← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Inside a Trump 2024 Rally in Iowa
00:32:46
Following a trip to Dubuque, Benjamin Wallace-Wells considers why the former President has maintained such a significant lead in the race for the Republican Party’s nomination.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:16]
Podcast Host
Please welcome the next President of the.
- [01:19]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
United States, President Donald J. Trump.
- [01:28]
Tyler Foggatt
Earlier this week, you reported on your first Trump rally in a really long time in Dubuque, Iowa. How did that feel? What was the energy like?
- [01:37]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
It was weirdly mundane. It was much less boisterous, much less deranged, much less destabilizing than the Trump rallies I went to. It seems, you know, curiously, like a kind of regular Republican rally.
- [01:55]
Tyler Foggatt
That's my colleague Benjamin Wallace Wells, who covers American politics for the New Yorker. Ben made some time to speak with me this week right after reporting on the ground in Iowa where the state caucuses are only four months away. You're listening to the Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt, and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. Okay, so how did this happen? Because you recently wrote a piece on this and you mentioned that, you know, this is your third election cycle attending Trump rallies and that back in 2016, some of the rallies you went to were, I think you described them as the darkest political events you'd ever witnessed. So how did we get from that darkness to what seems like a pretty mundane Republican rally.
- [02:37]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah, it was just crazy to be flying out and remembering what the rallies were when I first started encountering the Trump experience, and this isn't just true for me, but for, I think, a whole generation of political reporters who had come up in the Bush years and the Obama years in this pretty tame sort of political environment where you might sit there at the back of a political event, scribbling notes and thinking, that doesn't sound quite right, but you never felt like you were somewhere where something kind of awful might happen. The Trump rallies in 2016, as I think most people who are following politics remember when were really something, they were often in places that were like hockey arenas, very big crowds, 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 people, sometimes airport runways and hangars. They lasted for a long time. Usually nobody spoke except for Trump. It was at times pretty blood curdling. The kind of chants and cheers and denunciations of Hillary Clinton. Trump, frequently from the podium, would be calling for physical injury to immigrants or terrorists or their family members. Often he would indicate the press who were in a sort of designated area and have the crowd shout and scream at them and say how they were selling out America. It was pretty scary. And even if you were not going into these rallies, you know, scared for your own safety as a reporter, you were often just kind of worried that you would see something terrible happen. It's sort of striking then to see him now, you know, and last Wednesday in dubuque, there's like 800 people there, maybe a thousand. Something on that order. That's very big for a primary crowd. But it's nothing like these huge crowds, these huge rallies that it used to have. There's a panel discussion beforehand of immigration.
- [04:34]
Tyler Foggatt
A panel discussion?
- [04:35]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah. Like, they have four Republican officials up there, and they're talking about how illegal migration has created problems in local communities and in Iowa. It's not exactly Meet the Press, but it's very much within the realm of sort of normal Republican political event. And then Trump comes in and he's Trump, he's schmoozy. He says kind of crazy things sometimes.
- [05:02]
Tyler Foggatt
Like what?
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Benjamin Wallace Wells
Well, I mean, the most recent example from Monday's rally was he said that windmills in the ocean in South Carolina were leading to the deaths of whales on a rate that has, like, never been seen before in history.
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Tyler Foggatt
Really? I thought that according to Trump, windmills caused cancer.
- [05:21]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Windmills are the source of maybe many more of our problems than we had previously thought. If Trump is to be believed but, you know, like, he's on Twitter. He went after NBC News and said there should be an investigation. They're treasonous. This is presumably about some forthcoming story. So there's all kinds of stuff where you still, like, if you read through the quotes that Trump is giving and you select the five craziest ones, which is not a bad way to compile a newspaper report or wire dispatch, you would still say, man, this guy sounds kind of unhinged, kind of deranged. But if you're at a political event and you're listening to the ideas he's proposing, they're not new. They're not different than they were in 2016. They're no longer different from what the other Republican candidates are proposing. There is not the kind of, at least I haven't experienced yet, any of the blood curdling hostility of the press and to racial minorities and any kind of other groups that Trump has targeted in the past. And you kind of come out of it and say, you know, he's not tamer, exactly. He's not saner. Exactly. But something about this is different for sure. It's much less insurrectionary. It's not envisioning some revolution of the party and of American politics. It's taking place within, very comfortably within a Republican Party in shape of partisan politics that has already been transformed by Trump. And having spent a bunch of time just at Desantis rallies and Ramaswamy rallies and Haley rallies, just about everything sounds pretty much the same. And that, to me, was interesting.
