Preet Bharara:

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

George Packer:

I think the bigger concern I have than Trump’s staying power is let’s say he’s cratering. He has had an effect on the civic mind that is not going to go away.

Preet Bharara:

Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. My guest this week is George Packer. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic where he covers politics, culture, and foreign policy. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Can the country survive the erosion of public trust? And what is the best path forward for Democrats in today’s Trumpian political environment? George Packer, welcome back to the show. It’s good to see you, my friend.

George Packer:

Always good to be back with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

As I was thinking about this interview, this conversation, which I prefer to the word interview, I’ve known this, but I was marveling about how you, not uniquely, but pretty significantly are able to and have an interest in fairly equally domestic affairs and foreign affairs. You written books about international relations. You also chronicle the ailments and ills of American society and the plights of the disenfranchised. That’s not a normal combination. Am I wrong?

George Packer:

I guess not. Yes, you’re not wrong.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not even flattering you, George. I’m just being descriptive.

George Packer:

I think of myself first as a writer and that covers a multitude of sins and subjects. So if a war in Iraq interests me, I’m going to spend four years going back and forth to Iraq until I feel that I’ve reported all I can. If the financial crisis and the Great Recession interests me, I’m going to spend the next four years traveling around some of the kind of left behind parts of the United States with the great benefit of having a great magazine or two, back then it was The New Yorker, now it’s The Atlantic, behind me. And I also, in case you weren’t aware, I also write fiction.

Preet Bharara:

You do. I know. That’s very impressive.

George Packer:

And my most recent book is a novel called The Emergency.

Preet Bharara:

I am aware.

George Packer:

Which came out a few months ago. So I just think I’m a writer and whatever passion, anger, aspiration animates me and needs words, needs to take the form of words, I try to find a way to do it and not to pigeonhole myself or box myself into a category that’s going to make me unhappy.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about domestic affairs first and some of it is related to foreign affairs. The price at the pump is related to a war that’s going on in Iran, so we shouldn’t segregate those things too much.

George Packer:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

You, as I said a moment ago, do spend some time trying to diagnose and list and describe what ails various constituencies in the country. Fair?

George Packer:

That’s been the obsession for about 20 years.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So as I think about where we are today, May, I guess it’s May 12th. We’re recording this on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s a beautiful day in New York City. We’re both inside with our microphones having this conversation. And Trump is in a second term. We’re in a war that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s the first war people have said since polls were invented in which there were more people against the war than for the war at the start of it. As I mentioned to you before we hit the record button, I am just coming off of watching Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden. It was a different kind of concert. There’s a lot going wrong. We have democracy under attack. Bruce Springsteen talked about that and I’ll mention that a little bit more in a moment. What is the feeling that an American should have about how things are going?

There’s a favorite quote I have from not the most serious movie, but a good movie called Grosse Point Blank. And the John Cusack character is talking to his psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, “How are you feeling?” And this is what I said I think during Trump one. And John Cusack’s answer is, “I’m uneasy, man. I’m uneasy.” Which is a very good descriptor. I feel beyond uneasy. And I don’t want to give you multiple choices, but I will tell you there was a quiet feeling of rage a bit at the beginning of this concert yesterday, an eloquent rage, but there’s a bit of anger. Is that how we should be feeling? Should we be feeling angry?

George Packer:

Anger is a good feeling right now. My fear is that there’s not enough of it and that repeated abuse, repeated corruption, attempted silencing of journalists and other voices and all the other things that he talked about, abusive immigrants, I have a lot to say about all of that. I fear that it’s become daily life and human beings are capable of accustoming themselves to almost anything that is part of our resilience and part of our stupidity. And I sometimes worry that with all the noise of the media, we are nonetheless sort of dulled to all of the ways in which Trump is betraying the country and not just Trump, lots of people around Trump, lots of people in society who know better and who are doing it out of cowardice or greed or just going along. So if there was a fine edge of anger in Madison Square Garden last night, I’m glad to hear it because we should be beyond angry.

The problem is anger is not always very constructive. It can be performative, it can be self-destructive, it can burn itself out quickly. So there has to be thoughtfulness and patience and willingness to hear people out, even people who you might not want to listen to. We still have to do that and to learn how to talk to them in a way that doesn’t just immediately alienate them. But the stories I’ve been working on lately are right at the molten core of the anger that you’re talking about and I’m writing them with anger. I’ll give you two examples. One that will be in the June issue of The Atlantic and that was just published on the web last week is really about corruption. It’s about a guy named David Sacks who is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist entrepreneur, Peter Thiel, friend, sidekick, former PayPal alumnus who Trump appointed as his AI and crypto czar.

