America’s “Bad Emperor” Problem

0:00Well, it is the first big snow of the season. Washington looks fresh, magical, and new. It's like an inch and a half. I am a fan of snow. I'm going to just put that out there. I know it's controversial, and D.C. especially, but I love snow. This morning in our house, I have never seen more sorrow than the discovery of snow on the ground, but no snow day. That is a cruel fate indeed. I suppose you don't serve hot chocolate either, do you? Well, I tried, but there was a rending of PJs, a pulling of hair. And they really lost control. I don't want to point fingers, but my children lost. Well, expectations were set.

0:39Yeah. That's it. Well, this is all about expectations, it turns out. Well, they need to get organized. In your household, we expect political organizing. They probably are. You're right. They need to get on the weather service and on the local school boards. They're going to take control of the means of communication, a swift overnight strike. If they get a hold of my text messages, if you see any conspicuous spelling errors, you know that they've seized the devices. Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos.

1:19Hi, Susan. Hey there. Hi, Evan. Good morning, guys. Hey, well, President Donald Trump, now 79 years old, will be the oldest sitting president in U.S. history by the end of the second term. For years, his bluster and uninhibited style have insulated him from questions about his age and health. But that's changing. Recent observations, including Trump appearing to nod off during a cabinet meeting as Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised him, and reports of a shorter work schedule have fueled new questions about his stamina and his mental sharpness. The irony is inescapable. Trump won the 2024 presidential campaign by attacking Joe Biden as Sleepy Joe.

2:14Now he faces some of the same questions about his own stamina, leadership, and aging in politics. So in this episode, is Donald Trump asleep at the wheel? If so, what are the political consequences for the rest of us? So let's start by grounding ourselves in what we do know. Trump's style has, of course, always leaned towards the unpredictable. He has a longstanding tendency towards incoherence, and he tends to ramble. He claims that his non-sequiturs are something that he calls his special weave. It can kind of be hard to distinguish between the style we've come to know from Trump and signs of aging and decline.

3:00But there have been certain clear signs, according to reports from The New York Times. Evan. Yeah. Can you please walk us through what we're hearing about? Yeah, I have to say I enjoyed the process of going back in anticipation of today and really reminding myself of a series of remarkable moments. I think that this really kicked up after this meeting that you mentioned briefly in the Oval Office. It was November 6th. And people will remember that that was the day that the president of the United States was really just sitting in his chair with his eyes closed for long periods of time. And you had these kinds of analyses by various news organizations sort of counting up the minutes, 20 minutes apparently, in which he was, shall we say, losing the battle against the midday nap.

3:49And afterwards, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, seized on this, as one does in politics, calling him Dozy Don, which, you know, these are the kinds of things that are sound ridiculous, except that, as we learned with Sleepy Joe, it really does follow you around. So dozy Don he is. Now, The Times did a really good analysis where they really put together all of these really startling indicators about Trump's health. The fact that he now routinely puts makeup on his hand to cover this big unexplained bruise. The fact that he's now working many fewer hours. I mean, they say he's working basically noon to five, which was one of his big accusations against Biden.

4:30And one of the things that I think really registered with the public, the fact that he's doing many fewer events. I mean, all of these are not incidental facts. And one of the things we learned in the last administration was the public may not follow all the ups and downs of somebody's policies and politics, but they read very visibly your physical health and vigor. And if the image becomes set in stone that this is somebody who is drowsy or dozy or asleep at the wheel, as you say, that becomes very hard to shake off. And I think it's a big reason why Trump went absolutely berserk about that New York Times piece.

5:05Yeah, I mean, look, it cuts to the core of Trump's political identity even more, by the way, than until the end Biden, because Trump has always projected himself as literally the incarnation, the physical incarnation of a strong man. There's this amazing scene that's recounted by one of his assistants in his first term where she's concerned about Trump's appearance or health that he's not feeling well early on in the first term. And his other advisor sternly reprimands her and says, Donald Trump is never sick. Donald Trump is never unwell. And it's core to his political identity as well as I think his self-identity is this idea of strength, of power.

