The Political Scene | The New Yorker

American voters have elected a President with broadly, overtly authoritarian aims. It’s hardly the first time that the democratic process has brought an anti-democratic leader to power. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who both teach at Harvard, assert that we shouldn’t be shocked by the Presidential result. “It’s not up to voters to defend a democracy,” Levitsky says. “That’s asking far, far too much of voters, to cast their ballot on the basis of some set of abstract principles or procedures.” He adds, “With the exception of a handful of cases, voters never, ever—in any society, in any culture—prioritize democracy over all else. Individual voters worry about much more mundane things, as is their right. It is up to élites and institutions to protect democracy—not voters.” Levitsky and Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” during Donald Trump’s first Administration, but they argue that what’s ailing our democracy runs much deeper—and that it didn’t start with Trump. “We’re the only advanced, old, rich democracy that has faced the level of democratic backsliding that we’ve experienced. . . . So we need to kind of step back and say, ‘What has gone wrong here?’ If we don’t ask those kinds of hard questions, we’re going to continue to be in this roiling crisis,” Ziblatt says.

The second Trump Administration might dramatically reshape the foundations of the federal government for decades to come. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is reckoning with what could be interpreted as a generational rebuke of its platform and presentation. But is this the beginning of a mass political realignment in the United States? And how will politicians communicate their platforms in a world where the “attention economy” has so radically shifted? Author, political commentator, and MSNBC host Chris Hayes joins guest host Andrew Marantz for an election postmortem and to discuss where the Democrats go from here. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump, Reprised”  “The Tucker Carlson Road Show,” by Andrew Marantz “Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?,” by Andrew Marantz  “Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist,” by Andrew Marantz “Why Was It So Hard for the Democrats to Replace Biden,” by Andrew Marantz  Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

The Washington roundtable is joined by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, to discuss how Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sexual abuser, won both the Electoral College and the popular vote—a first for a Republican President since 2004. Democrats lost almost every swing state, even as abortion-rights ballot measures found favor in some conservative states. On this crossover episode with The New Yorker Radio Hour, they discuss Kamala Harris’s campaign, Trump’s overtly authoritarian rhetoric, and the American electorate’s rightward trajectory.  This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Revenge,” by Susan B. Glasser “2016 and 2024,” by Jelani Cobb “How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters,” by Kelefa Sanneh “The Reckoning of the Democratic Party,” by Jay Caspian Kang “How America Embraced Gender War,” by Jia Tolentino “Donald Trump’s Second Term Is Joe Biden’s Real Legacy,” by Isaac Chotiner To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Four years after refusing to accept defeat and encouraging a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Donald J. Trump has once again been elected President of the United States. The former President, who in the past year alone has been convicted of a felony and has survived two assassination attempts, campaigned largely on a platform of mass deportations, trade wars, and retribution for his detractors. On Tuesday, he secured the Presidency thanks to a surge of rural voters, high turnout among young men, and unprecedented gains with Black and Latino populations. What does a second Trump term mean for America? Clare Malone and Jay Caspian Kang, who’ve been covering the election for The New Yorker, join Tyler Foggatt to discuss how we got here, and the uncertain future of the Democratic Party. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Revenge,” by Susan B. Glasser The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War, by Charles Bethea What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?, by Jay Caspian Kang  Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

In recent weeks and months, dozens of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have come out against Donald Trump, declaring him a security threat, unfit for office, and, in some cases, a fascist. Way out in front of this movement was Liz Cheney. Up until 2021, she was the third-ranking Republican in Congress, but after the January 6th insurrection she voted to impeach Trump. She then served as vice-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. She must have expected it would cost her the midterms and her seat in Congress, which ended up being the case when Wyoming voters rejected her in 2022. Since then, Cheney has gone further, campaigning forcefully on behalf of Vice-President Harris. David Remnick spoke with Cheney last week at The New Yorker Festival, shortly after Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, blocked its planned endorsement of Harris. “It absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable, responsible adult, because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” Cheney told Remnick. “And I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post.”

The Washington Roundtable discusses the 2024 election with the historian Michael Beschloss, before a live audience at The New Yorker Festival, on October 26th. He calls this election a “turning point” as monumental as the election of 1860—on the eve of the Civil War—and that of 1940, when the U.S. was deciding whether to adopt or fight Fascism. “I think Donald Trump meets most of the parts of the definition of the word fascist,” Beschloss says. “You go through all of American history, and you cannot find another major party nominee who has promised to be dictator for a day, which we all know will not be only for a day.” But, if Trump does return to the White House, he adds, there is still hope that the rule of law, public protest, and the presence of state capitals free of federal domination will allow the U.S. to resist autocracy. This week’s reading: “Garbage Time at the 2024 Finish Line,” by Susan B. Glasser “Safeguarding the Pennsylvania Election,” by Eliza Griswold “The Fight Over Truth in a Blue-Collar Pennsylvania County,” by Clare Malone “Standing Up to Trump,” by David Remnick “The Trump Show Comes to Madison Square Garden,” by Andrew Marantz “The Obamas Campaign for Kamala Harris,” by Emily Witt “Trump’s Health, and Ours,” by Dhruv Khullar To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

At Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden this past weekend, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.” In the swing state of Pennsylvania, which is home to nearly half a million people of Puerto Rican descent, the fallout from Hinchcliffe’s offensive remarks threatens to shift the balance of the Latino electorate. The New Yorker contributing writer Geraldo Cadava joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the public response to the rally and why the Republican Party has appealed to Latino voters in recent years. “In all of the interviews of Latino Republicans that I’ve done over the past several years, they will point to real concerns they have about crime, safety, charter schools, immigration, the economy that they feel like the Democrats haven’t had an answer for,” Cadava says.  This week’s reading: “The Political Journey of a Top Latino Strategist for Trump,” by Geraldo Cadava “The Radio Station That Latino Voters Trust,” by Stephania Taladrid “Donald Trump and the F-Word,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Trump Show Comes to Madison Square Garden,” by Andrew Marantz “Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?,” by Nicolas Lemann  Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

In these final days of the Presidential campaign, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been getting in front of voters as much as she can. Given the polls showing shaky support among Black men, one man she absolutely had to talk to was Lenard McKelvey, much better known as Charlamagne tha God. As a co-host of the syndicated “Breakfast Club” morning radio show, Charlamagne has interviewed Presidential candidates such as Harris, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, as well as New York City’s embattled Mayor Eric Adams and many more. He tells David Remnick that he received death threats just for speaking with Harris—“legitimate threats, not . . . somebody talking crazy on social media. That’s just me having a conversation with her about the state of our society. So imagine what she actually gets.” Charlamagne believes firmly that the narrative of Harris losing Black support is overstated, or a polling fiction, but he agrees that the Democrats have a messaging problem. The author of a book titled “Get Honest or Die Lying,” Charlamagne says that the Party has shied away from widespread concerns about immigration and the economy, to its detriment. “I just want to see more honesty from Democrats. Like I always say, Republicans are more sincere about their lies than Democrats are about their truth!”

The Washington Roundtable discusses the avalanche of disinformation that has taken over the 2024 election cycle, including an A.I. video meant to slander Tim Walz and claims that the votes are rigged before they’re even counted. Will this torrent of lies tip the election in favor of Donald Trump? Is there a way out of this morass of untruth? “I think the lies are clearly winning,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “But I would also say that that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the tools that are available.” Osnos notes recent defamation rulings against Rudy Giuliani and Fox News over false statements about the 2020 election as cases in point.  This week’s reading: “Donald Trump and the F-Word,” by Susan B. Glasser “Can Older Americans Swing the Election for Harris?,” by Bill McKibben “What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?,” by Jay Caspian Kang “Door-Knocking in Door County,” by Emily Witt “What Would Donald Trump Do to the Economy?,” by John Cassidy “The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s Sorority,” by Jazmine Hughes To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Since Donald Trump tried to challenge the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee has been hard at work building a network of poll watchers to observe ballot counting in counties across America. The program could help Trump and the R.N.C. challenge the results of the 2024 election should Trump lose, while also driving turnout among Republican voters who are skeptical of election integrity in the U.S. The New Yorker contributing writer Antonia Hitchens joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the R.N.C.’s poll-watching efforts may come into play on November 5th and beyond.  This week’s reading: “The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference,” by David Kirkpatrick “The Election-Interference Merry-Go-Round,” by Jon Allsop To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins in November, it will likely be on the strength of the pro-choice vote, which has been turning out strongly in recent elections. Her statements and choices on the campaign trail couldn’t stand in starker relief against those of Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, who recently called for defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Harris “is the first sitting Vice-President or President to come to a Planned Parenthood health center, to come to an abortion clinic, and really understand the conversations that have been happening on the ground,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president and C.E.O., tells David Remnick. The organization is spending upward of forty million dollars in this election to try to secure abortion rights in Congress and in the White House. A second Trump term, she speculates, could bring a ban on mifepristone and a “pregnancy czar” overseeing women in a federal Department of Life. “Is that scary enough for you?” Johnson asks.

