The Bulwark Podcast - John Ganz: Trump’s Coalition of the Aggrieved

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

The era of hell that we are living through may have been ordained in the 90s by angry Republican voters who felt screwed by the corporate elite—and political leaders who didn’t represent them. Trump watched Pat Buchanan and David Duke and saw how their protectionist, anti-immigrant, culture war messaging was resonating. More recently, Trump returned to his New York wheeler-dealer vibe by getting us in a war because he needed to look strong after SCOTUS struck down his stupid tariffs. Plus, more on Vance’s insincere religious discovery, Platner’s tattoo, the Dems’ nerd problem and its incompatibility with the base’s desire for a fighter, the jock/creep administration, and the Dan Goldman coffee shop incident.John Ganz joins Tim Miller.show notes John's book, "When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s"  John's Substack  Tim's interview with Jon Ossoff  Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code THEBULWARK at mudwtr.com/THEBULWARK! #mudwtrpod

Welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Glad to welcome to the show, the author of Unpopular Front on Substack. He wrote the book When the Clock Broke, Conman, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the early 1990s, about the David Duke and the right-wing media ecosystem. We're going to talk about that. He goes, host 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 a good. up vomiting all night and I had to meet with TA this morning to discuss some reading Kavrimas. Oh, God. We draw up hard and, you know, we're going to

do a little René Gerard. So it's we'll be okay. It wasn't the fun kind of vomiting though. 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. Okay. So far as I can remember. Not the best evening.

I just want to start for people who aren't familiar with your substack, which is great. Give us a little baseline for your politics. JVL and 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 is the good part of the social part.

Either, yeah. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm a social Democrat. I would say that's how I would identify. 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 social social. 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 have. tell you and and you know we're we're very temperamentally similar i think uh eliz i know i you know elizabeth warren is someone also i have a lot of admiration for i oc you know i was very excited about her rise and and

you know and i supports nara mom dani so you know these are my politics basically i've had too many burney people on the pod lately i've got to we need a cleanse yeah i need to get joe mansion back on the pot yeah you got to find somebody the left of of uh 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. 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 people in charge are evil, stupid, or both, and those who support them are either evil, stupid, or both, 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 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, but 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, you know, 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, anything they do, you know, a week from then the line has totally changed. You know, usually a presidential coalition, you know, has tensions, but theirs isn't like open confrontation with each other all the time,

which is unusual, you know, a president usually went like undertaking a project like going to war say right now usually you would imagine i mean this is the way we 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 than you know we grew up with and we're accustomed to to commenting on and it very much is the Trump show. And he, he personalizes everything. He does 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 don't think that, I think basically he is sometimes swayed by conspiratorial rhetoric is 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 like a person behind them. He'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. 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, you know, he can also change course. Unlike, say, you know, he has some instinct that, you know, listening to Stephen Miller about every single thing is probably not the best idea. But he keeps him around. Where do you feel like the Iran war and the latest one 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, you know, 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 strategical for the United States. They were talking in the beginning about regime change. We're making all this noise, all this grandiose plans. And then we basically have nothing of like that. And we're going to go to something that is kind of a weaker version of the JCPOA. And, you know, it's, it's, 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 that he was led to believe, he decided to walk away. And he's

just basically pulling out of what he feels is a bad deal and trying to enter into a new deal with Iran, who now he praises his reasonable people. And before they were a lunatic. and so and so forth. If you go back to the way he behaved in New York City and the way he carried on business deals and he carried on his behavior with politicians trying to get those deals across, it was always like this. It was a lot of recriminations, huge statements that he would never work for somebody. This guy was crazy. It was a lunatic. He was the worst. And then the next week he's trying to make buddy buddy or vice versa. He has a close relationship, working relationship with somebody, and then they have a terrible falling out and he's saying all kinds of horrible things to them.

He speaks in a way that is guaranteed to make headlines, you know, to stay in the news all the time, but it can't entirely be taken seriously. He's a self-promoter extraordinaire. There's a term called mere puffery, right, in advertisement. Like if you say it's the best coffee in the world, I can't sue them for false advertising because that's obviously, you know, just an piece of advertising rhetoric. Trump's almost every word is essentially mere puffery. Like, that's his functional mode of discourse.

And so you can't really take any of his declaration seriously, which makes, I'm sure, doing diplomacy with him very hard or doing any kind of, you know, business with him at all, very difficult and hard to get it. And it's extremely unreliable. I have a little schadenfreude, as I think many people do, as the Israelis having such a hard time with him and being so shocked, what did you think? Who did you think you were dealing with? Yeah.

Oh, you thought you had the Spanish. key to his heart. Give me a break. I mean, oh, we're so friendly and he's so good to us, he can change his mind any moment. He's dropped old friends. He can drop some political ally when it doesn't seem like it's going as wet. Consistency is not his forte. And he, you know, to his advantage, he's able to change course very quickly. Should have bribed him. Well, I'm sure that they probably tried and are doing something. But I think the real people who are excelling and bribing him are the Gulf states probably. And that may reflect the approach here. I'm a big coffee drinker, and I used to think caffeine was the only way to get the energy and focus

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go to mudwater.com slash the bulwark and grab the starter kit. Use code the bulwark and you'll get 43% off. The frothar alone is worth it. That's right. Up to 43% off with code the bulwark at M-U-D-W-T-R.com. After you purchase, they'll ask you how you found them. Please show your support for our show and tell them we sent you. I want to go back to an early 90s Trump because this ties to your book in this period.

