Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?

We are one year into Trump’s second term. And it feels like so much has happened – more than the human mind, or the country, can absorb. But how much has Trump really accomplished? What policies have changed the country in a way that will last? My guest Yuval Levin is one of the smartest thinkers on the right, and his verdict is: not that much. “There’s an important story to tell about the absence of action in the past year, too,” he tells me. Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the founder and editor of National Affairs and the author of several books on policy and political theory, including “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation – and Could Again.” Mentioned: Charts Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus Book Recommendations: Insecure Majorities by Frances E. Lee Making the Presidency by Lindsay M. Chervinsky Last Branch Standing by Sarah Isgur Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  As long as it may have felt, we are one year into Donald Trump's second term as president. To follow the Trump administration, the news is to be exposed to the full muzzle velocity of this presidency, the overwhelming procession of news stories, wild statements, like spectacular, outrageous, sometimes terrifying events. It feels like so much more is happening than the human mind, than the entire media, than the country can absorb. But how much has actually changed? How much has Trump actually gotten done? How many of these stories that were so spectacular when they began have followed through into durable difference in how the government works, or what it does, or how we live?

• 1:16Ezra Klein?

  About a year ago, just a few weeks into Trump's second term, I had Yuval Levin on the show. Levin is one of the smartest thinkers on the right, a real conservative who thinks deeply about institutions and the nature of the presidency and how these things work in the constitutional order. And at that time, he was, in some ways, a very measured voice. This was the moment of Doge and Musk and executive orders. And he was skeptical that as much was actually happening as seemed to be happening. So now, after this truly wild year, a truly historic year in American politics and life, I want to have him back on to see what he thinks has happened and how his analysis of Trump has or has not changed. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:13Ezra Klein?

  Yuval Levin, welcome back to the show.

• 2:15Yuval Levin?

  Thank you very much for having me, Ezra.

• 2:16Ezra Klein?

  So, we talked, at least on the show last year, right after Trump took office. And this was in the sort of early chaos. It was Doge and executive orders and this feeling that the entire presidency was being reshaped. They could do anything. You were a little less alarmist and were skeptical that they were going to accomplish as much as it felt like they might at that moment. We're a year into this long second term. Where are you now?

• 2:45Yuval Levin?

  Well, yeah, it has been a long year in a lot of ways. And there's been a lot of action, I would say. But I think that, on the whole, the view that they were not well set up to accomplish an enormous amount of durable policy change is still more or less my view. I think that a year in, you're hearing two kinds of stories. One story says there are a lot of accomplishments. The southern border is much more secure than it was a year ago. Woke, left-wing radicalism in a lot of institutions is back on its heels now. The Iranian nuclear program has been set back a lot. The war in Gaza is over and the surviving Israeli hostages are home.

• 3:29Yuval Levin?

  The big, beautiful bill is law. Unemployment's low, the economy is strong. It's a year of achievements. On the other hand, you can tell the story from the point of view of a Trump critic that says federal law enforcement has been contorted in the service of the president's grudges and priorities. The administration has intimidated all kinds of institutions throughout American life in this year. There are squads of masked agents pursuing immigrants around the country. Federal scientific research funding is in disarray. Tariffs have increased prices. These stories are both true at the same time. But the common denominator of these stories is that they're both stories about a lot of action.

• 4:14Yuval Levin?

  And I actually think that's not quite right and that there's an important story to tell about the absence of action in the past year, too. The absence of traditional uses of presidential power and authority in our system. There's been very little legislation. It's true, the big beautiful bill is law. Donald Trump has signed fewer pieces of legislation than any president in the modern era. The pace of regulatory action is actually slower than the past five or six presidents, if you look at the numbers. The amount that they're doing that amounts to durable policy change is actually pretty constrained. And so I think the question is, how do you reconcile the amount of activity with the

• 4:59Yuval Levin?

  absence of durable action? And to me, that's the story of the first year of this presidency.

• 5:04Ezra Klein?

  Walk me through the numbers you ran comparing federal spending in 2024, under Joe Biden, to federal spending in 2025, under Trump.

• 5:12Yuval Levin?

  Well, this is one of the striking things, is we spent the first six months of the year watching Doge take all kinds of actions intended to reduce federal spending and restructure the government. But at the end of the day, because there was no legislative action to change spending, there was no real change in spending. The government was on a continuing resolution, on two of them, for the entire year, so that we're still at Biden's spending levels. And overall, because the big beautiful bill spent a little more on immigration enforcement and on defense, and because appropriations were even for the year, the federal government actually spent 4% more in 2025 than in 2024.

• 5:55Yuval Levin?

  And so, a lot of times, when you see claims and descriptions and assertions of what's about to happen, it's worth kind of making a note for yourself and saying, I should come back to this in six weeks and ask, did this actually happen? And a lot of the things that everybody got very worked up over this year, not all of them, to be clear, there's a lot going on, and it's especially true in immigration and trade and a few other areas. But on the whole, it's important to see that the way the administration is acting, which is more narrow-cast and focused on specific news cycles and specific instances, means they have not gotten nearly as much accomplished as they say, and they've not gotten as much

• 6:38Yuval Levin?

  accomplished as most presidents do in the first year of a new presidency.

• 6:42Ezra Klein?

  One example of this is the National Institutes of Health, which people might have heard about them gutting spending for early in 2025.

• 6:50Yuval Levin?

  Right.

• 6:50Ezra Klein?

  What happened there?

• 6:52Yuval Levin?

