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, how much blame does President Trump deserve for the latest gun massacres?

ross douthat

The connection here is not just Trump’s personal qualities. It is also his bigotry and his flirtations with incitement.

david leonhardt

Then are Democrats breaking up with Barack Obama?

michelle goldberg

If Joe Biden is going to run essentially on Obama’s record, people are going to try to litigate that record.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

Then I just remember thinking like this is about as happy as I can be.

david leonhardt

On earlier episodes of this podcast, the three of us have debated whether it’s fair to lay some blame on President Trump for mass shootings. Michelle and I both think the answer is a clear yes, but Ross, I want to start with you today, because you also say yes, but not in quite the same way that many progressives do. So make your case.

ross douthat

I mean, I think the case I was trying to make was one that substitutes the word participation for the word blame. Blaming political actors for these spasms of violence, absent a situation where the political actor literally says, “Please, my followers, go commit mass murder,” is just very fraught, and I think we have a case study in how fraught it is and the fact that this white nationalist shooting in El Paso was accompanied by another shooting in Dayton that seemed to proceed from the same kind of psychological disturbances and personal alienation. It just didn’t have a white nationalist manifesto attached to it. And I think that’s what you see generally when you look at what does seem like a real upsurge in mass shootings, that occasionally, and maybe increasingly, you get white nationalist ideology as the kind of official explanation, the manifesto that gets put out and so on. But it’s still a minority of cases, and the real commonalities between these cases have to do with personal factors, this kind of deep mix of sort of narcissism and male bravado and psychological alienation and all of these things that are not, I think, the result of some particular ideological force at work. But they are part of a cultural trend that Donald Trump, as president and really throughout his career, embodies, narcissism layered over spiritual emptiness, this clamoring desire for media attention and fame, regardless of whether the attention is positive or negative. I think the cultural conservative diagnosis is sort of right, that this is more a spiritual crisis than it is a technocratic problem to be solved by regulation. But I also think that the spiritual crisis is partially embodied by the man who cultural conservatives have helped put in the White House and made the most outsized cultural figure in our country today.

michelle goldberg

Obviously, there’s a part of Ross’s argument that I agree with. Obviously, I believe that the presidency of Donald Trump represents a profound moral crisis in that he embodies this metaphysically evil nihilism. But I still find this argument so frustrating because it seems to deny the entire role of propaganda and incitement in pogroms and genocide throughout history. For example, there’s a reason that the radio station in Rwanda was seen as an integral part of the genocide there, and it didn’t start with them saying, “Go out and club your neighbor to death.” It started with them talking about Tutsis as vermin. And to say that, well, Donald Trump didn’t say go out and shoot up a Walmart in El Paso — Donald Trump compared Mexican immigrants to something subhuman, and then he gave a wink and a nod when his supporters talked about shooting them in a way that suggested that he would be more than happy if that happened or that he thought that that suggestion was maybe a little bit naughty, but not off base. And so to then suggest that because not every mass shooting is motivated by white supremacy, that when the shooter kind of lays out a manifesto using language that is identical to the language of the president of the United States, a person who, by the way, has been president for the shooter’s entire adult life, and so clearly has shaped his sense of what is true and false on the political stage, when he then goes out, murders people, tells investigators that the goal was to kill as many Mexicans as possible, to then say, well, this has nothing to do with the political environment, it just seems like a willful act of blindness. And then you have this murderer in Dayton. And people have been saying well, he liked Elizabeth Warren. Isn’t that the same? No, it’s not the same. There is no suggestion in that murder that there was a political motive, that he was targeting people who had been kind of demonized by the left. And so there is this troll-ish effort to draw a kind of false equivalency. And my final thing I would say is that one thing that Ross said in his column that I think is right is that he compared these white supremacist murderers to members of ISIS. A lot of these members of ISIS were kind of disaffected, alienated young men. They weren’t necessarily Islamic fundamentalists, and they also weren’t even usually that well versed in Muslim theology. But I don’t think Ross— and maybe correct me if I’m wrong — would say that you could talk about combating ISIS without talking about Muslim fundamentalism, or tell me if I’m wrong?

