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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Paige DeSorbo
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- [01:30]
Susan Glasser
Okay, close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax. And let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [01:39]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free for 1-800-contacts. You guys, they're so fast. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [01:51]
Paige DeSorbo
Hi there.
- [01:52]
Susan Glasser
Did you find everything okay?
- [01:54]
Charlie Sykes
Yes, I did, because I found the exact same contacts as my eye doctor prescribes at 1-800-contacts. Here, give me that. Attention shoppers. Did you know 1,800-contacts has 45 million contacts in stock?
- [02:07]
Okay, we checked the brakes. Everything looks good.
- [02:11]
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- [02:19]
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- [02:29]
Susan Glasser
1-800-Contacts.
- [02:43]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast, joined by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker on just another one of these days in the Trump era that feel like we're measuring them in dog years. Susan, good to talk with you again.
- [02:59]
Susan Glasser
Hey, it's always great to be with you, Charlie.
- [03:02]
Charlie Sykes
So we ought to talk about the most important story, the big story of the day, at least based on what I'm seeing on social media. Apparently Big Balls is no longer working for the federal government.
- [03:13]
Susan Glasser
You know, my Conde Nast colleagues at Wired have had scoop after scoop on the Elon Musk doge beat and they are the ones who inform me of this important news. But you know, it's one of those little indicators, right? You know, we can forget how crazy everything has been. So let's just take a second to pause on, you know, the, the era of Elon Musk's reign of terror over the federal government and how he and his team of intern hackers reat havoc and revenge.
- [03:48]
Charlie Sykes
And now they're heading toward the exits. Actually, that was one thing I was just going to drop into our conversation like whatever happened to Elon Musk? Because things go so quickly. It's like Elon Musk is darkening the sky for so long. We're there with the chainsaw and the co president and all of that. And then of course we had that rather dramatic blow up and he's been very quiet lately, hasn't he?
- [04:13]
Susan Glasser
I mean, yeah, well, you know, destroying billions of dollars of value in your own companies and that of the people you work with eventually generates some blowback which appears to be part of what's happened with Musk. But it also, I have to say, don't you feel like it's Donald Trump always somehow manages to, you know, we're so deep into 16 other huge enormous stories of war in the Middle east and bombing Iran and then NATO zombies that, you know, you can't even remember this all consuming fight of just a couple weeks ago. And I do think that Trump, you know, has learned to play that news cycle probably better than anyone. And you know, I have to say he benefits from our constant state of national forgetting.
- [05:08]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, well, let's talk about that national state of forgetting because you were, I were on a TV panel briefly yesterday and I thought you made a very, very interesting point about the, the media, cultural amnesia. And you know, part of the problem of trying to analyze, you know, major events within a couple of days is that many of these things don't play out for a very, very long time, they don't play out for years, for decades. You know, how was the war in Iran going? Well, get back to me in a couple of years to find out how that played out. But there's also this sort of what I would call the year zero effect, which is that we, and we being the punditocracy, will sometimes look at some story or something that Trump is doing and forget what the context is. So, for example, and you made this point very, a very important point. Donald Trump has bombed Iran. We may or may not be at war with Iran. And it is worth remembering how we got here, that one of the signal acts of his first presidency was scrapping the Iran nuclear deal, which in theory was supposed to contain Iran's nuclear capabilities. Right. And you can draw a line between that decision and what happened this weekend. And remarkably few commentators have done so.
- [06:32]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, no, I was really struck by that. And thank you for bringing it up again, Charlie, because, you know, frankly, I wanted to sort of, I don't know, I found myself almost dizzy reading just, you know, commentary after commentary, listening to all these people, you know, making these specious, almost absurd comparisons with 2003, like, are Americans, like, are we so brain dead now that we don't know the difference between an armed invasion force of over 100,000 troops versus airplanes sending bombs? Which, by the way, George W. Bush did, Barack Obama did repeatedly, Bill Clinton did repeatedly, Joe Biden. I mean, it's literally like, I feel like it was like just this hysterical moment in Washington when people across the political spectrum lost their frigging minds and did not do a good job of presenting in a clear and cogent way what the specific challenges were for Trump. And by the way, it clearly was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu essentially forcing this choice upon Trump of whether or not to do this. But I personally think you have to look at Trump and his actual history with this Iran nuclear issue in his first term to understand how he came to the moment where essentially he had the choice of either joining in or facing the, with the bombing or facing the very real chance that Israel would fail to achieve its objectives of, you know, degrading or eliminating the nuclear program and actually have made Iran more likely to obtain. Now, that clearly is the calculation that Netanyahu went into the war with, which is that the US that any President, Donald Trump or any other American president would probably have to make the same choice. I think that was a rational calculation on Netanyahu's part. It's not necessarily the act of a good friend and partner, by the way. But, you know, it's related to the fact that we had a constraint on Iran's nuclear program, and Donald Trump in the spring of 2018, chose to walk away from it.
