Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Ezra Klein:

There is also the possibility that Donald Trump doesn’t care that much about J.D, Vance’s highfalutin ideas about what MAGA policy should and should not be, and that instead what Donald Trump cares about is the fact that J.D. Vance will back him.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Ezra Klein. He’s a columnist at the New York Times and host of the Ezra Klein Show. Klein is an incisive commentator on national politics and author of the book, Why We’re Polarized. This week, we’re tackling one question, what the hell is going on with our politics? That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from Alice who begins with a disclaimer. “I have not read all of Judge Cannon’s ruling.” Okay, fair enough. The question is, “What is the correct way to give Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Trump V. US mentioning special counsel appointment and appropriations? No one else signed onto it. Now we have an entire opinion relying on it. Thoughts?” That’s a great question. Obviously you’re referring to the Judge Cannon decision from earlier this week in which she found that the appointment of the special counsel on a couple of different grounds was unconstitutional, therefore dismissing the indictment and meaning that for now at least the case cannot go forward.

You may recall that last week I was asked generally about the role and legal relevance of concurring and dissenting opinions. My short answer was they don’t really matter a whole lot, but I gave a few examples where dissenting opinions later became the majority rule, but it has something to add to that response and it’s relevant to your question. Sometimes concurrence can inspire or influence a judge in the lower court, and that’s exactly what appears to have happened with Judge Eileen Cannon in Florida. As I mentioned earlier this week, Judge Cannon dismissed Trump’s classified documents case in Florida and in that opinion she cites repeatedly to that lone concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas in Trump v. United States. As a reminder, Trump v. United States was the Supreme Court decision from just two weeks ago ruling that former President Trump has at least some significant immunity from criminal prosecution.

In that decision, Justice Thomas wrote separately from the majority to address an issue that hadn’t even been raised in the litigation or in the briefs, the constitutionality of appointing a special counsel to prosecute the January 6th case against Trump. He wrote, “If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people.” Now, as you pointed out in your question, no other justice joined his concurrence, not the liberals, not the conservatives, but in her decision dismissing the case against Donald Trump, Judge Cannon took up that exact argument ruling that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was in fact unconstitutional and referred to Justice Thomas’s concurrence throughout her opinion.

Now, to go back to your question, what is the right amount of weight to give to that concurrence? My answer is not a whole hell of a lot, given that it wasn’t briefed below in the Supreme Court, folks didn’t argue in favor of it or against it, no other justice including the conservative justices who made up the majority in the decision. For all of those reasons, I don’t think it should be accorded much weight. It’s a little bit odd how many times she refers to it and how much emphasis she places on Clarence Thomas’s opinion in that concurrence. I imagine that on the appeal, the appellate court in the 11th Circuit will have something to say about it.

This question comes in a tweet from Patricia and also relates to the Judge Cannon case. The question is, “Can the documents case against Trump be revived at some point or would it have to be filed in a different way? #NotaLawyer.” That’s a great hashtag. So obviously the first route to reviving the case against Donald Trump relating to the documents is to win the appeal. So without question, Jack Smith’s team will be appealing that decision by Judge Cannon to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals not clear how they will rule either way if it goes for Jack Smith or against Jack Smith, the other party will further try to appeal it perhaps to the entire 11th Circuit and then certainly to the Supreme Court. Will the Supreme Court take the case? Unclear. It’s as I mentioned on the podcast with Joyce Vance this week, the Insider podcast. There’s at least one vote to hear that appeal on the question of the constitutionality of the appointment of Jack Smith and that’s Clarence Thomas.

As I mentioned a few minutes ago. Whether there are sufficient additional votes is unclear. That process by the way of appealing to the 11th Circuit, perhaps to the entire 11th Circuit and then to the Supreme Court is going to take a long, long time and depending on what happens with the election, the result of that appeal and this constitutional question on which Judge Cannon is a lone island won’t be resolved till well after not just the election, but the installment of the next president, whether it’s Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Judge Cannon essentially ruled that the special counsel in this case has a certain kind of significant and considerable authority and because of that level of authority that the person is exercising with a modicum of independence from the Justice Department, although not complete independence, that person under her reading, which again is an outlier reading, but under her reading that person needed to have been appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

Jack Smith was not appointed by the President nor confirmed by the Senate. He was appointed by the Attorney General and she made a finding that wasn’t sufficient, that was outside and beyond the powers of a cabinet officer like the Attorney General. So under her ruling, someone like Jack Smith is not appropriate as a special counsel, but someone like David Weiss, the special counsel who’s overseeing the investigation prosecution of Hunter Biden is okay because David Weiss, although he has the same title special counsel as Jack Smith was previously appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate as the sitting United States attorney in Delaware. So that tells you that I guess it’s possible feasible and some people have mentioned this possibility that Jack Smith and the Justice Department could decide to give the case over to a Senate confirmed United States attorney in Florida or New Jersey or perhaps DC or elsewhere if there’s a venue and have that person refile the case that would cure the infirmity That’s at the center of the decision by Aileen Cannon.

Now, although that’s possible given the timing, given the proximity of the election, given the fact that Donald Trump could get reelected and will likely stop these prosecutions by causing his justice Department to abandon them, I don’t expect that they’ll do something like that that might bring criticisms of judge shopping. So I think they’re going to go the appellate route. In fairness to Jack Smith’s office, they must be rather upset, perhaps even seething over the way that this went down in Judge Cannon’s courtroom for a number of reasons. But among them, the Smith team literally asked Judge Cannon for an opportunity to brief her should she be seriously considering and validating the appointment of Jack Smith on other remedies that would fall short of dismissing the indictment altogether and they could brief her on the possibility of simply reassigning the case to other federal prosecutors or putting most of the existing prosecution team under the supervision of a Senate confirmed presidentially appointed US attorney and she said no, she didn’t need that briefing. Although that remains a possibility, I think just the nature of events as they have unfolded, the proximity of the election and the uncertainty of who might win the election, probably counsel against their taking that course, but they could.

By the way, we also got a number of questions about the verdict in the trial of Senator Bob Menendez and I’ll have something to say about that verdict at the end of the show. I’ll be right back with my conversation with Ezra Klein.

THE INTERVIEW

The Republican National Convention gathered this week in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at his rally over the weekend. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein joins me to talk about this unprecedented election season. Ezra Klein, thanks so much for being on the show. Welcome back.

