The News Items Podcast
John Ellis talks with interesting people doing important work. Some you've heard of. Some you haven't. All of them are worth listening to, at some length.
The News Items Podcast
Episode Nine: John Heilemann
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John Ellis sits down with journalist John Heilemann for a sharp, fast-moving tour of a volatile geopolitical moment. They unpack a fragile Iran ceasefire, the limits of “madman theory” diplomacy, and the reputational damage to U.S. power abroad. The conversation widens to domestic fallout: Trump’s political erosion, GOP anxiety, and surprising Democratic gains in special elections. Along the way, they dissect elite decision-making, media narratives, and the vacuum of big ideas in American politics.
Hosted by John Ellis
Hello and welcome back to the News Items Podcast. I'm John Ellis. I am the founder and editor of two Substack newsletters. One is called News Items, the other is called Political News Items. You can find them both at news-items.com. We have a very special guest today, my friend John Heileman. John is the best-selling author of two great books about American presidential politics. The first entitled Game Change, which chronicled the 2008 presidential election. The second, Double Down, which chronicled the 2012 presidential election. I highly recommend both books. I think Game Change became a HBO movie or something, right?
SPEAKER_01Most certainly did. It won tons of Emmy Awards and Golemmy Awards. And a Peabody and all kinds of things, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, I have to finish your intro, which is uh John is also a former staff writer for New York magazine, for Wired magazine, the New Yorker magazine, and The Economist. He's also a national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and the creator and host of the Emmy-nominated docuseries, The Circus. John offers political reporting and analysis in the Sunday edition of Tuck's The Best and the Brightest. John, thank you very much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_01And this is a great place to be. And thank you for that kind introduction. And you read it just like I read it. Well done.
SPEAKER_00So let's I mean, we we were going to do this podcast yesterday, and we thought, well, maybe we should wait a day. Thank God.
SPEAKER_01Thank God we decided to hold off for a day, John. With talk about like what like uh what would have been the audio equivalent of a birdcage rap. You know, what if what do they call it? Fish wrap.
SPEAKER_00Fish rap.
SPEAKER_01The audio equivalent of fish rap or the lining of a birdcage, right? That that's basically what that podcast would have been. Now, this one may not be no better, but that one uh certainly would have been those things. Overtaken by events in a big way.
SPEAKER_00Indeed. So we start with the good news, which is destruction of a civilization was averted, and a ceasefire obviously is devoutly to be wished under any circumstances. The bad news is this appears to be a humiliating defeat for the United States. What's your view of this?
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, I think first of all, I guess two things. One is, John, I think, you know, I'm I'm with Tim Snyder about this. I think, you know, even though we didn't destroy Iran as a civilization, or something slightly short of that, like cripple it in a profoundly damaging humanitarian way for months and months and months, as would have been possible if Trump decided to take out the power grid there. I do think that like when an American president, for the first time in our history, and hopefully the last, you know, comes out and openly threatens not just a war crime but genocide, you know, on paper, writes that down, so to speak, on paper, on digital paper, commits that to something that will live in the archives forever. I think you cross the line that you never can really come back from. I mean, on some level, the notion of the United States as an exceptional country as the shining city on the hill is in some way eroded by that. And I don't think it's like you can just be like, ah, you know, Trump was just kidding. I do think there's uh lasting damage where the rest of the world looks at America differently. And then there's the question I think you're raising, which is, you know, Trump has tacoed a lot. And in a lot of cases, Trump's tacos have been, you know, exactly what you wanted to have for lunch, right? I mean, he's back to he's tacoed on things that would have been damaging to the world economy or would have, in this case, would have been damaging to all kinds of things. And so they're, you know, I'm not obviously this is the preferred outcome. Um we were all praying for him to taco. And yet, you know, when you've gone that far, you have laid a lot of credibility on the line. And at some point, people around the world start laughing at you. And the the notion of him tacoing becomes more of a laugh line than it already is. And I do think that, you know, there's I mean, the Iranians are laughing at us in state media and other places. And the the 10-point plan that they put forward that Trump said was a good basis for a starting point, a good basis for a starting point for negotiations of a lasting peace, you know, has things in it like Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz and they go continue to have a nuclear program. I mean, the idea that that suddenly something that they put something forward that was a substantive step towards what Trump says he wants, although Trump has said he wants almost so many different things, it's hard to know what he really wants. I mean, I think Trump looks like a fool on the world stage a lot in the last 14 months, but this has got to be the one that is the most glaring example of a thing where he's damaged the the credibility of the United States and has damaged our interests around the world by by making a threat that he clearly, I guess, never had any intention of going through with.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting. There's uh Janon uh Ganesh has a column today in which he discusses the madman theory that Richard Nixon talked about back in the in his, I guess, first term. Um and the madman theory is that he's so crazy you don't know what he's gonna do, so you back off. Janon make the point that Nixon did that privately. He conveyed that message was conveyed by Kissinger to the North Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese didn't pay any attention to it, but it didn't happen publicly, and so the climb down, you know, was secret. It it was unknown on the public stage. This one, it's it's right out there. It uh I am I am potentially lunatic enough to blow your civilization back to the Stone Age, and then he climbs down. It just has to do enormous damage, doesn't it? To US standing, if you will.
