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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Trump Talk
00:18:39
This week, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump gave starkly contrasting speeches about American greatness. Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how Trump’s bleak message about a country under siege by illegal immigrants and terrorists breaks all the political rules--and why it works.
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- [00:00]
A
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This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, September 2nd. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. This week, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump gave dueling speeches about how they would approach the job of commander in chief. On Wednesday, Clinton spoke at the American Legion's national convention. If there's one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is the United States is an exceptional nation. I believe we are still Lincoln's last, best hope of Earth. We're still Reagan's shining city on a hill. We're still Robert Kennedy's great, unselfish, compassionate country. Donald Trump, just back from a brief, somewhat conciliatory meeting with the president of Mexico, went straight to Phoenix, Arizona, and spoke there on Wednesday night.
- [02:19]
C
These next four years, I will be uncompromising in the defense of the United States and our friends and our good allies. At the same time, we will change our immigration screening procedures to help keep terrorists and extremists out of our country. We have enough problems. Our country has Enough problem. We don't need that one.
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Evan Osnos joins me to discuss how the two candidates describe the White House duties they're competing for. Hi, Evan.
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D
Hi, Dorothy.
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B
It's now clear that at home, at least, Trump has no intention of softening his message on immigration. It's really the only issue he speaks passionately about, correct me if I'm wrong. And of course, it's symbolized by his fantasy of a big, beautiful wall, as he puts it. No one paid any attention to Clinton on Wednesday. It was not a very spirited speech on her part. But when you do listen to the two of them side by side, you're struck by the fact, more than any campaign I can think of in recent years, that they are talking almost about two different countries.
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D
Yeah, that's the part that I find sort of amazing. There was this intense curiosity about what Trump was going to say on immigration, because there was this period which now already feels like a very long time ago, but was just about, you know, a week or two ago when Trump began to moderate. And he said that he might have a softening of his immigration policy. He would not pursue mass deportations of the kind that he talked about initially. And the reason why that was so intriguing was it was this moment to say, oh, is Trump actually going to finally become a politician who looks at the map and sees that he has to reach out to a much broader population? And then he flew into Phoenix and made it very clear that, in fact, no, he was going to let Trump be Trump. The prospect of mass deportations is still at the absolute center of his candidacy. And what I think is sort of fascinating about it is if you listened to Hillary Clinton give her speech on her vision of not just foreign policy, but really the role of the United States in the world, it was about the notion of us as an exceptional nation. And we sometimes say when we talk about American exceptionalism, we imagine, well, that just means that we have a bigger military and we have sort of grander capabilities than everybody else. But actually, no, it's a deeper idea. It's about the idea that we set aside our own self interest at some moments in order to pursue these values that are better for the world and are larger than ourselves, that we look beyond our self interest. And what Trump is saying is the that idea is obsolete. We're not exceptional. In fact, we are a survivor in a kind of anarchic world. And it is up to us to do everything we can to protect ourselves.
- [05:20]
B
You know, when you look back at the two parties conventions earlier in the summer. I think most people would agree that the most memorable moment came when the father of Captain Humayun Khan, who died in Iraq, gave his speech at the Democratic convention. Trump went on to attack both parents. And then in the weeks afterward, Hillary's campaign got a really nice headwind. Has that died down? I know you've been talking to Trump supporters throughout the campaign. What are Trump's die hard supporters saying?
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D
Yeah, this was eye opening for me at least. I basically picked more or less at random from the notebooks. Over the course of the last year, four people who I've spoken to who were fans of Donald Trump. They were four people I spoke to last summer and, and I called him up and I said, how are you feeling about Donald Trump today? And one of them was a guy named Fred Rice, who's an army veteran, he's a New Hampshire state representative. And I sort of imagined that he would have been offended by Donald Trump's comments about the parents of a soldier who had died in Iraq. And what Fred Rice said was, oh, no, it was in fact inappropriate for the Khan family to, in his view, politicize their son's death. And as he put it, dying in combat doesn't make you a hero. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there was a kind of fury in his sentiment, frankly, that really startled me. And what he said was, look, I am even more devoted to Donald Trump today than I was a year ago. And that's a view that I heard over and over again as I made these calls. Somebody else who I spoke to a woman named Nancy Mertz, who, who really seemed on the fence last summer. She was a Trump fan, but she's also a churchgoer. She wasn't the kind of person, I think, who was naturally drawn to Trump's private life and the sort of antics that have been such a part of his public Persona. And what she said was, I have gone through, in her words, a kind of political awakening over the last year. And I am now completely dedicated to Donald Trump because I see the kind of corruption in politics. And I said, well, who are you referring to? And she said, the other Republicans, the ones who have turned their backs on Trump. And she said, when this is over, I will vote for Trump and then I will register as an independent. And so what you got out of this is this really kind of remarkable demonstration of the birth of a new political subculture, a political subculture that really has nothing to do with the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. It is the phenomenon that's been created by Trump. And I think we're going to be dealing with those consequences for a long time.
