This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

OK, recording.

Woo!

So today we are minus our lovely comrade, Lydia Polgreen, who is taking a well-deserved vacation.

Does anyone ever take an undeserved vacation?

Constantly.

I’m not sure why Lydia allowed a vacation at all.

I take them all the time.

Shouldn’t, yeah, shouldn’t we say —

It’s unacceptable.

— a maybe deserved vacation?

Yeah.

She can’t leave me here with you guys.

A who the hell knows deserved vacation.

[MUSIC PLAYING] OK, let me rephrase, we’re minus our thankless comrade Lydia Polgreen, who is taking a perhaps deserved vacation. From New York Times Opinion, I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.”

OK, so no Lydia today. But the three of us will be taking a dip back into the presidential race.

Oh, God.

And, in particular, let’s try to understand why so much of America and so much of the Republican Party, in particular, just cannot seem to quit Donald J. Trump. So he lost in 2020, so I hear. But he certainly didn’t go the way of other one term presidents and just kind of fade in the distance. And then last fall, a lot of his picks didn’t do well in the midterms. There was a brief moment when it seemed like the Trump magic was disappearing. But that didn’t really happen.

So now, it’s August 2023, just days away from the Republican debate, the first Republican debate. I know you’re all looking forward to that.

Edge of my seat.

And we have a twice, a twice impeached, thrice indicted former president with Michelle’s favorite possible indictment, Georgia, coming soon.

Georgia.

It’s the hipster indictment.

Don’t mock me.

Michelle was into Georgia before it was even a state.

Before it was cool.

And yet, Trump is still, despite all that, crushing the Republican field for the 2024 nomination. And he’s also tied with Biden in the polls on a possible rematch. So where does this staying power come from? And what does it mean for our politics, for democracy, for our system of justice?

Ross, why don’t you kick us off? You just wrote a column called “The Normal Paths to Beating Trump are Closing.” What was that all about?

So that was based on a piece that a University of Chicago economist named Luigi Zingales, who is from Italy originally, wrote for The Times in 2016 when Trump was first elected, where he basically compared Trump to Silvio Berlusconi, the very successful very controversial populist prime minister of Italy and said, look, we have experience with this kind of thing in Italy. And the way to beat an outrageous populist is to be relentlessly normal, argue about policy, don’t try to use extra political means to kick him out of office. Don’t just try to close establishment ranks against him. Run as if he’s a normal politician. Treat him that way. That’s how you defeat him.

And I think what we’ve seen across the Trump era is a kind of ping pong between normalizing ways of fighting or debating or dealing with Trump and abnormalizing ways. You’ve had people who have run against him on policy and people who have insisted that he’s a fascist threat to democracy. The argument in the piece was just that once you reach the point where reaching now, where Trump is going to be running for president under at least three indictments, could be running for president from prison —

No, he’s not going to be running from prison.

There’s no —

It’s not going to happen.

I can’t tell where the sarcasm meter is there.

I’m serious. There’s no way he’s going to be in prison.

Is there a non-zero chance —

No way he’ll be running in prison?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

This is not “Oppenheimer.”

Well, anyway, right, so maybe normalcy will be restored. And Michelle is confident. But, basically, there’s no way to just do the sort of, this is a normal campaign thing. And that’s going to be true for Joe Biden if Trump is the nominee.

And I think it’s increasingly true for his Republican opponents that the path that Ron DeSantis especially wanted, where you could basically say, look, I know you like Trump, Republican voters, but it’s time to turn the page and we won’t sort of argue out January 6 and everything else. Even that path is closing.

So the normal path is closing, only abnormalizing is possible?

Every campaign against Trump, whether it’s a primary campaign or a general election campaign now is going to be defined by the abnormality of him being under multiple indictments.

I do think that we have reached a point where, as you were talking about Berlusconi, Trump’s genius has always been to present himself as fighting against a system that is corrupt. So, by definition, any time the system comes after him, it’s because the system is at fault, and they are trying to take him down because he’s trying to expose the system. So I think we’ve talked about this before.

By that definition, the worse it gets for him, his followers see it as just further proof of his heroic willingness to keep fighting the fight even as they’re trying to take him down. So I do think for that third of the Republican Party who is just die hard MAGA, there is literally nothing he could do that would make them turn against him. So the question then is what to do about the 2/3 remaining or thereabouts of the Republican primary voters who, theoretically, could go for somebody else.

