Trump, Putin, Biden, You | Matt Taibbi | EP 392

The journalists, uh, the donors, and the parties got so used to being able to almost completely control who got to be the nominee that when someone came along and disrupted the whole pattern, they didn't know how to respond to it except with total rage and incomprehension. They didn't realize that Trump was just being smart and running against the system, and it was scoring heavily with people all over the place across the political spectrum.

Hello everyone watching and listening today. I'm speaking with author and journalist Matt Taibbi. We discussed his early career, both in journalism and professional basketball, his time in the USSR learning Russian and publishing a successful Gonzo-inspired newspaper, and his breaking coverage of the subprime mortgage bubble. We also examine the state of the world today with Russia and the US military-industrial complex, the upcoming presidential election, and the dire necessity for alternative news sources.

Matt, I have to know what was it like playing for the Uzbek national baseball team?

Uh, that was great actually. I, uh, at the time, I was trying to be a freelance reporter in Uzbekistan. I was really young, in my 20s, and I walked by a, uh, a university field and saw a bunch of Cubans playing baseball. So, uh, they were, I think Cuban Refrigeration students, and I was the only American on the team. We had a fun time playing against other Central, uh, Asian teams.

And, um, we had one funny story. We had ground rules. Uh, if you hit a sheep at one field it was a triple, if you hit a cow it was a double, and if you knocked the cow out, was that a home run or was it a consequence of the degree of damage? I don't think we ever got that far.

So your career plan was to be an independent journalist in Uzbekistan, and that didn't work out, so you turned to pro baseball?

Well, at the time, I was more interested in being a writer, uh, just generally than being a reporter. I thought, um, I had been living in St. Petersburg, which was filled at the time with, uh, freelance journalists, and I thought I'm not getting a lot of work. I'll move to a place where there are no reporters. So I moved to the middle of nowhere, basically, waited for something to happen, uh, so that I could get a byline and, um, a wire service or something like that. But I figured while I was there, maybe I could do something like write a book about, you know, playing baseball for the USCS, and I ended up doing that kind of thing a lot.

I moved to Mongolia later, played basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association.

Well, that was my next question, okay? Because that's obviously the logical career progression — move for someone who's a journalist in Uzbekistan and then playing baseball is to go to Mongolia and play pro basketball. So tell me about that.

Yeah, that happened because I was working, um, in Moscow for an expat paper called the Moscow Times, which still exists, and I played a lot of street basketball. Uh, back in those days at, uh, Moscow State University. You've probably seen pictures; it's got that beautiful, gigantic sort of wedding cake skyscraper building in the background. I used to go there in the afternoons and play hoops.

And there was a kid there from Mongolia, uh, who told me they had a league in Mongolia called the NBA, which was the only basketball league in the world that played by NBA rules with a 24-second clock and everything. So I quit my job the next day, got on the train, and got on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and went to, um, Mongolia, had a tryout, and played for a season in the Mongolian Basketball Association.

So, were you big among the Mongolian fangirls?

A little bit, you know. It was actually, um, it was actually quite an experience. Uh, Mongolia at the time was very basketball crazy, and there's a long story about why, uh, but basically every Mongolian kid was playing basketball in the early 90s. And, you know, my friends were big celebrities in the country. Uh, there was one of my teammates who was considered the Mongolian Jordan. So everywhere I went there were lots of people following us around. It was pretty cool.

Well, that's all completely unexpected and crazy. Now, you also went to the Leningrad Polytechnical. Was it the St. Petersburg Polytechnical by then? Why did you end up, why did you end up in the, uh, missiles of the former Soviet Union? What, what, how did that all come about, and why did you decide to stay there for, well, a number of years?

When I was a kid, I was fairly lonely and depressed and introverted, and the thing that I found that became my escape in life is that I fell in love with comic fiction. And my favorite writers were all Russian writers like Gole and Bulgakov. And my, uh, decision as a very young man was to move to, um, the then Soviet Union and learn Russian so that I could read those books in the original language.

So when I studied originally it was actually still Leningrad Polytech. I'm old enough to have gone, uh, to school in the Soviet Union, and, um, I went there to study Russian, even though it was a polytechnical school. They had a Russian language faculty for all the new students, and that's what I did there.

So did you read the Master and Margarita in the original Russian?

I did, I did. That's a tough one; I'm not going to lie.

I bet! It's a tough book, man.

Yes, some of the Russian writers are easier than others to read for a foreigner, I would say. Tolstoy is easier; he's just very clear. Uh, but there's a, you know, there's a tradition of a different kind of writer. Unfortunately, my favorite, Gole Dki, is another one. Bulgakov, they use very, very convoluted long sentences. Um, and, but they're beautiful. I mean, Russian's a beautiful language.

Yeah, well, the Master and Margarita, that's — I don't know, maybe is that the most complex, dreamlike novel ever written?

Might be. I think I've read it three times, you know. It's, well, it's a crazy book. I mean, it's got five or six things going on at the same time, all of which are preposterous and surreal, and it's a very, very sophisticated, multi-layered work. I mean, it's really quite the piece of fiction.

Um, I can understand why you would be motivated to learn Russian, although that... that's a hell of a motivation to read it. And so, now, you also worked, um, at a newspaper in Moscow. Was that the Exile? Was that what it was called?

Originally, I worked at the Moscow Times, which was sort of the straight news newspaper for the big burgeoning expat community, um, which was quite large in the 90s in Moscow. And then I left that and ended up, um, co-starting my own newspaper called the Exile, which was kind of a cross of Time Out and Screw magazine. It's hard to explain, but it was sort of a, uh, a satirical nightlife guide, let's put it that way. And it's gotten me in some trouble, um, you know, not in my later years but, um, it was an experiment in extreme free speech.

Uh, doing everything, saying the way a normal newspaper would do it, but backwards. Uh, we had corrections for things that had never appeared in the paper. I mean, we tried to make an absolute joke of the whole newspaper format.

How did that go over in Moscow? I mean, it's not exactly known as a bastion of free speech, so how did that work out?

It actually worked out, um, brilliantly, believe it or not. The people who were in Moscow in the 90s, and especially the late 90s, uh, that was a crazy city. It was a lot like the Wild West, um, or Chicago in the 1930s. This was a place where, you know, superpower had just dissolved; the laws had not yet been built back up. People were making fortunes overnight. There was gunfire in the streets. People were being defenestrated left and right. It was not uncommon to see dead bodies.

Um, so a newspaper like ours actually fit right in with the tenor of that whole community. We were quite popular. Uh, just, you know, we actually made money; we were profitable. It was a normal small business that made money, and, um, it worked out quite well for a while.

Uh, but you know, eventually, there came a time when Putin came to power where, you know, the paper was just not tolerated.

And so what happened when it became not tolerated? Were you still around?

