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:

news clip The White House is strongly defending President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border.

david leonhardt

Is Donald Trump a national emergency?

ross douthat

And what’s happening with Trump is that he’s got his fingers on the burner and he keeps twisting the knob in random directions.

david leonhardt

Then Amazon is pulling out of Queens. Is that a good thing?

mara gay

You want to come to New York City? Well, so does the rest of the world. Get a number.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

I hear the same thing over and over and over again: that I just have to read it. And so I will.

david leonhardt

Last week President Trump finally did what he’d been threatening to do for weeks. He declared a national emergency to fund a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

donald trump We’re talking about an invasion of our country with drugs, with human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs.

david leonhardt

Democrats and even some Republicans condemned the move, calling it an unconstitutional abuse of his authority. Sixteen states are now suing to block the declaration. This whole fight plays into one of the big questions that Ross, Michelle and I have about Trump. Is he a frightening authoritarian president, or a flailing incompetent president? And I must say the national emergency pushes me toward the incompetent option. It’s still not clear that the wall will ever be built or if it is, that it will really affect immigration policy. Trump doesn’t have anywhere near unified Republican support on it either. So I take this as another sign of Trump’s weakness. And Michelle I’m wondering if you think I’m being too blasé?

michelle goldberg

You know, I go back and forth, right? You said like, is he a frightening authoritarian or flailing incompetent? Or I don’t remember the exact language, but I think the answer is both. And when you look at other countries that have undergone this transformation from a liberal democracy to authoritarianism, you know, it doesn’t happen all in one fell swoop. And it often happens over a period of years. So on the one hand it seems like Trump is too weak and kind of disengaged from the details of governing to actually institute this transformation. At the same time he has hollowed out a lot of the government. He has normalized a kind of authoritarian rhetoric that used to be unprecedented. And he has normalized, I think, this sort of like extra-legal mode of governing. And so, you know, part of what’s happened with Trump — we talk about this all the time — is this frog-in-a-pot phenomenon, where actions that would have created a huge amount of shock and outrage a year ago or two years ago we now have become inured to. And so everybody rolls their eyes when, for example, he accuses the former acting director of the FBI of treason. And so while this emergency declaration maybe isn’t that scary, it’s going to make it that much easier for him to do the next one. And the next one might be in circumstances that are a lot more alarming.

ross douthat

I want to take Michelle’s metaphor and suggest something a little different with it. Which is that basically, over the course of multiple presidencies, when it comes to executive power and what we call the “imperial presidency,” we’ve been in a kind of boiling-the-frog situation, where you had this immense consolidation of executive power over foreign policy and national security after 9/11 that George W. Bush pushed and then Barack Obama basically embraced. And then you had a substantial expansion, checked by the courts in various ways, of presidential power over domestic policy pushed by Obama in his second term around health care and climate policy and immigration. So that was sort of the frog being boiled slowly. And what’s happening with Trump is that he’s got his fingers on the burner and he keeps twisting the knob in random directions. And so the heat keeps flaring up and the frog keeps jumping around, even though the water isn’t necessarily getting hotter. Is this — this may be a terrible metaphor. But what I’m trying to say is that I think the real danger here, the more plausible danger, is that you have really politically effective presidents who make power grabs that work. And what Trump is doing is sort of exposing how that works by being really crude and ridiculous about it. And I think it’s actually weakening the imperial presidency in various ways and making an authoritarian scenario less likely than it would be under a more sophisticated future imperial president.

michelle goldberg

And you think that’s a danger?

ross douthat

I think that — I think that the danger over the long run is basically that American democracy, the constitutional system, is devolving into this order with a vestigial legislature that doesn’t really do anything and an executive that claims more and more power because nobody else is claiming that power and then ends up getting in endless fights with the Supreme Court. And I think that dynamic has continued under Trump. I just think it’s more overt and transparent and crude. And so people are much more aware of it and Trump isn’t as good at doing what Bush and Obama did: cloaking his power grabs in sort of, you know, consensus-oriented rhetoric and so on, and so people are just more aware of what’s actually happening.

michelle goldberg

One of the fundamentally frightening things about this wall declaration is that it’s based on a racist lie. And you know this is — sort of a hallmark of authoritarian governments is that they both, you know, kind of make up lies and then create government policies to instantiate those lies. And that’s very, very different from Obama going around Mitch McConnell to establish DACA.

