The Political Scene | The New Yorker-logo

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC

Join The New Yorker’s writers and editors for reporting, insight, and analysis of the most pressing political issues of our time. On Mondays, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, presents conversations and feature stories about current events. On Wednesdays, the senior editor Tyler Foggatt goes deep on a consequential political story via far-reaching interviews with staff writers and outside experts. And, on Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the latest developments in Washington and beyond, offering an encompassing understanding of this moment in American politics.

Location:

New York, NY

Description:

Join The New Yorker’s writers and editors for reporting, insight, and analysis of the most pressing political issues of our time. On Mondays, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, presents conversations and feature stories about current events. On Wednesdays, the senior editor Tyler Foggatt goes deep on a consequential political story via far-reaching interviews with staff writers and outside experts. And, on Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the latest developments in Washington and beyond, offering an encompassing understanding of this moment in American politics.

Twitter:

@newyorker

Language:

English

Contact:

4 Times Square New York, NY 10036


Episodes

Should Big Tech Stop Moderating Content?

3/27/2024
The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tension between protecting children from the effects of social media and protecting their right to free speech. Kang considers the ways in which social-media companies have sought to quell fear about misinformation and propaganda since Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, and why those efforts will ultimately fail. “The structure of the Internet, of all social media,” he tells Foggatt, “is to argue about politics. And I think that is baked into it, and I don’t think you can ever fix it.” Read Jay Caspian Kang’s latest column. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Duration:00:34:52

Adam Gopnik on Hitler’s Rise to Power

3/25/2024
In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the “F-word”: fascism. He saw Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe. In the years since, Trump has called for “terminating” articles of the Constitution, has marked the January 6th insurrectionists as political martyrs, and has called his enemies animals, vermin, and “not people,” and demonstrated countless other examples of authoritarian behavior. In a new essay, Gopnik reviews a book by the historian Timothy W. Ryback, and considers Adolf Hitler’s unlikely ascent in the early nineteen-thirties. He finds alarming analogies with this moment in the U.S. In both Trump and Hitler, “The allegiance to the fascist leader is purely charismatic,” Gopnik says. In both men, he sees “someone whose power lies in his shamelessness,” and whose prime motivation is a sense of humiliation at the hands of those described as élites. “It wasn’t that the great majority of Germans were suddenly lit aflame by a nihilist appetite for apocalyptic transformation,” Gopnik notes. “They [were] voting to protect what they perceive as their interest from their enemies. Often those enemies are largely imaginary.”

Duration:00:29:08

The Political Books That Help Us Make Sense of 2024

3/22/2024
The Washington Roundtable reflects on the books they’ve been reading to understand the 2024 Presidential campaigns and the state of international politics. Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos swap recommendations of works about all things political, from the anger of rural voters to the worldwide rise of authoritarian rule, including a fictionalized imagining of a powerful real-life political family. Read with the Roundtable: “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,” by Jacob Heilbrunn “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” by Rachel Maddow “The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism,” by Joe Conason “Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” by Brooke Harrington “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” by Giuliano da Empoli “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” by Joshua Cohen “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq,” by Steve Coll (The New Yorker) “The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China,” by Minxin Pei “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker) “Romney: A Reckoning,” by McKay Coppins “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim Alberta “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind,” by Sarah Posner “Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right,” by Mary Jo McConahay “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” by Stephen Breyer “The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court,” by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” by Richard Ben Cramer Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy: “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” “Theodore Rex,” and “Colonel Roosevelt,” by Edmund Morris To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback about this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Duration:00:34:56

Why Robert Hur Described Joe Biden as an “Elderly Man with a Poor Memory”

3/22/2024
The New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her interview with Robert Hur, the special prosecutor who caused a political uproar with his report on his investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents. The report, which referred to Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” elicited a furious response from the White House—but, Gersen argues, its meaning and Hur’s motivations may have been misunderstood. Gersen and Foggatt also discuss the likelihood that the federal cases against Trump will go to trial before Election Day, and what Americans might expect if they do not. Read Jeannie Suk Gersen’s piece on Robert Hur here. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Duration:00:38:01

