Andrew Marantz
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
He didn't say, how dare you, sir, and get up and leave and storm out.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You know, he kind of laughed along and yes anded the joke in a way that kind of steered him away from the xenophobia parts and toward a kind of more common understanding to the point that by the end of that interview, Stavros was offering a kind of very concise explanation of why he thought Trump and the Republicans were terrible and delivering this to Theo Vaughn, who is
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
had kind of just been at Trump's inauguration and almost seemed to be in his corner. And it wasn't contentious. It wasn't heated. It was real disagreement, but it was in a kind of amiable, bro-y way. So I don't know. I mean, if that's the manosphere, then it's not as scary as all that. But it's not always possible to model – That kind of agreement, it takes, you know, prior relationship often.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It takes trust, the word you brought up. So it's not like this is a kind of cure-all for, you know, all the cultural ills of America. But I do think it's worth it for at least Democratic politicians to take note the kind of pearl-clutching aesthetic is just very, very off-putting to people. I mean, I heard that more times than I could count.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Well, I think there's something about when your job is to talk for a living and to kind of push boundaries for a living. You, I think, kind of over index for that.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I mean, a lot of the comedian's craft is to look at something you've seen a thousand times, you know, the line to get into the airplane or the, you know, room service at a hotel and find something quirky and new and maybe a little bit taboo to say about it. And so it kind of makes sense that if you're on one of these long form podcasts, you're
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It's not going to sound like, OK, here's a very tidy, efficient summary of the negotiations yesterday over the budget shutdown. It's going to sound like, man, like what even is a budget? Like, why do we even give money to each other? Have you ever thought about that? You know, it's like sort of radically open.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And I think a lot of Democrats underestimated how powerfully affecting that is for people. I mean, in the piece, I kind of refer to this as parasocial media. It's not social media anymore. in the sense of, you know, an algorithmic feed. It's parasocial in the sense that, I mean, that word means basically a kind of imagined one-way friendship that the listener has with the host.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So if you're listening to Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan for tens or dozens or hundreds of hours while you're at the gym or while you're folding laundry or whatever, you'd feel like you know them. I mean, I feel like I know them. And so then when they tell you something or they start a line of questioning,
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
you have a certain amount of trust and a certain amount of generosity like oh let's see where he's going with this and that's a very very very powerful tool in culture and in politics and I think for a long time there's been this assumption that oh politics is one thing and Spotify is another and they're just not separate things at all and I feel like
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It took way too long for political consultants to learn that about social media. I feel like they've now learned it about social media, but they're a little behind the ball on parasocial media.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I first encountered him in 2020 while I was covering the Bernie Sanders campaign for The New Yorker, and he was covering the Bernie Sanders campaign for his Twitch channel, which he had just launched. So he started out on a YouTube show called The Young Turks, which was one of the first online shows. Sort of populist left shows.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It's been around forever and that it just happens to have been started by his uncle. Hassan was born in New Jersey, but he grew up mostly in Turkey. So he's kind of been back and forth between Turkey and the U.S. his whole life. And when he landed in L.A., he got a job at the Young Turks. And he eventually went solo on Twitch. And what that meant was just basically streaming all the time.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I mean, I thought I knew the basics of what Twitch was, but I really didn't get just how constant it is. So when I encountered him in 2020, I was, as I put it in the piece, a kind of youngish reporter from an oldish outlet doing the traditional thing of taking notes and then, you know, writing about it days or weeks later.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And what Hassan was doing was he had a backpack on, an IRL backpack with a camera rigged up to it, and he was just live streaming it. And there were all these people in his chat, these kind of commenters who were constantly offering him comments in the chat. He was monitoring them on his phone.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And people kept coming up to him out of the crowd and, you know, wanting to get selfies with him and get him to sign stuff. So it was kind of half journalism, half kind of celebrity influencer stuff.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It's completely incredible how often. I mean, so that year that was 2020. That year he was live on camera for 42 percent of the hours of that year, like all the hours of the year, not waking hours. And he doesn't like film himself sleeping like this is him hosting a show for 42 percent of his life.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Oh, yeah. I flew to L.A. and I, you know, took a lift to his house and rang the bell. And, you know, he showed up at the door and he said, all right, sit out of the shot. Don't make any sound. I'll talk to you when I'm done. And then he just sat down and kept going for four more hours. This was already four hours into the stream that day. That was a Sunday. And so...
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
He's just doing it all the time. And he's getting numbers that are like, you know, that day it was a Sunday. It was kind of a slow news day. He had maybe 30 something thousand people watching him simultaneously, which is like better than some cable networks. And especially in the coveted youth demographic. Yeah. And he was covering the overthrow of Assad in Syria, which had just happened.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
He was covering a YouTube documentary about NATO. You know, just whatever he's looking at on his screen, you're looking at with him. And it actually sometimes can be really exciting. Like the next day when I came to his house, you know, he went to play basketball in the park. And then he came back and said, OK, what should I talk about today? Maybe I'll talk about this. Maybe I'll talk about that.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And then about, you know, a few minutes before he went live. Luigi Mangione was arrested, the suspect in the United Healthcare assassination. And he said, OK, this is what we're talking about. And for six straight hours, he just went through all the things his commenters were sending him. You know, what was Luigi looking at on Twitter? What was he looking at on Goodreads?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Can we watch his valedictorian speech from high school? And it's kind of thrilling to watch someone dig through it in real time and be making comments. live commentary. I mean, it's kind of a high wire act. He's trying not to say something too erratic, but he's trying to be erratic enough to be entertaining.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
He was trying to be careful not to, you know, actually explicitly glorify murder, which is against Twitch's rules. But he was not exactly condemning Luigi either, or he was kind of doing it, but doing it semi sarcastically. So it's kind of an incredible thing to watch someone do that for that long.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yeah, he's really the only leftist star on Twitch. I mean, it's kind of hard to overstate how thoroughly platforms like Twitch have become magified. And so Hasan Piker is really the only outspoken leftist. There are other people who probably have progressive politics, but they don't talk about politics all day. They talk about video games or something. He's like a real leftist.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I mean, he's a kind of like a socialist Marxist leftist. And so he has a lot of views that put him to the left of the Democratic Party's leading politicians. You know, throughout the 2024 election, he was... sort of taking this position that Trump is really terrible, so you should probably cast a vote against him.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
But, you know, I can't exactly defend what Harris and the Democrats are doing either. So it was this kind of critical support outlook. And we didn't end up having space for this in the piece. But I was reporting from the DNC in Chicago last summer. Hassan Piker was there. He was actually kind of given a seat of honor by the DNC because they realized that he's this very prominent voice
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
in their coalition. And then he started saying these very, very edgy things about Gaza. And then they took his credential away.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I think it means a few things. So I don't think he is saying stop all podcasting, stop all streaming, right? It would be hypocritical of him to say that in the middle of his 10-hour stream. So he is not saying to pull out of the battlements that the left is currently in and is currently losing. I think what he's saying is you can't exclusively podcast your way out of the issue.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So when he's objecting to someone like Gavin Newsom, it sounds like what he's objecting to is – Gavin Newsom apparently saying, well, instead of rethinking what about our policies is driving people away, let me just start a podcast and that'll fix it. Right. So it's sort of a question of is this a Band-Aid solution?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
