Tom Friedman: Trump Is a ‘Small Man in a Big Time’
"Nearly 60 days in, the president is failing to engage in long-term thinking.
President Trump has been operating with complete impunity and disregard for American institutions. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the Times Opinion deputy editor Patrick Healy and the columnist Thomas L. Freidman discuss the repercussions of such behavior on America’s national and international policy.
Tom Friedman: Trump Is a ‘Small Man in a Big Time’
Nearly 60 days in, the president is failing to engage in long-term thinking.Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
This week, I wanted to talk to my colleague, Tom Friedman, about how the world we knew is being unraveled by its most powerful player, America. The American president is slapping tariffs on our friends, giving license to Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu to act with impunity and thumbing his nose at America’s judges and courts.
Tom has been the foreign affairs columnist at The Times for decades, and he has his finger on the big problems facing our country and the world. So I wanted to get Tom’s insights on how Trump is trying to reshape reality through sheer force of will.
Tom, thanks for joining me.
Thomas Friedman: Always a pleasure, Pat.
Healy: Let’s start with the economy. Trump is asking Americans to go along with higher groceries and cost of living — temporarily, he says — in exchange for a future where America will be in a stronger economic position.
We just had the Treasury secretary call this stock market decline “healthy” and say it’s better to have a market correction now rather than a crash later. And, you know, we’re both hearing the recession talk, too. But voters in November, they wanted a president who would stabilize the economy and make life more affordable.
I still think that’s what Trump will be judged on in the end. But, do you think it matters to Trump what voters want?
Friedman: Well, Pat, if you don’t build your economic plan on hard truths and solid foundations, you’re going to get a recession just for recession’s sake, and you’re not going to get a recession that clears the way for a new future.
Let’s remember what Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s White House spokesman, said the other day: that tariffs are a tax cut. Now, tariffs are many things. They can be paid by the exporter, the importer, the merchant in this country, or passed on to consumers. But there’s one thing tariffs aren’t, and that’s a tax cut. And that’s just calling black, white. Now that scares the heck out of me. Either you believe that, in which case that’s shocking, or you were told to say that, which is even more shocking. But what is for sure is that it is not true; that’s a lie. If you build your economics on a lie, it’s going to end badly.
Just as Trump said President Zelensky of Ukraine is a dictator — you can like Zelensky, you cannot like Zelensky. But if you call him a dictator, you’re building your policy on Ukraine on a lie. And that’s what worries me about these people.
Healy: That’s how they use language, Tom, right? What do you think Jerome Powell was thinking in his head when he hears that they’re calling tariffs tax cuts, or even the Treasury secretary? These people are supposed to be credible people.
Friedman: Let’s start with Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary. He was a hedge fund manager. I have zero doubt, Pat, that if he were still running his hedge fund, he would be shorting the market right now. I mean, there’s no way he would be doing this.
And Bessent to me is Exhibit A of the fundamental truth — and we’ve talked about this before — of the Trump 2 administration. Trump 1 was surrounded by buffers, and Trump 2 is surrounded by amplifiers. There is simply no buffer anymore between what Trump hears at the Mar-a-Lago bar and what becomes Treasury policy days later, or foreign policy days later.
Now, as for Jerome Powell, I can’t say for sure, but judging from everything he’s said and believed over the years, he knows how you cut the government budget, how you reduce spending, and it’s not by gutting the crown jewels of the American government, which are our institutions.
Healy: And Tom, China is watching all of this, and Trump pretends at least to say that he cares a great deal about competition with China, America’s position against China. But I find myself wondering — and you watch China closely, you visit there, you talk to officials there — how do they see this kind of long-term trajectory of what America is trying to do with tariffs, with trade, with its own economic house, trying to get it in order? And what does that look like for the future?
Friedman: Well, I’d say a couple things about China and Russia here, where they’re aligned.
Number one is these two countries spend a huge amount of money on disinformation and trying to soil the American brand around the world. They don’t have to spend a dime anymore, Pat. All they have to do is quote Donald Trump. When Donald Trump says Zelensky is a dictator, well, what does Putin have to say? He just has to quote him.
Number two, China and Putin have the exact same agenda, which is to shrink American power, keep it bottled up in North America, get the Americans out of Europe and get the Americans out of the Pacific Asian theater. Anything that does that is just perfect for them. That is their alliance; it’s to shrink American influence in the world.
