Masha Gessen

There always seems to me to be here an assertion, not just about...

international institutions, or nations, but also about human beings.

When I listen to MAGA and Trump and then its theorists and its followers, I hear something being said about this idea that we have restrained the

animal, masculine, dominance-oriented, conquest-oriented instincts that on some level made humanity great that, you know, in the Elon Musk version that will get us to Mars in the future and tied them up.

in hollow liberal values and self-restraints and debate and discussion and deliberation and rules and procedures.

And there's something being said that is operating really at all levels.

The way America is acting under Trump is the way America should act, the way a superpower should act.

That is what it means to be a superpower.

It is to be unrestrained.

But the way Trump acts is also the way a man should act.

I don't always hear them saying that everybody else is lying.

I hear them saying almost something different, like their idea of like the woke mind virus, that something has happened, right?

And an ideology has taken over that is poisoning ambition and aggression and a set of forces, a kind of vitality that is what drove civilization forward.

A weakness virus.

That's a better way to put it.

I want to play for you a clip of Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, talking about at least one of the ways in which he wanted to change the culture of the U.S.

military.

He goes on to launch an attack on beards also in that.

There is a real obsession with aesthetics across this administration.

Who it appoints and then what they want from the people beneath them.