Preet Bharara:

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

Evan Osnos:

You have to believe that this place is worth improving. That it is not terminally and permanently damaged by the flaws in our history and our character. And I think it’s finding that combination of, call it a sort of fierce love, a critical love of this country has been the great challenge, not just for Democrats today, but also for Kamala Harris.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Evan Osnos. He’s a staff writer at the New Yorker, where his work spans everything from national politics to foreign affairs to espionage. Evan has a unique way of analyzing where we are right now, just days out from the election. He looks beyond the headlines and into the cultural and political undercurrents that shape our beliefs about the role of leadership in turbulent times. Today, Evan and I zoom out to take in this moment in American political life. How should we handle cruelty as a society? What does patriotism mean in a deeply divided country? And does empathy still have a place in modern politics? That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Before I get to your questions, I want to quickly note that we’re offering Stay Tuned listeners a special discount on the CAFE Insider membership. With the election around the corner and difficult legal questions certain to follow, understanding the law is more important than ever. CAFE Insider can help you make sense of it all during these divisive and complicated times. From now through November, you can get 40% off your first year of CAFE Insider membership by heading to cafe.com/november. Again, that’s cafe.com/november. Thank you as always for supporting our work. Now let’s get to your questions.

Q&A

This question comes in an email from Doug and I really like this question. “Hi, Preet. Longtime listener. I’ve never missed either podcast. Can you give my high school civic students who can’t yet vote some advice for watching this election unfold over the next few weeks? I want them to have faith. Keep up the good work. Doug.” Doug, that’s a great and important and I think central question. I would say as an initial matter, what I’d like your students who can’t yet vote to realize and appreciate is how close this election will be. As the tallies come in in state, after state, after state, particularly in the seven battleground states, the separation between the winner and the loser may be hundreds or thousands of votes. That may be true in multiple states. That may be true in the overall electoral college tally. And separate and apart from the presidential election, that may be true in many, many state and local races and congressional races around country as well.

And the reason I mention that is, and the reason I want your students to focus on that is that hopefully it will give them a lifelong incentive to understand the value and power of their votes and they will develop a lifelong commitment to voting, not just in seminal elections every four years that determine who the President of the United States will be, but midterm elections and local elections and state elections and municipal elections for school board all the way up to the President of the United States. If they take that lesson away from the closeness of this race, that will have been worth it. The second thing I would say is, and this is true for life generally, is I hope your students think about how to apply common sense and critical thinking.

These are challenges in the country. Lots and lots of people in business and in politics, but especially in politics I think of late, say a lot of things that don’t make sense, say a lot of things because they’re trying to get a vote, but they don’t really hold up under scrutiny. So I hope you and your students have the opportunity, not just around election time but otherwise, to analyze the positions that politicians and candidates take and see if they actually add up under the weight of scrutiny. Do their positions have merit or not? No particular politician or particular newspaper or particular editorial board, even when they do take a position, is going to answer that question fully for you. I hope in connection with this, you teach your students to try to get information from multiple sources about a candidate or about a position. Not just from one source.

Relatedly, I hope your students will pay attention and scrutinize the promises being made by different candidates and see how they play out after the election. Do the positions have merit or just some popular support? And that would suggest a critical eye be brought to bear on both sides of the presidential divide with respect to anything from the Trump tariffs to Kamala Harris’s idea about price gouging. Learn to figure out ways to make up your own mind about the candidates. And as you do that, I would hope that your students would develop their own set of values so that they come to their own views about what policies resonate, what messages resonate, which candidates resonate. And then finally I will say voting is not the only way to be involved in the political process. It’s an important way, it’s an essential way. And hopefully as I mentioned, your students will vote in every election for a lifetime. But we know from recent history in particular that there are other things that students can do. You can write, you can organize, you can protest, you can call Congress. We saw this for example, and there are many other examples of this, on the part of too young to vote students after the Parkland massacre some years ago. So I love the fact that you are teaching civics. I love the fact that your students are engaged. I love the fact that you’re asking this question. And I hope they learn from this election and from future elections as well.

This question comes in an email from Owen who writes, “Hi, Preet. After nine years of serving as an AUSA, an assistant US attorney, I will be leaving government service at the end of the year for private practice. I anticipate a healthy amount of our work will be criminal defense oriented. I’d love to hear about your thoughts on moving to the other side of the courtroom. What you found surprising or particularly fulfilling or anything really. Thanks. Owen.” First, Owen, thank you for your service. Nine years is a good, healthy amount of time to have represented the United States of America in court, so thank you for that. I don’t know from your question whether you ever served in private practice previously. So my own experiences as follows. I was in private practice after law school for about six years and during a portion of that time I did some criminal defense work, what I call criminal defense work.

Then went to the US Attorney’s Office. Then worked for Senator Schumer on the Judiciary Committee, then became the United States Attorney. Then started this podcast company and wrote a book. And as many of you know, for the last two years plus I’ve been back at a law firm practicing law and a lot of my own work is criminal defense oriented. So there are a lot of things that are different, but in this season where we talk about sides and controversies, that’s what lawyers do. Take one side in the controversy. What has really hit home to me is the idea that having varied experiences and having experiences on both sides of a question or an issue or on both sides of the courtroom as you put it, will make you better at both. So I thought that I had appreciated and I thought I was sensitive to the burdens faced by targets of investigations, whether it’s investigations run by the FBI or the police or the DEA or any other federal law enforcement agency, but not until recently when I have had to be shoulder to shoulder with people who were under investigation have I really fully internalized and understood the burden they have to carry when they’re in the crosshairs of an investigation.

Which doesn’t mean that the investigation is not appropriate. It doesn’t mean that the investigation should end in something other than an indictment. That happens from time to time. But I think I identify more and understand better what people and companies are going through when they’re under the gun. The other thing that I’ve noticed is even on the defense side, when people are being investigated, they don’t have a full understanding of what the other side is thinking. So one of the things that I bring to this job as a private lawyer representing companies and individuals who are under investigation is try to explain to them the perspective whether right or wrong, whether correct or incorrect of the prosecutors, of the government and how they are skeptical and they are suspicious and they’re doing the things that they’re doing because they have a particular view, they have a particular mandate and they view their mission in a particular way.

