What about discussing the impact of cuts to NIH, and other scientific agencies and studies? As usual this group is focused on politics and economics. As an academic scientist I can confirm this has been absolutely devastating to American science. You can’t expect private for profit companies to take over fundamental research and development. Trump’s actions are likely to accelerate and guarantee China overtakes the US as the global science leader.
With all due respect all of you seem to omit the relentless propaganda flowing from the right wing media. Whether NEWSMAX or FOX news, a profusion of misinformation, extremism and outright lies flows to Trump supporters billed as true information .
Add to that the corrosive effect of social media and such platforms as X and you have an echo chamber of reinforcement and demonization of anyone who disagrees. Only when economic and social policies truly hurt his constituents will his support by the base of the Republican Party erode.
DAVID BROOKS, ROSS DOUTHAT, DAVID FRENCH AND BRET STEPHENS
David BrooksRoss DouthatDavid French and Bret Stephens
Mr. Brooks, Mr. Douthat, Mr. French and Mr. Stephens are Opinion columnists.
Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with four Times Opinion columnists about the Trump administration’s popularity among Republicans and why so many in the party believe the country is heading in the right direction.
Patrick Healy: David, Bret, David, Ross: Donald Trump is the only president in our lifetimes who’s had a net-negative job approval rating in his first 100 days in office. Trump also has the largest gap in approval ratings in 80 years — 90 percent of Republicans like his performance, while only 4 percent of Democrats do. Those Trump supporters are really on board with him; more registered voters think America is on the right track than at any point since 2004, according to a new NBC News poll. To be clear, a majority still say America’s on the wrong track, and Trump’s polling on the economy is sagging. But I want to dig into why more voters feel better about America’s direction now than compared with under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump 1.0.
And I wanted to do so through the eyes of my more conservative colleagues. The four of you span the ideological spectrum on the right, and you’ve all written extensively about Trump. Why do so many Republicans like the direction Trump is taking the country in? Is it about his style, or his policies, or the mind-set and mood of the G.O.P., or something else?
David Brooks: I’d start with the world we’ve been living in for the last decade or so. According to an Ipsos survey last year, 59 percent of Americans think our country is in decline. Sixty percent believe “the system is broken.” Sixty-nine percent believe the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.” If those are your priors, then you’re going to be happy with a president who wields a wrecking ball.
Healy: As Trump liked to say while campaigning, “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Brooks: I’d add another phrase: “brokenism.” This is the belief systempopularized by Alana Newhouse in Tablet magazine in 2022. It’s the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down. Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption. Do you remember that 2013 study that people who consumed a lot of media about the Boston Marathon bombing experienced “higher acute stress” than those who were actually at the bombing? There’s something about screens that contributes to a catastrophizing mind-set.
David French: In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans (sadly!) want their opponents to suffer. They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the “deep state” or RINOs.
So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who’s being disrupted really matters — and if it’s the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain. Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms. Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire.
Healy: That element of gleeful animosity comes through on Trump’s social media posts, David — like a “Take that!” smack, sticking it to universities or shutting down D.E.I. One of Trump’s most effective rallying cries in the last campaign was “I am your retribution.”
Ross Douthat: I think there are all kinds of ways in which Trump’s popularity is connected to distinctive shifts in the culture in the last 15 years — the trends on both left and right that have boosted populists all over the Western world. But it’s also important to stress that part of what Republicans like about Donald Trump is just that Donald Trump is a Republican.
His biggest policy accomplishment so far is shutting down illegal immigration — something Republican voters strongly support. His signature legislative goal is extending his first-term tax cuts — a classic Republican policy goal. He wants to fire federal bureaucrats, downsize and devolve the Department of Education, cut regulations — this isn’t some populist rebuke of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism, this IS Ronald Reagan’s conservatism! So is picking fights with liberal judges and liberal universities. And if you told someone in, say, 2004 that a Republican president was stretching the boundaries of civil liberties to deport noncitizens accused of sympathizing with Hamas and Hezbollah, absolutely nobody would regard his popularity with G.O.P. voters as a puzzle in need of explanation.