  The story of NIH spending is very interesting because in most areas of government, if you track it month by month, and this is the way to track federal spending, there's there are a lot of ways to chop up the numbers, but there's a monthly Treasury statement that just reports how much money went out the door. And I think that's the number to look at. It's public, it's on the internet, it's very easy to read. In most departments, those numbers looked identical in 2025 to 2024. Appropriations were the same, and so spending out the door was the same. There was a long government shutdown, but at the end of it, all the money went out. And so in the end, it looks the same. NIH looks very different. In the first six months of the year, NIH spending was far behind its 2024 levels.

• 7:35Yuval Levin?

  And there seemed to have been a decision made to withhold spending, to redirect spending, and I would argue even to force a confrontation over impoundment. The president just ignoring Congress and not spending appropriated money on NIH money. And then in June or early July, you see a sudden acceleration of NIH spending. And clearly, there was some kind of decision made that actually, no, the money has to go out the door by the end of the year. They did that in a way that deformed or distorted some of that spending. So they decided to spend multi-year money all in one year in a broad range of federal grants in order to be able to get the money out the door so that 100% of the appropriated

• 8:20Yuval Levin?

  amount would be spent by the end of the fiscal year on October 1st. That's going to create problems down the road because these multi-year grants, the institutions that receive them are not really equipped to spend them all in one year. But in any case, a decision was made, I think it's unavoidable from looking at the numbers, a decision was made to avoid an impoundment fight and to spend all the money. And by the end of the year, NIH had spent 100% of its appropriated money for the year.

• 8:46Ezra Klein?

  Something you've said to me that I've thought about after is that Trump governs retail rather than wholesale. What does that mean?

• 8:55Yuval Levin?

  I think there are a couple of ways to see that. And it's important to, as a way of reconciling those two stories that we started with. There's a way of thinking about what the president does that is about just being in the center of every news cycle. And Donald Trump is extremely good at that. And focusing on the issue of the day, sort of governing there, being the end of that story. But broadly speaking, the role that the president of the United States has is an administrative role. It's a role that uses, that has an enormous amount of power over vast terrains of American life through regulatory action, through administrative action, by setting uniform rules that govern entire sectors of society.

• 9:37Yuval Levin?

  The Trump administration in the past year has not been interested in exercising those powers in the ways that presidents normally do. The Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University tracks federal regulations. And they find that economically significant rulemaking has been slower than in the first year of the Biden administration, or the Obama administration, or Bush, or Clinton. There's been, as I say, much less legislation, and the president has not had a legislative agenda. I don't think there is a legislative agenda for the next three years of this administration. If you ask yourself, what do they want Congress to do? It's actually very hard to answer that question.

• 10:16Yuval Levin?

  What the president has done, though, is use the power of the executive as a way of exercising leverage to drive behavioral change in particular institutions. We saw this first, actually, with Doge. A lot of what Doge did was take control of federal grant-making in ways that were hyper-focused, that were grant by grant, and they were essentially trying to govern one by one. I think on the whole, and we can talk about that, the Doge experiment didn't really work. What they tried to do didn't succeed, and it's mostly over. But we've seen a second way of exercising power one by one like that.

• 10:57Yuval Levin?

  And that is through retail deal-making in place of wholesale policymaking. So that the president has Gone deal by deal, one by one, trying to gain some advantage or use some leverage to drive behavioral change. You know, in the universities, this maybe to change admissions or hiring. In law firms, he wanted to get some specific concessions. He wants discounts from drug companies, and that's his approach to reducing health costs. He's buying up segments of chipmakers. It's a very unusual way for the president to think about the role that he has. And so, deal making gives the president more leverage, more freedom.

• 11:39Yuval Levin?

  It allows him, in a focused way, to advance his own priorities and not go through the usual processes of rulemaking and legislation. It's a way that gives the impression of a lot of action, but that, in fact, is very narrowly focused. And each of these deals achieves something relatively small. It can be significant, it can be important, but it's not broad governance. A lot of the institutions that are making these deals see this as a way to get through the next three years. They see it as a way to avoid changes in regulations or in law, and therefore, to protect their freedom of action, rather than to give ground to the government.

• 12:19Yuval Levin?

  And ultimately, these are just not ways of securing meaningful, durable change. You see that with the deals made with the pharmaceutical companies, for example, where they agreed to lower prices on specific drugs, and then they started the year, those same companies, by raising prices in general. It leaves them with a lot of room. It's not the way the government normally achieves its purposes, but it is very much the mode of action of this administration so far.

• 12:45Ezra Klein?

  One thing we saw in Trump's first year was this assault, really, on the universities. And picking pretty the Ivy League ones, but not only them, off one by one, to bring them more into line with what the Trump administration wanted them to be. What has that achieved? How do you see its status now? I think people are seeing less from it. What did it all amount to?

• 13:10Yuval Levin?

  I think that's really an instance where policy by deal making shows some of its limits. The administration has had a lot of influence on a small number of universities that it chose as targets and which it forced into some governance changes, some of which will be good for those universities and some not, but which the administration wanted. It forced them into them by individual deals. The administration tried to broaden that out into something more like policy. It put out a compact for higher education, which it wanted all universities to sign on to. And the response that compact received from a number of elite universities right away

• 13:52Yuval Levin?

  was basically, "Well, no, let's do one-on-one deals." There's a fascinating letter to the administration from Brown University's administration, which basically said, "No, the way to do this is just, let's have an arrangement between you and us that helps us figure out what you want and what we can do out of that." The compact basically fell apart. It did not succeed. No university signed on, and the administration returned to a process of deal making. And what you find there is that the universities prefer these individual deals to changes in the Higher Education Act or changes in the regulatory structure of the government's relationship with them, because they see the deals as more manageable, they have some

• 14:35Yuval Levin?

  more negotiating leverage. I think that some of what the administration is trying to do would be much better achieved by legislation. And I actually think it's possible to imagine a legislative change to the Higher Education Act that would get some democratic votes. It wouldn't do everything the administration wants, but it would do some important things. The White House has shown no interest in that, and the universities, in acting defensively in this moment, seem to prefer those deals too, which I think tells us a lot.

