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The Opinions

The round table convenes to discuss the start to Trump’s 2026, from Greenland to Minnesota and Venezuela.

Jan. 10, 2026

Video

From ICE to Foreign Quagmires: Escalation Everywhere

The round table convenes to discuss the start to Trump’s 2026, from Greenland to Minnesota and Venezuela.

President Trump began 2026 by invading an autonomous nation and capturing its leader. The Opinion politics writer Michelle Cottle talks to the columnists David French and Carlos Lozada about the ICE shooting in Minneapolis and what the “Donroe Doctrine” portends for the president’s foreign policy over the next three years.

From ICE to Foreign Quagmires: Escalation Everywhere

The round table convenes to discuss the start to Trump’s 2026, from Greenland to Minnesota and Venezuela.

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 NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Cottle: Happy New Year, guys.

Carlos Lozada: Happy New Year, Michelle.

David French: Happy New Year!

Cottle: I was going to ask if you weren’t happy, David. Come on, step up.

**French: **No, I’m happy.

Cottle: President Trump decided to ring in the new year by invading a sovereign country and capturing its leader. So we are going to dig into Venezuela and what it says about Trump’s future foreign policy. But before we do, we are recording this on Thursday and just yesterday an ICE agent in Minneapolis fired a gun into Renee Nicole Good’s car and killed her. I’ve seen the videos — it is awful. It’s horrific.

The Trump administration has claimed that the agent was acting in defense that Good was about to ram him with her vehicle. But, of course, there’s video and a New York Times analysis concluded that Good appeared to be driving away from the officer, not toward him.

So, like on the one hand, this is classic Trump, don’t believe your eyes and ears, believe only what I tell you. But the sheer speed and scope of the rewriting of history here really strikes me as impressive. I continue to think that the fracturing of reality is a problem we’re going to be dealing with long after this particular pack of liars is out of power.

David, you’ve spoken before about the many problems you see with deploying ICE agents en masse on American streets. Have you considered something as awful as this maybe happening, or did you expect this response from the administration? How are you looking at this?

French: I didn’t consider this a possibility. I considered something like this a near-inevitability. Because what you’ve done is you’ve put a situation where you are training ICE agents for sort of maximum aggression. You are putting them in places where you don’t typically have ICE agents. You are doing it in a way that’s deliberately inflammatory. You’re trying to stoke up rage. You’re trying to stoke up anger.

And let’s remember that ICE agents are not beat cops, for example; this is not F.B.I. These are not people who are actually really trained all that much for the kinds of really tough public interactions that are the absolute norm if you’re beat cops. So these are not even the police who are normally responsible for maintaining law and order.

We have seen a lot of reports about problems in training and problems in standards in ICE. And so you put all of that stuff together and then you add on top of that a poor woman is barely dead and already the administration’s calling her a domestic terrorist. Anyone can look at that video — and I think a fair viewing of the video — the worst thing you can say about her is that she panicked and responded in the wrong way in response to a very confusing situation. That is the worst thing you can say. There’s zero evidence that there is domestic terrorism here.

The worst thing that you could say, I don’t think, is even necessarily accurate, either. It looked like she was trying to wave agents past to allow them to pass her and then back up and go down the road herself. Someone comes and grabs her door inexplicably; she’s turning away. It’s very, very fast. It’s very, very quick. But it is not one of those situations where you could say, “Oh, I can totally, clearly, plainly see how this person was defying the police.”

It looked to me like a very confusing situation that just escalated so quickly, so dramatically, in such a deadly way that this is exactly what so many of us have been worrying about.

Lozada: I think that the key word that David brought up was “escalated,” because escalation is built into this entire system and how it’s being set up. You put ICE agents in American neighborhoods — places where they’re not used to seeing that kind of presence — detaining immigrants, detaining in some cases American citizens. People react in protest, in concern and confusion, and then terrible things like this happen.

And the president and Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, further escalate and inflame the situation with the way they respond to it. I’s one of those absolutely tragic moments that is entirely unsurprising given the way this whole thing has been set up.

What I’ve been thinking about over the last few hours is how, five and a half years ago, less than a mile away from where this shooting happened, was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. That prompted — to use an overused word — a reckoning over race and policing. And somehow I don’t imagine that this particular shooting, as horrible and as tragic as it is, will necessarily prompt the same thing. I think we’re too entrenched for that to happen.

