David Remnick: This presidential election is, to say the least, confusing and anxiety-provoking in a lot of ways. At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page. Instead, our political life feels like a strange dream we can't wake up from. A couple of weeks ago, we asked you what's on your minds and what's still confounding you about the whole election season, and dozens of you wrote to us from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, Salem, Virginia, Eugene, Oregon, Dolores, Colorado, all over the place.

You asked some very complicated questions about the Electoral College and campaign strategy and some questions that might seem simpler, but really don't have simple answers.

I'm going to tackle just a few of your questions today with help from my esteemed colleagues, staff writers at The New Yorker, covering politics in different ways from different perspectives, and we'll shed some light where we can. Let's begin. One question many of you are dying to understand is a variation of this one from a listener named Jane. Jane writes this, "I remain profoundly puzzled why nearly half of Americans, according to polling, continue to support Donald Trump now four years after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, that they view him as their redeemer when everything he does and says, shows himself to be a self-serving power monger with no respect for the law."

Well, where to begin on that one? Why does half the country and maybe more support Donald Trump? Well, I'm going to start with Andrew Marantz, who's written about politics and extremism. Andrew, what say you, what's so appealing about Trump at this point? Maybe not, in spite of, but perhaps because of his seeming disregard for the law.

Andrew Marantz: I think at this point we can admit that he's funny. There might be some sort of hard nucleus of supporters who will deny to the ends of the earth that Donald Trump is self-dealing or that he's self-serving or that he's corrupt. I think many of his supporters know that, and it's a very time-honored tradition of saying, "Yes, he might be a little bit self-dealing, but at least he's honest about it. At least he's authentic."

David Remnick: Andrew, it can't be just because he's a great insult comic that he's got this appeal. It has to be something on a political level, however, visceral.

Andrew Marantz: Well, the question mentioned I'm your redeemer, or I'm your vengeance, and it has to do with the essence of reactionary conservatism. There is a promise being made there.

David Remnick: Jill Lepore, as a historian, as a political observer, what do you see as Trump's appeal?

Jill Lepore: I think any explanation that goes to Trump is a showman. Obviously, there's a great deal of truth to be found in that, but that relies on dismissing the preferences of his supporters as misguided and they're not, therefore, guided by policy, by political preferences, by commitments to genuine political ideas.

It's to participate in the dismissal of the far right that liberal intellectuals committed in the 1950s, the liberal consensus theory there is nothing but liberalism that's an idea in American history everyone else is a paranoid nut job and as Hofstadter would've said participates in a paranoid style. I just would say, I think there is an obligation to understand what those policy preferences are.

Over the course of the 20th century, the far right ideology that has moved from the far right to the entirety of the right is an objection to the power of the federal government to federal power over the states, an objection to the moral high-handedness of liberals, and then of progressives. You can watch the kind of Trump Safari Daily Show version of let's go quiz these people and see how stupid they are.

That just generally has no interest in what it could be about the nature of the exercise, of federal power through the administrative state that could genuinely be disappointing and failing to deliver goods to people.

David Remnick: A listener by the name of Lawrence emailed to ask this, "I'd love to know why you and your staff like Evan Osnos, Susan Glasser, and Jane Mayer are not doing critical interviews with people like Donald Trump or other high-level mega politicians or enablers on a regular basis. It doesn't seem like top-level journalists like yourselves have a chance to challenge these people to their faces. Are they not willing to speak with New Yorker journalists, or is there some other reason? Susan Glasser, you are a biographer with your husband Peter Baker at The New York Times of Donald Trump. What say you?

Susan Glasser Well, thanks, Lawrence. I did do two very interesting, but not necessarily very revealing interviews with Donald Trump. I spent three and a half hours with him at Mar-a-Lago after the 2021 events unfolded. Like many engagements with Trump, it is shocking, but not surprising. He's not an interview subject in a conventional sense. It's not just because he only goes on Hannity and they give him softball questions.

