The New Yorker: Politics And More

On Monday, Ron DeSantis lost the Iowa caucuses to Donald Trump by thirty points, despite dedicating a great deal of his campaign funds and time to the state. Yet the Florida governor still insists he is in the 2024 Presidential race for the “long haul.” Sarah Larson, a New Yorker staff writer, calls Tyler Foggatt from Des Moines to discuss the meaning of these results, and the challenges of covering this unusually uncompetitive election.

This time last year, Republicans were reeling from a poorer-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterm elections; many questioned, again, whether it was time to move on from their two-time Presidential standard-bearer. But Donald Trump is so far ahead in the polls that it would be shocking if he did not clinch the Iowa caucuses. The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Robert Samuels have seen on the ground how much staying power the former President has despite some opposition from religious leaders and establishment power brokers. For MAGA voters, “The core of it is, ‘If Donald Trump is President, I can do anything I want to do,’ ” Samuels tells David Remnick. “ ‘I won’t have anyone . . . telling me I’m wrong all the time.’ ” Since 2016, Trump has honed and capitalized on a message of revenge for voters who feel a sense of aggrievement. Among evangelical voters, Wallace-Wells notes, Trump seems like a bulwark against what they fear is the waning of their influence. “To them, [Biden] is the head of som

The Washington Roundtable: With former President Donald Trump dominating the polls in Iowa and other early-primary states, this primary season looks like it may be brief and uncompetitive. “We’ll see what happens when the voters actually get a say, but it’s fair to say already that the political story of 2023 was Donald Trump’s consolidation of the Republican Party behind him,” the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Meanwhile, President Biden, despite his low approval ratings, has had only “token” opposition inside the Democratic Party, Glasser says, referring to Dean Phillips of Minnesota, whose Presidential campaign has not gained traction. The New Yorker staff writers Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos join Glasser to discuss the absence of a competitive 2024 primary, the effort by some Democrats to test the waters rather than declare a campaign, and what the coming months may bring in this historic race for the Presidency.

On Monday, with the Iowa Caucus, the 2024 Presidential race officially begins. A year ago, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador under Donald Trump, seemed like a longshot candidate. Now she appears poised to become the runner-up behind the former President. Antonia Hitchens, taking a break from her reporting in Iowa, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Haley’s unexpected rise and the unusual significance of second place in this Republican primary.

The veteran political reporter John Nichols was taking his daughter to the orthodontist on January 6, 2021, the fateful day when the transfer of Presidential power was temporarily derailed by a mob at the Capitol. On March 4th of this year, the former President Donald Trump is scheduled to stand trial for his actions on and around that day, and, in a court filing last November, his attorneys implied that the government is withholding information about whether Nichols, and others, had a role to play in the Capitol attack. This bizarre move not only thrust Nichols uncomfortably into the center of yet another January 6th conspiracy theory but raised some questions about the seriousness of the defense that Trump intends to mount in the case. “It looks like they’re throwing things at the wall,” Nichols tells David Remnick. “Just trying for dozens and dozens of possible conspiracy theories.” And, though Nichols has endured only teasing from his colleagues for getting name-checked in Trump discovery documents, he no

The Washington Roundtable: Three years after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the fallout continues to shape American politics, both on the campaign trail and in the courtroom. With Donald Trump leading the Republican field, conservative media outlets and the political right are trying to rewrite the story of January 6th—what the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser calls “one of the most remarkable acts of historical revisionism in real time that any of us has ever seen in American politics.” Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris camp has decided to put the ongoing threat to democracy and the fear of violent political extremism at the center of its campaign; Evan Osnos discusses the President’s first ad of the year, which features imagery from January 6th. How will the memory of that dark day shape the 2024 election? The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer joins Osnos and Glasser to weigh in.

One of the most read New Yorker stories of 2023 was Ronan Farrow’s investigation into Elon Musk—how the U.S. government came to rely on him, and why it’s now struggling to rein him in. With Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter (now known as X), Musk is deciding the future of the auto industry, the space race, and free speech. The reason for this, Farrow explains, is not Musk’s outrageous personality; it’s the structures of neoliberal capitalism that allowed a person like Musk to ascend. Read more by Ronan Farrow on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, Britney Spears’s conservatorship, and the Israeli surveillance agency Black Cube.This episode was originally published in August, 2023.

