Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We have Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, with us to do kind of double duty today. We'll talk about what might be a dramatic turning point in the Biden administration's relationship to the Israel-Hamas war. We'll place soundbites of Vice President Harris and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who are both now being openly critical of the way Israel is fighting in Gaza, killing so many thousands of civilians.

How important is this turn and how might it affect the short and long-term outcomes of this intractable conflict? Jeffrey has deep experience in the region, including serving in the Israel Defense Forces and being a columnist for The Jerusalem Post and Middle East columnist for The Washington Post. We'll also touch on the Russia-Ukraine war, which Jeffrey has written about and which the world forgets about at its peril with Israel-Hamas so difficult to look away from.

I said "double duty" because Jeffrey Goldberg, as editor of The Atlantic, will also take us inside the new special issue of the magazine. Notably, it's the January-February 2024 issue that contains 24 essays by 24 writers about 24 things that might happen if Donald Trump is reelected president in 2024. Let's dive right in. Jeffrey, we always learn things when you come on the show. Thanks for making this one of your stops about the special issue and for talking about the news as well. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: I'll give you the courtesy of talking about the special issue first in some detail, but let's stipulate that the country is already divided into people who think a second Trump presidency would be a horror show for democracy and those who don't. What's the big picture to start out here of what's new that you're trying to bring?

Jeffrey Goldberg: We're just trying to pull together in one place, one issue of the magazine. We have a lot of writers who spent a lot of years now investigating, analyzing Trump and Trumpism. I wanted to pull them all together and talk about, based on their experience, based on the first term, based on what Donald Trump has said he would do, should he become president again.

I wanted them to all give our readers a sense of what we should expect if Trump returns to office. I wanted to put it in one place. You never really have a goal as a magazine editor beyond providing your readers with interesting and illuminating and possibly entertaining information, right? You don't hope to set to change the world in some way, but I did have this thought in the back of my mind that you put it in a single print issue.

Obviously, it's online at theatlantic.com as well. You put it in a print issue and you have it all in one place. You have very good writers being very clear about the consequences of a Trump victory. You're right. The country's divided, but there are still people on the fence. We have a lot of moderate Republican conservative readers. There are still people who think, "Yes, he may be X, but his tax policy is good, or is this policy is good?"

The point of all this is to not normalize Donald Trump. It's not that he's a conservative because he's not really a conservative anyway. It's not that he's a Republican. That's not the issue here. That's not the problem. We believe at The Atlantic, I believe personally, that the country is best served when it has at least a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party battling out, fighting in the marketplace of ideas.

It's not about that. It's about his authoritarian tendencies. It's about January 6th. It's about the revenge that he's promised to enact on people who opposed him. It's about his threats to the Justice Department and the independent judiciary and his threats against journalism and his threats to politicize the military. It's about all of the behaviors that are outside the norm of anything we've experienced to date in modern American history.

Brian Lehrer: Something that you referred to in your editor's note that, I guess, opens the package that I hadn't heard yet, to be honest. I don't know how I missed it, but that maybe represents the intensity of the potential threat that people may not have their minds around yet, that Trump literally sounded like Hitler recently. This is your sighting of him sounding like Hitler describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are poisoning the blood of our country. The point is he's going even further than he went from day one in 2015 on Mexico sending drug dealers and rapists and that whole "fear the brown people" appeal.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I think what you're getting at is that the language is getting more extreme. The vermin. Vermin was the line in the last, I can't remember when, two or three weeks ago when he started referring to people, his enemies, as vermin. This has some serious echoes when you dehumanize your enemies. By the way, he's talking about Americans. That's the part that always gets me.

You're at war with somebody, a foreign power. You might use very harsh language to describe them. It's fine. That's what war is. Maybe it's not great, but it is what it is. I hear you're talking about fellow American citizens. One of the things about Donald Trump that continues to surprise me, and I guess more to the point, his followers, one of the things is that he doesn't even pay lip service to the idea that the president is the president of all the people.

Every president, going back-- Barack Obama, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, you always come out and say, "To the 50% of the country that didn't vote for me, I am your president too, and I'm here to serve you." It's an aspiration. Sometimes they don't fulfill it entirely, but it's an aspiration. In the catalog of troubling and novel facets of Trumpism, this is very high up there. The idea that he is divided, he sees people who don't support him as literal enemies even though they are fellow Americans.

Brian Lehrer: Just to give listeners a little more sampler plate of your special issue, some of the 24 articles. David Frum on the revenge presidency, Caitlin Dickerson on family separation. Sophie Gilbert, women will be targets. Elaine Godfrey, a plan to outlaw abortion everywhere. Clint Smith, Trump will suppress American history. Michael Schuman, China will become stronger. Juliette Kayyem, extremists emboldened. Anne Applebaum, America will abandon NATO, and all the others adding up to 24.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's not the lightest issue, by the way. It's not the lightest issue, but these are great writers. These are the people who lead their fields in their subjects and it's a sobering issue. If people need reminding of the consequences of the stakes here, I definitely suggest going and reading it.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let's graze a little bit now that I've listed some of those since you're a foreign policy guy. The Michael Schuman article, China will get stronger. Really? Isn't one of Trump's calling cards being tough on China?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me just say this generally about Trump and toughness. There is an argument to be made obviously that his-- Let me step back. Do you remember the crazy Nixon theory, Kissinger's crazy Nixon theory that Nixon was an effective foreign policy president because no one knew what he was going to do? Henry Kissinger would tell America's adversaries, "Look, I understand your qualms and I understand your fears, but the president I'm working for is nuts." He would use that as a tactic and it's a very clever tactic. So long as the president isn't actually nuts, it's a game.

Here's the thing about Donald Trump, is there's no stability in his approach to foreign affairs. His approach to foreign affairs is like his approach to domestic affairs. It's entirely based on whether the person facing him is being ostentatiously, performatively respectful to him, right? This is why John Kelly may have saved the planet when he convinced Donald Trump, "Instead of picking a fight with the leader of North Korea, why don't you just go become friends with him because he wants to be your friend?" Remember how he pivoted from attacking little rocket man to basically becoming almost a sick fan?

Brian Lehrer: Love letters.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, love letters. The love letters. It's all about the personal ego. In other words, there's no-- and this goes back to this point that I'm making that it's not about conservative or liberal or a muscular foreign policy or a dovish foreign policy. It's all however he is reacting emotionally to a situation. On the one hand, you could say, "Well, the Iranians and the Chinese and the Russians, they never know what he's going to do. He might overreact. He might do something precipitous and irrational." I'll stipulate that that's a possibility. I will also stipulate to a certainty that there would be no fixed policy.

If the Chinese figure out a way to manipulate his ego, then he will, among other things, I'm afraid, sell Taiwan down the river. He doesn't care about human rights of Uyghurs or Tibetans or the people of Hong Kong, et cetera, et cetera. Just in the China area, you can see a complete lack of stability. Also, don't forget, and this is probably the most important point in this piece and others, it's he has a predisposition toward dictators, toward strongmen. He loves strongmen. He envies strongmen, Orbán, Putin. The way he talks about Xi, who is a person who oversees, among other things, a human rights catastrophe of a country.

Brian Lehrer: Right. "I hate China, but their authoritarian leader is a great guy."

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, look, he controls a billion and a half people. That's amazing. That's the way he sees this. I'm going to say this very directly. It's an un-American way of looking at the world. The American way of looking at the world is to understand the power of restraint. They understand the power of compromise, understand the power of democratic consultation, and checks and balances. He has no respect for the ideas that have made America the most powerful, most successful nation in the history of the planet. He looks to the way China operates and says, "I want that. I want to be that guy."

Brian Lehrer: You say it's un-American. Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. They have a special issue out now with 24 writers on 24 things that might happen if Trump is elected president again in 2024. You say un-American. I've struggled with this in the whole Trump era and I'm curious to get your take on it. Is the real issue perhaps less Trump than almost half of America?

Romney and McCain didn't generate this much fervor as relatively moderate Republican presidential candidates. Donald Trump gave them what they want and they're with him to this day, according to the polls, despite everything, or maybe because of everything. Maybe it's less of a Trump problem, a "this is not who we are" problem, or "this is an American" problem, and more of a, "This is who this country--"

Jeffrey Goldberg: "This is somewhat who we are. We are a lot of things and this is something--"

Brian Lehrer: Which might be much worse.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, but I believe in leadership. I believe that individual humans can change the direction of-- Here's an interesting thing. I've always thought about this. I was thinking back to Donald Trump's speech to the Boy Scouts. Now, remember, going to the Boy Scouts jamboree, 10,000, 20,000 Boy Scouts, whatever it is, is one of those moments that presidents always do. They always say, "Be nice to your mother. Study hard. Polish your shoes." They have 10,000 teenage boys, right? You can do anything you want with 10,000 teenage boys. You could turn them into a mob. You could turn them into a great--

Brian Lehrer: Civil servants.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Great productive group of people, right? There's a lot of hormones in that crowd. Donald Trump went and talked about prostitution in front of them. I talked to a bunch of politicians, a bunch of serious American leaders after that. They said they were profoundly disturbed by that because it's the job of a leader, of a president in particular, to shape the way the country looks.

Look, all human beings have good impulses and bad impulses. The evil inclination, the good inclination, right? Most of us are followers and most of us go with the flow. If the flow is going in that direction, it goes there. If it goes in the other direction, that's where you go. All that being said, this is not to absolve grown-ups for making bad decisions. You're exactly right. Donald Trump without followers is this guy sitting in the Florida sun playing golf and eating hamburgers.

There is that. Obviously, the Republican Party was susceptible to this kind of populist rhetoric and populist resentment-based ideas. They weren't communicating with their people and they were not understanding what was causing fear and anxiety and instability among their people. Donald Trump came into the vacuum and filled it. It's a very complicated thing and I don't want to blame human beings for being scared of the future.

The future looks pretty scary sometimes. Donald Trump comes in with some answers that are very easy that won't work, but they sound great to certain ears. This whole question of, "This is not who we are," eventually, people talk about that issue a lot in terms of gun violence, right? This is not who we are. Well, if it happens over and over and over again, it's a little bit who we are, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I think this is why this election is so important because we're going to decide who we are. We go through good times. We go through bad times. The American people are capable of greatness. The American people are capable of doing pretty terrible things just like all people. The acute challenge of the moment is that one of the two major parties is led by someone who does not embody traditional American values.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions and comments welcome for Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, on their special issue, 24 articles on if Trump wins in 2024. You can also call about the developments we'll get to in the Israel-Hamas war and the potentially changing US response. 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692. Of your 24 articles for the 24 presidential campaign, two of them struck me, Jeffrey, as what I'll call "response articles." Not about Trump, but how to respond to him if he's reelected or the prospect of it. George Packer, his article, Is Journalism Ready? Helen Lewis, The Left Can't Afford to Go Mad. Talk to me about the Helen Lewis article. What does that mean, The Left Can't Afford to Go Mad?

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's a very smart article by a very, very smart writer. She's English, so she has the benefit of being an outside observer. I once sent her, by the way. She learned how to drive and she drove an SUV around Florida to report on Florida, which is a pretty exotic and exciting foreign assignment for an English writer. She has very, very smart take on the left. What she's arguing, in essence, I don't boil down a complicated piece.

What she's saying is, in essence, she's giving advice to the left. Use Joe Biden as a model. Don't get lost in these extraneous and radical and obscure culture war fights that just alienate the mainstream Americans from the Democratic Party. She quotes, I remember, this is an amazing quote, Joe Biden responding to critics who say he's a far leftist or something. This is around the George Floyd period. He said, "Do I look like a radical socialist to you?"

By the way, that was his implicit argument to Black voters in South Carolina. If you remember, Joe Biden turned things around for himself in South Carolina by appealing to a mainstream moderate, culturally moderate, politically moderate group of people who outnumber people on the far left. I think what Helen is trying to say is don't be diverted. Don't pay too much attention to some of these almost ritual arguments on the left that have to do with cultural issues that just serve to alienate. In other words, the--

Brian Lehrer: Although some of the articles tell us that Trump is going to pick culture war fights. Outlaw abortion everywhere, cause a gender panic is another one of your articles.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We're a big magazine and we contain multitudes. I have different writers making different kinds of arguments in it. I think they all point in a general direction. I did not subject every writer to [laughs] a purity test. In Helen's case, I think she's giving a warning. In a way, as you called it, it's a little bit of a response piece to some other people who might be arguing that Trump poses a culture war threat. Therefore, he should be fought on those grounds.

Brian Lehrer: You ready for a Trump supporter to engage with? I think a Trump supporter--

Jeffrey Goldberg: I love talking to all Americans.

Brian Lehrer: Joseph in Toms River, you're on WNYC with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. Joseph, did I characterize you accurately?

Joseph: Somewhat.

[laughter]

Jeffrey Goldberg: That's a good Brian Lehrer listener. Somewhat.

[laughter]

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's complicated.

Joseph: Jeffrey, I heard what you said about Donald and, basically, his ego foreign policy. I just wanted to know whether you would be willing to admit that, at the same time, we are dealing with someone that has tremendous talent and ability with dealing with world leaders on a big stage and dealing with serious issues with tough adversaries, which at the same time when his ego does get in the way, that takes over 100%. At the same time, there is someone there in commander-in-chief who can do tremendous amount of benefit for our country moving forward. Would you be willing to give that to him?

Jeffrey Goldberg: No. The reason is because I don't think he's actually tough on America's adversaries. I will say in the Soleimani case in Iran, the assassination of Soleimani, who was the terrorist chieftain of Iran, there was an expectation on the part of some foreign policy experts that Iran would explode and attack America, and it didn't. You could argue very clearly that that was a smart decision, a smart defensive decision to take out this person who's responsible for the deaths of a lot of Americans. I will give you that.

What I'm arguing is that Donald Trump on a Tuesday is completely different than Donald Trump on a Wednesday in so many ways that it's impossible to run a superpower with somebody who's that unstable. Where my "no" comes in a very hard way is he's not tough on most adversaries. Put it this way. Ukraine would have been completely swallowed by Russia by now if Donald Trump had remained president, pretty sure of that. He has too much affection for dictators to be the president of the United States, the leading democracy in the world. He has too much affection for Xi in China and for the North Koreans and for the Russians. It's not strength as I understand strength.

Brian Lehrer: Joseph, thank you for your call. Listener texting us, "Trump, like any good businessman, sold something to people they didn't know they wanted. I blame him entirely for hyping people up and giving them permission to behave in atrocious ways." I guess that's a response to me worrying that it's more the American people lifting up somebody who represents them.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. Look, we're all grown-ups. We're all accountable for our decisions, including decisions we make in the voting booth. I don't want to absolve individuals of responsibility here. We're not just manipulated meat sacks or something.

Brian Lehrer: Right. One other thing--

Jeffrey Goldberg: I'm going to write that down, "manipulated meat sacks."

Brian Lehrer: There's your March-April issue headline right there.

Jeffrey Goldberg: [laughs] Advertisers will love it.

Brian Lehrer: One more thing from the issue and then we're going to turn the page a little bit and talk about the developments in the Middle East, which you've long covered. The George Packer article, Is Journalism Ready? There's a dilemma in covering Trump that we face on this show and all good-faith news organizations face.

If we ignore the dangerous things that Trump advocates, we risk normalizing them and letting him fly below the radar with just how extreme he would be. If we get all excited every time he says something outrageous, it's exactly what the media did wrong in 2016 when that blowback and that publicity wound up giving oxygen to his most extreme statements and positions and arguably helped him build his base and win. Do you see a dilemma in anything like those terms?

Jeffrey Goldberg: I no longer have any dilemma about this. The reason is simple. He's a former president who is the putative nominee of the Republican Party for president again. Our rules in American journalism are that the statements of presidents, ex-presidents, and especially candidates for president, all over their statements are newsworthy. It's axiomatic, right?

Even if he weren't running and was an ex-president and said some of the things that he said, it would still be newsworthy. It wouldn't have quite the consequence. The way I put it is this way. If George W. Bush or Barack Obama said the things that Donald Trump says in the course of trying to influence Americans, the world would stop. The headlines would be, George W. Bush Calls Enemies Vermin, or Barack Obama Praises China's Leader.

We'd all be staring at the screen, staring at the newspaper going, "What the hell happened to these people? They used to be sane, and now they're not." What happens is human beings, and it's a great attribute of being human, we adjust to anything. We get used to anything. The novelty wears off. The shock wears off. Every story that's initially surprising and horrifying becomes just part of the background noise.

Donald Trump, by repeating over and over and over again some of the things that he says, he ignores us to this. The deeper issue for me is that it is the responsibility of the press to cover the statements and actions and proposals of newsworthy individuals. An ex-president, current candidate for president, is axiomatically a newsworthy individual. Every time he says something newsworthy, it should be reported.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, and I'll ask him to put on his Middle East expert's hat, former Middle East correspondence hat, and react to some very dramatic developments, perhaps in the US relationship to the Israel-Hamas war. We'll place sound bites that might surprise you a lot if you haven't heard them yet, listeners, from the vice president and the defense secretary and discuss. Stay with us.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, is our guest. His background includes growing up in New York, but then later being a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, as well as covering the Middle East for The Washington Post. With all that background, Jeffrey, I'm going to play these sound bites from over the weekend of the vice president and defense secretary of the United States. Here's Vice President Harris first.

Vice President Kamala Harris: As Israel defends itself, it matters how. The United States is unequivocal. International humanitarian law must be respected. Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin: You know I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq and leading the campaign to defeat ISIS. Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas, and the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian quarters even during the toughest battles. The lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. You see, in this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. If you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.

Brian Lehrer: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin from over the weekend, proceeded by Vice President Kamala Harris from over the weekend. Jeffrey, I presume they also speak for President Biden, so how much is the US relationship to this war suddenly changing?

Jeffrey Goldberg: I don't think it's suddenly changing very much at all actually. I think those were brushback pitches obviously approved by Joe Biden, who is frustrated with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. That frustration predates the war obviously. I think what you're seeing is public rhetoric as a substitute for actual action on the ground, meaning conditions placed on Israeli tactics in Gaza.

Obviously, the Americans have been trying to communicate this to the Israelis. The Israelis have been saying back to the Americans, I've heard this from people on both sides of these conversations, "Thank you for the lecture, but we watched what you did in Mosul and Raqqa when you were fighting ISIS and thousands of civilians died, and you know as well as we do that it's almost impossible to avoid civilian casualties in those situations."

The Americans respond, "Yes, but you could always do more." The Israelis are in this bind. They see themselves as being in a bind. They feel they don't have endless time to carry out the destruction or the dismantling of Hamas in southern Gaza in particular, and so they are rushing in a lot of ways and not spending many months or years as it took to dislodge ISIS from Mosul.

In the course of doing that, they are steamrolling where they shouldn't be steamrolling. On the private communication level, I think both sides understand that this is incredibly difficult situation, but the Biden administration is susceptible to criticism on the left side of the Democratic Party on the hill. Israel's not going to be cut off anytime soon. You look at John Fetterman and his approach to this as more indicative of where Congress is than, let's say, where Kamala Harris has been talking in the last couple of days.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I see that at least two senators, Bernie Sanders said something yesterday and Chris Murphy of Connecticut a few weeks ago, talking openly about the possibility of putting conditions on future US aid to Israel with an aid bill coming up. Do you foresee a real Senate debate at least on that?

Jeffrey Goldberg: I foresee a debate. I would see a healthy portion of Democratic senators wanting to engage in that debate and a healthy portion of Democratic senators not wanting that debate at all. I don't see any Republicans wanting to have that debate, so I don't see any actual action on it. I see a lot of argument, debate posturing the usual sort of things that you see on the hill, but I don't see any change in the way America supplies Israel in this war unless the Israelis do something really stupid.

You go back to the bombing of that hospital whenever that was, four or five weeks ago, I can't even keep track anymore, which turned out to be an Islamic jihad rocket, not an Israeli rocket. If that had been an Israeli bomb that killed 500 people in that hospital, I think we'd be in a very different place right now that would've had consequences that would've moved all down the line. You're always one--

Brian Lehrer: They're killing so many people in so-called collateral damage in so many of the individual attacks. The thing that's been in the news in the last day is that after telling Gazans to go to the southern part of the country as a safe zone, now they're bombing there. That's the criticism.

Jeffrey Goldberg: A, I don't know what's true and what's accurate and what's not and the individual tactical level. I agree with you that any civilian dying is a horror, but I would give you two reactions to this. One is this is a lesson for Hamas, which is the governing body of Gaza. You attacked and kidnapped and murdered the civilians of a much stronger country. What do you think is going to happen? A, right?

B, there's two kinds of hostages in Gaza and this is important. There's two kinds of hostages in Gaza. They're the Israeli hostages, the soldiers and women and children and the old people, some of whom were released, who were stolen from Israel, carried into Gaza and kept as hostages, but then there's the civilian population, which Hamas is also holding as hostage. This is the diabolical formula here. Hamas seeks to maximize the number of Palestinian casualties. They said this.

The leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said the other day that they need more blood from civilians. They need more of it. They seek to maximize the casualties. It's the Israelis' job to try to minimize those casualties and the Israelis often don't seem to understand. The leadership of Israel doesn't seem to understand that the international media and the international organizations are also battle terrain, right? You could say it's not Hamas' job to make it easy for Israel. Hamas is making it as hard as possible. Hamas obviously has no interest in protecting Palestinian lives because they wouldn't have done this in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: That was the main point, I think, that Defense Secretary Austin was making in that clip that everything you said is, I'm sure, true that Hamas wants civilian casualties because it strengthens their hand, but it does actually strengthen their hand because who are the civilians going to blame? Are they going to blame Hamas or are they going to blame the powerful country that's bombing them?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we don't know the answer to that.

Brian Lehrer: I think you see that that's what happened. We don't know the answer yet.

Jeffrey Goldberg: We don't know the answer to that because Hamas is an authoritarian power in Gaza and there's no freedom of speech in Gaza, so we don't know. My assumption is a lot of Gazans would blame both, a pox on both your houses. "The Israelis are killing us, and why did you invite them in here?" This is the question. If you were a Gazan, you say, "What was the point of kidnapping those Israeli babies, except to make the Israelis infuriated? Why would you go and make a country that has a powerful air force so infuriated?"

The question to the Israelis they would ask is, "Why are you killing us? We're not Hamas. We didn't do this." It's the civilians of Gaza who are caught in this terrible pincer. If you were a civilian in Gaza, I think about this often. It's like if you had the ability to influence Hamas' decision-making, you would go to Hamas leadership and say, "Could you please just let the rest of the Israeli hostages you stole from Israel go? Let them go. Send them back to Israel." That's the best possible way of ending this campaign that Israel is launching in Gaza against us. Again, you're scared of Hamas, right?

Brian Lehrer: One call on this topic before we ran out of time and it relates back to our earlier segment on the 2024 election, I think. Timothy in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic.

Timothy: Hi there, Brian. Hi, Jeffrey. I wanted to tie in the Gaza-Israel conflict back to the Biden-Trump election because I think that what we're seeing is in the last two months, Biden has lost the youth vote and has lost the Muslim vote in key swing states. He was looking like a pretty weak candidate before October 7th.

I hear all sorts of more establishment-leading Democrats coming down on the young voters for saying they're not going to vote for Biden. What I wonder is, why can't people take the young voters seriously, listen to them when they say they're not going to vote for him again and put someone else in the race? We have time. He didn't look like he could win before this. He definitely doesn't look like he could win now.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's an interesting question. The first thing I would say is that the election's not for a year. We know historically that foreign policy issues, most times, don't influence the outcome of elections. This could be different, but this war is going to end. It's going to recede from the headlines because Americans have the attention span of gnats. We barely think about Ukraine anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in because I know we have only a minute left before you have to go, Jeffrey, and I want to ask Timothy a follow-up question. Briefly, Timothy, if we assume that the younger Democrats who care about the safety of the Palestinians are alienated by Biden because of all this, those same young voters put in the position of voting for Biden or Trump probably are among the most activated to think that Trump would just be a disaster for the country and for the world. Why do you think they really wouldn't turn out for Biden given that binary if it comes to that?

Timothy: Because I think it's different right now because I think young voters are seeing the Biden administration give the green light for what we're seeing in Gaza. A lot of people look at this and say, "Trump would've done the same thing." It would feel much less stable if Trump was in office, but there's this idea that the Democrats aren't listening to the people now either, so I--

Brian Lehrer: It might be apathy. I'm sorry to cut you off, but I know Jeffrey has to go. You want to give one last brief thought, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey Goldberg: No, it might be apathy. The issue might be apathy and staying at home. Especially when it comes to the Muslim vote, I find this to be an interesting conversation. We'll watch what's happening in the Muslim-American, Arab-American communities over the next year. I think people who follow the news understand that it was Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, who imposed a Muslim ban when he was in office.

Part of the challenge of being a citizen of a complicated democracy is that you're never going to find a candidate with whom you agree 100%. I have to imagine that voters in the Muslim-American community and Arab-American community, some might stay home. Some might cast their votes for protest candidates, but I have to imagine that a lot of them will look at the alternative to Joe Biden. If that alternative is Donald Trump, who literally banned citizens of Muslim-majority countries from moving to America-

Brian Lehrer: -and says he would do it again.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, and he said he's going to do it again, so there you have it.

Brian Lehrer: Which bring us full circle to why Jeffrey Goldberg came on the show in the first place today for the January-February 2024 of The Atlantic, for which he is editor-in-chief. That contains 24 essays by 24 writers about 24 things that might happen if Donald Trump is reelected president in 2024. Jeffrey, thank you so much.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.