Opinion | ‘Is the Destruction the Point?’: Three Opinion Writers on Trump’s First 50 Days

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I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of “New York Times” Opinion. And this is “The First 100 Days,” a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.

OK, so we’re now halfway through Trump’s first 100. The onslaught of executive orders, executive pardons, executive muscle flexing to fire anyone Trump wants and close agencies. We’re seeing an unprecedented use of the word “unprecedented.” And this week, we’re seeing a president who promised a golden age of economic growth actually steering America toward a recession with his chaotic tariff policies.

It’s sometimes hard to find the language to meet the moment, so I wanted to talk to two of my colleagues, opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, and opinion contributor Frank Bruni, to try to make sense of it all. Michelle Goldberg, Frank Bruni, thanks for being here.

Patrick, thanks.

Great to be with you, Patrick.

So since we’re at the halfway mark through 100 days, I’d love to hear from each of you about an issue or person or moment that you think defines how Trump has used power during these first 50 days. Michelle, do you want to start?

Sure. I mean, there’s a few, but one that stands out for me is the gutting of USAID, both because it’s illegal, it’s so flagrantly immoral, and so utterly self-destructive.

During the first Trump term, I would sometimes have to catch myself because even though I thought and think that Trump is uniquely despicable and dangerous, the fact remains that if you just want to look at the lives lost and global damage done, George W. Bush really outstripped him.

Trump was maybe a worse person, but the damage that he did was much more contained to the United States. And I think that in the second Trump term, he’s changed that very quickly, not just by taking America’s soft power in all sorts of ways and setting it on fire, but really making these abrupt decisions that are going to kill hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million people and doing it in this incredibly arbitrary, careless way.

And I just want to say something really quick before we get to Frank. I have a 12-year-old son who, as he learns more about various dark chapters in American history, can get really down on this country. And so I find myself often in the strange position of trying to talk up American greatness, because I don’t want him to feel despair about the country that he’s growing up in.

And it’s occurred to me that every single thing that I have pointed out to him as a sign of American greatness or goodness, whether that be foreign aid, whether that be our support for Ukraine, our success in welcoming immigrants and refugees, our scientific preeminence — everything that I thought was best about America, Trump has either destroyed or tried to destroy in less than two months.

It’s really interesting to hear Michelle talk about that because I don’t have children, and I feel so much despair and fear and heartache about what’s going on. And I often do wonder, what do you say to children at this time? How do you maintain their optimism and their belief that they do live in a special country? So that’s fascinating for me to hear.

The two things that stand out to me are related. And they have to do with a culture of intimidation that President Trump has created. Among all that’s happened, these seem like the clearest baby steps or not even baby steps towards something like autocracy.

I think of what happened on day one. And I worry that because it happened on day one, in such a blizzard of activity, that it’s gotten lost. But granting pardons, clemency of various kinds to the 1,500, 1,600 defendants in the January 6 cases, that was an extraordinary and chilling, chilling thing.

And what it said to those who would support him or who steadfastly support him is there will be a reward to being on Team Trump. And at the same time, another thing that’s been forgotten, I think, too much, is his withdrawal of the security details from Mike Pompeo, from John Bolton, and from a few others. These were people who were facing credible death threats from Iran because of their service to the United States.

Because of their service to Donald Trump.

Correct. And that was so extraordinary. I remember I was here at Duke, where I teach. Maggie Haberman came down to do a panel. And when I asked her the question, what has surprised you, the only thing that had really surprised her, she said, and had chilled her to the bone, was that, was the withdrawal of the security details because it was such an exercise of brute power.

But I mention those two things because they’re entwined, and it’s about a system of rewards and punishments that says, if you countermand me, if you contradict me, if you speak against me, there will be consequences. But if you go along with me, if you do as I please, there will be rewards.

Michelle, makes me think of your great column this week about what’s happening at Columbia University. I mean, listening to Frank, also thinking about your point about USAID, are Americans only safe if we’re on Donald Trump’s side?

