Jake is a journalist and a dear old friend, starting in our early days as interns together at TNR. He’s the former longtime editor of Slate and the co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. He’s also the chairman of The Committee to Protect Journalists and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. His new book is called Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.
A polished transcript is here, including money quotes. Below are timestamps for the main sections of the pod:
04:09: Jake’s background that made him especially attuned to corruption and totalitarianism
18:45: Contrasting the craven Lindsey Graham with the principled Liz Cheney
25:45: How Megyn Kelly — and others demonized by the left — came to support Trump
35:15: Liberal lawyers like Brad Karp who needlessly bent the knee
45:52: Debating the culpability of colleges targeted by Trump
53:36: Jeff Bezos’ 180 and his lifelong obsession with space travel
58:43: The abomination of January 6th and McConnell caving over the impeachment
102:28: Debating the culpability of John Roberts for Trump’s success
117:26: Reminiscing on our early days at TNR and the genius of Mike Kinsley
For two clips of the episode — on why McConnell balked at banning Trump, and how Megyn Kelly became a bully — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: growing up in Chicago with public servants for parents; his dad taking on the Daley machine; Jake’s talent for takedowns back at TNR; South Park mocking Trump; Stop the Steal and Jan 6; Biden’s clusterfuck campaign; the Cheneys backing Harris; Trump’s retribution; the weakness of Schumer; McCain’s nonconformity; Massie’s cojones; the university deals with Trump; his talent as a bully; higher ed’s dearth of viewpoint diversity; anti-semitism in the Ivy League; Musk and the big subsidies for SpaceX; decimating USAID and PEPFAR; Bezos funding the Melania doc; SCOTUS checking tariffs; the presidential immunity ruling; the post-presidencies of Bush and Obama; and the one magazine piece I would never write.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Emily Eakin on the French postmodernists, Sean Illing on the relevance of Camus and Nietzsche, Michael Lewis on the bureaucrats who fought back against Trump, and Evan Barker on how the Democratic Party got hijacked by elite activists. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The Cults They Are A-Crumblin’
“My freaking eye is twitching. I can’t even listen to him talk anymore. How many times has he said the war is over, the strait is open? No it’s not, you big liar,” - Ryan Wagner, 41, a former Trump voter in northern Michigan.
This week, the bottom fell out for Trump.
He’s been underwater by 19 points or so for a while, but suddenly, as voters focused again after Labor Day, the spread has plunged to -23. On inflation, it’s now -46 percent. With 60.4 percent overall disapproval, and a 50-50 break even among white non-college-educated voters, we’re watching the death of a presidency. We’ve waited so long for this, and it’s finally happening. Trump is being rejected by the only people who can truly destroy him: Republican voters.
The war did it. No one ever liked it, apart from the Israel Firsters. But those who were just leery of the war this spring, looked around this fall and realized Trump has been winging it all along, and has no real strategy to win. And the inflation they are grappling with is therefore not like the usual inflation — caused by an oil embargo, or Covid’s supply-chain disruption. It’s quite obviously caused by Trump’s war of choice. He hasn’t merely failed to bring inflation down; he has directly pushed it up. Combine that with the betrayal of his other core campaign promise — never to enter an open-ended war in the Middle East again — and Trump’s cult is in a death-spiral.
He will, of course, lash out at the press — see the hissy fit this week. He will try to trash the legitimacy of elections he loses. But the wave that appears to be building will be impossible to spin as anything but the end. We’ve waited a decade for this. Savor it. The next few months will be karmic for the monster-clown now befouling the presidency.
And then, after Talarico’s move toward the center last week, we have more signs of the death of the cult of woke. Two more major hospitals agreed to shut down their child sex-change clinics after a negotiation with the federal government. The feds’ leverage? Almost certainly billing fraud. NYU Langone hospital agreed to pay an $8.5 million penalty and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center will pay $1 million. That follows similar deals at Mt Sinai in NYC, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. Gay kids can now be saved from the transing industry. Too late for many, but better late than never.
You can also sense an era ending with the near-universal reaction to a Boston Globe piece about the unraveling of a lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts. A proposal to end a mandatory KN95 policy set off a woke struggle session, and the story detailed the awful fallout. First off, this was in the Globe — the wokest paper in one of the wokest states, coming at us with fantastic deadpan sentences like:
But by the time of Last Ditch’s monthly community meeting ... only one of the original founders, Matellian, is still involved. The two others stepped back from the daily operation months before... One had enrolled in clown school.
I reach Noire, who identifies as a gender-expansive lesbian and uses he/him pronouns, by Zoom a few days later. I ask whether he has any sympathy for those running Last Ditch, given the profound financial strain they are under. “No,” he replies.
The full name is Soe Noire — and he/she/it is an instant star. The story went viral globally, got the Globe thousands of new subscribers, and dominated social media. If you want to listen to the audio of the struggle session, Jesse and Katie have you covered. And most everyone found it hilarious, absurd, toxic, and dumb.
That kind of reaction is what happens when a cult is over, when it has become so self-evidently crackpot to a critical mass of the population that it becomes socially beneficial to disown it. “Woke 1 was crazy” is now increasingly the liberal consensus. People on the left are finally pining for something fresher. They haven’t yet left the madness and toxicity of 2020 fully behind. But for the first time, you begin to feel a sense that they really want to.
The temptation here, as both cults collapse under the weight of their own delusions, is, of course, to lambaste the latecomers to sanity. Why did they not see the madness before now? How did they ever take Trump seriously? How could they ever support crude discrimination on the basis of race? Name and shame them. That’s the approach of Jonathan Last in this evisceration of Gerard Baker for belatedly seeing the light. And he’s not wrong. Writers like Baker and Walter Russell Mead and my old buddy Niall Ferguson have taken the Trump clown show far too seriously for far too long. But they can’t keep it up anymore without seeming absurd.
So we need to demonstrate some grace going forward. Those who’ve seen the error of their ways — even if they are not fully there yet — need to be welcomed to the sane center, not harangued for their past sins. Seek converts back to liberal democracy; and don’t shame those who have begun to return. We may need to forgive Nikole Hannah-Jones and Marco Rubio very soon, if we are to restore liberal democratic life and civility. However brutally tough that will be.
The View From Your Window
Dallas, Texas, 10.30 pm
Money Quote For The Week
“Man, these gas prices is higher than me,” - Afroman.
Yglesias Award Nominees
“The country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president,” - John Curtis, Republican Senator from Utah, seeking a subpoena for Don Jr over his wedding gift from a Russian oligarch.
“Most writers don’t admit to mistakes, much less publicize them so that we can all benefit. Nikole Hannah-Jones has done both of those things with this powerful essay. I do not agree with every word (or with some underlying assumptions), but she deserves nothing but praise for bringing her daughter’s story to light,” - Coleman Hughes.
Mental Health Break
If Microsoft Paint took LSD:
Heads Up
I’ll be at St Paul’s Lutheran Church on October 8 with Jake Weisberg and Michael Lewis discussing their new books. It’s sponsored by Politics & Prose, and tickets are here.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW photo book or a two-year Dish subscription. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please indicate that in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription. Happy sleuthing!
A reader writes:
As a long-time fan and subscriber, I was disappointed by your announcement to suspend your column to write your memoir, and I was thinking of cancelling my subscription. But I’m glad I did not do so. I was happy to find that “In the 'Stacks” seems to be continuing, since I enjoy finding interesting things to read every weekend. This and the podcast make the subscription still worth it.
Here’s our latest batch of recommended pieces on Substack:
