michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, will Republicans ever turn on Trump?

ross douthat

The issue now for Republicans is figuring out how to balance acknowledging the reality of what Trump did with whatever arguments they’re going to come up with to explain ultimately voting not to convict him.

david leonhardt

Then we talk about another recent hot topic of debate — airline etiquette.

michelle goldberg

There is nothing I hate more than sitting next to a strange man on an airplane. They assume that any space that you are not physically occupying belongs to them.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

O.K., you sold me. I mean, I’ve been meaning to watch that anyway.

ross douthat

It certainly is close to many of Michelle’s interests.

david leonhardt

The Watergate break-in happened in 1972. And for more than a year afterwards, Republican members of Congress stood solidly behind Richard Nixon. They called impeachment a partisan witch hunt. Ultimately, though, Republicans realized that Nixon’s behavior was dragging down their whole party and so they broke with him. Isolated and facing impeachment, Nixon finally resigned. Today’s Republicans are still a long way from abandoning President Trump, but some cracks have started to show. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania called Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine “inappropriate.” Senator Ben Sasse called it “troubling.” Cory Gardner of Colorado called it “a serious issue.” And Mitt Romney of Utah has gone further than any other critic of the president’s.

mitt romney If the president of the United States asks or presses the leader of a foreign country to carry out an investigation of a political nature, that’s troubling. And I feel that. And so, clearly if there were a quid pro quo, that would take it to an entirely more extreme level.

david leonhardt

We’ve talked before about all the reasons that Republicans are standing behind Trump. And those reasons are all still there. But things do seem to be shifting a little bit. Or is that just me hoping they’re shifting? Ross, what do you think?

ross douthat

Yeah, I think something — I think one thing has definitely shifted, which is that, in this case, unlike in some of the intricacies of the Mueller investigation, you have Donald Trump on the record in a transcript the White House itself released saying something pretty obviously inappropriate, in his own words, in carrying out his official duties as president of the United States. And in that sense, I think the Republican senators who you just quoted sort of don’t have a choice but to say this is concerning. I mean, we spent a lot of time in the Mueller investigation, and a lot of time arguing on this show, about the question of whether the election interference issues could be brought back to Trump himself. And in this case, we are there. And so the issue now for Republicans, as they try and balance these facts against their political realities, is figuring out how to balance acknowledging the reality of what Trump did with whatever arguments they’re going to come up with to explain ultimately voting not to convict him.

david leonhardt

Michelle, I don’t want to overstate it, but the polls over the last week or so haven’t been particularly good for Trump. And so, I’ve lost hope that Republican members of Congress will abandon Trump on principle, because he’s manifestly unfit for office. But I guess I am a little bit more hopeful that this is going to continue going badly for him and Republicans are going to look around and say, this guy at his peak was at 45 percent approval, and he’s falling, and this is a disaster, and we got to get rid of him. Am I sort of wish-casting there? Can you imagine that happening?

michelle goldberg

I guess I could imagine that happening maybe with someone really endangered, like a Cory Gardner or a Susan Collins, taking as a given the extreme cynicism and lack of loyalty to their fellow Americans or to any sort of broader national principles. Republicans, in making this calculation about self-interest, are in a difficult spot, because let’s say Trump’s approval ratings fell to 35 or 30 percent, any Republican who breaks with them is still basically pissing off the Republican base that they need to get re-elected. And are probably not going to get credit for that from voters who are furious at the Republican Party and want to elect Democrats. You know, one of the most interesting things to me has been realizing how much these people who bloviate endlessly about values and religion and faith actually don’t seem to believe in any kind of ultimate comeuppance. You know, they’re all acting as if they believe sort of what Rudy Giuliani has said out loud, which is that his gravestone might say he lied for Trump, but he’ll be dead, so who cares?

ross douthat

In fairness, Rudy Giuliani’s practice of Catholicism has never, I think, impressed anyone [GOLDBERG AND LEONHARDT LAUGH] with its fervency and piety, so he might not be the optimal example for your otherwise reasonable point, Michelle. I mean, can I answer your question, David? I think you’re overreading the polls. I think the polls right now show the predictable consolidation of Democrats around an impeachment inquiry once it’s started. That Democrats who were skeptical were always likely to get on board. And I think it shows a reaction among some independents to this sort of novelty, and as I said earlier, the difference of this particular case. But as yet, the polls I’ve seen are not getting you into massive public support for impeachment. They’re getting you just support for the inquiry, which is somewhat different. Now, his approval ratings may be slumping a little bit. But I think Michelle’s point is right that the example of Nixon suggests that your party breaks with you when your approval gets down much lower than where Trump’s is right now. And so far, this hasn’t changed, and it may change it in the weeks to come. But we’re not there yet.

