The Opinions - ‘Platner Is Vile.’ McConnell Is Missing. Welcome to American Politics.

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

The word of the week for politics is “humiliation.” At least according to the Opinion contributing writer David Wallace-Wells, who joins the Opinion columnist David French and the national politics writer Michelle Cottle on “The Opinions.” This week the trio takes a look at how humiliation factors into President Trump’s failed cease-fire with Iran and the demise of Graham Platner’s candidacy. And, with Mitch McConnell in the hospital for several weeks, they debate how much privacy we owe our public servants. Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Video editing by Julian Hackney and Arpita Aneja. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times opinion. And this week, I am here with the oh so illustrious columnist David French. And just to keep me on my toes, our other favorite David, David Wallace Wells is back. David's, how goes it? It's going great. Great to be here. Going well, Michelle. All right. So really, we have way too much to cover from the news this week. So before we start, a little game here, does either of you have a word that kind of captures. this insane week for you. How about humiliation? I'm thinking of, you know, the embarrassing spectacle of the America's 250th. I'm thinking about the U.S. soccer team embarrassing itself on the field against Belgium. I'm thinking about the online left somewhat embarrassing itself with Graham Platner. And I'm thinking also about Trump's desperate need to avoid humiliation in this conflict with Iran.

Michelle, David has expired me with a word, too. Tell me. Exposure. Exposure is the word of the week for me. That sounds a little ominous. Well, yeah. So we had more information about Graham Platner that is changing the American political landscape, putting the Senate, you know, casting the Senate into even more doubt as to how this is going to all unfold.

And also, the Wall Street Journal had some very interesting series of articles about the way in which the rest of the world is handling Donald Trump. And it really sort of exposed the extent to which the rest of the world is making this determination that they cannot count on the United States anymore and sort of laid bare that they just don't trust us. They just don't trust us. Maybe for reasons that we might talk about here in a few minutes. Okay, okay. I like that. This is a very intriguing entree into our discussion. So I'm going to latch on to the exposure and here.

humiliation of Graham Platner. I myself cannot stop rage texting my friends and colleagues about this. I'd like to apologize to David French, who's already had an earful about this and the epic disgrace that was the Democrats now ex-Senate nominee in Maine. We also do need to talk about the mysterious disappearance of Senator Mitch McConnell, who has been hospitalized now for nearly a month with no clear explanation of what's going on, which is stirring up all kinds of crazy rumors on the right, and which resurrects the question of how much Americans are entitled to know about the private lives and health of our elected officials. But first, I think we got to go global. We got to look at the Iran's ceasefire that basically never was. So at the NATO summit earlier this week, President Trump suggested that the ceasefire with Iran is over. Turns out that that loose agreement,

agreement announced last month, left a little too many sticky issues on the table. And so here we are. As of our taping this Thursday morning, there have been tit-for-tat strikes, along with Trumpian threats to, of course, take it farther. So, how are you guys feeling about this situation? Any chance the administration is going to sort this out and reach a deal before the mid-August deadline set by the memorandum of understanding? ending. David French, you go first. Yeah. So there was an irreconcilable tension at the heart of the Iran deal that was this. How do you end a war where both sides can declare victory? And this became a real issue after this initial memorandum of understanding, which was, by the way, very favorable to Iran, very favorable to Iran, the original ceasefire deal.

It became very clear to me that there was absolutely no way that Donald Trump could spin the resolution of the conflict as a victory. He was going to try to do it, and it was also very clear to me that there was actually not a meeting of the minds on what Iran was supposed to do

and how Iran was going to conduct itself. And I don't think Iran has ever since the start of the war, clearly and unequivocally a promise to reopen the strait of Hormuz. The initial ceasefire that was supposed to reopen the strait. It did not. The memorandum of understanding was supposed to fully reopen the strait. It obviously did not. Iran was still exerting control.

