Ta-Nehisi Coates on the DSA, Mayor Mamdani, and Why Donald Trump Is the Dominant Figure of Our Age

My guest today is someone who has spent his whole career asking questions of himself and about how power operates in the world: Vanity Fair senior staff writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ta-Nehisi is the author of multiple books, including We Were Eight Years in Power and Between the World and Me, which won a National Book Award in 2015.

Working with Ta-Nehisi is, honestly, one of the great privileges of my job, and we in the office look forward to getting his next column the way that some people look forward to Christmas.

In Ta-Nehisi’s latest for Vanity Fair, he turns his attention to President Trump, referring to him as a, quote, “visionary” politician. Someone who has seen and wielded his power to fundamentally alter the public perception of what an American president, or, indeed, any elected official, can do.

We talked not only about why Trump’s two presidencies are consequential, but also about the growing momentum around the Democratic Socialists of America just ahead of the midterms, why the way that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 matters, and how we begin to fix the damage that has been done.

Mark Guiducci: We’re here to talk about your new column that’s in the issue that’s just dropped, but I wanted to start with a question about yourself, which is that you’re sometimes referred to as a public intellectual. And I wanted to ask you about that term because—

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I fucking hate it.

Yeah, I thought you might. But tell me why. Just because it’s pretentious, or is there more to it?

Yeah, it’s just pretentious. Like, what do you do? What is your actual work? Like, what do you do? I mean, I’m a writer. I’m a writer and a journalist. It’s pretty easy to describe what I actually do. I like being identified with the actual work. I do not think of myself [as someone] who spends most of his working time just pontificating. Probably the thing that I love most about the job, even though it seems like I have these really strong opinions, is actually having the question before, putting the pieces together, talking to people, and trying to figure out what is actually going on. I’m rarely absolutely certain when I start anything. And if I am absolutely certain, it’s because I asked some questions a long time ago. And so that kind of interrogation, that kind of asking questions of the world, asking questions of yourself, quite frankly, is such an important part of the job. And rightly or wrongly, when I hear “public intellectual,” I think [of] some dude with a snifter and elbow patches kind of just sitting there, just dispensing his or her thoughts out into the world, and I don’t feel like that’s what I do.

No, I don’t think so. It’s almost like you’re a writer who thinks before they write.

Yeah.

That’s what I think it is. I also—

Wait, can you tell I don’t like being called a public intellectual? Could you tell?

I just…

Like, do I grimace?

We don’t even know each other that well, but I know you well enough to know that you would not like that. And so I was just curious to know, what would you prefer to be? Writer and journalist.

I think writer and journalist is just fine. I actually think it’s great honor in it too. There’s great honor in being a journalist. There’s great honor in being a writer. And so I enjoy it.

So in your latest column for Vanity Fair, about President Trump, you investigate how he has wielded his power in the second term. And in an interview with our own Aidan McLaughlin, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan talked about how Trump is the most consequential president of their lifetimes. But you go further than that. You talk about how he’s the most visionary politician of his era and the dominant American of our age. Tell me about what you meant by that.

You know, this started, actually, in his first term, and I was talking to my mother, who is not a Trump fan, but she said, “I feel his presence in my life constantly.” She never talked about any president, Republican or Democratic, in that way before. I think previously people and presidents in general, even when they’ve had a difficult relationship or a challenging relationship with the law, have kind of understood the law, customs, norms. It’s things that…I mean, maybe you step over them sometimes, maybe even break them sometimes, but you really shouldn’t. There’s a kind of caution in their brain. And he just has none of that.

None.

He just has none of that. And I think what he’s really seen, rightly or wrongly—wrongly, obviously, from my political vantage point—is how much you can do, how much you can take. It never occurred to somebody that you could actually bend the American university system to your will. It never occurred to somebody that you could actually take opposing law firms that had worked for your opposition and not only get them, subject them to fines, but to actually have them actually work for you. Look, I think rightly or wrongly, and I’m saying it that way because I think even those of us who were not identified with his politics need to step back and take a second and look at what’s happened and look at the world we thought was possible and the world that actually is. When I was working at The Atlantic in 2016, one of the pieces I was most proud of I did was about President Obama, and we did this series of interviews in his Oval Office, and I’ll never forget him telling me Trump can’t win. Actually, he cannot win the presidency because Americans do not go for pessimism. Richard Nixon is an exception to that. In general, there has to be some sort of optimistic shame. You can’t come out here and do this thing about how bad we are and how awful everything is and how awful America is. And that turned out not just to be wrong about the election, but it turned out to be wrong about the era itself. And I don’t particularly hold Barack Obama responsible for that because I think a lot of people believed that. I think that was the dominant belief at the time, and he’s proved something different.

