Preet Bharara:

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

David Ignatius:

Gaddafi in Libya, he ended up being killed. You had chaos, incivility across the country. Bashar al-Assad again, there wasn’t a clear idea of what to do next. This is part of the American way of war. We blow in, we break things, and we just don’t seem to have the skills or dang power to create something new.

Mark Leibovich:

A party becomes defined by who their central figure, who their quarterback becomes. Democrats haven’t really anointed a effective quarterback since Barack Obama, pretty much.

Preet Bharara:

This week, I’m joined by two special guests. David Ignatius is a longtime foreign affairs columnist at the Washington Post and a best-selling author. He joins me to discuss the US-Israeli military operations in Iran and the killing of Iran Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Then I’ll be joined by the Atlantic staff writer, Mark Leibovich to talk about the Tuesday primary results and his recent piece, The Democrats aren’t built for this. That’s coming up. Stay Tuned.

The US is at war with Iran. David Ignatius breaks it all down. So my question is, are we unequivocally at war? Because I have seen some members of the United States Senate get up on TV, at least one, and say, “This is not a war.” I guess in part, trying to justify not going to Congress. The Secretary of Defense, who calls himself Secretary of War, does call it a war. Settle that question once and for all, are we at war or not?

David Ignatius:

So wars are declared by Congress and Congress has not declared war. So legally, there must be some other justification. I think the whole issue of on what basis with what legal support, with what strategic rationale we’re engaged in this widening conflict with Iran is absolutely central. One of my feelings, Preet, is that the United States gets involved in the Middle East in ways that the public simply isn’t prepared to sustain, doesn’t understand.

I first remember that when I was in Lebanon. In 1983, President Reagan found himself in support of Lebanon after the Israeli invasion, put the country back together. Americans got killed and he bailed. That wasn’t a war and he was arguably smart enough to pull out before it got more dangerous. But is this a war? Yeah, it’s a widening war, whatever legal basis.

Preet Bharara:

David Ignatius says it’s a war, so it’s a war. The rationale that you talked about, so Marco Rubio said a bunch of things the other day. And among the things he said was, “Well, Israel was going to go in and then Iran was going to attack us.” And so he called that preemptive. We decided to strike first, which is an odd way of formulating what a preemptive strike is. What do you make of the rationale? What do you think the real rationale is if it’s something different?

David Ignatius:

So I was struck Preet by the fact that Mike Johnson gave much the same account of this that Rubio did after he got his classified briefing. What I’m assuming, obviously I don’t know, and Rubio himself has now contradicted his initial account, is that he was trying to give an explanation of the imminent threat that the United States faced that justified our taking this military action. And he couldn’t say that the imminent threat was Iranian ballistic missiles that could strike the United States because that’s not true. They don’t have them.

They may someday, but it’s some years off by most estimates. He couldn’t say that it was Iranian nuclear weapons because by President Trump’s account, we obliterated the Iranian nuclear program. And from what I know, that’s pretty much true. The damage that last June was enormous. So what was the imminent threat? And I think he explained that in a way that would provide a legal basis for what was done, that we had intelligence that the Israelis were about to strike Iran, and we knew from intelligence that Iran would respond by striking the United States. So we faced an imminent threat because we knew Israel was about to attack.

Preet Bharara:

This may be an odd question, but who is it exactly that we’re fighting at the moment? And the question is about the current state of affairs. So we killed the Supreme Leader. The President and the Secretary of Defense tell us that the entire Navy is at the bottom of the ocean, that we either have or are about to have complete and total dominance of the air.

The place is in chaos. Who are we fighting and who’s left? What is the state of affairs of the Iranian military? And if they were going to sue for peace, who’s going to do that? Do they actually have, as far as you know, a structure in place? Is it something less than chaos in Iran? How do we even bring this to a conclusion given the state of affairs?

David Ignatius:

Well, I think that’s an interesting question and problem with the decapitation strategy. As you decapitate people who could resolve the [inaudible 00:05:55] who are gone, there’s just nobody left. And President Trump himself referenced that. We were going to deal with this one and that one, but they’re dead. So select new people, but they’re dead.

So I think that’s a very real issue. What we’re dealing with is the remnants, and they’re still significant of the regime that was headed by the supreme leader, Khamenei, that will be led apparently by his son, Mojtaba. The architecture of that regime has been degraded, but it’s still there. The RGC still has people operating throughout the country, throughout the world, probably. The besiege militia that’s suppressed Iranians so viciously is still there.

The police special units that were out in the streets in January, Trump was right, machine-gunning, the Iranian protestors, they’re still there. And so I think the war continues to try to destroy as much of that infrastructure as possible. The problem is, it’s become so familiar. What happens then?

So after you’ve degraded all those people and that infrastructure and you’ve got this sort of rubble of the regime, who governs and how, and how’s that going to be handled? And I still, I haven’t heard in now nearly a week of this war, any coherent account of where this is all heading, whether it leaves Iran and the Middle East more stable than I were before.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s so odd. You were reciting earlier something that Trump said about, “Well, we’re going to talk to this person and they’re dead.” Trump’s been doing a lot of allowed music and ruminating, including saying forthrightly when asked about succession, well, we kind of killed all the successors and suggesting in the way that he said it, that that was not necessarily intentional. A, I don’t know what you think about that. B, the other musing he’s been doing is to say, “Look, I guess it could turn out …” I’m paraphrasing.

“It could turn out terrible because you could go in there and do the things that we’ve done and then somebody worse comes along and gets installed in power. And a few years later, basically it was all for naught.” He’s getting criticized a little bit for that, which I think is deserved to the extent that if that is what turns out to happen, then I think he deserves a lot of criticism for allowing that to happen because it could have been avoided presumably. But does he get any credit for being super frank and upfront about not only that, but about the sacrifices American soldiers will likely have to make in the coming days and weeks?

David Ignatius:

What I’ve written, Preet, is for 45 plus years, American presidents have been wanting to reverse the course of this revolutionary regime that has so destabilized the Middle East. And I’ve said in print, I loath this regime. They’ve created from one end of the region to another. I worry about a policy that seeks to shatter the regime without a clear idea of what comes next, because I’ve seen that over and over. That’s what happened in Libya.