Believing what the president says, or believing what the Secretary of Homeland Security says, it’s not about conviction. It’s not about belief in a certain set of facts. It’s about allegiance. It’s about showing what team you’re on. That’s one of the legacies of the way that this president or movement deals with matters of truth and falsity: it’s about loyalty. It’s not actually about believing what you see with your eyes.

Cottle: I was going to say that we have seen with this immediate split in how people react and what their definition of reality is. If you look back at the Jan. 6 stuff — the administration this week has put up an official White House webpage claiming that the Democrats staged the real insurrection and that the Jan. 6 defendants were unfairly targeted. So it’s just a commitment to generating a fracturing of reality that strikes me as troubling beyond any particular incident that we’re dealing with here.

But David, for people who don’t follow the news very closely, who don’t see themselves as having a particular political allegiance, do you have a gut sense of how they’re going to perceive the shooting?

French: I think this is a situation where his bluster and lies — because they’re going to be so easily and immediately rebuttable — this is one of those rare instances where they might work against him. Because I think there’s a couple of ways to frame this incident that really can affect public opinion. Framing No. 1 is what the administration chose, which is: Domestic terrorist attempts to ram and kill officers.

Well, as soon as you watch the video, you’re like, what are you talking about? There is zero evidence from this tape that there is any effort to intentionally kill these officers. If, however, the framing was “confusing situation, officer had to make a tough call because it looked like a car was heading for him,” then people would look at that and say: “Oh, that was confusing. Where was the officer?”

It makes it much more difficult to analyze in a way that’s inflammatory. It makes it much more technical and legal. But by going with the domestic terrorist angle right away, going with gross lies right away, this could be one of those instances where the Trump administration actually does shoot itself in the foot through its own dishonesty.

**Cottle: **Yeah, they really locked themselves into a very kind of particular structure here.

I want to shift toward another really big reality-splitting action that I think took almost everybody by surprise: the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Lame-duck presidents often decide to start playing abroad and making big moves as they feel like their power is waning at home. But even with that in mind, the administration’s decision not only to attack Venezuela, but to lob threats at Colombia, at Greenland — there’s more than a whiff of imperialism in the air. Am I right here, it’s not just me?

French: No, Michelle. It is absolutely not just you. I had a great conversation with Masha Gessen about this issue that we published earlier in the week, and one of the themes that we explored was that nationalism almost always leads to militarism.

It’s a mistake to think of isolationism going hand-in-hand with nationalism, that nationalism leads to militarism. Especially if you’re talking about a person who is very concerned with greatness, bigness and legacy to say: “Well, in Trump’s second term,” 30, 40 years from now, “what happened? I don’t know. It seemed like it was a relatively peaceful and calm time. It’s all lost in a haze of mediocre presidents or whatever.”

No, this is not how these folks think about these things. They think about greatness. They think about legacy. And domestically, that’s hard. We have a system that makes it very difficult in the absence of a truly sweeping electoral victory to have a giant domestic legacy. It’s just hard.

But when it comes to foreign affairs, and especially when it comes to the kind of Donald Trump style that we now have seen him perfect to a degree over the five years or so he’s been in the Oval Office, he likes the big showy military strike that is done quickly — overnight. For example, in Venezuela, victory is declared and there is a check in the box of greatness for Trump. And then he moves on. I think that the problem he’s going to face here, to the extent that he even cares about long-term outcomes — to be clear, to the extent that he cares — because I’m not convinced that he does —

Cottle: So that’ll be zero. That extent is zero.

French: — he can’t create from one strike and then a bunch of bluster, thousands of miles away — he cannot create and reshape an entire nation. That’s just not really truly possible. And so you’re looking at something that is being set up to become a quagmire or a total failure.

Cottle: So, Carlos, you wrote this week that the administration is actually limiting its global influence with this adventurism. How do you interpret what Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and top administration henchman Stephen Miller have been up to in both word and deed here?

Lozada: First, let me just follow up on something David said — the sort of nationalism leading to militarism and the legacy-building — you see it in so many other leaders as well. For Xi Jinping, it’s so important. Taiwan** **is so important. For Vladimir Putin, expanding the sphere of influence is also vital. And for both those leaders, that is history-making, legacy-making stuff. That’s how they see it.

And that actually connects to your question, Michelle. I’ve been struck by the chest-beating from the administration over what is in effect a kind of regional retrenchment. When he had his first news conference announcing the Venezuela operationt, Trump said that American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned. And then the State Department tweeted on its official account on X, “This is our hemisphere.” It sounded like a football coach saying, “No one comes into our house and pushes us around.” That’s usually what a football coach who loses some away games tends to say.