I had left by that time. Um, I already left in, uh, 2002, but shortly after that, the paper got a visit from the tax police. And, um, you know, whereas before we could always pay a bribe and make them go away, uh, this time they weren't satisfied with that, and the paper, uh, ultimately got closed. But, um, yeah, well, you know a state is corrupt when you can't even bribe it, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's... uh, what's an honest person to do in Russia at that point?

So, right! Exactly. Well, at least when you're dealing with someone with whom you share a common language of greed, you can understand what they're up to. But once you're out in the moral Hinterland where that doesn't work, God only knows what's up their sleeves.

So, were you a fan of the Gonzo journalists like Hunter S. Thompson?

He's probably the canonical example.

I was. I was a fan of Hunter Thompson. I read him actually later, uh, in life than some other uh, journalist. I was probably more of a fan earlier of H.L. Mencken. But, um, I love Hunter Thompson. In fact, at one point, I got hired, uh, by a publishing company to try to put together an anthology of Gonzo journalism, and that project ended up failing, um, when I realized mid-project that Gonzo was a term that had no meaning other than Hunter Thompson. Uh, so unless we were going to put together just a whole book full of Hunter's articles, it wasn't going to actually work. So, uh, but I was definitely a fan of his, uh, his writing.

Well, he was he was definitely a singular creature. I mean, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is quite the piece of work, and he wrote one on the Hell's Angels and one about the campaign trail. They're all great books—really iconic 60s works.

And, um, I also really like Tom Wolfe, especially, um, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Yep, yes, exactly.

And Candy-Colored Tangerine Flake Baby. That's also a great collection of essays!

He wasn't, like, as much of a Gonzo journalist as Thompson, but man, he had an eye for the times, and he could sure write, man! Those, those articles are so brilliantly plotted in books.

Yeah, he really nailed it. So, and Thompson is just, of course, a complete bloody scream.

So, absolutely! And it's interesting; up until pretty recently, there was always a very strong tradition in American journalism of the narratively interesting journalist. Um, and that's kind of been driven out of modern journalism, unfortunately, I would say.

Yes, now we just have the pathologically uninteresting, um, mediocre, boring, lying journalist type, mostly in the Legacy Media.

Yeah, it's so... it's so pathetic and appalling. The New York Times today reported on underground climate change.

Yeah, I mean, it's not, uh, a good sign when you're writing in the old boring format of the New York Times, but it doesn't even have the upside of being semi-reliable like the New York Times. So that's, that's kind of a double whammy, uh, that's for sure.

That's for sure. Yeah, that's right. I mean that, at least when those enterprises were, let's say, more conservative in the traditional sense, you could vaguely assume that some of what they were reporting bore some relationship to the facts. And so that was quite a relief! And it's really quite a catastrophe to see these places fall apart.

Actually, you know, I mean, there's a satirical part of me, I suppose, and a somewhat cynical part that celebrates the demise of institutions like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, because for all its abysmal Canadian centralist niceness, it was at least a reliable purveyor of information—and to some degree culture—for, you know, 30 years, something like that.

And, uh, you know, in many ways, it did its job, and I think you could say the same thing; although the New York Times, you know, had some pretty bloody egregious sins on its conscience at least some of the time, what it was producing bore some resemblance to news instead of whatever the hell it is they’re doing now, which is, you know, almost impossible to comprehend either conceptually or metaphysically.

It's true. Yeah! It's funny; I interviewed Noam Chomsky at one point because I wanted to write a book that was going to be a rethink of Manufacturing Consent, which is his famous book of, um, media criticism. And that book is actually full of criticism of the New York Times. But when I asked him about the Times, he said, you know, people got the wrong idea about my book. You know, the New York Times is full of facts; it's just got lots of problems you have to learn to read it and fight through the biases that are in it.

And, um, you know, so I think, unfortunately, the, uh, lack of attention paid to the factual aspect has taken away, uh, some important value from those institutions.

So when were you at the Polytechnical? What years were that?

Oh, that would have been. I was in Russia studying in '89 and '90 primarily.

So you really were there during the wild times in, in Russia!

Yeah! And then I stayed in Russia. Um, I went back after school, and I stayed from 1991 till about 2002. Um, there were some trips in between.

So do you think—well, so you, you have a real personal connection with that country obviously and a pretty detailed knowledge of it. What do you have to say, if anything, and what are your thoughts on what's happening with regard to the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

Well, first of all, that situation is extraordinarily complicated. Uh, it's been frustrating for me to watch the coverage of, um, you know, the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Uh, you know, people not understanding the history of places like Crimea, uh, or how far back some of these, uh, conflicts in places like Luhansk and Donbass—um, I, I don't at all agree with the invasion, you know, by Vladimir Putin. In fact, we were very heavy critics of Putin from the start when he came to power.

But, you know, there's a long backstory, uh, here with the United States' support of, um, Ukraine and some pretty questionable kind of far-right elements in Ukraine as a way to sort of undermine.

Pretty questionable.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so this goes back, you know, decades before even the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a lot of that background is left out of all this. It's kind of an open question in my mind whether we ever really entertained a situation where, um, NATO wasn't going to expand all the way to Russia's borders.

Uh, I think, you know, there's a reason why a lot of academics in 1997, uh, pretty conservative ones, were signing an open letter urging the American authorities not to keep pushing NATO toward Russia.

Boris Johnson announced today that the expansion of NATO into Ukraine should be of no concern to the Russians.

Yeah, I don't understand that. I mean, I keep seeing that—trying to, I think he's trying to top his net-zero idiocy, personally.

Maybe! That's possible! But, you know, think of the legends in the United States, right? We have movies like 13 Days, where, you know, the arrival of one missile or a couple of missiles in Cuba is grounds to, uh, you know, start this, uh, awesome confrontation, risking nuclear annihilation for the entire planet.

Uh, but we think the Russians shouldn't object if they're surrounded on all sides by military bases? Should they respond by invading another country? I, I don't agree with that, but I certainly understand, um, knowing this just from talking to Russians while I was there, what their feelings are about NATO. They're very, um, nervous about it. They've always been since the early 90s. It's a situation they've been conscious of the whole time, and I think Americans don't understand that.

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Well, you know, I think we had a real opportunity to bring permanent peace, um, to put in place a permanent peace with the Russians, and that could have happened during the '90s, and we pretty much fouled that up as badly as we possibly could have. And now we're paying the price, and God only knows how that pot brewing in, in Russia and Ukraine is going to, what the consequence of its continued bubbling, uh, in the background are going to be. It's very distressing, and the fact that more attention isn't paid to it, and the fact that there seems to be no real attempts to bring about anything that looks like a serious attempt at peace talks, is really quite the staggering miracle to me. So, I don't know what the hell we think we're playing at exactly.

And I can't understand for the life of me what the endgame is. You know, I've talked to a lot of hawks in Washington, and these are people whose views I generally respect, and you know, their sense was that if the, if the West had to spend several tens of billions of dollars—although it's rocketed beyond that now—to weaken Russia's conventional military, that that might not be such a bad investment.

