Charles Fain Lehman, Neetu Arnold, Rafael Mangual, and Daniel Di Martino discuss voters’ increasing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and potential 2028 frontrunners, why President Trump is targeting the Smithsonian’s museums, and reporting that an Eric Adams adviser gave cash to a journalist in a potato chip bag.
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Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, Senior Editor of City Journal.
Joining me on the panel today are Neetu Arnold, Rafael Mangual, and Daniel Di Martino. You know them, you love them, you know they’re from the Manhattan Institute and also frequently City Journal. Let’s jump right into the news of the day. Neetu actually sent me this piece, so she has to have takes on it.
There’s a recent analysis in the New York Times which finds that the Democratic party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls, in the words of the sub head. Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections, often by a lot. They also have registration disadvantage for first time in at least five years of Pew’s data. And so there’s a bunch of big red flashing warning signs for the Democrats in terms of registration. A lot of people say registration doesn’t matter. And I think there is an interesting question here about, is this about a decline in partisan identification versus a decline in willingness to vote? But it is part of this broader changing electorate that we talk about a lot on the show and that we’re very interested in that transformation. So I want to throw it to the panel. What do we make of this headline, what do we make of this development? Is this a warning sign? Is it a sign of something else? What should Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else take away from this?
Neetu Arnold: I mean, I think it’s been a warning sign for a long time. I mean, even since the election results in November. I mean, right after the election, you know, everyone was talking about the Hispanic vote shifting to the right. And I looked into the Asian vote shifting to the right. You know, major cities, even New York shift. A lot of the Asian voters had shifted by 30 points to the right. And I went and talked to those voters. And I think what I would characterize what they told me. The Democrats were pushing policies that were very, it was like toxic compassion because they want to support affirmative action. They want to support making it easier to get into some of these high-quality schools and competitive schools, but it’s often at the expense of people who worked really hard.
You know, they, when it came to crime, they weren’t addressing those issues very well. And there were real effects on people. They were changing their behavior and whether they took a subway to work or not. So I think there were some real effects on people, and they were tired of the extremes of their party. And I think many, just, you know, they were not happy with the Democrats. And so we saw that with the election results, and I think when you’re seeing decrease in voter registration, you’re seeing people who are sending a message to the party. They’re not happy.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with former New York Democrats who have sort of consistently voted with the left their entire lives, who were just completely mugged by the reality of 2020, particularly on the crime issue. So, obviously that’s not a representative sample. But I think the other thing going on here too is just the demographic problem that the Democrats face. I mean, Gen Z is significantly more conservative than previous generations, or specifically millennials.
Charles Fain Lehman: Some measures but not by every measure, right? It depends on which cohort you create. Part of it is COVID exposure. Some polling says there’s a juncture there.
Rafael Mangual: Sure.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, but there’s also like a big gender dynamic there as well, right? Like Gen Z men are significantly more conservative than Gen Z women and significantly more conservative than millennial men. And so that political gender gap is going to grow, is growing, has grown. And I think that’s got to be showing up here in some way. And it’s going to be interesting to see what happens over the long term. I mean, I’m certainly not an expert on relationship dynamics, but when you have that big of a political shift, you have to imagine that at some point the genders are going to come together on issues because they can’t hate each other forever. Out of necessity, right? Either that or the population is going to go down a lot.
Charles Fain Lehman: The experience of South Korea tells us that a developed democracy can have such a profound gender misalignment problem. It can get way worse than we have.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, the joke in Germany is that because the party is a multi-party system, right? And then there’s the far-right and the far-left party. The joke is that the fascist guy dates the communist woman in Berlin. I think it’s not just about what happened in the last few years, the decline in Democrat registration. It’s also just the polarization of the country, right?
I think in the past there used to be huge swaths of the United States that were registered Democrats and would vote for Republicans. That’s what the Reagan Democrats were. That’s what the Democrats who voted for Nixon were. The Democrats who voted for Bush, that’s not going to happen anymore. And there didn’t used to be, by the way, many Republicans who voted for the Democrats. The Republicans were like just the tinier conservative party and the Democrats were more like the catch-all party that some Republicans appeal to. I think we are now firmly in a system that is of two camps that are opposed to each other, and there’s very little overlap.
