David Rieff: ‘It’s one thing to have a bad president and another to have a crazy one’

Perhaps taking a step back from his own country allows David Rieff, 72, to make a more accurate analysis, and helps him to have a clearer and more complete framework, a broader perspective of the state of things, as if correcting an American-centric myopia. Since the war in Ukraine broke out in 2022 after the Russian invasion, the editor, essayist, and political analyst has been largely dividing his time between New York and Kyiv.

But this is not his first foray into a war zone: in the 1990s he traveled to Bosnia, to a war that his mother, Susan Sontag, also wrote about. Armed conflicts and their resolution, international justice, immigration, and humanitarianism have been central themes in much of his work, reflected in books such as A Bed for a Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Interventions, and In Praise of Forgetting. His upcoming book, Desire and Fate, is set to be released in the U.S. on November 21.

While passing through Madrid on his way to New York, Rieff discusses “the nervous breakdown” that the United States has been having since 2015, the still-unquantified impact of traditional media’s new role compared to platforms like TikTok, and the polarization that has diminished the common space shared by all Americans.

Question. The healing effect of forgetfulness in societies, which you have explored in your books, takes on a different dimension in these elections.

Answer. The United States has been having a nervous breakdown since about 2015, when Trump emerged on the scene. I don’t say that it’s all Trump’s fault. The nervous breakdown has taken many forms, both on the right and the left, with mini-insurrections after the murder of George Floyd, the rise of woke, the revival of white nationalism and the kind of rebellion of young men who are quite disoriented by feminism.

Q. What is your forecast for the elections?

A. As things now stand, it’ll be very close, which is a disaster because it means that the hardliners on both sides will reject the results. Kamala Harris will win the popular vote, but we don’t have direct elections. You can lose the popular vote overwhelmingly and yet if the right states fall into your hands, you still win the election. That’s how Trump won in 2016. Now if Trump wins Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania by two votes, he’s won the election.

Q. How do you explain the uncertainty surrounding these elections?

A. It’s not the popular vote that matters, it’s the states that vote for you and how many electoral votes those states have. That’s why you go into an election fighting for nine, 10 or 13 states. We don’t know yet what the effect of the comparative marginalization of the mainstream or legacy media is. So much of what’s going on is taking place in media outlets that people like me don’t know anything about: we know they exist, but we don’t know how they work. How effective is Trump’s TikTok presence? Those are the things that are going to determine this election, not whether the Boston Globe or the New York Post endorses you. The U.S. is in a terrible mood on all sides, and nobody really can talk to each other anymore.

Q. What would it take to overcome that division?

A. A real leader who can talk to everybody. On the other hand, when it comes to social media… Like anyone who has a historical memory of what the media was like in the U.S. before, say, 1945, I’m very skeptical of this post-truth stuff.

Q. What effect will the wars have on these elections?

A. Ukraine will have very little effect. I wish it didn’t as someone who spends a lot of time there and teaches in Kyiv. There’s quite a lot of popular sympathy for Ukraine in the U.S., including in improbable places, such as the LGBTQ+ community. There’s quite a lot of support, but I don’t think that will significantly influence the vote in swing states.

Q. And Gaza?

A. Israel has always been a domestic political issue. Ukraine is much more shocking for Europe than it is for the U.S. In Germany, Poland and Hungary, you’re very aware of the war. But in the U.S., it’s more remote. For the foreign policy establishment, both military and civilian, Russia is a kind of afterthought. The right and the left are obsessed with China.

Q. Will the candidates pay at the ballot box for supporting Israel?

A. Americans aren’t that interested in foreign policy. Most Americans, including quite educated Americans, know very little about the rest of the world. But there are certain issues, like migration and Gaza, which have become domestic issues. Now there’s this very noisy, disenchanted group of young people who really feel that the society they live in is pretty horrible, and they really want it to change. U.S. aid to Israel, in their view, is what makes the Gaza war possible. Zionism was a kind of American religion as well as a Jewish religion, and now there is a counter-religion: anti-Zionism, anti-imperialism. In electoral terms, this doesn’t matter so much, except in the swing states and those with a large Arab-American population. If they stay home and do not vote for Democrats, which is what they did in the last election, Trump could win, for example, Michigan.

Q. To what extent is the election business as usual, and to what extent is it truly exceptional?

A. It will depend on the results. I don’t think it’s the election of the century in terms of politics, but the problem is that I don’t think Trump is entirely sane. It’s one thing to have a bad president, another thing to have a crazy president. Trump is completely unpredictable. I was told that, when he was in the White House, in the weekly military briefings, they had a lot of trouble keeping Trump’s attention. In the end, they understood that the only way to get him to pay attention was to say his name every 30 seconds. He’s a character out of a Nathaniel West book. He’s the American id, in the Freudian sense: uncontrolled, unbuffered, all greed and desire and shameless vulgarity. He is a nightmare figure, ruthless when it comes to seeking the satisfaction of his desires and urges. Because that’s very American.

Q. Does being a woman work against Harris?

A. No, it works for her because I think getting back these young men who are with Trump would be very difficult. So, better to go with your strength, which is the women. This is going to be a very gendered election, the racial part is obvious, but gender will be more important. There will be majorities of women voting for Harris and majorities of men voting for Trump, and this includes Latino men, many of whom are surprisingly pro-Trump. What Latina women think is less clear in the polls, but Black women will come out to support Harris. Again, with Black men it is not so clear.

Q. Does support for Trump have to do with Trumpnesia and voters forgetting the chaos he created, or his management of the Covid-19 pandemic?

A. Yes, there is a lot of forgetting, and it is not the kind that I would praise. People are not thinking about Covid. Biden did a good job with that crisis and with many other things, but he didn’t get much credit. In many ways, he was a better president than Obama, who was charming and intelligent and a very appealing figure, but perhaps the most important thing he did was get elected. And Trump is the kind of person who gets away with things because he’s so shameless. Harris is reasonable, well-briefed, competent, professional, a centrist politician who doesn’t excite anybody.

Q. A better candidate than Hillary Clinton?

A. Less arrogant. Hillary lost that election just as much as Trump won it. We know that they screwed up in the Midwest. They couldn’t believe that they weren’t going to win, or that this guy they considered a joke was going to make it to the White House. I don’t think Harris is overconfident.

Q. What do you expect from a Harris administration?

A. She’s a centrist, she’s not going to change much, she’ll disappoint the left, but she’ll be quite woke like Biden in practical terms. As I argue in my book on this topic, woke is congruent with capitalism. The interesting thing will be to see if, should he lose, Trump will continue to control the party or will there be Republicans who will reorient it. Has the victory of the far right in the party been such that there can be no turning back, that it can never be John McCain’s party again?

Q. And the Senate? According to the polls, it seems clear that the Republicans will win it.

A. This means that even if Harris wins, there will be many things she will not be able to do: any major reform will not pass and the judges she wants to confirm will have to be more centrist than her people would like. A Republican Senate with Trump in the presidency would be very different from one with Harris in the White House. The key in any case is that the Democrats regain the House. If that happens, well, you have gridlock and, historically speaking, Americans rather like gridlock.

Q. Where will you be for election night?

A. I’ll be in New York, so I’ll probably go to a friend’s house.

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