← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The MAGA Agenda Is Sinking in Popularity. What Might Donald Trump Do?
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Susan Glasser
Did you notice that now they've hung a gigantic banner of Donald Trump on the outside of the Department of Justice? Kind of like the one they hung before on the outside of the Department of Labor. It's like Pyongyang on the Potomac over here.
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Evan Osnos
This one's even bigger.
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Susan Glasser
Oh, it's a huge. It's literally like dog peeing on fire hydrant. Also, by the way, like, I own the Department of Justice.
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Evan Osnos
No, no. The other thing that's notable about it is I know how these things go. Cause I mean, having been to Pyongyang, having lived in societies where they get into this kind of competitive obeisance, what you end up eventually is a statue of the boss that you can see from space. That's the only direction this is going.
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Jane Mayer
This is going there. Well, maybe the ark will turn out to have a humongous statue of him on top of it. 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 Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser. Hi, Evan.
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Evan Osnos
Good morning, guys.
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Jane Mayer
Hi, Susan.
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Susan Glasser
Hey there. So great to be with you.
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Jane Mayer
I want to start today by reading a list. These are the things Donald Trump said he would do on day one in office. End inflation, bring down the price of eggs, end the war in Ukraine, launch the largest deportation operation in American history, and be a dictator for just one day. That was his promise. Next Tuesday, Trump is going to walk into the House Chamber for the State of the Union address and tell the American people how he thinks it's going. He'll claim he deserves an A. But before he gets to make the case today, we wanted to examine where does the country actually stand? What does it mean that so many Americans, including some who voted for Trump, are having buyer's remorse? And with the midterm elections looming, what are the Republican and Democratic parties strategies to kick things off? I want to start with a big picture question heading into the State of the Union, Is Trump in political danger? What do you think?
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Susan Glasser
Well, to a certain extent, Right. The question is not, is he in political danger? But what is he going to do about it? And I think you have the most divisive, polarizing president in American history. He's sagging in the polls. He's at the low end of where he's been. But essentially the question is, how much of a reaction are we going to get from Donald Trump? Is he accountable to any laws of political physics? And we can all say this, that he seems extremely uneasy and focused, even to the point of obsession about the midterm elections. At the same time, he's been very, very unable to focus on what his White House keeps claiming any day now is gonna be his laser like focus on the economy and the affordability agenda. But Donald Trump isn' the program, Right? He says, in a sort of funhouse mirror version of Joe Biden, that he's conquered the affordability issue. He's won already on that. And so what I'm gonna be watching for next week is can Donald Trump even get through a speech? If you look at his recent performances over the last year, what you see is a sort of a decline, right, Physically, mentally, in his ability to focus on things, in a decline in his ability to sort of look at the parameters of American politics.
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Jane Mayer
Really interesting that you're looking at him as, like, how out of control he might be at the podium, because I know you've talked before about how the speeches have gotten longer and longer as one metric. Evan, what do you think? Is he in political danger? Do you think? Is he. What are you watching for?
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Evan Osnos
Well, in some ways, every day you see him lose some more people and take some more power. That's the central dynamic here. So, Susan, you mentioned that extraordinary, eloquent moment when this ginormous poster went up on the Justice Department this week. His face. You see him wielding the power ministries like the Justice Department in ways that were even more extraordinary than we expected. I think there's a telling measure here which is the way that his judges and I use his advisedly have been helping him achieve this. There was a study done recently that found that overwhelmingly the judges that Trump has put on the appellate courts have sided with him in more than 90% of the cases that have come up. Overall, though, if you ask the public, what are they feeling, I think the dominant sensation is even for people who wanted him, there's this sense that it's sort of like, waiter, this is not what I ordered, but it's right.
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Susan Glasser
It's the out of controlness of it in an almost inchoate way because it's so many different fronts. Nobody can really say, like, what is Trump trying to do right now except wield power for its own sake? I mean, Jane, do you see it?