The title I really like, when the clock broke. It's about a Murray-Rothbard speech. I kind of feel like your publisher had to hate it, though. My publisher hated when I proposed them kind of like weird self-referential titles and, you know, wanted it to be very straightforward, but it works for me. My agent didn't seem to think it was going to be a good idea, but I convinced the publisher of it pretty quickly. Okay, nice. I want to get into kind of the political, like philosophical, if you even want to call it that, underpinnings of this, but you have an interesting insight in. to that, like, about how Trump is a bit of an unfrozen caveman from this period, too. And Trump is maybe,

was obviously not influenced by the writings of Murray Rothbard, but his obsessions and, you know, his instincts were kind of developed in the same time. Well, Rothbard foresaw the type of politics that Trump practices as a path forward for like the hard right, which is basically a kind of, what he called it at the time, right-wing populism. He was looking at the time. He was looking at the time. looking at David Duke running in in Louisiana and how the media kind of freaked out about it. And he said, this is the way to do it. You know, you go around the media, you short circuit the media, and, you know, you talk directly to the people and you attack, you know, your enemies and the bureaucracy and the elites and the liberal elites. And, you know, you get a lot of people very excited and, you know,

it's a very bombastic style. So he envisioned the style, I would say the policies, insofar as there's any kind of coherent background, a guy named Sam Francis, who envisioned, you know, basically a kind of U.S. under a kind of dictatorship, but that was like a developmental dictatorship that was highly protectionist that would try to protect American businesses, a unilateral aggressive foreign policy, America first foreign policy. So that was the kind of people who I saw as being harbingers or profits of Trumpism. Now, Trump has. himself, he saw Pat Buchanan and David Duke running. He said, look, you know, they're, they're doing well because there's a lot of anger in this country. And he, for a very long time,

had these protectionist instincts. Essentially, you know, he temperamentally goes along with this ideological program, which is that the United States' relationship with the world is adversarial and our so-called allies are trying to screw us. Immigrants are sucking. up our resources. It's a very zero-sum, hostile and paranoid attitude towards the world. And, you know, insofar as a philosophical articulation, these guys do it. But, you know, you can also just boil it down to certain instinctual or habitual behaviors and beliefs of Trump that he picked up through his life. He also, don't forget, Trump experienced a near brush with ruin in the late 80s, early 90s. I think that this intensified his paranoia and his attitude to the world as being

an essentially hostile place. He found his negotiations with the bankers, which ultimately came out quite favorable to him because they could have ruined him, to be very humiliating. And he wanted to take revenge against a lot of people we felt had not stuck with him through his hard times and turned on him. The 80s was a great move time for Trump. That comes to an end at the the end of the 80s. And he sticks with a lot of the same preoccupations. Urban crime. You know, urban crime is on the decline, but that's an obsession for Trump. You know, if you go back to this era, this is the era where Japan, South Korea, and at that time, West Germany, their imports, you know, were very competitive with American manufacturers. And there was a current of opinion,

which Trump was, you know, shared, which is that, you know, we need to protect domestic industries. And I think that basically Trump is also in this kind of late Cold War period where those under our protective umbrella are now becoming our competitors. You see it also in his attitude towards immigration. You know, the Reagan administration was fairly liberal on immigration, but there was a current of opinion that started to get more and more paranoid or hostile that immigrants were harming the national substance. of the United States or taking up resources. I think his obsession with Russia has to do with his notion that Russia is still a power on par with the Soviet Union. You know, this is also, he's very obsessed with this summit diplomacy that he must have seen Gorbachev and Reagan engaging in and the pompant circumstance with it. So his idea of Russia is just, well, you know, these are the Soviets, we need to treat them with respect and so on and so forth. And that suits Russia just fine,

because that's exactly how they want to be perceived. I also think that Trump temperamentally finds Putin's mode of government to be appealing. I think that he likes his way of doing things. He's a bigger gangster in a certain way. I don't know that he has direct desire to help Russia because of, you know, whatever. P-taped. Yeah. As I was listening to some of your interviews on this,

like the emergence of this you know kind of mindset this kind of right populism in the period of the early 90s this stuff was bouncing around before that right and it's not as if it was not you know kind of right populist thought before I mean a lot of this was in

you know kind of like like mailed newsletters and Republican campaigns and like things through this notion and so I was trying to figure out like this question of like when you were on Chris Hayes' show and he was talking about this like why 1992 and 2016. And you guys, as progressives, like, both fell back on economic anxiety, basically, like, economic structures that were happening at these times.

And I'm just, like, not sure if that's right. Like, to me, it feels like it's more about mass media. And, like, there was this, like, undercurrent of right populism in the country that needed, you know, basically bombastic media figures slash politicians. to be able to, you know, reach them. And like a lot of these people weren't reachable. You know, it was hard to organize this sort of thing prior. What do you make of that?