Charles Fain Lehman: I do think we shouldn’t go too far on this metric because partisanship is partly about voting intention, but it’s also about identification. There are many independents who you can sort as leaning D or leaning R, and that’s pretty predictive of their voting behavior. From the voting behavior perspective, one of the things we’ve seen is there’s been this sort of switch in the dynamics where the GOP used to be the smaller but more likely to vote party because it captured a lot of share the elderly vote the elderly turnout. Today the Democrats have the high propensity voters even as they’re becoming the smaller party and so that sort of checks their size disadvantaged because they show up in the midterms. They show up in the off- cycle elections in a way the Republicans don’t, but so to me the signal is almost actually much more about a decline in the willingness to identify yourself as a Democrat, right, which goes along with the declining popularity of the Democrats and in some senses with the normalization of Donald Trump, right? There was a, just as an example, there’s a news story earlier this week about—I forget, maybe it’s the PGA tour. I think it’s the PGA tour—re-added one of Trump’s golf courses to its circuit. And that was a sign of like, Trump has won. After 10 years in the discourse, he stuck around and he won. And so if your brand was built on, as the Democratic Party’s brand was built on, being against Trump, you have a serious cultural problem when the culture shifts in the Trump direction. And I think that’s been true even as the president’s popularity has sort of stagnated over the past three to five months.
Rafael Mangual: Can I pose the following question? I mean, does anyone buy the possibility that part of what we’re seeing is just unpopularity of the Democrats on the left, which is becoming more and more extreme? And we see this with the rise of people like Mamdani, who had the highest voter turnout in New York City mayoral primary history. People like AOC, these DSA figures that would have been fringed two years ago, are now kind of becoming mainstream. I mean, is that part of what we’re seeing? Is the Democrat Party dying in part because it’s not attracting its left flank?
Daniel Di Martino: Did you see the post of party registration by name? And so they had the name Muhammad and what share of Muhammad’s in the United States are registered Democrats. It suddenly dropped in the last couple of years. This is not because Muslim voters are becoming Republican. This is because of the entire, you know, Palestine, Gaza thing. And then they’re like, we’re just not going to register Democrat, but they’re really still on the left. And so I think there is the two cases, Rafa, there is the really far left people who say, I’m not a Democrat, but they still vote left. And then there’s also the very moderate Democrats that are like, the Democrats have moved too far left on cultural issues and I can’t identify as a Democrat, even if I’m not a Republican.
Neetu Arnold: I mean, one thing that was interesting looking at the New York Times map was that you’ll see large decreases in Democrat registration in the Northeast, so states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island. You know, Massachusetts has a lot of registered independents, even though it’s considered a solidly blue state. So I think some of the lower registrations you’re seeing in Democrats, they may just be going more independent. But I think to your point, I see this on social media a lot of times, especially among, know, Gen Z or among millennials. They think the Democrats are not going far enough. And so some of them are just, they’re very, they’re not happy with the Democrats. And so it’s sort of like Democrats are bust. And I think that is something we should be concerned about because you’re going to be seeing a lot more polarization and it almost seems like you’re going to have something extremely far left and then we might have to go extremely far right. I think that creates a lot of instability.
Charles Fain Lehman: I do think there’s an interesting sort of tripartite, or yeah, three-part framing there where like there are, in the American democratic system, we solve our problems of ideological diversity by putting all the ideologies under two tents rather than having every ideology represented in a multi-party system for a host of reasons. And I think you could argue that the Democrats have sort of three discrete ideologies under the tent right now. One is the sort of DSA tendency that, contrary to what Ralph is saying, I think will, it seems likely to sort of dominate in big blue cities, New York, Seattle, Minneapolis, the three we’ve talked about on the show. I’m not sure it has play outside of that. You know, like Dan Osborne didn’t do that great. This is DSAism. There’s sort of what I think of it as like, like, I don’t know, actual existing Bidenism, which is sort of a combination of like deference to the institutions, deference to authority, deference to sort of party rule combined with generic affection for democracy, whatever that may mean. And then the third bucket is like this sort of reformist, like third way Democrats, which are most recently instantiated in the sort of abundance people, but I think are really just part of that Clintonian inheritance.
Daniel Di Martino: The Blue Dog Coalition in Congress.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right, yes, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who’s a representative from Washington for listeners who don’t know her and has sort of tried to stake a position as a moderate on a bunch of these issues. So, I mean, it’s…
Rafael Mangual: Laura Gillen’s another one.
Charles Fain Lehman: Who?
