So it's just this just brilliant guide to watching a proto-Trump kind of create the mess that we're in right now.

Yeah, and that idea of a proto-Trump, it raises some questions to me about your question, Carlos, which is Cohn's influence on Trump.

And I think it's hard to say how much of the similarities between the two men is because Trump was the protege of Cohn or just that they're the same kind of political archetype.

that they came up in the same milieu in a lot of ways.

They were surrounded by amoral people and criminals who were making tons of money, and they are sort of walking in the same footsteps.

And so because this is a biography of Cohen and not of Trump, we don't know all of the other influences on Trump that also helped to shape him into this particular type of person.

And I think the other challenge with tracing the influence question is, I don't know if you noticed this, but in the sections where Cohn is talking about his influence on Trump and Trump is talking about his relationship with Cohn, you're just sitting there like this is like an unreliable narrator dance-off.

And once one person does that, it's easier for others to do it as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there is this you have to have that sort of like anti-system philosophy in order to reject and break free of the traditions and the norms and the rules of the culture that you grew up in.

And then for a lot of folks at Woodstock and in communes and other places, they were choosing a communitarian lifestyle.

Right.

Like I individually am going to opt out of the culture I grew up in and I'm going to choose this this life, but with other people.

Right.

I mean, Bad Bunny's whole performance was this global, political, like... like everyone had a take on same with Kendrick Lamar's the year before and every other person that is I feel like performed there's been some sort of critique or analysis or conversation about like you know what are they saying and who are they speaking to what are the symbols and like you know like all of that that's that's not necessarily every concert but or every halftime show but I do think that there's an expectation that who performs Tells us a lot about the space that we're in right now.

This was the period of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden How serious was it for the image of the United States in the world that Barack Obama appeared unable to deal with these issues and change the way that the United States was approaching them?

Well, it was certainly the case that all of that promise that had been vested in Obama didn't seem to be delivering once you got several years into his presidency.

And that was true globally, but it was also true in the United States that there had been an anti-war left and an anti-war on terror liberal and left.

and to a certain extent a libertarian right that had hoped that barack obama would be able not to just rationalize the war on terror but to actually roll it back and what they found instead was that those appeals that barack obama had made to international law and to domestic law was his very lawyerly way of understanding the way the war on terror should work.

And so then some things like torture, which were outside of the conventions of international law, he wanted to do away with.

But then otherwise, he was helping to use the law in order to prosecute the war on terror.

And that was using the law as a way of figuring out how to escalate drone strikes abroad.

When did it start to change into this more insurgent party?

[laughs]

... how particularly like the, the broad use of peptides in recent years has been a kind of a eugenics adjacent kind of movement, um, because it is focused so much on that idea of optimization and maximizing your genetic potential, which is often it's understood as like, um, you know, the, what is it? The gene set that load the, uh, uh, load the gun and the environment pulls the trigger.

Um, that you can actually do quite a lot, um, with that, uh, with that genetic environment that you can maximize.

But what are they maximizing for? Right? Bryan Johnson is maximizing for longevity, which I think there are some interesting, um, big moral and existential questions with.

But what most people are doing it for is because they want to be thinner, they want to have better hair, they wanna have better jawlines, they wanna build muscle more quickly.

Um, that it is, um, about trying to approach this culturally constructed idea of what the ideal hu- human form looks like and what ideal human optimization looks like.

And so I think that it's, it's related to genetics, but I also think it's related to, um, people trying to figure out how to maximize their advantage in an economic system that no longer works for them.

And all that's kinda absent from Gattaca in a way that I find really interesting.

He just thinks of himself as sort of naming the natural state of things.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And his views are widely shared in a lot of the United States.

And in fact, I would say that this would have been the sort of mainstream white opinion in the 19th century and not just for people who believed in supported slavery.

But there is this kind of.

view of the world, that the world has been separated into races, to four or five different races.

turning point for

Do you feel that way?

I do to a certain extent.

Um, certainly there has been a growing frustration among Republicans and even within parts of the base, um, when it comes to Donald Trump.

To the extent that he has lame-ducked himself, fantastic term, um, to the extent to which he's lame-ducked himself, um, it is by, by his own making, right? It, it's not just that he goes off and says crazy things.