david leonhardt

And that actually is my number one fear here, which is — I agree with you Michelle. This is based on a racist lie. And there’s another court case which is similar. It’s the attempt to add a question to the census about citizenship status, in which the administration’s lies have now been documented in federal court. And I do worry a little bit about this idea that the president makes up some lie and then the courts feel some need to say well, we’ll meet you halfway. That is my one fear here.

ross douthat

So, I mean, again this — I think this is a really interesting question, right? Because I agree that Trump is a more transparent and flagrant liar than any normal president would be. And that is a big change. At the same time it’s not clear to me why it’s more worrisome to have a president who tells big flagrant lies and then when he can’t get the funding he wants from Congress, appropriates some extra funding to build a few more miles of fencing along the Rio Grande or in the border area. Why is that more terrifying than a president who basically says, I can just ignore Congress and launch military interventions overseas without congressional authority? Which is what Obama did in Libya. I mean I understand why the lies are more frightening but at the same time the actual policies are a much bigger deal.

david leonhardt

But I guess I feel — and Michelle I assume you agree — that when presidents are dealing in reality as Obama did, it’s quite different from when they’re making up an emergency and trying to do it. So to me it’s not so much the length of the fence he’s building, it’s that he is inventing out of whole cloth a security crisis on the border and trying to do something to respond to that for political reasons. Whereas you are really upset that Obama overreached on climate but Obama wasn’t making up climate change when he pushed the boundaries of his executive authority. And I sort of don’t think you can ignore that distinction.

michelle goldberg

Yeah. It’s, whether this is just a sort of pretext to, again, instantiate his hallucinatory vision of the world and the — I mean part of our fundamental difference here is that, you know, my feeling is that the threat to American liberal democracy has come not just from Trump but from the Republican Party writ large. And so to me Barack Obama was responding to a broader breakdown in the Republican Party’s willingness to let non-Republicans govern, you know? I just, I don’t think you can blame Barack Obama for claiming unilateral power — or at least I wouldn’t blame Barack Obama for kind of claiming whatever unilateral power he could, when you saw Republicans who had basically decided that Democrats don’t have the right to govern and they are going to do anything that they can to stop Democrats from governing.

ross douthat

But, but that is literally the argument for like Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Right? Like it’s, it’s not Caesar’s fault that the Senate is this nest of corruption and vice that unfairly wants to prosecute him when he was just fighting wars for the glory of Rome. And so he has no choice but to march on the capital. And I want to be clear, just to be more provocative still, there is a case there, right? Like there is an argument that in fact the evolution of the imperial presidency is just necessary. Right? That like America is not really a republic anymore. We really are just an empire. You need a president who can declare national emergencies willy nilly and so on because that’s the only way anything ever gets done. And the legislature basically exists, should exist, as like a mild check on executive overreach.

michelle goldberg

No, I’m not going down that road with you. Right? I’m not making that argument. I’m making this argument against treating the two parties — and their obstructionism and their sort of willingness to subvert norms of liberal democracy — I think that there’s no argument for treating them as symmetrical. And so, you know, again because I think that the Republican Party itself has become this authoritarian illiberal anti-democratic movement, you know, I place most of the blame for the breakdown in the separation of powers with them.

david leonhardt

So I want to think about this in the context of another headline this week which is that Andrew McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director, has admitted that he and his colleagues at the Justice Department talked about using the 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office. And Trump has fired back by accusing of McCabe and accusing his own Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein of treason, which is kind of amazing, his own deputy attorney general. So Ross I know on some level you really do think Trump is different from Obama or Bush. I mean you wrote a column —

ross douthat

I endorse — I endorse treason.

david leonhardt

You endorse the McCabe option, as it were. So are you still there? Do you still think that the 25th amendment in which the cabinet and vice president vote to remove the president should be something that’s on the table?

