The New Yorker Radio Hour - New Yorker Reporters on Impeachment

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

David Remnick asks five New Yorker contributors about the nascent impeachment proceedings against the President. Susan Glasser, the magazine’s Washington correspondent, notes that Republicans have attacked the inquiry but have not exactly defended the substance of Trump’s phone call to Zelensky. Joshua Yaffa, who has been reporting from Kiev, notes Ukraine’s disappointment in the conduct of the American President; Jane Mayer describes how an impeachment scenario in the era of Fox News could play out very differently than it did in the age of Richard Nixon; Jelani Cobb reflects on the likelihood of violence; and Jill Lepore argues that, regardless of the outcome, impeachment is the only constitutional response to Donald Trump’s actions. “This is the Presidential equivalent of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue,” she tells Remnick.  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 The New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. No modern president has ever been convicted on impeachment charges. Richard Nixon resigned before the vote ever took place. Bill Clinton was impeached, but he was acquitted in the Senate, and his popularity went up. What will happen with this wildly unpredictable presidency, the Trump presidency? is pure conjecture. Every day brings a new revelation, a new turn.

There are so many big questions about what's going on right now, and we're going to tackle at least a few of them with some of the writers who are covering the situation for the New Yorker. We'll start with Susan Glasser, a veteran of D.C. politics who writes our weekly column on Washington in the age of Trump. I reached her on Skype. Hi, this is Susan.

Hey, Susan, it's David. How are you? Hey, great. I'm sorry to interrupt you. lunch, but I can't help but ask, what is the mood like in Washington this week? It seems to me like it's, it hasn't been this way in a very long time. You know, I saw somebody referring to it as Shocktober, which is pretty silly, but Washington has these weeks, days when the wheels feel like they're coming off. And that's usually in the early days of a scandal or investigation when tons of information starts to break free. And I feel like usually, you know, it could end up

being wrong, but usually in Washington there's a pretty strong conventional wisdom and people have a sense of how the politics of something are going to shake out. And here you will run into people who will allow that they can see it both ways, that the beginning of impeachment could be the day that Donald Trump won re-election. And, you know, you can get Democrats who tell you that and yet nonetheless feel they need to proceed. You can have Republicans say the opposite, which is, you know, I know that's been the conventional wisdom, but we're really terrified that this is going to be awful for us. Now, if I'm a congressional Republican, how do I see a decent outcome for me and the party here? Is there a template of defense that they can look to

historically? Well, they seem to be quite upset just that there's not been a more vigorous defense. And obviously it does vary by district. But most of the Republicans right now, they aren't even defending Trump on the facts. There's a lot of shouting about the whistleblower, about a coup in progress. There's a lot of demands to investigate Joe Biden, to investigate Mueller and the basis on his report, basically to obfuscate and to throw up kind of chaff. But when you strip it away, it's interesting that they're not. really defending Trump.

So there was a routine on Saturday Night Live in which there was a kind of typical Washington panel, you'll forgive me. And this one is saying it's a turning point and this is horrible and this horrible. And this kind of wised up African American academic says, yeah, but it's not going to matter. And there's sense in that. I mean, how many scandals have we had? We've had hush money payments to porn stars. We've had the Mueller report which has 10 indications of possible obstruction of justice.

This is now consigned to history, it almost seems. Is there any reason to believe that Donald Trump can't survive this? Look, I was really, really struck to your point. There's a new poll out today that's getting circulation here in Washington that would underscore this, a Monmouth survey that shows that 40% of Republicans believe that Trump raised the issue of investigating Joe Biden and his son in the phone call with the Ukrainian president, even though that is actually in the transcript that the White House itself released. So, I mean, propaganda works, telling a lie over and over and over again, at least enough

people start to believe it. You asked on Twitter whether we should call this whole affair Ukraine Gay. Has anyone been able to come up with a name that works better yet? You know, it's funny that you mentioned that. I was going to put that in my column this week. I got thousands of responses. Some of my favorite were moron contrast. John Oliver, John Oliver says Stupid Watergate.