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Jane Mayer
Well, I actually made a little checklist. I wrote down on one side of a piece of paper his successes and the other side, his failures to try to do a report card for him. And I tried to do it, stripping it of my own values and politics, just to see how I thought he'd stack up in his own lights. And I came away somewhat appalled because I came away thinking, actually, he's been kind of astoundingly successful by his own lights, which are corporate America has become complicit and cooperative with him in terms of asserting unitary executive control. He's got a kind of a power control, as you guys are talking about, over the executive branch, that's personal. He's gotten rid of the civil service. He has in terms of having power over Congress. They're completely supine. His own party has bowed down to him there. He has managed to, you know, spill over all of the congressional guardrails that would stop him from appropriating money for the programs that he wants to waging war, taking over Venezuela. And I think on one level, we have to think also about what his own personal goals are. He wants to be rich. This man and his family have made almost $4 billion in office. Now, these are his goals, not our goals.
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Evan Osnos
That's a key point.
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Jane Mayer
But I think it's kind of surprising when you look at what he's been able to consolidate in a democracy in one year, despite erratic rule and all the other things. And I think we're beginning to see autocratic backlash that we talked about with Ruth Ben Guillot last week. And there's some overkill on the two issues that he got elected on, the economy. And people are not feeling that he's delivered. I think you guys are right. And then I think on his other Signal program, which is deporting undocumented immigrants, there's a growing backlash to the cruelty and overkill in it. So I was surprised when I looked at this, thinking, by his own lights, not by mine, he's done a lot right.
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Susan Glasser
It's gonna be hard to put that in a speech, though. Now. I think that's what's interesting. To your point that he has a personal agenda for a personalist style of. But in a State of the Union address, you have to make the pitch for yourself and your party going into an election. What's striking there is actually a lot of Trump's rhetoric is sort of a word fog to disguise the fact that he's actually had a very hard time when it comes to the substantive parts of his agenda. For example, the economy last year was a terrible year for jobs overall. A lot of focus on the relative bright spot of the American stock market, much less focus. And we're not sort of economists here, but a friend of mine who is very plugged into this made the point to me the other day that, okay, so the stock market had a good year last year, but people don't pay attention to the relative decline in value of the US Dollar, which declined as much as the stock market has gone up.
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Evan Osnos
I mean, the key thing that he ran on was he's the businessman who's going to make your lives economically better. Right? Isn't that the core of the proposition? And what do you see today? In some ways, one of the most reveal appealing statistics when you look at the condition of the business mood out there is that people aren't hiring very much. New jobs are way down. That is one of the really telling statistics, because what it means is people feel uncertain. Businesses don't feel confident about where things are going in order to invest, in order to hire new people on board. And that ripples out across the economy. If you're not getting new jobs, that means people feel uneasy about where they are. You see this showing up in the polling data. People who are asked, are, are you better off or worse off financially than you were a year ago? Which, as we all know, is sort of the core of the political proposition. How do you feel compared to a year ago? Only 17% of Americans will say they are better off than they were a year ago, and twice that will say they're worse off. 30%.
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Jane Mayer
I mean, that's absolutely true. If you talk to any businessman, they will tell you they're not hiring because it's the uncertainty that Trump has created that Makes them unable to take the risk of bringing people on board because they're just not sure what's happening next. I mean, it's also interesting that after all of this talk in tariffs, we've just had new balance of trade numbers that show that there's no big difference after all of this. And so, I mean, it depends what metrics you apply here, of course, but we can talk a little bit more about foreign policy and our relationships with our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico. I mean, they've deteriorated unbelievably. And it's always been one of the great strengths of the United States that we have these great neighbors and great trade with them. But I think on the economy, he's in the same fix Biden was in where he's trying to yell at people and tell them, you are better off than you think you are. And that, we know, doesn't work.
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Evan Osnos
Susan, you pay a lot of attention to how the US Looks around the world. You know, you're talking to folks in other countries. I'm sort of curious. You know, there has just been a huge amount of activity over the course of the last year. Trump obviously said he was gonna end the war in Ukraine on day one. We know that that war continues on. I'm struck by the fact that here we are, it's, you know, we're in the middle of the Olympics. In Italy, there is talk about an Olympic boycott. In the United States, perhaps. I mean, that is a pretty telling measure of where we are.
