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"Meeting The Moment" - A New Discussion With Stuart Stevens Of Lincoln Square

These monthly get togethers with Stuart are always a treat.....

Simon Rosenberg

Feb 2

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Greetings all. Sat down with the great Stuart Stevens of Lincoln Square this afternoon for our monthly live get together. You can find a video recording of our discussion above and a full transcript below. It’s a lively and wide ranging conversation, all essentially around the theme of “meeting the moment.”

My part of the discussion draws heavily from three recent Hopium posts:

Here’s a good summary of where I think we are now as we enter this very consequential debate over reining in ICE:

The way I think about this is that in year one of Trump, we were successful politically and electorally. We had great election wins all across the country of all kinds including in Texas this weekend. Trump has been significantly degraded, his approval rating has plummeted across the board, his coalition has unraveled, and he is weakened. And his hold on his party has weakened. All of that was necessary, but it was insufficient for whatever we are going to do next.
What did not go well for us in 2025 is that we were not as successful as we needed to be in stopping the harms he was doing to the world and to America. I think we need to learn from our European counterparts who saw one of their own countries attacked. They rallied as a continent behind Denmark, stared Trump down, and he buckled and retreated. The next step for us in this movement is to start developing the muscles to block him and the harms he is doing more effectively. That is something we did not do well in year one, and we need to do better in year two. You are seeing now this attempt to rein in ICE as sort of an acid test for us about whether we have the capacity to organize ourselves into a more powerful coalition against him. To not stay by the old way of doing things… we need to come together as an opposition movement and create a unified front against his escalating authoritarianism. I think this fight over ICE will be an incredible test of our ability to fight at a higher level and one that is needed in 2026.

It’s why we need to keep our heads down my friends, and keep working as hard as we can - Simon

Vermont Conversation: Stop panicking and fight, Stuart Stevens tells Democrats - VTDigger

Transcript - Stuart Stevens And Simon Rosenberg (2/2/26)

Stuart Stevens:
Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us on this Monday. This is something I always look forward to, talking to Simon Rosenberg. And as I always say, whatever you are doing, stop, and go to the Hopium Chronicles Substack and subscribe, pay money, support it. I think in a world of a lot of information and a lot of opinions, it’s one of the few that I read every day. I go to it daily. What always impresses me the most is that I never really know what Simon is going to say or what his take is going to be. And I think that makes it so compelling. So Simon, thank you for joining us.

Simon Rosenberg:
It’s great to be here, Stuart. It’s always great to be with you.

Stuart Stevens:
Admire what you’re doing so much. Just step back… in the year we are living in right now… where is this country? And what do you think is happening out there?

Simon Rosenberg:
It’s a great question. The way I think about this is that in year one of Trump, we were successful politically and electorally. We had great election wins all across the country of all kinds including in Texas this weekend. Trump has been significantly degraded, his approval rating has plummeted across the board, his coalition has unraveled, and he is weakened. And his hold on his party has weakened. All of that was necessary, but it was insufficient for whatever we are going to do next.

What did not go well for us in 2025 is that we were not as successful as we needed to be in stopping the harms he was doing to the world and to America. I think we need to learn from our European counterparts who saw one of their own countries attacked. They rallied as a continent behind Denmark, stared Trump down, and he buckled and retreated. The next step for us in this movement is to start developing the muscles to block him and the harms he is doing more effectively. That is something we did not do well in year one, and we need to do better in year two. You are seeing now this attempt to rein in ICE as sort of an acid test for us about whether we have the capacity to organize ourselves into a more powerful coalition against him. To not stay by the old way of doing things… we need to come together as an opposition movement and create a unified front against his escalating authoritarianism. I think this fight over ICE will be an incredible test of our ability to fight at a higher level and one that is needed in 2026.

Stuart Stevens:
So what do you think is going to happen?

Simon Rosenberg:
I don’t know. I mean, I really honestly don’t know. Senator Schumer had I think a significant victory by this separating out the five appropriations bills from the DHS appropriation. What is likely to happen in the next few days… and we don’t know because the House is so incredibly unstable and Johnson’s hold over the House is so weak… is that we’re going to pass both the five appropriations bills, meaning that ten appropriations bills will go to Trump's signature this week, and we’ll have Congress taking back its Article I power of the purse authority because it’s going to be much harder for Trump and Vought to move money around when there are appropriations that are specific, as opposed to CRs when they have much more running room to screw with the appropriated monies.