The Washington Roundtable discusses the ultra-rich figures, such as Elon Musk, who are donating staggeringly large sums of money to Donald Trump’s campaign. Susan B. Glasser’s recent piece examines what these prominent donors may expect to get in return for their support.“You’ve now got oligarchs who have a sense of impunity,” Jane Mayer says. “There are no limits to how much they can give and how much power they can get.” Plus, how Trump’s fund-raising figures compare to those of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has raised one billion dollars since launching her Presidential campaign..   This week’s reading: “How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again,” by Susan B. Glasser “Can the Women of the Philadelphia Suburbs Save the Democrats Again?” by Eliza Griswold “What the Closeness of This Election Suggests About the Future of American Politics,” by Isaac Chotiner “What the Polls Really Say About Black Men’s Support for Kamala Harris,” by Jelani Cobb Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Jessica Pishko, who recently published a piece about the devastation left behind by Hurricane Helene, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss conspiracy theories that have emerged in the storm’s wake. On social media, people have falsely claimed, among other things, that the federal government has diverted disaster funding to migrants and that FEMA has seized peoples land. In a battleground state such as North Carolina, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, has been mired in scandal, what do the confusion and conspiracies mean for the upcoming Presidential election?  This week’s reading: “Will Mark Robinson Derail Trump’s Chances in North Carolina?,” by Peter Slevin “Outrage And Paranoia After Hurricane Helene,” by Jessica Pishko Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, ‘We’re going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country.’ ”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the final stretch of Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign, including a recent media blitz on podcasts and television shows. The Vice-President has never been entirely comfortable with the interview format. “She doesn’t ruminate and reflect,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “I think it’s the self-protection that comes with being aware of people who are always going to doubt her capacity to make history.”  Osnos’s deeply reported profile of Vice-President Kamala Harris, “Kamala Harris's Hundred-Day Campaign,” has just been published. Plus, the panel deconstructs the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” about Donald Trump’s relationship with the Russian President Vladimir Putin. This episode was updated after the publication of Osnos’s piece on the Harris campaign. This week’s reading: “The Harris-Trump Endgame Is On: Is It Time to Panic Yet?,” by Susan B. Glasser “How Podcasts Are Transforming the Presidential Election,” by Brady Brickner-Wood ““The Apprentice,” Reviewed: The Immoral Makings of Donald Trump,” by Richard Brody “Has the Presidential Election Become a Game of Random Chance?,” by Jay Caspian Kang “J. D. Vance and the Success Stories of Bidenomics,” by John Cassidy To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

With the U.S. Presidential election less than a month away, and the war in Gaza now ongoing for a full year, the group of voters who are “uncommitted” to a candidate remains a wild card. Thousands of Democratic voters say that they will not vote for Kamala Harris because of her support for Israel’s war effort. The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the potential impact of such protest voters. “If you’re antiwar . . . it can actually be really hard to figure out who represents your interests, if anyone,” Marantz says. “That’s the kind of information vacuum, the kind of ambiguity, that Trump thrives in.” This week’s reading: “Reporting on Democratic Rifts in Michigan,” by Andrew Marantz “Among The Gaza Protest Voters,” by Andrew Marantz  “The Gaza We Leave Behind,” by Mosab Abu Toha  “A Year After October 7th, a Kibbutz Survives,” by Ruth Margalit  “Why Netanyahu Won’t Cease Fire,” by Bernard Avishai To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Long before Donald Trump got serious about politics, Newt Gingrich saw himself as the revolutionary in Washington, introducing a combative style of politics that helped his party become a dominating force in Congress. Setting the template for Trump, Gingrich described Democrats not as an opposing team with whom to make alliances but as an alien force—a “cultural élite”—out to destroy America. Gingrich has written no fewer than five admiring books about Trump, and he was involved in pushing the lie of the stolen election of 2020. Like many in the Party, he balks at some of Trump’s tactics, but always finds an excuse. “I would probably not have used the language Trump used,” for example in calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled,” Gingrich says. “Partly because I think that it doesn’t further his cause. . . . I would simply say that he is a very intense personality . . . and occasionally he has to explode.” But he sees Trump as seasoned and improved with age, and his potential in a second term far greater. “It’s almost providential: he’s had four years [out of office] to think about what he’s learned . . . and he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it.”

The Washington Roundtable is joined by the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, Ben Wikler, to discuss ground operations for Kamala Harris in the key battleground state, and why he thinks the Trump campaign is falling behind when it comes to reaching voters in person, despite the financial support of Elon Musk and other big donors. “I was just on the phone with the chair of Oneida County, in Northern Wisconsin, and we’re seeing crickets,” Wikler says of G.O.P. outreach. Still, he sees the state of the race in Wisconsin as “super, super, super, super tight.” This week’s reading: “J. D. Vance and the Failed Effort to Memory-Hole January 6th,” by Susan B. Glasser “It Could All Depend on Arizona,” by Rachel Monroe “Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?,” by Eyal Press “J. D. Vance Got the Conversation He Wanted at the Vice-Presidential Debate,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells  Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The first and only Vice-Presidential Debate of the 2024 campaign was mostly cordial, but J. D. Vance's smooth performance tried to soften the sharper edges of Trumpism in a conversation that stretched from climate policy to child care, gun control, the Middle East, and January 6th. However, with polls tightening and barely a month till Election Day, can Vance’s efforts compensate for Donald Trump’s poor debate with Kamala Harris, last month? The New Yorker staff writers Clare Malone and Vinson Cunningham sit down with Tyler Foggatt to recap the Vice-Presidential debate and consider its potential impact on what may be the closest election in decades.  This week’s reading: “Live Updates: The 2024 Vice-Presidential Debate Between Tim Walz and J. D. Vance” by New Yorker Staff Writers Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Actors and comedians have usually played Donald Trump as larger than life, almost as a cartoon. In the new film “The Apprentice,” Sebastian Stan doesn’t play for laughs. He stars as a very young Trump falling under the sway of Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong)— the notorious, amoral lawyer and fixer.  “Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing when Donald was a nobody from the outer boroughs,” the film’s writer and executive producer Gabriel Sherman tells David Remnick. He “taught him the dark arts of power brokering … [and] introduced him to New York society.” Sherman, a contributing editor to New York magazine, also chronicled Roger Ailes’s rise to power at Fox News in “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” Sherman insists, though, that the film is not anti-Trump—or not exactly. “The movie got cast into this political left-right schema, and it’s not that. It’s a humanist work of drama,” in which the protégé eventually betrays his mentor. It almost goes without saying that Donald Trump has threatened to sue the producers of the film, and the major Hollywood studios wouldn’t touch it.  Sherman talks with Remnick about how the film, which opens October 11th, came to be.

Recent polls suggest that American men and women are more divided over the 2024 election than they were in 2016, when Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton. The Washington Roundtable discusses the split with the independent Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who identifies causes that go beyond the issue of abortion. As for how Kamala Harris can win over blue-collar women who might be leaning toward Trump, “we have a program,” she says. This week’s reading: “Trump Is Not Pivoting to Policy, Now or Ever,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Fantasy World of Political Polling,” by Jay Caspian Kang “Is There a Method to Donald Trump’s Madness?,” by Clare Malone “How Powerful Is Political Charm?,” by Joshua Rothman “Donald Trump’s Many Lucky Breaks,” by John Cassidy Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The Political Scene brings you a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” hosted by the special correspondent Brian Stelter. The Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis and the Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman join Stelter to discuss the Trump campaign's strategy of courting so-called podcast bros,  including the comedian Theo Von and the Twitch streamer Adin Ross. Both have provided Trump with some of the most viral moments of the 2024 campaign, and helped him reach a young, male audience whose support he may need in order to win in November. The strategy carries risks, however, as we’ve seen in the case of Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, whose past media appearances have come back to haunt him. “They do kind of lure people into this . . . confessional, chatty mode,” Lewis says of the bro podcasts. “And I think that's why maybe they could become quite dangerous. . . . Politicians might not realize how that might look in the cold light of day to other people.” This episode originally aired on September 12th. To discover more from “Inside the Hive” and other Vanity Fair podcasts, visit vanityfair.com/podcasts.