- [08:55]
Charlie Sykes
Right. And that brings us to this moment. And again, I don't know how you can talk about how we got here without mentioning that. Now, I'm not a big enough expert. I remember the incredible debate that we had over that original deal. But there does seem to be a consensus that you had an inspection regime, you did have controls, and that once Donald Trump scrapped that deal, you know, all bets were off. But again, you know, in this fog of war, we don't know, you know, what Iran was doing, how close they were to a bomb. The intelligence community did not come up with anything. And by the way, I'm also struck by the fact that, you know, in the run up to Iraq or the run up to a lot of other things that have been happening, there have been debates, there have been consultation, there's been testimony, we've had findings from the intelligence community, some of them deeply flawed. But in this particular case, we have none of that. So here we are, as you and I are speaking. We're now getting this initial bomb assessment that would suggest that, in fact, this mission did not succeed, that Iran still has a nuclear capability, and that we may have delayed it only by months. Now, if that is the case and this mission not accomplished, so what is the rational calculation now? Can they leave the. If the whole rationale was we must destroy this or seriously degrade it now, do they now have to go back in again? Are there negotiations? Is Iran going to negotiate again, considering that the first round was kind of a ruse? Or where are we at here? I mean, how do you not blow up your own ceasefire if, in fact, it turns out that, no, they still have this enriched uranium and they still have the capacity of making a bomb?
- [10:47]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I think you're asking all the right questions. And that's the point, in a way, which is that we need to be asking questions because we don't have definitive answers. And yet we have a president and a machinery around that president that that's so deep into sales mode. They're pitching us on statements that we have no way of evaluating their credibility. And of course, that's kind of the great tragedy at the moment is the sort of explosion and implosion of our ability to trust in our institutions, certainly in the word of a president who contradicts himself as frequently as he breathes. And so in that Context. When Trump declares that he's, you know, obliterated Iran's nuclear capacity, that was the term that he used. He doesn't offer us compelling evidence or proof to support it. The news organizations very quickly are very credibly reporting on analyses inside the US Intelligence community. In particular, I think you're referring to one from the Defense Intelligence Agency that offered a preliminary assessment, the reporting of that. And again, that's also a preliminary assessment. Maybe that'll change. Maybe it turns out that the damage was greater. The point is that we don't know yet. And yet, nonetheless, Donald Trump, of course, went like DEFCON 80 million against journalists, spent his time at the NATO summit in the Hague going off against the scum of the earth news organizations that dared to report intelligence information from within his own government that he doesn't want the public to have. He even took the very unusual step of essentially pressuring the Israeli government to put out their somewhat contradictory and somewhat more upbeat assessment of the damage done to Iran's nuclear capacity. The point is the obfuscation, the confusion, and to sell, sell, sell in the middle of such a confusing moment, it doesn't underscore any kind of faith in the credibility of the US Government, first of all. Second of all, and most importantly, it tells us very little, I think, about what is going on on the Iran side of the equation. You know, that's a very opaque situation right now. And I think, you know, that's a big problem, because Donald Trump often is more interested in his own posturing and positioning and his own politics vis a vis his own base and other world leaders. And he's a lot less interested in what the facts on the ground are inside these other governments.
- [13:29]
Charlie Sykes
And this is who he is. And this is, again, one of the reasons why it is perhaps not advisable to go to war with somebody who lacks the credibility of Donald Trump, who is a chronic liar. Because one of the questions I have is, how will we ever know what the truth is? Will he listen to anyone in the US Intelligence who tells him anything other than what he wants to hear? And I think we know what the answer is. I mean, spoiler alert. No, he won't. He will discredit them. So who is he listening to? Well, he's listening to Benjamin Netanyahu and Lord knows who else. But, I mean, this is part of the problem of, you know, I mean, I certainly am old enough to remember during the Vietnam War, we had the credibility crisis, which had tremendous impact, not just in our ability to fight the war, but you know, in terms of military policy, but in terms of American soc, that credibility crisis seems like it's been squared or cubed now with. With Donald Trump, which is one of the reasons why I have always, you know, I do understand that there's kind of a split in the anti Trump movement about this. There are people who go, okay, you know, right call, wrong team, whatever, or, you know, we need to support him at least on this, because we've always wanted to bomb Iran. I just think the dangers and the risks of going to war with Donald Trump are so great. And including just this question of will we ever know what the truth is? I mean, we are in a post truth era, and fighting a war in a post truth era strikes me as extremely dangerous.
