The Last 2 Months — and Next 2 Years — of U.S. Politics

It’s our first subscriber-only “Ask Me Anything” of the year. The show’s executive producer, Claire Gordon, joins me to discuss your questions about the risk of a constitutional crisis and how Democrats, businesses and universities are responding to President Trump. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions. And if you aren’t a New York Times subscriber but would like to be, just go to https://www.nytimes.com/subscription. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently” by The Ezra Klein Show with Jake Auchincloss “Don't Believe Him” by Ezra Klein 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. 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 Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer 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.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  Welcome to the second ever Ask Me Anything for subscribers. So if you're here, you have subscribed. We are grateful. You've also linked your subscription. We are doubly grateful. And we got a truly astonishing, overwhelming number of amazing questions, which we will not get through even the most minute fraction, but we will do what we can. I am joined, as I am so often, both in front of the mic and behind the scenes by our wonderful executive producer, Claire Gordon.

• 1:00Claire Gordon?

  Great to be here, Ezra, again, for our first AMA of the Trump era. And I would say, reading through the questions, the temperature of the audience right now is quite high. A lot of questions about, will we have fair elections in 2028? I mean, that's kind of my first question. How high?

• 1:20Ezra Klein?

  That's where we're starting?

• 1:20Claire Gordon?

  How high is your internal temperature? How, what is the right temperature?

• 1:24Ezra Klein?

  Oh, I think your internal temperature should be feverish.

• 1:30Ezra Klein?

  I think we're going to have elections. I do. I think we are very likely to have a constitutional crisis. The Trump administration is gearing up to defy the courts. They're not acting in a way that makes me think what they're trying to do is create, you know, perfect model test cases and a good chummy relationship with John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett to win at the Supreme Court. I think they're getting ready for, at some point, a world where the Supreme Court rules against them, and they basically say, well, you enforce your ruling. And then we're in very, very uncharted, dangerous territory.

• 2:07Ezra Klein?

  I also, when I say I think we'll have elections, and I do, I'm not going to tell you that I'm not concerned with the control I see them trying to exert over the security apparatus, very, very clearly, right, putting loyalists like Cash Patel and Dan Magino and Pete Hegseth in charge of the FBI and the Pentagon. And looking at the way ICE agents have been unleashed to harass, to at least temporarily disappear, green card holders, this is a very dark timeline. I don't know another way to put it. Things are happening that are worse by a lot. I was one of the much more pessimistic people, I feel like, leading up to this. I was not on team, this is all going to be normal. But the green card harassment is something I did not see coming. And I think you have to see this

• 2:52Ezra Klein?

  as a exercise of state power, a sort of unleashing of the security state's ability and the creation of a habit in the security state to harass people here on what are functionally political crimes. You know, they found something on your phone that seemed you were supportive of, at least not the Israeli side of the Israeli Hamas conflict. Or maybe they found nothing at all. I think that the way the government works is often a habit, a muscle, a sense of what is okay to do. And one way to think about this is they're figuring out who inside of it is willing to do their dirty work. I wish this is not the question we had started on. I don't mean to start this in such a dark space.

• 3:34Claire Gordon?

  So we can end, hopefully.

• 3:36Ezra Klein?

  But I think we have to, like, I think it would be a lie to not admit that's where we are.

• 3:40Claire Gordon?

  The constitutional crisis that you think we might be heading towards, I feel when that's brought up, people say things like, and that would be uncharted territory. And it's like, the screen goes black. Do you have a picture at all in your head of what that looks like?

• 3:52Ezra Klein?

  I don't. It depends on how it happens. You know, it was an interesting thing when they refused to abide by the judge's order to turn that plane around, that they did try to say initially, it was a technicality. Oh, the plane is over international waters. Your verbal order doesn't count, only your written order counts. So they were trying to say they weren't defying the order. Then, of course, they moved to, he's a radical leftist judge, he should be impeached. There is a kind of procedural gimmickry that is a little different than we are simply saying that this other branch of government cannot contain us. So I could imagine a world like that.

