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Back in February of this year, New York Times columnist and podcast juggernaut Ezra Klein posted a video evaluating the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second term. Observing that Trump was following Steve Bannon’s “muzzle velocity” strategy with his deluge of executive orders and DOGE rampage, Ezra noted that the cumulative intended effect was to convince Americans that Trump could do anything he wanted. “Don’t believe him,” Klein urged, in a video that’s racked up 2 million views.

For Ezra, 2025 was a year in which his sense of alarm over what the Trump administration was doing to our democracy—and the befuddled weakness of the only extant alternative out there, the Democratic Party—seemed to grow more pitched and urgent with each passing day. But a funny thing happened in the final few weeks of the year, such that, when I hosted Ezra recently for a year-in-review episode of my Impolitic podcast, I found him ending 2025 in a surprisingly hopeful mood. The sources of Ezra’s relative equanimity were many and varied: Donald Trump’s sinking popularity, the cracks in the MAGA coalition, Democrats’ ability to get their groove back after their stunning overperformance in November, and even the emergence of new potential leaders in the recently leaderless party. As always, this excerpt from our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity, but you can listen to the whole enchilada right here.

John Heilemann: There’s been a tonal shift in your podcast over the course of the year. For much of the year, there was this sense of mounting alarm. But there’s a moment around the 60th episode where you and Jon Favreau talk about Democrats finding their fight—and from there onward, there’s a new sense that Trump is starting to lose steam. So tell me how you think the Trump story changed over the course of 2025, and where it is today.

Ezra Klein: I do want to be careful, because I don’t hold to the view that it’s settled into any one thing. I would not call Donald Trump a lame duck. We’ve got—barring a health emergency for him or something else unexpected—three more years of his presidency. I think any liberals unrolling the “Mission Accomplished” banner should think twice.

What I do think is that a couple of things seem to have happened in the past few months. The single biggest thing was the November elections. And if you had to ask me, “What is the best thing that happened to Democrats in 2025?” it’s that the polling underestimated them. Democrats won a governor’s race in Virginia. They won a governor’s race in New Jersey. They won a mayoralty in New York City. They won a ballot measure in California. And then the narrative is: Oh shit, they’re overperforming.

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Washington, much like financial markets, works off of expectations. So people think they know what’s going to happen, and then suddenly they have to update all their information all at once. You tend to get very rapid changes in momentum and conventional wisdom, and you could feel the Republicans almost immediately begin to lose confidence at the same time that you had the shutdown going on. You’re seeing Republican unity in Congress crack. You’re seeing a sense that Democrats are in position to have a big midterm if they don’t fuck something up, or things don’t rapidly change for the Trump administration—and Trump himself is unpopular, and the economy is proving to be quite soft.

And then there are the cracks in the Trump coalition itself.

One of the things that made Trump’s victory so discomfiting to Democrats in 2024 was that—unlike in 2016, where he won unexpectedly, but with the sort of far-right coalition you would expect—he bolted on all of these seemingly incongruous and even contradictory elements. So you had Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and the tech right. You had the MAGA–Proud Boy–Groyper core. You had the more conventional Republicans who had dropped their dissent to Donald Trump. You had R.F.K. Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard and the MAHA thing, and now you see all the contradictions of that becoming clear. Like, can you really have a Republican Party that includes Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes? Can you really have a Republican party where on the one hand you have the tech right, and on the other hand you have a populist movement that hates billionaires?

So what is Donald Trump’s agenda now? They pass a big, beautiful bill, which is very unpopular. But what is their second big bill? What do they want to do in 2026? One reason I don’t think Trumpism seems to have the energy today that it did then is that it doesn’t actually seem to have an agenda moving forward. Yes, Stephen Miller is going to try to treat immigrants with as much cruelty and callousness as he can possibly come up with. But aside from that, Trump seems fundamentally more interested in the ballroom than in the economy.

Well, Trump is term-limited here, and he seems utterly uninterested in doing anything to fix the problems that will improve Republicans’ political standing. And that natural divergence is exacerbated by the things Trump is actually enthusiastic about, which mostly involves self-enrichment and spending a lot of time with billionaires, which only makes their problems worse. And I don’t really know if there’s any indication that he’s planning to do anything to remedy that.

I sort of want to bring the attention layer into this conversation, too, because I don’t think these things are actually separable. Trump—and much of MAGA, for that matter—is fundamentally a creature of attention. His genius is not at governing. He’s not one of the great policy minds of our age. He’s not an empath, God knows. He is a genius at attention.

There’s also a lack of empathy when you hear him talk about the economy. Why will he not concede that there’s a problem with high prices, that affordability is not a hoax? Because he really just does not believe that the economy is in bad shape, for a variety of complicated psychological and other reasons. And I don’t think there’s anybody who can go to him and say, Sir, we need to talk about affordability. Or, You might think tariffs are helpful in the long run, Mr. President, but right now, people are out there hurting.

I think if any one thing is responsible for breaking the momentum of Trump’s popularity and putting the Republican Party in a fundamentally impossible place, it’s the tariffs. When he was running for office, he was saying he would lower prices on top of an agenda of tariffs and deportations that would raise the cost of goods and labor. Where they’ve ended up on the tariffs is arguably the worst of all worlds. Because what they’ve done is create a tariff regime that is neither strong enough, constrictive enough, nor predictable enough to lead to long-term changes in investment decisions on behalf of corporations—but nor is it absent such that it’s not raising people’s prices. So that’s Liberation Day: We’re liberated from low prices and free trade.