SPEAKER_01I think so. And also look, the madman theory is a theory that that has a lot of problems with it to begin with. But if you accept it on its own terms, it only is functional if the madman behavior is a deviation from the norm. If you're constantly being a madman, you're no longer really using the madman approach as a tactic or a strategy. You're become the boy the boy that cried wolf, which is what, you know, which I it feels like now in these 14 months, again, we can make a very long list of things that Trump has threatened and then pulled back at the last minute, um, uh or imposed, tariffs he's imposed and then pulled back when the markets have reacted badly. And at some point, people just stop taking you seriously. I mean, the madman theory, if it's going to work, only works if you have a period in which the madman is behaving wholly rationally and then suddenly he comes out and starts acting like a nut, or privately, as you just said, John. He suddenly, privately, even more powerfully, where the insiders of the administration say, you know, our boss, who used to be, uh, like Nixon, a foreign policy genius, has suddenly gone off the rails. And, you know, then you can convey that to your adversaries convincingly. You can imagine it might work, but Trump's whole thing is in public. You know, there's not everything that happens with Trump in public is also what's happening in private. And and the public nature of the madman behavior does, you know, reduce even the theoretical efficacy of the madman strategy, I would think. And I do think, as I said a second ago, I just don't think that either our enemies or our allies have not profoundly changed their views of the United States and its power and this administration over the course of the last 14 or 15 months. But really, it we've hit a tipping point, I think, with this.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell David Sanger had a tough piece today in the New York Times, and he pointed out that nukes, no change on the strait, big change. Iran basically controls it now. Regime change zero, which is to say the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was the muscle and the fact of Iranian governance, is still in power and still probably stronger than ever. I want to ask you about do you have a sense of where the new concern has that been alleviated at all, or is it just that we've re-obliterated it and so it'll take them a long time to find it, so to speak?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell I mean, I I sort of thought there was again trying to track all the things that Trump has said about the war in these four or five weeks that we've been at war now is very hard to do because there have been so many and so many of them at odds with each other. But I sort of took it for I sort of think the baseline now is when Trump said the other day that they may still have some enriched uranium, but it's buried so far beneath in the ground that we don't have to worry about it. And I think that was Trump's way of kind of trying to write that off as a concern. When people went to him and said, you know, actually tried to get the rich uranium. We don't know where it is. It's gonna be an incredibly risky and costly mission to go in and get it. And I think that's one place where some rational signals reached him. And so he made up some maybe it is buried beneath the earth so deeply that we can't get it. But I also think that was Trump's way of signaling that that's no longer on his list of things he cares about. And and he hasn't, I don't think he's changed on that subject since then when he uttered those words. So I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with that as where the administration is on this, which is I think the right place to be, because I think you and I would probably agree. Trying to go in there and do an extraction uh mission to find and extract the the the nuclear fissile, the enriched uranium, I should say, would be hairy. I mean, on the base of everything that I know. And I think you're you're already now you're in boots on the ground territory and you're gonna take uh casualties and deaths if you do that mission, I think. And uh and no one wants to see that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, uh in in that case, you would actually have to build a runway. So if you bring in, you know, Bob's construction company to to put down some tarmac. It just it seemed impossible to think about. But the strait is obviously the thing, right? And Trump, if I read this correctly this morning, I've been reading so much I'm not sure that I have it exactly right. But apparently Trump said or intimated that the strait could become a kind of joint venture between the Iranians and the U.S., and that that would ensure free passage. He also said that this whole ceasefire is dependent upon free and safe passage through the strait. But the big fact is before we went in, there was free and safe passage through the strait, and now there's not. Isn't that just an a complete humiliation for the U.S. or or am I overreacting?
unknownAaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Well I think it's the most vivid sign of the fact that the war, uh that we are not winning the war. I mean, on some level, right? I mean, there's uh there are a lot of ways you can make that argument, but but certainly the notion that that I think the bare the bare facts, you know, if we strip away everything else, John, we we look at it, we say, well, first of all, 40 years, every foreign policy expert who knew anything about Iran said, don't get in a war with Iran, because they will close the close those trade before moves. Republican, Democrat, military all said this is a very, very high likely uh likelihood, very high probability. And Trump ignored that. I know we're gonna talk about the Maggie and Swan piece, but you know, you see it in that story of how we got to the war. Uh, the piece in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. And Trump basically kind of, you know, thinking as always he knows better than everybody, sort of looked at Dan Cain and others and said, nah, they won't close the strait. They will capitulate. We'll bomb them so hard that they will, you know, be, they will be at our mercy at that point. So he ignored the advice, not just of his own people, but the advice of 40 years of bipartisan military strategic consensus. And now the global economy is profoundly messed up and not just as reflected in the high gas prices and high diesel prices that we see right now, but in a way that even if this war ended magically tomorrow and the strait opened immediately, you're gonna still see supply chain impacts that are gonna go on for months. And the gas prices are not gonna come down for months. And if you're thinking about the political implications of all this, it's still gonna be a box that Republicans are gonna be very finding impossible to get out of in the midterm. So all of that was self-inflicted. And so what we get from a, if we successfully, we have a ceasefire and we eventually get to a permanent ceasefire, we get to go back to the status quo ante on the fundamental thing that's really uh that that Iran has leverage and that we knew in advance they would have leverage on. So I just I think it's it's a another, it's another sign to the world that the United States under Donald Trump is not thinking clearly about strategy and about why it got into this war in the first place, that it didn't really have a clear set of goals, clear and achievable set of goals, or a clear and achievable way of getting out without all of what we've seen over the course of the last five weeks, and we'll see for some number of weeks and months into the future.