- [07:02]
Tyler Foggatt
Speaking of Haley and Ramaswamy, you wrote in your piece that at this rally, Trump was really emphasizing how he was the most electable candidate, the best person in the Republican field to beat Biden. Do you think that this more moderate tone and just the way that he was running the rally was supposed to kind of communicate that to people? And also, do you buy that argument? I mean, it seems weird that the only candidate who was also facing four trials would be the most electable one. But as we've seen from the polls, yeah, maybe it's the case.
- [07:36]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
It seems completely wild. I don't know. I think that as a substantive matter, the electability dynamic in this primary has run differently than I might have expected at the outset. People might point to the polls and say, look in the head to head matchups. It seems like just about any other Republican does a little better against Biden. Not a ton better, but a little better than Trump does. It's longer really the case. You can go through poll after poll and Trump is Sort of back to par, basically, with other candidates. And he will make a point of talking about. At this rally I was at in Dubuque, he talked for several minutes about his own approach to abortion, which sort of stops short of some of the absolute bans that other candidates have put.
- [08:21]
Donald J. Trump
Forward, like Ronald Reagan before me. I believe in the three exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of. Of the mother. I believe in that. I think it's very important. Without the exceptions, it is very difficult to win elections. We would probably lose the majorities in 2024 without the exceptions and perhaps the presidency itself.
- [08:47]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
He's particularly been critical of Ron DeSantis signing of a bill in Florida that says no abortions after six weeks, which effectively eliminates, you know, most abortions. So Trump has been critical of that. Saying that goes too far. You know, of course, he's still somebody who has called for the punishment and imprisonment of women who get abortions in the recent past. So I don't know that moderate is exactly the right term to apply here. But, yeah, he has made a real show of being the more electable candidate. And I think the kind of card he has is that he actually won. He actually became president. He says, you know, about the Dobbs Decision and Roe vs. Wade. The whole party talked about this for 52 years, and all they did was talk in terms of overturning Roe. And I got it done.
- [09:38]
Tyler Foggatt
Yeah, he was the one who appointed justices. Yeah.
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Benjamin Wallace Wells
And, like, there's no lies there. He did do that. And so, you know, I think that, like, you know, the Desantises and Halleys, maybe more poignantly a few months ago, might have had more of a point if they could point to the polls and say, look, we're doing six points better against Biden than Trump, as we're doing eight points better than Biden. But now that it's basically the same thing in most polls, and Trump can say, well, I'm the guy who actually got elected, who actually won a general election in the past, who actually got some of the stuff he wanted done. Done. I think that that electability argument that many other Republicans hope to make has faded a bit, and maybe that shows a little bit how contingent it was on a particular dynamic in the polls, a particular moment in time.
- [10:24]
Tyler Foggatt
Yeah. From what I remember in 2016, I think that there are a lot of sort of establishment conservatives who were very skeptical of Trump's politics. He's this, you know, incredibly rich guy from New York who supported gay marriage.
- [10:39]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
And had been pro choice.
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Tyler Foggatt
Yes. And it was very easy to paint him as an elitist who yet wasn't, you know, socially conservative the same way that, you know, someone like Ted Cruz was. And it seems like now he's almost leaning into this idea that he isn't as conservative as some of his rivals and that that's actually the thing that sort of sets him apart and that makes him electable rather than the thing that will sink his candidacy.
- [11:03]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I think that's absolutely right. And I think that one thing that is pretty striking about the way his national political career has unfolded is having been the guy who tried to overturn an election and was still able to keep 30%, you know, 33% of the country, like, staunchly in his corner, you know, most of whom are sort of the most conservative voters in the country. He seems to have a lot of latitude to say things that are not doctrinally conservative and to keep their support. And I would say the things that we're talking about a little bit of a, you know, differentiation from what is by historical standards, an extremely radical anti abortion stance that Ron DeSantis has taken. This is not like a huge amount of moderation, but I do think it suggests a way he might move in the general election. If he gets there. I think he might have quite a lot of latitude to say things that the conservative base might not tolerate from another candidate.
