SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Today, speaking in Europe, President Trump told an audience of global leaders that for now at least, he has decided the United States will not try to acquire Greenland by military force.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 'Cause people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force.
DETROW: The fact that I just read this sentence tells you a lot about the state of the Trump administration now a full year in. In international relations, tariffs, immigration enforcement, federal spending, federal prosecution, sending the military into cities and many more areas, Trump has repeatedly said and done things that were previously assumed to be unacceptable to voters. As Ashley Parker wrote in The Atlantic this week, the Trump administration has pushed the window of what is possible in American politics so far that his opposition just seems exhausted. Ashley, thank you for joining us again.
ASHLEY PARKER: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: I want to start with the title of your essay. The president has had this term for critics for years now that they suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. And you wrote that there's been so little meaningful resistance this term that we might think about Trump exhaustion syndrome instead. Can you tell me more about what you're thinking about with that?
PARKER: Yeah, what I was really trying to explore with this piece one year into his second term was sort of the boiling frog theory of American politics. And I should say upfront that this theory is apocryphal. It's not actually true, but I think it works for our purposes.
DETROW: Yes.
PARKER: Which is - the way it goes is that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it will hop out. But if you put a frog in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, it will not know to jump out because the changes will be so incremental and gradual, and it will boil to death.
DETROW: I think you also gave a really good example when you talked about the boiling frog. You walk through the series of events leading up to the seizure of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Can you recap kind of how we got from point A to point B without any of the steps feeling overly dramatic?
PARKER: Sure. So it really starts back when - in 2015 when Trump comes to national prominence as a politician in a campaign launch speech that demonizes immigrants broadly as, you know, criminals, rapists, not the best among us, people who are bringing drugs across the border. So he has been getting the country comfortable for a long time with the idea that undocumented immigrants are dangerous and they're a problem. But going to this term with Venezuela, he uses a fairly obscure wartime powers act, the Alien Enemies Act, to essentially declare that we are at war with Venezuela, specifically a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. And because we are at war with them, we're able to take certain wartime liberties to deport Venezuelans.
DETROW: And a lot of opinion polls along the way showed that, by and large, a lot of these steps did have broad, if not a majority - you know, from time to time, a good chunk of Americans were on board with each of these steps.
PARKER: Exactly. Now, there might be images they see of what this actually looks like that they kind of cringe at, but yeah, broadly, they support this. Then he begins a series of strikes on boats in the Caribbean and east Pacific oceans off the coast of Venezuela. And yes, a lot of these boats that are targeted, there are drugs on them. But it is not, as the president has claimed, you know, a huge mob or cartel boss headed to the United States. In some cases, these are small fishing boats, people who are petty criminals, bringing small amounts of cocaine, not to the United States but to neighboring islands like Trinidad. But again, I was talking to someone in the White House, and they said, look, if you ask the average American - should we blow up a boat with drugs on it headed to the United States? - they say, yes.
DETROW: And that all sets the stage for the most recent seizure of another country's president...
PARKER: Correct.
DETROW: ...Who's brought to the United States and put on trial. And maybe, as Steve Bannon put it, a lot of people who read The Atlantic are upset about this. But maybe Americans are actually on board with a lot of this and the pushback to steps toward authoritarianism is a lot different than maybe what we thought it would be in high school social studies.
PARKER: Yeah, that's exactly right. A slide towards authoritarianism, you know, when you talk to experts about this, including some of my colleagues, is - people sort of imagine it like the movie version, where there's, you know, men in jackboots marching in the streets and tanks rolling. And that's not really how it often starts. It's sort of a slow slide of getting people comfortable with things that they never thought they would be comfortable with.
DETROW: I mean, what is your sense a year into the second term, reporting this story and many other stories? Do you have a sense of what you think Trump's end goals are? Is it, I want to tear down democratic norms, or is it something more straightforward of, I want to be a notable, famous president, or is it even more moment to moment and topic to topic than that? Like, how do you think about this?
PARKER: I don't think he has a particular pointed desire to tear down democratic norms. What - essentially, he wants to do what he wants to do, unconstrained by laws and norms and the Constitution. And when he took office the first time, Congress could prevent that from happening. Sometimes a single senator, sometimes a single senator from his own party, could foil something he cared deeply about, and that things like the Geneva Conventions and NATO alliances could get in the way with what he wanted to do. And in many ways, these guardrails worked. And in his second term, he is just unconstrained and doing what he wants to do. And if it means shattering democratic norms, he's more than happy to bulldoze through them, but that's sort of an inadvertent symptom, not the end goal.
DETROW: Yeah. Ashley Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thank you so much.
PARKER: Yeah, thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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