So I think that there’s probably a scale of exposure. And I think that the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a leader in the Columbia protests against Israel last year — he’s someone who — he has a green card. He’s married to an American. He’s expecting a baby soon.

The idea that someone can be taken away arbitrarily, it certainly means that people with green cards, of whom there’s about 13 million, have fewer protections than they did a few months ago because until very recently, it was settled law that if you were inside the country — and particularly if you were somebody who had a green card — you had the same constitutional protections as American citizens.

That is clearly no longer the case. And so you might think, well, I’m safe because I’m an American citizen. But I think that what this shows is that a government that is this willing to ignore free-speech protections for one group obviously can’t be counted on to uphold them for the rest of us.

Frank, do you think that Trump actually cares about any of this destruction that he’s undertaking, or is the destruction the point? By which I mean, I’m not sure if Donald Trump really cares about foreign aid and soft power. And I’m not sure he really cares if he’s putting John Bolton at risk or not.

I feel like he left the first term and entered the second term wanting to be a doer. It’s the action that’s the thing.

I could not agree with you more. I don’t think he has a coherent value structure, as most of us understand it. And I think we’re seeing a president who’s operating without anything any of us would recognize as a conscience, truly.

It is about showing what he can get away with. It’s about showing his enemies what that they supported, he can tear down. It is all about a display of brute strength. He gets off on that. And in that sense, it seems not so much an autocracy, but a flexocracy. Let me show you how I can flex my bicep as I use it to power my fist coming into your face. That’s what it feels like.

Just to build on what Michelle was talking about is we’re seeing clear violations of free speech. You know we’re in that territory when Ann Coulter, who is, as she said in a social media post, that she’s for almost every deportation. But wait a second, what’s happening with Mahmoud Khalil feels like a clear violation of the First Amendment.

When Ann Coulter is raising that point in this context, you know we’ve strayed onto some very, very interesting and dangerous territory. But it’s so fascinating to me, Patrick and Michelle, that many of Trump’s supporters in the middle, for lack of a better word, said, we want free speech. We’re tired of cancel culture. We’re tired of the language policing on the left.

And there are legitimate complaints there for absolute sure. But what we’re getting in return is not free speech. We’re getting a different kind of censorship. And we’re getting a different kind of approved speech.

And that goes back to your question, Patrick. It’s not about any coherent values. It’s not about any North Star. It’s about showing that you can turn the boat 180 degrees around, that you can do whatever you want, and you can bring the people who opposed you and were against you to their knees.

Well, and I also think free speech means something different for someone like Elon Musk than it does for a civil libertarian. It means that I get to say whatever I want without restriction, and you have to listen, and you have to take it. And I’m the one who has the power to redefine terms, not you.

And so there’s this glorying in seizing the power that they felt the left was exercising unfairly. And for some people, that’s what free speech was really about. It was about a system of social norms that provided maximum grace towards the most powerful people in society.

At the same time, when you talk about people in the middle, there’s also just a lot of people in this country who do not like being told what to say. And it’s really interesting that one of the most unpopular things that Trump has done, if you look at polls, is try to make people call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Michelle, I want to pick up on your point about Elon Musk. Now, I have been more guilty than most in commissioning lots of op-eds, columns on Elon Musk in the last 50 days. But I really think he has been the story. He’s my pick for this first halfway point.

And it’s not just his chainsaw for the government. I think Musk is bad disruption personified. And I think, more than anyone, he’s set the tone for this administration in throwing out ideas, crazy ideas to provoke and change America.

I think Elon Musk is at war with America as we know it. I think he sees the government, media, and academia as proxies for the Democratic Party. He wants to break them. He wants to redefine society as a two-gender deal.

He doesn’t like NATO. He doesn’t like the UN. He’s all for grabbing natural resources like Greenland and earth minerals in Ukraine. He doesn’t care about allies because he’s a completely unilateral mindset person. And I get the sense he wants to break the back of America, to rebuild it to his specs.

