The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Tumultuous Week in Impeachment, and Jill Lepore on Democracy in Peril

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

The Washington correspondent Susan Glasser has been covering the scene in the Capitol as Republicans rush to contain the damage of the John Bolton manuscript leak. Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, told Glasser that “if a Republican makes the argument that removing the President this close to an election isn’t the right response, [that] we should trust the American electorate to make the decision, then you have to support [calling for] more witness and more documents” in order for the electorate to make an informed decision. Glasser also spoke with Zoe Lofgren who is one of the House impeachment managers prosecuting the case against the President. Lofgren is an expert on the subject: she was on the House Judiciary Committee in 1998 during the Clinton impeachment, and, in 1974, as a law student, she helped to draft charges against Richard Nixon. Nixon, she points out, was far more forthcoming than Trump with Congress, directing his staff to appear for questions without a subpoena. If the Senate votes to acquit, endorsing a campaign of stonewalling by the executive branch, Lofgren says, “It will forever change the relationship between the branches of government.” Plus, the historian and staff writer Jill Lepore talks with David Remnick about how Americans rallied to save democracy in the nineteen-thirties, and how we might apply those lessons to a time when our own democracy has weakened.  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.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, 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. To stretch just a little bit what Donald Trump has already said, if the president shot John Bolton in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it seems he wouldn't lose any voters. Not among the Republican senators voting in his impeachment trial anyway. And by the time you're hearing this, it may be over, all but the shouting. And just as the president's lawyers have said already, it's finally going to be up to the voters to decide the fate of Donald Trump and the fate of the Republicans who have supported him all the way.

Will you make it on Bolton's motivations of this plan? Do you think he's trustworthy? Just a half-ass in the house. I've seen the New York Times story. I have no idea what they're talking about. I think there's no need for witnesses. The case, as I said, is so strong. Hopefully it's over this week,

and we can get focused on doing the business of the American people. So far as I know, there has been no witness deal. Senator, are you in conversations about a bipartisan deal? Whoa, whoa, thank you. Are you in conversations about a bipartisan deal? No. No. No.

The Democrats have spent a lot of time imagining what the president's motives are. Someone ought to spend some time imagining what John Bolton's motives are other than making millions of dollars to trash the president. I will vote for a motion that allows for all relevant witnesses,

and I think both sides are entitled to relevant witnesses. I do not see how Biden is relevant to these allegations, but I believe the standard is they have to be relevant. We heard Senators Lindsay Graham, Jim Jordan, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and Kirsten Gillibrand. All of our coverage on impeachment is at New Yorker.com, much of it from Susan Glasser,

who reports from the Capitol. I see Carl Holst there, the very distinguished New York Times corresponding. I actually heard something funny today from staff. They're kind of enjoying this because they are, their members are locked in the Senate without their phones for like all day, and they know where they are and don't have to talk to them. We are on our way to. to hook up with Senator Chris Coons of Delaware.

We're gonna walk over from his Senate office to the Capitol for yet another day of proceedings in the Senate trial. It's Wednesday, right in the middle of the Senate trial of President Trump. Hey, how are you? Hi. Thanks so much.

Hi there. Sorry, I hear the protests, yeah. Yeah, I was just reflecting on the fact that if we walk from here over there, we're gonna walk right through the middle protests. When we walked over here before, I don't know if there's a huge number of people who come out, but there weren't like a ton of people.

Which is one of the notable things, really, about this impeachment trial. I've been really struck by the fact that there aren't, you know, people in the streets. We had extra people lined up to answer the front desk calls. Because, you know, during Kavanaugh, during the strike on Soleimani, during other moments in the last year or two, we've gotten just floods of phone calls. We haven't. We've gotten hundreds, but not thousand. The fact that they feel that they know the outcome.

is really the thing. Not that there aren't strong passions on both sides, but I know what's going to happen. It's like watching a game that you've recorded and intend to watch, but then someone blurts out who won and what the score was, and you decide not to go back and just watch the replay. What I wonder is about, you know,

we're about to have the Iowa caucuses in New Hampshire win an election year. You know, President Trump has essentially always appealed to people on the idea that this is a rigged process and a rigged system. in the Democratic Party, arguably, Bernie Sanders says something of the same. The system is rigged against you. This is literally kind of like a rigged trial.

