The Daily Beast Podcast - This Is Why Humiliated Trump Lives in Fear

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

In this special episode of the Daily Beast Podcast, Joanna Coles brings together a revealing collection of conversations about the forces reshaping America, from the psychology and behavior of strongmen to the increasingly visible signs of political and institutional upheaval. Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains why authoritarian leaders become more paranoid and dangerous as they accumulate power, how corruption and humiliation become tools of control, and why she believes Donald Trump may be on a trajectory toward failure. Kurt Andersen discusses his new novel The Breakup, his vision of an America fractured by political violence, and why the country may be living through an American tragedy. Plus, Farrah Tomazin reports from Washington on Trump's physical transformation of the capital, the troubled Reflecting Pool project, and the surprisingly empty Great American State Fair. #ad Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BEAST at https://www.oneskin.co/BEAST #oneskinpod #ad Download the Kalshi app and use code TDB to get $20 when you trade $20. https://kalshi.com/r/tdb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The secret of strongmen is that they live in fear. This is why they build their bunkers. And Trump's always talking about, you know, not only the ballroom, the bunker underneath, that's his safe space. No longer they're in power, the more paranoid they get. If you have surrounded yourself with people who will not tell you the truth if bad things occur, then you start to make bad decisions. Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast.

I'm Hugh Docte. I'm executive editor of the Daily Beast. And I'm in for Joanna Coles to introduce someone. of her most brilliant special conversations over this past summer. We're doing this special edition because it's Labor Day. So if you're in the US or Canada,

happy Labor Day. But before we get to these highlights, please take a moment, share this podcast with your friends and invite them to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We can also follow The Daily Beast on Substack. We've got QR code on the screen right now. We begin this special highlight show

with Joanna's interview with Dr. Ruth Ben-Giatt. She is the NYU History Programme. Professor. She's the renowned scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders. And I should say, she's also the author of the hit substack, Elucid, and the book Strong Men, please check them both out. And she and Joanna are discussing the threat of autocracy in America, why Donald Trump is so obsessed with what else, his ballroom, and why strongmen like Trump rely on humiliation. You've probably heard us talk about one skin before for their best-selling skincare, but now they're bringing that same breakthrough longevity science to their scalel.

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without disrupting your normal routine. Born from over 10 years of longevity research, One Skin's OS1 peptide is engineered to support your hair to look visibly fuller and thicker at any age. For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using code beast at OneSkin.com slash beast. That's 15% off. OneSkin.com with code Beast. And after you purchase, they'll ask you where you've heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Dr. Ruth, I am really struck by how I get up in the morning. I get my cappuccino. I stride to work or I ride my city bike, everything feels very similar to how it felt when Joe Biden was president. I was asking a friend the other day at the Yankees game. I was sort of struck looking around

the stadium and I said, are we actually in an autocracy? And his point was, don't be ridiculous. You couldn't even ask that question out loud if we were actually in an autocracy. And then other people, you know, other friends are kind of feeling hysterical about it. Is this actually what an autocracy feels like, the confusion about it? Autocracies happen in stages unless there's a coup. And there are still coups in the world. And in a coup, as a friend of mine who lived through a coup in Uruguay said he left his house in the morning in a democracy and he came back to a dictatorship the same day.

Wow. But he was lucky to come back at all. So they happen over time. And a lot of the, like if we take Vladimir Putin, he's been there for 26 years. Orban was there for 16 years. And so we've had Trump around for 10 years on and off. But he has done a huge amount in just 18 months or so. But all the same, it doesn't feel for your daily life,

depending on who you are in America. if you're an immigrant, you're living in fear, you're not going out as much, you could find yourself deported to a third country. And so the scale of illegal things that are going on is enormous. And in fact, if you look comparatively at the first year of this administration versus the first year of Putin or Orban or Erdogan in Turkey, the changes are much more rapid. And yet, daily life for many, many people can go on. And we don't have a one-party state. We don't have a crackdown on media that's total.

