Trump’s and Biden’s Reversals of Fortune
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2022
⏱️ 40 minutes
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Summary
The Senate’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act this week marks a turning point in the Biden Presidency. After more than a year of negotiations, the Democratic caucus agreed on a sweeping package, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which includes many of the Party’s long-sought climate and healthcare initiatives. This was followed by the news that the F.B.I. executed a search warrant to look for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s primary residence. The staff writer Evan Osnos and Michael Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, break down these two momentous stories. They’re also joined by staff writer Susan B. Glasser, who along with Peter Baker, published a major story about Trump’s antagonism toward the military in the waning days of his Administration. “Were they contemplating using the military in the effort to overturn the election results?” Glasser says. “Your rational self wants to say, ‘No way, that’s crazy.’ But, in fact, the record that’s still being assembled suggests that they were considering doing so.”
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| 0:48.8 | Welcome to the political scene. |
| 0:50.5 | I'm Evan Osnose, a staff writer at The New Yorker. |
| 0:53.1 | And I'm Michael Luo, the editor of New Yorker.com. Hey, Evan.nos, a staff writer at The New Yorker. And I'm Michael Luo, the editor of |
| 0:54.6 | New Yorker.com. Hey, Evan. Hey, Mike. So, Evan, this felt like a really big week in politics |
| 1:02.4 | in a lot of ways, historic week. But you're a jaded Washington guy who's been around town. What's your sense of how big of a deal it really was? |
| 1:15.2 | I think it was a really big deal because you had this really rare combo of events that were |
| 1:21.4 | substantive and surprising. You had first the Senate passing the Inflation Reduction Act, |
| 1:29.4 | which resuscitated Biden's domestic agenda. And then, just within a day, you had the FBI executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, |
| 1:36.7 | home, of course, of former President Donald Trump. You don't get a combination like that very often. |
| 1:42.0 | And we also had the very surreal experience of seeing photos of the bottom of Donald Trump's |
| 1:49.1 | toilet, little bits of paper with his handwriting and Sharpie on them. |
| 1:54.1 | I can't get the image out of my head. |
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