• 15:04Ezra Klein?

  There's an interesting dynamic where retail deal making fits the bandwidth of the news and legislation doesn't.

• 15:14Yuval Levin?

  Exactly.

• 15:15Ezra Klein?

  People do not know a tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, the big, beautiful bill for that matter.

• 15:25Yuval Levin?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:26Ezra Klein?

  That in legislation, often much more change is happening than people realize, but you cannot fit it into the size of a news story. You cannot even fit it into the size of a dozen. And people's attention spans, and particularly as we've gone down to social media, things are just flying by really quickly. Whereas these deals, they cut a deal with Nvidia, they cut a deal with Japan.

• 15:49Yuval Levin?

  Right.

• 15:50Ezra Klein?

  They actually fit, not maybe everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable, right? They made a deal with this university, they intimidated this person, they launched an investigation here. Everything has the size of a news story functionally. I mean, I have never covered an administration before where the problem was not that we have a communication problem where people don't know how much we're doing, right? That is what every administration, Biden, Obama, Bush, right? They all felt that way. Whereas Trump, in a way, it's almost, at least in your telling, and I do want to complicate this eventually, but it's almost the opposite, that the pace of events feels actually faster in some ways than the events themselves.

• 16:33Yuval Levin?

  Yes, absolutely. There is, there's more said than done, there's more above the surface than beneath the surface, and it is very well suited to a telling of the story. And one way I think about it is, the president wants himself to be at the end of every story on Fox News. And so, something's going on in the world, and it's this or it's that, it's troubling, it's challenging, and at the end of the story, Donald Trump has solved that problem. And one way to think about that is, he wants to do everything, he wants to control everything. But it's actually a very narrow notion of what the president can do. And it's not using most of the powers of the chief Executive of the American government.

• 17:16Yuval Levin?

  But it's absolutely true and it's not just legislation, but regulation too works this way. There's never a moment when you can sort of say, we've done this. When you're, when you're moving regulatory action. There's a proposed rule and there's comments and it's years. And at the end of the day, you've done something that's going to endure, but it's not an easy story to tell. And it's very dull and lawyerly. And if you just instead make a deal with Brown University or with Nvidia. Then you can just say that day and there's the CEO and he says it too. And something big is going on. And so I think this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. And it has created an impression of an enormous amount of action.

• 17:57Yuval Levin?

  When the real amount is not zero by any means, but we're living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.

• 18:05Ezra Klein?

  But deals and particularly deals, events, the decapitation of USAID, these retail moments. That are graspable, that are in many cases spectacular. They do serve to communicate things about how the country works now, how this regime works. And I do wonder if looking at federal spending numbers or rules passed understates that. Let's take Doge. I mean, you touched on this actually, but I always understood Doge's actual purpose. As the intimidation of the civil service of the federal bureaucracy. That there was a view among many Republicans that the federal bureaucracy was liberal and woke and opposed to them. And it hampered them in Trump's first term.

• 18:48Ezra Klein?

  And so they made examples of a series of agencies, the USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And people at the Department of Education and so on. And both those were real, right? They did change those agencies and functionally destroyed a few of them. But it was also a message to everyone else in the civil service as the firings were, as everything was.

• 19:12Yuval Levin?

  Right.

• 19:12Ezra Klein?

  To either shut up or get on board, right? You can be cowed, you can be on the team, but otherwise they're going to come for you. And that might have changed things at a cultural level, which would matter. Do you think that's happened?

• 19:26Yuval Levin?

  Absolutely. This is what I mean when I say that they've used the power of the presidency as leverage to drive behavioral change, attitude change. They've used the weight of the government as a kind of cudgel to push people around. And that's no small thing, and I think it does create cultural changes. I do think that if you take a longer term view, and I don't mean a generational view, but a kind of medium term, five, 10 year view, this way of doing things does achieve less than it seems to in the news cycle. But absolutely, they're changing the attitude of people who work for the government. They're changing the attitude of people who rely on the government for funding or just

• 20:08Yuval Levin?

  for a stable relationship that makes business possible. I would say that the effect that's having is to undermine people's sense of the American federal government as a predictable, reliable player in various arenas at home and abroad. And so it's not the specifics of what the administration is driving people to do. I don't think it's actually going to be possible to go back to the pre-Trump attitude toward the federal government. A university president who was forced by the administration's actions in the first half of the year to reckon with just how dependent that university is on federal funding

• 20:51Yuval Levin?

  and just how dependent that funding is on the president's personal priorities is never going to look at his budget the same way again. Even if the next president is very friendly to whatever that university president wants to do or be, it will always be in the back of his mind that this can change, that this could go away, and I shouldn't make long term plans that assume that this relationship is steady. I think that's true about a lot of other countries, thinking about the United States too, after the past year. The assumption that the United States would just play a kind of stabilizing role in various environments is no longer tenable. And yeah, I think a lot of people who have depended on the government without thinking

• 21:35Yuval Levin?

  about it too much now have to think about it more. Now, I'd say there's some good in this. Some of that dependence was really, as the president likes to say, abusing the government or using it. Universities should depend on the federal government less than they do. But the downside of this, the cost of it, is much higher than the upside because the sheer stability made possible by a predictable, reliable federal government was a massive invisible subsidy of American life. It made it possible for Americans to make assumptions about what various institutions could do for them that we've never really had to think about. There's an engine of basic research humming in the background of our lives.

• 22:17Yuval Levin?

