The Political Scene Live: A Year Since Trump’s Win, What Have We Learned?

0:04Welcome to the political scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined as ever by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. Hi, Jane, and hi, Susan. Hey, Evan. Hey, Susan. Hey, great to be with you guys. We are coming to you live this week from the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard University's Institute of Politics. It says applause, people.

0:39you almost made me have to Jeb Bush the situation this was really a desperate turn of events it is a pleasure to be here with you tonight on this Wednesday evening it has been believe it or not one year one dizzying disorienting year since the election of Donald Trump the Trump presidency 2.0 has looked at times beyond any conceivable constraint as it slashed at federal agencies, indicted its political opponents, deployed American troops on American streets, while pursuing one showdown after another with universities, civil society, and news organizations. And yet today, there are stark signs of what may prove to be a turning point.

1:29This president's popularity has reached historic lows. He's facing a rebellion for members of his own party in just the last few days. These are members of Congress who were, until recently, in total lockstep with him. His own Treasury Secretary has said that parts of the economy may already be in recession, and the Epstein scandal shows no sign of going away. The Democratic Party is watching and strategizing and trying to figure out which paths it has forward. Tonight, we wanted to mark this moment with some serious Trumpology, trying to figure out what we've learned over the course of the last year, where it may be going, and what it's been like to cover it from Washington.

2:11So we got to start, guys, with the news of the week, which is quite extraordinary. This is, by any measure, a stunning turnaround. Let's just remind ourselves, Trump and his party have spent the past year doing everything within their power to prevent the release of the Epstein files. He described it as efforts to force disclosure. He called it a democratic hoax. He called members of his party who were supporting this idea traitors. And yet, within the span of a week, you have both the House and the Senate passing the bill. The vote in the House was 427 to 1. So, Susan, how do we make sense of this?

2:50How do we make sense of any of it? It's so great to be here, I have to say. There's a whole group of amazing students here who have been part of Team Baker Glasser at the IOP. Yay! You guys have been amazing. And, you know, really this conversation today was inspired for me a little bit by the conversations with students all fall. Because one of my clear takeaways, and this came out of one of our very first conversations, was you guys in Washington are always talking about how abnormal and crazy and disruptive and unprecedented everything is. And that's true, by the way. But it's also true that looking at undergraduates today and young people across this country, their entire conscious lives have existed more or less in the Trump era in American politics.

3:44You know, the last 10 years have been dominated by this very singular disruptive figure of Donald Trump. So what we define as the new abnormal, I think, you know, for a whole generation of Americans is in fact the new normal. And it prompted a resolution for me, which is that, you know, I hope that I can do and we can do a better job as journalists and laying out for people. What is it that is so extraordinary and crazy and unprecedented and abnormal and undermining that we're seeing here? Can we do a better job of laying that out? OK, so flash forward to another crazy, abnormal, insane week in Washington.

4:23Where does this one fit on the scale of outliers? Listening to your introduction, Evan, I felt a little whiff of, you know, is it, you know, the scent of sea air that I'm smelling here? How many times have we heard that? Yes, exactly. So beware irrational exuberance, I would say. That's a good principle when going forward. But you're exactly right that Donald Trump is the one who made this such a test of his leadership and, frankly, his ownership of the Republican Party and failed. You know, he just did a big belly flop. If you can't get Lauren Boebert, OK, Lauren Boebert from Colorado, one of the, you know, the sort of MAGA TV warriors.

5:05If you can't get her to, you know, knuckle under and take the big vote for you when you need it. They brought her into the situation room just just a week ago, worked her over a situation room. By the way, folks, that's for major national security crises, not for Jeffrey Epstein's emails. So I do think it's significant that Donald Trump basically was told no by his own party. That's something we haven't seen happen. I do caution against irrational exuberance. And in terms of the craziness, I know we're going to talk a little bit more about this week. But to me, as extraordinary, disruptive, and abnormal of an event occurred just yesterday in the Oval Office.

