The Press Box - The Latest from CBS News and the Craziest Postgame in the Playoffs. Plus: the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser on Year 1 of Trump 2.

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David discuss everything coming out of CBS News, including The New Yorker’s profile on Bari Weiss, Trump’s remarks to Tony Dokoupil, and the spiked '60 Minutes' segment finally making it to air (00:27). Next, the guys listen to some football audio from the College Football Playoff national championship (08:48) before checking in to see how Tony Romo did in the announcer booth this weekend (22:26). After that, The Ringer’s own Lindsay Jones joins the show to discuss her experience covering the postgame happenings after the Denver Broncos beat the Buffalo Bills (24:40). Lastly, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser joins the show to discuss year one of Trump 2.0 (48:25), whether popularity matters to Trump (57:42), and whether Trump has changed the way news is reported (1:13:20). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guests: Susan Glasser and Lindsay Jones Producer: Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Damn it! Yes. I know this will surprise you, but we have more news from CBS News. Oh, yeah? A news division so embattled that Nikki Glazer took time away from making fun of Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriends to make fun of it. First off, the long-loss-C-C-Cott 60-minute segment finally aired on Sunday.

Yeah. And in the Department of Interesting Timing, It ran just as a New Yorker story by Claire Malone was on its final approach to the runway. And also it ran up against a Rams Bears NFL playoff game, which guaranteed a gigantic audience. Let me tell you something. Do you read the Claire Malone piece in the New Yorker? Yes, I did.

I did. I breeze through some of the sections in the middle. It was one of those New Yorker profiles where, you kind of get 5,000 words in and you realize you know most of this stuff. Like it's not always, it's not always the case that you've been, that it's a subject you followed as closely maybe as you and I have followed the subject of Barry Weiss. But yes. Better or worse, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I did read it. The big thing that got a lot at play was, I guess Weiss was with Nora O'Donnell when Noro Donald was interviewing Trump. And Trump and Weiss greeted each other with. they kiss on the cheek, malo, right? Yeah. Because if you were trying to convince your news division that you were not that person,

you would definitely greet Trump in that way. That's exactly what I would have. Met him for the first time, supposedly, and kissed him on the cheek. Yeah. And then there was this line that I thought was good. This is from a person that worked with Ways. I don't think if you sat her down and said, can you explain the difference between a news story,

an investigative story, and an enterprise story. She could tell you what it means. and she wasn't going to let that slow her down. That's about Weiss and her time at the free press. So there's that. That's a great line. It's a great line and a great sentiment too. I mean,

I think that there's a great, you know, the greatest trick the devil of ever pulled sort of thing with it. I mean, it really was incredibly effective because we don't talk about it. And that's that despite her tenure at the New York Times, she was never really in the New York Times, like physically at the New York Times.

She was a. In the news pages. A relatively short-tenured opinion writer. I mean, she does not know what a newsroom is. An opinion editor, which we see her when she's, you know, grabbing all these big name interviews for CBS. 60 Minutes segment finally airs. Brian Stelter wrote this in his newsletter.

Sharon Alfonzi, who's a correspondent, was certainly reluctant to make changes to the original report, but on Thursday she was tasked with interviewing a Trump official such as Christy Noem or Tom Homan. Remember that was Weiss's big note. Why don't we have the voices of the Trump administration in here? Continuing with Stelter here, Weiss said she would personally book an interview, two sources said.

So 60 Minutes producers flew to D.C. from New York, and Alfonzi flew in from Texas. But the promised interview did not materialize, and everyone went home empty-handed. So we held this story for weeks to get people on camera. Weiss assured everybody, hey, you know, I have some phone numbers. If you'd like some cell phones, I can get you, we can help you do this.

And then they didn't get the Trump people on camera. I mean, just this whole thing. I mean, think of back at this. I mean, you know, first of all, the idea of both sidesing a segment that is about Venezuelan nationals who were shipped to a prison in a country they are not from. And where they say they were kept in inhumane conditions and or tortured, that somehow we needed an official opinion about immigration policy to. counter that in that form. We needed a Trump official. Also, just from the news gathering perspective,

you think Tom Holman wanted to be the he said of that exchange? He'll know we're not getting on camera to be part of this story. And you know, you and I talk all the time about Weiss repositioning CBS News. So the hears out the Trump administration at the very next. Guys, CBS News is the kind of stodgy down the middle by the book organization that wants nothing more than to get comment from both sides. They didn't need that lesson. That's just such a dumb note to throw out there. They tried to do that when they reported the original pre-edited piece. Of course they did.

They're CBS News. Yeah. That's just like that is as a note that's just worthless, completely worthless. also from CBS David Tony DeCopal landed an exclusive sidel with Donald Trump It was at the Ford factory in Dearborn Michigan last Tuesday We got a report in the New York Times from the firm of Grinbaum and Mullen About something Trump spokesman

Some spokesperson excuse me Caroline Levitt said after the interview Levitt's quoting Donald Trump here He said make sure you guys don't cut the tape make sure the interview is out in full. The Copel responds, yeah, we're doing it, yeah. Then Leavitt says, he said, again, she's referring to Trump, if it's not out in full, we'll sue your ass off. Now, Michael Grinbaum and Ben Mullen allow that some people thought that

Caroline Leavitt was joking when she said that. Yeah. But do you get to do that just joshin, if your boss has actually sued the pants off of several media organizations? It's, you know, it's a fine line there, but no, generally. You don't get to do the major flinch if you previously punched a person in the face at full strength, right? You really don't. Also, I don't like to play Guess and Source, but the fact that somebody sent this exchange to the New York Times,

somebody presumably around CBS News, I don't know, maybe they could have been on. There was a, you know, Ford factory worker running. Oh, yeah. They walked by. Uh-huh. Yeah, it's just, that whole thing is fascinating. All right, one clip here. This is from the interview.

You're going to have to fight through some Ford factory background noise here, but this was the exchange that everybody bounced on. Tony, we have now the hottest country in the world, and a year and a half ago, our country was dead. We had a dead country. You wouldn't have a job right now. If she got in, you probably wouldn't have a job right now. Your boss, who's an amazing guy, might be bust, okay?

Might be what? That's how big. Might be bust. I doubt it in his case, but you'd never know. Let me just tell you, you wouldn't have this job. You wouldn't have this job, certainly whatever the hell they're paying you. Our country is rocketing right now. We have the hottest country in the world.

If they got in, we would be Venezuela on steroids. Thank you, President Trump for the immediate piss test there at the end. And, of course, everybody's like, oh, see, he's calling out the fact that DeCopal was hired. by Barry Wyss. As part of this repositioning orchestrated by David Ellison, I think he was actually just saying that David Ellison would be bankrupt. Yes. I wasn't president.

What a moment. I guess, you know, to CBS's credit, they did play it in full. It would have been a moment that I might have edited out if I were, judicious editor. All right, David, coming up on the press box, a big playlist of football audio. We've got a sad coach interview. We've got Tony Romo possibly being back.

And the most interesting post-game press conferences since we first heard the name Lynn Jones. Plus, how did Hunter S. Thompson die? The best story you can read about Mel Brooks. And we marked the one-year anniversary of the second Trump administration with New Yorker writer Susan Glasser. All that much more on the press box.

A part of the rigor podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox Tuesday. It's Brian Curtis. It's David Shoemaker. It's producer Bruce Baldwin here. David, I have got a massive bag of football audio for you. Yes.

And let's start with last night's national championship game. Indiana. Yes, Indiana wins a miraculous, undefeated national title. The play we'll all remember was Fernando Mendoza's touchdown run on fourth and five. In the fourth quarter, here's ESPN's Chris Fowler. He's going to take us where he won the Heisman trophy. I was standing on my soapbox the other day for Chris Fowler

when everyone was doing the Sean McDonough-in and trying to demote Fowler. Yes. And then he had just a real so-so to not great game, Miami versus Ole Miss. Yeah. You've done that where you feel bad about your take? Yeah. You're just like, I did something nice or something. somebody. Oh, damn it.

