The New Yorker Radio Hour - How the Journalist John Nichols Became Another January 6th Conspiracy-Theory Target

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

The veteran political reporter John Nichols was taking his daughter to the orthodontist on January 6, 2021, the fateful day when the transfer of Presidential power was temporarily derailed by a mob at the Capitol. On March 4th of this year, the former President Donald Trump is scheduled to stand trial for his actions on and around that day, and, in a court filing last November, his attorneys implied that the government is withholding information about whether Nichols, and others,  had a role to play in the Capitol attack. This bizarre move not only thrust Nichols uncomfortably into the center of yet another January 6th conspiracy theory but raised some questions about the seriousness of the defense that Trump intends to mount in the case. “It looks like they’re throwing things at the wall,” Nichols tells David Remnick. “Just trying for dozens and dozens of possible conspiracy theories.” And, though Nichols has endured only teasing from his colleagues for getting name-checked in Trump discovery documents, he notes that many other journalists have been targeted and doxxed by far-right actors. False allegations like the John Nichols conspiracy theory can be almost amusing, but they are a dire indicator of the state of American politics. “There are people who desperately want to drive the deepest possible wedges,” Nichols says. “To believe that those who disagree with them don’t just disagree with them but are actually evil.” 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. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David Remnick. Late in November, Donald Trump's legal team filed discovery documents in the federal criminal case against him, which should be a routine legal matter. But the documents from Trump's lawyers were rife with heated political rhetoric and conspiracy theories about what had happened on January 6th. His lawyers referred to foreign actors who sought to, quote,

undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process. They mentioned Antifa, of course, because why not? And they also wanted information from the Justice Department on John Nichols, or any similar persons who were encouraged or participated in

any illegal activities on January 6th. Some January 6th conspiracy theorists believe that John Nichols, who was in Wisconsin, on January 6th, not in D.C., appeared at the Capitol in order to trick Trump supporters into ransacking the place to make them look bad. They've got like a nickname for him and some video they think they've identified him on the scaffold. So that is the caliber of argument you could expect from the Trump legal team. False flag from John Nichols of the nation. So who is this John Nichols?

He's a political reporter based in Wisconsin, the author of more than a dozen books, and he was nowhere near the Capitol on January 6th. How did you end up in this bizarre position of learning that that people thought you were involved in January 6th somehow? About a year and a half ago, I got a email from Caitlin Graff, who is the publicity director for the nation. And she said, this is going to make you laugh. And she sent me a post from someplace that said, you know, was John Nichols involved in January 6th? was he, you know, one of the people, like, urging people to storm the Capitol. And it had a kind of a grainy picture of me from many years ago, sadly, to say, before I got my bifocals and when I was perhaps a bit more youthful.

And next to a picture of somebody who, I guess, was involved in January 6th, right? Or potentially. So they sent me this. She sent me it, and I thought, well, that's, you know, weird. So hold up. So based on one photo where you maybe resent. a guy who was at the insurrection. The internet says liberal John Nichols of the nation was at the capital instigating violence. That's it? I've been pretty public for a long time, and I've

had people say, you know, wild and negative things about me in the past. So it's not, you know, this isn't the sort of thing that shocks me. And then in November, right around Thanksgiving, I got a call from a very good reporter for the Washington Post who said, you're not going to believe this, but your name came up in the filings by Trump's lawyers regarding the D.C. trial on his attempts to overturn the election. Right. And I said, you've got to be, really? And so she sent me a link to the documents. I went in. And this is sadly, David, this is where it kind of loses its romance, because it turned out I was one of 35 line items in this discovery document in which they were going after stuff from Nancy Pelosi and the FBI and the CIA and all sorts of other folks, I guess.

But there I was. Just for the record, what were you doing January 6th? I was working really hard. And I suspected you were as well. January 6th, 2021 was a very kind of like a tightly constructed day for me. I got up early and took my daughter to the orthodontist. And if you have a daughter whose orthodontist age, what you know is, that those last appointments are really very, very happy appointments because you're about to stop,

you know, paying a lot of money. But so I took her over and, and we, you know, came back and I said, well, we got to get back by, by, you know, a certain time, you know, like around noonish, little afternoon, because I got to turn on C-SPAN. I'm going to sit in front of the TV like the election geek I am, and I'm going to watch what's happening in the Capitol. And ignorantly, I had not taken, you know, the Trump rally and things like that, all that seriously. But I really thought that the action was going to be inside the Capitol. And I was super interested in the Republican objections, all the stuff that would play out, how Pence would handle it. And I planned to write a big piece on that.

