How to Get Under a Strongman’s Skin, with George Conway
41:58 Share

Did you guys see the one where it's one guy, but he voices different Trump quotes from the debate in the voice of every single character from The Simpsons? So, like, you know, here's one done by Christy the Clown. Here's one done by Homer. And it's just one guy, but he does all the voices. Susan, I'm really sorry, but you're letting on that our jobs are not full-time jobs. I was going to say. Come on.

Welcome to The Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos. Hey, Jane. Hey, Susan. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys. You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.

I think it's fair to say that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won handily in Tuesday's debate against Donald Trump. One of the things that Harris demonstrated most effectively was her ability to get under Donald Trump's skin. First, let me respond to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.

Knocking Trump off balance, triggering, you might say, Donald Trump, is something that others have struggled to do over the years, but is shaping up to be a key strategy of the Harris campaign.

Today, we have a very special guest who's been on the triggering Trump bandwagon for years. George Conway, one of the original co-founders of the anti-Trump group, The Lincoln Project. He's also just started for 2024 a new group called, and yes, this is the actual name, the Anti-Psychopath Pack.

More seriously, as a longtime Trump critic, George has made a particular focus of studying ways to get under Donald Trump's skin for years. George, welcome. George. Working on it. There we go. Oh, yay. Hey.

Hey. There you are. Hi. Welcome. Oh, you guys are like in a real studio. Oh, yeah. Kind of wish you were right here. Well, at least you're not. We had James Carville on this podcast, and we were fascinated by watching his backdrop was

entire liquor supply thing, which was so much liquor that it looked like a supply store, I thought. That's perfect James Carville. It was on brand. I have my t-shirt on for today. Oh my gosh, wait, I can't read it. Can someone read it? What does it say? I'm a love your neighbor Christian, not a storm the capital kind.

All right. Well, George, that is a perfect opening in some ways to this conversation because you have brought a different approach, I would say, to the challenge of getting under Donald Trump's skin, of understanding who this man is and why it is that he's come to dominate both the Republican Party's psyche, but also that it's a story about his own.

own psyche. So we want to talk about that this week. Of course, we should start with the debate because that's what inspired this conversation. I was making a list before this taping today of all of the ways in which Kamala Harris is

prosecuted the case against Trump by getting under his sin, taking, in effect, the psychological approach to Trump in that debate, which is something very different than certainly Joe Biden did in his various debates with Donald Trump. My list included, obviously, the rally comment, which we've already run a little bit of a tape of that. She dug at him for his inherited wealth. That really upset him. The values I bring to the importance of homeownership, knowing not everybody got handed...

$400 million on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times. She talked very explicitly about that he was having trouble, quote, processing his defeat, the language of psychiatry. And clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that. She said, and I thought this was very, you know, designed to poke at him and who he is. He said that Vladimir Putin would eat you for lunch. And why don't you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up?

for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.

that they're laughing at us around the world. She used his language and called him weak. It is very well known that Donald Trump is weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy. And then another one was the very beginning, getting in his physical space with the handshake that he was rattled by. And then, of course, the final one that I wrote on my list was she said, Donald, you were fired. Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people.

So let's be clear about that. Again, using Trump's own words and languages. What did you make of the kind of rattled Donald by getting in his head strategy? Was that effective on her part? Yeah, it was absolutely effective. And it's something...

I've been talking about for a number of years. In fact, I was urging the Democrats, I actually said this on Twitter, to hire a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to help figure out how to get under his skin. But it turns out it's really not that hard at the end of the day. And I don't say this in any way to diminish what Vice President Harris accomplished this week. She did a tremendous job. It was pitch perfect. But the way you get under a narcissist's skin

is to poke at what they are most sensitive about. Narcissists are narcissists because they are deeply, deeply insecure human beings.

And so they constantly need self reassurance and reassurance from others that they are the person they imagine themselves to be. But no, deep down, they really aren't. So to know what it is that you have to attack or poke Donald Trump on is simply to you just have to listen to what he talks about when he talks about himself.

I'm a genius. I'm the stable genius. I have an uncle who went to MIT. I have the biggest crowds. You know this from January 2017. He had a perfectly fine crowd.

At his inauguration, it was raining and cold. It sucked. And unlike Obama, he wasn't the first black president, which brought out a lot more people. But he could not help himself. This man had just become president of the United States, and he wants to argue about who had the bigger crap. It's it was cuckoo.

