https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/trump-ice-detentions.html
Panelists: David French, M. Gessen, Lydia Polgreen and Zeynep Tufekci
‘What Is Our Country Becoming?’ Four Columnists Map Out Where Trump Is Taking America.
April 4, 2025
New York Times
‘What Is Our Country Becoming?’ Four Columnists Map Out Where Trump Is Taking America.
April 4, 2025
New York Times
Credit: Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by David Dee Delgado, Andrew Harnik, and HERIKA MARTINEZ/Getty
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By David French, M. Gessen, Lydia Polgreen and Zeynep Tufekci
[Mr. French, Mx. Gessen, Ms. Polgreen and Ms. Tufekci are Opinion columnists.]
Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with four Times Opinion columnists about how President Trump is changing America.
Patrick Healy: Masha, David, Lydia, Zeynep, I’ll be blunt — I never thought our country would have masked federal agents snatching students off sidewalks seemingly because of newspaper opinion pieces they wrote or protest movements they helped lead. As I was walking on my own sidewalk the other night, I played out the tape and imagined where these detentions and tactics might lead. Would a day come in America when conversations like this one are not permitted by the state? What if my country won’t always be what I think it is? I thought that Donald Trump was likely to win last November, and that a backlash was coming over progressive activism, illegal immigration, free speech and more. But I did not expect — as Masha wrote powerfully in their column this week — the forced deportation of people in the U.S. legally and the growing irrelevance of the law. So play out the tape with me: What is our country becoming?
M. Gessen: I want to try to be precise here. The future is not preordained. We can observe today’s events and the direction in which things are moving, but we cannot predict the future. That said, is it possible that conversations like this one will one day be banned by the state? Yes, it is. Will this happen? It depends. Are we closer to such an outcome than we were three months ago, two weeks ago, yesterday? Without a doubt. How do we know? For one thing, political speech is already becoming impossible for a rapidly growing number of people. This country has always severely restricted the political rights of immigrants, including green-card holders. Now political speech by college professors and students has become risky, regardless of their immigration or citizenship status.
Healy: There’s only one correct side in the eyes of the American government today — President Trump’s side.
Gessen: When universities and individual researchers lose funding because the White House doesn’t like their academic policies or because their grant applications include words like “diversity” (even if it’s “genetic diversity”), we have entered a period when the speech space is rapidly shrinking.
David French: We’re becoming an earlier version of ourselves. Nothing we’re seeing is truly new. Too many people forget the thousands of people prosecuted during the Woodrow Wilson administration for protesting American involvement in World War I, or the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, much less the experience of Black Americans for centuries. The list of American injustices is long.
Thankfully, we’re not yet facing crises that grave, but America has always been at war with its darker nature, and sometimes that darker nature wins. We are living in a period of profound national regression.
Lydia Polgreen: I had the surreal experience of watching the video of Rumeysa Ozturk being snatched off the streets near Tufts while I was in Damascus, Syria. I was there on a reporting trip for my series on global migration, and my notebook was already filled with stories of arbitrary detention by faceless agents of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime. This was an omnipresent fear for millions of Syrians during the Syrian civil war who were suspected of disloyalty by the regime.
So it was striking how small an impression this video made on people I spoke to the next day. It depicted a woman in a hijab, being grabbed by a male agent while on her way to break the Ramadan fast. Of course Syria is in the midst of its own struggle to rebuild after the fall of the Assad regime, but I was struck by how irrelevant, even puny, the United States seemed to Syrians.
Healy: What did you take away from that, Lydia?
Polgreen: It’s useful to see your own country through the eyes of those who have felt the rough end of its power and the chill of its indifference. The question, it seemed, was less what the United States is becoming, than whether Americans realize what it already is.
French: I also think it’s useful to consider what we’d think if we saw this same behavior in a foreign democracy. If a man who instigated an attack on, say, a parliament building to preserve his hold on power was able to hold office again and then immediately not only began pardoning the loyal militia that attacked the government but also denied due process and free speech rights to his political opponents, we’d consider that nation to be in the midst of an autocratic takeover.
