In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Amanda Ripley, Jesse Singal, and Thomas Chatterton Williams explore whether Trump has succeeded in remaking American culture in his image, the rise of white identity politics and its psychological drivers, and how America might break free from cycles of political revenge and backlash.
Amanda Ripley is the founder of Good Conflict. Her latest book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
Jesse Singal is the co-host of Blocked and Reported and the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is Summer of Our Discontent.
Will you be in London on Sunday, September 6? I’ll be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought to mark the publication of his memoir In the Realm of the Last Man at the Sekforde at 5pm. Find out more and book tickets here. Paying subscribers can access a code for free tickets here. —Yascha
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
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Yascha Mounk: It strikes me that we’re in a strange, frenetic moment in American culture that also is a kind of weird interlude. Around 2024 and 2025, there was the much-discussed vibe shift, which is part of what got Donald Trump elected. When I look at other countries in which figures who resemble Trump in certain ways came to office, some of them were really able to enjoy a kind of cultural victory—imposing their values on a large swath of the public and becoming the default mainstream way of thinking about the country. I would argue—and I’ll see whether you disagree with me—that in the second year of his presidency, it is already quite clear that Trump has failed at doing that. Whatever the vibe shift felt like 14 or 15 months ago, with a lot of young people, a lot of Latinos, et cetera, voting for Trump, it does not feel like Trump is remaking all of America in his own image. Obviously his administration is using executive orders and his power very aggressively to change institutions and do all kinds of things, but it doesn’t feel like Trump is managing to remake the country in his image. So where is American culture going? Thomas, how should we think through this?
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Politically, I agree with you, but on a cultural level, I think one of the lasting impacts of this new Trump era—Trump 2.0—is that white Americans have gone all in on claiming a standpoint position for themselves. They are getting involved in the kind of battle royale of identity and declaring that they’re not neutral, that white culture and white identity is not the atmosphere that everybody moves in. White identity is racialized, and they want to advocate for themselves as such. Jeremy Carl’s testimony before the Senate, when he was asked by Senator Murphy of Connecticut what he meant by white culture and white identity, is instructive here. He said he was advocating for heritage Americans and that they had been really harmed by immigration. I think this is going to be a lasting change: white Americans—a diminishing majority, but still a large numerical part of the population—are now going to be participating in the game of anti-racism that was really installed in the past 10 to 15 years during the Great Awokening. I think that is going to be, lastingly, to the detriment of society.
Mounk: That’s really interesting. Eric Kaufmann has this point in Whiteshift where he talks about asymmetrical multiculturalism. The idea is that there’s this kind of encouragement of taking pride in your group for all of the minority groups, and Kaufman’s point was that that’s unsustainable—eventually, the white majority group is going to say that’s the way the game is played, and they’re also going to take pride of place. I think Eric felt that was a kind of natural downstream effect and we should just embrace that. I was always much more worried about it. But perhaps it turns out that he’s right about the natural tendency of society. That’s kind of what we’ve been saying, Thomas—that we’ve now gotten to the point where multiculturalism is no longer asymmetrical, and whites as an identity group are playing the same game. Amanda, that would be bad for a modern society, would it not?
Amanda Ripley: What we’re saying is that in some ways Trump has imposed potentially lasting cultural shifts on the country, and in other ways he has not. I think one of the biggest challenges of dealing with someone like Trump is that in trying to oppose him, you can end up playing the very same game and thereby perpetuate it. It’s very tricky not to do that.
More than anything else this cycle, the thing that I’m frustrated by in the way that we’re covering culture and politics is that we’re not talking about the psychology of it. The psychology of Trump is about the addiction to revenge-seeking. It’s not just Trump. This is why Fox News is successful. It’s why many media outlets are successful. It’s less about outrage and more about revenge. Revenge operates in a really interesting way in the brain, and we’re just starting to understand this. It is addictive. There is a way in which you can see everything as a grievance and then, feeling aggrieved, seek revenge. A lot of our media outlets and politicians on both the right and the left are now not just giving us grievances—which they’ve done for a very long time—but also serving up a revenge fantasy.
