New York Times journalist Ezra Klein is insisting his podcast won't be a "resistance show" during the incoming Trump administration and questioned liberal orthodoxy believing that President-elect Donald Trump and his movement are "abnormal."
On Tuesday's installment of "The Ezra Klein Show," Klein answered submitted questions from listeners. One focused on Klein's past invitation of Trump allies to appear on his show, something the listener thought is "extremely enlightening" but that it "casts the current political scene as ‘normal’ in a way that it isn't."
"Normalizing MAGA, normalizing Trump by having certain people on the show: Do you have any thoughts on, on that and that charge?" Klein's podcast editor Claire Gordon summarized the question.
"I don’t know what counts or doesn’t count as normal," Klein responded. "On the one hand, do I think Donald Trump is a normal or even a very stable genius? I don’t. On the other hand, he has been elected or almost elected president three times now."
"So who’s more normal, your glasses-wearing Brooklyn podcast host that you’re listening to right now… or Donald Trump? I think the effort to treat him as continuously abnormal is a way of trying to not see other people, including him," he continued. "That doesn’t mean you don’t oppose things he does or that his world of people do… There are lines that feel very clear to me. Particularly weaponizing the government. And I want to be very alert to that."
"But I want to be pretty clear: Don’t expect this show to be a resistance show. I don’t do this or have these interviews because I’m open-minded. I am a reporter. I am curious. I’m trying to understand things so I can make up my own mind," he added.
The Times journalist stressed the importance of trying to "understand" Trump and his administration's actions even when he vehemently opposes them, striking a "balance" he may see as a challenge over the next four years.
"I think there are going to be things inside the Trump administration that are directly on the authoritarian pathway. That are him actually trying to do what gets called academically an authoritarian breakthrough. And they’re going to be other things — maybe the Department of Governmental Efficiency or things that happened on Marco Rubio’s secretary of state tenure or tariffs — that are not like that and that need to be simply reported on as normal politics," Klein said. "And so this is another dimension that I think the effort to make normal a binary — things are or are not normal — makes hard. It’s an administration. It’s going to govern the country for the next four years. And parts of it are just going to be politics and policy. And parts of it might be something else entirely. An effort to change or corrupt the system itself."
"And I intend to try to take everything at its level and the fact that one thing is happening doesn’t mean you have to cover the other thing — in either direction. I think this is going to be really hard to balance. I did less of this in the first Trump administration, to be honest," he conceded.
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Klein went on to summarize how liberals treated the first Trump presidency as "illegitimate" between Trump losing the popular vote in 2016, the Russia investigation as well as the constant "leaking" from his own administration about "what a maniac he was."
"It was much easier, even for the people reporting on it, to treat him as aberrant. Because in some ways his own administration treated him as aberrant. And it seemed possible this was just a one-time fluke in American politics: The butterfly flapped its wings, and we got this. And that’s not what it is anymore. It wasn’t in a way what it was then," Klein said. "And my first job on this show is to be a good reporter. I understand the show is an act of continuous reporting, and I’m not being a good reporter and not doing a good job if I’m not actively reporting on this administration."
"So we’ll see what shape that takes. Many of them don’t want to talk to me, but it is not going to be a closed-door policy because Trump goes over some line in one area — and then there’s no more talking about the tariffs or something. It’s not the way I’m going to do my job," Klein added.
