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We warned you last month to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula.” In a recent study conducted about consumer products, researchers concluded kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants, which you do not want anywhere near your hot food. After the article was published, its author received reports, possibly exaggerated, of people in Burlington, Vermont, throwing their black plastic spatulas out en masse. You should too.

That article was just the appetizer. This episode of Radio Atlantic is the entire meal, coming to you in time for Thanksgiving. We talk to its author, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, about every other plastic thing in your kitchen: cutting boards, nonstick pans, plastic wrap, slow cookers, sippy cups. Read it before you cook. And prepare to hassle your plastic-loving hosts. Politely.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Well, it’s Thanksgiving—the day on the American calendar centered most around food, when we gather together to cook for our families and friends. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about our kitchens and the things in them that we should maybe be worrying about.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, we’re here to ruin your Thanksgiving. A little bit. Just kidding. Mostly.

What I’m talking about is an Atlantic story from a few weeks ago that hit a nerve with people.

The headline of that story was, “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula,” and I’m joined in the studio by the author of that story, staff writer Zoë Schlanger, who writes about science and the environment. Hi, Zoë.

Zoë Schlanger: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: Um, I have a black plastic spatula.

Schlanger: Oh no.

Rosin: I do. I’ve been using it for so many years that I can’t—you know what, Zoë? I have two black plastic spatulas.

Schlanger: Because the first one started melting?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Because the first one just ate into my brain, and I didn’t—

Schlanger: It told you to acquire a second.

Rosin: It told me to acquire a second. Exactly.

So, okay. You said the black plastic utensils are “probably leaching chemicals” into our cooking, and I want to understand why. But I will say that your story opened up a whole bunch of worries besides the spatula that I want to run by you, not just for me, but for a lot of my friends. And I’m sure that happened to you as well.

Schlanger: Oh yes.

Rosin: Yeah. Were a lot of people writing you?

Schlanger: Everyone was texting me. Someone texted me that the entire town of Burlington, Vermont, was throwing their spatulas out the window at the same time.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You know what? I absolutely believe that. That’s an incredible image. Were people texting you like, What about this? And what about that? And what about this other thing?

Schlanger: Absolutely. There’s a lot of discussion about how to tell silicone apart from plastic, whether different color plastic was okay, which, like—spoiler alert—probably not, but black is worse.

Rosin: I feel like what’s going to happen on Thanksgiving—sorry, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. We really do wish you the best and most peaceful Thanksgiving. People are going to be sneaking into—if they’re not the cooks, they’re going to be sneaking into the kitchen of whoever is cooking and, like, monitoring their kitchen utensils and implements just in case.

Schlanger: I love that.

Rosin: Anyway, it’s better than political arguments, so it’s not so bad.

Okay, let’s start with what you wrote about. Why should I throw out my black plastic spatula? Which by the way, I haven’t done. It’s only because you’re here with me in person in the studio.

Schlanger: So I have to convince you?

Rosin: You have to convince me face-to-face because it sounds like other people you know have thrown theirs out, but I haven’t.

Schlanger: So the reason black plastic spatulas are particularly concerning, and I will caveat this by saying you should really throw out any plastic spatula you have of any color, but black plastic has this particularly noxious place in our product stream because it can’t be fully recycled.

Recycling plants just ignore black plastic. They can’t really see the plastic that’s black, because they use optical sensors. So that means, instead of coming from a clean recycling stream, some black plastic products seem to be made out of dubious recycled products, particularly e-waste—electronic waste—often abroad with very little oversight.

And electronics are imbued, often, with flame retardants. So we’re talking about, like, the black plastic housing on your computer monitor or your cell phone or your keyboard. Those can all have flame retardants in them to keep them from catching fire. And flame retardants are associated with a huge range of health hazards, from cancer, diabetes, thyroid issues.

And then they may end up remolded into implements that are touching your food, which they were never meant to be part of. And then you use those implements with heat and oil, which are all things that encourage these compounds in the plastic to migrate out of the object. And then you just eat a lot more of those gross things.

Rosin: Wow. That was a lot. I’m going to slow that down, so I understand. Okay, there are so many facts I learned there. I just want to make sure I learned them correctly. Black plastic is probably recycled from electronics?

Schlanger: Right. Not all of it is. Certainly there could be new, pure black plastic that is not coming from recycled e-waste, but there’s no way to tell.

Rosin: Now, regular plastic in a recycling facility gets rid of these toxins—is that what happens? Like, it can notice them and get rid of them, but in black plastic it just can’t be treated properly?

Schlanger: No, actually. There’s lots of toxins in all recycled plastic, but we’re mostly just talking about flame retardants here. And in the U.S. and in lots of other places, there are laws against or rules against combining electronic waste with the general-consumer recycling flow. So really, these flame retardants are never supposed to get into your consumer products, but they are.

Rosin: Okay, so that’s the black plastic. It can have flame retardants in it. It might come from e-waste. What about gray, white, red—all the other color spatulas? I do have two black ones and one gray one. So what about those?

Schlanger: Why plastic, though? It’s just, it’s—well, first of all, from a purely utilitarian perspective, plastic’s just a terrible thing to use when you’re dealing with a hot pan.

I mean, the thing melts. It’s just not a very durable product. But plastic of all colors probably has stuff in it that you don’t really want interacting with your food. I mean, at the very bottom of this long list is microplastics. If you have a piece of plastic that you’re using regularly in the kitchen, it’s sloughing off microplastics into your food.

Rosin: No matter what? This is nothing to do with heat. It’s just giving off little flakes?

Schlanger: It’s, like, use.

Rosin: Dandruff—just like plastic dandruff is coming off.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) Exactly like dandruff. I mean, one thing I also noticed in people’s kitchens is how common a plastic cutting board is. And that’s just you slicing chunks of plastic into your tomatoes every single time. And I get why people have it. It’s easier to make it sanitary, and they wash quite well. But it’s just not worth it. You can use anything else.

The other problem with most plastics is that there are other molecules in that material—in that base polymer—that are added there to make the plastic flexible or make it really thin, and those things are broadly called “plasticizers.”

They include things you might have heard of, like phthalates, that have also been associated with lots of harmful health outcomes. Basically, there’s no good plastic, particularly not in your kitchen.

Rosin: Okay, so no cutting boards. I’m not going to give you “no good plastics” yet. I have to go through it a little slowly. What about storage containers? Like, I have just a million plastic storage containers.

Schlanger: Can you tell me more about them? Are they hard and sturdy, or are they like what you got your takeout in, like, seven months ago, and you’re still using them?

Rosin: Both? (Laughs.) Both. I have a couple of these very hard ones with the click-in tops, but then those get lost because those are the most used. So they end up in my kid’s backpack, and they end up at school. And so then we just revert to the 3,000 takeout containers that we have sitting around.

I can already see—I already feel bad. Okay. What’s coming?

Schlanger: I mean, I get it. It’s like, there’s so much convenience to this. So typically, my understanding is—one rule of thumb is that harder, sturdier plastic is maybe shedding fewer phthalates than the very flexible ones, but they could be shedding other compounds of concern.

And the thing about containers is that if you’re putting something in that container that is fatty—if it has an oil, an animal fat, anything like that—lipids encourage these compounds to migrate out of the plastic and into the food. These plasticizers I was talking about are lipophilic, meaning they easily transfer when in contact with fats. So we’re often putting our leftovers in these bins, and, almost always, those have some kind of fat. And then it also depends if you’re heating things in that plastic. Heat is something that degrades plastic quite readily.

(Laughs.) I see you smirking and—

Rosin: —I am going to confess something now. This is what I think happens to most of us: We know, and we don’t know. So we sort of know what you said, and then it goes into a short-term memory hole.

So what I know and don’t know is that my son loves leftovers. He loves leftovers. Like, he’ll take it over anything for lunch the next day. Of course he microwaves it. Like, of course he puts it in the takeout container, takes it to school, and then microwaves it. That’s like a perfect storm, right?

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s not the best. It’s great that he is eating leftovers. We don’t like food waste either.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Schlanger: Yeah. Microwaving plastic is one of those ones that I just don’t do anymore.

So heat degrades plastic. Cold—my understanding is that cold actually makes plastic a bit more chemically stable, at least in the short term. But then, I have seen at least one paper that found that the cycle of heating and freezing, if you use the same container to do both many times, will also enhance degradation and also enhance those plasticizers leaching out.

And that was a study that was looking at, actually, farmers. They put these big plastic tarps over their fields to suppress weeds, and those get heated and frozen over and over again. So I assume you could apply that to consumer plastic goods too. It’s all polymers. It’s all the same base material, but that was done in farm fields.

Rosin: Interesting. So is where we’ve landed with plastic, no plastic at all? Or, Use the hardest plastic you can find? Like, what about those very sturdy plastic containers, or are we just going for Pyrex glass?

Schlanger: I have now transitioned entirely to glass in my own kitchen. And I think that that’s more of a risk-tolerance thing. We all do things that will slowly kill us, and it’s sort of choosing which things those are. I mean, we’re bombarded by problematic compounds in every aspect of our life, and you cannot eliminate them all. So if you want to use your sturdy plastic containers to store fat-neutral things, like crackers, that’s probably fine.