And so Sacks spent a year halftime because he did not quit his job as a venture capitalist. He got a sort of special benefit of clergy and was allowed to continue to invest money while making policy about technology and ultimately about money. Sacks pushed the Trump administration, which didn’t need much pushing into a position of sort of a radical anti-regulatory stance on AI. Let’s keep the federal government out of it. Let’s override state regulations about it. Let’s just let, as he would say, the private sector cook. And that’ll be the way that we win the AI race and defeat China and become the global dominant power. And meanwhile, on crypto, slightly different, let’s get the federal government involved to the extent that issuers and buyers and investors in crypto will have some confidence that if things go wrong, there’s going to be dollar backing to their bets.

And if that dollar backing goes wrong, then perhaps ultimately there’ll have to be a bailout because that’s what we do when a financial instrument gets tied to the broader banking system, the big institutional banking system. So basically Sacks and Trump have pushed American policy to let the titans of industry, of tech and of finance have their way. And who does that leave out? It leaves out basically the public. It means that one single interest group took over control of a major part of government policy and that is a form of corruption. It’s legal. I don’t think anyone broke any laws in doing that. We could talk about what’s illegal that Trump is doing in terms of corruption, but I don’t think Sacks broke any laws, but it’s a form of corruption by warping the public interest for private purposes.

And that’s what Trump is doing every day blatantly. One corruption and ethics expert said to me, “Yeah, some of his acts like the Qatari Jet or the meme coin galas with investors paying top dollar to spend two hours in the presence of the president at a private gathering. That’s like, I could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose any voters. That’s power corruption.” In other words, proving that no one can do anything about it.

Preet Bharara:

But if the people are okay with it-

George Packer:

Well, that’s what makes people numb.

Preet Bharara:

Isn’t that fine?

George Packer:

They may not be okay with it, but they either don’t know about it or it’s too complicated or they just say, “That’s Trump.” And of course he’s going to do that and it becomes normalized, but it is so not normal. He is the most corrupt president in American history. And so my piece is a long profile of David Sacks and how Sacks was installed at the White House by the powers that be in Silicon Valley in order to make Washington essentially the handmaiden of the tech industry, which has historically kept its distance on Washington. But now they’ve realized Washington can be a threat to us. It can regulate us. It can enforce civil and criminal penalties. Trump, as you know, I’m sure, Preet, dropped all the SEC cases against the crypto companies that Biden had brought. These great anti-monopolists are essentially now on the side of the monopolies and the would be monopolies.

So all of that is just one piece of the bigger picture. But to me, the corruption is kind of at the heart of the dagger that Trump has aimed at American democracy. And if not the willingness, at least the acquiescence of the public, because I don’t see a tremendous outcry against the corruption. It’s as if, of course, what do you expect? They’re all corrupt. That kind of cynicism which Trump breeds then benefits Trump by making it seem like it’s normal.

Preet Bharara:

So I have a lot of reactions to the themes you mentioned, not all the particulars. We’ve had people on the show to talk about Viktor Orban’s defeat and Viktor Orban, strong man, authoritarian streak, all those things that people used to describe him and some of your most reputable colleagues at The Atlantic have been on and talked about those things. But what felt him at the end, as I understand it, were two things, not unrelated to his authoritarianism, but it was corruption and what we in America call kitchen table issues, the economy. And it’s the becoming comfortable with autocracy people say that led to his corruption, but it has to be understandable corruption. And the closest thing to corruption on the part of Trump that seems to have gotten, not just people who have always been opposed to him or have come to become opposed to him, but people who have been largely with him, but to cause some of those people to break ranks and maybe corruption is not the right word, but everything having to do with Jeffrey Epstein.

And I wonder if you think that that is a type of corruption that involved wealth and abuse of women and directing the Department of Justice to pretend to produce documents which they didn’t produce in full. And why, if that is corruption of the kind you describe, why is that the thing that broke through to the MAGA base and not the Qatari plane? Although I do think, and I have not seen polls, that nobody is a big fan of the billion dollar ballroom.

George Packer:

I think it comes down to what every writer has to understand, which is how to make a story hit home. What makes a story hit home? The billion dollar ballroom, I think those images of the East Wing being leveled by backhoes and the rubble that the White House has become. I saw a picture a couple days ago. It’s amazing to see the White House with the porta-potties and the security fencing, temporary fencing and the construction vehicles and the mounds of dirt like any construction site, except in this case it’s the people’s house. It’s not Trump’s house. I think that hit home in a way that maybe a meme coin, which is a weird abstract thing does not. And with Epstein, it’s because it’s about underage girls and sex trafficking and abuse and powerful people taking advantage of vulnerable, terribly vulnerable young women. And it became a stand-in for a whole class of elites, both financial elites and cultural elites and political elites, and a sense that they’re getting away with something that is wrong.