Since the war in Ukraine began, the historian Timothy Snyder has made several trips to Ukraine, and it was there that he wrote parts of his newest book, “On Freedom.” The author of “Bloodlands” and “On Tyranny,” Snyder spoke in Ukrainian with soldiers, farmers, journalists, and politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky.  He talks with David Remnick about the Ukrainian conviction that they can win the war, and the historical trends that support that conviction.  But the thrust of Snyder’s new book is to apply what he learned from them to larger principles that apply to our own country.  In areas taken back from Russian control, Ukrainians would tell Snyder they were “de-occupied,” rather than liberated; “freedom,” he writes, “is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.” “If you think that freedom is just negative,” Snyder told David Remnick, “if you think that freedom is just an absence of [evil] things, I think you then argue yourself into a position where given the absence, stuff is going to work out. … The market is going to deliver you freedom, or the founding fathers … something else is going to deliver you freedom. And that of course is wrong. It’s an essentially authoritarian conviction. Because if anyone’s going to deliver you freedom, it’s going to be you, in some way.”

Last week, New York City’s police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned after a federal corruption probe. Shortly after, Mayor Eric Adams’s chief legal adviser also stepped down. But, despite the scandals, Adams remains in contention for reëlection in 2025. “The job of Mayor of New York is a big job,” Eric Lach says. “But it’s also attached to a political system that is insular and small.” Tyler Foggatt sits down with the New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach to parse the scandals and to preview the upcoming mayoral election. This week’s reading: “Could Eric Adams Lose Next Year?” by Eric Lach “What Kind of Trouble Is Eric Adams In?” by Eric Lach To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

In 2024, all eyes are on Pennsylvania: its nineteen electoral votes make it the largest swing state, and it’s considered a critical battleground for either  or  to win the White House. For many years, Pennsylvania trended slightly blue, but the state has become deeply purple—with a divided state House and a series of razor-thin margins in general elections. One notable exception to this was the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race. The Democrat Josh Shapiro won by almost fifteen points against a Trump-aligned Republican, and his approval ratings in the state remain high. “To win in Pennsylvania, you’re not winning with only Democrats,” Shapiro told David Remnick. “You’ve got to get like-minded Independents and Republicans.” Shapiro was on the shortlist of candidates for Harris’s pick for Vice-President—which may be the cause of attacks from Donald Trump, including one calling him an “overrated Jewish governor.” He spoke with Remnick to talk about Harris’s  of Minnesota’s governor, , as her running mate, and what it takes for a Democrat to win Pennsylvania. “We’re a big state, but we’re still a retail state,” Shapiro said, “meaning you got to show up!”

The Washington Roundtable is joined by George Conway, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and creator of the Anti-Psychopath Political Action Committee, both of which specialize in making custom attack ads designed to aggravate Donald Trump. They discuss Vice-President Kamala Harris’s debate performance and how her campaign might continue to draw out Trump’s worst instincts by psychologically triggering him. “When we first started running ads, he went on Truth Social and specifically attacked me and Fox News for putting my ads on his TV,” Conway says. “The thing got into his head. . . . He would never have talked about himself possibly having a ‘personality defect’ if it weren’t for what we had said.” This week’s reading: “Donald Trump Had a Really, Really Bad Debate,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Presidential Campaign, After Philadelphia,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “Kamala Harris Makes Her Case Beyond Big Cities,” by Emily Witt “Donald Trump’s New ‘Voodoo Economics,’ ” by John Cassidy Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Kamala Harris successfully prosecuted a case against Donald Trump on issues ranging from abortion to the January 6th insurrection at last night’s debate in Philadelphia. How will that fare with voters against Trump’s “fan service” recitation of Internet conspiracies? Tyler Foggatt sits down with the New Yorker staff writers Clare Malone and Vinson Cunningham to examine each candidate’s performance, along with a surprise Taylor Swift endorsement for Harris, and what it means with less than two months until Election Day.  Share your thoughts on The Political Scene. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2

Of the sixty-five lawsuits that Donald Trump’s team filed in the 2020 election, Democrats won sixty-four—with the attorney Marc Elias spearheading the majority.  Elias was so successful that Steve Bannon speaks of him with admiration.  Now Marc Elias is working for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and, despite his past victories, Elias says that 2024 is keeping him up at night.  The bizarre antics and conspiracy theories of Rudy Giuliani are a thing of the past, Elias tells David Remnick: “We should all expect that they are more competent than they were before. And also Donald Trump is more desperate than he was before. … He faces the prospect of four criminal indictments, two of which are in federal court.” Election-denying officials are now in power in many swing states; Trump has publicly praised his allies on state election boards.  Elias fears the assault on the democratic process could be much more effective this time.  Still, some things don’t change. “I believe Donald Trump is going to say after Election Day in 2024 that he won all fifty states—that there’s no state he didn’t win,” Elias says. “That is just the pathology that is Donald Trump.”

The Washington Roundtable revisits Vice-President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s past debate performances and considers how the candidates might approach next week’s showdown. “Trump doesn’t do subdued self-defense,” Evan Osnos says. “He’ll come back furious and basically do a lot of the work for [Harris] of showing, to borrow one of his favorite adjectives, what a ‘nasty’ guy he is. I think that could be pretty effective for her.” Plus, where the fund-raising race stands with Election Day only two months away. This week’s reading: “Can Red-Baiting Save Trump’s Flailing Campaign?,” by Susan B. Glasser “How Kamala Harris’s Coalition Changes the Race for Congress,” by Isaac Chotiner “Do Celebrity Presidential Endorsements Matter?,” by Tyler Foggatt To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

How has a phrase that just a decade ago had a narrow, technical definition come to essentially represent anything political that we don’t like? Jon Allsop, who writes Columbia Journalism Review’s daily newsletter and contributed this week to The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how “election interference” has become a ubiquitous term and what that indicates about the future of American political discourse. “It’s a project that is designed to insulate candidates against losing, whether they actually lose or not,” Allsop said.

In fiction and nonfiction, the author Danzy Senna focusses on the experience of being biracial in a nation long obsessed with color lines. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President, some of Senna’s concerns have come to the fore in political life. Donald Trump attacked Harris as a kind of race manipulator, implying that she had been Indian American before becoming Black for strategic purposes.  The claim was bizarre and false, but Senna feels that it reflected a mind-set in white America. “Mixed-race people are sort of up for debate and speculation, and there’s a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters, not what your background is or your identity,” she tells Julian Lucas, who wrote about Senna’s work in The New Yorker.  “And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we’re going to debate you and we’re going to discount you and we’re going to accuse you of being an impostor.”  Senna talks about why she describes people like herself and Lucas using the old word “mulatto,” despite its racist etymology. “The word ‘biracial’ or ‘multiracial’ to me is completely meaningless,” she says, “because I don’t know which races were mixing.  And those things matter when we’re talking about identity.”  Senna’s newest novel, “Colored Television,” follows a literary writer somewhat like herself, trying to find a new career in the more lucrative world of TV.