ross douthat

Well, I guess a couple of things, right. I mean, one, I agree with a bunch of what you said, and I said so in the column that I think the connection here is not just Trump’s personal qualities. It is also his bigotry and his flirtations with incitement. That stuff is all real. That being said, I’m also hesitant to say — for instance, there have been a number of incidents in the Trump era when leftists and liberals have committed or tried to commit acts of violence that did seem to have a political motivation. The baseball field shooting is the most famous example. The guy who tried to firebomb a Border Patrol station is another example. I think when you’re dealing with these cases where the primary factor is personal alienation, not political ideology, you just want to be hesitant about saying, this political figure caused this with their rhetoric. In the case of ISIS, I think the example — I don’t think Donald Trump is literally running a white nationalist, fascist, ethno-state.

michelle goldberg

Right, no, that’s what he aspires to. I don’t think he’s running one either.

ross douthat

I don’t think you can talk about the ISIS shooters without talking about the guys who tried to set up the caliphate in the Middle East and murdered Christians and Yazidis and gays and so on. But Donald Trump isn’t — you know, he isn’t actually ISIS.

david leonhardt

I agree that it’s different. I place him somewhere on the spectrum between people who use quite extreme political rhetoric, with which I often disagree, but don’t incite people to violence, and ISIS. And I guess I’m curious, do you agree that Donald Trump specifically incites people to violence or attempts to?

ross douthat

I think what Michele said is right. Donald Trump has a sort of winking approach to whether it’s violence at his rallies or what do we do with these people, and the crowd yells shoot them, that is distinctively worse than normal for American politicians. I agreed with your column, David. I think right now at this moment, the American right has more of a sort of flirt with violence problem than the American left. But again, I think if you start to dig into actual like white nationalist ideology, the direct connections to Trump often crumble in the sense that you’ll often have people who will say, I liked Trump in 2016, but then I decided he is a cuck, right? And what does that mean? Does that mean Trump incited them by disappointing them by not actually being a white nationalist?

michelle goldberg

Here is what I would say about that. I mean, first of all he certainly raised their expectations because they suddenly tasted real power. One of the things that I wrote about is that usually you actually have a decrease in right wing terrorism during Republican administrations because the right typically is more likely to resort to terrorism when it feels powerless and disenfranchised. So now you have this sort of new thing where you have the most right wing president ever accompanied by this increase in right wing terrorism, partly simply because he has the whole country in a state of constant agitation, and that is also true for the right, partly because the movement actually feels like it can taste victory or feels like some sort of revolutionary change is at hand in a way that it didn’t necessarily in the past. And then there’s also just the kind of material way that Donald Trump has pulled back even the modest law enforcement efforts of the Obama administration to track and investigate white nationalists. So there is an actual kind of dereliction of law enforcement duty in dealing with what is now clearly the most potent domestic terrorist threat that this country has.

ross douthat

No, I think that’s an interesting point about the ebb and flow of violence, because one thing I sort of expected from the Trump era was more violence on the left for a sort of mirror image of the explanation Michelle just gave that it’s the Nixon administration that really gets the Weathermen going because the left feels powerless. And instead, the interesting thing about Trump is that you had this wave of disturbances ranging from the surge in Islamic state terrorism to urban riots to campus protests that are sort of coded as either left or things conservatives are against in the run up to his election. And since his election, it does seem like the Islamic State is crushed, and it hasn’t continued to produce violence. And campuses have been more peaceful, Middlebury and Berkeley notwithstanding, than I expected. And meanwhile you do have, it seems like, an increase in people in this larger zone of male alienation, who are latching on to white nationalism.

david leonhardt

Michelle, I’m curious what you think people who are extremely alarmed by these developments can do about it? You and I agree completely that Donald Trump is a racist, and he’s a liar, and he’s really just the worst person to hold the presidency in our lifetimes by a considerable margin. And yet it doesn’t feel like repeating that has any effect. And I guess I’m curious how you think about what people who are alarmed about this can do to try to fight back against this rise of white nationalism that Trump is helping to fan to one degree or another?

