The New Yorker Radio Hour - The New Yorker’s Political Writers Answer Your Election Questions

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can’t wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what’s still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells. Some years ago, the poet Ada Limón moved from New York City to Lexington, Kentucky. In a book called “Bright Dead Things,” she writes about adjusting to a new home, and the constant talk of thoroughbreds. “People always asking, ‘You have so many horses in your poems—what are they a metaphor for?’ ” she told the Radio Hour. “I think they’re not really a metaphor. Out here, they’re just horses.” Limón, who’s the current Poet Laureate of the United States, took us on a tour of Keeneland racecourse, in Lexington, and read her poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl.”This segment originally aired on April 13, 2018.  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. I'm David Remnick. This presidential election is, to say the least, confusing and anxiety-provoking in a lot of ways. At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page. Instead, our political life feels like a strange dream we can't wake up from. A couple of weeks ago, we asked you, what's on your minds and what's still confounding you about the whole election season. And dozens of you wrote to us from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, Salem, Virginia, Eugene, Oregon,

Dolores, Colorado, all over the place. You asked some very complicated questions about the electoral college and campaign strategy, and some questions that might seem simpler but really don't have simple answers. So I'm going to tackle just a few of your questions today with help from my esteemed colleagues, staff writers at The New Yorker covering politics in different ways from different perspectives. And we'll shed some light where we can. So let's begin. One question many of you are dying to understand is a variation of this one from a listener

named Jane. And Jane writes this. I remain profoundly puzzled why nearly half of Americans, according to polling, continue to support Donald Trump now four years after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, that they view him as their redeemer when everything he does and says shows himself to be a self-serving power monger with no respect for the law.

Well, where to begin on that one? Why does half the country, and maybe more, support Donald Trump? Well, I'm going to start with Andrew Morant, who's written about politics and extremism. Andrew, what say you? What's so appealing about Trump at this point? Maybe not in spite of,

but perhaps because of his seeming disregard for the law? Yeah. I think at this point we can admit that he's funny. I mean, there might be some sort of hard nucleus of supporters who will deny to the ends of the earth that Donald Trump is self-dealing or that he's self-serving or, you know, that he's corrupt. But, you know, I think many of his supporters know that. And it's a very time-honored tradition of saying, yeah, he might be a little bit self-dealing, but at least he's honest about it. At least he's authentic. But, Andrew, it can't be just because he's a great insult comic that he's got this appeal. It has to be something on a political level, however visceral.

Well, yeah, the question mentioned, I'm your Redeemer or I'm Your Vengeance, and it has to do with, you know, the essence of reactionary conservatism. So there is a promise being made there. Jill Lippoor, as a historian, as a political observer, what do you see as Trump's appeal? I think any explanation that goes to Trump as a showman, obviously there's a great deal of truth to be found in that,

but that relies on dismissing the preferences of his supporters as misguided. And they're not, therefore, guided by policy, by political preferences, by commitments to political, genuine political ideas. It's to sort of participate in the dismissal of the far right

that liberal intellectuals committed in the 1950s, the sort of liberal consensus theory, you know, there is nothing but liberalism that's an idea in American history. Everyone else is a paranoid nut job and commits, you know, as Hofstadter would have said, you know, participates in a paranoid style. So I just would say I think that I think there is an obligation to understand what those policy preferences are. And over the course of the 20th century, the far right ideology that has moved from the far-right to the entirety of the right is an objection to the power of the federal government,

to federal power over the states, an objection to the moral high-handedness of liberals and then of progressives. And yeah, you can sort of watch the kind of Trump-Safari daily show version of let's go quiz these people and see how stupid they are that just generally. has no interest in what it could be about the nature of the exercise of federal power through the administrative state that could genuinely be disappointing and be failing to deliver goods to people. So a listener by the name of Lawrence email to ask this, I'd love to know why you and your staff like Evan Osnose, Susan Glasser, and Jane Mayer, are not doing critical interviews

with people like Donald Trump or other high-level mega-politicians are enabling. on a regular basis. It doesn't seem like top-level journalists like yourselves have a chance to challenge these people to their faces. Are they not willing to speak with New Yorker journalists, or is there some other reason? So Susan Glasser, you were a biographer with your husband Peter Baker at the New York Times of Donald Trump. What say you? Well, thanks, Lawrence. You know, I did do two very interesting, but not necessarily very revealing interviews with Donald Trump. I spent three and a half hours with him at Mar-a-Lago after the 2021 events unfolded. And, you know, like many engagements with Trump, it is shocking but not surprising.

