Donald Trump Returns. What Now?
53:41 Share

The only good thing about this election being over is none of you have to get phone calls from me at 7 o'clock in the morning. What's going on? What do you know? I thought of one other thing. Okay. Desperately looking for silver linings. Yeah, we'll take it. We don't have to go for the pussy bow. Yeah. I don't have to wear that thing again. That's a fantastic silver lining. Okay. Authoritarianism in America, but no pussy bow. Just letting you know.

Well, welcome to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. And today I'm joining my colleague Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos to discuss, guess what, the return of Donald Trump to the White House and what it means for America. So hi, all.

Hi, David. Hey there. You guys sound great. You sound like you've been up for four nights running. You're a little chipper up there in New York City. You're kind of chipper, yeah. It's called caffeine, my friends. All right, let's get this truck out of the garage, for God's sake. This week, Susan, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election for the second time, and we're speaking on Thursday evening. So we've had a couple of days to, how do we say it, process this information. How are you making sense of this, Susan, right now?

Well, I mean, I would say... While standing on one foot. Yeah, exactly. David, look, first of all, I do not admit to having processed this information. And even with a fair amount of anticipatory dread on my part, my colleagues know this, probably anyone who listens to this podcast knows this, but having anticipated something is not the same thing as experiencing it and the full weight of what it's going to mean for the country for four more years. And...

That's one of the most important things to me is the idea that we are not –

two days into the Donald Trump era, but eight years into it. And I think that means we're looking at a very large swath of the country, the core of the Republican Party that has been now quite fully radicalized and transformed into a very different Republican Party than it was at the start of the Trump era. Then you combine that with Trump's ability in this election

which I think was underappreciated in the realms that we all frequent, underappreciated the extent to which Trump was able to win over not just that core of the Republican Party, but independent voters, low-frequency voters, with a pretty simple message, it seems to me, of control.

complaint, lament, outrage, resistance, unhappiness. And the anti-incumbency gene is something that is very present here in the United States and around the world right now. It's global, isn't it? Exactly. And it's an anti-incumbency feeling that seems directed specifically at cost of living, a sense of deep inequality. I think...

If we ascribe everything to the craziness of Donald Trump, we make a profound mistake. I think for a lot of voters, it's despite the craziness, despite...

I mean, those are all fact-based causes. I mean, while he is an unusually gifted liar, those are actually some truths that people are experiencing that the Biden administration was slow to address, particularly the inflation and the price of groceries. You know, and I think sort of a post-pandemic difficult economy that was really hard on people who don't have extra income. And I think that's a really important thing.

And this economic inequality, I mean, it's ridiculous that it's Trump, who is the plutocratic president of all time and governed that way in his last term. But he managed to voice the resentments of people who are economically disadvantaged and depressed in this country who are stuck because there's much less social mobility. And there's been just giant economic inequality that started with Reagan and has just grown ever since.

Then the obvious question, Evan, to you, who's written a book about American inequality and spent a lot of time all over the country to report that book, why couldn't first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in the hundred days that was left to her to campaign, why could she not get her arms around that central issue?

And why was it such a losing issue for the Democrats? Yeah, you have to start with the fact that in a way that people don't articulate every day, but on some level they know. If you were a kid born in this country in 1940, you stood a 90 percent chance of out earning your parents.

that number has fallen in half. And it runs through everything that people encounter, whether you're the young man or young woman or you're a person of color or you're a white person. It is a defining fact of your existence. And, of course, the Democratic Party self-image is that it has an almost self-evident claim on speaking to those frustrations, on those issues. And in some ways, it evaporated in a period of time before the Democrats could fully demonstrate

acknowledge that they were losing their grip on it. But, you know, you asked about Kamala Harris. I actually think, look,

In many ways, Kamala Harris ran, and people will quibble with this, but she ran as good a campaign as a person probably could in 107 days. There are obviously some things you might want her to do more effectively, certainly. And a thousand times better than the campaign she ran the first time she tried. For sure. And I also, look, she was a very effective debater. There were all these moments, honestly, where Democrats, going back to this point of a moment ago, were Democrats who hadn't fully realized what connection they had lost financially.

with a big piece of the electorate, thought, oh, these are galvanizing moments. Surely they will, people who see the debate will come to the same conclusion that I have. And the fundamental fact was that in the end, you have to just look at the data to come away with a clear sense that one in three people of color in this country voted for Donald Trump. You know, a huge swing of Latino voters voted.

Something like north of four in 10 young voters voted for Donald Trump. So a lot of the assumptions that people had about the shape of the electorate and where it was naturally inclined turned out to be wrong. Wait, can I just. OK, after you, I have something I want to say, too, about that. I do have a slightly different. I do have a slightly different. We had a show in which we could.