There was a monstrous dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, he ended up being killed and you had chaos in civility across the country for most of a decade. I watched it happen in Syria. There was a challenge that we supported to Bashar al-Assad, again, a dreadful leader like Khamenei, but there wasn’t a clear idea of what to do next. This is part of the American way of war. We blow in, we break things, and we just don’t seem to have the skills of staying power to create something new. I just don’t feel that’s being repeated and it really bothers me.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s not unforeseeable that you bomb a country, you destroy its leaders, you think it’s Navy, that there might be some chaos. And to figure out what comes next or what the possibilities of are for what comes next, it’s maybe an unfair question and overly quantitative, but on a scale of one to 10, what is your sense of how much preparation has been done or was done by the Trump administration for the aftermath?

David Ignatius:

So I’m not aware of any significant preparation. I think Trump’s model now is Venezuela. He understandably intoxicated with our amazing military, the things it can do, and it’s understandable. Imagine what it’s like to be president and command a force like this. But in terms of planning for the day after has become the phrase we use, I’m not aware that it’s been done. This is tough stuff. We’re historically not very good at it.

The Israelis, I’m afraid, pretty toxic in Iran, so it’s hard for them to do it. There’s talk now of arming the Kurds and sending Iranian Kurdish militias in. The problem with that is that that will create ethnic divisions, deepen the divisions that exist in Iran. So I’m not sure that’s a good strategy. I haven’t heard anybody articulate with clarity how we get from where we are now to, as I say, a new Iran that’s more stable in a new Middle East that’s more stable, and I want to hear that to feel-

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s very peculiar because the president says very dramatically, and I think in an intended, inspiring fashion, the Iranian people need to rise up and take their country back with no infrastructure to do so, no real, for at least 45 years, social structure in which to do so. On the heels of our government’s numbers, 30,000 of them being killed for protesting, nobody knows who’s in charge, nobody knows who’s going to be in charge tomorrow. I guess if you had been planning this, what kinds of things would you have done or should the administration perhaps have done to create an environment in which the people of Iran who he’s exhorting could do what makes sense for them to do, which is to take their country back?

David Ignatius:

You get a change of regime when there’s fragmentation in the elite that’s supporting the regime, and you begin to be able to pull people away who’d say, “The IRGC led government that we’ve been part of is corrupt, it’s unpopular, it’s increasingly unsuccessful, its military is being shattered by Israel. We need something different.” And you find a way often in secret to reach out to those people, you begin context.

An example, frankly, is what was done in Venezuela. It turns out the US was conducting extensive conversations with Elsie Rodriguez, who is now the acting president of Venezuela after Maduro about life after Maduro and how to govern, and that was done in secret fairly well. Doesn’t seem to have been done here. I need to do more reporting as I’m a journalist. I need to find out was this done? Was it done well done badly? But from what the question I’ve asked, I don’t see evidence that it was done much at all.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Do that reporting and come back, David. The people of Iran, from what we see, but I think it’s hard to know, mostly jubilant and elated. Is that correct?

David Ignatius:

That’s my impression. I’ve been in it twice. I’ve been impressed each time I go by the sophistication of the Iranian people and how much they dislike the regime. The fact that year after year, they go out in the streets and they face enormous repression. They end up getting killed, imprisoned, and they come back the next year and do it again. Tells you that this is an unpopular regime. People want something different.

Preet Bharara:

What about a different constituency? The cohort that is our allies other than Israel, how are they feeling about this?

David Ignatius:

So I think they started off feeling very wary. They don’t like getting punched in the nose. I think the UAE is proud that it’s surviving an attack that it feared. When we traveled to Dubai and Abu Dhabi and Doha and Qatar, you see these incredible cities of glass that have come out of the desert and they’re magnificent, but they’re fragile. And I think the UAE is worried that it would be the target if there ever was a general war with Iran. It now has been a target, but they’re facing up to it.

They’re shooting down most of the drones and missiles that come at them. And where I think they began worried about getting involved, they’re now ticked off. I think they’d be more willing to support action against Iran today than they were in the beginning, but they’re nervous. The UAE has had a policy of trying to stay out of conflicts, a subtle conflict, and that’s now blown up in its face as it has for the other Gulf countries. Saudi Arabia too was trying to make nice with Iran, not anymore.

Preet Bharara:

What about our European allies?

David Ignatius:

So obviously they’ve been wary. Britain, most particularly, President Trump was curious that the UK, there’s no Winston Churchill. Poor Keir Starmer had enough problems before this, but look now. So I think the Europeans have come to be really quite suspicious and worried about Trump’s bowl looking for a China shop to blow into. And they’re not comfortable anymore following Trump’s lead everywhere. Trump makes them pay a price.

Preet Bharara:

What are the kinds of things that you are looking to see happen in the immediate term and in the medium term that would signal to you this will end better than worse?

David Ignatius:

So from a military standpoint, the campaign will continue as Trump and others said yesterday, it’s entering a new phase. Iran air defense is basically gone. And so you can attack targets at will, and the US and Israel will. They’ll degrade every target they can find, every piece of the missile program, every ship they’ll sink.

It’ll be a general attack on the remnants of Iranian military power. And so you’ll have essentially a shattered state, except in the sense that there is no other governance. Who’s going to keep ordering? And that’s the dilemma the United States is going to face. Will we, with some kind of coalition, if we could put one together, go into Iran and try to help the Iranians build something new?

If you want to see a new Iran and a better Middle East, your idealistic sense, “Gosh, we need to go in and help is engaged.” Or at least mine is. The idea of just blowing things up and then walking away doesn’t sit right with me. But that’s the kind of commitment that Americans are very wary about, understandably after Iraq and Afghanistan. So it’s going to be a hard sell. But starting a war that just leaves a pile of rubble and instability, it’s not a good idea. The evidence is overwhelming, that it’s destabilizing.

Preet Bharara:

There’s one person I think of who also had that view that this kind of a thing is a bad idea. You know his name?

David Ignatius:

Well-

Preet Bharara:

Donald J. Trump.

