Opinion | Trump Is the Wrong Answer to the Right Question

Gail Collins: Bret, this is our last conversation of 2024. We’ll be back in January, as will, um, President Trump. Any New Year predictions? Wishes? Desperate hopes?

Bret Stephens: Wishes: A team other than the Chiefs wins the Super Bowl. Prediction: The Chiefs win the Super Bowl.

As for desperate hopes, I guess it would be that Trump 2.0 will prove to be a pleasant surprise. I’m not entirely ruling it out, notwithstanding some, ahem, dubious cabinet picks. How about you?

Gail: I am ruling out being pleasantly surprised. Well, maybe the president-elect will receive a sudden apparition from Frances Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants, who will persuade him to make sheltering the poor his top domestic priority. Otherwise, no real hope on my end. Tell me your vision of Pleasant Surprise Donald.

Bret: Trump is a disrupter in a system that needs a lot of disruption. So many things in American life feel broken. Our public schools, which keep getting more money even as they produce worse outcomes. Our byzantine permitting system, which makes it difficult, expensive and almost comically time-consuming to get even the most basic building projects off the ground. Our defense procurement system, which spends trillions of dollars on a diminishing number of exquisite weapons systems that are increasingly vulnerable to inexpensive threats like drones. Our immigration system, which under the Biden administration was overwhelmed by the largest illegal migration surge in our history. The I.R.S., which answers fewer than one-third of phone calls from taxpayers. The criminal justice system, which rarely nabs a thief.

Point is, we’ve got a 20th-century government straining under the weight of 21st-century challenges. My main quarrel with Trump, other than his personal awfulness and his shaky democratic commitment, is that he’s the wrong answer to the right question — a bomb when we need a hammer.

Gail: Some of your priorities for reform are perfectly reasonable — if you had a reasonable administration trying to perform them. But I do not, for instance, think a Trumpian I.R.S. is going to become more efficient at ferreting out tax evaders.

Bret: Well, my concern was with the agency responding to normal requests from law-abiding taxpayers. But you were asking for hopes, not expectations.

Gail: Some of your other proposals for presidential reform priorities, I just don’t get. Violent crime has been dropping during the Biden administration. Education is a state-by-state issue, with some systems getting much better results than others. The place with the best education system, by most estimates, is the somewhat-less-than-right-wing state of Massachusetts. Deeply doubt Trump’s new education czarina, Linda McMahon, is going to use her experience running professional wrestling matches to turn things around.

Bret: Even if the states are mainly responsible for education, the Department of Education’s discretionary budget for 2024 still runs to a whopping $79 billion, with one of its main goals being to “achieve academic excellence.” But math scores have plummeted in recent years, so maybe I’ll take the wrestling exec over Miguel Cardona, the teachers’ union favorite who’s the current secretary. As for crime, it’s true that violent crime is down, but some property crimes are up, and many victims don’t report them to the police — probably because they’ve lost trust in cops’ ability to help them.

Gail: Given the choice, I think, most folks would prefer a world in which violent crime was down.

Bret: By the way, speaking of criminal justice, any further thoughts on the two cases that have roiled New York in the last couple of weeks: the arrest of Luigi Mangione for the killing of Brian Thompson and the acquittal of Daniel Penny for the death of Jordan Neely?

Gail: In the interests of conversational harmony, I’m going to refrain from saying something cynical about how the Penny trial demonstrates that the system works — a middle-class young white male really can get a fair trial.

Bret: At least it was fair.

Gail: Penny is the Marine veteran who shared a subway car with Neely, a homeless guy with mental health issues whose behavior was unnerving other passengers. Penny jumped him and put him in a lethal chokehold.

I’d have liked to have seen a verdict that paid at least a modicum of respect to the loss of Neely’s life. But the jurors couldn’t agree, and after a complicated series of tries, the D.A.’s office agreed to drop the manslaughter case, and the jury found Penny not guilty of a lesser charge.

All sad but not shocking. Except that now Penny’s being lionized by the right. He attended the Army-Navy football game as a guest of JD Vance, where he was enthusiastically received.

Yuck.

Bret: I think we both agree that what happened on that subway car was a tragedy and that in a better world, Penny would have been able to subdue Neely without killing him. But Neely wasn’t just unnerving other passengers; he was terrifying them and threatening harm. I don’t see evidence that Penny acted out of racist motives or had murderous intent. I see a young man who lived by his code as a Marine and acted to protect frightened passengers from a scary, violent guy who should have been in a psychiatric ward, not on the F train. That the Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg, decided to prosecute was a travesty, and I don’t think Democrats help themselves when they can’t see the stark difference between an upstander like Penny and a sadist like Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd.

Gail: The nation has been absolutely obsessed with Mangione, a wealthy young white male who’s gotten into big trouble. He apparently was suffering from some sort of breakdown related to severe back pain. He’s accused of gunning down the head of UnitedHealthcare on a Midtown Manhattan street.

Bret: Lots of us have dealt with crippling back pain. Generally speaking, the right answer is to find a good physical therapist, not shoot a stranger in cold blood.

Gail: The case has stirred up a lot of talk about the role of private insurance in our health care system. I think that’s a great discussion for the nation to have. I suspect, Bret, we’d come down on different sides of that debate while agreeing that shooting corporate executives should definitely not be part of the equation.

Bret: It’s totally fine to have a serious conversation about health insurance and how it might do better to ensure all people get the care they need. But using a father’s killing as the occasion to have that conversation is morally obtuse and politically ill judged. And I’m pretty disgusted with people who want to turn Mangione into some kind of folk hero. Imagine if some right-wing lunatic murdered a progressive journalist in the name of people’s justice. Somehow I don’t see Mangione’s current fan base taking it in stride.

Change of subject, Gail: President Biden still has five weeks left in office. Any suggestions for what he should do with his remaining time?

Gail: Biden, alas, is probably going to go down in history as the president who gave a pardon to his delinquent, tax-evading son. I’d like to see him expand that story a little — not by issuing pardons in advance to public figures Trump hates but by looking at the average folks who deserve a break.

Bret: With you so far.

Gail: One possibility would be commuting the death sentences for federal inmates who could be resentenced to life in prison. That’d be good news for those of us who simply don’t believe execution is a civilized punishment for criminals who could be locked away instead.

Biden has already given pardons to nearly 1,500 prisoners who had been moved to home confinement during the pandemic. More actions like these would underline Biden’s belief that besides battling the nation’s enemies, the president should also focus on spreading a sense of good will.

Bret: For my part, I hope that Biden allows Nippon Steel to purchase U.S. Steel, which right now he plans to block. It would be good for American steelworkers, good for America, good for our alliance with Japan and bad for China’s efforts to dominate a critical industry. Trump may be a sincere believer in protectionism, but I don’t believe Biden is that dumb, and this would be in the interests of shoring up American power for the long term.

Also, before we go, be sure to read Anemona Hartocollis’s terrific report in The Times on the efforts on college campuses to revive the dying art of conversation, as a remedy against angry campus politics. No, it isn’t a cure-all, and the people who are the most eager to discuss their differences aren’t necessarily the same people who could really use the practice. But — as I hope we’ve shown these past few years — conversation for the purpose of learning rather than scoring points isn’t just educational or therapeutic. It’s also … fun. People ought to give it a try.

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