Wu, Trump and a ‘blue wave’: Top stories GBH News is following this week

Every week, GBH News’ assignment editor Matt Baskin jumps on our airwaves to look at some of the stories that the newsroom is focusing on in the week ahead. In the wake of the midterms — including a “blue wave” in New England — Baskin looked at some of the top political stories in the works.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: So, we're a week out from the election now. Is there anything new left to say about local politics?

Matt Baskin: Well, there's always something new to say about local politics. But rather than give you a rehash of last week's results, or what we might expect in the transition from the Charlie Baker administration to the Maura Healey administration, I want to talk actually about Mayor Michelle Wu — because this week marks one year since she took office as Boston mayor. It's a year tomorrow, actually. And our City Hall reporter, Saraya Wintersmith, is speaking with the mayor for the occasion. And we're working on a little bit of a retrospective.

Mayor Wu's win last November was a major, major milestone for Boston. She's the first woman, the first woman of color to be elected to the office. I say elected because she succeeded interim Mayor Kim Janey, also a woman of color who inherited the office from Marty Walsh when he resigned to become Joe Biden’s secretary of labor.

There's a lot to unpack in looking back at one year of mayor. There's, of course, the pandemic. She faced stiff, continued, sometimes racist opposition over the vaccine mandates she put in place for city workers early in her administration. There's the emphasis she's put on a local version of the Green New Deal. She's trying to get Boston signed up for a statewide pilot program where 10 cities can put bans on new construction that connects to fossil fuels. I should also say here, there's a push afoot for Governor-elect Healey to expand that — just make it a standard part of the state's building code.

And then there's also Mayor Wu's relationship with the police that we're going to be looking at. She's trying to reshape a department that, like many police departments, has been under a lot of scrutiny in the past few years. This summer, she hired Michael Cox as the city's new police commissioner. He's a Black man who was a victim of police brutality himself. When he was a rank-and-file cop in Boston in the ’90s, he was mistaken for a suspect by his own colleagues and beaten. It's hard not to see his hiring as pretty symbolic.

And then there's, of course, the school system. Boston Public Schools narrowly averted state receivership earlier this year. They've been dealing with all sorts of problems — getting kids to class itself; late, sometimes no-show buses. And today, actually, parents are holding a rally outside City Hall, pushing the mayor to do more for the district.

Rath: It's interesting, kind of reminded me a little bit that, at least in terms of things locally, last year was actually a more interesting election. But coming back to the national scene, the midterms this year: Talk about how that's playing out here in Massachusetts. The big picture.

Baskin: I think a lot of people in Massachusetts are still surprised, pleasantly surprised, given the state's kind of blue political makeup with how the midterms went. Democrats are keeping the Senate and doing way better than expected in the House — looks like Republicans are only going to have quite a narrow majority.

But now we're waiting on a speech scheduled for tonight from Donald Trump in which he's expected to announce another run for president. And we're curious, of course, about how that's going to be received by local Republicans. A lot of folks in the GOP establishment are laying last week's losses at Trump's feet and trying to move on from him, at least for now — we’ll see what happens in the months ahead. But what we don't know yet is whether his supporters will be willing to move on from him and maybe into the camp of someone like Ron DeSantis.

I should say that this also speaks to some post-election fracturing in the Massachusetts Republican Party after local Republicans didn't win a single statewide office last week.

There's a wrinkle here that we in the news business have really struggled with for the past seven years, now, believe it or not: in figuring out how to properly cover Trump and those who back him. You and I have spoken many times off the air about how disappointed we've been with some outlets giving him more oxygen than might be warranted or wise.

And there's, of course, the phenomenon that's come to be called the "Trump Safari piece": stories along the lines of, "We sat down with six Republican voters in a diner in Peoria, etc., etc., etc."

I think it's important that we be really careful with that kind of coverage. Donald Trump is a right-wing extremist who tried to subvert American democracy. We need to say that plainly, we need to be honest about that when we cover people who may want to see a second Trump term — and not just treat it as politics as usual.

Rath: And I'll mention on that point that we will not be bringing you Donald Trump's announcement live this evening. We'll cover it as news as it is warranted.

Finally, Matt, let's talk about the situation in Massachusetts hospitals. It used to be where we were looking at the COVID numbers every week, and now I feel like we're looking at what's going on with RSV every week. Tell us about what's going on there right now.

Baskin: That's right. That's the respiratory virus, RSV, that's really hitting children hard. I should say that most kids who come down with the recover just fine, but it often does require hospitalization.

Doctors are sounding some alarms here just based on volume. We're still hearing about packed ERs, lack of beds, some kids being shuttled out of state for treatment just because hospitals — Massachusetts’ world-class hospitals — are so full.

Our Morning Edition reporter Mark Herz is all over this. We can expect to hear more from him on it tomorrow, including how parents are handling things.

Rath: Matt, that’s a lot, as always. Thanks again.

Baskin: You got it, Arun.

Rath: And that's GBH News assignment editor Matt Baskin. This is GBH’s All Things Considered.