  There are ways in which other countries treat Americans because of what they expect our government to be for them that we just take for granted. And if we can't take that for granted, the costs will feel and be very real. So I'm not suggesting that nothing's changed, but I think that we have to see that the way in which this president has thought about his role and his power is very different, very distinct from how most presidents do. I think it's short-termism. I think ultimately it doesn't advance the ball in the way that some of the president's supporters think, but it is changing things, and some of that changes very much for the worse.

• 23:22Ezra Klein?

  The two places where I think there has been tremendous policy change are tariffs and immigration.

• 23:29Yuval Levin?

  Yes.

• 23:30Ezra Klein?

  And those do not show in the same way on a tracking of federal legislation passed or rules promulgated. But how do you understand those areas where Trump really has reshaped what the government is doing in ways that are affecting the real world in a... Very profound way.

• 23:51Yuval Levin?

  Yeah, immigration really does show up. Immigration is the great exception to the administration's general governing approach so far. And in immigration, they have used the traditional powers of the American president alongside all kinds of other things. There has been legislation, they got new authorities and new money from the reconciliation bill, the big beautiful bill earlier in the year. There has been regulation, they've been moving a lot of rules and regs and guidance in the traditional ways. The people running immigration policy in the administration know the system extremely well, and they are operating through it. They see the immigration bureaucracy as in the service of their policy in a way that isn't really the case almost anywhere else in the domestic sphere.

• 24:32Yuval Levin?

  And so, in immigration, absolutely, they have been using those powers, and they've driven a lot of change that will be durable. The changes at the border in particular are likely to endure, they've achieved a lot there. Changes in domestic enforcement are going to be a matter of the next president's priorities, and certainly may not endure, but changing what they're doing here is going to take a lot of work. Trade is a complicated story. On trade, the president has deployed powers that are not normally at his disposal, and it's unclear how much of that is going to endure. As we speak, the Supreme Court has not yet announced its decision in the tariff case that it faces, that could happen literally any day. And a lot of what the administration has done could be reversed, at least temporarily.

• 25:17Yuval Levin?

  It's worth looking at tariffs through the lens that we've just been using to look at domestic policy in general, because tariffs too have been used in a focused way, in a narrow way, country by country, but sometimes literally company by company. And Trump has used tariffs for leverage in individual instances to try to change behavior, as much as he's used it for what we would traditionally think of as trade policy. But without question, tariffs and immigration are the two exceptions to that mode of governance, and there's been a lot of action there.

• 25:47Ezra Klein?

  You keep saying Trump is doing this, Trump is doing that.

• 25:54Ezra Klein?

  Is that the way you understand what is happening? So you take a normal White House, right? The George W. Bush White House, the Barack Obama White House, the, I would even say this is how the Joe Biden White House worked, despite, I think, people later being less sure of that. And there is a policy process that ladders up and there are briefs delivered and then it goes all the way up and you have meetings with the Chief of Staff and the Domestic Policy Director and the President and the President's making decisions. And one thing that constrains how much happens in a day is that the policy process for significant decisions can only absorb so much. Is that what you understand to be happening in the Trump White House? A complex policy process laddering up to the President? Is it something different?

• 26:39Ezra Klein?

  How do you see the actual management structure of all this activity?

• 26:45Yuval Levin?

  I think the White House has been very different, but the effect has not quite been what you suggest there. I think in some ways it's actually made it narrower, not broader. But if you think about what the White House generally does, in modern presidencies, the work has been to organize and facilitate presidential decision making. That's what most people in the White House do. Their job is to organize information and structure policy questions so that when it's necessary, they can reach the President as a discrete question for the President to decide. Many policy questions get resolved before that and there isn't really a need for a presidential decision. That's part of the job, too.

• 27:26Yuval Levin?

  When I started working at the Bush White House at the beginning of Bush's second term, the Chief of Staff basically told me, you work on domestic policy, we're in the middle of two wars that need to take the President's attention, and if you're in the Oval Office driving a decision, it probably means something has gone wrong. That was the attitude in the second term. That's part of how the White House works. In this White House, the basic logic of the operation is that it moves decisions down into the bureaucracy. The president decides, or sets priorities, or has already said something for years, or on Twitter last night, and what happens is, we do it.

• 28:07Yuval Levin?

  There are not a lot of people around the president who are there to complicate decisions, which is what a lot of people in the White House normally do, or to bring in other sources of information. Things really are driven a lot by a fairly narrow range of priorities that are known to be the president's priorities and goals. And there's a very centralized policymaking structure, centralized in Stephen Miller, who's the deputy chief of staff for policy. That job, deputy chief for policy, was created first in the Clinton administration. It's existed ever since, but it works very differently this time. Stephen Miller, I would say, is the most powerful policy staffer in the history of the modern White House. Almost everything flows through him, and-

• 28:51Ezra Klein?

  He often seems to me to be the prime minister.

• 28:52Yuval Levin?

  Yeah, I mean, I think he drives a lot of action. He brings decisions to the president in the form of ideas. The president does say no sometimes. It's not that Miller's making policy by himself, but he's the person who puts things on the president's desk when it comes to policy, and also who takes the president's rhetoric and tries to turn it into policy by driving the system.

• 29:14Ezra Klein?

  I guess one reason, though, I'm a little skeptical of describing it so rationally is that, yes, at some level, Donald Trump is a final decision maker, and he does say no to certain Stephen Miller ideas. But if you listen to an interview with Donald Trump, if you watch him speak, if you read about or talk to people who brief him, Trump has a very erratic mind, is one way to put it. Somebody who used to brief him once, I've always remembered this description, that described briefing Donald Trump as chasing a squirrel around a garden.

• 29:49Yuval Levin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:50Ezra Klein?

