michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” [DRUMS PLAYING] This week, Joe Biden’s remarkable comeback and what happens next.

michelle goldberg

If you don’t have the votes out there to replace the party structure, you have to try to co-opt and persuade some of them.

david leonhardt

Then coronavirus continues to spread. How should we be preparing?

ross douthat

You know, we have a totally failed testing regimen that only now is starting to improve.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

It sounds in a lot of ways like an old, classic soul album without sounding cheesily retro. [MUSIC PLAYING]

archived recording (joe biden) This is your campaign! [CROWD CHEERS] Just a few days ago, the press and the pundits had declared the campaign dead.

david leonhardt

Joe Biden first ran for president more than 30 years ago, in 1988. And he flamed out quickly. He ran again in 2008 and flamed out almost as quickly. In neither race did he win a single primary. This year, Biden lost all of the first three contests without coming close in any of them. And then came a remarkable four-day stretch that was unlike anything in politics that I can remember. Biden won South Carolina by almost 30 percentage points. He won most of the Super Tuesday primaries. Bernie Sanders isn’t far behind and could still win. But Biden is now - incredibly - the favorite. Michelle, what the heck just happened?

michelle goldberg

I mean, I think that all along, most Democratic voters have cared above all else about beating Donald Trump and have been kind of confused about who is the best candidate to do that, which is why there’s been a lot of jumping around. You also have this strange phenomenon where large numbers of black voters are trying to figure out who white voters will vote for, and white voters just want the candidate that large numbers of black voters will vote for. So once Biden did really well with black voters in South Carolina, it sort of set off this cascade. You know, I remain pretty worried about Biden as a candidate, not really for ideological reasons, although I disagree with him about a lot ideologically. I just think that all of the deficits that made Iowa voters turn away from him when they saw him up close are still there. And it’s going to be sort of harrowing to watch him compete for the next however many months if he’s the nominee. There was a huge number of voters who kind of were not on board with Bernie Sanders’ revolution who he didn’t really bother to convince that he was going to be the kind of electable, unifying candidate. And we’re just waiting for some kind of cue about who that candidate was. And so as soon as it came, there was this astonishing consolidation. And I think it just goes to show how much so much of what we’ve been talking about for the last few months, especially in the debates, has been irrelevant, right? People don’t care. Or they care, but they care less about the details of how we’re going to pay for universal health care or Medicare for all versus Medicare for all who want it. There are people who really care about that stuff. But what most people care about is the house is on fire, how are you going to put it out, not how are you going to rebuild afterwards.

david leonhardt

So last week, editors in the Opinion section asked six of us columnists to make the best case for the leading candidates. Michelle, you did Elizabeth Warren. I did Amy Klobuchar. Ross, you did Joe Biden. So I guess I have to ask you, did you just singlehandedly swing the Democratic primary race?

ross douthat

I mean, first, yes, absolutely, I did. Second, as far as I could tell, you know, nobody wanted poor Joe Biden so that they had to come to the conservative columnist and say, Joe’s on the way out. We can’t get anyone to stand up for him. Would you at least send him off into retirement with some nice words? And so Joe Biden, if you’re listening, I believed in you when nobody else did. And in the Biden administration, I hope that I get the David Brooks chair in respected conservative columnists who gets invited in to the White House to take the temperature of the country. So I just want to make that statement for the Biden campaign. [GOLDBERG LAUGHS]

david leonhardt

That is a fair request under the circumstances.

