 Hello and welcome to this latest Lowy Institute live event. This is part of what we call the Long Distance Lowy Institute in which we communicate our content and analysis online while we're unable to do it in person. A very warm welcome to everyone joining from Australia including a number of my board members and to those dialing in from overseas. My name is Michael Fully Love and I'm the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute. Joining me today is the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. Jeff is one of the most thoughtful and respected journalists in America and of course he's the editor of one of the world's most interesting and important magazines, The Atlantic. Previously he served as a national correspondent for The Atlantic as well as Washington correspondent and Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker. Over the course of his career, Jeff has interviewed many heads of state including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, British Prime Minister David Cameron, King Abdullah of Jordan and many others. His reporting has taken him all over the world including to Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon. So he's a terrific person to speak with. Before I go to Jeff, some quick housekeeping. At the bottom of your screens you'll see a Q&A button where you can submit questions to Jeff and later in this event I'll put some of your questions to our guest. As always please include the name of your organization or any other affiliation when you send through your question. But first I have some questions so welcome Jeff and thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Jeff you're the editor of a storied 19th century magazine that is now publishing in a remarkable 21st century media environment. So tell me I guess to begin with how is The Atlantic going? What is it that presidents or at least normal presidents say at the beginning of the state of the union that the state of The Atlantic is strong. That's not entirely true. I can't kid you and say that the state of the media business here or there I suppose is particularly strong. We've all taken a double hit in the advertising market obviously. And also as you kind of suggest in the live events world in the live events business we have a lot of conferences and that sort of thing. So that's been hard but there's an appetite for quality journalism out there that is very powerful. And you know without putting too many numbers against this question you know our audience has been growing and growing and growing our internet audience. We probably now have on average somewhere between 45 and 55 million unique visitors unique readers a month. And surprisingly or not surprisingly because of the quality of the print magazine we actually are selling a huge number of print subscriptions which is not the 21st century model necessarily but I think people are realizing after 20 years of Wild West internet nonsense that it's good to have a carefully edited quality, carefully edited quality publications where people are doing some discernment people are doing some curating for you rather than just sort of dumping everything into the big ugly river of the internet. And what's the balance of global readers of your website for example compared to American readers. I think we're about 75-25 roughly. 75 local. 75 local. 75 US and Canada. Yep. And 25% overseas. Obviously the best majority of those are people in Sydney but it's clear. A little bit in Melbourne but just like tiny. They're not discerning obviously. No we actually have, I hear quite frequently from people in Australia which is great in New Zealand too. But you know the places you would think you know London, Singapore, Hong Kong, large English speaking populations in Australia. But no we're very much founded to be 163 years ago to be the magazine of the American idea. We have that focus and we're always trying to figure out a way to explain Americans to America to itself but also explain America to the world. We also do plenty of overseas coverage and there we're explaining everything to everybody we hope. Now you were appointed to the top job in 2016. You're the 14th editor in the Atlantic's history. Is it more fun to be the editor or was it more fun to be a journal? I think editors are also journalists. Maybe I'm mistaken. I mean I'm also a middle manager. This has its satisfactions. I won't make too many jokes about this. It has its satisfactions. I'm not the greatest meeting goer in the world. I think meeting should last about four minutes on average. Just tell me what the thing is and then we can just go on. So there's that. This is not a meeting. This is a colloquy. It's completely different. But no I mean it is satisfying to watch young journalists develop. I'll say this that when I became editor in October 2016 I had covered our policy and the Obama administration quite intensely. I had to push some before that. And I was expecting, I don't know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting Donald Trump to win the next month. So the whole term of my editorship so far has been in this. I'm trying to think of a word that passed the censors. This unusual period in American history and nothing's normal about this. It makes having a free press all the more important when the president thinks of a free press as an enemy. But it's certainly been an unusual experience. It's not the experience that I was expecting necessarily. But no I mean I can't kid you and say that I don't miss. I mean people who are journalists and watching this know that there's nothing more exciting than landing in a city, getting into a renting a car and pointing it in the direction of a story. Whether that city is Topeka Kansas or Jakarta or wherever. There's just something exciting about not knowing what the day is going to bring you. But this kind of role, I mean you're familiar with this kind of role. It definitely has its excitement and it has its purpose, that's the point. Let me ask you, you mentioned the free press being under threat or under attack from the president, from the leader of the free world actually. And also you mentioned the Atlantic's mission. I'll spend a little bit of time on that expression by the way. Maybe put a pin in that and come back to it because it is such an amusingly archaic expression. You and I both use