But Piker is like a really committed leftist and he really thinks that the Democrats do not have adequate solutions. So I think. What he would probably say is, OK, great. Someone like Kamala Harris should go on Joe Rogan. But when Rogan asks her, how are you going to fix the health care system? Instead of having a really simple answer like Bernie, like we'll just give everyone health care.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
She has this sort of ticky tack, you know, technocratic answer. Like if you make under $60,000, we'll do this. Right. So I think he would sort of say that the policy doesn't make for good messaging because it's not universalist policy. It's not clear, simple policy. Now, you can agree or disagree with the sort of Bernie bro democratic socialist policy platform, but it is empirically the case that.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
When someone like Bernie Sanders goes on these shows, he doesn't have to struggle with how calculated to be. He says what he says, which is what he says when he's talking to NPR or The New York Times or Fox News because he just says the same thing every time. So I think the Democrats can't podcast their way out of this means if your policies are unpopular, the messaging can only get you so far.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yeah, there's definitely money going into the right wing podcast sphere, some of it from political donors and some of it just, you know, Joe Rogan got a massive deal from Spotify just because he was very popular. And part of what, you know, when Hassan Piker says, you know, the Democrats can't podcast their way out of this.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I think part of what he means is you can't just have a kind of astroturf industry. solution where you throw a bunch of money at sort of randomly selected people whose views you like and that'll do it. Right.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So to kind of play out that argument, the way that argument would go is, OK, let's say some left of center donor decided to give hundreds of millions of dollars to whichever, you know, TikTok star was kind of supporting the Democrats and Would that boost awareness of the Democrats? Probably.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
But what it wouldn't do is have the authentic feeling of an organic, trusted, authentic, weird voice, right? So you were saying before people who've known parasocially someone like Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan for years, they have a kind of trust in them. And a lot of what that trust comes from is not just –
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
putting in the parasocial hours, although that's important, but also, frankly, how weird and idiosyncratic these people's interests are. You can't grow Joe Rogan of the right in a lab because Joe Rogan wasn't the Joe Rogan of the right until a few months ago. In 2020, Joe Rogan was the Joe Rogan of the left. He supported Bernie Sanders for president. And then between 2020 and 2024, he was lost.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
But the point I'm making with that is if you had decided to astroturf your way to Joe Rogan, you wouldn't have been looking in the right place because you wouldn't have been funding Joe Rogan. So a lot of where the trust and authenticity comes from is... You know, this is someone whose interests I actually just vibe with at a totally apolitical level.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And then when they start talking about politics, maybe I'll take some advice from them. That's a very hard thing to kind of recreate from the top down.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
The way Hassan Piker put it to me is, yeah, Trump lies constantly, but at least people get the sense that he's saying what he really thinks. So it's kind of a tricky double-edged sword because I think a lot of his supporters don't even necessarily believe that he's being truthful, but they believe that he's authentically speaking his mind.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And actually in his flagrant interview with Andrew Schultz, who I also spoke to for this piece, When Trump was interviewed on that podcast, he at one point said, you know, I'm basically a truthful person. And the host, Andrew Schultz, laughed in his face and was like, what does that mean, a basically truthful person? But I think there is ironically some truth to it.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I think Trump does constantly say things that are demonstrably false, but he gives the sense that what's happening on the inside of his brain is coming out of his mouth. And I think if the rubric you're using is are you calculated or are you just free, you it's very hard to beat Donald Trump at that game.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And I should also just say on the Rogan thing, we were talking about the, you know, did Kamala Harris try to do Rogan and all the miscommunications there. One thing I found interesting when they were debriefing the kind of top campaign staffers debriefed after the election, they actually, on a podcast, they went on Pod Save America, and they were talking about the different
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
decisions in the campaign and what they could have done differently. And they were asked this sort of big question of the day, why didn't she go on Rogan? And they claimed that it was because of scheduling and they couldn't get to Texas that many times. Texas is not a battleground state. But another thing they said that just has stuck with me is they said,
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You know, we did want to do it not so much for the conversation itself, but just because it would have broken through, meaning like presumably it would have gotten attention in the mainstream media. And I just thought that's such a mistaken old school way of thinking. I mean, even now you're thinking the point of a Joe Rogan interview is to get a headline on CNN.com. It doesn't.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It's just backwards. But, you know, I think it's going to take a few years for people to catch up.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk was on Rogan a week or two ago talking about all this stuff. And it was after the Doge stuff had started, after they had made these massive cuts to USAID. And Rogan asked him, what's going on with this, man? People say that, you know, like babies are dying and all this terrible stuff is happening. And Musk just said, oh, no, that's not really true.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And then they kind of moved on. You know, again, this is not a journalistic standard of pushback. This is not a you know, I'm coming in with the receipts and I'm going to make you answer.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I think that could be really illuminating, actually, if someone could get someone like Elon Musk to sit down for four hours unedited with receipts and say, here you said you cut a billion dollars, but it was actually a million dollars. Your explanation, please. You know, but I just don't think that is what someone like Joe Rogan sees his job as. I think he sees it as a hang.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I think it is. Luckily, I'm not a political strategist, so I have no idea how to do it. But one thing we haven't mentioned, which I think I should just explicitly say is that what do we mean by the left is actually a very live question. So when people talk about the, you know, can there be a Joe Rogan of the left or can the left win back young people?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Are the left and the Democrats the same thing or are they actually at odds in many ways? A lot of what Hassan Piker does is criticize the Democrats from the left. And often what he says is, I'm a leftist, not a liberal. So one thing that has to be sort of Or at least the tension has to be, I think, recognized is what do we mean when we say the left?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And then I think to the second part of the question, can the center left Democrat anti-Republican coalition win young men back? I think yes. And I think it, you know, based on the conversations I've had with various people, you know, it's a combination of material factors and kind of cultural factors.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So I think it's trying to deliver a coherent policy agenda that will actually benefit people and make their lives better and more meaningful. And then also showing up in these spaces, both online and IRL, to help tell them how you're going to do that. So easier said than done. And as I say, luckily, it's not my job to do it, but it's possible for sure.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yeah, it's interesting. I listened to that episode, and he was being very deferential. I think it's also really funny the way you introduced it as Gavin Newsom joining the Manosphere, because it's not clear what that means exactly, other than people talking in an unscripted way. So I understand the reaction to things like Gavin Newsom deferring to Charlie Kirk too much.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
