Hillary Rodham Clinton Slams Joe Biden’s “Terrible Mistake”—and More
Less than a year after Hillary Rodham Clinton’s crushing defeat in the 2016 election, I saw her speak at Riverside Church, in Manhattan. The atmosphere in the pews was funereal, as if the news of a Trump Presidency had come just the night before. Her hosts felt compelled to confess their grief and fury. Clinton, for her part, gamely confided that she had been coping with her devastating election loss with a combination of prayer, yoga, and “my fair share of Chardonnay.” But she was still somewhat buttoned up in those early speeches, reluctant to speak out too emotionally, too frankly, about the dark wood into which Donald Trump was leading the country. To do so, she seemed to say, would sap the nation of its meagre reserves of hope and provide Trump, who kept on threatening to “lock her up,” with an even deeper emotional satisfaction.
That was a long time ago, and it’s not hard to argue that even the starkest early forecasts of the Trump Presidency were too optimistic. As the country prepares to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the grave realities of authoritarian rule, malevolent rhetoric, grotesque corruption, intensified culture wars, and an over-all assault on the rule of law and foreign alliances are plain to see. As a retired politician who will always carry the weight of 2016, Clinton has gradually allowed herself to be more forthright in her interviews.
When we met on the stage of the 92nd Street Y on June 15th, for a live taping of The New Yorker Radio Hour, she didn’t hesitate to let loose both on Trump, as she has been doing for some time, and on Joe Biden, for the “terrible mistake” of having run for reëlection in 2024. She also made plain that Trump’s decision to accede to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appeal to go to war against Iran has ended in a strategic defeat for the United States. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Secretary Clinton, in your book “Something Lost, Something Gained,” you write about your state of mind after the election of Donald Trump. You describe yourself as someone who remains “an optimist who worries a lot.” Now, we all worry, but I want to grasp the extent of your agony, and I want to begin with a big question: Does Donald Trump—and Trumpism—represent a real and sustained era of authoritarianism in this country?
I really believe that he does represent the threat of authoritarianism. And the people who enable him, who support him, who follow him, have clearly decided that his kind of performance politics—his deliberate cruelty—is exactly what they want to see for the country. The good news is, his favorability is in the mid-thirties, but he is doubling down. He’s doubling down on his impulsiveness, and it’s very worrisome to me. I teach a course at Columbia University with a dean there. It’s called Inside the Situation Room. We talk about the traits of leaders—their behavior, their psychology. And there is a view that is rooted in how people make decisions—all of us, not just leaders—about what happens when someone finds themselves in what’s called the “domain of loss.” It’s a psychological concept. And, almost counterintuitively, when people feel they are losing, they very frequently take greater risks. They double down on their behavior. And that’s what I’m now worried about. He’s lashing out. He’s demanding that we accept his version of reality, which is unhinged from the actual world that we live in and the actual consequences of his actions. So, I think we have to be extremely vigilant and ready to push back every chance we get.
How has your understanding of his support evolved? You were criticized a lot, probably rightly, for using the word “deplorables” for many of his followers—but how do you view the evolution of his followers, and what it is that they want most of all from him?
Well, first of all, I said only about half were. So, to be fair—
Well, are you doubling down on “deplorables”?
I gave a speech, for example, about something called the alt-right, which the press had no idea what I was talking about. Certainly the public had no idea what I was talking about. But I was beginning to see this really disturbing rhetoric—racist rhetoric, sexist rhetoric, the kind of authoritarian demagogic claims about our politics. And it worried me. So I tried to put that into the political debate, but I also did try to draw a line between those who were following him because of that.
It wasn’t a bug—it was the feature. And people didn’t take it seriously. People were, like, “Oh, that’s just Donald. He’s just spouting off. Don’t worry about it.” I saw something darker. But I was in . . . not the strongest position, since I was running against him, to make that case. I was trying to say, Look, I understand there are people who believe that kind of stuff, but most of the people, at least half, who are following him—they want change. They are not satisfied with where we are in the country. It was something that I was aware of, and I respected, because people were feeling that it’s hard to succeed a two-term President of your own party. I knew that going into it. People liked and respected President Obama, but they wanted something that might be a little different, and something—
A little different?
