The New Yorker Radio Hour - Podcast Extra: A Hundred Days of the Trump Presidency

Episode Date: May 18, 2017

Lydia Polgreen, Eli Lake, Joy Reid, and David Fahrenthold talk about the challenges the press faces in covering Trump. 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 a bonus podcast for the New Yorker Radio Hour. It was recorded at Public Forum, a series of events moderated by David Remnick at the public theater in New York. This event marked the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Joining David to talk about the challenges of covering this presidency were Lydia Pullgreen, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, Eli Lake, a correspondent for Bloomberg View, MSNBC host Joy Reid, and Washington Post reporter David Ferenholt. So it's 100 days of the Trump presidency. How are you feeling, okay? You're all right. Yeah.

And the only good thing about, in my mind, Eli may disagree, the good thing about this is that time moves so slowly that we will never age. It'll be all right. Four years will seem like 20, but it'll only be four. Everybody was worried in November that the press was going to come under fire, the First Amendment we suspended, we'd all be in trouble. Meanwhile, I go to work.

Everything works. Computers are on. No trouble, right? Lydia? So far, so good. Okay. But what is the relationship now between the press and the President of the United States? Is it any different than with any other president? I mean, I would say that there is an extraordinary level

of extremely intimate access to the President. I mean, I'm stunned by how many reporters he's talked to one-on-one, both informal and informal settings. The difficulty with this is that nothing he says is of any use. I mean, if the president speaks and the things that he says don't make any sense, what are we supposed to do with that? I mean, what do we take away from that? What does access mean when there is no truth or falsehood to what the president's saying, if he's going to change his mind back and forth 1,500 times?

So, I mean, it was very, very difficult to get access to the Obama White House. But if you got to sit down with President Obama, you would make news on something of substance. But to my question about the First Amendment and fears about attacks on the press, yes, he said attack the fake news. and he dist that and the other thing. But he calls the New York Times failing and fake news. You've gotten the same honorific at the Washington Post. I have not been as blessed, but I live in hope. And for circulation reasons.

But, you know, what are you bitching about? Well, I think we... I mean, my sense is that he talks. to Maggie Haberman at the Times and the equivalence at the Washington Post more than most members of his family. Trump sees the media as the most important barometer of him succeeding as president. He sees us as the mirror of himself. He doesn't look to things beyond us. He doesn't look to it. He looks to polls in some degree. He doesn't look to results. He looks to the media and how they're covering

him as the daily barometer of whether he's succeeding or failing as president. So he doesn't really hate you? No, he needs us. No president has ever needed us to prop himself up or to reaffirm himself in the way that Trump does. What's the difference between him and other presidents in that sense? Well, I think other presidents had a sense that they, well, they ignored us in some cases. They tried to reach directly to the public. They had a sense of accomplishment that went beyond us or around us. And they didn't, I think rightly so, look to us as the people who would tell you you're doing a good job. Obama talked famously by hating Mourting Joe.

He hated that sort of chattering class. And Trump, that kind of show, and I think it's more Fox and Friends now, that kind of show is where he turns to sort of, that's his view on the world. It's not the CIA or the FBI or whoever else. It's those, those folks. I think it's a little bit more complicated than that because his relationship, which is now on the outs with Steve Bannon, is deeply ideological and it's deeply disruptive to what is a kind of elite right-left

consensus on things like free trade and I think free immigration. And that represents a real challenge in a significant way. And I do think that there's an element of Trump that believes this. He's talked about China taking our jobs, even though his foreign policy has been very kind to China in recent weeks. But to look at this in another way, we have a moment where I think those of us in the cosmopolitan elite, many consider themselves part of a resistance and that Trump is a representative of a kind of American fascism. But I would submit that this kind of lack of any core, or to put it other way, fascists are much better at consolidating power and implementing an agenda than Donald Trump has been in the last 100 days. And this in some ways should force us to rethink perhaps this mode of

resistance politically and to look at this more like an opposition because there's plenty to oppose with Donald Trump. At least so far, though, I don't think he is that kind of extinction level threat that we were all worried about back in November. Well, you know, I think of Donald Trump as if you look at this sort of four million people on average a night who watch Fox News, who watch the prime time in Fox News, if one of them were to become president tomorrow, they wouldn't be materially different than Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a guy who spends a lot of time watching Fox News and watching cable TV. To the extent that he has beliefs,