david leonhardt

I mean, I think he’ll be in significant trouble if he’s consistently in the 30s, but I sort of have a rule of, I never pay attention to one poll, so I’d want to see much more than that. Trump’s approval rating has generally been hovering in the low 40s, which is so low that even a modest fall could create really big problems for him and transform the situation. But I take your point that the polling is not solidly against him at this point. Ross, can I ask you to channel some of the Senate Republicans, whether it’s Ben Sasse or Josh Hawley, who’s been on our show, or Cory Gardner— not one of them in particular. But I think a whole bunch of them really are disgusted by Donald Trump, the human being. How is it that they justify to themselves, do you think, standing behind this person who all reporting suggests they don’t respect or particularly like? What do they tell themselves about why they’re not willing to end this and make Mike Pence, a man many of them respect more, the president of the United States?

ross douthat

I mean, I think there are — the arguments would vary with the senator. But to channel at least one widespread perspective, which is shared by pundits, as well, and not only pro-Trump pundits, they think to themselves, look, our party was sort of overturned by this huge populist rebellion. There are similar populist rebellions happening all over the Western world. So Trump is a symptom. He’s not a singular cause. And this kind of populism is built on a total distrust of the elite, not just sort of the liberal elite but also the Republican Party elite, the conservative movement elite, every kind of elite. And when a revolt like this puts someone in power, if you push him out of office with another presidential election looming, it doesn’t make the underlying populist arrangement any better. It probably makes it worse. And it sets the stage for Trump 2.0, Trump on steroids. And so on. So it’s better to let this play out. I think you have a number of prominent Republicans now who feel the same way that prominent Republicans did in 2016, which is that they expect Trump to lose the next election. And they think it’s much better to run things out that way than to, in their view, make the situation down the road that much worse.

david leonhardt

So I want to talk a little bit about William Barr, the attorney general. My guess is we have some different opinions about William Barr, maybe even more different than we have about Donald Trump. So Michelle, you wrote a column this week about the thorough corruption of William Barr, who is the attorney general which, post-Watergate, has had this tradition of trying to be at least a little bit more separate from the president than other cabinet agencies. I’m not saying that every attorney general has fully lived up to that. But none of them, in my view, have behaved the way Barr has behaved. And so, can you just make the case about why what he is doing here is just so odious?

michelle goldberg

Right. Well, there’s two different parts, right? I mean, there’s just the, on its face, outrageous circumstance that he has not recused himself from any involvement when he himself is a possible party to a criminal conspiracy. He himself is mentioned in the phone call that started all of this. There is no conceivable neutral legal standard in which he should not have recused himself. But he has simply not the tiniest inkling of respect for the basic professional norms of the legal profession. Number two is him gallivanting all over the world to get foreign intelligence services to help him undermine the foundation of the Mueller investigation and sort of put meat on the bones of what seems to me to be the craziest and most outlandish conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories. Again, about the genesis of the Russia investigation, that it was some sort of conspiracy involving an internal bad actor in the Democratic Party and Ukraine and all sorts of other forces. I think that one — what strikes me about Bill Barr is that unlike past Republicans, he’s not like a Fox News producer. He’s not somebody who’s out there cynically manipulating the public by putting out propaganda. I mean, he is that. But he’s also somebody who himself has been manipulated by propaganda, right? He’s a Fox News viewer. He’s all in this kind of bizarro world conspiracy theory. And so it is now the foreign policy of the United States, even though it actually shouldn’t be the attorney general conducting foreign policy, to subvert our relationships with foreign intelligence services, to get them to back up this fixation of Donald Trump. I mean, it is so outrageous. It doesn’t seem like there can be any sort of bonds of civic affection with the people who are propping this up and the people who think it’s O.K.

david leonhardt

Ross, you and a number of conservatives defended Barr by basically saying, look, there’s nothing wrong with an attorney general getting involved in an investigation. This is completely different from the Ukraine call with the president. And I guess, the problem I have with that is twofold. One, the level of involvement of an attorney general flying around the world basically like a line prosecutor to get involved in this investigation — that by no means is one of the more important investigations in the Justice Department. And two, it really at its core appears to be based at least partly and maybe wholly on fabrications meant to protect the president. And so, I agree with you, there is a plausible way in which an attorney general would reach out to foreign governments and try to work with them that would be perfectly appropriate. But this ain’t it.

