The New Yorker: Politics And More

The Washington Roundtable discusses the avalanche of disinformation that has taken over the 2024 election cycle, including an A.I. video meant to slander Tim Walz and claims that the votes are rigged before they’re even counted. Will this torrent of lies tip the election in favor of Donald Trump? Is there a way out of this morass of untruth? “I think the lies are clearly winning,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “But I would also say that that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the tools that are available.” Osnos notes recent defamation rulings against Rudy Giuliani and Fox News over false statements about the 2020 election as cases in point. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump and the F-Word,” by Susan B. Glasser “Can Older Americans Swing the Election for Harris?,” by Bill McKibben “What’s the Matter with Young Male Voters?,” by Jay Caspian Kang “Door-Knocking in Door County,” by Emily Witt “What Would Donald Trump Do to the Economy?,” by John Cassidy “The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s Sorority,” b

Since Donald Trump tried to challenge the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee has been hard at work building a network of poll watchers to observe ballot counting in counties across America. The program could help Trump and the R.N.C. challenge the results of the 2024 election should Trump lose, while also driving turnout among Republican voters who are skeptical of election integrity in the U.S. The New Yorker contributing writer Antonia Hitchens joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the R.N.C.’s poll-watching efforts may come into play on November 5th and beyond. This week’s reading: “The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference,” by David Kirkpatrick “The Election-Interference Merry-Go-Round,” by Jon Allsop To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com.

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins in November, it will likely be on the strength of the pro-choice vote, which has been turning out strongly in recent elections. Her statements and choices on the campaign trail couldn’t stand in starker relief against those of Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, who recently called for defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Harris “is the first sitting Vice-President or President to come to a Planned Parenthood health center, to come to an abortion clinic, and really understand the conversations that have been happening on the ground,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president and C.E.O., tells David Remnick. The organization is spending upward of forty million dollars in this election to try to secure abortion rights in Congress and in the White House. A second Trump term, she speculates, could bring a ban on mifepristone and a “pregnancy czar” overseeing women in a federal Department of Life. “Is that scary enough for you?” Johnson asks.

The Washington Roundtable discusses the ultra-rich figures, such as Elon Musk, who are donating staggeringly large sums of money to Donald Trump’s campaign. Susan B. Glasser’s recent piece examines what these prominent donors may expect to get in return for their support.“You’ve now got oligarchs who have a sense of impunity,” Jane Mayer says. “There are no limits to how much they can give and how much power they can get.” Plus, how Trump’s fund-raising figures compare to those of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has raised one billion dollars since launching her Presidential campaign..  This week’s reading: “How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again,” by Susan B. Glasser “Can the Women of the Philadelphia Suburbs Save the Democrats Again?” by Eliza Griswold “What the Closeness of This Election Suggests About the Future of American Politics,” by Isaac Chotiner “What the Polls Really Say About Black Men’s Support for Kamala Harris,” by Jelani Cobb Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Jessica Pishko, who recently published a piece about the devastation left behind by Hurricane Helene, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss conspiracy theories that have emerged in the storm’s wake. On social media, people have falsely claimed, among other things, that the federal government has diverted disaster funding to migrants and that FEMA has seized peoples land. In a battleground state such as North Carolina, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, has been mired in scandal, what do the confusion and conspiracies mean for the upcoming Presidential election? This week’s reading: “Will Mark Robinson Derail Trump’s Chances in North Carolina?,” by Peter Slevin “Outrage And Paranoia After Hurricane Helene,” by Jessica Pishko Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the final stretch of Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign, including a recent media blitz on podcasts and television shows. The Vice-President has never been entirely comfortable with the interview format. “She doesn’t ruminate and reflect,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “I think it’s the self-protection that comes with being aware of people who are always going to doubt her capacity to make history.”  Osnos’s deeply reported profile of Vice-President Kamala Harris, “Kamala Harris's Hundred-Day Campaign,” has just been published. Plus, the panel deconstructs the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War,” about Donald Trump’s relationship with the Russian President Vladimir Putin.This episode was updated after the publication of Osnos’s piece on the Harris campaign.This week’s reading: “The Harris-Trump Endgame Is On: Is It Time to Panic Yet?,” by Susan B. Glasser “How Podcasts Are Transforming the Presidential Election,”

With the U.S. Presidential election less than a month away, and the war in Gaza now ongoing for a full year, the group of voters who are “uncommitted” to a candidate remains a wild card. Thousands of Democratic voters say that they will not vote for Kamala Harris because of her support for Israel’s war effort. The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the potential impact of such protest voters. “If you’re antiwar . . . it can actually be really hard to figure out who represents your interests, if anyone,” Marantz says. “That’s the kind of information vacuum, the kind of ambiguity, that Trump thrives in.”This week’s reading: “Reporting on Democratic Rifts in Michigan,” by Andrew Marantz “Among The Gaza Protest Voters,” by Andrew Marantz  “The Gaza We Leave Behind,” by Mosab Abu Toha  “A Year After October 7th, a Kibbutz Survives,” by Ruth Margalit  “Why Netanyahu Won’t Cease Fire,” by Bernard Avishai To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. T

Long before Donald Trump got serious about politics, Newt Gingrich saw himself as the revolutionary in Washington, introducing a combative style of politics that helped his party become a dominating force in Congress. Setting the template for Trump, Gingrich described Democrats not as an opposing team with whom to make alliances but as an alien force—a “cultural élite”—out to destroy America. Gingrich has written no fewer than five admiring books about Trump, and he was involved in pushing the lie of the stolen election of 2020. Like many in the Party, he balks at some of Trump’s tactics, but always finds an excuse. “I would probably not have used the language Trump used,” for example in calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled,” Gingrich says. “Partly because I think that it doesn’t further his cause. . . . I would simply say that he is a very intense personality . . . and occasionally he has to explode.” But he sees Trump as seasoned and improved with age, and his potential in a second term f

The Washington Roundtable is joined by the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, Ben Wikler, to discuss ground operations for Kamala Harris in the key battleground state, and why he thinks the Trump campaign is falling behind when it comes to reaching voters in person, despite the financial support of Elon Musk and other big donors. “I was just on the phone with the chair of Oneida County, in Northern Wisconsin, and we’re seeing crickets,” Wikler says of G.O.P. outreach. Still, he sees the state of the race in Wisconsin as “super, super, super, super tight.”This week’s reading: “J. D. Vance and the Failed Effort to Memory-Hole January 6th,” by Susan B. Glasser “It Could All Depend on Arizona,” by Rachel Monroe “Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?,” by Eyal Press “J. D. Vance Got the Conversation He Wanted at the Vice-Presidential Debate,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells  Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.