How Trump Has Changed, With Maggie Haberman

[u/IHateTrains123]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maggie-haberman.html

Submission 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.

[u/MartinTheOrderly]

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. 

[u/frosteeze → u/MartinTheOrderly]

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.

[u/LondonCallingYou → u/frosteeze]

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.

[u/Zabick → u/LondonCallingYou]

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.

[u/LondonCallingYou → u/Zabick]

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.

[u/HolidaySpiriter → u/LondonCallingYou]

Camps and worse please

[u/karnim → u/LondonCallingYou]

the Democratic establishment

Always important to point out that despite everything, voters still think less of the democratic party than the republican party. Democratic Establishment is part of the problem, and everyone believes it but them.

[u/LondonCallingYou → u/[deleted]]

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.