After earning a bachelor's and two master's degrees from Stanford, Kristin Hansen spent nearly two decades at Silicon Valley software startups and in executive roles at both IBM and Intel. While teaching at Stanford's business school, she gave up the corporate life last year to become the founding executive director of the Civic Health Project. Her answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
We aim to reduce polarization and create healthier civic discourse in our citizenry, politics and media. We partner with academics and practitioners to design and execute projects that deliver improvements in rationality, empathy and decision outcomes for a healthier democracy.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
As a high school senior, I represented my local Rotary chapter at California Girls' State. After serving as the Whig Party leader there I was elected as one of two senators to represent California at Girls Nation in Washington. These back-to-back, immersive experiences of civic learning set me on a lifelong path of political study, inquiry and action.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
My happiest professional moments have involved bringing people together across diverse opinions, perspectives and priorities. The challenge is to define an elevated vision and purpose that everyone can rally around, setting personal agendas aside. In the private sector, this typically means convincing people to unify around a plan to build a better product, generate more revenue or delight more customers. In the nonprofit sector, we can articulate similarly bold, elevated ideas that inspire us to overcome our differences and pursue better societal outcomes for all. I firmly believe we can transcend this current, hyper-polarized chapter in American history and embrace a shared obligation to nurture our fragile democracy back to health.
And your most disappointing setback?
I wish I had applied to work at Zoom Videoconferencing back before the IPO! Amazing technology, fantastic company. I am a passionate believer in the power of videoconferencing to transcend distance and connect people, both personally and professionally. Civic Health Project is proud to sponsor Mismatch, which uses videoconferencing to connect middle school and high school classrooms across the U.S. to engage in respectful civil dialogue across distance and divides.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
Having spent many years in marketing roles in the tech industry, I'm now applying these professional lenses to the challenges of reducing polarization and improving civil discourse. At Civic Health Project, we are exploring ways to harness technology, marketing and social media in support of depolarizing interventions. For example, we host an online clinic full of simple, everyday tools individuals can use to reduce their own polarizing attitudes and behaviors. And we invest in innovative technology projects, such as one being spearheaded by team members at the Center for Humane Technology, which aims to offer YouTube users the option to choose less polarizing, radicalizing content than what is all too frequently served up by YouTube's default recommendation engine.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Keep your options open. My mother told me that, back when I was still single. I eventually failed to heed her advice!
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Civanillaty? Mis-Matcha? I'll admit I also thought of Impeach Cobbler, but that's way too polarizing.
What is your favorite political TV show or movie?
This will sound cliché, but just the other night I overheard a TV retrospective about "The West Wing" and it made me feel briefly nostalgic for both the show and the era. Season after season, the show portrayed characters who — in the main — fulfilled their civic roles not with cynicism or irony, but with honor and integrity. As many have noted, it was a "love letter" to American democracy.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Play Boggle. I'm hopelessly addicted, even though my scores have recently flatlined.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger. For a bodybuilder, he was a pretty good governor of California.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.