it. But what is the free world and who is its leader I think are really open questions right now. Sorry I'm not trying to hijack your interview or anything like that. Well no I mean I would say it is an archaic expression but it's one that Donald Trump wouldn't recognize or identify with would he? That's the point, that's the point. Anyway go on, sorry I didn't mean to derail you. No no, it's a colloquia as you say. I'm going to derail you 28 more times in the next 50 minutes. Okay you mentioned the free press, you mentioned the Atlantic being the magazine of the American idea I think was your term. So let me ask you about this big debate about free speech and journalistic values in the United States at the moment. Last week the columnist Barry Weiss from the New York Times who visited the Institute a little while ago resigned from the Times and she said in her resignation letter, Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times but Twitter has become its ultimate editor and obviously this is against the background of the Tom Cotton op-ed where the Times first published Senator Cotton's op-ed and then decided that publishing it had been such an egregious error that in fact the senior leadership of the op-ed team including your predecessor at the Atlantic James Bennett had to resign. And there's been a lot of commentary from Barry and others that the Times is in the middle of a civil war between younger, more aggressively left wing journalists I guess and older, more traditional liberals. So let me ask you what did you think of the way the Times played the issue of the Tom Cotton op-ed? And more generally what do you make of the New York Times as the newspaper of record these days? Is there a pass option? Do I just get to hit a button and pass that question? No. Not that might be a possibility. I want to stay at 30,000 feet if that's okay because I don't want to get into that many personalities. Except to say that James Bennett obviously is a close friend of mine. We covered the second Palestinian uprising 20 years ago together. I was at the New Yorker, he was at the Times. He then became later on the editor of the Atlantic before me. I think he's a great journalist. I think with that particular story there's some structural problems in the common understanding of what an op-ed page is for. 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, there were a few places where the readers of the New York Times would find out what a senator like Tom Cotton thinks. And so it probably had more value back then to put, let's say ostentatiously provocative pieces by people like Tom Cotton opposite the editorial. And I think there's been a generational shift in the understanding of what the purpose of that kind of mechanism is. I think that the entire operation James and Barry and everyone else kind of walked into a chasm of understanding between different forces. I would say that I'm not going to go in for dramatic language. I don't think there's a civil war anywhere, but I would say that in a time in which there's a real fear of authoritarian behavior on the part of an American president in the time of racial and social reckoning. There are people who are substantially younger than I am who have a different understanding about what their publication should be doing. And I think we're all feeling our way toward this. My hope is that if we do indeed get a new president next year, that the temperature generally comes down and that we can have less angry conversation. I don't disagree with the general observation that Twitter makes everything go too fast and get too hot. But I think we might be heading toward maybe a more useful or clarifying conversation about all of this stuff. I'm being hesitant because I haven't talked to that many people inside the Times honestly about this. I don't want to characterize what's happening inside. Let me ask maybe about The Atlantic if I can. This sort of debate is happening in The New York Times. Of course, we saw it in The New Yorker a couple of years ago. It's happened in The Atlantic and elsewhere. What's your approach? You've talked about striving to be a big-tent journalism organization at a time of national fracturing. What do you think about the merits of publishing or amplifying objectionable views? Where do you draw the line as an editor? I take something close to the ACLU view of free speech, which is that the whole idea of protecting speech is to protect reprehensible speech. Popular speech doesn't need to be protected, obviously. The issue comes when you decide who the gatekeepers are. I'm sure there are things that I find reprehensible that you don't and vice versa. Therefore, it's generally easier to just say, let a thousand flowers bloom, and we're going to publish things that you find objectionable and I find objectionable. Obviously, the notion of a big-tent can be big, but the nature of a tent is that there's something outside the tent. I'd like to have the tent be big, but I recognize that there's thousands of ideas that are too objectionable to publish. I do get that, and every day we have to ask, is that something that doesn't feel appropriate? It's something that's written out of malice. It's something written out of prejudice. It's something that's not on the level or not honest. These issues come up all the time. There's no formula. Everybody's always looking for a formula. We're in a laboratory and we just pour a little of this op-ed and a little of that op-ed into a beaker, boil it and see what happens. The line moves all the time. The line is defined by the collective wisdom and feeling of the editors in a given moment and reflecting society at large. Yes, of course I worry about outside forces telling us what we can and cannot do. I'd much rather have people come to me and tell me, why don't you publish X writer or Y writer who you haven't published before, rather than telling me who I can't publish. It's much more useful. I would say this about my particular situation is, you know, and by the way, I know the magazine American Idea sounds pretentious. It's not pretentious. It's actually from the opening manifesto of the Atlantic 163 years ago. The idea is that the Atlantic is a place where different writers can go to sort of illuminate and refine and debate what it is that America stands for, what it's meant to be, how it's supposed to