Mark Meadows and the “Congeniality of Evil”

09/02/23 • 34 min

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The Washington Roundtable: Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former right-hand man, took the stand in Georgia this week to argue that his actions in the election-racketeering case—in which he was indicted two weeks ago, alongside eighteen co-conspirators, including Trump—were taken in his capacity as a federal official. For that reason, he and his lawyers petitioned for the case against him to be moved from state to federal court. Meadows, who has been a significant and disruptive force in American politics since he arrived in Washington, in 2013, may be trying to have his case heard before a more sympathetic jury. “I don’t think there’s anyone I can think of in American politics,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says, “who’s put his finger to the wind more often to try to figure out which way it’s blowing.” What does Meadows’s rise—and now, potential fall—teach us about the Republican Party today? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos weigh in.

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Does Diplomacy Have a Chance of Ending War in Ukraine?

It’s been eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine. In that time, Russia has annexed four Ukrainian territories; the mercenary Wagner Group staged a coup against Putin, and then its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a mysterious plane explosion; Ukraine mounted a successful counter-offensive, and then a less successful one, which is currently ongoing. All the while, the U.S. has engaged in what seems like a proxy war with Russia, imposing extensive sanctions and providing thirty billion dollars in weapons, training, and intelligence to Ukraine. Some foreign-policy experts are questioning this strategy.

Keith Gessen, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, has been covering the war in Ukraine since its beginning. This week, he published a piece titled “The Case for Negotiating with Russia,” about the analysts who are pushing for diplomacy over warfare. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the state of the conflict, and why it’s the U.S. that could ultimately decide how it ends.

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Bob Woodward Discusses His Trump Tapes

Bob Woodward has been writing about the White House for more than fifty years, going toe to toe with nearly every President after Richard Nixon. Woodward is every inch the reporter, not one to editorialize. But, during his interviews with Donald Trump at the time of the COVID-19 crisis, Woodward found himself shouting at the President—explaining how to make a decision, and trying to browbeat him into listening to public-health experts. Woodward has released audio recordings of some of their interviews in a new audiobook called “The Trump Tapes,” which documents details of Trump’s state of mind, and also of Woodward’s process and craft. Despite having written critically of Trump in 2018, Woodward found his access unprecedented. “I could call him anytime, [and] he would call me,” Woodward tells David Remnick. His wife, Elsa Walsh, “used to joke [that] there’s three of us in the marriage.”