Unfortunately, the DeVos-funded Reopen America "Movement" is spreading like its own pandemic, helped along by Donald Trump, Fox News, and a mainstream media that should know better than treat it like a legitimate protest. Your co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman talk about the strategy behind the propaganda, how Americans are uniquely vulnerable to these appeals, and welcome Professor Daniel Drezner on to talk about his new book The Toddler In Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About The Modern Presidency.
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How can I do my job if y'all idiots are blocking up the ways to get to the hospital?
There are people dying every minute.
And you guys, Trump supporters, want to block up everything and don't care about nobody else.
These are people expressing their views.
I see where they are and I see the way they're working.
They seem to be very responsible people to me.
The worst thing we could do is gather without observing all of the CDC recommendations about wearing a mask and staying six feet apart and all of the prescriptive measures that are really important.
Hey everybody and welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I am your co-host Nick Hauselman and as always I'm joined by Jared Yates Sexton.
And before we get into our conversation I want to let you know that we have a fantastic interview with Dan Drezner who's a professor at Tufts and a contributor to the Washington Post.
And his new book is called Toddler in Chief.
It's available now on Amazon, so make sure you check it out.
We had a great discussion about the historical context of the Trump presidency and how he is constantly being described as a toddler and whether or not that will ever change.
But first, let's talk about all these protests going on to open up the country.
And what's interesting is that we kind of predicted this pretty accurately last week, wouldn't you say, Jared?
Unfortunately.
And by the way, since this is an audible experience, we need to make sure that when we say protest that we're doing air quotes every single time that we say protest or movements.
This is a completely artificial thing.
And I don't know how you're feeling about it, but every time that I'm seeing you get airtime, every time I'm seeing anyone treat this like it is anything besides a propaganda operation, I am just enraged by it.
It is so angry-making and demoralizing and frustrating.
It is a complete and utter fabrication.
And we got to talk about that again.
We got to talk about what's happening.
Well, here's the thing, though.
We've got to put a little bit of context to this because while the genesis of these things are fabrications without question, when you throw the chum in the water, it's like World War Z. The actual real, quote-unquote, air quotes, organic people do come out of the woodwork.
So this does become fueled by sort of real people, right?
But, like, I have no doubt that a lot of these people really were, like, sitting in their houses, really pissed about everything, and got out there and wanted to show everybody that they're libertarians who no one can tell them what to do.
You know what I mean?
So not everyone is being, like, a paid agent to go out there and protest.
Is that fair?
Yeah, and let's start with everyone sitting in their house pissed off.
Let's go ahead and start there and let's deconstruct how something like this happens.
And, of course, we're talking about the Reopen America movement that we're all being inundated with, which is, again, a complete fabrication.
So it starts with everyone in their house pissed off.
And everyone has a reason to be in their house pissed off.
Right, the federal government has completely mishandled is actually way too generous of a word for it.
You know, there's a case to be made that people have died unnecessarily and intentionally, but that's neither here nor there.
I want to take everyone back real fast to 2010 with the Tea Party movement.
That was a movement that started.
With an actual anger towards the 2008 financial crisis, which, you know, had bankers and all of these money people who melted down the economy, there was a reason to be pissed off at them.
But those people were manipulated by wealthier people than them, billionaires like the Koch brothers, who took that anger and then redirected it.
And they redirected it towards Barack Obama using racism and white supremacy.
What's happening now is that people have a right to be pissed off because the government has not only mishandled this, they've allowed the economy to crumble.
Anybody who's keeping track of where all the money is going right now, which good luck trying to do that, it's going to the wealthy and the powerful.
It's turned into a slush fund for Donald Trump's best friends and probably his own businesses.
They have a reason to be pissed off.
But what happens is, again, another billionaire group, in this case it's our Secretary of Education,
And and her family including her brother who uses his paramilitary to infiltrate liberal groups and spy on them They are pumping tons of money into these fake fronts these political action groups right and they're putting a bunch of money on Facebook and through social media and God knows where else and they're they're chumming the water and they're they're they're basically
Creating this artificial movement that isn't organic and they're they're taking people's anger redirecting it and they're saying oh, it's your governor It's your Democratic governor and you know it's the Democrats out there who want to ruin your family and probably are part of the quote-unquote New World Order and the gun groups and the white supremacist groups and the white separatists are all getting involved in this thing and they're creating like you said it's like people who think that something is happening are Joining a movement that is completely artificial from the bottom up and unfortunately
Unfortunately, our media and politicians are treating this like it's a real thing, and it's completely not a real thing at all.
Right.
And at the very least, when you're watching the Fox News, they are basically providing free advertisements for all of the rallies or whatever we're going to call these things across the country, and just sort of promoting these things for them.
Very excited that they can finally ratchet up and, like, you know, get these real sound bites from people, which are frankly fucking insane.
When you hear them talking about, you know, Jesus' blood is going to protect them from the virus, or that they're just out in the open hugging each other,
I mean some of these things are I hate to say they're hilarious because it's serious and it's deadly but you see these people who are screaming and yelling and chanting and then all of a sudden the guy starts coughing at the end of that and you have to believe that like these are not just going to be coughs that are you know dry throat and you have to believe that odds are very high that there will be some COVID-19 infections going on directly as a result of this and then again odds are that there'll be deaths can cause from all of this.
And that's what's so scary about this.
And you're exactly right.
Let's get to the really macabre, savage awfulness of this.
While they're pumping hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, into creating these fake movements, these billionaires are sitting at home, or in their safe rooms, or wherever they are right now, and they're sending all of these disposable Americans out To do their dirty work for them, which is exactly what the Koch brothers did, and what has continually happened.
They're sending them out there, and they don't care if they live or die because of a pandemic.
They don't care at all.
All it is, is creating the illusion that something is happening that gives Donald Trump and corporate billionaires an opportunity to say, oh, Americans are dying to get outside, and then they're going to die.
Right?
