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  • ‘Spider-Noir’ is the best TV superhero series since ‘The Penguin’

    Transcript:

    DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

    This is FRESH AIR. The Spider-Man character was introduced in a Marvel comics book in 1962. Since then, he’s been the center of several live action superhero movies over the decades, some well-received animated features and has been reimagined in stories set in different times, even in different universes. One comic book series that began in 2008, “Spider-Man Noir,” imagined the hero as a gumshoe of the 1930s but with superpowers. Now Prime Video has brought that concept to television as “Spider-Noir,” starring Nicolas Cage. Our TV critic David Bianculli says everything about the series is unexpectedly enjoyable.

    DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: In this universe, I’m pretty much tired of superhero films and TV series and random multiverses and don’t approach any new one with much enthusiasm. When I heard about “Spider-Noir” and that Nicolas Cage was starring, I couldn’t imagine why he’d choose a superhero story for his first TV starring role. Then I watched the eight-episode first season and realized it probably represents one of the best and boldest Nicolas Cage performances of his entire risk-taking career.

    From the very start, “Spider-Noir” takes the noir part seriously. It’s set in the Depression-era New York of the 1930s, and Cage plays a superpowered masked character known as The Spider. When we meet him, he’s loved and lost a woman, a story he recounts in the rain over her grave. He’s gone on a multi-year bender and now has an office as a private eye. His name is Ben Reilly.

    (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “SPIDER-NOIR”)

    NICOLAS CAGE: (As Ben Reilly) We were going to be married in the spring. I even bought a ring to make it official, a ring I never had the chance to give her.

    (SOUNDBITE OF THUNDER CRACKING)

    CAGE: (As Ben Reilly) Ruby once told me that with great power comes great responsibility. Well, she was the greatest responsibility I ever had. And I failed her. The Spider failed her. After that, I didn’t want the power or the responsibility.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    CAGE: (As Ben Reilly) So I went back to being just an ordinary man. That was five years ago.

    BIANCULLI: If that opening narration sounds as though Cage is channeling a bit of bogey, well, he is. But the imaginative conceit of “Spider-Noir” is that the bite that gave The Spider superpowers also made him more spidery than human. Ben Reilly, in order to blend in and do his job, really does have to act like a human and like a private eye. So he goes to the movies and watches the latest Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney films and imitates them a bit. But there also are scenes where Ben Reilly, the gumshoe, like James Garner’s Jim Rockford in “The Rockford Files,” hands out fake business cards and adopts different accents and dialects.

    Cage has enormous fun with all of this but also establishes that his character sometimes is primarily a spider and physicalizes that in a way that’s just a riot. If you saw him in “Vampire’s Kiss,” you’re familiar with his brand of unbridled acting. And he’s not acting alone. Lamorne Morris, who won a well-deserved Emmy as the deputy on Season 5 of FX’s “Fargo,” plays a reporter who works with The Spider and keeps his secret. It’s a rich role, and Morris delivers, and so do the show’s other costars.

    The always commanding Brendan Gleeson plays the ruthless power broker Silvermane, who tracks down superpowered mutants to persuade them to join his gang. As always with this genre, the villains have a lot of the fun. Gleeson, as Silvermane, veers easily between playful and menacing, as when he captures a mutant played by Andrew Lewis Caldwell and introduces himself. Caldwell, for his part, is great fun, too.

    (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “SPIDER-NOIR”)

    BRENDAN GLEESON: (As Finbar Byrne) Well, I assume you know who I am.

    ANDREW LEWIS CALDWELL: (As Dirk Leyden) The man with the mane of silver, born from nothing, built his empire through gut and guile, purveyor of the finest spirited potions, king of the five buroughs, Mr. Finbar Byrne himself.

    GLEESON: (As Finbar Byrne) I see you like to talk. Think you could listen for a second?

    CALDWELL: (As Dirk Leyden) Oh, I am like a Nebraskan cornfield – all ears.

    BIANCULLI: Of course, every classic noir, even a “Spider-Noir,” has to have a femme fatale. This one is a chanteuse and heartbreaker played by Li Jun Li, who played Grace in “Sinners” and was a star of the 2008 Lincoln Center revival of “South Pacific.” She gets to show off her musical talent when Cage’s Ben Reilly first sees and hears her at Silvermane’s nightclub.

    (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “SPIDER-NOIR”)

    UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Ladies and gentlemen, Cat Hardy.

    (APPLAUSE)

    LI JUN LI: (As Cat Hardy, singing) Stars shining bright, above you. Night breezes seem to whisper I love you. Birds singing in the sycamore trees. Dream a little dream of me.

    BIANCULLI: She sounds beautiful and looks dazzling, too, outfitted in stylish costumes with vibrant colors. Well, they’re vibrant and in color, depending upon how you choose to watch “Spider-Noir.” Oren Uziel, who developed this series for TV is presenting it in an unprecedented manner. On Prime Video, you can decide to watch in what it calls either true hue color or authentic black-and-white, or toggle between the two. I found it fun to keep switching, especially to learn the colors of sets or costumes in the color-saturated versions. But both versions are exciting to watch.

    There are loads of allusions to classic films. The fight scenes explode with energy, and the various writers and directors work as a coherent team, whether they’re presenting intimate scenes between characters or wildly hallucinatory dream sequences. No matter which way you watch it, “Spider-Noir” is the best TV superhero series since “The Penguin.”

    DAVIES: TV critic David Bianculli reviewed “Spider-Noir,” starring Nicolas Cage. On tomorrow’s show, New Yorker staff writer Ben Taub gives us an inside look at Donald Trump’s campaign to acquire Greenland. While it’s faded from the headlines, Taub says there are ongoing influence operations at Trump’s direction to keep the possibility alive. In a new article, Taub reveals some key players in the effort and its impact on Greenland and our European allies. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what’s on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram, @nprfreshair.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DAVIES: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley. I’m Dave Davies.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  • ‘The Lost Founder’ profiles a brilliant lawyer who helped craft the Constitution

    Transcript:

    DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

    This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, we’ll hear a lot about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others. But what if I told you that one of the nation’s founders, one of only six who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a critical voice at the Constitutional Convention, and arguably the man most responsible for the government we’ve had for two centuries is someone you’ve never heard of?

    That’s precisely the case made by our guest today, Jesse Wegman. He’s a journalist who writes about the Constitution and democracy. Wegman’s new book is about James Wilson, a man regarded as one of the American colonies’ most brilliant lawyers in the late 18th century and one who led a colorful and impactful life. He was nearly killed during the Revolutionary War when rioters attacked his house in Philadelphia. He later became a Supreme Court justice and died at the age of 55 in the back room of a tavern in North Carolina, on the run from the law and creditors. But Wegman argues that a careful review of records from the founding show that James Wilson was a highly influential figure in crafting the Constitution and a powerful voice for democracy, insisting that direct rule by the people should be the guiding principle of the new government.

    Jesse Wegman served for 12 years on the editorial board of The New York Times. He’s currently a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He was last on FRESH AIR to talk about his earlier book, “Let The People Pick The President: The Case For Abolishing The Electoral College.” Lately, he’s written opinion pieces advocating term limits for Supreme Court justices. Wegman’s new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” Jesse Wegman, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

    JESSE WEGMAN: Thanks for having me.

    DAVIES: You know, you write about James Wilson and how he was a significant lawyer in the colonies in, you know, the 1760s, when tensions between the colonies and Great Britain were growing. And he wrote this essay, which was a groundbreaking legal analysis, which concluded that the British Parliament had no legitimate authority over American colonies because all lawful government is founded on the consent of those subject to that government.

    This essay proved very influential in the years to come. And, you know, as I was reading about this, it struck me, these ideas don’t seem so novel or revolutionary. I mean, to the modern ears – right? – it’s commonplace. We have lived with this notion of, you know, government by this consent of the government for a long time. And I wonder, was it hard for you, as you got deeply into this research, to get into the mindset of the 18th century, when these ideas were really new?

    WEGMAN: That’s a great question. And I was, at first, having trouble, you know, remembering how radical these ideas were at the time. They aren’t particularly new to us now. They weren’t even particularly new then. I think a lot of people were saying bits and pieces of these things. Obviously, you know, the consent of the governed goes back to Locke and before. And many of these ideas are floating around, but nobody took them up with the clarity and the vigor of Wilson.

    And I think that came through in this essay, which he writes as a 26-year-old who’s just come over from Scotland on a boat a few years before to the colonies and, you know, apprentices in law and quickly becomes one of the sharpest and most sort of forward-thinking lawyers in the colonies. So he writes this essay in 1768 in which he says all men are, by nature, equal and free. No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent. All lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.

    So, you know, these are words and phrases that we actually know very well because several years later, they end up, only slightly altered, in the Declaration of Independence. And so when I see these words coming, you know, eight years before the Declaration of Independence comes out, I think, who is this guy, (laughter) you know? How did I miss him? Did I skip some class? Because, you know, Wilson seems to be at the center of everything from almost the moment he arrives in America.

    DAVIES: You know, many of the founders came from very privileged backgrounds. You know, some were wealthy farmers, merchants, many owned slaves. James Wilson was different, right? He grew up in Scotland. Tell us about his background.

    WEGMAN: James Wilson was, like a few of the framers of the Constitution – Alexander Hamilton, I think, being the one people are most aware of – he was an immigrant. And he was born into a poor farming family in the lowlands of Scotland, outside of Edinburgh. And so he has this pretty standard Scottish upbringing for a young farm boy of the – you know, in the mid- to later 18th century. He grows up, you know, in the Presbyterian Church, which is far more democratic in its governance than, say, the Anglican Church or the Catholic Church.

    The parishioners vote for the elders. There’s much more involvement by the regular people in the church than in these other churches where it’s much more of a top-down hierarchy. So Wilson is – so already he’s imbued with this democratic notion of governance early in his life. He’s also educated in schools in Scotland that are explicitly there to educate all Scottish children. Everybody is expected to get an education. Everyone is expected to learn to read and write.