• 4:28Claire Gordon?

  Does that comfort you?

• 4:30Ezra Klein?

  No, I mean, it would if we stayed in that world. I mean, depending on what they did, like you can do gimmickry at a point where nobody believes it's a gimmick anymore. And now you're just, you know, in the actual defiance world. So there's that. You know, the courts have a number of remedies. You can hold people contempt. You can do all kinds of things that are escalatory. The other thing is it matters when this happens. You know, if this happens after the midterms and Democrats control the House, you know, and seems unlikely they'll control the Senate given the map, but it's not impossible. Then that also adds a lot of power to what the court does because right now, the way Trump is getting the power of the purse is congressional Republicans are letting him take it. But the House actually does control the money and they could just cut off the money the Trump administration is using. And so there's a lot you could actually do

• 5:15Ezra Klein?

  if Democrats controlled the House. So there too, it's, you know, I don't think they're going to want to have this kind of fight before the midterms because this kind of fight would not be popular. I think it's more likely after the midterms when the walls start closing in on their authority. But also at that point, they're very likely to be weaker. It does make it very important that Democrats put themselves in a position to win back power in the midterms. And of course, it makes it important that elections are free and fair in the midterms. As of yet, I have not seen anything that would make it be think they wouldn't be. But again, we're two months into this and things are much worse than I think people on both sides thought they would be. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't be overly sanguine.

• 5:54Claire Gordon?

  So having

• 5:58Claire Gordon?

  Well, I feel almost every, almost every question sort of follows from this. And yeah, having laid out how dark the picture seems to be, Graham F. had a question about how we got here, which was, I would appreciate if Ezra could provide commentary on how we got to this political moment that is so defined by anger and resentment that people are willing to allow a system to crumble that was by most standards, working. And then he goes on to qualify working and there's obviously deep inequality and there's a lot of pain, but relatively speaking, the US compared to other countries, compared to history, prosperous. It's like, I can't wrap my head around this disconnect, other than to blame it on misinformation.

• 6:38Ezra Klein?

  So how we got here is that One, the populist right is popular in a lot of different countries. Like, that's not just a, like, an America thing. This is just a fairly populist type of governance. Authoritarianism is often popular. It's just not the reality that human beings are innately tuned to favor the world democracy. They're not. And it's not that they're favorably tuned to something else instead. It's just they're willing to accept a quite wide range of governments. And, you know, it was a weird election in a bunch of different ways. Joe Biden was very old. His administration is very unpopular. There was a lot of inflation. People voted for Donald Trump quite narrowly. And now they're getting something much more intense than what they necessarily voted for.

• 7:22Ezra Klein?

  And Donald Trump is surrounded by Elon Musk and other people who are, you know, kind of accelerating the disruptiveness of his reign. So I think a lot of historical contingencies stacked up on each other. But the lesson of history is that a lot of different worlds are possible. The fact that you're now in a dark one doesn't mean you're going to snap back to a moderate one. Now, I think, in a way, the thing that Donald Trump is doing to safeguard democracy in this country is crashing the economy. Because the real dangerous democratic backsliding world is a world where they're doing incredibly competent macroeconomic management. So the stock market is booming, and now inflation is down. And they've given people a big tax cut. And so Trump's approval rating is 56%.

• 8:07Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, Republicans hold on in the midterms. But they're doing all of this work to corrupt and clamp down on the administrative state. They're turning it into a kleptocracy. They're paying off oligarchic friends. Democratic backsliding is much more likely under conditions of executive popularity. Donald Trump speedrunning his way to becoming unpopular again and creating mass mobilization against him is a terrible idea from their perspective. Democrats have no power, but the markets do have power. The economy does have power. And even the things they say they're trying to target aren't working. If you look at the data set that is tracking the orders that manufacturers expect to be placed, if you look right when Trump is elected, they're very, very optimistic and it's just

• 8:51Ezra Klein?

  nosedived. Because tariffs are really bad for manufacturers. It does not help manufacturing when you cannot import metals and timbers and so on. So it's not just the stock market. Expectations for inflation are going up. The labor market is softening. We're talking about, in terms of their economic theory, companies making multi-billion dollar reinvestments, shuttering plants where they have a huge amount of personnel and capital invested in other places, bringing them back here. I mean, those are decade-long planning decisions. If you were a corporation, would you make a giant investment right now? Like, into what? Why? It's very, very hard to know what the situation will be here in a year.