ross douthat

I think it’s totally fair. The argument that I made in the piece was not obviously a ringing endorsement of Joe Biden. It was just an attempt to make the best case. And I thought the best case was pretty simple, that Biden doesn’t resolve the question of what kind of party the Democrats should be in the way that nominating Sanders, or Warren, or Bloomberg would sort of push the party in a particular direction. Nor does he offer a sort of once in a generation chance to swing the country towards social democracy, which is what Sanders is promising. But you know, he has consistently looked like a at least as electable if not more electable than all of the alternatives. He offers to a lot of people, I think, the promise of a certain kind of calm. Not that Twitter or talk radio or cable news will be calm under a Biden presidency. But there might be less spillover from those worlds into everyday life. And then the last point, which I don’t think I put in the column but which I do think has mattered at least a bit in this swing, is something we’ll talk about more in the next segment, which I think the coronavirus has, I think, made the appeal of ideological revolution maybe seem marginally less appealing. And as much as Biden doesn’t always seem like the steadiest hand, given his age and verbal gaffes, he does represent the idea that you can put some of the technocrats back in charge. You can bring some of the Obama people back. And you know, when there’s a pandemic breaking out in your country, sometimes the establishment choice doesn’t sound that bad.

david leonhardt

Michelle, I want to come back to the fears that you have because, I mean, again, Joe Biden, in his entire career now, has one good week in all of his presidential campaigns combined. And it’s the current week. So what is your fear particularly that the next eight months could look like if he continues to do well and is the nominee?

michelle goldberg

I mean, basically, just that he has very obviously aged in a way that Bernie Sanders isn’t really. Despite his heart attack, he doesn’t seem that different than he seemed four years ago. I feel like when you watch Joe Biden speak, you’re sort of watching somebody on this high wire. Or as I’ve put it before, you’re watching an actor that always looks like they’re on the verge of struggling to remember their lines. And so there’s just this terror that there’s going to be this endless series of gaffes and a kind of narrative about senility that will undermine the case for a kind of steady, normal, calm leadership, right? I would feel much better about where we are today, as somebody who cares about beating Trump above all else — I would feel much better about where we are today if it was a Biden of four or eight years ago.

ross douthat

I mean, before — we can talk more about Biden’s electability. But I’m — just to stick with Sanders for a second, I’m curious about what you guys think about what this says about the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party. Because before I wrote my amazing, totally prescient, world-changing case for Biden, I think my last column about the race was a column that said, look, this race is shaping up a lot like the Republican race in 2016, where you have a divided establishment that can’t find a champion. You have various candidates who seem like they’re going to stay in the race long after they don’t have a chance. And meanwhile, you have a candidate in Bernie Sanders, who, like Trump, has a passionate base of support that is well distributed geographically, so he’s strong in just about every state around the country. And it seems like — you know, at that point, it seemed like he was going to do a version of what Trump had done. So is your takeaway here — I mean, Michelle was talking about voters and the signal sent by South Carolina. How much of this reflects the resilience of an actual party establishment in the Democratic Party, where you can get Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg and even Beto O’Rourke — god help us — not only to have dropped out but also to tag team an endorsement of Biden in this crucial three-day stretch in a way that has no parallel in the train wreck that was the Republican primary in 2016? Is the party deciding? Does the Democratic establishment exist in a way that it doesn’t for the Republicans? What do you think?

david leonhardt

Here’s what I would say. I think more of a Democratic Party establishment does exist. But my main focus is the missed opportunity here for the left. The Democratic Party has moved to the left and understands now just how progressive the country as a whole is on economic matters. And this really was an opportunity for a progressive to win the nomination. I mean, Bernie Sanders still could. But I think the big mistake the left has made here is not thinking about how to expand its coalition. Sanders didn’t do that at all. He continued to run as an insurgent when he could have run as a frontrunner. And Warren, to my disappointment, instead of running as the progressive who excited many progressives but also made moderates more comfortable than Bernie Sanders, basically, tried to get as close to Sanders as possible and ran as a kind of fresher face, more detail-oriented version of Sanders. And I think it’s really important, if the left wants to win more, for it to be honest with itself, that it can’t simply do its total agenda on everything and create some huge surge of voters. Michelle, you wrote a great column about this. That surge of new voters isn’t happening. The left needs to look for ways to compromise or package itself in a way that wins over more than just its base. And that’s the lesson I think progressives should take from this.