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Susan Glasser
Yeah. I mean, if you had to give a report card here, you know, for a year into the Trump 2.0 era, what you would say is that America is more isolated in the world than it has been. It has scared the crap basically out of our friends and given heart to our adversaries. And this is a really sort of shocking re imagining of the world. I think that you've seen a new national security doctrine from the Trump administration that suggests that he sees himself as sort of a czar of the Western Hemisphere, basically, and moving very aggressively. Jane mentioned Venezuela. We're also effectively blockading Cuba at the moment. We have the threats to Greenland, which have caused not only convulsions here, but I think was really a breakpoint for many of our European allies and partners, who I think are coming out of the last few months in a profoundly different place than I've ever heard before. Really understanding that the basic compact that held between the US and Europe ever since World War II has sort of entered a new phase. You have, at the same time, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who have an adversarial relationship still with us, because there are so many now rational conflicts that Donald Trump can't simply override them, but at the same time, they see someone who wants to deal with them much more on their own terms. So I think it's a very perilous moment, in my view, for Trump personally as well. We talked about this last week, but just if he is in trouble here domestically, politically, I think we have to broaden the list of things that he might do internationally. And that's where I look at what's happening in the Middle east with this flotilla of lethal force being assembled against Iran. I think, wow, he might do something there that I don't think he would have done in his first term. It's a level of reckless international adventurum that's gonna lead a lot of consequences.
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Evan Osnos
Very much agree with you. We may be in the preamble here to war with Iran, which, to return to a key point where we started. Waiter. This is not what I ordered. I don't know how many Americans looked out and said, gosh, what I'd really like to achieve in my life over the course of the next two years is with Iran. And I think you could actually take the same principle and apply that to how Americans are looking at the immigration campaign. There is a sense, yes, that was one of the issues that people wanted addressed. They wanted something to be done on immigration, but did they want this? We now know it's measurable. The fact is he's underwater on immigration substantially. This is not an issue that people feel good about. And what I think is kind of telling. And I think, Susan, you mentioned this early on. Jane, you've also addressed this idea that people just feel fundamentally, fundamentally that things are out of control. That is one of the dominant sensibilities that shows up in the polling data. There was one interesting question that I took note of, that I think kind of drives home a bit of how people are feeling, which is, you know, standard polling question. People will say, you know, what are the words that you associate with this president? You know, Mark, the words that you associate with this president. For Biden, it wasn't good. Remember, they said he looked weak or they said old. That was always the key thing. And they're given options like you could mark bold or strong. Right now, Donald Trump's highest measurements are for divisive, corrupt, cruel, and number one, is dangerous at 50%.
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Jane Mayer
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
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Susan Glasser
It's only 50%.
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Jane Mayer
Well, that's my point. It's only 50%. Anyway, we are going to take a quick break, and when we come back, with Trump's popularity dipping, is the Republican Party in trouble? The political scene from the New Yorker will be right back. 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.
- [16:46]
David Remnick
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Jane Mayer
By historical standards, Trump's never been a popular president, but he's now losing support among some of the groups that voted for him in 2024, as well as from independents. In the latest YouGov poll this week, only 39% of people approved the way Donald Trump was handling his job as president. A majority regard his presidency as a failure. What are these numbers telling us? And what do you make of Trump's reaction? And do you think it will impact how he governs in the coming months?