Otherwise, we wouldn't be sitting here. I would certainly be in jail, like many more people, who speak out. So autocrats use different methods also today. They sue you. They rely on their thugs to give you death threats. And so the methods are also different. And if we're working with an old-fashioned view of autocracy, it's not going to look the same. You're an expert on strong men.

But Trump right now seems like a weak man. He seems sort of pathetic. He's standing there trying to get the reflected glory from the Spain football team. He's in a war that he's losing. The economy's a mess. People are seeing the cost of the war at the garranted. gas pump. Does that make him more dangerous or less dangerous? So we're living through something extremely interesting in history because we're living

through it in an accelerated fashion. Before I said that he has managed to do more lawless and repressive things in 18 months than most people we consider established autocrats today in their first 18 months. But he's also managed to emerge to immerseous. himself in this process I call autocratic backfire. Autocratic backfire? Okay, what is that? So when, usually it happens over time, but Trump is so extreme that he's doing it all very quickly. Is he extreme even for a strongman? Yeah, yes he is in many ways. Okay, yes. And so they are megalomaniacs, many of them are narcissists, some sociopaths, and they

have a constant need to feed their ego because they are weak and fragile people. The secret of astronomer is that they live in fear. This is why they build their bunkers. And Trump's always talking about, you know, not only the ballroom where people can adulate him and he can get money, but the bunker underneath, that's his safe space. And he's talking about the military hospital and there are going to be places where snipers can shoot people. And he's always worried about being hunted. When the Supreme Leader of Iran was killed, he said, I got him before he could get me. And this, the hunt or be hunted is the mentality of the strong man. But to be fair, Donald Trump has had several attempts on his life. I mean, the most dramatic being Butler, Pennsylvania,

but if I were Donald Trump, I feel like you can cut him a break on that because he's genuinely been the target of assassination attempt? Yes, of course, of course. And they all are. Putin, many autocrats hide them, if they can. Putin's had of six or seven at least. Putin's had six or seven attempts on his life. Yes, yeah.

And they don't want that to be spread. And of course, what I mean is not as concretely. They are interested in self-preservation more generally, not just, of course, they're interested in keeping themselves safe, of course. They have to be like everybody else and especially in their positions. But the strongman mentality is they're always looking out for number one, which is them. Right. And this is why they create what are called these inner sanctums around themselves,

which are full of sycophants, family members. In Lucid, my substack, I have several articles about sons-in-law. There's a whole category, a subset of sons-in-law who are part of this inner sanctum, who can keep their secrets because they're family, their tasks with, often with corrupt deals. And so over time, if you only have sycophants around you, and everybody's subjected to loyalty tests constantly, you don't have what every manager knows is essential,

which is objective feedback on your actions. Right. They're not interested in objective feedback. They want to be agilated. So we've all seen the cabinet meetings where everybody goes round like it's North Korea and says, how great Trump is, and he requires that.

It's also why in other countries there are purges, like Xi Jinping is constantly purging people. Right, you see those people sitting on the dais and suddenly someone comes along and literally takes them away, right? terrifying. Right. Because they get paranoid. And the longer they're in power, the more paranoid they get. That's one of the paradoxes. The more power they amass, the more afraid they are of somebody coming to take it away or internal plotting, palace coups, this kind of thing. So, but if you have surrounded yourself with people who will not tell you the truth if bad things occur, then you start to make bad

decisions. Now, in our case, the tariffs, the shakedowns, so these had bad economic effects. And so that would lead another kind of leader to course correct. Okay, I made a mistake. Didn't work. We'll do something else. Strong men never course correct. They barrel down even more. Right. So they doubled down. They doubled down. That's what they do. And the more they fear inside that they're looking like they're fallible rather than infallible, right, the more they feel they have to do what they want to do. And they start believing their own propaganda because there's always sycophantic religious people who tell them they're in office by the will of God. All of them have this, some form of this. And Trump has evangelicals, Orthodox Jews. You're in

office by the will of God. Everything you do is guided. You're, you know, by death. and they start to believe it. And so I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that was published February 1st about autocratic backfire. Had Mussolini, Putin, and Trump. And I talked about the first two who got into wars that in the first case went very badly. And Putin's not going well. And I said that Trump was getting into the zone as his popularity tanks, as he gets more desperate. And I warned people that he could start in, he could have some kind of military adventure. And then we had Iran. Right. And so war is something they do when they're in this zone because they feel like they want to prove themselves to history. They're going to do

something world historical. Putin's going to restore the Russian empire. And then it goes badly. and they often, that's the end of them in various ways. They get outvoted or they lose power, create instability around them as in Russia. And so I think that Trump is on that trajectory now. Think you know what's going to happen next. You can trade that on Kalshi. From the biggest stories in the world to the wildest questions in pop culture, Kalshi, America's number one prediction market platform lets you try.