Rosin: I think what you’re saying is that I should send my son to school with his leftovers in a glass Pyrex container.

Schlanger: Yeah. It’s heavier, which is a pain, but I’m saying yes, definitely.

Rosin: You’re saying yes.

Schlanger: And I don’t know how old your kids are, but some of these things matter a lot for children, because one of the big concerns about plastic additives getting into our bodies is that they mimic estrogen and can have endocrine-disrupting properties, meaning they mess with your hormone system.

And for a developing hormone system in a child, that’s especially crucial. It’s also crucial for pregnant people or people of childbearing age. So there’s different moments when it’s really critical to avoid this stuff.

Rosin: Okay, so we have to throw out those plastics. We do have to cook, though. We’re back preparing the Thanksgiving meal. What is a substitute for the plastic spatula? What kind of spatulas do you have?

Schlanger: I have silicone spatulas—they’re great—wooden spatulas, and stainless-steel spatulas.

Rosin: Interesting. I just got my first wooden spatula. My friend’s mother, who lives in Norway, gave it to me, and it was made by hand by her neighbor on the farm. And I don’t understand why I’ve never used a wood spatula before. It’s fantastic. Like, it’s so good.

Schlanger: It’s a great material. I think people hate that you can’t really put them in the dishwasher, but you just rinse it off. No big deal.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So silicone. Is silicone always okay? What is silicone?

Schlanger: Silicone, to my understanding, is made out of a number of things, but notably silica, which is essentially sand, which is the same thing that glass is made out of.

So as far as we know now, silicone is inert. It’s considered not reactive with food or with body material, with fat, or anything like that. So I think all signs right now point to silicone being a very good choice. I know that at very high temperatures, I think if you’re baking at above 400 or 500 degrees, silicone can emit a gas of some kind that might be a problem, but if you have to bake in something that isn’t stainless steel or ceramic or cast iron, that’s not the worst thing in the world. I’m pro-silicone for now. I mean, maybe we’ll learn something else later.

[Music]

Rosin: When we return, Zoë and I keep going through the kitchen list, from sippy cups to gas stoves.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So no plastic spatulas. Sort of no plastic storage containers. I asked people on Instagram—I posted your article, and I asked people on Instagram, and I got a lot of questions from people about other things in their kitchen. So can I run them by you?

Schlanger: Please.

Rosin: Okay. No. 1: sippy cups. They’re always labeled as BPA-free plastic. I remember that. Even when I had little kids, everything was BPA-free. Does that make a difference?

Schlanger: In a way, it does. BPA was researched intensively. We know it’s bad, and so everyone’s trying to avoid making things with it. But then what companies went and did was create a bunch of alternatives to BPA, which at least some research finds is not any better than the BPA. The way that chemicals are regulated in this country is: No one has to really prove they’re safe before they go in the market.

And so we have a trickle of information coming out that suggests that the replacements aren’t any better. I would say no to plastic sippy cups.

Rosin: Whoa. Whoa. You said it, though. Okay. Just to be very accurate about this, you said “a trickle of information.”

So there was a kind of panic about BPA. People created replacements for BPA. But we just don’t know yet if they’re better, and the early signs are that they may not be. Is that a fair summary?

Schlanger: Exactly. There was this moment in, like, 2015, 2016 when there was a smattering of studies coming out highlighting the BPA replacements and looking at their potential toxicity and finding that they might just be as endocrine disrupting as BPA was. So the thing with BPA is that it mimics estrogen in the body, which is not something you want to keep adding through your diet.

And it’s associated with all kinds of issues—thyroid issues, fertility issues. And researchers on these few studies I saw back then found that the replacements were as estrogenic or more so.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. I really want to Google, What is a safe sippy cup? But instead, I’m going to ask you. Do you know what a safe sippy cup is?

Schlanger: I was actually talking to this pediatrician about this for a story, and she was talking about how the rest of the world gives their kids things in stainless-steel containers. Like, it’s just, you know—you don’t have plastic plates for kids. You just have stainless-steel ones that they can throw on the floor.

And I know they make stainless-steel ones with, like, the silicone sippy tops and stuff for kids now.

Rosin: It’s interesting. I think we think of stainless steel as something—like metallic. There’s something that we resist about stainless steel, like it’s going to taste different or something. But you’re saying it’s safer.

Schlanger: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. “Oh yeah,” you say. That means it’s definitely safer. (Laughs.)

Okay. Another one that people ask me a lot about—a lot, actually—were the black plastic lids on coffee cups.

Schlanger: This just occurred to me recently. I mean, yeah. Presumably, if it’s black plastic, there is a chance it came from that material stream of recycled e-waste. And the last thing you want is scalding hot, foamy, creamy coffee passing through a little black plastic hole into your mouth. It’s not ideal. So I actually just got coffee right before this and did not take a lid.

Rosin: Yes, this is absolutely true: Someone sent me that request on Instagram—Please ask Zoë about black plastic coffee lids—almost at the instant that the barista in the place that I was put the black plastic coffee lid on top of my coffee, and I had the same reaction you did. I was like: Of course! And just flipped it right off again.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Oh boy. Okay. So No. 2 on Instagram that people asked a ton about—I bet you can guess: nonstick cookware.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: So many questions about nonstick cookware. Are there different kinds? Do I throw it out the second it has a scratch on it? Like: What do I do about nonstick cookware?

I think there’s a whole bunch of sort of short-term memory-hole feelings about it. Like, Ah, I kind of read this thing. But then, I like my pan, so I forgot about it.

Schlanger: Yeah. So I’d start by saying that the issue with nonstick—Teflon is one brand name for this, but there’s a bunch of them—nonstick pans are coated in a class of chemicals called PFAS. And these are also coating things like our raincoats, our hiking boots. Just anything that is nonstick is basically made out of these compounds that we’ve now found are very bad for our health in high concentrations.

So the people who are really affected by this are the ones living near a plant that made PFAS, and now their water supply has been contaminated for 30 years, or people who live near an Army base where they are using a lot of firefighting foam, which is full of PFAS. But then you zoom in on people using individual products, and it becomes a little hazier.

We do know that the PFAS in your pan becomes unstable at high temperatures. So there’s lots of warnings on these things that you’re not really supposed to use them to cook at, you know, temperatures higher than 400 or 500 degrees.

But who doesn’t accidentally leave their pan on the stove sometimes and scorch it, and then it smells terrible? You’re breathing in fumes from PFAS, most likely. You mentioned scratched coatings. It’s super easy to scratch. Actually, the No. 1 response to the “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula”—when I was like, Just get stainless-steel ones—people were like, But it’ll scratch my nonstick pan. And just, my response to that is: Throw out your nonstick pan.

But we can’t necessarily ask everyone to do that. I get that. It’s so convenient to make an egg in a nonstick pan. I haven’t done it in years, but I hear it’s great.

Rosin: (Laughs.) That was amazing, Zoë. That was a great judge-but-not-judge.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I don’t mean to sound judgy, but honestly, cast iron is just so much better.

Rosin: I’ve recently come to that conclusion. I noticed that my first reach for everything, including an egg these days, is my cast-iron skillet. So I’m like, Why don’t I just get a few more of those and call it a day, you know?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: So you do not use nonstick pans?

Schlanger: So I grew up in a house with a parrot when I was young, and bird owners know that cooking with nonstick pans could result in the death of your bird, so I just grew up not having them around.

Rosin: Why?

Schlanger: I think it’s because the gas volatilizes. PFAS, the nonstick compound, its fumes get in the air, and birds are much more sensitive than humans, like all small animals.

Rosin: This is a literal canary in a coal mine.

Schlanger: Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

Rosin: I feel like that image, more than anything you’re gonna say, is gonna convince people: If they had a bird, that bird would be dead. So these are real.

Schlanger: I mean, yeah. I feel like it’s the kind of thing with, like, dogs and chocolates. Like, they won’t die every time. But there was a chance, so we didn’t have it in the house. But there was never a discussion about it being bad for human health. It was just like, No, you have a pet bird. You can’t have nonstick.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. So no nonstick pans. Another one that came up, and this is specifically related to Thanksgiving: marinating things in plastic. Like, it is something that people do. It’s something that people do on Thanksgiving. Is that a problem?

Schlanger: I wouldn’t do it. My understanding is that—I was thinking about, like, sous vide bags too, you know?

Rosin: Yeah, like brining turkeys or sous vide bags. There’s a whole bunch of ways that meat and plastic have to do with each other.

Schlanger: It would violate my personal rule about, like, putting fatty things next to plastic, because I just know the chemistry of that means it encourages migration of compounds out of the plastic and into your food.

But my understanding is that the bags specifically designed for this are considered food grade and often can be labeled “phthalate-free” now. So there is knowledge about this in the consumer market enough for companies to make things that are less harmful. That’s not to say they’re not potentially problematic.

