Life After Lockdown, and the Politics of Blaming China

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour – "Life After Lockdown, and the Politics of Blaming China"

Date: May 29, 2020
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Peter Hessler (New Yorker staff writer, reporting from Chengdu, China), Evan Osnos (New Yorker staff writer, reports from Washington)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores two interwoven themes: life in China as cities emerge from lockdown and a look at how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped and intensified political rhetoric around China in the United States. The first segment is a personal and detailed account from Peter Hessler living through and after quarantine in Chengdu, while the second segment, featuring Evan Osnos, analyzes the U.S. political response, the surge of conspiracy theories, and the long history of blaming China in American political discourse.

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Segment 1: Life After Lockdown in China

Guest: Peter Hessler
Timestamps: 00:10 – 08:54

Life During and After Lockdown

• Early Lockdown Experience

  • Hessler and his family entered strict quarantine in January 2020, well before the U.S.
  • “Convenience stores were always open. Kind of like small markets were always open. A lot of people do stuff online anyway here.” (Peter Hessler, 00:32)

• Reopening & Nightlife

  • Peter reports on social life resuming, including attending a crowded techno party:
    • “It was a club and…it was mostly gay, young Chinese. Chengdu is a pretty hip place and it's got a pretty active music scene.” (01:00)

• Public Health Measures and Social Practices

  • Despite mask-wearing, there’s little social distancing:
    • “People wear the masks. They know that's important, but there's no space in lines...I was just on a flight…There was not a single seat empty on that flight.” (01:29)
  • Schools Reopening:
    • Hessler’s children returned to a class of 54 students; initial mask-wearing was soon dropped.
    • “They wore masks for three weeks. And then the teachers got tired of it, clearly, and they let everybody take the masks off.” (02:17)

• Remaining Precautions and Surveillance

  • Intensive temperature checks, QR code health tracking required for school and travel:
    • “You have to scan a QR code for each of the kids. And one of these health code apps...I have to send to college where I teach my own information every morning.” (03:39)
    • “You could not travel in China now without a smartphone.” (04:29)

• Government Accountability and System of Control

  • Outbreaks met with swift punitive action (e.g., officials fired after a cluster in Jilin):
    • “When they don’t contain it…they fire people. So, you know, the system is built partly on fear.” (03:08)

Cultural Contrasts: U.S. vs. China

• Compliance vs. Rebellion
  • “There is a complete difference in terms of the response…in China…people were very obedient, very willing to go along.” (05:20)
  • Messaging and strategy in the U.S. are described as lacking clarity and follow-through:
    • “…they never told Americans it's going to take this amount of time. And while we're lockdown, we're going to set up a system that makes sure that we can tell where this disease is popping up.” (05:20)

Conspiracy Theories and Perceptions

• Chinese Public Perception
  • Conspiracy theories exist (“the US started this and that it was brought in by the military”), but Hessler finds them half-hearted:
    • “If the US did deliberately, they should have been ready for it. It’s not a very good conspiracy theory.” (06:46)
  • Chinese people, on a personal level, respond with “pity” rather than anger toward the U.S.:
    • “I almost feel like they feel sorry for me and sorry for what's going on there.” (07:26)

Looking Forward: Hopes and Anxieties

• Vaccine Uncertainties
  • Divided expert opinion within China on vaccine prospects; no long-term national plan:
    • “I asked them, I said, so what's the long term plan? And he said, there is no long term plan. There's no country that has a long term plan.” (08:54)

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Segment 2: The U.S. Politics of Blaming China

Guest: Evan Osnos
Timestamps: 09:03 – 20:14

Chinese Response: Failures and Strengths

• Initial Mishandling

  • Chinese authorities suppressed early warnings, notably Dr. Li Wenliang’s attempts to raise the alarm.
    • “He was silenced. The police told him not to spread rumors…there was this critical six day period in January when the senior leadership in Beijing knew the severity…but didn’t move to do anything.” (10:14)

• Authoritarian Effectiveness

  • The government quickly implemented stringent controls, forced quarantines, and achieved world-leading testing and tracking.
    • “...all the things on which the United States frankly, failed.” (10:54)

• Global Impact of Delayed Response

  • “A British study…estimated that at least 60% of the cases in March around the world could have been avoided had China moved faster.” (11:54)

