The Unlearned Lessons of 2016, with Katy Tur

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

As you can probably hear, I'm calling in from Las Vegas.

On the other end of the line is producer Kevin.

Hey, Kevin.

Hey, Isaac.

So where exactly are you right now?

Well, I booked a hotel in Las Vegas, which means I booked into a casino.

And of course, The casino that I booked into is Caesar's Palace.

So that's where I am.

What brought you there?

Well, Well, so we had the Democratic debate on Wednesday night, the lead-up to the caucuses on Saturday, which could

be an important moment in this race, could be another ridiculous catastrophe like what happened in Iowa.

We will see.

I watched the debate from back here in D.C.

What was it like there?

Well, it was...

intense because the race feels like it is in a new phase now.

We've had two states vote, have two more coming up in the next week and a half, and then we go right into Super Tuesday at the beginning of March.

And it was also the first debate, obviously, that had Mike Bloomberg in it.

And that changes the dynamics of everything going on here.

It's starting to be that you can look at the Democratic debate stage and say, one of those people is going to be the nominee, which is not a feeling that we had certainly in June of last year when these debates started.

And while all that's going on, back in D.C., there's this very different conversation going on with Roger Stone, the Trump associate linked to WikiLeaks, was just sentenced to a little over three years in prison.

And the news around the case has followed a week of absolute crisis for the Justice Department.

All this happening in parallel to what's going on out in Las Vegas.

Yeah, it's a lot that's happening all at once.

On the one hand, it feels crazy.

On the other hand, it's the craziness that we are just all living with.

It seems like week to week at this point, day to day, of just so much going on.

And as these two major storylines are happening of what's going on in the White House and what's going on in the campaign trail, and they are now about to really collide into each other head-on, and that makes it a little tricky for those of us in the news business, let alone for everybody who's trying to consume what we're producing.

All right, I felt a segue coming there.

Who did you talk to this week?

Well, so the interview this week is with Katie Ter.

She is the host of a show on MSNBC.

But in the last cycle in the 2016 election, she was on the Trump campaign every day.

She spent almost a year and a half with him, everywhere he went around the country, interviewing him, going to his rallies.

And it seemed like the perfect moment to not only take stock of where we are in journalism, but get her thoughts on what a re-election campaign will look like for Donald Trump.

One of the things that I think about a lot and have been thinking about since 2016 is what political coverage should be like, how we do it, where we did go wrong, and what we should reorient and recalibrate.

And that is a thought process that Katie has been going through as well.

And that's part of what we've talked about: this, not just how you handle everything, what you pay attention to, what you don't, but how much do we use Twitter, all those sorts of things.

All right, you want to get things going?

Yeah, let's hit it.

From NBC News,

the Democratic Presidential Debate.

Live from Las Vegas, Nevada.

There is nothing normal about what has been going on at the Justice Department in the last few days.

Welcome to Las Vegas.

Everything is on the line tonight.

Tonight there are growing calls for the resignation of Attorney General Bill Barr.

Are you trying to say that I'm dumb or are you mocking me here, Pete?

Another domino of our democracy that is falling right in front of us.

This is the ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

I'm currently on NBC Set in the Las Vegas Trip with this week's guest, MSNBC host, Katie Turr.

Hey, Katie.

Hey, Isaac.

So last night was the debate.

It was intense.

Walk me through what that is like.

That moment maybe mattered or that didn't, or like, where is that going to head to?

Which one is going to get cut into an ad?

I was at a watch party last night and I was watching to see how the audience reacted and which moments really got their attention.

The one that stood out last night was the Amy Klobuchar Pete Buttigieg exchange, where she said, do you think I'm dumb?

And that got them going.

It's usually the moments where someone insults another person that gets the crowd excited, not necessarily the policy debate.

Right.

It's the gladiator aspect.

Yes.

So the inspiration for talking with you is truly from, and this sounds very insider-y, but whatever, that's what we're doing here.

On Monday, I was on your show, and I was sitting in the makeup chair next to Eli Stocols of the LA Times and I said to him, what are you talking about?