That’s what you see with the gerrymandering race to the bottom. That’s what you see with the coarsening of the rhetoric: if you did it, then I’m going to do it—this tit-for-tat cycle that leads to endless revenge. The research is also very clear that to get out of that, you have to play a very different game. You can’t just do the same thing, or you perpetuate it. The ways in which Trumpism is likely to endure have to do with that psychological piece as much as the bigger, more obvious changes he’s imposing on our norms and institutions.
Jesse Singal: On this whitelash question, I may be skeptical of the extent of it. Persuadable voters who voted for Trump voted for him for a lot of reasons, and I think a lot of those reasons are a little bit obscured to people like us. This won’t be news to the panel or to anyone listening, but voters just make these decisions in a very different way from the way we do. It’s less ideological and more vibes-driven. Looking at the graph of Trump’s disapproval rate on Nate Silver’s website, he’s having an extremely bad presidency from a public opinion standpoint. So I think if there were any real appetite for asserting a white identity—maybe I’m just skeptical—I think there are some bad actors in and around his administration who want that, and there are certainly some online influencers who want that, not least the vice president. The memes alone posted by DHS and others are very creepy and white nationalist-coded, and I say that as someone who is often skeptical of claims of racism. They’re bizarre and they harken back to an America that never really existed. But I think there’s this problem that a lot of politicians have between telling the difference between what the people want and what their creepiest online fans want. I don’t think there’s a huge market for this stuff among the general public.
What we’re seeing is what feels like an exhausted democracy that’s going to keep barely electing people, then quickly getting mad at them, then moving on to the next person. It’s all pretty dark, but I think it’s maybe more complex than white identity reasserting itself.
Mounk: Let’s separate out two different things. One point is that the vibe shift, when it was happening, was remarkable in part because it went beyond white voters. The number of black voters who voted for Trump in 2024 was double the number who had voted for him in 2016. The number of Asian-American voters who voted for him was going up a lot. Numerically, the most important group that increased the vote for him was Latino voters. There was a feeling that the whole society was sufficiently disappointed in the Biden presidency and perhaps saw something in the second promise of Trump that made them willing to make that jump.
The second point is that perhaps we have to distinguish between the kind of white nationalist, creepy DHS images and so on—which I think is a very real theme of this administration—and a broader kind of social logic. I’d agree with Jesse that that’s certainly not the driving force of most of the people who voted for Trump. It’s just become such a part of American life—this natural reference to identity all the time—that perhaps it becomes natural for white people to identify themselves in that way. It doesn’t have to be as creepy as the DHS memes. The form that white self-identification takes doesn’t need to be as extreme as that. But I would still be quite worried if that becomes the default form of expression in the country in general, and particularly for the white majority group, even if it doesn’t take the form of the craziest meme on the DHS Twitter feed.
Williams: That’s right. I think that’s what JD Vance is trying to slip into the common parlance when he talks about heritage Americans—this desire to be able to speak as a heritage American and make claims to grievance that then get you special privileges or consideration in the zero-sum competition for status and prestige in the society. I think it operates along the lines of the logic of mimetic desire that René Girard talks about. After all of this time that groups have been advocating for themselves as a group, a lot of white Americans want that too now. That desire has become mimetically replicated among a lot of whites. I think Trump really did act as a kind of tribune for these people, even as he excited some working-class and downwardly mobile minorities and less educated minorities as well.
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Whiteness is really much more complicated in the 21st century than it was in previous eras of American history. One of the most prominent spokesmen for white nationalism is Nick Fuentes, who admits to his followers that he’s not only part Mexican but may very well have African ancestry. This stuff is complex.
Mounk: Jordan Bardella, who may well be the next president of France, is mostly an Italian immigrant to France. It’s already interesting that the leader of the far right is an immigrant from a neighboring European country. A little known fact in the United States is that he’s also partially of North African ancestry.