You know, and I have some qualms about that theory because it isn't obvious to me that a weak nuclear-armed country is less dangerous than a strong nuclear-armed country. And I think you could have an intelligent discussion about that. But I also don't think that weakening Germany after the First World War turned out to be such a brilliant idea either.

And I guess I also think—think that, like, wouldn't it be better, all things considered, if Russia and the West were allied, let's say, and presented a stable unitary front in relationships, say, to the Chinese? I mean, just to throw that out there. And I think we could have had that, and it seems to me that it's a lot of leftover Cold War-era thinking in some ways, and I suppose some real self-interest on the part of the military-industrial complex that's kept this war brewing.

And I don't know, it seems to me that the primary beneficiaries of the current situation in Ukraine are arms manufacturers and the self-same military-industrial complex. And they don't have Afghanistan anymore to keep things, to keep the market hopping, but they've certainly got a war that could go on forever or expand quite nicely in Russia and Ukraine.

I mean, do you think I'm missing something in that analysis?

Undoubtedly! Right, because it's a complex situation. But I think that's pretty much right. I think we had an opportunity to genuinely bring in the Russians at least as a strategic partner. There was always going to be some friction there. The two countries, um, both see themselves as superpowers. There's some resentment, some cultural resentment, that's true in both places, um, where, you know, neither of them wants to concede that the other is more powerful.

So there's always going to be some difficulty between those two countries. But they did agree on things like, uh, you know, facing Islamic terrorism together, right? I think they demonstrated that kind of cooperation was possible. But the people you reference, the kind of hawkish contingent within the foreign policy elite in Washington, I think if you ask them deep down what the endgame to all this, the answer they would come up with is regime change in Russia.

I think they really believe that.

Yeah! And so what's that going to be? What's that going to be, he-man? Are we going to get someone better than Putin?

Are we, given Russia's history? And then maybe we could have instead a fractured state, and so then what would we have? We'd have control of nuclear weapons in the hands of essentially warlords if the state collapsed?

Like, what the hell would be the positive regime change here?

Exactly! We’d get some real Democrat in Russia? It’s like, I don't think so. Honestly, that seems to me to be preposterously naive.

Where in Russian history could you find one example of that that you could point to that's even vaguely credible? And if you want Russian leaders worse than Putin, that's a very, very long list. So I just don't understand that at all.

And the danger of the breakup of the country, especially given our dependence on—I mean the world's dependence on Russia for certain necessities, energy for example for the Europeans, or ammonia for food production or edible wheat, there'd be another one, you know—it's like, obviously, we're strategically aligned in many ways with Russia, and the idea that there's going to be some magical transformation of regime that's going to make them easier to get along with, is like, why would you think that?

I mean, dead seriously, I don't understand how anybody could possibly imagine that.

Well, it's the same error of vision that we had going into Iraq, where we imagined that we could roll tanks into Baghdad and establish Switzerland overnight. It doesn't really work that way. There's history and a long, uh, cultural tradition that you have to take into account, but you know, that war was launched by people who didn't even know there was a difference between Sunni and Shia, uh, Muslims.

And you know, this war I think is being prosecuted by people who have no conception of Russian history, Far Eastern history, um, you know, the inability of democracy to really ever take hold in that part of the world.

If you're sincerely hoping that somebody better than Putin is going to come along if you depose that person, um, you're not looking, uh, honestly, I think, at that country's past.

Yeah, well, that's, that's certainly how it seems to me. So, I don't know what the hell we're playing at, and I think that I really think that what's happening is that because I've been trying to account for the absolute idiocy of Western foreign policy in relationship to Russia for the last 30 years—criminally negligent to say the least—and I think really what likely happened is that clueless people gave the foreign policy situation kind of a backseat, and so it was never a pressing concern like it might have been in the aftermath of the Cold War.

And then there's constant pressure from the munitions manufacturers, etc., to keep a warlike hawkish stance at hand.

And I can understand that, you know, like if you're a munitions manufacturer, obviously you're going to be somewhat paranoid with regard to the stability of foreign affairs in your public pronouncements and likely your beliefs. And since you have a pecuniary interest in the outcome, your ability to continually foster a pro-hawk, pro-paranoid, anti-Russian view—well, that's always going to be there, because why wouldn't it be?

And if there isn't something to offset that, that's continual, like a real effort to make peace, for example, then that's not going to happen. You know, when you think, well, peace with Russia is impossible, I would say, yeah, that's what people said about the Middle East too.

And then some, some relatively radical nonprofessional diplomats decided they were going to do something about it and hammered together the Abraham Accords in basically no time flat.

And so the idea—and they just walked around the State Department to do that—and they did that with a tremendous degree of success!

And if the Biden Administration hadn't been so juvenile and, um, resentful, they would have patted Trump on the back for having accomplished that.

I always thought, you know, if they would have given Trump the bloody Nobel Prize or maybe a medal at the White House for his work on the Abraham Accords, he might have just ridden off into the sunset happy, right?

Instead of hanging around.

Well, absolutely! Absolutely! And then the Saudis would have signed the Abraham Accords because they were basically chomping at the bit to do so. And then you Americans could have had access to Saudi oil instead of having Biden go cap in hand to them after insulting them terribly and not noting what they did, for example, behind the scenes for the Abrahamic Accords and walking away empty-handed.

You know, like, Jesus, you can't make this stuff up!

You know, and I've talked to Democrats about this. I said, why the hell don't you celebrate Trump at least for the bloody Abraham Accords?

And their response to me is always, well, you know, they're not as good as they look. It's like, well, yeah, compared to what? Anything you guys managed for, like, 70 years, they're pretty damn good as a first step.

I mean, there's real, there’s actually peace breaking out between Israel and a variety of Arab states! And like who the hell would have ever predicted that?

The idea we couldn't do that with Russia, especially given our mutual apprehension, let's say, of the Chinese—and well-warranted apprehension, I think—that's utterly preposterous!

So I also know from behind the scenes that, you know, there were peace talks in the offing in March of 2022, and they were scuttled by the US Administration.

And so, you know, that's pretty damn unforgivable as far as I'm concerned.

And we flag-wave and hop up and down morally about supporting the Democrats, you know, and this desire for democracy in Ukraine, all the while, you know, conveniently ignoring the fact that Ukraine has just as totalitarian history as the rest of the former Soviet Union and are hardly paragons of moral virtue by any stretch of the imagination—and are unlikely to turn overnight into Switzerland, as was precisely the case in Iraq.

So, like, I don't understand it, man! I don't see what's going on at all, and it's a bloody dangerous game that we're playing.

Yeah, even more disappointing from my point of view is, at least during the Iraq War, there was an anti-war movement that was visible in the United States.

There was an incredible episode early in this whole situation where I think a handful of, uh, members of the House put together what they called the Peace Letter, which very generically suggested that maybe opening peace talks might be a good idea at some point.

They weren't suggesting that Ukraine surrender or that, you know, they stop fighting or anything along those lines, but even within that coalition, um, the idea collapsed, and they ended up kind of snitching on each other in the media, and there was no effort along those lines.

