Lozada: That’s so hard — there’s such a fire hose of news every day. I think about, every day, looking at the New York Times app or other news apps, and I look at what’s at the top and I think: Is that the most important thing going on, or is that just the latest thing going on? And I don’t know. That’s a difficult thing. The sense of hierarchy is sort of eluding me sometimes. It takes time to figure out what is really the most important thing.
I think that one thing I’ve been thinking about is the notion, as you just put it, of “We, the people” — that’s how the Constitution begins. And what I’ve been thinking about with Trump is that so much of what he’s doing is limiting the universe of “We, the people.” He’s telling us that there are people who really don’t count in that world. And that could be federal workers — they’re expendable, their loyalties are suspect, we don’t need them. The U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants also don’t belong, aren’t really “We, the people,” should not receive citizenship at birth as the 14th Amendment tells us. Opponents of the president, former officials who have criticized him don’t deserve to be protected.
You know, it’s another one of the key aspects of populism that populist leaders purport to speak for the people, but the definition of the people is always malleable. It always changes, it’s always shifting. And inevitably it becomes smaller, it shrinks until the only people who are “We, the people” are the supporters of the leader. And to me that’s one of the through lines of the Trump era, certainly of the first 100 days of this second term.
Healy: Maureen, what has Trump done that matters most?
Dowd: Well, again, I come back to the fake reality he’s trying to create. He pardoned the 1,600 Jan. 6 insurrectionists and is trying to change the narrative of that day, which shall go down in infamy. He’s going after The Associated Press because they won’t use “Gulf of America.” So it’s like, if he says it and you don’t go along with it because it’s not true, then he punishes you the way he’s doing with Zelensky.
I interviewed George Clooney about his Broadway show, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” about Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy, and when I first heard he was bringing this to Broadway, I was kind of surprised, like, what is the relevance? It’s become more relevant every minute of every day, because of how Trump is going after people who are truthful but who won’t go along with his fake reality.