Ezra Klein The Year in Politics, Part II
00:01:
(John Heilman)
Impolitik with John Heilman is presented by BP.
00:05:
(John Heilman)
See all the ways that they're investing in America.
00:44:
(John Heilman)
Aloha and namaste, everyone, and welcome to InPolitic with John Heilman, a Puck and Odyssey joint featuring lively, in-depth conversations with the people who cruise the corridors of power in America, sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.
00:55:
(John Heilman)
In our last episode with Pond Save America co-host John Lovett and Jon Favreau that came out last Friday, we did a look back on 2025, the year in politics.
01:07:
(John Heilman)
And if you haven't listened to that episode already,
01:09:
(John Heilman)
Stop what you're doing right now.
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(John Heilman)
Hit pause.
01:12:
(John Heilman)
Go and get that episode.
01:14:
(John Heilman)
Listen to it.
01:15:
(John Heilman)
It is wonderful.
01:16:
(John Heilman)
You're going to want to hear it.
01:17:
(John Heilman)
And then come back to this episode, because this episode is part two, where it's really more of a second installment in a two-part series in which we look back on the year in politics in 2025.
01:28:
(John Heilman)
And as promised in that episode, we have with us for this second installment, the one, the only,
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(John Heilman)
the inimitable, the unrivaled, the unmatched, incredibly influential, and increasingly powerful, Ezra Klein of the New York Times.
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(John Heilman)
Ezra, a New York Times opinion columnist, the host of the Ezra Klein Show, massive hit podcast that you can find on any audio podcast app that you're looking for, and also YouTube in the New York Times where it is a juggernaut in video.
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(John Heilman)
Ezra, in addition to all of that, is also the author of one of the most important books
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(John Heilman)
of 2025.
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(John Heilman)
His book, Abundance, with his co-author Derek Thompson, which got Democrats and whether they were politicians, pundits, operatives, prospective presidential candidates, all chattering at a feverish clip about whether this
02:25:
(John Heilman)
vision that they had for how to make democratic governance work and the political implications, if they could, might be the answer to a lot of the woes the Democratic Party has been suffering in recent years.
02:35:
(John Heilman)
Ezra and I talked about those woes.
02:38:
(John Heilman)
We also talked a lot about Donald Trump.
02:41:
(John Heilman)
If you are used to Ezra being a little bit on the, not exactly a doomsayer, but someone who has been very clear-eyed and very
02:49:
(John Heilman)
worried about the future of the country, worried about Trump's power, worried about Democrats' weakness.
02:53:
(John Heilman)
You will be heartened to hear that on almost every front, Ezra ends this year sounding a lot more hopeful than he sounded throughout much of it.
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(John Heilman)
You'll look forward to that.
03:02:
(John Heilman)
And you'll also look forward to the part of our conversation about two of the more unusual guests to appear on the Ezra Klein Show, both of them appearing late.
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(John Heilman)
In 2025, they're not the kind of obvious people you think of as people that Ezra would interview, but he does an incredible job interviewing two of the most interesting people in the entire modern history of popular music.
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(John Heilman)
That would be Brian Eno and Patti Smith.
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(John Heilman)
It's still just...
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(John Heilman)
It befuddles me when I hear some of the music that Ezra is into, but that doesn't stop him from appreciating greats like Patti Smith and Brian Eno and doing a fabulous job interviewing them.
03:37:
(John Heilman)
We talk about that as a little light moment at the end of a very dark year in our politics, but one that may be looking just a little bit brighter up here to believe what Ezra Klein has to say on this all new episode of InPolitik with John Howman that's coming at you in three, two, one.
03:56:
(Ezra Klein)
If you want to understand the first few weeks of a second Trump administration, go back and listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS's Frontline in 2019.
04:05:
(Steve Bannon)
The opposition party is the media.
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(Steve Bannon)
And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time.
04:12:
(Steve Bannon)
All we have to do is flood the zone.
04:15:
(Steve Bannon)
Every day we hit them with three things.
04:17:
(Steve Bannon)
They'll bite on one and we'll get all of our stuff done.
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(Steve Bannon)
Bang, bang, bang.
04:21:
(Steve Bannon)
These guys will never be able to recover.
04:24:
(Steve Bannon)
But we got to start with muzzle velocity.
04:26:
(Steve Bannon)
So it's got to start.
04:27:
(Steve Bannon)
It's got a hammer.
04:28:
(Steve Bannon)
What does it work?
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(Steve Bannon)
Muzzle velocity.
04:31:
(Ezra Klein)
Donald Trump's first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon's strategy like a script.
04:36:
(Ezra Klein)
The flood is a point.
04:38:
(Ezra Klein)
The overwhelm is a point.
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(Ezra Klein)
The message wasn't in any one executive order or announcement.
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(Ezra Klein)
It was in the cumulative effect of all of them.
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(Ezra Klein)
The sense that this is Trump's country now.
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(Ezra Klein)
It is his government now.
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(Ezra Klein)
It follows his will.
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(Ezra Klein)
It does what he wants.
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(Ezra Klein)
That he is limitless.
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(Ezra Klein)
If he says that birthright citizenship is over, then it's over.
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(Ezra Klein)
or so he wants you to think.
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(Ezra Klein)
In Trump's first term, people said, don't normalize him.
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(Ezra Klein)
In a second though, the task I think is a little bit clearer.
05:11:
(Ezra Klein)
Don't believe him.
05:12:
(John Heilman)
That was an oldie but a goodie.
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(John Heilman)
A video essay whose title was the kicker of that clip.
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(John Heilman)
Don't believe him.
05:20:
(John Heilman)
That video essay, video podcast, was posted way back on February 4th of 2025.
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(John Heilman)
And since then, it has racked up nearly 2 million views on YouTube, making the most watched video all year from our guest today, Ezra Klein.
05:37:
(John Heilman)
Ezra, a name that has always meant a lot to a lot of people, but seems to mean more to more people today than ever before.
05:46:
(John Heilman)
How are you?
05:47:
(Ezra Klein)
I don't like how this is beginning at all.
05:52:
(Ezra Klein)
You said this was the year in review, John, not the me in review.
05:55:
(John Heilman)
Well, you know, I think I can assure you, Ezra, that we're not doing an entire episode devoted to the year in Ezra.
06:06:
(John Heilman)
Though I do have a few questions along those lines that we will get to later.
06:09:
(John Heilman)
But, you know, given the trajectory of your show this year, it does seem to me that
06:14:
(John Heilman)
it provides a kind of useful framework for looking back at 2025 or, you know, kind of like a prism through, you know, a prism you can look at the year through.
06:24:
(John Heilman)
So with that in mind, embarrassingly, I'm going to say that, you know, look, I wanted to be at least a little rigorous because you're famous for your rigor.
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(John Heilman)
So I went back.
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(John Heilman)
This is the embarrassing part.
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(John Heilman)
I went back and I studiously, like, looked through all of your 2025 output from January until now.
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(John Heilman)
Which is, you know, something that knowing you and your appetite for self-scrutiny and for data, I imagine you and your team might have done something like this.
06:51:
(John Heilman)
You might have done the same thing for your own purposes.
06:55:
(Ezra Klein)
We didn't ask me anything that structured itself across a bunch of the essays I did over the course of the year.
07:00:
(Ezra Klein)
But I have not done a true accounting of my year in podcasting.
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(John Heilman)
72.
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(John Heilman)
episodes of one kind or another that I could count.
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(John Heilman)
Now it's possible that I missed something.
07:12:
(John Heilman)
It's not impossible.
07:14:
(John Heilman)
I've made errors before, but for now I'm going to go with 72.
07:17:
(John Heilman)
Nine of which were the essays, the individual, no guest where you just did a shorter form thing.
07:23:
(John Heilman)
Does that sort of comport with your memory?
07:25:
(John Heilman)
You think that's roughly right?
07:26:
(John Heilman)
I think that's probably right.
07:28:
(Ezra Klein)
What do you think the- I'm not going to question you here.
07:31:
(Ezra Klein)
I haven't looked at it.
07:33:
(John Heilman)
Well, I thought you might say, well, no, I've done two a week.
07:35:
(John Heilman)
I've definitely done 104.
07:35:
(John Heilman)
And I'd be like, I don't know how I missed 28 of them.
07:39:
(John Heilman)
Do you have any idea what the main, like what topic you were devoted to more than any other topics?
07:44:
(John Heilman)
I mean, the Democratic Party and Trump.
07:47:
(John Heilman)
Yes, first of all, the Democratic Party and Trump are kind of different topics, but you definitely spent more time talking to or about Democrats.
07:54:
(Ezra Klein)
I feel like this is like getting a Spotify rapped on myself in the voice of John Heileman.
07:59:
(John Heilman)
Yeah, it's kind of good, right?
08:00:
(John Heilman)
It's not bad.
08:01:
(Ezra Klein)
Do you do that?
08:02:
(Ezra Klein)
Is this a service you now offer?
08:05:
(John Heilman)
If someone will pay me, I will happily do it for anyone.
08:08:
(Ezra Klein)
You see that Uber will now give you your year in Uber wrapped.
08:12:
(John Heilman)
I know.
08:12:
(John Heilman)
I saw that.
08:12:
(John Heilman)
I don't actually want to know where I went.
08:17:
(John Heilman)
I really don't want to know.
08:18:
(John Heilman)
That's not a, that's not a helpful thing.
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(John Heilman)
If you're at all OCD, you could get lost down that rabbit hole for a long time, you know, where you're kind of like just digging around and looking at like, where'd I go?
08:27:
(John Heilman)
Why was I there?
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(John Heilman)
Or what, what was I doing on that day?
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(John Heilman)
Why did I go from here to there?
08:31:
(John Heilman)
Yeah.
08:31:
(John Heilman)
Could make me crazy.
08:32:
(John Heilman)
But it's interesting because it's not just the number of, you did seven episodes in the economy that were either on the economy or finance.
08:42:
(John Heilman)
A bunch of those are tariff episodes from the beginning of the year.
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(John Heilman)
You can kind of like walk through the first year of Trump 2.0 if you kind of, you know, follow, I was kind of following, charting my way through here.
08:53:
(John Heilman)
It's like, you know, there's this early kind of emphasis on tariffs and the economies.
08:57:
(John Heilman)
They're kind of following the news, basically, right?
08:59:
(John Heilman)
You got a lot of that.
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(John Heilman)
The Democratic stuff is kind of sprinkled throughout.
09:03:
(John Heilman)
You get to this one point where you suddenly, where the, you know, the deportation stuff around the Kilmer-Abrego-Garcia story breaking, where suddenly that becomes a major focus.
09:12:
(John Heilman)
of what you're doing the other thing you did a lot of uh are relatively speaking relative to other things is uh and trump is obviously throughout the entire thing i can't even make a separate category for that but um
09:21:
(John Heilman)
uh israel gaza is another thing that uh got a bunch of your attention um a few episodes on ai um and and related things i don't know where you put the attention economy i don't really know how to tech i'm not that good at the taxonomy i'm not sure if that's an ai thing a social media thing or like uh if you think that means a tech story or more as a it's all of it i think of it as a fundamental substrate of modern life
09:45:
(Ezra Klein)
You can't think about politics without the attention layer.
09:47:
(Ezra Klein)
You can't think about Trump without the attention layer.
09:49:
(Ezra Klein)
You can't think about AI without the attention layer.
09:53:
(Ezra Klein)
What we pay attention to is what our lives are made of.
09:55:
(John Heilman)
100%, yes.
09:56:
(John Heilman)
And I think you're a focus and emphasis on that from the very beginning.
09:59:
(John Heilman)
It was one of the first episodes you did in the year.
10:02:
(John Heilman)
And it's become now kind of a truism that people are focused on this kind of attention economy thing.
10:11:
(John Heilman)
I guess my first real question to you is, if you think back over the year, which of these episodes stand out for you?
10:18:
(John Heilman)
Forget about the essays for now.
10:19:
(John Heilman)
Just in terms of the guests you had on,
10:22:
(John Heilman)
When you think back on the year, which of them have stuck in your mind and continue to be people or ideas that got raised that you really think are, that you continue to ruminate on and that have really kind of maybe changed the way you see the world?
10:37:
(Ezra Klein)
I probably think about the year in terms of a couple of ideas and themes I was pursuing across episodes.
10:44:
(Ezra Klein)
So the way you're breaking this down feels true topically, but not true in the way that I pursue it.
10:51:
(Ezra Klein)
So the way I think about what I was pursuing this year, for me, there's been the simply covering the
10:59:
(Ezra Klein)
major actions of president Trump and trying to understand the nature and rules of his regime, right?
11:06:
(Ezra Klein)
That's been one thread.
11:08:
(Ezra Klein)
Yep.
11:08:
(Ezra Klein)
And then there has been a thread on abundance.
11:10:
(Ezra Klein)
My book abundance with Derek Thompson came out this year.
11:13:
(Ezra Klein)
Uh, and that was a huge thing for me.
11:15:
(Ezra Klein)
It wasn't as much on my show because that was something I was mainly doing external to the show, but you had a book this year for my sins, my man.