ross douthat

I think that the argument there actually flows from what I was just sort of provocatively saying to Michelle, right? Which is that the more imperial the presidency becomes, the more important it is that the man who actually holds that immense power is sort of at least semi-competent to exercise it. And so that that would be the sort of the Caesar-est case for using the 25th amendment to remove ineffective Caesars. But I have a lot of sympathy for whatever was going through McCabe’s mind and other people in the Justice Department, because obviously I was writing this, you know, “Consider the 25th Amendment” column around that time. And that was in the first couple months of Trump’s administration when there was this period when everything was chaos. And then he fired Comey which was an objectively kind of insane thing to do and obvious at the time. It created the whole Mueller investigation, basically. And then he was — it looked like he was about to fire Sessions. And to me at that moment he gave the appearance of a man incapable of exercising the office of the presidency. Now here we are two years later and I think it’s clear that as unfit as he remains, people around him — like he didn’t fire Sessions, right? He hasn’t fired — he hasn’t tried to fire Mueller —

michelle goldberg

Well, he did.

ross douthat

He hasn’t — well he —.

michelle goldberg

He did fire Sessions.

ross douthat

He fired him in a normal, sort of, after 18 months, you know, get a replacement lined up kind of way, rather than in this sort of insane cascading behavior way. So I think there’s evidence from the last two years that people around Trump have been able to restrain and channel him in ways that strongly weakens, if you will, the argument for removing him via the 25th Amendment. I wouldn’t write the column in the same way today.

michelle goldberg

But this is like a classic sort of frog-in-the-pot argument, right? Because everything that people were afraid of happening at that moment happened, it just took longer than people anticipated, right? So he has sort of defenestrated all of the leadership of the F.B.I. and many of the intelligence agencies. It’s taken him longer but he has slowly removed all of these possible checks on his power. You know Rod Rosenstein is about to leave. We have this new Attorney General William Barr who is now refusing to recuse himself and whose kind of previous claim to fame was the role he played in the pardon of various people who’d been convicted for their role in Iran Contra. Right? So we’re getting to the point where he’s kind of creating this structure of impunity. It’s just that rather than taking a few months, it’s taken a couple of years.

ross douthat

I guess I think that when it comes to the 25th Amendment — which is, again for listeners who don’t know, a mechanism to remove the president for incapacity — there is actually a big difference between the scale of chaos involved in those first few months and where Trump is now. I think where Trump is now, having removed some of the obstacles to his power, if he then does proceed to do things like fire Mueller or anything else like that then the mechanism in response, the natural mechanism would be impeachment, not the 25th Amendment, because his behavior would suggest a man who is sort of in control of his own actions just in a malign way. If that distinction makes sense. So I think I think even if Michelle’s worst case scenario is right then we aren’t in 25th Amendment territory, we’re in impeachment territory.

david leonhardt

Let’s end where we started, with the wall. What do you each thinks actually going to happen? Are the courts going to block the wall or let some version of it go through? Michelle?

michelle goldberg

You know I think that we have gotten really used to kind of relying on the courts to check Trump’s authoritarian impulses. But one thing that’s been happening over the last two years has been the transformation of the courts including, you know, putting Kavanaugh — who has shown himself to be a total partisan hack — on to the Supreme Court. And so you know, who knows? I mean hopefully Chief Justice Roberts will want to maintain some sort of institutional legitimacy. But I think that that institutional legitimacy is less and less of a safeguard with each new judge who’s confirmed.

david leonhardt

Ross?

ross douthat

I think Trump does a little bit of building under his claims of power, under existing law. The emergency declaration is still being litigated in the courts when Bernard Sanders is sworn in as the next president of the United States. [LEONHARDT LAUGHS]

david leonhardt

And obviously part of that is what Trump wants, right? Clearly Trump wants the wall to campaign on in 2020 and so he wants to both be able to say he’s made progress on it but also that he’s been stymied enough that he needs to be reelected in order to finish the wall.

ross douthat

“Finish the wall” is the new slogan, yes.

david leonhardt

O.K., we will leave it there. No doubt we’ll be coming back to a bunch of these related topics including what William Barr does as attorney general because I think the way he decides to oversee the Mueller investigation, as both of you mentioned, is going to be one of the really big questions for the beginning of his term. We’re going to take a quick break right now and we will be back to talk about Amazon and New York City. We’re back and now we’re going to talk about Amazon. The company announced last week that it was abandoning its plans to build a major office complex in Long Island City Queens.

news clip The company abruptly announced it’s pulling out after growing opposition from some lawmakers, union leaders and activists.

david leonhardt

Amazon decided that it would be too difficult to deal with the progressive politicians and activists in New York who are criticizing the corporate subsidies that the company received to come to the city. Those progressives, not surprisingly, have been celebrating Amazon’s decision. But many other people are worried that New York has needlessly damaged its own economy by scaring away Amazon. Joining us to talk about Amazon this week is Mara Gay, our colleague in Opinion who writes about New York for The Times editorial board. Mara, welcome back to “The Argument.”

mara gay

Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt

So help us understand particularly why The Times editorial board was quite disappointed by the outcome here.

mara gay

Sure. So we actually weighed in twice. First when the deal was immediately announced saying that the deal was not a good deal. We didn’t think that there was enough public input and that Amazon didn’t actually give the city enough of what it needs in terms of infrastructure and transit needs. But the decision by Amazon last week, the very abrupt decision to pull out of New York was very disappointing. And we felt that the city was hostile and inhospitable to even having a conversation with Amazon about how to make the best deal that we could get over the next year. There was supposed to be a year long process by which the city and the state and Amazon the company would sit down and they would hammer out the details of how to get the best out of the deal for all sides. And that never happened because there was a lot of kind of grandstanding by some local elected officials who felt that they had been cut out of the deal. And a lot of them also are our newly-elected progressives who felt that they didn’t think this really wealthy company should get these huge incentive packages in general and they had a lot of problems with the fact that the deal was done kind of in secret behind closed doors and then presented to the public with no input. And we were sad to see 25,000 jobs go. We could have had a productive conversation and that didn’t happen.

david leonhardt

So I agree there was grandstanding and some of it was silly, right? It was basically capitalism is evil. And I agree that the 25,000 jobs would have helped Queens. And yet I still found myself cheering this because I think this whole game in which companies hold up local governments — which is really taxpayers — for these subsidies, it’s just terrible economic policy. It doesn’t do anything to grow the economy. It just has cities bidding against each other. And so even if New York takes a modest hit — and it’s only modest, it’s 25,000 jobs in a city that has four million jobs — I guess I think there is a larger principle here. And that’s if cities are starting to get a little bit more aggressive about saying no to companies that try to hold them up, I’m really pleased about it. And I think New York did the country a favor here.

mara gay

You know, I hear you. I think though that there was a projected 27 billion in revenue from this deal over 20 years. Now even if half of that had materialized that’s money that we could have used as a city to pay for and address just massive infrastructure needs. We need to fix the New York City subway. We need to build housing. I actually think that had the governor and the mayor, who really brokered this deal, had they along with Amazon presented this agreement along with a commitment to address the subway crisis and the housing crisis. Could have been for example — let’s say Amazon gives a gift of half a billion for housing and half a billion for the subway and then the governor commits to spending, you know, half of the projected $27 billion revenue over many years to direct it toward those issues. I think we would be having a very different conversation. But I think that not only our corporations out of touch, but I think that public officials and in this case specifically Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio are extremely out of touch about what people are very concerned about. New York City doesn’t have a jobs problem. It has an income inequality problem. It has a wages problem.

michelle goldberg

Mara so given that, weren’t all those people right to be angry? Right? Because these things that you’re talking about, these commitments to use some of that revenue to fix the subways or to address affordable housing, they weren’t in the plan. And so there was obviously going to be some winners from this proposal. And you know one of the things that’s been interesting to me is seeing the kind of anger of some of the local public housing tenants association that you know wanted this plan and thought there was a lot in it for them. But a lot of other people, right, they had reason to believe that they were going to be priced out of their neighborhood.

mara gay

Yeah.

michelle goldberg

They had reason to believe the subways were going to become even more unbearable. And I think people who were maybe outside New York City — one of the things, I don’t know how much it filters through, is how the kind of complete breakdown of the reliability of subways has completely changed the texture of daily life in this city. In my own neighborhood there has been such a lack of investment in like new schools and all sorts of civic infrastructure that you need when there’s an influx of new people. You know my son didn’t get into our zoned kindergarten, for example. And so people who live there have real reason to believe that they’re going to be the losers from this influx of really highly-paid new jobs which aren’t necessarily going to them. And this is coming with no guarantee that this money is going to go back into the community or back into infrastructure.

mara gay

Yeah I think — so those are all great points and I share a lot of those concerns, to be frank. But the process was just beginning. So those were things that we could have addressed through a state land-use process over the next year to year and a half. And I think people didn’t realize that because the deal was done behind closed doors in the middle of the night and was presented to the public and then the governor essentially said, “Here you go! Why aren’t you thanking us?” And very quickly it was clear that they had — all, everyone involved had misjudged what the appetite was here and what the concerns really are. But I have to say that my disappointment was the really gross financial illiteracy in the city and in the state around this notion that we were giving Amazon three billion dollars, as though we were going to hand them $3 billion in cash even though it was a tax benefit. So people on Twitter were saying well now we can use three billion dollars to the subway instead, you know, and they’re cheering. And that’s not quite how it would have worked, right? I don’t want to overstate it but I do think we should definitely think more as a city and state about how to be friendlier to business but also how to negotiate with them to make sure that we’re getting what we need as a state and city.

ross douthat

There’s, I think there’s a real fascinating parallel between sort of where a lot of especially newly-elected progressive politicians are with this stuff and where a certain kind of like Tea Party activist was on the right like eight or nine years ago. Right? Where you have this dynamic where you have people, newly elected, who are making arguments effectively against crony capitalism that mix a kind of sincere civic mindedness with a certain kind of economic illiteracy. Right? I think that was sort of present in the Tea Party in spades. And what’s interesting is to read, like I’ve been reading a lot of the conservative critiques of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You know she’s always the lightning rod but also, you know, some of the other anti-Amazon politicians and these critiques, you know, the conservatives are sort of having a field day making fun of how anti-corporate socialists drove Amazon out of New York. But if this had been some Tea Party legislator who was killing some similar deal in a red state those same conservatives would have been cheering it and a lot of center left pundits would have been like oh look at those Tea Party activists in red states. Or you know, they’re shooting their own economies in the foot once again. And I don’t really have a point exactly — [ALL LAUGH]

mara gay

No, no, I think there’s a little bit of strange bedfellows and a lot of kind of interesting philosophical debates going on. But I also think something that has gotten missed by I would say mainstream Democrats is that, locally speaking, a lot of the politicians in New York who came out against this deal most vociferously — these are people who were actually put into office by gentrifiers. By millennials, by middle class and upper middle class highly-educated voters who were upset about Trump but also are, you know, oftentimes — like myself frankly — millennials who are really drawn to big cities like New York but who can’t really afford to live there. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect example of this. She wasn’t elected by the poorest folks in her district, although some of them voted for her, but but by these gentrifiers. And so my point is that I think that politicians have underestimated the anxiety about that group of people which is large, which is growing, which is pretty powerful when they vote and those are the politicians that now represent them. I mean the house I grew up in is in Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and I could never afford to live there. It’s now a bed and breakfast, O.K. [ALL LAUGH] It’s pretty wild. So we can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods or the cities that we grew up in. But it was this deep anxiety about where people are going to live who aren’t rich but who also don’t live in public housing. I have a friend who’s paying $1,600 a month for a one-bedroom in Astoria and she was terrified of Amazon coming because she can’t afford $3000 a month, which is what she figured it would be and I don’t think she’s crazy. And so that kind of anxiety about affordable housing and about the subway is so real and I think no one in the state certainly not the governor and the mayor have really understood the depth of that and how that affects people’s lives. And that’s partially because they don’t ride the subway which is another story for another time.

david leonhardt

One of the most interesting pieces that I read on this was in Wired by Zachary Karabell in which he argued that Amazon will live to regret this, and that if you look at the populist strains that we’re talking about from, really, right, center and left, these tech companies are going to have to grapple with those strains because there are a lot of frustrated people out there. And this was an opportunity to do so. And Amazon’s just in the long term not going to be able to say, oh we might have to get our hands dirty? We’re outta here.

mara gay

I agree and one of my frustrations with this initial deal is Amazon came into New York City. New York City! And said we’re going to offer you five million dollars for workforce development. [GOLDBERG AND LEONHARDT LAUGH] I just found that — I said, you know and no offense to Kansas but this is not Kansas. And I have a feeling that, you know, you want to come to New York City? Well, so does the rest of the world. Get a number. Pay your full share. [GAY AND GOLDBERG LAUGH] I think a lot of people felt that way. So I think there was a sense by some of, hey since when do we beg people to come to New York? And that’s a larger conversation that’s happening nationally but I hope that there is going to be less hand-wringing, less grandstanding and more thoughtfulness about how to attract the right employers, the right businesses. We don’t want to treat everyone the way that we treated Amazon before the city council. We we want to get better deals out of companies. But what does that look like and and how do you have those conversations?

david leonhardt

Well Mara, you mentioned de Blasio and Cuomo and even for people who are sympathetic to their criticisms of Amazon, it seems quite clear they didn’t handle this well. And I do really think there’s a big opportunity for politicians on both the right and the left but particularly the left who can kind of channel the unhappiness out there but do it in a more productive and skilled way than they managed to do in this case.

mara gay

I think that’s right. If nothing else the governor and the mayor learned some lessons here. You can’t just shove these deals down people’s throats.

david leonhardt

Well Mara, thank you for coming on.

mara gay

Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt

Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation. Each week we give you a recommendation that helps take your mind off the day-to-day headlines. And this week it’s my turn to make a recommendation. My recommendation is not exactly a secret because it’s been the best-selling book in America for the past three months but it is Michelle Obama’s memoir. More particularly it is the first half or two thirds of her memoir. The last half is interesting if you’re a political junkie, but it’s the kind of memoir we’re used to from political figures. The first half is really quite incredible. It’s extremely honest about her marriage to her husband Barack, about them going through couples counseling. It’s full of these really incredible stories. But the main takeaway I had was really about the power of education. We’re living in this time where I think some people on both the right and the left are skeptical of education and it’s just really clear from this book that education is the engine that changed Michelle Obama’s life. And there’s one anecdote I want to tell which is, she was learning piano and she was learning it on a broken piano from a piano teacher in her low-income neighborhood. But for her first recital she had to go play a non-broken piano and she sits down at the piano and she realizes, wait a second I don’t actually know how to play an non-broken piano. I only have experience playing a piano with chipped keys and I need to figure out how to play this normal piano. And the book is full of anecdotes like that that just give you a sense of what life is like in neighborhoods like the South Side of Chicago and how people like Michelle Obama once in a while manage to overcome that.

michelle goldberg

You know, I don’t know why I haven’t read this book yet and part of it is that it still breaks my heart every time I contemplate kind of what we had then in the White House to what we have now. I should kind of be eager to, you know, be reminded of these better people in this better time. But there’s something about it that I’ve been, just like felt resistant about. It’s like reading like a memoir by your parents who died or something. And yet I hear the same thing over and over and over again: that I just have to read it. And so I will.

ross douthat

It sounds really interesting. I haven’t read it because I don’t read any books written by politicians or, in this case, first ladies because they’ve gotten very long and the ratio of time it takes to read them versus what you get out of them is not a good ratio. I’m curious — do you think this is the exception? Have you read a lot of other recent politicians books, David, or is this sort of — did you make an exception for the former first lady?

david leonhardt

I made a partial exception. The other best recent — I normally don’t read them but the other really good one I read, I know he’s now somewhat discredited on both the right and the left, but Tony Blair’s memoir is fantastic. I would say that the parts of this book that are classic political memoir are fine. And if you don’t enjoy reading classic political memoir I wouldn’t encourage you to read those parts of Michelle Obama’s book. I would basically encourage you to pick it up and read the parts until Obama gives his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. [ROSS LAUGHS] And if you want to keep going, great. The rest of the book is perfectly good. But the part up to there is really fantastic. And Michelle, I know what you mean but it actually is possible for a little sections to forget that until recently this was the first lady of the United States and just kind of focus on this incredible American story that that is her life. So that’s my recommendation. Start Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” and finish it if you want to. Last week in our segment about Brexit we presented you with the three major options on Brexit and we asked you to choose among them. Some of you called in and told us which one you’d pick. Here’s what you had to say:

listener voice mail Hey my name is Ann. I’m calling from Oregon. Hi this is Armon. I’m calling from Irvine, California. Walter Nickland. My name is Jerome Alexander. My vote, if I were Britain would be to hold another vote using ranked-choice voting. Re-vote would be the best option from what I heard on the podcast. I think it’s clear we need to have another vote. “Soft Brexit” it is. I think that a second referendum is the right choice because, as one of the guests mentioned, the British people did not have all of the necessary information about what actually Brexit means. And that’s my opinion. I always enjoy the show. Bye. Thanks!

david leonhardt