Zeynep Tufekci: Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted by people wearing masks who stuffed her into a car. It was such a revelatory moment. There is no credible claim that she broke any laws. It’s a clear example of how lines shift under one’s feet, like quicksand. A year ago, the very people who are now cheering on her treatment might have said newspaper opinion pieces were fine as freedom of speech. Free speech was fine until it wasn’t. Protests were fine until they weren’t.
Healy: Masha, you wrote this week that an American police state has arrived. I want to take the other side of that. America just had a member of the opposition party speak unmolested in the U.S. Senate for more than 25 hours. The liberal candidate won handily in a big state election in Wisconsin. A free press published your column — and has published columns by all of you — challenging Trump and the administration. I am not saying the contours of a police state or authoritarian state are not emerging; I graduated from Tufts, and the video of the Tufts student was like a scene out of a totalitarian state. But isn’t civil society still robust and free in America in most ways? Or is that an illusion, a rationalization?
Gessen: I think it’s a mistake — a very tempting mistake to make — to take stock by looking at what we still have rather than what we have already lost. Two and a half months has not been enough time for Trump to quash every single opposition voice, dismantle the electoral system, successfully intimidate every single judge and bring every single publication to heel. Is that good? Of course. But there is no way he could have done all of that in less than three months. He has successfully destroyed more in two and a half months than even I, ever the catastrophizer, thought possible. He has enabled a secret police force, inflicting terror on millions of people in this country. He is rapidly normalizing disregard for the judiciary. He has brought a leading university and several giant law firms to their knees, and some large media companies have arguably assumed a supplicant position as well. That is a spectacular amount of institutional and societal damage, and I think damage is the more meaningful metric right now.
Healy: Masha, you’re making me think of your recent column on whether to obey or not obey Trump and the way pragmatism factors into that calculus. I think a lot of people — myself included — look more at what we still have than what we’ve lost — partly to avoid sliding into grievance and resentment over those losses. But I see the dangers you describe. As a citizen, our country is becoming less recognizable, especially on matters of “liberty and justice for all.”
Gessen: Patrick, I think one of our best and worst traits as humans is the ability to adapt to what we have. Living under the Putin regime for many years (and observing my friends living there for much longer), I got used to a sort of a shock-and-lull cadence. There would be a terrifying new law or a wave of arrests or the invasion of a neighboring country — and people who were opposed to Vladimir Putin would collectively gasp, talk about how unthinkable this was and how they may need to leave the country. A bit later, we’d breathe out, take stock and think, “Well, I can still do meaningful work, live in community with my friends, look forward to a few things — this is not the end of the world.” And, of course, it’s never the end of the world (until it is), but I think our adaptability plays tricks on us. We don’t notice how, as individuals and a society, we lose more and more freedom to act and think.
Back when I was living in Russia, I would regularly try to leave the country and go to Ukraine or Sweden or the United States, to remind myself what it actually felt like to live in a free society. Maybe we should all develop the habit of taking regular breathers in Canada, the better to take stock of our actual situation.
French: I sometimes think people argue so much over political or legal terms, such as “police state” or “constitutional crisis,” that we distract ourselves from focusing on the terrible facts of the injustice that’s taking place right in front of our face. I think Masha’s arguments about a police state are extremely compelling, but no one has to agree to use that term to unite with Masha in saying that the administration’s actions are utterly appalling, deeply unjust and profoundly dangerous.
The question I ask myself isn’t, “do we have a police state?” but rather, “Is there a line Trump won’t cross?” In other words, is there any self-restraint at all? And if the answer is no (as I think it is), then we have to realize that the only things preventing America from sliding into violent despotism are the courage of Trump’s opponents and the strength of those institutions that are willing to take a stand.
Polgreen: I remember a conversation I had with Masha in the first days of this Trump administration. I invoked the hell Republicans would likely pay in the midterms, and Masha said something to the effect of, if there are midterms. I am on record as being deeply averse to catastrophic thinking, though definitely not immune to panic. And I now feel pretty chastened by my own blithe, if limited, optimism. I just did not have the capacity in those first weeks to imagine how bad it could get.
Healy: And now?
Polgreen: Seeing the broad capitulation of institutions and individuals has left me thinking much more as Masha does here. Every inch given is a permission slip to push a little further next time. Every failure of solidarity is a crack with which to wedge the foes of autocracy a little further apart. Bargaining makes fundamental rights seem negotiable, and negotiations are what Trump wants. Anything less than total refusal feels wholly inadequate.