My guess is that what he's trying to show is kind of modeling a... I'm not afraid. I can swim into uncharted waters. I think people like Newsom are guessing that they'll fare better if they are willing to go out and engage and show that they're not afraid. And I mean, this is something that I heard from multiple people in the piece.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Just the idea of showing up and holding your own and humanizing yourself in many instances is almost more important than what you say, at least to a certain type of voter.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yeah, so just to start from defining terms. So manosphere is, like a lot of internet terms, pretty ill-defined, and it keeps changing. So often, originally, when people used the term, it was for really, really extreme, hateful stuff, right? So it was for... Andrew Tate, who is a proud misogynist, defines himself that way, has been accused of human trafficking. Really, really, really bad dude.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And so often when people talked about the manosphere, they would talk about that. But then it kind of migrated into people who are, you know, conservatives on gender roles or who don't even have like gender content. that they often bring up, but maybe are just into things that are commonly coded as dude stuff, you know, video games or hunting or, you know, lifting weights or whatever.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So all of that is kind of depending on who you're listening to, contained within that category. And there's no reason that the right has a monopoly inherently on being down to earth or being relatable. You know, it's been mentioned many times that people like Bernie Sanders have no problem going onto these shows and, in fact, have been criticized for going onto these shows.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So it's a bit of a caricature, but it's definitely one that's stuck. And I think we can now see in the data it's definitely one that hurt Kamala Harris in the last election.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Absolutely. And Joe Rogan has been around since he was, you know, telling people to eat worms on Fear Factor. And so and I think you nailed it with the word trust and authenticity. I mean, a lot of times and I think this is true for everyone, but I think it's especially true of listeners who don't think of themselves as political people.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
People who I think are sometimes pejoratively called low information voters, but people who just don't think it's their job to study up on the ins and outs of politics. often what it comes down to is who do you trust? And so you hear a lot of conflicting, competing information.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You know, you hear one source telling you Doge is just a scam and it's just, you know, a way for Elon Musk to enrich himself. And then you hear Joe Rogan or Elon Musk or Theo Vaughn saying, I don't know, it seems cool to me. You know, we're cutting waste from the government. And if you don't want to embark on the
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
really difficult project of sifting through the conflicting evidence, you can just trust one source and not the other. So you mentioned Theo Vaughn. To my mind, he is a funny, really affable, kind of goofy guy. He presents himself as basically so curious that he almost seems to see it as his job to go in with no prior information into any conversation. And
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You can hear him from one week to the next. I mean, he, within the span of a week last summer, interviewed Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. And with each of these interviews, his stance is to kind of just sit back and go, oh, well, that's interesting. I never heard of that before.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
He kind of copied this format from Rogan where when something new comes up that they don't know about, they have a production assistant or an intern or someone kind of sitting in the studio and they'll go, oh, could you pull that up?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yes, very much. It's a dorm room kind of sitting around at a diner kind of conversation. They are a proxy for the audience who may or may not know all the proper nouns. And so they'll just Google it for you in real time. And often that's why it takes two or three or four hours because they're really not in a hurry.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You know, I believe he said he wanted to speak to her. And they were kind of still negotiating the details and then it ended up not happening. There are many people who – I mean sort of should Kamala have gone on Rogan was one of the main Monday morning quarterback topics after she lost the election.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And there are people who said she would have been great on Rogan because he wouldn't have asked her tough questions. He's not generally a very tough interviewer. There are other people who said she might have had a tougher time because – She is more of a kind of buttoned up politician than Trump is certainly.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Actually, Joe Rogan was talking to Theo Vaughn on his podcast and he said, he sort of crystallized this. He said, look, man, I didn't want to ask her about policy. I just wanted to get her in a room, get her talking for a couple hours. And I feel like if you start talking for that long, I'll just start to see if your mind is calculated or if you're just free.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And so that seems to be for people like Rogan and Theo Vaughn, and I think for a lot of their listeners and for a lot of potential voters, that seems to be like the main criterion. Are you calculated or are you just free?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Definitely. And it did not used to be the case. Liberals used to be the counterculture. They used to be the upstarts. And liberals now have become defenders of norms and institutions. But it's now the case in the data and in the perceptions as well that the base of the democratic vote is the educated vote.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And if you're a working class voter, you know, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, et cetera, you're starting to see in the numbers that people do not feel as at home in the democratic party. It's still not obviously across the board and the Democrats still win a majority of votes of people of color and women and all these things. But
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It's clear that the Democrats have lost this connection to being unassailably the party of the working class. And... Sometimes that has to do with policy and raising the minimum wage. And sometimes it just has to do with a vibe of feeling snobby or feeling like you're always being second guessed or you're always being fact checked.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Or I've heard it said that people don't even necessarily vote for the politician they like. They vote for the politician who they think likes that likes them.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I guess my sort of like really rudimentary rubric on this would be it's not, you know, how many celebrities can you line up on your side? It has more to do with kind of. What does it signify? And to your point about identity, showing up at a UFC fight is not just a random room with a lot of people in it. It's about brutal combat. It's sending a very, very specific message.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Certainly there was more that the Harris campaign could have done. For example, she tried to get booked on Hot Ones, the show where you eat really spicy wings.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And that would have been, I think, a great humanizing moment for her. She could, you know, place for her to hang, be a human being, be relatable. You know, yes, I think there is more that any politician can do to get out there, but a lot of times... just speaking purely from a kind of
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
media, new media, social media angle, it's not always can you get the biggest celebrity because often that doesn't have the spontaneity, the authenticity, the feeling of, you know, this is really what people are like in a room. Beyonce is many, many things, but she's not spontaneous and authentic. She's very controlled about her image.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
I mean, the sort of viral behind-the-scenes moment that was working, as far as I could tell, the best for Kamala Harris was... I think I do. Yes. And I just think it's an element of campaigning that when you're too controlled, too risk-averse, and too cautious, and you let it fall by the wayside, you're leaving votes on the table.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Definitely. There was a really interesting moment on Theo Vaughn that I spoke to Stavros Halkias about. He's another comedian who's actually a much more leftist comedian. A lot of these guys are professional comedians for, I think, interesting reasons. And when Stavros went on Theo's show, Theo started to say stuff that sounded pretty xenophobic. And because Stavros is his friend...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Thank you so much, Tanya. So good to be back.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Yeah. So just to start from defining terms. So manosphere is, like a lot of internet terms, pretty ill-defined, and it keeps changing. So often, originally, when people used the term, it was for really, really extreme, hateful stuff, right? So it was for... Andrew Tate, who is a proud misogynist, defines himself that way, has been accused of human trafficking. Really, really, really bad dude.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And so often when people talked about the manosphere, they would talk about that. But then it kind of migrated into people who are conservatives on gender roles or who don't even have like gender content that they often bring up, but maybe are just into things that are commonly coded as dude stuff, you know, video games or hunting or lifting weights or whatever. So all of that is kind of
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