5:45And we can talk more about that, Jane. But do you agree with me that the Epstein thing is significant, but not, you know, sort of the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning or whatever that is? I'm probably a little more hopeful about it in that I think that there's a moment when both parties go against the president that begins to really tarnish his image. And I'm thinking back to not even that long ago when both parties turned on Biden in the way that he was withdrawing from Afghanistan. In some ways, if you look at opinion polls, that was the beginning of the end. And I think, you know, going back to, I go all the way back to having been in college when Carter was president.

6:31I've seen them get irreparably damaged. It's a very strange thing of all the things Trump's done that this is the thing that would be causing such damage. And I think it's incredibly interesting that it is in many ways. And we're sort of thinking about why it is. But the other thing that happens when you have a moment like this is, all right, the president now may be sort of facing potential really damaging documents. And I was talking to a friend last night who was one of the Watergate lawyers, the special prosecutor, Richard Benvenista. And he said, this is when the cover-ups begin and the cover-ups are always where they really get themselves in trouble.

7:12So there are things to look forward to, basically. Essentially, what I hear you saying is that if it's not fundamental damage to him, at least what we know is that this idea of the kind of infallibility, that there's nothing he can do, which was the narrative, frankly, for 11 months. I mean, I'm not sure it's just Epstein, though, either. I mean, I think Epstein is what we're talking about right now. But the prices of groceries are really important. and people might disagree with me, but I don't think that America loves cruelty and corruption. I think those have always been parts of our history, but they're not our ideals.

7:52And he has been so apologetic, he and his administration, in reveling in cruelty and corruption. I think that hurts him. I do think also, Susan, it's notable, Jane mentioned Biden's experience when the parties turned on him during Afghanistan, it is also true that it was after inflation had begun to register. And when you look at the effect on public attitudes, that confluence of events is very hard for a president to escape. And also it punctured essentially for Biden, he had a different kind of animating story that he told about his presidency, which was the idea that he was sort of the restoration of the status quo ante, including a competence to American government after the chaos and disruption of Trump's first four years in office.

8:37And Afghanistan was the very visible public sign that, in fact, competence was not back. And I think that punctured his entire sales pitch for the presidency. So now you have Trump. What is his sales pitch? His sales pitch to a certain core of the MAGA base was a sales pitch, well, I'll give you whatever you want. You think that there's a crazy cabal of, you know, evil sex traffickers at the heart of the American power elite. Well, sure, I'll give you all the documents, never thinking he'd actually have to produce him and that his name might be all over them. So I think it punctures a promise that Trump made to people he cares about.

9:15The difference, right, is that Trump has never for one day in this term or his previous term in office aspired to sort of govern across the board for 51 % of the American population, right? He is a guy who has defined himself as a president for Red America, and this is Red America's rebellion. But again, irrational exuberance, I caution here. The United States Congress is controlled, both the House and the Senate, by Republicans. The only time we've seen Congress assert its prerogative as a legislative body in the face of enormous encroachments by the executive branch has been on the matter of these particular documents.

10:00So Donald Trump aggregated to himself already in the first nine months, you know, literally he stole the power from the legislative branch to appropriate money and to decide, you know, what agencies should exist in our government. They were shut down. I haven't heard a word from Congress about that. And that's a lot more important in many respects than this. So I would wait to see, and it's very likely, I would guess, not until after the next year's midterms when you might see more organized institutional pushback on things that affect a broad swath of the American people, which these documents do not.

10:36And so I think it's a sign, but probably as you pointed out, Jane, let's talk about the approval ratings. Donald Trump, maybe these Epstein things are distracting us from that. I mean, to me, that story is a pretty incredible story. Trump, historically unpopular. He's now the most unpopular he's ever been. Evan, do you think that's from the economy? I mean, is Epstein really an issue that affects the overall popularity of the president? I think it has, as Jane said, it has this strangely personal quality. It is, in the end, something that Americans find deeply offensive. It transcends politics.