Williams: This stuff is going to get weirder and weirder. I think that Trump—and some of the voices of white identity would agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates on this—is the first white president.
Singal: What concerns me, in terms of trying to figure out how this happened again, is that some of this talk may distract from one of the biggest drivers of Trump’s second election, which was the border crisis. There was a genuine border crisis, and wanting a secure border is not just a white point of view. Most Americans want a secure border and are perhaps comfortable with some deportations, but are not comfortable with what Trump is doing. There is a lot of talk about the connection between Trump and white nationalism, and I get that, especially in this second and creepier term. But perhaps one of the lessons is that we simply need a normal, moderate immigration policy—which people in Biden’s orbit, by the end of his presidency, realized they had gotten catastrophically wrong. That framing brings the conversation down to something more tractable: what can Democrats do, and how should they message? The white identity framing, which I agree is menacing and weird, is perhaps a little tricky to pin onto specific political outcomes.
Ripley: What Thomas said earlier—about zero-sum thinking and the search for status—is important. That can take a lot of different forms. In our country, it is often about race; in other countries, it’s more about religion, class, or other things.
To bring us back to reality: Jesse, I think you’re right. Lee Drutman, a political scientist whose Substack I really love—he wrote Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop a couple of years ago—was recently arguing that the biggest mistake Democrats are about to make is thinking that a backlash against Trump and the GOP means endorsement of the Democratic Party. This is what we keep seeing over and over: this nauseating swing back and forth. Public opinion always moves against the party in power. Every president since FDR who has had control of Congress has also lost seats in the midterms.
So then what? What does anyone who cares about this country and wants to get out of this never-ending cycle do? We know a couple of things. We know that about 80% of Americans believe we’re in a political crisis. Almost half the country now identifies as independent. Americans don’t just dislike both parties—they want more of them. This is what Lee has been arguing for a very long time: that one way to exit this roller coaster is to promise—whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat—that if elected, you will give Americans more parties and move toward proportional representation, which is actually achievable. It doesn’t require a constitutional amendment.
Mounk: Lee is an old friend and we were colleagues at New America for many years. I think the idea of proportional representation in America is deeply foolish for two reasons. The first is that the causes of political fragmentation are much deeper than the electoral system. You see it just as strongly in Germany, in Spain, obviously in Israel, obviously in Italy—countries that have systems of proportional representation, or, in the case of Italy, ran away from a system of proportional representation because of the chaos it was causing. More fundamentally, it is a complete pipe dream to think you can have proportional representation in the United States, because the only chamber in which you could have it is the House of Representatives. To have proportional representation in one chamber—the least powerful chamber—would probably mean five, six, or ten different political parties in the House, while the Senate would still be controlled by two parties, since by definition you’re electing one senator per state per election. The presidency would have a very bimodal outcome. I think that would make America far less governable than it already is.
The more profound question is this. I agree on the thermostatic voting—which is the political science term for this, though I think it’s a dumb term; I’m not sure what a thermostat has to do with it. The idea is that public opinion always moves against the president. Because of gerrymandering, the primary system, social media, and the donor class, each party always goes way overboard, putting in place what the activists want rather than what average voters want. Voters say they hate the people in power, give the other side a try, the other side goes too extreme, and then voters say they hate that even more and put the original people back. That is a huge problem and a huge danger for Democrats in 2028. At this point, I think Democrats will likely win the midterms and may well win 2028. I’m very worried about what is going to happen in 2032 if they get it wrong once again.
I have a more fundamental question: has the basis for any kind of social cohesion just gone away? In my optimistic moments, I look at the opinion polls on immigration, on America’s relationship to its history, on what should be taught in schools, on trans rights, and on all of these issues, and the average American has a very reasonable opinion. The average American is pretty tolerant and pretty sensible. Perhaps we can finally find somebody who actually governs in the name of that majority and escape this spiral of polarization. In my less optimistic moments, I think our society is now so fragmented—with so many different ideological tribes, so many people getting information from such different sources—that the basic mechanisms of our public discourse are driving people toward polarization to an extent that we’re never going to have a mainstream big enough to keep our parties together again. What do you think?
