- I just wanna say I'm really depressed now.

(laughing) (hosts and audience laughing) - [Jeffrey] I thought I was making good jokes.

- [Evan] We've done our jobs then, right?

That's it.

- I thought it was good.

- You did.

- Yes.

- But where does that leave us?

What kind of bit of hope can you possibly leave in response to what you've said?

I just, I want my mindset to be a little hopeful as to a future.

- What do you got for us?

- I would suggest, you know, I understand the impulse.

I'm also not a clergyman.

(audience laughing) We're analysts.

And I'm gonna just tell you what I think regardless of if it makes people sad or happy.

What I would say is that, I mean, my baseline position is I remain hopeful.

It's kind of hard to kill a 250-year-old wildly successful experiment.

Like, we have resilience.

I mean, and you know, the other point is, it's like, people always ask me, like, "Don't you get tired, 10 years of whatever?

And I was like, "No."

Like, you have something to fight for.

It's exciting.

You know, like, if the choice is between fighting and not sure you're gonna win something and not fighting, well just go fight.

Like, it's fine.

Like, you know, the world is, the world is also an amazing place, and it's a beautiful place.

And especially if you have children or grandchildren, like, we don't have a choice anyway.

So like, I don't like spend a lot of time getting upset about like, "Oh, what's the," nihilistically or something.

I'm not saying that you're being nihilistic.

I'm saying you're being, you may be being appropriately depressed (audience laughing) about, like, weird things that are going on, but, like, I don't feel that, in part because I don't feel like any of us has a choice.

And part of that can just be trying a little harder on a very personal level to reach across divides.

Part of it can just be being civically engaged.

Part of it can just be reading and watching and subscribing and talking and embracing reality as you understand reality in any given way.

I don't mean to be like, now I'm trying to sound like a clergy.

But I mean, I don't, first of all, I really do think that a lot of people, for a lot of people, this is a game.

Look, electricity flows.

The supermarkets are filled with food.

You know, the stakes are still low.

I think if the stakes got higher, I think a lot of people would be like, "Okay.

Enough of that."

- Right.

And reminding people what we could lose is pretty important.

- There are a lot of people though, who look at where we are right now.

They say gas is $4 and something something a gallon.

It's hard to afford to buy food, you know, - It's bad.

- Communities are divided by deliberate, intentional, back to enthusiasm, enthusiastic polarization, you know?

- Yeah.

- I saw today that the Tennessee legislature has now put a map forward that would eliminate the one Democrat in Tennessee.

We're about to have a cascade of these things around the country so that we're gonna have redder reds and bluer blues.

- Yeah.

- We're going in the opposite direction from coming together.

- Why are you trying to depress this nice lady?

- I'm sorry.

(audience laughing) - She's in crisis.

- Right.

- Be nice.

- I guess the point is that there is a lot to process if you're just an average person trying to get through your life.

- Yeah.

- It's reasonable to be concerned about when is this going to turn, right?

- Yes, and there are temptations to go toward extremism.

I'm not even talking about the violent idiots - Right.

- Who are making life more frightening than it needs to be.

There's a temptation to go toward the simplicity of extremism rather than the honest complexity of the world as it actually is.

- Yeah.

- And I'm not saying it's not frustrating, I mean.

- But you gotta keep going.

- What else are you gonna do?

- What choice do you have?

Yeah.

Question.

- It's a little tonally different.

And I wanted to take this opportunity here that you are here, someone who could maybe give us, Evan, who we love working with very much and have worked with many years, an anecdote about Evan.

(audience laughing) - [Evan] Why?

Why on earth does anybody need that?

(audience laughing) There's no anecdote about Evan.

- He has no anecdotes.

- [Evan] I have no anecdotes.

It's anecdote-free zone.

- Evan, you know, Evan has one setting, which is actually called Evan.

Right.

(audience laughing) It's very interesting.

It's, like, so we do events together, you know, we do all these big programs.

We have a big thing in New York and do Washington.

And I'm like, you know, my attitude, especially in live events and TV things, it's like, "Oh, that light bulb went out.

What a disaster.

I'm gonna go home and give up."

