The Political Scene | The New Yorker – Details, episodes & analysis

The Washington Roundtable discusses the fallout from the messy rupture between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, how battles between maximalist rulers and the mega-wealthy have unfolded in history, and how this week’s fighting could portend a new, more combative phase of American oligarchy. They talk about America’s new Gilded Age, drawing on “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich,” a new book by Evan Osnos, just out this week.

This week’s reading:

• “The Musk-Trump Divorce Is as Messy as You Thought It Would Be,” by Susan B. Glasser
• “Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder,” by Evan Osnos
• “The Sublime Spectacle of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Social-Media Slap Fight,” by Jessica Winter
• “The Private Citizens Who Want to Help Trump Deport Migrants,” by Jessica Pishko
• “Can Public Media Survive Trump?,” by Jon Allsop

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker staff writer Ava Kofman joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her recent Profile of the iconoclastic right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin. They discuss Yarvin’s desire to end American democracy by installing a monarch, whether his provocations can be seen as trolling, and how his writings have found a receptive audience among conservative politicians and the tech élite. “Obviously, Yarvin’s influence on the right is great, and maybe can’t be overstated,” Kofman says. “But, at the same time, a lot of these ideas he’s getting from having conversations with powerful people in Silicon Valley and with powerful people in Washington.”

This week’s reading:

• “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” by Ava Kofman
• “Democracy Wins a Referendum in South Korea,” by E. Tammy Kim
• “Josh Hawley and the Republican Effort to Love Labor,” by Eyal Press
• “Trump Makes America’s Refugee Program a Tool of White Racial Grievance,” by Jonathan Blitzer
• “Elon Musk’s Vanishing Act,” by Jon Allsop

To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

For a long time, Republicans and many Democrats espoused some version of free-trade economics that would have been familiar to Adam Smith. But Donald Trump breaks radically with that tradition, embracing a form of protectionism that resulted in his extremely broad and chaotic tariff proposals, which tanked markets and deepened the fear of a global recession. John Cassidy writes The New Yorker’s The Financial Page column, and he’s been covering economics for the magazine since 1995. His new book, “Capitalism and Its Critics: A History,” takes a long view of these debates, and breaks down some of the arguments that have shaped the U.S.’s current economic reality. “Capitalism itself has put its worst face forward in the last twenty or thirty years through the growth of huge monopolies which seem completely beyond any public control or accountability,” Cassidy tells David Remnick. “And young people—they look at capitalism and the economy through the prism of environmentalism now in a way that they didn’t in our generation.”

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected].

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 [email protected] 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.”