Ezra Klein:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a lot to talk about.

Ezra Klein:

Why, what’s been going on?

Preet Bharara:

A couple three things to talk about. There’s a lot to talk about with respect to politics and how recent unprecedented events affect the outlook for the future. Before we do any of that, we’re now a few days from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and before we talk about what that means for the race and what that means for politics, I wonder if you have a view on what that says about the state and level of political violence in this country?

Was it a one-off? Is there a direct line from some of the other things that have happened including January 6th to this act of violence? We’ve also learned in the last number of days, this is not domestic, but that there were forces in Iran who were contemplating a plot to assassinate Donald Trump. Do you have anything to say about the fact that Joe Biden had talked about lowering the temperature in this country and it seems that we’re at a high mark not just because of climate change, but politically as well. Any thought on that where we are?

Ezra Klein:

I don’t have a view backing out of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. We know there are quite a number of assassination attempts that happen in the country. That was a very serious plot against a Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The scary thing about the assassination attempt against Trump is that it came so close to succeeding. It seems, among other things, to have been a quite profound failure on behalf of the Secret Service who did not have an agent posted on the relevant roof because they felt the relevant roof would be unsafe for the agent to stand on. But I think, look, I am not a security professional, but my assumption would be the kinds of people who try to assassinate political leaders are highly risk tolerant. Maybe thinking that a roof looks dangerous to stand on is not actually going to deter them. So first and foremost, it seems we had a terrible failure. In terms of what it says more broadly than that. I wouldn’t venture to guess yet.

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask you a different question. What does it say to you that on both sides of the aisle there are roiling conspiracy theories? There are some folks on the left who in the immediate aftermath of the event filled up social media with suggestions, not suggestions, but conclusions that the whole thing was staged because it was a good photo op and it was orchestrated and organized by Trump himself, which is absurd for a number of reasons. And then on the other side, people maybe, I don’t if it’s the same degree or not suggesting an even concluding that this was an inside job and it was an attempt on the part of Biden or his supporters to assassinate Donald Trump, but it failed. What does that say about where we are?

Ezra Klein:

There’s a theory in public safety, which you probably know better than me about what conditions are… What gets called criminogenic, right? What conditions are encouraging to people to commit crimes? And what I would say about social media is social media is conspiracy theory-ogenic.

That it is a space in which conspiracy theories are encouraged. They get high engagement both negative and positive. We end up talking about them so they have this line into more mainstream media spaces which they might not otherwise breach if this was a different time and these were more confined to people talking to their neighbors or sending around email forwards or using the venues that were once more popular for conspiracy theories. So the truth is I don’t think that much of it. I’m not sure it tells you that much except for something we already know, which is that social media is a place where extremely extreme theories, opinions, perspectives tend to prosper because the structure of social media is designed to reward that kind of thinking.

Preet Bharara:

So the Republican National Convention is underway. You and I are recording this on Wednesday, July 17th, so we haven’t seen the conclusion of it yet. Big night tonight, J.D. Vance is going to speak tomorrow, the former president is going to speak. Do you have a sense of how unified they are and how much of that will persist? How do you think the Republican Party is doing?

Ezra Klein:

I think this is the most unified Republican party we have seen since George W. Bush’s second term convention, since the ’04 Convention. I think part of that is a sense that Donald Trump is hurtling towards a huge victory. I was just talking to Tim Alberta, the Atlantic reporter who had been embedded with the Trump campaign for some months. I mean, they believe they’re going to win. Functionally, everybody believes they’re going to win, including elected Democrats at the moment as they keep telling, not just Axios off the record, but me off the record, the degree to which a Democratic Party seems resigned to losing. They expect Joe Biden to lose but do not really think they can do that much about it. So they’re just marching forward in this grim procession towards predicted defeat is-

Preet Bharara:

The baton march.

Ezra Klein:

It’s a little shocking to watch and to hear people rationalizing to you in private conversations. The other thing is that something that I think we are seeing in this Republican convention is that it is long been noted that the Republican Party seems to have collapsed into being a personality cult behind Donald Trump, which is true, but in becoming the property of one man, the Republican Party also become more malleable. So we are seeing more ideological change and moments to me of flashes of things that are actually ideologically interesting happening on that stage this year than we have in other conventions. I mean the Republican Party, it is too early to say if it will change, but some things in it are changing. It was very striking to see the head of the Teamsters giving a keynote speech on the first night. J.D. Vance, there is a lot to say about him and he’s in many ways a complex political text to read.

Preet Bharara:

You have an open field field here to talk about him, sir.

Ezra Klein:

He is ideologically interesting and he’s somebody who thinks hard about policy comes out in places I find more congenial and then dramatically less congenial.

Preet Bharara:

Can we analyze that for a moment? Because the most notable thing J.D. Vance is known for, and I don’t think this is an ideological issue or it’s not in the dimension of ideology, is that he compared Trump some years ago to Hitler said all manner of terrible things about him as a thoughtful bestselling author, Yale Law grad, adult, fully formed brain and mind, and he’s recanted all of that and become such an ardent supporter on the flip side that he’s now the choice to be the vice president, one heartbeat away from the presidency if Trump wins again, is that only a flip of political opportunism or did he manifest changes in his ideology along the way for it to fit the flip-flop on Trump?

Ezra Klein:

First I would say a couple of things. So one, the path he has traveled, there is a very normal path inside the Republican Party. It was very common in 2016 to amass these roll calls of the terrible things that every one of Donald Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary had said about him as they now fell in line behind him, as they endorsed him, as they took cabinet jobs. I mean the things Trump said about Rick Perry and then Rick Perry becomes head of the Department of Energy, of course, a cabinet, an agency Rick Perry had said that he would eliminate the things that Ted Cruz said about Trump, the things Donald Trump said about Ted Cruz and about Ted Cruz’s wife and about Ted Cruz’s father, very weirdly suggesting Ted Cruz’s father might’ve been involved in the assassination of JFK, but Ted Cruz became a complete lickspittle towards Trump.

