I think everyone in America, I mean, it's very hard to find a unifying principle today, but everyone in America agrees that something's broken, something's off, some people have a set of rea one set of reactions, other people have another set of reactions, but Susan, is Donald Trump is the presidency or the double presidency of Donald Trump.

Is it, is it a symptom of this, this dysfunction, this polarization, or has he been a cause of it?

Or you obviously have a choice C, which is both.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's no question he's an accelerant and you know, a divider, one might even say, you know, by nature, but he wouldn't have been elected your book right now.

He wouldn't have been, he wouldn't have been elected if he didn't play to what a large segment of our society has been asking for, I think relevant to that you have to look at the fact that a majority of the country has not said that the country is on the right track.

You have to go back to the early George W. Bush era.

So we're talking two decades, you know, the lifetime of our children has been one of complete kind of dystopia as far as the public space, as far as young people are concerned today.

They're astonished when we talk about you know this sort of mythic past when there was a national consensus when we were promoting democracy at home and abroad because the new normal for them is this contentious divided, polarized environment.

So Americans don't believe what they're united in is believing the country's gone to hell, that they don't think the country's on the right track.

There's been a general diminution in support and belief and faith in all institutions that includes religious institutions.

It includes institutions of the government, even the military, which until recently had been, you know, and still has higher, you know, ratings, but even that, as we see in a purpose ful way, we do have a political party now that is very purposefully organized itself to attack the legitimacy and foundations of institutions that to me is one of the signal differences of Donald Trump, right, is that he is going after the things that make our society work.

The individual, you know, the sort of superstructure of American democracy are the very things Donald Trump every day calls into question, and that has been very effective in a society that already had major questions and partially Jeff, I think it's been really fascinating to hear these answers, to have pull out of the news and you know, and hear a little bit more foundational conversation.

But one thing I would say that's so different and head snapping right now is that we speak still of one America.

We say, well, America is in a tough place right now, or America is no longer promoting democracy abroad, but it's actually not that.

I mean, it's that we have different starkly competing visions of America right now that we can't say there's one American view at 250 years.

I think we can say that there is a clash of definitions, and we've seen head snapping changes.

Just 3 years ago we had a president who believed that promotion of democracy was the essence of American foreign policy who convened a global summit of democracies as his item one of his presidency So it's not that we have abandoned that.

It's that we have uh a country that can't decide what it wants and is veering wildly between different competing and incompatible visions of itself.

Yes, Steve, jumping off something that Susan said, I've used this before on this show and elsewhere, but the question that that that plagues me is, is this Are we experiencing in America at 250, uh, uh, is this a head cold, uh, a nervous breakdown.

a midlife crisis or a terminal illness.

I mean, I didn't go to medical school for a reason, right, but you are an economist though, right?

Um, look, I, I, I don't know, to be honest, I don't know the answer to that question.

Um, I mean, how do you feel?

I mean, I say that advisedly because this is a show about thinking, not feeling, but, but does it feel recoverable?

Um, look, I think anything's recoverable.

We've had hard moments in the past.

We had a civil war.

We went through this the civil rights era.

There's this, you know, Winston Churchill, this may be an apocryphal quote, said Americans always do the right thing only after they've tried everything else, right?

I feel like we're trying everything else.

We're in the middle of that right now.

Yeah, it's recoverable.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't, uh, pronounce the country dead at at this moment.

But I think these are real concerns.

I think Susan touched on, on some of them, um, and you know, to return to, to Ashley's answer, I think one of the, the, the biggest questions facing the country right now is the sort of the pace of information, the speed of information, and the sort of willingness or even eagerness of the populace to have its views affirmed rather than challenged, and you know, the the the relative lack of interest in the truth, and I, I don't know that I would say that that's new.

It's certainly that's always been the case, but now it's constant and it's, you know, this isn't a 24/7 news cycle.

This is a nanosecond news cycle, and people are turning to find the things that they think they already know, just to have them told that they're right.

And in that kind of an environment that I think the challenges to the country to to having a one America.

