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Chapter 1: What historical factors contributed to Trump's rise in politics?
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast.
Chapter 2: How did Trump's personal experiences shape his political views?
I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome to the show the author of Unpopular Front on Substack. He wrote the book When the Clock Broke, Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s about the, you know, David Duke and the right-wing media ecosystem. We're going to talk about that. He hosts a film podcast, Unclear and Present Danger with Jamel Bowie. It's John Gans.
How you doing, man?
Good. How are you, Tim?
Well, I kind of feel like I'm in college again because I was up vomiting all night and I had to meet with T.A. this morning to discuss some reading. Oh, God. And, you know, we're going to do a little René Girard. So it's we'll be OK. It wasn't the fun kind of vomiting, though.
Chapter 3: What role does populism play in Trump's coalition?
So you got to carry me. You got to carry me. Is that all right?
Okay, I will do my best. I will do my best. I was not vomiting so far as I can remember.
Not the best evening. I just want to start with people who aren't familiar with your sub stack, which is great. Give us a little baseline for your politics. JVL on our internal Slack was calling you one of the good socialists. I don't know if you accept that moniker. Sure. But why don't you give people a little... Which the good part or the socialist part? Either. Yeah.
Chapter 4: How does Trump's administration differ from traditional politics?
Yeah, I guess you could say I'm a social democrat. I would say that's how I would identify. Hmm. That's the tradition I feel closest to. Like David Brooks. Yeah, like David Brooks used to be. I hope I don't have the same trajectory. I think I'm too old for that now already. But, you know, that's part of the socialist tradition. It's one part of the socialist tradition historically.
And, you know, it comes with a commitment both to, you know, an economy that tries to work for everyone and also – a commitment usually to liberal democracy and, you know, a robust, free society.
Okay, so, you know, give me a, if John Gans was in Congress, who would your doppelganger be?
I mean, I very, very rarely disagree with anything Bernie Sanders says, I got to tell you. And, and, you know, we're, we're very temperamentally similar.
Chapter 5: What are the implications of Trump's foreign policy decisions?
I think, uh, I know I, you know, Elizabeth Warren is someone also I have a lot of admiration for, uh, AOC, you know, I was very excited about her rise and, and, you know, and I support Zara Mamdani. So, you know, these are my politics basically.
I've had too many Bernie people on the pod lately. We need a cleanse. I need a cleanse. I need to get Joe Manchin back on the pod.
Yeah, you've got to find somebody to the left of Bernie to put on the pod, like some PSL people or something like that. I could tell you how he's a revisionist.
I'm open to it. I want to start with just kind of Trump administration stuff, then we're going to go back into your book and the origin of how we got here on the right. Sure. You wrote this, which resonated with me, which shouldn't surprise you, you know, given that I've got to wake up and talk about this nonsense every day.
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, I wrote that I wasn't enjoying my job anymore because it was at once too easy and too awful. The people in charge are evil, stupid, or both. And those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both.
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Chapter 6: How do Democrats respond to Trump's coalition of aggrieved voters?
That's all there is to say over and over. Anything else strains the truth.
I stand by that. I mean, yeah, absolutely. And I think that what I what I wrote after that is actually it's become more difficult and not as easy because I find that, you know, when you write political analysis, you know, you usually attribute. motives or reasons for people's behavior. And sometimes those reasons are ideological. Sometimes they're self-interested.
Sometimes they're in the context of partisan politics. You try to make it legible for people and you try to put your spin on it, maybe advance your politics a little bit, generally try to communicate the truth.
With the actions of the Trump administration, it's very difficult, I find, to give them any coherence because it's so based on Trump's personal whims and his own very idiosyncratic and mercurial way of doing things.
So I often find that when I attribute, you know, some kind of ideological thinking or some kind of project to anything they do, you know, a week from then, the line has totally changed. You know, usually... A presidential coalition has tensions, but theirs is in open confrontation with each other all the time, which is unusual.
A president usually undertaking a project like going to war, say, right?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the 'nerd problem' in Democratic politics?
Now, usually, you would imagine, I mean, this is the way we used to think about politics, they would first have their own party very much on board, and then they would use that as a platform to get the rest of the American people on board. Now, Trump didn't even have his own party on board.
going into it so it's a different type of politics and you know we grew up with and we're accustomed to to commenting on and it very much is is the trump show and he he personalizes everything he is not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions ideas like the market or you don't believe that donald trump can abstract I don't think he can, basically.
I think basically he is sometimes swayed by conspiratorial rhetoric. Some people are ideologically conspiratorial because it sort of supports their worldview. I think that Trump is basically psychologically incapable of understanding things as processes that don't have a person behind them. That's the way he's always done business.
He always thinks someone's trying to screw you or you're trying to screw somebody. And you can see the way he runs the economy. The idea of a deal is like a one-off kind of carve out where you make some compromises. Now... For the behavior of businessmen and firms, that's fine. At scale, you have to have rules.
Chapter 8: How does the episode address the future of political coalitions in America?
So you can't have a million different rules for each type of business. There has to be some rules across the board, which is why the terror policy looks so incoherent. And why most of his policies look so incoherent is because he basically doesn't have the conception of the economy as a system. He has it as a conception of
okay, this guy's in my ear, wants a break for his business, and I want this business to do that. It's just a consistent kind of making of carve-outs and making exceptions, and you can't have nothing but exceptions. It's just total chaos.
Maybe this is just another way of saying the evil, stupid frame. But isn't it really just that Trump is a megalomaniac and everything that he's doing is in his personal self-interest and it's enriching himself and his family. And it's just like sometimes he has the illusion of knowledge and doesn't realize what's in his interest. And so he does shit that ends up being not in his interest.
That's about right. I think that he, I mean, we all don't exactly have a perfect idea of our self-interest, but his instincts lead him sometimes, I think, to make mistakes in his political career because his idea of his self-interest is extremely narrow and not very subtle. But he can also change course.
Unlike, say, he has some instinct that listening to Stephen Miller about every single thing is probably not the best idea, but he keeps them around.
Where do you feel like the Iran war and the latest one we have kind of fits on the evil stupid?
It's both. It's really remarkable. I mean, you know, it's a war that had no public support. I am... not an expert in foreign policy in any way. I read the news, just like a lot of Americans, and I've been following politics for most of my adult life. Anybody who has half a brain knew that this was not going to end up in a way that was favorable to the United States or the world at large.
that it would be some kind of catastrophe. In fact, this is kind of on the lower end of the catastrophes. But it's a completely absurd situation. We engaged in this war. It didn't accomplish a single strategic goal for the United States. They were talking in the beginning about regime change. They're making all this noise, all this grandiose plans. And then we basically have nothing like that.
And we're going to go to something that is kind of a weaker version of the JCPOA. And, you know, it seems as if basically and this goes back to his decision making process, he was talked into it. He thought it was a good idea. He was talked into this very simplistic idea of it. And when it turned out to be a lot tougher than he was led to believe, he decided to walk away.
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