There are important ways in which Trump’s style and tactics and some of his policy goals — the trade and tariff agenda, above all; foreign policy to some degree — are not old-school Republican politics as usual. But we shouldn’t exaggerate the break or make a deep mystery of why Republican voters would react favorably to much of what he’s doing.
Bret Stephens: Patrick, Alexander Hamilton supplied one part of the answer in Federalist No. 70: “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” So leave to one side questions about what Trump is doing. What most Americans notice is that Trump is doing: bombing the Houthis, tariffing our neighbors, strong-arming President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, threatening Hamas, abolishing U.S.A.I.D. He’s the guy supporters and opponents alike struggle to keep pace with — while he grips their attention.
A second part — and this is especially important for Trump critics like me to acknowledge — is that at least some of what he’s doing is succeeding. It is important that we finally have regained control over the southern border — proving, if nothing else, that we aren’t helpless in the face of these vast migratory flows. Getting rid of D.E.I. programs that had become a pervasive system of racial gerrymanders is, by my lights, another achievement. Demanding that Columbia University ban face-covering masks and enforce meaningful discipline on menacing and disruptive pro-Palestinian protesters in exchange for continued government funding strikes me as a good conclusion. And I really don’t think the nation will miss the Department of Education when it’s gone.
Brooks: Bret, you now live in a country in which “tariffing” is a verb. I feel like this signifies the end of Western civilization. It started when consultants began using “learnings” as a noun. The path to perdition is slow, but accelerating.
Stephens: It’s a legit verb, David. For realz.
French: I’m glad Bret brought up the border and the Houthis. These were two areas where the Biden administration failed (without good excuse), and the ease with which Trump pivoted to a different and better course highlights that many Democrats still don’t quite understand how poorly the Biden administration performed in its approach to both crises.
Healy: And you’re seeing in poll numbers now that the Democratic Party is at a nadir in popularity. It boils down to trust, ideas and leadership.
Brooks: I’d offer up one more word for consideration: “exclusion.” Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions. Trump has gone after these institutions big time — the universities, the Department of Education, the State Department. Of course, the MAGA crowd feels justified revenge.
Stephens: An important point, David. I know liberals love to point out that MAGA politicians like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and Elise Stefanik all went to Ivy League schools (as did Donald Trump, though I doubt it was on account of merit). But those campus conservatives were always ideological minorities at elite colleges, and it’s where they learned to loathe the contempt they felt coming from liberal professors and peers.
Douthat: Fortunately, all of us have learned to rise above it instead.
Stephens: At the University of Chicago, Ross, I was almost a liberal. Almost. Relatively speaking.
French: I never did, Ross. That’s why I sued so many universities during my litigation career, but always with an eye toward protecting constitutional rights, not denying them to my political opponents
Brooks: A lot of elite conservatives continue to struggle with what I call the near-abroad problem. They may dislike MAGA, but they (we) are mostly around progressives or moderates on a day-to-day basis, by virtue of being elite. These progressives sometimes make our teeth hurt. We react more strongly to minor sins of the people across campus than the major sins of the people far away. This is something I’m working on.
Healy: I want to bear down on the idea that more Americans think the country is on the right track with Trump. I have three theories to stress-test with you — or else I want to hear your own.
One: Authoritarians are popular, until they aren’t — that’s how it works.
Two: The enthusiasm is a honeymoon stemming from the November election, where Democrats got a big comeuppance from Trump.
Three: A lot of Americans think Trump is generally right in both his diagnosis and Rx of government — that nothing terribly bad is going to happen, that the State Department can run foreign aid and the Treasury and the states can run Education Department programs, that tariffs will be a net positive in the long run, and that for all the sound and fury (and illegality), Trump 2.0 is trying to help America avoid becoming like societies struggling with long-term decline, weak national identities and sclerotic economies.
And I’m open for business on a fourth theory, or more.
