His Act Is Getting Old

Hi, I'm Robert Siegel, and this is our regular conversation about politics, joining me as usual is New York Times' opinion contributor, EJDON. Great to see you again. And joining us once again, Times' opinion columnist, Carlos Lozada. Welcome back. Sure, to have you here, Carlos. Once more into the breach. Let's go. And we have a lot to talk about. In New England, two Senate races have produced, for this year, surprisingly unsurprising results. President Trump, evidently undeturbed by stories that Republican candidates are trying to distance themselves from him, has put on a special midterm convention minus the platform minus the nominating addresses. It's a Trump-Pappalooza, we're told. And all of this contemporary politicking unfolded in a week when we recalled this being the 25th anniversary of 9/11, an event that altered our politics, I would say, in more ways than we sometimes realize. Lots to talk about. And let's start with Donald Trump's attempt to rally Republicans and remind them of what he sees as his many accomplishments in office. DJ, the president had had C-SPAN, he had the C-SPAN audience, Fox dipped into his keynote address, I mean, after all, what else was on the air? You would have to remind me of the disastrous defeat of my New England country at the hands of the Seattle Seahawks. I was switching back and forth, and I found neither experience very satisfactory to quote the old Neor Wolf line. You know, I think what was so striking about what Trump did is that it shows how vulnerable he thinks he is in this election, and he's not following the strip Republicans might want, which is, please go into hiding because you're killing us in the polls. But he wanted to change the nature of the conversation. So he, you know, at least the old political machines used to give you five bucks if you voted for the machine. Take it. Trump is giving voters a $5,000 IOU for this money. He says he's going to give them. And this, of course, from a guy who is famous for not paying his debts. But the very fact that I am mentioning this is what Trump wants people to do because he doesn't want people to talk about the war or inflation or lots of other things. And I think that this is going to be a real contest between whether it's a normal midterm election where Democrats can focus the election on Trump and his record, which, as Charlie Cook, the great political analyst, who's very careful in what he says, a lot of Trump voters, he says, think they were victims of a bait and switch, given Trump's priorities when they voted for him in the presidential race. And Trump wants to, here's $5,000 and by the way, the Democrats are communists. And you can't possibly elect them. And it goes back to the great podcast Carlos did actually with Michelle Kotl and the historian Nicole Hammer about McCarthyism that never died. And this is a real throwback to something that worked once before. And Trump, you know, communism plus crime plus an obsession, which I thought was very strange, with dirty streets in Democratic cities. That's what he wants us talking about. And I guess I just played his game because I did. Carlos, what do you make of Trump's celebration of his own presidency? And do you think he believes that his negative approval ratings can be somehow washed away through his talents of persuasion? Well, far be it for me to parse exactly what is in Donald Trump's mind, but in terms of this celebration, I think really, I feel like the entire Trump presidency is a celebration of the Trump presidency. Everything he does has to be the biggest and the best and the smartest and the most historic thing in the history of human events. Right? And really that's part and parcel with what he's been doing during the second term. All these kind of side quests that he's been on about, you know, whether it's the ballroom or, you know, the arch or renaming everything America, it's all part of this effort to sort of burnish a legacy rather than really earn one. And in terms of the midterms and what we saw at Trump's pollusa is that, you know, those efforts are crashing up against a certain reality, right? And the reality is the broken promises, the failed promises of bringing prices down and avoiding costly prolonged wars. Now, will his persuasiveness, you know, help reshape that story, falling up on something E.J. said, he seems both confident and afraid at the same time, confident when he says pretend I'm on the ballots, right? He's almost daring voters to judge him on this record, on this record, frankly, of promises he has not kept. But he seems afraid when, you know, he's essentially has to offer, he's reduced to offering people money. You know, I'll give you five grand, a piece, American adults, if the Republicans win. You know, in essence, it's sort of being reduced to the offer of a bribe. If we've learned something about Trump though, it's that whatever happens in November, he's going to declare victory. If the Republicans do better than expected, he'll say, probably correctly, that it was because of him. It was because of his co-tails, because he asked people to vote as if he was on the ballot himself. If the Republicans get spanked, it'll be because, you know, when he's on the ballot, people just aren't excited, because it's really all about him. He's always been able to separate his brand from that of the party. Trump is very good at declaring victory even when he loses, sometimes especially when he loses. So, I think you really put your finger on something important about the paradox of what Trump was doing. I mean, what he's trying to do, which is really hard in politics, is to have his own voters, but only his own voters, think that he's on the ballot. You know, Ruth Egelnik and Carolyn Solar had a great