Oh, yeah. All the time. All the time. Well, Chris Fowler was great last night. I love the emotion in that call because he's figuring out mid-call that this is going to be one of the most memorable college football plays you will ever see. Yeah. Fernando Mendoza, who kind of runs like an 80s quarterback. Totally true. Somehow finding his way into the end zone.

I was watching just randomly over the weekend, a clip of, of, uh, Matt Damon talking about how you have to learn how to run when you run in like an action movie because you think you're running cool and then it turns out you're running like a idiot. And I thought about that because Mendoza looked so cool when he was running. And then more importantly, when he was making that dive and it was just like he like it looked like something somebody practices. I guess or you're just born with. It was picture perfect. But it was good. And the call was really good.

his call at the end of the game obviously like you know pre-written was incredibly of the moment but I think more than anything with all of that there was a lot of things that felt like he kind of had him in the bag which is which is how you would expect when to do that I think more than anything he was smart to realize that to a lot of the diehard football fans and to people like him who were involved in the week out and week out of the whole thing like this is a cool story but it's probably going to be a much cooler story with, you know, at the, at the 10,000 feet view than it is to all of us who are right here in the weeds. And so he went out of his way time and time again to impress upon us the significance of this moment. He was like he was recording the soundtrack for the documentary that's going to come out in a decade. You know, like he was, he was very, very clear on what a big deal this was. And I thought that that really added a lot to the game. I agree. And it's great when you have a sports story that works on GMA.

for that audience and also works in the game broadcast. The U is back is a great story too. But, you know, Michael Irvin whipping, you know, an inanimate object with a belt. That could be so many things. That's not a sports movie. This could be a sports movie. For sure. I think Greenberg on Get Up this morning said it's just, this is Hoosiers.

This is Hoosiers too, you know. It really does have those kind of overtones. Yeah. We were watching the game with the tailgate crew at Ringer HQ here in L.A. And Jack Wilson, our head of video was sitting next to me. And he's like, if Sports Illustrated still existed, that Mendoza reach over into the end zone would be printed. Here we go, cover of SI this week. And we would all be waiting to get that in the mail.

I think I said this at the time, but as SI has evolved into a marketing agency or whatever the heck they are, a logo that. you put on fanny packs of the airport or whatever um i don't know why they're still not doing covers like would you not would would people not buy the framed cover of that the sports illustrated cover of of mendoza reaching out flying over the the goal line don't you think they probably are we just don't know there's probably maybe they cover yeah they will definitely there will definitely be something to buy for indiana fans which we hear it's like the largest alumni base in the country how did that happen um they've been saving up the money for a long time.

No, Indiana's a great school. And you know, you have a good old friend that went to IU. Dude, I was texting with Matt last night. He was so excited. But it's, they've had a great business school for a long time. It's a lot of business dorks. Mendoza is football dork. There are also a lot of business dorks that were rooting for football dork.

But I think they just have a, they have an incredible network. As far as state schools go, I mean, this is a very blinder, like very specific view. I grew up across the river from Indiana. But like, of those, of the big state schools, in my experience, IU has maybe the best, like, like, like, alum network, you know? I mean, there's just a lot of, and not just like, oh, there's like, whatever. There's a group to join in whatever big city you're in. But like, like, you know, Ivy League style, like, you know, just,

connectivity, you know, like we, like, we are like, I'm hiring people because they went to my alma mater or like I'm helping people because they went to my, my alma mater, even if I don't know them. I think it's, it's been, it's been bubbling underneath for a long time that IU fan base. And, and finally they got something to spend their money on. Yeah, it's not a basketball jerseys, because Notre Dame, you just hear so much about it and so oppressive on Twitter, all the Notre Dame fans coming out of the word, but all of a sudden's like, all right, oh right, you know, Joe Buck went to IU, Corny Kronin went to I. There's all these IU people.

Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban was doing a lot of postgame interviews last night. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of the post game, I love the ESPN post game because they were in inside the NBA mode. Mm-hmm. Basically, Scott Van Pelt was doing SportsCenter from the field. Yeah.

So it's like, we got nothing to talk up. We got nothing to do other than this. Mm-hmm. We're just going to hang out. And I know as a football fan, you have a big game, especially a great game. and all you want to do is just have people talk about the game more. Yep. This is why people started leaving broadcast and going to podcasts because they're like,

this game broadcast, this entity that has the exclusive rights, it's not giving me what I want. Yeah. Which is just like, I need to come down. I'm excited. I just need people, smart people talking about the game for an hour. And Van Pelt had Reese Davis come and sit with him. Reese is like one of those studio hosts who actually knows a ton about football.

He was great. He went to Herbie and Fowler and the. booth and that was great. And it just played into the night in a really satisfying way. It's like, oh, let's get Kurtzik. We've talked to Kurtzig Day. Let's get them again. Why not? Let's just keep going. Yeah. I think

they've been doing that in some of the big daytime programming too. I mean, that was like, I mentioned I watched Get Up. They had the same guest cycle in and out about five times on Get Up today, just talking about the championship game. They separated the college commentators from the pro commentators, you know, and all this kind of

and just sort of like just kept going around in circles. And I think that that's, I think that that must be a directive from on high. Reese Davis, by the way, is, you're right, is so great. But it's, it feels like everything he says should be less valuable than it is because his voice is, because he has an announcer's voice. And then he's just brilliant. Like, he's just so plugged in. But it's good. I think that we've, it does feel like across the board we've gotten to the point where the vast majority of play by play guys could be podcast host in terms of depth. Obviously, they could be in terms of quality. And it's weird. I don't know if it's just a meritocracy thing or maybe it's just the necessity.

We've talked before about how just being a public figure in the modern era just demands more knowledge of you, more expertise than it would have a decade, two decades ago, and you can just sort of go be a public face. But yeah, it's wild the degree to which they just, it seems like all of these guys popping up and doing PR coming into this week or, you know, you can cite other examples who just are so on the ball. It's such a great point. I think you're right. The world did change. Like you just can't be. And when I see people now, they're like, you're just TV person. Your talent is being good at television, but not knowing anything. Yeah. I reject them a little bit. Because I'm like, you know, I can find another person who's 10% worse at TV, but knows a ton.

It's just not the job is different The job demands other things And I don't know if that's podcasting And this whole second screen of media That has just made it harder You know to just be like I'm a I'm a TV handsome man And this is my this is what I do you know Like I just it does but it's like I just can't imagine

You know having a long conversation about football with Pat Summerall back in the day Or Dick Inberg in the way that you would have it with Chris Fowler Absolutely not Reese Davis or these guys. I just think the depth is... Even on the studio shows, too. I mean, like, I don't think that, like,

first take picked Shea Cornett using the same criteria they had for previous hosts of ESPN shows, you know? And she's been, you know, she's fantastic. You know, I mean, she just, I mean, obviously she's had a nice run as an IU grad herself, you know, in recent weeks. But, like, yeah, but it's just, it's a very,

it's expertise is, is weirdly the, not weirdly, but maybe surprisingly, the number one thing. I'll tell you about the time I saw Reese Davis at the Hartford Airport. No, you didn't. We were, family and I were flying out just like sitting down and he comes walking by. And I went over to say hi and he was wearing shorts. And it was very disturbing. Yeah.

Because Reese Davis is a man of television. He's a man of neckties and pockets. You don't even know what his legs look like. It's hard to imagine him with shorts. I do now. No, what I'm saying? You didn't know what he looked like in pants. Like it was just just raised up.

Yeah, he was a waste up guy. And he was wearing the button down kind of Hawaiian style shirt and shorts of his vacation Reese. But you ID did it. That's pretty impressive. Part of that ESPN post game was that we got a sad coach interview. Yeah. Sad coach being Miami's Mario Cristobal.