behave in the world. The only possible way to do that in a barring language from a colleague is with the kind of radical humility. The radical humility says that we don't know the one true path toward the American idea, whatever that idea is. So we have to bring in different voices and we have to show them all to our readers and we have to let our readers decide. And we also have to let these voices kind of bang up against each other with respect, not in a kind of ad hominem crazy way. But, you know, robust debate and out of that tumult and out of that ideology of saying let's bring in this conservative and this liberal and this libertarian and this theocon and this socialist. Maybe we'll maybe we'll get to something. And, you know, it creates some, it creates in a period of anxiety in a period in which there is a sensorious quality on the part of many people on the left and many people on the right. It does create for, you know, some interesting phone calls, but that's okay. And in my culture, the culture of my magazine, it is more broadly accepted that hey this is what we do. So I don't ask anyone who works for us or writes for us. I never ask them to agree with the pieces that we publish. I don't agree with most of the pieces we publish. That's not my job to agree with them. My job is to make sure they're good pieces. I don't ask them to agree with it. I just say, you know, live with it respectfully. I will protect your right to say what you want as much as I'm protecting this guy or that writer or that woman or whoever. You know, that's the way to go. Sorry for the big free speech. Well, I asked for it. So let me move on from the naval gazing that I've required you to do to look at America's condition more broadly. And you're a very thoughtful observer of your own country. So let me ask you about to begin with with America's COVID performance. Now your country now is, I think, 143,000 dead. Number one, Michael, we're number one. You're making America great again. You have nearly four million confirmed cases. Now the world has been shocked and saddened really by America's inability to deal with this pandemic. And my question to you is whose fault is this? So we all automatically reached for Donald Trump and the New York Times put out a big investigation over the last couple of days where they really pinned the blame in particular on his decision in mid-April to embrace overly optimistic projections and proclaim victory over the virus. And I think you and I can agree that his performance in the briefings is shocking and he's uninterested in the science and so on. But how much of the fault is his and how much of the fault relates to broader frailties in your system, its hyper-partisanship, the decentralized federation, the sort of running down of state capacity over many decades, even perhaps the rugged individualism of Americans? How much is this Donald Trump's fault? Can I just sign on to what you just said? The reason people blame Donald Trump for this is that it's Donald Trump's fault. I mean, he's the chief executive in a federal system. I covered Obama's response to Ebola. I got to watch a president actually execute. It wasn't like he wanted to do it. It wasn't like he woke up in the morning and said, you know what I'd like to do is like to put down a deadly pandemic, but he did it. Different kind of pandemic, obviously, and a different sort of disease. But I see where you're going. And so you can, you know, Donald Trump without his enablers in the Republican-led Senate and in the broader Republican Party is an emperor without any clothes. But now he's clothed and the people who are clothing him are his allies in the Senate. I mean, they know and the Republican governors. I mean, the smart Republican governors, you have some in the South who are just at this point. I don't know engaged in criminally negligent homicide. You know, the doctors are telling them, tell your people to wear masks and they refuse because it goes to this other question you're bringing about a quote unquote rugged individualism. Rugged individualism is great. I mean, being American is great. Being part of this culture is great. The reason that America has invented most of the things that people around the world enjoy using. And, you know, and the reason that we've been a world leader for so long is in part because we have a kind of there is this kind of can do spirit. You know, nobody was holding you back. You can invent anything you want. You can go from poverty to riches. Some of its myth, obviously some of its grounded in some kind of reality. So that's that's fine. It where it becomes toxic is when people forget that they also live within a web of community and family and and people. And these communities and webs of people include people who don't look like they each other. And so that is a problem. I mean, so, so look, I'm trying to be nonpartisan about this. Donald Trump is a uniquely incompetent president. I mean, confidence doesn't actually get at what is going on here. He couldn't do what he's doing without the help of a large number of people who know better. Okay, so park that to the side. Take this individualism, this kind of, you know, cowboy, Wild West. I mean, it's not, you know, the reason we get along so well with Australians is because we're a lot alike, but there are some differences, you know. And so that rugged individualism when it's raised to the level when it goes when it goes from a level of being just sort of a personality disposition to an ideology is where it gets a little dangerous. And then of course you have to deal with the fact that I have forgot the way you put it exactly. But if you spend years running down the idea that government is capable of getting good or that government is there to do the things that we can't do individually. You know, I can't, I can't build my own FDA to test drugs to see if they're safe for my family. I can't be my own Coast Guard to protect. If I go out on a boat, I can't be the FBI to investigate. We have a government in order to do things collectively that we can't do individually. But going back to Ronald Reagan and there, right. I mean, you know, the ideology of shrinking government, you know, grounded in something real grounded in this fear, sometimes legitimate. That we waste money and we do bad things and government people aren't you government's not