The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Chaotic Election Ends—Maybe?

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

No matter the vote count, legal challenges and resistance in Washington continue to make this election historically fraught. David Remnick speaks about the state of the race with some of The New Yorker’s political thinkers: Evan Osnos on Biden’s candidacy, Jeannie Suk Gersen on how the Supreme Court may respond, Susan Glasser on Mitch McConnell’s hold on power, and Amy Davidson Sorkin on Washington and the nation. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. What an incredible week it has been. Tuesday's election and the ensuing days of counting. Then came waiting for results, from Michigan, Wisconsin, then Nevada and Arizona. And finally, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, it has been a world of tension. But also in some of the United, some sense, predictable. Donald Trump's election night edge in some of those states slowly eroded as officials tallied up mail-in ballots that tended to favor Joe Biden. And that was the red mirage scenario that many reporters and analysts had been predicting all along. And nearly from the start of

things, Joe Biden led in the popular vote. Susan Glasser is a Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. Susan, I'm reaching you on a Friday morning and a few states still have not been called definitively. But now with Biden ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia, we've got to assume that Joe Biden is going to hit that 270 mark. Now, your column is called Letter from Trump's Washington. You've been writing it throughout. What is the mood inside Trump's inner circle? You know, Donald Trump is someone who avoids reckonings. He's done so his entire life. He has managed to escape from so many previous situations where it looked like disaster loss with imminent bankruptcies.

And, you know, it appears that he's finally hit a moment of true decision about whether to follow through on his threats. And I think you're starting to see already the cracks, the seams, the fissures in this inner world. One thing we know about Washington and about power generally is that it ebbs very quickly. And, you know, you will see some Republicans going public with their disagreements as they already are with the president. And this is, you know, for a man obsessed with loyalty, this is kind of the ultimate test right now. So I think you'll see a lot of recriminations spilling out into public.

So we've seen those two press conferences early in the morning after election night. And then again, on Thursday, they might have been in the long history of, Trump's speeches, press conferences, and statements, the most dangerous, the most anti-democratic statements from any president of the United States that I've ever read about or experienced. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, you know, Donald Trump all along has been sort of a worst-case scenario for American democracy. And I think when we saw him follow through in his threats, the thing that was so painful was the sort of slow-motion car crash aspect of this. When somebody tells you they're going to smash the car and then they do it, it's still a terrible

car crash. And watching the president do what he'd threatened to do for months, which is call the election rigged and stolen with no evidence, seeing him do that, we don't know yet what the cost to American democracy is of having a president who has led millions and millions of fellow Americans to distrust the basic pillars of, you know, the democracy. But we know there is a consequence to that. And it was a scary moment, too. Now, what cause has he got left to? play. Let's assume that Joe Biden has gone over the top, or he will very soon. What cards does Donald Trump have left to play, either legally or in the remaining days of his presidency? Well, look, David, I do think that, you know, this is the peril of our system. A president who is

defeated but not gone and who is a kind of president like Donald Trump is, is a great risk factor because we imbue the executive with such power and authority. You know, he has the authority to pardon his friends, his family, even potentially himself. He has talked about firing potentially the director of the FBI and the Secretary of Defense. These are, you know, perhaps our two most key domestic and international security positions. So I think you're going to see this drama of the election. results itself fade to a certain extent, right? We'll see in the next few days whether Trump gives in to the pressure he will surely start to feel. I doubt it. For now, they're saying he

won't concede. But then the scrutiny will turn to what he can do between now and January 20th in terms of the executive branch, in terms of making changes that could undermine, you know, sort of the will of Congress or the will of the people that we've just seen. You said earlier that in Washington, power ebbs away very quickly after an election in particular. And yet, he has bent the Republican Party to his will all along. There is no one else in the Republican Party even now after a loss that can easily replace him. There are all kinds of people down the line you could imagine.

