Trump's D.C. Crackdown, Putin Summit, and Cuomo's Mamdani Jabs

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Speaker 19 This whole thing is so. We are in a simulation, David.
Just so you know, this is none of this is real.

Speaker 19 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 18 Welcome back to.

Speaker 18 Scott Free August.

Speaker 18 That was explosive. I like that.
I know. Well,

Speaker 19 that's for Scott. And while Scott is off gallivanting, who knows where, I have yet another brilliant co-host joining me, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Speaker 19 He's a podcaster now. David, welcome.

Speaker 18 Oh, it's great to be here, Kara, since we've known each other for about 242 years.

Speaker 19 42 years at our old alma mater, the Washington Post. How is it going? How's the New Yorker going?

Speaker 18 We're doing okay.

Speaker 18 There's wood here, so I can knock on it. But editorially, we're doing great.
And, you know, despite everything, I mean, we could be frank. Yeah.
We're doing all right.

Speaker 18 Business is okay. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Are you going to be in the Devil Wears Prada 2?

Speaker 18 I am not.

Speaker 18 I'm just asking. I am not.

Speaker 18 If I can reveal this, I got a phone call to be an extra in it, and I decided maybe

Speaker 18 it's better to watch the the film than be oh, really?

Speaker 19 Interesting. You don't want to wear nice clothes and everything else? Do you get to keep it? I don't think so.
All right, then forget it. You'd be playing David Remnick, so whatever David Remnika.

Speaker 18 I think we're better things to play.

Speaker 19 What is David Remnick's fashion sense?

Speaker 18 You're looking at it.

Speaker 18 You're looking at it.

Speaker 19 If you had to name the style, what would it be?

Speaker 18 I think it would be late-middle-aged, slouchy. Nate, million, dad, like cool dad?

Speaker 18 Cool, not even cool dad, just dad, or you know, waiting, awaiting senescence. Senescence.

Speaker 18 You're wearing a Guinness t-shirt.

Speaker 18 I could easily rock that. Oh, yes, I am.

Speaker 19 I have so many t-shirts, I don't even know what I'm wearing. I like to send messages with my t-shirt sometimes.

Speaker 18 What are you telling me now with the Guinness thing? Nothing.

Speaker 19 I've got a clean one. I almost wore my old Twitter t-shirt.

Speaker 18 I still have the t-shirt that I was wearing in July of 1998. with Leon Russell on it.

Speaker 18 I came into work to write a piece. Tina Brown had told us the day before that she was leaving the New Yorker.

Speaker 18 And I came to work the next day in a Leon Russell t-shirt that even then had some holes in it, had some hole problems. Okay.
And I was called in to see Sign Newhouse, the owner of

Speaker 18 the camp for what reason I had no idea. And that was Destiny.

Speaker 19 Oh, wow. What did he say anything about your outfit? Not very condé nasty, that's for sure.
Your cafeteria upsets me every time I go there because I feel like a homeless person or something.

Speaker 18 Like I look like, hi, I'd like some free food.

Speaker 19 And then everyone's eating tiny little things.

Speaker 18 It's all Yeah, egg whites.

Speaker 19 Egg whites, yeah. Anyway, we have so much talk about it.
Just David has been a long time. When was that? 19.
What year did you join? You said 19. It was the last century.
The New Yorker?

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 18 I left the Washington Post. I'd been in Moscow and came home, wrote a book for, took me a year.
And then in 1992, Tina Brown became the editor of The New Yorker and asked me to come.

Speaker 18 be a writer there. And I was thrilled.

Speaker 19 Yeah. And you became editor in six years later, something like that.
Yeah. Wow.
So it's a long time. Yeah.
Yeah. Are you going to outlast Anna?

Speaker 18 Well, she started before I did. I know, I know, but you know, it'll be a fight to the end.

Speaker 18 I have to tell you, my relationship with her, which is longstanding, and I don't think anybody would mistake me for her or vice versa, we get along terrifically well. She's, she's actually

Speaker 18 incredibly smart as a business person and obviously as an editor. And

Speaker 18 i remember asking what makes anna winter a great editor and this person said she knows what she wants and i it was actually the scales fell from my eyes because i think editors who don't know what they want

Speaker 19 confuse everybody and make everybody else crazy oh that's interesting did you did you use you don't feel that way cara i mean i i wasn't much of an editor i was i i mean i was because i ran the thing but i i guess i do i did know what i wanted i did I wanted people to,

Speaker 19 yes, when I started running All Things D, yes, I wanted them to tell you what they actually were telling each other.

Speaker 18 It doesn't mean you're not filled with uncertainty or bound to make mistakes, but you do have to make a call at a certain point.

Speaker 19 Right. One of the things Tina Ronnie, speaking of Tina, told me, says you can teach someone how to write, you can't teach them how to see.

Speaker 19 Like in terms of getting the stuff that you need to report on. I thought that was smart.

Speaker 18 I couldn't agree more. You know, you go out into the world, you go to the Middle East or New York City, and you're going to write a quote-unquote story.

Speaker 18 And you feel like one of those quarterbacks in a video game that a lot of commotion is happening in the field of life in front of your eyes.

Speaker 18 And finding a way to locate a story that's both honest, accurate, depending on the circumstances, entertaining or serious, that is a skill. I think that's what she meant.
It is.

Speaker 19 I think she said, what to see. I can't teach you what to see.
Yeah. That's what it was, which I thought was a very, very canny actual.
She's also a canny editor, as are you.

Speaker 19 So I want to ask you about your latest piece in the New Yorker called The Politics of Fear. It's very serious, speaking of not entertaining, but it is.
It's beautifully written.

Speaker 19 It's all about Donald Trump's long, lifelong bullying tactics.

Speaker 19 You write specifically about the us versus them mentality that he's using in his second term to intimidate people and bend them to his will.

Speaker 19 And you call his cabinet a quivering collection of yaysayers. Nice, well done.

Speaker 18 Well, look at Pam Bondi.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I know, I know, but yaysayers, I just like the word. Though you you do say cartoon bullies do not inevitably prevail.

Speaker 19 You say pushback like the South Park creators, but talk about how well it's worked, actually. It may not be effective, but it's worked well.

Speaker 18 You know what? Maybe I'm trying to gird my own

Speaker 18 loins there when I say that to myself and to the reader, because if you're being honest with yourself, horrible things do happen.

Speaker 18 Democratic systems have disintegrated under pressure historically. So maybe I'm being only three-quarters honest there, but I don't think it's inevitable.

Speaker 18 I don't think it's inevitable that the project that Donald Trump has set out on, which I think at its heart is authoritarian and anti-rule of law and all the other things that you discuss on this show quite a lot.

Speaker 18 I don't think it's inevitable that it prevails.

Speaker 18 Has it been corrosive? You bet. Has he won lots of victories? You bet.
Has he intimidated

Speaker 18 all kinds of institutions, including our own business,

Speaker 18 with terrible consequences? That has all happened. And I guess it's important

Speaker 18 on all kinds of media, all kinds of circumstances, to rally people's spirits as best as you can. I'm not deluded that a common piece in the New Yorker is suddenly going to cause

Speaker 18 truth, justice, and the American way to prevail. But I look at the place where you and I worked.

Speaker 19 The Washington Post.

Speaker 18 The Washington Post. I was there for 10 years

Speaker 18 as a young guy.

