The word of the week for politics is “humiliation.” At least according to the Opinion contributing writer David Wallace-Wells, who joins the Opinion columnist David French and the national politics writer Michelle Cottle on “The Opinions.” This week the trio takes a look at how humiliation factors into President Trump’s failed cease-fire with Iran and the demise of Graham Platner’s candidacy. And, with Mitch McConnell in the hospital for several weeks, they debate how much privacy we owe our public servants.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion, and this week I am here with the oh-so-illustrious columnist David French and — just to keep me on my toes — our other favorite David, David Wallace-Wells, is back. Davids, how goes it?
David Wallace-Wells: It’s going great. Great to be here.
David French: Going well, Michelle.
Cottle: All right, so, really we have way too much to cover from the news this week. Before we start, a little game here: Do either of you have a word that kind of captures this insane week for you?
Wallace-Wells: How about “humiliation”? I’m thinking of, you know, the embarrassing spectacle of America’s 250th. I’m thinking about the U.S. soccer team embarrassing itself on the field against Belgium. I’m thinking about the online left somewhat embarrassing itself with Graham Platner. I’m also thinking about President Trump’s desperate need to avoid humiliation in this conflict with Iran.
French: Michelle, David has inspired me with a word, too.
Cottle: Tell me.
French: “Exposure” is the word of the week for me.
Cottle: That sounds a little ominous.
French: Well, yeah. So, we had more information about Graham Platner that is changing the American political landscape, and casts the Senate into even more doubt as to how this is going to all unfold. And also, The Wall Street Journal had some very interesting series of articles about the way in which the rest of the world is handling Trump. And it really exposed the extent to which the rest of the world is making this determination that they cannot count on the United States anymore, and laid bare that they just don’t trust us.
They just don’t trust us, maybe for reasons that we might talk about here in a few minutes.
Cottle: OK, I like that. This is a very intriguing entree into our discussion.
I’m going to latch onto the exposure and humiliation of Graham Platner. I myself cannot stop rage-texting my friends and colleagues about this — I’d like to apologize to David French, who’s already had an earful about this — and the epic disgrace that was the Democrats’ now ex-Senate nominee in Maine. We also do need to talk about the mysterious disappearance of Senator Mitch McConnell, who has been hospitalized now for nearly a month, with no clear explanation of what’s going on, which is stirring up all kinds of crazy rumors on the right — and resurrects the question of how much Americans are entitled to know about the private lives and health of our elected officials.
But first, I think we’ve got to go global. We’ve got to look the Iran cease-fire that basically never was. So, at the NATO summit this week, Trump suggested that the cease-fire with Iran is over. Turns out that that loose agreement, announced last month, left a little too many sticky issues on the table, and so here we are. As of our taping this Thursday morning, there have been tit-for-tat strikes, along with Trumpian threats to, of course, take it farther.
So, how are you guys feeling about this situation? Any chance the administration’s going to sort this out and reach a deal before the mid-August deadline, set by the memorandum of understanding? David French, you go first.
French: Yeah. So, there was an irreconcilable tension at the heart of the Iran deal that was this: How do you end a war where both sides can declare victory? And this became a real issue after this initial memorandum of understanding, which was, by the way, very favorable to Iran — very favorable to Iran, the original cease-fire deal.
It became very clear to me that there was absolutely no way that Trump could spin the resolution of the conflict as a victory — he was going to try to do it. And it was also very clear to me that there was actually not a meeting of the minds on what Iran was supposed to do, and how Iran was going to conduct itself. And I don’t think Iran has ever, since the start of the war, clearly and unequivocally promised to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The initial cease-fire was supposed to reopen the strait; it did not. The memorandum of understanding was supposed to fully reopen the strait; it obviously did not. Iran was still exerting control. And so, the bottom line is, right now we’re in a position where Iran now believes it is essentially the owner/operator of the Strait of Hormuz, and it is going to exert a certain degree of control.
Iran believes that it has essentially defeated Trump and is entitled to all the bounties of its victory, and then Trump understands that the strait — it’s finally gotten through to him that the strait has to be open, but he still doesn’t actually have a plan for that. And it’s very hard to see a clear path forward.
Cottle: Oh my God, so much winning. David W., what do you say?