Healy: David, I want to get your views as a lawyer about the creeping criminalization of free speech. We are seeing it around university campuses and around not only pro-Palestinian action but of pro-Palestinian thought. You had Johns Hopkins tell faculty and staff members not to get in the way of ICE detentions. You have the various agreements being made with Trump by Columbia University and, perhaps, Harvard soon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomats overseas to scrutinize social media content of some visa applicants for evidence of criticizing America and Israel. As an Opinion colleague mentioned the other day, screening for criticism of the U.S. is chilling — but it’s remarkable to screen for criticism of another country.
French: The atmosphere for free speech in this country is the worst it’s been since the Red Scare. This might sound strange, but I’m actually more alarmed by the capitulation of so many powerful legal and academic institutions than I am by Trump’s unconstitutional demands.
Healy: Say more about that — because I know, as a lawyer, you are concerned about the unconstitutional demands!
French: So, between the 1950s and 1970s, American courts developed a series of very robust legal doctrines designed to protect free speech — partly as a result of the Red Scare, but also because of efforts to suppress the civil rights movement. If NATO is the geopolitical version of saying “never again” to invasion and genocide, then First Amendment jurisprudence is the American version of saying “never again” to the censorship and tyranny of the past.
But to rely on the First Amendment, you have to have the courage to go to court, to sue the administration, to secure court rulings and then make the president defy the Supreme Court if he wants to continue his campaign of censorship. Of course he could do just that, but Paul, Weiss and Skadden, Arps are making Trump’s work easier — and his opponents’ work harder — by throwing in the towel before they even attempt to appeal to a legal system that should be built for exactly this moment.
Tufekci: Notice the many intellectuals and Silicon Valley folks who complained about the stifling of free speech before this year, and note how many of them are now completely silent or even cheering what’s going on with the apparent criminalization of campus speech. There are a few principled people who have spoken out, thankfully, but I find myself constantly shaking my head at so much silence. I also agree with David that the unprincipled capitulation is more important and worrying than any single attack.
Healy: I want to bear down on the belief among some Americans about the growing irrelevance of the law, judges and lawyers. A colleague noted how Trump allies apparently managed to get Andrew Tate out of Romania (and into Florida) — but now they are powerless against the “foreign sovereign” El Salvador to help a man they accidentally deported there. David wrote recently about how Trump has not intimidated the courts so far. But I keep wondering if Americans will still have faith in the rule of law when the Trump administration keeps applying or interpreting it however it likes.
Gessen: That’s such a good point, about Andrew Tate and Romania versus the man deported to El Salvador. For the record, while it’s very important to tell the stories of individuals subjected to injustice, it makes me uncomfortable when we focus on the man who had protected status, or the Venezuelan gay makeup artist, or the young barber, who were on those planes to El Salvador — when in fact every single man who was on those planes was put there without due process and is now confined to a prison, indefinitely. This well-observed contrast between the fates of two different men in foreign prisons points to another way in which Trump is transforming power. By sidelining the courts on the one hand and decimating the federal bureaucracy on the other, Trump is concentrating power in an extreme way.
Putin holds an annual televised hotline during which a person might ask him to fix a leaking roof in a school building or intervene in a salary dispute — trying to totally normalize the idea that one person wields all the power and nothing can function without him.
I think this is how Trump understands power, too. It’s true that Trump has not intimidated the courts so far. But his administration seems to be consistently ignoring court rulings, whether on deportations, or on the trans-people-in-the-military ban, or on funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. By word and deed, Trump is showing it’s always up to him.
French: I’m so glad Masha said that. Violations of due process are not unjust only when inflicted on the innocent. The Fifth and 14th Amendment due process protections apply to any “person” in the United States, not just to citizens or certainly not just to the innocent. Indeed, due process is how we try to discern guilt or innocence. Like Masha, I fear that by focusing on the terrible individual injustices, we might (perversely enough) send the message that a due process violation is only a problem when it inflicts harm on the innocent. Due process is a fundamental human right.
