israel hawks and would-be realists in foreign policy, right, it's not going to be the dynamic where you have

you know, sort of some grizzled veteran secretary of state or defense trying to stop Trump from doing something wild. It's much more going to be

two very empowered factions are going to be fighting it out for getting Trump to go along with one or the other of their perspectives. So that's going to be really important to watch. And yeah, in terms of like Trump's own disregard for norms and rules and limits, I certainly think that issues around the Supreme Court are a key place. Like if he goes off the rails in some way, it's most likely to happen in response to an adverse Supreme Court ruling. But I also think

And I also think that we may be at a sort of high watermark, right? I mean, Trump got what he wanted, right? He's been vindicated. He won. He won the popular vote. And there's a part of me that sort of wonders, like, what else is there for him? You know, like, he's in the history books. He's got what he wanted. Does he sort of leave everything to everyone else? No, I mean, I think that's the other question. It's like, does Trump become a lame duck in any kind of normal way? Like a normal second term president, you've got about a year to sort of try and do things. And then,

You're a lame duck. People are all obsessed with the succession, even if you're popular.

It's hard to see that exactly happening with Trump. I think the thing that prevents him from just taking victory laps will be that sort of will to, you know, holding the attention of the world. But it's certainly a good question. Trump's worst behavior in his first term was when he was defeated and couldn't bear to be defeated. So if you're hoping that he doesn't drive us towards a pointless constitutional crisis, you might place hope in the fact that, you know, he's a winner and, you

He doesn't need to force a crisis to vindicate himself in the face of defeat. Got so much to react to there. I do, in following up on Lydia's point, I do think Trump has always enjoyed campaigning, running, winning more than governing. I mean, that's just, that's his happy place. And so I think now, ostensibly, there are no more campaigns to run.

So governing is all that is left for burnishing that legacy. One of the – and this follows up on something Ross said. Like one of the truisms of Washington, right, is that really you can only push – a president can really only push one big thing through before the midterms come and change everything, especially for second-term presidents, but not solely second-term presidents. Like Obama did the Affordable Care Act, right? Trump did tax cuts. Now Trump is at least speaking –

as if he has this sort of vast, far-reaching mandate to affect change across a variety of areas, right? But if that truism still holds, I would imagine that immigration is the one key area he feels he has to deliver on. It's been the overwhelming kind of

standard bearer issue of MAGA from the very beginning. What the wall was to the first term, deportations will be to the second. Now, maybe the wall didn't really happen last time around, so who knows what's going to happen here. But I think he'll make a lot of noise about this, and I think it's going to be his focus. I wonder if there's a tension, unlike some of the issues that Ross raised about areas where he has a lot more power, the tension between the issue that is his signature issue and his ability to sort of do some of the things that he wants to do with it.

as we talked about with birthright citizenship.

I would just say a lot depends on actual immigration rates. Which are way, way down. Right. They're way, way down right now, as they were at the start of his first term, and then they went back up, right? But if he builds the wall and can say immigration rates went down, then I think he— He declares victory? He has room to declare victory. Ross, you mentioned that the Trump coalition contains multitudes and that those fights—

will be one of the defining tensions of certainly the first year and issues like visas and the others. I wonder if that's also a sort of unique outcome of

Trump's presence in American political life, because those kinds of differences are the things that normally get litigated during a primary season, right? Especially when you're not the incumbent president, right? You try to figure out, you know, what does the party stand for? Since so much of the party has become just subservient to Trump, period, those issues that normally get figured out during a primary season,

are now going to be front and center during the presidency. It's really, much as the Supreme Court is no longer about, you know, liberals versus conservatives, but rather the divisions among the conservative supermajority to see how far they're going to go. The biggest fights of this period might be less about left versus right, Democrats, Republicans, but the fights for the soul of MAGA. It's no longer the soul of America as Biden wanted to depict it. It's really the battle for the soul of MAGA.

And I think that's what may be defining year one and really this next Trump term. Yes, I think that's right. I think there is a kind of monarchical flavor where you have a king and then you have different people who could be appointed as his first minister who have different agendas and they're competing for favor. That is real.

And I think one reason that different groups like people in Silicon Valley have sort of moved partway into the Trump coalition is that they see it as a place where there's room to compete for influence and power. The question that hangs over all of this is, you know, how does the economy do right? Because I think if the economy booms.

It's going to be a while before the Democrats get fully back on their feet, whatever particular policies Trump champions. If the economy stagnates, stock market goes down, inflation returns, then all these tensions within the Trump coalition, there's plenty of room for Democrats to exploit them. But the one thing we haven't mentioned in this conversation is the one thing that isn't really in the executive order so far, which are the big, big tariffs that Trump promised.