So this is a common path. The question of is it mere opportunism? I’ll offer you my observation on this from covering people in politics for a long time. A lot of my 2020 book on political polarization is about political psychology. Insincerity and cynicism I think are overused explanations. It is very hard for most people to maintain high levels of cognitive dissonance. And so when they need to change their mind or when they begin changing their mind, that process can be internally violent, but end with them in a place that is entirely sincere. And to maybe offer an example of this that is a little bit more easy to absorb for people listening to this show, the Never Trump Republicans who were hardcore Republicans in 2012 and thought Democrats were terrible and thought Barack Obama was going to end the free enterprise system and it was destroying America’s prestige abroad, many of them have become more hardcore partisan Democrats than liberals like me. Now, the conversion process for them as they were repelled by Trump has ended with them being the most hardcore supporters of the Democratic Party to some give Joe Biden, I mean Stuart Stevens, the former Romney campaign head. I mean he’s just out there pumping for Biden nonstop, right? Many of them, they’ve undergone this full conversion process.

Preet Bharara:

Is Liz Cheney in that category?

Ezra Klein:

I wouldn’t exactly put Liz Cheney in that category. I think she’s more focused as an anti-Trump figure rather than a pro-Democrat figure. But this thing where people undergo conversion is not new. I don’t know if Vance’s conversion is initially motivated by sincerity, but I think there are threads of resentment that were there in what he was doing with Hillbilly Elegy, his first book, which I think had a very different line on what was leading to poverty in the regions that he grew up near and identifies with, that his family is from, and then what he says as a political candidate. But I do think that a lot of people, he was able to find his place in the Trump cosmology through his resentment of the people who were attacking Donald Trump and in attacking Donald Trump or attacking the people Vance identifies as his people. If you’re trying to take him generously, and I try to take people generously.

I would say that Vance begins moving towards Trump, not as a pro-Trump figure, but as an anti-anti-Trump figure. And then Vance finds his way ideologically into the national conservatism world, which we can talk about what that is and how it differs from other forms of conservatism. And that from there, Trump, I’m sorry, Vance finds his way into understanding Trump the way many of these people understand Trump.

Not as necessarily in every respect an admirable human being, but as a kind of mystic interpreter of the wisdom and resentments of the people they identify as the common man. And so Trump becomes, they see Trump, like I said, like a mystic figure. He’s like the ayatollah of national conservatism, not like the technocratic president of national conservatism, and that gets Vance all the way there. And then I think there are elements of Vance becoming what he felt he needed to become in many respects. I think that the rage and contempt and antagonism with which he speaks about liberals, I mean Vance is guy who was on my show back in the day and then he once said that it’s like people like me and David Brooks really lost our mind in the Trump years, but we didn’t change at all. He changed dramatically.

Preet Bharara:

Do you believe this theory, some people have suggested that kind of on a parallel with the rage and grievance that Donald Trump felt when he was humiliated and mocked by Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents dinner that J.D. Vance was enjoying a great life, a lot of acclaim from unquote elites, liberals included. And then his book, which was highly acclaimed and a bestseller was made into a movie and the movie failed and was made fun of by a lot of people in Hollywood and elsewhere. And that deepened his disdain or caused in part his disdain. Is that too facile a story?

Ezra Klein:

I don’t buy that at all.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Ezra Klein:

I really think that it is important. I think liberals are so hung up on who Vance was that they’re not really trying to take seriously who he is. It’s like on some level, I don’t care what leads to Vance’s conversion.

Preet Bharara:

I think the issue for a lot of people is they don’t buy that there’s been a bona fide conversion, a feeling thought approach to Trump, approach to ideology that he still harbors and holds all of those negative feelings and views. He’s just masking them. You are saying we need to take seriously that there has been an actual conversion of his thought.

Ezra Klein:

Yes, but I guess I’m saying something a little bit deeper than that, which is a way of apprehending politics and figures in politics. And look, I’m perfectly happy to be called naive on this, although I think I’m actually in a way more realistic or cynical than a lot of people. People go through ideological conversions all the time. I mean, that’s why I use the example of the Never Trumpers. I don’t think the people who look at J.D. Vance and say there’s nothing sincere in that conversion. Look at the Never Trumpers and say there’s nothing sincere in that conversion. And I think the reason is that they can emotionally connect to where they are now, just as myself and liberals like me can emotionally connect to where J.D. Vance was before, but they can’t emotionally connect. There’s an empathic chasm for many in believing or understanding Trump is appealing.

I think for many liberals, he’s so repellent that to get over the jump where you actually go from finding a repellent to finding him appealing, seductive, admirable, it’s impossible. But obviously many people do it right? I mean many, many people think Donald Trump is magnificent, important, right? A world historical figure. And I really think that a beginning place of a certain kind of political wisdom, or at least a place where I think you can learn more, is to try to ask why people would authentically feel that way as opposed to assuming that there must be inauthenticity in it. A different way of putting this might be, I don’t think liberals wander around.

I’m now being like Ted Cruz does not actually Donald Trump ,that saying Marco Rubio has not actually come to a deep kind of intuitive accommodation with Donald Trump. And I don’t know, I’ve watched Vance and his political rise. What I find harder to believe about him is the way the sort of temperamental gentleness in him turned into a deep-seated contempt and antagonism. Something in him curdled, or I would be willing to believe that he adopted a tone had not adopted before because he was convinced that that was what the politics of the era meant. But whether I believe that he’s actually become a kind of national conservative, I actually do believe that Vance believes what he believes now or at least believes it for now.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, that curdling and that tone, usually you see, generally speaking in people who’ve been around the block a few more times and have had a few more revolutions around the sun than 39. But just to persist on this just for another minute, when we compare the conversion of someone like J.D. Vance with respect to Donald Trump to the Never Trumpers, what exactly is that conversion and how are they comparable? The point I’m making

Ezra Klein:

There is that often when people go through a conversion, they don’t become a moderate version of the thing they’re converting to. They become the most full-throated And in some ways, unsubtle version of the thing they’re converting to a lot of the never Trumpers to me, and I like them, this is not exactly meant to bash him, but I have found it to be very interesting. They’ve become a crude version of liberals and Democrats. They believe everything down the line with very little variation. I mean, I remember watching Bill Kristol begin to argue that Republican tax cuts were deranged. I was like, Bill Kristol is arguing Republican tax cuts are deranged. Where was he the last however many years on this? And I see this sometime, and I see this with people like Vance, but look, you see it with religious people, right? I know people convert into religions and they often become much more dogmatic than people who were raised inside those religions. Conversion, as I was saying before, there’s a psychological violence to that process. It almost requires you to kill an old version of yourself.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, I guess a couple of things. One is unlike with the Never Trumpers, it’s a little convenient for the conversion in the direction towards Trump who dominates the party and has been renominated and maybe reelected with a fairly decent likelihood that conversion is consistent with J.D. Vance’s and his cohorts. It’s consistent with and aligned with their ambition, and they’re forward-looking about their own careers, whereas actually the Never Trumpers are in a worse political position, in a worse position with respect to power than before. And I don’t know that it’s correct or accurate or wise to say that somehow more noble or more appropriate, but there is that distinction.