Speaker 19 Me too.

Speaker 18 I was a young guy, too. And I'm watching this drama with a broken heart, with a broken heart.
The idea that the Washington Post was not just mutable,

Speaker 18 but that could be undermined to this degree so that so much of its talent runs screaming from

Speaker 18 the building.

Speaker 18 To see a gazillionaire like

Speaker 18 Bezos

Speaker 18 do the right thing when he first had the Washington Post and then turn tail

Speaker 18 is

Speaker 18 really chilling.

Speaker 19 I have an interesting, I mean, I don't think he did much of anything. He kind of left it alone, which is one of the problems.
They didn't do anything post-Trump.

Speaker 18 He do no harm, right? It's like being a doctor.

Speaker 19 Yes, yes. I wouldn't call him particularly like, he said a lot of tech stuff, but I don't think he was.
I mean, he brought Fred Ryan kind of like sailed along under the Trump thing.

Speaker 18 Fred Ryan might not have been the most

Speaker 18 perhaps inspiring leader on the business side. And there was all kinds of things that they could have done better, I guess.
But

Speaker 18 Marty Barron, as an editor, had the same long leash as the editors of the New York Times and all the places that were doing their job well in the first Trump administration, including our place.

Speaker 19 Can I ask you? I think about someone's asked me, why is he doing it? What's the point?

Speaker 19 I have not answered that question. I'm not sure.
I think he was like that before because I've never particularly liked him. I think he's tough and aggressive.

Speaker 18 Is he tough?

Speaker 19 Yes, he's not a nice person. I never thought he was a nice person so

Speaker 18 i don't mean nice person i mean the ability to say look um i have power too

Speaker 18 i i can stand up to this and he has made a decision for i think business reasons first and foremost

Speaker 19 look the washington post is hardly his biggest business it's his smallest i don't think he really likes journalists that was always my my experience and you have to ask yourself why buy it i don't know that's the part

Speaker 19 i think he got guilted into it by Mrs. Graham, and he thought it was interesting.
I think his ex-wife was interested in it too. And

Speaker 19 she's distinguished herself since, like with her giving and everything else. I think he was not under her influence.
I wouldn't say that. He was in that world.
And then now he's in a different world.

Speaker 19 That's, let's take over Venice and be very performative in our outfits. You know, I think that's what he was actually like versus.

Speaker 19 what he he was cosplaying like friend of liberty kind of guy before i don't i think before was not what he was doing so it's not it's not a lack of self-awareness

Speaker 19 i think he's doing but i but what i want to understand at least for being there is he's not even he's not even being bullied in this case he just is doing it right he's he's anticipating bullying or wants more of the space game or whatever it happens to be but i i i want to like what's the point what where's the end game here because i can tell you the people that have left i i hear from all of them every day there's so many more leaving and so how do you run an institution Like, maybe that's the point, to hollow it out, to fill it with who you want.

Speaker 18 I don't know.

Speaker 19 I just, if you have any thoughts, I don't.

Speaker 18 I don't think he cares that much.

Speaker 18 Number one,

Speaker 18 Don Graham and Catherine Graham, for whatever, I think there was always an illusion that somehow these were lefties.

Speaker 18 That actually is not the case. Catherine Graham was great friends with Nancy Reagan.
She was an establishmentarian.

Speaker 18 But when the push came to shove to do the right thing on the Pentagon papers, on Watergate, and much smaller decisions along the way,

Speaker 18 they did the right thing. And they made the staff feel, and I'm not talking just about star reporters and editors.
I'm talking about people in the press room.

Speaker 18 They felt like they were part of something, part of something important.

Speaker 18 Not just an instrument of a billionaire's, a multi-multi-billionaire's

Speaker 18 power complex. Yeah,

Speaker 19 it's inexplicable at this point because now it's just like suicidal, it feels.

Speaker 19 But one of the one of the things, you see, the quivering collection of yaysayers at the Trump, like the tech people have become yaysayers. You saw Tim Cook do this the other day with the

Speaker 19 golden statue.

Speaker 18 What the hell was that?

Speaker 19 I don't know. I can't even write them.
I also was like, are you fucking kidding? But I get it. I get it.
He wants no tariffs.

Speaker 18 Man, you get one chance on this earth.

Speaker 18 I agree. I had someone say that.

Speaker 19 Yeah, well, shareholders is his goal. Shareholders.

Speaker 18 That's all he cares about.

Speaker 19 I know. Great.
But when you say yays, talk talk about the Trump cabinet, because it's particularly bending. I don't think they even have to bend.

Speaker 18 They've bent. We started off bending.

Speaker 18 The first Trump cabinet in the first term was not my idea of

Speaker 18 my politics or obviously, but

Speaker 18 these were kind of establishmentarians from the business world, in defense, in intelligence, and the rest. They were, by the way, not absolutely top rate, all of them,

Speaker 18 but they had some sense of what too far was. They had some sense along the way of limits, of the law,

Speaker 18 of

Speaker 18 what is just

Speaker 18 shame is a good word. I don't see many people in this cabinet who are

Speaker 18 possessed of shame

Speaker 18 or a sense of

Speaker 18 what a limit is. When you look at the press secretary, there's nothing she will not say.

Speaker 18 When you look at the Attorney General, there's no limit she will not break. Her client is not the law.
Her client is the President of the United States. She's the personal lawyer.

Speaker 18 She's behaving as if she's the personal lawyer for the President of the United States.

Speaker 18 That is an immense difference.

Speaker 18 You could argue that maybe John Mitchell did the same when he was

Speaker 18 under Nixon. But here it's across the board.
And also there's a competency problem. Pete Hegg Seth,

Speaker 18 I don't know.

Speaker 18 Carl, would you hire him to run a grocery store?

Speaker 19 I wouldn't hire him to watch my kids.

Speaker 18 I wouldn't. Well, yeah, well,

Speaker 18 and you could say that about a lot of people in the White House and the top of the federal bureaucracy.

Speaker 19 Do you see anyone in the writing of this that you thought, okay,

Speaker 19 possibly?

Speaker 19 Good or possibly. I mean, Marco, Rubio was considered competent by many before, before, but now everyone who was close with him is like, we don't understand what happened to this person.

Speaker 18 Well, Marco Rubio seems to have been kind of put in a corner. I mean, he does things, but he knows his limits.

Speaker 18 Look, remember, Marco Rubio is a guy who was insulted so many times in the 2015, 2016 presidential race. I don't know

Speaker 18 at what reach of one's character you can say, you know what, that's just between friends. Now I'll be the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor.

Speaker 18 It's a signal to Trump that I will do anything you ask without limits. And that's not what these people in those jobs are supposed to do.

Speaker 19 How does pushback become a larger and more successful moment? It can be South Park. That's certainly.
Satire is often a way that happens. Very funny, very tough satire.
You see it a lot from comedy.

Speaker 19 And you see it, I've just got Chris Isgruber's, who's the head of Princeton's book. Tough book, like he's writing, you know, pushing back.
You see it in different law firms.

Speaker 19 You see it in different reporters, certainly.

Speaker 19 How do you make that larger? I think people, regular people, you see when you see these videos of people on the street stopping ICE from arresting people, you see it there.

Speaker 18 It's civil society in various forms. It can't be underestimated, but it isn't absolutely everything.