- [12:09]
Tyler Foggatt
And how did he talk about immigration? I mean, it seems like, sure, he brought up the migrant crisis in New York and what he probably sees as Biden's failures at the border, but with abortion, he can point to the Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade, but with immigration, it's a bit murkier. So how did he talk about that?
- [12:28]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Well, I think he sort of lied, basically. I think he said, I stopped all this. And then Biden came in and it started again. And I built a really strong border wall, and we're gonna finish it when I get there. And if you look at the ebbs and flows of migration into the US through the southern border, maybe you can squint and squint and squint and see some pattern like that.
- [12:52]
Tyler Foggatt
Well, also, I would attribute some of it to the pandemic and just the fact that we weren't letting anyone in.
- [12:57]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Sure, sure. So I think that's basically his tactic there. What I would say is that among the voters that I talked to, there was a sense that it would be self evident to a general election audience, even to people who, you know, are Democrats or who live in cities, that everything is complete chaos. All over America because of the numbers of migrants coming through. Everybody asked me how crime was where I live, you know, what was going on with migrants in New York. You know, Eric Adams, the mayor, has been very publicly worried about the level of migrant crisis. And, you know, we talk about national politics in the Trump era as being basically about sort of vibes and positioning and stuff like that. But there are very real questions, you know, undergirding this coming election, one of which is how is the economy going to be seen as doing under Biden in another year, which is sort of, you know, tbd, but it looks a little shaky at the moment. But another one is, will people around the country really feel like their communities are unable to take care of people who are there? Are people going to feel threatened by migrants in their community? Are they going to feel like the Biden administration is doing enough? And so I don't think there was much new from Trump on immigration. It sounded just like the same braggadocious talk that we heard six or seven years ago. I don't think that he was very effective at distinguishing himself or making a case for his own policies. But I think the thing in the background is, how bad is this actually going to be? How bad will it seem to voters over the next year? And I think that's sort of a very important and real unknown. And I think one further note on this is just, I think that a big part of why Republican voters are so comfortable slipping back into the Trump jet stream is that they think that the country is doing very badly, and voters generally will be eager to reject Joe Biden. And so if they're giving up a percentage point or 2 percentage points, Trump relative to some other Republican candidate, doesn't matter, because, you know, Biden's going to be seen as so weak. You know, the Republican is going to win. It's just like a lot of confidence among. Among Republicans.
- [15:19]
Tyler Foggatt
A lot of the concerns with Biden revolve around his age and this idea that he is becoming increasingly enfeebled. And when you talk about this Trump rally, how it was calmer and more mundane than you expected, I mean, it makes me wonder, I mean, can you attribute sort of the potential lack of aggression that you're describing to Trump's own aging? I mean, he's old, too.
- [15:41]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
He certainly is. He's, I think, 77 at the moment. I'm a little cautious right now because, you know, we're still early. And I'm not sure that Trump will seem exactly the same in six months or nine months, as he does now. But I would say that there's a different dynamic around Trump. Liberals still see Trump as scary, and they see the project he seeks to impose on America as scary. And that is just hard to connect to a story in which this guy is aging and losing it. I don't know that he seems especially like low energy to me. He still is the same guy, still makes jokes. You know, he still can keep going, keep a crowd going for. For a long time. What I would say is he seems like he's repeating himself. There's just not any new ideas. And I don't know that that is something that is going to really undermine him in an election. But that's the place I see the aging with him, whereas with Biden, you know, I mean, his events are just smaller and shorter. And I think that when conservatives look at the country, they see it as adrift. And that is a little bit easier to connect to a story in which a politician is visibly aging than one in which that aging politician is still terrifying. I sort of tend to think that the Biden enfeeblement story is a very big part of this election, but that his position is going to eventually be determined by more concrete things. How much better off people feel than they did four years ago, whether they feel the economy coming back, whether they feel things like the situation at the border has been taken care of, whether they basically feel like he is improving the country.
- [17:31]
Tyler Foggatt
That's interesting. I mean, I feel like that's been missing from a lot of political reporting these days, is just the idea that, at the end of the day, people still care about policy and the issues. I feel like there have been a lot of think pieces about how the election is basically some kind of litmus test or, you know, sort of figuring, you know, like, a lot of people are voting for Trump as a way of, like, virtue, signaling that they're, you know, upset with what the Democratic Party is doing to him. And so it's refreshing to hear that, at least if people are, you know, that people are voting and thinking about, you know, actual policy, because I feel like that's something that's very easy to forget about.