And it's classic narcissism. He likes to assert that he made his own wealth, that his father only gave him, I don't know how much money, minimal money, but that's not true. I mean, he basically has been living off of trust with all that income from all those tenements and queens for all his life. And that's how he funds all the businesses that he bankrupted. You know, all you have to do is figure out what it is that he talks about in self-defense

And poke him at, and then he goes off in that direction. And that's exactly what she did. You know, I'm so glad you pointed this out because one of the big questions for a lot of people is Trump is Trump, and you can go right back to January of 2017 as the template for understanding him or, you know, go back to, frankly, January of 1980 for that matter. We'll go back to 1946. Exactly. I want a little bit of your...

approach to this and how you came to this. You and I have talked about your origin story before as a professional Trumpologist. You've talked about reading a 2017 Rolling Stone article that was headlined, Is Pathological Narcissism the Key to Trump's Behavior? Why do you think you

came to this insight. And it is an important insight. A lot of other people have had different and maybe less successful approaches to going after Trump. Why did you gravitate towards this? Well, I don't take credit for it because there are people who saw this before the rest of us. And the two groups of people in particular, from a professional standpoint,

were shrinks, psychologists and psychiatrists who were restricted in what they could say, or many of them believed that they are restricted in what they could say because of the Goldwater rule, which is a whole other thing we do a whole program about. And then his people who

act on or study history, which would include not just professional historians, but other social scientists and diplomats and military types, which is why you saw all the national security types come out in 2016 and say, this man is dangerous, because they saw him, you know, a reflection of pages of history. Now, when I...

You know, I supported President Trump in 2016. My wife was, you know, his campaign manager. I thought it was an amazing thing that she got this buffoon elected. And I didn't, but I didn't think he was going to be that bad because I thought he'd surround himself with good people. He wanted to do a good job. In other words, I thought there was some, you know, despite his screwiness, I thought there was some normality in there. And it became pretty clear from the get-go

from that day on at the inauguration that there was something deeply wrong with him. And I was puzzling over this. How do you get this guy to behave like a normal human being? What's wrong with him? And I saw that article. I read that article that you just mentioned, which was by a really great writer named Alexa Morris.

And she basically, what she did was she went through the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. And you can find it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a fifth edition put out by the American Psychiatric Association. And she went through every single nine of them. And he ticked every box. It was just no question about it. And, you know, you only need five for a diagnosis.

He was nine for nine. And you know, lawyers, lawyers like elements of a claim. We like things like you have to prove the following four things, members of the jury. I loved that list of nine things. I could point, you know, it's like, wait, okay, I have nine things I need to prove to the court and I can, I collect evidence for each one and I prove my case. And I started doing that. What happened was I realized this guy was completely unfit to become president. And

As soon as I saw that he was just a classic narcissist, and I hadn't really focused on psychological stuff before. I didn't really take courses in psychology since high school. It's like this man is completely unqualified constitutionally to be president because he's incapable, utterly incapable. He's the most extreme narcissist you will ever see. He's utterly incapable of putting anyone else's interests first.

above his own. So, George, did this... I gather that the book by Justin Frank, Putting Trump on the Couch, has been important also in helping you understand the psychology of Trump. Has this psychological approach informed your decision on how to take him on? I mean, is this the guidebook that you've been trying to use? Yes, absolutely. Because

Once you understand that he is a narcissist, I mean, he's also a sociopath, which is a big problem too, but let's stick with the narcissism for a while. Once you understand that he's a narcissist, you understand he's incapable of considering anybody's interests other than his own and therefore is unqualified to hold any office of public trust from dog catcher on. And then you realize what his weaknesses are.

He is deeply insecure. Narcissists are deeply insecure. Everything to a narcissist is about them because they want to project themselves as being greater than they fear that they are not.

And so that's what drives Trump. That's what drives a lot of his insane behavior, is that he's trying to put out this false front. And anything that even scratches at that false front requires an absolutely devastating response. And someday, I hope that we see

all the foreign intelligence dossiers. Actually, we'll probably be all dead by then. We'll see all the foreign intelligence dossiers on Trump's psychological condition. And I'd love to see all that because that's how they manipulated him. You know, Macron did it by having a big parade. And Trump then wanted to have a big parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. And then, you know, you had

the prime minister of Japan suggesting that he would nominate Donald Trump for a Nobel Prize. Well, fact check there, George, actually, amazingly enough, and this certainly doesn't undercut the Trump psychological analysis.