Right, stupid Watergate. A lot of people said that. Ukrainian won. My favorite response, though, was Monday. Because that's when I made the tweet on Monday. Susan, thanks so much. Thank you, David. The only thing that matters is the transcript of the actual conversation that I had with the president of Ukraine.

It was perfect. Joshua Yafa is a reporter who's usually based in Moscow, and he's been covering the Ukraine scandal from Kiev. Hello? Hey, Josh. How are you? Hi. Good, good. It's good to talk to you. Not long ago, this country, the United States, was consumed with the question of whether Donald Trump sought Russia's help. in influencing the 2016 election. And here we are talking about the president attempting to get Ukraine to influence the 2020 election.

How did these two stories kind of nestle together? Well, it all goes back to the counter narrative that Trump and those around him tried to come up with as they were facing the allegations that grew out of the Mueller report about there and the campaign's interactions with various Russian entities. And it was the search for contradictory or exculpatory or diversionary stories that led them, the president and his allies, first and foremost, Rudy Giuliani, to look to Ukraine. And it was there where Giuliani had told to him this conspiracy theory about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, and the former prosecutor general of Ukraine. Now, when you're in the offices of Ukrainian officials these days and you're talking about these things, what is the kind of emotional valence that you're getting? They must feel like this is the last position that we want to be in is in between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and it's the biggest rock and the biggest hard place imaginable.

That's exactly right. The first thing I think they feel is something between confusion and disappointment. After all, to the extent that American presidential administrations have put pressure on their counterparts in Kiev over the years, it's been essentially to strengthen rule of law, to keep politics out of the judiciary and the law enforcement system, to make sure that presidents weren't using or abusing the Ukrainian legal system for political benefit. And so this sad irony wasn't lost on anyone that now it was an American president who apparently was using his office to put pressure on his Ukrainian counterpart to use that country's judicial system for political ends. The roles were reversed.

And that was certainly unexpected and I think quite dispiriting for a lot of Ukrainian officials who were used to if they were going to get a lecture from their American counterparts. it was really to do the exact opposite. Josh, thanks so much. Thank you. Lindsay was saying, I never knew you were so nice. That was a perfect conversation. I heard Rick Scott today say that was a perfect conversation. How can you impeach somebody on that conversation?

Jane Mayer is a veteran chronicler of Washington scandals going all the way back to Iran-Contra, and maybe even a little bit before. Hey, Jane, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Jane, you've been in Washington for, you know, a few years, and you've been around for some scandals. Does this feel different?

Well, everything's different under Trump. It's just all a little bit wilder. How do you mean? Usually, when you have a scandal, you've got kind of an organized pushback coming back from, say, the White House. In this case, you've just got sort of a reign of crazy twitters coming from the president, calling his accuser's names. I guess that is different.

There's no kind of organized effort here, it seems like. And some of the language that's coming from these tweets is really remarkably extreme. Meaning treason, civil war, deep state, all the rest. Absolutely. I mean, the word treason being used by a president, as we know, basically, what he's talking about is that the whistleblower, If he were treasonous, he's basically saying he should be killed. And so it has a kind of an unhinged feel.

Has the intelligence community turned on Trump? Is there any validity to that argument? Well, I mean, by all accounts, the whistleblower comes out of the intelligence community. And if so, he's one of their own, and he played it by the book. And I think there's a pretty strong feeling within the intelligence community that it's threatening when the president is talking about treason and also about unmasking a member of the intelligence community. I mean, that's kind of a serious affront to them.

And so you've actually seen a number of key intelligence figures go on the air. Mike Morel, for instance, who was acting director of the CIA, made a very careful but interesting appearance on television in which he basically supported the whistleblower. Nothing can be certain about what the future holds for the Trump presidency, and I'm not asking you to predict too much. but the specter is coming of a possibility of something that you wrote about, President Pence. You wrote a long piece about Pence. Would a President Pence be at a policy level, all that different from President Trump, do you think?