- [14:59]
Susan Glasser
Yeah. I think, honestly, I would just, like underscore that, put an exclamation point next to it. I mean, you know, Charlie, I think, frankly, whatever your policy views on Iran are, or even your foreign policy views about, you know, what level of national security threat that poses to the United States to have them pursuing a nuclear program, it's also fair to say your point, which is a slightly different point, which is not about the advisability or not of seeking to go after the nuclear program, but what kind of national security is possible in a situation where the President, United States himself, is in many ways the security risk by destabilizing the world, by undermining our alliances, by having such a questionable relationship to the truth that no one knows at any given moment whether he is negotiating or lying or actually telling the truth. And so this is a real, I think, dilemma for people. Can you feel that way about Trump and also quietly breathe a sigh of relief at the possibility, even if it's just for now, still a possibility that Iran might not, you know, might be much farther away from obtaining a nuclear weapon? Sure. You know, this is a tyrannical regime that has not only, you know, tyrannized its own people, forced, you know, multiple generations of women and girls to live in really unbearable conditions of persecution. At the same time, its foundation of its ideology is the extermination of its neighbors in Israel. And you can understand why that does, in fact, pose an existential threat. That's exactly right. So, you know, can you be relieved?
- [16:53]
Charlie Sykes
Better, safer place?
- [16:54]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, yeah. Now, the problem is, is that we even can't say that I am totally open to the possibility that this succeeded and this might be a good thing for the world. The problem is, as you and I are talking right now, on Wednesday, June 25, we actually can't say whether it succeeded or quite the opposite possibility. Unfortunately, the opposite outcome is still very much not ruled out, and that is that this attack on Iran's nuclear facilities actually ends up persuading the embattled and weakened Iranian regiment that pursuing a nuclear deterrent as quickly as possible is the one way that they have of kind of. Right. Sizing their power in a region after.
- [17:40]
Charlie Sykes
You know, which is also a rational calculation.
- [17:42]
Susan Glasser
Yes, exactly. And so we just two countries.
- [17:44]
Charlie Sykes
But yeah, I mean, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for a promise that it would be protected. We've seen how that worked out. Iran, you know, facing this because it does not, in fact, have, you know, does not have nukes. I mean, there's a reason why we did not bomb North, North Korea. So the rational calculation of nations all around the world has to be, you know what, you either have a, you either have a nuke or you are going to be, you're going to be low on the, on the, on the food chain. So, as one of the nation's leading Trumpologists, I wanted to get your sense of this because, you know, when he announced the two week, the, the two week pause, I think a lot of us rolled our eyes and said this is Trump's way of saying never, that he looked like he was blinking. There was a lot of, you know, you know, snickering about, you know, Taco, that he always chickens out. And in part it's because he loves the trappings of the military, but he generally backs off from the kind of messy thing of protracted war in the Middle East. So were you surprised that he, that he pulled the trigger on all of this and give me your sense of how Donald Trump sees and views the military, because this came in the context, and you wrote about this where he had the big military parade. He's sitting there watching all of his tanks and all of his missiles. Was there an itch there for him to use it? What do you think happened? What was going on?
- [19:08]
Susan Glasser
Well, first of all, that is a horrifying title to bestow on anybody, one of the nation's leading tropologists. Although it is sadly true that I actually think I might have been the person who came up with the phrase Trumpology when I was the editor of Politico magazine in 2016. But that's a different story. And I can't take any credit for thinking that this was, I thought it was a more or less a tongue in cheek exercise when I first commissioned it.
- [19:33]
Charlie Sykes
But you didn't think you'd be doing it for 10 years.