It’s also completely unclear what the geopolitical goals are. Is it to achieve lower reciprocal rates or to raise them? Is it to hurt our allies or China? The administration’s strategy, and messaging, has been all over the place.

If you look at a chart of effective tariff rates, they were a little bit under 30 percent on Liberation Day [April 2], and now they’re around 15-ish percent, a little bit above. But then there’s a second pivot on tariffs. And the idea is, no, no, we’re not going to keep tariffing an island that only has penguins on it. We’re not going to primarily be in a tariff war with Canada and Mexico for no reason. The tariffs are actually an effort to encircle China. And a lot of people point out, well, then why did you start by attacking our allies? And why do you still have tariffs on our allies? Don’t you want to be creating a kind of anti-China trading bloc? But no, we’re just gonna have 15-ish percent tariffs on everybody, with some exceptions, but tariffs on China are going to be 100 percent, 145 percent maybe. And what we’re going to do is break China because we can’t have the whole world dependent on the Chinese industrial manufacturing juggernaut.

So what actually happens? Trump quickly realizes it’s going to break the economy. If he does that, then China threatens to withhold rare earth materials. So where have we ended up now after the deal? The effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods is 20 percent, which is lower than the tariff rate on Brazil, Brunei, or Laos. And we are shipping China the advanced Nvidia chips that are actually crucial to building the sort of A.I. systems that might be a quite large contributor to geopolitical primacy in the future. Meanwhile, we’re gutting our own electric vehicle and renewable energy industry. So among other things, we’ve raised prices. We’ve accomplished nothing in terms of manufacturing. We’re actually down manufacturing jobs over the course of the year, and we fought a trade war with China and lost. So now what you have is a tariff regime that’s raising prices, accomplishing nothing anybody can tell.

I’m interested in your view that things seem to be gelling a little bit for Democrats. You said something about seeing signs that the “nature of the Democratic Party is changing” and that you can “feel a new synthesis that’s beginning,” and you sounded vaguely hopeful. So where do you think the Democratic Party is here at the end of 2025?

Let me just start with the set of reasons I think the Democratic Party is maybe beginning to find its footing. They did not win the shutdown in the sense that they got what they wanted in the deal. But I do think they won the shutdown in the sense that they ended up in a better position, and Republicans ended up in a worse one. And this gets to a complicated thing to talk about, but the Democratic Party has been functionally leaderless since 2016.

Mamdani obviously caught tremendous amounts of fire in New York City, and there’s something in the merger of his form of very affordability-focused democratic socialism and the incredible friendliness and pluralism in his approach. Mamdani does not represent—as he did even at other times in his own career—the kind of leftism that is scolding you or telling you that the police are anti-queer. He’s smiling. He’s going to synagogues. He’s meeting everybody. He is willing to talk with anybody who doesn’t like him. One of his lines that I love: He keeps talking about having a New York City that loves you back, right? There’s an incredible buoyancy in Mamdani. I think he actually ends up creating some sort of energy for Democrats.

You recently had Gavin Newsom on your podcast, who you’ve noted has adopted a much higher tolerance for political risk. You’ve also talked about James Talarico, in Texas, whom you’ve got on an upcoming episode.

Gavin Newsom, to my great surprise, is another Democrat who began to figure something out this year and vaulted himself to the front of the 2028 ranking. He basically followed a contradictory path. On the one hand, he begins a podcast right after the election where he’s interviewing Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Michael Savage… all these MAGA, or right-leaning, figures that you would never imagine the highly progressive, resistance-y governor of California sitting down with for these very open conversations.

So he’s exploring the right and sitting in communication with them. And then he also becomes the leader of the resistance. He leads the redistricting initiative. He develops this trolling, holding-up-a-mirror style with Trump and the attention economy. And what unites these two things about Newsom—that a lot of Democrats don’t share—is that he simply is not afraid. He is not afraid to try things. He’s not afraid to take fire from the right. He’s not afraid to take fire from the left. And so he begins to move experimentally. Some things work, some things don’t—one thing I’ve liked is he signed a bunch of very big abundance bills—but he’s trying a lot of things simultaneously. And in a Democratic Party whose cardinal sin is caution, Newsom begins to be one of the people showing what it might look like if you had a Democratic Party that was trying things as opposed to being too afraid to.

I think James Talarico—the Texas Senate candidate who’s now in a primary with Jasmine Crockett—is really interesting. He’s the first real Democrat that Joe Rogan has had on in a very long time. And Talarico’s politics are very explicitly Christian. Talarico is putting out these TikToks and these viral videos, and they’re almost always him arguing with the right, but from this very moralistic and religiously rooted space. You see in him—and I think in the response to him—the desire for something friendlier, for something morally grounded in this era of callousness and cruelty.

I’m not saying these are the sum total of possible directions Democrats can go in. They’re not. But what you are seeing is a series of Democrats who, in the last year or two, seem like they’re figuring this moment out in a way that the Democratic Party, previously, understood MSNBC and The New York Times—but it was like it had never watched YouTube or TikTok at all. And it just felt very, very misaligned. And on the policy side, the Democratic Party has cohered around affordability as the central question and message of the moment, and that has also given it some shape.

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