Politics After Mueller

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It's Robert Mueller's final act as special counsel, formally ending his investigation just two months shy of two years after he was appointed.

Two years, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 people interviewed.

So it's a four-page letter from the Attorney General to the chairman and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Well, certainly the most important thing is the total vindication of the president and his staff on the issue of collusion.

I mean, there's just no other way around that.

While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Robert Mueller's job is done.

Last week, the special counsel submitted his report to Attorney General Bill Barr.

And this week, Barr shared his brief summary of the big conclusions.

There was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

And as for obstruction of justice, Mueller left that question unresolved.

In his letter, Barr said the DOJ has decided the evidence presented does not merit criminal charges.

More could change with the release of the actual report.

In fact, six House committee chairs have demanded it by next Tuesday.

But the Mueller chapter of this presidency, at least in terms of an investigation, is now essentially closed.

So what does the post-Mueller landscape look like?

Does the end of this investigation, with no bombshells detonated as yet, does it hurt Democrats in 2020?

Or might it actually help them?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Joining me to discuss this tumultuous, insane week in American politics and what lies ahead is McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic, senior staff writer in his own mind.

McKay, thanks for joining the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Alex.

And Isaac Dover, also a staff writer for The Atlantic.

A junior staff writer.

Junior staff writer.

In his mind, McKay is also a centralized with my staff writer, Jeff.

You get a little toy with it, too, though.

like a happy meal.

Gents, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Thanks for joining.

It's great to be here, Alex.

It's been a crazy week.

It has been one of those weeks where it's really hard to know even what to say.

And I kind of almost worry sometimes about recording in a moment like this because this will be around for posterity and the landscape is, well, it's shifted so much in the last week and it could shift again.

But here we are.

on Thursday morning and it feels like the Mueller report, though we haven't gotten the unredacted or at least broader conclusions assessed by the special counsel, the investigation itself is over.

And as we all try and make sense of sort of where we go from here,

let's talk first about the president and his party and how they've reacted.

The Mueller News on Sunday, Attorney General Barr's report, was met with great enthusiasm from the president.

There was no collusion with Russia, there was no obstruction, and none whatsoever.

And it was a complete and total exoneration.

And Steve Bannon predicted, this is what I want to ask you guys about.

Steve Bannon predicted that Trump is going to go full animal now and that Trump will come off the chains and use the findings to bludgeon his opposition.

If there wasn't criminal behavior before, that certainly sounds like homicide.

Isaac and McKay, do you think Trump's going to go full animal?

How do you read his behavior this week?

And what do you expect from this president as we shift into campaign mode?

What is the difference between

how Donald Trump has gone after the media to this point and bashed every reporter that he doesn't like on Twitter or at rallies

and whatever will happen now?

The difference seems to be that he feels somewhat validated by the conclusions of the Mueller report, even though, as of when we're recording this, he does not know the full conclusions of the report.

He just knows that there are no more indictments and that Barr has said that there was not obstruction of justice.

There is this open question of whether Mueller in his report says there's no obstruction of justice or whether he left it as an open question and meant for Congress to look at the evidence and the report and make a judgment on it.

Of course, Mueller doesn't have the power to give the report to Congress.

He had to give it to the Justice Department, and it's in the Attorney General's power to decide what happens with the report, which is why we're in this situation to begin with.

Right.

McKay, when we talk about the president, there's obviously a difference between the way he comports himself and the way the rest of his party comports themselves.

I wonder if you think they can feasibly make hay of this, assuming,

let's say we get the report and it effectively doesn't change anyone's conclusions about anything substantively.

Is this something they can feast on for the next 19 months?

I think they will try.

I think that one of the animating kind of forces in the Trump-era Republican Party is this sense of aggrievement and being under siege from a cabal of elite media political figures and financial figures and the deep state.

And this will feed into that narrative, narrative, if only because President Trump will make sure it does.