Maybe Trump himself believed that.

Yeah, because I don’t think he thought he was going to win.

Right. People say that his superpower is his absence of shame. But I think what you’re positing in your column is that there’s a creativity to it too. You call him visionary. He saw possibilities that none of us did, and you actually give him credit for that, which is something.

Yeah. No, I think you have to. I mean, people used to laugh at these lawsuits against these media and go, This is utterly ridiculous. There’s no way this is going to work.

Here we are.

Here we are.

So in the column, it’s quite sweeping in its approach, and you cover crypto and $TRUMP coin, his libertarian attitudes, his authoritarian attitudes, his diminution of the nation’s great law firms and universities you were mentioning, his bellicose foreign policy, his use of secret police and deportations. And finally, you start the column by… The lede is about the Great American Fair, which I wish... Our IP department probably disagrees, but I think would’ve been the perfect—you could have called that Vanity Fair, actually. But ultimately, nobody fights back is your point and that he’s getting away with it because perhaps everyone is still so stunned into submission. You actually write, “And to the extent that there is a genius to Donald Trump, it is in his apprehension of this reality, so very few people who matter care. When you’re the president, they let you do it.” What did you mean by that?

Oh man, that was very sad to write. It was very, very hard to write. I wrote that that way because there are people who do care. There are people who are fighting back. You certainly saw that in Minnesota. I mean, there are people who’ve died fighting back in this country. And so I don’t want to be dismissive of that. I think, Mark, what has most surprised me is people who would have told you about the greatness of American institutions, the greatness of American norms, the greatness of our legal system, the greatness of our university system, which is world-class, the greatness of the oldest democracy in the world—the very people who have benefited from that and who claimed credit for it were some of the first people who turned over, who rolled over, and weren’t willing to defend it. There was a lot of talk about the greatness and the importance of the press. Obviously, I’m a believer of that as a journalist, as I identified from the beginning, but the way in which we have just not fought for it has been, for me, a moment to question the extent to which certain people actually believed in it. And maybe that’s too harsh. Maybe more complicated is to say a heritage, a tradition, a legacy is not a thing that just kind of sits there and protects you. It has to be cared for. It has to be improved upon. And we speak a lot about our founding fathers, about our heritage, about our legacy, about our history, and maybe some of us got it in our head that these are not things that have to be fought for.

When I was in DC recently, I went to the [National] Portrait Gallery that houses all the portraits of the presidents all the way back. And there are brilliantly written captions, placards next to each portrait. I found that visit to be encouraging because we haven’t been here before, but we’ve been there before. Both in terms of how far we’ve strayed from the founding fathers, but also in terms of the power of the presidency, where do you place him?

I think that’s actually a great question. I think that’s a great question because I am probably the person that would have leaned toward, This actually is not new, that we actually do have a legacy of authoritarianism in this country. We have had a red scare before. We did have redemption after reconstruction before. We have seen our press not exactly always cover itself in glory. I think the thing that really, really distinguishes Trump is, we have not seen, first of all, just the level of profiteering. There is no record of somebody taking the Oval Office and then using it essentially to… I can’t remember how much money it is. I think, is it David Kirkpatrick at The New Yorker who’s doing that running tally? I think he’s up to $4 billion. That’s just never happened before.

Kara Swisher calls him the coin-operated president.

Right, right, right. And I don’t think that’s going to go away with him because there’s not going to be any sort of criminal trial. There’s not going to be any sort of repercussions at all. Why would someone not just assume, Oh, I can do this now. There’s nothing to stop me.

And not just the president, but every lawmaker.

Right. This was a taboo and now it’s not. I do think that’s actually different.

How do you restore taboo? How do you bring back shame?

You know what I think? I think it’s easier to destroy than it is to build. I think it’s going to take a lot. I think it’s going to take a lot. And so one of the reasons why I wrote that column in the way I did and with the aggression I did about calling him a visionary—insisting upon the level of his consequence is to say there really, really needs to be some serious, serious reflection about how you keep this from happening. Mark, honestly, that’s a very difficult question, because one would say, Okay, maybe we need new laws. But laws have to be enforced by people.

