IN THE MAKING: They Don't Know What the F*ck They're Doing

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:19

With reaction and insights to the biggest stories and breaking news from the USA and a little bit of history thrown in. This is America, a history in the making. Hello and welcome to America, History in the making.

It's been a little while since we've done one of these, but. But I'm delighted to be joined on the podcast by a regular. But for today, she is our Washington, D.C. correspondent, Emma Long. Welcome.

Emma Long: 00:00:53

Hi, Liam. Good to see you.

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:55

Good to see you. It's been a while.

Emma Long: 00:00:58

It has.

Probably to the relief of regular listeners who listened to our coverage of the election and just got bored with having to listen to my voice for so long.

So, yeah, it's very good to be back and it's nice to see you and good to be chatting again about American history and politics and everything that's going on at the moment.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:18

Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know what we could possibly talk about. It's been very quiet, hasn't it?

Emma Long: 00:01:22

I was gonna say nothing at all to talk about in about the first five months of the Trump administration. I mean, nothing's going on at all. Right.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:30

Yeah, Predictably.

Predictably as quiet as you would expect with the first five months of a Trump administration and topped off recently by, of course, all the events that are happening not just in the US but globally with the Israel and Iran conflict. Are we calling it a conflict or is it a war? Are we saying war now?

Emma Long: 00:01:55

It's always a bit complicated, isn't it? If we're talking about it from the US Point of view, I don't think we're talking about it as a war.

Americans are quite careful, right, about calling things a war, especially if it's something they might be involved in. Because technically, wars require Congress to declare, even though they don't, they haven't always, throughout American history.

So here, when I'm watching the news here in Washington, D.C. i hear events in conflict in, but I haven't really heard them use war a lot. So maybe we err on the side of caution while acknowledging that there is.

There are military exchanges going on which potentially look an awful lot like war. Right.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:39

Yeah. Well, I mean, on.

On that note, I mean, at the start of this week, I think we were all gearing up for some long, ongoing conversations about the US Seemingly inserting itself into the conflicts between Israel and Iran. But, I mean, no secret here that we're probably both Democrats. But do we owe Trump something here?

Because for all the craziness and all the absolute unpredictability of this week, there has been a Ceasefire of sorts.

Emma Long: 00:03:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting, isn't it, that it's sort of. It seemed to be going one way and then suddenly it seemed to be going another.

And weirdly enough, discussions from the first Trump administration, even from some critics of Trump, and particularly this kind of, what seems to be this kind of chaotic approach to things where the administration is unpredictable, that things can change on a dime, to draw a local phrase where you're never quite sure what the next tweet is going to say that could change policy.

And actually, one of the things that people have recognized about Trump is, is while it puts his opponents off, right, it wrong foots them, they don't know kind of quite what's coming next.

And when you think about that, in terms of international politics, international relations, on one hand, that's dramatically destabilizing in terms of alliances and the ways in which other countries, particularly maybe Russia and China and those that are opposed to the US the things they think they might be able to do or might be able to get away with that might feel like they've got more leeway.

But on the other hand, when we're talking about to take this, you know, the situation with Iran as an example, it does kind of seem also that that wrong footing of other nations can sort of lead to sort of, well, we, we don't know what will happen next, so maybe we'd better be a bit more reserved about what we do because we can't predict, you know, whether he's going to send more missile, whether, you know, he's going to send more missiles or, you know, push us to the negotiating table some other way.

So I think even some critics would acknowledge that in some ways this approach is not helpful for the stability of things, but it can also have the impact that we've just seen recently.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:22

Yeah, I mean, it's a high risk move, isn't it? Well, basically, everything Trump does is high risk, but in this case, it seems to have paid off.

I think what's been really interesting when I've been looking at the reaction in the US is that there seems to be a fair amount of anger from Republicans because Trump, when he was campaigning up to the election, he did really bang on about how, you know, the US Were not going to insert themselves into stuff that didn't affect them. And now he seems to have done a bit of a 180 on that in bombing Iran. So, you know, he's got to surely win back some of those people, isn't he?

