Masha Gessen

What do you make of that?

This is something I've become slightly weirdly obsessed with.

Why do fascist movements, authoritarian movements, why do they seem to care so much more about aesthetics and, in their own way, beauty than Keir Starmer's government or Joe Biden's government?

Even Donald Trump...

Coming into office, and amidst everything else he had to do, deciding to chair the board of the Kennedy Center, as that was clearly the thing he really wanted to do, and then recently having his name etched into the institution, the Trump Kennedy Center, it's now called, if you go to the website, if you go to the building, he immediately signed an executive order about bringing classical architecture back to federal construction.

I do not share Donald Trump's aesthetic.

He filled the Oval Office with gold.

But he really does have one.

And he really understands it as a dimension of politics and power and cultural control.

And this goes through other leaders like him.

I mean, Putin has, you know, his bare-chested photos and his aesthetic.

And you go back to the mid-century and early 20th century fascists and you see an incredible, you know, I have a whole book on Nazi aesthetics at home.

I have come to think it's first a weakness of liberal politics that it does not see itself as having a relationship related to beauty, that it does not believe beauty should be part of politics necessarily.

It likes beauty.

It wants other people to do beautiful things.

But, you know, we're the people in the suits.

who have the charts and can tell you how healthcare system is run, not the people who have views on what is and is not beautiful.

Why do you think it is that these movements see spectacle, see beauty, see aesthetic as so much more central to how politics should operate and how power is wielded than certainly liberal left-wing coalitions do?

So I want to talk about a different dimension of spectacle that you have written quite a lot about, which is that the constancy of spectacle, Trump everywhere all the time, that there is a way, and the Times had an amazing review of

Trump's media presence in 2025 and showed that he was twice as prevalent as he himself was in 2017, right?