The idea of doing all these appropriations bills… it was a bipartisan effort to reclaim lost power of the Congress. And it’s one of the reasons that Schumer has kind of protected this process so much because it’s actually meaningful to see the Republicans seizing back power that they should never have given away to Trump. But then the eleventh appropriations bill, the DHS appropriations bill, will be just for two weeks. And the idea is that we’ll be having a debate about reining in ICE, and that Democrats won’t provide the votes to pass in two weeks the DHS appropriation unless there is meaningful reform.

What that is, we can get into detail, but I think that’s going to be the negotiation, and certainly the things that Democrats are proposing are meaningful if we were to do them, and would change ICE… the way that ICE is operating in the country. And that’s important. So for everyone watching now, however you’re watching this, this is a deeply consequential moment in Trump 2.0. Everyone needs to be as loud as they possibly can, pushing their elected leaders to go as far as possible to rein in this terror regime that’s been foisted upon the country. Trump gave away the store a little bit with his arresting of journalists last week… what’s really happening here? What is the goal? Is this immigration enforcement?

No. The goal is that Trump is working very hard to create something we’ve read about in history books about police states, a personal private police force of enormous size and strength and power that he can use to terrorize his enemies and suppress blue states and free states, and potentially interfere in the elections in 2026. This is an incredibly consequential fight. I’m pleased that Senator Schumer has decided to take this on, and now we have to go get as much as we can in the next few weeks.

Stuart Stevens:
You know, one of the things that really strikes me that would be so helpful here, and it may be just impossible, if someone from the Democratic Party could give a national address and frame it just as you framed it. These are the stakes. This is why this is important. I just wonder, everybody in their daily busy lives, they catch… I think it’s terrible, this man was murdered, this woman was murdered, but the sort of process stuff, particularly in a world in which there’s no longer three networks, there’s no gatekeepers… I just don’t know how you focus the attention on it.

Simon Rosenberg:
Let’s talk about this. I think this is really important. One of the things that I have kind of come to realize, you know, we all feel like we don’t have enough and we need more… I think that’s true. And I think that in part it’s true because of the way our democracy was set up, the way our government was set up. If we were in a parliamentary system, there would be a shadow prime minister, a shadow foreign minister, a shadow homeland secretary, who would be part of the government, right. The party out of power would have gone through a process to have selected those people, who then had not an honorific role, but a legitimate serious role in the government itself. Parliamentary systems have built into them these unified oppositions that can fight against a party with majority power.

We have learned that we don’t have that. What we have is a lot of disparate voices in the Senate, in the House, the governors, the attorneys general, who are all doing their part, but the sum isn’t greater than the parts. We don’t have this unified opposition. One of the things I’ve been calling for is that I do think that Senator Schumer and Leader Jeffries need to create some kind of loose governing council with the governors and the attorneys general… to settle on a handful of things that are true for all Democrats all across the country, that we set. It doesn’t have to be a laundry list of twenty things. It can be mostly, I think, about fighting his escalating authoritarianism, and to say this is a line in the sand for all of us, and we’re going to fight in a unified fashion on these issues together for the next few years because we’re proud patriots who love our country, and we can be warriors for the middle class, and also people who are fighting for freedom and democracy here and everywhere.

I think what I’m getting at is that we have to recognize that the systems we have in place are inadequate for the fight that’s in front of us. We have to invent new ones and do what the president of the European Union said… which is to abandon caution. And start inventing new ways to aggregate power prior to the election. We can’t wait until we get back power in January of 2027. We need to aggregate power now to block the things that Trump is doing that are doing enormous harm to the country and to the world. And I think this is where we have to push our leaders to have greater imagination and greater ambition because I think these things are doable. And the first test of this is what we’re going to be able to get in this fight over ICE.

Let me just say you’re correct. We don’t have a unified voice. We don’t have a national spokesperson. But we can create something that feels a lot more like that if we decide to do it… if the people who are in their silos decide to coordinate and collaborate instead of sort of being comfortable with managing their own little piece of the pie. What Trump is doing is exploiting this by pitting state against state, you know, isolating Minnesota. We need to have this in our mind that we’re stronger together than apart. And we need to come together in order to fight him using all the tools in our toolbox. I think this is doable, and I think it’s really incumbent upon us to continue, Stuart, as you know… part of the role that you played to advise politicians… they’re drinking water from a fire hose every day. The reason they have advisors is to help them think about strategy and things that didn’t necessarily occur to them. I think in this kind of thing around how they have to organize themselves differently now to better counter Trump, and to have the ambition of not just legislating but stopping him from doing things that are harmful to the country, we’re going to see really the first example of that in this fight over ICE. And that’s why I think this is so consequential.