As the fourth Beatle and the visitor here, Jane first and then Susan. Okay. I'm just going to be quick because I just want to add to the statistics because one other jumped out and people are really not talking about it as much. Yes, it's true. There were some of those shifts in the black and Latino voters. But guess what? Which was the one demographic group that had a majority of voters for Trump? It was white people. Okay. Let's not lose sight of the fact that it was white resentment that he captured most effectively. Right.

and played to. Are you too quick to ascribe a racial change to this and not a class one? Take a look at the numbers. And not only that, but okay, we're going to do all the Monday morning quarterbacking that people do and self-flagellation that Democrats especially excel in. But let's just

put it out on the table. She was a black woman. And it is not easy to be a woman running for president. No, none has succeeded yet. And he ran the most misogynistic campaign of any candidate in modern times. Well, since the last time he ran. Yeah, since the last time he ran. But there's not a day that went by in the last couple of weeks that he did not insult women in one way or another.

Susan? Well, I mean, I guess I'd like to just sort of take a slightly different perspective. First of all, I agree that things like inflation and inequality have powered our politics in ways seen and unseen for quite some time. But this inequality existed not only when Joe Biden won election just four years ago, but actually Democrats have had an extraordinary run

of winning the popular vote prior to this election for six of the previous seven elections. That's an amazing run at exactly the period when this income gap was widening. So, again, I don't dismiss it as a factor. I just don't think it's fair to say that that's the reason for this particular outcome. As far as the women goes, you know, I, too—

despair, really, despair, both at the power, the continuing power of sexism and misogyny. And to see it so nakedly expressed is, you know, a gut punch for anyone who cares about freedom and equality in this country. You know, watching as the polls were closing, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's xenophobic campaign, literally tweeting all

All men, all men, please go to the polls right now. I just, you know, that was a kick in the stomach. But I do want to point out, since we're looking at data here, that I think we don't fully understand where and how that is effective. Because one of the more notable things that we're going to be talking about for a long time in terms of these election results is the return of ticket splitting and different outcomes in key Senate races.

In five Senate races, essentially, in the battleground states, it looks like Democrats have prevailed even where Harris lost. And in three of those, you have female candidates, female Democratic candidates in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan who are leading. You know, I think we're still going to be trying to understand and digest this

for quite some time, because I do think there is something different about the presidential race and the idea of a female commander in chief that Trump in particular honed in on. But my big picture point that I want to hear what everybody has to say about, including you, David.

is that we love to talk about issues, especially here in Washington, where all policy wonks, but that it's a clash of identities that Trump has made. You know, I call this the sort of Godzilla versus the technocrats problem for Democrats. And Harris was like that. Biden was definitely like that. They are not candidates who protect a vision, really, in some ways. You know, they're talking about sort of micro-targeted

small-bore policy issues in many ways. And Donald Trump is offering a worldview. He's offering simple explanations. I think that's totally right. Look at Obama. Obama used masterfully the language of the civil rights movement, the fierce urgency of now, phrases like that, the cadences of the civil rights movement to do what? To advance racial progress? No. To advance...

things like the Affordable Care Act, to advance the notion of a multi-ethnic democracy, to advance all kinds of policy. That was his superpower until it wasn't. And when the unexpected happened, when Hillary lost in 2016, I mean, he told his aides, "Yes, this is not apocalypse, and I don't believe apocalypse until it happens." But he was also asking privately the question, "What if we were wrong?"

phrase that he used many, many times in private and later in public. And that sense of self-questioning was not very advanced. The whole notion of the information sphere was just coming into focus. I remember Obama talking about, well, there are these guys in Macedonia making fake campaign ads, but not a deep sense of how the whole press universe had exploded. Not a deep sense of the

real consequences of the financial crisis and NAFTA and the burdens on the working class. This is the Democratic Party at its zenith, despite Vietnam in 1968, when it was the party potentially of Bobby Kennedy, was a coalition of not only ethnic groups, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and so on, but also white working class. That has just been shattered. And as many policy initiatives as Biden succeeded on

There was never a story told that could equal the narrative of what Obama employed. There was no poetry to it. I'm not suggesting that Trump is poetry, unless it's the most Charles Bukowski. Howl is the... Obscene kind. Howl would be his poem. Bukowski, by the way, takes offense at the analogy. But go ahead. And rightly so. I mean, he's also not policy. I mean, for all the complaints about how she's... But he has a story. And the story is...

I am your champion. This is a country of ruin. We are awash in migrant scum and rapists and all the rest. And foreign leaders are laughing at us. And I am here to save you. I'm the strong man. Yeah. And that's the Codillo. And it's an old model and it's appealing and funny at times. And it's just, there was no answer to that. And certainly, God bless her, not in 100 days.

It was too hard to overcome in the end. Does that sound insane? I think that's right. I mean, look, I think there is this big fact that is looming in our story of what just happened, which, of course, is the Biden presidency. And, you know, you hinted a moment ago, David, at the idea that it sort of failed to find a story. And there's something in there that it never had the narrative kind of philosophical reach that Obama personally had.