I mean, we're never all going to agree on anything, but to to having a one American and having a conversation about those founding principles and about the things that we've been talking about becomes very, very difficult.

We have a bit of geographic diversity on this panel, and I want to ask Tim, who lives in Michigan and Idrees is from Kentucky.

to, to comment on what Steve is talking about in terms of what people you live around who aren't immersed, one of the things that makes them different from what we do in Washington is that they're not thinking about all this stuff all the time.

They actually have lives.

Um, and, and so I'm wondering from what you're picking up, is it, is it the speed of information that that it's overwhelming people is, is, is the information just worse than ever?

What is it from your perspective?

So I would, I would see the point that we are living through this epistemological crisis right now, and it is it's really, really, really dangerous and, and I just don't think that we could, we could devote an entire panel to talking about the threat of what happens when you have people who no longer share a lived reality or no no longer operate from a common baseline of fact and information.

I mean, it's it's it's really damaging and we see it every day, and I think it's accelerating.

I would argue though that I think that epistemological crisis is actually downstream from a crisis of trust, and the thing that is so striking to me, not only when I jump in my truck and do road trips for reporting, but just with friends, family in Southeast Michigan in my backyard, people who I grew up with.

These are people who, to the point about sort of institutional decline.

These are people who have reached the conclusion that no one is looking out for them, that that no one has their best interest in mind, and that no one can be trusted, whether that's higher education, whether that's law enforcement, whether it's the government, whether it's the press.

whether it's Major League Baseball, right?

I mean these are people who have become sort of deeply cynical, deeply calloused, and I think in that space of real wounding.

there is an opportunity for them to be preyed upon and to be manipulated and to be demagogued, and that is where certain actors in American life have been very successful.

Donald Trump, chief among them, but he's not the only one.

And I do think that it's very difficult for us to discuss this idea of is it a head cold?

Is it a terminal illness?

How do we rebuild?

How do we heal the body politic until we've really done deep diagnostic work to understand this erosion of trust and what can be done about it.

Ashley, you understand Donald Trump better than almost anyone.

What that's an actual serious observation.

and and we, and we, and we thank you for your service.

You understand Donald Trump.

You spent a lot of time with Donald Trump.

What does he understand about the American people that so-called elites didn't understand.

Wait, I think it's a couple of things.

I think it's what Tim said and what I experienced on my road trip, this sense of, of grievances.

First of all, that people feel like no one is looking out for them, and he is going to take that grievance and and channel it and sort of cast himself as the martyr on their behalf, um, he also benefits what he understands is that just in a lot of these things I say understands, is it a true sort of gut visceral level, but that shamelessness is a superpower, um and it's much easier, frankly, to be shameless in a world where trust and information sources and in reality is so polarized to begin with.

I mean, just briefly to go back to the previous question, I was thinking we have always made choices about our information, right?

Subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

That's a choice you're going to get slightly different news sources watching Fox News or MS Now, slightly different choices, but I think what we have not accounted for is that social media, you're not at this point you're not even making a choice.

When you open your phone based on an algorithm that recognizes that you spent 2.5 seconds looking at something.

The algorithm is feeding you something that wants you to believe, something that reinforces something that you may not even consciously know that you believe.

And so if you get fed a bunch of videos that cats commit crimes at an alarming level, right?

That influences your thinking.

He understands all of that and he also understands that that for a lot of Americans for these reasons we stated just now facts are funderable.

So I mean, I think it's worth stepping back and saying he didn't like the results of the 2020 election because he lost.

It was a free and fair election, but the idea that he just intuitively understood that if he just said I won this election, it was stolen and he said it shamelessly enough and frequently enough that he could get a huge portion of the population to believe that in their bones.

I mean, I mean that is real understanding of something.

Idrees, why are cats committing crime.

Um, I want you to answer the same question.

I, I, I asked Tim about what people are thinking and using how they're using social media in places that are not Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and so on.

You're from Kentucky.

Talk about that.

Yeah, I think there, there can be a kind of um, you know, in Washington, people are very interested in politics and people who are interested in politics tend to be the ones who sort themselves into these, these rival camps with these rival epistemologies, and they lob, you know, grenades at each other through vodcast and whatever else they're, they're, they're kind of fighting over a kind of mass of people who are, um, you know, not trusting a politician's disinterested in politics.

If you look at their voting behavior, they're, they're not terribly consistent from one year to another, you know, from 2012 up until 2024, probably 2028.

Americans have voted for a different presidential party every every year, the midterm elections, they always cycle in and out.

Political scientists have this thermostatic conception of American voters that, you know, they turn it up and then they turn it down and they turn it up, they turn it down, and that's been a good model for, for how people are.

So in terms of what we're talking about, it's, it's true and it's important, but it's also important to see that that's a description of elite behavior and and people who are interested in politics and that's important because elites, I think, matter for for voting patterns.

They matter for um for all the things that that we're talking about, you know, respect for losers' consent, elections, etc.

all of that matters, but I think that, you know, if you go outside of Washington or New York, um, a lot of people are getting on with their lives as as we said earlier, America's really rich, and people are a lot of people just enjoy having a nice life, um, that does still happen here.

Um, which is, which is sometimes harder to see for for all that we're de b ating So it's not to say that what we're saying is not right.

It is right, but it's also, it's also, there's also a lot else that's going on, but I would just, I would just add to that quickly, you know, I, I think we're separating ourselves in, in other ways.

It is the case that that's largely an elite phenomenon, and you have conversations with partisans in Washington DC that like literally don't even make sense to real people in the real world.

that's they don't think like this.

Why would you vote for a Republican who, you know, is, is against all of your values and does things that you abhor just because that person's a Republican.

Same thing for Democrats, but we're also dividing ourselves, I think, into, into in another way.

You have this sort of massive middle of the the country that is increasingly so turned off by our politics that they're checking out.

These are people who are news avoiders.

These are people who maybe at one point paid attention and sort of out of a civic obligation and are just saying I'm, I'm helpless to do anything here, so I'm not going to do it.

And then I think that the corollary to that is that the partisanship you see in Washington, we've seen this for a long time in Washington.

sort of bleeds out into the rest of the country where people are now increasingly building their identities around their partisan associations, and that is, I think, growing at the same time that you have this, this group that is either apathetic or or feels like they can't make a difference.

Peter, small question for you.

Is the post-World War II international liberal order created and maintained by the United States, over.

Yes.

OK, thanks, Ashley It doesn't mean that the United States isn't still the most dominant actor on the stage, it is, obviously, to introduce's point earlier, we are still the most, you know, potent economic and military force, even if we don't want to be the world's policemen, of whom we don't want to be the hegemon, we don't want to be the leader.

Uh, but certainly our understanding of what we thought the world order was uh for the last 80 years is is over.

It is, it just is.

Now it doesn't mean it can't.

change again with another president, but this president has made very clear that he does not see it as America's role to be friends with Europe, the way every president, Republican or Democrat, since World War II did.

He does not see it as his role to stand up to autocracy, to, to Susan's point about Biden's summit.

In fact, he is perfectly comfortable with autocrats, maybe more so than with Democrats.

He himself has said that it is a very different way of looking at the world.

Um, having said that, he does not come at it with this coherent ideology other than, you know, we, the first term we used the word isolationist a lot today.

We would not use that word.

We would use maybe imperialist.

I mean, he's kind of himself evolved over time as he's become more comfortable with power, but he's using it in a way that Reagan and Truman and Eisenhower and Obama would never have used it.

And I think that that is challenging our conception of who we are in the world and whether we stand out as that beacon you asked about earlier for the rest of the world.

What strikes me is how do people see us today?

Do they see us as, you know, a country that's led by Trump that we may or may not agree with Trump, or do they see America as being what Trump says we are, and I think that when we have a times been alienated from our friends in Europe over the Iraq War or over, you know, Pershing missiles during the Cold War or whatever.

People didn't lose faith in America.

They might have disagreed with America's leader at the time, and the difference today, I wonder, and I'm not smart enough to know, is whether we are changing our, um, the way we present ourselves to the world and how they see us.