This

week on the BOF podcast, I'm pleased to share my conversation with Tina from BOF Voices 2024. We reflect on the seismic shifts in media and what this means for truth, democracy, and the role of journalism in the age of Donald Trump. Here's Tina Brown on the BOF podcast. Good to see you, everyone.

Good to see you.

You too.

really an amazing occasion, I must say. A combination of high style and brain sex, I decided.

Oh, I love that. The new slogan for voices. High style and brain sex. Okay, Tina, let's get into it. U.S. election. As I was doing my reading and research over the weekend, I came to learn that you actually knew Donald Trump very well during his rise in New York. There's a famous story of you sitting next to him at a dinner in the 1980s or 90s. Before covering what's happening now, what were your impressions of him back then? What was he like and how did that change over time?

Well, in those days, he was a sort of rough diamond, you know, outrageous carnival barker, New York character that actually was very refreshing I thought I mean I published in Vanity Fair the extract of his famous book The Art of the Deal and it was exactly as he is now but without the darkness what has changed I think because in those days he was almost I wouldn't say sunny but there was something very up about him and he's become very dark as the years have gone by. I mean, the man that we see now the last time, you know, at the Madison Square Garden rally, which was a sort of 30s kind of foaming at the mouth, you know, dark, you know, anti-everything about sort of that was about life, it seemed. That's very different. So he's changed an enormous amount, I think, from those early days. But

you kind of knew, because in your book, The Vanity Fair Diaries, you wrote, it feels when you have finished it as if you've been nose to nose for four hours with an entertaining con man. I suspect the American public will like nothing better.

Indeed. Yes, well, I could, you know, he has great appeal. He did and does now. I mean, whatever one says and one can a lot about Trump, you know, he is the world's great showman. I mean, he ran a campaign that was just endlessly watchable and was so extraordinarily sort of resourceful and improvising all the time, you know, as he went along. I mean, you know, his stunt with the McDonald's, for instance, when he was... Which went viral. Which totally went viral, puts on an apron, starts serving out, you know, the French fries through the windows. I mean, it's incredible. You know, he gets into a dumpster truck and, you know, drives the garbage truck because of the comment of garbage. He is so quick to sense that zeitgeist, that pivot, and he knows exactly how to do it. It's really a sixth sense that you have to frankly admire in terms of his technique. It was like he was

made for the social media world that we live in, so that he knows how to, you know, captivate

people. And I think that what's happened really is that, in a sense, you know, we've become so debased by entertainment values that we now require our politicians to be entertainment. And I actually question whether the old style politician, you know, will ever be in favor again. Some years back when I was at the Daily Beast, I commissioned Brett Easton Ellis to write an essay about the crazy antics at the time of Charlie Sheen. And he wrote a brilliant essay about how Charlie Sheen was, as he put it, post-Empire. That there was empire and there was post-Empire. And empire was about being buttoned up, presenting yourself in a way for the public versus to the private. And all that in Charlie Sheen had gone. And he was just like letting it all hang out, totally foul-mouthed, crazy, an addict, all of this. And he identified it, Brett, as this post-Empire style. And what we've really seen is that post-Empire is one. And I don't know that we're ever going to go back to the kind of politician that a Joe Biden was, that a Kamala Harris was. I think Americans now value the entertainment values more than anything else. And Trump has done that essentially.

We heard Ravi Agarwal's pretty analytical assessment of the impact of Trump's return to the White House on the world. I'm curious about your take. You've now lived in the U.S. for 40 years, is that right? We understood what kind of the impact is for the world. What's your take on what this means for American democracy? As I said in my introduction, there's been so much hand-wringing about what this means for the future of the U.S., which is, you know, like it or not, we all are impacted what's happening there. Well,

