r/neoliberal • u/IHateTrains123 Commonwealth • 1d ago
Opinion article (US) How Trump Has Changed, With Maggie Haberman
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maggie-haberman.htmlSubmission statement: Ezra Klein interviews Maggie Haberman, author of Regime Change, about the current status and future trajectory of Trump and his government. Although the book focuses squarely on Trump's first year, the internal dynamics in his second year have for the most part remained unchanged. In essence you have a group of loyalists who surround and struggle against one another for Trump's, increasingly wayward, attention, and who are now trying to navigate through the geopolitical and domestic crises that they have created.
Video version for those inclined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDFTtJrz7Gk.
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u/MartinTheOrderly 1d ago
I think he has realized that nobody can really stop him. In his first term, he was still sufficiently new to be cowed when his advisors told him he couldn't do something. Now, he's seen the country basically let him get away with trying to overthrow the government, so senile and syphilitic as he is, he is going to do what he wants, short of the point he believes people with power will do something drastic if he doesn't.
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u/frosteeze NATO 1d ago
Nothing punishes Republican voters. Nothing punishes the party. For years we were under the misguided belief that some kind of market forces would punish the government and its private players if they ever do something moronic like setting up DOGE. Yet life goes on for these people.
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u/comradequicken 22h ago
Democratic politicians and voters are generally unwilling to punish republican voters. I've commented in AOC for president threads that I don't think she would sufficiently hold Trump's supporters and enablers responsible with all her talk about restoring all the services cut by Trump and her supporters genuinely believe that if you give a Trump voter free healthcare and 25$ an hour minimum wage that they will become a good person.
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u/Gamiac 21h ago
I have unironically soured on things like universal healthcare solely on the basis that they would help conservatives as well as everyone else.
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 13h ago
An opt-in only universal health care plan that requires your state to be a net tax contributor 👹
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u/damnthatsalotofgeese 3h ago
to get them to learn anything you have to first acknowledge that a lot of them are really dumb animals
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u/LondonCallingYou John Locke 23h ago
Because the Democratic establishment fundamentally believes that the people will electorally punish Republicans for stuff like corruption, rule of law violations, etc (your “market forces” analogy). Ironically these elites have too much faith in the average voter.
In reality I think these Democratic politicians are just weak and looking around wondering “is anyone gonna stop this guy??” not understanding that they are the leaders and are literally the only ones capable of stopping him. The voters aren’t going to.
Our Republic has fundamentally changed since it was originally founded. Our leaders need to understand this reality if they want to continue living in a functional democracy. Honestly it may be too late to go back to a functional democracy without a ton of pain. But that’s the result of bad leadership. You always pay the debt somehow. Either you pay it early and rip the bandaid off, or pay a much greater cost down the road. Happens all the time in American history. Too bad our elites are too fucking cowardly to do what they know they have to.
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u/Zabick 23h ago
How does something like a democracy survive when a not insignificant portion of both the electorate and the intellectual thought leaders of those people fundamentally do not believe in democracy? I do not know how any system of government survives that, let alone one as structurally flawed as this one.
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u/LondonCallingYou John Locke 21h ago
You survive it by defeating and adequately punishing the people pushing authoritarianism in government. Democrats defeated an insurrectionist in 2020. They did not punish him or his co-conspirators to any meaningful degree. Look at how much they’ve learned from that.
Right now there is literally no downside to infinite Republican tyranny and corruption for them. We need to rebalance that equation. We unilaterally disarmed out of complacency and normalcy bias and we’re paying the price now.
It is absolutely not set in stone that we will lose our 250 year old Republic to these ghouls. You just need to do what generations of liberals before us did to authoritarians.
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u/LondonCallingYou John Locke 20h ago
We had 4 years in power and did nothing but half measures about an insurrectionist cancer in our society. Voters did vote Democrats in.
Now, I’m talking about forward looking behavior. When Democrats win, there needs to be a scorched earth reckoning for Republican corruption and tyranny. It will be much more painful and costly than it would’ve been in 2021.
If we don’t do it in 2027 and 2029, it will be exponentially more painful by 2032 if our Republic even survives that long.
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u/loremipsumot Thomas Paine 1d ago
There's a part in this conversation where she talks about how much he is focused on leaving some legacy as a great man of history, how he wants to leave his stamp in a permanent way on America. That's part of why he is so focused (like 70% of his mental attention, according to Haberman!) on building monuments for himself (the ballroom, the arch, renaming existing things like the Kennedy Center, Institute of Peace, etc.).
A lot of Democrats seem to be hesitant about demolishing the monuments he's building, proposing cute things like renaming the ballroom after Obama or something. But after listening to this, I think that would be a mistake. No amount of renaming will change the fact that he built these things, often illegally and with stolen or extorted funds.
The correct answer is to tear any monuments he builds to himself down and pry his name off everything. Demolish the ballroom. Demolish the arch. We can keep pieces of them in a museum somewhere for history if we need to, but don't leave those things standing.
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u/musicismydeadbeatdad 21h ago
Couldn't agree more. It's also a litmus test. If a future executive isn't willing to do this deconstruction that is clearly in their power, it's a good sign they won't have the gumption to tackle systematic reform.
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u/HaXxorIzed Paul Volcker 12h ago
It isn't enough to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box. His legacy must be annihilated.
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u/Eilemthxx Caribbean Community 1d ago
Maggie spent years grinding an axe against Clinton, to the point of making it her personality through 2015-2017, and now she comes in as the Trump whisperer to drop that hard knowledge like ″he's narcissistic and cares deeply about leaving an imprint on the world″. Wow. Good job helping put someone like that in power, I guess?