But the notion to me is that they’re hunkering down around North and South America, going from “America First” to the Americas first. That is where we are. And in a sense, owning up to the sphere of influence model of the world. Like, let China have its stuff. Let Russia have its stuff. This is our hemisphere. This is what we are doing.

At the end of the Cold War, when America was strutting around the world, basking in the unipolar moment, it would have been absurd to imagine that we would be so proud about limiting our sphere of influence to this hemisphere.

So I keep thinking, how is Beijing or Moscow going to react when they see Washington busy and satisfied with the duties of merely regional hegemony — when you’ve abdicated being the leader of the West, and instead you’re the leader of the Western Hemisphere?

French: Carlos, I think you put the nail on the head there: Chest-beating over decline — that’s what they’re chest-beating over. Because if you’re talking about NATO not being that critical anymore and that you’re going to pivot to the Far East, but not going to be doing so in a way that’s projecting strength in any real, substantial way, you’re talking about really this diminished American influence that is accompanied, as you said, by chest-beating.

And it feels like: Are you conning me? Are you punking me here? Because, really, what you are talking about is not “make America great again.” It is “recognize America’s limitations now.” It’s one of the sympathetic ways you would actually even encapsulate or talk about Trump policy. Maybe what’s actually happening is that some people in the Trump orbit believe we’re just overtaxed.

We can’t do all that we’ve done. We can’t do that going forward in the future. And so, therefore, retrenchment is necessary. How do we sell retrenchment? How do we sell being less to the American people? In a weird way, you sell being less by pretending it’s more. By pretending you’ve got some sort of empire or domination plan.

And then the one thing I want to say very quickly is that when I was getting ready to publish the piece I published on Venezuela, one of the things I wanted to look at is: How true is it really that we don’t need allies — the notion that we are just so strong that Europe drags us down, that our allies drag us down? I looked it up, and there was a RAND Corporation study that found that the U.S. — when talking about all of our allies and the total collective defense of the United States and all of our allies — we contribute about 39 percent of that total burden. The rest of our allied world contributes 61 percent.

Could they do more? Sure, some of them can do more, but it is not the case that we are being restrained by our allies. It is the case that we’re empowered by our allies. And that has always been the case for America at its best. We create alliances of cooperation, whereas the Soviet Union, for example, tried to create an empire of domination. Our alliance proved more durable and stronger than their approach of domination. And we are now doing, what? Backing away from the successful approach to try to adopt something that looks more like the unsuccessful Soviet approach. It’s completely backward.

Lozada: It’s the difference between dominance and leadership. The United States isn’t claiming leadership in the Western Hemisphere. They’re claiming dominance over the Western Hemisphere. And those are two very different approaches to how you engage with the world.

Cottle: So it’s hard to gauge what the administration is even claiming its reasons were for this little adventure. But part of what seems to be driving Trump here is oil. Venezuela could be a big producer. How much of this do you think boils down to Trump’s grab for natural resources?

French: If you listen to him, that’s the ball game. It’s really interesting. There’s this pattern in the Trump administration now for two administrations — although less now than it was then — where you would have statements from administration officials that would be reasonable to greater or lesser degrees. Or in compliance with existing political patterns and practices to greater or lesser degrees.

So you’re still going to have a Rubio out there talking about making life better for the Venezuelan people. Or talking about freedom and democracy to some extent. And then Trump’s like: Oil. It’s the oil.

**Cottle: **Give me oil.

**French: **He’s the president, it’s about the oil.

But I think if he’s thinking that he just created a giant windfall for American oil companies that will benefit him in some way, a lot of the oil infrastructure in Venezuela is dilapidated; it’s damaged. There’s got to be an enormous level of investment in Venezuela to bring it up to the standard it needs to be to resume full-scale production.

And you need stability and peace before people are going to be investing tens of billions of dollars to develop oil fields and oil facilities. And right now, Venezuela is anything but stable. This place is still being run by the street gangs and the street militias. So I’m not sure what he thinks is going to happen right away.

Cottle: As you know, I’m obsessed with “Landman,” the show about the Texas oil industry. And this weekend when I was catching up on “Landman” episodes — and they talk about failing infrastructure or all of the challenges just to deal with this stuff in Texas — all I could think of was: “Well, that’s going to be great when we try to have oil companies translating all of this to Venezuela. That’s going to be easy. The oil’s going to be flowing any day now.”

Lozada: It’s infrastructure week in Venezuela now.

Cottle: Oh, my God. Bringing it back.