Ripley: I totally agree, Yascha, that our problems run way deeper than a winner-take-all system. In many countries that have proportional representation, you still see very serious polarization. On average, countries that have multiple parties and proportional representation are less polarized than countries that don’t—but there are so many factors there, to your point. It’s not the solution. It’s one of many things we need to do to get outside of the game we’re in. We can’t keep doing this. We have to do something very different that Americans can see is very different, because average Americans are not represented in Congress. That’s not how primaries work. One of the reasons primaries are the way they are is because of gerrymandered districts.
The phrase gerrymandering comes from a Massachusetts Democrat whose last name was actually Gerry, who carved up the districts into something that a political cartoonist thought looked like a salamander—combining those words to make “gerrymandering.” This has been going on for a long time. But there are three big differences now. One is the sophistication of the mapping and the tools used to carve up districts. The second is our profound contempt for one another—these revenge cycles that make us very vulnerable to thinking the only option is scorched earth and extreme measures like gerrymandering. The third is the Supreme Court, which has abdicated any role in keeping campaign fundraising and gerrymandering under control. A lot of these things need to get fixed. One way to prevent the splitting we are doing—dividing the world cleanly into good and evil—is to mix it up and have more than two choices.
Mounk: Jesse, Thomas—you can choose to speak to this more narrow institutional debate or to the broader point. Is there still a kind of American mainstream, a reasonable voter that some political force could successfully speak to and mobilize? Does the center still hold in American society more broadly?
Williams: Whether the center holds is really dependent on having the right kind of politician who can articulate ideas in a way that reaches that broad and sensible center. There is a center-left and center-right that’s not entirely comfortable with the extreme rhetoric and constant warfare of contemporary political culture. But it would require somebody who has a lot more talent than what we’ve been seeing.
Barack Obama was clearly able to reach Americans on a rhetorical level that inspired a certain amount of hatred and animosity, but also really inspired a lot of Americans to exercise their better tendencies, especially in the first term. He’s still quite popular. That’s asking a lot of a candidate, and I don’t see that kind of talent on the Democratic side at all. A lot of Americans could also be relieved to vote for somebody with the sensibility of Mitt Romney, if that were on offer from the right. I think a lot of people would like to turn the temperature down. What do you think, Jesse?
Singal: It’s interesting that a lot of the most charismatic politicians—and I’d put folks like AOC and Mamdani in that camp—have a lot of baggage from having said radical things, and they don’t really do the Obama style. They’re probably capable of that sort of rhetoric, and I think we’re going to see them shift toward it as their ambitions get higher. Obama is a generational political figure, but to answer the question: we’re not so broken that we couldn’t see another Obama type who talks in sweeping, unifying terms from a center-left perspective. In other ways, though, we’re experiencing runaway fragmentation that is not going to get better. The idea of a truly shared culture—beyond the Super Bowl and Bad Bunny—seems increasingly remote. There will be a few super-culture attractors that most people know, but I don’t think we’re going back to any sort of shared culture in terms of people’s day-to-day consumption of music, art, political figures, and so on. To the extent there are superstar political streamers, they tend to be hyper-partisan, which is a problem. So mostly I’m pessimistic about this whole America thing.
Mounk: There are surveys which show that in the 1980s, when you asked people who the most famous actor was, the answer was someone in their 20s. The same was true in the 1990s. Then the age started going up. The reason is that when Matt Damon, George Clooney, and those figures were first in the big movies, everybody was talking about those movies—they were central to American culture, and so those actors reached a degree of celebrity that goes beyond what Timothée Chalamet now enjoys. The common basis for that shared culture has eroded over the last few years because of technological developments.