I don't know how that resounds politically, but I've been thinking a lot about that. Well, if what ends up happening after two days of questioning is that every one of my Republican colleagues votes for no more witnesses, no more documents, it'll be hard to reach any other conclusion than they just didn't want to know because John Bolton is available, is offering to testify, is if press accounts are to be believed, the author of a finished manuscript

that is directly relevant to the issues in front of the Senate, it's pretty hard to explain why you wouldn't want to hear from John Bolton. So, okay, you're sitting there every day. I'm stuck up in the gallery, so I'm staring at you. You haven't been a milk drinker. I'll wave next time I see you. You're not a milk drinker, apparently Mitt Romney's a chocolate milk drinker. You're sitting there next to Amy Klobuchar, who of course is one of several Democratic senators running for president and who are stuck here in Washington instead of in Iowa.

You're a big Bidenbacker coming from Delaware. You guys are passing notes. You know, what are you talking about? So Amy, Senator Klobuchar also sits next to me on the Judiciary Committee. You know, partly they're just lighthearted notes, observations about particular members of the president's team or the House managers and how they're doing or what's going on. And sometimes I'm just encouraging her because I know it's difficult to be literally days away from the most important political moment of her life, which is the Iowa caucuses, and to be here rather than there. Yeah, no, it's really every time we're now arriving at the Capitol. So we'll have a great security interlude, at least for us.

You guys have got to go through that. So now we're inside the Capitol with Senator Coons. And we and Senator Cantwell has just come in for the day too. You have party lunches before. Yes, we have a caucus lunch that's beginning right now. And how useful are those for touching base with people? Are you talking about the trial? Absolutely, we're talking about the trial.

We're sort of comparing notes on conversations. we're having with colleagues. Today, in particular, we're having conversations about what are the questions that we're going to be asking and what order who's taking the lead on which issues. Right. So what is your question that you most want answered? Well, I've got 10 that I'd most like to be able to ask. Here's the question. The president's brief states, Congress has forbidden foreigners involvement in American elections. Despite that, in June 2019, President Trump said, if Russia or China offered information on his opponent. Quote, there's nothing wrong with listening. And he said he might not even alert the FBI. Does President Trump agree with your statement? And again, this is a question to his

lawyers, that foreigners' involvement in American elections is illegal. Good question. Let me put it this way. If the answer is, no, we have a big problem. If there are Republicans who refuse to accept this foundation illegal principle, haven't helped us. And I'm assuming that those who end up voting against removal because of these impeachment articles will still agree that what the president did was wrong. Well, that's the interesting thing. I would say that the Alan Dershowitz argument on Monday night for the Republican senators was key because he essentially gave them the free pass to make the argument that you and I anticipated all wrong. It was designed to give them a hook to hang their hat on that says, yes, what the president did was wrong, but you can't impeach him for that.

I would say this, if your argument, if a Republican makes the argument, removing the president this soon, this close to an election, isn't the right response. We should trust the American electorate. Let them make the decision. That's another strong argument. Then you have to support more witnesses and more documents because otherwise you're saying, I trust the electorate, but I'm willing to participate in a cover-up that prevents them from knowing what they should know to reach a conclusion about this. So, Senator Coons, you've been very generous with your time today. I can smell the lunch wafting out, although it doesn't smell that good. Is the food been okay? I'll tell you the food here is usually really good, but not always. Well, thank you again, Senator Coons for your time. Thanks, Susan. Great to be on with you.