Lozada: I hope it works out better for them. And you know what’s interesting to me about this question of the oil is, when you look back on past American interventions — say, in Iraq — there was always this great care on the part of the administrations to say this was not about oil. The criticism was like ——

**Cottle: **Not blood for oil.

**Lozada: **No blood for oil. But that’s not what we’re doing. Here it’s upfront; it’s naked and obvious.

Some folks have referred to Trump as “neocon Don,” in this sense for engaging in regime change. I think it’s completely the opposite. The neoconservative dream was that a country like Iraq would become a beacon of light, a beacon of democracy for the Middle East. Trump does not see beacons of light; he sees oil rigs.

Cottle: There’s no regime change.

Lozada: He’s at least consistent in the sense that he’s not into nation-building; he’s into nation-fleecing. That’s what he’s trying to do.

Do you remember he complained in the 2016 race that in Iraq, we should have kept the oil. It’s the same philosophy coming to the fore. I agree that someone like Rubio, probably in his heart of hearts, is not necessarily in the same vein, but he’s in a tough spot.

My grandmother would always say, when you complain about your job or something, she would say, “You know you wanted to be a soldier. Well, now you got to march.” That’s what Marco Rubio is having to do. He’s like the ambivalent, reluctant viceroy of Venezuela now.

I want to hear more from David on this all because he’s more plugged into Republican politics than I am. All I would say is that I think there’s a really interesting mini primary happening right now between Rubio and Vance. And I believe Rubio has already said he would be deferential to Vance being the next guy. But we have to remember that Vance, in the infamous Signal chat that Jeff Goldberg from “The Atlantic” was somehow on, Vance was the guy who was pushing back against airstrikes — American intervention around the world.

It took Stephen Miller stepping in and saying that the president’s decided, so everyone shut the heck up. So it was interesting to me that Vance wasn’t present at that moment. It was Miller and Rubio and Hegseth — but not the vice president. And so if this goes well, it really elevates Rubio’s star and Rubio’s vision. If it doesn’t, I think it plays more easily into the more isolationist, perhaps, tendencies of someone like JD Vance.

David, what’s your view on this?

French: I’m asked all the time what’s the impact on this, since this isn’t what MAGA necessarily voted for, because they wanted no foreign wars, no more endless wars, et cetera.

I feel like you just have to stop and remind people that you have to distinguish between the Twitterati in MAGA and the actual millions of Republican voters. The millions of Republican voters are, by and large, a lot less ideological than we thought, say, in the era of the Tea Party and leading up to the 2016 election. But they’re very invested in Donald Trump winning and being successful. They’re not nearly as concerned with whether he is successful according to certain kinds of doctrine or populist doctrine or whatever doctrine. They like to see Trump win.

A lot of Republicans are absorbing the news about how well done the military operation was and it appears to have been brilliantly executed. And when Trump is accomplishing things, MAGA is happy. When things crumble, MAGA takes scalps. But not Trump’s.

So what Carlos said about Vance and Rubio, I think, is very salient because if things go south in Venezuela, the last 10 years of history have taught us that Trump will be the last one held accountable. The people who will be held accountable are the layer below him.

Cottle: If I’m Marco Rubio, I’m sleeping with one eye open. I’m very nervous about this.

**French: **You’re in the hot seat. You’ve made a big gamble.

Cottle: I think it’s interesting you are pointing out — again, I think it can’t be said enough — the difference between the online MAGA folks and the Republican voters in general. The issue of Venezuela has popped up in Kentucky with the House race, Thomas Massie.

He has been a thorn in Trump’s side on a lot of issues. And he has come out hard smacking the administration for the Venezuela stuff. Trump had recruited a challenger in the primary for Massie because he can’t have this kind of disloyalty running around in his own party. And the challenger, Ed Gallrein, has fired back at Massie for being disrespectful and not appreciating Trump’s great adventure in Venezuela. And this has become a little sniping match between the two.

When you talk to the folks around the Gallrein campaign about whether they are worried that the America first folks will be unhappy about this, that they’ll support Massie’s position. They’re like: Voters don’t really pay attention to isolationism and isms. And is Trump sticking with this? What is America first, really?

They like to see him doing studly things in other countries. That’s exactly what they’re looking for. If anybody even remembers what’s going on in Venezuela by November, it’s not even going to matter with the voting. But we’ll see.

French: Tell me if you think I’m too cynical ——

Cottle: Almost never. You’ve met me.

