Jonathan Martin on Trump, the Democratic Party, Political Journalism, and the Future of American Politics

Jonathan Martin has spent years covering American politics from the inside, reporting on presidents, campaigns, congressional leaders, party factions, and the private conversations that often explain more than public statements ever do. In this conversation, he reflects on a Republican Party now organized around Donald Trump, a Democratic Party caught between generational transition and coalition politics, and a Washington culture where fear, ambition, and survival often matter as much as ideology.
Martin also discusses the reporting behind This Will Not Pass, his book with Alexander Burns on the convulsive politics of 2020 and 2021. The book, he explains, was not simply meant to be a campaign account, but an “intensive first draft of American history” about Trump, Biden, COVID, January 6th, and the political fever that still has not broken.
The conversation closes with Martin’s advice for young political reporters: get out of Washington, cover state capitals and state campaigns, build sources across the ideological spectrum, read constantly, and understand that political journalism is ultimately a way of telling the story of American history, culture, identity, and power.
​
—Jonathan Martin is a veteran political journalist and co-author, with Alexander Burns, of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future

The Two Parties and Where Power Actually Lives
Ben Wolf: You’ve covered politics long enough to see several versions of both the Republican and Democratic parties. When you look at Washington now, what do smart outsiders still misunderstand about where power actually sits inside the two parties?​

Jonathan Martin: The two parties are very different right now. The Republican Party has become a personality cult in which power flows entirely through the preferences of one man, Donald Trump. That’s a very different moment. All presidents are powerful and have enormous sway over their own parties, but this is something different entirely.
The Democratic Party is in a strange period because it’s out of power entirely in Washington. Generationally, its most prominent figures are part of yesterday rather than tomorrow. People like Chuck Schumer, the Senate leader, and former presidents like Biden, Clinton, and Obama are all figures, to borrow the Bill Clinton line, who have more yesterdays than they do tomorrows.
So we’re in a generational transition. The Democratic Party has always been a coalition party, but it’s sort of a patchwork of constituencies. It’s become much more of a high-and-low party now, which is to say it’s dominated by the most educated Americans: people with advanced degrees, lawyers, PhDs, high-income folks who live in big cities and close-in suburbs. And it’s also a party of people who are closer to the margins of society, who are dependent upon the federal government to survive. That includes a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants. It also includes, obviously, African Americans, who historically are the most loyal voting bloc for Democrats.
So the parties are different. But what’s unique about this era is just how Trump has become a singular force who dominates his party and controls what they do and say. But he also has enormous sway over the Democratic Party, too, because the Democrats, being patchwork in nature, are organized largely in opposition to Trump more than around any coherent ideological agenda right now.


Public Justifications and Private Motives
BW: One thing your reporting does especially well is separate the public justification from the private motive. When you talk to elected officials off the record, where do you see the widest gap between what politicians say is driving them and what is actually driving them?

JM: What’s driving their choices on the Republican side is survival. Republicans want to survive the next primary, and you don’t antagonize Donald Trump and survive many primaries. That overwhelmingly is what’s driving Republicans.
Privately, they’ll acknowledge that. And privately, they’ll mock and belittle Trump. They’ll talk about how little he knows, how uninformed he is, how absurd some of his behavior is. Obviously, they don’t want to say all that in public.
Democrats are more candid privately about issues around identity, whether it’s gender or race, that they don’t want to talk about publicly because of the sensitivities of their coalition. You certainly saw that with Biden. A lot of Democrats were uneasy about him running for reelection at 82. They were reluctant to say so out loud, in part because they feared the next question, which would have been, “Well, then, do you want Kamala Harris to be the nominee?” And the answer would have been, “Well, no, I don’t.” But they didn’t want to say that out loud.
Why? Because they thought she would have been a lackluster candidate. What she turned out to be. So here we are.


Ideology, Ambition, and Fear
BW: A lot of political coverage still treats ideology as the central explanation for why politicians act the way they do. But when you follow decisions from inside the room, how much is ideology, how much is ambition, and how much is fear of the coalition turning on you?