Thank you. Okay, so we've just finished having a conversation with Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, and now we're going to walk through the Capitol to the Capitol Crypt and the Hideaway Office of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who's one of the seven House managers. I'm here with Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren from California, who has the very interesting distinction of being not only one of the seven house managers prosecuting, in effect, the case against President Trump, but she is the only member who has been on her third impeachment. And so we can talk a little bit about that. Congresswoman, Nixon, Clinton, Trump. As Nancy Pelosi said, no matter what happens in the Senate,

Donald Trump is always going to be impeached. That list is always going to include him. That's right. What's the shorthand you have in your head so far about the difference between Nixon, Clinton, and Trump? Well, there are some surprising similarities between Nixon and Trump. Nixon tried to cheat in an election and he covered it up. Trump tried to cheat in an election and covered it up. The differences are, honestly, Nixon was more forthcoming with the Congress. He told publicly all his staff to come to the Congress, to answer relevant questions honestly,

without requiring a subpoena or anything of that nature. Trump told every member of the executive branch not to testify, no documents, nothing. Most people won't realize that Nixon was less of a cover-up artist than President Trump. Amazing. So we are speaking on Wednesday morning before the trial goes into session. And of course, the big question is whether there's really anything other. other than a completely orchestrated kind of march to the inevitable outcome that we're witnessing. So what is your view of that?

Well, I'm an optimist. I don't think I could have this job if I weren't an optimist. You have to be one. And we have presented a very compelling case based on evidence and fact witnesses. In the trial, senators have a chance to call additional witnesses, and there has never been a trial in the Senate on impeachment, and it's not just presidential treatment, it's judicial as well,

where there haven't been witnesses and documents. So if the Senate declines to have documents and witnesses, that would be a radical departure from history and from precedent, it would also defeat the purposes I think they have, which is to find the truth. Ultimately, that's what a trial is about, to find the truth. Well, of course, Congresswoman, right in the middle of the trial over a weekend, on a Sunday late in the afternoon, is when the news about John Bolton dropped in the New York Times.

Where were you when you heard about it? And what did you think? I was sitting with the other managers in a room in the Capitol going through the next day's proceedings and preparing. And one of the staff got a flash on their phone. And the first words out of my mouth were yikes. So you had no advance notice, no morning. No, I had no idea. Now, we had heard, we read in the paper that there was some book, but what had said, we had no idea. I was just thought, wow, I mean, that is a game changer. That's like when Nixon admitted everything Monday morning and he had to announce his resignation the next day. Wow. But it wasn't. It's more like Access Hollywood, isn't it? You know, that was about sex, just like the Clinton impeachment was about sex. I don't approve

of what Clinton did, and I certainly don't approve of the language and the behavior that President Trump engaged in. But that's not a high crime and misdemeanor. That's for voters to decide. and they decided that they didn't care about that misbehavior President Trump. This is a very different issue. This is about misusing his power to subvert the Constitution of the United States to the detriment of the interests of the American people. That is a very severe charge. I think that's what's so extraordinary for me just as an observer to watch what happens

from that yikes, wow, moment on Sunday evening over the last few days, and I have both been in the Capitol, and we've heard a process, once again, of many of your Republican colleagues in the Senate essentially going from, wow, I'm not sure, to, well, we don't really need to hear from that anyways. And it's, well, some of the senators have said that, let's be clear, most of the senators haven't said anything. So we don't know what they're thinking, and I'd like to believe this, that they are evaluating what is the right thing for the country.

That's what I'd like to believe they're doing. For you, during the House Manager's presentation last week, I was struck by the fact that you seemed to take a much more kind of evidence-based and legal approach to the presentation, and some of them were much more partisan and rhetorical. Was that by design on your part? This is a trial. and so if they are laying out evidence that's incorrect or a theory of the law that doesn't hold up,

then I think it's helpful, I hope, to the senators to point that out in a very logical way that gives citations to actual facts and law that they can use as they reach a conclusion. And that's a job I was assigned to do and I'm trying to do it as best I can. So, okay, on the arguments, what do you think is the strongest and weakest? as part of your case constitutionally? I think there's clear evidence that the president committed a high crime and misdemeanor.