American Political Rhetoric and Anti-China Sentiment

• Political Ads and Narratives
  • Donald Trump and Republicans are using China as a central campaign theme.
    • Sample ad: “China’s killing our jobs and now killing our people.” (12:48)
  • Osnos’s analysis:
    • “They're going to use that idea where they just took the freeform political energy that had been circulating around the sense that China's economic competition has undermined America's way of life. They've shifted that now onto the language of the pandemic.” (13:09)

Trump and Biden: Complex Records on China

• Trump’s Praise and Rhetoric

  • Trump alternated between praising China and blaming it for the virus.
    • “You had a moment early on when...Trump was trying to decide...whether to turn China into the opponent. Trump, he was saying, I think the Chinese government has it under control.” (14:30)
  • Motivation: Trump wanted calm in the markets and hoped for a personal relationship with Xi Jinping.

• Biden’s Approach and Evolution

  • Under pressure, the Biden campaign engages directly with the China issue but risks feeding racist or xenophobic attitudes.
    • “They have to meet some of this China focus toe to toe...Now the question will become: how do you have a response to it that does not take this in a downward spiral to the lowest common denominator?” (15:52)
  • Noteworthy: Increase in anti-Asian incidents in the US, attributed partly to pandemic-related rhetoric:
    • “There have been a significant uptick in attacks on Asian Americans...this is attributed...to this climate of hostility…” (15:52)
  • Biden has generally represented the “Washington consensus” of engagement with China, but both parties have shifted toward a more confrontational stance in recent years:
    • “He is harder on the place than he was when he was the Vice President and certainly than when he was in the Senate.” (16:50)

Down-Ballot Races and Longstanding Trends

• Anti-China Messaging in Local Campaigns
  • Example: Texas congressional candidate Kathleen Wall’s ad:
    • “China poisoned our people...President Trump has the courage to call it what it is, the Chinese virus...China is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a sovereign nation. It’s time to fight back.” (18:31)
  • Evan Osnos contextualizes this as a recurring political strategy:
    • “This idea of attacking China has been part of our politics for a long time…So the effect is that it has amped up the anti China rhetoric to quite a remarkable degree.” (19:02)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I mean, honestly, you could not travel in China now without a smartphone.”
  — Peter Hessler (04:29)

• “The system is built partly on fear.”
  — Peter Hessler (03:08)

• “If the US did [start the virus] deliberately, they should have been ready for it. It’s not a very good conspiracy theory.”
  — Peter Hessler (06:46)

• “There is no country that has a long term plan.”
  — Peter Hessler (08:54)

• “A British study…estimated that at least 60% of the cases…could have been avoided had China moved faster.”
  — Evan Osnos (11:54)

• “There are just very few people in the United States who are going to rise to the defense of the Chinese Communist Party right now…”
  — Evan Osnos (13:09)

• “It's a live issue…whether the United States is gonna…see China as an opponent that it can deal with…or whether it's…an enemy…of a fundamental Cold War style conflict.”
  — Evan Osnos (16:50)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:10 – Peter Hessler describes daily life and reopening in Chengdu
• 02:17 – Schools reopening and changes to mask-wearing
• 03:39 – Surveillance and health QR codes
• 05:20 – Compliance/culture comparison: China vs. the U.S.
• 06:46 – Conspiracy theories in China
• 09:03 – Evan Osnos on the pandemic’s politicization in the U.S.
• 10:14 – Osnos on China’s early mistakes and strengths
• 11:54 – Quantifying the cost of delayed action in China
• 12:39 – Example of China-focused American political ads
• 13:09 – Osnos: Why anti-China rhetoric works politically
• 16:50 – How the U.S. consensus on China has changed
• 18:31 – Down-ballot anti-China ads and historical context

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Tone & Language

Remnick’s tone is earnest and inquisitive, aiming for clarity and depth. Peter Hessler is detailed, pragmatic, and occasionally wry (“not a very good conspiracy theory”); Evan Osnos provides clear-eyed, concise analysis of politics and policy. The episode moves briskly between personal narrative and high-level political analysis, maintaining a balanced, insightful tone throughout.

