The Run-Up (2016)

The Run-Up will be back soon. In the mean time, you can satisfy your craving for Michael Barbaro and politics with today's episode of The Daily, his new show. You can subscribe to The Daily wherever you are listening to The Run-Up.

Michael told you he'd be coming back with something new for you. It's here. (Well, almost.)

Michael Barbaro, in his last episode as the host of this show, travels to the National Mall on Inauguration Day to ask Donald J. Trump's supporters, minutes after he is sworn in, what a successful presidency would look and feel like for them. He then joins three of his New York Times colleagues to discuss what the Trump White House might accomplish.

How will history remember Barack Obama? Former Representative Barney Frank talks about Mr. Obama's adversarial relationship with Republican lawmakers. Who was to blame? And we talk with David Leonhardt, an op-ed columnist at The New York Times who chronicled the Obama administration from the start, and Jodi Kantor, author of “The Obamas.”

How does it feel to be a member of Congress right now, digesting the new reality of a Donald J. Trump presidency? We ask a United States senator.

There's a lot about the current political moment that we didn't see coming a year ago. Because predictions are hard — even hazardous. But as the final days of the year tick down, The Run-Up wants to look ahead, carefully, to 2017. So we asked four seasoned Times reporters — Amy Chozick, Jim Rutenberg, Peter Baker and Peter Goodman — to offer a guide to the coming year.

How did Alec Baldwin construct his mischievously exaggerated, hyper-gesticulating, searingly funny portrayal of Donald J. Trump on “Saturday Night Live”? We hear him explain in his own words during a discussion with the journalist Sarah Maslin Nir, who conducted the first interview with Mr. Baldwin about the comedic role. We also talk about the real Mr. Trump's busy week of global affairs in Germany, Turkey, Russia and Syria.

The most brazen, disruptive and manipulative attack on the American electoral system since Watergate — a vast cyberattack by Russia, aimed squarely at Democrats in 2016 — hinged on a series of human errors and institutional misjudgments. We talk with Eric Lipton and David Sanger, Times journalists who co-wrote a stunning story about out how the hack unfolded, moment by moment. We also talk to a victim of the attack.

Kellyanne Conway knows what critics say about her and about her boss, Donald J. Trump. On today's show, Ms. Conway, Mr. Trump's campaign manager in the final months of the 2016 race, sits for an extensive interview with Maggie Haberman. From her office in Trump Tower, Ms. Conway rebukes her critics, defends her boss and sheds light on the president-elect's relationship with the elusive next first lady, Melania Trump.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has been hosting a parade of potential cabinet appointees at Trump Tower, with the daily drama being punctuated by his provocative early morning tweets. We devote today's show to the transition spectacle. Michael Barbaro is on vacation, so Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, is filling in. He is joined by Michael Shear and Julie Davis, two New York Times White House reporters, and Charles Homans, the political editor at the magazine.

A gay actor in California and his father in Kentucky have felt heightened tension around the election. Craig feels betrayed by his father's vote for Trump, and Craig's father feels pressured by his son to evolve in ways that are uncomfortable to him. They discuss their positions in the third and final installment of our series of dialogues between pairs of voters who are struggling with feelings of mystification and fury over the Election Day decision of a person very close to them.

A reconstruction of Donald J. Trump's hourlong visit to The New York Times, using exclusive audio clips from the encounter. Michael Barbaro was in the room, and he discusses the meeting with two colleagues who also participated in the interview: Maggie Haberman, a politics reporter, and Ross Douthat, a Times op-ed columnist.

As the mother of a child with a disability, Amy was deeply offended by how Donald J. Trump mocked a disabled reporter during the campaign. Dawn has her own personal stake in the election: her husband's job working in the mining industry, a job she worried was threatened by Hillary Clinton's policies. They discuss why they voted the way they did in the second part of our Dialogues series.

The Run-Up asked different pairs of Clinton and Trump voters to open up to each other about why they voted the way they did, why it feels like such a personal betrayal and why it has been so difficult to discuss. First we hear from two high school friends of different races who say that social media drove them apart during this election and who disagree on the role that race played or should play in the way people voted.

We make sense of the new reality of Donald J. Trump's victory by exploring how the polling let us down so spectacularly and what a Trump White House will mean for those Americans who feel overlooked, misunderstood or maligned by President-elect Trump. Our guests: Nate Cohn of The Upshot, Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for The Times Magazine.