Speaker 18 I mean, finally,

Speaker 18 we have a Congress that's completely in its majority obedient to a president who is, by instinct, an authoritarian, and a court that is

Speaker 18 suspect in many ways as well. So, finally, political power can be influenced by and maybe limited by civil society, and it's essential.
You know, it's exactly what Russia does not have.

Speaker 18 Civil society has been all but crushed. in

Speaker 18 very, very limited corners of civil society still exist in today's Russia.

Speaker 18 It's infinitesimal. We still have that.
And if we squander it,

Speaker 18 whether it's

Speaker 18 managing partner of a law firm or university president or boards of trustees of universities, if we keep squandering it, the picture will get worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 18 And people seem to be changing their minds, too. Look at Harvard University.
Harvard University seemed to be standing up, and they had all all the money in the world to do so.

Speaker 18 Now it looks as if they're going to make a deal.

Speaker 18 And you could say, well, I don't blame them. You know, they'd be losing all their research money and.

Speaker 18 I get it. These are complicated positions.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be moral quandaries in the first place.

Speaker 18 But if we keep

Speaker 18 backing up, bending down, use whatever metaphor you like,

Speaker 18 the sum total of that will be the gradual and then accelerating erasure of civil society.

Speaker 19 Civil society.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Well, speaking of Russia,

Speaker 19 we've got a lot to get to today, but I want to move to several stories on the politics of fear on full display. So let's get to it.
Trump and Putin are set to meet in Alaska this week for a summit.

Speaker 19 You can see Russia from Alaska. I don't know if you know that.

Speaker 19 As Trump pushes for the end to the Russia-Ukraine war, after announcing the summit, Trump said there will be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both, very Chamberlain-esque.

Speaker 19 Ukraine's President Zelensky, who's not attending the summit as of this recording, called decisions made without Ukraine decisions against peace.

Speaker 19 European leaders are backing Zelensky, saying that Ukraine and Europe's security must remain a top priority.

Speaker 19 And Trump just said a little while ago that the next meeting will be him, Putin, and Zelensky. So talk a little bit about this.
Trump is now calling it a feel-out meeting, which sounds kind of

Speaker 19 a little gross, yeah. Yeah, a little Epstein-y.
And what realistically is going to

Speaker 19 come out of it? You wrote this back in 2022, ahead of Russia invading Ukraine.

Speaker 19 Few leaders have leveraged inscrutability the way Putin has, but his general imperative is obvious, the preservation of power.

Speaker 19 Talk a little bit about this summit, this feel-out situation.

Speaker 18 Well, it's more than just the preservation of power. It is the

Speaker 18 resurrection of

Speaker 18 Russian supremacy in as much of the old Soviet Union as can be mustered. Not because of communism.
Communism

Speaker 18 went out the door even before the fall of the Soviet Union. But I mean, just in terms of great power relations.

Speaker 18 Trump is - I don't know if this is news.

Speaker 18 I don't know if it will require a flash across our phones, but

Speaker 18 is a pretty inscrutable person and this changes his mind and his temperament from hour to hour. So

Speaker 18 the spectacle of his berating Zelensky in the Oval Office was one of the most depressing moments of the past six months.

Speaker 18 It was the opposite of what an American president should be doing to a leader like Zelensky, who's been nothing but brave and tireless and an advocate for his people and incredibly shrewd.

Speaker 18 And he just sold him out.

Speaker 18 And then, lo and behold, Russia

Speaker 18 kept up its attacks on doing what it does best and

Speaker 18 killing lots and lots of people and destroying lots and lots of Ukrainian infrastructure.

Speaker 18 And lo and behold, Trump said,

Speaker 18 This guy is bullshitting me, meaning Putin. So who knows?

Speaker 18 I think it's if we ascribe to Trump some sort of that he's tallyrand or Metternich and has some sort of grand strategy and all along, he's thinking ahead.

Speaker 19 Metternich and Trump don't go together.

Speaker 18 No, no, no. I'll go for it.

Speaker 18 Or anybody else possessed of a strategic mind. Richelieu.
Richelieu.

Speaker 19 Then you're kidding yourself. Now we're showing off our colleges.
Whatever.

Speaker 18 I've just exhausted it.

Speaker 19 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 18 So the other truth, though, is that Putin has lost a lot. This adventure has lost him one million Russian casualties, deaths and

Speaker 18 people wounded combined. It has expanded NATO, which is exactly what he didn't want in his

Speaker 18 northwestern region.

Speaker 18 It's isolated Russia and Russians. Russian life is not better.
Economic life is more perilous, although they've survived better than one would have thought.

Speaker 18 So this adventure

Speaker 18 is not great.

Speaker 18 It's not great.

Speaker 18 Now, he's gained some territory, about 20% of Ukrainian territory, Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and he wants to hold on to it as much as possible.

Speaker 19 This is the Donbass region, correct?

Speaker 18 Yeah, I think he'd like to call it a day, but with maximal gains so he can come back and declare a great victory and have lots of parades. The question is, is the United States

Speaker 18 going to let him do that?

Speaker 18 So?

Speaker 18 Is? Well, I think we'll see.

Speaker 19 What are you looking for from this meeting besides a lot of performative nonsense?

Speaker 18 I don't think it's performative nonsense. I think you need some clarity from Donald Trump.
It may be asking too much.

Speaker 18 Some sense of

Speaker 18 that Russia cannot just have what it wants.

Speaker 18 And also, Russia has lost Ukraine. It may have gained territory in the East.
It may have gained

Speaker 18 Crimea, maybe for the foreseeable future, which it took in 2014.

Speaker 18 But if you think Ukrainians are now more sympathetic to Russia, that want to be part of Russia and its sphere of influence, you're crazy.

Speaker 19 Right. They want to be part of Europe.

Speaker 18 They want to be part of Europe even more intensely than ever.

Speaker 19 So, what should he do here? If Trump listened to everything you said to David, what should I say exactly?

Speaker 19 What would you think the best thing? Should Zelensky be there from the start?

Speaker 18 Or

Speaker 18 there needs to be a process in which Zelensky and Putin and Europe and the United States are involved.

Speaker 18 It cannot be a situation in which Trump, in all his bluster and weakness, is alone in a room to the end with Vladimir Putin. If this meeting sets off a process that becomes one that's wider,

Speaker 18 I don't think Zelensky is going to get back everything he wants.

Speaker 18 Which is a horrific tragedy, but a reality.

Speaker 18 But if Trump goes to Alaska and just seeds everything,

Speaker 18 Zelensky will be in a horrific shape and we will have committed a strategic and moral blunder, the likes of which we haven't seen for quite some time.

Speaker 19 Aaron Powell, do you have any guesses of which way that's going to go? And where is Europe? I mean, Europe's been obviously pressuring.

Speaker 18 Europe is still

Speaker 18 complicated, but Europe is much more stalwart in Zelensky's corner, without question. Yes.

Speaker 19 So what does it do here? Because this will affect them.

Speaker 18 Right, exactly.

Speaker 18 Who's threatened more than Europe? You know, if you're sitting in Estonia, Poland, Lithuania,

Speaker 18 you're watching this a lot more carefully, necessarily, than if you're in New York or North Dakota or California.

Speaker 19 Do you think Putin would do that at this point?

Speaker 19 Does he have a sell-by date at all?

Speaker 18 I think the one provided by God. Oh, well.
Mortality.