Now, I do think some of the Epstein rhetoric and language is too broad. I think there’s degrees of shame, like how ashamed should Trump be, how ashamed should Clinton be, how ashamed should Larry Summers be, how ashamed should Noam Chomsky be? We have to make distinctions in what they did and when they did it, but for the public, those distinctions have pretty much evaporated and it’s just become a single scarlet E affixed to the faces of a class of the elites. And Trump lived by hatred of the elites and he may die by hatred of the elites, die politically, because I think Trump is now associated with not just Epstein, but with plutocracy. I mean, the end of my Sacks piece has him naming his advisory council on science and technology. Who’s on that council? It’s like a parody of crony capitalism. It’s Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang and Sergey Brin and Marc Andreessen and David Sacks and on and on and on.

Every titan of finance and industry who is worth more than a billion dollars or two because Trump loves those people. He loves people with money, certainly more than he loves, as he once said, the poorly educated. So at some point, the poorly educated are going to say, “Hey, wait a minute, your AI seems to be warping my teenage daughter’s mind and you’re not doing anything about it. So I thought you were on my side.” And in that sense, I think Trump, both with the war and with the economy and with technology, is on the wrong side of his people, of his people. Of course, some of them are never going to abandon him, but-

Preet Bharara:

Let’s go back to the anger theme. You know what anger had a dramatically important, significant, propulsive force on? The election of Donald Trump in 2016. These were angry people who were right to be angry about a lot of things. There’s a lot of things you can say about Trump. He was correct in 2016 and to the extent he still thinks this or articulates this, I would argue he’s still correct that the system is rigged in a lot of ways for a lot of people and there have been people who have been forgotten and are not at the top of the agenda for elected officials and appointed officials in this country. And out of anger, I believe a group of people in this country voted for Donald Trump.

What has happened to their anger? Is some of it turned back on him? Do they feel like they’ve been taken for granted? I mean, look, they all knew on this ostentatious “let them eat cake” persona that Donald Trump passed. He’s had that for a long time. He had gold-plated toilets in 2016. I’ve been in that elevator. There’s gold everywhere. So you can’t color yourself surprised that he’s going to have an ostentatious gold-plated ballroom. So what do you do with that? This is a psychology question. What do you do when you’ve committed yourself to that guy, knowing all those things and now he’s making good on them? How do you undo that in your head?

George Packer:

Well, a couple thoughts. First is, yeah, we all knew that he had a taste for vulgar displays of wealth. That didn’t alienate a lot of his core supporters because he was saying to them, “You should have this too. And the people who are keeping you from it are them.” And who are them? Well, you and me, coastal elites, the well-educated, and immigrants. So you count twice, Preet. And he played to their resentments and their grievances because he’s a man full of grievances. When he was in New York, he didn’t get invited to the right philanthropic galas, I guess. I’m kind of making that up because I wasn’t invited either, but he was constantly feeling like they despised him for his Queen’s accent. So that appealed and the ugliness, the language, the coarseness, it all appealed because it meant he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t part of that self-satisfied elite.

So it didn’t matter if his toilets were made of gold or gilded. So what do you do with the anger once you realize it was actually a con job? Well, another Atlantic writer, David Frum, I think once said, “If you have been conned into putting your money into a scam and someone says to you, ‘You really shouldn’t have put your money into that scam. You should be really angry at that scammer.’ The chances are you might actually be angry at the person telling you that than you are at the scammer because it’s a humiliation to admit I was conned.”

Preet Bharara:

I have real life experience and I can tell you there are stories of people who were in fact scammed and would be testifying witnesses in a criminal case who, two things. One, didn’t love the idea that they were humiliated in this way and they looked kind of stupid, but also a little bit continued to believe and this was a little bit tough, “Maybe that Nigerian guy was a prince. If I had just gotten him the chemicals earlier, he could have washed the money.” Those various schemes. “I just didn’t give him the right chemical because the $100 bills, I think that soot would’ve come off the bills.” So two things are going on there. Once you’ve committed to a fraud, it is embarrassing and humiliating to let that go. And I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, there’s some people who remain gullible till death do us part.

