His Act Is Getting Old

0:00E.J. Dionne Jr.:If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Tabitha Brown. With YouTube Premium, I get ad-free videos, offline downloads, and so much more. Try YouTube Premium for two months free. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime.

0:18Robert Siegel:Hi, I'm Robert Siegel, and this is our regular conversation about politics. Joining me, as usual, is New York Times opinion contributor E.J. Dionne. Great to be here. Good to see you again. And joining us once again, Times Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada. Welcome back. It's great to have you here, Carlos. Once more into the breach. Let's go. And we have a lot to talk about. In New England, two Senate races have produced for this year surprisingly unsurprising results. President Trump, evidently undeterred by stories that Republican candidates are trying to distance themselves from him, has put on a special midterm convention, minus the platform, minus the nominating addresses.

1:02Robert Siegel:It's a Trump-a-palooza, we're told. And all of this contemporary politicking unfolded in a week when we recalled this being the 25th anniversary of 9-11, in an event that altered our politics, I would say in more ways than we sometimes realize. Lots to talk about. And let's start with Donald Trump's attempt to rally Republicans and remind them of what he sees as his many accomplishments in office. E.J., the president had C-SPAN. He had the C-SPAN audience. Fox dipped into his keynote address. I mean, after all, what else was on the air?

1:42E.J. Dionne Jr.:You would have to remind me of the disastrous defeat of my New England Patriots at the hands of the Seattle Seahawks. I was switching back and forth and I found neither experience very satisfactory, to quote the old Newell Wolf line. You know, I think what was so striking about what Trump did is that it shows how vulnerable he thinks he is in this election. And he's not following the script Republicans might want, which is please go into hiding because you're killing us in the polls. But he wanted to change the nature of the the conversation. And so he, you know, at least the old political machines used to give you five bucks if you voted for the machine ticket.

2:30E.J. Dionne Jr.:Yes. Trump is giving voters a five thousand dollar. I owe you for this money he says he's going to give them. And this, of course, from a guy who is famous for not paying his debts. But the very fact that I am mentioning this is what Trump wants people to do, because he doesn't want people to talk about the war or inflation or lots of other things. And I think that this is going to be a real contest between whether it's a normal midterm election where Democrats can focus the election on Trump and his record, which as Charlie Cook, the great political analyst, who's very careful in what he says, a lot of Trump voters, he says, think they were victims of a bait and switch given Trump's priorities when they voted for him in the presidential race.

3:22E.J. Dionne Jr.:And Trump wants to, here's 5 ,000 bucks. And by the way, the Democrats are communists and you can't possibly elect them. And it goes back to the great podcast Carlos did actually with Michelle Cottle and the historian Nicole Hemmer about McCarthyism that never died. And this is a real throwback to something that worked once before and Trump, you know, communism plus crime plus an obsession, which I thought was very strange, with dirty streets in democratic cities. That's what he wants us talking about. And I guess I just played his game because I did.

4:01Robert Siegel:Carlos, what do you make of Trump's celebration of his own presidency? And do you think he believes that his negative approval ratings can be somehow washed away through his talents of persuasion? Well, far be it from me to parse exactly what is in Donald Trump's mind. But in terms of the celebration, I think really, I feel like the entire Trump presidency is a celebration of the Trump presidency. Everything he does has to be the biggest and the best and the smartest and the most historic thing in the history of human events. And really, that's part and parcel with what he's been doing during the second term.

4:37All these kind of side quests that he's been on about whether it's the ballroom or the arch or renaming everything America. It's all part of this effort to sort of burnish a legacy rather than really earn one. And in terms of the midterms and what we saw at Trumpapalooza is that, you know, those efforts are crashing up against a certain reality. And the reality is the broken promises, the failed promises of bringing prices down and avoiding costly, prolonged wars. Now, will his persuasiveness help reshape that story? Following up on something EJ said, he seems both confident and afraid at the same time.

5:24Confident when he says, pretend I'm on the ballot. He's almost daring voters to judge him on this record, on this record, frankly, of promises he has not kept. But he seems afraid when he's essentially has to offer, he's reduced to offering people money. You know, I'll give you five grand a piece, American adults, if the Republicans win. You know, in essence, it's sort of being reduced to the offer of a bribe. If we've learned something about Trump, though, it's that whatever happens in November, he's going to declare victory. If the Republicans do better than expected, he'll say probably correctly that it was because of him.