Judith Butler on the Global Backlash to L.G.B.T.Q. Rights

3/18/2024
Long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990) and in other works, Butler popularized ideas about gender as a social construct, a “performance,” a matter of learned behavior. Those ideas proved highly influential for a younger generation, and Butler became the target of traditionalists who abhorred them. A protest at which Butler was burned in effigy, depicted as a witch, inspired their new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” It covers the backlash to trans rights in which conservatives from the Vatican to Vladimir Putin create a “phantasm” of gender as a destructive force. “Obviously, nobody who is thinking about gender . . . is saying you can’t be a mother, that you can’t be a father, or we’re not using those words anymore,” they tell David Remnick. “Or we’re going to take your sex away.” They also discuss Butler’s identification as nonbinary after many years of identifying as a woman. “The young people gave me the ‘they,’ ” as Butler puts it. “At the end of ‘Gender Trouble,’ in 1990, I said, ‘Why do we restrict ourselves to thinking there are only men and women?’ . . . This generation has come along with the idea of being nonbinary. [It] never occurred to me! Then I thought, Of course I am. What else would I be? . . . I just feel gratitude to the younger generation, they gave me something wonderful. That also takes humility of a certain kind.”

Duration:00:26:17

How Gaza, Ukraine, and TikTok Are Influencing the Election

3/15/2024
The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss how foreign policy is shaping the 2024 campaign, such as a possible ban on Chinese-owned TikTok and the wars in Europe and the Middle East. The panel also considers Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s sharply conflicting views of America’s role in the world. This week’s reading: Susan B. GlasserTo discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback about this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Duration:00:37:07

What Biden’s Budget Means for His Reëlection Battle with Trump

3/13/2024
John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss President Biden’s “bold proposal” to shift the tax burden back to the wealthy and tackle inflation, both key concerns for voters in the run-up to Election Day. The pair also considers why companies continue to rake in “bigger profits than ever before,” even as the economic fallout of the pandemic recedes. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Duration:00:34:33

Vinson Cunningham on His New Book, “Great Expectations”

3/12/2024
Like most Americans, Vinson Cunningham first became aware of Barack Obama in 2004, when he gave a breakout speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Very good posture, that guy,” Cunningham noted. “We hang our faith on objects, on people, based on the signs that they put out,” Cunningham tells David Remnick. “And that’s certainly been a factor in my own life. The rapid and urgent search for patterns.” Although Cunningham aspired to be a writer, he got swept up in this historic campaign, working on Obama’s longshot 2008 run for the Presidency, and later worked in his White House. Cunningham’s adventures on the trail inspire his first novel, “Great Expectations,” an autobiographical coming-of-age story about where and how we seek inspiration. Cunningham recalls that Obama was seen as the “fulfillment” of so many hopes and dreams for people like himself. Now he wishes the former President were playing a larger role. “I will admit that it has been dispiriting,” in Obama’s post-Presidential life, “to see him making movies and being on Jet Skis as the world burns. … more like a movie star than someone whose great hope is to change the world.”

Duration:00:18:29

At the State of the Union, Biden Came Out Swinging

3/8/2024
The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Biden’s energetic State of the Union address, the positive response among Democrats in the polls, and how press coverage is shaping the public’s perceptions of Biden’s campaign. “He wasn’t looking to convince anybody,” Glasser says. “What he was looking to do was to tell his side, ‘Stop freaking out. I’m in the fight.’ ” This week’s reading: So Much for ‘Sleepy Joe’: On Biden’s Rowdy, Shouty State of the UnionJoe Biden’s Last CampaignTo discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Duration:00:38:41

The Mood at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday

3/6/2024
Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the results of Super Tuesday, and how a “general decay” in Biden’s support, on top of his tight margins, could be exploited by a third-party candidate. Plus, Antonia Hitchens takes us behind the gilded curtain at a Mar-a-Lago primary-night watch party. Read Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the primaries and Antonia Hitchens on experiencing Super Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Duration:00:29:29