But Trumpism, am I right, Susan, will persist even after Trump leaves the Washington area? Well, Trumpism, it depends what your definition is. There's no question that he has shown the power of this kind of right-wing populist nationalist demagoguery. And that force awakened in the land, you know, is not easily put down. You know, there's lots of talk here in Washington spread by Trump and his advisors quite liberally around the town, you know, that he will think about running again in 2024. You saw his sons and his former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, on Thursday, literally threatening Republican officials saying, if you ever want to win your reelection four years from now, you better speak up and defend Trump right now.

Color me a bit skeptical. I think that Donald Trump, there's a reason he's tried his whole life to escape the label of loser. It's a stench that covers someone in his view. And I think he's not wrong in that. And so my own sense is that the man himself may not, may find himself not able to exert as much power as the years go on. And he's gone from the Oval Office. But I do believe that his style of campaigning and there will be a fierce competition that we're already seeing in the Republican Party to lay claim to the mantle of Trumpism and to fight for his hardcore voters. And you already see that in terms of who, who responded to the Trump brothers call yesterday. You saw Ted Cruz respond. You know, you saw Tom Cotton respond. You

saw, to a certain extent, Nikki Haley respond. They're fighting for the remnants of Trump's voters, as opposed to Trump, per se. Let's talk about the establishment on Capitol Hill. Democrats lost some seats in the House, and it's not likely that they want a majority in the Senate. So is Nancy Pelosi gone? Soon. Not yet. Not yet. There's no obvious, you know, person to take her on. I do think that, you know, the immediate emotionalism, you know, around the still unresolved presidential election. So you have, you know, House Democrats on this call that leaked, you know, kind of yelling at each other and crying. And, you know, the centrist, you know, pleading with the left wing of the party saying, you're killing us here. Will you shut up about defunding the police? least. If you want to be a majority, you've got to act like one. We'll see how Pelosi handles that. That's a significant challenge. But she's been counted out many, many times before. She sure has. And in the last couple of years, she showed her steal.

Yes, absolutely. And in fact, she was the one who was the de facto leader of the Democratic Party in the Trump era. And I think a lot of people are very grateful to her for that and showed, you know, enormous resolve at a time when others didn't. The New Yorker's Susan Glasser. Thanks so much, Susan. Oh, David, great to talk with you. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we'll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.

We want all voting to stop. We don't want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay. It's a very very important. It's a very sad. It's a very sad moment. While Washington tries to sort out the balance of power, this week the Trump campaign repeatedly engaged a signature Donald Trump move. Let's file lawsuits, as many as possible. It's a fact that Donald Trump has been a party to thousands of lawsuits in the course of his business career and in politics.

Memorably, in some cases, the president's campaign asked for the counting of ballots to stop. Jeannie Sok Gerson is a professor at Harvard Law School and a contributing writer to the New Yorker. Jeannie, good morning. Now, is there any likelihood that this ends up, as Donald Trump keeps saying, in the Supreme Court? He's setting up a sense of drama reminiscent of the year 2000, Bush v. Gore, but on a multistate or interstate conspiracy level. Yes. Well, there is, of course, Bush v. Gore, which was really about really. recounts. It's about the recount in Florida. And so if there is recount litigation, which Donald Trump could well bring in multiple states this time, it won't be just a Florida or one state situation. It could be multiple fronts of recount litigation. That could end up being appealed

all the way to the Supreme Court. Whether the Supreme Court would take one of those cases is getting less and less and less likely as it seems clearer that Biden will have. have a comfortable victory, even though the margins in each of the states that he needs would be razor thin. I do think that it soon will be time, perhaps not exactly right now, but very soon will be time to move beyond the litigation issues around election day and election vote counting, because we have to remember that there are several hurdles to clear major ones before Biden is actually the president of the United States. We have the choice of electors in all the different states,

the appointment of electors by the states themselves based on the vote of the citizenry. And we have the meeting of the electors to actually cast their votes for their candidate. And then after that, we also have Congress, which has to agree on the result based on counting the electoral votes. You seem more concerned about that? I am concerned about it because of the groundwork that has been laid for months and increasingly

