The Presidential Fitness Challenge

Packages by Expedia.

You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

We were made to easily bundle your trip.

Expedia.

Made to travel.

Flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

Dangerous breaches of norms have marked the first year of the Trump presidency.

Some would argue that among the most dangerous is this.

Many people, reportedly including some close to President Trump, are asking whether he's capable of discharging the duties of the office.

Is it irresponsible to ask that question?

Is it irresponsible not to?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Over in New York, we have my esteemed co-host, first Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

And

wait, what was funny about that?

That's the straightest introduction I think we've ever had on radio.

Not anymore.

Well, okay.

Thanks to our other co-hosts.

The other co-host who voice you here at this very moment is our esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Alex.

Greetings, Matt and Jeff.

With me here in D.C., sitting right across the table for the first time in Radio Atlantic's tenure is James Fallows, who we know as Jim, who has been a correspondent for The Atlantic for Low These Many Years.

Jim, welcome.

Matt, it's great to be here.

Hello, Jeff.

Hello, Alex.

What does Low These Many Years actually add up to?

So it's the first story I ever did for The Atlantic was 43 years ago.

It was a profile of a person who was then running for president, a then alive senator from Texas, Lloyd Benson.

So

he was trying to get the nomination from the person who I ended up by blind blind chance actually working for in the White House, Jimmy Carter.

Two score and three years ago, James Fallows embarked upon.

Which is in part the occasion for bringing Jim to our table here this afternoon.

You've been chronicling the presidency ever since before you served in the White House as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter.

So we're in the middle of, we are both agents of, I would say, and parties to, one of those weird national conversations that sometimes happens.

And I'm putting that in air quotes for our listeners who can't see.

This time, the national conversation is about President Donald Trump and his fitness for the office of the presidency.

Obviously, this is not a new conversation, but it has been given new life by a new book, by the author, Michael Wolf.

Of many explosive claims in Wolf's book, Perhaps the most significant comes in this passage from the Hollywood Reporter's excerpt of the book.

He writes of Donald Trump's small White House House team that, quote, his indelible impression of talking to that team and observing them through much of the first year of Trump's presidency is that they all, 100%,

came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

Jim,

what is the American public to do with an assertion like that?

And in particular, given its source?

I think we can talk about the source later on.

On the basic knowledge, I have my perhaps contrarian view is that the public has, for the last year or two, essentially known what there is to know about Donald Trump.

If you thought, as I did, that Donald Trump was unprepared for public office, that he was sketchy on his command of issues, that he was inflaming negative trends in the American psyche and all the rest, the evidence for that was very, very well on the record long before

the electorate went to the polls a little more than a year ago.

To my mind, the question is, what does this mean for the Republican establishment?

By which I mean there's only one group of people right now who really can do anything about this knowledge, setting aside Robert Mueller and his team.

And that's essentially the Republican majority in the House, the Republican majority in the Senate.

Those are the people who can say, we're going to have hearings, we're going to issue subpoenas, we're going to have accountability, we're going to look into this or that.

We're going to have different rules for what foreign policy impulses the president can himself indulge.

So I think think what the American public should do is say, hey, Mr.

Speaker Paul Ryan, hey, Mr.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, hey, all of you elected Republicans.

This is your responsibility to do something.

What are you going to do?

On that note, Jim, a lot of people, or the scuttlebutt in certain circles, was that the Republican leadership in Congress was just waiting to get their tax reform package passed, and then they could finally be rid of Donald Trump.

And in a midterm election year that potentially could swing in the negative for Republicans, they would cut their losses and finally distance themselves from the president.

Now it's only January something or other, so it's pretty early in the year.

But do you think that that calculation is potentially going to add up, as it were?

Do you think the Republican leadership shows any signs of ditching the president?

Here is where I give my standard caveat that I know Jeff is familiar with, which is I made exactly one prediction about Donald Trump, which was two and a half years ago.

I I said, nobody like this has ever been elected president, therefore nobody like this will be elected president.

Since then, I have forsworn all predictions of any kind.

However,

it is surprising to me that the main sign you see of Republican congressional sort of distance from Trump is the people who are not running anymore.

What is it, a couple dozen now Republican congressmen or a significant number in swing districts are saying, uh-uh, I don't need this anymore.

And so it seems to be a silent voting with their feet.

But you would think if there were -

I just, I'll ask each of you or ask all of you: what can you imagine as a trigger that will finally make the Republicans in Congress say, okay,

we've gone this far, but condition X, SXSX, is the one that finally pushes us over the brink, gets us off the tree.

That's crazy.