depending on who you're listening to, contained within that category. And there's no reason that the right has a monopoly inherently on being down to earth or being relatable. You know, it's been mentioned many times that people like Bernie Sanders have no problem going onto these shows and, in fact, have been criticized for going onto these shows.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So it's a bit of a caricature, but it's definitely one that's stuck. And I think we can now see in the data it's definitely one that hurt Kamala Harris in the last election.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Absolutely. And Joe Rogan has been around since he was telling people to eat worms on Fear Factor. And I think you nailed it with the word trust and authenticity. I mean, a lot of times, and I think this is true for everyone, but I think it's especially true of listeners who don't think of themselves as political people.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
People who I think are sometimes pejoratively called low information voters, but people who just don't think it's their job to study up on the ins and outs of politics. Often what it comes down to is who do you trust? And so you hear a lot of conflicting, competing information. You know, you hear one source telling you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Doge is just a scam and it's just, you know, a way for Elon Musk to enrich himself. And then you hear Joe Rogan or Elon Musk or Theo Vaughn saying, I don't know, it seems cool to me. You know, we're cutting waste from the government. And if you don't want to embark on the really difficult project of sifting through the conflicting evidence, you can just trust one source and not the other.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So, you know, you mentioned Theo Vaughn. To my mind, he is a funny, really affable, kind of goofy guy. He presents himself as basically so curious that he almost seems to see it as his job to go in with no prior information into any conversation. And You can hear him from one week to the next. I mean, he, within the span of a week last summer, interviewed Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And with each of these interviews. his stance is to kind of just sit back and go, oh, well, that's interesting. I never heard of that before. He kind of copied this format from Rogan where when something new comes up that they don't know about, they have a production assistant or an intern or someone kind of sitting in the studio and they'll go, oh, could you pull that up? Could you Google that?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
I mean, I was listening when someone in a Theo Vaughn interview mentioned FDR and the New Deal and Theo Vaughn went, What is that again? Can we pull that up? And they Googled New Deal and started reading the Wikipedia article. So... The vibe is very much not, you know, we've done our research, we've studied up, we've pre-fact checked everything. It's really the opposite.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Yes, very much. It's a dorm room kind of sitting around at a diner kind of conversation. They are a proxy for the audience who may or may not know all the proper nouns. And so they'll just Google it for you in real time. And often that's why it takes two or three or four hours because they're really not in a hurry.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Definitely. There was a really interesting moment on Theo Vaughn that I spoke to Stavros Halkias about. He's another comedian who's actually a much more leftist comedian. A lot of these guys are professional comedians for, I think, interesting reasons.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And when Stavros went on Theo's show, Theo started to say a lot of stuff that I think is frankly pretty offensive about why we need to close the border and stuff that sounded pretty xenophobic. And because Stavros is his friend... He didn't say, how dare you, sir, and get up and leave and storm out.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
You know, he kind of laughed along and yes anded the joke in a way that kind of steered him away from the xenophobia parts and toward a kind of more common understanding to the point that by the end of that interview, Stavros was offering a kind of very concise explanation of why he thought Trump and the Republicans were terrible and delivering this to Theo Vaughn, who is
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
had kind of just been at Trump's inauguration and almost seemed to be in his corner. And it wasn't contentious. It wasn't heated. It was real disagreement, but it was in a kind of amiable, bro-y way. So I don't know. I mean, if that's the manosphere, then it's not as scary as all that. But it's not always possible to model – That kind of agreement, it takes, you know, prior relationship often.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
It takes trust. So it's not like this is a kind of cure-all for, you know, all the cultural ills of America. But I do think it's worth it for at least Democratic politicians to take note the kind of pearl-clutching aesthetic is just very, very off-putting to people. I mean I heard that more times than I could count.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Well, I think there's something about when your job is to talk for a living and to kind of push boundaries for a living, you, I think, kind of over-index for that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
I mean, a lot of the comedian's craft is to look at something you've seen a thousand times, you know, the line to get into the airplane or the, you know, room service at a hotel and find something quirky and new and maybe a little bit taboo to say about it. And so it kind of makes sense that if you're on one of these long-form podcasts, you're
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
It's not going to sound like, OK, here's a very tidy, efficient summary of the negotiations yesterday over the budget shutdown. It's going to sound like, man, like what even is a budget? Like, why do we even give money to each other? Have you ever thought about that? You know, it's like sort of radically open.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And I think a lot of Democrats underestimated how powerfully affecting that is for people. I mean, in the piece, I kind of refer to this as parasocial media. It's not social media anymore. in the sense of an algorithmic feed. It's parasocial in the sense that, I mean, that word means basically a kind of imagined one-way friendship that the listener has with the host.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So if you're listening to Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan for tens or dozens or hundreds of hours while you're at the gym or while you're folding laundry or whatever, you'd feel like you know them. I mean, I feel like I know them. And so then when they tell you something or they start a line of questioning,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
you have a certain amount of trust and a certain amount of generosity, like, oh, let's see where he's going with this. And that's a very, very, very powerful tool in culture and in politics. And I think for a long time, there's been this assumption that, oh, politics is one thing and Spotify is another. And they're just not separate things at all. And I feel like
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
It took way too long for political consultants to learn that about social media. I feel like they've now learned it about social media, but they're a little behind the ball on parasocial media.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Yeah, there's definitely money going into the right wing podcast sphere, some of it from political donors and some of it just, you know, Joe Rogan got a massive deal from Spotify just because he was very popular. And part of what, you know, when Hassan Piker says, you know, the Democrats can't podcast their way out of this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
I think part of what he means is you can't just have a kind of astroturf industry. solution where you throw a bunch of money at sort of randomly selected people whose views you like, and that'll do it, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So to kind of play out that argument, the way that argument would go is, okay, let's say some left of center donor decided to give hundreds of millions of dollars to whichever TikTok star was kind of supporting the Democrats. Would that boost awareness of the Democrats? Probably. But what it wouldn't do is have the authentic feeling of an organic, trusted, authentic, weird voice, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So you were saying before people who've known parasocially someone like Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan for years, they have a kind of trust in them. And a lot of what that trust comes from is not just – putting in the parasocial hours, although that's important, but also, frankly, how weird and idiosyncratic these people's interests are.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
You can't grow Joe Rogan of the right in a lab because Joe Rogan wasn't the Joe Rogan of the right until a few months ago. In 2020, Joe Rogan was the Joe Rogan of the left. He supported Bernie Sanders for president. And then between 2020 and 2024, he was lost.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
But the point I'm making with that is if you had decided to astroturf your way to Joe Rogan, you wouldn't have been looking in the right place because you wouldn't have been funding Joe Rogan. So a lot of where the trust and authenticity comes from is... You know, this is someone whose interests I actually just vibe with at a totally apolitical level.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And then when they start talking about politics, maybe I'll take some advice from them. That's a very hard thing to kind of recreate from the top down.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk was on Rogan a week or two ago talking about all this stuff. And it was after the Doge stuff had started, after they had made these massive cuts to USAID. And Rogan asked him, what's going on with this, man? People say that, you know, like babies are dying and all this terrible stuff is happening. And Musk just said, oh, no, that's not really true.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And then they kind of moved on. You know, again, this is not a journalistic standard of pushback. This is not a, you know. I'm coming in with the receipts and I'm going to make you answer.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