- [18:08]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I know one thing that, you know, some Democratic advisors close to Biden are quite worried about is that, you know, both in 2016 and 2020, they struggled to convince voters that Trump was not a genius at managing the economy. You know, and even in October of 2020, you know, a month before an election he lost, Gallup found that 58% of Americans thought that they were better off than they had been four years ago.
- [18:35]
Tyler Foggatt
Is that just tax cuts?
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Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's sort of a weird stat, right, because it comes, you know, six months after the start of a pandemic. But, yeah, I think tax cuts, I think the economy really had boomed. People were doing pretty well. I don't know that Biden is going to get as much credit as maybe his advisors think he should for the rebound and the kind of managed rebound.
- [18:58]
Tyler Foggatt
Yeah, the fact that there wasn't a recession. I mean, it seems like Biden and his advisors are really trying to push, you know, the idea that Bidenomics is working and that the economy is getting better. But, I mean, this is kind of a separate conversation. But is there, I guess, is there a reason why Trump can damage the economy and not get any of the blame, whereas Biden can help fix the economy and still get blamed for the fact that inflation went up, even though that was partly because of Ukraine?
- [19:26]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
And, yeah, I think there's a lot going on there. But one thing I might note here is that, you know, those pollsters who have looked at the Biden approval ratings and in particular the approval voters give him on his management of the economy, I think that might be one place that his age comes into play that, you know, people simply can't believe that this guy fixed all these complicated technical things. It must have been somebody else. It must have been outside of the realm of government.
- [19:54]
Tyler Foggatt
An act of God.
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Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah, yeah, some, something, you know, or the markets or, you know, Elon Musk or, you know, however you want to attribute it. I think Republicans have enjoyed public opinion advantages on managing the economy as a general matter for a long time. And, you know, Trump had a really powerful brand as a genius businessman, however cooked up. We sort of think it was. One of the people I ran into at the rally in Iowa told me that he had first encountered Trump in the mid-1970s when Trump was on a late night talk show and advising his audience when they were thinking about investing in real estate to keep an eye on the interest rate collapse, to look at the oil market, to think of it as an expression of sort of macro trends. And this guy told me that in his own. He's a home builder in Dubuque, Iowa, at the time. And he told me that in his own business he took that to heart and managed to stave off disaster and so on. And so I think that there's a long tail of him being presented as a kind of economic genius. And I think that I'm not sure the Democrats really tried to damage that very hard in 2016 or as hard as they might have. And 2020 was obviously sort of about different things, but I do wonder if they might still be sort of vulnerable to a case where Trump says, you know, you had a great economy under me, you had great lives under me, and then you elected this old guy because you were worried about whatever you were worried about, and he blew it. And I actually think that might be a more compelling general election message than what Ron DeSantis seemed to be gearing up to do, which was sort of to say, you know, this 80 year old guy who doesn't seem that progressive in person is wokeness run amok. So all this said, we are going to be heading into a pretty long stretch of hearings and criminal trials where Trump is going to be very pressured. These trials all look pretty terrible for Trump to my eye. And I think that the primary electorate right now is dismissing those as a witch hunt or, you know, as unimportant. But I can't imagine that that is unimportant to a general election audience. And if you're looking at a situation where Trump has been through a couple serious trials, looks like he's headed to prison. Is that guy really going to win the presidency? Seems a little crazy to me.
- [22:25]
Tyler Foggatt
Yes. So, Ben, I want to ask you more about The Trump and DeSantis rivalry, about the trials, and about the upcoming Republican debate. But before I do that, we're going to take a quick break. We'll have more with Benjamin Wallace Wells on the political scene from the New Yorker in just a minute.
- [22:41]
Katie Drummond
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. I want a shark that, that eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [23:14]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. And to the best of my ability.
- [23:23]
Katie Drummond
Every 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.
- [23:40]
Tyler Foggatt
False.
- [23:41]
Katie Drummond
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.
- [23:54]
Tyler Foggatt
So there's been a lot of talk about how Iowa is really the place where DeSantis can finally overcome this huge gap between him and Trump. He's put a ton of time and money into campaigning in the state. You know, he's been touring, running ads, getting endorsements from politicians that Trump has feuded with. But it seems like Trump is still pulling pretty far ahead. Now that you've spent some time in Iowa, what's your sense of why Trump's popularity still has such a strong hold and if there's anything that can be done by DeSantis to weaken that hold?