I mean, that's a psychotic breakdown.

Well, I I mean, I'm not kidding.

I'm not kidding.

I mean, like, like

active proof or

incontrovertible proof that he's become fully detached from reality.

Right now, he's not detached from reality.

He creates his own reality.

He exaggerates.

He mythologizes.

You know, as I think it was our colleague Jim Hamblin who said, at least he said it to me.

I'm not sure if he told our readers, but he said that it's one thing to say that the crowd size is one thing when it's another.

But if he had come out and said, not only did I have the biggest crowd ever seen, but it was filled with vampires.

At that point, I think some Republicans might say, okay, this guy's actually nuts.

But, you know, we're far away from a psychotic break.

To that point, I think another ⁇ I often hear another type of answer to a question like that, which is that

to your point in the story you wrote for TheAtlantic.com the other day, Jim, that it was an open secret that the behavior of President Trump was on display to some degree,

how much of it you believe, on display to some degree or another in Michael Wolfe's book, is behavior that has been paraded in public through Trump's self-presentation since he was campaigning for the presidency and certainly since he has occupied it.

And in that light, what's different now?

What is the set of steps that would cause Republicans in Congress to have to take another, to actually have to start taking more steps than they already have and starting investigations and what have you.

Let me give an oblique answer from a time even before when I first wrote for The Atlantic.

Actually, the the very first article I ever did for a national magazine was for Esquire magazine, which I was doing reporting on in 1973 and 1974 when I'd just gotten out of graduate school.

And it was about the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee that were investigating Richard Nixon and what what sort of m

not migration, but what process they went through in deciding how they're going to vote.

And I spent a lot of time with a man named Charles Wiggins, who was then a

he eventually became an appeals court judge for the Ninth Circuit, but he was then a very conservative Republican congressman from a suburban L.A.

district.

El Monte was in his district, essentially the same district that Congressman Royce has just announced he's not going to run for again in California.

I spent months with this guy, and he was one of them who finally went to Richard Nixon in the White House after the release of some of the crucial tapes where Nixon was saying all of his most incriminating things.

And watching this process

back then, 40-plus years ago, saying there is a certain gelling moment, a time when the kaleidoscope comes into focus, a time when suddenly people say

it's the open secret moment, as we see with Harvey Weinstein.

And so

when it came,

going back even further, when it came to Lyndon Johnson and his viability in office, it was the collection of events in early 1968, a subject of a previous Radio Atlantic show, where the Ted Offensive and the riots in the cities and the assassination of Martin Luther King and all the rest made Lyndon Johnson think that suddenly it was not viable for him to stay in office.

Suddenly, in the summer of 1974, it became not viable.

for Richard Nixon to stay in office, and the Republicans told him that, even though the objective facts were only slightly different from what was known before.

So again, the question that I'm not willing to predict yet, but something will make it suddenly not viable for Donald Trump to exercise the powers that he does.

And we can't know maybe this Michael Wolf book will be the thing that has that gelling effect.

I don't know.

So far, it's hard to see signs of Republicans choosing to bail out over it.

I want to hear what Alex thinks might be the breakpoint, but I want to challenge you, Jim, a little bit on something.

This whole conversation is posited on the idea that the Republicans are behaving in an unusual and

really irresponsible way.

But the Democrats during the Clinton impeachment scandal were standing by their man, right?

And their man, by our lights today, was engaged, had engaged in behavior that was completely egregious and immoral.

I'm just wondering

if the Republicans are acting in some sort of particularly egregious way, or this is just a typical way that members of a party behave when they're protecting the president and protecting their power.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So it's a good question, which I would respond to in two ways.

One is

back in the Nixon era, there were a number of Republican centrists or statesmen or whatever, who I'm thinking of Hugh Scott and Mark Hatfield and others, who were willing to say, we are loyal to our president and our party, but this is wrong.

So that's a standard by which today's Republicans fall short by their own party's standards.

The other is to think about, you know, what Bill Clinton did and was impeached for in the White House was

horrible and unseemly and indisciplined and everything else.

But objectively, I would contend it was about 1 percent as grave a threat to the Republic as what has been alleged from Donald Trump now in terms of lack of transparency on taxes, of foreign entanglements, and all the rest.

So

I am a little wary of having exact parallels.

And lest we forget, Joe Lieberman was, he was still a Democrat when he was criticizing Clinton, wasn't he?

I think.

That's true.

Yeah.

I think also another differentiating factor is what Wolf, if you believe what Michael Wolfe is reporting, 100% of the people who work in the Trump White House think Donald Trump is unfit to be president.