• 9:57Claire Gordon?

  Well, moving on to the Democrats, who while they don't have power, do have some power. They had the power to possibly shut the government down and chose not to. This question was from Gabriel J. Did Democrats in Congress have an obligation to reject the continuing budget resolution and resistance to Trump? Would shutting down the government have been a better political move?

• 10:20Ezra Klein?

  I have talked to a bunch of the people on both sides of this. I've talked to Schumer. I've talked to key people in the House and the Senate. I think the first thing to say is that people who are extremely sure about what the right move was, that to me is a little discrediting. Because all the moves, and everybody will admit this, were a gamble in one direction or another. And you never quite know how the cards are going to play out. Schumer came to the conclusion that a shutdown was not actually leveraged for the Democrats. It was probably going to be leveraged for the Republicans and for a couple of reasons. The most obvious one is that Elon Musk and JD Vance and Roosevelt and Donald Trump are trying to destroy and remake the federal government.

• 11:04Ezra Klein?

  And in a shutdown, they would get to decide what is and wasn't essential and who is and who was not essential. And so decisions they're making right now that are lawless would actually develop the force of law. And was there ever really going to be pressure on them to reopen it? I mean, I think they would care a lot less about the government being closed for extended period of time than the Democrats would. They're much more sensitive to complaints that things are going poorly for people. And Donald Trump has already proven himself quite inured to market reaction. He doesn't care, right? If he cared about markets being upset about things he was doing, he wouldn't be doing the tariffs. Did Democrats have the capacity to hold out on that? And would they even like what was there on the other end? So that was like one set of problems. Also, eventually, you could see the courts

• 11:47Ezra Klein?

  shutting down. And then all of these lawsuits would stop. And you'd have that problem. The argument for a shutdown was also twofold, I think. One was that it was a way of getting attention for the Democrats. Maybe a shutdown wasn't leveraged, but it was attention. All of a sudden, what Hakeem Jeffries was saying, what Chuck Schumer was saying, would really matter to people. And there would be much more attention on the Democratic messaging. And the second argument is that, yeah, it would be chaos. It would be uncertainty. It might be bad for the markets. But in the long run, that's good for Democrats. Ultimately, come the midterms, people are going to blame the incumbent party for chaos. And the other issue is like, well, when would the Democrats accept the chaos of, you know, if Trump does

• 12:31Ezra Klein?

  defy court orders, are they going to do anything about it? I've talked to some members of the Senate who say, well, then we're going to need a general strike. But they don't have a big red button that says general strike under it. So I do think there is that question. Demobilizing your own base is a real problem.

• 12:48Ezra Klein?

  I think this is really hard. I'm glad it wasn't my decision to make. I understand where Schumer came down. And one reason I understand it is that the markets have emerged as very strong opponents to Donald Trump. Right? They are punishing him. He's become unpopular. There is a real way in which the thing that Democrats would ideally want to do with Trump, which is like deliver a message that turns him from popular to unpopular, weakening him and his party for the midterms, which are, to be fair, not for a long time. The markets are doing that for them. If Democrats stepped into the middle of that and helped generate a shutdown, then this question of who's responsible for the chaos we're seeing would become more of a shared question.

• 13:30Ezra Klein?