Now, that is not to say, as I’ve discovered in a number of cases not involving the Southern District of New York, that is not to say that some of the actions taken by the government and some of the views and positions taken by the government are correct. Sometimes they’re misguided, sometimes they’re overreaching, sometimes they’re heavy-handed. And I’ve experienced that in private practice over the last couple of years as well. But it is sometimes helpful in life to have had the opposite experience. For example, when I was at the US Attorney’s Office, every person who served as the chief of my criminal division, and this is a custom in the Southern District of New York, had the reverse experience. Has spent a number of years in private practice understanding what it meant to defend an individual in court, to defend an institution or a business organization in court, and then came to the US Attorney’s Office to exercise their discretion as the chief criminal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York. And having the other experience, understanding what it’s like to be in the shoes of someone on the other side of the V in the caption, I think gave them great wisdom and discretion and respect for both sides of the process.

I wish you great luck. It’s a bit of an adjustment. Among other things, when you’re on the defense side, you just don’t know what’s going on in the minds of the government. They hold their cards close as I’m sure you’ve been doing for nine years, but your experience having been a prosecutor will make you, I think, a well-rounded and powerful advocate for the people who you’ll be representing in private practice. Good luck.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Evan Osnos.

THE INTERVIEW

New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos has been writing about national politics for decades. He joins me just days before the election. Evan Osnos, welcome back to the show.

Evan Osnos:

Thanks, Preet. Great to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

Very excited to have you. We are recording this exactly one week ahead of election day, one week ahead of November 5th. Before we get into the substance of things and the conversation I want to have, I want to tell you a quick anecdote. I didn’t warn you I was going to tell you this anecdote.

Evan Osnos:

I’m ready.

Preet Bharara:

You probably know it. But it was a couple of months ago and I was speaking or was planning to speak at the Texas Tribune Festival in downtown Austin and I was at a bar with some journalists along with our executive producer Tamara, and we’re talking to people at the table and we get into conversation with this lovely woman who seems very smart and on the ball and we introduced ourselves and within 90 seconds felt it necessary to say, “Evan Osnos is my husband.” And the way she said it, it was not clear-

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. That’s the key question. What was the valence of this announcement?

Preet Bharara:

It was mildly panicked, which I took to mean possibly she was concerned that without transparency about who her legal partner was in life that Tamara and I might say something negative about you.

Evan Osnos:

So this was a prophylactic announcement.

Preet Bharara:

That’s what it sounded like. Can you ask her?

Evan Osnos:

Well, maybe … Yeah, I should probably find out if this is a pattern. Because it could have gone a lot of different ways. You could have said her tone was apologetic, her tone-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, no it wasn’t. Because that would’ve been, “Evan Osnos is my husband.”

Evan Osnos:

And yet I’ve fashioned a life for myself. Well, I think there’s a lot to unpack there.

Preet Bharara:

Can you explain this?

Evan Osnos:

My guess is it was probably the preface for her talking about something that the media was struggling to achieve so she could at the beginning say, “Here are my bona fides. That I have somebody inside the house who is a participant in this-”

Preet Bharara:

Maybe. Or maybe it was like a form of fishing. Now that I’ve put on the record in a public forum that Evan Osnos is my husband, you’re obliged to say nice things, which we did. We didn’t feel obliged, but we did.

Evan Osnos:

It does hang in the air for that moment. Look, as you know, my wife works in the world of trying to regenerate local news at a time when local news is under massive threat. And so she’s used to hearing-

Preet Bharara:

By the New Yorker.

Evan Osnos:

Well, not just the New Yorker. Not just the-

Preet Bharara:

What role are you playing in the destruction of local news?

Evan Osnos:

It’s not a zero-sum game when it comes to dog cartoons and local news.

Preet Bharara:

All I know is if you live somewhere and you read a New Yorker article, there is no time to read a local news article. Fair? Where’s the lie? Where’s the lie, Evan?

Evan Osnos:

It’s true that at times a person begins to search the coming pages for that little diamond at the end of the story that signifies a sense of achievement.

Preet Bharara:

Closure.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Also signifies mortality and oncoming death sometimes.

Evan Osnos:

Well, the way we think of it in our house is that I’m at one end of the hall, I have my office and I’m writing about treachery in American politics of one kind or another, and then she’s at the other end actually building things. And I think that having the two things co-exist in the house is probably a healthy balance.

Preet Bharara:

So maybe when she quickly, hastily announced who her husband was, it was a call for help.

Evan Osnos:

That’s very possible. Decode the blanks. We’ll have to see if they spell anything out.

Preet Bharara:

All right. What’s funny is this is a week that is very fraught and very important as have been the last number of weeks, and I still find it an opportunity to laugh at things and I’ve been watching the Penguin as a coping mechanism. I went from the MSG thing to the Penguin, which is not for everyone. Have you been seeing this? Have you watched this series?

Evan Osnos:

I’m tempted by it, but I haven’t yet. But I’m with you that I find myself looking for increasingly antic entertainment options as a way of avoiding the reality of the news.

Preet Bharara:

I hadn’t read about it. It took me like an episode and a half before I realized that the Penguin was played by Colin Farrell.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, that’s the only part I do know about it, I guess, but-

Preet Bharara:

Well, together we would have complete knowledge.

Evan Osnos:

But isn’t that pretty dark stuff to be watching before bed?

Preet Bharara:

It’s very dark. It’s very dark. But it helps. It’s helpful.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. Okay. Well, all right, I’m putting that on the list.

Preet Bharara:

There’s not another Ted Lasso on the horizon.

Evan Osnos:

See, I need the occasional Ted Lasso. Now look, I’ll be honest, Ted Lasso is not-

Preet Bharara:

I know a Ted Lasso at the moment.

Evan Osnos:

He’s not held in particularly high regard by the culture gatekeepers at places like the New Yorker, but I-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, you mean the place that’s killing local news?

Evan Osnos:

That’s it.

Preet Bharara:

And you can tell David Remnick I said that. It’s a direct quote from me.

