The Political Scene | The New Yorker

What Stops Democracy from Backsliding? Feb 22, 2025

The Washington Roundtable discusses with the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond about President Trump’s attempts to claim broad powers, why most Republican lawmakers have fallen into line out of fear, and whether the United States has already tipped over into authoritarian territory. Plus, how the courts, Congress, and ordinary citizens might course-correct American democracy.

This week’s reading:

“The Crisis of Democracy Is Here,” by Larry Diamond
“Trump’s Putinization of America,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Pulling Our Politics Back from the Brink,” by Evan Osnos (2020)
“Month One of Donald Trump’s ‘Golden Age,’ ” by Antonia Hitchens
“We’d Never Had a King Until This Week,” by Bill McKibben
“The Trump Administration Trashes Europe and NATO,” by Dexter Filkins
“The Second Trump Administration’s New Forms of Distraction,” by Kyle Chayka

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Elon Musk’s A.I.-Driven Government Coup Feb 20, 2025

The New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Elon Musk’s seizure of power within the U.S. government, the tech industry’s slide into right-wing politics, and how the ideology of techno-fascism is taking root in Silicon Valley. Can the populists and the technologists coexist in Donald Trump’s Washington?

This week’s reading:

“Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency,” by Kyle Chayka
“The Second Trump Administration’s New Forms of Distraction,” by Kyle Chayka
“Make South Africa Great Again?,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Elizabeth Warren Fights to Defend the Consumer Protection Agency She Helped Create,” by John Cassidy
“A Fistfight Over Donald Trump at the Evangelical Version of Harvard,” by Emma Green

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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The A.C.L.U. v. Trump 2.0 Feb 17, 2025

In Donald Trump’s first term in office, the American Civil Liberties Union filed four hundred and thirty-four lawsuits against the Administration. Since Trump’s second Inauguration, the A.C.L.U. has filed cases to block executive orders ending birthright citizenship, defunding gender-affirming health care, and more. If the Administration defies a judge’s order to fully reinstate government funds frozen by executive order, Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, says, we will have arrived at a constitutional crisis. “We’re at the Rubicon,” Romero says. “Whether we’ve crossed it remains to be seen.” Romero has held the job since 2001—he started just days before September 11, 2001—and has done the job under four Presidents. He tells David Remnick that it’s nothing new for Presidents to chafe at judicial obstacles to implement their agendas; Romero mentions Bill Clinton’s attempts to strip courts of certain powers as notably aggressive. But, “if Trump decides to flagrantly defy a judicial order, then I think . . . we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”

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What Does It Mean to Resist Trump in 2025? Feb 13, 2025

The essayist and cultural critic Brady Brickner-Wood talks with Tyler Foggatt about the opposition Donald Trump encountered in his first Presidential term, why many liberals are feeling a sense of resignation, and the Democratic Party’s struggle to present a unifying message. Plus, the political commentary embedded in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show.

This week’s reading:

“What Happened to the Trump Resistance?,” by Brady Brickner-Wood
“The War on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“The Fears of the Undocumented,” by Geraldo Cadava
“The Madness of Donald Trump,” by David Remnick
“Elon Musk and Donald Trump Are Not Fixing U.S. Foreign Aid but Destroying It,” by John Cassidy
“Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency,” by Kyle Chayka
“What Happens if Trump Defies the Courts,” by Isaac Chotiner

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I. Feb 10, 2025

Many of the most draconian measures implemented in the first couple weeks of the new Trump Administration have been justified as emergency actions to root out D.E.I.—diversity, equity, and inclusion—including the freeze (currently rescinded) of trillions of dollars in federal grants. The tragic plane crash in Washington, the President baselessly suggested, might also be the result of D.E.I. Typically, D.E.I. describes policies at large companies or institutions to encourage more diverse workplaces. In the Administration’s rhetoric, D.E.I. is discrimination pure and simple, and the root of much of what ails the nation. “D.E.I. is the boogeyman for anything,” Jelani Cobb tells David Remnick. Cobb is a longtime staff writer, and the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. “If there’s a terrible tragedy . . . if there is something going wrong in any part of your life, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that, somehow, another D.E.I. is there.” Although affirmative-action policies in university admissions were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, D.E.I. describes a broad array of actions without a specific definition. “It’s that malleability,” Cobb reflects, that makes D.E.I. a useful target, “one source that you can use to blame every single failing or shortcoming or difficulty in life on.”

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Why Trump Is Targeting Foreign Aid, with Atul Gawande Feb 08, 2025

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Atul Gawande, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to discuss Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s rapid-fire dismantling of the agency. They explore the life-and-death implications of the Trump Administration ending foreign aid, why the agency was targeted, and which federal agencies might be next.

This week’s reading:

“Behind the Chaotic Attempt to Freeze Federal Assistance,” by Atul Gawande
“Elon Musk’s Revolutionary Terror,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Donald Trump’s Madness on Gaza,” by David Remnick
“How Donald Trump Is Transforming Executive Power,” by Isaac Chotiner
“What Happened to the Trump Resistance?” by Brady Brickner-Wood
“Donald Trump’s Anti-Woke Wrecking Ball,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“Trump’s Trade War Is Only Getting Going,” by John Cassidy

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Is Flying Actually Becoming Less Safe? Feb 06, 2025

Matthew L. Wald joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the political aftermath of last week’s horrific collision between an American Airlines plane and a Black Hawk military helicopter. They look at the current state of airline safety, the changes afoot at the Federal Aviation Administration, and President Trump’s wild pronouncements that somehow diversity initiatives were to blame for the crash that claimed sixty-seven lives. “The culture warriors, with such a vengeance, are now turning to the F.A.A.—it’s something new and it’s not healthy,” Wald says.

This week’s reading:

“How to Understand the Reagan Airport Crash,” by Matthew L. Wald
“How Donald Trump Is Transforming Executive Power,” by Isaac Chotiner
“The U.S. Military’s Recruiting Crisis,” by Dexter Filkins
“Donald Trump’s Anti-Woke Wrecking Ball,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“Kash Patel’s Political-Persecution Fantasies,” by Tess Owen

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Bill Gates on His New Memoir and Dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago Feb 03, 2025

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Bill Gates was the best known of a new breed: the tech mogul—a coder who had figured out how to run a business, and who then seemed to be running the world. Gates was ranked the richest person in the world for many years. In a new memoir, “Source Code,” he explains how he got there. The book focusses on Gates’s early life, and just through the founding of Microsoft. Since stepping away from the company, Gates has devoted himself to his foundation, which is one of the largest nonprofits working on public health around the globe. That has made him the target of conspiracy theories by anti-vaxxers, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has asserted that Gates and Anthony Fauci are together responsible for millions of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gates views the rise of conspiracy thinking as symptomatic of larger trends in American society exacerbated by technology. “The fact that outrage is rewarded because it’s more engaging, that’s kind of a human weakness,” he tells David Remnick. “And the fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety—boy, was that naïve. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it. Not some bat biology.

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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on What Democrats Should Do Next Feb 01, 2025

The Washington Roundtable discusses the fallout of the White House releasing, and then rescinding, a memo intended to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans. The incident, as well as this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for controversial Cabinet nominees such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel, offers Democrats an opportunity to seize control of the narrative—if they can get organized, Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, says. “If what Democrats are doing is running around calling them chaotic and incompetent, that’s not going to win the day unless those charges are connected to actual harms happening to regular people.”

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Revenge,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Trump’s Orders Sow Chaos Inside the Nation’s Enforcer of Equal Opportunity,” by E. Tammy Kim
“Kash Patel’s Political-Persecution Fantasies,” by Tess Owen
“Behind the Chaotic Attempt to Freeze Federal Assistance,” by Atul Gawande
“The Junk Science of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,” by Clare Malone
“How Donald Trump Seizes the Primal Power of Naming,” by Jessica Winter
“Trump’s Attempt to Redefine America,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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How Trump’s Federal-Aid Fiasco Is Testing the Separation of Power Jan 30, 2025

On Tuesday, the Trump Administration sent out a memo attempting to put a blanket pause on most federal funding, sowing confusion about financing for student loans, SNAP benefits, nonprofits, and more. The next day, after a backlash, the Administration rescinded the memo, while maintaining that a freeze remains in “full force and effect.” The order created chaos across the federal government, threatening a power struggle between the President, Congress, and the courts. The New Yorker contributor and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Trump’s directives are testing how far a President can go.

This week’s reading:

“Trump's Attempt to Redefine America,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“The Unchecked Authority of Trump's Immigration Orders,” by Jonathan Blitzer
“Donald Trump Throws the Doors to the Patriot Wing Open,” by Antonia Hitchens
“Trump Is Already Drowning Us in Outrages,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Britain’s Foreign Secretary Braces for the Second Trump Age,” by Sam Knight

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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A Spirit of Vengeance in Trump’s First Week Jan 25, 2025

The Washington Roundtable discusses President Trump’s first week in office, during which he broke a record for the most executive orders any modern-day President has signed on Day One. The President’s inaugural address and barrage of orders seemed driven by a sense of grievance, accrued in the course of four years out of office, four criminal prosecutions, and a deep desire for revenge. Will an apparatus of rage, taking form as vengeance, ultimately inhibit the government from performing its functions? Plus, they discuss the Episcopal Bishop Marianne Buddy’s remarks at the interfaith prayer service, and the importance of speaking truth to power.

This week’s reading:

“Trump Is Already Drowning Us in Outrages,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Unchecked Authority of Trump’s Immigration Orders,” by Jonathan Blitzer
“The Big Tech Takeover of American Politics,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“Why Is the Mastermind of Trump’s Tariff Plan Still Sitting at Home in Florida?,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“How Much Power Does President Trump Have?,” by Jeannie Suk Gersen
“Donald Trump Invents an Energy Emergency,” by Bill McKibben
“What Trump 2.0 Means for Ukraine and the World,” by Isaac Chotiner

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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David Remnick on the Dawn of Trump’s Second Term Jan 23, 2025

Within hours of his Inauguration, and shortly after proclaiming that his victory had been preordained by God, Donald Trump signed dozens of executive orders. These included exiting the World Health Organization, attempting to end birthright citizenship in the United States, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. He also issued pardons for hundreds of the January 6th convicts. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what Trump’s first days back in office portend for the next four years. “[Trump] hasn’t changed one iota,” Remnick says, “except that his confidence has increased, and his base has increased, and the obedience of the Republican Party leadership is absolute.”

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Inaugural Day of Vindication,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Donald Trump Plays Church,” by Vinson Cunningham.
“ ‘An Oligarchy Is Taking Shape,’ ” by David Remnick
“What Trump 2.0 Means for Ukraine and the World,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Donald Trump Returns to Washington,” by Antonia Hitchens
“Donald Trump Invents an Energy Emergency,” by Bill McKibben

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Big Money and Trump’s New Cabinet Jan 18, 2025

The Washington Roundtable discusses this week’s confirmation hearings for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Pam Bondi as Attorney General, and the potential for a “shock and awe” campaign in the first days of Donald Trump’s second term. Plus, as billionaires from many industries gather around the dais on Inauguration Day, what should we make of President Biden’s warning, in the waning days of his Administration, about “an oligarchy taking shape in America”?

This week’s reading:

““The Trump Effect”: On Deal-Making and Credit-Claiming in Trump 2.0,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Pressure Campaign to Get Pete Hegseth Confirmed as Defense Secretary,” by Jane Mayer
“Why the Israel-Hamas Ceasefire Is Happening Now,” by Isaac Chotiner
“ ‘An Oligarchy Is Taking Shape,’ ” by David Remnick
“How Much of the Government Can Donald Trump Dismantle?” by Jeannie Suk Gersen
“The Shock of a Gaza Ceasefire Deal,” by Ruth Margalit

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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How the Blazes in L.A. Got Swept Into the Culture War Jan 15, 2025

The Eaton and Palisades fires continue to wreak destruction across Los Angeles. They are predicted to become the most expensive fire recovery in American history. As the fires have burned, a torrent of right-wing rage has emerged online. Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Charlie Kirk have attacked liberal mismanagement and blamed D.E.I. programs and “woke” politics for the destruction. Meanwhile, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has expressed concerns that the future Trump Administration may add conditions to federal financial-assistance relief for California, something that Republican Congress members have already floated. The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what happens when disaster relief is swept up in the culture war.

This week’s reading:

“The Insurance Crisis That Will Follow the California Fires,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
“On the Ground During L.A.’s Wildfire Emergency,” by Emily Witt
“An Arson Attack in Puerto Rico,” by Graciela Mochkofsky
“Elon Musk’s Latest Terrifying Foray Into British Politics,” By Sam Knight
“The Pressure Campaign to Get Pete Hegseth Confirmed as Defense Secretary,” by Jane Mayer

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Representative Ro Khanna on Elon Musk and the Tech Oligarchy Jan 13, 2025

Representative Ro Khanna of California is in the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus. And although his district is in the heart of Silicon Valley—and he once worked as a lawyer for tech companies—Khanna is focussed on how Democrats can regain the trust of working-class voters. He knows tech moguls, he talks with them regularly, and he thinks that they are forming a dangerous oligarchy, to the detriment of everyone else. “This is more dangerous than petty corruption. This is more dangerous than, ‘Hey, they just want to maximize their corporation's wealth,’ ”he tells David Remnick. “This is an ideology amongst some that rejects the role of the state.” Although he’s an ally of Bernie Sanders, such as advocating for Medicare for All and free public college, Khanna is not a democratic socialist. He calls himself a progressive capitalist. Real economic growth, he says, requires “a belief in entrepreneurship and technology and in business leaders being part of the solution.”

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What the End of Meta’s Fact-Checking Program Means for the Future of Free Speech Jan 10, 2025

The Washington Roundtable discusses Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end its fact-checking program across Meta’s social-media sites. Instead, Meta will release a tool that allows readers to add context and corrections to posts, similar to the way one can leave a “community note” on X. What does this choice mean for truth online in the coming Trump Administration, and have “alternative facts,” as they were dubbed by Kellyanne Conway in 2017, won out? Plus, free speech in the era of Donald Trump, lawsuits brought against the mainstream media, and how journalists will cover President Trump’s second Administration.

This week’s reading:

“King Donald and the Presidents at the National Cathedral,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Why the MAGA Fight Over H-1B Visas Is Crossing Party Lines,” by John Cassidy
“Lauren Boebert’s Survival Instincts,” by Peter Hessler

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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Will Justin Trudeau’s Resignation Lead to the MAGA-fication of Canada? Jan 08, 2025

After nearly a decade as Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau has resigned from office. His stepping down follows a years-long decline in popularity, which stands in sharp contrast to his meteoric rise in 2015. It now seems likely that the Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, whose far-right populist support some have likened to Trump’s MAGA movement, will attain Canada’s highest office. The New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik joins the show to discuss Trudeau’s descent, Poilievre’s ascent, expectations for the upcoming parliamentary election, and what the future of Canadian politics may hold.