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell I want to ask you, I suspect that a number of people who listen to this podcast might not have seen Maggie and uh John Maggie Haberman and John Swann's piece uh in posted yesterday and in today's paper. But what was your take on the piece? And I was amazed by the reporting. I was literally inside the room. And there are only you know, there are like eight suspects as the leak, and I think four of the suspects are are obvious to all. But what did you make of the piece?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Well, just to say first, you know, this is they this they flag in the piece that this is um drawn from reporting that they're doing for a forthcoming book that's, I believe, out in June called Regime Change. And I think everyone in Washington and certainly everyone in the administration is on tender hooks waiting for that piece because those two are really extraordinarily good reporters. And the piece has, you know, a few things that I think because it's the New York Times, the two of them don't embroider very much or or opinionize, or there's not a lot of what some would call analysis in the piece. It's basically just like here's a factual but deeply reported account of how Trump got to war. And the things that stood out to me, first of all, the opening scene of Bibi Netanyahu in the in the sit room with all of his war cabinet projected behind him on video, essentially making the case to Trump for war. John, I don't know about you. You you've known, uh you've been around politics for longer than me, but we've both been around for a pretty long time. I've now asked like a dozen people in various administrations whether they've ever heard of a foreign leader in the sit room, doing a meeting in the sit room with the president, sitting opposite him at the table with the president, not at the end of the table running the meeting, but the two sitting like in a co-equal way. No one I know says they've ever heard of that before. Cannot think of an example in the past. That's an extraordinary thing. And for anybody who is of the view, and there are many, some of them like hardcore anti-Semites, and some of them not, anybody of the view that Israel was critical to getting us into this war and that BB was leading Trump, maybe not by the nose, as you would put it colorfully, but leading him into this, making the arguments that ultimately persuaded him to go to war and had an outsized role in getting us into this war, you will read this piece and you will say that is that those are there's evidence of that that comes that blares through in this reporting. And the second thing I'd say is that the people around Donald Trump, by the time you get to the end of the piece at the senior level, Susie Wiles, Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, Dan Cain, the White House counsel, all of them had profound reservations about going into launching a war in Iran. All of them. Either they're ambivalent or openly against, or not openly, but privately against it. And none of them, except for JD Vance, the only exception to this, but the none of those other people ever come out and just say to Trump, Mr. President, I think this is a bad idea. No. And that's the model of how we want White Houses to work, is that there's a truth teller somewhere inside the White House who's willing to sit down with the president and say, Mr. President, I think you've got the wrong end of the stick here. Here's here's why I think. You're obviously free to disregard my opinion. You're the president, you make the decisions, I will do whatever you say. But let me make the clear case for why I think this is going to be a problem or a disaster or whatever. None of them say that. All of them, according to the piece, all of them are thinking that in the kind of, I guess, about eight days that are reported in this piece at the end of February, between like 20, February 21st, I think it starts with the BB meeting and ends on the 28th with the with the actual war beginning. I think that's rather, you know, rather not surprising. If you've ever watched a cabinet meeting, sycophancy is the order of the day. And so the fact that in in private they're maybe not quite so sycophantic, but ultimately deferential and afraid to speak their minds in front of Trump is not surprising. But still, in a case where war is what we're talking about, um, it's hugely problematic that more of them were not willing to be honest with Trump. And I think that's the picture, kind of the collective picture. The other thing is the picture of Trump that it paints, which is of someone who came into that meeting at the on the 21st, already inclined to go to war, already kind of joined at the hip with Bibi Netanyahu, much more hawkish than a lot of the people in the America, first part of the MAGA movement, whatever, thought that he was, and what you would have thought on the basis of 10 years of his rhetoric, he was much more hawkish. He had really decided he wanted to do this. He more or less listens to when the various advisors lay out pros and cons, he more or less dismisses the cons and only hears the pros. And we've seen this in the president before, you know, where he hears what he wants to hear. And that also comes through very strongly in this, that like pretty much there was not really a moment of doubt. Trump says sounds good when Bibi makes his case. And basically on the day that we launched the war, he's still essentially saying sounds good, and kind of ignoring any of the warnings and cautions that people did raise in the room, even if half-heartedly.
SPEAKER_00Just to go back to the ceasefire for a second. Today, the east-west pipeline in Saudi Arabia, which uh gets oil from point A to point B, avoiding uh the Strait of Hormuz, was hit by a drone. We don't know the extent of the damage, but given that oil was flowing through it and given that it was hit by a drone, we can have some idea that it was not an easily fixed problem. Then we also have Israel pounding Beirut with the ongoing offensive operations or whatever you want to call them by Israel into Lebanon. Is this a ceasefire that will allow you that's built to last, John? No, well, it's a sort of we have a ceasefire, US Iran, but we'll allow all this other stuff to go on. Right. Well, and is that aren't the Houthis now involved too?
SPEAKER_01Didn't we didn't we see some action by the Hoodis today?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. The Houtis are are this sort of Iranian secret weapon because they're you know, the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea are obviously important for the flow of oil and liquid natural gas. And the Hooties have proven their ability to uh well, again and again, have proven their ability to make it treacherous enough that insurance companies don't want to underwrite the individual tank. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Well, and have been quite quiet to a lot of people's surprise through the conduct of the war. There's been kind of like the the dog that has embarked has been the Hooties, but they've been in the background because of their ability, as you say, to like shut down the Red Sea. And so how active is it? Are we entering a new phase in which the Hooties are more active than they had been previously? I, you know, all the proxies are still, you're saying, yeah, that that there's signs one day after this historic ceasefire, there's a that a lot of the proxies and a lot of the peripheral conflict, like in Beirut, peripheral but still deadly, uh, is still going on. What's your over-under on how long you think the ceasefire holds, even in its in its kind of threadbare sort of gossamer form that we have it now? What do you think the overunder on that is?
SPEAKER_00Well, I just don't think that you know, if the core uh condition is that uh there be free and safe passage through uh the strait, if some kind of joint venture between the U.S. and Iran enables that, then I don't think Trump cares about anything else. But how you sell that the U.S. electorate is is another matter. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Totally different kettle of fish. I I just think, I mean, I'll be stunned if we get to two weeks from now. And what we have seen is the ceasefire, again, even if in its most threadbare form, holding and we're on some kind of a of a predictable and rational path towards uh a final resolution. I'll be stunned. I'm not saying it won't happen. I hope it does on some level. I've you know, I hope it does. I'm not I'd be really surprised if that were the case. It does not this does not seem to be a ceasefire, a ceasefire that's built to last.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, uh it does seem like that the Trump view of it is that the US-Iran ceasefire is standalone, and that the proxy Israel terrorist groups, whatever, that's that's that's not part of the deal. And I don't know. I mean, if you're blowing up the East-West pipeline, that's that's kind of a hard position to maintain. But on the other hand, I do not I have heard this from our friend at the New York Times a number of times, which is Trump doesn't care about what you know you and I think about proxies, you know, fighting during a ceasefire. He he's as you know, able to just keep his mind focused on what's what supports his view of things. And as long as the Iran-US ceasefire holds and that we're not attacking one another, proxies are doing the attacking, then he'll say that's a win, I guess. Yes.
SPEAKER_01We don't know. I mean, I have I have occasionally said to our friend the New York Times and others who are deep inside the Trump inside Trump's brain, reporting on it or trying to influence it. I've often said, you know, Trump is a mollusk, basically. He's just like a very he's like a very, very simple organism who kind of moves in in, you know, towards towards the water or away from the water. And every time I use that metaphor, they laugh and kind of say, yeah, it's basically about right.
SPEAKER_00A mollusk. Yeah. I'm gonna have to make that the title of this podcast. So anyway, we have this and it's playing out. And of course, it's playing out in analysis and commentary and reaction from all over. And I'm particularly interested in your view on how Republicans and uh right-wing media uh are interpreting this. Have you heard or read commentary that's of interest that we should be aware of that you think is important?
SPEAKER_01I have not done my taking my daily acid bath, diving into the right-wing fever swamps today, John. But you know, I don't imagine that uh the Meghan Kellys and the Candace Owenses and the and the Tucker Carlsons are going to look upon what uh happened last night as a reason to turn back towards being happy with Donald Trump. I mean, they like Trump, who went pretty far out of his skis by threatening to end Iranian civilization. These are people who were saying things literally 24 hours ago, like Trump should be impeached, Trump should have the 25th Amendment invoked, Trump has lost his mind. In a weird way, it's harder for them to walk back from those positions, given the way they've been for the past 10 years, than it is for Trump to walk away from his threat to annihilate the Iranians. And and I think also not only is it hard for them to back away, but I also think that all of those people now see something we can talk more about if you want, but you know, is That Trump has gone over, I think, the point of no return in terms of his public approval. And, you know, you see this in every administration, especially in second terms, where whether it's George W. Bush after a Katrina or whether it's Biden, who was not a second-term president, effectively felt like one, but this happened to him after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, where you hit a point and the country is like, I'm done with you. And enough things have happened now that we've seen not only that independence are wholly abandoned, the president and his project, and so many of the policies he's advocated, and so many of the things that have happened, and so many of the promises he's broken have been so core to his political identity and to his promises in the 2024 election. Independence are gone and they're not coming back. And you're starting to see this data, not at the crude level of how many Republicans or MAGA Republicans support the Iran war, but in terms of what they're actually saying about Trump on specific issues, their trust in him on handling the economy, on prices, on national security, on even on things like immigration. You're starting to see erosion, not just again, not just on those issues, but also at the and not just in the media sphere of mega media, but actual, for the first time, actual erosion and cracks in the coalition among his base. Again, you know, we've seen this before. And it's tempting to say that a lot of the, you know, laws of physics and politics have been repealed in some way by Donald Trump. But I look at the trajectory of his numbers and they really look a lot. You could, you could lay, you could overlay these numbers on George W. Bush in early 2005. And the numbers are, the tracking of those numbers is very, very, very similar. They are on basically on about the same level of dissent. And I think it's going to be very hard for him to turn that back around. And the reason I raise that is that Meghan Kelly, Candace Owens, Ataka Carlson, even Laura Ingram on Fox News, who was the first person I've ever heard on Fox suggest publicly that Donald Trump may not have the mental capacity to understand the dimensions of the war in Iran. She came right out and said that on prime time last week. Those people, they see the writing on the wall. And some of them want to run for president in 2028. And some of them just want to be, want to like leave the ship before it sinks. But I don't think there's much that's going to change that's going to make them be like, got to get back on board the Trump train. I just think we're like, that's another part of the downward spiral, is that, you know, as people's self-political and personal self-interests are now starting to take them away from Trump rather than towards Trump. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00I think of Trump as Biden with the base in that he was elected by a very narrow margin, which he interpreted as permission to initiate dramatic uh change. And in order to be a successful president, at some level you have to have the permission of the electorate to go forward. Trump keeps saying he was elected by a huge landslide. He behaves that way. And now he's finding out that, you know, instead of trying to expand his base, he is taken the entire administration basically has been devoted to the base, which has driven, roughly speaking, 60% of the electorate away. I agree with you. I think it's at a point of of no return. And I think this, the Taco Tuesday, is his equivalent to Biden's botched uh departure from Afghanistan, which I I think people forget just how devastating the uh the Afghanistan exit was for Biden. I mean, it was the beginning of the end.