The New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry joins Tyler Foggatt to unpack Kamala Harris’s cultural blitzkrieg and how a litany of A-list celebrities and online influencers have helped revitalize the Presidential race. “It’s like the scene in ‘Pulp Fiction’ or something, where Uma Thurman overdoses and then has the adrenaline shot into her heart,” Fry said. To what degree can a candidate turn “being cool” into a winning strategy? This week’s reading: “What Kamala Harris May Have to Do Next,” by Jay Caspian Kang “Kamala Harris’s Youth-Vote Turnaround,” by E. Tammy Kim “The Kamala Show,” by Vinson Cunningham To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

The Washington Roundtable discusses the highs and lows of the Democratic National Convention and Vice-President Kamala Harris’s rousing acceptance speech, with Evan Osnos and Susan B. Glasser reporting from Chicago. Plus, behind-the-scenes moments from the “festival atmosphere” for delegates, donors, and influencers, at the United Center.  This week’s reading: “The Speech of Kamala Harris’s Lifetime,” by Susan B. Glasser “Proud and Impassioned, Joe Biden Passes the Torch at the D.N.C.,” by Evan Osnos “Kamala Harris’s ‘Freedom’ Campaign,” by Peter Slevin “Why Was It So Hard for the Democrats to Replace Biden?,” by Andrew Marantz “The Democratic Party Rebrands Itself Before Viewers’ Eyes,” by Emily Witt “Can Kamala Harris’s Campaign Solve the Latino Turnout Problem?,” by Geraldo Cadava “How the Harris Campaign Beat Trump at Being Online,” by Kyle Chayka “What Kamala Harris May Have to Do Next,” by Jay Caspian Kang Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the sights, sounds, and broader implications of the Democratic National Convention. Marantz describes a convention defined by feelings of unity and a profound sense of relief among party insiders. Plus, they reflect on the D.N.C.’s use of what Marantz describes as “cringe-millennial” culture. This week’s reading: Proud and Impassioned, Joe Biden Passes the Torch at the D.N.C., by Evan Osnos. The Obamas’ Rousingly Pragmatic Call to Action at the D.N.C., by Vinson Cunningham To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Despite a surge of enthusiasm for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, the 2024 race remains extremely competitive. And one factor very much in Donald Trump’s favor is an increased share of support from Latino voters. Anti-immigrant messaging from Trump and the Republican Party has not turned off Latino voters; he won a higher percentage of Latino voters in 2020 than in 2016, and he was roughly tied with President Biden at the time Biden stepped out of the race in July. Geraldo Cadava, the author of “The Hispanic Republican,” wrote about the Republicans’ strategy for The New Yorker. He spoke with prominent Latino Trump supporters about why the message is resonating, and how they feel about all the signs reading “Mass Deportation Now.

The Washington Roundtable discusses the surge of enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign among Democrats in relation to Bill Clinton’s bid for the White House in 1992. They’re joined by the Democratic strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, whose work as architects of that Clinton campaign was portrayed in the 1993 documentary “The War Room.” Plus, a look ahead at next week’s Democratic National Convention. This week’s reading: “Kamala Harris’s Best Campaign Surrogate Is Donald Trump,” by Susan B. Glasser “Tim Walz and the Lessons of High-School Football,” by Louisa Thomas “Kamala Harris’s Youth-Vote Turnaround,” by E. Tammy Kim To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Elon Musk has once again found himself at the center of a geopolitical dustup—this time in Venezuela, where strongman Nicolas Maduro has accused Musk of hacking the nation’s electoral council. Although the allegations are unsubstantiated, Maduro’s worries about Musk meddling in the affairs of other countries “are not without foundation,” Anderson writes. His latest piece, “Elon Musk’s Surging Political Activism,” explores Musk’s metamorphosis into a geopolitical power broker.  This week’s reading: “Elon Musk’s Surging Political Activism,” by Jon Lee

Nancy Pelosi, who represents California’s Eleventh Congressional District, led the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives for so long, and so effectively, that one forgets she was also the first woman to hold the job. Her stewardship of consequential legislation—including the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—during her eight years as Speaker is legendary. And Pelosi has wielded tremendous influence this election cycle: she seems to have been instrumental in persuading President Biden to withdraw from the campaign in place of a new Democratic candidate. After years of friendship with Biden, it wasn’t easy, she tells David Remnick, who asks, “You think your relationship will be there?” “I hope so,” Pelosi admits. “I pray so. I cry so. I lose sleep on it.” After stepping away from Democratic leadership herself, in 2023, she wrote a book with a short and apt title: “The Art of Power.”  Pelosi speaks to Remnick about the importance of having a strong mission undergirding the skills of political gamesmanship. “This is not for the faint of heart,” she says. “This is tough. If you know your ‘why,’ the slings and arrows are worth it. If you don’t know your ‘why,’ don’t even do this. . . . You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the addition of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to the Democratic ticket and Donald Trump’s erratic response at a press conference on Thursday. “Walz has scrambled the circuits for Trump because he’s not easy to pigeonhole,” Osnos says. “He’s not what Trump imagines, in his comic-book way, of what a progressive looks like.” Plus, the campaigns’ strategies in the battleground states and what it will take to win key states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania.  This week’s reading: “Does Anyone in America Miss Joe Biden as Much as Donald Trump?” by Susan B. Glasser “How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be?” by Jay Caspian Kang “How Kamala Harris Became Bigger than Donald Trump,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “What Tim Walz Brings to Kamala Harris’s Campaign to Beat Donald Trump,” by Peter Slevin “ ‘Weird’ Is a Rebuke to Republican Dominance Politics,” by Katy Waldman “What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?,” by Clare Malone To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Israel has occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River since 1967, after the third Arab-Israeli war, and ever since Israelis have settled on more and more of this contested land. Violence by armed settlers against their Palestinian neighbors has increased dramatically in recent years, as a far-right government came to dominate Israeli politics. Unless things change, the American journalist Nathan Thrall tells David Remnick, the future for Palestinians is “not unlike that of the Native Americans.” Thrall won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” which uses one isolated incident—a road accident in the West Bank—to illustrate the ways in which life under occupation has become nearly unlivable for Palestinians. On July 19th, the United Nations’ International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling that the occupation violates international law. While the world’s attention is focussed on the devastating war in Gaza, and the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the occupation of the West Bank remains a fundamental challenge for any peaceful resolution.  Remnick also speaks with the Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh, a longtime advocate for peace with Israel who lives in Ramallah. Palestinians “are, in a sense, living under a different law than the law of the settlements. And so the settlers are going to be part of Israel, and the laws of Israel apply to them—and that's annexation—but not to us. There will be two communities living side by side, each subject to different laws, and that’s entirely apartheid.” Shehadeh’s new book is titled “What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?” He argues that, as much as a concern for their security, many Israelis refuse to contemplate a two-state solution because recognizing Palestinians’ claims to nationhood challenges Israel’s national story.   Although Thrall believes that any false hope about an end to the conflict is damaging, he acknowledges that U.S. sanctions on violent settlers is a meaningful step, and Shehadeh sees the I.C.J.’s ruling as a new degree of global pressure. “That could bring about the end of the era of impunity of Israel,” Shehadeh believes. “And that can make a big difference.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the fiery advertising war between Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. They are joined by Jennifer Lawless, the chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia and the author of “Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era.” Plus, how memes and social media have boosted the Harris campaign. “The Harris campaign will have a couple of uplifting, very positive ads, especially when they announce who the V.P. will be,” Professor Jennifer Lawless says. “But my bet is that this will be a race to the bottom in terms of negativity.”  This week’s reading: “Trump’s Racist Attack on Kamala Harris Was No Accident,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Politics of ‘Weird’,” by Jay Caspian Kang “Does Kamala Harris Need a Latino Campaign?,” by Geraldo Cadava To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

