The Reelection Battle Begins

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

The 2020 race is now really underway.

This past Sunday, 19 Democratic candidates descended on Cedar Rapids, Iowa for the unofficial kickoff in the first caucus state.

Let me tell you, it was a wild scene.

Pete Bootijudge was playing the keyboard at a barbecue his campaign hosted.

Bernie Sanders was marching in with McDonald's striking workers.

Elizabeth Warren supporters put on feather boas and were dancing to Dolly Parton in the streets.

Corey Booker's staff was banging on the ground with sticks covered in signs from his campaign.

John Delaney's folks even had a bagpipe player and a mini blimp.

So that's the Democrats.

And by the way, Joe Biden, the current frontrunner, was in Iowa this week too, though he skipped that big event in Cedar Rapids.

I was there with him as he campaigned along the southeast side of the state on Tuesday, trying to basically skip the primary and face off directly against President Donald Trump, who was in Iowa himself that day, and eager to have the fight.

Now, Trump is going to be the star of the show himself in a few days when he holds a rally in Orlando to officially announce his re-election campaign.

So where do things stand?

Is the race working out so far how Trump wants or how the Democrats want?

With me in studio is Elena Plott, Atlantic staff writer, and my colleague here in the newsroom.

Hi, Elena.

Hey, Isaac.

Glad you could be here.

I cover the Democrats running against Donald Trump, and I run all around the country trying to track what they're doing.

You cover President Trump and see what's happening in Washington and elsewhere.

You're going to be in Orlando for that kickoff rally.

So we're operating in two different but overlapping universes that are going to continue to converge more and more pretty much by the week here, it feels like.

Let's compare notes.

What

is going on with Donald Trump and Joe Biden?

Let's start with that.

I think one thing that always gets lost in discussions about why Trump is as obsessed he is with Joe Biden is the fact that

For Trump, looks matter a lot.

Aesthetics are quite important.

And what AIDS have told me is that for Trump, Joe Biden looks like what Trump has always understood a president to look like, really what Americans have always historically understood a president to look like.

An older white man, exactly.

Gray hair.

And in Trump's mind, not only is he an older white man, but it's not the Bernie Sanders variety necessarily.

It's kind of like sleeker and, you know, talks about appealing to the middle and all these sorts of,

you know, optimistic overtures.

So, yes, Biden is the front runner.

That is certainly true.

But I do think there is another layer to that obsession that goes so far beyond poll numbers.

And even I was speaking to a White House source earlier this week who told me that in a senior staff meeting around 7 a.m., Trump was already saying, hey, did you guys hear what I called Biden recently or whatever jab that I lobbed at him in Iowa?

I mean, he's really, really enjoying the fight on this one.

And meanwhile, Joe Biden is enjoying the fight himself.

I was with him on Tuesday in Iowa, three different stops.

He seemed like he could not stop talking about Donald Trump.

That was the whole point of the visit.

He wanted to make it seem like it's this head-to-head battle.

Like we've skipped over the primary already and gone right to the general election.

I think that there are 20 or so Democrats who will not be comfortable with that being the way that things are and will be fighting to stop Biden not only from being the nominee, but will want to keep him from stopping the process that's going on in the Democratic Party to figure out what it is, right?

And to get to that next place that they think that the Democratic Party needs to get to, where Biden is, of course, mostly promising to bring the country back to where it was before Donald Trump.

But it does seem like they are both, and I wrote this slide a couple weeks ago, that it's two

and three, when you count Bernie Sanders,

older men arguing about how to make America great again.

Right.

And

as long as the president, the most visible figure in our country, is reinforcing the notion that Biden and Sanders are his most formidable competitors, it's going to be interesting to me how much of that just inherently seeps into the Democratic voter base in terms of like, at the end, do they also decide that electability,

you know, as derived from who Trump is most worried about is most important to them?

Aaron Powell, and it's this issue, I think, that you hit on very well, and it makes sense with Trump, that he has a vision of what a president looks like.

He's often, you know, he didn't want to have John Bolton be his national security advisor, right?

Because he has a mustache, right?

He thinks about those things.

And that gets at something that's going on very much in the Democratic Party, that like we don't, it's very hard

for people to imagine a female president because there hasn't been a female president.

And that's some people, I should say,

that's what's going on.

And that seems to be maybe one of the things that powers Biden through, that's not just Donald Trump who sees Joe Biden as, to use a phrase that Donald Trump likes himself from central casting.