And he said, I'm talking about the pardons and what are you talking about?

And I said, I'm talking about Bloomberg and the primary race and the debate and everything that's coming up.

And I said to him, look, you know, with the way that I'm covering this race,

every couple of days I look up and I have to be like, wait, what happened in the White House?

And he said, yeah, I feel the same way about the campaign.

Cause he covers the White House.

And

he said, I have to look up and say, what's going on over there?

And it hit me as I was walking out of the studio that you you are sitting there on set for the whole of it and have to bounce between this.

So what is that juggling process?

And then, God forbid, there's something completely out of left field, like a weather event or a terrorist attack, and then you have to, or the Harvey Weinstein verdict, and you have to suddenly get yourself involved in that.

It's weird.

It's weird.

You have to become at least a passable expert in all things,

or at least make it seem like you're a passable expert in all things.

And with this administration, so much is happening every single day.

So you have to, I mean, you're just constantly reading.

I feel like my face is buried in my phone because I'm constantly reading.

Is it on you to figure out what the right balance is between spending X amount of time on whatever the latest news is out of the White House

or the presidential campaign or foreign policy?

Well, listen, we spent the past three and a half years focused on every single detail coming out of this White House and every investigation and everything the president said and every move that he made.

Now I'm personally hungry to cover something else.

And that is the 2020 race, which is so pivotal for this country.

And it's going to be such a slugfest come the general election.

It already is kind of a slugfest right now.

So I'm trying to focus more on what we're seeing on the campaign trail.

Also, I just really love campaigns.

I really love them.

2016 was a wild campaign.

It sparked some

joy within me, if you could say that.

So let's back it up and just talk about you.

You come at this with the perspective of somebody who was a foreign correspondent and then 510 days covering Donald Trump's campaign and then being on set anchoring for the last couple of years.

What is the perspective that that builds in a person?

It is so weird.

So I moved to London in 2014 and I was prepared to disengage from America and start covering the world.

I checked out from American politics.

I really wasn't covering Obama.

I wasn't covering the lead up to the 2016 race.

And this is late 14 into 15.

This is late 14 into 15.

And America still has relatively good standing.

And nobody's, you know, Donald Trump liked to say that no one respected America, but it was different living overseas in 2015 than it was visiting, say, in 2002, 2003, I'm sorry, 2003 post-invasion of Iraq when everybody hated Americans,

it felt like Americans were embraced overseas.

So then I came back to New York and

one of the things I covered before I got on the Trump campaign was the decision to legalize gay marriage.

And I remember thinking, wow, what a moment of progress progressive policies have taken over and

what an optimistic view of where America is going.

And looking back on that now, how open and accepting everybody was,

it feels like I was living in an imaginary space.

Yeah, I mean, the gay marriage decision happened the morning of when Obama gave the eulogy in Charleston and saying Amazing Grace.

Exactly.

Which I was, I was in Charleston covering that.

And it did feel like something was changing in America.

And it was, and I know from reporting on it then that the Obama people were like, yeah, well, like our vision is here.

Exactly.

And they were up.

It felt like there was no turning back.

This is the way it's going to be from now on.

We have moved beyond this idea that you cannot be accepted in our society.

We've moved beyond even the racial bigotry of the past.

We were going forward.

Maybe that was just my limited experience.

No, no, no.

I mean, I think that it felt that way to a lot of people.

And again, like Obama saying that day was so cathartic, and the Confederate flag came down over the Capitol in South Carolina.

and they flew back to the White House and it was lit up in rainbow colors and Obamacare had just been held up by the Supreme Court the day before.

There was this feeling among progressives, and definitely among the Obama White House staff and Obama himself, like that's it.

But then again, we should have realized that the tragedy in Charleston was not a one-off, it wasn't the end.

It was, in some cases, more the beginning of what we were about to say: the rise in hate, the rise in division, the rise in anger in the country, or something that was boiling underneath the surface that we just hadn't detected.

And then, getting on the Trump campaign, I got a first-hand view

of how angry a section of this country was.

And

it was really surreal.

It was really surreal.

It felt like I moved overseas and came back to a country that I didn't recognize any longer.

