The New Yorker Radio Hour - Trump in Review

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

The Presidency of Donald Trump has been unlike any other in America’s history. While many of his core promises remain unfulfilled, he managed to reshape our politics in just four years. On the cusp of the 2020 election, David Remnick assesses the Trump Administration’s impact on immigration policy, the climate, white identity politics, and the judiciary. He’s joined by Jeannie Suk Gersen, Jonathan Blitzer, Bill McKibben, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Andrew Marantz. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As we look back at four years of Donald Trump's administration, you could point to the beautiful wall that didn't get built. The Affordable Care Act that didn't get replaced were the promises of an infrastructure bill that dissipated like a summer mist. But there's no dispute that Donald Trump's presidency has been one of the most consequential of our times. In one term, he's managed to reshape our politics and our culture in the most profound ways. We're going to spend this hour looking at Trump's impact on the immigration system, the climate emergency, and the politics of race and identity. On this October evening, and it is so beautiful, the First Lady and I welcome you to the White House to bear witness to history. In a few moments, we will proudly swear in the newest member of the United States. But let's start with the courts. My fellow Americans,

even though we judges don't face elections, we still work for you. It is your constitution that establishes the rule of law and the judicial independence that is so central to it. The oath that I have solemnly taken tonight means at its core that I will do my job without any fear or favor. Trump has tipped the Supreme Court to a six-three conservative majority with Mitch McConnell certainly sharing the credit for that.

But just as important, Trump and McConnell have changed the ideological cast of our entire federal court system. Trump has appointed the most Court of Appeals judges in a single term since President Carter. Trump has confirmed 53 court of appeals judges, whereas Obama had 55. And Obama served two terms, whereas Trump has only served one term. Jeannie Sukkerson is a contributing writer, and she's a professor at Harvard Law School. Those judges are remarkably white and young in their 40s, and the youngest judge even being in their 30s. And given that on the Court of Appeals, they will serve for, say, 50 years, 40 years. That's why people are talking about it as a transformation of the courts for a generation.

I have to ask, does that represent a failure of the Obama administration? The Obama administration started out with 60 Democratic senators. They were able to pass health care as a result in the first stage. What did Obama do wrong? I think all presidents have priorities. They're always tradeoffs. You have to make deals about what kinds of initiatives you can get through. And these kinds of log rolling deals have to be made.

and judges are one of the things that you have to trade off. Obama left about 105 judgeships unfilled at the end of his presidency. So in January 2017, when Trump came into office, there were 100 spots right there. That sounds like a terrible mistake, I must say. I think in retrospect it was, but I think if you were to talk to people who were right there in the White House about it. They would say Mitch McConnell blocked them. That's one thing. But I don't think it can only be laid at the feet of Mitch McConnell because it really is also about how much you want to push.

Because the Obama administration definitely got some things done, even with Mitch McConnell there. It turned out that Mitch McConnell really did care about the courts, as did the Republican Party and the Federalist Society. They have been focused on the courts and it's a priority for them. And I trace this back to Obama's legal education, just as a lawyer and as a law professor, there definitely has. has been, in the past generation, a kind of approach that possibly he was influenced by, which is, oh, the courts, the courts, we obsess about them. But really what's important is the executive branch and what's really important is Congress. I do think that he possibly embodied this idea that the emphasis should not be on the courts.

Now, we've just had a third Supreme Court justice appointed by the Trump administration, a distinctly conservative justice. What will this mean for the court? And when was the The last time the Supreme Court was this conservative. Okay, so I have to just put my own cards on the table and say that I do not think that overnight we're going to see, say, Roe v. Wade just thrown out the window. Why not? Well, first of all, it's a big deal to say, here's a case, the name of which possibly every single American who knows anything about the Supreme Court or about law would be

able to name. If you ask people on the street, what's one case you can name? Probably they would say Roe versus Wade. Well, it is not the kind of thing that a justice really wants for people to be able to say, oh, overnight, a case of that much cultural importance is just gone. If they want to do something about abortion, it will take decades. There will be an impact year to year because we will start seeing decisions that cut away at the abortion right, one state will say pass a law that makes it so that it's harder for a woman to get an abortion. But it'll be in the form of a restriction that sounds somewhat reasonable to some people. And the standard in the Supreme Court

is, is this an undue burden? Now, an undue burden is a very malleable and very ambiguous term. The collective effect of that, after a number of years, if this goes on, without the Supreme Court personnel changing, will be significant restriction of abortion rights, but we are not in a situation where I'm thinking that one day I'm going to wake up in the next year and see that Roe v. Wade is gone, and we don't have the federal constitutional right to an abortion.