michelle goldberg

You know, I think that that’s right. And I don’t even — it doesn’t even necessarily have to be about compromising fundamental ideals. One of the real mistakes that I think Bernie Sanders made is that Democrats don’t hate the Democratic Party the way some conservative Republicans hate and resent the Republican Party. So when Bernie Sanders says, “I’ve got news for the Republican Party.” What does he say? “I’ve got news for the establishment of the Republican Party. I’ve got news for the establishment of the Democratic Party.” I think a lot of Democrats are really offended by people who would equate the two party structures, right? They like their party. And so Bernie Sanders, because he obviously doesn’t have the votes out there — and Ezra Klein wrote a good column about this. If you don’t have the votes out there to replace the party structure, you have to try to co-opt and persuade some of them. And you don’t do that by calling everybody who disagrees with you a corporate sellout, and act like it’s kind of corrupt for people that you’ve insulted to endorse someone else. I don’t think the Sanders movement understands how alienating it is to people who aren’t already on board with it or even to people who are maybe on board with 85 percent, 90 percent of what they believe. There’s a sort of paranoid style in that movement. Also, this is just something that’s — you know, I’ve been around the left long enough to know that the left has always attracted a certain number of people who are just in it for the re-education camps, right? [DOUTHAT LAUGHS] Who like the fact that — or who feed on the fact that because you’re fighting for the oppressed, it gives you license to express all your anger, all your sadism, all your contempt. That’s not the left. But it’s a certain — it’s an endemic kind of character who always makes their way into left-wing movements. And left-wing movements succeed or fail to the degree that they can marginalize or quarantine those figures.

david leonhardt

Ross, what do you think this says about the left?

ross douthat

Well so, two things, pivoting off both things Michelle said, right?

david leonhardt

And by the way, good job getting both me and Michelle to say critical things about the left.

ross douthat

No, I know. Well, we need to have — clearly, this podcast has swung way to the right, and we’re going to need to correct it in upcoming weeks. But yeah, I have to write a column after this. And I think I’m going to write a little bit about what a key difference between what didn’t happen in 2016 and what just seems to have happened on the Democratic side is a version of what Michelle says about Democrats disliking their own establishment less than Republicans. But I think a lot of it just boils down to the fact that the last Republican president before Trump, George W. Bush, ended his presidency widely seen as a failure. And Barack Obama, for all that Trump got elected — and there were plenty of problems with the Obama era — was seen by most Democrats, when he left office, as a success. And so Trump was able to capitalize on this sense, this widespread sense, that establishmentRepublicanism had governed for eight years and left us with a financial crisis and the Iraq War. And that feeling, I don’t think, has a real analog on the Democratic side, again, as much as there is discontent with certain aspects of the Obama era.

michelle goldberg

OK, so I would say — I mean, I think it does have its analog among young Sanders voters, right? And for a bunch of different reasons — partly because they have borne the brunt of the financial crisis more than older people, and also because, if Barack Obama is sort of your first— the first president that you are politically aware of, he’s just the baseline, as opposed to, for people who are older who have seen progressives crushed over, and over, and over again, you know, the election of Barack Obama was this transformative miracle. And so you just have a sort of different baseline expectation of what’s possible in American politics. And so I think there is a tremendous sense among younger Democrats that Barack Obama’s administration was a disappointment, that he didn’t go far enough on health care, that he didn’t do enough to fight inequality and prosecute the banks. And part of the problem is that Bernie Sanders case has been that those part those people were going to rush into the electorate and fundamentally change the political dynamics in this country. And that just hasn’t happened. And instead, the most surprising thing, the thing that I don’t know if any pundits got right, is that there was this huge turnout surge for Joe Biden.

ross douthat

Yep, the suburbs of Virginia and South Carolina turned out in force. And this, then, goes to, I guess, my other point, which is just, again, to mostly agree, but say what’s striking about the Sanders campaign. It’s not just, I think, that he has not — I mean, not yet figured out a way to pivot to a more expansive coalition. It’s also that he actually has been pulled to the left in various ways over the last five years by the leftward shift of the party, so that Sanders — Sanders, the Vermont senator, used to have sort of heterodox views on issues like guns and immigration. And now, he no longer has those views. Or he may have them, but he doesn’t express them. So there hasn’t — Sanders hasn’t found a way to, I think, make a case for his own electability based on the places where he wasn’t, until recently, all that left-wing.