I sort of kind of flip from being a historical optimist to a sort of hysterical pessimist. I wake up one or the other. What we haven't seen before, of course, is a completely unfettered Trump. You know, the first time in his 216 victory, he was held down by the fact that, you know, he didn't have every branch of government. But he has every branch of government now. You know, he's going to have the House, not quite finished the elections there, but he will, Republicans are winning, they've won the Senate, he's totally politicized the Supreme Court and now has his toadies there, and he has the White House. So now he's completely unfettered. And he's also realized last time around, because he didn't know anybody, didn't expect to win and was in a state of constant chaos, he sort of appointed people that other people told him to appoint, who hadn't taken the oath of allegiance, as it were, to Trump. That's gone. The last four years, you only get to join him now if you're a true believer. So he's now surrounded by the true believers. And there's no one to sort of say him nay. Now, we're all thinking, if you're the hysterical pessimist, you think, this is, you know, everything he wants is going to happen. No one is going to stop him. But the thing about Trump is he's so unpredictable, he could also turn on his true believers. You know, if things go wrong, if like, for instance, if he does his tariff thing, which he seems to be obsessed with and has been one of the very few consistent sort of themes of his entire sort of life is tariff obsession for some reason. But if inflation suddenly, know, goes crazy, he will turn on everybody and blame them and they'll be gone, you know. So there is that caprice which you can almost kind of rely on. And of course, in the midterms, the Republicans could lose the House and the Senate, in which case you're going to have some of those restraints coming back on him again. But this is going to be a time for courage. And we haven't seen very much of it. You know, the entire Republican Party just turned into moral amoeba. Incredibly so. I mean, people who had stood up against him and had denounced him and so on when he lost and went on every talk show now just flipped and they're back groveling in a way that's really, I have never seen it before, how they can actually look in the mirror and see the soundbites of themselves saying, the man has got absolutely no integrity. January the 6th was a disgraceful blah, blah. Then they turn around and say, I'm voting for Trump and they're trying to get a job, you know. And it's really remarkable. And I'm not quite sure why they've become so desperately cowardly.

You know, there's one other entity that could theoretically also hold Trump to account. I mean, we talked about the Senate, and we talked about Congress and the House, and we talked about Supreme Court. There's also the media. Absolutely. And so, like, what is happening in American media at the moment? You have such an interesting vantage point. The media has been kind of whipped into this polarization. I'm just curious about your take of how you see that. Well, I mean, I think that

we are now, as you say, I mean, the resistance is going to have to come from the media. And there's this narrative that has now got going, of course, pushed really by Trump, which is that the media is untrustworthy, that everybody's partisan. But I mean, that is actually really not true of the majority of, you know, hardworking American journalists. I mean, they are trying to get it right. What I think is more scary now is the fact that the media owners are what is the problem, because they are now terrified of their businesses being impacted by Trump. And we saw what happened at The Washington Post. I mean, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, who bought The Washington Post some years back, he was a very stalwart owner in the first term, actually. He backed his editor in a way that was quite admirable, in fact. But now, just before the election, he killed the endorsement of Harris by the opinion section, which was unheard of. You know, ever since Watergate, they've always endorsed a candidate. And once Bezos heard it was Kamala, bam, he killed it. He was like the first, I think, at least one of the first of the sort of digital oligarchs to tweet, you know, his congratulations of Trump, you see that he's pivoted. And just yesterday, the owner of the LA Times just has swept out the entire editorial board and has said he's going to have a new editorial board. And you're seeing really what's happened in Modi's India, essentially, which is, you know, you don't have to tell the journalist what to write. You simply have to create a culture where you don't get hired if you write anything that's going to antagonize Trump. And we've seen in India how the free press has been decimated because what the way Modi operates is he he goes for those corporate owners. If he can't, you know, get those corporate owners to sort of play ball, then eventually, you know, a friend of Modi will buy the media outlet. He has constant lawfare against journalists where they're sued for crimes that have nothing to do with journalism or their taxes are audited and they're called tax felons. You know, so he goes after journalists for other reasons than the journalism. And of course, he goes after advertisers so that the advertisers don't want to be advertising in something that's anti-Modi. And that is, I think, that the route you're going to see happens in the US if Trump does what he's promising. And he tends to do it. I mean, he calls the media the enemy of the people. I mean, he is hostile to the point of lunacy, really, about media that tell the truth. And I think you're going to see a lot of fear in the owners. The journalists, I think, are doing, a lot of them are doing really great work. And my heroes right now are journalists because I think they are giving their lives. They are one of the last kind of portions of society anywhere that are not doing it for the money. I mean, nobody makes any money, you know, as a journalist. That is one global fact we can all say. They do it for passion, they do it for conviction, and they do it for principles, actually. So I started a conference two years ago. Truth Tellers. Yes, called Truth Tellers, which is in honor of my late great husband, who was a fantastic journalist, Sir Harold Evans, who was a big, brilliant crusading editor of the Sunday Times, who campaigned for 10 years to get compensation for the thalidomide victims and really was a great leader in terms of courageous investigations. And at Truth Tellers, we bring together these journalists to really strengthen the bonds of journalism, to make people... I mean, journalism is such a demoralised profession that we have to support journalists because without them, there's going to be no resistance.