  And I don't want to say he's manipulated by his advisers, because I don't think it's quite that, but they do know which code words and intuitions and ideas excite him.

• 30:06Ezra Klein?

  And he moves towards his own excitement. There's something very intentional. He's like his own Twitter algorithm. And, you know, he brings conversations back to his victories or to, you know, renovating, you know, the east wing of the White House. There was reporting on how, once Rubio figured out he could describe Maduro as a drug lord, like a crime kingpin, that seemed to like trigger for Donald Trump. And so you look at the way people in the White House and in the administration tweet, and sometimes it feels to me like a lot of people vying for the king's attention as much as anything else. And yes, they're doing it based off of a theory of what he wants. But he doesn't pay attention to dull, drab things.

• 30:50Ezra Klein?

  You got to do something big to get his notice.

• 30:54Yuval Levin?

  Well, I agree with that, but I think it feeds into a fundamental difference about the understanding of the president's role, where a lot of recent White Houses have thought of the president's role as making difficult decisions. The Trump White House sees it as advancing tough change. And those are different ways of thinking. So it's true, Donald Trump is all over the place. He says a lot of things. But all those things are about a fairly narrow range of subjects. And it's reasonably clear to the people around him, the direction that might appeal to him or that he might want to take. And so I think there's, there's more contending with what's on Trump's mind and less contending

• 31:36Yuval Levin?

  with what's happening in the world than there ought to be in the White House. A simple example, normally, senior appointed officials, say cabinet members, play a kind of dual role where they represent the president's views to the bureaucracy that they run in their department, but they also represent that bureaucracy to the president. They bring the expertise that's only available at the FDA or at the State Department into the decision-making process at the White House. And so the Secretary of State just kind of ends up being a champion for diplomacy and the Secretary of Defense for military action, because they're kind of speaking for different parts of the government. That's not happening now at all. As far as I can see, there are not debates happening in front of Donald Trump in the Oval

• 32:21Yuval Levin?

  Office or in front of Stephen Miller. The process doesn't land on an internal debate within the administration about policy direction. Decisions aren't structured that way. The process here, the structure of decision making is very different from what I can see.

• 32:36Ezra Klein?

  I did a conversation with my colleague at Times Pity, Masha Gessen, and their frame of reference is Russia under Vladimir Putin and the turn to autocracy there. And something they said to me is that there are democratic metrics for what is happening in a country and a system, and there are autocratic metrics for what is happening in a country and a system. And in their view, the democratic metrics here don't really tell the story. I mean, we've been talking about leverage a bit, which I think bridges the divide a little bit, but I would say there's a lot of things that look a lot to me like bribes and transactionalism and cabinet meetings where people go around and give very autocratic

• 33:21Ezra Klein?

  praise to the leader. And you have ICE agents in masks and now collisions on the streets and the National Guard in cities. And this reflects a little bit of the story you were talking about at the beginning that maybe liberals tell. But the thing I want to push on there is that in that story, there is a point to all this, that they are trying to build a different form of not even presidency, but regime. They are trying to make the whole system work differently. And in that respect, not going through Congress is actually part of the whole point because you do not want to be bound by Congress and its slowness and its deliberation and its laws. Not going through rulemaking processes is part of the point.

• 34:04Ezra Klein?

  You're trying to create this executive who functions more like an autocrat, an authoritarian or a king. What do you think of that?

• 34:14Yuval Levin?

  I think there is some truth to that, but that it's worth not being carried too far by the analogy to Russian autocracy or elsewhere, because it's not, I think, as thought through as that for most of the people involved. I think Donald Trump doesn't actually know how the American system usually works, which is a strange thing to say, he's already been president for five years. But it's not that he has a grasp of what that is and he's doing something different. What he's doing is what he takes the job to be of the chief executive of the national government of the world superpower. And his view of that is directionally autocratic. There's no way around it, it always has been.

• 34:59Yuval Levin?

  I think there are some people in the administration who have a more expressly consciously transformative view of what they're doing to the constitutional system. A sense that the government we need would have a much stronger president, would not be constrained by Congress, would not be constrained by procedural rules. And there is certainly some push in that direction. And it's very dangerous and very damaging, and those things really are happening. I would only add to that story one complication, which is that it's not ultimately succeeding so far, because there is a democracy underneath all that. What they're doing isn't popular.

• 35:41Yuval Levin?

  And the elements of it that they are now leaning into most seem to me to be the least popular parts of what they're doing. The masked agents on the street are not popular. And more than that, I would say there's a disposition, a way of speaking and thinking that emanates from this White House that is cold and hard and sees the world as just one harsh, intense confrontation after another. And that picture of American life, which is the way in which the administration speaks about the country, is not attractive, and it's not ultimately effective. I think, first of all, it's not right.

• 36:23Yuval Levin?

  It lacks the kind of grace and humanity that you ought to have when you have a lot of power in a free society. But it's also not smart. It's not politically effective. Think about what happened in Minneapolis, for example. Imagine if the president, wanting to build some support for the agents on the street there, said something like, "You look at that video and you see two people who have both panicked, who are in a situation they didn't expect, and they're both acting in ways they couldn't have thought through, and it was a tragic situation, and what the officer did there was not illegal. It was a reaction to a situation he found himself trapped in. There was a car coming at him." You could speak that way.

• 37:06Yuval Levin?

  I'm not sure it's true, but you could speak that way. What he said instead was, "This was a rabid activist who was trying to mow him down with her car. That's what immigration enforcement is like, and it's necessary to shoot these people." That's essentially what he said. That isn't a winning argument, and it still matters whether you win the argument. The president was elected by a coalition that was about 49% of the electorate, and he's now spent a year bringing that down to 40% rather than bringing it up to 55%. And I think that has a lot to do with the tenor that some critics perceive as authoritarian,

• 37:47Yuval Levin?

  but that is, at the very least, just cold and inhumane, and therefore, in our country, also ultimately unpopular.

