Micah Loewinger: On Wednesday, we asked you, our listeners, a question.

Speaker: How do I feel today? I feel angry. It's not even some sort of electoral college thing. He won the popular vote. My goodness.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on the show after Tuesday night, the manosphere is celebrating what it perceives as a win.

Dana White: I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the NELK Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, we speak to M. Gessen, who gives us a guide on how to survive in autocracy.

Masha Gessen: American democracy is a very specific kind of dream. We're never going to have a country in which everyone is free and everyone is equal, but we could have a country that is becoming more like that every day rather than less like that every day.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Wednesday morning, AKA the morning after, Micah and I and OTM executive producer Katya Rogers got on a call to talk about what we were going to do on the show this week. Here's some of that conversation.

Micah Loewinger: All right, I'm setting up my pro tools.

Brooke Gladstone: What time did you go to sleep?

Micah Loewinger: I went to sleep at a reasonable hour. I saw the writing on the wall and I was tired and I figured there was nothing, nothing that couldn't wait until the morning. What about you?

Brooke Gladstone: We stayed up till 2:00, but I just couldn't hang around for Trump. I knew I would hear it the next day or hear about it.

Micah Loewinger: Hey, Kat.

Katya Rogers: Wow.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's not talk unless we're ready to record.

Micah Loewinger: We're recording. Don't you worry.

Brooke Gladstone: We are. Okay. Kat, you threw up all night?

Katya Rogers: I did. I slept on the bathroom floor for a couple of hours. It was a bug, but maybe it wasn't.

Brooke Gladstone: We need to think about this week. I don't think that we're going to need to talk about the coming legal challenges to the vote.

Micah Loewinger: Disinformation around voter fraud.

[laughter]

Micah Loewinger: It wasn't a problem, I guess. It was a great election. Free and secure. Move on, everybody.

Brooke Gladstone: Those plans that we had on the boil are probably defunct at this point.

Katya Rogers: My feeling is thinking about 2016 compared to now. Remember we spoke to Masha Gessen and they gave us this roadmap, like how to survive what we were going to go through. The courts will not save us. The lying is the point, and those kind of things. It was like, "Okay, we'll just hold on to these instructions. We can make it through four years, and then we're back to normal." Now I feel like the Biden four years was a post-pandemic blip. This country is on a trajectory and it's a serious realignment, and we can't think we're off track and we'll just get back on track. This is the track.

Brooke Gladstone: Certainly, there's a possibility that we are on an anti-democratic trajectory and our institutions are so profoundly weakened that that system is in decline, but we don't know.

Micah Loewinger: I'm quite frightened that it is.

Katya Rogers: Just how do we cover, how do we filter stories? What's our frame? Honestly, if this is a realignment, if this is as dramatic as it feels, I'm not even sure what the frame is now.

Brooke Gladstone: I think we can't know. I think we have to take it day by day.

Katya Rogers: I love when you say that. I love when you say that.

Brooke Gladstone: We're living in history. We don't have a roadmap, but we never have. The show has changed so much. We keep talking about the messages that are out there, how they get out there, and hope that we can make a contribution.

Micah Loewinger: I'm not saying we don't serve a purpose. I really want to stress that I think that the need for good information is as high as ever. The need for great reporting on the upcoming Trump administration is absolutely paramount. I just fear that the business model that supports it and the trust that powers it are falling apart. It's so upsetting for me to scroll on TikTok or listen to a podcast, and what I'm hearing is mainstream journalism filtered through people who present themselves as a foil to mainstream media. The source of good information is required to fuel everything, but somehow people have just completely lost faith in it, and it really scares me.

Brooke Gladstone: You spend a lot of time on social media. Thank God, someone has to. People are getting their information from everywhere. A lot of generational difference, but everybody is existing in the world. I don't know what else we can do. It's not like we have the answers. We know how to do this thing, tell the truth, try to contextualize it, and send it out like a message in a bottle that you throw off the side of a rowboat. That is our role. We can do it differently. We can see what message resonates, but we don't run a campaign. We're just trying to be honest brokers.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. I think the best we can do is just affirm the truth and reality to the best of our ability to the people that we reach.

Brooke Gladstone: What do we do this week?

Micah Loewinger: I think we should talk about Joe Rogan.

Brooke Gladstone: Didn't Trump call him a hero or the greatest of the great or something like that?

Micah Loewinger: Yes, I think that his endorsement meant something. It's impossible to know if it won him the election, but I think Joe Rogan is emblematic of a new media environment that is so potent, that is so easily swayed by Trump's lies.

Brooke Gladstone: I was thinking. I was hesitating because I know you're sick to death of the guy, Micah.

Katya Rogers: I know what you're going to say.