Unfortunately, there’s nobody else who’s kind of distinguished themselves. I mean, part of the problem here is that Ron DeSantis is who all these people hitched their wagon to, the donors and establishment poobahs. And he’s turned out so far to be pretty lousy unlikable candidate. So now they just don’t, they’re kind of casting about for what to do next. And that serves Trump beautifully.

It’s not just that the indictments don’t hurt him. He even believes that they help him. He —

They absolutely have helped him.

He just said that last week, that every time they indict me, there’s — I go up in the polls. And a fourth indictment would really wrap things up for me just great. It’s kind of like when he said in 2016 that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s the same message, right? He’s saying that the rules of politics don’t apply to him. The rule of law doesn’t really apply to him.

But it’s even more extreme. It’s like saying, if I shoot someone, I’ll get more voters, not just not lose any. It’ll actually help. And that’s what he seems to clearly understand about these indictments. Because as Michelle says, it’s, you know, it’s this corrupt system fighting against him.

Well, but it’s a little different. The reason the indictments help him is that he’s not the one doing them. So it’s actually different than the shoot someone on 5th Avenue scenario. January 6 did not actually help Trump in the polls, as absurd a statement as that may be to offer. If you look at public opinion about Donald Trump even among Republicans, Donald Trump suffered in his poll standing after January 6. So Trump doing something terrible or something that seems terrible is not an automatic plus. The reason people are rallying to him is the perception that this something is being done to him and the people doing it cannot be allowed to claim his scalp.

Yes, Ross, so the kind of boiling that down is, it’s not that he’s done something terrible. It’s that somebody is trying to hold him accountable for him doing something terrible. And that is unacceptable for these folks. Because he has trained people to think that only he is virtuous and that anything that is coming for him is coming for him from a place of bad faith. So holding him accountable is impossible on some level.

Again, I don’t think it’s that he’s trained all of — there is a core of Republican voters who think Donald Trump is a great virtuous hero. But there’s this segment of Republican voters that swung to DeSantis after the midterms and swung back to Trump not when DeSantis’s campaign started to flail — though it has flailed — but when he was indicted. For those voters, it’s not about Trump’s virtue. It’s more like, look, this is the battle that the liberal elites have chosen.

And even if don’t love Trump, I’ve got to fight them on this battlefield. Trump has trained people, yes, to think of the establishment as an enemy. But it’s also just the natural posture of a big chunk of Republicans and conservatives and conservative-leaning independents, that you cannot trust the American establishment to do the right thing. And if they are indicting a former Republican president, they’re probably doing something wrong.

So if you try to hold a career criminal accountable, it’s a problem. I get that. That’s not a problem, Ross. I understand.

I’m not —

No, I’m just saying —

I’m trying —

— that’s the situation we’re in.

Well, look — well, let’s —

It’s genius on his part.

I mean, look, again, I think Trump has been indicted three times. Well, first of all, the first indictment —

We all find the first indictment kind of questionable.

— was and remains politically motivated bullshit. The second indictment is the one that seems pretty much like a legal slam dunk. And the third indictment is — none of us are legal experts, I’m certainly not. It seems like a case where Trump’s wickedness is clear, but the legal details are a tiny bit iffy.

And Georgia is still coming.

And Georgia is still coming. But so you have a mixed bag of indictments, which if you are inclined to be skeptical of the system of justice and how it worked itself out, provides grounds for that. And then, I mean, again, people will say to me that, I can’t understand why people are rallying to Trump.

I lived through the late 1990s. If you had told a liberal feminist Democrat in 1991 that they would be rallying to the defense of a man who solicited oral sex from an intern, they would have said, well, that’s crazy. I’m not going to do that. But because Clinton had the right enemies, everyone in the Democratic coalition rallied to him. This is the most human and normal and predictable thing in the world.

And, yes, it’s terrible for the republic and Donald Trump should not be president again. But we can’t just sit around and be self-satisfied about it. You know, Trump is tied in the polls with Joe Biden, which suggests that there is a segment of persuadable independent-minded Americans who were prepared to vote for a man who might be in jail during the election. And that’s just reality.