Wallace-Wells: One thing, David, that you said that’s interesting to me is that Trump now knows that he has to reopen the strait, and actually I’m not sure about that.
I think one of the things that may have happened over the last few weeks — maybe the last few months — is that Trump started to see the effects of the war shaking out in less consequential ways than many advisers and commentators had predicted. And it seemed that the economic warfare that we had entered into would be less damaging to America and its allies than we were worrying about at the outset of the war. This has been a surprise to me.
This is a war that’s been full of surprises. You know, we learned that Iran, with its cheap drones, could match the U.S. military; we learned that the Hormuz weapon was probably the most powerful weapon involved in either of these militaries, more powerful than anything the U.S. could manage; we’ve learned something about the humbling of the American empire and what we can do in the world.
But one other thing we’ve learned is that the closure of the strait — which we were told, in the spring, would be absolutely catastrophic for the global economy — has had its effects. There has been suffering, particularly in Asia. There have been impacts in Europe and America. But those impacts have not been nearly as dramatic as we were warned about. I was just looking at the price of oil futures this morning, and at no point in this conflict did the price of oil go above what it was even when Russia invaded Ukraine. And certainly, it didn’t reach the levels that we saw in the 1970s, which is what everybody in the energy world was telling us to expect if this would go on even two months, let alone five, six months.
And so, I think one thing that may be happening is that — whereas two months ago, Trump thought that even if we’re taking an L on this, we’ve got to move on because we’ve got to reopen the strait — he may now be thinking: You know what? We can endure the pain of continued closure. That is not going to be as damaging to American interests as we worried, and that allows us a little bit more leverage at the bargaining table than we thought we had, even a couple of months ago when we thought we had our backs up against the wall.
Cottle: So, how much do you think Americans are paying attention to this, beyond the prices at the pump?
Wallace-Wells: Well, that’s another thing. I don’t think that it has penetrated the public political consciousness in nearly the way we might have expected. You know, Americans will say they oppose the war. They want it to be over. They’re unhappy about its effect on the economy and on gas prices. But it is not a Topic A conversation on the news. It’s not the leading item in newspapers like ours. It is not dominating social media. And you see a sort of growing awareness that this is the kind of bad imperial behavior that the U.S. engages in without any real outrage about it.
And I think that alone is a kind of depressing, distressing development: that the public could come to hold those two thoughts in their head at once, to say, “We understand that this is irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president, and we’re not even paying all that close attention to it.”
Cottle: Yeah, we just shrug. “Yeah, whatever.”
Wallace-Wells: And just letting it slide by. But I do think that that’s the best way of describing the public response. And that means that, in addition to there not being so much economic pressure on the U.S. to really resolve this, there’s not much political pressure either. Which again, if you had told me that in February, I would have been shocked.
Cottle: David French?
French: Yeah. I think David’s exactly right — that there are some people in the administration, maybe Trump himself, who think, “Ha ha, the strait didn’t hurt us.”
Now, there are other countries, allied countries, that are feeling the pain more than we are. But we are feeling some pain. But I also think that the very idea that he would enter into a worse deal than Obama had — that’s the red line. That’s the third rail. That’s when he reacts volcanically. And I don’t think there’s any way for him to look anyone in the face and say, “I have a better deal than Obama,” if Iran is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, charging tolls, fees, whatever, commissions, whatever term you want to use, dictating the routes that tankers have to use and merchant ships have to use, firing missiles at our Gulf allies to enforce its rule.
If he’s in that position, plus giving the billions of dollars that have already been outlined as part of the memorandum of understanding — with these sort of vague future assurances about the nuclear program — he can’t look anyone in the face and say he did a better deal than Obama. And I think that this is one of the things that’s just genuinely driving him — this pride, the “I have to have the better deal.”
Wallace-Wells: And that was the main public response, from skeptical right-wingers, in the immediate aftermath of the deal, like, “This is not what we were hoping for.” One additional layer I would add is that — to the extent that the world has been protected from some of these more catastrophic economic impacts that we were expecting earlier in the war — it’s actually been sort of publicly credited to China for not importing oil, for drawing down their own strategic oil reserves, and therefore softening the impact on the global oil market. And I think — again, to the extent that we’re tallying losses for Trump here — it’s not just that he made a worse deal than Obama; it was also that, on some level, the experience of the war demonstrated not just that Iran controlled the Hormuz weapon, but that China also was quite a powerful player with their oil weapon, and both of those are probably pretty upsetting to someone who wants to assert power on the global stage as nakedly as Trump does.
