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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
What Happens if Trump Is Elected While on Trial?
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What Happens if Trump Is Elected While on Trial?
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- [00:00]
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- [01:15]
Jane Mayer
Is there actually any mystery about which of the big blockbuster movies this weekend the New Yorker correspondents are going to go see first?
- [01:26]
Susan Glasser
I have already made a controversial statement on social media that.
- [01:30]
Evan Osnos
What'd you say?
- [01:31]
Susan Glasser
I'm not seeing the Barbie movie. It was the one thing my 1970s mom had rule no Barbies and no toy guns. And you know what? I'm thanking her for it. And I think we're Team Oppenheimer, I'm guessing on the Political Scene podcast, but.
- [01:49]
Evan Osnos
If you didn't have any toy guns, would nuclear weapons were okay? Is this what I'm.
- [01:54]
Susan Glasser
I believe this is a cautionary tale. Evan.
- [02:03]
Jane Mayer
Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Evan Osnos. Hey, Susan. Hey, Evan.
- [02:18]
Susan Glasser
Hey, Jane.
- [02:19]
Evan Osnos
Hey, Jane.
- [02:21]
Jane Mayer
It is officially the dog days of summer. But over the last few weeks, while you've been at the beach or maybe in your house, hiding from the wildfire smoke, the 2024 presidential race has seen some surprising Developments. Last week's campaign finance filings gave us a better view into the Republican primary field as over a dozen candidates fight to unseat Trump as the party's front runner. And speaking of the front runner, as of this taping, it looks like Trump is on the cusp of facing another indictment, this time for his role in obstructing the the 2020 election. It is, as he has put it. And as Susan Glasser has picked up in her latest column, the Final Battle. Meanwhile, the third party group no Labels has stepped further into the fray. They hosted their first public event reminding us all that a historically large number of voters want neither Trump nor Biden to be president come 2025. So let's start with Ron DeSantis. His campaign has struggled to gain momentum, sort of surprisingly. Susan, what did you learn from his campaign's recent financial filings? And what do you think they tell us about the state of his candidacy?
- [03:36]
Susan Glasser
Well, you know, guys, I really, let's just be real here. You know, the search for an alternative to Donald Trump in the Republican 2024 race, it just, it's so far, it's completely fallen flat. It's failed. And Ron DeSantis is this year's Jeb Bush, it looks like. And that's what the campaign finance filings told us. The numbers don't lie. Money is the, you know, the mother's milk of politics. And when you burn through millions and millions of dollars of it and your poll numbers go down and not up, it's not a good sign for your campaign. And, you know, I think in the end, Jeb Bush in 2016 raised something like $100 million at the time. That was real money in politics. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is not at that level yet in terms of how much money he spent. But if you add up what he's raised and spent on his campaign and what his associated super PAC that's promoting him has, we're looking at an enormous investment that many big Republican donors have made in an alternative to Donald Trump. And it's just not panning out in terms of the Republican electorate. Ron DeSantis had that disastrous campaign launch, and it's kind of gone downhill from there. So that's why I think we have to look and say, is there anyone who is at this moment in time, a meaningful alternative? Now you could say, well, as long as Ron DeSantis can keep standing, maybe Trump collapses, maybe he could still be the alternative. But he made a choice. And I'm curious what you and Evan, think about this. He made a choice about how to present himself. He could have been the get things done governor of Florida, a responsible choice alternative Trump. Instead, he chose to run as sort of Trump where without the tweets, Trump, without being so crazy and even harder. Right. And honestly, the Trump voters seem to want to prefer Trump to the fake Trump.
- [05:28]
Jane Mayer
Yeah. I'm curious, Evan, why do you think that he's so apparently failing to translate the popularity and the success he's had in Florida? I mean, for whatever else you think by Ron DeSantis, he was overwhelmingly reelected and he's got kind of an experiment running there in a kind of right wing government with all of his woke sort of wars. And so what do you think's going on? What's the problem here?
