Opinion | Has the MAGA ‘Sugar Rush’ Finally Run Out?

I’m going to sound like the kinds of conservatives I read when I was in high school: Don’t have this victim mentality all the time. ILet it out. Let it out. Testify testify. I’m Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for a New York Times Opinion. And I am here this week with the usual suspects, columnist David French and Jamelle Bouie. Gentlemen, good to see you Good to see you as well, Michelle. Great to see you. All right. This week, ahead of America’s 250th birthday celebration, we are talking about the division that we’re seeing in the country and the kind of leadership that might be able to get us out of it. But first, I want to take a quick look at what’s been going on in this very exciting news week, starting with one of my personal favorites, the glorious reflecting pool. All right, so as a veteran Washington resident, I myself cannot get enough of the story. Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool for those who have managed to avoid it so far. The basic gist of it is Trump spent millions to upgrade what he calls a swimming pool, most notably painting it American flag blue on the bottom for the nation’s upcoming 250th celebration. But unsurprisingly, perhaps, the whole thing has turned into a gloppy swampy mess algae peeling paint, hapless bystanders arrested and accused of vandalism, and of course, the president blaming everyone but himself. Now, this is not the first of Trump’s public missteps, of course, not even the first involving one of his crazy vanity projects. So why has this specific face plant become such a hot topic. Jamelle? Let’s go to you first. I mean, I think first because the visual is so are striking. It’s similar with the demolition of the East Wing. It’s one thing to be corrupt and stuff and to collect billions of dollars in crypto money. That’s all quite abstract, but when to borrow to borrow from, I believe David Roth that defector when it looks like they’re brewing yodas in the reflecting pool it is “brewing Yodas.” I love that. I think it’s very funny. It’s of course, people are going to raise their raise their eyebrows a bit. They’re going to notice it. And when the president doesn’t just seem obsessed with this, when he really ought to be doing better things. I mean, I know he’s Trump, but he’s also the president. Like he’s a real job. But he’s obsessed with this and he’s preoccupied for reminding us. I think all that together makes it just puts it into the public view in a way that the somewhat more abstract scandals are. It’s just like everyone knows that the reflecting pool looks like this is a major national symbol, and now it’s like a sickly green. It looks like Gak –– for viewers my age, late millennial viewers, it looks like Ecto Cooler. My favorite one that I’ve seen is somebody, some comedian saying that it looks like the world’s largest pool of kombucha. It’s just that they’re brewing kombucha. Sorry go ahead. David? I think of this and the ballroom very similarly. And they both have one thing in common, and that is real estate. I mean, this is Trump’s thing. He wants things to be big and to be beautiful. If there’s one thing he thinks he knows, it’s real estate. There are also both perfectly representative of Donald Trump in real estate because one of them is real estate plus corruption. And that’s the ballroom. It’s not being done lawfully. You’ve been misleading the public. Is it going to be privately funded. Is it going to be publicly funded. This one is another subspecialty of his real estate plus incompetence. And so yeah, he’s very focused on this as this real estate tangible visual thing. Part of the beautification of Washington. I got to say, Michelle, it is pretty striking the visual difference in the Trump Washington D.C. Now, some of this was already underway. There was already efforts to clean up the city. After a lot of the homeless encampments during the pandemic era, and so there were some positive changes in that way. But the reflecting pool undermines any sense of forward motion, even from the most MAGA dedicated person who likes seeing Trump up there. It is. It’s a debacle. And it’s a debacle that he from his standpoint, perversely enough, is just magnifying every day the more that he talks about it. I have to say, I particularly like these kinds of face plants of his because they’re farce instead say, tragedy or horror, which is what we usually get from him. I mean, this big to do, and he looks completely clownish, which helps undermine his whole master of the universe take charge persona. And it’s just something everybody can grasp, as you were talking about with the images, Jamelle. A dead duckling floating in a pool of slime is something that everybody can go, yeah, yeah, it’s the perfect metaphor. It’s like. Whereas when he has the military and they bomb a school in Iran, nobody wants to look at that. Nobody wants to think through the horror of what’s happening or shipping people off to foreign prisons or whatever. This is much more to my mind, the kind of way you undermine his whole get things done. I’m super competent and just have the will to dominate. I mean, he can’t even dominate a pool of algae. This is not impressive. I have to say, in addition to just the way that it works with familiar symbols of American civic religion, I do think that when looking at D.C. as a