michelle goldberg

Well, I would say two things. I mean, first of all, I think we should look at the kind of not just the incitement, which is real, but also the policy changes that the administration has engaged in and that could be undone. You see with this administration having rolled back any attempt to take white nationalism seriously on an investigative level whether that be at the Department of Homeland Security or the F.B.I., and instead, basically say that the only threat we’re interested in is radical Islamic terrorism. That’s something that can be undone. Similarly, there was an article in Vice recently about how Twitter and some of these other platforms took real steps against recruitment by ISIS, and they’ve been reluctant to do the same with white supremacist recruitment and incitement because there are areas in which it would overlap with normal Republican or normal conservative speech, and they don’t want to be seen as censoring Republicans. But I think that you could have similar policies when it comes to white nationalist recruitment. I mean, I think it’s probably a good thing that 8chan is increasingly finding it hard to work with anyone who will host them on the internet. So there are things beyond just condemning this president which I think are necessary. And I do think that despite all of our best efforts, this president has been normalized and kind of language that would have been intolerable a few years ago, has now become routine. But there are also just like more concrete things that people can call for.

david leonhardt

What do you think about those ideas, Ross?

ross douthat

I mean, I guess this is where it comes back to what I think is a real disagreement, which is that de-platforming 8chan is a good idea. I think there are other things you can do especially maybe related to the internet where you do things like consider prosecuting people on message boards, who encourage people with violent fantasies who go on to act on those fantasies as accessories to murder, which is something that for various obvious reasons, authorities have been hesitant to do. But if this is happening on a larger and larger scale, it’s worth considering. But these are things I think that are ultimately more connected to the nature of alienation and its discontents on the internet than they are to white nationalism, per se. White nationalism is one ideology among many seized on by people, many of whom are inclined to do this anyway. And to the extent that we’re thinking about this problem, it is a conversation about male alienation and the internet and a bunch of other things in addition to being a conversation about Trump. There is a trap here, I think, for liberals that Michelle sort of acknowledged, where many of the things that conservatives did and championed and liberals, too, in reaction to Islamic terror, are seen in hindsight as something of overkill and sort of making a ideological threat out of something that is often more connected to alienation.

david leonhardt

So let’s end by talking about gun control. I’m torn about whether the politics of gun control are just hopelessly stuck or making progress just way, way too slowly. So this week, Mike DeWine, the Republican conservative governor of Ohio, proposed a red flag law which would let the police take guns away from people who a court has decided are dangerous. In what direction do you each see gun control going? Do you think we’re going to slowly get more gun safety regulation and laws, or is it basically just going to remain stuck where we are now?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I think we’ll get it if we get a Democratic Senate. Then we might get significant gun safety legislation. Otherwise, we’re not going to. Or alternately, you could get a President Kamala Harris who’s willing to push the envelope on executive action around gun safety. But we’re obviously not going to get it from any of the Republicans who are in office right now.

ross douthat

I think there’s a possibility for reforms, like the red flag law that increasingly have some conservative and Republican support that are seen as an alternative to anything that smacks of large scale gun confiscation. I don’t think anything like that is going to happen under Trump, because very little will happen under Trump. And in certain ways, I think you’re most likely to get a gun control action under a future Republican president who shares Trump’s lack of ideological conviction on the issue, but is more effective and competent than Trump. I think you can imagine a certain kind of Republican president in four, eight years pushing through some bigger gun control bill. But all that being said, I want to return to my consistent theme in this discussion, which is that much of the evidence we have suggests that the gun control measures on the table are most likely to be effective in maybe reducing suicide rates. I think the odds of any gun control legislation dealing effectively with this particular scourge of sort of isolated and determined young men is very, very low.