piece in the Times about the sharp shift in party identification, where Republicans have lost 17 points net among young people, nine points net among Latinos in the last few years. So, he's got this real problem, and that's where the distraction comes in. That's where he wants to believe his being on the ballot is the key because of his own people, but he has somewhere inside him. As you suggested, I think there is this lack of confidence, and that's why he's doing the other thing. The Times had a great editorial arguing that Trump was sabotaging the midterms by using the Postal Service to try to completely turn mail voting into chaos. And I think that's the real tell. If he were confident in these elections, I don't think he'd have to do that, and the Supreme Court may at some point, maybe when this goes on the air, have ruled on this. But, boy, is that the big tell? I think it should be noted that there is a new official answer as to when the war with Iran is going to end. Now we're told it'll be the day after election day. And there may be a little bit of truth there, remembering Jimmy Carter and the Iranians stretching out the hostage crisis until Ronald Reagan was sworn into office, and they could humiliate Jimmy Carter one last time. Is it hand, and the hand is at the end of the tunnel, you know, that's really what we are reliving here. I mentioned at the outset of the surprisingly unsurprising primary results in New England in Massachusetts, Senator Ed Markey decisively turned back a challenge from Congressman Seth Molten, whose main argument seems to have been, I'm 47, he's 80. EJ, how did Markey do it? Markey did it by running, really, a very similar campaign to the one where he defeated Joe Kennedy six years ago. He made himself the Tribune of the left side of the Democratic Party. He turned it into an ideological choice and ideology trumped age in that race. And I think also Congressman Molten wasn't that popular a lot of establishment Democrats. And just ranked a file Democrats weren't crazy about Molten, and that was enough for Markey. And I think it showed that a mechanical view of politics where, you know, it's all about age or it's all about ideology, actually, it depends. And then in Hampshire, Chris Papis, actually, the Congressman running for the vacated seat of Senator Gene Sheehan, won very handily over a candidate of the left. And I think this is sort of, should be a lesson to media where when DSA candidates, Democratic Socialists of America and candidates were winning this summer, the talk and Trump echoed it in his "Trupple Palozo" speech. Ah, the Socialists are taking over the Democratic Party. No. There is disaffection in the party. The party is almost certainly more progressive than it was 20 years ago. But no, there were plenty of normal elections that happened out there. And, you know, they don't get as much attention because they're normal, they don't sort of break new ground. That's why I don't blame them. media for highlighting a change, but it really can distort the larger picture of what's happening inside the party and in the country. And the New Hampshire results were so normal that first the Republicans nominated for Senator former Senator John Sanunu, who is of course the son of a former governor of New Hampshire. And the Democrats, as you mentioned, Chris Papis, the congressman is running to succeed Jeanne Shaheen. They nominated Jeanne Shaheen's daughter to run, to fill the seat vacated by Papis, who doesn't get more conventional than that. You know, I defer to EJ, as our politics guru, you know, I think, on your sort of media critique, it is possible to overread or overthink, you know, some races, the expense of others. I mean, I think that the rise of DSA and sort of the DSA inflected Democratic Party is a big story, right? I agree with that. And because a more conventional Democrat wins in Massachusetts, doesn't necessarily undercut the import of that story, these transformations don't happen all at once, right? And the rise of a new more assertive, you know, DSA wing of the party, I think, is meaningful. And in part, it's meaningful, and all these races that you're discussing, Robert, because the, both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to figure out who they are beyond being pro-Trump or being anti-Trump. And that's been sort of too easy and too pat for too long, and it's not going to keep working. And I think these primaries and these midterms are a part of that process, a part of that debate. And so I think it's healthy, it's healthy to see both of these forces working at the same time. I have to agree with Carlos's, as always, carefully-recent correction or modification of what I said. I certainly do not want to downplay the fact that the DSA victories do tell us something. That the rise of this critique of the economy, whether people call themselves socialists or not, goes back to Occupy Wall Street and to Bernie Sanders campaign. And there is a frustration out there, and there have been some really good stories actually out there, essays on democratic socialists of America, and how complicated that movement is. It's not a movement of a single wing that the Republicans love to quote the most radical pronouncements of the most radical people in DSA, when, in fact, DSA is a kind of collection of people on the left to range, if you will, from social democrats to something much harder on the left. So, that's all true, but I do think there is still a hair trigger tendency that exaggerates or doesn't get at the subtlety of what's going on. And that's why the results like we had in Massachusetts, which, by the way, was about the power of the left, that you know, that, that, you know, Ed Markey mobilized the left on his behalf. But also, the hampsha races, you