Emma Long: 00:06:11

Yeah, it's been Interesting, hasn't it, watching the kind of that MAGA group that was so cohesive, really, during the election and in the first few months of the administration fracture on this and this question about how far does America first mean staying out of things and how much does it mean throwing your weight around in places where you think you can be successful with it? So it is interesting that that difference between kind of the hawks and those who kind of want to stay out.

Difficult, always difficult to say with maga, but I'm not sure that the fracture over this will feed into other things. Right.

So I don't think that a fracture on American positions with regard to Israel and Iran, for example, is necessarily going to feed into divisions on cutting Medicare or, you know, issues around the budget. I think, you know, they're very good at dissembling. Right.

And taking each issue of its own, rather than kind of one issue bringing the whole house of cards down. But it is interesting to see that there are differences there, that it's not a monolith.

Liam Heffernan: 00:07:33

Yeah. And I wonder, though, I mean, I know we can say if this and if that, but just say Iran did retaliate with a bit more aggression than they did.

There were casualties or injuries to American citizens that would have forced America's hands to respond because Trump wasn't backing down on that. And then Trump does have an issue, doesn't he?

Because at that point, the US Is a lot more involved in the war and Trump, a point where they can't really back down.

Now, maybe it's just because I don't like Trump, but I struggle to believe that he's that much of a psychological genius, that he knew with certainty that doing what he did was going to result in a ceasefire.

Emma Long: 00:08:25

No, possibly not. Although one of the things you can say about Trump is that he's got hubris. Right?

He has that kind of sense of, some would say confidence, others would say something would describe it else in a different way. Right.

So it's difficult to know whether he kind of feels like the combination of him and the power of the office kind of should lead to these results. I mean, you see the frustration.

Just to change focus a little bit, you see the frustration that he hasn't been able to bring Putin and Zelensky to the negotiating table, Right, to end the war in Ukraine.

And it seems to me that part of that is because he thinks that they should be listening to him and doing what he wants in combination, because he is Trump and he is President of the United States, and they should listen. So Part of me thinks that maybe he did think that if he did this, that it would have that outcome. But it goes back to.

I think it goes back to something you said earlier. And I think it speaks to a lot of what comes from the administration, and particularly the second administration, which is high risk strategy.

It's a kind of winner takes all approach. So you either win big or you kind of crash and burn. And I mean, the consequences of crashing and burning are huge.

But I think the people that Trump has surrounded himself with, and Trump, in terms of his personality and his approach to this, are very much on the kind of we risk it all and expect that it will come out fine. I mean, just out of just sort of an interesting anecdote.

So I was flying on Monday, so after the news had broken that the US had sent missiles into Iran to attack the nuclear plants, but before there was any hint of a ceasefire and talking to people, I was sat on the plane with that sort of all of us flying to Washington, D.C. there was this kind of real concern about what we were going to find when we were on the ground.

You know, what did that mean for the nation's capital? Did it make it less safe? Was it going to make Americans less safe?

And while clearly the few people in the seats around me that I spoke to over the course of the flight does not exactly make for a representative sample of people, you get the sense that there was that some degree of unease amongst Americans too, about what it meant, potentially even what it still means longer term.

Liam Heffernan: 00:11:19

Yeah, well, there's still a certain amount of paranoia that is being fed a little bit by news outlets in the theory that Iran have this network of sleeper cells that they're going to spontaneously activate to sort of trigger a load of domestic terrorist incidents. And I think, particularly for America, that's going to be very triggering, you know, when they think back to like 9, 11 and times. So I.

I mean, you're on the ground there in D.C. i wonder, you know, what is the feeling now that there's an element of calm in all of this?

Emma Long: 00:11:59

Yeah, I mean, I can't say I've met lots of people since I've. Since I've been here this time around so far. But I think there is that.

That sense listening to kind of local news and, you know, the conversation I've had since I arrived, that kind of feeling of, I mean, you have to remember Washington, D.C. is quite a democratic city, so it's not a natural environment for people to be supportive or even praising of Trump.

