The New Yorker Radio Hour - Donald Trump’s American Carnage Comes to Washington

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Luke Mogelson and Susan B. Glasser report on the convulsions of Donald Trump’s final days in office, an unprecedented second impeachment of a President, and the threat of insurrectionary violence hovering over the entire nation. And a game designer offers insights on how the fantastical, wholly fictional narrative of QAnon has captivated so many people—to such dangerous effect. 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. This week, Donald Trump became the first president of the United States to be impeached twice. He must go. He is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love. They want to cancel the president. Mr. Speaker, we are debating this historic measure at an actual crime scene. I informed that House to Mr. Blumen, I will vote yes. on H-RES-24.

As a member designated by Mr. Liu, pursuant to H-R-R-8, and from the House, the Mr. Loo will vote yes on H-RES-24. It's yet another unprecedented event in a presidency that has been absolutely full of them. But Trump's time is coming to an end,

and he leaves to Joe Biden enormous challenges, the unending death toll of COVID-19 first and foremost, the economic crisis of the shutdown, the consequences of a four-year assault on democracy in the rule of law. And meanwhile, the Senate will be occupied with the first ever impeachment trial of a former

president. Susan Glasser is our Washington correspondent. Hi, Susan. How are you? Hi, David. Thanks so much. We're talking on Thursday morning, and you were inside the Capitol during the impeachment vote. Can you give us a sense of the mood in the building? What was it like all around in the, in the lobbies, in the foyers and all the rest? Well, you know, David, for me, it was really unsettling and jarring. My first job out of college was working in Washington on Capitol Hill as a reporter for Roll Call newspaper. And every time I went into that Capitol, it was a powerful experience. It is maybe not obvious to those who don't go in there all the time, but it is not just a historic building, but it's a gorgeous building whose very kind of majesty tends to inspire. And so after,

sort of spending a week absorbing the images of the rampaging mob to go in there, the thing that was really unsettling was it's now a fortress. It is now surrounded by an occupying army. There are tens of thousands of troops now in the Washington area, more than even there are U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined at the moment. And you go inside the Capitol and there are literally these National Guardsmen in fatigues, toting long guns, assault weapons. You know, it's very intimidating.

But to go inside, and the thing that you notice is the silence and the uncanny emptiness of this place that's normally bussling with activity and tour groups and members of Congress, two and fro and staffers and reporters, and it's this incredible open interplay, unlike the rest of Washington, which is generally very close. So that's all gone, more or less. Now, you spoke to Jeff Van Drew, who's a Republican from New Jersey. Let's play a clip from that.

So just on this day, do you believe now that Joe Biden was elected president of the United States legitimately? Yes. Do you believe that Americans should have faith in that process? I think Americans are having a difficult time having faith in the process because we have altered it in so many ways, and we're not listening, obeying the rule of law that we need to do. Jeff Van Drew is a very interesting character because, first of all, he's this sort of very flamboyant figure, you know, dressed up in this almost technicolor three-piece suit having this conversation. He is the only Democrat who has the distinction of having switched parties to become a Republican because of his strong support for Donald Trump. To me, this was a sign. This conversation was an example of the incredible gap in not just our politics, but in the actual reaction.

and the world that Republican members of Congress are living in versus the world that Democratic members of Congress are living in. And I was sort of having this back and forth with him. Like, Congressman, well, first of all, I asked him, do you recognize Joe Biden's victory? Because people may not realize the vast majority of Republicans in Congress never acknowledged that Joe Biden won until after the storming of the Capitol, until after they voted. many of them actually voted hours after the storming of the Capitol to continue to attack the electoral college results and to therefore say that Biden is not a legitimately elected president. I have to ask you, it seems like 15 years ago, but it's only a year ago that there was a

first impeachment of Donald Trump, which you covered. Did the tone or the temperament of everyone in the building feel very different this time around and how? The short answer is both yes and no. And yes, in the sense that it was just a year ago, somebody said, well, I didn't realize that impeachment was about to become an annual national ritual. You know, there's only been four impeachments of a president in history. Now two of them have been of Donald Trump. So something that was incredibly rare has this bizarre feeling of now becoming almost a political commonplace, which is a striking development in and of itself. You know, Nancy Pelosi, who was very adept at the symbolism of politics,