Rafael Mangual: Laura Gillen.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, Jared Golden in Maine. The point I’m making is like, in some senses, if we’re talking to the Democratic Party getting smaller and becoming more like the late 20th century Republican Party, which was an ideological coalition, the limit to that model, which I forget who said that, but the limit to that analogy is the Republican Party is small because it was dominated by one ideology, and that was American conservatism as dictated by a handful of tastemakers. The Democratic Party is ideologically split at the same time that it’s getting smaller. Sorry, go ahead, Daniel.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, before Reagan, it wasn’t that way.
No, because before Reagan it wasn’t that way. Before Reagan there were the liberal Republicans and the conservative Republicans and it was still a small party. So you could still have an equilibrium like that, I guess.
Rafael Mangual: And even in the post-Reagan world, I mean, it was a fusionist party, right? I mean, you still had lots of infighting on the right, in all sorts of spaces between conservatives, libertarians, religious traditionalists.
Neetu Arnold: I thought liberal Republicans still existed even after Reagan.
Charles Fain Lehman: Kind of, but they very rapidly became Democrats.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, well, but it was it was the great decline, right? Like the Rockefellers of the world, all of that after Goldwater won the primary in ‘64. That was a big shift. today, I mean, who are the liberal Republicans, right?
Neetu Arnold: Okay, maybe not today, today, but like maybe 10 years ago.
Charles Fain Lehman: Bill Weld. I mean, there are, you know, a handful…
Rafael Mangual: Haven’t heard that name in a while.
Charles Fain Lehman: The best example for a liberal Republican is Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins in the Senate. And Susan Collins is actually, or like Phil Scott, the governor of Vermont, John Sununu.
But like New England Republicans are very specific and strange breed. They do exist, but they do not represent the party.
My response to that, Daniel, is just that there is a 15 to 20 year period where the conservative movement is taking over the party. They’re in a very active struggle with the Rockfellas and the John Lindsay and all the rest of them. And they kind of just win decisively in 1980 because Ronald Reagan is, like Donald Trump, a generational figure in American politics. And he just completely sweeps the board. And everybody coming after him has to, for a period of arguably between 1984 and 2016 everyone just has to like agree with the Reagan consensus, which is a really useful way for disciplining a party. My point is like if you don’t have numbers and you don’t have ideological discipline you have a really big problem and what saved the GOP’s small-sized historically was the ideological discipline that they were able to pull people over into their coalition as the ideology was persuasive and that’s not true for the Democrats at least at present although I think there’s a real threat that it becomes true as the party shrinks, which is my separate concern.
Rafael Mangual: Although to the extent that what we’re seeing in the voter registration share shift is Republicans pulling new voters in, that actually I think could possibly undermine the ideological conformity within the party because to the extent that new people are coming in, I’m not sure it’s because they’ve been persuaded by conservative ideas as much as they’ve been dissuaded by the crazy Democratic elitism on wild issues. I have friends that are union guys, iron workers that have voted Democrat their whole life, but the transgenderism stuff just threw them for enough of loop that they’re now voting for their full-on MAGA. They don’t care about free markets. They don’t care about crime to some extent, but the sort of bread-and-butter tax and spend issues that conservatives really define themselves by is not with motivating their sort of…
Charles Fain Lehman: And the Republican Party has adapted to that, right? When you think about who is drawn in portion of the coalition, it’s the 5 percent of voters who came in under RFK, who is Democrat, and a bunch of voters who are attracted by Donald Trump, who is at various points in his life a Democrat and has at no point been a doctrinaire movement conservative, and is pretty disdainful of the movement a lot of the time. That, you know, the GOP, this is my point at switching places, the GOP is becoming a bigger and less ideologically cohesive tent at the same time that the Democratic Party is becoming smaller and potentially more ideologically cohesive. It’s not obvious how.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah. Right. The question about the Democrats becoming smaller and the whole ideological battle, kind of like what happened in the GOP, is which faction is going to win, right? Like, are they going to become a socialist party? That’s my greatest concern because…
Rafael Mangual: I mean, I think so. Who was it yesterday that said that anyone opposing Mamdani was opposing the future of the Democratic Party?
Daniel Di Martino: Ben something? Was it Ben? I saw it on twitter.
Rafael Mangual: Was it Ben Rhodes?
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, I think it was Ben Rhodes.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, it’s like, I never would have guessed that.
Charles Fain Lehman: He was nicknamed “Hamas” in the White House.