Evan Osnos:

We consider it just a side benefit of what we’re doing. No, I think the reality is people right now, all kidding aside, I think that we are completely oversaturated in political information and-

Preet Bharara:

Oh no. I was about to go to saturation coverage of political information in a moment. That’s why you’re on the freaking show, Evan.

Evan Osnos:

Oh God, you’re right.

Preet Bharara:

Isn’t to talk about the Penguin.

Evan Osnos:

I’d like to offer a full retraction of my comments about saturation.

Preet Bharara:

Although there’s a tone in which one can do it, right?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. I think so.

Preet Bharara:

I rarely talk to a guest before the taping or before the episode, but I wanted to mention to you over the weekend that I want to have a kind of conversation that’s not just about the horse race and not just about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, although we will talk a lot about them, but about what these forces are, whether they’re tectonic plates, whether they’re passing breezes in our politics and in our psyche and our culture. And one way, by the way, I’m coping, which is why … Some people I think look down on a lighthearted tone when discussing these topics. I don’t. I think you must do that.

Evan Osnos:

I agree.

Preet Bharara:

Even when times are dire. Otherwise, how are you going to get through a conversation much less a Trump second presidency? And we will get through it, I think. Let me start with a political question. So I mentioned Madison Square Garden and Trump and his entourage came. He invited some people that maybe he should not have invited who he’s now forsaking and distancing himself from. There was the “comedian”. I don’t understand what the joke was. Look, I watch off-color comedy. I don’t watch all politically correct comedy. I don’t know what politically correct comedy is, but the “joke” made about the barge of trash and it’s called Puerto Rico, not funny. There are references to a black friend and a watermelon, not funny. And lots of people are up in arms and I understand why they are. And on the one hand people are saying, well, that was a strategic error on the part of Trump because bad Bunny and a number of others have reached out to their 50, 45, 50, 55 million Instagram followers and are endorsing Kamala Harris and the Puerto Rican community is very upset and they’re an important constituency in a lot of states including Pennsylvania and Florida and elsewhere. And Republican politicians have repudiated those comments. So that’s one view. On the other hand, other people I respect like Pete Buttigieg and others say stop …

I mean I’m paraphrasing. Stop talking about it. It’s bait. It’s another example of Trump and his cohorts saying some crazy shit and rather than focusing on reproductive rights or the economy or foreign policy or our alliances with NATO, et cetera, we are now churning away all the time talking about the guy who insulted Puerto Rico. Which side of that are you on?

Evan Osnos:

Well, I tend to think that in a way these two things can coexist. Meaning Pete Buttigieg is right that part of the whole strategy here is that the cruelty is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a way of announcing a position. When I say a moral position, I’m not describing it as something rich with moral character. I think you understand that I’m describing in a sense his contempt for a certain set of ideas. And there was nothing accidental about that lineup, about that tone, about the people they chose to speak. As we all know, when an event like that comes together, it is the product of a whole culture. You’re sitting backstage, they’re joking in the green room, they’re deciding how they’re … And then they’re putting things on the teleprompter. I think that the conventional argument right now and has been for months among political professionals has been that whichever candidate is getting talked about the most on election day is the candidate that’s probably going to lose because we’re in-

Preet Bharara:

Wait. I’ve not heard that. That’s interesting.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? Because if you think about it, in 2016, the problem for Hillary Clinton at the very end was of course, as everybody remembers, there was this resurgence of talk about her emails. There was the James Comey announcement and so on. Put that aside for a second. The point being that really the center of energy and discussion was about whether Hillary Clinton could win. And so it put aside the question of Donald Trump at the crucial moment. I think the hardest thing for people to absorb if you’re somebody like us who pays a lot of attention to politics is that most people don’t. And we know that intellectually, but remember a lot of people are just tuning in, believe it or not now, and they’re tuning in, particularly if you’re one of the 400,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, people of Puerto Rican descent or a hundred thousand in another state, that the first time that they’re being fully drawn into this process is around an incredibly insulting comment at a Trump rally. I do think that that has meaning at this point in a way that it wouldn’t have had as much meaning two months ago. So we won’t know until the end, of course, what the dispositive effect is, but I don’t think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of comment is redounding to his benefit at the moment.

Preet Bharara:

You probably haven’t done this poll, but are most funny comedians conservative or liberal?

Evan Osnos:

I think by and large, I think it’s always been a puzzle how conservatism deals with humor.

Preet Bharara:

What’s very funny to me is … Funny is the wrong word given that we’re talking about funny. That there are conservatives who say all the time liberals have no sense of humor, and liberals often say the same about conservatism. I’m not sure which one is true. And people can have a view that the late night comics are not funny anymore and some people think that they’re too political, but the fact remains is they’re the ones who have the shows and one conclusion you can draw from that is there’s some barriers to entry for conservatives other than that Greg Gutfeld guy who is super, super not funny.

Evan Osnos:

Right. Yeah. I walked by the line outside his studio the other day and was kind of amazed, actually.

Preet Bharara:

Doesn’t he have an exclamation mark at the end of his name for the show? I thought that went out with Jeb.

Evan Osnos:

That worked out for Jeb really well. It’s a bad sign when you’re forcing people to be enthusiastic with your punctuation.

Preet Bharara:

If you did that, Evan, from a New Yorker, would it have to be Osnos semicolon?

Evan Osnos:

Yes. Thank God. I’m so glad you chose the semicolon because we’re droll and uncertain. That’s our goal.

Preet Bharara:

It could be Osnos M dash.

Evan Osnos:

Nice. I like that. We’d accept that. But I will say that remember Al Franken made the observation that turns out to be a really durable observation, which is he said that he’d never seen Donald Trump laugh.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Oh, we’ve talked about that a number of times on the show. Yeah.

Evan Osnos:

And part of that is Orwell had this great observation. He said a joke is a tiny revolution. And what he meant by that is that there is a way in which an authoritarian mindset, set aside authoritarian governance, but an authoritarian mindset which is rooted in the idea of hierarchy, in dominance, in politics of force, which say what you will, that is certainly how Donald Trump thinks, and in fact some of his followers think of that as a great asset and a great credit to him. But that does not have the philosophical entry points to be mocked. I mean this is the reason in some ways Trump’s greatest mission is to avoid being mocked and that’s why I think humor has always had a hard time dealing with conservative political ecosystem.