I think they're both. It's both and. It's not either or. I think that basically, yes, the fragmentation of media has opened up the doors for a lot of things that would not have made it into, you know, the previous ecosystem of media. and that is a boon to all kinds of crackpots and charlatans and politics that were once fringe. There's no doubt about it.

But the appeal of these politicians only makes sense if you consider the trajectory of the society and the fact that you have large members of the middle and lower middle classes is feeling increasingly squeezed and dispossessed and feeling unrepresented by their politicians who they feel are intrinsically corrupt. And, you know, I don't think that Trump comes along without the 2008 crash and the feeling that there's something, you know,

rigged about the system, as he likes to put it. So I don't think you can really disentangle them. They're not represented as a good word, though, because this is another thing I was thinking about because, and this is why I'm not like, I'm of the view that the Republican Party is like not returning to anything, resembling anything from before when the clock broke. Well, I guess unless you're counting like Lindbergh, unless you're counting that way before.

Right. Because another variable that these two times is I'm thinking about like, why is Buchanan rising in 92 and why is that successful? Why is Trump successful in 2016? And I think, well, yeah, it's because this is what Republican voters really wanted. Like the Republican voter voter id was always. Buchanan, culture war, Trump, but, you know, that the elites of the party managed to be able to kind of control the animals a little bit. And then you have like H.W. Bush and Mitt Romney, God love them.

Like, we're both particularly ill-suited to kind of be able to bring that crowd into more of a mainstream conservatism. Reagan and then H.W. son and W. Bush both like, you know, both had a folksiness that kind of allowed them. to bridge it. Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. I do think that, you know, the new right that coalesced around Reagan, and, you know, Reagan was not the first choice for a lot of those guys. They wanted somebody crazier like John Connolly. You know, Reagan was kind of too moderate for some people in that version of the new right. And then they kind of grew to love him and realize, you know, he was sort of one of them. But the people I write about exited the Reagan years feeling betrayed and let down that he wasn't.

more radical rightus. For people on the left like me, you know, that sounds wild because we think, oh, Reagan was an absolute catastrophe and could not have been more right wing. And as Buchanan said, the biggest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan. And there was a constituency for the type of politics they practiced. It became apparent. Wallace campaigns showed it. It was there. It overlaps with the, let's say, the Republican primary voter, but it's not entirely partisan because it's an I think this is what you have to understand about Trump is and what I was trying to get out in my book. He also encapsulates the spirit of a third party candidate, right, of a candidate like Ross Perrault who comes out and says, you know, the parties are crooked. I'm

going to reform them. I'm going to change everything. So there is a populist spirit which is not entirely contained in either party and in fact can attack the party's system itself. And if you look at the way Trump takes over the Republican Party, he kind of attacks it as a almost a third party kind of candidate. He is not connected with any of the existing power structures. He's connected with kind of a mass movement in the Republican Party because he's a Tea Party figure. But he's not connected really so far and the elites that that generate. But he's not connected to any of the old party structures. And that makes him appeal, right?

Because there's a feeling of betrayal, a feeling that those people aren't tough enough. I mean, the Massey quote where he said, oh, I realized that they didn't care what I believe they were just voting for the crazy son of a bitch. It's one of the most insightful things about American politics. Anybody said in about 20 years. So, yeah, there was a desire on many levels for a figure like Trump. And it was contained, but it couldn't be contained permanently because the voters got fed up. And they said, we don't like the candidates. You're feeding us.

And in that way, it's democratic. I mean, Trump's first election is not through democratic means. It was through the FACTA system of the electoral college. But in terms of the way he took over the Republican Party, he won those primaries, fair and square. There was a huge, huge, you know, enthusiasm behind which I'm sure you guys all remember. But the internal party democracy of the Republicans allowed Trump to happen. The Democrats still have a little bit of an intact party structure for good and ill. summer change is how I get dressed.

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I want to get to the don't guys a second, but your comment about Trump and how he, like, despite, you know, being the three-time Republican nominee, still kind of represents or positions as a non-partisan figure or as like some kind of outside figure. The kind of big news in right circles. Yesterday is a clip from Tucker Carlson, what he said on a show in Canada. He was speaking to uncensored Canada. We're exporting our crankery as well.

So Tucker on the show said this. I would not support the Republican Party. There's no chance I'd support it. Not going to support the Democratic Party either. How could I support a political party that is not loyal to the United States? There's no defending this. I'm out. I don't believe that for a second.

I don't believe that for a second. First of all, again, like, Trump and Tucker Carlson has been in media for a very long time. He knows how to make a, he knows how to make news and get into headlines. And he does that instinctually. He's got to be interesting. He's got to always say something. Also, he's mirroring what people do with the right of already said is he's just copying Nick Fuentes at this point. He's been saying the same thing. Nick Fuentes goes farther to be provocative and says he's going to vote for Democrats. He's going to change his mind. So is Tucker Carlson. They're making news. The other thing about Tucker Carlson is I don't think he remembers half the

things it says. And he makes outrageous statements all the time. He said that he thought that, you know, this administration was ruled by the Antichrist. And then he was on the Times. They said, well, you said this administration is ruled by the Antichrist. And he said, I never said that. I never said that. I don't know if he was lying or he just doesn't know the truth from anything. These people, I mean, you know, we're a part of it in a certain way, but I don't think in exactly the same way. They basically have an ongoing discourse, verbal diarrhea, and I don't think that they really pay that close attention are that careful about what they say. They don't say, oh, I said this, and to be a principled person, I have to stick by it. I'm sure by primary time, Tucker's going to have his guy,

and the fact that he said that is going to mean nothing. People are going to play the clip over and over of him saying, I'm not going to throw Republicans. He's not going to care. He's going to care. He's going to say, well, actually, this guy, probably J.D. Vance is fine. And you know what? Frankly, he might be setting himself up for his own run. There's been a lot of speculation for a long time that Tucker has admissions in this regard. And the only reason why you think that might not be true is because, you know, a lot of his friends and family work for JD Vance and they seem to have a buddy relationship. So does he really want to compete directly with him?