Cottle: I think it’s sweet that he’s boosted China’s global image. That’s awfully nice of him.
Wallace-Wells: He keeps doing that!
Cottle: But it sounds like you guys don’t really think he’s going to pay much of a political price. Or will his party pay a political price in this year’s midterms?
Wallace-Wells: Well, one big question is whether the soft economic impact that I was describing was a temporary thing, and the landscape there will change once our oil reserves really do go to zero. That was some of the pressure that was on Trump a month or two ago, when he was first coming to the table and reaching the memorandum of understanding — the idea that this had been, relatively speaking, relatively comfortable for a period of time, but we’re about to hit some really hard limits.
And the question is whether that’s true, and whether — if we continue to have the strait closed over the next, say, two or three months — we’ll start to see a much more punishing economic impact. If that does come to pass, I think it may drag his approval ratings even lower.
Cottle: David F., you got anything before we move on?
French: Just to add to that. David’s exactly right that the impact has been softer than some people feared. At the same time, nobody’s happy. Well, very few people are happy with this economy. And so, there is a short window for the Trump administration to show some concrete results before the November election.
And I think that Trump sort of had this view, that once the conflict is over, then inflation will go back down. That, very quickly, all will be right with the world economically. He thinks he can talk the stock market into almost anything he wants it to do. And I think one of the realities is that even if it is a softer economic impact than a lot of people feared, there is still an economic impact, and it is very hard to turn the ship around, or even be seen to start to turn the ship around, before the midterms if this conflict is still going on.
Cottle: So, I guess my question is whether or not whatever he winds up doing, or not doing, with Iran and that agreement, the more time he spends on that, the more time he wastes on his absurd election fraud obsession, the less time he is spending conveying any kind of interest, or whether or not he cares at all about the economic pain that people still say they’re feeling.
Like, whatever is actually happening with the numbers, people are surly; people do not feel like this economy is working for them, and I’m not sure that there is time to turn that around before the midterm. So, I think beyond the specifics, just the image of him doing everything but caring about the economy, and coming up with absurd statements like, “I love the inflation,” or, I don’t care about, you know, economic whatever, and I just have to think that this, more generally, lends to the narrative that he just doesn’t give a crap. So we’ll just see.
French: Well, one quick thing on that: The Republican strategy is not necessarily to tout its successes. The Republican strategy that they believe will work, and they have some foundation for this, is they will essentially go the doom direction: “You, Democrats, will destroy this coun——”
Cottle: The “doom direction”?
French: The doom direction: “Our country is at stake. The Democrats will destroy this country. They’re communists.” This is going to be the sales pitch. It’s not going to be, “Look how great America is.” That’s a really hard one to make when there’s such negative feelings about the economy. It’s going to be, “They’re the ultimate threat. They’re the existential threat.” And that is going to be the nonstop message for the next several months.
Cottle: I am getting “Lots of the communists are coming for you” fund-raising pleas from the Republicans in my inbox.
Wallace-Wells: That’s what Trump made his July 4 address about, issuing exactly that warning.
Cottle: It’s always that the communists are coming for your children and your dog. But that is the perfect segue into the complete freak show in Maine and Graham Platner.
So, speaking of disastrous decisions, the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine has suspended his campaign. He did this on Wednesday, after a woman publicly accused him of rape, an accusation that he has denied. But when the story broke, pretty much all of Platner’s Democratic allies abandoned him lickety-split. But before this particular allegation, many — especially in the insurgent wing of the party — were willing to overlook a large number of very red flags with this guy. Whether you’re talking about the Nazi tattoo, hateful Reddit posts, sexting with other women behind his wife’s back, other allegations of mistreating women — it’s not like the sirens weren’t going off.
So, David French, you’ve thought a lot about character, morals, the importance of these in politics. What does this messy Platner trajectory tell us about the Dems, and are they inching toward the win-at-all-costs position that they used to criticize Republicans for?