Also related to the Supreme Court, there's a lot of talk about court packing. Yes. And all historians will remind us that that was the bridge too far for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. what's the proper way to look at an attempt to so-called pack the court? It is really a great thing to look back at the FDR presidency and his relationship with the Supreme Court because there are a lot of lessons there for us in this era. So FDR got into office in the Great Depression

and Congress and the executive branches are, as he said, pulling in the same direction in trying to deal with the Great Depression by enacting all kinds of policies that are progressive. And what's happening is the Supreme Court, in case after case after case, is striking down acts of the legislature and saying, nope, unconstitutional. This is what is known as the famous Lochner era. And they're doing that by reference to the due process clause, basically saying, actually, the due process clause of the Constitution contains a right that is not enumerated. but we read into it a right to economic liberty, liberty of contract. And so when you make these progressive pieces of legislation, they affect the economic rights of the employers and of the employees. They have the right to say, we're going to work 60 hours a week.

And so basically, Congress wants something, the president wants something, but they can't get it done because the Supreme Court keeps saying, oh, the Constitution doesn't allow you to do it. And so that is what led FDR to say, you know what, this is an untenable situation. Let's pack the court. Congress would add six justices to the Supreme Court. And he announces this plan right after he's reelected in 1936. And what did that lead to? We actually saw the Supreme Court adjust. They experienced the court packing plan of Roosevelt as a threat. And several Supreme Court justices, both conservative and liberal, spoke out against the court packing plan. And almost overnight in 1937, there ends the Lochner era. There ends the era of the Supreme Court striking down these cases based on the liberty of contract. And now, of course, we're in an era where we think of the liberty of contract is something that the court just made up. And it was illegitimate. And it was done by a Supreme Court that was conservative in order to prevent progressive legislation from the conservative. side, they look at the Lochner era with as much criticism as liberals do, but they think that

the Roe versus Wade era was another version of the Lochner era, an era in which the Supreme Court got into its mind that there was a liberty that is not written out in the Constitution, namely the right of privacy, and that right of privacy contains the right to an abortion. modern conservatives will see the Supreme Court striking down abortion restrictions as a kind of activism, just like we saw in the early part of the 20th century. So what would you expect Joe Biden to do coming to office? He's facing a Supreme Court that's 6.3, possibly 5, 4 in some cases, against him. Do you think he will act in a way that moves toward packing the Supreme Court? I think what he's doing right now is the right thing. Even though in the past he has said, I'm not a fan of a court-packing plan. He is now saying, I'm open enough to it that I want to study the issue further and I want to enlist some people who are constitutional scholars who are really expert in this. And of course, we do know that the court has been as small as six justices. It has been as large as 10 justices in our history. And so there's nothing written in stone that says nine has to be the number. My assistant, is that he does not want to go there. But just like with FDR, this is a dialogue where the executive

branch puts forward a certain openness. And then the other branches kind of adjust to that. This Supreme Court, I suspect, they do not want to see Congress mess with the number of justices on the court or the terms. So they now also understand that when they're looking at a case, like the ACA case or the abortion cases, the voting rights or the environmental rights, regulations, all of these kinds of issues, they know that they're being watched with an idea that the institution can change without they're being able to control it. And Congress will be the one that has the power. And they will factor that in. Of course, they're not supposed to because we have this illusion that lawyers sometimes display that they only look at the case. They're only

deciding according to the law. Yes, that is true to some degree. But there are all kinds of social, political, and personal career incentives, and then also the larger, more noble incentives of wanting to protect the court and its reputation, its legitimacy and its ability to do good. And there's no way those dying justices think that it's going to be good for the country if the court is packed.