Then there's sort of two things going on, I think, in those Biden years that are worth identifying. One, and you've heard this in recent days, there was a way in which

There was a political misjudgment made after the 2022 midterms made by Joe Biden and also the party generally. And that judgment was that, oh, we didn't do as badly as we thought. That means, A, we have a coalition out there of people who agree with us on this big democracy issue. B, we have Dobbs. The overturning of Roe v. Wade is this powerful galvanizing force. And then maybe Joe Biden's earned the right to use a term he would probably have used for

And of course, that was a catastrophic misreading, most of all about himself. You know, I was thinking about it today because he gave a short speech at the Rose Garden in which he said he kind of used his central mantra, the thing that has explained his life, which is, you know, when you get knocked down, you get back up. And he said, you know, I was thinking about it today because he gave a short speech at the Rose Garden in which he said he kind of used his central mantra, the thing that has explained his life, which is, you know, when you get knocked down, you get back up.

And I heard it today and it had the echo of catastrophe about it because it was that mantra that inspired him to run for the second term and then to stay in despite people and despite the polls and despite other Democrats saying you've got to get out, you've got to get out. It was almost like he made himself unavailable to hear what the universe was saying. So I think that's exactly right. I just want to add one footnote to that, which is that was a key moment.

arguably the key moment in this campaign, the idea that Joe Biden was running again. That was a catastrophe. But I think there's another key moment, though, also in January, February and March of 2021. And that was the catastrophic misunderstanding about the Republican Party and about Donald Trump. You know, they believed that Donald Trump was

was finished. He was over. He was politically dead. And they promised the country a normalcy and a reversion to the status quo anti-Trump that was literally impossible. There was an interview with Anita Dunn back then. Senior comms advisor. She was senior comms advisor to Biden. And she was saying, well, we're not going to talk about Trump because he's over. People aren't interested in him anymore. So they thought they could ignore them. I mean, if this was a monster movie, it would be

They'd be saying that and there would be this looming shadow right outside the window. Here comes Godzilla. I was going to say, we're back to Godzilla. What's really funny, by the way, is like, I don't, I think I've watched one Godzilla movie. I think you got the point of it. You got the main thrust of it. I'll tell you what, during the break, we can watch some Godzilla, but we have to take a break right now. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.

You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well-informed colleagues at The New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome back to The Political Scene. Jane Mayer, there's an alternate universe in which rather than preparing for a move back to the White House, Donald Trump is preparing for a potential prison sentence. And now that he's returning to power, how do you expect he'll use it? What's going to happen with all his...

Well, one of the first things that I expect is that the special counsel, Jack Smith, will no longer be in his job. One way or the other, those cases are going to go away. What I really think people need to pay a little attention to is Trump, who's already been in the office for a long time,

already had an extraordinary opportunity to put three justices on the nine-person Supreme Court in his first term, is now facing the possibility of being able to replace two of the oldest justices who are conservatives, that's Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, and name by the time

At the end of his term, five of the nine justices on the Supreme Court and conservatives are salivating already over this prospect. Ed Whalen, who's a conservative legal blogger, he's already written a piece saying this could be a Trump court until 2045. Let's let that linger in the air. Who do you think he might appoint?

You know, there's been a pattern when a justice retires, often they look for one of his former clerks. So you would look for Alito clerks, and there are several of them out there who are possibilities. The Fifth Circuit has some of the most far-out right-wing judges there.

and covers Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The other circuit that often is a launchpad for the Supreme Court, of course, is the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, and conservative handpicked people who've been groomed practically since they were conceived for this job are just waiting for the call. Adjacent to that question, Susan, if Trump can reclaim control of the Justice Department, and I think he'll make every effort to do so,

Are we going to see political opponents locked up, as he has always said? Is that going to happen? Yeah, David, I do think that this is really, you know, the warning indicator light for how extreme or, you know, radical or anti-democratic a Trump second term will be is in this debate.

Question of how much and in what ways does he follow through on his threats to prosecute and go after the enemies within? Because I think that that's really the hallmark where you're seeing a break from democratic small d norms and traditions and politics.

By the way, in Trump's first term, this was a consistent theme of his. He just he had people who resisted this agenda, but he was demanding prosecutions of his political enemies from the very beginning of his term. He even publicly tweeted at his attorney general, Bill Barr, in the fall of 2020, where's the indictments of Joe Biden? As you know, that was the reason for his first term.

impeachment back in 2019 was because he was demanding that another country, Ukraine, investigate his political opponents. He had

has a long record of wanting to see independence of other institutions, especially law enforcement and intelligence-gathering institutions, eroded. And so I think you're going to see an effort by the White House to really break traditions of independence when it comes to both the Justice Department, the FBI. One of the things you could see is him possibly firing the man that he himself

hired as the FBI director of Christopher Wray. He threatened to do that in the immediate aftermath of his defeat in 2020. He didn't follow through on it, but he might this time. What prevents him, if anything, from following through on these efforts where the Justice Department and the FBI are concerned? The oft-used word in your city is guardrails. Remember norms? There used to be norms. And that, I mean, all kidding aside, that was something that