(audience laughing) And if we were doing an event together in New York, and let's say the electricity went out, and we had a thousand people in an audience and we had to go on in two minutes, Evan would be like, "This is an amazing opportunity to use candlelight for the first time at an event."

(audience laughing) You know?

And it's like, (audience applauding) - I'd be like, I'm looking for any excuse to get on the couch in front of Netflix or whatever.

And he's like- - I don't like to lose.

That's what it is.

- "What a fantastic opportunity."

- Ma'am.

Hey, Kris.

- Hi.

I liked your reminder of Trump and-- - [Evan] McCain.

- McCain, thank you - McCain.

- So my question is, I know journalists are responsible for reporting the news.

When is it journalist's job to say "Enough is enough."?

- Depends on what journalist, what kind of journalist you mean.

You have columnists every day saying, "Enough is enough."

And you have columnists saying "Trump is great."

And, you know, they argue with each other.

- Yep.

- And different people do different tasks.

I think it's very important for reporters to keep their heads on straight and tell you what's going on without doing that.

I mean, look, we have this, let me talk about this with, like, some kind of appropriate distance.

There is a debate.

I'm just reporting this.

I'm not showing what team I'm on in this case.

There's obviously an active conversation around kitchen tables and in restaurants and softball leagues and wherever, there's an active conversation about is this president cognitively, mentally capable of being president, right?

People shy away from those que- - Well, we had the conversation at the end.

- How much time do we have?

- I mean, a little bit.

We had the conversation at the end of the last president.

It's not about party.

- Yeah, no, I mean, that was more about actual physical/mental - Physical fitness.

- decline because of age.

What we're talking about here is a debate.

And I'm simply acknowledging that there's an argument.

What if the president is actually crazy?

Or what if he's a pathological narcissist or what if he has like some kind of diagnosable condition?

People ask these questions.

I don't know if it's a journalist's job to weigh in on that.

I don't know if we're, by the way, I'm about to use, you know, analogy, that's not true.

When you put a frog in boiling water, this is actually true, they try to jump out.

People always say, "Well, if you slowly boil a frog, it just sits there."

Somebody actually ran this experiment, and frogs are like, "Get me the hell outta here."

(audience laughing) But I don't know if we're the frog of the mistaken story, you know, where it's like, we're so... Like, I read his Truth Social posts at the end of every morning, and it's like, "I don't remember anybody ever talking this way."

Right?

And you know, we'd say colloquial, "Well that's nuts."

But it's like, I think I know where you're going.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about where you're going with the question, but, you know, there is constant pressure within ourselves, within our institutions to say, "You know what?

This is so abnormal as to be something that it's actively dangerous and that it has to be called out in a different way than we're calling it.

The truth is, in different ways and in different places, people are calling that all the time.

I'm not weighing in on that debate, 'cause I do prefer, - Well, organizations- - I do prefer to just say, - Yeah.

- This is what he did.

This is the consequence of what he did.

This is what he said.

This is why it's unprecedented.

- But is it wrong when he attacks the Pope?

- Is it?

(laughing) - Is it wrong for journalism - It's not the smartest - To say that's - Political move - A little weird?

I mean, you know, - And we do.

- Right.

- And we do.

- And the funny thing about that, the funny thing, is that, you know, he usually has like a pretty good finger feel for like what's politically tenable and what's not.

And it's like, there are a lot of blue-collar Catholics and white-collar Catholics who are like, "Uh, yeah, we don't do that.

Like, that's not a thing that we," - That's a line.

- "That's not a thing that we do."

And I think he's, I was gonna say he pulled back from it.

But my vision- - He attacked the Pope again, I think, in the last 24 hours.

- Yeah, I think he did it again.

- Yeah.

- This is my operating theory of the president.

This is gonna sound like I am making a snarky joke.

I'm not actually.

My view of his mind is that of a lazy Susan.

And there's seven items on the lazy Susan.

There's Greenland, there's Iran, there's tariffs, there's crime in the 1980s, there's the Pope - People who are - Making him mad.

- Mean to him, right?

And people who think that an issue has passed are usually wrong, because the nature of the lazy Susan is that it comes around again.