Do you think it's that you didn't recognize it or that you didn't see it before you left?

I think I didn't see it before I left.

And I grew up in Los Angeles.

I lived in New York.

I lived in London.

I covered general assignment stories.

So I covered accidents and tragedies and one-offs.

I wasn't covering, you know, the building racial tensions.

I wasn't covering the rise in hate crimes.

I wasn't covering what was happening in politics.

I wasn't covering narratives.

This wasn't a serial.

It was, you know, it was a one-off in my daily life.

So I don't think I was seeing it.

I wasn't seeing the patterns.

This is maybe a sensitive question for someone who works in TV.

Do you think TV has made news coverage better over the last couple of years?

We get a lot of people complaining, oh, cable TV, it's just...

I think it's a hard question, yes and no.

I come at it from the perspective of having grown up in TV news and my parents covered Los Angeles news and they covered car chases and the OJ chase and from a helicopter.

From a helicopter and they would jokingly say is when we grew up that they broke TV.

They broke TV news.

And you you know i mean i think that that's like what you're talking about here the the helicopter is a big part of well yeah it made it more reality right

they got a helicopter and they were in the air for these things so you got a different view from it and you would see you saw new angles and you saw new new new aspects to what was happening i mean but los angeles in the 90s was just a crazy place to begin with and they were they were covering all that but putting the the live police pursuit on television and watching it minute by minute what was the news value in that there wasn't as much news value as there there was in just the

adrenaline of watching a chase.

It was reality TV.

Did you have that conversation with them at any point?

Oh, of course.

We had that conversation, if not in real time, then close after it.

And we've had that conversation since, especially while I was covering the Trump campaign, because the Trump campaign felt like reality TV as well, because you never knew what he was going to say and you were watching just to watch.

And there were real questions about the news value of playing those rallies over and over again.

We've all, there's no secret about it.

We've all had to wrestle with how that coverage played out.

At the same time,

it was a movement and it has been a movement in our culture and it's there.

It exists.

It wasn't created by cable news.

Donald Trump just tapped into it.

So you have this balance

the coverage, right?

Do you feel like that can be

coverage?

Like

they go back to 16 of, I mean, the famous one of when there was the live shot of the empty podium waiting for him to show up, right, for like an hour.

But continuing, this debate goes on now.

Should, when he gave that speech the day after he was acquitted in the impeachment trial at the White House, it went on for an hour and was all over the place.

Like, should that be something that is covered?

Should it be something that's carried live, right?

Like that.

I think there were real questions about that.

And I don't think we figured it out.

I don't think we in the news media figured out how to cover Donald Trump.

Still.

Still.

On one hand, he's the president of the United States.

so what he says is inherently valuable, period.

At the same time,

he says a lot of nonsense and things that are not particularly relevant, and he will go off on these political rants, and you are kind of just handing him over a platform to say whatever he wants.

Is that our decision?

It is a real question, and we wrestle with it every day, and we're wrestling with it right now.

But in terms of, you asked whether cable news and the coverage of him helped um i guess large in or helped um helped his movement uh uh flourish i'm not sure

large in's on a word i don't know where i made that word but it's a case and large thank you that's what happens you don't sleep in vegas um

i'm not sure it did i'm not sure it did you know it it it was there and he would have spoken to those people regardless of whether or not we were putting it on television.

When I would talk to folks and I would say, you know, did you see this?

Did you see that?

No, I didn't see any of that.

Did you watch this?

No, I wasn't watching that.

I mean, he was talking to them on Facebook.

He was talking to them on Twitter.

He was there.

He could get it on YouTube.

And he's there even more so now because he's the president of the world.

Exactly.

Exactly.

What about on the Democratic side of this?

We had a Democratic debate.

It was the ninth debate.

It was the 11th night of debating because there were the first two of those two-night affairs.

The complaint that a lot of Democrats have is that

this has just been turned into a show that hasn't benefited the party so much.

And that's not on TV so much as it is the complaints about the qualifications and thresholds.

It's made for a lot of good TV.

