Jonathan Martin serves as the politics bureau chief and senior political columnist at POLITICO, an outlet he helped build as one of its first hires in 2008. Martin also spent nearly a decade at the New York Times as the publication’s top political reporter. Recently, he co-authored the New York Times best-seller, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future” with HPR alum Alex Burns ‘08. This fall, he is a resident fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, where he will co-lead a study group titled “Rematch or Renewal: An In-Depth Discussion of the 2024 Presidential Race.” Martin sat with HPR for a wide-ranging conversation that covered topics including Washington’s age problem, the responsibilities of journalists and politicians in an era of democratic backsliding, and the forces behind Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency.
The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: One thing that really comes through in reading your columns is that you have a strong ability to see past spin. I’ve noticed that in your recent article on Nancy Pelosi, especially, you were not only seeing through what she was saying, and her reasons for saying it, but also the reasons that she didn’t want to say things. How did you cultivate that strong insider knowledge of the political system, while also, by the necessities of being a journalist, existing solely at the periphery of it?
Jonathan Martin: I spent the first 17 years of my career as a news reporter, and now that I have a column, it’s much more liberating in terms of your voice and your ability to convey to the reader not only what you think, but to decipher what the political subject that you’re writing about thinks. And that is great fun for me because I’ve covered politicians long enough where I know that, as we say at POLITICO, “there’s what they say, and there’s what they mean.” And those things can often be different, or at least not exactly the same. So that’s somewhat liberating. It’s not to say that you can’t decipher spin when you’re writing straight news articles. You can, but you have to do it in more subtle ways. With the column, you can try to do it more directly, if that makes sense.
How do I figure out what they’re actually trying to say or what they’re unintentionally saying without saying it? I think it’s just years of spending time around politicians; covering campaigns; going to events; understanding the tidal ebbs and flows of politics, of careers, of seasons, of governance, of elections; and recognizing how these people’s minds work. And that may be the most important thing: immersing yourself in the material, immersing yourself in these people’s careers, knowing who they are and knowing what drives them, understanding their psyches.
There’s definitely an element of playing therapists here. You’ve got to know what makes them tick. I ask questions like “Tell me about your parents.” And if you want to get inside them and figure out, well, why is Nancy Pelosi wrestling with whether or not to run again, and what’s driving that, you have to understand Nancy Pelosi. You have to understand the arc of her career. And so it requires a lot of work, and a lot of getting out. But if you’re curious enough about politics and politicians, boy, you can figure it out. Not easily, but you can figure it out.
HPR: You talked about how there are some advantages to going with your new column format. Oftentimes, your columns involve long-term embedding with a person or conducting interviews. But you approach them in a more thematic way than you’d be able to do with just a standard article. When you are approaching these articles and these columns, do you often go in with a theme in mind or does it emerge out of the writing process?
JM: Let me just talk about the column for a bit because this is important for your readers, especially younger readers. In Washington journalism, for a very long time in the 20th century — and I may actually write something for POLITICO explaining this more — the reported column was a standby. It was a fixture of politics and government. Not only did the big papers like the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, but even smaller regional papers had a columnist in Washington. And there were syndicated columnists whose work appeared in all kinds of papers. This for decades and decades was standard. In the 21st century, the genre has faded, and there’s not the kind of reported column like there was.
And what I’m trying to do is, in some ways, revive the genre. You still sometimes see it in the national security realm, but you don’t see a lot of this reported column on politics per se, at least in Washington like you used to. And the idea with it is that you’re writing in your voice, and you’re writing authoritatively, and you’re offering insight and your views. But you’re also doing it from the basis of reporting. You’re going to places, you’re talking to people, you’re trying to break news, you’re trying to advance stories. You’re offering new information. And I feel like most columns today, in the 21st century, it’s almost all opinion, right? And there’s just not much reporting in there. And so I really want to try to revive, if I can, the reported column. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do for almost the last year now at POLITICO. It’s been a lot of fun.
And I do approach the topics with at least sort of a kernel of a thought in mind. And I don’t have a lack of ideas. In fact, the challenge I have is trying to get through all the ideas that I have — it can be overwhelming. But I did spend more time this summer on two topics and wrote a lot longer on two topics than I have in most of the columns, and they were almost magazine-length pieces. And those two pieces were about Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi: Two figures who obviously are in the winter of their careers, but I thought for different reasons required a level of reporting and insight that was sort of longer than the typical column.
HPR: You mentioned your recent columns with Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi. Something I’ve noticed throughout several of your columns so far is that age has been a constant through-line. You’ve interviewed this older generation of elder statesmen and women: Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell. But you’ve also looked at people who are up-and-coming: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
JM: That’s a good insight. It feels like age is always central in our politics. There’s always a hunger for the new, for tomorrow, for what’s fresh. I mean, I can go back to the namesake of the building that we’re sitting in right now. Kennedy was so appealing in 1960 in part because we had come out of eight years of Eisenhower, an older president. JFK is exciting because he’s the first president born in the 20th century. He was new, he was young. He had a young family, a young wife. That is a persistent feature of American politics.