In some ways, the person who best understands this, as much as I hate to say it, is Steve Bannon, who has talked about Musk being a technofeudalist. And I do think that that is a pretty accurate picture of where he wants to take us.

And I also think that’s one reason why this administration has been so different in some ways. And it’s because Trump is fundamentally — for all his hyperactivity, he’s also sort of lazy and hands-off in a lot of ways.

Yes. Yes. And he sees Musk as a glorious, successful businessman, right?

Right. And so the people who are actually running a lot of the government day to day in the first Trump administration were normal Republicans, some of them who thought of themselves as people who were protecting the government from Donald Trump.

And at the time, I thought that they were doing us a disservice by propping him up and shielding the country from the consequences of electing someone like Donald Trump as president. And I think that this second term has really borne that out.

It made people very complacent about putting such an erratic figure in charge of the most powerful country in the world. And so now, instead of them running the day-to-day operations of the government, it’s both a bunch of Project 2025 ideologues, but also Elon Musk and his band of feral children with —

People keep talking about the feral children, Michelle. But I see it differently. I think of them as world builders. I think of them as all these Tolkien kind of kids who want to rebuild a world in the shape of Musk. And they’re willing to drive the economy into a ditch if they need to.

The notion that it’s all just kids running around accessing our data, and they don’t know what they’re doing — I’m a little worried that they do actually know what they’re doing.

I think it depends on what you — I think that maybe they know what they’re doing in terms of wanting to cripple the, quote, unquote, “deep state.” But why these systems exist in the first place, I don’t think they understand.

And you see that with Musk being like, oh, we made a mistake. We fired the people who were trying to halt the spread of Ebola, but then we hired them back. Of course, he didn’t. None of that has been reconstructed. So actually, I don’t think that, in many cases, they know what they’re doing.

Frank, can I ask you about where Trump fits into this? Because I think of Trump as someone who is so hyperconfident, so narcissistic. He’s his own person. But I think he’s also taken with the idea of world building. I think he very much wants Greenland, and he’s going to try to manifest that into being.

But what I don’t understand is, is Trump his own person, or like Michelle was getting at, is he kind of a lazy, half-checked-out guy who’s happy to sit back and watch Elon and Rubio get into it, and Elon smash and grab and just see where it takes us, even if it takes us into an economic ditch?

Well, it’s a little bit of both. He likes to sit back — I think that’s clear — and watch Musk and Rubio tangle. But he sits back knowing that they’re tangling because they’re both in his good graces for the time being. They’re tangling because he put them in positions where they have some kind of power and agency and investment to tangle.

To him, so much is a show. At the end of that disgraceful, shocking meeting in the Oval Office with him, Vance, and Zelenskyy, I believe one of his —

Children, Frank. Children.

Yeah. I believe one of his final comments was — he turned to someone and said, that’ll make great television, huh? The significance of that comment is immense. He sees so much of this as a spectacle.

He’s staging a spectacle for Americans. He’s staging a spectacle for his own amusement. And Musk — I think it’s interesting, Patrick, that you keyed in on him. I think where he and Trump are complete doppelgangers is in their understanding of power and what should be done with it.

And one of the fundamental changes here is it used to be, to some extent, imperfectly, in America, we saw the measure of power as being our grace. Our stature was reflected in how big and generous a player we could be on the world stage, with generous being part of the mix.

To Trump and Musk — and you mentioned Greenland — power is acquisition. Power is bringing people who disagree with you into submission. Power is just basically concentrating as much influence and wealth around you as you can. And that is diametrically opposed, at least to the story we used to tell ourselves about America and power.

I find myself both nodding along and also feeling like we just lack the language to talk about what Trump is doing to our country. I hear so many Democrats talk about Trump as an authoritarian or an autocrat or make comparisons to Putin.

And I just wonder, is that adequate to the moment? Does that fully capture it? Does this man defy historical comparison or comparison in the world stage? When people say, well, the test of a constitutional crisis is going to be whether Trump defies an order from the Supreme Court, does that language even capture it?