- [05:57]
Evan Osnos
Susan reminded us, of course, of Jeb Bush. And there was this great detail that always stays with me about the Jeb Bush campaign, which was that there was an exclamation point after the word Jeb on his signs and his slogans. And somebody finally asked the campaign, they said, why is there an exclamation point? And they said, because it conveys enthusiasm. And there's an Element of Ron DeSantis campaign that's very similar, which is that we're being told to be enthusiastic about Ron DeSantis, but nobody is enthusiastic about Ron DeSantis. If you go back to the beginning, you remember that Fox News was actually so determined to promote him as a candidate that at some point people counted up how many times he'd been on Fox, and he'd been on 113 times over the course of a few months. He was on nearly once a day. And now you're seeing reports that Rupert Murdoch himself has said, you know, I wanted to be interested in this guy, but the more I see of him, the less interested I am. And I think there's some truth to that across the board. And so what you're starting to hear, and this is a sort of inevitable part of the campaign process, you guys will recognize this, that there are stories now that are saying the problem is staff, or the problem is money, or the problem is the donors. And what of course we all know, and this is sort of a classic truth, is in general, it's usually the candidate when the problem is this persistent. And at this point they're already talking to use the dreaded R word, which is a reboot. And that reboot seems to be essentially putting him back in front of voters in a slightly different hat.
- [07:27]
Jane Mayer
When you've reached the new Coke Phase, you're really sunk, basically. And this reboot, relaunch. I mean, I agree with you. The campaign is always really about the candidate and the guy at the top, no matter what. You can't really blame everybody else for what's going on in it. I mean, and I guess that it comes down to him, his personality to some extent, which we've had a wonderful profile of in the New Yorker that basically described him as kind of unlikable. And, you know, it's not that people have found Donald Trump likable over the years, but he does have a certain kind of, I guess, charisma and kind of a demagogue sort of power. And I guess Desantis just really is lacking that. Meanwhile, it looks like the big funders in the Republican Party who are not behind Trump are. Are sort of desperately dialing for somebody, it looks like. And it seems like the sort of the candidate du jour might be Tim Scott. Have you guys taken a look at his funding and who's behind him?
- [08:28]
Susan Glasser
You know, every four years or eight years, there is the, you know, the sort of beltway insider favorite candidate, sometimes in the Democratic Party, sometimes in the Republican Party, depending on, you know, who has a more open primary. But this year, I would say you're right, Jane, that Tim Scott is one of those figures. The senator from South Carolina, one of two candidates from South Carolina in the race, Nikki Haley, the former governor, also running for the Republican nomination. Scott is a favorite of the kind of establishment in. Such as it remains in Washington. He is a pretty compelling personal story. He's one of the only prominent national black Republicans, not a Trumpist, although never really aggressively disavowed him either. And frankly, that's the sort of center of gravity for these folks. I got to be very blunt, right? Tim Scott is not going to be the Republican nominee. You know, you know that when a lot of coverage at the beginning of your campaign starts with, well, is he running for vice president or not? You know, that. That pretty much describes the arc. He's not well known nationally. You know, this could raise his visibility. It'd be interesting to see what he's like on the debate stage, actually. But to me, it's just one of those kind of recurring phenomenon of American politics.
- [09:52]
Jane Mayer
I mean, he does have a surprising amount of money. I mean, I think when you take a look at the recent statistics on campaign finance of the various candidates, I mean, he had $21 million on hand.
- [10:04]
Susan Glasser
Well, that's what you get when you're the favorite of the establishment. They have money, they just don't have votes.
- [10:08]
Evan Osnos
You know, in some ways he's the guy who is fulfilling that gap that we were talking about earlier, which is that people don't really want to talk about Trump. They want to talk about somebody. Look, they like the idea that he is somebody who could change the narrative in theory around the Republican Party as being dominated right now by the kind of white nationalist phenomenon that Trump represents. You've seen his numbers in New Hampshire are very positive. I mean, over the spring, between April and July, his favorability went up something like 23 points. So there is a moment of coalescing to some degree among people with big checks to write. But in some ways what's lurking I think in the background of all of these candidates imagination is they all want to be John McCain in 2007, this idea. Cuz he's kind of the exception to the pattern, which is that you can shift the course of your campaign and break out at some moment by sheer discipline, by having a small campaign, by appealing to people. And that, that is sort of a fairytale at this point. It's not like anybody's actually in striking distance of achieving that.
- [11:13]
Susan Glasser
Well, and to Evan's point, which I think is an Excellent point, John McCain at that time was the initial front runner, first of all, a household name and a leader in the polls. You can't do that move when you're in single digits in the polls. And in fact there's a long. If you look at the numbers, we're already pretty far into this thing. There's very little history to suggest that if you're not already essentially in first or second place, that you have a realistic chance of winning the nomination, given the nature of our kind of celebrity driven political culture.