And so the bottom line is, right now we are in a position where Iran now believes it is essentially the owner-operator of the Strait of Hormuz, and it is going to exert a certain degree control. Iran believes it is essentially defeated Donald Trump and is entitled to all the bounties of its victory. And then Trump understands that the straight, it's finally gotten through to him that the straight has to be open,

but he doesn't still, doesn't actually have a plan for that. And it's very hard to see a clear path forward. Oh my God, so much winning, David, W. Yeah. What do you say? One thing, David, you said this interesting to me, is that you said that Donald Trump now knows that he has to reopen the straight.

And actually, I'm not sure about that. I think one of the things that may have happened over the last few weeks, maybe the last few months, is that Trump started to see the effects of the war shaking out in less consequential ways than many advisors and commentators had predicted. And it seemed that the economic warfare that we had entered into would be less damaging to America and its allies than we were warring. about at the outset of the war. This has been a surprise to me. This is a war that's been full of surprises. We learned that Iran with its cheap drones could sort of match the U.S. military. We learned

that the Hormuz weapon was probably the most powerful weapon involved in either of these militaries, more powerful than anything the U.S. could manage. We've learned something about the humbling of American Empire and what we can do in the world. But one other thing we've learned is that the closure of this strait, which we were told in the spring would be absolutely catastrophic for the global economy, has had its effects. There has been suffering, particularly in Southeast Asia. There have been impacts in Europe and America. But those impacts have not been nearly as dramatic as we were warned about. I was just looking at the price of oil futures this morning. And, you know, at no point in this conflict, did the price of oil go above what it was even when Russia invaded Ukraine? And certainly

not at the, it didn't reach the levels that we saw in the 1970s, which is sort of what everybody in the energy world was telling us to expect if this would go on even two months, let alone five, six months. And so I think one thing that may be happening is that, whereas two months ago, Donald Trump thought, even if we're taking an L on this, we got to move on because we've got to reopen the straight, he may now be thinking, you know what, we can endure the pain of continued closure. That is not going to be as, you know, as damaging to American interests as we, worried, and that allows us a little bit more leverage at the bargaining table than we thought we had even a couple of months ago when we thought we had our backs up against the wall.

So how much do you think Americans are paying attention to this beyond the prices at the pop? Well, you know, that's another thing. I don't think that it has penetrated the public political consciousness in nearly the way we might have expected. You know, Americans will say they oppose the war. They want it to be over. They're unhappy about its effect on the economy and on gas prices. But it is not a topic A conversation on the news. It's not the leading item in newspapers like ours. It is not dominating social media. And you see a sort of growing awareness that this is the kind of bad imperial behavior that the U.S. engages in without any real outrage about it.

And I think that alone is a kind of depressing, distressing development that the public could come to hold those two thoughts in their head at once. that is to say we understand that this is like irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president and we're not even paying all that close attention to it and just letting it slide by. But I do think that that's like the best way of describing the public response. And that means that in addition to there not being so much economic pressure on the U.S. to really resolve this, there's not much political pressure either, which again, if you had told me that in February, I would have been shocked. David French.

Yeah. And I think David's exactly right that I think there are some people in administration. maybe Trump himself who thinks, ha ha, that straight didn't hurt us. Now, there are other countries, allied countries that are feeling the pain more than we are. But we are feeling some pain. But I also think it is an immense,

he, the very idea that he would enter into a worse deal than Obama had is, that's like the red line. That's the third rail. That is the thing that, you know, if he has, that's when he reacts, volcanically. And I don't think there's any way for him to look anyone in the face and say that I have a better deal than Obama. If Iran is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, charging tolls, fees, whatever commissions, whatever term you want to use, dictating the routes that tankers have to use

and merchant ships have to use, firing missiles at our Gulf allies to enforce its rule, if he's in that position plus giving the billions of dollars that, you know, have already been, you know, sort of outlined as part of the memorandum of understanding with these sort of vague future assurances about the nuclear program, he can't look anyone in the face and say he did a better deal than Obama. And I think that this is one of the things that's just, you know, genuinely driving him as this pride that I have to do, I have to have the better deal. And that was the main public response from skeptical right-winger in the immediate aftermath of the deal was like, this is not what we were hoping for. One additional layer,

I would add is that to the extent that the world has been protected from some of these more catastrophic economic impacts that we were expecting earlier in the war, it's actually been sort of publicly credited to China for not importing oil for drawing down their own strategic oil reserves and therefore sort of softening the impact on the global oil market. And I think, you know, again, to the extent that we're tallying losses for Donald Trump here, it's not just that he made a worse deal than Obama. It was also that on some level, the experience of the war demonstrated, not just that Iran controlled the Hormuz weapon, but that China also was quite a powerful player with their oil weapon. And both of those are probably pretty upsetting to someone who wants to assert power on the global stage as nakedly as Trump does. I think it's sweet that he's boosted China's global image. That's awfully nice of him. He keeps doing that.

