Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois, is best known for his service on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. He and Liz Cheney were the only two Republicans on that committee, and completely noncoincidentally, neither one is in Congress today. The new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is more typical of the House Republican caucus: He was a leader of the election deniers.

In his new book, Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, Kinzinger details his manifold struggles: with his conscience, with his ambition, and, ultimately, with the Republicans who attempted to subvert the Constitution. A six-term congressman and an Air Force veteran, Kinzinger today is chastened but still somewhat hopeful—not hopeful about the short-term future of the Republican Party, but hopeful that pro-democracy voters are still sufficient in number to turn back the authoritarians.

I first met Kinzinger in 2014, when we were both members of the late Senator John McCain’s delegation to the Munich Security Conference. Also in that delegation were Senator Lindsey Graham and then-Representative Mike Pompeo, who later became Donald Trump’s CIA director and secretary of state.

[Peter Wehner: The man who refused to bow]

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of a conversation I had with Kinzinger earlier this month on stage at the Democracy360 conference, sponsored by the Karsh Institute at the University of Virginia. We started by talking about that now-unlikely constellation of Republicans: Kinzinger, McCain, Graham, and Pompeo.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You guys were all in the same camp, the muscular internationalist Republicans. Two of you went one way, and two of you went another way. What happened?

Adam Kinzinger: Craven politics, craven power—that’s what it is. This is something I still try to grapple with every day, when I look back on January 6. I always thought everybody had a red line. Like, okay, we can play politics to a point, but there’s a red line we'll never cross. I’ve learned that’s not the case.

I’d say [we] are all still probably for a muscular foreign policy. The difference, though, between people that went one way or another is the recognition that U.S. foreign policy also means we have to have a healthy democracy at home, and that democracy-building overseas is fine, but having a strong democracy here, where people have faith in the voting system and faith that whoever gets the most votes will win, is just as important.

I think there are unfortunately too many people that got into the Trump sphere, that it  just became about power, identity, and not looking at the broader picture of your impact in this world.

Goldberg: So I want to stay on this for a while because I want you to name names.

Kinzinger: I can name names for an hour. A couple off the top of my head: One of the ones I’m most disappointed in generally is [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, because I always thought that McCarthy had some version of a political soul. And I’ve come to realize that to him it was all about just the attainment of power. Somebody like Ted Cruz never surprised me. He’s always been a charlatan. But Lindsey Graham has also been a big disappointment to me, because I’ve traveled with Lindsey, leading congressional-delegation trips around the world. I always thought he and I were eye to eye on a lot of these foreign-policy issues. And to watch him so closely adopt and closely support Donald Trump, when Trump was doing exactly what Graham was preaching against just prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene, was a pretty disappointing moment.

[Read: ‘We put sharp knives on the hands of children’]

During this speaker fiasco, I would listen to names during the roll call, people like Mike McCaul, people like Mike Gallagher, and hear them say the name Jim Jordan and know, for a fact, they have no respect for Jim Jordan. But it’s all about that determination to survive politically. I have come to learn that people fear losing their identity and losing their tribe more than they come to fear death.

Goldberg: You saw Lindsey Graham throughout this process. What were conversations like? Did you ever just say, “Lindsey, what are you doing?”

Kinzinger: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, our relationship hasn’t been that strong in the last few years, obviously. So I can’t say there were recent conversations, but it would just be like, “What’s going on? So Donald Trump did this thing. Why are you okay with that?”

People have given so much of their soul, of their values. They’ve compromised so much that at some point to stop compromising, or to recognize that this is a mistake and you need to correct course, would be an indictment against who you are and what you have done for the last four or five years. And I think Lindsey has been a victim of that. He liked the idea of being in the room with Donald Trump.

And I will tell you, I’ve met with Donald Trump a number of times; he is actually one of the most fun people to meet with, because he’s crazy, but it’s like a fun crazy. And he’s really good at drawing you in and making you feel seen at that moment, because he knows how to manipulate you. And it works perfectly with Lindsey. Lindsey says, “Now I have a seat at the table. I care about foreign policy.” But what he didn’t realize is that bargain came with selling who he was as a person.

Goldberg: If John McCain hadn’t died, would Graham have gone over?

Kinzinger: I don’t think so. I think Lindsey Graham needs a strong person to  mentor him or carry him, and it was John McCain. And when John McCain passed, the next guy, the strongman that Lindsey Graham was drawn to, was Donald Trump.

Goldberg: You got to Congress when the Republican Party is still the Republican Party you imagined it to be. One question that people like you always get is: Were you kidding yourself the whole time, or did something actually change?

Kinzinger: Looking back, I can say, “Oh, yeah, there were signs from the very beginning,” but I was part of the moderate Republicans, who constantly had this optimistic view that the Republican Party was this thing of smaller government, hope, opportunity, strong national defense, that kind of stuff. And I always just saw these elements of crazy nationalism, of authoritarianism, of racism exist in the party, but it’s a battle. And I’m fighting on the good side here to try to save the party. And then when Donald Trump came, we lost that fight.

I think the moment I started to realize, like, Okay, we have lost, was January 6. Before that point, I thought, Donald Trump is going to lose; people are going to wake up. Even on January 6 I said, “People are definitely going to wake up now.”

Now, with the benefit of time and looking back, I can say, “You know what? Those strains were there.” Some of them were hidden because it was not yet socially acceptable to say things like “Let’s throw out the Constitution.” I hear a lot of people say “You’re naive, because the Republican Party’s always been this way.” And inevitably those are people on the left that have always had a bad view of the GOP. I understand the viewpoint, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think there were a lot of really good factions in the GOP.

Goldberg: Explain the psychology there. What motivates this outburst of anger on the part of the voters that led to Trump’s triumph?

Kinzinger: I think the resentment came from Fox News and the right-wing-media echo chamber. Why do I say that? So this is something I take a lot of personal blame for being part of as well, although I think I did better than most.