- [11:50]
Jane Mayer
Yeah, I mean, I have to say I think Evan's point about the racial dynamic here, which is that it kind of flatters the Republican Party bigwigs to think that they could back a black candidate. It makes them feel good about the Republican Party. But is that really the reflection of where the Republican Party is on race and other issues? I take a look at where's the money coming from for Tim Scott. It's coming from Ron Lauder and it's coming from Andy Sabin. Both are sort of New York billionaires and you know, they may feel comfortable with this, but I'm not really sure. I have not become convinced yet that the rest of the Republican Party is there on that particular issue. I think that there are things about Tim Scott though that are, I think appealing to big money. And one is he's very optimistic and he's sort of a Horatio Alger story. And he's very much the idea of a self made kid who came up from nowhere and through hard work succeeded. And I think that is, that's a kind of a mythology that resonates big time with big donors. But again he's in single digits. So let's get realistic here. Have any of these Republican contenders figured out how to lay a glove on Donald Trump?
- [13:07]
Susan Glasser
Chris Christie, who we haven't talked about, knows how to lay a glove on Donald Trump. And that is his campaign, his whole narrative, which of course is catnip to what we are, which is essentially known as the free media in campaign parlance. So Chris Christie is going to get endless airtime on MSNBC and cnn and his whole scenario here is basically use the national media, beat up on his former friend Donald Trump, be the truth teller in the field. He's a very accomplished debater, the former New Jersey governor. And of course he knows Donald Trump's weak points since he was the guy who prepped Donald Trump for the debates that Trump participated in to the extent that anyone can prep Donald Trump for anything. But you know, let's be real, that's a very narrow and essentially non existent lane in the Republican primary today, which is the lane of the Trump basher and these other people. It's just remarkable, the contortions. I mean, you know, we've all been doing this for a number of years but I mean they could have a new gymnastics board at the Olympics for the way that Republican office holders, you know, on Capitol Hill and now in the Republican primary, their efforts not to comment on Donald Trump or to, you know, this elaborate rhetoric. Well, January 6th was bad. Some of them will say, but you know, you shouldn't weaponize the, the judicial system. You know, they're all essentially singing from the Trump songbook still. And it's extraordinary levels of self abasement. It's frankly, it's cringe worthy to watch. It's embarrassing. And you know, the bottom line is Donald Trump has only benefited from their bowing down to him again and again and again. He's consolidated his position in the Republican primary field at exactly the moment when he is being charged with serious felony crimes that would be unacceptable and are unacceptable for any public official in this country. Nevermind someone who wants to be the President of the United States, period, full stop. And I know we're in the fan, you know, we have to, we get sucked into the normalizing of, you know, let's just talk about this campaign as if there's two real political parties in America. Donald Trump is going to be on trial for the most serious kind of criminal felony charges you can have in this country, including directly attacking the principle of our constitutional democracy. And he's going up, not down in the Republican field.
- [15:33]
Jane Mayer
Let's take a quick break and then we'll talk about Trump's newest legal troubles and what's going on with the third party called no labels.
- [15:50]
Susan Glasser
America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is THE Global story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [16:23]
Jane Mayer
Even if the other contenders and the rest of the Republican Party doesn't want to speak about Donald Trump, we do. So let's turn to Donald Trump and the very busy few weeks that he's had. Just this past week, he received a target letter from special counsel Jack Smith signaling that he'll likely be indicted soon for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Susan, you've been following Trump as closely as anybody in America. What did we learn from this letter?
- [16:56]
Susan Glasser
Well, look, obviously, the thing that's really significant about this is that more so even than the existing the two existing criminal cases already filed against Donald Trump, one in New York and related to the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, and then one by Jack Smith related to the classified documents. This one, finally, finally, two and a half years later, gets to the heart of the matter, which was Donald Trump's unprecedented effort to overturn the 2020 election results that he lost and to remain in power. We don't know the details of the charges yet, but what's been reported is that they're considering charging him under three different laws. Many of those have been used in cases, by the way, already against the more than 1,000 defendants who have already been charged in relation to the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. And I think that's also why it's such an important case politically in this country, because it says potentially we're not just going to lock up the schmoes who listened to Donald Trump and thought they were acting at his behest when they acted as a mob to storm the Capitol to try to stop the certification of Trump's defeat on January 6, but that, so far, no one of the organizers of this plot, and it is, by the way, it's a plot against America. Let's be clear. But so far, up until now, not Donald Trump, not the people who worked with him to try to obstruct Congress and block the election, none of them have been charged. So I think in that sense, it's a very, very significant potential case that gets right to the heart of the matter.