So I Think I haven't spoken to anybody who's gone, yes, Trump did absolutely the right thing and, you know, showing our power and forcing Iran to back down. You know, I've not heard any of that outside of conservative news outlets. But there is, I think, some sense of relief, albeit it's still quite.

This possible ceasefire, or at least, you know, cooling of things still feels quite new.

So I think there's a lot of people sort of holding their breath to see whether it holds or whether there's something else that triggers the next round of whatever might come.

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:10

Yeah, I think what's really interesting now is seeing this war of words in. I guess it's typical Trump.

You know, he likes to spin the narrative and he likes to take credit for a lot of things, but he's claiming that the US has inflicted catastrophic damage on Iran's nuclear sites. Iran. And some intelligent sources are saying, actually, no, the damage isn't that bad.

But I feel like at this point, as you were sort of saying before, like, Trump really needs a win here because the Ukraine, Russia thing just didn't happen. And I feel like this is his chance to really get a huge kind of foreign affairs win under his belt.

Emma Long: 00:13:58

And I think he wants one. Right.

I think that was in part what the whole thing about the campaign, about being able to solve the Russia, Ukraine conflict in 24 hours, you'll remember, from sort of last year, I think that was part of what that was about. I think it's.

For all Trump's hubris, bravado, bluster, however you want to see it, what he likes is the acclaim that comes from having achieved things. And the Ukraine conflict is not bringing that. That he's been trying to push Benjamin Netanyahu in.

In Israel over Gaza, which of course is, I don't know about in the. The uk, but certainly here, there's practically no mention of anything to do with Gaza at the moment, and Ukraine just has disappeared off the.

Off the radar. So, you know, but.

But if we think back a week, such a long time in politics, that wasn't working out well because Netanyahu was, again, also not kind of following Trump's playbook. So, yeah, I think he sees potentially this as one to get the win.

I don't know if anybody who's listening saw the sort of impromptu press conference that Trump gave before he went to the Netherlands for the UN summit that's going on at the moment as we record this, but I was watching it live here and talking about that disconnect, right, between Trump, having said that they just completely disabled the Iranian nuclear capability. And other outlets, including neutral ones, saying, yeah, we're not so sure about all of that.

And he just went on a complete rant here about how this was the. This was fake news. This was the. Again, the lamestream media. He rolled out msdnc, which I haven't. I hadn't heard in a little while.

But he, you know, he's talking about that and CNN and the failing media, and he just went on a complete rant about anything that kind of challenged his narrative of it. And I happened to be watching it on the BBC here. And of course, he used an expletive, which, for purposes of this podcast, I won't repeat.

And the BBC was suddenly kind of scrambling to apologize for the expletive. But I remember thinking, that's not very presidential, is it? I'm not sure I can think of many.

I mean, lots of things you can say about Trump are not traditionally president, presidential.

But, yes, that kind of the reporter asking the question, right, about the difference between what Trump had said about the results and what others were saying, not even American outlets. Right. But they're saying just kind of triggered this whole barrage of the. Well, the same rhetoric that we've heard elsewhere.

But I think it probably does play into that sense that he, you know, he wants the win.

Liam Heffernan: 00:17:20

It also goes back to what we were sort of saying before that, you know, when Trump just, he has no filter. And when you rile him up and when you get him going, he says stuff he doesn't care about sticking to the script.

And that's why, I think when you consider the way he's acting, I don't think it's this sort of calculated chaos. I think he's just, he's acting how he wants to act and saying what he wants to say in the moment.

And the outcome, I think, is probably luck more than judgment.

Emma Long: 00:17:54

Yeah. I mean, I think it's possible.

I think the kind of the orchestration of the chaos, should we say, I suspect, comes more from the people that he has around him. Thinking back to the first administration, you know, Steve Bannon talking about this as a strategy. Right.

To overwhelm opponents so they don't know which battle to fight, and therefore they end up not fighting any of them or fighting one, but losing on others. I don't think it's. I agree. I don't think it's Trump's personality to plan and strategize, although I think it is for the people around him.

But I think that kind of, you Know, forgive the phrase in the context of what we're talking about, but they're kind of shooting from the hip, right?