chose to wear the exact same outfit for this impeachment, knowing she would be very photographed that she did for the first impeachment. And, of course, that was immediately remarked upon. And I think the message is a very somber black dress. The message I got from that and from talking with Democratic members, yesterday was sort of a combination of a deep and profound sadness that this is where we are, continuing alarm about the threats to the Capitol. But also, the undercurrent here is, we told you so. We told you so. And of course, that's Adam Schiff's famous speech from the end

of the first impeachment trial, which is he's going to do it again. He's going to do it again, and he will never change. And we're fools to think. other was, right? Yes, exactly. I actually, I've been thinking about that a lot, that speech, since the end of the election, actually, when it was clear that Donald Trump was going to do what no president of the United States has ever done and attack the legitimacy of the election and refuse to accept the outcome. That in and of itself was the unprecedented thing. But this crisis, therefore, has been going on ever since the election. I believe since literally that moment, I wrote a column for the New Yorker in the middle of the night overnight of that

election night that appeared on November 4th saying Donald Trump may have lost, but he is still the president of Red America and these people are going to follow him over the cliff of constitutional denialism. And it just didn't seem real to people, I think, until that horrible storming of the Capitol. Now, not every congressman and congresswoman did follow him over the cliff in this second impeachment vote. Ten Republicans joined the vote to impeach? What political price will they pay, and why weren't there more of them? Well, that is the question. I think that I understand there are two almost diametrically opposing ways of looking at this impeachment. One is, well, this was the most bipartisan impeachment ever, and it is true

that this is the largest number of members of a party voting to impeach a president from their own party. Ten. The previous record was five during Bill Kemp. Clinton's impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky affair. But look, nearly 200 Republican members of Congress, 197 Republicans versus 10. So, you know, I'm not that good at math, but even I can, you know, look at that and say, I understand where the weight of the party is. So the biggest person to defect from Donald Trump, of course, in this vote, was Liz Cheney, the number three ranking House Republican, the daughter of the former vice president. Cheney for some time has made it clear, especially since the election that she was deeply

uncomfortable with Trump's attacks on the institutions. So I wasn't surprised in a way, but of course immediately there are calls for her to be removed from her leadership post. I think that will be an early sign of what happens. But the truth is, is that if you want to know how big is the institutionalist wing, the Republican establishment wing of the House GOP, the answer is it's, it's It's almost infinitesimely small. It's a mystery to me what Mitch McConnell actually wants. He has signaled to the press that he was fine with impeachment, which in stark contrast to the first time around.

And yet it's not clear that he would vote to convict or whether he even has the influence to whip 17 votes in favor of conviction. What does he want to come out of this? Look, I think he would want Donald Trump to be gone, banished, done over as a factor in his party. I also think that Mitch McConnell is ultimately an institutionalist for whom Senate majority leader was always the highest calling. And Donald Trump just destroyed his Senate majority by his behavior in the Georgia Senate races and took away the only job that Mitch McConnell ever wanted. The reports are that Mitch McConnell is done and finished with Donald Trump.

So, however, he can still count votes. And the bottom line is, is that the House Republicans, despite these signals emitting from McConnell World, did not go along with a breakout. And so Mitch McConnell, I think, made a significant decision that he wasn't going to hold a Senate trial right away, but was going to wait until the Biden presidency. Meanwhile, as they say in movies, Joe Biden will be president of the United States come next week, and he faces all the challenge that we know. Is there going to be a first priority, or does he have to do,

many things at once. What are you hearing from the Biden people? You know, David, what's so remarkable about this transition and the fact that we're just days away from the inauguration of a new president? There's so much mayhem and chaos, it's been hard even to focus on it. And so his first priority in some ways is actually the more amorphous one that's the theme of his inauguration, American unity. And the question of can he at least appear to change the direction of our divided politics. The events of the last week made that much harder to do, it seems to me. In a specific sense, the pandemic, of course, is the top priority and will continue to be, I think, for many months into it. They've said that they will bring a new COVID relief