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Susan Glasser
You guys, I mean, look, actually, that poll you cited might be on the high end of where a lot of the surveys are right now. The question is, is there a floor for Donald Trump? What is the core MAGA base that is gonna be with him to the end? And remember, by the way, there, there was about a third of the country that was supporting McCarthyism after McCarthy fell. There was about a third of the country that was supporting Richard Nixon after Richard Nixon was forced out of office. So one question is, what's the floor? And remember, the reason that matters is because we are in a midterm election year. Donald Trump isn't on the ballot. It's not a presidential election year. We're talking about congressional elections across the country that are in districts that have already been extensively gerrymandered by party. It's one of the reasons we have such a polarized country right now. So in these primary elections, one of the reasons you don't see Republicans coming out and dumping all over Donald Trump in the way that they might have in the past with such an unpopular president is because he still plays an outsized role in Republican primaries. And he still has a hold on the faithful of this party, at least more than any other figure. So I think it's important to discuss his popularity in the context of that. That's number one. Number two, though, there are real fissures and divisions among Republicans about all of Trump's polic about what to do. And what I'm gonna be paying attention to as we look at the primary season which is about to unfold is a. What remains of the kind of pre or possibly post Trump establishment voter. Is there such a thing as the country club Republican anymore? And how do they do in primaries? We'll see an early test of that in Texas coming up soon. They have an early primary, and you have a Texas senator, John Cornyn, who's up against the very, very out there, far right, Ken Pa. Other candidates. So let's see. What do the elections tell us about the enduring power of MAGA at a time when Trump's overall agenda is sinking nationally?
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Jane Mayer
Evan, if Trump seems to be pushing out in a direction that's increasingly unpopular, even with some of the MAGA faithful, do you see any evidence that the people around him in the White House are able to rein him in or know how to deal with this, whether it's Susie Wiles or Stephen Miller or any of the others?
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Evan Osnos
Well, we learned very clearly from Susie Wiles herself that she says that she's really never had one of these conversations where she goes into the Oval Office and tells him, you can't do this. That's just. She doesn't see that as her role. I think one of the fascinating errors that the people around Trump have made is mistaking devotion to him as devotion to them. So you see this over and over. So, of course, J.D. vance thinks, well, Trump's popular with our people. Maybe I'll be popular with our people. Kristi Noem, prime example. Last week we talked about the absolute chaos inside the Department of Homeland Security. We've talked today about the unpopularity of the immigration campaign. There's even talk, actually just some reports, about maybe Kristi Noem would find a way to make her way back home to South Dakota, maybe run for the Senate instead of sticking around in Washington. Look, I think Kash Patel is another prime example. Here's a guy who thinks I've got the tailwind of Trumpism behind me, when in fact, in fact, he is in many respects very unpopular and doing things that I think bother the public.
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Susan Glasser
Does it matter that the FBI director is unpopular? I mean, that's where the lack of accountability comes in. And also our basic assumptions that we still live in kind of a dysfunctional version perhaps, but basically live in the democracy that we have all grown up with or not. And that's the thing that I would like to put out there because I think it's very important. We have to talk about the politics of the elections, but at the same time the politics of the country as how they affect the people wielding power. Cash Patel has been given unimaginable power within our system. We have FBI directors appointed for 10 year terms meant to be nonpartisan officials. And yet what's happened is a perversion of the basic concept of the law by which Congress hands over this power to the executive branch. And, and what does it matter to anyone except for Donald Trump? Donald Trump on some level is the only person at this point who can rein in Cash Patel. Does anyone here think he's gonna be reigned in? No, of course not. The question is Donald Trump pushing him to do more and more and more to advance his agenda of revenge? And I think there's.
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Jane Mayer
I agree, I agree. And again, this is why when I made my report card, I thought, my God, they've managed to do all of this to personalize the power and institute corruption at every level. But I do think I was just thinking about Kash Patel and how safe he is in that position. There is a point at which competence matters and especially with something like the FBI and you know, if you watch sort of the Nancy Guthrie, the terrible story going on and on about them unable to find a suspect, let alone locate her, I think there's an opening. Put it this way, if you had an effective opposition, they could take on this administration on the simple issue of incompetence, I think.
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Evan Osnos
But anyway, before we get to the opposition, because we are, in fact, I think we should devote a lot of time to that. I actually want to get your guys sense of this gets right to the question of does any of this matter? The answer lies in what is the Republican Party right now. Yes, you know, look, when you lose Marjorie Taylor Greene, that is a sign of something happening.
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Jane Mayer
Well, that's what I wonder. Is there a fissure?