So there's no longer an anti-war coalition of any kind anywhere in American politics. Um, you know, that even does symbolic politics—left or right, you know, and it's really quite something.

It's quite the miracle to see. It's very—it's really incomprehensible in many ways!

I can't wrap my head around it.

All right, so you were in the former Soviet Union during the insane 90s. When did you come back to the States?

Like, and I don't know what happened to you between, say, about the year 2000 and 2004. You started to work for Rolling Stone in 2004. So what did you do after you had completed whatever it was you were up to in these multiple adventures in the former Soviet Union?

And how do we know you're not a Russian spy, by the way?

Um, well, uh, the Russians would never hire somebody like me to be a spy, I think. I—I'm the wrong type for them.

Ah, so it's on the basis of your self-perceived incompetence that we should trust you!

Yeah, exactly! I'd be unable to keep quiet about it, I think, is the problem!

But the right, right! Noisy journalists don't make the best spies!

Exactly! Exactly! Um, I had been in, you know, while I was at the Exile, Rolling Stone had actually done a story about our newspaper in the late 90s, so I had some contact with the magazine before I came back to the States.

I came back in 2002, I briefly tried to start a newspaper in Buffalo called The Beast, um, which was modeled out on the Exile, but pretty quickly got a call from, uh, Rolling Stone from the editor there who remembered me, had been keeping an eye on me, and, uh, suggested that I go out and start covering the campaign, um, that was just starting in 2003.

So really, almost as soon as I came back to the United States, I started working for Rolling Stone, uh, essentially as a campaign reporter to start, and, uh, eventually as more of a financial investigative reporter.

So what did you learn? Uh, we were talking about Hunter S. Thompson earlier, and famously he wrote a book called, uh, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, if I remember correctly, which is quite the riotous, um, account.

What did you learn about the American political system that you didn't know and that was surprising, serving as a campaign reporter?

Well, my first complication in covering American politics, having come from the former Soviet Union, was that in post-communist Russia, everything was visible. You could see which mafia interests were supporting which politician. You could see the real financial interest behind every contract that was given out by the government.

Uh, the corruption was as clear as it would have been if you were taking one of those tours with a glass-bottom boat looking at the bottom of the ocean. Um, in the United States, you know, when I went out on the campaign trail and I—going out on the campaign trail and listening to these people give one speech after another where they said absolutely nothing for a long time, I was really puzzled by it.

I thought there had to be another layer of something to American politics that was more interesting than this. And for a long time, I was really, um, very frustrated by the predictability of the American, uh, political system, the way there was kind of a conspiracy of interest, I would say, between the donors, the campaign journalists, and the political parties to really very strictly control who got to be considered a legitimate and serious candidate and who didn't.

And they did this through a variety of means. They used sort of code words. Uh, you know, somebody like Dennis Kucinich would be dismissed as fringe or Elfin, um, and Howard Dean would be called pointed and angry, but John Kerry was nuanced and warm, right?

And this is how we signaled to audiences that this was the—it’s the climate changed that made him warm, by the way.

Right, exactly! Yeah! Otherwise, he wasn't terribly warm, I would say.

Um, but I think, you know—and this is all a preview to the Trump experience because I think what happened was the journalists, uh, the donors, and the parties got so used to being able to almost completely control who got to be the nominee, um, that when someone came along and disrupted the whole pattern, they didn't know how to respond to it except with total rage and incomprehension.

They thought something must be totally amiss; somebody must be cheating somehow, and they didn't realize that Trump was just being smart and running against the system.

I mean, I recognized this pretty early in 2016, which was he was running against the journalists. He was running against the donors. He was running against the fake two-party system, which was really a one-party system, and it was scoring heavily with people all over the place across the political spectrum.

But nobody really wanted to admit that; they just wanted to make him out to be this very scary villain. And, um, even though some of those things they said about him were true, they were kind of missing the point of what that, uh, campaign was about and why it succeeded.

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Yeah! Victor Davis Hanson wrote a great book on Trump called The Case for Trump, which is the best thing I've read on that election cycle.

And I mean, he points out something that seemed relatively obvious to me at the time, watching from the outside, was that, you know, Clinton and her crew—first of all, I don't think people trusted Hillary at all because even though she had a lot of experience, when someone aims at power that egregiously for, like, six decades, you really got to wonder what the hell's going on.

It's like, why is it that important to you, you know? And you might think, well, of course being president would be that important, but you know, it's not that obvious, because if you associate with people who are highly accomplished, many of them would have to set aside the concerns they're already engaged in, which are often large-scale concerns, to consider something like a political career.

And so if you're someone who has the chops to be president, which should mean that you're good at a lot of things, it is obvious that political power per se would dangle as the greatest possible opportunity.

Right? Maybe you could be coerced or enticed into running for leadership because a lot of people come to you and say, "You know, we really need someone like you," which is the best way to, to become a leader, by the way.

But other than that, you know, you're sort of about your own business. Whereas Clinton was—she was making a beeline for the presidency certainly even while her husband was president.

And so—and then, of course, her and her foolish and treacherous advisers, I would say, decided that it was perfectly good thing to sacrifice the American working class on the altar of their purported moral virtue, and she sunk herself doing that.

And it was, it was an act of true hubris and foolishness, right? Because, well, CL Trump didn't so much win that election as Clinton lost it—because it was hers for the taking had she not been who she was, I would say fundamentally.

And especially had she not stabbed the American working class in the back.

And, of course, they turned to Trump for odd reasons, you know, because it isn't obvious that this sort of brash, flashy billionaire would—or at least multi-millionaire—would appeal to working-class people. They're not of the same economic class, obviously, but, you know, at a wise working-class guy I once worked for back in the 1970s—he was a conservative and not a socialist—and I was at that time, I was about 14, I was pretty entranced by socialist ideas and the Socialist Party in Alberta, by province, had a pretty good small business platform, and I said, "Why the hell don't you vote for the Socialists? They have a lot better platform for your endeavor than the conservatives, who are a party of big business."

And he said, "Small business owners don't want to be small business owners; they want to be big business owners."

And people vote their dreams, not their reality!

And I thought, oh my God, that's so smart! And you know, and then I thought too, with regards to Trump, is that even though his wealth was unimaginably, uh, out of reach for the typical working-class person, I think people could look at Trump and think, well, there are conceivable universes in which I could be Donald Trump, right?

That, or this is what I would do with that money!

Yeah, right!

And then he also had this capacity to speak off the cuff and directly to people, you know.

And I heard from people who were around Trump, especially when he was talking to military personnel, that he was actually very good at that.

And the same people who made that comment had been around other politicians who were often flummoxed and intimidated when they were talking to real servicemen.

You know, because, well, first of all, there was a cultural gap between them, and second, you know, they felt morally intimidated in the face of people who'd actually put themselves on the line.

But Trump seemed to have that ability to talk directly to working-class people.