Very different. How so? Pence is an idiologue. He's somebody who cares about policy, and he is a devout evangelical Christian. He cares about all of the issues that, animate the religious right. He's very anti-abortion. He's had some very controversial views about gay rights. And he's also someone who's been in bed for most of his career with the big money in the Republican Party. And Trump has cast himself as independent of those big money donors.

I mean, recently, since he's taken office, he's cozyed up to them. But he ran against them as a populace. And Pence is very different. And I actually interviewed Steve Bannett at one point about Pence, and he surprisingly said to me, he thought that a presidency in Pence's hands, the White House would be controlled by the Cokes. It was a real concern. And that's the Cope brothers, who are the, you know, some of the biggest donors have been traditionally in the Republican Party. So Pence would be very different. He'd also work better with the Hill because he knows how Washington works. In a way, Jane, these are early days, but is there a scenario that you think that the Senate turns on Donald Trump, if articles of impeachment are brought to the Senate?

Senate? I mean, anything's possible. It doesn't look like that today. But, you know, people tell me on the hill that a lot of Republicans in the Senate dislike Trump personally. What's holding them there is that he's got a hold on the base of the party whose votes they need. And if that changes, they'll change. Now, in Watergate, Nixon's base of support shriveled to almost nothing. And as we famously remember, Republican leaders of the House and the Senate came to the White House and told him it was time to resign. Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and all the rest. The world is different now,

and the ability to retain your base through Fox News and social media and all the other instruments that didn't exist in 1974. That seems to indicate that it might be easier for Trump to hold on to the base to the bloody end. Yeah, I mean, he has an alternative communications system, and Fox is a big part of that.

And in fact, it's interesting because... But Fox seems to be fracturing. Somewhat. Its news side is peeling off a little bit. But when Roger Ales founded Fox, Roger Ales, you have to remember, was a veteran of the Nixon administration. And he founded Fox partly in reaction to Watergate, saying, we're not going to let this happen again.

Next time, we're going to have our own way of reaching our voters. So that they could retain the base and survive something as bad as Watergate. Right. Jane, thanks so much. Great to be with you. I saw many of the senators talking about it, many of the congressmen talking about it. Not a thing wrong. Unless you heard the Adam Schiff version where he made up my conversation.

He actually made it up. It should be criminal. It should be treasonous. Hey, Jolani. Hey, how are you? Jolani Cobb has covered justice and many other issues in the Trump era. He's a staff writer and a historian currently teaching at Columbia University. You know, in the last few days, Trump has accused his critic.

of treason, and he's made ominous and remarks about punishment for the whistleblower, talk of civil war. Does any of this have any precedent in American history? You know, I've thought about this, and I can't really find anything that

compares. And the one thing that I say that's really interesting, though, about this, you know, the comparisons to the civil war, is that, you know, in what he called, I think, a civil war, a civil warlike fracture and a retweet of his. But the weird thing about that is that when we start

talking about the civil war, it takes us not to 1860, but to 1776, which is dynamics that were present at the beginning of the Republic that over the course of decades to patch together and ultimately culminate in a fracticidal war nearly a century later. I don't think, the fate of the Trump presidency is anywhere near that scale. Jelani, if that was meant as a note of reassurance, I appreciate it. But shouldn't we take it seriously when the president of the United States says things about arresting people and incites violence at rallies and in his rhetoric? Yeah, I do think that we should take it seriously.

And I think that's been the kind of tricky line that people have tried to finesse since he's emerged as a public figure, which is, you know, clearly he has a tendency toward hyperbole, but that doesn't mean that we should completely ignore everything, the entire underlying sentiment. And so we've seen in his campaign rallies that he has the possibility of riling people up into, you know, committing acts of violence. We've seen that in other instances, people who are maybe unwell are inspired to other acts of violence, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, or Syak and mailing pipe bombs to various people who he thought were critics or enemies of Donald Trump.