Well, a couple minutes in to watching it, I saw things begin to get chaotic. Somebody ran in, Pence got pulled out and stuff like that. It took me, I don't know, it took me a few minutes to figure out exactly what was going on. And even then I didn't really fully understand it. And then I started doing what, again, David, the sort of things you would do. I started calling people who were on the scene. While the capital chaos was still going on, I started writing a big piece on, you know, what this would mean constitutionally. So you were doing your job.

You were doing your job in Madison, Wisconsin, minding your own business, as it were, except for the business of the nation. But now, how does this affect your life, though? And what does it tell you about Trump's case that you're dragged into this? So those are two very separate questions. Number one, it affects my life in that all of my friends are teasing me now. And I have had people from all over the country call me. So that's one side of it. And it hasn't.

I mean, I think that there are people who journalists who are in much more difficult positions, right, and who have people who target them for all sorts of reasons. There have been people doxed throughout the press, and it's pretty unrelenting. Yeah. Yeah. And so what it has been, though, and this is what I do. I write about politics. And I read about that intersection of media and politics and those points at which the process is strained.

And what this is done for me is to actually tell me that the process is much more strained and much more, I think, dangerous than perhaps we even imagined. And the first part about it is, you know, you asked about Trump's case. What I'll say about Trump's case is this. It looks a lot weaker than I thought. And I thought it was pretty weak. Because of your presence there as a witness. Yeah. Yeah.

It looks like they're throwing things at the wall, right? You know, just trying for, you know, dozens and dozens of, you know, possible conspiracy theories. And digging pretty deep into conspiracy theories. I'm talking with reporter John Nichols. We'll continue in a moment. What conspiracy could John Nichols, writer for the nation, possibly participate in? And have you heard from any Trump lawyers? No. I've not.

Are you going to have to testify in any potential trial? I'm willing to. You know, but I have not been contacted. You'll be testifying about orthodontry, I suppose, and reporting. Well, I don't know that much about it, David. So my hope is that they would take me into the political, you know, some of the deeper. I would hope it would be testifying about the arcane constitutional realities of the transition of power in the United States. To me, it's very interesting what this says about both the Trump

defense and really in many ways about our politics. And that is that there's, I think there are people who desperately want to drive the deepest possible wedges, right, to believe that those who disagree with them don't just disagree with them, but they're actually evil. But in this case, when it gets beyond the kind of troll world or the fringe of the internet and comes into a very major legal case, right, and a filing as regards that case, that is a big deal. Has it led you to look even more carefully at Trump and social media and what have you learned about it? What I think about it at this point is the decay of our communications and those communications which, you know, underpin democracy, is far more severe. than I thought before this came along. How do you mean?

Because we know that local media is dying in a lot of the country. Journalists are getting laid off. That internet news operations are not filling the void. And so we know that there's a gap out there. There's an information gap. And that that gap is increasingly, especially on social media, being filled by lies, propaganda, spin. And we also know that in this era,

it's possible to produce those lies in much more sophisticated ways. So the gap is an opportunity for political operatives. Yeah. And for not even the highest level political operatives, for folks even on the fringe to fill a void and say, well, here's the explanation for things you can't understand. And so I do think this relates to a collapse of traditional media. Not that I'm a big fan of traditional media.

I've probably been one of the biggest critics over the years. But it relates to the reality that we no longer have those reliable known sources. Now increasingly, people do rely on, on, you know, a Twitter feed or on something on TikTok or something like that, which I do too. I, you know, I want to acknowledge I'm one of those people. I rely more and more on social media than I used to. And you do that because, you know, it's. Because if you have a distrust of the New York Times and the Washington Post or because... No, it's because it's easy and fast.