In 2010, we learned that fear is the best way to raise money ever. If I send you an email and it says, “Dear Jeffrey, I want to lower tax rates and we need some help, blah, blah, blah,” you may give me money. But if I send you an email and it says, “Nancy Pelosi is trying to murder you and your family,” and in essence, I convince you that I’m the only thing standing between you and the life of you or your family, you’ll part with anything, including a significant part of your fixed income from Social Security. So in 2010, we learned this. And instead of using that kind of fire in a controlled way like politicians do, sometimes we let it burn. There was always this fire going, and we stoked it too far.

Goldberg: How do you reach people who haven’t been reached, to change their minds? There’s 30, 35 percent of the voters who are hard-core.

Kinzinger: Well, if the January 6 committee didn’t do it and the people still believe the scandals, I’m not sure that 35 percent can be turned on a dime today. But here’s the two things we can do. We can convince their children. You would be amazed how many children have a different viewpoint than their parents, and how they can pull their parents off the ledge. I did that with my parents when I got elected. My dad would call, and he’s watching Fox News all the time. And I finally said, “Dad, I’m in the middle of this and I don’t have near the stress you do, and you can’t even see the difference. Right?” And he’s like, “You know what? You’re right.”

The other thing is, if only every one of those people running against Donald Trump in the primary would tell the dang truth, people would actually believe it. Donald Trump gets indicted with all these different indictments and then they ask, you know, ‘What do you think, Tim Scott?” “What do you think, Nikki Haley?” “What do you think, Vivek Ramaswamy? What are your feelings on these indictments?” But every one of those people say this is a witch hunt.

Goldberg: I appreciate the view. I’m not sure I believe you, though. The truest thing that Donald Trump ever said was that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him. It seems like he understood something elemental there.

Kinzinger: I guess I would caveat that. I don’t necessarily believe, if Nikki Haley alone came out and said it, that it would be game over for Donald Trump. I think this is a specific moment where if all these people told the base the truth, they could damage his support significantly.

Goldberg: Stay on this question of Trump and Trumpism. Who do you blame for his return?

Kinzinger: One person: Kevin McCarthy. And I’m going to tell you exactly why. So there was a period after January 6 for two or three weeks. It was quiet. And we’d meet in a room with all the Republican men and women of Congress. Kevin would stand up, all that stuff—if you’re in the room, you could sense there was this trepidation in the room about, like, “We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know where we’re going. What are we supposed to do?” Until the day Kevin McCarthy showed up with a picture of Donald Trump. And just like that, everything changed.

[David Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?]

Goldberg: You’re talking about his visit to Mar-a-Lago.

Kinzinger: His visit to Mar-a-Lago. Those of us that voted for impeachment were leading the charge against Donald Trump. People were actually coming up to us and asking us, “How do I do this?” We were talking about “How do we get the downtown PAC community to only support those that are pro-democracy?” We were going to set up our own scoring and vetting system to say This person voted against certification; this person voted for it, and only give money to the people that voted for it. And you think about the power that could have had.

Then that picture happened in Mar-a-Lago, and all of a sudden we went from considering doing a vote of no confidence against Kevin McCarthy because of his role in January 6 to a point where everybody turned against me, Liz Cheney, and the others that voted to impeach, all because of that picture.

Goldberg: So you must be at least a little bit happy about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall.

Kinzinger: I’m very happy about it. I’m very happy. I’ve got to be honest. I’m sorry. It’s not great for the country, but it’s really good.

Goldberg: You’re describing Kevin McCarthy as a person who went along with the radical pro-Trump, anti-democracy right and then he eventually got eaten by them.

Kinzinger: This dynamic to an extent has always existed. It would be people like me fighting against the Jim Jordans, but it was behind the scenes. Now it’s brought out to the open because for the first time you now see the people like me—I will call them the moderates, even though there’s really no moderates left. The moderates are finally standing up and fighting back with some of the tactics that Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan used.

Why is it that terrorists are so powerful? Because they’re willing to do something that most other people aren’t: you know, commit an act of terror if you’re a legislative terrorist, like John Boehner called Jim Jordan very accurately, and he’s willing to vacate the chair or Matt Gaetz is willing to vacate the chair. They’re powerful unless people push back. And that’s what’s happening. How does a Kevin McCarthy get to this point? A man who I thought had a red line, I always thought he was a very good politician and that he could play around the edges, but he wouldn’t cross [the line]. And in January, he cut a deal that made what happened a few weeks ago completely obvious. Everybody knew this would happen. That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are. And this is a moment where the Republican Party either will collapse in a heap of fire or they will actually fix themselves somehow through this.

The country needs a healthy Republican Party regardless of what you feel about the Republican Party, because we need a liberal and a conservative philosophy competing in the United States. That’s what a healthy democracy is.

Goldberg: Does Trumpism survive Trump?

Kinzinger: Five months ago, if we were sitting here and you said, “Does it survive past Trump?” I’d be like, absolutely. Because Trumpism has now been learned by others. But I’m starting to play with the idea that maybe enough Republicans are starting to get exhausted of Trump and maybe Trumpism doesn’t survive. Donald Trump got elected in front of a wave of people that wanted to break the system. But there is an undercurrent right now of people that are desperate to fix and heal the system. And when that right person comes along, like an Obama-type character, I think that may revolutionize the future, but I’m not sure.

Goldberg: Can you imagine yourself back in Congress as a Republican?

Kinzinger: That’s two different questions. Could I imagine myself back in the House? No. Could I imagine myself back in politics? Yes. Could I imagine myself back in politics as a Republican? Not in the current environment.

Goldberg: In other words, do you think that the fever would break to a point where the Republican Party would be a different party and have you back?

Kinzinger: I think someday; I just don’t know when that’s going to be. And it’s not now. I think if I ran as a Republican now, I wouldn’t do too well.

Goldberg: Are you still a Republican?

Adam Kinzinger: It’s an interesting question. I will not vote Republican. I voted Democratic last election. I intend to vote Democratic this election, not because I’ve changed my mind necessarily—I’ve moderated, you know, quite a bit—but because I think it is a binary choice. Do you like democracy or don’t you like democracy? And I think that the only thing we can vote on in 2024 is democracy. So I’m not giving up the title Republican yet, because I haven’t changed. They have. And I refuse to give them that satisfaction yet. But I feel like a man without a party.