Which is a terrible, terrible thing.
But then you also look at, and you're exactly right with how it's being advertised on Fox News, they're treating this like the Tea Party.
Which is something that the Tea Party, er, that Fox News realized with the Tea Party, they could use them as a vehicle to say, what we talk about is popular and there is a populist movement out there that is behind our policies and our ideas and our criticism of Barack Obama.
But eventually the Tea Party, and this is the really frightening thing if you look at recent American history, the Tea Party took over the Republican Party and took over Fox News.
And it went from being a fabricated movement into becoming one of the standard bearers of American politics.
And once you understand that, you start to realize just how fragile all of this stuff is, and then all of a sudden you have people out with Confederate flag, Nazi flags, carrying semi-automatic rifles, talking about the New World Order, talking about, you know, Christian God striking people down, all this bullshit.
It just grows and grows and grows, and it carries on a weight of its own.
Where it is right now, today, April 20th, as we tape this, Who can tell where it's going to be?
And we need to talk about the real-world consequences of that stuff because people die.
There are murders, there are uprisings, there are violent acts that come from things like this.
And people are going to get sick and they're going to die.
Right.
Now the only thing that's interesting about the whole thing is that, you know, for years you heard about Soros paying the liberals to go, you know, do the same exact kind of thing.
And we would roll our eyes and, you know, listen, I was out there protesting.
I never got a check from Soros.
I'm still waiting for it.
Can I ask you a quick question, Nick?
Yeah.
Why is it that it's always Soros that is the one that's manipulating and sending out checks?
I don't know.
Almost like a puppet master, Nick.
What am I missing here?
What is that?
You know, are you talking about the whole Jewish thing that's involved?
Oh, okay!
Oh, that's right!
Because...
Every conspiracy theory from the Protocols of Elders of Zion to the New World Order to the Deep State to QAnon is about secretive Jewish people like puppet mastering politics behind the scenes when in fact every conspiracy theory that is based on that, that anti-semitic garbage, is about what white supremacists are doing to control things.
I'm just throwing that out there.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Go!
No, no, no.
So that's the funny thing about this thing because, you know, there is a... The thing is, I asked you earlier, is DeVos hasn't even responded to this connection that the governor of Michigan called her out on, right?
That was pretty impressive to me that, like, while this can be conceived of as a conspiracy theory that Betsy DeVos and her longtime political advisor, I suppose, is the guy, the head of the business that's been sponsoring these protests, You know, you would think that she would go out there and just lie and say, oh, we have nothing to do with this.
We don't even know.
But it's interesting absence of any response from her.
I had to imagine she's just probably really gun shy because she's been so bad whenever she's been out in public talking to, you know, in the microphone.
Well, I want to throw something out there real fast.
Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, has handled this with incredible aplomb.
I mean, just an exemplary job of not just handling the resources of the state, but standing up against Trump and now, you know, billionaires coming after her.
It's been really amazing.
And we tend to try and not prognosticate political futures on this show.
She's got one.
I think what she's been able to do has been really impressive.
But no, nobody's going to come out and admit that they're paying hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to manipulate, you know, the Vox Populi.
This is something that people have done for years and years and years, particularly billionaires who, you know, kind of do look at American politics from that puppet master idea that they can control these things and move people like chess pieces.
So no, they're not going to come out and deny it and they're not even going to pretend like any of this is fake.
That means that the onus should actually be on respectable news organizations.
And they do mention it, but I don't know if you've seen it or if our listeners have seen it.
It's always like paragraph 15, 16, 20, 24.
After you hear about these protest movements and what the people are saying, which pretends that they're real, eventually it will mention all of these people throwing their money at these and creating them.
It needs to be a response that says this is a fake thing.
The president is taking over a fake movement.
None of this is real.
You need to understand that you're being manipulated.
But the media is really afraid of talking about that and calling it what it is.
Jared, did you ever see the CNN segments where they went to people who had organized Trump rallies in 2016, inspired by Russian bots or Russian trolls on Facebook?
I don't know if you ever saw it, but they confronted them, and they actually said, and they refused To believe it.
It's kind of like in Westworld.
That looks like nothing to me.
They won't even acknowledge that that was what happened, even though they had the proof of that.
And so it's almost like it wouldn't matter.
There's no fog to be lifted for the people who are out there following this and who are angry, who are not necessarily directly related to these sponsored protests.
They're just joining the protest because they're so angry.
So they're never going to believe that this is manipulated by anybody else, but just sort of populist, you know, anger.
I'm glad you said that.
One of the biggest problems in American culture is the idea of rugged individualism.
Americans have a real problem understanding that they, like every other person on the face of the earth and every other person who has ever existed, is sensitive to outside persuasion.
They don't like to believe it.
They buy the things that they like to buy.
They don't like to think that corporations use propaganda to sell them things and that, you know, Freudian theories basically determine what they buy and what they wear and what they drive and all those things affect them.
In this case, that is what has given people like Vladimir Putin and Vladislav Surkov, his propaganda minister, and now Donald Trump and, you know, DeVos and all these people, it's given them cover to manipulate them.
And by the way, it's also what's given big tech cover, which it's kind of weird, isn't it?
That Facebook just continually is where all this happens.
It's almost like Facebook doesn't care If they're used for, you know, malevolent political purposes, but that's neither here nor there.
Maybe that's an episode for another day.
Hey, Facebook is taking down certain posts that they feel are passing misinformation about COVID-19.
It's out there.
I don't want Trump to complain about it, but...
Well, they have done that, but man, they are more than willing to take ruples, I mean, dollars, from anyone willing to pay them over.
And they have created, and so Americans who are lost in their own fantasies, and by the way, people need to understand, this isn't just a public health crisis, and we're going to talk in a minute, it's also a mental health crisis.
It's also an educational crisis.
It's also a civic crisis.
There's all these things that are coming together, and Americans need to take a long look in the mirror, understand why they do the things they do, and start to understand what propaganda is.