11:25:
(Ezra Klein)
And then, um,
11:27:
(Ezra Klein)
And then I've been doing a lot trying to think through the Democratic Party and how did the Democratic Party and how did liberalism
11:36:
(Ezra Klein)
become so exhausted, attenuated.
11:40:
(Ezra Klein)
How did the Democratic Party lose a working class?
11:43:
(Ezra Klein)
How did it lose rural voters?
11:45:
(Ezra Klein)
How did we go from a point where in 2010 you had Democratic senators from Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and like a list like that could go on, Louisiana, to where most of those places, not all of them, feel
12:07:
(Ezra Klein)
almost unrecoverable for the Democratic Party as it currently exists, right?
12:12:
(Ezra Klein)
What would the Democratic Party need to be to be competitive in as many places in 2026 or 2028 as it was in 2010 or 2008?
12:22:
(Ezra Klein)
And then there was attention and AI, which are not the same thing for me, but attention was a big one for me and AI and then Israel, Gaza, which has been a brutal ongoing story.
12:35:
(Ezra Klein)
And those are probably the big strands.
12:40:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think that of those ones that feel very alive to me right now,
12:45:
(Ezra Klein)
I feel like the nature of the Trump story is changing.
12:49:
(Ezra Klein)
I was just finishing a column about that before we jumped on the pod.
12:53:
(Ezra Klein)
I feel like the nature of the Democratic Party is changing.
12:58:
(Ezra Klein)
And you can feel the sort of synthesis beginning.
13:04:
(Ezra Klein)
You can feel its confidence returning.
13:07:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think that the...
13:11:
(Ezra Klein)
AI and attention questions are in an interesting place.
13:16:
(Ezra Klein)
But probably the ones that are obsessing me the most right now are trying to understand what is happening right now as Trumpism loses steam.
13:25:
(Ezra Klein)
trying to understand what the Democratic Party is going to become in time for the midterms, and trying to understand what it would mean to have a pluralistic politics that can act as an answer and an antidote to the way that I think the Trump coalition is not going to be able to maintain itself on top of its own internal contradictions.
13:52:
(John Heilman)
Okay, so if my math is right, and I heard you right, and God knows my math is often wrong, but my ears work pretty good.
14:00:
(John Heilman)
If I'm right, that is four big topics or themes that you just identified for the year.
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(John Heilman)
Trump, Democrats, attention economy, and Israel-Gaza.
14:12:
(John Heilman)
Or was there another one?
14:13:
(John Heilman)
Was there a fifth?
14:15:
(Ezra Klein)
I would say AI is something I want to spend much more time covering if I'm able to do so in 2026.
14:20:
(Ezra Klein)
But I'm not going to have as decided a theory on it at the moment as I do on the others.
14:26:
(John Heilman)
So I was being a little bit pedantic and overly deterministic in categorizing and counting up your various episodes in 2025.
14:33:
(John Heilman)
But in looking at it that way, you not only get a sense of your kind of intellectual priorities and editorial judgment and all that stuff.
14:40:
(John Heilman)
You also get a pretty clear sense of the arc of the stories, you know, or the themes that you focused on.
14:46:
(John Heilman)
And, you know, like just starting with Trump, there's really a tonal shift that takes place in your shows over the course of the year.
14:56:
(John Heilman)
You know, in addition to the guests that you had on, the way that you framed those conversations, if you look at those video essays that you did, you know, the kind of tenor of your commentary in the first two thirds or three quarters of the year has the sense of like mounting alarm.
15:10:
(John Heilman)
And sometimes like, you know, five fire alarm level of alarm.
15:16:
(John Heilman)
You know, the clip we just played with Bannon talking about muzzle velocity.
15:21:
(John Heilman)
Then a couple months later, you know, when Trump's deportation agenda, thuggery really kicked in.
15:27:
(John Heilman)
You did this essay called The Emergency is Here.
15:30:
(John Heilman)
And then we got, you know, Trump is building his own paramilitary was one of your episodes and Then we had stop acting like this is normal But there's this moment where in the 60th episode of in my count is how the Democrats found their fight was the an episode you did with Favreau and from there forward the last dozen
15:50:
(John Heilman)
has a different kind of tone to it because Trump is starting to lose steam.
15:54:
(John Heilman)
There is starting to be signs that the early part of the administration, he's lost, the coalition is under strain.
16:01:
(John Heilman)
There's some people who are starting to resist, Republicans who are starting to push back against him.
16:05:
(John Heilman)
Obviously, the election happens in November.
16:08:
(John Heilman)
And this notion of Trump as lame duck,
16:12:
(John Heilman)
I just saw Favreau and John Lovett out here in LA.
16:16:
(John Heilman)
And Lovett actually used the phrase, in like a lion, out like a lamb, which is, I think, overly simplified.
16:22:
(John Heilman)
But it's a feeling that a lot of people have.
16:24:
(John Heilman)
So tell me about how you think over the course of 2025, the Trump story changed and where it is today.
16:32:
(Ezra Klein)
So I do want to be careful because I don't hold to the view that we have...
16:37:
(Ezra Klein)
It has settled into any one thing.
16:39:
(Ezra Klein)
I would not call Donald Trump a lame duck.
16:41:
(Ezra Klein)
I would not say he's out like a lamb.
16:43:
(Ezra Klein)
We've got, you know, barring health emergency for him or something else unexpected, three more years of his presidency.
16:51:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think any liberals unrolling the mission accomplished banner should think twice about that.
16:58:
(Ezra Klein)
What I do think is that a couple of things seem to me to have happened in the past couple of months.
17:04:
(Ezra Klein)
One is that the single biggest thing was the November elections.
17:08:
(Ezra Klein)
And if you had to ask me what is the best thing that happened to Democrats in 2025, it is that the polling underestimated them in New Jersey.
17:19:
(Ezra Klein)
That was the best thing that happened to them.
17:21:
(Ezra Klein)
Because it turned the outcomes of the 2025 election from exactly what you would expect.
17:28:
(Ezra Klein)
Democrats won a governor's race in Virginia.
17:30:
(Ezra Klein)
They won a governor's race in New Jersey.
17:31:
(Ezra Klein)
They won a mayoralty in New York City.
17:35:
(Ezra Klein)
They won a ballot measure in California.
17:38:
(Ezra Klein)
into, Oh shit, they're overperforming.
17:43:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
17:43:
(Ezra Klein)
And you could, I mean, you, you know, this stuff better than I do, John, you could feel the way that took hold in Washington and Washington, much like financial markets is a place that works off of expectations.
17:55:
(Ezra Klein)
So when all of a sudden people think they know what's going to happen and then
18:02:
(Ezra Klein)
They have to update all their information all at once.
18:05:
(Ezra Klein)
You tend to get very rapid changes in momentum and, you know, conventional wisdom.
18:13:
(Ezra Klein)
And you could feel the Republicans almost immediately begin to lose confidence.
18:18:
(Ezra Klein)
At the same time, you had the shutdown going on.
18:23:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
18:23:
(Ezra Klein)
And even though Democrats ended the shutdown with a whimper, they...
18:30:
(Ezra Klein)
They sort of won it in public opinion, which was not obvious at the beginning.
18:35:
(Ezra Klein)
And even in the last week, we've watched a number of Republican moderates breaking with Speaker Mike Johnson to support a Democratic compromise bill to extend the Obamacare subsidies for three years, defying Trump.
18:48:
(Ezra Klein)
So all of a sudden, you're seeing the Republican unity of
18:54:
(Ezra Klein)
in Congress crack.
18:57:
(Ezra Klein)
You're seeing a sense the Democrats are in position to have a big midterm if they don't fuck something up or if things don't rapidly change for the Trump administration.
19:05:
(Ezra Klein)
You're seeing, I mean, Trump himself being unpopular and the economy proving to be quite soft.
19:12:
(Ezra Klein)
And then I think there's this other thing going on, which has been evident to everybody paying attention, which is that one of the things that made Trump's victory so discomforting to Democrats in 2024 was that unlike in 2016, where he won unexpectedly, but he won in relatively the way and with the sort of coalition you would expect a far-right populist to have.
19:35:
(Ezra Klein)
In 2024, he bolted on all of these seemingly dangerous
19:41:
(Ezra Klein)
Incongruous and even contradictory elements.
19:44:
(Ezra Klein)
So you had Elon Musk and Mark Andreessen in the tech right.
19:48:
(Ezra Klein)
You had the MAGA, Proud Boy, Griper core.
19:54:
(Ezra Klein)
you had the more conventional Republicans who by that time, unlike before, and again, you covered this before much more closely than I did, there was no more dissent to Donald Trump.
20:03:
(Ezra Klein)
You had RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and the Maha thing that happened.
20:08:
(Ezra Klein)
And now you see all the contradictions of that
20:11:
(Ezra Klein)
coming clear.
20:12:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, can you really have a Republican party that includes Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes?
20:19:
(Ezra Klein)
Because it doesn't really seem you can in a peaceful sense.
20:22:
(Ezra Klein)
Can you really have a Republican party where on the one hand you have the tech right and on the other hand you have a
20:33:
(Ezra Klein)
you know, populist movement that both hates billionaires, but is also fundamentally mistrustful of technology and corporations.
20:41:
(Ezra Klein)
And increasingly, it seems probably you can't.
20:42:
(Ezra Klein)
And so the energy that was coming out of the sense that something wholly new might be created here with a Praetorian guard of a Republican Party that was now a loyalty cult,
20:57:
(Ezra Klein)
doesn't seem as obvious.
20:59:
(Ezra Klein)
Again, that does not mean Trump is not dangerous.
21:02:
(Ezra Klein)
It does not mean he will not get more things done.
21:04:
(Ezra Klein)
It does not mean we'll not be at war with Venezuela by the time this podcast comes out.
21:09:
(Ezra Klein)
But it does create a fundamentally different sense of the energy and the structure.
21:16:
(Ezra Klein)
And by the way, I think the last thing I'll say on that is Trump mishandled
21:21:
(Ezra Klein)
The shutdown so badly.
21:23:
(Ezra Klein)
He was tactically so incompetent.
21:26:
(Ezra Klein)
And all of their bluster, you know, the Russ Vought video, you know, Here Comes Reaper, they didn't do anything.
21:33:
(Ezra Klein)
Because in fact, they didn't have anything to do.
21:35:
(Ezra Klein)
And that what I would say is like the final piece of this.
21:38:
(Ezra Klein)
What is Donald Trump's agenda now?
21:39:
(Ezra Klein)
They pass a big, beautiful bill, which is very unpopular.
21:43:
(Ezra Klein)
What is their second big bill?
21:45:
(Ezra Klein)
What do they want to do in 2026?
21:47:
(Ezra Klein)
One reason I don't think Trumpism seems to have the energy today that it did then is it doesn't actually seem to have an agenda moving forward.
21:55:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, yes, Stephen Miller is going to try to treat immigrants with as much cruelty and callousness as he can possibly come up with.
22:03:
(Ezra Klein)
But aside from that, Trump seems fundamentally more interested in the ballroom than in the economy.
22:10:
(Ezra Klein)
What are they about now?
22:12:
(Ezra Klein)
You need energy to coalesce a movement.
22:17:
(Ezra Klein)
But it just seems to be riven at the moment with infighting.
22:22:
(John Heilman)
Yeah.
22:22:
(John Heilman)
And I think there's, you know, there's a couple more things I'd load onto that.
22:26:
(John Heilman)
One of it goes back to the 2024 election, which is and why the 2025 off your election was so heartening and seems to signal something important.
22:34:
(John Heilman)
It's kind of the return of.
22:36:
(John Heilman)
what we would think of as normal expected politics.
22:38:
(John Heilman)
You were talking about the kind of putting together the coalition that had all these disparate pieces on that side.
22:44:
(John Heilman)
I mean, the other thing, of course, from 2024 was, you know, you saw Trump chipping away at these core constituencies of Democrats, whether it was African-Americans or Hispanics.
22:52:
(John Heilman)
And those things all, you know, you talk about New Jersey, seeing the swing back among Hispanic voters in the wake of the deportation agenda.
23:00:
(John Heilman)
It's like, well, that's what's supposed to happen.
23:02:
(John Heilman)
Right.
23:03:
(John Heilman)
The mystery of why all these Hispanics like Donald Trump, you know, when he's promising to deport them.
23:07:
(John Heilman)
And there are various theories about, you know, how you could make gains with Hispanics while you're promising this deportation agenda.
23:12:
(John Heilman)
But once they started to enact the deportation agenda, the expected political reaction backlash seems to have come good in November.
23:22:
(John Heilman)
And I think the other thing, to your point, your last point, which is...
23:29:
(John Heilman)
that what Trump is interested in and what congressional Republicans are interested in, kind of just by watching their behavior, those things, if Trump is lame duck, meaning he's not gonna run for reelection again, try to run for reelection again in 2028, I'm not sure we really know anything about that.
23:44:
(John Heilman)
We can know the future, but he's officially under the Constitution, he's term limited here.
23:50:
(John Heilman)
Their interests, their political interests were gonna diverge anyway.
23:53:
(John Heilman)
And the fact that he seems utterly uninterested in doing anything to fix the problems that will improve their political standing and instead seems mostly interested in making himself richer and doing, you know, building a new ballroom on the East Wing, et cetera, et cetera.