He started the war in Iran, which sent gas prices and inflation through the roof.

Um, it was a deeply unpopular war.

He never tried to garner any public support for it, and he knew it was an issue that would fracture his base, because he was supposed to be the no new wars president.

[laughs] Yeah

Do you feel that way?

I do to a certain extent.

Um, certainly there has been a growing frustration among Republicans and even within parts of the base, um, when it comes to Donald Trump.

To the extent that he has lame-ducked himself, fantastic term, um, to the extent to which he's lame-ducked himself, um, it is by, by his own making, right? It, it's not just that he goes off and says crazy things.

He started the war in Iran, which sent gas prices and inflation through the roof.

Um, it was a deeply unpopular war.

He never tried to garner any public support for it, and he knew it was an issue that would fracture his base because he was supposed to be the no new wars president.

[laughs] Yeah

Supreme Court.

I think it has been...

Look, the Supreme Court has not been a great force in our politics over the past, certainly the past 30 years.

And why has it become so bad? Well, there was the Warren Court, which was the only progressive Supreme Court that we've ever had.

And Richard Nixon hated it, as did his supporters.

They wanted to change the court.

And the problem was there were all these liberals on the court.

High school debate where you go nuclear, right? Straight back into it.

Do you feel that way?

I do to a certain extent.

Um, certainly there has been a growing frustration among Republicans, and even within parts of the base, um, when it comes to Donald Trump.

To the extent that he has lame-ducked himself, fantastic term, um, to the extent to which he's lame-ducked himself, um, it is by, by his own making, right? It, it's not just that he goes off and says crazy things.

He started the war in Iran, which sent gas prices and inflation through the roof.

Um, it was a deeply unpopular war.

He never tried to garner any public support for it, and he knew it was an issue that would fracture his base, because he was supposed to be the no new wars president.

Yeah

Do you feel that way?

I do to a certain extent.

Um, certainly there has been a growing frustration among Republicans and even within parts of the base, um, when it comes to Donald Trump, to the extent that he has lame-ducked himself, fantastic term.

Um, to the extent to which he's lame-ducked himself, um, it is by, by his own making, right? It- it's not just that he goes off and says crazy things.

He started the war in Iran, which sent gas prices and inflation through the roof.

Um, it was a deeply unpopular war.

He never tried to garner any public support for it, and he knew it was an issue that would fracture his base because he was supposed to be the no new wars president.

Yeah

It is, it just, there's no words, I think, to sort of encapsulate how depraved that is.

Right.

It's depraved at that like social level.

And then at the political level, what you see emerging and I mean, it's already there in the 1890s, but it's the way that a kind of a, And visceral and violent white supremacy just becomes part of the politics of the South, right? Like you have all these politicians who rise to the highest levels of government in the United States.

Like you'll hear if you if you read about the politics of the 1950s and 60s, James Eastland mentioned, who's a senator here.

And he was involved in heinous acts of anti-Black violence and his family was.

But this is just like that's the power structure.

And it's

Among them, a National Review piece claiming, quote, "Voice of America staff ordered not to call Hamas terrorists." What are they talking about?

There was a directive from VOA to avoid using the word terrorist when talking about members of Hamas.

Now, people are free to call Hamas' activities acts of terror, terrorist acts.

The word terrorism is not verboten, a- nor is it banned to call members of Hamas terrorists.

But what they're responding to, and this is something that a number of media organizations within the US adhere to as well, is that the word terrorist in the US is a particularly politically loaded term that is used unevenly depending on who is being spoken about.

But there is no ban on the word terrorist.

That's part of a, a much more nuanced conversation that is just one of journalistic protocols.

It's gonna hurt, but it's the right thing to do."

Are our elites ever gonna, you know, be held accountable?" While not blaming Donald Trump for the failure to hold people accountable? How, how, how long can they do that? [chuckles]

I mean, they're going to try to do it for the rest of Trump's time in office.

Um, there- this, this really is something where [sighs]-... they're just, they're, they're gonna try to hold it together as long as they can because there's a real cost to going straight for Donald Trump.

Um, and there's a real cost with their audience.

There are gonna be, going to be members of their audience who demand they go after Trump, and there are going to be members that demand that they don't.