    So Wilson, you know, by the time he’s a teenager, he is already sort of filled with these just very natural ideas of democratic rule, the equality of all people and the sense that everybody – no matter what their station in life, where they come from – has equal access to the truth and has an equal right to govern themselves. And that’s what he brings over to America. And it’s true, you know? Few, if any, of the other founders that he worked with had that kind of background, had that kind of upbringing.

    DAVIES: Right. He immigrates to the United States and settles in Pennsylvania, gets a law degree and quickly becomes a well-recognized and prosperous lawyer. He eventually is a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1776, which drafted the Declaration of Independence. What have you learned about his role in drafting that document?

    WEGMAN: So Wilson does not have a direct role in the drafting of the declaration itself. That’s obviously Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and a few of the others that we know well. But what Wilson did do was write this essay that, you know, he first drafted in 1768, arguing that the British Parliament had no authority at all over the colonies. This was a groundbreaking argument at the time because Everyone else was trying to argue that, well, you know, Parliament has some power over us. Parliament is sovereign over us, but, you know, they can’t impose taxes.

    You know, all of the things that we know the colonists were arguing over are against this backdrop of Parliament being sovereign, Parliament having ultimate authority over the colonies. James Wilson is the first to argue, no, they have zero. They have no authority over us at all. Now, this is such a groundbreaking argument that one of his mentors reads it and says, James, you’re a young man. You have a, you know, big career ahead of you. Don’t put this out there yet. It’s too bold.

    DAVIES: And so he kept it secret for, what, six, eight years? Yeah. Yeah.

    WEGMAN: So he put it away in a drawer for six years. But in 1774, he publishes it. It’s published anonymously. And instantly, it was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who, you know, very quickly says, no, this isn’t by me. You know, it’s by a man named James Wilson. And, you know, suddenly, people start to find out who this guy is. We know that Thomas Jefferson, who is the writer of the Declaration of Independence, had whole sections of Wilson’s essay, this essay on the authority of Parliament, pasted into his commonplace book, where he kept, you know, quotes that were important to him. We know that the essay as a whole deeply influenced Jefferson. And historians going back now about a hundred years have theorized that Wilson’s essay was one of the biggest, if not the biggest influence on Jefferson as he sat down to draft those famous words of the declaration.

    DAVIES: Right. The words, we hold these truths to be…

    WEGMAN: Yes.

    DAVIES: …Self-evident, that all men are created equal. It’s likely that Wilson had some significant influence on Jefferson’s thinking.

    WEGMAN: That’s right.

    DAVIES: Right. It’s interesting that he authored this legal theory, which led to the radical conclusion that the colonies could separate from Britain, but he himself was more cautious about that, wasn’t anxious to do that initially. But nonetheless, the declaration was signed. The rupture was complete. The Revolutionary War erupted. And there’s this remarkable episode in 1779, just a few years into the war, when James Wilson has moved his family into Philadelphia after the British have evacuated it. They had occupied the city for, I guess, nine months or so, and it was tough. I mean, there were – you know, there were killings. There were – shops and homes were looted. The population suffered. There were food shortages, and there was a lot of anger there. And in 1779, a mob starts going after people regarded as disloyal. They target Wilson’s home. Tell us what happened.

    WEGMAN: Yeah, so this is, in some ways, the most shocking riot of the revolutionary period because it is Americans targeting other Americans. You know, they’re in the middle of a war against Great Britain at the time for their independence, and this really shakes a lot of the people down to their core. Wilson is one of the elites of Philadelphia at this time. He is a leading lawyer. He’s become very wealthy. He has a young and growing family with his wife, Rachel, and, you know, he’s enjoying the high life. You know, for all his commitment to popular rule and to the power of common people to govern themselves, he really is happy being an elite. And, you know, he is an awkward guy too. This is part of what, I think, made him fall out of the sort of – the founding narrative, our national narrative of the American founding, is that he’s a difficult guy to get to know and to like. And so he doesn’t have a lot of, let’s say, social capital at the time. And in 1779, it’s a pretty tough time. And so people like Wilson stand out.

    On this particular day in October of 1779, a mob of militiamen gather at a bar. They drink all morning. They get themselves liquored up, and then they go out looking for the elite of Philadelphia to capture and to, you know, teach a lesson to. Wilson gets word that there is a mob of now, I think, several hundred men coming toward his house. They’re armed. They’re drunk. And he barricades himself in his house with about two dozen of his friends and allies, and the mob approaches the house. There are words exchanged. A gun is fired. There end up being about seven people who are killed. There are many more wounded. Wilson is almost pulled out of the house himself. They breach the front door. They go in with clubs, and they try to pull him down the stairs. He actually escapes, you know, with his life. He leaves town in the middle of the night. He hides out for several days and doesn’t come back until things have quieted down.

    But it was – this incident really drove me to want to write this book because I was so struck that a man who was committed to the idea of popular sovereignty, the idea that people are the foundation of all power in government, would experience a life-threatening attack by a mob and come out the other side no less committed to that ideal. I wanted to know, how could somebody experience that sort of attack and not for a second stop and think, maybe I don’t want democracy, maybe democracy is too dangerous?

    DAVIES: Well, we should take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Jesse Wegman. He is a journalist who writes about the Constitution and democracy. His new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” We’ll talk more after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re speaking with journalist Jesse Wegman. His new book about James Wilson, an influential figure in the founding of the nation who is not so well-known, is called “The Lost Founder.” So let’s talk about the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787. Colonies, after they separated from Britain, were – they had a loose federation, governed by the Articles of Confederation, which didn’t really work. And so a bunch of them came together in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia to craft a new Constitution. And it’s really kind of interesting just what a weird enterprise this was. These were people who had no particular authority to do this, right? I mean, who does, you know, bring birth to a nation? You write that one delegate from Georgia said, Wilson ranks among the foremost in legal and political knowledge. The delegates were very impressed with him. Tell us about that relationship.

    WEGMAN: Wilson is, without question, one of the leading lawyers in the country at the time, if not the leading lawyer. Everyone looks to him for his legal acumen, but also his knowledge of history and of government that he developed through his training in the Scottish Enlightenment. But Wilson brings this energy to the convention that I had not noticed before. You know, he’s constantly saying things that sound more like they were said by someone in the 21st century than someone in the 18th century, and those have to do primarily with the ideals of political equality, the idea that people are the foundation of government, and all people are equal, right?

    This is not very welcome to a lot of the delegates who are much more interested, say, in their states, right? They care about making sure their state has equal power. So one of the biggest fights at the convention is over the Senate. Will the Senate be a body of states with equal power, or will it be based on the population of the states and the people themselves? Wilson argues tirelessly throughout the summer for a government based on population. And he says, people should be represented in accordance with their numbers. Why is this so hard? And (laughter) he can’t understand why so many of the other founders resist him. So that fight – that fight over popular rule versus, you know, state equality takes up the entire first half of the summer. And in the end, Wilson, for all his arguments, actually ends up losing that one. Wilson and James Madison and a few of the other nationalists had really wanted a government based on population. They don’t get it. They get a Senate that has equal state power.

    DAVIES: Right, but there were some things he did win, and that was the popular election to representatives of the House of Representatives. And that wasn’t an equal apportion for each state. It was based on population, but there was this huge, troubling debate about the slaveholding states, which wanted their slaves to count as members of their population, even though they, you know, had no legal rights and no vote. There was a compromise that resolved this question. What was Wilson’s role in that?

    WEGMAN: And this is one of the ironies of Wilson’s life and of his role in our founding. And it’s a complicated one – and I take him to task for it in the book – which is he really, I think, did not go after slavery with the energy and the commitment of some of the other founders, including slaveholders themselves, who were quite open about the evil – the moral evil of the practice. Wilson actually introduces the three-fifths clause, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of representation in Congress and for taxation.

    Now, Wilson didn’t come up with the three-fifths number himself. It was already there, floating around from earlier debates under the Articles of Confederation. But the fact that he was willing to countenance that, the fact that he said, it’s OK, we – it’s more important for us to have a union here, even if it means the perpetuation of slavery, I think, really undercuts a lot of his fundamental commitments to equality, to popular self-rule, to the basic dignity of humans.

    And, you know, in the book, I quote a number of his contemporaries being very open about the fact that this is an evil. This is a moral profanity. And Wilson is really quite muted on this point, and it’s something that there’s no good resolution to. He wanted the union more than he wanted an end to slavery, and he accepted – although he was opposed to slavery, he accepted this compromise, and I think, you know, he doesn’t get a pass for that.

    DAVIES: Yeah. Well, I think there are clearly a number of cases. That is one. Another one is the proportional representation in the Senate, where he finally agrees to let each state have equal representation. We should also note that there were some things he did win. Like, for example, when the discussion initially began on how Congress would be structured, there was a lot of strong support for having members of Congress selected by state legislatures. I mean, simply the direct election of members of Congress was a contested issue, right?

    WEGMAN: Absolutely. And Wilson was the strongest advocate for popular self-rule. You know, he says at one point, can we forget for whom we are forming a government? Is it for men or for the imaginary beings called states? It is all a mere illusion of names. We talk of states till we forget what they are composed of. Right? He had this just laser-like focus on people as the foundation of all government power. And so he really leads the charge, along with James Madison and a few others, for a House of Representatives, at least, that is, you know, apportioned by population.

    DAVIES: Right. And he would often invoke the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, you know, that all men are created equal. It doesn’t say all states are created equal.

    WEGMAN: (Laughter).

    DAVIES: And he brought that up, right?

    WEGMAN: Well, yes. I mean, this is the part of Wilson that I think is, in some ways, the most thrilling and the most, I think, useful to us today, is how much he understood the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as being connected. So the Declaration of Independence, you know, is based on this theory of popular sovereignty – the idea that when people are not happy with their government, they may change it. They may change it whenever and however they please. And that is what they do by first declaring independence and fighting a war to be independent from Britain, and then by drafting a Constitution.