• 38:22Ezra Klein?

  I think, in many ways, I'm probably closer to your side of the argument here than the other, but I want to voice the other, because I do think this goes to the core of, are we looking at democratic metrics, where you think about popular opinion and elections? Are we looking at autocratic metrics, where you think about power and suppression? Because... Many, many, many people, myself being one of them, have said from the beginning of these deployments, they are creating the conditions for a collision and a tragedy between federal ICE agents, CBP, National Guard, whomever, and protesters, immigrants. They're doing this in a very aggressive way, and they are creating the conditions which something is going to go terribly wrong. And then it does.

• 39:06Ezra Klein?

  And it's not like I think the order to shoot Renee Good dead came from a higher up. I mean, things were clearly happening very fast in the moment. But then you immediately see Kristi Noem and Trump and others come out with full-throated support for the agent. And from one perspective, whether or not that is popular, it is a signal. And the signal to ICE agents, to CBP agents, to the National Guard, and to protesters is, this is what can happen. And to the protesters, get out of our way, or you might lose your life. And that is, from one perspective, even if it's not popular, that is a consolidation of power.

• 39:50Ezra Klein?

  Maybe people think twice before being at a protest now. I've seen even just in the last few days, a few videos that feel to me like escalation in the aggression of ICE agents, talking about these provisions they can use to really jail and it seems to me, almost disappear people who are in their way. And so if you are looking at this not as, is it good politics, but is it good, in quotes, power consolidation? Maybe it is what they've not wanted, but it fits what their directionality has been.

• 40:23Yuval Levin?

  I agree with that, right up until the very end. So I agree with the description you offer, and I think that is part of what they're trying to do. I think you can see it in moments of crisis. In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk's murder, it looked as if they were just getting ready to start to crack down on groups on the left that they would now define as domestic terrorists. Where I don't quite agree is that I don't think it's actually effective. It certainly is setting a tone. It certainly is trying to have a chilling effect on opposition. I think that's right. But if we think about the political life of our country in time spans longer than a news cycle, maybe longer than a year or two, are they succeeding or failing here?

• 41:07Yuval Levin?

  I don't think that what they're doing is building public support. And so ultimately, I think the democratic metrics matter more, although those authoritarian metrics tell us something important. I think the democratic metrics matter more because they determine whether this is durable change. I've spent now 25 years in Washington, and I think one thing I've learned is that it always seems like the big question of the moment is the question for the duration, that it's going to extend into the future indefinitely, and that this is, whoever is winning now is winning. When in fact, it has turned out over and over that what looked like winning for a minute was losing.

• 41:50Yuval Levin?

  And both parties have fallen prey to this. That's what the cultural transformation of that woke moment in 2020 felt like. It's what the Obama moment felt like. It's what the post 9/11 moment felt like. It was a moment where people absolutely did get carried away by the big question of that instant. And where in retrospect, not a generation later, but a couple of years later, an election later, it turned out actually what was going on there was not what it seemed. And I think the administration is in the process of rendering itself unpopular. That is not to say that I don't worry about the effect they're having on our system of government.

• 42:35Yuval Levin?

  The excesses of presidential power will have lasting, damaging effects. The weakness of Congress, which has been exacerbated, didn't start this year, but it's been made worse, will have lasting and dangerous effects. I absolutely think we're seeing very grave problems develop before us. But I think it's worth keeping them in perspective so that we, on the one hand, can see some ways forward. And on the other hand, we can keep in reserve some vocabulary of authoritarianism. authoritarianism that if things get worse, we will need to say the sky has fallen before it has, just doesn't leave you enough to say when you face a much more grave threat. And I think it's worth seeing that there are ways in which they've been restrained

• 43:19Yuval Levin?

  by the system, by Congress and the courts. And we should try to have some perspective over what we're seeing, even though it's a very dramatic and in some ways dangerous moment.

• 43:29Ezra Klein?

  What are some of those ways they've been constrained?

• 43:30Yuval Levin?

  Well, look, let's think about Congress. The story of Congress this year is not a happy story. If you care about Congress, the institution has been pushed aside in a lot of ways, has been ignored, has not had a lot to do. At the same time, the Congress at this point is in the process through its regular appropriations of essentially undoing the work that Doge did that members disapproved of, undoing the changes made to scientific research funding, undoing some of the changes made on the personnel side. The Senate has had a very active year of resisting presidential nominations that senators didn't approve of. This hasn't really been part of the of the narrative we tell ourselves, but the US Senate

• 44:11Yuval Levin?

  on its website publishes a list, an up to date list of presidential nominations withdrawn in this session of Congress. And that number at this point is at 54. 54 is a very high number. So just about once a week now for a year on average, the president has withdrawn a nomination that he had sent to the Senate. The Senate has resisted presidential appointments below the cabinet level to a much greater degree than we imagine and is pushing back some with appropriations. It's not enough. The Congress is underactive. As you know, if you get me started on that question, I have a lot to say about it. I'm a congressional supremacist. But there has been some restraining action.

• 44:54Yuval Levin?

  The courts have done a lot to restrain the administration. The administration has faced a lot of federal cases against it. 573 cases were filed, about 230 of them are still in process. But of the ones that have been decided, the administration has lost 57%. That's a very, very poor record for the federal government in federal court. And a very small number of those losses were then appealed to the Supreme Court. The administration's had an interesting strategy here of appealing only cases that the Solicitor General really expects to win. They've appealed only about 25 cases, having lost something like 200 cases.