Because the longer that they deny it, and the longer that they're ignorant about it, they are perfect targets for that manipulation.
And that's what we're seeing on the streets of America right now.
I'm so glad that you brought up propaganda because, you know, I was looking through some stuff on Twitter and they were talking about, I don't know if you remember, but in 2010 Daryl Issa, in fact I believe it was Daryl Issa's, like, Chief of Staff or whatever was giving us insight because I think he's completely now a never-Trumper, was saying that, you know, they were legitimately looking into the Obama administration to prosecute them for violating propaganda laws for, get this,
Wanting or wanting to and posting those big signs that announce this is part of the TARP program that we are rebuilding America after the Horrible crash from a weight that was you know, whatever it was not propaganda It's the same things we had seen in with an FDR with a New Deal when they were rebuilding America You'd see you know, these these murals and you'd see these signs that you know, let us know this is from the government It's not propaganda.
And yeah, I've got a sign down the street from me right now that says the Georgia Department of Vehicles or transportation paid for blindly Yeah!
Fine!
You know, that's not propaganda.
But meanwhile, we have the President of the United States.
Basically, you know, before this iteration of my life, I used to make, you know, like high-end event videos for, you know, bar mitzvahs and weddings, right?
Like these love stories and these coming-of-age things.
And he's basically, like, having his own staff on our dime edit these things together, this propaganda stuff of these random, out-of-context bits of news reports that try and shine them in a nice light.
And in fact, they cut it early, apparently.
They didn't put the part he wanted that he thought made him look the best from Cuomo.
And he starts yelling at the staffer in front of everybody.
And the staffer actually argued back with him.
It was amazing.
How is that not what the thing is?
How are we not at a point where the Republicans aren't being grilled, I suppose?
Like, what would have changed?
The question should be, you wanted to prosecute for propaganda in 2010.
What's changed now that you don't want to do the same thing for Trump and what he's doing?
So the Republican Party, and this is one of the problems, there's so many problems.
My God, Nick, there's so many problems.
I was reading an article this morning, I believe it was in the New York Magazine, and it was about, again, the federal government seizing life-saving supplies, which should be one of the greatest scandals in the history.
Or modern history, at least.
I mean, they're letting people die and seizing these things with explanations.
Well, wait, is there any version of that matrix that they're actually putting, instead of, you know, Colorado, they're actually going to somewhere that needs it more?
Is that possible?
No!
Okay.
No, not at all.
Like, this is not an administration that's worried about saving lives.
This is about money and power and political maneuvering.
- Oh, oh man. - Wait, but really quickly, we didn't mention the $55 million no-bid contract to a bankrupt company with no employees for N95 masks, which they're charging at seven times the cost anybody else's is charging. - And by the way, we're only talking about two scandals right now, right?
God knows how many... Like, if I had to sit down, like, I don't know if I have enough paper in my house right now to make an appropriate list, not of scandals during the Trump administration, because that ship has sailed.
That's never gonna get known, how many scandals.
We're never gonna know how many people died from this thing, and we're never gonna know how many scandals there were during this presidency.
It's overwhelming, and what's actually happened is this weird thing, and we saw it happen in 2016, and I remind people, and I know this is traumatic for some people, Donald Trump had God knows how many scandals hamper him during the 2016 presidential election, right?
Hillary Clinton had one, and the one scandal was the email scandal, right?
So the media talked about the email scandal and built it up and built it up to, and then with Trump, there was like this, this, this, and this, and this, and it never stuck because it just overwhelmed.
Trump and the Republican Party Benefit and gain power from the fact that nobody expects them to be consistent or to be Competent or have integrity or follow the law so as a result There's just nobody expects it because to expect it right now would be to be naive right and so this is one of those things where you want to talk about propaganda and Propaganda works particularly well when you muddle the water to the point where nobody knows what is real.
And that's where we are right now.
And this goes back to the protests.
A lot of people understand that it's not real.
Well, what are you going to do?
What is real?
And then all of a sudden you start having a conversation about how many things aren't real.
And it becomes really demoralizing.
And it can lead to total apathy and a breaking of will.
I mean, it's authoritarianism 101.
And we have to familiarize ourselves with that and understand how it affects us and what it's done.
Or else we're just going to be victims of it.
We're just going to continue being victims of it.
Jared, the wife and I have binged-watched the first two seasons of Westworld.
And I gotta tell you, after enough of those episodes, I start to look at my forearm and wonder if I have an interface so I can cut myself and plug into a computer.
Because all the issues that these robots have are really just a metaphor for, you know,
Social anxiety and and and other mental illnesses you might have the code is just gotten infected And I feel like what you just described as far as nobody knowing what the truth is and the propaganda has become so thick It's just the nature of how long it's been out there right for how many decades and we have this sort of four-pronged attack That's been laid out by Rush Limbaugh and all these people which is an attack to discredit the the four major tenants which are academia government Science and media.
The big four.
And after decades and decades of attacking that and discrediting those things, here we are.
So I'm going to introduce listeners and I want them to look this guy up because this is one of the reasons we did this podcast in the first place.
We didn't want to do just headlines, right?
Because talking points, it's the same thing as a symbol, man.
They just don't matter, right?
And at some point or another, you talk about politics, some people you listen and you're like, you're just trading headlines back and forth.
It doesn't get any deeper than that.
I'm going to introduce everybody real fast to a guy named Jean Baudrillard.
Okay?
B-A-U-D-R-I-L-L-A-R-D.
Jean Baudrillard.
This is an academic.
I know, everybody, don't freak out.
We mentioned an academic in public American discourse.
I'm an academic as well, and let me tell you something.
One of the things that has happened over the past few decades, particularly since the 1960s when the academy and college became a place where subversive ideas and critical thinking were pushed, and by the way, before that, if people want to know what actually happened, The colleges were used as testing grounds for the CIA and the military and then all of a sudden in the 1960s it was like it didn't work anymore.