    And perhaps the way in which Wilson brings the spirit of the Declaration of Independence most directly into the Constitution happens in the middle of the summer. He’s on this committee. It’s called the Committee of Detail. Most of the other delegates go away for 10 days and just take a break ’cause they’re all exhausted over – fighting for the last two months over Congress, and Wilson and a few other delegates write the first draft of the Constitution. We have no records of what exactly they discussed, but what comes out of that committee is Wilson’s opening words of the Constitution. He put the words, we the people, at the beginning of the Constitution. And what he was doing there is he was making clear that this is a constitution. This is a government founded on people – not states, people. We the people he understood to be the three most important words in the Constitution.

    DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Jesse Wegman. His new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” He’ll be back to talk more after this short break. I’m Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF EDGAR MEYER, ET AL.’S “OLD TYME”)

    DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. We’re speaking with journalist and senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice Jesse Wegman. In his writing, he’s advocated eliminating the Electoral College in presidential elections and imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices. His new book is about James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution who Wegman argues was more influential in crafting the government we’ve had for two centuries than better-known Founding Fathers. He writes that Wilson, whose colorful life had a tragic end, was a tireless proponent of the principle of direct rule by the people. Wegman’s book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.”

    We were talking about the Constitutional Convention. This was, you know, the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. It’s hot. It’s humid. And in the middle of the proceedings, there’s a break, and a five-member committee called the Committee of Detail actually drafts the text of the Constitution, and Wilson was one of those five. He was very influential here. And one of the big issues they had to confront was how much power the federal government would have, as opposed to the individual states. Remember that as the country was governed then, the states had enormous power. The Congress had no power to tax. And so all these centrifugal forces were sort of tearing the country apart. So what perspective did Wilson bring to this question of how much power a central government should have, and how did he wield it in this debate and in the drafting?

    WEGMAN: Wilson very much wanted a powerful central government, with several of the other founders on this point. You know, he said – going back, I think, to 1776, he said, we are not so many states. We are one large state. We lay aside our individuality whenever we come here. And I think that sort of sums up his philosophy. He believed that the states were, you know, pointless, imaginary beings that deserve no respect. And Wilson in the Committee of Detail comes up with what we call the Necessary and Proper Clause. This is a clause that ends up being one of the most consequential in the Constitution. It gives Congress massive power to legislate for the nation and over the states. And, you know, there’s a huge amount of resistance to it from the opponents of the Constitution, who come to be known as the Anti-Federalists.

    But Wilson pushes strongly for the inclusion of this clause because he believes Congress cannot legislate, it can’t do its job, the federal government can’t do its job without an enormous amount of power, without enormous latitude and authority to pass laws and do the things that a federal government needs to do, such as raise an army, collect taxes. All of these things, Congress has used that clause throughout American history to justify its power to pass laws that have transformed America. So I think Wilson himself is really at the heart of giving the federal government the power that it has today.

    DAVIES: Now, another big, big issue that they had to resolve at the Constitutional Convention was the nature of the executive branch of the government. And, you know, today we’re used to the idea of a single chief executive, the president, chosen in a national election. But this was not assumed at all, right? I mean, some people saw – maybe thought the executive branch should be a council controlled directly by Congress. Wilson felt that it’s critical that they have a strong executive and that it be vested in a single person. What were the objections and alternatives? How did that debate go?

    WEGMAN: Well, this is how I came to Wilson in the first place. I was writing my book on the Electoral College, and I was looking through the notes of the Constitutional Convention – James Madison’s notes – to find when was the moment that the Electoral College is adopted. And here’s this guy, this long-winded Scot who keeps saying things that sound more like they come from our era than his own and saying, you know, the president should be a single person, which was not at the time fully agreed upon, and that he should be elected directly by the people.

    When Wilson says this about the president being a single person, James Madison records what he calls a considerable pause in the room. You know, the other delegates are sitting there basically shifting in their seats. Nobody’s very comfortable at this prospect. You know, they don’t want to have another tyrant like King George, and they’re also sitting right there in front of another George, George Washington, who is widely understood to be the front-runner for any sort of executive office that might be created. So everyone’s feeling awkward at that moment. Wilson is not at all. He says, this is obvious. Of course. We need a single executive who has the power to carry out his duties, and he should be elected directly by the people because anyone who’s that powerful needs to be in direct connection to the people over whom he has that power. If he’s not, there will be problems.

    So Wilson basically is the first person to argue for a direct popular vote for president, which is what we still talk about today. He’s saying it in 1787. He does not get a lot of support for this. So they say, you know, James, go home, come up with something a little better. He comes back the next day, and he proposes a system of electors who are chosen by eligible voters and who then, in turn, choose the president. That is remarkably similar to the system that we have today that we call the Electoral College. So this is yet another of the ironies of James Wilson’s life is that he ends up proposing the very system that he opposed for choosing the president.

    DAVIES: But once he agreed and the convention agreed that people would choose electors who would themselves choose the president, the question was, how many electors does each state get, which is pretty critical, right? I mean, is it going to be proportional to their population? Is it going to be equal numbers of electors for the states? How does that work out?

    WEGMAN: What ends up being adopted is the system that we know today, which is that each state gets a number of electors equal to its representation in Congress. So that’s the number of members of the House of Representatives it has, plus its two senators. So that means smaller states get a real benefit in the electoral college because they have proportionately more electors given their voters. Again, Wilson was not happy with this arrangement, but he accepted it as the price of business. And as the convention neared its end in September, I think everyone was so exhausted and wanting just to get this document out the door and ratified that he agreed to it.

    DAVIES: But in the end, they come up with a document that will bring a far more unified country because there’s a strong central government. There is popular election of the members of the House and some participation by voters in the election of the Senate and the president. So it’s a lot of what Wilson wanted. There is, of course, this glaring hypocrisy here in that, you know, it tolerates a half-million humans being held in bondage, and women are denied the right to vote, as well as other basic rights. What, if anything, did Wilson have to say about, you know, those so disenfranchised and exploited?

    WEGMAN: You know, at the ratifying convention in Pennsylvania, where Wilson takes a leading role in convincing the delegates to that convention to support the Constitution, you know, he says, I acknowledge this was not the best arrangement. I would’ve done it differently if I had had my way. But we have laid the groundwork for the eventual elimination of slavery in the states. You know, obviously, the Constitution, as it was written, barred any intrusion on the slave trade for 20 years after its ratification.

    But as we know, that fight would continue on into the middle of the 19th century and lead to the Civil War, which resulted in the deaths of more than half a million people. And, you know, it was only then that slavery was actually banished from the Constitution. Wilson did oppose slavery. But, you know, he was willing to live with it as the price of a Constitution with the other elements that he wanted so badly.

    DAVIES: Need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Jesse Wegman. His new book is “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” We’ll talk more after this break. This is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF SLOWBERN’S “WHEN WAR WAS KING”)

    DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we’re speaking with journalist and senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice Jesse Wegman. His new book is about James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, who Wegman argues was more influential in crafting the government we’ve had for two centuries than many better-known Founding Fathers. The name of his book is “The Lost Founder.”

    You know, so this government that was drafted by these 50 men in Philadelphia has endured, I mean, not without some problems. I mean, we needed a civil war to settle the question of slavery and another century to recognize basic civil and voting rights. And, of course, women couldn’t vote until the 1920s. But this basic structure of an elected Congress, you know, and a president, an independent judiciary – the three branches checking one another’s power – has kind of held together arguably until, well, really, recent years, in the current administration in the White House, where we’ve seen – I mean, it’s just a fact that longstanding boundaries and norms have been violated. You’re following this closely. I mean, this is a big question. But what’s the impact of the changes we’re seeing? And, you know, what lies ahead?

    WEGMAN: One of the reasons I wrote the electoral college book back in 2020 was the election twice in the century to that point of the person who won fewer votes. That’s a fundamental violation of majority rule, right? You know, majority rule is at the heart of Wilson’s theory of government. Why? Because majority rule is the only way that we ensure political equality. It’s the only way that you count all votes as equal. Any other method, by definition, counts some votes as worth more than others.

    So, you know, this violation of majority rule, I think, is at the heart of so much of what ails us today. You know, both George W. Bush in 2000 and then Donald Trump in 2016 were elected to the White House with fewer votes than their opponent. And I really think that there’s a toxin there, that people feel that their wishes, as a majority, are not being represented. And that leads to all these other problems that we see every day now. I think the Senate itself is obviously, you know, by design, a non-majoritarian institution.

    The House of Representatives is technically majoritarian. But with, you know, partisan gerrymandering kind of spiraling out of control now, with the help of the Supreme Court, we are finding that fewer and fewer people feel represented by that House of Congress. So on every level of government, you have this sense that what a majority of the people want is not being reflected in their government. And that, I think Wilson understood that 250 years ago as being what he called a poison contaminating the government. And that was why he fought so hard to make sure that there were mechanisms to ensure majority rule would be the way we governed.

    DAVIES: You know, the other thing we’ve seen is we’ve seen enormous influence on the judicial branch by the president, him picking political loyalists for, you know, district courts, appeals courts and arguably for supreme court. No way around that, really, is there? I mean, that’s the power that was given to the president under the Constitution.

    WEGMAN: Yeah. I mean, every president chooses judges, you know, who are – you know, they think will be ideologically aligned with them. And that’s understandable. But at the same time, you know, this interacts with this life tenure that the founders gave to Supreme court – well, to all federal judges. And this creates a problem because now you have people living far longer than they did at the founding, people serving on the court, like Clarence Thomas, for 30-plus years. He could go 40. He could even go 50 years. He’s not even that old (laughter) by the standards of Supreme Court justices.

    And I think when you have presidents appointing justices who sit on the court that long, then you add on top of that presidents who were chosen by, you know, a minority of the population, you have essentially minority rule in America, where you have the judiciary representing political realities from decades before and sometimes not even a reality that was – you know, that represented the majority of the people. So I think you have a real problem with a court that is so unrepresentative. You know, the court is not supposed to be democratically representative the way that the elected branches are. But when it is so far removed, I think you start to run into serious problems of legitimacy.

    DAVIES: You have a specific proposal for the Supreme Court. You want to explain that?