I’m not worried about the generals yet.

OK.

I am concerned about the Republican primary. Because, of course, in a country where politics has become a partisan bloodsport, there will be people who will not vote for a Democrat. What I am looking for is some sign that the Republican Party is going to recover its sanity and rally around someone other than Trump while there’s still time.

So let’s go to the primary for a second. I’ve been thinking about how this compares to 2016. I’m glad you kicked us off with the Luigi Zingales piece, Ross, which was a great piece. And, actually, parenthetical, it became part of a great book called “Rules for Resistance,” a collection of essays from people around the world kind of looking at America and trying to say, here’s the better way to deal with Donald Trump. Now, in 2016, if I remember that race correctly, some of the candidates, after initially being critical of Trump, decided, I’m not going to cross him, at least not overtly, assuming he’d eventually inevitably implode. And then they could sweep in and be the second favorite —

Looking at you, Ted Cruz.

— of the Trump — exactly, exactly. But by the time they realized he was not going to implode, it was too late. And then it was just Ted Cruz yelling at people to vote their conscience. Now, eight years later, it seems that, for a while, the opponents had sort of a similar approach. We’re not going to cross them. They’ve even been defending him against these legal attacks against him.

But now you are starting to see, whether it’s Mike Pence, whether it’s Chris Christie, even Ron DeSantis coming out in some at least mild opposition. I have no idea if it’s enough. The polls suggests that it is not. But what does it mean, for instance, when DeSantis says that, clearly, he lost the 2020 election, right, which seems kind of an obvious thing to say.

Yet, it has to be said. Are these cracks in the deference to Trump just desperation? Or is there any possibility that these cascading indictments could have an impact on his basis of support and, therefore, on what some of his opponents in the primary do?

So, I mean, I assume that with DeSantis and the rest of them, they are desperate to kind of get some traction. And they need to throw some punches. What they’ve been trying so far is not working. I mean, you see everybody from Nikki Haley to Pence to Christie to all these people, they’re just — they’re trying. They’re throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. And so far, nothing sticks. And, I mean, some of his opponents are saying, he’s cost us in elections the last two times. Can we afford that again? And that’s the only approach that the group seems to think might work with the kind of soft Trump voters.

But, so far, it’s just not working. So I don’t have much hope that any of these indictments will make a huge difference. That said, I do think that the indictments could wind up giving him some sort of accountability. But I do think there’s almost two tracks running here — political and legal.

Well, the theory of the DeSantis campaign, which I thought was a reasonable theory and I had real hopes for, was that DeSantis could, by virtue of his positioning as a successful conservative who had done a lot of stuff that the Republican base liked during the Trump presidency and afterward, could lock up a bunch of the sort of moderately pro-Trump Republicans. And then the really anti-Trump Republicans would say, look, he’s a little more conservative than I’d like. He’s a little more pro-Trump than I’d like. But he’s our best chance. We’re going to go with him. And there’s your coalition. But because DeSantis has stumbled.

He hasn’t been able to put together that coalition. And so he’s got some sort of, presumably, sort of lukewarm on Trump voters in his camp. But the really anti-Trump voters are gravitating towards Chris Christie in New Hampshire or Tim Scott, maybe. So you just have a broken field. And that then does really just start to look like 2016 all over again.

I will put more of this on DeSantis even than Trump. But a couple of things, he picked the most inexplicable course possible, which was to double down on all the nasty Trump stuff, just be as obnoxious as possible and go woke warrior. But those people already have Trump. They don’t need DeSantis, the people who are really into the MAGA stuff. And he just abandoned any kind of more moderate positions at all. So he’s completely, in terms of policy and positioning, put himself in a weird spot.

Plus, we’ve had this discussion before. He’s unlikable we’re talking about a presidential race, not a congressional race, not a race for county commissioner. Americans vote for boyfriends or girlfriends for president. You have to have a certain vibe. As Hillary Clinton, Al Gore will tell you, it’s hard if you’re not a super kind of likable, backslapping sort of candidate. And that’s what Ron DeSantis actually reminds me of a lot.

He reminds me of kind of those really earnest, really ambitious, but not terribly good with retail politics sort of guy. And he’s just not got what it takes. And so this has left the field to splinter. And that is something that is as big a problem on some level as the fact that Trump is who he is.