Now, I happen to think that’s crazy from a Chinese point of view. What I’ve said to the Chinese is, you keep saying you’re tired of America setting the rules of the global order. Hey, tell me something: How did you do in this world ordered by America? You did pretty well, I’d say. What are the alternative set of rules on trade and commerce and intellectual property that you want to impose that you think you’re going to do better in?
China could not have done better in any world other than the world that America created after World War II. So I think they’re on a very wrong track there.
Healy: What’s fascinating, Tom, about the world that we’ve had for the last 80 years is that the country that, frankly, benefited the most from that 80-year world order, that lifted a lot of boats, was America.
You’ve written about how more people, more countries, got slices of the pie over the last 80 years, but America was the one that was always getting the biggest slice. And it seems as if Trump looks at the world and he doesn’t believe in the notion of a rising tide lifting all boats. It’s rather a “survival of the fittest,” and America wants the whole pie, not just a big slice.
Friedman: Exactly. At least half of it.
I was speaking to a friend of mine from the previous administration the other day and we were very hard on ourselves. I think my generation — I was born in 1953, so my mom was in the Navy in World War II — and I grew up covering Jim Baker, George H.W. Bush. Those are men who fought in the military. And I covered the reunification of Germany, so I was very aware of that world.
I think one of the great failures of my generation, both journalists and political figures, is that we actually didn’t teach the next generation about that world. They take the world as it is right now for granted, and they just don’t appreciate the role America played in forging this new world and the sacrifices that people made. I think it’s been a real failure of education, Democrats and Republicans, to bring along generations X, Y and Z to appreciate what is being lost right now.
Healy: I want to bring up a parallel between what the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is doing and Trump. Netanyahu has sought to fire the head of his domestic intelligence agency saying he’s lost trust in him.
When it comes to political power, I want to ask you, Tom, what happens to a country when its leaders don’t explain their actions or govern based on sound reasoning, but instead they make loyalty the most important trait?
Friedman: I’ve always said, to me, Trump and Netanyahu are brothers from different mothers, and there’s only one good thing about both of them, and that’s God only made one of each.
The real parallel with Netanyahu though, is today, this moment, is with Putin, because I think Putin and Netanyahu both understand that forever war is their friend. It’s Putin’s friend because he uses it to completely strangle any political opposition in Russia. He absolutely reinforces his iron grip on power.
The same thing with Netanyahu. Netanyahu knows that as long as the Gaza war continues, there is not going to be a commission of inquiry into his responsibility for Israel suffering the worst death of Jews since the Holocaust in a surprise attack. So Netanyahu wants the war to go on. It’s what keeps his cabinet together. Putin wants the war to go on. It’s what reinforces his grip on power.
Healy: What you’re describing could also be seen as them just saying: This is opportunity, people, with Donald Trump in power in the White House, I can act with impunity because I don’t have America or a strong world order constraining me anymore. I’m not afraid of consequences.
It gets back to the word of the week, Tom, which feels like it’s impunity — what Trump is doing on the foreign policy stage, with judges and courts in America. You have watched so many presidents act, try to act, boldly. They get constrained, they get pushed back on. Where does impunity lead, Tom? When you look at the world stage, what concerns you the most? What is actually the most dangerous dynamic for America right now?
Friedman: You know, Pat, listening to you, I’m thinking of this story, probably apocryphal — no one knows for sure — where Muhammad Ali was flying on an airplane. He was about to take off and he didn’t have his seatbelt on and the stewardess came by and said, “You have to put your seatbelt on.” And he said, “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.” And the stewardess said, “Well, Superman don’t need no airplane.”
These guys think they’re Superman, but we all need seatbelts in the end because you can’t fly. The laws of gravity will eventually prevail.
It’s not just impunity, Pat. What’s going on in Washington today is a combination I’ve never seen: A president acting with impunity, backed by a party that controls the House, the Senate and effectively the Supreme Court which are absolutely terrified of challenging Trump on any issue. Backed by the world’s richest man who can fund a primary against any of these people and who can really intimidate them with social media and launch a Twitter mob against them.
So it’s this combination of impunity and utter fear of getting in the way of it, that I have never seen before.
To me, the core failure of the Trump administration, Pat, is it’s all first-order thinking. First-order thinking says: I’m going to end the war in Ukraine and for that we have to be more pro-Putin and less pro-Ukrainian. That’s first-order thinking.