they are no different than the beliefs of most of his voters. So he thinks sort of on a surface level, China bad. China is bad. They're hurting us. They're killing us on trade. But if you, to the point of the AP interview, sat down and tried to have a nuanced, detailed policy conversation with Donald Trump about China,

you would get an incoherent sort of mumble, a jumble of sort of words that wouldn't really mean anything. Because it doesn't have any policy depth. Which does you make you more afraid, or it makes you really? In other words, what I'm saying is, we've had 100 days, Hitler did not come to power. Right? And in fact, all those things that you thought he believed with unbelievable ferocity was all fungible.

He had 10 minutes with Chinese leadership. Suddenly, not so much. You know, suddenly, I liked him very much, and they're not currency manipulators. Because he liked him. He's like, he likes me. And if he likes me, then I guess he's not so bad. I mean, I literally, the person who and I won't take credit for it, so that it's malevolence, malevolence tempered by incompetence.

And that's why he isn't dangerous. If they were mildly competent, we'd be in trouble. But he is not only sort of, he's surrounded by incompetence. But that's the question of when competence comes into play on situation like foreign affairs where you might hope for some competence as opposed to hardcore ideology, that's another matter. Is it not, Eli? It is another matter.

as somebody who, I'm very grateful that there is not a Yalta II conference with Russia right now, dividing up the world with this guy who just meddled in our election. That would be a disaster. Instead, what we have are pretty rocky relationship between the U.S. and Russia, and I've seen from the Trump administration, and you have to give him some credit, he appointed people, or he chose people for his cabinet, who were much tougher on Russia than he campaigned. He said things that were outrageous for a president or a presidential candidate to say.

He compared American leaders to Vladimir Putin and he said, well, you know, we think we have killers. I mean, I couldn't believe that. I wrote a whole column called Code Pink Republican. So in that respect, we should be glad that he wasn't competent in implementing this dangerous agenda of embracing Russia and thinking that they could be a reliable partner in a lot of ways. on the other hand, it should give us pause that if he can turn so quickly, he could turn again. But at the same time, I've seen

we've gone from very haphazard first couple weeks to the beginning of a process. HR McMaster, I think, has begun to sort of implement a normal national security council where various people have their turf fights, and it's beginning to look a lot more normal. And we just saw that, you know,

they said some things about the Iran deal, but they recertified it. They haven't done these radical things that were promised, and I think in that sense it's pretty good. Now, Joy, it strikes me that if Mitt Romney or John McCain, in other words, another species of Republican, had committed any one of these sins, the effect on their electoral prospects and or presidencies

would have been different, that Trump has something else, there's something else happening here about Trump where he's more immune. I think he has appealed to that triumvirate of nationalist, particular nationalist views that are sweeping the entire world ever since 9-11. Islamophobia, which is swept Western Europe as well as the United States, a real anxiety about immigration, non-white immigration, and a hatred of free trade. Those things are very powerful. They're also the third one, the trade one, is what drove Bernie voters, too.

So there's a real anxiety there that Trump taps into, so he doesn't need to know policy or no specifics. He sounds like them. Again, he is sort of in the same milieu as all the other guys watching Fox News his age. He sounds like them, and they like them no matter what he does. The traditional left-right parties, are essentially, the dichotomy is essentially collapsing. I mean, none of the establishment parties

that represent the traditional left or the traditional right, they were completely left out in the cold. Eli, you wanted to respond. I do think that there's a reason why Trump supporters call themselves the deplorables. And it wasn't just the, I think you're correct that they're concerned about Islam, immigration, and free trade. But, you know, it's true that if you have a job at Carrier, globalization may create more jobs in the American economy,

but it won't create more jobs for you in your community. They have a point. For 30 years, American right and left elites have ignored their point of view. And the result is in this election, these people who were, angry and have been frustrated and feel like they've had their elites lie to them, have been told that they have some sort of psychological ailment, that they're paranoid or they're diluted or something like that, I think that they became incredibly frustrated. And they saw Trump as the way in which to infuriate the elites that really couldn't, that found him so deplorable. Trump as a hand grenade.

