WATCH: How Trump was "disciplined by reality"

We just had a deep, wide-ranging, and even inspiring conversation with more than 2,000 Ink readers and two guests from very different worlds: the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo and Michael Cohen, the former Donald Trump lawyer turned anti-Trump activist. Both conversations started with how to make sense of all the tariff chaos — and how Trump was finally “disciplined by reality.” But that was just the beginning.

Beyond the tariffs, both Taiwo and Cohen, in their different ways, ended up talking about how essential it is going to be to get millions of everyday Americans to understand how they’re under threat, how their rights are being taken away, and why they need to defend them — and to get them into the fight against the regime.

As Cohen told us, that means everyone pulling together to face Trump with no fear. And as Taiwo put it, progressives need to reach out and embrace everybody to do it. The reason Black Lives Matter provoked the far right so much is that it was truly frightened by the prospect of normies — the brunch crowd — demanding justice.

Some of the other things we covered:

* Look at the “pause” on tariffs as a triumph of organizing against Trump — but it was big capital doing the organizing. What can the resistance learn from that?

* The attack on the universities is a lesson: staying safe by being quiet or withdrawing is not the way to win. You can’t count on individual bravery, but you can count on collective courage.

* Progress is reversible! The gains of civil rights were substantial, and we can’t lose sight of what’s being taken away, but we never should have thought that they didn’t require defense.

* Trump has no fear of anything and only thinks transactionally — that means he does care what the 77 million voters who backed him think. And that’s an opportunity to convince them, in the simplest terms.

Want to know more? Michael Cohen will be joining Jim Acosta for a town hall in New York City next week. And be sure to check out Olufemi O. Taiwo’s book Elite Capture, which goes deep into many of the issues we talked about today.

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