michelle goldberg

I mean, obviously, we need more broad based gun control than any of the measures that are on the table. There’s a reason that you have a scourge of alienated, young men who spend a lot of time playing video games in, for example, Japan. And you don’t have this problem because the problem isn’t the alienation. It’s the guns. Although obviously, it would be a heavy lift to remove guns from this kind of violence-drenched society. I’m not sure why you think it’s more of a heavy lift than curing alienation and social atomization. That’s also a pretty big project for the government to undertake, and we don’t have obvious mechanisms to do that either.

ross douthat

I agree with that.

david leonhardt

O.K., we’ll leave it there. I very much hope we do not return to this topic anytime soon, but I wish I could be more optimistic about that. And on that note, we will take a break, and we’ll be right back. President Obama was an undercurrent of the most recent democratic debates and not in a good way. Some of this year’s leading Democrats want to get rid of Obamacare. They think parts of Obama’s immigration policy were monstrous. And they use those criticisms to make sharp attacks at Vice President Joe Biden.

archived recording (cory booker) Mr. Vice President, you can’t have it both ways. You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not.

david leonhardt

That was Cory Booker, the New Jersey senator. Michelle I’m interested in what you think is going on here. I have a sort of intellectual way of asking you which is are Democrats just distancing themselves from Biden, or is there something bigger going on here? And then I have the emotional way of asking you, which is how I actually feel, which is what the heck are they doing?

michelle goldberg

I feel like that to some extent, too, because obviously you want to go beyond Barack Obama, beyond what he accomplished. And again, it’s kind of partly why I have said from the beginning, I wish Joe Biden wasn’t in this race, because if Joe Biden is going to run essentially on Obama’s record then it makes it inevitable that people are going to try to litigate that record. They’re not going to talk about maybe the 80 or 90 percent of it the Democrats admire. They’re going to talk about the places where Obama either failed or didn’t go far enough. And so it becomes this sour and dispiriting reckoning with one of the only truly universally beloved figures left in American politics.

david leonhardt

What I find so wrongheaded about it is I think there is a case to make against Obama and Obama-ism that doesn’t A, seem to tear it all down, and B, hand a huge re-election gift to Trump. You say, look, Obamacare didn’t cover nearly enough people, and it didn’t do nearly enough to hold down health care prices and drug prices. And I’m going to do more of it. But this idea the Democrats are having this whole debate about whether to abolish private insurance, which wherever you are on that debate, I would argue it’s totally unnecessary right now and plays right into Trump’s hands, or the fact that they’re going so far left on immigration and making Obama sort of seem Trump-ist in the way they talk about his immigration policy, it really strikes me as self-defeating for the Democratic Party. And I keep imagining Donald Trump sitting there, watching the debate, and just chortling.

ross douthat

But here’s the good news. Joe Biden is winning the Democratic primary right now. Joe Biden - Mr. “Obama was great and I’m going to continue it” - he’s ahead. And Donald Trump is sitting and watching those debates, and God knows, I agree with you, David, that there is a version of the Democratic Party on display in those debates that would lose to Donald Trump, but that version isn’t leading the polls. To me, this is the striking thing about the debates so far. We had two, but really four democratic debates. And Joe Biden did not perform amazingly well in the first one, and I didn’t think he performed amazingly well in the second one. But despite a dip in his poll numbers, he’s back to 30 percent of the primary vote. The top three or four seem very stable. None of the long-shot candidates are getting any traction, much to my Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson disappointment. And I think if you’re an Obama Democrat, you look at the situation right now, and you say, I don’t love what I’m seeing up on that stage. But there’s a candidate of continuity with Obama who, by the way, in the poll I’m looking at today is beating Trump in Texas, and he’s ahead in the polls, and I should be happy about that.

