The New Yorker Radio Hour - How Donald Trump Broke the Iowa Caucuses and Owns the G.O.P.

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

This time last year, Republicans were reeling from a poorer-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterm elections; many questioned, again, whether it was time to move on from their two-time Presidential standard-bearer. But Donald Trump is so far ahead in the polls that it would be shocking if he did not clinch the Iowa caucuses.  The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Robert Samuels have seen on the ground how much staying power the former President has despite some opposition from religious leaders and establishment power brokers. For MAGA voters, “The core of it is, ‘If Donald Trump is President, I can do anything I want to do,’ ” Samuels tells David Remnick. “ ‘I won’t have anyone … telling me I’m wrong all the time.’ ” Since 2016, Trump has honed and capitalized on a message of revenge for voters who feel a sense of aggrievement. Among evangelical voters, Wallace-Wells notes, Trump seems like a bulwark against what they fear is the waning of their influence. “To them, [Biden] is the head of something aggressive and dangerous,” he says. Susan B. Glasser, who writes a weekly column on Washington politics, takes the long view, raising concerns that we’re all a little too apathetic about the threats Trump’s reëlection would pose. “What if 2024 is actually the best year of the next coming years?  What if things get much much worse?” she says. “Now is the time to think in a very concrete and specific way about how a Trump victory would have a specific effect not just on policy but on individual lives.” 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 with a raspy voice thanks to a cold. And lo and behold, here we are. It's 2024 election season. And the Iowa caucuses are on Monday, the first stop on the long journey to November 5th. There's been a lot of news about the two candidates who seem to be competing for second place in the Republican Party. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Rhonda Santos of Florida who visited all 99 counties in Iowa. Oh, what is that? An icy? Yeah, that's probably a lot of sugar, huh?

Good to see you. But dominating these primaries, of course, is a candidate who has not participated in debates who barely campaigned and is polling at more than 50%. Don't stay home, just please, you know? The polls are showing we're going to win by a lot. And worst thing you can do, oh, let's just stay home, Alice, let's watch. Let's watch it on television. We don't want to do that.

You got to get out because the more we win by, we're shooting for November, because we've got to send a message. We've got to send a message we can't be beaten because if we are beaten, we're not going to have a country left anymore. They're destroying this country. Two of the New Yorkers political reporters have been in Iowa covering the run-up. Robert Samuels and Ben Wallace Wells. Now, Ben, you just wrote an illuminating piece about tensions within the Christian right, and that is incredibly influential in Iowa.

You talk with pastors coming out for, and some against Donald Trump, and you spoke to a pastor named Joshua Graber, who opened a rally for Trump by saying, We ask those who stand against him be put to silence. Now, that's quite a turn of phrase. Who is Graber? Joshua Graber is a man who leads a very, very small church in a town called Vinton, Iowa. It's a Baptist church. He's somebody who, like a lot of the Trump pastors, who tend to exist outside of the existing evangelical establishment, was not especially politically active until a few years ago.

But also, like a lot of pastors in Iowa, he has come over the Biden years and maybe a little bit before that to see his version of Christian. is really up against the wall. You know, over the last decade and a half, we've gone from having evangelical Christians be something like 23% of the U.S. population to something like 14%. When you look at, you know, a public opinion environment in which the Dobbs decision remains hugely unpopular and a real challenge for Republicans, there is a feeling, I think, of sort of existential threat that Christians like them are on the verge. of being ostracized or driven out of power entirely. When I talked to, you know, both Trump and DeSantis pastors across Iowa, they tended to see the world a little bit similarly. Even the

DeSantis people, that old evangelical establishment that, you know, pushed Huckabee and Santorum and Cruz to victory in Iowa, their sensibility is quite similar too. They also seem very stressed. They also have a kind of exaggerated sense of precipice. And so, you know, to have this fighter, you know, for you in a kind of crisis is something that's more appealing to these guys. Robert, why didn't DeSantis connect at all? And how is Nikki Haley connecting? What's been her success and to what extent can she be successful there? Well, I like to think of Iowa as having three major buckets. The first bucket would be the evangelical vote. Those are the votes that are typically together that have allowed candidates like Cruz and Santorum and

Huckabee to win in the past. There are the Chamber of Comberts-type Republicans, what we used to call the H.W. Bush or the Reagan Republicans. Also, there's a very strong foreign policy sense in Iowa, and people tend to gravitate toward more hawkish foreign policy experiences. Those three buckets don't really loan themselves to DeSantis in a way. that's distinct from Donald Trump. Now, Nikki Haley not only has the hawkish policies that are pretty popular in Iowa,

people want folks who'll go tough on China, who'll be hard on Mexico, but she has that Chamber of Commerce sense about her, and she has leaned more conservative. It also helps that she is more of a people person. Nine days until the caucuses, and guess what that means for you? No more commercials, no more text messages, no more your mailbox being full with mail.

