Bret Stephens: Gail, before we start, is there a journalist from another publication you’d like to invite into this conversation?
Gail Collins: Gee Bret, could you be referring to Jeff Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, who wound up being accidentally included in a group chat among top Trump officials discussing classified plans for airstrikes in Yemen?
Bret: Best journalistic scoop of the season, and it couldn’t have been easier to get.
Gail: Seems to me that Goldberg behaved very responsibly in a screwed-up situation that once again defined the utter ineptitude of the administration — from top to bottom. My initial reaction was to wish I could fire them all and buy Goldberg a drink.
Bret: If President Trump were, well, someone else entirely, he’d be the one buying Jeff a drink for keeping the nation’s military secrets to himself for as long as they needed keeping — and then exposing Trump’s top national security aides as the amateurs they are.
Gail: A new week, a new dimwit roundup …
Bret: Paging Tulsi Gabbard. And that’s saying nothing about JD Vance, the vice president whose comments on the Signal chat suggest that he doesn’t think the president grasps the implications of his own foreign policy. What a shame Vance didn’t extend his weekend visit to Greenland for another, oh, 45 months.
The other thing worth paying attention to, Gail, is the Republican response, especially in the Senate. Outside of the always gutsy Alaskan Lisa Murkowski, I’m not seeing much more than murmurs of G.O.P. dismay. Just imagine if the shoe had been on the other foot, and it was Joe Biden’s secretary of defense and national security adviser accidentally sharing battle plans with, say, Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.
Gail: Ah, Bret, every day I envision the shoe-on-the-other-foot saga. Almost as often as I obsessively return to the what-if-Biden-had-just-retired …
Bret: Can’t say we didn’t beg, week after month after year.
Gail: But enough. We’re seeing trillions of reports from town hall meetings held by members of Congress where their outraged constituents complain about programs that were frozen at the behest of Elon Musk.
Musk, of course, is frequently rated the richest man in the world. More and more Americans are beginning to wonder about trusting their financial future to a guy who thinks 20 million dead people are collecting Social Security.
You’ve always been a let’s-spend-less conservative, right? Any hope you can offer up on this one?
Bret: I suspect historians will one day remember the Department of Government Efficiency the way we now remember lobotomies. It seemed, to some at the time, like a good idea.
Gail: Hey, maybe future generations will look back on the Trump administration as The Lobotomy Laboratory.
Bret: The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t pare down spending or rethink the org chart of the federal bureaucracy or get rid of agencies or departments that may be doing more harm than good. For instance, why should universities spend about one-tenth of their budget on government compliance costs instead of scholarships and new labs?
The problem is that competence and execution matter; that public input matters; that the federal government is not a tech company where you can afford to move fast and break things; and that you can’t afford to take a hammer to a problem that requires a scalpel without grievously injuring your patient. As for Musk, I’ve been calling him “the Donald of Silicon Valley” for years. Glad my liberal friends are finally catching up with me — even if he moved to Texas.
Gail: Happy to be in your company on this one.
Bret: Another subject, Gail: The Wall Street Journal has a worrying report about the ways the administration is coming after the mainstream press with lawsuits and other acts of aggression, like booting The Associated Press from the Oval Office because it won’t refer to “The Gulf of America.” Does that mean we’ll never be able to refer to the president as a short-fingered vulgarian? Or as Benito Milhous Caligula?
Gail: Well, he’ll never outlive “short-fingered vulgarian.” But we have to credit the AP with saving the country from a possible Trump renaming frenzy, in which California got christened Donaldoria and Michigan became Muskigan.
Bret: Hehehe.
Gail: We’re gonna be stuck with the Donald for — OMG, I can’t imagine three and three-quarters more years. Is it too soon to start imagining the presidency after? Any stars on the dim horizon?
Bret: What presidency after?
Not long ago, I would have been joking about that, but on Sunday the president made it clear that he was “not joking” about a third term and that there were “methods” for keeping him in the White House.
Methods.