whole, because I’ve been in D.C. a bunch recently as well, and the big banners of Trump on federal buildings, it cuts against, I think, Americans expectations of what their government does. Americans, don’t Americans associate that with tinpot dictatorships? They don’t associate this thing with the United States of America. And I do think that Trump may, under Trump, may see all of this as glorification for him. And certainly his supporters see this as look at what Trump is doing. But I think a lot of people look at it and they’re like, what do you. What’s this about, man. Like, no one elected you to be. To make yourself pretend. God emperor. They elected you to lower prices. And that hasn’t happened. So what do we think it says about the fact that the reflecting pool and all of these July 4 celebrations that the White House has been cooking up have, instead of becoming a unifying event, have basically split everybody even further. This just this is the piece of this that depresses me even as I’m laughing my butt off over the reflecting pool. So I see that as very intentional from the administration. Like the White House doesn’t conceive of all Americans as being American in the same way. Like some of us, some of us don’t count the same as others. And the dividing line seems to be do you support their political project, the notion that the president is the president for the entire country that, yes, you have your supporters and yes, you were elected by your base and you have your party. But the office represents the whole people just is anathema to this White House. They don’t think about it. And that translates to their celebrations. The weird the weird special event for our birthday boy, Mr. President, what, two weeks ago with the U.F.C. fight and all of that was not only was that not meant for the broad public right. Like you had to have a Paramount+ subscription to even watch it. First of all, it was meant for just like a subset of even his own supporters. It wasn’t any kind of attempt to bring the country together in under like, common civic rituals. And to me, it’s an intentional thing. They’re thinking of the 250th as an attempt to glorify, and I use that in the religious term, the religious way to glorify Donald Trump and not as an opportunity to despite our many divisions and fractious, fractious nature and all that not to think about our common origins and our common purpose. And the last thing I’ll say and the last thing obviously, the thing I’ll say for this little riff, is that when you consider the extent to which the intellectuals associated with MAGA and I include the vice president, the extent to which they articulate a kind of hostility to the egalitarian reading of the Declaration of Independence, to the notion that creedal nationalism, the notion that what makes an American is your commitment to a set of ideas, that they are hostile to that it all makes sense. Like the very thing that anniversary celebrations in this country have tried to focus on. I was reading Gerald Ford’s address during the 200th not long ago, which is not just common origins, but common purpose, common ideals they reject straight up. And so what else are they going to do but have a bunch of meathead Professional Fighters and guys on motorcycles right around the White House lawn. Like, what else is there to do. David what else is there to do. There’s a middle finger aspect to everything the administration does. So it’s exactly what Jamelle said. It’s the opposite of unity. It’s the opposite of an inclusive version or vision of American life. It is to stratify certain kinds of activities and people as real American or not. And so these are the real American sports. And you had initially with Freedom 250 an array of country and Americana rock performers. That’s real American music. He couldn’t even get that though, right. But he couldn’t even get that. Once people realize what was happening, they were like, whoa. But that no. I’m with you, bro. You saw the original vision of it. And so there’s. It’s always subdividing and slicing to where there is a kind of sport. There is a kind of activity that is the real American activity. It all fits with the MAGA aesthetic. It’s this constant stratification. It’s this constant sense of a pecking order and then this constant sense. There is always, always in the back of their mind something that goes like this. How can we do this in a way that will make other people mad, that will make our enemies mad. How can we make our enemies mad today, as opposed to how can we bring the country together today. It really does seem to be an absolute communications priority of this administration is to just go ahead and decide to tick people off on purpose, as long as it’s the right people, that strikes me as at the root of the president’s movement all along. It’s like whatever you think of his politics, it’s all about taking off the elites now, which is hilarious because he is an elite of sorts. He’s just an elite who’s always had a chip on his shoulder. And he’s elites. Elites here is defined in a purely cultural, non-material way, elites for these people. If you are like a barista with an English degree making $15 an hour, you’re an elite. Because I don’t know. I guess there’s Netflix producers like to make shows for you sometimes. Whereas if you are a billionaire buying pardons for your buddies, not an elite