If Kamala Harris, if Elizabeth Warren, if Corey Booker, Corey Booker, there obviously has been a black president, but all these people who are very different

from the traditional portrait of a President Pete Buttajudge, any of them, really, other than Joe Biden and a couple of the other governors and senators who are older white guys themselves.

So how does it fit in with Trump's obsession with Obama and Biden?

Is that part of the thinking here, that he sees Biden as bringing the Obama administration back?

I don't know actually that that has so much to do.

I mean, indeed, Trump derives a lot of pride from what he sees as the accomplishments of his administration of all these regulatory rollbacks, for instance.

A lot of deregulation hasn't actually gone through.

It remains tied up in courts, but

he does rightly feel that his White House has put a halt to a lot of the regulations the Obama administration ushered through.

But not to sound like a broken record player, I do think it gets back not only to the aesthetic of Biden as central casting, but also the heft that you bring when you can say you've been in the White House before, that you have done this before.

You know, for somebody like Donald Trump, let's look at Pete Buttajudge.

The idea of a mayor being a mayor,

that does not sound impressive to someone like Trump.

But something like vice president of the United States,

that term alone carries with it an aura that he is going to find

most

interesting going forward.

And there has not ever been a mayor directly elected to the presidency.

There are, I think, one or two who were mayors at some point in their careers who then made their way up.

But what Buddhajudge's line on this is that he has more executive experience than Donald Trump had before he was elected president in government.

And or sorry, I think it's more military experience, more government experience than Trump had

and more

executive experience than Mike Pence had when he was elected vice president, more military experience than the both of them combined.

So

that's the Buddha Judge response on that.

But it is, look, you look at this field and very few few of these people would fit very easily on the chart of the presidents that like we had up in elementary school, right?

But of course, neither would Barack Obama or Donald Trump.

So maybe what we're seeing here is a change in what America thinks of as a president, right?

Well, you know what I think the Democrats may in fact have an advantage in is that if they do in fact nominate somebody like Kamala Harris, Trump might not even have the vocabulary for against someone like that.

Like, I think for somebody like Biden, he feels very, very confident and assured in his offense.

Yeah, he knows the play, right?

This is something that I've noticed because it seems like he's just running a lot of the Clinton playbook right now against Joe Biden.

He's tried to drum up questions about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who was mixed up in

some business in Ukraine that seems like, from anything that's been that's come out so far, completely above boards.

But saying maybe that's foreign entanglements.

It goes back to what they tried to make the Clinton Foundation look like.

And there have been some questions that have been seeded out in Fox News about Joe Biden's health that are very reminiscent of the paranoia, conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's health, none of which turned out to have any basis in fact.

That that's what it is and that it's like running against the status quo in Washington.

Oh, you want to bring it back.

Trump, I thought, was very effective in 2016 in a way that most of us didn't understand of what was going on at the time of saying like, Washington hasn't been working for you.

And some Trump folks said this to me a couple of weeks ago that they think that

they can say that

Biden is bringing back the status quo.

Absolutely.

So it's not only a playbook that Trump feels comfortable using in this moment, it's one he's been using since this time in 2015.

I mean, it's second nature to him at this point.

But again, I say, get somebody like Senator Harris on the debate stage with him.

That playbook is no longer functional.

Is it just Kamala Harris, or do you think that that would be true of other people, too?

I think any woman, virtually.

Well, so that's a list of five women, right?

That's Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Tulsi Gabbard.

There are five women running.

I guess Maryam Williamson is running too, so there's six.

Is it just that?

Do you think he'd be struggling with Corey Booker?

Do you think he'd be struggling with Buddha Judge, Judge, with someone

from a Trump-friendly state like Steve Bullock?

Or is it really just the woman thing you think in this book?

I think a lot of it is the woman thing, but of course Hillary Clinton was a woman too.

So I think it's being a woman coupled with seeming like an emblem of Washington.

And I don't think you can say that as much as a lot of these Democratic candidates.

I mean, I think that's the reason that Klobuchar in particular is trying to position herself as

a bit more anti-establishment.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And certainly from the Midwest saying that she's one Trump county strategy.

From the heartland, yes.

Although she has been very hard to pin down on what that actually means when you ask her from the heartland.

Impeachment is coming more and more forward in the Democratic Party right now.

In the Republican Party, this has just been about Justin Amash, the congressman from Michigan, who has frustrated a lot of his colleagues

and apparently prompted Donald Trump to say that maybe he'll support a primary challenger against him.