This idea that Trump from the second that he won the election was hamstrung by this hoax of an investigation, those are the words that you're hearing bandied about in Republican circles now, and that this was just more proof of the way that the swamp was out to get Trump and he defeated the swamp.

And I think that this is a narrative you're already starting to see percolate on Fox News.

And certainly President Trump is kind of pushing this idea.

So I think they'll try to make, hey, but ultimately, does that reach much beyond the president's base?

I'm not sure.

I mean, I think there probably are

some people who will

see the very cursory headlines coming out this week and just say, oh, wow,

what was that all about?

But I still don't know if it really affects the way that they'll vote.

One point that I will make, though, Alex, is that, and I think you were getting at this a little bit earlier, is that President Trump himself has been kind of tortured by this process throughout his first two years in office, right?

This has been a, you know, to use the much maligned vocabulary that the New York Times used, a cloud hanging over his presidency.

Yeah.

But it really has.

I mean, just even just for him, right?

This is a president who watches cable news obsessively and for hours every day, it seems like.

And when he turns on cable news, often what he's seeing, at least when he views from Fox, is coverage of Russia and coverage of potential collusion and coverage of this investigation.

And you would hear or see periodically reports about how he would kind of get extremely angry about it or he'd get agitated about it and it would be distracting for him.

And for that, the investigation at least to be over, regardless of what we do see come out of the Mueller report, if and when it's released, is kind of a burden lifted for the president himself.

And as we know, this is a White House that is governed a lot by just kind of the president's moods and his.

His psychology.

Yeah, that is the dictating.

I mean, we don't really know what the Trump doctrine is other than the sort of emotional index of the chief executive.

Lots of grievance politics.

But I do think that the thing that we should not forget about here that the Mueller report says from what we know from the bar letter is that it seems like there was not a Trump collusion, the word that he likes,

an an effort to work with the Russians that seems indictable from what Mueller found.

But he did seem to find definitive evidence, not only in the indictments that we've seen so far, but in the report, that the Russian government was directing a cyber attack on the United States that helped Donald Trump or was with the intent of helping Donald Trump win the presidency.

is a an issue that seems like it should go beyond politics, but is not something that we see either the president of the White House or

any of the people in Congress, including the Democratic leadership, paying much attention to at this point.

Not only

the Republican leadership.

I mean, absolutely.

If the president has been in some way vindicated by this, they theoretically have more running room to go after Russia in terms of election interference because it doesn't theoretically implicate the president.

But no one on Capitol Hill, and especially not anybody in the president's party, has suggested they're going to do that.

Right.

And it also is not about what we're going to do going forward.

We know that we were attacked, and we haven't done anything, it seems, from anything that we know about, to protect against future attacks.

Instead, Lindsey Graham, who is the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is talking about a different kind of investigation.

He's saying he's going to investigate anti-Trump bias at the FBI and the Justice Department, and he has called on the Attorney General Barr to appoint a second special counsel.

Graham said, by any reasonable standard, Mr.

Mueller fully investigated the Trump campaign.

You cannot say that about the other side of the story.

Do we think that Republicans on the Hill are actually going to go forward with these kind of counter-Mueller investigations from now on?

I think it's a good thing to throw it politically.

We'll see if they actually go forward with it in any real way.

But

Hillary Clinton seems to be the best way to rile up the Republican base and certainly riles up Donald Trump.

And Lindsey Graham is playing into that for a number of reasons, including his relationship with Donald Trump and including the fact that he's up for re-election himself next year to the Senate.

So there are reasons to make Hillary Clinton a topic of conversation politically.

I don't know that there are reasons for them beyond the politics of it to actually try to pursue an investigation here, but we'll see.

We focus thus far on the GOP, but there's obviously been fallout on the left-hand side of the aisle, McKay.

And you wrote about how resistance, sort of the dark corners of resistance media and the resistance echo chamber, have grappled with the news of the last week.

I think it's stunning to anybody, resistance or no, that in the wake of the Mueller report, Republicans aren't talking about Mueller.

