Obsession-Worthy Stories: A Washington Summer Roundtable

20:00Jane Mayer:No, in some ways we're involved in our own narcissistic melodrama at the very moment that these tectonic shifts are happening. And there's a fascinating parallel in history here. I spoke to a scholar named Rush Doshi, for instance, who teaches at Georgetown and is a China expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. And he says, look, there is a pattern here, which is that in the 18th century, while Russia was obsessed with trying to get territory, like control the Eurasian steppe, you had Britain mastering the steam engine. And then in the 19th and 20th century, while the Europeans were fighting over Africa, you had the Americans mastering the assembly line and electrification.

20:44Jane Mayer:And so in some ways, while the Trump administration is spending its time on trying to govern Venezuela, trying to subdue Iran, you know, perhaps Cuba, you've got China just kind of putting one foot in front of the other and nailing down one after another of the key technologies, which are the foundation of national power. And there's nobody in Washington who has right now the combination of power, expertise and coherent thinking. In fact, the administration itself has been so gutted of China expertise because Laura Loomer at one point kind of wandered through and, you know, cast her hand across a big swath of people and they were gone.

21:22Jane Mayer:And so as a result, you see Trump going off to Beijing basically with like one or two people in his entire world who know this place and everybody else kind of winging it. And again with family members, right?

21:34Susan Glasser:Right. Totally right. Family again.

21:37Evan Osnos:But interesting, I do want to ask actually about Trump and his policy, Evan, because it's not just that he doesn't have expertise. I actually don't know what it is right now toward China because he goes on that trip to Beijing and he's just sucking up to the big guy, flattering him. You know, it looks like all the predictions of a sort of trade war and confrontation are wrong. And then just a few weeks ago, he comes back here and he gives a speech and he talks about how China is actually the author of all evil and it's the rigged election and it's this bad stuff. So what is our policy right now toward China?

22:15Evan Osnos:Is Trump confronting them or is he not?

22:19Susan Glasser:— Doubling down on Susan's question, is that incoherence and all of these contradictory signals, is this because he's listening to warring advisors and he changes his mind depending on who he's just bumped into? Or what accounts for this kind of incredible inconsistency and incompetence?

22:39Jane Mayer:Well, he sees China in two ways. I mean, on one level, as we said at the very beginning of the show today, he invokes the Chinese communist threat as a really useful piece of political shimmery technology. I mean, it's just he knows that communism is a powerful term that he can use with his base. So that's helpful for him in that respect. But personally, it's completely clear that he is absolutely dazzled, awed and humbled in a way by the simple scale of Xi Jinping's power. I mean, look, Susan, you mentioned him, you know, glue gunning gold onto the Oval Office. I mean, this is the ultimate country that puts gold all over its ruling precincts.

23:25Jane Mayer:You know, you can't go to Beijing. And remember, Trump did that in the first term and was given a tour of the Forbidden City where he's kind of gawking at all of the at all of the imperial trappings of it. And so there is a way in which China is the ultimate expression of his almost childlike admiration for power and scale. And so the result is is a warring set of attitudes, both within the man and then within his administration. There is not, at this point, a coherent policy that it is expressing. And this is not unique to the China policy, right? I mean, you've been looking at Russia and Ukraine this summer.

24:05Jane Mayer:And can you give us a way of describing his approach on Ukraine that has anything approaching a consistent line?

24:14Evan Osnos:Well, you know, Donald Trump has a sort of almost personal fetishization of what he sees as the sort of crude, brutal, thuggish and yet assertiveness of Vladimir Putin. And this sort of very hot and cold dealings with Vladimir Zelensky, who flew all the way to Washington to be at Lindsey Graham's funeral, along with Benjamin Netanyahu. And that, to me, was actually a remarkable moment where you have basically this one senator is like Ukraine's best hope for getting an audience with the czar here. And, you know, Ukraine is wondering, is their entire foreign policy strategy of how to deal with Washington down the tubes because Lindsey Graham unexpectedly died?

25:02Evan Osnos:This is a really remarkable thing that tells us, A, about the personalization of power, B, about what appears from the outside to be incoherent veerings back and forth, you know, of an American system that's not about institutions and policy so much as it is about the predilections of one man. Right.

25:23Susan Glasser:We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll turn back to D.C. and try to understand why Congress is targeting Anthony Fauci. Plus some good news, believe it or not, on money in politics and a few of our summer book recommendations. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

25:49The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

26:27Evan Osnos:While Evan is talking about the future of the global economy and thinking about that, and I'm thinking about does anyone in America even care anymore? What is it that our politics has become? What's the spectacle that occupied us this week? Bullshit, right?