French: Some people are doing more than inching, Michelle. Some people are sprinting. “He might be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” is sort of the — —
Cottle: Ah, the dirtbag defense.
French: Exactly, exactly. But it’s funny, just yesterday somebody came up to me and they said, “How did you have Graham Platner pegged?”
And I said, “It was the easiest thing in the world, y’all, if you weren’t blinded by the fact that, like, ‘Somebody who shares my ideology must be a good person.’” Which is a giant mistake to make, just in life, to think that just because somebody sort of shares your political or religious worldview, that that makes them by default a good or decent person.
And I said, “Your mileage may vary, I’ve never encountered a person who had a Nazi tattoo for 20 years, who was also an otherwise good dude.” Like, that is——
Cottle: [Sarcastically] Other than that, he’s a great guy.
French: And a lot of people started to even make fun of those who brought up the Nazi tattoo. Like, “Well, he already explained that.” I’m thinking: And you bought that? You bought that explanation? You actually did? I’m going to tell you, if you did, I’m talking to somebody who had incredible ideological blinders on. Because I guarantee you, you would not have bought that explanation with a Republican. You wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.
You would have said, “This is the most obvious, clear thing in the history of the world.” And this is so obvious and pedantic to say, but it’s also very true and very hard, and that is to apply the exact same standard to somebody on your own side when you find out about a scandal allegation that you apply to somebody on the other side.
And instead, here’s what we do. Here, what we basically do is we say, “This person that I like, they’re for Medicare for All, so I know that, man, they’re with me on this, and I like them.” And then, when you hear the scandal, you go, “Well, man, an otherwise lovable guy is just — you know, nobody’s perfect.” But then, you have somebody on the other side, and maybe they have a more free market-oriented approach to health care, and you’re like, “You’re horrible. You’re a terrible person.” And then you find out that they had a scandal, and you go, “Yep, that’s confirmation. That’s confirmation.”
Cottle: [Sarcastically] I knew it.
French: And so, we just can’t be in this loop. It’s driving this country mad, to be in this loop where you just have these continual grace for the horrible actions of somebody on your own side, and absolute swift condemnation for the other.
Now, I will say this: At least the Democrats said no. It took way too much. It took way too much. But finally, they did say no. And, you know, one of the grievous things, there’s this other guy hovering around out there, Ken Paxton. There are a whole bunch of Texas Republicans right now who are going, “Those Maine Democrats are horrible for voting for Graham Platner, with all the waving red flags. And oh, by the way, you’re not a Christian if you don’t vote for Ken Paxton.”
And that is coming. You’re going to see that all over Texas for the next couple of months: Christians have one option, and it’s to vote for the adulterer over James Talarico. And it’s to vote for the corrupt politician — so corrupt that he was impeached by a Republican House. He had his own very conservative staff resign out from under him in protest. That’s how corrupt he is. But you have to vote for him.
Cottle: [Sarcastically] But other than that, he’s a great guy.
French: And they’re going to stick to it all the way — all the way, Michelle.
Cottle: David W.?
Wallace-Wells: Well, I think there are a lot of different actors in this saga, right? There’s Platner himself, who was dissembling, misleading the public, misleading his staff.
Cottle: “Dissembling.” That is a sweet word. That is a very sweet word. The only way he wasn’t flat-out lying is if he was always too drunk to remember any of it, and I’m not sure that’s a defense.
Wallace-Wells: There were the people who found him and didn’t vet him properly. There’s his campaign staff. Then there are a lot of enablers in the media.
But I also think that we shouldn’t look away from the fact that he won the primary. And the voters actually did see much of this — not all of it, but they saw much of this behavior and nevertheless voted to make him the nominee. And that’s in a particular situation against particular other candidates. We can’t read all that much into it.
But the thing that concerns me about it is that I don’t know how much of that is — as David said — extending grace to someone who shares your ideology, and how much of it is voters liking the roughness of his presentation. And that’s not to say that a large share of Democratic Maine voters wanted someone who may have raped an ex-girlfriend, or wanted someone with a Nazi tattoo. But they were able to make sense of the narrative in a way that made Platner look like an outsider, like a fighter, like someone who is angry, and that those elements excited them about his candidacy. Not just things that they could excuse, but things that actually drew them to Platner as against Janet Mills or any of the other candidates. And I do think that this is one thing — again, as David was saying — that applies across the country here, not just within one party, not just within one wing of one party; to the extent that the country is surly — as you said earlier, Michelle — and to the extent that the country is angry, there are going to be some number of voters who want to see their politicians expressing the same sentiments.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to turn to a monster. Think of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. He’s selling much of the same politics that Platner is, but I think is a much more honorable figure. We’ll see how that campaign goes, but he seems like a kind of contrasting figure. Or Zohran Mamdani in New York, who has his enemies, but is also, I think in an interpersonal way, an obviously good person who is interested in trying to improve the world.
Platner was cut from a different cloth, but I think that as we go forward, failing to address the latent anger of many millions of people around this country, we are likely to see more politicians whose main qualification for higher office is rage, and that ——
Cottle: I can feel my blood pressure rising as we’re discussing this. So, this is where I just want to jump in and say ——
French: Go, Michelle, go.
Cottle: So, for starters: Platner is vile. Even what we know about him is just, like, he’s vile. I don’t want to hear from him ever again.
You don’t get to set the joint on fire and then have a say in who’s going to come in to clean up your mess. Not every jerk who’s angry in a flannel shirt is a working-class hero, and this is where the people who really need to be slapped are the people who decided, oh no, we don’t need to vet him. We don’t need to worry about the red flags. We don’t need to pretend that the rules of politics apply to our guy because he’s so freakin’ charming and has interesting facial hair. I am sorry, but, like, it’s not just a question of whether he could get elected. I mean, this guy in the Senate would have cut a swath across Capitol Hill that we would have been hearing about forever.
So, I get it. I get that people are angry, but not all angry jerks are the same, and a guy who likes to pretend he’s a working-class hero is not automatically who you want to throw in with. So do some due diligence. That said — and here’s the thing — Chuck Schumer should be embarrassed that the choice in this race was Janet Mills, who was way too old and way too tired. Like, she didn’t want to be in this race. For the people of Maine to have basically had to pick between too old and too vile is inexcusable.
Wallace-Wells: But I just want to underline something that you said about the people who found him and halfway-vetted him: They didn’t fail to do their due diligence — they wanted someone who broke the mold. I mean, that was the language they used: We didn’t want someone who was grown in a vat. We wanted someone who has lived experience. They did this as a kind of central casting. Here’s someone who looks like an outsider, who ——
Cottle: And how’s that working out for them?
Wallace-Wells: I’m not making a positive case for it, I’m just saying it’s notable that what we’re seeing here is not exactly an oversight — people having a perfect candidate who has skeletons in his closet. They chose someone who looked like they had skeletons in their ——
Cottle: You can vet someone and not expect them to be some kind of bland, milquetoast model that could survive, like, in the McKinsey boardroom or whatever. So, OK, they got what they asked for. Congratulations. Now step aside and let someone clean up your wretched mess.
French: Can I just say something real quick about this?
Cottle: Please.
French: We have got to stop confusing assholery for courage or for conviction. I see this on both sides of the spectrum, especially among the angriest part of the base. They’re looking at somebody who’s basically extending the middle finger to the world and demonstrating this sort of like raw fury and anger, often in a way that’s deeply cruel and dishonest, and casting that as, well, they are a fighter, OK? They’re a fighter.
Well, that is not the only model for fighting, guys. Look throughout history, if you’re going to look at the people who led in difficult times, who demonstrated and history has vindicated for their courage and their resolve and their conviction. Often they were people who went out of their way to try to extend olive branches to win people over who were wavering, who had to demonstrate a tremendous amount of moral character.
And this is something that is a huge problem that I’ve seen on the right for the last decade, that they view you as weak unless you’re cruel. And all of your scandals, as David was saying, they’re a bonus. They’re a bonus because what they mean is that you don’t care about norms. You’re willing to go as far as you need to go. And down that path lies madness and there is no path in which that is going to unify this country, or achieve justice and prosperity and equality, and all of the things that you’re looking for.
That is not the path for it. And I’m longing for a moment where especially the bases of the parties wake up and they say, “You know what? Sometimes the most courage you can demonstrate is to demonstrate humility or kindness in the face of an arrogant and cruel age.”
Cottle: Well, we’re going to have to wait till Trump’s out of the White House before that’s even a possibility. But David W. did bring up a less gut-wrenching, soul-crushing primary situation, and we’re going to move, for now, to Michigan.
The stakes there are sky high, in the Democratic Senate primary on Aug. 4. State Senator Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the contest this week, and it’s cleared the field for a tough race between Representative Haley Stevens, who’s the establishment favorite, and Abdul El-Sayed, an anti-establishment crusader, whose very edgy progressivism is making some in his party a little nervous. Now, no Republican has won the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan in over 30 years, but if Democrats lose this race, it’s going to pretty much kneecap their chances of taking control of the Senate in November. Who do you think is going to give them the best chance?
Wallace-Wells: I don’t have any detailed knowledge of the race on the ground. I just look at the polls, and what I’ve seen lately suggests that Abdul El-Sayed maybe has a little bit of an advantage there. That doesn’t mean that that’ll hold over the course of the general election. But I think that even a few months ago, we would’ve looked at the polls and said that he was the much weaker candidate. And I think the behavior there, voters’ behavior over the last couple of months, suggests that he may well be the stronger one.
And I do think that this would be a major event in American politics. He would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He would be a natural successor figure to Bernie, as a lefty in the Senate. I do think that he’s more, as I said a minute ago, a more admirable character than Platner. I think he’s gotten less attention over the course of this race than Platner has, and that’s a little bit of a shame. I think he’s a more interesting vector for the American left ——
Cottle: He just doesn’t look as good in flannel. I’m sorry, go ahead.
Wallace-Wells: I don’t know if you’ve seen him in the gym. He’s quite fit. But he does seem to cut a bit of a different figure, which I don’t think we know as easily what to do with. I mean, Platner looked this part. He wasn’t exactly — as you were saying, Michelle — a white working-class figure from generations left behind by globalization. That wasn’t his actual background. But he looked like that, and that meant that, to voters, he scanned very easily as a familiar archetype, one that they could dump a lot of rage and political enthusiasm into. Abdul El-Sayed looks like a less familiar archetype, which is one reason why I think it’s possible that he does crack open American politics in a pretty interesting way going forward.
I’m not going to say I think it’s a safe bet that he wins the primary, or if he does that he’ll win the general election. But it’s a very consequential race, not just for who controls the Senate starting in 2027, but in terms of where the country, and the Democratic Party, goes going forward.
Cottle: David F.?
French: You know, Michelle, growing up in the South, did you ever hear this phrase? We used it a lot in law: Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Cottle: I’m afraid I have.
French: You have.
Cottle: I have.
French: So, essentially what that means is, if you reach too far — it would come up in settlement negotiations — like, you’re just asking for too much.
And when you ask for too much, you break off the settlement negotiations, and you might then lose the case. And so, I think one of the things that we have seen is that when one of the parties is weak — and the Republicans right now are weak, they really are. I mean, Democrats may end up over-performing their 2024 numbers very substantially, which could hand them control of the House. Which means that even a Michigan Senate seat, which has been in Democratic hands for a really long time — odds are almost no matter who they nominate, it’s going to remain a Democratic seat. These are very favorable tailwinds right here.
However, if you then take that moment to say, now is when we can push the envelope with our candidates — in other words, this is the opportunity to really, as David was saying, put a successor to Bernie in the Senate. Coming from a swing state, that’s pretty risky.
And I keep flashing back to the 2022 midterms, and there was very high inflation. Joe Biden’s approval rating had already gone below 50 and was not coming back. There was just all of this talk of a red wave, and it never materialized. I use two Ds to describe why it didn’t materialize: Dobbs and doofuses. The Dobbs was obvious, right? As somebody who’s pro-life, I regret this deeply, but there is very much a pro-choice majority in the United States. It galvanized a pro-choice majority.
And then, the Republicans nominated MAGA candidate after MAGA candidate in these statewide swing-state elections, and lost and lost and lost and lost in what would have been a very favorable environment. And, you know, I think that’s instructive. And so I really do question the way in which a lot of people seem to view Trump, and the unpopularity of Trump, as a political opportunity to sort of press in, and lean in, to deeper and deeper progressivism. And I just feel as if I’m sort of getting this sense of déjà vu, so ——
Wallace-Wells: You know, one thing that I think is important to note in this context is who we’re talking about when we’re talking about making this decision. Like, in a previous era, the party might have exerted stronger control over the race, either in candidate selection or in funneling money. And these days, the Republican Party is weak because of Trump, but the Democratic Party is weak as well. And one thing that we’re seeing is simply voters’ choice. Now, it may be that Democratic primary voters are doing themselves a disservice, as Republican primary voters have done in the past, by choosing people that align with a harder ideological line than the median general election voter would be.