- [24:27]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Well, one thing that I think does explain some of the dynamic and the polling dynamic in Iowa that is not really part of that, if I may, is just that DeSantis is not the only candidate who sees Iowa as his big Stan. Tim Scott has been running a lot of ads there. Mike Pence has been campaigning there quite aggressively. Vivek Ramaswamy has even been spending a bunch of time there, though I think his case is better in New Hampshire. If you're somebody who is a little bit skeptical of Trump, even outright thinks he's kind of unfit for office and is going to be caucusing in Iowa. I think the failure of DeSantis campaign over the summer was just he could not effectively establish himself as the lone alternative to Trump. And so you have Trump and then a bunch of people taking pretty well funded potshots at Trump because they all think this is their chance to make a name for themselves. I'd also say that there's really been like kind of shockingly little policy content to this election so far. And so, you know, as the, as the kind of potential Trump rivals have sort of been tiptoeing around the whole January 6th unfitness for office stuff. And Chris Christie and Nikki Haley have been a little bit more aggressive in that than others have, it has been hard for me to find really clear areas where the alternative candidates are making strong policy cases for saying, here's what I will do for you that Trump won't. You know, I can't really tell you what Tim Scott is campaigning on at the moment. You know, even having seen his events and watched a ton of his ads. So, you know, I'm a little bit surprised about the way this election is run in Iowa so far. I thought Trump would be much more vulnerable. I thought DeSantis would be clearly stronger. There's still a few months, and, you know, many of these elections sort of turn late. You know, Pete Buttigieg won Iowa in 2020, and even at this point, Pete Buttigieg was way down the list of potential challengers there. And so still time. But right now, I think the basic story in Iowa has been sort of an echo of the basic story nationally. It's that it's just nobody has been able to. And DeSantis seemed like the most likely guy, but nobody's been able to sit to distinguish themselves as, like, the main rival to Trump. And so it's sort of Trump and the seven Dwarves, Trump and the Minnows, something like that.
- [27:05]
Tyler Foggatt
I'm curious about whether the politician endorsements that DeSantis has been able to get, whether those have made any sort of difference or will make a difference in your mind. I mean, I think you mentioned earlier that Trump is repeating himself in a lot of ways, repeating what he did in 2016.
- [27:21]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
But.
- [27:21]
Tyler Foggatt
But at the same time, I mean, so much has happened, and he's so different. And one of the main differences is that he seems a lot lonelier. Like, he doesn't have his family with him. He doesn't have his former cronies. He has all of these politicians who hate him. Has that not weakened him at all?
- [27:37]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Not really. I mean, again, I sort of thought it would, and it hasn't. I think that, like, the thing that's happened is that people who worked closely with him have come out against him. You know, and it's pretty astonishing to run through the list of his White House chief of staffs. His vice president is running against him. Nikki Haley, who is his ambassador to the UN Is running against him very critically. Chris Christie, who was a pretty close advisor to him for a long time, ran his transition committee, is going against him really hard. But at the level of the county Republican chairs, at the level of members of Congress, you know, this party has changed. And with the exception of a few holdouts like Mitch McConnell or, you know, Mitt Romney, who's leaving the Senate now, this is Trump's party. And if you look at what's happening in Washington right now, you have an establishment faction and an extremist faction in the House that are debating what to do about this really crazy, seemingly government shutdown menace that's looming, both of those factions are basically all endorsing Trump for reelection already. Kevin McCarthy has come out and said, and he's the Establishment figure, the speaker of the House. He's come out and said, Ron DeSantis is just not on Trump's level, and I've got no time for him. And so there is a kind of weird dynamic here where he is personally considerably more isolated, more lonely, as you say, than he was either the last two times around. But at the level of the party, he has moved the party towards him.
- [29:14]
Tyler Foggatt
I know that the polls definitely reflect what you're saying right now, but at the same time, I mean, what's up with that, you know, relatively small crowd in Iowa? You know, it was a group of 800 to 1,000 people, as you said, back when it used to be 8 to 10,000 people. Like, what. What happened?
- [29:31]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
I mean, I can give you my theory, and this is early, and I don't know if it's right, but I think that kind of outsider. We're going to change the world. Energy around Trump has also faded. I think his revolution kind of failed.