I don't know. Like, even paying attention to that seems to be kind of stupid. He's just making noise. Two things for that. Later in the interview he does talk about J.D., and then he discusses like basically how this is why he's a media person and J.D. is a politician because he couldn't be in J.D.'s shoes. he's in this impossible situation, the vice president, you know, works for the president,

can't be fired. And he's like, I believe the JD, you know, realizes that this is a mistake. This is kind of the Iran War, Israel partnership element of it. And I think that he is trying to, like, at least position himself as being an outside air cover, I guess, for JD. But in the context of the book that I do think it's interesting, like, he is, he is leveling the same critiques of the, right populists from the area you're talking about, you're writing about. Yeah, especially when it comes to Israel. That was a big, that was a big issue for them even at that time when it wasn't quite so salient. I think it's extremely dangerous and irresponsible to pretend like that, first of all, JD Vance was a part of the policymaking apparatus of this administration and didn't

have a hand in making this decision. And that Donald Trump is not a grown-up who doesn't make and so decisions. I mean, like, they support a guy who they seem to implicitly say in their discourse is swayable and controllable by other people. So, like, what kind of a person is that? What are you doing supporting this person? And they're creating this narrative, this kind of stabbed in the back narrative, where, oh, well, you know, Maga was great, and we were going fine, and then the Israelis, the Jews, came along and screwed it all up. Well, Trump screwed it all up because he, unlike every single other U.S. president, didn't see through the fact that BB's rhetoric and ideas about this were unrealistic and crazy. And he had his own political needs to take care of

that had nothing to do with the United States and nothing to do with, you know, protecting our interests and just said, eh, go fuck yourself. I'm not going to do it. Trump was the only person stupid enough or, you know, mercurial enough or whatever to try to roll the dice. I think he'd roll the dice because his administration was sinking on every other issue. You know, don't forget this comes not long after the tariffs thing. You know, I think do you have to put every decision in the context of what is going on in the news for Trump shortly before? And if he feels like he's being weakened or he looks bad, he makes these improvisational decisions based on the meaning to appear strong. The president happens have a lot of power of foreign policy and war-making powers, unfortunately. So that's an area he can

make an immediate impact and try to make a big splash when the policy part of his administration is very much a flop. So, you know, I think that that's what he was thinking with the war, and he thought it would probably be something like Venezuela, a simple matter. And anybody who is an adult who's read the newspaper can tell you not the same story at all. But for some reason, every 15 years or so, the United States forgets how to think. We think that the world is some simple place that we can manipulate it will. And oh, well, you know, we're going to go in there and then we're going to knock over their regime. And people who ought to have known better because they live through Iraq were like, oh, yeah, well, maybe it'll work out this time.

You know, even some people who were critics of Trump went, well, about this. Look, about this thing. oh, you mean one of the most unrealistic and potentially catastrophic things he could possibly do, which is to pick a fight, start a war with another power with no idea what was going to be at the end of that war, I think the United States basically showed itself to be not that powerful. You know, he made a lot of big noises like he could affect a lot. Now they realize, eh, we're going to kind of just take what we can get here. I did not actually suffer through communion, producer Ansley, did, J.D. Vance's new book.

Yeah, I have read it either. Sent some sections. It's a section I want to share with you because I noticed you were on the Know Your Enemy podcast, shout to our guys over there. We've been on a couple times. One time I was discussing Renee Gerard.

Yeah. And you won't be surprised that René Girard gets a shout-out in communion. There are two sections I want to read to you. The first one is how came around to seeing the error of his ways

with regards to atheism. Peter Thiel impacted me in another way. Possibly the smartest person I'd ever met, he identified very openly as a Christian. He defined the simple social template I had constructed that dumb people were religious and smart people were atheists. I began to wonder where his faith came from,

which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher, under whom Teal had studied at Stanford. Gerard's thought catalog is rich enough that my summary went to a justice, his theory of mematic rivalry, that we tend to compete over things other people want, spoke directly to some of the competitive pressures I had experienced at Yale.

So it goes on, but I just wondering what you're kind of initial reaction as to that origin story? Well, René Girard believes that people essentially, you know, mimic each other and want the same things, and that leads them into inevitable conflict. And that's the part of this kind of philosophical anthropology and description of the world. And the upshot for him is the only way out of this is religious faith. So the whole thing is kind of a Christian apologetics. For me, what he's describing there is not really being moved by religious sentiment. It's kind of realizing that the smart people that he wants to be in with are religious and then kind of changing his tune.