Donald Trump did violence to in his first term was the sense that what is a norm? It is the idea that the rest of the political class will rise up in protest and say this is unbearable. And for a while in the beginning, it was supposed to be members of his own party. Remember, there were the Mitt Romneys of the world who were going to stand up. And a lot of those people are really they're gone. I mean, most of them, if not all of them now. I think part of what we're asking is, is there anybody left who has

influence and credibility with Donald Trump who can stand up and stop him? Because then the answer is, okay, if it's not him, then what are the institutions of society, the press, the courts, the other independent sources of power that are not subject to his control? And how much power do they have? Well, I'm

I mean, basically, a lot of these norms are post-Watergate norms that were reactions to Nixon's corruption. And again, they're customs and practices. They're not laws. They're not real guardrails. They have to do with whether, as Evan put it really well, whether people will stand up and complain and protest. And also, the Supreme Court has, to the extent there were laws, the Supreme Court has already eroded much of the post-Watergate framework.

one of the biggest responses to Watergate was the restriction of campaign contributions. Well, the Supreme Court already got rid of that a long time ago. And I think you can explain part of the catastrophe in our political system from that. But in terms of Trump's executive power, this is a Supreme Court that has leaned so hard into executive power. And I think that's where that immunity decision, which is a product of the Biden administration's

own belated efforts to seek accountability for Trump's actions at the end of his term may end up actually ultimately empowering him as president to a far greater degree in the law than we might have seen. So that's one thing, David, that I think is really important. Well, as we water ski through all our anxieties and predictions, let's discuss some of the people that might

staff this White House, this administration, and who you're most anxious about? Jane, anybody in particular? I've got my eye on Russell Foud. We actually had a wonderful profile of him in The New Yorker. He is a self-professed Christian nationalist who was in the first Trump term and who has been working on Project 2025 and other blueprints for a second Trump term. And he's

A combination of being an ideological right-wing radical and someone who understands the Washington bureaucracy. So he's got the know-how and he's got the motives to really push the government in directions it hasn't been in before. Susan, one of the people I know you have your eye on is RFK Jr. Do you think that...

Trump has just kind of played RFK Jr. or do you think he'll empower him? You know, to me, I would put this out as, you know, sort of maybe the first emerging scandal of the new administration, of which I do expect many. And that, by the way, we talked about are there any guardrails left? One of the guardrails is Trump's own incompetence.

And the chaos—no, seriously. And the chaos and dysfunction that have surrounded him in any role that he's ever been in. Self-limiting. No, and it is self-limiting. And so we expect that there will be vicious infighting, as there were in all of his campaigns. You're suggesting that golf and television—

It's what stands between us and horrible authoritarianism. And the apocalypse. But so on RFK Jr., the reason I bring it up here, right, is that Trump made a practical political decision to bring in RFK Jr. to his campaign. And by the way, in the post-election campaign,

There's a fair case to be made that this was a significant positive reason for Trump and why he won, you know, in terms of reclaiming young men. Explain that, that RFK Jr. has real appeal to voters. Yeah, I think that he had real appeal to a certain segment of the otherwise, you know, maybe Trump curious but not really sold on him party.

part of the electorate, especially the demographic of younger men. And that arguably is one of the reasons this was still a narrow election. And in that context,

I think RFK was a smart political choice for Trump, but of course he's a catastrophic choice when it comes to anything related to actual policy. RFK has given several interviews, David, that I think are cause for true alarm. He has said both before the election and actually then after the election that one of the first things this new administration wants to do—I'm laughing only because it's so unbelievable—

is to take the fluoride out of America's water, one of the great public health triumphs of the 20th century. And we've heard no pushback from anyone at Mar-a-Lago.

My father, the late dentist, would have made a much better living had RFK Jr. come along sooner. Truly. You interviewed RFK Jr., right? I mean, so did you see the potential for this kind of appeal? Look, I have a child with really profound autism. And so I paid attention for years, as my wife, Esther Fine, has for years, about all this rhetoric about vaccinations and the fear-mongering. And I just hold him responsible for

for some large percentage of this fear-mongering and this manipulation of parents who have to deal with this and and most profoundly of all the human beings who have to deal with this and um so i i have no great truck with him and i and the interview with him was an exercise and it was like the experience of sitting down in a seat in a bus on a 10-hour ride and you've some guy sits next to you

and talks your ear off about flying saucers. It's like that. Now, Evan, speaking of odd characters on the American landscape, what role is Elon Musk

Now that he's invested so deeply in the Trump campaign. Yeah, it's I mean, it is the makings of an oligarchic arrangement that we really haven't had in modern times. Here you have the world's richest person who also happens to own a communications platform that he is now explicitly positioning as an alternative to a victor over Trump.