Speaker 19 You know how long Lenin is still sitting there.

Speaker 18 Well, Lenin died of a stroke. I went and saw that.

Speaker 19 No, I know, but I went to see him dead.

Speaker 18 I did. And well, I don't think Putin is going to be followed by the living incarnation of Navalny, though.

Speaker 18 I mean, he has set up a system that's both personalist and highly, highly, highly nationalist and authoritarian. And I don't think

Speaker 18 unless you're a fantasist, you'll suddenly revert to the flux of 1991, 92. Right, right.

Speaker 19 Where is Boris Yeltsin when you need him? Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well,

Speaker 18 Boris Yeltsin is not a pure picture either.

Speaker 18 Boris Yeltsin,

Speaker 18 I guess you could say he peaked in August of 1991 with his strength of standing up to the coup.

Speaker 19 So you're going to be watching, what would be, give everybody one sign of good or bad.

Speaker 18 If we don't get a repeat

Speaker 18 of

Speaker 18 Trump coming out, as he did in Helsinki years ago, and say, I believe Putin, I don't believe my own intelligence agencies. You remember that incident? Yes, I believe.

Speaker 18 If we don't get a repeat of the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, where he just humiliated him and he went out of his way to do so with the help of J.D. Vance,

Speaker 18 then we'd have to count it as a small victory. In other words, if he doesn't entirely sell out Ukraine,

Speaker 18 that would be nice. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Well, he wants that Nobel Prize, doesn't he? He's jumping. So we'll see.

Speaker 19 Listen, if he settles the thing

Speaker 19 with a modicum of like not losing everything, he could possibly get it.

Speaker 20 Okay, David, let's go on a quick break.

Speaker 19 When we come back, Trump cracks down on DC.

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Speaker 19 david we're back with more news another thing about the politics of fear president trump says the police department in dc will be placed under federal control because of quote totally out of control crime let me tell you as a citizen of the district of columbia things are not totally out of control here it's actually a very safe city the U.S.

Speaker 19 military is preparing to activate several hundred National Guard troops in the city on Monday as we tape. Let's listen to a clip of this speech on the matter on Monday morning.

Speaker 32 Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.

Speaker 32 And we're not going to let it happen anymore. We're not going to take it.

Speaker 19 Actually, all those people work at the White House, but

Speaker 19 I got to tell you, there's,

Speaker 19 anyone who lives in D.C. is like, what are you talking about? Crime is down.

Speaker 19 Meanwhile, he's trying, we'll get to marijuana in a minute, but what do you take for this? He did it in California. The governor resisted,

Speaker 19 but still he did it. And D.C.
is under a really unusual situation where the government can't take over the city or has much more purview over the city, including its elected officials.

Speaker 18 Sorry, Karen, this is the oldest tactic authoritarians have. Drugged out maniacs are robbing your houses and et et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Fear, politics of fear.

Speaker 18 And then he wants to show that in his own backyard, it's a swamp and he's going to clean it up. This is a repeat of L.A.
in some way, right? Where the governor and the mayor, I think

Speaker 18 they.

Speaker 18 Karen Bass,

Speaker 18 in a way, the mayor of Los Angeles, after having a rough time during the wildfires,

Speaker 18 I think reasserted her

Speaker 18 reputation and her authority by pointing out very clearly in various interviews and news conferences. We had an interview with her in the New York Radio Hour that was very good.

Speaker 18 And she made it very plain that this was just absolute bullshit and a manipulation by

Speaker 18 the federal government in the name of Donald Trump to make it seem like drug-addled maniacs, in this case, immigrants,

Speaker 18 were just running rough shut over

Speaker 18 the

Speaker 18 ability of the LAPD to control the situation in an isolated spot in downtown L.A.

Speaker 19 Yeah, there was a small spot.

Speaker 18 And I have to think, and also the cable television didn't help by 24 hours a day focusing its camera on one burning car. I'm not saying that, you know, violence in the streets is a great thing.

Speaker 18 But a sense of what it actually was and its

Speaker 18 what was reality and what was exaggerated and the ability of this president to manipulate that situation made it a hell of a lot worse.

Speaker 19 Why D.C. Now, obviously, the Epstein stuff is another distraction from the Epstein stuff.

Speaker 19 But what can the mayor do here? Because at one point, remember after Trump had those troops downtown with the Bible, the whole thing,

Speaker 19 you know, they painted the plaza. They painted the plaza right near the White House to mock him.
She has since gotten rid of that to try to please him and work with the Trump administration.

Speaker 19 And now, of course, this is what she's getting, right? This is what cooperation yields you.

Speaker 19 Why? And of course, it started with this guy named Big Balls who worked for Elon Musk. This whole thing is so, we are in a simulation, David, just so you know.

Speaker 19 None of this is real.

Speaker 19 This guy named Big Balls. This kid was working for Elon Musk.
He got beaten up. I'm sorry, Big Balls.
It's really terrible. thing to happen to you.

Speaker 19 But, you know, living in this city, the crime is down. All kinds of major crimes are done.
It's a very safe city.

Speaker 19 Same thing with San Francisco is now on the upswing and everything's looking great and everything else. So trying to paint it as this.

Speaker 18 Oh, we have this in New York City. Right.
Well, it's coming for you.

Speaker 18 Of course it is. And by the way, Andrew Cuomo, in his rhetoric, is participating in this.
Right, exactly.

Speaker 19 So I'm going to get to him in a second. So the boxer,

Speaker 19 what do you do here?

Speaker 19 What could happen here? You've been in Russia. You've been in lots of hotspots like this of authoritarian rule.
Is this just posturing just so we can make a speech and get

Speaker 19 things away from what's really happening in this country? Or what's the danger here? Like as a citizen,

Speaker 19 I'm like disturbed that there would be U.S. military on the street when I, whenever I'm in a country where that's the case, I'm like, I don't like this country so much.

Speaker 18 I've arrived in a banana republic. Right, exactly.
Well, one thing traditionally that's been in the authoritarian playbook is not just the use of troops, but it's the

Speaker 18 taking,

Speaker 18 either staging or taking an incident in which there is a clash and using that as an excuse for a crackdown that's even greater.

Speaker 18 You saw this in the Soviet Union. You've seen it all over the world.
You know, that something will be, I remember in Lithuania, for example. was still Soviet times.

Speaker 18 Troops went in where they were not needed because there were demonstrations, there were nationalist demonstrations.

Speaker 18 And the next thing you know, 13 people were dead, and the crackdown became more. And

Speaker 18 the central authorities, particularly in that case, the KGB, were delighted. Delighted.
They exploited it. They staged it and the whole thing.

Speaker 18 Now, how sophisticated and what kind of forethought is going into this, I don't know.

Speaker 18 I couldn't say because I'm not in those rooms.

Speaker 18 But I dare say that we'll find out soon enough.

Speaker 19 I think the more adjectives they use, the stupider it is. Violent crimes, bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs, wild youth, drug-doubt maniacs,

Speaker 19 and homeless people. Homeless people didn't get a qualifier.

Speaker 18 But look, things will always happen in cities that are terrible. You know, it is a bad thing that Big Balls or whatever his real name is, gets beaten up.

Speaker 18 It is a horrible thing when there's a murder in the Bronx or in whatever part of

Speaker 18 New York City. That's always going to happen.