So it's weirdly not a question that is going to the Republicans.

It's right now just a question that's going to the Democrats.

There are about 60 Democrats in the House who are in favor of impeachment.

And among the Democrats running for president, it's

about half

who are in favor of it.

Pete Budajudge was in our office this week here at the Atlantic, and he said that he thinks that maybe there would be criminal prosecution potentially for Trump once he's out of office.

That's where Kamala Harris has been on this question, too.

Where is the White House really on the impeachment question?

Because Nancy Pelosi says that, oh, he's just trying to goad us into doing this.

We shouldn't give him what he wants.

He wants to get

the Senate to take up the question and then to be found innocent, and that'll be the victory for him.

Is that really what the sense is?

No, and in the last week in particular, it's been quite strange to me that a lot of credibility has been given to that narrative.

And particularly even among reporters, it's just become kind of second nature now, I think, for reporters to use this vocabulary of the White House wants impeachment.

They're like girding for it or something.

When I talk to Trump aides, they don't want it.

I mean,

this is not something, well, one,

you know, interestingly, they put it in a historical perspective.

It's like, it's not a badge of honor to be one of the few presidents in American history who have been impeached.

Does Donald Trump really care about that?

The AIDS do.

I don't know that he does necessarily.

I mean, that was an issue for Bill Clinton.

He knew that it would really be a mark on him despite all that he had done, whether you think it was impeachable offenses or not.

He was really disturbed by that.

And when Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress, he was really disturbed by that.

It feels like William Barr did not want to be held in contempt of Congress as the process is moving along to do that.

But I just I'm not sure that I believe that Donald Trump himself.

I'm saying people around him definitely care about that.

You know, believe that or not, but that's what they tell me.

Because it's hard to get your next job when you say on your resume, working on on the business.

You know, a little bit.

And they're already having a bit of a tough time anyway right now.

And that added layer, I don't think, is

a super glowing, exciting prospect for them.

But number two,

Trump is an anxious person.

And as much as he says that he wants the fight, you have to remember that this is a guy who will not actually fire somebody in person.

Confrontation is not of interest to him.

Yeah, you're fired is something he said on TV.

And never like that at all.

It is only something he said on TV.

I think a perfect moment of that is just kind of leaving Reince Priebus on the tarmac and driving away and tweeting, by the way, I fired this person.

John Kelly, you tell him that you're taking his job.

This is not somebody who actually agitates for confrontation.

And in his view,

sitting in front of the Senate to testify as to why he has not committed high crimes and misdemeanors as a president is the equivalent of a a nightmare.

Yeah, and I think that the other part of it is that we don't really know how the politics of this will play, right?

There's been this question of, oh, it'll destroy the Democrats.

One of the things that I'm always struck by with the Democrats is the defeatism that is sort of wired into the brains of Democrats.

Oh, we're going to screw it up and we'll deserve to lose.

And the Republican mentality is the reverse of that usually.

Like, we're going to win.

We're going to beat them.

On the impeachment question, even though if you go back and look at what happened with Bill Clinton 1998 and into 1999,

that ended up not hurting the Republicans.

They did well.

Obviously, George Bush was elected in 2000 in a very tight race, but nonetheless.

It doesn't seem like we know what the politics of this will be, but a lot of the Democratic leaders still seem convinced that the politics of this would be bad for them.

Aaron Powell, well, I don't think they're wrong for that.

And I think that's why, and I say this in a morally neutral way, I think that's why what Attorney General Bill Barr did in the immediate aftermath of his receiving of the Mueller report was so brilliant.

He set the tone for what that report meant for Donald Trump.

Strategically brilliant.

That's what you're saying.

Strategic brilliance.

I mean, you could not have played that better if you are somebody who is uninterested in seeing Donald Trump impeached.

Because the reality is the narrative that has seeped into the American household at this point is that Donald Trump maybe was not exonerated, but that he did not collude collude with Russians and neither did others on his camp, whatever, that the special counsel could not establish evidence of that and that they could not charge him with a crime vis-a-vis obstruction.

And that's why I think that

if you see Democrats say, okay, you know what, we're going to take this step and trigger the impeachment process, there's not a lot of a plumb to that.

I think you would have a lot of Americans saying sincerely and in good faith, but why?

But why?

I thought actually Mueller pretty much cleared him and this was was a little bit of a nothing burger.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, and this is one of those places where we should say, if you have not read the Mueller report yourself, you should and make your own conclusions about what's in there and not just conclusions from the way that it has been read.