Ezra Klein:

Well, I mean that wasn’t quite true in the Biden years. They’ve been much closer to power in the Biden years than they would’ve been otherwise.

Preet Bharara:

I know you said Liz Cheney doesn’t fall in this category, but the people who have become violently anti-Trump who were Republicans generally speaking, are without a base and without power.

Ezra Klein:

Liz Cheney is a different, I agree with you that Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney sacrificed something, right? She’s not a pundit, she’s not a commentator. She was a member of house leadership and she gave up her seat to oppose Donald Trump,

Preet Bharara:

Adam Kinzinger too.

Ezra Klein:

Yeah, I think I would agree with you that there is a different set of considerations for elected officials, but again, the point I’m making is about ideological conversions, which is a slightly different point and look, I mean, I don’t really see-

Preet Bharara:

Ezra, what is actually the… If we can distinguish between a conversion with respect to a particular figure, and that seems to be a lot of what’s going on with J.D. Vance versus an ideological change from being, for example, somebody might be opposed to every form of abortion with no exceptions, then moderate on that, that’s a change of ideology or going from protectionism to anti-protectionism. What I guess I’m not sure of, and I haven’t studied it deeply enough, is what is the actual ideological other than the tonal conversion and rhetorical conversion, what’s the ideological policy-based conversion that J.D. Vance has undergone other than once hating and despising a man and finding him contemptuous and now finding him to be the savior for America?

Ezra Klein:

So the ideological conversion for Vance, and it’s funny because I don’t really want to put myself as a J.D. Vance expert, you might want to have Ross Douthat on or someone for that, but the ideological conversion has been, to me, the interesting part of him, and it’s I think very important to understand about him if you’re sort of coming to this from the outside, that he’s considered among the people trying to construct a cohesive ideological platform around MAGA intuitions to be the chief ideologist in the Senate. He is considered to be the person doing the most ideological work to fashion something coherent out of what for Donald Trump is intuitive.

A good place maybe to start, if people want to start somewhere, is, I was just listening, walking around yesterday to the speech J.D. Vance gave at the fourth annual National Conservatism Conference, which happened roughly a month ago, two months ago, something like that. And the National Conservatism Conference was started by Yoram Hazony and some other folks trying to build, and Hazony is an Israeli political thinker trying to build an idea of a conservatism that was much more built around blood and soil nationalism.

J.D. Vance:

The real threat to American democracy, it’s not, certainly not Donald Trump, it’s not even some foreign dictator who doesn’t like America or our values. The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more. That is the threat to American democracy.

Ezra Klein:

And I have a lot to say about that and a lot of very profound disagreements with it. But it is a reformist faction, a highly ideological reformist faction inside the Republican Party. And I think Vance has been at every one of those conferences going back to 2019, and these are not like the conferences of all the people in power, right? Mitch McConnell does not speak at this conference. This is a highly ideological subgroup that is basically saying a couple of things. It is making an argument that understanding nations as cohesive and contained things where the national community should have vastly more moral weight than it is currently given, that that should be the center of politics. That foreign policy should be much more based around national interest and much less based around values. It’s why you see Vance and others like him becoming much more isolationist.

One of the things that really repelled a lot of Never Trumpers, of course, who were primarily neocons, including Liz Cheney, is that Trump and this faction’s foreign policy views are much more isolationist and they actually have a very profound ideological disagreement. Whereas Biden is very pro-NATO, he’s a sort of humanitarian interventionist, et cetera. And they tend to believe that Republicans or these national conservative movements should be pro-worker in a way that they have not been. And that does not mean pro-worker in the way Democrats often think of it or how Democrats would get there, but they are union curious. I would say one reason you saw that the team’s first president up on the stage on the first night of the RNC, they are much more open to things like the child tax credit. And the reason they think about this is because they believe that one of the great failures of speaking here in the American context, Republican Party economics over the past however many decades, has been to break apart the economic structure that allowed you to have a two-parent family with a single male breadwinner, with a mother watching a number of children that is larger than two, and that is the core unit of what makes America great. And politics should be, I’m sorry, economics and for that matter, politics should be subservient to elevating again, that more traditional vision of how things are structured.

And so within that, they’re also very mad about woke ideas and gender ideology, as they would call it, all these things that are breaking this more traditionalist view of the nation, the family and the community. So in many ways you can understand this, I think as a emergence in America of an ideological tendency that is very, very common in other parts of the world, which is social conservatism, Christian conservatism. These parties in the quadrant of more economically populist, more socially traditionalist, which has largely been suppressed within the Republican Party until Donald Trump broke that suppression. If you listen to the speech J.D. Vance gives at that conference, I don’t think you can listen to that and hear him and not hear someone who’s been doing a lot of ideological work. He’s extremely critical of the Wall Street Journal, really attacks him in a way without provocation.

He’s up a series of points about how simultaneously of a Republican Party establishment that thinks we need to be ready to fight a war with China, but is also shipping American manufacturing and industrial capacity out to China. And his argument is, how are we going to fight this war with China that you all want if we’ve given up all of our manufacturing prowess to China because it is industrial capacity that wins wars, he gives a very long and strange, in many ways, to me, discourse against immigration about how it makes nations poor, which it does not do, but he goes through a large thing about how it makes housing prices higher, and I would say you want to lower housing prices by building more housing, but he has a whole thing about immigration economics in there. The guy’s a highly, highly, highly ideological thinker at a level Donald Trump, frankly is not. A lot of people are now trying to build ideology around Trump, and that is what Vance is.

Preet Bharara:

Well, to hear you talk, one could argue then, and maybe you have this view that Donald Trump is actually sophisticated enough and farsighted enough to have selected a perfect and deaf choice to be his vice president because he can do that ideological work to consolidate and crystallize whatever Trumpism is, into the future, when Trump is gone. Is that what happened here?