So what did Republicans do?
They started attacking colleges and universities and undermining them and basically telling people don't pay attention to experts.
Experts know what's going on.
You know, experts in science particularly and in, you know, immunology.
Like those people know what's happening.
They can tell you what's actually happening in the world.
Jean Baudrillard is a postmodernist, and everybody rolls their eyes when they hear the idea of postmodernism.
And they're like, well, that's a dangerous idea.
It's not an idea.
It's actually an indictment of culture.
And what Baudrillard says, and this goes to what you were just saying, Nick, he says over time there's so much culture, there's so much society, there's so much popular culture, mass media, there's so many lies.
That it becomes impossible to tell the difference between what is real and what isn't.
And at some point you just can't, right?
It's like being in a stream of water and you can't stop like a single particle of water.
You just let it rush over you.
Now, academics can tell you this stuff.
They can at least get it in your head like where you are.
But guess who doesn't like academics?
Republicans who rely on propaganda and disenfranchisement and myths that could be easily seen through with a little bit of history and a little bit of education.
And also companies.
And particularly companies like oil companies.
Which by the way, real fast Nick, can you tell me how much a price of a barrel of oil is right now?
It's actually like in the negative numbers if I'm not mistaken.
I believe it's right around negative $40.
So in order, if you went to an oil manufacturer, you could say, pay me $40 and I'll take a barrel of oil off your hands, by the way.
So these groups, okay, so like you know how they fought against climate change for years and years and years?
It's not like they didn't believe in climate change.
They're smart people.
They listened to experts.
They knew that climate change was real.
But they decided that they could make money and disrupt those experts and undermine them.
That's what we're looking at now with these people out in the street with Trump and all these people saying, oh, everything's fine, the pandemic's over.
They hate experts because the experts keep them from being able to profit off of ignorance.
And that is unfortunately the state of this country.
Well, you know, the experts in this case, well, he's French.
Or, he's a liberal.
You're right, you're right.
I mentioned a French academic on an American podcast.
Yeah, that's the jackpot right there.
Wait, I just heard everybody click off.
This is what I just heard.
You know, but I'm talking about like this notion of, because you know, I think it's safe to say that a lot of the academics are liberal, you know, and there's always this notion of the Harvard professor, and they're indoctrinating the students with this liberal ideology, but like, I don't even think it's liberal, right?
I think that's the wrong term, too.
We've gotten to a post-liberal setting now where it's really just, do you care about the country?
Do you care about your fellow man or not?
Well, so we used to, and we talked about this a lot in the past.
Everyone likes to talk about the political spectrum like it's a flat line, right?
There's liberalism and conservatism.
The Republican Party isn't a conservative party anymore.
And the quote-unquote liberals or Democrats, it's actually everybody else who's just like, you all are insane.
And you are living in a different reality that has nothing to do with an actual reality.
And so it's, that's one of the reasons why the Democratic Party is such a mess right now.
It's because the Republican Party is over here and they're like, well, at least we're on the same page about bullshit.
Well, except for the shell-shocked one table in the corner of Republicans who, you know, were the Reagan Republicans who can't quite leave for whatever reason, you know what I mean?
Which, by the way, we're going to have an interview later on in this podcast with author Dan Drezner and we're going to talk about Ronald Reagan.
Those people are lost in the mythology and fake reality of Ronald Reagan.
They remember a Reagan who never existed.
Ronald Reagan ran incredible deficits.
He gave amnesty to immigrants.
I mean, he didn't even do the things that they like to think that he did.
He raised taxes!
He raised taxes and that dude's over those people are over here still getting misty over the idea of the gipper riding on a horse and then meanwhile there's just a party over here that is a death cult and everyone else is like can we can we just stay in our houses for a few more weeks please just for safety of children and parents and the economy and then you have these mad people out in the street being paid by billionaires
Okay, so let's talk about that for a second, because the mad people, I feel like their ideology and the root of it is, fine, you stay in your house for as long as you want.
I don't give a crap about what you want to do.
I am going to go out there because I can't have a government tell me, it's always the what's next, right?
If they tell me that I can't stay in my house and I can't go to work, then they're going to tell me I have to get the vaccine.
And the next thing you know, they're going to implant something in me that's going to control me, whatever.
That's how their minds go.
The galaxy brain.
Everything's going.
I love it, Nick.
This is great.
But what they don't understand is that, OK, we will stay in our houses because we care about the community of itself.
But it'll just keep us in our houses that much longer because, again, we're not going to be able to go out.
And that's going to distinct the economy because there's not enough of them to keep the economy going anyway without us, the people who actually, you know, the 58, 60 percent of America who recognize how dangerous this can be and how we have to stay in.
And I think that's the weird thing is that they've just been disconnected from the notion that we are all a part of the same thing.
Yeah, and so there's a bunch of stuff again like there's never a silver bullet when explaining any of this stuff, right?
It's never like this this this or this this group is so inundated with a fake reality That has manipulated them for years and years and years that they're operating in in a totally different world But they're also operating in a world where okay, so like for instance I think we've all known this guy the guy on like a college campus or out in town that it's like 10 degrees out and he's wearing shorts and no sleeves You know what I mean?
Or you have the other guy who's macho to the point where it's obvious that he's overcompensating.
It's people who are like, I'm not afraid of a virus!
What are you talking about?
Look, I've got a big giant truck and I've got guns.
Why would I be afraid of a virus?
No, you're projecting your insecurities on the world and trying to prove that you're not afraid and you're not weak, which is, you know, masculinity and the problem of masculinity.
It's about the individual and the outside.
And this continual cycle between the two has just screwed up America so bad, particularly because of, again, rugged individualism, but also the way our political parties and especially the Republican Party have worked.
Now that personality flaw that you just described is basically Donald Trump, and so I suppose that they won't ever be willing to admit that they have that kind of flaw, that they would be that way, but they would gravitate towards others who have that same flaw, who can project everything that's wrong that they're doing onto other people.
