The Politics of Disagreement with Steve Inskeep 01:04:28

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Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naima Raza. As listeners know, there's been a new level of tragedy unfolding in the Middle East this week. Hamas attacked Israel on Saturday. The images and reports are just horrific and unconscionable. Israel has responded by ordering a complete siege of Gaza, which the U.N. Secretary General has already referred to as hell on earth.

So it just looks like things are going to get worse before they get worse, and it's absolutely heartbreaking for us to see the loss of so many innocent civilians. Yes. We're preparing an episode next week with Christiane Amanpour, who, of course, has been covering global affairs in the Middle East since the 1980s. She's one of my heroes as a reporter, and...

I think she'll have a lot to say about what's happening and give us some real context. She's been doing great coverage on CNN so far, and we hope to get a lot of thoughts of where it's going and show what's gone on in the past as to what's going to happen next. But today we're tackling another subject, which still seems relevant, which is what happens when you're confronted with people who disagree with you.

It's a conversation we taped last week with NPR journalist Steve Inskeep. Steve is the host of NPR's Morning Edition and their morning podcast Up First and has been the voice of NPR's morning news for almost 20 years and many millions of Americans wake up to him every day. Do you wake up with Steve Inskeep every day, Cara? I don't. I don't. I do. I do, actually. He's perhaps best known as the journalist Donald Trump hung up on when Inskeep kept

challenging the former president's efforts to repeatedly question and lie about the 2020 election. He just hung up on him. Well, what a surprise. Would you have called him back, Cara? I would have if I had his number for sure. I mean, I would say, oh, did you by accident hung up on me? No. You know, Donald Trump gives ridiculous interviews to people for the most part and just talks over people. So not a surprise that he would do something like that.

Inskeep likes talking to people who disagree with him, he says, and he's turned to history to examine our divides. He's got a new book out. It's called Differ, We Must, How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America. And it's structured around these kind of key moments and key relationships that Abraham Lincoln had on topics of disagreement, really difficult topics, topics like slavery and slavery.

There have been something like 15,000 books, I think, written about Lincoln, Kara. So it's hard to find a new angle. What stuck out to you about this one? You know, Lincoln has been sort of one of the great figures of history. And he figured out how to get along with people he didn't get along with. And he had a team of rivals. That was Doris Kearns Goodwin's book. He wanted for people who didn't agree to get to agreement. And that's why I'm interested in this, because right now we have a lot of people not getting to agreement on a wide range of things. Yeah.

You know, let's leave the Middle East out of this because this is an entirely different and incredibly horrific situation. But in this country right now, we have that happening almost continually in Congress and between and among people. And so it's a really important topic to talk about. Yeah. And this book is really a political strategy book in a lot of ways because one of Inskeep's major points is that political leaders and democracies need to have majorities, which seems super obvious, but it seems also pertinent in today's climate.

And I have to ask you, going into this conversation, were you skeptical about the idea that lessons from Lincoln apply to today? No, I don't. I think it's a good way to write about it. I mean, I don't think you can hang every hat on Lincoln, which people tend to try to do. Incredible politician, incredible strategist.

statesman and obviously a visionary in many ways, beautiful writer, beautiful conversationalist, et cetera. So it's not an unusual thing to use him. You know, that was one of the most difficult points in American history of the many difficult points in American history. And he managed to make it work even despite the great loss of life, despite all these things, as he managed to get it through in a time where nobody thought they could get through. And I think that's why people keep looking back at him.

And Biden has been, you know, kind of ran on this idea of bipartisanship and has passed a lot of bills that have gotten bipartisan support, including the CHIPS Act and others. And yet he's lambasted for it sometimes as compromising. I'm just curious, if you study political economy, there's this world where, OK, in primaries, you're going to get these extreme politicians. But over the course of a representative democracy, you're going to get some medium voter theory, right?

That seems like it happens less now with the likes of Trump. Well, I think three things have happened. Gerrymandering, social media, and something like Fox News, you know, that has created a constant division. You need characters. Elon Musk does it over at Twitter. Everyone's an enemy. Everyone's aggrieved and angry. And so it both makes money and it also brings power. 100%. And do you think that social media has shifted dramatically?

journalistic coverage, which is something we're going to talk to Steve about as well. Everything's been affected by it in not a good way, in a reductive and grievance-filled way. So, you know, it's something I can't imagine Lincoln being around if there was Twitter. I don't know if we, I think we'd still be in the middle of a civil war.

Well, we're not in a civil war now, which is something that you see in headlines a lot. It's called civil war is what's happening. You think it's a civil war? I do. I do. Yes, I do. Wow. Okay. Well, that was a key question that we wanted to ask Steven Scape. And we also wanted to ask him about the role of journalists in a world where there's so much disagreement.

And about the unique role that NPR plays, because they have something like 44 million people that they reach, and yet it's a public radio station and one that receives some public funding. We're going to head into our conversation with Stephen Skeap in a moment. But we should note, we taped with Steve on Thursday on the heels of Kevin McCarthy being booted of the House. You and I are talking Wednesday afternoon. And as if they knew we were going to be taping, the Republicans have just concluded their closed-door, no-phones meeting and have delivered a nomination, which is Steve Scalise's.

That feels compromising. I like it. I don't like him very much, but sure. At least it's not Jim Jordan. That was not the reaction I expected from you, Cara. Well, look, it's like, would you like this toxic waste dump or this toxic waste dump?

I don't know. I just look. He's not Jim Jordan is really pretty much my feeling on things. Well, some members, as they were leaving chambers and speaking to journalists like Max Miller from Ohio, said that they're still going to vote for Jim Jordan. So I'll be curious to see if by the time people hear this, there is a vote that's happened and if Steve Scalise has stuck. They're working at the entire country's last nerve, the Republicans. So just get yourself a leader and start passing bills. That's your job. Do your job. That's my feeling.