drawing the best people and your taxes are going to waste. But but we spent so long running down the idea of government that when you actually need a CDC and you still think, by the way, that the CDC is the best disease fighting agency in the world. And then you discover, oh, some combination of degradation or decomposition of its capabilities. Combined with a chief executive, because the boss of the CDC is ultimately the president of the United States, who not interested. Whatever you want, you know, would rather not have testing because, you know, in his mind, the more you test the bigger the disease load you have. I mean, that's a real thing that he believes we're here because we've been building toward it. We've been here because, look, quite obviously, and I'm not I'm not trying to anticipate what I think might be your next question. But quite obviously, the system that brought Donald Trump to power is broken because you would like to think that the system is built to find the best people across the landscape, political landscape, and otherwise become high officers of your country. And, you know, there were many people Donald Trump was running against and the Republican primary, who I believe would have done a good to excellent job managing the coronavirus. This is not a commentary on republicanism or conservatism. They probably would have been burdened by the same president would have been, which is this this decomposition or degradation. I'm talking about, you know, they would have taken the threat seriously. All right. I'm sure you watched Chris Wallace's interview of President Trump on Fox News. I did. I found it incredibly dispiriting. And I was particularly struck by his answer to Wallace's question towards the end. How would you look back on your time as president? And his first response was that he had been treated very unfairly and the self pity, the narcissism, the self absorption, the negativity of it. Of course, we've seen it for three years, but to watch a sort of sustained interview like that for 40 minutes really brought it home to me. So let me ask you, what does it say about the United States that you elected someone like President Trump? What are the chances of him being re-elected in November? And what will it mean for your country if he is re-elected? I'm just writing these down. Can I just stay on that point about rugged individualism and the cowboy ethos? Because it's really interesting to me. Better to go on to November, I think. Say that again. Better to go on to the November election. Fine. All I would say is that what's so... No, I think this is fascinating. We've thought this for years. Traditional-minded American males have an image of what rugged American manhood looks like. And rugged American manhood is the stoic cowboy or the stoic marshal coming into town and cleaning up the criminals. It's not whining. That's all. Let's leave it at that. Not incessant self-pitting and whining. It's interesting because even in their own terms of what their behavior looks like, it doesn't correspond. I mean, I already sort of dealt with the question of a system breakdown. I think it's the marriage of technology and the ethos of celebrity culture and the ethos of reality TV combined with a party that was, especially after eight years of the first black president, primed for racial resentment. A million different factors went into this, including by the way that the Russians helped steal the election. Let's not forget. A million different factors went into this. It was sort of this devil's storm of different pathologies that all sort of emerged and coalesced at once. Combined with an unpopular Democratic nominee. Who happened to win more popular votes than Donald Trump? Re-election. You've got to be kidding me. You think I'm going to predict who's going to win? Yes. That'd be great. Well, 11.15 p.m. on election night, 2016, to go, huh, huh, oh, that can't be. So you don't want my prediction. The, I mean, everybody who's on this call reads the same things I read in the same polls. You know, and I think I have to imagine that particularly people overseas, people who aren't American look and look at our 140,000 COVID deaths and look at the national humiliation that we're enduring. By the way, we had a very interesting piece a couple of weeks ago by Tom McTague, one of our London based English journals, London based guys, who wrote about essentially the fact that the world, I think you'll understand this, The world is used to, especially in the post-World War II era, fearing America, loathing America, respecting America, envying America. Obviously. But the world is not used to feeling sorry for America. And that's where we're at. So I think the question a lot of people overseas have is, it's not that can Donald Trump win. It's like, I don't understand the 35 or 40% of hardcore Donald Trump supporters. Like, what are they not watching? What are they not seeing here? It's one of the enduring mysteries. You know, are we dealing with a question also of what happens if he doesn't win? I mean, bridged across when we come to it. Well, no, but my assumption is there's an expression I saw that I thought was very, there's zero chance, somebody said this, zero chance that Donald Trump will leave the White House gracefully. There's a high chance he will leave the White House ungracefully. It's implausible in even the American mind, even after three and a half years of this, you know, circus. It's really implausible. The idea that the president will literally grab onto his desk and not allow himself to be removed come noon on January 20 of next year. It's beyond our capacity to understand, but, you know, on the other hand, this is a completely novel presidency. You studied the president, the American presidency. You know that this is completely not. Yeah. All right. And of course, Nancy Pelosi has told us that if necessary, the president will be fumigated out of the White House. So we've got that plan B. Let me ask you about some more positive ideas if I can. Let me ask you about the possibility or the shape of a Biden presidency. So you were very involved, I think, in working on the Atlantic's endorsement of Hillary Clinton at the last election, which I think was only the third such endorsement in the history of the magazine. Will the Atlantic be endorsing Vice President Biden for the November