As J. D. Vance faces a bumpy public reception on the Trump ticket and Kamala Harris considers her options for a running mate, the New Yorker staff writers Amy Davidson Sorkin and Benjamin Wallace-Wells join Tyler Foggatt to discuss all things Vice-Presidential. In a race as short and tight as this one, what is each campaign communicating with its choice? This week’s reading: “Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?” by Amy Davidson Sorkin “J. D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family,” by Jessica Winter “J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion,” by Paul Elie To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Today, we're bringing you a special preview of the new season of the New Yorker investigative podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. The series examines the killings of twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, and asks why no one was held accountable for the crime. In Episode 1, a man in Haditha, Iraq, has a request for the In the Dark team: Can you investigate how my family was killed? In the Dark is available wherever you get your podcasts.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the start of Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign and the surge of excitement among Democrats on the Internet and at rallies. Plus, who might be her running mate and how Republicans plan to launch “racist, misogynist” attacks against her.  This week’s reading: “Biden’s Exit, Harris’s Moment,” by Susan B. Glasser “Why Did Progressive Democrats Support Joe Biden?,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor “Kamala Harris Should Tell Her Family’s Story,” by Jay Caspian Kang “J. D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family,” by Jessica Winter “Was Biden’s Decision to Withdraw ‘Heroic’?” by Isaac Chotiner “Kamala Harris, the Candidate,” by Doreen St. Félix “Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?” by Amy Davidson Sorkin “J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion,” by Paul Elie To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writers and cultural critics Doreen St. Félix and Vinson Cunningham join Tyler Foggatt to discuss Kamala Harris’s sudden ascendence to the top of the Democratic ticket. How might her gender, race, and long political career from prosecutor to Vice-President shape the campaign ahead? “In a weird way, I think that she can run against both Trump and, implicitly, very subtly, against Biden, too,” Cunningham says. “I think her strongest way to code herself is: we're finally turning the page.”  This week’s reading: “Kamala Harris, the Candidate,” by Doreen St. Félix “A Mood of Optimism at Kamala Harris’s First Campaign Stop,” by Emily Witt “Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Biden’s stunning exit from the 2024 Presidential election and his endorsement for Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic ticket. How could this new matchup change the terms of the race, now that Biden’s age is no longer a key issue? This week’s reading: “Joe Biden’s Act of Selflessness,” by Evan Osnos “Joe Biden Leaves the Stage,” by Adam Gopnik “Where Do Republicans and Democrats Stand After the R.N.C.?” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “The Spectacle of Donald Trump’s R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens, photography by Sinna Nasseri To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss takeaways from the Republican National Convention, which Glasser reports had the feeling of “a very polite Midwestern cult meeting.” Plus, Donald Trump's selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate and the mounting pressure for President Biden to drop out of the race. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Second Coming,” by Susan B. Glasser “Doctors Are Increasingly Worried About Biden,” by Dhruv Khullar “The Rise of the New Right at the Republican National Convention,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “Are We Already Moving On from the Assassination Attempt on Trump?” by Jay Caspian Kang “The Paralysis of the Democratic Party,” by Isaac Chotiner “Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “Bernie Sanders Wants Joe Biden to Stay in the Race,” by Isaac Chotiner “Trump, Unity, and MAGA Miracles at the R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker contributing writer Antonia Hitchens calls Tyler Foggatt from Milwaukee to offer some details and observations from the first night of the Republican National Convention, at which Donald Trump was formally nominated to be the G.O.P.’s 2024 Presidential nominee. An assassination attempt on the former President over the weekend only heightened the messianic feeling that surrounds Trump, and gave a strange poignancy to the anointing of J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate and the potential next leader of the MAGA movement, Hitchens says.  This week’s reading: “Trump, Unity, and MAGA Miracles at the R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens “A Nation Inflamed,” by David Remnick “Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

The panic that gripped Democrats during and after President Biden’s performance in the June debate against Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. In January of last year, the Radio Hour produced an episode about President Biden’s age, and the concerns that voters were already expressing. But no nationally prominent Democratic politician was willing to challenge Biden in the primaries. After the debate, Julián Castro was one of the first prominent Democrats to say that Biden should withdraw from the race, and he went on to tell MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that potential Democratic rivals and even staffers “got the message” that their careers would be “blackballed” if they challenged him. Castro—who came up as the mayor of San Antonio, and then served as President Obama’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development—ran against Biden in the Presidential primary for the 2020 election. He talks with David Remnick about how we got here, and what the Democratic Party should have done differently.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Joe Biden’s struggle to retain voters’ confidence in his bid for reëlection and his animosity toward the “élites” he says are insisting that he step down. Plus, Donald Trump’s campaign strategy amid Democratic turmoil and ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “The problem is the meta-narrative, which seems to be centered on: Will Biden faceplant or won’t he?,” Jane Mayer says. “And, so long as that’s the narrative, the narrative is not on Donald Trump and the threat to democracy that he poses.” This week’s reading: “Joe Biden’s Less-Than-Awful Press Conference Does Not Mean Everything Is Now O.K.,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Controlled Normalcy of Kamala Harris’s Trip to Las Vegas,” by Antonia Hitchens “A Congressional Democrat Explains Why He’s Standing with Biden,” by Isaac Chotiner “Joe Biden’s Cynical Turn Against the Press,” by Jay Caspian Kang  “Joe Biden Is Fighting Back—but Not Against Trump, Really,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker contributor and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a once obscure constitutional provision that allows Cabinet members to remove an unfit President from office. Gersen believes it’s time to use it on Biden. “The Twenty-fifth amendment was designed for a situation in which the President may not recognize his own impairment,” she says.     This week’s reading: “This Is What the Twenty-fifth Amendment Was Designed For,” by Jeannie Suk Gersen “The Reckoning of Joe Biden,” by David Remnick “Joe Biden Is Fighting Back—but Not Against Trump, Really,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Many Democrats saw John Fetterman as a progressive beacon: a Rust Belt Bernie Sanders who—with his shaved head, his hoodie, and the Zip Code of Braddock, Pennsylvania—could rally working-class white voters to the Democratic Party. But at least on one issue, Fetterman is veering away from the left of his party, and even from centrists like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Israel’s war in Gaza. Fetterman has taken a line that is not just sympathetic to Israel after the October 7th attack by Hamas; he seems to justify the civilian death toll Israel has inflicted on Gaza. “When you have that kind of an evil, or that kind of a movement that came out of a society,” he told Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed. . . . that’s why Atlanta had to burn.” Wallace-Wells shares excerpts from his interviews with Fetterman in a conversation with David Remnick, and they discuss how Fetterman’s support for Israel is driving a wedge among Pennsylvania voters, who will be critical to the outcome of the Presidential election.

With the New Yorker office closed for the July 4th holiday, The Political Scene brings you a recent episode from Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” hosted by the special correspondent Brian Stelter. Tina Nguyen, a national correspondent for Puck, and the Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, a national political reporter, join Stelter to discuss how Steve Bannon helped rehabilitate Donald Trump among Republicans after January 6th. Bannon’s popular “War Room” podcast has been galvanizing the far right at the local and national level, and his four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress could actually burnish his bona fides with the base. “It’s amazing clout,” Nyugen says of Bannon’s prison sentence, “for someone in the MAGA world, in these MAGA times, with a MAGA audience.” This episode originally aired on June 20th, 2024. To discover more from “Inside the Hive” and other Vanity Fair podcasts, visit vanityfair.com/podcasts.

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can’t wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what’s still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Joe Biden’s flubs, and Donald Trump’s lies, in the first Presidential debate. Plus, how American politics arrived at this point and what is next for the Democratic Party.  This week’s reading: “Was the Debate the Beginning of the End of Joe Biden’s Presidency?” by Susan B. Glasser “The Writing on Joe Biden’s Face at the Presidential Debate,” by Vinson Cunningham “Do the Democrats Have a Gen Z Problem?” by E. Tammy Kim “Some Faint and Likely Temporary Relief on Abortion Rights,” by Jessica Winter To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writer Amy Davidson Sorkin joins Tyler Foggatt to examine the biggest Supreme Court decisions of the year—those already decided and those yet to come. They discuss the Court’s attempt to moderate its radical rulings on guns and abortion, its politicized selection of which cases to hear, and its influence on the 2024 election.  This week’s reading: “The Supreme Court Steps Back from the Brink on Guns,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin “Yet More Donald Trump Cases Head to the Supreme Court,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Kevin Costner has been a leading man for more than forty years and has starred in all different genres of movies, but a constant in his filmography is the Western. One of his first big roles was in “Silverado,” alongside Kevin Kline and Danny Glover; he directed “Dances with Wolves,” which won seven Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture; more recently, Costner starred as the rancher John Dutton in the enormously successful “Yellowstone.” Perhaps no actor since Clint Eastwood is more associated with the genre. Throughout his career, Costner has also been working on a project called “Horizon: An American Saga.” Too lengthy and expensive for studios (Costner put up tens of millions of dollars to fund it), “Horizon” evolved over decades into a series of four films about the founding of a town in the West. Part 1, which involves the destruction wrought on Native communities by white settlement, comes out next week. While the politics of the genre have evolved, “there were certain dilemmas that [Westerns] established,” he tells David Remnick, that were timeless. “They talked to me about character and just as important, lack of character.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss whether the debate  will affect the outcome of the November election. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is the author of “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” joins the conversation to look at what the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate can tell us about the upcoming event. This week’s reading: “Project Trump, Global Edition,” by Susan B. Glasser “Biden Is the Candidate Who Stands for Change in This Election,” by James Lardner “Trump’s Brazen Pact with the One Per Cent,” by John Cassidy “The American Election That Set the Stage for Trump,” by Isaac Chotiner To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone joins Tyler Foggatt to analyze how President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are being skewered on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. She discusses our shifting media habits, why the 2016 election is surfacing in new contexts online, and how both campaigns are relying on algorithms to gain momentum ahead of November. This episode originally aired on January 31, 2024.  This week’s reading: “The Meme-ification of American Politics,” by Clare Malone  “What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes,” by Daniel Immerwahr To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