All right. Sounds like you disagree with them. I do. I'd like them to do their job. I think most Americans would like them to do their job. So you were going to use a word there. Yes, I was going to say fucking job, but, you know, whatever. All right. Well, you disagree with them. Stephen's Keep has a point of view about disagreement. Let's see if Lincoln can help you, Cara. Okay. Take a quick break and we'll be back. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify.

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Welcome, Steve. This has been a difficulty getting you online. Aren't you the audio guy? You would think that I would be, but I'm traveling and everything's always a little tricky when you travel, at least for me. But you sound great now. And of course, your voice is so well known to millions and millions of listeners. Thank you for listening. I will be talking a little bit about NPR, but I want to start with your new book, which is called Differ We Must, How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, which seems particularly pertinent today.

Today and this past year, it's about the political life of Abraham Lincoln through the lens of disagreement. We're taping right after the House ousted Kevin McCarthy with former President Donald Trump in court and subject to a gag order because of his bad behavior. We obviously have been in a long period of high polarization and partisanship. It's not the Civil War, obviously, but it's not good. So let's start by looking back.

Differ We Must is about Lincoln as a brilliant strategist more than anything else. You structure the book around 16 relationships that shaped his career and legacy, all due to how he disagreed with these folks and how he did so in a constructive way. Explain your concept of doing this.

Yeah, I started wanting to illuminate a diverse America. I was thinking about the different kinds of people that were in the United States in the 19th century. White men had all the power or 99.99% of the power. But there were all kinds of people. And I thought if I had Lincoln meeting with a diverse group of characters, different races, different genders, different classes, different backgrounds—

I would illuminate the country. But as I got into it and as things continued getting worse and worse in the journalism that I do every day, I realized, you know, difference or disagreement really was the story, not just difference, but disagreement. And I feel that that is true

true regardless of your political perspective at the moment. I mean, you can think about this from the Democrats' point of view, where you have very progressive people who want big change in the country, and they do not have any power in Congress unless they also have the support of more conservative people like Joe Manchin, who progressives can't stand. But we could look over at the Republican Party right now. The essence of

politics in a democracy, if you're going to have a democracy, is to have a majority, a majority to do the right thing or as close to the right thing as you can get away with, which seems to be something that a lot of people forget. And as you and I are talking, there's this drama that has unfolded in the House of Representatives where Kevin McCarthy couldn't keep his majority. And honestly, I mean, Matt Gaetz doesn't have a majority either. I have no idea, as you and I are talking, what anybody's going to do to make a majority there.

So let's talk about that Republican Party right now. I'm looking at a headline in The Washington Post that said McCarthy ouster exposes the Republican Party's destructive tendencies. Well, that's kind of an understatement of the year. Talk a little bit about that idea. Let's use Lincoln as the formative thing. He obviously there was so much.

partisanship, so much disagreement happening during his term and in the years leading up to it. Yeah, and I guess we should say, I mean, Lincoln was in many ways a partisan. He was a member in his early years of what was called the Whig Party, which was one of the two major parties, and he was a very loyal party guy who did partisan things. But he realized that he needed a majority for his point of view. And as it developed, he was an anti-slavery politician who

at a time when it would be hard to get 51% for any particular view of slavery. There were people who were for it. There were people who were against it. There were people who said it was evil but didn't really care or had all kinds of rationalizations for why not too much should be done about it. And Lincoln needed to assemble a coalition of

Without giving up his principles, without giving up his basic point of view, Lincoln wanted a coalition that could win. And that, I think, is an essential skill that people seem to have forgotten the basics about today. It's not about agreement. It's about getting people necessarily, which I think most people think it's getting to agreement.

I'd love you to shed some light on the best examples of this within the book. Here's a really hard example. A morally perilous choice that Lincoln made.

He participated in building a new political party in the 1850s. It was the Republican Party. It started as an anti-slavery party. Issues were very different, and it just stood for different things than it does today. And so people should not necessarily bring whatever beliefs or prejudices they have about the Republican Party when they hear about it. It was an anti-slavery party. It was a mainstream party, and it was trying to build political support. And Lincoln took part in this in the state of Illinois. Right.

And he realized that in order to build an anti-slavery majority, to have enough voters to have a chance to win an election—he was running for the United States Senate in 1858—he desperately needed the votes of people who could be persuaded to vote against slavery, but also hated immigrants. They were nativists. They were know-nothings, as they were called at the time. There were these

secret societies that had spread across the country, vowing to keep foreigners out of government and vowing to make sure that foreigners could not vote very often and talking about conspiracy theories about Catholics being used by the Pope to take over America on and on and on. In some ways, familiar themes that we hear about today. He realized he needed to get some of those people to vote for him.

He found their anti-immigrant views disgusting. He actually said, if they ever win power, I would rather move to Russia where they make no pretense of loving liberty. But he needed their votes, and he was very active in trying to get them. He had a friend, actually many friends among the nativists, and he appealed to them to get their voters for him. Give me a specific example of these relationships in the book.

Joseph Gillespie is the key person that I'm thinking of who had been a friend of Lincoln's for 20 years. In fact, they'd been in the state legislature together. They were close friends. And yet Gillespie had these nativist views that were so repulsive that Lincoln could hardly bear to talk to the guy when he went off about it.

And yet Lincoln wrote him again and again, said, do everything you can to get your voters, who interestingly enough were called the American voters, get your voters to vote for me, to vote for my side in this upcoming election. I need at least four-fifths of them. Lincoln even went and appeared on stage with this guy at at least two campaign events. This is the kind of thing that—

you would be shredded for today. You would be questioned constantly, why were you on stage with this repulsive person? And I'll be honest, I mean, I would have my own questions about that. I would wonder, like, what do you mean by that? How far is appropriate to go to reach out for people? But Lincoln's fundamental insight, which does apply to us today, is that even if the person across the table has repulsive views, they still have power because they have the vote, so long as we do have a democracy anyway.