    WEGMAN: Right. Well, this has been suggested for a long time. But term limits for Supreme Court justices, I think, would go a long way to making people feel more like that the court was a democratically legitimate branch of government. So the most popular proposal out there is 18-year terms. So on a nine-member Supreme Court, that would mean that every two years, a new vacancy would open up. And every president would, by definition, get two appointments to the Supreme Court per term. The justices who finish their 18-year term would be allowed to stay on as senior justices, which is the system we have now in the lower Federal Courts of Appeals. But I think it would make a really big difference in giving people the sense that there wouldn’t be this unpredictability, this sort of unfairness where one president gets four picks to the court and the next one gets zero. We want a Supreme Court that basically reflects the country as it is today, not as it was decades ago.

    DAVIES: You know, you write regularly on constitutional questions. You have a Substack, right?

    WEGMAN: Yes.

    DAVIES: Major Questions, I think, is what’s called.

    WEGMAN: Yes.

    DAVIES: Right, right. And, you know, as we talk about this stuff, I mean, these are interesting but very tough questions and require a lot of knowledge and thought, and, you know, you want to bring your experience to bear. And when I think about the fact that, you know, nobody reads the newspaper anymore, and, like, internet memes capture our attention so quickly with all the algorithms of the social media, do we have a shot at actually doing – thinking rationally about government anymore?

    WEGMAN: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the founders faced this same question. There was a real concern that most people would not understand politics, were not educated enough. At that time, they were largely right. And I’m not going to stand here and say, I think social media is an unalloyed good. But I do think we also live in this moment of incredible explosion of good writing and thoughtful commentary on the Constitution, on democracy, on the way that we can live together as a people, an incredibly large and diverse country.

    When the founders built this country, they were trying to do something that had never been done before, which was to design a republic, you know, over an expanse that was larger than any that had been tried in the past. And I think we’re still, in some way, trying to do that. We’re trying to keep a government running that is far larger and more diverse than anyone could have imagined.

    And I mean, I’m actually – when I read other writers and other thinkers – not just legal scholars, but regular people – talking about what they want and what they imagine for the country, I’m actually quite invigorated by it. I think most people want a country in which their voice is heard, in which the majority gets its way, in which there are protections for minorities that are generally, you know, applied by the courts, but that majority rule and political equality are the fundamental guiding lights of our system. And I think, you know, in this moment, we actually have more people more thoughtfully and more critically talking about these things than we’ve had in my lifetime.

    DAVIES: All right. Well, a hopeful thought there. Jesse Wegman, thank you so much for speaking with us.

    WEGMAN: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

    DAVIES: Jesse Wegman’s new book is, “The Lost Founder: James Wilson And The Forgotten Fight For A People’s Constitution.” Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the new prime video series “Spider-Noir.” This is FRESH AIR.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  • Israel Reacts To Iran Deal, Trump Meets World Leaders At G7, Georgia Primary Preview

    Transcript:

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    LEILA FADEL, HOST:

    The U.S. and Iran have a deal to end the war, but Israel is not happy.

    A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

    Israel’s prime minister rejects Iran’s demands for Israel to withdraw from Lebanese land.

    FADEL: I’m Leila Fadel. That’s A Martínez, and this is UP FIRST from NPR News.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    FADEL: President Trump is meeting with world leaders in France today. They’re expected to discuss the deal with Iran. But European leaders are eager to talk about Ukraine. What else is on the agenda?

    MARTÍNEZ: And voters in several states are heading to the polls today, including high-stakes runoffs in Georgia, a swing state, where President Trump’s endorsement is facing another test. He’s backing a different candidate in the state’s Senate race than Georgia’s Republican governor. Stay with us. We’ve got the news you need to start your day.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: The U.S. and Iran will sign an agreement to negotiate an end to the war this Friday in Switzerland. What those negotiations will look like are still not clear.

    FADEL: But what is known is that Israel, which began the war with the U.S., will not be a party at those talks. Israel’s prime minister has been sidelined in the agreement and could be a spoiler in negotiations to end the war.

    MARTÍNEZ: For more, we go to NPR’s Carrie Kahn in Tel Aviv. So, Carrie, what’s in the agreement that Israel does not like?

    CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: It’s not so much what is in the agreement, but what is not. We don’t have a lot of the details yet, as you said. But first and foremost, for Israel, there is no stated plan to deal with Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that’s why Israel started the war with Iran in the first place – to prevent what he said was this imminent nuclear threat, right? But the agreement being signed is just a commitment to negotiate, and that’s concerning to Israel. Also unclear what will happen to Iran’s proxies fighting with Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and Israel rejects Tehran’s demands for Israel’s withdrawal from all Lebanese territory, which Israel has significantly attacked and occupied during this war. And that’s something Netanyahu says will not happen, and that could be a major sticking point in getting this pact even signed.

    MARTÍNEZ: And what is Netanyahu saying publicly about that and not being part of the negotiations to end the war?

    KAHN: He is not happy, and he’s getting a lot of heat here at home for it. He held a press conference last night and immediately addressed the criticism that his goals were not met, especially Iran’s nuclear question, which he calls his life’s mission – not to allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. He says that will remain his priority. He was asked, of course, about his relationship with Trump. Recently, Trump has publicly called Netanyahu crazy, difficult, ungrateful. Netanyahu clearly didn’t want to address any rift. He just said, look, Trump doesn’t do everything I say, nor do I do everything Trump asks.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: (Non-English language spoken).

    KAHN: “We are partners, and often we agree, and sometimes we disagree.” That happens in the best of families was all he would say.

    MARTÍNEZ: All right. So what are Israelis saying about the deal?

    KAHN: There seems to be widespread dissatisfaction with the deal from the streets to the political corridors. Here’s Ori Ben Ami. He’s a communication and relationship coach that we talked to in Tel Aviv. He called the deal shameful, as it leaves Israel out of the picture and Hezbollah still active in Lebanon and Hamas still in Gaza.

    ORI BEN AMI: I think it’s a loss for us. We did a lot of effort. We’ve been through a hell of a time here in Israel it seems like not for a lot of benefit.

    KAHN: Political opponents and Netanyahu’s allies are hammering him over it. Remember; elections are coming this fall. The far right, even those in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, are calling it dangerous. And just remember, a few months back, Netanyahu saw a very different political landscape here for himself. He and the U.S. together would bring down Iran, and he would sail to another electoral victory. Now, just months before voters go to the polls, he has this very public rift with the U.S. president, and he is left out of negotiating the war’s end.

    MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s Carrie Kahn in Tel Aviv. Carrie, thanks.

    KAHN: You’re welcome.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: It’s President Trump’s first full day at the G7 summit.

    FADEL: Qatar and the UAE are not part of that group, but their top officials will be meeting with Trump today, key stakeholders to the deal he just came to with Iran. But as much as the European members of the G7 want the war to end, they are just as focused on getting Russia to negotiate an end to its war in Ukraine.

    MARTÍNEZ: NPR’s White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben is here. So, Danielle, what has the president done so far at the conference?

    DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Well, yesterday he met with French President Emmanuel Macron, and this morning, he and other G7 leaders met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And while Iran has understandably gotten a lot of attention in the run-up to the summit, leaders at the G7 have been eager to talk Ukraine. Just this week, Russia fired dozens of missiles at Ukraine, killing 11 and sparking a fire on one of Ukraine’s religious landmarks. And that all just came hours after Trump spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy.

    And ahead of the G7 amid all that, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said one goal would be to increase the pressure on Russia in order to get Putin to negotiate. But of course, the topic of Iran will be central at this G7 meeting, as well. Like you said, Trump will meet with leaders from Qatar and the UAE, both of which had targets Iran attacked during this war. And then after all that, there’s a bigger meeting between G7 leaders and Middle Eastern leaders.

    MARTÍNEZ: So what’s the reaction been to the Iran deal there at the G7?

    KURTZLEBEN: Well, Macron praised it in brief remarks yesterday, calling the agreement important in that it deals with the nuclear issue. But of course, we don’t know how that will shake out in further U.S.-Iran talks. It’s also possible that the leaders of G7 countries – that’s a group that includes Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Japan – that they’re going to praise Trump this week, even while they’re pretty frustrated with him. I mean, this war did hurt their economies after all. And additionally, we did see Trump get upset when some European countries didn’t help out with the war to his liking, such as allowing the U.S. to use their airspace.

    But zooming out, as our colleague Franco Ordoñez has reported, Trump’s repeated antagonism toward European nations – whether it’s regarding NATO or Greenland or tariffs – it’s pushed those countries together, making them more willing to just kind of band together and push back against the U.S., like with Iran, for example. And Macron has been one of the louder European voices calling for those nations to be a little more independent from the U.S.

    MARTÍNEZ: All right. So what’s left on President Trump’s G7 agenda?

    KURTZLEBEN: Well, in addition to those meetings he still has planned, there are other big topics the White House says it wants to talk about, like AI regulation, the Ebola outbreak in Africa and critical minerals. Beyond that, Trump has a private dinner with Macron before he leaves at the Palace of Versailles, no less, which seems like it’ll be the kind of spectacle Trump really enjoys. But altogether, he just seems to have come into this summit feeling like he has a better hand because of the Iran breakthrough. But there are still a lot of challenges to discuss. Not to mention, he’s just not been on the best of terms with a handful of leaders here.

    As for news, one more thing – there is the possibility of more news from Trump at the end of this trip because often at this type of summit, the president does take questions right before he leaves.

    MARTÍNEZ: All right. That’s NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben. Thanks a lot.

    KURTZLEBEN: Thank you.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: Another Tuesday brings another set of primary elections that tell us how American voters are feeling about the state of politics.

    FADEL: Yeah. That includes a set of runoffs in Georgia, which got some major endorsements over the weekend.

    MARTÍNEZ: NPR political reporter Stephen Fowler is covering this from Atlanta. All right, so there are Georgia runoffs for the Republican nominations for governor and U.S. Senate. What do we need to know there?

    STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: Let’s start with the Senate. Jon Ossoff is, on paper, the most vulnerable incumbent on the ballot for Democrats, and whoever wins this Republican primary will set up a high-profile, big-money matchup in November. So in the wee hours of the morning Sunday, after early voting already finished, President Trump made a lengthy endorsement for his pick to try and beat Ossoff, Congressman Mike Collins. Trump dinged Collins’ opponent, former football coach Derek Dooley, for not living in Georgia, for not voting in 2016 and 2020 and for saying that Trump lost Georgia in 2020, which he did. Dooley has the financial and political support of outgoing Governor Brian Kemp, whose argument, among other things, is that Dooley is the more electable candidate in a purple state like Georgia in a year that will likely be harder for Republicans at the ballot box.

    MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. Kemp also rejected Trump’s falsehoods around the 2020 election. The two have not had the best relationship since then. Was that a factor in the endorsement?

    FOWLER: Republican strategists and voters alike that I’ve talked with in the last little bit say that that certainly didn’t help Dooley’s chances. And the Collins endorsement is not inherently a surprise if you’re paying attention. Mike Collins has been one of the more prototypical Trump-era congressmen. He’s very brash online and with his campaign messaging, especially when it comes to emphasizing Trump’s policies around immigration. What was surprising is Governor Brian Kemp’s endorsement Sunday in the race to replace him of current Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, who also has Trump’s backing.

    MARTÍNEZ: Why was that surprising?

    FOWLER: Well, in that conversation about electability in a divided state like Georgia, Jones is the more hard-right candidate, and he’s less appealing to middle-of-the-road voters than this billionaire healthcare executive outsider, Rick Jackson, who’s also in the runoff. Burt Jones was heavily involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, and he’s the leader of the state Senate, where he helped shepherd through some of the more controversial legislation in recent years in Georgia around everything from abortion restrictions to voting law changes. So Kemp’s argument that Trump’s candidate isn’t right for the Senate but is right to be the next governor highlights this big divide in the Republican Party that we’re seeing right now.

    MARTÍNEZ: All right. There are other primary contests this midterm season, and you’ve been keeping track of some of them. What else is worth keeping tabs on?

    FOWLER: Well, in Oklahoma, there is a series of musical chairs that left seats open after former Senator Markwayne Mullin was appointed the Homeland Security secretary. Mullin’s current replacement isn’t running for a full term, so you’ve got a House representative, among others, seeking a promotion, then others looking to earn the nod for that House seat.

    In Alabama, you’ve got some runoffs, including both parties’ nominee for U.S. Senate and another case where President Trump has his pick facing somebody else in a runoff. Then there’s D.C., where a highly consequential mayoral primary and the race to be the district’s nonvoting member of Congress are on the ballot, plus, A, a rollout of a new ranked choice voting system for all you election nerds out there like me.

    MARTÍNEZ: That’s NPR’s nerdy Stephen Fowler. Stephen, thanks.

    FOWLER: Thank you.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MARTÍNEZ: And that’s UP FIRST for Tuesday, June 16. I’m A Martínez.

    FADEL: And I’m Leila Fadel. Today’s episode of UP FIRST was edited by Tina Kraja, Rebekah Metzler, Ben Swasey, Mohamad ElBardicy and Taylor Haney. It was produced by Ziad Buchh and Ben Abrams. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Neisha Heinis. Our technical director is Carleigh Strange, and our supervising senior producer is Vince Pearson. Join us again tomorrow.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  • Captain America and the nation’s conscience

    Captain America and the nation’s conscience

  • Obama’s new Presidential Center and his tricky relationship with the South Side

    Obama’s new Presidential Center and his tricky relationship with the South Side

    Transcript:

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    GENE DEMBY, HOST:

    What’s good, y’all? You’re listening to CODE SWITCH, the show about race and identity from NPR. I’m Gene Demby.

    B A PARKER, HOST:

    And I’m B.A. Parker.

    DEMBY: OK. So there’s this school on the South Side of Chicago called Hyde Park Academy. It’s really big, and it has a lot of the challenges that really big inner-city schools with lots of poor kids have – you know, old building, not a lot of resources.

    PARKER: We’ve heard that story before, yeah.

    DEMBY: Just last month, some students there walked out of class to protest because three students died over the course of just one month. That’s horrible. But the students who walked out said that the school had cut the community groups offering support services. But right across the street – Stony Island Avenue – from Hyde Park Academy is the sprawling, ambitiously designed campus of the Obama Presidential Center.

    PARKER: Not the presidential library, even though that’s still what some folks call it.

    DEMBY: Right, right, right. But there is actually a Chicago public library branch on the center campus grounds. But anyway, it has a big basketball court. There are grills for everybody to use. There’s a state-of-the-art playground and a museum. Parker, there’s a sledding hill.

    PARKER: A sledding hill?

    DEMBY: Yeah, ’cause, you know, Chicago is famously flat. And so Michelle Obama, you know, who grew up nearby on the South Side, had them build one because she never got to sled as a kid.

    PARKER: Oh.

    DEMBY: The Obama Center reportedly cost around $850 million to build, and the Obama Foundation touts the fact that it was almost all private money that was raised to pay for this thing. But you know how it goes. The city, of course, had to come up off some money for costs related to its construction in a public park there. So the Obama Center is set to officially open to the public on Juneteenth. But from almost the moment around 10 years ago – they announced it back in 2017 – that this pretty spot sitting on Lake Michigan would be the spot for the Obama Center, there has been pushback – like, a lot of it – and from a lot of different directions.

    PARKER: Yeah. I’ve heard about some of that. There were people concerned that this big, shiny new campus to commemorate the Obama presidency would speed up the gentrification already happening on the South Side – people having to move because the cost to rent in the neighborhood was going to go up even higher.

    DEMBY: Right, right, right. And other folks were concerned that letting the Obama Center build on this public park in the city, that would mean opening up parkland to other private builders.

    PARKER: But also, like, don’t the folks on the South Side deserve nice things, too?

    DEMBY: And that’s a really big sentiment, too, Parker. People have a lot of feelings about their new neighbor, like this 2019 Hyde Park graduate who requested we not use her name because she currently works for the city and is not authorized to speak to the media.

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: And I was saying the Obama Center isn’t a bad thing. It is truly a really good thing if it is used right, if it is prioritized for the people who live in that community. The studio, the little park – I can see myself walking my dog in the little garden next to little Nancy (ph) and Karen (ph).

    DEMBY: But she did share that the neighborhood around the Obama Center has become too pricey for her and her family, and she wondered how all this would affect her old school.

    UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: People like – students like me wouldn’t be able to attend there. That’s the end goal. They don’t want to continue to cater to Black students, if that’s the way they want to move.

    DEMBY: But, you know, public space is always contested, not unlike a presidential legacy.

    PARKER: True. And the architecture of this place – I mean, what’s a diplomatic way to say it looks excessive?

    DEMBY: (Laughter) Right. Right. It looks like a giant – they call it the Obamalisk pejoratively.

    PARKER: Oh, boy.

    DEMBY: But a lot of the architectural reviews of this center are about the very different vibe you get from looking at this place, depending on where you’re standing. Like, either it looks like a beacon in the sunlight or this big foreboding monolith.

    PARKER: I mean, it probably looks different if you’re a tourist walking the grounds than it would if you’re one of the kids of that high school across the street.

    DEMBY: And it’s, like, transforming this intensely segregated neighborhood. And so that’s what we’re going to answer today, Parker, because we’re talking to two South Siders who have been looking into the Obama Center, and we’re going to dig into the complicated local legacy of the man and the myth that this sprawling project commemorates and celebrates. And we’re going to try to think back to those heady, hopeful days not all that long ago when the South Side’s dreams and the country’s dreams were all wrapped up in each other.

    PARKER: Take it away, Gene.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DEMBY: So I wanted to pick the brains of some of our CODE SWITCH play cousins who live on the South Side. These are folks who have been covering the Obama Center and, you know, all the drama around it from different angles in their day jobs since the notion of putting the center on the South Side was just a baby idea.

    NATALIE MOORE: I am Natalie Moore, a Chicago native, longtime reporter and editor in Chicago. And I teach journalism at Northwestern University.

    MAIRA KHWAJA: And I’m Maira Khwaja. I’m a writer and an educator and a multimedia producer. I’ve been at the Invisible Institute for the past 10 years. It’s a journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago. We mostly investigate police misconduct, but for many years, we also had a youth program at Hyde Park Academy, which is across the street from the Obama Center. And I interviewed kids about their feelings about the development for many years.

    DEMBY: Both of you are Chicagoans. But the South Side was for decades – it was, like, the largest Black neighborhood in the United States.

    MOORE: It is the capital of Black America.

    (LAUGHTER)

    DEMBY: Atlantans – feel like a bunch of Atlantans will get mad at that. But, like, you know, the estuary into which all the rivers of the Great Migration flowed. It’s part of the reason Barack Obama was drawn to it – right? – when he was, like, working through his big questions of identity. It’s where he met Michelle, obviously.

    MOORE: You know, I did stories back then, you know, about why the first Black president came from the South Side of Chicago because I am serious when I say Chicago is the capital of Black America. You look at – you know, Black History Month founded here, Black studies, you know, all the – you know, the different ways that things have converged here in the heartland.

    DEMBY: Like, can you talk about, if you lived in the South Side during his presidency – like, I read about and heard about how there was, like, you know, a Secret Service detail in the block – right? – that he and Michelle used to live on. Was there other ways in which his sort of, like, presidency was, like, physically felt in the space of the South Side of Chicago when he was in the White House?

    MOORE: Well, I used to live on Greenwood, the same street…

    DEMBY: OK.

    MOORE: …As the Obamas.

    DEMBY: Neighbors.

    MOORE: Two blocks away. We moved there.

    DEMBY: Did you borrow sugar from them?

    MOORE: No. They were in the White House by the time…

    DEMBY: OK (laughter).

    MOORE: …We moved there.

    KHWAJA: Also, same.

    DEMBY: Oh, word?

    MOORE: You were on Greenwood, too?

    KHWAJA: I was on 53rd and Greenwood, yeah. They were on 50th.