Preet Bharara:

You would think if that’s really his goal, he might make different personal choices I would think.

Evan Osnos:

Well, I think it’s sort of who’s doing the mockery. I think part of what drives him crazy is there is this theory of course, that he was sitting in the audience at the White House Correspondents dinner. You’ve talked about it. That moment is-

Preet Bharara:

I don’t think that theory is a terrible one.

Evan Osnos:

No.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you another question about … We’re going to just jump around here for a second and feel free to ask me questions.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

A lot was, I think, appropriately made of the autocratic tendencies of Donald Trump and there’s this whole debate about whether he is or is not a fascist. Some Republican leaders got all bent out of shape because Kamala Harris answered a question about Trump. Is he a fascist? Yes, I think he is. Then Jake Tapper and others played a series of clips in which Donald Trump forever getting away with stuff that other people complain about when the Democrats do it, calling Kamala Harris, not just a fascist, but calling her a Marxist communist fascist. I think there’s some sort of political science inconsistency and self-contradiction in giving all those appellations to one person. But the one thing I have a rule about this. I don’t think I’ve ever violated my rule, but I’ve been doing a podcast for seven years, so maybe I have. I’ve never compared either Trump or anyone else to Hitler. I feel it’s a pretty good rule of thumb to avoid the Hitler comparison. I don’t know who it persuades. Maybe it animates some people. Do you have a view on that?

Evan Osnos:

Well, in some ways the risk of course is that it exhausts the power of the comparison.

Preet Bharara:

It does. It certainly does.

Evan Osnos:

And there’s something obscene about invoking Hitler unless you’re making a very earnest and real comparison. I mean there’s always been the problem of Trump is that he really invites all of that kind of analogy because he really does inhabit that set of instincts, those set of ideas, and yet we don’t bring ourselves to say, all right, we’re going to equate this guy with the worst genocidal leader in history. And I guess I’ve always stopped short of it. But I’ll be honest, Preet, the problem of writing about Trump is that we’ve tried these different techniques. We started with understatement. I remember the first piece I wrote about him in 2015. It was almost just sort of allow what at the time seemed to be self-evidently disqualifying, just let that play out on the page. At the same time then there was a different mode and I remember doing it too at various points saying, okay, no, I’m going to adopt the maximalist position of describing what is the conceivable range of political violence he could achieve.

I don’t mean violence with force and mayhem, I mean the undoing of institutions and norms and so on. I think part of what we’re feeling now as a group of people who think and write about politics is that we’ve tried these different techniques and it’s very hard to say, well, one of these breaks through, one of these actually lands. I mean I am curious how you think about this. We’ve been at this now for nine or 10 years and trying to figure out how to make people pay attention to the stakes. For a while the mantra was let’s talk about the stakes, not the race. And there’s some, I think, real value in that. But have you found that there is a way to talk about … If you talk about the law, does that make it clear and concrete or do you talk about the culture? What is it? What do you find has been the most effective?

Preet Bharara:

I think it depends on who your audience is. I said on the other podcast, on the Insider podcast, and I said this at a dinner last week. I’ve been thinking about this lately. I have a platform. You have a platform. We’re very privileged to have our platforms, even if it’s at the expense of local news, Evan. I’m just going to keep calling that back.

Evan Osnos:

I’m going to tell her you said that.

Preet Bharara:

That’s referred to as a callback.

Evan Osnos:

In the business.

Preet Bharara:

Now I’ve got one for the whole hour. So for whatever reason, I don’t find it persuasive given the voice I have and given the background I have to yell and scream and pound the table. A lot of people who listen to me, and I’m guessing a lot of people who read you, are already on one side of the fence on Donald Trump. I don’t have a lot of Trump lovers in my feed and to the extent I have them, they’re there to hear what the other side is saying or to attack me on social media or whatever. And there are certain things if you begin to do them … And I’m not begrudging anybody their own tone or their own style and everyone is different and that’s good. But I feel if you do the Hitler comparisons or you spend a lot of time focusing on some …

I remember once during Trump’s presidency, he said something about the White House. He’s like, “The White House is a piece of shit,” or, “It’s a shithole,” or something. And you shouldn’t say that. I saw the reaction and on social media, I said something like his crude criticism of the White House is like the 55th most important thing today that you should worry about with Donald Trump. And the reaction was not like, oh yeah, that’s right. There’s some perspective. The reaction from a lot of people was we can multitask. We can hit all the things. So I’ve also never … I don’t think, but people will call me out if I made this error. I don’t think I have ever made fun of Donald Trump’s appearance. Neither his hair or his skin tone or his tan or his weight. I just feel like, again, I’m not trying to be holier than thou. I don’t know what it gets you. I mean it’s fine for a comedian and every once in a while people do the orange thing. I try not to do that either.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Is that-

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. Look, I-

Preet Bharara:

Is that virtue signaling? Criticize that.

Evan Osnos:

No. This gets to this larger question which is sort of lurking here, which is this question about how we think about character in public life. Because you don’t have to be a rose-tinted, glass-wearing nostalgist to say that there is a moment not too long ago when we really did want to have, in the simplest terms, a public life that we felt good showing our kids. I mean, just a point of personal anecdote for a second. We talked about Sarah Beth a moment ago. My mother-in-law was at a protest early … It was the protest right after Trump was elected. The Women’s March in Washington. And I just remember this really distinctly. I loved this. She made a hand-drawn sign that said … I’ll get it mostly right, but she said, “Please be decent. The children are watching.” And there’s just something about that that stayed with me, partly because we have little kids and I do think constantly about what they see and read and think, but also because to your point about do you descend into that pool where we’re talking about each other’s appearances and frailties and physical blemishes and everything else or not.

But the question I’m curious about on that is was it always an illusion that we cared about character? Were we being falsely decorous and behind closed doors people were nasty to one another? Or is it really true that Trump is both a catalyst for and an agent of and a harbinger of a cruder, more disregarding approach to one another?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I think it depends on who you’re talking about. I think in any population there are people who like appeals to their better angels as they say, and believe in kindness and they raise their kids that way and they’re drawn to that. I think there are other people who think that that’s silly and naive and it’s a tough world, a Hobbesian world, and they raise their kids to be go-getters and they might use the term alpha and they like people. Look, there’s some people who like professional wrestling. The WWF. I did when I was a kid. I grew out of it.