And they will do what they can to prevent that from happening. And so people are alarmed that it will be a very radical shift to the right. It will be much more moderate than that. It will be much more gradual than that. The sky is kind of falling, but it's not going to fall all the way down. You know, in the context of life lately, that counts as kind of reasonably decent news, the way you put it anyway. Jeannie Sukk-Gerson, thank you so much. Thank you.

Jeannie Sogerson is a contributing writer and a professor at Harvard Law School. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we're looking today at some of the many ways that Donald Trump has reshaped American politics. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're looking at the past four years of the Trump administration. Trump launched his presidential campaign focusing on the issue of immigration. Mexican rapists.

The Wall. We don't need to rehash at all. But after his inauguration, arrest by immigration and customs enforcement, ICE, increased very sharply. Undocumented immigrants began to live in real fear. Staff writer Jonathan Blitzer has covered immigration for us throughout this administration. And early on, back in 2017, he went to a church in Upper Manhattan to talk with a woman named Amanda Morales-Gera.

And her story was particularly dramatic. Threatened with deportation, Amanda had taken her children and sought sanctuary in the church, where they lived for months. What's been the hardest thing about staying here in this church for three months? More than three months. She says the hardest part about people. being here was the day that my kids first went to school. And I couldn't take them.

She could only leave them as far as the door. And all sorts of other things, like taking my girls to go to the doctor. It feels incredibly painful to be stuck inside here. It gives you too much stress. Do you ever want to step out of Isabel, he's going to Go ahead, Isabelle, to

go ahead. Let me get them, mommy. Oh, my God. Do you ever want to step outside? Do you have of once in a to go to

visit out? I see, to I feel stuck in here. I feel nauseous. Like, I can't breathe. I, I, I, I want to get outside.

I want to almost have wings and fly away or just walk away outside to breathe the air outside. To get out of here. To breathe the air. I hope I can leave and be outside with my kids. That my kids can study here.

And that I can be free. And that I can be free. That's the only thing I ask of God. John, that was 2017. How much has changed since then? I actually think on the whole that level of commitment to the issue of immigration. It really didn't abate at any point in the last four years. I mean, if one thing can be said of the Trump administration is that this administration on the issue of immigration came in with a laser-like focus and didn't really deviate at all.

I mean, the president, sure, he's been ranting and raving, but there were people in key positions at the Justice Department and the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, who were really advancing the agenda, sometimes without the broader public even fully understanding the extent of it. John, can you just walk me through the highlights of what Trump has achieved when it comes to immigration? It's been huge. I mean, it's been a resounding success for the nativists. The White House has passed over the last four years, over the last four years, over. 400 executive actions on immigration on pretty much every level of immigration policy. So, you know, the kind of big ticket stuff, the administration has decimated the refugee resettlement program. I mean, decimated it. Brought it from, you know, a country that used to settle, you know, about 80,000 people a year in the U.S. to less than 7,000 so far in the current fiscal year. They've completely undone the asylum system at the border through a combination of measures,

but most notably in the form of shunting 60,000 people into Mexico, where they're just stuck waiting for asylum hearings that now, because the pandemic, will never happen. They have cut deals with governments in the region to try to actually outsource the responsibility of providing asylum to Central American governments rather than the U.S. itself. They've chipped away at legal immigration in the form of green cards and visas. I mean, the list goes on and on, and it's, It's going to be extremely hard to undo and to reconfigure. Why is that? Let's say Joe Biden wins.