I know you are excited, but also get excited because this is when you can really set the tone of where we're going in our country. Nikki Haley seemed to be having a few decent weeks in the conventional sense. And then she was asked about the Civil War. And she did not care to summon that slavery might have been an essential factor in the Civil War. Is that something that just elite media care about? Or do people in Iowa pick up on that too? What I think it exposed for them is the idea that there's a liberal media who likes to ask gotcha questions, that they're a country that's preoccupied by race.

And I actually think that answer that she gave probably played off better than people presume it did because so many people are desirous of moving past race. Ben, again and again and again, every time that Donald Trump has been in these races, the press goes through a period of self-flagellation. We must learn the Trump voter more intimately. We didn't do it well enough last time. what are you learning that's new? There is a sense that

conservative America is losing that I think is really profound and really alters how many conservative voters think and behave and we, you know, from our perch might look at, you know, Trump having been elected very recently at the structure of the Supreme Court

at the kind of disproportionality of the Senate and the electoral college and say, what are these people talking about? you know, this thing is set up for conservatives to succeed. This isn't becoming a more progressive country, but because the society is changing, because the culture is changing, because it's changing in ways that are, you know, moving away

from many, especially social conservatives, I think there is a sense of desperation and fear that I can't quite, you know, justify myself. That feels exaggerated to me, but is present again and again and again. When it comes to thinking about Donald Trump, he's not trying to save anyone. He's trying to save himself.

And people are responding to it, I think, in ways that are deeper than they have before, is they actually see him and the tumult that he's going through as a proxy for some of the cultural issues that they think they're losing. The core of it is if Donald Trump is president, I can do whatever I want to do, right? I can be the type of American I want to be. And I won't have anyone trying to take that away for me or telling me I'm wrong all the time.

And I think that's the message that continues to resonate and in a lot of ways resonates even more deeply than in 2020 or 2016. No, I know the Democrats are not a factor here in Iowa, but what are you hearing about the Biden presidency and Joe Biden? One of the surprising things, at a Nikki Haley event, you will run into a lot of Obama-Trump Biden voters. And one of the things that really surprised me

was this belief that Joe Biden is actually presiding in a way that's more liberal than he had presented. They think he's too palsy-wowsy with the squad and the Green New Deal, and he's too quick to acquiesce. Now, that's not something that I hear a lot in Washington, D.C., but I think it's really resonant that people think he's acceded to the radical left. Now, you can read Ben Wallace-Wells and Robert Samuels reporting from Iowa at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come.

Does 91, do 91 indictments, do outlandish statements only add to his support, or in the end will they begin to diminish it? When it came to the Republican primary electorate, they proved to be a political advantage. Susan Glasser writes a column for us about Washington, and she's thinking hard about the real prospect of a a Trump victory. We can say that as more or less a statement of fact in the sense that Donald Trump began last year, actually, you know, potentially challengeable, at least as far as the polls went. He had about an average around 45% support nationally from Republicans last year. As the four different indictments in four different criminal cases began to be filed,

his numbers went up and up and up. He consolidated support as a result of the backlash that he was able to engender around these indictments. What does it mean for the general election? The survey suggests that... Before you get to the general election, are we already riding off the Republican nomination? Let's put it this way. Were someone other than Trump to emerge now as the Republican nominee, it would represent really an almost unprecedented. outcome. There is the very real prospect, David, that Trump would secure the nomination and also that it would be over for all intents and purposes as a race as early or earlier than any primary race that we're familiar with in recent times. He could have it essentially all over and done with by early March Super Tuesday. As a matter of the general election, you asked sort of the question in many ways, which is will all of these court cases,

would a conviction in any one of them or all of them have the effect of finally spelling the political end of Donald Trump? There's a small subgroup of Republican voters who say that it would make a difference to them were Trump to be convicted in any of these cases. And again, because of the highly polarized nature of our politics right now, we're not talking about running a national 50-state campaign or even, the campaigns when you and I were young, say, back in 1976, when I was a kid, 25 states were basically genuinely toss up races in that very close 1976 election. Today, that number is likely to be no more than five or six battleground states. So the real question is, are there a significant, you know, small number of Republicans, 6%, 10%, whatever the number is, that just won't vote for Donald Trump if he is convicted of a crime. So you don't need the answer to be, I got to convince 51%

of Republicans. The answer is I need to convince 6% of Republicans in Arizona or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin. I have to say, as Americans, we lack imagination about ourselves sometimes, it seems to me. We lack it. And maybe for a good reason, maybe that's part of Americanness, that we lack the darkest sort of imagination, as if certain things that happen elsewhere can happen. happen here. And I wonder when you think about this election of 2024, and if it turns out to be that either Trump wins it flat out or things end in the possible mess that they could end yet again, what are the outcomes in terms of the daily lives, the civic lives, the foreign policy lives of this country, that will be the consequence?