Evan Osnos:

Me too.

Preet Bharara:

And then some people don’t like that. There’s a subset of people in this country who believe the earth is flat, a subset of people in this country who believe the moon landing was faked, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Republican administration at the time. And most shockingly to me and less frivolous and trivial is what one of my guests once said, in any even western liberal democratic society, there are 25 to 30% of people who are latently attracted to strongmen, to autocrats.

Evan Osnos:

That’s true.

Preet Bharara:

And I bet I’m going to say some things that maybe not everyone will be pleased by. It’s not just on the right. People like you and I and other people who are trained in the law who say … This is a little bit off the character issue, but I’ll come back to that. Who say that democracy is important and process is important and the constitution is important. One of the most important concepts in the rule of law is due process. Due process is not the result that you want. Due process is a process and by dint of a process, it’s provided for in the constitution of the country and the state constitutions and the laws state or federal that are applicable to one’s case, there’s an outcome. And I think not everyone cares about the process. They care about the outcome. I don’t know how many people cared as deeply as they might about the process by which Donald Trump is being prosecuted.

But people have made a judgment about him that he must go to prison and the process is not as important. And I’m guessing there’s a subset … People may not admit it. There’s a subset of people on the left who if given the choice between open process like we mostly do in this country, but there are flaws that has resulted in a 6-3 Supreme Court majority against the left, and that may produce in a week a future 7-2 or 8-1 court because the normal processes are going forward. And you said, well, how about we have a benevolent person on the left who would have all sorts of autocratic powers, you’d have a much stronger presidency, he or she could overrule Congress. Executive orders could have so much more force. That person wouldn’t have to have Supreme Court justices confirmed by the Senate, but that person would nominate people like Justice Sotomayor or Brennan. People that you like. And his policies would be the policies you like. How many people would vote for that? Am I making that up?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. I hear and encounter that instinct a lot. This feeling that in a sense the only way to fight fire is by being tough-minded and by recognizing that this isn’t patty cake. We’re not going to get our way through this with symposia and high-minded marches. I remember very early on sensing that in a sense the extremity of this period and everything that Trump had pushed us toward had unleashed the appetite for somebody who could cut the Gordian knot on the left or on the right. And I will tell you, I mean that worries me. I’ve lived in societies that had … I’ve lived in China, lived in Egypt. I’ve lived in these places that have succumbed at various times to the temptation for refuge in order, refuge in a strongman. And it’s the inevitable result of a period in which people feel basically fearful. It doesn’t end well. It doesn’t end well.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Evan Osnos after this.

On the character point, I’ll make a more specific observation. I think character flaws are fatal to politicians who elevate character as a reason for their either running for office or asking you to vote for them. So if you run as a boy scout, if you run either directly or indirectly on a theme, again, explicitly or impliedly of virtue, then a transgression will fail you.

Evan Osnos:

You’re vulnerable.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. And also I think there are issues of racism and other things that are going on. Barack Obama, I don’t know if he said this, but people would I think correctly say this, he had to be twice as good. He couldn’t be angry. He had to be very careful and he had to be extra excellent. And his brand a little bit is virtue. And so if he did one-tenth of the things that Trump has done, he would be done probably. Trump never ran as a virtuous politician. Bill Clinton who also survived scandal, ran a little bit … You knew he was a rascal. He never pretended otherwise. Don’t you think that makes a difference?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I do think so. I mean, Van Jones had a line the other day that his been circulating, which is a thoughtful point actually. I mean, he said, “Why is it that Donald Trump can be lawless, but Kamala Harris has to be flawless?” And I think there are elements of, there’s some racism and some misogyny in here, and it is also that Trump has put himself out there as the icon of a … He says, “We are fallen. All of us.” That’s his view. Now, I think that that is actually a dire conception of human affairs. I mean, that is what Putin wants us to believe. I mean, I think there is a way in which it’s not just that they’re asking you to succumb to your worst instincts, to your worst angels, but that they’re saying that anything that is above that is an act of inauthenticity, an act of fraudulence.

And I just don’t buy it. I just don’t buy it. It’s saying something. Having now worked in this kind of political work for a long time and working in … I covered wars and authoritarianism. And I actually don’t come away with the sense that our default position is this, as you put it earlier, this kind of Hobbesian state. I actually think that this is where the power of leadership comes in. I mean, this is now a caricature of a China hand, but there is this old Confucius line where he says that the leader is like the wind and the people are the grass, and as the wind blows, the people will lie in that direction. And I think Trump is just the most dramatic example of that. We live through that.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think if times were different and the order of history or shifted some that a candidate like Barack Obama, like the ’08 Obama … It’s hard to do this counterfactual because different times are different and reward different qualities and characteristics and people have different fears and hopes depending on what year it is. But don’t you think a politician as talented as Obama would be running away with it against Trump or not?

Evan Osnos:

I do. I really do. Because I think if you go back and you look at the way that people felt a sense of inspiration … Somebody once described it as philosophical reach. That’s what Obama had. This is the part that’s hard to quantify.

Preet Bharara:

But you’ve got to be pretty special to do that, right?