Right?
And so they recognize that, like game meets game, and they gravitate towards that.
That seems to me what gets them.
And I've also said this before a lot, but the notion that Trump will continually ignore reality to paint a positive light on things is another one of those, I think, flaws.
It could be a flaw that they also just gravitate toward.
That's that magnetic quality, I suppose, that Trump can have over a very small amount.
I do want to change the polling.
The polling, by the way, was Only 10% of Americans think we should relax social distancing, according to Jon Favreau.
And actually only 18% of Republicans feel that way.
So it's such a vast majority country.
It's not real.
Yeah, it's not real.
And that's the thing.
If you haven't seen it yet, you should seek it out.
I think I retweeted it a couple of days ago.
The Fox News graphic that advertised all these rallies, it looks Like it's like a large swath of Americans.
And then you have like mainstream media companies that should know better showing these protests.
And here's the thing.
They're just like showing them like the heart of them, right?
And they're like, look, there's a hundred people in this frame.
Well, guess what?
There's like three people on the outside of that frame, right?
Right.
But it feels huge and real fast.
And this is something that blew my mind when I was researching my book that people need to look up.
Do you remember, uh, it was like one of the crowning achievements of the Iraq War.
It was the day that the Saddam Hussein statue was pulled down in the square.
Yeah.
Right?
So, the people who are listening, I want you to imagine that.
What it felt like when you saw that.
It felt like there were so many Iraqis there, like, cheering as it happened.
There were a couple of dozen there.
That was a PSYOP.
That was a military propaganda effort to make it seem like they were greeted as liberators.
And it has continued on in the mind as a mythic moment of American victory.
But it wasn't.
The people who were there were like, there's nobody here and this is just weird and isolated.
But it looked like it was a massive thing.
That's what's happening here.
And this is the media continually trying to pretend like they're bipartisan you know unbiased or whatever they want to try and give everybody uh and and that's trumpism too right trumpism's not that many people and it's just like they treat it like it's a major major movement and it's not it's like maybe 28 of the country maybe
Right, and so if you talk to someone who's engaged in that kind of ideology, like, you can just say to them with a straight face, you are just so part of an extreme fraction of the country.
Like, you just don't represent anything that's part of the country, and that's just like telling them, calling them a horrible word, and just, you know, they'll just dismiss that and walk away.
That's the thing.
The reality distortion also indicates to them that they are part of a huge movement.
And it's constantly reinforced to that by watching things like Fox News.
And that's dangerous.
When you feel like you're a part of a big movement and everyone's behind you and the whole country feels that way, it's hard to ever walk that back.
Now, meanwhile, I feel like I'm amongst the vast majority of people in the country and how they feel, but I don't have any empowerment over that.
All I do is bite my nails and have anxiety every day over this notion that Trump is going to win again because there's enough of these, you know, those Republicans who are sitting in the damn corner of their table, that round table at the wedding, who won't leave.
even though the guy is giving the worst drunk speech of all time that's insulting every race and every, you know, gender and everything.
And there's enough of those and enough, you know, there's the 60,000 people in the three random states that are going to decide the electoral college, right?
We're still in that situation where nothing historically, the polls right now can indicate what's going to happen in November.
Well, how do we respond?
Are we going to go out in public in March and coalesce and, you know, protest?
No, we can't.
Because we're practicing social distancing and, you know, self-quarantining.
So it feels, and by the way, this is probably the smartest thing that Richard Nixon ever did.
It's the idea of the silent majority.
It says, you may not hear people saying what you're thinking all the time, but everybody is.
It's a very small group of people.
And actually, there was a really good article that Greg Sargent had in the Washington Post today, which is that Trump, when he talks about these people and he talks about Democrats, he tells his supporters, oh, The only reason that Democrats get more votes than you and have power or whatever is because they cheat and they lie and they steal.
It's not a real election.
We are technically the majority.
And these people are the liars.
And so it's, again, it's more fabrication.
It's more astroturfing.
It's more building up a fake movement to seem larger than it is.
And so what you have to realize is that America is inundated and poisoned with these fabricated realities.
It's a really sad state of affairs, but it's what's happening.
And meanwhile, we got Joe Biden to save us from all of this.
Yeah, and we have to rely on them.
And if I'm pissed off about it, you're pissed off about it, what do we do?
We pick up our phone and we tweet about it.
We just send it out in the void and then it doesn't do anything, right?
It's a machine that makes us feel like we're doing something.
It makes us feel like, oh, I get this many retweets or this many likes or shares on Facebook.
And it makes you feel like you're actually doing something, but all you're actually doing is powering a machine with your outrage and your anger.
And these people are showing up with AK-47s, right?
Over here.
Or AR-15s.
And they're showing up on Capitals, and there's like a hundred of them, but they're treated like thousands.
Yeah, and what have we come to that, you know, back in the day these people would not even dare talk about Russia or have any association, but yet, when they have an AK-47, which is a Russian-made rifle, and they're proud to have those things, too, that's crazy, crazy talk.
The whole notion of Russia being our enemy has so become corrupted, where, like, you'll see those people wearing shirts that say, I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat, right?
How have we gotten to that point?
Because those specific people of all the people in the country should be the ones who are completely railing against what Russia did and how they were involved in the election and how chummy Trump is with Putin.
You know, Trump has had four calls with Putin that are basically hidden from us.
We don't even know what they talked about in all these different calls.
I'm so glad you brought that up because it comes full circle.
It's all part of the same thing.
The reason why Republicans and... I don't even want to call them conservatives anymore.
The reason why Republicans and Trumpists are so tight-knit on Russia is because they're all possessed of white supremacist conspiracy notions.
The idea is that there is a global conspiracy of shadowy... What kind of people, Nick?
Jews.
Oh yeah, the Jews.
They are orchestrating a global conspiracy that is going against white people to take their power away.