ross douthat

One, I wasn’t arguing that everything Barr is doing is appropriate. I was just arguing that it is categorically different from the kind of transcript that we have of what Trump was doing vis-à-vis Biden and Ukraine. The critique of Barr would be, as you say, that he’s getting involved in a line investigation inappropriately, when an attorney general should be keeping his hands off. That’s very, very different from Donald Trump arguably leveraging U.S. foreign policy and foreign aid in order to launch a foreign investigation of his political rival. They just seem like very different things. Two, I don’t understand the claim that this is not an important investigation. The claim made against Donald Trump for several years was that he was a Manchurian candidate, committing treason, and working for Vladimir Putin. How can you then turn around and argue that the origins of that issue are not — “it’s just not an important” — of course the Trump administration thinks it’s important.

michelle goldberg

Because, Ross, if you read the Mueller report, it basically tiptoes up to that conclusion, although it says it cannot prove criminal conspiracy. What you’re just saying has in no way been disproved.

ross douthat

The Mueller report does not tiptoe up to the conclusion that any of the claims in the Steele dossier and elsewhere about direct Trump inner circle collaboration with Russian intelligence were true. It doesn’t. It tiptoes up to the claim that Trump obstructed justice. And it explicitly makes the claim that people in his orbit had contact with Russia. But he doesn’t get you anywhere near those big, Trump talking to the Russians before his campaign, kind of allegations. It just doesn’t.

michelle goldberg

Well, I would say two things. First of all, as you know, the Mueller report doesn’t actually even look at most of Trump’s financial dealings. The only financial dealings that it really does look at was Trump’s continual series of lies about trying to get a Trump Tower built in Moscow as he was running this pro-Russia propaganda campaign. The Mueller report says basically that there was these 30 contacts between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, that Trump solicited Russian help, that Russian help was provided, that Trump’s campaign used that Russian help when crafting their campaign strategy. And it has since been abundantly clear that Trump has taken all sorts of foreign policy steps that would not be any different than the steps he would take if he were actually trying to pay back the help he was given in becoming president in the first place. We also know now that he told the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office that he did not mind the Russian interference in the election on his behalf. So the fact that it did not live up to the absolute maximalist view, if none of this stuff with Ukraine it happened, it would be still the biggest scandal in American political history. It would still — in my view — prove that Trump is disloyal to this country and an illegitimate president. And again, I think it’s kind of a propaganda coup of the right that they’ve been able to spin the Mueller report as an exoneration instead of an extraordinarily damning document that — thanks in part to the machinations of Bill Barr — has been quashed in a disinformation campaign.

ross douthat

It hasn’t been quashed.

michelle goldberg

No, not quashed. The rollout that presented it as this anticlimactic exoneration shaped the information environment in which it was then very, very hard to accurately convey what was in it.

david leonhardt

What’s interesting to me here is that as we’ve gone from talking about Ukraine to talking about Russia, to me, I feel like we’re helping to make the case for a very narrow impeachment, which is, the arguments about Russia — Michelle and I think they’re a slam dunk, but Ross, I know you disagree. And the fact is, the country has not been won over to Michelle’s and my view on this. And there is a part of me that is really saddened by the idea that Donald Trump is unfit to be president and has violated his oath in so many different ways, the idea that Congress is going to impeach him with a narrow set of articles on Ukraine. And yet, the more I think about Mueller and all of these rabbit holes, the more I think that if your goal is to weaken Trump, a narrow impeachment probably makes a lot more sense than a broad one. Michelle, do you disagree with that?

michelle goldberg

No, not really. I mean, I think it’s probably strategically wise, because again, one of the reasons that the Ukraine scandal has resonated much more than all of these other scandals is just because it is so clear cut and simple to understand. Given the information environment in which we live. It is probably smart for them to proceed with a very quick, tight, focused impeachment that can get as many votes in the House as possible.

david leonhardt

Ross, you get the last word.

ross douthat

No, I think a narrow impeachment is probably the way to go. And I’ll leave it there.