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Calci products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values and available markets may differ from those. For more information, see calshy.com forward slash regulatory. Putin is reputedly the richest man in the world. Donald Trump, as, you know, as we know, made at least $2.5 billion and probably a lot more just in his first 16, 17 months in office. How important is the grift and the money here? It's everything. It's everything. And in fact, people who do comparative autocracy studies say that the

corruption in the first 18 months is off the charts. It surpasses actually anything. Early Putin, after coups, the devastation to transparency, accountability, anything to do with conflicts of interest. They're not interested in conflicts of interest. These are quaint democratic notions. And so they are there as predators to kind of to seize whatever they can, including our tax dollars. So you have to look at it from the autocratic point of view, including kleptocracies like Russia. So tax dollars and any public agencies and public funds, they see them as something they can pray upon and use and turn to their own devices and spirit off used to be Swiss bank accounts. and now it's offshore financial areas. And so we've already seen Trump starting to do things with tax dollars

and moving them here to pet projects. And we saw him with his $1.8 billion slush fund. The slush fund. Right, to the weaponization of the DOJ. And in Russia where it's institutionalized for many years, and that's why we call Russia a kleptocracy, gas prom, because gas and fossil fuels are the, lubricants of the kleptocracy in Russia. Gasparm is the big conglomerate that's public,

and it's been sacked for years and years. There are a couple of really good books on this, and I have stuff. I have statistics and strongmen. It was sacked by Putin and his cronies. It was deprived of money, and then the money was sent off to offshore financial accounts. And so you literally prey upon the economy. The other thing that autocrats do is that they shake down private businesses. Now, Putin has done this very explicitly. One out of six Russian businesses had had some kind of hassle by 2019. What Trump's doing is more of a shakedown, a threat. He's not actually going after them yet. But he threatens them. He has different ways of getting their loyalty, which is also why you see Tim Cook and all the big, big ones. But this is happening

in an established kleptocracy, it happens to any kind of prosperous business. And do people care? I mean, Trump is, you know, you said he's got no empathy and he doesn't care about people. He also says that people don't care about his own grift. You know, he's openly said people don't care. I realize I could take this money. Do you think that's true? It is not true. And there are some very interesting. studies now about, because we hear all about the march of autocracy and how skill for these guys are, we're not hearing about the fact we're living through a global renaissance of protest, mostly nonviolent, all over the world. People are, you know, demonstrating and sometimes pushing

out established elites, forcing people to resign. And one of the main issues we know from studies now is corruption. Blatant corruption, deal-making. The latest example, Albania, they call it the Flamingo Revolution. And we started and there's Kushner again. And so it ignited a popular protest and it's the biggest protest since the fall of communism. And this is happening many places. Hungary. And this was over Ivanka and Jared's discovery of an island just off the coast of Albania that they want to turn into a spa resort. Yes. And so it has environmental things. It's about foreigners coming in and wrecking the natural heritage. It's about the complicity of Albanian authorities with these foreign grifters. And so people want a different kind of leadership.

They don't want corruption. So corruption is one factor. Economic hardship that comes from a corrupt society is another. And the third is interesting. It's when a government is not only really brutal and starts using violence, but also uncaring, just doesn't really care what happens to its people. And we're seeing this in the United States, too. So these three things, I think, are coming together in the United States. That's why we see an uptick in protest and Democrats are winning their elections. it really isn't tenable. And so I don't think they will try and fix the election system, the Maga and Trump, because they're desperate.