Ezra Klein:

I think with Trump, you have to accept everything as existing in a foggy cloud of probability distributions. And so I’d say a few things.

Preet Bharara:

Is it accidental political genius?

Ezra Klein:

Well, it doesn’t have to be political genius or not. I mean, it might be that it works out exactly that way. It also might be that J.D. Vance gets in there and imagines that he’s going to be the chief ideologist of the MAGA movement. But Donald Trump, as he was musing to Bloomberg picks Jamie Dimon to be Treasury secretary and everything J.D. Vance is saying about how Lina Khan is great, and we should have this robust antitrust enforcement and we should get rid of this globalized financialized capitalism. And the guy who’s actually running a lot of economic policy for Donald Trump and who Donald Trump respects as a business person is Jamie Dimon. We don’t know if that will happen, but it’s the kind of thing that repeatedly happens around Donald Trump. Why Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance, I wouldn’t say I know. There’s a theory that he was choosing an heir to the MAGA movement who can be the ideologist and he was not.

It’s also possible he just likes what I would call this sort of other stream of it, which is Vance’s populist aesthetic. I’ll give a way of thinking about this, which may be pulls these ideas apart. I just have on my show, Oren Cass, who is Mitt Romney’s, former domestic policy director in 2012, underwent this huge himself ideological conversion founded group called American Compass, which has become like the nerve center of this sort of reformist, populist, conservative group in the Senate and in Republican party politics. And Oren Cass has no populist aesthetic, right? He’s not an angry person, he’s not a contemptuous person. He and I had a very interesting, and for me very enjoyable conversation and things we agree on and things we disagree on, but he is sort of creating populist economic policy for Republicans without any kind of genuine populist aesthetic. J.D. Vance, if you listen to interviews he gives to Steve Bannon, to Dr. Carlson, et cetera.

One dimension of him has been to really be an unbelievably contemptuous jerk to Democrats, to liberals, to call them these miserable cat ladies who just hate their life choices, and that’s why they have the politics they do. And then there’s this other side which is actually creating this populist economic or backing this populist economic policy. He’s combining this sort of policy here of the populist conservatives with this in-your-face, contemptuous, antagonistic political style. And that is, it’s possible that what Trump responded to was that in-your-face contemptuous political style. It’s also possible that what Donald Trump responded to was a sense that J.D. Vance would be the kind of person who would’ve done what Mike Pence did not do and refused to certify the 2020 election.

Whereas a Marco Rubio, a Doug Burgum would’ve done what Mike Pence did and certified something like the 2020 election. And so there is also the possibility that Donald Trump doesn’t care that much about J.D. Vance’s highfalutin ideas about what MAGA policy should and should not be, and that instead what Donald Trump cares about is the fact that J.D. Vance will back him in the breach and will fall in line when Trump needs it most, which is when some of these other figures would say, “No, my commitment is to potentially American institutions not directly to you.” Vance has certainly signaled that is not the stance he would take.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Ezra Klein after this. I want to shift our focus a little bit more to the Democrats. Here’s something you wrote or said, “I think one reason Democrats react so defensively to critiques of Biden is they’ve come to a kind of fatalism. They believe it is too late to do anything else, and if it’s too late to do anything else, then to talk about Biden’s age is to contribute to Donald Trump’s victory. But that’s absurd.” And one of the reasons you said that’s absurd is because it was February, you wrote that in February and you said, “Fatalism this far before the election is ridiculous. Yeah, it’s too late to throw this to the primaries, but it’s not too late to do something.” Is it too late now in July?

Ezra Klein:

I don’t think it is too late now. I think it is not as advantageous as it would’ve been if people had done what I was suggesting in February, but I think the… I mean Democrats are driving me truly crazy just marching towards what they believe to be defeat. Look, if I were calling Democrats, if I were talking to Congressional Democrats, if I were talking to democratic strategists and what they were saying to me is, “No Ezra, you are wrong. Donald Trump is not going to win this election. Joe Biden is a strong candidate. He’s going to make up the gap in the polls and we just have a different political theory of this than you do.” Fine, fair enough. How many elections have I personally won? Zero elections. No. What they are saying to me is they believe Joe Biden is going to lose, and that includes people supporting Joe Biden, right? That includes people who are mouthing all the platitudes about how he’s our nominee in public, and that is driving me crazy. When you’re going to lose try something else.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Is anyone of note behind the scenes, and you have a lot of people you talk to and a lot of sources, is anyone who’s notable and prominent saying behind the scenes, they really think that Biden has a good and clear shot.

Ezra Klein:

I have spoken to no people who say that. I think probably if you talk to Joe Biden’s campaign manager, they will make that argument to you. I’ve talked to people who are making that argument too, and that argument is not convincing or compelling at this juncture. I will say this as clearly as I can. I do not know a person who in a private conversation will tell me that Joe Biden is a even odds or better than that chance to win the election. Now, what some might say is that it is too chaotic. It is too impossible to imagine replacing him. For a period of time, this argument was Kamala Harris would be weaker than Joe Biden.

Preet Bharara:

That’s not a crazy argument.

Ezra Klein:

Not a crazy argument. People seem to believe that less now than they did before. And then the other version is doing an open convention, there’s no time. It’ll be chaos. It’ll be too fractious for the party. So I do think there’s been a kind of paralysis among Democrats that they don’t believe Biden is strong. They now believe he’s probably fatally wounded, but they can’t figure out how to do anything else. They don’t know how to make him step aside. If he did step aside, they’re not sure they would win anyway. Nobody wants to be blamed for the loss. In theory, you’re not going to get blamed if Joe Biden loses. He’s going to get blamed if he loses. There’s been a kind of flight to passivity that-

Preet Bharara:

There’s some paralysis, right?

Ezra Klein:

Yeah. They’ve frozen.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote this just to analyze why Biden is in the position he is and why his supporters and advisors are where they are. I thought it was very well put. You wrote this again also in February. “The question the Biden administration keeps pretending only to hear is this, can Biden do the job of president?” But you’re write, “But that is not the question of the 2024 campaign. The insistence that Biden is capable of being president is being used to shut down discussion of whether he’s capable of running for president.” Why are those two things so different from each other?