This week’s reading:

“Why Justin Trudeau Had to Step Down,” by Adam Gopnik
“How Much Do Democrats Need to Change?,” by Peter Slevin
“Bourbon Street After the Terror,” by Paige Williams
“How Sheriffs Might Power Trump’s Deportation Machine,” by Jessica Pishko
“New Mexico’s Nuclear-Weapons Boom,” by Abe Streep

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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From Critics at Large: The Modern-Day Fight for Ancient Rome Jan 03, 2025

The Political Scene will be back next week. In the meantime, enjoy a recent episode from The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast. Artists owe a great debt to ancient Rome. Over the years, it’s provided a backdrop for countless films and novels, each of which has put forward its own vision of the Empire and what it stood for. The hosts Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss the latest entry in that canon, Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” which has drawn massive audiences and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. The hosts also consider other texts that use the same setting, from the religious epic “Ben-Hur” to Sondheim’s farcical swords-and-sandals parody, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Recently, figures from across the political spectrum have leapt to lay claim to antiquity, even as new translations have underscored how little we really understand about these civilizations. “Make ancient Rome strange again. Take away the analogies,” Schwartz says. “Maybe that’s the appeal of the classics: to try to keep returning and understanding, even as we can’t help holding them up as a mirror.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Gladiator II” (2024)

“I, Claudius” (1976)

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966)

“The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988)

“Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979)

“Cleopatra” (1963)

“Spartacus” (1960)

“Ben-Hur” (1959)

“Gladiator” (2000)

“The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama

“I, Claudius,” by Robert Graves

“I Hate to Say This, But Men Deserve Better Than Gladiator II,” by Alison Willmore (Vulture)

“On Creating a Usable Past,” by Van Wyck Brook (The Dial)

Emily Wilson’s translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

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Why Banning TikTok Could Violate the First Amendment Jan 01, 2025

The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss efforts by the U.S. government to rein in social media, including the latest attempt to ban TikTok. While Kang agrees that society should be more conscientious about how we, especially children, use social media, he argues that efforts to ban these apps also violate the First Amendment.

“Social media has become the public square, even if it is privately owned,” he says.

This episode was originally published in March, 2024.

This week’s reading:

“The Misguided Attempt to Control Tiktok,” by Jay Caspian Kang

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Remembering Jimmy Carter, a “President Out of Time” Dec 30, 2024

President Jimmy Carter has died at the age of one-hundred. He is remembered as a man of paradoxes: an evangelical-Christian Democrat, a white Southern champion of civil rights and solar energy, and a one-term President whose policies have come to seem prescient. Carter was unpopular when he departed the White House, in 1981, but, more than any other President, he saw his reputation improve after he left office. What does the evolution of Carter’s legacy tell us about American politics, and about ourselves? Lawrence Wright spent significant time with Carter and even wrote a play about the Camp David Accords, the peace deal that only Carter, Wright argues, could have brokered between Israel and Egypt. He joins Tyler Foggatt to remember Carter as a man and leader.

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How Henry Kissinger Accumulated and Wielded Power Dec 27, 2024

The Washington Roundtable revisits an episode recorded after Henry Kissinger’s death, in November, 2023. Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos evaluate Kissinger’s controversial legacy, share anecdotes from his time in and around Washington, and discuss how he continued to shape U.S. foreign policy long after leaving the State Department.

“There are not that many hundred-year-olds who insist upon their own relevance and actually are relevant,” Glasser says.

This week’s reading:

“Henry Kissinger’s Hard Compromises,” by Evan Osnos
“Why Washington Couldn’t Quit Kissinger,” by Isaac Chotiner

This episode was originally published in December, 2023.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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We Have Some Questions for Isaac Chotiner About 2024 Dec 18, 2024

From the conflict in Gaza and the war in Ukraine to political chaos across Europe and the reëlection of Donald Trump, 2024 has been among the most tumultuous years in recent memory. Isaac Chotiner, the primary contributor to The New Yorker’s Q. & A. segment, has been following it all. He joins the show to reflect on his favorite interviews of the year, and to discuss 2024’s two biggest stories: the violence in Gaza and the reëlection of Donald Trump. Chotiner also talks about Joe Biden’s legacy, and his view on how Biden’s Presidency will be regarded by history.

This week’s reading:

“The Year in Brain Rot,” by Jessica Winter
“Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero,” by Jessica Winter
“Syria After Assad,” by Robin Wright
“In South Korea, a Blueprint for Resisting Autocracy?,” by E. Tammy Kim

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism Dec 16, 2024

Power dynamics in the Middle East shifted dramatically this year. In Lebanon, Israel dealt a severe blow toHezbollah, and another crucial ally of Iran—Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria—was toppled by insurgents. But the historian Rashid Khalidi is skeptical that these changes will set back the Palestinian cause, as it relates to Israel. “This idea that the Palestinians are bereft of allies assumes that they had people who were doing things for their interest,” Khalidi tells David Remnick, “which I don’t think was true.” The limited responses to the war in Gaza by Iran and Hezbollah, Khalidi believes, clearly demonstrate that Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance “was designed by Iran to protect the Iranian regime. . . . It wasn’t designed to protect Palestine.” Khalidi, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of a number of books on Palestinian history; among them, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” has been particularly influential. The book helped bring the term “settler colonialism” into common parlance, at least on the left, to describe Israel’s relationship to historic Palestine. Sometimes invoked as a term of opprobrium, “settler colonialism” is strongly disputed by supporters of Israel. Khalidi asserts that the description is historically specific and accurate. The early Zionists, he says, understood their effort as colonization. “That’s not some antisemitic slur,” he says. “That’s the description they gave themselves.”
The concept of settler colonialism has been applied, on the political left, to describe Israel’s founding, and to its settlement of the Palestinian-occupied territories. This usage has been disputed by supporters of Israel and by thinkers including Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, who has also written about philosophy for The New Yorker. “Settler colonialism is . . . a zero-sum way of looking at the conflict,” Kirsch tells David Remnick. “In the classic examples, it involves the destruction of one people by another and their replacement over a large territory, really a continent-wide territory. That’s not at all the history of Israel and Palestine.” Kirsch made his case in a recent book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.”

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Why Luigi Mangione Is Being Treated as a Folk Hero Dec 11, 2024

After a five-day manhunt, Luigi Mangione, a twenty-six-year-old Ivy League graduate, was arrested and charged on Monday with the widely publicized assassination of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O. Brian Thompson. The case seized public imagination, and there has been a torrent of commentary celebrating Mangione and denigrating Thompson, including fan edits of the alleged shooter to posts sharing personal anecdotes of denied health-insurance claims. “Mangione is going to be seen as a folk hero across the aisle,” the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino tells Tyler Foggatt. What does the lionization of a suspected murderer say about the health of our society?

This week’s reading:

“How Daniel Penny Was Found Not Guilty in a Subway Killing That Divided New York,” by Adam Iscoe
“A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing?,” by Jia Tolentino
“What Will Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Accomplish with Doge?,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells“
The Fall of Assad’s Syria,” by Rania Abouzeid

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Inside Donald Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plans Dec 09, 2024

Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s political career, and in his second successful Presidential campaign he promised to execute the largest deportation in history. Stephen Miller, Trump’s key advisor on hard-line immigration policy, said that the incoming Administration would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” possibly involving the use of the military. “I do think they’re going to strain the outer limits of the law on that,” the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells David Remnick. “We’re entering unprecedented territory.” Blitzer unpacks some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and explains measures that the new Administration is likely to take. “I.C.E. has a policy that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts,” he says. That policy can change and, he believes, will. “You’re going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places.” The aim, he thinks, will be “to create a sense of terror. That is going to be the modus operandi of the Administration.” Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis.

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Is Trump’s “Shock and Awe” Transition Working? Dec 06, 2024

The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s transition back into the White House, the world he will inherit in 2025, and his provocative nomination of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. In their final Roundtable episode of 2024, Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos also reflect on the twists and turns of the past year in politics, including what to make of President Joe Biden’s legacy.

This week’s reading:

“The Scandal of Trump’s Cabinet Picks Isn’t Just Their Personal Failings,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Pete Hegseth’s Secret History,” by Jane Mayer
“The Demise and Afterlife of Donald Trump’s Criminal Cases,” by Jeannie Suk Gersen
“Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Further Undermines His Legacy,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Stopping the Press,” by David Remnick
“The Immigrants Most Vulnerable to Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans Entered the Country Legally,” by Jonathan Blitzer

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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How the Trump Indictments Backfired Dec 04, 2024

A year ago, Donald Trump was facing four separate criminal indictments, and had become the first President to be charged with and convicted of a felony. Now that Trump is President-elect, and with the Supreme Court having granted sitting Presidents broad immunity, the Justice Department’s efforts to hold Trump accountable appear to be over. Even so, Trump’s legal saga has radically changed American law and politics, the New Yorker staff writer Jeannie Suk Gersen argues. “These prosecutions forced the Supreme Court to at least answer the question [of Presidential immunity],” Gersen says. “It will affect the kind of people who run for President, and it will affect how they think of their jobs.”

This week’s reading:

“Pete Hegseth’s Secret History,” by Jane Mayer
“Stopping The Press,” by David Remnick
“The Fundamental Problem with R.F.K., Jr.,’s Nomination to H.H.S.,” by Dhruv Khullar
“Did the Opioid Epidemic Fuel Donald Trump’s Return to the White House?,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Further Undermines His Legacy,” by Isaac Chotiner.
“A Coup, Almost, in South Korea,” by E. Tammy Kim.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Ketanji Brown Jackson on Ethics, Trust, and Keeping It Collegial at the Supreme Court Nov 25, 2024

Since the founding of the nation, just 116 people have served as Supreme Court Justices; the 116th is Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by President Biden in 2022. Jackson joined a Court with six conservative Justices setting a new era of jurisprudence. She took her seat just days after the Dobbs decision, when Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturned Roe v. Wade. She wrote a blistering dissent to the Harvard decision, which ended affirmative action in college admissions, in which she accused the majority of a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to the reality of race in America. She also dissented in the landmark Presidential-immunity case. Immunity might “incentivize an office holder to push the envelope, with respect to the exercise of their authority,” she tells David Remnick. “It was certainly a concern, and one that I did not perceive the Constitution to permit.” They also discussed the widely reported ethical questions surrounding the Court, and whether the ethical code it adopted ought to have some method of enforcement. But Jackson stressed that whatever the public perception, the nine Justices maintain old traditions of collegiality (no legal talk at lunch, period), and that she sometimes writes majority opinions as well as vigorous dissents. Jackson’s recent memoir is titled “Lovely One,” about her family, youth, and how she got to the highest position in American law.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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How to Prepare for Trump 2.0 Nov 23, 2024

The Washington Roundtable discusses how people in D.C. and across the country are preparing themselves for Donald Trump’s second Presidency, and what tools citizens have to protect their rights and push back on abuses of power. The American Civil Liberties Union has called attention to the strategies of litigation, legislation, and mobilization—strategies that are proven to work. David Cole, a former legal director of the A.C.L.U. and a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University, joins Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos to discuss the checks and balances that exist as guardrails in government and civil society, and how those may be utilized in the coming four years.

This week’s reading:

“What Could Stop Him?,” by David Cole (The New York Review of Books)
“The Explosion of Matt Gaetz and Other Early Lessons in Trump 2.0,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Donald Trump’s Administration Hopefuls Descend on Mar-a-Lago,” by Antonia Hitchens
“The Pain Creating a New Coalition for Trump,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone,” by Ronan Farrow
“Donald Trump’s U.F.C. Victory Party,” by Sam Eagan
“Understanding Latino Support for Donald Trump,” by Geraldo Cadava

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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What Is Donald Trump’s Cabinet Planning for America? Nov 20, 2024

The New Yorker staff writers Dexter Filkins and Clare Malone join Tyler Foggatt to examine Donald Trump’s appointments of former congressman Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to his Cabinet.Gaetz, who has been nominated for Attorney General, is one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders and the former subject of a sex-trafficking investigation run by the Department of Justice. (Gaetz has denied all allegations.) Trump has chosen Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, giving one of the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists broad powers over public health. How would these men reshape the legal and medical infrastructures of our federal government? And will they even be confirmed?

This week’s reading:

“How Far Would Matt Gaetz Go?,” by Dexter Filkins
“R.F.K., Jr.,’s Next Move,” by Clare Malone
“Why Is Elon Musk Really Embracing Donald Trump?,” By John Cassidy
“Trump’s Cabinet of Wonders,” by David Remnick
“The Most Extreme Cabinet Ever,” by Susan B. Glasser

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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The Authors of “How Democracies Die” on the New Democratic Minority Nov 18, 2024

American voters have elected a President with broadly, overtly authoritarian aims. It’s hardly the first time that the democratic process has brought an anti-democratic leader to power. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who both teach at Harvard, assert that we shouldn’t be shocked by the Presidential result. “It’s not up to voters to defend a democracy,” Levitsky says. “That’s asking far, far too much of voters, to cast their ballot on the basis of some set of abstract principles or procedures.” He adds, “With the exception of a handful of cases, voters never, ever—in any society, in any culture—prioritize democracy over all else. Individual voters worry about much more mundane things, as is their right. It is up to élites and institutions to protect democracy—not voters.” Levitsky and Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” during Donald Trump’s first Administration, but they argue that what’s ailing our democracy runs much deeper—and that it didn’t start with Trump. “We’re the only advanced, old, rich democracy that has faced the level of democratic backsliding that we’ve experienced. . . . So we need to kind of step back and say, ‘What has gone wrong here?’ If we don’t ask those kinds of hard questions, we’re going to continue to be in this roiling crisis,” Ziblatt says.

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Chris Hayes on the New Trump Coalition, and What Democrats Do Next Nov 13, 2024

The second Trump Administration might dramatically reshape the foundations of the federal government for decades to come. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is reckoning with what could be interpreted as a generational rebuke of its platform and presentation. But is this the beginning of a mass political realignment in the United States? And how will politicians communicate their platforms in a world where the “attention economy” has so radically shifted? Author, political commentator, and MSNBC host Chris Hayes joins guest host Andrew Marantz for an election postmortem and to discuss where the Democrats go from here.