Tufekci: Patrick, rule of law isn’t something that happens in a vacuum. Currently, judges are constantly being targeted by name and face as well as through their family members. Elon Musk has posted the name and photo of the daughter of a judge who ruled against something the administration wanted to do, even though it was a temporary injunction to stop them from doing something until higher courts stepped in. And that’s not the only example of a judge or a judge’s family being targeted like that. Institutions are made of people, too. People who keep thinking courts will surely put a stop to the excesses have to remember that courts are run by vulnerable human beings who are also subject to pressure and targeting.
Healy: So, how does everything we’re talking about differ from the architecture of the war on terror? I think a bit of compare-and-contrast would be helpful here. I was a war reporter in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East in the early 2000s, and returned to the United States of the Patriot Act, enhanced interrogation tactics and Guantánamo Bay.
French: When I think of the present moment compared to the early 2000s, it’s as if the Trump administration is experiencing greater political hysteria, with far less cause.
The Trump administration is acting as if America faces a threat to its existence — but from immigrants, Democrats and Canadians, and not from a powerful and heavily armed terrorist group that just inflicted catastrophic damage in the heart of two of America’s great cities.
Also, while there were obvious excesses and outrages in our response to Al Qaeda (or during our invasion of Iraq), the legal issues surrounding our counterinsurgency operations were infinitely more complex than the simple legal norms that Trump is defying today. It is not easy to fight an enemy that deliberately and systematically violates the law of war, and we often faced rather novel legal issues created when an army confronts unlawful, un-uniformed enemy combatants.
But we learned. We improved. During my deployment in Iraq, my unit provided suspected Qaeda insurgents with more humane treatment and due process than the Trump administration is providing to some visa holders who write pro-Palestinian op-eds. It’s a farce.
Gessen: There are always different stories one can tell about any given political moment, but the story that is relevant to me goes back to the American response to 9/11. The police infrastructure that is now deployed against immigrants was created then. But it’s a lot more than that: It’s the story of America that was forged in the wake of 9/11 — the story of a country under siege, cowering and baring its teeth against a hostile world. That was an insane story to tell about the most powerful country in the world, and it is the story that Trump is now telling about all of his policies, from the crackdown on immigrants to tariffs.
Tufekci: Masha is right — some of the machinery for the current erosion of rights came to being after 9/11, and was upheld and even expanded by both Republicans and Democrats. This is why it’s so important to defend fundamental rights on principle. It’s always good for people to imagine a tool in the hands of someone that doesn’t like them before deciding it’s a great tool simply because they happen to like who wields it at the moment.
Healy: Lydia, when you have an opposition effort that comes to life — Cory Booker’s marathon speech, the Bernie Sanders-A.O.C. rallies around the country, the “Hands Off!” protests this weekend, even the plunging stock market, which is its own form of opposition from the business world — what does that tell us? Is that real and consequential opposition, or is it a kind of performance of opposition and resistance that doesn’t have any real impact on Trump and his administration?
Polgreen: There is clearly a hunger to manifest in the physical world the anger and betrayal many Americans are feeling, and I am glad that some Democrats are waking up and showing up to give a venue and bring some focus to that anger. Booker’s speech is a welcome intervention, as is the move to put holds on nominees in the Senate. But I have to wonder — what took so long?
That said, I think the disgust at the Democrats, reflected in abysmal polling, is a bit of a red herring. Just look at the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, which was won in a blowout by the Democrat-aligned candidate. Or the thinning margins in deep red Florida house races. The decision not to put Elise Stefanik’s House seat in a strong Republican district into play tells you a lot about how the White House thinks this is going.
But there is also polling that shows that Trump remains consistently high, at just about 50 percent, on immigration. Of course, much depends on how you ask the question. When asked about specific practices, like the one that sent a gay makeup artist to a gruesome prison in El Salvador with no due process, people naturally say they are against that kind of thing. But revulsion to a sympathetic individual story elides the broader point. Immigration seems to be the place where the greatest cruelty and crudeness is on display, and he has continued to enjoy relatively high support on the issue, which tells you something about where Americans stand.
Healy: Trump talked a lot in his first term about roughing up protesters, “shooting” looters, and allegedly privately asked about shooting protesters in the legs. Will we get there? We already have, at Kent State in 1970, and Nixon then won easily in 1972. But what I’m asking is: are the conditions being laid for violence by the state against its citizens, or is that hyperbolic, alarmist?