Goldberg: Why do your colleagues want to stay in Congress so badly?

Kinzinger: I don’t know.

Goldberg: It doesn’t look like the greatest job.

Kinzinger: It’s not the greatest job. But, okay, when you walk into a room for five or 10 years and no matter what room you walk in, unless it’s the White House, you are the center of attention because you’re the highest-ranking person there and you’ve spent your whole life to attain this job—a lot of my colleagues spent everything to become that. Losing that freaks you out. As somebody that announced I wasn’t running again, the thing you fear the most is how do I feel the second after I put out that press release?

My co-pilot in Iraq sent me a text that said, “I’m ashamed to have ever served with you.” I had family that sent me a certified letter saying they’re ashamed to share my last name, that I was working for the devil. I used to laugh about it 10 months ago, but I’ve really allowed myself to accept what damage that’s done to me and my family. It’s not easy to go through. But I’m going to tell you, I have 0.0 percent regret for what I did, and I would do it all the exact same again.

When I first heard that Israeli civilians were being massacred on the country’s Gaza border, I thought of my friend Amir Tibon. Amir is an exceptionally talented journalist who is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and has devoted his life and skills to humanistic coverage of what can often be a dehumanizing region. His writing includes award-winning reporting on efforts to achieve a two-state solution and a biography of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

On Sunday, I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead.

That’s because Tibon lives in Nahal Oz, a small community bordering Gaza that has no Iron Dome missile defense to protect it. On Saturday, it came under mortar fire from above and was invaded on the ground by Hamas terrorists. During their incursion into Israel, they murdered more than 900 Israelis, while brutalizing and kidnapping many others, most of them civilians. The death toll is continuing to rise.

Tibon and his family survived the indiscriminate slaughter, but only after enduring a horrifying ordeal. Just before he put his two young daughters to bed tonight, we spoke about what happened, how he was saved, why he thinks Israel arrived at this point, and what he would like to see from the international community in the days ahead. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Yair Rosenberg: What does your life look like right now?

Amir Tibon: I’m happy to be alive. I’m happy my family is alive. I’m staying with my extended family. I’m worried sick about friends and neighbors who were injured or kidnapped into Gaza. And I’m worried about my country.

Rosenberg: As a religiously observant Jew, I don’t use electronics or access the internet on Jewish holidays or the Sabbath, so by the time I logged on after two days offline, you had posted that you were safe and shared the harrowing story about what you and your family experienced. Can you talk about what you endured?

Tibon: I’m happy that you missed the events as they were happening, because it was a dark day, really the worst day in the history of the state of Israel. It’s Saturday, October 7. We’re in bed, sleeping. I live with my wife and two young daughters in Kibbutz Nahal Oz. It’s a small community, 500 people, located directly on Israel’s border with Gaza. A beautiful place, very resilient, very courageous people, with a very strong sense of community and togetherness. But it’s Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle.

My wife, Miri, immediately pushes me. We run from our bedroom to what we call the safe room. In every house in our community and other communities along the border with Gaza, there is a room that is built of very strong concrete that can withstand a direct hit from a mortar or a rocket. And in most families, that’s where they put the kids to sleep every night. So we run to the safe room where our two daughters are: Galia is three and a half years old; Carmel is one and a half years old.

They don’t know that anything is happening. We shut the door and we wait. I mean, this is something we’re accustomed to. When you live on the border with Gaza, attacks like this happen from time to time. You wait sometimes an hour, you pack your bags meanwhile, and when there is a break of a few minutes, you just shove the kids in the car and you go away from the border toward a more secure place.

But this time as we were packing, I heard the most chilling noise I’ve heard in my life. Automatic gunfire in the distance. First I’m hearing this gunfire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road, then I hear it from the neighborhood, and then I hear it outside my window. I’m in the room with my wife and I hear the gunfire directly outside my window, as well as shouting. I understand Arabic. I understood exactly what was happening: that Hamas has infiltrated our kibbutz, that there are terrorists outside my window, and that I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls and I don’t know if anyone is going to come to save us.

That’s how it started.

Rosenberg: One thing for people to understand: Nahal Oz is very, very close to the Gaza border. And that’s why you guys don’t have something like Iron Dome and why you are in the safe room in the first place.

Tibon: Yeah, we’re so close that Iron Dome, which is an amazing invention that protects large parts of Israel from rocket fire, is not relevant in our area.

But I’ll tell you something. In a way, the fact that they shot the mortars at our community before they broke through the border saved a lot of people’s lives, because it caused people to run into the safe room. And this safe room, if you lock it properly, is very hard to open from the outside. A lot of people were barricaded in those safe rooms for hours and sometimes an entire day. In a lot of cases, the terrorists tried to break in and they couldn’t.

What happened in our case was that we were sitting there in the dark. A few minutes after we got in and we heard this gunfire, the electricity stopped. We had no food. We did have some water. And we’re telling our daughters: “You have to be quiet now. You have to be absolutely quiet. Not a word. You can’t cry. Can’t talk. It’s dangerous.” And my girls were absolute heroes. They waited silently in the dark for 10 hours and they did not cry. They understood. Maybe that’s not the right word, but they felt that we were dead serious about this. So we’re with them in the dark, and they’re completely silent.

In the beginning, we still had cell reception. A short time later, there was no cell reception either. I texted my parents: “There are terrorists outside.” We actually thought they were inside the house, because they were firing live ammunition into our house and we heard it as if it’s inside. And we’re looking at our group text with our neighbors and everybody’s saying there are terrorists outside my house or inside my house.

I called a colleague and friend, Amos Harel, the veteran military-affairs correspondent for Haaretz. I told him, “Amos, there are terrorists outside my house, maybe even inside.” And what Amos told me in reply was the scariest thing I heard. He said, “Yes, I know, but it’s not only in your kibbutz; it’s not only in Nahal Oz. It’s all over southern Israel. It’s all over. It’s in cities and in towns and in kibbutzim and in villages. Thousands of armed Hamas fighters have infiltrated the country. They have taken over military bases.” That was scary because I realized that if that’s the situation, it will take a very long time for the military to come and confront these terrorists and save us.