David Ignatius:

Well, so he did all that-

Preet Bharara:

He used to think it’s a terrible idea. So if you have a final thought on what happened, you hinted at a potential motive or explanation, which is commander-in-chief war game power went to his head, particularly after Venezuela, but is that it? Is there anything else as you leave us with your final words of wisdom, David?

David Ignatius:

My last thought Preet, so this is a president who’s searching for a legacy, just thinks about all the time. And he’s not wrong to say every American president has looked at this threat of Iran and hasn’t done anything about it. They haven’t fundamentally been willing to challenge it. So I’m Donald Trump. I’m just the biggest, toughest guy on the block and I’m going to take care of it, and that’s who he is. We see that in every aspect of his behavior. The problem is doing that without a clear plan of where you’re going can get you in real trouble.

Preet Bharara:

David Ignatius, thanks so much. Thanks to my guest, David Ignatius. My conversation with Mark Leibovich begins after this. Mark Leibovich, welcome back to the show.

Mark Leibovich:

Preet, it’s always a privilege.

Preet Bharara:

So we have a lot to talk about. You wrote this article about the Democrats, which is getting a lot of attention. We’re going to sort of go through it. We’re recording this on Wednesday morning, March 4th, and we had originally scheduled this interview for Monday and I realized, or we realized we should wait and delay a couple of days so that you could comment on the primaries from last night and then we’ll get into your article.

So in Texas, I believe as of this taping in the very, very watched primary for Democratic nominee for the Senate race, we’ll go on to face either Ken Paxton, who’s the current Attorney General or John Cornyn, who has been a Senator there for a long time, they’re headed towards a runoff. So on the Democratic side, the race principally was between James Talarico and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

Mark Leibovich:

She conceded, at least she put out a very gracious statement within the last hour, which I know to be true because it was on Twitter as I was on the subway coming in.

Preet Bharara:

Good. We need unity with the Democrats in Texas. And there’s some other people I want to ask you about. Let me ask you this question. Why so much focus nationally on that primary? What’s interesting about it?

Mark Leibovich:

A few things. One, Texas I think always gets outsized attention, especially given that Democrats have been really hoping against hope, as it turns out, to flip the state from something that’s been solidly read for really a quarter-century. There just haven’t been many Democratic candidates who have done well statewide really since Ann Richards or Lloyd Bentsen going back to the ’90s or maybe even the ’80s.

So look, there are a lot of high profile races there. Beto O’Rourke was given so much hype and attention from almost beating Ted Cruz in 2018 that he turned around and was on the cover of Vanity Fair and ran for president in 2020. And his campaign when he actually started campaigning lasted about as long as Kamala Harris’ campaign did in 2020, which is to say not very well. So then Beto came back and ran against the sitting governor Greg Abbott also lost.

So there is a fairly recent tradition of candidates, Democratic candidates who receive outsized attention in some ways like New York mayoral candidates and often it doesn’t amount to anything. But in Texas, look, Texas is a legitimately fast changing state. It is a fascinating state. It is a bellwether in that very, very big Hispanic vote, which has become such a sort of swingy block of voters since Trump did so well with them in 2024.

It looks like Talarico did extremely well with them and Democrats just had a lot more Hispanic voters voting in the primary than Republicans did, which confirms a lot of data recently, which is that Hispanics are flooding back to Democrats, especially in the wake of some of this ICE stuff. But no, Talarico is a fascinating candidate. He’s a seminarian. He talks a lot of Jesus.

Preet Bharara:

And Democrats usually, some Democrats, I should say, find that off-putting, but not with this guy. Why is that?

Mark Leibovich:

Some Democrats might have found it off-putting and they might’ve voted for Jasmine Crockett who got quite a few votes. The question is, will they find it off-putting enough to vote for Greg Abbott or John Cornyn in the general election or will they stay home or what have you? This is sort of like what will determine the next few months and ultimately who wins in November. But Talarico is fascinating because he really, the guy like he knows the scripture, he is going to do everything he can, I’m sure in the next few months to, one, try to consolidate his Democratic base probably with an emphasis on African-American voters who voted heavily for Crockett and who comprised about maybe 12, 13% of the state.

But also, Talarico certainly has the potential to reach a lot of Trump voters or sort of Republican voters or voters who might otherwise stay home who are turned off either by the kind of long kind of musty been there forever image of John Cornyn or the much more kind of divisive morally suspect, legally suspect reputation of Ken Paxton, who’s the state attorney general, who’s much sort of pure MAGA. But yeah, it should be a fascinating general election beginning with the next three months where Republicans have to determine who their nominee is and that’s going to be pretty intramurally brutal and obviously And costly. And costly. Yeah. I think Democrats are thrilled by this.

Preet Bharara:

Go back to Talarico for a second. And so I’m not a particularly religious person. I have great respect for people who are authentically religious. And something about Talarico who I was introduced to by various clips by some folks and have seen an action a number of times now, to me, the attraction of the guy is that he seems genuinely a man of deep faith and he’s not making it up.

And he doesn’t seem to be using it as a cudgel. He doesn’t seem to be using it as a wedge. And so you have a deeply religious person who in good faith talks about his faith in an inclusive way, not as a cudgel, not as a wedge. That’s new stuff for a Democrat. And I think that is not off-putting to anybody who I think understands the power of faith. Is that fair?

Mark Leibovich:

I think it is. And I think he gets to a very important idea, which is that for many, many, many years, Republicans have kind of owned the idea of faith and in fact sort of become expert at using that as a cudgel, thinking that to be a person of faith, you must be against abortion under any circumstances, any kind of tolerance for, say, same-sex marriage or something like that. Talarico makes a very compelling argument on two levels.

One, he is like, there’s nothing in the Bible about abortion. There’s nothing in the Bible about say same-sex marriage and various Supreme Court decisions and so forth. He takes a much more, and I think very intellectually compelling view on what religion and faith means vis-a-vis the contentious issues across the political spectrum. The other thing about him is he has a very, very strong unifying message.