michelle goldberg

I think the thing that Bernie could do, or could have done and maybe still could do, is basically say, I am here to complete the unfinished business of Barack Obama’s presidency. Barack Obama brought this surge of young people into the process. He was propelled into office on the backs of this multiracial coalition. And that’s the future of the Democratic Party. And that’s what I’m building here, to go even further than Barack Obama was ever able to go. But to do that, I think, he’d need to have a more magnanimous approach to the party and to a lot of people who’ve been resistant to his candidacy instead of becoming more conspiratorial and acting like, when other Democrats endorse his opponents, it’s part of some corporate plot to crush the left on behalf of billionaires. I’ve always thought that one of the problems with the Sanders movement — and let me be clear, I think this is going to come down to Sanders and Biden. And I can’t really imagine a scenario where I don’t end up voting for Sanders. And so I’m really mad at his campaign and mad at his movement, but also, hope they get it together because I don’t think that Biden is a safe candidate.

ross douthat

So wait, you’re going to vote for Sanders over Biden?

michelle goldberg

Yeah. I can’t— I mean, of course. Basically, I sort of feel like they are both extremely high risk.

ross douthat

Uh huh.

michelle goldberg

And so if you have to choose between high risk, high reward, and high risk, low reward, I think you have to vote your values in that situation. If I thought Biden was a safer candidate, I would probably vote for him. But it seems to me that he’s— that both of them are incredibly risky.

david leonhardt

So Michelle’s look ahead is that she still prefers Bernie. My look ahead is that I think, at some point, Joe Biden should sit down and do an interview, where he talks more honestly about his stutter than he has so far. It seems to have reemerged a little bit as he’s gotten older. I think the piece that most affected the way I think about Biden was by John Hendrickson in The Atlantic in which Hendrickson and talked about his own stutter and talked about Biden’s. And I mean, it seems clear to me, when you watch him, that he still has a milder version of the severe stutter that he had when he was young. And first of all, I think it’s actually quite an inspiring story. And second of all, it changed how I think about his mental capacities. It actually makes me think he’s much sharper than I did before I read that piece. And I think he would be smart to do that. And let’s spend one minute on Mike Bloomberg, who has now just dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. What is the lesson that we should take from the Bloomberg campaign?

michelle goldberg

Well, I mean, to me, this is — you know, in a presidential primary that, at this moment, is otherwise cause for a lot of anxiety and, for me, disappointment, I think this is one point of optimism, that it turns out that, although we might increasingly live in an oligarchy, you cannot just come in and literally buy the Democratic Party nomination.

david leonhardt

Ross, what’s your quick Bloomberg postmortem?

ross douthat

I mean, first, since I’ve been a Bloomberg skeptic throughout, I should say he actually got further than I thought, and had he been a little more prepared for the debates, might still be in the race and be a viable candidate. So in spite of my Bloomberg skepticism, I feel I should concede that much as he bows out. Second, I think there is a way, fascinatingly, in which he — his entrance clearly hurt Biden temporarily, but may actually have helped Biden long term because it created this space in the zone between New Hampshire and South Carolina where you had two consecutive debates that were very Bloomberg-centric, where in first one, everyone was trying to tear him down. And then the second one, at least Elizabeth Warren was still trying to tear him down. And Biden seemed like he was in decline and no one attacked him. And that, in turn, made his comeback, I think, a little bit easier. So in a weird way, Biden maybe owes Bloomberg a big thank you, even before the endorsement and Bloomberg possibly spending lots of money for him in the general election.

