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- [00:00]
Charlie Sykes
Foreign Sykes. Welcome to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. We're joined today by our good friend Susan Glasser, who of course is staff writer at the New Yorker, based in Washington, D.C. writes a weekly column on life in Washington, and is the host of the Political Scene podcast. Welcome back, Susan. Good to have you back.
- [00:29]
Susan Glasser
Oh, I'm so glad to be with you, Charlie. Thank you for having me.
- [00:32]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, I want to start with a cosmic question, because I'm always haunted by this and given all the things that are happening in the era of Trump, that sometimes it feels like we're distracted by the distractions to the distractions to the things that we should really be paying attention to. So I guess the question is, how do you sort it out? What should we really be paying attention to right now?
- [00:54]
Susan Glasser
You know, I feel like that is a trick question and I'm supposed to say I'm too distracted by all the distractions to be able to answer that question. You know, what's remarkable about Trump 2.0, that is, I think, something of a difference from Trump 1.0 is the extent to which we don't have the luxury of even focusing on his many, many, many, many words anymore, because there are disruptive actions being taken now of a nature and substance that are really very radical. And so looking wherever possible at the underlying institutions that are being disrupted or sort of concrete, specific steps that are being taken, I think that really is important. I think the coverage has shifted to reflect that, but that it's, it's, it's important to do that because Trump every day gives us an enormous amount of head spinning things and, you know, like, we can laugh or cry or cringe at Trump circulating an image of himself as the Pope.
- [02:07]
Charlie Sykes
The Pope.
- [02:08]
Susan Glasser
But is it more important than, you know, threatening and ordering the IRS to look into the tax exempt status of, you know, major universities? Right. You know, that's the dilemma for us.
- [02:21]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, it is the dilemma. I mean, you know, I would like to talk about things like, you know, the war on Barbie or, you know, bringing back Alcatraz or the, you know, the tweets about, you know, the Pope, Donald. But, but you're right, those are the kind of distractions. I mean, they may be revealing about his character and about his mentality, but there are these underlying issues that are going on. And I mentioned in my newsletter yesterday, over the weekend, I watched, I don't know whether you've seen it, the Brazilian film that won the Academy Award. I'm still here about life under the military dictatorship and what it's like to be disappeared, you know, live in a country where there's no due process, there's no habeas corpus that functions and no free press. And then to wake up the next morning and to read that interview with Donald Trump, what he's asked, are you going to uphold the Constitution? He says, I don't know. And it really did strike me that we talk about democracy a lot. But as important as elections are, the rule of law, due process, the fact that the government cannot put a bag over your head and snatch you off the street and disappear you, that's kind of fundamental to the functioning of a constitutional republic, isn't it?
- [03:35]
Susan Glasser
Well, that's right. And that's sort of, I mean, your point in a way, though, is undercutting the kind of don't pay attention to the circus argument. And so I, you know, I want to emphasize, I guess, and underscore that I'm not saying don't pay attention to what Trump says, because in fact, my argument is over time, if you look at over the eight years, you know, since Trump has sort of been dominating our public life for nine years now, the people, the Trump ologists, if you will, who focused on, you know, don't just dismiss what he's saying, have probably proven to be more right over time than those sort of Washington hands who say, as I literally just came back from an event with a rare bipartisan type luncheon where there were still Republicans making the kind of look at the policy, not the man argument, I don't think that holds up very well because I think that over time, trying to discern in Trump's rhetoric where he's actually headed how has proven to be more fruitful than looking at the infrastructure of the Republicans around him who often are making points that address parts of their own constituency or rationalizing elements of Trump to themselves or others. So I do pay close attention in many ways what Donald Trump says. I also think that we might as well point out that he's the oldest president ever elected to the beginning of a term. And, you know, that shows in ways that will probably become even more emphasized over time. And, you know, he, he's already saying remarkable things that don't actually make any sense. Like, for example, in his recent round of valedictory 100 day interviews with various media outlets, including Time magazine, there's this incredible exchange where he says, oh yeah, we've had trade deals. And the reporter's kind of incredulous. And they say, well, what do you mean? Like, you know, there aren't any. And he says, oh, no, there are 200 trade deals. I don't even think the United States recognizes 200 countries, actually, by the way. 200 trade deals. And the report says, what? And he said, oh, yes, 200 trade deals. Here's how it works. America's a department store, and I set the price, and so the deal is the price that I set. And obviously, even Donald Trump doesn't actually think that, but it's an extraordinarily bizarre thing. Is it a brain malfunction? Does he actually live in a fantasy world where he thinks that's what's happening? I don't know. But that's an example of why we shouldn't dismiss what he says out of hand, because it's obviously a very important insight into him.