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump, Reprised”
“The Tucker Carlson Road Show,” by Andrew Marantz
“Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?,” by Andrew Marantz
“Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist,” by Andrew Marantz
“Why Was It So Hard for the Democrats to Replace Biden,” by Andrew Marantz

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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Donald Trump Returns. What Now? Nov 08, 2024

The Washington roundtable is joined by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, to discuss how Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sexual abuser, won both the Electoral College and the popular vote—a first for a Republican President since 2004. Democrats lost almost every swing state, even as abortion-rights ballot measures found favor in some conservative states. On this crossover episode with The New Yorker Radio Hour, they discuss Kamala Harris’s campaign, Trump’s overtly authoritarian rhetoric, and the American electorate’s rightward trajectory.

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Revenge,” by Susan B. Glasser
“2016 and 2024,” by Jelani Cobb
“How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters,” by Kelefa Sanneh
“The Reckoning of the Democratic Party,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“How America Embraced Gender War,” by Jia Tolentino
“Donald Trump’s Second Term Is Joe Biden’s Real Legacy,” by Isaac Chotiner

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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How Trump Took Back America Nov 07, 2024

Four years after refusing to accept defeat and encouraging a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Donald J. Trump has once again been elected President of the United States. The former President, who in the past year alone has been convicted of a felony and has survived two assassination attempts, campaigned largely on a platform of mass deportations, trade wars, and retribution for his detractors. On Tuesday, he secured the Presidency thanks to a surge of rural voters, high turnout among young men, and unprecedented gains with Black and Latino populations. What does a second Trump term mean for America? Clare Malone and Jay Caspian Kang, who’ve been covering the election for The New Yorker, join Tyler Foggatt to discuss how we got here, and the uncertain future of the Democratic Party.

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Revenge,” by Susan B. Glasser
The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War, by Charles Bethea
What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?, by Jay Caspian Kang

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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Liz Cheney on Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Jeff Bezos Nov 04, 2024

In recent weeks and months, dozens of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have come out against Donald Trump, declaring him a security threat, unfit for office, and, in some cases, a fascist. Way out in front of this movement was Liz Cheney. Up until 2021, she was the third-ranking Republican in Congress, but after the January 6th insurrection she voted to impeach Trump. She then served as vice-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. She must have expected it would cost her the midterms and her seat in Congress, which ended up being the case when Wyoming voters rejected her in 2022. Since then, Cheney has gone further, campaigning forcefully on behalf of Vice-President Harris. David Remnick spoke with Cheney last week at The New Yorker Festival, shortly after Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, blocked its planned endorsement of Harris. “It absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable, responsible adult, because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” Cheney told Remnick. “And I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post.”

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Why American Democracy is in Danger, with Michael Beschloss Nov 01, 2024

The Washington Roundtable discusses the 2024 election with the historian Michael Beschloss, before a live audience at The New Yorker Festival, on October 26th. He calls this election a “turning point” as monumental as the election of 1860—on the eve of the Civil War—and that of 1940, when the U.S. was deciding whether to adopt or fight Fascism. “I think Donald Trump meets most of the parts of the definition of the word fascist,” Beschloss says. “You go through all of American history, and you cannot find another major party nominee who has promised to be dictator for a day, which we all know will not be only for a day.” But, if Trump does return to the White House, he adds, there is still hope that the rule of law, public protest, and the presence of state capitals free of federal domination will allow the U.S. to resist autocracy.

This week’s reading:

“Garbage Time at the 2024 Finish Line,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Safeguarding the Pennsylvania Election,” by Eliza Griswold
“The Fight Over Truth in a Blue-Collar Pennsylvania County,” by Clare Malone
“Standing Up to Trump,” by David Remnick
“The Trump Show Comes to Madison Square Garden,” by Andrew Marantz
“The Obamas Campaign for Kamala Harris,” by Emily Witt
“Trump’s Health, and Ours,” by Dhruv Khullar

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Is the Backlash to a Racist Joke Trump’s October Surprise Oct 30, 2024

At Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden this past weekend, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.” In the swing state of Pennsylvania, which is home to nearly half a million people of Puerto Rican descent, the fallout from Hinchcliffe’s offensive remarks threatens to shift the balance of the Latino electorate. The New Yorker contributing writer Geraldo Cadava joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the public response to the rally and why the Republican Party has appealed to Latino voters in recent years. “In all of the interviews of Latino Republicans that I’ve done over the past several years, they will point to real concerns they have about crime, safety, charter schools, immigration, the economy that they feel like the Democrats haven’t had an answer for,” Cadava says.

This week’s reading:

“The Political Journey of a Top Latino Strategist for Trump,” by Geraldo Cadava
“The Radio Station That Latino Voters Trust,” by Stephania Taladrid
“Donald Trump and the F-Word,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Trump Show Comes to Madison Square Garden,” by Andrew Marantz
“Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?,” by Nicolas Lemann

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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Charlamagne tha God Has Some Advice for Harris and the Democrats Oct 28, 2024

In these final days of the Presidential campaign, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been getting in front of voters as much as she can. Given the polls showing shaky support among Black men, one man she absolutely had to talk to was Lenard McKelvey, much better known as Charlamagne tha God. As a co-host of the syndicated “Breakfast Club” morning radio show, Charlamagne has interviewed Presidential candidates such as Harris, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, as well as New York City’s embattled Mayor Eric Adams and many more. He tells David Remnick that he received death threats just for speaking with Harris—“legitimate threats, not . . . somebody talking crazy on social media. That’s just me having a conversation with her about the state of our society. So imagine what she actually gets.” Charlamagne believes firmly that the narrative of Harris losing Black support is overstated, or a polling fiction, but he agrees that the Democrats have a messaging problem. The author of a book titled “Get Honest or Die Lying,” Charlamagne says that the Party has shied away from widespread concerns about immigration and the economy, to its detriment. “I just want to see more honesty from Democrats. Like I always say, Republicans are more sincere about their lies than Democrats are about their truth!”

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The Lies Are Winning Oct 26, 2024

The Washington Roundtable discusses the avalanche of disinformation that has taken over the 2024 election cycle, including an A.I. video meant to slander Tim Walz and claims that the votes are rigged before they’re even counted. Will this torrent of lies tip the election in favor of Donald Trump? Is there a way out of this morass of untruth? “I think the lies are clearly winning,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “But I would also say that that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the tools that are available.” Osnos notes recent defamation rulings against Rudy Giuliani and Fox News over false statements about the 2020 election as cases in point.

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump and the F-Word,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Can Older Americans Swing the Election for Harris?,” by Bill McKibben
“What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“Door-Knocking in Door County,” by Emily Witt
“What Would Donald Trump Do to the Economy?,” by John Cassidy
“The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s Sorority,” by Jazmine Hughes

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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How Poll Watchers Could Help Trump Challenge the Election Results Oct 24, 2024

Since Donald Trump tried to challenge the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee has been hard at work building a network of poll watchers to observe ballot counting in counties across America. The program could help Trump and the R.N.C. challenge the results of the 2024 election should Trump lose, while also driving turnout among Republican voters who are skeptical of election integrity in the U.S. The New Yorker contributing writer Antonia Hitchens joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the R.N.C.’s poll-watching efforts may come into play on November 5th and beyond.

This week’s reading:

“The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference,” by David Kirkpatrick
“The Election-Interference Merry-Go-Round,” by Jon Allsop

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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The Stakes for Abortion Rights, from the Head of Planned Parenthood Oct 22, 2024

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins in November, it will likely be on the strength of the pro-choice vote, which has been turning out strongly in recent elections. Her statements and choices on the campaign trail couldn’t stand in starker relief against those of Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, who recently called for defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Harris “is the first sitting Vice-President or President to come to a Planned Parenthood health center, to come to an abortion clinic, and really understand the conversations that have been happening on the ground,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president and C.E.O., tells David Remnick. The organization is spending upward of forty million dollars in this election to try to secure abortion rights in Congress and in the White House. A second Trump term, she speculates, could bring a ban on mifepristone and a “pregnancy czar” overseeing women in a federal Department of Life. “Is that scary enough for you?” Johnson asks.

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What Billionaires See in Donald Trump Oct 19, 2024

The Washington Roundtable discusses the ultra-rich figures, such as Elon Musk, who are donating staggeringly large sums of money to Donald Trump’s campaign. Susan B. Glasser’s recent piece examines what these prominent donors may expect to get in return for their support.“You’ve now got oligarchs who have a sense of impunity,” Jane Mayer says. “There are no limits to how much they can give and how much power they can get.” Plus, how Trump’s fund-raising figures compare to those of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has raised one billion dollars since launching her Presidential campaign..

This week’s reading:

“How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Can the Women of the Philadelphia Suburbs Save the Democrats Again?” by Eliza Griswold
“What the Closeness of This Election Suggests About the Future of American Politics,” by Isaac Chotiner
“What the Polls Really Say About Black Men’s Support for Kamala Harris,” by Jelani Cobb

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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How Hurricane Helene Has Fuelled Far-Right Conspiracies Oct 16, 2024

Jessica Pishko, who recently published a piece about the devastation left behind by Hurricane Helene, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss conspiracy theories that have emerged in the storm’s wake. On social media, people have falsely claimed, among other things, that the federal government has diverted disaster funding to migrants and that FEMA has seized peoples land. In a battleground state such as North Carolina, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, has been mired in scandal, what do the confusion and conspiracies mean for the upcoming Presidential election?

This week’s reading:

“Will Mark Robinson Derail Trump’s Chances in North Carolina?,” by Peter Slevin
“Outrage And Paranoia After Hurricane Helene,” by Jessica Pishko

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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How Kamala Harris Became a Contender Oct 15, 2024

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, ‘We’re going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country.’ ”

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What Motivates Kamala Harris? Oct 12, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the final stretch of Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign, including a recent media blitz on podcasts and television shows. The Vice-President has never been entirely comfortable with the interview format. “She doesn’t ruminate and reflect,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “I think it’s the self-protection that comes with being aware of people who are always going to doubt her capacity to make history.” Osnos’s deeply reported profile of Vice-President Kamala Harris, “Kamala Harris's Hundred-Day Campaign,” has just been published. Plus, the panel deconstructs the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” about Donald Trump’s relationship with the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This episode was updated after the publication of Osnos’s piece on the Harris campaign.

This week’s reading:

“The Harris-Trump Endgame Is On: Is It Time to Panic Yet?,” by Susan B. Glasser
“How Podcasts Are Transforming the Presidential Election,” by Brady Brickner-Wood
““The Apprentice,” Reviewed: The Immoral Makings of Donald Trump,” by Richard Brody
“Has the Presidential Election Become a Game of Random Chance?,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“J. D. Vance and the Success Stories of Bidenomics,” by John Cassidy

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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What Some Gaza Protest Voters See in Trump Oct 09, 2024

With the U.S. Presidential election less than a month away, and the war in Gaza now ongoing for a full year, the group of voters who are “uncommitted” to a candidate remains a wild card. Thousands of Democratic voters say that they will not vote for Kamala Harris because of her support for Israel’s war effort. The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the potential impact of such protest voters. “If you’re antiwar . . . it can actually be really hard to figure out who represents your interests, if anyone,” Marantz says. “That’s the kind of information vacuum, the kind of ambiguity, that Trump thrives in.”

This week’s reading:

“Reporting on Democratic Rifts in Michigan,” by Andrew Marantz
“Among The Gaza Protest Voters,” by Andrew Marantz
“The Gaza We Leave Behind,” by Mosab Abu Toha
“A Year After October 7th, a Kibbutz Survives,” by Ruth Margalit
“Why Netanyahu Won’t Cease Fire,” by Bernard Avishai

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Newt Gingrich on What Trump Could Accomplish in a Second Term Oct 07, 2024

Long before Donald Trump got serious about politics, Newt Gingrich saw himself as the revolutionary in Washington, introducing a combative style of politics that helped his party become a dominating force in Congress. Setting the template for Trump, Gingrich described Democrats not as an opposing team with whom to make alliances but as an alien force—a “cultural élite”—out to destroy America. Gingrich has written no fewer than five admiring books about Trump, and he was involved in pushing the lie of the stolen election of 2020. Like many in the Party, he balks at some of Trump’s tactics, but always finds an excuse. “I would probably not have used the language Trump used,” for example in calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled,” Gingrich says. “Partly because I think that it doesn’t further his cause. . . . I would simply say that he is a very intense personality . . . and occasionally he has to explode.” But he sees Trump as seasoned and improved with age, and his potential in a second term far greater. “It’s almost providential: he’s had four years [out of office] to think about what he’s learned . . . and he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it.”

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How to Find Every Democratic Voter in Wisconsin Oct 05, 2024

The Washington Roundtable is joined by the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, Ben Wikler, to discuss ground operations for Kamala Harris in the key battleground state, and why he thinks the Trump campaign is falling behind when it comes to reaching voters in person, despite the financial support of Elon Musk and other big donors. “I was just on the phone with the chair of Oneida County, in Northern Wisconsin, and we’re seeing crickets,” Wikler says of G.O.P. outreach. Still, he sees the state of the race in Wisconsin as “super, super, super, super tight.”

This week’s reading:

“J. D. Vance and the Failed Effort to Memory-Hole January 6th,” by Susan B. Glasser
“It Could All Depend on Arizona,” by Rachel Monroe
“Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?,” by Eyal Press
“J. D. Vance Got the Conversation He Wanted at the Vice-Presidential Debate,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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Will J. D. Vance’s Debate Victory Matter on Election Day? Oct 02, 2024

The first and only Vice-Presidential Debate of the 2024 campaign was mostly cordial, but J. D. Vance's smooth performance tried to soften the sharper edges of Trumpism in a conversation that stretched from climate policy to child care, gun control, the Middle East, and January 6th. However, with polls tightening and barely a month till Election Day, can Vance’s efforts compensate for Donald Trump’s poor debate with Kamala Harris, last month? The New Yorker staff writers Clare Malone and Vinson Cunningham sit down with Tyler Foggatt to recap the Vice-Presidential debate and consider its potential impact on what may be the closest election in decades.

This week’s reading:

“Live Updates: The 2024 Vice-Presidential Debate Between Tim Walz and J. D. Vance” by New Yorker Staff Writers

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

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Young Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, and the Dark Arts of Power Sep 30, 2024

Actors and comedians have usually played Donald Trump as larger than life, almost as a cartoon. In the new film “The Apprentice,” Sebastian Stan doesn’t play for laughs. He stars as a very young Trump falling under the sway of Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong)— the notorious, amoral lawyer and fixer. “Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing when Donald was a nobody from the outer boroughs,” the film’s writer and executive producer Gabriel Sherman tells David Remnick. He “taught him the dark arts of power brokering … [and] introduced him to New York society.” Sherman, a contributing editor to New York magazine, also chronicled Roger Ailes’s rise to power at Fox News in “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” Sherman insists, though, that the film is not anti-Trump—or not exactly. “The movie got cast into this political left-right schema, and it’s not that. It’s a humanist work of drama,” in which the protégé eventually betrays his mentor. It almost goes without saying that Donald Trump has threatened to sue the producers of the film, and the major Hollywood studios wouldn’t touch it. Sherman talks with Remnick about how the film, which opens October 11th, came to be.