So it sounds like you guys don't really think he's going to pay much of a political price or will his party play a political price in this year's midterms? Well, one big question is whether the soft economic impact that I was describing was a temporary thing that will, and the landscape there will change once our oil reserves really do go to zero. That was some of the pressure that was on Trump a month or two ago when he was first sort of coming to the table and reaching the memorandum of understanding was the idea that, you know, this had been relatively comfortable, you know, relatively speaking, relatively comfortable for a period of time, but we're about to hit some really hard limits. And the question is whether that's true and whether if we continue to have the straight closed over the next, say, two or three months, whether we'll start to see a much more punishing economic impact. If that does come to pass, I think it may drag his approval

ratings even lower. David, if you got anything before we move on. Yeah, just to add to that, David's exactly right that the impact has been softer than some people feared. At the same time, nobody's happy. Well, very few people are happy with this economy. And so there is a short window for the Trump administration to show some concrete results before the November election. And I think that Trump sort of had this view that once the conflict is over, then inflation will go back down. It sort of be very quickly all will be right with the world economically. He thinks he can talk the stock market into almost anything he wants it to do.

And I think one of the realities is even if it is a softer economic impact than a lot of people feared, there is still an economic impact. And it is very hard to turn the ship around or even be seen to start to turn the ship around before the midterms if this conflict is still going on. So I guess my question is whether or not whatever he winds up doing, or not doing with Iran and that agreement, the more time he spends on that, the more time he wastes on his absurd election fraud obsession, the less time he is spending, conveying any kind of interest or whether or not he cares at all about the economic pain that people still say they're feeling. Like, whatever is actually happening with the numbers, people are Certainly, people do not feel like this economy is working for them. And I'm not sure that there is time to turn that around before the midterm. So I think beyond the specifics, just the image of him doing everything but caring about the economy and coming up with absurd statements like, I love the inflation or I don't care about, you know, economic, whatever. And I just have to think that that more generally lends the, you know, lends to the narrative that he just doesn't.

give a crap. So we'll just see. Well, you know, one quick thing on that, that's not the, the Republican strategy is not necessarily to tout its successes. The Republican strategy that they believe will work, and they have some foundation for this, is they will essentially go the doom direction. You, Democrats will destroy this country. The doom direction. Our country is at stake. Democrats will destroy this country. They're communists. This is this is going to be the sales pitch. It's not going to be look how much, look how great America is. It's a really hard one to make when there's such negative feelings about the economy. It's going to be they're the ultimate threat. They're the existential threat. And that is going to be the nonstop message, you know, for the next several months.

I am getting lots of the communists are coming for you, fundraising pleas from the Republicans in my inbox. But that seems that's that's what Trump made his July 4th address about. It's true. It's always that the communists are coming for your children and your dog. But that is kind of like the perfect segue into the complete freak show in Maine and Graham Platner. So speaking of disastrous decisions, the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine has suspended his campaign. He did this on Wednesday after a woman publicly accused him of rape, an accusation he has denied. But when the story broke, pretty much all of Platner's Democratic allies abandoned him lickety split. But before this particular allegation, many, you know, especially in the insurgent

wing of the party, were willing to overlook a large number of very red flags with this guy. You know, whether you're talking Nazi tattoo, hateful Reddit posts, sexing with other women behind his wife's back, other allegations of mistreating women. It's not like the sirens weren't going off. So David French, you've thought a lot about character, morals, the importance of these in politics. What does this messy platinum trajectory tell us about the dams and, you know, are they inching toward the win at all costs position that they used to criticize Republicans for? Some people are doing more than inch inching, Michelle. Some people are sprinting, sprinting to, he might be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch, is sort of the...

