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- [00:01]
A
Displacement is at its highest level since World War II, but more than $1 billion in essential programs are being cut just as needs grow. Families forced to flee war are arriving in camps hungry, cold and exhausted. With your support, unhcr, the UN refugee agency, provides essentials for emergencies. Warm clothes, blankets, cooking sets, and shelter materials help families survive the deadly winter ahead. Donate@unrefugees.org scene.
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Well, it is the first big snow of the season. Washington looks fresh, magical, new.
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B
It's like an inch and a half.
- [00:42]
C
I am a fan of snow. I'm gonna just put that out there. I know it's controversial in D.C. especially, but I love snow.
- [00:48]
B
This morning in our house, I have never seen more sorrow than the discovery of snow on the ground. But no snow day.
- [00:57]
C
That is a cruel f. They were like these people. I suppose you don't serve hot chocolate either, do you?
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B
Well, I tried, but there was a rending of PJs, a pulling of hair, and they really lost control. I don't wanna point fingers, but expectations were set. Yeah, this is it. Well, this is all about expectations, it turns out.
- [01:17]
A
Well, they need to get organized in your household. We expect political organizing. They need to get on the weather service and on the local school.
- [01:26]
B
They're take control of the means of communication. A swift overnight strike. They're gon if they get ahold of my text messages. If you see any conspicuous spelling errors, you know that they've seized the devices.
- [01:40]
A
Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos. Hey, Susan.
- [01:54]
C
Hey, there.
- [01:55]
A
Hi, Evan.
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B
Good morning, guys.
- [01:57]
A
Hey. Well, President Donald Trump, now 79 years old, will be the oldest sitting president in US history by the end of the second term. For years, his bluster and uninhibited style have insulated him from questions about his age and health. But that's changing. Recent observations, including Trump appearing to nod off during a cabinet meeting as Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised him, and reports of a shorter work schedule have fueled new questions about his stamina and his mental sharpness. The irony is inescapable. Trump won the 2024 presidential campaign by attacking Joe Biden as Sleepy Joe. Now he faces some of the same questions about his own stamina, leadership, and aging in politics. So in this episode, is Trump, Donald Trump, asleep at the wheel? If so, what are the political consequences for the rest of us? So let's start by grounding ourselves in what we do know, Trump's style has, of course, always leaned towards the unpredictable. He has a long standing tendency towards incoherence, and he tends to ramble. He claims that his non sequiturs are something that he calls his special weave. It can kind of be hard to distinguish between the style we've come to know from Trump and signs of aging and decline. But there have been certain clear signs, according to reports from the New York Times. Evan?
- [03:40]
B
Yeah.
- [03:41]
A
Can you please walk us through what we're hearing about?
- [03:45]
B
Yeah. I have to say I enjoyed the process of going back in anticipation of today and really reminding myself of a series of remarkable moments. I think that this really kicked up after this meeting that you mentioned briefly in the Oval Office. It was November 6th, and people will remember that that was the day that the President of the United States was really just sitting in his chair with his eyes closed for long periods of time. And you had these kinds of analyses by various news organizations, sort of counting up the minutes, 20 minutes, apparently, in which he was, shall we say, losing the battle against the midday nap. And afterwards, Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, seized on this, as one does in politics, calling him Dozy Don, which, you know, these are the kinds of things that are sound ridiculous, except that, as we learned with Sleepy Joe, it really does follow you around. So Dozy Don, he is now, the Times did a really good analysis where they really put together all of these really startling indicators about Trump's health. The fact that he now routinely puts makeup on his hand to cover this big unexplained bruise, the fact that he's now working many fewer hours. I mean, they say he's working basically noon to five, which was one of his big accusations against Biden. And one of the things that I think really registered with the public, the fact that he's doing many fewer events. I mean, all of these are not incidental facts. And one of the things we learned in the last administration was the public may not follow all the ups and downs of somebody's policies and politics, but they read very visibly your physical health and vigor. And if the image becomes set in stone that this is somebody who is drowsy or dozy or asleep at the wheel, as you say, that becomes very hard to shake off. And I think it's a big reason why Trump went absolutely berserk about that New York Times piece.