Ezra Klein:

Back then, and I would say I find them a little less different today than I did then, but back then when we had a lot less information about how Biden was on the campaign trail, but you could see that he wasn’t doing many interviews and was doing no hard interviews. He was skipping the Super Bowl interview and in this press conference, which was very rare for him, he does not give many press conferences, where he came out to rebut the special council report about his memory. He managed to mix up Mexico and Egypt creating the very worries about his memory and his cognition that he was trying to quiet. You could see in that set where my read of this was they’re keeping him locked up and scripted because they don’t believe he can perform that well in public and everything I had seen in the moments when he did perform in public suggested he could not perform that well in public. That look, I did not have information that he was not making good decisions in meetings.

I thought the administration was largely making good policy decisions, but if you cannot run for president, if you are an unpopular president behind in the polls who has not been able to make a case for your agenda, and it appears your campaigning skills and communication skills have degraded to the point that your own campaign staff will not put you out in the places you need to be to make the case for your agenda, then you have walked yourself into a very serious problem, which is you’re not going to make up the ground you need to make right. If you’re way ahead in the polls, fine, maybe you can run a front porch or back porch campaign, but if you’re behind in the polls, you can’t do that. And so at that point, I would say that they were arguing about cognition and ignoring the question of performance, and they knew it because I had spoken to many of them about it and they were sort of, I thought, making an argument that was disingenuous.

Now it is really evidence of how far things have fallen, that the argument that they are having to go back and forth on is actually about cognition, not performance. I think something hit in a little bit in thinking about that February piece. The situation now and the perceptions of Biden now are significantly worse than it was then and it was quite bad then? I’ll just say there was an AP associated Press and ORC poll that came out today, and it found that a huge super majority of Democrats wanted Biden to step aside, but it found that only three in 10 Democrats believed Biden had the cognitive fitness for the job.

But the more I think telling thing is that it noted that in February it had asked, the poll had had that same question, so way before the debate and only four in 10 Democrats thought Biden had the cognitive fitness for the job. This was the other piece of it for me. You could see this in every poll that the American people had decided Biden was too old for this and the Democrats were just not listening and given that they had to change this perception, the fact that Biden could not perform in ways that were changing the perception of him was an obvious blinking light that the party was simply refusing to see,

Preet Bharara:

So what are they supposed to do? How did it unfold in a way that makes sense, it’s consistent with democratic principles and that is a path to victory for the Democratic Party?

Ezra Klein:

I think it is folly at this point to suggest that anything is risk-free, but obviously running Biden is not risk-free. Running Biden has become unbelievably risky, so that’s I think the first place to begin, right? When you’re doing something where the expected payoff is tremendously negative, plausibly a landslide for Donald Trump and Senate Republicans, and it’s going to be very hard for Democrats to win the Senate if they lose a bunch of the seats this year, the map is going to be very bad for them. Then you have to try something else. My view that I’ve argued over and over and over again is that the way political candidates have been chosen for most of American history is at political conventions. And yes, it is unfamiliar, but it would be a, I think the Democratic Party has a huge amount of talent that Democratic delegates who are Biden delegates, want to win the election.

It’s not a super weird ideological group of people and that running the kind of, if Biden decided to step aside after the Republican convention, you could have all these candidates out there doing CNN town halls and giving speeches and lobbying delegates and doing debates with each other, giving people information. Then at the convention, we could have what we used to have, which is a process of voting for the ticket, and out of that a strategically capable ticket could emerge. People say, “Oh, no. That’s ridiculous. The Democrats couldn’t possibly make a strategic choice,” but I would say that if you look at democratic performance since 2018, Democrats have been relentlessly strategic about candidate decisions, by the way, including [inaudible 00:46:24] uniting Joe Biden in 2020, which was not the choice that was inside the most passionate hearts of the Democratic base. It was a choice he made strategically. And so Trump is having a very, very good convention as of the moment that we are talking.

He had this assassination attempt that led to this iconic photograph of him with his fist up and blood running down his face. He’s a much stronger candidate than he was. Now he’s a kind of fresh-faced, although I think politically very vulnerable vice presidential pick in Vance. If Democrats scrambled the chessboard and nominated a ticket that actually lit the country on or at least lit their own voters with some fire, where they weren’t just voting against Donald Trump, but they were excited to vote for this democratic ticket, whatever it might be, and I don’t prejudge what it might be, that would be a quite strong way to reset the terms of the election. I mean, again, right now, Joe Biden is not that far behind Donald Trump, but by the way, other candidates are pulling better against Donald Trump, and I think Biden is pulling way behind democratic senate candidates.

So I think there’s very good reason to believe Joe Biden is currently and was before the debate polling at or very near the floor for a Democratic candidate running against Trump. So you have the possibility of a lot more upside in another candidate, and yes, maybe you lose, but right now you are almost certainly going to lose. Whatever. If you look at the good election models, not the 538 model that shows Biden behind in the polls and behind in the fundamentals, but somehow likely to win. Aside from that Nate silver leaving that website has been very, very bad for the model there. If you look at the economist model, you look at Nate Silver’s model, you just look at the polling, you talk to democratic strategists, you look at the behavior of Democrats in purple and purple districts, the party can see where this is going, and unless all the numbers are wrong, it’s very dangerous.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no it’s funny. Everyone modeled these magazines, the Economist and others that you mentioned, to a person everywhere in the world, in the United States and everywhere in the world predicted to an absolute certainty that we would have a recession in 2023, and the guy who we’ve been talking about who I don’t understand why he’s not said every day 10 times a day, his policies and his leadership averted what everyone thought was going to be a near certain recession is now a guy who may be in his mind thinks, I’ve been down this road before and people said it could never happen, so I don’t believe them and I believe in myself. Do you think that’s true of Biden or do you think there’s some part of Biden that also thinks that this is a low probability proposition for him?

Ezra Klein:

I don’t know what Biden thinks. I don’t know what information he’s getting or being given and not getting. The reporting is he’s very bunkered down among family and highly loyal advisors. I mean, he is talking to some congressional democrats, so he is certainly hearing from them increasingly on calls. He’s probably not reading the New York Times and the Washington Post. He’s very, very angry at the press. People are not in their most open-minded information evaluating perspective when they’re under the kind of pressure he is under, so I don’t know what he thinks exactly. I suspect he’s hearing more about good polls for him than bad polls for him, and that’s probably happening by a lot. And if you listen to him, he said something at the press conference that I found very unnerving, which is… I think it was at the press conference, but it’s possible it was in one of the interviews.