- [07:57]
B
Response to Trump's slogan make America great again is America is already great. You would think that would be effective, especially since she's giving us this positive, patriotic vision of an inclusive America. But she sounds defensive, and I guess one of the imponderable questions this year is whether most voters are still hopeful about the future or whether they shared Trump's dystopian vision of a country that's overrun with rapists, murderers, and terrorists.
- [08:28]
D
I think in the end, it comes down to a choice between whether people vote based on their frustrations or based on their aspiration, because these two ideas coexist. They always have. You know, we've always felt, in some ways proud of who we are, but at other moments, recognizing the ways in which we feel constrained or we feel as if opportunity has evaporated. And from the very beginning, what Trump figured out was that he could talk explicitly about a part of American politics that was kind of awkward and uncomfortable to discuss, which was that people didn't always feel as if we were the shining city on the Hill. But it's a very different thing to get people's attention with that message than it is to say to them 15 months later, this is the defining fact of our time, and that this is the thing on which you should make the most consequential political decision. In some ways, these two different messages, america is great versus Make America great again. That distinction more or less maps onto what you see today in the support that these two candidates enjoy. There is a core population that is even more devoted than ever to Donald Trump in their belief that America really has lost something. But if you look more broadly, there is still a larger portion of the general electorate who finds that idea alien to them and believes basically, above all, that we do have values that we want to express.
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I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.
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I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of consumer Tech and Culture.
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And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
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At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
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Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories. And how they affect you.
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Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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B
It's interesting, too, that his supporters keep saying they like his authenticity. And one of the many striking things about this campaign is how effective. Trump' sit's basically grade school vocabulary. It's really limited. He uses the same phrases over and over again. He makes these really ugly off the cuff attacks, but he doesn't speak like a traditional politician. And that clearly is having some effect. And Clinton sees it. And she keeps struggling to lose the wonky policy details and to simplify and come across with her own strong, simple vision. But Trump is such a genius at this, and his competitors during the primaries discovered this. Lyon, Ted, Little, Marco. Now we get Crooked Hillary 24 7.
- [11:30]
D
I am thinking a lot about this in anticipation of the debates because you would naturally assume you line up the two baseball cards of these candidates next to each other and you say, hillary Clinton's been debating for a long time. She's good at it. She's been in the jobs. She has the sort of policy experience. Donald Trump is new at this. She's going to mop the floor with him, right? Well, there are 16 Republican Wraiths wandering the halls of Washington who will tell you about why Donald Trump should not be underestimated. He takes the vocabulary of politics and he flips it on its head. If you're expecting a policy answer, he gives you an attitude answer. If you're expecting, you know, an assertion of vision, he goes down some sort of esoteric little policy wormhole that he knows is going to generate a response from a very specific part of the electorate or even more kind of assertive. Astutely, he picks an issue that he knows will get a rise out of the people in that room. You know, Newt Gingrich, who is, after all a Donald Trump adviser, says of Trump very admiringly that Donald Trump speaks at a fourth grade level because he says he is a genius at marketing.
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B
And there's no evidence that illegal immigrants are swarming the borders, hurting the economy, taking jobs from American citizens. I mean, just you look at the records and that's just wrong. Or that those who do get across disproportionately commit crimes. Politicians always lie. He's gleeful. The more preposterous the better, actually. And it reminded me of one of my favorite essays, Orwell's Politics and the English Language. And one of the things he said there is that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and to Give solidity to pure wind. That is exactly what Trump is doing here. Think about what he's saying now that Obama founded isis.
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D
Yeah, you know, it's funny, I quoted that essay in my book on China because I was writing about propaganda. I mean, what Horwell was writing about was the way that political language could, as he put it, make murder respectable, quote, unquote. You could use these kinds of bland euphemisms like leave much to be desired to talk about something like the dropping of the atomic bomb. And I should say, in our current race, we have versions, blander versions of these examples. So, for instance, when Hillary Clinton talked for months about having a private server for convenience sake, it was a euphemism that grated on some level against everybody's ear because they knew it just didn't sound right. And what Trump has done, he's blown up these cliches and these euphemisms and has just said, I'm going to completely relocate what words mean from their definitions. So when he says Obama founded ISIS, or he says that Hillary is the, quote, most corrupt candidate ever, it has almost nothing to do with the actual definition of the words. He is hoisting them up and saying, I am giving these a new definition because political language has lost the respect of the public.
