Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

So, V, we're far enough into Trump's presidency now that we have a good sense of what his agenda actually is.

Did you ever picture it looking like this?

I didn't think he would change that much from his first presidency, from his first administration.

So I kind of knew what kind of policies he'd pursue.

But the chaos of it and the aggressiveness and the kind of

mania that he brings with it, I don't think anybody expected it to be at this level. So it's a

combination of, yeah, he's doing what we expected, but he's doing it so much more aggressively

and single-mindedly now that it's really shaken up the political

economy and the culture. Yeah, well, I think what's interesting is if you look at Trump supporters,

there is a portion of his base that couldn't be more pleased, probably because they were not

necessarily expecting him to go to the lengths he has, and then he did. And then another portion that was

sort of betting the whole time that his presidency was going to be basically a carbon copy of his

first term. And so we're kind of pissed off at him that he's actually doing all this stuff.

I mean, within his base, there's a call to upend the system, to tear things down, to smash the

institutions. And this time he came prepared to do it. And if that tear things down, to smash the institutions.

And this time he came prepared to do it.

And if that's what you wanted to see, yeah, you have to be happy with it, I think, if you're

a Trump supporter.

Yeah, I think that's right.

If you really believed in, you know, taking him out of his word, but I think a lot of people

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