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Summary Takeaways

• China’s post-lockdown life is marked by a rapid return to normalcy in some respects, but under the watchful eye of intense surveillance and public health monitoring.
• Cultural and political responses to COVID-19 differ sharply between China and the U.S., explained in part by government structure, clarity of public messaging, and historical context.
• COVID-19 is politically weaponized in the U.S., with both major parties engaging in aggressive anti-China rhetoric, often lacking nuance and risking further stigmatization of Asian Americans.
• The global consequences of China’s early concealment were severe, yet its later efficiency in containment stands in sharp contrast to failures in the West.
• The pandemic may fundamentally reshape U.S.-China relations, with both nations—and their leaders—trying to recalibrate their post-pandemic strategies.

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Transcript

[Host/Producer]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A couple of months ago, I called up Peter Hessler, a staff writer who lives with his family in the Chinese city of Chengdu. It was just before our country had started going into lockdown, but Peter and his wife and his daughters had already been under strict quarantine since January. And he described exactly what that was like.

[Peter Hessler]

Convenience stores were always open. Kind of like small markets were always open. A lot of people do stuff online anyway here. Like there's some guy upstairs about like 100 inch television, you know, when you see them.

[David Remnick]

Peter is reporting now on the process of reopening China, and I called him last week to see how that was going and because I, to be honest, was a little worried about some of this reporting. Peter, I hear that you went to a dance club. What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?

[Peter Hessler]

One of my former students was taking me out. It's a techno party. I was curious to see what, you know, is this really happening? Are people really going? And it was a club and, you know, it was mostly gay, young Chinese. Chengdu is a pretty hip place and it's got a pretty active music scene. And, you know, this sort of the promo material was all about, you know, nobody else in the rest of the world can really do this, so let's show solidarity and. And have some fun, basically, you know.

[David Remnick]

And was it packed in?

[Peter Hessler]

Yeah, yeah, it was crowded. I mean, there really is. I mean, it's actually sort of a problem. I've been talking to epidemiologists, and because the lockdown was so intense here and so absolute, people didn't really develop the sense of social distancing. So people wear the masks. They know that that's important, but there's no space in lines or, you know, I was just on an air. On a flight from Chengdu to hangzhou. There are 185 passengers. There was not a single seat empty on that flight.

[David Remnick]

Peter, when we spoke in March, you'd written in the New Yorker about your life in Chengdu. And it was, to be honest, like reading the future of what our life in New York would be just weeks ahead of time. So can you do that again? Where are you now in terms of the way people live in China? And how does the opening up process play out?

[Peter Hessler]

Well, I mean, I'm afraid I can't do it again because I think the future has diverged. That was the story at that point, everybody was going through the same thing with the lockdown, but partly because China's lockdown was so intense, also because they caught things earlier, and also because, mostly because of their intense contact tracing and testing, we don't have the same issues anymore. So my life now is, I think, not the life people in America are going to be having anytime soon. We have, I mean, my kids have been in school for three weeks. I mean, they've got 54 kids in the class. They're all back. You know, they wore masks for three weeks. And then the teachers got tired of it, clearly, and they, you know, let everybody take the masks off, basically.

[David Remnick]

So the masks are off in a classroom of 54 kids?

[Peter Hessler]

Yeah.

[David Remnick]

And people are feeling safe.

[Peter Hessler]

Yeah. I mean, you know, personally, I feel like they're going to always have things popping up because students are in. Chinese nationals are always coming back. But I think that they can contain it all. And when they don't contain it, like that's what happened in Jilin, they fire people. I mean, they fired six officials. So, you know, the system is built partly on fear.

[David Remnick]

What restrictions do exist? Is there any restriction on freedom of movement or the way people work in offices or in schools?

[Peter Hessler]

You know, when my kids went back to school, I mean, they take their temperature a lot. I mean, we have to take it every morning and send it to the school. And then, I mean, actually they have their temperature taken three times by 8:30. You know, once at home, once in the subway station, going to school, and then once as they enter the school, and then the school usually checks them in the middle of the day. So there's, you know, we have to scan a QR code for each of the kids. And one of these health code apps that they have I have to send to college where I teach my own information every morning. So there's a lot of this stuff going on. And when you travel, you have these health codes which are actually by city. So like when I made this trip last weekend, you know, I had to prepare three other cities codes before I made that trip to make sure that.