But it is also not the case that Abdul El-Sayed is being anointed by anyone in particular. He is neck and neck, or ahead, in the polls, and that tells us something about the Michigan electorate — maybe not determinative for the fall, maybe just indicative. But it is also the case, I think, that there’s a real signal there, there’s still something on the ground happening that we sort of need to be paying attention to.
Cottle: OK, now I love a good primary fight; I know that the political class does not because it costs them money and they’re worried about splitting the vote. But I’m all for a good primary battle. So, you know, let’s go forward. We’ll see how that goes. But before we go, I want to pivot to Washington just briefly, and the question of how open elected officials need to be with the public about their whereabouts.
And I’m bringing this up because Senator Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old former Republican leader, has now been hospitalized for several weeks, and we have yet to get any kind of clear explanation about what’s going on. This has sparked crazy rumors about whether something already happened to him that’s horrible, and it’s being covered up by his team for political reasons. And the McConnell drama is coming hot on the heels of another medical mystery, which is that New Jersey Republican House member Tom Kean Jr. disappeared for over 100 days, during which time the public was told only that he was receiving medical treatment for something. It wasn’t until after he returned to the House in late June that people were told he had been treated for depression.
Now, I’m always grateful when members of Congress talk about their mental health challenges and we get honest about that sort of thing, but really shouldn’t the public have been given more information on this earlier? Like, the same thing with McConnell. How much can we expect to know about the health and well-being of our political officials, guys?
French: Could I propose a quasi-mathematical equation here?
Cottle: Ooh, you’re going to get specific. I like it.
French: The greater the power the public official exercises, the greater the obligation to disclose to the public their physical condition. So, at the very top of that is the president of the United States, and I think we’ve now had a couple of presidencies — including this one, by the way — where you don’t really feel that they’re all that transparent about what our president ——
Cottle: Healthiest president ever, David. Fittest, cognitively sharp, whatever.
French: Yeah. So we’re approaching Soviet levels of opacity here. Is that the right word? Michelle, you might remember back in the days, when a Soviet leader would get a cold, and next thing you know, you had a new Soviet leader.
They were completely unforthcoming with information, right? We’re approaching almost, like, Soviet levels of concealment here when it comes to senior elected officials. And look, elected officials are human beings. Human beings, no matter what — there are zones of privacy, but when we’re talking about life-or-death situations, capacity to do the job for which you were elected — we are owed transparency.
I’m sorry. We are. We are owed transparency, and this actually should be a consideration. If you’re somebody who’s wanting to keep serving and you’re deep into your 70s, you can’t have this thing both ways. And the more powerful you are, the more transparent you have to be. I mean, that’s ——
Wallace-Wells: One other variable is the last one, I think, that David mentioned, which is really important, and that is age. If you’re in your 40s, your voters, your constituents can probably trust that unless there’s some surprise, you will be capable of managing the job. Once you’re in your 70s or your 80s, the question is much more normal to ask.
You know, some large share of Americans in their 80s are not capable of something like running the United States from the White House. And so, the older you get, I think the more natural it is to ask these questions, too. Which ties it back to the broader question of gerontocracy and what it means that we’re living in a world that is governed, to some large degree, by much older people.
Now, it looks a little bit less that way on the surface than it did a few years ago. We have a vice president who’s quite young. A lot of Trump’s cabinet is relatively young. You know, by the way, Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton were all born within one year of one another.
Like, they’re all exactly the same age. So, the next cycle, we’re going to be in a different generational phase here. We’re going to be, at least in the presidential contest, looking at members of a different generation. And there is ——
French: Gen X. Gen X.
Wallace-Wells: Isn’t there some theory that we’re going to skip entirely over Gen X?
Cottle: There’s never going to be a Gen X president, David.
French: There has to be.