George Packer:

Yeah. And those are the people who are the 35% of Americans and maybe not quite that many because people support Trump for different reasons and some of them are very wealthy and still support him. But let’s say people who make under 80,000 a year or 60,000 a year and are hardcore Trump supporters in spite of tariffs and gas and war and corruption and plutocracy, there’s nothing to really you can say and I wouldn’t try that it’s a religion. It’s a cult. Nothing is going to shake it loose. I do think, and here we should think about how anger can become constructive, that there is a pretty large minority of voters who could have gone either way in 2024 and went for Trump just because of kitchen table issues, as you called it, or because he seemed tough or because they hated something about the Democrats.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, that one we got to spend some time on.

George Packer:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Go ahead.

George Packer:

And those people are gettable for Democrats, very getable. They’ve abandoned Trump. Independents have abandoned Trump. I remember standing outside of Madison Square Garden in October of 2024 in this immense wall-to-wall crowd on I think it was West 32nd Street that was trying to get into the garden to hear Trump in that big election Eve rally that he held where his people kind of went full Nuremberg, to say the thing you’re not supposed to say. And I couldn’t get in. There was too many people trying to get in. It was a scam because I had signed up for a ticket, but my ticket was useless. I wanted to go as a journalist.

I was surrounded by men from Flatbush, men who were largely Caribbean in origin and were decked out in sweats and in MAGA hats and in Trump regalia. And I was saying to them, “Well, so what brings you here? Why are you…” “We love the man.” “Why?” “Well, literally the price of eggs is too high and he’ll stand up to our enemies and we love him.” Do they still love him? I don’t know. I haven’t talked to them, but I would bet some of them are no longer so crazy about Trump and that’s the sort of voter that the Democrats have to be able to speak to and reach.

Preet Bharara:

Look, I mean, the problem for him is, and I’ll tell you my theory that I’ve thrown out at various guests of the circumstances that may be converging to hurt him once and for all while he’s a lame duck. And lame duck status is one of the factors, but I’m not an expert in economics and I have never understood the relationship between a president’s policies and the daily price of gasoline at the pump. When it’s high and a Democrat’s in power, the Republicans blame the president and the reverse is also true.

When I worked in the Congress, I attended various press conferences about the price of gas and everyone’s a hypocrite and says it’s that guy because it’s this good, easy politics here for the first time that I can remember in modern times, at least since Carter, but maybe I’m wrong about this, there is a direct line between a particular action and an unpopular action, going to war against Iran, that basically only the President of the United States wanted to do, who we care about in terms of having the authority to wage that war. There’s a direct line between that action and the price is at the pump. You can’t blame other people.

George Packer:

And poor Carter, the Iranians had a revolution. I mean, he didn’t… In fact, he told the Shah, “We love you.” Which may have helped cause the revolution. But anyway, yes, I get your point.

Preet Bharara:

Three factors seem to be causing him to slip, some people say crater, but he rises better than anybody I’ve ever seen rise before. So people best not underestimate him. The combination of Iran, Epstein and inflation in further combination with fatigue that people have about any politician who’s been around and in your face and stealing your attention for years, plus his lame duck status is not a recipe for popular success, is it?

George Packer:

No. And in normal times, we wouldn’t even be saying, “Can he come back?” We would be saying, “Well, he’s finished. The battle for the future of his party and the next nominee has started. We’re going to have to pretend that the president matters for the next two and a half years, but basically a second term lame duck president at 35% in the polls is a cipher.” But Trump alone manages to keep our attention riveted and waiting for the next move, which could be a comeback. So by normal standards, he’s finished, but I would not say Trump is finished. That would be a foolish thing just to say.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But we don’t treat him like… A Democratic president who’s polling at these numbers would be given the back of the hand. And like every issue, on every pronouncement, he is still viewed, I mean, there’s a conflict in my head between the need to remember not to underestimate him with the danger of overestimating him, he’s still viewed as a formidable political force when he’s cratering on every issue.

George Packer:

And by the way, you were asking earlier what happened to the working class support he had and to that working class over the last 10 years. Well, in my lifetime, the best president for the working class I think has been Joe Biden in the sense that he got three major bills passed, all of which were geared toward creating jobs that people with high school degrees could do in de-industrialized, left behind, red state parts of the country. He walked a picket line, he supported unions, he did oversee 8% inflation. Okay, that was the great disaster of the Biden years. Plus, he became an incompetent president. He could not do the job and had too much pridefulness to see that. So in that sense, he was the author of his own demise, but did he get any credit for that? I was in Phoenix, Arizona doing a big Atlantic piece in ’23 and ’24. A lot of money from the CHIPS bill and the Infrastructure bill and the Climate bill were going to the Phoenix area. No one knew it. No one knew about it.

Preet Bharara:

So it’s all about the marketing.