So talk about that idea of repulsive views because, you know, now everyone does junks on Twitter. Does that kind of dialogue happen in U.S. politics where people swallow things?

things. In private, it certainly does. But in public, it just doesn't happen because everything's performative. Yeah, everything is performative. And a lot of the differences seem to me to be about shallow differences or memes almost, rather than serious, substantive differences, even though there are obviously big divides and big issues facing the country, which we could talk about. But here is a current world example. Joe Biden, early in his presidential campaign—

Kind of boasted at some point that in his early career in the 1970s, he had dealt with segregationists in the United States Senate and he had occasionally gotten things done. And he was fiercely criticized by some in his own party for bragging about that sort of thing. Why would you associate with these people?

And if you're going to get something done, you may need that vote. And that's a thing that Lincoln did. He was even reaching out to literal slave owners, befriending them, working with them. When he became president and the Civil War came, started by the South over slavery, he tried to persuade some slave states and slave owners to stay in the Union. And he succeeded, drawing on some of his own personal relationships with slave owners.

I was just thinking about Dianne Feinstein, who just died, and Lindsey Graham was giving quite a persuasive argument about that because she hugged him and got a lot of attacks for doing so. And she was well known to be partisan, which used to be celebrated. Ah.

Um, Lindsey Graham was saying that, that, that she would reach across the aisle. That was the point he was making. Yes. And it was a good thing, but now, but of course she got attacked when she did that in a recent, uh, Supreme court nomination battle. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, McCarthy just lost his job for a bipartisan vote. Um,

And, you know, we don't even need to label that the right thing. It was just like the normal thing to pass legislation to keep the government open. And McCarthy lost his job over that. So there's clearly a different point of view that is widespread, that working with somebody on the other side is a really bad idea. I just want to underline a distinction. This is the distinction that I think people draw. I don't think...

that we have to stand up and cheer if someone works across the aisle to pass something that is bad, you know, to pass terrible legislation or to approve some disaster or to discriminate against some part of the population or any number of things. But you might, if you're thinking the way that Lincoln did,

consider or be open to the possibility that people on your side might find coalitions with voters who believe differently than you on eight or nine out of 10 issues, but on the one or two, you can work together. Right. So you wrote about this as Lincoln as someone who knew people, especially their interests. You're talking about their interests. Yeah. Why did he focus on it versus their beliefs or anything else since it was calculated? This was a revelation to me.

This is a thing that I did not understand, even though I grew up in Indiana where he spent a lot of his youth and I always read about Lincoln and have had books of his speeches around the house and so forth. I hadn't really thought through, how did he motivate people? What did he think about people? And he told his friend and law partner, William Herndon, that he believed that people were motivated by self-interest.

Mm-hmm.

He realized that he needed to talk with them about it. Like when you share an interest with someone, you may have a basis for collaboration. Well, obviously slavery is such an impossible issue to agree on. Then, ultimately, he did go to war, right? Ultimately, it didn't quite work out that way. But extrapolate it today on something like abortion, which is what—

You know, it seems like there's just no give anywhere. And even someone like Trump is trying to say, well, maybe 15 weeks or maybe there's a middle ground or –

Well, Trump is wanting to win an election, I suppose. He wants something that's going to appeal to people. And, I mean, he was pro-choice once upon a time, if memory serves. So, I mean, he's kind of frank about what he wants out of that transaction. But you made the remark about the Civil War, which I think is very perceptive and very important to talk about. Reaching over to the other side doesn't mean giving up your principles. There was a line beyond which Lincoln could not and would not go. He was asked—

By a slave owner. This is one of the 16 meetings. He was urged by a slave owner that he'd known for years named Duff Green, this newspaper man and propagandist, urged to accept a compromise with the South. And the compromise was they would enshrine slavery in the Constitution forever, along with a number of other things.

And Lincoln talked to the guy, but ultimately he and his party could not go along with that kind of compromise. And so there was—ultimately there was a war, which was started by the South. He did not—

always make a deal with the other side. And I would not pretend now that we can always make a deal with the other side, nor are we supposed to in a democracy. We're supposed to disagree. What we need if we want to improve the country is not everyone to agree with us, but for a majority, a governing majority to agree. Sure, but the middle path

you know, doesn't seem to get there because of the partisans on each side are so much louder. Well, that's certainly a problem in the House right now. Like a lot of issues, there is broad agreement. Gun control is a good issue. And yet the two sides or one side particular in that case really just is not letting it happen.

Like the minority does rule versus a middle path is what you're talking about, what Lincoln tried to do. Yeah, and like let's even for the purposes of argument suppose that Matt Gaetz is correct substantively. This is just for the purposes of this question. And I'm not even sure what his substantive position is, to be honest with you. But let's just suppose that that were the case. Yeah, let's say there's one lawmaker who is right about everything.

The way that democracy works just is not that one person governs everything and dictates to the other people from whatever position. There is a point at which

at which this is democratic and normal and within our traditions and checks and balances and filibusters and everything else we do. There is another point beyond which it ceases to be democracy at all and someone is playing some other kind of game. But talk about that idea because the tendency is actually for people to try to get along. Is there a difference, though, between engaging in with disagreement and both sides-ism? You know, I'm thinking of the Christiane Amanpour quote, "'Be truthful, not neutral.'"

Well, I totally agree with that. And I actually think that a lot of the answer to that in journalism is to be really, really specific. Make sure that you really know the story. The Republicans and Democrats are not alike. They each have their own foibles and failings and each have their own strengths and so forth. And we need to be really specific and honest about that.

And that doesn't mean we have to proclaim that this guy is evil and this person is 100% good. We just have to be really frank about it. You said that it's natural to try to get along. I would agree with that. There is a kind of human tendency. But there is another tendency that I think is really evident today, which is to say that it is horrifying and immoral—

to talk with someone who is wrong from your lights on a particular issue. And there's a tendency, even if you don't think it's immoral, to just say it's like weak and naive. I mean, I guess that's the Matt Gaetz view. Like, why are you dealing with these Democrats? You're betraying my side and you're being weak.