Yeah. And I think that there, I guess, and I consider myself as, as part of this cozy elite bubble. So I'm speaking as after the election, that is something that I really started thinking about and, you know, journalistically, which was how did we miss this? And what is it that, why do we just assume all of these debates about free trade?

And to a certain extent, and I have no patience for the anti-Muslim bigotry, but there is also a kind of elite way that we've spoken about the issue of Islam as if we can never say, that there are specific problems that are going on within that faith, or else we get into this zone of, oh my God, this is very problematic.

You know, and I think that that opens up a space for real demagogues and bigots. So, I don't know. I mean, I would have liked to have seen more self-reflection on the part of us, as opposed to you sort of looking at these communities and saying, well, you know, this is just your superstition. But can I just say, I just disagree with the idea

that these people have been ignored. I think they are obsessed over. I think we spend so much time examining them and trying to understand that. Precisely, that's exactly right. But by the way, American culture throughout, particularly the 20th century, if you look at the whole early first half of the 20th century, who were the heroes? The cowboy, right?

The Rosie, the Riveter, the working man. There's a whole language of politics that is centered around the hardworking, working class. politics obsesses over them, the middle class, the waitress. Remember we had waitress moms, we've had NASCAR dads, we've had soccer moms, all of them carved out as the group that you must win to win an election. There's never been a group that has had more sort of varieties of labels applied to them of why they are the important thing to win. You know, there was no equivalent of NASCAR dads about African American voters ever. There's never been an obsession over any other group of voters like. there is about white working class voters. We are obsessed with them. And the reality is nothing about the way they vote has changed in 100 years. They are conservative voters. There is an entire network called Fox News, which was created to reflect their point of view back to them 24 hours a day. Donald Trump is the human equivalent of Fox News. It's constituent service. He is serving them back

what they believe. I get it. These are folks that want, you know, what they see as red-blooded American values restored to centrality. They want to again be the center of the conversation as they were for the entire 20th century of the United States, right? So they want that back. But what they'd say back... I don't know. That's what I think... Hang on.

What they'd say back is, no, the best of them. I'm not talking about the stone-called racism among them. That they would say, look, I had a job in an auto factory, and by the way, so did my African-American brother or friend on the line. When they'd let them in the union, because, remember, that was a whole issue as well. Totally fair enough, Troy. But now neither one of them have a job because of automation or globalization, and now they're both working at Walgreens, and then at night, and you know the whole story.

And the resentment grows as much out of that as anything to do with the Muslims that they never see. Sure, but they are then turning around and voting for the exact same candidates that the CEO of the company who outsource their job vote for. I mean, it's actually a brilliant trick on the part of the Republican Party, is that the guy who's getting laid off on the line factory floor votes precisely the way the CEO of the company who's enriched by stock options. by sending that job to Mexico is voting.

They vote the same way. Make a quick point. Okay, but Trump is not your average Republican. He's the CEO. No, but he is the CEO. But his message, and when he got elected, is, and what Fox News, they never had a debate about, you know,

maybe we shouldn't join, I mean, it was, the anti-Nafta, the anti-trade voice was Ross Perot, as Pap Buchanan, it was the outcast, the mainstream Republican, Republicans continually nominated pretty middle of the road people who did not offer them that debate.

Trump comes along and he represents something very different. But those same guys voted for the elite version of the Republicans too. So it's not as if they've been rejecting Republican candidates who supported outsourcing globalization. They've been voting for the seat. They vote for whoever

is the Republican. They voted for Mitt Romney too. Let me wrestle this back into our topic of the press. Eli, a question on national security in the press. During the campaign when the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta were hacked, famously, the then candidate Trump got up and said, I love WikiLeaks. I believe that's a quote. A week ago, the Trump appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency said that Julian Assange

and WikiLeaks should be treated as a foreign intelligence organization and that they were preparing to prosecute Julian Assange. What do you make of that? And how do you view Julian Assange? Should he be prosecuted? I have pretty complicated feelings on Julian Assange because, like I think most journalists, I thought that the initial WikiLeaks disclosures

of what was known as Cablegate was extremely valuable to understanding the murky and shadowy world of our alliances in the War on Terror. And ultimately, that I think did a lot of good. good in sort of bringing out of the open the total hypocrisy of our relationship with countries like Yemen and other and Pakistan and places like that. And I'm so I'm grateful for it and I used it as a resource as a journalist. And I still do use those WikiLeaks as a resource.