It’s cultural.

Right.

It’s cultural.

Right. And how do you do that?

Right.

How do you do that? If people don’t actually uphold norms, what do you do then? It’s actually a much, much thornier question, but I do think it merits some serious reflection.

He’s so deeply unpopular now.

Yeah.

And some people would say that we’ve seen him at his strongest and this war has changed things, and the midterms could reflect that. I wonder just how you feel about that unpopularity. Have people had enough?

Probably, but I don’t think people should take great comfort in that because the damage, for instance, done by the destruction of USAID, I mean, that just is what it is. Again, this column has forced me to give more credit than I want to to Donald Trump. But again, I do think he’s perceived and the movement behind him has perceived that you become popular in order to win the election and hold power, but you don’t necessarily hold power to become popular. Obviously, you need popularity to stay in power, but you hold power to do things. Ideally, you can do things and you can stay popular too, but they clearly do not care.

No.

Actually doing the thing is clearly much, much more important to them. I wonder if there’s something to be said for that. And just so I’m absolutely clear about that, what is to be said is not that, with my politics, that you need a left-wing version of this, right? That we shouldn’t care about norms, that we shouldn’t care, that we need somebody that’s going to go in there and profiteer. That’s not what I’m getting at, but I do think perhaps there is another version, a more healthier version, of imagination that could be exercised.

How do you see this ending? Because some would say that even if he’s not in office, that he will remain this dominant American figure, and I’m curious to know what ways out you see.

The presidency, particularly in the post–World War II era, it’s a very, very powerful position. Even presidents who people view their terms as failures, their ghosts linger. I don’t know if, for instance, the Democratic Party has ever gotten over how it perceived Carter as president. I don’t know that that’s gone away. Certainly Nixon is still with us.

To say nothing of Reagan.

To say nothing of Reagan. To say nothing of ones that people actually view as successful. And so I think this one’s going to leave a mark, man.

Right.

I think it’s gonna leave a mark. I think it has said some things are possible for some very, very dark forces in this country. I need to add that we also need to have some humility and some reflection about the fact that in other countries and in other democracies, people don’t always respond the way that we’ve responded. Brazil had an attempted coup also, and they didn’t respond the way we did. South Korea, they didn’t respond the way we did. And so I think there’s some—

You mean by reelecting him?

Yeah. And by effectively immunizing and saying, Yeah, you can run again. Go, go, go. It’s fine. There was clearly some sense that, no, there needs to be some consequence here. I think we need to ask ourselves why. Why did we not do that? And actually, I think that relates back to your question about popularity. Look, Americans are working jobs, trying to keep their heads above water. They can’t keep up with every little thing that’s happening. And if there’s ire in this column, it is for the elite class of Americans, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I mean that in the most literal way. The caretakers of American democracy, I think they failed here. I guess I include myself as a journalist. I think we failed here, because I’m a journalist, right? I’m part of it. I think we failed here, and everybody’s elite, everybody’s caretakers of the state don’t respond this way. It’s not like, Oh, this is just what happens. No, this is ours. So what does that say about us?

Even on Epstein, when you think about Epstein in the way that the British have responded, you’re out.

Yeah. Yeah.

It doesn’t matter if you’re royal, you’re out. And I think that that is a worthwhile example. There are rules and things that you… Anyway.

No, but you’re onto something. There’s a great book by Chris Hayes. It’s from 2012. He’s obviously gone on to become this incredible journalist, but before he became Chris Hayes as we know him now, he wrote this book, Twilight of the Elites, that I just think was prophetic and predictive. And it’s a pretty wide-ranging book because it goes from Major League Baseball to the Catholic Church to the political system. And what it says is there is a failure in the governance of elite institutions across the board. It’s actually deeply, deeply problematic for the country. And that book bore out to be exactly right.

It had already corroded that many years before.

Yeah. I mean, he was saying this in Obama’s first term. He was saying, Listen, we’ve got a real, real problem. And you can see it here. You can see it now.

Yeah. The DSA has incredible momentum, but I’m curious about, within the DSAs—it’s a fractured organization, but within the national chapter’s manifesto, there’s a—

A lot of interesting stuff.

A lot of interesting stuff. There’s a call to abolish the presidency, abolish the Senate. And you were saying earlier, it’s a lot easier to destroy than it is to build. I’m curious just where your head is at.