The mainstream media. I mean, what he said after Trump won was you are the media now, essentially to the platform. And Trump, in many ways, would give Musk whatever he wants. He's talked about calling him the secretary of cost cutting. It's unlikely that Elon Musk is going to go into the government. He doesn't need to. What's much more likely is just that there is now going to be this.

Gusher of influence and transaction and a complete fusion of policy and profit in a way that has been a kind of implicit backbeat of American politics. Jane's written about it better than anybody. But it is now suddenly going to be actually an articulated part of his appeal. Exactly. You know, Vladimir Putin is sitting in Moscow and it's not just Putin.

That the Trump election gives him what seems to be permission to, shall we say, resolve his war in Ukraine successfully to his advantage. But Trump's re-election also underscores Putin's point about politics in general, that there's no such thing as democracy, there's only hypocrisy.

And that Americans have their own oligarchs, their own empowered oligarchs. And what's the difference between a Russian oligarch and Elon Musk? That's the way he's going to see this, no, Susan? I mean, you've, I don't know, spent long enough in Russia. David, the difference, as Putin sees it, is that, you know, he has control over his oligarchs.

And I think he perceives Donald Trump to be a vain, foolish, weak and malleable man who might be controlled by his oligarchs. And that's one key difference that Putin would perceive. I think this is a best case scenario for Putin and other of America's adversaries around the world. And yet that makes it so remarkable, the lies and propaganda that Putin

Trump and the Republicans were able to kind of put a frame around foreign policy without ever talking really about foreign policy in this election. What did they talk about? They talked about, well, Donald Trump is going to bring back sort of safety and security in a troubled world. And they somehow managed to blame Joe Biden for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, for Hamas's attack on Israel, and for essentially everything that's happening in the world. It was really a remarkable gaslighting ploy that I think

worked and resonated with a significant chunk of the American electorate, which, you know, historically, left and right doesn't really want to pay that much attention to the rest of the world. So for Putin, remember that not only has Donald Trump said that he's going to solve the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, well, there's no way to do that without doing what he and J.D. Vance have already suggested, which is essentially forcing, pressuring Ukraine to cede its own

stolen territory to Russia in exchange for a peace that, you know, I think anyone who has really paid attention to the situation understands is not going to be a real peace because Putin will never stop here. He has maximalist goals. That's number one. Number two,

Donald Trump, to the extent he talked about it at all, what did he say? He said, NATO means nothing in terms of Article 5, because if these people don't pay up, Vladimir Putin can do anything he wants to do. In our book, we have an example that I think is a really important one. This is your biography of Trump with your husband, Peter Baker. That's right. In the spring of 2017, when they were trying to explain the core of NATO to Donald Trump, which is its collective defense strategy,

And Trump in the Oval Office said, are you telling me that I would have to go to war to protect Lithuania? Because there's no effing way I'm ever going to be going to war for Lithuania. Well, Vladimir Putin knows that very well. And so it seems to me that even as we're sitting here today in November of 2024, the NATO Article 5 guarantee is already a dead letter.

We're going to take another break, but after that, we'll continue the conversation on what the world looks like in Trump's America, round two. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back. If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thanks so much for listening.

The 2024 election is upon us and the stakes couldn't be higher. But the outcome might not be clear till long after everyone has voted.

If the race ends up being as close as it looks right now, we could be in for a repeat, or worse, of the year 2000, when the presidency came down to a recount in Florida that ended at the Supreme Court. To hear the whole story, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore, a podcast from the co-creators of Slow Burn. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

We had this unprecedented movement of Trump officials and Republicans warning us, he's a danger to the republic, he's a fascist. And yet voters in their majority were unmoved by this. What do you make of that? Are people okay with authoritarianism or fascism as it's been defined by even Mark Milley?

Or didn't they believe it, Susan? Yeah, David. I think Donald Trump, no question, has benefited throughout his nine years in political life from people not taking him either literally or seriously. And, you know, I noticed in speaking with, you know, some of his wealthiest backers, even they treat Donald Trump as a sort of choose-your-own-adventure. You know, they adopt the parts of his policies that they like and they pretend that he won't follow through on the things that

that they don't like. I take it very seriously. I think it was an extraordinary moment, actually, in American politics, and one that, even if the voters didn't take it seriously, historians will take it seriously when you have John Kelly on tape to The New York Times immediately before this election, essentially reading out loud the dictionary definition of fascism and saying, yes, Donald Trump meets it. And yet, a conservative columnist for The New York Times scolds us

He basically is saying that when and if Donald Trump wins, who is going to be at fault? You, Susan, you, Jane, you, Evan, are going to be at fault for using words like fascist because people don't like being called that and it alienates them. Evan. You know, I am reminded of something that Michael Beschloss, the great historian, said at the New Yorker Festival this year when we were having this conversation just the other day. He said, you know, it's notable that 80 years after D-Day—

The memory of that era, of what fascism actually meant when it rippled through people's lives and around the world is fading. It's becoming an abstraction. People struggle to define it properly. And I think in some ways, the challenge of this period going forward will be to make sure that the language we are using feels connected. Not to say that it's, you know, this is not an argument for euphemism. In fact, it's just an argument for staying as vigilant as

about describing what we're living through and what's happening as we can be. And honestly, that's frankly what the work of what good incisive writing is supposed to do. Can I just say one other thing? You know, it's not Susan, Evan, the New Yorker, the rest of us who injected the name of Hitler into this campaign.