JM: I think it’s a combination of the three. Again, separate the parties. Republicans are driven by fear of Trump, especially if their prospects hang on a primary. If your survival every two years, every six years, every four years, is surviving a primary, then obviously Trump is the biggest force in your life. Staying right with him is everything.
On the Democratic side, the primary still matters a lot. Obviously, compromising with Trump or being seen as enabling Trump is detrimental to your survival in a primary. But most Democrats are still more focused on the general election, at least if they’re in more competitive districts or states.
Look, politics used to be a hodgepodge of partisan, regional, generational, and individual preferences. It was more confused. It’s much more coherent now, and polarized, in the sense that the parties have less give in the rope. If you look at the votes in Congress, if you look at the preferences of the voters themselves, it’s much more coherent along partisan lines.
That’s why Manchin and Sinema stood out so much, and why Fetterman stands out now, and why Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski stand out on the Republican side. There used to be 30 of them or more in the Senate, these wild cards, these more individual actors and free agents. Now it’s a much more party-line chamber. And the House, obviously, is the same way. People are much more inclined to vote the party line because that’s what’s expected of them.
There’s such a severe penalty, implicit and explicit, for stepping away from the party line. We’re in tribal times, and the expectation is that you will follow the expectations of your party. A lot of this is driven by political polarization and negative partisanship, which is voters voting against the other guys. Helping the other team is the biggest sin. It’s not even ideological principle or an agenda as much as it is being part of the home team.


Where Democrats Misread the Country
BW: You talked earlier about survival as a major force inside the Republican Party. Looking at Democrats, where do you think the party’s leadership class has most misread the country over the last few years? Not morally, necessarily, but analytically — where did they get the model wrong?

JM: Democrats didn’t fully appreciate how divisive the issue of Israel and Gaza was going to be with a lot of their voters. They thought it was more of a temporary issue, and it’s been stickier than they thought.
I think Democrats also misread their electorate and thought that their voters were more committed to Joe Biden. I was so struck by this in 2023. I actually wrote about it. I did a piece about Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, from Mackinac Island. What was so striking is that the higher on the political ladder, the more loyal Democrats were to Biden and renominating Biden. But further down the scale, toward the grassroots, Democratic activists and voters were okay with other folks running in 2024. There was not some overwhelming feeling of, “We can’t abandon our president.”
But actual Democratic voters were different. I think a lot of Democratic elites were so uneasy about sticking their head out, about being the ones who were going to speak up first and say Biden couldn’t run again, because the perceived penalty for stepping out of the pack in these tribal times is so severe.
Dean Phillips of Minnesota did it and got belittled. Also, nobody wanted to answer the second question about Kamala. So they said, “I don’t want to be the one who says it.” And so here we are. Biden runs for reelection while turning 82, and it turned out to be a debacle. These folks knew the risks. Not that it would be that bad, but they knew the risks and they were uneasy about it. Nobody said a word.

BW: Looking ahead to 2028, and even to the midterms before then, do you think Democrats have absorbed that lesson? Or do you think the party is still at risk of repeating the same mistake?

JM: I think there’s an appetite for a wide-open primary now. I’ll tell you what: if you look at the races where Democrats have won the presidency — 1976, 1992, 2008 — basically everything except Biden in modern times, and let’s take Biden out of the equation because Biden was really a vehicle against Trump and a vehicle against COVID, every one of those races was an open race.
There was not an incumbent president or vice president of their party running. Nobody tried to put much weight on the scale. The three folks who emerged all won the presidency: Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
In 2016, Hillary was basically anointed. Yes, Bernie challenged her, but that was an insurgency that had no support from the party leadership. So in 2016 and 2024, you’re basically talking about coronations more than competitive primaries. I think Democrats don’t want that again. They want a clean, open primary.


What Journalism Gets Wrong About Populism
BW: You’ve had a front-row seat to elite political journalism in a period when trust in institutions has clearly fallen sharply.

JM: I’ve noticed that.

BW: What do reporters still get wrong when they cover populism? And where does journalism confuse performance for conviction, or noise for actual leverage?

JM: There’s a saying, I think Gary Hart, the former senator and candidate for president, said this. David Axelrod sort of borrowed it, and I think it’s totally accurate: Washington is always the last to get the news.
What that means is that the conventional wisdom in D.C. about who can or can’t be a candidate, or who is or isn’t going to be a strong candidate, is often wrong. The voters surprise us. Arthur Schlesinger had this great saying that the future outwits all of our certitudes, and the voters tend to outwit all of our certitudes here in Washington.
They’re more open to Barack Obama, or Bernie Sanders, or Pete Buttigieg, or hell, Donald Trump, than we think they’re going to be in D.C. So let’s not prejudge who can or can’t be a nominee. That’s the biggest thing: understanding that the aperture is wider with voters than we assume it is. To me, that’s all the more reason to get out of D.C. and cover politics beyond D.C.