  And it's very hard for Donald Trump to make the markets his enemy, but he's very capable of making the Democrats his enemy. Like, would Democrats outmaneuver Donald Trump in a media fight over an extended period of time? Like, are you really sure Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries can outdo Trump and Vance and Musk and that whole world? I'm not. The way a shutdown should have gone is something that I was sort of saying, going back to the "Don't Believe Him" essay, was Democrats needed to be defining what Trump was doing as lawless, which I think they largely have been. But then to get to a shutdown, they need to be very clear for a long time that if you don't do X, Y, and Z, we are going to give you nothing. But they never defined X, Y, and Z.

• 14:14Ezra Klein?

  They didn't spend a month saying, "Well, you got to restore USAID", because I think they don't actually believe necessarily that fighting for USAID is that popular. But they didn't have anything like that. So when I was texting with the people in the Democratic Party who wanted a shutdown, and I was like, "Well, what's your demand?" They're like, "Well, we need to have a bipartisan negotiation over the CR." I'm like, "You're going to shut down the government?"

• 14:35Claire Gordon?

  Not a rallying crime.

• 14:36Ezra Klein?

  "You're going to shut down the government with your demand being a bipartisan negotiation over a continuing resolution? Nobody's going to give a shit." So I think that Democrats didn't do the work to get themselves into a position for a shutdown. To the extent I am angry at them, I am more angry about that than having not done the work. I don't think they were in a good position the day they had to vote on the CR.

• 14:57Claire Gordon?

  Well, I was gonna wait on this question, but since we touched on it here, Preston H. had a question about what you think the theory of attention for Democrats should be. How should Democratic candidates, activists, politicians, capture attention during the next couple of years? And do you see any Democrats who are doing a good job?

• 15:20Ezra Klein?

  No, I don't see any doing a good job. I think there are two theories you could take right now. One is a theory where you should get a lot of attention, and that requires conflict and unexpected spectacle. Like, those are the two ways you can get attention. You can create conflict that is meaningful to people, which is a shutdown, for instance, would be conflict that is meaningful, and that would get you a lot of attention. You can do things that create spectacle. I mean, Al Green standing up and shaking his cane and yelling at Trump during the joint session of Congress address, it did get attention, it was a spectacle. But they make you the topic, and does it make you the topic in a way that ends up being good for you? Right? That's the big question with those approaches. There's another argument, James Carville made a stronger version of it than I would,

• 16:04Ezra Klein?

  his sort of Democrats who need to strategically retreat, play dead, and just let Trump be the center of attention. There is an argument, and it's an old adage in politics, when your opponent is drowning, don't throw him a lifeline. And from this perspective, Trump is quote unquote drowning, he's becoming more unpopular, the markets are upset, he's losing court cases, and so don't throw him the lifeline of you jumping into the middle and saying, "Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me." Now, that's not very emotionally satisfying. And it also assumes we're in a more normal political state, maybe than we are, going back to the question of will we have elections? But I think those are the two theories. One is that you want attention, but it's gonna be very hard to

• 16:46Ezra Klein?

  get the kind you want. The other is that midterms are typically a referendum on the incumbent, and the incumbent is doing a great job making it a negative referendum on himself. It's unfortunate, you don't have much power right now, the courts and the markets have some power and they're exercising it. So you wait, and nobody's gonna be very happy about that, but it's probably gonna lead to a pretty strong midterm. And you'll get more attention when you get near the midterms, because then there's an electoral conflict that's more interesting to people. Those are the two theories.

• 17:16Claire Gordon?

  The way you laid them out, it seems like you're almost a little sold by the Carville message.

• 17:22Ezra Klein?

  I think that... This continuing resolution doesn't go forever. And I think that if I'm not wrong, I think it goes until September, but

• 17:31Claire Gordon?

  Six months.

• 17:31Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, something like that. So there's going to be another bite at this apple. I don't think in good conscience, Democrats can just sit by and never exercise what leverage they have over the government. But I think they need to decide what it is their red lines are that they're arguing for having reversed in a shutdown. And the problem is, it's not worth doing this if you can't win it. It really isn't. First, if Donald Trump will just keep the government shut down forever and gut it. I mean, this has always been a problem Democrats have when facing down Republicans in these kinds of negotiations.