Speaker 18 And it's never completely satisfying to say that the statistics are down because

Speaker 18 one sentence is filled with life and loss and bloodiness and the other feels cold and statistical. Durecratical.
I got it. But in fact, but in fact, it's a huge accomplishment in your city and mine

Speaker 18 that crime, violent crime is down.

Speaker 19 And you don't feel unsafe. I don't feel unsafe in New York or D.C.

Speaker 19 And I have felt unsafe in both places.

Speaker 18 Look, when I was a kid applying for college, my parents, I grew up in New Jersey. My parents said the one place I couldn't apply was Columbia.
It was on 116th.

Speaker 18 And to them, sitting in suburban New Jersey, it just seemed very dangerous. And probably the 70s, it wasn't so great.
But I think it would have been fine if I'd gone.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 now nobody would dream of saying that about Columbia. They have other things to say about Columbia, but not that.

Speaker 19 Yeah. You know, what's interesting is that there was a shooting in Montana.
Should he send the national troops there? It's just, it's like, it doesn't matter. It's the same.
It's just such

Speaker 18 we know what it's about.

Speaker 18 But his ability to change the subject, as you said, Kara, is amazing. You know, three weeks ago, the Epstein situation was going to be, you know, yet another end of Donald Trump.

Speaker 19 I think the Epstein situation still has legs. That's what I'm feeling.

Speaker 18 I do.

Speaker 18 What will take place that will

Speaker 19 if you go to you if you go to the

Speaker 19 places I read on the internet with the MAGA people, it illuminates them. It still does.
And I don't think they've let Donald Trump.

Speaker 19 I think they're trying to let Donald Trump off the hook, but they're still, he's trying to sideline it. And it will not be, that particular thing won't be sidelined.

Speaker 18 But what could they find out that they don't know already that would turn them against Trump?

Speaker 19 Oh, I don't think they would turn against Trump. 47% of Republicans would still vote for Trump, even if he was implicated in Epstein's activities, which is disturbing.
So I don't know.

Speaker 19 I think that something like that could happen. I think something like that could happen.

Speaker 18 This is part of the whole, too, this whole business that,

Speaker 18 you know, the phenomenon that seems to stun liberals all the time, that evangelicals will vote for Donald Trump, even though they know X, Y, and Z about his character, that it's quote, and this is the phrase that's always used in Washington talk, that it's baked in,

Speaker 18 that they know that about Trump, where if they heard it about, say, Obama, they'd be shocked, shocked, shocked, and

Speaker 18 shield their eyes.

Speaker 19 Yeah, it's true. But he is going to

Speaker 19 make marijuana, reportedly considering recasting marijuana as a less dangerous drug after companies in the industry have donated millions to his political groups.

Speaker 18 That's fine.

Speaker 19 That one, I'm okay. I'm fine.

Speaker 19 I'm going to move on from that.

Speaker 19 So last thing on this segment, Governor Greg Abbott says the redistricting fight in Texas could literally last years as he defends his push to arrest Democrats who fled the state to block GOP efforts.

Speaker 19 I think they popped up in California this week. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, by the way,

Speaker 19 please Google Ken Paxton divorce, has also asked the state Supreme Court to remove 13 of those Democrats from office as redistricting battles spread across the country.

Speaker 19 California Governor Gavin Newsom is pushing for a special election to get a new House map approved by 2026.

Speaker 19 And Trump is now calling for a new census that excludes undocumented immigrants, a move he's tried before.

Speaker 19 A new census would reshape congressional acts and impact federal, state, and and local fundings if it were to happen.

Speaker 19 Talk a little bit about redistricting.

Speaker 18 Redistricting is nothing new, and it's something that's

Speaker 18 look, Barack Obama's district as a state senator, as a state senator in Illinois was

Speaker 18 an absurdity. You know, it was kind of a little strip along the north side, and it kind of came down and then went into Hyde Park.
And

Speaker 18 these congressional districts historically have been shaped in ways that are congruent with all kinds of political interests. Early on racism and to this day, racism and anxiety about

Speaker 18 so many other subjects. So both parties and American politics has been given to redistricting for less than high motives for a very long time.

Speaker 18 But as usual, in the Trump administration, they're taking it to its very heights. To do this in the way they're doing this, this is not something that has clear precedent that I can see.

Speaker 18 Aaron Trevor Brandon. Yeah.

Speaker 19 No, he's doing it because he thinks he's going to lose the house. Of course.

Speaker 19 And then it's over. Then it is kind of game over for him in many ways.
He'll just spend his time

Speaker 19 trying hard to do executive orders that won't be.

Speaker 18 Well, I think this was the illusion of some people in the Democratic Party that after an initial explosion of activity and noise and all the rest,

Speaker 18 that this term, like the last term, would see him have his interest flag and maybe he's getting older and he'd play a lot more golf.

Speaker 18 But I think we have to admit that in numerous ways, maybe too many to count, this term is not only much worse than the first term,

Speaker 18 but the

Speaker 18 dark sophistication that he's gone about so many things, some of them collapse like Doge,

Speaker 18 has been a surprise to a lot of people. Yeah.

Speaker 19 No, he's a lively old man. He is.
Have you ever gone to my mom's own assisted living? There's a guy. There's a guy in every assisted living home that's like this.

Speaker 18 Real,

Speaker 18 real anime.

Speaker 19 That's the aspect. There's like the Biden guy who's wheeling around, who's actually a little more with it than he seems.

Speaker 19 And then there's the Trump guy, and he's really crazy and really irritating and definitely like walks.

Speaker 18 It's not just the usual Trump character that we've known for so many years. He's surrounded by people where age

Speaker 18 isn't an issue. Stephen Miller's a young man.
He is. And he is filled

Speaker 18 with

Speaker 18 all kinds of impulses.

Speaker 18 And he is, so far, in a dark way, good at it.

Speaker 19 Right. He is.
Absolutely. Is that the person you would focus most on? Would you consider him a quivering yaysayer?

Speaker 18 I think that's a good question. No, I think he isn't an actor.
He is,

Speaker 18 from what I understand, especially in terms of domestic policy, but not only, he is the most essential

Speaker 18 figure in that building.

Speaker 18 And in fact, what we learn from that chat group that Jeff Goldberg was invited on inadvertently, but what you learn there in that discussion, that it wasn't the Secretary of State or the Defense Secretary that was in charge of the conversation.

Speaker 18 It was Stephen Miller who brought things to a conclusion, who said, okay,

Speaker 18 we've discussed this enough.

Speaker 19 President. Very interesting.

Speaker 18 He was clearly the one speaking in Trump's name.

Speaker 19 He was, absolutely.

Speaker 19 absolutely that's what and jeff pointed that out it was clear you know hex s was sort of performatively saying playing the secretary of defense on television kind of thing like look i have some dates and times and stuff like that and it he was surprised vance was quite against it which was interesting to see that but nobody cared nobody cared nobody cared in that conversation miller came in and wiped this floor with everybody um so what is it a good idea for uh gavin newsom to do this or you know now one a republican governor in new Hampshire said, absolutely not.

Speaker 19 I'm not going to redistrict, even though she's under pressure to do so.

Speaker 18 You know, this is the dilemma that stretches out to a lot of areas.

