So on the one hand, yes, I think you could argue that there is a certain amount of — I mean, there’s the famous H.L. Mencken quote, “Democracy is when the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” I might be mangling it a little bit ——
Healy: Exactly that.
Stephens: It’s exactly that. [laughter]
Goldberg: But I also think that you can already see that people, again, they should have known, but they didn’t. I think there was a poll today that 52 percent of Americans think Donald Trump is a dangerous dictator.
In polling, Donald Trump is underwater on every single issue because I think a lot of people either didn’t know what it was going to look like, or they convinced themselves that the people who were going to be hurt were some other group of people that wasn’t going to touch them. You see this in, say, the people who are like: “Wait, how come my employee or my wife got deported? I thought Trump was only going to deport the bad people.”
I do think that the democratic legitimacy that he has is eroding quickly.
Healy: Bret, I want to come to you next on this because, to Michelle’s point, I might disagree a little bit, only because we heard so much from Trump about tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs last fall. How do you see this? Do you see this as a mandate at work or something else?
Stephens: No, not at all. This is the point of my recent column; I think Trump voters, outside of maybe a very hard MAGA core, are shocked. Back in 2018, ’19, before the pandemic, I was talking with a hedge fund guy who — I wouldn’t call him a Trump supporter, but he was leaning in the president’s favor. And he said: When I listen to the president, I don’t like it; but when I turn the volume down to zero, I like the policy that I’m getting. And that’s because the policy that he was getting in the first term was largely kind of a Paul Ryan Republicanism. Agree or disagree, but it’s a known quantity in American politics.
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