Biden Reveals His Thoughts on the 2024 Election

3/4/2024
Despite hand-wringing among Democrats about Joe Biden’s age and his discouraging poll numbers, the President’s campaign for reëlection displays an “ostentatious level of serenity,” Evan Osnos says about the election. “This is a matter of great personal importance to Joe Biden. He feels almost, viscerally, this contempt for Trump and for what Trump did to the country,” Osnos tells David Remnick, after a rare private interview at the White House. “And let’s remember, he didn’t just try to steal this election—from Biden’s perspective—he tried to steal it from him.” Although Biden once referred to himself as a “bridge” President, he told Osnos that he had never considered stepping aside after one term. His gait has slowed, but Osnos found the President quick to jab at his questions and at “you guys” in the media, whom he blames for naysaying his campaign. But alongside complacent media coverage, threats to the President’s reëlection are many. The war in Gaza has alienated many voters from Biden, especially in Arab American communities, and it resonates even more widely. “When Houthi rebels started firing rockets at ships in the Red Sea,” Osnos points out, “it had an immediate effect on global shipping, to the point that it could have, and could yet still, push inflation back up. . . . I know this is the worst cliché in journalism, but this election has an element that is beyond anything we’ve ever really dealt with before.”

Duration:00:21:21

Why the Primary System Is “Clearly Failing”

3/1/2024
The Washington Roundtable: In the Michigan primary on Tuesday, more than a hundred thousand Michigan Democrats chose “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, as a protest of his support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In Dearborn, which is home to a large Arab American and Muslim population, fifty-seven per cent of the vote was “uncommitted.” And, while former President Trump has so far swept the Republican contests, Nikki Haley has seized on college-educated and moderate-to-liberal Republican voters, taking forty per cent of the primary vote in South Carolina, her home state. This week, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear oral arguments on Trump’s claims of immunity, delaying the possibility of a trial before the election in the federal January 6th case.“It’s practically a kind of game-over moment for our democracy, what the Supreme Court did this week,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Will apathy among Democrats and the Supreme Court’s delay of Trump’s trial lead to a second Trump term? The New Yorker staff writers Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos join Glasser to weigh in.

Duration:00:32:08

With Navalny’s Death, Putin is Feeling More Confident than Ever

2/28/2024
After a decade of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin through organized protest, anti-corruption investigations, and taunting social-media posts, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, from what the Kremlin claims was a pulmonary embolism. The New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen, who knew Navalny, calls his death “a shock, but not a surprise,” and says that, had Navalny been killed a decade ago, the incident might have led to even more widespread outrage. But Russian citizens and the world have since grown accustomed to Putin’s iron grip on power. With Putin gaining momentum in his war on Ukraine and Western sanctions seeming to be unable to stop him, Navalny’s death does not appear to signal Putin’s weakness; rather, it suggests that the Russian President feels as emboldened as ever. Despite this, Gessen sees a future for Russia’s political opposition movement. “They’re not going to organize to bring down the regime,” Gessen tells Tyler Foggatt. “That’s not the project. The project is to have a politics in place for when the regime collapses under its own weight. And I think it’s not impossible that they could do it.”

Duration:00:38:11

Ty Cobb on Trump's Admiration for Putin

2/26/2024
Ty Cobb represented the Trump White House during the height of the Mueller-Russia probe, so he has a unique insight into the former President’s admiration for all things Putin, and his refusal to condemn the dissident Alexey Navalny’s death in prison. Trump’s response, bizarrely, was to compare his own legal troubles to Navalny’s political persecution and likely murder. Yet Cobb still feels certain that Russia has nothing concrete on Trump, which was the question of the Mueller investigation. Rather, Putin “has what Trump wants,” he tells David Remnick, “total control and adulation and riding the horse with his shirt off.” His quest to secure that power, seemingly by any means necessary, has made Trump “the greatest threat to democracy we’ve ever seen.” Cobb has been following Trump’s myriad of criminal cases closely, and he has concluded that only the January 6th case concerning Trump’s attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power has the potential to derail his political career. If a trial decision is not reached before the November election, and Trump were to win again, he can order the Justice Department to dismiss the case, and “it will be as though it never existed."

Duration:00:13:50

Does Impeachment Mean Anything Anymore?

2/23/2024
Since Joe Biden’s earliest days in the Oval Office, some House Republicans have sought to remove the President and his Cabinet members from office. Last week, the Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, was impeached—on a second attempt—by a slight margin, in regard to the Biden Administration’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis. Meanwhile, the House’s other impeachment investigation, into Biden, is on the verge of collapse, after its star witness was charged with providing false information about Biden and his son Hunter to F.B.I. agents. The F.B.I. informant also, by his own account, has ties to Russian intelligence agencies. The ubiquity of impeachment cases today signal a change in our politics. “What was once a pretty rare and solemn instrument of accountability now looks more and more like just another partisan tool,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Jane Mayer join him to weigh in.