It happens to be that Donald Trump kept the speeches of Hitler by his bedside at his table, and he turned to his generals and said, I wish I had generals like Hitler had. The origin of this is Trump and his own statements and interests. Jane, thanks for bringing that up because...

I've never applied the label of fascism to Donald Trump. What I did was report that John Kelly was told this in the Oval Office of the United States. What we did was report in The New Yorker magazine that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

thought about resigning because of Donald Trump's attacks on the constitutional order. And he wrote in a letter that he did not believe that Donald Trump subscribes to the basic principles for which the United States fought in World War II. That's journalism. That's reporting. And Americans might not feel comfortable with the label fascism, but I actually believe that people...

no racism and hatred and misogyny and xenophobia when they hear it and whatever label they want to call it. It took millions and millions of Americans and the wealthiest man in the world to overlook that aspect of Donald Trump and to support him anyways. A question for all of you. Maybe we'll start with Jane. The Democratic Party in this election lost ground with constituency groups like Latino voters and young voters and

What is your sense of how the party, after its period of mourning, is going to come to terms with this reckoning? And do party officials even see it as a reckoning? You know, it's early days here. They surely will convene some sort of great summits and talk to each other and create a circular firing line. I don't know what they will come up with here. I would hope...

that they would consider how the money picture has corrupted both parties. I mean, I think it's very hard for the Democrats to be the champions of the working people when the election looks like a battle between billionaires, ours versus theirs, and the consulting class is getting rich and working for corporations in between the elections. It's very hard to keep the line close to the working voters that used to be the base of the party.

Evan? I think there is always a risk of over-reading an election. I mean, it's an irony here that at the very moment that we're dealing with the seismic shock of Trump winning, it is also a fact that we have a stronger minority party now on empirical basis than we've had in a long time. 48% of the country believes in essentially some form of the values or the ideas the Democratic Party represents. So there's almost like at the same time that you have to have an honest view of

and an honest look at the party, you also don't want to overdraw the lessons and immediately become your opponent. That said, I think that it is a very simple fact that as we started this conversation talking about, a lot of Americans decided fundamentally that Republicans are more interested in their economic hardship. And they wanted to listen to that as radical and offensive as it was in many cases. And you know, the left's reply to that, and you're seeing that pop up again. Right.

Bernie Sanders would have been the answer, that a principled left-leaning economic populism would have been the way to beat Donald Trump. I certainly think that at this point, the argument that the Democratic Party, as personified by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and this vast and in many ways incoherent coalition that had to address a equal number of issues on equal terms, is

clearly did fall short on the number one issue, which was economics. You know, somebody, a Democrat said to me last night and rings true to me, which is that people value their identity as consumers as much as they value their identity as workers, meaning that if you've lost the ability to consume in the way that defines you, then you begin to treat that as a grievance. You know, Democrats are still in such a

denial, you know, that is, as Jane said, you know, going to be a huge process. But, you know, the most organized group inside the Democratic Party, right, is this progressive left. They had Biden, you know, who presents as a sort of centrist guy, but actually in a lot of ways in the personnel, in many of the individual policies of this administration, it was a very hard left.

And one of the aspects that we haven't talked about at all, but I do think, you know, helped to power this was Donald Trump and his party's effective use of culture war issues to pry away independent voters who otherwise otherwise.

We're open to voting for Democrats. And I don't see, you know, that with our media bubbles the way that they are. I see the organized effort by the progressive left minority in the Democratic Party is already kicking in gear. You have Bernie Sanders kind of blaming centrism, a lot of his allies already doing that. I don't see any kind of willingness to say, like, well, let's talk about that.

transgender ad or, you know, why is it that so many Americans were open to the kind of manipulation and fear and panic of this idea that there's going to be boys playing girls sports? I mean, that was probably one of the biggest applause lines after mass deportation now, both at the Republican convention, at the Madison Square Garden rally that you attended, as well as I did, David. Kamala Harris is for them, they. Donald Trump is for you. Exactly. So in a narrow sense,

I didn't see a lot of critical thinking or ability to look at, like, how did Democrats let Joe Biden declare for reelection, you know, when he was going to be 86 years old and let that go on until the, you know, it just literally kicked them in the face this year. And the same way that right now, after this election, I just think the institution is

The institutional party, you know, there'll be lots of loudness, but in the end, it's pulling in the extremes. And the Republicans, I think, are going to get more extreme to the right. And I think the Democrats are going to get more extreme to the left. So you think the idea that somehow Trump will come to office, he'll cut some taxes, he'll hope like hell that he can...