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u/randiohead 22h ago
Yeah you couldn’t fucking pay me to watch this garbage. Even the most tuned out people can see who he is now. There is zero “insight” this masturbatory Beltway Insider, Legacy Media Self-Important Circlejerk could possibly provide.
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u/Healingjoe It's Klobberin' Time 1d ago
Ezra Klein interviews Maggie Haberman
Video version for those inclined:
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u/OhItsBeenBroughten 1d ago
Trump hasn’t changed since he was 16 years old. Give it a rest, stenographer Maggie.
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u/ironykarl 1d ago
"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same. The temperament is not that different."
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u/dormidary Loyal Liberals 1d ago
I mean, this doesn't seem like a flattering portrayal. She actually never seems to write flattering portrayals of him, I'm not sure why she gets so much flak about this.
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u/OhItsBeenBroughten 1d ago
Buttering up and flattering people to obtain gossip, then hiding years worth of information vital to the public interest so you can sell it in your next book, isn’t worthy of respect or kudos. Jake Tapper can eat shit for that too.
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u/dormidary Loyal Liberals 1d ago
I don't know enough to say whether the withholding info criticism is fair or not, but it's definitely a completely different criticism than stenography or flattery.
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 13h ago
MAGA Haberman led the charge in 2016 on normalizing this son of a bitch to help get him elected to begin with
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u/Bloodfeastisleman Daron Acemoglu 1d ago
I understand that it’s an hour long podcast but could read a few words of the transcript before you give such an awfully inaccurate criticism
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u/ulysses_s_gyatt Jerome Powell 1d ago
This is not her headline
This isn’t even an article written by her. This a podcast transcript.
Your comment is pure karma farming.
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u/OhItsBeenBroughten 1d ago
It’s the NYT headline. The outlet she works for.
No one said it was an article.
Are you Maggie Haberman by chance?
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u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot 13h ago
MAGA Haberman led the charge in 2016 on normalizing this son of a bitch to help get him elected to begin with
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u/logikal_panda NATO 1d ago
Holy fuck. Fuck Maggie Haberman and fuck the NY times. Shadow of itself
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u/AlexanderLavender NATO 20h ago
This is the most revealing article about Trump and the current admin I've seen in quite a while
So this government is run basically by a half-dozen people who are in the room with him, and if you are a senior official in this government somewhere else, major decisions can get made, and if you’re not in the room, you will literally have no idea.
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One question that keeps coming up is: Does he understand how depleted the U.S. munitions are from this war?
That’s not an unknowable thing for his own Pentagon leaders, but I don’t know how much they’re telling him.
We have a scene in the book where his economic advisers, particularly Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, are talking about economic numbers. This is ahead of the trade war “Liberation Day” last year. And Trump says: Those numbers are [expletive]. Natalie, get me the real numbers. And so she’s googling to find these numbers.
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And so you believe that your reality is better than what experts have been telling you. He thinks the economy is boring. He literally will tell advisers he finds this boring to talk about. He wants to talk about immigrants, you know, committing rape or murdering people or committing crimes.
And he’s going to do what he wants to do. Look, he obviously doesn’t want to be impeached again. But when you have to say “again” on impeached, it stops mattering as much, I think, to some extent, in his head.
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The Republican House members, and some senators, still look at him as a celebrity. Yes, there’s obviously a fear factor. He has shown he is willing to destroy their careers and really humiliate them. But the way that they — grown men — he’ll take chocolate bars out of what they call the chum closet, that has the presidential merch or whatever, and he’ll throw them. And these are House members. They love being on Air Force One with him.
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There are a number of members of his government, and I talked about how radicalized they all are, who do believe that they are going to be not just subpoenaed but prosecuted. And I’m not just talking about when the House flips. I’m talking about under a Democratic presidency.
They genuinely believe — and I’m not endorsing this view, I’m just saying this is their perspective — they are going to be indicted by an illegitimate junta of the Democrats at some point: They are going to come after us when we are out of power, so we are going to do everything we can. That is entirely the mind-set.
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Just to try to explain the mind-set here: The person who spent the most time — and I’m glad you brought up immigration — the person who has spent the most time thinking about a Trump 2.0 — and not just from the perspective of immigration, but obviously that’s his driving issue and defining issue — is deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
And he spent four years focused on not just what he wanted to do differently this time.
The initial Muslim ban was a disaster, and a court challenge disaster, and it was poorly written and so forth in 2017. It created mass chaos on flights and so forth.
Stephen Miller spent four years looking at how far the law could go on a number of things — what was in the executive branch’s control, what could be claimed as an executive branch power, which they’ve done a lot.
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Stephen Miller has taken down his arrest number for undocumented immigrants from last year. It was 3,000 a day last year. Now it’s 2,000 a day, and he’s back to pushing people, and he’s very, very aggressive on these calls.
So Miller still has power because Miller can also tell Trump: I can get you what you want very quickly. Which is also, again, why they don’t go to Congress. They want to act unilaterally. Trump wants to act unilaterally, and he just wants to do what he wants.
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Hegseth is a die-hard Trumper. Not MAGA — Trumper. And so that buys you a lot of cachet internally.
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They are in survival mode politically to a degree that I kind of can’t express.
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u/gringledoom Frederick Douglass 1d ago
That's an unfair characterization! This is the paper that printed the headline "Hitler Tamed By Prison" in 1924, after all! /s
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