I mean, this primary is just purely a sort of Trump referendum. It’s almost purely just like, where do people stand vis a vis Trump? Ron DeSantis, when he talks about Trump, it’s all — the critiques are very kind of subtle.

He says that executives should govern within the confines of the institution, that we shouldn’t seek to perpetuate ourselves in office. He says he’s not susceptible to flattery, that he himself, DeSantis, is not ceptable to flattery, that Trump doesn’t understand governing.

He’s easily manipulated. And even then, it’s all very implied. So what don’t understand is if the primary race is really about Trump, then why would his leading opponent only very tentatively come out against him? I don’t see how.

Because if the race is about whether you like Trump or not, Trump will win. I mean, this is the opening DeSantis had was that the race could be about whether Trumpism was costing Republicans, it cost them the midterms. That’s why DeSantis’s numbers surged after the midterms and Trump’s numbers sagged. Because it wasn’t about whether you liked Trump. It was about whether Trumpism was a winner who was the right person to lead the Republican Party against Biden.

The indictments swing everything back towards Trump, Trump up and down. Are you with Trump or against him? And I just don’t see — and I may be too pessimistic. I was too optimistic about DeSantis’s chances six months ago.

So the pendulum can swing too far either way. But I don’t see how, if that’s the atmosphere — do you like Trump or not? You for him or against him? You with him or with his enemies?— DeSantis has a clear path to getting 50 percent percent of the vote.

But I also, I really don’t see how any of the others do. I mean, this is the other thing is just I agree with Michelle about DeSantis’s charisma deficit and likability problems and so on. But is Chris Christie getting 55 of the Republican vote against Trump? Of course not. It’s a lot of variables. But it’s hard to see the path right now.

This is why you see a lot of Republican moneymen still kind of sniffing around and calling up Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia. They wanted Chris Sununu up in New Hampshire, all of these governors —

Chris Sununu, come on.

— were being sniffed around.

The great hope.

Well, I’m just saying, this is why, this is why you see them.

Yes, yes.

For my money, you’re better off with Youngkin or Kemp in the Republican primary right now. But I mean, there’s no sign that any of them are jumping in. But you do see the moneymen sniffing around. Because they know they have a problem.

Right, but the moneymen are also themselves part of the problem —

Yes.

— in the sense that they are also the ones propping up Chris Christie and other — I mean, the moneymen want a Republican Party — not all of them, but a bunch of them, that just doesn’t exist at all. And the advantage of DeSantis is that his candidacy was built for the Republican Party that actually exists. And maybe a Glenn Youngkin could have built that and done that after his win in Virginia, sort of started running for president on day one.

But I guess, again, maybe I’m too pessimistic. I think if the DeSantis model fails, you’re not going to slot in a less well-known, somewhat more moderate blue state governor and say, you know, hey, mildly pro-Trump Republicans, rally to this guy. I just don’t —

Look, I think we’re stuck with a Biden-Trump redo myself. But I’m just saying that there are reasons why people are still hoping for somebody to come riding in.

Yes.

Ross, who is Mike Pence trying to appeal to? I mean, apparently, he just made the debate stage, right? So, you know, yay, congratulations, Mikey. But what is he trying to appeal to by sort of being the, I’m the constitutional conservative?

He’s trying to appeal to the conservative part of the Republican Party that didn’t support Trump in 2016, which is a mixture of evangelicals who had not yet reconciled themselves to Trump and sort of Tea Party conservatives who thought Trump was unprincipled and not really conservative. That’s who he’s pitching. But there’s no sign that Pence is getting traction.

You know, Pence is in a position where he’s not going to be the nominee most likely. He has a sort of moral case against Trump. He is making it pretty forthrightly. And I think he deserves credit for that, all independent of the question of whether there’s any strategic value in it. I think it’s good for Republicans and good for the country to have Trump’s vice president standing up and saying that what Trump tried to do around January 6 was a betrayal of the Constitution. That’s good. That’s a good thing. Good for him.

I also think he’s trying to redeem his soul for everything that he put us through for four years.

No —

I don’t think it’s true. But I like it.

I mean, if Mike Pence was in a position to do, quote, unquote, “the right thing” on January 6, it’s only because he did the wrong thing for so long.