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The Election Dividing Husbands and Wives Across America Sep 28, 2024

Recent polls suggest that American men and women are more divided over the 2024 election than they were in 2016, when Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton. The Washington Roundtable discusses the split with the independent Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who identifies causes that go beyond the issue of abortion. As for how Kamala Harris can win over blue-collar women who might be leaning toward Trump, “we have a program,” she says.

This week’s reading:

“Trump Is Not Pivoting to Policy, Now or Ever,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Fantasy World of Political Polling,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“Is There a Method to Donald Trump’s Madness?,” by Clare Malone
“How Powerful Is Political Charm?,” by Joshua Rothman
“Donald Trump’s Many Lucky Breaks,” by John Cassidy

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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From “Inside the Hive”: Behind Donald Trump's “Bro Podcast” Binge Sep 25, 2024

The Political Scene brings you a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” hosted by the special correspondent Brian Stelter. The Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis and the Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman join Stelter to discuss the Trump campaign's strategy of courting so-called podcast bros, including the comedian Theo Von and the Twitch streamer Adin Ross. Both have provided Trump with some of the most viral moments of the 2024 campaign, and helped him reach a young, male audience whose support he may need in order to win in November. The strategy carries risks, however, as we’ve seen in the case of Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, whose past media appearances have come back to haunt him. “They do kind of lure people into this . . . confessional, chatty mode,” Lewis says of the bro podcasts. “And I think that's why maybe they could become quite dangerous. . . . Politicians might not realize how that might look in the cold light of day to other people.”

This episode originally aired on September 12th.

To discover more from “Inside the Hive” and other Vanity Fair podcasts, visit vanityfair.com/podcasts.

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Timothy Snyder on Why Ukraine Can Still Win the War Sep 24, 2024

Since the war in Ukraine began, the historian Timothy Snyder has made several trips to Ukraine, and it was there that he wrote parts of his newest book, “On Freedom.” The author of “Bloodlands” and “On Tyranny,” Snyder spoke in Ukrainian with soldiers, farmers, journalists, and politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky. He talks with David Remnick about the Ukrainian conviction that they can win the war, and the historical trends that support that conviction. But the thrust of Snyder’s new book is to apply what he learned from them to larger principles that apply to our own country. In areas taken back from Russian control, Ukrainians would tell Snyder they were “de-occupied,” rather than liberated; “freedom,” he writes, “is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.”

“If you think that freedom is just negative,” Snyder told David Remnick, “if you think that freedom is just an absence of [evil] things, I think you then argue yourself into a position where given the absence, stuff is going to work out. … The market is going to deliver you freedom, or the founding fathers … something else is going to deliver you freedom. And that of course is wrong. It’s an essentially authoritarian conviction. Because if anyone’s going to deliver you freedom, it’s going to be you, in some way.”

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Is Eric Adams Impervious to Scandal? Sep 18, 2024

Last week, New York City’s police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned after a federal corruption probe. Shortly after, Mayor Eric Adams’s chief legal adviser also stepped down. But, despite the scandals, Adams remains in contention for reëlection in 2025. “The job of Mayor of New York is a big job,” Eric Lach says. “But it’s also attached to a political system that is insular and small.”

Tyler Foggatt sits down with the New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach to parse the scandals and to preview the upcoming mayoral election.

This week’s reading:

“Could Eric Adams Lose Next Year?” by Eric Lach
“What Kind of Trouble Is Eric Adams In?” by Eric Lach

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Josh Shapiro on How Kamala Harris Can Win Pennsylvania Sep 16, 2024

In 2024, all eyes are on Pennsylvania: its nineteen electoral votes make it the largest swing state, and it’s considered a critical battleground for either or to win the White House. For many years, Pennsylvania trended slightly blue, but the state has become deeply purple—with a divided state House and a series of razor-thin margins in general elections. One notable exception to this was the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race. The Democrat Josh Shapiro won by almost fifteen points against a Trump-aligned Republican, and his approval ratings in the state remain high. “To win in Pennsylvania, you’re not winning with only Democrats,” Shapiro told David Remnick. “You’ve got to get like-minded Independents and Republicans.” Shapiro was on the shortlist of candidates for Harris’s pick for Vice-President—which may be the cause of attacks from Donald Trump, including one calling him an “overrated Jewish governor.” He spoke with Remnick to talk about Harris’s of Minnesota’s governor, , as her running mate, and what it takes for a Democrat to win Pennsylvania. “We’re a big state, but we’re still a retail state,” Shapiro said, “meaning you got to show up!”

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How to Get Under a Strongman’s Skin, with George Conway Sep 14, 2024

The Washington Roundtable is joined by George Conway, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and creator of the Anti-Psychopath Political Action Committee, both of which specialize in making custom attack ads designed to aggravate Donald Trump. They discuss Vice-President Kamala Harris’s debate performance and how her campaign might continue to draw out Trump’s worst instincts by psychologically triggering him. “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,” Conway says. “The thing got into his head. . . . He would never have talked about himself possibly having a ‘personality defect’ if it weren’t for what we had said.”

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump Had a Really, Really Bad Debate,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Presidential Campaign, After Philadelphia,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“Kamala Harris Makes Her Case Beyond Big Cities,” by Emily Witt
“Donald Trump’s New ‘Voodoo Economics,’ ” by John Cassidy

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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Will Kamala Harris’s Debate Win Be Enough to Move the Needle? Sep 11, 2024

Kamala Harris successfully prosecuted a case against Donald Trump on issues ranging from abortion to the January 6th insurrection at last night’s debate in Philadelphia. How will that fare with voters against Trump’s “fan service” recitation of Internet conspiracies? Tyler Foggatt sits down with the New Yorker staff writers Clare Malone and Vinson Cunningham to examine each candidate’s performance, along with a surprise Taylor Swift endorsement for Harris, and what it means with less than two months until Election Day.

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Preparing For Trump’s Next “Big Lie,” with the Election Lawyer Marc Elias Sep 09, 2024

Of the sixty-five lawsuits that Donald Trump’s team filed in the 2020 election, Democrats won sixty-four—with the attorney Marc Elias spearheading the majority. Elias was so successful that Steve Bannon speaks of him with admiration.

Now Marc Elias is working for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and, despite his past victories, Elias says that 2024 is keeping him up at night. The bizarre antics and conspiracy theories of Rudy Giuliani are a thing of the past, Elias tells David Remnick: “We should all expect that they are more competent than they were before. And also Donald Trump is more desperate than he was before. … He faces the prospect of four criminal indictments, two of which are in federal court.” Election-denying officials are now in power in many swing states; Trump has publicly praised his allies on state election boards. Elias fears the assault on the democratic process could be much more effective this time. Still, some things don’t change. “I believe Donald Trump is going to say after Election Day in 2024 that he won all fifty states—that there’s no state he didn’t win,” Elias says. “That is just the pathology that is Donald Trump.”

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Will Harris Get Trump to Self-Destruct at the Debate? Sep 07, 2024

The Washington Roundtable revisits Vice-President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s past debate performances and considers how the candidates might approach next week’s showdown. “Trump doesn’t do subdued self-defense,” Evan Osnos says. “He’ll come back furious and basically do a lot of the work for [Harris] of showing, to borrow one of his favorite adjectives, what a ‘nasty’ guy he is. I think that could be pretty effective for her.” Plus, where the fund-raising race stands with Election Day only two months away.

This week’s reading:

“Can Red-Baiting Save Trump’s Flailing Campaign?,” by Susan B. Glasser
“How Kamala Harris’s Coalition Changes the Race for Congress,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Do Celebrity Presidential Endorsements Matter?,” by Tyler Foggatt

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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What Does “Election Interference” Even Mean Anymore? Sep 04, 2024

How has a phrase that just a decade ago had a narrow, technical definition come to essentially represent anything political that we don’t like? Jon Allsop, who writes Columbia Journalism Review’s daily newsletter and contributed this week to The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how “election interference” has become a ubiquitous term and what that indicates about the future of American political discourse. “It’s a project that is designed to insulate candidates against losing, whether they actually lose or not,” Allsop said.

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The Writer Danzy Senna on Kamala Harris and the Complexity of Biracial Identity in America Sep 02, 2024

In fiction and nonfiction, the author Danzy Senna focusses on the experience of being biracial in a nation long obsessed with color lines. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President, some of Senna’s concerns have come to the fore in political life. Donald Trump attacked Harris as a kind of race manipulator, implying that she had been Indian American before becoming Black for strategic purposes. The claim was bizarre and false, but Senna feels that it reflected a mind-set in white America. “Mixed-race people are sort of up for debate and speculation, and there’s a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters, not what your background is or your identity,” she tells Julian Lucas, who wrote about Senna’s work in The New Yorker. “And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we’re going to debate you and we’re going to discount you and we’re going to accuse you of being an impostor.” Senna talks about why she describes people like herself and Lucas using the old word “mulatto,” despite its racist etymology. “The word ‘biracial’ or ‘multiracial’ to me is completely meaningless,” she says, “because I don’t know which races were mixing. And those things matter when we’re talking about identity.” Senna’s newest novel, “Colored Television,” follows a literary writer somewhat like herself, trying to find a new career in the more lucrative world of TV.

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How Much is “Being Cool” Actually Worth in Politics? Aug 29, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry joins Tyler Foggatt to unpack Kamala Harris’s cultural blitzkrieg and how a litany of A-list celebrities and online influencers have helped revitalize the Presidential race. “It’s like the scene in ‘Pulp Fiction’ or something, where Uma Thurman overdoses and then has the adrenaline shot into her heart,” Fry said. To what degree can a candidate turn “being cool” into a winning strategy?

This week’s reading:

“What Kamala Harris May Have to Do Next,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“Kamala Harris’s Youth-Vote Turnaround,” by E. Tammy Kim
“The Kamala Show,” by Vinson Cunningham

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Kamala Harris’s “Different Kind of ‘Hope’ Campaign” Aug 24, 2024

The Washington Roundtable discusses the highs and lows of the Democratic National Convention and Vice-President Kamala Harris’s rousing acceptance speech, with Evan Osnos and Susan B. Glasser reporting from Chicago. Plus, behind-the-scenes moments from the “festival atmosphere” for delegates, donors, and influencers, at the United Center.

This week’s reading:

“The Speech of Kamala Harris’s Lifetime,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Proud and Impassioned, Joe Biden Passes the Torch at the D.N.C.,” by Evan Osnos
“Kamala Harris’s ‘Freedom’ Campaign,” by Peter Slevin
“Why Was It So Hard for the Democrats to Replace Biden?,” by Andrew Marantz
“The Democratic Party Rebrands Itself Before Viewers’ Eyes,” by Emily Witt
“Can Kamala Harris’s Campaign Solve the Latino Turnout Problem?,” by Geraldo Cadava
“How the Harris Campaign Beat Trump at Being Online,” by Kyle Chayka
“What Kamala Harris May Have to Do Next,” by Jay Caspian Kang

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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Unity, Millennial Cringe, And Overwhelming Relief Abound at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Aug 21, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the sights, sounds, and broader implications of the Democratic National Convention. Marantz describes a convention defined by feelings of unity and a profound sense of relief among party insiders. Plus, they reflect on the D.N.C.’s use of what Marantz describes as “cringe-millennial” culture.
This week’s reading:

Proud and Impassioned, Joe Biden Passes the Torch at the D.N.C., by Evan Osnos.
The Obamas’ Rousingly Pragmatic Call to Action at the D.N.C., by Vinson Cunningham

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Why Are More Latino Voters Supporting Trump? Aug 19, 2024

Despite a surge of enthusiasm for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, the 2024 race remains extremely competitive. And one factor very much in Donald Trump’s favor is an increased share of support from Latino voters. Anti-immigrant messaging from Trump and the Republican Party has not turned off Latino voters; he won a higher percentage of Latino voters in 2020 than in 2016, and he was roughly tied with President Biden at the time Biden stepped out of the race in July. Geraldo Cadava, the author of “The Hispanic Republican,” wrote about the Republicans’ strategy for The New Yorker. He spoke with prominent Latino Trump supporters about why the message is resonating, and how they feel about all the signs reading “Mass Deportation Now.

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What the Harris Campaign Needs to Win, with James Carville and Paul Begala Aug 17, 2024

The Washington Roundtable discusses the surge of enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign among Democrats in relation to Bill Clinton’s bid for the White House in 1992. They’re joined by the Democratic strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, whose work as architects of that Clinton campaign was portrayed in the 1993 documentary “The War Room.” Plus, a look ahead at next week’s Democratic National Convention.

This week’s reading:

“Kamala Harris’s Best Campaign Surrogate Is Donald Trump,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Tim Walz and the Lessons of High-School Football,” by Louisa Thomas
“Kamala Harris’s Youth-Vote Turnaround,” by E. Tammy Kim

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Elon Musk’s Pivot from Online Troll to Political Machinator Aug 14, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Elon Musk has once again found himself at the center of a geopolitical dustup—this time in Venezuela, where strongman Nicolas Maduro has accused Musk of hacking the nation’s electoral council. Although the allegations are unsubstantiated, Maduro’s worries about Musk meddling in the affairs of other countries “are not without foundation,” Anderson writes. His latest piece, “Elon Musk’s Surging Political Activism,” explores Musk’s metamorphosis into a geopolitical power broker.

This week’s reading:

“Elon Musk’s Surging Political Activism,” by Jon Lee

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Nancy Pelosi, the Power Broker Aug 12, 2024

Nancy Pelosi, who represents California’s Eleventh Congressional District, led the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives for so long, and so effectively, that one forgets she was also the first woman to hold the job. Her stewardship of consequential legislation—including the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—during her eight years as Speaker is legendary. And Pelosi has wielded tremendous influence this election cycle: she seems to have been instrumental in persuading President Biden to withdraw from the campaign in place of a new Democratic candidate. After years of friendship with Biden, it wasn’t easy, she tells David Remnick, who asks, “You think your relationship will be there?” “I hope so,” Pelosi admits. “I pray so. I cry so. I lose sleep on it.” After stepping away from Democratic leadership herself, in 2023, she wrote a book with a short and apt title: “The Art of Power.” Pelosi speaks to Remnick about the importance of having a strong mission undergirding the skills of political gamesmanship. “This is not for the faint of heart,” she says. “This is tough. If you know your ‘why,’ the slings and arrows are worth it. If you don’t know your ‘why,’ don’t even do this. . . . You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.”