Mm-hmm. Dude, some of these sad coach interviews just are ponderous and feel obligatory. The person doesn't want to be there. The announcer doesn't really know how to handle them. I remember when the Panthers lost the Super Bowl, Evan Washburn was sadder than Ron Rivera. Yeah. He was trying to match him emotionally and it just didn't work.

Molly McGrath, the BSPN, was awesome with Mario. Here's a little bit of that interview. What did you say to your team in the locker room just now? I mean, there's a lot, you know, you probably really can't share all of it, but that's a really resilient, tough, this really special group of human beings. They've been elite competitors. They've been the best thing that's happened to the University of Miami in the community in 25 years. And, you know, I love them. They certainly, they love each other.

they turned around a program that, I mean, I'm really kind of out of loss for words. It was, let's just say that it's very real. They, you know, we let one slip away. Credit to Indiana, great football team. Really a tremendous amount of respect for them. But these guys, our guys never stopped battling. Resiliency was awesome like always in. Sometimes it's not even the words, it's just the tone.

him getting choked up and that interview went on for another minute and half yeah he really was there for the assignment yep and man that was good it was just the whole just a great piece of television yeah that it's unexpected um it was yeah it was it was it was all really well done it was it was a very satisfying watch beginning and what and in such a great game too it did feel like the one thing missing in that moment in that interview is just like, you guys didn't way better than a lot of people thought you might, right? You know? Keep your head up, coach. Exactly. You should have done that. You don't need to be ashamed.

Yeah, it was a fantastic game. It was just really fun to watch. God, so satisfying in every possible way. Can I interest you in a Tony Romo redemption game? Yes. Oh, yeah. Bill's Broncos. We had some awesome football. lately, went into O.T. Mr. Tony got off to a little bit of a shaky start. I want you to listen to what he called Josh Allen after a big run. Regular season, we're going to take off.

There wasn't a big opening, but he found one. But finally, he barrels right into Tavanaue Hufunga for a long gallop of 26. Go ahead and watch. Mahomes right here. He's going to go ahead and get back and look, and he knows it's man. So I know Patrick Mahomes is often playing in this game, pretty much always playing in this game, but that was not Patrick Mahomes, sir.

And Twitter just lit up like a Christmas tree. Like, you see this, the Mahomes conspiracy? He's not even playing and they want a lavish praise on Mahomes. So we had that. There was a goal line sequence where Romo and Jim Nance were just fish tailing all over the place. It was very hard to tell what was happening, which is a bad thing to say about a television broadcast. But then Romo settled in.

And he had a few of his trademark predictions hit. Yep. And you could really feel, Nance, after all the noise about Romo last week, over congratulating him for sure, for getting the predictions right. Tony, you called it. Just want to underline that, Tony,

you called that before it happened. Sure, it did, yep. And I always go to lame football analogies here, but it really felt like Romo threw an interception. He nearly threw another one. And then he settled in and played pretty well. Mm-hmm.

And if we're actually going to grade these guys week to week, not just go searching for data points to prove our thesis about Tony Romo, we have to say Tony Romo had a good game. That was an A-minus. That was what I want from Tony Romo.

Mm-hmm. It was a good game. A-minus somewhere in there. Maybe it's a little higher, a little lower for you, but just like if the Tony Roe, I think the Tony Romo, the general critique is correct. Yeah. That he's wheels off in so many ways that you can tell there are holes in his prep. You can just, sometimes he gets way too excited and just starts babbling and all that kind of stuff.

But you have to say when he has a good game. It's true. Or otherwise you're just, you know, just humping your ideas. David, what was more fascinating than the announcers was the postgame scene in Denver. Oh, yeah. Here to provide an eyewitness account is Ringer's senior editor, former Broncos beatwriter. She is Denver's very own. Lindsay Jones, welcome back to the press box.

Hi, thank you guys so much for having me. I thought of you immediately in that wild press box or press conference scene there. And I got three things I want to ask you about. First was the Bill's post game. You were standing to Josh Allen's left when he had this. Terry Press conference. I feel like I, yeah, feel like I let my teammates down tonight. This emotional for us is what has brought this on system?

I just missed opportunities throughout the game. It's been a long season. I hate how it ended. And it's, uh, it's going to stick with me for a long time. What was that like in person? It was really sad. Um, I was also standing kind of at the end of the tunnel where all, the Bill's players came off the field and kind of got to see the full gamut of emotion.

So Josh at that point was really stoic, hands in his pockets, head down. Didn't look like he was crying at that point. Joey Bosa threw his helmet and yelled in the tunnel. There was just a lot of, there were a couple other guys who were kind of teary at that moment. But it was when Josh walked into that press room still in his full uniform. And you can hear it in his voice, right? You can hear the sniffles.

You can hear that his voice is catching. But his face was streaked with tears. And I have covered, I don't know, what, 150 NFL games. And I could probably count on one hand, maybe just a couple fingers of the times where I remember the quarterback, like, really crying in a moment like that. It was, it was very sad. And you could tell that he was just, you know, you heard him say that he thought he let his teammates down, and he really, really felt that very deeply. And I don't know at that point if he had

said that to his teammates, that he had really, like, verbalized that to them. One of the things he did say in that press conference was that, you know, I think somebody asked, well, what do you say in this moment? Like, what did you say to your teammates? And he kind of admitted that he hadn't really been able to talk yet. Like, it took him basically everything to pull himself together enough to even get up to that podium. All right. That's clip number one. Number two, the since fired Bill's coach, Sean McDermott. He was pissed about an interception call against the bills. I'm saying it because I'm standing up for Buffalo, damn it.

I'm standing up for us. Because what went on is not how it should go down, in my estimation. That plays, these guys spend three hours out there playing football, pouring their guts out to not even say, hey, let's just slow this thing down. That's why I'm bothered. This is an amazing template for future insults towards the referees. Just don't just say, I'm doing it for the city. I'm doing it for the team.

I'm doing it for the city. I think every coach across every sport should just give that a shot. It felt like he was trying to keep his job in real time. Did it not, Lindsay? In retrospect, it 100% feels like that. Yeah. Well, and it's not just that. It's that he, I mean, he stood up there.

He was real angry. And then he, like, stood in it and got more and more. worked up about it and then called one of the beatwriters, Jay Skerski from the Buffalo News, to go on the record more about how angry he was about that call after he had watched it. I think he said 20 times in his locker. So yeah, he was irate. And I do think playing those clips back to back of Josh Allen and Sean McDermott is really interesting because there was one guy who was probably taking like really, really internalizing it and taking a ton of accountability

really apologetic for what happened. And then the coach who was basically just assigning blame to everybody else except for him, his team, his staff, all of that sort of stuff. But yeah, in hindsight, like in that moment, I wasn't like, oh, God, Sean McDermott is trying to keep his job. I thought he was kind of projecting and trying to deflect a little bit of, I'm so angry about this one play and feel like if this one thing had gone differently, you know, we'd be one game away from the Super Bowl instead of looking back at all of the

other reasons that they lost that game. In hindsight, I think maybe he felt what was coming and that if one play had gone differently and if one call had gone the other way, that he'd still have a job today. Yeah, he saw the Brandon Bean scapegoating coming straight down the tracks. You might not have predicted that Bean was going to get a promotion for putting together that messed up roster. That was quite a press release. I hope there's room to talk about that press release.

Absolutely. It was really weird. Every single football fan, I'm sure the Bill's fans, too, for the first half of the press release, were just like, man, it's really weird that he got fired and not Bean, and then you get to the punch of like,

and Bean's getting promoted. And everybody, it was just a great, great narrative arc on that press release. And an all-timer of a typo in the first sentence. Oh, my gosh. An admiral job. An admiral job.