And, you know, he's not an interview subject in a conventional sense. And it's not just because he only goes on Hannity and they give him softball questions. The challenge of engaging with Trump one-on-one, whatever news outlet you represent, is that, you know, he doesn't take in your question and spit back out and answer. There's no noun, verb, and a period to end a sentence. And, you know, essentially he does the same kind of free-form discourse, more or less that you see in his rallies. And they never mentioned me. I'm up here sweating like a dog. Secret Service said, we have to make sure everyone's safe. I said, what about me? Oh, we know. ever thought of it. They don't think about me. I'm working my ass off. I'm working hard.

This is hard work. Front row Joe. Front row Joe. This is not the Republican Party that it was in 2015 or even in 2016. And that's a phenomenon that's been very interesting to observe as someone who spent a long time reporting in Washington. You know, someone like Marco Rubio, for example, was someone I interviewed for one of the first pieces I did for the New Yorker. This is a guy. who called Donald Trump a kook, who ran as a national security-minded presidential candidate, really the choice of the Republican establishment in many ways in Washington and non-capital in 2016. Just the other day, I noticed that he tweeted that Joe Biden was a sick and deranged old man as if Donald Trump had seized his phone and was tweeting for him.

And so I think that, you know, it's important to recognize that the world that we're operating in as journalists has changed as well. Claire Malone, you've had some experience with this. How would you answer that question? Why is it so difficult sometimes to do critical interviews with politicians and influencers on the right? I guess my experience with this was, you know, not interviewing President Trump, but talking to Candace Owens, who's a pretty prominent right-wing reactionary media personality. And I did a profile of her. And she did agree to let me come and speak with her and talk. But, you know, she wanted to make sure that she was all. was able to record. She sort of wanted to limit where I was allowed to interact with her. It was basically just at the studios of the daily wire. She sort of felt a deep, I think a deep suspicion of me. What was also interesting is in some ways she also didn't care. The way she sort of put it to me was like, I don't care how this piece ends up for me because it's essentially it either raises her profile or it proves of the point that the mainstream media attacks those on the right wing,

which I thought was, you know, an interesting, and I think she's a savvy person and a savvy reader of her audience. There's also kind of the interesting element of we in the mainstream media because Trump really, I guess, cannily played into a lot of institutional distrust that people have had for decades of the media, but he really accelerated this feeling that we are, as we all know now, the phrase he used, the enemy of the people. And I think that that did an interesting thing where it made our job of, you know, calling out what's true and what's not and trying to wrangle misinformation, something that I think is like a pretty impossible task these days. I do think that that did

this interesting thing where it almost politely. litigize the media and it's in the in the partisan America of you're on this side you're on that side you're on the republican side you're on the democratic side the democratic party does not have the same problem with misinformation and um you know the alternative reality that the Republican Party does and so I think inevitably that sort of has placed us more on the well you're in the Democratic camp that's not to say that Democratic politicians don't take liberties with the truth or spin things But I just think in the binary, there is an interesting dynamic that makes right-wing politicians less likely to talk to mainstream media.

So let's talk about Biden. A listener named Jim expresses a concern that we know is pretty widespread. So let me quote it directly from his letter. I'm very frustrated by Biden's arrogance to deny all comments about age and unfavorable poll ratings. Why are Democrats not pulling out all the stops? And why are they so casual and foolish based on the stakes? Susan Glasser. I do think that Biden and his team in the White House have stoked the idea that somehow he's getting an unfair rap from the media. And what I have perceived, certainly in Washington, is a lot of what you might call working the refs, kind of an inside game from the Biden campaign in the Biden White House.