On the other hand, what Julian Assange did is he published hacked emails. He claims he does not know the source. He disputes it, but I don't find his explanations credible by any stretch. and this is another form of Meaning you feel that the source is Russian or else? I believe that the source is the GRU. I believe the U.S., the Russian military intelligence. And I don't believe WikiLeaks at one point, like OJ looking for the real killers,

suggested it was this guy Seth Rich who worked for the DNC and who was horribly murdered and tried to sort of say these two things were connected, further causing misery for this poor guy's family. But one way, to look at what WikiLeaks did in the case of the Podesta hacks and the Democrat hacks is an incredible violation of privacy. And so when a government would do something like that, we would be outraged. The idea that our personal communications would be monitored and then

disclosed is what a police state does. When I lived in Egypt, this was a classic tactic when you knew somebody was out of favor with Hosni Mubarak, the former dictator. Now, in the this case, WikiLeaks is not a government, but, and there is some news value to some of those emails. So it's not an easy call. Says who? Well, I mean, I think you have to say that, you know, finding out that there was dissent within the kind of Clinton campaign. That was surprised? With regards to the Clinton Foundation? No, no, no, with regard to the Clinton Foundation. And specifically that we knew that Chelsea was on one side of this and that there was a buck-raking scheme where Clinton was kind of double

dipping in a sense of what we were supposed to be doing in terms of, I mean, I don't know, I don't remember exactly all the details. I thought that memo was extremely newsworthy. It told us a lot about what might be called the monetization of Bill Clinton's ex-presidency. But Eli, you know where we're going to go on this question. So it's a question of who's ox's

goreed here. I agree with you. It becomes an ideological question. No, but I don't, I don't mean it to be ideological. I'm trying to say that it's complicated. Right. Because that kind of invasion of privacy, when it's done by a foreign government is horrendous. That is the worst. And we wouldn't

accept it if it was our government doing it. We shouldn't accept if it's the Russian government doing it. On the other hand, there is legitimate news value in those emails. So I think it's a hard call on Julian Assange. But you know what happens when it becomes a hard call. Somebody jumps, it goes into print, and that's the end of the game. I agree. David? I think that was right. I think there was an attitude on our part. I sit next to the folks who covered those things that they were going to be out there anyway. It was our responsibility to look at them

and see what was newsworthy. I don't think in the end the actual contents of those emails had that much of an effect on the election, but certainly it was something we felt like if it was going to be covered, we should be doing it as well. I totally disagree.

I mean, we didn't use any of the WikiLeaks, and I made it very clear on my show that we weren't going to use them because I think they were the product of a foreign government attempting to interfere in the election. I thought most of the emails that were disclosed, particularly the Podesta stuff, was just gossip.

And it did have a material effect because the intended effect of releasing... Would you use it if it? if it had been the other way around, if it had been stuff on Trump that was really awful? I think that the Access Hollywood is sort of the flip side of that, right?

Where you have Donald Trump. But that's not a foreign government. Right, but exactly. And that's the difference. I think that in case of Access Hollywood, this was actual behavior by someone whose attitude toward women was a factor in the campaign.