david leonhardt

O.K, we will leave it there, as well. We’re going to take a quick break and be right back. We’ve had a heated couple weeks in national politics so we’re going to take a little break right now to touch on a different hot topic — air travel etiquette. After fights over armrests, traveling pets, and crying children, there is now a new battleground — the window shade. The Wall Street Journal calls it the latest airline passenger cabin conflict. New York magazine says it’s even harder to resolve than the endless battle over reclining seats. Passengers are getting more aggressive about closing their window shades and about asking other passengers to do so, too. It seems like a lot of people would rather spend a long flight looking at their phone or their tablet or their laptop, without the bother of natural light. Fights over the window shades have prompted questions about whether the airlines need to get involved and set clear policies. I am on team shades up. With the exception of overnight flights, I would much rather have some daylight flowing into the cabin. On a recent nine hour daytime flight, I couldn’t believe that the shades were closed almost the entire time. I went like 30 hours without sunlight and felt groggy for the entire day afterwards. And I am curious, Ross and Michelle, where are you two? Shades up or shades down, and who should decide?

michelle goldberg

So I have a lot of extremely strong feelings about air travel, which I think is one of the signal horrors of modern life, at least coach air travel. It’s like the— if your one encounter with just, we don’t care if you’re in pain. I basically think that window shade is at the total discretion of the person sitting next to the window.

david leonhardt

You are a window shade libertarian?

michelle goldberg

Yes.

ross douthat

Yeah, I think I’m a libertarian on this, too. But there does seem to be more of a shades down consensus. And it seems to me that when you’re in a window seat, you’re cramped, but you have the power over the shade, right? And it seems to me to be sort of part of the weird landscape of the airline that I’ve gotten accustomed to living with. And it’s weird to have there be a sort of demand for a consensus or a policy overall.

michelle goldberg

I was going to say, the thing that I feel like I wish the airlines would weigh in on more decisively. You guys know there was just this story recently about a Japanese airline publishing baby maps, so that you can avoid sitting next to a baby if you’re the kind of person who can’t stand small children. On the one hand, it seems like a viciously anti-natal policy. On the other hand, I’m for it because there’s nothing worse when you’re traveling with a baby than people who keep glaring at you and loudly sighing. But what I really wish is that they would publish maps of men, or have female-only sections, because of the way that they assume that any space that you are not physically occupying belongs to them. So they always take both armrests. And airlines won’t do anything about it. So I have gone to a stewardess and said the truly disgusting things that a man has said when I’ve asked him to please move his elbow from in front of my chest. And they’ll basically say, there’s nothing they can do about it. They can maybe move me to a middle seat in the back of the plane. I wish that they had optional shades or something, that you could clearly demarcate the space between the two seats. Or even better, that there was a way to request, if you’re a woman, to sit next to another woman.

ross douthat

I mean, I — I have to reverse field here. So I just did this defense of the libertarian airline. But listening to Michelle, it has become crystal clear to me that airline travel is actually a perfect case against extreme libertarianism and social liberalism and the intersection thereof. And I need to fully embrace Michelle’s argument and just repurpose it to socially conservative ends. I mean, I think you could make a partial defense of the male sex by saying, on average, men are bigger. We have longer legs. We’re suffering more from the squishing effect of airline travel. And that explains some of the sort of over spilling that Michelle is noting. But in general, yeah, the dominant mode on airlines is, this is the state of nature. I’ve paid for my seat. And I’m going to do whatever I want in this zone. And what Michelle experiences as a woman, I experience primarily as a father of kids, where we have three small children who are not obviously incredibly fun to fly with. And you stagger onto the plane. And often, the airline has failed to seat you together or done some other terrible thing. And again and again, you have situations where one of your kids doesn’t want to sit next to a stranger. It’s incredibly easy for this stranger to change their seat or to just do some mild thing to accommodate you. And you get this sort of blank stare. It is this perfect individualist society that is incredibly hostile to women and children. And so, it’s the tragedy of late modern libertarianism in a nutshell right there.

david leonhardt

I want to come back to the baby maps, because the idea that you could look up online where babies are going to be on a plane and try to sit not near them, that sounds like a good idea. But mostly, I think that adults just need to get much more comfortable with the idea of babies on planes, because I’m always horrified when there is a baby crying and there’s loud sighing. And it’s almost always from a man, I would add. It is not that pleasant to listen to a crying baby, but it is much, much, much more unpleasant either, A, to be a crying baby stuck inside an airline tube, or B, to be the parents of a crying baby trying to comfort that baby when that everyone around you is getting mad. And I think it’s kind of insane that we’ve basically gotten to the point where you’re allowed to complain about a tiny little human being who is upset on an airplane, but we also allow people to bring their pets onto planes, even though some people are allergic to the pets, so long as the people have lied and said that their pets are therapy pets. And 90 plus percent of them are in fact lying about it.