It’s populist in that, like a lot of Democrats, he’s like billionaires bad. Oligarchy bad, but he does make a compelling case that when you get outside the realm of politics and a person goes out into the world into a restaurant or is driving across the country or needs a tire fixed or something, the vast majority of people, their impulse is to be neighborly, and that’s a big word for Talarico, neighborly or neighbor.

It is not to immediately go down some kind of Facebook chat group rabbit hole and yell at each other about politics. And to me, I think that’s a very powerful and very, very true to life perspective that I don’t think has really gotten the kind of mileage that it could. And I think Talarico is pretty well positioned to do that.

Preet Bharara:

And he’s a young guy.

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah, he’s in his 30s, mid 30s, like 36, something like that. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Let me talk about another Texas guy who I’m very fond of, Bobby Pulido, who Tejano Singer, not a person who you think would be involved in politics, great music, and he’s from the place, deeply from the place that he ran from. So I was listening to the coverage last night and I was thinking to myself, there’s James Talarico, there’s Bobby Pulido, there’s another person who’s a farmer from North Carolina, Jamie Ager. And I feel like once upon a time in politics, and maybe I’m totally wrong about this, people are right in and you’re the political historian aficionado, so you can tell me if I’m wrong or right.

Everyone had sort of the same telegenic look. They all had a sort of Washington look and they had to be palatable to everyone, whether they were from a red district in Texas or a blue district in Vermont. And Jen Psaki was making this point last night, and I won’t make it as well as she made it, but the observation was we should be electing people and people want to vote for folks who are like them in their district, who are of the district, who are of the state, and they maybe don’t look like every telegenic political pro campaign manager type from the 90s who looks good at a podium, and I feel like these guys are like that.

It’s not quite the citizen representative model that Jefferson, I think, talked about, but you know what? Why not have a singer? Why not have a deeply religious Democrat? Why not have a farmer? Why does everybody have to be a career politician? I think that’s one of the things people are sick of. And I don’t know if this is a trend or this is just a few folks.

I don’t know if it’s a product of people getting fed up like Pulido has said, and he wants to run and represent his folks and his constituents and his neighbors in Congress, or if it’s a strategy by smarter operatives than they used to be, it’s a mishmash of observations, but I like the trend. What do you think?

Mark Leibovich:

I have a mishmash of observations to throw right back at you. I agree with you. And I think that that can be a very compelling political storyline, whether you’re John Tester, a guy, genuine farmer who managed to get elected as a Democrat multiple times until his luck ran out in 2024, but in Montana, which is a bright red state, he was able to do that. And then in a place like New York, you have someone like AOC who basically, who’s a sensation now, but her background is she was a bartender and she literally went from bartender to superstar politician.

She was in Congress, but there’s no intermediary city council race, state rep race step there. And she’s been derided for it left and right. It’s like, “Oh, she’s just a bartender.” And in some ways, that can be weaponized, but in some ways it can also be used to build a career on. On the other hand, you do have to be worried, and this is where my kind of maybe cynicism or maybe realism kicks in, which is when does a shtick become too much of a shtick? A guy like John Fetterman, for instance.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s not a shtick if it’s genuine.

Mark Leibovich:

I know, but that’s where the sort of nose of the voters comes in.

Preet Bharara:

That’s so interesting that if that’s who you are, then it’s not a shtick.

Mark Leibovich:

Well, here’s the thing. At some point though, when does the shtick collide with the demands of being politic? And for instance, you have an oyster farmer like this guy.

Preet Bharara:

I talk a lot about that guy. Yes.

Mark Leibovich:

Graham Platner, gets a lot of attention. Maine, Senate candidate, no political background at all. He kind of comes out of nowhere. Bernie endorses him. He starts blowing out these halls in a way that raises a lot of money for him nationally in a way that Talarico did because even though Talarico has a political background, he had a whole viral thing going.

He gave a lot of speeches that got a lot of attention, very compelling on TV, went on Joe Rogan and so forth. But a guy like Platner, all of a sudden that’s going to collide headlong with a completely unvetted past. And in Platner’s case, you have a whole bunch of old problematic Reddit posts, tattoos that have all kinds of Nazi connotations and all kinds of other things. And then you sort of realize there is a risk, a very big risk for Democrats especially to fall in love with someone like that because all of a sudden, they become unreliable.

And like someone like John Fetterman prevails. And obviously Fetterman, there’s a lot of intermediary sort of concerns. One was he had stroke and he suffered from pretty severe depression. But again, when you’re unvetted, when you’re like Graham Platner and you don’t really know what you’ve been through and where you’ve been and what sort of Reddit posts you have out there, you just don’t know what you’re getting. So it’s a fine line.

Preet Bharara:

Look, there’s the problem with politics. By definition, Democratic politics, small Democratic means that to become an elected official, you need more people to vote for you than for the other guy. And that means you need to appeal to the largest possible constituency. And so one man’s joke is another man’s offensive remark. One man’s eccentric, attractive quality is another person’s off-putting affect.

And so for a long time when I was younger, I thought “These politicians are all robots, they’re all boring, they’re all terrible, none of them are funny.” And then I began to think sort of in the middle of my adulthood, “Well, it’s not their fault because jokes are punished, personality is punished and you want to offend the least possible number of people.” And so democracy a little bit, in this regard, forces a reversion to a boring, middling, mediocre mean.

And now I’m coming around back to my earlier view that you know what? We have a big country and every district, congressional district has hundreds of thousands of people. There should be some who can both be true to themselves, be more interesting than the average telegenic politician, and also not wear thin, because you and I both know people like that in real life.

Mark Leibovich:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

There are people like that in business. There are people like that in the arts. There are people like that in the law. Presumably there are people like that in journalism. I don’t know, Mark, I haven’t met any of those people, and that’s a joke.

Mark Leibovich:

Well, I’m above it all, Preet. I don’t know these people either.

Preet Bharara:

So that’s the arc of my thinking about what I want to expect and demand from people who want to represent hundreds of thousands of people in the United States.

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah. Look, here’s the thing. I mean, what we’re talking on some level about is populism, right? What is popularized? What appeals to the highest number of people? And who is the ultimate populist in this age? Donald Trump, right? He ran as a populist. It’s absurd to think that he is like a kind of classic definition of a populist in that he is a pitchfork, farmer kind of working man kind of guy, which is kind of a joke.