SPEAKER_01Well, right. And and and I would say, John, that what you just said is all correct except I'd add one proviso, which is that in Trump 1.0, he definitely governed only for the base rather than trying to add. He tried to deepen. And as we know, although he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, he did get 8 million more votes than he got in 2016. He actually, they actually went out and found a bunch of Trump voters who hadn't voted in 2016. They did that with enormous skill and they did something a lot of us thought was impossible. Rather than expanding, they went deeper. Okay. I would say the war, the handling of Jeffrey Epstein, the the obvious signs of corruption and personal enrichment and his focus on those things, like his public focus on things like the ballroom and so on, those things are antithetical to the to the MAGA base. I mean, the MAGA base is was anti-war. I mean, believed when Trump said over and over again that he was never going to start any more endless wars and certainly not any more in ventures in the Middle East. They believed that he was going to bring Jeffrey Epstein and that the administration, with the help of Cash Patella, Dan Bungino, was going to bring Jeffrey Epstein and his uh whole cabal of predatory elites, they thought mostly Democrats, but it turns out to be everybody, of predatory elites out. They thought he was going to lower prices. They didn't, I don't think very many people in the MAGA base were like that, I really thought through they were like pro-tariff. They were just like Trump's going to get a handle on the economy. And then the self-enrichment thing. I think what's happened to Trump is that he's now on the wrong side of the most powerful thing in our politics, which is left and right, which is that left, right, center. Everybody fucking hates politicians. They hate anybody who looks like a politician. They think they're all the same, different flavors of the same thing. And that you see these focus groups people are doing in swing states now, and people are just like, I fucking hate Republicans, I hate Democrats, I want somebody who will actually fight for me. I want someone who is like, who understands what suffering is, right? This populist anger that you see. All of those things, war, Epstein betrayal, and the self-enrichment and the focus on all the gold in the White House and all that stuff, is really that's not playing to the base. That's that's the contributing factor. Trump looks to a lot of those people like just another politician now. And that's the one thing you could never say about Trump for a decade, that he was just another politician. Hate him, love him, whatever. He wasn't just another politician, he looks like just another politician now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I uh had access to some, I guess you would call it, private uh research that was done by a group on behalf of uh now Governor Spanberg in Virginia, but the research was done in September, and there were three findings. One, that por portion of the electorate could vote either way, was in a very foul mood. Uh it viewed the political system as thoroughly corrupt and indifferent to their concerns, and that their resolution uh or their preferred outcome would be to throw out whoever was in power as far out the window as they possibly could. And I think that that, you know, it was Virginia, but I don't think it's any different in Louisiana or California, for that matter.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I don't want to go too far afield here, but you're a person who's uh who's familiar with New England. And, you know, there's there's the only explanation for Graham Blatner, not just beating Janet Mills right now. Latsa's leading her, but by healthy double-digits margins of the Democratic primary is the thing you just described. You know, he's got all kinds of problems, you know, all the normal playbook of bring out all the stuff, the Appo, talk about all the stuff that he's done. He's got the bad tattoo, he said terrible things on Reddit or whatever. It's like all those things are not, he's getting his greed is growing the more that Mills runs those ads against him. And I'm not like a stand for any politician. It's not like I'm like, oh, you know, Grant Platiner is a savior. I'm just saying that what's driving the dynamics in Maine on the Democratic side and will probably make Graham Platiner ultimately lead him to win that race and crush Susan Collins in the general election, is the stuff we're talking about here, is that dynamic that the Spamberger people saw. And that you're seeing is the is the dynamic that the people in Spamberger's camp are seeing, and that we're seeing play out in different ways in all of these places that aren't the deepest red or the deepest blue places in the country. If you're anywhere where there are median voters around right now, those dynamics are in play and they are looking for candidates. You know, Dan Osborne, Dan Osborne could win the Nebraska Senate race, you know? It's that kind of candidate who's like a mechanic, you know. People who are like people go, oh, I get that guy. He understands me, and he's not part of the system. It's, you know, we've seen this impulse in our politics for a while. It's not new, but now it's like the dominant impulse in our politics for people who are who are who occupy a very large and very crucial swath of the electorate in a bunch of really crucial states.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell I have a theory about the 2026 and 2028 elections. Give it to me. I want to hear that. Which is that uh opposition research will help the candidate who's targeted. And the Platiner case being number one, they dump all this Appo on them, they run all the same ads and so on and so forth, and his numbers increase.
SPEAKER_01It's about the form factor because the thing is the opposition research leads to political ads that look like political ads. And that's part of what these people who are deciding the elections hate.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's not even there's probably some way that a piece of Appo or something that some candidate did that was really terrible could still take their campaign down. But you're not going to take that person down by finding something deep in their past and then running a negative ad against it that looks like everybody has seen before. That just looks like politics to people. And they're like, you know, fuck that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we had here in our neighborhood, meaning the New York metro area, uh, we had the New York New Jersey gubernatorial campaign in 2025. And so we had the local news, so we had the all of the ads. And I would say that 90% of them were negative. And so my new theory of of campaign advertising is that you say all of the messages you're going to hear from my opponent are negative. They're probably true, but this is what I believe.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah, I think that's I think the the value of those negative spots just traditional traditionally produced and traditionally aired, normal broadcast or cable negative spots, the value of those is is has never been lower and may in fact be uh the opposite of what the people who are paying for them think they're having. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00And yet it's interesting because the political consulting class seems to think that it's the only thing that works.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's the only way they get paid.