24:08:
(John Heilman)
And they're kind of, you know, the natural divergence of their interests are exacerbated by Trump's
24:15:
(John Heilman)
apparent indifference to their plight politically and the things he's actually enthusiastic about, which mostly involves self-enrichment and spending a lot of time with billionaires, which only makes their problems worse.
24:29:
(John Heilman)
And I don't really know if there's any indication that he's thinking about
24:35:
(John Heilman)
or planning to do anything to remedy that, which just means that the number of Republicans who are willing to stand up to him is going to grow in 2026.
24:45:
(Ezra Klein)
Maybe this is also a way to bring in the attention.
24:48:
(Ezra Klein)
I don't even want to call it the attention economy.
24:49:
(Ezra Klein)
I sort of want to call it the attention layer into this conversation, because I don't think these things are actually separable in an interesting way.
24:58:
(Ezra Klein)
Trump, and for that matter, much of MAGA,
25:04:
(Ezra Klein)
is fundamentally a creature of attention.
25:08:
(Ezra Klein)
His genius, when we talk about what Donald Trump is a genius at, he's not a genius at governing.
25:15:
(Ezra Klein)
He's not one of the great policy minds of our age.
25:18:
(Ezra Klein)
He's not an empath, God knows.
25:22:
(Ezra Klein)
He is a genius at attention.
25:24:
(Ezra Klein)
He does not feel your pain, Ezra.
25:26:
(Ezra Klein)
He does not.
25:27:
(Ezra Klein)
He does not.
25:28:
(Ezra Klein)
And many of the people around him, and when I say around him, I don't mean Susie Wiles.
25:33:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean...
25:34:
(Ezra Klein)
at the apex of his movement.
25:36:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, MAGA even compared to the Democratic Party on the other side, to wield influence on it, that influence is wielded attentionally in part because the way you communicate with Donald Trump is attentionally appearing on television and so on.
25:50:
(Ezra Klein)
The key figures in MAGA are very, very hooked up to the algorithms.
25:54:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, you look at what has happened to Tucker Carlson once he left Fox News and his bread was buttered by the YouTube algorithm.
26:02:
(Ezra Klein)
And so the thing that is happening is that Donald Trump and many others are very, very good at acting in a day-to-day way where they dominate the story.
26:14:
(Ezra Klein)
So Trump cuts a deal with a company or gets in a fight with somebody or has a meeting with Zora and Mamdani.
26:21:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, he's a master at constantly being in attentional movement, but he doesn't govern.
26:30:
(Ezra Klein)
in a concerted, sustained, and systematic way.
26:34:
(Ezra Klein)
And I've started to think about this as actually leading to two different failure modes the Trump administration has.
26:39:
(Ezra Klein)
There are two ways the Trump administration governs.
26:42:
(Ezra Klein)
In one of those ways, Donald Trump hands over power, almost fully disengages, and gives it to, in some domain or another, a highly ideological, usually highly radical deputy who...
27:01:
(Ezra Klein)
The problem becomes there is too much coherence, cruelty, and callousness in the agenda.
27:06:
(Ezra Klein)
So immigration under Stephen Miller would be one example here.
27:09:
(Ezra Klein)
The federal workforce under Russ's vote is another.
27:14:
(Ezra Klein)
Then there's a place where Trump himself is very engaged.
27:18:
(Ezra Klein)
And there you have the opposite problem of incoherence, of chaos, of inconsistency.
27:25:
(Ezra Klein)
But if none of Trump's most radical and Machiavellian lieutenants have taken something on, and Donald Trump himself doesn't care, then nothing happens.
27:37:
(Ezra Klein)
So there's no health care plan, right?
27:39:
(Ezra Klein)
There's no, as far as I can tell, economic plan.
27:42:
(Ezra Klein)
Who is Donald Trump's closest economic advisor?
27:45:
(Ezra Klein)
Is it Kevin Hassett?
27:46:
(Ezra Klein)
Is it Scott Besant?
27:47:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, who does he actually listen to and empower?
27:51:
(Ezra Klein)
He's out there saying affordability is a hoax.
27:54:
(Ezra Klein)
Why don't they have an actual policy agenda on affordability?
27:57:
(Ezra Klein)
They could pass anything they want through Congress on affordability, but they're not doing it.
28:02:
(Ezra Klein)
You think about the Biden administration at this point.
28:05:
(Ezra Klein)
Biden was by now underwater politically.
28:09:
(Ezra Klein)
But they were pretty relentlessly pushing forward on an agenda.
28:14:
(Ezra Klein)
And so in the second year of Biden's term is when, aside from the infrastructure bill, his major bills passed, right?
28:20:
(Ezra Klein)
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act.
28:23:
(Ezra Klein)
They were sort of moving forward.
28:24:
(Ezra Klein)
You knew what they were trying to do.
28:25:
(Ezra Klein)
And Trump, he is somehow constantly in motion, right?
28:32:
(Ezra Klein)
And it is not at all clear.
28:35:
(Ezra Klein)
And you can tell me if you think this is wrong, but from what I can tell, talking to Republicans in Congress, they do not know what he's trying to do anymore.
28:43:
(Ezra Klein)
They definitely don't know what he wants them to do.
28:44:
(John Heilman)
Right.
28:46:
(John Heilman)
And that's a big problem.
28:48:
(John Heilman)
A hundred percent.
28:48:
(John Heilman)
And, you know, I was going to say he's constantly in motion, except when he's falling asleep, which, which, you know, tires you out being in that much motion, which he really does.
28:57:
(John Heilman)
You get sleepy.
28:58:
(John Heilman)
I see it with my kids all the time.
28:59:
(John Heilman)
It was awesome to see him kind of nod off in the middle of the meeting about reclassifying cannabis.
29:04:
(John Heilman)
I'm kind of like, you know, somebody give that guy a really good Indica gummy or what?
29:08:
(John Heilman)
Like, um, it's like, yeah, Donald Trump poster boy for really powerful sedatives.
29:15:
(John Heilman)
Um,
29:16:
(John Heilman)
I definitely think a lot of that is right.
29:19:
(John Heilman)
And there's a related thing, which is, you know, he clearly, you know, if you go back and listen to, there's this interview he did with...
29:32:
(John Heilman)
Terry Moran last year, right at the end of the first 100 days.
29:36:
(John Heilman)
And it was about Kilmar Obrega Garcia.
29:39:
(John Heilman)
You may remember this.
29:40:
(John Heilman)
It's incredible.
29:41:
(John Heilman)
And if you haven't watched it recently, you have to go back and watch just the part where he gets in this fight with Terry Moran about whether Kilmar Obrega Garcia really had MS-13 on his knuckles or whether that
29:54:
(John Heilman)
was just a Photoshop thing.
29:56:
(John Heilman)
And not even a deceptively Photoshop thing, but just a Photoshop thing that the administration was using to illustrate that he had gang tattoos.
30:03:
(Donald Trump)
He had MS-13 tattooed.
30:05:
(Donald Trump)
We'll agree to disagree.
30:06:
(Donald Trump)
I want to move on to something else.
30:07:
(Donald Trump)
Terry, do you want me to show you the picture?
30:10:
(Donald Trump)
I saw the picture.
30:11:
(Donald Trump)
We'll agree to disagree.
30:12:
(Donald Trump)
And you think it was Photoshop?
30:13:
(Donald Trump)
Here we go.
30:13:
(Donald Trump)
Here we go.
30:14:
(Donald Trump)
Don't Photoshop it.
30:15:
(Donald Trump)
Go look at his hand.
30:15:
(Terry Moran)
He had MS-13.
30:16:
(Donald Trump)
He did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way.
30:18:
(Donald Trump)
I'm not an expert on them.
30:19:
(Donald Trump)
I want to turn to Ukraine.
30:21:
(Terry Moran)
No, no.
30:21:
(Terry Moran)
Terry, Terry.
30:21:
(Donald Trump)
I want to get to Ukraine.
30:22:
(Donald Trump)
No, no.
30:24:
(John Heilman)
He had MS, as clear as you can be, not interpreted.
30:28:
(John Heilman)
This goes on for a really long time.
30:30:
(John Heilman)
It's a very long exchange where Trump will not give up
30:35:
(John Heilman)
the notion that those really were the letters on his knuckles.
30:39:
(John Heilman)
And as you watch it, you're like, he's obviously a pathological liar, but he believes it.
30:47:
(John Heilman)
I mean, nobody could perform the way he's performing that moment who was kind of making that up.
30:53:
(John Heilman)
He's not trying to spin Terry Moran.
30:55:
(John Heilman)
He believes...
30:56:
(John Heilman)
that those letters are on Kilmar Abrega Garcia's knuckles.
31:00:
(John Heilman)
And I think that's the same thing that's happening when you hear him talk about the economy.
31:05:
(John Heilman)
It's like, why will he not concede that there is a problem with high prices, that affordability is a real thing and not a hoax?
31:14:
(John Heilman)
Because he really just does not believe
31:17:
(John Heilman)
that the economy is in a bad shape.
31:20:
(John Heilman)
And for a variety of complicated psychological and other reasons.
31:24:
(John Heilman)
But I think this goes to, you raised the question of who are his top economic advisors?
31:29:
(John Heilman)
I don't think there's anybody who either can or wants to or thinks they can go to him and say, they can say, sir, we need to talk about affordability.
31:39:
(John Heilman)
But no one can go to him and say, look, the stuff we're doing,
31:45:
(John Heilman)
You might think tariffs are helpful in the long run.
31:47:
(John Heilman)
You might, you know, we get that, Mr. President.
31:50:
(John Heilman)
But right now, the people are out there hurting and we are killing ourselves by not acknowledging that there's still a lot of work to do at a minimum, that, you know, that we've maybe made a little bit of progress, but we have a lot more progress to make.
32:04:
(John Heilman)
And he seems to, I think, every indication is that he is fully convinced that the economy is way better than it is and that everything they're doing is and everything's going great.
32:15:
(John Heilman)
And that is another reason to get to the larger meta point, which is the reason there's no affordability agenda is because Trump doesn't think there's an affordability problem.
32:25:
(John Heilman)
And and and so I don't know what his economic advisors think about this, but until the president says, yeah, OK, I get it.
32:31:
(John Heilman)
There's a problem and we need to fix it in some way.
32:33:
(John Heilman)
You need to at least appear to be fixing it for political reasons.
32:36:
(John Heilman)
They're not going to be an agenda, an economic agenda in the second term.
32:39:
(John Heilman)
And that's, I think, what Republicans on the Hill, both substantively and politically, are freaking out about.
32:43:
(John Heilman)
Right.
32:43:
(John Heilman)
It's like he's not living in the reality space that we live in.
32:47:
(John Heilman)
And frankly, there was a period of time when Joe Biden was like that, too.
32:50:
(Ezra Klein)
There is a saying in therapy, and for that matter, in meditation, don't believe everything you feel.
32:57:
(Ezra Klein)
Donald Trump believes everything he feels.
33:02:
(Ezra Klein)
Yes.
33:02:
(Ezra Klein)
I think it is actually quite fundamental to who he is.
33:06:
(Ezra Klein)
It is what makes him, I mean, I've written a big essay on his disinhibition.
33:10:
(Ezra Klein)
This is a little bit before the election.
33:11:
(Ezra Klein)
The disinhibition is the fundamental quality of Trump.
33:14:
(Ezra Klein)
But what disinhibition is, in a sense, is an absence of barrier, right?
33:20:
(Ezra Klein)
between impulse and action.
33:22:
(Ezra Klein)
You feel something, you act.
33:23:
(Ezra Klein)
Something comes into mind, you say it.
33:24:
(Ezra Klein)
That's Trump.
33:26:
(Ezra Klein)
And it's a real problem because the world often does not accord to our feelings.
33:32:
(Ezra Klein)
And the people around Trump cannot go and talk to him and say, listen, we've been trying this thing that feels right to you and it is wrong.
33:44:
(Ezra Klein)
Now, sometimes Trump's feelings on something will change and he will change course.
33:48:
(Ezra Klein)
But not honestly, usually in that as a full reversal.
33:56:
(Ezra Klein)
So let's talk about the terrorists for a minute.
33:58:
(Ezra Klein)
I think if anything is responsible, if any one thing is responsible for...
34:04:
(Ezra Klein)
breaking the momentum of Trumpism, of Trump's popularity, and putting the Republican Party in a fundamentally impossible place, it is the tariffs.
34:13:
(Ezra Klein)
And, you know, many of us, like I pointed this out, it was not a rare point to make when he was running for office, that he was running a campaign saying he would lower prices on top of an agenda, tariffs and deportations, that would raise the cost of goods and labor.
34:27:
(Ezra Klein)
Sure.
34:28:
(Ezra Klein)
They have ended up on the tariffs in...
34:32:
(Ezra Klein)
I think arguably the worst of all worlds.
34:35:
(Ezra Klein)
Because what they've done is create a tariff regime that is neither strong enough, constrictive enough, and predictable enough to lead to long-term changes in investment decisions on behalf of corporations.