6:04It's because of, you know, his coattails, because he asked people to vote as if he was on the ballot himself. If the Republicans get spanked, it'll be because, you know, when he's on the ballot, people just aren't excited because it's really all about him. He's always been able to separate his brand from that of the party. Trump is very good at declaring victory, even when he loses, sometimes especially when he loses.

6:31E.J. Dionne Jr.:You know, I think you really put your finger on something important about the paradox of what Trump was doing. I mean, what he's trying to do, which is really hard in politics, is to have his own voters, but only his own voters, think that he's on the ballot. You know, Ruth Gelnick and Carolyn Soler had a great piece in The Times about the sharp shift in party identification where Republicans have lost 17 points net among young people, nine points net among Latinos in the last few years. So he's got this real problem. And that's where the distraction comes in. That's where he wants to believe his being on the ballot is the key because of his own people.

7:19E.J. Dionne Jr.:But somewhere inside him, as you suggested, I think there is this lack of confidence. And that's why he's doing the other thing. The New York Times had a great editorial arguing that Trump was sabotaging the midterms by using the Postal Service to try to completely turn mail voting into chaos. And I think that's the real tell. If he were confident in these elections, I don't think he'd have to do that. And the Supreme Court may at some point, maybe when this goes on the air, have ruled on this. But boy, is that the big tell.

7:54Robert Siegel:I think it should be noted that there is a new official answer as to when the war with Iran is going to end. Now we're told it'll be the day after Election Day. And there may be a little bit of truth there remembering Jimmy Carter and the Iranians stretching out the hostage crisis until Ronald Reagan was sworn into office. And they could humiliate Jimmy Carter one last time.

8:19E.J. Dionne Jr.:Peace is at hand and the hand is at the end of the tunnel. You know, that's really what we are reliving here.

8:26Robert Siegel:Well, I mentioned at the outset the surprisingly unsurprising primary results in New England. In Massachusetts, Senator Ed Markey decisively turned back a challenge from Congressman Seth Moulton, whose main argument seems to have been, I'm 47, he's 80. E.J., how did Markey do it?

8:45E.J. Dionne Jr.:Marky did it by running really a very similar campaign to the one where he defeated Joe Kennedy six years ago. He made himself the tribune of the left side of the Democratic Party. He turned it into an ideological choice and ideology trumped age in that race. And I think also Congressman Moulton wasn't that popular. A lot of establishment Democrats and just rank and file Democrats weren't crazy about Moulton. And that was enough for Markey. And I think it showed that a mechanical view of politics where, you know, it's all about age or it's all about ideology. Actually, it depends. And then in New Hampshire, Chris Pappas, actually the congressman running for the vacated seat of Senator Gene Shaheen, won very handily over a candidate of the left.

9:34E.J. Dionne Jr.:And I think this is sort of should be a lesson to media where when DSA candidates, Democratic Socialists of America candidates were winning this summer, the talk and Trump echoed it in his Trumpapalooza speech. The socialists are taking over the Democratic Party. No, there is disaffection in the party. The party is almost certainly more progressive than it was 20 years ago. But no, there are plenty of normal elections that happen out there. And, you know, they don't get as much attention because they're normal. They don't sort of break new ground. And so I don't blame the media for highlighting a change, but it really can distort the larger picture of what's happening inside the party and in the country.

10:24Robert Siegel:And the New Hampshire results were so normal that first, the Republicans nominated for Senator, former Senator John Sununu, who is, of course, the son of a former governor of New Hampshire. And the Democrats, as you mentioned, Chris Pappas, the congressman, is running to succeed Jean Shaheen. They nominated Jean Shaheen's daughter to run to fill the seat vacated by Pappas. So it doesn't get more conventional than that. Dynastic. You know, I defer to EJ as our politics guru. You know, I think on your sort of media critique, it is possible to overread or overthink, you know, some races at the expense of others.

11:12I mean, I think that the rise of DSA and sort of the DSA-inflected Democratic Party is a big story. I agree with that. And because a more conventional Democrat wins in Massachusetts doesn't necessarily undercut the import of that story, these transformations don't happen all at once. Right. And and the the the rise of a new, more assertive, you know, DSA wing of the party, I think, is is is is meaningful. And in part, it's meaningful in all these in all these races that you're discussing, Robert, because the both Democrats and Republicans have to figure out who they are beyond being pro-Trump or being anti-Trump.

11:56and that's been sort of too easy and too pat for too long and it's not going to keep working and I think these primaries and these midterms are a part of that process, a part of that debate and so I think it's healthy. It's healthy to see both of these forces working at the same time.