Polgreen: I have been deeply worried since Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as secretary of defense about the wanton use of military violence against civilians in the United States. His lobbying on behalf of soldiers convicted or accused of heinous crimes against civilians is pretty chilling, especially because it represents a big shift in his views over time. I don’t find it hard to imagine him sending soldiers to shoot civilians if Trump orders it. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act, absurdly, against a Venezuelan gang. There is no reason to think Trump would hesitate to use his extraordinary powers to deploy the U.S. military on American soil to put down protests he doesn’t like, and even less reason to think Hegseth would refuse him.
And even before you get to the extreme point of using U.S. troops, you already have agents from ICE willing to engage in what seem to be totally lawless arrests. One might have once taken comfort in the possibility that the police, members of state National Guards and other armed agents would exercise restraint when faced with unarmed protest. Not so much anymore.
Gessen: It’s already happening, and it happened during Trump’s first term. During the Black Lives Matter marches in the summer of 2020, we saw violence, some of it extreme, deployed against protesters. I am thinking, in particular, about Portland, Ore., where, in addition to the physical violence, protesters or people suspected of going to or from a protest were reportedly getting snatched up off the street. Why am I bringing this up now? Because the force deployed in Portland five years ago was the Department of Homeland Security, the militarized outfit that is not subject to the constraints imposed on the military acting domestically. I have argued that the D.H.S. was destined to become our secret police — and now, with ICE raids and detentions, we see exactly how it functions.
The distinction implied in your question, Patrick, is between noncitizens and citizens. But, in just a couple of weeks, we have seen the focus of ICE raids expand from people who are in this country without legal status to legal permanent residents. At this rate, in a couple of weeks naturalized citizens will be seen as a legitimate target (this was already done in the first Trump administration), as will be the children of immigrants (see the executive order repealing birthright citizenship). Other categories of citizens will follow. And, as I noted, D.H.S. has already been deployed against citizens who were protesting.
French: I keep going back to the argument Trump supporters made time and again in 2016. They take him “seriously, not literally.” So when he talked about shooting protesters or immigrants, they interpreted him as saying, “We need law and order and a secure border, and I really mean it.”
But Jan. 6 should have ended that nonsense. He always wanted to be taken seriously and literally, but key members of his first-term administration threw their bodies in front of his worst plans. When they were gone, Trump was unleashed, and now he’s surrounded by sycophants and fanatics. Trump has no line, and neither do the key members of his team.
Polgreen: I’m glad Masha brought up the special role of D.H.S, because it brings us back to 9/11. I remember the first time I heard the name “Department of Homeland Security” it made my skin crawl. It felt like such an un-American name — vague, capacious, full of trouble. The perfect vessel for an authoritarian project.
Tufekci: We should take politicians seriously and literally. If people talk themselves into complacency, we should expect exactly the result that complacency will bring.
Healy: So, what are the danger signs for America that have not happened but that we should be watching for? What are the forms of intimidation that do not involve unmarked vans and arrests and detentions?
Gessen: This may come across as an infuriatingly soft answer, but I believe it’s the most important thing. I think of it as intellectual drift. Consider ideas that seemed beyond the pale to you a few years ago that you may now think twice about questioning in the company of people you don’t know very well. It may be something like the border wall. Remember 2016, when Trump’s incessant “build the wall” served as a sort of shorthand for his belligerent, fear-mongering politics? It seems mild now, not just because he has said many more outrageous things, but also because the need for extreme border security has become a pretty mainstream idea. Now think about things that seem insane now. Invading Canada or Greenland? Taking possession of the Gaza Strip and expelling Palestinians (a pretty mainstream idea in Israel already)? Claiming that trans people don’t exist (but, despite our nonexistence, are very dangerous)?
Healy: Aligning with Putin and saying it’s the president of Ukraine who’s a dictator.
Gessen: Exactly. When you find yourself looking around the room before saying that Russia started a war of aggression against a democratic country, you know we are deep in the territory of autocratic intellectual drift. (I know you asked about forms of intimidation — I think intimidation is at work in this kind of intellectual drift, but it’s the intimidation in the ether rather than in physical form.)