I think that could be really illuminating, actually, if someone could get someone like Elon Musk to sit down for four hours unedited with receipts and say, here you said you cut a billion dollars, but it was actually a million dollars. Your explanation, please. You know, but I just don't think that is what someone like Joe Rogan sees his job as. I think he sees it as a hang.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
That, you know, we're just hanging. And it would be weird if you were hanging with your friend and you kept badgering them with receipts. So that's not what he's going to do.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
I think it is. Luckily, I'm not a political strategist, so I have no idea how to do it. But one thing we haven't mentioned, which I think I should just explicitly say is, what do we mean by the left is actually a very live question. So when people talk about the, you know, can there be a Joe Rogan of the left or can the left win back, you are the left and the Democrats the same thing?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Or are they actually at odds in many ways? A lot of what Hassan Piker does is criticize the Democrats from the left. And often what he says is, I'm a leftist, not a liberal. So one thing that has to be sort of resolved or at least the tension has to be, I think, recognized is what do we mean when we say the left?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And then I think to the second part of the question, can the center left Democrat anti-Republican coalition win young men back? I think yes. And I think it, you know, based on the conversations I've had with various people, you know, it's a combination of material factors and kind of cultural factors.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So I think it's, you know, trying to deliver a coherent policy agenda that will actually benefit people and make their lives better and more meaningful. And then also showing up in these spaces, both, you know, online and IRL to help tell them how you're going to do that. So easier said than done. And as I say, luckily, it's not my job to do it, but it's possible for sure.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I think you could... I mean, I'm with you that this week, as compared to a couple of weeks ago, the wind seems to be shifting in that direction. But I think in terms of assessing which timeline we're on... I'm not sure that it's that material where the winds are shifting this week or last week or last month. I think it's just too early to know.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So I think if we're on a timeline that is anything like competitive authoritarianism, the first year or two or three might be the period we should look at rather than the first hundred days.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
The competitive part means you still have elections. They may be free but not fair elections. They may be heavily gerrymandered elections. But it's not the totalitarian thing where the tanks roll in and it's emergency law forever and you rip up the Constitution.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
It's a more subtle thing that political scientists, Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way, tell you is happening before you kind of realize it's happening. So... Orban is looked at as the model, the most successful consolidation of power. He didn't get what he wanted right away. He doesn't even get everything he wants now. He could lose the next election. I mean, maybe, maybe. I mean, he could.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But even on a micro scale. There was a radio station that he wanted to get rid of when he first came into office. It was tied up in the courts until 2021, and then he finally shut it down. So I think, sure, the fact that the wind seems to be at the back of some of the resistance stuff this week is notable and I think hopeful.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And to be clear about my position, I don't think it's like we're cooked and it's over. But... I mean, basically what I think the goal should be is, you know, there's one of these great Orwell aphorisms. It's sort of overused, but I think for a good reason. Seeing what's in front of one's nose needs a daily struggle.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I think to see things clearly, you need to not be writing backwards from the end of the story.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, I think that basically sounds right, and it explains how the figure of Soros or the international Jew is kind of used in different ways. I mean, you don't have to look much further than Elon Musk doing what looked a lot like something that sort of seemed like a Roman salute, and then... And then Steve Bannon doing it. And then Steve Bannon doing it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Breaking that news here. But I do think that it's important to have that framework. It gets to this point of ambiguity, hybridity, plausible deniability. What are you? Are you anti the Jews or are you for the Jews? You know, it cuts against this idea of a kind of clean, quantifiable checklist. And also it cuts against the idea of
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
you know, did Columbia fully exceed and did Harvard fully join the resistance, right? Before Harvard became the hero of the resistance, they adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. They kicked out the head of their Middle East study center. All of this, you know, what Tim Snyder would call anticipatory obedience. And then the administration pushed them too far, maybe by accident.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And then they joined the resistance, right? So it's always hybridity all the way down, I would say.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Look, I used to, we used to call it the alt-right. Now it's called the right. And they are playing with taboos in ways that I think are multiple things at once. Some of it is just the old-fashioned troll, you know, can't you take a joke? You know, this isn't actually what you think it is. Or can't you take
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah. Are you too scared to talk about taboo things? Can't we just push the boundaries, right? Those things all kind of redound to the political benefit of the movement that is, you know, transgression and the thrill of forbidden knowledge is one of the most appealing things in the rhetorical playbook.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But just to stick on the Hungary example, first time I did a reporting trip to Hungary was 2022 when they announced that CPAC was going to be held in Hungary, the first European CPAC. And I first heard that and said, that must be a troll. Like, that's too on the nose. You wouldn't have CPAC in the only authoritarian country in Europe if it's 2022 and you're trying to win re-election. But they did.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I went. And there was this whole saga about whether they would let me in. And they kind of, again, with the sort of gaslighting and the hybridity, they were like, sure, sure. We love independent media. You can surely come in. And then in the end, they didn't let me in. And then I had to sneak in. It was a whole thing. But... While I was there, Orban had just been reelected.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
The resistance, the sort of popular front against him thought they had a chance to beat him, and it turned out they really did not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And one of his first speeches in Parliament, he did a whole thing about the Great Replacement Theory, which used to be this fringe alt-right idea that the international Jew, among others, are trying to engineer this whole conspiracy to let in these scary brown hordes and overwhelm majority white nations with invaders. That used to be like crazy, crazy fringe 4chan stuff.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And over the time that I had been covering it, it went from... the fringe discredited theory known as great replacement theory to the thing Tucker Carlson is saying every night on his show to the thing Victor Orban is saying in parliament to now the things that members of Congress are saying in the US.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I mean, so to be clear, I would agree with Zach's broad point that Trump is not doing it the Orban way and that Trump is impulsive and that the tariffs hurt him. And so I think we all broadly agree that the laws of political gravity have not been suspended.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I mean, one of the important points that people made to me over and over again while I was reporting this piece is even if you call it authoritarianism, and many of the people I spoke to did, many of the political scientists I spoke to, including some of the, we spoke to some of the same political scientists, they told me flat out, America is currently not a democracy. And yet in the next breath.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, so it was interesting. So Stephen Levitsky, who was one of the co-authors of How Democracies Die, he also was a co-author of this really seminal paper where he defined, he invented the term competitive authoritarianism. I spoke to him and his co-author on that paper, Lucan Way. And when I talked to both of them, and I said, where are we on the map of history right now?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
They said, we have crossed the line. We are no longer a democracy. They had written this piece called The Path to American Authoritarianism, and they said, we are on that path, and we are, in fact, past the line. They didn't say we're past the point of no return, because the definition of- But what is the line? It's a little squishy what the line is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
To back up, one thing I said, because I was thinking about metaphors, and we were talking about, you know, where in the Schrodinger's cat of democracy are we? One thing that I think is a real flaw in the metaphor is, you know, we're writers. We think about metaphors.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