11:14It's visceral. Frankly, I think covering this administration has been hard because it is, as one of our colleagues put it, it is like Watergate every day. and it is very hard to help Americans or to describe things in a way that don't sound like it's just a sort of continuing momentum. This one is different because it has names, it has faces, and it fortifies what is the underlying most neuralgic issue in American life, which is the idea of rich and powerful people helping one another to take advantage of others. That's for me why I think it brings you. Well, I think it really took off. When you listen to both what Ro Khanna and Massey are saying, they are talking about this as impunity for the rich and powerful, behaving hideously towards the weak.

12:06And look, the victims of Epstein, they were basically working class, powerless. They are very much like sort of the MAGA base. And these people were taken advantage of and exploited. and then they were exploited in the election. And I mean, you've been writing a lot about class politics. You know, I think, I mean, there's a real sense that this country's not cohering anymore. We're going to talk more about it, but I want to talk for a second. Let's conceptualize where we are. Let's step back. We're a year into what is, as we've described it, Trump sort of 2.0. Susan, you've been covering Trump in one form or another up close, up against the coal face now for going on 10 years.

12:47How do you conceptualize this administration as distinguished from 1.0? You know, my big takeaway from doing the interviews for our book, The Divider, on Trump's first term was something actually that Jared Kushner would say about what did he conclude was the biggest mistake of their first four years in office. And he would tell people that it actually was about the personnel, which, by the way, is always, I think, the kind of tip-off, you know, if you want to understand Washington or any other capital, right? It's the, you know, there's a Soviet saying, it's the cadres, the cadres. The nomenclature.

13:24You know, the cadres decide everything. And, you know, I think that that was what the Trump inner circle concluded, is that Donald Trump didn't have the people in place to do what he wanted. And if you look at that early focus on getting loyalists in there, even people who, you know, to our eyes might seem wildly unqualified, you know, they were pretty focused on this is going to be the big difference. So they themselves set it out as a difference from 1.0 to 2.0. And that has led, of course, to the big thing, which is Donald Trump is a president operating without any visible constraints. And even where there are constraints, he's essentially bulldozing over them.

14:05And so far, you know, there's another Soviet saying, right, the Lenin saying, right, about the Civil War, you know, keep going until you hit steel. And he hasn't hit steel in many cases. We're talking about this vote this week. And so for me, that's a big, big difference in this second term. And then the final thing is Donald Trump is approaching 80 years old. We all know, I call it the bad boyfriend theory of the case. You know, he's not going to change who he is, right? Like, you know, Donald Trump thinks what he thinks. And if you think you're going to change him, you're wrong, right? But, and this is interesting, he is a radicalized version of himself.

14:46I believe that he's radicalized by the failure to win re-election in 2020, radicalized by January 6th, and especially the prosecutions of himself and some of his inner circle in the years since then. And the revenge and retribution agenda, always a part of his personality. He was demanding that people be prosecuted in the first term. But now, look at how many ways in which he's executing on that. Jane, one of the things I hear Susan saying is essentially you've got this sort of triumph of the middle ranks because there's no longer the Jim Mattis's and the John Kelly's around who were, as we know, modulating Trump to some degree, preventing the wackiest ideas from happening.

15:22You now have Lindsey Halligan, who is the White House aide, who's now become the prosecutor who is going after Comey. You've got Russell Vogt, who is the architect of the shutdown strategy. These are sort of, you know, the middle ranks of the MAGA true believers. And they are essentially willing to take him to the maximalist position on each one of these. Yeah. I mean, there's nobody standing around him who's telling him, no, sir, that's a bad idea. And that's a very dangerous thing when you have as much power as he's got. I am not convinced that he's changed. I mean, I definitely buy the bad boyfriend theory.

16:00You're not going to change it. By the way, I'm going to trademark that. Okay. But I don't think he has changed. You heard it here first. I went back and took a look at what Tony Schwartz told me in 2016. He was the true author of The Art of the Deal. He's the co-author on the cover, but he actually wrote the book for Trump, with Trump. He spent a lot of time with Trump. And if you go back and you look at what he said, he knew him really well. Trump is exactly the same. Tony Schwartz said he's completely unconstrained by the truth in a way that nobody else I've ever seen. He has no ability to concentrate beyond a few seconds, basically, except for one subject.

