Opinion | When It Rains, It Pours

Gail Collins: Bret, we’ve spent so much time agreeing about President Trump, it’s been great — at least for argument’s sake — that you can come up with specific presidential actions where you’re now pro-Trump. While I tend to irrationally object to every single thing he does.

Well, maybe not so irrationally. But today, tell me how you feel about the latest sweeps to save money by shutting down humanitarian aid overseas and offering buyouts to the entire C.I.A. work force.

Bret Stephens: I’m not pro-Trump. He scares me. There are days when I wake up and think: If this goes on like this for four years, or even four months, we’re going to be living in an unrecognizable republic — one in which lickspittle Republican legislators and cabinet members rubber stamp every crazy Trump idea, federal court decisions are simply ignored by the executive branch, Elon Musk creates a Department of Personal Efficiency (DOPE) that tracks and scores your every move, and a booming economy keeps a majority of voters indifferent to the collapse of civic and constitutional norms. We saw that model play out in the early years of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule in Turkey.

Gail: I do like that Elon Musk idea — not the actual agency, just the part about calling it DOPE.

Bret: But today I’m in the mood to provoke our readers a little. And the truth is I just don’t disagree with every single policy of Trump’s. With regards to U.S.A.I.D., I’ve always had my misgivings about the way the United States delivers aid, often via self-dealing contractors to corrupt countries, and often making our supposed beneficiaries more corrupt and less self-reliant. As for the C.I.A., it’s not going to be abolished in this presidency or any other. Though I’m a little surprised to hear so many liberals spring to the agency’s defense.

That said, the way the Trump administration has essentially tried to shutter U.S.A.I.D. overnight, stranding employees, cutting off critical health-care programs and getting blocked by courts, is reckless, capricious and cruel. We need to rethink and reform aid delivery, not destroy it. The same goes for all the other agencies and programs to which Musk is taking a hatchet instead of a scalpel.

Gail: Pretty hard to argue with reform-not-destroy. Although it definitely depends on the character of the so-called reformers.

Bret: The federal government isn’t some tech start-up where you move fast and break things.

Gail: You know I never argue foreign policy, Bret, but when Trump announced that he thought the United States should take over Gaza and “own it,” that struck me less as an issue of international affairs than another deeply scary sign that our president is … just nuts.

Bret: Other than the fact that the United States will not own Gaza, I have no idea what Trump meant by it — and I’m not sure he does, either. But I also think it’s smarter to view some of his wilder utterances not as serious policy proposals but as entry points to negotiation. I’m glad Trump seems like he won’t countenance Hamas’s survival as the ruling regime in Gaza. And I don’t think it’s wrong to ask a dependent dictator like Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself to the teeth before the war, to not wall out Gazans while the area is rebuilt.

Gail: As I said, not doing foreign policy. Let’s move back home.

Bret: The larger point is that Trump is asking for fresh thinking about a conflict where all the supposed solutions have been tried and failed. And he’s insisting we think anew about what the government does and how it operates abroad and at home. For instance, what is there to say about the Department of Education after 45 years of failing to improve educational standards?

Gail: The Department of Education has a lot of responsibilities, and if you want to argue that it’s failing on some, feel free. But the missions are themselves so important. Some agency has to keep an eye on student loans, which in their worst forms bankrupted recipients who were totally misled about what they could expect to gain from a very expensive, definitely useless-to-borderline-crooked program.

I’d go on here, but since it would take 60 senators to abolish the department, I’m just adding this to all the government services Trump is going to try to ruin rather than improve.

Bret: Gail, if it were up to me I’d get the government out of the business of student loans entirely. We have driven generations of students into debt on the dubious promise that a college education is the right choice for everyone. Meanwhile, decades of federal investments in K-12 education, and bad brainstorms like George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act yielded pathetic results, especially for minority children. If liberals want to regain their traditional polling advantage over conservatives on education, they need to have an idea that’s more than just about throwing more billions of dollars at the problem.

Gail: We’ve have to continue the education discussion over this new year. Let’s talk cabinet appointments. Trump has been getting pretty much what he wants. But the Republican majority in the House and Senate is so narrow, the House especially, that I can’t imagine them always sticking together when Congress has to begin its regular business. Do you agree? And where do you think we’ll see the first break?

Bret: The G.O.P.? They’re not going to break. If they’re willing to confirm cabinet picks like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., then they’ll go along with absolutely anything. That’s what scares me: Congress has ceased to think of itself as a coequal branch of government, and congressional Republicans have turned themselves into footstools for the president.

That means Democrats need to get their act together for the midterms. But if their central strategy is to just wait for the country to turn on Trump, I don’t think they’ll get very far. What’s your advice to them?

Gail: Well, there are plenty of issues to run on. On global warming, the Republicans are betraying generations to come by embracing the “Drill, baby, drill” theory of energy policy. Tax cuts for the rich don’t make sense to most Americans, and they reduce revenue to shore up programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and, yes, education.

Bret: It’s not for me to tell Democrats what they should run on. But I’ll never tire of suggesting what they should run from. They need to make a clean, loud, vocal, convincing break from the most progressive fringes of their party. Bail reform. Drug decriminalization. Defunding of police. De facto open borders. Sanctuary cities. Biological males in girls’ sports. Identity politics — including the excesses of D.E.I. All this stuff has left the Democratic brand politically radioactive.

Gail: You don’t have to be in a fringe to want to make sure everybody who’s arrested but not yet convicted of anything should have an equal opportunity to stay out of jail until their trial. And I don’t think most Democrats are pressing for de facto open borders. As we were saying earlier, there’s a difference between wanting to make something better and wanting to get rid of it.

Bret: People would be alive today in places like Waukesha, Wis., if easy bail hadn’t let dangerous people return to the street. Democrats also need to replace incompetent progressives with competent liberals, especially at the municipal and state level. That may at last be happening with San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, who’s pledging to clean up the downtown after years of decline. I wonder if it might happen at the state level, too. Any thoughts about whether Kamala Harris should run for governor?

Gail: I would like to see how Harris does in a race where she has to compete in a tough open primary to get the nomination. She was a mediocre presidential candidate because the job got dumped on her at the last minute, but she never struck me as dim or inept.

Bret: Dim? I wouldn’t know. But inept? Beyond inept. If California thinks that what it most needs is more high-tax, high-regulation, high-cost, low-delivery governance of the sort that every year drives hundreds of thousands of taxpayers, along with some of its most valuable companies, from the state, then she’s the perfect candidate. Democrats need a different state to model a different kind of governance. Like Kentucky, or North Carolina, or hey, Kansas, which has a Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, who believes in balanced budgets, immigration enforcement — and the right to choose. She’s in her second term.

On a cheerier note, Gail: the Super Bowl. Who knew?

Gail: Hey, I always did like Philadelphia, but given the recent election saga, I can’t say I was in the mood for another whopping, nothing-but-despair-for-the-losers outcome.