That said, who knows where this is going to go? The thing that concerns me is not so much his potential to inspire violence as his capacity to actually author it. Is that your greatest fear that he is so unpredictable, and that's a mild word for it, impulsive, that he may react to this political crisis in a way that's even more dangerous than the crisis itself. Things I think that people on the left have happening, I guess, if he can do Trump presidency, is that he has been strikingly dovish in terms of his actual military engagements.

But we also don't know what that volatile personality could do, especially we know that Trump is particularly attuned to humiliation and that he seems to be really, driven by any instance in which he perceived himself as being embarrassed and so on, what an impeachment might unleash in that kind of psyche, I have no idea, and I don't think any of us do. Jolani Cobb, thank you very much. Thank you. Here's where I fooled him.

They never thought I'd release the conversation. They never thought in a million years that I'd release the conversation. Staff writer Jalipur is also a professor of history at Harvard University, and her recent recent book called These Truths is a survey of pretty much the entirety of American history. Jill, you recently wrote a kind of suma, a book on the full arc of American history. How do the things that President Trump is accused of lately compare to the allegations against previous presidents like Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton? They're very bad, but that's not what impeachment is for. You can't be impeachments.

for being a creeper, a bad president. And that's, I think, one of the things that's been tricky to the question, you know, the last week and a half has been, how much worse is this, this latest set of revelations? And what do you make of the revelations? Do you think they're bad enough for articles of impeachment and possible conviction in the Senate? I do. I do without hesitation. I think in terms of the House, the articles of impeachment are not.

really a choice, but I think a duty that members of Congress have, a constitutional duty. What happens in the Senate is a different matter. I mean, it's easy to focus on individual senators and personalities in the state of the Republican Party, but the structural matters really do prevail here. It is a very high bar. It's going through a narrow window after climbing a very high ladder to get their conviction in the Senate. And so I think that's why you kind of just see people spinning around. Well, has there been any fundamental historical change in the country which has enabled a president to be this brazen?

Or was it just that his predecessors exercised more restraint? Or did that? It's chiefly a deterrent, right? It's the gun on the mantle that not only never goes off, but people rarely even notice that it's there. Since there've only ever been, you know, two and a half impeachments, we presume the presidents have always known that it's there, and it governs to some degree their tendency to abuse their own power. So Trump is an ungoverned person, right? It's just as a human being.

He doesn't govern himself. So it's not surprising that he's not deterred by the threat of impeachment, I think, and to the contrary, probably thrilled by it. What is a good outcome here? Historically speaking, you describe the predicament we're in in every manner. What's a good outcome? come here. Optimism.

I, I, you know, you're always provisionally optimistic compared to so many other scholars and journalists. Yeah, I am testing it. I might be about the powers of the presidency, relative to the other branches of government.

It is a, you know, for those of us who teach civics and history, it's a really important moment to think about what are the checks against the power of the executive. You know, there's congressional oversight. their elections and there's impeachment. And if congressional oversight fails

and the impeachable offense is interfering with elections by soliciting the aid of a foreign power, then really all you have left is impeachment. Actually, there's a lot of clarity, even in just understanding that that's the nature of the dilemma, the constitutional dilemma. But more likely, I hate to say, but more likely is an outcome in which articles of impeachment are written.

They go to the Senate, and the core of Trump's support does not, not shrivel, and therefore the senators act on that and dismiss these articles, make them go away, and he's still in office. It's a principal thing to do. It was still the obligation of the House to send those articles of impeachment to the Senate. And it will be the burden of history that lands on the shoulders of those senators. I mean, this is the presidential equivalent of shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue.

Jill Laporte, and we heard from Jolani Cobb, Jane Mayer, Josh Yoffa, and Susan Glasser. You can read all their reporting on the impeachment inquiry at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. 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 Tuneiards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.