Two years. Twenty-three major-party candidates. Twenty-five debates. Countless moments of ugliness and drama. Here's how an epic presidential campaign sounded, from start to finish.

And how did almost no one — not the pundits, not the pollsters, not us in the media — see it coming? We're joined by the New York Times journalists Nicholas Confessore, Maggie Haberman and Jim Rutenberg to discuss.

While we wait for the polls to close, our politics team answers the big remaining questions from you, our listeners, in our special call-in episode.

As we near the end of an exhausting election, we take a comedic break with three of our favorite comedians: Phoebe Robinson, Chris Gethard and Cameron Esposito.

How is it that with seven days left until the election, we are consumed anew by Hillary Clinton's emails? We sift through the still-unfolding facts and implications of the case with our guests: two New York Times reporters who have covered the investigation since it first emerged, Amy Chozick and Michael S. Schmidt; Carrie Cordero, a former attorney at the Department of Justice who worked closely with the F.B.I.; and Nate Cohn of The Upshot, to tell us what impact this could have on the election.

Here's the dilemma for the Republican Party: Tens of millions of its voters support a candidate, Donald J. Trump, who rejects the organization's values, reviles its policies and wants to kick its leaders out of power. How does a once-proud party begin to recover from that?

We hear more from Michael D'Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a biographer of Donald J. Trump. After discussing in Part I Mr. Trump's reluctance to confront the traumas of his childhood, in Part II we explore the grown man Mr. Trump became: fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status, and contemptuous of those who fall from grace.

Michael D'Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a biographer of Donald J. Trump, shares hours of audio interviews he conducted with Mr. Trump, three of his children and his first wife. We interview Mr. D'Antonio and draw on those tapes in Part I of our two-part psychological portrait of Mr. Trump.

Who won? What surprised us? How much will it change the race? We recruited Amy Chozick and Nicholas Confessore, political reporters for The New York Times, for a bleary-eyed post-debate discussion fueled by cheap rosé.

We talk numbers with Nate Cohn, a reporter for The Upshot and our most trusted translator of polls. We also check in with seasoned pollsters from each party — Geoff Garin, a Democrat, and Whit Ayres, a Republican — about Mr. Trump's chances. Finally, we speak to a longtime researcher of polling psychology, Kyle Dropp, about a phenomenon that could be Mr. Trump's last hope.

A woman in Manhattan is watching the second presidential debate and hears Donald J. Trump say that, no, he has never kissed or groped a woman without her permission. She goes to bed deeply upset. The next morning she writes an email to The New York Times to say, yes, in fact, he has. It happened to her, she says. Mr. Trump denies her account. Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey tell the story of the days that followed.

Michael Barbaro hands the host chair to his editor, Carolyn Ryan, who runs campaign coverage for The New York Times, to discuss the tape of Donald J. Trump talking unguardedly about women and his behavior toward them and why it has blown open a discourse on gender, politics and culture. She speaks with Maggie Haberman, who has covered both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump, and Maureen Dowd, The Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and a historian of the Clintons.

The vice presidency has been the butt of jokes for generations. But politicians beg for the job, and with the right chemistry and personal dynamic, it can be a powerful position. We talk with the former chief White House reporter for The New York Times, Peter Baker, who has written a book about Vice President Dick Cheney's relationship with President George W. Bush, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.” We also talk with Amy Chozick and Jonathan Martin, political reporters for The New York Times, about what we know about Senator Tim Kaine and Governor Mike Pence, the current candidates for the job and whether, once elected, Hillary Clinton or Donald J. Trump is prepared to hand over real responsibility and stature to either of them.

David Barstow and Susanne Craig, reporters for The New York Times, explain how they cracked open the biggest story of the campaign, overcoming nagging doubts to nail down Donald J. Trump's tax returns. We also talk to Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney, about why the 2012 Republican nominee was so reluctant to release his tax returns and to Alex Burns, a Times reporter, about how the latest tax revelations are reshaping the last few weeks of the presidential campaign.

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are full-blown stars in their own right, and have spawned and inspired television characters and shows. We talk to the chief television critic at The New York Times, James Poniewozik, about how television and film characters past and present inform our views of both candidates. We also chat with Susan Dominus, of The Times Magazine, about the surprising ways that gender is playing out in pop cultural depictions of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton in this campaign.