George Packer:

Well, where does our attention go? A president really should be able to give a speech. If he can’t, that’s a problem. Biden couldn’t, that was a problem. But I think the bigger concern I have than Trump’s staying power is let’s say he’s cratering. He has had an effect on the civic mind that is not going to go away with Trump. He’s produced long-term damage to our ability to make decisions together, To disagree together, to solve problems, to speak, to think in the most basic ways. And the fact that he’s normalized corruption and he’s normalized crude and vicious discourse and he’s normalized partisanship to the point where right now we’re seeing a mid-decade scramble to rig the midterm elections in favor of one party or the other.

But with the Republicans as usual winning that scramble, the habits of mind that he’s going to leave behind really worry me. People’s acceptance of a lower standard and the behavior of elites who not only accepted but have benefited from it, who’ve gone along with it because it was in their short-term interests. Are they going to immediately go back to decency as soon as Trump is gone? I don’t think it works that way. I think it’s corrupting in a longer, more insidious way.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with George Packer after this. What’s President Rubio going to be like? Is he going to be a pugnacious, lying, corrupt, trolling, authoritarian figure?

George Packer:

He won’t be Trump. He won’t be Trump. At one point-

Preet Bharara:

But JD Vance might be Trump.

George Packer:

Well, JD Vance is a hollow man who…

Preet Bharara:

Tell us how you feel, George.

George Packer:

Well, I’ve written this a year ago in The Atlantic. He’s a hollow man who had a real potential for achieving something worthwhile. I mean, Hillbilly Elegy is a fine book. I don’t mean he should have stuck with his Yale Law School credentials. I mean, he was the one son of the working class who rose to the pinnacle of society and could have in some way bridged that gap or brought it together. And instead he chose to give into the most toxic thinking and speaking of MAGA because he wanted power. Marco Rubio, what I remember of Marco Rubio is a video of him in February of 2025 sitting in the Oval Office with Vance, Trump and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. And Vance and Trump are going after Zelenskyy and Rubio is sinking into the yellow-

Preet Bharara:

It’s the meme. It’s a famous meme.

George Packer:

Sinking into this yellow sofa, and as I wrote at the time, “As if his principles were visibly leaving his body so that he had nothing to keep him afloat and he was kind of caving in to the cushions.” And that’s Rubio. I think he does have some principles. I think maybe the Iran war was one of them. I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

So here’s my take on Rubio that makes him interesting to me. I believe he’s the only member of the Trump circle who is genuinely in the Trump circle, who is lauded by Trump like he was at the State of the Union and I think authentically so. And also retains some quantum not insignificant of respect and trust on the part of people on the other side of the aisle. Is there another person who checks all those boxes? I can’t think of one.

George Packer:

Are you sure about that with Rubio?

Preet Bharara:

I’m not sure about anything, but I’m testing this with you.

George Packer:

How do you know that he’s respected on the other side of the aisle?

Preet Bharara:

Well, so I’ll say-

George Packer:

Or is that just sort of some residual senatorial courtesy from the-

Preet Bharara:

No, I think part of it’s-

George Packer:

19th century.

Preet Bharara:

It’s grading on a curve when people benefit from the contrast. If you are in the cabinet that has RFK Jr. and had Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth-

George Packer:

Pam Bondi, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Pam Bondi. I mean, these are like the great clowns of Clownville and you have some gravitas and you don’t act like a, an abusive vitriol spewing and you had some reputation of national import and international significance before that moment. Yeah, you’re not doing very badly. You’re not doing very badly. And I know you haven’t said that unlike JD Vance, you haven’t said Marco Rubio is a hollow man, is he?

George Packer:

Well, I don’t think he’s a hollow man, but I think he’s a weak man. He spent 10 years or more, 15 years in the Senate as a pro sort of America as leader of the free world. That would’ve been Rubio’s foreign policy in a single phrase. And that included spending money on disasters, crises, poverty, et cetera, in poor countries. In other words, USAID, which I know well, having spent time looking into it, reporting on it, had much bloat and maybe some corruption, but which nonetheless extended the lifespan of millions of people around the world. As Atul Gawande said to me, who was the deputy administrator, and Rubio oversaw its destruction at the hands of Elon Musk and DOGE. He participated in it, he justified it. And now millions of people are dying or will die because of that. So anytime I hear-

Preet Bharara:

All fair, all fair.

George Packer:

Yeah. Anytime I hear that he has gravitas or that he has retained a shred of honor and dignity, I have to go back to that and say, “What did you get, Marco, that was worth those lives?”