- [05:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, look, it cuts to the core of Trump's political identity even more, by the way, than until the end, Biden, because Trump has always projected himself as literally the incarnation, the physical incarnation of a strong man. There's this amazing scene that's recounted by one of his assistants in his first term where she's concerned about Trump's appearance or health, that he's not feeling well early on in the first term. And his other advisor sternly reprimands her and says, Donald Trump is never sick. Donald Trump is never unwell. And it's core to his political identity as well as I think his self identity is this idea of strength, of power. Remember, he's fighting for them. That's been his whole appeal to the MAGA base. And so for him, it cuts right to the political identity. If he is no longer the incarnation of power and he actually physically cannot fight for them, then what is it exactly that he's doing for them? So number one is the political question of how they're going to address this. And the reason that I think it's important to have this conversation now only 10 months into this second term is because this is only gonna become a bigger issue, right? When a guy is pushing, he moves one direction. There's gonna be more naps, right? We can just say, and in fact, actually there were two naps this week even after don't knock it till you talk Cabinet room thing. And we should stipulate, by the way, no one at this table is immune to a little bit of eye closing midday, right? That happens. It's nature and aging. Of course, it's not a straight line, it's a zigzag. And it will be for Trump as it was for Biden up. Now, Trump benefited, I would say, from a sort of impression of sheer physical bulk and he was aging in a different way than Biden. And then the other factor, Evan, I wanted to point out, is one you mentioned, which is what is the line between Trump's incoherence and where you call that aging. And frankly, he benefited greatly from that in his first term. Donald Trump was already getting palpably older in many respects in his first four years in office. I would suggest to anybody who is not sure about this conversation, go back and look at a video clip of Donald Trump from say the late 80s or the early 90s on the Larry King Show.
- [08:10]
B
Don, why don't you and people like you build low income, medium income housing?
- [08:15]
D
Well, as far as building housing is concerned and low income housing, I've built a lot of it. I haven't recently, but I've built a lot of it. I built senior citizens housing and beautiful, beautiful housing. I built low Income housing, and I'm very proud of it. The policies of the government right now just don't allow it. Because really what's happened by the tax incentives that were taken away and by the lack of federal programs. You used to have federal programs. You don't have them anymore. And it really doesn't allow it to be done on any economic basis. And it's a pretty rough situation. I mean, you just don't have subsidized housing, low income, moderate income housing, and it's a really big problem.
- [08:48]
C
He's a much sharper, clearer, more understandable person. He speaks with nouns and verbs and periods at the end of sentences. He has a larger vocabulary. Flash forward to the 2016 campaign. Look at a little clip of that.
- [09:02]
D
Yet Hillary Clinton wants to double down on Obamacare, making it even more expensive, and it doesn't work. It's no good. I'm asking for your vote so we can repeal and replace Obamacare and save healthcare for every family in Michigan and throughout the United States of America. We have to do it. We don't have a choice.
- [09:29]
C
Him pretty vigorous, you know, and he had talking points in that campaign, a message to deliver. And he delivered it with some discipline over and over again. In fact, analyses have shown that his language actually changed in the 2016 campaign to be sharper, to, you know, swear less than he did normally. Then he gets to be president and it starts to unravel. By the end of his first term, he's a different guy. By the 2024 campaign, he's all over the place, just word salad. He's talking for twice as long. That, to me, was always a really interesting data point. In fact, they call this, I guess, disinhibition. But his rally lengths doubled. They were over 87 minutes of speaking, I believe, in his second campaign.
- [10:16]
A
I mean, but let's talk a little bit about what you described as the unraveling. It's not just the length of these discourse of things that are going on coming out of the Oval Office. I don't know how to describe it practically, but it's also the actual subject matter and the words that he's using, they seem to be intensifying outbursts and more profane. Correct. I mean, are you seeing language that we haven't seen before?
- [10:41]
B
Well, I think when you drill into these studies that Susan mentioned, there's actually some really interesting specifics. I mean, the fact is that his use of violent language has gone up substantially. This is something that scholars at UCLA discovered that it's not just These sort of general disinhibition where he is. And he's doing that too, where he's cursing more. And evidently the barriers around his own self governance, if we can use that term with him, are giving way. But the fact that he's actually historically now talking about both war and crime at a level that is much higher than previous presidents is notable to the scholars who look at this stuff. It's also notable, and I just have to draw attention to this, that he is luxuriating more in the mental palace of the 1980s. I mean, he says things like at one point he was talking about where's Johnny Carson? He says, can we bring. And Carson, of course, has been dead since 2007.
- [11:40]
A
He's been talking about Cary Grant. Cary Grant and Lindbergh. I mean, this is even before his own time.