But I see a trajectory for defeat. Let's talk about humiliation, because you talk about that in Strong Men, humiliation as a management tool effectively. Can you talk to that? Yeah. So anybody, so unfortunately for the country's, thought are afflicted with these people. These are damaged people who get pleasure from humiliating people because it makes them feel important. It's actually not about the person being humiliated.

It's about them. They have like a need to do this. And so that's why they do it, they do it in private, but they especially do it in public. The best is if you do it on camera. And you take someone who thinks they've served you well, and then you humiliate them. You take them down so that you stand above, and everyone else has to fawn you. And you humiliate one to serve as a lesson to the others, to not get out of line.

You can sort of see that around the cabinet table, that everybody's sort of avoiding his eye because they don't want to be the subject of his random thoughts or possibly humiliation. When Vladimir Zelensky visited the White House earlier this year and Trump humiliated him and then J.D. Vance weighed in on top of the humiliation. Was that a net positive for Trump? Does that humiliation that he inflicted, I understand how it might build him up in the moment, but in the longer term, did that serve him well? It depends if you're in part of Maga and you've been brainwashed to hate Ukraine and hate Zelensky, who's supposed to be a Nazi and all Ukrainians are Nazis. They used every trick, right?

Then you thought this was great. It was great theater. It was great spectacle, right? And he did it against the background of his redone White House that looks a lot like Putin's palace, actually, the white and the gold. And if you were not Maga, you found this rather disgusting. And Zelensky being a performer in his past was the best equipped to get through this and not lose his dignity. It's very hard in such situations, but he knows how because he was on stage for years. And in that, he's like Trump.

It's the only way he's like Trump. They are performers. And the fact that Vance was doing it too was that he was modeling the behaviors on this great world stage that Trump would approve of. Right. So what happens is, have you seen how many times some on important occasions, Maga sycophants, the officials, they wear the red tie, they wear Trump's a version of Trump's uniform? Right, right. His bryoni sued and his tie. So it's also that behaviors that the leader approves of, which is being brutish.

Think about Hegsseth. It was always brutish. But now he celebrates being brutish. And that's how you keep your status in the party is to become a mini-Trump. And so during both in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, people talked about mini-Hitlers and mini-Musilinis. And these were like local officials. and they were hated by people because they were brutal and they were like laughable in their attempts to imitate the leader.

And so we see that happening as well. So although there are many people who are not personally affected, especially if they're not political, and they're like, there's nothing going on, it's fine. there are cultural changes for gender, for behavior in the leadership class too, that have far-reaching consequences. We're really early in this, and I can just keep repeating. A lot has been done in 18 months to wreck our institutions. It's very rare that somebody goes after science to wreck science. that's a whole other conversation. That's very rare that you come in and you instantly wreck something that gave such prestige and prosperity to the nation.

And what's the short answer to that? Because I'd love to have you back and we should talk about specific institutions he's gone after. And I hadn't thought of it in terms that you've just presented it. But why would he do that? What is in it for him possibly to wreck America's reputation as, you know, at the apex of science research? I think, and I wrote a series of essays in Lucid, right when he came in in 2025,

I think he wants to wreck America as a democracy. He wants to completely wreck it in every way. And it's a predator and wreck the institutions. And he said it in a 2024 campaign speech. he was going to make autocrats do great. So America has to go down so that Putin and she and North Korea and they can prosper. And I really think that there's an intention here

to just bring us to our knees. And do you think that's because they have something on Trump? Or like what could possibly be his motivation for not building up America? as the biggest, so that he's the biggest of all strong men? I think that first, as Bannon, I was, you know, always used to say, first you destroy and then you create. So the destruction of the administrative state.