There's a quote actually from the New York Times today, which is very pertinent. But in today's Republican Party, doing the right thing is considered a transgression, not a virtue, a sign of unforgivable allegiance to the political establishment. How can the GOP come to any kind of common aid given the huge delta of interest between Democrats and Republicans and then within the GOP itself?

Well, clearly nobody has figured this one out, so I don't know that I am here, except that if we are going to stay in a democratic system, I mean, the winning side needs to assemble a majority. And if you're a democrat who wants to govern the country, that forces you to think in certain ways. Like, you need to be reaching out

to red states in some manner. And I don't necessarily mean change your positions, but somehow you need to have more of a purchase in red states so that you don't have the disadvantage that Democrats have in the Electoral College and in the United States Senate.

If you are a Republican, you would need to think about the way that you ran the last election. Kevin McCarthy would not have been unseated by a relative handful of his colleagues had Republicans run a different campaign and had a more normal result for the party out of power in the midterm election. They underperformed, which is why his majority was so small and he finally ended up losing his job.

So is your audience for the book someone like Matt Gaetz? Is he going to read this? I'm not sure he can read and be swayed by it. Who is the audience then? I would be happy if Mr. Gaetz reads this book. I was a joke on my part. It was very mean when I meant it. I understand. I understand. Note it as a joke. I'd be happy if he reads the book. I'd be happy if anybody reads the book. But I guess I am aiming at people who are interested in history and interested in taking the long view, which is a thing that—

I think Lincoln did, and that I at least try to do, it gives me a little better perspective and at least a little more confidence about our unsettled world when I think 100 years back or 150 years back. And I would hope that it gives me some idea of which things are important and which are not. I mean, that's one of the reasons that I say that some of our divisions are

their, uh, media creations, their memes, their, they're not really about, uh, uh,

anything for a lot of people. I mean, there are a lot of issues we discussed that don't really touch a lot of the people who get fired up and end up voting one way or another. And the long view gives you a little more patience, I think, with some of these things. So you told your colleague, Scott Simon, that while writing the book and simultaneously covering the news of today, that disagreements you focused on the books were, quote, really, really relevant to

to today. Does it feel like the same time to you, like right now? We'll get into people thinking more in a second. It doesn't feel like the same time, but the resonances to me are amazing. I

As you may notice, flipping through here, I gave a kind of title to each kind of person who came to meet with Abraham Lincoln. There is an activist. There's a conspiracy theorist. And I suppose one of the reasons that I did that, not to be too obvious, is that I feel that I have seen similar kinds of people today. We are operating within the same basic republic, although, of course, there have been changes and amendments, but the basic republic

separation of powers, Congress, President, Supreme Court, all the same as they were then. Divisions between state and federal government, all the same. And human nature is the same. And so when I read, for example, the paranoid conspiracy theories of Duff Green, it sounds really familiar. The enemy, the anti-slavery people, are bringing in immigrants to cast millions of illegal votes to end slavery.

Like, where have we heard that kind of theory before of connecting immigration with illegal voting? It's amazing to me that the kind of rhetorical tropes persist. Yeah, I think we heard it yesterday, I believe, Poison and Immigration.

Whatever. There was yesterday, I believe. Is there, you know, obviously Lincoln navigated the country during a civil war. There's a lot of chatter about how we're on the brink of a civil war now. A few headlines. The threat of civil breakdown is real by Stephen Simon and John Stevenson in Politico earlier this year. These are the conditions ripe for violence. How close is the U.S. to civil war by Barbara Walter in The Guardian last November? How to save the U.S. from the second civil war by Peter Coleman in Time magazine in October of last year. Do you think there's any merit to these headlines? Yeah.

No. Okay. I mean, I just, I'm not saying we can't have another civil war. I just don't see it right now. I don't see something like slavery that would cut between us so cleanly that the red states would peel off from the blue states or that you would have Marjorie Taylor Greene's national divorce or that the blue dots of cities would go to war against the countryside. Right.

But I want to emphasize that doesn't mean there's not going to be political violence because political violence has very often been with us. It was with us on January 6th. That was a new event to try to disrupt an election in that exact way. But especially in times of social change, there has been a lot of terrorism of different kinds or even state-sponsored attacks on people in different parts of the country. We'll be back in a minute.

Many people are worried about what's ahead, and you've reported on the last seven presidential elections. How do you look ahead? How will 2024 be different? Okay, let's think about that. First, I kind of avoid reporting on the future, so I may be a little evasive here.

We presume that we know both nominees. We presume that we know how it is all going to shake out. But of course we don't. We don't know for certain. I mean, we don't know that both of the nominees, the presumed nominees will be healthy a year from now. I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty. It could be that 2022 gives us a little bit of forecast of what it's like.

that you have Republicans who make a particular approach in particular places. You have Democrats who run somewhat on President Biden's record and somewhat more on the argument that the other side is very, very dangerous. I think we can presume a reasonably stable economy, although, of course, that's hard to predict. And then it comes down to a few questions about coalitions.

And I'll name two. One I've already alluded to. Democrats are in grave danger of losing the United States Senate.

And what they need to keep a majority in the United States Senate is to win several, most, almost all of about six red states that voted for Donald Trump or that are somewhat divided and purple states ranging from West Virginia to Arizona, which is turning blue, but not all the way. And they need to prevail in the majority of those races, which is going to be a lot of work. Republicans have their own version of that challenge.