Micah Loewinger: Stephen Miller. Right?

Brooke Gladstone: No. There was an amazing story about what Elon Musk stood to lose if Kamala Harris won. That probably Twitter would go or X would go just down the drain, and there were a bunch of other possibilities for him in a Trump administration, not just as the commissioner of efficiency or whatever-

Micah Loewinger: Firing people.

Brooke Gladstone: -but a lot of business stuff.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, all those government contracts.

Brooke Gladstone: I think it's a useful context why he was willing to throw so much money into this campaign, massive quantities. The men of Trump or something.

Katya Rogers: It's funny. It's like Kamala just hours have passed, and that seems like a world that was like a million years ago. Tim Walz, like a traditional-- like a guy. Just a guy.

Brooke Gladstone: We hardly knew ye.

Katya Rogers: We hardly knew ye.

Micah Loewinger: One thought I was having. I don't know if this will work for the show is what Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, I think, have in common is they're both champions of the marketplace of ideas. They both presented an image of free speech, which is, "We'll just hear from all sides, and the good things will rise to the top." That's what Joe Rogan does on his show.

Katya Rogers: It's quote-unquote that marketplace of ideas thing.

Micah Loewinger: Absolutely. They both tilted their marketplaces for Donald Trump. At the end of the day, this radical neutrality thing was a farce, whether or not they knew it. Ripe for exploitation, whether they knew it, and not honest.

Brooke Gladstone: They always knew it.

Micah Loewinger: It's hard to wake up this morning, see the popular vote the way it was, and not feel like the world's just completely turned upside down, like the truth doesn't matter anymore. I don't know. I was posting on social media, like, "How are you feeling?" On our socials. We were getting a lot of responses. A lot of them were negative, but maybe this is an opportunity to lean into our show being a community for people, a celebration of good journalism, a belief in the truth to our best ability to understand it and report it. Could we say let us know what you want us to cover, email us, tell us how you're feeling. I don't know. I'd love to do a show where we collect how our listeners are feeling and make this a little bit more of a dialogue.

Katya Rogers: I think we should meet with the team. Let's wrap it up. We're going to make a show.

Micah Loewinger: Sounds good. All right.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay.

Micah Loewinger: Pretty soon after posting that podcast on Wednesday, we started hearing from listeners.

Speaker: Hey there On the Media team. Good morning from Berlin.

Ilona: Hey, my name is Ilona. I thought I would record a little voice memo.

Kendra Hall: Hi, Brooke. It's Kendra Hall in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Carlos: Hi, On the Media, this is Carlos talking to you from Europe.

Annie: Hi, On the Media team. My name is Annie. I'm in Westchester, outside of New York City.

Gretchen: Hi, On the Media. Hey, this is Gretchen from Montana.

Micah Loewinger: We asked people to send a voicemail answering a simple question.

Speaker: Okay, so to the first question, how am I feeling today? I'd say just blah.

Speaker: I feel hopeless.

Speaker: Realizing people essentially vote on the nebulous idea of the economy is probably the hardest idea to deal with.

Speaker: When I saw the news, when I woke up this morning, I was just like, "What the [bleep]. What the actual."

Speaker: It's not even some sort of electoral college thing. He won the popular vote. My goodness.

Speaker: This country has shown again and again how much it hates women, how little it values our lives, how disposable we are at all ages.

Brooke: We also asked you what you want us to cover as we wade back into another Trump presidency.

Speaker: The misogyny and racism. Even though Kamala Harris was clearly the more qualified candidate, people would prefer to elect a white man, even one who is a convicted felon and rapist, and all these other terrible things.

Speaker: I also really like the idea of covering Trump's men, as I feel like the bro culture has really permeated the Republican Party and is almost the soundtrack of young men's lives.

Speaker: Maybe talk to some Trump voters and see how much of his presidency are they aware of. How much of the scandals and all the chaos, the fact that he was impeached twice January 6th, none of that stuff matters.

Speaker: I would like to hear more on a topic that Micah mentioned, which is that there's a disconnect between a lot of people's real-life experiences and the media's portrayal of how things are going.

Speaker: I would really be interested in you all talking and exploring personality as a driver in these alternative media sources breaking away from mainstream media. Do we just need more cool, charismatic people to tell the good, rigorous news? Do we have to be cooler than the radicals?

Speaker: I'd just be interested in y'all thinking through your own complicity in how this situation unfolded. I think, again, the war on Gaza is a great example. Micah brought it up in the debrief, and it just was completely glossed over and not really spoken about. I think that's one of the big issues that lost the Democratic Party.

Brooke: Many of you seized on the question, what's next? How do we prepare ourselves for another four years?

