Thanks so much for joining me. This is the Mona Charon's show. Today I am delighted to welcome

New Yorker writer Susan Glasser. Susan writes the indispensable weekly letter from Trump's

Washington, which is fantastic, and also is the author of several

books, including most recently The Divider, which was about the first Trump term that she wrote

with her husband, Peter Baker, of the New York Times. Susan, thanks so much for joining me. Great to be with you, Mona.

So let me bounce something off you. We're going to get into what I do think is a little bit of

Trump running into barriers and having to hit reverse. But before we get there, I think since it's been a hundred days,

it's worthwhile thinking through something. And here's what I would love your view on.

During the rise of Trump, before the first term, in the first term, and of course since,

there's been a tremendous amount of commentary about the cowardice of the Republican Party.

And I have written many a piece like that myself, just talking about how, you know, if they could have banded together

against him in the beginning, their strength in numbers, but instead they allowed themselves

to be picked off individually. They never engaged in collective action. He was able to do a

hostile takeover of the party, and we saw this awful spectacle over the

years of Republicans swallowing ever more outrageous things and making excuses for it and so on.

Why did they do that? Well, you know, partly cowardice, partly he could really hurt them because he could endorse a primary challenge,

and so they were all afraid of him.

But now let's go forward to the Trump's second term.

And arguably, what we have seen is a lot of elites

outside of Republicans becoming just like Republicans. You've had big tech leaders. You've had

news executives. Most recently, Paramount has, uh, had in, because they are afraid that the

Trump, um, uh, uh, SEC or, or FTC will block, sorry, FTC will block a proposed merger. Um,

...