And he said, oh, well, you know, I want to impress Teal. So I'm into Ernie Gerard. And that's memetic behavior like Gerard describes. You start to copy people because I think Teal is smart, therefore what Teal pursues. So I've always believed that J.D. Vance is deeply wounded by the kind of entry into America's elite that he had, which is that he's a bright guy. He went to Yale, you know, but he comes from this underprivile background. And I think he, he like Richard Nixon before him, who was a bright guy, but really resented elites and their condescension towards him.

I think that, you know, he really has a chip on his shoulder about that. It's funny. There's another clip of his. I was watching Bob Costa was interviewing him and Usha together about the book to join interview. And I just thought it was like really unintentionally revealing. Oh, I thought you said Bob Costas for a second. I was like, that's a kid.

Oh, he knows. He could be rebranding. Everybody's a podcaster these days. Right. And here is Usha Vance explaining why she didn't convert alongside J.D. I think it's pretty telling. Well, I think in some ways it has been a very person. journey for him. I grew up in a household, a Hindu household, a very stable household, and I've not felt the same sense of need to seek something different that he has.

So I think the journey has been more in our relationship, right? Trying to understand where he is, the different ways he's thinking about things, how that fits into the life that we have together and less a religious journey of my own. I love the clip so funny. She's like basically saying like, yeah, J.D. was wounded. His ego. was wounded by the lack of a father figure and, you know, maybe by the people looking down their nose at him as E.L. And this is all part of his self-discovery more than it is actually a religious endeavor. One knock you could make on Gerard in general and this approach to religion and a lot of conservative's approach to religion, quite frankly, is that no doubt many of them are sincere, of course. But they usually relate to religion as some kind of social or psychological necessity, and that's not quite the same as believing, right? If you say, well, it's better for society

if we do that, that's not quite saying, I believe in the literal truth that, you know, of this religion and that, you know, God is communicating through its representatives. It's something much more utilitarian. So I think that Girard's philosophy is an entry point for people whose viewpoint on the world is fundamentally not one of faith. It's one of reason. And this seems to be a rational picture of the world and how it works and why people are competitive. What Gerard is right about is that being involved in these social competitions and desiring what others want and being in these memetic, basically love triangles is extremely painful. And it's very difficult to feel like you've accomplished, you know, very much because there's always this endless regress of all of this

person has something I want. So the appeal of religion then is it seems that Gerard said, well, instead of imitating others, imitate Christ, and he was the only person not infected by this. And yeah, I can understand, you know, the pains of living in a competitive society. When we want to escape that and take a more contemplative stance towards it, it seems to me that these fellows have a very utilitarian, almost synestable, almost synest, relationship to religion that is not one of deep feeling. I don't know. I've not read the book, but does he describe, you know, being in the presence of God, or is it like Augustine's confessions where he has this very, you know, this realization that his former life was deeply sinful?

Well, he does shout out of his mistake about the childless cat ladies. You mentioned the love triangle, and I do wonder if maybe that, I don't know if you know that Dinesh DeSuzza and Laura Ingraham and Aaron Coulter were in a love triangle back. during the early 90s. And so maybe that was a Girard. I'm very sorry to have learned that because it's a totally repulsive prospect, and I will never forget that. I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me. I mean, like, you know, the professions of conservatives to moral rectitude, everyone knows that's a hypocrisy. Everyone knows they're just like everybody else. I want to read one more quote from the book, and then we'll do Democrats.

Girard's work captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privilege members. Mired in the swamp of social media, we would identify a scapegoat and digitally pounce. We're keyboard warriors. He goes blind to our own failings. It's hard to imagine how you can write that without, you know, reflecting on one's own failings, the author's own failings, but J.D. manages to do that. He thinks he's talking about the cancel cultural libs, I guess. Yes. Okay. So that's the other part of sure arts philosophy. He believes that basically society pick scapegoats, and this is an outlet for aggression that would otherwise, you know, lead to kind of a universal civil war all the time. So we've scapegoed people. And his solution

is like, well, he thinks Jesus was scapegoated, but he was the one person who was totally innocent, so therefore it revealed the mechanism of scapegoating, so on and so forth. What I think that people like Teal and Vance take from Gerard is not, in order to be good Christians, in order to be good people, we ought not to scapego. They say, well, that's kind of the way the world works. So we're going to pick our own scapegoats and we're just going to make the right people are scapegoating. I don't think the man who repeated the, you know, the slander against Haitians, eating cats, you know, I don't think that person really can say with a lot of sincerity that they're against scapegoating. So I think that essentially that's another side of the cynicism,

is that Girard gives them a picture of the world of a humanity that's irrelevant. rational, competitive, prone to violence, naturally, scapegoats people. And then Gerard himself says, well, this is why Christianity is necessary and why, you know, there is an escape from this. But they sort of say, well, that's just sort of the way things are. Yeah, and it works. And it works. Right.