david leonhardt

My very quick Bloomberg take is, this is a reminder that entering presidential races late doesn’t really work. But it’s just a reminder. If you want to run for president, run for president. [MUSIC PLAYING] Next week, we will have contests in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington. And we will learn more then. No doubt we’ll be back talking about the race once it becomes clearer. Now, we’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] Coronavirus is on its way to being a pandemic. And I want to start our discussion of it today by telling you two a little story about my trip to California last week. I met my cousin for dinner one night in Los Angeles. And we went out for Sichuan food, which, as you both know, is pretty much my favorite food in the world. And when I got to the restaurant, there was a long note on the door that informed you, among other things, that if you did not submit to having your temperature taken with an infrared thermometer on your way into the restaurant, you would not be allowed in. And if you had a fever, you would not be allowed in. But they would give everyone a discount of 5% for takeout, which they encouraged people to do. So sure enough, I submitted. The maitre d’ pointed the thermometer gun at my head. And I passed the test. And so did my cousin. And we sat down and had an absolutely delicious Sichuan meal. So I guess the question is, do we think that restaurant is being a little bit extreme? Or is it time for us to take some more significant measures as a society than we’ve been taking? Ross, what do you think?

ross douthat

My view is that that restaurant was being entirely sensible. I am actually leaving for Southern California about 24 hours after we tape this podcast. And I’m considering at the moment whether or not to wear — I think it’s an N95 mask on the flight. I expect that if I do, I’ll be one of five or 10 people in a mask. And I’ll feel extremely conspicuous and like some sort of paranoid weirdo. But my read of the situation right now in the US is that we have a pretty narrow zone for state and local governments and institutions in areas that either clearly have an outbreak, like the Pacific Northwest, or likely have one that we just haven’t sufficiently measured, which I would assume to be the case in Southern California, to take real steps to encourage social distancing, to close institutions that have any kind of connection to cases. And I have been an alarmist about this for a while. And actually, one of my regrets as a columnist is that— I did write about it for my column last week and took a fairly alarmist tone. But I feel like I should have written the alarmist column a week earlier, and I was sort of discouraged from doing that by the fact that I’m not an epidemiologist. And the markets and the experts seemed relatively calm. But you know, generally, it seems very strange to me that we have severe outbreaks in Iran and Italy, outbreaks around the world. The news this morning is that Italy is shutting down all of its schools at the moment to try and contain the outbreak. And here in the U.S., you know, we have a totally failed testing regimen that only now is starting to improve. And we clearly have the beginnings of a serious outbreak without, I think, as yet, the appropriate responses. So that’s my current view.

michelle goldberg

I think we have to agree that part of the failure in this country has been political, part propagandistic motives, part out of sheer incompetence so that you still have a lot of Trumpists who’ve been convinced by the president that this is just a hoax, or you know, a minor flu-like illness that the Trump-hating mainstream media has pumped up in order to somehow undermine him. And I think that that probably is affecting the response in a lot of places. I think the fact that his administration at various levels has both failed to coordinate a national response and seemed to have, until now, actively discouraged widespread testing — so we have this total failure of leadership at the top. And you have all of these local governments making different ad hoc decisions. And I find it very difficult to even know how to be responding to this. So for example, I’m supposed to go to Spain next month with my family. And we’ve been talking a lot about whether or not we should still go. But I don’t really know even what authority you would go to for advice about how to make decisions like that. Or I’ve been talking with my family about going to this — a friend of mine invited us to this big Purim party on Saturday. And I’m thinking, is it a good idea to take my kids to a big, public party in New York City? And once again, there’s just sort of no guidance on this beyond what you can get from the internet. And so, I have obviously an extremely low opinion of this administration. But I’m still sort of gobsmacked, you know, particularly by a president who’s a germaphobe, who’s given to fear mongering, you could have imagined him overreacting in certain ways and using this as an excuse to sort of seal off America from the world, has instead been responding in some ways not unlike China at the beginning of this epidemic, and just sort of trying to minimize it, and pretend it’s not happening, and limit public information about how widespread it is.