On July 4th—while the U.S. celebrates its break from Britain—voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls and, according to all predictions, oust the current government. The Conservative Party has been in power for fourteen years, presiding over serious economic decline and widespread discontent. The narrow, contentious referendum to break away from the European Union, sixty per cent of Britons now think, was a mistake. Yet the Labour Party shows no inclination to reverse or even mitigate Brexit. If the Conservatives have destroyed their reputation, why won’t Labour move boldly to change the direction of the U.K.? Is the U.K. hopeless? David Remnick is joined by Rory Stewart, who spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and now co-hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” He left the government prior to Brexit and wrote his best-selling memoir, “How Not to Be a Politician,” which pulls no punches in describing the soul-crushing sham of serving in office. “It’s not impostor syndrome,” Stewart tells Remnick. “You are literally an impostor, and you’re literally on television all the time claiming to understand things you don’t understand and claiming to control things you don’t control.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos analyze the impact of Hunter Biden’s criminal conviction and how the trial turned the spotlight on the Biden family’s private struggles through grief and addiction. Plus, how Trump supporters are waging an attack on the justice system and making its integrity one of the core issues of the 2024 Presidential election. This week’s reading: “Happy Seventy-eighth Birthday, Mr. Ex-President,” by Susan B. Glasser “Is Hunter Biden a Scapegoat or a Favored Son?” by Katy Waldman “Hunter Biden and the Mechanics of the ‘Scandal Industrial Complex,’ ” with Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker writers Stephania Taladrid and Jonathan Blitzer join Tyler Foggatt to unpack President Biden’s stringent new executive order on asylum and the border. They discuss the strained diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico and the political calculations underpinning Biden’s decision, and imagine what negotiations between Donald Trump and Mexican President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum would look like.  This week’s reading: “Will Mexico Decide the U.S. Election?,” by Stephania Taladrid  “What’s Behind Joe Biden’s Harsh New Executive Order on Immigration?” by Jonathan Blitzer To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

When Raphael Warnock was elected to the Senate from Georgia in the 2020 election, he made history a couple of times over. He became the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the Deep South. At the same time, that victory—alongside Jon Ossoff’s—flipped both of Georgia’s Senate seats from Republican to Democrat. Once thought of as solidly red, Georgia has become a closely watched swing state that President Biden can’t afford to lose in November, and Warnock is a key ally. He dismisses polls that show younger Black voters are leaning toward Trump in higher numbers than older voters; Biden’s record as President, he thinks—including a reported sixty per cent increase in Black wealth since the pandemic—will motivate strong turnout. Warnock returns to Atlanta every Sunday to preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he remains senior pastor, and he thinks of the election as a “moral and spiritual battle.” “Are we a nation that can send from the South a Black man and a Jewish man to the Senate?” he asks. “Or are we that nation that rises up in violence as we witness the demographic changes in our country and the struggle for a more inclusive Republic?”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser and Jane Mayer speak with Sarah Longwell, a longtime G.O.P. strategist and publisher of the Bulwark. Longwell has conducted focus groups across the country for the past eight years, and her research provides an unparalleled look at what motivates certain Republican voters to stay with Trump and what causes others to abandon him. She’s applying that research to persuade a segment of Republican voters to change their vote to Biden, now that Trump has become a convicted felon. What can Democrats learn from her efforts, and from the Republican Party’s messaging tactics? This week’s reading: “Fighting Trump on the Beaches,” by Susan. B Glasser “The Trials of a Never Trump Republican,” by Susan B. Glasser “Joe Biden’s Last Campaign,” by Evan Osnos To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writer Rivka Galchen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a class at the University of Chicago with a tantalizingly dark title: “Are We Doomed?” It’s in the interdisciplinary field of existential risk, which studies the threats posed by climate change, nuclear warfare, and artificial intelligence. Galchen, who spent a semester observing the course and its students, considers how to contend with this bleak future, and how to understand the young people who may inherit it.  This week’s reading: “Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It,” by Rivka Galchen  “It’s a Climate Election Now,” by Bill McKibben To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

In “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports,” the journalist Michael Waters tells the story of Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports. Koubek shocked the sporting world in 1935 by announcing that he was transitioning, and now living as a man. The initial press coverage of Koubek and another prominent track star who transitioned, Mark Weston, was largely positive, but Waters tells the New Yorker sports columnist Louisa Thomas that eventually a backlash led to the 1936 Berlin Olympics instituting a sex-testing policy for women athletes. Any female athlete’s sex could be challenged, and cisgender women who didn’t conform to historical gender standards were targeted as a result. These policies slowly evolved to include chromosome testing and, later, the hormone testing that we see today. “And so as we talk about sex testing today,” Waters says, “we often are forgetting where these policies come from in the first place.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the consequences of a major moment in American history and politics: the first-ever trial and conviction of a former President in a court of law. Will Donald Trump’s guilty verdict threaten his campaign, or will it only shore up support from his party?  This week’s reading: “The Revisionist History of the Trump Trial Has Already Begun,” by Susan B. Glasser “Trump Is Guilty, but Voters Will Be the Final Judge,” by David Remnick “When the Verdict Came In, Donald Trump’s Eyes Were Wide Open,” by Eric Lach To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of the Infinite Scroll column, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the latest ChatGPT release—which uses a voice that sounds, suspiciously, like Scarlett Johansson’s character in the dystopian sci-fi movie “Her.” Chayka has reported extensively on artificial intelligence, and he describes some recent blunders that tech companies, including OpenAI and Google, have made in trying to push their products through. This week’s reading: “Faux ScarJo and the Descent of the A.I. Vultures,” by Kyle Chayka  “Your A.I. Companion Will Support You No Matter What,” by Kyle Chayka, from November  To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

On the reality-TV dating show “Love Is Blind,” the most watched original series in Netflix history, contestants are alone in windowless, octagonal pods with no access to their phones or the Internet. They talk to each other through the walls. There’s intrigue, romance, heartbreak, and, in some cases, sight-unseen engagements. According to several lawsuits, there’s also lack of sleep, lack of food and water, twenty-hour work days, and alleged physical and emotional abuse. The New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum has been reporting on what these lawsuits reveal about the culture on the set of “Love Is Blind,” and a push for a new union to give reality-TV stars employee protections and rights. “The people who are on reality shows are a vulnerable class of people who are mistreated by the industry in ways that are made invisible to people, including to fans who love the shows,” Nussbaum tells David Remnick. Nussbaum’s forthcoming book is “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss why global events—such as the death of Iran’s president, a recent meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and the worsening situation for Ukraine—should not be overlooked in favor of domestic issues during the 2024 campaign. This week’s reading: “There Is Literally Nothing Trump Can Say That Will Stop Republicans from Voting for Him,” by Susan B. Glasser “What Raisi’s Death Means for the Future of Iran,” by Robin Wright “Is the Biden Campaign Running on False Hope?,” by Isaac Chotiner “Lara Trump’s R.N.C. Sets Its Sights on—California?,” by Antonia Hitchens “The Biden Administration’s Have-It-Both-Ways Report on Gaza,” by Isaac Chotiner To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has never held elected office but is related to many people who have, is emerging as a potential threat to Democrats and Republicans in the 2024 Presidential race. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and, then, Senate second, or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,”  he told David Remnick, in July, when he was running as a Democrat. Now, as a third-party Presidential candidate, his numbers have grown in the polls—enough to push votes away from both Biden and Trump in November, especially, it seems, among younger voters. Besides his name, the seventy-year-old environmental lawyer is known as an anti-vaccine activist and a proponent of conspiracy theories.  This election season, we’re eager to hear from you. What questions do you have? Let us know at: newyorkerradio@wnyc.org This interview originally aired on the New Yorker Radio Hour on July 7, 2023.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss  the unusual and dangerous aspects of Donald Trump’s reëlection campaign, from his quid-pro-quo offer to oil executives to his daughter-in-law’s new leadership position in the Republican National Committee. This week’s reading: “On Trump and the Elusive Fantasy of a 2024 Election Game-Changer,” by Susan B. Glasser “Can You Believe What Michael Cohen Just Said at the Trump Trial?,” by Eric Lach “It’s a Climate Election Now,” by Bill McKibben “Stormy Daniels’s American Dream,” by Naomi Fry “The Historic Trump Court Cases That We Cannot See,” by Neal Katyal To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Naomi Fry, a staff writer and co-host of the New Yorker podcast Critics at Large, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her impressions of Stormy Daniels’s testimony in the hush-money trial of former President Donald Trump. Having spent weeks doing a deep dive on the adult-film star’s life, Fry explains her understanding of Daniels’s motivations in accepting the hush money and what the sordid tale says about American culture today. This week’s reading: Stormy Daniels’s American Dream, by Naomi Fry Can You Believe What Michael Cohen Just Said at the Trump Trial?, by Eric Lach To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