- [11:47]
C
Okay, but to be fair, it's more about, as you said, it's an intensification of attributes that were already there with Donald Trump. So he already, his entire political Persona was a sort of an archeological RELIC of the 1980s.
- [12:04]
E
Right.
- [12:04]
C
And that was true when he came in, but it's become intensified, distilled, and some of the more menacing aspects of his personality have come through. So that means that he's not controlling, controlling himself when he's angry. And what does it say that Evan mentioned the Times piece on his age and the ways in which the White House was compensating for that with a reduced schedule and the like. This caused him to be really RIP shit. And I think his demeaning of the reporter who wrote that obviously hit a nerve with Donald Trump because I think it does go to who he is as a politician and it actually could undermine his connection with his base.
- [12:50]
A
You know, actually, Susan, when you talk about his reaction to the New York Times report on his fatigue or whatever we want to call this, Trump posted 160 times on truth Social in response to the New York Times article. If you look at what he posted, he has statistics about how the number of times the stock market has hit the highs and all the things he claims all the wars and, and he claims he's solved and everything else. And you know what I thought when I looked at that, I figured this is what his aides are telling him. He is cosseted by sycophants who are feeding him these lines and telling him no one has ever been better. And part of what we're looking at as we describe the outlook of the President is a man who is surrounded by yes men who seems to be increasingly detached from reality. We see this in his discussion of the affordability issue, where he claims that affordability concerns are a hoax. He's obviously out of touch with anyone who goes shopping.
- [13:53]
C
Look, he's the man in the bubble, right? But all presidents have this to a certain extent. I mean, and I think it's a very relevant point, Jane, because, you know, history is full of, you know, late stage emperors and kings and who are increasing in isolation. But I think it's best distilled, in fact, by an incident that you referenced in the opening today, which is the cabinet meeting this week. He repeatedly had trouble staying awake, but he particularly had trouble when the man literally sitting next to him, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, is not only flattering him, but praising him in terms fit for an emperor. You, sir, are the greatest peacemaker of all time. And what I found amazing is that Donald Trump is so weary that even this praise is no longer enough to stir him.
- [14:45]
A
Honestly, I think it's his favorite lullaby, actually. Truthfully.
- [14:50]
C
I mean, it makes him feel good to have this bath of warm work.
- [14:53]
B
Yeah. But what's going on seems to wake him up.
- [14:56]
A
And I've wondered.
- [14:57]
C
His conflict is hate.
- [15:00]
A
I mean, he rises to the occasion to say something racist about Somalis or to trash these particularly women reporters who have come in. I mean, we've heard four of them trashed by him in very, very nasty terms in the last few weeks.
- [15:17]
C
And although nastiness, again, not a new facet of his personality. And I think, you know, what we're likely to hear is just more of it because he feels defensive and in.
- [15:29]
B
But I want to put this in.
- [15:30]
A
Profanity is real. Okay. I just have to say, I have found, and I'm not someone who cares that much about profanity generally, but coming from the Oval Office, the President of the United States, to hear him say such things as that when he was talking about Israel and Iran, you know what?
- [15:47]
D
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that?
- [15:57]
A
In the world of diplomacy, and it is shocking and kind of, I mean, it's jarring and it's debasing in some way. That's really, I think, I mean, and now I've seen it, you know, you can see it from the people around him. His spokesman last week told, you know, reacted to something that I tweeted, saying that I ought to shut the fuck up. You know, to say to a reporter that Obviously, it is their fantasy that all reporters will be silenced. But to use language like that from the pulpit of the White House of the United States, it is so coarse and so lowering.
- [16:39]
B
Well, I mean, this is. These are fighting words. I mean, this is a language that has a long history around it. And I think that one of the things that that's especially worth watching is that in an administration like this, in which people pattern themselves so clearly after the president, there's this kind of obvious, rather pathetic attempt to just ape him aesthetically, that that's what they do. And you watched it in the Cabinet meeting, which I have to say, makes for fascinating viewing, because you see that he is getting. He begins to get drowsy when it's things that he doesn't care about. So he's sort of faintly awake for Lutnick. And then as you begin meeting at secretary of Commerc to get into the various agencies that he could care less about, like HUD and the epa, he's drifting into this deep and restorative REM stage, I think. And then finally, when Rubio, who he considers to be a kind of hollow vessel, who is hopelessly, desperately trying to puff him up, that's the point at which he is rendered at his most restorative.