SPEAKER_00So they're Well, I understand that part. So speaking of political reactions, we had two special elections last night, one in a deep red congressional district to fill the seat that's recently opened up by the departure of Marjorie Taylor Green. The other was a state uh Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, which those elections have been very interesting going back to, I don't know, 2011 or 2012 when there was a special. And then margins back then were very close, 51, 49. I remember doing election night on one of those state, I guess it was 2013 or whatever. And it was, you know, it was, we were up till four o'clock in the morning, and it was it was not decided until then. This one, and the most recent ones have been 10 points, basically, eight or ten points. Uh but this one was 20 points. And so you can say, well, yes, you know, the mega people don't vote, and you know, and the Democrats were all stirred up, so they all vote. And I think that gets you to 10 points, but it doesn't get you to 20. Is that your take?
SPEAKER_01That's my take. I mean, Chris Taylor, who won that Wisconsin Supreme Court race, you know, you think back, we had a Supreme Court race just a year ago. It was the one that Elon Musk invested heavily in and made himself injected himself personally in. And you can make whatever you will of that, but uh a 10-point shift from from from 10 to from 11 to 21, sort of a 20, a 10-point shift in the course of a year to the left in Wisconsin, which, you know, as you know, purple state, like as purple as any state there is in the country right now. And some of the closest margins in our presidential elections, the last three elections running, you don't like laugh that off. You also don't laugh off what happened in in the Georgia race, right? Where, you know, mathematically speaking, it's even more bullish for Democrats. You know, Marjorie Taylor Green won that race by 29 points in 2024. Trump won it by 37 in 2024. And the Republican nominee down there who won the race, Clay Fuller, won it by 12. So that's a 25-point shift towards Democrats based on Trump's margin in one of the reddest districts in the country. I mean, that is not a type of place where you can put anything down to basically a blue district. And John, I would say all of that can only be understood set against the context of this is happening in every special election at every level that Democrats are competing in over the course of the last 15 months. There's not an exception where there hasn't been a double-digit swing in a special election at any level in the course of the time that Donald Trump's been back in office for the second time. And, you know, one uh shift like that is uh maybe an outlier. Two, you know, if you're high enough, it could be an outlier. But like all of them, including the 2025 off-year elections, it is the thing that I think of all the things that Republicans on the Hill are terrified about. It's that more than anything in the poll numbers, you know, gas prices is one very big flashing, you know, red sign for them. But the other is looking at actual Democratic performance in actual special elections over the course and off-year elections over the course of the last 14 months, because that has been the most predictable, the most reliable indicator of where you're headed. And right now, not only are Democrats crushing it, but they're crushing it by more and more the deeper we get. And again, to my point earlier about Trump reaching the point of no return, what is it that as we sit here right now on Wednesday, April 8th, what is it, John, that you would point to that Republicans can do between now and November to alter in a fundamental way the politics that are gonna be the objective, data-driven, empirical reality that are gonna drive the political dynamics going in November? What can they do? What's gonna happen? What piece of legislation do they pass? What happens that they can make the whole political environment shift against what we've seen for the last 14 months? And I'm saying that not in a tone of like um celebration. I'm just saying this is why Republicans are scared shitless right now. And this is why people are retiring at a record pace, and this is why people all have basically assumed that now Democrats are gonna win the house. And the only question is by how many pickups there are gonna be. I know you were, you know, you talked to your friend Charlie Cook about the structural limits on that, reasonable points that Charlie made, but there's still only a debate about how many seats it's gonna be. There's no one who's saying, All right, go, yeah, you know, Republicans can pull this around. And then the next question is are Democrats now potentially, potentially the slight favorite to retake the Senate, which is a conversation you couldn't have had six months ago. You know, no one would have said that. You would have said you need to pull an inside straight or a double bank shot for that to happen. And now people are like, eh, it's a coin flip. That's incredible.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the prediction markets are 52, yes, 48, no, I guess the last time I looked. So there you go.
SPEAKER_01And that and look, you know, it's not surprising. Donald Trump is is, again, put aside all of his personal things. The policies they're running on are extraordinarily unpopular, like just one by one. There's not a thing that Trump has done in 14 months that's been net positive. Not I don't think you could find a single thing of any consequence that he's done where it's had a net positive polling margin in the across the country. So, you know, that's where we're headed.
SPEAKER_00I think I think he does does get credit for uh shutting down the border.
SPEAKER_01Shutting down the border. True. Fact. Although his immigration ratings are net negative. So if you look at the larger question.