16:42The only subject that interests him is his own aggrandizement. He doesn't read books. Tony Schwartz said, I put lipstick on a pig about that book. And he said, there's one line in it where Trump is quoted saying, you know, I don't care about money. All I care about is the art of the deal. And Tony Schwartz says to me, he cares about money. And I think we're seeing that now. So, I mean, I think he's the same person. And I think vengeance has been part of his character. And I think Roy Cohen was his mentor. and if you look back at that, you can see he's the same person. The difference is, as you're saying, there's nobody around him stopping him from being himself.

17:26And it's a little bit like, I think it was Robert Caro who said, you know, power, according to Caro, doesn't corrupt, power reveals. And he has revealed himself to us now. And that's what we're seeing. So, Evan, I want to, here's a slight variant on this, although, you know, feel free to answer the 1.0 to 2.0. But related to that, because we get this question all the time together and individually, which is, what has actually surprised you, given that we have a pretty clear read on Donald Trump 10 years? And somebody said to me the other day, well, imagine telling your January 19th self, you know, all these terrible things happen.

18:03And I, you know, I've been thinking about it a lot ever since because, honestly, like, I would be upset but not shocked by most of the things that have happened this year. But there are some things that are truly, even for Trump, whoppers. You know, I return like a fever dream to that scene of the stage on Inauguration Day, where we saw something we have never seen in this country, which is the world's wealthiest people lined up next to a president, so many of them on the stage, in fact, that the leaders of Congress were relegated to the audience. That felt to me like a seismic geography of power, that that was a meaningful change in how we actually took the quiet part and just put it right there on stage.

18:46And I think there's a couple of explanations. I think you could probably write a Russian novel about just that scene, about the complexity of the power dynamics. I mean, there were some people up there who are true believers, who believe in what Trump was saying and what he's doing. And then there were others up there who are afraid. And they're afraid despite being immensely powerful. That's interesting to me. But there was a way in which that moment, which it set the pattern for months to follow in which he started riding through one institution after another and waiting, as you say, waiting until, you know, he hits steel.

19:23And I think only now are you beginning to see perhaps, and I don't want to get, you know, irrationally exuberant, but I do think we're getting to a point where people are starting to say what in Washington is a deathly description, which is, is he a lame duck already? I mean, Jane, usually you don't get to be lame duck until the midterms if you're a second term president. But is he already a lame duck president? Also, you usually are not about to be 80. So, I mean, you know, I think those pictures of him falling asleep in the Oval Office with everyone around him, you know, it may sort of push lame duckism.

19:54I have a question for both of you. I think that, you know, given that you have both covered authoritarian countries, You, China. You, Russia. I'm curious if he is a lame duck. And after this period where the Republican Party really is Donald Trump, I mean, it's his party. What happens, do you think, next after Trump's MAGA? What happens to it, the movement? Yeah, let's talk about the authoritarianism thing, because, of course, part of the answer to the what next question depends on the how successful with the authoritarian project question, right? And Evan, thank you for bringing up that indelible image of the inauguration.

20:42I'm sure haunts many of you. But actually, I thought there was an incredible update to that just yesterday. Basically, some of those exact same oligarchs, right? These are American oligarchs. Jane has written an amazing book about them, Dark Money. But America's oligarchs were the ones who were invited to essentially all but a state dinner for the crown prince of Saudi Arabia yesterday in the newly guildified White House in which you had— By the way, we need to do a whole show about the interior decoration of Yolanda. I would like to talk a lot about that. I personally think the raising of the East Wing is, along with perhaps what's happened, that's part of the jumping of the shark for Trump.