• 45:36Yuval Levin?

  And so the courts have restrained the administration quite a bit. And what we haven't seen in either case is the kind of confrontations that I certainly was worried about last year, a year ago. We haven't seen a big fight over impoundment. I thought that would happen, and it hasn't. And we haven't seen the administration openly defying the Supreme Court. Now, that could happen. The tariff case is an example of an issue that the president really cares about, for example, but it hasn't, and that's worth seeing, too.

• 46:05Ezra Klein?

  What did you make of the criminal probe that got opened into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and his response?

• 46:13Yuval Levin?

  Yeah, I think it's bizarre. It's an example of the first and most significant problem we've confronted this year, which is the deformation of federal law enforcement in the service of the president's own grudges and whims. I don't know yet, and I think we will know, where this decision came from. The president said that he didn't know anything about it. That's possible. But I think somebody at DOJ certainly thought that it would please him if there was a case started against the Fed chairman, and I think it did please him.

• 46:46Ezra Klein?

  Does the head of the mafia always know who's going to get whacked?

• 46:48Yuval Levin?

  Right. There's a certain amount of plausible deniability here, but what we're seeing here is the deformation of federal law enforcement. I thought it was both right and impressive that Chairman Powell came out and said, this is just political, they're trying to get us to change monetary policy, and that's not going to happen. I think it's a case that won't go that far. I think Powell will easily win that case. But, look, it's a form of intimidation. There's no way around it. And they've used federal law enforcement that way to provide favors, on the one hand, and to intimidate opponents, on the other hand, all year, to a degree that we have not seen before.

• 47:27Ezra Klein?

  One thing I thought about watching it was Powell is quite unique in that he has a very potent independent power base and that power base is the markets. If the markets actually believe the Fed is going to be compromised, you will see bond prices go wild, you will see stock market turmoil. But it made me think about how often something like that is happening, not always with a criminal probe, maybe a threat of firing, maybe, you know, forms of leverage we don't see or don't know about. But the person does not have independent power. They do not have the standing to go release a video and that video will become headline news.

• 48:08Ezra Klein?

  And how much intimidation has occurred out of our sightline?

• 48:14Yuval Levin?

  Yeah, quite a lot.

• 48:16Ezra Klein?

  Quite a lot. There's things where we know, right? We saw the FCC and Jimmy Kimmel. I mean, there are a couple of stories that really break through, but there's a lot of quiet resignations and that that's sort of deeper corruption of the system. And to your point about Donald Trump maybe not knowing that this was coming, to me that in a strange way makes it worse. And what I was saying earlier about the way normal policy process would work is you just would never, you would never want to surprise the president with an attack on the Federal Reserve that would lead the Federal Reserve chair to release a video that might send

• 49:01Ezra Klein?

  markets into turmoil. Somebody would want to know about that beforehand and weigh the cost benefit of what you're about to do. You could say the same thing, you know, maybe about the Kimmel situation. It's more the fact that people think this is what the president wants. And if it turns out badly, maybe he doesn't want it. He only wants it if it turns out well. But the sense that that signal has been sent out. And at all kinds of levels, from what ICE agents do to what career and political appointee prosecutors do, that this is what they think the White House wants. Whether or not the White House told them to do it, that seems very significant to me.

• 49:38Yuval Levin?

  Yeah, I think there's no doubt about that. I would say that the Powell case is maybe a little less obvious because federal prosecutions don't generally get presidential approval in advance. In fact, the DOJ is usually much more independent than it is.

• 49:50Ezra Klein?

  Right. If I thought this was a legitimate prosecution, I would feel differently about it.

• 49:53Yuval Levin?

  But I think broadly speaking, the one way to think about how presidents run their administrations is that there has to be some way in which a mid-level political appointee can say to himself, if the president were in my job, what would he be doing? If the president were the deputy secretary of labor, what would he do? And that means that the administration very often has the personality of the president. You saw that. I think we could describe it very clearly in the Clinton years, in the Bush years, in the Obama years. It was harder in the Biden years because it was just never clear what the president's own priorities actually were, what he cared about. And you saw that, too. That administration

• 50:33Yuval Levin?

  was underactive for that reason. But in this respect, this Trump administration is like those. It's just the president's personality is very different. And what that undersecretary says when he thinks, what would the president do if he were in my job, often just isn't like what we would expect of the person in that job to do. And I think this is a tremendously damaging problem. It creates enormously damaging precedence in the uses of executive power. It's one reason why president of the United States should not be the first job you have in government, why our presidents should be formed some by the system of government we have before they rise to that powerful opposition. And Donald Trump is the first

• 51:18Yuval Levin?

  president we've had who was not formed by any of the existing institutions of our government. He came in with a very different view of what the role is and was. And this time around, even more than last time, his personality is shaping implicitly the judgments of a lot of people throughout the administration. And I think we see the effects, and they're very damaging effects.

• 51:42Ezra Klein?

  We've talked here about change the administration is making that may not be durable, institutions that they are intimidating, that might snap back into their older form in a couple of years if Trump is succeeded by a Democratic president and the system is held. But I think there's one institution, movement, culture that is changing, which is the right itself. What it means to be a 20-something ambitious young Republican or young conservative, or whatever term you want to use for it. I mean, this is a world you're much more enmeshed in than I am, but we all know that Washington is run by 20-somethings

• 52:21Ezra Klein?

  and 30-somethings. And the ideological trends and movements among young ambitious politicos in a given moment do tend to seep out into the system pretty quickly. So from your perspective, you know, the kind of traditionally conservative think tank, how do you see the right changing, and particularly the young right, changing?

• 52:46Yuval Levin?