12:15E.J. Dionne Jr.:I have to agree with Carlos's as always carefully reasoned correction or modification of what I said I certainly do not want to downplay the fact that the DSA victories do tell us something, that the rise of this critique of the economy, whether people call themselves socialists or not, goes back to Occupy Wall Street and to Bernie Sanders' campaign. And there is a frustration out there. And there have been some really good stories actually out there, essays on Democratic Socialists of America and how complicated that movement is. It's not a movement of a single wing that the Republicans love to quote the most radical pronouncements of the most radical people in DSA.

13:02E.J. Dionne Jr.:When in fact, DSA is a kind of collection of people on the left who range, if you will, from Social Democrats to something much harder on the left. So that's all true. But I do think there is still a hair trigger tendency that exaggerates or doesn't get at the subtlety of what's going on. And that's why the results like we had in Massachusetts, which, by the way, was about the power of the left, you know, that, you know, Ed Markey mobilized the left on his behalf. but also the New Hampshire races, you know, that we should sort of do this carefully, not sort of not start sort of jumping off a cliff over a few election results.

13:48Robert Siegel:But you mentioned echoes of the Red Scare earlier. I mean, do you think this Republican attack that, you know, Democratic policies span the gamut from Bolshevik to Menshevik? Do you think that it has any traction with people?

14:04E.J. Dionne Jr.:I think that it's more a mobilizing tactic than a persuasion tactic that the issues he put on the table that might have more, a little more persuasive power are the old staples, you know, particularly crime. I don't think immigration works for him as much anymore because people have sort of turned away from these pretty heinous policies he's pursued on the streets of the country. I think the communism appeal may solve a small bit of his turnout problem, or so he hopes. But again, it seems so antique. I think part of Trump's problem now is that his act really has started feeling old. And I think that started a while ago.

14:52E.J. Dionne Jr.:And to go back to communism, which was an issue about the 1950s, is kind of a reminder of how old that act is getting. Yeah, all I'll add is that I wouldn't, I would never bet against the paranoid strain in American politics.

15:20Recently, we asked about how you share your New York Times account. And you had a lot to say about New York Times games. I need my own New York Times login because my sister is so much worse at the crossword than I am.

15:32E.J. Dionne Jr.:I discovered that he's already finished Connections that day. And I'm like, Jonah, it was my day. It doesn't let us play the same games as each other. I play the stoku. I do the crossword. I do the spelling bee. I do the Wordle. Please help. My kids want to be able to play Wordle, but with the Wordlebot. We would love to be able to have our own puzzles. I love New York Times games. I want to be able to play my own games. Listeners, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times games family subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins, and your existing stats and streaks come with you.

16:09Find out more at nytimes.com slash family.

16:16Robert Siegel:Well, many people have remarked this week on the 25th anniversary of 9-11. For me, it remains a watershed event in a variety of ways. Carlos, does it still resonate for you and what you see in American politics and life? Well, I mean, it certainly resonates politically. I think first and foremost, it resonates tragically, viscerally in the lives of people who survived the attacks and people who lost loved ones in the attacks. Politically, it's almost impossible to imagine our politics without it, right? If we just stay at the level of presidential politics and look at the presidents who have led us since 9-11, President Bush, George W.

17:01Bush, entered office, sort of weakened, questioned, you know, following the 2000 election, you know, Florida recount and the like. 9-11, his leadership in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 was comforting, was popular. It really elevated him. And Congress and the American people handed him enormous powers as a result to respond. What he did with those powers then diminished him greatly, whether we look at - Two wars. Yeah. I mean, or the black sites and torture, euphemized as enhanced interrogation, and the like, but really the expansion of the global war on terror, quote unquote, from Afghanistan into Iraq.

17:49In fact, the two presidents that followed, Obama and Trump, were in some measure able to reach power because of their position on the war. Obama famously had said early on, I don't oppose all wars, just dumb wars, right? And referring to Iraq as that dumb war. Eight years later, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination, he broke with GOP orthodoxy and really was very critical of the Bush administration for having gone to war in Iraq. It was like Trump and Obama were running on the same anti-war ticket, just separated by eight years. Joe Biden trying to end the longest war in America's history was severely diminished due to the chaos of a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power so quickly.