because the cultural tastemakers supposedly look down on you, it’s a very self-aggrandizing vision of who constitutes an elite and one that allows people with actual wealth and actual power and actual influence to obscure that under cultural grievances. But it’s so darn exhausting. It’s like I grew mud bogs and tractor pulls. And I’ve been to rattlesnake roundup. I challenge the president to find somebody in his cabinet who’s been to a rattlesnake roundup. But I don’t understand how you can just spend so much of your time being angry and aggrieved about somebody not appreciating your cultural and constantly thinking about social hierarchy and social status, just constantly thinking about it. And in a way that’s always self-aggrandizing, that always puts you like it’s the scrappy underdog role. Like, so what Jamelle said was exactly right about elites. You can be an underemployed Brown English or art major grad, and that’s an elite. And if you own five car dealerships and say, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, you’re just a working man, right. And so it’s that where you’re constantly on the bottom of a particular pecking order. That, by the way, is not the pecking order in their community. And in their lives. So in the actual physical space that they occupy, somebody who’s a very prominent MAGA person will be often revered in the community, very respected in their community, somebody who might be on the elder board of a church in the head, head of the local Kiwanis Club, or has their name on a building in a local college. And they will view themselves as the scrappy underdog, because the gender studies Department in Oberlin looks down on them and oh, my God, that kind of constant, constant sense. That’s all I’ve got to say. The president is just hoo hoo. Get over it. O.K get over yourself. I’ll say it’s not even that anyone’s looking down at them. It’s just that no one like the people, people who they associate with cultural prestige, aren’t necessarily thinking of them. But I personally find this whole way of experiencing the world totally alien. It’s like, I don’t man, to be a little real for a second. Like I’m a Black American. Like, I know for a fact that there are no non, not insignificant portions of the country that think kind of nasty things about of my particular cultural background. And it’s like, all right, who cares. I’ll just live my life grown up. It’s a big country. Be a grown up. People will be prejudiced. Whatever just like, I don’t grow up. Be don’t be a snow. Don’t be a snowflake. I just I really do not understand this I’m about to sound. I’m going to sound like the kinds of conservatives I read when I was in high school. Don’t have this victim mentality all the time. I let it out. Let it out. Testify testify. All right. As much as I hate to do this, I’m going to move us from the pool over to Capitol Hill there. The Republican led Congress is in a Trump induced swivet. I love it. So we’re taping this. I should say we’re taping this Thursday morning. Who knows what’s going to happen. But Trump earlier this week abruptly canceled plans to sign a bipartisan housing bill because he’s mad that Congress won’t pass his beloved SAVE Act. Working to restrict voter access or whatever. So this has even Republican lawmakers spitting mad. We’ve talked about the SAVE Act before. And, Jamelle, I know you have many thoughts. So you want to just first give us a refresher on the legislation and its current sorry status. So the SAVE Act is just this voter integrity bill. You could say that is more or less designed to sharply reduce the number of people who might be able to participate in the electoral system. The big thing it does is demand you prove your citizenship before you can register to vote. And I think, as we’ve discussed here before, that will disenfranchise millions of Americans, not because there are millions of illegal voters, but because it’s actually kind of difficult to prove your citizenship if you don’t have all the exact documents you need. And many Americans – Real IDs, driver’s licenses, very few states have ones that would count. You would have to whip out a passport, or birth certificates, things like that. You can’t just take your driver’s license down. exactly. So many, many Americans do not have immediate access to birth certificates or passports. If they have them, that would prove citizenship. It costs money to get birth certificates in most states. It definitely costs money to get a passport. So the whole thing, I mean, in my view, amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax. And it would also put restrictions on mail in balloting and the. And Trump, who believes he lost 2020 because of mail in voting and illegal voting once this imposed to help Republicans tried to hold on in November. Republican lawmakers, other than the most sycophantic MAGA house reps, seem to grasp that this could very well disenfranchise a bunch of Republican voters and have been, as I see it, they’ve been basically humoring him on this, saying, yeah, we’ll put it up for a vote, sure. But no intention of trying to get this thing out precisely because the Republican coalition relies on a lot of people who if you asked them tomorrow to prove that they’re citizens, they probably couldn’t. They probably couldn’t. All right. So, David, why does Trump’s refusal to sign the housing bill and put hold it