When people— When you have to think twice before you speak up.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And on that point, you know, we were talking about we're sitting here in the citadel and we're not afraid to call it out. And that's true. I will say—and again, these are very early signs because we're not far enough into the timeline to know— No, the New Yorker has not been compromised. And no, free speech is not dead. And yes, it does matter that we have a First Amendment.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I will say, though, when I was reporting up at Columbia, people were giving me anonymous information. And they were saying, we're actually sort of scared to give this to you because we don't know what all the harboring laws are. We could be sort of making you an accessory to someone who's on the run from ICE or something.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I gave the spiel that journalists always give, which is, if you're an anonymous source, I will go to the mat to protect you. We are willing to go to jail to protect our sources. And when those words came out of my mouth, I said, How willing to go to jail am I, actually? That was the first time I'd had to think about that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So I don't think I'm going to jail anytime soon, but the fact that I had to think twice about it. I agree with this. I have the same experience.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, and so I think we can agree that the tariffs were a bad idea and that they will have a political cost and that generally people don't like it when you tank the economy and that that might cause them to lose the midterms. And by the way, generally speaking, you always lose the midterms when you're in the White House. But by more, by more. By more.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But then the question is really, what do we mean by losing? If they lose the midterms and if Trump doesn't get everything he wants, right? If Trump doesn't get to be king for life and he doesn't get to hand the scepter and crown to Don Jr. and he doesn't get his face on Mount Rushmore, is that losing? Because I would argue that
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
they've already not lost in the sense that, okay, a couple of the students that they tried to put in jail have been freed. Mahmoud Khalil is still last I checked in prison. I don't mean last I checked glibly. I mean, like, I checked yesterday and I don't know what happened today. I don't think, on the flip side, that one should see as much alarm and hair on fire either everywhere you look. But...
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
There's a little bit of goalpost shifting that I worry about where we'll say, well, what if something really scary happens like defying the Supreme Court? And then we all watch on live TV as they sit in the Oval Office and defy the Supreme Court. And we go, maybe in the future, something scary will happen. Like, I don't know how much more. So I think that's right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So I totally agree that you don't want to. I think... don't obey in advance includes don't treat him like a dictator before he's a dictator. And I think that's very important. And it is also what I worry about when we talk about having crossed a bright line. That's why I push back on the permanence of the death metaphor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
If we're talking about erosion or rebuilding, then it starts to be a little more clear. So I actually... If you talk about they lose the midterms or the next president is a Democrat, you say they can instantly rebuild. It's hard for me to see how we just go back to normal from here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Part of what I worry about and part of why I worry that we're not plainly saying what's in front of us is the way in which the Trumpist regime has already gotten some of what it wants in informal ways. Precisely because it's not agreeing to the consensus of, you know, it feels very vaporous to talk about norms and institutions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I am very much not into the norms will save us, the courts will save us. Like I get all the critiques of that and I share many of them. But to say that Trump doesn't have the formal power to do X, Y, or Z, I think ignores the ways in which he's already done those things. So can he disappear people? Yes, he can. He already has. Can he freeze and impound funds? Yes, he has.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I get it. But what I'm saying is that whether they're entrenched, to me... is not merely a measure of whether they're written down on paper in a judicial order. Whether they're entrenched also has to do with when you do them, what happens informally to you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So all I'm saying is I don't think we're all going to end up in a gulag, but I don't necessarily think that that power is unentrenched because it is informal. So let me back up. There's this idea of political orders. I know you're a Gary Gerstle head, as am I. Gary Gerstle has this whole notion of what a political order is. It's this big hegemonic, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So he has this notion that there was the New Deal political order, which was succeeded by the Reagan neoliberal political order. It's not just, oh, people used to like Democrats. Now they like Republicans.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Great episode. And so what I sort of see that political order thing as doing is trying to get outside, trying to get on a much bigger timeline. And I sort of see, I don't know if Gerstle would co-sign this, I might be out on a limb here, but I sort of see it as like a structure of scientific revolutions of politics. Mm-hmm.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
The structure of scientific revolutions where we get paradigm shift from, it's not like... Is it the book by Thomas Kuhn that coins the term paradigm shift? The philosopher of science who, when he's talking about a paradigm shift, he's not talking about... oh, we didn't have microscopes and now we do. What a paradigm shift. That's really useful.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
He's talking about ideas that are inconceivable, unthinkable, not allowed by... Like, you don't even form them in your mind because they're unthinkable. And so if you take that into the structure of political orders and how they shift... Things that were unthinkable as an Eisenhower Republican or a Nixon Republican, you know, you don't just attack and defund the welfare state.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
That's not how politics works. Then after the Reagan Revolution, all you do is different degrees of attack the welfare state, right? So in that sense, if we want to talk about the timeline of what it would mean for Trump to be winning and reshifting, I think you said, the constitutional order, part of what I think about is if the neoliberal order is cracked, as Gerstle says it is,
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Then the question is, what will succeed it? It could just be that we just sort of muddle through with nothing to replace it, and it's just what Gramsci would call the time of monsters, like, indefinitely. Or it could be... Abundance? It could be abundance. Right. But so, you need a vision for what will replace it, as you know. The whole conclusion of the book is about political orders. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And so... If abundance liberalism is what succeeds neoliberalism, that's an answer. If Trumpist competitive authoritarianism is what succeeds it, that is an answer. And in a way, this is like a little sort of weird to think about, but it may be the case that it's already happened and we just don't know it yet. This is kind of the Schrodinger's cat thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I mean, when the rise and fall of the New Deal order came out, The book's introduction said, the New Deal order is over, but we don't yet know what will replace it. That book came out in 1989. So we might be sitting here in a timeline where Trumpism has replaced neoliberalism in 2016, and we just don't know it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, I don't disagree that there are fissures and tensions within the Republican coalition. I mean, one thing about the BAP and Yarvin and all this stuff, the cadres are interested in reading them, but the, you know, chief ideologists in the White House are retweeting them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And not only is the vice president reading them, but he's saying things like, when the Supreme Court gives us an order we don't like, we should say, the justice has made his order, now let him enforce it, right? So I think you could put together some worrisome signs. I also think the strength or weakness of the opposition matters enormously in this too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So in every place in India, in Hungary, in Israel, the reactionary right is able to rampage to victory precisely because of the weakness and division within the opposition. So none of this, I agree, is foretold. One of the things I worry about is it kind of overly rigid reliance on the kind of playbook stuff, like this isn't how it's supposed to be done.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Because I agree, he's doing different things than what Orban is doing. He's doing some Bukele stuff. He's doing some improvisation. I just woke up today and thought of something weird and put it on Truth Social. It's a hodgepodge of stuff.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I mean, Kim Lane Shepela has this term, the Frankenstate, where you can kind of Frankenstein a bunch of legitimate seeming things and make your own new form of an illegitimate state. Now, I don't think anyone would disagree that Trump is not as patient and diligent and well-read as Victor Orban. But, you know, Bolsonaro did a version of this in Brazil.