Speaker 18 I just had on our own podcast

Speaker 18 a conversation between Ruth Marcus and Jeannie Suk-Gerson. They were talking about the Supreme Court and how it should deal with certain things.
And

Speaker 18 the dilemma is, do you answer in kind in a way that feels extra-legal or goes outside the bounds of normal politics?

Speaker 18 And that's the tough thing. And I think Gavin Newsom is basically saying, you know, we can't afford to just let Trump and the Trumpists do whatever they want.

Speaker 18 And we have to answer in kind, otherwise too much will be lost,

Speaker 18 even though we know these tactics are ugly.

Speaker 18 You know California a lot better than I do. You think he has a shot in the end as a presidential candidate?

Speaker 19 It depends on the atmosphere. It depends on the 2026 elections.
If he sort of wins and pushes Trump back, and yeah, I suppose he could. Yeah, I suppose he could.

Speaker 19 He's got a lot of negatives, but yeah, he's tall. And I think we're going to like the tall, handsome white guy for sure, you know, as the president.

Speaker 18 So not a short, handsome white guy. So Pete Buddy judge, no.
No, no. Why?

Speaker 19 I think, because I think the gay thing is still a problem for many people. I'm sorry.

Speaker 19 I think he's terrific. I think he's incredibly well-spoken.
He's really thoughtful. I just don't.
Wes Moore is the other person I would just think could be an interesting character.

Speaker 18 He's not a white guy so far as I can.

Speaker 19 He's not, but he's so fantastic looking. And he's got, you know, he's got, just, I think he's got a lot of attributes.

Speaker 19 You know, you look, maybe it's someone from, we don't know, David.

Speaker 18 I don't know.

Speaker 19 Maybe it's someone we don't know.

Speaker 19 I have to say, anyone who has any charm against J.D. Vance, if J.D.
Vance is their thing, I find J.D. Vance charmless and repellent to voters ultimately.

Speaker 18 The one thing, though, that gave me real pause is his performance in the vice presidential debate was extremely skillful.

Speaker 19 Yeah, but as president, that's different. If he's the man, he's not really the man.

Speaker 18 He did give a speech recently. I don't know if you caught this at Claremont.

Speaker 19 I always listen to him.

Speaker 18 Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 18 In other words,

Speaker 18 Trump is an instinctual authoritarian. Right.

Speaker 18 J.D. Vance is a very sophisticated nationalist authoritarian ideologist.
I mean,

Speaker 18 he is a different set of qualities.

Speaker 19 He absolutely does. And we're going to be paying for the fact that his mama didn't love him enough for the rest of our lives if he wins.

Speaker 18 I'll tell you that.

Speaker 18 I mean, he's a story of history.

Speaker 19 It's just that 100%.

Speaker 19 Mama didn't love him, didn't hug him. I find him charmless.
I think the voters, most voters find him charmless. And the fact that South Park made him tattoo kind of said everything for me.

Speaker 18 Plain. Surprising that South Park, how long has South Park been on the air?

Speaker 19 26 years.

Speaker 18 And that it still has the juice.

Speaker 19 Well, it goes in and out. My kids love it, have loved it since they were small kids.
But yeah, it does. It has the juice.
You still have the juice, David.

Speaker 18 Ah, you're so sweet. You still have the juice.

Speaker 19 You do.

Speaker 18 You actually do.

Speaker 19 I mean, now that you come at the story, I'm like, oh, look at that guy. Anyway, let's go on a quick break.
When we come back, Cuomo comes after Mom Donnie in what he calls a heavyweight bout.

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Speaker 19 David, we're back with more news. In New York City, your home, in the mayoral race, Andrew Cuomo is targeting frontrunner Zoran Mamdani in a series of social media attacks.

Speaker 19 And I use that term broadly because they're really stupid. Cuomo is now framing the race as a heavyweight bout, which is what someone who still lives in the 1980s when Rocky was hot would use.

Speaker 19 Cuomo slammed Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized apartment, calling him rich and saying he should move out.

Speaker 19 Cuomo, I'll note Cuomo moved to the city about a year ago and pays about $8,000 in rent.

Speaker 19 And the New York Times also reported last week that Cuomo recently spoke with Donald Trump about the mayoral race, though both men have denied that.

Speaker 18 It's very sad.

Speaker 18 I have to say that he is proof positive that there is a such thing as a sell-by-deck.

Speaker 18 When you saw him in the debate, Mamdani, Cuomo, and some other figures, Brad Lander, and so on, and I have never seen a clock cleaned so efficiently as Mamdani cleaned Cuomo's clock.

Speaker 18 He just, Cuomo had lost it. This was a guy who really had prided himself on a certain kind of,

Speaker 18 I get things done. Tough guy.
Tough guy, but I'm your tough guy. That mode.
Very different from the. I of the tiger.

Speaker 19 Very I of the tiger.

Speaker 18 And Mamdani, who's very young, right? And he just came in

Speaker 18 very cool.

Speaker 18 funny, engaged. Look, there's all kinds of things we can discuss and argue, and he's a fascinating figure.
But just on raw politics, as a boxing match,

Speaker 18 that was the kind of decision where the, you know, you win by 10 points. You win every round.

Speaker 19 Besides Kuo's terrible boxing, though, using that metaphor feels so dated at this moment. I don't know why.
I bet the youngs are like, what?

Speaker 18 Yeah, boxing is not exactly at the center of attention. Here's the thing.

Speaker 18 We live

Speaker 18 in a very, it's a young city. It's a city where certain constituencies have been totally overlooked.
We have in this city between 750,000 and a million Muslim voters.

Speaker 18 We have a city filled with young people who are deeply depressed by national politics and see no hope in it and are fed up.

Speaker 18 with all kinds of versions of the familiar and feel that they've been there they're not going to have the kind of life care that you and I have been privileged to have.

Speaker 18 And so I think they look at somebody like

Speaker 18 Cuomo as just worn out and cynical.

Speaker 18 And it matters. His ads and his social media are just very 20 years ago.
Eric Adams comes across as, you know, at this point, not very much.

Speaker 19 I'd vote for Eric Adams over Cuomo at this point. I can't believe I just said that.

Speaker 18 I understand.

Speaker 18 But you also have this hilarious phenomenon that Adams and Cuomo are waiting for one or the other to drop out,

Speaker 18 even though they're neck and neck in the polls. And I bet you that neither one of them do.

Speaker 19 No, Adams would have a better chance against Mom Dani, actually.

Speaker 19 Actually, if I had to like

Speaker 18 that Adams has a better chance. Right.
I think that's absolutely right. Well, he could still get a substantial African-American vote.

Speaker 18 There might be some people who see Mom Dani as

Speaker 18 that comes from a privileged background, no matter what the ethnic background is, or some people that feel rightly or wrongly alienated by his views on the Middle East, even though the mayor of New York very rarely controls foreign policy.

Speaker 18 But they may feel alienated by that. But I think Mom Dhani is going to win.

Speaker 19 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right. No, he's way up.
But if people don't know, right now the polls are showing him doing very well.

Speaker 18 No, and we're forgetting Curtis Sleewa, who I first covered as a young Washington Post reporter. And he lives up the street from me, I think in a studio apartment with about 15 cats and his wife.

Speaker 18 He's an odd, he's an odd bird, but he's he's getting some votes.

Speaker 19 He is actually. You know, actually, of all the people presenting, he's actually somewhat funny.
And I'm like, and he's himself. He's himself.