- [06:19]
Charlie Sykes
Well, okay, this is a really important point, because when we have a government by whim or an economy by whim, then the whims of the man who's making the decision, no matter how irrational, become important. Right. That, you know, he wakes up at one in the morning and thinks about a conversation that he had at Mar a Lago and tweets out, we're going to impose 100% tariff on all foreign films. Where did that come from? And yet he has the power to unilaterally do that. So attention has to be paid to all of that. You know, he. He's sitting around watching Netflix and sees this, you know, Clint Eastwood film about escape from Alcatraz. And the next morning, the President of the United States says, we're going to reopen Alcatraz, which, by the way, is not going to happen. But it's interesting because things are flowing through his head and then come out his mouth, and often it does affect people in the real world. And that's the problem.
- [07:14]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, no, that's exactly right, Charlie. And I also think it's important to note that Donald Trump, unfiltered and unconstrained, is kind of the macro theme of what we're seeing here. He's now got an infrastructure of amplifiers and enablers in the White House who do not see their role as constraining him and, in fact, have worked to advance a very kind of radical vision, maximalist vision of the powers of the executive branch. And so, you know, a lot of these actions actually don't have anything else in common except for the fact that they tend to aggrandize executive power and therefore to aggrandize Donald Trump's power. Because the other thing he's done is to kind of remove established processes, whether they were the independence of how prosecutorial decisions are made or the very elaborate national security interagency process process that has, you know, sort of been built over time by Democrat and Republican presidents alike. Now, you see, you know, what looks to me like a pretty straightforward attack on the primacy of the National Security Council in our system by removing the national security advisor, putting it in the control of Marco Rubio after having already subjected the staff there to not one, but repeated ideological purges of the staff. Kind of largely unexplained. You know, it looks from the outside. And again, we're Trump ologists here, Kremlin ologists here, but what it is, is again, aggrandizing Trump's power and minimizing the ability of nonpartisan long term US Government officials to actually help shape outcomes.
- [09:07]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I want to come back to the tariff issue, but you raise an interesting point. The rise of Marco Rubio is really rather extraordinary. He has about 10 jobs. Now, I'm exaggerating, but it was interesting that over the weekend when Donald Trump was asked about whether he was going to run for a third term and he said he's not, by the way. I personally don't take that as gospel, but he mentions J.D. vance, but he also mentions Marco Rubio. So the rise of Marco Rubio is rather extraordinary given where Rubio was back in 2016 and in the years since. Sense. What, what is your take on that? What has Rubio done or why has Trump decided to cling to him so closely and vice versa?
- [09:49]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been talking in recent days with a number of people who knew Rubo when, you know, back when and in some cases, by the way, when back when was just a few months ago. For example, the longtime board member of the International Republican Institute, you know, longtime supporter of Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, that Marco Rubio, who was in the Senate as recently as January of this year, is not the same guy who is going along with the dismantling of America's soft power infrastructure in the world, dismantling our ability to monitor human rights abuses, dismantling our ability even to monitor elections overseas, which has been a function carried out for decades under the aegis of the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. Again, this Marco Rubio, it wasn't even like, oh, that guy disappeared sometime after losing in 2016 to Donald Trump. That guy was still around, still promoting his support for Ukraine as recently as, you know, a year or two ago, and so maybe it's as simple as Donald Trump values, or says he values, the person who's willing to chuck all his principles and crawl on his belly, you know, for the chance to have approximately proximity to Trump. But there are a lot of people who are willing to do that. So either Marco Rubio is just exceptionally good at doing that, or, you know, it's hard to say. I mean, he's a talented politician. He's a very, very articulate person, and he convinced a lot of people in your world, didn't he, Charlie, that he was, that he was a real old fashioned, you know, a modern version of an old fashioned Republican.
- [11:53]
Charlie Sykes
No, I actually have an old picture from the before times. I think it was 2015 when I was with Marco Rubio at a time when a lot of people thought that he was going to be the future of the Republican Party. But then again, I remember when Paul Ryan was the future of the Republican Party. By the way, speaking of the before times, you and I are taping this on May 5th, which is. What is that? That's exactly six months since election day. Six months, because I was looking over my notes, I was looking over my notes the other day, and it was six months since the Ann Seltzer poll came out over that weekend. And everybody was thinking, well, this is going to turn out this way. It feels like, it doesn't feel like six months. It feels like these tectonic plates have shifted in the world. So one of the reasons I was asking the question about the distraction from the distraction, because there are so many things going on, whether it's the abandonment of Ukraine, what's happening internationally, America first becoming America alone. But you, on your, on your podcast, you talked about something that is so. It's so egregious that I feel that we haven't paid enough attention to it, which is that we can talk about the economics by women, the tariffs, but increasingly it feels as if the entire thing is this massive grift shakedown. You impose a tariff. If people come in and they kiss your ring, you will exempt somebody. People are gaming out how you buy access to the Trump administration, the crypto coins. And so this open corruption. Let's talk about this, because on the podcast, your political scene podcast, you said the amount of money flowing into the Trump family coffers is of a scale and scope that just sort of blows the mind in any context. And I sometimes feel we're distracted from this by all of the other things that we have never seen, the corruption on the scale and the scope of it and the complete shamelessness and the complete lack of accountability or pushback. So talk to me about that.