Stuart Stevens:
You know, you think back to the Civil Rights Movement, there were these defining moments, you know, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where politicians joined with activists and put themselves out there. And I just wonder if in a simple step, if Democratic leaders were to in some large numbers go to Minnesota or go to Springfield, where it looks like this is going to happen next, and deliver messages, stand there with the people who are out there on the streets. Because I think if this is a Washington story, it’s one thing. What was it that resonated with people so much with these horrible murders, it was that here was a woman that had stuffed animals in her glove box, the normalcy, that here was a guy who was a nurse at the VA. It made it so real and it wasn’t about the theoretical or the process. I don’t think in a political sense that this takes away from focusing on the economy or focusing on affordability or any of that. I think all of this helps. And it’s not an either/or because ultimately it’s about the direction that you think the country is going and what is change going to be.

Simon Rosenberg:
I think your point about the leaders of our party starting to see the people on the street in Minneapolis and the No Kings movement as being their movement, and their fight, and not a fight of activists or a fight of other people is really critical. We’re going to have No Kings on March 28th, and Leaders Schumer and Jeffries should be leading that effort and being part of it and grounding ourselves that this is, you know, that we’re stronger together than apart, that we have to keep coming together and aggregating more power rather than doing things separately. I think it requires a different way of thinking about all this.

Just to build on something you said, Stuart, I think that is really important is that there are these moments. And what I have come to believe is that this advice that smarty pants Washington people have been giving our political leaders to pivot back or focus on kitchen table issues has become pernicious and ruinous for us. The reason why is that what we know from history… there are two great lessons from those who have fought fascism and autocracy that we continue to hear again and again. Number one is that if you don’t fight the autocrat across every piece of his agenda, they view that as weakness, and so it encourages escalation. By not fighting Trump’s escalating authoritarianism, we’re actually contributing to it and accelerating democracy’s decline rather than fighting it. There is enormous risk in not contesting, for example, his seizing of a national monument, the Kennedy Center, and other things, because we must contest all of these lawless actions. Or he views it as weakness and we create a permission structure for him to escalate.

The second lesson, which is of equal import, is that they are going to try to split our movement. Orban did this in Hungary. You split the opposition, you stay in power for a generation. There is going to be tremendous effort from domestic forces and foreign forces to pull us apart in the next decade, or the next ten months or nine months, which is why we need to stay together. We’re going to hang together or hang separately, and we need to forge this movement into something bigger. It’s a game of addition, not subtraction. We need to keep getting bigger, keep coming together, and stay together as complicated and as hard as that is. Frankly, it’s one of the reasons I love doing this show with you. You know, we need to make strange bedfellows in this movement. We need to be working with people that didn’t necessarily always used to be on our team in order to get bigger and stronger and more capable.

Where my head is at right now is that we need to aggregate more power than we have right now. And we know how to do that. We need to get about the business of doing that.

The way we do it is we act like Americans. We fight for freedom and democracy. That’s what we do and who we are –– that’s our mission in the world –– that’s our birthright. We need to do this unapologetically and with great power and enthusiasm because that’s our job and we’ve got to get on with it.

Stuart Stevens:
Yeah. I think one of the great things that you do at Hopium is you step back and point out more often than not that we are winning… which I think is so important because part of the key tools of the autocrats is to make you feel helpless.

Simon Rosenberg:
Yes.

Stuart Stevens:
If I were a Republican consultant now… there is a roadmap for Trump to do better, for Republicans to do better, but it involves admitting that there is a problem. [Simon laughs.] It involves the classic political play. We’ve heard you, you’re right, this has gone too far, we’re taking these steps, give us another chance.

And Americans have this both wonderful and horrible ability to always give people another chance. You can say you’re going to quit drinking, but you kind of have to go to Betty Ford first. You can’t say you’re going to change while you’re still at the bar. There has to be this moment of contrition. That play, or instinct, is just impossible in Trump’s mind. And it makes it impossible for Republicans too because if they admit there’s a mistake and it’s gone too far, then Trump gets on top of them. And I think that’s such a powerful tool that Democrats could use.

I just watched the film Nuremberg, which I thought was extraordinary, and it blows my mind that Russell Crowe didn’t get a Best Actor nomination. But at the sort of climax of the film, the British prosecutor, under the advice of the shrink who had been interviewing Goring, asks this last question… even knowing what we now know, would you still support Adolf Hitler? He couldn’t say no. He had to say yes. And at that moment he was convicted. That ability to expose a fundamental weakness of Trump… which is that he cannot admit a mistake or say something’s wrong… had he gotten rid of Kristi Noem and appointed somebody sane or responsible, it would have helped him.