34:50:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
34:51:
(Ezra Klein)
But nor is it absent such that it is not raising people's prices.
34:56:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
34:56:
(Ezra Klein)
So that's one dimension of it.
34:58:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
34:58:
(Ezra Klein)
The initial theory that we're going to put these tariffs on the world, reciprocal base tariffs, all of it.
35:03:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
35:04:
(Ezra Klein)
Liberation Day.
35:04:
(Ezra Klein)
We're liberated from low prices and free trade.
35:08:
(Ezra Klein)
It ends up he goes back and forth constantly.
35:12:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
35:13:
(Ezra Klein)
Things now are kind of a mishmash, but if you look at a chart of effective tariff rates, they're around a little bit under 30% on the day after Liberation Day, right?
35:22:
(Ezra Klein)
That's what he's announced.
35:23:
(Ezra Klein)
And now they're around 15-ish percent, a little bit above.
35:26:
(Ezra Klein)
But here's the thing.
35:27:
(Ezra Klein)
Then there's a second pivot on tariffs.
35:29:
(Ezra Klein)
And the idea is, no, no, no, we're not going to keep tariffing an island that only has penguins on it.
35:36:
(Ezra Klein)
We're not going to primarily be in a tariff war with Canada and Mexico for no reason.
35:40:
(Ezra Klein)
The tariffs are actually an effort to encircle China.
35:45:
(Ezra Klein)
And a lot of people point out, well, if that was what you were doing, why did you start by attacking our allies?
35:50:
(Ezra Klein)
And why do you still have tariffs on our allies?
35:51:
(Ezra Klein)
Don't you want to be creating a kind of anti-China trading block?
35:54:
(Ezra Klein)
But no, we're just going to have 15-ish percent tariffs on everybody, with some exceptions like Brazil, which we could talk about.
36:03:
(Ezra Klein)
But tariffs on China are going to be 100%, 145% maybe.
36:09:
(Ezra Klein)
And what we're going to do is break China because we can't have the whole world dependent on
36:13:
(Ezra Klein)
on the Chinese industrial manufacturing juggernaut.
36:16:
(Ezra Klein)
So what actually happens?
36:18:
(Ezra Klein)
He quickly realizes it's gonna break the economy if he does that.
36:23:
(Ezra Klein)
Then China threatens to withhold first rare earth magnets, certain kinds of magnets that are necessary for advanced manufacturing, a lot of kinds of manufacturing, and then later on a broader export control on rare earth materials.
36:36:
(Ezra Klein)
So where have we ended up now after the deal?
36:39:
(Ezra Klein)
The effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods is 20%, which is lower than the tariff rate on Brazil, Brunei, or Laos.
36:47:
(Ezra Klein)
So think about that.
36:48:
(Ezra Klein)
And we are shipping China the advanced NVIDIA AI chips that are actually crucial to building the AI systems that might be a quite large contributor to geopolitical technology.
37:00:
(Ezra Klein)
supremacy or at least primacy in the future.
37:04:
(Ezra Klein)
And meanwhile, we're gutting our own electric vehicle and renewable energy industry as a race ahead on both.
37:10:
(Ezra Klein)
So among other things, we have raised prices.
37:13:
(Ezra Klein)
We have accomplished nothing in terms of manufacturing.
37:15:
(Ezra Klein)
We're actually down manufacturing jobs over the course of the year.
37:18:
(Ezra Klein)
And we fought a trade war with China and lost.
37:23:
(Ezra Klein)
And so now what you have is a tariff regime that is raising prices, accomplishing nothing anybody can tell.
37:31:
(Ezra Klein)
And, but nor are they saying, you know, we tried it and it didn't work.
37:35:
(Ezra Klein)
Every Republican, I think, is hoping the Supreme Court removes most of his tariff power, right?
37:40:
(Ezra Klein)
That would be, that would, you know, save them on a lot of levels.
37:44:
(Ezra Klein)
But it's just a, you think about that as a matter of governance.
37:48:
(Ezra Klein)
You think about how broken a policy process is that leads to that outcome, political pain with no policy rationale that makes any sense at all, any longer.
37:59:
(John Heilman)
Yeah.
38:01:
(John Heilman)
And, you know, I mean, this is maybe like a simple anti formulation or something.
38:05:
(John Heilman)
It's like, you know, political pain plus no policy rationale plus no economic gain.
38:14:
(John Heilman)
That's not a recipe for winning.
38:16:
(John Heilman)
Let alone, like, so much winning that we're all going to get tired of winning, you know, as Trump once promised us.
38:22:
(John Heilman)
Anyway, look, we got to take a break.
38:25:
(John Heilman)
And when we come back, I want to return to a point, Ezra, that you made earlier about Trump's disinhibition, a quality that was, like...
38:33:
(John Heilman)
kind of grotesquely on display in his reaction to the double murder of Robin Michelle Reiner.
38:40:
(John Heilman)
Um, but I don't really want to talk about the Reiners.
38:43:
(John Heilman)
I just, I want to talk about the way in which it illustrates the way he reacted, illustrates like a broader point.
38:48:
(John Heilman)
Um, um,
38:49:
(John Heilman)
about why Trump is ending the year.
38:52:
(John Heilman)
I think not like a lamb or like a lion, but more like Shamu, you know, like going from giant belly flop to giant belly flop with all of us in the splash zone.
40:14:
(Terry Moran)
President, a number of Republicans have denounced your statement on True Social after the murder of Rob Reiner.
40:20:
(Terry Moran)
Do you stand by that post?
40:22:
(Donald Trump)
Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all.
40:24:
(Donald Trump)
He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned.
40:27:
(Donald Trump)
He said he knew it was false.
40:30:
(Donald Trump)
In fact, it's the exact opposite, that I was a friend of Russia, controlled by Russia.
40:35:
(Donald Trump)
You know, it was the Russia hooks.
40:36:
(Donald Trump)
He was one of the people behind it.
40:39:
(Donald Trump)
I think he hurt himself career-wise.
40:42:
(Donald Trump)
He became like a deranged person, Trump derangement syndrome.
40:46:
(Donald Trump)
So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form.
40:50:
(Donald Trump)
I thought he was very bad for our country.
40:52:
(John Heilman)
So that was the president talking about Rob Reiner.
40:55:
(John Heilman)
And Ezra, I said before the break that I wanted to go back to your point about disinhibition.
40:59:
(John Heilman)
And in Trump's reaction to the Reiner murders, you see a combination of a very extreme form of disinhibition
41:08:
(John Heilman)
married to an equally extreme form of clinical narcissism, like in the sense that he has no empathy whatsoever, can't put himself behind the eyes of any other human being on earth and thinks everything is about himself, right?
41:23:
(John Heilman)
If you marry those two things together, that is how you get someone doing something as not just inhumane and disgusting, but also as obviously unpopular in that it has united everyone across the spectrum from Nick Fuentes to Barack Obama and kind of being like,
41:38:
(John Heilman)
I'm sorry, man, Rob Reiner's our guy.
41:40:
(John Heilman)
Shut up, Trump.
41:41:
(John Heilman)
It's hard to do that.
41:42:
(John Heilman)
Hard to get Nick Fuentes and Barack Obama on the same page about something, but there you are.
41:46:
(Ezra Klein)
I was struck that there was as much criticism of Trump on the right for that as there was because Trump's response to personal tragedy is so often so politically ghoulish.
41:59:
(Ezra Klein)
And his cruelty in these moments has been such a...
42:04:
(Ezra Klein)
a trend and pattern of his time in public life.
42:08:
(Ezra Klein)
And one thing I think it represents is that, I mean, you remember a year ago when, or right around when he won re-election,
42:17:
(Ezra Klein)
And the idea was we were in this huge vibe shift and cruelty was back and you could call anybody any slur you wanted.
42:25:
(Ezra Klein)
And, you know, you had this New York magazine piece on the cruel kids table about how they all, you know, and you've had these pieces about like the base ritual and they're all passing along Nick Fuente's clips and competing to make racist jokes and saying, I love Hitler in their group chats.
42:39:
(Ezra Klein)
And one thing about that kind of edgelord offensiveness is it can be...
42:47:
(Ezra Klein)
refreshing and a signal of a certain form, at least of independence in a moment of conformity.
42:58:
(Ezra Klein)
But when the conformity, the technocratic organizational managerial liberal, whatever conformity is gone and that's all you have.
43:09:
(Ezra Klein)
then it's repulsive because cruelty isn't fun to live in.
43:13:
(Ezra Klein)
And from Trump's comments on Reiner all the way to the immigration policy, which it has been interesting watching people like Joe Rogan say, oh, I didn't think we were gonna go after just these random people who've been here for 20 years and are just working and raising a family.
43:30:
(Ezra Klein)
I thought we were going after criminals.
43:32:
(Ezra Klein)
Nobody wants this.
43:35:
(Ezra Klein)
It's like they thought he was kidding.
43:38:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
43:39:
(Ezra Klein)
And, and maybe that's because some of them were kidding, but he's not kidding.
43:44:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
43:44:
(Ezra Klein)
He's never been kidding.
43:45:
(Ezra Klein)
And now that he's the power center and his people are much more dominant in culture, all of a sudden it's not fun edge Lord humor.
43:57:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
43:57:
(Ezra Klein)
It's yes.
43:58:
(Ezra Klein)
Do you want to be governed by this guy and these people?
44:04:
(John Heilman)
Right.
44:05:
(John Heilman)
Yeah, it's and I, you know, look, I always when people say when you think about Rogan and some of these other people like, well, he told you what he was going to do.
44:13:
(John Heilman)
I'm always like, you know, if you listen to him in 2024, he probably enunciated every number.
44:20:
(John Heilman)
in terms of the millions of immigrants he wanted to deport, every number between like 4 million and 20 million.
44:27:
(John Heilman)
He was all over the place about this.
44:29:
(John Heilman)
And he definitely said things like, you know, the most extreme version of what the deportation agenda would look like.
44:34:
(John Heilman)
He also said other things that were a lot less extreme.
44:37:
(John Heilman)
And he said the worst of the worst and everything.
44:38:
(John Heilman)
And when you listen to Trump, you're like, you know,
44:41:
(John Heilman)
You know, like I said before, a pathological liar, there's a lot of stuff.
44:45:
(John Heilman)
Trump announces everything he's going to do.
44:48:
(John Heilman)
Everything that he's going to do is there's in a seat.
44:50:
(John Heilman)
You can look back and say, he told you he was going to do this.
44:52:
(John Heilman)
He also tells you a lot of things he's going to do that he never does.
44:55:
(John Heilman)
And the combination of that with the fact that most Americans, normal Americans,
45:00:
(John Heilman)
think all politicians are liars, especially during campaigns, you can understand why some people were like, well, yeah, Trump's saying that he's going to deport everyone, but he's not really.
45:09:
(John Heilman)
That's not going to really happen.
45:10:
(John Heilman)
I actually have some sympathy for people who think, yeah, I heard him say those things, but I didn't really think he was going to do that.
45:16:
(John Heilman)
I thought he would end up doing something on the more mild end of the spectrum rather than the more extreme end of the spectrum.
45:22:
(John Heilman)
And those people, I think, turned out to have
45:25:
(John Heilman)
you know, at least to some extent, understandably, underestimated the depths of his cruelty and the degree of power that people like Stephen Miller have over him.
45:34:
(John Heilman)
Because those people do, I think, have an enormous amount of sway over Trump about the actual execution of the policies of that kind.
45:42:
(Ezra Klein)
To offer the nerdiest possible update on Mario Cuomo's famous line, Trump campaigns in wave and governs as a particle, right?
45:50:
(Ezra Klein)
He campaigns in superposition where everything is possible all at once.
45:55:
(Ezra Klein)
That was so adorable.
45:57:
(Ezra Klein)
Thank you.
45:59:
(Ezra Klein)
He campaigns in superposition, like everything is possible all at once.
46:02:
(Ezra Klein)
He tells everybody what they want to hear.
46:03:
(Ezra Klein)
Even within the course of one rally, he says a bunch of things that contradict each other.
46:07:
(Ezra Klein)
But then when you govern, it collapses down to a single...
46:12:
(Ezra Klein)
reality right you don't get to govern in the fucking quantum multiverse you have to govern in one thing and you make a choice and the choice is whether or not you deport abrigo garcia the choice is whether or not you send masked ice agents um and national guardsmen into all these cities the choice is whether or not you actually do or do not send that uh truth social missive or whatever about rob reiner and this has always been i mean this is always a problem you can it
46:40:
(Ezra Klein)
Campaigning, you can be something of a blank slate or, you know, a lot of people can imagine what they want onto you.
46:47:
(Ezra Klein)
And Trump in particular encourages that.
46:50:
(Ezra Klein)
But then choices have to be made in governing.
46:53:
(Ezra Klein)
And again, I want to keep coming back to this.
46:55:
(Ezra Klein)
And it's something you were saying earlier about political gravity beginning to affect Trump.
47:00:
(Ezra Klein)
people do not like the choices Donald Trump, President Donald Trump is making.
47:06:
(Ezra Klein)
That is, you do not need to make the story dramatically more complicated than that.