- [14:00]
Susan Glasser
Well, thank you, Charlie. This is the weekly podcast that I do with my great colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos, both of whom have done terrific reporting over the years. Of course, Jane's book, Dark Money is kind of one of the seminal works in that space. And Evan currently has a new book coming out that looks at essentially the rise of what you could call an American oligarchy and the incredible widening inequality gap. And that comes inevitably in our society and in other societies, along with ever more explicit efforts, successful efforts in many cases to purchase government on the part of the oligarchs. Right. That's, that's a, that's an aspect of many of these systems of government that becomes corrupted over time, not just in this country. But I really appreciate that we're giving a little attention to it because the scale of this is becoming more clear now that we're more than 100 days into the Trump administration. First of all, you've seen a spate of new deals announced recently by Donald Trump's two sons, Don Jr. And Eric, that really show how dramatically, first of all, they are benefiting. But also, and this is different from previous scandals involving influence, scandals involving presidential relatives or kids. We've had lots of those in our history. Just reading a fantastic forthcoming new book by my friend Ed Luce about Spig Brzezinski that rehashes the sorry tale of Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy Gate. It was known at the time, believe me, Billy Gay pales in comparison, largely because Donald Trump, the incumbent president himself, is also benefiting directly his financial bottom line, directly benefiting from some of these deals that Don Jr. And Eric are announcing while he's in office. So that is different, number one. Number two, the dollar amounts are different. Okay, we are talking about, here's a $2 billion project announced just last week in the Middle East. Here, here's a $1 billion project being announced. Here's hundreds of millions of dollars that are not transparent. We don't know who exactly it is buying of these Trump meme coins, the top purchasers of which are going to be given an exclusive private dinner with the president himself. You know, this is essentially, you know, I'm no expert on this, but, you know, the crypto world, it seems to be a direct way of giving money to the president's family. Here's another amazing example that in and of itself, I think, would have been headline news, you know, for days, if not for weeks would have been investigated by Congress. Jeff Bezos, you know, not. No longer the richest man in the world, but I think he's number two to Elon Musk, going, having dinner with Trump at Mar A Lago. And then miraculously, a $40 million documentary project is greenlit. That is a Melania Trump documentary produced by none other than Melania Trump and which she personally gets $28 million of the $40 million. So that's a $28 million payout from Amazon directly to the incumbent, the sitting first lady. Again, like, wow. I mean, you know, like in the past, we all got very exercise here in Washington about scandals that involved former presidents receiving, say, a, a six figure speaking deal, payout after six figures, six figures after they had left office and things like that. There's never been anything like this in this country. And the one other element, and I'll stop, sorry, I could go on, but it's just so, to anyone who spent their career in Washington, it's just so astonishing what's happening. Because the other element is that in addition to making these deals that benefit the President and his family, the other element is structural and institutional. From day one of this new Trump administration, they've been going after the guardrails, the watchdogs, the institutions that look after corruption in our society that many of which were founded in the wake of Richard Nixon's abuse of our system in order to watch and oversee the potential for corruption. The Federal Election Commission essentially now no longer functioning. Dismantling, gutting the Public Integrity Section, the main part of the Justice Department that oversees prosecutions of corrupt officials, firing, I believe it's 17 of the inspectors general at key agencies around the government on day one of the Trump administration saying that you will no longer enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices act, ending prosecutions under Farah, the Foreign Agents Registration act, and on and on the list goes. So dismantling the institutional barriers to corruption as well.
- [19:21]
Charlie Sykes
No, I mean, you go through, you know, American history, the various scandals we've had, you know, the raw corruption scandals, and they all, as you point out, absolutely pale in terms of the scope and the amount to what we're seeing right now, but also how incredibly blatant it is. And now everybody's kind of open. You know, there's, there was a, was a conference in Qatar where people are sitting around talking about, you know, how do you buy influence with this administration? There's a piece in the Huffington Post, an international trucking logistics firm is buying as much as $20 million worth of President Trump's crypto coins to influence the administration's trade policy. The precise sort of corruption that experts warned Trump was encouraging when he unveiled the venture. It's a company called Freight Technologies Incorporated. And the CEO said in a Wednesday news release that buying Trump coin would be, quote, an effective way to advocate for balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S. i mean, okay, he's just saying it. We're buying the coins because we're lobbying. And so, and also, I guess, you know, we're again reminded with all those guardrails that have been destroyed, who's going to do anything about it? What watchdog, what, what form of accountability will he actually have? Trump seems to be looking around, figuring out, I can get away with anything, I can do anything. And so they are coining money at an astonishing rate.