Simon Rosenberg:
He not only can’t admit a mistake or act with contrition, but when he gets cornered like this, he actually escalates. He has the exact opposite response.

Stuart Stevens:
Right. It’s the Roy Cohn…

Simon Rosenberg:
Right. So when he feels weak and things are slipping from his grasp, he’s like an addict. He needs more and more… bigger hits into his body. He stashed Maduro, he launched Minneapolis, he tried to grab Greenland, he may now bomb Iran. Because he is not strong, powerful and mighty, he needs to be so. He has this need to create spectaculars to make himself feel mighty and strong and powerful when he doesn’t feel it every day because he is addled and corrupt. And the worst man who has ever lived in the United States in all of our history. And a traitor. The interesting thing about what you said, Stuart, is that the traditional political instinct is to admit fault, to say I hear you. Trump can’t do that. In fact, he does the opposite. That’s why I call it the vicious cycle of a declining strongman. Every time he gets threatened, he escalates. Americans don’t want a dictator, they want a president. It pushes him further away from the electorate. He further declines, and then he has to further escalate, right, to deal with this sense of inadequacy and being weak.

That’s why we’re in this situation. Look what happened this morning. We wake up today and that young boy, Liam, is returned to Minnesota. He gets to go to school today, his first day back. At 6:15 in the morning there were three ICE trucks in the parking lot of his elementary school to greet him and intimidate him out of just complete sadism and diseased minds. Then bomb threats come into the school and the school is canceled today. At this point we’re not really dealing with anything… one of the things I talk about, Stuart, if you don’t mind for a second, is that I think one thing that’s really important… if we were to give this address to the country that you were describing… is this idea that somehow the ICE agents have been badly trained or were not given proper instruction. The truth is that they’ve been acting lawlessly from day one. When they smash a car window, that’s a felony level crime. When they grab people out of a car and pull them out of the car, that’s a felony level crime. When they shove that woman to the sidewalk that precipitated the murder of Alex Pretti, that’s a felony level assault crime. They can’t do those things.

So they’ve actually been trained to ignore the law, not to actually follow it. They had to be trained and given permission by this administration, by this regime, to do this because there is no law enforcement agency in a democracy or in the United States that is trained to ignore the law. So they had to be told specifically that in these cases they could ignore the law. They could arrest legal immigrants and send them to Texas, right, we now have this case of 130 legal refugees to the United States who have been arrested in their homes without warrants and sent to Texas. There is nothing remotely legal about any of that. What we have to recognize is that the regime has created something we can’t call a law enforcement agency anymore because they exist to disobey the law, to ignore the law, to act as if law doesn’t exist, to create terror for all of us.

That’s why we have to confront this now. Because if this continues, if it metastasizes, if they buy and build these detention centers all over the country, this will get far worse. One of the things I wrote about this weekend is why do we need detention centers for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in America? If you look at the immigrant population in the United States, somewhere between half a million and a million are criminal migrants. The rest are either undocumented without a criminal record or here legally. To round up all the criminals that’s half a million to a million people. Then why do we need detention centers for half a million people that are going to be in place? Because they’re intending to deport all of the undocumented immigrants and all the legal migrants and potentially even green card holders, tens and tens of millions of people. That is their actual goal. It’s not to deport criminal migrants. That’s the cover story. The real purpose is to build this massive machinery to do mass deportation. At a million people a year, it’s going to take ten, fifteen, twenty years. So we’re talking about a terror campaign that will last ten to fifteen years in their mind and it will get far worse. That’s why we have to fight this now and prevent this dramatic escalation which would be the greatest violation of civil rights and civil liberties in American history.

Stuart Stevens:
You know, this is why it’s so important to be able to identify these agents. Because when they say, well, when they’re identified, you want to name them and hold them up to their communities… my answer is yes… that is exactly what we want to do. As long as they’re faceless… like the Klan… the Klan was susceptible to social pressure. They realized it hurt them getting hired in many cases. One of the things the FBI did back when my dad was in the FBI going after the Klan was that they would go to Klan rallies, they were hooded, but they had cars and license plates. They would take down license plates then go knock on doors and ask were you at this Klan rally… that in itself had a definite effect. We’re going to find out who these agents are. There are records. Those records will come out. There will be a day when we know every ICE agent, where they were assigned, how long they were agents, what their background checks or lack of background checks were. And the idea is to make them completely unhirable by any federal or state agency for the rest of their lives. This is it.