- [19:36]
Susan Glasser
No, but, Charlie, I will tell you this, though. I wasn't surprised. And this. I wasn't at all surprised. And in fact, we had a running discussion, of course, as everybody did, about this in the days leading up to it, and I was strongly of the view that this was likely to happen. In fact, I expected it on Saturday, and I kept saying, okay, now it's going to happen. So the reason that I expected it and that I wasn't surprised were a couple of things. One, I think I already mentioned in this podcast, it actually is my belief that it's very likely that any American president of either party, having been boxed in by Netanyahu like that, probably would have come to a similar decision. I believe that that's the reason Netanyahu did it. Now, I don't know that Netanyahu would have rolled the dice and launched a preemptive attack on Israel with the view in mind that essentially he needed an American president to come in and finish the job, because that really was the war plan there. So, number one, I believed that any American president in the situation Trump found himself in with Netanyahu having already started the war, was likely to do that because the alternative is so unpalatable of those nuclear sites remaining intact after Israel launched the war, number one. Number two, the fallacy that we were already talking about in terms of people having the exact wrong precedent in mind, and this I've seen this time and again in Washington, you know, the sort of death by analogy. And people, if you pick the wrong analogy, you get the wrong analysis. Okay, people had the wrong analogy, and they had the wrong analysis. And unfortunately, you know, that was sort of driving me crazy. You know, people are, like, relitigating the invasion of Iraq without, like, literally not occurring to them that, oh, there's not 100,000American ground troops about to enter the war. There's not months of buildup. There's not. And so from my perspective, I thought all along that Trump will look not to that debate, which he didn't participate in, but that as a very egotistical, you know, kind of thinking about himself all the time, he's going to think about his own experience, and his own experience with Iraq goes back to his first term in office, and he viewed the strike that ultimately killed Soleimani, the leader of the irgc, as a great success. It's been somewhat forgotten, I think, because it happened early in 2020. And that, of course, was such a wildly disruptive year. And soon after that came Covid and the election and all of those things.
- [22:25]
Charlie Sykes
But that was a one and done.
- [22:27]
Susan Glasser
Exactly. And Donald Trump, that was actually an earlier, less sweeping precursor event to this. And in some ways, that analogy actually is more apt. It was the United States choosing to make a targeted attack using air power and missiles and not anything like ground troops or joining an ongoing conflict. So I thought, you know, that analogy to Soleimani is the kind of thing that Trump will be looking at and that he's also, you know, very much driven. He's not a long term strategist. He's very much driven by the kind of news, momentum and optics of the moment. And he sees this as a Netanyahu success that he wants to be a part of.
- [23:15]
Charlie Sykes
And part of.
- [23:16]
Susan Glasser
Yeah. The other thing is, is that I feel like people lost their basic tropology skills. So let's go back to basics here, folks, as Trumpologists, and we're all Trumpologists now because we kind of blown up the regular order system of American government in basic Trumpology, right? You gotta like screen out a lot of surround sound. And you know, what is Trump himself actually signaling? And Trump himself actually signaled quite clearly that he was going to do this. And he talked about we. And he talked about bombing. And some of his true social posts were almost explicitly basically saying, when he tells the entire population of Tehran to evacuate. Now, now, exactly why did. And then, you know, I think that was accurate. So I saw that messaging from Trump and I thought, okay, he's going to do this. And in fact, if you notice some of the very interesting reports after the US Strike came out that the US Military also concluded that Trump had been too clear in his signaling. And in fact, they had to launch a deception with the B2 bomber, sending some of them over the Pacific because they were worried that Trump had been so clear. And I thought he was clear. So I was kind of surprised that people were surprised, frankly.
- [24:38]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's pull a lens back since we're deep into Trumpology, because your book with Peter Baker was the Divider in Chief. Do I have that right?
- [24:49]
Susan Glasser
The divider?
- [24:50]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, yeah, the divider, which is of course also a signature of the Trump administration. You know, it really is interesting that other presidents have tried to pull the nation together, to unite the nation. You know, Trump seems to, you know, you wrote that book a couple of years ago, but he seems to have accelerated this idea that I'm really not interested in having any sort of unity or pulling people together or having any sort of a compromise. He makes it very clear that he is the president of one faction, and he feeds them red meat, the redder the better, and keeps ratcheting it up almost on a daily basis. It's like he and Stephen Miller sitting in the Oval Office figuring, how can we make people more angry? How can we make them more fearful? How can we. And it's really an extraordinary mindset, and I don't think any president has ever had anything remotely like this mindset, and since we're now sort of in a war footing. But it is striking how that theme of him being the divider is really the signature of our time, because, you know, when have we ever had a leader so invested in upsetting and frightening half of the country? Interesting, you know, ruling philosophy.