I mean, the way I think about this is: Everything could affect you negatively a little bit. And we are so bombarded by problematic things in our everyday life getting into our bodies, and you just want to lower your dose. So it’s kind of choosing how to lower your dose.

It’s not that your turkey bag is going to kill you. It’s that you’re just adding a little extra, and you don’t need to.

Rosin: Right. So if you needed to brine something, and you put it in, say, a glass bowl with plastic wrap on it, is it just that—oh God.

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, so no to that, just because the plastic wrap would touch it. So in fact, you should just use tinfoil, is what you’re saying.

Schlanger: Mm-hmm. Or you just put a plate over it. Like, you don’t even need all this stuff. You know, plastic wrap’s gone through all these iterations. It used to be made out of much more harmful stuff, and then they eliminated some of it. I just avoid it.

Rosin: Really? You have no plastic wrap?

Schlanger: No.

Rosin: So you’re making a cake. What do you put over it? You just put a cake topper?

Schlanger: A bowl.

Rosin: You put a bowl or a cake topper? Okay. I’m trying to think of any other use I have for plastic wrap, particularly on Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: I wrap—you know, you get cheese, and you have to wrap it in something, so it doesn’t go bad immediately. I have—this is going to make me sound so crunchy—but I have those beeswax wraps. It’s like cloth waxed in beeswax, and that’s what people—people used to just use wax paper for everything. You can just do that.

Rosin: And you can reuse that, so that’s good. Okay.

I’m already imagining some of the people listening to this podcast walking into the kitchen of their parents and friends and causing all kinds of trouble. And this one is real trouble, but I’m going to ask you anyway, because a couple of people asked me about it: natural-gas stove.

So like, hassling your friends or parents about their natural-gas stove would be, like, a really, really low move. But I’m going to ask you anyway. There’s just so much talk about this. It was a big deal, like, a year ago. What about it?

Schlanger: So we know it’s not great to be in a home with a natural-gas stove. We know that it is associated with higher rates of child asthma, just breathing problems in general. You’re inhaling things like benzene. That said, many people have them. I have one. I’m a renter in New York. There’s no way I’m not going to have a gas stove. I can’t ask my landlord to buy a beautiful induction stove for me.

But one thing that makes a big difference is using your overhead vent, just gently turning on your family’s overhead vent while they’re cooking can actually take a lot of the problematic compounds out of the air.

Rosin: Oh really?

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: Okay.

Schlanger: It’s not totally a fail-safe. It doesn’t get it all out. It would be nice if we all had induction stoves. But I also get, it does sometimes feel good to cook over fire.

Rosin: Yeah. One day I will make the transition, but I’m so used to seeing the fire. But I understand.

Schlanger: I will say that that is a really elaborate PR job by the natural-gas industry too. Do you remember this? There was this moment when they were, like, hiring Instagram influencers to promote gas stoves and things like that.

Rosin: Because it’s one of those things that seems good and natural but is the exact opposite. Like, it looks like the thing that you should be cooking things on, but in fact, it’s the unnatural option.

Schlanger: Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, that was pretty good. Okay. So what else are we missing for Thanksgiving that we don’t know about? One just came to me: parchment paper. I bake a lot with parchment paper.

Schlanger: As do I. And I only recently learned that some parchment paper is coated in PFAS. That’s what makes it nonstick. So you actually want to check. And I recently got parchment paper that’s coated in silicone instead and is nice and nonstick because of that, and it doesn’t cost any more.

Rosin: Oh really? You have to look online and see what it’s coated with. Interesting.

Anything else we’ve forgotten about the Thanksgiving dinner? Let’s just do a tour. So you walk into an average kitchen. There are containers with plastic wrap on them. We’ve already covered that. There are things that have been cooked with nonstick pans. We’ve already covered that. There are deadly spatulas. We’ve covered that. (Laughs.)

Schlanger: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Anything else that we are forgetting for a typical Thanksgiving meal that could kill you?

Schlanger: Right. None of this is going to kill you, but I recently went down the rabbit hole of trying to buy a slow cooker and pressure cooker, and I really wanted to get an Instant Pot. And then I went online and looked at their disclosures on the website, and it turns out those can contain PFAS. I was really surprised by that because the basin of an Instant Pot is just a stainless-steel bowl, but my assumption is there’s something in the lid that is in the food-contact surface that is also PFAS.

So just basically, many, many other kitchen appliances are coated in a nonstick layer of PFAS. I also tried to buy a toaster oven, like, for the counter, so I wouldn’t have to turn on my gas oven every single time I wanted to bake something, and a lot of those—the entire interior is just coated in PFAS.

Rosin: Interesting. So how do you figure—so your rule is: Very much limit plastics to almost no plastics, and definitely no PFAS.

Schlanger: Yeah.

Rosin: And how do you know if something has PFAS? Like, I wouldn’t have guessed about an Instant Pot, which I do have, or about a toaster oven, which I don’t have. But I wouldn’t have guessed about either of those.

Schlanger: They put it on their website. If you look in, like, the Materials and Care section of most of these things, it’ll let you know.

Rosin: Okay. So maybe now that we have—would you say, is there any way to say that we haven’t ruined people’s Thanksgivings? Like, no. We’ve made them less stress-free? Possible? Depends when they listen to this?

Schlanger: Well, it’s so important to remember: Stress is also a major health hazard, so I don’t want anyone to get super stressed out about this or blow it out of proportion. You’re not going to die because of any of this, but you are just accumulating things you don’t need in your body.

Rosin: Your kitchen is just slightly less stress for you. Like, you look around your kitchen, and because you’re attuned to microplastics, you just don’t see them everywhere. So in fact, for you, it’s less stress.

Schlanger: Yeah. I walk around all day. There’s so many inputs to my body I can’t control. But at least I can control the ones in my kitchen.

Rosin: Right. Your kitchen is a little sphere of control. I actually really like that idea.

Now, I’m having a Friendsgiving this year, and I am now actually gonna drive to my friend’s house who does most of the cooking and “evacuate” the dangerous utensils from his kitchen.

Schlanger: (Laughs.) I hope he thanks you and doesn’t get really pissed off. That could go either way.

Rosin: (Laughs.) As I fling away all his spatulas.

Schlanger: Are you going to bring him replacements?

Rosin: I guess you’re right. If I throw away all his spatulas, before I do that, I have to bring him silicone replacements for sure.

Schlanger: That seems only reasonable. I will say, you know, on other Thanksgivings, my two sides of my family have very different ideas about all this. So there is, like, one home I’d go into where basically everything is, you know, natural products and the other side where everything would be microwaved in plastic.

Rosin: Wow. So how do you handle that situation?

Schlanger: You just mostly have to live and let live. It’s like, also, you know, if I’m their daughter, and they’re not reading my articles, there’s not much I’m going to do, you know?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. I didn’t realize that was your actual parents. That’s funny. Yeah, I suppose the last thing we should do is give advice to people who walk into a kitchen, and everything has been, you know, baked in the microwave in plastic containers.

Schlanger: You just eat that meal, and go back to your own kitchen, and think about your own choices. I mean, okay, this is all to say: You eat in restaurants all the time. Restaurants are using plastic constantly. It’s really just like, you lower your own dose when you can.

Rosin: Yes. I think that’s what it comes down to. It’s not about policing everybody’s plastics and everything you put in your body. It’s about controlling what you can. And your own tiny or big or however size your kitchen is, that is a sphere you can control, so you might as well do that. And that’s a lovely thing. And everything outside of that, don’t worry about it.

Schlanger: I think so. I think that’s the moral here.

Rosin: Okay. Excellent. Thank you, Zoë.

Schlanger: Thank you.

Rosin: Happy Thanksgiving.

Schlanger: Happy Thanksgiving.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the turkey. Enjoy the mashed potatoes. Enjoy the stuffing. And enjoy all the plastic you’re eating.

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How do you know when a democracy slips into autocracy or fascism or some other less-free and less-savory form of society? Do they hang out a sign? Post it on X? Announce it on the newly state-controlled news channel? In the run-up to Donald Trump’s election, and even all the way back to his first administration, people who study autocracies in other countries have shown us how to spot the clues. One reliable teacher has been Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc. and co-host of the podcast series Autocracy in America. Over the years, Applebaum has situated Trump’s musings in a broader historical context. She’s pointed out, for example, that when Trump fired government watchdogs in his last administration or talked about deploying troops against protesters, those are actions that other dictators have taken.

In the last few months of his campaign, Trump was free and open with his dictatorial impulses as he talked about punishing “enemies from within.” Now that he’s won, have we crossed the line into a different kind of country? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Applebaum joins political writer McKay Coppins to help us know how to find the line. Does this resounding win mean the electorate gave Trump a mandate to act on all his impulses? Does he mean what he says? And how will we know?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. So Donald Trump won. It’s looking like he won every swing state and, also, like there was a rightward shift even in the states he lost. He won even though, in the last months of his campaign, he was at his darkest and most crude. None of that mattered, apparently.