I think stuff like that is very important because these are weak people. As soon as they think they’re going to be exposed, it will make it harder. That’s why JD Vance goes out and says they have absolute immunity, which he later denied which is hysterical. As long as people think they’ll be held accountable… it’s a limiting factor to it. This is why the whole movement in American policing has been so much toward more transparency.

It’s just insane what they are doing. It’s also stupid. Because if you wanted to win this battle long term, you would do it in a methodical way that’s easier to defend than basically putting death squads on the street. Then you have to make Americans accept death squads? That’s pretty hard. I’d rather be arguing that we need to get more Americans to accept border limits. [Simon laughs.] Obama deported more people than Trump has, but he did it in a way that didn’t create big civil unrest and wasn’t seen as unduly targeting the innocent. I go back to… if I were a Republican now I don’t know what I’d be running on. What’s the bargain?

Do you think the Democrats should put together some equivalent of a contract with America? This is what you’re going to get.

Simon Rosenberg:
Yeah, I do. I think, you know, when we did this in 2006, for example, Pelosi had ‘Six for 06,’ as she called it, and there were six items, six checkboxes.

Stuart Stevens:
I remember that.

Simon Rosenberg:
And I think we can do that this summer. It doesn’t need to be now. It can be, but yes. To your point, what got lost on Friday in all the news around Epstein and everything else was that the PPI, one of the most important gauges of inflation, came in really hot at 0.5 percent, which is 6% on an annualized basis, way above targets. Trump is a failed leader. He is making the country less prosperous, less safe, and less free. Your point of what can Republicans run on… inflation is too high. The economy has slowed way down. They’ve broken the health care system in the United States. They’re throwing legal immigrants and even US citizens into squalid detention centers that are getting more and more attention for the unhealthy conditions.

I just saw this this morning something I had not seen –– that there is now a measles outbreak in a Texas detention center. The reason that matters… I mean, measles is a wildly infectious and deadly disease. It had been eradicated in the United States. It is now roaring back because this administration has at its core a eugenicist view of the world where they believe they can let it rip and the weak will die and the strong will live.

And the thing that’s happening now, though, because of the detention facilities… it means that we are introducing measles into places when people are then being taken and flown all over the world and then flown all over the United States. So, measles in this Texas detention center is a global super spreader of measles, potentially. A disease that has been eradicated in most of the world.

This is now becoming potentially a global health hazard, not just a domestic health hazard… it’s wildly infectious… I saw a congresswoman who had been in the Whipple facility in Minnesota over the weekend… she said there was no health care of any kind. No nurses. No doctors. People chained in bathrooms, sleeping on floors, no access to clean water. The inhumanity of what’s happening… to your point, Stephen Miller is obviously a diseased person. Dark, sadistic… he is one of the darkest figures in American history. What they are doing to people… these are not migrants or immigrants, these are people. There are human minimum standards for how we treat people around the world, and we are not living up to them in America… whether it’s the Salvadoran gulag or the gulag archipelago we’re now creating in the United States, Whipple in Minnesota, detention centers in Texas, the inhumanity is shocking. The next few weeks, Stuart, are going to be really consequential. Trump has stumbled. They’ve made mistakes. They are retreating. They’re signaling weakness. It’s why we have to exercise strength and power now to do what’s right for the American people.

Stuart Stevens:
You know, I’ve been on this kick reading everything I can about Germany in the 30s and 40s. It’s amazing you can get this stuff on Kindle now… I came across this collection of interviews with POWs, mostly German, who came to the United States. They were held in POW camps here. They were extraordinarily moving. This one particular series by women POWs and how they were treated… one uses an example of their first breakfast in Minnesota at a big POW camp… they were allowed as much maple syrup as they wanted on a pancake, and what has happened here, and how does this world exist... a lot of them wanted to stay, but for those who went back it was about the goodness of America, the success of America. Not this idea that Stephen Miller somehow represents the American spirit. Because if that is the American spirit, then America is dead. You know.

Well listen, Simon, thank you so much. And let me just tell everybody again, please subscribe, support, follow Hopium Chronicles. Every day there’s more disappointment in what were once national media, still some holdouts out there, but it’s balanced by the rise of someone like Simon, who can speak directly to the Hopium Chronicles with your support. So thank you, and Simon, look forward to it next time. Talk to you soon.

Simon Rosenberg:
Right back at you, Stuart, and thank you the contribution you’ve made over the last ten years and also Lincoln Square’s remarkable success. You guys have become a major powerhouse in this independent media space. Back at you, for subscribing, and being part of your community that’s pumping out amazing stuff every day. Both written analysis and great interviews. It’s become a must-go-to place. And so, back at you, brother. See you everybody.

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