47:10:
(Ezra Klein)
It doesn't mean he's over, it doesn't mean he can't recover, it doesn't mean he's got no options, but the actual problem, and what's interesting is all the problems they're really facing, at least in my view, are self-created.
47:22:
(Ezra Klein)
So many presidents come into office, like Barack Obama in 2009,
47:28:
(Ezra Klein)
And it's like, oh shit, there's an ongoing financial crisis that is like annihilating the job market.
47:36:
(Ezra Klein)
Trump comes in, the economy is functionally fine with inflation now under control, and he begins systematically creating problems that he then has to deal with.
47:47:
(Ezra Klein)
And he has spent the year now
47:51:
(Ezra Klein)
under the thumb of many of his own problems.
47:55:
(Ezra Klein)
Like this is the problem.
47:56:
(Ezra Klein)
And I do feel like I said this, like when I did my sort of initial essay on, you know, don't believe him in muscle velocity, that the problem with trying to act at muscle velocity, the problem with trying to govern in muscle velocity is you think you're overwhelming the opposition and you are, but you are also overwhelming yourself.
48:13:
(Ezra Klein)
You do not have attentional reserves and resources.
48:16:
(Ezra Klein)
The rest of the world does not.
48:18:
(Ezra Klein)
you can completely lose track of your own threads and the sort of relentless action and believing of your own bullshit will affect you too.
48:26:
(Ezra Klein)
The sort of effort to govern in that way is not just outwardly focused, you're also creating your own internal culture and eventually your own internal problems because you're breaking a lot of things all at once and you don't know which one of them will break in a way that then you actually have to fix it.
48:44:
(Ezra Klein)
Versus breaking away where you can, you know, point and laugh or even run on it.
48:50:
(John Heilman)
Um, so I, I want to shift to our second, uh, big theme for you in 2025, you know, the plight of Democrats, um, and, and the sense that maybe they finally started to find their footing, but you know, just a button up on Trump.
49:08:
(John Heilman)
Um, I mentioned earlier, you know, that John Lovett said this thing about Trump is going, uh, coming in like a lion and out like a lamb, both, uh, both Johns Lovett and Favreau, both
49:18:
(John Heilman)
said quite clearly, the fact that he's so politically weak now, or at least politically weaker at this point than he has been at any time in Trump 2.0 and arguably politically weaker than he's been maybe ever in the times that he's been in office.
49:31:
(John Heilman)
they're like, that doesn't make him any less dangerous.
49:34:
(John Heilman)
In fact, you know, he's more dangerous when he's cornered.
49:36:
(John Heilman)
So we all are in the same place about the fact that he is politically weak right now.
49:43:
(John Heilman)
And there doesn't seem to be an obvious way out, or at least an obvious way out that he's ready to contemplate, willing to contemplate, or able to contemplate doesn't mean he can't do a huge amount of damage still to the country.
49:53:
(John Heilman)
But that gets us into the Democrat thing.
49:55:
(John Heilman)
And so does your last point, which was,
49:58:
(John Heilman)
so much of the problem, so much of his crisis, so much of his loss of altitude is self-inflicted.
50:04:
(John Heilman)
Democrats have done some things where they have not managed to fuck it up, which is not nothing when someone is stepping on rakes over and over again.
50:16:
(John Heilman)
I mean, in those situations, you basically just try to stay out of the garden, right, and let them keep bashing themselves in the face.
50:22:
(John Heilman)
But I'm interested in your
50:25:
(John Heilman)
in your view, enunciated at the top of the podcast here, which is sort of that things seem to be gelling a little bit for Democrats.
50:31:
(John Heilman)
You have been not like a doomsayer, but someone who has throughout the year, and I would say not just this year, but going back, has been very clear-eyed in pointing to the notion that
50:46:
(John Heilman)
something is that Democrats have lost their way and that on a variety of issues, there's things that seem to be fundamentally broken in the party that need to be remedied if the party is going to ever be a national governing institution again.
50:59:
(John Heilman)
And you see it throughout the shows you've done over the course of the year, both in some of the guests you've had on and in your video essays.
51:11:
(John Heilman)
In both of which, you know, the overarching tone is, you know, tough love.
51:16:
(John Heilman)
Sometimes really tough, sometimes less tough.
51:20:
(John Heilman)
But earlier, you said something about seeing signs that, and I think I got this quote right, about the, quote,
51:30:
(John Heilman)
And that you can feel a, I think the word you used was a new synthesis that's beginning.
51:37:
(John Heilman)
And, you know, you sounded vaguely hopeful when you said those things.
51:40:
(John Heilman)
So tell me about all of that and where you think the Democratic Party is here at the end of 2025.
51:46:
(Ezra Klein)
Let me just start with the set of reasons I think the Democratic Party is maybe beginning to find its footing.
51:57:
(Ezra Klein)
They did not win the shutdown in the sense that they got what they wanted in the deal.
52:04:
(Ezra Klein)
But I do think they won the shutdown in the sense...
52:07:
(Ezra Klein)
They ended up in a better position and Republicans ended up in a worse one which for an opposition party causing a shutdown is actually quite remarkable a hundred percent So Democrats were unhappy with how it ended they did not I mean Schumer was not able to work with his moderates to find an off-ramp that would allow him and his group to save face but
52:28:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, you think about like the Ted Cruz Obamacare shutdown, which has ended in total humiliation for Cruz and the Republicans and Democrats navigating this, not necessarily because they were so...
52:40:
(Ezra Klein)
strategically brilliant.
52:42:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, Trump just like played it terribly, but I think that's something.
52:46:
(Ezra Klein)
The elections that we talked about.
52:48:
(Ezra Klein)
The other thing that I think is interesting is that- They did a fine job, I would say, Ezra.
52:51:
(John Heilman)
I think they did a fine job in deciding to focus on healthcare.
52:55:
(John Heilman)
You were very good at talking this year, and I totally agree.
52:59:
(John Heilman)
That the shutdown, in fact, was about a bunch of larger problems, about a bunch of things the Democrats did not want to pay for a government that was acting the way the Trump government was acting.
53:07:
(John Heilman)
But tactically and strategically focusing on health care was the right thing to do.
53:11:
(John Heilman)
And it's why, in the end, I think they unquestionably won the shutdown, even though many people were frustrated, particularly on the left, about how it ended.
53:18:
(John Heilman)
As we sit here today, there's just no doubt that they improved their position rather than weakening their position.
53:24:
(John Heilman)
And that is the only metric when you're a minority party.
53:27:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah, I am less certain that the counterfactual shutdowns are worse, but that's an unknowable question.
53:33:
(Ezra Klein)
But I agree with you that in terms of having chosen the healthcare shutdown, they ended up doing the thing they intended to do with it, which I think more than actually winning the subsidies was elevating the affordability issue and putting Trump on the wrong side of it.
53:46:
(Ezra Klein)
So then you have the wins in 2025.
53:48:
(Ezra Klein)
And then you have...
53:50:
(Ezra Klein)
I think something that is quite meaningful, which is the emergence of Democratic figures and candidates who seem like they are winning in the attention wars in a way that is native to this moment in politics.
54:05:
(Ezra Klein)
And this gets to something that I think is a complicated thing to talk about in the Democratic Party.
54:10:
(Ezra Klein)
But the Democratic Party has been functionally leaderless since 2016.
54:14:
(Ezra Klein)
In 2016, Hillary Clinton loses.
54:16:
(Ezra Klein)
In 2020, Joe Biden wins, but he wins already in a somewhat diminished state as a communicator.
54:23:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm not a believer that he was senile or not doing the job of the president.
54:26:
(Ezra Klein)
But in terms of the kind of party leader that Joe Biden would have been at age 68 – and you've known him, I think, much better than I have –
54:36:
(Ezra Klein)
He would have been a very aggressive party leader and really aggressive in articulating what the Democratic Party was in this moment.
54:41:
(Ezra Klein)
He was not able to do that any longer.
54:43:
(Ezra Klein)
And then you have this weird.
54:45:
(Ezra Klein)
So then in 2024, he doesn't ultimately run again.
54:48:
(Ezra Klein)
But nor do you have a primary in which the shape of the Democratic Party is hashed out and chosen.
54:54:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
54:54:
(Ezra Klein)
And of course, the Democrats will lose in 2024.
54:56:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
54:56:
(Ezra Klein)
And so what I think you're seeing now is that after a period of time when Democrats were – their strategy against Trump was to retrench into something before, right?
55:05:
(Ezra Klein)
Joe Biden was basically a return to normalcy candidate.
55:09:
(Ezra Klein)
Let's treat Trump as an aberration and show we don't have to live like this.
55:13:
(Ezra Klein)
We don't have to be here.
55:13:
(Ezra Klein)
We don't have to go here.
55:14:
(Ezra Klein)
We can bring you back to more stable ground.
55:17:
(Ezra Klein)
That didn't work in the end.
55:20:
(Ezra Klein)
And so what you now have, I think, are people sort of beginning to –
55:24:
(Ezra Klein)
show that they compete intentionally and compete politically by offering something different.
55:29:
(Ezra Klein)
Mamdani obviously caught tremendous amounts of fire in New York City, and there is something in the merger of his form of very, very affordability-focused democratic socialism.
55:43:
(Ezra Klein)
And the incredible friendliness and pluralism in his approach, Mamdani does not represent, as he did even at other times in his own career, the kind of leftism that is scolding you or telling you that the police are anti-queer.
55:58:
(Ezra Klein)
He's smiling.
56:00:
(Ezra Klein)
He's going to synagogues.
56:01:
(Ezra Klein)
He's meeting everybody.
56:02:
(Ezra Klein)
He is willing to talk with anybody who doesn't like him.
56:06:
(Ezra Klein)
There's an incredible pluralism and friendliness to his approach.
56:11:
(Ezra Klein)
One of his lines that I love, he keeps talking about having a New York City that loves you back, right?
56:16:
(Ezra Klein)
There's an incredible buoyancy
56:18:
(Ezra Klein)
In Mamdani.
56:19:
(Ezra Klein)
So he's one.
56:20:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think he actually ends up creating some sort of energy for Democrats.
56:24:
(Ezra Klein)
I would say Gavin Newsom, to my great surprise, is another who begins to figure something out this year and vaults himself to the front of the 2028 rankings for Democrats.
56:35:
(Ezra Klein)
Whether he's the right candidate for 2028, I think people will and should argue about.
56:39:
(Ezra Klein)
But he basically follows, and I just did an interview with him about this, and I think it's pretty interesting, but he follows a contradictory path.
56:47:
(Ezra Klein)
On the one hand, he begins a podcast right after the election where he's interviewing Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Michael Savage, Dr. Phil, Frank Luntz, right?
56:57:
(Ezra Klein)
All these actually MAGA or right-leaning figures who you would never imagine the highly progressive people.
57:06:
(Ezra Klein)
resistance governor of California sitting down with for these very open conversations.
57:10:
(Ezra Klein)
So he's, on the one hand, really exploring the right and sitting in communication with them.
57:15:
(Ezra Klein)
And at the same time, he begins to become the leader of the resistance.
57:18:
(Ezra Klein)
He leads Prop 50, the redistricting initiative on the ballot.
57:23:
(Ezra Klein)
He develops this trolling, holding up a mirror style with Trump in the attention economy.
57:29:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think what unites these two things about Newsom that's very important and that a lot of Democrats don't share
57:35:
(Ezra Klein)
is that what he simply is, is not afraid.
57:40:
(Ezra Klein)
He is not afraid to try things.
57:42:
(Ezra Klein)
He's not afraid to take fire from the right.
57:44:
(Ezra Klein)
He's not afraid to take fire from the left.
57:46:
(Ezra Klein)
And so he begins to move experimentally.
57:49:
(Ezra Klein)
Some things work, some things don't.
57:50:
(Ezra Klein)
One thing I've liked is he signed a bunch of very big abundance bills and talked about that over the last year.
57:55:
(Ezra Klein)
But he's trying a lot of things all simultaneously.
57:57:
(Ezra Klein)
And in a Democratic Party where I think it's cardinal sin is caution,
58:02:
(Ezra Klein)
I think Newsom begins to be one of the people showing what it might look like if you had a Democratic Party that was risk-tolerant as opposed to risk-averse.
58:10:
(Ezra Klein)
It was trying things as opposed to too afraid to try new things.
58:15:
(Ezra Klein)
Then, and I'm not saying he's as big as these other two figures, but I do think the amount I see him on social media is indicative of something.
58:22:
(Ezra Klein)
I think James Tallarico in Texas is really interesting, the Texas Senate candidate who's now in a primary with Jasmine Crockett.
58:28:
(Ezra Klein)
And, you know, he ends up on Rogan.
58:31:
(Ezra Klein)
He's the first real Democrat Rogan has had on in a very long time.
58:34:
(Ezra Klein)
And Tallarico's politics are very explicitly Christian.
58:37:
(Ezra Klein)
And Tallarico is putting out these TikToks and these viral videos.
58:41:
(Ezra Klein)
And they're almost always him on.
58:44:
(Ezra Klein)
arguing with the right, but from this very moralistic and religiously rooted space.
58:51:
(Ezra Klein)
And you see in him, and I think in the response to him, the desire for something friendlier, for something morally grounded in this era of callousness and cruelty.