- [18:47]
Jane Mayer
I mean, there are also details that I guess we're waiting to hear about. There's some mysteries still about who might be cooperating and what Donald Trump's role really was. Right. I mean, there's some things that we could learn from this indictment, correct?
- [19:05]
Susan Glasser
Yeah. I mean, you know, I can't wait. I mean, it. Just as you saw in the classified documents case, when the actual indictment came out, we saw some significant new evidence that Jack Smith and his team had gathered, including literally incriminating recordings in Trump's own words. And so do they have that kind of evidence in this case? That's something we'll be watching for. You mentioned potential cooperators. There's been enormous speculation in recent weeks about Mark Meadows, the fourth and final Trump White House Chief of staff. You know, and he's been quite silent. He's a key potential witness. You know, he knows where at least some of the bodies are buried. I don't know. Evan, what do you think? You know, when you have a case like this, it's sort of like a. Like a mob case. Right? You know, you wanna roll up some of the insiders, they usually have the best evidence.
- [19:57]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, there is. If one lesson we've learned after watching the previous Trump indictments is that you actually do learn a lot from the paperwork you find out, for instance, as we discovered in the last one with the documents case, we didn't know that there was this crucial recording of him waving around a document that might actually be one of the most damning moments in that prosecution in this case. We have no idea what's actually gonna become the crux of it. But I think that the larger point, this is the one that I think we're beginning to understand, is that after months of people debating whether or not the United States could bring itself to actually prosecute a former president for something as grave as this crime, what we've discovered is that, in fact, of course we can and we must, when the facts are what they are. And, in fact, had we not done it then the United States would be at even graver risk. So I think there's a way in which this process, as slow and as sort of frustrating as it has been for some people, is marching in a direction that is consistent with the history and what we would hope to say of the future of American law.
- [21:00]
Jane Mayer
I mean, I totally agree with you. And I was taken with a quote from Republican lawyer Ben Ginsburg, who's an election lawyer, who's been on the Republican side, you know, famously all the way back to Bush V. Gore in 2000, who sort of basically said, this case, the stakes in this case are so high. I mean, what I worry about a little bit is if it doesn't result in somehow laying down the law, it could be opening the floodgates to some new chapter in American history that we can hardly imagine. Meanwhile, I mean, whatever the outcome of the trial, assuming there will be an indictment, I guess I wonder how also will this country deal with a lead Republican presidential candidate who has to face all of these legal proceedings at the same time? And Evan, I don't know. I mean, it looks like, you know, Grand Central Station, basically. We've already seen people rushing from one courtroom to the next and practically bumping into each other in the various Trump trials.
- [22:04]
Evan Osnos
The crazy thing about it, Jane, is that it's not even as organized as Grand Central Station, because there is not one central authority that dictates which trials get to go at different times, in what sequence. I've become sort of fascinated by this puzzle of how do you sequence all of these trials while at the same time having somebody run for president. So one of the things that is an informal practice is that the judges will call one another and kind of work out a schedule so that they're not all piled up on top of each other. But inevitably there are collisions. We had one just the other day, where you had a witness, somebody who had worked for Donald Trump at one point, who was being expected to testify before a grand jury at the same moment that he was needed in another court. And the judges are not happy about it. And I think just in practical terms, let's lay out for people what's coming. Cuz it's easy to lose sight of it. There is the very first trial that is about to come is in October. This is a state civil trial in New York on the question of whether his family and his businesses committed civil fraud. Then you have another trial involving the writer Jean Carroll and whether he defamed her. Now, he doesn't have to necessarily show up for civil trials, but criminal trials you have to be there for. Which poses a really big problem because there may be times where he's going to be off the campaign trail, not just for days, but in some cases it could be weeks. I'll mention just one other thing that I think is fascinating, cuz it almost perfectly captures the predicament that the United States finds itself in, which is that but if Donald Trump manages to get elected president and takes office at a time when he is still on trial for some of these things or still pursuing appeals, the Justice Department will go from having been in the position of prosecuting this man and then all of a sudden if he's the president, they will find themselves actually serving as a part of his defense apparatus almost overnight. It's a bizarre but sort of inescapable fact of where we are.