Rosenberg: Could you talk to you about how we got to this point?

Tibon: Yes, I want to say something about this failure of the military and of the government. Miri and I moved to this community in 2014, immediately after the war that took place that summer between Israel and Hamas, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. We were living at the time in Tel Aviv, a young couple with no children. And the communities on the Gaza border during that war suffered from Hamas’s use of attack tunnels into Israel. They basically dug tunnels under the border. The fighters would emerge from underground on the other side, and they killed and kidnapped soldiers. The scariest thing back then were the tunnels. We came originally to support the community, and we fell in love with the place and decided to stay there.

But successive Israeli governments, all of them led by Benjamin Netanyahu, invested billions of dollars—I think some of them actually from U.S. support—in constructing an underground wall to prevent Hamas from using those tunnels again. This was a major infrastructure project for the state of Israel. And that project allowed us to sleep at night, because you can deal with rockets falling over your head if you have a safe room in your house, but if terrorists are infiltrating underground and they can walk into your community, that’s a game changer. And so the reason we could live there, and that’s true for everyone, is because of this underground wall that Israel constructed. And in the morning hours of Saturday, October 7, when we heard the gunfire outside our window, we realized that this project is an utter and complete failure.

Israel invested so much in it, and what did the Hamas people do? They took a few tractors and SUVs, and they ran over the border fence. We prepared everything to make it impossible for them to come from underground, and they just walked through the border. That is a major, major failure. And so bringing myself back to the conversation with Amos Harel, when I realized that this is the situation all over, that’s when I thought: Okay, we’re going to die here. Nobody’s going to be able to come in time. And if they manage to break into the house, they will then try to break into the safe room. And if they manage to do that, we will be dead or kidnapped.

Rosenberg: How did you ultimately get out?

Tibon: I called Amos, but I also called my father. My father is a retired general. He’s 62 years old. He lives in Tel Aviv. And my parents told me: “We’re coming. It’s an hour-and-20-minute drive.” Now, this goes against all logic. But I told myself, Okay, right now I’m asking my two young daughters to put complete faith in me and my wife, in their parents, to do what we’re telling them in order to save their lives, which is to be very, very quiet and understand that we cannot get out of the room, we cannot go get food, we cannot go to the bathroom, we cannot go out to play, and I’m asking them to put their faith in me completely.

And I told myself: I have to do the same thing right now. I have to trust my father, who is a trustworthy man, that if he said he will come here and save us, he will do it. Only many hours later, when my father arrived, did I learn what had happened that day to my parents, which is an incredible story by itself.

My parents started driving from Tel Aviv. They arrived in the town of Sderot, which is the largest town in the border area. When they get there, they see people walking barefoot on the road. These are survivors from a music festival nearby, where the Hamas people came early in the morning and massacred more than 200 people, people who came to a music festival. My parents put the survivors in their car and took them farther away from the border. They’d already gotten to the border area, but they’re seeing people who need help, so they take them away. And then they turn around and they continue driving toward our area.

They stop in a nearby community that is close to the border, but not as close as we are. And my father convinces a soldier who is standing there and looking for a way to help to come with him to Nahal Oz, to my kibbutz, in order to kill terrorists and save families. They drive toward the kibbutz, but along the way they see a military force being ambushed by Hamas fighters. They get out of the car. My father is retired; he doesn’t have military-grade weapons. In Israel, unlike in America, citizens cannot buy AR-15s, and I’m glad for that. But my father has a pistol with him, and he and this other soldier join the soldiers who are fighting the Hamas cell, they help kill them, and now they’re very close to my kibbutz. They’re five minutes from the entrance to my kibbutz, but two of the soldiers are wounded. And again, my father has to turn around. He puts the wounded soldiers in his car with the help of that other soldier who joined him, and they go back to where my mother is.

My mom takes the wounded soldiers with her in their car to a hospital. My father sees another retired former general, Israel Ziv, who’s closer to 70 than 60. But Israel put on his uniform and came like a regular soldier down south to try to help. My father tells him, “Israel, I don’t have a car. My wife is taking the wounded soldiers to the hospital to save them. I need to get to Nahal Oz, where my family is barricaded. My granddaughters are there. Take me to Nahal Oz.”

These two guys over the age of 60 are driving in a regular car. It’s not even a Jeep or something. It’s not an armored vehicle. It’s just a car, like people take on the New Jersey Turnpike on their way to work in the morning. They’re driving now on the road where half an hour earlier there was a deadly ambush of soldiers. They both have weapons. My father took weapons from the wounded soldiers, who gave them to him because he told them, “I’m going back in.”

They reached the entrance to the kibbutz. And when they get there, they meet a group of soldiers from special forces who are about to begin the very dangerous process of going from house to house in our community to try to engage the terrorists and release the people who are barricaded. By that point, I have no idea that all of this is happening. We are in the safe room. The terrorists are still outside. And we have no cell reception. We have no phone battery. We’re just waiting in the dark.

But we start hearing gunfire again—and this time, it’s two kinds of guns. And we realize there is a battle. We realize that there is an exchange of fire. And I tell my wife: “He’s coming. My father is coming. They’re fighting. He’s with these soldiers.” They didn’t come immediately to our house. They went from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, inside our community. I don’t remember how long it took.

We were just hearing the gunfire getting closer and closer. The girls had fallen asleep, but now they woke up. I think it’s 2 p.m. They haven’t had anything to eat since last night. There’s no light and we don’t have cellphones anymore, so we can’t even show them our faces, and there’s one sentence that is keeping them from falling apart and starting to cry—I’m telling them: “Grandfather is coming.”

I tell them, “If we stay quiet, your grandfather will come and get us out of here.” And at 4 p.m., after 10 hours like this, we hear a large bang on the window and we hear the voice of my father. Galia, my oldest daughter, says, “Saba higea.” Grandfather is here. And that’s when we all just start crying. And that’s when we knew that we were safe.