58:59:
(Ezra Klein)
And I'm not saying any one of these people is the right next leader for the Democratic Party.
59:04:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm not saying these are the sum total of possible directions Democrats can go in.
59:07:
(Ezra Klein)
They're not.
59:08:
(Ezra Klein)
But what you are seeing is a series of Democrats who seem like they are figuring this moment out in a way that I think a year ago, two years ago, it's like the Democratic Party, it understood MSNBC and the New York Times, but it didn't like it.
59:23:
(Ezra Klein)
It's like it had never watched YouTube or TikTok at all.
59:25:
(Ezra Klein)
And it just felt very, very, very misaligned.
59:29:
(Ezra Klein)
And on the policy side, I think the Democratic Party is so coherent around affordability as the central question and message of the moment.
59:34:
(Ezra Klein)
And that has also given it some shape.
59:37:
(John Heilman)
Okay, well, there is a lot to unpack there.
59:41:
(John Heilman)
And that is exactly what we're going to do right after we sneak in one more quick break.
59:47:
(John Heilman)
And then we'll come back for the final leg of our look back on the year in politics, policy and governance with Ezra Klein.
59:53:
(John Heilman)
So do not go anywhere.
60:04:
(Ezra Klein)
I've met a lot of Democrats who don't, who they're more worried about things going wrong in their communication than something going right.
60:12:
(Gavin Newsom)
Ezra, I'm a fail forward fast guy.
60:15:
(Gavin Newsom)
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
60:17:
(Gavin Newsom)
I got a 960 on my SAT.
60:19:
(Gavin Newsom)
I wasn't one of those straight A students at Harvard.
60:21:
(Gavin Newsom)
I can't read.
60:22:
(Gavin Newsom)
You've never seen me read a speech.
60:23:
(Gavin Newsom)
I can't read a speech.
60:25:
(Gavin Newsom)
I have severe dyslexia and a learning disability that is defined me and who I am.
60:28:
(Gavin Newsom)
My struggles, my insecurities, my anxieties, but also my willingness to try new things and learn from my mistakes.
60:34:
(Ezra Klein)
Got a lot of facts you've been spit at me.
60:36:
(Ezra Klein)
How do you learn?
60:37:
(Gavin Newsom)
It's just, I absorb a lot.
60:39:
(Gavin Newsom)
I observe, I absorb, it's just harder.
60:42:
(Gavin Newsom)
I have to do hundreds and hundreds of reps. For one, you know, some folks, you know, do one or two reps, but in that process, you overcompensate and you then develop all of these other skills that have been gifts.
60:54:
(Gavin Newsom)
It allows you to read a room, it allows you to pivot, allows you to be a little bit more flexible.
60:58:
(Gavin Newsom)
Yes, dare I say, even more authentic.
61:00:
(John Heilman)
So that was an exchange from your lengthy year-end interview with the governor of California, Ezra, directly addressing one of the points that you were making just before the break, which is that Gavin has an unusually high tolerance for political risk, at least for a Democrat.
61:18:
(John Heilman)
And look, I've known the guy since he was the mayor of San Francisco, and I like the guy.
61:23:
(John Heilman)
Yeah.
61:23:
(John Heilman)
And I would say that he's been on an interesting journey this past year.
61:26:
(John Heilman)
We're like early on, he always has this problem with seeming to a lot of people to be too calculating.
61:33:
(John Heilman)
And that kind of was a little too close to the surface in the early months of the year, I think for a lot of people's tastes and in a way that again, kind of reinforced for people who are skeptical about his core beliefs and convictions that maybe he's not
61:49:
(John Heilman)
you know, trying things on for size and trying to figure out what works rather than following his heart or his head.
61:55:
(John Heilman)
And I think he genuinely, a lot of the things that people now identify as having put him into the nominal frontrunner's position for the Democratic nomination in 2028, came out of a genuine sense of outrage when Trump decided to send troops into L.A.,
62:11:
(John Heilman)
And the kind of like any pretense of trying to work with the Trump administration got stripped away and he got pissed and the pissed part of him,
62:21:
(John Heilman)
gave rise to a lot of the kind of innovation you're talking about.
62:24:
(John Heilman)
He's obviously very good at the attention economy, but also the mocking of Trump on social media.
62:29:
(John Heilman)
The more aggressive posture of going after Trump was, I think, an admirable adaptation of the circumstance and is driven by a genuine sense of anger about the way the country's being governed.
62:43:
(John Heilman)
Having said that, what I don't, listening to your interview with him,
62:47:
(John Heilman)
What I still don't get about him, what he doesn't have yet, and I'm not saying you can't get it, we're still a long way out from 2028, is like, what's the animating?
62:56:
(John Heilman)
He's not just a straight up.
62:58:
(John Heilman)
If he were like, hey, you know what I am?
62:59:
(John Heilman)
I'm the abundance candidate.
63:01:
(John Heilman)
Here's my theory of the case.
63:03:
(John Heilman)
Here's what's wrong with the country.
63:05:
(John Heilman)
Here's a bunch of policies.
63:06:
(John Heilman)
Here's how I knit it together thematically.
63:08:
(John Heilman)
That is a thing that Bill Clinton did in his way, a thing that Barack Obama did in his way.
63:14:
(John Heilman)
Newsom is very good on your podcast.
63:18:
(John Heilman)
And he answers all these questions.
63:19:
(John Heilman)
But what kind of a Democrat is Gavin Newsom?
63:25:
(John Heilman)
What's the lift of the driving dream with him?
63:28:
(John Heilman)
I don't think that's there yet.
63:29:
(John Heilman)
Whereas James Tallarico, the other person that you were pointing to before the break, I get what he's about.
63:36:
(John Heilman)
And I'm not trying to push James Tallarico as a presidential candidate.
63:38:
(John Heilman)
But the thing that you just described, someone who fuses the moralism
63:43:
(John Heilman)
of his religious upbringing and convictions with a progressivism that is as pure
63:52:
(John Heilman)
in the contemporary sense as Gavin Newsom's progressivism.
63:56:
(John Heilman)
That I get.
63:57:
(John Heilman)
I mean, I get that.
63:58:
(John Heilman)
That's Christian liberation theology.
64:00:
(John Heilman)
That's lefty, that's a very identifiable strain of lefty Christians, lefty Catholics who've existed for a long time.
64:07:
(John Heilman)
We haven't seen it much in our politics recently.
64:10:
(John Heilman)
But I understand what Tallarico's kind of theory of the case is for what has to happen
64:17:
(John Heilman)
to fix the country, fix the party, fix our politics.
64:20:
(John Heilman)
I don't really know what that is for Newsom, do you?
64:23:
(Ezra Klein)
So I'd say a couple things here.
64:25:
(Ezra Klein)
So one, it's funny, I just did a very long also wonderful interview with Tallarico that'll come out on my show in early January.
64:34:
(Ezra Klein)
And I really, really like Tallarico, but I think in many ways he's got less sense of what he actually wants to do than Newsom, who's just a much more experienced politician, has been governor of California for a long time.
64:47:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm not surprised.
64:49:
(John Heilman)
If Tallarico had as much of a policy agenda as Gavin, we'd be in trouble because Gavin has run California for two times.
64:54:
(Ezra Klein)
So I think that there's something – but the thing I'm saying about that in a way is that I think that there is – all the problems you point out with Newsom or separately with Hillary or any of them I think are true.
65:06:
(Ezra Klein)
I don't think Newsom is a defined candidate yet.
65:09:
(Ezra Klein)
And nor – I think the Democratic Party will want to think very, very hard.
65:13:
(Ezra Klein)
I think Newsom will have to prove some things he's not yet proven to have the governor – and he and I talk about this in the show –
65:20:
(Ezra Klein)
the governor of the state that ranks 50th out of 50 on affordability.
65:24:
(John Heilman)
You asked the right question.
65:25:
(John Heilman)
You put your finger right on that question in the podcast.
65:27:
(John Heilman)
You were like, how do you run on the California miracle when affordability is the main issue and California's least affordable state in the union?
65:35:
(John Heilman)
I don't think he really had an answer to that either.
65:37:
(Ezra Klein)
But so what I'm really saying is not, and I want to be super clear about this, that Newsom should be the candidate in 2020.
65:43:
(Ezra Klein)
We'll see.
65:44:
(Ezra Klein)
What I'm saying is that compared to a year ago,
65:47:
(Ezra Klein)
We have watched a series of Democrats, and I think you could name a couple more.
65:53:
(Ezra Klein)
Those are the ones who come most obviously to mind.
65:54:
(Ezra Klein)
But, you know, I think if he had not ended up in the weird tattoo scandals, you would talk about Graham Plattner in Maine.
66:00:
(Ezra Klein)
I think we'll see what happens.
66:01:
(Ezra Klein)
The Michigan primary is going to be pretty, pretty intense.
66:04:
(Ezra Klein)
But Mallory McMorrow is another person who I think has been really interesting this year.
66:08:
(Ezra Klein)
I think you have begun to see Democrats who feel like they are grasping the texture of this moment and breaking through in it.
66:17:
(Ezra Klein)
And again, going back to something you identified in my show, I just see attention as such a fundamental currency right now.
66:25:
(Ezra Klein)
So you and I both remember the era of the note, you know, the morning email.
66:32:
(Ezra Klein)
And they would talk about the invisible primary.
66:35:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
66:35:
(Ezra Klein)
And, you know, when I was reading that stuff back in, you know, it's like 2005, the attention given to how much money different candidates were raising as the signal for where they figuring out and where they being able to arrange something significant.
66:49:
(Ezra Klein)
It's like all anybody talked about, I felt like was fundraising and staff or hires.
66:53:
(Ezra Klein)
And I just think that we live in the thing money was supposed to buy you was attention.
66:58:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
66:58:
(Ezra Klein)
And I don't think money can buy enough attention anymore.
67:02:
(Ezra Klein)
The candidates who work in this era need to be able to earn the attention.
67:06:
(Ezra Klein)
And you can only earn the attention if you're able to figure out a series of things.
67:10:
(Ezra Klein)
Some of them, by the way, very substantive.
67:12:
(Ezra Klein)
It's not just style points.
67:14:
(Ezra Klein)
Part of Momdani's attentional strategy is actually having a policy agenda so clear and memetic that half of New York could recite it by heart.
67:24:
(John Heilman)
I mean, they could recite it by heart, and they did.
67:28:
(John Heilman)
By the time that Zoran won, he turned his agenda into a call and response thing at his rallies.
67:36:
(Zohran Mamdani)
New York, we're going to freeze the...
67:41:
(Zohran Mamdani)
Together, New York, we're going to make buses fast and...
67:46:
(Zohran Mamdani)
Together, New York, we're going to deliver a universal...
67:52:
(Ezra Klein)
This is also, by the way, true for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
67:55:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, Medicare for All and Build the Wall are mimetic policies as much as they are anything else.
68:00:
(Ezra Klein)
They are policies that stand in for the entire agenda.
68:03:
(Ezra Klein)
But as you're saying, Tallarico reflects a sort of moral argument.
68:08:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, there's a populism that you see happening aesthetically and in some cases, substantively with these candidates.
68:13:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, Newsom is much more, I think right now, simultaneously the leader of the resistance.
68:17:
(Ezra Klein)
And also, I just think he's learning things from the right.
68:20:
(Ezra Klein)
I think his podcast was a much bigger part of his evolution than other people do.
68:25:
(Ezra Klein)
You learn a lot talking to people.
68:26:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think he talked to them and absorbed them and figured something out there.
68:30:
(Ezra Klein)
And that's part of why he's been able to reemerge in this form.
68:33:
(Ezra Klein)
But again, I don't want to say any of these guys are the future of the party.
68:36:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
68:37:
(Ezra Klein)
I understand.
68:37:
(Ezra Klein)
What I am saying is that part of why I am thinking a little bit differently about the Democratic Party is six months ago, I felt like none of them had their footing.
68:47:
(John Heilman)
Right.
68:47:
(Ezra Klein)
And now we look around and a bunch of them seem to have their footing.
68:51:
(John Heilman)
It felt more abundant.
68:52:
(John Heilman)
And now it doesn't feel more abundant.
68:54:
(John Heilman)
It's like, it's a little bit like,
68:55:
(John Heilman)
If you were doing, if you're a doctor and you were doing a diagnosis or an assessment of the state of the democratic body politic, you would have said a year ago, you know, touch and go.
69:08:
(John Heilman)
Right.
69:09:
(John Heilman)
And now you're kind of like not dead yet.
69:10:
(John Heilman)
You know, there's still, we got some, we got a pulse here, right?
69:13:
(Ezra Klein)
There's, there's, it's starting to walk around the hospital floor a little bit.
69:17:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah, it's trying to take those steps.
69:19:
(Ezra Klein)
It's not flat out.
69:21:
(Ezra Klein)
Then, of course, there's policy, and we could talk about that.
69:23:
(Ezra Klein)
But I do think you're seeing really interesting syntheses around affordability, around various forms of economic populism, around abundance.
69:33:
(Ezra Klein)
I've been drafted in as a character in what field of people like fights, but to me they feel like...