• 18:05Claire Gordon?

  Like Pelosi saying it's hard to negotiate with people who believe in nothing?

• 18:10Ezra Klein?

  No, because they don't believe in nothing. They believe in Donald Trump's power, they believe in gutting the government. The thing is, what you're doing with both the shutdown and possibly a death ceiling is you're taking the functioning of the government and holding it hostage. And only one side is really willing to shoot the hostage. I had Democrats tell me that, you know, well, we're not doing this, but maybe we'll do, you know, the death ceiling is a lot of leverage. I was like, you're not going to fucking do the death ceiling. If you're not willing to take the cost of a shutdown, you're not going to take the cost of a death ceiling. And they're like, you might be right about that. But there'll be another bite at shutdown. This was pretty soon into Trump's administration. I mean, we're two months in. So the idea that maybe you wait to do the shutdown until eight or nine months in, it

• 18:54Ezra Klein?

  doesn't strike me as completely crazy. But I do think that Democrats have to decide what is the message? Like, shut down if you don't X. What is X? X can't be have a bipartisan negotiation with us. X has to be three or four things that you repeat relentlessly, that the public is on your side about. X has to be

• 19:18Ezra Klein?

  You've destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and we don't think Americans should be getting scammed day in and day out. Access to be, you destroyed the Department of Education, and we believe that when people call up because there's a problem with student loans, they should reach a person on the phone. Right? Like, access to be things that the public agrees with you on. You have to define them, and then you have to be willing to take the pain until you win them. I just don't know if Democrats are willing to do that. And you can lose, right? You can make a high-stakes play and lose. So I'm not convinced by Carver in the long run, but I do think you have to be strategic.

• 19:59Claire Gordon?

  So moving on to positive vision of the future territory. A question from Ron M. Is there anything anywhere that you are aware of in the progressive universe vaguely as specific or ambitious as Project 2025 was? Is anyone even laying out the broad priorities or guiding principles for such a plan? You are not allowed to plug your book.

• 20:20Ezra Klein?

  I'm not?

• 20:21Claire Gordon?

  Oh, plug your book.

• 20:23Ezra Klein?

  Well, I will say that Asstad Herndon, my colleague, asked this question on Twitter, and Representative Richie Torres just tweeted out a cover of Abundance by being Derek Thompson. So I do think in terms of the guiding principles that could help inform a plan, we're trying to do that. But look, Project 2025, I mean, that came about in the third year of Biden's presidency. It was an effort to create a coalition of groups and a menu of policy options to inform campaigns. I just don't think this is the moment for Project 2025. I think it's a moment for big idea books that help Democrats think about the world in a different way and reconceptualize how they approach their own failures and some

• 21:06Ezra Klein?

  of the reasons people don't like them and don't trust them. I think it's also really important to say this. Project 2025, as a political document, was a huge disaster that Donald Trump and, you know, his ticket ran away from. Now, they are using it, but the time for Project 2025 is when you've won the election and you're handing policy ideas to the winner. It's not.

• 21:30Claire Gordon?

  But it was energizing to conservative.

• 21:33Ezra Klein?

  I don't believe it was.

• 21:34Claire Gordon?

  No?

• 21:34Ezra Klein?

  No, I think it was created infighting. I think it made the president of the Heritage Foundation extremely unpopular in Republican circles for a long time. I think Donald Trump was mad about it and Chris LaCivita, his campaign manager, was tweeting about how they were mad about it. It was not a helpful political document. It just wasn't. Like, that's a crazy retcon if anybody believes otherwise. Like, Project 2025 was a political failure and a policy success. Yes, the next Democrat who runs for president should have a big policy menu, but the idea that you should have a bunch of groups lay out a bunch of hugely unpopular positions, I think you should have the Democratic candidate for president try to run unpopular positions and not have people think in the background

• 22:17Ezra Klein?

  they're gonna like decriminalize illegal border migration or something.