and more intensely in the past days about fraud. And that claim of wide-ranging fraud in all of these different races and then probably there will soon be claims of fraud that are a bit more focused on the states that will tip the balance. And those claims could translate by the Republican Party into claims that it shouldn't be counted in Congress, that Congress should disregard certain votes. Let me be clear. What you're saying is that the Electoral College itself and its electors could somehow put a real spanner in the works here when it comes to the election of Joe Biden? What I'm saying is that even if everything were to go smoothly after today in the selection of electors by each of the states based on the vote by the citizen rate, even were that to go smoothly

and then we had a slate of electors in each of the states that reflects what the what the voters did, even at that point on January 6th, when Congress is supposed to count the electoral votes, there could be a claim of fraud, an allegation of fraud that is mounted by the president. And if Congress, members of Congress, do not simply ignore it if they decide to take it seriously. and it turns out that some members of Congress or significant members want to discount the votes for Joe Biden, particularly the ones that put him over the edge, then we might have a situation where Congress itself cannot agree

as to who has won the election. What happens if Congress can't agree? It seems that we would be in a state of chaos, unprecedented chaos. We would be in a state of chaos if Congress could not agree on who won the election. But it would not be an unprecedented chaos because we did have the election of 1876, where Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden were in a presidential race. This happened in Congress. Congress could not agree as to who had won the election because states, some states,

three states sent electors from both parties. to Congress to be counted. And so there was a bit of an impasse. There was a big impasse. And that was a constitutional crisis because the Constitution did not clearly lay out a roadmap for how to proceed from there. So we know we have that precedent. So we know that this time, if Congress cannot agree on who won the election, then we could see something similar to what happened there, which is that Congress appointed a commission to hash it out. And ultimately, we do know that Hayes became the president of the United States. Do you think it'll go that far? I don't think that it will, but I do think that there's a significant possibility that it will go that

far. A chilling thought. The New Yorker's Jeannie Suk Gerson, and we heard from Susan Glasser. In a moment, we'll look at what's happening in the Biden campaign with Evan Osnose. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Only three presidential campaigns in the past have defeated an incumbent president. When it's finished, God willing, we'll be the fourth. Evan Osnose has spent many months over the last year speaking with Joe Biden and many of the people around him about his race for the presidency. I called up Evan to check in on what's next for the former vice president and who seems to be the president-elect. So right now, Friday morning, it looks like Joe Biden is likely to be president.

What's been the campaign strategy over the last week because it has been a week like no other? Well, as soon as it was clear how close this was going to be, their strategy was obvious to them, which was to begin to make the case for the math, to say in effect, no matter what Donald Trump says or does, we see where this is going. We're not stating victory before it's official, but this is not a process we don't understand. And the Biden campaign took a pretty strong lesson from what happened in 2000 when in the disputed election of Al Gore and George Bush, they allowed themselves to be drawn into the appearance of a dispute. And in this case, what the Biden campaign wanted to do from minute one was to dispute the idea that there was even a dispute here,

because in fact, it was proceeding in an orderly way. And they didn't want to allow the notion of uncertainty to be introduced by Donald Trump. And from the beginning, they've been trying to strike a of projecting a sense of inevitability but not being presumptuous, meaning they're going to talk about the fact that they are moving along with transition in a peaceful way, but they're not yet naming cabinet members and things like that. Now, you heard Jeannie Sogerson tell us that she fears that this could spill over into the chaos of 1876, that as chaotic and incoherent as these core challenges may seem to be, it could be challenged by the electoral college itself and by Congress.