Has this process been healthy for the Democratic Party, I think?

Oh, gosh, that's a big question.

Yes and no.

I think the town halls are especially helpful because you have one-on-one time and you can flesh out some of their policies.

The debates were really difficult when there was 10 people or more on stage.

You're not going to get much out of anybody.

You can get short answers.

I thought last night's debate was explosive.

But I thought what was good about it was I felt like the candidates were up there differentiating themselves from each other.

Really, I do.

And I think that's a good thing to see when you are trying to make a decision for who you want to vote for.

I want to see you on stage tell me why you're the most qualified candidate.

And it's tricky, of course, because debating has pretty much nothing to do with actually being president.

Nothing.

Nothing to do with it.

It's part of our process.

The problem with our process is it has become a popularity contest more than anything else.

How do you perform?

What do you look like?

What did you say?

How did that land?

What was the face that you made?

Yeah, exactly.

How do you look under pressure?

That's not governing.

What's governing is the ideas you have and the coalitions that you could build.

Yeah, and I think you could point to the fact that both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, our last two presidents, were not great debaters.

And they have both been president, right?

They won.

Which might be good news for Bloomberg because he was not a good debater.

All right, let's take a quick break.

We'll be back with more in a moment with Katie Tur.

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It does feel to a lot of people like we are just stuck forever in 2016.

Yes.

That it never ended.

It's like you're inside my head.

You lived through it in a way that no one else did.

So, what is it like inside your head where we have never left 2016?

So, I've been to a few Trump rallies recently, and it is really weird walking into them because, on the one hand, it's like you're walking into

a watch in an explosion.

It hasn't moved.

Everything's exactly the same.

He read The Snake the other night at the New Hampshire rally.

The voters are all the same voters that were there in 2016.

I actually tried to look for new voters, found very few.

They're wearing the same t-shirts.

He's saying the same thing on stage, except it is a much more professional organization now.

They have people taking in information when you walk in.

They are much more data-driven.

They were always data-driven, but they're getting more organized about it.

So it feels like a professional campaign, but it still sounds and looks like the Donald Trump campaign of 2016.

He's also, also, I mean, the same things that he was talking about in 2016 is the same thing he said over and over again in the White House.

It's like

you're Bill Murray and Groundhog's Day every day.

You wake up and it's the same thing and you wonder if you do something else.

Some different version of events in this day will change what happens tomorrow.

It doesn't.

You are at the forefront of something that is very real for, I think, a lot of people in journalism now: of being

drawn into the campaign itself, becoming a player on the field.

Trump talked about you at the rallies.

He made a point of it.

What was that like with the benefit of hindsight now of what you

were going through and trying to process it?

At the time, you know, you don't really think about it.

You compartmentalize.

I can't deal with this right now.

I've got a nightly news live shot.

I've got 16 MSNBC hits.

I've got to write an article for the web about internal campaign workings.

I've got to call these sources.

You just don't think about it.

You don't think about it until you get home and you look at your phone and your mother is texted 30 times and called 10 times.

And at that point, you're too tired to respond.

I got to a point actually where I had my personal phone with me and I ended up turning it off because I couldn't deal with it any longer.

I never turned it back on.

Like, I tried to turn it back on just the other day.

This is four years later.

And it said, you need to,

you have too many reset tries or something.

You can't open this phone for three million minutes.

Basically, it's dead.

I can't get into it.

But anyway, in the moment, you don't really think about it.

But looking back now,

while it lent itself to a unique experience and made for a really interesting book,

I'm kind of, I'm frustrated by it because I don't want to be a part of the story.

I wanted to cover the story.

And I didn't want to be be seen as a target of the president.

I don't want to, because inevitably people will see it as me being a foil to him or an enemy of his.

I don't want to, I'm not that.

I'm a reporter.

I want to cover him.

I don't want to be seen as unfair.

So even if I was abundantly fair, if he's going after me, there's going to be a section of the population that thinks, oh, well, she must be this, that, or the other.

So it's frustrating.

And I look back and I wish it didn't happen because

I enjoy reporting and it doesn't make reporting that easy.