Evan Osnos:

Exactly. This is the part that’s very hard to quantify. The difference between good and great or between great and once a generation kind of talent is not just a difference of degree, it’s a difference of kind. It has this ability to pull people towards you, and it’s so rare. And I think in some ways, it’s amazing to think back that Barack Obama was winning counties in Iowa. He was winning in Missouri. He was winning in all of these places because people allowed themselves to be open to that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I think people will ask the question, what’s more effective? What are people more attracted to, a message of hope or message of fear? And it’s kind of like in the middle of the World Series, not going great for the Yankees, unfortunately for me and my family, but it’s a little bit like asking what’s a better pitch, a knuckleball or a fastball. Well, it depends on the freaking pitcher. I think that if you take a messenger, the most talented, artful messenger you can find in both categories, fear and hope, the hope candidate wins. But that’s not what you’re presented with often. Right?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. I also think that the big difference between now and 2008 is the fact that nobody is consuming … They’re not reading from the same hymnal. The fracturing of our information culture, which we all talk about constantly in one way or another, is really the defining, underlying fact here. That it would be very hard even for Obama with his rhetorical power to get up today and reach enough people without it being twisted and distorted along the way for them to hear him. It’s not impossible, but it would be that much harder.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But it’s even worse than that, Evan, I think. People might not hear the speech you’re talking about or people might not watch the interview that Trump does on Fox on the other side, but there are occasions like the debates when everyone is watching. You have tens of millions on one side, tens of millions on the other side, and they’re watching with their same human eyes and listening with their same human ears and they’re having completely different reactions. I feel like that’s a little bit different. It’s not only that they’re siloed, but when they’re unsiloed, the same people are seeing different things.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. Well, this is where I sometimes come back to this observation that somebody made to me once just offhand. It was like a political strategist saying for all of the time and energy and money that we expend on all of this stuff, in the end, the most powerful thing you can project in politics is the idea that this candidate is on your side. I don’t mean that in the cheesy local, the kind of … But just literally that they represent, they see your problems, they get you. I mean, I’ll give you an example I saw not too long ago. I was dinner with a CEO, who I can’t really name, but he’s a pretty prominent guy, and he basically, to my utter astonishment, and it was pretty depressing, basically indicated that he thinks that Trump would be better for him. And he said, I think most people in my world agree with me even though they won’t say it publicly.

And I said, “But hold on. Goldman Sachs has said Donald Trump’s going to be worse for the economy. He’s going to have four times the debt that a Harris agenda would produce and on and on and on. We all know this.” And he said, “Yeah, but fundamentally he gets it.” And that idea, he gets it, it’s the most impossible thing to quantify and it is also at the heart of why I think there are still people today that are willing to go along. I mean, for me at least, I don’t know what you think, Preet, but that’s always the mystery.

Preet Bharara:

It just occurred to me when you were speaking, this may be a terrible analogy, but I’m good at terrible analogies. He’s kind of the opposite of a visionary entrepreneur, and his followers are the opposite of visionary investors. And I’ll explain what I mean by that. To succeed at a new business as an entrepreneur, the idea, the vision is not nearly enough. I’ve often said that I’ve been very irritated over the years. My brother and his best friend from high school started a company called Diapers.com. Enormously successful. They sold it to Amazon for half a billion dollars a decade ago. And I come across people who will say, “Oh, I should have thought of that. Diapers on the internet.” I’m like, “Fuck you.”

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. That’s all it took. The idea.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It’s about execution. And the reason I mentioned that in this context is Donald Trump seems to get away with just getting it. He has the thought about grievance and his execution, whether it’s about the border or it’s about our alliances, is complete crap. How is he selling, just getting it? I wonder, is that a function of just how left behind a lot of people feel that the mere getting it is almost the whole battle?

Evan Osnos:

I mean, the irony is it’s not the people that are feeling left behind that are often the ones who say that Trump gets it. It’s often people in some of the most privileged positions in society. I’ve written about, essentially some of the wealthiest Trump supporters over the years because they’re almost the biggest mystery. Or it’s not that much of a mystery. In some cases, they’re doing it for tax policy or for deregulation. That’s fine. And I understand why. The part that is a mystery to me is to your point, they say that he is ideologically sympathetic because he is business oriented. On the other hand, he has run one business into the ground after another. He has proven himself incapable of executing, and were he not essentially born on third base, would he ever have been able to do anything? That’s the part that I find bizarre.

I think the people who are really left behind, and in some ways I understand their instincts more because what they’re doing is essentially saying, “We have felt overlooked. We have felt abandoned by the Democratic Party, and this guy is paying attention to us.” I mean, I wrote about West Virginia a lot, and I I remember this. The prime example is when I went to the Historical Society in Clarksburg, West Virginia, in the Northwestern, North-central part of the state. And I said, “Tell me about the democratic candidates that have been here over the last few decades.” Because it used to be a fully democratic area. And they went back and they checked and they said, “What we can find really is just that Jesse Jackson came in 1988 and that’s it. It hasn’t been here.” But if you go back to the ’60s, they had this huge amount of attention from the Democratic Party. So I think in some ways I’ve been reading a lot about status and culture, status anxiety, what it is that people need, what gives them a feeling of status, and ultimately it’s the awareness that others are seeing you, are acknowledging you that you matter. And in his horribly crude way, Trump’s gaze is the thing that people respond to. Does that sound off to you? Does that sound right?

Preet Bharara:

No. Look, Trump says some things that are deeply, deeply, fundamentally true. And the first speech I gave after I was fired at Cooper Union, I said that he is right and it resonates when he says that the system is rigged, that there is a swamp, and there are people who have been left behind and forgotten. Those three things are absolutely true. They were true in 2015, in 2016 and 2017. It’s true in 2024. More or less, I’m not sure. But the mere fact that he recognizes those things does not make his prescriptions or his election a good thing for the people who identify with that diagnosis. It’s like you have COVID, now take bleach.

His political sensibility is kind of like his medical sensibility. There’s no science, there’s no logic. But I’m not a therapist. I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist. But going back to this question of just understanding people, I mean, you and I know that in real life, that half of getting someone to feel better, even if you don’t have a solution to their problem … Your friend got broken up with or lost their job or is having a fight with their parents or has an identity crisis or whatever the case may be, the most important thing you can do firstly is not administer medicine to them or get them a job or a divorce lawyer or whatever the case may be. Those things can be important, but the first thing is to have empathy and to understand where they’re coming from and have them believe.