Look, I didn't realize he was like doing his job from a boat out at sea, which was, I don't know, boat in around Niagara Falls, I don't know, but epic typo. Only in NFL press releases, for sure. So McDermott circled back to make a point. And somehow in this same crazy postgame scene, Sean Payton, the Broncos coach, also circled back.

He'd done his conventional postgame presser. And then he came out in a high-in car heart looking jacket and gave us this shocker about quarterback Bo Nix. Not good news. On the second to last play in overtime, Bo fractured a bone in his right ankle. He's scheduled to have surgery Tuesday of this week, which will put him out for the rest of the season. Stead he's ready to go. And it was the second to last play before he threw the past.

to Mims. Stiddy for the uninitiated as backup quarterback Jared Stidham. Lindsay, I was so shocked. First of all, I think Shoemaker and I both thought we were reading fake Adam Schaefter tweets because we'd already moved on to Seahawks 49ers when we got this news.

How did so much information from not only his bone ex out to we know the day he is having surgery get put together and actually delivered to the media in attendance? Yeah, that was wild. So I hadn't been over in the Broncos locker room or I wasn't at Sean Payton's initial press conference because I was over there with the bills as we as we kind of talked about. But on my way back up to the locker room, the Broncos media room is on the way.

And Bo Nix usually talks last. And it usually takes a while. So I'm like, well, I'm going to pop into this press room and see, you know, I'll just gather a little bit more stuff. And sure enough, he hadn't come in yet. The defensive players were still going. Jayquan McMillan was in there talking about that, you know, the controversial interception. and we kind of stood there after he finished going like, where's Bo? Like, this is, like, I know he usually takes a while to, like, get showered and dressed,

but, like, this is just really dragging on. And that's when Sean Payton walked in wearing, you know, completely different clothes than he was during his first press conference. And, you know, and he said it. He just kind of announced it. And, you know, I want to be clear, Sean Payton doesn't do do favors for the media and certainly not for the local media. So he wasn't doing this additional.

media availability to announce this is like a favor to the beatwriters. He was really doing it because he knew it was he couldn't hold it, hold that news until the next time he saw his team. And he didn't want everybody to learn from an Adam chapter tweet because it would have come out, right? I mean, he's got both scheduled for surgery. He's going to be on a plane. All of the agents are talking, you know, the agents from all the other players are going to start leaking stuff out. So it probably wouldn't have lasted a couple more hours. And Sean very much wanted that to come from him. And a lot of the players had already left. I mean, it was probably an hour after the game. So some of the guys were still there. Some of the guys got to find out in person from Sean before he announced it to the team.

But a lot of the guys were probably, you know, in their cars on the way home or getting texts from their agents or their friends and learning about it the way that, you know, most of you guys did. It's so fascinating. So it's accountability to the team, not accountability to us, the report. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I appreciated that he did it. I mean, he's not a guy who tends to, like, is that do a lot of favors to the media. But, you know, I think it did give everybody that was there a chance to kind of reshape the story and the narrative because, look,

a lot of people had already filed their copy about like, oh, my God, the Broncos win. And Bo Nix gets the Broncos to the AFC championship game and start looking ahead to that, you know, the Bo Nix, Drake, Drake, made type of matchup. And Sean kind of reshifted. shifted that pretty quickly. I mean, but it was, I mean, that was a very weird post game in that everybody left that stadium bummed. Like it just was a huge, huge damper on that celebration for sure. Well, we talked about, you know, before about the, you know, the winning side and the losing side

and the degree of emotion you get from both of them. In this case, you got the both degrees from one from one stage. What kind of, like talk a little bit. I know you weren't there for the first Sean Payton section, but talk a little bit about that emotional swing. I mean, not just the sadness of reporters who had already filed their copy and had to swing or something else out. Luckily, I had a blank screen. I was good to go.

It's the ringer. Yeah. That's not a thing that you experience. That is not an emotional state that you find yourself much in sports in general, that level of swing for one team. It's really, it's really rare to be completely caught off guard by something like that. Like I really have a hard time remembering the last time or really any other instances that are comparable to that where I sat in a press room and been completely blindsided by what the coach or whoever it was had to say.

And now, you know, you can connect. You go back and you look and you're like, okay, it looks like, yeah, you did see him hobbling a little bit after this play. And oh, in his on field interview with Tracy Wolfson, yeah, he did look like he was only standing on one leg. And so you can kind of connect those dots. but like there was no everybody really felt blindsided by this news. And yeah, it, I think all of the reporters who were in there, and it wasn't everybody, because there were a lot of people who had already gone upstairs to file their stories. I mean, there were probably, I was sitting near the front, so I didn't count the people behind me.

But I don't know, maybe 10 reporters in there maybe and a couple cameras. It wasn't like this packed press conference room by any sense. And we all kind of just looked at each other like, wait, Is this, you know, we're all racing to tweet it right on our phones. And I think there were probably five or six of us who did it because they weren't, that wasn't being carried live anywhere, right? I mean, it was just a handful of us that were in that room. And we all looked at each other like, is this really happening?

And, you know, and then you kind of get the, you know, you pull back the curtain a little bit. Obviously, if you're the Denver Post, the athletic based in Denver, you know, immediately everything you do shifts to what do you do without Boe Nix and the plan with Jared Stidham and all of that kind of stuff. And then, you know, nationally, you kind of have to say, okay, well, does this change everything? What's the, what do people still want to read about? And what's the talking point? And generally it was the appreciating. But yeah, it swung everything really, really quickly. I mean, I know my social media feeds, you know, all my local friends are Broncos fans. And it was a lot of just like heartbroken for Bonics and, you know, the memes about the like, you know, celebration to

devastation immediately. And now Denver's trying to talk. themselves into a steady as a paid paid call him. I got one last one for you, Lindsay, before you go. This comes from alert listener, the mysterious Dr. Z. I'm reluctant to reopen the Lynn Jones Pandora's box here, but there was a sentiment on Twitter on Sunday that said this. Look, you know, we all got mad at Lynn Jones because she stood up and she said some, keep your head up, coach.

but then every single football writer you know got on Twitter after the Bill's Broncos game and said, man, you got to feel for Josh Allen. I feel horrible. I feel horrible for this guy. So were we pointing fingers when, in fact, we were delivering similar human sentiments in slightly different form? Yeah, I think it's probably just the stage. And I have, I mean, I have stayed out of the Lynn Jones, Liam Cohen. I'm trying to drag you in. Let's all get. I know. I was like, Brian, I was out of this. I'm like, I have not in charge of the PFWA anymore. I do not have to wait into these waters. I mean, I think it's like, look, we all, we're all human and want to approach, I mean, or hopefully we want to approach this job with humanity and empathy. And I think the,

generally the people that I think do the best job at, you know, at this covering sports are the people who view athletes as humans and complex people and athletes and I will say, and coaches too. And look, if you if you got went into that Josh Allen press conference and like didn't feel something for him, I think that you're too, maybe too cynical. And I am as cynical, I am as cynical, I think, as they come now. And but if you can't like watch somebody just really, really going through it. But look, nobody was in there like, Josh, I'm so sorry. Nobody, nobody was like apologizing to him. There was a lot of like, you know, you know, the questions get asked in that like hushed, you know,

there's like a hushed tone, certainly that happens. Look, I think you, and especially if you're a beatwriter and you're around these guys all the time, like, you know them, you know how they think, you know how they feel and you kind of want to feel for them. It's just recognizing the time and place to maybe deliver to deliver it. Can we get the ringer just our tradition where we send somebody in the loser's locker room of every big game and when they get called on just say, just say, hey, man, you look like you need a hug. Can I give you a hug?

Who would be the right person for that job? Not me. I'm not. Somebody cuddly. We'll talk about it off the air. Lindsay Jones, boots on the ground in Denver. Thanks as always for coming on the press. I'll be back for Stiddymania. All right, David, let's finish up with two highlights from Bears Rams. Speaking of amazing football games.