5:50Remember, he's fighting for them. That's been his whole appeal to the MAGA base. And so for him, it cuts right to the political identity. If he is no longer the incarnation of power and he actually physically cannot fight for them, then what is it exactly that he's doing for them? So number one is the political question of how they're going to address this. And the reason that I think it's important to have this conversation now only, you know, 10 months into this second term is because this is only going to become a bigger issue, right? Yeah. When a guy is pushing 80, there's going to be more naps, right?

6:28We can just say. And in fact, actually, there were two naps this week, even after he had that cabinet room thing. And we should stipulate, by the way, no one at this table is immune to, you know, a little bit of eye closing midday. Right. That happens. It's nature. And aging, of course, it's not a straight line. You know, it's a zigzag and it will be for Trump as it was for Biden. Up until now, Trump benefited, I would say, from a sort of impression of sheer physical bulk. And he was aging in a different way than Biden. And then the other factor, Evan, I wanted to point out is one you mentioned, which is what is the line between Trump's incoherence and where you call that aging?

7:14And frankly, he benefited greatly from that in his first term. Donald Trump was already getting palpably older in many respects in his first four years in office. I would suggest to anybody who is not sure about this conversation, go back and look at a video clip of Donald Trump from, say, the late 80s or early 90s on The Larry King Show. Don, why don't you and people like you build low-income, medium-income housing? Well, as far as building housing is concerned and low-income housing, I've built a lot of it. I haven't recently, but I've built a lot of it. I've built senior citizens' housing and beautiful, beautiful housing.

7:51I've built low-income housing, and I'm very proud of it. The policies of the government right now just don't allow it because really what's happened by the tax incentives that were taken away and by the lack of federal programs, you used to have federal programs, you don't have them anymore. And it really doesn't allow it to be done on any economic basis. And it's a pretty rough situation. I mean, you just don't have subsidized housing, low income, moderate income housing. And it's a really big problem. He's a much sharper, clearer, more understandable person. He speaks with nouns and verbs and periods at the end of sentences.

8:22He has a larger vocabulary. Flash forward to the 2016 campaign. Look at a little clip of that. Yet Hillary Clinton wants to double down on Obamacare, making it even more expensive. And it doesn't work. It's no good. I'm asking for your vote so we can repeal and replace Obamacare and save health care for every family in Michigan and throughout the United States of America. We have to do it. We don't have a choice. Him, pretty vigorous, you know, and he had talking points in that campaign, a message to deliver, and he delivered it with some discipline over and over again. In fact, analyses have shown that his language actually changed in the 2016 campaign to be sharper, to, you know, swear less than he did normally.

9:12Then he gets to be president and it starts to unravel. By the end of his first term, he's a different guy. By the 2024 campaign, he's all over the place. Just word salad. He's talking for twice as long. That, to me, was always a really interesting data point, in fact. They call this, I guess, disinhibition, but his rally lengths doubled. They were over 87 minutes of speaking, I believe, in his second campaign. I mean, but let's talk a little bit about what you described as the unraveling. It's not just the length of these discourse of things that are going on coming out of the Oval Office. I don't know how to describe it practically, but it's also the actual subject matter and the words that he's using.

9:58They seem to be intensifying outbursts and more profane. Correct. Yeah. Are you seeing language that we haven't seen before? Well, I think when you drill into these studies that Susan mentioned, there's actually some really interesting specifics. I mean, the fact is that his use of violent language has gone up substantially. This is something that scholars at UCLA discovered, that it's not just, you know, the sort of general disinhibition where he is. And he's doing that, too, where he's cursing more. And evidently the barriers around his own self-governance, if we can use that term with him, are giving way.