Instead of leaving the office, we pour a round of drinks and dissect the spectacle we just witnessed. Michael Barbaro is joined by Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, and Carolyn Ryan, senior editor for politics at The Times. Michael Grynbaum, a Times media reporter, parses the performance of Lester Holt, the moderator.

Debate night is coming. Tony Schwartz, the man who channeled Donald Trump to write “The Art of the Deal” and has lived to regret it, explains why he is turning his intimate knowledge of how Mr. Trump thinks and behaves into advice for how Hillary Clinton should conduct herself in Monday night's highly anticipated presidential debate. We also talk about what to expect on Monday with Frank Bruni, a New York Times opinion columnist, and Amy Chozick, a New York Times reporter who has covered Mrs. Clinton for the last two years.

Is deliberate dishonesty an official campaign strategy for Donald J. Trump? We posed that question to two top presidential campaign strategists from both parties: Mike Murphy, who advised Jeb Bush this year and John McCain in 2000, and Paul Begala, a political strategist for Bill Clinton in 1992. We're also joined by Maggie Haberman, who has covered Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton for The New York Times.

Long before Hillary Clinton's pneumonia or Donald J. Trump's bizarre doctor's note, there was a history of voters demanding candidates' medical records. We get some perspective from John Dickerson, a history buff, columnist at Slate and moderator of Moderator of CBS's “Face the Nation,” and Lawrence K. Altman, a former reporter at The New York Times who was the first to interview candidates about their medical histories.

“Basket of deplorables.” A public roasting at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The Khan family. So many gaffes and stumbles in a presidential race can feel at the time like major turning points. But it often takes months of hindsight to know at which point the whole campaign actually turned. We speak with six Times campaign reporters about the moments — often subtle, often off-camera — that struck them as pivotal in this election.

What just-right combination of factors is required for a country to embrace a woman as its leader for the first time, and was it inevitable that Hillary Clinton, or someone like her, would be the first in America to make it this far? We explore with Claire McCaskill, the senior United States Senator from Missouri, and Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist who has written several books on women's history.

Whose ads are breaking through this year, and why? We dissect this season's campaign ads with Wesley Morris, the chief culture critic for The New York Times, and Russ Schriefer, a longtime Republican ad maker who has created some of the most memorable campaign commercials of the past decade.

Donald J. Trump and Anthony D. Weiner have ridden impulsiveness and narcissism to dizzying political highs but have also found that they take a toll, raising doubts about their judgment and fitness for public office. We discuss with Frank Bruni, a columnist and former political reporter at The Times, and Maggie Haberman, a national political reporter.

Does Hillary Clinton deserve 91 percent of the black vote? Is Donald J. Trump even trying with black voters? We discuss with two New York Times journalists who have been covering this election and its racial dynamics: Charles Blow and Yamiche Alcindor. We also hear from Tara Wall, a campaign operative who helped President George W. Bush and Mitt Romney court black voters.

She is a quiet but devoted Methodist. He subscribes to a theology of positive thinking. The two leading presidential candidates have been molded by religion — even if they don't often talk about it. We hear from Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps”; Burns Strider, Mrs. Clinton's religious adviser during her first presidential campaign; and Jonathan Martin, a national political correspondent at The Times.

Has the media lost its position as an arbiter of truth in this campaign? We discuss this possibility with two people who occupy very different places in the media world: Charlie Sykes, an influential conservative radio show host; and Sarah Ellison, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Jim Rutenberg, The Times's media columnist, explains how it all comes back to the syringe.

Four of 10 voters are still squarely in Donald J. Trump's camp. To understand who they are we turn to J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” which has been described as the best explanation of Mr. Trump's political rise. We're also joined by the New York Times reporters Nicholas Confessore and Nate Cohn.

How did Hillary Clinton lose Americans' trust? Stanley Greenberg, a top Democratic campaign strategist, describes how he addressed the trust issue for another Clinton: Bill. We also speak with Lissa CQ Muscatine, a longtime adviser for Hillary Clinton, and Mark Landler, a White House correspondent for The Times.

Sometimes the most powerful Trumpisms are throwaway lines like “I don't know.” Michael Barbaro talks with Thomas Friedman, Patrick Healy and Barbara Res, Trump's former construction manager, about how Trump uses language.

We explore whether Hillary Clinton, the most distrusted Democratic presidential nominee in a generation, could be heading for an old-fashioned, legitimate landslide. Our guests: Newt Gingrich, Amy Chozick and Nate Cohn.