I mean, in the Clinton.

By the way, caveat, I'm not sure we believe.

Sure.

But if we're operating.

This is a guy who thinks if people believe something is true, then it's true.

This is Michael Wolfe's philosophy.

So let's be careful.

Well, but I'm just as a point of argument, right?

Like

there were people that legitimately did not think that what Bill Clinton, and I'm not offering a judgment here, but there were people that legitimately didn't think it was that big of a deal what Clinton did in the White House with Lewinsky.

And

therefore, I mean, I feel like the sort of moral pretzel,

what is it?

the, the,

the moral pretzel.

The moral pretzel making.

Which the name of our newest podcast with Alex Webb.

That would actually be an incredible moral pretzel.

But, you know, the twists that one had to contort oneself into as a Democrat, potentially, in those years, were perhaps less fraught than that.

I think you're cleaning up the past.

No, but I think that there was like legit, but look, I'm all for the reckoning that we're having, the conversation we're having around sexual assault and predation.

And I think in the light of, to your point, Jeff, what we're discussing,

Clinton's transgressions look a lot worse today than I think they seemed in the mid and early 90s.

I mean, I think that's just fact.

We just think about sexual assault and predation in a different way.

And I don't think Trump's fitness for office,

which is apparently widely contested.

among members of his own party, if quietly, it's not the same.

It's an apples to benefit.

All I'm saying is, is that the Republican behavior that seems so aberrant is actually not aberrant within the broad American political context, which is that they stick with their guy.

But don't you think this is a different moment in terms of like,

no, of course I do.

I'm just, you know, I just think they haven't caught up in a kind of way.

You know, and

you could do a lot of tricks in your mind to make it seem more normal than it is.

I'm just playing with the current.

I wonder, though, like, do you think, I wonder what Republicans really think of Donald Trump.

I don't have to wonder.

I talk to them.

I know what they think of Donald Trump.

Well, what do they think of Donald Trump?

They think he's not fit for office.

Aaron Trevor Bowie, and that's my experience, too, in talking with Republicans.

I'm just saying that I it's fine.

Republicans should be more aware of his faults and flaws.

I'm just saying that this is ⁇ actually, I'm just having fun.

I'm just having a little fun arguing with you guys.

I'm looking for an argument.

So to this point, though, I mean,

is there something that's distinctively beyond the pale in the observations that Michael Wolf has either recorded or, depending on whom you talk to, perhaps exaggerated or fabricated.

So that's something where I imagine we all would agree, and this is, I think, implied in what Jeff and Alex are saying, is we're not going to take everything in this book at face value.

And I think in my piece, I said, let's assume half that's true.

Let's assume a deep discount.

Even at a deep discount, this is different, I think, from what we've heard before.

And I'll give these couple illustrations.

In what is now known as the final days for Richard Nixon, it was widely thought that he was drinking heavily, that Alexander Haig was sort of intervening, and James Schlesinger was sort of intervening to take him out of the nuclear chain of command, et cetera, et cetera.

But that was viewed as a very specific time at the end of his presidency.

Nobody thought he was incompetent.

They thought he was a crook.

They thought all these other things, but nobody questioned his intelligence or his competence.

Lyndon Johnson, too, is, I think, he was by most definitions an actual paranoid.

And Doris Kearns Goodwin, right after she stopped working for then Doris Kearns as a young White House aide, she wrote a book about all the sort of mental twists in Lyndon Johnson's psyche, but nobody thought that he didn't know what he was doing or that he was having, he was sort of operating out of fantasies.

And I think the consistent narrative about Trump in this book from people around him on the campaign trail is that this is a guy who mentally and in terms of information is different from, at least in modern times, anyone we've had in this office.

Aaron Powell, wait, I want to understand: do you think,

just let's go back to this for one second.

You don't think that Wolf is presenting anything that people don't already know, do you?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

My premise is that he was sort of the open secret premise.

It was like, you know, or the Casablanca shock, just shocked, gambling's going on.

That he is making more vivid something that had been in Latut, Washington, and among Latut Republicans.

They all knew that there was something unusual about this guy.

And I think the virtue of that is saying if everybody knows about this, why aren't they doing something about it?

I don't know.

Matt, just give me one second.

I want to read something written in October 2016.

Donald Trump has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office.

His affect is that of an infomercial huckster.

He traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective.

He is appallingly sexist.

He is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic.

He expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself.

He is easily goaded at poor quality for someone seeking control of America's nuclear arsenal.

He is an enemy of fact-based discourse.

He is ignorant of and indifferent to the Constitution.