- [20:43]
Susan Glasser
Well, to the point about presidential impunity, it's a direct consequence of the Supreme Court's decision on immunity. And I believe that he thinks that that decision last year during the presidential campaign on presidential immunity was essentially an amazing get out of jail free card that he's able to wield. You know, when you play Monopoly, you know, you only get one. This one seems to be like a permanent get out of jail.
- [21:11]
Charlie Sykes
But he's not wrong, is he? He's not wrong. It is. Right?
- [21:14]
Susan Glasser
That's right. I mean, you know what, what the lawyers will say is, well, Donald Trump is the only one who is. And you know, other people are still liable for corruption. But of course, a, he wields the pardon power and has taken an expansive view of that. So to the extent anyone surrounding him were to actually get into legal trouble, he would probably just preemptively pardon them. Number two, he's taken over and politicized control of the Justice Department to a degree not seen since the Nixon era, repudiation of that kind of hyper politicized Justice Department. And that was really one of the key takeaways from the Watergate era, was to try to re insulate prosecutors and the administration of justice from political, nakedly political considerations. And Trump has taken it in exactly the opposite direction. I think, if anything, his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and some of her statements don't get as much attention as they might considering the important role that independent justice has played in our society and in guaranteeing, by the way, investors from around the world that this is a rule of law society as opposed to a rule of one man society. And I think that's the profoundness of the shift that so many people are reacting to in this first few months of Trump's second term.
- [22:46]
Charlie Sykes
Well, okay. I mean, that is a giant shift because one of the sources of American prosperity has been the fact that we are a nation of laws. And investors always knew there was that certain amount of stability. And, you know, there have been, you know, economists and thinkers like, you know, Hernando de Soto, who have identified that as the key element for prosperous, free societies is the rule of law. And when that gets undermined. So speaking of the courts and the. And the great gift that the Supreme Court gave Donald, Donald Trump, there's the big question, of course, is the court is watching all of this. We had, you know, Katanji, you know, Brown Jackson, last week, issue a very, very strong statement about the attempts to intimidate the court. We've had a series of court rulings, nine, nothing on the, on the Abrego Garcia case initially, then followed up with a 7:2 ruling. Give me your sense about, you know, in terms of institutional guardrails. Congress is clearly completely checked out. So now we're looking at the courts. Do you sense that what Trump has been doing and saying is backfiring him, or would this be another Lucy, in the football case of hoping for the courts to do something that they're going to disappoint us about? What do you think?
- [24:08]
Susan Glasser
Well, I think that those who have been out there predicting this or that decision by the Roberts Court have often been found wrong. And I think that immunity case is probably the most notable example of that. So I, you know, I'm not a Supreme Court pundit. I don't want to be a Supreme Court pundit. I think what it means is that we have to put that asterisk against a lot of the commentary right now and a lot of the efforts, which I understand. Right. We're trying to make sense of Trump's actions, but it's hard to do that when the verdict is not in on so many of the important institutional challenges that he's made, challenges that go to the heart of, of our constitutional system. Is the Supreme Court going to allow the president and his designees like Elon Musk to essentially override the will of Congress and Congress's authority to determine by law who gets to spend what and what kind of government we have? That, to me, that challenge to the impoundment act of 1974 and other challenges to Congress's spending authority, that's got to rank as number one because it's a profound statement that we're waiting on from the U.S. supreme Court about the balance of power between the different branches of government in our society. So I feel like that's like the biggest kind of question mark or asterisk hanging over things, first of all. Second of all, there is the question of due process and of the integrity of, of the judiciary itself. And that would encompass, you know, both the very threatening language coming from Trump administration officials like Stephen Miller, but also their actions in challenging in court the basic idea that federal judges can, can restrain a president. So I'm waiting to see what's going to happen there. There are a lot of other subsidiary challenges, many of which, by the way, fall under the heading of free speech. Because Donald Trump, unlike in his first term. The other thing that I think is really remarkable here, Charlie, and you may have a different perspective, is that Trump is seeking to insert himself into so many non governmental pillars of our society. He wants to tell network news executives whose interview they can air and how they can edit Kamala Harris's interview. He wants to tell law firms that if they make an extra effort to hire African American people that they're going to get thrown out of government buildings or government businesses. He wants to cancel cancer research at Harvard and MIT and other places around the country because he doesn't want to have Middle east studies curriculums that talk about Palestinian rights. Like, wow, right. So there's a free speech element to a lot of what the Trump administration is doing that I think is a very important test of our judiciary and whether they're going to stand up for basic values that you and I have thought were already decided.