Speaker: I'm actually glad that-- I mean, I'm not glad Trump won, but given that he won the Electoral College, I'm glad that he did win the popular vote, because it cuts off this escape path for Democrats to say, "Oh, it's the Electoral College. There's nothing we can do about it." Okay, cut that path off. Now Democrats have to actually look at ourselves and see what needs to change.

Speaker: What's actionable, where is the best use of our energy right now, our collective energy? I'm curious in hearing a conversation about action.

Speaker: I need solutions, not just more reporting on all the horrible stuff. I need more concrete solutions than, "Get involved."

Speaker: I'm going to increase my support for my local nonprofit newsroom, the Montana Free Press, which I love. There are tons of local nonprofit newsrooms all over the country. They're doing amazing work. In this time of uncertainty, it's helpful to look to group of people who really care about their community and their state and their city, and I think the nonprofit newsrooms are doing that for us.

Brooke: Thanks to each and every one of you who took the time to send us a voicemail. Unfortunately, we weren't able to include them all, but we listened, and we're going to keep listening to you.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the manosphere celebrates a win.

Brooke: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Dana White: This is karma, ladies and gentlemen. He deserves this. They deserve it as a family.

Micah Loewinger: Dana White, CEO of UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship, on stage with Donald Trump on election night.

Dana White: I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the NELK Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

Micah Loewinger: White seems to think these podcasters help sway the vote. Maybe you've never heard or seen their shows, but their victory speech shout-out tells us a lot about how the Internet has evolved, especially for young men. Take the NELK Boys. When I first started watching their YouTube channel a few years ago, they seemed largely apolitical. Still partying with college students.

Nelk Boys: Let's go, baby.

Nelk Boys: Look who's back in the dirt. It's after 10:00 AM. Got to have a dirt. That's it.

Nelk Boys: I'm proud of the boys right now. Proud of them. Where are the boys?

Micah Loewinger: Just two weeks ago, they were sharing the stage at Trump rallies.

Donald Trump: I'm with your favorite people, the NELK Boys. They're having a good time at my expense. They're having a good time on my plane.

Micah Loewinger: Then there's Adin Ross. He's the gamer who gave Trump a cybertruck while interviewing him on YouTube and Kick, a fringe live-streaming platform.

Donald Trump: That's an Elon.

Adin Ross: It is an Elon.

Donald Trump: Wow.

Adin Ross: Shout out to Mr. [unintelligible 00:15:38].

Donald Trump: That's beautiful.

Micah Loewinger: Ross molded his politics after his hero, Andrew Tate, the notorious misogynist who was arrested in Romania on human trafficking charges. Another name that Dana White listed off. Theo Von, the standup comic. Not exactly a MAGA guy, though he hosted a viral conversation with Trump on this past weekend. His podcast.

Donald Trump: How did--

Theo Von: No, I would just do cocaine. That was really--

Donald Trump: Wow.

Theo Von: Yes. Not just-- yes.

Donald Trump: That's down and dirty, right?

Theo Von: Yes. I mean, it was--

Donald Trump: You don't anymore?

Theo Von: No, I don't do it anymore, man. I'm not a lawyer.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, the big story was the nod from the powerful Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump after interviewing him, J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk, all in the final 10 days of the campaign. Kamala Harris got an invite, too, but her team passed. A big miss, according to some pundits.

Speaker: Yes, Harris should have been there and in places like it. Same for Tim Walz.

Micah Loewinger: Ezra Klein this week--

Ezra Klein: On YouTube alone, Rogan's interview with Trump was viewed some 46 million times. You're just going to abandon that in an election where you think the other side winning means fascism?

Micah Loewinger: And voters.

Speaker: It's been surprising how often the topic of the Joe Rogan podcast keeps coming up.

Micah Loewinger: An NBC reporter on the Arizona State University campus on election night.

Reporter: We've talked to several students now who say that they listened to that Joe Rogan podcast with the former president and that was the deciding factor for them. They've also said that if Kamala Harris would have appeared on that podcast, they may have had their vote skewed.

Micah Loewinger: How did the former host of the network reality show Fear Factor become a political kingmaker? For one, he was an early podcast adopter. Rogan realized that there was a deep hunger for alternative media that doesn't tell you what to think, or at least presents itself that way. A hunger for discussions that aren't bound by broadcast time constraints, stuffy talk show decorum, and editorial guardrails that favor mainstream experts and centrist politics.

Joe Rogan: The thing that television, the thing that entertainment, in general, is money. They were selling advertising, so everybody has to say certain words. Don't say certain words. Don't bring up certain subjects. You can't just express yourself because you're expressing yourself to someone who's selling advertising space.