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And yes, he ended up getting defeated in the next election, but he came very close to rigging it in his own favor. And Bolsonaro was not a disciplined, well-read guy either. So there's different playbooks and you can invent new ones as you go. Let me turn this question around, Zach.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, you could make a version of the fighting the last war argument in precisely this context, that the Democrats are learning that maybe they should have waited Trump out more the first time and not done such a big, visibly cringe resistance. And so now they're trying to play dead more than they should.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, this is where, again, I would sort of argue for a wider frame. So, like... I think that the timeline can be broad enough that it can contain something like Trump losing some or all of the tech right without him being done for. You know, for example. I'm not saying he's done for. No, no, no. But I mean, even if we're just thinking about where this ends up. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Let's say he loses parts of his coalition. Let's say he loses Musk. That would be a big blow to him. But, you know, you've written about Shemeshka in Hungary out of it. Hungarian words are famously hard to say, so I'm sure I'm butchering that. But, you know, the Musk before Musk oligarch who was one of Orban's biggest allies, and then he lost him and he became an opponent.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And that was a blow to Orban, but it was not at all fatal to him. So I could totally see a story where... The coalition is big enough and durable enough that it can withstand things like losing the midterms. And it's already done things. I mean, you talk about the Supreme Court. We're already in a timeline where they wouldn't give Merrick Garland a hearing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
You know, again, it's like if you heard about this happening in another country, you'd say it doesn't sound super 100 percent democratic to me to not seat your opponent and then seat one of your own people on the Supreme Court. One thing we know about John Roberts is he really wants to seem even-handed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So if you take a bunch of things to the Supreme Court that are just facially unconstitutional, they're not going to hand you down smack-down 9-0 decisions every time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, I would say it kind of is changing the structures of American life in the sense that it's how you get a new paradigm. So part of what FDR was doing there was not just politics as usual. It was battering his way to a new political order. So I agree that the biggest challenge to all this is—and someone, a conservative legal scholar, said this to me while reporting the piece—
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
If someone were doing this on behalf of policies you like, how much would it bother you? I think that is the hardest question to answer. And we can sit here and say we would be perfectly consistent and non-hypocritical, and who knows if that's true. One key point, though, is that, yes, you work things out in the courts, you challenge the courts. The fact that that is...
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
an option that's available to you, to me, doesn't put it outside the realm of competitive authoritarianism. If Trump is able to break through to a new political paradigm and get competitive authoritarianism, I think that is part of how he will do it. He'll throw a bunch of stuff to the courts that says the 14th Amendment doesn't say what it says.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I know you said discrimination against trans people was illegal, but I'm going to do it. And on and on and on and on and on. And if they let him get one out of those 10 things, that is actually how you get competitive authoritarianism. You throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And I agree that he's doing it in this flagrant, blatant way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
It could be incompetence and impulsiveness. It could be actually that that's part of the strategy. But either way... I don't think he's going to get it by amending the Constitution. I don't think he's going to get it by indefinite martial law. I think if he gets it, it'll be through stuff like this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Look, I mean, I think what we can agree on is that every case is different. we're not the Hungarian case. We can't use a two-thirds majority to rewrite the constitution. But again, you know, this is what I mean about kind of writing to the end of the story instead of seeing what's in front of our nose. Netanyahu didn't win the fight over the judicial reform. Orban loses fights all the time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
We tell the story in retrospect as Orban, the great genius who got what he wanted. But we know that he loses fights all the time. This is what's competitive in part about competitive authoritarianism. It's still politics. It's still a fight. And so, look, I grant that every case is different. But Bukele did it a different way. Duterte did it a different way. Bolsonaro did it a different way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And ultimately, when the history of this is written, it won't be, oh, he didn't do it the right way. It'll be, did it work?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Oh, I think they did in the sense that, look, I agree with you that Trump won't reign forever. Right. The question is, what's the wreckage you leave behind? And we were talking before about how easy would it be to rebuild. I don't think if you come in in Brazil or Poland, you just rebuild right away and everything's cool. I think it takes many, many years to rebuild.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So if what we're talking about is, can you do four years of constitutional damage and then leave? I wouldn't consider that losing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, one thing that a lot of people in Hungary were saying to me during the piece and then after the piece came out is one downside of talking about autocracy and strongmen and all this stuff is that people often use it as an excuse to turn their brains off and stop thinking creatively and stop trying to have a viable and vital opposition. So one is just... how strong is the civil resistance?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
How strong is the private sector, public sector resistance? Another thing is, is the emergency sort of slow rolling and gradual enough that we start to just say, oh, well, he disappeared 10 people and eight of them were sent back. So the system is working. The system is holding. He merely got the universities to preemptively agree to some of his demands, not all of them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Therefore, the institutions are holding, right? So I would worry about a kind of shifting of goalposts in that sense.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
You know, an analogy I make in the piece is to climate change where you would think that at some point when enough of Canada was on fire and enough of the smoke in midtown Manhattan had reached the point where you couldn't go outside, everyone would look up and lock arms and say, the emergency is happening now. But in fact, that doesn't happen.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And so the main thing I worry about in terms of if we're in a slow-rolling democratic emergency is that we never have a chance to all get on the same page about it. And it continues being fractured and hybrid and weird. I mean, people I spoke to in Hungary, they all had different... timelines for when they sort of came to emotionally accept that they no longer lived in a democracy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
For some people, it was very early, but for a lot, it was 2015, 2016, 2020, 10 years in. When I talked to Steven Levitsky about Venezuela, he said opinion polls showed that most Venezuelans thought they lived in a democracy 10 years into the Chavez regime. So one thing I worry about is just the collective felt experience of the emergency could be here and we never really get it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Andrew? So I am going to break norms a little bit because this is a book that I just picked up and I'm not actually finished reading yet. But I mean, you know, we're in a post-norm reality now. So I figure I just picked this up a couple of days ago. It's called Melting Point. And it's all primary sources. And it just sets you down in the middle of history.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
In this case, it's the history of the early days of Zionism. And the reason I bring it up in this context is there's one line that one of the characters says, which is, it's never inevitable at the time. And I just think in terms of putting one foot in the other, seeing what is in front of one's nose, I think that's something we know intellectually.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
We don't know how the end of the story is written, but it's something we need to remind ourselves what it feels like. Another one also in that vein is actually a film, I'm Still Here, the Brazilian film. They're six or seven years into a military regime, a military junta, at the point that the film starts, and yet their life feels very hybrid. It feels very liminal.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
They're going to the beach and playing volleyball, and their life is actually kind of beautiful, and then comes the knock on the door. And so, again, I'm not saying we are going to have a military coup in America. I'm just saying that the felt sense of it is very unpredictable at the time that you're living.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
You kind of want to shout at the screen, like, don't you know you're six years into a military dictatorship? But they kind of don't, or they don't know what the informal rules of that dictatorship are, even though they're in the middle of it. And then last, I would bring up The Constitutional Bind by Aziz Rana, which is a really big and challenging book, and I'm not sure I...