But they didn’t know how different at the time.
I don’t want to jump too far ahead, but I think it’s fair to say that, so far, J. D. Vance has not covered himself in glory, and Marco Rubio probably doesn’t appeal to the base with quite the same stickiness as Trump himself. I wonder if you think it’s possible—and I think maybe this has run through your head—that the Trump family has dynastic ambitions, whether it’s Donald, Jr., or someone in the family, who might pretend to succeed him.
Well, David, you and I think alike. I think, if he could figure out a way to stay, he would. My husband likes to say, “If he tries to stay, I’m running again.” But, if that’s unlikely, which we have to hope it is, I don’t get the feeling he’s all warm and fuzzy about J. D. Vance.
No.
I don’t think he is warm and fuzzy about nearly anybody other than himself and who is closest enough to him, and that is possibly a son or a daughter.
A son or a daughter?
A son or a daughter.
And the daughter is thought to be cleverer than the sons.
Well, I’m not going to characterize them. It’s the blood relationship that matters.
Understood.
Look, we’re speculating like we know something, which we don’t. I’m not hanging out at Mar-a-Lago and picking up the bread crumbs of gossip.
I think you’d like it there.
Yeah. But, given Trump’s psychology, if he can’t do it himself, he wants somebody he can control, and preferably somebody related to him. And that would be, I think, his hope.
You’ve watched Trump over a long period of time. You’ve debated him three times. You’ve observed him very carefully, obviously. Is he disintegrating?
I think he is. He’s certainly not what he was. He falls asleep in lots of public meetings. I mean, poor Joe Biden. I mean, he shut his eyes once or twice, but Donald Trump is falling asleep all the time these days. But part of that is, he stays up all night posting on Truth Social. So he’s not getting enough sleep anyway, which is pretty disturbing, because I don’t think people who are sleep-deprived make good decisions, on top of everything else. But I really think he has a number of traits that have got more obvious. He doesn’t even try to hide them. His impulsivity, his immaturity, his lack of curiosity about anything going on around him. When he launched the war against Iran, and then, out of the White House, you hear that “Nobody told me about the Strait of Hormuz. Nobody told me they could close the Strait of Hormuz. Where is the Strait of Hormuz?” You can’t make it up. It’s like some movie that you walk out of because it’s so outlandish.
“Dr. Strangelove.”
Yeah, exactly.
We’re talking on a day the United States and Iran seem to have signed an agreement to end, at least for now, this war. Did the United States lose this war?
Yes. The United States has come out weaker. Iran has come out stronger. Now, I started the negotiations that led to the J.C.P.O.A., the agreement that President Obama eventually signed. It was an intensive diplomatic effort. We started by getting the U.N. Security Council to impose global sanctions on Iran in June of 2010. We then worked to get secret negotiations started through Oman, and those began with several meetings and with a plan about going forward, which I handed off to my successor, John Kerry. These were serious negotiations, with high-level people. When we sat across a table from the Iranians, we had our own nuclear physicists there, as did they. We had experienced diplomats, people who had negotiated on many different fronts for many years. That’s not the way this Administration does its business.
The United States doesn’t send bombers to Iran because anybody else commands it to, but it’s very clear that Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, pushed and pushed Donald Trump to do this. It’s my understanding that, when you were Secretary of State, Bibi Netanyahu made the same case. Tell me about that.
Well, you’re absolutely right. When I was Secretary, it was a constant theme by Netanyahu and his then government, the then Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister. It was relentless. It was a constant push. I remember—
What would he say to you?
What?
What would he say to you?