He appears not to read.

That's from the Atlantic's 2016 endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

I mean, nothing's new.

And

nothing's new.

To our podcast listeners who are listening to that on Double Speed, you might have to actually reverse it and do a half a minute.

You know, I just started listening to the podcast on Double Speed.

I just learned about that.

That's awesome.

Does anybody do that?

You get twice as many podcasts.

That's unbelievable.

To Jeff's point, though, Jim,

in the endorsement, I mean, much of these, that same argument was made.

This is a man in for office.

Yes, and in the 162 installments that I did of the Trump time capsule, literally, that was a number.

But who's counting?

But who's counting?

From March through November of 2016, I was essentially laying down the case that was just very well summarized in that editorial.

Whoever might have written that was Mr.

Jeff,

which made the case.

And so I think

we're saying something similar and different.

The facts about Donald Trump have been there for anybody who cared to see them.

But

can I interject, though, Jim?

Because there was still, though the and I always encourage everyone to read the Atlantic's point of view on basically everything.

But there were a lot of people who hoped and thought maybe that when Donald Trump was sworn in, he would somehow become presidential and broker bipartisan legislation with Democrats and sort of challenge the orthodoxy of the Republican Party.

That was a campaign premise, after all.

At some point, I'm going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored.

Right.

So

as much as it was an open secret, there was like sort of willful denial that the secret wasn't what we thought it was.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Yes, and I think everybody hoped that.

I hoped that, as somebody who very much did not want him to become president, would became president.

I hoped that he would become the dealmaker, et cetera.

And this would all be

a bad memory of the campaign.

But again, I think the seemingly contradictory but actually not point that we're all grappling with here is that the evidence of what he is like has been around there for a long time.

Something will make it harder for those who can do something about it to ignore.

So

let me try another line of questioning, hoping for better answers, right?

Well, so this comes from the definition of insanity, right?

Asking the same question, hoping for a better answer.

There has been something of a pattern of when Republican presidents are in office, certainly for the last three, including the current one, of questioning

their mental aptitude and fitness for the role.

I will recall your attention to a book published in 2004 by an author named Dr.

Justin Frank called Bush on the Couch, Inside the Mind of the President,

which was about in part the

mental acuity of President George W.

Bush in office at the time.

After President Reagan, after he left the office and in 1994 revealed a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, there was a lot of speculation about

how was his mental state in the final years of his taking the office.

And

is it just that every time there's a Republican president, isn't there a party of out-of-sorts liberals who just want to attack the Republican president on the grounds that they are somehow unfit or indecent, that they're mentally incapable of living up to the role?

How is this line of questioning about President Trump different from that?

I will start with the premise that anybody who becomes president is abnormal in some way because it's such

a demanding and crazy-making process to get there and to have the job.

And when I was before I worked for the Atlantic, I was working for Jimmy Carter.

And so it is even Carter, who seems saint-like in his post-presidency.

He was an abnormal guy, too, and he became president almost by accident, et cetera, et cetera.

So yes, anybody there will have some kind of strange psychological traits.

Point two, Ronald Reagan, by all accounts, was suffering from early dementia, at least in his second term.

And I think that's not a partisan observation.

It's just sort of an an actuarial fact that most people recognize.

On the other hand, he was surrounded by some of the most veteran practitioners of statesmanship and politics, James Baker, George Schultz, Colin Powell, et cetera, who were around there, which is different from now.

But again, I think it is, yes, there is a partisan edge to criticizing any president of either party.

Clinton was criticized in this way, Obama, LBJ, et cetera.

But I think that does ⁇ that may distract attention from the fact that this guy is different in his preparation, his level of knowledge, his departure from the factual realm.

So in a moment, we will pick up that question.

In what ways is Trump different and what has surprised him most about his presidency?

Stick with us.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with the name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.

Try it at progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

Price and Coverage Match Limited by State Law, not available in all states.

So, Jim, I wanted to ask.

You mentioned the Trump time capsule, which was an exercise in sort of chronicling the campaign of Donald Trump as he was ascending to what would become the presidency.

But you've paid a lot of attention to our president.

What

now has surprised you most?

What have been the moments that now stick out as, wow, I never thought that I would see that?

I suppose there have been two positive sources of surprise.

One is that we haven't all been blown up.

The world is a big and tricky and dangerous place in North Korea and in Iran and the South China Sea and in all sorts of other places.

And I think so far there's been an almost abashed or cautionary seeming reaction, even from Kim Jong-un in North Korea, thinking, whoa, we don't really want to rock the boat so much here.