Rosenberg: I want to move from the personal to the political a little bit. You work for a Tel Aviv–based liberal newspaper. Most people assume you live in Tel Aviv, but you don’t. You moved to Nahal Oz, and you told me you were inspired to go there after you first visited it as a journalist, following another clash with Gaza, during which the community had been rocketed again and again. And yet, you met people there who were Israeli patriots still committed to the place and to peace and who wanted to find something better, even though they perhaps had more reason than anyone to distrust the future. I know you share that faith, but I’m wondering how it feels right now. Is that faith ever shaken?

Tibon: The politics of our area, of the Gaza-border area, is very interesting, and it’s a microcosm of politics in Israel. The kibbutz communities, like mine, are very left-leaning. And the large town in the area, Sderot, which also went through a terrible, terrible disaster, is actually much more right-wing and religious and supportive of Netanyahu. So there’s this split. But we’re in this together. It’s true that there is this divide, but we are both suffering from these same conditions right now. And I think a lot of people are going to reexamine everything once it’s over.

I love my community. I love my neighbors. I’m proud of them for their resilience on this horrible day. What we went through is not a unique story. This is the story of an entire region in Israel.

I’m ashamed of my government. We had a contract with the state that communities like ours protect the border. This is why people live there. We protect the border with our presence there. This is a fundamental strategy of the state of Israel since the earliest days of the country, that a border that does not have civilian communities and civilian life along it will not be properly protected.

We kept our part of the contract. We lived on the border. We went through difficult situations sometimes, with mortars and with the use of incendiary devices to set fires in the fields. If you live in a place like Nahal Oz, you wake up every morning and you know there are people on the other side of the border who want to kill you and your children. And so the contract was: We protect the border and the state protects us.

And this government, which is the worst government in the history of the state of Israel, led by a corrupt, dysfunctional, and egoistic man who sees only himself—Benjamin Netanyahu—failed us. There were warning signs that this will happen. The military and the intelligence agencies warned that Israel’s neighbors were seeing the internal divide in the country over the government’s disastrous plan to eliminate the powers of the judiciary. There are reports coming out as we speak that Egyptian intelligence warned Netanyahu a few days ago that Hamas was planning something massive on the border.

The way that the events of the day unfolded is the worst failure in the history of the state of Israel. I mean, people like my father, like Israel Ziv and other retired officers, had to come down to save citizens, to try to save their own families and others. Meanwhile, the military is falling apart, and all the civilian infrastructure that is supposed to support the military and society in such an event is also not functioning.

Listen, right now we have to win this war. We have to destroy Hamas. We have to make it impossible for them to ever, ever again conduct anything that is even close to what happened on Saturday. No country in the world can allow something like this to happen to its citizens and just go back to business as usual. I feel very bad for the people of Gaza. I’m heartbroken. But this was our 9/11.

After we win the war and we eradicate Hamas, there will be time also to throw into the dustbin of history any politician, starting with the prime minister, who had anything to do with this failure. But that’s a conversation for tomorrow. Today it’s about saving our citizens and destroying the enemy’s ability to do something like this ever again.

Rosenberg: Tomorrow, what happens to Netanyahu?

Tibon: First of all, we have to win the war. This is the most important thing. After the war, I believe the people who went down to fight and to rescue their families, and the people who have loved ones kidnapped inside Gaza, and the people who lost their homes—these people will not allow this government to stay one more day. The protests that Israel saw in the last year are going to be a children’s game compared to the anger of the public after this. But right now, it’s about winning the war.

Rosenberg: This is not over. This is ongoing. There are people held hostage. What do you expect now from the U.S. and the world?

Tibon: First of all, I was relieved to see the very, very strong commitment of President Biden, verbally but also in action, in sending U.S. military forces to the region and making clear that if any other actor in the region is confused, the United States will support Israel if someone is trying to use this moment of crisis in the wrong way.

There is the issue of the Israelis who are kidnapped, some of whom are dual citizens of other countries. And on this, as someone who covers diplomacy, I think the language really matters. You can say “Hamas is responsible for their fate.” That’s, you know, the usual diplo-speak. But the sentence I hope to hear from countries, including the United States but also others, is: “We expect their immediate release.”

These are citizens, okay? The majority of them are not soldiers. There are many women there. There are children, there are elderly people. And I think the international position should be that they must be immediately released. This is what I hope to hear.

Objectively speaking, President Joe Biden has presided over some significant, even historic, accomplishments: a massive vaccine rollout, the biggest infrastructure investment since the Eisenhower administration, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Yet, when voters are asked about these things, their responses are perplexing. Poll after poll show that voters have never heard of these programs, are annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just don’t care. Why don’t Biden’s political and legislative victories penetrate the public consciousness?

Political insiders point the finger at Biden. He isn’t a great communicator, they say. He tends to defer and give other people credit. He doesn’t have enough energy. But part of it is also how voters consume political news.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, and Elaina Plott Calabro, a politics writer at the Atlantic, about what political news is—or isn’t—breaking through, and the gap between what voters say they want and what they actually seem to want.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Not speaking as a partisan here, just an observer of human nature, there is something I can’t understand about the Biden administration. They have objectively, objectively, pulled off some pretty huge things: an enormous and complicated vaccine rollout, the biggest investment in infrastructure in over 50 years, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years.

These are moves which are impressive and historic and helpful to many, many Americans, and yet, poll after poll shows that when people are asked about these accomplishments, they’re surprised. They’ve never heard of them. They’re annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just shrug, like Who cares?

Why? Why don’t these legitimate wins penetrate the public consciousness?

Now, there are inside, political consultant-type answers, which point the finger at Biden and his style of governing, just as there are insider-type answers to what happened in the House this week, when a tiny group of Republican extremists ousted the Speaker of the House.

Something is going wrong with them, the politicians. But I suspect it’s more complicated than that.

And what I’m wondering more about is us, the voters: what we’ve become accustomed to, what we’re maybe encouraging, what we are and aren’t paying attention to, what we say we want versus what we actually want. What part of it is them, and what part is us?

Recently at a live show, I ran these questions by The Atlantic staff writer Frank Foer, who just wrote a book called The Last Politician about Joe Biden, and Elaina Plott Calabro, who writes about politics for The Atlantic and who has asked a lot of experienced pollsters questions like this: What’s the problem? Why don’t voters know about these big successes?