Why is it hard to reconfigure and reverse that? For one thing, just the sheer volume of things the Trump administration has done has made it difficult. There's just going to be a lot of stuff for a new administration to undertake. But most specifically, the Trump administration got smarter over the last four years. You know, it began with all of the pageantry and high drama of executive orders. Those are relatively easy to undo. But over time, the White House got more sophisticated in how it unveiled certain policies. So, for example, they started to move to rule changes, regulations, kind of layered rule

changes across different government departments. A kind of a huge policy for this White House has been a thing called the Public Charge Rule, which pretty much isn't just an assault on legal immigration in the U.S. It is actually a wholesale reimagining of who is allowed to become a legal immigrant in the U.S. the public charge rule would use immigrants financial status to determine whether or not they qualify for green cards and eventually citizenship. You know, in 2017, how would Trump have wanted to do this? He would have wanted to pass an executive order, signed it with a Sharpie, kind of made a big show of it. But in fact, by the time this thing came out in 2019 in the form of a regulation basically proposed by the Department of Homeland Security,

there were also three or four other forms of this policy being pushed through on different levels at the State Department, the Social Security Administration, Housing and Urban Development, various presidential proclamations that also layered in different aspects of this policy. But why can't they be reversed? I think all of them, you know, rules and regulations are harder to undo, especially if they've been set in motion in the right way. Some of these things require notice and comment period. You know, things have to be taken under advice.

And what's also happened simultaneous to all of this is, of course, the president has named a vast number of judges to the appellate bench. So in the past, in the early years of the Trump administration, when you had federal judges at least putting the brakes on some of these policies, now you don't even have that. And they've actually decimated the departments themselves that are supposed to be carrying out this work. One of the talking points I see all the time on social media in particular is that deportations remain much higher during the Obama administration, during the Trump administration. Is that simply because there are just far fewer people getting into the country in the first place? Yeah, it's a combination of things. It's a complex and interesting question.

I mean, for one thing, because the Obama administration had priorities for who it went after, who was going to arrest, why it was going to arrest those people, people with criminal records, people who had recently arrived in the country as opposed to people who had spent many years here and had families, there was more efficiency built into the system. This has been, by comparison, a kind of chaos. One of the first things the Trump administration did in 2017 was it eliminated priorities for who ICE was supposed to go after. And so if no one's a priority, then everyone's a priority, which leads to a kind of chaos. And so what you saw in the early years of the Trump administration was arrests soared, and specifically arrests of people who did not have.

have criminal backgrounds. The number of people in ICE detention shot up, but the deportations themselves didn't. You also had a major border crisis, and that meant that ICE officers who ordinarily would be policing the interior suddenly had to go to the border and were tasked with dealing with families arriving and seeking asylum. So that set them back a bit. You've also had more of an organized resistance to the Trump administration than you ever really did under Obama. So for example, sanctuary jurisdictions, cities, municipalities, localities, states have banded together and refused to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. You didn't have that level of coordination during the Obama years. And actually, that accounts for a significant number of

deportations because in effect, you know, if a city or a state is cooperating with federal immigration authorities, it makes it much easier for ICE to arrest people. They just go to a jail. These people are already in detention. and they just take them into ICE custody. So there are all of these different things that have led to the deportation numbers being lower under Trump. So, John, how significant of a loss for Trump

was the fight on DACA? Of course, it's hugely embarrassing to the administration, especially because they came into office, these guys. This is Jeff Sessions, who then was the Attorney General and Stephen Miller, the top White House counselor, all with the fantasy of ending DACA.

And so here you have, them basically, you know, starting in on one of the signature policies they wanted to undo. And, you know, they basically whiff after three years of it. I do think that the fate of Dreamers remains very much in the balance. And so the reason why I hesitate to say it's a total loss for Trump is if the intention was to inflict pain. And I think people in his administration who wanted to end DACA wanted to end DACA to send a message and to put this population back in legal limbo. And in that sense, they succeeded because this

population is now very much waiting on pins and needles to see what happens with a new administration and whether Congress can actually codify protections in law for them. You know, importantly, after that Supreme Court ruling, DHS came around and said, look, we will continue to process the applications that had already been filed, but we will not accept new applications. The language of the Supreme Court ruling makes pretty clear that the government has to accept new applications. So even after that Supreme Court ruling, it was quite shocking, and I think pretty typical of where the Department of Homeland Security is now, that the response from the administration to the Supreme Court was to say simply, well, we're not so sure we're going to follow the whole

letter of the law here. That's something obviously to continue to watch. Jonathan Blitzer, thank you so much. Thanks, David. Jonathan Blitzer covers immigration for the New Yorker, and you're You can find everything that he's written about child attention, Stephen Miller, and much more at New Yorker.com. I want the cleanest water on earth. I want the cleanest air on earth. And that's what we're doing. To say the whole world is watching the White House at this hour is not an overstatement.