Now, it’s a very odd thing for people on one side of the aisle, myself included, at first blush, to think Donald Trump has empathy. Because I think he doesn’t actually have interpersonal empathy, but it’s the great paradox of Donald Trump who is a freaking liar. He lies as he breathes, but is perceived to be by a lot of people as somebody who is emblematic of truth. He speaks truth to power. He speaks truth to the system. And that manifests itself in other ways too. He’s utterly unsympathetic and not empathic and not empathetic towards individual human beings, but the fact that he understands the language of that grievance makes him empathetic in some other sense. Does that compute?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. I think it does, because I think, to borrow a line that Joe Biden has always used, don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative. And the reality is that part of the reason why Trump happened was because the conventional liberal idea … And this is something that Michael Sandel and others have written about really effectively. Sandel in particular. It became punitive in the sense that if you didn’t succeed within the meritocratic culture, well then it was on you. And ultimately the Democratic Party didn’t create the kinds of systems that would help people through the honest to goodness adversity that would come with the decline of their status and of their professions and of everything else. Preet, I look back on this moment of, back in 2016 when it seemed as if Hillary Clinton might win, one of the things she was talking about that is really thrilling that would’ve actually had real impact was to finally introduce some kind of real … What’s known as trade adjustment or retraining or helping people whose jobs are being engulfed by globalization and are going away either because of mechanization or because of trade and so on.

And that she was finally saying, and it took this campaign to make it clear. She said, “We’re going to need to invest in that in a real way.” And if you look in places in Europe that have actually been able to … Places like Norway that have avoided some of the most disruptive experiences of having industrial jobs go away, it’s partly because they do figure out ways of cushioning that blow. And had she been elected, that was something she was actually going to do. And of course, Trump has done none of that. He’s done none of that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’ve talked with Michael Sandel, who was my own professor in college.

Evan Osnos:

Me too. That’s great. It shows you how long he’s been doing this too. I love that. He’s teaching it again. He’s still teaching.

Preet Bharara:

I know. It was called Moral Reasoning 22.

Evan Osnos:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

When I was in college. Look, this valorization of college is, I think, an important issue. Part of the reason I want people to understand why we’re having, at least I feel like the need to have this conversation, which might seem odd to some people a week in advance. We haven’t talked about the polls. We haven’t talked about who’s likely to win. I hope Kamala Harris wins. I have great confidence in her, and she’d be about four million times better than Donald Trump. But she may not win. And so we’re going to have to grapple with all these things. And I would submit, even if she does win, she’s going to probably eke it out. All these questions-

Evan Osnos:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

Are still relevant. What happened to the country? How could someone that has all the features of Donald Trump, which I think are deeply, deeply, deeply flawed and problematic, how can half of our fellow citizens think that’s the guy? Whether it’s a shade below 50% or shade above 50%, because that’s going to be the result next week. I’ll give you another example of something that I wonder about because I know you talk about it and I think about it, and I have as well. This idea of patriotism. And maybe this is unfair. I feel like often liberals, people on the left, shrink a little bit from unabashed patriotism. A, do you agree with that? And B, what do you think of that?

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, I think there certainly was a time when it became dishonored as an idea for a couple of reasons. I think one, there was the legacy of the post 9/11 jingoistic surge when patriotism led into this harsher form of freedom fries and then everything worse that followed. This idea that it was a harsh and punitive form of pride in this country. I think though then there was another thing, which is that at a certain point, the flag was taken up as essentially a tool and a weapon by the right. That they had sort of exclusive ownership over the language of patriotism. USA, USA. And then there was a third thing, which is I think that as we began to talk about American history with clearer eyes and began to talk about the history of racism and of slavery, that it became hard to have an unambiguous, full-throated announcement of love for the idea of the United States without having all of the clauses and qualifications that come with it. So that became baked in. That was the inhibition that surrounded the idea of liberal patriotism. But we forgot something along that path. I mean, there’s this really interesting little passage that now reads like prophecy, frankly.

But Richard Rorty, who’s a theorist at Harvard, he wrote … This was back in the late ’90s. He had this incredible prescient description of what was coming in our politics. And this little bit went viral for a while where he said basically that workers who feel increasingly left behind by forces of control and capital in this country will eventually turn to a strongman, he said, and they will turn against all of the people who they think have been keeping them down or abandoning them. And that circulated for-

Preet Bharara:

It’s an echo of what we talked about earlier.

Evan Osnos:

Exactly. And what’s amazing is to read it now, it just reads like crystal ball. But we missed something. We missed something, Preet, which was in that very same piece of writing back in ’98 when he wrote this, he also said that a necessary precondition for, call it national self-improvement, is that you have to have some pride in the nation. You have to believe that this place is worth improving, that it is not terminally and permanently damaged by the flaws in our history and our character. And I think it’s that finding that combination of, call it a fierce love, a critical love of this country has been the great challenge for, I think really almost specifically, not just for Democrats today, but also for Kamala Harris. I mean, I watched it at the convention. I think she succeeded at it. I really do. I think watching the way that patriotism had found its place again in Chicago was encouraging. Because that was a step beyond some of that conflicted, inhibited feeling that people had a few years ago. Is patriotism a superpower for Democrats or is it something that’s always got this asterisk next to it?

Preet Bharara:

I think it can be a superpower for anybody who in good faith and with authenticity embraces their country. And it’s interesting to me, and I haven’t analyzed this, so maybe this is unfair. I feel the people who talk on the left most passionately and persuasively about their love of country are immigrants.

Evan Osnos:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

They don’t take this place for granted, and I’m one of them. It has never felt awkward or corny to me. I can never ever remember it being awkward or corny to me or bordering on some kind of weird right wing flag waving thing for me to talk with great love and affection for the United States of America. I’ve done it. I do it a lot in public life when I became the head of an office and I have a platform. But my Twitter handle says … You have limited characters. Patriotic American made the cut. And I think people have come up to me after I’ve given talks, and I have different political views from conservatives, but boy, if you believe what they say, there’s no daylight. They don’t have anything on me when it comes to how much I love the country. And yeah, I want to improve it and I think it’s imperfect, but there’s not any thinking person in America who doesn’t feel that way. By the way, Donald Trump, beacon of patriotism, that guy, he calls the United States a trash can.

He bashes the United States all the time. And in his case, I’m not sure why people think, well, that’s just a patriot trying to bring back America’s greatness, and when liberals do it, it’s something different. I think part of it is there is a little … I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or not, or a rhetorical thing. There’s a little bit of discomfort sometimes, I think this is true, on the intellectual left, speaking in those terms about their country. And I think it’s not the right way to be generally, but it’s also politically damaging.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah, it really has been … In a way it’s been self hobbling to the left because people want to be … And this is something that Barack Obama was very effective at doing. He was running in an overtly patriotic voice, and when he talked about the idea of the United States, people responded to it.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a great example. Democrats ate it up.