- [24:08]
Susan Glasser
What you know, we have breaking news just this morning as we're having this conversation on Friday morning, which is that the judge in the classified documents case has set a trial date of that for mid May 2024. And that's assuming it doesn't slip even further with disputes or motions. Okay, so this is the disaster that I've been worrying about and it's going to happen. What it means, folks, is that Donald Trump will very likely, quite possibly have already sewn up the Republican nomination by the time these trials even begin, nevermind are resolved. And that's just the first classified documents case. The indictment in the other Jack Smith case related to January 6th hasn't even happened yet. There is really no conceivable way that these legal cases, these criminal cases against Donald Trump are going to be resolved by the time that Republican voters vote next year for their nominee. And I think this is setting up a huge new crisis.
- [25:10]
Jane Mayer
Susan, I mean, why does this make the problem worse? I mean, in a way, every Republican.
- [25:15]
Susan Glasser
Jane, it's a Democrat.
- [25:16]
Jane Mayer
I mean, think of it. But every Republican voter already knows that he's cruising into these potential charges. It's not like they're being defrauded. They voted and then he was charged. They everybody knows this is going to happen. It's just been a matter of timing. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know that a court date changes it. We've been in the position where Donald Trump could be pardoning himself at the end of his administration when Jon Meacham actually gave me a fantastic quote about it in the New Yorker calling it the ultimate act of presidential onanism and said he always expected it would happen. I mean, this is. The crisis has never abated, basically. It may have been that it's sort underwater for a little while when he went down to Mar a Lago, but you have to sort of suspect it. In part, he's running for president again so that he can pardon himself, so that he can argue that the only reason he's being charged with crimes is because he's a political leader. I mean, those are all justifications for what's basically criminal behavior in any other sort of understanding. But I don't know, Evan, what do you think? Are you seeing this as a new phase?
- [26:28]
Evan Osnos
I think that one of the things that he's counting on is a constitutional crisis, which is to say that if in fact there is some, let's say there's some other Republican who gets in, though, that at this point seems extremely unlikely that they would suddenly be in the position of having to decide do they use their power over the federal government to try to remove some of the threat that he's facing. Though of course they can't intervene in state cases. So it would force our politics into an impossible position. Even Joe Biden would face some sort of question of whether he would intervene in these federal cases, though I think the pattern we've seen so far is that he would not. But it is a scenario. I have to tell you, this campaign started in the realm of kind of sci fi or history, the idea that could somebody run for president like Eugene V. Debs from prison? And we're now getting closer with each of these developments to the actual reality of something that I think we all thought was unthinkable.
- [27:23]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I think Evan's point is an important one, that it's not, Jane, that it wasn't possible or a scenario that was contemplated. But now that we move into the reality of it, it's very clear that it would have been much better to have these federal cases move with much more expediency so that they did not converge with the 2024 primary season. And in fact, now they're going to largely miss the 2024 primary season and simply be hanging out there for Donald Trump to gain advantage with as a victim as he presents himself as a martyr to Republican voters.
- [27:58]
Jane Mayer
I mean, one of the things that also came out in, I think it was in this last week was something that gave us a little bit more of a glimpse into what that could look like if Donald Trump somehow survived and won the White House back again. People who have been working with him have drawn up basically a blueprint for what he would do in a second term that, as you say, Susan, sort of anticipates what it would be like if he had control of the Justice Department. The people who drew it up work for something called the center for American Renewal, which is part of the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is where a lot of former Trumpers are now sort of holed up on Capitol Hill. And they've drawn up this blueprint that suggests that he can centralize power in a way that's never been done before in the American presidency and really strengthen the executive branch control over the sort of modern federal government in a way that makes it much more politicized. Sort of gets rid of a lot of the checks and balances and the sort of professionalization of the civil servants that we've come to know as are supposed to be neutral and professional and not just political hacks. And it's a kind of a terrifying image of a game plan for a dictatorship, really, or at least a demagogue who could take power.