The dirtbag defense. Exactly, exactly. But, you know, it's funny. I was just yesterday somebody came up to me and they said, how did you have Grand Platner pegged? And I said, it was the easiest thing in the world, y'all. If you weren't blinded by the fact that, like, somebody who shares my ideology must be a good person, which is a giant mistake to make just in life. is to think that just because somebody sort of shares your political or religious worldview, that that makes them by default like a good, good or decent person.

And I said, your mileage may vary. But my, I've never encountered a person who had a Nazi tattoo for 20 years who was also an otherwise good dude. Like, that is, that is not. And a lot of people started to even make fun of the people who sort of brought up the Nazi tattoo. Like, well, he already explained that. I'm thinking, and you bought it. that? And you bought that explanation. You actually did. I'm going to tell you, if you did, I'm talking to somebody who had incredible ideological blinders on because I guarantee you,

you would not have bought that explanation with a Republican. You wouldn't. I know you wouldn't. You would have said, this is the most obvious, clear thing in the history of the world. And this is just sort of like so obvious and pedantic to say, but it's also very true and very hard. and that is to apply the exact same standard to somebody on your own side when you find out about a scandal allegation that you apply to somebody on the other side. And instead, here's what we do. What we basically do is we say, this person that I like, they're for Medicare for all. So I know that like, man, they're with me on this and I like them. And then when you hear the scandal, you go, well, man, an otherwise lovable guy is just, you know, nobody's perfect.

Oh, my God. But then you find out somebody on the other, you know, you have somebody on the other side and maybe they have a more free market-oriented approach to health care, and you're like, you're horrible, you're a terrible person. And then you find out that they had a scandal. And you go, yep, that's confirmation. That's confirmation. And so we just can't be in this loop.

It's driving this country mad to be in this loop where you just have these continual grace for the horrible actions of somebody on your own side and absolute swift condemnation for the other. Now, I will say this. At least the Democrats said, no. It took way too much. It took way too much. Way too much. But finally, they did say no.

And, you know, one of the grievous things, there's this other guy hovering around out there. Ken Paxton. Ken Paxton. There are a whole bunch of Texas Republicans right now who are going, those main Democrats are horrible for voting for, you know, Graham Platner with all the waving red flags. And, oh, by the way, you're not a Christian. if you don't vote for Ken Paxton. And that is coming. You're going to see that all over Texas

for the next several couple of months is Christians have one option and it's to vote for the adulterer over Tala Rico. And it's to vote for the corrupt politician so corrupt he's impeached by a Republican House. He had his own very conservative staff resign out from a hundred-in protest.

That's how corrupt he is. But you have to vote for him. But other than that, he's a great. But other than that, and they're going to stick to it all the way, all the way, Michelle. David W. Well, I think there are a lot of different actors in this saga, right? There's Plattner himself who was, you know, dissembling, you know, misleading the public, misleading his staff. Dissembling, that is a sweet word.

Like, that is a very sweet word. The only way he wasn't flat out lying is if he was always too drunk to remember any of it. And I'm not sure that's a defense. There were, you know, the people who sort of found him and didn't vet. him properly. There's his campaign staff. Then there are a lot of enablers in the media. But I also think that, you know, we shouldn't look away from the fact that he won the primary. And the voters actually did see much of this, not all of it, but see much of this behavior. And nevertheless, voted to make him the nominee. And there are, you know, that's in a particular situation against

particular other candidates. We can't read all that much into it. But the thing that concerns me about it is that I don't know how much of that is, as David said, extending grace to someone who shares your ideology, and how much of it is voters liking the roughness of his presentation. And that's not to say that a large share of Democratic main voters wanted someone who may have raped an ex-girlfriend or wanted someone with a Nazi tattoo, but they were able to make sense of the narrative in a way that made Platner look like an outsider, like a fighter, like someone who is angry, and that those elements excited them about his candidacy, not just things that they could excuse, but things that actually drew them to Platner as against Janet Mills or any of the other