Dexter Filkins has reported on conflict situations around the world, and recently spent months reporting on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a piece published earlier this year, Filkins tries to untangle how conditions around the globe, an abrupt change in executive direction from Trump to Biden, and an antiquated immigration system have created a chaotic situation. “It’s difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what’s happening there unless you see it,” Filkins tells David Remnick. Last year, during a surge at the border, local jurisdictions struggled to provide humanitarian support for thousands of migrants, leading Democratic politicians to openly criticize the Administration. While hard-liners dream of a wall across the two-thousand-mile border, “they can’t build a border wall in the middle of a river,” Filkins notes. “So if you can get across the river, and you can get your foot on American soil, that’s all you need to do.” Migrants surrendering to Border Patrol and requesting as

Inside The Hive host Brian Stelter explores the fracturing of the evangelical church with Tim Alberta, an Atlantic staff writer and author of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Alberta, the son of an evangelical pastor, charts the church’s rightward trajectory and embrace of Donald Trump, who is seen as a champion in an Us vs. Them political showdown. Stelter and Alberta also discuss how a steady diet of outrage on cable news, talk radio, and social media has helped radicalize the flock. 

In 1979, as Christmas approached, the United States Embassy in Tehran held more than fifty American hostages, who had been seized when revolutionaries stormed the embassy. No one from the U.S. had been able to have contact with them. The Reverend M. William Howard, Jr., was the president of the National Council of Churches at the time, and when he received a telegram from the Revolutionary Council, inviting him to perform Christmas services for the hostages, he jumped at the opportunity. In America, “we had a public that was quite riled up,” Reverend Howard reminds his son, The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Adam Howard. “Who knows what might have resulted if this issue were not somehow addressed? . . .Might there be an American invasion, an attempt to rescue the hostages in a militaristic way?” Reverend Howard was aware that the gesture had some propaganda value to the Iranian militants, but he saw a chance to lower the tension. Accompanied by another Protestant minister and a Catholic bishop, Howard entered front-

The Washington Roundtable: For their final episode of 2023, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos search for a single word to encapsulate U.S. politics in 2023. It was a hard year to sum up: Donald Trump was criminally indicted four times; support for reproductive rights drove voters in elections across the country; and Republican primary hopefuls searched for solid footing in a crowded field. Glasser, Mayer, and Osnos explore the common threads in this year’s big political stories, and consider how a year full of surprises couldn’t prevent the most predictable political outcome of all: a likely Biden/Trump rematch in 2024.

In 2023, Isaac Chotiner conducted more than sixty Q&As for The New Yorker, on a wide array of international and domestic topics. He has gained a reputation for being a fearless interviewer, who does not flinch from confrontation. Chotiner joins senior editor Tyler Foggatt to look back on the year. They revisit a few conversations that stood out—about settlements in the West Bank, Henry Kissinger, and India’s economic growth—and discuss some questions Chotiner hopes to get answered in 2024. 

Growing up in Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha wasn’t used to seeing Israeli soldiers in person. “You are bombed from the sky. You are bombed by tanks. You do not see the people, the soldiers who are killing you and your family,” he tells David Remnick. Abu Toha is a poet educated in the United States, who has contributed to The New Yorker from Gaza since Israel launched its bombardment after the October 7th Hamas attack. As Abu Toha and his family tried to flee Gaza, he was stopped by Israeli forces, taken from his wife and kids, and wrongly accused of being a Hamas activist.  He describes being stripped naked and beaten in detention. “I kept saying, ‘Someone please talk to me,’ ” Abu Toha recalls. After an interrogation, he was released, but with a more pessimistic view of the possibility for peace. “In Gaza, even a child who is six or three or four years old, is no longer a child. They are not living their childhood. They are not children. They are not learning how to speak English, how to draw; they’re just learning

The Washington Roundtable: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s requests for more aid from the United States got a frosty reception from many Republicans on the Hill this week. It’s the most recent expression of the American far right’s affinity for Vladimir Putin’s project in Russia, and, more recently, for Viktor Orbán’s consolidation of power in Hungary. The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins the Washington Roundtable to discuss his reporting on CPAC Hungary, where far-right political figures gathered in Budapest last year, and on why American conservatives are gravitating toward figures like Putin and Orbán. “You don’t have to be a red-string-on-a-corkboard conspiracy theorist to see the connections,” Marantz says. “In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration has admitted when they wrote the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, they were modelling it on a previous Hungarian law, which was itself modelled on a previous Russian law. So, no one’s really entirely hiding the ball here.” Marantz joins