hostage, put his congressional team in tough, such a tough spot at this moment. Well, the Congressional team, they’re all one third of the Senate. And the whole house is facing an election, an election in which affordability, especially housing affordability, we talk a lot about groceries and gas prices, but housing is huge. It’s huge. And so this is something it was passed on a bipartisan basis. It would allow Republicans and Democrats to go back to their districts and say, we hear you. We’ve done this thing. It’s going to do these specific things for you. And so it was something very important for incumbents who are trying to defend their seats. Trump doesn’t care about them at all. So this is one of those points where Republicans, for the umpteenth time, remember, he’s in it for himself. And so this just as every point that goes down in his aggregate poll average, there’s a one percentage point increase chance that somebody somewhere in the Republican caucus will say enough. And we’re starting to see that on the edges with these War Powers Resolution votes. He’s triggering intense anger on Capitol Hill with this latest stunt. He is very slowly but very surely eroding his goodwill, even with some of his core on Capitol Hill Yeah, I want to say that his trip to the Hill and the yelling with the senators was in part, he was really attacking the Republican senators who voted for this Iran resolution thing. I mean, he’s just but I do. I do like your math. The one point drop, the one point improvement and chances. I just want to one more thing on that, which is to zoom out and say, this is not just about the SAVE Act. To Jamelle’s point, he is really obsessed with it. Like Jamelle is so right on with that. But even more than that, what he is hoping to do is cause such chaos in the Senate that the leadership there has no choice but to do all of these broader based things he wants kill the filibuster or fire the parliamentarian so they can ram through more things along party line votes. He is just blowing the place up. And I do think that because of his lame duck status and his toilet level popularity numbers, I just I think that we are finally seeing a few of the Republicans ends go: No no no no no no. Had enough. Maybe I’m just an optimist. I think you’re right, Michelle. I think also politically, for them, it’s just a bit too late that they already spent all of 2025 tying themselves incredibly tightly to the administration under as I read it, this was like irrational exuberance, this idea that kind of caught hold, I think, throughout a large part of American politics that Trump’s win represented. We’ve talked about this. Trump’s win represented some MAGA sea change in American life. And as that I think and I believe I wrote multiple times, in December 2024, that this wasn’t the case and that what you would see pretty quickly was kind of reversion to the mean. The mean being people actually don’t like this guy very much when he’s president. And now we’re at this point where yeah, Trump’s approval ratings they are the political equivalent green algae and the reflecting pool. And Republicans, I think, are beginning to distance themselves from him, from him. But I think it’s a bit too late because they’ve already there was no separation prior. And so I think for voters it’s like, well, of course, yeah, of course you want to get away from him now. Look how unpopular he is. Like the double edged sword of Trump for Republicans has always been that yes, in presidential elections, he can turn out a bunch of low propensity voters, a bunch of non-voters who then vote for Trump. They don’t vote down ballot. They don’t show up in midterms. It’s like a sugar rush and it’s not sustainable. And Trump does not identify himself with the Republican Party. He identifies himself with his own political standing. And so he feels he needs to do something to protect his standing that harms Republicans. He’ll do it without even thinking. And that’s I think, Senate Republicans in particular, who did not expect to be fighting for their majority this fall, are. Somehow only now coming to understand that, yes, if you are in his way, he is going to. He’s going to make life difficult for you, even if that cost you a Senate majority. And there’s a 50/50 chance 60/40 chance that it cost the Republicans their Senate Majority and the element of that the one area in which you can get Trump to care about these races is if you can convince him that if the Republicans lose, that it’s a repudiation of him. And sometimes you’ll see this, sometimes you’ll see this awareness dawn on him. But then here’s what I think the failure of the SAVE Act does for him internally in his mind, it creates the alternative explanation, which is well, they didn’t pass the SAVE Act and the Democrats stole the election. That’s not a reflection on me. It’s just more fraud like 2020. And so you can already see this process starting to lock in because the rhetoric, in that Twitter- podcast-right, this is the fate of the Republic. Everything depends on it because it has so locked in to the minds of lots of people on the right that they cannot legitimately lose. All elections are stolen from them. That is the excuse that Trump is already building into that mental architecture so that he is not repudiated this November. And, and but that’s the only way you’re a Republican member of the House or