Preet Bharara:

No, he’s a carnival barker.

Mark Leibovich:

Well, he’s a carnival barker, but-

Preet Bharara:

Sincerely so.

Mark Leibovich:

But what is the essence of populism in America? It’s celebrity. And he kind of proved that. I remember Al Franken when he was in the Senate told me that one of the things he learned fairly early on when he came to the Senate is that celebrity transcends ideology. And he learned that when he, in his first years in the Senate, people who agreed with him on nothing, who probably trashed him on the air and so forth, just completely dismissed him, just would come up to him on the floor.

I remember Marco Rubio, he told me about this once, just would come up to him and talk about, start quoting old SNL lines with great specificity. And there would be a level of fascination that would sort of transcend. Now that’s celebrity. You could ask, at what point does an unknown become a celebrity politician? And the truth gets completely muddled in the middle here. But there’s a lot at work here.

I also think that someone who’s kind of boring and kind of milk toast, like say Andy Beshear, who’s a Democrat, can be an extremely effective politician in a place like Kentucky where he’s been elected governor a couple times and might run for president. And at the same time, a guy like Fetterman, maybe Platner or maybe Talarico, whatever. There are a lot of different flavors of this, but I don’t know what the end of the paragraph is, but I do think that there is definitely a hunger for someone who, one, can read as authentic and two, who can be somewhat entertaining. Or if you’re in Kentucky, boring.

Preet Bharara:

Well, Mitch McConnell, not the most scintillating politician, but some would say the most consequential Republican of modern times, given the totality of what he has done. So North Carolina for a second, Roy Cooper. I’ve been hearing about him. I actually never had occasion to see him speak, but I saw him last night and I’m thinking, even if the TV had been on mute, I would’ve said to myself, and tell me how shallow this is.

I’m like, “What a likable seeming guy.” And then when you listen to him, because I didn’t watch on mute because I’m not Donald Trump, just plain-spoken, I don’t know a lot else about him except that he’s had electoral success in a, I guess, semi-purple state of North Carolina. And he seems totally a genuine guy pressed into service to run for the Senate at the ripe bold age of 68, 69. He’s a guy who could have run for president and probably done pretty well, no?

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah. Who’s to say he won’t turn around and run for president.

Preet Bharara:

Right. There’s no age bar any longer.

Mark Leibovich:

I think there is. I think the late 60s are beneath it. That’s a whole other thing. When you talk about the Senate, I mean, Roy Cooper was a prized recruit for Democrats because, again, he was elected governor, very high name recognition and seen as centrist, people know him. And like you said, he’s a perfectly likable, somewhat trustworthy figure in North Carolina who has done very, very well there. You have someone like Sherrod Brown in Ohio who has had success in Ohio. You do have to sort of balance … Sherrod Brown is 73, I think 73 years old, so you do have to kind of balance that. But again, any number of styles can work here. It’s just you just have to fundamentally be good enough to do it.

Preet Bharara:

That sort of leads me to a question I wanted to ask you, and that you address a little bit in the article that I mentioned, and we’ll talk a lot about it. I was going to say first, what’s the real divide in the Democratic Party or in politics generally? And then I thought to myself, “Well, why do we have to have a binary choice and say there’s a divide as opposed to a spectrum.” But let me ask the question anyway, because I think some people opined on this in your article. Is it liberal versus moderate? Is it old versus young? Is it authentic versus fake? Is it fighter versus non-fighter? Is it all of those? Is it none of those? Does it depend or are these all silly questions?

Mark Leibovich:

No, it’s all of those. And I think that the problem we, and as people who try to come off as smart about politics, especially in the Democratic Party, is that we’ve sort of framed this as a moderate versus progressive split in the party, whereas-

Preet Bharara:

Is that correct or not?

Mark Leibovich:

I think it’s proven somewhat simplistic and somewhat incorrect in that someone like Gavin Newsom, who has been accused of being all over the spectrum here, has basically enhanced himself a great deal and gained a great deal of popularity nationally by being sort of seen as the original fighter for Democrats over the last year or so, meaning he basically just took the gloves off maybe about a year ago starting when Trump sent the National Guard into LA.

And he was really the tip of the spear as far as just really head-to-head day-to-day battle with the administration. And all of a sudden, he put his money where his mouth is. He rewrote the congressional map in California in response completely to national trends. This was not an on the ground sort of command from the voters of California. It was in response to national politics, which obviously voters in California are very attuned with.

It was spectacularly successful. And he coupled that with a really sort of effective social media strategy. And he was seen as a fighter. I remember Beto O’Rourke said to me, I talked to him for the Democrats piece and he has this line in his public appearances these days where he said, “I never had much use for Gavin Newsom, but I’ve watched him recently and that guy is a fighter.”

And the room generally breaks into applause. And Elissa Slotkin, who’s a Senator from Michigan, basically made this point to me originally, which is that the divide is not left and center at this point. It is doing what it takes and doing anything that it would take to defeat Trumpism because that is the existential threat that we are all mostly concerned about. I think that’s been true.

Preet Bharara:

It’s sort of interesting how you think about things, and I sometimes think that people are putting the burden of everything on each individual. So it’s sort of like you have a football team and we’re judging every player by whether or not they would make a great quarterback. That’s not how a team works, right? Some guy’s got to kick and a team with all quarterbacks would be the team in the history of the NFL or of high school football as well.

And so I have issues with Gavin Newsom and some of the cheesiness and cringeworthiness of some of his trolling, but I’ve come to the view that if you think of the party as a team and people can have their own ambitions about whether they want to become president or not, that’s not part of the team. That’s like, to extend the bad analogy or metaphor, everyone’s vying to get the Nike deal that’s off the field. But on the field, people have different talents and different uses.

And it’s really important, I think, to have a Gavin Newsom on the team because Talarico’s not doing what Gavin Newsom is doing and that Newsom is not doing what Talarico is doing. And so if you talk about a team, because the party still matters, I think you spend a lot of time in the article talking about how down in the dumps the Democrats are polling wise and in the eyes and hearts and minds of Americans, need different kinds of people on the team, fair or not?