Elaina Plott Calabro: I think it’s not natural for someone like President Biden to try and go out and focus on shaping the narrative that way. At the end of the day you’ll talk to pollsters who say I go in and say, Did you know that this administration kind of executed the largest investment in infrastructure, really since the Eisenhower era? When they do bring this up with voters and focus groups, they’re almost angry that they haven’t heard about it.

Rosin: What do you mean, they’re angry?

Plott Calabro: Why didn’t I know about this? Why didn’t this break through the media for me? And it’s interesting because reporters do cover these things, but that, I think is, kind of a dynamic that’s become really pronounced in the Trump era. What does it mean to achieve ubiquity as a politician when you are not Donald Trump? And when has that become the standard for how one breaks through?

Rosin: Why aren’t they pleased? Like, why isn’t it a Oh, this is wonderful.

Plott Calabro: I think it’s more of just, I feel that I should have known about this. Why is this not something I’m seeing on TV every day? Or that when I just, like, log on to the homepage of whatever news source I use is the banner of the day?

Rosin: So, I feel unsatisfied in understanding why they’re not breaking through the public consciousness. Is it because they are not great communicators? Is it because—maybe what I’m asking, is the problem them or us?

Franklin Foer: Yeah, well, I think, as a nation we’re suffering through some sort of equivalent of a long COVID, where even though the pandemic is gone, there’s a lot that still feels bad about its aftermath. Whether it’s inflation, which is something that you’re reminded of constantly, and whether the administration contributed to it in a somewhat meaningful way or an extremely meaningful way, it’s there and people are pissed off about that.

Like, when was the right moment to crow about the vaccine? Like, was it while people were getting vaccinated, but there were different variants that continued to rage across the country? Was it after we returned to normal? Returning to normal wasn’t something. I read The Plague by Camus, and there was actually a fireworks display at the end of that pandemic when the quarantine was lifted. They tried that fireworks display on July 4, 2021, and they got lashed roundly for that. So I think there’s something about the times that we’re living in. And then I do think that there is something about his age that ends up compounding this impression that he’s not governing in a competent sort of way. So when you read my book, you would see that he’s a micromanager. He’s involved in a lot of decision making, but the public impression is that he’s not an energetic president. Is that persuasive?

Rosin: That’s almost persuasive, but I think my fear is that we don’t have tolerance to take in good news. Like, our senses are heightened to conflict in such a way now that we can’t even hear anything that’s below the decibel of that. And so if he were to somehow say, Look I’ve accomplished, I’ve done this great thing. I’ve, you know, done this with inflation. I’ve done this with vaccines, it just comes in as noise, you know, dull noise.

Plott Calabro: I would say Celinda Lake, who’s a pretty prominent Democratic pollster, has done a lot of work for the Biden campaign. She put it to me pretty succinctly, which was that when you understand that people feel day to day, like the vibes are off in the country, they don’t want to see their politicians taking a victory lap, even if it’s deservedly so, for example. When it’s not matching, sort of, their day-to-day experience in the country, it just—it’s a recipe for disaster. Like fireworks not going so well for instance.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Plott Calabro: I think that’s something important to think about. But the second thing that’s interesting about whether voters today have the capacity to, I don’t know, register good news or even seek it out, you know, on their own—that’s, I think, something that Democrats are confused by too, because, you know, Biden was swept in ostensibly on this idea that voters want a return to normalcy.

They want to get back to a place where they’re not actively, like, wondering what their president is saying or doing every day. In some ways, that is what this president has been able to provide, but even if voters were saying back in 2020, That is the dynamic we want, it’s not the one that seems to compel them day to day in terms of, like, wanting to be engaged with what is happening.

Rosin: So this is one of those cases, I can’t remember the psychological, sociological term for when there’s a gap between what you say you want in a poll and what you actually want, and you’re not even aware of that, your desire, because it’s subconscious. So you’re like, Check. I want to go back to normal. But it’s not actually….

Okay, so we have 12 months until the election or so. I’ve heard the term—a lot of people say we’re sleepwalking into the same election, but I think that’s not true. Like, I think that many things are very different than they were four years ago. So let’s start with Trump. What’s different, Elaina, about Donald Trump now? Who’s the Donald Trump now versus the Donald Trump we knew last time?

Plott Calabro: The Donald Trump who ran in the last election was someone who felt he was playing with house money, right? And I think that was a large part of his appeal. There was no plan necessarily for what to do once he got in office, because not even he actually expected for that to ever happen.

There is a degree, I think, of seriousness to the bid this time to where, you know, you might recall, Hanna, the very popular and overused phrase back in 2016, which was “Take him seriously but not literally.” I think we’ve arrived at a point where Donald Trump has shown voters enough of himself, and consistently, that you can no longer just say, Don’t take him at his word.

Especially after January 6, we are far, far past that. So if he is saying something to rile up a crowd, I don’t think that there is the same degree of suspension of disbelief maybe there was in 2016—and perhaps never should have been—that he is very serious about what he wants to do.

And I think when it comes to his very nakedly authoritarian tendencies, that is what gives this election, I think, like, a much darker tenor and, like, starker shape than the one that we saw.

Foer: You know the other slogan or the other catchphrase is one that Paul Krugman came up with, which was, “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” And so I think that there is a chance that it could be malevolence tempered by less incompetence heading into this campaign. And I’m so fascinated by the fact that he’s managed to go many months without overexposing himself to the public.

I think that part of the reason why the poll numbers are where they are is that people have forgotten the malevolence of Donald Trump. And when he wages his equivalent of a basement campaign, which seems like it runs against everything, every fiber of his being to be quiet, that’s interesting.

And then you’ll get the abortion issue and the way that he’s trying to pivot to the center against the other Republicans who are running against him, he’s made this calculation, This nomination is mine. I need to start running a general-election campaign. That’s a shockingly competent move. And then I think when it relates to the authoritarianism that Elaina’s just describing, you see all of these plans that are in the works, that think tanks are ginning up in order to remake the civil service, to eliminate the swaths of the deep state that he abhors, that seems much more competent than the last go around.