(audience laughing) So what I'm saying, what I mean in practical terms is that if you're the prime minister of Denmark, and you think that, "Oh, he's so busy with Iran, he's forgotten about me."

I don't think he's forgotten, because these issues come, by the way, maybe this is a completely normal thing.

We have preoccupations, right?

Some of us have had the same interests for decades.

It's not abnormal.

But I think it's all gonna come around.

I think everything that you've seen will come around again.

So keep your eye out for that.

- Thank you, - Thank you.

- Thank you all.

That was excellent.

- Sir.

- Hi.

- Hi.

I think your show is great, "Washington Week."

- Thank you.

- Watch it every week.

I like the rotating commentators you have and- - But.

Wait, there's a but.

(audience chuckling) - And (chuckling).

- Oh.

(audience laughing) - Nice.

Very nice.

- Good, good.

Good one.

- Very nice.

- Very nice.

Very nice.

- Nice.

- That's good comic timing.

- I've been here before too.

(laughing) - [Evan] That was good.

(hosts and audience laughing) - My friends who watch the show, if I can get them to watch the show on the conservative side.

- Yeah.

- They don't get the same thing out of it.

And I wonder whether or not you think it just leans left.

I know it's truth telling.

That's how you want to say it.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- But I don't get much of a conservative approach to inside government that I think the conservative side would wanna see.

- Right.

- And I know you don't have a lot of time to do.

- No, no, no, no.

It's a very serious question.

- Yeah.

- First things first.

I don't necessarily see Trump as a conservative.

- No, I agree.

- You know, and I'm a big believer that a properly functioning American democracy would have a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party.

And they'd be based on ideas, and they'd be arguing all day long, everything from tariffs to NATO to this, that, and the other thing.

And then you, the citizen, will go, "That guy's more convincing than that guy."

So I don't see this as conservatism.

I have a problem, the bigger problem is at the Atlantic in assigning pieces, unlike a lot of magazines, I will run pro-Trump pieces or pieces that are, and we do, when he does something that seems clever or smart to one of our writers.

The real challenge is in the fact checking process.

Like, you can't run something that's just not true or provable.

And that's the challenge.

So yeah, I could have a conservative pro-Trump commentator on, but if they say things that just aren't factual or based in fact, then it's a hard thing.

I'm not arguing with you that mainstream journalism leans liberal in the sense that the undergirding unexamined suppositions generally lean center left.

I don't think it's like a hard left thing.

There are people on the left who think that, of course, we're corporate media and all the rest.

But it's a huge challenge.

And I try to, like, calm things down when I can if people are upset.

But, the fact of the matter is, let's use Iran as an example.

I can't have someone come on and say, "Well this was a well-thought-out strategy."

(audience laughing) No, I'm serious.

Like, I have defense correspondents and foreign policy writers come on and they say, "He kind of did this on a whim, and now we see the consequences of that."

And a person who leans toward Trump might be offended by that commentary.

But I can't deny the underlying analytical reality of that commentary.

So that's the dilemma.

- I agree.

And if I may follow up, but don't you think in this time you need that conversation?

'Cause it sounds like it's too liberal.

You don't mean or intend to do it that way, 'cause I like the fact, I'm a lawyer, I like the fact point of view, - Yeah.

but there must be someone to complete this conversation on the right or conservative that can bring you facts.

Like, well this is something that maybe the liberal side didn't think about.

Not that I'm a conservative, I just think it, you know.

- It would be better.

Look, it would be better for everyone.

- Right.

- But I mean that's the abnormality of the time, in a way.

That is representative of the abnormality of the time.

But many of the things that Trump is doing are not what I would consider conservative.

- Well, I agree with that part.

- Yeah.

No, but I don't disagree with you at all.

I think you're making an excellent point, and we should try harder to do that.

- Well, keep up the good work.

- Thank you.

- Good.

- All right, (audience applauding) we've gotta get Jeff down to the PBS Annual Meeting downtown for his thing this afternoon, so please give him a big hand.

(audience applauding) - Thank you so much for being here.

- We'll see you again soon.

- All right.

Good.

(audience applauding continues)