Micah Loewinger: Joe Rogan as a guest on an Internet Talk show in 2007, which seems like the precise moment that he discovered the potential of podcasting.

Joe Rogan: You just need to keep doing this. We need to figure out how you make money from this.

Micah Loewinger: Definitely figured that out.

Reporter: Spotify have signed a multi-year, $250 Million deal with Joe Rogan.

Reporter: Rogan somehow caught lightning in a bottle.

Micah Loewinger: Justin Peters, a correspondent for Slate, profiled Joe Rogan.

Justin Peters: His podcast began with him generally just interviewing fellow comics, standups that he'd met on the road. He went into interviewing MMA fighters because he's a big mixed martial arts guy. Then at a certain point, he started bringing on academics, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, people from the tech world. I can't stand the guy, but I also have to acknowledge that his podcast can be incredibly entertaining.

Joe Rogan: Boom. Thank you. Thanks for doing this, man. Really appreciate it.

Elon Musk: Hey, welcome.

Joe Rogan: It's very good to meet you.

Elon Musk: Nice to meet you, too.

Micah Loewinger: This is Rogan's 2018 interview with Elon Musk. That time they smoked a blunt on camera.

Elon Musk: Is that a joint or is it a cigar?

Joe Rogan: No.

Elon Musk: Okay.

Joe Rogan: It's marijuana inside of tobacco.

Elon Musk: Okay, so it's like pot tobacco posh?

Joe Rogan: You never had that?

Elon Musk: Yes, I think I tried one once.

Joe Rogan: Come on, man.

Micah Loewinger: I'd argue this was when Musk's hyper online man of the people shtick took root.

Speaker: I think you're right that this was the moment where Musk started really trying to reach out for the alt-right intellectual, dark web appeal. Smoking weed with Joe Rogan was the turning point. Certainly, I'll buy that.

Micah Loewinger: For Rogan, politics were a bit more complicated. Even as he hosted buddy-buddy interviews with Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and the like, he was still reaching a politically diverse audience. He was saying stuff like this on his show.

Joe Rogan: I think I'll probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being when I was hanging out with him. I believe in him. I like him.

Speaker: Look at you progressive.

Joe Rogan: Yes, I've always been.

Speaker: What? Everyone says you're a right-winger.

Joe Rogan: I've never voted right-wing in my life.

Speaker: Really?

Joe Rogan: Never. Never. I voted Democrat except for independent. I voted for Gary Johnson because he did my podcast.

Micah Loewinger: Rogan in 2020. Part of a montage of clips that resurfaced on social media this week.

Joe Rogan: 87% of scientists said that human activity is driving global warming. I'm very pro-choice. I'm very women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights. I'm even universal health care. Obviously, this protected status is driving me crazy. This thing that Trump's doing with children that were born in other countries and then brought over here as children, and then they're talking about--

Micah Loewinger: How did Rogan the liberal end up endorsing Donald Trump? I've heard several explanations. One is that Rogan gave up on the Democrats after they dumped Bernie Sanders in 2020. Another is that he's been slowly red-pilled by his guests.

Speaker: When someone keeps on saying, I'm a liberal, I'm a liberal, and then people with whom he talks speak incessantly about the evils of cancel culture, who talk about how the mainstream media is suppressive, and so on and so forth, then you're not actually a liberal. You're wearing a costume. I think what's happened over the past five years is Rogan has finally taken off that costume and revealed himself for who he was all along.

Micah Loewinger: Since 2020, Joe Rogan has become a lightning rod for controversy and criticism. The kind of scrutiny that comes with the territory when you're the most popular podcaster in the world. There was that time a couple of years ago when he had to apologize after the Internet discovered that he'd used the N-word repeatedly in old episodes.

Joe Rogan: Look, I can't go back in time and change what I've said. I wish I could. Obviously, that's not possible, but I do hope that this can be a teachable moment for anybody that doesn't realize how offensive that word can be coming out of a white person's mouth in context or out of context. My sincere and humble apologies.

Micah Loewinger: There was his interview with so-called vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone.

Dr. Robert Malone: These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. They're explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont Report.

Speaker: Over a thousand doctors, scientists, and health professionals are calling out Spotify over false claims about COVID aired by its most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan.

Micah Loewinger: Rogan would double down on the vax stuff and even went on to endorse his friend RFK Jr. after he came on the podcast. Then there was this.

Joe Rogan: Ready for this? My friend, his wife is a schoolteacher and she works at a school that had to install a litter box in the girls room because there is a girl who's a furry who identifies as an animal.

Micah Loewinger: He had to walk back this totally bogus story in 2022 saying he must have misunderstood his friend or something. More recently, he told a guest that Joe Biden faked the State of the Union address.

