Masha Gessen

They are also just reacting to the situations they create.

And if you look at Donald Trump's polling, if you look at recent elections, not effectively for their political standing.

Same or when you say democratic metrics no longer apply?

Let me try to take the other side of this.

I don't love talking in terms of optimism and pessimism because I don't actually consider myself optimistic.

I'm more trying to have the best picture of reality that I can.

But if I were to take the other side, and I do think I see this somewhat differently...

I am not yet seeing things that would make me think that there has been some deterioration either in the media universe such that there's no capacity for backlash because nobody knows what's happening.

And in fact, when I look at non-aligned media, Joe Rogan or Flagrant or things like that, I seem to see a turn on Trump.

the sort of bro podcasters and people just being like a little more upset about the immigration and not sure of what they're seeing.

And I mean, we don't know how the 2026 elections will go.

And so maybe it'll go the way you're saying, but to the extent we have signals yet, the signals seem to,

very, very bad for Republican performance in elections, starting with the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

But then, of course, moving through to the New Jersey and New York City and Virginia elections, moving through to the Prop 50 redistricting ballot initiative in California,

Moving through to every House and so on special election where Democrats have been overperforming by about 14 points in one of the analyses I've seen, although there are different ways of thinking about this and different ways of measuring overperformance.

But I guess I would ask why the 2025 elections, which were so uniformly against the regime, haven't made you rethink this somewhat?

But to what extent do you think their politics, the Trump-Mamdani voter, the Trump-AOC voter, of which there are some, they're not, I want to say, actually that many, but they exist.

But how much are those not highly attached?

I don't like how much everything costs voters.

And the thing, as I was saying, I'm not even joking, that I think Trump's tariffs and economic mismanagement and his evident inattention to cost.