69:41:
(Ezra Klein)
an effort people are making to work through different ideas and find a way to braid them into something that feels coherent.
69:49:
(Ezra Klein)
And by the way, something that might also be contradictory, a deep belief I have about politicians, and you were saying a minute ago that Obama and Clinton represented something clear.
69:57:
(Ezra Klein)
That is both true, I would say, and false.
69:59:
(Ezra Klein)
The other thing that is true about them, just like it's true about Trump and true about, I think, all truly great national politicians in a country this big is
70:06:
(Ezra Klein)
Is it they tend to be able to hold contradictory things together inside themselves.
70:11:
(Terry Moran)
Sure.
70:11:
(Ezra Klein)
Obama, Clinton, the populist and the new Democrat, for instance.
70:14:
(Ezra Klein)
Sure.
70:14:
(Ezra Klein)
And I'm just seeing like I'm seeing more force, you know, just forces, energies that are colliding inside the Democratic milieu.
70:26:
(John Heilman)
You mentioned, of course, I just want to give you one piece of advice as the person who co-authored the book Game Change.
70:36:
(John Heilman)
I have tried, Ezra.
70:38:
(John Heilman)
I worked on it like 12 bastards to figure out a way to get royalties from every time anybody used the phrase.
70:45:
(John Heilman)
There's no way to do it.
70:46:
(John Heilman)
There's no way you can put a toll on the use of the word abundance.
70:51:
(John Heilman)
I would never want to, man.
70:53:
(John Heilman)
I'm an open source guy.
70:55:
(John Heilman)
I want to ask you... Creative comments over here.
70:59:
(John Heilman)
I want to ask you as we wind down here, I made you uncomfortable at the beginning by saying, you know, you're an Ezra.
71:05:
(John Heilman)
I do want to ask you one question, right?
71:07:
(John Heilman)
Because the essays...
71:09:
(John Heilman)
when you do a video essay, those have gotten a lot of attention.
71:12:
(John Heilman)
And you don't do a video essay on the basis of every column that you write.
71:17:
(John Heilman)
You write things that don't turn into video, I believe, where you are just doing a straight up column and don't try to turn it into a podcast little video essay.
71:25:
(John Heilman)
It seems like a lot of thought goes into when you decide to do that.
71:29:
(John Heilman)
And it also seems there's a great degree of intention.
71:32:
(John Heilman)
And you're also a smart enough person, obviously, that you're aware that the fact that your audience is not just
71:40:
(John Heilman)
the viewer, the people who like the Ezra Klein show or the audience of the New York Times or the audience of any particular, you were speaking to democratic elites in a way and those decisions, those essays, the columns you write in general, but in particularly some of these video essays are landing with a particular kind of force
72:02:
(John Heilman)
and having a kind of influence that is, frankly, unusual.
72:06:
(John Heilman)
And I guess I'm curious about having listened to you do the show over the course of the last year, and then seeing some of your appearances on other shows, you seem like you're kind of not struggling, but grappling with...
72:21:
(John Heilman)
how do I think about my role?
72:23:
(John Heilman)
What is it I'm doing here?
72:25:
(John Heilman)
I mean, it would have been easy to say what that was 10 years ago.
72:29:
(John Heilman)
And I think it would have been pretty easy to say what it was even three years ago.
72:34:
(John Heilman)
But starting with the Biden controversy and leading up to now where we said, it feels like it's different.
72:40:
(John Heilman)
And you understand that it's different.
72:42:
(John Heilman)
And you're trying to get your arms around what your role is in
72:49:
(John Heilman)
not just in journalism, but in our political life and in the party and so on.
72:53:
(John Heilman)
I'm just really interested to hear how you think about that.
72:57:
(Ezra Klein)
I am probably less internally confused as to what to do week to week than I am simply resistant to doing that much navel-gazing in public.
73:11:
(Ezra Klein)
Yes, everything you say is true.
73:13:
(Ezra Klein)
I wouldn't deny any of it.
73:14:
(Ezra Klein)
I think it would be stupid or... Disingenuous.
73:18:
(Ezra Klein)
Disingenuous, thank you.
73:20:
(Ezra Klein)
And also, the way in which some things are landing with more force is true, but the degree to which those things feel completely new to me is not all that true.
73:34:
(Ezra Klein)
I could very much have imagined writing something like the Biden piece...
73:38:
(Ezra Klein)
you know, at Vox, I just don't think at that moment it would have landed in the same way.
73:42:
(Ezra Klein)
So I agree that, and the thing of, or now there are video essays in there, I mean, that just has to do with that I have a video team now and, you know, and we've learned how to do these things.
73:52:
(Ezra Klein)
So when I, but there is a kind, the thing that I think you are like getting at is that there is a kind of piece I do sometimes that is like, it's beyond a column, it's obviously not an interview.
74:04:
(Ezra Klein)
And it's me trying to really say something.
74:07:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, I did a piece on like, this is how you beat Trumpism, but it was about like the big tent Democratic Party and the need to expand the tent and what that might mean and trying to sort of say that.
74:14:
(John Heilman)
And then stop acting like this is normal essay, which was basically giving Democrats a very direct advice on how to handle the challenge of a prospective shutdown.
74:22:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah, but on the other hand, like, here's what I would say about it, right?
74:27:
(John Heilman)
I'm not being critical, by the way.
74:28:
(John Heilman)
No, no, I don't take it as critical.
74:30:
(John Heilman)
I don't think there's anything wrong with any of these things.
74:31:
(Ezra Klein)
No, I don't take it as critical, and I'm not being defensive about it.
74:36:
(Ezra Klein)
As you hear, I find it weird to talk about this in public, because I like talking about my work, but I don't like talking about my meta work.
74:42:
(Ezra Klein)
But...
74:44:
(Ezra Klein)
I just think that, you know, something like the stop acting like this is normal.
74:48:
(Ezra Klein)
That one, for instance, in particular, on the one hand, I understood that I was arguing for a certain kind of shutdown.
74:54:
(Ezra Klein)
And on the other hand, I think I would have understood it as my job the whole way through this job I've done to argue about a shutdown in the lineup.
75:04:
(Ezra Klein)
But yeah, there is an energy around them now that, you know, I think I – the main way I feel it is not so much that –
75:13:
(Ezra Klein)
In the past, I wouldn't have done a piece saying this is the way I think Democrats should do a shutdown.
75:19:
(Ezra Klein)
But I think I would not have thought that piece had any real chance of mattering.
75:24:
(Ezra Klein)
And now I think they do have a chance of mattering.
75:27:
(Ezra Klein)
And that is a heavier responsibility to hold in advance of doing them.
75:33:
(Ezra Klein)
And I try to take that seriously.
75:36:
(Ezra Klein)
But in many ways for me, my job doesn't feel that different.
75:42:
(Ezra Klein)
The world around me feels different.
75:44:
(Ezra Klein)
And the reason I am often awkward talking about this in public is
75:48:
(Ezra Klein)
is I'm really trying to not let it get too much in my head, because I don't want to sit and think about myself like I'm throwing lightning bolts down from the mountaintop, and I don't want to get into a thing where I'm doing a lot of image management or influence management.
76:02:
(Ezra Klein)
I think all those things, when people get into that place, and I've watched people in our profession do that, the work becomes inauthentic and untrue.
76:09:
(Ezra Klein)
And one thing that I do believe about podcasting and about, you know, these kinds of essays, people can feel when the work is true and when it's not.
76:17:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, this isn't just cerebral.
76:19:
(Ezra Klein)
It's not just my walk blog days where if the chart is right, that's sort of the point of the post.
76:24:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, there is something about...
76:26:
(Ezra Klein)
I am trying to sense my way through this moment.
76:29:
(Ezra Klein)
And then I guess to go to something I said to you at the beginning of this answer, that's why to me what I do week to week doesn't feel that unclear because it is very intuitive and it is about trying to feel the moment and feel what I actually have to say and what my actual angle on it is.
76:51:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
76:52:
(Ezra Klein)
I only do those essays when I feel them, truly.
76:56:
(Ezra Klein)
Every piece like that that happens, those ones you're describing, it has to feel like a fever before I use that particular form.
77:06:
(Ezra Klein)
Something has to be building internally, and then I know it's time to do that.
77:10:
(Ezra Klein)
But I can't describe the process more than that.
77:12:
(Ezra Klein)
It's not like I sit down and I'm like, I need to do a shutdown one of these.
77:16:
(Ezra Klein)
Until I saw it, I would have never done it.
77:18:
(Ezra Klein)
And so, you know, the practice, as weird as it sounds, and again, it's why I try not to talk about it too much.
77:25:
(Ezra Klein)
The practice is trying to maintain an openness and an internal awareness of like what is happening and how it's feeling in me.
77:32:
(Ezra Klein)
When I did the emergencies here stuff about Abrego Garcia.
77:36:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, the emotions of that are 1,000% authentic.
77:42:
(Ezra Klein)
And to me, that's a lot of the job in this era is to absorb everything, like let it go through the weird intuitive processing that happens inside of me.
77:55:
(Ezra Klein)
And then when something begins to happen, when I begin to feel that emotion,
78:00:
(Ezra Klein)
you know creative energy you know that then check it right do the reporting like make sure everything you like really try to like battle test it but but also to not be afraid of it um and and my biggest worry about my own work is that every interview i do now it has this kind of like you know meta like looking at myself in the third person and if i start looking at myself in the third person my work is going to become shit and so i want to try to avoid it as much as i can that's my resolution for 2026
78:29:
(John Heilman)
Um, I'm sitting here in California.
78:31:
(John Heilman)
And one of the things I remembered hearing that your interview with Gavin, you're like, you know, every minute I spend outside California, I would just wish I was there.
78:38:
(John Heilman)
And I wasn't sure if you were being hyperbolic.
78:40:
(John Heilman)
We're both Californians or both Southern Californians.
78:42:
(John Heilman)
You grew up a little further South than me, but both suburban Southern California kids.
78:46:
(John Heilman)
Um, do you really like, would you really rather be here?
78:48:
(John Heilman)
Oh, yeah.
78:50:
(Ezra Klein)
My heart is really northern California, I should say.
78:52:
(Ezra Klein)
If I could live anywhere.
78:54:
(Ezra Klein)
Well, you grew up in Irvine, right?
78:56:
(John Heilman)
Didn't you grow up in Irvine?
78:57:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, nobody wants to move back to Irvine.
78:58:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm not saying that.
78:59:
(Ezra Klein)
Plenty of people like Irvine.
79:00:
(John Heilman)
I'm saying it.
79:01:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm saying it.
79:02:
(Ezra Klein)
Well, you could say it.
79:04:
(Ezra Klein)
But man, if I could live in Santa Cruz and Marin or those are places like I feel like it's my soil.
79:12:
(Ezra Klein)
Why can't you?
79:12:
(Ezra Klein)
There's family reasons and other reasons I'm here.
79:15:
(Ezra Klein)
Okay.
79:16:
(Ezra Klein)
There's a lot going on in anybody's life.
79:18:
(Ezra Klein)
And I'm not unhappy.
79:19:
(Ezra Klein)
Sometimes I say this stuff and people are like, I love, like New York's been great.
79:22:
(Ezra Klein)
It's been great for me, great for my family.
79:24:
(Ezra Klein)
But yeah, I love California and it is, you know, that's my soil.
79:29:
(Ezra Klein)
It's my culture.
79:31:
(Ezra Klein)
It's a place I feel most like myself and where I like find the most inspiration.
79:36:
(Ezra Klein)
So yeah, I mean, in the sense that if all is for equal, would I live in the most beautiful state in the country where I can always drive to Big Sur?
79:45:
(John Heilman)
or um hike parasima like yeah i would hell yeah i would um i have like my last couple questions for you are very or one of them is a little off the wall and one of them is like my like the pièce de résistance the one that's a little off the wall or will be for others but probably not for us um you know i made that list of the things you did and there's two of your episodes in this two of why i say things you did episodes of the show last year um
80:12:
(John Heilman)
And of course, the two that stick out like sore thumbs, I shouldn't say sore thumbs, those two that really stand out as different from the rest, which of these things are not like the others, are two of my favorite episodes you did, one with my friend Brian Eno and the other with Patti Smith.
80:26:
(John Heilman)
And they are distinctly different from everything else
80:31:
(John Heilman)
Every other interview you conducted the year, I don't think there's anything close to those.
80:35:
(John Heilman)
They're the two artists, and they're obviously both two iconic epic artists.
80:39:
(John Heilman)
I also learned in listening to the Brian interview that your taste in music is really, really weird.
80:45:
(John Heilman)
I mean, you're like, I don't mean that in a critical way.
80:48:
(John Heilman)
I just mean we have to talk more somewhere offline about, because you talk about some of the things that move you deeply emotionally.
80:54:
(John Heilman)
You play some of those clips, and I'm like, man,
80:57:
(John Heilman)
Um, I need to understand how that's a thing that connects with you deeply.
81:01:
(John Heilman)
Um, I think maybe Brian thought that too.
81:04:
(John Heilman)
Um, tell me about those interviews and what they meant to you.