The challenge of engaging with Trump one-on-one, whatever news outlet you represent is that he doesn't take in your question and spit back out an answer. There's no noun, verb, and a period to end a sentence. Essentially, he does the same kind of freeform discourse, more or less that you see in his rallies.

Donald Trump: They never mentioned me. I'm up here sweating like a dog. Secret Service said we have to make sure everyone's safe. I said, "What about me?" "Oh, we never thought of that." They don't think about me. I'm working my ass off. I'm working hard. This is hard work. Front row, Joe. Front row, Joe.

Susan Glasser This is not the Republican party that it was in 2015 or even in 2016. That's a phenomenon and that's been very interesting to observe as someone who's spent a long time reporting in Washington. Someone like Marco Rubio, for example, was someone I interviewed for one of the first pieces I did for The New Yorker. This is a guy who called Donald Trump a kook, who ran as a national security-minded presidential candidate that really the choice of the Republican establishment in many ways in Washington and on Capitol in 2016.

Just the other day, I noticed that he tweeted that Joe Biden was a sick and deranged old man as if Donald Trump had seized his phone and was tweeting for him. I think that it's important to recognize that the world that we're operating in as journalists has changed as well.

David Remnick: Clare Malone, you've had some experience with this. How would you answer that question? Why is it so difficult sometimes to do critical interviews with politicians and influencers on the right?

Clare Malone: I guess my experience with this was not interviewing President Trump, but talking to Candace Owens, who's a pretty prominent right-wing, reactionary media personality. I did a profile of her and she did agree to let me come and speak with her and talk, but She wanted to make sure that she was always able to record. She wanted to limit where I was allowed to interact with her. It was basically just at the studios of the Daily Wire. She felt, I think, a deep suspicion of me.

What was also interesting is in some ways, she also didn't care. The way she put it to me was like, "I don't care how this piece ends up for me," because essentially, it either raises her profile or it proves the point that the mainstream media attacks those on the right wing. Which I thought was interesting, and I think she's a savvy person and a savvy reader of her audience.

There's also the interesting element of we in the mainstream media because Trump really I guess, carnally, played into a lot of institutional distrust that people have had for decades of the media. He really accelerated this feeling that we are, as we all know now, the phrase he used, the enemy of the people. I think that that did an interesting thing where it made our job of calling out what's true and what's not and trying to wrangle misinformation, something that I think is a pretty impossible task these days.

I do think that that did this interesting thing where it almost politicized the media and it's in the partisan America of "you're on this side, you're on that side, you're on the Republican side, you're on the Democratic side." The Democratic Party does not have the same problem with misinformation and the alternative reality that the Republican Party does. I think inevitably, that has placed us more on the, well, you're in the Democratic camp. That's not to say that democratic politicians don't take liberties with the truth or spin things, but I just think in the binary there is an interesting dynamic that makes right-wing politicians less likely to talk to mainstream media.

David Remnick: Let's talk about Biden. A listener named Jim expresses a concern that we know is pretty widespread. Let me quote it directly from his letter. "I'm very frustrated by Biden's arrogance to deny all comments about age and unfavorable poll ratings. Why are Democrats not pulling out all the stops and why are they casual and foolish based on the stakes? Susan Glasser.

Susan Glasser: I do think that Biden and his team in the White House have stoked the idea that somehow, he's getting an unfair route from the media. What I have perceived certainly in Washington, is a lot of what you might call working the refs. An inside game from the Biden campaign and the Biden White House. They've hauled in individual news organizations for meetings at the campaign headquarters in Wilmington. There's a sense that if only somehow he would get a fair shake from the remnants of the mainstream media, this would be different.

I don't think that the information such as we have bears that out right now. If you look at surveys, it's very, very clear that Biden would be winning this election in a landslide if it was only readers of The New York Times. There's a huge problem with Biden breaking through with the platforms that younger voters tend to be on. In particular, those people who only get their information from social media are essentially a very different segment of the entire rest of the population in terms of their views about Biden.