Preet Bharara:

He got to be Secretary of State. Look, I want to summarize what you said and compare it to something that I heard recently from an unlikely politician for me to be quoting probably. You said a minute ago, JD Vance had the chance to do something worthwhile. There’s a lot of work being done by worthwhile because the response to all this stuff that you and I are bloviating about, although I don’t think we’re bloviating, is that, “Yeah, you know what? He got to be the fricking Vice President of the United States.” He’s a heartbeat away from the presidency. Probably this was his best path. Whether his agenda is worthwhile or not is a separate matter. Marco Rubio is on a path back to potentially being the President of the United States. He’s the Secretary of State, he’s the National Security Advisor and it’s nice for a lawyer like Preet and a journalist like George to poo-poo these men and what have they done?

They’ve reached the pinnacles of power and success of historic magnitude, not just in the country but in the world. And the politician I want to invoke, it came into my head when you said these things, is there’s all this speculation about whether AOC is going to run for president. And a lot of people have a lot of views about her and moderate Democrats are skeptical of her. But she said an interesting thing that sounds a similar note and it was something like, I’m paraphrasing, I don’t know if you saw this. It was something like, “Look, people keep asking me, do I want this or that title? Do I want to have this or that job? My ambitions are a lot larger than that.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

They assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.

Preet Bharara:

Now, whatever you think of AOC, it’s a pretty fricking great answer.

George Packer:

A great answer.

Preet Bharara:

And an answer of that, whether it’s meant or not, whether it’s politics or not, whether it’s shtick or not, that’s a great answer and it’s the counterpoint to what you’re saying about these other guys.

George Packer:

Because we’ll look back and say, “Well, what did you get for the selling of your soul or the destruction of all that life in Africa and Asia or the-”

Preet Bharara:

A chapter in the history books.

George Packer:

“What did you get?” And so you could say, “Well, Lyndon Johnson made a whole bunch of compromises when he was Senate majority leader and suffered the humiliation of the Kennedys, which is not the same as being humiliated by Trump, but it’s humiliation. And then he got the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare. He also got the Vietnam War.” I would say for Johnson, a man who was obsessed with power, you can justify it, you can certainly justify it. I do not know what Rubio or Vance would do or could do his president that would justify all the beyond compromises, the selling out of American values, the justification of January 6th for starters that it took to get to power. I don’t know what they could achieve that would justify that. Can you think of any? What’s likely or even possible?

Preet Bharara:

No, I don’t. But this is an unfair question and I think the answer will not redound to the glory of the Congress. If you took the 535 members of Congress, and you could read their minds and you could put them into one of two categories, did they become members of Congress because they want to change the world, because they want to make the world better, because they want to improve people’s lives. Forget about what they say in speeches versus, I really want to be a congressman. I really want to be a senator, maybe because then it’s one step to the presidency, or I like power, or I think I’m a good speaker, or everyone has told me you should run for office. All that nonsensical, trivial bullshit. How many would you put in the first category and how many would you put in the second?

George Packer:

And how many begin in the first and end in the second? Because I mean-

Preet Bharara:

And some the other way, Johnson maybe was the other way.

George Packer:

Yeah. Well, Johnson, after the Civil Rights Act passed, a group of civil rights leaders came to the Oval Office and one of them said, “We didn’t think you were on our side. We thought you were on the other side. What happened? What made you change?” And Johnson said, “I’m going to quote a friend of yours. Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I am free at last.” The presidency freed Johnson. Then it, of course, imprisoned him. He became his own prisoner. Most of them, I mean, you know at least as many as I do and-

Preet Bharara:

It’s not a good ratio, George.

George Packer:

No, it’s not. The answer to your question is bad, but I think some of them, maybe even plenty, go in with aspirations and when you sit down and talk to them away from the attention of the public and of the donors, they can be impressive. You know that. They’re not idiots and they’re not utterly craven, not all of them. Some of them are. But something about the job and I would say our culture, the culture of politics today turns them into versions of Marjorie Taylor Greene because there’s nothing to do in Congress except get attention. You’re not going to pass any important legislation. What you can do is get attention.

Preet Bharara:

The most famous members of Congress didn’t pass a bill. Look, I’ve often wondered and assessed that one of the reason most politicians are boring as all get out and are not funny and don’t make jokes, and I’ve met a number of them who are privately humorous and have actual personalities. And my theory is they start out being themselves, but you run in a jurisdiction that has, it’s not a monolith and they’re, what, 400,000 or what is it now? 700, 800,000 people in your district. And anything you say can be used against you in the court of public opinion and can be distorted. So nobody wants to make a gaff and by nobody making a gaff, they all sound like cheap first generation AI.

George Packer:

Aren’t we moving past that though, Preet?

Preet Bharara:

I think we are. I think that’s not a bad thing.