Douthat: First, I would stress that Trump is not terribly popular, and undoubtedly will become less so if the stock market trends down and recession fears mount. He has a commanding position within his party, but even at his apotheosis his approval ratings barely got over 50 percent.
Second, Americans lived through the first Trump term, when sky-is-falling rhetoric was commonplace, but the average American did not experience a crisis until Covid hit. Then, through the Biden term, the media dialed back the crisis rhetoric dramatically, but in reality, inflation soared, the border seemed wide open, the world became much more dangerous, and the president was manifestly incapable of doing his job. So, while you can make a plausible case that this time is different, that Trump is more empowered and therefore more dangerous, you should still expect many Americans to wait for proof of that in their daily lives before they immediately re-embrace his first term’s narrative of crisis.
Brooks: I’d take you back to a 1971 Clint Eastwood movie, “Dirty Harry,” or a 1974 Charles Bronson movie, “Death Wish.” Both of those were produced in a time of social decay, and they’re both about a guy who is willing to break or bend the rules to restore order. To this day, there is a large chunk of Americans who think the system is so broken, we need someone who will break the rules. That’s what’s happening.
Plus, the unfortunate fact is that there is almost always a kernel of truth to Trump & Co.’s assaults. The most noxious thing they have done in my view is eviscerate U.S.A.I.D. Millions will die. But it was true that U.S.A.I.D. was a bureaucratic nightmare. A generation of administrators there tried to fix it. The problem — which the Trumpies don’t understand — is that a lot of the sinecures were established by members of Congress who insisted they not be removed. Trump policies are not 100 percent wrong; they are just overreactions. Destroying an agency rather than fixing what is wrong and saving what is right.
Stephens: Unless you happen to live within a few miles of Capitol Hill, you probably don’t give two figs whether our (sometimes misspent) foreign aid is distributed via a semiautonomous agency called U.S.A.I.D. or directly through the State Department itself. You also probably think it’s no tragedy that government workers should experience the periodic layoffs that the rest of American workers have lived through since forever. The sort of inside-the-Beltway moves that feel like political earthquakes to a certain kind of Washington insider leave Trump voters somewhere between indifferent and pleased.
The other point that can’t be emphasized enough: Trump wouldn’t be as popular as he is with his side of the country if Democrats and progressives weren’t as unpopular with most sides of the country. Just the fact that he drives the Rachel Maddows of the world into fits of rage and despair and thoughts of European exile is reason enough for many Americans to support him. Sometimes even including me.
French: Those of us who follow politics closely always seem to forget that we’re the strange ones. I really question how much the average rank-and-file Republican even knows about most of these early controversies. If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, “woke” programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.
That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.
Healy: I want to return to a word I used in the last question: illegality. Democrats and plenty of independents, and not a few judges, see illegality or evidence of it in some of Trump’s actions on federal spending, agency dismantlement, deportations, defiance of judicial rulings. Why do some conservatives see illegality differently?
Douthat: First, some of these moves are not obviously illegal, and exist in a zone of contestation over presidential power and constitutional interpretation where a normal partisan naturally takes his own side’s side.
Healy: We’ll get to some specific moves a bit later. Go on.
Douthat: Second, I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in its everyday impact — schools closed and masks mandated, ideological double standards for different forms of public gathering and protest, ideological speech codes tacitly or explicitly imposed — than anything they experienced under Trump.
This sense of things may change as Trump pushes the envelope of presidential power or as the right embraces its own forms of censoriousness. Indeed, already you can see some factions that aligned with Trump because they were anti-woke start to break away or critique MAGA excesses.
But it’s still important to grasp that for many Americans, the fights over presidential prerogatives within the federal bureaucracy feel much more distant from their own liberties than liberalism’s recent agenda did.
Stephens: What I see is a president doing things that are, if not outright illegal, genuinely scary, like trying to go after the Washington law firm representing Jack Smith, the former special counsel. At a minimum, Trump represents an almost unprecedented stress test to the judicial system and the separation of powers. And if he starts openly defying Supreme Court rulings à la Andrew Jackson, that’s when you’ll find me at the barricades.