He subverted the constitutional order for his personal benefit to the detriment of the interests of the country. I think there's really no evidence of the contrary. Are there any arguments that you heard from the Trump team so far that you thought were

particularly strong or that you were surprised by? You know, it's just dust in the air. I was really disappointed that it was not, I thought, very weak. Isn't the lesson here for American politics that Stonewalling works? If the Senate allows it, it will forever change the relationship between the branches of government. What it would say to a president, Democrat or Republican, you can just tell the Congress to pound sand. If this misbehavior, is basically just ignored, I think what it means is there would not be in a capacity for the Congress

to utilize the remedy that the founders put in the Constitution to hold an executive to account because there will never be a piece of information or a witness ever sent to Congress for an impeachment and probably for oversight either for anything the president doesn't want. Congresswoman Zoh Lofgren, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. Susan Glasser is the New Yorker's Washington correspondent, and you can read her on impeachment and much more at New Yorker.com. Zoh Lofgren represents the 19th Congressional District of California.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. In the 1930s, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio. Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks for scraps of food, and democracies dying from the Andes to the Ural's to the Alps. Jillipur is a historian at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker,

and she's cultivated a real specialty in setting today's political upheavals in the context of American history. Her essay in every dark hour considers how our nation responded the last time, it seemed, that democracy was in serious trouble around the world. American democracy too staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation.

Who do not distrust the future of essential democracy, FDR said, in his first inaugural address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans' own declining faith in self-government. What does democracy mean? NBC radio asked listeners. Do we Negroes believe in democracy? W.B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here?

Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered and hungered and wondered. Jill, in your essay, you're describing a time when Americans and people all over the world were really questioning the future of democracy. What was going on that was making Americans so nervous, a familiar feeling, but so nervous about the democratic process? It was witnessing new democracies fail.

So at the end of the First World War, a whole lot of new democracies had been born when European empires had been broken up. And it was exciting and riveting, and there was a sense of triumph, that early 20 sense of triumph, that markets were soaring, people were getting wealthier, democracies were thriving, and it all seemed to fall apart. And by the time you get to the 1930s, the beginning of the Depression, of course, it's much worse and much more perilous because the staggering needs of mass society seemed in many parts of the world to just be not addressable by majority rule, that there needed to be a

strong man who could rescue starving populations from their suffering. So this was a period of enormous uncertainty for democracy, and Americans themselves had a lot of questions about what democracy meant and how it should work. And the solution you suggest to some extent was to talk. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, a lot of Americans were swayed by communism and by fascism. I mean, there's a huge range of political opinion. And all all kinds of new political activity in the United States in the 1930s, political experiments. But in many ways in response to the attractions of forms of political extremism, Americans who did believe in democracy really fought for it by trying to rekindle its spirit.

Well, I want to play a clip from something called America's Town Meeting of the Air. What does democracy mean? This is this completely goofy. I mean, I think I just sort of warn listeners. This sounds really corny. So you either love this stuff or you don't love this stuff. It was a national radio broadcast. It started in 1935, and it was enormously successful.

So they would hold these debates in a lecture hall. They'd bring in like a thousand people, sometimes more. And they'd bring to the stage a few different people. A panel of maybe four or five people. It wasn't like a one-on-one debate. I mean, they called it a debate. It's more of a panel or something. symposium, and they'd have these big questions, you know, should the United States have universal

health insurance? And they bring in half, you know, half the people on the panel would agree and half would disagree. No more appropriate place could be found for a discussion of the subject. What does democracy mean than our own town hall in New York City, the home of America's town? In the early American town meetings, a majority of all citizens of a community used to meet together and determine where to build the new schoolhouse, how to run the new road, and what to do about widow Jenkins of Streper's cow. Is it possible to conceive of self-government today in those terms? What then does democracy mean under present conditions?

