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‘2024’ and ‘From the Clinics to the Capitol’ dissect opposing political movements
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- [00:00]
Andrew Limbong
Are you that friend, the one who's constantly recommending podcast episodes to anyone who'll listen? If so, subscribe to NPR's Pod Club newsletter and nerd out with us. You'll get fresh podcast recommendations every week, handpicked by the people who live for this stuff. Subscribe@npr.org podclub. You can also find the link in the description for this episode. Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong.
- [00:27]
Sarah McCammon
Welcome.
- [00:28]
Andrew Limbong
There's a new nonfiction book out titled from the Clinics to the How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary. And it's about the wide tense that exists within the anti abortion movement, how this one issue can gather supporters from all sorts of different perspectives, from fairly mainstream voters to conspiracy theorists to violent extremists. That interview is coming up in a bit, but first I want to play you this interview about another politics related book from earlier this summer. It's with these longtime reporters who wrote 2024 How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. It's a look back at the failures of the Kamala Harris campaign. And before you roll your eyes at rehashing the 2024 election, I think it's an interesting case study in comparison in what happens when a political movement struggles to broaden its tent to different perspectives. NPR speaks with reporters Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorff after the break.
- [01:24]
NPR Sponsor Announcer
Support for this podcast and the following message come from indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. Indeed's sponsored jobs helps you stand out. According to INDEED data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com NPR terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. Start selling with Shopify today. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify's the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Go to shopify.com NPR It's July 2024.
- [02:13]
Scott Detrow
And Vice President Kamala Harris seems to be taking off like a rocket.
- [02:17]
Sarah McCammon
Good evening, Philadelphia.
- [02:21]
Scott Detrow
Fast forward a month and some Suddenly, the overnight Democratic presidential nominee is stalling. The race has become a dead heat, no clear leader within the margin of error.
- [02:30]
Sarah McCammon
Polls are virtually in a tie.
- [02:33]
Scott Detrow
We've heard a lot in recent months about what was happening behind the scenes in former President Joe Biden's inner circle last year. But what about Harris. What was Harris and her team thinking as they leapt into a national presidential campaign with just 107 days to go before Election Day? We're going to talk about that now with journalists Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, along with Josh Dossey. They wrote the new book 2024 How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. I want to pick up with this moment of President Biden dropping out of the race. Tyler. Vice President Harris, as we all know, finds out in the Naval Observatory, gets to work right away in her hoodie, surrounded by aides and friends. And it seems like it's off to this fast start. But how would you describe the structural disadvantages that Vice President Harris faced at that moment when she found out you, you are suddenly likely the Democratic presidential nominee?
- [03:24]
Tyler Pager
Yeah, I think it's this remarkable moment where she's making pancakes for her grandnieces in the vice presidential residence and she gets a call from Joe Biden. And at that exact moment, her brother in law is leading a secret meeting just across the way, plotting and planning for the hypothetical that she would take over the campaign. And they knew immediately that they would have to work to win the nomination. But they also recognized, as you said, Scott, a lot of structural disadvantages that they would have to overcome. Chief among that there was a campaign built around a different candidate who was of a different generation, a different gender, and in some ways a different message. And she needed to, in this very tight time window, turn over the campaign to not only reflect her as a person, but what she would do as president.
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Scott Detrow
What was the biggest, most dramatic change that her brain trust made right away when they suddenly took over that Wilmington infrastructure?
- [04:17]
Tyler Pager
One of the decisions they made that was not so dramatic but ultimately proved to be was they kept everyone in place. They didn't really make any huge fundamental changes to the campaign structure. And in retrospect, a lot of her close advisors thought that was a mistake in the moment. The advice to her and the decision was it would be more disruptive to try to reinvent the wheel, bring in new people and fundamentally alter a campaign that had been going for more than a year. But now a lot of Harris aides thinks that was actually a fundamental flaw because. Because the people who were driving the process were not her people.
- [04:54]
Scott Detrow
So, Isaac, at this moment, President Trump has defeated Joe Biden in a debate where Joe Biden had one of the, you know, biggest self collapses in the history of American politics. He has survived an assassination attempt and had a Republican convention where he just seemed like on a glide path to the presidency, to that moment. Then suddenly he finds out he has a new opponent. How did he and his team react to Harris suddenly jumping in?
- [05:20]
Isaac Arnsdorf
Trump really had a hard time dealing with that change. He felt like he had won. He felt like the election was over. We had a very revealing conversation with one of his advisors that we have in the book where he says, I just don't have any respect for her. And he took it out on his own team because they had encouraged him to do the early debate and told him that Biden wasn't going to go anywhere. And he came very close to blowing up his own operation that until that point had been running very smoothly.
- [05:49]
Scott Detrow
So, Tyler, let's go back to the Harris campaign. And she starts hitting the campaign trail and suddenly Democratic events are packed and there's energy and there's excitement and she's raising insane amounts of money that have never been seen before. And it seems in many ways like this is a rocket ship taking off and then it starts to stall. And I think the one thing that we in the media latched onto to, I think the frustration of her campaign is the fact that she takes weeks and weeks to agree to a substantive sit down interview. And how much did that hesitancy hurt her campaign and what was going on behind the scenes?