I’ve been watching a lot of Biden media lately, but he says, I think towards the end of that, the only way he would step aside is if his pollsters, his team came to him and said he had no chance of winning. No chance.

Preet Bharara:

Well, there’s never no chance.

Ezra Klein:

But they’re not saying that. But I thought it was very, very telling that he didn’t say, I would step aside if I thought I didn’t have the best chance of beating Donald Trump. This was a very, very important shift in the way he’s talked about it. He’s talked about himself as the best qualified to beat Donald Trump. At other times, the sort of Biden theory of everything is he’s got to run because Donald Trump is so divisive. Democrats should have ran him and nominated him in 2016, which is true, and then in 2020 after being counted out, he did win the nomination and he won. And so they’ve made this mistake before and Joe Biden is the person who can beat Donald Trump. I think that is the way he understands it, but I think that the fact that he’s now talking in terms of he would step aside if he were told it was hopeless, not if he were persuaded that he was not the candidate likeliest to win, is telling where I think in his mind this has become about him and about him proving something to everyone else, and that’s dangerous.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, there’s another concerning thing. He said during his interview with George Stephanopoulos.

George Stephanopoulos:

And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you’re warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

Joe Biden:

I will feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.

Preet Bharara:

I think that gave some Democrats pause as well, right?

Ezra Klein:

I’m sympathetic to Joe Biden in the sense that, I mean, I’m sympathetic to him in many senses, but here in the sense it is very hard to give good answers when you are repeatedly being asked, “Why don’t you step aside? Aren’t you wrong for this position? What are you going to do if Donald Trump wins?” It’s a lot of pressure, but to what we were talking about earlier, he’s not performing well under that pressure. That was a disastrous answer for him to give that as long as I’ve done, depending on how you heard him, the goodest job I can or the good as job I can, which doesn’t actually make any sense, he would feel fine about it. That was an answer designed to freak Democrats out. Is that how Joe Biden, in his best moments, thinks of it? I don’t know that it is.

But the problem is that as it becomes clear that he doesn’t have the performance skills, and he doesn’t to make up ground here, he needs to give an answer like that because he doesn’t have an answer that people are going to believe that he is the candidate with the highest level of political skill right now. Look, I don’t know if people watched this interview that Biden gave to a YouTuber named Speedy. This is like a 20-minute interview. Speedy works for a complex, which he’s a young African-American guy. Biden was doing this to reach a group that he’s having trouble with, which is young men who watch YouTube. He needs to win more of them than he is.

This is just like a softball interview. Speedy is a friendly chill interviewer, and Biden is just terrible. It is just a bad performance. It’s not that he says something so wrong. He doesn’t completely lose the thread and go blank, but not a person who watched that interview who would be converted by it in my view and go watch it. This is a thing people should be doing is actually watching Biden’s performances day in and day out and seeing if he’s up to the job, and this is the problem.

He doesn’t have the juice anymore to do it. He can’t turn these questions to his advantage. He’s not nimble on his feet, right? He gets a question and he flops it saying that if he does the goodest job or good as job as he can, that’s enough. I am a person who for years was arguing against the power of presidential rhetoric. I wrote a new Yorker piece years ago called the Unpersuaded about the tendency of presidential rhetoric to anti-persuade, right? The stronger perspective a president takes on something, the more he polarizes the other party against it. I am like the first to tell you campaign skills are not everything. I have been involved in the building of fundamental based political models to predict elections.

We built one at the Washington Post on Wonk blog, which I ran in 2012. It predicted the election to within a 10th of a percentage point of the popular vote. Campaign skills are not everything. They are not nothing. When you are behind, they’re very much not nothing, and the sense people have of your fitness for office, they confidence in you as a leader, that is important. Once you clear that bar, campaign skills may not matter that much after that, but you got to clear that bar and he’s not clearing it.

Preet Bharara:

Just ask Michael Bloomberg or Bill Bradley. I think there was a notable, and I think they’re both strong, powerful leaders now. I can respect them both, but I think an argument can be made that they were formidable candidates and formidable vision and leadership skills, but when it came to seeking the office of the presidency, their campaign skills fell short.

Ezra Klein:

I mean, I would say they were both factional. I mean, I have probably a different interpretation of them, which is that they were both factional candidates. They were candidates running from the sort of radical centrist wing of the Democratic Party.

Preet Bharara:

The factional candidates win and can do very well if they have the campaign goods.

Ezra Klein:

Yeah, I don’t think that kind of factional candidate tends to win, but I take your broad point. Look, I would be, in terms of campaign skills, I’d be much more comfortable with Michael Bloomberg up on the stage against Donald Trump… And that’s not, by the way, Michael Bloomberg ran in 2020. That’s not how I felt about that. Then I thought, Biden-

Preet Bharara:

Well, four years makes a big difference.

Ezra Klein:

Yeah, four years can make a big difference.

Preet Bharara:

Part of the problem is the reason that Biden is not doing well in the polls… I mean, I know there’s inflation, but it’s not because there is some objective thing that’s happening that can then be turned around. The trajectory, given how he is at best, in the best case scenario, the same, that he’ll display the same performance at a debate or in an interview in four months as he’s displaying now, and so I wonder what you think. I think you’ve written this or some other very smart person you has written this. The press narrative is an interesting question. If there is a challenge at a convention and there’s a replacement with the blessing of Joe Biden and in a sort of whirlwind, somebody new comes to the top of the ticket and there’s a new person in the second spot as well, do the Democrats then start to get more of the oxygen than Trump?

Because that’s been the story of the Trump campaign, even when the story every day is that Trump is losing a civil case, Trump has been adjudicated a sexual assault, or Trump has been adjudicated criminal felon, he’s still getting all the attention. Can Democrats in some way count on winning a little bit more of the attention if there’s a change or does it not work that way?

Ezra Klein:

No, it exactly works that way. I mean, look, going back months now, I was arguing that Democrats have no real theory of attention in this campaign. To the extent they did, the theory was to focus attention on Donald Trump. Mike Donilon, Joe Biden’s key strategist often said this, that the election was going to be about democracy, about January 6th. Joe Biden has had, whether this was strategic or reflective of his communication limitations, he has had a very restrained presidential communication style. He does not try to drive media through high intensity appearances. What they’ve done in 2020, Donald Trump was the incumbent. Obviously attention was focused on him in 2020. A lot of attention was focused on MAGA figures who are running in Senate primaries and then ultimately in Senate general elections, and the theories are going to do that again in 2024, and that the American people were going to look at Donald Trump and say, “We hate that guy. We’re flocking to Biden. We’re with Joe.”