It is something that I feel like a lot of reporters struggle with.

I do

being on Twitter, and you have to, on the one hand, express a little bit of who you are because that's what social media demands.

But that doesn't mean that when I write a story that is tough on someone, that means that I have an agenda against that person.

But when you have like raw story come out and say, Katie Tur slams so-and-so, and I'm like, no, we're having a discussion about policy.

No one's slamming the other.

Yeah, and it gets twisted.

Right.

And and on I feel like

and this is true of some candidates more than other candidates on Twitter you'll see their supporters come

no matter what if you write anything that's not like they're wonderful and and like it is true it's just a fact that this is more the case for Donald Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders supporters in different ways than it is for any other politician.

You're not wrong.

You're not lying.

The remedy to that is to turn off Twitter.

Yeah, or mute.

Mute.

I mean, honestly, I've taken a step back.

I don't tweet as much as I used to.

I find that being part of the conversation is important to other journalists.

It's not necessarily important beyond our sphere of influence.

And I also, I feel like when you are looking at it so much, inevitably your coverage will be influenced by it.

So if 30 people are screaming at you over a question you had about the Sanders campaign, do you look at that and think to yourself, oh, wait, was I not totally fair?

And do you change the way you word the question the next time?

Do you change the way you cover it?

Do you go harder?

Do you go softer?

It's going to have an influence.

I think at debates, it's been a thing for me that I'll tweet a couple of times through the debate, but I actually won't read any of the tweets

because then you see narratives being formed or like little moments that become things.

Look, an example of it that was a question at the debate last night of Amy Klobuchar not knowing the name of the president of Mexico.

That is something that took on

a bigger role because of Twitter, because it's such a Twitter thing.

So let me ask you this.

Is it just a big role on Twitter, though, or does that end up bleeding into the news coverage?

And then does that bleed into the subconscious of more and more voters?

Absolutely.

That's the problem.

That's the problem.

I mean, Twitter is, how many people are on Twitter?

It's like

not even 10% of the population, right?

And they're mostly, it's mostly just a bunch of journalists.

No, it's often performance hard for it.

It brings out the worst of the navel-gazing, talking to each other thing that happens.

Yeah, we end up just being an echo chamber for ourselves.

And then what's really awful about it, beyond our own echo chamber, is

we might have an ability to sift through the content and know what's real and not real, and

who's a reliable source and who's not a reliable source.

But most people don't.

Like my mother-in-law will come to me and say, Did you see this?

And she'll read some crazy headline from Twitter, and I'll say, That's not true.

And she'll say, Well, how do you know that?

I'm like, Well, because look at the person.

Is that your mother-in-law who's related to you?

And it's related to your husband who's also in the news.

They'll have a check mark next to their name, but they're like an actor.

They're not a journalist.

And that doesn't mean the information coming from them is valid.

And I just find it to be, it's so confusing if you are an average consumer that the only solution is for all of the journalists and all of the newspapers and TV outlets, everybody to pull their content and their people off of it and just leave it as a space for

arguing about, I don't know what.

I mean, you just can't have the...

So shut down well not shut down Twitter, but just take the

reporting out of it.

That way you know you can't go there for reliable information.

It's not the place you're going to go to learn.

It's more like what Facebook ends up.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a place you can go to hear conspiracy theories and angry people

or look at pictures of cats, which is always great.

Yeah.

What do you have against cats?

You're not going to go for Washington Post reporting or NBC News reporting or Atlantic reporting.

I hate when people talk about the media, but I'm going to use it for this anyway, since we are both part of the media.

Do you think the media has learned enough lessons from what happened in 2016?

No.

What have we not learned?

We haven't learned how to cover him, Donald Trump.

We haven't learned how to get away from the horse race.

I think we haven't learned how to take a deep breath.

Honestly, there's a lot of coverage that is just so immediate.

And

there's this trigger Twitter finger where you want to retweet, retweet, retweet.

And I think we need to all take a step back and say, is this true?

Is this going to be true in three hours?

Or is this even more hot?

Or is it worth our time?

All right.