So one of the things I really want to explore with you is this, you know, one of the political problems Democrats have is, I don't remember who I stole this from, and I've said a lot. So my apologies is the crank alignment under Trump. And where a lot of people that resonated with the politicians and figures in your book had been Southern Democrats, you know, that were kind of racist Southern Democrats. They were part of the FDR coalition. You know, so a lot of them had been kind of independence that were not really part of the political process, maybe voting for parole, maybe they voted for Clinton one time. And now, fast forward today. And Trump has kind of united all of those types of voters

inside the Republican coalition. And as Democrats try to think about how to handle that challenge, there's like, whatever, social justice, woke thought that's like,

fuck those people, whatever. You know, and then there's another school of thought that maybe is, you know, the Platiner might be an example of, you know,

which is like, we need, you know, kind of a bad boy of our own, a working class figure of our own to reach them. Like, how do you,

like, think about the political challenge of, reaching these kind of aggrieved voters. Well, I think it's going to shake out the way it's going to shake out. And this whole primary season, an electoral cycle is going to see who there's probably going to be some coalition and mixture of the two. The Democratic Party will be, you know, an amalgam as it always has been.

I do think there's a populist tradition of the Democratic Party, obviously. And perhaps Democrats have moved too far away from that populist tradition. That's independent of the merits of any particular candidate or defending it. particular candidate. You know, Obama comes out of a wing of the Democratic Party, which kind of doesn't exist so much anymore. But it was kind of the Howard Dean progressive side of the party, which was anti-war, you know, a little populist, but, you know, not looney tunes. Not Dennis Kucinich, right. So. Mike Ravel.

Right, right. So it was kind of, I don't know, you might want to call it like moderately populist. And that was kind of what it meant to be a Democrat for a while. And I think that that spirit is good and fine and actually necessary. And I think it will appeal to people, you know, who feel that alienated from politics. I think Trump's coalition of the alienated obviously was extremely fragile and temporary. And many of the people he brought on board, he quickly alienated himself and they're up for grabs. Are they all going to become Democrats? No. Some of them will just be demobilized, you know. But I do think, yeah, of course, like a politician who seems to be a fighter against entrenched sloth and privilege and systemic corruption is going to appeal to a certain

type of voter. I don't think that the appeal to we are competent technocrats is really going to work, especially since... This leads to your Pete skepticism. I went back and looked through our Twitter history of you dunking on me on Twitter. Oh, sorry. No, that's okay. No, it's great. Your first ever Twitter dunk on me was over me being too gushing to Pete. You were like, he got exactly what he deserves.

This was like right after he dropped down. Maybe I'm less hostile to him now than I was then. I think that he's demonstrated a lot of seriousness and is genuinely. He does seem to be kind of going a little too and set pieces. He seems a little stiff to me. I think John

Ossoff is a little bit more like the Pete Buttigieg, who's a little more spontaneous? I'll give you a homework assignment. You should go listen to John Osloff on this podcast a couple months ago and report back to me. Okay. We'll see if you still feel that way. All right, okay. Well, I've seen him speak.

I've seen him speak and I've seen him speak and. His speech is really good. The speech is good. Okay, that's not the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pete's more actually chill. And I will agree with you, yes, Pete, Pete's appearances in talk show circuit have been quite interesting.

And I think that, you know, he's positioning himself as a kind of radical reformer, which is an angle perhaps in the in the primaries which will be one of the angles you know he's got to find some ire because it's going to be a cycle where you know democrats are angry at their own party angry at the republicans and they're going to want somebody who seems like a fighter and is going to change things yeah you know the democrats do have a little bit of a nerd problem yeah let's say the Biden administration was the test run for the competency and technocracy. Wasn't that the Obama administration?

I think the Biden administration was like Biden having a couple of old timers around him and then outsourcing the policymaking to Elizabeth Warren Wong's, I think. Well, yes, but those people were, that's true. But there was a lot of people who were, you know, highly qualified, educated people who had all these advanced policy ideas. And then the perception of people's actual experience of those policies is a lot different than, you know, they wanted. Also, he was not in great shape as a messenger for all of it. So I would say it depends. He was not, I'm not saying technocrat as synonymous with centrist. Sure. I'm just saying there was a highly wonkish aspect of the Biden administration, which I was very friendly to because I thought their ideas sound.

great and I think some of them actually worked and just to draw attention to them. But yeah, I mean, the thing is, is like the kind of social democratic ideas that Biden tried to implement were sunk partially because of inflation, which is an issue that, you know, every politician just seems to be kryptonite for everybody and there's not much you could do about it. On those kind of reform questions and you kind of mentioned that Pete's trying to do radical reform, it's something that I have like two wolves inside of me on this question, which is, assuming the Democrats get back into power, like how do you solve the Biden problem

of people not feeling the positive change? And I think that the predominant view within democratic circles is going to be, you know, we should be more aggressive, you know, and using the levers of power that we have in order to get policies done. Biden kind of trying that with a student loan thing

and it backfired, you know? So this is like a little bit of easier said than done. I think a lot of people are like, magic wand, we're going to start doing it. Then there's like another view which is, okay, we need to reform the whole system and like take less power away from a future demagogue and, you know, fix things. And this kind of question, you wrote something a while ago about like an old about what we could learn from, I think it was the French in the 20th century and this question