Joe Rogan: The State of the Union was not live.

Speaker: Yes, it was.

Joe Rogan: No, no. Did you see that they found out that it wasn't? Someone zoomed in on his watch and his watch was the wrong time.

Speaker: How could that even be? I don't think all the Republicans would agree to it, too. They're all there.

Joe Rogan: [crosstalk] They knew. They're all there live while he's doing it.

Speaker: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Rogan had his producer do a mid-interview fact check. They pulled up an article debunking a photoshopped image of Biden's watch.

Joe Rogan: Yes, there is a fake image. They got me.

Speaker: How do you fall for this stuff?

Micah Loewinger: It's been pointed out by many of his critics that Rogan doesn't seem to prepare enough for his interviews. He exercises poor judgment. Rogan says he's a victim of cancel culture. I think that's a big reason why he likes Trump.

Joe Rogan: There's probably no one in history that I've ever seen that's been attacked the way you've been attacked and the way they've done it so coordinated and systematically. When you see those--

Micah Loewinger: This is how Rogan set up his three-hour interview with Donald Trump last week, by telling their shared story about the media and the political establishment. They hate us not because of our behavior, but because we threatened them.

Joe Rogan: Did you just assume because people loved you on The Apprentice they were going to love you as a president?

Donald Trump: Why think it would be so easy?

Joe Rogan: Probably would have been if the media didn't attack you the way they did, if they didn't conflate you with Hitler. Even today, like Kamala was talking about you and Hitler, they're going to take what you said about Robert--

Micah Loewinger: We'll never know whether Rogan's endorsement moved the needle on Tuesday, whether Kamala Harris's appearance would have made any difference, but all the spilled ink about it this week says a lot about where it feels like political influence is headed.

Ryan: I hope that this is the last Democratic nominee who says no to Joe Rogan. Like, even if you have to go to the studio.

Speaker: I would go further than that, Ryan. You need your own Joe Rogan is the bigger point. That's your bigger problem.

Micah Loewinger: One of the closest analogs to a left-wing Joe Rogan is 33-year-old Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and political commentator. He's big and burly, fluent in memes and gaming culture. He gets the Internet. As a socialist, he's likely seen as too radical to be embraced by mainstream Democrats in the way that Republicans have harnessed their right-wing influencers. I watched Hasan Piker deliver the results on election night with some 200,000 concurrent viewers. As the news began to set in, he started raging against Trump supporters who joined his chat to rub in the loss.

Hasan Piker: Donald Trump winning the presidency is not going to improve your life. It's actually going to continue making it worse because there are major material issues that you are experiencing and neither party is actually providing any adequate solutions to that, but owning the libs is not going to improve your life. It is a way for Donald Trump and the Republican Party to distract you away as they pick your pockets and rob you blind.

Micah Loewinger: For years now, he's been sounding the alarm on the rise of the manosphere.

Hasan Piker: There is a massive amount of right-wing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces.

Micah Loewinger: Here he is speaking on Jon Favreau's podcast Offline.

Hasan Piker: If you're a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it's playing video games, whether it's working out, whether it's-- I don't know, listening to like a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is just completely dominated by right-wing politics.

Micah Loewinger: As he watched Dana White shout out the podcast bros during that victory speech we heard at the beginning of this piece--

Dana White: Adin Ross, Theo Von, and last but not least--

Micah Loewinger: Hasan Piker reacted on his live stream

Dana White: -the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

Hasan Piker: No.

Dana White: Thank you, America. Thank you. Have a good night.

Hasan Piker: What is this country? We're done.

Micah Loewinger: The news monoculture of old is dead. It seems that, to many, the New York Times, a company that employs 2,700 journalists, is just one source of information and perspective. Joe Rogan, another. The incoming administration has shown us that it will lean on a new generation of personalities and media networks to spread its lies and shape hearts and minds. Here at OTM, we'll do our best to keep up.

Brooke: Coming up, rules to survive an autocracy.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke: I'm Brooke Gladstone. In 2016, after Trump won that election, writer M. Gessen wrote a list of rules to survive an autocracy. On this show, they've explained how American exceptionalism gave rise to a perilous failure of the imagination, blinding us to what could happen here. Masha's wisdom was hard-won. They grew up in and later fled Russia, and now Masha's on Vladimir Putin's wanted list, a dangerous place to be.

Masha Gessen: I don't know if I would call this wisdom, but I certainly have had some experience, and I think I have a somewhat different set of objects.

Brooke: M. Gessen is the author of the 2020 book Surviving Autocracy and also an opinion columnist at the New York Times.