So that has been a positive surprise.

I guess the sort of response of civic society around the country has been somewhat positive too.

The part, the sort of negative surprise to me is in,

not surprise, but realization is

the erosion day by day of the things that to me make me proud to be an American, the inclusiveness of the country, its broad-mindedness of being an arena where people from around the world can realize their dreams.

We have been, I think that's both an ideological intellectual advantage to us and a practical advantage to.

I think

we're giving that up.

The other is, as mentioned earlier,

that so few people in the Republican Party, even those who have nothing to lose anymore, like Bob Corker or Jeff Flake or the many Republican congressmen are not running anymore, are not saying, I'm auditioning now for my role in the new version of Profiles and Courage.

I'm going to say, you know, here's, I'm going to vote for this or that.

I'm going to join a majority to ask for investigations.

Jim, do you think, I feel like I keep asking you to make predictions, but

in this world, and I, you know, as we talk about the erosion of institutions and the people who are complicit in that erosion,

do you think there are consequences for people who abide by open secrets?

Because I look at Hollywood and I, you know, there was some talk, if you look at Harvey Weinstein, the people who were around Weinstein, like, would they face, or any of these sexual predators, would they face some kind of retribution or punishment for having basically abetted illegal, if not toxic, behavior?

And I kind of wonder whether you think there will, I mean, I don't want to, I'm not going to make it a prediction.

Do you think that there are consequences for people who live with and help keep, if you will, open secrets?

You know, certainly, I think there are eras in history we look back on and we say they should have done more.

The grotesque, extreme case would, of course, be letting the Nazis come to power.

But it would be in the civil rights movement.

It would be in 19th century America.

It was a period.

McCarthy period and all the rest.

When I was in college, the president of the university was a guy whose whole reputation was having stood up in the previous generation against McCarthy and shaming those who hadn't.

So

I think this will be my one prediction for the episode, that a generation from now, 20 years from now, when people look back on this era, they'll say, why weren't more people taking a stand?

Why weren't more people who could have done something doing something?

They're saying that now about Hollywood.

They said it about corporate corruption.

We certainly say it about all the other episodes I was mentioning.

I think they'll say that 20 years from now about the people who were not taking stands.

I tried in the time capsule to say, this is the person you are endorsing, institutional Republicans.

Consider how this is going to look in history's eyes.

Your prediction is predicated on the the idea that we are not in an irreversible decline, though.

You know me, Jeff.

I'm Mr.

Robinson.

I'm going to bring us really down CBS.

No, but

I'm serious, though.

I mean, you assume that there's a bounce back here, that there's some sort of snapback.

Why does there have to be a snapback?

So, to wax both serious and Graybeard here,

the U.S.

has been through a lot of troubles, and it's not yet evident this is a worse episode than ever before.

It's, I think, a worse national politics in a long time.

But in your previous podcast about the year of 1968, I actually was around then.

That was a terrible time.

Day by day, just things were really happening in an even worse fashion than now.

Was the climate worse?

The climate was worse?

I think there were, in a couple dozen cities, there were outright riots going on at the same time.

And having two major assassinations within a time of three months and

hundreds of Americans per week being killed in Vietnam.

It was a fraying time.

Aaron Powell, but Jim, the circumstances and

the divide may have been steeper and bloodier and all the rest, but in terms of the institutions themselves and the man leading those institutions, I mean, I can't remember who it was recently said that if Nixon had had Fox News,

he might not have had to resign.

Aaron Powell, I would agree.

And I think that is one case where we're unambiguously we're in more institutional trouble than 50 years ago now, which is that there was, for better and worse, a commanding heights of mainstream media in those days.

The worst part is if they didn't pay attention to the civil rights movement or didn't pay attention to women or whatever, attention did not get paid.

The good part is they could say, look, Vietnam is not working out.

Look, you know, you have to pay attention to this or that development in civil rights.

So

there wasn't the equivalent of Fox News, which I think could have legitimized Nixon.

So to return to this question of, you know, what are we to do with all of this?

One of our colleagues, Jim Hamblin, our resident MD on the writing staff, recently wrote a robust piece arguing that there should be some sort of a body, a nonpartisan body, independent of Congress and independent of any particular president that could evaluate the president.

Let me let Jim talk about his idea here.

A panel of people who are experts in neurology, psychology, psychiatry, who could not only administer a battery of tests about a person's cognitive fitness, but could then offer an expert assessment in the same way that a CBO might offer an assessment about what will happen with a healthcare bill and how it will affect the nation going forward and the economy and the number of people with or without insurance, that a group of seven or nine or 11 people appointed by Congress could say, okay, we've given the president these tests or this presidential candidate these tests.