I want to segue into the second topic I loosely thought we would talk about today, which is how the Democrats are reacting to all of this. We have the failed vibe shift of a few years ago and the recognition—which I think is valid—that Trump is actually starting to fade. He’s perhaps managing to remake a part of Americanism, but he’s not winning an all-out victory where it feels like everybody is now on board with Trump. There were a few months when it felt like that might happen. I think that danger is now quite clearly banished.
How have the Democrats reacted? During the first Trump administration, part of the reaction was to fully embrace a new identity ideology on the left that felt very new and exciting and was able to sweep through institutions quite quickly. This time around, it doesn’t feel like Democrats have explicitly gone back to fully fighting for woke. In some ways they’ve superficially surrendered on some of those issues. It’s surprising that not many Democrats are going around saying the first thing they will do is nominate Supreme Court justices who are going to put affirmative action back in place. Perhaps that is in fact what they would do, but it’s not a prominent calling card.
At the same time, it feels like they’ve inverted Michelle Obama’s line—”when they go low, we go high.” One of the lessons the Democrats seem to have taken from the Trump era is that he won because he went low, and this time they’re going to go low as well. We see them campaigning with people like Hasan Piker, who is, in the old-fashioned description of the left, someone who actually defends the dictators of tanks rolling over other countries. We see Democrats making excuses and getting very angry at people who criticize them, like Graham Platner, who had a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for over ten years before it became a campaign issue. You even see it in some of the institutional fights—on gerrymandering, the attitude seems to be: if the Republicans are gerrymandering as hard as they can, we’re going to gerrymander as hard as we can as well.
How should we think about the evolution of the Democrats? Is it fair to say that’s the lesson they’ve taken, and how do we feel about that?
Williams: It certainly is the lesson that Gavin Newsom has taken, at least stylistically, and I find that extraordinarily off-putting. The strength would be to model the kind of political behavior that many of us would recognize from the past and miss, as opposed to mimetically replicating Trump’s online behavior—the trolling and the extraordinary vulgarity. I find that deeply depressing.
I’m a little more agnostic about whether you have to accept that people are flawed and find ways to reconcile with previously flawed candidates if they have a chance of winning and have rejected the previous behavior you find problematic. Someone like Graham Plattner doesn’t stand by the Totenkopf. He says—whether we believe it or not—that it was a mistake, that he got rid of it, and that it’s not what he stands for now. Realistically, there has to be a path towards reconciliation, especially when somebody has momentum, because the alternative is that you don’t support him and you empower Donald Trump to have one more advocate in the Senate. There’s not one response to that question—it depends on the situation. Gerrymandering also presents another set of calculations.
Ripley: It’s hard to generalize about Republicans or Democrats, but if you look at some of the loudest voices—House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries keeps referring to maximum warfare everywhere all the time when it comes to gerrymandering—this is literally, as Thomas said, mimicking the behavior of your opponents. It doesn’t get you out of the trap you’re in.
Plattner is a really interesting example. We know from the research on human behavior in these revenge addiction cycles that one way out—and I know this is going to sound incredibly squishy, and it sounds squishy to me too, but it is backed up by the research—is that you have to start forgiving people. That is the only way out. You have to do it even internally. Even if you never say it out loud, it actually has an effect on that kind of addiction cycle. Plattner has spoken enough to the whole issue of the tattoo. We just can’t keep doing this.
Mounk: Has he, though? When Barack Obama had the most serious crisis of his primary campaign in early 2008, tapes of Reverend Wright were released in which he was saying “God damn the USA,” et cetera. Obama gave a major speech in which he laid out his relationship to race. It wasn’t Obama who was on tape saying these things—it was the pastor of the church he attended. He said: let me take this really seriously. I understand why a lot of people are going to be upset about that, and they will be right to be upset. Even so, he laid out what the pastor’s perspective was and where he came from. He threaded the needle in both a beautiful speech—which I often assign to my students—and in a serious way: not hiding who he is, not debasing himself, but explaining it and recognizing why it was so upsetting to people.