So here to help us understand what happened are two Atlantic staff writers: Anne Applebaum, who covers threats to democracy—hi, Anne—

Anne Applebaum: Hello.

Rosin: —and political reporter McKay Coppins. Hi, McKay.

McKay Coppins: Hey.

Rosin: So, McKay, what do we know about how he won? The particular coalition, the demographics—what do we know so far?

Coppins: Well, you just got at it. I think that the most surprising thing is not that he won—because the polls were so tight, and everyone was warning us to be prepared for either candidate coming out victorious—but the fact that he won so decisively, making gains in almost every state and almost every demographic group is something that I think most people were not prepared for.

Just to run through a few of the highlights: He made major gains with Latino voters, according to exit polls. It depends on which exit poll you’re looking at, but Harris won Latinos by between eight and 15 points. That is a lot less than Biden’s roughly 30-point win among Latino voters four years ago.

He made some more modest gains with Black voters, especially young Black men. A lot of Trump’s gains were concentrated with men. One exit poll showed him narrowly winning Latino men; the other one showed him narrowly losing them. But in either case, that is dramatically outperforming his performance in 2020.

And so, you know, you take all this together, and what you see is that there is a rightward shift at almost every section of the electorate. And, you know, that includes parts of the Democratic coalition that Kamala Harris and her campaign thought they could take for granted coming into this race.

Rosin: And is it just men? Like, everyone you mentioned were men. It’s like, Latino men, young Black men—

Coppins: It definitely was. He definitely did better—

Rosin: (Laughs.) Sorry, McKay.

Coppins: (Laughs.) Not to speak for my entire gender here, but he did seem to do much better among men. Though, I will note that, coming into the campaign, a lot of Democrats had pinned their hopes on the idea that Dobbs would motivate a surge of women to support Harris.

And we’re so early now that it’s still hard to tell from the exit-poll data how much that happened, but it is worth noting that Trump won white women in this election. He won them narrowly, but there was some hope among Democrats that Dobbs would push independent and even former Republican white women to the Harris camp. That does not seem to have happened in the numbers that they were planning for.

Rosin: So all of that is somewhat surprising and things we have to reckon with over the next many months and years.

Anne, you have been helping us understand, over many years, what it looks like when a country or democracy drifts towards autocracy. How do you read this moment?

Applebaum: So I read this moment not so much as something new but as a continuation of things that we’ve seen in the past. I felt that, during the campaign, it would be useful for me to record some of the things the president was saying, to say how they echoed in history, to comment on how those things compared to what has happened in other countries.

I did a podcast about this with The Atlantic. It’s called Autocracy in America. When he was last in the White House, Trump ignored ethics and security guidelines. He fired inspectors general and other watchdogs. He leaked classified information. You know, he used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, kind of deploying troops in American cities.

Obviously, he encouraged the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. When he left the White House, he took classified documents with him, and then he hid them from the FBI. I mean, all those things are indicative of somebody who is in defiance of the rule of law, who thinks he’s above the rule of law, who’s seeking to avoid normal rules of transparency and accountability, who wants to help his staff get around, as I said, things like security, clearance, guidelines, and so on.

And those things do represent a break with all previous presidents in modern history: Republican, Democrat, left wing, right wing—all of them. We didn’t have a president before who defied those kinds of rules and norms and laws and respect for some basic principles of the Constitution before.

The fact is that people either liked it that he was doing that—they found the transgressiveness attractive, along with the language that he used about his enemies, you know, calling them “vermin” and the “enemy within” and so on. Either that was appealing—and, of course, that kind of language historically has been appealing; it does appeal to people—or they didn’t care.

But that means that there has been a shift in how Americans see their government, what they understand the Constitution is for. And that shift clearly precedes Trump. I mean, probably he helped shape it during his first term. He helped shape it during the four years he was out of power. But we now have a country that is prepared to accept things from their leader that would have tanked the career of anybody else eight years ago.

Rosin: So did you wake up on Wednesday morning and think, I live in a different country than I thought I did?

Applebaum: No. I mean, I thought from the beginning of this election campaign—I thought it was possible that he would win. I mean, I suppose, particularly the last couple weeks of his campaign, when he became darker and darker and more and more vitriolic, you know, I wondered whether some of that would bother people.

You know, the imagining guns trained at Liz Cheney, you know, talking about his enemies as the enemy within, talking about using the expression vermin or poison blood—these are terms that are directly taken from the 1930s and haven’t been used in American politics before. So I wondered whether people would be bothered by that.

But am I entirely surprised that they weren’t? No, I’m not. I think the population is now immune to that kind of language, or maybe they like it.

Coppins: Yeah, I would just say: I think that is one of the legacies of the Trump era, is how much he has successfully desensitized the country to this kind of rhetoric and behavior that, in an era not that long ago, voters would have deemed disqualifying.

He has managed to convince enough Americans that this kind of behavior, this kind of rhetoric is okay or, at least, that it doesn’t matter that much. And looking forward, I do think that’s going to be something we live with in our politics long after Trump is gone.

Rosin: I mean, there’s one way of looking at what you both are saying, which is: We woke up today; we have confirmation that we live in a failing democracy. But we actually don’t. All we have confirmation of is that people either don’t care that he talks like an autocratic ruler, they don’t notice, they like it, or they don’t put it in a broader historical context, which is that these are actual signs of actual autocracies, which happen all the time in history and across the world. Right? That’s all we know so far.

Applebaum: Yeah, that’s all we know. That’s all we know. We also don’t know whether Trump will do some of the things that he said he would do. I mean, he talked about mass firings of civil servants. He talked about having people around him who were loyalists. That’s what political scientists would describe as “capturing the state”—so taking over government departments, government institutions, putting them not in the service of the nation and of everybody but making part of your political machine, using them for your political purposes.

He talked about doing that. Will he try it again? Maybe, if he has a House and a Senate that will support him. As we’re speaking, we don’t know about the House, so we’ll see. They might make it easy. Will the judiciary support him? Some of it will. So will he do it? I don’t know.

General John Kelly, who was his former chief of staff, has said that last time Trump was president, he talked about: We should investigate or get the IRS on—at that time he was talking about the former FBI director, James Comey, or his deputy, Andrew McCabe. Maybe now he’s talked about punishing Adam Schiff—who’s a congressman, now a senator, who he doesn’t like—or Nancy Pelosi.

Will he do it? Will he use the IRS to go after people? I mean, that’s another thing that happens in failing democracies. And it’s also something that has happened in U.S. history before, so it’s not unimaginable.

So I don’t know whether he’ll do these things, but it’s now on the record that he has said he would, or he said he wants to. In some of the documents written by people around him, there have been plans to do that. That’s what Project 2025 was, in part. And none of it bothered people, and so we have to assume that it’s a possibility.

Coppins: I do think, to answer your earlier question, that it’s worth noting that, while a lot of voters went into the ballot box thinking about democracy—and in fact, according to one exit poll, around a third of voters said democracy was their top issue—a lot of voters were not thinking about these things, and they were not voting based on hoping that Donald Trump would weaponize the IRS against his political enemies. For example, a third of voters said the economy was their top concern. And I think when we talk about the shifts among those demographic groups, we have to acknowledge that a lot of it was a very simple response to groceries costing more, inflation being up, feeling like the economy was on the wrong track, and responding to a deeply unpopular incumbent president.

And while we can sit back and look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy. But I think it’s also good to point that out because Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate, coming out of this election, and say: I swept the swing states. The voters want me to have all this power. He’ll implicitly say, They want me to abuse my power. They’ve given me permission to do whatever I want. And I think that it’s worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.

Applebaum: Yeah, but that’s not really an excuse. I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you’re voting for stands for. And the responsibility of the president of the United States is not merely to control inflation. The president also has a lot of power over the U.S. government, over U.S. institutions, over American foreign policy, and by deciding you don’t care about those things, you do give him that mandate.

Coppins: But my concern is that there’s a risk of a kind of democratic fatalism coming out of this election, where we will decide that: Look—Americans voted for this aspiring autocrat, therefore he will be an autocrat, and democracy has failed.

And I think that it’s worth parsing this electoral data a little bit and acknowledging that a majority of Americans did not necessarily give him an autocratic mandate. Whether they were thinking about the things that they should have been thinking about, weighing the priorities the way that we think they should have been, I don’t think we should let—it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let Trump and his allies claim that, because he’s said and done all these things and he won the election, he now has permission to do whatever he wants.

Rosin: Yeah. One way of seeing the vote is that it wasn’t at all a referendum on Trump. It was people saying: My life was better in 2019, so I’m going with Trump. And I think why what you’re saying is important, McKay, is because people who didn’t vote for Trump can get discouraged and overwhelmed and tell themselves, People who voted for him voted for everything he stands for. And what follows from that is a sense of alienation. Like, This is not my country, and I don’t understand what’s going on.

Anyway, Anne, you mentioned that Trump ran an explicitly vengeful campaign, that he would come after “enemies from within,” whether they were immigrants, Democrats, or us, the journalists. And you have taught us to take leaders’ words seriously. And yet a lot of people, not just voters, have said, Oh, this is hyperbole. Stop taking it so seriously. So how do we know the difference?