of the Senate and like how to deal with the Senate. You can take that wherever you want. I'm just kind of wondering where your head is on that. I mean, I am fine. personally conflicted as well. I mean, you know, I am sympathetic. I'm highly sympathetic to the belief of fellow people on the left that there are deeply undemocratic and unrepresentative parts of the U.S. system. That, you know, is it fair that New York State has two senators and North Dakota has two senators? And that makes the, you know, the proportional representations of those places so out of whack. I don't think so. Is it fair that the judiciary, which is packed with conservative justices, so much power. I don't know. But on the other hand, you know, as this second Trump administration

has unfolded, I have to say the checks and balances are real. I mean, perhaps not Congress, unfortunately, but more you see this the judiciary institution I never really had much regard for. Now, unfortunately, I think the Supreme Court has made things a little easier for Trump in some regards, but also, you know, rejected key parts of this policy. So, you know, I'm, I guess, a little bit more of a constitutionalist than I was at the beginning of Trump. But I will say that that is tempered by the fact that, you know, the parts of the Constitution that we're supposed to protect us from a crazy demagogue, ironically, allowed him to take power in the first place, right? So the idea that those mechanisms are so essential to prevent, you know, abuse, I don't know.

And I do think that perhaps if they were reformed and there was a more muscular mode of governance, the desire for a kind of strongman figure might be lessened because there would be less sclerosis and less frustration with the political system and people could see it working, are people ever going to be totally happening now? So am I worried about like a future Trump? I mean, having less, you know, checks on their power. Like whoever has authoritarian designs on the United States has learned plenty and they're not, I don't think that they're going to need that much help. It's kind of where I fall, end up falling too, which is frustrating, which I don't like it. I want to circle back to Platner really

quick, though, because part of the reason why we invited you is because I had professional jealousy over your Platter article, because it was another thing where I think we're in a similar boat where we're grappling with the question of Platner. Like, I totally recognize the appeal

to main voters, and like that is what democracy is. And you have this old governor who, like, wants to compromise, like, running against an old senator who wants to compromise. And you've got a young guy's basically like, fuck these people, we need to care about your economic interests. I'm going to fight for you.

Like, and he's from Maine and they get it. They know the type of character. Like, I get it 100%. I don't think that it's sneaky anti-Semitism among the 75-year-old Maine Democratic primary voters. Like, I get it. No. On the other hand, like, so there's like the main platener that you write about.

And then there's kind of like the platonor as a figure as a national figure that is an avatar for this kind of factional fight within the Democratic Party. And on that, he's a little more complicated. Sure. And my professional jealousy was sealed when you pulled a random Simone de Beauvoir quote that just, like, nailed him. I was just like, where did you fucking pull this from? So this is so good. I mean, it just had him.

Yeah, from the ethics of ambiguity. Yeah, just going to him as like this adventure or lost soul. So anyway, for people who haven't read it, why don't you kind of summarize that? Yeah, you know, I think that his character is legible to me. I could be wrong. I can't see into his soul, but from his behavior, from his activities. I think, yeah, you know, he's a person who yearn for adventure, who yearned for a more authentic feeling life than was given to him.

And, you know, those types of people can be very charismatic and wonderful and do great things in the world. And they can also be very dangerous and really only kind of nihilistically interested in their own self-expression and so on. Which is platinum? I don't know. I would say I would rather plan on our side than the other side. I would say from my perspective, he's lending his powers for good. I'm, you know, pleased with most of the things he says. He's not said anything that I find particularly offensive or worrisome. We share very close politics. Frankly, I just find it intellectually insulting to believe that he didn't know that that was a Nazi

symbol when he got it. He obviously no. He obviously knew. Because he can't say, yes, I know I got a Nazi Tetsu because everyone's going to be like, what do you mean? Because what he was doing was, and it seems like everyone doesn't have a conception of this for whatever reason, even though it's to me very understandable. He did it to be edgy. And if you say, well, that's too offensive. Well, that's the whole fucking

point. It's a taboo. I get this 100%, by the way. So this is somebody can whatever, clip this and use this against me if I ever, I'm never running for Senate. But like, when I was in college, I was being edgy and we have various, you know, overlaps and dissimilarities between me and Platner, but like my buddies went to Ole Miss.

And I got like old Colonel Reb gear and like brought it back to my dorm room to like troll the Northeastern Libs. And it wasn't like I want to bring back the Confederacy. I'm scared of needles so I didn't get a tattoo. It was like kind of a trying to be a bad boy kind of thing, which is silly and childish. Right. But like that's what happened. Like that's what happened.

He got the tattoo. Maybe he didn't know at the exact moment, but eventually he knew. And then he thought it was funny and edgy and whatever. And so he didn't get rid of it. Like he didn't keep it because he's a fucking. secret Nazi. Like, that's why he did it. Those people are not that good at, like, hiding their politics. There would be a lot of other things other than the tattoo that suggests the other politics. And I don't think being a critic

of Israel is a sign, frankly. So I'm very sensitive to signs of Nazism. And I just don't see any in platy more frankly. He doesn't strike me as that sort. Now, in a different historical era, different conditions, would someone like him be attracted to fascism? Sure. But so, many people, right? I would say that, you know, his adventurous streak and maybe the slightly nihilistic and boundary-breaking thing, yeah, he could get into that, but it seems like, you know, as an adult, he has an ethical worldview. And is that ethical worldview always been expressed consistently throughout his whole life? No. But the story that he has matured and become a better person is trying to do civic service, it's a plausible one. You weren't negative polarized by the

reaction among Platner's stance? I think that that's a bad way to going about thinking about the world. It's tempting, but you can't, like, this is a problem. Like, you know, a lot of the people who I thought who were going to the mat for him, I was like, you sound like an idiot and I don't like that you insist, like I sound like an idiot. But I don't think that your judgment of the world should be, you know, affected that much by, okay, well, you know, assholes. really like this guy, so I don't want to be on the asshole team. So therefore, you know, I think that that really deformed your judgment. With that being said, what people are projecting on him, what he represents for certain people,