I have seen nothing like that from Graham Plattner. All I’ve seen from him is the claim that this is trolls on the right weaponizing something he didn’t know about. His story does not add up. His chief of staff has said that he referred to it as “my Totenkopf” years ago, and yet he later claims he never knew what it was. He hasn’t explained that in a satisfactory way.
I’ve said many times that I’m against cancel culture. But being concerned about a candidate who literally had a tattoo of a symbol associated with the SS on his chest for ten years, covered it up once it became a national political issue, and never addressed it seriously—that’s a different matter. Ninety percent of what he has said about it is that this is just right-wingers trying to exploit it against him. I’m open to him perhaps one day being a great senator, and I’m open to forgiveness. But has he actually, in a serious way, explained what it is, where it comes from, why it’s upsetting to people, and what it means for the Democratic Party? Aren’t we being deeply hypocritical? If somebody on the right had a Totenkopf tattoo for ten years, would we really be saying it’s perfectly natural to forgive that?
Singal: It does seem disingenuous. David French complained about the slide in decency and standards, writing that “the slide begins when you tell yourself that the stakes are just too high for normal politics”—that of course you wouldn’t support this candidate in better times, but now American democracy is at stake. He’s saying: don’t go down that road. I understand the argument given how tight the Senate is and what one seat means. But I find it demoralizing that people act like it’s a crazy cancel culture campaign to be concerned about a Nazi tattoo. In many cases, it’s the same people who, before the vibe shift, were calling for people’s careers to be ruined over much lighter offenses. There’s a degree of disingenuousness on display that I just don’t like.
Mounk: The same thing applies to Hasan Piker, where people completely mix up two different things. When somebody has a big media platform, should you go and make your case in front of that platform? Sure. Should Democrats go on Fox News? Should they go on Joe Rogan? Should they go on those shows and be authentically themselves and try to reach those audiences? Yes. If somebody wants to go on Hasan Piker’s stream and argue for their political views, I don’t have a problem with that—even though I am deeply concerned about Piker’s views and have some strategic questions about whether that is actually going to be very useful, given that his audience is very different from the mostly apolitical audience of Joe Rogan. But let the consultants make that call. That’s different from campaigning with him. That’s different from saying he’s the future of the Democratic Party.
Ripley: Litigating the tattoo back and forth at this point is not super helpful. What I find revealing about Plattner is that while he has apologized for that—and I think in a more believable way apologized for some of the things he said about sexual assault in the military—he still uses the tool of revenge-seeking. It’s just different subjects, different scapegoats, different targets of blame, but it’s still the same mindset of splitting the world into good and evil, with the conviction that you are on the side of good and that anything is justified because the other side is so evil. That’s the piece of his behavior today that gives me pause. I know people who have gotten idiotic tattoos in their 20s that they didn’t know the meaning of. We perhaps can’t expect an Obama-level reflection from this guy, but we could expect people to start thinking a little more critically about this constant cycle of oversimplifying and blame.
Williams: I understand the arguments that Yascha and Jesse just made and the point Amanda is making. But at the end of the day, if you are actually concerned about things like anti-Semitism—and if you have any familiarity with German culture—look at the memes coming out under the banner of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security. These are not things being rejected or covered over. They are deliberate emulations of actual Nazi propaganda and rhetoric. If anti-Semitism is your concern, Graham Plattner is not where you should be channeling all of your outrage. Unfortunately, in some situations, we do have a binary choice.
Mounk: That’s where Amanda is saying: why do we debase our standards in that way? Why can’t we both be outraged at the DHS Twitter feed and the symbolism of Trump and all of that, and also say—excuse me—the party that was, as Jesse was saying, canceling people, is now telling us how dare we be upset about a man who had a Totenkopf tattoo for ten years? I wrote about an electrician in San Diego who was actually of Latino heritage, who had his hand dangling out of a truck and somebody thought it looked like the OK sign, which they took to be a white supremacist gesture. He lost the best job he ever had. Those same people are now telling me I have no right to be upset about Plattner. Excuse me if I find that a little galling.