I think when you go back at that statement that Bob Mueller himself made publicly two weeks ago, what it really did come down to was please read the report.

It's free.

It's up on the Justice Department website.

And if you want to get a bound copy, you can pay for it.

Yeah, and well, and juxtapose the strategic brilliance of what Bill Barr did with the strategic blunder of Democrats who in many ways accepted that narrative even after the report was made public.

It took Bob Mueller saying aloud stuff that was in the report verbatim for Democrats like Corey Booker to suddenly say, we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis.

And it's like, okay, Senator Booker, but nothing has changed functionally.

The argument that Booker has made about that is that in between when Barr's summary of the the Mueller report came out and then when Mueller came and spoke on television is that there were other things about asking for documents, subpoena requests, that the White House was just ignoring and that that mounted the

case for impeachment.

That case was made to me by Booker's team when he called for impeachment and I had tweeted something about how he's just doing it because Mueller came out on TV.

And they were saying, oh, it wasn't just TV.

And I was like, yeah, but that was the Mueller report.

That changed it.

And they said, yeah, well, that's true.

It's just TV.

Yeah.

All right.

We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll discuss what we can expect from Donald Trump in his second ever election, now running not as an outsider, but as a president.

Stay with us.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

We're back with Atlanta Plot talking more about Trump and Democrats.

We are going to have this rally that Trump does in Orlando to officially kick things off.

You're going there.

Lovely time to go to Orlando, June.

What

is the campaign going to be?

Are we going to see him running against Washington?

Are we going to see him running against the Democrats overall or against Joe Biden?

How is he going to, as he actually gets into this campaign?

What does it look like?

So as elementary, a question as that is, I actually think it's a really meaningful one because

what Trump was sort of fueled by was an offensive posture in 2015 saying, I'm coming in from the outside to take on the swamp, to take on the establishment.

From a very literal interpretation of establishment and swamp, I mean, he is part of that now.

He is that.

He is the one.

He is the incumbent fending off a challenger.

It is not just functionally natural for him right now to adopt the posture of, I am here to take on Washington.

If anything, he can talk about ways in which he did take on Washington.

But what I think you're going to see him do is specifically with regard to immigration, say that He could have done so much more if Democrats weren't so obstructionist with his agenda.

Because that's really the only natural enemy at this point for him.

He can't take on Washington really as an entity.

It is going to be,

I think, much more party-focused.

It seems to me like this is the question becomes whether Trump can frame this as, I wanted to do a lot more and the Democrats stopped me, like you were saying, or if the Democrats can make it as like, he didn't even do the stuff that he said he was going to do, right?

And there's all the other reasons to dislike him about the things that he did do.

But if it becomes that question of why didn't Trump build the wall with Mexico?

Why didn't Trump improve the economy around trade?

Why didn't all these things happen?

Did he fail?

Or did the Democrats make him fail?

That's a pretty important question that America is going to have before it, right?

Right.

It's an important question and one that Trump can't necessarily answer, I think, in good faith by just blaming Democrats.

Because, I mean, remember,

his first major legislative effort when he came into office with Republicans holding both the House and the Senate was trying to repeal and replace Obamacare, and it failed miserably.

So if he is planning, as I am told he is, to try to say with regard to a lot of his biggest, most ambitious goals, the reason he failed was because of Democrats.

Democratic candidates, I mean, ostensibly, will ask him to account for what about Obamacare?

You know, you don't have that excuse for your first year or so in office.

And Biden was making that case actually on Tuesday to reporters in Iowa.

I was standing there that like that's what happened.

He tried to take away the health care system that Obamacare created and it didn't work and people told him it didn't work because people told him they didn't want it.

And that that's what he says will happen both in the election and then going forward, that you make the case to people and they'll respond.

On healthcare, it was pretty clear how that went.

It was a seminal moment also for Democrats because in between November of 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost through July of 2017 when the Obamacare vote happened and that's that famous John McCain walking out onto the floor putting his thumb down, right, all that stuff,

that was the Democrats in their most

decimated moment.

And they suddenly saw when they were able to protect Obamacare in the ways that made sense to them, organizing, getting activists and going, maybe the rules aren't all gone, right?

And now they have since then had the wins in the midterms in the House.

Obviously, they lost three Senate seats to the Republicans.

And it seems to them like maybe more of the rules make sense.

