The New Yorker: Politics And More

On Friday, federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment against Donald Trump, revealing their case that the former President mishandled classified documents after leaving the White House. The indictment is Trump’s second in recent months, after the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, charged him with thirty-four felony counts in relation to hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. Trump said that he has been summoned to the Miami federal courthouse on Tuesday, just as the Republican primary race heats up. Three new contenders threw their hats into the ring this week: the former Vice-President Mike Pence, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. How will Trump’s legal woes affect the race for the nomination? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos spoke Friday morning, before the release of the indictment.

There’s a connection between Bush v. Gore, gerrymandering in North Carolina, and Donald Trump’s legal challenges to the 2020 election: they’ve all been justified by a dubious legal idea called the “independent-state-legislature theory,” or I.S.L.T. Its proponents argue that the Constitution gives state legislatures complete authority over elections, even the authority to override the popular vote. In a story by Andrew Marantz in this week’s magazine, Laurence Tribe, a law professor emeritus at Harvard, says I.S.L.T. was “pulled out of somebody’s butt.” Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, calls it “right-wing fanfic.” But, as fringe as it may be, this theory is now before the Supreme Court, in the case Moore v. Harper. Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the theory took hold and what the consequences of the Supreme Court decision could be.

David Remnick sits down with Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, GPT-4, and other artificial-intelligence programs. A.I. is a tool, Altman emphasizes, that streamlines human work and quickens the pace of scientific advancement. But he claims to empathize with concerns about the emerging technology. “Even if you don’t believe in any of the sci-fi stories,” he tells Remnick, “you could still be freaked out about the level of change that this is going to bring society and the compressed time frame in which that’s going to happen.”  Despite examples of GPT-4 declaring love or longing to escape to the real world, Altman avoids projecting sentience or goals onto it, and he describes it modestly: “What this system is is a system that takes in some text, does some complicated statistics on it, and puts out some more text.” And, though he acknowledges that the tool can be misused, he added, “I don’t believe we’re on a path to build a creature.” Altman, who testified before Congress last month, des

Policymakers have avoided a financial catastrophe just days before the “X-Date,” when the U.S. Treasury would have run out of money to pay its bills. Despite some opposition from members of both parties, the House and Senate chambers passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a compromise by Speaker McCarthy and President Biden that will raise the debt ceiling until January of 2025. While the Hill was consumed by these negotiations, the judiciary continued to hold insurrectionists accountable for their roles in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for seditious conspiracy, which the sentencing judge called one of the most serious crimes an individual in America can commit. The sentencing was a victory for democracy, but also a reminder of the anger that still courses through the country and fuels our political system. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos analyze these two recent eve

On Sunday, after four seasons, the HBO series “Succession” came to a close. More than good TV, it was an artifact of Donald Trump’s Presidency, and of the lingering feelings that have extended into the Biden era. Within the structure of a family drama, the show satirized corporate power, skewered the ultra-wealthy, and critiqued the media. And, notably, it successfully fictionalized Trump—or perhaps it imagined a kind of candidate who could ascend in a world in which Trump’s views had become more widely accepted. Following the finale, Naomi Fry joined Tyler Foggatt to discuss what made the series such an effective rendering of the current political climate.

Earlier this month, E. Jean Carroll won an unprecedented legal victory: in a civil suit, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse against her in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and for defamation in later accusing her of a hoax. But no sooner was that decision announced than Trump reiterated his defamatory insults against her in a controversial CNN interview. Carroll has now filed an amended complaint, in a separate suit, based on Trump’s continued barrage. But can anything make him stop? “The one thing he understands is money,” Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, tells David Remnick. “At some point he’ll understand that every time he does it, it’s going to cost him a few million dollars. And that may make a difference.” Carroll acknowledges that Trump will keep attacking her to get a laugh—“a lot of people don’t like women,” she says simply—but she is undaunted, telling Remnick, “I hate to be all positive about this, but I think we’ve made a difference.” “This is his moment of comeuppance?” Remnick asks her;

Donald Trump has always presented a problem for journalists. His years as a reality-television star taught him to outmaneuver facts and control narratives. Now as Trump’s second Presidential run gets under way, these skills are proving useful yet again. At CNN’s recent town hall, Trump answered questions in front of a live and sympathetic audience—a situation that played directly to his strengths as a performer. For Jelani Cobb and Steve Coll, New Yorker writers and Columbia Journalism School faculty members, the town hall raised some questions: Where is the line between coverage and promotion? And what is the role of news organizations in the age of political polarization? Cobb and Coll join Tyler Foggatt to discuss the dilemmas that journalists face when reporting on the former President and his 2024 campaign.