Neetu Arnold: I mean, what’s interesting to see with the divide here, like when you look at the GOP, there are a lot of competing factions and you see a lot of leaders that we can name off. But when I look at the Democrats, you know, who’s their front runner? Like right now, Gavin Newsom is making the news, but sometimes I think is it too early? Like, is he the front runner for president? And I know we talk about Mamdani or AOC, but you know, that’s, to me, that feels more local right now. And so it’s sort of like who’s leading the Democrats and where are they going?
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, no, I think you’re right that like a socialist is very unlikely to win the next primary. But the question is the direction and how long until they have a serious contender, kind of like what Bernie Sanders was. Because if they do take over, a socialist will eventually become president because this is a country that alternates between parties. And so that is why it should be a great concern for all Americans, regardless of whether you’re Republican or Democrat, to have one socialist party in the country.
Charles Fain Lehman: Let’s take Let’s take Neetu’s answer and Neetu’s thought as our exit. I had something else, but I think we went in a different direction. Let me ask of the current, you know, forming field of potential 2028 Democratic nominees, who do you think is the front runner right now? And the answer is almost certainly that whoever wins is not going to be somebody who’s in the field right now. But who’s currently the front runner in 2028? Neetu, you floated something like the question, so I’ll give it to you first.
Neetu Arnold: I mean, I’m going to say Gavin Newsom for right now, but you’re saying based on what we know right now. I think it’s a little too early. Like, I think he has the chance to fizzle out, but he’s the only person that comes to mind.
Charles Fain Lehman: Gavin. He’s…whatever the heck he’s currently doing. He’s doing some weird stuff on Twitter. Ralph, who’s who do you think is the frontrunner right this instant?
Rafael Mangual: I think it’s AOC. Scary as that might be. I mean, just look at the crowds that her and Bernie were drawing on their little tour. I don’t think this is just a localized thing. I think the Democratic Party has really shifted towards socialism in big way. And it has kind of thrown, you know, like, it’s thrown expertise out the window in a way. It’s just made the decision that young, dynamic, compelling personalities are the future of its party, and I think AOC checks those boxes.
Daniel Di Martino: You know, I just checked Polymarket. The front runner on beting is Gavin Newsom, but the second is AOC. And they’re pretty far ahead from the others who are like Pete Buttigieg or like Andy Beshear. I think it’s certainly one of them. I would say, you know, a primary between like AOC and Gavin Newsom would be very interesting because even though Newsom has a lot of the spotlight, he’s really charismatic, AOC doesn’t, like… She doesn’t… She’s not a governor. She doesn’t have a record. She doesn’t have anything they can blame her for. And Gavin Newsom has a terrible record as a governor that she’s going to attack and probably is going to attack him very effectively as a woman, younger, like so, so, so many ways that, that I do think AOC has a greater chance than Gavin Newsom in 2028.
Rafael Mangual: But I can’t imagine her line of attack because, I mean, it’s hard to believe that she would have governed particularly differently.
Daniel Di Martino: That he’s bought out by the big corporations in Silicon Valley.
Neetu Arnold: But then again….
Charles Fain Lehman: No, no, no, he’s too moderate. He’s too moderate.
And I think that would be the question. Newsome is trying to pivot. He is trying to signal moderation in sort of superficial ways, and the question is like, will that help or hurt him? His bet is that it will. Maybe. We’ll see what happens in two years. You know, is the…
Rafael Mangual: I would hurt him in today’s Democratic Party. Absolutely hurts him.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, redistricting stuff is helping him, I’ll say. This whole thing with Texas and California redistricting is absolutely putting him on the spotlight in a good way for Democrats for him.
Charles Fain Lehman: He fights. All right, I’m going move on to from national politics to, well, also national politics, but in the District. On Tuesday, President Trump announced his plan to review the Smithsonian Museums for alleged negativity towards America. To quote from him on Truth Social, “the Smithsonian is” —all caps —“OUT OF CONTROL. Where everything discussed is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future.”
This has obviously provoked something of a backlash. Critics are charging Trump with rewriting history. Defenders are saying, no actually we’re trying to make history balanced. What do we… What do we make of this controversy? Is there, you know… Is it good to for Trump to get involved on this level? Are we concerned about this kind of management from the White House? And at the same time are the Smithsonian Institutions and museums more broadly too negative? Is it a problem that we’re too negative about American history? What do we make of this?