Applebaum: We’ll know by his actions. Maybe it’s true that by saying those things and by acting out vengeance, maybe that was appealing to people who want some kind of vengeance, who are angry at whatever—the economy or the system or the establishment or the media or Hollywood or the culture—whatever it is that they’re angry at or feel deprived by, that he acted that out for them, and that was appealing to them. I’m sure that’s a piece of the explanation.

And then another piece of the explanation is that there were people, like The Wall Street Journal editorial board or the writer Niall Ferguson, who said, Oh, these things just don’t matter. It’s just hyperbole. You know, That’s just how he talks. So we’ll see, and we’ll wait for it.

Rosin: McKay, Project 2025, which came up a lot in the campaign and has been described as a blueprint for the next administration, includes transformative ideas about everything from abortion to tax policy. How much do you think that’s a realistic roadmap for what the administration might do?

Coppins: I would take it seriously. I think that there is a risk that—because Donald Trump, realizing it was a political albatross around his neck, decided to distance himself in the final months of the campaign—that we collectively take him at his word, and I don’t think we should.

I think that what he ends up doing in his next term will rely a lot upon who he appoints to his administration. I reported, back in December, that, in talking to people in Trump world about future appointees, the watchword was obedience. They talked about how Trump felt burned in his first term by appointees, people in his cabinet who saw themselves as adults in the room, who believed that their role was to constrain him, to keep the train on the tracks. And he doesn’t want people like that in his next administration. He doesn’t want adults in the room. He doesn’t want James Mattises or Mark Milleys or John Kellys. He wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological worldview or, out of a sense of ambition or cravenness, are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.

And so when you look at Project 2025 and the part of the plan, for example, that has to do with politicizing the civil service, taking 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy and making them political appointees subject to the whims of the president, it will matter a lot whether he follows through on that and who those people are.

A big part of Project 2025 was identifying loyalists, partisans, conservatives who could fill those roles. And so I think, when we talk through his next administration, what his agenda will look like, a lot of it comes down to this kind of truism of Washington that personnel is policy. So does Stephen Miller return to his administration in some kind of role where he gets to oversee immigration enforcement? It’s entirely possible, but that will make a big difference in terms of how much he follows through on his threats of mass deportation.

Who does he appoint as attorney general? That was one role that everybody I talked to in Trump world told me he was very committed to getting right because he felt the two men who served in that role in his first term betrayed him. So is it somebody like Josh Hawley or Mike Lee or Ted Cruz? These are the questions that we’re going to have to be answering, and we’ll get a lot more clarity in the coming weeks and months as we see those appointees and those short lists emerge.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, we’re going to get into what mass deportations under Trump could look like.

[Break]

Rosin: Something else I’ve been thinking about a lot that Trump has threatened is mass deportations. They are expensive. They’re actually quite difficult to carry out. They require a lot of manpower, local and national. Is that bombast? Is that a realistic threat? How will we know the difference?

Coppins: Yeah. Again, this is where I think personnel will matter a lot, who is head of the Department of Homeland Security, for example. But just to go through what Trump promised on the campaign trail: He said that he would build massive detention camps, implement mass deportations at a scale never before seen in this country, hire thousands of additional border agents, use military spending on border security.

He even said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel people who were suspected of being in drug cartels or gangs, without a court hearing.

He said he would end “catch and release,” reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy. And I think it’s notable that he did not directly answer whether he would reinstate family separation, which was the most controversial aspect of his immigration policy in the first term.

Take all these together—I think there are some of these things he could do pretty easily on his own with executive orders, and there’s not a lot of evidence that he could be constrained by the courts or by Congress. There are some things, like building massive detention centers, that would require a lot of money. Hiring thousands of more border agents would require a lot of money. So this is where control of Congress is going to matter a lot.

Rosin: Are there others on his list that are top of mind for either of you? Aid to Ukraine is one that I’m thinking of. Are there others where you’re going to be vigilantly watching: Okay, he said X. Is he going to do X?

Applebaum: Aid to Ukraine is in a slightly different category. It’s not about American autocracy and democracy. It’s a question of our position in the world. Are we going to remain the leader of a democratic camp, which is opposing the growing and increasingly networked autocratic camp? Will we oppose Russia, which is now in alliance with Iran and North Korea and China? Or will we not?

And this, again, from Trump world, I know a lot of people who spent a lot of time in the run-up to the election trying to find out what Trump meant when he said, I’ll end the war in one day, which has been his standard response when asked about it. And you can literally find almost as many interpretations of that expression as there are people in Trump’s orbit.

I mean, it ranges from, We’re just going to cut off all the funding, to, We’re going to give Ukraine to the Russians, to something quite different. There are people who said: No. We’re going to threaten the Russians. We’re going to tell them we’re bringing in a thousand tanks and a thousand airplanes unless you pull back. And so that’s another version that I’ve heard. There are versions that suggest offering something to Russia—you know, some deal. But honestly, I don’t know.

Rosin: But those are legitimate foreign-policy debates. You can be an isolationist democracy. Those are not fundamental threats in your mind to the nature of this country and what it should be?

Applebaum: No, although there are connections and have always been—we haven’t always acknowledged them—between America’s alliances and America’s democracy. So the fact that we have been aligned in the past with a camp of other democracies, that we put democracy at the center of our foreign policy for such a long time during the Cold War, was one of the reasons why our democracy was strengthened.

It’s well known that during the Cold War, one of the reasons why there was an establishment shift towards favoring civil rights and the civil-rights movement was the feeling that: Here’s this thing we stand for. We stand for democracy. We stand for the rule of law, and yet we don’t have it in our own country. And there were a lot of people who felt that very strongly. And it’s not a bad reason why that happened, but it’s part of the explanation.

You know, Who are your allies? Who are your friends? This affects, also, what kind of country you are and your own behavior. Who are your relationships? You know, if our primary political and diplomatic and economic relationship is with Russia and North Korea, then we’re a different kind of country than if our primary relationship is with Britain and France.

Coppins: The only other kind of policy area that I’ll be keeping an eye on is tariffs. He has said that he would impose between 10 and 20 percent across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. imports and a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods.

A lot of economic experts pointed out that this would very likely cause massive inflation. And given that he was just elected, in large part, on voter frustration with inflation, it’s an open question whether he’ll follow through on this. He clearly does not believe—and this is one of the few issues that he’s been pretty consistent on his entire life—he does not believe it would cause inflation. Almost every economics expert disagrees with him.

And in his first term, there were people in the White House who blocked him from imposing more tariffs than he actually did, in fact to the point where we saw reporting from Bob Woodward that his staff secretary was literally taking executive orders off his desk before he could sign them and kind of losing them in the bureaucracy of paperwork. Will there be somebody like that this time? Will there be somebody who can get his ear and convince him not to go through with this? That is something that I think a lot of people will be looking at because the economic implications for this country and globally could be pretty profound.

Rosin: And what are the bigger implications of tariffs? Like, that could just be a legitimate economic debate. Some people believe in tariffs. Some people don’t believe in tariffs. And it’s an experiment and, you know, economic protectionism.

Coppins: I would not say that this is one of those kind of core democratic issues, that certainly, to various degrees, there have been protectionist policy makers and politicians in both parties over the last several decades. It could cause a trade war. It could interfere with our diplomatic relations with the countries that we’re imposing tariffs on. There are a lot of trickle-down implications.

But yes, I do think it’s important. And I like that what you’re doing here is separating the issues that are kind of more typical policy disagreements from those things that Anne has been talking about, which are fundamental to American democracy. I don’t think tariffs are, but they could have an effect on a lot of Americans, and so that’s why I think it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Rosin: Okay. There’s obviously going to be some resistance to Trump. Let’s start simple: McKay, who is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party?

Coppins: So, obviously, if Democrats take control of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, the next speaker, would, I think by default, become the kind of leader of the Democratic opposition to Trump, at least for a while.

If Democrats don’t take control of the House, I think it’s a very open question and, frankly, it’s one that Democrats probably should have been trying to answer two years ago. Joe Biden deciding to stay in the race after the 2022 midterms will probably go down as one of the most consequential political decisions in this era. The fact that he stayed in for so long, only to drop out in the final months of the election, meant that Democrats didn’t really have time to have the big intraparty debate about what they should stand for, who their standard-bearer should be.

That debate will be happening now. And it’s going to be contentious and noisy and unsettling to a lot of left-leaning voters. I also think it’s healthy to have these conversations. And I think Democrats, in some ways, are kind of innately averse to that kind of contention. And I think that they might need to kind of get comfortable with it, because one way to look at the two elections that Donald Trump has won is that he really benefited from the fact that Democrats cleared the field for the two nominees he ended up beating: Hillary Clinton in 2016, Kamala Harris in 2024.

One takeaway that I think a lot of Democrats will have is that Democrats need to decide that they’re okay with a little messiness in letting their voters decide who their nominee will be.

