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 view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.