And this is a fissure that, that all of these podcasters [chuckles] and media figures are, like, trying to hold together.

A- and it, it gets at a tension underlying the entire Trump regime, which is he is the elite.

What happens now?

H-how, how long can they do that?

I mean, they're going to try to do it for the rest of Trump's time in office.

Um, they're...

This, this really is something where they're just-- They're, they're gonna try to hold it together as long as they can because there's a real cost to going straight for Donald Trump.

Um, and there's a real cost with their audience.

There are gonna be, going to be members of their audience who demand they go after Trump, and there are going to be members that demand that they don't.

And this is a fissure that, that all of these podcasters [chuckles] and media figures are, like, trying to hold together.

What happens now?

Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of give us a taxonomy of MAGA? In other words, like, what makes the MAGA contingent that still wants the files, like Boebert, I guess for now anyway, what makes them who they are, and what makes the other MAGA faction who they are?

So there is a, a sort of civil war in MAGA right now between the people whose careers are entirely beholden to or in the shadow of Donald Trump, who believe that their political futures are tied to lashing themselves to Trump and never deviating from the party line.

So that's one faction of MAGA.

Then there's this other faction of MAGA, and these are the people who have kind of bigger goals.

In the case of Nick Fuentes, it is, um, the transformation of America into a white ethno-nat- nation state.

Um, for others, it is this kind of post-liberal project, who see Donald Trump as a convenient vehicle for their politics, but their politics do not live or die with Donald Trump.

And that, again, empowers them in certain ways, because always their bigger goal is going to override loyalty to Trump.

Is JD Vance gonna be able to, I don't know, become a leader who develops his own version of it? What are you looking at? Like, what are you watching for going forward?

Can you talk a little bit about that and kinda give us a taxonomy of MAGA? In other words, like, what makes the MAGA contingent that still wants the files, like Boebert, I guess, for now anyway, what makes them who they are, and what makes the other (laughs) MAGA faction who they are?

So there is a, uh, a sort of civil war in MAGA right now between, uh, the people whose careers are entirely beholden to or in the shadow of Donald Trump, who believe that their political futures are tied to lashing themselves to Trump and never deviating from the party line.

So, that's one faction of MAGA.

Then there's this other faction of MAGA, and these are the people who have kind of bigger goals.

In the case of Nick Fuentes, it is, um, the transformation of America into a white ethno-natio- uh, nation-state.

Um, for others, it is this kind of post-liberal project, who see Donald Trump as a convenient vehicle for their politics, but their politics do not live or die with Donald Trump.

And that, again, empowers them in certain ways, because always their bigger goal is going to override loyalty to Trump.

Is JD Vance gonna be able to, I don't know, become a leader who develops his own version of it? What are you looking at? Like, what are you watching for, going forward?

(laughs)

... to take fluoride out of the water.

Um, so they can be long l- long living like that.

Um, or even during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, there were all sorts of conspiracy theories about the Clintons, including one that one of their close friends, Vince Foster, um, who had committed suicide in a real tragic moment, um, had actually been killed by the Clintons.

And this is one of those conspiracy theories that not only found legs in conservative media, but through conservative media, then made its way into, uh, the Kenneth Starr investigation, the special counsel investigation to Clinton.

I think it was Brett Kavanaugh who was, uh, the one who was in charge of, of investigating that part of, uh, of the Clinton administration.

There was a member of Congress who went into his backyard and shot a melon to show that it wasn't possible that Vince, Vince Foster could have shot himself.

Right, and so how does this play out within the kind of, uh, timeframe of the Trump presidency though? Can they actually keep a lid on it all through the Trump years or not?

MAGA created it, right? And now Trump is just essentially saying, you know, "Forget what you've said for years, just blame it on Democrats." (laughs)

It- it's- it is a response that, uh, shows that Trump is in an unusual position, that he is kind of his back's against the wall with his base, and he's throwing everything he can, trying every trick (laughs) in the book in order to try to redirect them.

And one of the reasons it's not working is precisely what you were saying, which is there are a significant percentage of MAGA voters who are deep into the Epstein conspiracy, um, because again, it's sort of like the legitimate edge of the QAnon conspiracies and the Pizzagate conspiracies, and so they know what the documents look like.