Donald Trump actually asked Shinzo Abe in a private dinner at Trump Tower, he demanded that the prime minister of Japan nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is even worse. But the Chinese knew this from the get-go, partly because they have been, in a sense, entertaining barbarians for a thousand years. And they know at a certain point,

There are things you can do. You can literally give somebody a tour of a big fancy building and they feel terrific, but they also feel on a level they don't even consciously recognize. They feel insecure. You know, George, you've been doing this now for so long that I imagine along the way you have learned things that you didn't know at the beginning. Yeah.

about Trump's psychology. I think all of us are kind of coming to terms with the fact that here we are now, nine years into this public communal trauma of this political period in our lives, and we're still astonished seeing the debate the other night about how much we're learning about how triggered he can be. Are there things along the way that you didn't realize at the beginning, oh, this is an area of opportunity that could be exploited?

I can't point to any specific revelation. I did believe very early on that the way to puncture him is to confront him with the truth about himself. And the first thing I ever wrote, I mean, I tweeted some stuff about it and it got him very, very angry, which I tweeted about him being a narcissist and an sociopath and

March of 2019, and they told him at the White House to shut up and don't amplify Conway. But of course he did. And he attacked me. I was the husband from hell. I was a loser. I was this, that, and the other thing. And then I tweeted back, see, you've just shown everybody what narcissistic personality disorder is. And I guess I did learn from that. But the first time I ever really wrote it all out was I wrote a long piece for The Atlantic.

I'm allowed to mention the Atlantic. I don't know what you're referring to, but it's OK. Some other magazine. And the article came out November 3rd, 2019, just as the Ukraine matter was starting to explode, just before the hearings that were conducted in the House.

And one of the things I said is that an impeachment trial could show us absolutely how crazy he is if they actually put on witnesses and confronted him with the evidence. And that was how I closed the piece. In that paragraph, I was basically saying you need to come right at him with the evidence against him, point out his flaws, point out his weaknesses, point out his mistakes, and

and embarrass him, and he will bat you. Isn't that really what Kamala Harris did during this debate? And it's almost, I'm not sure that it's happened to him face to face like that before. And is that what you saw? Yeah, that's exactly, I mean, this is exactly the correct approach. And Joe Biden didn't do it in 2020. He certainly didn't do it in the first debate. And my thought before the first debate is what you have to do is you have to bait him before

and during the debate. Before, by ads, audience of one ads if you have to, and that's exactly what the Harris campaign did. So are you briefing them, George? No, no, no. I mean, I've expressed my views on

I've expressed my views privately to people. I don't know whether or not that kind of settled in. I mean, I think they figured it out on their own. But I've been saying this for a long time. And obviously, my PAC runs these audience of one ads where you're basically just running it in the Mar-a-Lago, Mar-a-Lago and Edminster. What do you think is the single most effective either of your ads or the, you know, the Lincoln Project ads from 2020? Like, what's the best thing

single example of somebody just saying,

Going directly at Trump on his psychological vulnerability. Well, I mean, I think Rick Wilson at the Lincoln Project did a number of ads in 2020 that were just absolutely spectacular, including the ones where they have, I don't know, I'd like to hire her. She's got this great voice. He has this woman who does voiceovers, who speaks in this kind of conspiratorial way. Nothing worked, Donald. You tried everything to delay the trial. Yeah.

And you think that works on him?

Oh, my God. Absolutely. It works. And they were using it. And Rick was doing it in 2020 to basically imply to Trump that he was being ill served by his campaign manager. I mean, George, your pack has a new ad out recently that really it almost seems as if it is designed for an audience of one. I mean, literally it is right. Hey,

Hey, Donald. Governor Chris Sununu called Trump crazy. All your friends, all the people that have worked with you. He's a very, very flawed man. They all think you're nuts. The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist. He's a populist, authoritarian narcissist. Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. Our country can't be a therapy session for a troubled man like that. Governor Sununu called Trump crazy and said if he was in a mental institution, he wouldn't get out.

So, I mean, do you have any sense of whether he sees these things? Yeah, he does. I mean, first of all, when we first started running ads, he went on Truth Social and specifically attacked me and Fox News for putting my ads on his TV. And then, in this one, this is a little subtle, but it's really actually kind of amazing. Yeah.

In the introductory video for my pack, which was like a three or four minute long thing, and it wasn't just a 30 second spot or one, it was like four or five minutes, a little too long, they say, but I liked it. One of the things I pointed out was that understanding his personality disorders is critical to understanding almost basically everything about Trump. To understand Donald Trump, why he's unfit for office, and why he's a danger to the

Including his authoritarianism, his love of dictators, because he wants to be all-powerful like those people. He considers himself to be like Putin, aspires to be like Kim Jong-un and all the bad people in the world. And the Friday or Thursday or Friday before the Democratic convention, he had this tiny little rally, you know, tiny rally in Asheville, North Carolina,

And he started rambling on about how he got along with Viktor Orban and that he gets along with all the tough guys and that some people say that's a personality defect. And they asked the head of the prime minister of Hungary, very tough man, strong man, very, you know, somebody that I always got along. I get along with the strong ones. I don't get along with the weak ones. Isn't that sad? That's a personality defect.

Personality defect. I was talking about personality disorders. The thing got into his head. It's rattling around in his head. He would never have talked about himself possibly having a personality defect if it weren't for what we had said.

George, I understand that the Lincoln Project looked at the possibility of using his relationship with his father to make him unravel because his father would make him feel like he's a loser and that that would be something that would completely get under his skin. Is that right? Have you looked into the family dynamics as well? Yeah, no. I mean, that's something actually that Dr. Frank's book is very, very good about. And

Also, a very, I mean, books are really great to read together. Dr. Frank's book called Trump on the Couch and then Mary Trump's book. Those are great profiles of his psychological development.

And the first time I ever talked with anybody about an audience of one ad was in the summer of 2019. My friend Molly Jong Fast told me she was having lunch with Rick Wilson. I'd never met Rick Wilson, and I wanted to meet Rick Wilson because I knew he was this great ad maker. And I told Rick my idea. I learned that you can really just broadcast a television ad just in one location.

And I thought it'd be a great idea to just do it in the White House, figure out who the cable provider is at the White House. And I told Rick the idea, and he said, that's a great idea. And then we started talking about what we could do to trigger him. And one of the things we thought about, and I think he ultimately did do very recently, we talked about possibly having an actor come and play Rick.

Trump's father and say, you're a loser. You're you screw up your businesses. You've been a terrible president. And we actually Rick and I actually talked about the possibility of finding that actor and bringing him to one of the debates. But it never it never came to pass. But ultimately, Rick did.

create an artificial intelligence video of Trump's father. Donnie, I always knew you'd blow it. You were always a fool, a joke, low rent. I bailed you out so many times.

Your deals were all garbage. You couldn't even make money off a casino, you fuck up. I'm ashamed you have my name. Everyone knows why the women leave you. You're boring, broke, and I told you not to get fat.

Unbelievable. All right. Well, we're just going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll have even more from George Conway on getting inside Donald Trump's head and also what it means for the campaign. Looking forward to the final weeks of the election. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

Hi, I'm Nicholas Bleckman, The New Yorker's creative director. We've designed a collection of stylish and fun products for all seasons and ages, from beach towels and umbrellas to t-shirts and baby onesies. These and other items, including limited edition tote bags, are available only in The New Yorker store, carefully crafted and featuring work by the magazine's celebrated artists.

In the lead up to the 2024 U.S. elections, more people than ever are wondering how our electoral process actually works. What systems are in place to ensure secure and accurate results? How

How can we recognize misinformation and be able to fully participate in our democracy? The new season of Democracy Decoded, a podcast by Campaign Legal Center, covers all of this. You'll learn from top lawyers and democracy's frontline heroes, such as poll workers and civil rights advocates, to understand how our elections function, the potential threats they face, and the checks and balances in place so voters can rest assured that the election results will reflect the will of the people.

Because here's the thing. Our electoral system works. And Democracy Decoded will help you understand why. Listen now at democracydecoded.org or in your favorite podcast app. And a big thanks to Democracy Decoded for sponsoring the show. Thank you.

Let's talk about the election a little bit. Oh, the election? Yeah, that thing, that thing. Yeah, that thing. We can all agree that Trump is now definitely, definitely triggered. So what do they do if you're the Harris campaign looking forward? What do you do to keep Donald Trump in this state of what might be called extreme psychological distress? Agitation. Just keep hitting him. Just keep. It doesn't have to be anything new or different.

It just has to be more of the same. He's continually repeating, I'm not weird. JD's not weird. Every rally now,

You could just hit him on the same thing. And that's all he's going to talk about. Do you think it actually matters politically, though? I mean, to me, that's the interesting question, right? Like, clearly, it's a good thing as a general principle to have your opponent be off balance and defensive and, you know, sort of talking about himself as opposed to the country. But what does it mean in terms of, you know, electorally speaking? Does it matter, do you think, to voters? Yeah, it does. And you just expressed the reason why. I mean, look, this election...

is going to be a close run thing no matter what. Or you can expect it to be because of the way the nation is politically divided. But there are undecided voters or movable voters, including Republicans. And you don't have to move that many of them to bury Donald Trump. Okay. I mean, it was something like, I mean, the Lincoln Project used to say four years ago, they called it the Bannon line.

Which was basically Steve Bannon basically said that all the Democrats need to do is move five or 10 percent. I forget what the percentage was of Republicans and Trump's a goner. And that still holds true. So you don't have to move that many people. And the best way to move those people is for them to see Donald Trump on their TV saying weird shit.

which he's happy to oblige. I mean, eating cats, eating dogs. I mean, Hannibal Lecter. I mean, it was great when Vice President Harris said, you go to his rallies and he's talking about Hannibal Lecter. Oh my God, I mean, it was perfect. And I think people need to see the more Donald Trump

they see, and the more triggered Donald Trump they see, the more they understand, this guy makes me uncomfortable. He's weird. There's something going on there. I don't fully understand it, and I'm not going to vote for him.

And that's that's my theory. Well, he's raising awareness about windmill cancer. Of course, everybody's very concerned about that. Yes. Windmill cancer and electric boats and electric boat sharks, sharks. A question, George, about the about the potential for Trump to respond in some other way. I remember if you go back, you know, the sort of story of Trump's

political life in its curious way can be traced to, I don't want to overstate it, but there was that moment at the White House Correspondents Dinner, perhaps this was the first triggering of Trump that we ever had, when President Obama actually said to him, sort of poked him, made fun of him about Gary Busey on The Apprentice. And in the history of that period, we've come to sort of see that as the moment when Trump said, you know, I'm going to get back at these guys, these people who laugh at me.

Is there any potential for blowback, any potential that he actually responds in a politically productive way for himself? No, because we know we now have the technology. We know exactly what happened then and what has happened since and how to manage it.

And I, you know, and also he is, he has declined physically and cognitively since then. Do you think so? I mean, I've, I've certainly seen people saying this, but you've been watching him as closely as anyone. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I, I mean, last night, CNN, I forget which anchor late night ran some tape showing the difference between his focus and the debate against Hillary and

And his complete lack of focus the other night. I mean, look, he's old. He's 78 years old. When you get that old, you're not as sharp, particularly somebody like Trump. Because Trump, he's not the brightest guy in the world.

Okay. He never was the brightest guy in the world. Come on. His uncle was a professor at MIT. I can't believe you're saying this. And he's just weaving. He's weaving stories. That's all it is. George, I do think this is an important point, though, is like, is Donald Trump, is there any evidence that this narcissism is getting worse? That, you know, the psychiatrists, they talk about decompensating or what happens when you put a narcissist in a corner? Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's all happening and it's being compounded by his age. I mean, this is a man, to go back to the point I was just, I was about to make was, you know, Dr. Justin Frank in his book points out that one of the reasons why Trump doesn't, never thought very well is because if you lie all the time and you're just making shit up all the time, it's a substitute for thinking.

So his brain was atrophied to begin with, and now he's getting old. It's getting even worse. He doesn't think. He can't think. He can't think straight. And that compounded with the pressures on him, the fact that he's not just running for president, but he is running from prison.

All of these things, his declining ability to attract crowds, he knows he's going down. One last question before you go, George. In the same way that you've developed a technology of reaching his brain in a very specific way, do you see this becoming this idea of triggering political opponents becoming part of our politics now? Or do you think it's specific to him and it sort of goes away?

Look, I mean, there always has been some of this in politics, you know, a little psychological warfare here and there, but it's usually just on the edges, on the margins for entertainment. And I hope it stays that way because I want to get back to it. Like, I'd like to have a serious democracy where we talk about serious things in a serious way for serious things like an election. But with Donald Trump,

You know, he's a dangerous person. He's a danger to the country, danger to the republic, danger to the constitution. We've seen danger to the world. We've seen it all. And you have to use the weapons that are available to take, to put him and to take him out of the political system and send him back to Mar-a-Lago into prison. So, um, we have to do this. It's not a desirable thing, I think for the long run, but this is just something that, that has to be resorted to at this particular point.

point in time. George, you must trigger him like no one else. George, you have given us a lot to think about, I have to say. This is such an important conversation. I truly and deeply hope that your expertise in this field of Trump studies may soon become, let's just say, something for the history books.

But we are very grateful to have you with us. And we hope that if you're a guest a year from now, it's on a different subject. I do really think that debate proved your theory as nothing else could. I think so, too. Not to be narcissistic or anything, you know. But I'm entitled to a little bragging. Thank you so much, George. Thanks, George. Thank you. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.

I'm Nomi Frye. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics At Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out. That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie. Maybe it's a book. Maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the ether. And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.

We talked about the midlife crisis, starting with a new book by Miranda July, but then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno. You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so-called disappearance. And from that, we moved into right-wing conspiracy theories. Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes the Beatles. You know, we've also noticed that advice is everywhere. Advice columns, advice giving. And we kind of want to look at why.

Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. I still am marveling, Jane, over the extent to which it's like

If George wasn't exactly in the room for the debate prep, certainly the spirit of everything he's been saying for the last four years. And it was really different than Joe Biden's approach to Donald Trump. I do think, I mean, it's been interesting watching that George has been saying this for years. And so were some psychiatrists like Justin Frank. And they were kind of held at the margins and really

There was even a debate, I think, within The New York Times about whether it was proper to bring up psychology when discussing Trump. And it has moved, we've seen now, from the fringes into the strategy that Harris actually used. And it obliterated Trump in many ways. I mean, that was not a debate. That was a vivisection, I think. You know what's amazing, too, is—

You remember there was, of course, Michelle Obama's belief that when they go low, we maintain the standards of our moral aspirations for this country. We should stay high, right? And that's not actually where we needed to be. We as a country, really, in 2024, if you listen to Michelle Obama, her speech at the convention, she

She no longer says when they go low, we go high. In a sense, she didn't say it directly, but she said when they go low, you go for the jugular. And there's something poignant about the idea that George Conway and the others who have been doing this to trigger Trump are hoping that they have developed a technique that goes away. They don't want this to become a permanent part of our politics, because if it is, then

That leads us to a pretty dark place. Well, we're in a pretty dark place is the problem, right? But it's interesting how much Harris adopted this particular stratagem. I think your point is absolutely right, Evan. You know, they've decided the gloves have to come off. We're not going high. We're going to be in the ring. But I still there was a lot of advanced talk about Harris, the prosecutor, showing up to prosecute the case against Donald Trump. And she did

a certain amount of that in debate. And yet I think what we are all responding to is that actually the most effective thing that she did really was adopting the psychological case against Trump more than even a kind of a legalistic approach. She adopted approach of like, let's look at the vulnerabilities of this man's troubled

And I'm curious, like in all of your reporting and thinking about Joe Biden and the differences between him and Kamala Harris, it seemed that Biden had a different at least political conclusion about what worked against Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. Yeah, there really was at their core a fundamental, almost a philosophical and stylistic canyon between the way that Biden thought politics works in 2024 and the way Harris does it.

Biden, in his own way, tried to conduct a campaign as if it was 1984 instead of 2024. He sort of would try to treat Donald Trump as a grave national security threat, which, of course, he is. But in a way, it felt muted, constrained. And I think part of you see this in Joe Biden, almost you see it on his face. You could see it in the debate.

He couldn't quite grapple with the reality of the person across from him. And it was such an insult to how he thought politics should work that he never really figured out how to respond. I think what she did was she laughed at him and that she knew that that was his true vulnerability. She made him look small, seem silly, unkind.

said that people were bored and walking out of his rallies, that he was a disgrace, that he was just a nepo baby. These things were... They were...

not just about being tougher than him. It was about her kind of, you know, basically snickering at him. And she literally did during the debate. And I think that is the thing that really unravels him. Well, using insults on, you know, the world's most sort of feral insult comedian is an interesting approach. But I actually do agree with Evan that Biden always took this tone of sort of aggrieved,

distress even about Trump. He was outraged that this man was even in politics. But it built Trump up. Exactly. It built Trump up in a flattering way. In effect, it responded to the response that Donald Trump wanted to provoke in Joe Biden and the other members of the sort of the establishment writ large who was against him. Whereas I think Harris was

And it's almost as if she was briefed by a psychiatrist on here's the way to undermine a bully. I do think they could study this, you know, in in the textbooks in in medical school as if you want to get at a bully, here's how you would do it and using his own words.

and language against him was the other thing. He finds those words very offensive, which is why he uses them on other people. And so to have her say, you are weak, what has he called her? He's called her weak. What does Donald Trump do in every single one of his rallies? He says, the world is laughing at us. They're laughing at us.

She said, Donald, they're laughing at you. And she laughed at him, too. I mean, I really do think that it was just such a wound to his pride to particularly to have a woman, a woman of color who outfoxed him. There is a fascinating history to the use of humor against strongmen. I mean, just to give you one amazing example, in the late 1990s,

The pro-democracy movement in Serbia at that point couldn't figure out how you make a dent in Slobodan Milosevic until one day they had an idea. And they put a barrel in the middle of the town square with a picture of Milosevic on it. And all they did was leave a baseball bat next to it.

And people figured out what to do. And people would walk up, they'd pick up the baseball bat, and they'd thrash this barrel. And eventually the police were undone by this. They didn't know what to do. And so they did exactly what the activists wanted them to do. They arrested the barrel, which was the most ridiculous result. And they had these photos of police, Milosevic's, you know, jackbooted thugs walking

arresting a barrel. Mission accomplished. And that is a pattern that you actually see in Putin's Russia and in other places. And there's more to say on that. But it is an established, fascinating playbook. Think about what really got to Gaddafi. It was when the New York Post called him Gaddafi Gaddafi. These are these puffed up pride of the strongmen are their vulnerabilities. And I guess that's what they figured out, thanks to George and others.

Well, the election isn't quite over yet, but the debate is over. And you could call that sort of the last great known unknown. There could be many more unknown unknowns to quote the late Donald Rumsfeld. But, you know, this was the big final hurdle, at least on the calendar before the election. They're already sending out mail-in ballots. Pennsylvania is about to become the first state to do the in-person early voting process.

You know, quick vibe check before we end. Jane, Evan? I mean, I think you'd be foolish to say that you can see how it's going to all turn out. It's very tight, but there's lots to watch. I'm particularly interested that Laura Loomer has been traveling with Trump. She's an online social media provocateur and in many ways one of the most offensive people in America. And I think...

It's the beginning of a lot of dissension right within his campaign. I think things are beginning to unravel a little bit on the inside of the Trump campaign. So I'm watching that. I am astonished and alert to and frankly quite alarmed by the fact that after everything we've all seen and everything we've all been through, that it is as close as it is. And one of the themes that you hear when you're talking to people inside Trump

The world of democratic politics is the numbers are as close as you can possibly get. And I think it's sometimes worth separating out the visceral glee that a lot of people feel by watching Donald Trump unravel on television from the very real fact that this race is in many ways a dead heat.

Evan, thank you for playing the role of reality check here. I would just leave us with the thought and the reminder that Hillary Clinton also defeated Donald Trump very handily in their debates in the fall of 2016. Okay, I'm going to be the voice of optimism here, as usual. Oh, we need one. Somebody's got to be, and I'm just going to say that in addition to triggering criticism

Trump during this debate. She did some other things that were, I think, masterful. And the way she framed the issue of abortion, I think, is going to matter and resonate with so many people that it's entirely possible that the turnout

particularly among the women, is going to be spectacular. You heard it here, folks. Evan, Jane, great to be with you guys. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Susan. This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Susan Glasser, and we had research assistance today from Alex D'Elia. The episode was produced by Julia Nutter and Sheena Ozaki. Our editor is Gianna Palmer.

Thank you so much for listening. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

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.