That said, some of what Trump is doing is simply a turbocharged version of what his liberal predecessors did while the mainstream press remained mostly mum. Remember Barack Obama’s threats of unilateral executive action through his phone and his pen? Or Joe Biden’s almost open flouting of the Supreme Court with his student loan forgiveness schemes? I also think millions of Americans are tuning out some of the claims of Trump’s unconstitutional behavior as so much partisan noise. That’s one of the downsides of some of the more doubtful efforts by liberal prosecutors to put Trump in jail.
French: First, I sincerely doubt that most Republicans think or believe that Trump has done anything illegal so far. Right-wing media is full of legal talking heads telling their loyal audiences that the various district judges are lawless. The right is even attacking Amy Coney Barrett, calling her a grifter or a RINO for exercising her independent judgment.
We’ve seen this pattern throughout the Trump years. Trump will advance an illegal or unconstitutional policy, MAGA lawyers will spring to MAGA media to rationalize and justify it, and then, when even conservative judges or justices block Trump’s actions, they scream that the courts are lawless, not Trump.
Brooks: As a matter of principle, Democrats should be screaming bloody murder about Trump’s threat to the Constitution. As a matter of political tactics, I think they’re better off emphasizing Trumpian incompetence. Determining the constitutionality of some act requires a law degree, but incompetence is something we all recognize — and there is a lot of it.
Healy: On the economy, I ask in all seriousness: Are Republicans really OK if Trump drives America into a recession? Listening to Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, this week, stock market corrections are healthy and recessions may be sometimes necessary. Putting aside the macroeconomic finer points there, I’m confused that so many Republicans think we’re on the right track when that track may be leading to recession. Are they not paying attention?
French: It’s so important to distinguish between the core of MAGA — which dominates discourse online — from the bulk of voters who put Trump back in the White House. Online MAGA will pay any price and bear any burden for Trump; they’ll even buy electric cars to keep the DOGE dream alive. But the people who actually made him president were primarily concerned about prices, and it wasn’t close. If the economy tanks, MAGA will stay with Trump, but we know from the 2020 election that enough voters will step off the Trump train to swing the balance of power back to the Democrats.
Douthat: It’s not unique to MAGA, though — real partisans don’t change their vote just because the economy goes bad, and especially not under polarized conditions. It’s not like the inflation under Biden suddenly made partisan Democrats open to a vote for Trump. But as David says, Trump’s current coalition includes a lot of not-that-partisan nonloyalists who voted for him because they thought he’d be good for the economy, and those voters will be voting Democratic in the midterms without a second thought if we’re in a recession.
Brooks: I do think Trump’s popularity will plummet if the economy really heads south. People will tolerate a lot from their government, but not unnecessary chaos.
Healy: And not when Trump promised an economic boom from Day 1.
Brooks: People forget how many voters like Trump mostly because he’s a businessman who, they think, knows how to “grow the economy” (speaking of words that should have never been verbs). If that myth is busted, things will head south fast. In fact, I worry the political momentum will shift so fast that the Democrats won’t be ready to take advantage. They’ll still be dealing with their own trauma, intellectual incoherence and recriminations. They won’t have time to offer something new, which is why parties recently have not reformed themselves after defeat. The other side screws up too fast.
Stephens: Well, Treasury Secretary Bessent is right. Market corrections arehealthy. Recessions should sometimes happen. Having the government or the Federal Reserve ensure that markets only go up is the road to inflating bubbles that ought to be pricked, and to zombifying large parts of the economy that ought to be allowed to die. The practice by presidents of both parties to ensure that profits are privatized and risk is socialized is a road to ruin.
The problem is, trying to go about this by jacking up tariffs in incoherent and unpredictable ways is the worst possible way of pricking bubbles. But I wouldn’t be so sure that the economy is going to tank. Markets usually like deregulation, permitting reform, “Drill, baby drill,” an extension of the 2017 tax cuts. And Trump can always lift the tariffs. Like Soviet diplomacy under Andrei Gromyko, Trump has a gift for creating crises so that he can take credit for solving them.