And you know, you have to be a certain kind of person to do that. What one kind of person you have to be is someone who actually regards the working class and what they're capable of doing, which is working, with the degree of respect that's actually appropriate.

You know, and I mean, I've worked with lots of working-class people—contractors and so forth—and I've had lots of working-class jobs, and you're an absolute bloody fool if you don't have respect for, you know, electricians and plumbers and carpenters and, and people who keep everything going, who are truly competent, because that requires a high level of honesty and expertise and communicative ability and planning and, and real knowledge.

And so Trump seemed to be able to deal with people like that, maybe because he had so much experience on the construction side.

Yeah, the irony of that is, is that, uh, Hillary Clinton tried to run—actually, she quite successfully ran a similar campaign towards the end of her duel with Barack Obama, um, in the Pennsylvania primary. She ran as the avatar of the white working class!

You might remember she had all these speeches about being the granddaughter of, um, you know, a worker in a lace factory. And she seemed to really enjoy that role, and in all the different personas that I've seen her try to play on the stump, and she has many of them, um, that was the one I thought she did best at.

Uh, but she reverted in 2016 to trying to sell herself as the most experienced insider, which was a catastrophic strategic error in a year where there was an unprecedented level of distrust towards Washington.

Um, the degree to which they were blind to that was kind of amazing to me.

And, and you know, you brought up Hunter Thompson before—he actually had a metaphor that really described how that happens. He talked about how if you go hunting, um, in normal times, you can't get within a thousand yards of a bull elk.

Like it's sensitive to the smallest sound in the forest; it will never let you get near it. But when it's in heat, you know, you can drive right past it, and it won't even know that you're there. It's so focused on its, you know, its goal of mating, right?

And that's exactly what politicians who see the presidency are like.

Um, they become blind to just about everything but power, uh, and they don't think strategically anymore, and I think that happened to the Democrats in 2016.

They just were not paying attention to all the different signs that were so obvious to everybody.

Um, around—you think with all their polling and all their hypothetical reliance on their idiot consultants that they would have been clued into some degree.

And of course Clinton always also allied herself with the progressive front of the Democrats, and that certainly wasn't something in keeping with the basic sentiments of the working class that she also stuck a shiv in.

So she certainly deserved to lose, and, um, whether we deserve to have Trump as president in consequence—well, that's a whole different question—but at least he was a bull in the china shop.

Speaking of whom, what do you—I kind of think Robert F. Kennedy is the same sort of force on the Democrat side. I mean, what do you think of Kennedy?

Yeah, I like him! Um, you know, and his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, is somebody who I've known for a long time, going back to the first campaign I ever covered. He was somebody I always respected as a, um, an original thinker, a real intellectual—somebody who read two books a day—and, uh, and really thought about, you know, the future of this country and what possible solutions, um, you know, might work, might not work.

Yeah, you think he's an impressive character?

I do!

You think he'd be a good podcast guest?

I think he would be, yes!

Is he brilliant?

Uh, you know, his, his politics are controversial, but he's got an incredibly interesting history. He was, you know, mayor of Cleveland at a ridiculously young age. He was homeless when he was a kid. He lived in a car with his family, uh, you know, he won his first elections by literally going door-to-door with no financial backing.

And, um, and so this is the kind of person who's behind, uh, RFK's campaign.

I mean, obviously, I don't know Robert F. Kennedy as well. You know, I did some of his shows years ago.

Uh, but I think he recognizes, as Trump did and as Bernie Sanders also did in 2016—though to a lesser degree—that there was this groundswell of frustration, um, building in America toward, I guess you would call it some sort of mainstream political thought, uh, which was increasingly elitist and indifferent to the fate of ordinary Americans on both the left and the right.

Um, Kennedy, uh, I think is going to succeed just because he's not Joe Biden just because MSNBC doesn't like him and CNN doesn't like him.

Those things are actually advertisements in the current day and age.

Uh, Trump understood this very keenly in 2016; he embraced it, and that was one of the reasons why he did so well. And Kennedy, I think, also understands this.

Unlike Bernie Sanders, who I think in, you know, deep within his heart had a lot of affection for the Democratic Party, didn't want to see, um, something bad happen to it, uh, RFK I think is running a campaign where he's willing to go to the mattresses with, um, you know, the people within the Democratic Party structure, and that's going to be very appealing to a lot of voters and a lot of independents as well.

Yeah, this is going to be some ridiculously surreal presidential campaign, man! I don't think we'll have ever seen the likes of it, so it'll be something to watch.

So, um, what was it like working for Rolling Stone when you worked for them?

It was great! When I worked for Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone had a couple of heydays, I would say, in the late 60s and the 70s—obviously, the magazine did both great music journalism and some groundbreaking, um, journalism of other types, including Hunter Thompson.

But they also published, you know, people like, um, Carl Bernstein. Uh, they eventually brought in P.G. O'Rourke. They kind of pioneered this, this formula of, you know, reporting that was serious but also witty, uh, and, and readable.

And then, you know, they regressed a little bit in the 90s, but when I came in in the early 2000s, they had just brought in some new editors, and, um, and they were fantastic.

They let me do work, uh, that I know a lot of the senior people didn't agree with, but they were really encouraging, um, and they let me get into some areas that were really weird and unusual for a mainstream American news—mainstream American magazine. And that was great. It was a great time—

For a long time.

And then it got a little strange at the end.

What was the most interesting area you delved into when you worked for Rolling Stone?

Well, after the 2008 election, you know, I had covered, um, Obama's win. And that was when the, um, financial collapse happened. And they assigned me to do one story basically about what happened at AIG.

They wanted me to explain in ordinary terms, you know, what that was.

Um, and we did one story that was called, I think, "The Big Takeover," and it, it just attempted to translate for ordinary people, um, a lot of the verbiage that, uh, people used on Wall Street.

And the response to that was so overwhelming that I ended up doing that for eight years, and so I got to cover all kinds of crazy things you would never expect a mainstream music magazine to take on, like, you know, the ratings agencies, um, you know, bidding for municipal bonds, uh, you know, foreclosure fraud—all kinds of stuff like that.

And I got 7, 8,000 words a shot to do this and lots of time!

So for an investigative reporter, I mean, at the time, there were maybe 10 jobs like that in all journalism.

And it was, uh, it was a great period to do it.

And the only problem was—

That’s a good deal!

Yeah, it was a great deal! But unfortunately, the market has changed quite a lot in the last three or four—well, five or six years, I would say.

Now, did The Great Derangement come out of that?

Your book The Great Derangement came out of my earlier, um, sort of campaign trail stuff for Rolling Stone and some other places. I did some writing for The Nation too at that time.

Where did you write in book form about the financial collapse?

So I wrote a book called Griftopia.

Ah, it's Griftopia! Okay, another one!

Yep! Right, right!

So let me recap for a second or two part of what happened in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Tell me if you think I've got this right and add anything that you feel would be useful.

So my sense was that it was at least in part a technological—it was a consequence of a rapid technological revolution. I mean, so the idea, as far as I could tell, was that if you, so there's—you can assign mortgages a different risk of default, and that seems mathematically probable.