package to the floor of the newly Democratic Senate as their first piece of business. Biden has already laid out in quite significant detail, some changes that he plans to make. First of all, just having a national approach to the pandemic in and of itself is a change. Internationally, there is also a big agenda that will start on day one, including rejoining the Paris Climate Accords. There will be the question of what to do about Iran and the nuclear deal. Can it be returned to? There is an arms control treaty with Russia that expires in just a few weeks. So there's a huge agenda of announcing to the world that America is back in some significant way as a partner to its allies and also as an adversary to its adversaries again.

Susan Glasser has been writing our column, and brilliantly, I should say, letter from Trump's Washington, and she's been doing it since 2017. And now, soon, she'll begin writing a column called Letter from Biden's Washington. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, David. That's transition, I guess, in the column begins at 1201 p.m. next week. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll be talking more about the transition of power in Washington. Reporter Luke Mogelson joins me just ahead. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The threat of violence during the inauguration is hanging over the United States like some sort of ugly cloud. The FBI warns of armed protests in every state capital. In Washington, 20,000,

National Guard troops will be deployed, as though we were at war somehow. American carnage, indeed. When he said, we're going to the Capitol, it was like the entire crowd had already been primed to know exactly what he meant and what they were going to the Capitol to do. That felt pretty clear to me. Mugalson has been reporting for the New Yorker about the right-wing uprising against the election, and he was at the Capitol during the riot, writing everything down and recording things with his phone. As we approached the Capitol grounds, there were already violent confrontations between the riot police

at the base of the Capitol steps and protesters who had arrived before Trump had even finished his speech. And they were deploying tear gas and pepper spray and flashbang grenades. But again, there were just too many Trump supporters, and they were determined to get through. Now, you made your way into the Senate chamber. What did you see and hear? What were these people saying? What did they want?

Well, it was extremely surreal. They left in a hurry, do this? And it contrasted pretty starkly with the scene outside of the Capitol because inside the Senate chamber, there were very few people and it was quiet. Once people were inside the Capitol, they were searching for lawmakers, members of Congress, senators. and after they realized that the lawmakers had already been evacuated from the building, they didn't really know what to do with themselves. But they were searching for them toward what end? Because we did hear reports of cries of, you know, hang Mike Pence

and similarly disgusting things directed toward Nancy Pelosi. Yeah. Nobody explicitly stated to me or, you know, to each other that I observed, what their intent was, what they were going to do to the lawmakers if they found them. But it seemed pretty clear to me that their lives would have been in danger. That seems like a safe deduction to make. I don't mean to make light of this at all, but in your description of things, not least in the Senate chamber, the people there seemed like lost soul.

A guy sits down in the Senate chamber and he says, I've got to call my dad. And people taking selfies of themselves. There's a quality not only of rage, but in some circles, of lostness, of something really both ugly but also colossally foolish. Once they were inside the chamber, they really didn't know what to do with themselves.

And they were making, crass jokes, taking selfies, rifling through the senator's desks, looking for incriminating documents, misunderstanding, pretty much every document that they did come up on. Ted Cruz's objection to the Arizona. He was going to sell us out all along. What? Objection to counting electoral votes of the state of Arizona.

You don't get a forward? Wait, no, that's a minute. All right, all right. He's pissed. He's with this. He's with us. Don't do that. Most of the people that initially entered the Senate chamber

left after 10 or 15 minutes because they got bored and didn't know what to do. One guy joked, we might as well set up a government while we're here. A couple people gave speeches from the vice president's chair. as if they were in a school play or something in some ugly horrific way it had that quality to it unbelievable

look it's hard to ask a reporter whose main job is to tell us what you see right there and prediction is a low form of journalism but is January 6th the end of this or the beginning of a chronic frightening problem in American lines

when it comes to this kind of pro-Trump, America first, white nationalist, violent potentially movement? I would guess the latter. I think that it would not be prudent to assume anything else or prepare for anything less. at the end of the night after the National Guard had finally managed to expel the last of the rioters from inside the Capitol several mobs kind of shifted their attention to the broadcast journalist who had set up outside

and chased them off, smashed their equipment and at some point everybody was standing around in an almost ritualistic type circle surrounding this heap of smashed camera equipment and a man gave a speech to everybody telling them that this was the beginning of a new civil war and that they needed to go home go storm their respective capitals go hunt down the traitors, hunt down the enemies of the people, make lists, and kill them, kill the traders. And, you know, since Parlor has been de-platformed and the FBI has launched this massive national investigation trying to identify and track down the people who participated in the attempted insurrection, a lot of them have gone to ground.