election? And secondly, if Biden wins, given that you're such an observer of U.S. foreign policy, what would a Biden foreign policy be like? How would it be similar to Barack Obama's? How would it be different? I mean, on the particulars, obviously, I think the, you know, the really interesting thing about that question is how much time the Biden people will need to a restore treaties and a normal pace of participation in international organizations, right? We've got to get back into the World Health Organization. They've got to revitalize the Iran nuclear deal. They've got to talk about climate change in new ways. So there's going to be, you know, a huge amount of effort just to going, doing the technical things that need to get done in order to bring America out of its isolation and back into these structures, the normal structures, and then some of the Obama invented structures like the Iran deal. The second piece is going to be a lot harder, obviously, and I don't think America recovers from this very quickly. I mean, Joe Biden or his Vice President and Secretary of State or all of them are going to have to go around the world first to allies and say, you know, essentially, hey, listen, I'm sorry I got drunk at the party. You know, we, I've been having a midlife crisis. I don't know what's wrong with me, you know, but that's over. It's over. It's over. We're back. We're back. And then a lot of foreign leaders and say, great to see you, Joe. They all know him. Obviously, great to see you. Don't really believe you because you are the leader of an unstable country. You're the leader of some sort of bipolar polity, right? And we don't necessarily believe you. So a lot of work is just going to go into reassurance of allies. A lot of work is going to go into resetting relationships with adversaries, right? Like, like, like figuring out how do we contain China? How do we punish Russia for all of its interventions, cyber interventions and otherwise. And so a lot of it is just going to be reassurance resetting, re-engagement. It will be Obama, Obama foreign policy, maybe even a little bit more, because the left and the Democratic Party has swayed now than it had four years ago. So you're not going to see obviously an interventionist, although Biden is not really an interventionist in some enormous way. Nobody's an interventionist anymore, really. But, you know, you're going to see something that looks akin to the Obama foreign policy. I'll just add to this that I don't want to be overly cynical about it. I think if Joe Biden wins, there are prime ministers and presidents and kings and sultans and whoever all around the world. We're just going to breathe out and say, you know, call Joe Biden up and say, please come over and spend some time and we'll be very, very happy to see you. And it'll be interesting. That'll be interesting. I mean, China won't be happy, Russia won't be happy, there are other countries that won't be happy. But allies are kind of allies are freaked out because we're supposed to be the mature big brother who handles crises. I don't know. I mean, you can speak on the Australian side of that, obviously. Yeah, well, I think, well, Mr. Trump is very unpopular with Australians and and yeah, Australians are shocked and really horrified according to our polling about what's happening. So and Australians tend to be in favour of free trade. They believe in alliances. They like the idea of American leadership of the world. So every core element of Mr. Trump's worldview kind of conflicts with Australians instinct. So if Australians had a vote, you could be even more confident, I think in November. But let me ask you. You mentioned you mentioned that Biden knows everybody. Biden's been around forever. But let me let me let me ask you about the quote from Bob Gates, Obama's Defense Secretary. You might remember in 2014, Gates said that Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. And it's true that Biden, for example, opposed the Gulf War, which is generally regarded as a success. He supported the Iraq War, which is universally regarded as a failure. He opposed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He opposed the troop surges that brought some stability to Iraq and Afghanistan. So that's a pretty skating assessment from Gates. What do you think of Vice President Biden's foreign policy instincts? To be fair, that's Gates's view of Biden's foreign policy. To be fair, also that if you're a Democratic politician, your decision in 2003 on Iraq was very much predicated on what you've voted the last time in Kuwait. Now, I would say that obviously, I mean, I don't think anybody would disagree that a vote against the first Gulf War, which was, you know, a kind of Westphalian war, you know, to protect a sovereign state from invasion. That shouldn't have been that controversial, even in a dovish party, but it was. And of course, it was a successful war, so everybody now says, well, that was a good one. And so, you know, I understand then why he would come back and toggle to authorizing Bush to go forward or authorizing Bush to have the power to go forward in Iraq and do that. I don't know. I think your judgment might be slightly harsh. I mean, he, as I understand it, he raised serious qualms about the Afghan raid, but I think that's exactly the sort of role that somebody who has the confidence of the president should raise. Hey, Baraka, are you sure you want to go do this and raise some questions? Though he's been for, I think his view on Afghanistan is we're coming around, or the country came around to his view, which is minimal footprint. We want to fight terrorists. We cannot change the nature of Afghanistan with invasions. I think on Russia, you know, he's where the majority of the foreign policy establishment is. I don't know a lot about what he says about China. You know, I have to remind you or tell you that no one cares right now in America about foreign policy, particularly during the COVID crisis, but even before. We are, we've become remarkably inward looking and part of that is kind of this, you know, mindless triumphalism on the right and kind of like self loathing on the left, combined to make for a not very productive foreign policy conversation. Maybe that's maybe that's what I'm getting at. So, you know, foreign policy national security issues generally don't move post