Listen to This Ezra Klein Op-Ed to Calm Yourself Down

Ezra Klein is a polymath who is sort of a cross between a journalist and a public intellectual. In a country where everyone is issued a Substack upon birth, he is one of the most astute observers of American politics and culture currently opining his life away.

This op-ed from yesterday, audio with transcript, makes the argument there is much less to the shock and awe of Trump’s first two weeks in office than meets the eye. Trump’s early moves are causing real fear in average citizens, and the experts on autocracy I follow are less sanguine — in fact, their hair is pretty much on fire — but Klein has not shown himself to be someone who engages in wishful thinking. (In fact, he was way early on the realization that Joe Biden was not up to the job of running for president.) Here is the crux of his op-ed, but by all means listen to the whole thing:

Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

Klein’s recommendation:

Don’t.

Update:

For a deeper dive into the same broad issue Klein is addressing, listen to this On the Media interview with legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick. To sum up, she thinks the real potential danger is down the road, when and if the Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s initial extremely sloppy and obviously unconstitutional executive orders on ending birthright citizenship and withholding congressionally appropriated funds, among others, but leaves open the possibility for the administration to iterate their legal arguments and the scope of the dictates, until they are finally ruled constitutional. Lithwick says this is how it went in the first Trump presidency on several key issues.