Rosin: Anne, when other countries have faced a moment like this—a moment when you have to be vigilant, things are in the balance, the opposition feels alienated, it’s unclear who the opposition leaders are at the moment—how do you move through a moment like that? Like, how have other countries successfully moved to a healthier place?

Applebaum: I mean, it almost entirely involves building broad coalitions. The only real example I can give: I live part of the time in Poland. We had an autocratic, populist government takeover in 2015. They did try to capture the state.

They did it pretty successfully. They took over state media, which is a big deal in Poland, and they made it into a kind of propaganda tube. Poland has some state companies, and they took over the companies and began using the money to fund themselves and their party and so on. They enriched themselves, and they tried to create a system whereby they would never lose again.

Remember that another sign of autocracy and a very, very important thing to watch for is corruption. Because when you remove guardrails and when you remove inspectors general and when you weaken the media, then it becomes much easier for people to be corrupt. And we’ve already got that problem in our system, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

Essentially, what happened was the building of a coalition that went, in their case, from the center-left to the center-right—kind of center-left liberal, center-right—of people who wanted something. It was, in part, an anti-corruption coalition, so it wasn’t so much built around fighting for democracy, although that was a piece of it.

The coalition was also seeking to fight against corruption and for good government. But it took eight years. It was a long process. And along the way, a lot of money was stolen. And the institutions declined, and the country is worse governed, and there are a lot of problems that are not going to be easy to solve.

But there’s a look for coalitions. There was some internal soul-searching about what it was we did that—Why did we lose? But I’m not sure even how useful all of that was. I mean, what mattered, in the end, was the reconstruction of an opposition that had a clear message, that had a clear critique, and offered a vision of a different kind of future that was led by somebody who was charismatic.

Rosin: Yeah. That is actually really useful, even to know that the coalitions don’t have to be for the restoration of democracy. They can be against mass deportation, against tariffs. Like, you can form coalitions, if you tell yourself, No, the voters did not give a mandate to Donald Trump to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies. That is not what happened in the last election, coalitions can form—popular coalitions—around all kinds of issues.

Applebaum: Yeah. I mean, you could have a coalition that really cares about women’s issues and women’s rights and abortion rights. And you can have another one that really cares about the environment. And you can have another one that really cares about corruption. And you link them together, and then you have a movement.

Rosin: Right.

Applebaum: And that’s sometimes more effective. I mean, democracy is an abstract word that doesn’t necessarily mean things to people. It has to be made real through something that people experience. And maybe that’s how we have to look at it too.

Rosin: Yeah. I think the thing that catches me in this election, which we haven’t quite touched on, is the truth-and-lies problem. I find that so overwhelming, like, the idea that people believe an untrue thing about what happened on January 6 and an untrue thing about what happened at Springfield, Ohio. And, as a journalist, I always find that an impossible barrier to cross. But maybe you’re suggesting ways to cross that barrier is: Well, people believe smaller truths.

Applebaum: It’s one of the ways. We now have an information system that enables the creation of alternate realities. For me, one of the really striking things about the election campaign wasn’t so much Trump. It was Musk. Elon Musk, who owns a big and important social-media platform, was saying things that he must have known not to be true: falsehoods about immigration, about the election.

He was allowing the platform to deliberately promote them. And he seemed to be doing that as a way of demonstrating his power. He was showing us that he can decide what people think. And he was working hard to create this alternate world in which things that aren’t true seem true. And that—I’m afraid it was really successful.

Rosin: Right.

Coppins: And the other thing that I think we’ve seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true but to almost exhaust their ability to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not, and make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try.

I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering disinformation in the campaign. And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters. It wasn’t so much that they believed everything he said. Some would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate. But they would throw their hands up and say: Yeah, they all lie, right? Who even knows what’s true? And that, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next few years.

Applebaum: That is the essence of Putinist propaganda. It’s not so much that you’re expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or the horror of Western civilization. But you’re expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you’ve been told that you throw your hands up in the air, and you go home, and you say, I don’t know anything. I can’t be involved in this. I don’t want anything to do with politics. I’m just going to live my life.

And that turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda, probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great, which you can disprove pretty easily.

Rosin: Well, Anne and McKay, with your idea of coalitions, I had almost succeeded in finding us a practical path of thinking about a future. But now we’re back at this big veil of disinformation, which is not the place I want to end. Is there some way to turn that ship?

I’ll ask you again, Anne: How have people turned that ship when you find a culture, a populace that’s just become cynical and overwhelmed by lies? How have other countries successfully crawled out of that disinformation?

Applebaum: You build relationships of trust around other things. I mean, almost as we were just talking about, you find alternative forms of communication, all different ways of reaching people. That’s the only way.

Rosin: All right. Well, Anne, McKay, we will have many more such conversations, but thank you for helping us be more discerning.

Coppins: Thank you.

Applebaum: Thanks.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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One thing tomorrow’s election will test is Americans’ appetite for chaos, particularly the kind that Donald Trump has been exhibiting in the last few months of his campaign. After weeks of running a disciplined campaign, Trump’s advisers lost control of their candidate, the Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta reported this week. Trump grew restless and bored and drifted off script in his campaign appearances. During a summer interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, for example, he mused aloud about Kamala Harris, “I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?” From the perspective of his advisers, Trump’s string of offensive public statements needlessly alienated potential voters. Members of Trump’s campaign staff told Alberta that they became disillusioned about their ability to rein in their candidate and left the campaign.

Will this unleashed version of Trump affect the election outcome? In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Alberta and another Atlantic staff writer, Mark Leibovich, about how candidate Trump transformed over the summer, how Kamala Harris’s campaign reacted, where each campaign stands now, and what it means for the election. Alberta and Leibovich also offer tips on how to manage your inner chaos while watching the election results.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. We are recording the Monday before Election Day. The candidates are furiously campaigning in the swing states. At some point, their planes were on the same tarmac in North Carolina.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump mused about shooting reporters; Kamala Harris said normal campaign things. And yet the race is still one of the closest in American history.

Anyway, in this episode, I want to get the inside view of both political campaigns in their last days. So I have with me today two seasoned political reporters, Mark Leibovich. Hi, Mark.

Mark Leibovich: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: And Tim Alberta. Hi, Tim.

Tim Alberta: Hi, Hanna. Hi, Mark.

Leibovich: Hi, Tim. Isn’t it good to be seasoned today?

Alberta: I’m feeling very seasoned.

Rosin: Yeah, that’s a cliché word. It doesn’t mean old. What’s a more flattering word than seasoned? Like, experienced? Or longtime? Longtime: that’s flattering, I think.

Leibovich: It’s definitely flattering.

Alberta: We don’t use veteran.

Rosin: No, veteran is old. How about active?

Leibovich: Yeah, we’re very active. Yeah. Can you tell by our voices?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Anyway, Mark, I understand you’re writing up a preelection guide to how to approach Tuesday night.

Leibovich: Basically, I’m trying to collect a helpful toolkit to how to approach Election Day from sort of a practical standpoint as far as what information you can ignore, but also a habit or even mindfulness standpoint about how to not drive yourself needlessly crazy, how not to be triggered by the kinds of things that Election Night coverage will probably overload you with.

And that includes Donald Trump probably declaring victory wildly prematurely or erroneously, which, I mean, will be news because he’s one of the candidates, but it also should surprise no one. And there are ways to kind of condition yourself, or try to, going into what tomorrow night will be like—which will be obviously very anxious for a lot of people.

Rosin: I see. So instead of “We know it’s going to be like that,” like, “We know that we don’t have enough information.”

We know that there probably isn’t going to be, sort of, instant early clarity. So you’re going into it eyes wide open, doing what? Like, what? Because maybe Tim needs this advice.

Leibovich: Well, I’m trying. Well, I think we all need this advice, Hanna. I mean, I think it’s an approach to how we consume information, how we get information.

I talked to a couple of Democratic consultants who said that one of the first things they do is turn off all their text notifications, because any kind of text notification is designed to trigger you on Election Night.

There is a lot of manipulation of your emotions before the actual only information that is necessary, which, the most valuable information is going to come in probably after 11 o’clock, or quite late. It could be days later. The idea is the news will find you. Turn off your phone if you can. Information is coming in haphazardly from a million different directions, out of order, in no particular sequence whatsoever, about something that has already happened—meaning the voting has already happened. So no control is there. This is basically just people throwing information out in no order, and it is not necessarily—

Rosin: It’s not cumulative and it’s not adding up to—

Leibovich: —Not cumulative.

Rosin: Exactly. Exactly.

Leibovich: So anyway, that’s one reason you can skip that part.

Rosin: Interesting. Tim, do you think you could do that?

Alberta: I fear that in the attempt to not drive myself crazy, I would drive myself crazy. In other words, you would find your brain stacking up with all of the things that other people know that you don’t, because in that moment you have decided to sequester yourself or at least to sort of rigidly compartmentalize your emotions and your brain waves and your political intake.