I'm like, well, that's stupid too. But I don't think that that's necessarily Platner's fault that they're projecting that out to him. Maybe it helps him in a certain way. But so, no, I really try to avoid that sort of habit of thought of being negatively polarized. Here's a more concerning part within the coalition for me than Platner. There's a story yesterday. Dan Goldman is running tonight in the primary in New York. He's going to get his ass beat by Bradlander, which is democracy. That's how democracy works.

But like Dan Goldman was an impeachment manager. He's a conventional down-the-line, liberal, progressive. He was out there defending his chief of staff, vociferously, when these right-wing assholes were posting pictures of him. like leather gay outfits and Goldman was coming to his defense he is a J Street type pro-Israel liberal

not an A-PAC type also is Brad Lader really right and he goes to a coffee shop, Poetica in New York and they said they were going to deny him service but they didn't recognize him in time so they posted a picture calling him a genocide lover and and they refunded the money and that

activity on the left starts to head more down the path of anti-Semitism to me. I don't know that Dan Goldman deserved to be denied sitting at the counter because he has like some conventional progressive views on Israel. Well, yeah, probably not, but you have to keep in mind that I mean the common sense on this has shifted enormously in the past couple of years. Like, yeah, I think that

you know, it gets ridiculous and it can edge on anti-Semitism, but the fact the matter is, is that a lot of people live in a previous world where Israel is perceived very differently, and they're having a rude awakening because, you know, the fact that matter is people grew up, they didn't grow up with Israel as this brave little country standing up to big enemies all around it. They grew up with the occupation. They grew up with Gaza, and they have a very different perception of it, and they view Israel, like they say, as, you know, the, you know, use the word apartheid as people would view South Africa or Rhodesia as kind of rogue racist country. And they have some good reason to feel that way. So I just think that there's a generation gap and older

people are very shocked. There are several other apartheid countries though. And it seems like Dan Goldman's the only one that's getting denied his coffee. Well, I mean, is there any others that we, you know, directly give their military so much aid and like just went just went to war? We're cutting a deal with Pakistan right now. I don't know that they're internal politics or, I mean, is there, the focus on, on Israel is because, well, yes, I mean, I am no friend of the UAE. But, you know, Israel right now, those places are not great places. You cannot deny that Israel post October 7th and maybe for some understandable reasons. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying that Dan Goldman should be able to get a cup of coffee in New York. Sure, whatever. And that's a little

Yeah, I think that that, you know, is, is, I don't think that that's a systemic problem. I mean, there are many Dan Goldman's in New York getting coffee just fine. Thank you. So, like, yeah, I don't think New York City is to worry about a spate of anti-Semitism. We'll keep an eye on it. All right. We're going to close with a rapid fire. You had, you famously had the jock creep theory of fascism where the Italians were the jocks and the Germans were the creeps. I googled the German word for classic example, and that is musterbischpiel.

I would say that the Mouccibe spiel examples of this would be Stephen Miller as the creep and Pete Heggseth is the jock Sure So I'm going to rapid fire to you Other figures in the administration You tell me where they are

Greg Bevino Jock Carrie Lake Jock Jady Vance Creep Stephen Chung Jock

Carolyn Levitt Jock A lot more jocks and creeps? Who are some other creeps in the administration? Miller. Michael Antom, but he's not part of the administration anymore would be another example. I'm sure there's a lot. Todd Blanche is jock.

Jock. At the high level, Trump picks the jocks. Trump picks the jocks. The face of camera facing his jocks. I mean, Trump's the jock. Yeah, right. Vance is the creep. That's the coalition right there. You know, Tucker is a jock, but he's a prep. That's something, a little bit of a synthesis.

So, you know, there's probably a lot of people we don't know about in the policy wing or like, you know, staffers who are, but yeah, pretty jocky, jocky bunch. It's notable how jocky it is. I can find the, umbrino echo, the urefascism, like the parallels to Trump are so much more on the nose than the Hebbler stuff. Oh, for sure. You know, and so there's, so it's jock, jock fascism. We'll leave it there. Anything I didn't ask you? Anything you want to eliminate the Bullark audience on before we let you go?

No, please subscribe to my substack. If you think I sound like I make sense at all and buy my book, it's out in paperback. And yeah, that's it. I'm hopefully going to have a new book that I'm going to be working on soon. So I can't talk about it yet, but it's a little teaser. Exciting. All right. It's unpopular front.

It's a good substack. I recommend it. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow. Hopefully about the color will be back in my skin. And I'll get a good night's rest. So we'll see you all then. Peace. Thanks, John.

Thanks, love, too. The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer, Anzley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.