French: I feel like every major city in Venezuela could essentially burst into flames with rioting and chaos, and so long as there weren’t Americans being killed in that, as long as this wasn’t impacting the American economy, I think that American people would have already moved on. And most of them will not even be aware of it if Venezuela collapses into chaos. When I say most, I mean the overwhelming majority of people.

I really think one of the actual secrets of the Trump administration is that they have very cynically, in a way that I’ve never seen other administrations quite do, hacked civic ignorance. They realize how little attention most Americans pay to political news. And they’ve realized if they can get out there with a top-line message very aggressively right away, they can set the term debate regardless of the underlying truth of the matter. So they say things all of the time that are just designed to get through the next news hour or the next news day with extreme confidence that all of this just fades away.

And you really begin to see how much the American system is dependent on the honor system — since the conception. It is dependent, to some degree, on politicians’ agreeing to act with at least some degree of truth in their relationship with the public because the public will not even be aware enough of the facts on the ground to be able to hold politicians to account when they’re systematically dishonest.

Lozada: David, what you said about people only caring about something that is happening in the world when Americans are affected reminded me of the movie “The Paper.” Do you guys remember “The Paper”?

Cottle: Absolutely.

Lozada: It’s one of the absolute best journalism movies ever. It’s with Michael Keaton, Robert Duvall, Marisa Tomei.

Cottle: Glenn Close.

Lozada: There’s a scene where they’re having their afternoon story meeting, and the foreign editor is desperately trying to get people interested in what’s happening. And they’re like: train derailment in Peru, X number died. Nobody from New York. Because this is a New York tabloid. Or: There’s a tornado in this place, a monsoon somewhere else, and they’re witnessed by someone local. It’s like, oh, OK. Suddenly, it’s going to go in the paper.

So, yes, I think that well beyond politics, there’s a narrow obsession with how this affects myself or people I know.

Cottle: OK, so we have this illegal adventure in Venezuela, but what should the response be of critics? If you’re the Democrats and you’re looking at this, what should they do? How can you push back on this without falling into the whole “they should have come to Congress first,” which no one cares about? Let’s just stipulate that Americans hear that and they’re like ——

Lozada: That doesn’t make it wrong,

Cottle: There are a lot of things that aren’t wrong, but it is not a compelling pushback.

Lozada: Let’s not devolve into the politics immediately. It’s OK to ask for that.

Cottle: You can but is not a powerful response. What should they be doing?

French: For one thing, you definitely do not want to whitewash Maduro or in any way be seen as putting yourself on the side of Maduro. Maduro — horrific. I do think a lot of the legal technicalities don’t line up with people’s interests. Their eyes glaze over with technicalities.

So what you have to do is skip a step and ask: Why do we have these rules in the first place? And go to that issue. Because what’s happening right now is: You’re playing with fire, with the world. This is dangerous. So that’s top-line No. 1: It’s dangerous. Top-line No. 2: It’s lawless. Lawless and dangerous is a lot more effective, I think, than saying, “well, you didn’t go to Congress first.”

One of the interesting things here is that I think there hasn’t really been a rally-around-the-flag effect here. They have compared this to Panama, but that’s a poor comparison on a number of fronts. For one thing, the Panamanian government had declared a state of war against the United States. The Panamanian military had engaged in live combat with American troops and killed a Marine.

So when Bush went into Panama and deposed Noriega, the rally-around-the-flag effect was extraordinary. There was extraordinary public support. This moment has had no impact on Trump that we can tell. So a lot of Americans are skeptical, and it’s up to Democrats to say: I’m going to tell you why your instincts are right, why you’re looking at this with a side eye. You’re looking at it that way because it’s dangerous and it’s lawless. So keep it simple.

Cottle: OK. Carlos, did you have a thought?

Lozada: I guess just prompted by David’s comparison to Panama, that was — if you remember — Operation Just Cause. And this kind of feels like Operation Just ’cause. There doesn’t seem to be a clear, vital interest at stake. And really, it’s not even about not whitewashing Maduro. I think that a legitimate line of attack, and I don’t mean by Democrats, I mean just by anyone observing the situation, you would talk about what a terrible guy this is, how you had to get him out of there. And then you’re just dealing with all the same people in his own regime.

So it quickly puts the lie to the righteousness of decapitating this odious regime — this truly odious regime. But you’re actually not doing that. And to me, that’s kind of the simplest criticism on the substance of the operation.