Rafael Mangual: I think yes, it’s a problem that we’re too negative about American history. I haven’t been to enough of the Smithsonians and not in recent…
Charles Fain Lehman: Really? We get you down to D.C.
Rafael Mangual: I mean, I’ve been to a few, but not recently. I mean, yeah, you know, honestly, my favorite museum in D.C. closed a couple of years ago. That was the Newseum. I used to love that place. Every time I would go to D.C., I would buy the two-day pass and I would go both days. And they had this old exhibit of old newspapers going back to like, I don’t know, 800 AD or something like that. And you could see like op-eds written by the founders, which was super, super cool. Anyway. Yeah. Look, I think it’s absolutely a problem. And what Trump is doing here is he’s sending an important signal, which is, you know, you have one party in this country that has kind of branded itself on criticizing America and everything that it stands for and undermining its history in order to rewrite it for the future. And I think he’s just putting a stake in the ground and saying, no, we’re going to be proud of our history. And I think that’s a good thing. How he goes about doing that with this kind of micromanagement approach and picking the Smithsonians as a target. I mean, we’ll see if it plays out. I suspect if it gets a lot of play, he’ll continue to go down that road. But if it doesn’t catch on, he’ll move on to something else. But it is an important signal for him. But I don’t think outside of maybe the Museum of African American History, that you can make that case all that compellingly. I’ve been to the Smithsonian Museum of History.
Daniel Di Martino: There’s a Latino museum now, Rafa, and it’s pretty bad, actually.
Rafael Mangual: What was that?
Daniel Di Martino: There’s a Latino museum now and it’s pretty bad. It’s pretty bad, yeah.
Rafael Mangual: Is there now? Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, yeah, I think the, you know, the sort of ethnic-branded museums are always going to be, you know, where you see most of that stuff. But I mean, a couple of years ago was the last time I went to the Smithsonian for American history. It wasn’t, it wasn’t all that bad. And the Air and Space Museum, I walked out of there ready to go to war with, you know, China. I mean, it was, you know, that place is awesome.
Charles Fain Lehman: Thanks
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, I think that they don’t need to make this like a presidential issue. He just needs to use his appointees to change what’s going on inside. You don’t even need to make headlines about it, but I do think it needs to change because the African American History Museum, the Hispanic or Latino History Museum, those are pretty woke. And it’s not because they exist necessarily, though that’s a different debate, but it is certainly because of the persistent focus on oppression and discrimination and blaming of the U.S. government for all of it, when in reality, we need to put it into context of what happened in the world in that same time period, of the opportunities of those same people in other parts of the world, of how this country abolished slavery and went to war to abolish slavery. Like this is the real history of it.
And the success, right? Because so many people of those backgrounds found success because there was actually not that much oppression as the Left wants to say today, right?
Rafael Mangual: And still find success, right? I mean, the Democrats are currently fighting tooth and nail to open the borders and liberalize immigration policy, all based on the reality that people around the world recognize the United States as the land of opportunity, as a place where to whatever extent they might be oppressed, that is going to be completely overshadowed by the potential benefits associated with living in the United States.
Daniel Di Martino: Rafa, it was so much so that Blacks from the Caribbean were immigrating to America, while there was still slavery, as black free persons and they were finding success.
Rafael Mangual: 100 percent yeah. Yeah?
Neetu Arnold: Look, I think the White House is targeting the Smithsonian museums in part because there’s just a larger distrust of institutions and, you know, especially going to the universities. I mean, when you look at history fields, they lean overall left. And I think the thing with history is it’s not so much of a problem of showing what happened in history, showing both the good and the bad, but it’s the interpretation. And that’s going to be a problem when your fields are overwhelmingly left. There isn’t people challenging each other. And I think that’s why we do end up getting biased history. And that’s unfortunate for places like the Smithsonian because I think they can be great educational resources for our public.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, there is a challenge just in sort of, you can’t avoid making value judgments in how you curate, right? And I think that in some senses, there’s a sense that Trump is trying to undo the ideology and my response is like, the ideology of the value judgments, also Trump has a set of value, right? Daniel has a set of value judgments about like, I happen to agree with Daniel’s value judgments about like America is a land of opportunity and prosperity, but it is a set of value judgments and you couldn’t make a different one. And so it is just like, this gets into this deeper issue of like, is Trump depoliticizing or is he politicizing in a different direction? And what, you know, is…
Daniel Di Martino: There will always be politicization and I think the Smithsonian should promote the idea that America is a good country. And we need to be unapologetic about it. America is a good country. America is a great country. That’s why people come here. That’s why people visit the Smithsonian. Yes, there was slavery in the United States. So was there slavery in the entire planet, but there is still today.
Rafael Mangual: There was also slavery in every other society in the world.
Daniel Di Martino: So we need to be unapologetic about saying that America is great. And I do like that Trump is doing that focus.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, look, think that…
Neetu Arnold: I think it’d be more effective if the process, like how he did it, like I think Ralph brought up earlier, know, the White House micromanaging, you know, maybe not the best way to go about it.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, but I think he sees this as a sort of continuation of the fight that he just won against NPR, right? The question that he’s trying to answer is, should American taxpayers, who are, a majority of whom are deeply patriotic and voted for him, should they be forced to subsidize the making of a case against their own country? Right? And I think that’s an easy question to answer, right?
Ultimately, to the extent that he has the powers to pull these levers, he should pull these levers and let the next president, if it’s AOC, pull them in the opposite direction and fully embrace that brand. But I think it’s actually a useful fight to have for that reason, right? Because it forces the dichotomy. It forces the other side to come out and say, no, actually, we do think America is bad. And I think what Trump is betting on is that that’s not a message that’s going to resonate with a huge portion of the population. And I think he’s right.
Daniel Di Martino: But then imagine when they try to change it back in the future to saying those things, it’s going to look so bad. So maybe if they don’t like it, we can also get rid of taxpayer funded institutions. I also am not totally opposed to reducing government spending.
Charles Fain Lehman: But I think this gets to point I made earlier about sort of the normalization of Trump, which is last time, if he had tried this, I think there would have been a much more aggressive response. And the undoing by the Biden administration, which simply would been framed as Trump tried to undermine the integrity of these institutions, and we’re just returning to what the commonly accepted history is. And I just don’t think the public would buy that anymore, which is a marked shift in how they engage with this conversation, the conversation of Trump.
Rafael Mangual: I think that’s exactly right.
Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, I want to keep us moving but I will ask everybody, I don’t know if… We’ll see what Ralph’s answer is, but you’ve been to some Smithsonians. My question is what is your favorite of the Smithsonian Institution museums that you have been to? If you can’t name one, you can name another one in D.C., it’s okay, but I really prefer Smithsonian.
Rafael Mangual: It’s easily Air and Space.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, okay, Ralph goes to Air and Space. Daniel?
Daniel Di Martino: Really? No, for me, it’s Natural History.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s a good one.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, I love Natural History. Yeah, I have a second best, but I want to let Neetu…
Neetu Arnold: Sorry, Air and Space here.
Daniel Di Martino: Really? You guys should go to the National Portrait Gallery as well. The National Portrait Gallery is part of the Smithsonian Network, right? Yeah.
Rafael Mangual: I’ve been, I’ve been. The Natural Portrait Gallery is great. Yeah, I’ve been to Natural Portrait Gallery, American History, Natural History, Air and Space, I think one or two others, but Air and Space, by far the best, the flight simulator, so much fun.
Daniel Di Martino: I remember I went there my first year that I interned in DC and it was very cool.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’m going to assert moderator’s prerogative to say three things. One is that I can’t pick Natural History because the Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh where I’m from is better because we had all the robber barons stealing the dinosaurs way back when. We have a good collection of stolen dinosaurs. Thing two is I will also go to the Air and Space Museum, but I will be different and select the Udvar-Hazy Center, which is the Air and Space Museum annex out in Virginia, which if you haven’t been to, should absolutely go to. They have an SR-71 Blackbird and also a space shuttle.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: And every time we go there, my kid tries to bother me into getting him a plane from the gift shop and I usually give in because planes are cool. And three is that I will give an honorable mention to the Museum of the American Indian, which itself is like eh, but the cafe is extremely good. So if you’re looking where to eat at the Smithsonian museums, yeah.
Daniel Di Martino: That’s rare in government museums.
Neetu Arnold: Charles Fain Lehman: No, actually a number of the, like the African American history museum, actually the cafe is also decent. Like they go out of their way. I mean, they go out of their way to like do ethnic cuisine, but it’s not like, you know, messing around. Like it is, it’s actually good.
Rafael Mangual: And the Natural History Museum Cafe here New York is actually pretty good.