You can look at the income and the credit history of the people who have the mortgages, and you can calculate the probability of default, and then you can come up with a risk estimate, and then you offset the risk estimate by either not lending to the people who are at high risk or increasing the interest rate.

Okay, so that's pretty straightforward and strikes me as highly probable that that can be done. And then the idea was, well, if you lumped enough mortgages together of a certain, certain risk category, let's say relatively high risk, that you could average the risk across all the mortgages, that you could calculate exactly what that risk was statistically, and then you could define and offset that so that a large enough tranche aggregate of mortgages would now become a definable asset, right?

Which makes it a secure asset.

And, you know, that really is brilliant; that's really, really smart. Now, what happened, though, was that what often happens when there's a financial revolution of that sort is that the act of producing the instrument produced unexpected changes in the market.

So now that you could sell clumps of low-of-high risk mortgages to, like, pension funds because the risk was specified, you produced an almost indefinite market for high-risk mortgages.

And so the consequence of that was that financial institutions went out and sold increasingly high-risk mortgages at a mad rate forever, and that was abetted by policies stemming from the Democrats and the Republicans alike, designed to foster home ownership among low-income Americans, which, you know, sounds like a fine idea.

But I suppose selling people houses they can't actually pay for is not a good idea, and so the consequence of that was a housing boom, a mortgage boom, increased malfeasance on the mortgage risk rating front, and then the eventual construction of correlated housing prices across the entire economy, which is something that never happened before because these things had all now been linked together behind the scenes.

And so then, when housing prices started to collapse in one district, that spread very rapidly, and it collapsed everywhere, and that just took the whole game out.

But to me, the initial, the initiator of that was actually a technological revolution on the financial front and not something corrupt in and of itself, like—it led to a form of corrupt, it led to a form of corruption, but it wasn't crooked right at, from the, from the get-go.

That's how I understood it. I mean, you've looked into this deeply.

Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. It started off as actually quite a brilliant idea. Um, you know, what you were describing with mortgage-backed securities, this process called tranching, right?

Um, where you could pull, uh, a whole group of mortgages, let’s say a thousand, two thousand of them, uh, and you could take a gigantic group of essentially junk-rated mortgages but peel off a portion of it and sell it as AAA.

So it was a Rumplestiltskin story; it was, you know, you take a whole bunch of straw, but you can get a little bit of gold out of it, right?

And you can sell that gold, as you said, to pension funds because they have requirements for—um, you know, they need to have at least a certain amount of AAA-rated stuff in the portfolio, and this was earning a higher rate of return than traditional AAA investments.

So now you had this booming, exploding market for essentially junk-rated mortgages, and that started off as an idea that produced an awful lot of cash and capital that, you know, initially led to a boom in the economy, but it—and it expanded housing ownership, which seemed to be a good thing!

Exactly! Lots of people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to get houses got houses!

But very quickly, uh, you started to develop, um, all kinds of fraud schemes that abetted this, where, you know, the mortgage companies, which were once incentivized to prevent you from getting a mortgage if they didn't think, uh, you could make your payments, now all of a sudden knew that as soon as you got into the pool, that they were going to be selling your mortgage to the next person.

So they overlooked all kinds of things. Did you have ID? Did you have a job? Um, you know, were you a citizen? Uh, all that stuff would kind of be little details like that—

Yeah, little details like that!

—they would forget to put that stuff in or check it.

Um, and you know, you would have these big banks which would be representing to their customers, like pension funds, that, oh yeah, we checked all out all these mortgages that are in this pool; they’re all great!

Um, and they’re everything that we say they are, and next thing you knew, uh, people started to default at a high rate and couldn’t make their payments anymore, and you know the whole house of cards fell.

So it's not like a lot of other financial booms in history; it's just, uh, the particular form of this was that it, um, it all happened within the confines of this system of mortgage-backed securities.

And there was an additional complicating factor, which was that, uh, this came alongside the invention of another financial instrument, type of financial instrument—the credit default swap—that allowed financial companies to bet on the success of, uh, of these instruments.

So you might have a mortgage, and if it failed, you might have a cascading series of losses that resulted from that because people were essentially trading on whether or not that mortgage was going to succeed.

So it, it was a way of basically punching a black hole into the economy, um, you know, beyond the limits of, uh, you know, how much money there actually was in circulation.

Um, it was really—it was fascinating to learn about that.

Yeah, it's attractive to be cynical about what happened in 2008, and it's also attractive to be conspiratorial and to note that, you know, there were very—there was almost no criminal prosecution in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. But you know, I'm not unwilling to assume the utility of punishment where it's due.

Um, but it's never really been obvious to me that, except in, you know, a relatively small number of egregious cases, that the, that the criminal case for that, the case for criminal conduct could be easily made, given the complexity of the financial innovations that were also part and parcel of this.

Now, you have focused on, you know, the old boys' club, so to speak, that governs political conduct in the United States across both parties and the entrenchment of the power elite, let's say, that keeps that system going.

And you could say the same thing on the financial side, and you've looked deeply into financial corruption and the collapse in 2008.

What was your sense about what should have been done in the aftermath of that catastrophe?

Well, I think just as there were a series of basically symbolic prosecutions after the accounting control scandals of the early 2000s, like you know, Enron, Adelphia, Rite Aid, you know, that sort of thing—that were designed to send a message to the market, like hey, you can't do this—there were some obvious cases they could have taken up, uh, that would have similarly sent a message that it's not a good idea to, you know, sell gigantic pools of mortgages that, you know, have problems with them that you know are in tranches that you know, um, are likely to default as soon as you sell them.

And they could have done that, didn't do that, and I think that engendered a lot of problems.

And frankly, that was something that Trump picked up on, um, again in 2016, that there was anger, um, in the population. There were an awful lot of people who got thrown out of their homes after 2008.

Uh, you know, we're talking like five million people.

Yeah, well, there were a lot of ordinary people who suffered and a lot of extraordinary people who didn't, and there was an awful lot of corporate bailout and socialization of risk and privatization of profit.

Right? That was really, that was really a dismal outcome. Now, you know, I think it is hard to keep enterprises on the hook financially because with a big company, partly because the executive leadership and even the ownership of the company can switch quite dramatically.

It's not like you can hold a company to the same standards of responsibility that you can hold an individual to. It's slippery and tricky, and it isn't obviously the case, too, that you should be too punitive with regards to your business class if they engage in ventures that don't work out well, because then you suppress innovation and risk-taking.

I mean, that's one of the advantages of having bankruptcy laws, right? This means you get to fail without dying, and that's really useful given that you have to fail quite a bit often before you can succeed.

But it still did seem to me that, you know, the chickens didn't come home to roost as thoroughly as they might have in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

I also wonder, too, tell me what you think about this. You know, we've seen the rise of woke capitalism to a great degree in the last—well, let's say since 2008.