George Packer:

Well, Trump has shown that you can grab them by the you know what and still get elected president.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. No, look, John Fetterman is an authentic… It’s all about authenticity now, George.

George Packer:

And now there’s Graham Platner up in Maine with the Nazi tattoo and the pretty ugly remarks on social media who has been embraced by the grassroots Maine Democratic Party because of his authenticity and his anger and his being.

Preet Bharara:

Look, I can’t construct a perfect politician.

George Packer:

I’m not sure which way to go. I’m truly in a dilemma about this because clearly the Democratic Party is poised to move toward a version of the Trump style toward people who are full of gaffs, in fact commit them on purpose and who love to mix it up, get into fights and find enemies to target and use demagogic rhetoric. And you have to say, “Well, if that’s the only way to fight this battle, you don’t unilaterally disarm.” And if people are that angry about politicians and about the economy and about the state of America in decline, well, you don’t get up and give a temperate speech that could have been given in 1955. You have to live with the time. So I’m torn. I don’t know which way the Democratic Party should go.

Preet Bharara:

It reminds me of the very silly phrase that has a ready often used retort. And it’s like, you got to fight fire with fire. No, no, actually you fight fire with water. It’s like, I don’t know. You see the firefighters, the hoses, they don’t bring dragons to the firefight. And so I think the wrong lessons get learned, but I also still think the fatigue factor and the pendulum doesn’t just swing on ideology, it swings on style too.

George Packer:

My ideal candidate Would be in some ways the opposite of Trump. It would be someone who appeals to common humanity, to decency, to basic human values and does not try to bring us all down to his level, but whose policies are perhaps even radical and is willing to rethink all the sacred cows, all the holies of the party and of the country because we cannot keep having 20th century solutions for our problems. But he would do it or she would do it in a way that does not do dirt on human life and human values. And I feel that we’re going in the opposite direction where instead politicians think you have to be a wild man or woman. You have to sound like Lauren Boebert or Donald Trump if you’re going to get anywhere. And then you don’t really have to do anything once you’re there because the public is so gullible. All they want is sort of the entertainment value of it. That’s my worry.

Preet Bharara:

Where have gone, George, the Daniel Patrick Moynihans?

George Packer:

There are a few who could have been Moynihan in a different era, in the Moynihan era. I would say Michael Bennet of Colorado.

Preet Bharara:

I’m a big Michael Bennet fan.

George Packer:

Could have been a kind of leader of the Senate and of the country, a great speaker and statesman like Moynihan, a great thinker, but he lives in a time when to be Michael Bennet is you’re just far too mild, far too reasonable. When he stood up on stage in the 2020 primaries with like 12 or 15 other people, he was the one everyone forgot about because he was too reasonable, too decent.

Preet Bharara:

George Packer, thanks again for your insight and your time.

George Packer:

I always enjoy it. Thank you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Our conversation continues for members of the insider community. In the exclusive bonus content, Packer discusses the public’s role in shaping our political environment and why we’re experiencing national cognitive decline.

George Packer:

There are no Churchills, but there are some decent, hardworking, there everyday politicians who get tossed out when the public has a little brain spasm of anger or infatuation.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about whether Jim Comey can sue for malicious prosecution and where the phrase 86 comes from. Heads up folks, Stay Tuned is going live. I’ll be speaking with my friend and colleague, former US Attorney Barb McQuade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Sunday, May 31st about her new book, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob Style Government. To get in person or virtual tickets, head to cafe.com/barb. That’s cafe.com/barb. Don’t miss it. I hope to see you there.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question came as an email from David who wrote, “Recently there has been much debate over the meaning of the phrase to 86 something. Why has that random number become a verb and what is the origin story?” David, that’s a great question. We’ve been talking about it a lot. A lot of folks have been talking about it a lot. Lawyers are going to be talking about it a lot and at least one court will also be talking about it. The history is kind of fascinating but not completely settled, which by the way, spoiler alert, means it’s a bad case for the government in my view. You are surely asking the question because of the Jim Comey indictment we discussed a bit with the last question. Prosecutors allege that the message was a threat. The seashells arranged in the form of 8647, alleging that, “A reasonable recipient who was familiar with the circumstances would interpret the seashell formation as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

But when you look at where 86 actually comes from, most credible accounts and even the popular folklore have very little to do with violence. And by the way, what matters more than all that is what Jim Comey intended. What Jim Comey thought 86 meant. One of the most colorful origin stories comes from a legendary New York speakeasy called Chumley’s. That bar opened in 1922 during Prohibition and it became a dependable place to get a stiff drink. He was also frequented by hard drinking writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas. So the legend goes something like this, Chumley’s had an exit on Bedford Street and that address was 86 Bedford. When the speakeasy got word that police were coming for a raid, bartenders would warn patrons and tell them to leave through that door. So in this rendering at least, 86 meant to exit through the door on 86 Bedford Street. No assassination there, no violence there. So anyway, that’s a great story.