10:35But the fact that he's actually historically now talking about both war and crime at a level that is much higher than previous presidents is notable to the scholars who look at this stuff. It's also notable, and I just have to draw attention to this, that he is luxuriating more in the mental palace of the 1980s. I mean, he says things like at one point he was talking about, where is Johnny Carson? He says, can we bring – and Carson, of course, has been dead since 2005. He's been talking about Cary Grant. Cary Grant. I mean – and Lindbergh. I mean this is even before his own time. OK. But to be fair, it's more about, as you said, it's an intensification of attributes that were already there with Donald Trump.

11:22Right. So he already – his entire political persona was a sort of an archaeological relic of the 1980s. Right. And that was true when he came in. But it's become intensified, distilled, and some of the more menacing aspects of his personality have come through. So that means that he's not controlling himself when he's angry. And what does it say that Evan mentioned the Times piece on his age and the ways in which the White House was compensating for that with a reduced schedule and the like? You know, this caused him to be really ripshit. And I think, you know, his demeaning of the reporter who wrote that obviously hit a nerve with Donald Trump because I think it does go to who he is as a politician and it actually could undermine his connection with his base.

12:16You know, actually, Susan, when you talk about his reaction to the New York Times report on his fatigue or whatever we want to call this, Trump posted 160 times on Truth Social in response to the New York Times article. If you look at what he posted, he has statistics about how the number of times the stock market has hit the highs and all the things he claims, all the wars he claims he's solved and everything else. And you know what I thought when I looked at that? I figured this is what his aides are telling him. He is cosseted by sycophants who are feeding him these lines and telling him no one has ever been better.

12:57And part of what we're looking at as we describe the outlook of the president is a man who's surrounded by yes-men who seems to be increasingly detached from reality. We see this in his discussion of the affordability issue where he claims that affordability concerns are a hoax. He's obviously out of touch with anyone who goes shopping. Look, he's the man in the bubble, right? But all presidents have this to a certain extent. I mean, and I think it's a very relevant point, Jane, because, you know, history is full of, you know, late stage emperors and kings and who are increasing in isolation. But I think it's best distilled, in fact, by an incident that you referenced in the opening today, which is the cabinet meeting this week.

13:46He repeatedly had trouble staying awake, but he particularly had trouble when the man literally sitting next to him, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, is not only flattering him, but praising him in terms fit for an emperor. You, sir, are the greatest peacemaker of all time. And what I found amazing is that Donald Trump is so weary that even this praise is no longer enough to stir him. Yeah, that's a great point. I think it's his favorite lullaby, actually, truthfully. I mean, it makes him feel good to have this bath of warm work. Yeah, but what seems to wake him up, and I've wondered about this, is hate.

14:25I mean, he rises to the occasion to say something racist about Somalis or to trash these particularly women reporters who have come in. I mean, we've heard four of them trashed by him in very, very nasty terms in the last few weeks. And it's— Although nastiness, again, not a new facet of his personality. And I think, you know, what we're likely to hear is just more of it because he feels defensive and inappropriate. But I want to put this in the... Profanity is real. OK, I just have to say, I have found, and I'm not someone who cares that much about profanity generally, but coming from the Oval Office, the President of the United States, to hear him say such things as that...

15:10When he was talking about Israel and Iran... You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that? In the world of diplomacy and in it, it is shocking and kind of, I mean, it's jarring and it's debasing in some way. That's really, I think, I mean, and now I've seen it, you know, you can see it from the people around him. His spokesman last week told, you know, reacted to something that I tweeted saying that I ought to shut the fuck up. You know, to say to a reporter that obviously it is their fantasy that all reporters will be silenced, but to use language like that from the pulpit of the White House of the United States, it is so coarse and so lowering.

16:04Well, I mean, this is these are fighting words. I mean, this is a language that has a long history around it. And I think that one of the things that's especially worth watching is that in an administration like this, in which people pattern themselves so clearly after the president, there's you know, there's this kind of obvious, rather pathetic attempt to just ape him aesthetically, that that's what they do. And you watched it in the cabinet meeting, which I have to say makes for fascinating viewing because you see that he is getting he begins to get drowsy when it's things that he doesn't care about.