david leonhardt

So I also have stocked up on Purell and sanitary wipes so that when I go to a restaurant, I can wipe off the table, and doing little things like that. I’m trying really hard not to touch my face, which is pretty much impossible. Ross, the one thing you said that kind of surprised me was the masks. One, it doesn’t seem like they do all that much to protect healthy people. If you’re sick, I think it makes sense to wear a mask. And two, there is this shortage. And so people who A, are sick, or B, are health care workers, need the masks. And the stuff that I’ve read suggests that having the rest of us take the masks actually creates a public health problem.

ross douthat

So I mean, two things. One, we didn’t stock up on masks. I mean, I actually did buy some surgical masks months ago, before there was a shortage. But the masks that I’m considering taking are literally left over from work we had done at our house years ago. And I think it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a successful donation of masks effort. I don’t think if we took the masks to the local hospital, they would accept them for surgical use. So I don’t think I’m depriving anyone of a necessary mask. In terms of the effect of the masks, I mean, I think this goes to Michelle’s point about the uncertainty of information available. But certainly, it’s clear that masks limit the spread if you already are infected, which I’m on a book tour, so I’ve been traveling . I’ve been in New York and D.C., and New York again. And I’m going to Boston. And I’m going to L.A. And you know, it’s very low probability, but there’s a chance that I, as a sort of middle-aged person, could be a carrier of the disease without knowing it. And so there’s something at least somewhat responsible, I think, about limiting your own possible spread. And also, at the very least, masks reduce the amount of time you spend touching your face. So in that sense, they do reduce transmission, even if they aren’t preventing you from breathing things in. And I think the evidence on breathing things in and how they affect transmission that way is pretty ambiguous. But I’m— my basic assumption is that once you reach the point that Washington State seems to be reaching, with the number of fatalities, and the number of likely cases, and the period that they think it’s been in Washington State, you should not do essential travel, not go to big birthday parties, cancel public gatherings, and close the schools closest to infections. And I think what’s been done in New York just in the last few days with the cases of school closings, voluntary quarantine, is the right response. And I’m encouraged that that’s what’s going on. I’m not looking forward to my own kids’ school being closed. That will be very difficult if that happens. But everything that we’ve seen from South Korea, and Singapore, and Hong Kong suggests that you can actually reduce the spread of this dramatically through various social distancing measures. And we’re not going to go as far as places like Singapore can go. But there are clearly steps we can take. And I totally agree with Michelle that Donald Trump was elected with the slogan, we need a complete shutdown until we can figure out what’s going on, right? And he was talking about ISIS infiltration of the US. But that’s the Donald Trump that we needed in this moment. And instead, we got the Donald Trump—

michelle goldberg

No. I mean, no we don’t. But go on.

ross douthat

OK, well, we can — I mean —

michelle goldberg

I mean, to me, that would be a different kind of bad reaction.

ross douthat

See, I think there’s this fear of panic in the public health establishment, this fear that if you tell people the worst case scenarios that you will have rioting in the streets, and cats and dogs living together. And clearly, you’ll get runs on toilet paper at Costco. But in general, there’s a lot of sociological evidence that people tend to behave pretty well in a crisis. It doesn’t — you know, if the crisis extends for months, then you get breakdowns. David, you seem very calm. So make the case for calm.

david leonhardt

Oh, I don’t know how calm I am. I mean, I guess I’m just sort of naturally calm. But I mean, I’m washing my hands a lot, right? I’m basically thinking about the things that I should be doing more than I am, like the ones I mentioned before of carrying Purell around more and wiping off tables when I’m in public. I mean, when you read pieces by journalists who’ve been covering public health for a long time, like our colleague, Donald McNeil and others, it seems really likely that this is going to be one of the most severe viruses to spread around the world in many decades. And so, I mean, I think the right approach for people to have is a version, Ross, of the urgency that you feel about it, which is to change their behavior based on some of the things going on. And Michelle, I also agree with you. It does feel like the lack of guidance on what kinds of gatherings people should and shouldn’t be doing is a real problem. And I think it would be really helpful if some place like the C.D.C., which continues to have a lot of credibility, were to come out and offer some guidelines about things like travel.

