David Remnick: Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick with a raspy voice, thanks to a cold. Lo and behold, here we are. It's 2024, election season. The Iowa caucuses are on Monday, the first stop on the long journey to November 5th. There's been a lot of news about the two candidates who seem to be competing for second place in the Republican party. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Ron DeSantis of Florida, who visited all 99 counties in Iowa.

Speaker 2: Oh, what is that?

Speaker 3: An icy.

Speaker 2: An icy, yes? That's probably a lot of sugar, huh? Good to see you.

David Remnick: Dominating these primaries, of course, is a candidate who has not participated in debates, who barely campaigned, and is polling at more than 50%.

Donald Trump: Don't stay home, just please, the polls are showing we're going to win by a lot. The worst thing you can do is, "Oh, let's just stay home, Alice. Let's watch it on television." We don't want to do that. You got to get out because the more we win by, we're shooting for November because we got to send a message. We got to send a message we can't be beaten because if we are beaten, we're not going to have a country left anymore. They're destroying this country.

David Remnick: Two of The New Yorker's political reporters have been in Iowa covering the runup. Robert Samuels and Ben Wallace-Wells. Now Ben, you just wrote an illuminating piece about tensions within the Christian right, and that is incredibly influential in Iowa. You talk with pastors coming out for and some against Donald Trump. You spoke to a pastor named Joshua Graber, who opened a rally for Trump by saying, "We ask those who stand against him be put to silence." Now, that's quite a turn of phrase. Who is Graber?

Ben Wallace-Wells: Joshua Graber is a man who leads a very, very small church in a town called Vinton, Iowa. It's a Baptist church. He's somebody who, like a lot of the Trump pastors who tend to exist outside of the existing evangelical establishment, was not especially politically active until a few years ago. Also, like a lot of pastors in Iowa, he has come over the Biden years and maybe a little bit before that to see his version of Christianity is really up against the wall. Over the last decade and a half, we've gone from having Evangelical Christians be something like 23% of the US population to something like 14%.

When you look at a public opinion environment in which the Dobbs decision remains hugely unpopular and a real challenge for Republicans, there is a feeling, I think, of existential threat that Christians like them are on the verge of being ostracized or driven out of power entirely. When I talked to both Trump and DeSantis pastors across Iowa, they tended to see the world a little bit similarly, even the DeSantis people. That old evangelical establishment that pushed Huckabee and Santorum and Cruz to victory in Iowa, their sensibility is quite similar too. They also seem very stressed. They also have a kind of exaggerated sense of precipice, and so, to have this fighter for you in a kind of crisis is something that's more appealing to these guys.

David Remnick: Robert, why didn't DeSantis connect at all, and how is Nikki Haley connecting? What's been her success, and to what extent can she be successful there?

Robert Samuels: I like to think of Iowa as having three major buckets. The first bucket would be the Evangelical vote. Those are the votes that are typically together that have allowed candidates like Cruz and Santorum and Huckabee to win in the past. They're the Chamber of Commerce type Republicans, what we used to call the HW Bush or the Reagan Republicans. Also, there's a very strong foreign policy sense in Iowa. People tend to gravitate toward more hawkish foreign policy experiences. Those three buckets don't really loan themselves to DeSantis in a way that's distinct from Donald Trump.

Now, Nikki Haley not only has the hawkish policies that are pretty popular in Iowa, people want folks who will go tough on China, who will be hard on Mexico, but she has that Chamber of Commerce sense about her, and she has leaned more conservative. It also helps that she is more of a people person.

Nikki Haley: Nine days until the caucuses. Guess what that means for you? No more commercials, no more text messages, no more your mailbox being full with mail. I know you are excited, but also get excited because this is when you can really set the tone of where we're going in our country.

David Remnick: Nikki Haley seemed to be having a few decent weeks in the conventional sense, and then she was asked about the Civil War. She did not care to summon that slavery might have been an essential factor in the Civil War. Is that something that just elite media care about, or did people in Iowa pick up on that too?

Robert Samuels: What I think it exposed for them is the idea that there's a liberal media who likes to ask [unintelligible 00:05:34] questions, that they're a country that's preoccupied by race. I actually think that answer that she gave probably played off better than people presume it did because so many people are desirous of moving past race.

David Remnick: Ben, again and again and again, every time that Donald Trump has been in these races, the press goes through a period of self-flagellation. We must learn the Trump voter more intimately. We didn't do it well enough last time. What are you learning that's new?