He would basically say, “You need to support us in attacking Iran.” And back then—this was 2009 to the end of 2012—we had more capacity than Israel did, on several fronts, to do that. And so there was a constant argument that we would have. I remember, one day, I was on the phone for hours with Ehud, with Bibi, with others. And they would say things like, “Our planes are on the tarmac.” And I’d say, “Well, good luck. I mean, great. Why are you doing this?”
So you’re saying you were being played?
All the time. All the time.
By an ally that receives an enormous amount of aid.
Well, of course. Bibi’s been obsessed, as long as I’ve dealt with him, with two things: Iran, as you know, and his desire to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia. The first formal meeting I had with him in 2009, probably March, at the State Department, it was absolutely “How can we get normalization with Saudi Arabia, and how do we totally decapitate Iran?” And he had this view that I think has become very clear in his dealings with Trump. No. 1, decapitate the regime, it will fall. No. 2, disable the military insofar as possible, the people will rise up.
And that was just never our read about what was going to happen. In part because this is a ruthless, theocratic regime that—at least at the top levels, the clerical level—has a kind of apocalyptic view of their own importance in the struggle against Israel, the United States, the West, their Sunni neighbors, the whole map that they look at. And they are also a regime that learned, sadly, a lesson from the overthrow of the Shah [in 1979]. There’s a lot of analysis about why the Shah was finally deposed, but one of the arguments is that at the end he would not murder his people. He would not order the mass murder of the demonstrators in the street. This regime has no such compunction. So if you have a regime that has already proved, as it did last year, that they were willing to kill thirty-five, forty thousand Iranians over the protests that were going on; if you have this alliance between the clerics and the military, they have enough folks in their ranks to keep moving up and taking over. Our take on Iran was: absent an effective, armed opposition (which we’ve never seen), and absent some kind of internal dissent—whether a general who would say, “I’m not going to tolerate this any longer” . . . But this regime is not going to be toppled by appeals to their humanity, to the angels of their better nature.
If I hear what you’re saying correctly it’s this: No. 1, Bibi Netanyahu bamboozled Donald Trump, and No. 2—I don’t imagine the intelligence changed radically, about the state of play in Iran—that the President ignored not only the advice of his Vice-President and Secretary of State but the intelligence community telling him, on the ground, that this would be a terrible idea.
Well, I can’t speak to that. I don’t know what was presented to him. I also think, coming off the attacks of last June, which I supported—I supported the very specific, surgical attacks on the known nuclear-weapons sites—I believed that that was a clear mission with very achievable goals. I didn’t know whether you could eliminate the program, but I thought you could certainly set it back.
Let’s stay in the same region for a moment. I know that you’re for a two-state solution and see it as the only outcome that any kind of peace can exist. . . . But, if I look at the Israeli polity, they don’t want a two-state solution, certainly not now. And, if you look at the Palestinian polity, which is an even more complicated set of geographies and populations, a two-state solution is not anywhere near the offing there. A two-state solution—which was fought for so hard, but began going out the window many years ago—seems impossible. Am I wrong?
You might be, but you might not be. And here’s why. I’m going to say something positive about Trump. So hold on.
O.K., I’ve got a grip on my chair right now.
Trump’s twenty-point plan for Gaza is actually a pathway to security for Israel, reconstruction for Gaza, and the possibility of self-determination—however defined—for the Palestinians. There are a lot of people who reject it because Trump did it, but it’s the only game in town. There’s nothing else. And I’ve engaged in some kind of track-two diplomacy with Israelis—not in the current government, former governments, military intelligence, political officials, Palestinians, Arabs. So it’s a very painful discussion, because these are experienced people with lots of scars to show for their efforts over many years, not just on peace but on security, particularly for Israel. But I really believe if we took this twenty-point plan, which starts with the disarmament of Hamas, a huge important step yet to be accomplished, but took all of the twenty points—so that it wasn’t just to disarm Hamas and maybe do some reconstruction and build some resorts on the coast—but if you really took the whole approach that is embodied in that twenty-point plan, and I know there are people who are working to try to move forward on that, there is a glimmer of a possible path forward.