It seems to me that, you know, there's a fair bit of unrequited and maybe deserving guilt on the part of high-flying capitalists who made their money in manners that might be a little bit more crooked than necessary and that one of the ways they can pay the piper hypothetically without actually having to go through any serious moral re-evaluation is to beat the ESG drum, for example, on the climate side, or to pretend to be in accordance with that—what, what, what—whatever the newest woke delusion is on the Civil Rights front.

And so it's a false contrition, and I think that's emerged in the aftermath of unpunished malfeasance, let's say, on the corporate front with regard to the financial crisis of 2008.

So, I don't know what you think about that theory.

That's interesting! Uh, yeah, I mean, so I often you get people who are, um, confused about, uh, my take on all this because they think that because I wrote very critically about companies like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and, um, you know, Bank of America that, um, you know, I'm a communist or anti-capitalist.

Actually, nearly all of my sources during that time period were people who worked on Wall Street. They were, you know, other rich people, basically, and their complaint about these companies, um, was not that they were, uh, being too arch-capitalist, but that rather they were subverting capitalism by cheating and relying on bailouts.

Uh, and, um, you know, and manipulating markets in ways that were unfair to, you know, sort of the smaller-sized competitor. And, um, I think that was a consistent theme of what happened.

There were cases they could have made, and, uh, that would have been, you know, I think, important to the markets. It would have sent a message that no matter how big you are, uh, you're not outside the reach of the law, and it would have restored faith in this idea that, um, you know, that the government isn't basically a silent partner of these gigantic banks.

Uh, that was clearly, yes, that will always backstop them in times of trouble, uh, and won't look into, you know, money laundering and other problems.

And that's why we're having this crisis with small regional banks now, among other things, because the markets know that, uh, it's cheaper for big banks to borrow money because everybody knows they'll always get bailed out.

Um, you—that’s an inherent advantage that they shouldn't have, I don't think, uh, in capitalism. So all of that is a hangover of 2008. The ESG thing is, I think, just another version of the same ratings agency scam that, um, we saw with mortgages—it’s just that they're playing around with different terminology and insider, um, you know, sort of rigging of the game.

Uh, this time it's more political.

Doesn't seem to be working out so well for Disney!

Right, exactly! Uh, you know, I think these schemes always, whenever they try to get, uh, you know, game the system too much that way, it, it always ends up seeming to backfire.

Um, I think—

Yeah, well, that, that it does backfire if the market, if a well-regulated market actually retains its dominance.

And because, as you pointed out too, you know the people who are playing the capitalist game honestly—and that's the majority of people who are conducting business in the US, because otherwise the US would not be as filthy rich as it is and so unbelievably stable and productive, right?

'Cause things actually get done, and they work, and that means that people who actually get things done and work are doing those things.

Now, there's a handful of bad actors on the capitalist side, and it's definitely not in the interest of honest capitalists to let the dishonest crooks game the whole system and get away with it on the regulatory capture side, etc.

You know, that's really a place where the left and the right could come together, you know, in their totally—

That’s right!

Yeah! Okay, okay. So let’s talk about your last three books briefly, and then I want to cover the debate you had with Douglas Murray, Michelle Goldberg, and Malcolm Gladwell.

It was you and Douglas on the same team, and a little bit on the Twitter files, but let's go through Insane Clown President, I Can't Breathe, and Hate Inc.

If you could just say a little bit about each of those books, I think that would be very interesting.

Let's start with Insane Clown President.

Yeah, so Insane Clown President is basically just a compilation of all the stuff that I wrote in 2016, mainly for Rolling Stone, about the Trump campaign.

There we decided after Trump won that there was probably enough of an appetite out there for, uh, reading about what happened during the campaign that people would buy that book, and you know it turned out to be true—it was a bestseller!

Um, but the thing that I like about that book when I go back and look at it—and I don't like all my books, um, but I think that one early on, you know, I think I called a lot of what happened with the Trump campaign correctly.

Um, you know, my early impressions of his campaign was that he was on to something, uh, that if, um, sort of mainstream American pundits didn't wake up, they were going to find out very quickly that, uh, you know, they were making him stronger by misreporting things about him.

And um, and then, you know, there is a section of that book where I—I was convinced by a pollster that he had absolutely no chance of winning.

And so I—I kind of got the wrong impression that his campaign was really going to result historically just in the destruction of the Republican Party.

Um, but I think there were a lot of things about that book that captured 2016 correctly, and it was, um, you know, it's a funny book to read too because there were a lot—there was a lot of odd stuff that happened on the campaign trail, so—

Yeah! So what did you come to make of Trump, both in terms of his strengths and weaknesses? What's your assessment of Donald Trump?

Well, one of the first times I saw Trump in person was in New Hampshire.

Um, I think I was in Plymouth, New Hampshire. I was at Plymouth State University, I think was the locale. And, you know, the press is always on a riser; we always look ridiculous standing in the middle of a, a political event.

And Trump started to talk about us. He, you know, like he feels the crowds out like a comedian. He looked at us and he said, "You see these people over here? See these bloodsuckers? You know, they’ve never come so far for an event. They hate me. They want me to lose so bad; they want all of you to lose."

And I watched as the crowd kind of turned toward us and started hissing, and they were throwing bits of paper at us and everything.

And I immediately recognized this is going to work, you know? Um, and the reason I knew it was going to work is because who doesn't hate journalists like us, you know? Just look at us, you know?

And, and there were a lot of people, you in your Mongolian basketball career.

Well, yeah! They don't know the average person probably doesn't know about that. But the, the ordinary journalist, uh, you know, a political journalist who covers presidential campaigns is a very specific type of character.

That person is always wearing a gingham shirt, a tie, and khakis, and asks you one question that he already knows the answer that he wants.

Um, and then goes back to, you know, and then writes the story they’ve already pre-written. People hate that person, you know? And I recognized for good reason!

Right! And so Trump picked up on that, and then he started to move not just from the press but to other institutions, you know, NATO, the Fed. Um, you know, Congress, obviously.

But what he was doing—he was feeling in his crowds that that there was this enormous amount of resentment out there about all kinds of issues, um, and he was feeding it.

I think, in many cases, with very sensible and real criticisms; some of the things he said I totally disagreed with, and I thought were outlandish and crazy and unnecessary.

Um, but he was—

So to what degree—what—

To what degree do you think the—the thing that concerns me, let's say, about figures such as Trump, even though he's singular in many ways, is that when you're attempting to redress populist concerns, you can go in two directions, right?

You can listen to the concerns, and you can honestly try to formulate responses and policies that would deal with those concerns, or you can capitalize on that resentment and foster it.

And that's a very, very dangerous road to walk down.

Now, I'm not making a categorical judgment that Trump did one or the other of those. I'm curious about what you thought, because of course, his populist front was what in principle terrified his, though the people who became incredibly paranoid about him.

But what was your sense? You watched him, and you watched his handling of the crowd. You said that he would do things like single out the journalists and turn the crowd against them.