26:41Susan Glasser:Bullshit. Right. Just basically victimizing a scientist who tried to do his best. Maybe it was imperfect, but he was a public servant trying to help the country through a earth shattering global pandemic, COVID-19. And this is the Tony Fauci hearings this week in Congress, which to me, it reprised some of the worst spectacles of McCarthyism. And in one way, it was even worse, actually, which was that Senator Rand Paul and his buddies on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Administration, they banished Fauci's lawyer. That was amazing. He was not even allowed to have his lawyer next to him as he had to invoke the Fifth over and over again in order to avoid being prosecuted by them.

27:36Susan Glasser:They were trying to catch him up in some kind of contradiction where they could say that he lied to Congress. So he was told by his lawyers he should just not say a word. So he was treated like a criminal, someone who spent at least 50 years of his life doing public health in this country. To me, the ability of the far-right ecosystem between its media system and its leaders in Congress, their power to rewrite history, erase people's reputations, turn black to white, white to black, is so frightening, really. I mean, honestly, I bumped into Fauci at some point. I don't know him well, but I was talking to him.

28:17Susan Glasser:He has been literally erased. His image has been erased from a mural at NIH. It is amazing how you can turn somebody from a public servant into literally somebody described him on the right as Mengele. Amazing. It's astonishing.

28:37Jane Mayer:Jane, you know, I'm trying to understand the why behind it. But you've described so well the thoroughness, the way that the right has heaped endless abuse on him. And I'm trying to figure out why. I mean, some of this, there's this personal element with Rand Paul, but then the fact that it has metastasized into this much larger phenomenon. Have you formed a sense of why it was that Fauci himself became the vessel for all of this?

29:05Susan Glasser:I mean, I have to just guess that he is the face of expertise, of science, of learning, of academia, of elitism in some ways, all the things that are under attack right now. And he's also the face of government, face it. I mean, if you want to understand and sort of reduce to its basic elements, why Rand Paul? Rand Paul is probably as much of an ideologically pure libertarian who hates big government as you can find in Congress. And Fauci is the face of government but also of a very powerful program that required people to do things they didn't want to do for others. Even the whole idea of public interest is something that's under attack, honestly.

29:52Susan Glasser:I mean, if you're on the right, you don't believe in public interest. You believe in private interest. And Fauci is saying we need to sacrifice individually for the whole. That ideology is what the far right is at war against. And so it actually encompasses some very big themes in the culture wars.

30:09Evan Osnos:Yeah, you know, I think that is such an important point, Jane, because it's where the culture wars merge with the political wars. But it's also a way, isn't it, of absolving Donald Trump responsibility. Remember that the 2020 pandemic was the great crisis that almost certainly contributed in a very big way to Donald Trump's defeat in the polls in the fall of 2020. This was a disaster that happened on his watch. And frankly, from the minute that it happened, Trump signaled to himself, to his supporters, that he was terrified of being blamed for this out-of-control pandemic. In fact, he once wanted to take credit and arguably should have taken credit for a very successful American project leading the world in developing a vaccine that worked safely and effectively saved millions of lives.

31:10Evan Osnos:Donald Trump did take credit for that. And by the way, was one of the very first people to get that vaccine as soon as he could, you know, into his arm. Jane, but it was also the low farce of modern McCarthyism, right? I mean, what are they accusing Fauci of? Totally. His diary. Let's talk about this stupid, idiotic diary. This doesn't prove anything. This isn't a crime. The poor man is excited to have dinner with Jake Tapper. That might be whatever you can question his judgment, but it's not, you know, it's not illegal to be excited to have dinner with Jake Tapper. It's not illegal to be excited to meet various celebrities.

31:48Evan Osnos:That's what's in the diary.

31:49Susan Glasser:Really? You know, I mean, and so, but the other thing, honestly, cynically, we talked about the big ideas behind this, but also face it, it's just rank politics. It works. It divides people. You know, I mean, they proved nothing except that Tony Fauci is really flattered that Barbra Streisand thinks he's great. You know? Okay.

32:10Jane Mayer:There's on the other side of the ledger here in the grand cosmic, oh my God, where are we going? ledger. There's also been something kind of encouraging that you're watching in the courts around the possibility of actually beginning to address money in politics. This is a case that is not getting very much attention, but you're beginning to pay closer attention to it, are you not? What's the case?

32:35Susan Glasser:Okay, so good news. And it actually happened this week. And I don't think too many people probably paid any attention to it. But in Boston, there was a hearing, and it was in front of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. And it's in a case that might seem arcane, that has been cooked up by a Harvard professor who, Evan, you know too, Larry Lessig. He's a former conservative clerk to Scalia. And so he noticed something pretty interesting, which is in the Citizens United case, the court came to its decision that we all know, But there's another case called Speech Now that around the same time was not even reaching the Supreme Court that everyone has taken as settled law.

