Jamelle Bouie and I Debate Trump’s Failing Grade
1/25/202640 min
President Trump’s aggressive return to the White House has been disruptive in ways that will continue to reshape American — and global — governance and politics for decades. At a live event with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, I joined my colleague Jamelle Bouie and our boss, the Opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, to break down the first year of Trump 2.0. This conversation originally aired as an episode of “The Opinions.”
(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJamelle Bouie· Guest0:00
[upbeat music] Hey, listeners, I'm here with a special bonus episode for you. We're a year into the second Trump administration. Only a year, even if it seems maybe a little bit longer than that, and I've been thinking a lot about Trump's very specific unilateralist style of executive power, and whether it means that all the crazy-seeming changes of the last year are really permanent and enduring, or whether they're actually fragile and temporary. So I was glad to sit down with my opinion colleague, Jamelle Bouie, and our boss, opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, this past week at an event hosted by the Los Angeles Public Library. The three of us had a lively conversation about Trump 2.0, and how the country and the world have changed, or not changed as much as you might think, since his second inauguration. I think we covered a lot of ground, but you can be the judge.
Kathleen Kingsbury0:58
[upbeat music] [audience applauding] Thank you all for being here tonight. I'm excited to be in Los Angeles for this live conversation with opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie and Ross Douthat. It has been an eventful year, to say the least. Given what's happened even in recent weeks, I wanted to start this discussion with how President Trump is reshaping