- [29:44]
Tyler Foggatt
Well, then, will his followers still go out and vote, you think they're just not going to the rallies?
- [29:49]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Could be. Or could be they don't turn out to vote. I mean, Nikki Haley said recently, like, he's the least popular politician in America. And like, that's true. That's true. You'd see poll after poll have 60, 65% of the country saying, we disapprove of this guy. Joe Biden's pretty close to that level, but Trump is lower. And so when I got back from Iowa, a friend called me and said, what's he like now? And I said, he just feels like a Republican to me. And that's how I see him right.
- [30:21]
Tyler Foggatt
Now, a Republican who's about to face a number of criminal trials. You mentioned earlier that it's kind of hard to know how things will shake out in the general election. You know, if there are trials going on, just, you know, the image of Trump in a courtroom, which we've already seen a couple of times just at these arraignments, it seems like it would be hard for that to help him. But at the same time, you know, in your piece, you mentioned that you spoke to a woman in Iowa who said that, you know, the more criminal trials Trump faces, the more his supporters will support him.
- [30:52]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah.
- [30:53]
Tyler Foggatt
Is that the general sentiment that you got from most of the people you spoke with?
- [30:56]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Yeah. That this helps him in the primary and hurts him in the general election? I think is the general sentiment I've gotten from people at rallies, but also political consultants from both parties. I think that's kind of the. At least the conventional wisdom at this point that the more other Republicans, the more he. The more conservative commentators say this is a witch hunt, the Biden administration is just out to get him because he's a political threat. The more it has bound sort of loyal Republicans to him, the more it's made them see his fights as theirs. But I think what Haley says about his general unpopularity is true. And he has done a lot of really terrible things. January 6th, maybe most memorable and most significant among them. And there are a great, great many people outside of the third of the country, roughly, that really supports him, who I think are pretty disgusted. And I think that for all the patterns that we talked about earlier around the economy and migration and the potential intrusion of sort of Biden's own, you know, struggles to turn out, you know, young voters and so on, I think a really important dynamic in this election is going to be that those criminal trials, you know, though they might help him in the short run and among primary voters just sort of, you know, make clear to them that he is the kind of Republican warrior still. He is the one Democrats are focused on taking down. It's still his fight that as much as it does that among primary voters, that these trials are going to look pretty terrible to independent and Democratic voters. And I think that one reason, and this may be speculating too much, I don't know this from his advisors or for him or anything, but one reason he might be eager to rebrand as the most electable Republican, to kind of bind a larger part of the party to him, is he's gonna need those people if he's gonna make it through these trials. You know, there are ways in which he kind of needs his popularity not just to be niche, but to include the Republican Party if he wants to try to insulate himself from these very serious charges.
- [33:11]
Tyler Foggatt
So the least popular and yet most electable Republican candidate will not be participating in the second Republican debate on Wednesday night. Yeah, it is now going to be the second that Trump has not appeared in. And I'm wondering what you're looking out for during the debate.
- [33:30]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Well, I was pretty underwhelmed by the first one. I thought that, you know, none of the candidates really made a compelling case that they were offering something different from Trump or that Trump should be disqualified from running in the minds of voters because of these trials, because of January 6, because of all manner of things, they seemed to be caught up largely in trying to introduce themselves and then in sort of some jockeying amongst each other for kind of position as a leader in the field, apart from Trump. And I think what any one of them needs is to make a convincing case why Donald Trump should not be the nominee for this party. And I think until and unless one of them does that, and I have not seen many signs that any of them are doing it in other venues, but until and unless somebody does that, you know, is Trump's contest to lose very clearly.
- [34:28]
Tyler Foggatt
Well, thank you so much, Ben.
- [34:30]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
Sure.
- [34:33]
Tyler Foggatt
Benjamin Wallace Wells is a staff writer at the New Yorker. You can read his piece. Is Trump Just an Ordinary Republican? Now on new yorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggatt. The show is produced by Michelle Moses with support from Sidney Cobb and Gianna Palmer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. America is changing and so is the world.
- [35:15]
Podcast Host
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [35:23]
Tyler Foggatt
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [35:26]
Podcast Host
Tristan Redman in London. And this is THE Global story.
- [35:29]
Tyler Foggatt
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [35:35]
Podcast Host
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [35:43]
Tyler Foggatt
From.
- [35:43]
Benjamin Wallace Wells
PRX.