they've hauled in individual news organizations for meetings at the campaign headquarters in Wilmington. You know, there's a sense that, you know, if only somehow he would get, you know, a fair shake from the remnants of the mainstream media, this would be different. I don't think that the information such as we have bears that out right now. If you look at surveys, it's very, very clear that Biden would be winning this election in a landslide. was only readers of the New York Times. There's a huge problem with Biden breaking through with

the platforms that younger voters tend to be on, in particular, those people who only get their information from social media are essentially a very different segment of the entire rest of the population in terms of their views about Biden. Now, Diana, who's a listener from Massachusetts, has a concern about Biden's communication with us, with American voters. And she asks this, why aren't Americans, and thus voters, understanding the magnitude of Biden's legislation that will improve our country for years to come? For example, build back better, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Bill, these affect and improve red and blue states alike. I'm confounded by why this message is not getting across. Evanosnes.

Yeah, I think the questioner raises a really interesting point, which is that by any ordinary measurement of electoral credentials, Joe Biden's kind of going into this race with a pretty strong hand. You have violent crime right now. Is it basically a 50-year low? You've got the stock market hitting all these highs. Unemployment is at record low. So why? Why is it that he doesn't get any credit for that? The usual answer in Washington is, oh, it's the communications. He's not, you know, somehow that it's getting lost in this static. But I think one of the things that's going on is that we are much more discombobulated, disregulated by the, you know, the effect of the last four years, including really at the heart of it, COVID, in a way that we don't

adequately describe, I just think it has thrown off so much of how we perceive ourselves as a political community and our leaders that it makes it almost easy for people to forget that they are looking at a legislative record than in any other year would pretty much guarantee re-election. So we're answering some of the questions that listeners have sent us about the election over the past couple of weeks. Kelleafasana, here's a question for you, and it's pretty blunt. How did we wind up with this rematch of Biden versus Trump redux? And why are there no inspiring leaders?

Is it too costly to challenge the wealthiest candidates? It doesn't have to be that way, the question goes on. We do need to change that, or we are doomed to the same old, same old. Kelfa, what say you? Well, yeah, I mean, part of that might have to do with the weakness of political parties, right? That it's hard for either party to either step in and say, no, we don't want this person or to say, no, we really do want this other person. Sometimes what you see in the absence of that is that you get candidates who are either celebrities, rich and famous, or you get candidates

who are extremely old and have been around forever. And, you know, obviously in this race, once again for the second time in a row, we have an old person versus a celebrity who also happens to be quite old. Claire Malone, I want to come back to you here on the Biden-Trump rematch. There were other potential presidential candidates out there, weren't there? What exactly happened to them? There's sort of a whole generation of voters now or millennials even who have sort of been waiting for the baby boomers to stop running for office. I mean, I think Gavin Newsom maybe wouldn't admit it, but he sort of seemed to be doing some sort of like shadow, hey, I could be the guy.

Pete Buttigieg has long been a person who appears on Fox News pretty regularly. So, you know, there were people. Gretchen Whitmer, yeah. Yeah, so I think there were, there was a moment. But I think, like, a lot of things in life, inertia just sort of set in, and everyone looked around and no one jumped in the Democratic Party specifically. And I think that's how we end up here with the rematch. Jill, we have a question from a listener named William, and it requires a sense of history as well as a sense of the structure of how our political system is organized. William writes this, independent observers and many within both parties, feel that the two-party system is controlled and dead-ended.

Is there a realistic, viable way to establish a third-party candidate for future elections? And I know you've done a lot of research in our democracy, God knows, over time. what's the history behind that two-party system? And would a multi-party system, like you see in the UK or many other countries, be a better course for the United States? Well, I think there is an extraordinary amount of frustration with a two-party system. I think, as both Claire and Ben had pointed out, especially with young people, the two-party system, which is not in our Constitution,

is something that evolved over time, is in considerable tension with some of our structural separations of power in the Constitution and makes it very difficult for certain features of our constitutional order to work. And it's a much bigger problem when the parties are polarized. So I think sometimes when people are complaining about the two-party system, what they're really reacting to is the polarization of the party. What are the prospects for change? I mean, there are some great exciting ideas out there that people can become involved in if they're committed to them. And I think some of them are surely possible. You know, Daniel Allen who does a whole series for the Washington Post that's about reimagining our democracy. She's a big advocate of ranked choice voting, which is one of the mechanisms that would allow for the blossoming of third party. and multi-parties. I think it's a little hard with our presidential system to imagine a really vibrant