Masha Gessen: I think this is the gift of living in exile. I think actually a lot of exiles have a kind of way of not taking for granted things that natives take for granted. Watching this election campaign was a similar experience to what I experienced eight years ago in the US Watching the election and thinking, "You people don't seem to be seeing what I'm seeing."

Brooke Gladstone: When it comes to autocracy, you've said it's more useful politically to think of the past and the present rather than of the left or the right. Kamala said we're not going back. At that point, I think you thought she got it.

Masha Gessen: I did. I thought, wow, between we're not going back, joy and Tim Waltz, she really gets it. Because I could see her saying, we can be happy in the face of a future. We can be joyful. We can be deeply caring in the way that Tim Waltz is deeply caring. You will wake up in 10, 15 years in this country and feel good about where you live and feel good about your family and feel good about your economic situation. Instead of saying that, they got stuck on Trump as a fascist and abortion rights.

Brooke Gladstone: It's true, but she also talked about-- I think she used the phrase too much because it became a cliche, the opportunity economy. She did talk about helping people purchase their first home, which is the American dream, with a nice pile of money to provide better child care. These are a politics of the future. I know that she did say pretty much that she wasn't going to depart from Biden's policies on a whole range of issues, but I think her program was more progressive.

Masha Gessen: To the extent we even know what her program was, it was more progressive. She spent a lot of time avoiding questions. The only question she really leaned into, and I mean that physically, she would physically lean forward and talk with passion about abortion rights. Next question, she would lean back. Her shoulders would come together, and she would be in this defensive posture. Again, I think it's much more useful to try to understand the emotional valence of her message.

I couldn't help feeling after the first couple of weeks of the campaign that emotional valence was of voters being handled, and that a team of advisors has read the polls and said, "Okay, so we're not just not going to talk about this other stuff. We're only going to talk about abortion rights because that's enough to carry us over. They've read the polls and they're handling us." Instead of, "She is one of us, and she is going to help us face this future and it's going to be less scary."

Brooke Gladstone: I just don't know how you manifest that. I understand the technocratic approach to politics and campaigning doesn't put enough weight on the value of emotion. You've said that people know when they're not being offered a genuine vision.

Masha Gessen: I think it would manifest something like this. It would be Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz, saying, "Look, we live in the greatest, most prosperous country in the world. There isn't a problem we can't solve. We have more Nobel laureates than any other country in the world. We have the intelligence, we have the resources, we have the care." Tim Walz plays his dad thing where he's taking care of the people of his state. I don't say that cynically.

I say that with the utmost admiration. He did an interview with my colleague Ezra Klein that was music to my ears. He was a real guy talking about how Americans need somebody to make breakfast for their children so they can spend more quality time with their kids before school. That was real and relatable and deeply caring, and that just vanished.

Brooke Gladstone: The technocrats took over.

Masha Gessen: The technocrats took over. That's my interpretation. I have no inside knowledge.

Brooke Gladstone: You also said that condescension is the Achilles' heel of the Democratic Party, and I've certainly felt that way.

Masha Gessen: There's also this trope that people who vote for Trump vote against their own interests. I can't imagine a more condescending attitude to the way that people use one of the very, very few instruments that they have of speaking to power. What they're saying when they vote for Trump is not that they're voting against their own interests. It's that they're so deeply interested in letting the government know that they feel unseen, unheard, not taken care of, generally failed by the system. They will vote for somebody who may or may not create policies that will benefit them just to send this message.

That's not called voting against their self-interest. It's called being so fed up that the interest of sending this message trumps all the other interests. Then you get the Democratic Party looking at that and saying, these people obviously are ill-informed and don't know what they're doing, so we have to tell them that Trump will destroy democracy and that will fix everything. It's really not effective when you have a campaign and an administration saying, "No, objectively you're fine. Objectively, you're better off than two or four or six years ago." What if I'm subjectively in a panic and you're refusing to see this panic and Trump doesn't refuse to see the panic?

Brooke Gladstone: How do you address that panic if it's based on, as we have so often heard, people being worried about being displaced? Great replacement theory. So much of what Trump was framing was in essentially racist terms, otherizing. You're not expecting Democrats to embrace those ideas.

Masha Gessen: Absolutely not.

Brooke Gladstone: What do they do?

Masha Gessen: I think they appeal to the opposite. I think we've seen this, and we saw it not that long ago with Barack Obama. He had an extraordinary talent, I think, for appealing to the best in people. I happened to be in the United States for the academic year of '08/'09. I was observing the election very closely. What struck me was that the mood in the country after the presidential election, when you couldn't find that day's newspaper because they had all been bought up in the first hours of the morning, was people woke up in a country that was better than they thought it was.

That's a hallmark of great political leadership, is to go out and to say to people, "Look, you're better than the worst in you. Together we can be strong, and together we can be good, and together we can be generous. Together we can change because we'll take care of each other."

