The New Yorker: Politics And More

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

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,”

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. T

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 f

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 WritersTune 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 produ

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

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

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

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

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 afte

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.