Senate, the only way to get him to care about the midterms or your seat at all is to tie it to him personally. So I want to look at where we are as a nation right now. We’re looking at a 250th birthday celebration, but it’s been with this administration and this president have weird, unsettling time to think about breaking out your party hats for democracy here. How are you both feeling about this upcoming anniversary and where we are with all of our divisions and chaos. So one thing I think it’s worth thinking about is that these anniversaries, these 50 year, every 50 year marking, marking the Declaration of Independence have often fallen at times of like heightened political division. It’s actually striking to look at. So 1826 is just in the wake of the Missouri crisis, where the country the first major sectional crisis over slavery that is so fresh in the mind of everyone there. And it’s just two years after an extremely bitter presidential election in which famously, Andrew Jackson loses after the election, goes to the House. And it’s a real time of heightened political division in the country, 1876. That should be a year that is familiar to people. 1876 is the year where we tend to mark the end of Reconstruction. And the prior two years sees really horrific political violence throughout the South. Again, a time of heightened division in the country, even 1926. This is at a high water mark for American nativism, and there’s quite a bit of division in the country in 1976, obviously, in the wake of Watergate, in the wake of the Vietnam War, a time of malaise, you might say. So there’s this funny way in which this 2026 celebration, which is in the midst of a period of heightened division and anxiety about the future. It’s very in keeping with what happens during these celebrations, very in keeping with how these things have. So you’re saying we’re right on track. This is we’re kind of right on track. I’ll say this, I think, from the White House, there’s as we’ve discussed, there’s really no interest in putting forth a celebration or a commemoration. What have you aimed at least trying to pretend like the divisions aren’t there, at least trying to aim for the notion that this is, we have a common heritage here. We’ve common ideals. But I do think that there are plenty of opportunities for just like individual communities, for states to play that role. I might myself, I’ll say, go up to Monticello in Charlottesville, where I live and attend the naturalization ceremony that happens every July 4, where they do a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. I find it very fantastic. I find it very moving. And I think just because our politics are heavily divided does not mean that we can’t in our own, collective ways, try to think about the high ideals of the country, the aspirations we’ve had, the extent to which we need to still try to reach them and Mark the period that way. I don’t want to go too long. I’ll say I will say this. I’ll say this. The Declaration of Independence, obviously written in Philadelphia, post up in Philadelphia, but it was printed and it was printed and distributed throughout the country and it was read publicly throughout the country. It was in a lot of ways, a public and Democratic document with different communities of Americans across the colonies. Reading it for themselves. Understanding it for themselves. Some people who weren’t included in it. Hearing it and taking ownership of it for themselves. And that spirit of taking ownership for yourself, of your community, taking ownership, I think, is like the right spirit for this particular moment. David, when I think about and I love Jamelle’s run down through American history, which actually shows this very messy moment that we’re in, is also a very American moment that we sometimes suffer from this halo effect about American history that looks at it with these gauzy, filtered eyes when the reality is this thing this American nation has always been a tenuous project to live up to the noble ideals of its founding. And when I think about it, you have this beautiful idea. We’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights Among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This beautiful idea and advanced by some deeply flawed people. I can’t think of a better illustration for This American experiment. It’s a beautiful idea that is always laying on top of a deeply flawed people. And some years, some generations, we have picked up the torch and we’ve carried it and we’ve advanced and we’ve moved closer to that beautiful idea. And some generations and times we’ve taken steps back away from that beautiful idea. But for 250, the way I’m putting it in, thinking about it, it doesn’t take me take much to convince me to celebrate the American idea. I can celebrate it on July 4, 5, 6, 7 day. Whenever you want me to celebrate it, I can celebrate that. And I think we should celebrate it. But against the celebration in the backdrop of the celebration is an indictment. The indictment is. What are you moving towards that beautiful idea or away from it. And right now, I feel like we’re in a period of national backsliding. And so in that sense, I think 250 can be a tonic and a corrective because it can remind us of who we are supposed to be. It can remind us of the vision upon which we were founded. And it’s a great opportunity to hold that