This was, I don't even even introduce it. Caleb Williams, Mike Dorico, here we go. Command in motion. Williams, drifting, sprinted for space. In all kinds of trouble, put it up for grabs at the end. Two things I loved about that. Chris Collins were just laughing. It was so perfect.

The laugh and nothing else, so perfect. We've been talking a lot about emotional authenticity in broadcasting lately and that's it, man. It's like there's two sides of it. There's Tariq like, oh my God, I'm jumping off my couch. This is unbelievable. But then there's also just, I'm just laughing. Well, there's some moments that we've talked about this before, too,

that there's some moments that just require laying out, right? You either let it totally turn it over to one person or neither of you talk for a moment to let it sink in. This was that sort of third path where it's like, we're just going to let Toreco just go nuts. And then, you know, yeah, you completely, you basically, Collinsworth basically lays out except just throws in the laugh

which is just so pitch perfect. It was weird that Tariko call was rushed, no pun intended at the beginning because the play was breaking down so quickly that it was that there was impossible to call, right? Like if you got to do the post facto voiceover for the box set or whatever,

you would probably, you know, just target the rush a second earlier and just say there's no way this is going to happen just so you can really underline it. But it was, but he, he caught up. He caught up. He was like a musician who was like a note behind. And then he just like starts shredding on the guitar solo right at the perfect beat.

You know, he's, he's, he just, he caught. Right when the ball got caught, he was there. And it was, it made it so much more exciting in a weird way. That was going to be my second point because he, of all announcers, has every syllable looked after. Yeah. Especially during a big play. Like Mike Torrico was never thrown. He's never, you know, pushed off.

course like he he has this right he has got this that Caleb Williams throw almost got him yep it did it was like one little sound in there where he was like beep but beep you just like you just almost feel it it almost got him but then he as you say he was like musician back i got this yeah yeah that's how big a play it was it took that to almost yeah almost throw mike i feel you know there this was a big set this is a big weekend for feeling bad for for football players I don't know. Everybody put up a good fight and fell in all these games that we've been talking about. So you've got to feel bad for Caleb Williams, but like, is it, is it on some level sadder that that throw will get lost to history than it is that they lost the game?

I, yeah, man, that is funny to me because I am fascinated by lost plays like that. Yeah. I mean, if he does win a Super Bowl, then that will kind of come back into the highlight reel. Or if he continues the trend of crazy fourth quarter plays or whatever, yeah, that'll be on the highlight reel. But, man, if that had won them the game or put them in position, if they had gone on to win the game, that would have been like the most famous. That's the throw that defines his career. That says, you know, quarterback scramble over the, over the line of the end zone. I mean, it would have been.

So, this is the last one. And only you and the erudite press box listener will care about this. This was earlier in the game. Tariko was telling a story about Bears' offensive lineman Joe Tunney. Switching from Guard to tackle for this game. Did you expect to hear the name of this best-selling popular historian? One time Super Bowl champ, he has gone. So we talked to Tuny on Friday, and the word of this switch did not get out for a little bit.

So he got a call and he was reading David. McCullough's book on the Wright brothers. He's from Dayton, Ohio, very proud of Daytonian. He just said, yeah, coach called and said, here's the move. And he said, all right, fine. Great nugget, but man, I did not expect to hear David McCullough's book about the Wright brothers. Oh, my God, that's so funny. And just such a funny thing to throw in.

Yeah, that'd be great. Just did the Joe Tooney and David McCullough book club would be fantastic. Or just the Joe Tooney Book Club. We could just throw in all like the great, uh, American history books. Team of rivals. Theodore Rex.

What else can we, uh, Toste into that? Uh, founding brothers. Can we do that? The brothers. That's a great one. Um,

yeah, no, that's great. We should reach out to him. Come on. Reese Whitherspoon doesn't have a monopoly on, on, on U.S.

history. That's right. He could, he could really get a, get a foothold in there. Uh, also just before we go, two,

uh, old fashioned only in sports writing words. I encountered in the athletic this weekend. A team punched its ticket to the conference championship game. Great one, great one. And also the coaching carousel. Outside of sports writing, how many punch tickets and carousels do you encounter an American life today?

We have a carousel. I think we have a carousel on the ringer.com's homepage, which we talk about on the back end. That's right. That is a web publishing term. Carousel, yes. But aside from that, no, you never. As a matter of fact, yeah, there's no other carousels in pro sports.

There's not a free agency carousel. I guess the idea is that there's only so many jobs and there's only so many coaches and it's just sort of like you're going around in circles. That's the implication, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I guess it does accurately describe the idea that everybody gets recycled. This year it feels really apt. In some years, it's like, okay, it's kind of like, it's more like musical chairs in the

carousel, unless it's a carousel where like you, there's an age. limit on the carousel and they get kicked off and they let more new people on. But yeah, it's the coaching carousel. It only exists. It only exists for coaching, coaching, hiring and firing purposes. All right. Coming up in 30 seconds, year one of

Trump two with the New Yorker columnist who never runs out of material. But first, David, let's do the overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag. It was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to have the Press Buckspot where they are always, always gratefully received.

As we talked about, we got heartbreaking news that Bo Nix would not play in the AFC championship game after fracturing his ankle. Remembering what happened to Florida State a few years ago, it was an overworked Twitter joke to write the playoff committee should take into consideration that the Broncos QB is injured before setting the field for the AFC championship. Thanks to Shemez for that one. also funny one from listener B.R. Hoffman

when Miami finally scored to get back in the game yesterday. Yeah. He noted that everybody on Twitter did the dad thing of we got ourselves a game. Yeah. We got ourselves the games.

Like, thank you obvious football analyst for telling us that. It's so funny. That used to be all of Twitter, though. Wasn't that, I mean, wasn't that seriously like 90% of Twitter not that long ago. It is people doing

just tepid live reaction. I miss football Normie Twitter. I really do. Yeah, me too. You didn't have to know analytics. Just,

hey, this is going to be a game all right. By the way, can we just get, Bruce, can we just get the audio of Chris Collinsworth's laugh isolated and just put it on

after every, every Twitter joke Brian reads from now on? All right. Collinsworth laugh. I love this. I got too many book club Collinsworth laugh down

for future episodes. This is perfect. A few cents that I actually said we got a game last night. Congratulations. or Twitter joke of the week. I want to welcome in Susan Glasser.

Her New Yorker column is called Letter from Trump's Washington. You can also hear her on the political scene podcast. Last year in a column about Mike Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives, Susan wrote, How was that not a bigger deal? It should probably be the mantra for the second Trump administration. Susan, welcome to the press box. Oh, thank you, I'm very happy to be with you.

Let's start here. What has Trump done over the last year that surprised you? Well, I suppose one doesn't get credit for being a doom and gloomer from the start, but I do assure you that my bivodifieds on this one are real. You know, if anything, right, the amazing thing is that we keep being surprised. And yet, I've come to realize that as frustrating as that is, there's an element that's important because I feel like we need to retain our collective ability to still be shocked by the shocking, right? One of Trump's political gifts,

it seems to me, for this last 10 years, and it has amazingly been a full decade, you know, that he's been sort of dominating our political life. And one of his great gifts over these 10 years, politically speaking, is the ability to make the unthinkable, both thinkable and then real. And, you know, so, you know, there are scenarios we can still imagine, I think, that would surprised the hell out of us. But, you know, look, the thing about Trump is that it's actually fairly easy, in my view, to have a pretty clear read of him. What's happened that's most surprising is the reactions of the rest of the world and the people around him. This would not be happening if it were not for so many people letting it happen. And that is, I think, a surprise.