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The Harris-Walz Reboot Aug 10, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the addition of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the Democratic ticket and Donald Trump’s erratic response at a press conference on Thursday. “Walz has scrambled the circuits for Trump because he’s not easy to pigeonhole,” Osnos says. “He’s not what Trump imagines, in his comic-book way, of what a progressive looks like.”Plus, the campaigns’ strategies in the battleground states and what it will take to win key states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania.

This week’s reading:

“Does Anyone in America Miss Joe Biden as Much as Donald Trump?” by Susan B. Glasser
“How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be?” by Jay Caspian Kang
“How Kamala Harris Became Bigger than Donald Trump,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“What Tim Walz Brings to Kamala Harris’s Campaign to Beat Donald Trump,” by Peter Slevin
“ ‘Weird’ Is a Rebuke to Republican Dominance Politics,” by Katy Waldman
“What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?,” by Clare Malone

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Israel’s Other Intractable Conflict Aug 05, 2024

Israel has occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River since 1967, after the third Arab-Israeli war, and ever since Israelis have settled on more and more of this contested land. Violence by armed settlers against their Palestinian neighbors has increased dramatically in recent years, as a far-right government came to dominate Israeli politics. Unless things change, the American journalist Nathan Thrall tells David Remnick, the future for Palestinians is “not unlike that of the Native Americans.” Thrall won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” which uses one isolated incident—a road accident in the West Bank—to illustrate the ways in which life under occupation has become nearly unlivable for Palestinians. On July 19th, the United Nations’ International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling that the occupation violates international law. While the world’s attention is focussed on the devastating war in Gaza, and the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the occupation of the West Bank remains a fundamental challenge for any peaceful resolution.

Remnick also speaks with the Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh, a longtime advocate for peace with Israel who lives in Ramallah. Palestinians “are, in a sense, living under a different law than the law of the settlements. And so the settlers are going to be part of Israel, and the laws of Israel apply to them—and that's annexation—but not to us. There will be two communities living side by side, each subject to different laws, and that’s entirely apartheid.” Shehadeh’s new book is titled “What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?” He argues that, as much as a concern for their security, many Israelis refuse to contemplate a two-state solution because recognizing Palestinians’ claims to nationhood challenges Israel’s national story. Although Thrall believes that any false hope about an end to the conflict is damaging, he acknowledges that U.S. sanctions on violent settlers is a meaningful step, and Shehadeh sees the I.C.J.’s ruling as a new degree of global pressure. “That could bring about the end of the era of impunity of Israel,” Shehadeh believes. “And that can make a big difference.”

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Decoding the “Compelling” Attack Ads of the 2024 Campaign Aug 03, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the fiery advertising war between Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. They are joined by Jennifer Lawless, the chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia and the author of “Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era.” Plus, how memes and social media have boosted the Harris campaign. “The Harris campaign will have a couple of uplifting, very positive ads, especially when they announce who the V.P. will be,” Professor Jennifer Lawless says. “But my bet is that this will be a race to the bottom in terms of negativity.”

This week’s reading:

“Trump’s Racist Attack on Kamala Harris Was No Accident,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Politics of ‘Weird’,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“Does Kamala Harris Need a Latino Campaign?,” by Geraldo Cadava

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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J. D. Vance’s Rough Rollout and Kamala Harris’s Veepstakes Jul 31, 2024

As J. D. Vance faces a bumpy public reception on the Trump ticket and Kamala Harris considers her options for a running mate, the New Yorker staff writers Amy Davidson Sorkin and Benjamin Wallace-Wells join Tyler Foggatt to discuss all things Vice-Presidential. In a race as short and tight as this one, what is each campaign communicating with its choice?

This week’s reading:

“Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
“J. D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family,” by Jessica Winter
“J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion,” by Paul Elie

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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From In the Dark: Season 3, Episode 1 Jul 30, 2024

Today, we're bringing you a special preview of the new season of the New Yorker investigative podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. The series examines the killings of twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, and asks why no one was held accountable for the crime.
In Episode 1, a man in Haditha, Iraq, has a request for the In the Dark team: Can you investigate how my family was killed?
In the Dark is available wherever you get your podcasts.

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What Kamala Harris Needs to Win the Presidency Jul 29, 2024

Kamala Harris will face barriers as a woman running for the Presidency. “Women constantly have to credential themselves,” Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran of Democratic politics who served in the Clinton Administration, says. She was also the director of communications for the Obama White House, and then for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Harris will “need to remind people of what she has done in her career and what she’s done as Vice-President, because people assume that women haven’t accomplished anything.” But Harris also has notable strengths as a candidate, and—having avoided a bruising primary campaign and having been handed a torch from the incumbent—she has advantages that no other woman running for office has had. For a female candidate, the world has changed since 2016, Palmieri believes. She shares insights into how Joe Biden was finally persuaded to step out of the race, and explains what she meant by advising women to “nod less and cry more.”

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Could Kamala Harris Be a Trump-Level Cultural Phenomenon? Jul 26, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the start of Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign and the surge of excitement among Democrats on the Internet and at rallies. Plus, who might be her running mate and how Republicans plan to launch “racist, misogynist” attacks against her.

This week’s reading:

“Biden’s Exit, Harris’s Moment,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Why Did Progressive Democrats Support Joe Biden?,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“Kamala Harris Should Tell Her Family’s Story,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“J. D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family,” by Jessica Winter
“Was Biden’s Decision to Withdraw ‘Heroic’?” by Isaac Chotiner
“Kamala Harris, the Candidate,” by Doreen St. Félix
“Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
“J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion,” by Paul Elie

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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The “Strange Charisma” of Kamala Harris Jul 25, 2024

The New Yorker staff writers and cultural critics Doreen St. Félix and Vinson Cunningham join Tyler Foggatt to discuss Kamala Harris’s sudden ascendence to the top of the Democratic ticket. How might her gender, race, and long political career from prosecutor to Vice-President shape the campaign ahead? “In a weird way, I think that she can run against both Trump and, implicitly, very subtly, against Biden, too,” Cunningham says. “I think her strongest way to code herself is: we're finally turning the page.”

This week’s reading:

“Kamala Harris, the Candidate,” by Doreen St. Félix
“A Mood of Optimism at Kamala Harris’s First Campaign Stop,” by Emily Witt
“Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Special Episode: Biden Passes the Torch Jul 23, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Biden’s stunning exit from the 2024 Presidential election and his endorsement for Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic ticket. How could this new matchup change the terms of the race, now that Biden’s age is no longer a key issue?

This week’s reading:

“Joe Biden’s Act of Selflessness,” by Evan Osnos
“Joe Biden Leaves the Stage,” by Adam Gopnik
“Where Do Republicans and Democrats Stand After the R.N.C.?” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“The Spectacle of Donald Trump’s R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens, photography by Sinna Nasseri

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Trump’s Triumphant R.N.C. and Biden’s Dilemma Jul 20, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss takeaways from the Republican National Convention, which Glasser reports had the feeling of “a very polite Midwestern cult meeting.” Plus, Donald Trump's selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate and the mounting pressure for President Biden to drop out of the race.

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Second Coming,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Doctors Are Increasingly Worried About Biden,” by Dhruv Khullar
“The Rise of the New Right at the Republican National Convention,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“Are We Already Moving On from the Assassination Attempt on Trump?” by Jay Caspian Kang
“The Paralysis of the Democratic Party,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“Bernie Sanders Wants Joe Biden to Stay in the Race,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Trump, Unity, and MAGA Miracles at the R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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A Dispatch from the Republican National Convention Jul 17, 2024

The New Yorker contributing writer Antonia Hitchens calls Tyler Foggatt from Milwaukee to offer some details and observations from the first night of the Republican National Convention, at which Donald Trump was formally nominated to be the G.O.P.’s 2024 Presidential nominee. An assassination attempt on the former President over the weekend only heightened the messianic feeling that surrounds Trump, and gave a strange poignancy to the anointing of J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate and the potential next leader of the MAGA movement, Hitchens says.

This week’s reading:

“Trump, Unity, and MAGA Miracles at the R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens
“A Nation Inflamed,” by David Remnick
“Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Julián Castro on the Biden Problem, and What the Democratic Party Got Wrong Jul 15, 2024

The panic that gripped Democrats during and after President Biden’s performance in the June debate against Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. In January of last year, the Radio Hour produced an episode about President Biden’s age, and the concerns that voters were already expressing. But no nationally prominent Democratic politician was willing to challenge Biden in the primaries. After the debate, Julián Castro was one of the first prominent Democrats to say that Biden should withdraw from the race, and he went on to tell MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that potential Democratic rivals and even staffers “got the message” that their careers would be “blackballed” if they challenged him. Castro—who came up as the mayor of San Antonio, and then served as President Obama’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development—ran against Biden in the Presidential primary for the 2020 election. He talks with David Remnick about how we got here, and what the Democratic Party should have done differently.

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The Great Democratic Party Freakout of 2024 Jul 13, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Joe Biden’s struggle to retain voters’ confidence in his bid for reëlection and his animosity toward the “élites” he says are insisting that he step down. Plus, Donald Trump’s campaign strategy amid Democratic turmoil and ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“The problem is the meta-narrative, which seems to be centered on: Will Biden faceplant or won’t he?,” Jane Mayer says. “And, so long as that’s the narrative, the narrative is not on Donald Trump and the threat to democracy that he poses.”

This week’s reading:

“Joe Biden’s Less-Than-Awful Press Conference Does Not Mean Everything Is Now O.K.,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Controlled Normalcy of Kamala Harris’s Trip to Las Vegas,” by Antonia Hitchens
“A Congressional Democrat Explains Why He’s Standing with Biden,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Joe Biden’s Cynical Turn Against the Press,” by Jay Caspian Kang
“Joe Biden Is Fighting Back—but Not Against Trump, Really,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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The Case for Using the Twenty-fifth Amendment on Biden Jul 10, 2024

The New Yorker contributor and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a once obscure constitutional provision that allows Cabinet members to remove an unfit President from office. Gersen believes it’s time to use it on Biden. “The Twenty-fifth amendment was designed for a situation in which the President may not recognize his own impairment,” she says.

This week’s reading:

“This Is What the Twenty-fifth Amendment Was Designed For,” by Jeannie Suk Gersen
“The Reckoning of Joe Biden,” by David Remnick
“Joe Biden Is Fighting Back—but Not Against Trump, Really,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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John Fetterman’s Move to the Right on Israel Jul 08, 2024

Many Democrats saw John Fetterman as a progressive beacon: a Rust Belt Bernie Sanders who—with his shaved head, his hoodie, and the Zip Code of Braddock, Pennsylvania—could rally working-class white voters to the Democratic Party. But at least on one issue, Fetterman is veering away from the left of his party, and even from centrists like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Israel’s war in Gaza. Fetterman has taken a line that is not just sympathetic to Israel after the October 7th attack by Hamas; he seems to justify the civilian death toll Israel has inflicted on Gaza. “When you have that kind of an evil, or that kind of a movement that came out of a society,” he told Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed. . . . that’s why Atlanta had to burn.” Wallace-Wells shares excerpts from his interviews with Fetterman in a conversation with David Remnick, and they discuss how Fetterman’s support for Israel is driving a wedge among Pennsylvania voters, who will be critical to the outcome of the Presidential election.

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From “Inside the Hive”: How Steve Bannon’s Prison Sentence Could Help Trump Win Jul 03, 2024

With the New Yorker office closed for the July 4th holiday, The Political Scene brings you a recent episode from Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” hosted by the special correspondent Brian Stelter. Tina Nguyen, a national correspondent for Puck, and the Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, a national political reporter, join Stelter to discuss how Steve Bannon helped rehabilitate Donald Trump among Republicans after January 6th. Bannon’s popular “War Room” podcast has been galvanizing the far right at the local and national level, and his four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress could actually burnish his bona fides with the base. “It’s amazing clout,” Nyugen says of Bannon’s prison sentence, “for someone in the MAGA world, in these MAGA times, with a MAGA audience.”

This episode originally aired on June 20th, 2024.

To discover more from “Inside the Hive” and other Vanity Fair podcasts, visit vanityfair.com/podcasts.

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The New Yorker’s Political Writers Answer Your Election Questions Jul 01, 2024

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can’t wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what’s still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

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What Does Biden’s Disastrous Debate Mean for Democrats? Jun 29, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Joe Biden’s flubs, and Donald Trump’s lies, in the first Presidential debate. Plus, how American politics arrived at this point and what is next for the Democratic Party.
This week’s reading:

“Was the Debate the Beginning of the End of Joe Biden’s Presidency?” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Writing on Joe Biden’s Face at the Presidential Debate,” by Vinson Cunningham
“Do the Democrats Have a Gen Z Problem?” by E. Tammy Kim
“Some Faint and Likely Temporary Relief on Abortion Rights,” by Jessica Winter

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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What You Need to Know About 2024’s Most Significant Supreme Court Decisions Jun 26, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Amy Davidson Sorkin joins Tyler Foggatt to examine the biggest Supreme Court decisions of the year—those already decided and those yet to come. They discuss the Court’s attempt to moderate its radical rulings on guns and abortion, its politicized selection of which cases to hear, and its influence on the 2024 election.

This week’s reading:

“The Supreme Court Steps Back from the Brink on Guns,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
“Yet More Donald Trump Cases Head to the Supreme Court,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone,” “Horizon,” and Why the Western Endures Jun 24, 2024

Kevin Costner has been a leading man for more than forty years and has starred in all different genres of movies, but a constant in his filmography is the Western. One of his first big roles was in “Silverado,” alongside Kevin Kline and Danny Glover; he directed “Dances with Wolves,” which won seven Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture; more recently, Costner starred as the rancher John Dutton in the enormously successful “Yellowstone.” Perhaps no actor since Clint Eastwood is more associated with the genre. Throughout his career, Costner has also been working on a project called “Horizon: An American Saga.” Too lengthy and expensive for studios (Costner put up tens of millions of dollars to fund it), “Horizon” evolved over decades into a series of four films about the founding of a town in the West. Part 1, which involves the destruction wrought on Native communities by white settlement, comes out next week. While the politics of the genre have evolved, “there were certain dilemmas that [Westerns] established,” he tells David Remnick, that were timeless. “They talked to me about character and just as important, lack of character.”