    MOORE: I was on 52nd and Greenwood.

    DEMBY: Oh. So neighbors, yeah.

    KHWAJA: Neighbors, yeah.

    DEMBY: You can borrow sugar from each other if not from the Obamas.

    KHWAJA: (Laughter).

    MOORE: So, you know, when the Obamas were in town – I mean, I remember one time, I had a flat tire. I’m trying to come home. And the police are like, you can’t come down this block because I wasn’t on the list. I’m like, but do you see I have this flat tire.

    DEMBY: (Laughter).

    MOORE: And I had to drive all the way around to try to get home. You know, it was an inconvenience. But it wasn’t – like, they weren’t there a lot.

    KHWAJA: Yeah. And when they were, you could just go to Valois, which is his favorite diner, and sometimes meet him, which was a fun way to meet him.

    DEMBY: Oh, whoa.

    KHWAJA: So I don’t know. It was kind of cool, like, to get to meet him that way.

    DEMBY: You’ve met your neighbor Obama at some point?

    KHWAJA: Yeah.

    DEMBY: Both of you, like, bumped into him at the diner?

    KHWAJA: A couple times.

    DEMBY: Oh, wow.

    KHWAJA: A couple times.

    MOORE: I’ve met him in the capacity as being a journalist, not as a neighbor (laughter).

    DEMBY: (Laughter) Not just neighbor, yeah

    MOORE: Yeah. And there was a certain ownership that people felt. They saw him. They knew him. This wasn’t something that was abstract.

    KHWAJA: Yeah. And, like, globally, too. Whenever you travel, and if you say that you’re from Chicago, any taxi driver or whatever would be like, Obama.

    DEMBY: Obama, right.

    KHWAJA: You’d be like, yeah.

    DEMBY: (Laughter).

    KHWAJA: That is my neighbor. Like, it was exciting in that way. And the merch game was unmatched.

    MOORE: It’s still Oprah, Michael, Obama.

    (LAUGHTER)

    DEMBY: What do you remember about how people talked about the Obama presidency in the city back when he was in the White House? Like, what was the vibe?

    MOORE: I would say mostly excitement. You know, there’s 2008. And then there’s 2016. But, you know, I was a reporter the whole time of his presidency, and yeah, I just – I think it was exciting. And then, you know, you have folks, Black folks – not just Black folks – who, you know, just really don’t believe in the imperialist nature of a presidency. So, you know, I heard some of that. You know, sometimes things were a little unfair, you know, questioning his motives or, you know, who he is. And then there are, you know, other critiques that are rooted in policy and understanding that the empire knows no color.

    DEMBY: But, Maira, you were pretty young during the Obama presidency. Now you work with younger people who probably don’t remember a pre-Obama America, right? So, like…

    KHWAJA: No.

    DEMBY: …How do the people in the neighborhood you work with talk about or think about his legacy to you?

    KHWAJA: There’s honestly something kind of amazing about the fact that having a Black president was not, like, considered remarkable to them. Like, when I would talk to students a lot about – high school students about voting or, like, take them to vote once they turned 18…

    DEMBY: Oh, you would take them to vote?

    KHWAJA: Yeah. That was, like, part of what I did. And then if they didn’t want to vote, I would, like, interview them about why just to, like, understand their, like, interest in civics or disinterest. And I think there was overall not an interest in voting, in part because the students I worked with, their interaction with the government in general was through the lens of just being policed every day, and having police in their school, police around their school, cop cars waiting outside of Hyde Park Academy every day expecting a fight.

    And so, to them, it’s like, participating in voting or anything was, like, just the same thing as interacting with the police. And so Obama kind of fell into that, too. He visited Hyde Park Academy a few times. That was cool. Like, it’s cool. He’s very nice, right? Like, he’s a celebrity. But there wasn’t this feeling of, like, oh, me, too – I could be like that.

    DEMBY: For sure. I mean, for those of us who are not from the Chi, who don’t have a sense of the geography there, like, how would you describe the specific area that the Obama center is located?

    MOORE: For people who aren’t from Chicago, the South Side is like this blank, amorphous term. But it’s the largest geographic part of the city. So it is in Jackson Park, which, you know, it’s near the Woodlawn neighborhood, which is a Black neighborhood. My mother grew up in west Woodlawn. This is where Lorraine Hansberry’s father bought a house that was the inspiration for “A Raisin In The Sun.” But I would say, the park is more of a South Side park rather than just a Woodlawn park. Woodlawn is just south of the University of Chicago, so there have always been housing tensions that are there.

    DEMBY: Housing tensions because the University of Chicago is a well-resourced school. And so much of the South Side of Chicago, where it is, is, like, working-class, middle-class Black families. And all the sort of friction and drag that comes on…

    MOORE: Correct.

    DEMBY: …Housing for Black folks.

    KHWAJA: Yeah. One thing I’d love to mention about the geography of where the Obama center sits is that it kind of straddles this extremely wealthy part of Hyde Park. And then you cross this park, and then you’re at Hyde Park Academy, which, like Natalie said, is actually in Woodlawn. And so, quickly, you shift from, like, wealthy Hyde Park into a much lower-income area. There’s affordable housing right around there that has been kind of under threat. And a lot of tenant unions have been organizing around it.

    The other thing I’d say, too, to these observations about how Jackson Park has been used and cherished over the years is I remember when the Obama center was deciding on where they were going to build. And one of the advocates for building it in Jackson Park was the president’s adviser, David Axelrod. And I remember he famously said that nobody uses Jackson Park and that this would bring people to Jackson Park. And that, like – I continue to feel and hear that in my head every time I’m in Jackson Park, biking through for the cherry blossoms, going to the house music picnic.

    MOORE: Yeah. But there’s some invisible lines within the park on who was going where. Like, I never go to the cherry blossoms because I always forget.

    KHWAJA: Right, right, right. They’re also there for, like, three days (laughter).

    MOORE: Yeah. I’m not opposed to them.

    (LAUGHTER)

    MOORE: So I always miss the window. But have I taken my daughter on the swings? Yes.

    KHWAJA: Right.

    MOORE: Do I go to the beach? Yes.

    KHWAJA: Yeah. People love Jackson Park and have been using it for a long time. And it’s just an important thing to think about when you think of what this impact will be.

    DEMBY: When he says nobody, he’s like – he means certain nobodies, right? Like…

    KHWAJA: Yeah, exactly. He means, like, tourists (laughter).

    DEMBY: So, Natalie, you’ve been down to the new center. You’ve seen the Obamalisk, as his detractors have called it. You’ve seen the new center. What do you think of it?

    MOORE: So I’ve been covering this story since before the site was even picked.

    DEMBY: So you have, like, a longitudinal view on, like, this – yeah.

    MOORE: Yes. I would say the campus itself is beautiful. There’s a lot of open space and winding walking paths. There’s a beautiful public library branch. There’s gardens. There’s a lagoon, and then there’s, like, Michigan on the other side. So you can walk from one space to the other. You know, the – some of the architecture critics here were skeptical of the building because nothing is that tall. But now that it’s done, there’s a sense of, OK, I see how all of this works.

    I guess I’ll finally say, having a building like this so big in a community or swath of a community that’s not used to it, you know, is a little – it’s jarring. But people also point out, like, there’s this wonderful Picasso statue in Daley Plaza that was – when it was built decades ago, people hated it. They’re like, this is ugly. Why is this here? We need to replace it, and now it is beloved. So I do think over time, we might see some different opinions on how this space looks. But I would say, from a campus perspective, it’s beautiful.

    KHWAJA: The playground is – looks really cool.

    MOORE: Oh, yeah, the playground.

    KHWAJA: And, like, my biggest fear about the architecture or, like, frustration, rather, is the playground that the Hyde Park Academy students would play on was across the street, and they built home court over that. And I know that that campus will be heavily policed, and I’m like, well, where’s – where are they going to play? And so my hope is that the new playground, which does look dope, like, that’s a space that the kids can come to.

    DEMBY: Have you been, Maira? Have you been down to the Obama Center?

    KHWAJA: I have not been inside of it, no. I’ve, like, looked around the campus, but I have not been inside.

    DEMBY: Gotcha. Yeah, the thing you said now is interesting, is, like, the way that sort of – when things are sort of habituated into the landscape in these ways. Like, you know, I remember thinking about the Vietnam War Memorial was, like, hated when it was first, like, introduced on the Washington Mall, right? And now is, like, this sort of, like, almost, like, the paragon of how you should do something that’s, like, that somber. And so many of the reviews I’ve been reading about the Obama Center have been kind of almost necessarily in conversation with the Trump moment, and it’s like, oh, I wonder how people will think about the way this place looks when we are further removed from this particular moment. Do you have any sense of, like, how the area around the Obama Center will be policed?

    MOORE: So it is supposed to be public.

    DEMBY: But, you know.

    MOORE: What I am interested in seeing is what does that public look like. Outside of the Obama Center, there’s so much policing at the beach. And I know people are thinking, what are you talking about? Yes, Chicago has lots of beaches.

    DEMBY: Yes, it does.

    MOORE: Because Lake Michigan is a sea. It is not a placid lake. You cannot see the other side. So, you know, there’s already a heavy police presence in public parks. So, yes, I will be curious to see what this is like.

    KHWAJA: Yeah. I think this summer, in particular, I’m interested and anxious to see what the policing will be like because in the neighborhood of Hyde Park and the beaches that Natalie is describing, the police presence has dramatically intensified as the weather has gotten warmer. There is a lot of fear around groups of Black teenagers just gathering, and it is pretty stark, the difference in how people are policed in that area. So I’m excited to hear that, you know, we’re all supposed to be able to use the park grounds, and I think that it’ll be really beautiful. And the summer, I think, will be a contentious time. Tends to be a contentious time.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DEMBY: When we come back…

    KHWAJA: I do think that even people that love Obama and that love the center have not been able to argue with the facts of, like, the affordability crisis and the displacement.