David Remnick talks with Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired magazine, about the TikTok ban that just passed with bipartisan support in Washington. The app will be removed from distribution in U.S. app stores unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, sells it to an approved buyer. TikTok is suing to block that law. Is this a battle among tech giants for dominance, or a real issue of national security? Drummond sees the ban as a corporate crusade by Silicon Valley to suppress a foreign competitor with a superior product. She finds the claim that TikTok is a national-security threat to be “a vast overreach that is rooted in hypotheticals and that is rooted in hypocrisy, and in … a fundamental refusal to look across the broad spectrum of social-media platforms, and treat all of them from a regulatory point of view with the same level of care and precision.”   For another perspective on the TikTok ban, listen to David Remnick’s conversation with the tech executive Jacob Helberg, who lobbied lawmakers to pass it. The segment will publish on the New Yorker Radio Hour feed on Tuesday.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and the potentially decisive role that the youth vote will play in the Presidential election. Cyrus Beschloss, the C.E.O. of The Generation Lab, a company that studies trends among young people, joins the show to break down the latest polling data.  This week’s reading: “Biden’s Public Ultimatum to Bibi,” by Susan B. Glasser “Israel’s Politics of Protest,” by Ruth Margalit “The Kids Are Not All Right. They Want to Be Heard,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor “A Generation of Distrust,” by Jay Caspian Kang To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach joins Tyler Foggatt to share a firsthand account of the bizarre stories coming out of the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. President. Lach explains why the former publisher of the National Enquirer testified about catch-and-kill schemes involving celebrities like Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and describes Trump’s real-time reaction as adult-film star Stormy Daniels testified in lurid detail about the alleged affair at the heart of the prosecution’s case.  This week’s reading: What Is Hope Hicks Crying About?, by Eric Lach To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

In December, the presidents of three universities were summoned to Congress for hearings about whether a climate of antisemitism exists on campuses. Politicians like Elise Stefanik made headlines, and two of the presidents, including Harvard’s Claudine Gay, were soon out of their posts. The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote an essay for the London Review of Books about the reverberations of those events. “Folks were out to get Claudine Gay from the get-go,” he thinks, “and were going to use any openings with which to do that”—for reasons that had little to do with protecting Jews. Kennedy tells David Remnick about a lawsuit against Harvard that would equate opposition to Zionism with antisemitism, and render a range of thinkers (including many Jews) unteachable. And “this,” Kennedy asserts, “is very dangerous.”  This segment is part of the New Yorker Radio Hour’s episode devoted to the protests and the speech issues that college campuses have raised.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the Presidential candidacy of the anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and explore the ways his run for the White House as an independent might spoil the election for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump.  “He’s not a serious threat in terms of being able to win,” says Jane Mayer, “but he is potentially a serious threat in being able to spoil this election for one side or the other.” This week’s reading: “Is 2024 Doomed to Repeat 1968 or 2020—or Both?” by Susan B. Glasser “Trump Is Turning Victimhood Into His Legal Strategy,” by Eric Lach “Donald Trump’s Sleepy, Sleazy Criminal Trial,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writer David Kirkpatrick joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Marjorie Taylor Greene’s call to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson from office, just seven months after her colleagues forced out Kevin McCarthy. Kirkpatrick explains why Greene’s likely doomed effort is potentially lucrative for her, and walks through the ways in which her strategy is influenced by her predecessors.  This week’s reading: How Marjorie Taylor Greene Raises Money by Attacking Other Republicans, by David Kirkpatrick To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Brad Raffensperger, who holds the usually low-profile office of secretary of state in Georgia, became famous after he recorded a phone call with Donald Trump. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump demanded that Georgia officials “find 11,780 votes” so that he could win the state. The recorded phone conversation is a linchpin in the Fulton County racketeering case against Trump. Refusing that demand, Raffensperger—a lifelong Republican—received death threats from enraged Trumpists, and the state senate still wants to investigate him for it. But the politician tells David Remnick that he hasn’t lost faith in his party. He believes he can convince election deniers of the fairness of Georgia’s methods. And, by the way, that story line on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about the Georgia crime of giving a person water while they wait in line to vote? Raffensperger has a suggestion for Larry David.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss Donald Trump’s argument for Presidential immunity with former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal. Will the Supreme Court deliver Trump a legal victory in his fight against prosecution by the Justice Department ahead of the November election? This week’s reading: “King Donald’s Day at the Supreme Court,” by Susan B. Glasser “What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial,” by Ronan Farrow “Donald Trump Is Being Ritually Humiliated in Court,” by Eric Lach “The G.O.P.’s Election-Integrity Trap,” by Antonia Hitchens To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Anika Arora Seth, the editor-in-chief and president of the Yale Daily News, joins Tyler Foggatt to share what it has been like covering campus protests since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Seth explains both the global and university-specific forces at play that led to the arrest of forty-seven protesters on Yale’s campus this week, and lays out how the university has responded to concerns over students’ safety during the protests.  To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Both anecdotally and in research, anxiety and depression among young people—often associated with self-harm—have risen sharply over the last decade. There seems little doubt that Gen Z is suffering in real ways. But there is not a consensus on the cause or causes, nor how to address them. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that enough evidence has accumulated to convict a suspect. Smartphones and social media, Haidt says, have caused a “great rewiring” in those born after 1995. The argument has hit a nerve: his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” was No. 1 on the New York *Times* hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. Speaking with David Remnick, Haidt is quick to differentiate social-media apps—with their constant stream of notifications, and their emphasis on performance—from technology writ large; mental health was not affected, he says, for millennials, who grew up earlier in the evolution of the Internet. Haidt, who earlier wrote about an excessive emphasis on safety in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” feels that our priorities when it comes to child safety are exactly wrong. “We’re overprotecting in [the real world], and I’m saying, lighten up, let your kids out! And we’re underprotecting in another, and I’m saying, don’t let your kids spend nine hours a day on the Internet talking with strange men. It’s just not a good idea.” To social scientists who have asserted that the evidence Haidt marshals does not prove a causative link between social media and depression, “I keep asking for alternative theories,” he says. “You don’t think it’s the smartphones and social media—what is it? . . . You can give me whatever theory you want about trends in American society, but nobody can explain why it happened so suddenly in 2012 and 2013—not just here but in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe. I’m waiting,” he adds sarcastically, “for someone to find a chemical.” The good news, Haidt says, is there are achievable ways to limit the harm. Note: In his conversation with David Remnick, Jonathan Haidt misstated some information about a working paper that studies unhappiness across nations. The authors are David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and Xiaowei Xu, and it includes data on thirty-four countries.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos talk with the NPR reporter Andrea Bernstein about what has happened inside the courthouse during Donald Trump’s first week on trial. Plus, how the historic trial may factor into the 2024 race and whether President Biden should be talking about it on the campaign trail. “This idea of the old ‘Teflon Don’ is just finished,” Evan Osnos says. “The guy is now a creature of the court.” This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Trial of the Century,” by Eric Lach “The Supreme Court Asks What Enron Has to Do with January 6th—and Trump,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin “Biden Is the Most Pro-Labor President Since F.D.R. Will It Matter in November?,” by Eyal Press “Did Mike Johnson Just Get Religion on Ukraine?,” by Susan B. Glasser To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Ronan Farrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and contributing writer to The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the impact of rulings made this week by Judge Juan Merchan in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, where he faces thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels around the time of the 2016 election. Farrow explains why two other hush-money payments, made to former Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, are central to the Manhattan District Attorney’s case. As Farrow explains, “the coverup is ultimately a much, much bigger story than any of the underlying things being covered up would have been.” This week’s reading: Inside the Hush-Money Payments That May Decide Trump’s Legal Fate, by Ronan Farrow The National Enquirer, a Trump Rumor, and Another Secret Payment to Buy Silence, by Ronan Farrow Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity, by Ronan Farrow To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Texas has multiple abortion laws, with both criminal and civil penalties for providers. They contain language that may allow for exceptions to save the life or “major bodily function” of a pregnant patient, but many doctors have been reluctant to even try interpreting these laws; at least one pregnant woman has been denied cancer treatment. The reporter Stephania Taladrid tells David Remnick about how two lawmakers worked together in a rare bipartisan effort to clarify the limited medical circumstances in which abortion is allowed. “If lawmakers created specific exemptions,” Taladrid explains, “then doctors who got sued could show that the treatment that they had offered their patients was compliant with the language of the law.” Taladrid spoke with the state representatives Ann Johnson, a Democrat, and Bryan Hughes, a conservative Republican, about their unlikely collaboration. Johnson told her that she put together a list of thirteen conditions that might qualify for a special exemption, but only two of them—premature ruptures and ectopic pregnancy—were cited in the final bill. Still, the unusual bipartisan action is cause for hope among reproductive-rights advocates that some of the extreme climate around abortion bans may be lessening.

