100 Daze

And an inspiring false alarm.

Columnists, like ballplayers, go through hot streaks and slumps. David Brooks—a fellow Mets fan—is on a mortal roll right now. His Friday column in The New York Times identified the essential quality of the Trump administration, a frantic energy:

To understand why taking the initiative is so important, it’s best to read military grand strategists like Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, Martin van Creveld, B.H. Liddell Hart and John Boyd….

You learn from these strategists that a leader who takes the initiative forces his opponents into a reactive mode. He forces his opponents to respond when they are not yet prepared. He destroys the enemy’s planning by presenting them with situations they did not anticipate. The purpose of permanent offense is to produce in the minds of your opponents a sense of disorientation, defensiveness, disruption and mental overload. (Welcome to the modern Democratic Party.)

Ah, the Democrats. Brooks’ observation—the dichotomy between energy and lethargy—is a more sophisticated vision of my own view, published after the 2024 election: Trump won because he was strong and Kamala Harris was perceived as weak. But the subsequent lethargy of the Democrats—the utter lack of anything interesting to say or propose—has been a surprise. It shouldn’t have been. The Democrats have been hamstrung by their conflicting sensitivities for the past decade. They won major cultural victories—on race, on gender, on sexuality—over the past 50 years and never took credit for them. Indeed, they denied the victories had been won. They refused to admit, against all evidence, that any progress had been made; they caved to their “activist” supporters. They didn’t understand the tenuous relationship of those activists to the communities they supposedly represented. They didn’t, for example, understand that black voters were far more concerned about crime than white liberals were. They didn’t understand that Latinos didn’t want to lumped into the “people of color” basket; they wanted to assimilate. The Democrats’ default position was pessimism about America; Trump joined them in that—one of the myriad of reasons he’s loathsome, but he was smart enough to link it to patriotism. Too many Democrats seemed to hate this country; they ignored its brilliant entrepreneurial spirit, the essentially benign—if sometimes stupidly kinetic—nature of its foreign policy. They fixed on grievances, which they took to ridiculous extremes, rather than celebrating the multifarious cultural explosion that was taking place. They made Trump inevitable.

And now, they are lost. They are slipping into a bad old habit, being led by their angry, unrepresentative extremists. They are slipping into nostalgia for the protest movements of the past. They want to mount a “resistance,” which is understandable given the president’s nudging up against the edge of authoritarianism. Indeed, Brooks’ previous column, about the need for such a resistance, was widely hailed in Democratic precincts. His basic thesis is irrefutable:

So far, each sector Trump has assaulted has responded independently — the law firms seek to protect themselves, the universities, separately, try to do the same. Yes, a group of firms banded together in support of the firm Perkins Coie, but in other cases it’s individual law firms trying to secure their separate peace with Trump. Yes, Harvard eventually drew a line in the sand, but Columbia cut a deal. This is a disastrous strategy that ensures that Trump will trample on one victim after another. He divides and conquers.

Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.

So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.

Brooks is a product of conservative culture, so he can afford to be optimistic. Those of us more familiar with Democratic Party politics shudder. I envision—no, I fear—a national call to action, like the mobilizations of the Vietnam era, which dribbles tens, not hundreds, of thousands onto the Mall in Washington, a very Bernie/AOC sort of crowd, punctuated by trans activists and America-hating fools like Cornel West and environmental crazies…and far too few American flags. This would only work to Trump’s advantage. He’d love it. His supporters would watch the coverage on FOX and be disgusted.

But Brooks is right and he was echoed by Lawrence Summers on our podcast this week. When asked by my pod-partner John Ellis what advice he’d give the CEO of a major bank about dealing with Trump, Summers said: “We have a president who, of all things venerates, the titans of industry and the titans have not been Titanic and have not come together collectively as a group.”

I immediately envisioned A March on Washington led by the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce. Well, maybe not, but those guys are about to be crushed by Trump’s tariff delusions. We need their sobriety to have any credibility. A Resistance can’t be threatening to average folks—the barber on Main Street, the inventory manager at the local Walmart. They have to be on board.