That is the defining ideology of Russia right now under Vladimir Putin.
And that is also the defining ideology of trumpist america they are looking at the exact same thing and it is a new world order deep state globalist whatever you want to call it again an anti-semitic conspiracy theory that unites them and it makes them feel like they have to be uh allies in this thing which by the way um you know we're nearing the end of the podcast so i just want to point that's out there that's also what united the axis powers but that's just neither here nor there nick i'm
I just want to point out that conspiracy theories and paranoia and the perceived loss of power, particularly in the face of the loss of power in a white supremacist world, leads to strange bedfellows and it leads to bad things and manipulation.
I can't agree more and you know just quickly reminded me of the thread that we saw on Twitter from I think it was Tim Mack you share with me about the history of the pandemic the 1918 Spanish flu which when they relaxed social distancing a little too early in San Francisco it came roaring back and you had a whole anti-mask committee that was again propaganda that got people just like we are today.
There's nothing has changed.
We haven't learned from the history of that either.
You throw in the fact that the World War I ended as well, and everyone got on the streets to celebrate that.
And it just ended up right back where we are, which is death and sickness.
And by the way, even if you recover, there's talking about long-term damage to major organs here that you might not ever recover from after that.
So that's the thing that doesn't seem worth it.
No matter how ever you slice this, and yet there they are angry in the streets and being interviewed on Fox.
Just to show that this is an unbiased podcast, let's just bring up real fast one of the worst presidents and human beings in human history, which is Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, who created a cult of personality around him and engineered a lot of the propaganda that we're now seeing weaponized.
And in World War One he was treated as the savior of the world because it was American propaganda which got us to where we are now.
And I just want to point out that at these rallies people are flying Trump flags of him dressed up like Rambo with like big giant muscles holding weapons and and in like slathered up like Putin.
It's this cult of personality that is all based on propaganda and social engineering and manipulation, and that's how you get here, is when a country gets taken over by cult and personality and propaganda manipulation, which is exactly what we're watching happening right now.
Jerry, we need our own propaganda for this podcast.
Well, I think we can work on that.
In the meantime, maybe we can ask our guest Dan Dresner about that.
We're about to welcome him on to talk about his book, Toddler in Chief, which talks about the infantilization of Donald Trump and the horror of that.
So yeah, everybody hang out for a second and here's Dan Dresner.
Hey, everyone.
We are incredibly lucky to have a special guest with us today, Dan Drezner, who is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a regular contributor to the Washington Post.
Dan is the author of the new book, The Toddler in Chief, What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency.
You know, it's a funny title.
It makes me laugh every time I see it, and then I remember in sheer terror that this man is in charge of our country.
That's exactly the tightrope I was walking writing the book, by the way.
A tightrope over a wilderness of razors.
Can you talk a little bit about the impetus for this thing, and maybe, I don't know, trying to make sense of one of the most absolutely ridiculous, dangerous, and frightening things that I can ever imagine, and how you sort of came to terms with this project?
This started in late April of 2017 as a Twitter threat and it was a response to, and you've got to remember the mindset of people in early 2017, and this is important because I'm not trying to diss people when I say this, but I think particularly within the mainstream media there was this aching desire to normalize Trump.
In other words, to look at Donald Trump and think, OK, it was an awful campaign, OK, it was a rocky transition, but you know what?
He's going to grow into the presidency.
He's going to realize the awesome powers of the office he's occupying.
There are adults in the room that will will guide him, you know, as an inexperienced person to actually, you know, going into this.
And, you know, we're all going to be OK.
And we saw this in the mainstream media reaction, for example, to Trump's first joint address to Congress.
We saw it in the reaction to the missile strikes he launched on Syria.
You had people like Fareed Zakaria saying this was the day Trump became president or Van Jones saying this was the day Trump, you know, grew into the presidency.
And I got that.
But on the other hand, you know, you would see those statements and then you would also see a passel of news stories in which Trump's own staffers were describing him anonymously the way you would describe a petulant two year old.
And so on April 25th, I think there was a story by Robert Costa and Ashley Parker, my colleagues at The Post, where they talked about Trump watching a lot of television and a staffer said something to the effect of, You know, once he goes into the East Wing, there's no controlling him.
And, you know, I remember babysitters saying this to me about my own children.
I mean, not about the East Wing, but like, you know, we, you know, once he goes into his room, we couldn't do anything.
And so I just tweeted something.
I said, you know, I'll believe that Trump grows into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.
And I didn't think it was going to be anything.
I just sort of, you know, it was Twitter.
It was snarky.
And then about a day or two later, I saw a Politico story that had the exact same kind of feel to it.
It's important to stress the people describing him like a toddler in my book and in this thread are not Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or, you know, Adam Serwer or David Brooks or any of those people.
They are people who have a political interest in the success of Donald Trump, who nonetheless describe him the way you would describe a two year old.
And so I started keeping this thread.
And, you know, It just struck me the more I did it, the more I realized the theme stuck.
I think I think the moment I really knew I was going to probably keep at it for a while was if you remember in May of 2017, there was a Time magazine story about Trump's life in the White House in which it was described what happens like, you know, he has dinner with Pence and so on and so forth.
And this detail just got me where like when the dessert course is served, everyone gets one scoop of ice cream except Trump, who gets two scoops of ice cream.
And chocolate sauce.
Such a good boy.
That's the most toddler thing ever.
And so that, you know, that was when I realized at some point I might try to turn this into a book.
Well, Dan, do you remember when you first started, like, how many followers you had on Twitter at that time versus what you have now?
Oh, God.
I want to say I had about 60,000 maybe, I think.
Maybe 70.
I don't remember.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so now you're at like, what, 170, something like that?
137.
It's safe to say this took off and sort of gave you a platform that people really wanted to continue to hear more of, I suppose.
Yes, and furthermore, the other nice thing about it is that as a thread developed, you know, mostly this was just me being on Twitter or reading the news and seeing these kinds of, you know, quotes and adding them.