And it was a completely reasonable theory that did not pan out. And notably the Biden campaign asking for negotiating out a completely unexpected June debate was built on this theory. They thought the whole thing they had to do was get the public to take seriously the possibility of a Trump restoration. And when people saw Trump and Biden on that stage, when it felt real to them, they would flock back to Biden. And so an important way I think, of thinking about where the Biden team is right now is their theory failed and they have not come up with an alternative one. They made a huge high-risk gamble in running Biden again. They made a huge high-risk gamble in the June debate, and that theory collapsed. Now they are getting attention. Every interview Biden does is closely watched.

But it’s the exact kind of attention you don’t want. There is a narrative that Biden is cognitively unfit for the presidency. And every time, and it happens constantly that Biden stumbles, that he sort of trails off in the middle of an answer and then says, “Oh, I should stop. I shouldn’t go on that.” He mixes up words that he has this kind of low raspy voice that you can kind of barely hear that it confirms this thing that voters already thought about him. And so yeah, you both need a new attention strategy and you want to get a different kind of attention, and this is a challenge. How do you do it? Biden probably can’t do it. If he was able to perform at a super high level day after day after day, we would’ve seen it by now. We are not seeing it. We’re seeing the opposite.

He has good days, bad days. The press conference after the NATO summit was a good day. Some of the other interviews we’ve seen have been bad days. The debate was a bad day. The bad day seemed to be getting more frequent. They seemed to be getting more severe. If they did this completely unexpected huge thing and had an open convention change the ticket, put all this attention on new faces. It could be Kamala Harris, but not only, yes, I mean for better or for worse, they would have a huge shot of attention and the entire terms of the race would be reset. We don’t know what would happen on the other side of that, but that is better than having a pretty good idea of what is going to happen on the other side of this, and the thing that will happen is Donald Trump winning a significant victory.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote, speaking of Kamala Harris, that there’s a good case to be made that she’s underrated, make that case.

Ezra Klein:

I think she is underrated. I think that if you go back to 2020, Kamala Harris was seen as a huge rising star. You look at her 2020 presidential campaign, it was sort of rudderless, but she had good moments, right? Like the debate where she sliced into Biden, she’s a strong enough communicator that the Biden campaign chose her as vice president. She did not make huge mistakes during the general election as a vice presidential candidate. I think that Harris has had a real problem of political identity because she had been a smart on crime, moderate Black Democrat in California. Then she became national and ran for president at a time when the politics in the Democratic Party did not want that anymore. They were very oriented towards criminal justice reform. So Harris sort of abandoned that political identity, but never rebuilt a new one, then becomes vice president, and then has this kind of very weird total collapse in the estimation of her in political circles in Washington, D.C.

You can’t really point to a thing that went terribly for her as vice president, or at least not unusually, but yet all of a sudden it’s like, oh, this was a terrible pick. She’s so much weaker than Biden. She’s pulling beneath him. They give her a series of impossible assignments like the border, which she was never going to be able to solve. And then there’s a theory that she’s quite weak. I think she is underrated. I think you see that in the interviews she’s given, some of the speeches she’s given. She’s clearly more capable as a campaigner right now, than he is. But the thing I will say about her is she has never won an election where she has been the name atop the ticket in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and underrated, if you say that she’s currently seen on a political skills measure as a five out of 10, which I’m not saying is true, but for the sake of argument, she could be underrated and be a six out of 10 and she could be underrated and be an 8.5 out of 10.

And those are very, very different conditions for the Democratic Party, which is why I think you need some kind of, as Jim Clyburn put it, mini primary. Where you test out the candidates, you see how she would present herself, you kind of stack her up against other people in the party, and the Democratic Party makes a choice for the strongest candidate it can have, not just falling in line. I mean they almost fell in line behind Biden. It was a huge mistake. Don’t fall in line with that insufficient information about the campaigning skills of the person you’re falling in line behind. I think that should be an obvious lesson out of this year.

Preet Bharara:

Ezra, thanks so much for your time and your insight. Great to have you on the show again.

Ezra Klein:

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ezra Klein continues for members of the CAFE Insider community.

Ezra Klein:

I do not want to see Donald Trump win the election, but the best-case scenario for them is they win a victory that is significant enough. It’s just kind of a smooth transition of power.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month. Head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week by talking about a criminal case that hasn’t gotten as much attention as it may have deserved. On Tuesday, Senator Bob Menendez was convicted on all counts by a jury in New York. If you recall, the Senator was charged in federal court with wire fraud, bribery, extortion, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. He had been previously indicted on different charges some years ago, but the jury hung and Menendez was not retried. The charges here included some salacious allegations related to accepting gold bars, envelopes of cash, and a luxury car. It’s not surprising at all to me that he was convicted. Now, I have a couple of comments. First, astonishingly, Senator Menendez does not automatically get expelled from the Senate and doesn’t have to resign. His fellow senators could vote to expel him though if they so choose.

My former boss, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer swiftly called on Menendez to resign. He said in a statement, “In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate and our country, and resign.” Second, here’s my other comment. This was an important and powerful Senator prosecuted by an administration of his own party. Let me repeat that. Prosecuted by an administration of his own party because he was deserving of prosecution because it was a meritorious case. Even though he was a Democrat and the Senate hangs in the balance. He was prosecuted fear or favor by my former office.

And in the wake of the conviction, you don’t hear me or prominent elected officials moaning and crying, witch hunt or rigged or Banana Republic or calling out the judge or the jury or the Department of Justice. Now, just compare that to some other jury verdicts recently. This is the rule of law, the Department of Justice and my former office, SDNY, at work, and I respect that work. No matter the political affiliation of the defendant in question, though I do have, but one little quibble with my successor US attorney Damian Williams after the verdict, he did what I did many times he made a statement and he brought out the team to thank them too. The only problem is that he did it outside in 96 degree heat on a hot Manhattan sidewalk. I might’ve opted for a venue with AC.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks to my guest, Ezra Klein. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag, #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Lianna Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.