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What to Expect from the Biden-Trump Debate, with the Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin Jun 21, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss whether the debate will affect the outcome of the November election. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is the author of “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” joins the conversation to look at what the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate can tell us about the upcoming event.

This week’s reading:

“Project Trump, Global Edition,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Biden Is the Candidate Who Stands for Change in This Election,” by James Lardner
“Trump’s Brazen Pact with the One Per Cent,” by John Cassidy
“The American Election That Set the Stage for Trump,” by Isaac Chotiner

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Could the 2024 Election Be Decided by Memes? Jun 19, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone joins Tyler Foggatt to analyze how President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are being skewered on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. She discusses our shifting media habits, why the 2016 election is surfacing in new contexts online, and how both campaigns are relying on algorithms to gain momentum ahead of November.

This episode originally aired on January 31, 2024.

This week’s reading:

“The Meme-ification of American Politics,” by Clare Malone
“What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes,” by Daniel Immerwahr

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Is Being a Politician the Worst Job in the World? Jun 17, 2024

On July 4th—while the U.S. celebrates its break from Britain—voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls and, according to all predictions, oust the current government. The Conservative Party has been in power for fourteen years, presiding over serious economic decline and widespread discontent. The narrow, contentious referendum to break away from the European Union, sixty per cent of Britons now think, was a mistake. Yet the Labour Party shows no inclination to reverse or even mitigate Brexit. If the Conservatives have destroyed their reputation, why won’t Labour move boldly to change the direction of the U.K.? Is the U.K. hopeless? David Remnick is joined by Rory Stewart, who spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and now co-hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” He left the government prior to Brexit and wrote his best-selling memoir, “How Not to Be a Politician,” which pulls no punches in describing the soul-crushing sham of serving in office. “It’s not impostor syndrome,” Stewart tells Remnick. “You are literally an impostor, and you’re literally on television all the time claiming to understand things you don’t understand and claiming to control things you don’t control.”

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Hunter Biden’s Conviction and Trump’s Risk to the Justice Department in 2024 Jun 15, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos analyze the impact of Hunter Biden’s criminal conviction and how the trial turned the spotlight on the Biden family’s private struggles through grief and addiction. Plus, how Trump supporters are waging an attack on the justice system and making its integrity one of the core issues of the 2024 Presidential election.

This week’s reading:

“Happy Seventy-eighth Birthday, Mr. Ex-President,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Is Hunter Biden a Scapegoat or a Favored Son?” by Katy Waldman
“Hunter Biden and the Mechanics of the ‘Scandal Industrial Complex,’ ” with Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Biden’s Executive Order on Immigration and the Politically “Toxic” Puzzle of the Border Jun 13, 2024

The New Yorker writers Stephania Taladrid and Jonathan Blitzer join Tyler Foggatt to unpack President Biden’s stringent new executive order on asylum and the border. They discuss the strained diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico and the political calculations underpinning Biden’s decision, and imagine what negotiations between Donald Trump and Mexican President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum would look like.
This week’s reading:

“Will Mexico Decide the U.S. Election?,” by Stephania Taladrid
“What’s Behind Joe Biden’s Harsh New Executive Order on Immigration?” by Jonathan Blitzer

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Senator Raphael Warnock on America’s “Moral and Spiritual Battle” Jun 10, 2024

When Raphael Warnock was elected to the Senate from Georgia in the 2020 election, he made history a couple of times over. He became the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the Deep South. At the same time, that victory—alongside Jon Ossoff’s—flipped both of Georgia’s Senate seats from Republican to Democrat. Once thought of as solidly red, Georgia has become a closely watched swing state that President Biden can’t afford to lose in November, and Warnock is a key ally. He dismisses polls that show younger Black voters are leaning toward Trump in higher numbers than older voters; Biden’s record as President, he thinks—including a reported sixty per cent increase in Black wealth since the pandemic—will motivate strong turnout. Warnock returns to Atlanta every Sunday to preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he remains senior pastor, and he thinks of the election as a “moral and spiritual battle.” “Are we a nation that can send from the South a Black man and a Jewish man to the Senate?” he asks. “Or are we that nation that rises up in violence as we witness the demographic changes in our country and the struggle for a more inclusive Republic?”

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A G.O.P. Strategist on the Republican Voters Who Could Abandon Trump Jun 08, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser and Jane Mayer speak with Sarah Longwell, a longtime G.O.P. strategist and publisher of the Bulwark. Longwell has conducted focus groups across the country for the past eight years, and her research provides an unparalleled look at what motivates certain Republican voters to stay with Trump and what causes others to abandon him. She’s applying that research to persuade a segment of Republican voters to change their vote to Biden, now that Trump has become a convicted felon. What can Democrats learn from her efforts, and from the Republican Party’s messaging tactics?
This week’s reading:

“Fighting Trump on the Beaches,” by Susan. B Glasser
“The Trials of a Never Trump Republican,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Joe Biden’s Last Campaign,” by Evan Osnos

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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What Do We Know About How the World Might End? Jun 05, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Rivka Galchen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a class at the University of Chicago with a tantalizingly dark title: “Are We Doomed?” It’s in the interdisciplinary field of existential risk, which studies the threats posed by climate change, nuclear warfare, and artificial intelligence. Galchen, who spent a semester observing the course and its students, considers how to contend with this bleak future, and how to understand the young people who may inherit it.
This week’s reading:

“Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It,” by Rivka Galchen
“It’s a Climate Election Now,” by Bill McKibben

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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The Trans Athletes Who Changed the Olympics—in 1936 Jun 04, 2024

In “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports,” the journalist Michael Waters tells the story of Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports. Koubek shocked the sporting world in 1935 by announcing that he was transitioning, and now living as a man. The initial press coverage of Koubek and another prominent track star who transitioned, Mark Weston, was largely positive, but Waters tells the New Yorker sports columnist Louisa Thomas that eventually a backlash led to the 1936 Berlin Olympics instituting a sex-testing policy for women athletes. Any female athlete’s sex could be challenged, and cisgender women who didn’t conform to historical gender standards were targeted as a result. These policies slowly evolved to include chromosome testing and, later, the hormone testing that we see today. “And so as we talk about sex testing today,” Waters says, “we often are forgetting where these policies come from in the first place.”

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A “Stunningly Decisive” End to Donald Trump’s Trial May 31, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the consequences of a major moment in American history and politics: the first-ever trial and conviction of a former President in a court of law. Will Donald Trump’s guilty verdict threaten his campaign, or will it only shore up support from his party?

This week’s reading:

“The Revisionist History of the Trump Trial Has Already Begun,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Trump Is Guilty, but Voters Will Be the Final Judge,” by David Remnick
“When the Verdict Came In, Donald Trump’s Eyes Were Wide Open,” by Eric Lach

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Sam Altman Dreams of an A.I. Girlfriend May 29, 2024

Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of the Infinite Scroll column, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the latest ChatGPT release—which uses a voice that sounds, suspiciously, like Scarlett Johansson’s character in the dystopian sci-fi movie “Her.” Chayka has reported extensively on artificial intelligence, and he describes some recent blunders that tech companies, including OpenAI and Google, have made in trying to push their products through.

This week’s reading:

“Faux ScarJo and the Descent of the A.I. Vultures,” by Kyle Chayka
“Your A.I. Companion Will Support You No Matter What,” by Kyle Chayka, from November

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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How the Reality-TV Industry Mistreats Its Stars May 27, 2024

On the reality-TV dating show “Love Is Blind,” the most watched original series in Netflix history, contestants are alone in windowless, octagonal pods with no access to their phones or the Internet. They talk to each other through the walls. There’s intrigue, romance, heartbreak, and, in some cases, sight-unseen engagements. According to several lawsuits, there’s also lack of sleep, lack of food and water, twenty-hour work days, and alleged physical and emotional abuse. The New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum has been reporting on what these lawsuits reveal about the culture on the set of “Love Is Blind,” and a push for a new union to give reality-TV stars employee protections and rights. “The people who are on reality shows are a vulnerable class of people who are mistreated by the industry in ways that are made invisible to people, including to fans who love the shows,” Nussbaum tells David Remnick. Nussbaum’s forthcoming book is “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV.”

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Why Vladimir Putin’s Family Is Learning Mandarin May 25, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss why global events—such as the death of Iran’s president, a recent meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and the worsening situation for Ukraine—should not be overlooked in favor of domestic issues during the 2024 campaign.

This week’s reading:

“There Is Literally Nothing Trump Can Say That Will Stop Republicans from Voting for Him,” by Susan B. Glasser
“What Raisi’s Death Means for the Future of Iran,” by Robin Wright
“Is the Biden Campaign Running on False Hope?,” by Isaac Chotiner
“Lara Trump’s R.N.C. Sets Its Sights on—California?,” by Antonia Hitchens
“The Biden Administration’s Have-It-Both-Ways Report on Gaza,” by Isaac Chotiner

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on Why He’s Running May 20, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has never held elected office but is related to many people who have, is emerging as a potential threat to Democrats and Republicans in the 2024 Presidential race. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and, then, Senate second, or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,” he told David Remnick, in July, when he was running as a Democrat. Now, as a third-party Presidential candidate, his numbers have grown in the polls—enough to push votes away from both Biden and Trump in November, especially, it seems, among younger voters. Besides his name, the seventy-year-old environmental lawyer is known as an anti-vaccine activist and a proponent of conspiracy theories.

This election season, we’re eager to hear from you. What questions do you have? Let us know at: newyorkerradio@wnyc.org

This interview originally aired on the New Yorker Radio Hour on July 7, 2023.

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The Most Profoundly Not-Normal Facts About Trump’s 2024 Campaign May 18, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the unusual and dangerous aspects of Donald Trump’s reëlection campaign, from his quid-pro-quo offer to oil executives to his daughter-in-law’s new leadership position in the Republican National Committee.

This week’s reading:

“On Trump and the Elusive Fantasy of a 2024 Election Game-Changer,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Can You Believe What Michael Cohen Just Said at the Trump Trial?,” by Eric Lach
“It’s a Climate Election Now,” by Bill McKibben
“Stormy Daniels’s American Dream,” by Naomi Fry
“The Historic Trump Court Cases That We Cannot See,” by Neal Katyal

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Stormy Daniels’s Biggest Role Yet May 16, 2024

Naomi Fry, a staff writer and co-host of the New Yorker podcast Critics at Large, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her impressions of Stormy Daniels’s testimony in the hush-money trial of former President Donald Trump. Having spent weeks doing a deep dive on the adult-film star’s life, Fry explains her understanding of Daniels’s motivations in accepting the hush money and what the sordid tale says about American culture today.
This week’s reading:

Stormy Daniels’s American Dream, by Naomi Fry
Can You Believe What Michael Cohen Just Said at the Trump Trial?, by Eric Lach

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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The TikTok Ban Is “a Vast Overreach, Rooted in Hypocrisy,” Wired’s Katie Drummond says May 13, 2024

David Remnick talks with Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired magazine, about the TikTok ban that just passed with bipartisan support in Washington. The app will be removed from distribution in U.S. app stores unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, sells it to an approved buyer. TikTok is suing to block that law. Is this a battle among tech giants for dominance, or a real issue of national security? Drummond sees the ban as a corporate crusade by Silicon Valley to suppress a foreign competitor with a superior product. She finds the claim that TikTok is a national-security threat to be “a vast overreach that is rooted in hypotheticals and that is rooted in hypocrisy, and in … a fundamental refusal to look across the broad spectrum of social-media platforms, and treat all of them from a regulatory point of view with the same level of care and precision.”

For another perspective on the TikTok ban, listen to David Remnick’s conversation with the tech executive Jacob Helberg, who lobbied lawmakers to pass it. The segment will publish on the New Yorker Radio Hour feed on Tuesday.

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Will Young Americans Tip November’s Election? May 11, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and the potentially decisive role that the youth vote will play in the Presidential election. Cyrus Beschloss, the C.E.O. of The Generation Lab, a company that studies trends among young people, joins the show to break down the latest polling data.

This week’s reading:

“Biden’s Public Ultimatum to Bibi,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Israel’s Politics of Protest,” by Ruth Margalit
“The Kids Are Not All Right. They Want to Be Heard,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“A Generation of Distrust,” by Jay Caspian Kang

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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The Pure Chaos Inside Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial May 09, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach joins Tyler Foggatt to share a firsthand account of the bizarre stories coming out of the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. President. Lach explains why the former publisher of the National Enquirer testified about catch-and-kill schemes involving celebrities like Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and describes Trump’s real-time reaction as adult-film star Stormy Daniels testified in lurid detail about the alleged affair at the heart of the prosecution’s case.

This week’s reading:

What Is Hope Hicks Crying About?, by Eric Lach

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Randall Kennedy on Harvard Protests, Antisemitism, and the Meaning of Free Speech May 06, 2024

In December, the presidents of three universities were summoned to Congress for hearings about whether a climate of antisemitism exists on campuses. Politicians like Elise Stefanik made headlines, and two of the presidents, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, were soon out of their posts. The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote an essay for the London Review of Books about the reverberations of those events. “Folks were out to get Claudine Gay from the get-go,” he thinks, “and were going to use any openings with which to do that”—for reasons that had little to do with protecting Jews. Kennedy tells David Remnick about a lawsuit against Harvard that would equate opposition to Zionism with antisemitism, and render a range of thinkers (including many Jews) unteachable. And “this,” Kennedy asserts, “is very dangerous.”

This segment is part of the New Yorker Radio Hour’s episode devoted to the protests and the speech issues that college campuses have raised.

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Who Should Be More Worried about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.– Biden or Trump? May 04, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the Presidential candidacy of the anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and explore the ways his run for the White House as an independent might spoil the election for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump.

“He’s not a serious threat in terms of being able to win,” says Jane Mayer, “but he is potentially a serious threat in being able to spoil this election for one side or the other.”

This week’s reading:

“Is 2024 Doomed to Repeat 1968 or 2020—or Both?” by Susan B. Glasser
“Trump Is Turning Victimhood Into His Legal Strategy,” by Eric Lach
“Donald Trump’s Sleepy, Sleazy Criminal Trial,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Trying to Oust House Speaker Mike Johnson? May 01, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer David Kirkpatrick joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Marjorie Taylor Greene’s call to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson from office, just seven months after her colleagues forced out Kevin McCarthy. Kirkpatrick explains why Greene’s likely doomed effort is potentially lucrative for her, and walks through the ways in which her strategy is influenced by her predecessors.