Actually, I’d been thinking along similar lines, since a recent conversation with my friend Sam Brown, who played a decisive role in organizing the million-person antiwar marches of the late 1960s. Sam, an Iowa native, has a vision too: Tractors! Thousands of tractors, driven by farmers whose corn and soy and wheat have no markets because of Trump’s trade war. “This the time of year when they buy seed,” Sam said. “This is when they decide what to plant. How can they make confident decisions given Trump’s chaos?”

Sam’s bottom line was this: A march on Washington—a national protest movement—won’t succeed unless it has a healthy cohort of former Trump supporters. Sam may disagree with me on this, but that mass movement won’t happen until the Democrats admit a few things.

This op-ed piece by Sherrod Brown, a human I admire but often disagree with, lays out the case for a reasonable tariff regime, which seems like blinkered nostalgia to me. Those muscle-labor jobs aren’t coming back and, if they do, they’ll be performed by robots...although there may be robot-maintenance jobs for tech-educated vocational school graduates. Even Larry Summers, an inveterate free trader agrees that we’ve got to bolster our national defense industries. We need to produce chips. We need to produce weapons. We let those vital industries slip away during the past 30 years. So there’s the potential for common ground…except for one thing. Notice what Senator Brown does not talk about. He has nothing to say about the cultural issues that drove the working class away from the Dems in the first place. This is a strategy: Democrats seem to think that if they don’t talk about “woke” identity politics, the public will forget that they went so badly off the rails in the first place. That seems fanciful to me. If they want to build a national coalition, and expunge the toxic residue from their brand, they’re going to have to be honest and forthcoming about their mistakes. I won’t go through the litany here. I’ll just let it go with Latinx. You can fill in the blanks. And they will have to be strong—and not at all defensive—about some core issues. I met face-to-face with one of those issues during a recent hospital visit, which I describe below.

But until they get their act together—until their leaders are moderates, not self-indulgent “socialists”—any resistance will do more harm than good.

False Alarm

So I went to my cardiologist and the nurse saw a shadow, perhaps a tear in my aorta. The doctor didn’t think so, but out of “an abundance of caution” he advised me to get to the emergency room. Immediately. Yikes.

So I went to NYU Langone hospital and here is what I found: The medical assistant who checked me in was a Filipino immigrant. The first doctor who spoke to me was from Pakistan (and amazed that I’d been to her home town of Karachi); her supervisor was Boston Irish. The nurse who gave me an EKG was from Haiti. The guy who wheeled me into the CT scan was from Harlem, but had moved his family to Pennsylvania; he visited them on weekends. The two guys who operated the CT Scan were saintly souls from Ghana. The nurse who discharged me—it was a false alarm—was half Puerto Rican and half Ecuadorean. Each one of them was calm, considerate, utterly professional and personable. I asked each about their families and thanked them for coming here (Which is something I always do with immigrants.)

It was a classic New York experience. It was a classic American experience—and I feel sorry for those poor souls, Trump supporters, who react reflexively against people like the immigrants who cared for me. These people are not only essential, they enrich our culture with the variety of their experiences. They are at the root of our strength as a nation, and always have been. They work hard. They want to be accepted as part of the great American middle class…and Bernie Sanders should note, they are not doing manufacturing jobs; they are part of the 80% who work in the service sector. In the end, I was not only relieved but also inspired. The Trump opposition has to be all-in for expanded legal immigration. It has to be all-out opposed to the demonization of the foreign born.

We have to be for they/them. Because they are the best of us.

A number of you have been asking for transcripts of the interviews John Ellis and I do on Night Owls. Some of us—like, me—read better than we listen. Our intrepid producer Alex Kotlikoff has done a transcript of the interview with Lawrence Summers, which I’ll be publishing later today. We pay Alex to do that sort of stuff, which is why you should consider paying to subscribe to Sanity Clause.