French: And it’s the kind of thing that if Delcy Rodríguez executes some sort of deal with Exxon or another company, that’s going to be their “Mission Accomplished” banner. They get rid of Maduro, they ink an oil deal, mission accomplished, and then they don’t care if the militias are running the streets. They don’t care about that at all.

And so one of the interesting things — just thinking out loud — about how to respond to this is every time the Republicans emphasize how bad Maduro is, you can say, well, then why did you keep the entire regime in power? If the animating purpose of this intervention was to get rid of this undeniably horrible human being leading the country, why did you leave the whole undeniably horrible infrastructure in place? You don’t get to make the human rights argument if you keep the tyrannical regime in power.

Lozada: But that’s the argument that Trump is making. He’s paying lip service to what’s good for the Venezuelan people. But he’s very obvious about how he’s not concerned about Venezuela’s democratic infrastructure. He’s concerned about its energy infrastructure.

**Cottle: **Let’s land this plane for the week, but as we wrap up our first episode of the new year, I wanted to take this moment to know — in the interest of making a fresh start — give me something that you think we should leave behind in 2025.

French: I have been thinking about what I am trying to leave behind in 2025 that isn’t the lame, normal thing that everybody says they’re trying to leave behind in 2025.

**Cottle: **What’s the lame, normal thing?

Lozada: Extra pounds?

French: The lame, normal thing is: minimize social media. I know this sounds lame, and a lot of people say it now. But I think it’s becoming more and more urgent. I don’t know if you’re noticing this, but I think there’s an increasing difference between people who live in the online world and people who don’t. And it’s not a difference that’s good for the people who are online a lot. People who spend a lot of time online are increasingly occupying a different world from everyone else — a world that’s angrier, more bitter, more divisive, more anxious.

And I’ll tell you when I felt that most clearly. This summer I went to a game at Wrigley, sitting in the bleachers, which is really the only way to see a game at Wrigley, because it’s dinner and a show. It’s the game, and then it’s the show in the stands. And I was struck by how almost nobody was on their phones. It was just a joyous moment. People were much more concerned with creating a snake of empty beer glasses from the top of the bleachers to the bottom than they were with Instagramming any given moment. And that contrast, of the joy and the spontaneous community of the real world — I don’t know. There was something about that moment. I know it sounds sappy.

Cottle: I love that.

French: For me it kind of broke something in my mind that’s like, I need a lot more of this and a lot less of this.

Lozada: I’m going to go with a bit of a pet peeve about what we’re doing now in the podcasting world, in the opinion-mongering world. There’s a question that people always ask on podcasts, on panels and in these kinds of conversations. It sounds very thoughtful, very chin-stroking and it’s: How did we get here?

And I’m so sick of “How did we get here?” It purports to be this big, dot-connecting moment. But really, “how we got here” just depends on your own beliefs about the world. You can always go back and pick whatever moment proves the point you have. “How did we get here?” isn’t about dispassionately assessing the past. It’s about subjectively dissecting the present. Proximate causes proliferate. You can always go back and find the one thing that leads to your particular silo or your particular vantage point right now.

And I think the real question isn’t “How did we get here?” but “What is here? Where are we? What is actually happening?” Once we have some consensus — even a basic agreement about the present, then we can go back and talk about the dots. How we get here always bothers me, and I see it everywhere.

I was reading an article yesterday — I was on a flight and I was catching up on an old New York Review of Books and boom: How did we get here? It’s everywhere, and I’m done with it.

Cottle: This is a very philosophical Andy Rooney rant for you.

I’m going to go really personal here, and everybody can just suck it up and deal. I gave this a lot of thought, and I think I have to leave behind in 2025 lecturing my children, which is easy enough, they don’t pay attention anyway, but also lecturing my 79-year-old mother.

This is something that comes up if you’re dealing with parents whose health is fading, who are sliding into some golden-years issues. My sister and I are terrible about this, and I have vowed to stop. Now, that of course means, as my methadone, I’m going to start lecturing you two instead. Or, if you’d like me to call your parents and do it, I can. But I’ve got to stop doing it to my poor mother.

That’s it. That and balloon jeans. No balloon jeans, people. Let ’em go.

French: One thing I have to put a pin in — before I saw our prompt for this week, I was fired up and ready to unleash all the haters against the “Stranger Things” finale. So I have to put a pin in that. At some point, that just has to happen. I have to mount my vigorous defense.

Cottle: We can do a whole episode on that. All right, guys, that’s it. Thank you.

Lozada: Great to see you guys.

French: Thank you, Michelle. Carlos, great to see you.

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Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Stephen Maturen/Getty

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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle

Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT

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