And never mind what the polls say. The polls right now show Trump and Biden reasonably close. Anybody could win. And I would agree that if those two guys are the nominees, I wouldn't want to forecast for sure that anybody would win. But Republicans have had massive

massive erosion of their vote in suburbs that were Republican a generation ago, or even five or six or seven years ago. And they would need to persuade people in those suburbs that they're not too extreme, that they can get something done, that they're not solely about chaos, as McCarthy alleged that a faction of his party was. And so each party was

can expect that its fate will be determined by its success in building a broader coalition. How's that for an evasive but somehow on-topic answer? Well, okay, looming civil war or not, I'm going to ask sort of one more Lincoln-related question in his methods of governments. Where can people like Trump and Biden, where do they fit? How Lincoln-like or unlike are they?

Or each of them. Oh, okay. Well, Biden has been almost explicit about the comparison to Lincoln, which is not surprising since he was Obama's vice president. And Obama invited the comparisons to Lincoln by opening his campaign at the old Illinois State Capitol where Lincoln once worked back in 2008. And obviously, as the first black president, he has this connection to Lincoln. Biden's politics, though—

And I'm not going to say that he succeeds necessarily, but Biden's effort as a politician is to do a little bit of what I'm describing Lincoln doing, getting people under the tent for as much business as you can get done, regardless of whether you agree or disagree on everything. You think in Biden's case—we'll get to Trump in a minute—but do you think that's real or opportunistic? I think that—well, I—

I think that he wants to win. I think that he, you know, he is of a different generation. He has a particular style of politics that he prefers, which has been justified to the extent that he has won a hard-fought presidential election. Well, let me draw a comparison here, if you don't mind. Lincoln was...

person who in his political approach to slavery could be described as a moderate, as not all that radical. The solutions that he proposed for slavery before the Civil War were not that radical because he acknowledged that the Constitution and the structure of the country at that time made it almost impossible to destroy in the states that practiced it. So he said, let's

Let's contain it. Let's limit its spread. That sounded like a squishy kind of moderate position, but because it got him into power and because history moved in a certain way,

it became a radical position. It led to the South objecting, seeing the threat that this moderate position posed, starting a war for the preservation of slavery, which allowed Lincoln to destroy slavery, to strike a death blow against slavery. So you have Biden, and in no way am I saying, you know, Biden is on Lincoln's level. I mean, other people can judge Lincoln.

But he is matching, in some cases, relatively moderate rhetoric with really large legislation that is a lot of what progressives say they want and very upsetting to a lot of conservatives in the first couple of years when they had control of Congress.

They passed a lot of stuff. They did a lot of progressive things, even though his rhetoric, his rhetorical and political approach is not necessarily terribly progressive. So that is a kind of American style of politics. Now you want Trump, I suppose. Trump, yes, I do, I suppose. I mean, I would say that Trump can be said to resemble Lincoln not in his political style, but in his innovative and creative use of the media.

Um, Lincoln was, was not very active on Twitter, uh, or X as they now call it. And yet he was someone who wrote apparently hundreds of newspaper articles as a younger politician. They would typically be unsigned. They were occasionally satirical. They were often partisan, but they were getting his view out of the world. He worked the media really hard. His, um,

His friend and law partner, William Herndon, said of him that Lincoln never overlooked a newspaper man who had an opportunity to say a good or bad thing about him, which does remind me actually a little bit of Trump, who made himself extremely accessible to the media. That was his rise in the world. His cultivation of the media was at least, if not more important than whatever success he managed to gin up in business. And in Trump's

to the people who support him, there is something of a similarity with Lincoln who cast this image as a man of the people, as an ordinary man of the people, and people did feel, and even today feel, that he is a relatable person, even though he's in many ways really quite mysterious. Does his legal fate...

affect that? How does that play out? Or is it something he's using? Of course, he's doing it every day in court. He's doing it on Twitter or Truth Social, wherever he happens to be wandering. This is... You know, we talked about 2024, and I didn't even talk about the trials. I literally don't understand how this is supposed to work, that there are really going to be trials in March and another one waiting for later in March and another one in May and another one not even scheduled. And this is

Absolutely the same time that there are supposed to be presidential primaries. I have no idea how that part is supposed to work. The only thing that would give me hope that we will even get through that is that our systems have held together up to now. And I suppose it seems unlikely— Well, it seems to be boosting him. It seems to be boosting these charges. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there's—

There's a lot of history on this, which you probably know very well. As we're talking, I'm in Boston, where James Michael Curley, if I'm getting his name correctly, was repeatedly elected mayor of Boston, even briefly was governor of Massachusetts, and he was

in and out of prison constantly, constantly under investigation, and had been literally in prison early in his political career and went back later. And he was someone who made a very Trump-like appeal. The elites are coming after me. The elites don't like me because I'm like you and they don't like you. There's something very human and something very American about that. The thing that is new and disturbing and hard to get your brain around is it happening at the presidential level.

I mean, in some ways, it's unusual if someone who's considered to be an insurrectionist in 2021 is elected back into office in 2024. Kind of feels like if Jefferson Davis ran and won the presidency post-war. Hey, you know, Cara, I mean, there was a danger of that happening after the Civil War.

the Republican Party, this anti-slavery party, got to dominate the country and the government when 11 southern states said, we're out of here, and they took their representatives out of Congress. And when the war ended, one of the great conundrums of that moment was that the Republicans realized if we let the South back in,

Their representatives will be voting, and in combination, they would be Democrats almost exclusively. In combination with Northern Democrats, they might end up in charge of the country. And that caused an awful lot of struggle and debate. So I'm not even too surprised there would be that kind of debate.

So let's focus, speaking of that, the media's role. You talk about Trump and the media. The debate on how to cover Trump has been all over newsrooms and will be back again in 2024. You had your own encounter with Trump walking out of your interview. Sure.

back in January of last 2022. Newsrooms have not decided how to deal with this still. I'd love to know where you fall in this debate and if it's evolved. As I said, Christiane Amanpour said, be truthful, not neutral. Wes Lowry has talked about the need for moral clarity. Where do you fall in this debate over objectivity in journalism, especially now?