SPEAKER_00That's more ICE related than it is. Uh I mean uh but the midterm elections by definition are for the party in power a holding action, right? You you're not gonna w you're not gonna gain, although Clinton did in 1998, but that was the result of really, or at least partially result of 1994 being such an enormous. So it's a holding action. And if you if you're looking for historical parallels, you'd say, okay, Reagan passes the t uh tax cut in 1981, the recession follows, and the tax cuts don't really get there in time for the midterms. And so John Deerdorf and Doug Bailey come up with this campaign, which is stay the course, it's coming, right? Hang in there with us. And remarkably, in five Senate races that were decided by a total of 75,000 votes, the Republicans held the Senate. An amazing, amazing, amazingly effective campaign. I just don't think it's even in the thought bubble of anyone in the Trump administration that they could run a stay the course campaign. They only know aggression. Uh they have no idea of holding action or clever defense or whatever. And so they'll keep going and going and going, it seems to me, and they'll just drive more and more people to the polls to say, stop doing this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I think that's that seems right to me. I love that this is the maybe the only podcast I could ever go on where the host would cite Doug Bailey and Dan Deerdorf. Trevor Burrus, Dan Deerdorf? Dan, right? John John Deerdorf. John Deerdorf and Doug Bailey, and have the expectation that that both the guest and everybody in the audience would know who he was talking about. That's a fantastic thing.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, amongst our growing audience, I expect most of them to.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, Doug Bailey, you know, Doug Bailey, creator of the hotline, talk about an avatar of uh an avatar of political media. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00He offered me the job of editing it, which I foolishly turned down because that then became whatever. But we'll find let's wrap up with everybody talks about whoa, the Republicans are awful, but the Democratic brand, quote unquote, is even worse. What do you make of that?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Well, it's partly about it's A, it's true. And and it's a thing that I will that I get into fights with all the time with Democrats, because they're always like, you know, everything's fine. You know, I and you know, they're like, well, we had this crisis, you know, after coming out of the 2024 presidential election, boy, you know, the Democratic brand is really in trouble and we really need to figure out, reinvent the party. Uh, and then you you get this run of special election victories and Trump's, you know, declining numbers and everything else that we were just talking about. And you know, these Democrats say, yeah, it's okay, we're fine. Like all we need is a you know a good midterm election, everything's gonna be back. Man, people hate the Democrats. I mean, people, people, the number there, the party's the polling has, I think they have about a 24% approval rating for the party on the whole. You know, they're they are getting buoyed enormously by Trump's extraordinary and the Republicans' extraordinary unpopularity. But on the questions of their attributes, what people think they believe in, who they think they're fighting for, what they think about their ideas for the future, the party is in serious trouble. People like David Plough are out there kind of saying, guys, don't, you know, don't be get seduced by the notion that everything is fine here in the House of Blue because Trump is so horrible in terms of public approval. I think, you know, you raised the thing. It's a very rare thing for John for me to speak to a male American in their 20s or even 30s who has any time whatsoever with the Democratic Party. I mean, the gender thing at the with young voters is extraordinarily, extraordinarily stark. And, you know, they've lost the except for there's a kind of a left, a far-left exception here, but it's, you know, the party is not the party of young people anymore. It's not the party of the working class anymore. And it is, again, because of Trump's extraordinarily unpopular deportation policies. Democrats are inheriting a lot of these Hispanic voters who voted for Trump in 2024 or Republican in 2024 and now are regretting that vote because they didn't take Trump seriously on mass deportation. But are those now reliable? The lesson of that is not that Hispanics are now, you know, coming back home and that they're not now reliable parts of the Democratic coalition again. You know, the lesson of that is that they, like everybody else, or or like many, many people at least, are free agents in the electorate and need to be fought for. And I'm shocked as we sit here that in the course of the last 14 or 15 months, I haven't seen more of um, I don't mean like some organized, you know, democratic interest groups getting together and have a witherless state hand-wringing about the state of the party. I'm just amazed that of all these guys who are running for president, that no one has come out with a kind of, you know, vision that makes sense, that kind of tries to say we are in the 21st century and the scales of the challenge, the scale of the challenges that face the country are extraordinary and existential. Let's start with, you know, the economy and talk about AI and talk about climate and talk about the way the world has changed and talk about stuff that has everybody in the country that I talk to, especially young people, bewildered, scared, uncertain, and feeling like powerless, right? Whatever you want to say about Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, all the rest of these guys. It's like nobody's out there saying I have an agenda and a policy agenda married to a vision and an ideological, if you want to call it that, an ideological construct that's like, here is the big vision to meet the challenges of the 21st century. In a way, Trump's popularity, people get so mad at me on the left when I say this, but MAGA is not a big idea, but it's a big swing. You know, implicit in MAGA is a notion of like the world is going to shit and everything's out of control. And here's how we're gonna fix it. We're gonna go back to the 1950s, right? That's a big idea. What Bernie and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and Zora Mamdani, again, whatever you, I'm not taking a side here. I'm not trying to say I like all their policies. They have a big idea too. They're they're, and that's why so many young people are turned on by the left in a way we haven't seen in a long time. They at least are swinging for the fences. Trump is swinging for the fences. The Democrats who are running for president, so far, no one's swinging for the fences. There, no one's in that way. And I don't think the Democratic brand can be rehabilitated until some ones start to do that, start to lay out an agenda and a set of ideas that feel like they're commensurate with the scale of what we're facing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. One of the most interesting pieces of polling I've seen in the last, I don't know, six months is prominent figures Gallopassed the electorate, a large, a large body, a large uh sample size, who they viewed favorably and unfavorably amongst well-known people. Pope Leo was number one and number two, but with the only net positive rating was Bernie Sanders. Everybody else was underwater, I thought was really interesting and telling. Um I guess we have to uh uh finish with one last question, which is who's gonna deliver the speech that really addresses what's happened in the last month on the Democratic side? Isn't this a huge opportunity for somebody to step up? Up and say, we can't we can't we can't go down this road anymore, and this is why and this is what we should do.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell I don't know the answer. So if the question is, is that a huge opportunity? I think it is and it isn't, in the sense that because Democrats have no power and can't really change the trajectory of the war, you're basically giving a speech that's just a speech, and you don't really can't really propose a remedy. And so there's a little bit of a impotence problem with just giving a speech about it. I do think that it's it still is something that whether it's in the next month or or down the line, is going to need to get folded into some of these candidates and leaders. I want to say STEM speeches because that kind of diminishes it, but into how they frame like what has gone wrong in the country and what this moment is and what it requires. I do, lastly, I think that I think at the moment, consistent with what I said a second ago, where I said Democrats were kind of had thought that the party was in crisis, then the brand was in crisis, and then they saw Trump start his so far inexorable decline in political support and public approval and decided that everything was fine on the Democratic side. This is the same sort of thing. There's a little bit of an attitude of like, why should we get in the way if everything Donald Trump is doing is just administering more self-inflicted harm? You know, this guy's shooting himself in the foot day after day after day. Why do we want to be in the headlines at all? Just let him keep administering these wounds to himself. And I see the logic of that. I mean, it's not a crazy logic to stay out of the guy's way as he's as he's harming himself. But I also think you're right that I don't know, again, whether it's um this month, I think the general thing that you're saying, I think, is right, which is that Democrats who aspire to lead the country and lead the party, you know, are gonna need to have this be part of, you know, the analysis of where we are that they're gonna push off of when they try to build their vision for where they want to take us.
