The New Yorker: Politics And More

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 Inf

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 the

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected].

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

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected].

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 wr

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 [email protected].

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

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'

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 [email protected].

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 nonbin

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss how foreign policy is shaping the 2024 campaign, such as a possible ban on Chinese-owned TikTok and the wars in Europe and the Middle East. The panel also considers Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s sharply conflicting views of America’s role in the world.This week’s reading:“I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You,” by Susan B. Glasser To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback about this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss President Biden’s “bold proposal” to shift the tax burden back to the wealthy and tackle inflation, both key concerns for voters in the run-up to Election Day. The pair also considers why companies continue to rake in “bigger profits than ever before,” even as the economic fallout of the pandemic recedes.To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

Like most Americans, Vinson Cunningham first became aware of Barack Obama in 2004, when he gave a breakout speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Very good posture, that guy,” Cunningham noted. “We hang our faith on objects, on people, based on the signs that they put out,” Cunningham tells David Remnick. “And that’s certainly been a factor in my own life. The rapid and urgent search for patterns.” Although Cunningham aspired to be a writer, he got swept up in this historic campaign, working on Obama’s longshot 2008 run for the Presidency, and later worked in his White House. Cunningham’s adventures on the trail inspire his first novel, “Great Expectations,” an autobiographical coming-of-age story about where and how we seek inspiration.  Cunningham recalls that Obama was seen as the “fulfillment” of so many hopes and dreams for people like himself. Now he wishes the former President were playing a larger role. “I will admit that it has been dispiriting,” in Obama’s post-Presidential life, “to see him

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Biden’s energetic State of the Union address, the positive response among Democrats in the polls, and how press coverage is shaping the public’s perceptions of Biden’s campaign.“He wasn’t looking to convince anybody,” Glasser says. “What he was looking to do was to tell his side, ‘Stop freaking out. I’m in the fight.’ ”This week’s reading: “So Much for ‘Sleepy Joe’: On Biden’s Rowdy, Shouty State of the Union,” 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 [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the results of Super Tuesday, and how a “general decay” in Biden’s support, on top of his tight margins, could be exploited by a third-party candidate. Plus, Antonia Hitchens takes us behind the gilded curtain at a Mar-a-Lago primary-night watch party. Read Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the primaries and Antonia Hitchens on experiencing Super Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago.Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Despite hand-wringing among Democrats about Joe Biden’s age and his discouraging poll numbers, the President’s campaign for reëlection displays an “ostentatious level of serenity,” Evan Osnos says about the election. “This is a matter of great personal importance to Joe Biden. He feels almost, viscerally, this contempt for Trump and for what Trump did to the country,” Osnos tells David Remnick, after a rare private interview at the White House. “And let’s remember, he didn’t just try to steal this election—from Biden’s perspective—he tried to steal it from him.” Although Biden once referred to himself as a “bridge” President, he told Osnos that he had never considered stepping aside after one term. His gait has slowed, but Osnos found the President quick to jab at his questions and at “you guys” in the media, whom he blames for naysaying his campaign. But alongside complacent media coverage, threats to the President’s reëlection are many. The war in Gaza has alienated many voters from Biden, especially in Ara