The sort of gutter sniping between D&C people who obviously as Democrats didn't really care for the idea of an independent getting the nomination. How was that newsworthy? Can you twist this as you will, to make it ideological. In other words, you say,

well, from a Republican point of view, as I just learned all about, as Eli was pointing out, I just learned all about debates within the campaign and buck raking and by the way, Goldman Sachs speeches. I don't think that the news media, and first of all, we had a guy called Malcolm Nance,

and one of the things he said to us early on, back in July, when the first WikiLeaks dumps came out, timed to coincide with the convention, with the goal of trying to get sort of Bernie Sanders supporting Democrats to not vote for Hillary Clinton. That was the goal of it, was to sort of drag her down in order to hurt her chances either of election or if she wanted to sort of undermine her presidency, right? And one of the things that Malcolm Nance said is that the reason that you don't use

hacked material is that you can't necessarily trust it. You don't know, for instance, whether or not in spoofing and taking these emails if anything's been changed. You don't know if they've been altered. And how would you remember if someone had 20,000... campaign never denied that they were because how can you? If I said to you, I have an email of yours from 13 months ago

I immediately go to my email and I'd check it out yeah I mean the reality is I think that because you couldn't be sure of the product and because the product came from a foreign hack in my mind these were not something that we should be using I disagree with my own news organization on this and we personally

didn't use them on my show I'm with you on this I mean I'm with David I feel like you know would you have publish the now famous dossier? That's the one. Just to fill in the spaces.

Buzzfeed, as a lot of news organizations, were in possession of the so-called famous Christopher Steele dossier, which contained material about Kremlinology and also activities

at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel that were less than dry. So CNN came on the air and said, there is this dossier, President of the United States, and the President-elect have been, President-elect by then,

had been informed of this, and it's been summarized for them. 48 seconds later, BuzzFeed, put the dossier up. And this dossier had been in the hands of some news organizations. I am ashamed to tell you. One of them was not the New Yorker. I know. I was like, what am I, chopped liver?

Exactly. Same. Exactly. You know, I think that that was a very carefully considered decision by BuzzFeed that was extremely congruent with their view of journalism, which is that if a bunch of people are talking about something and there is a closed circle in which people are discussing this document that has great import, that the public should know about it.

I didn't have the document. I didn't have to make that decision. I am very sympathetic to BuzzFeed's point of view on that. People think that because Trump has broken all these rules of normal behavior by a politician that by covering him, we can cover him by breaking the rules as well. But the reason we have trust in us is that if we put something out, we know that it might be real, that it is real and that it has relevance. And in this case, just put out this dossier whose authority was completely unproven

just because people were talking about it. I felt that was a wrong decision. Just quickly interject. The Pew Trust, last. year in their survey. 18% of respondents said they had a lot of trust in national media. So 18. Put that in your pipe. Fantastic. Okay. That was going to be my last question. You know, we're up here speaking with a lot of confidence, some disagreement, some agreement, and yet we are roundly, and I say this with utter confidence because the Pew Trust told me so,

and they tell me every goddamn year, we are not adored. We are not adored Sorry Speak for yourself Have you seen this guy's Twitter mentions? They're incredible The guy's had a great year Your time will come my friend

Your time will come Everybody Adores David But with the exception of David Why are our ratings so low Why are we mistrusted I mean we are, are we lower than Congress I don't think anyone

It's lower than Congress Congress is like single digit So, okay. So, all right, so mission accomplished. But it's still, it's not where we would like it to be. Eli, why is that? I always, I always, when I see that, I always think to myself, would you rather have, like, British press, which publishes anything and has an official secrets act? Would you rather have the Israeli press, which is crazy? And as you know, having recently done that really great profile of horror arts. I mean, I like, I mean, I'm speaking of bias here, but I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm speaking of bias here, but I, but I, I think that one of the strengths of the American press, especially now in the era of the Internet, is you can get any number of vantage points. You still have a number of organizations.

I wish we had more that are doing serious work. And, you know, I'm kind of angry at the American people that they don't appreciate us more. So your grievances with the American people is the most honest. I take it to the American people. They have no idea how good they have it. We have a terrific media, and I'm sick and tired of us being derided by politicians.

Because usually what we do in these panels is, Yeah, I know we're supposed to feel bad about it, but we shouldn't feel bad about it. We work very hard. The industry's been cratering. The cartoons are hilarious. Yeah, the cartoons are really good. We write good English. I'm just sorry that we just chose a new slogan.