In June, a first-of-its-kind lawsuit will go to trial in Montana. The case, Held v. Montana, centers on the climate crisis. Sixteen young plaintiffs allege their state government has failed in its obligation, spelled out in the state constitution, to provide residents with a healthful environment. The psychiatrist Dr. Lise Van Susteren is serving as an expert witness and intends to detail the emotional distress that can result from watching the environmental destruction unfolding year after year. “Kids are talking about their anger. They’re talking about their fear. They’re talking about their despair. They’re talking about feelings of abandonment,” she tells David Remnick. “And they don’t understand why the adults in the room are not taking more action.” Dr. Van Susteren is a co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a network of mental-health providers concerned with educating colleagues and the public about the climate crisis.

President Joe Biden was set to make a historic tour through the Indo-Pacific over the next week, becoming the first sitting U.S. President to visit Papua New Guinea, an island state that declared a national holiday for his arrival. But negotiations over the debt limit back home forced the President to cut his trip short, and he’ll return to Washington immediately after the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan. Debate over the debt ceiling could not be postponed, the White House said, with as the U.S. closes in on the day it will run out of cash. Biden’s cancelled visits would have taken place at a time of growing concern about China’s expanding military and economic influence in the region, and on the heels of G-7 discussions about competition with China and the war in Ukraine. Can the U.S. reassert itself as a leader on the international stage if it can’t take care of business at home? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos analyze America’s global standing and the G-7 summit in

Last June, after the Supreme Court reversed nearly half a century of legal precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade, the New Yorker writers Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid joined Tyler Foggatt on The Political Scene to talk about the potential fallout. This week, almost a year later, they reconvened to discuss the changes that have occurred—and what they mean for reproductive rights, maternal mortality, and public attitudes toward abortion.  In March, Tolentino won a National Magazine Award for essays and columns about the repeal of Roe; earlier this month, Taladrid was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her reporting on abortion rights and women’s health.

Just over a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity—instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, legislatures have worked to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands. Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor and the author of “Laboratories Against Democracy,” talks about how state politics  has become nationalized. “If you’re a politician, and you’re trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party,” he notes, “your best bet is to join the national culture wars”—even at the expense of

This week, Representative George Santos, the New York Republican,  was indicted on thirteen counts of alleged financial crimes, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. The congressman then took a page out of former President Donald Trump’s playbook by calling the prosecution a “witch hunt.” Trump himself was found liable this week for defamation and sexual abuse, in a Manhattan civil trial brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll; Trump was ordered to pay her five million dollars in damages. Amid those developments, the relationship between the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow and the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas continues to spark ethics concerns, following revelations about financial and real-estate transactions involving the two men. Despite the scandals, Santos, Thomas, and Trump maintain their respective positions of power as lawmaker, Justice, and Republican front-runner in the 2024 Presidential

Screenwriting, once a solidly middle-class vocation in Hollywood, has become akin to a kind of gig work. In the past ten years, structural changes in the film and television industries have fundamentally altered the way that writers in Hollywood earn their livelihood. The rise of streaming has changed how TV seasons are aired, how residuals are paid, and the kinds of risks that networks are willing to take on new ideas. Shows hire fewer staff writers, and employ them for less time and less money. The arrival of A.I. has made this tenuous situation even more precarious. Michael Schulman spoke to a number of writers before they went on strike, and joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the conditions that gave rise to this major labor action—and the spirit of the picket line a little more than a week in. 

Joshua Yaffa first met Evan Gershkovich after Gershkovich arrived in Moscow as a young reporter in 2017. As their friendship grew, Yaffa was impressed with the energy and passion Gershkovich brought to his job. “He had a really deep and nuanced sense of Russia,” Yaffa tells David Remnick. As the regime moved toward authoritarianism and then war, “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working. He understood this was a very different Russia than the one he had arrived to.” Still, Yaffa says, there was little reason to think a foreign journalist would be targeted by Putin until Gershkovich was arrested in March and charged with espionage—quite obviously a false accusation. It’s the first time the Kremlin has imprisoned an American reporter for spying since the nineteen-eighties, and a significant escalation of tensions between the countries. Yaffa, who has spoken with  Gershkovich’s family, reflects on Gershkovich’s reporting and life in Moscow, and what may lie ahead.