Based on our results, he's in the 10th percentile of cognitive functioning in these different ways, and we think he would not be able to execute well the office of the presidency and do with that what you will.

What do you guys think of that idea?

I think it's a nice idea, but the chances of it actually working are, I mean, we're in a moment where we're debating climate change.

I mean, where the CBO has now now been a body that's under attack by Republicans in Congress when it doesn't deliver the numbers that they're looking for,

when it does deliver numbers that are not politically expeditious.

So the idea that an independent body or person would be able to sort of make a health judgment about the fitness of leading political candidates seems like

we already do have that, though, for physical health.

I mean, the president of the

president has disastrous blood pressure, we'll find out.

By the way, we haven't gotten the results of Trump's own physical, but I think Jim's talking more about a sort of cognitive psychological profile.

I don't think it's going to happen now, but all ideas like this seem improbable at first, and then they get carried through.

And we'll see.

With any luck, the country will be able to institute that sort of process without first going through a disaster in this presidency.

But

certainly a disaster in this presidency will spur that kind of thing on.

Jim, didn't Jimmy Carter talk about this in the 90s after Reagan's Alzheimer's was made public?

He did, and I think that some of that was dismissed because Carter had famously lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and was bitter.

He did?

Wait a second.

Wait a second.

If only he had the same campaign speech writers he had four years ago.

I know we're all laughing about it, but inevitably, I mean, it will have to be a Republican that suggests this idea.

And I think no matter what happens,

a bunch of Republicans.

You know, the point Jeff makes about blood pressure is a relevant one in that we tend to have an institutional solution to the last guy's problems.

And releasing presidential medical records only became common after Dwight Eisenhower had his heart attacks, and tax records only after Richard Nixon and his various issues, and the War Powers Act after Vietnam.

And so I think that probably after Trump, we'll have something like this.

But I probably like both of you,

I don't think it will really kick into function with him.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And Jim's point, I mean, part of

Dr.

Jim Hamblin's point is that having a conversation about certainly the cognitive fitness of the president, the mental functioning of the president, absent an independent and nonpartisan context in which a body of experts can speak to that fitness is itself irresponsible and itself causes harm.

I've tried to take into account all the ways that this discussion can go wrong.

People who interact with the psychiatric system in all different kinds of ways can be affected.

People who are of advanced ages and who experience discrimination based on that could be harmed by it and the ways in which it can be responsibly talked about.

The assumption that there is nothing to be gleaned from the cognitive sciences into what a person's past and present behavior tells us about their future,

it's irresponsible to think that there's nothing that can be learned.

At the same time, I think it's irresponsible to simply be applying labels to people from afar

without ever having personally interacted with them.

Aaron Powell, my view of this is that I have tried to avoid systematically medicalizing discussion of Trump.

If you give it a name, you can give it a name.

But we know what his performance is.

We know the way he talks about issues.

We know his temperament.

And so we can judge that just without giving it a medical name.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: One of your points, Jim, about the president that distinguishes this moment from some of the moments that have preceded it, when similar questions have been raised, is the quality of Trump's team or perhaps

the novice quality of Trump's team in some instances.

And

you recently made an observation about Stephen Miller, about a moment in Stephen Miller.

I was wondering if you could tease that out for us.

So the context, Stephen Miller was doing an interview the other day with Jake Tapper, where he was quite combative.

I was booked to talk about the very issues I'm just describing and you're not even asking about them because they're not interesting facts to you.

That's not true.

I have plenty of questions on immigration.

You've attempted to filibuster by talking about your flights.

No, I'm not.

No.

I want to

say that.

No, don't be condescending.

Jay, Stephen,

the reason why I want to talk about the president's experiences, what I've seen with him traveling to meet dozens of foreign leaders, with his incredible work.

Okay, you're not answering the questions.

I understand.

You have 24 hours a day of anti-material.

You're not going to give three minutes for the American people to get the real experience of Donald Trump.

There's one viewer that you care about right now, and you're being obsequious.

You're being a fact totem in order to please him.

What stuck out to you, by the way?

I could listen to that all day.

I could listen.

That's like the soundtrack of our lives.

It's like the opposite listener to you in that respect.

That strikes me as deeply unpleasant.

What was remarkable about that?

Well,

the precision of Jake Tapper saying at the end there's there's one listener you care about, because obviously Stephen Miller, with his sort of down-the-line

support of Trump with a certain kind of Roy Cone

settler affair to it,

that is something that distinctly previous people in this role have known not to do.