This week’s reading:

How Marjorie Taylor Greene Raises Money by Attacking Other Republicans, by David Kirkpatrick

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Georgia’s Secretary of State Prepares for Another Election Apr 30, 2024

Brad Raffensperger, who holds the usually low-profile office of secretary of state in Georgia, became famous after he recorded a phone call with Donald Trump. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump demanded that Georgia officials “find 11,780 votes” so that he could win the state. The recorded phone conversation is a linchpin in the Fulton County racketeering case against Trump. Refusing that demand, Raffensperger—a lifelong Republican—received death threats from enraged Trumpists, and the state senate still wants to investigate him for it. But the politician tells David Remnick that he hasn’t lost faith in his party. He believes he can convince election deniers of the fairness of Georgia’s methods. And, by the way, that story line on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about the Georgia crime of giving a person water while they wait in line to vote? Raffensperger has a suggestion for Larry David.

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Trump’s “Bonkers” Immunity Claim, with Neal Katyal Apr 27, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss Donald Trump’s argument for Presidential immunity with former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal. Will the Supreme Court deliver Trump a legal victory in his fight against prosecution by the Justice Department ahead of the November election?

This week’s reading:

“King Donald’s Day at the Supreme Court,” by Susan B. Glasser
“What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial,” by Ronan Farrow
“Donald Trump Is Being Ritually Humiliated in Court,” by Eric Lach
“The G.O.P.’s Election-Integrity Trap,” by Antonia Hitchens

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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A Student Journalist Explains the Protests at Yale Apr 24, 2024

Anika Arora Seth, the editor-in-chief and president of the Yale Daily News, joins Tyler Foggatt to share what it has been like covering campus protests since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Seth explains both the global and university-specific forces at play that led to the arrest of forty-seven protesters on Yale’s campus this week, and lays out how the university has responded to concerns over students’ safety during the protests.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Jonathan Haidt on “The Anxious Generation” Apr 22, 2024

Both anecdotally and in research, anxiety and depression among young people—often associated with self-harm—have risen sharply over the last decade. There seems little doubt that Gen Z is suffering in real ways. But there is not a consensus on the cause or causes, nor how to address them. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that enough evidence has accumulated to convict a suspect. Smartphones and social media, Haidt says, have caused a “great rewiring” in those born after 1995. The argument has hit a nerve: his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” was No. 1 on the New York *Times* hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. Speaking with David Remnick, Haidt is quick to differentiate social-media apps—with their constant stream of notifications, and their emphasis on performance—from technology writ large; mental health was not affected, he says, for millennials, who grew up earlier in the evolution of the Internet. Haidt, who earlier wrote about an excessive emphasis on safety in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” feels that our priorities when it comes to child safety are exactly wrong. “We’re overprotecting in [the real world], and I’m saying, lighten up, let your kids out! And we’re underprotecting in another, and I’m saying, don’t let your kids spend nine hours a day on the Internet talking with strange men. It’s just not a good idea.” To social scientists who have asserted that the evidence Haidt marshals does not prove a causative link between social media and depression, “I keep asking for alternative theories,” he says. “You don’t think it’s the smartphones and social media—what is it? . . . You can give me whatever theory you want about trends in American society, but nobody can explain why it happened so suddenly in 2012 and 2013—not just here but in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe. I’m waiting,” he adds sarcastically, “for someone to find a chemical.” The good news, Haidt says, is there are achievable ways to limit the harm.

Note: In his conversation with David Remnick, Jonathan Haidt misstated some information about a working paper that studies unhappiness across nations. The authors are David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and Xiaowei Xu, and it includes data on thirty-four countries.

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The Morality Play Inside Trump’s Courtroom Apr 20, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos talk with the NPR reporter Andrea Bernstein about what has happened inside the courthouse during Donald Trump’s first week on trial. Plus, how the historic trial may factor into the 2024 race and whether President Biden should be talking about it on the campaign trail.

“This idea of the old ‘Teflon Don’ is just finished,” Evan Osnos says. “The guy is now a creature of the court.”

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Trial of the Century,” by Eric Lach
“The Supreme Court Asks What Enron Has to Do with January 6th—and Trump,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
“Biden Is the Most Pro-Labor President Since F.D.R. Will It Matter in November?,” by Eyal Press
“Did Mike Johnson Just Get Religion on Ukraine?,” by Susan B. Glasser

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Ronan Farrow on the Scheme at the Heart of Trump’s New York Trial Apr 17, 2024

Ronan Farrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and contributing writer to The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the impact of rulings made this week by Judge Juan Merchan in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, where he faces thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels around the time of the 2016 election. Farrow explains why two other hush-money payments, made to former Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, are central to the Manhattan District Attorney’s case. As Farrow explains, “the coverup is ultimately a much, much bigger story than any of the underlying things being covered up would have been.”

This week’s reading:

Inside the Hush-Money Payments That May Decide Trump’s Legal Fate, by Ronan Farrow
The National Enquirer, a Trump Rumor, and Another Secret Payment to Buy Silence, by Ronan Farrow
Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity, by Ronan Farrow

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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A Bipartisan Effort to Carve out Exemptions to Texas’s Abortion Ban Apr 15, 2024

Texas has multiple abortion laws, with both criminal and civil penalties for providers. They contain language that may allow for exceptions to save the life or “major bodily function” of a pregnant patient, but many doctors have been reluctant to even try interpreting these laws; at least one pregnant woman has been denied cancer treatment. The reporter Stephania Taladrid tells David Remnick about how two lawmakers worked together in a rare bipartisan effort to clarify the limited medical circumstances in which abortion is allowed. “If lawmakers created specific exemptions,” Taladrid explains, “then doctors who got sued could show that the treatment that they had offered their patients was compliant with the language of the law.” Taladrid spoke with the state representatives Ann Johnson, a Democrat, and Bryan Hughes, a conservative Republican, about their unlikely collaboration. Johnson told her that she put together a list of thirteen conditions that might qualify for a special exemption, but only two of them—premature ruptures and ectopic pregnancy—were cited in the final bill. Still, the unusual bipartisan action is cause for hope among reproductive-rights advocates that some of the extreme climate around abortion bans may be lessening.

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Will an 1864 Abortion Law Doom Trump in Arizona? Apr 13, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the revival of Arizona’s hundred-and-sixty-year-old abortion ban, what role the issue of reproductive freedom will play in the November election, and how the position of reproductive health care in politics has evolved over the decades.

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump Did This,” by Susan B. Glasser
“The Fight to Restore Abortion Rights in Texas,” by Stephania Taladrid

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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From WIRED Politics Lab: How Election Deniers Are Weaponizing Tech To Disrupt November Apr 11, 2024

Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, its become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and harassment.

Listen to and follow WIRED Politics Lab here.

Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

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What to Expect from Trump’s First Criminal Trial Apr 10, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach joins Tyler Foggatt to provide a preview of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, which begins next week in Manhattan. Trump faces thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016. Lach and Foggatt discuss the features of the controversial case and what six straight weeks of court appearances could mean for Trump’s campaign.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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The Attack on Black History in Schools Apr 08, 2024

Across much of the country, Republican officials are reaching into K-12 classrooms and universities alike to exert control over what can be taught. In Florida, Texas, and many other states, laws now restrict teaching historical facts about race and racism. Book challenges and bans are surging. Public universities are seeing political meddling in the tenure process. Advocates of these measures say, in effect, that education must emphasize only the positive aspects of American history. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter who developed the 1619 Project, and Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, talk with David Remnick about the changing climate for intellectual freedom. “I just think it’s rich,” Hannah-Jones says, “that the people who say they are opposing indoctrination are in fact saying that curricula must be patriotic.” She adds, “You don’t ban books, you don’t ban curriculum, you don’t ban the teaching of ideas, just to do it. You do it to control what we are able to understand and think about and imagine for our society.”

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After the World Central Kitchen Attack, How Far Will Biden Shift on Israel? Apr 05, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss how the Israeli strike on World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza could factor into a policy shift by the Biden Administration on Israel and the war. President Biden realized that he needed to “catch up to where the country was,” Osnos says. Then the British barrister Philippe Sands, a prominent specialist in international law who represents the state of Palestine in the case against the Israeli occupation before the International Court of Justice, joins the group to discuss whether the laws of war have been violated in this conflict.

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Amnesia Advantage,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Biden’s Increasingly Contradictory Israel Policy,” by Isaac Chotiner
“What It Takes to Give Palestinians a Voice,” by Robin Wright

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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How Should Reporters Cover Donald Trump? Apr 03, 2024

The New Yorker staff writers Jelani Cobb and Steve Coll joined Tyler Foggatt last May to discuss the ways in which Donald Trump maneuvers around facts and controls narratives when confronted by journalists. At last year’s CNN town hall, for example, Trump answered questions in front of a live and sympathetic audience—a setup that played to his strengths as a performer. For Cobb and Coll, who are Columbia Journalism School faculty members, the town hall raised some questions: Where is the line between coverage and promotion? And what is the role of news organizations in the age of political polarization? Cobb and Coll spoke about the dilemmas that journalists face when reporting on the former President and his 2024 campaign, and some potential solutions.

This episode originally aired on May 25, 2023.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Kara Swisher on Tech Billionaires: “I Don’t Think They Like People” Apr 01, 2024

Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “You can’t walk into my store and take all my Snickers bars and say it’s for fair use.” She is disappointed in government leaders who have failed to regulate businesses and protect users’ privacy. Although she remains awed by the innovation produced by American tech businesses, Swisher is no longer “naïve” about their motives. She also witnessed a generation of innovators grow megalomaniacal. The tech moguls claim they “know better; you’re wrong. You’ve done it wrong. The media’s done it wrong. The government’s done it wrong. . . . When they have lives full of mistakes! They just paper them over.” Once on good terms with Elon Musk, Swisher believes money has been deleterious to his mental health. “I don’t know what happened to him. I’m not his mama, and I’m not a psychiatrist. But I think as he got richer and richer—there are always enablers around people that make them think they hung the moon.”

This segment originally aired on March 1, 2024.

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Should Big Tech Stop Moderating Content? Mar 27, 2024

The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tension between protecting children from the effects of social media and protecting their right to free speech. Kang considers the ways in which social-media companies have sought to quell fear about misinformation and propaganda since Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, and why those efforts will ultimately fail. “The structure of the Internet, of all social media,” he tells Foggatt, “is to argue about politics. And I think that is baked into it, and I don’t think you can ever fix it.”

Read Jay Caspian Kang’s latest column.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Adam Gopnik on Hitler’s Rise to Power Mar 25, 2024

In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the “F-word”: fascism. He saw Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe. In the years since, Trump has called for “terminating” articles of the Constitution, has marked the January 6th insurrectionists as political martyrs, and has called his enemies animals, vermin, and “not people,” and demonstrated countless other examples of authoritarian behavior. In a new essay, Gopnik reviews a book by the historian Timothy W. Ryback, and considers Adolf Hitler’s unlikely ascent in the early nineteen-thirties. He finds alarming analogies with this moment in the U.S. In both Trump and Hitler, “The allegiance to the fascist leader is purely charismatic,” Gopnik says. In both men, he sees “someone whose power lies in his shamelessness,” and whose prime motivation is a sense of humiliation at the hands of those described as élites. “It wasn’t that the great majority of Germans were suddenly lit aflame by a nihilist appetite for apocalyptic transformation,” Gopnik notes. “They [were] voting to protect what they perceive as their interest from their enemies. Often those enemies are largely imaginary.”

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The Political Books That Help Us Make Sense of 2024 Mar 23, 2024

The Washington Roundtable reflects on the books they’ve been reading to understand the 2024 Presidential campaigns and the state of international politics. Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos swap recommendations of works about all things political, from the anger of rural voters to the worldwide rise of authoritarian rule, including a fictionalized imagining of a powerful real-life political family.

Read with the Roundtable:

“America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,” by Jacob Heilbrunn

“Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” by Rachel Maddow

“The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism,” by Joe Conason

“Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” by Brooke Harrington

“The Wizard of the Kremlin,” by Giuliano da Empoli

“The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” by Joshua Cohen

“The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq,” by Steve Coll (The New Yorker)

“The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China,” by Minxin Pei

“White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman

“Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker)

“Romney: A Reckoning,” by McKay Coppins

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim Alberta

“Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind,” by Sarah Posner

“Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right,” by Mary Jo McConahay

“Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” by Stephen Breyer

“The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court,” by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong

“What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” by Richard Ben Cramer

Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy: “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” “Theodore Rex,” and “Colonel Roosevelt,” by Edmund Morris

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback about this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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Why Robert Hur Described Joe Biden as an “Elderly Man with a Poor Memory” Mar 22, 2024

The New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her interview with Robert Hur, the special prosecutor who caused a political uproar with his report on his investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents. The report, which referred to Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” elicited a furious response from the White House—but, Gersen argues, its meaning and Hur’s motivations may have been misunderstood. Gersen and Foggatt also discuss the likelihood that the federal cases against Trump will go to trial before Election Day, and what Americans might expect if they do not.

Read Jeannie Suk Gersen’s piece on Robert Hur here.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Judith Butler on the Global Backlash to L.G.B.T.Q. Rights Mar 18, 2024

Long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990) and in other works, Butler popularized ideas about gender as a social construct, a “performance,” a matter of learned behavior. Those ideas proved highly influential for a younger generation, and Butler became the target of traditionalists who abhorred them. A protest at which Butler was burned in effigy, depicted as a witch, inspired their new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” It covers the backlash to trans rights in which conservatives from the Vatican to Vladimir Putin create a “phantasm” of gender as a destructive force. “Obviously, nobody who is thinking about gender . . . is saying you can’t be a mother, that you can’t be a father, or we’re not using those words anymore,” they tell David Remnick. “Or we’re going to take your sex away.” They also discuss Butler’s identification as nonbinary after many years of identifying as a woman. “The young people gave me the ‘they,’ ” as Butler puts it. “At the end of ‘Gender Trouble,’ in 1990, I said, ‘Why do we restrict ourselves to thinking there are only men and women?’ . . . This generation has come along with the idea of being nonbinary. [It] never occurred to me! Then I thought, Of course I am. What else would I be? . . . I just feel gratitude to the younger generation, they gave me something wonderful. That also takes humility of a certain kind.”

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How Gaza, Ukraine, and TikTok Are Influencing the Election Mar 15, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss how foreign policy is shaping the 2024 campaign, such as a possible ban on Chinese-owned TikTok and the wars in Europe and the Middle East. The panel also considers Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s sharply conflicting views of America’s role in the world.