Charles Fain Lehman: Which one?
Rafael Mangual: The Natural History Museum in New York. Yeah.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, the one in New York City is really good.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right. So before we go, we can talk about something else, but I feel like our, you know, our light item is, I got to come up with a question for this one, but just before we all get on, we were talking about this strange story that broke. A reporter from The City, which is a New York-based magazine alleges with substantial supporting details that Eric Adams campaign affiliate, tried to give her a potato chip bag with an unknown, but non-trivial amount of money in it. And then she tried to…
Rafael Mangual: Is it non-trivial? Was it like 180 bucks or something like that?
Charles Fain Lehman: If you want to give me a hundred and eighty bucks, I will take it from you, so you know, I’II…
Daniel Di Martino: That’s a bad bribe.
Charles Fain Lehman: I don’t just want to ask what’s going on here, but very succinctly, what do we make of this situation? Without necessarily passing judgment on the merits of the candidate, what do we make of what’s going on in this latest breaking news? And I will score responses. Ralph, go ahead.
Rafael Mangual: I cannot think that this came anywhere close to the candidate. This is just, I mean, $180 in a potato chip bag, unsolicited to a reporter for The City, which is like, if you don’t know what The City is, mean, these are, what I would guess would be some of the least bribeable reporters in New York City journalism circles.
So yeah, the whole thing just strikes me as completely strange, but I don’t think it has anything to do with Adams. My guess is this person who apparently has a bit of a criminal history here is just off her rocker, kind of crazy. Because yeah, again, I just can’t think that $180 in a potato chip bag would have gotten you anything.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, she did…
Neetu Arnold: Also, why 180? Sorry, this is just me. I like having zeros at the end. Why not 200 or 150?
Daniel Di Martino: It’s all the cash you got. It’s all the cash you got.
Charles Fain Lehman: We don’t actually know if it was 180. It was 100 and some 20s and we don’t know the exact amount.
Rafael Mangual: I don’t even know if it’s hundred eighty. Several twenties, yeah, it was a hundred dollar bill and several twenties so…
Daniel Di Martino: Probably all the cash that person had in the wallet and that’s it.
Neetu Arnold: OK.
Charles Fain Lehman: We should note that she asserted that it was a cultural affectation. This woman is Chinese, and a number of other Chinese New Yorkers have sounded off to go, no, it’s not. So I’m very glad.
Rafael Mangual: I never heard of it.
Daniel Di Martino: I mean, I would have believed that if she was Latin American because it’s so common to bribe in Latin America. But it is a bribe, it is not a cultural affectation. People just bribe a lot in developing countries.
Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah, but in Latin America, $180 will get you pretty far. I mean, in New York City, that’s, you know, that’s dinner.
Daniel Di Martino: yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to Philippines, I’ve seen the videos of like the cops in the Philippines being bribed for that.
Rafael Mangual: The Dominican Republic is even worse. It’s bad.
Daniel Di Martino: So no, I think this is just a crazy person. Actually, it’s great for the journalists because now the journalists has a great story to break of something that happened. But this has nothing to do with the actual candidate and it’s a shame.
Neetu Arnold: Does this happen a lot in journalism or in politics or is this just a one-off incident?
Rafael Mangual: No one’s ever offered me any money, but if you want my Venmo, I’ll shoot it out.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, bribery doesn’t happen in that way. Bribery doesn’t happen in that way. But PR agencies, as we’ve seen with influencers on the left and the right, it’s insane the number of influencers that people trust because of what they supposedly believe. And they’re all being paid tens of thousands of dollars to promote, or hundreds of thousands, depending on who, for specific issues. I don’t know if you saw the recent article on Laura Loomer herself, that now the White House is concerned about her because she’s getting paid to promote all the things she does. And I had warned about this, you know, months ago because it’s obvious that these influences are getting paid to promote these issues.
Charles Fain Lehman: On that note, I think that’s about all the time that we have for potato chip bags and everything else. Listeners, thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our special producer, Sophia Izzo, who’s sitting in for Isabella. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, even if you haven’t, don’t forget to like, subscribe, YouTube, other platforms, anywhere else you can hear our show. Comments and questions, always welcome down below. Maybe at some point we’ll even my answer to some of them. Mostly we get comments. We don’t really get a lot of questions. I’d love to answer some questions.
Daniel Di Martino: Yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: Until next time. You’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. Hope you’ll join us again soon.
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
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