But if anything, I think that the people we need to be most worried about were galvanized by January 6th, not humbled by it. Markable. You can find Luke Mogelson's article Among the Insurrectionists at New Yorker.com. One of the things we've been struggling with so much during the revolt against the election is the role of the Q&on conspiracy theorists. Q&on diehards were in the vanguard in the assault on the Capitol. and a great many people are interested in, or even sympathetic to their claims, including a couple of new members of Congress.

And yet the term conspiracy theory, it doesn't quite cover the depths of Q&N. Its believers see Democrats, not as a political party, as an opposition, but as a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who are going to be vanquished in a kind of holy war led by Donald Trump.

How is something so fantastical? so deranged, so seemingly marginal, come this close to the mainstream. The New Yorker's Monica Rassick has been looking into this. I'm Monica Rassick. I'm the digital director at The New Yorker, which means I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to engage an audience. And Q&ON, it has to be said, has certainly captivated an audience, to a degree that's become extremely dangerous. For those fortunate enough not to know, QAnon is a conspiracy theory movement that started on 4chan, an internet message board, a user calling themselves Q, supposedly, because they've got top secret Q level security clearance, started posting these enigmatic messages.

Things like, why did Soros donate all of his money recently? Fast forward three years later, and there's a huge community of people who work together to decode these messages. And what they believe Q is trying to tell them is that there's a massive international conspiracy of global elites that's threatening America. So I was doing a little bit of reading, and a colleague slacked me a medium article by a game designer named Reed Berkowitz. I am a game designer, and I research games and fiction and media. And so obviously when I saw what was going on with QAnon, it sparked my interest right away. Reed makes alternate reality games, or ARGs, which are a kind of role-playing game that takes place partly online and partly out in the real world. An alternate reality game is a game that often starts on a computer. Everybody is meeting online and getting large parts of the story online. But there's also many other components to it. So there's offline elements, there's parties, there's puzzles. It's a treasure hunt, mixed up.

with a good old-fashioned mystery story usually. So you start playing the game on your computer, but then maybe you get an email or even a phone call from a character in the game, and that sends you out into the real world to gather clues or interact with other players. ARGs are very good at drawing you in and immersing you in a world,

and they've been used to promote everything from big Hollywood movies to video games, to albums, to McDonald's. When Reed looked at Q&N, he thought it seemed very familiar. I wasn't the only one to recognize that. Many other ARG developers looked at it and said, wow, this is an ARG or some form of an ARG. And, you know, we were all very upset because it was using our techniques to really hurt people.

How does QAnon resemble a game? What are the tools that are at play here? Okay, well, the first one is that it's fiction. QAnon models itself after popular fiction. You have a mysterious figure who appears, and it starts dropping you clues about, you know, a vast conspiracy that only you can solve. You're the hero. Somehow you're the one that's going to find the children that are in desperate need

or the government conspiracy or anything else, and you're going to be able to find it because Q is going to give you what you need to do that. Yeah, it sets off on the classic hero's journey essentially. Classic, yes. You've been given a tip and you're off to the races. And it also, I mean, the part of the hero's journey that gets everybody is the call to adventure.

It's that moment where you leave the ordinary world and enter into the fictional world, which is so internal and exciting and meaningful. And that's what all game designers love is that feeling, you know, when Alice drops down the rabbit hole. And Q uses that same iconography as well, even though that's a clear call to fiction.