16:40So he's sort of faintly awake for Lutnik. And then as you begin meeting at secretary of commerce and then as you begin to get into the the various agencies that he could care less about, like HUD and the EPA, he's drifting into this deep and restorative REM stage, I think. And then finally, when Rubio, who he considers to be a kind of hollow vessel who is hopelessly, desperately trying to puff him up, that's the point at which he is rendered at his most restorative. But listen, guys, when you come back to the issue of whether he is increasingly asleep at the wheel, as we've said, in some ways, I wonder if this could be – will this provide him cover?

17:24I mean, if you take a look at the debate and discussion over the Hegseth situation right now, basically Trump has said he had no idea that there was what they're calling a double tap and that the U.S. military came back and killed two people hanging off the side of a boat who, according to military law, should have been rescued in the eyes of most experts. Is it believable that he did not know? And if so, is this going to maybe give him some cover? Well, I think what the Hegseth situation tells us is it's really kind of proof of a couple of the phenomena we've been talking about, which is that as you have a president who is valorizing and lionizing demonstrations of, quote unquote, strength and violence and vigor, that you're going to have people in his orbit who are desperate to demonstrate that, try to operationalize it.

18:17And here you've got somebody like Pete Hegseth, who, as we all know, in so many ways, has none of the experience of secretary of defense and having been relieved at the outset of his tenure of things like military JAG officers, some of the most senior legal advisors, counsel, oversight that exists inside the military that is now essentially gone further and further down the track until it finally violated a sense that even Republican senators. could accept. I'm curious, Susan, what you think about this moment. Is it plausible to you that Trump is actually unaware of what's going on? Or is this, in fact, just an occasion where he can put some distance between somebody who's gotten himself in trouble?

19:02You know, maybe rather than an or answer, it's an and answer, right? You know, Donald Trump certainly has a longstanding habit of distancing himself from advisors who get in trouble. And he'll be like, oh, wait, Pete who? You know, I never heard of the guy. And that's your tell that the poor fellow is on his or her way out. So partially that's just what Donald Trump does when there's a controversy, sees whether he can distance himself from it. But I do think it's an interesting question that this raises about whether as a political matter, the age will increasingly become the kind of cover for Donald Trump as the scandals of the second term inevitably metastasize and swirl around him.

19:48And, you know, Jay and I, of course, have been thinking a little bit in this context about Ronald Reagan and his second term, and not only at the time considered to be our oldest modern president, although way younger than these guys, but Iran-Contra. You covered Iran-Contra. You wrote a fantastic book about Ronald Reagan. Tell us about, like, is it fair to make this analogy? I always thought that one of the reasons Ronald Reagan didn't, for example, get impeached in the Iran-Contra scandal was because nobody really believed that he was firmly in control and command, which is a remarkable thing in and of itself, but that people basically gave him the benefit of the doubt.

20:28They said it was rogue advisors, you know, Oliver North in the basement of the White House who was doing this deal. You're absolutely right. His safety was that he was out of the loop, and it was entirely believable that he was out of the loop. I mean, but that's a double-edged sword for a president. When the Iran-Contra affair broke, it was just after the 86th midterm election, and Reagan's popularity dropped 21 points. And from then on, he was really seen as a lame duck and somewhat enfeebled. And so, yes, it probably saved him from impeachment or any kind of legal repercussions. But at the same time, it's not helpful to a president.

21:11And as you were saying at the outset, it's especially, I think, a problem for a president like Trump, who has cast himself as a strong man. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Biden and what we have learned about the political consequences of aging in the White House. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

21:41If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thanks so much for listening.

22:00Come see Critics at Large live on February 19th. We're going to be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a conversation about Wuthering Heights. There's a new adaptation coming up starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. and we will certainly be getting into that, but we'll also do what we, humbly I'll say, what we do best. Returning to the text, we're going to go deep on the gothic and Emily Bronte. Join me, Vincent Cunningham, and my co-hosts, Alex Schwartz and Nomi Frye, for the discussion. And crucially, if you buy a VIP ticket, you'll join us for an after party too. Go to 92NY.org for more information.