33:18Susan Glasser:Speech Now is what created super PACs. And super PACs are actually the plague right now that has allowed people with unlimited amounts of money or virtually to give unlimited amounts of money to these, you know, whatever you want to call them, sort of slush funds that are pouring it into American politics. And what Larry Lessig said was the Supreme Court actually never authorized this. Super PACs did not exist at the time of Citizens United. And so he's ginned up a case that takes on super PACs, and he's done it in an incredibly clever way, which is this case began by getting Maine. They had a statewide vote on whether they wanted to control super PACs.

34:03Susan Glasser:And lo and behold, like 75 percent of voters in Maine said they wanted to put a cap on how much money people can give to super PACs, a lid of$5 ,000. And they demanded that whoever gives money to super PACs explain who they are and reveal their identities. OK, so this became the test that this case is taking on. That referendum passed in Maine overwhelmingly. And on the other side is, as usual, the Chamber of Commerce, a couple of very far-right sort of organizations that formed as sort of fronts for the big money here. And this whole issue had a hearing in front of the First Circuit this week.

34:45Susan Glasser:And what's also interesting is it had a very glittery cast of characters. So the lead lawyer who's taking on the money is Neil Katyal, who is one of the foremost litigators in the Supreme Court bar. And if this case makes it to the Supreme Court, he has the talent to really argue this case in a way that gives it a shot. And some of the other people who are involved in this case is really interesting are some of the big money people who are sick of big money and are saying it is actually a corruption of American democracy. So you've got Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban have submitted amicus briefs on the side of getting rid of super PACs.

35:27Susan Glasser:So, I mean, we will see.

35:28Jane Mayer:But you know what I think is so interesting about this case? This is something, you know, Larry Lessig has believed for a long time that the core, the sort of nuclear core of our political dysfunction is money and politics. And what he identifies within that, and you gestured to it a moment ago, is this American cynicism about the issue. And I will say, I think that earlier in this conversation, we talked about the sense that there is a rupture in the world order. I think clearly there is a rupture in American politics, too, in which it is not at all clear which of these various camps, the center of the Democratic Party versus the far left, the Democratic Party, or the various elements of the Republican world, you know, which one of these will prevail?

36:10Jane Mayer:And what what is in play is the idea of whether people are willing to believe that any change is possible. And that is, you know, that's a hugely powerful thing if you can harness it and you can catch the establishment by surprise in some cases.

36:24Evan Osnos:Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's a very interesting argument. I was really struck as someone who wrote about money in politics early in my career and then came back to it in the 2024 election cycle is the metastasis in the amounts of money being spent. And the reality of our politics right now is so far in the other direction that perhaps it will create this correction. But we're having this conversation on a day when Elon Musk has said he'll spend another$100 million on politics just this year in the run-up to this year's elections. When Donald Trump is using every bit of power in the Oval Office to demand that corporate chieftains pay up to the tune of millions of dollars.

37:09Evan Osnos:We're talking about fundraising on a scale that's never been done before. And so while the seeds of reform are contained within the catastrophe of the amounts of money, I think it's important to point out that the reality that we're looking at this year is more money than ever before being spent in less transparent and more nefarious ways than ever before in our history. And so I think that's the key point to make.

37:35Jane Mayer:I was going to say, actually, I mean, you're actually saying the same thing in some ways, because precisely what you're describing, Susan, this absolute tsunami of cash, which continues to grow, is also now become the center of the language on the left, which is when Larry Leslie, when I was following him around, you know, more than a decade ago, writing a profile of him in the New Yorker, this was a fringe issue. It really wasn't. People did not fundamentally see a connection between the concerns in their lives and the profusion of money in politics. He spent a lot of his time trying to make the case for that connection.

38:11Jane Mayer:Now it is the main event. The reason, you know, if you asked Bernie Sanders or AOC what their primary issue is, they will talk about oligarchic politics. So that is an astonishing backlash.

38:22Evan Osnos:Can I just say, like, it's been a preoccupation in my entire adult lifetime, these kind of reform issues. And in my entire adult lifetime, it's gone in the exact other direction because people, they support. You can get a poll showing that shows 70 percent, 75 percent, 80 percent of Americans agree that we have too much money in politics. But when it comes to actual choices about what issues matter to them and therefore matter to their representatives in Congress, it's really not only not about that, but in this election in particular, it's the core economic and quality of life issues, I think, that are powering the possibility of a major rebuke of Donald Trump.

39:06Jane Mayer:I think, Susan, the issues that you're describing, which is, I completely agree, this collective sense of the affordability crisis, that that is now understood to be connected to the same forces that allow money to pour in from very small groups of individuals. So, you know, I think this is partly being refracted through the advent of AI because it is, in its way, it is now the piece of technology that frames these issues about power, money, and control in very concrete terms.