And another thing you mentioned that I thought was interesting is that Q doesn't just tell you the story. Like in a game, you have to actually do something to move the story along. You know, that's another, one of the fictional elements is that, you know, in a mystery, you're always uncovering the clues and following the signs. Clues are revealed. It's all done in questions and puzzles that you have to solve, just like in an alternate reality game.

Yeah, I thought that was one of the more interesting things, the idea that, you know, these clues are being left behind. Whoever could piece together the quote unquote most likely reasoning behind it then essentially gets upvoted, you know, whether it's in forums or in conversations or in other chat groups. and that becomes the canon of what's going on. And yeah, it's fascinating how, you know, that kind of group think creates this narrative. I used to research role-playing games, not the Dungeons and Dragons style, but the online version where there's no rules. People just chat, right? The rules were social rules.

They weren't statistics, like in a, you know, a Dungeons and Dragons game. they were there there was it was all based on social capital and that social capital was based on what what felt the best who came up with the best story it becomes uh you know really a creative project you're you're solving something together with your friends and um yeah when when cue drops uh the clue it's it's a good time you know you kind of touched on this a little bit but you know one thing i'm wondering, you know, why go through all of this? Why doesn't Q just post, hey, everyone, here's the deal about this massive conspiracy. Why instead are they using the model of or and the tools of this kind of game? Oh, yeah. They're using the tools of the game because it binds people

together. So not only does it, does it give you a dopamine rush every time you solve problems or get get kudos from your community, but it gives them the chance to surround you with a group of people that can guide you and keep you in the group. You know, even if something, you know, people are like, oh, well, that is wrong. That didn't happen.

And you're in this community of people that is telling you, no, it did happen. You know what I mean? They've created a false universe for you and you, and you're in it. this this becomes a community and an activity and a way of thinking because once you apply it to the clues that cue has dropped well people learn that they can apply that to other things as well and do so you know q has joined all the other conspiracy theories and helped to amplify them 5g bill gates uh wayfar well yeah

i mean there's a you know there's a sense that q anonon is a random phenomenon that's been seized on by a community and it's growing organically, but what we're talking about sounds very deliberate. I mean, I think that there could have been organic roots to this game. I think that there's definitely organic pieces to the game, but to create those organic pieces, you need a lot of know-how. And a lot of people and time. Yeah. And planning and... You know, if somebody was just, if it was just a couple guys on the internet joking around, right? And suddenly, for some reason, they could afford to organize, you know, marches and all 50 states and create their own movie.

You know, on top of this, you know, they're still producing content, a real producer, some college kids, they burn out within a month. I mean, even really well-funded campaigns burn out. I mean, nonchalance or one of the other projects that went on for years, they're done. At a certain point, they can't sustain because it's, like you said, there's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. So since you know the tools being deployed here, would it be possible to theoretically reverse engineer a game that uses the same tactics but to discourage Q&N?

Yeah, I mean, I get asked this every once in a while, but when it comes down to it, I don't think a game can be a solution for another game. I think, you know, the solution really is you've got a lot of people out there who are isolated, alone, disfranchised, and removed of any genuine experiences. And games are a way to provide that. You know, you play World of Warcraft. It makes you feel good about yourself. You meet new friends.

You know, you connect to the world. And you can change your, you know, you can try things out and your ego and say, oh, I was very brave. I'm maybe, you know, I go to school today. I feel a little bit better, you know. You're never going to be Q, because Q is not a lot of. only a very fulfilling way to look at the world, but they're saying it's real. So I think the, I think the solution is not necessarily another game, but what breaks down a game, which is

community and building. So in many ways, I think it's almost the community more than the game itself that draws and keeps the cube players. So you would have to create a really nice, welcoming community with some fun things to do. Right. And so not just, you know, immediately ostracizing someone because they've fallen prey to this, but rather keeping them in the fold and in your circles. Absolutely. Keep them close. Keep them close. That would be my advice. And, yeah, just expose them to a lot of reality. Reid Berkowitz is a founder of the multimedia company, Cybernautics,

and he directs the Curiouser Institute. He spoke with Monica Rassick, whose digital director of The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Have a good week and stay safe. See you 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 Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ava Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Callalia, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.