The problem is, there isn’t a ton of solid evidence that Chumley’s is where the expression actually began. So apologies, but it may be more myth than fact. A much more likely explanation is that 86 started as restaurant and soda fountain slang in the 1930s. In that world, 86 meant you were out of something on the menu. Some sources suggest that it may have caught on because it rhymed with nix, meaning rejecting or canceling something. There’s a famous description from the late American folklorist, Alan Dundes. Typically, cooks in the kitchen would place an 86 on a blackboard next to an entree to signal to waitstaff that they should not accept any more orders for that item. In fact, we even have a direct example from 1941 published in the New York Herald Tribune, “When a soda popper says the tuna fish salad is 86, he means there isn’t anymore.”

As for how it became a verb to 86, let’s look to Miriam Webster. That dictionary traces that shift to the 1950s when it starts showing up as a way of saying someone has refused service or tossed out of a bar often for being drunk or causing trouble. Pete Hegseth, anyone? Then by the 1970s, the phrase grew beyond its restaurant and bar origins. A famous example is in the 1972 movie, The Candidate, when Robert Redford’s character is told, “Okay, now for starters, we’ve got to cut your hair and 86 the sideburns.” So that’s some interesting history about a vague and ambiguous phrase, all of which is going to be trouble for the prosecution. And so giving the history showing that 86 usually isn’t a violent threat, it would not be unreasonable for a judge to consider 86ing Jim Comey’s case.

This question comes as a post from Arnold in the stay tuned Substack chat. Arnold wants to know this, “What is the definition of malicious prosecution and what penalties might the government face if that charge is successfully brought?” Arnold, that’s a complicated legal question and one that seems to keep coming up. I want to at the outset before answering your direct question, talk about another two terms that sometimes get confused and conflated. There are three terms that some people use, but they mean different things. One is malicious prosecution that you just mentioned, another is vindictive prosecution, and the third is selective prosecution. Now, we have seen motions based on the theory of vindictive prosecution and selective prosecution relating to due process violations or equal protection violations. Those motions tend to be brought during the criminal case. So it’s an argument that a judge should dismiss a criminal case because the basis of it was vindictive or selective and there are various standards that apply to all of that.

Malicious prosecution, which sounds similar, is something different. A malicious prosecution lawsuit is usually brought after the prosecution ends and it’s a claim for damages. The basic idea is, this case was stupid and terrible and unfair and never should have been brought by reasonable good faith prosecutors in the first place. We actually talked about this a little bit last October after former FBI Director Jim Comey’s first indictment. Since then, DOJ has indicted him a second time and in my opinion, on an even more groundless set of facts. It’s over his Instagram post showing seashells arranged to spell out 8647, which prosecutors claim amounted to a threat of violence against the president. As I said last week, proving that beyond a reasonable doubt is going to be difficult to say the least. Since then, my colleague Elie Honig has also outlined multiple arguments Comey’s defense could raise in a pretrial motion to dismiss that could be effective.

You can find that article on the Stay Tuned Substack if you’re interested. And by the way, also expect those other motions to be brought by Jim Comey as well, selective prosecution and vindictive prosecution. Now with respect to your question about malicious prosecution, if a judge were to dismiss the case or if Comey were ultimately acquitted, could he then sue on that ground that’s in your question? Well, the federal government is usually protected against lawsuits by the doctrine of immunity, a rule that the government can’t be sued unless it has explicitly consented to be. But Congress has created some exceptions under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows people to sue the United States for certain wrongful acts committed by federal law enforcement officers, including for malicious prosecution. So if Comey were to prevail and that’s a threshold issue, you have to prevail in your case, he’s got to prove a series of other elements as well, that the proceedings were initiated against him, that there was a lack of probable cause, that there was malice, and as I mentioned, a favorable determination in his favor.

And finally, there was harm suffered. So we’ll keep looking at that, but let’s not put the cart before the horse. First, he’s got to deal with the second indictment and as of this recording, he hasn’t even been arraigned yet, but I suspect that your question will become very relevant at some point in the not too distant future as Jim Comey and probably several others who will get favorable judgments against the government or watch the government fail in their prosecutions against them seriously consider and file exactly the lawsuit you mentioned, malicious prosecution.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, George Packer. 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 hashtag #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 audio and 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.