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the revival of Arizona’s hundred-and-sixty-year-old abortion ban, what role the issue of reproductive freedom will play in the November election, and how the position of reproductive health care in politics has evolved over the decades. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump Did This,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Fight to Restore Abortion Rights in Texas,” by Stephania Taladrid To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, its become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and harassment. Listen to and follow WIRED Politics Lab here. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

The New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach joins Tyler Foggatt to provide a preview of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, which begins next week in Manhattan. Trump faces thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016. Lach and Foggatt discuss the features of the controversial case and what six straight weeks of court appearances could mean for Trump’s campaign.  To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Across much of the country, Republican officials are reaching into K-12 classrooms and universities alike to exert control over what can be taught. In Florida, Texas, and many other states, laws now restrict teaching historical facts about race and racism. Book challenges and bans are surging. Public universities are seeing political meddling in the tenure process. Advocates of these measures say, in effect, that education must emphasize only the positive aspects of American history. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter who developed the 1619 Project, and Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, talk with David Remnick about the changing climate for intellectual freedom. “I just think it’s rich,” Hannah-Jones says, “that the people who say they are opposing indoctrination are in fact saying that curricula must be patriotic.” She adds, “You don’t ban books, you don’t ban curriculum, you don’t ban the teaching of ideas, just to do it. You do it to control what we are able to understand and think about and imagine for our society.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss how the Israeli strike on World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza could factor into a policy shift by the Biden Administration on Israel and the war. President Biden realized that he needed to “catch up to where the country was,” Osnos says. Then the British barrister Philippe Sands, a prominent specialist in international law who represents the state of Palestine in the case against the Israeli occupation before the International Court of Justice, joins the group to discuss whether the laws of war have been violated in this conflict. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Amnesia Advantage,” by Susan B. Glasser “Biden’s Increasingly Contradictory Israel Policy,” by Isaac Chotiner “What It Takes to Give Palestinians a Voice,” by Robin Wright To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send  feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker staff writers Jelani Cobb and Steve Coll joined Tyler Foggatt last May to discuss the ways in which Donald Trump maneuvers around facts and controls narratives when confronted by journalists. At last year’s CNN town hall, for example, Trump answered questions in front of a live and sympathetic audience—a setup that played to his strengths as a performer. For Cobb and Coll, who are Columbia Journalism School faculty members, the town hall raised some questions: Where is the line between coverage and promotion? And what is the role of news organizations in the age of political polarization? Cobb and Coll spoke about the dilemmas that journalists face when reporting on the former President and his 2024 campaign, and some potential solutions. This episode originally aired on May 25, 2023.   To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “You can’t walk into my store and take all my Snickers bars and say it’s for fair use.” She is disappointed in government leaders who have failed to regulate businesses and protect users’ privacy. Although she remains awed by the innovation produced by American tech businesses, Swisher is no longer “naïve” about their motives. She also witnessed a generation of innovators grow megalomaniacal. The tech moguls claim they “know better; you’re wrong. You’ve done it wrong. The media’s done it wrong. The government’s done it wrong. . . . When they have lives full of mistakes! They just paper them over.” Once on good terms with Elon Musk, Swisher believes money has been deleterious to his mental health. “I don’t know what happened to him. I’m not his mama, and I’m not a psychiatrist. But I think as he got richer and richer—there are always enablers around people that make them think they hung the moon.” This segment originally aired on March 1, 2024.

The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tension between protecting children from the effects of social media and protecting their right to free speech. Kang considers the ways in which social-media companies have sought to quell fear about misinformation and propaganda since Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, and why those efforts will ultimately fail. “The structure of the Internet, of all social media,” he tells Foggatt, “is to argue about politics. And I think that is baked into it, and I don’t think you can ever fix it.” Read Jay Caspian Kang’s latest column. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the “F-word”: fascism.  He saw Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe.  In the years since, Trump has called for “terminating” articles of the Constitution, has marked the January 6th insurrectionists as political martyrs, and has called his enemies animals, vermin, and “not people,” and demonstrated countless other examples of authoritarian behavior.  In a new essay, Gopnik reviews a book by the historian Timothy W. Ryback, and considers Adolf Hitler’s unlikely ascent in the early nineteen-thirties. He finds alarming analogies with this moment in the U.S.  In both Trump and Hitler, “The allegiance to the fascist leader is purely charismatic,” Gopnik says. In both men, he sees “someone whose power lies in his shamelessness,” and whose prime motivation is a sense of humiliation at the hands of those described as élites. “It wasn’t that the great majority of  Germans were suddenly lit aflame by a nihilist appetite for apocalyptic transformation,” Gopnik notes. “They [were] voting to protect what they perceive as their interest from their enemies. Often those enemies are largely imaginary.”

The Washington Roundtable reflects on the books they’ve been reading to understand the 2024 Presidential campaigns and the state of international politics. Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos swap recommendations of works about all things political, from the anger of rural voters to the worldwide rise of authoritarian rule, including a fictionalized imagining of a powerful real-life political family. Read with the Roundtable:  “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,” by Jacob Heilbrunn “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” by Rachel Maddow “The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism,” by Joe Conason “Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism,” by Brooke Harrington “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” by Giuliano da Empoli “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” by Joshua Cohen “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq,” by Steve Coll (The New Yorker) “The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China,” by Minxin Pei “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker) “Romney: A Reckoning,” by McKay Coppins “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim Alberta “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind,” by Sarah Posner “Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right,” by Mary Jo McConahay “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” by Stephen Breyer “The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court,” by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” by Richard Ben Cramer Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy: “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” “Theodore Rex,” and “Colonel Roosevelt,” by Edmund Morris To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback about this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

The New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her interview with Robert Hur, the special prosecutor who caused a political uproar with his report on his investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents. The report, which referred to Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” elicited a furious response from the White House—but, Gersen argues, its meaning and Hur’s motivations may have been misunderstood. Gersen and Foggatt also discuss the likelihood that the federal cases against Trump will go to trial before Election Day, and what Americans might expect if they do not. Read Jeannie Suk Gersen’s piece on Robert Hur here. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

Long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990) and in other works, Butler popularized ideas about gender as a social construct, a “performance,” a matter of learned behavior. Those ideas proved highly influential for a younger generation, and Butler became the target of traditionalists who abhorred them. A protest at which Butler was burned in effigy, depicted as a witch, inspired their new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” It covers the backlash to trans rights in which conservatives from the Vatican to Vladimir Putin create a “phantasm” of gender as a destructive force. “Obviously, nobody who is thinking about gender . . . is saying you can’t be a mother, that you can’t be a father, or we’re not using those words anymore,” they tell David Remnick. “Or we’re going to take your sex away.” They also discuss Butler’s identification as nonbinary after many years of identifying as a woman. “The young people gave me the ‘they,’ ” as Butler puts it. “At the end of ‘Gender Trouble,’ in 1990, I said, ‘Why do we restrict ourselves to thinking there are only men and women?’ . . . This generation has come along with the idea of being nonbinary. [It] never occurred to me! Then I thought, Of course I am. What else would I be? . . . I just feel gratitude to the younger generation, they gave me something wonderful. That also takes humility of a certain kind.”