They're back on Hillary Clinton, which is a sign of how emboldened the grand old party is.

What has been the reaction on the far ends of the left spectrum, McKay?

What is going to happen to all the commemorative Bob Mueller vote of candles and the dogs and pets, the loved ones who've been named Bob Mueller?

Well,

as I wrote this week, the Robert Mueller fetishization cottage industry is collapsing, which is a shame for the people who are making some good money that.

But I think in general, you know, we talk about the resistance, but there's also this very

narrow part of the resistance that I call resistance Inc., which is kind of the people who are making money off

liberal activists and people who don't like Donald Trump by selling them Robert Mueller swag or getting them to donate to their Patreon accounts or,

you know, churning out kind of clickbait that's based on conspiracy theories or fevered speculation about the Mueller investigation.

And with the investigation now over,

without more indictments to go through and without a conclusion of a conspiracy between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, a lot of these people I found are kind of trying to scramble to figure out what their next gold rush is, right?

Where do we go from here?

We should, I mean, it's important to note that there are ongoing investigations in the Southern District of New York that a a lot of people on the outside will say those pose more of an existential threat to this presidency than Mueller ever did.

Now, who knows, right?

But they're ongoing and they're not bound by the same constraints that the special counsel's investigation was.

Do you think, Isaac, that the existence of those investigations is enough to keep liberal appetites whetted for impeachment and that kind of sensational politicking heading into 2020?

Or do you think think the way the Mueller report has landed thus far has dimmed that enthusiasm?

I mean, there wasn't actual enthusiasm among the elected officials in the House of Representatives or the Senate to do much in terms of impeachment for the most part.

There is this very active

group of people,

whatever it is, 10, 15 percent of the Democratic Party who

is really committed to impeachment and maybe

beyond that, who like the idea of impeaching Trump and just want him gone and want him gone as quickly as possible.

I don't think what you're going to see in Congress, though, is any movement more towards impeachment at this point.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

I just finished up the last spring season of the circus, the Showtime documentary series.

And as part of that, I was on the Hill a lot.

And you could really sense the temperature change from the beginning of our run, which was in January, to the end of it, which which was in March, in terms of the Democratic appetite for even talking about impeachment.

You know, you talk to House leadership Democrats and they are pretty firm in their assessment that the Democratic Party is not going to win in 2020 talking about getting Trump out of office by

sort of impeachment process, but they're going to get him out of office by having American voters on their side in terms of a number of pieces of domestic policy.

Pelosi said on Tuesday of this week, we've never taken our focus off the for the people agenda.

We're going to talk more about what that for the people agenda is going into 2020.

But before we take a break, I want to ask both of you guys, as we sit here, media denizens in New York and Washington, D.C.,

there is a sense that the media needs to take stock of how it covered this entire chapter in American politics, that the media may be at fault or worse.

Do you think that the,

and again, I will say the current dynamics of the Mueller report and the assessment that I think we have at least initially about it not having any bombs particularly or smoking guns.

Do you think that that has been a repudiation of sorts in terms of the way the media teed up this moment?

And does the media have a responsibility to

have a conversation with itself about how we do this the next time.

Well, so I always have trouble having these conversations about the media as though it's one giant,

you know, complex that all treated this the same.

And I know that this is how we talk about it, and this is certainly how the political debates around these questions always form.

I think that when it comes to the Russia story, let's not lose sight of the fact that there, you know, while there was no conspiracy that was established by Robert Moeller,

there's a lot there that is troubling.

As Isaac mentioned before, there was a Russian effort coordinated and to some degree successful to interfere with our political process during a close presidential election.

And a lot of the reporting around that, I think, stands up.

I also think that there was some overheated reporting.

And one of the kind of

systemic problems, I think, or at least things that we should be thinking about, is that there are a lot of reporters at major outlets

that their reporting, their stories were appropriately cautious and they were appropriately caveated and everything in their stories were factual and well sourced.