Or is the language that I’m groping for a language about a country where so many people may not care whether Trump defies an order or not.

There’s two different levels. On the one hand, is the language accurate? And on the other, does the language meet the moment or communicate to people the danger that we’re in?

Yes.

I think that in terms of historical parallels, obviously none are exact, but there’s a lot. And, as I say in my column, I really have to ration my Hannah Arendt references because otherwise I would just be constantly larding my columns with citations from the origins of totalitarianism.

So it is true that there is a sense of profound apathy. And one of the right-wing views that I’ve maybe come around to in the course of the last abominable decade is that we do need more classical civic education, because without it, it’s very hard to communicate to people why these various limitations on the government and separation of powers and the like is worth preserving and is worth being alarmed about when it’s destroyed.

I don’t think there are tidy comparisons. And I think it’s the overwhelming fact of that that is what has so many people numb and tuned out and feeling helpless or just not really paying attention.

To begin to really look hard at Trump’s indecencies, at his overreach, at his defiance of the law and his contempt for — I’m going to use the word “norms.” And that’s a perfect example of how language fails us. But to start staring at that hard and long is to end up in a black hole from which you can never escape.

And I bet you all three of us of feel that emotionally after years of writing and talking about this. And so I do think there are many Americans who, because it’s so impossible to comprehend, because the immensity of the departure from past presidents and from the American past as such, that they really end up concentrating all their worries on the price of eggs.

We, in the media, who are paid to spend time thinking about and analyzing all of this, one of our greatest shortcomings is we forget how many Americans have these overstuffed, stressed days in which if they have half an hour to follow the news, that’s a lot.

And Donald Trump and Steve Bannon — I mention him because he’s the big proponent of the “flood the zone” strategy — they’re counting on that. They know that.

Yes, I think that’s right. And they know that a lot of those people aren’t sitting around debating the finer points of what a constitutional crisis is. I do wonder, though, in terms of that numbing, maybe what’s going on with the economy will start shaking some more people out of this. It’s not just the markets.

I think it already has to some degree, around the edges. But you already see Trump’s approval rating, which was positive for the first few weeks of his administration, is already underwater, although only slightly.

His numbers in polls on the economy are pretty bad. And the information environment is so bad that it’s not clear to me how much people are making the connection between, say, Trump saying that he can’t rule out a recession and the value of their retirement portfolio crashing.

I thought it was a remarkable moment in the last couple of days when Trump retweeted something or retruthed — God. Something from —

Retruthed, Michelle!

— on his Truth Social thing. But this post from Charlie Kirk that said, shut up about the price of eggs. And then said, Donald Trump’s saving you money in so many other ways.

But again, this is the most tiresome pundit observation. But imagine if Joe Biden had posted “shut up about the price of eggs” at a time when egg prices were increasing as rapidly as they did in his administration.

Yeah, we’re hearing more and more from CEOs privately that they’re not investing in their firms. They’re playing it safe. It’s not just the markets but the sense of this chaotic tariff policy and where it’s going to take people.

We know that Trump pays attention to numbers. He’s obsessed with his poll numbers. And he’s obsessed with markets. But again, what we were talking about before, that desire to break America down —

But that’s Trump’s idea of power. If I can destroy, if I can defile and march on relatively unscathed and unpunished, well, that makes me powerful. Other people can’t get away with that. And that’s how dominant, that’s how superior I am.

But Michelle made a really, really, really important reference a moment ago to the information environment. And what I think is so fascinating to watch right now and potentially deeply troubling — the markets are not doing well. The price of eggs is not coming down and on and on.

And there’s a widespread belief that OK, that’ll be his reckoning. Americans are going to see that, and they’re going to say, no, we need a change, just like we felt we needed a change from Joe Biden.

But with such a corrupted information environment and with such a committed demagogue in the White House, can Trump succeed in weaving a different narrative, selling a different narrative, appointing other people to blame, shifting the blame? Is he going to usher us into something that looks like a post-accountability era?