The kind of, you know, I'm going to do what feels right or say what feels right is why a lot of people support Trump, because to them, it's kind of, yeah, he's, he's honest, he's truthful, he's not filtering himself, which is absolutely not something that they said about Biden or Obama.

This sort of, you know, one of the big criticisms of Obama, this idea that he was professorial, as if somehow that makes him less honest or less accessible somehow.

So for a lot of Americans, I think what we're talking about, which to those of us outside of the US Often feels frightening and unpredictable and not the kind of thing that we would want. We want the strategy. Right. We want somebody to have said, I've been given the predictions and the plans of this, and I know what.

There were predicted four possible outcomes, and we thought about them and we took the least, the least worse or the least damaging. You're not going to get that from Trump. You're just not. It's just not part of how he operates.

Liam Heffernan: 00:19:56

No, that's a fair point.

And actually, I should call out the news agents usa, because I think they had an interview, a fairly long interview with Steve Bannon not that long ago, and it's a hell of an interview because Steve Bannon, he does, he doesn't hold back. He's a very honest guy and it was very insightful.

If you want to kind of get a slightly better understanding into the mindset, not necessarily of Trump, but of the team around him and of the campaign and how they were orchestrating a campaign to suit Trump, I think he sheds a lot of light on kind of the mechanics that were running behind that. So, yeah, Anyone listening to this, if you do want to learn more, check out that because.

And I'll see if I can link to it in the show notes, because that was a fascinating interview.

Emma Long: 00:20:50

Yeah.

I mean, I often say to my, you know, when I'm teaching my students, they would kind of look like, look at someone like Steve Bannon or some of the others around Trump and say, they're just crazy. I don't agree with them. I'm not going to pay any attention to them and say, no, no, you have to.

If you want to know how somebody's going to respond or how the administration is going to respond or what it's going to do or how it's going to think about things, you actually need to pay attention. You need to watch Fox News, even if it's painful to your own, you know, political position. Right. Watch Fox News, watch the commentary programs.

Look on Breitbart if you can bring yourself to do it right. See what they're talking about and importantly also what they're not talking about and the way that they talk about it.

It's a kind of, I don't know, know you enemy type situation. But I actually think Bannon is kind of an interesting, interesting character.

And the fact that he's willing to be kind of open and upfront and kind of combative like that actually gives you really interesting insight. I haven't heard that episode of the newsagent, so I have to have a look.

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:01

Yeah, you should check that out. Steve Bannon is the guy, though, that you can tell a mile off that you're just waiting for the memoir and the film to come out of that.

It's just, it's a matter of time. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

But, Joe, I'm going to pivot a little bit here because we talk about Trump and the Republicans and obviously we've been talking about the Middle East a lot on this episode, but the Democrats are making a little bit of noise in the news recently.

They've, I mean, they've been very quiet since the election, but grimaries have been underway in New York City as the election for the mayor moves on. And there's been a bit of an upset. So I don't know if you've heard about this, but, yeah, I just heard.

Emma Long: 00:22:48

It on the news this morning. Andrew Cuomo, right, has withdrawn from the Democratic primary. And on one hand, you know, he's the known name, right?

Liam Heffernan: 00:22:58

Former governor of New York State as well.

Emma Long: 00:23:00

Yeah, exactly. So, no, but of course, people were sort of surprised that he ran again because he. There was a.

I forget the details now, but there was a scandal around him when he was governor, right, which forced him to kind of step away from politics for a while.

And it sort of seemed like he stepped back in when Trump won the election, as if somehow all the scandals around Trump made it perfectly reasonable for anybody who'd experienced a political scandal before to just step back into politics and pick up where they left off. So I think there was surprise when he announced.

I don't know how much surprised there'll be about the result in the primary, but certainly what I heard here this morning from some of the more sort of liberal, centrist commentators is this kind of sense that the. And forgive Me, I forget the name of the guy who's now won the Democratic nomination. Thank you very much.