michelle goldberg

I tend to feel wary about overreacting. And it’s not in my nature to be super prepared, in part because I just — you know, I have a small apartment. I don’t have the capacity for it. I have bought about five boxes of pasta. But for me, that’s, like, fully prepping.

ross douthat

[LAUGHS]

michelle goldberg

And also five things of frozen ravioli and a frozen pizza. But probably, for a lot of people, that’s just like a normal shopping haul. And so I’m sort of torn between yeah, not wanting to overreact and be ridiculous, and then not wanting to do something that, in retrospect, would look obviously foolish if it went sideways.

ross douthat

I mean, I think the way that I’m balancing urgency and what I think of as reasonability is to say, this is a crisis that will pass in the sense that first, presumably transmission rates will go down over the summer. And second, people I’ve talked to are pretty confident that we will have a vaccine at a certain point. Let’s say, nine months to 10 months from now. And at that point, even if this stays with us, it becomes something like the seasonal flu that you can get vaccinated for, is manageable, is not rolling waves of pandemic as far as the eye can see. But to me, that, then, makes a stronger case for saying, OK, well, it’s OK to overreact in this particular window because we have a three to nine-month window where a certain number of people can die. And we don’t want them to die. So it’s OK to accept some stock market dips and accept some school closings and so on.

michelle goldberg

Oh, I’m very accepting of the stock market dips.

ross douthat

Well, right. Well, I know. Well, this is— you know, I’ve had lots of conversations with people who have said, I wouldn’t say expressed glee, but expressed a certain pleasure in the prospect of this ending the Trump presidency. And I’ll just say, based on Trump’s reaction to date, if this is what ends the Trump presidency, it will be both deserved and richly ironic in the way that providence likes to deliver historical ironies, that the germaphobic president who wanted to shut down our borders ends up undone by a pandemic that he didn’t do enough to shut down, even though it literally came from China, his public enemy number one. [MUSIC PLAYING] Let’s leave it there and now, make time for our weekly recommendation, when we give you a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. Michelle, this week is your turn. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

I feel like since I’ve gotten older, I listen to a lot less new music. And it’s exacerbated, I think, by this scourge of podcasts. But I was on a road trip recently from Tucson to Palm Springs in California and listened to a bunch of new albums, including one that blew me away. And so maybe I’m really late to this, and maybe a lot of people have heard about it. But it’s Yola’s album, “Walk Through Fire.” [YOLA’S “WALK THROUGH THE FIRE PLAYS] It sounds, in a lot of ways, like an old, classic, solo album without sounding cheesily retro. There’s elements of roots and country in it. She’s a British singer-songwriter with this big wall-of-sound production behind it. And it was one of those albums that, after I’ve listened to just a couple of times, it feels like it’s been in my life forever. And so, again, maybe I’m late to this. The thing that makes me think I might not be is that it really sounds like the kind of album that you could imagine being ubiquitous. And it’s not something I’ve heard all over the place. I strongly recommend that people check it out.

david leonhardt

Ross, have you listened to Yola?

ross douthat

No, I haven’t. And now, I will. But I am, like Michelle, pretty much the furthest there is from an early adopter. I’m mostly focused right now on teaching my kids the true classics, like Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” [GOLDBERG LAUGHS] to prepare them well for their teenage years. But it only has 210 reviews on Amazon, which suggests to me that maybe it’s more of a sleeper than a huge hit. I’m just looking at it now. But they are all five-star reviews. So Michelle is clearly onto something.

david leonhardt

Your point about not listening to new music is a really good point. I mean, I love the music I’ve been listening to for decades. But it seems ridiculous that every time I go to Spotify, which is this fantastic album of the world’s music, that my music choices are so narrow. So thank you, Michelle. What’s the recommendation again?

michelle goldberg

It’s Yola, “Walk Through Fire.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

That’s our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, 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 was produced by James T. Green and Alex Laughlin for Transmitter Media, and edited by Sara Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Freddy Chavez, Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Michele Teodori, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Ryan McEvoy, and Francis Ying. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. Don’t forget to wash your hands. And we’ll see you back here next week.

ross douthat