Mark Leibovich:

Totally fair. And also, I do think now that I’ve filled my story with polling data about how people perceive Democrats, I will say that that’s beside the point to how the individual candidates and politicians are. A party becomes defined by who their central figure, who their quarterback becomes. Democrats haven’t really anointed a effective quarterback since Barack Obama, pretty much. And no one saw him coming, just like no one saw Donald Trump coming in 2016.

So the bottom line is you’re right. There are a lot of different positions, there are a lot of different skillsets, there are a lot of different strengths. You do need a quarterback. And one thing I think Trump has done, and I think probably Newsom more than anyone would benefit from this, is that Trump has in some ways created a permission structure, which is now a cliche, permission structure. I can say permission structure because I’ve named.

Preet Bharara:

Ironically. Ironically.

Mark Leibovich:

Ironically. No, he’s basically, like Trump, he’s got a lot of flaws, right? And he has an ability, I think, to sort of burn right through them, to project a kind of straight ahead. Maybe you need a screw loose for this. I don’t know, but-

Preet Bharara:

I think you may. I think you may.

Mark Leibovich:

You very well might. You very well might. Thankfully, people like us who are completely even-headed and mature and well adjusted can talk about this. But no, you do. I think Newsom, you could talk forever about Newsom’s flaws and why California is the worst place in the world you want to run for president from. But the guy has proven very much over the last year, in addition to his aggressive approach, I think he’s proven that you can sort of bulldog your way through a lot of flaws if you are willing to smile at it, but also fight your way through it and not apologize the way Trump has. I think it’s harder to do as a Democrat, but I also think that Newsom could conceivably pull it off. I don’t dismiss him.

Preet Bharara:

It’s an amazing skill, and maybe I should go to a class to learn how to be that. We’ll be right back after this. Maybe this is because of your dislike of well-trod phrases, you make up your own. I don’t know if you coined the phrase, but you have a colorful term in your article, autopsy porn.

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah, that was good, right?

Preet Bharara:

Which sounds very terrible because it brings to mind lots of bad images. What is autopsy porn and what is your view of it?

Mark Leibovich:

So the context in which I used that phrase was that Democrats after the 2024 election and the months after and the year after it pretty much just absolutely inundated the internet or whoever their constituencies are with these after action reports on the election where the Democrats went wrong. There’s a term of art in politics, which is that after big elections or especially after big election defeats, parties should commission an autopsy to sort of see what went wrong.

Preet Bharara:

Isn’t that a good thing?

Mark Leibovich:

It is a good thing, but what happened was this went on and on and on and my desk at the Atlantic. And if I were actually at my desk, piled high is just raw tonnage of after action reports that various Democratic groups have put together to explain where Democrats went wrong and how they can write themselves and how they lost the working class and how they lost moderates and how they’re seen as too woke and blah-blah-blah. So I read it all as part of my research for this Democratic piece, and so there’s just so much of it. It kept coming and I referred to it in the piece as autopsy porn.

Preet Bharara:

I was going to say, it sounds like you found it boring and not helpful, so it’s more like autopsy phone book?

Mark Leibovich:

I read enough of it so that I could sort of-

Preet Bharara:

Were you trying to be sensational in your coinage?

Mark Leibovich:

No, I was trying to read enough of it to sort of just dispatch with it and describe for readers in a very snarky, dismissive and preferably brief way what some of it said.

Preet Bharara:

Is there a consensus or is there a common theme or is everyone diagnosing something completely different?

Mark Leibovich:

I think there’s a common theme, which is that they are contradictory. If you read all of the tonnage here. Look, everyone sort of brings their own biases, I think, to this. I don’t have any sense that … I don’t think people are cooking the numbers.

Preet Bharara:

What’s your diagnosis then? Because you read everything and you observed these things and you’re neutral and you’re a journalist, what went wrong for the Democrats?

Mark Leibovich:

Here’s a recurring theme. Democrats have lost the working class. It’s true.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, so let’s start with that. So how did they lose the working class when the Democrats talk about a living wage, they talk about healthcare, they talk about family leave, they have generally talked about affordability, even though everyone is trying to attach themselves to that word now. How in that context, given the policy discussions, do Democrats lose the working class?

Mark Leibovich:

I think people don’t pay attention to policy discussions in so much as they pay attention to the sense that Donald Trump is on their side, even though it’s laughable to think that working class people, given his policy record and given presumably their sort of lived experience would not match up. And yet Donald Trump, for the first time in decades, was the first Republican who carried voters, considered working class voters, defeated Kamala Harris by a few points, whereas Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney 12 years earlier by 20 points for the same category of “working class voters, middle class voters” what have you.

So whatever it is, Donald Trump, and I think a lot of this has to do with cultural issues like things that are considered overly woke. People assume, and a lot of this is because Republicans have emphasized this in a lot of their campaigns, which is that Democrats care only about transgender people being allowed to play in high school sports. Republicans have been good for many, many generations of turning small cultural questions that affect a tiny population, turning it into a big defining issue.

And I think it cost Kamala Harris prodigiously. And that’s another thing about Talarico. He has this great line in his stump speech, which is that less than 1% of the population is one, transgender. Less than 1% of the population is an undocumented immigrant. Less than 1% of the population, there’s a third thing there. Anyway, tiny population of Americans account for massively outsized parts of Republican messaging.

And on the other hand, you could argue less than 1% of Americans are billionaires, and yet all Democrats talk about now is like billionaires bad, oligarchy bad. So pick your population, pick your boogeyman, boogeywoman, boogie gender, non-binary, what have, boogie person. Yeah, so boogie billionaire. So I guess it’s sort of part of a political style and so forth, but Trump more than anyone was great at doing that.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s one analysis that you have in the article, quoting from Sarah Longwell, erstwhile Republican. By the way, erstwhile is one of my top five fancy words.

Mark Leibovich:

What does erstwhile mean?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know.

Mark Leibovich:

I use it all the time and I have no idea what it means.