Evan Osnos:

Exactly. And enough Republicans.

Preet Bharara:

So why didn’t we learn from that lesson?

Evan Osnos:

Well, I think there’s something there. I think Kamala Harris is the child of two immigrants, meaning two people who chose this country at tremendous risk and dislocation and all of the things that we all know that comes with this. Look, my father came to this country as a refugee. It’s a quirky fact, but my father was born in India because he was in a Polish-Jewish family that was fleeing the Nazis in Poland. And so he came to this country and grew up with this very explicit sense in the house that we’ve chosen to be here. This country has sheltered us. And by no means did that ever allow a complacent disregard for America’s failings, but it meant that actually this was a place that it was a chosen love. It was the chosen family, which is a very fashionable idea now.

Preet Bharara:

Look, it seems to me that what Trump has going for him, and I think these are things we need to think about. He’s the anti-politician. I think it’s less left or right because he inverts them and twists them up. Tariffs, that’s not a right-wing idea, at least in modern times, but people are so fed up with the anodyne nothings, platitudes that come out of politicians mouths or the outright lies that everyone just sort of accepts you have to tell these fibs and these lies. He doesn’t do that. So even when he comes out and he says … I’m not saying we should adopt his style.

Evan Osnos:

No, I get it.

Preet Bharara:

But there’s something to learn. How often is it that a citizen listens to a politician give a speech and it seems true? It seems fully and completely true as opposed to staged or as opposed to pandering. And there are people who break through and get it done. Now, I would prefer to see somebody do it in the way that Obama and maybe some foreseeable rising star in the future might, which is to speak in those terms and in those phrases and in a tone that is hopeful and uplifting and inspiring and have it ring true as opposed to having it ring true with spewing hatred and division in antipathy, which is what Trump does.

Evan Osnos:

Yeah. We talked a bit earlier about Pete Buttigieg and one of the things that Pete has been able to do is to speak in a way that is … There’s nothing truly unusual about what he’s doing, but what he does is he speaks with the right kind of language, meaning that it’s original, it’s deeply felt. At the New Yorker, which is kind of my intellectual home-

Preet Bharara:

And the adversary of local news.

Evan Osnos:

I think that would be a tough-

Preet Bharara:

The sworn enemy of local news.

Evan Osnos:

Tough match to imagine. Look, we’re such partisans for local news in our household. The idea that the New Yorker is somehow its mortal enemy is a tough one to imagine. But the thing that I think is amazing is there’s nothing that people at the New Yorker are more allergic to than cliche because cliche is actually the enemy of an honest connection with the reader or the listener. And in some ways I think what people recoil from in politics is that kind of fuzzy obfuscating language. The worst example of it, the one that I think of most often, is after there’s been an awful shooting in a school and what do people get? They get thoughts and prayers.

Preet Bharara:

Thoughts and prayers.

Evan Osnos:

It’s like this-

Preet Bharara:

I saw somebody mix it up once and he said prayers and thoughts.

Evan Osnos:

At least that would be original, but he should be cast out too, whoever that is.

Preet Bharara:

Evan, I’m glad we’re having this kind of conversation in advance of the election. Whatever happens either way, I think we need to keep thinking about these issues that are larger than particular candidates, larger than a particular issue or two. It’s about where we are as a country, what we need in our politics, what we need in our leaders, and so hopefully you’ll be back and we’ll talk some more. Evan Osnos, thank you.

Evan Osnos:

Glad to do it, Preet. Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you.

BUTTON

Preet Bharara:

To end the show this week, I guess it would seem odd to talk about anything other than the impending election. Tens of millions of people have already voted. That voting comes to a close in just a few days on November 5th. I don’t know exactly what to say about it. I don’t know what there is to say that I haven’t said already. I don’t know who will win. I don’t know when we’ll know who the winner is. I don’t have a closing argument like the candidates have given in recent days. I get asked a lot in recent times, how’s my mood? How are you feeling? What do you think? I ask people the same question. I feel like it’s a little bit different when you get into Teams or Zoom or a phone call now and you ask somebody, “How’s it going? What do you think is going to happen?”

Everyone knows what you’re talking about. You’re not talking about the stock market. Maybe you’re talking about the World Series if it’s the last couple of days, although that’s not going so well for my Yankees. But lately when people ask the question, how are you, what’s going to happen, it seems more weighty. It seems more fraught. So when people ask me how I’m feeling, I tend to identify with something that was said by the John Cusack character, Marty Blank from a great film, Grosse Pointe Blank, who says at one point to his shrink, “I’m uneasy. I feel uneasy.” That’s how I feel. I feel kind of uneasy. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Everyone knows what I hope happens. We’ll see if it comes to pass. What I do know is whatever happens I and we will be here next week, we’ll be here the week after and the week after that, speaking from the heart and also the brain from time to time about what we think is important, what we need to fight for in this country, and how we can keep the country in line with the ideals we have for it.

Someone also asked me on Twitter in the last number of days, “What’s your playlist for the week ahead?” I don’t change my playlist dramatically, but I will say that some of the old standbys are on my playlist as always and forever. Bruce Springsteen this week a little bit, my favorite of all time, Thunder Road, but also songs like The Promise and Promised Land are a bit on my playlist. I have a new love for a singer, Jason Isbell, who I saw live in concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville just a couple of weeks ago. Then there’s a particular song that I’ve been playing a lot lately and captures a little bit, reflects a little bit how I’m feeling. It’s a song by Jimmy Cliff, but covered beautifully and brilliantly by my friend and collaborator, Zeeshan B, who I’ve talked about on the show a number of times, and whose new record I helped to produce. It’s called A Hard Road to Travel, and we’ll take it out to that tune. See you on the other side of the election.

Music:

I’ve got a hard road to travel and a rough, rough way to go. Said it’s a hard road to travel and a rough, rough way to go. But I can’t turn back. My heart is fixed. My mind’s made up. No I’ll never stop. All my faith will see me through. All along this lonesome road, I rode. I’ve got no …

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Evan Osnos. 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 @PreetBharara 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 Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.