This week’s reading:

“I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You,” by Susan B. Glasser

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback about this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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What Biden’s Budget Means for His Reëlection Battle with Trump Mar 13, 2024

John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss President Biden’s “bold proposal” to shift the tax burden back to the wealthy and tackle inflation, both key concerns for voters in the run-up to Election Day. The pair also considers why companies continue to rake in “bigger profits than ever before,” even as the economic fallout of the pandemic recedes.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Vinson Cunningham on His New Book, “Great Expectations” Mar 12, 2024

Like most Americans, Vinson Cunningham first became aware of Barack Obama in 2004, when he gave a breakout speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Very good posture, that guy,” Cunningham noted. “We hang our faith on objects, on people, based on the signs that they put out,” Cunningham tells David Remnick. “And that’s certainly been a factor in my own life. The rapid and urgent search for patterns.” Although Cunningham aspired to be a writer, he got swept up in this historic campaign, working on Obama’s longshot 2008 run for the Presidency, and later worked in his White House. Cunningham’s adventures on the trail inspire his first novel, “Great Expectations,” an autobiographical coming-of-age story about where and how we seek inspiration. Cunningham recalls that Obama was seen as the “fulfillment” of so many hopes and dreams for people like himself. Now he wishes the former President were playing a larger role. “I will admit that it has been dispiriting,” in Obama’s post-Presidential life, “to see him making movies and being on Jet Skis as the world burns. … more like a movie star than someone whose great hope is to change the world.”

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At the State of the Union, Biden Came Out Swinging Mar 08, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Biden’s energetic State of the Union address, the positive response among Democrats in the polls, and how press coverage is shaping the public’s perceptions of Biden’s campaign.

“He wasn’t looking to convince anybody,” Glasser says. “What he was looking to do was to tell his side, ‘Stop freaking out. I’m in the fight.’ ”

This week’s reading:

“So Much for ‘Sleepy Joe’: On Biden’s Rowdy, Shouty State of the Union,” by Susan B. Glasser
“Joe Biden’s Last Campaign,” by Evan Osnos

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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The Mood at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday Mar 07, 2024

Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the results of Super Tuesday, and how a “general decay” in Biden’s support, on top of his tight margins, could be exploited by a third-party candidate. Plus, Antonia Hitchens takes us behind the gilded curtain at a Mar-a-Lago primary-night watch party.

Read Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the primaries and Antonia Hitchens on experiencing Super Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago.

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

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Biden Reveals His Thoughts on the 2024 Election Mar 04, 2024

Despite hand-wringing among Democrats about Joe Biden’s age and his discouraging poll numbers, the President’s campaign for reëlection displays an “ostentatious level of serenity,” Evan Osnos says about the election. “This is a matter of great personal importance to Joe Biden. He feels almost, viscerally, this contempt for Trump and for what Trump did to the country,” Osnos tells David Remnick, after a rare private interview at the White House. “And let’s remember, he didn’t just try to steal this election—from Biden’s perspective—he tried to steal it from him.” Although Biden once referred to himself as a “bridge” President, he told Osnos that he had never considered stepping aside after one term. His gait has slowed, but Osnos found the President quick to jab at his questions and at “you guys” in the media, whom he blames for naysaying his campaign. But alongside complacent media coverage, threats to the President’s reëlection are many. The war in Gaza has alienated many voters from Biden, especially in Arab American communities, and it resonates even more widely. “When Houthi rebels started firing rockets at ships in the Red Sea,” Osnos points out, “it had an immediate effect on global shipping, to the point that it could have, and could yet still, push inflation back up. . . . I know this is the worst cliché in journalism, but this election has an element that is beyond anything we’ve ever really dealt with before.”

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Why the Primary System Is “Clearly Failing” Mar 01, 2024

The Washington Roundtable:In the Michigan primary on Tuesday, more than a hundred thousand Michigan Democrats chose “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, as a protest of his support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In Dearborn, which is home to a large Arab American and Muslim population, fifty-seven per cent of the vote was “uncommitted.” And, while former President Trump has so far swept the Republican contests, Nikki Haley has seized on college-educated and moderate-to-liberal Republican voters, taking forty per cent of the primary vote in South Carolina, her home state. This week, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear oral arguments on Trump’s claims of immunity, delaying the possibility of a trial before the election in the federal January 6th case.“It’s practically a kind of game-over moment for our democracy, what the Supreme Court did this week,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Will apathy among Democrats and the Supreme Court’s delay of Trump’s trial lead to a second Trump term? The New Yorker staff writers Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos join Glasser to weigh in.

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With Navalny’s Death, Putin is Feeling More Confident than Ever Feb 28, 2024

After a decade of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin through organized protest, anti-corruption investigations, and taunting social-media posts, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, from what the Kremlin claims was a pulmonary embolism. The New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen, who knew Navalny, calls his death “a shock, but not a surprise,” and says that, had Navalny been killed a decade ago, the incident might have led to even more widespread outrage. But Russian citizens and the world have since grown accustomed to Putin’s iron grip on power. With Putin gaining momentum in his war on Ukraine and Western sanctions seeming to be unable to stop him, Navalny’s death does not appear to signal Putin’s weakness; rather, it suggests that the Russian President feels as emboldened as ever. Despite this, Gessen sees a future for Russia’s political opposition movement. “They’re not going to organize to bring down the regime,” Gessen tells Tyler Foggatt. “That’s not the project. The project is to have a politics in place for when the regime collapses under its own weight. And I think it’s not impossible that they could do it.”

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Ty Cobb on Trump's Admiration for Putin Feb 26, 2024

Ty Cobb represented the Trump White House during the height of the Mueller-Russia probe, so he has a unique insight into the former President’s admiration for all things Putin, and his refusal to condemn the dissident Alexey Navalny’s death in prison. Trump’s response, bizarrely, was to compare his own legal troubles to Navalny’s political persecution and likely murder. Yet Cobb still feels certain that Russia has nothing concrete on Trump, which was the question of the Mueller investigation. Rather, Putin “has what Trump wants,” he tells David Remnick, “total control and adulation and riding the horse with his shirt off.” His quest to secure that power, seemingly by any means necessary, has made Trump “the greatest threat to democracy we’ve ever seen.” Cobb has been following Trump’s myriad of criminal cases closely, and he has concluded that only the January 6th case concerning Trump’s attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power has the potential to derail his political career. If a trial decision is not reached before the November election, and Trump were to win again, he can order the Justice Department to dismiss the case, and “it will be as though it never existed."

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Does Impeachment Mean Anything Anymore? Feb 23, 2024

Since Joe Biden’s earliest days in the Oval Office, some House Republicans have sought to remove the President and his Cabinet members from office. Last week, the Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, was impeached—on a second attempt—by a slight margin, in regard to the Biden Administration’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis. Meanwhile, the House’s other impeachment investigation, into Biden, is on the verge of collapse, after its star witness was charged with providing false information about Biden and his son Hunter to F.B.I. agents. The F.B.I. informant also, by his own account, has ties to Russian intelligence agencies. The ubiquity of impeachment cases today signal a change in our politics. “What was once a pretty rare and solemn instrument of accountability now looks more and more like just another partisan tool,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Jane Mayer join him to weigh in.

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Why Matt Gaetz Keeps Getting Away with It Feb 22, 2024

Representative Matt Gaetz is one of the most outspoken critics of the status quo in Washington, which he demonstrated most recently by playing a key role in removing fellow-Republican Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. How was Gaetz able to pull off such a feat given his deep unpopularity in Congress, and the fact that he’s under a House Ethics Committee investigation for the sex trafficking of a minor? The New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins, who recently profiled Gaetz in the magazine, joins Tyler Foggatt to explore the congressman’s motivations, including how fractured party politics have played a role in his rise to fame. “The party has to decide what it is,” Filkins says. “It’s not what it used to be, and it’s rapidly becoming something else. . . . In the interregnum, we’re seeing all these morbid symptoms as the party kind of convulses and tries to figure out its new identity.”

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“Pod Save America” ’s Jon Lovett on Biden’s Accomplishments Feb 19, 2024

Jon Lovett had been deep inside politics, as a speechwriter in the Obama Administration, before he joined his colleagues Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau to launch Crooked Media, a liberal answer to the burgeoning ecosystem of right-wing news platforms. “There was too much media that treated people like cynical observers,” Lovett tells David Remnick, “and not enough that treated them like frustrated participants.” Crooked Media has gathered millions of politically engaged listeners—“nerds,” Lovett calls them—to “Pod Save America,” “Lovett or Leave It,” and other podcasts. But Lovett is more worried about voters who no longer get a steady stream of reliable political coverage at all, as local news outlets wither and platforms like Facebook downplay the sharing of news. “The vast majority of people do not know about Joe Biden’s accomplishments,” he says. “When they say to a pollster that this is not someone they view as being up to the job, they’re not . . . understanding how he performed in the job so far.” Lovett shares the widespread concerns about Biden’s apparent aging, but notes that his performance remains effective, whereas, “in Trump, the reverse: he is more energetic—I think the threat of federal jail time sharpens the mind!—but by all accounts is emotionally, psychologically, and mentally not up to the job.”

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Do Democrats Have a Biden Backup Plan? Feb 15, 2024

The Biden campaign has come out in full force against a special-counsel report that refers to the President as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” But, as the staff writer Andrew Marantz points out, this “October-surprise-level political stumbling block” may require a more substantial response if Democrats hope to recapture the White House in November. Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to outline the issues the Democratic Party is facing right now, and discuss why one lesson from Lyndon B. Johnson may come back to haunt the President later. “There is just a fundamental cleavage within the coalition over what’s going on in Israel and Gaza the way there was with Vietnam,” he tells Foggatt. “I honestly don’t know what the ace-in-the-hole political move is here for him.”

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Can Joe Biden Squash Concerns About His Age? Feb 10, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: The special counsel investigating President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, released a report Thursday that describes the President as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden will not face charges for “willfully” retaining classified documents, but the report has reignited concerns about the President’s mental acuity. In a late-night press conference, Biden forcefully pushed back against the report’s findings, declaring, “My memory is fine.” But the incident could be “incredibly damaging” to the President, the staff writer Jane Mayer says, because people recognize it as “potentially true and potentially a giant campaign issue.” Another octogenarian politician, the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, also had a bad week in Washington. The long-awaited bipartisan deal on border security and Ukraine aid collapsed, with Senate Republicans turning on their own leader. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Evan Osnos join Mayer to weigh in.

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Why the Trump Ballot Case Is the Ultimate Test of Originalism Feb 08, 2024

This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that has the potential to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado, and possibly across the country. At issue is the Fourteenth Amendment provision that prohibits the leader of an insurrection from holding office, and whether the clause can be applied to Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, along with other notable historians, wrote an amicus brief that contextualizes the law. “This court has made momentous decisions in the last few years, certainly in the last two decades, in the name of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution,” she tells Tyler Foggatt. “And the only originalist interpretation of the Constitution available to them in this case is that Donald Trump cannot run for President of the United States.”

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The Last Real Legislative Battle of 2024 Feb 03, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: Prospects for the passage of a long-negotiated aid package that includes funding for Ukraine and Israel, and policy changes for the U.S. southern border, rapidly shrank this week, after the deal met resistance from House Republicans and former President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, President Biden’s approval rating on immigration has sunk to eighteen per cent. Why are Republicans simultaneously concerned about the crisis at the border while also stymying bi-partisan legislation to address it? The New Yorker staff writerJonathan Blitzer, who is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” joins the hosts Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos to weigh in on the implications that our knotted immigration politics have for the 2024 election.

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Why You Keep Seeing Biden Falling on Instagram Feb 01, 2024

If your Instagram Reels and TikToks are inundated with videos of President Joe Biden tripping or stumbling over his words, you’re not alone. Americans are increasingly tuning out the news and turning to social media for their political fix, and the online world is delivering an abundance of right-wing memes and misinformation. The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss our shifting media habits, why the 2016 election is surfacing in new contexts online, and how both campaigns are relying on algorithms to gain momentum ahead of November.

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Introducing The Runaway Princesses, from In the Dark Jan 30, 2024

The wives and daughters of Dubai’s ruler live in unbelievable luxury. So why do the women in Sheikh Mohammed’s family keep trying to run away? The New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake joins In the Dark’s Madeleine Baran to tell the story of the royal women who risked everything to flee the brutality of one of the world’s most powerful men. In four episodes, drawing on thousands of pages of secret correspondence and never-before-heard audio recordings, “The Runaway Princesses” takes listeners behind palace walls, revealing a story of astonishing courage and cruelty.

“The Runaway Princesses” is a four-part narrative series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. To keep listening, follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts or via this link: https://link.chtbl.com/itd_f

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The Oscar Nominee Cord Jefferson on Why Race Is So “Fertile” for Comedy Jan 29, 2024

The writer and director Cord Jefferson has struck gold with his first feature film, “American Fiction.” Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jefferson, the film is winning praise for portraying a broader spectrum of the Black experience than most Hollywood movies. It’s based on the 2001 novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, a satire of the literary world. And Jefferson, who began his career as a journalist before branching out into entertainment, has long seen up close how rigid attitudes about what constitutes “Blackness” can be. “Three months before I found ‘Erasure,’ I got a note back on a script from an executive” on another script, Jefferson tells his friend Jelani Cobb, “that said, ‘We want you to make this character blacker.’ ” (He demanded that the note be explained in person, and it was quickly dropped.) Jefferson hopes that his film sheds some light on what he calls the “absurdity” of race as a construct. He finds race “a fertile target for laughter. … On the one hand, race is not real and insignificant and [on the other hand] very real and incredibly important. Sometimes life or death depends on race. And to me that inherent tension and absurdity is perfect for comedy.”

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Biden’s Dilemma in the Israel-Hamas War Jan 27, 2024

The Washington Roundtable: After more than a hundred days, the Israel-Hamas conflict appears to be approaching an inflection point. Pressure has mounted on Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to reduce military activity in Gaza and plan for an end to the violence. Meanwhile, Netanyahu remains committed to “total victory” and the elimination of Hamas, and President Biden, reportedly frustrated behind closed doors, has been left to navigate the fraught politics of the conflict in the United States during an election year. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, has travelled to Israel twice since the war began, and recently published “The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition.” Remnick joins the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos to weigh in on the political ramifications of the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East and within the Democratic Party.

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How “the Élite” Became the Most Convenient Straw Man in Politics Jan 25, 2024

Everyone loves to rail against the élites. But to whom does the term refer? For right-wing politicians and pundits, it’s the mainstream media and the Ivy League-educated. For progressives, it’s corporate honchos. The malleable language of élite-blaming makes it easy for the American public to talk past one another without addressing an underlying grievance: entrenched income inequality. The New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos has written about this fraught concept in this week’s magazine. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss his findings, and to consider the nuances of how they manifest in the political lives of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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