In that sense, democracy for the first time is really being tried. Democracy for the first time is really being tested. Now for the questions. We'll take some man in the balcony there. Mr. Hathaway stated that the democracy he expects is the democracy that will permit this fresh capitalist class to bring in socialism peacefully. Don't you think that the working class, Mr. Hathaway,

would do very well to drop any nonsense of any possibility of bettering its conditions under this present system of society and listen to the message of the Socialist Labour Party the only revolutionary argument. What I'm struck by listening to it is like the sense that people had in the 1930s that they were really on the precipice of history, that democracy was new, as that announcer said.

Historically, like, democracies had only begun with, you know, the United States in 1776. But what they really do accomplish a lot of these conversations is really bringing in ordinary people. I mean, you just really do get the sense when you listen to them or when you read accounts of debates that are going on in, you know, town libraries and in school buildings that are opened up at night for debates, political debates, that, you know, your kind of basic farmer is there, your union worker is there, then, you know, the nurse from the hospital is there, the librarian is there. And people are really kind of dedicating themselves, kind of struggling with working their way through these really big questions.

I mean, think about the suffering of the depression. I mean, everyone was vulnerable to complete economic collapse. No matter where you stood, you could fall really fast, and people saw one another falling really fast. And so what was going to hold people up? Well, you were going to have to hold each other up. Jill, I understand you want to play another clip, which might be more familiar to our listeners.

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the interconferral continental radio news. At 20 minutes before 8th Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pearson of the observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation and describes the phenomenon as, quote, like a jet of Blue flame shot from a gun, unquote.

Well, I think some people at least will recognize that this is a clip from Orson Wells' famous apocalyptic radio drama, The War of the Worlds. But I have got to say, it's not the direction I thought we were heading in. How does this relate to discussions about democracy that were going on at that time? I was totally just a pretext to listen to Orson Wells, no. So War of the Worlds was broadcast, of course, on Halloween in 1938. and Wells has offered many explanations over his lifetime for why he did it, but the one I believe and I choose to believe is that Wells was actually genuinely concerned about the possibilities

that radio could be used for nefarious purposes. If you think about what the implications are of a technology of communications, radio is invasive. Like it's this voice in your kitchen coming out of your living room. It's incredibly intimate. And the very, the term fake news comes out of the 1930s because it's what Americans and the British, what's what the Allies call, Nazi radio broadcasts on shortwave radio. They broadcast these English language news reports. There were just a bunch of lies.

They broadcast them all over North and South America. And there was a lot of stuff on the radio. There was Father Coughlin. There's a lot of nuttyness from Huey Long. There's a lot of stuff that you should be really suspicious of on the radio. And Wells was kind of interested in. saying, here's actually another obligation of living in a democracy, you have to actually be careful where you're getting your information. You have to have a critical apparatus around it.

And that's a lesson we're still struggling with, it seems. Jill, one thing that surprises me, you wrote about the Democracy Index, which rates the nations of the world on just how democratic they are, right down to the bottom of the list where North Korea is. But the U.S. isn't doing so great in recent years. Why not? What are the factors that go into a country's rating in the Democracy Index. Yeah, it's this, I mean, you can, I guess people try to measure anything. And there was a kind of concern. This Democracy Index was started by a think tank, I think associated with the Economist magazine,

as an expression of concern for the seeming fragility of democracies around the world, that would be something that would be worth paying attention to. So there's a whole series of measures that go into it, having to do with voter turnout. or having to do with, do people show up, even kind of congressional turnout, legislative turnout, are laws being passed or are laws being vetoed? How is the, is the press free? Is there censorship? And unsurprisingly, when the democracy index started, the United States was one of the stronger democracies, rated as a full democracy. According to this index, the United States first fell out of that top-tier category in 2016 and became flawed democracy and every year since 2016, the U.S. rating has been worse. So two things seem

to be true from this evidence, right, that the number of democracies around the world has been dwindling. And then in the case of the United States, the United States has become significantly less democratic. So we chalk that off to Donald Trump. What are the factors that have made us dip? I guess I just think that stuff that's been going on with the growing power of the presidency as against the other branches of government goes pretty far back. I mean, it certainly goes back to Nixon. That's for sure. I can't see Hillary Clinton White House having turned that around and ceded power back to Congress, for instance. The increasing politicization of the Supreme Court is something that, I mean,