- [27:23]
Charlie Sykes
No, I agree with that completely. But also what I think was extraordinary was the surrender of some of those institutions before they even got to the court. Because I think what's increasingly obvious is that the law firms that stand up and challenge these attacks are going to win their cases. Abc, I think, would have won its libel case. CBS would definitely have won its case against Donald Trump. So the question is, are they too afraid to take it on? I mean, as you wrote, fear was one of the dominant themes of the early part of this administration. And so there was, at least initially, this sense that he's unstoppable. We have to, we have to, you know, bow down to all of him. I wonder whether that's changing or not. You know, when you were talking about, we'll connect some of the dots here, the, the, the attack on the law firms, I think was, at least for me, the most breathtaking thing. I just. The implications of that and the fact that, you know, some of the major law firms Essentially put themselves into receivership out of, you know, fear of Donald Trump was, was, was, was stunning. And then, of course, the pressure on places like 60 Minutes, the executive producer resigning under pressure. But this last Sunday, Scott pelley and the 60 Minutes crew did something interesting. They focused on Trump's attack on the law firms at a time when apparently Sherry Redstone, who is the CEO of Paramount, apparently or allegedly has been whispering to cbs, don't do any really negative, sensitive Trump stories. So they're doing it. So I wonder whether or not, and again, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, you're starting to seal a few green shoots of courage after that initial shock and awfulness of fear of the first hundred days. What is your sense?
- [29:10]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, look, it's always going to be, unfortunately, a mixed bag. Donald Trump, one of his great skills as a lifelong bully and divider, you know, hence the name of our book on him. But, you know, that's what he does. He looks for the fault lines, the fissures, the pre existing weaknesses in institutions in society, and he finds ways to exacerbate them. Or, you know, he doesn't always know what he's gonna find when he probes inside. My guess is with the law firms, you know, he was amazed at how willing a number of them were to kowtow. That would be. My guess is that, you know, he was probing, punching, you know, hard to see what he could turn up. And what he turned up was some rottenness inside the heart of some of America's leading liberal as well as conservative law firms. You know, I spoke the other day with someone who's a very senior partner at one of the firms that chose to fight. And you know, they remain confident, as you said, that they're going to win their case. But the damage, you know, to, to the law firms writ large I think is enormous. And even if there's victories on paper, you know, I think it's, it's a terrible thing that they all wish could be walked back. In fact, this idea that, as one lawyer said to me the other day, if we lawyers are not going to defend the law, who is going to? And I think that it's the cravenness of some of this which helps to feed the MAGA movement anyways, you know, which again, has defined itself essentially in opposition to all the, the kind of reigning institutions in our society. So anytime the weakness, hypocrisy, internal contradictions of those reigning institutions are revealed to the public, even if Trump doesn't win in court, therefore, he wins by exposing this. And I think that, you know, that's, that's part of what he's done. But, you know, I do agree with you. You know, as an alum of Harvard, I have to tell you, like, you know, basically Harvard alums are used to Harvard being on the wrong side of everything pretty much for decades. Like, whatever your issue is, you know, believe me, it's not like everybody was always proud. And, you know, there's a lot of people, you know, donating now. You know, they're getting a rush of donations in from alumni. But will that substitute for the very, very large, high dollar donations that were withdrawn by some of the conservative Wall Street Harvard types? Who knows? But certainly you see a kind of a demonstration effect kicking in for other universities that are now joining hands in solidarity. I think it's important to show and to have examples for people.
- [32:08]
Charlie Sykes
No. And, you know, it is contagious. That's now become almost a cliche. But let's talk about Harvard a little bit because, you know, we go through the things that are, you know, sort of breathtaking. Donald Trump's personal order to strip them of their tax exempt status. This was the kind of thing that at least initially wasn't. One of the impeachment articles against Richard Nixon was the abuse of the IRS. And once again, the Trump Trump 2.0 feels like it's kind of an antimatter answer to the Watergate era, that all of the guidelines that guardrails that held back then are being destroyed right now. What strikes me about how radical it is that Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, says, I'm going to punish Harvard for resisting me. We're going to strip them of their tax exempt status. Is. Has the right really thought through the implications of this? Do they really want to live in a world where the president, ruling by fear and favor, could strip the tax exempt status of foundations, of nonprofit organizations, of churches that he disapproves of? Or are we just so much in the moment that nobody's thinking about the precedent that we're creating here? Because it's pretty dark whichever side of the political divide you're on.