Not in his administration, in corporations, in terms of state houses and other countries, you're saying? Absolutely. You know, one thing that you can say versus Trump 1.0 versus 2.0 is that his assaults on civil society institutions on the United States have found a lot of give there, a lot of people who were just willing to go along with him in assertions of executive power that. I really did not think was entirely possible. I mean, look at all the businessmen. Fine, you can say, well, the Republican big givers, that is a foregone conclusion at this point. Those are the people who basically Trump figured out how to own in his first term. But in the second term, you know, how do you explain people like the CEO of Apple, whose products we all use every day? You know, why is it that he needs to give a million dollars or more to knock down the E.E. wing of the White House, right? You know, okay, fine. You can say, well, a few billionaires,

they, you know, they've read too much on the internet and they've decided to become Trumpers, you know, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. But I don't think that explains the broader giving in of leaders, leaders of law firms and academia and, you know, countries who should have known better. Europe is finding out right now that sucking up to Donald Trump, was not, in fact, a full-proof theory of the case for how to manage this period in American politics. You wrote a column last week about Trump sending federal agents to Minnesota and what you called the carnival of violence that he's created there. Besides immigration raids and deportations, what are Trump's goals in Minnesota, do you think? Well, that is a great question.

And as always, I think, you know, I'm very wary. I think people do tend to attribute too much in the way. way of a kind of sweeping ideology or, you know, pre-planned theory of the case to Donald Trump. And I think that's a consistent kind of category error with him. I remember once being in a green room with Chris Christie, who, as you know, was a close friend of Trump's before they then sort of had a very public breakup in 2020. And Christy was listening with some great frustration that, you know, sort of pundits like, you know, talking about Trump. And, you know, he interrupted. And I wrote about this once in the column. He got mad at me for writing.

but I'll repeat it. You know, and he said, wait a minute, you guys, you have to understand, like, Donald Trump, enough with the, like, 3D chess and all this bullshit, you know, basically Donald Trump is not playing chess. He's not playing checkers. He doesn't have a plan. His time horizon is the next few minutes. And I do think that's an important kind of caveat here, right? So he is kind of a creature of the 24-hour news cycle. So a lot of what he does, especially when he's escalating is in response to what he's seeing on TV and on his social media feed and the like. However, that being said, I think he has the instincts of a natural authoritarian. And with Minnesota, I do think he is sort of crystallized his second term theory of the case,

which is about asserting total dominance inside the country, especially against what he defined, as his most important enemy, which, by the way, it's not Denmark and Greenland. You know, it's really not Russia and China. He has told us very clearly, yeah, we have adversaries like Russia and China, but the biggest adversary that we have is the enemy within. And I think Minnesota has now become the template and the demonstration project for how Trump and Stephen Miller intend to go after what they have defined as the enemy within. Speaking of Greenland, we woke up Monday to a typically mind-bending report that Trump said he wanted to annex Greenland in part because he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize. His peacemaking was insufficiently celebrated, therefore he wanted to take land from another country. Once upon a time, you actually interviewed Trump about Greenland. Why does he want to acquire Greenland? Well, I mean, spoiler alert here. And let's stipulate that it's very, very hard to fact check Donald Trump when every single thing about that sentence that you just said is not only untrue, but, you know, almost, almost farcical in nature, starting with the fact that, of course, it's not the government of Norway that decides who wins the Nobel Prize. Number one. Also, Norway is a different country than Denmark, which actually is the owner of Greenland. Putting all that aside, the biggest thing that's really unbelievable. about that statement is that Donald Trump has coveted Greenland ever since he was told about it, according to our reporting for our book, The Divider, in his first term as president.

You didn't know anything about Greenland before he became president. But sometime very soon after he became president, his friend Ron Lauder, who he went to college with at the University of Pennsylvania, you know, the cosmetics error, told him that there was great potential in Greenland. And we were really stunned to find this out in reporting our book because we, like the rest of the world, had considered this not much more than a classic Donald Trump kind of throwaway line when it first became public in the summer of 2019. You remember that. And he floated this and he was like tweeting like weird memes of, you know, like, you know, Trump golden places in Greenland. And the day and said, no, thank you. And then, you know, it was the fodder of late night comedians. But when we were reporting the book, We were told by former senior national security officials to Trump that actually he was very serious about this throughout his first term, i.e. way before he was demanding a Nobel Peace Prize for the eight wars that he allegedly ended and did not actually end in his second term. So we asked Donald Trump about this in November of 2021. And I think his answer still is the real answer today. He basically told us, look, I love maps. I looked at this on a map. It's massive and we should have it. And, you know, he said at the time in November 2021, it's really just like a real estate deal to me, except it's a lot bigger. And I think Trump's desire to write his name on the map of history is a lot of what we're seeing, not just with Greenland, but with many of these other very disruptive and unsettling actions that he's taken. of them, minor but upsetting, you know, like putting his name on the U.S. Institute of Peace or putting his name on the Kennedy Center. You know, that's a man who's in a bid for as much immortality as he can

get. And Donald Trump defines it in the most literal of terms. You know, he's not looking for grand sweeping geopolitical doctrines. He's looking for his name in big gold letters on as much stuff is possible. I want to ask you about polls because one notable aspect of the second Trump administration is that he is not popular. In December, Gallup had him at a 36% approval rating. Do you think popularity matters to Donald Trump at this point? You know, I think that's an important question and I, you know, that we need to consider a lot more. You know, there's a sort of idea that took hold by the end of 2025 among a lot of the president's critics that, you know, basically he's a sort of unpopular, increasingly disempowered lame duck. And it is definitely true, as you point out,

that he is not only hip unpopular, but really historically unpopular. There's no presidents, including first term Donald Trump, who have ever been as unpopular at this point in his term as Donald Trump is right now. And it's notable that it's not only his personal divisiveness that the voters seem not to like, but many of his policies now are as or more unpopular than the man himself, on the economy, on immigration now. And that was never true in the first term, where it used to be that Trump was personally seen as divisive and unpopular, but much of what he was doing, especially on the economy, still had some more appeal to voters. So I think it's right to say, you know, that he's lost the vast majority of the American people with what he's doing in his

second term. However, my fear, when I look at Trump's own behavior, his psychology, what he's doing, and how it fits in with other would-be authoritarianes around the world, my behavior is that that's just another constraint that's falling by the wayside because Donald Trump is not eligible according to the Constitution for another term in office. So what does he care, you know, about the voters anymore? And, you know, that is what we're seeing again and again and again is that the constraints that existed on him in the first term basically are no longer present, whether it's advisors who define their role as making sure he stayed within the lines of legality, whether or not. it's courts that have been transformed by, you know, hundreds of appointments that Trump made of judges in his first term, you know, and down the list we can go of constraints that had been present and weren't.

And I think the absence of electoral pressure on Donald Trump is another one of those constraints that's falling by the wayside. When people rage about Trump, they often pause for 10 seconds and then they start raging about the Democrats for failing to stop Trump. Trump, what's a reasonable criticism of congressional Democrats over the last year? Oh, are you inviting me to engage in the same? I'm happy to do it. Look, you know, Democrats have, I think, been consistently surprised by what Trump has done, unable to effectively find means to stand against him. and more importantly, in my view, right now, especially, I just, I'm not convinced that enough

Democrats actually believe their own existential rhetoric about the threat that Donald Trump poses. Because it seems to me that a lot of Democrats here in Washington, where I live and work, are still basically of the view that this is one of those oscillations in American politics and that as, you know, wild and crazy as it seems that, in fact, the conditions are in place for Democrats to do very well in the midterm election, that they can just go back to some kind of normal, if not the exact status quo ante in the next presidential election, and that Trump is kind of a regrettable, but more or less within the framework of our politics. And that is very much at odds with what you've actually been hearing those leaders tell the

electorate for the last 10 years. You know, Joe Biden, you know, this is an existential threat to a democracy. and on we can go. I just, I'm not convinced that Democrats are acting like he is. And I think the best evidence, unfortunately, for that theory of the case is the complete failure to correctly anticipate exactly how dramatic the actions Trump would take after he was sworn in last January 20th were and to take proper action when they could have. They were not prepared in terms of activism, in terms of lawsuits. They took very little action when they did control both houses of Congress at the beginning

of Joe Biden's terms. They were too busy overreaching and calling Joe Biden, you know, the second coming of FDR and LBJ rolled into one. And, you know, with the exception of revising the Electoral Count Act to make it more clear, they hoped and to avoid a kind of another January 6 type situation, aside from doing that legislatively. The Democrats did not work with centrist Republicans to pass laws that could have made it harder for Trump to do some of the disruptive things that he's done to the U.S. government. And so, you know, I mean, one could go on, but I think it's very fair to say that

Trump could not have done as much as he's done if his opposition hadn't been weak. If the Democrats take back the House in November, how much do you think Trump would actually be restrained? You know, that is also a fantastic question that gets to the heart of it. You know, obviously Trump does not want the Democrats to take back the House, and he certainly doesn't relish the idea. He's been talking about it already. Actually, publicly, he's several times mentioned, and it doesn't gotten very much attention, but he several times mentioned that if Democrats take back the House, they're going to impeach him again. He obviously doesn't really want that to happen.