What’s also a persistent feature of American politics is an older generation hanging on to power, especially in the Congress, and especially in the Senate. These are standbys of American politics. It’s just that right now, we have an inordinate concentration of older people dominating our political scene. It just happens that in both parties, there’s this coterie of leaders who were all born either immediately before or immediately after World War II, who are now in power.
Chuck Schumer is now 71 or 72. He’s kind of the spring chicken of the bunch. But you know, Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden were both born in 1942. Nancy Pelosi was born in 1940. Jim Clyburn and Steny Hoyer were, I think, born in ’39 and ’40. And then Trump, obviously, was born in ’46 — the same year, by the way, that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were born. So, Obama is kind of the exception to that. We had this real Obama interregnum. But besides that, for a while now, we’ve had political leaders in this country who were all born roughly within the same 10 year period. So it’s hard not to grapple with that, especially when we’re sitting here in 2023.
One of the things I always love thinking about is applying this moment to an earlier stage in American history. And it would be like if at the dawn of World War I, they were still fighting over Civil War and Reconstruction era grievances. The Vietnam War was half-a-century ago. But we have politicians who were formed in large part by the Vietnam War and by the protests thereoff. And we’re talking about this stuff, but people like you were born in the 21st century. And Vietnam is something that you’ve read about, right? And your parents were probably born after the Vietnam War. It’s a fascinating moment in history.
There’s always been a conversation about yesterday and tomorrow, and there’s been older folks in Congress, and there’s been an appetite for the new and the fresh President. It just so happens that now we have a lot more members of the older generation serving at one time. But it does raise — on a more serious tip — it raises questions about what the implications are for policymaking and for our future on issues like technology, like climate, in which some of our leaders just aren’t as versed in those kinds of issues because they come from a world of, as I said, Vietnam War debates. And so we are at this hinge moment where so much of the conversation is less about tomorrow than it is about yesterday because of the very nature of who our leadership is.
HPR: You were one of the early hires at POLITICO when it was still a young startup. Many people at the time described it as the “ESPN of politics.” Then you went over to the New York Times, which is a very formal, distinguished institution. Now you’re back at POLITICO. So you’ve oscillated between these two very different newsrooms. How have you felt that your own writing has been impacted by the culture of these two very different institutions? And how do you think you’ve been shaped by these two very different ideas of what journalism should look like?
JM: I think for the better. To me, it is a beautiful synchrony. I embraced the ethos of the new, the startup, the digital. I like the voice of it. I like the forward lean to it. And I like the willingness to take risks. At the same time, I appreciate the role of institutions in American life. And I recognize the value of tradition and of continuity, of a certain voice, and of a certain cadence, and of a certain elegance to how writing can be.
And I think there’s a way to marry the two — to have writing that is both conversational and accessible, but also has an air of authority and insight to it that hopefully is elegantly turned as well. I don’t think it’s either/or. I think it’s a false choice, to borrow a favorite Bill Clinton phrase. I think you can sort of marry the best of both worlds and create a sort of hybrid, a stew, if you will, that is quite pleasing to the reader’s palate. So that’s what I’ve tried to do.
Sometimes it can sound more like the Times. There are other times it can sound more like POLITICO. But hopefully it sounds like both. And I want to serve the reader, I want to give them the best of both. I want to give them nice writing, sharp insights, exclusive reporting, and also a sort of historical perspective about people and events that they can’t get in a lot of other places.
When I think about writing, I think about not just the present. But I also like to think about yesterday and tomorrow. What happened before that is shaping my writing about today, and how what I am writing about today is going to shape events of tomorrow and what could be. And I think that that’s always important when you’re writing about politics — that you’re approaching it with an eye towards implications for the future, and a perspective of what happened in the past to get us to this day.
HPR: You’ve authored books about two different presidential elections. You covered the 2012 cycle in a book that you co-authored with Glenn Thrush. And you also wrote about the 2020 cycle in a book that you co-authored with HPR alum Alex Burns. What was the difference between covering these two very different cycles, both in terms of the politics, but also in how the approach to the media has changed so much between 2012 and 2020?
JM: It’s the horse and buggy versus Tesla. I do think that the 2012 campaign was one of the last campaigns of an earlier era, maybe the last campaign. There was a very conventional Republican pro-business candidate not really saying or doing anything that the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t like that much running against a pretty conventional center-left candidate. The debate was largely between the 40-yard lines of American politics. And most importantly, it was not central in American life.
Yes, it was a presidential campaign and good people paid attention to it and were civic-minded citizens and did their duty. But people went about their lives. Politics wasn’t the driving force in American life. I think that the biggest difference after Trump is that politics is just so much more central in our conversation as a country. And it’s hard to escape. And people who are not involved in politics follow it and know about it at a level that they never did before.