know, that we should sort of do this carefully, not sort of not start sort of jumping off a cliff over a few election results. But you mentioned echoes of the red scare earlier, I mean, do you think this Republican attack that, you know, democratic policies span the gamut from Bolshevik to Menchovic? Do you think that it has any traction with people? I think that it's more a mobilizing tactic than a persuasion tactic, that the issues he put on the table that might have more, a little more persuasive power are the old staples, you know, particularly crime. I don't think immigration works for him as much anymore because people have sort of turned away from these pretty heinous policies he's pursued on the streets of the country. I think the communism appeal may solve a small bit of his turnout problem or so he hopes. But again, it, it seems so antique. I think part of Trump's problem now is that his act really has started feeling old. And I think that started a while ago and to go back to communism, which has an issue with about the 1950s, is kind of a reminder of how all that act is getting. Yeah, all of us, all of that is that I wouldn't, I would never bet against the paranoid strain in American politics. Well, many people have remarked this week on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. For me, it remains a watershed event in a variety of ways. Carlos, is it still resonating for you and what do you see in American politics and life? Well, I mean, it certainly resonates politically. I think first and foremost, it resonates tragically, viscerally, in the lives of people who survive the attacks and people who lost loved ones in the attacks. Politically, it's almost impossible to imagine our politics without it, right? If we just stay at the level of presidential politics and look at the presidents who have led us since 9/11, President Bush, George W. Bush, entered office, sort of weakened question, following the 2000 election, Florida recount and the like. 9/11, his leadership in the media aftermath of 9/11 was comforting, was popular, it really elevated him, and Congress and the American people handed him enormous powers as a result to respond. What he did with those powers, then diminished him greatly, whether we look at two wars. Yeah, I mean, or the black sides and torture, euthamized as enhanced interrogations and the like, but really the expansion of the global war on terror, quote, unquote, from Afghanistan into, into Iraq. In fact, the two presidents that followed Obama and Trump were in some measure, you know, able to reach power because of their position on the war. Obama famously had said early on, "I don't oppose all wars, just dumb wars," right? And referring to Iraq as that dumb war. Eight years later, when Donald Trump was running for the public nomination, he broke with GOP orthodoxy and really was very critical of the Bush administration for having gone to war in Iraq. It was like Trump and Obama were running on the same anti-war ticket just separated by eight years. Joe Biden, trying to end the longest war in America's history, was severely diminished due to the chaos of withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and the return of the Taliban to power so quickly. If there was a beginning of the end for Biden, it may have been that. What strikes me most, I think, sort of in the right now, looking at the Trump era of American politics is that even though it comes 25 years later, so much of the rhetoric and the policy of MAGA, of Trumpism, to me feels impossible without 9/11. It was enabled by the world that 9/11 created. Absent 9/11, I can't imagine someone becoming a prominent political figure and winning a nomination based on birth arisen, right? On the lie that the sitting American president was foreign, was Muslim, was therefore a constitutional fraud. It was therefore untrustworthy, right? Absent 9/11, I can't imagine the first policy out of the gate of a new administration being a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent 9/11 in the war on terror, I can't imagine Americans who are exercising their right to protest government policy being shot and killed and then branded as terrorists by the very agency that was created to, in the aftermath of 9/11, to stop it, which was DHS. All these years later, I feel there's ways in which we're very much still living in the wreckage of 9/11. Yeah. That is, I think, a brilliant analysis. I think all of us, whenever we talk about the political and historical meaning of 9/11, want to pause to remember that day and how horrible it was. At the time, a lot of my wife, Mary's family, at the time lived in Rockaway, and that neighborhood suffered greatly both because there were a lot of police and firefighters who lived in that neighborhood. And there were a lot of people who worked in that building, and I think it's so important for all of us who want to talk about the implications to just try to remember what that was like for the lives of so many people in New York City. But I think Carlos is exactly right, firstly, you know, unexpected, but I think correct point that in certain ways, 9/11 fueled Obama's rise, but also Trump's rise in all the ways that you said. But I also think there was just a fundamental way in which the country went haywire for 25 years after that event. All our kids and I think of this in terms of how our children see this, our kids were all born in the 90s. When they were born, I felt, my Lord, they're going to grow up in a great time, a peace and prosperity just like I did. You know, I remember the presidencies of Ike and JFK. And then this event happens and they all turned, they turned 479 in the fall after 9/11. And what happened after 9/11? There was the attack itself. There were the