Duration:00:30:13

Why Matt Gaetz Keeps Getting Away with It

2/21/2024
Representative Matt Gaetz is one of the most outspoken critics of the status quo in Washington, which he demonstrated most recently by playing a key role in removing fellow-Republican Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. How was Gaetz able to pull off such a feat given his deep unpopularity in Congress, and the fact that he’s under a House Ethics Committee investigation for the sex trafficking of a minor? The New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins, who recently profiled Gaetz in the magazine, joins Tyler Foggatt to explore the congressman’s motivations, including how fractured party politics have played a role in his rise to fame. “The party has to decide what it is,” Filkins says. “It’s not what it used to be, and it’s rapidly becoming something else. . . . In the interregnum, we’re seeing all these morbid symptoms as the party kind of convulses and tries to figure out its new identity.”

Duration:00:28:53

“Pod Save America” ’s Jon Lovett on Biden’s Accomplishments

2/19/2024
Jon Lovett had been deep inside politics, as a speechwriter in the Obama Administration, before he joined his colleagues Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau to launch Crooked Media, a liberal answer to the burgeoning ecosystem of right-wing news platforms. “There was too much media that treated people like cynical observers,” Lovett tells David Remnick, “and not enough that treated them like frustrated participants.” Crooked Media has gathered millions of politically engaged listeners—“nerds,” Lovett calls them—to “Pod Save America,” “Lovett or Leave It,” and other podcasts. But Lovett is more worried about voters who no longer get a steady stream of reliable political coverage at all, as local news outlets wither and platforms like Facebook downplay the sharing of news. “The vast majority of people do not know about Joe Biden’s accomplishments,” he says. “When they say to a pollster that this is not someone they view as being up to the job, they’re not . . . understanding how he performed in the job so far.” Lovett shares the widespread concerns about Biden’s apparent aging, but notes that his performance remains effective, whereas, “in Trump, the reverse: he is more energetic—I think the threat of federal jail time sharpens the mind!—but by all accounts is emotionally, psychologically, and mentally not up to the job.”

Duration:00:30:25

Do Democrats Have a Biden Backup Plan?

2/15/2024
The Biden campaign has come out in full force against a special-counsel report that refers to the President as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” But, as the staff writer Andrew Marantz points out, this “October-surprise-level political stumbling block” may require a more substantial response if Democrats hope to recapture the White House in November. Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to outline the issues the Democratic Party is facing right now, and discuss why one lesson from Lyndon B. Johnson may come back to haunt the President later. “There is just a fundamental cleavage within the coalition over what’s going on in Israel and Gaza the way there was with Vietnam,” he tells Foggatt. “I honestly don’t know what the ace-in-the-hole political move is here for him.”

Duration:00:24:36

Can Joe Biden Squash Concerns About His Age?

2/10/2024
The Washington Roundtable: The special counsel investigating President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, released a report Thursday that describes the President as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden will not face charges for “willfully” retaining classified documents, but the report has reignited concerns about the President’s mental acuity. In a late-night press conference, Biden forcefully pushed back against the report’s findings, declaring, “My memory is fine.” But the incident could be “incredibly damaging” to the President, the staff writer Jane Mayer says, because people recognize it as “potentially true and potentially a giant campaign issue.” Another octogenarian politician, the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, also had a bad week in Washington. The long-awaited bipartisan deal on border security and Ukraine aid collapsed, with Senate Republicans turning on their own leader. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Evan Osnos join Mayer to weigh in.

Duration:00:40:40

Why the Trump Ballot Case Is the Ultimate Test of Originalism

2/7/2024
This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that has the potential to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado, and possibly across the country. At issue is the Fourteenth Amendment provision that prohibits the leader of an insurrection from holding office, and whether the clause can be applied to Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, along with other notable historians, wrote an amicus brief that contextualizes the law. “This court has made momentous decisions in the last few years, certainly in the last two decades, in the name of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution,” she tells Tyler Foggatt. “And the only originalist interpretation of the Constitution available to them in this case is that Donald Trump cannot run for President of the United States.”

Duration:00:27:37