Preet Bharara:

I think it’s a good Atlantic word and you should use it more than the New Yorker does, but erstwhile kind of like formerly, but with a sense of wistfulness.

Mark Leibovich:

Oh.

Preet Bharara:

You might refer to your erstwhile friend and it’s like, ah.

Mark Leibovich:

So there’s a mournfulness to it though, right?

Preet Bharara:

I think so. Is Sarah Longwell mournful? I think she is a little bit.

Mark Leibovich:

You’ve talked to her, I assume. No, I find her extremely upbeat and dynamic and vibrant. I wouldn’t call her mournful at all, and therefore not erstwhile.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m not going to say not erstwhile, but if you and I had a falling out, I would call you my erstwhile friend.

Mark Leibovich:

Oh, interesting. So you and Sarah have had a falling out?

Preet Bharara:

No, we have not had a falling out.

Mark Leibovich:

Okay.

Preet Bharara:

Pay attention. So she says in your article, because I didn’t really think this of Democrats as sort of a work ethic thing, “Republicans are over here being straight up mercenaries. Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.” And then you write, she apologized for yelling into the phone, Democrats “are not built for when the fascists come.” She concluded. Is that fair?

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah, it is. I think first of all, it’s very-

Preet Bharara:

I would love to have Fridays off, but of course I’m a practicing lawyer, not a Democratic politician.

Mark Leibovich:

I think she was exaggerating. She was turning an idea of Democrats into a bit of a cartoon, but I also think it goes to a kind of pampered, perhaps younger American new school, maybe overly indulgent view of that we see tensions thereof in the workplace. But I think also in politics, and the context of this conversation with Sarah, my not Erstwhile source in person, who I think is wonderful, was after the lead of the story was about how the Democratic National Committee had this big ridiculous kerfuffle because Ken Martin, the chair of the party, basically said, “Look, starting in February 2026, everyone needs to return to the office.”

Like a lot of organizations, the DNC had a pretty generous hybrid work policy. You could work from home if you needed to, what have you. Most companies have sort of done away with that now that COVID is long in the past, hopefully. And so when Ken Martin did this, there were immediate complaints. The actual DNC Union, I don’t even know that DNC had a union, but their employees union was so upset they leaked to the New York Times their dissatisfaction, which was ridiculous because it was a terrible book for Democrats who were basically saying, “Look, we are fighting fascism.

This is an existential threat, and yet our employees cannot be bothered to actually get dressed and come into the office like everyone else out there.” I sort of wrote about that sort of fiasco, and then I quoted people like Abigail Spanberger and Sarah and Alyssa Slotkin and so forth about the absurdity of it, which I think does go to a larger sort of theory that Democrats are quite soft in some ways.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting, and maybe this is because the class of people I’m about to mention are the people who have won. I have yet to meet a successful politician who is lazy. It’s a lot of work. And by the way, a lot of that work doesn’t happen at the office. It happens the shoe leather, right? It’s like a journalist, it’s going to people’s homes, it’s going out into the community, it’s talking to people, et cetera, et cetera.

Just further to this point, you say in your article about Democrats marginalizing themselves, “No matter how eager they were to resist Trump, they kept living up to their worst image as an overly sensitive out of touch and terminally online band of myopic and overindulged factions.” Terminally online, talk about that.

Mark Leibovich:

It’s this idea that you’re on Twitter all the time or Instagram all the time, Facebook all the time, what have you, which means that you become disproportionately concerned, upset by whatever the very, very myopic outrage of the day is.

Preet Bharara:

But the premise of the critique is that’s not the real world.

Mark Leibovich:

It is not the real world, and it is absolutely not the real world. That’s another thing Talarico is very good about. He was a very neighbor is a tactile concept, right? The whole idea of a digital neighbor is absurd and contradictory. So I do think, again, and that goes to the earlier point, which is the touching grass thing. I forget who the politician was who said touch grass.

Preet Bharara:

That gets quoted a lot.

Mark Leibovich:

It gets quoted a lot. I’m sure the politician … Well, the politician I assume was quoting someone else, but it is a very important thing. Look, I don’t know if she’s listening, but my mother is one of these people who, she’s 87 years old and she watches a lot of cable television. She’s not online, I don’t think that much. I think, but watching cable all day, whether it’s MS Now or CNN or Fox, what have you, does give you a very, very narrow viewpoint of the world and also makes you, I think, much amplifies, I think, your reactions in a way that is potentially unhealthy than when you are actually out taking a walk.

Preet Bharara:

You already mentioned Elissa Slotkin who was quoted in your article as saying, “First and foremost, Democrats need to get much more ruthless about winning.” Bill Clinton, ruthless, correct?

Mark Leibovich:

He was certainly perceived to be. And certainly, look, I mean, they played really hard. They had a lot of very, very-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I think they sure did. Okay. So he’s in the ruthless column.

Mark Leibovich:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Obama?

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah, although he had a way to hide it. He hit it-

Preet Bharara:

When he needed to be ruthless, and people made some comments when I made this reference previously, when he had the controversy with the minister and he threw him under the bus, that was a moment of ruthlessness.

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah, I think so. I think another moment was in 2012 when Mitt Romney was running against him. They went totally negative on him very, very early on and portrayed him in a way that might in retrospect not have been fair. Yeah, no. So look, the thing about Clinton and Obama is they were able to hide it in a way that was kind of smooth and quasi-centrist, which is what got them in the door and got them elected the first times. And they were able to sort of ride that to two terms.

Preet Bharara:

All right. So who’s ruthless now?

Mark Leibovich:

I think Newsom has certainly shown potential for ruthlessness. I think, I don’t know. We’ll see. I think a lot of, we’re going to learn a lot from obviously the midterms, but also the early months.

Preet Bharara:

Is Josh Shapiro ruthless?

Mark Leibovich:

I don’t know. I don’t know. He certainly has a lot going for him, but it’s hard to know how ruthlessness plays in a primary versus a general, whether someone is sort of wired for this. And a lot of these people have never run for president before. Most of them haven’t run for president before. So you’re learning a lot as you go along.