My head is at, I want to write about the DSA for Vanity Fair.

Okay.

That’s where my head… I have many, many questions.

We agree on that.

No, I have many, many questions, and some of them... Okay, this is beautiful because I’ll just speak about where I’m at right now, and then you can see the thing in motion.

Okay, cool.

I don’t quite understand what the DSA is, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way.

No, me either.

I mean, if I had to point out, Okay, there’s that governance structure; this is where Zohran Mamdani stands, this is where the national chapter stands, this is where this person, this is how this happened—I couldn’t do that for you. I couldn’t actually do that for you right now. And I’ll be honest, I have not quite read the piece of journalism that’s actually done it for me, that’s made me understand this movement. I’m putting value judgments aside, whatever you think of it, you know what I mean?

Totally.

What is actually going on here? And I guess this is my frustration.

Because it’s powerful.

It is. It is. It is. I mean, clearly, right? And so my frustration with journalism at this moment is there has been too much, What does this mean for the midterms? What does this mean for the Democratic Party? And not enough, Okay, but what is this? How’d this happen?

What is this?

You know what I mean? If I read another scene from a DSA party in Brooklyn where people are drinking beer and doing whatever, I’m going to scream. I don’t care about how they socialize. I want to know what they’re doing. What are they?

Yeah. Enough scene reports, enough trend reports.

Enough, enough. Give me the nitty-gritty. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So this is where I start. This is why I don’t want to be called a public intellectual, to go all the way back. Obviously, I have some politics and some thoughts about all this, but at my root, I go to bed thinking, What is going on?

It’s curiosity.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

I also want to ask you about your column in our summer issue about Vice President Harris and her run for the presidency, that perhaps the fatal flaw of her campaign was her inability to acknowledge what was happening in Palestine and perhaps the inappropriate use of Black women civil rights leaders in that campaign.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that that would’ve won her the presidency. So again, this starts with Vanity Fair, quite honestly. I was sent out in 2024 for Vanity Fair to cover the DNC. It was kind of a broad sort of mandate, which was sort of cool because we didn’t know what we were going to see. You don’t know what's actually going to happen. So I go out there and what I see is this relatively small Uncommitted Movement, which at that point was demanding that either there’d be a Palestinian American speaker or an Arab American speaker. There had not been an Arab American speaker at the DNC since 1988.

They were asking for a lot of other things besides that, but that was the big thing, right? And then they would use that to go back to their communities and say, Okay, this is somebody we can actually support. Two things happened. The first thing was there were a lot of normie Dems who had never heard of the Uncommitted Movement, who I would just watch from afar, and they would come up to these guys. There was a lot of energy around it. They wanted to know what was going on. What is this? Who are you? Actually, it was not as fractious up close as it ultimately looked to be. It was actually quite a bit of curiosity. And the second thing that happened was, obviously, they were unsuccessful. I have never run a campaign. I’m not what you would call a political strategist in any respect. I do think that people in life should think about how they want to lose, though. I do think that’s an actual clarifying exercise. And I do think—

Explain that.

Yeah. I mean, I do it in my own life. Just personally, I do it, because it gives you an idea of, what are your boundaries? Where’s the thing, like, No, no, no, it’s not worth it? No, I don’t want it. You know what I mean? Actually, if I have to give it up this way, then that’s fine. I’m okay. I can sleep at night.

Where’s the tap-out moment?

Where’s the tap-out moment? Exactly.

Yeah.

And I do think losing because, especially given how the issue has moved, losing because Kamala Harris said in public what numerous people said to me, in my reporting, she said in private, I think that would be viewed very differently today. And I think the party would view her very, very differently today. I do think that matters. I think how she lost actually mattered. And I say that to say, maybe she would’ve lost anyway. Maybe she allows a Palestinian American speaker up there. She still loses. Maybe she says, “What is happening in Gaza right now is unacceptable and under my presidency, I will enforce the Leahy Law,” which is to say we will be looking at human rights abuses and linking that to our armed shipment. Maybe she loses anyway. Maybe that is the case, but there’s a difference between being seen as somebody who did not have the courage of your convictions and being seen as prophetic.

In that column, you suggest, posit even, that the presidency is an office maybe antithetical to the kinds of values that—

That elevate Black politicians there in the first place.

That elevate Black politicians there in the first place. But I’m going to try to end this on a positive note.

Yes. I thought I ended that piece on a positive note.