But the way that those stories were then interpreted and

whipped up and spun in the rest of the media contributed to an overall narrative that got us way far out ahead of where we actually were.

And I think that that's partly to do with this resistance media complex I wrote about, partly to do with social media, partly to do with the fact that a lot of these same reporters also became kind of TV talking heads and pundits.

And as somebody who goes on TV sometimes to talk about politics, I can identify with the pressure to, you know, when a host is in your face trying to get you to go further than your reporting suggests.

I think that that is another kind of issue in all of this.

And so I do think that we should be considering the way that we covered this.

But I also don't want to go too far in self-flagellation because I think there was a lot of good reporting on Russia and

we shouldn't regret that.

And I'd add to that that

we also have what is just with what happened already, the greatest scandal in American history.

We have the president's former campaign chairman going to jail, convicted in two different trials, his former national security advisor

who took a plea deal, all these other people who have been under indictment, his personal lawyer for campaign finance violations.

This is a huge number of indictments, of convictions, of plea deals.

And we shouldn't lose sight of that even

as we say that, yeah, the Mueller Report did not find some giant smoking gun here

and

recognize that for what it is, which

does go against what a lot of people thought in a lot of the way that the coverage of it was.

It does not yet answer to us why

so many people

lied.

about their connections to Russia or their conversations about Russia.

We just don't know what that is and if there is is some one answer out there or whether it's just a lot of people with guilty consciences that all were hooked up in one way or the other

to entanglements.

We just don't know what's going on.

And I think that that question of why is one that we need answered even if Bob Mueller's report is not going to be the one that answers it.

Aaron Powell, yeah, I think if there was maybe a trap that we fell into or that we set for ourselves, it was not taking those indictments and those sentences.

The fact that Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort are going to jail, that in and of itself is seismic in terms of American politics, as you point out, Isaac.

But inevitably in those conversations and in the coverage of those indictments, everyone always toggled back to the president and what does it mean for President Trump?

Whereas just full stop, Paul Manafort is going to jail.

Mike Flynn is going to jail.

Rick Gates is going to jail.

Period.

That should have been the end of it.

To me,

it's like if you look up in the sky and and you see stars, right?

Now,

when you look at what these constellations are supposed to be, sometimes it's like, is that really a bear?

Are those twins, right?

Like, that's really pushing it sometimes.

But that doesn't mean the stars aren't there, right?

These points are all there.

We just maybe,

and a lot of quarters

made pictures of how they all connected that turned out to not be quite right.

What a beautiful metaphor.

Orion's belt.

I was in English.

Ursa Ursa major.

Ursa major, Ursa minor.

Thank you for that, Isaac.

That's why you're a staff writer at the Atlantic.

We are going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we are going to talk about the road ahead for Democrats and Republicans in 2020 and how that road may be made bumpy or smooth by the Mueller Report.

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So we are back with Isaac Dover and McKay Coppins, two of my least favorite people at The Atlantic.

That last segment was tough, I guess.

It's opposite day.

Gents, Jonathan Martin in the New York Times writes that Republicans on the campaign trail and generally in politics are positioning Democrats as unrelenting Javerts hunting their Jean Valjean, a message that is likely to become central to Mr.

Trump's effort to further solidify his base over the 19 months leading to the election.

Isaac,

unrelenting Javerts hunting their Jean Valjean.

So much French.

I happen to know

you're a big Les Miz fan, actually.

Well, aren't we all, secretly?

You've been out with candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Will the Les-Miz attempts work?

Are people actually talking about Russia and Mueller out on the campaign trail?

Now, understandably,

this news is a week old.

So, in your experience over the last few weeks and certainly in the midterms, how much was Russia animating voters?

Well, I should caveat what I'm about to say by saying that I was covering

events that Democratic presidential candidates or soon-to-be candidates when I was covering them back in the fall and the midterms

were going to and were being attended by Democratic voters.

That said,

Russia is not something that comes up all that much.

Mueller is not something that comes up all that much.