Healy: I’d like to do a lightning round and go through actions Trump has taken and learn if you agree or disagree with each of them — to help readers understand how the four of you with histories on the right see these issues. First: Trump’s negotiations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
Brooks: Let’s not overthink this — siding with a villainous dictator against a brave democrat is repulsive. That said, I don’t think we’re going to return to the postwar international order. The 21st century was bound to look a lot different from the 20th. Those of us internationalists have some thinking to do.
Douthat: Negotiating with Putin in some form is an absolute strategic necessity, given the situation of the war and American power overall. Which doesn’t mean that Trump will produce a good deal.
French: Of all the outrages of Trump’s first two months, his betrayal of Ukraine is likely to be the most consequential. If he continues on this course, he’ll hand Russia a military victory, rip the heart out of the Western alliance, and place a diminished America in a bystander role as great power competition likely leads to nuclear proliferation and greater international instability.
I agree with David that the 21st century is going to look different from the 20th. But this does not mean our alliances are somehow less valuable, and that it’s better for America to alienate Europe for the sake of embracing Russia.
We should want the European powers to increase defense spending as partners and friends, not as angry, estranged former allies. We need their help.
Stephens: Trump at his absolute worst. A betrayal of the free world and its courageous champions in Ukraine. A betrayal of the promises of the Atlantic Charter and 80 years of American global leadership against totalitarian aggression. And a portent of betrayal for every other small country — whether it’s Latvia, Taiwan or Israel — that looks to America for the protection of independence and liberty. I can only hope Putin’s refusal to agree to a cease-fire does something to sober Trump’s judgment.
Healy: The federal government sending hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, deciding they were gang members even as a federal judge was assessing their cases, and doing so even though the judge ordered the deportation flights to turn around and head back to the United States.
Stephens: I’d need to learn a few more details, but it sounds legally iffy. Still, not the hill Trump’s critics should want to die on.
Douthat: Deporting gang leaders is good. But claiming wartime powers to go around the normal deportation system seems guaranteed — as in the War on Terror, to stress again Trump’s continuity with past Republicans — to yield abuses and mistakes, and that may have already happened in this case.
Healy: Trump calling for the impeachment of that judge — and the notion of impeaching or disregarding judges generally whom Trump disagrees with.
Stephens: Terrible. I only stop to observe that all the liberals who went berserk over John Roberts’s nomination to the court 20 years ago owe the chief justice an apology, especially after his intervention in this case. He’s a model of conservative jurisprudence.
Douthat: Trump’s rhetoric against his opponents, judicial or otherwise, always goes too far. But I think elected officials aggressively attacking judges who make aggressive rulings is a completely normal part of democratic politics in a country with a powerful judicial branch, and I would say the same about many sweeping liberal attacks on the Roberts court and its conservative justices in the last few years.
Brooks: Atrocious. As usual, Trump is being patrimonialist — treating the U.S. government like his own family business.
French: It’s not just dreadful, but it’s also part of a calculated attack on the role of the judiciary in the constitutional order. Russell Vought, Trump’s influential head of Office of Management and Budget, has said that the right “needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years, and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches.
Healy: Trump’s confidence in Elon Musk as an essential partner in reinventing government, to use an old Al Gore phrase.
Douthat: Let’s just say I was more optimistic about this experiment two months ago than I am today.
Brooks: Elon Musk knows as much about the government as I know about rocketry. But deregulation could be my favorite thing Trump accomplishes. There is a pretty compelling link between overregulation and economic stagnation. See: Europe.
French: Government inefficiency and overregulation are very real and very serious problems, and Elon Musk is the wrong person to take on the challenge. He’s a perfect illustration of the reality that accomplishment and expertise in one field do not translate into every field. Or, to put it another way, focus on getting us to Mars, Elon. You’re out of your depth on the budget.