And let's think of White House aides.

One of the jobs of White House aides to go on TV and make the case, but even those who might be pretty acerbic in person, like Jodi Powell, who is Jimmy Carter's press secretary, my de facto boss, he was kind of a mean guy.

James Carville could be a mean guy, Sununu, who worked in the Bush administration, et cetera.

When these guys went on TV, the idea was to have the charm offensive because the audience wasn't just the president.

And it was to people in Congress.

It was to the public.

It was to the interviewer to try to have some kind of EQ connection.

So this is, again, this is something new in the annals of public pressure.

Stephen Miller is in his early 30s.

Do you think he envisions?

And so successful.

Do you think he envisions life beyond the Trump White House?

Because one would imagine the prospect of that should curb some of his more combative impulses.

He's such a Washington careerist.

Well, I'm just thinking, Mike.

He believes.

That's the kind of interview.

He believes.

It's not the first time this observation has been made, but there is definitely a reality television component to that.

And that there's a character that's popular in this White House, and the analog to that character has not previously been popular before.

That's the reality show character that's constantly saying, you know, I'm not trying to be anybody's best friend.

This White House, there are a lot of folks in this White House who are not trying to be anybody's friends.

It's not trying to be anybody's best friend.

Except perhaps for the president.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And it's possible that this is, you know, there is this role which Corey Landowski had for a while.

Bannon, in his own charm-offensive way, had too.

And

in the tapes of Stephen Miller back from his days at Santa Monica High School, this seems to be the real him.

This is the guy.

And if to the extent he is a principal speechwriter, which I gather is the case, it's a tone that comes through a lot of the speeches going back to the famous American Carnage address with which this whole era began.

Yeah.

About which George W.

Bush referred.

Didn't George W.

Bush call that weird shit?

That was the honestly, that's what we're living through.

That was the weird shit speech.

I'll be about myself if I don't ask this question.

Speaking of, once again, President George W.

Bush,

many have observed that President Bush, Bush 43, has come to be a statesman in contrast to President Trump, and that it's a surprise to have such

a stark contrast between the last two Republican presidents.

And

how do you, my co-hosts and Jim, now view the way that President Bush was described and discussed in the media now in light of President Trump.

So George W.

Bush will always be the person who made what is, in my view, the greatest error in modern American history, invading Iraq.

He'll always be a person who had, I think, an economically destructive tax cut, et cetera, et cetera.

But he seems to be, number one, to have qualities of personal decency and generosity, and number two, to understand the institutional role of the president and the past president, too, and to try to do things to be president of all the people.

So I respect him a lot for that.

Let us turn to the closing segment of our show this week and every week ask you the question, what is your keeper?

What have you heard, seen, watched, listened to recently that you do not want to forget?

Jeff, how about we start with you?

I think I'm going to betray my age and socioeconomic class when I say that I can't get enough of the crown.

Oh, yeah.

I'm so.

We thought it was all yo MTV rap videos from the mid-90s that were on a continuous loop at your house.

Actually, they are.

Last night, I was explaining to my son who Cool Mo D was.

Wow.

I wish I had been there for

you.

He started the conversation by saying, Have you ever heard of someone named Dougie Fresh?

Oh, M.

T.

And you were like, Son, have I ever?

Let's have the talk.

But I've moved Dougie Fresh.

I think I've moved from Schooly D and Cool Mo D and Curtis Blow right to the crown without really much of a

DJ Kool herc through line directly to Queen Elizabeth.

I will confess, my wife and I spent New Year's Eve watching the crown very happily.

It's a great show.

I don't know why.

It's because it's a riveting, delicious show.

And you know what?

You know who my keeper is?

Queen Elizabeth.

Keep her around.

Keep her around.

Look, I recognize that it's an idealized version of Queen Elizabeth.

That show loves Queen Elizabeth.

But you know what?

So do I.

Especially Claire Foy.

I can't can't get enough of Queen Elizabeth in my life.

Claire Foy is pretty awesome.

Claire Foy should probably stop acting because this is about as Netflix Queen Elizabeth is the character.

She's going to be staring as Lisbeth Salander in the next Girl with the Blank franchise.

True.

Yeah, which is true thing.

Yeah, true story.

You heard it here first.

Well, I'm going to miss her when she leaves the crown.

I've got to tell you that.

We all will.

Oh, man.

Alex, what is your keeper?

My keeper is

similarly bourgeois.

I'm reading like, these are just the, these keepers are like news flash.

We're doing the things that everybody else is doing.

I'm reading Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, and she's a really good writer.