The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. The EPA is so restrictive that they are putting our energy companies out of business. But what about the scientists who say it's worse than ever? You'd have to show me the scientists because they have a very big political agenda. I can't bring them in. Scientists also have a political agenda. The Trump administration ended environmental regulations by the truckload. To the familiar arguments against a responsible climate policy,

that it hampers our economy, that it's big government, that it's a hoax. Donald Trump added something else, a visceral hatred of foreign agreements and treaties. Just months into his presidency, he announced our withdrawal from the landmark Paris Climate Accord and took an undeniable relish in doing so. Our writer Bill McKibben has watched all of this unfold. So, Bill, time has been elastic.

Four years has seemed like, I don't know how many years at this point, but where exactly were we on? climate change in 2016 as Donald Trump entered office? Yeah, well, that's the problem here, because for physics and chemistry, time is not elastic. It's real. 2016, when Trump came into office, we'd just come out of, as you'll recall, the Paris Climate Accords. Finally, finally, after 25 years of trying, the world had come up with something, not something amazing, but something. There was an agreement, and the hope was that it was going to acquire a kind of virtuous cycle, a momentum, as countries began trying to meet the modest

targets they'd set. They'd find that the cost of doing so was cheaper than they'd imagined, and they would accelerate their targets, and we might actually begin to make the progress we needed. So part of that equation worked, you know. The price of solar power and wind power just kept falling like a rock, you know. Suddenly there people were bidding one and a half cents a kilowatt hour for producing, you know, power from solar farms. Prices we've never heard of anywhere. But, but Trump's election took what could have been a path of increased momentum and dug big ditches across it. Potholes is almost too small a word. He did everything he could, everything that the oil industry could figure out to ask him to do to slow down this momentum, to try and reverse it.

The people he put in charge of deregulating the environment were not the amateur clowns that he put in charge everywhere else. This was not the Rudy Giuliani's of the world. These were lobbyists taken straight out of the fossil fuel industry, and they went straight to work, and they got, unfortunately, a ton done. What would be the first steps you'd want to see a Biden administration take to get the United States on track where climate change, the climate emergency is concerned? Well, Biden's basic climate plan

was kind of worked out in negotiations between the Sanders campaign and the Biden campaign before the convention. And the leader of the team that worked it out from the Sanders side was AOC

and a woman named Varshini Prakash, the head of the Sunrise Movement, these youthful climate people. Look, The numbers they're talking about are important, you know, a $2 trillion spending plan to deal with climate change. A, helps you deal with climate change. That's a lot of infrastructure quickly. And B, it's the only, you know, large-scale answer that anyone's come up with to how you deal with the number of unemployed people left after our mishandled pandemic.

So what is the $2 trillion spent on? What is the nature of the plan? One assumes it's spent on a lot of renewable energy, a lot of helping the transatlient. transition to electrified transport, knowing Joe Biden, some of it's going to go for trains, and there's a lot of work to be done. You know, we have millions of buildings in this country that were built in a very different time and now have to be retrofitted. In the largest sense, the task everywhere is to electrify things as much as we can't,

to stop burning things, be it coal, gas, oil, biomass, whatever it is, and just count on the burning of the sun, you know, 70 million miles away, to do that job for us. And so that's, you know, that's what the next decade's going to have to be about. Massive electrification, massive renewable energy. It won't be easy because the wild card in all of this is the enormous power of the fossil fuel industry. You know, the Koch brothers, or Charles Koch, the remaining Koch brother, apparently spent a fortune to put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. He's our biggest oil and gas baron. And clearly, the goal of the right is to make sure that no matter what passes through Congress, it's going to get tossed out by the judiciary. So there's a ton of work to be done. And truthfully, I think that's one of the very good reasons to think very long and hard about. expanding the Supreme Court.