- [26:16]
Susan Glasser
No, that's exactly right, Charlie. I think you're right. It's who Trump is as a person, too. And so, you know, it doesn't. It's not a surprise in that sense that his. His political ideology, because it's so rooted in himself and nothing else is, is about division. And now it also happens that he's surrounded by people who do have more fixed ideology, and they've spent years, even before Donald Trump entered politics, demonizing the other side in American politics as existential threats to the nation, as evil people, as, you know, challenge to our core principles. And when you define the other side in politics in existential terms, and when you define them as not just wrong, but evil, of course, then you don't give any quarter to them. And so I think it's that confluence of Trump's own personal sort of mantra of, you know, never give in when you're punched, you. You always punch back harder. That's literally Donald Trump's guiding philosophy in life. He's articulated that out loud to interviewers in the past. And so you have a man for whom that is the point of view fused with a kind of an apocalyptic ideology that's developed over the last few decades among a big part of the kind of almost radical. Right. Exactly. And so. But I think that the biggest, truest expression of this actually came back in 2020, in the. In the very beginning of the pandemic, when it became clear that even at that moment, rather than bring together, you know, a divided and scared and, you know, kind of traumatized nation that actually was experiencing something unifying, which is the unifying experience.
- [28:13]
Charlie Sykes
Yes.
- [28:14]
Susan Glasser
Of having the whole place shut down all at once, even then, very quickly, Donald Trump turned into kind of the COVID plan for blue America and the COVID plan for red America. And he literally would talk about, well, my numbers and my people. He didn't care if blue America was dying of COVID as long as red America wasn't. And to me, that was sort of the kind of template of Trump as divider that helped to inform, you know, how we thought about our book. And I do think that's. That's just fundamentally who he is.
- [28:47]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you know, I've thought about this, and I'm sure you have as well. And maybe this is an obvious question or the answer is obvious. There once was a time when people speculated, okay, what would it take to bring America together, that some major national disaster or a war or an attack would bring us together? After 9, 11, there was for about, it felt like about five minutes, there was a moment of national unity. Are we at a point now where nothing would have that effect? I'm trying to imagine what would it take to have a moment of national unity, almost leaving Donald Trump out of the picture, another president being able to unite the country. And I can't really imagine anything at this point. Maybe that whole era is over. The division is so baked in now with the incentive structures, the alternative reality. Silas, what do you think? What would it take? You know, I mean, would a natural disaster an act of terror? What do you think?
- [29:47]
Susan Glasser
You know, it's a great question. At least it's hopeful that you're still asking it in the sense that, you know, the question implies the possibility of a yes at some point in the future. I do agree that it's almost inconceivable as long as Trump is the president because he's a uniquely divisive figure. And, you know, I could certainly imagine, imagine actually, while Trump is president or someone else is president, there could be very short term unity around some probably horrific tragedy or global event of some kind. But it's likely to be very short.
- [30:25]
Charlie Sykes
Term once politics returns the blame.
- [30:30]
Susan Glasser
Right. When politics returns, sometimes quickly, in 24 hours or maybe in some really disruptive event, maybe it takes a little bit longer. But as soon as politics came back, I think there were flickers, frankly, at the very beginning of the Biden era of what the Biden people clearly hoped would be maybe not a return to the status quo ante, but some future in which there was more pragmatic, less polarized and ideological politics around our leaders. But, yeah, yeah, I don't think so.
- [31:08]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, no. Well, you know, speaking of Biden, I think that he probably thought that he was, you know, and speaking of, you know, Mideast wars, I imagine that they thought that by pulling out of Afghanistan that they would sort of eliminate that as an issue that, you know, take that off the table as something that would divide Americans. They need to be concerned about. And yet the withdrawal from Afghanistan, as almost everything in the Middle east, there are so many unknown knowns, there are so many contingencies, there are so many unexpected events. The disastrous pullout and the bombing really was a turning point for the Biden administration. I'm not sure that he ever recovered from them. And that's the thing that presidents always go in with a certain expectation of how things are going to play out, and it never does. But then the next president's never learned the lesson. Okay, so let's switch gears here because I want to sort of back into what happened in New York City where Andrew Cuomo flamed out, the establishment was completely rejected. You have a democratic socialist, somebody really on the kind of the far fringes of the left who was elected. But there's a centrist Democratic hot take in Politico this morning. I wanted to read to you. I don't know who this is. A Democratic strategist who tells Adam Wren something. And this is sort of a larger question of our political moment. It is extremely alarming that the only candidates who genuinely excite our voters are the ones making absolutely insane promises on politically toxic positions, leaving us on the spot of trying to execute on bad policy and losing terribly or failing to keep our promises and reinforcing the idea that all politics is bullshit. And I wonder whether or not that we actually are in this issue of, in this moment of just performative, angry politics, that people are voting for somebody because they express their id. Any thoughts about that?