- [29:25]
Evan Osnos
Yeah, this is a scenario that has been hinted at in vague terms earlier on and now is getting very specific. I think we're now into the point where the people who continue to choose to work for Donald Trump are people who believe that not just that they're, quote, unquote, loyal Republicans, but that they actually want to effectuate the things that he stood for in his candidacy, which is this kind of really unprecedented notion of what the presidency is and the power it could have by bringing things like the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission under his control, by essentially purging the government of people who are, to use a word that was mentioned in one of the reports, independent, that is actually now a kind of four letter word in the eyes of some of the people who are planning his second term, that they would actually seek out people who would stand in his way.
- [30:21]
Jane Mayer
And the Federal Reserve was another one of the agencies they're talking about. I guess this is, you know, the plan is to take on what he's been talking about as the deep state, meaning sort of the professional governing class.
- [30:34]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, you know, Donald Trump, first of all, you know, his big takeaway, it's important, I think, for people to get. His big takeaway in coming out of his first term was that that his failure was, to the extent there was a failure, was of personnel and of people, and that he won't make those mistakes again. He now talks about that openly on the campaign trail. He says, well, you know, I was new to Washington. I never spent a night there in my life. And essentially he portrays himself as a victim of his own terrible appointees. And so he often actually runs against the very people he installed in key positions, like Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense or Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. And he says he won't make those mistakes again. And so I think, you know, first of all, it would be down to a cadre of really hardcore Trumpists. And that's one big takeaway, number one. Number two, he already signed. People forget this, but he actually signed an executive order in the final days of the Trump presidency that would eliminate, you know, a whole category of essentially independent civil service positions and replace them with political appointees or have the ability to replace them with political appointees. One of the first things Joe Biden did when he came into office was to rescind that executive order. Donald Trump would reimpose that. He's now, as this great Times story pointed out, looking at eliminating independent agencies, which, by the way, many of which have existed since the New Deal, you know, nearly a century ago, as independent agencies where the president was, while being the head of the executive branch, did not exercise a level of day in and day out control. And if you look at many of the actions that he contemplated to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election, Trump already was very interested in essentially eroding the independence and the norms around not only the Justice Department, but the Defense Department, the politicization of. Of nonpartisan, independent parts of our country. And I think that you have to assume that whatever extreme, radical things Donald Trump talked about in the first term that he would want to find a way to actually make happen in the second term, and, you know, things like pulling the United States out of NATO. He already openly talks about ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, notwithstanding an enormous bipartisan consensus in this country to support Ukraine after its invasion. Donald Trump is out there not just sucking up to Vladimir Putin and even Xi Jinping the other day with his words, but he would be radically changing almost overnight many of the key foundations of American policy, both at home and overseas.
- [33:20]
Jane Mayer
I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that I would worry about is that it would convert the federal government into a machine to reward his friends and hurt his enemies. It would turn it into sort of an old time ward boss kind of model of governing. And we've already seen that he had talked about in the last administration using the IRS to go after his enemies. It could really corrupt the power of the federal government in ways that we haven't seen. So it's yet another reason why this campaign this year just seems like it's hard to imagine the stakes being any higher in many ways. So there is meanwhile, and maybe we should take one quick look and talk for a minute about a kind of a third party entity that is rising on the horizon. It's the no Labels group that may actually affect the math and the dynamics of the two party campaign. It's billing itself as just a set interest third party organization. Since the group has just had its first town hall meeting in New Hampshire, we've gotten a little glimpse of it somehow. It seems to be that both the Democratic senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, and Jon Huntsman, the Republican, seem to be potential candidates, I guess. Do either of you feel like you've got any kind of grasp of what no labels is really about and what they're up to?
- [35:02]
Evan Osnos
You know, I've spent time writing about Joe Manchin over the years. He's a figure who is in some ways the persistent center of attention in American politics by choice. And he will announce, I don't like receiving all this attention. But he finds his way into the spotlight most recently by putting himself forward as a face of. But this is a key distinction. Not yet a candidate of no labels, I think, to state the obvious, I think a lot of Democrats are very concerned about what no labels could do. Because if you look at theoretical matchups in which there is a third candidate in the race of any consequence, that tends to draw a lot of votes away from Democrats more than Republicans. But I wanna say something about these two figures, Huntsman, Jon Huntsman and Joe Manchin. Both of them are in a sense, candidates without a natural home. Right now, Joe Manchin obviously is facing the possibility of losing in his own home state of West Virginia, which is now overwhelmingly red. Jon Huntsman has run for president before. He was an ambassador under Donald Trump, but he's not really naturally at home in the Republican Party. And there was a moment in this announcement that really caught my attention, which is Joe Manchin said, I've never been in a race that I don't intend to win. And then he said, with that being said, I haven't made a decision. And the reason why that's important, it's not just boilerplate. Joe Manchin in the end, is a guy who likes to be liked. And if it comes down to the point when it appears that he would be the person who restored Donald Trump to the presidency, I may be wrong on this, but my hunch is that he would find some way of actually avoiding being the person that history ascribes that blame, too.