Reporting This Will Not Pass
BW: You co-authored This Will Not Pass, which gave readers a very close look at how political actors behaved when the stakes were unusually high. After doing that reporting and the research that went into the writing, what most surprised you about the way senior officials rationalized their decisions to themselves?

JM: Just the massive gap between what they say in public and what they say in private about people. There’s such a gap. They’re so petrified of talking publicly about some of the folks in their own party. But it’s so revealing when you have them on audiotape and can hear how they talk in private.
That was the big reveal. I’m really proud of that book that Alex Burns and I did. We got so much reporting about the conversations taking place at the highest levels of politics in Washington, but also in big cities and state capitals. It’s a really panoramic look at American politics in 2020 and 2021, and the aftermath of 2020.
So, folks, give it a look: This Will Not Pass. Available on Amazon.com right now.

BW: Certainly a must read. Mr. Martin, can you take us inside the reporting process for the book? How did the idea first come together, and what did the work actually look like as you tried to reconstruct that period?

JM: Sure. We had some friends in the publishing world who were eager to have a book about the 2020 campaign. What Alex and I wanted to do was less a campaign book and more a book about a period of time.
I think some of the best books in American history are about a single year: 1865, 1912, 1929, 1968. I think that period of 2020 and 2021 — Trump, COVID, Biden, January 6th — was a convulsive period in American history.
It turns out the title held up pretty damn well, because here we are in the spring of 2026, and we were pretty prescient with This Will Not Pass, because the fever hasn’t broken. We’re still living through these tumultuous times.
The idea was that we were going to capture this moment in American politics and American history and do a real, intensive first draft of American history that hopefully will be looked at by future historians.


Curiosity, History, and the Making of a Political Reporter
BW: You’ve covered politics at the highest level across several eras of the media business. Looking back, what choices or habits most shaped the kind of reporter you became?

JM: Two things: you’ve got to work hard, and you’ve got to be curious.
Work hard. Come in early. Stay late. Be curious. Give a damn. Take an interest in the world that came before you. Harry Truman once said, “The only new thing is the history you don’t know.” You’ve got to know where the world was. The world didn’t start in 2016 with Donald Trump. The more you know about what came before that, the better you’ll be.
Then just work hard and get after it. Luck helps, timing matters, connections matter, but if you put yourself in a place to succeed, you’re going to go a long way. I had good mentors. I had good timing, and that helped. But I also had a curiosity that I still have about the how and the why of American politics, American culture, and American identity.
Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going?
I’m curious about all of that every day. The beauty of political journalism is telling a story about America and American history through the prism of our elections. So it’s a lot of fun.

BW: Where did that curiosity come from for you? Was there a moment when you realized that politics, history, and public life were the subjects you wanted to spend your career trying to understand?

JM: I was always interested in history and politics and public affairs. I was lousy in math and science, and I was always curious about the world around me.
I had parents who would take my brother and me to all kinds of historic sites, and who made sure that we constantly had books around us and were constantly at the library, learning and reading. You’re never bored if you have a book. That has been the maxim I’ve lived by now for almost half a century. That helped a lot.
At some point, you’re either interested in this stuff or you’re not. Some kids reject what their parents are into. I embraced it. For me, it was second nature. I just can’t imagine not being interested in history, politics, place, identity, and culture. It’s all fascinating to me.
I love the vast buffet that is American politics and American history. It’s all interesting to me, and I want to eat quite a lot of it.

​
Advice for Young Political Reporters
BW: If you were advising a serious young reporter who wants to cover American politics well right now, where would you tell them to look that the rest of the press corps is still underestimating?
​
JM: I would tell them to go cover a state capital or a state campaign. Get sources on the ground from across the ideological spectrum. Learn how to write. Learn how to report. Learn that the tougher you write, the more skeptical you are, people aren’t going to walk away. They’re going to respect you more, because you’re going to have more authority in your coverage.
And read, read, read. Again, the more you read, the better writer you’ll become. Writing is like osmosis. You just pick it up. You get better by seeing what other writing looks like on the page.
Read, read. Learn about the world that came before. Understand how we are, why we are, and you’ll have an advantage over the next guy. You can get it in your pocket. You have a computer in your pocket. Take advantage of it, man. Get off the social media stuff and read books and articles.