I want to go for a different term, if I can. Specificity. And I'm thinking specifically about Trump's trials. We have this tradition in the country, and it is a legal tradition, that people are innocent until proven guilty. And Trump now stands accused of violating various federal and state laws, and so he has a presumption of innocence in court.

I would even accept that he has a presumption of innocence among the public. I mean, I can't say for sure how a jury is going to find on all of these scores of counts and whether they're going to find he violated the law here or here or here. That is a legal matter. Right. But as a matter of fact—

We don't have to pretend we're not sure if he tried to overthrow the government. We don't have to pretend we're not sure if he tried to overturn an election that he obviously lost because he did that in the open in front of everybody. There are recordings, there are videos, uh, everyone witnessed it. Uh, thousands of election officials from both political parties testified to the results of the election. So I don't want, uh,

the news organization that I work for anyway, to be saying Trump allegedly tried to overturn the election. He tried to overturn his defeat. Although I will give, Grant will find out if that is found to be as a legal matter, a violation of some particular federal law. That's what I mean by specificity. If we can just be more exact about

a lot of these problems go away. Does that not get him off the hook in a lot of ways? Is it only because he's not been...

Indicted, correct? I don't know. He's been indicted. He hasn't been convicted. Really? How does it get him off the hook? Because we're still saying what we know. What we know is he tried to overturn his election defeat. And we even know how he did it. And what we know, he's been indicted. And we know he's been indicted. Yeah. I mean, we don't know what a jury is going to find. We don't know if he's going to remember to ask for a jury. We don't know a lot of things about how these trials will unfold. And we can cover them relentlessly and fairly.

Fairly to everyone involved, including the defendant, while also being honest and very, very frank about the facts that we know from our own reporting and our own eyewitness accounts. Okay. So when you're thinking about how to interview him, what would you ask him right now? Hmm. Let me think about that for a minute. Okay.

because it was a frustrating interview. It was illuminating in a way until he hung up. Explain what happened. We were on the phone. He called in. We had agreed to talk for 15 minutes, and he made a number of statements that were untrue, and I had an obligation talking with him in an interview that was going to be broadcast as an interview to correct the record a number of times, and then slightly less than 10 minutes in, he'd had enough and hung up.

And that was a challenging experience, although we did learn a little bit about his state of mind, his attitude and state of mind. It'd be worth talking with Trump again, I suppose, sometime. You'd want to interview him again. Yes, I would want to interview him in the way that I interview a lot of difficult people or people who are controversial people.

I might actually begin with a tactical question. I might begin just by asking, how do you plan to juggle your various trials with your presidential campaign?

Just tell me how that's going to work on a day-by-day basis. Do you think that there'll be days that you're in court and then that evening you go out to a rally? Do you think you'll schedule the rallies to be convenient to the courts? Do you intend to show up for your trial? So logistics, logistics. Yeah, I think that might be the beginning of a conversation because that's part of what we're wrestling with, isn't it? Like what on earth is it going to look like if any of these trials really begin on time? Right, right. So I want

if these coverages with someone like Trump or what's happened to the Republicans matter when people are self-selecting their news and they're in their silos and discredit anything else that they hear. You know, everybody has family members who do that have different points of view. Let me just say, Gallup reported trust in media has remained at an all-time low. It's never been high, but it's low. That's one of those questions that...

I would almost want to be more specific with an individual. When people are asked about the media, I think that the world is really complicated. Stories are really complicated. And we collectively have incentives to simplify them and make them a little more alarming and make them fly a little bit more and get more clicks and more eyeballs. So we probably deserve a little bit of the skepticism. And I think, again, like...

Laying out your case every single time is one limited answer to that very big problem. I wouldn't say it's the entire answer. I also think that people's views evolve over time.

And I think that happens with voters a little bit, too. We assume that everybody is dug in. And I think that's probably true for millions and millions and millions of people. But I think there are other people who evolve, who will check in or out of the system, or who will come to see things in a different way five years from now or 10 years from now than they do right now or tomorrow. Okay. So...

As a publicly funded organization, does NPR need to approach questions of objectivity or coverage differently than, say, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or even Fox News? I certainly hope not. I mean, there's an entire thing that we could go through about the public funding. Local public radio stations are started in communities across the country. They get the largest single source of funding from just listeners who call in on these pledge drives.

And they also get a small percentage of government funding, which helps for various things that they do. NPR then sells them programming. So NPR, I think, is pretty well insulated from some congressional appropriation or whatever. Yeah, they've tried over the different times. Is that pure and ideal? I don't know. But we could raise the same question about the advertisers of NPR.

any given podcast or of the New York Times, how do they, and how does the desire to please those advertisers shape the news coverage? I think the starting point is that we're all imperfect. We're all struggling with that. And we all kind of come from a point of view. There is this ideal that I think is, was never true and is definitely outdated of like,

purely objective reporting, just the facts. I think it was once called the voice from nowhere. You know, like there's just a voice telling you the facts. And I don't think that that's like a real thing. Like, you know, I'm a guy from Indiana. I'm a guy from Indiana.

I have a particular education. I have a particular set of experiences. I've interviewed thousands of people around the world, and I bring all that to the story that I have to tell. And then I kind of mediate that story in my news organization. I go back and forth with an editor who has a bunch of experiences and ideas and maybe multiple editors and a producer and any number of other people. And then it gets mediated again because we put it on the radio and it needs to be exactly

a certain length. Sure. And so my point is that the funding is not the sole influence or even necessarily a big one. But when you're thinking about it, don't you want more listeners? Because obviously liberals and Democrats like NPR. It's not like that's the trope. It's not one that conservatives listen to a lot. Do you think you need to be broader ranging?

Okay. There's been different studies, but yeah.

With more of the polarization of media, there are probably more liberals than conservatives, self-identified, and yet we have millions of all kinds of listeners. And as someone who's worked for the organization— And these are NPR internal studies? Do you know the percentage? Yeah.