Everybody knew that.

I've read several other of her books, but this one is really very, very good.

And if you've gone through season two of The Crown and need some evening entertainment, pick up a copy E or otherwise of Manhattan Beach.

And no, I'm not on the payroll.

Excellent.

Thank you very much for that, Jennifer.

Egan, what's the name of the book again?

Manhattan Beach.

Manhattan Beach.

Jim.

I will endorse both of those, and I'll plant a little seed for

the next time I join you all in the program, which is to tell you about the time I actually sat next to Prince Philip at a dinner.

Ooh.

No mic drop situation.

Tell us everything.

That is for.

But you can't tell us now?

Well,

see how long the show is, but I will.

Let me just, can I just ask Jim, did he seem like a nice guy?

We talked aviation.

The subject was suddenly I asked him about his piloting career, and suddenly he lit up.

And we spent the next two hours, and there I was at 4,500 feet, et cetera.

It was, as you can see from the first season of The Crown, that was what actually, I think, the one thing he really has enjoyed in his life is being a pilot.

Isn't there an anecdote about that in the foxholes in World War I or World War II that

German soldiers, sort of allied Naxis soldiers, met across a trench in September 19th?

On Christmas Day, I think they had the famous truce.

So this was, anyhow, so that was,

so I don't need to come back on the show again because that's my Prince Philip story.

But my keeper is that I've been reading Ron Chernow's biography of Ulysses Grant, which really is magnificent as a work of narrative and history.

And Grant himself was quite a guy.

And I think there's nobody about whom I have changed my opinion more than Grant on the I mean, for example, he must have been the first American president to be able to speak Spanish from the Mexican War.

But this is part of a larger meta point for me.

I'm going to try harder to read more things actually in print because you remember them better than you do through the magic of the screen.

Yeah.

I'll also say I can't wait for the Ron Chernow book on Donald Trump.

That's going to be a doozy.

I can't wait for the Lynn Manuel Miranda musical on the book about Donald Trump by Ron Chernack.

I love it.

That's going to be awesome.

So

I usually do the bookkeepers and someone else usually does the food keepers, but my keeper this week is a food keeper.

Who's someone else?

Could you be referring to me?

I'm not trying to point my fingers.

I'm not trying to name any hands over here.

I'm happy to be that somebody else that does food keepers.

I like that designation.

Always like your food keepers, Alex.

Thank you.

They usually involve alcohol.

Go ahead, friend.

So

in Guyanese households, there is a tradition on Christmas.

On Christmas morning, we have garlic pork.

Garlic pork.

You begin to prepare garlic pork weeks in advance of Christmas.

You get as much, and apologies for any

ethical vegetarians or vegans in the room.

I sympathize with your cause.

However, garlic pork for me is larger than it.

You begin with pork, you rub it up with as much much thyme and garlic as you possibly can, and you soak it in a bath of vinegar.

My mom does half vinegar, half water for weeks.

You leave it, you can leave it on a counter because it's bathed in vinegar.

And then on Christmas morning, you do two things.

First, you cook up the garlic pork, you put it in the stock pot, and you just cook it down until the pork just shrivels up into these delightfully acidic, crispy bites.

And you also pair it with homemade bread, And my preference is homemade butter.

So the sweetness of the bread and the acidity of the butter form the perfect pairing, and your entire house smells of garlic and thyme on Christmas morning.

It is, I have just finished the last of the frozen garlic pork that is a leftover from Christmas.

There's not usually leftovers from Christmas, but my mom made sure to set aside a little bit for me this year.

It is a tradition that

should carry forth unto all the generations.

And I grant it to you.

We are one day, if we make it into the big leagues, we will get invited home to the Thompson house for garlic pork.

You shall.

You shall.

Maybe.

You're all invited next Christmas if you happen to be with me and the folks.

Well, wow.

You forget these books and movies.

Garlic pork sounds like the way.

It is.

It's an open secret.

It's an open secret.

It's on my mind.

I definitely don't want to forget it because it's the last that I'm going to have of it for another like 350-some odd days.

So

till then, till we meet again, Garlic Pork, and till we meet again, co-hosts and Jim, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Alex, Jeff,

don't break New York.

We'll try.

All right.

See you next week.

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

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Diana Douglas and Kim Lau.

Thank you to the inestimable James Fallows for joining us and thanks as always to my co-hosts Alex Wagner and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Our theme, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, is by the legendary John Batiste.

Please leave us a voicemail with your contact info and your thoughts on this episode at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, do rate and and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May it serve as proof of your good taste and unquestionable smarts.

We'll see you next week.