And now we go into this, and they think that that's where things are going to go.

Right.

I think to say the rules make sense is actually a great point because it does chip away at what Donald Trump ran on, which is that a business person should be the one running the government, when in fact they are entirely different

conglomerates.

And I mean, that's been the knock on Jared Kushner the whole time.

His, you know, Office of American Innovation was supposed to totally revitalize government.

I actually ask about that office quite regularly just because I'm personally curious what has happened from it.

And I've never gotten a clear answer.

Does it exist?

It does exist.

It's staffed.

I mean, there are paid staffers in the Office of American Innovation or Council, American Innovation Council.

It's one of those two words.

But yes, I think it chips away at Trump's primary argument, which is that kind of the rules and the pace of Congress, he could overcome those alone.

I mean, I'll never forget.

I think it was, it might have even been during the primary when on the Hill they were having trouble passing an omnibus or something to that effect, some sort of spending package.

And Trump said, I could literally just put people in a room and say, don't come out until you have something.

That isn't how this has worked at all.

No, in fact, he walks out of the room.

He walks out of the room within three minutes.

And that argument,

I mean, that argument functionally for him has translated to, well, I could have done it if I just had this.

It's all about hypotheticals and excuses now, which is fun.

You know, Congress is tough to work with, but that fact looks a lot more jarring and negative

for a candidate like Trump because he came in saying

that none of that stuff matters.

And people have held onto that as crutches for why they couldn't accomplish things in the past.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And that's one of the things that you see often happens on Twitter is that something will go wrong.

And the Trump administration, people will find an old tweet of his from when he was on the sidelines saying, this is the way it would work, or this is what I would do.

And that's not what's actually playing out in real life now that he is the president.

As the president, he has access to a lot of levers of power that

only the president does.

There are Democrats who in their most paranoid times say, oh, he's going to start a war.

But even short of that, there are many things that he could do,

ways that he can refocus the conversation because of the attention that the presidency commands.

Should we expect that he's going to be using those levers over the course of the next year and a half

as part of the

not officially political process but like really political process here?

Trevor Burrus I don't know that he'll be using those levers himself so much as using the threat of them and I think the Mexico tariffs are a great example of that.

Yes, his Office of Legal Counsel on the back end was able to sort of make a flimsy case as to why as president he would have unilateral authority to institute those tariffs against Mexico should he want to.

But for Trump, what is most empowering to him in terms of changing the conversation is not actually doing something like that, but threatening to do it.

And even when he says that he is going to do something, as I've reported often, his aides often can walk him back

or ignore him and he forgets something the next day.

And I think that

Syria is a great example of that when he said that all American troops would leave the region.

And within, I feel like a week or or so, it was up to 6,000 would remain.

Aaron Powell, I'm thinking, though, of like in June of 2012, when Obama was running for reelection, is when he created the Dreamers, the DACA program, letting children who had come here as minors stay, giving them protections under the law.

He did that from the Rose Garden.

In June of 2012, that's the important year there.

They said this was, of course, just policy.

He was frustrated that there was no immigration reform going on in Congress.

But again, it was in the middle of a re-election year when he was obviously eager to get support from Latinos in key states all around the country.

Do you think that there's stuff like that that we could see coming?

Or is it just going to be the sort of threat, as you said, with the tariffs with Mexico?

I do think it is more of the latter because there is no proactive concrete agenda that the Trump administration is working with right now.

When he does make spur of the moment threats or even

decrees by tweet,

because all of the process-oriented things have to be done on the back end, it is just such an open question as to whether anything happens.

And I think with the example of Dreamers, that was not just something that Obama woke up one day and decided he wanted to do.

I mean, he knew that he could do that.

in an executive position, and it was rolled out after that.

With Trump, I think you would have seen the equivalent of that just would have been a tweet

or a speech in the Rose Garden and just have us talk about it for 24 to 48 hours, but then nothing so much happens.

Aaron Powell, right.

So does it now work the other way that Trump's strategy worked when he was an outsider, but not as the man himself, the president who actually has this power?

You know, it's a great question.

One I thought about a lot when I reported out, you know, what are all these times that Trump has made kind of a spontaneous declaration or ordered his aides to do something that everybody, you know, got in a tizzy about, we forgot about the next day, you know, what actually happened to a lot of those things?

And you've done some great reporting on this.

Thank you.

You know, the short answer is that a lot of them just didn't go through.