You know, for better or for worse, was your sense that he was—was he manipulating the crowds? Was he manipulating the crowds and himself at the same time?

Was he playing a relatively straight game? You know, what do you think he was up to?

And you, you kind of—you also compared him to a comedian, right? That could read the crowd, and a leader can do that, but you can be led astray by the darkest impulses of the crowd too.

Yeah, so it was interesting because I was covering Trump and Bernie Sanders at the same time, and Sanders was picking up on a lot of the same things, but his answer to those grievances—he had a long list of policy solutions that he was really, really anxious to implement.

Trump, on the other hand, I think, you, at heart, Donald Trump is a salesperson. Like, that's who he is. He's always selling something, right?

And it was funny to watch the reporters because they were all carrying around, um, you know, books about fascism and, you know, like, you know, the 1930s, whereas they should have been reading books about sales culture because that was the key to understanding Donald Trump.

And I thought Trump basically was selling outrage. He was selling, um, he was selling the experience of feeling, uh, solidarity with other people who'd been screwed over, and he was—

So he was fostering those feelings in people. I think, you know, to answer your question—

Yeah! And did you detect a danger in that?

Did you get, did you detect a danger in that?

I mean, because look, there are times being frustrated and wanting justice—those two things aren't that easy to distinguish, right?

Right! And being resentful and wanting justice, those two things aren't always that easy to distinguish either, right?

I mean, it's a tricky business because you know, you say, well, you should forgive and forget, and people think that's the highest possible dictum, but justice has its place as well.

And if you have been screwed over—and I think the American working class has been screwed over in many ways—although whether that was planned or just incidental is a different question, they had their reasons to be outraged.

Now, Trump obviously appealed to that outrage. You're, you're intimating that you believe that he capitalized it on it as well, though, in a way that you didn't see characteristic of Bernie Sanders.

Now, of course, Bernie also didn't—wasn't burdened with the delusion that he was likely to win.

No! And—and Bernie didn't really—he didn't have the same ability to connect with people that Trump had.

Right! Right, right!

Yeah, yeah!

You know, um, I—that's a difficult question, right? Because it’s—the—it gets to the question of motivation.

I would say I never got the sense that Donald Trump was honestly a reformer, that that was really his motivation was to, uh, you know, change the system, and that he was up at night reading policy proposals—that wasn't my impression!

I think Donald Trump, you know, over the—over time, I got the idea basically—and this was in part from talking to people who knew him—which was that he was insecure but mostly just wanted to be liked.

Um, I didn't find the, you know, that the core of him was terribly scary. Maybe I was wrong in perceiving it that way.

Um, but—

Well, I don't—I don't think the evidence is clear that you were wrong.

I mean, look, under Trump, we had no wars.

You know, that wasn't such a bad thing.

And we did get the Abraham Accords, and the economy did quite nicely, and I don't think the culture wars were raging as intently under Trump, even though they raged away quite madly as they are now.

So you know, for all of Trump's purported dangers, he was much less of a threat, certainly on the international stage, than he might have been, and than everybody had been afraid he would be.

And I do think also that he generated a certain degree of respect and apprehension from, you know, the more authoritarian types around the world, and I certainly don't think that's the case with Biden at all, because I think Biden, like Trudeau, I think is beneath contempt in relationship to people like the president of China.

So—and I don't think that was true for Trump, 'cause at least he was unpredictable or had that appearance.

So I don't—I don’t think you were out of line in your failure to see anything truly malevolent in Trump.

Yeah, I mean, I—I don't know. I mean, I—my impression of him was that he, he was doing this for a lot of reasons that were complicated.

He, he has a mischievous streak in him.

Um, it was, it was clear watching his family early in the campaign that they wanted no part of any idea that he might win.

Um, but—and I wasn't exactly sure that he wanted to win.

But, right, right!

Yeah!

Well, I thought it was an exercise in brand awareness expansion, at least, and quite a brilliant one in some ways, if if you're thinking purely from the perspective of sales, right?

And he was selling himself the entire time, and he was doing a great job at it! I mean, you know, with the tools that were available to him, uh, he was a pioneer in many respects by bypassing the media and going straight to people using Twitter and that sort of thing.

Um, all that was very interesting, and I think that was something that if people had looked honestly at the situation, they would have found really compelling, uh, to study. Instead, I, you know the establishment press just settled on a narrative about him about halfway through the campaign, and from there it was just attack, attack, attack, and it became, um, I would say, on a sort of ongoing one interesting diatribe from that point forward.

Yeah! Well, it would have been a lot more compelling had there been real journalists covering the Trump phenomena trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Because at minimum, it was insanely interesting and not predictable in the least and, and mysterious, and it would have been good to get to the bottom of it.

Like I said, I think Victor Davis Hansen did a nice job in his book The Case for Trump.

I think it's a very even-handed treatment, uh, without the kind of crazy Gonzo journalism style that, you know, might have added something quite compelling to the overall analysis of Trump.

What did you do with, um, I Can't Breathe and Hate Inc., the other two books, 2017 and 2019?

Yeah, I—I lived very close to where Eric Garner, um, was killed in Staten Island. I was in New Jersey, um, just a short drive away. So I decided to do a book about, um, what happened there, and I just—just on a lark I went to the neighborhood, hung out in the street for a little bit, talked to some of his friends, and found that he was, I thought, a very interesting person.

So I thought it might be cool to write a book about this guy, and, you know, so I spent a couple of years really just talking to drug dealers and hanging out in the street and ended up with a portrait of what happened to Garner—all the different forces that converged to, um, cause, you know, that incident.

And, you know, I was left with an understanding of police brutality that was a lot more complicated than people made it out after the George Floyd incident, which I think is, um, was unfortunate.

Well, complicated in what ways? What did you learn?

Well, I think a lot of what happened with cops in cities like New York, uh, especially after the implementation of programs like Broken Windows, was that they were, uh, forced by these new stats-based policing regimes to, um, create artificially, uh, engender contacts with the population when they weren't necessary.

Uh, you know, the court case Ohio v. Terry, which is from 1968 in the United States, allowed police to randomly stop and search people on the street, and police departments clued into the idea that if they did enough of those stops, they would find people who were, who had warrants on them, that they would probably grab a lot of guns, uh, that people were carrying, and/or stop people from carrying them in the first place.

So they did hundreds of thousands of these stops, and on the surface that might sound like a good idea, but what ended up happening was a lot of people got frustrated with being stopped and searched, uh, and a lot of those incidents went wrong, and that's how a lot of these police brutality cases happen.

They happen because they begin with some really stupid reason for stopping somebody on the street. Somebody gets mad, and it ends up in a melee, and somebody dies.

And that's, that unfortunately is, is the backdrop for a lot of these cases, right?

Okay, okay.

Well, I read recently that there's no real evidence that the police are more likely to use deadly force, for example, on black people compared to white people. In fact, I think the stats show slightly the reverse.

But that's not true at all when it comes to arguably, well, more minor in some ways acts of harassment,