Now, having said that, you are dealing with two peoples who are even more traumatized than perhaps has happened in the past. You had Rachel Goldberg-Polin on your podcast last week, and I met her during the time when I was trying to help and support families who were advocating to get the hostages back, and she writes this very moving, profoundly sad book about her son, Hersh.
And we’ve had Mohammed Mhawish and Mosab Abu Toha, who lost multiple members of their family.
And I’ve met with them as well.
And did the Biden Administration fail to push hard against the Netanyahu government? Did it give too free a rein to the Israeli government during the—
I think it’s a very, very hard question to answer for this reason. As I said, October 7th was a mass-trauma event. Clearly, the people who were murdered, the families who lost loved ones, the hostages—two hundred and fifty-plus who were taken into Gaza—it was a long, terrible trauma.
One hundred per cent. But Biden came to Israel, and the wisest thing, it seems to me, that he said was “I feel your pain. I understand how horrible this is. We support you, but at the same time, do not repeat our mistakes and act out of prolonged vengeance.” He was obviously referring to Afghanistan and even more so to Iraq—the misadventures there, to say the least, and the damage they did and the lives lost there. And I think a lot of people would say that is exactly what Israel went ahead and did, by such a prolonged war, and that the United States and the Biden Administration and later the Trump Administration did very little to put a pause to it.
Again, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what the internal discussions were, but every time there was a push against Israel to change tactics, to avoid certain targets, the response would be “We know that there are tunnels. We know there are something like three hundred and fifty miles of tunnels. We know that they can be entered through a lot of these sites.” And it’s very difficult to refute that, because we know that there were tunnels, and we know that numbers of them entered into hospitals, schools, and all kinds of civilian places. Could and should the Israelis have been more careful with civilian casualties? Absolutely. There’s no doubt about that. But did they have a response to what they were trying to accomplish, rescuing hostages, getting access to Hamas leadership and fighters in these tunnels? They did. And trying to walk that line in the middle of a war is very hard.
So I try to imagine myself: I’m sitting in CENTCOM and talking to the Israeli military; I’m sitting at the C.I.A. and talking to Mossad. And they are coming back not with totally unbelievable claims. They’re coming back with “Here’s what our intelligence tells us. We think if we can get there, maybe we can get [the Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar, maybe we can rescue hostages.” And the fog of war was totally overwhelming.
When you hear [the former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert refer to war crimes, when you hear an Israeli scholar like Omer Bartov refer to genocide—or even David Grossman, a novelist you know well—do you agree with them?
Again, I am looking at facts. I have not reached my own conclusions, because I don’t have an . . . oftentimes there are after-action reports. And the thing I am most critical of is: there has been no after-action report about what happened leading up to October 7th, on October 7th, and post-October 7th. So we don’t have all the information I personally would like to see and know about. The original sin is: Why did October 7th happen? What were the signals that were missed? What could have been done differently? What did Bibi Netanyahu think he was doing, having Qatar pay Hamas millions and millions of dollars a month, in order—in his thinking—to weaken the Palestinian Authority? What did he think was going to happen? So I guess my point, David, is: I want to know everything I can know. I want to know everything I can about the intelligence failures, the military decisions, before I’m willing to say, “You could have done this,” or “You should have done that,” or pass judgment.
I received a text today from one of the best journalists I know in Israel, a very keen defense analyst, and he said that this memo of understanding [between the U.S. and Iran] is the end of Bibi. I think a lot of people have gone broke predicting the political end of Bibi Netanyahu. Are you willing to go broke?
He has certainly more than nine lives, politically, but I think this is a real defeat for him. He did push Trump into the war against Iran. We didn’t gain anything of real importance and we may have lost a lot, but that means Bibi also lost. Because to go into that kind of alliance, and to push Trump to do something that I’m not sure even Trump understood the implications of, and then for Trump wanting to get out of it, because—what did he say a few weeks ago? “I’m bored. This is boring. Trying to make peace is boring.” So Bibi’s left out there by himself.