Now, we tend to think of our own political phenomenon as unique somehow, and yet Donald Trump, as somebody who has authoritarian instincts and who thinks of climate change as a hoax and all the rest, is one of many leaders, whether it's Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban, and Hungary, and many others that we all can name so easily at this point, is part of the ideological picture for all of them a cynicism about climate change? Well, part of it is a fealty to the fossil fuel industry. It doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with authoritarianism. The equally authoritarian and unappealing in many ways,

Xi Jinping seems to have decided that this is actually going to be the way China tries to get some moral high ground, is to make this the one issue on which they're actually trying to do the right thing. And in what way is China doing the right thing and to what degree? Well, China's now announced that they're going to be net zero carbon producers as a nation by 2060. That's a very ambitious target for a country that under the Paris Accords is allowed to keep growing its carbon emissions till 2030, I think. And so they're going to have to, if they're serious about that, and they appear at least for the moment to be, they're going to have to install renewable energy.

They're already installing it faster than anybody in history, but they're going to have to quadruple that pace to make it happen. Donald Trump was a propagandist for what I would call climate denialism. How successful was he as a propagandist? I don't think he's actually convinced that many people to take up this cause. In fact, the polling shows that there's a higher percentage of Americans than ever who understand we face a big problem, but it's going to take incredibly hard work

to undo what he has done. And if he's re-elected? Well, if he's re-elected, truthfully, you know, geologists are going to be able to tell it in 30,000 years. How do you mean? Well, I mean that the oceans are going to be higher

than they would otherwise have been and the extinction rate's going to be higher than it would otherwise have been and, you know, the trompocene will not be a pleasant place for man nor beast. The trompocene. Bill, thank you so much and thank you for all your work on this issue for so long. Thank you, friends. A pleasure to talk. Great to talk to you.

Bill McKibben is a contributing writer, a scholar at Middlebury College, and he's a founder of the Climate Action Group 350.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Rennick. We're spending this hour looking at the promises made by Donald Trump and the results he delivered. Nobody has done more for the black community than Donald Trump. And if you look, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, possible exception, but the exception of Abraham Lincoln, nobody has done what I've done. And the first time he said that, it was almost like he was joking.

But it's so often the case, he stuck with the formulation, not since Abraham Lincoln. The contradiction is beyond. description. While bragging about his ostensible support from black voters, Trump has encouraged a politics of white grievance and white identity, and the likes of which we haven't heard from a national political figure, perhaps since George Wallace. The New Yorkers Andrew Morance and Keanga Yamada Taylor talk with me about race in the Trump era. I remember when he, in response to Elijah Cummings, that Baltimore is a rat and rodent infested city that no human being would want to live in. I mean, this is a kind of casual, disgusting racism that you certainly don't expect from the most

powerful political seat in the world. And so what flows from that is the confidence of the kind of violent fringe right they're being activated by Trump's encouragement to then come from beneath the rocks out into the open. Well, what about you, Andrew? In 2016, you just took on a new beat covering what was then called the alt-right. What kind of reactions did you see online from these far-right groups and white supremacists when Trump was initially elected? Well, yeah, I mean, Kiyang is definitely right. They were certainly activated and energized. that's not even a question.

But part of my goal was not merely to look at the sort of lorid fringes, as we're saying, but to look at how they're connected to the rest of the body politic. And what did your reporting tell you as you got to know people? I think sometimes it's more conscious than other times. Some people are useful idiots. Other people know exactly what they're doing. There's all this scholarship about how if you just come out and say, hi, I'm from the Ku Klux Klan, you know, your mass support.