- [06:24]
Tyler Pager
Yeah, it undoubtedly hurt her campaign. And it contributed to this idea that a lot of Americans kept saying, we just feel like we don't know her. And I think it not only impacted her, but I think one of the interesting findings in the book is that it also stymied her vice presidential candidate, Tim Walls. Tim Walls had this boom onto the national scene as there was the conversation about who might be her running mate. He did all these cable interviews, he did all these media appearances that he got a lot of attention for. But then once he joined the ticket, his team was basically told, you can't do anything until Kamala Harris does something. So he couldn't go on cable news until she did. And so a lot of the enthusiasm around the ticket was sort of was stymied because they didn't get her out there enough.
- [07:07]
Scott Detrow
So that approach to strategic decisions is like one big storyline of the Kamala Harris campaign and another one, and I want to talk to both of you about this, is is the way that Kamala Harris just would not or could not distinguish herself from Joe Biden in any way. And Tyler, you all reported that there was a direct conversation between Biden and Harris about that and that Biden almost pressured. Well, he did Pressure her. What happened?
- [07:32]
Tyler Pager
Yeah. So this is a really remarkable moment. On the day when she's going to debate Donald Trump, she receives a phone call from Joe Biden, and ostensibly, he's calling to wish her good luck ahead of one of the most important moments of the campaign. And he says, you know, you should be careful. And he frames it as political advice that he's very popular in Pennsylvania, and if she tries to break with him, it could have harmful impacts on her electoral ability, which is just amazing. Right. If you think about this moment, Joe Biden has dropped out of the race because of all this pressure from Democrats. The polling shows that he cannot win, and he's calling his replacement, his vice president, to basically cajole her into being more supportive to him. And what's striking about it, Scott, is that she was not even breaking with him at that point. Democrats wanted her to do more, and she wasn't.
- [08:19]
Scott Detrow
So, Isaac, this all culminates in September when Kamala Harris is on the View, and this moment happens.
- [08:25]
Sarah McCammon
Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years? There is not a thing that comes to mind.
- [08:34]
Scott Detrow
How did the Trump campaign respond to that moment in this broader trend of Harris locksteping with Joe Biden?
- [08:41]
Isaac Arnsdorf
Well, they were ecstatic because in this period that she was not doing interviews, there were two things happening. First, they convinced themselves that she was hiding because she couldn't handle it. And second, they went into that void and said, well, we're gonna define Harris, and the way we're gonna define her is exactly the same as Biden. So then you've got this moment on the View, and she was making the exact same argument that they were making in all of their ads, that they were pouring millions of dollars into this argument, that she was just the same as the candidate who the Democrats had cast aside, who voters didn't like. And now it was coming out of the Democratic nominee's mouth.
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Scott Detrow
Is there one or two moments that anyone on the Trump campaign thinks if this goes differently, the election outcome is differently?
- [09:25]
Isaac Arnsdorf
Well, I mean, obviously, the first one that comes to mind is the assassination attempt. I mean, a quarter of an inch difference there. Who knows what would have happened? But we'll put that aside for a second. One of our findings in the book is that it was not inevitable that Trump was gonna take the rematch and that he really got pushed more and more to running again because of the prosecutions. And it was ultimately the search of Mar A Lago. And this is where we start the book for this reason. That convinced him that he had to go for it because it was his best hope of avoiding prosecution or avoiding jail.
- [10:01]
Scott Detrow
Become president or go to jail.
- [10:03]
Isaac Arnsdorf
No choice. Those personal stakes for him really focused him as a candidate and as a politician in a way that was lacking in the previous campaigns.
- [10:14]
Scott Detrow
That was Isaac Arnsdorff and Tyler Pager along with Josh Dossey. They co wrote 2024 how Trump retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.
- [10:21]
Isaac Arnsdorf
Thanks to both of you. Thank you.
- [10:22]
Tyler Pager
Thanks so much.
- [10:28]
NPR Sponsor Announcer
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- [11:25]
Andrew Limbong
I said, it's interesting to hear what happened with the Democrats in 2024 in comparison with the long game of the anti abortion movement and their embracing of far right groups. And it definitely was a long game. Carol Mason lays out the history in her new book, from the Clinics to The Capitol. Here's NPR.
- [11:43]
Sarah McCammon
Sarah McCammon Professor Carol Mason has gotten used to students rushing into her office at the University of Kentucky, alerting her to a far right group demonstrating on campus. Mason is a humanities professor who's written several books on extremist movements and reproductive politics, so she's become a local authority on the matter. But during the first year of the first Trump administration, Mason noticed a change in rhetoric, particularly with anti abortion groups. Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land in 2017, but the movement had taken on a new directive.