They've charted where the different planes go and who they think is on the client list and all of these different things.

They're parsing every single word Pam Bondi has ever said about Epstein.

They are parsing every single word that, uh, Trump has said about Epstein and about his partner Maxwell.

Um, so they- they are so closely following this that that kind of reflexive, uh, "I don't know, Obama made up the Epstein files," is something that just doesn't fly within these conspiracy circles.

Where does this fit into that 50-year story? It- it strikes me that there's something kind of qualitatively different happening here with sort of the absolute contempt that Trump is showing to these audiences on this stuff, and the challenge that this poses for right-wing media who had spent years telling their masses to take this seriously.

Just blame it on Democrats." (laughs)

It- it's- it is a response that, uh, shows that Trump is in an unusual position, that he is kind of his back's against the wall with his base, and he's throwing everything he can, trying every trick in the book in order to try to redirect them.

And one of the reasons it's not working is precisely, uh, what you were saying, which is there are a significant percentage of MAGA voters who are deep into the Epstein conspiracy, um, because again, it's sort of like the legitimate edge of the QAnon conspiracies and the Pizzagate conspiracies.

And so they know what the documents look like.

They've charted where the different planes go and who they think is on the client list and all of these different things.

They're parsing every single word Pam Bondi has ever said about Epstein.

They are parsing every single word that, uh, Trump has said about Epstein and about his partner Maxwell.

Where does this fit into that 50-year story? It- it strikes me that there's something kind of qualitatively different happening here with sort of the absolute contempt that Trump is showing to these audiences on this stuff, and the challenge that this poses for right-wing media who had spent years telling their masses to take this seriously.

More broadly, what's happened here? Are there structural reasons for this change that you can identify?

Right-wing media, which I've tracked back since the 1940s, 1950s, it's been around in the United States for a long time, got closer and closer with the Republican Party in the 1990s and the 2000s, as you rightly point out.

There is something different.

Is it structural? It's structural in the way that Donald Trump being president makes it structural.

Uh, he has been this, uh, not polarizing, but almost congealing force within the Republican Party.

He has become its new center, and for ideological media that were trying to pursue a certain set of policies, a certain worldview that he doesn't quite match, what it has done is it has functionally transformed a, a s- a place like Fox News from an organ of right-wing politics into an organ of Trumpian politics.

And those might seem the same, but they're actually different, because one is a, a set of policy preferences and one is a cult of personality.

But at the same time, some of these on the outer tier are also Fox's audience, right? And so, how does Fox manage this? Can it- can it hold everything together?

Promoting democracy, espousing the values of freedom of information and freedom of speech. This all sounds so great, (laughs) I mean, but are there examples of moments where the VOA didn't live up to these lofty goals?

You know, where's the line between, uh, (laughs) promoting a free press and promoting a certain economic form, promoting the hegemony of American culture and businesses, right, in ways that have often made countries feel a little intruded upon, right? Because when American culture starts to push out national culture, that's not ideal (laughs) for the countries where VOA is broadcasting. And so I think there is this tension between soft promotion of democracy and free press and a kind of cultural imperialism, and that is always going to be an issue with an organization like VOA because of its mission.

Now, I don't think we've had a problem in the east part of Europe for a while now with them not being free. You know, when Donald Trump says, "Hey, I want you to go into this agency and fix it," it's kind of like, "Hey, there's a problem with your dog. He's in the shed. Can you go fix Old Yeller?" "Yeah, I can. I can, Dad. It's gonna hurt, but it's the right thing to do."

It's a fascinating viewpoint that has become much more prevalent on the right in the last 10 years or so, that the US doesn't have a role to play in the world. Glenn Beck would go on to say in that segment that NATO should be done away with. And so there is this larger set of goals that the dismantling of VOA plays into that makes right-wing audiences so happy. VOA stood for a defensive democracy and free press across the world, and this is an administration that does not stand for those things. This is an administration that doesn't believe in the liberal world order, that's based on a set of rules, that's based on human rights, but believes in a world order that is based on power. And that means that the US alliances in that world are with regimes like China, like Russia, these strongmen states. And so to see the US begin to withdraw from the institutions that were built to guard against totalitarianism says a lot about where the administration sees the US in the world, and that's, I think, particularly worrisome.