endless wars that we suffered. There was the economic collapse of 2008, the Great Recession. And lots of other things that were developing gradually, but that really hit home. We lost industrial jobs and parts of the country were being hollowed out, but the China shock really hit hard in that decade. My Brookings colleague Bill Galston, in his, well, street journal column made an interesting point that I had not thought about the last balance budget we had was dated September 30, 2001. And we proceeded on an economic policy that involved a bunch of wars and tax cuts. We went to war and a tax, yeah. And that is not the normal way of, you know, pursuing things. And so we talk about this now. And so I think that we should, in a way, be a bit charitable to all of us as Americans about our politics going haywire because there was so much that went haywire that has led us here, which leads me to believe, and we'll find out in a couple of years, I think the country is kind of crying out to get past this. I think there is an opening for a big leap forward. I think those, those three catastrophes, 9/11, the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, went a long way toward undermining any confidence in American life and the sense that, as you say, that the world, for kids who grew up at that time, isn't this warm, comfortable play. I'm reminded of being about five or six years old and learning in Sunday school, this is a Jewish Sunday school, about the holiday of Purim and that there had been Heyman, an evil guy who wanted to kill all the Jews. The principle told us, "Actually, there was a man who wanted to kill all the Jews. He was eight-off Hitler." When I asked my mother about that, I don't know, I don't remember being terribly shaken, but I've never heard this. She said, "Well, you know, that's why Daddy's picture shows him in uniform. He was in the army." The army went, he went to Europe, and they defeated Hitler. I felt very good about that. They've made the world good for me. COVID, I was one of the kids who got the experimental sock vaccines, the part of the huge trial, so I, rather than see some new, incurable illness strike, I saw some terrible illness we'd lived with for years and centuries, be defeated by American science. I think the optimism that baby boomers had every reason to grow up with just seems to be gone and to me it's evident in an attitude that begins with throwing the bombs out. That's the first option and a sourness and discomfort with the way things are. I shall resonate with that. My dad enlisted a few days after Pearl Harbor. What you said resonates with something Robert Reich, former labor secretary, and intellectual wrote many, many years ago, which is that the country in the '50s and '60s had a kind of confidence in public life generally because we, that generation, defeated the Great Depression and one, World War II, and there was an enormous confidence that you saw reflected like in the Kennedy Nixon campaign where both had real confidence in the ability of public action to achieve great things. That began to dissipate with Vietnam. It dissipated further with Watergate and we have been on a long slide since, and then the period after 9/11 really accelerated what was already a very difficult trend. It was interrupted a bit by the Reagan era, but not that much, and you're so right about how generational memory is so different in our country right now. When 9/11 was studied by a bipartisan independent commission, one of the things the government was faulted for was a lack of imagination, being presented with facts about what Al Qaeda was up to and not imagining what they might possibly do. Are we any better on that score, do you think, Agrizo? Five years ago for the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I went back and read the full 9/11 commission report, and I was struck by that. It was one of four failures they identified. The others were failures of policy, of capability, and management, but the failure of imagination was their first one, was the one they sort of led with, and that's, as you say, it's about not seeing something coming, or believing that something was too unlikely or fantastical to ever come to pass, but in fact, many people did warn, the most famously just a few weeks before the attack, the President Bush received the presidential daily briefing, and that was titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," and of course it didn't specify how and why, but certainly there were, and even before that there were others in the FBI and other parts of the government that did have their hair on fire, that were warning about this. There have been many failures since that have been similar failures of imagination, mentioned the Great Recession, the collapse of the housing market, the notion that that is a thing that could happen. The January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was an assault on the one building that the 911 hijackers weren't able to hit, we did that ourselves, right? That was another good point, that was another sort of failure of imagination, even when there were warning signs all along by lots of people. I think the key question is, how do we increase the chances that we will be able to listen to those warning signs, to respond to those warning signs, to in some ways act on them? The 911 Commission report said something that feels almost contradictory, said, "We have to institutionalize imagination," even while acknowledging, "You know, we're not very good at that. Bureaucracy's aren't great about thinking very creatively, but that doesn't minimize its need. It's important because what happens when you wait till after a crisis occurs to respond? It means that you can't prepare, it means that you're being reactive, and