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I saw a slogan that was new to me, ignore Roe. And I thought, well, that's interesting. Not overturn Roe, not end abortion, but ignore Roe. And I think that signaled to me that something was up with the anti abortion movement, that they had come to see the rule of law as something to be ignored.
- [12:43]
The COVID of Mason's new book from The Clinics to the How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary features a metal barricade that many have come to associate with the videos of people storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The bike racks being ripped aside by violent pro Trump extremists determined to get inside where lawmakers were certifying the election for Joe Biden. But Mason recognized the metal barricades from somewhere else.
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We know those barricades as what became necessary to keep anti abortionists away from clinics and their clients.
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In your book, you argue that the anti abortion movement and white nationalism have slowly become more and more intertwined over time. What were some of the early signs for you? Where did you see that?
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Some of the earliest depictions of that I picked up when I was writing my first book in the 90s where a Klan group from Florida basically said abortion is genocide of the white race. The Genocide Awareness Project is another anti abortion campaign that goes around to different colleges. They started out as a connection to the Promise keepers back in 1997, I.
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Believe the Promise Keepers were a group focused on conservative critics, men emphasizing things like family and fatherhood and traditional roles, right?
- [14:10]
Absolutely. And more so the idea that men need to take back their communities from forces that they felt were detrimental to Western Christian civilization. And so the Genocide Awareness Project chose its name and the gap to correspond with the theme of the Promise Keepers rally at that time, which was called Stand in the Gap.
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What did that mean to them, Standing in the gap?
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Standing in the gap means to them obeying God's law over man's law, a way to get in the middle of people they see as enemies, as attackers.
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I want to go back to the idea of the January 6th insurrection and the connection you see between that kind of movement and the anti abortion movement. How and where does the issue of abortion show up among the J6 rioters?
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It shows up, I think, in that idea of child sacrifice, that there is a global cabal, a deep state that is a bunch of elites that is actually orchestrating things. They share this kind of conspiracy theory.
- [15:27]
You know, I've covered the abortion issue for a long time. I think most anti abortion activists would say that they are equal opportunity. They want to, as they would put it, save babies. This isn't a bad. Explain to me where you see the connection with white supremacy.
- [15:40]
Well, I think that the anti abortion movement has facilitated a lot of intersections among far right groups. And so, for example, I go back and look at the army of God manual. It was an underground manual that was unearthed in 1993. When anti abortion person was basically arrested for trying to shoot an abortion doctor. And I think there you get an early iteration of this idea that Western and Christian civilization is what's at stake here. And that seems to me to be the bridge to current white nationalist ideas that suggest that we are in white demographic decline. Other people have expressed this in terms of a replacement theory, that abortion is somehow part of that.
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You know, when it comes to the great replacement theory, which of course is a racist and anti Semitic conspiracy theory. And faced with some of these critiques, anti abortion activists tend to point out that women of color, particularly black women, access abortion at significantly higher rates compared to white women. And some black conservatives have pointed to this data and argued that abortion is disproportionately harmful to black Americans, that were it not for abortion, there would be more black Americans. How do you square that reality with the argument that the anti abortion rights movement is just trying to produce more white babies?
- [17:12]
Well, if you look at the history of those kinds of campaigns, you'll see that those groups change their tune according to whose votes they want to mobilize. For example, in 2010, in the midterm elections during the Obama administration, there were huge billboard campaigns to try and convince Africa, African American voters that abortion is a black genocide. And so it's who their audience is and how that relates to electoral goals.
- [17:46]
One of the themes of your writing is that the anti abortion movement frames women both on the one hand as sort of warriors and heroes, and on the other hand as victims. Can you explain what you mean by that?
- [17:59]
Well, for years, the anti abortion movement has sort of suggested that women need to be protected from abortion, that abortion is something that harms women. And I think one of the things that is really astonishing to me is to see how much pregnant people are seen as giving up their entitlement to call themselves part of the nation if they have an abortion. So their sense of belonging in their home nation is dependent on whether they're mothers. And these ideas of protecting women sort of goes hand in hand with protecting the nation.
- [18:45]
Now that in many respects the anti abortion movement has achieved what was its number one goal for decades, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Where do you see that movement headed next?
- [18:57]
I see them sort of converging with other far right groups. We see the idea of not just regulating pregnancies, but ending abortion altogether. And I think that this kind of absolutism is reflective of, and also egging on some of the most theocratic and white nationalist impulses that that are around today.
- [19:26]
That's author Carol Mason. Her new book is called from the Clinics to the How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary. Thanks so much for joining us.
- [19:35]
Thank you, Sarah.
- [19:36]
Andrew Limbong
And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter@npr.org Newsletter Books. I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Maher. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Melissa Grace, Amanda Balaban, Sarah Handel, Michael Levitt, Justine Kennan, Alejandro Marquez, Honsa, Elena Torek, Timby Ermias, Tyler Bartlam, Gabriel Sanchez, Jeanette woods and Lauren Hodges. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
- [20:15]
Scott Detrow
Foreign.
- [20:20]
Isaac Arnsdorf
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- [20:49]
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