And therefore the exit polling showing the number of non-college whites in Maricopa County breaking away from Trump is lost on you in that pivotal moment, when that could be the little parcel of information that is necessary for you to believe that you have finally figured out this electoral equation and that you have a bead on it in this moment.

It’s a game of inches, and the inches are everywhere around us, Hanna. So how could I give up any of those inches when we are so close to the end of the game? I want the zen that Mark is offering, but I just don’t find it realistic.

Rosin: Hmm. You know how sometimes you start with the moment of meditation? We’ll consider that our moment of meditation, and now we’re gonna go into the stressful part of this conversation. So, Tim, you’ve been covering the Republican side closely, and you recently spent a lot of time talking to Trump’s advisers.

How would you describe the state of the campaign in the weeks before the election?

Alberta: I would describe it as something slightly removed from the serenity that Mark has described for us.

Rosin: Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Alberta: Yeah, look, Hanna, I think the context here is really important: that this Trump campaign, unlike the previous two, was for the majority of its time in operation, really pretty disciplined, pretty smart.

The people running the campaign had done a pretty good job of keeping Trump out of his own way and talking him out of bad ideas and sort of curbing some of his most self-destructive impulses. And what we’ve seen in the last couple of months is basically Trump going full Trump, and an inability among those senior advisers to really do anything to stop it.

This has been kind of the proverbial slow-motion car wreck. And, you know, it’s not just Trump himself, although of course he is the inspiration for the chaos. He is the generator of all of the turmoil that you see.

He is at the center of this chaos, but the chaos ripples out away from him. And so when you ask yourself the question of how could it be that at the most important public event of the campaign, with 20,000-plus jammed into Madison Square Garden in prime time, the whole world watching, and you pay a million dollars to put on this event, and the guy who kicks it off is a vulgar, shock jock, insult-roast comedian who was dropped by his own talent agency for using racial slurs onstage—how could this person possibly be booked into that position to open for Trump in that environment? It’s exactly the sort of thing that the people around him had been really successful in avoiding for most of the campaign. But ultimately, in the key home stretch here, in the sort of the witching hours of this campaign, it’s all fallen apart.

Rosin: Mark, same for the Democrats. How would you describe where they are?

Leibovich: I would say I’ve talked to a fair number of Democrats on the campaign in the last few days.

It feels like something approaching the general area of the ballpark of confidence.

Rosin: Interesting! Anomalous for Democrats.

Leibovich: Well, they are so incredibly quick to embrace bad news and to go right from bad news to deep levels of doomsaying. I’ve not seen that in the last few days.

I mean, look, I think their numbers internally seem a little better. I think a lot of the external polls have been encouraging. And I think you can’t underestimate how much of a train wreck Trump’s last 10 days have been, in a way that, if he loses, I think people will very much point to.

Rosin: So, Mark, I remember we sat here in the spring and discussed how absolutely stagnant this race would be. Like, we were just sleepwalking into a repeat.

Leibovich: But it was a great podcast. Everyone should listen to it again. (Laughs.)

Rosin: But it was very, you know—we didn’t have much to say. And then for everybody, the reset button got pressed in July.

Tim, the full Trump who we’ve seen on the campaign trail for the last few months started, actually, according to your account, before Harris entered the race. So what happened?

Alberta: I think that maybe the proper visual here, Hanna, is like the wild animal that has chased down its prey and has mauled it mostly to death and is now just sort of pawing at it, toying with it, unsure of really what to do because, well, what’s left to do?

Donald Trump really found himself, according to all the reporting I did, sort of over it. Sort of bored with running against Joe Biden. Because here is, in his view, this sort of hapless old man who can’t even string together sentences, much less really defend himself or go on offense in a meaningful way against Trump. And so I think that he’s looking at Joe Biden thinking, Gosh this is sort of a bore, and around this time, of course, in late June, early July, Trump’s polling is better than it’s ever been in any of his three campaigns for the presidency.

The battleground polling is showing him consistently pulling ahead five, six, seven points across all of these states. The national polling is up. His favorability is up. Democrats are preparing for a bloodbath not just to lose the presidency but to lose the House and the Senate, and it’s, you know, The sky is falling. And everyone around Trump is sort of giddy and gleeful. They’re looking around like, Nothing can stop us.

And around this time is when you started to see Trump talking a little bit differently, behaving a little bit differently, according to people close to him—almost looking for some disorder and some mayhem to inject into the campaign. He starts talking to people on the outside. And when Kamala Harris gets in the race, he was angry, on the one hand, because he thought he had it sort of sewn up against Biden, and he liked running against Biden in the sense that Biden really, you know, couldn’t punch back.

But I think also he’s sort of excited in the sense that with Harris, he’s got this live target. He’s able to channel some of the base instincts that brought him to power in the first place. You know, Trump, I think, viewed the Harris switcheroo as a new lease on life in the sense that he was going to be able to go whole hog again.

But the people around him were saying, No, no, no, no. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do. And frankly, the reason you’re in this position is because you’ve listened to us and because you haven’t been going rogue and running the kind of, you know, totally undisciplined #YOLO 2016 campaign that you would like to run and that you would run if you were left to your own devices. And around that time is when Trump started to lose confidence in those people who were giving him that advice, and he brought in other people to help with the campaign, and from there things really started to spiral.

Rosin: So, Mark, how are Democrats responding as Trump is reasserting this peak-Trump version of himself?

Leibovich: I think in a kind of measured way. I mean, I think, look, the peak Trump pretty much speaks for itself. It’s not like you need people to amplify. I mean, to some degree you do, because outlets that a lot of Republicans watch—like, say, Fox—are going to be insulated from a lot of this, because just Fox doesn’t show it.

I mean, that’s just not their point of emphasis, But I think they’ve been very deft—they’ve made a lot of ads around the kind of changing abortion messaging. I mean, even Melania Trump saying that she believes in a woman’s right to choose, things like that, to some degree, they’re trying to highlight it, but to another degree—this is a big political-operative cliché, but they are running their race.

And I think the Democrats, beginning when Biden stepped aside, I think Harris has performed much better than a lot of people thought she would, and I think her campaign has made a lot of good decisions, and she herself has made a lot of good decisions.

Rosin: It does, from the outside, seem exactly the opposite of the chaos inside the Trump campaign that Tim described, because if you think back to when Biden dropped out, there was some worry that the transition might not be smooth.

Leibovich: Oh, 100 percent. I mean, Tim and I, remember, we were at the Republican convention together, and that was such a moment, because Trump was really kind of at his peak then, which is kind of ironic to say, because the assassination attempt had taken place two days before the convention started. But his popularity, I mean—there was a sense of confidence at that convention which was just off the charts to a degree to which you could almost sense the boredom creeping into Trump when he’s giving this acceptance speech, and I guess it was Thursday night, and then about halfway through, he just kind of went off the rails, and he just sort of—it became just a very unhinged acceptance speech, went from kind of a gripping one where he’s describing the assassination attempt to something completely different, which kind of became a metaphor for how the rest of the campaign would unfurl for him.

And of course, three days later, Biden got out and then the world changed again.

Rosin: All right, up next, I ask Tim and Mark whether the chaotic final months of the Trump campaign could end up costing him the election. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: So from a campaign manager’s perspective, the chaos is disturbing, but what we actually care about is whether it has any impact on voting day. Tim, so what are the ways the drama you describe could affect the election? Like, say, turnout or whatever it is that we’re worried about?

Alberta: Well, look, if these episodes were contained to just Trump being a little bit goofy or going off message and sort of ranting and raving about the latest person who said something very nasty about him on cable news, I don’t think it would have much real-world effect. But I think that some of what we’re unpacking here over these past 10, 11, 12 weeks, Hanna, is something that actually gets to a fundamental weakness, which is a failure of the Trump team to expand its coalition.

Or at the very least what we’re seeing is the way in which the potential of expanding the Trump coalition has been undermined by Trump’s own actions or by the people close to him. So, for example, we know based on six months of really solid, consistent data that Trump is likely to perform better with Latino voters as a whole and particularly with Latino men under 40 than any Republican nominee in modern history.

And yet, when the dominant headline coming out of your rally at Madison Square Garden the week before the election is that one of your speakers calls the island of Puerto Rico floating trash in the ocean, this is self-sabotage.

Another core component of this Trump campaign, from the beginning, has been How do we keep our margins tight in the suburbs outside of Detroit and Milwaukee and Philly and Vegas and elsewhere? How do we keep our margins tight with these college-educated, suburban women? We’re not going to win them, right? But how do we manage to keep it close? How do we lose them by just seven or eight points instead of by 16, 17, 18, 20 points?

And when you look at, for example, the selection of J. D. Vance and, you know, his old, greatest-hits reel around childless cat ladies, and he thinks abortion should be illegal nationwide, right?