david leonhardt

Well, I’m almost happy about that. But let me ask an uncomfortable question. I can’t help but think how old he looks when I watched those debates, and I watch him even in that second debate struggle to come up with the word that he wants, and when his time is up, it looks like he’s incredibly relieved, as opposed to the other candidates who want to take every additional second that they can get. I mean, Michelle, imagine that we knew Joe Biden would be the nominee. How worried are you about his performance so far?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I wake up in the middle of the night in a total panic. I worry about this all the time, not in an ideological way. I mean I could live with any ideological compromise in the name of getting rid of Trump. I don’t think Joe Biden is as electable as everybody says he is. I know the polls show him beating Trump by a lot now. The polls also would have showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump by a lot. He was never a great debater. He was always sort of undisciplined. But there’s something different now. He seems frail. He can’t quite manage the words that he’s looking for. It was so telling when Trump got the name of this city where the shooting in Ohio was wrong, when he said, “God bless the people of Toledo.” And yet, here we have a Democratic frontrunner who also got the cities of both of the shootings wrong, although at least he managed to correct himself. We need to move beyond the gerontocracy that is ruling this country right now.

david leonhardt

Yeah, what did Biden say again, Michigan and Houston?

michelle goldberg

And Houston, I think.

david leonhardt

Yeah. Ross, do you think Biden looks better than we do?

ross douthat

No, I agree with everything you said. I will say I find it slightly charming in a world of long winded politicians of which Biden is famously one to have him sort of and his answers by saying, well, you know how it goes and then trail off. I find that sort of likeable in a certain way, but knowing Biden over all these years, I also think it has to reflect age and deterioration. That’s not — the Joe Biden that we all knew and loved or didn’t love would never have cut himself off if he could have kept talking. I don’t honestly know how that plays in a general election against Trump. And I guess I’m curious for both of you guys, maybe especially Michelle. I think many of us have underestimated Biden from the start. Is there something that can happen on the debate stage that you think could change this situation where Biden is sort of like a battered sailboat gliding towards the nomination?

michelle goldberg

I’m not sure it will happen on the debate stage, but I think it could happen in the early states. I mean, I’m going to go to Iowa in a few days where all the candidates are going to be there for a bunch of different events over the weekend. And Iowa is one of those places where everybody or not everybody, but a great many people expect to see the candidates up close. They see them multiple times. And when I’ve seen Biden on the stump, he doesn’t seem any more vigorous than he does in the debates. If anything, he seems even more tongue tied and subdued. I think it’s possible that his standing could erode in Iowa. And then if he comes out of Iowa in a weak position, my sense is that the whole thing will sort of collapse.

david leonhardt

Let’s tick through some of the other candidates, because it does feel like the field is about to winnow. Getting into the debates is going to get substantially harder in September. Only eight of the 20 plus candidates have qualified for September so far. So I’m interested in what you each think about Kamala Harris. I mean, I keep hearing from Democrats some version of I want to her more than I actually do like her. How are you each thinking about her candidacy?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I like her a lot. I would say that I thought that the debate was very damaging for her, not so much because of Tulsi Gabbard’s kind of devastating attack on her criminal justice record themselves. Those attacks are devastating. The very fact that Joe Biden is in the lead shows that there’s a lot of Democrats who are willing to forgive candidates for their past criminal justice positions. I mean, to me what was devastating about that is that after the first debates, people thought that it would be so amazing to see Kamala Harris on stage eviscerating Donald Trump, that made it seem like she had more of a glass jaw, like she wasn’t necessarily as formidable as she had seemed to be.

ross douthat

I think I’ve probably made the Kamala Harris-Marco Rubio comparison before. And in certain ways, I think it doesn’t fit. But it fits insofar as Harris seems sometimes sort of stranded between the different wings of the party, where her positioning on paper seems like it should be unifying. She’s the candidate who bridges the Biden-versus-Warren-Sanders divide. But in practice, it’s not clear that there are enough voters who want that bridge, or it’s not clear that she’s figured out a way to make that bridge. And I think her — to me, the worst exchange of the debate was her inability to coherently defend her health care plan in the early going, and it’s left her with a plan that’s vulnerable to obvious attacks from Biden and other moderates, and that she herself doesn’t seem to know quite how to explain. Warren just has a much more clear and compelling pitch for why she should be the nominee, and Harris is the nominee that maybe you want, if you’re a consultant, but she hasn’t persuaded the voters that that’s what they want.