There would be Democratic Committee chairs. There would be investigations of what's happening in the executive branch and subpoenas and oversight hearings. And so I don't think he wants it. At the same time, what's remarkable is that even though Republicans, in theory, control all three branches of government right now, right? They control the House, the Senate, and the White House. So much of what Donald Trump done has simply bypassed.

Congress, even with Republicans in control of it. He's basically just taken to dramatically ignoring Congress, even where it's pretty clear what its constitutionally designated role is, for example, in appropriating and authorizing funding for programs of the federal government. Trump has chosen to shut down tons of those programs to fire tens of thousands of federal workers, despite the fact that Congress authorized them, and Congress hasn't done anything about it. So, you know, a president who governed by executive order and sort of declarative fiat doesn't seem like a president who's all that intimidated by Congress. I think he's concluded that it's a toothless tiger, even when it's controlled by his own party as well as the other party. I want to ask you about

the discourse in politics, Susan. Trump's insults sound to me more. or less like they sounded the first time around. What's striking to watch, though, is members of his administration from J.D. Vance on down adopt his rhetorical style. I believe the technical term is shit posting. Do you think that has any long-term effects on American politics? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think if anything, people have been way too quick to dismiss the cultural impact of, you know, Trumpism and the Trumpian style in American politics. And, you know, think about what impact that has on, you know, American voters and a whole new generation of people sort of who will grow into adulthood in this period of time. I was really reminded of this last fall.

My husband and I were fellows at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School and spent a lot of time around college students. And, you know, at one of our, we had a study group each week and one time this great, smart group of kids, one of them said, you know, we're always struck that you and your visitors, they're always talking about how abnormal Trump is. But you have to understand, like Donald Trump is essentially the only president that we recall. Some of us, like, you know, the kids who are freshmen and sophomores today in university, like Barack Obama was a kind of like a, you know, like a dream about their time when they were toddlers. You know, their mom and dad told them there was this president named Barack Obama. They don't have any

essentially conscious memory of the Obama years and what came before the long Trump-eraan American politics. So what is normal for Americans going forward? It's going to be that kind of discourse. It's going to be this kind of scorched earth approach to the opposition where it's not just disagreements that we have over policy, but disagreements about whether we can even be on the slain planet without killing each other. Yeah, I look at the as yet announced presidential campaign, as yet unannounced presidential campaign of Gavin Newsom. And I think it's highly likely that the Democrats in 2028 will just look for a more benign version of this rhetorical style,

but that this will be the rhetorical style. You're posting all the time. You're insulting all the time. You're going after your enemies all the time. It just may have a slightly different form than it does under Trump. Well, I think that's going to be actually a part of an explicit part of the debate in 28, actually. I'm sure there will be Newsom and other Newsom-like candidates who will emerge. And I'm sure there will be people who say, you know what, actually the country is ready to

move on from that and who campaign as the opposite, as the untram. And it'll be fascinating to see what the Democratic electorate picks. I mean, in many ways, it seems to me, Newsom is the candidate, or the kind of candidate the Democrats wish they had in 2024, whether he will be seen as the candidate of the future in 2028. I think that's still an open proposition. If we agree that a decade's worth of badness has been crammed into the last year, can you point to something you think Trump has done well accidentally or otherwise? Well, that's a good question. I mean, look, sort of Washington in the years leading up to Trump, it was a pretty complacent place, I would say. It was a, you know, a sort of a technocratic, you know, kind of get yours while you can era in which it was increasingly divorced, I think, in many ways from American society, right?

you know, our politics. And if nothing else, this has been a crash course in American civics in American history. And, you know, the most important lesson involved in the Trump years is that, you know, democracies don't just exist on autopilot. And that, you know, the tendency, which the founders knew very well, but I don't think modern Americans did, was that, you know, you have to take ownership of it each generation or it's not going to exist. You know, that there are obligations that come with American citizenship as well as benefits. And I do think that there was an extraordinary complacency in American society and a smugness. You know, I think back to all of those lectures about American exceptionalism in the Obama years

and, you know, how, of course, we were the greatest country and, you know, the history of the world and our democracy was the best. And, you know, it's a painful lesson to have learned. But I actually believe that it was crucial to American renewal, though I can't say that I'm convinced that that American renewal is happening anytime soon. We talk on this podcast a lot about how Trump has gone after reporters this time around. What struck you about his relationship with the press? Yeah. I mean, obviously Donald Trump, first of all, he is a creature of the media in ways that I still think are not fully appreciated. You know, one of the most memorable conversations I recall was with someone who worked throughout Trump's first term in the White House who told me that he reminded them of the little American kid in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who, you know, wants, who loves, I think his name is Mike TV.

And he loves watching TV so much his ask for Willy Wonka is to be transported inside the television. And, you know, to hear that from a Trump White House aid, I thought was just so revealing. I mean, you know, the guy is literally sitting in a room off the Oval Office watching TV all day long, then, you know, tweeting and reaction to it and just a sort of self-reinforcing cycle. So he is a creature of the media. He cares what the media says. But, you know, what are you to make of a man who sues the New York Times, including my husband, Peter Baker, for $15 billion? Okay, that's billion, not million, and then invites them in for an hours-long interview. And I think that, you know, captures it.

But I think the danger that we're seeing is that his probing in the second term has found the weaknesses in media ownership. And I think that alarmingly Donald Trump's vicious rhetoric towards the media calling them the enemies of the people and the like, which is, by the way, straight out the language of dictators. I worked for four years in Russia, and I can tell you that enemy of the people is literally the term that Stalin used to condemn millions of people to the Gullah. But what's happening in the second term is that that rhetoric is now being accompanied by Trump's pressure tactics working in changing both the ownership and the leadership of major media companies in the country, and he now is advancing almost a kind of a blackmail-type idea that the president of the United States gets to dictate how he's covered. And that's what I find very worrisome and very

pernicious, frankly, about the settlements that he's managed to get from ABC, from CBS, in particular for, you know, just completely spurious legal claims. CBS paid him millions of dollars. because its owner was trying to get a billion-dollar merger approved by Trump's government, which it then approved. And the result of which is that Donald Trump now has reason to believe that he can control the nature of his own coverage, which, of course, is the dream of every leader out there. It's interesting. He's extracted those settlements. He has created or at least empowered this pro-Trump wing of the media. and we meet a new member in that new media seat, quote unquote, in the White House briefing room. But if somebody who's been around Washington a long time, do you think he's really been able to change mainstream reporting?