it means that you often over-correct or over-respond, as President Bush, for instance, did with 911 itself. I don't think that we're getting better at it. There's more crises to come. We could talk about artificial intelligence, and where that is taking us. We've had warnings in the culture, in literature, in the tech and science realm, with that for a long time as well. When being an extremely unusual one in which business is saying, "Don't leave us to our devices, come regulate us." Protect us. Protect us, yes. Right, and actually we have a successful tradition in our country of sometimes protecting business against itself, which in the long run is actually good for business. I just feel in the country there is this desire for kind of seriousness, hopeful seriousness, that we can actually get a handle on these things, and I think of sort of three errors where we made a leap in some way, the FDR election, and some ways the Eisenhower JFK elections, JFK let's get the country moving up to some degree, the Reagan election. I think we are looking for that leap because we are so aware as a country of how much these past difficulties weigh on us right now. I was trying to think whether the Iranians, seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, was a failure of imagination, or whether the people whom we pay to imagine such things, warned the president that this could very well happen, and was a failure of something else, which is listening to the people who were born in New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York. And that's been the sort of like number one on the list of things that can happen. Even if you engage in conflict with Iran, you know, that the military has as planned for. I think, you know, there's that tendency with President Trump, he just thinks things are going to work out for him. You know, Venezuela went the way he wanted it to go, so this will probably go the same way. He was fed that story also by Netanyahu, and that now famous meeting in the situation room. And so that is a prime example of having the information, having the warning, you know, knowing what is likely to come, but simply deciding that you're just going to bed again. against it. Well, guys, it has been as ever enlightening for me to listen to the two of you. But before we go after every conversation, I want to hear from all the people, what's brought some joy into your life recently? Carlos, why don't you begin? Well, E.J. kicked us off, mentioning his patriots. So I will, you know, in football season, I will mention my fighting Irish of Notre Dame. I'm fated to be a college football fan because I went to Notre Dame. And this year, our opening game was against the Wisconsin Badgers at Lambeau Field, an NFL stadium in Green Bay. The home of the Packers in Green Bay. Now, one of my closest friends from college is from Wisconsin. And so a few of us, we were all roommates together in school, decided that we would travel to Wisconsin and go to the game together and spend this past weekend together. Now, the game gave me joy. Being at Lambeau gave me joy. But what really gave me joy was this time that I had to reconnect with old friends. In some cases, see their families, see their kids, get to know them a little better, and really just be able to reminisce and revisit and think about all that's happened in the decades now, since we were in college together. Notre Dame won the game. That was good. We're considered one of the contenders to win it all this year. I hope that happens. But whatever happens on the field, just having this time with close friends and their families, like that, that was the victory for me, and that was a moment of joy. It was a beautiful thing. My friend Peggy Seinfelds, the former editor of Common Magazine, once wrote a hilarious piece that was a papal statement that anyone should be excommunicated if they don't root for Notre Dame. Any Catholic should be excommunicated. Those of us like who teach at Georgetown or people who went to B.C. have other views on this. But that was a beautiful story. I have a perhaps unusual one this time. I read a book by a wonderful historian called Kim Phillips Fine on the New York City Fiscal Crisis called Fear City. Now you would say, oh, in the world can a book about the New York City Fiscal Crisis give you joy. Partly for me, it was, I covered as a reporter, the tale end of the New York City Fiscal Crisis. But it was so insightful about why New York was there. And it opened a debate about whether the solution of cutbacks that had seemed to be required after that. Were they required? Were there other ways out of it? Unlike, I think all good history first, it's beautifully written. But secondly, it's something that gives an account of the past that forces us to think and in some cases rethink the past, but also gives us something to think forward. Because I thought her account made us think about what about all these new movements in cities with very different kinds of mayors, like Mary Lourie and Seversisco on the one end or Mamdani in New York on the other end, I think we might be seeing a time where we really want to rethink urban policy. I think that's a subject now. But anyway, it was a beautiful book. And it reminded me of how much joy reading great history has given me over a long period of time. You guys both have had more joy recently than I've had. My idea of joy in the past few weeks has been when the temperature in Washington has gone below 89. Hey, man, I've just been rare. But there was also what we had a couple of lovely get-togethers with family and with two old college friends and our wives and had a wonderful dinner together. E.J. Dion and Carlos Luzada, thank you very much for this conversation about politics. Thank you. [MUSIC]