Well, that would be a strategy that's totally consistent with Donald Trump's approach to the law. Let's remind ourselves. I mean, his central theory of jurisprudence comes from Roy Cohn, his late lawyer and mentor, who used to say, after all, I don't care what the law is. Tell me who the judge is. So if this becomes essentially a fight at the juncture between the court of public opinion, and Congress, the approach that the Biden campaign will take is to say, we understand how this process goes because the Constitution tells us how it goes. This is not a matter of persuasion and

dispute. And there's a very telling moment in these key early days. You remember when Donald Trump came out into the White House and gave his, I think, most unhinged speech in which it was sort of one series of fabrications after another about election fraud and so on. What did the Biden campaign do in response? Nothing. They did not respond. They let the networks cut away. They allowed this idea, essentially, this kind of fantasy of Donald Trump's, to play itself out. President Obama, in his appearance, said, if your neighbor was acting this way, you would worry about your neighbor. This is not normal behavior. And what they're trying to do is, He's not insult the nearly 70 million Americans who've cast ballots for Donald Trump,

but they want to sequester Trump's comments and his increasingly, let's call it what it is, delusional perception. But fair enough. But who's going to be with Trump in the end? I mean, is the Republican Party going to abandon Trump now that they see the votes? Or are they just going to coalesce around him and act as a kind of, I don't know what to call it, suicide mission or worse. I think that's why it is, in some ways, it's even more important to listen to what other Republican leaders are saying than what Donald Trump is saying or what Joe Biden is saying.

Because remember, other than Donald Trump, frankly, Republicans had a pretty good week and they gain seats in the house. They may or may not have held on to the Senate. And there are reasons why if you listen very closely to what somebody like Mitch McConnell is saying, he's talking about, okay, let's begin the of setting the table for policy, talking, sort of leaking to the press, the idea that they're going to try to contain Biden's cabinet choices so that they're not as progressive as they might be. You think Mitch McConnell is moving on from Donald Trump? I would never underestimate Mitch McConnell's capacity to change course here. He's reading the public. He's reading where he thinks this is going. But Mitch McConnell has his interests

at the center. And his interests are what the Congress is going to be able to do. And you hear this active debate around the edges of the Republican Party leadership right now about who is going to hitch their wagon to Donald Trump and who is beginning to part ways with him and let his wagon go over the cliff. Lindsay Graham seems to have hitched himself to the wagon. And not a huge surprise. I mean, look, there is there is not at this point a clear consensus from the Republican leadership about what they're going to do. That's why they're the ones to watch. But my point is, I think that to assume that the Republican leadership in Congress sees its interests as utterly intertwined with Donald Trump's is probably to misread some of their own incentives here. And there may come a point when they decide, all right, let's go into plan B. We're not there yet.

How is Biden and his team planning to handle Donald Trump, if in the, well, possible likelihood that the president becomes increasingly erratic in these next few weeks and even few months? Well, they're projecting the message, as one Biden advisor said to me this morning, that Donald Trump should be worried most right now about Tish James, the Attorney General of New York. In effect, what they're saying is Donald Trump can rage against the fates here and pretend that he got more votes than he did. But actually, the electoral math is clear and Donald Trump should be thinking about life after the presidency. Now, look, there is a degree of bluff here, obviously, because. there is all of the full range of potential legal and political disaster. But at a certain point, what they're trying to avoid doing is allowing themselves to get sucked into this vortex of uncertainty and chaos that Trump is seeking to convey. And so in a way, what they're trying to do is maintain this posture of what I would describe as sort of vigilant reassurance, saying this need not be crazy unless Donald Trump makes it crazy, but we will not have to respond.

by being as crazy. The New Yorkers Evan Osnos in Washington. Thanks a lot, Evan. Thanks, David. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we're looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late.

Power can't be taken or asserted. It flows from the people. and is their will that determines who will be the President of the United States and their will alone. One of the enduring questions of this election, and of the entire Trump presidency over the past four years, has been about the integrity of our democracy. Can it endure under the stresses that have been placed on it? And what about the lack of confidence from citizens across the political spectrum? I reached out to Amy Davidson Sorkin, who writes about politics for the magazine,

Hi, Amy. Hi, how are you doing? I'm doing okay. Now, throughout this campaign, Donald Trump has sought to undermine the integrity of the process. He made no secret about it. He basically told us what he was going to do from the start. What kind of lasting damage do you think this might have? You know, it's profound.