But I think that Trump long ago internalized ideas about geopolitics and statehood that are autocratic. And there is something with Putin. We don't know what it is. But that's a specific thing. Trump's worldview, he doesn't like democracy. He likes strongman rule. And so it's as though if you look at all the damage that's been done

to institutions and to everything that brought us greatness, they've gone after these things. And it's extremely sad. Okay, I'm now fleeing from the office. Convinced we're living in an autocracy. I would love you to come back and talk to us about the dismantling of specifically. specific institutions, the Department of Justice, the scientific research, America's elite

universities that have hitherto, you know, drawn talent from all over the world. I think it's so hard for people to imagine why anybody would want to tear their country down, even if it is in theory to rebuild it as a mirror of them. Yeah. Final question. Is it too late? No, I don't think it's too late because the rapidity with which he's done all these depressing things we've been talking about is why there's a mobilization to, that's why Democrats are winning in places they don't normally win. That's why his polls are down.

That's why the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is publishing op-eds that are against his election denial. Even Fox News, which is the propaganda, de facto channel of the state channel, is dissenting more. And so I think he's on a trajectory to failure because he has been too extreme and done too many things that affect too many people adversely. And if you were going to give one word of advice to the Democrats as they barrel towards the midterms, what would it be? What's the most effective way to impact someone like Donald Trump, other than getting out the vote, but in terms of putting him on the back foot? It's hard to put him on the back foot because he's shameless. So rather than focusing on him, we have to focus on the election.

actually. And it has to be, as happened in Hungary, an overwhelming turnout, so overwhelming that any of their machinations about it being rigged won't hold up. Right, so too big to rig. Yes. And now we have the highlights of one of the best interviews of the summer. It was with Kurt Anderson. I know he is a favourite guest and he and Joanna discussed his new book, The Breakup, which offers a fictional depiction of the death of one Donald J. Trump. And spoiler, this death happens on the very same golden escalator that he came down in 2015 to launch his presidential campaign. Joanna and Kurt got into what it was like imagining this strange scenario for the 80-year-old president

and the possibility of another American Civil War. It's quite a conversation. Please enjoy it. Kurt Anderson, I am so glad to be clutching a copy of your book, The Breakup. You've spent three years writing it. And in that time, you have imagined the death of Donald Trump. A smile crept across your face when I said that. Tell us, can you tell us in the book without too much of a spoiler alert how he dies? Because it's not perhaps, as one would imagine.

Well, it is, the book is set in 2045, and there's a, there's a backstory to 2035, when at age 89, on, in fact, on his 89th birthday in my imagination, this is a novel. Donald Trump is celebrating both his birthday and the 20th anniversary of his first run for the presidency. He is at Trump Tower going down to meet his throng of January 6th, pardonees and MAGA people and ICE agent pardonees and this crowd of his to celebrate and party, going down the famous golden elevator, and he dies on massive brainstem stroke on the elevator as he's going down, going down. the people gathered who had gathered for a party decide that it's a deep state assassination and begin rioting and go out on Fifth Avenue in New York and bash pedestrians and car windows and store windows

and it's the first spectacular piece of violence, spontaneous violence, that then results a year later in an uprising in a true right-wing uprising, terrorist uprising, because the Democrats, meantime, in the last few years in the early 30s, have had a full comeback into federal power. Okay, so the breakup refers to two breakups, right? There's a divorce in it, but it really refers to the breakup of America. You, as a regular guest on the podcast,

you spend a lot of time thinking about what's happening culturally to America with this current president. And it's odd that we're recording this on Thursday, and it's actually 10 years, I think to the day since Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination to be president. So it's particularly timely that you're here. How much have you sucked out of the chaos

that's going on now to inform this book? It's a good question. And my last two books were these big nonfiction books, about 500-year American history and 50 years of American history, as a friend said, and you like repeating, basically my two fuckinging of America books. Right. And so those certainly fed into this.

And for a while I was thinking, oh, maybe I should write a nonfiction book about what the future could hold. I said, no, no, no, no. I'm done with those. I'll return to novels. This is my fifth one. And so, but certainly I was fed by that and fed by the last three years, as you say. I mean, when I started, it was set in the future, so of course AI would be part of it and robots and all that stuff.