Well, yeah, that’s what liberal opponents of Donald Trump would say. But that’s obviously not what Mike Pence thinks. Mike Pence thinks that he spent four years channeling Donald Trump in better directions. And it broke down at the end. But if he hadn’t been there, if Trump had been elected with Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich as his vice president —

Oh, sweet Jesus.

— the country would be in immeasurably worse shape. And so Pence by being there, by doing what he had to do to be there absolutely did the right thing. That’s —

You mean doing what he had to do on January 6?

Doing what he had to do by accepting the vice presidency, that this — it was absolutely the right thing to do rather than letting Trump give it to Newt or Rudy. That is what Pence thinks 100 percent. He’s not plagued by guilt about his decision to be vice president. That’s a liberal delusion.

No, no, no, it shouldn’t — nobody says he should be plagued by guilt for having accepted the job. Somebody thinks that he probably —

I’m a little tetchy, tetchy.

— probably could have done a better job as vice president.

I don’t think there’s any guilt. You know, but if you read his own memoir, Pence had concluded just shortly after the 2020 election that if there was any fraud, it wasn’t enough to change the result. And by mid-December, he wrote that for all intensive purposes, the election was over after the state electors, the real ones, had officially voted and delivered the electoral college majority to Biden and Harris.

And he didn’t tell the public this at a moment when it could have made a difference. He told Trump over and over he didn’t have the authority to overturn the election. But he never said, in 500 pages of his book, he never said that — you know, I said to the president, even if I had the authority, I wouldn’t exercise it because we lost, you know?

He never does that. So I have a hard time swallowing the kind of redemptive, you know, Pence heroism at the end story. You don’t get credit for saving democracy from the brink if you put it there. And Pence helped put it there.

So, anyway, we will take a quick break here. Let me catch my breath. When we come back, let’s talk about what Trump’s fate means not just for the future of the nomination or of the party, but for the future of the country.

So we’ve talked about Trump’s staying power. Let’s try to figure out what he might do if he’s actually back in power. So Michelle, what are we hearing about what Trump plans to do?

Well, I think the very short answer is that there’s already kind of an effort afoot so that he can restructure government starting on day one to centralize even more power in his sticky little hands. Our news side, in fact, had a great piece up. And it’s a maximalist theory of the unitary executive theory, which says that the president needs to be in complete control. Article II gives him complete control over the entire executive branch to the point that Congress can’t even appropriate money for things that he’s not super on board with. So if he winds up getting reelected, he intends to do things like strip employment protections for civil servants so that they’re easier for him to fire.

He’s going to bring the administrative state to heel, which is something that conservatives more broadly have been looking at doing for years. And they’ve run into questions about legality over here or they’ve hit backstops because of the way things are structured. But what the Trump folks are doing or working on a blueprint for doing is removing all those guardrails and backstops so that he can just come in and do whatever his little heart desires going forward.

Ross, this is something I know you follow more closely. And so I’m curious what you think of it. But there was a moment early on in Bannon’s rhetoric and some others where it seemed like bringing the administrative state to heel, knocking it down was rhetorically the objective. But it seems more like it’s harnessing, using the administrative state that may be more the goal, using it to whatever his personal or ideological purposes might be. Is that a distinction without a difference?

I think it’s really hard to say. The reality is that there’s sort of, if you take away Trump himself and just look at debates among conservatives over the last five years or so, there’s a clear or semiclear division between people who are interested in a more old school libertarian, we’re going to get into the bowels of the administrative state and figure out how to deregulate everything and reduce government’s power, and people saying, no, we need to use the administrative state for some set of conservative ends that past Republicans haven’t been able to use it for. So there’s that divide. There’s sort of people who want to weaken the government versus people who want to use it.

But what does Trump himself want? I mean, Michelle’s talking about the idea that he’s going to centralize more power, right? I certainly think in a second term, there would be more Trump loyalists in more positions than there were in his first term. But it’s not at all clear what Trump’s agenda is beyond punishing his enemies and probably staying out of jail.

Do he have one other than that?

I don’t think it’s at all — I think in 2016, he had a fairly clear agenda as much as parts of it weren’t implemented. At this point, I think it’s really, really hard to say on policy substance what a Trump second term would stand for. It’s also just really hard to say, who’s his cabinet in a second term?