david leonhardt

Well, let’s finish by each saying a word about one of the other candidates. And I’ll go first. I’ve been pretty tough on Beto O’Rourke, but I thought he had a really good debate. And it highlighted something for me that I hadn’t realized before, which is I think he actually understands how to appeal to swing voters in a way that many of the other Democrats are missing. He represents El Paso, obviously on many of our minds this week. It’s a border community. And yet he is able to send a message when he talks about immigration that he, too, cares about having strong borders. And I think the other Democrats don’t realize the extent to which they’re telling Americans that that’s not a concern of theirs, and Beto is. And I think he’s also got the smart policy on health care. He’s avoiding this Medicare trap. And so when you look at all the candidates, with the exception of Biden, Beto’s the only one who’s qualified for the next round of debates already who isn’t sort of trying to run against the tide of public opinion on one of these major issues. I guess Amy Klobuchar has now qualified, so she joins that list too. So my word is for Beto even if I’d be surprised if he comes back. Michelle, who’s on your mind?

michelle goldberg

I mean, obviously, this week, Beto’s response to the shootings in El Paso reminds me why I loved him so much when he was running for Senate against Ted Cruz. The candidate that I wrote about recently is Cory Booker. Cory Booker was fantastic in both debates. He has a lot of the qualities that Mayor Pete has: Rhodes scholar, dynamic mayor. On top of that, he has, I think the ability to help mobilize African-American voter turnout and get it up. I think that a lot of the showboating quality that he has that have always made people, including me, roll their eyes at him, would actually be useful when you’re running against a reality TV star. So I would love to see him emerge as the sort of alternative to Biden. If what you really want is a continuation of the Obama presidency, he seems like much more likely to actually deliver that. And I think would be pretty formidable in a general election.

ross douthat

The people who performed best in these debates, as debaters, included Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard and Julián Castro. They all did well on those stages and got no response that you could see from the polls. And I think that says that for all the radicalism percolating in certain parts of the Democratic Party, the average democratic voter, just as they like Obama, they like a lot of the people running for president now and aren’t in the market for radical disruption.

david leonhardt

Well, the next debate is in Houston in September, and there’s a chance now that there will be only one stage, which should allow for some engagement between, for example, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, and that’ll give us all a chance to return to the campaign later in September, which we will definitely do. It is time for our weekly recommendation, when we give you a suggestion meant to take your mind off of politics. Michelle, this week is your turn. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

So this might be a little bit like something I’ve said on this show before. I mean, in the past, I recommend going for a ride in a hot air balloon. I really do like to be up high. I was in California last week, and I was walking by like a parasailing booth, and I was with my son, who’s six. And he was interested, and so I went and I said, can you take a six-year-old parasailing, and it turns out that you can take a six-year-old parasailing. You know, we went together. They have like a harness for two people. And in case you don’t know what parasailing is, it’s like basically they attach you to a parachute, and you’re on the back of a speedboat and then the boat goes and you kind of lift up into the sky. I think you’re like 500 feet into the sky or something. When we were up there floating above everything, holding hands, my son was so delighted, and I just remember thinking like this is about as happy as I can be.

david leonhardt

That sounds great, and I feel like sometimes we forget in our white-collar lives just how much the physical sensation of motion, just how good that can feel. I’ve spent a lot of my life biking, but I went five or six years without getting on a bike because of some health problems, and I’ll never forget the first time I got back on, the feeling of wind in my face. It’s sort of like what I would imagine you would feel parasailing.

ross douthat

I have a mild fear of heights, so I think it’s probably not for me. I really enjoy the Ferris wheels, except for any part where you stop at the top. But I definitely get the sweaty feeling when you look down. Although I really love — I mean, I think we should probably have some sort of faux-expert scientist come on the show and tell us all what it is about the wind in your hair that people love.

david leonhardt