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Evan Osnos
So that's the. Well, I put the question to you.
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Susan Glasser
Well, again, I think there is a real fissure. How consequential it is. You can look at it in two ways. You can look at, okay, let's keep a chart of the primaries and the elections and sort of who's winning these contested Republican primaries or are there even a significant Number of contested primaries. Are they going to dump the feckless Mike Johnson? Are they going to. So you can look at it by the measure of elections, or you can look at it by the measure of the elected officials we already have. And here, what you see is Congress supine. What you see is. I love the congressional press corps. It's so much more robust in many ways and aggressive than when I was a kid starting out in journalism at Roll Call. They're so on top of things. At the same time, it's like a machine that's set to the lowest setting. They're so attuned to the slightest little hint of Republican opposition to Donald Trump that I would say there's been some premature claims of ebbing from the MAGA coalition. And what I see right now is that Trump has sort of broken the Republican Party at the national level. That really, you look at John Thune, who was meant to be the kind of. Of Maybe not Mitch McConnell level, but the establishment Senate majority leader who wouldn't go along with everything that Trump has so far, he more or less has. So far, his conference more or less has.
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Jane Mayer
I agree. We do not see them breaking with Trump at this point, do we?
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Susan Glasser
I mean, they haven't even stood up for their own institutional interests. And I think that it's gonna be harder for some of them to defend. I mean, one of the most effective early ads that I've seen so far in this election cycle, I don't know if you guys have seen it, is this ad in the main Senate race. Janet Mills, the governor running against Susan Collins in one of the only states in the country where it's still represented by a senator from a different party than the state went for in the presidential election. So Collins would probably be in trouble no matter what. Very concerned. I have a number of concerns. I'm also concerned.
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Evan Osnos
Collins is always concerned, but never courageous.
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Jane Mayer
Caving to Trump on health care, concerned
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Evan Osnos
on affordability, concerned on ice, concerned.
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Jane Mayer
I saw that ad. I gotta say one other thing, though. We're in looking for breaks within the MAGA base before we leave this behind, which is, I think one crack is, believe it or not, over the Epstein scandal, which is that Trump cast himself in running as a populist who cared about the little people and was gonna take on the rigged elites. And if you look at what's going on in far right social media, there's a lot of anger at him because they see him now as covering up for the elites in the Epstein matter and not on their side on this, and it's a crack out there.
- [26:44]
Evan Osnos
That's a really important point, Jane, because you see this in other ways, too. I mean, just this week, the maha moms were up in arms. The White House issued an executive order that increases production of this kind of weed killer. That is a big issue in the moms. Aha. Community. And you saw these really scorching quotes from people saying, this was our thing, this was our issue. And he's now turned his back on us. So that's the question. This is a game of inches. So every day you lose a few more people. Does that begin well?
- [27:13]
Susan Glasser
But that's also where the pressure to be ever more extreme comes from, unfortunately, in our politics. And the maha moms are a great example of that. I have to say, I almost couldn't sleep last night. Maybe different news events hit people differently, but there's been this measles outbreak in South Carolina, and there was a mother, all of their children not vaccinated against measles, but one of the kids became very ill with encephalitis. And there's the mother being quoted saying, the son, again, literally encephalitis, you know, essentially coma, like symptoms in hospital. And the mom saying, yeah, I would do it over again. I still wouldn't vaccinate my child. And I thought, you know, this is how we get extremism deeply entrenched in our politics, because it's a game of inches to Evan's point. So you've pissed off the maha moms here. So in the primary season, rather than Republicans or Donald Trump and the administration feeling compelled to pull to the center here, I fear that they're going to be doling out favors to constituencies that want to rip our country apart even more.
- [28:23]
Jane Mayer
On that happy note, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. And we're going to have a look at the Democrats. The political scene with the New Yorker will be right back.
- [28:46]
David Remnick
Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothee Chalamet and Teyana Taylor aren't the only major nominees. The New Yorker will be there, too, with two nominated short films, which you can watch@newyorker.com video. Two people exchanging saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabelle Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams of about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short films@newyorker.com video.