The candidates will usually throw in some kind of zinger, some jab at Trump or

make a comment one way or the other.

Every once in a while, there will be a question about it that comes up at a town hall.

But the things that are being talked about at these events, whether they're speeches or questions or the way that the candidates are answering them,

healthcare, climate change, this feeling of not being able to get ahead still, that other people seem to be doing better than they are and they can't make the mortgage or they can't make the student loan payments.

And questions about America's character and its place in the world.

That's what is animating Democratic voters.

That's where the Democratic campaigns are right now.

And there isn't anybody in the race currently who has

made

the Russia questions a central part of the candidacy.

You have from Kamala Harris this idea that she talks about being a prosecutor, and the president is up to a lot of criminal behavior potentially, and she would be the answer to that.

That's about as close as that comes, but that's not specifically on Russia.

It's not specifically about Mueller or a collusion argument.

I felt like I should be humming, can you hear the people sing, as Isaac was singing.

Can we overlay that track

over that little

product?

I feel like you should sing it.

I was going to recommend that Alex sing it.

I don't know.

Well, listen, that's a separate podcast where I just do classics.

I will also say in my limited experience out in the country, Russia was not the thing people were talking about.

It was more economic, sort of bread and butter issues, kitchen table issues.

McKay,

given that, and that's not necessarily a secret, right, that Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike do truly care probably more about issues that directly affect them than an abstract Russia investigation that was taking place behind closed doors, no matter what the media coverage was.

It is unbelievable that the president brought the issue of health care front and center this week on Monday when the Trump administration asked a federal court to essentially overturn all of Obamacare, including coverage for people with pre-existing conditions,

what did you make of that when it happened?

It seems like it was, from all the reporting we have, driven by the president's own personal belief around wanting to tear down the ACA.

Here's what he said right before a meeting with GOP leaders.

Let me just tell you exactly what my message is.

The Republican Party will soon be known as the Party of Healthcare.

You watch.

McKay, this is literally the day after the president believes he's been vindicated by Barber Mueller, and he puts health care at the center of the conversation.

This is very strange.

And Republicans throughout Washington were immediately scratching their heads, if not kind of getting nervous, about that move by President Trump.

My best guess, as somebody who has spent a lot of time, maybe too much time writing about the psychology of our current president is that he was feeling good after the bar letter, was feeling maybe invincible and got excited and, you know, kind of speaking off the cuff, decided to announce a major policy pivot for an entire party without consulting that many people.

We saw reporting subsequently that McCarthy, the House Minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, privately told President Trump that this idea made no sense.

I I really want to know if he said this makes no sense.

I just would love to know if McCarthy actually said that to Trump.

I have to believe that he was a little bit more diplomatic as Republicans

on the Capitol Hill have learned to be with this president.

But in any case, essentially told him, you know, this is not a good idea for us.

And

there are obvious political reasons, one of which is Republicans squandered a whole lot of political capital right out of the gate early in the Trump presidency trying to repeal Obamacare.

It did not work.

They

wasted a lot of time doing that.

They tried again and again and again and it didn't work.

And now you're heading into an election where health care will probably be, as it almost always is,

one of the top concerns among voters.

And Republicans, while they probably believe that

Obamacare is bad policy, that they could maybe come up with better policy, also know that you have to, it takes a lot of time and a lot of planning to come up with a program that is ready for prime time, ready to roll out during an election year.

And without having done that and without a president who seems all that disciplined or interested in the policy specifics when it comes to healthcare,

this is not a good idea.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, let's just say this is also a party that has its feet firmly planted in two conflicting fundamentals.

One, no individual mandate.

Two, maintain coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.

Those things usually have to go together in order to work, and there's been no semblance of an alternative plan beyond that.

Isaac, I wonder if

we look at the events of the last month on Capitol Hill, specifically as it pertains to Congressional Republicans and the Trump White House, it seems like there's at least a hairline fracture between the two of them.