Let’s assume for the moment that these methods fail. On the Republican side, the immediate front-runner would probably be JD Vance, maybe with Donald Trump, Jr., as his running mate. If anything, I think that’s a greater danger to the country’s future than the current administration, since Vance has exposed himself as a militant isolationist and far-right fanboy.
The more interesting question is on the Democratic side. Do you think the party will try to pivot to the center or veer further to the left?
Gail: I suspect we have different definitions of “center” and “left.” Every Democrat knows the party has to come up with an inspiring vision of the future — and its goals for getting there.
Mine would be higher taxes on the wealthy, to save us from what looks now like a future deficit explosion and to fund much-needed services like health care for the poor and early childhood education — while taking a cleareyed view of global warming and how to avoid turning our pollution into a planetary disaster.
Also hope the Democrats are growing a new crop of future presidential candidates, preferably from a younger generation — like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who’ll be ending her second term in her mid-50s when the Democrats start picking a nominee. Or Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who’s 51 and a very strong anti-Trump voice.
How about you? I can already see you signaling for a turn to the right.
Bret: I don’t expect any plausible Democratic Party to adopt my politics. But I’d love Democrats to be able to actually win an election against the next Trumpian nominee, whether it’s Vance or someone else. And that’s not going to happen unless Democrats understand their past mistakes, as a terrific Times editorial on the weekend made clear. Democrats blundered badly on immigration and urban disorder, veered too far left on cultural issues, got too comfortable divvying up the country into an alphabet soup of various victim groups, and all but colluded in denying Joe Biden’s manifest decline. I’d also love to see Democrats propose policies that help working-class people even if they upset powerful Democratic interest groups, like vouchers that allow parents to opt out of failing public schools or an end to all the licensing requirements for professions like hair stylists.
Gail: Totally agree with you about the Times editorial. But very wary of voucher programs, many of which seem to be aimed at supporting religious private schools. I’m proud of the Catholic schools I went to, all the way through college, but the federal government’s top concern should be monitoring — and helping — public schools that serve everybody, particularly kids from lower-income families and neighborhoods.
We can pick up on the hair stylists later, but about the next presidential prospects …
Bret: As for the candidate who can do this, I’d take any Democrat who, in his or her bones, feels more sympathy than contempt for Trump’s voters. Having someone who has proved able to win in a Trump-voting state, like Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin or North Carolina’s Josh Stein or Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, would be a plus.
Gail: A Democrat who’s going to be a serious candidate has to reach out to Trump voters. At least the sensible ones, that small but deeply significant chunk capable of swinging the Electoral College vote.
Bret: If the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is ascendant, there will be no reaching out to those voters — at least not in ways they recognize as meeting their concerns. We’ll see.
Gail: Right now the next biggie on the horizon is the House of Representatives. The Republicans have a five-vote margin and any modest loss from sickness or political rebellion could cost them a working majority.
I am not enamored of Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican that Trump was planning to make our U.N. ambassador, until it became clear the move might cost him a seat in the House. But you have to feel a tiny bit sorry for her. More, at least, than for all the Republican insiders who are enthusiastically supporting the Trump cost-cutting crusade — while lobbying madly to make sure none of the canceled jobs come from their districts.
Bret: May I say something a little incendiary? Maybe Trump could follow up on his non-appointment of Stefanik as U.N. ambassador by withdrawing the United States from the U.N. entirely. I wouldn’t be altogether sorry.
Gail: Really cannot think of anything we need less right now than another example of the United States being impossible to work with.
Bret: The U.N. building has amazing views of the East River. Would be a great condo conversion.
A final thing, Gail, because I don’t want to let last week’s news go without making note of an important item. I’m no fan of the anti-Israel protests on college campuses, too many of which veered into outright antisemitism. And I think there should be swift and stern consequences for bad conduct, like taking over buildings, bullying other students, or lying on immigration forms. On the other hand, the right to speak freely is the most elemental right of all, which we should honor for citizens and noncitizens alike. If the administration can’t offer better reasons for arresting foreign students than not liking their op-eds, they should be freed. Anything less is un-American.