If I'd known you don't know how good you have it was available. Can we discuss? Does everybody know the new slogan of the Washington Post? Would you like to tell us, David? Democracy dies in darkness. I feel like I can't do that without sort of Dracula playing the organ. in effect. Dean Beckay, with glee in his eyes,

the editor of the New York Times, said that it sounded like... Like a Batman movie. Yeah, okay. But it's true. Democracy does die in darkness, so why aren't we more adored, Joy? I think it's sort of the way people do feel about Congress

and that they say they hate Congress, but they like their congressman. And generally, people who say they hate Congress still reelect their incumbent cop politicians. And so I think what you find is the answer is partisanship. people want to hear their own inner core reflected on their TV and in their news media that they read. And to the extent that they hear their own inner voice reflected back, they like and trust it. To the extent that anything is making them uncomfortable or is refuting their point of view, they think it's a lie.

We've gone to the point where people don't just say that point of view that is opposite to mind is opposite to mine. If it is opposite to mind, it is a lie. And that's the way that we've sort of trained ourselves up over the last 40 years or so, when partisan media came in and filled the void and said, we will give you your own voice reflected back at you. Media was always partisan. Media used to belong, American newspapers used to belong, as you know better than I do,

to political parties. That this whole objective, New York Times, pre-and-post-war thing, that's a really narrow moment in history. I mean, I think we're also talking about newspapers. I mean, what we really need to talk about is television, right? I mean, I don't know if any of you read the profile of Jeff Zucker in the New York Times Magazine,

but it's clear that this is a person who views his work through the lens of entertainment and sports, right? And so he's gathering up, you know, these people to have these gladiator fights, and it doesn't matter if anything is true or if anything is important. It's just about ginning up these shout fest.

I mean, you just feel like your head's going to explode. In defense of my rival network just for a moment, and I think a lot of the critiques of cable news are accurate, right? We have trying to fill 24 hours of time, and it is entertainment, in a sense, right? Because people no longer view the news as the voice of God, they view it as, again, my own point of view distributed to me with entertaining sort of voices, right, interesting people. And to the point that you made, and the opening point you made, I was watching it today

and thinking to myself, we are sending professionals, either journalists, either journalists or advocates, to go on television and debate nothing. The pro and con merits are whether we should string a Berlin wall across the southern border that everyone who's a thinking, sentient person knows is a ridiculous idea. And you're asking people to sit there and debate it. Except one. Does he even believe it? He doesn't even know.

I mean, the thing is we're asking, when you're asking someone to debate things Donald Trump says. Again, read the AP transcript. In fairness, that got a lot of support during the... It did, but he didn't believe, I mean, like, does this man have any fixed beliefs, right? Again, I would answer that the same way. I don't disagree with you. Right. He won the election. In which 56% of Americans didn't even bother to vote. Just like last time.

Right. He won less than half of less than half of the people who bothered to vote. These are the rules of the game. Exactly. And so the reality is that because it is a sort of content-free, it's sort of a, there's a lot of it that's ridiculous. And so asking people to debate the ridiculous is very difficult. And so you have essentially all you can do is sort of yell back and forth across. I mean, we had a big debate last fall over whether we

should keep having Trump surrogates on. These are people with no experience in policy. For the most part, they just found them somewhere. Katrina Pearson, these other people, they don't know anything. I mean, what are we going to debate about? And so you're having them on to simply have an argument about nonsense. And so is this edifying the viewer? Are you learning anything

at the end of the debate? And we went through a whole period where we just didn't have any of them on because what was the point. First of all, if people are going to lie to you. And let's just talk about that for a moment. If Kellyanne & Conway is going to come on your TV show and tell blat lies, you can't debate her about them because they are lies. And so what's the point? But is that a novelty completely, or is it just the degree to which she does it? Not in this, in this administration. It is what they do. Sean Spicer is made, but you stand up and lie to before by other administrations. Oh, absolutely, but not to this extent with this, this sort of, it's constant. It's sort of like a

a stream of brazen, blatant, constant lying to the point where the debate itself becomes absurd. Thank you so much. Joy and Eli and David and Lydia. That was David Remnick with Lydia Pull Green at the Huffington Post, Eli Lake of Bloomberg View, Joy Reid of MSNBC, and David Ferenhold of the Washington Post. They were together on April 24th as part of Public Forum at the Public Theater. Thanks for listening.