Which is to say,

two weeks ago, Republicans voted to disapprove of the president's national emergency declaration, which is his bid to build a border wall.

There's Kevin McCarthy telling him, hey, man, this whole ACA thing makes no sense, or whatever Kevin McCarthy said.

Do you think that this split here is meaningful?

Does it portend anything for the way Republicans campaign in 2020?

Is President Trump maybe going to run against his own party as well as Democrats, or am I

overreading the tea leaves?

I would say it's meaningful only in terms of how substantive the actions are that are taken off of this.

Notably, that national emergency declaration or the vote in the Senate over the declaration, he lost a number of Republican votes, but he did not lose votes of most of the Republican senators who are up in tough races next year.

So we are not seeing the Republican Party in action moving away from Donald Trump in a real way in the people who it'll matter about.

And until that starts to happen, I don't know that we can see that there is a division other than people sending out press releases and saying that they disapprove of the president, which is basically quietly bellyaching to him on the telephone.

Right.

And that's basically where we've been since 2016.

I would also point out, though, in 2016, Donald Trump did pretty successfully run against his own party on specifically entitlement programs and health care.

Now, it was kind of very Trumpian in that there weren't a lot of specifics and often seemed like he was ad-libbing.

But remember, one of the things that distinguished him early in the Republican primaries was that he said he would not cut Social Security and would not cut Medicare and that he thought those were dumb ideas.

And he said he was going to make the country so rich that we can afford all those programs and more.

And I remember there was one

famous interview or debate performance where he said that he didn't want people dying in the streets,

contrasting his own kind of instincts with healthcare with the other Republicans.

Now, of course, once he got in the White House,

he had very little policy knowledge or interest in kind of governing the policymaking process with Republicans.

But he found that that was politically successful in 2016.

I think that it was probably one of the reasons that some people who had previously voted for President Obama or Democrats decided to come over because they thought he was a more populist Republican.

And

I would not bet against him trying to do that again in 2020.

It's just that he has more of a track record now on this issue, which is going to make it more difficult.

And he's trying to get away from that.

Well, trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act entirely with no plan for its substitution is going to be a real political liability in terms of debates and having to explain that position.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: And it was in 2018, right?

We're 10 years into Republicans saying repeal and replace.

And so far we've gotten a lot of failed votes to repeal and not any suggestion of what the replacement would be.

And if you look at what happened in the midterms,

the voters were onto it.

Yeah, 2018 is probably the election where

the positions may hold for 2020, which is to say Democrats ran on health care.

And Republicans were probably talking more about impeachment and the sort of existential threats that Democrats posed to this president as a bid to get the base out.

One wonders whether the Republicans will use Mueller in 2020 and use that for grievance victimization politics and Democrats will try and go, you know, use health care.

And it'll be almost a redux of what happened in 2018 in terms of the issues, at least, if not the outcome.

But I think that one of the things that really powered Donald Trump in 2016 was a feeling that was out there in the country that people feeling, nobody's doing anything for me.

I'm getting screwed.

And at least this guy is saying he's going to shake up the system.

I may not like him for one reason or another, but I like that.

And he got a lot of votes that way, probably

the margin that allowed him to win.

That feeling from my experiences going out, again, mostly to Democratic events, but in the states that are going to be voting first in Iowa, New Hampshire, et cetera,

is that people are still feeling like nobody's doing anything for them.

And they they feel like healthcare is a prime example of that.

They can't pay their bills.

They're having problems with their insurance companies still.

And so it seems like Trump and the people who are supporting this lawsuit to get rid of

the Affordable Care Act altogether think that they can say, okay, well, it was all because of Obamacare and now we're going to take it away and that'll make it better.

But what people seem to want to hear is, okay, so then what?

What are you going to do?

How is it going to work?

When do my bills start going down?

And so far we haven't seen that.

I just want to note before we wrap this up that, you know, the question about healthcare, as much as it is plagued by vagaries on the right, it's plagued by specifics on the left, right?

There is a question about Medicare for all.