goes down to four or five percent. But if you say, I'm concerned about immigration or, you know, I'm concerned about states' rights or whatever the code of the day is, you can get more than half the country to go along with you. You see Stephen Miller saying, well, yes, I want, you know, I only want English speakers to come to this country as immigrants, but, you know, there are English speakers in Ghana. There are English speakers in India. It's like, come on, anybody who pays attention knows that what he's saying is he wants the country to be more white. It sort of seems like unless he comes out and says, I am a white nationalist, he keeps a large swath of support. Now, people don't want you to say things that overtly that they feel uncomfortable about themselves. You know, white people

in the crowd don't want to be made to feel that they themselves are racist. But our definition of racism has become so narrowed over time that if you don't say, I have hate in my heart, somehow there's a wide swath of the American public that will let you get away with it. Kianga, there have been any number of policies in this first term or final term, we don't know yet, of Donald Trump, that impact communities of color in particularly and in a really hard hit way. Can you talk about one or two of them that have had really serious implications for black and brown people and will for years to come? What we're seeing now in terms of federal neglect regarding the pandemic, here we have. By the end of this year, COVID will be the third leading cause of death for black people in this country. We have yet to have the federal government stabilize a response to not just the pandemic itself, but it's reverberations.

So black unemployment remains somewhere between 13 and 14 percent. Black children are bearing the disproportionate brunt of not just schools not being, able to reopen, but the ways that inequality shape the impact of remote education. And so the crisis around housing, the crisis of evictions, all of these will be having disproportionate impacts among African Americans. And the response from the government, which is simply to throw the hands up and say, we're just going to ride this out and basically not intervene. The impact on black people in this country is catastrophic and will not just simply end if Donald Trump is voted out of office and leaves in mid-January.

Andrew, last year you did a story for the radio hour about a young woman who had reached out to you because of your writing for us about the alt-right. Samantha was her name. Samantha had been in a white nationalist group and she decided to get out. Yeah, I, I, I spent a lot of time talking to this woman, Samantha, you know, had been canvassing for Obama and had considered herself sort of a middle-of-the-road liberal and then started ending up in this online social set of people who were going on 4chan and posting all kinds of jokes about Jews and people of color and whatever. And it all felt very alienating at first, but eventually she started listening to some of their

podcasts and watching some of their videos and she kind of got sucked in. Yeah, it's a fascinating story because she described to you her conversational. version in a short period of time from the political mainstream to really ugly extremism. I want to play a scene here where Samantha talks about a gathering that she attended with Richard Spencer, the white nationalist or neo-Nazi leader. And this one kid just said Sieg, and another kid said Heil. And they were pointing at Richard Spencer with this stiff-armed Nazi salute. We started with like hail victory, hail victory or seek

and then everyone would say hi'll seek, high, seek, highle, seek, hile. I don't know, there was just this energy in the room. It was palpable, like you could, you could have eaten it. It was so intense. Sam had this moment of like, she always said that she wasn't into Nazi stuff and that that was over the line and that was inappropriate. And yet now she's in this room where there's

just dozens and dozens of people at this fever pitch of like doing this kind of ritualistic thing. This is the one thing they're not supposed to do. This is the one thing they can't do in public. And they are high on the just sort of transgressive energy of it. And Sam describes this one moment

where she looks over and sees Richard Spencer as this is happening. And he looks back at her and gives her this sort of eyebrow look like so. Are you going to do it? He was staring me dead in the eyes. And I did it.

You know, most people don't go this far. Most people don't find themselves in parties in Charlottesville, Virginia, with literal Nazis. But it was indicative to me of how there's a sort of slippery slope that people can go down if they're not prepared or inoculated against a lot of the crap that they see on the internet. And to me, you know, obviously the message here is not. you know, parents guard your children so that they don't all become Nazis because they're not all going to become Nazis. But the issue is that these things are less distant from us than we would like to believe. Now, can you talk about what Trump's presidency means for people like