But a month after I started writing, chat GPT appeared. So it was like, whoa, this is cooperating life with my writing process. And the Trump thing, of course, he was out of office and, you know, was running, but like, you know, back then, and then, of course, 23 to 24, and here he is. So the last year and a half, and I was basically done when he took off, almost done when he took office this time. The horror show of this term, the nightmare, beyond what I expected to tell you, it was, and I'm not alone in that, obviously, and what one of my characters expected, who never, you know, thought her husband was overblown and hyperbolic in thinking,

oh, this time it's going to be a threat to democracy and all these things. Well, it was one of his, you know, I told you so moments to his wife in this story. And so, yeah, what has happened last year and a half didn't require any kind of wholesale restructuring of my story, which was basically complete, but certainly required me to go through

and darken the backstory and make, you know, the Trump 20s, as one of the characters calls them, more horrible and nightmarish than I had had them in the earlier draft. Is it possible? And I can't even believe I'm saying it out loud, but is it possible that there is real violence, that there is some kind of civil war in America? and you tackle that in the book. I guess my question for you as a novelist is what does it feel like imagining and writing about violence in the country that you live in? Is it good karma to do that?

That's a good question. I hadn't thought of it as bad karma or good karma. I think it's useful to squarely and clear-eyedly face the various possibilities, the various conditions. the various contingencies. And I'm not saying this is inevitable or even that it's probable, but I'm saying certainly that it's possible

and I think I've depicted it plausibly, and I think that in the last year and a half in the last three years, since I began writing this book, it has become much less far-fetched than it seemed when I began as, oh, this would be interesting to think about. So no, it,

so I don't think it's bad carbon. do think it is so difficult to think about and so horrific to think about the war and the violence, let alone breaking the country into parts. But I also think I've, you know, will provide an ability for people to look at this future possibility in some, with some basis for thinking about it, and some framework for thinking about it. All right. Well, I'm going to come on to the blurbs you've got in a moment and ask you how much you paid for them, because the blurbs for this book are outrageous. But I wanted to ask you something else first. You've got a very good line in there about how American journalists refer to everything as a tragedy. And I'm actually

going to quote it and you go, life is half tragedy for Christ's sake, maybe more than half, which is one of the reasons why I grade almost everything on a curve. And I guess my question is, are we living through an American tragedy? Short answer, yes. I, I, I, I, I, do think that we are already in a tragedy. And I don't see how we get out of it suddenly or without pain of some degree between here. And whatever the end is. I mean, that's the thing, isn't it, I find, is to imagine a happy ending. Now...

A happy ending for Trump or a happy ending for America? Well, for America. And what I want to say is, I mean, this book is immediately categorized by the algorithms as, oh, it's dystopian. Maybe dystopian satire, but still dystopian fiction. And I had a conversation with my friend in Blurber, Gary Steingard, who writes dystopian satires. And he's got a great love. He does. But we'll go on to that in a minute.

But I said, do you think of your fiction as dystopian? He said, and basically he said, it's, they're comedies. sure, but, and I said, I agree because I feel like dystopias are where there are zombies and everything is collapsed and it's a rubble and wreckage and, oh my God, it's horrible. I mean, on the other hand, if you want to say we're in a quasi-dispopian situation now, I'd buy that too. So, but I feel one of the things I ended up writing with the breakup is, is an ending. I wouldn't call it a ending because there's a war and there's breaking up of the country. But as with divorces, and some of us at this table have been divorced. And, you know, one knows they're painful and

complicated and awful in many ways and some many worse than others. But, you know, sometimes they're mandatory. And sometimes there's no other way to manage such a thing. Well, and they can also be new beginnings. Precisely. There is, as my wife, who has lost I looked, we're still married, said to me as we were talking about this very thing the other day, she said, about the book, not our marriage. Not your divorce. Not your pending divorce. She said, you know, and no, she said, you know, is horrible and awful and if you're lucky, liberating, you know. And so, you know, I think so in my, in real life and certainly, certainly in my story, and certainly in my story, fought five, ten years from now, 15, the war itself looked pretty horrible and dystopian,

but I think, you know, out of facing the facts and dealing with the facts at hand, if we can ever do that. And see, that's the thing with this book and this story, really, is it's hard for me to imagine how we go back to pursuit of happiness and everybody getting along without some giant spasm that provokes everybody looking at things the way they are. It's hard to imagine a great leader will come. John Ossoff will come and lead us all together back to a normalcy. Maybe, and that would be great, and I hope it happens, but for many years and more these days, I feel like the likely that it's impossible for that to happen in a normal way without some kind of fever-breaking,