When you look at these people and think ahead to what a general election would be like against Donald Trump for any of them, do you think that they seem ready for that?

For what you think it'll be?

I think Elizabeth Warren looks ready.

I don't know if she'll get the nomination, but I think she, I can imagine her on a debate stage with Donald Trump.

Do you think there'll be a debate with Donald Trump?

I don't know.

That's a good question.

But I can see it.

And I think the campaign likes to say that she showed that last night with Michael Bloomberg.

And I think they're right about that.

I can imagine.

I can imagine a Joe Biden.

I don't know if they, what I don't think the Democrats are ready for, maybe the Bloomberg campaign is ready for this, is the data operation that Trump has and what they are doing to micro-target voters and those voters' friends and make sure that they squeeze out every single vote that they can.

I don't think the Democrats were ready for that in 2016 and they've only gotten better at it.

Are they ready for the way that he is able to

grab at least many of the people who report on politics and grab their attention and our distractions?

If they're not ready for it, they better get ready for it.

I mean, I think they all know.

I think they all saw how 2016 played out.

I don't know if they know how to use it to their advantage, but I think that there is an awareness that Donald Trump will try to dominate every single headline.

It's going to be a little bit different.

I think we will be more judicious in what we cover and what we don't cover.

Do I think we have all the answers?

No.

Yeah.

I mean, it's the argument of like, if you want to try to play Donald Trump's game, no one is better at it than Donald Trump, right?

And if that's the strategy politically for a Democrat, it seems like a failing strategy.

And then they have to figure out how to play a different game that somehow will work.

So Hillary Clinton tried to play the Donald Trump's not fit for office.

He's a X, Y, or Z, and his supporters are X, Y, or Z, blah, blah, blah.

It didn't work for her.

I think what worked in 2018 for the Democrats that won in the midterms were the ones that went out and sold their policies.

Yeah, talked about it.

Talked about health care, talked about what they were going to do, talked about where the administration was failing.

Right.

Not the tweets.

Dan Pfeiffer had this advice, has this advice in his book and had this advice on my show yesterday.

Hit him where he's strongest.

Hit him on the economy.

Everyone knows what he's like.

They know his personality.

They know his rhetoric.

They know how he conducts himself in his office.

You're not going to win on that.

Hit him in a place where people see him as strongest.

The economy.

I wonder if any of them can do it.

I don't know.

What do you think?

I think that the primary race so far

has not been substantively a good preparation for what a general election race would be.

But on the sort of showmanship of it, it has been.

It's turned a lot of them into much better debaters.

Joe Biden's a better debater than he was at the beginning.

Elizabeth Warren was always good.

Budajutch has gotten much better.

Klobuchar has gotten much better.

But the kinds of things that they have been talking about

much more cater to people who would never ever ever vote for Donald Trump and will absolutely vote against him than

what they will need to and how they will need to talk about things and present themselves to the voters that they would need to be elected president.

I am always consistently shocked at how little targeting of new voters politicians do.

I mean,

if I were running for office, I would spend all my time trying to find new voters and convince them that if they participate in the system, they can make a difference.

It's 50% of the country.

Yeah.

When you look at the number of people who didn't vote and then the fact that Trump only won 46% of the vote, it does seem like a Democrat who is looking to win.

You're not going to get Trump voters, right?

I mean, I think it's safe to say you're not going to get Trump voters.

Or if you are, it'll be a sliver of them.

Yeah, a sliver of them.

But you can win if you find new voters.

Right.

And there are a lot out there.

Tons.

Well, that's not a happy note for the Democratic Party to end, or maybe for journalism, but

we're figuring it out.

We're working on it.

Come along for the ride.

Send us your suggestions on Twitter.

Maybe a happy note for the Trump campaign.

But that's.

Remember, they did only win by a sliver.

They did.

All right, Katie Terry, thanks for being here on The Ticket.

Isaac, thank you.

That's our show for this episode of The Ticket.

Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Thanks as well to Breakmaster Cylinder for our theme music.

We're now a few weeks into this new version of the show, and we want to hear what you think.

So if you like what you hear, drop us a rating on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next week.