David Remnick: Now, Diana, who's a listener from Massachusetts has a concern about Biden's communication with us, with American voters. She asks this, "Why aren't Americans "and thus voters," understanding the magnitude of Biden's legislation that will improve our country for years to come? For example, Build Back Better, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Bill. These affect and improve red and blue states alike. I'm confounded by why this message is not getting across." Evan Osnos.

Evan Osnos: I think the question raises a really interesting point, which is that by any ordinary measurement of electoral credentials, Joe Biden's going into this race with a pretty strong hand. You have violent crime right now is at a basically a 50-year low. You've got the stock market hitting all these highs, unemployment is at record low. Why is it that he doesn't get any credit for that? The usual answer in Washington is, "Oh, it's the communications. He's not--"

Somehow it's getting lost in this static but I think one of the things that's going on is that we are much more discombobulated, dysregulated by the effect of the last four years including really at the heart of it COVID. In a way that we don't adequately describe, I just think it has thrown off so much of how we perceive ourselves as a political community and our leaders that it makes it almost easy for people to forget that they are looking at a legislative record that in any other year would pretty much guarantee reelection.

David Remnick: We're answering some of the questions that listeners have sent us about the election over the past couple of weeks. Kelefa Sanneh, here's a question for you and it's pretty blunt. How did we wind up with this rematch of Biden versus Trump redux and why are there no inspiring leaders? Is it too costly to challenge the wealthiest candidates? It doesn't have to be that way. The question goes on, we do need to change that or we are doomed to the same old, same old. Kelefa, what say you?

Kelefa Sanneh: Part of that might have to do with the weakness of political parties. That it's hard for either party to either step in and say, "No, we don't want this person." Or to say, "No, we really do want this other person." Sometimes what you see in the absence of that is that you get candidates who are either celebrities, rich, and famous or you get candidates who are extremely old and have been around forever. Obviously, in this race once again, for the second time in a row, we have an old person versus a celebrity who also happens to be quite old.

David Remnick: Clare Malone, I want to come back to you here on the Biden-Trump rematch. There were other potential presidential candidates out there, weren't there? What exactly happened to them?

Clare Malone: There's a whole generation of voters now or millennials even who have sort of been waiting for the baby boomers to stop running for office. I think Gavin Newsom maybe wouldn't admit it but he seemed to be doing some shadow, "Hey, I could be the guy." Pete Buttigieg has long been a person who appears on Fox News pretty regularly.

David Remnick: Gretchen Whitmer there--

Clare Malone: Gretchen Whitmer who-- I think there was a moment. I think in a lot of things in life, inertia just set in and everyone looked around and no one jumped in the Democratic party specifically. I think that's how we end up here with the rematch.

David Remnick: Jill, we have a question from a listener named William. It requires a sense of history as well as a sense of the structure of how our political system is organized. William writes this, "Independent observers and many within both parties feel that the two-party system is controlled and dead-ended." Is there a realistic, viable way to establish a third-party candidate for future elections? I know you've done a lot of research on democracy, God knows over time. What's the history behind that two-party system? Would a multi-party system like you see in the UK or many other countries be a better course for the United States?

Jill Lepore: I think there is an extraordinary amount of frustration with the two-party system. I think as both Claire and Ben pointed out, especially with young people, the two-party system which is not in our constitution, is something that evolved over time. Is in considerable tension with some of our structural separations of power in the Constitution and makes it very difficult for certain features of our constitutional order to work. It's a much bigger problem when the parties are polarized.

I think sometimes when people are complaining about the two-party system, what they're really reacting to is the polarization of the parties. What are the prospects for change? There are some great exciting ideas out there that people can become involved in if they're committed to them. I think some of them are surely possible. Daniel Allen does a whole series for the Washington Post, it's about reimagining our democracy. She's a big advocate of ranked-choice voting, which is one of the mechanisms that would allow for the blossoming of third parties and multi-part.

I think it's a little hard with our presidential system to imagine a really vibrant multi-party system unless we had a parliamentary structure. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. It all goes to that feeling of brittleness and rigidity. That I think for young people is also associated with being elderly that everything is creaky and everything moves slowly and is half broken and geriatric. There's something not just about these two presidential candidates but about our constitutional order that just is that way.