    DEMBY: Stay with us, y’all.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DEMBY: Gene. Just Gene for this part. CODE SWITCH. And we’re talking about the impact of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. So I’m talking to some locals, Maira Khwaja, a writer and organizer who’s worked with students at the school, kind of next door to the center, and the journalist Natalie Moore.

    Natalie, you have been following this, obviously, from the moment this center was announced, right? You’ve been following the story for a while. And, you know, from the beginning, there’s been all these concerns around, like, what putting the Obama Center in this location would do to the rest of the neighborhood. There’s been really intense pushback from people in the neighborhood from organizers trying to stop it from being built. Like, could you talk about the universe of concerns that they had in the early stages when this was, like, in the sort of gestational stages of the center being built?

    MOORE: You know, one of the stories that I did early on was there was a lot of concern that this was going to be a land grab for the University of Chicago.

    DEMBY: Yeah. That was one of the things I heard, too. Yeah.

    MOORE: Yeah. And so a project that I did with another reporter was we created a boundary and said, let’s see who the biggest landholder is in East Woodlawn. And it was not the University of Chicago. It was actually the city of Chicago because these were vacant lots, like, houses that were torn down, property that the city inherited. So the city really had more of the power to help shape because of what they owned. So that was the big takeaway.

    DEMBY: Gotcha.

    MOORE: And I remember doing that story. The late Mattie Butler, a housing organizer, did affordable housing, said there is enough room for everybody in this community because there’s so much vacancy that people don’t have to leave. There’s no need for displacement because there’s so much to build on.

    KHWAJA: Totally. And Miss Butler and, like, the tenant unions that she worked with – they really did say throughout their 10-year campaign that – we’re not anti-Obama Center. Like, we just want to be able to stay here to enjoy it. And that’s also what the young people at Hyde Park have said over the past 10 years of interviewing them – was, like, we feel like we’re going to be pushed out or our family’s going to be pushed out. Like, it seems really cool. I hope my younger siblings get to enjoy it.

    DEMBY: Have we seen any of that happen? Like – but have we seen people displaced? Have we seen housing prices go up?

    KHWAJA: So yeah. So the Illinois Answers Project recently put out a story that had some really helpful data. In the past 10 years, the median sale price of a single-family home in Woodlawn has jumped 4.6 times. So…

    DEMBY: Jeez.

    KHWAJA: The real estate speculation has been dramatic. If you’re just browsing on Zillow, you’ll see homes for $1 million in Woodlawn. So, yes, people have been displaced.

    DEMBY: I’m curious about how the Obama Foundation was responding to all these complaints – right? – to all the sort of pushback they were getting from South Siders.

    MOORE: Not much. They’ve stayed on message about, this is development for the community. We want to be on the South Side. This community is important to us. It’s near where Michelle Obama grew up. It’s addressing some of the things that she said that she didn’t see as a kid. And I also think that they were able to punt because, like I said, the city owns so much of the property.

    DEMBY: Like, they could say, it’s not our – it’s like, this is not our question to solve.

    MOORE: Yeah. And I would just say in general, you know, just to broaden this out, like, outside is so expensive. Like, Woodlawn is not the only neighborhood that is suffering from affordability issues.

    DEMBY: Right.

    MOORE: You know, the city hasn’t been able to pass other measures that housing advocates have wanted. Like, rent is really high. You know, there is a citywide housing crisis that is going on, and there are very few neighborhoods that are exempt from that.

    DEMBY: Right. I’m curious about when people are organizing, you know, to – and pushing back on the Obama administration. There’s, like, the singular effective representational power of the Obama presidency – right? – for Black folks in particular. And I imagine part of what the organizers had to deal with was also just people who rock with the Obamas, who were, like, Obama fans. Was that a dynamic that was present on the ground? Like, were people – were there Obama stans, for lack of a better word, who were sort of, like, hey, hey, hey – not too much of our president? You know what I mean?

    KHWAJA: I would say – yeah. I don’t – I wouldn’t say they were organizing. But I do think that even people that love Obama and that love the center have not been able to argue with the facts of, like, the affordability crisis and the displacement. Some people want the displacement also. There’s a lot of hatred of poor working-class people. There – I think there are, like, not just developers, but I do think there are people who are like, yeah, I don’t want that housing to be so close to the Obama Center. I think that’s been a hard legacy in some ways of Chicago’s public housing crisis since demolishing high-rise public housing. I think there’s just a lot of feeling of, like, I don’t want people who are in public housing to be in my neighborhood. Like…

    DEMBY: Yeah.

    KHWAJA: Why are they here now? And that’s something that I have noticed in talking with people. But I would also love to add that I think one thing I did notice in terms of people feeling activated around the housing campaign, whether or not they got deeply involved, I think one of the things that made people more sympathetic to it was in the early days of the campaign. I think this is 2017. President Obama sat in, like, a conference – like, one of those community meetings. And he was directly asked about if the Obama Center would sign on to a CBA, a community benefits agreement.

    DEMBY: What’s a CBA, for those of us who don’t know?

    KHWAJA: Yeah. A community benefits agreement is basically, like, a packaged piece of legislation that provides protections that are negotiated around, like, housing or jobs – some set of agreements with the community. And so sometimes a CBA can be about environmental concerns. That’s been a – that’s a conversation right now in another part of the city. But the Obama CBA was specifically around housing protections.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    BARACK OBAMA: Michelle and I, as residents of the community, as people who have worked and lived there for a very long time, feel very confident in our ability to make sure that we have a very inclusive process where everybody has their say.

    KHWAJA: And he basically was like, you guys – broadly speaking, he was like, there’s no community organization that speaks for all the community. We know what’s best. You should trust us. And he just shut it down.

    DEMBY: That’s very fascinating, considering he is a community organizer, famously, right?

    KHWAJA: Yeah.

    DEMBY: Like, he would have been one of the people maybe on the other side of this in a different lifetime.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    OBAMA: I’ve been there. You know that? I used to be the organizer…

    (LAUGHTER)

    OBAMA: …Insisting on accountability for the community.

    (APPLAUSE)

    KHWAJA: But it – I remember, for me, it was jarring. It was really jarring to hear him just flat-out refuse to engage with organizers. And I think a lot of people like me were also kind of taken aback by it.

    DEMBY: Natalie, from, like – from the outside, this seems kind of like, you know, your classic gentrification and revitalization story. Like, you got – this person wants to build something. They have deep pockets. They want to build something in a neighborhood, and that building might speed up the rise of housing costs, speed up displacement. But in this case, the deep-pocketed developer person is the first Black president. Is that too simple a framing here?

    MOORE: I would say yes.

    DEMBY: OK.

    MOORE: This may be going on a tangent, so just bear…

    DEMBY: Yeah. For sure.

    MOORE: …With me here. Black South Side neighborhoods, in particular, have been stripped away and also starved from investment. So when things do come to a neighborhood, there are concerns about, who is this for? When I have heard organizers say, this is a wholesale attempt by the Obamas to just push us out – they don’t want us here – I don’t agree with that sentiment. I think that’s going too far. My take has been that there’s a lot of overstating on all sides. There are not white yuppies who are dying to move to Woodlawn to live by the Obama Center. I also don’t think that the Obama Center is going to spur this renaissance of Black-owned businesses on 63rd Street either. And, you know, Gene, you and I have talked about this. Gentrification is a fraught word because it often does not happen…

    DEMBY: …In Black…

    MOORE: In Black…

    DEMBY: …Neighborhoods. Right.

    MOORE: …Neighborhoods.

    DEMBY: Right.

    KHWAJA: Right. Totally.

    MOORE: So what does that look like here, to have a beautiful development but making sure everybody gets to use it? I think that there are some bolder things the foundation could have done, given Barack Obama’s legacy as a community organizer. Michelle Obama grew up in South Shore. They got married at the South Shore Cultural Center. You know, they lived near the community. So I think their intent is not, we’re building this so we can push Black people out. That said, if you do feel left behind in this country or this city and neighborhood, I understand that more protections are needed. I also want to highlight the pushback from a white-led group called Protect Our Parks.

    DEMBY: OK.

    MOORE: Their issue was, we don’t think this should be built on park land. That was just their fundamental feeling.

    DEMBY: I was reading about this.

    MOORE: And this group kept suing. And the courts kept throwing it out. And, you know, there was a final ruling in 2018 that said, this isn’t going to happen. So when I see a white-led group called Protect Our Parks that doesn’t advocate for equity otherwise, that is a very intentional, curious choice to me.

    DEMBY: Got you.

    KHWAJA: I appreciate you bringing that distinction up because I think that that was part of the reason that the housing campaign had to be so strong in its messaging about saying, yes Obama center, no displacement. Because in media, specifically national media, it’s hard to make that distinction of, like, not all these people organizing around issues related to the center are on the same page. And I know that they’ve had to turn down, you know, interviews from outlets that are kind of secretly right-wing because they’re like, wait, what’s the angle on why they’re trying to be critical of the center? It makes it really hard to talk about this, which is why I think even Natalie and I are being, like, so careful with our words, too, because I don’t – I just never wanted to be, like, disrespectful because I know also how much this does mean to so many people.

    MOORE: It just means – to people.

    KHWAJA: It means – I, like, really can’t understate, like, how excited so many people really, deeply are.

    MOORE: How many Black family reunions are going to be coming here every summer.

    KHWAJA: Exactly.

    DEMBY: A thousand percent. Like, it’s going to be a site of pilgrimage for a lot of people who, like, you know – if my mom and I find myself in Chicago, this is going to be on our list.

    KHWAJA: As it should be. And then, also the people that live around there, like, I’m like, I’m sure I’ll take the kids I babysit to go play on that playground. That’s going to be the nicest playground in the area, like, absolutely.

    DEMBY: Absolutely, yeah.

    KHWAJA: So, you know, I’m always like, I don’t want what I’m saying, this ideally nuanced critique, to become fodder for a white supremacist who just hates Obama.

    DEMBY: Well, I mean, to that point, I mean, this Obama center is coming into being on Juneteenth, at a time when, again, the vibe, friends, the vibes are trash.

    KHWAJA: (Laughter).