As the thread caught on, I then started getting help.
Uh, from others who would say, you know, Dan, this is a toddler and chief thread edition here.
Every once in a while, I've had a reporter ping me as well, in which they write something where it's like, oh, you're going to like this.
Not like they would DM me or something.
You know, I think, I keep hearing this and it's like, I was telling somebody a couple of months ago that like comedy comes from the release of horror.
You know, the idea that like something is so out of the ordinary and so surreal that it makes you uncomfortable and so you have to like come to terms with it somehow.
I, you know, we're talking about the most powerful man, theoretically, in the world, who is the man in charge of nuclear codes and is now in charge of a generational pandemic.
And I keep trying, personally, and I keep trying to wrestle around with the people that you're talking about.
We're talking about, like, reporters, and we're talking about pundits, and we're talking about seasoned veterans, right, who have served in presidential administrations, who have constantly looked at this man, who is a force of chaos and grift and the most immature, probably, occupant of the presidency we've ever had.
And they continually do this thing.
Like you're saying, it's almost like laying the bumpers out at the bowling alley.
And they're like, "Oh, don't worry, there are going to be those people in the room.
Somebody's going to be able to handle him.
Today's the day he became president." What do you think is behind that?
Where does that rationale come from?
Where does that delusional sort of navigation originate? - I think it comes from a couple places.
The first, and you know, another book I wrote once was "Theories of International Politics and Zombies," which is a textbook for international relations.
But one of the things I learned writing about that is that one of the utilities of genre is that, you know, genre fiction allows us to deal or to cope with the horror of actual reality, but in a way that we're not just constantly going, Oh, my God, you know, constantly.
In other words, it's a way and it's a psychological way in which we can process Things that are bad, but not incapacitate ourselves so much.
And the reason I say that is that by talking about him like a toddler, there is an element of humor to this because there is an element of humor to this presidency.
It's, you know, it's a clowning in many ways.
And I don't mean to deny the tragedy of it, but I think in some ways, part of the reason I wrote this was it's a way in which we can cope with that tragedy by also realizing there's humor in it.
And so it's a way of processing the bad stuff.
I think the other deeper reason, though, that that people believe this is because, to be fair, prior to Trump, this was a narrative that made some sense.
You know, it's not like Trump is the first inexperienced president to come into office.
A lot of presidents, you know, most presidents, I mean, at least all the post Cold War presidents were elected without a great deal of federal government experience.
You know, Clinton had been a governor for a long time, but had never, you know, dealt with anything international.
George W. Bush, you know, also a governor.
Barack Obama had been only a one-term senator.
Trump, we don't need to get into.
And so, prior to Trump, most of these people did actually have adults in the room that would tell them, do this, don't do that, you know, or this is a bad idea, and so on and so forth.
Now, there's a danger sometimes that presidents rely too much on these people.
You know, maybe they wind up making the wrong decisions.
You can argue that's certainly the case with George W. Bush in Iraq, for example.
But that said, you know, not even Bush's Iraq advisers would probably have given him catastrophic advice like, you know, relax about the pandemic.
It's not that big of a deal.
Or, you know, encourage your supporters to rally at state capitals as a way of changing things.
And the other thing that's happened is that For the longest time, and this is a deeper part of the book that I'm telling, is that essentially this is a bigger problem we have now than we would have had 50 years ago because the checks and balances on the presidency have eroded very badly since the sort of post-Watergate days.
That Congress has become incapacitated in no small part due to polarization.
The judicial branch has shown undue deference to the executive.
Presidents have learned to run roughshod over the bureaucracy.
over sort of informal norms and rules and procedures.
And so all of this was done in no small part because the rest of Washington was so incapacitated, the president was given more and more power because the president was thought to be the last adult in the room.
And then we elected Donald Trump. - Well, my question I think is, I don't know if you could have a favorite example of how he's been described as a toddler because that seems, well, maybe, I think comedy is tragedy plus time, right?
So maybe eventually we'll find it funny.
But is there any one in particular, give us a little taste of, not to put you on the spot, that jumps out in your mind that you feel like is something that was really extra special, memorable for you that encapsulates that description of him?
I think there's a couple.
I mean, the first is in terms of the quotes, you know, a lot of the accusations are, well, all these, you know, staffers who say, you know, Trump is a toddler are anonymous.
There's on the record stuff of people saying this.
And my favorite are the ones where, like, it's a guy who's been Trump's, you know, full-throated supporter.
My favorite quote, I think, is from Lindsey Graham, actually, where Lindsey Graham at one point in early 2019 said, the president's been, he can be a handful.
That's just the way he is, you know.
What are you gonna do with that?
That's exactly the way you would describe a rambunctious toddler.
I'm sorry.
And then the other, the time story I liked, but I do think my favorite story that seems toddler-like was his desire to buy Greenland.
You know, and by the way, that is another reason why I wrote this, because a lot of the stuff in this book, it's mostly, again, I was relying on the media, you know, on mainstream media reporting.
I wasn't really, you know, going out of my way to look for this stuff.
But the problem with Trump, or living under Trump, is that we get inundated with wave after wave of constant shocks.
We forget stories like, oh yeah, he thought buying Greenland would work, or he asked about nuking a hurricane.
You know, these kinds of stories where we just sort of forget that he actually tried this stuff.
And I also like that because, let's face it, in the end it was hopefully harmless.
I don't think he helped US relations with Denmark.
My favorite part was where he canceled the state visit, or the visit to Denmark, because the Prime Minister wouldn't sell him.
I mean, it's like the ultimate toddler move of, I think I'll do this crazy idea, and then when the crazy idea doesn't work, you pout.
Man, I had almost forgotten about the nuking of a hurricane.
That was a thing he said?
- That was a thing he said, yeah. - Story by Jonathan Swan and Oxyos, where he basically asked, well, you know, hurricane season's coming in, why can't we just nuke the hurricanes?