And there are several really serious questions. What he’s doing in Lebanon now is, to me, counterproductive. He has never had, Israel has never had, in as long as I can remember, a government that started out more open to working with Israel to try to disarm Hezbollah. And rather than trying to be, in my view, kind of smart about how to build up a Lebanese government for the purpose of disarming and neutering Hezbollah, which is definitely in Israel’s interest, Israel has been engaged in this bombardment of Lebanon. So they’re fighting on that front. I think their turning a blind eye to the settler violence in the West Bank is extremely dangerous. I think Netanyahu believes that war is his friend, because he wants to contain the opposition by creating conflict so that he tries to rally the country behind him. I think this Iran deal may be the straw that finally breaks that, and creates an opening for his departure in the upcoming elections.
But I’m worried that, if you don’t see a government that understands the importance of tending to Israel’s economy and future, you’re going to see a big exit by, particularly, young Israelis, and there is some evidence of that.
A few weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee released an autopsy report on the 2024 election. It satisfied nobody. Not one person did it satisfy, except for maybe the Bidens, because it didn’t mention Joe Biden’s decision to run. But, when you look back on his decision to run, did he make a terrible mistake?
He made a terrible mistake. He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy, and for the country. He had said that he would not run again, and counterfactual narratives are always a bit tricky, but I believe that if he had kept to that plan, that he wasn’t going to run, that he was going to pass the torch to the next generation, we would have had a real contest. And very sadly I believe whoever emerged from that contest—whether it was the Vice-President or a governor or a senator or anybody else—would have beaten Donald Trump. I think it was a terrible miscalculation on the part of President Biden, but once he held on for as long as he did we were in a terrible dilemma.
Why didn’t anybody say so? You’re a powerful figure still—a powerful voice in the Democratic Party. There are a lot of people that are powerful—not a lot, a select group of people with powerful voices—whether Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody said this [before the Trump-Biden debate]. Why was it so difficult to speak about this?
I think there were a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes. I certainly am aware of that, and participated in a number of them, but there was no way to convince him by going public. And eventually what convinced him was—
The debate.
—polling information.
But after a horrendous public disaster.
Well—
But were there private discussions? Were there people on your level, of your eminence, that went to Joe Biden and said, “Look, Joe, we love you, but it’s time. You’re not the guy you were fifteen years ago. Enough already.”
I know of a few people who tried that, and they were met with total denial. And not just from him but from the people around him who were—
Jill Biden, in particular?
Before the debate, before what happened at the debate, there was a belief—and it was strongly held inside the White House—that he would win again. After the debate, I think they were in a state of disbelief about what happened, and kept trying to explain it, rationalize it, justify it. There were a lot of people who publicly and privately then said, “That’s not recoverable.” Initially, that was denied. But, look, it happened. It’s over. It’s behind us. I don’t think it’s useful to keep beating that horse.
Well, one other retrospective question.
O.K., beat one more horse.
No. A different horse.
It’s a donkey!
I know that joke. It’s a good joke. . . . But did Kamala Harris lose solely because she only had a hundred days to run?
I think that was definitely a factor. I think she also found herself in a difficult position trying to run as the sitting Vice-President but to separate herself from the sitting President. There was no gap between her service, as there was with mine, and her campaign. So I think that was a real problem.
And then there’s the other thing. I can’t tell you how many people—people on the left, people who consider themselves good feminists, enlightened about identity in all senses—will say to me, “Next time, in ’28, we cannot take the risk. It can’t be a woman. It can’t be African American, et cetera, et cetera.” And I find this shocking. We’re a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, and we’re still having this conversation. You’ve lifted the microphone and you’re ready to go. I don’t need to continue.