These are NPR internal studies. Years ago, it was about one-third, one-third, one-third. I think if I went and got the information more recently, we would find that it's probably more liberals and fewer conservatives and a lot of people middle of the road. But I am confident that of the, I don't know, 50-some million people who use NPR routinely, that you would find many millions of

In all of those categories. And I'm even happy, if you've got time, to tell you anecdotally why I think that would be the case. Sure. Briefly.

And they're also interested in the world. And NPR covers the world, which a lot of news organizations don't, or they do it in a very shallow way. And they get interested in NPR while they're abroad, and it's often accessible abroad, and they come home and continue listening when they're on a base at home or when they are retired.

You go out into red states, rural red states, and you find farmers and people in rural communities who do a lot of driving. And they're listening to their NPR affiliates in their home states. It's their communities listening to the radio and getting informed on the world, which really matters to a rural state because they're selling their products around the world online.

NPR is not just New York or whatever headquarters of a news organization. They're based in hundreds of community stations across the country. And that's every kind of state because it's all the states. And that is why there's every kind of person listening. Okay.

That's a very nice ad for NPR. But let me ask you a question. You asked the question. I gave you the truth, my friend. I'm teasing you. NPR caught Elon Musk's ire in April. He labeled NPR's Twitter account state-affiliated media label. He also applied to the BBC. He later revised the label to government-funded media. By the way, he is government-funded himself.

How much does publicly funding put a target on the back? How did you—NPR responded by quitting Twitter, essentially. Their last tweet was on April 12th. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that. Do you think it was the right decision? Sure. Well, I find it interesting. It's not something that I did personally. I'm still on Twitter, and NPR left us as employees free to do what we wanted to do, and I'm still there. I think I still find you there, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I do. I never promised to get off or not. Yeah.

Exactly. I never get off. I was there first. That's my argument. But in any case, so I'm still there because I believe in talking to lots of different kinds of people and communicating with lots of different kinds of people. NPR made its decision partly for the safety of its correspondence overseas. And I think this is a real argument.

When you're a journalist and you travel overseas, as I have done, you want to make sure that people understand and treat you as a journalist and not some kind of government spy. Because when they think you're a spy, it massively increases your risk of being detained, perhaps in a very, very bad way.

way. It's a real thing. But there was another reason that they gave for dropping off of Twitter, which I found particularly interesting. And it was essentially the business case for not spending NPR's time on Twitter. They argued we're not getting any return on investment for the time that we spend posting all these stories on Twitter because of the however many people see a tweet, not that many of them necessarily click on links.

It is rather inefficient. It doesn't work. It is. And as a result, Twitter then gets advertising revenue from people looking at Twitter, but the news organization doesn't get any advertising revenue for people clicking through to the story. And I think there's probably something to that business case.

What did you all feel internally when he said you're state-affiliated media? I think we learned something about Elon Musk from the fact that he did that. It was, I guess, a little annoying, but there are periodic controversies about the news organization that I work for, as would be the case at any news organization that I work for. I feel like I've been around long enough that I've been through a few of these things. Yeah.

So I also recently interviewed Naomi Klein about her book Doppelganger, and she had an interesting maybe Canadian take suggesting that public broadcasting should have a larger remit, maybe even owning social media platforms or creating them. She proposed a BBC-run Twitter, for example. Any thoughts on that? I don't know. What do you think the odds are of that happening in the United States, given our politics at the moment? Less than zero.

Well, so there we go. So maybe we should talk about a thing that's practical. But, you know, I don't know. I mean, if there were a public media organization that wanted to start a social media platform, I guess they could try it and it would just be in the marketplace and we would find out if it would

If it would succeed. I mean, the thing that made Twitter a success to the extent that it was and maybe still is a success. I mean, I guess it's still there in any case, was that it was the clash of all kinds of people. That you could be not famous and suddenly talking to someone who was famous. That you could be wildly to the left and be watching the thoughts and ideas of somebody wildly to the right. Right.

In fact, that actually turned out to be like what made it a depressing site for a lot of people. But I guess you'd have to ask if public media could do that, could they make it that kind of really broad marketplace of ideas or would people find that just way too controversial? I don't know. It's sort of a panopticon, right? Speaking of prisons, it feels like that sometimes. Yeah, yeah.

Let me ask you the last question, then, since you just thought about everybody watching each other, and in this case, not trying to get along, but it could be used to try to get along where you see other people's points of view. How do you think Lincoln would do on something like that on social media? Ooh, I have some thoughts about that. I think that he would probably let a lot of trolls pass without comment.

One of the things that I realized in studying Lincoln that I had not before was that although he's eloquent with his words, he also used a lot of silences. In fact, he would even be silent to the point of being almost deceptive with his allies about what his plans and intentions were. And he did not often answer questions.

unless he saw a purpose in it for him. And that's something, uh, that I try to emulate myself when I'm on social media. I will sometimes respond to someone's angry remark or in my view, intemperate remark or just harsh, ridiculous attack. But if I respond, I'm not just there to call them an asshole. Uh,

I will respond in a way that gets out a message that I think is valuable for them to hear and also for the other people who will read that conversation. I will say something about me, something about NPR, something about the story that we're covering that I will take the opportunity of that conflict to send out. And that is a thing that I learned from studying Lincoln.

So he wouldn't just say, you know, dunk or put up a meme, a dank meme or things like that. No, no. I mean, he would mock people. I mean, there was a guy when he was a younger man. He did. He wrote a newspaper article that mocked a man so severely the guy eventually challenged him to a duel. There's more to the story than that, but it started with a newspaper article. He could get a dig in, but when he was at his best, as he nearly always was in his later career, he would only do that for a purpose.

he would have his own strategic purpose in mind when he spoke out at all. Well, on that note, I think he'd be great on social media. Steve, thank you so much. I really appreciate the discussion. It was very lively. I enjoyed this. Thank you. Thank you.