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B
Well, see that? It's brilliant in its own way. And he's gone one step beyond Orwell, who is talking about these ready made phrases, as you say, which, as he saw it, anesthetized part of the brain. And Trump, his phrases light up the lizard brain.
- [14:45]
D
Yeah. There have been a couple of moments when people have tried to nail him down on this. At one point, Hugh Hewitt, who is a conservative radio host, said to Trump about whether he really meant it, that Obama had founded isis. He gave him an opportunity. He said, what you mean by that is that Obama's foreign policy created a vacuum in which ISIS could thrive. Right. And Trump said, no, I mean it. He founded isis. Actually, that comment bounced around the world in ways that actually had nothing to do with American politics. And in fact, it ended up becoming a major bit of news in the Middle east because the head of Hezbollah held up Trump's comment and said, look, he is saying that the United States founded isis. Hezbollah, of course, is a rival of isis, an enemy of isis. Hezbollah has for years promoted this crackpot theory that the United States created ISIS in order to foment chaos among Muslims in the Middle East. And here you have an American politician who is speaking one kind of language that actually makes a certain sort of sense to his supporters in places like Arizona and New Hampshire and elsewhere. But when you actually bring it back into the real world of fact and information, it has a really strange effect. It's a kind of a theater of the absurd at a certain point. But people draw energy from it because they are so the thoroughly frustrated with politics. And that's the underlying unifying element here among a number of the subjects we've been talking about, is that if you want to understand why does somebody like Nancy Mertz up in New Hampshire get so frustrated by Hillary Clinton? I think it's because Hillary Clinton has become the biggest symbol of the American political system today. Whatever you think of her and her individual policies in any given speech at the American Legion is almost immaterial because Trump is running against an entire culture. And that is a very, very hard thing to push back from.
- [16:42]
B
I think you mentioned the debates, which now are just several weeks away. I wonder what you think about how these two totally contrasting visions of the country and really two languages, you would think that Hillary could demolish him easily. Will Trump be able to push back?
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D
I think that going into it, you're going to have two candidates going onto the stage inhabiting completely separate, almost non overlapping universes of facts. So it's a cliche to talk about an echo chamber, but really think about it for a second, that if you are a Trump voter today, or if you're a Clinton voter today, you can go through your entire daily experience, the news you watch, the friends you interact with on social media, the conversations you have in your workplace, and you will be almost entirely unruffled by the introduction of information that you don't agree with. Really think about how powerful that is. What's going to be so important, I think so interesting about these debates is these two campaigns have been going on in parallel fashion for months. But you put those two on a stage and it's going to force people to see that these are two different sports that are being played. And I'm fascinated. I think the moderators are going to be especially important here because it depends largely on how much Trump is able to go down these sort of rhetorical asides or whether he's going to be forced to talk about, for instance, whether he understands the definition of the nuclear triad and whether he knows the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurdish ethnic minority.
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B
Well. And Hillary will jump all over him on all of that. Yeah.
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D
And that's where, in a sense, she may find herself most at home on that debate stage. But if we've learned anything over the last two election cycles, it's that you can't go into this expecting to do well. Or you can end up like Barack Obama in his first debate against mitt Romney in 2012, when he was kind of sort of lackluster and sort of unprepared.
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B
I want to end by playing Reagan's City on a Hill farewell address. I think we've actually used it before on this program, but it's really worth repeating right now because it shows just how far Trump has veered not only from Republicanism, but from what everyone traditionally has thought of as America. Reagan was quoting John Winthrop's sermon in 1630 as the Arabella approached Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy quoted it, too, in 1961, when he was president elect. Here's Reagan in 1989 I've spoken of.
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C
The shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God blessed and teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace. A city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.
- [19:58]
B
Thanks so much, Evan.
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D
Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
Evan Osnos is a staff writer and the author of Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. This has been the play from the New Yorker. You can find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com or on the New Yorker apps available at no extra charge from the App Store and Google Play. And you can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. The Political Scene is produced by Alex Barron and Jill dubeuff. For new yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
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D
I'm Michael Colory, Wired's director of consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [20:48]
B
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [20:57]
E
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
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D
Right? So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
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B
Affecting Washington and how they affect you.
- [21:18]
E
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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D
From PRX.