the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and be a kind of establishmentarian president in disguise is a fantasy. I've heard that somewhere. David, I feel like... Exactly. Oh, my gosh. You know, that's what scares me, honestly, is that... It's complacency about that. Too many people are...

putting their heads in the sand. It's human nature. It's psychology to be like, oh, it'll work out OK. And by the way, I see a lot of Democrats and independents and people who don't love Donald Trump immediately kicking back into that. It's called rich people.

people who are not going to be deported enough and a lot of people are not going to be hurt. But I'm glad you brought up rich people because we've talked a lot about the people who have economic anxieties and depression and how they've gotten behind Trump. But as Susan has written also fantastically for The New Yorker, there are

It was a coalition of the economically downtrodden, overlooked and the economically, you know, privileged in the extreme. I mean, there were a number of billionaires and are behind Trump. Well, there are a number of billionaires. In fairness, there are a number of billionaires behind. As we've said, but.

Right. I mean, it's become a billionaire's game. But these tax cuts aren't a minor thing. And they have a lot to do with why the billionaires are behind Trump. If he moves ahead with these tax cuts, you're going to see gigantic deficits and the further weakening of the federal government to the point where there could be all kinds of problems for people. Jane, this has been a, you know, we used to say a certain music to commit suicide by. Sorry. Maybe this conversation feels...

Very dark. But one silver lining for Democrats certainly is that seven states passed ballot measures to protect or expand abortion rights, including some Republican voting states. How do you interpret this alongside Trump's decisive, really decisive victory?

and a Republican majority in the Senate and quite possibly the House. There's no doubt that there are a lot of women who are motivated to take on Trump still on reproductive rights issues. And Harris championed this issue passionately and

And people flocked to her campaign because of it. I mean, don't forget, we're talking about as if she this was a landslide. It actually was not a landslide. There were a lot of people who voted for her and who really care about reproductive rights. And you may see more of these mass rallies in Washington from women pushing back. You know, I can see Susan's shaking her head. No, I actually I agree. I agree with Jane that this is a, you know, powerful, powerful campaign.

But the reason I am and it's that I feel the, you know, the sad feeling in the pit of my stomach recurring at this point because the tragedy, Jane, is that you could argue that the margin of Donald Trump's victory was from women's

Women, in particular white women, who support abortion rights and voted for the man anyways, who gave us the repeal of Roe versus Wade. White women were the issue. And white voters, as I was saying before. We can't lie to ourselves, right? Like that's, to me, what's the hardest part after something like this is the temptation to, you know, want to look for silver linings. Let's look at the aftermath on the other side. On the day after the inauguration in January 2017, there was a massive protest.

demonstration with pink hats, not only in Washington, but in New York City and cities and towns across the country. There was an onslaught of investigative reporting and commentary directed against the Trump administration in all kinds of press, Washington Post, New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other outlets. So much so that there was even the vaunted Trump bump for some of these outlets. There was real interest in this. There was something called

Even the resistance, however grandly titled. I get the sense, and please argue with me, and I know it's early days, that the reaction to this Trump victory is different than 2016. That there was shock in 2016. Very few people expected this, with some exceptions.

This time around, probably more people than not expected Trump to win. And it's been met less with shock than with, for his opponents anyway, gloom, depression. And I am very concerned about the not only capitulation in some quarters, but also just lassitude, inertia.

Look, I think there's a couple of things. I mean, one is 2016, it was a surprise. It was not a surprise this time, as you say, David. In fact, one of the big differences was in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. And the fact that Donald Trump won the popular vote is part of the reason why we're having this conversation about what does the Democratic Party stand for and who does it stand for? Because in a sense, that's the harder question. You know, at the time, it was almost galvanizing to have this sense that

But for this quirk, this almost criminal constitutional fact of the Electoral College going the other way, that maybe Hillary Clinton would have prevailed. And I think this time it is actually occasioning more of a moment of –

where did the party go wrong? And inevitably also, what do we do about individual candidates? But that's why I think it feels more like a moment to talk seriously about what the Democratic Party should be. And to that point, I just want to mention one thing, which is I think there has to be a precise...

understanding of what we mean when we talk about the left of the Democratic Party, because it's not clear that Bernie Sanders is the same as the cultural progressive forces we were talking about a moment ago. And in fact, it may turn out that the Democratic Party is going to double down on a piece of it on the economic message and reexamine what it how much and how it represents exactly. Well, while thinking about

I mean, and in fact, the part of the left that cares most about identity issues has often been at odds with Bernie Sanders because they don't see him. I mean, the Hillary crowd particularly did not see him as supportive of women. There are fissures within all of that.

I just wanted to, you know, lift your spirits by quoting the late, great Senator John McCain, who said, the darkest hour is always before it turns pitch black. Yeah.