Brooke Gladstone: Your work has largely been shaped by your own lived experience in Russia, but also the work of a Hungarian sociologist, Bálint Magyar, who studied Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at length. It seems it's not all that uncommon for an autocrat to do what Trump did, which is to leave power for a term or two and then take it back again.

Masha Gessen: I actually talked to Bálint this morning, and one of the things that we talked about was that Viktor Orban was voted out of office in 2002 and was out of power for two terms. He spent that time consolidating a movement that was based on the premise that the only legitimate representative of the people's will was Orban and his party.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Masha Gessen: Because they were the true Hungarians, because they understood the people, and the government that people had actually voted for was fundamentally illegitimate. Of course, we know that Trump did it much more literally from the moment that he lost the election, he insisted that the Biden administration was illegitimate, and he was the only legitimate representative of the will of the people.

Brooke Gladstone: That was Stop the Steal. You're talking about something called exclusive legitimacy, meaning only he is legitimate in this case, or does it mean only he and his supporters are legitimate?

Masha Gessen: He's the only legitimate leader, and his supporters are the only true Americans. It's a feedback loop.

Brooke Gladstone: We can expect more of the same in the next term.

Masha Gessen: First of all, we're technically getting more of the same with what appears to be full control of federal power.

Brooke Gladstone: The trifecta, the House, the Senate. The White House.

Masha Gessen: Exactly. By Trump's Republican Party. Even on paper, he has exclusive legitimacy. Then what Orban and his party did in Hungary was move very, very quickly to change the constitution, to pass a huge number of laws that gave them the power, as Magyar puts it, he's really good at coining aphorisms. He has a new collection out that's called From Rule of Law to Law of Rule. Because Hungary went from a very well-designed European democratic system, because, remember, it was only 20 years after the fall of the Soviet empire, so the system was crisp and new, not like ours, very rickety and full of holes, and yet they were able to redesign it very, very quickly to serve their needs.

One of the ways in which they did it is by passing these bills late at night, without discussion, in huge batches so that legislators didn't have time to read them. This is not unfamiliar to us. The Congress and the Senate already do this a lot, but when this happens by design, it's a way of entirely destroying what remains of the deliberative process.

Brooke Gladstone: It happens in the Supreme Court, too, the shadow docket, making decisions without even signing them, necessarily, but they're in law. I think Magyar was saying that there's something called autocratic breakthrough. That's another one of his phrases, I guess, which means you take the system that elected you and then change it so it has more trouble unelecting you when that time comes.

Masha Gessen: Right. He divides autocracy into three stages. Autocratic attempts, autocratic breakthrough, and autocratic consolidation. Autocratic attempt is what we saw during Trump's first four years in power, and I would argue January 6th, that was a real autocratic attempt. That was an actual attempt to seize power by force. Autocratic breakthrough happens when it is no longer possible to reverse autocracy by electoral means. For example, in Hungary, Fidesz, Orban's party had a supermajority, so they changed the constitution with two-thirds of the vote.

As one of the legal scholars that I was interviewing said, nobody's ever going to have a supermajority again. Like all of this is irreversible. Like, even if we imagine, and this is in 2012, that we throw Orban out and we throw Fidesz out and we have a Democratic coalition, it will be a Democratic coalition. It will not be a supermajority, will not be able to change the constitution back. It will be dealing with an autocratic system. We see it in Poland now, where the so-called Law and Justice Party was in power for not as long as Orban was, but was able to change the system in ways that the new liberal Democratic government is finding very, very difficult to reverse.

Brooke Gladstone: Should we expect autocratic breakthrough under Trump? What would that look like?

Masha Gessen: Yes, I think we should expect an autocratic breakthrough under Trump. Obviously, we look at Project 2025. That's a kind of program. I'm thinking more and more that it's much more about the how than about the what. At least in the immediate term, there's going to be a huge barrage of bills, attacks, public statements, hearings, all this stuff. I expect these attacks to be on various institutions of public deliberation. This is just based on the Hungarian playbook.

He will use the power of the pardon and he will immediately pardon himself for his federal crimes and the January 6th gang and anybody else who needs a federal pardon. We saw that again in the first term. We saw the hollowing out of entire agencies, including the State Department. I think it will be much faster now and more decisive and more devastating.

Brooke Gladstone: Back in 2016, you offered some rules for surviving autocracy. It meant a lot to us when you came on to talk about it and you expanded it in your 2020 book. One of those rules was to truly grasp that lying isn't just a strategy. Lying is the point. Autocrats want to create chaos, doubt in everything, so that they can dictate what is real. One more mantra, your institutions will not save you. The institutional press certainly hasn't saved us, though its coverage of Trump, I think, has improved since 2016. How should the press approach a second Trump term?