81:06:
(Ezra Klein)
You're not listening to the new, you're not listening to the Oniotrix 0.0 album.
81:11:
(Ezra Klein)
It's great, man.
81:12:
(Ezra Klein)
It's like, you know, one of the best albums of the year.
81:16:
(John Heilman)
People should check it out.
81:18:
(John Heilman)
I'm saying this in a totally, in a totally loving way, but there's a little bit of like, kind of like,
81:22:
(John Heilman)
Brian, there's this song that I heard that I listened to all year long and it was like the most moving thing I've ever heard.
81:28:
(John Heilman)
Here, let's play a clip of it.
81:30:
(John Heilman)
Yeah.
81:31:
(John Heilman)
It's just, it's just noise to you.
81:34:
(John Heilman)
It is.
81:34:
(John Heilman)
I mean, it's not, I wouldn't say it's just noise to me, but it doesn't really compute.
81:38:
(John Heilman)
I wouldn't say it's like, it's not hooky.
81:40:
(John Heilman)
Let's put it that way.
81:42:
(John Heilman)
Um, but tell me about those, like those interviews, how much you decided to do them.
81:46:
(John Heilman)
I know people were like, Hey man, can you please take us away from politics?
81:49:
(John Heilman)
But, um, why those two artists?
81:52:
(John Heilman)
And if you,
81:53:
(John Heilman)
And do they stick with you?
81:54:
(John Heilman)
Do they stick to your ribs?
81:56:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, if you listen to, not if you listen to the show, but over the years, in years when politics is not as...
82:06:
(Ezra Klein)
violently insist as it has been this year.
82:09:
(Ezra Klein)
I do a lot more shows like that.
82:12:
(Ezra Klein)
It's usually with novelists, which is if you go back, of course, across the course of the show and you ask me, what are your favorite episodes?
82:20:
(Ezra Klein)
It's like half of them are novelists, right?
82:22:
(Ezra Klein)
It's like Marilyn Robinson.
82:23:
(Ezra Klein)
It's Richard Powers.
82:25:
(Ezra Klein)
It's George Saunders.
82:26:
(Ezra Klein)
It's Zadie Smith.
82:27:
(Ezra Klein)
It's, you know, I love those episodes.
82:30:
(Ezra Klein)
And Eno, I've just always wanted Yvonne.
82:33:
(Ezra Klein)
I love his music.
82:34:
(Ezra Klein)
I love him as a thinker.
82:35:
(Ezra Klein)
And then he wrote this book, right?
82:36:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, What Is Art For?
82:38:
(Ezra Klein)
I think is what it was called.
82:39:
(Ezra Klein)
And Smith, too.
82:41:
(Ezra Klein)
And Smith, I love her books.
82:43:
(Ezra Klein)
And she had a new one this year.
82:45:
(Ezra Klein)
I think it was called Bread for Angels.
82:46:
(Ezra Klein)
But if people haven't read Just Kids, they absolutely should.
82:50:
(Ezra Klein)
I both think there's something fundamental, but also very political.
82:54:
(Ezra Klein)
And I mean that in the best sense.
82:56:
(Ezra Klein)
about maintaining
82:59:
(Ezra Klein)
an attachment and a line of sight on beauty.
83:02:
(Ezra Klein)
And this is a topic for another time, but I actually think one of the deficiencies in liberal politics is, is insufficiently concerned with beauty.
83:09:
(Ezra Klein)
Totally agree.
83:10:
(Ezra Klein)
And there is a lot to be said about that at some point.
83:13:
(Ezra Klein)
And it's a thing I've been thinking about a lot, but I love talking to the, the artists and the humanists and the, like on some level, that's what this is all really about.
83:22:
(Ezra Klein)
The point of politics is to make possible society where people can have, uh,
83:27:
(Ezra Klein)
dignified and beautiful lives.
83:31:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think that there is one of the things Donald Trump does to us is a narrowing.
83:37:
(Ezra Klein)
Although I will say also at the same time, one of Donald Trump's under acknowledged sources of strength is that there is no president, at least in my lifetime, who has cared as much about culture and beauty as he does.
83:47:
(Ezra Klein)
Now, do I agree with his vision of culture?
83:50:
(John Heilman)
You have to unpack that a little bit.
83:52:
(Ezra Klein)
Look, he comes in and what's one of the first things he does that he actually seems to really care about is he takes over the Kennedy Center.
83:58:
(Ezra Klein)
They do an executive order on what kinds of architecture are going to be allowed in federal building, trying to bring it more back towards classical.
84:06:
(Ezra Klein)
There's a whole movement on the new right to bring back classical ideas of beauty.
84:10:
(Ezra Klein)
And he really cares about it.
84:11:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, you look at how proud he is of how gold he has made the Oval Office.
84:16:
(Ezra Klein)
I don't agree with his vision of beauty, but what I think it needs is an answer.
84:20:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm not complimenting it.
84:21:
(Terry Moran)
I'm not saying it is mine.
84:22:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think it is the cruelty that lies inside of it and the self-veneration is sick.
84:30:
(Ezra Klein)
But he understands and the people around him understand the power of culture and beauty and art.
84:37:
(Ezra Klein)
And I mean, and I think they actually take it.
84:39:
(Ezra Klein)
I think they take it with a deadly seriousness that is not how most politicians of the right or left do it.
84:48:
(Ezra Klein)
So anyway, I love those episodes, and it's all much closer to my heart.
84:54:
(Ezra Klein)
And in some ideal world, that'd be more like a third of the show as opposed to an occasional break.
85:03:
(John Heilman)
Um, speaking of Trump and his, and his design choices, I will say literally the line that I will remember as when my start, when I get older and my Alzheimer's gets worse and worse.
85:12:
(John Heilman)
I can remember almost nothing else.
85:13:
(John Heilman)
I will always remember Jon Stewart saying that the design for the new ballroom where the East Wing used to be was designed to look like the inside of Marie Antoinette's vagina.
85:23:
(John Heilman)
I think it's like maybe the funniest thing I heard.
85:26:
(Ezra Klein)
I thought the best version of this, or another very good version of it, let me not compete with Stewart.
85:31:
(Ezra Klein)
I think somebody said that Trump's design tasting the Oval Office was Saddam Corp.
85:39:
(John Heilman)
Which I thought was pretty good.
85:40:
(John Heilman)
Yes, it's totally right.
85:41:
(John Heilman)
And I hope that you've gone and taken...
85:43:
(John Heilman)
I really loved the interview with Brian, partly because...
85:48:
(John Heilman)
you brought the right spirit to it and you were, and he was clearly delighted by you on some of your questions, which were really good, but also because he is truly one of the great conversationalists alive.
85:58:
(John Heilman)
Yeah.
85:58:
(John Heilman)
Isn't he amazing?
85:59:
(John Heilman)
He's, I mean, just, he's such a polymath and he knows so much about so much stuff and he's an original thinker and he's also just so humane and calm, but also just kind of sparkingly brilliant all the time.
86:12:
(John Heilman)
I hope you've taken his advice to heart on the, the, the recommendations he gave to you at the end of the,
86:18:
(John Heilman)
podcast, because if you don't own a pattern language like Christopher Alexander, you must.
86:23:
(John Heilman)
It's an incredibly good book.
86:25:
(John Heilman)
Here's my last question.
86:29:
(John Heilman)
Literally, the question I've been asked, it comes back to politics.
86:32:
(John Heilman)
The question I've been asked more this year than any other question by normal people that I run into.
86:37:
(John Heilman)
And I've said before that
86:39:
(John Heilman)
In the first Trump term, the question I would get more often out in the world was, are we going to be okay?
86:45:
(John Heilman)
And in this year, the question I got more often was a variation of that, but a darker one, which is, how fucked are we?
86:53:
(John Heilman)
Like, how fucked are we, really?
86:54:
(John Heilman)
How fucked are we?
86:56:
(John Heilman)
Taken together over all the work you've done over the course of the last year, all the trend lines we've just talked about, like where the Democrat Party's had it worked, the Trump...
87:03:
(John Heilman)
political project is headed, et cetera, et cetera.
87:05:
(John Heilman)
I ask you that question as we sit here on the precipice of 2026, Ezra, how fucked are we?
87:11:
(Ezra Klein)
It depends on what we do and it depends on what they do.
87:14:
(Ezra Klein)
And I don't mean to make that we they too sharp, because obviously there are many people in the middle of that.
87:19:
(Ezra Klein)
But I do think Donald Trump represents a coalition that wants to fundamentally change the nature of our political system of our country.
87:25:
(Ezra Klein)
I think if they succeed in that, it would be very dangerous.
87:28:
(Ezra Klein)
So it really matters.
87:30:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, going across what we've been talking about, the reason I'm so focused on the Democratic Party right now, which is not the most comfortable place for me to be, is because...
87:40:
(Ezra Klein)
If you think Trump is as dangerous as I do, then the alternative political coalition, the one that believes in liberal democracy and wants to prove that it works, has to be pretty fucking good at what it does, right?
87:53:
(Ezra Klein)
This is not a time when you have a margin for error.
87:56:
(Ezra Klein)
And so I don't think there is an answer to how fucked we are or how fucked we are not.
88:00:
(Ezra Klein)
The answer is, of course, it depends, but it doesn't just depend on fate.
88:06:
(Ezra Klein)
It depends on action.
88:08:
(Ezra Klein)
It depends on discrete human beings at every level of society, ranging from the CEOs who have engaged in truly cowardly, naked transactionalism with Trump, as opposed to stand up for the system and the rule of law that has made their success possible.
88:27:
(Ezra Klein)
to the really brave human beings and normal people who, you know, tape ICE agents and stand with immigrants and attend No Kings rallies, to Democratic politicians who need to be focused on winning and serious about what that means and what does it mean to contest Ohio and what does it mean to contest Alaska and Florida and Iowa and on and on and on.
88:51:
(Ezra Klein)
And there's nobody exempt from this.
88:55:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, you can choose to not play, but if you care about it, then you got to do the best you can.
89:03:
(Ezra Klein)
What Trump and the people around him do will matter.
89:06:
(Ezra Klein)
I think a lot has been saved by them making bad decisions.
89:09:
(Ezra Klein)
But
89:10:
(Ezra Klein)
they have succeeded before by taking advantage of other people's bad decisions or decisions to sit things out.
89:16:
(Ezra Klein)
And so, you know, I take this as a period, if you believe this whole thing is worth it, if you believe this can be beautiful, if you believe progress is possible, you know, we got to, many of us got to live in a period where the political boundaries exist.
89:33:
(Ezra Klein)
were fairly well set.
89:34:
(Ezra Klein)
And that was the aberration.
89:36:
(Ezra Klein)
That's not how most of American politics has been.
89:38:
(Ezra Klein)
The 90s, if you grew up in the 90s, it was pretty good.
89:42:
(Ezra Klein)
And most times are less calm than that.
89:44:
(Ezra Klein)
That was the punctuated time out of history.
89:48:
(Ezra Klein)
Even though we can look at it now and see all the history burbling from Pat Buchanan to all the rest of it.
89:54:
(Ezra Klein)
So...
89:55:
(Ezra Klein)
I don't have a clean answer.
89:57:
(Ezra Klein)
It's not like we're 70% fucked or we're 37% fucked.
90:03:
(Ezra Klein)
We're in the fight and time continues to be the arena.
90:11:
(John Heilman)
We could be fully fucked or we could be really fully unfucked.
90:15:
(Ezra Klein)
It's a wave, not a particle, my friend.
90:18:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
90:20:
(Ezra Klein)
They're still in superposition.
90:22:
(John Heilman)
Ezra, thank you.
90:24:
(John Heilman)
Happy New Year.
90:26:
(John Heilman)
And we will see you on the other side.
90:31:
(John Heilman)
And to you.
90:31:
(John Heilman)
Been a lot of fun.
90:32:
(John Heilman)
Thank you, man.
90:40:
(John Heilman)
Impolitic with John Heilman is a podcast in partnership with Odyssey.
90:43:
(John Heilman)
Thanks again to Mr. Ezra Klein for coming on the show.
90:46:
(John Heilman)
If you enjoyed this episode of Impolitic with John Heilman, please follow us, share us, rate us, and review us on the free Odyssey app or wherever you have to bask in the splendor of the podcast universe.
90:53:
(John Heilman)
I am John Heilman, special correspondent for Puck.
90:56:
(John Heilman)
To read my stuff along with the reporting and analysis of all my fabulous Puck partners, go to puck.news slash jheil, J-H-E-I-L, and subscribe, please.
91:06:
(John Heilman)
Speaking of my colleagues, John Kelly and Ben Landy are executive producers of Impolitik.
91:10:
(John Heilman)
Lori Blackburn is our guest wrangling guru.
91:13:
(John Heilman)
And Bob Tabador is our very own Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, Steve Albini, and the Bomb Squad all rolled into one.
91:21:
(John Heilman)
Flawlessly producing, editing, mixing, and mastering the show all by his lonesome and in no time flat.
91:27:
(John Heilman)
From all of us to all of you, a little mashup of a pair of late greats, my mom and Bob Marley.
91:32:
(John Heilman)
Don't get arrested, don't get dead, and don't give up the fight.