invasion, civil war. I don't know. Who knows? It could be many things. But just on our own, given everything, given the way we live in our digital bubbles and hate the other and hate the other and hate the other and have different views of how life should be led and countries should be governed. It's hard to imagine it without such a violent, literally violent or not rupture of some sort. Our final highlight is a brilliant interview with our very own Farah Thomason. She is one of the Daily Beast DC team and she has been reporting on what the Trump administration called renovations to capital. You might use other words. She is giving Joanna all the scoop on what he has done to the reflecting pool, the national mall and of course going inside that

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Better never stops. You've spent the last few weeks chronicling the physical changes in D.C. What is the latest with the Reflecting Pool? Well, I was down at the Reflecting Pool yesterday, actually, and it is now fenced off to the public. So visitors, unfortunately, are unable to get those beautiful, iconic pictures of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. It is also drained completely.

So what you'll basically see if you go down there at the moment is a concrete drab mess. There's no water. We don't know whether there will be water in the immediate future as to when this project will be finished. It's interesting because, as everyone knows, this was a botched project that Donald Trump has since blamed on vandals. He said that there was a 250-foot gash that vandals created possibly with a box cutter or a knife or some razor blades. I saw no sign of that whatsoever. I saw no signs of the American flag blue that he so famously bragged about constantly. What I did see, however, was interestingly tire marks in the middle of the reflecting pool.

And you may recall Joanna in May, the president took his motorcade down to the reflecting pool and did a drive-by essentially with Secret Service agents, the Interior Secretary Doug Bergham. and his entourage. And there are tie marks down the middle of the Reflecting Pool, whether they are the presidents, I do not know. But that's pretty much what you're going to see when you go to the Reflecting Pool now. It's quite a sad state of affairs that this really wonderful, iconic landmark has been turned into this mess and a national embarrassment, really.

Washington is obviously built on a sort of soft waterbed. It's swampy. Does it smell? Reflexing pool? Do you know what? When we first had the problems with reflecting pool, the algae and the like, I actually went down there. A lot of people were kind of doing the same thing. They were putting their nose to it just to see if there was anything strange. People were actually strangely enough putting their hands in it as well, obviously before Donald Trump started to crack down on anyone and everyone who was looking like a vandal. It did not smell to me, but I spoke to tourists

who thought that they could, when the wind blew a certain way, they could get a whiff of a whiff of something funky. It does not smell at the moment. It's just concrete, dreary, sad looking mess. If you know you have an enormous deadline like the July the fourth week of America's 250th anniversary, surely this work would be done in advance with enough leeway that even were things to go wrong, which often happen in refurbishment projects, anybody watching or listening to this who's ever tried to do an extension on their home or try and alter, you know, some part of their home or an office knows that building projects are notorious for going over budget and over time. Nonetheless, if you have people coming to town, as you say,

for the World Cup, for a huge fireworks display, what is going wrong? in the organizational process of this, that the city isn't gleaming and beautiful and a credit to the president who claims he is a world-class builder? Well, that's right. I mean, he claims he is a world-class builder. I mean, I guess the fact that a lot of these projects

had just rushed through. I mean, we had no idea until not long ago that he was suddenly going to be creating an American flag bloc. Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Paul. Nobody voted for it. Nobody knew about it not that long ago, and suddenly he couldn't stop talking about it. And that's the thing with Donald Trump. Every president leaves a mark on Washington, you know, that they're usually in the form of policies in terms of defining legacies. Obama, for example, had the Affordable Care Act or FDR

had, you know, reshaped government itself. But Trump seems determined to kind of leave something much more physical. He wants monuments. He wants events. He wants buildings that people can literally point to, you know, Washington is obviously the nation's capital, but for him it's also kind of an audience, a stage. So he's rushing through projects in a way that, you know, then they don't have competitive tender processes on many occasions. They're not well thought through. He's got, I know for a fact that government sources tell me within various departments that they're just scrambling. They'll suddenly be hit with this idea that he's bragged about, oh, I want a reflecting pull to be American Flav Blue, and suddenly, you know, they've got to start scrambling.