Preet Bharara:

You talk about the Democrats being stuck in their funk, which is interesting because I feel like Democrats, they shouldn’t overly rely on the following, but I think they’re not thinking about it enough. And that is that Donald Trump is a deeply, deeply unpopular president. His numbers are in the 30’s. And the weird thing about it is, and tell me if you think this is true or not, he doesn’t act like it.

He doesn’t act like a guy who’s at 36%. I want to get to issues that you talk about in the article relating to coalitions. And one of the critiques of the Democratic Party, part of the autopsy porn, is that they’re trying to check boxes and make sure that the constituents are happy, which causes them to be feckless or ineffective in some way. Meanwhile, Donald Trump doesn’t try to build a coalition.

Accidentally, he got something of a coalition in 2024 because he got more votes among Hispanics and others, but I don’t see anything resembling in that side of the political spectrum, a coherent strategy to do that. He’s all about his base, and it got him elected twice. It got him the greatest comeback in political history. What’s the Democrat’s base or is it only possible to stitch together a number of constituencies into a winning majority for them?

Mark Leibovich:

It’s possible when you can stitch together these coalitions through the prism of one person, which is that a cult of personality? I don’t know. I think Donald Trump definitely has a base and he’s built it. I think it is around the kind of fringy, far right in some ways. I remember, he kind of built his political career on Obama’s not born in the United States. I mean, the othering of Barack Obama, the idea that he’s a Muslim.

Preet Bharara:

On lies, you mean?

Mark Leibovich:

Lie, very much. Entirely lies, entirely lies. But I remember I did a story on him, I think in Trump in 2015, maybe late 2015, there were polls that came out that said that maybe 70% of the Republican Party believed that Barack Obama, between maybe 70 and 80% of the Republican Party believed that Barack Obama was born not in the United States or was a closet Muslim or something, which is flat out wrong.

It is built on lies or what have you. And it indicated to me that, “Oh, okay, this is not just a viable base, this is potentially a winning base, that if you appeal to that strong majority group inside the Republican Party, you really have something.” And if the right demagogue comes along, even if he or she knows better, you can have great success with it.

So yeah, so I think that’s a base. I think the question is how much of it is still alive. But I think the fact that this is dissipated and seems to be dissipating and shrinking is what gives the Democrats, I think, hope right now.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a lot in the article about, and there are various words, we talked about this before we press the record button. There’s a word I’m not going to use. It rhymes with wussy. And liberal use in the hallowed pages of the Atlantic with that word, Mark, I wonder if the publisher had to speak to you about it.

But lots of issues about masculinity and Democrats shying away from it and all sorts of discussion about that. Is that a real thing given that I think women make up a greater percentage of Democratic voters than men? And yes, men can be disaffected by that, but is there an argument that women also like testosterone filled politicians, male or female?

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah. A lot of women voted for Donald Trump too. I think both sexes, but I think it certainly extends to women like a kind of alpha figure.

Preet Bharara:

Is that the nature of politics?

Mark Leibovich:

I would say, look, to be sure, by the way, Donald Trump as the avatar of masculinity and male voters and so forth is kind of a joke. This guy is, the idea of the conventional sort of strong, silent type ideal of the Reagan Marlboro man, John Wayne, what have you. I mean, he turns that on his head. It’s like the buck does not stop with him. He is always-

Preet Bharara:

Whiny liar.

Mark Leibovich:

Yeah. He is a massive cry baby. He takes responsibility for nothing. He doesn’t sound like he’s a very good husband traditionally. He doesn’t seem like a man of his word traditionally. There’s a lot of, I would say, virtues in there that I do not associate with my ideal of masculinity.

And I think I speak for a lot of people. But I do think Democrats have, and Talarico made this point to me when we talked, made a point that a lot of Democratic rhetoric makes men feel fundamentally unwelcome. I think there’s a guy named Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for Senate in Michigan, progressive, big Bernie guy, who basically said that you talk about masculinity and he has a whole rap on what I just said, how Trump is ultimately not the alpha he makes himself out to be.

But he says that the idea of toxic masculinity, ]toxic is the one sort of adjective that is most likely to be coupled with masculinity. And it’s sort of a phrase associated with the left. And it is something that, again, is very off-putting to a lot of men, as you could understand. So again, this isn’t a sociology class.

A lot of it is, I hate this word, but vibes. But for whatever reason, the numbers have been very much pro … Men have been very, very, especially white men have been, but also darker-skinned men, Blacks and Hispanics, have been very much part of the Trump Coalition recently, certainly in 2024. So whatever they’re doing, there’s something very effective going on there.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know what toxic masculinity is. I think it’s an overused phrase. Some people will be listening to this and find it really regrettable that this is what we are talking about or feel like we have to talk about when there’s so many problems in the world, when there’s poverty, where there’s income inequality, where there’s a housing crisis, where there’s homelessness, where there’s huge amount of issues with immigration where we’re at war.

In Iran, Congress hasn’t been consulted, democracy is on the brink. I could go on and on and on. And Mark Leibovich and Preet Bharara are talking about the vibes of masculinity, WTF. Should we take a moment and think, scrap the whole thing, start over again, Mark? This interview?

Mark Leibovich:

No, not at all. Are you kidding? I think we are the mock for that.

Preet Bharara:

Defend this discussion.

Mark Leibovich:

Do we need to defend this?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know. I’ve never asked a guest to defend a discussion before.

Mark Leibovich:

You know what? I stand by this discussion.

Preet Bharara:

Do we not have enough of these discussions or do we have too many of these discussions in the media?

Mark Leibovich:

I would say that we have probably too many of these discussions, but this happens to be what we’re talking about today. And because it’s us, it’s endlessly fascinating.

Preet Bharara:

Mark Leibovich, thanks so much.

Mark Leibovich:

Preet, always a pleasure.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Mark Leibovich continues from members of the CAFE Insider community.

Mark Leibovich:

No, I don’t think this will age well. Any death of any American troops or any civilians who are trapped with no real plan to evacuate in some really, really dangerous places is going to look terrible.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, David Ignatius and Mark Leibovich.

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. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338, that’s 833-99 Preet, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more, that’s staytuned.substack.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr.

The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.