Cold War, don't move the discussion about presidential elections that much. This time it's much less. I mean, this is that we're dealing with an overwhelming one overwhelming problem and Joe Biden strategy is to stay in his house and say on television and hope that the American people are tired of what they've been getting. And how long can that strategy persist, do you think? You mean the strategy? Well, the guy can't go outside very much. I mean, he's 78, you know, and I'm in Trump is 74. And there's nothing to go to, like, like, you know, anybody who's responsible would say, well, we're not going to have a rally. Politicians go from rally to rally to rally. You're not going to have a rally. I mean, Trump will have rallies because it's a source of emotional sustenance for him. But it is the oddest political campaign, obviously, because there's no physical manifestation. We're all just used to seeing that physical manifestation. You know, the conventions are not going to look like anything really, they're going to be mainly virtual. And so, by the way, it seems it seems like an excellent way to run for president in the sense that you probably can sleep till 7 or 7 30 in the morning. You're not waking up in a, you know, days in or multi six and wherever, you know, outside Akron, Ohio and running 12 different rallies at once. It seems seems like a great way to run for president, actually. But I think it lasts. I mean, here's the thing. You know, Donald Trump, just a few hours ago, a couple of hours ago, praised Elaine Maxwell, however you pronounce her name, the alleged lover slash whatever, procurer of Jeffrey Epstein and says he wishes her the best or something along those lines. But every day there's something that's completely absurd that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth or the White House. If you're Joe Biden, you're like, okay, there's my plan for tax reform. And here's my plan for health care for, you know, for children, read it at will. But I'm not going to go make, I'm not going to be undisciplined and make statements because I'm going to let Trump say stuff. Don't interrupt your enemy when he's making mistakes. Exactly. You just said it much better than I did. One of the elements of the Biden's campaign that will be interesting and possibly important is the announcement of his pick for a vice presidential candidate. Now, the Atlantic published a piece recently arguing that Biden's vice president could be the most powerful vice president in history. Who would you like to see in that slot? Who do you think it might be? Come on. You can't ask me that. I'm just a journalist. I want to see, I'm not going to answer that question. I mean, I think we're going to see, well, we know we're going to see a woman. He's promised that. I think we'll see a woman of color. You can see a black woman, most likely. I think there's obviously, I mean, I'm not telling you anything that doesn't know. I mean, the chances are high. It's Kamala Harris, who is young ish and vibrant and has a national and I think the point is true. You know, there's a really high likelihood or decent likelihood that Joe Biden is a one term president and that he's a bridge to a future party where a future party in which 75 year old white male politicians don't dominate. And so obviously whoever he picks, let's assume it's a black woman. Anyone he picks will have an automatic sort of leg up on the competition for a nomination should that happen in the next election, which makes me think sometimes that maybe he will go a little bit outside the usual thinking and pick someone who might not be a natural born politician or someone who might not want to run for president. So he doesn't have to from his second year on be sort of like in the shadow of a permanent campaign to replace him. All right. All right. Now I've got a bunch of other questions, Jeff, but we've got about 15 minutes left and I want to give some of our audience members an opportunity to ask you questions. So we've collected a number of questions that people have submitted. If you haven't submitted a question yet, but you'd like to please do note now by the Q&A question. So let me let me put a couple of questions to you, Jeff. The first is from David Collins and this is interesting. We've been talking to date about how I guess President Trump on any objective measure doesn't deserve to be elected as president. That's my summary of what we've been discussing. But David Collins from Sydney asks, what needs to happen for Trump to be reelected given that he's now on a downward spiral? What would you what do you think would need to happen in the next 100 days to see Trump reelected? Well, you know, obviously a well, this is the part that's that's so mysterious to people. It's as the president, you have enormous power to shape a whole of government disease response. And you would think that one thing you would try to do is vanquish the virus. Not going to do that shows no inclination or interest in doing that. Economy could turn up somehow doesn't seem likely again, based on the fact that you really can't turn the economy on until you turn the virus off. His main play, especially in these last weeks is to sort of poke at race and division, ethnic and race division in the country. You know, these protests against statues from the Confederacy is a classic example. And I, you know, we've run a lot of pieces about this. It just seems obvious that his play is to stoke white fear and white resentment of a coming demographic or the becoming demographic change in America. The change that shocked people 11 years ago when Barack Obama was elected 12 years ago when Barack Obama was elected. And, and hope that because of our unique election system that you win enough states you can't win the popular vote with that but you win enough states electoral votes in order to achieve that was what he did the last time. And so I think the fear on a lot of on the part of a lot of people is that he will spend the next months stoking anxiety and fear and anger and deploying racism to advance his electoral cause and, you know, I'm completely serious I would never predict what would happen in the election by who's going to win, but say that if he were to win that is his most likely path, just enough fear and anxiety that it motivates. And then of course obviously, you know, there's a