In some ways, that’s great. It got more folks involved in their country’s government. In other ways, it’s pretty disappointing because one of the beauties of America was that we had basically a government on autopilot and most people could live blissfully unaware of what was happening with their government if they wanted to. It’s hard to comprehend most Americans — even folks who are pretty educated — knowing the names of these various characters in the Trump White House or in Trump’s orbit, in a different time. It just wouldn’t have happened.
Something that I think about a lot is how after the elections of 2016, or 2022, the Trump signs never came down. They weren’t just for a season. They weren’t just for a politician running in one campaign. It’s an identity. And I guess the way to get at this most cleanly is that politics became much more about identity than it had been when it was a mere preference like chocolate or vanilla. That is the big change.
HPR: Some people have tried to trace this movement that turned into what is now the MAGA movement back to 2010 with the Tea Party revolution, Sarah Palin, populism, and how it brought a certain amount of entertainment into our politics. Covering that election, did you feel any of that underpinning there, or would you say that former President Trump is a unique phenomenon?
JM: Oh, I think it’s all of the above. I think Trump is more of a symptom of what was already happening out there. He had the street smarts to accelerate it and harness it for his own advantage. But the forces of populism and contempt against Washington and institutions didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It didn’t begin with Sarah Palin either. It’s been going on for a long time. But you have to think about the ingredients that go into making those populist forces resonant.
I think that’s the key question. We’ve always had populist uprisings in American history. You can go back in a long course of American history and look at the forces of action and reaction. That’s not new. But what we have in the years leading up to Trump is a war of choice that did not have a clean ending and that was widely seen as a mistake in hindsight that injured and killed tens of thousands of Americans. We have an economic recession that profoundly impacted a lot of Americans. And we have a shift in culture on issues of gender and race in which a lot of Americans are suddenly having to come to terms with real profound differences in society. And I think if you take all of those things at the same time, you understand the backdrop for this surge in populism.
And the last thing I’ll just add is the changing identity of the country too. Backlash to immigration, or backlash to changes in the country’s identity have typically come after large periods of immigration like the one that we’re in now. And so you add all that together and I think that explains why Trump was able to harness this. And then, add in the weakness of the center-right to stop this. Democratic systems depend on healthy center-right movements. It’s especially important to have a healthy center-right. We had a weak center-right in the aftermath of Bush, and Trump was able to take advantage of that. And not just Trump.
This is a key point: the center-right has been flagging in other parts of the West too, and this led to the rise of this populist nationalism in other democracies as well—the UK being the most obvious one. So it’s not just America, right? That’s a long answer to say I think you have to look at all kinds of different factors that made up the kind of backdrop for what Trump was able to do.
HPR: One more question: You’re spending a semester here at the Harvard IOP and are going to have the opportunity to speak to a lot of Harvard students. If there’s one piece of wisdom that you hope to impart through your time here, what would that be?
JM: I’m so glad you asked that, and I hope every Harvard kid who reads this comes and talks to me at some point. The survival of America’s self-governed system, the survival of American democracy, depends on smart, serious, committed people getting involved in public life, whether as a candidate for office, as a policymaker, or yes, as a journalist. And we need people who are thoughtful, who are committed, who are in it for the right reasons, to commit themselves to a life of public service.
That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with going to Wall Street and working for Goldman or working for JP Morgan and getting that nice, sweet bonus. I don’t hold that against any of you guys if you’re reading this. That’s fine. I don’t blame you if you want to fulfill your parents’ dream for you and go and be a doctor either. That’s fine too. But you don’t have to do those things if you don’t want to do those things.
If you’re more interested in government, and politics, and public service, and journalism, and in trying to lead people or trying to steer the country in a really challenging time, then we need you in your state capitol, in your county government, in your city hall, and in your national capitol to be a leader, or to be a policymaker, or to be a journalist. And I would argue that in this moment, that’s more important and more desperately needed than you going to Wall Street or going to medical school. Again, if you want to do those things, and that’s your aspirations, do that. But if you don’t want to do that, if you’re more interested in public service, come talk to me and let’s figure out what you can do because we really need good people of good character who are passionate about the country, and passionate about public service because the leadership that we have now is not what it should be. And I really worry about the quality of our current leadership and the incentive structure out there right now.
Harvard has for generations produced a lot of the nation’s leaders. And I think there were times where it wasn’t as critical, where the country was on autopilot. We had challenges, obviously. But we’re faced with really profound challenges now in terms of the basics of self-government and in terms of having a functional democracy. And I think we’ve got to fix this. I think we have to get a healthier and better and more productive political system. And we need the best and the brightest, and a lot of those are here at Harvard. So I would urge all of you, if that’s where you think your head is at, if that’s where your heart is, if that’s what you want to do, then you ought to do it.
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