Cottle: You just got to let that dream go.
French: No, I can’t. I can’t let it go.
Cottle: No. Let it go.
Wallace-Wells: But I think part of the story here is just what it means when older people stay in power, hold onto power. They’re going to be more secretive, because the things that they’re trying to hide are more serious; and the public is going to be more agitated about those — that secret-keeping — because they suspect, rightly, that these are genuine, important questions to ask. And I don’t think that we should be launching a congressional investigation into the bruising on Trump’s hand. But it is an enormous area of internet obsession, that he has this running bruise on his hand. Even putting that aside, it would just be better if we had — I mean, better in a million ways, if Trump was not the president — but it would just be better if we didn’t have to worry all the time that our geriatric leaders were sliding down the slope to real old age.
Cottle: OK, so now I’m going to put, for those listening, I’m going to put David Wallace-Wells’s email directly into the feed so that all of the people who want to yell at him for ageism can do that directly. Because I feel that I get yelled at for that plenty. And David, you will come back for us when we do our next gerontocracy episode, because this is one of my favorite topics. So, we’re going to leave it there, and we’re going to do recommendations. What do you have to get us through the peak summer heat? David Wallace-Wells, you first.
Wallace-Wells: The book that I’ve been reading the last few days is a book called “In Trees” by a writer named Robert Moor, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It’s sort of a strange book to describe in summary, but it’s part nature essay, it’s part work of philosophy, it’s part personal essay, and it’s an effort to make sense of the tree; not just the forest landscape, but the idea of a tree, the intellectual structure of a tree, what it means to think through the metaphor of the tree as a sort of new model for thinking about rootedness and what we used to call “cathedral thinking.” That is to say, things that outlast human life. It’s a beautiful book. It’s impossible to put down, and ever since I picked it up, I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know, so I’ll recommend it to all of you as well.
Cottle: All right, David French.
French: So, first let me just say I love that David came in here with something of true interest, intelligence and sophistication, carrying the Jamelle torch.
Wallace-Wells: I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to recommend.
French: How about this? How about an Apple TV show about fact-checkers who are trying to solve the murder of a male OnlyFans star?
Cottle: Be still my heart. Tell me more.
French: The show is called “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.” It’s on Apple TV. And the way that I discovered it is — so, we were loving “Widow’s Bay,” and Stephen King tweeted out that he loves “Widow’s Bay,” but there’s an even better thriller on Apple TV called “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.”
And the story: You have a single mom, recently divorced. She’s a fact-checker for a fictional publication, and she is interacting with a cam boy, like a guy on OnlyFans, only they have a different name for it, of course. And she sees him apparently get kidnapped and brutalized. And then, high jinks ensue.
But what’s funny is it’s centered around a trio of fact-checkers who are on the case and on the hunt, and they’re a delightful trio, like a delightful cast of characters. They’re quirky, they’re funny, and I just find it hilarious. And, you know, shout out to all of our awesome fact-checkers at The New York Times who make our work possible.
Cottle: Doing God’s work. Doing the Lord’s work.
French: But “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” it’s ——
Wallace-Wells: What a title, too.
French: Yeah. It’s great.
Cottle: Just leave it to French to keep it highbrow. OK, I’m going to go in kind of a geeky direction for any puzzle people out there. So, my household likes to order these murder mystery case files that you can get. It’s often cold-case files or they have themes, like somebody gets killed at summer camp, or somebody gets killed at the theater.
They send you this package of clues, like autopsy reports, witness statements, crime scene photos. And it’s one of these things where you — two people can do it, or five people can do it. We’ll drag our kids into doing it when they’re home from school. Some of them are just easy breezy.
And they rank them according to difficulty. You can do them in a couple of hours. Some of them are really hard. We have failed on a couple of occasions, I’m not too proud to admit. But they’re really fun, especially if, for whatever reason, you might not want to stream a show one night.
And that’s it. That’s all I got. I feel that we’ve solved so many problems in the world. I really appreciate it. David Wallace-Wells, thank you for joining, and you will be back, remember, at least for the gerontocracy episode. David French, always a pleasure. Guys, have a great weekend.
Wallace-Wells: You too.
French: Bye, Michelle. Bye, David.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Video editing by Julian Hackney and Arpita Aneja. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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