And that question also will hang over the first year, right? Like, what is, what president, how is Trump using his presidential powers on economic policy? And how does that interact with how the economy is actually doing? And again, what that means for partisan politics. Especially since tariffs are something on which he has very clear executive authority. Very clear executive authority. I know 10% for China, 25% for our neighbors, Mexico and Canada is what...

what seems to be on the cards at the moment. You know, just on that last thought about the struggle for the soul of MAGA and so on, one thing that happens in elections is that it's, the people who win often interpret the result as being a kind of plebiscite for their ideas, when in fact the voters may be intending something quite different. Every winner wants to grab a big mandate, even if it's a very, very narrow victory, as it was in this case.

But ultimately, when you have things like, you know, for example, you know, the price of eggs is up 37 percent. These core issues that people said that they voted on are going to reemerge and people are going to say, like, wait, I didn't I didn't vote on, you know, anti woke in this sense. I just wanted the country to be a little bit more flexible.

fair. I think particularly around immigration, you know, if you end up rounding people up in ways that are very visible and ugly, you know, I think there's going to be pushback on that and people are going to feel uncomfortable. That absolutely shows up in the polling. So I think a lot sort of depends on how this all rolls out and that question of is it a plebiscite or is it just a regular election? We think of this as epic making, but the people who actually voted for Trump are

The majority of them might actually think that this was just a regular election. All right. I like leaving it there. 2024 was just a regular old campaign, an election, nothing to see here. That happened to usher in a golden age. We'll see. Or an age of iron. All right. Let's leave it there in the Iron Age. And when we come back, we will get hot and cold.

And finally, it is time for Hot Cold. Who's got the temperature for us this week?

I do. And this is a slightly unconventional hot-cold because I haven't been on the show for a while. So I was a little rusty. So the thing that I'm quite hot on is something that I hope to emulate that my wife does, which is she has a lot of hobbies. I am obsessed with my work and don't have a lot of hobbies. And so I think the benefit that having hobbies has for her, as she's expressed it to me, is that she's really comfortable with not being good at things. And that's something that I really aspire to.

Like a lot of people, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. And if I can't be absolutely excellent at something, then I don't even bother trying. So my aspiration, you know, one of my intentions for 2025 is to cultivate more hobbies. And one of the things that I have embraced is choosing things that I might not have any natural talent at at all as a way to kind of school myself in accepting my mediocrity in a

So, so far, I haven't yet started any of these hobbies, but I'm considering taking piano lessons. Your hobby is to collect hobbies, right? No, piano lessons is one possibility. Oh, wow. You know, penmanship is another one. I think I could really improve my handwriting.

So I'm very hot on hobbies, but I wanted to make a call out to the Matter of Opinion audience to ask them for suggestions. What hobbies do you think I should consider in 2025 in order to improve my tolerance for failure? Wow. So this means you have to come back on the show expeditiously. Oh, I can't wait. Right? Do you guys have suggestions?

If I had the time to cultivate such a thing, I would go with guitar over piano. Oh, interesting. One of my daughters is taking guitar lessons, and I always sort of wished that I could, like, play a folk song instead of just singing it off key. Yeah. Carlos, do you have any suggestions? Wow. I suck at so many things that this should not be hard.

You know, I've also always wanted to play guitar because I thought just being able to play guitar would have really enhanced my social life in college. I gave my love a cherry. But you know what? Here's one thing. So I'm basically equally fluent in Spanish and English, but I never really had to learn a language because I just grew up with both. I don't remember a time when I didn't know them both. And so...

I feel like I should go through the struggle of learning a new language. My grandfather was a scholar of Roman law, and I learned a little Latin in college, mainly through music. And so I feel like I should learn Latin or I should learn Quechua, which is widely spoken in my native country of Peru. I think that's what I would do. I would probably try to pick up a language. I love it. I think that's great. I'm terrible at languages, but...

These are great suggestions, guys. I'm sure I'll do none of them. No, we're all going to start. We're going to start a band. I mean, I think the lesson here is there needs to be a podcast band. And the lyrics will not be in English. Yeah, they'll be in something else. With Lydia on keyboard, me playing guitar, and Carlos singing in... Quechua. Quechua. I think Michelle obviously will do percussion.

Lydia, you know, you just you say it's been a while since you've been on the show, but it was you're just such a natural. It's like riding a bike, being on move. So please, another good. Please join us again soon. Would love to. It was so great to be here with you guys. See you, Lydia. See you guys. Bye. Thank you so much for joining our conversation. Give Matter of Opinion a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review while you're there as you let other folks know why they should listen.

Do you have a question for us based on something we discussed today? We want to hear it. Share it with us in a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440. And we just might respond in an upcoming episode. Also, you can email us at matterofopinion at nytimes.com. Matter of Opinion is produced by Andrea Betanzos and Sophia Alvarez-Boyd. It's edited by Jordana Hogeman. Our ace fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

Original music by Isaac Jones, Nathiem Shapiro, Carol Saburo, Sonia Herrero, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carol Saburo. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. Our executive producer is Annie Rose Strasser.