vision up and look at it and compare where we are, and then to say to ourselves, it’s our time. It’s our time, our moment to preserve this vision, to stop the backsliding and to maybe even turn this ship around a bit to make a move or two back towards it. And it’s the battle between the incredible virtue of the ideas of the founding and the remarkable vice that we as human beings can demonstrate, and selfishness and greed and all of the things that we’re prone to. But one thing I love about this country is. Every time we march towards vice, we are indicted by the virtue of the founding. So this is, I think, an important part. When I talk to people who are discouraged about what’s going on, or they just seem a little bit convinced that it’s never going to get better. You can’t see the field in terms of pride in the country. So obviously, there are a lot of flaws. Obviously, there are a lot of problems, obviously. It’s not headed in a direction that a lot that many Americans feel good about. But this is a moment to look back and to look forward and to not just shrug your shoulders or throw up your hands and say, I just I can’t deal with it. Democracy has to be tended or it winds up in the hands of the kind of people who will play with it for their own devices. So thank you for coming to my TED Talk. And with that, I want to shift to recommendations. And because we are where we are, this is the last time we will get to chat the three of us before the big Independence Day hoo-ha. I’m wondering if maybe you all have suggestions that kind fit into the spirit of the occasion. David anything? So I’m going to make a recommendation that it would be, if you’re going to go and you’re going to say, what could I watch. I’m going to stick to my wheelhouse, Michelle, it’s got to be streaming. It’s got to be one of these television recommendations. And there are some that immediately come to mind. Like if you’re going to talk about the best of America in this moment and so you could think about “Band of Brothers,” for example. But I’m going with something a little bit different, the “John Adams” miniseries from HBO. If you’ve not seen this, if you’ve not seen this is several years old. It might be more than 10 years old. It’s like –– It’s like 20 years old. Oh, you’re telling me that. Why you got to do. Why are you doing this to us. Come on. Why time is a flat circle. I was a teenager when it came out. Oh, stop. Please, David. I say we shunned Jamelle for the rest of the –– Yeah, yeah, this is terrible. This is terrible. I hate this, but we even. O.K, now that I know it’s like, hundreds years old, I can even recommend it with double enthusiasm, because I know that a lot of the listeners may not have even heard of it, but it’s a “John Adams” mini series, and it is this look at John Adams and the founding through his eyes. And it’s really fascinating, because it takes place in the United States. He’s got time in France, he’s got time in the Netherlands, he’s got time in England. It’s just this. And it really gives us a picture of the American founding of all of the various moving parts. We tend to think of it signed declaration, fought battles, won independence. But in fact, it was signed. Declaration negotiated here, negotiate there. Compromise with this person. Compromise with that person so that you had it was a multi-front battle. You had Washington in the field. You had the Continental Congress with each other. You have the American diplomat spreading out to try to bring legitimacy. It’s just and it’s just so well done. It is a delight. So that’s my recommendation. Jamelle? I will say we’ve talked a lot about the Declaration. There’s a very strong case to make that the Declaration, as we understand it, is not the one that was signed in 1776. It was the one that was reinterpreted by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. And so I will recommend that you read Gary Wills’s book “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” which is about the writing of the Gettysburg Address and the meaning of the Gettysburg Address, which famously begins: Four score and seven years ago, our fathers conceived, founded a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The speech begins with this invocation of the Declaration and wills really explores both the form of the speech, but also the meaning of the speech. And the speech does seek to not just make the Declaration this important document, but the mission statement for the American Republic in a way that it wasn’t prior to the war. And I will wrap this up with every year. Longtime listeners will know, July 4, I reread “The Great Gatsby,” which for me is the great American novel. Whether you’re talking about the self-creation and self-destruction of the central character, Jay Gatsby, whether you’re talking about Daisy and Tom, I think the story and the characters can be mapped onto all kinds of political eras and moments. And it’s just such beautiful writing. Which is why, in my opinion, it can never be made into a good movie. They’ve tried a couple times, but the book itself is incomparable. Just go forth. Read it. That’s my recommendation. That’s what I will be doing as I fly on the 4th of July. Just saying. All right. And with that, I’m going to land this plane. Guys, thank you so much. Enjoy the holiday and we will do this again on the other side Yeah thank you guys. Later.