multi-party system unless we had a parliamentary structure. And I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Like it all kind of goes to that feeling of brittleness and rigidity, right, that I think for young people is also associated with being elderly. That like everything is creaky and everything moves slowly and is half broken and geriatric. And there's something not just about these two presidential candidates, but about our constitutional order. That just is that way. A listener named Andrew asks this,

what happens if the Republicans in Congress refuse to certify the results and essentially install Trump? Jill, what can you tell us here? Who has control? in the event that Biden wins, who or what can ensure a peaceful transition next January? We don't have a repeat or worse of January 6, 2021. I came across this book written in 1890 called President John Smith, in which this same thing happens.

And there's an insurrection in the Senate floor during the joint session, or on the floor of Congress during the joint session to certify the Electoral College. And this was to certify whom? this was to certify this fictitious president John Smith in this 1899 dystopian novel that was set in the future that I just want to say people thought about this problem a long time ago and didn't solve it didn't fix it remember when you could just go catch a flight and just walk into the airport with your bag and walk onto the plane we won't have an election like where you could just walk onto the plane anymore until we get through this era of American history and an all but unprecedented risk of political violence. And is that era of political history defined by the presence of Donald Trump, or do you think it goes beyond that? I think if Trump had vanished from the national political stage after 2021, it would have ended with

Trump. But I think no matter how this election goes, it will go beyond this. That is a grim forecast for what's coming. In other words, what you're saying is that no matter what happens in November, the drop. We need TSA at the Electoral College certification. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Ben Wallace Wells, you've been covering the Trump campaign and you've watched the MAGA movement evolve since 2015, 2016. What have you observed? I think it's interesting, and maybe bears on this question, to think about the 2016 version of Trump and the Trump movement.

relative to the 2024 version. And some of this is inevitably nebulous and sort of anecdotal. But in my experience, the Trump campaign and the Trump rallies in 2016 were much scarier. They were much more violent. People got beat up in the stands. There were angry protests, street fighting outside. Trump himself, you know, people walked into those rallies and had no idea what was going to happen. You know, when I look at Trump himself today, it's a diminished figure.

You know, he's not able to generate the same energy. His crowds are smaller. It's a less intense effect. At the same time, and somewhat moving in contradiction, his movement has become much more openly opposed to democracy, to democratic institutions. His party is much more completely behind him. And so I sometimes wonder if when I walk away from a Trump rally, I've been artificially reassured, you know, by how mediocre he is. I had this feeling, too. I went to the rally in the Bronx. And Trump was telling stories about the Woolman's skating rink and various real estate moguls that he knew and the Yankees in the era of Steinbrenner. And it was, politics aside. it was like listening to Grandpa Thanksgiving,

but without even the bile that you were kind of used to. It was odd. And yet, Kellefasana looking at you here, when we watch him walk into an arena for some kind of boxing match or whatever it is, the crowd goes, for UFC,

the crowd goes nuts. Nuts. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is that core of people who love him. There's the core of people that are just happy to be in the same room as a celebrity. But I think it's also important to bear in mind the awesome power of negative polarization. I sometimes have liberals ask me, how could anyone vote for Trump

just out of kind of knee-jerk partisan fealty? You know, okay, you're not a, people who aren't crazy about Trump but are just willing to vote for him against Biden. And I have liberals who say to me like, how could anyone support this guy? And I say, picture if it was reversed. Imagine if the Democrats nominated like 50 cent. And 50 cent is running on a campaign to, I don't know, end police brutality forever, but he's also saying all sorts of things that seem to flout democratic norms and seem to maybe encourage violence and it's unsettling. What would it take for you as a liberal to vote for Ted Cruz instead?