18:47If there was a beginning of the end for Biden, it may have been that. What strikes me most, I think, sort of in the right now looking at the Trump era of American politics is that even though it comes 25 years later, so much of the rhetoric and the policy of MAGA, of Trumpism, to me feels impossible without 9-11. It was enabled by the world that 9-11 created. Absent 9-11, I can't imagine someone becoming a prominent political figure and winning a nomination based on on birtherism right on the lie that the sitting american president was foreign was muslim was therefore a constitutional fraud yeah it was there and was therefore like untrustworthy right absent 9-11 i can't imagine the first policy out of the gate of a new administration being a travel ban against people from muslim majority countries absent 9-11 in the war on terror i can't imagine um americans who are exercising the right to protest government policy being shot and killed and then branded as terrorists by the very agency that was created to in the aftermath of 9-11 to stop it which was DHS so all these years later I feel there's ways in which we're very much still living in the wreckage of 9-11 yeah that is I think

20:11E.J. Dionne Jr.:a brilliant analysis I think all of us whenever we talk about the political and historical meaning of 9-11 want to pause to remember that day and how horrible it was. A lot of my wife Mary's family at the time lived in Rockaway, and that neighborhood suffered greatly, both because there were a lot of police and firefighters who lived in that neighborhood and a lot of people who worked in that building. And I think it's so important for all of us who want to talk about the implications to just try to remember what that was like for the lives of so many people in New York City. But I think Carlos is exactly right.

20:48E.J. Dionne Jr.:First, the unexpected, but I think correct point that in certain ways, 9-11 fueled Obama's rise, but also Trump's rise in all the ways that you said. But I also think there was just a fundamental way in which the country went haywire for 25 years after that event. All our kids, and I think of this in terms of how our children see this, our kids were all born in the 90s. When they were born, I felt, my Lord, they're going to grow up in a great time of peace and prosperity just like I did. You know, I remember the presidencies of Ike and JFK. And then this event happens and they all turn. They turn four, seven and nine in the fall after 9-11.

21:34E.J. Dionne Jr.:And what happened after 9-11? There was the attack itself. There were the endless wars that we suffered. There was the economic collapse of 2008, the Great Recession. And then lots of other things that were developing gradually, but that really hit home. We lost industrial jobs and parts of the country were being hollowed out. But the China shock really hit hard in that decade. And my Brookings colleague, Bill Galston, in his Wall Street Journal column, made an interesting point that I had not thought about. The last balanced budget we had was dated September 30th, 2001. and we proceeded on an economic policy that involved a bunch of wars and tax cuts.

22:20E.J. Dionne Jr.:We went to war and the tax cut. And that is not the normal way of pursuing things. And so we talk about this now. And so I think that we should in a way be a bit charitable to all of us as Americans about our politics going haywire because there was so much that went haywire that has led us here, which leads me to believe, and we'll find out in a couple of years, I think the country is kind of crying out to get past this. I think there is an opening for a big leap forward.

22:53Robert Siegel:I think those three catastrophes, 9-11, the Great Recession, and the COVID pandemic, went a long way toward undermining any confidence in American life. And the sense that, as you say, that the world, for kids who grew up at that time, isn't this warm, comfortable place. I'm reminded of being about five or six years old and learning in Sunday school. this is Jewish Sunday school, about the holiday of Purim and that there had been Haman, an evil guy who wanted to kill all the Jews. And the principal told us, actually, there was a man who wanted to kill all the Jews. He was Adolf Hitler. And when I asked my mother about that, I don't know, it was a little, I don't remember being terribly shaken, but I never heard this.

23:45Robert Siegel:She said, well, you know, that's why daddy's picture shows him in uniform. He was in the army. And the army went, he went to Europe, and they defeated Hitler. And I felt very good about that. I felt they've made the world good for me. And COVID, I was one of the kids who got the experimental Salk vaccines, you know, part of the huge trial. So I, rather than see some new incurable illness strike, I saw some terrible illness we lived with for years and centuries be defeated by American science. I think the optimism that baby boomers had every reason to grow up with just seems to be gone. And to me, it's evident in an attitude that begins with throw the bums out.

24:44Robert Siegel:That's the first option. and a sourness and a discomfort with the way things are.

24:51E.J. Dionne Jr.:I so resonate with that. My dad enlisted a few days after Pearl Harbor. And what you said resonates with something Robert Reich, former labor secretary and intellectual, wrote many, many years ago, which is that the country in the 50s and 60s had a kind of confidence in public life generally because we, that generation defeated the Great Depression and won World War II. And there was an enormous confidence that you saw reflected like in the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, where both had real confidence in the ability of public action to achieve great things. And that began to dissipate with Vietnam. It dissipated further with Watergate.