candidates. And I do think that that is one thing, again, as David was saying, that applies across the country here, not just within one party, not just within one wing of one party, which is to the extent that the country is surly, as you said earlier, Michelle, to the extent that the country is angry, there are going to be some number of voters who want to see their politicians expressing the same sentiments. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to turn to a monster. I think of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. He seems, you know, he's selling much the same politics that Platner is, but I think it's a much more honorable figure. We'll see how that campaign goes, but he seems like a kind of contrasting figure. Or Mamdani in New York, who, you know, has his

enemies, but is also, I think, in an interpersonal way, kind of an obviously good person who is interested in trying to improve the world. Platner was cut from a different cloth, but I think that as we go forward, failing to address the latent anger of many millions of people, of people around this country, we are likely to see more politicians whose main qualification for a higher office is rage. Okay. So this is, this is, I can feel my blood pressure rising as we're discussing this. So this is where I just want to jump in and say, go, Michelle, go. So for starters, Platner is vile. If even like, even what we know about him is just like he's vile. I don't want to hear from him ever again. You don't get to set the joint on fire.

and then have a say and who's going to come in to clean up your mess. Not every jerk who's angry in a flannel shirt is a working class hero. And this is where the people who really need to be slapped are the people who decided, oh, no, we don't need to vet him. We don't need to worry about the red flags. We don't need to pretend that the rules of politics

apply to our guy because he's so freaking charming and has interesting facial hair. I am sorry, but like, it's not just a question of whether he could get elected. I mean, this guy in the Senate would have cut a swath across Capitol Hill that we would have been hearing about forever. So I like, I get it. I get that people are angry, but not all angry jerks are the same. And a guy who likes to pretend he's a working class hero is not automatically who you want to throw in with. So do some due diligence. That said.

And here's the thing. Chuck Schumer should be embarrassed that the choice in this race was Janet Mills, who was way too old and way too tired. Like she didn't want to be in this race for the people of Maine to have basically had to pick between too old and too vile is inexcusable. But I just want to underline something that you said about the people who found him and halfway vetted him. They didn't fail to do their due diligence. They wanted someone who broke them old. I mean, that was the language they used. We didn't want someone who has grown in a vat.

We wanted someone who has lived experience. They did this as a kind of central casting. Here's someone who looks like an outsider who donated to Bernie Sanders. And how's that working out for them? I'm not making a positive case for it. I'm just saying it's notable that what we're seeing here is not exactly, you know, oversight, people having a perfect candidate who has skeletons in this closet. You can show someone who looked like they had skeletons there.

You can vet someone and not expect them to, like, be some kind of bland milk toast model that could survive, I don't know, like, in the McKinsey boardroom or whatever. So, okay, they got what they asked for. Congratulations. Now, step aside and let someone clean up your wretched mess. And can I just say something real fast about this? Please do. We have got to stop confusing asking. for courage or assholery for conviction.

And so I see that's on both sides of the spectrum, especially amongst the angriest part of the base, is they're looking at somebody who's going to give them, you know, who's basically extending the middle finger to the world and demonstrating just this sort of like raw fury and anger, often in a way that's deeply cruel and dishonest and casting that as, well, they are a fighter. Okay, they're a fighter.

Well, you know, that is not the only model for fighting. guys. Look throughout history. If you're going to look at the people who led in difficult times who demonstrated and history has vindicated for their courage and their resolve and their conviction, often they were people who went out of their way to try to extend olive branches, to win people over who are wavering, who had to demonstrate a tremendous amount of moral character. This is something that is a huge problem that I've seen on the right for the last decade. and that is they don't they view you as weak unless you're cruel um and all of your scandals as david was saying they're a bonus they're a bonus because they what they mean as you don't

care about norms you're willing to go as far as you need to go and and that is down that path lies madness and there is no path in which that is going to unify this country or achieve the justice and prosperity and equality and all of the things that that is going to unify this country or achieve the justice and that you're looking for, that is not the path for it. And I just, I'm longing for a moment where America, especially the bases of the parties, wake up and they say, you know what, sometimes the most courage you can demonstrate is to demonstrate humility or kindness in the face of an arrogant and cruel age. Well, we're going to have to wait until Trump's out of the White House before that's

the possibility. But David W. did bring up a less gut-wrenching, soul-crushing, primary situation. And we're going to move for now to Michigan. So the stakes there are sky high in the Democratic Senate primary on August 4th. State Senator Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the contest this week and it's cleared the field for a tough race between Representative Haley Stevens, who's the establishment favorite, and Abdul al-Said, an anti-establishment crusader whose very edgy progressivism is making some in his party a little nervous. Now, no Republican has won the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan in over 30 years.