What’s second-order thinking? Second-order thinking says: If we abandon our traditional European allies of 80 years and do something we’ve never done before, sell out a country that is looking to defend and promote its liberty to a country that is promoting autocracy, if we do that, oh my God, what will other American allies do? I’ll tell you what other American allies will do: They are called Japan, Korea, Poland, Saudi Arabia. They will say that America’s guarantee to us is worthless and therefore we better get a nuclear weapon.
Then we go to third-order thinking. Well, what happens if the whole nuclear nonproliferation regime — one of the great achievements of the post-Cold War world, to limit the spread of nuclear weapons — what if that breaks down and suddenly all these countries go out and get nuclear weapons? Then what are we going to need?
We’re going to need a greater antimissile shield. And what will that cost us? A trillion dollars. So if you just stop at the first-order thinking, it may feel good for a day, but when you look at the second- and third-order effects of these things, it could be devastating.
Healy: You do wonder, Tom, whether Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, have any kind of understanding or really feel any kind of responsibility about strengthening society in the end.
Trump thinks that what he’s doing with the economy on tariffs is going to lead to a stronger domestic economic position for the United States. But I’m just not sure they see those second- or third-order effects. They’re just so narrowly focused on what they see as their own ends. So let me take the other side of this. What’s the best way to counter Trump on all these moves? What’s the counter message here?
Friedman: Well, what would a Democratic foreign policy sound like? Here’s, to me, what it would sound like: First of all, what world are we living in? Everything today that is complex is made in an ecosystem, whether it’s an iPhone, an electric car or an mRNA vaccine. That’s the world we’re living in.
Well, if we’re living in an ecosystem world, what do we, America, want? We want to be in touch with more ecosystems, and we want to make sure that the end products of those ecosystems are designed in America.
Now, let’s connect that then with hard-core foreign policy. What, then, should be American foreign policy? Let’s go back to what was going on in the world on Oct. 6, 2023, the day before Hamas launched its attack on Israel. On that day, Ukraine was trying to join the Western ecosystem, the European Union, and Israel was actually trying to join the Eastern ecosystem with Saudi Arabia, which would then anchor a kind of Middle Eastern-European Union.
Russia stopped the first, and Iran and Hamas stopped the second. Therefore, what should our foreign policy be? It should be to say to Netanyahu: You are not acting in our interest because our interest is a Saudi-Israel entente and that requires an Israeli-Palestinian entente. You are not acting in our interest.
And it’s to say to Putin: If you want this war to end, then why don’t you stop it? Because you started it. And in order to drive that point through your [expletive] head, we are going to triple down on our aid to Ukraine and make sure they have all the cards.
That, to me, is where Democrats should be. You can’t just say we’re for this and we’re for that. You’ve got to persuade voters that you have a take on the world. This is how America fits in, and this is how they fit in, and this is how it benefits all of us.
Healy: Tom, I’m thinking about something you wrote in a recent column. You quoted that famous line from President Kennedy’s 1961 speech, “Ask not what your country can do fo you, ask what you can do for your country.” And you put a twist on it, saying that under Trump’s leadership it’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for President Trump.”
That is the story that he is telling, the story that he is conveying. We’re heading into this future that’s based on no blueprint from the past, and it’s one that seems deeply self-centered.
Friedman: If you were to ask me, Pat, what’s the biggest thing that surprised you about what Trump has done? It’s the complete absence of any desire to pull the country together. And the complete desire to drive a completely partisan agenda.
I’ll give you a simple example. It’s the board of the Kennedy Center, this wonderful center for performing arts in Washington, D.C., that was always bipartisan, always had Democrats and Republicans. He came in and fired all the Democrats on the board and put his own people there.
It’s that “going to that next stage of where we’ve never gone before,” of “complete rule or die” politics: “When I’m in power, we get everything.” “It’s our time to eat and you get nothing.”
I think one of the many things Trump doesn’t understand, and what Democrats should be playing to, is that the most underappreciated political attitude in America today is actually the quest for unity. People want leaders who will pull us together, not pull us apart. I know division plays in 30 percent here and 30 percent there, but that’s not where the country is. And that’s why he is going to fail. Because we have big things to do, and big, hard things can only be done together.
As my friend Leon Wieseltier said about Benjamin Netanyahu, and it’s true of Trump as well: He’s a small man in a big time. Everything else is just commentary.
Healy: Tom, thanks so much for joining me.
Friedman: Really a pleasure, Pat.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Aman Sahota, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman •Facebook"
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