Rosin: What is the…I feel like the Republicans are starting to coalesce around a line about Biden. Like, they’re hitting on a line about Biden. What? What is that? And how did they come to that?

Foer: It does feel like they’ve successfully constructed a character. He’s “sleepy Joe Biden.” He’s this guy who slurs his words and can’t complete a sentence.

There’s almost a conspiratorial edge to it that he’s just a sorry corpse who is like, it’s Weekend at Bernie’s. He’s being carted out by these evil advisors

Rosin: For the deep state—

Foer: To do their progressive bidding.

And then they have the Hunter Biden thing, which I think has been so successful because, like I described the aging, the mental-acuity continuum, there’s this corruption continuum that now exists where Hunter Biden did his thing, and Joe– and Donald Trump did his thing. Nevermind that fundamentally subverting the democracy and, like, 90 different counts that have been indictable is very different than your son lying about his drug use on a gun application. Different in kind, but they’ve successfully created this impression that, you know, Joe Biden is just another elite who is getting away with it because he’s using his connections.

Plott Calabro: I do think, though, that there is a dimension that we haven’t addressed yet, and we should because Frank in particular has done great reporting on it. I would argue that Republicans actually finally gained the foothold they needed to position him as incompetent or less than ideal as a president—what have you—after Afghanistan. His poll numbers have not recovered since Afghanistan, which to me, I just find fascinating as a reporter because it does seem often that we’re in this moment that maybe a new cycle has three days before it fizzles out.

But Afghanistan is something that has kind of remained, like, a throughline of this administration when it comes to perceptions about, you know, competence or incompetence.

Foer: The Afghanistan stuff was so viral and so terrible. And the images of people falling from airplanes and the chaos in the streets. And it was one of those rare occasions where mainstream media and Fox News were completely in sync and somewhat, you know, as mainstream media reacted to it in a very moralizing sort of way.

Rosin: Like, sad for the people there.

Foer: Sad for the people there, outraged at Biden’s behavior and profoundly disappointed in Joe Biden.

Plott Calabro: And it was only really six months into the new administration, so there’s just such fertile ground for, you know, first impressions to be formed.

Rosin: Do you think Joe Biden is maybe too old?

Foer: So here’s, I thought a lot about this when I wrote my book, interestingly, I thought about the age question. It frames the book, but age isn’t a throughline of my story. And I had to question myself afterwards. Why didn’t I push the age question more? And it’s in fact, in the first few years of his presidency, and in effect I was writing a book about governing, age didn’t matter to the way that he governed.

Right now he has the ability to do the job, but there are a couple caveats that are very important that need to be appended to that. He doesn’t have the energy to campaign in the way that he would have a couple of years ago, let alone a couple of decades ago.

And does that become an issue for the republic, that he can’t energetically campaign in that sort of way? Then there’s the question of, Is it a good idea to have an 86-year-old president? I would say no. I would rather not have an 86-year-old president. But I would rather have an 86-year-old president than Donald Trump.

Rosin: I don’t instinctively understand the age question. I understand the gerontocracy question. Like, Why is everybody that old? But I don’t understand the specific age question. Like, 86-year-olds probably, to me, have a lot of experience and wisdom, and this is a terrible period, and Donald Trump is the other choice. Like, it doesn’t enter my mind the way it does a lot of other people.

Foer: It’s true. And I do think that there is, I don’t think, Ukraine or China—these really massive issues that loom over the world, loom over the presidency. Joe Biden happens to have an incredible amount of wisdom and experience as it relates to foreign policy. And to navigate a proxy war against a nuclear power where choices could result in a very, very dangerous escalation that could destroy the planet, there’s a lot of value in having somebody who’s been around the block.

Rosin: And I feel more so reading your book, it’s like a guy with a lot of experience, some amount of self-awareness, a lot of emotional intelligence, drive, sure.

Plott Calabro: Here, I would chime in to say, the conversation that y’all are having right now, and sort of, almost the case that you’re making, is not the one that the White House is currently making. I think where this White House is running afoul of voters, when it comes to this age question, is that they act as though it’s an illegitimate question.

Rosin: I see.

Plott Calabro: Okay, objectively, you know, it’s not really the point whether or not that’s true. The point is that polling day in and day out shows that Americans do care about this question. But White House aides, I mean, you bring it up and they—they act like you’re insane that you would even, like, deign to ask them about Joe Biden’s mortality, like, as a human being.

I mean, President Eisenhower, who, you know, entered office in—what was then, I think at the time, the oldest president—in his ’60s had heart issues pretty early into his term. He really felt that Americans deserved to know that he felt, you know, ready and willing to continue doing his job and, like, was there and with it.

But it was also important to him to demonstrate that even though he personally hated Richard Nixon as his vice president, just really didn’t like the guy, that Americans had the sense that, were something to happen to him, um, that they would be in good hands with Richard Nixon. And this White House is—this White House has not taken on, I guess, a similar mentality that this is something that, you know, is a legitimate thing to care about. Even if they don’t think it is, Americans do, and they should be communicating with the public accordingly.

Rosin: That’s such a good point. I never thought of that. If they just, like, took the Fetterman route, like, Here’s what’s going on. Here’s where I’m going to be ready. Kamala’s, you know, whatever, like just address it.

Plott Calabro: I mean, I’ve said that to White House aides before. I’m like, “Do you not think that it would go over relatively well if your boss were to say, Listen, I know I’m old, but I feel great. I have every expectation of finishing out four more years. But listen, if something, God forbid, were to happen to me, you’re in great hands with Kamala Harris.”

Foer: But they’re clearly worried about voters having to make the choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, because they’re not convinced that voters will choose Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.

Rosin: I feel like what we are leaving… where we’ve taken our audiences so far, is that the Democrats are sort of, like, drowning under a series of incompetent strategies. And Trump is the clever one. He’s riding it right.

Have you guys, in reporting on Democrats, landed on anything surprising, hopeful, where you think, Oh, that’s a clever move. Or like, That’s a person who knows what’s up.