- [17:44]
A
But listen, guys, when you come back to the issue of whether he is increasingly asleep at the wheel, as we've said, in some ways, I wonder if this could be. Will this provide him cover? I mean, if you take a look at the debate and discussion over the Hagseth situation right now, basically, Trump has said he had no idea that there was what they're calling a double tap, and that the US Military came back and killed two people hanging off the side of a boat who, according to military law, should have been rescued in the eyes of most experts, is it believable that he did not know? And if so, is this going to maybe give him some cover?
- [18:30]
B
Well, I think what the Hegseth situation tells us is it's really kind of proof of a couple of the phenomena we've been talking about, which is that as you have a president who is valorizing and lionizing demonstrations of, quote, unquote, strength and violence and vigor, that you're gonna have people in his orbit who are desperate to demonstrate, try to operationalize it. And here you've got somebody like Pete Hegseth, who, as we all know, in so many ways has none of the experience of secretary of defense. And having been relieved at the outset of his tenure of things like military JAG officers, some of the most senior legal advisors, counsel oversight that exist inside the military. That is now essentially gone further and further down the track until it finally violated a sense that even Republican senators could accept. I'm curious, Susan, what you think about this moment. Is it plausible to you that Trump is actually unaware of what's going on, or is this in fact just an occasion where he can put some distance between somebody who's gotten himself in trouble, maybe.
- [19:38]
C
Rather than an or answer, it's an and answer. Right? Donald Trump certainly has a longstanding habit of distancing himself from advisors who get in trouble. And he'll be like, wait, Pete who? I never heard of the guy. And that's your tell that the poor fellow is on his or her way out. Partially. That's just what Donald Trump does when there's a controversy, sees whether he can distance himself from it. But I do think it's an interesting question that this raises about whether, as a political matter, the age will increasingly become the kind of COVID for Donald Trump as the scandals of the second term inevitably metastasize and swirl around him. And Jay and I, of course, have been thinking a little bit in this context about Ronald Reagan in his second term, and not only at the time considered to be our oldest modern president, although way younger than these guys, but Iran Contra. You covered Iran Contra. You wrote a fantastic book about Ronald Reagan. Tell us about is it fair to make this analogy? I always thought that one of the reasons Ronald Reagan didn't, for example, get impeached in the Iran Contra scandal was because nobody really believed that he was firmly in control and command, which is a remarkable thing in and of itself, but that people basically gave him the benefit of the doubt. They said it was rogue advisors, Oliver north in the basement of the White House who was doing this deal.
- [21:09]
A
You're absolutely right. It was his safety, was that he was out of the loop. And it was entirely believable that he was out of the loop. I mean, but that's a double edged sword for a president. When the Iran Contra affair broke, it was just after the 86 midterm election and Reagan's popularity dropped 21 points. And from then on, he was really seen as a lame duck and somewhat enfeebled. And so yes, it probably saved him from impeachment or any kind of legal repercussions. But at the same time, it's not helpful to a president. And as you were saying at the outset, it's especially, I think, a problem for a president like Trump who has cast himself as a strong man.
- [21:56]
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Biden and what we have learned about the political consequences of aging in the White House. The Political Scene will be back in just a moment.
- [22:15]
If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thanks so much for listening.
- [22:32]
E
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [22:59]
B
I want a shark that, that eats.
- [23:01]
E
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [23:05]
B
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [23:13]
E
Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:49]
A
So, Evan, in a sense, we've been here before, as we've discussed a little bit. You're, you did a fabulous piece on Joe Biden taking a look at the age issue. And it became an even bigger issue in the 24 election as he was exposed. Increasingly, the question I have is has Biden changed the standard for what's allowable in the White House? Has he changed what the public cares about on this issue and what the press's role is in terms of covering it?
- [24:23]
B
Yeah, I do think that the Biden hangover is a big piece of how alert people are to Trump's aging. Because in a way, we learned some things about the culture of White Houses. For instance, that what happens over time is that as the president gets older, when they start already at a, at an advanced age, that it's like a frog in boiling water, that the people around him, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, that they actually begin to question their own judgment. They say, you know, they sort of rely on outsiders to come in and say, well, how does he look to you? Because they're seeing him at his worst, at his best. And so you kind of, a little bit like with an aging relative, you sort of make sense of it. There's another thing that happens which is that aides, the people around him, a president, they, I think, lose sight of that barrier between the ordinary political process of making your principal look as good as possible and the, and the tools and the strategies of what become deception, where you're essentially that barrier, I think, becomes much for them. It becomes more porous where they just say, look, we're just doing politics here. We're just trying to make our guy look good, particularly when he's up against an existential threat like his opponent. And so where you're looking at the Trump administration, where they're already inclined towards those sorts of instincts, that's where it gets really dangerous.
- [25:52]
A
I mean, of course, as the president's powers fade, that means the AIDS powers increase. I mean, it can become a way to take power. If you, you know, I mean, Susan, what do you think? I mean, and also, do you think that the press now has a different role to play with this? Has it learned something from Biden?
- [26:10]
C
Well, I do think that it's worth considering what it is that we've learned from Biden because, you know, your answer to the question of what you learned is gonna shape how you app. That's where I think this frame of the COVID up. And let's be honest, while we were talking on this podcast and others were reporting about Biden's age throughout his presidency, I think a narrative took hold. People were nonetheless shocked to see Biden in that debate in June of 2024. And there's a sort of bestselling book kind of story about the COVID up that occurred. And if you ask not only a Republican in America today, but even many independents, even frankly, many Democrats, they will say that the press failed to cover Biden's aging. And it's, I think, worth unpacking why that is and whether there's any relevance here. From my perspective, there were important real acts of journalism trying to report and write around this throughout Biden's presidency. However, I think the world of echo chambers we live in is such that there wasn't what I expected to be, frankly, the real kind of critical conversation among Democratic officials, among journalists, columnists in the fall of 2022, when it mattered. And the reason that to Me was always, the key point is this is the moment at which Joe Biden, that.
- [27:45]
B
Was the midterm election, takes the wrong.
- [27:46]
C
Election, takes the wrong message from that midterm election and decides, well, gee, we didn't lose as badly as everybody said we were gonna lose. And therefore somehow that means I should run for reelection without anybody, without any real process. People have documented there really wasn't a big meeting, a big moment when all the advisors came together and sat around a table and had to look him in the eye. And well, sir, you're going to be 86 years old at the end of this next term and this is a problem. And I remember frankly having this conversation not only in this forum, but in many other forums and saying, listen guys, we're playing this kind of game of gotcha. That seems to me very unproductive, right? We're trying to discern in ways that are very hard for all the reasons Evan just laid out so coherently. We're trying to discern what's his exact mental state at this moment in time. And, and I always felt frustrated that we couldn't shift the conversation to what I saw as the more meaningful question, which is we don't need to know exactly what's in Joe Biden's brain right now. He's asking the American public to put him back in office for four more years until he's 86 years old. And frankly, people push back so much against that. And so when I think about that moment of time in 2021, 2022, and I put that forward to now, I think Republicans potentially are going to have a hard time grappling with the inescapable evidence of Trump's decline and his aging, because it would require a series of changes and structural shifts in the presidency and their political orientation in a whole system that they've built up with him as the leader. And I think it's going to be very hard for them to really come up with a way of politically accounting for the fact that is in front of all of our eyes. And Biden's people, it wasn't that they perpetuated this mass deception because we all knew, I mean, ask a 10 year old child and they would be like, yeah, like my nephew, he'd be like.
- [29:49]
B
Cover up in prison.
- [29:50]
C
Jo Biden's too old, right? So it wasn't that they succeeded in this grand cover up. But I do think the critique is about the politics that Biden people never came up with a plausible and useful political explanation for the truth of Biden's aging, and I see that happening now with the Trump people, that their reflexive response to this is to deny that he's aging rather than to find some way of living with it as a political fact for the next few years.
- [30:18]
A
I mean, it's interesting because you're talking about 2022 was the turning point with Biden when there needed to be an intervention and reality from his aides. And this president is not gonna have to make a decision about running for another term, presumably. So what will be the occasion for anybody intervening? And what are the implications if they don't? I mean, they have built now a presidency with the theory of the unitary executive that is more powerful, has more legal power, military power, concentrated in one man's person than we've seen before.
- [31:02]
What happens if he starts to lose it?