• 22:20Claire Gordon?

  But it feels like conservatives have been just like fantasizing about, you know, shutting down the Department of Education for decades. Do you see anything that liberals have been fantasizing about that feels like could be part of a policy agenda?

• 22:34Ezra Klein?

  I do, but it's things everybody knows about. You know, it's universal pre-K. It's expanding health insurance, even, you know, quite dramatically and from where it is, it's expanding what Medicare covers. Medicare doesn't cover all kinds of things people need. It is.

• 22:48Claire Gordon?

  Normal.

• 22:49Ezra Klein?

  Normal, right? Like, things people would enjoy. It's building enough housing so that 25-year-olds can own a home on the median wage in a big city. It's a million things. Like, it's building enough energy. It's building up energy that energy is cheaper at this time when AI is gonna slurp up more and more and more of it. The idea that Democrats don't kind of in the back of their minds, like, have a bunch of big things to do, shutting down the Department of Education, they've not done it time after time because it's a bad idea. It's unpopular. It's gonna cause chaos. I would like to see Democrats come out with like a great healthcare vision, but not a terribly unpopular healthcare vision that's like the Democratic version of shut down the Department of Education or make it illegal to get Plan B.

• 23:32Claire Gordon?

  In terms of

• 23:33Ezra Klein?

  Project 2025 begins with banning porn. It's a very weird document that did not do them favors.

• 23:40Claire Gordon?

  One policy area that does seem ripe for the picking. This is a question from Jen G. She writes, I have a five year old daughter. And whenever I get together in a group of parents, we typically start talking about education. Everyone is concerned about the trajectory of educational outcomes in the US. I teach college students and many are unable to focus for a sustained period. Read a 20 page article or write coherently. Yet neither political party seems to be talking about our educational crisis beyond culture war issues. Why is no one seizing on this? How can it be a priority for the Democrats?

• 24:12Ezra Klein?

  I think this is a very good point. This, by the way, if you listen, Rahm Emanuel seems to be planning to run for president. And this is a big thing you keep saying that education is the issue sitting in plain sight. The Democrats need to grab again. I think one reason Democrats don't do that much on education anymore is they got exhausted by the intra party fighting. They set off on their last round of doing education reform, which is that there's a big faction of the Democratic Party that wants to make schooling, you know, try to modernize it in certain ways, make it more flexible, pay teachers for performance, do all these different things. And then there's the the teachers' union wing of the party, which wants to increase teachers' pay and, and, you know, worries about, I mean, both sides worry about child poverty. But there's a big fight over actually how to do the schooling.

• 24:55Ezra Klein?

  And it's never fully settled in the Democratic Party. But it causes them a lot of problems. So it's inter coalitionally, education has tended to be a pretty hard fight for them. The other thing now is I think the the questions are also becoming very different. When Jake Akinklaas was on the show, one of the things he talked about was, well, you know, could we make tutoring a much more central part of education? Maybe that's partially human tutoring, but AI tutoring is getting very good, very quickly. I mean, it's AI tutoring is very good for an eight year old. It's more than good enough to do that. How do we make that central to the experience? Because we know tutoring is an incredibly, incredibly potent form of of learning. But we actually don't really know how AI tutoring will work and will that be the same, right? I saw some like early evidence that maybe it's really good while people are

• 25:40Ezra Klein?

  using it, but if you take away the AI tutor, they have a big regression. So education policy can be pretty hard is part of the problem. But being mad about education not going well, I mean, our literacy rates are declining and test scores are not doing well. Being mad about how education is currently working, I mean, that's very good politics. The problem for Democrats is having a clear vision of what they think you should do.

• 26:37Claire Gordon?

  So this question I thought was interesting and you might have interesting thought on, which is about elites and how part of the MAGA project right now, as we've discussed on the show, is that they want to create a counter elite or now they're create a new class of elites. And Sarah C. wrote in and asked, is the existence of elites in a democracy necessarily a contradiction? Or does effective governance require a class of elites to function properly? Your thoughts on elites?