But if Democrats lose this race, it's going to pretty much kneecap their chances of taking control of the Senate in November. Who do you think is going to give them the best chance? I don't have any detailed knowledge of the race on the ground. I just look at the polls. And what I've seen lately suggests that Abdullah-Sahed is maybe has a little bit of an advantage there. That doesn't mean that that'll hold over the course of the, of the, you know, the general election. But, you know, I think that a few months ago, even we would have looked at the polls and said that he was the much weaker candidate. And I think

the behavior there over, you know, voters behavior over the last couple of months suggests that he may well be the stronger one. And I do think that that would be a major event in American politics. He would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He would be, you know, a sort of natural successor figure to Bernie as a, as a left. in the Senate. I do think that he's a more, as I said a minute ago, more admirable character than Plattner. I think he's sort of gotten under, you know, less attention over the course of this race than Plattner has. And that's a little bit, you know, a little bit of a shame. I think he's a more interesting doctor for the American left. He just doesn't look as good in flannel. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Well, I mean, I don't know if you've seen him in the gym. He's quite fit. But he's, he does seem to cut a bit of a different figure, which I don't think we know as easily what to do with. I mean, Platner looked this part. He wasn't exactly, as you were saying, Michelle, a white working class figure from generations left behind by globalization. That wasn't his actual background. But he looked like that. And that meant that to voters, he scanned very easily as a familiar archetype, one that they could dump a lot of rage and political enthusiasm into. Abdul al-Sayad looks like a less familiar archetype, which is one reason why I think it's possible that he does crack open American politics in a pretty interesting way going forward. I'm not going to say I think it's a safe bet that he wins the primary or if he does that he'll win the general election.

But it's a very consequential race, not just for who controls the Senate starting in 2027, but in terms of where the country and the Democratic Party goes going forward. David F. You know, Michelle, growing up in the South, did you ever hear this phrase? We used it a lot in law. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. I'm afraid I have. You have? I have.

So essentially what that means is if you reach too far, if you become too, if you try to get, you know, it would have come up in settlement negotiations. Like you're just asking for too much. And when you ask for too much, you break off the settlement negotiations. and you might then lose the case. And so I think one of the things that we have seen is that when one of the parties is weak, and the Republicans right now are weak, they really are. Democrats may end up overperforming their 2024 numbers

very substantially, which could hand them control of the House, which means that even a Michigan Senate seat, which has been in Democratic hands for a really long time, odds are almost no matter who they nominate, that person is going to be, it's going to remain a Democratic seat. These are very favorable tailwinds right here. However, however, if you then take that moment to say now is when we can push the envelope with our candidates. In other words, this is the opportunity maybe to really, as David was saying, put a successor to Bernie in the Senate coming from a swing state. That's pretty risky.

And I keep flashing back to the 2022 midterms. And there was very high inflation. Joe Biden's approval rating had already gone below 50 and was not coming back. There was just all of this talk of a red wave. And it never materialized. And I put it into – I used two Ds to describe why it didn't materialize, Dobbs and Dufuses. Dobbs was obvious, right?

You know, as somebody who's pro-life, I regret this deeply, but there is very much a pro-choice majority in the United States. It galvanized a pro-choice majority. And then the Republicans nominated MAGA candidate after MAGA candidate in these statewide swing state elections and lost and lost and lost in a very, what would have been a very favorable environment. And, you know, I think that's instructive. And so I really do question the way in which a lot of people seem to view Donald Trump

and the unpopularity of Donald Trump as an operative as a political opportunity to sort of press in and lean in to deeper and deeper progressivism. And I just feel as if I'm sort of getting this sense of deja vu that, you know. I hate it when you do that. I'm getting that deja vu. But, you know, one thing that I think is important to note in this context is, you know, who we're talking about when we're talking about making this decision. Like, in a previous era, the party might have exerted a stronger control over the race, either in candidate selection or in funneling money. And these days, you know, the Republican Party is weak because of Trump, but the Democratic Party is weak as well. And one thing that we're seeing is simply voters' choice.