Do you think there are fewer tough stories about Donald Trump than there would be if he hadn't done anything, any of these things we're talking about? Yeah, I mean, that isn't a great question because the answer is no. You know, much of, you know, our conversation wouldn't be possible today if it weren't for the terrific investigative reporting being done by our colleagues. colleagues at the New York Times and ProPublica and all around the country. I mean, look at how local outlets like the Minneapolis Star Tribune are stepping up and providing crucial information to communities that are feeling the effects of Trump 2.0. So I think it's actually important in many ways, you know, a big takeaway of Trump second term in office is, you know, if you want to do anything, you know, support the independent media. I'm worried that there's a constraining

and a constricting space for that. Our colleagues at the Washington Post are still doing good work, many of them on the news side, but how long can that go on? They've had an owner who has made it clear that his, you know, in a choice between Donald Trump and his publication, he's going to pick Donald Trump. And so, you know, there's reasons to be worried about the sort of the shrinking space for that kind of independent investigative reporting,

especially at a time when the economics of the media business are so challenging. And, you know, thousands of journalists have been laid off over the last decade, not having anything to do with Donald Trump. But the effect, of course, is certainly to make it easier for him to flourish in so many communities around the country that no longer have any independent journalism about their politics or holding their leaders accountable at all at the local level. So I think that's important to say.

I really do. Let's end on a cheerful note. As we hurdle into year two, what worries you the most? Look, one of the clear lessons of Trump and frankly of any other bully is that they tend to respond to strength and they tend to respond to pushing back. And so the more that institutions figure that out, the more that individuals do, I think Trump was really rattled by those no kings protests around the country last summer. I really do. I think that he is very concerned about the upcoming. and results of the midterm elections. I think there's a real threat, by the way, to the independence and integrity of those elections as a result of it. But the point is that the time to defend your institutions and your rights is before they're taken away. And maybe the first year of Trump's

return to office is the cautionary tale that Americans and people around the world need to begin using the power that is still vested in them to push back on it. for it's too late. I think that that is still very much a possibility. I do not believe that the endgame here is a foregone conclusion. Susan Glasser, you can find her columns and her podcast at The New Yorker. Susan, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you so much for having me. All right, David, two more quick things before we exit this year podcast. Did you read the Hunter S. Thompson story? No, I did not read. I was, I spent, I spent, uh, three, of the past four days reading

the New Yorker Barre-Wa story but but I do know what you're talking about you told you told me you wanted to talk about it to tell me about it I mostly just want to point people to it it's by Tim Rango and it what turns out

100 Thompson died by suicide in February of 2005 and they are reopening the case or at least taking another look at the case piece by Timorango in the Times all about this. It's just very interesting and there's obviously some,

some issues between Hunter as Thompson's widow and his son, who were both, both sort of prominent characters in the story. Anyway, if you were interested in Hunter Thompson and that whole era of journalism, I highly recommend that in the Times. The other thing I wanted to run by you, so I think we should start a new department. Probably come up with a fancier name at some point, but the department is the best piece about.

Oh, yeah, yeah, this is a good idea. idea. I like this idea. The best piece about. And for our inaugural, inaugural best piece about, I would like to nominate Mel Brooks, David, there's a new Mel Brooks documentary coming out on HBO Max. This week. How exciting is that? It's great. He's got like Judd Apatow was a co-director, Rob Reiner's in it. They got everybody, of course. Mel Brooks, by the way, turning 100 this year. So that is the It's crazy. That is what we're celebrating here. The best piece ever written about Mel Brooks appeared in the New Yorker in 1978.

Wow. It is called frolics and detours of a short Hebrew man. That is an appellation that Mel Brooks gives himself in the piece. It is by Kenneth Tynan. Wow. Great one. So as Greg Olson likes to say, great on great. Yeah.

Ken Tinen on Mel Brooks. Just like many, a 70s New Yorker piece, it is 25,000 words long. Also in the style of that magazine in that era, Kenneth Tynan's byline appears at the end of the story. So you read 25,000 words and then you discover the identity of the author. It's a big surprise. It's sort of an Easter egg that they throw a false finish there. It's great.

I can't wait to take a look at that. That's so cool. I remember first reading this story because Tyne has a collection called Show People. That's basically a collection of the 70s New Yorker profiles. And it is a Johnny Carson piece. It's one of those like every story's great. Do you think if we lived in a world with like, do you think if we lived in a world where like the cost of paper wasn't the number one great, you know, issue in magazine

P&L is that we'd have more 25,000 word feature stories? I just don't know at this point. whether we like what is the tide that has pulled us away from that as a thing like it's just so i mean just so hard to write that many words as you know as anyone who's tried to write that many words knows it's like if you're like if you tend towards long windedness it's surprisingly easy to write like 5 000 words you know sometimes you'll you'll be so you'll be trying to do a 2 500 word word piece and you'll be like oh god i can't get up below 3 500 it's just like you know you just think it feels so easy but man when you're aiming for a hind a hind a hind

number, it's really hard to get there. It really is. And I think if you go back and people go back and read this piece, you can find it on the New Yorker's website. Good luck to you if you want to read 25,000 words on the New Yorker's website. If you can make it through that. Is it a PDF or is it like actual text? It's just an actual text.

It's got to be a PDF, I think. There's old ones. You can read it. You can read it in those pages on the New Yorkers website. I would do. Those take so long to load in my estimation, they are really, really hard. If you're a tremendous sicko like me, you would have bought the magazine in anticipation of this feature a couple of weeks ago. It's all up on our Instagram account right now, by the way, if you want to see the pictures of it.

Or go by Ken Tyne's book. But the thing about 20, I was going to say about 25,000 words, but the leisureliness of it is he can do both the hang, the celebrity hang, and he can do the essay in the same piece. And as you know, great profiles have both of those elements. Yeah. Rarely do they have like 10,000 words. devoted to each element. Yeah, this space to really do it. Yeah. And it's like, I mean, again, you just look back at that era of both of the New Yorker and of being Ken Tyne and probably. But everybody who is mentioned in the article, Tynan basically has breakfast with to get

additional quotes. So like Buck Henry is, you know, mentioned kind of almost disparagingly. And then there's a quote from Buck Henry. Like, well, we just, and then we called him up to see, you know, like what he had to say? He's sitting in Gene Wilder's office, just getting these wonderful. By the way, impossible that they were actually said in this way quotes. Clearly, you know, stitched together with there's no way that this came out of this person's

mouth in this order. Gene Walth was quite a wordsmith, that guy. You've seen it. It was quite a wordsmith. But you had to be like to talk in paragraphs and paragraphs. Anyway, it's just a wonderful piece. Check it out. On the New York's website or however you you reach your 25,000 word pieces. All right, it's time for David's shoemaker

guesses. The strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Tuesday's headline about the end of Mike McDaniel's Dolphins career was Fien Fiend. So good. Today's headline comes to us from Jeff Agrest who does a great job covering sports media

for the Chicago Sun Times. It's from his newspaper, David. The Bears, alas, lost to the Rams. But the Sun Times ran a sunny side-up headline because the bears still have, the aforementioned Caleb Williams, who does impossible things. They have an impossible things. And the bears still have their coach, Ben Johnson.

What was the Chicago Sun Times strained pun headline? I thought you were going to say a bear market pun of some sort. So it's like impossible and coach, amazing. They still have man who does the impossible. and coach Ben Johnson. What there's it's some obvious like 80 sitcom title that I can't think of. What is it? How about 80s basketball player?

Bears still have who's a person who does the impossible, David, a conjurer, you might say. Oh, magic. Oh, magic and magic Johnson. Magic slash Johnson. Yeah, it's comma. They still have magic comma Johnson, which is so wonderfully strained. I'm smiled so much at that headline. Yeah, that's great.

He's David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. By Bruce Baldwin. We are going to have our second press box of the week of day early. That's coming Wednesday because Joel is here in L.A. doing national championship stuff. So you can look for that on. Actually, we'll record it Wednesday.

Look for it Thursday morning. So it'll be out earlier than normal. Then Joel and I have a special guest. We are going to pull into a studio and do a bonus show with a political theme. Look for that on. Friday. David, man, you and I got more stuff to do this week too. All of it will include more lukewarm takes about the media. See you soon, David. See you later, Brian.