In 2018, Sheikha Latifa of Dubai made a daring attempt to escape her home country. Her plan was to hide in the trunk of a car, launch a dinghy, reach a yacht, sail to India or Sri Lanka, and then fly to the United States to claim asylum. But, in the middle of the Arabian Sea, a team of armed men stormed the boat and forced Latifa back to Dubai. The commandos had been sent at the request of her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai.  The Sheikh has been praised by world leaders as a modernizer and a champion for women’s advancement in the Middle East, all while subjecting Latifa and other women in his family to confinement and abuse (charges that he has denied). Heidi Blake, a staff writer at The New Yorker, spent many months reporting on what led the princess to flee, and on the consequences that she faced. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Dubai royal family’s patriarchal system of control and the women who tried to break fre

Formerly a Beltway neoconservative, Tucker Carlson came to embody a populist figure—the angry, forgotten-feeling white man, an archetype that Carlson inherited from Bill O’Reilly when he took over Fox News’s coveted eight-o’clock slot. “Unlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he made news, he set the agenda,” Kelefa Sanneh, who profiled Carlson in 2017, says. “People were wondering, What is Tucker going to be saying tonight?” But though Carlson sometimes challenged Donald Trump more than other colleagues at Fox did, he overtly embraced white nationalism. He trumpeted especially the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which has inspired racist mass killings. He lavished attention on authoritarian, anti-democratic rulers like Viktor Orbán, of Hungary, and Nayib Bukele, of El Salvador. “One of the things a very talented demagogue like Tucker Carlson can do is put you on the back foot if you’re critiquing him,” Andrew Marantz, who covers extremist politics, notes, “never quite coming out and saying ‘the th

President Biden and Vice-President Harris are officially in the race for the Oval Office—again. For the past three years, strategists, members of the press, and voters have speculated that Biden might serve only one term in office, after he had described himself, during the 2020 campaign, as a “bridge” to future Democratic leaders. But Biden’s announcement this week of his bid for reëlection confirms that the bridge does not lead to Kamala Harris in 2024. With voters worried about Biden’s age—eighty—eyes are on his running mate, who is the first woman, the first Black person, and the first South Asian person to serve as Vice-President. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at why Biden chose to run again, whether Harris will be an asset or a drag on his campaign, and how the 2024 election will serve as a referendum on the character of America.

In theory, the Justices of the Supreme Court are immune to influence, with no campaigns to finance and no higher positions to angle for. But a cascade of revelations published by ProPublica concerning Justice Clarence Thomas—island-hopping yachting adventures underwritten by a right-wing billionaire patron, undisclosed real-estate transactions—raises questions about his proximity to power and money. Judges “are supposed to be honest, they’re supposed to be independent,” Jane Mayer tells David Remnick. “And I think it stretches common sense to think that a judge could be independent when he takes that much money from one person.” Mayer co-wrote the book “Strange Justice,” about Clarence Thomas, almost thirty years ago, and last year reported on Ginni Thomas’s influence in Washington. She notes that other Justices, including the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have accepted large gifts from politically connected donors. A deepening public distrust in the integrity of the Supreme Court, Mayer thinks, is dangerous for

At the eleventh hour, Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems resolved a defamation suit over the network’s coverage of the 2020 election, evading weeks of trial that would have brought the network’s biggest names, including Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity, to the witness stand. Although the court found that Fox aired falsehoods about Dominion, apologizing or retracting those falsehoods on air was reportedly not part of the settlement deal. Even as Fox was able to resolve its suit with Dominion just hours after jury selection, the network still faces other legal challenges. Fox News is being sued by Smartmatic for $2.7 billion in damages for defaming the voting-technology company in its coverage of the 2020 election, and a former producer has filed a pair of lawsuits against the company alleging a hostile work environment and claiming that the network’s lawyers pushed her to give misleading testimony in the Dominion case. With its reputation—and money—on the line, what is next for Fox News and t

On April 4th, Bob Lee, a multimillionaire tech founder, was found stabbed to death in San Francisco, at 2:30 in the morning. Even before concrete details of the crime were revealed, some residents blamed Chesa Boudin—the former D.A., who was ousted last summer—for a general sense of lawlessness in the city. Boudin was one of the more high-profile district attorneys elected in a wave of candidates running on platforms of criminal-justice reform. But he became associated with rising crime and disorder, leading to his eventual recall. Where has that left the progressive-prosecutor movement? Jay Caspian Kang, who wrote about Lee’s murder and the suspect, joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about perception versus reality in the battle over crime and homelessness, and how they affect attempts to fix a broken system.