I sat down with
for a wide-ranging conversation about where we are as a country ten months into Trump’s second term—and what it means for those of us who still believe in the American experiment.We talked about the fear that many of us are feeling right now, and why that fear is warranted. When masked federal agents are disappearing people off American streets, when constitutional constraints are treated as suggestions, when basic due process rights are violated with impunity—your alarm is not hysteria. It’s consciousness recognizing danger. But we also talked about why this fear cannot paralyze us, and where genuine grounds for hope might exist in the fracturing of Trump’s coalition and the economic pain his supporters are beginning to feel.
I laid out my biggest concern: that we’re heading toward serious economic hardship driven by tariffs, mass deportations, and the gutting of social programs that Trump voters themselves depend on. The data is already showing Trump supporters souring on the economy in ways we didn’t see during his first term. That’s an opening—if the Democratic opposition can actually meet the moment instead of threading needles for corporate donors while Americans are being brutalized by their own government.
We also talked about something more personal: the capitulation. The friends I’ve lost, the billionaires taking a knee, the corporate surrender to authoritarianism. Joe asked me about the banality of it all, and I found myself thinking about Hannah Arendt—about how many people simply aren’t as tethered to higher principles as we might hope, how many will simply follow power wherever it leads.
But mostly, we talked about what I love. I love this country—not because it’s perfect, but because it represents something radical and beautiful: the idea that ordinary people can govern themselves through institutions, that we can struggle together toward that more perfect union despite our failures and sins. I’m an Americanist before I’m a partisan. And everything I write, everything I witness, serves that love—the defense of the framework that makes democratic self-governance possible.
Joe called me his favorite observer of our political moment. I prefer “moral witness.” I’m watching what’s happening to the country we both love, and I’m trying to bear witness with clarity about what matters most. Not every outrage, not every distraction, but the things that threaten the core of what we’ve built together over nearly 250 years.
The conversation is a little less than an hour, and we covered a lot of ground—from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s political calculations to why Democrats need to learn how to talk like human beings again, from the coming economic reckoning to why I try to stay disciplined about what deserves our attention in an age of information overload.
These are scary times. But they’re also clarifying times. And I’m grateful to Joe for the conversation, and for the work he does every day grabbing his musket and getting in the trenches. We need fighters and we need witnesses. We need people asking hard questions about where power resides and how it’s shifting. We need to hold the center together.
