Ben Smith

You know what?

Like if that's what you got to give him to go and own the Harry Potter franchise, like that's kind of that's the broad outline of the deal.

I'm just trying to keep a straight face over here, guys.

Hello, everybody.

Yeah, I don't think Trump is going to win the Dusseldorf mayoral election this November.

But more broadly, the thing about Trump is he is this bizarre political phenomenon who seems to play by none of the sort of rules that we grew up thinking about how politics works.

And when he arrived on the scene, everybody said he was gonna lose and he won.

And I think...

And yet at the same time, there are these other periods where he's sort of behaving exactly like any other political figure and actually having the first year of a presidency feel like this massive sea change in the direction of the country in which the president has absolutely reshaped everything.

And then you get to the second year and that all collapses is like the most familiar pattern in American government.

And, you know, Trump's numbers are somewhat worse, I think, in the polling.

Nate Silver has a little worse than Biden's were at this point of time, a little worse than his own numbers were eight years ago, which is, you know, pretty bad, but within the norms of the second year of a president, bad.

but and and think and i think one of the really interesting things is how much of what we thought was happening last year it turns out to be wrong i mean i think there was this idea that we were post-truth specifically that kind of the combination of these hyper partisan social media environment and um and ai was going to mean everybody would live in this kind of closed bubble and nothing would crack through that you know if you didn't like the reality you saw somebody would make you a video showing a different one

I just don't think that's really happened.

I was worried about that, but I think particularly around the ICE stuff, what broke through was the reality of these videos.

And it broke through, including to the White House, which is now pulled out of Minneapolis.

But I don't think anybody thought, oh, the big story of 2026 is going to be real videos on social media, which just change everybody's minds about reality.

I think that was a...

in a weird way kind of an unexpected plot twist.

And that to me is actually in some ways the thing that everybody got most wrong, the idea that Trump had created this new epistemic universe.