A lot of the candidates in 2020, the announced ones at least, have signed on to that.

There is likely to be a much more specific debate over what the right national health care policy is.

And that could prove tumultuous in its own right, in terms of a primary versus a general.

As we sort of put on our

long vision glasses, what do you call them?

Binoculars.

Bifocals.

I don't even know.

Binoculars.

A long,

long vision glasses.

As we put on our monocles, as we put our monocle to our eye and bring our ear horn to our ear,

when you guys, as we sit in the week that we have, there have been highs, there have been lows, there have been in-betweens.

In this post-Mueller landscape, in this post-let's get rid of the ACA landscape, which party do you think right now, at this moment, has the advantage heading into 2020?

Isaac you first.

I don't think we know.

I think

I really,

look, what we know from 2016 is that it was a very close election, right?

Despite what the Electoral College tally is that the president likes to repeat and doesn't quite get right most of the times that he talks about it, it was 3 million votes that were the difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

He also, I think importantly, won.

just 47% of the vote, right?

And I think that that's what it is.

And when

that's Hillary Clinton's vote and Gary Johnson's and Jill Stein.

So we don't know if the libertarian and green candidates will be there in 2020.

But I think the bigger thing is that we just,

when you think about what has seemed to be the most big animating thing,

it usually passes in a week.

And we're just,

I think what this election is going to come down to is people who, again, are still hurting, who are still asking what's going to be done for them.

And if they feel like Donald Trump has been trying to fight for them and he has been getting stymied and stopped by Republican opposition, by the media creating too much attention to Russia or Democrats in Congress stopping up his agenda, but he's still trying to fight for them, then that gives Trump the advantage, right?

But if people feel like, as a lot of Democrats certainly do and a lot of sort of people outside of the base that are Democratic leaning at the moment, that

they're not getting helped, and there's a lot of noise, and a lot of tweets, and a lot of chaos, and that's all fine and well, and it can be entertaining, but it doesn't do anything for them, then that is a burden that is on Trump and puts him in

a real disadvantage.

And at the moment, it does seem.

I'll answer your question.

It does seem to lean to the latter one of those.

But it could change.

Look, there's a lot of...

You don't even do that.

No, no, no.

I'll just say this.

Like,

a very simple thing that a lot of people talk about is we could be in a recession.

We could be in a war in the next 18 years.

Again,

that's my asterisk, okay?

I'm just saying right now, right now,

before you go to lunch, McKay Coppins,

who has the advantage right at this particular moment?

I think that Trump is extremely vulnerable.

So I would say that Democrats have a real opportunity.

They might have an advantage.

The thing that I will say as a hedge against that,

but truly, actually, I think is important to keep in mind, we just talked about healthcare.

Medicare for all as a concept is popular when you pull it.

When you add even a little bit of detail, like Medicare for all means you won't have access to your private insurance anymore, the popularity plummets, right?

And so one of the questions that I have is in this Democratic primary with a Democratic party that has lurched to the left and with a lot of candidates that are moving left,

what candidate emerges and what are the policy promises that they've made to get there?

And

do they open themselves up to Republican attacks on policies and proposals that are actually

less popular than they appear at this moment?

And if this election is a referendum on Donald Trump and his presidency, I think Democrats probably have the edge.

If Republicans can successfully turn the election into a referendum on the

quickly left-moving Democratic Party and socialism and all of these scary buzzwords, then I think that Trump has a very real opportunity to win.

I saw a lot of padding to both of those answers.

Very smart padding.

We're in the reporting business, Alex, not the punitive.

I know.

I know.

And I appreciate you taking a step out onto a limb, albeit a very ginger step that was quickly,

what is it, rescinded?

Can you rescind a step?

I'm only pre-verbal right now.

Gentlemen, it is a pleasure and an honor to have you on this podcast.

We thank you for your time and your great reporting and your fantastic staff writing for The Atlantic.

Thank you.

Thanks, Alex.

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

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