lot of talk about how these forces can suppress votes and in certain states where that are in their hearing, press the black votes press other vote. So, you know, there and then, you know, we cannot discount Russian interference, the interference of others. There are a lot of forces here that are at play. On that topic of voter suppression, Caitlin Ryan asks, would there ever be an appetite for compulsory voting in the United States as there is in Australia to, to, to, you know, to provide for a more fulsome democracy. No. We're American man you can't make us do anything. All right. Well, let me ask a follow up. Let me ask. Interesting. I mean, it's an interesting idea. Just it seems culturally far and it's not in the cards right now. Let me ask a follow up question. Can I just add to that to her. We don't even get many very few people get the day off on election day. We don't, in various ways, we don't make it easy to vote. Yeah. Like the opposite of sort of mandating that you have to go to the polls and do something. Well, let me ask you about that. I mean, we heard in that Chris Wallace interview, Trump was complaining about mail in voting. And it is amazing to me that there's so much inconsistency across the United States about voting, but also ranker about different elements of your electoral system, whether it's to do with early voting or voter registration or voter ID requirements or whatever it is. How is it that the world's leading developed country doesn't have a proper national electoral system that can guarantee uniform, consistent, accurate and fair elections? Thank goodness. I am not the spokesman for the United States of America. That's all I can say. Well, is there is there any suggestion? I mean, there's so much outrage moment about Donald Trump. Could this change things? Yeah, maybe. I mean, you know, I tend to think that people's attention waxes and lanes. It would be, it would be interesting to see if there's staying power in this movement for change on matters of race and equality. Right. And we see a more, we see some early signs that that's going to, that's going to change. The voting is one aspect of that, obviously. Look, with 50 different states, plus a District of Columbia, plus some other territories, everyone has their own. Localism is the, is the, is the religion. Localism is, is great in many cases. Yeah. It's, it's, you see great manifestations of democracy in many small communities, large communities, even at the statewide level. But voting is a voting is a, is a local matter, and it's very hard to impose something from above. It's like each constituency has to impose excellence on its, on its election systems and voting systems in our system. All right. We have a question from Sophia Garadesca. I hope I pronounced that correctly on a similar topic. And Sophia says, it's clear that Trump supporters are driven by disinformation on social media platforms, primarily Facebook. How influential will Trump's digital campaign be this time at this time around? And what do you think about Biden's digital strategy? I don't have much knowledge on Biden's digital strategy to say. Actually, one of the most interesting outside groups sort of constantly poking at Trump is this Lincoln project, which is disaffected. Yeah. People have seen their often very skating and humorous ads about Donald Trump on the, on the Trump side, you know, I mean, they just, he just shook up his campaign. The alleged genius who was doing it is now demoted. You know, there's an interesting corollary here, you know, there's this fear and David from and others at my magazine have written about this, this, you know, the authoritarian instincts of Donald Trump and people around him. But David and others have pointed out that it is tempered by by incompetence or laziness or or in other words, the critique is that Donald Trump is an incompetent authoritarian. And so on the one hand, I get it, they're doing, they might have great systems to manipulate social media and manipulate voters through social media. On the other hand, sometimes I think people overvalue or over index for their even nefarious genius. You know, I mean, without putting a value judgment on it, you know that that they over index on the idea that Oh, these people know what they're doing. And they're going to pull this out because they pulled it out before. I don't know. I don't know. I just think you have to be open to that possibility. All right, I've got a couple of questions back on the media topics we were discussing earlier. I have a question that's come in from one of my board members, Mark Ryan, who's also executive director of a new Institute for journalism and ideas in Australia called the Juth Nielsen Institute. And Mark asks as follows, he says Harper's magazine recently published a famous letter in defense of what we might call the traditional liberal approach to free speech and opinion. A large number of prominent writers, editors and academics signed that letter. Were you asked to sign it? If yes, why didn't you sign it? If not, would you have signed it if you'd been asked? I don't sign letters anyway. I mean, if I have something to say, I'll just say it. I don't need like a bunch of people to stand with. It's my nature. I'm also like, I'm also run a publication. I have people who, I have people on my staff who signed the letter. I have people on our staff who didn't like the letter. I have to be sort of a neutral arbiter of that sort of thing. Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, it was an interesting cultural moment. And, you know, obviously, I mean, you've heard me speak now about my own views on this wasn't so much about free speech as it was about quote unquote, cancel culture. It's not about, I think people make a mistake when they when they conflate to issues, you know, sort of Twitter criticism on the one hand, and effort, organized efforts to get you or someone else in an academic job in a journalism job fired because of some wrong think, quote unquote, wrong think expression of thought. And, you know, obviously, I'm not I'm not in favor of that. I mean, every each each instance has to be judged on its own merits. Obviously, there are, as I said, there are things that one just can't say, be decent to say. But I think this letter was motivated to a large degree, not exclusively but to a large degree about what happened at the New York Times with James Bennett. And it was alluded to in the letter. And I think there is anxiety that, especially a younger generation frame I use before is. And this is a gross oversimplification, I believe, but that the young generation is more interested in suppression of speaking disagrees with rather than argument. Okay, let's just, you know, part of it is the degradation of the American discourse, because, because Trump. Trumpism is not an ideal. It's not a recognizable Republican ideology in many ways. It's like, you know, I would publish pro Trump pieces, if they could pass through fact checking. Right. But we have we have we have a truthfulness and evidence standards that make some of those pieces very hard to get through. So, I mean, I think these things, I think they can't be disaggregated. But the Harper's letter is an interesting moment. And I think a lot of people are probably looking to the extent that people broadly know about this they look at at a bunch of, you know, intellectuals, you know, eating each other up about obscure subjects. Let me ask you, we've had a few questions about China. Let me put, let me, let me put a question to China to you. I know you're not an expert or you don't hold yourself out as an expert on China or China policy, but you are a long time observer of the foreign policy establishment in Washington. There was a piece that you might have seen a couple of days ago by Janan Ganesh in the FT remarking on how little debate there is about China in the United States, given that the United States is is facing very significant decisions when it comes to China. And actually, both sides are rather out, out toughing each other competing with each other to see who's tougher. You see Biden's ads on China, his main criticism of Trump is that he's too tough. What's your sense of the national mood on China? I hear what you say that China is not top of mind. You've got other things to think about. But is America heading sort of inevitably into a kind of a Cold War conflict with China? Do you think? I think one factor that might accelerate a kind of disentanglement. I mean, the reason the reason that it's very, very hard to have a Cold War with China is that our economies are both interlinked in a very obvious way, existential way, almost, right? But I think one of the things that people haven't picked up yet in really clear ways, and maybe this won't last, is there's a real feeling on the part of experts and non-experts alike that our supply chains are incredibly vulnerable, right? And that once we come out of the pandemic and let's assume it's a different president, there's going to be a lot of talk about how do we disentangle ourselves from the need for China in our economic life. That could serve to lower the temperature. Look, if Biden comes in, the temperature probably gets lower anyway, because I think there's probably going to be just sort of, you know, less chest thumping anyway. And they're simultaneously less chest thumping, but more recognition on the part of the Chinese government, because the Chinese government isn't scared of Donald Trump. And they know that Donald Trump is purely transactional and they know that Donald Trump doesn't care. Well, we know he doesn't care about Uighurs and he doesn't really care about Hong Kong. There are people in the State Department and other parts who might, but not Donald Trump. And so the Chinese might understand a Biden relationship as one where it could be sort of calmer, but I think that that a Biden administration would actually be tougher on policy. But I also think that there will be a substantial move to try to figure ways to disentangle the economies and that could either lower the temperature or actually make conflict more likely. And I don't want to predict, obviously, but I mean, going back to this FT piece, the remarkable, the remarkable thing about this is that we're not having a regular campaign for two reasons anyway, one where I'll lock down to one of the candidates is Donald Trump. So even in normal, quote unquote, presidential elections, foreign policy is usually not the main topic at hand. Now it's really diminished. So I don't want to predict what will happen. I know that it feels as if a lot of people believe that China has overplayed its hand. I'm not necessarily agreeing with that because it's playing a hand that Donald Trump is allowing it to play right now. It does feel to me, actually, if I can finish with an editorial of my own that China is missing an historic opportunity. They got this great opportunity with someone like Donald Trump as president and by overplaying their situation, they're missing that opportunity. But Jeff, we have a lot of other questions coming in, but we've run out of time. We'll have to continue this conversation, perhaps in person when the coronavirus passes. I want to thank you for giving us an hour of your time. Thank you for this fascinating conversation. You didn't tell us whether the Atlantic would be endorsing the former Vice President Joe Biden, but we'll keep reading the magazine to see if we're looking at Australian candidates at this point. Sorry. We're looking at mainly Australian candidates at this point. We need people who are like Americans, but not traumatized like Americans at the moment. We'll look at you. Thank you for that. And thank you for producing such a fascinating magazine. You mentioned you have standards of truthfulness and evidence in publishing the magazine. And I think at this time, we all appreciate that. So thank you, Jeff Goldberg. Please stay safe in Washington. Thank you, everyone else, for joining us for this latest Lowey Institute live event. Before we go, let me put in an ad for the Lowey Institute's podcasts. In the latest episode of COVIDcast, my colleague, Herve Lemakia, interviews the former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. In my own podcast, the director's chair, I've just interviewed Peter Varghese, the former head of foreign affairs. The next guest on the director's chair, I'm delighted to say will be Fiona Hill, Donald Trump's former Russia advisor, who was profiled recently in Jeff's old magazine, The New Yorker. In the meantime, thank you again, Jeff Goldberg. And from everyone at the Lowey Institute, thank you all for joining us today. And please stay safe and well. Goodbye.