And I think for a lot of people, that would be a hard ask because there is this idea that no matter how bad the person on our side is, at least he's not like those people on the other. other side. Thanks to all of you who wrote us your questions about the election. I'm sorry we couldn't answer every single one of them. And thanks to my colleagues, Susan Glasser, Jill Lippoor, Claire Malone, Andrew Morrance, Evan Osnows, Kelifasana, and Ben Wallace Wells. You can read all of them on politics and the state of the nation at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnik. For some of you out there, a few of you at least,

Summer doesn't necessarily mean the beach or the lake or the ballpark. It means the racetrack. We'll close the show today with a visit to the track, guided by the poet Ada Limon. Some years ago, Limon moved from New York City to Lexington, Kentucky, where there are fewer rats and more horses. In a book called Bright Dead Things, she writes about adjusting to her new home in the constant talk of thoroughbrance. Hey there. This is cactus. A cactus.

Beautiful quarter horse. You know why I call him cactics? What? Where's his name? Oh. We met up with Ada Limo, the poet laureate of the United States, a few years back at a racetrack near Lexington. We're standing in front of the main entrance here to Keenland, and they've got this beautiful stone walls, and it kind of looks like a castle. Keenland, I think, is one of the prettiest race courses in all of the United States.

The sun's not quite up. It's a little cloudy. Being here when it's empty is kind of lovely. So right now we're walking through the main track area before we get to the actual race track. So this is where you have the concessions, where you get your popcorn and your Kentucky's burgoo. which is a sort of legendary Kentucky food. I'm not a huge fan, don't tell anyone. You get soft pretzels and popcorn and soft ice cream for the kids. And then as we keep walking up here,

you'll see all of the bedding windows. I grew up going to the track occasionally with my stepfather who loves to play the ponies. But we would go to the Sonoma County Fair and go to the track out there. People always ask me, you know, what, you have so many horses in your palms, what are they a metaphor for?

And I think they're not really a metaphor. Like out here, they're just horses. The very first time I came to Keenland, it was here to meet Zanjada, who's a famous Philly, who I just adore. She's famous for having to be. having won the Breeders' Cup Classic, the only Philly to have won the Breeders' Cup Classic. And she was sort of an icon of mine, and so it was fun to get to meet her.

And that was actually the very first time I came to Keenland. So right now I'm looking at the main track, which is a dirt track, has almost like a reddish quality. And it's loose dirt, even though we got some reddish. It looks like it's bouncy. They try to keep it so it's healthy for the horses to run on. And then the track right behind it is the turf. Now right now we've got a thoroughbred going by, a thoroughbred racehorse. There's something about them that is so beautiful as they race.

And as they just stand there in the pasture, and out here in Kentucky, you know, they're about as common as birds. This area right here is the apron, and this is where if you just pay general admission, you can come and sit and stand on the rail and root for your horse. On a busy day, it will just be packed and loud and ruckus. It's a great sound. I kind of like coming out here when there's no one here.

It feels like there is some sort of ghost of, ghost of energy within the space, as if it's, you could almost hear the echoes of roars, people screaming with joy because they actually won big for the first time. This is a poem I wrote for the Kentucky Oaks Day, which is when all the Phillies race, and it's one of my favorite races. How to triumph like a girl. I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy. Like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger after winning. Ears up girls, ears up. But mainly, let's be honest, I like that they're ladies. As if this big, dangerous animal is also a part of me. That's somewhere inside the dead. delicate skin of my body, their pumps an eight-pound female horse heart. Giant with power, heavy with blood. Don't you want to believe it?

Don't you want to lift my shirt and see the huge, beating, genius machine that thinks, no, it knows it's going to come in first. Ada Limon, the U.S. Poet Laureate, she read How to Triumph like a girl, and you can find more of her work at New Yorker.com. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Ramnik. And I want to say a fond farewell to our producer, Kalalia, who's contributed so much to the program over the years.

She's always been willing to go above and beyond. Like that time, she edited the dating profile of someone she was reporting on. No, you don't put that. I would skip over you, too, if I read, just came on for my love. I just put that. You can't write that. I'm being honest.

I'm keeping things up front with people. So if they choose to, they choose to, if they don't, they don't. Why do you have 26? 26 to 45. That's too young. You need an older woman. I want to have kids. Okay, it's in 30.

Okay. I would go because 26 is too young. Kellalea, thanks for everything. 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 Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett.

And we had additional help from Ursula Summer. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Thank you.