[David Remnick]

When I. I mean, China's a big country and not everybody, I presume, has a smartphone. What if you don't?

[Peter Hessler]

You could not travel in China now without a smartphone. So, yeah, let's put it that way. You do need this to go to another city, because if you go to a train station or an airport, they check it and they say, you've got to have our version of this. And it has to come up green what that means is that if you've been somewhere where later there was a case turned up, the color of your code will and it would be yellow, which is like a warning thing. And then there's red, which means you're going basically you've got to be checked and everybody cooperates.

[David Remnick]

Nobody rebels against this.

[Peter Hessler]

No, no, not in China.

[David Remnick]

So when you see film of people in various parts of the country in the United States, people defying the law, defying recommendations of the cdc, what does that tell you about the difference, if any, between Americans and Chinese?

[Peter Hessler]

I mean, there is a complete difference in terms of the response of things like this. And you know, in China when they had the initial lockdown, people, you know, were very obedient, very willing to go along. But I think part of it is also that the messaging was much clearer here. I mean, you know, while we have, we do have these protests in the United States, they have come at the end of a long lockdown period that was very open ended and that was never presented to citizens in a strategic fashion. You know, they never told Americans it's going to take this amount of time. And while we're lockdown, we're going to set up a system that makes sure that we can tell where this disease is popping up. And so, you know, in some ways, while there's us protests are crazy. I do kind of understand the frustration people would feel because, you know, where does this end? Where is it going? They should have set this up. I mean, and that's what the Chinese were doing during the whole lockdown period, was setting up their systems to track things and to prevent future outbreaks, to be able to respond if something happens. The US doesn't have that. So it's all just guesswork now.

[David Remnick]

Now there's been talk of conspiracy theories in the United States about how the virus started, where it started, possibly in a lab, all this kind of stuff. And it's had been heavily trafficked online, of course. How is this all playing out in China? How does the official media describe what Donald Trump is saying and doing and how the Internet is discussing the conspiracy theories?

[Peter Hessler]

I mean, there's conspiracy theories here. I mean there's, you do hear from people that the United States started this and that it was brought in by the military and so on. I personally don't feel like people take that very seriously. You know, first of all, if the US did deliberately, they should have been ready for it. It's not a very good, it's not a very good conspiracy theory. You know, it's like a bomb that comes around and hits you. But, you know, they're, they're aware of Trump and people bring, I mean, when I went to the airport the other day, the guy, you know, run my bag through the X ray mach, he's like, hey, what do you think of your president? But just like, in a very joking way, I almost feel like they feel sorry for me and sorry for what's going on there. Isn't this.

[David Remnick]

Well, what does that mean? They feel pity for the United States.

[Peter Hessler]

I mean, the government, obviously the things the government says are different, but I'm talking about personal interactions. I've been here at many times when there have been tensions between the country and you feel a kind of anger on the part of people. It can be very tangible, very visceral. I have not felt that here. When I talk to my students, they're very cautious about asking any questions about the US My daughters to school on the first day back in school after, you know, a couple of months out. And, you know, their teacher made a point of saying Ariel and Natasha did not leave the country during this period, you know, just to let the other kids know that, not to be afraid that they were carrying the disease.

[David Remnick]

What are the next steps for China until a vaccine arrives?

[Peter Hessler]

I mean, that's the big issue and you hear different things from different people. I was just talking to a couple of epidemiologists in Shanghai and one of them was very optimistic and one of them was very pessimistic, actually about a vaccine because they have not had great luck with coronaviruses in the past. And he had other reasons. So if there isn't a vaccine, then China could at some point reach a point where there's this great disparity in terms of how many people have had the disease outside of the country and how many people have had it in China. And they would probably have to adjust their strategy at some point. But I asked them, I said, so what's the long term plan? And he said, there is no long term plan. There's no country that has a long term plan.

[David Remnick]

Peter, thank you and all the best to your family. Talk to you soon. Yeah, take care, man. Be well.

[Peter Hessler]

Bye.

[David Remnick]

Peter Hessler is a staff writer and you can read him on China and many other [e-mail] More on China in a moment from the New Yorker's Evanasnos. Stick around. Now, in the 2020 presidential race, the issue of China and the pandemic has become absolutely central in radically different ways. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are eager to prove that they will never be weak in the face of China.