That he kind of brought a real energy and enthusiasm to the campaign and talked about things that voters really wanted to hear about in a way that perhaps or way Democrats have been criticized in the election last year for not really doing so. There seems to be quite a positive response, at least from the Democratic side, from what I've picked up so far.

Liam Heffernan: 00:24:33

Yeah. And what I think is really interesting is that he's only 33.

He considers himself a Democratic socialist as well, which in my mind puts him in the same sort of camp as Bernie and aoc. And I think it's really interesting now that the response we're seeing from voters within the Democratic Party is almost like going the other way.

They're not looking for someone more central to balance. They're thinking, right, how do we polarize Trump right now?

And there seems to be more of a sway towards the left rather than the center within the Democrats.

Emma Long: 00:25:14

Yeah. I mean, you look at the crowds that Bernie Sanders is attracting to valleys and things that he holds right. And particularly young voters.

esses for Obama right back in: 2008

And sort of Democrats have had to be kind of grappling with that, along with all the other consequences of having lost the election in November about what to do. But, yeah, this campaign does very much seem to have tapped into kind of that younger Democratic generation.

But I mean, again, it's risky for Democrats. I mean, New York is an overwhelmingly Democratic city. I knew that.

What I heard this morning is that Democrats out, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in New York something like three to one.

Liam Heffernan: 00:26:34

Wow.

Emma Long: 00:26:34

So it's a very Democratic city. But we are seeing. So, you know, it's a very particular example which might tell us how things are going.

But I think we have to be careful because there's the other.

The other part of the Democratic Party that we've been seeing in some of those debates that you talked about in this kind of, you know, post mortem about how to move forward after the election and what's the best way to take on, if not Trump, then at least maga, which, you know, even if even once Trump Isn't president. That kind of mindset is still going to be around.

And you've got kind of that, the kind of the Democratic Socialist, slightly more left leaning wing, but you've also got the kind of more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, sort of centrist conservative Democrats perhaps, who are kind of going the other way, which is sort of saying we need to go back to the political center, we need to stop talking about, we need to stop talking about identity politics issues, kind of in a way sort of saying we've gone too far on issues like trans rights, gay rights even. They're not, they're not kind of saying it in quite that way because they don't want to lose the constituency.

They also don't want to be tarred with the brush of kind of discrimination or, you know, along those lines. But there is a definite split within the Democratic Party between those sort of two wings.

And you know, the primary in New York could suggest that the Democratic Party, the future of the Democratic Party is to move that way.

But it could also deepen a fracture within the Democratic Party which might actually make it harder for them to kind of pull a kind of coherent opposition to Republicans together, whether it's in the off year, elections, later this year, governor elections or so on. Thank you.

Liam Heffernan: 00:28:50

actually the goal here isn't: 2028

e like Shapiro will emerge in: 2028

And can they do that in three years? I don't know.

Emma Long: 00:29:40

Yeah, it's hard to say, isn't it? I mean, there could be some event or policy that kind of rallies people around.

I mean, one thing you can say about Trump and MAGA is that it has provided a unifying kind of momentum that the Republican Party didn't have for quite a long period of time. And now kind of the shoe's on the other foot, right? And the Democrats are now in that, that position.

And we spend so long talking about the American two party system.

That they're umbrella parties, that kind of, they encompass a wide range of different groups and different views, that they come together on certain things. But there are wings and factions and all the rest of it. And that's true.

But I think not everybody, I guess even now in the Republican Party is on board with, with maggot. But those who aren't are pretty quiet about it. But the Democrats are still fractured and part of me thinks they're asking the wrong question. Right.

I'm not exactly, I'm not a political strategist, so this kind of feels like me stepping out of my lane. But it feels to me like at the moment they're thinking how do we beat Trump and how do we win elections?

Well, actually, it seems to me the bigger question they should be asking themselves is what do we stand for as a party? Who are we now as Democrats having kind of become this broad umbrella party?

It seems to me that what they need is a kind of philosophical statement about what they are and what they stand for that they can then communicate to voters. And if all they're thinking about is how do we win the next election, that's not what they're doing.