Speaker 19 And actually, some of the things he says, I'm like, that's a fair point.

Speaker 19 I literally of him with the hat and from when he used to be on the stage. He's not wearing the hat and he's giving up the.

Speaker 18 No, he had the hat. He gives it up

Speaker 18 here and there because he wants to look, you know, mayor.

Speaker 19 I think he should go with the hat.

Speaker 18 That's why we know who he is. Yeah, exactly.
Like Groucho without the mustache and the cigar.

Speaker 19 I actually literally was like, okay, this is my stack rank. Mom Donnie,

Speaker 19 Silhouette,

Speaker 18 Curtis.

Speaker 19 Slua, whatever, him, the hat guy.

Speaker 19 Adams, Cuomo. Literally, that's how I go.
And it's like, I cannot believe I'm saying this. I don't live in New York.
Do you talk a little bit about Mom Donnie's weaknesses, though? Because

Speaker 19 my son lives in New York, has just recently left New York, who's at NYU. Love Mondami.
So does my other older son.

Speaker 19 And it's not for, you know, he knows that some of the stuff is like, he can't do grocery stores necessarily, but he likes the idea that he's talking about it.

Speaker 18 He's not sure he can do.

Speaker 19 He's like, well, he's thinking about people's food. He's thinking about, like, he goes, I don't know if he'll do it, but everyone else says shit that they don't do.

Speaker 18 Part of it is it costs a fortune to live decently in New York City, period.

Speaker 18 And so forget the poor for a moment, but to live a middle-class life on an income in much of the rest of the country would seem quite comfortable is really, really hard.

Speaker 18 And one of the truisms of politics is that parents want to know that their kids are going to live slightly better than them. And here

Speaker 18 the numbers are the opposite for a big part of the population. At first, Mamdani's support seemed to be isolated in what's called the Brownstone Belt.

Speaker 18 Comfortable, young creatives

Speaker 18 whose politics are left and who

Speaker 18 are

Speaker 18 struggling to make it work in Betsy

Speaker 18 or

Speaker 18 Park Slope, which is wealthier, and so on. In fact, that's not the limitation.
He's not limited to that vote.

Speaker 18 He

Speaker 18 is done quite well on the west side of Manhattan and downtown and other, in Queens.

Speaker 18 So I think he's just going to romp. I think he's going to win by a lot.

Speaker 19 I think he's going to win by a lot. And Cuomo, not by a lot.
What's his biggest weakness?

Speaker 19 If you were Cuomo and not living in the Rocky period, Rocky I period of the world, what would you tell Cuomo to do?

Speaker 18 Well,

Speaker 18 there are three areas of conversation. I don't know if they're weaknesses, but three areas of angles of attack that we've seen.

Speaker 18 One is the false accusation that he's somehow an anti-Semite. It's just really nonsense.

Speaker 18 There's no question that he's pro-Palestinian rights, and that was an energizing issue

Speaker 18 even in his college days.

Speaker 18 And some of the vocabulary that comes along with that alienates some voters, some of them Jewish. That's one area.

Speaker 18 The other area is he comes from a background where his father is a very distinguished Columbia professor and his mother is a movie maker. And while not wealthy in the New York sense,

Speaker 18 they're wealthy and privileged in every sense elsewhere, and certainly to the majority of New Yorkers. So there's one thing like that.
So he's the privileged kid of the left, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Then the third thing is, well, he can't do what he's promising.

Speaker 18 So he's talking about grocery stores. I think maybe

Speaker 18 when it comes to grocery stores, what he's talking about is having some models of how this would work. It's not like he's going to return us to the Soviet Union of empty state grocery stores in 1978.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 how you go about affecting rent prices and limiting raises in

Speaker 18 rent prices and how you have an effect on the really radical income differences in New York City and elsewhere depends on the state legislature.

Speaker 18 as Kathy Hochl has pointed out any number of times. And it's likely that he's certainly not going to win battle.

Speaker 18 But what a lot of people see is that he, and I hate to use the new AG, he sees them in a way that

Speaker 18 Eric Adams is too weird to do and

Speaker 18 Cuomo is past his sell-by-day.

Speaker 19 Past his sell-by-day. Do you worry about Donald Trump coming in if he wins? They're going to use it, the win as something.

Speaker 18 Of course.

Speaker 18 You know,

Speaker 18 it's unpredictable, but clearly Donald Trump sees himself as a New Yorker, even though he's mainly abandoned New York for the delicious tax comforts of Florida.

Speaker 19 Yeah, so he will come in.

Speaker 18 In some way or another. Look, he came, he's doing this in Washington.
Now, to what degree and how much of it is a show and

Speaker 18 there to just prove that he can do this with swagger like he's done to universities and any number of other institutions? It's hard to say.

Speaker 19 Yeah, The Battle for New York. That was a movie with Kurt Russell.
Yes, that movie is amazing. He plays Snake.
Escape from New York.

Speaker 19 There was Escape from LA too, but he plays Snake. That's his name.
I think his name is Snake. And he's New York becomes sort of a bad place.
And then a rich guy's daughter gets

Speaker 19 plane crashes there. And then he has to go in and get her.

Speaker 18 Can Kurt Russell run for mayor?

Speaker 19 Trust me. You and your

Speaker 19 Esther watch it tonight.

Speaker 18 You'll thank me.

Speaker 19 All right, David, one more quick break. We'll be back for Wins and Fails.

Speaker 33 Sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter, or following a counterintuitive instinct, or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision.

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Speaker 19 Okay, David, wrapping up, let's hear some wins and fails. Why don't you go first?

Speaker 18 Can I be patriotic in my win? Sure.

Speaker 18 David Kirkpatrick, who came to this magazine first as a fact checker many years ago when I first got here, and then returned here from a career at the New York Times to be a writer at the New Yorker, has published this week a huge piece in the New Yorker called The Number.

Speaker 18 And what it is, is a meticulous, fair-minded, non-jumping to conclusions accounting

Speaker 18 of how much money, of how much money Donald Trump and his family has made off of the president in six months.

Speaker 19 $2.5 billion.

Speaker 18 It's $3.5 billion, which is a lot in six months. And I will say

Speaker 18 that

Speaker 18 he's, if anything, Kirkpatrick bends over backwards to be conservative in his accounting by nature and by what I can see in the reporting and the fact-checking. So I think that's

Speaker 18 it's a win. It's a tragic win because of what it's telling you, but there's that.
Yeah, the grift. Do you have a win or should I go to Fail? No, go ahead.
Go to FAIL.

Speaker 18 And this is sentimental, but also, I think, important. It's what we started our conversation with.
I think Jeff Bezos' behavior with the Washington Post, I don't care how he gets married.

Speaker 18 He wants to take over the city of Rome or Albania to get married, as we say on my blog, Zygesunt.

Speaker 18 You know, fine.

Speaker 18 Maybe that pays a lot of catering bills and wonderful. But to take an institution, and what we're discovering in recent years to our pain is that institutions are fragile.

Speaker 18 Things that seem like they'd last forever and were a good thing

Speaker 18 in their sum total, total,

Speaker 18 they're fragile. And to watch really

Speaker 18 earnest, good reporters and editors have to live through this is really painful. Not just because I worked there a million years ago, but

Speaker 18 it's a big deal to have the news outlet in the capital of the country

Speaker 18 be put in this kind of deeply uncertain position at best. I'm glad to see that the Wall Street Journal in many ways

Speaker 18 has shown itself up lately. Emma Tucker proves to be a terrific editor.