Ben Wallace-Wells: There is a sense that conservative America is losing, that I think is really profound and really alters how many conservative voters think and behave. We, from our perch, might look at Trump having been elected very recently at the structure of the Supreme Court, at the kind of disproportionality of the Senate and the Electoral College, and say, "What are these people talking about? This thing is set up for conservatives to succeed." This isn't becoming a more progressive country, but because the society is changing, because the culture is changing, because it's changing in ways that are moving away from many especially social conservatives. I think there is a sense of desperation and fear that I can't quite justify myself. It feels exaggerated to me, but is present again and again and again.

Robert Samuels: When it comes to thinking about Donald Trump, he's not trying to save anyone, he's trying to save himself. People are responding to it, I think, in ways that are deeper than they have before as they actually see him and the tumult that he's going through as a proxy for some of the cultural issues that they think they're losing. The core of it is if Donald Trump is president, I can do whatever I want to do. I can be the type of American I want to be. I won't have anyone trying to take that away from me or telling me I'm wrong all the time. I think that's the message that continues to resonate, and in a lot of ways, resonates even more deeply than in 2020 or 2016.

David Remnick: No, I know the Democrats are not a factor here in Iowa, but what are you hearing about the Biden presidency, and Joe Biden?

Robert Samuels: One of the surprising things at a Nikki Haley event, you will run into a lot of Obama-Trump-Biden voters. One of the things that really surprised me was this belief that Joe Biden is actually presiding in a way that's more liberal than he had presented. They think he's too palsy-walsy with The Squad and the Green New Deal, and he's too quick to acquiesce. Now, that's not something that I hear a lot in Washington DC, but I think it's really resonant that people think he's acceded to the radical left.

[music]

David Remnick: Now, you can read Ben Wallace-Wells and Robert Samuels reporting from Iowa at newyorker.com. Do 91 indictments, do outlandish statements only add to his support, or in the end will they begin to diminish it?

Susan Glasser: When it came to the Republican primary electorate, they proved to be a political advantage.

David Remnick: Susan Glasser writes a column for us about Washington, and she's thinking hard about the real prospect of a Trump victory.

Susan Glasser: We can say that as more or less a statement of fact, in the sense that Donald Trump began last year, actually, potentially challengeable, at least as far as the polls went. He had about an average around 45% support nationally from Republicans last year. As the four different indictments in four different criminal cases began to be filed, his numbers went up and up and up. He consolidated support as a result of the backlash that he was able to engender around these indictments. What does it mean for the general election, the surveys suggest that--

David Remnick: Before we get to the general election, are we already writing off the Republican nomination?

Susan Glasser: [laughs] Let's put it this way, were someone other than Trump to emerge now as the Republican nominee, it would represent really, an almost unprecedented outcome. There is the very real prospect, David, that Trump would secure the nomination and also that it would be over for all intents and purposes, as a race, as early or earlier than any primary race that we're familiar with in recent times. He could have it essentially all over and done with by early March, super Tuesday. As a matter of the general election, you asked the question in many ways, which is, all of these court cases, would a conviction in any one of them or all of them have the effect of finally spelling the political end of Donald Trump?

There's a small subgroup of Republican voters who say that it would make a difference to them were Trump to be convicted in any of these cases. Again, because of the highly polarized nature of our politics right now, we're not talking about running a National 50 state campaign, or even the campaigns. When you and I were young, say, back in 1976 when I was a kid, 25 states were basically genuinely toss-up races in that very close 1976 election. Today, that number is likely to be no more than five or six battleground states. The real question is, are there a significant small number of Republicans, 6%, 10%, whatever the number is that just won't vote for Donald Trump if he is convicted of a crime? You don't need the answer to be, "I got to convince 51% of Republicans." The answer is, "I need to convince 6% of Republicans in Arizona or Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin."

David Remnick: I have to say, as Americans, we lack imagination about ourselves, sometimes, it seems to me. Maybe for good reason, maybe that's part of Americanness that we lack the darkest sort of imagination as if certain things that happen elsewhere can't happen here. I wonder when you think about this election of 2024, and if it turns out to be that either Trump wins it, flat out, or things end in the possible mess that they could end yet again, what are the outcomes in terms of the daily lives, the civic lives, the foreign policy lives of this country that will be the consequence?

Susan Glasser: Failure of imagination is one way of thinking of it. Amnesia perhaps is another way of thinking of it because the US has certainly been sorely tested before at other moments in its history. I said this to somebody recently, like, "Oh, how do I write a story? How do I write a column about 2024? It's going to be such a stressful, awful year no matter what." They said, "Here's a thought for you, what if 2024 is actually the best year of the next coming years rather than the worst? What if things get much, much worse in ways that we're still very hesitant to even acknowledge as possibilities?"

David Remnick: I can almost hear a lot of listeners listening and thinking that we are doing the oral version of doom scrolling as a kind of liberal indulgence for public radio and all the rest. Why is that not true?