His first term cabinet was a mixed bag. But it had a lot of establishment Republican figures who now say they’d never vote for him again. So who’s Trump’s secretary of state? Who’s his national security advisor?

This is where I think, actually, as much as being Trump’s vice president did not work out politically well for Mike Pence in the end, there are going to be a lot of ambitious Republicans who would love to be Trump’s vice president this time around on the grounds that you might get to really run his presidency this time. There’s going to be a lot of people thinking that way. Because it’s so unclear, so unclear what the policy agenda of Trump 2.0 would actually be.

That early phase of his presidency, the so-called “adults in the room” phase, to the extent that existed, that will not be repeated, right? I mean, I hate making predictions because then they’re always wrong. But I can’t imagine that he — he felt kind of reined in by that crew after a while. And he got rid of them.

And so you’d kind of go straight to whatever the lower tiers are in whatever version of the Republican Party wants to work for him. It gets to the old personnel is policy thing, right? Whoever he puts in will have potentially significant influence. But in the end, it’s so hard, even for underlings, for top aides, for cabinet members who have a specific policy agenda to really see it through because Trump is so unpredictable.

Well, if you believe all the stories, like Mark Milley, when he was chairman of the joint chiefs, has a story of how he was trying to keep Trump from attacking Iran. If you don’t have those people in the room, there is an argument to be made that things could go really poorly. Who’s going to be there?

On the other hand, John Bolton has the story about how Trump wouldn’t attack Iran when John Bolton —

John Bolton wanted him to attack Iran.

I mean, part of the problem is unreliable narrators, I guess, but —

Well, part of the — I mean, I think many of the people who went to work for Trump, including Pence, including, you know, Mattis, James Mattis, did have a lot of impact on policy. It just became intolerable for them to actually deal with Trump. US foreign policy did not shift nearly as much under Trump as it seemed like it might when he was running for president. We didn’t pull out of NATO. We continued supplying arms to Ukraine. We did a whole bunch of things that people around Trump wanted to do even though Trump himself might have been iffy on them.

But in a second term, so take foreign policy, let’s say Trump comes in and he wants to get Douglas Macgregor, who’s a retired US Army Colonel who went on “Tucker Carlson” a lot, as his secretary of defense. Macgregor is a real sort of isolationist, you know, sympathetic to Putin, would send off 17 alarm bells throughout the official Washington establishment. So let’s say he puts Macgregor forward.

Does MacGregor get Senate confirmation? I suspect not. That’s a lot of Republican senators who would try and sink that nomination. So then is Trump running his cabinet just with acting secretaries?

How long can he do that for? At what point does the Supreme Court get involved and constitutional issues come into play? There’s a whole range of uncertainties that I don’t feel at all competent to make a prediction about.

I have always worried more about presidents with foreign policy. Because usually, Congress is in a position to rein them in a little bit in terms of domestic policy. Whereas presidents can wreak a whole lot of havoc with their foreign policy. And if there aren’t people in there who are the so-called grownups in the room, at least at the start, I don’t see that going well in any way.

Arthur Schlesinger’s book, “The Imperial Presidency,” was all about how it was in foreign policy and issues of war that presidents acquired excessive power vis a vis the other branches, but then were able to extend that into the domestic realm under Nixon. So, you know, havoc can be wreaked in all arenas.

Because it was Schlesinger, he said it was under Nixon, when, of course, it was under a series of Cold War Democrats before that, but leave that aside.

So Biden’s campaign announcement, his 2020 campaign announcement, he said that if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Our very democracy, everything that makes America America, et cetera, et cetera is at stake. Is that campaign rhetoric? Do you think that’s true? Or is it obviously both?

I mean, I’d go for both. And when he did his 2020 announcement, that was before we saw the lengths to which Trump and folks like Giuliani were willing to bend the electoral system and corrupt it, or at least attempt to, the degrees to which they would just disregard voters. So I think it’s absolutely — nothing that we’ve seen since then suggests that it was not true. And so, you know, you’ve had a four-year gap. The question is, how much of that has given people time to recover? And I just, I don’t know the answer.

The four-year gap is interesting because, in some ways, it’s even more kind of definitive than eight consecutive years. Because, all right, America chose Trump. Then it tried something else. And then it’s like, no, no, no, no, we want that back. We want to go back. We want that again. You know, it’s —

It’s drama. We love the drama.