21:26I think that was a shocking moment to many people. But that's a footnote here. But they were back in the Oval Office. So authoritarianism. Let's talk about hosting the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who's busy giving literally billions of dollars to your family members directly, who instead of being chided, you would think, by the United States for literally ordering, according to our intelligence agencies, the bone saw killing of a Washington Post columnist. Jamal Khashoggi. You know, instead of that, Donald Trump is there. there's no really polite way of describing just how much love he was lavishing on this young gulf prince the thing that makes him stand out against any president i've covered democrat or republican is his consistent preference for america's autocratic you know frenemies at the expense of america's allies he admires these autocrats he wants to be like them even if they're 30-something guy.

22:30My God, he was like a salesman who thought the guy was going to drive off the lot with every Rolls Royce we had available in America. And to then have this dinner where you have Elon Musk and the other tech bros posing, if you guys haven't seen this picture, you know, it's just for me an indelible image of this presidency. I just have to say one other thing about that Oval Office meeting, which was, as you probably know, the ABC News reporter, Mary Bruce, asked a question about the murder of Khashoggi. Your Royal Highness, the U.S. intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist.

23:119-11 families are furious that you are here in the Oval Office. Who are you with? Why should Americans trust you? And the same to you, Mr. President. Now, who are you with? I'm with ABC News, sir. You're with who? ABC News, sir. Fake news. And I would just like to kind of say hats off to the fact that the press in this country is still not subordinate to the people in power and that they're still standing up even when they can get into the Oval Office, which they can't a lot of the time. What a great courageous question for Herde Reyes right there. Here's to Mary Bruce. Here's to Mary Bruce. Yeah.

23:53We're going to take a quick break. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

24:21identity, culture, science, it's all fair game. If you're done with the hot takes and hungry for real talk, come join the conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

24:42I think there are pieces of this administration that are probably being undercovered. Of course, there always are, but it's especially easy with one like this, where there is so much kind of pyrotechnic distraction on any given day. I'm curious how you guys think about, what do you think we're not talking enough about as we try to lay down a sort of rough draft of this first year? What do you think has not gotten enough attention? What I call basically the Kremlinization of the White House press pool, I would put that on the list. And again, there are a lot of just sort of horrors unfolding and a lot of, you know, real people really suffering.

25:20So I don't want to, you know, journalists can be inward looking. But my case for why this matters is because Donald Trump is a creature of the media. He is suffused in the media. That is essentially how he defines the job of president of the United States is a kind of continuous feedback loop. You know, he's live streaming himself. He's getting. So when he's surrounded increasingly by handpicked loyalist propagandists, many of them, masquerading, impersonating reporters in the White House in this second term. That really makes a big difference. So instead of facing more Mary Bruce questions increasingly now, he's facing questions from Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend, not previously in opposition.

26:00We'll see what happens now. You mean liberal icon Marjorie Taylor Greene. Exactly. In which, you know, he says things like, Evan, you know, were you— Right. What makes you so tall? Great or really, really great. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And to say nothing of the Pentagon, which, you know, having now evicted the press corps, it's now been repopulated with Trump-adjacent entities. No, that's exactly right. And that's the one other thing I wanted to flag that we haven't talked as much about. I'm sure we'll do a show on this soon. But when I asked readers and informants of my column a few weeks ago, help me think through what are the, you know, kind of the biggest things that should stick of this first nine months of the Trump presidency, I was really struck by the national security types who many of them wrote to me that they thought that essentially having an undeclared war on a false pretext where we're literally killing random people in boats because we claim that they're connected to the Trump presidency.

27:00to Venezuelan drug dealers, and by the way, you're not allowed to just kill people just because you think they're connected to Venezuelan drug dealers, that this was really crossing of a red line that, you know, in hindsight, we'll regret that we didn't pay more attention to. So I was struck that really people who I respect, you know, very greatly, they thought that was really not getting enough attention as a red line that had been crossed. Jane, I've been thinking about immigration on this question. I mean, we haven't talked about it much tonight, but the way that immigration has been weaponized in this administration in the most grotesque ways that we haven't seen since, you know, you'd have to go back to the Eisenhower administration.