You just said Lincoln would be great on social media, but you really think that? I do. I think he's, because he's so good. I mean, look, the Gettysburg Address, I think it was, it's a very short little thing, and it's one of the greatest pieces of writing in history. He knew how to be pithy. But Steve just described to you someone who used a lot of silences.

who would only use digs or answer attacks if there was a gain for him. Like, does that feel popular? That's why he'd be good at it. He'd be a professional tweeter. He wouldn't be an impulse tweeter. I mean, I consider myself a bit of a professional tweeter. I wait. I wait and watch. I heard you on Pivot.

bragging about how you had more followers than Einstein? Einstein, yeah. No, no, no. It was just the guy who does this. Do you think that Lincoln would be more popular than you? Oh, yeah. He'd be hugely popular. I mean, of course, all these stupid chodes would be like, you're so woke. To Lincoln? Yes, exactly. I think Lincoln would be woke. I think Lincoln would just be silent and only speak once in a while. And I hardly see silence anymore on social media. It would be perfect. It would be the perfect...

rejoined her. He was very good at that. All right. Well, that is one of the— Him and Mark Twain I would love to see on Twitter. Mark Twain would be great on Twitter. Great on Twitter. I'm just saying some of these people would be—they already express themselves in that way. If you ever retire, you should start a stable of, like, parody accounts for all these people. You know what? We just interviewed New York Times pitch bot, the guy who does it, and I love him, and I think he's the best. I couldn't get better than that, so I think I'll just—I'll let him hold the crown. Well, I think we live in a world where there is pressure not to be silent—

And there was pressure not to engage with people you disagree with, as Steve was describing. You sounded actually very surprised in a moment in that interview where he, where Steve said how Trump was similar to Lincoln. Well, I now get his point. I think he was saying that they're charismatic people. Like, you can't deny the charisma of either of them, I think. And he was saying that they're both exceptionally good at using the media. That's right. Yeah, in their own ways. You could say that about JFK with TV, with Franklin Delano Rosewood.

radio and Lincoln himself just in speeches. I think he was an astonishing giver of speeches and debates and things like that. So I think every president has their skills in that way. And there's certain presidents who really stick out depending on what the media of the day is. And as I've written many, many times, Trump is the greatest Twitter troll in history. The other part of that conversation I thought was really interesting was around the role of journalists and objectivity in media. And

He talked about the view from nowhere. He called it voice from nowhere. He meant view from nowhere kind of objective journalism. But the history of newspapers in this country is actually objectivity is only a hundred-year standard. The history was that they were very partisan papers in the times when people like Lincoln or Jefferson and others were writing. Sure were. It's a new concept. And it's also – I have never hewed to it very much. I thought that –

You're not into objectivity? No, I'm not. I am. No, but you know what? We're going to go into an interview next week with Christiane Amanpour, and I think she's right. Truthful, not neutral. And I think that's exactly how I think of journalism. You can have a point of view, but it should be based in truth and it should be based in reporting truth.

One of the reasons I started All Things D and then later Recode was because I felt that reporters weren't allowed to say what they knew and have a point of view after doing reporting. We called it reported analysis, and I thought it was much more helpful to the audience than anything else because these people knew what they were talking about and they could come to a conclusion. And it's the difference, I think, between...

Something I discussed with Walter Isaac and being a camera and actually telling you what the photograph says. And I'm the latter. And there's a difference, by the way, between that and what some have advocated for, I think, Wes Lauer being one, around moral clarity, moral clarity, journalistic having some kind of moral clarity, right? Yeah.

I kind of agree with that a little bit, too. You think you have moral clarity? On some things. Once you do reporting, you have to have the facts and then make a conclusion, and that's okay. And I think journalists get nervous about it, and they shouldn't. I think the word objectivity, it just makes you not say, like, on one hand, on this hand, Trump thinks the election was stolen. On the other, others, most everyone else...

And proof shows that it's not. The first part, you don't even need to. You just say that's a lie, and this is what the actual truth is. Although there's the conversation that's playing out in slacks and...

newsrooms everywhere and people are mincing words, afraid to use words like lie or racist. Well, Trump's a liar. There, I'm not afraid. He's a racist. So there you go. Steve also had his version of be truthful, not neutral seem to be be specific, not objective. Be specific. I think truthful, not neutral sounds better. I don't know. I get it right away. Christiane is a... But specificity is important. A lot of people come out with very broad points of view on all kinds of issues that they're under-informed about. And specificity...

Yeah, it's facts.

broadcast yesterday where Elon was arguing with me about COVID and he was acting like he knew what he was talking about and I was like, you actually don't. And

I kept saying the word science. I'm so shocked everyone on my social media feed who's been an expert on everything over the last year. They're like experts on, yeah, experts on the vaccine. Now they're experts on constitutional law. They're experts on, I'm like, wow, so much time. I was, you know, interesting. Someone asked me why I didn't comment on what was going on in Israel on social media. I said, because I don't know what I'm talking about.

Like, why would I? I'm putting out stories of people I think know what they're talking about and saying, please read this. This helped me. But it was fascinating. I was like, we want your opinion. I was like, I don't have one. How about that? I'm going to, like, read the people who really know what they're talking about. The only thing I can say about that is I'm not for massacres. All right. Well, we have Christiana Ompour on to discuss that with us. And we're going to be covering. We're covering by talking to people who know more on this. Yep.

And Scott has a conversation out this week as well on his podcast with Fareed Zakaria, which is worth checking out, I think. Absolutely. Fareed has been doing great coverage, I think, over at CNN. Yep. As has Christian. All right. Want to read us out, Cara? Yep. Today's show was produced by Naima Raza, Christian Castro-Rossell, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a stovepipe hat for Halloween.

If not, you get to go to Halloween as Donald Trump again. But in any case, go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.