Stephens: In 2018, I wrote a column calling Elon Musk “the Donald of Silicon Valley.” Not bad, except that I completely misjudged where Tesla’s stock price was heading. Musk is off to a bad start in his government career, but I sincerely wish him success. The federal government isn’t just too big, it’s obese. Elon may yet be its Ozempic.
Healy: Trump trying to ban transgender people from serving in the military, which a federal judge ruled as unconstitutional on Tuesday.
Brooks: Pure cruelty. This is one of those issues where anecdotes prevail over reality. We need to be able to defeat China in a possible naval confrontation. Is this really what we should be thinking about?
Stephens: I don’t think the military was “cruel” when transgender people were barred from military service for the first seven and a half years of Barack Obama’s presidency. This is an example of the deep disconnect between the moral certitudes of the part of the country that rarely serves in the military and the cultural convictions of the part of the country that often does — and on whom we all depend for our safety.
French: I see the matter primarily as a question of readiness, not rights. Medical transitions can be very physically challenging, sometimes including physically debilitating treatments. That can affect readiness a great deal. In that circumstance, the question is less about transgender status and more about the physical realities of complex medical procedures.
Douthat: I will just say that the policy seems to be obviously within the commander in chief’s constitutional powers, and the judicial ruling to the contrary is a good example of why many conservatives don’t feel they need to take the wider run of anti-Trump rulings all that seriously.
Healy: Here’s my last question — I’ve been asking a lot about specific policies. A lot of Republicans like what they are seeing. But are they missing the forest for the trees? Do the individual policies matter if America’s economy tanks, if there’s a constitutional crisis over defying court orders, if there’s geopolitical upheaval in Ukraine or Eastern Europe or Taiwan?
Douthat: We are two months into the presidency, and we just lived through four years of dramatic global and domestic upheaval under a Democratic president whose manifest incapacity was deliberately concealed from the country. I have a million concerns about where this administration is going, but it’s a bit soon to attack the president’s supporters for being irrationally loyal.
Brooks: Personally, I think Trump has set the world record for over-reading his mandate. I think his incompetence and bad character will drag him far lower this term than they did in his first. (This term, Trump is actually trying to do things.) But I wake up each morning and ask: What if I’m wrong? What if Trump wins the next four years? We’re entering an era of junkyard dog politics. Maybe Trump is the guy to stand up to Xi Jinping. Maybe governments need a pummeling cleanse before they can reinvent themselves. Maybe the vibe shift is permanent and the progressive march through the institutions is over. Maybe the American economy is a wonder to behold and it survives what Trump is throwing at it while our allies continue to stagnate.
If people like me focus on all the Trump failures that make us feel good, we may once again get run over by reality.
French: The big disasters (or big triumphs) always swamp individual policies, and most people judge presidents through the prism of their own personal situation. That’s exactly why Jan. 6, 2021, didn’t end Trump’s political career. Very few voters liked it, but they didn’t see it as relevant to their lives — at least not nearly as relevant as the price of groceries or disorder in the streets.
I completely agreed with the Democratic message that the rule of law was on the ballot in 2024, but I also know that voters will put up with an enormous amount of scandal and misconduct if the economy is strong and have no patience for corruption when the economy is weak. The “rule of law” is abstract. The price of eggs is concrete.
That’s why Trump’s incompetence is a greater threat to his presidency than his cruelty. A malicious man can win over the masses if jobs are plentiful and gas is cheap.
Stephens: On most days since Trump took office, the line that has run through my head is from the movie “Airplane!”: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” It’s just one damn thing after another.
But like David Brooks, I am a chastened Trump critic. I viewed his first term as a national embarrassment culminating in the epic disgrace of Jan. 6. Clearly, plenty of Americans didn’t see it my way, or they noticed things to which I was mostly indifferent: growing prosperity, a new attentiveness to the proverbial forgotten man — and the vapid, arrogant, hypocritical awfulness of many a Trump scold.
So, to adapt Larry David, I’m going to Curb My Nausea. Just please pass me the Dramamine, will you, Patrick?