22:43That's 92NY.org. Hope to see you there.

22:58So, Evan, in a sense, we've been here before. As we've discussed a little bit, you did a fabulous piece on Joe Biden taking a look at the age issue. And it became an even bigger issue in the 24 election. as he was exposed increasingly. The question I have is, has Biden changed the standard for what's allowable in the White House? Has he changed what the public cares about on this issue and what the press's role is in terms of covering it? Yeah, I do think that the Biden hangover is a big piece of how alert people are to Trump's aging because in a way we learned some things about the culture of white houses for instance that what happens over time is that as the president gets older when they start already at a at an advanced age that it's like a frog in boiling water that the people around him and we've talked about this in previous episodes that they actually begin to question their own judgment they say you know they sort of rely on outsiders to come in and say well how does he look to you because they're seeing him at his worst, at his best.

24:12And so you kind of a little bit like with an aging relative, you sort of make sense of it. There's another thing that happens, which is that AIDS, the people around him, a president, they, I think, lose sight of that barrier between the ordinary political process of making your principal look as good as possible, and the tools and the strategies of what become deception, where you're essentially, that barrier, I think, becomes much for them. It becomes more porous where they just say, look, we're just doing politics here. We're just trying to make our guy look good, particularly when he's up against an existential threat like his opponent.

24:51And so where you're looking at the Trump administration, where they're already inclined towards those sorts of instincts, that's where it gets really dangerous. I mean, of course, as the president's powers fade, That means the aid's powers increase. I mean, it can become a way to take power if you, you know. I mean, Susan, what do you think? I mean, and also, do you think that the press now has a different role to play with this? Has it learned something from Biden? Well, I do think that it's worth considering what it is that we've learned from Biden because, you know, your answer to the question of what you learned is going to shape how you apply it, right?

25:30That's where I think this frame of the cover-up. And let's be honest, like, you know, while we were talking on this podcast and others were reporting about Biden's age throughout his presidency, you know, I think a narrative took hold. People were nonetheless shocked to see Biden in that debate in June of 2024. And, you know, there's a sort of bestselling book kind of story about the cover-up that occurred. And if you ask not only a Republican in America today, but even many independents, even frankly many Democrats, they will say that the press failed to cover Biden's aging. And it's, I think, worth unpacking why that is and whether there's any relevance here.

26:16From my perspective, you know, there were important real acts of journalism trying to report and write around this throughout Biden's presidency. However, I think the world of echo chambers we live in is such that there wasn't what I expected to be, frankly, the real kind of critical conversation among Democratic officials, among journalists, columnists in the fall of 2022 when it mattered. And, you know, the reason that to me was always the key point is this is the moment at which Joe Biden sort of takes the wrong election, takes the wrong message from that midterm election and decides, well, gee, we didn't lose as badly as everybody said we were going to lose.

27:04And therefore, somehow that means I should run for reelection without anybody, without any real process. People have documented there really wasn't a big meeting, a big moment when all the advisors came together and sat around a table and had to look him in the eye and say, well, sir, you're going to be 86 years old at the end of this next term. and this is a problem. And I remember, frankly, having this conversation, not only, you know, in this forum, but in many other forums and saying, listen, guys, we're playing this kind of game of gotcha that seems to me very unproductive, right? We're trying to discern in ways that are very hard for all the reasons Evan just laid out so coherently.

27:43We're trying to discern, you know, kind of like what's his exact mental state at this moment in time. And I always felt frustrated that We couldn't shift the conversation to what I saw as the more meaningful question, which is we don't need to know exactly what's in Joe Biden's brain right now. He's asking the American public to put him back in office for four more years until he's 86 years old. And frankly, people push back so much against that. And so when I think about that moment of time in like 2021, 2022, and I put that forward to now, I think Republicans potentially are going to have a hard time grappling with the inescapable evidence of Trump's decline and his aging.