[Peter Hessler]

I would be on the phone with China and making it clear we are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open, you have to be clear. We have to know what's going on. But Trump rolled over for the Chinese.

[David Remnick]

He took their word for it. Staff writer Evan Osnos was based in Beijing for many years and he reports now from Washington. Now, you've covered China for a very long time. Is it your sense that criticism of the Chinese government's handling of COVID 19 is fair? What did they do wrong?

[Evan Osnos]

Criticism is fair. When the virus first appeared, the immediate political necessity was to maintain stability, to prevent the eruption of disorder in Wuhan. This is how, and we all now know about that doctor, Dr. Lee Wenliang, who was one of a handful of doctors who tried to raise alarms and said, there's a serious problem here. He was silenced. The police told him to not spread rumors because of a set of leaked documents. There have been reports now that there was this critical six day period in January when the senior leadership in Beijing knew the severity of the crisis, but they didn't move to do anything about it. They waited six days to undertake the kinds of dramatic restrictions which they later did. And those restrictions worked. They did bring down the virus in really extraordinary ways. Ways. It's also an authoritarian government is able to physically move people, which is what they did, in some cases, move them from their homes into quarantine facilities forcibly when necessary. They were also able to roll out a very competent response when it came to testing, contact tracing, monitoring the spread of the disease, all the things on which the United States frankly, failed. And so I think a full accounting of how China has performed on the coronavirus includes both its initial failure, which contributed to the global pandemic, and then also the demonstrations of extraordinary competence, which it did later.

[David Remnick]

Is there a way to quantify that? In other words, if the Chinese government had acted faster, a week faster or two weeks faster, what would the numbers be internationally? And would we in the United States be in this predicament?

[Evan Osnos]

It would have had a dramatic effect. There was a British study that estimated that at least 60% of the cases in March around the world could have been avoided had China moved faster. So we probably would have gotten it in this country anyway. We probably would have gotten it around the world, but the scale of the disaster would have been fundamentally different.

[David Remnick]

Evan, the 2020 campaign is now really in full swing. So let's take a Listen to this ad from the pro Trump America First Action super PAC, Joe Biden on China. It is in our self interest that China continue to prosper.

[Political Ad Voice]

Biden voted for job killing trade deals with China and failed to support the China travel ban to stop coronavirus.

[Peter Hessler]

Banning all travel will not stop it.

[Political Ad Voice]

China's killing our jobs and now killing our people.

[Peter Hessler]

They're not bad folks, folks.

[Political Ad Voice]

After, after 47 years in Washington, Joe Biden just doesn't make sense. America First Action is responsible for the content of this advertising.

[David Remnick]

Well, there it is in all its subtlety, Evan. You want to deconstruct that ad, what it's proposing and what's true and what's not.

[Evan Osnos]

I think what you're seeing right now from the Trump administration is an urgent effort to try to take what they recognize is a political reservoir of public dissatisfaction. There are just very few people in the United States who are going to rise to the defense of the Chinese Communist Party right now, either over its handling of American trade or the American economy or its handling of the pandemic. And so they're going to use that idea where they just took the freeform political energy that had been circulating around the sense that China's economic competition has undermined America's way of life. They've shifted that now onto the language of the pandemic. And I actually would not be so quick, David, to assume that it's not going to be politically useful for them. I mean, whether or not we think it is defensible, whether we think it's valid on the facts, that's a very different question from whether it's a successful campaign strategy.

[David Remnick]

I understand the logic, Evan. I just don't understand how it squares with the facts. Isn't it easy for the Biden campaign to put together a sizzle reel of quotes of President Trump extolling the efforts of President Xi and the Chinese? It's not as if he's been unfriendly to the Chinese leadership throughout this episode.

[Evan Osnos]

You had a moment early on when the pandemic came to the United States, when Trump was trying to decide whether he wanted to stay close to China on this and try to marshal some sort of cooperative response, or whether to turn China into the opponent. Trump, he was saying, I think the Chinese government has it under control. It's nothing to worry about. And so these quotes are becoming quite damning for him now. Now, why was he saying that? I think it's a combination of a, he didn't want to spook the stock market. He was trying to will this virus into submission, to sort of pretend as if it just wasn't going to be the threat that it became. And then there's another piece of this which he has had throughout the three and a half years in office. He's had this deep, abiding hope of being able to build a friendship with Xi Jinping that can somehow overwhelm the structural challenges that these two countries are facing. And it just hasn't really produced the dividends that he imagined it might.