- [29:41]
Jane Mayer
All right, well, let's take a look at the Democrats. Obviously, different Democrats have different strategies for responding to Trump. What do you see as the main camps at this point? And are there camps at this point?
- [29:52]
Evan Osnos
You know, there's an interesting way to look at it right now in California, you see, in some sense, two different stripes of Democrats. You've got Gavin Newsom, who is obviously making a big name for himself, trying to establish his primacy in the Democratic field for 2028. And he is opposed to the wealth tax that may be on the ballot there. And you have Bernie Sanders coming out there and now making a big push. I mean, the, the thinking is that if it gets on the ballot there, and you can set aside the question of whether that wealth tax is a good thing or a bad thing, if it gets on the ballot there, it might well pass. And so you've got this very stark demonstration of how issues like money and power are, in fact, not just an issue between Democrats and Republicans, but within the Democratic Party itself.
- [30:42]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Absolutely. There are two different axes you can look at to sort of say, where are the Democrats right now? One is the perennial ideological fight in the Democratic Party between what you might call sort of the center, center left and the progressive wing of the party. And that has been a persistent theme over the last decade. But then it's not just an evergreen debate. And by the way, I think from my perspective, that's where the professional Democrats and the very online Democrats, they love to have all the talk about the ideological wars inside the party. And it's true of all political parties. Right. The real enemy is the person inside your own party. It's not the other guy. So there's the ideological fight, and I think that's a very interesting new iteration of it. Right. How populous will the party be? How does it respond and react to the excesses of the Trump years? That's one bucket, and we don't really know where that's going to fall down. Then you have, I think, the more urgent for this midterm election question, which is the question of. Of really volume and sort of resistance. And how do you oppose a radical assault on so many of our norms and laws and rules and traditions by Donald Trump and Trumpism? And so it's funny because I thought when you were mentioning Newsom, Evan, that you were gonna talk not about ideology but talk about Newsom as the proponent of this kind of be loud, be proud, be all caps in your face.
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Evan Osnos
I don't think that's how he's perceived by a lot of progress Democrats. I mean, they're actually judging him on this ideology.
- [32:21]
Susan Glasser
Well, but that's to my point about. Because Democrats love to fight about ideology amongst themselves. So there's that fight. But on the question of how to react and resist to Trump. So we have, first of all, an interesting indicator just in the next few days when we have the State of the Union speech, some Democrats will refuse to attend and will boycott it. And there was a quote, I think, from Senator Chris Van Hollen, who last year did attend this, who says, this year he's not coming, because if somebody's bringing FASC to America, I'm not going to sit there and listen to their speech versus Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, who says, listen, this guy's coming to my house. And where I come from in New York City, you don't let somebody force you out of your own block. And so I'm going to be sitting there and quietly disapproving. So people understand that it's not just a cheering horde that greased Donald Trump. So that's the other axis here. And I think this goes to your question, Jane, which is really the question of the moment. What does it all mean for the midterm elections? What I'm hearing in Washington among the professional Democratic class is a difference of opinion about how great of an election it's going to be. Is it going to be, yeah, we're going to take the House back, but we're really scared about what Trump might do. Or is it Donald Trump's support is literally collapsing around the country and not only are we going to win the House, but we're gonna win the Senate, too, and we're gonna win it by so much that he won't be able to steal the election. And this little bit of, call it irrational exuberance, I have literally heard just this week from some very senior Democrats.
- [33:55]
Evan Osnos
Jane, what do you make of this? I will point out, by the way, that Joe Biden had very bad approval ratings and then went on to outperform in the midterms. So you can be an unpopular president and your party can still do well in the midterms, which should be a cautionary tale in some ways for Democrats.