And there’s just something that sort of went fundamentally awry over the summer. I think Mark is right. Both of us were remarking at the convention about how it was effectively an early Election Night victory party. I mean, they weren’t even—Republicans in Milwaukee weren’t even talking about the campaign as if it were going to be competitive. It was already over. The fat lady was singing onstage in prime time in Milwaukee. And yet, I remember corresponding with several smart Republicans—Trump supporters—while I was there, and they were a little bit nervous about the Vance selection. And then on Thursday night, to Mark’s point, Trump gives this sort of weird, meandering speech that seems to squander a lot of the goodwill that he had coming into that event because of the assassination attempt. And it felt like between those two things—the Vance selection and then the speech—and then, you know, 24 hours after leaving Milwaukee, Biden gets out, Harris takes over the ticket, and suddenly, those dominoes started to fall.

And what we saw was all of the best-laid plans of the Trump operation go awry. And it wasn’t just surface-level things where we say, Oh, that was sort of silly he said that. Or Oh, this was an unforced error, but it’ll be a quick news cycle and blow over. Some of what we’ve seen, I think, will have a real impact at the ballot box.

Rosin: So what you’re describing is a campaign strategy that is fairly traditional that they were following fairly successfully, which is: try and win over, you know, some middle-of-the-road voters, or at least not massively alienate those people.

But, Trump has been running a very different kind of campaign—like going to Madison Square Garden—and fewer on-the-ground resources. And that seems like a pattern across swing states, which for me raises the question whether what these managers are calling chaos, like, that is the strategy.

The strategy was always just: get a lot of attention.

Alberta: I think it depends on the type of attention you’re talking about. So when Trump goes to the southern border and has, you know, hundreds of cameras following him around there and talks about the lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants committing crimes—you know, that is attention, and it can even be attention that is rooted in some hyperbole, some demagoguing, some bombast. And yet it is productive attention politically for the Trump people, right? They look at this sort of cost-benefit analysis and they recognize that, sure, we might antagonize some people with this rhetoric. We might alienate some people with our focus on these issues, but we think that the reward is far greater than the risk.

So there is, I think, plenty of good attention that the Trump people do want. I think what they’ve tried to avoid is a lot of the sideshow that is appealing to some of the very online, right-wing, MAGA troll base but does nothing to add to the coalition that I was describing a minute ago. And ultimately at the end of the day, politics is a math equation. It’s multiplication and addition.

Leibovich: Right, and I think, to Tim’s point, immigration was an incredibly effective issue for Trump. When you tip that into people eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and just how that took over the narrative of the Trump campaign—I mean, one, they look like fools; two, it insults the intelligence of so many people, and it turns a very serious and effective issue for the Trump campaign, immigration, into a joke and into just something really, really problematic and gross.

Rosin: So the art of running a Trump campaign, then, is to siphon and manage and titrate the chaos exactly right. Like, you want the right kind of chaos, the right kind of attention, but if you lose control of it, it just comes back to bite you. Is that basically what’s happened?

Alberta: Yeah, and it’s always gonna be a high-wire act, right? These people aren’t stupid. They knew what they were getting themselves into. In fact, Chris LaCivita—who is one of the two people managing the Trump presidential campaign here in 2024—within a few weeks of his decision to join the operation back in the fall of 2022, you have Trump saying that he wants to terminate parts of the Constitution. You have Trump saying and doing these sort of crazy, self-destructive things. And LaCivita is sort of looking around saying, What have I gotten myself into?

And of course people who are friends with him are saying, Come on, dude, you knew exactly what you were signing up for. You know exactly what you were getting yourself into. So I think whatever degree of self-delusion may exist at the outset, when some of these folks ally themselves with Donald Trump, you know, it dissolves pretty quickly and they become clear-eyed about who they’re working for and what the challenges are.

And to your point, Hanna, yes, there’s inevitably going to be some chaos, some attention-seeking behavior, some stuff that is vulgar and inappropriate and racist and misogynistic and whatever else. Their job is to try to turn things that are kind of potentially toxic into productivity. They’re trying to mine coals out of manure here, and again, I can’t stress this enough: For most of the campaign, they were actually doing a pretty good job of it. But at a certain point I think it just becomes too much to manage.

Rosin: Mark, do you get the sense that the Harris campaign’s—you described it as, like, a little dose of confidence. Is that because of everything that Tim has described?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, I think Trump has given them so much to work with. And not just like, Oh, look, he said this and sort of putting that out there. I mean, early indications about the revulsion that women are having—women voters are having for Trump—even more so than usual. And the degree to which they seem to be voting and maybe even lying to their husbands about—to kind of use a new ad that the Harris campaign is using which is basically saying, you know, a lot of Republican women are secretly going into the ballot, and behind their husband’s back, they’re voting for Kamala Harris. So again, Trump made their job easier, but I think they have taken what has been given to them. And I do feel hopeful. Yeah. Again, from talking to a bunch of them, and levels of very, very cautious optimism—which I would say, you know, it would probably be an absolute verboten thing for anyone anywhere near the Harris campaign to show anything more than just a tiny bit of confidence. Because that’s going to harken back to the overconfidence of 2016 or the overconfidence of 2020, you know—Biden was supposed to win by a lot more than he did.

And I think what freaks everyone out is the idea that Trump, in the two times he’s been on a general-election ballot, has massively overperformed his polls. And now there’s a sense that perhaps that’s been accounted for in these polls and they’re undercounting African American voters, women voters, and so forth.

So anyway, I think all of that is kind of baked into this, but look, I don’t want to suggest that anything other than massive anxiety is the default for everyone around this campaign. And I assume both campaigns.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s leave the listeners with thoughts about Election Night. There’s the zen option, and hopefully many of our listeners will take advantage of the zen option.

Take a long, 12-hour walk. Be home by 11 p.m. and then turn on the television. Short of that, the map is really wide and open. I mean, seven open states. It’s a lot. So for those who are not spiritually built for the zen option, how—literally—will you guys be watching? Like, give a listener a guide of what to watch out for on the night.

Leibovich: Well, yes, there are seven battleground states. But I think there’s a lot you can learn if you can get information from other states. You know, there’s a poll that everyone has been talking about—a lot of insiders have been talking about over the last few days—from Iowa. Iowa, no one considered a swing state. Safely red, certainly has been in the last few elections, certainly for Trump. Ann Selzer, a deeply respected pollster, came up with this Des Moines Register poll on Saturday night, having Harris ahead by three.

Now, putting aside whether Iowa’s now a battleground state—I mean, if it’s even in the ballpark of accurate, I mean, as a euphoric result for people on Team Harris. I mean, look, if there are some early numbers from, say, South Carolina, Florida, that, you know, maybe show Trump’s margins a little lower than you would expect, possibly that’s something that you can learn from.

So again, it’s not just the seven battlegrounds, which will probably take a while to count, especially in some of the states with laws that make it harder to count early votes. But, yeah, I mean, like, the whole country does vote. It’s like, margins do matter, and I think we can learn from a lot of people.

And look, even, like, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky—I mean there are these early states that you know exactly who is going to win, but you can learn from.

Rosin: Because if the margins are smaller than they are expected to be, then that’s a bit of data that’s interesting. Tim, what about you?

Alberta: So there’s a known known, and a known unknown. The known known is that Democrats are continuing to see erosion in their coalition, specific to African American men, Latino men, and to some degree young voters.

And I think specifically if we’re looking at Detroit, at Milwaukee, at Philly, at Atlanta, at Maricopa County—there are places where we should be paying attention to this, right? I think the known unknown here is: Does Donald Trump get beaten up among suburban women, or does he get demolished among suburban women?

And I think that the answer to that question is probably determinative to who is sworn into office on January 20.

So I’m really paying very close attention to the collar counties outside of Philadelphia, to the WOW counties outside of Milwaukee. You have to look at Vegas and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Some of these places—I don’t want to be reductive, but I really do feel like, ultimately, that’s where the election is going to be won or lost.

Rosin: Both of you are saying: Look for signs. It’s not just big, broad swing states, but there are meaningful signs in smaller election results that you’ll be looking for.

Alberta: That’s right. It’s, again, it’s just a numbers game. And it so happens that the most dense, vote-rich areas of persuadable voters are just consistently found in these once re,d then purple, now pretty blue suburbs. And so whether you’re watching the presidential race or even if you’re looking for a potential upset in a Senate race, like in Texas, where Ted Cruz on paper looks like he’s going to win and maybe even win comfortably. But pay attention to Harris County, Texas, which, on Election Night in 2012, Obama and Romney fought Harris County to basically a draw. I think it was a matter of a few hundred votes that separated them. Fast-forward, you know, a decade. Democrats are carrying Harris County, which is the Houston suburbs—they’re carrying it by a quarter-million votes, 300,000 votes reliably, and that number’s only going up.

So those are the parts of the country where I think if you’re paying close attention, you’ll start to get a pretty good idea.

Rosin: Okay. I think we have options for the meditators and options for those who cannot bring themselves to meditate. Thank you both for joining me on this day before the election.

Leibovich: Thank you, Hanna. Thank you, Tim.

Alberta: Mark, I’ll call you tomorrow. We can meditate together.

Leibovich: I look forward to it. Yep, we’ll join figurative hands.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back later this week to cover the election, though possibly earlier than our usual Thursday release, depending on the results.

Thanks for listening.