Well, first of all, there is a global pushback on women’s rights. And part of that is being led by this Administration. [Shortly after returning to office] Trump fired the woman commandant of the Coast Guard, the Black combat-veteran Air Force general who was the chair of the Joint Chiefs, and the first woman to be the chief of naval operations. And we’ve seen what just happened, with [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth removing women and Black military officers from promotion. We’ve seen them taking down pictures of the first woman who flew with the Thunderbird formation. The Black general [Daniel] (Chappie) James, who was an incredibly effective fighter pilot. There is an unabashed campaign to undermine both minority leadership and women’s leadership in public spaces. There’s no doubt about that. And not only is it happening in so-called IRL, in real life; it’s happening online, to an extraordinary extent, where the threats against women, the attacks on women, [are so prevalent].
So this is a moment where we are seeing the firing of women, not men. I mean, for heaven’s sake—I’m not going to make any brief for the women whom he fired from his Cabinet, I didn’t agree with any of them, but Hegseth is still there! And so you think about the way that this man is treating women, the way he talks to women journalists. His whole behavior toward women is so disdainful. So I think that’s in the culture. It’s not made up when people say, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if we could vote for a Black candidate or a woman candidate.” But my ultimate answer to that is it depends upon the candidate.
Well, let me ask you about one. The candidate that’s polling now the highest, among women certainly, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. How would you feel about her as a standard-bearer for the Democratic Party nationally?
Well, those are not the same polls that I’ve seen. Look, she is a very talented politician, and she is, like, in the top five. But so is Kamala Harris, and depending upon the poll, sometimes Gavin Newsom. So it’s a—
I mean among women. Gavin Newsom is not that.
I’m talking about what I consider to be reliable polls of voter sentiment, which is both men and women, because you’re not going to win with just women. I wish that would be someday possible, but it’s not. So I don’t know. It’s way too soon, but here’s what I really think. No. 1, stay focussed on the midterm elections. We have to win the House, and hopefully the Senate, O.K.? And we have some really good chances of doing that in the House, and I think we have a fifty-fifty chance in the Senate.
To win the Senate, one of the seats that the Democrats have to win is in Maine. How do you feel about [Graham Platner]?
I feel about him the way I feel about any candidate. I want to see what kind of candidate he actually turns out to be. The bumps on the road that he has experienced, and some of the things he has said—
“Bumps on the road”?
Yeah. Clearly, bumps on the road, in terms of some of his prior behavior, some of his prior statements. And, I will tell you, I served with Susan Collins. She is going to be very hard to beat, and it’s going to be a tough election. So I’m reserving—
But, if you were a Mainer, where would you pull the lever?
But I’m not a Mainer. I’m a New Yorker. But seriously—
You’re going to let that pitch go by?
But David, look, I think this election has to be about affordability and accountability, and we need to start holding the people around Trump accountable, and we’re going to see whether we can take the Senate. But I think the House has to be the primary objective. And then, once that election is behind us, you’re going to have ten or twelve pretty good candidates, in my view, running in 2028. And I don’t know who’s going to emerge, because I don’t know who’s going to catch the moment. I don’t know who’s going to be able to convince the various factions of the Democratic Party to support him or her. But I wouldn’t rule out any woman who wants to run or any African American or any Latino or anybody else. If they want to get into the arena, get in the arena, show us what you can do, and see whether people will vote for you.
Do you think the Democratic Party has an “élites problem”?
No. I think some people believe it does. And that, I think, is somewhat amusing, because our élites are not stealing money from the Treasury to pay off the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol, and our élites are not going around the world making business deals for their children, at least so far as I know. And so, when people say that, they’re really saying, “Well, you guys, you’re in blue cities and blue states, and you don’t relate to us.” And so I think that’s the problem. I think it’s more of a political-identification problem. So you just have to take what people say about your candidates and be ready to fight back. That’s a false equivalence a lot of the time.