Now, it may be that Democratic primary voters are doing themselves a disservice as Republican primary voters have done in the past by choosing people that align with a, you know, a harder ideological line than the median general election voter would be. But it is also not the case that, like, you know, the Abdul al-Sayed is being anointed by anyone in particular. He is, you know, neck and neck or head in the polls. And that tells us something about the Michigan electorate, maybe not to turn. for the fall, maybe just indicative, but it is also the case, I think, that there's a real signal there. There's still something on the ground happening that we sort of need to be paying attention to. Okay, now I love a good primary fight. I know that the political class does not because it costs some money and they're worried about splitting. But I'm all for a good primary battle. So, you know, let's go forward. We'll see how that goes.

But before we go, I want to pivot to Washington just briefly and the question of how open elected officials need to be with the public about their whereabouts. And I'm bringing this up because Senator Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old former Republican leader, has now been hospitalized for several weeks. And we have yet to get any kind of clear explanation about what's going on. This has sparked crazy rumors about whether something already happened to him that's hard. and it's being covered up by his team for political reasons. And the McConnell drama is coming hot on the heels of another medical mystery, which is that New Jersey Republican House member Tom Keene disappeared for over 100 days, during which time the public was told only that he was receiving medical treatment for something.

It wasn't until after he returned to the house in late June that people were told He had been treated for depression. Now, I'm always grateful when members of Congress talk about their mental health challenges and we get honest about that sort of thing. But really, shouldn't the public have been given more information on this earlier? Like the same thing with McConnell. How much can we expect to know about the health and well-being of our political officials, guys? Could I propose something quasi-mathematical equation here? Ooh, you're going to get specific.

I like that. The greater the power, the public official exercises, the greater the obligation to disclose to the public their physical condition. So at the very top of that is the president in the United States. And I think we've now had a couple of presidencies, including this one, by the way, where you don't really feel that they're all that transparent about like what are, you know, what our president. What the truth is. Healthyest president ever, David. Healthiest ever. Fittest, cognitively sharp, whatever.

Yeah. So we're approaching sort of so. levels of opacity here, is that the right word? And you remember back, you know, Michelle, you probably, you might, you might remember back in the days when a Soviet leader would get a cold. And next thing you know, you had a new Soviet leader. They were completely unforthcoming with information, right? We're approaching almost like Soviet levels of concealment here when it comes to senior,

senior elected officials. And look, elected officials are human beings. Human beings, no matter what, there are zones of privacy. But when we're talking about life and death situations, capacity to do the job for which you were elected, we are owed transparency. I'm sorry, we are. We are owed transparency. And this actually should be a consideration. If you're somebody who's wanting to keep serving in your deep into your 70s, you can't have this. this thing both ways. The more powerful you are, the more transparent you have to be. I mean, that's... I would just, one other variable is the last one I think that David mentioned, which I think is really important, which is age. If you're in your 40s, you know, your voters, your constituents

can probably trust that unless there's some surprise, you will be capable of managing the job. Once you're in your 70s or your 80s, people are just, the question is much more normal to ask, you know, some large share of Americans in their 80s are not capable of something like running the United States from the White House. And so the older you get, I think the more natural it is to ask these questions too, which ties it back to, you know, the broader question of gerontocracy and what it means that we're living in a world that is governed to some large degree by much older people. Now, it looks a little bit less that way on the surface than it did a few years ago. We have a vice president who's quite young. A lot of Trump's

cabinet is relatively young. Then, you know, by the way, it's Trump, Bush, W. Clinton. We're all born within one year of each other. Like, they're all exactly the same age. So the next cycle, we're going to be in a different generational phase here. We're going to be at least in the presidential contest, looking at members of a different generation. And there is turn over. Gen X. Isn't there some theory that we're going to skip entirely over Gen X? It's got to be. President of David. There has to be. You just got to let that dream go. Let it go. No, I can't. I can't let it go. Oh, let it go. But I think part of the story here is just what it means when older people stay in power, hold on to power.