Susan Glasser: As the people in Hungary or Poland, or Turkey, what happens when an illiberal, authoritarian-minded leader comes to power and uses the tools of democracy in order to dismantle that democracy? These are not idle speculations. There is a pretty clear agenda being formulated. It starts not only with weaponizing the Justice Department to indict your political opponents. It starts with the takeover and the politicization, say, of the Civil Service, which is a 100-year-long effort in the US to build a non-partisan professional bureaucracy in the United States. Trump has already written up an executive order. In fact, he imposed that executive order at the end of his first term. It was just too late to actually take effect. Joe Biden immediately rescinded it, so they could enact a sweeping politicization and deprofessionalization of the executive branch.

David Remnick: This is the order that would've stripped federal civil servants of employment protection, allowing the president to fire them at will.

Susan Glasser: Yet one assumes that if Trump actually in this extra thought exercise comes to power, he has won a political victory such that you can expect that one, if not both houses of Congress are also supporting him and are also Republicans. When he said that he was going to leave NATO, this is something that he just didn't have the capacity to execute on. Now he can do so. Vladimir Putin has every incentive to continue the war in Ukraine to see whether Donald Trump is going to become the president.

What's going to happen in a very concrete sense that affects millions of lives not just in the United States, but around the world? It's not doom-scrolling. In fact, quite the opposite. I feel like there is to a certain extent, one of the animating things that perhaps has enabled Trump to continue to do as well as he's doing in the national pulse is a sense of collective helplessness/averting of the gaze. Perhaps a sense of powerlessness like, "What are we going to do? Maybe it won't be so bad after all." Now is the time to think in a very concrete and specific way of the ways in which a Trump victory can and would have a specific effect not only on American policy but on individual lives.

David Remnick: One of the most striking things about the biography or biography in power that you and Peter Bakker wrote about Trump, was the day-to-day chaos in the Oval Office and the seeming incompetence of that White House, and one, at certain points, read that book with a certain sense of, he's certainly an authoritarian, but he's bad at it. In other words, he didn't have the ruthless efficiency of some historical authoritarians, and that more malevolent things could have been accomplished in a four-year period than were.

Donald Trump: I'm going to [unintelligible 00:17:10] [laughter] We love this guy. He says, "You're not going to be a dictator, are you?" I said, "No, no, no, other than Day 1."

David Remnick: Will he be better at being an authoritarian in 2024 if he wins? Who would assist him in the effort?

Susan Glasser: A couple important changes would be taking place here. Because his big takeaway was basically, "I didn't have enough loyalists surrounding me", and he thinks that was his own critique of his first term if he was sharing it with you. He's going to be looking for people who-- He defines loyalty essentially as willingness to carry out my agenda, whatever that agenda may be. The other thing is no guardrails. He's proved in his first term that impeachment is essentially a dead letter as far as Donald Trump is concerned when it comes to acting as a constraint on him because under the scenario we're talking about, he's reinstalled in office after having survived not one, but two impeachments and essentially shown the toothlessness of impeachment as the tool of constraint that the founders envisioned.

Because there's no scenario in our divided country where really, a president of any party is going to be faced with a Senate that has the overwhelming majority that would be required to have a Senate conviction, so, no impeachment. Then the final guardrail that's completely gone here, of course, David, is that Donald Trump wouldn't be running again for another term in office. Again, he's not even worried about facing the voters if he were to have another term in office, so then we're in a totally different territory. For all intents and purposes, it's fair to say he would be absent the constraint of having to face the voters as other presidents and politicians do.

David Remnick: Within the realm of the possible and within the realm of the possible for a man of Joe Biden's current capacities, achievements, and downsides, what is his scenario to turn this around?

Susan Glasser: What you get publicly is also, to a striking degree, what you get privately. Speaking privately with senior democrats recently, they've also been asking these questions of the White House, and they get back essentially the same answer, which is, "We've got this."

David Remnick: What does that mean, "We've got this."? That's not [unintelligible 00:19:36].

Susan Glasser: We're going to gut it out. The fundamentals are much better than you think. For those who think that Trump is a uniquely pernicious assault on the American system, there's not going to be one hour of the year in which you can comfortably rest on the idea that Biden is secure in victory.

[music]

David Remnick: Susan Glasser, thank you so much. We'll be back to you again and again.

Susan Glasser: David, I'm going to go and pull back the covers over my head. I'm afraid after this conversation. [laughs]

David Remnick: Exactly. Susan Glasser's bestselling account of Donald Trump's presidency, written with Peter Baker, is called The Divider. You can read her weekly column on Washington at newyorker.com.

[music]

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.