David Remnick: A listener named Andrew asked this, "What happens if the Republicans in Congress refuse to certify the results and essentially install Trump?" Jill, what can you tell us here? Who has control in the event that Biden wins, who or what can ensure a peaceful transition in next January? We don't have a repeat or worse of January 6th, 2021.

Jill Lepore: I came across this book written in 1899 called President John Smith, in which this same thing happens. There's an insurrection in the Senate floor during the joint session or on the floor of Congress during the joint session to certify the Electoral College.

David Remnick: This was to certify whom?

Jill Lepore: This was to certify this fictitious president John Smith in this 1899 dystopian novel that was set in the future that I just want to say people thought about this problem a long time ago and didn't solve it, didn't fix it. Remember when you could just go catch a flight and just walk into the airport with your bag and walk onto the plane? We won't have an election where you could just walk onto the plane anymore until we get through this era of American history and all but unprecedented risk of political violence.

David Remnick: Is that era of political history defined by the presence of Donald Trump or do you think it goes beyond that?

Jill Lepore: I think if Trump had vanished from the national political stage after 2021, it would have ended with Trump. I think no matter how this election goes, it will go beyond this.

David Remnick: That is a grim forecast for what's coming. In other words, what you're saying is that no matter what happens in November, the drop--

Jill Lepore: We need TSA at the Electoral College certification. Yes, that's what I'm saying.

David Remnick: Ben Wallace-Wells, you've been covering the Trump campaign and you've watched the MAGA movement evolve since 2015, 2016. What have you observed?

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: I think it's interesting and maybe bears on this question to think about the 2016 version of Trump and the Trump movement relative to the 2024 version. Some of this is inevitably nebulous and anecdotal but in my experience, the Trump campaign and the Trump rallies in 2016 were much scarier. They were much more violent, people got beat up in the stands. There were angry protests, street fighting outside. People walked into those rallies and had no idea what was going to happen. When I look at Trump himself today, it's a diminished figure. He's not able to generate the same energy, his crowds are smaller. It's a less intense effect.

At the same time, and somewhat moving in contradiction, his movement has become much more openly opposed to democracy to democratic institutions, his party is much more completely behind him. I sometimes wonder if when I walk away from a Trump rally, I've been artificially reassured by how mediocre he is.

David Remnick: I had this feeling too. I went to the rally in the Bronx, and Trump was telling stories about the woman skating rink, and various real estate moguls that he knew, and the Yankees in the era of Steinbrenner. Politics aside, it was like listening to Grandpa Thanksgiving, but without even the bile that you're used to. It was odd, and yet, Kelefa Sanneh, looking at you here, when we watch him walk into an arena for some kind of boxing match or whatever it is, the crowd was--

Kelefa Sanneh,: UFC.

David Remnick: For UFC, the crowd goes nuts. Nuts.

Kelefa Sanneh: Yes, there is that core of people who love him. There's a core of people that are just happy to be in the same room as a celebrity, but I think it's also important to bear in mind the awesome power of negative polarization. I sometimes have liberals ask me, "How could anyone vote for Trump just out of knee-jerk partisan fealty?" People who aren't crazy about Trump, but are just willing to vote for him against Biden.

I've liberals who say to me like, "How could anyone support this guy? I say, "Picture if it was reversed.

Imagine if the Democrats nominated like 50 Cent, and 50 Cent is running on a campaign to, I don't know, end police brutality forever, but he's also saying all sorts of things that seem to flout democratic norms and seem to maybe encourage violence." It's unsettling. What would it take for you as a liberal to vote for Ted Cruz instead? I think for a lot of people, that would be a hard ask because there is this idea that, no matter how bad the person on our side is, at least he's not like those people on the other side.

David Remnick: Thanks to all of you who wrote us your questions about the election. I'm sorry, we couldn't answer every single one of them. Thanks to my colleagues; Susan Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells. You can read all of them on politics and the state of the nation at newyorker.com.

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