They're going to be more secretive because the things that they're trying to hide are more serious. And the public is going to be more agitated about that secret keeping because they suspect rightly that these are genuine, important questions to ask. And, you know, I don't think that, like, we should be, you know, launching a congressional investigation into the bruising on Donald Trump. hand. But it is an enormous area of like internet obsession that he has this bruise on us, this running bruise on his hand. It would just be better if we had, I mean, better a million ways of Trump was not the president. But even keeping, even putting that aside, it would just be better if we didn't have to worry all the time that our geriatric leaders were sliding down, you know, the slope to real old age. And yet that's where we are. For those listening,

I'm going to put David Wallace Wells' email directly into the feed so that all of the people who want to yell at him for ages and can do that directly because I feel that I get yelled at for that plenty. And David, you will come back for us when we do our next gerontocracy episode because this is one of my favorite topics. So we're going to leave it there and we're going to do recommendations. What do you have to get us through the peak summer heat? David Wallace Wells, Wells, you first. The book that I've been reading the last few days is a book called In Trees by a writer named Robert Moore, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It's a sort of a strange book to describe in summary, but it's part nature essay, it's part work of philosophy, it's part personal essay, and it's an effort to make sense of the tree, not just the forest landscape, but the idea of a tree, the intellectual structure of a tree. what it means to think through the metaphor of the tree as a sort of new model for thinking about

rootedness and what we used to call cathedral thinking, that is to say, things that outlast human life. It's a beautiful book. It's impossible to put down. And ever since I picked it up, I've been recommending it to everyone I know. So I'll recommend it to all of you as well. All right, David French. So first, let me just say, I love that David came in here with something of true interest to intelligence and sophistication carrying the Jamel torch. I can't wait to hear what you're going to recommend. How about this?

How about an Apple TV show about fact checkers who are trying to solve the murder of like a male only fan star? He stole my heart. Or only fan. Tell me more. The show is called Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. It's on Apple TV.

And the way that I discovered it is, so we were loving, Widows Bay. Yeah. And Stephen King tweeted out, I love Widows Bay, but there's an even better thriller on Apple TV called Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. And the story you have is a single mom recently divorced. She's a fact checker for a fictional publication.

And she is interacting with a cam boy, like a guy like OnlyFans. It's not only, they have a different name for it, of course. And she sees him apparently get kidnapped and brutalized. And so then hijinks ensue. But what's funny is it's centered around a trio of fact checkers who are on the case and on the hunt. And they're a delightful trio, like a delightful cast of characters. They're quirky. They're funny.

And I just find it hilarious. And shout out to all of our awesome fact checkers at the New York Times who make our work possible. Doing God's work. Doing the Lord's work. But maximum pleasure guaranteed, it's... What a title, too. Yeah, it's great. Leave it to French to keep it highbrow.

Okay. I'm going to go into kind of a geeky direction for any puzzle people out there. So my household likes to order these murder mystery case files that you can get. They are these mysteries. It's often it's cold case files or they have themes like, you know,

somebody gets killed at summer camp or somebody gets killed at the theater. And they send you this package of clues, you know, like autopsy reports, witness statements, crime scene photos. And it's one of these things where you two people can do it or five people can do it. We'll drag our kids into doing it

when they're home from school. Some of them are just easy, breezy. And they rank them according to difficulty. You can do them in like a couple hours. Some of them are really hard. We have failed on a couple of occasions. I'm not too proud to admit. But they're really fun, especially if, for whatever reason, you might not want to stream a show one night.

And that's it. That's all I got. I feel that we've solved so many problems in the world. I really appreciate it. David Wallace-Swells, thank you for joining. And you will be back. Remember, at least for the Gerontocracy episode. David French, always a pleasure.

Guys, have a great weekend. You too. Bye, Michelle. Bye, David.