So I think things are just a bit rushed, the lack of, I suppose, processes around it, and the fact that we have a president who really wants to, I guess, leave a legacy of Washington based on physical structures and things that you can point to. The builder guy, who was also a reality TV guy, wants those sort of, you know, spectacles and made for TV moments, whether that's in the form of the Great American State Fair, or the UFC fight night, or the White House ballroom getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Or the, we're about to have an IndyCar race

driving down Washington, D.C. The streets are about to be blocked off in August so that cars can drive at 190 miles an hour down Pennsylvania Avenue, a street that's made for 25 miles an hour limits. It's quite bonkers, actually, but this is the president. Okay, so let's talk about the, Great American State Fair. I know you went there for the closing days. We've got some incredible

photos that I want to show. Here we have National Endowment of the Arts. We have a man playing his heart out on the accordion with a fellow musician on a guitar. They've both got cowboy hats on, and they are playing to a crowd of precisely none. It was very sad and yet very emblematic of the American State Fair. And I'm going to say, Joanna, I'm from Australia. I love a good fair. An American tacky fair, bring it on, you know. Who doesn't love funnel cake? Who doesn't want deep fried butter? Exactly. Exactly. So I went to the great American State Fair, having great hopes, rocked up. There were no lines. I went on the first day, I believe, it was the day

after Donald Trump had kicked it off with a rally because he couldn't get enough people to sing at his concert, so he decided to make himself the headline act. He kicked it off the night before. It was a Thursday. I go during the lunch break because I think, okay, that's when the crowds will be, workers will come. People will sort of, you know, be there. Dead. Absolutely dead. Really? Really? I saw a band playing to absolutely no one. Yeah, nearly dead. No lines. I was interested in going into the various pavilions to see a bit of history and to see what I could find. A lot of them were empty because, as we know, a lot of states did not wish to participate.

The poor main pavilion, I think it had just two empty chairs and people were just going in there to get some time out from the scorching DC heat. There was, of course, Donald Trump's tacky arch that he'd made plywood replica of and put that into the very centre right next to the equally tacky Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel was the only ride. I was looking for more rides. And it was the only thing that had a line. Actually, no, that's the line.

The Florida Pavilion had a few lines because they were giving away stuffed manatees and other things. So people were in line for a stuffed manate? Absolutely. Yes. And look, you would get a passport at the start and they would encourage you to go into every pavilion to get your passport. So it ended up being like a little scavenger hunt, which I guess got some people excited and wanting them to go in and out of the pavilions. It was a great way to get people in and out of some civilians.

But there were controversies. I mean, I remember within the first day, there was a MAGA fan was arrested for lewd conduct while he was watching some circus performers. He may have been their only crowd member. Was he the guy that was dressed as Uncle Sam? Yes, he was the guy that dressed as Uncle Sam. The food pavilion suddenly went dark. There was no power, which of course resulted in melted ice cream,

much to the annoyance of everyone there wanting to get an ice cream on the hot summer day. The pavilions were half empty. It was really sad. And I could not find a corn dog or funnel cake for the life of me. Oh, no. No funnel cake. No corn dog. What is the point of a state fair?

Exactly. And look, I went back because I wanted to see what it was like towards the end. And it was exactly the same. No lines, a lovely band playing to an audience of none. there was I think people were kind of walking around there were some school groups I spoke to a couple of the vendors

and they were just over it they were like July the 4th was fantastic because there were people here watching the fireworks etc etc but this the rest of it was just they said pretty slow and monotonous and they were ready for it to wrap up thank you so much for joining us and thank you for supporting independent journalism

I am delighted to say that Joanna will be back tomorrow with Michael Roof from the latest episode of Inside Trump's Head. They have so much to talk about. A big thank goes to our production staff. John Romero, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Bissarrow, and Neil Rosenhouse. So the good news is we have so many Bee Beast tier members now. There are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support.

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad. I get it. I'm Siyahya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.