39:35Susan Glasser:All right. Before we go, I just wanted to get your recommendations for summer reading. Evan, Susan, do you have any special books you think people should take a look at?

39:43Jane Mayer:Susan, go ahead, and then I'll have one.

39:45Evan Osnos:Jane, you know, I want to read your book, but, you know, since I can't read your book. Okay, so we're doing something a little different this summer. We're doing Family Book Club, and this is a book, of course, that we've all read before, but we decided this is the moment to go back to it. All the King's Men, which is, I think, probably the greatest American work of political fiction ever. And it's the portrait of an American demagogue, Willie Stark. It is also, interestingly, a story about a journalist and journalism, Jack Burden. I was reminded of the book when I read another book that I would recommend to our listeners by our longtime colleague, colleague, a memoir by Nick Lemon, which is a really incredible story of his own family growing up in this small group of Jews in New Orleans.

40:40Evan Osnos:This book is called Returning, A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. And it starts out with Nick as a young man reading all the King's Men and identifying with its journalist hero on the bayous of New Orleans chasing after corruption, trying to understand the roots of populist politics. So I'm really looking forward to digging back into this book. You know, populism is in many ways, the story of our time right now in this Trump era.

41:12Susan Glasser:Evan, what are you reading?

41:13Jane Mayer:You know, there's something in the air, clearly, because Susan, we're reading books that are in neighboring cosmoses, which is to say I got a huge amount out of reading a book also by one of our colleagues this summer that's coming out soon from Jill Lepore, the amazingly prolific Jill Lepore, which is called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. And it too helps explain the rise of this populist political moment. Now, artificial state, in a sense, is a kind of way of talking about the algorithmic era, not just artificial intelligence as a technology, but really as an element of governance.

41:51Jane Mayer:And here's an example of the kind of thing. She's gone back and And she said, look, if you want to understand what it's like to live in a world in which we have offloaded our democratic instincts and rituals to essentially computers and the people who control them, you have to go back to the beginning of this. The whole idea of statistics, which is the basis of data, comes from the idea of numbers gathered for the purposes of the state, to rule a state. And in a way that only a historian can really do, she follows this all the way through the history of the rise of the algorithmic state and then comes to the belief.

42:29Jane Mayer:And here's why it ties into populist politics. I mean, one of the things you discover, and we know this intuitively, is that 97 percent of all the tweets posted by American adults about national politics were posted by fewer than 10 percent of all the users. So it's like the primarization of everyday life all year, all the time. And so we're kind of captive to these little tiny groups of people. And it's all happened under the illusion that it is simply another way to engage politics. And so the rise and fall, the artificial state, Joe Lepore, has been for me that rare book that is genuinely eye opening.

43:07Jane Mayer:And even for people like us who are constantly steeped in politics. What about you, Jane?

43:11Susan Glasser:You know, I'm still doing reading that's research for my book. And the hot new book in the area of Supreme Court's research right now is one called Supremacy. The subtitle is How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People. And it's by two Harvard Law professors, Nicholas Bowie and Daphna Renan. And its argument is the thing to do about a rogue Supreme Court is to fight back by raising the power of the other branches. They basically argued that courts got way too much power. And this was something, an argument liberals made long ago. But then after the Warren court, liberals began to think it was great when a liberal court had that much power.

43:54Susan Glasser:And once they started buying into it, both sides were saying we need to increase the power of the courts. And what their argument is, is it's gotten way out of balance. And Congress needs to push back and public needs to push back. So it's a somewhat academic book. I got to say, because I have to do all this reading from my own book, I don't have fun books to be reading right now. But I'm planning to watch a lot of movies. And I decided I want to have a film festival this summer for my family that's like great journalism movies. And so I want to see. I mean, Susan's reading all the Kingsmen. I want to watch again all the President's Men.

44:36Jane Mayer:You can't go wrong. I've seen it so many times. I can practically recite the lines. We do it every year, Jane, actually.

44:41Susan Glasser:So, all right. You know, hang a sheet out outside. Get a, you know, sleeping bag. Put a flag in your flower pot. Project it onto the side of the house and enjoy being a journalist again. So, when the good guys won. Anyway, listen, thanks so much, you guys. This was really fun just catching up with you.

44:59Jane Mayer:Terrific to be with you guys. Thank you for this conversation, Jane.

45:06Susan Glasser:We'll be back next week with our second annual special summer interview series. We're talking to some really interesting people. You won't want to miss it. This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker, and I'm Jane Mayer. We had research assistance today from Alex D 'Elia. Our producer is Nora Ritchie, mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. and our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening.

45:48The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.