- [36:51]
Jane Mayer
He said, also. Right. That I've never been a spoiler. So it seems you're right. He's already worried about that label. It's not no label. It's a label he doesn't want, which is being the spoiler that elected Donald Trump. Susan, from your standpoint, do you think that if no Labels really did start getting some traction, that it's Trump that it helps?
- [37:17]
Susan Glasser
Yeah. I'm with Evan here. I think that it's the kind of thing that we talk about pretty regularly. I don't see it happening. I think that, you know, it's not the thing that we're going to be talking about in the middle of the election. I really just.
- [37:31]
Jane Mayer
I'm skeptical the people behind it. I feel that, as usual, there's more behind the scenes here that people should know about, which is that no Labels is kind of the creation of Mark Penn and his wife, Nancy Jacobson. And Penn is an outcast American politics. He was a sort of conservative Democrat, very brilliant operative who was basically tossed out of the Clinton crowd eventually and ended up advising Donald Trump when Trump was president. So talk about someone without a home. I mean, the people behind this have no home also. And it seems to be some kind of moneyed reach for relevance, for power, for something.
- [38:21]
Susan Glasser
Well, it's got us talking about it.
- [38:23]
Jane Mayer
Well, it does. I mean, it really does have a lot of Democrats very worried about it, because I think that it must be partly because Penn is not a newcomer to American politics. He's someone who knows the mechanics of it, and he's got a ton of money, and so you can't kind of completely say, oh, well, this is the equivalent of Cornel West. There's something going on, and it's. It bears a little bit of watching, but. Okay.
- [38:49]
Evan Osnos
And it is worth mentioning, there is already now a super PAC that has been created specifically to counter no labels. It's called Citizens to Save Our Republic. It's got people like former Congressman Dick Gephardt behind it. So there is an effort to try to stop this thing in its tracks.
- [39:04]
Jane Mayer
I mean, and there is. I mean, I think the other thing that may be important to think about is that no labels is not the answer. But there is a question behind it, which is, what's gonna happen with two candidates that many in this country are not happy with? You've got a choice that people are. An awful lot of voters express a lot of dissatisfaction with and that gives you a sense that there's volatility here because both of the approval ratings for Trump and for Biden are so low that it feels like something bad could happen.
- [39:39]
Susan Glasser
Jane, this is a really important point to sort of bring this whole thing home. Anna, I'm really glad you made that point because. Because the truth is, there's one thing in American politics that Democrats and Republicans agree upon to a remarkable degree, and that is that they are very unhappy with the prospect of a rematch of 2020 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And yet that's what we're hurtling down the tracks toward. And so I do think that those are the things that are fueling a lot of the things we've talked about today, whether it's the money that's gone to Ron DeSantis in the vain, hopefully for Republican Alternative, whether it's this no labels project. And we'll see probably more of it, too, because right now we're locked into an increasingly unpleasant set of problems that I think with these legal cases of Donald Trump are just creating one more crisis for us all to have to weather through. It's been, to mix the metaphors, American politics these last few years, it's been a series of own goals over and over and over again. Forget about foreign adversaries. We're our own worst enemy.
- [40:45]
Jane Mayer
Well, if we're locked into a crisis as we move forward into this campaign, there's no one I would rather be locked into a crisis with than both of you. Smartest people I know, greatest colleagues. So thanks, guys.
- [41:00]
Susan Glasser
Thanks so much, Jane. Great to be with you guys.
- [41:02]
Evan Osnos
Thank you, Jane.
- [41:08]
Jane Mayer
This has been the Political hello Magazine. I'm Jane Mayer. We had production assistance today from Alex d', Elia, Dan Richards, and Catherine Winter. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
- [41:44]
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. Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [42:14]
Jane Mayer
From prx.