  I think these changes are very important, and people are formed by the political environment they enter into when they sign up to be part of a political movement or party. And younger people on the right today have really only known politics under Donald Trump. Trump, by the time this term ends, will have been the dominant figure in our politics for longer than any particular individual since Franklin Roosevelt, right? Because he will have been president not just for eight years, but in, you know, effectively on the right for 12, because he will have dominated the right even during the Biden years. The effect of that is hard to overstate. And I do think that the culture of younger people on the

• 53:29Yuval Levin?

  right is shaped by an attitude toward government, an attitude toward the country, and an attitude toward the left that's very different than it was when I was a younger conservative. It's not totally different, but it's more harder edged. It's, I would say, despairing in a way that wasn't really my experience, a sense that America is on the brink and about to fall off the cliff. And Much less possessed in its own self-understanding of any kind of commitment to American constitutionalism. You know, there was a lot of talk about the Constitution on the young right when I was younger on the right.

• 54:10Yuval Levin?

  Obviously, it wasn't all perfectly earnest and, you know, people in power are never simply what they say and all that's true. But it matters what you say. It matters how you understand yourself. And I do think that younger people on the right now are shaped much more by a sense that presidential power can break through the boundaries and the barriers. And so are less interested in the kinds of constitutional ideas about the role of government, less committed to the American political tradition, less committed to the market economy. It's not obvious what of this lasts and what doesn't, but important parts of it will last.

• 54:52Yuval Levin?

  And there's also a much more marginal, but still significant fringe that is genuinely open to racism and to antisemitism in ways that I think are very worrisome. I would say one dynamic on the right that matters a lot now is a kind of mirror image of a dynamic on the left in the last five years or so, which is a generational tension within institutions in which younger people are pulling towards the political margin and older people are struggling to keep the institution focused on something more like the political middle. And the younger people are winning. I think if you describe what's happening in some of the institutions of the right now,

• 55:36Yuval Levin?

  it would be familiar to someone who had to struggle in a left-wing nonprofit five years ago or maybe in left-wing journalism, too. That generational tension is very real now on the right.

• 55:48Ezra Klein?

  Do you see this as a story of continuity? People can look back at Sam Tanenhaus's recent biography of William F. Buckley and you see America First movements and John Birch's. And I mean, there's always been this strain, you know, Pat Buchanan and David Duke and, you know, running for governor in Louisiana. Or is this something new? You described the sort of near-apocalypticism, which I see too. You talked about despair. I would call it a cynical nihilism. Or is this really something new? Is something new taking over?

• 56:20Yuval Levin?

  There've always been elements like these in the coalition of the right, as there are versions of them on the left. They're more dominant now than they've been before. And so in that sense, it's not simply continuous. It's not one faction fighting from the margins, but it's the dominant faction of the right is populist now, I would say, more than conservative. One way to think about the difference is about whether your politics begins from what you care about most, what you love, or whether it begins from what you fear and what you hate. To me, as a young person, conservatism was appealing and has remained appealing because it's fundamentally rooted and begins from what we love in the world.

• 57:03Yuval Levin?

  It is a defense of what I take to be best about the world. And what is best about the world is always threatened. It's always challenged. It's challenged just by the realities of human nature. Sustaining it requires work. It requires moral formation and political action. And that's the work that conservatives at their best do. We conserve the preconditions for a flourishing life in a free society. But if the reason you have for entering politics first and foremost is to combat the left, to oppose what you don't like, then your politics are going to be different than that. Now, look, to defend what you love means fighting people who oppose it. And politics is argument, and it's always contestation.

• 57:47Yuval Levin?

  But I think it matters a lot whether fundamentally the reason that drew you in is itself the fight, or whether the reason that drew you in is a commitment to something you love, is fundamentally conservative, is about wanting to preserve the good.

• 58:05Yuval Levin?

  And I do think that that is the generational question for the right now. A question that can only be answered by the political fortunes of this experiment. Now, I will say the kinds of extremisms that you describe are not the dominant core of the right, but they matter. They're bigger than they used to be, they're more significant, and social media and other things mean that they're much more influential. And so it seems to me that it's incumbent upon older people on the right, like myself, to make the case to younger people on the right that ultimately, we win by advancing what we love in the world and by persuading the country, by persuading other Americans

• 58:50Yuval Levin?

  that they should love it too. And that understanding ourselves as being at war with our own society is not a recipe for an effective politics or a good life.

• 59:01Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a place to end. I'll ask a final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?

• 59:07Yuval Levin?

  Well, so we talked a lot about the American system of government, so I'll recommend a book each on the branches of our government. I think if you want to understand what's happening in Congress now, the book to read is Francis Lee's Insecure Majorities. It was written about 10 years ago. Francis Lee is a political scientist at Princeton, is a wonderful book about the dynamics that explain what's happening in Congress. Second, I would recommend Lindsay Trivinsky's book, Making the Presidency, which is a work of history. Trivinsky is a historian. It's a book about John Adams and the way in which he thought about the institution of the presidency in the wake of Washington. Really fascinating and also has a lot to offer us in understanding the contemporary moment.

• 59:50Yuval Levin?

  Finally, on the courts, I would point you to a very new book, which actually isn't out yet, but should be early this spring, I think, but I've had a chance to read it. It's called The Last Branch Standing, published by the legal journalist Sarah Isgur. I think it'll be out in April. And if you want a book that explains the Roberts Court from the inside, it helps you understand how that court operates and thinks, I haven't seen a better one.

• 1:00:14Ezra Klein?

  Yuval Levin, thank you very much.

• 1:00:18Yuval Levin?

  Thanks very much, Ezra.

• 1:00:31Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Esso Clan show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lynn, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina C. Maluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.