And I don't see, I mean, I suppose AOC and Ben Sanders and some of the others are kind of having part of that debate within a particular part of the Democratic Party. I'm not sure how many people they're bringing with them yet. Doesn't mean they can't.

But I don't necessarily see other Democrats yet having that bigger discussion.

Liam Heffernan: 00:32:03

Doesn't it say a lot for Trump that in the last eight years, and that's not long in the big scheme of things, the Democrats have become a party that are self aware enough and confident enough in what they are as a party to give the likes of Barack Obama platform, which at the time was a huge deal as the first African American president, to suddenly just being sort of defining themselves by we're not Trump.

And the fact that, you know, even the Democrats define themselves according or relative to Trump says so much about the impact and the influence that Donald Trump has had on US Politics.

Emma Long: 00:32:53

Yeah, I mean, like him or loathe him.

And there are people in both of those camps and somewhere in between, I think historians, when they look back on this period with enough kind of time away and sort of a slightly more clear eyed view of it, will have to reckon with the impact that Trump has had on American politics. Is it a blip? Will things, you know, once he, he can't run for office again Once you kind of. Once the MAGA movement sort of loses the.

That kind of figurehead that his.

That is so charismatic in many ways, that has pulled all of that together, either there'll be somebody who can take that on, or there's a risk that once Trump can't run again, that will kind of dissipate, sort of back. That the MAGA crowd won't disappear, but it won't be quite as unified as it's been under Trump.

In which case this kind of Trump era, for want of a better term, could. Could just be kind of seen as a kind of blip. Right.

A moment of, I don't know, broad madness at a time of quite significant international developments and sort of global challenges. The alternative is that somebody kind of steps forward to kind of marshal that MAGA crown, who can take on the mantle of that.

In which case Trump ultimately has changed American politics permanently in many ways. But, I mean, either way, Americans are going to be dealing with the very real consequences of this for decades, if not generations.

And yeah, historians are always going to have to reckon with, with Trump. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's.

If you can take a step back from the, the kind of immediate, kind of visceral reaction to what on earth do you think you're doing, or you can't do that, or that's terrible or whatever, you know, for those of us on the political left, natural inclination might be to take a step back, back and try and see the big picture. Trump has been remarkably successful at doing what it was that he set out to do.

And, you know, for everything else, 75 million Americans, something like that, voted for Trump. It's certainly in the last two elections, one he won, one he didn't.

And you can't dismiss the fact that he has tapped in to feelings in the United States that are there, that any politician is going to have to reckon with. Right, yeah.

Trump or not, Republican or Democrat, however that is, it's given voice to people who felt like previously they didn't have a voice and given legitimacy to certain positions, whether we like those positions or not, that politics is going to have to continue to grapple with. So from that point of view, Trump has fundamentally changed American politics, at least for the near to midterm.

Liam Heffernan: 00:36:08

Yeah, yeah.

And if I was a heartless producer, I'd be snipping the little bit where you said Trump has been remarkably successful and posting that all over social media. Emma Long endorses Donald Trump, um, but luckily I'm not. Um, but I think that's wise words for you to end on anyway.

And I think there's, there's always stuff to talk about. I think everything that's unfolding in the US in the Middle east and around the world at the moment, we're never short of news.

So we'll try and get back on the podcast and do another in the making sooner than it's been this time. Um, yeah, come back and come back.

Emma Long: 00:36:48

And see me in a couple of weeks when I've had a bit more chance to explore Washington, D.C. i'll feedback from, from what I'm discovering from being here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:36:55

Yeah, I'll hold you to that. And, and for anyone listening just to timestamp this so we've recorded this episode at roughly 9am Eastern time, 2pm British summertime.

This is going to go out about 12 hours later. So just in case, you know, the world goes crazy and everything goes wrong over the next 12 hours. That's why we haven't spoken about it.

But I'm sure we'll jump back on the podcast if that is the case. But Emma, as always, thank you for joining me on the podcast. It's been, it's been great to catch up.

Emma Long: 00:37:27

It's been good. Thanks for the invitation to come back.

Liam Heffernan: 00:37:31

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