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
even understand or agree with all of its arguments. But I bring it up because one of the great book titles on this stuff is Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone, which is... Another great book and worth reading. Another great book and a really clever idea of this kind of paradox of we've never really had a perfect democracy before.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
and yet there are parts of liberal democracy worth holding onto nonetheless. And I think Rana tries to do this with the Constitution. It's a book that's very, very critical of excessive veneration and worship of the Constitution, and yet he's able to hold onto why it's important to hold onto the parts of the Constitution that can still protect the vulnerable.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And so rather than sort of worshiping the status quo ante and saying it was all perfect before, we can hold onto what we want to preserve while also not fighting the last war.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I think that the sort of are they losing thing, I sort of have a few issues with it. One is I sort of disagree with some of the particulars of the way we're accounting for the checklist, like the fact that they're losing court cases four to one. It depends on what the strategy is. If the strategy is to win every court case, then that's not a winning strategy.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I don't think their strategy is to win every court case. I think there's a little bit of a heads I win, tails you lose kind of strategy where Trump has done a lot of losing of court cases in his life. He doesn't really seem to mind it that much. If he loses, maybe he loses partially. Maybe it's a splitting the baby kind of partial victory. And then he wins.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
a few court cases and he can take that as a victory. So I think if you lose sight of the felt experience of what it is like to be an American right now, and you just go to the checklist and you go to the norms and institutions, I think you're missing a key part of it. Like I can tell you the chilling of speech is working. It is working.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
whether they lose every court case or not, people's speech is chilled. Whose speech? Students that I've spoken to. Do you think the media is chilled? Yeah. Well, I mean, so... See, I don't.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, the New Yorker... Blink twice, Andrew. The New Yorker so far is not... Well, this is another thing, which is... where are we on the timeline? Yes, where are we on the timeline? If we're 100 days in, I mean, you totally could have gone to Orban's Hungary 100 days in and said, he hasn't taken control of the media. It took him seven or eight years to get control of the media.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So, you know, if you had the Washington Post killing editorial cartoons and changing its editorial mission ahead of a new regime coming into office, I wouldn't say the media is totally cooked, but I would say that doesn't look great.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Tell me about that trip. The felt sense was really, as you say, this liminal, you know, another term people use is hybrid regime. And the hybridity, the ambiguity, the plausible deniability, it's all around you. So, you know, you take the example of the universities. One thing that one reads about Hungary is Viktor Orban didn't like CEU, Central European University.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
He didn't like it because he was waging this kind of propaganda war against George Soros or the figure of George Soros who was funding that university. And so he got rid of it. He kicked it out. And then you go there and you go to a building that says CEU on the front of it. And it has a big plaque that says George Soros funded this university.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And you walk in and you're in the university that you were told was kicked out of Budapest. So right there, I was like, what's going on exactly? And I was talking to dissidents in the middle of Budapest, criticizing the regime and calling it autocratic. And they weren't fearing that they were going to get stuffed into a van.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I found this really actually confusing, but also instructive, because I didn't then leave and say, oh, Orban has lost. He has failed to consolidate control. I just thought, oh, what that means is maybe different than the notion I had in my head. So it doesn't mean...
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
that in order to get rid of CEU, you have to raid the building, put a padlock on the door, and sell it to become a barracks or something. It means CEU is no longer a degree-granting institution in Budapest. So it's this kind of, I call it a Potemkin University. It's kind of hollowed out from within. Then I come back to the U.S.,
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Trump is inaugurated, and he starts going after Columbia University, saying there are all these foreigners here, they have these strange foreign ideas, we don't like it, it's too woke, it's too anti-Semitic. Interestingly, the way they use the trope of the international Jew is kind of different in Hungary and in the U.S., but, you know, same, same.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And then he starts levying these kind of informal attacks on Columbia University, but they don't take the form of an executive order that says Columbia University no longer exists. He doesn't send in the army to raid Columbia University. He says, because you're too woke and antisemitic, we are going to freeze these funds from you.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I think if I had seen that through a lens of, is this Iran in 1979 or is this 1930s Germany, I would have said, oh, it's not happening here. But seeing it through the lens of competitive authoritarianism, I thought, okay, he's not going to get everything he wants. He's not going to wipe Columbia University off the map if that's even something he desires. But will he weaken it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Will he chill people's speech? I think he already has succeeded at doing that. I mean, and just to put, you know, the felt sense kind of to close that loop. What it really felt like reporting from Columbia University a few weeks ago was just this pervasive sense of fear and confusion about where the lines actually were, where formal and informal power was.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And that really reminded me of what it was like to be in Budapest. There's these kind of invisible lines that are being made up as you go along. So if you had told me on March 6th I'm afraid to leave my apartment because I think jackbooted thugs are going to show up in an unmarked van and stuff me in the van and I'll never see my family again.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And then when my wife asks where I'm going, they say, we're taking him somewhere because we didn't like his political speech. See you later. I would have said, you're insane. This is the United States of America. What are you talking about? There's no law anywhere that says they can do that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
If you told me that on March 9th, after they did that to Mahmoud Khalil, I would have said, yeah, you're right. You shouldn't go outside.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, I think that's one of them. I think the disappearing of political prisoners for squarely protected political speech, that's more out of the Bukele or Duterte or Pinochet playbook than out of the Orban playbook. And so it's a patchwork, right? It's sort of, it's not all of one or all of the other. I mean, the Hungarians I spoke to were like, whoa, what is that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
We are not familiar with that, which was pretty shocking to me. But also, as Zach says, in other pillars like the media, we're faring way better than they are.