[David Remnick]

So one Joe Biden ad claims that President Trump, and this is a quote, rolled over for the Chinese and that he let in 40,000 people from China after he announced his travel ban. Do we have a sense of why Biden is focusing on China and not the President's handling of the virus in this country?

[Evan Osnos]

I think that there is a sense among people in the Biden campaign that they have to meet some of this China focus toe to toe. Now the question will become how do you have a response to it that does not take this in a downward spiral to the lowest common denominator? There are activists in the United States, Asian American activists, who have pointed out that the risk here is not abstract. There have been a significant uptick in attacks on Asian Americans, verbal, in some cases physical. And this is attributed, they do, to this climate of hostility towards Asian Americans, partly because of the pandemic, but then also partly because of the way the President has been using that language from the bully pulpit.

[David Remnick]

So let's set falsehoods and conspiracy theories aside for one blessed second. What is Joe Biden's actual record on China? Is he generally in sync with what you could call the Washington consensus since, I don't know, 1978 or so?

[Evan Osnos]

He is. And I think it's then worth pointing out how that consensus has changed. So the basic consensus and the one that has defined Joe Biden going back to when he was, after all, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was that engaging with China, nudging it to open up to trade to some degree of Western influence, that that would ultimately be good for the United States and it would be good for China. That was the basic idea. And that continued in Joe Biden's time in the vice presidency. He had the job of being the counterpart to Xi Jinping. When Xi Jinping was the vice president, before he became the president, it was an important position, actually. He had to do a lot of face to face time to form an impression of who this very powerful incoming figure was going to be and what's changed since Then is that even if Donald Trump had not won the presidency, you were probably going to see a change in the thinking around China on both the left and the right. And Joe Biden has sort of moved in step with that. He is harder on the place than he was when he was the Vice President and certainly than when he was in the Senate. But where that's going is a live issue. It's actually an open question about whether the United States is gonna become. Is going to come to see China as an opponent that it can deal with in a kind of reasonable level of competition, or whether it's in fact an enemy that is on the opposite side of a fundamental Cold War style conflict. And that is partly what this election is about in the United States.

[David Remnick]

It's about that not only at the presidential level, but it also seems to be having an effect. Down ballot. Let's play an ad from Texas congressional candidate Kathleen Wall.

[Political Ad Voice]

China poisoned our people. President Trump has the courage to call it what it is, the Chinese virus. Kathleen Wall has his back. Wall will cut off trade, aid and support to China, fight to replace Made in China with Made in America, and stand with President Trump to face down the Chinese threat. China is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a sovereign nation. It's time to fight back.

[David Remnick]

I'm Kathleen Wall and I approve this message.

[Evan Osnos]

You know what's interesting about that, David, is actually that's not new. I've been hearing these ads recently and it reminds me of years ago. I was in Beijing 2012, and there was an ad by a Michigan Republican congressman named Pete Hextra in which it was the most offensive imagery. I mean, he had an Asian actress speaking in broken English wearing a conical hat. It was grotesque. By the way. Pete Hextra is the American ambassador to the Netherlands on behalf of the Trump administration. So this idea of attacking China has been part of our politics for a long time. On the Chinese side, they're used to this too. So on the Chinese government side, they basically tend to look at American campaigns as a kind of silly season in which you are going to hear absolutely everything. And they don't assume that a lot of that's gonna translate into policy. And that can create some weird reverb in the American political consciousness. Cause I've heard American political. Well, we know the Chinese don't take this seriously, so we can say pretty much anything during a campaign and it doesn't really have an impact. So the effect is that it has amped up the anti China rhetoric to quite a remarkable degree.

[David Remnick]

Already. Evan Osnos, thank you very much.

[Evan Osnos]

My pleasure. Thanks, David.

[David Remnick]

Evan Osnos reports for us from Washington. I'm David Remnick and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us and I hope you'll join us next time for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Host/Producer]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Botin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Callalea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester Gofen, Mputubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Steven Valentino, with help from Allison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng, Fei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsarina Endowment Fund.