• 27:10Ezra Klein?

  In the narrow question, no, it's not a contradiction. There's no democracy. I mean, by its nature, democracy leads to voting for people. Or even if you're doing something very direct democracy, somebody has to administer the programs you voted into existence. So the idea that there can be some people in charge of some things, there's no way around that. So that's a question of how do you have capable elite formation? How do you get a good class of elites?

• 27:39Ezra Klein?

  And I think that's harder. I think we have really rested a lot of our theorizing about elites on, you know, winning the meritocracy, which I think people at this point consider to be fairly rigged, but it's also kind of narrow achievement oriented. I think the view that our institutions produce conformists is not a crazy view, right? We really have created a system that rewards the organization kid. And I think the idea that elites lost a sense that pluralism, the capacity to hold contrasting sides of America within you and within your work was important for their legitimacy, I really buy that. I'm not here to tell anybody what their views should be, like

• 28:23Ezra Klein?

  from very far left to even quite far right. But in a lot of places of power, in political or intellectual life, I think you need to be able to hold within you the parts of the country that are not your own. If you can't, then your institution and the kind of way you've been governing and approaching things can be very, very, very vulnerable when your precise slice of the electorate loses power. John Height, something he had been saying for many, many, many years, was that the sharp turn of the universities to the left was very bad for the universities. And the fact that the university faculties, when you did surveys and things, had vanishingly few Republicans was very bad for the universities.

• 29:08Ezra Klein?

  And over time, I think the ideological monoculture, maybe that's too strong. It's not a monoculture. Like, you had liberals, you had Marxists, you had democratic socialists, you had, you know, anarchists of certain kinds. What you didn't have was conservatives. That made-

• 29:25Claire Gordon?

  I quibble that a little bit, but I agree in the minority for sure.

• 29:29Ezra Klein?

  I'm not saying you literally never had a conservative, but I've looked at a lot of the surveys of where people came down. I went to UC Santa Cruz. So I think that, you know, and UC Santa Cruz was, when I went to it in 2000, like, when did I, I was at the class of 2006, so I went in 2002. When I went, UC Santa Cruz was understood to be like the hippie left edge of the UCs. And so when a lot of the stories were coming out from other places, I was something like, well, that just sounds like where I went to school and that seemed fine. It was okay. I don't think I realized until later that what Santa Cruz was like to become the median of what other places were was actually a huge shift in the bell curve of like what was represented on campus. And then it over time, I think, came with

• 30:13Ezra Klein?

  real consequences, like ideological trends and movements swept through with very, very little resistance. And part of that is also Republican Party's fault. I mean, it became more and more hostile to expertise. It became, you know, when it turned on climate change, that was going to really upset people who believed in evidence. So it's a kind of feedback loop with the way polarization is happening and other things, but it's a problem. The problem now is that the problem for the universities is not that the administrators are too weak in response to, you know, whatever the fad of the moment is, is that the Trump administration is trying to break these universities over its knee and heavily politicize them and heavily police their speech. And so now you have this thing where you need

• 30:56Ezra Klein?

  this kind of elite you haven't had there, which is a courageous kind of elite. And not just a courageous kind of elite on behalf of like left wing causes, but on behalf of the revitalization and protection of the university itself, which has to balance at the same time that the university needs to be a pluralistic institution and also that it cannot in fact give in to what the Trump administration is demanding of it. And it can't turn on its students and it does have to protect the right to protest and all these things that are part of academic freedom and are part of a healthy culture of inquiry. But I do think it became a fragile internal culture and that reflected, like it wasn't the students' fault. I really feel this is important. It was the work of the faculty

• 31:40Ezra Klein?

  and the administrators to like allow students to have radical politics without completely collapsing in the face of that politics.

• 31:49Claire Gordon?

  And so does that mean to make this concrete, if you're a university president, resisting the demands of the Trump administration, even if it means losing your federal funding?