My spirits are soaring, Jane. Thank you for that. Okay. You know, there's something else we really have. You know, we're talking about what was wrong with the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party and the strengths and weaknesses of Trump, but we really haven't talked about

But the other thing that seemed so different during this campaign, at least to me, is that the mainstream media, so-called legacy media, really has lost dominance in terms of the information ecosystem at this point. Didn't we know that before this race? We felt it going election by election. I would say this is the one where it was gone. I mean, I don't think we're telling secrets out of school, Evan.

When we reveal that even a magazine that endorsed, maybe because we endorsed Kamala Harris and is seen as a somewhat liberal magazine, a liberal magazine, when attempting to interview Kamala Harris to get a little bit of her time, we got none of it for Evan's profile, whereas she was on every podcast in the world. I don't say that with any anger or resentment. Well, she wasn't on our podcast. Right. No, but it was. Damn right. David's point is, David's right.

A final question for all. The political scene is a show which, as you often say, is about the big questions in American politics. The return of Trump to the White House is the biggest one that we've seen in a long time. And now that it's happened...

What questions do each of you have for this new Trump era? Why don't we begin with Evan and go around the table? I think I'm interested in how institutions will protect people who need and deserve protection, meaning to take a prime example. One of the biggest shames of the first Trump administration was the separation of families. And I think that at the border and the prospect of something like that happening again is something that

institutions, whether they are legal or journalistic or investigative in other ways, they deserve support because it is not going to be coming from within the House, meaning it is going to be harder and harder for dissidents within the departments, within agencies to come forward and say there's something terrible going on.

And I think there have been lawyers out there over the last – in the first Trump term who deserve real valor and celebration for standing up and bringing important cases. And I think I'm going to be watching to see how those kinds of outside institutions operate again.

I mean, I'm always preoccupied with abuses of power. I'm really interested in whether the rule of law can contain Trump and the people around him at this point. Are we going to continue to be sort of this exceptional country where –

it's a democracy with checks and balances, or are we going to see it tip over into strongman government where it's deeply corrupt? And I think it's going to take constant vigilance on the part of the press. And I just hope we have the energy and the ability to just keep holding these people in power accountable. And Susan? Yeah, I think Jane and Evan are right that it's really about

Do we or do we not see Donald Trump implement the playbook for anti-democratic, authoritarian, strongman rule? And that will determine, I think, an answer to a question that's plagued us, which is, is Trump essentially an outlier but still, you know, within the framework of American politics? Or does he represent something like a

a rupture? And is this part of the natural oscillation of American politics and in two years will divide a government return in the midterms? Or will he go after the political enemies within? Will he attack the fake news media in a structural legal way, for example, by throwing reporters out of the White House, simply refusing to obey the ethics, laws, and rules that have been put on the books over the last few decades?

Will he weaponize the Justice Department? Will he transform the national security state and the intelligence apparatus of this country into his personal and political fiefdoms? Those are the questions I...

I think that you could make the argument about, say, Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban or Erdogan in their first term or even their first or second terms in power, you know, that you still didn't understand exactly which way that society was going. This is the pivotal four years. We're going to understand whether something like an American strongman can arise within our system right now or not. And I just add to that.

to those excellent questions, what can we expect of ourselves? You know, having lived in a totalitarian country and seeing them come out of it and then plunge back into authoritarianism, being Russia, we have to recognize that actual dissidence is very rare. That that level of self-sacrifice that we've seen from Alexei Navalny, or farther back in the past, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Evan knows all about this too, from China,

is exceedingly rare, but ordinary citizens are capable of ordinary kinds of heroism. And I think, you know, at home here at this magazine and in the press, I think we have to demand of ourselves, and that's the vow I make to our readers and my colleagues, that we will insistently do it. And

Our duty, our primary duty, is to apply pressure on power truthfully, accurately, consistently, and fearlessly. And I hope we're equal to that challenge, and I hope our colleagues elsewhere are too, because it's essential. Evan, Jane, Susan, thanks so much. Great to be with you, David. Thanks, David. Thank you so much, David. This has been the political scene from The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick.

Special thanks to the entire team at the New Yorker Radio Hour. We had research assistants today from Alex D'Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter and our editor, John Palmer. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks for listening. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for the New Yorker. I love

focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

You know, for us at In the Dark, we're paying equal attention to the reporting and the storytelling. And we felt a real kinship with The New Yorker, like the combination of the deeply reported stories that The New Yorker is known for, but also the quality of those stories, the attention to narrative. If I could give you only one reason to subscribe to The New Yorker, it would be... Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for, but...

I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue as a New Yorker. You know, like you have poetry, you have theater reviews, you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great, but I haven't even mentioned like

The other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read. You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we're so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe. And so to me, it's like I can't imagine not reading these writers.

You can have all the journalism, the fiction, the film, book, and TV reviews, all the cartoons, just by going right now to newyorker.com slash dark. Plus, there's an incredible archive, a century's worth of award-winning work just waiting for you. That's newyorker.com slash dark. And thanks. From PR.