But what I found fascinating is that in the minds of a lot of voters, just based on other reporting I had read, some of my own phone calls, they thought he had.

So take an example like he said he was cutting off aid to Central America.

He gave that speech down in Florida when he said, you know, no more aid to Central America.

You actually follow up with the State Department and with the Senate Appropriations Committee.

That didn't happen.

But the question there is

because of all the fanfare that the speech itself got versus the follow-up of the mechanics and whether it actually happened, what are people more likely to believe?

I mean, you know, if you are just an average American voter, I find it entirely sympathetic if you think that he did, in fact, cut off an emergency.

Yeah, the great example of this to me is when the way to end the shutdown at the beginning of the year was that he declared a national emergency so that he could seize the money from elsewhere in the government to build the wall.

Well, the wall is not being built.

We never ended that period of national emergency.

So right now we are in a national emergency.

I don't know if everybody remembers that.

Correct.

Correct.

And it doesn't seem very emergency-like out and about in the world or in the way that he's doing that.

And in fact, it's so much a national emergency that Donald Trump himself has not mentioned it for the last couple of months.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, it's going back to a derivative of what we've been talking about, which is that so much of what empowers him as an executive is feeling like he has changed the narrative, that he can offer as many excuses as possible for why something didn't happen than it is to actually proactively accomplish something.

So So for him, the value of declaring a national emergency wasn't so much that, okay, he could finally get what he needed to build the wall.

The cap on the money that you can actually get from a national emergency is quite low and, you know, wouldn't allow for him to construct nearly the amount of wall that he was touting on the campaign trail.

The value of declaring a national emergency, in his view, was that if any Democrat dared say to him on the trail, well, where's the wall?

You promised a wall.

I don't see a wall.

He could say, I did everything I could, and

y'all wouldn't deal with the crisis at the border.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

So here we are.

The rally is coming.

The Democratic debate is coming.

They're going to try to figure out how to talk about Trump in a way that satisfies the base's desire to jeer at him, which I see a lot of out on the trail, but also gets, for the most part, among the Democrats to something other than Trump.

Is there a sense within the Trump White House, within the Trump campaign, of how much trouble he's in?

Because there are these questions about internal polls that are showing him trailing Joe Biden.

I think there's a way to interpret those internal polls like Joe Biden is the sort of generic Democrat that people know, but that really almost any Democrat would beat Donald Trump.

According to where the polls are right now, obviously many, many things could change.

When you look at the states where things are, the map is very tough for Trump to find a path to reelection.

And that's why you see stories like, they're going to invest in Oregon now.

It's very hard to see how Donald Trump would win in Oregon.

But if he is not winning in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, obviously three states that were important, but where Democrats have had good elections since.

He needs to talk about those other states to even be thinking about being reelected.

Is there a sense that they they have that they're in trouble?

Aaron Powell, I get no sense of alarm from campaign aides whatsoever.

I mean, I think that what they will say, and they're being quite candid and sincere when they say this, is that American families are better off today than they were four years ago.

That's their talking point.

Whatever.

It's their talking point, but they do believe that, one,

that is what people will think about when they go to the ballot box.

And two, that polls were wrong about him to begin with.

I mean, for them to use polls as like a litmus test of sorts of what support does or doesn't actually look like, it's almost like a superstition to them in a way.

Like I could very much envision a world in which Donald Trump is up in the polls and I would talk to a campaign off the record and like that's when they would be jittery, you know?

I mean, it should be said that

he was down in the polls, most of the polls in 2016.

He was

down by a much slimmer margin than he is down by in the current polls.

Now, of course, it's the spring of 2019.

There's many, many things that can change.

And part of this is that the Democrats need to figure out who their nominee is.

That process and who the person who is produced by that process will have a lot of influence on what this actually looks like.

Well, and what they'll also say is it is the equivalent of the spring of 2015.

And in the Republican primary, Jeb Bush was leading.

That's right.

And it was not until June 16th, 2015, that Donald Trump appeared riding down that elevator in Trump Tower.

Everybody thought it was a joke.

It was just to get his contract negotiations going with NBC.

Nobody was really covering it as anything other than entertainment.

Even the Huffington Post said that they were only going to cover his campaign as entertainment for a while.

And he is the president.

Right.

So

short answer to your question is there is not a lot of anxiety within the campaign right now.

All right.

Well, that is a short answer to, after a long discussion, that I'm glad that we had Elena Plott, staff writer for The Atlantic.

Thanks for being here with us on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode.

And to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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