Frank, I think the answer is yes. He does defy in so many ways what would be a normal holding to account of a leader in power. I just never underestimate Donald Trump. It’s a rule of thumb of mine. Never underestimate the man.

And part of that is because there are so many Americans who just want leadership. And right now, they look at the Democratic party, they looked at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They didn’t see what they felt they needed to see to meet the moment politically.

What do you want to see from Democrats right now? What does leadership look like in this moment that would be effective in countering Trump, in holding him accountable?

I can give you one very short, easy answer. I want to see Elissa Slotkin’s response to Trump’s remarks to Congress. They were brief. They were to the point. They did not indulge in the hysteria that characterizes his approach to everything. So they provided a contrast. And this is key, I think. There’s an ongoing, intense argument in the Democratic Party. Do we match his tactics with those sorts of tactics of our own? Do we fight fire with even more fire?

And I think the way you get a change, the way you win elections, is to provide a contrast. And most of those responses to a State of the Union or to this almost State of the Union, non-state of the Union, most of those have been pretty lame and disappointing.

And I thought the way in which Elissa Slotkin’s response boiled it down to three fundamental American concerns, talked about those in language that was plain and that had not a trace of “can’t” in it and simply said, here is what is not being done correctly. And we care as much about those issues, but we’d approach them in a much more effective and commonsensical way.

I think she gave us the answer for how to respond to Trump. And I think maybe we’re doing too much hand-wringing and not looking at the obvious.

So I think her response was very good. And Elissa Slotkin is very impressive. But I also think that there has to be a measure of leadership and authenticity that comes from responding to where people actually are.

Now you have millions and millions of people who are so horrified, are so aghast by what’s happening. I talk to them all the time. And they feel like they have no leadership. They feel like nobody is articulating what they’re feeling. And they feel like nobody is doing anything about it and telling them where we go from here.

Those people, they need and deserve leadership as much as people who are voting based on the price of eggs. And it’s just not there. We don’t really have an opposition party.

Michelle, I want to read you a letter that we got last week after our episode with David Brooks, where David and I were talking about Trump’s address to Congress, Elissa Slotkin’s response, but also pieces like the James Carville op-ed that we had about Democrats needing to wait it out.

I heard from a lawyer in Ithaca who wrote this. “Democrats should wait it out? You guys apparently have no idea how angry and upset we regular citizen Democrats are at the lack of action by our elected officials. We are beside ourselves out here. We are watching what’s happening and seeing no one in Congress doing anything significant to stop it.”

And she went on and conveyed what you were getting at, Michelle, just that sense of wanting someone to lead, having someone take some kind of action, or at least lay out a plan of folks, this is how we’re going to meet the moment, and we’re going to get through the moment.

Can any one leader meet it, Michelle? Do you think that’s possible? One person, like a Bernie or an AOC?

Look, it’s probably not going to just be one person. But at the same time, there is this political mantle just out there that just as a matter of political entrepreneurship, you would think more people would be trying to grab.

Frank, any thoughts on our letter writer from Ithaca?

Listen, I feel the letter writer’s pain in terms of agreeing that this country is in a dire place, and it’s scary as hell, and the appetite for some sort of action that would take us out of this as fast as possible. I share that appetite.

I think Democrats don’t have a lot of cards to play right now. And I would throw that into the mix. One of the things that Democrats aren’t doing, it’s not the kind of thing that you get to explain in a rousing fashion on a podium with a microphone in front of you. But Democrats are fighting in courts.

And some of the most hopeful things that we’ve seen happen are courts saying, wait a second, too fast, let’s put the brakes on this. Maybe we can’t let this happen. But Democrats do not have a majority in Congress. They don’t have a lot of levers to pull here.

And I think a lot of the frustration gets translated into where is our inspiring, charismatic, spectacularly articulate leader, when really what’s wrong is that there aren’t a lot of cards to play.

Michelle, Frank, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you.

Thank you.