Samantha, people who are searching for identity or community? How does that, how does having a president like Trump reinforce white supremacy in the United States? You know, Trump has a lot of things at once. So he has authoritarian tendencies. He has these terrifying tendencies. He's also ridiculous and darkly comic in a lot of other ways. So there's always this kind of plausible deniability where people can shift from one to the other and say, oh, I'm just into him as a kind of pop culture punchline if they don't want to admit that they're into him as a kind of furor figure. But they, you know, I think beyond Trump, you know, when we still have kind of, I guess what we'll start to call Trumpism after Trump,

there was this Richard Rorty quote, the late philosopher, this quote that started going around sort of had a mini moment of virality right after Trump's election where he says, essentially if we don't pay attention to the needs of the working class, they might get duped by a strongman. And another thing that he said in that passage, which was not sort of stapled to the viral part of it, was that the ways of talking and thinking would usher in this new vacuum for just, casual cruelty, the stuff we've been talking about in this conversation. Cruel policies, cruel language, cruel rhetoric, they all are of a piece. So I think... The flip side of the cruel rhetoric is a remark by

Donald Trump that he uses now at every rally, that he's done more for the black community than any other president besides Abraham Lincoln. What in God's name, Kanga, is he referring to? What do you make of that tagline. Well, I, you know, I think that Trump is fishing for some loose black votes that are out there. You know, it looks like among black men that his numbers may slightly be higher. And so we have this kind of toxic patriarchal coalition, you know, among a small number of people that really is about, I think avoiding a larger discussion about the impacts of his policies on most black people and really what do we do with what is happening around race and inequality in this country because we all get caught up in the fact that Trump makes these outlandish statements and we go chase the statement. And meanwhile, the real discussion about what has happened in black communities that is so devastating that people will.

will engage in a month-long uprising and opposition to it, it doesn't get overshadowed, but it becomes less a part of the central discussion while once again we are caught up in the antics of Donald Trump. Now, a question for you both. Do you think that the Trump experience, these four years, has somehow changed what it means to be white, and particularly a white man in the United States, has his presidency influenced how whiteness is perceived? in the broader population?

So, yeah, so I have seen in my reporting actually the kind of salience of whiteness to white people seems to have gone up a lot. And that has both helpful effects and also very scary deleterious effects, right? You have people on the left who are now sort of getting used to thinking of themselves as white and maybe of themselves as having white privilege, which has led to, to what social scientists have actually called a great awokening is the term. And, you know, to increased friendliness to the phrase Black Lives Matter and the demands of that movement. Of course, on the other side, you also have people who's increased salience of their own whiteness takes a really scary turn, right?

When they start becoming more drawn to sort of proto-white nationalism or when they start to react to the demographic changes in the country by digging. in their heels and trying to protect what's theirs, in this case, their white privilege, rather than seeking to diminish it, they sort of seek to protect it. I will just say that I think it's wholly contradictory. And, you know, Trump wants to embrace a certain kind of whiteness and white identity and white pride. At the same time, that focus can also obscure what else. is happening to white people. And in some ways, it's used to divert attention from what is happening

to white people. The life expectancy for ordinary white people has gone into reverse in this country, which doesn't typically happen in the developed world. And it's driven by suicide, opioid addiction, and alcoholism. These are not the attributes of a kind of rising ascendant whiteness. These are the attributes of crisis and disease and despair and hopelessness. And what Trump does, and I think what in some ways white supremacy from above, what the Republican Party is doing is engaging in this in such a way as to distract from those deeper questions about what is happening to white America that would cause such deep levels of despair that people are literally drinking and drugging. themselves to death to escape the reality of America.

Right, because that would actually be a hard problem to solve, right? Rather than doing the easy thing, which is to divide and conquer and to somehow say, I can deliver some intangible benefit to you by making you feel part of the club rather than actually giving you any material benefits. It's classic, but most of the times it's not being directed from the White House. And that's what's different from Trump. You know, this is, it's not new in the United States and politics for the political class to ignore or to, you know, try to shroud what is happening to poor and working class people. That's not new.

What's new is bringing the kind of antics from the fringe into the center of power is also part of the distraction. Kianga Yamada Taylor and Andrew Moranz of the New Yorker. I'm David Remnick. And this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening. Election Day is Tuesday, and if you haven't voted yet, I hardly need to remind you how important that is. Please vote and vote safely.

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 Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianan and Corby, Calalia, David Kraus, Now, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuelle, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfe Chen, and Emily Mann.

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