Yeah, it’s an even — it’s a different kind of decision-making. But, to me, it feels even more definitive.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitive in the sense that Donald Trump is the dominant figure of our era. That’s the reality, that all those of us who prefer it to be otherwise have to — have to grapple with. The Trump presidency is not the Trump era. The Trump era is something longer and encompasses the Biden presidency in some way.

I mean, I think for Biden, we saw in 2022 that kind of, with January 6 sort of hanging over a lot of Republican campaigns, that those issues were very effective for Democrats, more effective than I thought they would be, that Democrats were able to effectively gain several points in the polls just by saying, look, the Republicans are crazy and wanted to have a constitutional crisis. But Biden could really use a good economy. I think a lot of liberals and Democrats have underestimated the extent to which the Trump economy at the end pre-COVID was really good.

The Biden economy, people who are sort really focused on economic policy will say, look, we’ve steered through this crisis, we’ve avoided a recession, we’re coming in for a soft landing, this is a great achievement. But if you’re an American sort of dealing with that economy, it doesn’t feel like a great achievement yet. So Biden needs, he needs a year of trends going in the direction they’re going in now, I think, to really have, that kind of normal case for re-election to go with the Trump is abnormal and may be in jail case.

Ross, you’ve brought us full circle to your opening, right? Just kind of hoping for a good economy as part of the Biden strategy is an extremely normal kind of —

Yes.

— campaign consideration. That’s just, is your policy right? Are the outcomes good? So it’s the case for normality in what seems to be, so far, a kind of abnormal race yet again. All right, Trump, it seems, can go on forever. But our conversation can’t. So let’s take a break here. And when we come back, we’ll get hot and cold.

All right, folks, who’s got the hot-cold this week?

Me, me, me, me. I’m absolutely frosty on the proliferation and growing tangle of medical portals, which all of us are — [CARLOS LAUGHS]

— see, right there — increasingly expected to navigate for everything from pre-registering for doctor’s appointments to getting the results of bloodworks and scans. So, look, to be clear, I do not object to having my medical info online. I like being able to pre-register for appointments. But this situation has become a mess.

All of my doctors have a portal. There are separate portals for the hospital systems in which those doctors operate. The labs they send me to have separate portals. Sometimes they have unique passwords. Some let you sign in with Facebook or Google. They send out too many notices that have nothing in it.

Facebook. Facebook is what I want my medical records connected to.

Right? That’s insane. And I even get messages instructing me to sign into a portal. But it’s not clear which doctor they’re coming from. So, now, look, for me, this is vaguely frustrating. But for my 70-something parents, this is a next-level challenge.

Nothing jacks my dad’s blood pressure like trying to navigate all of these. My mother then feels compelled to help. Then they aren’t speaking. Somebody has to call the doctor’s office just to figure out what’s going on.

Look, I have no idea what can be done about this. It strikes me as not so much as simply about portals as a symptom of the kind of weird siloing of American health care in general, which means there’s probably nothing that we can do with it. But I am pleading for someone to figure out a way to rationalize all these different systems and, preferably, before my parents kill each other.

Michelle, I’m sure there’s a portal where you can register your complaint.

There are 75 portals where I can register my complaint, Carlos. And they’re all accessed separately.

Yes.

I’m just saying, it’s a lot.

The American medical system, yeah, it’s not designed to be navigated by any human being anywhere.

I understand it’s on the whole a good and convenient thing. But like sometimes, I just can’t — I just can’t access my lab results or whatever. And I’m just like, am I just going to die because I can’t get — I can’t break into the portal?

That’s a whole other portal, you’ll be visiting then, Michelle.

Yeah, exactly, the ultimate portal, the ultimate.

And no password necessary from what I hear.

I’ll call Mark Zuckerberg. He’ll let me in.

All right, with that, we’ll talk soon.

Bye, guys.

Thanks for joining us today. If you liked our conversation, be sure to follow “Matter of Opinion” on your favorite podcast app. And as always, just let us know what you’re thinking. You can email us at [email protected].

“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, and Derek Arthur. It’s edited by Stephanie Joyce. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer and fearless leader is Annie-Rose Strasser.