I would date to really Reagan's Justice Department and Reagan's appointments. I guess conservatives would look at that different. but people would date that to the Warren Court, say. Those are things that are making our system of government not work as it was designed. And increasing income inequality, which precedes Trump, and it's just only been exacerbated, but it's not all on him. I take your point completely. It just seems that since 2016 in rhetoric and in action, the individual has made a difference. I'm not saying he's the everything and the be-all and there weren't factors before,

and it will probably outlive him. Well, it will absolutely outlive him. But, I mean, I don't know. Like I put a chart on the screen in a class that has income inequality, polarization charted from 1945 to 2016. And we get where we get based on changes that start in 1968. So, yes, you could follow that chart from 2016 to 2020 and things look worse. but it's a long-term, those are long-term trends.

Your piece fairly yearns for calls for the modern equivalent somehow of town halls, radio plays, public forums, the kind of thing we were discussing before. How would you see that taking place in the world that you know, of the university, of social media, of the technologies that we have available? Is it even possible? What would it look like? I'm sure that it actually does take place in all kinds of ways. I mean, I spend a fair amount of time.

going to K through 12 schools and meeting with kids and watching them debate stuff or argue over things, I think there's a lot more of that going on than we might perceive. I don't think you can really track it going on on social media because it's just not conducive. It's not conducive as a format to the kind of careful, deliberative listening that you can imagine. But I think it actually goes on all the time in classrooms. Like I went to my city council, to a city council meetings this year. I was like, all right, democracy is still working. But you kind of have to get into a room with people. So I want to go back to your piece. You write about a series that ran in 1937 in the New Republic where editors asked each writer, a series of writers, whether they thought

political democracy was on the wane. And you described the answer given by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. And Italy at that point was living under fascism. So what did Croce say? He objected to the question the way a good philosopher should. And he just objected to the passive framing of the question because he's like, his thing was, all right, politics and government is not like the weather. Like we don't just like, you're asking me basically a meteorological question, like, what's the weather look like? It's not the weather. We, this is actually, we control politics and government. So you don't ask people what's the weather going to be like.

You ask people, go out at, how are you going to go out of it? and change the weather. What are you going to do? You don't just sit around like trying to decide, do I need an umbrella today? You actually go out and change the weather. And that's, that's what I think people had a sense of needing to urgently do in the 1930s. And we do have a kind of different sensibility. I don't know, we, whatever, and the quarters I inhabit. There's a, there's a lot of political despair. It's a fashionable political despair. It's almost like a fetish for political despair. Is it a reasonable political despair? Seriously? No, I don't actually think it is. I really don't. I really don't. Because look, before 1965, we didn't even have voting rights in this country. Like, what is it the past that you think was so infinitely better than this moment? It's easy to take democracy for granted when things are going fairly well. And when you watch democratic institutions being jeopardized and when you watch abuses of power and authority, it casts your attention.

your concern into really stark light. And those conversations that you have about what's going on are what actually restores the democracy. They are what rekindles those traditions, what defends those institutions, and what renews the democracy itself. Jillipur, thanks so much. Thanks, David. Jillipur is a staff writer. Now, throughout this election year, we're going to be considering the future of democracy from a range of perspectives, and we've inaugurated a series appropriately called The Future of Democracy. And we'll send you all the pieces in the series if you text the word, democracy, to the number 701,0.1. Don't worry,

I tried it and it works. Text the word democracy to 701. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us today, and I hope you'll tune in to The New Yorker Radio Hour next time. 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 Garvis of Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Karen Frulman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Morgan Flannery, Allison McAdam, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann.

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