Would that be a way of destroying the hurricanes?
And by the way, this weirdly also helps to explain at least somewhat, I think, Trump's sort of level of support from his base.
Because if you think about it, that is a classic question from someone who knows nothing about policy or policymaking.
And to be fair, that's true of a lot of Americans.
Most Americans are rationally ignorant about politics because Americans are busy people.
They got lives to lead.
They, they, you know, they don't necessarily automatically pay attention to national politics.
So it's the kind of question that one of his supporters would ask as well.
Yeah, and you know, the idea that Americans sort of rely on the mythology of a president, right?
Like this whole idea.
And something I've been thinking about, I've been looking through your work over the past few days, and while I was doing research on my book, I was born in 1981, so like I was a child as Ronald Reagan was president.
And the Ronald Reagan that has been in my memory has been like the mythologized Reagan, right?
You know, the cold warrior and all this stuff.
And the more research that I do on it, the more that Reagan's presidency sort of, um, kind of weirdly resembled a lot of Donald Trump's presidency.
There were always adults in the room who were always, you know, doing things like making cartoons for him.
And, you know, they would have jelly bean breaks.
I mean, it's sort of insane when you start talking about it.
But somebody who's been looking at all this and sort of like getting in people's heads as they're talking about Trump as a toddler, Do you think there's a future where possibly this type of stuff could be mythologized and washed over and sort of turned into like a quirky presidency?
Or do you think that it's going to eventually shine through?
How do you see this playing out?
So I think honestly, and this is how I close the book, a lot of this depends on whether he gets reelected.
You know, if he gets reelected, then at a minimum, you have to describe Trump as a political success.
Which is he ran in 2016 and, you know, all the pundits didn't think he was going to win and he won against all odds.
He didn't win the popular vote, but he does he does surprise people.
If he gets reelected in the wake of the most severe economic contraction in a century and the most significant pandemic we faced in a century and he gets reelected with this, then, yeah, there is going to be there will be narratives constructed of This guy was a political genius.
He totally upended the game and was able to be elected twice.
Now, that said, it's worth remembering that, you know, George W. Bush was elected twice.
We've had other failed, you know, Richard Nixon was elected twice.
We've had other failed presidents that have won two elections.
But it becomes easier for, you know, Trump supporters to spin a narrative of him as you know, a successful president.
And it'll be one of those things that'll be debated going, you know, in the future.
I'm just kind of curious if, do you think that there's someone out there like taking notes, maybe even from what your book is about, and realizing what not to do, but to also carry out the same exact kind of, you know, policies that Trump is doing, who could be wildly successful and never had any of the issues that Trump is having and win, you know, who could be wildly successful and never had any of the issues that Trump The nightmare scenario is what we're asking about here, Dan.
That's something that terrifies me of, you know, does a Tom Cotton or a Josh Hawley, you know, look at this and think, okay, here's what worked, here's what doesn't.
They're, That is possible.
But I will say this, and it's the one encouraging thing, and it does suggest, by the way, there's something unique about Trump, which is everyone who has tried the sort of Trump formula that is not Trump has failed.
Um, you know, and this this is true of his cabinet supporters, your cabinet officials or people who run for elected office.
You think Matt Bevin in Kentucky, for example, I think is a good example.
Or Thomas Modley, who was this acting secretary of the Navy who just got fired or had to quit.
It might be that you would have to have some degree of Trumpian charisma, for lack of a better way of putting it.
And whatever you think about Trump, he had spent decades building a brand.
Such that, like, I think part of it also, to be honest, is that, you know, as someone who grew up, I'm older than you, but like both of us grew up with Donald Trump sort of in the pop culture background.
He was always, you know, this guy who we knew was a self promoter and kind of thought maybe was a little bit buffoonish, but like harmless in some way.
And I don't think that's how people would look at people like Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley.
He does.
Those people don't give off the same vibe.
And so I'm Well, you know, in a current events podcast, we will take cautiously optimistic as a way to close out anything that we possibly can.
or events.
If let's say Trump loses in 2020, but his success, and let's say President Biden is simply overmatched or overwhelmed, you know, then we'll see come 2024.
Well, you know, in a current events podcast, we will take cautiously optimistic as a way to close out anything that we possibly can.
Dan Dresner, where can people find you?
You can find me on Twitter at Dan Dresner.
And I write four times a week for The Washington Fantastic.
And again, we were talking with Dan Drezner, the author of The Toddler-in-Chief, What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency.
Thanks so much, Dan.
Thank you.
So that was Daniel Drezner, a fantastic follow on Twitter.
Again, he's got over 1,300 tweets citing people of the administration describing him like a toddler.
And he's simply not never grown into that position of elder statesman like he claimed he would.
Yeah and never will and I think it's we should have an episode later on about how all these people who treat him like a toddler think he's going to become a president have this absolutely misguided trust in the office.
It's almost like Jean Baudrillard would say something about the symbol of the presidency and the flag and the seal of the presidency in the White House and how it's sort of lost all meaning and it's you know been tainted and tarnished but that's neither here nor there.
Right.
I have hope that eventually, in the distant future, they'll look back on this time as a stain of our history, of our democracy, and we will have overcome it and figured out ways to fix all these problems.
Which reminds me, Jared, we still need to have that podcast where we list all of our solutions for how to avoid this happening in the future.
Yeah, we need to have a Solutions Podcast, and I think that's the closest thing that we're going to find to hope in all of this.
It is an extremely frustrating, aggravating time, but we thank you for coming and listening and the support.
This podcast is growing by leaps and bounds.
We are so excited about that, and we have had incredible feedback and just a lot of support from you, and we just want to let you know we appreciate it.
Please don't forget to subscribe, like, rate, share, retweet.
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So thank you so much.
For my co-host Nick Hausman, who you can find at CanYouHearMeSMH, I am at JY Sexton.