Polgreen: I am examining my own responses to government action very carefully, because what we guard against is a sign of what we allow to come into the realm of possibility. A couple of weeks ago I idly wondered if I should start carrying my passport around with me. My ethnicity is ambiguous, and I thought, well, it would be a big hassle if I was detained by ICE for some reason. And I pretty quickly decided that I would not do this — though I don’t begrudge anyone making a different choice. It felt like a surrender, and seeing powerful institutions surrender one after another, I could not countenance doing the same myself. It is a small thing, but I do think it will be up to individuals and smaller institutions to make these refusals and bear the consequences for the full horror of what is happening to become visible.
Tufekci: I’m an academic so I’m all about reading history books. But when it comes to now, I keep feeling there is too much meta-analysis — what will happen in the future and what exact line could be crossed as a sign of what’s to come — rather than a strong, singular focus on recognizing what’s happening and figuring out what needs to be done, now, this moment, in order to protect fundamental rights from further erosion and crucial institutions from hard-to-reverse destruction.
French: It’s not each new Trump action that alarms me nearly as much as each new capitulation. Each new capitulation hurts America more than each new executive order or unconstitutional mandate. We have the legal and institutional tools to deal with a man like Donald Trump, but it takes courage and will to use those tools.
But for the invertebrates of the American right — including members of the Republican establishment who loathe Trump behind closed doors and rally to his defense on Fox News — Trump would already be gone, impeached and convicted in 2019 and remembered in history as weak and ineffectual man who challenged a constitutional republic, and failed.
Healy: I want to finish with an open-ended question. Is there anything on your mind — or troubling you — that you want to bring up or return to?
Polgreen: Nothing is inevitable, and no process is unstoppable. This goes multiple ways. A failure to imagine how much our system of government relied on what turned out to be extremely soft norms got us to this point. The tools that have preserved and expanded democracy in the past — the courts, elections, the free press, universities — may be weaker than we thought. But failing to imagine that Americans do have the power to resist and obstruct, or to think that because powerful institutions are capitulating that smaller, weaker ones don’t stand a chance is to make a fatal error. Trump and his allies want us to believe that they cannot be stopped, but they are lying.
Tufekci: I will echo Lydia. The future is not set in stone, and a wake-up call should be a call to action. There’s no requirement for people to agree on everything else to come together to defend fundamental rights and liberties — especially free speech, due process and the rule of law — and basic principles like checks and balances. I know the saying about the moral arc of the universe and how it bends toward justice. As nice a quote as that is, it’s not something that just happens. The arc only bends toward justice if people are willing to take risks and work hard to bend it in that direction.
Gessen: Lydia, I’m glad you brought up the failure of the imagination. The things we are experiencing — a profound destabilization of the political and economic order, the introduction of political terror (for this is what a secret police does) — put us in a state of anxiety that’s terrible for the imagination. It’s hard to imagine the worst or the best when it takes all you have to put one foot in front of the other. And yet, to prevent the worst, we have to be able to imagine not only ways to resist Trump but a future for this country that makes this resistance necessary.
French: I often think about the letter John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798. “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” he wrote, “Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”
Another way of putting it is that character is destiny. We can create checks and balances. We can establish constitutional doctrines. But if the people who defend those doctrines abandon their posts, then we are lost.
From the comments section (NYT)
R
Ratan
NJ
April 4
Even now, Republicans get some resistance only because the economy is going down. If economy is doing good, no one will bother about human rights violations or the hit on the Constitution itself. In fact, millions of voters would cheer them up.
David French
Opinion Columnist
April 4
@Ratan I think this is one of the central insights of the moment. Sadly, a critical mass of the American people have a very high tolerance for corruption and even oppression so long as their personal circumstances are good. That’s a key reason why arguments about the rule of law or democracy didn’t resonate with so many millions of Americans. They may not exactly like or approve of Jan. 6, but they didn’t feel its impact in their lives. I think we’re learning the extent to which the success of the American experiment has always depended on the honor system — on a political class that wasn’t willing to fully exploit public passion and was willing to voluntarily constrain its worst impulses by (however imperfectly) maintaining basic respect for the truth and the constitutional order.