Last week, the U.S. Congress passed a nonbinding resolution that deemed any expression of anti-Zionism to be a form of antisemitism. This move closely follows the model set by the German government, which has created strict measures to combat antisemitism and a bureaucracy to enforce those measures. Sometimes, Jewish people are found to be in violation. In both Germany and the United States, many politicians championing similar protections are members of the right wing, some of whom are also known white supremacists. Masha Gessen, a New Yorker staff writer, recently wrote an essay about the politics of memory in Europe and the widespread insistence that the Holocaust is a singular event unlike any other. Gessen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the stories we tell about history can prevent us from understanding the conditions that give rise to atrocities. “The thing is, if something is unimaginable, then anything that happens in the present, which is by definition imaginable, is not like it,” Gessen says. “A

Liz Cheney has been Republican royalty, and a conservative stalwart in Washington—a daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and culture warrior Lynne Cheney. But after protesting Donald Trump’s election lies, and voting for his impeachment after January 6th, she found herself in exile from the G.O.P. Cheney is contemplating a Presidential campaign on a third-party line.  As she promotes her new book, “Oath and Honor,” she is raising the alarm that Americans across the political spectrum have become “numb” to Trump’s overtly dictatorial aspirations. “People really understood that what he had done [on January 6th] was unacceptable, not to mention unconstitutional and illegal,” she tells David Remnick. “That recognition quickly dwindled.” She finds herself frustrated with former allies on the right who have become shameless enablers of Trump; she does not trust Speaker Mike Johnson, a former friend, to perform his constitutional duties during the electoral process. She is also concerned that the left is sq

The Washington Roundtable: Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced his resignation from Congress this week, not long after a coup by several of his Republican colleagues cost him the leadership. The lawmaker who had temporarily filled the Speaker position—Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina—also announced his departure from the lower chamber. But it’s not just former House Speakers who are leaving their positions. Dozens of members of the 118th Congress are not running for reëlection. Some are leaving to run for higher office, others are retiring, yet others have simply had enough—and one, Representative George Santos, was expelled. Former Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, joins the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos on this week’s episode to analyze this phenomenon. “It’s really become a clown show, and elections are like clown swapping,” he tells them. “I don’t think there is a Republican Party anymore, and, if there is one, it’s ungovernable b

Donald Trump may be the first former President to be indicted for a crime, but he is not the first to lead an insurrection and then attempt to dodge the consequences. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the U.S. government set out to try Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, for treason. Those efforts failed. In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore, a staff writer at the magazine and a historian at Harvard, writes an essay about the lasting consequences of that failure. There are many parallels between our current moment and the post-Civil War reunification era: the thorniness of prosecuting politicians, the fear of inciting more political violence, and questions about how best to move a bitterly divided country forward. Lepore joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the historical lessons of Jefferson Davis and the legal efforts to kick Trump off the ballot using the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

We’re in the midst of another election season, and yet again American democracy hangs in the balance, with a leading Presidential candidate who has threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution. How did the foundations of our political system become so shaky?  Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University; Evan Osnos, a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; and the best-selling author and historian Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker’s Michael Luo for a discussion of that very existential question during the most recent New Yorker Festival. From Cobb’s perspective, “it’s not that complicated,” he notes, “If we went all the way back to the fundamental dichotomy of the people who founded this country and the way they subsidized their mission of liberty with the lives of slaves. So we’ve always been engaged in that dialectic.” Lepore argues that people on both sides of the political divide choose to embrace an account of the past that accords with their politics, something she cons

The Washington Roundtable: Henry Kissinger, who died this week, at the age of a hundred, served in the Nixon and Ford Administrations as national-security adviser and Secretary of State; for a period, he was both at the same time. Kissinger fled Nazi Germany as a teen-ager, and went on to advise a dozen U.S. Presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden. He opened up relations between the U.S. and China with Richard Nixon, pursued détente with the Soviet Union, and made decisions that led to death and destruction across Southeast Asia and beyond. Earlier this year, he travelled to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping in an attempt to massage U.S.-China relations. “There are not that many hundred-year-olds who insist upon their own relevance and actually are relevant,” the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Glasser calls Kissinger “the paradigmatic Washington figure,” and says that despite Kissinger’s history of destructive foreign-policy decisions, the American national-security establishment had