SPEAKER_00Final question, which is one we ask of all our guests. What's the best book you've read in the last year, and what's the best movie you've seen in the last year? That's a really good question.
SPEAKER_01I this is gonna be the most, like maybe predictable answer uh that you could give because it won best picture, but I do think One Battle After Another was an incredible film. And I love Sinners. I think both those movies were fantastic. And I love the ambition of them. I love the scale of them. I love the politics that they were so explicitly, not wholly explicitly, but pretty explicitly political. I love the gamble that the big studios took on them. Um I liked, I really loved that that they were as good as they were. Um something we don't see anymore, like grown-up movies with big budgets uh addressing serious themes by artists getting rewarded at the box office and then uh by the academy. So I'm a big fan of both of those movies. I'll tell you what the the book that I most want to read right now, um, because that would be hard for me to think about what's the best book I read last year, but the book I'm most excited to read is the new Michael Pollan, because I heard him do a really fantastic interview with uh Ezra Klein on his podcast about his book is about consciousness. Uh, it's sort of like a sequel to the last Michael Pollan book about psychedelics, um which Ezra said, I think somewhat tummy-in-cheek, but like this first, the last book was a book about psychedelics, a book about consciousness. Masquerading is a book about psychedelics, and this book is really a book about psychedelics, masquerading is a book about consciousness. But if you listen to Pollen talk about the five years he spent with not just all the most important scientists who rely on and are exploring materialist answers to the question like, what is consciousness and how does it work? Literally the thing that all of us have the most experience with of anything on planet Earth and that none of us can really understand, which is consciousness. That he spent five years talking to all the brain scientists and all the people who think that consciousness comes out of the brain. And then also with all of this new kind of expanding field of people who are like, no, no, consciousness is not doesn't come arise out of the brain. Consciousness comes from out here somewhere, and the brain is the is the thing that channels consciousness and and interprets it. And he doesn't come down, he says, I love this. I love Michael Pollins saying that he'd spent five years uh researching this book and that he knows less about the topic at the end of five years than he did when he started, but that the but that the journey was still worth, was totally worth taking. And listening to him talk about it was super fascinating. And I think probably for someone like you who is really interested in neuroscience, um, it's not a neuroscience book, but the larger question of consciousness, again, what is it? Where does it come from? How does it work? Why is it the way it is? You know, it's one of the great mysteries of of of life. And uh and I don't think there's anybody better in the journalistic tradition who's able to tackle that than Pollen.
SPEAKER_00I do have one final question, which is I think a couple of years ago we we did one of these, and there were two gigantic dogs in the background. Uh, do you still have those dogs?
SPEAKER_01Both of those dogs, they were both two in a in a chain of Great Danes that I've owned in my life. One of them was uh Fife Dog, and the other was his younger brother Dizza. Both of them have passed, unfortunately. Fife some years ago during the pandemic, and Dizza just last October, having had a wonderful life, but reaching the not unusual Great Dane expiration date of when he was about seven, almost turning to eight. So they are both no longer with me. I miss them both desperately. And I now have in my domicile with my uh beloved girlfriend two dogs, one of whom was hers, holy, that I that came into my life, whose name is uh Bill Bill the Bassett. And Bill is a is a is a bat is a basset hound named Bill. That's right. Bill Murray Goodman is his name. Um, and he is like a super, super charismatic and super handsome basset. And then we adopted a rescue um about a year and a half ago, who is a pit mix, who's a lunatic. I mean, absolutely one of the most lunatic dogs I've ever met, but also one of the most, one of the sweetest dogs I've ever met. Containing her and getting her through her puppyhood is a challenge, but man is she, is she cute? And man is she energetic, and man is she is she a lover. Um, and that's Maba Staples. Mabis Staples, a goodman heilman, so um, we have Maba Staples and and Bill Murray uh in the house. And and the next one that comes in will be a great dame puppy, John. So we'll have three at some point, and people will be like, you guys are fucking nuts, and we'll say, speaking.
SPEAKER_00We've uh we've taken exactly one hour of your time. Thank you very much for doing this, John. It was terrific, as always. And we will catch up, I hope, either just before the midterms or just after.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Good to see you, bro.
SPEAKER_00Take care.