Williams: There’s hypocrisy to go all the way around and excuse me if I got Amanda’s point wrong. I just solely disagree with Jesse.
Ripley: People will justify anything because they want to feel right and because the other side feels threatening. It never ends. I do it too. When I think about one of the things that has most made me ashamed of this country—a country I was born in, am a citizen of, and love—it was the way we withdrew from Afghanistan. At the time, I was angry at the Biden administration about that, but I didn’t necessarily blame Biden personally in the way I now very quickly catch myself blaming Trump for most things personally. You can catch yourself doing this, and the trick is to at least notice it and try—as Yascha is pleading with us to do—to reflect on the ways in which we are debasing ourselves, extending a huge benefit of the doubt to our own side while denying it to the other.
Mounk: Two more thoughts on Maine, and it’s not about the tattoo. The first is that it shows the really terrible field in so many of these Democratic races. On the one hand, you have a candidate who doesn’t have any very clear achievements, has a history of erratic political opinions, and looks like the image that people drinking coffee in Brooklyn have of what appeals to the country—in a way that I’m not sure it actually does. On the other hand, you have a governor who by all accounts is perfectly competent and decent, but who is 78 years old and has no charisma and no real ability to articulate what the campaign is about. Given those two choices, I understand where some primary voters ended up going for Plattner. I felt something similar on the day of the midterms when a couple of pretty reasonable governors were elected in New Jersey and Virginia. I tried to watch the victory speeches and they were really quite boring. Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani has a bunch of policies I disagree with, but he’s clearly a talented and charismatic politician. That’s a real concern for where the Democratic Party is.
The other question I want to raise is whether “when they go low, we go low” is actually a sensible electoral calculus. It relies on the idea that what drives Trump’s appeal is that he goes low, and it’s not clear to me that that’s what people like about him. Perhaps it is, but it deserves thinking through. If you embrace the same style without the same charisma, the same political cause, or the same political coalition, it’s not obvious that’s going to benefit you. Gavin Newsom going around signaling his social media dominance clearly appeals to the base, but is that going to win over independents in the way that Trump, for whatever reason, was able to in 2016 and particularly in 2024? I have my doubts.
Williams: For the people that style does appeal to, they can get it from Trump, and he does it better than anybody who’s trying to mimic that behavior—he certainly does it better than Gavin Newsom. So if that’s your thing, replicating it will not convert anybody to your side. What it can do is repel a lot of people who don’t like that quality in Trump but put up with it because they like certain other things he’s delivering.
Ripley: Is the lowness what people are actually attracted to? Some people are genuinely attracted to it. It feels authentic. It feels like this is a fearless person, because people feel—and they are not wrong—that the whole system is rigged. They’re finding the wrong solution, in my view, but they’re not wrong that there’s something deeply wrong, that there’s distortion and corruption and dishonesty in the dealings between the political class and the American people. So Trump’s lowness functions as a proxy for honesty and courage. It’s a false idol, and a dangerous one, but it looks courageous even when it’s deeply cowardly.
All sides can play that game and have tried, but as Thomas said, Trump is much better at it for a number of reasons, including his addiction to vengeance. This is not a healthy person, and it’s easy to forget that. Most of us were not involved in 4,000 lawsuits before 2016. Before he even ran for president, Trump was using the justice system as a tool of revenge. If you talk to any seasoned lawyer, they know people like this. In modern history, we do not have another example of a president routinely suing news organizations he doesn’t like while in office. He has sued Trevor Noah, the BBC, the Washington Post, and on and on. This is not normal behavior, but it is what Trump has always done, and his behavior is not going to change. He is a very fragile person, and lawsuits function like self-medication—a way to temporarily feel better.
That is the behavior we need to be looking for. The party affiliation matters less to me than the pattern itself: this conflict entrepreneurship behavior, and our collective failure to recognize it and become less vulnerable to it.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Amanda, Thomas, and Jesse discuss the state of free speech in the United States, whether Trumpism will continue beyond the presidency of Donald Trump, and what America will look like in 2030. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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