• 32:00Ezra Klein?

  And yeah, if you have an endowment, you should be resisting the demands of the Trump administration. I believe that completely strongly. What are these endowments for? What was all this for? All these billions and billions and billions of dollars. Do what you think is right. If you think some of the demands being made on you are the right thing to do, you should do them, right? Not everything anybody in the Trump administration thinks is wrong. But if you're one of these places with a $10 billion or $20 billion endowment, then yeah, you should have some independence. That's what that endowment's for.

• 32:32Claire Gordon?

  Well, I think we're seeing that the Trump administration is basically stress testing a lot of the system right now. What do you think is doing the best? And where are the bright spots?

• 32:43Ezra Klein?

  I think the courts are doing a good job. We will see what happens when the showdown begins to rise, when the Trump administration's defiance turns up and becomes unignorable. We'll see how the Supreme Court performs under that pressure. But right now, the courts are acting as the courts I think should. I don't want to call the market like an institution. That's just people making buying and selling decisions based on their sense of future earnings and the future state of the economy. But at least the market isn't closing its eyes to reality, I think, at the moment. And by the way, I think the media is doing a good job. I think the media is under a lot of threat from Donald Trump, lawsuits, all kinds of pressure on corporate parents,

• 33:27Ezra Klein?

  pressure on the people who own it. And I think we all worry about what the security state could eventually become and the ways it could be weaponized against us. And I see a lot of people doing, I see reporters doing great reporting, being out there, really trying to understand what is happening, trying to balance curiosity and some kind of trans partisan moral framework. Like, the publishers of a lot of these places have done terribly. But I think that the reporters and the editors of a lot of them are doing a good job. I think business leaders have been unbelievable cowards. I think they've been bending their knee to something at this point that they know is bad. These same people who were so up in arms and high dudgeon in the first administration, they didn't change all their views from the first to the second.

• 34:12Ezra Klein?

  But they've all gone into complicity mode. Not literally all of them, but so many of them. It is important that the people at the peaks of civil society speak. You don't have to become a member of the resistance, but you also shouldn't be cowed. Civil society matters. You know, the Pope coming out and saying some of the things he did early on, that was important. Religious leaders are going to be important here. And like the Democrats don't have power. They're not an opposition that has a point of leverage. It matters as signals people get from other parts of society. So, yeah, I will say it again. I think the part of society that has been weakest has been businesses that know better and they don't want to get crossfired

• 34:56Ezra Klein?

  with the Trump administration because they might get hit on tariffs. They might get bad regulatory rulings. Like this state is being run as a tool for reward and punishment. But that's not only true for them. It's true for everybody. And there were a lot of people who I think showed a lot more courage the first time and seemed to have given up on that as either cringe or just not useful the second. But that's dangerous for a society. And part of being rich and powerful, and that goes for universities with big endowments too. Part of being rich and powerful is you're supposed to have bought yourself a measure of independence. It'd be nice if more of them used it.

• 35:36Claire Gordon?

  And then for regular people, do you have a theory of what the most effective form of activism or resistance is, like protesting, calling your congressperson?

• 35:46Ezra Klein?

  I don't think I have any one. And it depends who you are and where you live. And it depends which part of this we're in. By when we're closer to the midterms, things are going to be different than they are right now in terms of where you should put your time. But I think it's easy to underestimate how effective mass protest is. I do think this is different in part because of the absence of the kind of visible, big resistance marches and energy that you had in the first. And the more that builds, the more it has an effect. Look, even the people showing up to the town halls had a big effect. And now the Republicans are afraid of doing town halls and everybody knows it. I think things like that matter.

• 36:19Claire Gordon?

  I think that's a good place to end. Thanks, Ezra.

• 36:22Ezra Klein?

  Claire Gordon, thank you very much.

• 36:42Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klans Show is produced by Chris Dinlin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, mixing by Isaac Jones with Afim Shapiro and Aman Sahauda. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Isquith and Jack McCordick. We've original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Kristina Semiluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.