- [33:20]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, well, I think that may be why we haven't seen the long rumored executive order yet targeting nonprofit profits and NGOs that all of people in that world have been bracing for in, in recent weeks, Charlie. But you know, Donald Trump, it's like he looks at Richard Nixon and all of the malfeasance that Nixon was accused of, and he says, oh, that's a playbook Rather than a list of things not to do, Trump, in some ways sees it almost as, you know, the aspirational goals for him in office. And I think, you know, somebody else said his goal is actually even bigger than that. It's. It's actually Trump's goal with this is to. To repeal the 20th century, which is a pretty great line. I wish I thought of it myself. But specifically on stuff like the threatening and the. The misuse of government institutions, I feel like, actually, Donald Trump might have gotten that from watching Richard Nixon. Although I would point out that the Nixon tapes only came out later. He was saying a lot of this stuff in private. It wasn't that he was going down into the White House press room and saying to the microphones, I'm gonna target Charlie Sykes and strip him of his tax exemption.
- [34:39]
Charlie Sykes
I mean, it is. If all of the Watergate tapes are now being played out in public, and imagine that there will be people, a generation of folks who grew up during the Trump era, who are going to read about Watergate and say, what was the problem? What was the issue there? So Richard Nixon went down because he was going to use the CIA to cover up various of his things. I mean, isn't that the President's power? Doesn't the President have complete control over the FBI? Shouldn't he be able to target his political opponents through the IRS and the FBI? It's the shattering of the norms. And again, the sort of the doppelganger effect is really, really amazing to me, including the fact that that was an era defined by media figures like Katie Graham from the Washington Post. Now our era is defined by her successor, Jeff Bezos, who's taken a very different approach. So all of those institutions that we counted on, I think, are still in play right now. And I think that's. That's the frightening thing. So what do you think the second hundred days is going to be like? The first hundred days was the shock and awfulness of it. But it strikes me that the second hundred days may actually be, in many ways, even more egregious, because all the pieces are in place now. They have the momentum, and they've seen how easily they can push through some of those norms, how much weakness there is in the opposition. Your sense?
- [36:10]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, that's right. Well, first of all, I do think that Richard Nixon's revenge will continue for longer. The revenge agenda knows no floor. Right. There is an enormous number of targets as far as those who are generating this kind of revenge agenda have. So I expect that to Go on. And there will be new enemies also. Donald Trump has a gift. As I said, he's a divider. But even where there isn't an enemy or fight, he will find one and pick one.
- [36:43]
Charlie Sykes
Right?
- [36:44]
Susan Glasser
So there will be new enemies who come from those who resist this new terms policies. And it won't just be about 2020 anymore. It will be about those who seek to hinder Donald Trump in 2025. So I would look for politicized court cases or IRS in audits of those on the enemies list. I saw the other day, Chris Krebs, who was targeted by an individual executive order. Again, this is remarkable stuff. The kind of stuff that in any other era we would call an outright abuse of executive power. An executive order targeted at an individual. Chris Krebs, who was head of the DHS agency charged with election monitoring. Trump hated him because he came out and publicly said essentially there were no major issues with the 2020 election. Not only has he targeted Chris, Krebs asked the Justice Department to consider prosecuting this individual. And one of the reasons specifically listed in the executive order is for the thought crime of not agreeing that the 2020 election was rigged. In addition, he, he noted the other day, Cubs went on TV and said, oh, and by the way, they canceled my global entry. You know, so there's nothing too petty. There's nothing too petty. You know, some of these orders to strip former Biden administration officials of their security clearances have also banned them from government buildings. I mean, you know, this is a level. So the revenge agenda is one. But I take your point about the second hundred days. I also agree that it's overly optimistic. Those who are talking about Pete Trump or that this was his high watermark and he's going to go down. I don't think so. Especially because when Trump is backed into a corner, when he does face resistance, we know what his response to that is. It's escalation. He's not a de escalator. He's an escalator. So to the extent that China wants to dig in on the trade war, you know, again, you may see escalation in certain ways. Now, the prospect of a full scale Trump recession, which is what we're looking at, yeah, that could cause a Trump climb down. But I think in order then to distract us from whatever climb down he's forced to do there, look for him to escalate on a whole variety or.
- [39:11]
Charlie Sykes
Pivot to something else that he's going to escalate on. I mean, that's what he's he's actually very good. Which raises the question, you know, what effect does his changing polls have on Donald Trump? He claims he's not running for reelection. He sometimes seems like he's all out of bleeps to give, pretends he doesn't care about the polls. He obviously does care about the polls. How will that affect, how will he respond if there is a recession and B, if his numbers continue to be in the tank? What does he do to change the narrative? And the interesting thing about him is that he's very, I think he surprises me every once in a while by being self aware, because that's not something I give him credit for. Where he does think of himself as a movie maker, somebody who is the executive producer, which means that if something's not working, we're going to come up with a different show or a different line, different plot line. So where does he go with that? Because you're right, he never puts his head down and says, yeah, I screwed up, right? He never backs away.