Failure of imagination is one way of thinking of it. Amnesia perhaps is another way of thinking of it because the U.S. has certainly been sorely tested before at other moments in its history. You know, I said this to somebody recently like, oh, how do I write a story? You know, how do I write a column about 2024? And it, you know, it's going to be such a stressful, awful year no matter what. And they said, well, here's a thought for you. What if 2024 is actually the best year? of the next coming years rather than the worst? What if things get much, much worse in ways that we're still very hesitant to even acknowledge as possibilities? I can almost hear a lot of listeners listening and thinking that we are doing the oral version of doom scrolling as a kind of liberal indulgence for public radio

and all the rest. Why is that not true? Well, I mean, ask the people in Hungary or Poland or Turkey, what happens when an illiberal, authoritarian-minded leader comes to power and uses the tools of democracy in order to dismantle that democracy. These are not idle speculations. You know, there is a pretty clear agenda being formulated. It starts not only with weaponizing the Justice Department to, indict your political opponents, it starts with the takeover and the politicization, say, of the civil service, which is a 100-year-long effort in the U.S. to build a nonpartisan professional bureaucracy in the United States. Well, Trump has already written up an executive order. In fact, he imposed that executive order at the end of his first term. It was just too late

to actually take effect, and Joe Biden immediately rescinded it. So they could enact a sweeping politicization and deprofessionalization of the executive branch. This is the order that would have stripped federal civil servants of employment protection, allowing the president to fire them at will. Yet, one assumes that if Trump actually, in this extra thought exercise comes to power, he has won a political victory such that you can expect that one, if not both houses of Congress, are also supporting him and are also Republicans. Well, when he said that he was going to leave NATO,

This is something that he just didn't have the capacity to execute on. Well, now he can do so. Vladimir Putin has every incentive to continue the war in Ukraine to see whether Donald Trump is going to become the president. Well, what's going to happen in a very concrete sense that affects millions of lives, not just in the United States, but around the world. And so it's not doom scrolling. In fact, quite the opposite. I feel like there is, to a certain extent, one of the animating. things that perhaps has enabled Trump to continue to do as well as he's doing in the national

polls is a sense of kind of collective helplessness slash averting of the gaze, perhaps a sense of powerlessness like, well, what are we going to do? And maybe it won't be so bad after all. Now is the time to think in a very concrete and specific way of the ways in which a Trump victory can and would have a specific effect. not only on American policy, but on individual lives. One of the most striking things about the biography or biography and power that you and Peter Baker wrote about Trump was the day-to-day chaos in the Oval Office and the seeming incompetence of that White House.

And at certain points read that book with a certain sense of, well, he's certainly an authoritarian, but he's bad at it. In other words, he didn't have the ruthless efficiency of some historical authoritarian's and that more malevolent things could have been accomplished in a four-year period than were. I'm going to be, you know, he keeps, we love this guy. He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no, other than day one. Will he be better at being an authoritarian in 2024 if he wins?

And who would assist him in the effort? A couple important changes would be taking place here. because his big takeaway was basically I didn't have enough loyalists surrounding me. And he thinks that was his own critique of his first term, you know, if he was sharing it with you. And he's going to be looking for people who he defines loyalty essentially as willingness to carry out my agenda, whatever that agenda may be. You know, the other thing is no guardrails. Okay. So he's proved in his first term that impeachment is a.

essentially a dead letter as far as Donald Trump is concerned when it comes to acting as a constraint on him because he would have be under this scenario we're talking about he's reinstalled in office after having survived not one but two impeachments and essentially shown the toothlessness of impeachment as the tool of constraint that the founders envision because there's no scenario in our divided country where really a president of any party is going to be faced with a senate that has the overwhelming majority that would be required to have a Senate conviction. So no impeachment. And then the final guardrail that's completely gone here, of course, David, is that Donald Trump

wouldn't be running again for another term in office. And, you know, so again, he's not even worried about facing the voters if he were to have another term in office. So then we're in a totally different territory. So for all intents and purposes, it's fair to say he would be absent the constraint of having to face the voters as other presidents and politicians do. Within the realm of the possible, and within the realm of the possible for a man of Joe Biden's current capacities, achievements, and downsides, what is his scenario to turn this around? What you get publicly is also, to a striking degree, what you get privately.

You know, speaking privately with senior Democrats recently, they've all. also been asking these questions of the White House, and they get back essentially the same answer, which is, we've got this. What the hell? What does that mean we've got this, though? That's not a sure way. We're going to gut it out. We, you know, the fundamentals are much better than you think.

For those who think that Trump is a uniquely pernicious assault on the American system, there's not going to be one hour of the year in which you can comfortably rest on the idea that Biden is secure. in victory. Susan Glasser, thank you so much. We'll be back to you again and again. David, I'm going to go and pull back the covers over my head. I'm afraid after this conversation. Susan Glasser's best-selling account of Donald Trump's presidency, written with Peter Baker, is called The Diviner. You can read her weekly column on Washington at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon.

Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbeth of Tuneiards with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.