But how lasting it is is something we're going to decide. There's no answer to that right now. But at the same time, I'll say that the depraved reaction, really, if there's no other word, on the part of some of Trump's prominent supporters, you know, Sean Hannity, it's really, it's quite shocking. And, of course, Trump's own attempts to just send the message that our elections can't be trusted, that a legal vote is a vote for him, an illegal vote is a vote against him. That is dangerous. And this is a hazardous time.

This is a hazardous moment. It can go a couple of different ways. And a lot of that depends on how Republican elected officials react. What does political normalcy look like from here on now? Political normalcy first is going to be everybody agreeing who won this election. Everybody minus Donald Trump. It's a reminder that. We have options in a democracy.

We get to vote. We get to change it. We have a terrible president, and then we have an election. That's the most base level normalcy. What normalcy is going to look like in terms of actually getting policy done, getting legislation through, that's another question. Keep in mind that we don't know yet who is going to control the Senate. The Democrats still have a shot of control of the Senate if they somehow won two. two Senate seats that are going to a runoff in Georgia.

Otherwise, you know, if the Republicans win one of those two seats, they'll have control of the Senate. That's probably going to be the most expensive pair of Senate races in history. And, you know, it's going to look very abnormal for the next couple of months in that sense, or at least we'll see how abnormally distorted by money our elections have become, we see how much pours into Georgia, as we see like the rhetoric that's going to surround those two races, that's going to be a reminder of the things that we've come to accept as normal in our elections that are really not healthy. Donald Trump does not respond well to humiliation.

How do you read the risks to the country between now and January 20th? I feel like the country is going to be paying a price a lot for Trump working up material for his post-presidential rallies, you know, his narcissism, his selfishness is really extraordinary. The idea that he, even when it's clear that he's lost, will be able to show any sort of restraint in leaving in a way that's dignified even. You know, this is a man who loves pomp, who loves ceremony, but that's not the same as dignity, although I think he's mistaken one for the other. So let's see. I mean, the Biden campaign said this morning that, you know, there were ways to remove trespassers from the White House. And whatever you think of that statement or that scenario, it's important to remember that the presidency is not just about Donald Trump saying he's president. It's not about people like him getting a ban to play Hale to the Chief, even if he's, you know, been thrown out of office. We have an actual government here that has actual Mexico. And it sure doesn't look like he's going to be able to seize power in any sort of way.

It's, you know, the Republicans are maybe disgracing themselves by feeding his fantasies that he's, that this is all like a, you know, all rigged election. But are they going to do that if he, if you won't leave the White House after the electoral colleges, Matt. That's hard to imagine at this point. Do you think, Amy, that there's a future to Trumpism? And what is it? You know, that is absolutely the case. We've talked so far about, you know, our democracy, our constitution, its mechanisms. That's different than the real political crisis that I think indoors with Trumpism. A lot of people who are ideologically close to Trump are going to, we're elected to Congress. They're in the Senate. They're in the country. He did pretty well in a lot of the country.

But a crisis for the Democratic Party is different than a crisis for democracy. When he's off stage, still railing, still pushing, you know, if candidates in the Republican Party go to him for their blessing or think they need him to get elected, this is a crisis about who we are. It's a crisis of character. But the question is whether it's a crisis that's contained within our still solid constitutional framework and mechanisms. It's not that he's not trying. It's not that people around him aren't talking about, you know, states renouncing their electors. But we're a long way from that right now.

We're at a place where we're likely going to have a president, Biden, and some really extreme things said in Congress, extreme governors elected. And that's something we've got to work on really hard. But, you know, we, I think that soon we may be able to say this election is, this election worked. This election worked. The New Yorker's Amy Davidson Sorkin. We also heard today from Evan Osnows, John's. Jeannie Suk Gerson and Susan Glasser. Our conversations took place on Friday morning.

You can find our coverage of the election at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.