- [34:11]
Jane Mayer
Well, one cautionary indicator is if you. The money. The Republicans have actually got a lot more money than the Democrats right now. And another Cautionary point is that Trump is very unpopular, but the Democrats are unpopular too. I do see the energy bubbling up against Trump all across the country. I think there's reason to think that the Democrats are gonna do really well in this election, but I wouldn't say that. That it's a clean picture up ahead. I'm not a fortune teller, but I can see some obstacles in the way, which are both money and that the Democrats themselves are not necessarily that popular right now. And I think one of the things that interests me that I'm gonna be watching is a sense within some of the younger, more ideologically alive Democrats that they need to come up with friends, ideas and a fresh sort of plat, not just a platform. They're not just talking about policies, but they need to understand who they are in opposition to Trump and present it. And there is actually some thinking going on behind the scenes to figure this out. And I think the younger generation is really trying to kind of be intellectually alive about what does the Democratic Party stand for at this point.
- [35:37]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, these are the Democrats who I like to think of are the ones who know that TikTok is not a breath mint, which, by the way, is not an abstract claim. There were two members of Congress in a hearing on TikTok who referred to it as tic tac. No, I think that. I think that there is this reservoir of energy out there. There was a really useful metric that came out on the number of protests last year. That's one of the hardest things for us to really gauge. Right. Because sometimes you feel like, oh, maybe they're just these. A few huge days of protest. No kings. No, actually, in 2025, there were more than 10,000 protests, which is significant because it's more than double in 2017, which was the first year of Trump's first term. There is energy. There is a desire to express yourself. And so the question then becomes, Susan, who in the Democratic Party has the skills, the instinct, the facility to be able to make sense of that and make use of that?
- [36:35]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Although, remember, this is a midterm election, and it's not yet the presidential election. And in fact, usually our assumptions about the. The next cycle presidential election at this point are almost always wrong. Right. Like, Donald Trump was definitely not gonna be president at this point in 2014, for example. So I think partially the fights of this year on the ground in our politics are gonna help shape what that looks like. I also think that part of the crisis, in my view, in American democracy right now is this sort of looking for another person on a white horse to kind of come riding in and to be our leader and to sweep us away. Where is actually that metric that you're talking about, Evan, about people on the ground, in places resisting? To me, that is a much healthier sign for democracy than people waiting around for seeing whether it's going to be Gavin Newsom or some other leader who's going to take us out of the dark days of Trumpism. I think part of the learning for me of the last few years is that democracy is not an entitlement that people are saying seeing in some ways, for the first time in our lifetimes what it means to have to pay into the democracy if you want to have it.
- [37:50]
Evan Osnos
I want to return us to where we started. In some ways, we've kind of come naturally around to the end here of what is the state of the Union right now? That is what Trump is going to be talking about this week. And I stashed away a quote that I thought was really telling about how people feel about the state of the union right now, which is there was a guy who runs a big toy company, it's called Basic Fun, which is, I think, the perfect name for a toy company. They make Care Bears and Lincoln Logs and stuff like that. And his quote is the following. It really, I can't make it better and clearer than what he said. He said we were expecting to grow from where we ended in 2024 by 10, 15% at least. We ended up losing 20% of our business in 2024. That's because of tariffs and because, as we all remember, Donald Trump's heartwarming Christmas message, which was two dolls and one pencil for every kid. So that is, in a way, where we are, you know, that's a small. That's a business that wanted to succeed. It wanted Trump to help them succeed.
- [38:53]
Susan Glasser
Nobody needs $30 for Christmas.
- [38:56]
Evan Osnos
Yeah. You have a pencil? Be happy with your pe.
- [39:03]
Jane Mayer
You guys, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. Well, thank you.
- [39:08]
Evan Osnos
Thanks. So fresh
- [39:11]
Jane Mayer
this has been the political scene from the New Yorker, I'm Jane Mayer. We had research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Nora Richie. Mixing by Mike Kutschman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. And our music theme is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening.
- [39:41]
Akilah Hughes
Remember when tech was supposed to save us, when politicians promised progress? Instead, the rent and everything else is still too damn high. The news is chaotic and people are having to confide in robots I'm Akilah Hughes. And on How Is this Better? We are asking the question out loud because if this is the future they promised us, it kind of sucks. Follow how is this Better? On Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts
- [40:14]
Susan Glasser
from. PRX.