- [33:07]
Susan Glasser
You know, I mean, I say that's part of it. I think that one of the occupational hazards in Washington is a consistent overstatement of how much ideology matters and policy matters. You know, look, it makes sense, right? Policy wonks are attracted to Washington. They care about things like healthcare and taxes and things like that. So they overstate the role that those things play in elections. You know, I'm not saying I know the answer at all, but let me just throw out there that maybe people didn't want a sexual harassing, lying ex governor as the mayor because he's a crappy candidate. You know, and I just, I feel.
- [33:47]
Charlie Sykes
Like he's a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign.
- [33:50]
Susan Glasser
Exactly. Like, honestly, like, I feel like that is a legitimate explanation for what happened, rather than the idea that New Yorkers have all turned into performatively bullshit left wing anarchists who want to blow up capitalism as we know it. I mean, sure, that's one explanation, but it's also quite possible people didn't want Andrew Cuomo to be the mayor of New York City.
- [34:18]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, so how. What. What does it say about the Democratic establishment that they rallied around, of all people, Andrew Cuomo?
- [34:26]
Susan Glasser
I mean, it doesn't say anything.
- [34:27]
Charlie Sykes
There have been moments that. Okay. I mean, Democrats knew that, you know, electing, you know, Zoran Mandani. I'll get the name right. Would be a political disaster for the Democrats. Perhaps. But rather than coalescing around a good candidate, I mean, Andrew freaking Cuomo, did they honestly think that that baggage wouldn't matter? And I have to say, it was a really cringy moment when you saw Bill Clinton parachute into New York to endorse Andrew Cuomo, which obvious. Which may even have back for. So what does it say about the Democratic establishment that they keep essentially pushing these retread, deplorable candidates?
- [35:14]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, honestly. Right. Aren't you having a flashback to how many of them acted about Joe Biden's candidacy? I mean, it just like, again, did it make you some radical leftist to think that Joe Biden running for reelection for a term in which he would be 86 years old at the end of it was just a bad idea and it didn't have anything to do with ideology and that, you know, it seems to me that's a very comparable situation to what just happened in New York. And, you know, they keep making these quote unquote, pragmatic endorsements that aren't very pragmatic because they end up spelling ruin and undermining the credibility of the party. I just, I think that, you know, I feel, frankly, I just feel sorry for New York that they're awkward choices like this.
- [36:16]
Charlie Sykes
It was a terrible choice and was an indication of just how screwed up. I mean, they have had a long track record of some, shall we say, rather squirrely mayors. I mean, the. The. I mean, how many shitty mayors in a row do they have to have before somebody realizes, hey, we gotta get to get our act together? I mean, you go from, you know, Bill de Blasio to Eric Adams to God knows what. I mean, I think it is possible that the general election might be more competitive. I don't think that people have really said, you know, that it's really, you know, settled in exactly all the implications. So leaving New York aside, how do you evaluate the national fallout? I mean, there are people like the Democratic centrist group Third Way that says, you know, What? Trump and the Republicans are going to hang this guy around Every Democrat in the country, they're going to try to say, see, you're all socialists. They're going to ask them, do you support this socialist for mayor? There's others who say, look, all politics is local. Why should anybody care about this? What do you think? How do you think this actually plays out? My sense is that reptilian instinct that Trump has of picking out a target, that they have every intention of nationalizing this in the way that, you know, one or two transgender athletes becomes, you know, $100 million ad campaign, you know, and the Democrats, well, it's. It's, you know, we shouldn't care about this, but we do. So what do you think? What do you think the fallout is going to be?
