Tuesday Morning Politics with David Remnick

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. And David Remnick is with me, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on the station. We're going to preview this weekend's New Yorker Festival, everybody you've ever heard of in one series of events, it seems like. And we'll talk about some of David's own writing in The New Yorker, which includes a searing piece on Donald Trump after the midterm elections.

One telling sign of what that might be like happened to come yesterday when Trump made this statement to reporters that even David Remnick, skeptic that he is, they find hard to believe.

David Remnick (0:47)

Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven't been doing much.

Brian Lehrer (0:53)

Russia's frankly been fine on Ukraine, said Trump, while in reality they're trying to bomb Ukraine's energy grid out of existence and their war of conquest and increasingly targeting civilian areas of Kiev and elsewhere. Russia's been fine on Ukraine. David Remnick knows a thing or two about how fine Vladimir Putin's Russia is, having written two books about Russia after communism, Lenin's Tomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and Resurrection, the struggle for a new Russia. With that, David, it's always great to talk. I always hear from listeners how they love it when you come on the show one-on-one, not just on the radio hour, and you get to riff in the guest's chair. So welcome back.

David Remnick (1:35)

I love being on with you. It's always a privilege, Brian. I wish you were privileged to react to this statement of Putin's, but it's utterly consistent with his policy and temperament for so long.

It's just more evidence that what he relates to is the big powers that he wants to be one of, namely China and Russia. These are the leaders that he admires, and he is content for Volodymyr Zelensky, who is a heroic figure of our time, and whose country was invaded by, invaded by the larger power, Russia, and after years of holding back Russian aggression as best he could, Ukraine now finds itself with an added burden, as if they needed another one, and that's the spectacle of the United States being on the side of Vladimir Putin. It is, it's unspeakable, is what it is.

Brian Lehrer (2:45)

You know, David Sanger and The New York Times wrote this up partly as Trump's push for deals with Russia and that he has an intensifying desire to normalize relationship with Moscow even if it means further undercutting Ukraine. If you agree deals with Russia, what kind of deals?

David Remnick (3:06)

Well, two kinds of deals. One kind of deal to enrich himself. I think we've seen this over and over again, whether it's in the Middle East or having to do with Russia.

And we've seen that for quite a while. And at the same time, deals that might enhance his political position going into the midterms and beyond.

He just simply does not have any moral dimension to his thinking, whether it's on domestic politics or foreign policy. I think if you don't know that by now, you never will. And it makes one... And I don't say this easily, Brian, at all. I lived in the last years of the Soviet Union, and it always struck me as something to think about, what it must be like to live in a place where you have utter contempt and shame for your leadership. Now, it's not to say that American leadership over time has been anywhere approaching perfect. We've had many dark marks on our historical record. I know that. I'm not naïve about that. But my Russian friends, my Moscow friends, would talk about this rather in the deepest terms. And it was a very hard burden that I didn't feel in the same way. And it's hard not to feel it in recent years, and never more so than in recent days to listen to the President of the United States, who's enriching himself and his family to the tune of billions of dollars, who's trying in his own chaotic way to stanch the losses of the midterms that are coming up in a couple of weeks, and to put himself on the side of Vladimir Putin. That's the leader he relates to. That's the one he's sympathetic to, not the one who has done everything possible and bent over backwards at times, and yet kept his dignity to protect the independence and sovereignty of the nation of Ukraine. It's a shameful spectacle.

Brian Lehrer (5:17)

In your article about Trump after the midterms, which I recommend to people because you get to so much of where we're at, not just right now like this week in The New Yorker, but big picture, you write, this is the ethos of the era defined by Putin and Trump.