- [31:04]
B
To answer your own question, Jay, I mean, I think you've already suggested where you see this going, which is we are so far from any culture change in this administration that would allow that kind of candid conversation. We're just, you know, they're sprinting in the other direction, which is to sort of demonstrate who is redder than red, you know, to revive a concept we've talked about. It's amazing when you go and you think about how easy it has been historically for presidents and administrations to deceive the public. I mean, these stories, everybody knows some bit of them, but, you know, right down to the Woodrow Wilson, essentially, after having repeated strokes being rendered essentially supine during his presidency, and it was being conducted by others. I mean, I don't see how this gets better. It only seems to get worse. Is there some exit off the highway that we're not thinking of here?
- [31:55]
C
No. Well, I think that's the point, right? Like, it's his core political identity. Strength, vigor, it's gonna go down and down and down. They don't really have a good explanation. Even the avuncular. Well, but even for Joe Biden, there was a possible alternate theory here, which is this sort of the avuncular elder statesman. I mean, fdr, he was seen as sort of the protector, grandfather type, which is remarkable when you see how old FDR actually was, because he really was very young by modern standards. You know, maybe Joe Biden could have pivoted politically to that kind of an identity had his advisors been more willing to acknowledge the reality of his aging.
- [32:41]
B
I don't see that's an Uncle Donald narrative here available.
- [32:45]
C
Avuncular and Trump are never gonna be paired in the same sentence.
- [32:49]
B
I mean, his niece literally wrote a book, multiple books, about what a monster.
- [32:53]
A
Uncle Trump.
- [32:54]
C
No, I don't see Grandpa Trump as the new identity for him. And so, so I'm actually quite alarmed, though. One could see this process of aging for Trump as sort of rendering him a little bit less powerful. But what I worry about is that it will render him not only angrier and more erratic, but potentially prone to really wild acts that would be unconstrained. So I'm actually quite concerned about what this aging will mean in terms of the country. I'm concerned and worried about, about specific actions that might result from this aging.
- [33:36]
A
The political scene from the New Yorker will be back in just a moment.
- [33:47]
C
It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at White House Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.
- [34:01]
B
I know there's going to be a.
- [34:02]
A
Twist one day, a massive twist. At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover up in this case.
- [34:08]
C
I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from in the Dark and the New Yorker. Find it now in the in the Dark podcast feed.
- [34:26]
A
Both of you have covered authoritarian countries with rulers that stay in power forever. As a last question, I'm just curious, what do you see in China and Russia when these rulers become too old? Is there anything we can learn from that?
- [34:41]
B
I mean, the history on this is blinking bright red. There is a pattern in Chinese history that is known as the bad emperor problem. This is Francis Fukuyama's term, and it's very distinct, which is that when you have have a system in which so much power is invested in a single individual, and this is true over the last 2,000 years under one ideology or another, that's the Chinese political model. And so when you have a quote, unquote, good emperor, then you can get a lot of things done. They build things, you know, along the lines of the late Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, for instance. But when you have a bad emperor, when somebody loses their mind or gets too old or becomes corrupted in other ways, then terrible things can happen. And the prime example of this is Mao Zedong, who in his final years embarked on unbelievably destructive political campaigns intended to shore up his own sense of vanishing power. So the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in tremendous human suffering, were on some level, all efforts to try to compensate for the fact that he recognized that his political and physical vigor were leeching away. In fact, Chairman Mao's record was so destructive that his successors put in place things to prevent it from happening again. It's a big reason why they had term limits. Term limits which I'll point out, have now been removed by Xi Jinping. So the bad emperor problem is something for us to be, alas, suddenly aware of. What about in the Russian context?
- [36:15]
C
Yeah, well, it's interesting, right, because Vladimir Putin, who right now is, is 73 years old, which is not all that old in American terms, but he's already older than the average life expectancy of a Russian man. He's also been in power much longer, actually than xi Jinping right now, 25 years, a quarter century. And I think it's a fair explanation among multiple explanations for his very risky invasion of Ukraine, which clearly has not worked out exactly as he wanted it to work out, that this was a long time authoritarian. Looking at the septuagenarian mark in society where that's considered to be a very advanced age, thinking about his legacy and thinking that he wants to be the man who began to reassemble the lost empire. And I think that is a legitimate context to look at this conflict in Europe in right now. That it is a function of Vladimir Putin's extreme longevity and power.
- [37:23]
A
When strongmen get weak, watch out seems to be the bottom line here.
- [37:28]
B
Well said.
- [37:32]
A
Thank you so much. This has been an incredible conversation. This has been the political scene. From the New York Yorker. I'm Jane Mayer. We had research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Nora Richie. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Allison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening and we will be back next week.
- [38:10]
From prx.