I lived in Moscow for four years during the collapse of the Soviet Union and then thereafter. And I would often think to myself, What would it be like to actually live in a society like this, where I loathe my government? And would I be someone who, in order to keep my family together or to preserve my bank account, would collaborate? And I have to say, I hope not with a minimum of righteousness, it has shocked me to see the level of acquiescence in our society, among élites who have turned on a dime—on a dime!—in order to preserve their immense fortunes and to make them greater.
Well, I’m afraid you’re right in terms of the acquiescence. So, for some people, it’s simply staying in power, being able to feel like they are important. But the people who are in positions of great economic power, like the tech companies and other large businesses, have been so disappointing in the way that they have basically aligned themselves with Trump, Trump policies—and in large measure, I guess, because they think, quote, “It’s good for their business.” But what they’re not appreciating is that this kind of unchecked, unaccountable power can turn and bite them just as easily. You saw it. You saw it in Russia. You saw the transition from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and you saw the oligarchs being formed, the privatization. But then when Putin came along, it was “I want five per cent. No, I now want twenty-five per cent. I want fifty per cent.” And that’s why people say he’s the richest man in the world, because he’s basically—
I must say, he loves you. I have never seen somebody speak so harshly of anyone as to watch Putin speaking about Hillary Clinton.
Well, I wear it as a badge of honor. Contrary to what you hear from Donald Trump, he did help Donald Trump win, and partly because he knew what kind of leader I would be compared to Donald, who he knew would not.
I want to ask you two quick questions about the law. On a scale of one to ten, how worried are you about being “locked up”?
Well, it’s not for lack of trying that I’m not. They continue to not only go after me but go after all kinds of people that Trump considers his “enemies.” I’m not worried about it if the law matters, and if the facts matter—I have nothing to worry about. And what I’ve been slightly reassured about in the past couple of months is the way the courts are actually enforcing their orders. So the name is off the Kennedy Center! The $1.776-billion fund is enjoined. And so there is, finally, the pushback. Our big problem has been the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has enabled and approved so much of what he’s done on the so-called shadow docket, and that is what has given him the permission to go forward with a lot of the things that he has pursued without there being yet any kind of final adjudication.
So when I think about the law personally, I’m not that worried for myself, but I do see him continuing to unleash his private law firm—which used to be called the Justice Department—against people and forcing them to be investigated, spend money, everything to just put them at risk. So, yeah, I do think that he is going to continue to do that, and we unfortunately are going to have to continue to fight back.
Has John Roberts, in particular, as Chief Justice, failed the law?
I voted against him as a senator. I met with him. I voted against [Samuel] Alito, and Alito was a much more obvious movement conservative, a results-oriented judge. And so I had no doubt about what he would do, and I gave a speech on the floor.
John Roberts, though, as I looked into his past, he wrote a memo about reversing the Voting Rights Act back in the nineteen-eighties. So he has been a known commodity to some of us who paid attention for some time, but he comes across as more affable—a kind of country-club person who you’d have a nice dinner with. But make no mistake about it—he led the charge against the Voting Rights Act. He led the charge against campaign-finance reform. He has been on the side of the sort of federalist agenda since he was a young lawyer, a young law clerk. And this is his Court. And I think they have concluded, led by him—the majority, certainly—that their job is to turn the clock back, as much as possible, on the twentieth century. They believe in the height of corporate power. They believe in the role that corporations should play in our politics and basically undisclosed, unlimited money. Plus, then things like the Voting Rights Act, which they view as, in the way they describe it, unnecessary in a, quote, “colorblind society” that’s gotten beyond race. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know who they talk to. I don’t understand it, but that is their stated view.
I went to law school with Clarence Thomas, and he just gave a speech for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth commemoration—I think at Texas or somewhere—he gave a speech basically saying that the progressive movement had destroyed America and it needed to be reined in.
Secretary Clinton, thank you so much.
Thank you, David. ♦
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.