- [40:14]
Susan Glasser
No, of course, no. He's just going to switch to a different plot line. So, you know, maybe that's where the takeover of the Panama Canal comes in or the, you know, little green American man in Greenland comes in. I mean, you know, and I don't know if he will pursue either of those, although I would note that he has refused to rule out military action in either case, which is astonishing in and of itself.
- [40:38]
Charlie Sykes
Astonishing.
- [40:39]
Susan Glasser
But the point more broadly I think we do know, which is that he will change the subject. He will not back down to the extent that reality intrudes and he's forced to climb down, especially on any of these very disruptive economic and trade measures. You know, look for him to escalate on other fronts, look for him to distract on other fronts. And, you know, I think that's just a core principle of Trump that is not going to be dissuaded either by the so far relatively small decline in his approval ratings. People have made up their minds on the most polarizing political figure of any of our lifetimes in America. And so there's a very relatively small bandwidth in which change can occur in those approval ratings to begin with. You know, Donald Trump has always had a minority, but a very passionate minority of supporters in the country that has proved sufficient for him to win not one, but two presidential elections. And I also think that here in Washington, and I'm curious, you know, what it feels like outside the beltway. You know, people, despite the evidence, they still, maybe it's, you know, the triumph of hope over experience. But, you know, they still put an enormous and, in my view, an inordinate amount of faith into these slight changes in public opinion polling regarding Donald Trump. First of all, if he's not running for reelection again, and the Constitution says he can't, then who the hell cares, you know, if his approval ratings slip? That's a problem for Republicans on Capitol Hill, for his successors, and he doesn't really give a crap about them. So, you know, there's the lame duck factor that people aren't considering, and then there's the factor of it actually might make him more radicalized, not less. And look at his behavior after the 2018 midterm elections. Was he chastened by losing all those seats? No, he actually took some of his most disruptive steps as president. In the aftermath of that electoral repudiation.
- [42:58]
Charlie Sykes
In 2018, it's important for people to remember that this is absolutely, you know. Yes, absolutely. That the setbacks can lead to more radicalization by Trump.
- [43:12]
Susan Glasser
Do you think people in Wisconsin, for example, you know, are just waiting for the polls to come down as James Carville counsels, and thinking that things will change then?
- [43:23]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I think there's a lot of Hopium out there. I think that there's a massive cottage industry of people who sort of wallow in a certain amount of delusion about it. Despite the fact that we've been doing this for 10 years, like the walls are closing in. This is it. This is the turning point, and it never happens. What's different now is that it feels as if the chaos that was really sort of confined to Washington for most of Trump 1.0 until Covid, that the disruption is trickling out into the rest of the country and that there are real anxieties that are hitting people in different ways. Whether it's, you know, in the agricultural community where don't count on farmers turning against Donald Trump, but anxieties about how these cuts are going to affect people in their daily lives. And it is remarkable how declines in 401ks, if that happens, if there is a recession, we'll focus the mind. So those are. Those are different sorts of things. But I think Democrats have been sort of locked into this, the sense that, you know, that people will look at Donald Trump and be so completely horrified that we don't have to deal with our major internal problems, because surely the public will see how awful this is in turn to us at some point. I mean, wasn't this the thinking sort of of the Biden folks who Were, you know, keeping him under wraps, that, you know, we don't need to have a really strong, you know, positive candidate. We just need not to be Donald Trump. And that's failed two out of the three last presidential elections. And you would hope they would have learned their lesson by now. What do you think?
- [45:01]
Susan Glasser
Yeah, I mean, there's so much obviously to digest there about, you know, the Democrats and, you know, what, what does a new generation of leadership look like for them? In my view, it is actually about kind of generational change and leadership, much more so than I have to admit. Like, I hear we're in Washington and I tend to think that people in Washington, for some very good and understandable reasons, over prioritize the role of kind of policy and ideology in our electoral politics. And so, you know, sometimes I hear, okay, well, in this crisis, Democrats, we just, we need to write a new plan to address the middle class. And you know, I honestly, I'm a little allergic to that. And I hear it a lot, by the way, Charlie, including from some very prominent, very senior people in the Democratic Party. And I think mostly they have a people problem, a connection problem, a generational problem, a leadership problem, but it's probably not going to be fixed however you define the problem, and there are lots of different ways to define it, I don't see like a new five point plan as being the way to, to get at the heart of it, honestly.
