What Are We Living Through in Trump 2.0? Here Are 3 Possibilities.

By Jedediah Britton-PurdyDavid Pozen and John Guida

Mr. Britton-Purdy is a law professor at Duke. Mr. Pozen is a law professor at Columbia. Mr. Guida is an editor in Opinion.

From the whirlwind start of the second Trump administration through the war in Iran, Americans have been put to a very difficult task: How are they to make sense of this cascade of events?

Last fall, two law professors, Jedediah Britton-Purdy of Duke and David Pozen of Columbia, wrote an article in Boston Review, “What Are We Living Through?” that tried to answer that question.

In a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion, they elaborated on their earlier answer and explored it further with recent developments.

John Guida: You offered three theories to answer the question in your title. They are: 1) an “authoritarian crisis” (the most alarming script); 2) a politics of “more of the same”; and 3) “constitutional regime change,” or a shift in the structure of how government works. How do you think about developments since then through those lenses?

David Pozen: Our article was published on Oct. 15. The very next day, the former national security adviser John Bolton was indicted on charges of mishandling classified information. Such indictments are extremely rare, especially against high-level officials, so this looked like yet another act of political retribution. And it was followed by a shocking string of events in Minnesota, Venezuela, the Caribbean and Iran.

All of these episodes have arguable precedents in modern U.S. history, especially the use of military force abroad without congressional authorization. But the degree of lawlessness and the scale of violence are meaningfully, alarmingly different today.

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