Plott Calabro: I was on this very stage yesterday. I did a panel with Sarah Longwell, who is a Republican strategist but, you know, very anti-Trump—she publishes The Bulwark and does focus groups constantly, and Alencia Johnson, who is a Democratic strategist. And Sarah at one point turned to Alencia, and she said, “You know, as somebody who very much wants Biden to win, it has been so clear that where Republicans have succeeded in the messaging game the past several years is that when Donald Trump says something, every Republican down the line is on cable news that night repeating it verbatim. With Democrats it’s just never the same.” So Sarah essential says, “I’m just gonna need you guys to kind of, like, get it together in that respect.”

But I mean, going back to the question about the vice president, even it’s just, like, faking that Democrats think Kamala Harris would be an exceptional president if elected.

I mean, Jamie Raskin is on with Jake Tapper, and he’s saying, “Yes or no? Do you endorse Kamala Harris for vice president?” He said, “Well, you know, I haven’t seen polling.” I mean, it was remarkable. And then you have Nancy Pelosi on with Anderson Cooper. He asks her the same question, and he said, “Do you think that Kamala Harris is the best running mate for Joe Biden?”

She said, “He seems to think so, and that’s what matters.”

Rosin: Burn.

Plott Calabro: So Republicans, meanwhile, they’ll, you know—they’ll go on TV, and then you catch them in the green room after, and they’re like, Well, I’m full of shit. I don’t believe any of that, whatever.

Rosin: Okay, anything you guys can prognosticate that feels different than what we all think is gonna happen? “No,” is a fine answer. You’re insiders so…

Foer: Can I just—I want to say one thing about—you talked about the difference between Democrats and Republicans. And I think part of that difference is the level of fear and anxiety that Democrats bring to every sort of political discussion, because the stakes are so existential that—you know, there’s this famous phrase that David Plouffe used to describe Barack Obama’s doubters, that they were bedwetters. And like, if your nightmare is about to descend on America, uh, you’re going to wet the bed all night long.

Rosin: By the way, it is amazing to me that that’s a mainstream political phrase, bedwetter

Foer: Radio Atlantic, this is your next episode.

Rosin: Yes. Bedwetting.

Plott Calabro: An investigation.

Foer: So I think the point is that when you’re bedwetting, you’re anxious, and that when you’re anxious, you’re not actually able to make cold, honest calculations about what’s happening. And there are so many reasons to be afraid of Donald Trump, but the political conditions right now, so many months before the election, are not necessarily reliable.

And if you look at what Nate Cohn has been writing in The New York Times—so I’m not saying anything that’s original, but, I think this is an under appreciated fact—Joe Biden has hemorrhaged support in California, in New York, where you have migrant crises, and you have high inflation—especially high inflation, high gas prices, and so he’s not going to be able to run up the margins in blue-state bastions.

But then you look in the industrial Midwest or the Rust Belt or Wisconsin and Michigan and the like, and Democrats have consistently performed very well there since Trump’s presidency and midterm elections and special elections.

Abortion has been a very salient issue that white voters in those places have actually stuck with Joe Biden. And so it’s possible that, headed into this election, we’re not going to have this massive disjunction between the popular vote and the electoral college.

Plott Calabro: I think another underappreciated dynamic that is likely to play out in a general election with Donald Trump as the nominee, is abortion becomes not so obvious a flashpoint just for Democrats anymore. If Ron DeSantis is the nominee, like, absolutely. I don’t think that Democrats worry about maintaining the independents and maybe more moderate Republican women that they were able to pick off in the midterms. With Donald Trump as the nominee, that issue gets trickier to litigate. I see it being, you know, just as much of a flashpoint in the election—this general election—as I do in the midterms.

And I think that, I mean, it’s just going to be interesting—

Foer: Just because Donald Trump is able to triangulate on the issue?

Plott Calabro: Absolutely. Absolutely. And he’s the only one in the field doing it right now.

Rosin: So it’s neutralized?

Plott Calabro: I don’t think it’s, like, entirely neutralized. I just think it becomes harder if Donald Trump is the candidate.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Last thing. Frank, so the title of your book, The Last Politician, you know, it’s positive to neutral for Biden. but it is, like, it could be interpreted as sort of worrisome for the country ’cause you make it seem as if this person who’s relatively effective, able to get things done, is an absolutely dying breed. And yet the feel of your book is not dark or pessimistic. Like, I actually felt good reading it. It made me feel a little bit hopeful in general about political culture, about the humanity of political culture. You describe the Biden White House as sort of a series of friends. It sounded like a cool office. I was like, Oh, I would like to work in that office.

Foer: It is not a cool office. The people who occupy that office are not cool.

Rosin: It sounded like, sure, like it’s a warm, like a human office. Like, it sounded like decent people working in a human office trying to get—like, I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t get that, like, Veep feeling.

Plott Calabro: That’s the decided lack of Steve Bannon, I would say.

Rosin: Yeah, maybe.

Foer: So my publisher came to me with this idea of writing a book about the first hundred days. And I didn’t want to write a book about Joe Biden. I wanted to write a book about earnest, well-meaning people descending on a government that had been ruined by the last occupant, as they contended with a historic pandemic and an economy that was on the brink.

I had this image of Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff, wearing a headlamp as he was excavating the ruins of government that Trump had left behind. And what was attractive to me about the project was writing a book about governance. I mean, I don’t have—

Rosin: But the fact that such people exist and they take governance seriously, that’s actually hopeful.

Foer: I agree. I agree.

Rosin: Like, that suggests that people go into politics for the right reasons.

And it’s not, like, just the last politician, and Oh no, like, What do we have left? Like, that—that there is a strain of people who care about running the country in that way.

Foer: Yeah, and also, our institutions can work. It’s like the people in this country have so lost faith in institutions. But you look at something like the vaccine, that is a program that was so well-designed, so well executed, that within six months of the Biden people coming into office, you could stroll into your CVS and get a shot that saved your life. Even though the distribution process for that was extremely difficult, and there were pockets of the country that were hard to penetrate, that happened. That worked, and I think that that is a reason to be optimistic.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s end there. I don’t want to end with anything pessimistic. I want to end with the possibility that America we could…

Plott Calabro: Maybe Build Back Better, potentially.

Rosin: Thank you all.

Foer: Yeah.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday.