‘We’d Have Been Better Off if Trump Won in 2020’: Three Columnists Brace for the First 100 Days

Opinion|‘We’d Have Been Better Off if Trump Won in 2020’: Three Columnists Brace for the First 100 Days

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists David Brooks, Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg about Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday and the first 100 days of the new Trump administration.

Patrick Healy: We’re at a historical moment that Americans have experienced only once before — the inauguration of a president who previously held the office and was turned out, only to win election again four years later. None of us were alive in 1893, so I want to explore how you’re making sense of it now. First, what do you remember thinking or feeling about Trump when his presidency began eight years ago?

Ross Douthat: What was the supposed George W. Bush line, upon hearing Trump’s Inaugural Address? “That was some weird [expletive]”? I think the weirdness was important, the fundamental surrealism, the sense that this was just not how normal American politics worked — something that was felt quite widely. And with it, the sense that if you just pulled the right political lever or legal maneuver, you could get back to the normal world and leave Trump world behind.

Michelle Goldberg: I went to that rally in Columbus Circle where Bill DeBlasio and stars like Cher and Robert DeNiro spoke. I remember feeling true terror about what was coming, but also a lot of solidarity with my fellow New Yorkers.

David Brooks: I was mostly morally appalled. It was like watching Larry Flynt get elected pope.

Healy: And when Trump’s first term ended four years ago, did you think your initial feelings and expectations about his presidency had been proven correct, incorrect or something in between?

Douthat: Part of me thought that there would have been some quick way out of the weirdness — when the Trump White House was in its maximal early chaos, I wrote a column (very popular with our readers at the time!) suggesting that he might be removed via the 25th Amendment. At the same time, I felt like I had a decent instinct for why he had won in 2016 and where the reaction to him might overreach or go astray or simply fail. That proved more prescient: There was no quick path back to normal; there were only failed attempts at restoration that have yielded to our own moment, when it’s Trumpism that’s normal, a central feature of a changed world.