ross douthat

Do you have stats — is that definite?

david leonhardt

That’s fair. You’re calling me out on making up a statistic.

ross douthat

I just don’t want people who have therapy animals to be calling in.

david leonhardt

I mean, what would you guess? What percentage of animals on planes? And I want to clearly distinguish here — seeing eye dogs and a few other exceptions should all be allowed on planes. But therapy dogs, to me, is just one of the great scams of 21st century life. Do you think I’m wrong about that?

ross douthat

I don’t — maybe we don’t want to go down that road. I just, I was curious. So let me just say with that, though, I guess you could make, as with Michelle’s argument for sex-segregated planes, you could make an argument for the baby heat maps as a sort of ultimately pro-baby move. That if you could create a section of a plane that was the family section, as a parent, I would much rather go into that section, where parents have this sort of solidarity of the trenches. Where you get in and it’s like, all right, everybody’s got the Cheerios. Everybody’s got to switch seats here and there. It’s all chaos, but you’re all in it together. Than the world of one baby per six rows surrounded by hateful anti-natalists that we have right now.

michelle goldberg

[LAUGHING] And actually, just to expand on that a bit, I fly a lot with my kids, but I fly more on my own for work. And I would sit in that section when I’m by myself, because I would usually rather sit next to someone with a crying baby than a man. [DOUTHAT AND LEONHARDT LAUGH]

ross douthat

Of any hierarchy, men are at the bottom.

david leonhardt

I do think we’ve landed on something important here, which is, flying should be less hostile to children. My kids aren’t young anymore, but my signature experience flying with young kids was when I had my two sons on a cross-country flight. A six hour flight with two toddlers, I mean, has time ever gone more slowly in my life than then? I don’t know that it has. And I accidentally stumbled on the fact that the flight attendant was out with the beverage cart, serving beverages. So I was in the back of the plane and my two and three-year-old sons discovered this empty space that was like a little playground for them that they climbed in. And when the flight attendant got back, she gasped, and she said, “Do you know how dirty it is in there?” And I responded, “Do you know how miserable it is flying with toddlers?” I will take any five minutes I can get. And I feel like that’s an experience that parents have all the time. And mostly we just blame them for the fact that flying with kids is hard, rather than trying to make their lives easier. So I fully sign on to the idea of a family section where parents and kids can sit. And also, Michelle, you can sit, and there’ll be fewer men. [GOLDBERG LAUGHS] Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we give you a suggestion meant to take your mind off of both politics and airline travel. Ross, this week is your turn. What do you have for us?

ross douthat

So the show is “Unbelievable,” which is a Netflix limited series about a serial rapist who went uncaught for many years. It’s a true story, and it’s based on terrific reporting by ProPublica and The Marshall Project on this investigation and these women’s stories. And the performances are — the two really amazing ones — are by Merritt Wever, who plays one of the detectives who ultimately cracks the case, and Kaitlyn Dever, who plays one of the initial victims who, as the title of the show suggests, is not believed by her local police department and ends up in a hell of being accused of making false accusations and losing her status in a foster home and all kinds of terrible things. And the performances are better than the show, because I think the show sometimes feels a little too much like a old lifetime movie of the week message movie, where characters are sort of explaining how bad rape is in ways that are admirable but don’t seem that realistic as dialogue. But the performances are so great that it’s worth sticking through some of the weaknesses of the script.

michelle goldberg

O.K., you’ve sold me. I mean, I’ve been meaning to watch that anyway, but it’s definitely up next.

ross douthat

No, I mean, I think the show is— it certainly is close to many of Michelle’s interests, and I mean, the story itself is harrowing and horrifying and basically true.

david leonhardt

I think you both may have a higher tolerance for darkness in your movie and TV watching than I do, because while it sounds extremely well done, I just find it really hard to get motivated to watch a long series of TV about something as dark as this.

ross douthat

I mean, I guess all I’d say is that in this series, I mean, it’s a show about where a form of justice is done in the end. And it’s a little different from some of the other darkest timeline shows that are on TV.

david leonhardt

Well, what’s the recommendation again, Ross?

ross douthat

The recommendation is “Unbelievable,” a TV show on Netflix, and particularly, two of the lead performances by Merritt Wever and Kaitlyn Dever.

david leonhardt

That’s our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts, you can leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple podcasts. This week’s show is produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Sarah Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week. In a bit of trivia, I have to tell you both that I went to the same high school as both William Barr and Roy Cohn. How about that?

ross douthat