- [46:21]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, that's absolutely true. I mean, you cannot deploy more whiteboards to solve this problem. We can't just have another seminar on these sorts of things. And I do think it's a matter of sort of values and attitudes because I think that a lot of people, you know, you know, out of, you know, in Wisconsin and other places want to know whether or not someone shares their values, whether they respect them, whether they look down on them. And the, you know, the tipping points for politics are very different than I think they perhaps used to be. I mean, I, you know, maybe it is still the economy, stupid, but trust me, the conversations I have, you could, we can spend 45 minutes running through everything that Donald Trump has done and then at the end of it, and by the way, this was very much the story of the presidential election. At the end of it, they'll come up with some culture issue, usually involving trans athletes, and say, yeah, but I can't vote for somebody who doesn't understand the difference between men and women or something like that. And all of the other issues are just like wiped away. And so at some point, you have to figure out a way to, you know, talk to people in a way that say, okay, we actually have this shared base of values. And by the way, let's talk about cringy. Was it Tim Walls who was giving that speech where he talked about, they picked me because I could. Was it code talk to white male, some jargon laded thing, you know, anyone, you know, to provide a permission structure? Anytime politicians begin talking about no code speak or permission structures, they're kind of telling on themselves, aren't they? Well, I'm not speaking that language.
- [48:03]
Susan Glasser
You know, I've been calling this for a while the problem of the Technocrats versus Godzilla, okay? And this, you know, essentially social science jargon substituting for, you know, real speak is, is. Is a version of the Technocrats versus Godzilla. And I think the Democrats have been certainly throughout the Obama era and the Biden era as well, the party of technocrats of, you know, responsible governance of people who really actually. And they have a base of support who likes that, by the way, but. But who, you know, like the PowerPoint people as opposed to the I'm going to, you know, rip your heart and lungs out people. And, you know, we're under invasion and we're going to, you know, shoot them up and knock them out people. And, you know, that appeals to raw, visceral emotion are not ones that Democrats have. Have cracked the code on in this very radically different communications era. And, you know, the lack of any response at all, never mind of an effective restaurant, but the lack of any response at all by the Kamala Harris campaign to that infamous transgender ad, you know, she's for they them is extraordinary. And I think in all the postmortems of the campaign, the thing that caught the single thing that caught my attention the most was the idea of the Harris campaign painstakingly focus grouping multiple different responses to that stupid ad and never putting her out there or any response at all because they decided, well, they just weren't effective. Well, I will tell you something that might have been effective, and we'll never know. But do you even know what her position was? Just because they. The Trump campaign found one clip of her, you know, responding to the ACLU back in the primary 19 of 2019. That doesn't mean that we know what her position was like. How come she didn't just look you and me in the eye and say, like, gee, America, number one, no, I don't support, you know, giving transgender surgery to, you know, violent criminal inmates. Number two, you know, stop listening to these crazy people when they're telling you that, you know, I'm going to be in favor of your sending your children to public school and then they come home with operations. That's some crazy thing that Donald Trump just said. Do you think I'm in favor of that? I'm not. It's crazy.
- [50:32]
Charlie Sykes
Well, think about.
- [50:35]
Susan Glasser
And even to this day, how come they can't just say, this is insane. You want to talk about trans issues? How many trans college athletes are there in America? You know, I've seen stories that say there are fewer than two dozen. Okay. @ the collegiate level. I would like to ask all of those voters who talk about this with you, Charlie, how it impacts their life in any way possible. It is the most extraordinary political marketing campaign of the culture war that I've seen.
- [51:11]
Charlie Sykes
Yes. And yet there was in the culture wars.
- [51:14]
Susan Glasser
Sorry, just to finish. In the culture wars around abortion for decades. Well, yeah, you know, millions and millions of women's lives are impacted by that effect. But we are talking in this instance about something that basically 0.000 whatever percent of Americans are affected by this.
- [51:34]
Charlie Sykes
Well, yes. And, and, and so it was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen that the Trump campaign spent $100 million on that one ad. And the, you know, as you were going through what she could have said about it, think about the decision making process in the mindset that prevented that from happening, that made that not happen. So, and again, for people saying, why do you keep talking about this? Well, because this was in many ways, this was the golden, the golden cudgel that Donald Trump used. And somehow you have to figure this out now. I understand there's also a school of thought that given the emergency that we're experiencing right now, you know, don't bash the Democrats, don't say anything about the Democrats. But here's a reminder that our politics are not, you know, up or down. It's not a referendum. It's a binary choice. And that unless the Democrats come up with a way to deal with and address their problems, MAGA will continue to win. These elections will continue, and even after. And what I worry about is that they will misread the. Once again, misread the midterms, because the Democrats are, I think, are going to do well in the midterms. But that does not mean that your future is David Hogg and aoc. That does not mean that you can, you know, shift to candidates who would not be able to be elected in any swing district in the United States of America. So that's that's my little preaching. Susan, thank you so much for your time and for, for being so patient with us. I appreciate it very, very much.
- [53:04]
Susan Glasser
Well, thank you, Charlie. It's really great to be with you. Thank you.
- [53:08]
Charlie Sykes
You can read all of Susan's well, you can read her weekly column, which is a must read in the New Yorker, her weekly column on life in Washington and the Political Scene podcast. And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary. You know why we do this? Because we need constant reminders. Easy.