Speaker 18 And that's good for competition with the Times and others. But to see this happen to the Post

Speaker 18 is on Jeff Bezos, and that's a fail.

Speaker 19 It's a real fail. I just, it's a stop.
You should buy it with me, David. He won't meet with me.
He might meet with you. You're a white guy.
But you got the Doe.

Speaker 18 You got the Doe. I'm the white guy.
Together we can conquer worlds. Worlds.
The Doe and the white guy.

Speaker 19 That's like a reality show. That would be such a good idea.

Speaker 18 Kurt Russell would play me. Who would play you?

Speaker 19 Yes, with a patch. Kurt Russell would also play me.

Speaker 19 All right.

Speaker 19 My fail is, I got to say, this story in the New York Times. Mark Zuckerberg was running a private school for his two daughters and a dozen other children out of his house in a compound in Palo Alto.

Speaker 19 And it's in violation of city code.

Speaker 19 Meanwhile, a school he and his wife established for low-income families in East Palo Alto announced it would be shutting down in April because he stopped funding it.

Speaker 19 I just, the idea of this private school for his children and a few other rich kids in the area or rich friends or whatever is grotesque. These people are already, they already go away from people and

Speaker 17 reality.

Speaker 19 And now they're even further raising their children to do so, to be out of,

Speaker 19 they should be in schools in Palo Alto. They have excellent public schools in Palo Alto.
And to do this is really, I find it grotesque.

Speaker 19 And so to do this just in a high-handed way, he's already taking over great swaths of this area. Now, Palo Alto has always been

Speaker 19 a rich place, but

Speaker 19 he's grotesquerized it in a way that's, and, and, um, it's just icky that this is what he's doing with his children. Um, kids should not be um sequestered like this.

Speaker 18 I feel like I like that word, grotesquerise.

Speaker 19 Grotoscerize.

Speaker 18 It's a word for our age.

Speaker 19 It is, it is, grotesqueries. And speaking of fantasies, um,

Speaker 19 I, the, the, the season finale of the Gilded Age was so good. I can't, oh my God, have you seen it yet?

Speaker 18 I watched like an episode when it began. I had to.
Oh, no, stop. Stop.

Speaker 18 Start with this season.

Speaker 19 Start with this season. You'll pick it right up.
Okay. It's rich people.

Speaker 19 You know, this is a different version of rich people. And

Speaker 19 there's Train Daddy,

Speaker 19 who is Vanderbilt, who's playing the character. His name is Russell.

Speaker 18 No exploding vehicles.

Speaker 19 Oh, it's the same guy who did Duncan Abbey. So, yes, there's things that happen

Speaker 19 with that guy. That guy.

Speaker 19 And so it's great. It's really great.
The costumes are great.

Speaker 19 I got to say, Carrie Coons, who plays Mrs. Russell, Mrs.
Bertha Russell, is just fantastic. Such a groping, grasping.
It's billionaires I get behind. Like, I love these billionaires.

Speaker 19 They're so fantastic and awful, but they're in the greatest of American ways. And at one point, in the finale, I'm not going to give away stuff.

Speaker 19 But she goes,

Speaker 19 she's letting divorced women into the balls. And so one woman says to her, you know, it's really important that we move into into the future.

Speaker 19 And the woman, Carrie Coons, who's fantastic and deserves every Emmy in the book, goes, this is the future and the future is America. Like, and it's so MAGA.

Speaker 18 It's so good. I'm sold.
I am sold.

Speaker 19 But at the same time, they have their, they've really doubled down.

Speaker 19 They have a whole, they're showing this sort of sort of upcoming black upper class and upper and middle class in a really beautiful way. And they juxtapose these balls and just wonderful, just really.

Speaker 19 And if at first people thought it was the most low stakes show ever. Like they're worried about whether someone crosses the street to go to a party.

Speaker 19 It's actually really, it's turned into something very heartfelt. So fantastic, fantastic finale.
And I'm excited for season four.

Speaker 18 I'm there.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I'm there.

Speaker 19 And I want to, one thing is, it's not a fail, but Sarah Jessica Parker is going to finally do her final show this week of, which is essentially Sex in the City

Speaker 19 franchise. And I have to say, pound for pound, and she doesn't weigh that much.
She's given a lot.

Speaker 19 Speaking of New York City, we can have all your criticism of that show, but really well done over the many, many, many years. And lots of it.
I personally like her a lot.

Speaker 18 Me too.

Speaker 19 Yeah. She's a lovely person.
And good. And it's been, it's gotten really good the last season.
So it's one more episode. And she deserves all the kudos to

Speaker 19 both of those ladies. Bertha

Speaker 19 and S, uh, SJP. Um, anyway, we want to hear from you.
Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.

Speaker 19 Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT and before we go this week and on with Kara Swisher I spoke with Gary Ginsberg and Carol Razzowill about America's enduring fascination with JFK Jr.

Speaker 19 also a New Yorker before he died let's listen to a clip of Gary Ginsberg a former senior editor at George magazine talk about JFK Jr.'s political stance

Speaker 37 He had a vision about politics that I think is really important for today. He thought of himself as kind of a post-partisan.
He didn't believe in partisan politics.

Speaker 37 Even though he was a lifelong Democrat, his family embodied the Democratic Party. He really thought that effective policymaking would be done through post-partisanship.

Speaker 19 As it turned out, he was wrong about that, but he was very pressing about that magazine, An Entertainment and Politics and Celebrity. Really interesting is a series on CNN that's really interesting.

Speaker 19 And it's, of course, a tragic early death of JFK Jr. But it's full of fantastic photos of JFK.
The entire thing is handsome JFK wandering through it.

Speaker 19 It'd be interesting to know what he would have been. Do you think he would have run for office? Absolutely.
Don't you think?

Speaker 18 Oh, God.

Speaker 18 Why would anybody?

Speaker 19 I know, but he would have, don't you think? I think probably, yeah. Impossibly handsome.
Very, quite smart, actually.

Speaker 19 Very interesting. Yeah, he probably would have.
We probably would have been better off with someone like him because he's a rich person who try. Yeah.
I like rich people who try.

Speaker 18 We're going to have them. He's getting thinner on the ground.
I agree.

Speaker 19 If we're going to have them, let's have the ones that try. And again,

Speaker 19 Bertha Russell.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 19 And please watch that. And Escape from New York, David.
I've given you two assignments for you and your wife for this one.

Speaker 18 I think I know which one I'm going toward first. All right.
Okay. But Gilda, I just said anyway.

Speaker 19 Okay. That's the show.
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 19 Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back on Friday and I'll read us out.
David, thank you so much.

Speaker 18 What a pleasure, Carol.

Speaker 19 What a pleasure. You're always a pleasure.

Speaker 19 You are one of the finest editors in the land, I have to say.

Speaker 18 Thanks.

Speaker 19 And you do an amazing job and you still have the juice. Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, Taylor Griffin, and Kevin Oliver.
Ernie Enderdrott engineered this episode.

Speaker 19 Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Make sure to follow Pivot on your favorite podcast platform.
Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 19 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/slash pod. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Speaker 17 Thank you, David, again.

Speaker 18 My pleasure.

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