    DEMBY: They’re absolute trash. Democratic voters are pissed at Trump. They’re just as angry at Democrats in Washington. In the decades since he left office, like, that Obama-era hope is increasingly hard to feel. And, like, the most cutting appraisals of his presidency are coming from the left, like, not just the right. So how does a building dedicated to optimism around democracy and the American project, like, how does that land differently right now for y’all?

    KHWAJA: So I haven’t been inside yet. But I will say that friends of a variety of backgrounds that have gotten a preview of the center all said that they cried and that basically that it felt like the promise of 2015. And so you just feel this stark contrast between, like, how bad the vibes are in 2026 and, like, what so many of us believe to still be possible in 2015. And the contrast sounds devastating. But, yeah, I’m curious. Is that how you felt about it, too, Natalie, that it felt like it was a monument to how we felt in 2015?

    MOORE: Yeah, so the piece that I wrote after the press day was a take about, what does it mean to have a museum talking about democracy when democracy is falling apart? And I think we should – we keep saying Jackson Park. We haven’t said who it’s named after. The park is named after Andrew Jackson.

    DEMBY: I was wondering about that.

    MOORE: A slave-holding president. So there are these interesting juxtapositions that are there. So it’s so hard not to think about Trump’s presidency in this moment.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    MOORE: The museum opens not with the Obamas but with other struggles, like suffragists, labor movement, you know, Black Panthers. So they are talking about movements that have worked, and have also floundered, before you even get into the Obama story. So I think that the museum is really designed for people just to have some nostalgia and think about that moment of hope, but to leave there and feel like they can do something, no matter how small it is, especially given the moment. Now, they’re not – they don’t ever say the word Trump. And when you ask – don’t even ask them that. Just talk about democracy. But that is their way. And they have to know that people are thinking about this.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DEMBY: Natalie Moore, Maira Khwaja, thank you for talking to us. Appreciate you.

    MOORE: Thanks for having us.

    KHWAJA: So good to see you guys, see both of you.

    DEMBY: By the way, we reached out to the Obama Foundation for comment. But we did not hear back from them in time for this episode. And, y’all, that is our show.

    PARKER: And just a reminder that you can follow CODE SWITCH wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. It was engineered by Kwesi Lee.

    DEMBY: And thank you to Maira Khwaja and the Invisible Institute for sharing some of the interviews they did with students from Hyde Park Academy. And we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That’s Christina Cala and Xavier Lopez, and Dalia Mortada and Leah Donnella. And Barton Girdwood, and Maya Dangerfield, and Yolanda Sangweni. As for me, I’m Gene Demby.

    PARKER: And I’m B.A. Parker.

    DEMBY: Be easy, y’all.

    PARKER: Hydrate. Happy Juneteenth, y’all.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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  • What we know about an Iran deal

    What we know about an Iran deal

    Transcript:

    SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

    It’s CONSIDER THIS, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, what we know about an Iran deal. After months of war and deadlocked negotiations, President Donald Trump announced Sunday on social media he has struck a deal with Iran.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The Iran deal that we made is going to bring a lot of success to the world because the oil was really clogged up there for a while.

    DETROW: That was Trump speaking today in France ahead of the G7 summit. According to Trump and Iranian officials, the deal would open the Strait of Hormuz and end fighting on all fronts, including between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But Israel, the U.S. partner in this war, is not a party to this agreement, and Israeli officials have said that their forces in Lebanon are not going anywhere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to comment on the deal. Trump says a final agreement would limit Iran to enrich uranium for, quote, “nonmilitary purposes forever.”

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    TRUMP: This is a very powerful document. It’s not like the Obama document, which was just a terrible document. This is a very powerful document, and I want it to be released. So probably pretty soon. I would say after – sometime after Friday.

    DETROW: CONSIDER THIS – Trump says the long-sought deal to end the U.S.-Israel war with Iran is imminent. But without Israel on board, will it actually stick?

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DETROW: From NPR, I’m Scott Detrow.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DETROW: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. The U.S. and Iran have reached an agreement that could end more than three months of war in Iran. But a day after the deal was announced, we still do not know what exactly is in it. We have called on two of our correspondents to break down what we know and what we don’t know. NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben is here in Washington, and Greg Myre is in Tel Aviv. Greg, I’m going to start with you. This memorandum of understanding has not yet been released, but is there anything that we know about that that should be set into motion, and how soon?

    GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Yeah, Scott, there is. If this agreement works as planned, several important things could start happening quickly, anytime over the next couple days. The U.S. and Iran will end the sporadic attacks taking place despite a ceasefire. Iran and the U.S. will lift their dueling blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, reopening it to oil tankers. And Israel and Hezbollah fighting in Lebanon should stop. So these are all significant positive developments, but if you remember, these conditions existed before the war began, so it’s really just a return to the status quo. The hard stuff has been put off for negotiations over the next 60 days, and this includes the fate of Iran’s nuclear program. Again, remember, the U.S. and Iran were negotiating this issue in Switzerland back in February, and as it turns out, that’s where this new agreement is supposed to be formally signed on Friday.

    DETROW: OK. So, Danielle, Greg lays this out like a return to the way things were before the war began. So I’m curious how President Trump is portraying it.

    DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Well, he’s sure been making it sound like he’s done something unprecedented. In a social media post, he wrote, quote, “the leaders of the region have, for the first time, found a president who can help them achieve real peace.” But like Greg said, this is, in many ways, a return to the status quo. And let’s also remember more than 3,000 people in Iran have been killed in this war, along with 15 U.S. service members. So in short, Trump is, yeah, overstating this as a victory when it really appears to just be fixing some of the problems he created.

    But he’s also probably celebrating because he needed an off-ramp here. His approval plummeted amid this war, including his approval on the economy, which had been a strong point for him. Gas prices went up. Fertilizer prices went up. Inflation passed 4%, so he wanted out. And now, since this all was announced, yeah, oil prices have fallen and stocks went up, so Trump is likely happy, even if this memorandum isn’t the win he says it is.

    DETROW: OK. Greg, how is Iran responding to all of this?

    MYRE: Yeah, multiple Iranian officials have spoken out in support of this agreement. And the general tone is that this is positive for Iran, though they’re deeply suspicious of the U.S. when it comes to the upcoming negotiations. The Iranians are also offering a somewhat different interpretation on how parts of this agreement will work. Iran wants billions of dollars of its assets that have been frozen abroad. It wants U.S. and international sanctions lifted, and it wants this sooner rather than later. U.S. officials are stressing that this will be performance-based, that Iran will have to deliver on its part of the deal first before it gets money. Also, Iran’s foreign ministry suggested Iran could charge fees for ships going through the Strait of Hormuz, even as it opens up. Well, Trump is saying it will be toll-free.

    DETROW: Danielle, you were talking about the economic implications of this war. It’s been pretty unpopular in the U.S. from the beginning. I’m curious whether you think this deal offers Trump a way to move on, even if there end up being problems with Iran down the road.

    KURTZLEBEN: I mean, it really depends on what those problems are. In general, yeah, this gives him a way to move on in the sense that we’ll see gas and diesel prices drop, but it could be weeks or more until they’re even anywhere near pre-war levels. And then for those prices to trickle through to other goods, that could take some time as well. But let’s be real. Those prices are what many Americans care about. So will this ease Trump’s political problems? Yeah, maybe some. But there are more complicated questions that hover over all of this.

    For example, how long of a memory will Americans have for this time of high prices? And then if Trump doesn’t get what he wants on the nuclear front, does he look weak? Does this hurt his party in the midterms? And you really get the sense that the White House knows that the messaging is important here. Senior administration officials have done multiple calls where they’re really just pushing back against what they call misinformation and emphasizing what they are framing as the big wins, even while we still don’t know details.

    DETROW: OK. So, Greg, you’re talking to us from Tel Aviv, and this agreement actually does call for a second ceasefire, and that’s one between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Curious – is a truce likely to hold there?

    MYRE: Yeah, Scott, that really is a big question mark. Israeli troops are still all over southern Lebanon. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel will keep them there indefinitely. Now, Hezbollah supports the ceasefire but considers it a prelude to an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. So if these Israeli troops remain on Lebanese territory, this will keep the region very tense.

    And one other point we should emphasize – Netanyahu spoke this evening about the Iran war and said, quote, “this victory will endure for generations.” But that really goes the kind of – against the kind of assessment we’re hearing throughout Israeli society today, particularly politicians and political analysts. They’re saying overwhelmingly that this is a very bad deal outcome for Israel. For decades, Netanyahu has been the leading Israeli voice in opposing Iran. He wanted to topple its government and dismantle its nuclear program. He long sought a major military campaign against Iran. It finally happened in the past few months, and now it’s fallen far, far short of his goals.

    DETROW: Danielle, all of this is happening as President Trump’s in France for the G7 summit. Is he likely to find criticism there for launching this war or support for ending it?

    KURTZLEBEN: Well, we already saw a little general praise from French President Emmanuel Macron today. He called the deal important for addressing the nuclear issue, in his words. But of course, we still don’t know how that nuclear issue will shake out. It’s just possible that altogether, the leaders at the G7 are going to praise Trump even while they’re pretty frustrated with him. This war, after all, hurt their economies.

    Now, the U.K. and France have said they’ll take the lead on getting mines out of the strait. That apparently is being discussed this week. But zooming out, as my colleague Franco Ordoñez has reported, Trump’s repeated antagonism towards European countries regarding NATO, Greenland, tariffs, it’s really pushed those countries together and made them somewhat more willing to link arms and just disagree with the U.S. sometimes.

    DETROW: That is NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben in Washington and Greg Myre in Tel Aviv. Thanks to you both.

    MYRE: Sure thing, Scott.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DETROW: This episode was produced by Kai McNamee with audio engineering by Ted Mebane. It was edited by James Hider, Rebekah Metzler, Sarah Handel, Courtney Dorning and Tinbete Ermyas. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning.

    (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

    DETROW: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I’m Scott Detrow.

  • Is Trump’s Iran deal a strategic blow for the U.S.?

    Is Trump’s Iran deal a strategic blow for the U.S.?