Yeah. I have criticized the Washington Post and the New York Times. I have to look back in the index and see if I criticize the New Yorker. Fair enough. Undoubtedly not. But I think you can have two things in your head at the same time. Yeah. I think you can recognize that traditional media is flawed and that has failed us in times of war

and in all sorts of other, you know, challenging moments. I think there are many folks who will tell us that it's, you know, failing even now in Israel, Palestine, Gaza. And so we can have those discussions. But separate from that is the fact that it isn't there, right? That at the local level and even the regional level, increasingly, those reliable sources aren't there. And so the gap gets filled.

I think for Trump, that's been very advantageous, right? Trump was really, in many ways, the first politician of a new era and that his ability to communicate directly to people and his understanding that the way to do that is to tell people that everything is urgent, that everything is breaking. And also that there are really bad players who are conspiring against you. And you better just rely on this stream of information because if you believe anything else, right, it's unreliable and it's probably, there to harm you. John, is Trump uniquely good at this?

There's a similar story when Trump shared a photo from the courtroom of his civil trial in New York, and he claimed that a man sitting way in the back of the room was the son of the judge, Arthur Engarron, somebody that Trump really hates. And that was completely wrong.

The man he picked out was a court reporter for the New York Post, in fact. But that didn't stop the claim from getting a lot of traction in Republican circles. Are we going to be seeing more and more of this kind of thing as the election year progresses. 100%. Absolutely.

In fact, that's why I'm interested in this. You see a $148 million judgment reached in the Giuliani defamation trial of two black former election workers in Georgia. He falsely accused them of stealing the election on behalf of Joe Biden, and that doesn't seem to have a sobering effect on Rudy Giuliani at all. He's still out there defaming them. Do you regret what you did to show... Of course I don't regret it. I told the truth.

They were engaged in changing votes. There's no proof of that. Oh, you're damn right there is. Stay tuned. What will it take for MAGA extremists to back down from character assassination and things like that when an entire media machinery, the kind you've been describing, remains powerful and vicious and unending? as a historian of the American experience, and I've written a lot of books about American history, we have moments of fever, and then we come out of them.

We calm ourselves. The period before the Civil War, the period of the first Red Scare, the period of the isolationism in the 30s into World War II, and then the Red Scare that followed it, if you look at what we saw in the 60s, you know, assassination after assassination after assassination of prominent figures, you can get to a point where you think, wow, this is, you know, it's all falling apart, right? And I think a lot of people are there now.

I mean, what happens in 2024 will give us a very, very strong signal of where this country is going. If I was to predict one thing, it would be a decisive election result in America is something that has the potential to break the fever. If we're committed to this small D democratic experiment, right, then we have to believe that the way out is to have a decisive. result one way or the other. I don't mean to deflate our one moment of optimism or hope, but we heard all during Trump's first term that, you know, if they got defeated at the ballot box in 20, and then again they were in 2022, that the fever would break. And yet the MAGA Republicans just keep coming. So are they our new normal or will they eventually retreat and become something different or marginal? I don't think there are a new normal. I know this is an odd thing to say,

but I have a regard for his skills as a communicator. He clearly knows how to kind of, you know, get hit with something and stand right back up and push back even harder. I think it is somewhat unique to him. I don't see many other figures. I mean, you have a whole bunch of Republican candidates are trying to recreate it. And so I do think there is a chance that Trump is a unique figure. As we've had unique figures in the past who, you know, kind of build a party around them. Trump has defined the Republican Party. There's no doubt of that. We are stuck in the United States with a two-party system.

I think that's problematic in many ways. I wish we had a multi-party system. And so if somebody dominates one of those two parties, they're going to define it. That definition is going to continue for so long as that person is in play. I do think that both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are going to have to redefine themselves. because right now the Democratic Party is defined by Trump, right, as well as the Republican Party. They're both kind of like, you know, revolving around this thing.

And do I think that's the point at which a fever breaks? I think potentially, yeah. I am open to that prospect because as my wife tells me, I am a very optimistic person. John Nichols of the Nation, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. John Nichols' books include coronavirus criminals and pandemic profiteers, and most recently, it's okay to be angry about capitalism, a book he wrote with Bernie Sanders. The federal trial of Donald Trump was scheduled to begin on March 4th, but that date is now in limbo

as an appeals court decides whether a former president is immune to prosecution for alleged crimes committed while in office. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick. listening. I hope your new year is off to a wonderful start. 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 Garbis of Tuneiards with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra

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