- [37:47]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, well, I'm sure you're right that they will attempt to nationalize it. And also, we don't know how. You know, basically a young, very skilled, I should say, very skill political communicator. How is Mamdani going to respond to this enormous victory? I mean, you know, will he moderate his message? Will he become, you know, a candidate for all New Yorkers? Will he do the opposite of what we've been talking about Donald Trump doing with the right, or will he double down on his, you know, extreme positions? We don't know the answer to that. And I think partially, you know, that will help reveal whether he goes national or not politically. But, you know, I just. I'm skeptical. I have to tell you that. I think that voters are pretty wise to that. And I think mostly it's a local race, but it's certainly part of a longer running trend right now, which is that Democrats have not been able to get their act together. They're a divided party. Republicans are a divided party, too, right now. But, you know, time is short and, you know, they're up against Donald Trump, so they ought to get their act together.
- [39:03]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I think so, too, but I mean, I understand the impulse that you worried about getting young voters. So you have a charismatic, attractive candidate, and people go, okay, you know, this is an. Obviously more attractive than, say, Andrew Cuomo. On the other hand, you know, the AOC type candidates are very, very appealing. They would not win in any swing district in America. They are not the majority makers. And so the question is, what is more representative of the Democratic Party right now? The fact that there are candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, or centrist Democrats, Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill, or that you have people like Alyssa Slotkin who are winning in Michigan at a time when Donald Trump is winning. And these are people who have moved to the center. And yet you get the sense that the ID is with these candidates who quite frankly, I think would be politically toxic anywhere outside of their own districts. And I'm specifically talking about the. And I do wonder about. He ran a great campaign. But when he was asked about, well, how do you feel about the chant about globalize the intifada at this particular moment, he was not able to distance himself. No, he was not able to. He didn't distance himself. And then when he got tremendous blowback, he kind of was. Gave that press conference. He was kind of weeping. Made me think that perhaps he's not totally ready for prime time. That when that national spotlight shines down on him and he gets outside of the New York progressive bubble, that he might be not quite the candidate that people are assuming he is right now.
- [40:40]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, those are really important points, Charlie, and I basically agree with all of them. So the answer is, number one, stay tuned. But also number two, again, what is it that made people respond to him? Why are people turning out for the Bernie Sanders AOC tour? Is it because they subscribe to every aspect of the Bernie Sanders ideology, or is it because they want somebody to fight back against Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are not doing.
- [41:10]
Charlie Sykes
It for them, and these are New Yorkers. And I'm guessing that both of those guys woke up today thinking, oh, my goodness, what happens? Do you think that AOC challenges Chuck Schumer in the Democratic primary? Because right now it wouldn't look good for Chuck. What do you think?
- [41:30]
Susan Glasser
Well, she's been a very, very, I think, savvy political operator since she had her own, you know, skyrocketing to fame. And people said all the same things about her when she came to national prominence basically from nowhere, winning her House race a few years ago. And, you know, I think she surprised a lot of people. She's been an extremely savvy political operator. She came to Washington. She didn't go to war against Nancy Pelosi. She figured out how to operate within the House Democratic Caucus while also continuing to grow her national profile. She didn't let the fact that Republicans tried to nationalize her immediately. Remember, she was literally the subject of every single FOX TV criticism. She was featured on Fox News literally every single night. And she found a way to handle that. So there is a path open for Mamdani and for Democrats more broadly. Right. So I don't know what she'll do, but I do actually hold her pretty high in my estimation in terms of how she has run her career.
- [42:38]
Charlie Sykes
And again, and yet she has that baggage. The baggage, the defund, the police, some of that rhetoric.
- [42:44]
Susan Glasser
Absolutely.
- [42:45]
Charlie Sykes
The thing that came back to really haunt Kamala Harris was her shift. Like back in 19, I mean, back in 2019, when they took all of those positions that seemed like they were popular within the Democratic coalition but then became absolutely toxic in a general election. So again, we have to stay tuned and see how this plays out, because my guess is that 90% of voters outside, way north of, 90% outside of New York have no idea who I'm sorry, Mom, Donnie is Mamdani. Please edit that out who Mamdani is or his positions. And yet I do think you're going to see him featured very, very, very, very widely in conservative media and Fox News. And so they're going and there's a lot to work with there. So, Susan Glasser, again, thank you so much for coming on and another amazing week. It's always good to talk with you, Charlie.
- [43:46]
Susan Glasser
It is amazing week and it's amazing times we're living in. I really appreciate the chance to talk.
- [43:51]
Charlie Sykes
It over with you and thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. You know why we do this, why we continue to do this, because now more than ever, it is absolutely crucial that we remind ourselves we are not the crazy ones. Thanks.
- [44:21]
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