Robby Hoffman Thinks There Are Worse Things Than Being Offended

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff under Barack Obama, for a discussion about the Democratic Party’s odds heading into the midterm elections. In 2006, as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emanuel helped engineer his party’s sweeping electoral victories against an unpopular Republican President. Two decades later, he anticipates Democratic wins across the board, including in the Texas and Iowa Senate races. Emanuel lays out what he sees as an affirmative agenda for the Party, should they take control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s term: ethics reform, a minimum-wage increase, an overhaul of the tax code, and a focus on corruption. “The way I talk about corruption is, He wants his ballroom and you’re getting the bill. He wants his arch, and you can’t afford a meal at the Golden Arches. He gets a $450 million plane from Qatar, and you get $4.50 a gallon of gas,” says Emanuel. “You gotta drive the corruption into the wallet.”

A growing portion of the electorate appears to recognize the mayhem President Donald Trump has instigated since returning to the Oval Office. That segment includes some of the people who put him back into office, including Rich Baris, who goes by the People’s Pundit on social media. Baris runs Big Data Poll, and appears regularly on “The Charlie Kirk Show” and other right-wing outlets. But he concurs with nonpartisan pollsters that MAGA is fracturing, and he talks with David Remnick about how the President lost the trust of his base; the contempt MAGA voters have for the old Republican Party; and who might take the reins after Trump.

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, to discuss his new documentary, “Musk.” Since July, Elon Musk has poured more than a quarter of a billion dollars into Republican campaigns, more than any other donor in the midterms by a wide margin, and all in plain view. Jane Mayer, the New Yorker staff writer and the author of “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” explains how Musk is bringing political financing by the ultra-wealthy out of the shadows: “He’s the coming-out party for the billionaires.” Gibney argues that Musk’s flagrant spending is less a matter of ideology than one of self-preservation—a way to forestall investigations, protect his companies, and keep the federal contracts coming. How did a single person come to wield this kind of power over our elections, our technology, and even a war on the other side of the world? “He sold us all a dream,” Gibney says, “and we fell for it.”

The New Yorker staff writers Isaac Chotiner and Benjamin Wallace-Wells join Tyler Foggatt to discuss what Democrats might do after the midterms if they win a majority in the House or the Senate, and how Donald Trump might respond to attempts to check his power. If Trump has been willing to circumvent Congress on issues like military action and tariffs, how much difference would a Democratic majority make during the remainder of his second term? They also talk about how large a Democratic victory could be, and ask what the results might reveal about voters’ views of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The economic punishment and threats of aggression that Donald Trump has launched against Canada are so severe that its government has looked at how to prepare for U.S. military action. David Remnick sits down with a former senior Canadian politician, Chrystia Freeland, to talk about the disintegration of a rock-solid partnership. Freeland served as the Deputy Prime Minister under Justin Trudeau, and has also held the roles of Minister of International Trade and Minister of Foreign Affairs; she helped negotiate a trade deal in Trump’s first term, which he subsequently broke. Freeland’s new book about the U.S.-Canada relationship is called “Unreliable Boyfriend,” but that title may soft-pedal it. “The vast majority of Canadians see this as a rupture” that will be permanent, she tells Remnick. “They think America is toxic and broken and can never be trusted again. . . . I actually am an outlier, because I think we shouldn’t write America off quite yet.”