Masha Gessen: With trepidation. Here's what the press shouldn't do. Unfortunately, I've heard a few editors say, "Oh, we know what to do, we just need to do journalism." Let's be honest, we don't know what to do. Anything that we do makes us in some way complicit.

Brooke Gladstone: Covering Trump doesn't make us complicit.

Masha Gessen: Let's go back to the first term for a couple of examples again. The New York Times approach, which was, we will cover this administration as critically as we can, but basically, the way we always cover any administration, which is when Trump does something crazy like write a love letter to Kim Jong Un, we're going to call it diplomacy and foreign policy. On the one hand, it is obviously wrong to call it diplomacy and foreign policy. On the other hand, that was American diplomacy and foreign policy at that point. How do we invent a new word every time we write about Trump? We can't. That's why I say that in some way it makes us complicit.

Brooke Gladstone: Give me an example of a non-complicit way of addressing an outrage.

Masha Gessen: I think you take the Kim Jong Un story and you say, it seems crazy to call this diplomacy, or this is what's happened to American diplomacy.

Brooke Gladstone: That's an editorial.

Masha Gessen: We editorialize all the time. Easy for me to say I work on the opinion side. The news people have a lot of rules, but their rules also shift and change. Again, it's really, really hard. There are no easy answers here. When Trump was president, it was normal for Trump to be president. When Trump was producing completely insane news, it was also our daily reality. How do you write about this stuff, pathologizing it just the right amount? I don't know the answer to that. I don't think we did a good enough job during the first Trump term. I think we did a somewhat better job during the election campaign, but I think it's ultimately an intractable problem and so we can just aim to do the least bad job.

Brooke Gladstone: You half pathologized. You said just enough. I took that to heart. The question is, how much is enough? How much is too much? It's like prunes.

Masha Gessen: How much is too much?

Brooke Gladstone: Another one of your rules, Masha, it's worth remembering now, is do not be taken in by small signs of normality. We want to reassure ourselves that maybe things aren't so bad, but that's a distraction.

Masha Gessen: It's going to be normal in the sense that the sun will come up and it will come down and we will have good food and good friends. Then there comes a time when you say, "Oh, maybe I can live with this." This is one of the most painful things for me because I've said this to myself, not about Trump, but when I was living in Russia, things were getting worse and worse and worse. I kept saying, "I can live with this, I can live with this," and I finally couldn't live with it because my family was in danger, and so we lef, and my friends stayed, and I was watching them live the life that I was missing.

They had fulfilling work, which, amazing, I didn't believe that it was possible, but it was possible. They had each other's company, they had the city that I loved. At a certain point, I thought, "Well, maybe I didn't have to get out of here. Maybe I could have lived this life." This was a month before Russia staged its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Brooke Gladstone: If our institutions won't save us, what can?

Masha Gessen: Rule number six is remember the future. We don't want to do anything that we don't want to live with after Trump. A good example is pro-democracy, pro-Democratic, large D activists who are arguing for electors to switch their votes in order to prevent Trump from taking the presidency. A worthy cause, but at the expense of invalidating elections forever. Delegitimizing elections forever. If we're going to have another election after that, and then in 2020, we see Trump trying to do the same thing.

Brooke Gladstone: In your book, you wrote, your rules, believe the autocrat, and a lot of Trump followers don't. They say, "He's not going to really do what he says," although we've seen in the past that he does. Do not make compromises. Be outraged. You said we will have to do more than vote and more than campaign. We will have to abandon the idea of returning to an imaginary pre-Trump normalcy when American institutions functioned as they should.

Which actually brings me to the last question. Someone tweeted recently that you know it's a bad day when they're sharing poems. You end your book, Surviving Autocracy, with a famous poem by Langston Hughes. "Oh, let America be America again. The land that never has been yet and yet must be, the land where every man is free." Why did you choose that?

Masha Gessen: Because it's the most beautiful poem I know about exactly the thing I was trying to put into words. Democracy is a dream. An American democracy is a very specific kind of dream. We're never going to have a country in which everyone is free and everyone is equal and everyone participates in governance, but we could have a country that is becoming more like that every day rather than less like that every day, which is the condition that we've been in for a number of years now.

Brooke Gladstone: Masha, thank you so much.

Masha Gessen: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Masha Gessen is an opinion columnist for the New York Times and the author of, among other books, Surviving Autocracy.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katie Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Joe Rogan: Turns out voting works. It's real. As much as we thought they had it rigged. As much as we thought there were shenanigans and it's just a puppet show and there's no way anybody could buck the system. Turns out voting is still real.

 

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