Only when we want to sound really cool. I was going to say. Try it. I just dropped a new piece today. Good.

This is the audience for it. Yes. Your new piece, Trump's followers are living in a dark fantasy. And I just read it. You talk about going to Trump rallies. I've been to a thousand Trump rallies. And you've gone to them over the years. I'm curious what you've noticed recently and how, if you've noticed any sort of change.

Yeah, I think, you know, what's really different about the rallies now, and I think, you know, I think it's important to recognize, you know, we're coming out of a difficult economic moment because of high inflation, because of the end of pandemic. But what's happened is there is a sort of universe of unreality that they're living in, in which everything bad that is happening in America at this moment is the fault of immigrants and illegal immigration. And that is primarily because that's what Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are telling them. And so they have this idea that, you know, if Trump comes in, he's going to take all this money that's being spent on these illegal immigrants that, you know, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are bringing in and spending all this money on. They're going to take that money and they're going to spend it on them instead. And that's really not what the agenda is. And so to me, I thought that was interesting. Was that different

than what you noticed in 2016? Yeah,

I mean, I think the sort of comprehensive universe of unreality that these people are living in is distinct. And I think we saw how dangerous that kind of conspiratorial universe can be on January 6th in 2020. But if anything, it's only gotten worse. People are in a kind of conspiratorial bubble where they think that they are being victimized by things that are not happening. And this is not to say that people are not suffering from real economic hardships. But the reasons they are being given for those things are not the actual reasons.

Now, you talk about the three circles of the MAGA universe here. Did you notice it broken down in three kind of types of people who were becoming and are fervent Trump supporters?

Yeah. I mean, I think there's the people who would staff a Trump administration, and they have a very specific policy agenda that I think is actually distinct from what a lot of the people who go to these rallies think is going to happen. Because when they go to these rallies, what Trump says, what his warm-up speakers say is that Harris and Biden are spending all this money on illegal immigrants and your life is getting harder. But we're going to take all that money and we're going to spend it on you instead. And that's not really what their plan is. So I think there's a sort the circle around Trump, his sort of policy advisors, his activists, those types of people, they understand what the actual policy agenda is, which is a very traditional policy agenda of redistributing income upward, of cutting health care, of, you know, shrinking the welfare state in order to, you know, cut taxes for the wealthy.

The ones who benefit primarily from it as well. That's like the Elon Musk live in that first circle.

Precisely. And, you know, there's this other circle, these people who are true believers who show up to Trump rallies and they love Trump and they believe that he is fighting for them and that when he deals with all these people, they have been told are their enemies, they're going to have much easier lives. And then there's sort of, you know, the people I would describe as a sort of medium Republican voter who, you know, they may not love Trump, but they are conservative. You know, they're anti-abortion. Maybe they own a business. You know, they want lower taxes. they have conservative principles, and they sort of are talking themselves into voting for Trump by dismissing, you know, the things that he has done by saying, you know, Jan 6, okay, fine, you know, it was bad, but the media is exaggerating, you know, yeah, he says a lot of colorful things, but, you know, politicians lie all the time, and they sort of rationalize, you know, what Trump is, who is a, you know, he is a uniquely dangerous person. You know, I don't think every Republican is like Trump. But they sort of dismiss this because they want to give themselves permission to vote for him anyway. And I think those are the three elements of what I would describe as the Trump coalition. And I think, know, tomorrow we're going to find out just how big those three circles are.

Now, you wrote a very influential and thoughtful piece called The Cruelty is the Point in 2018. It sort of articulated this MAGA movement and people finding community around the cruelty that Trump espoused and some of his, um, some of his actions that wasn't a byproduct of, of conservative values, but sort of the cruelty was what people did rally around. We are, we are now years past that. Have we become comfortable with that cruelty? How has that cruelty changed? I think that, uh, you know, one of the attack lines that the Harris

campaign has been using has been saying, oh, well, you know, people leave these Trump rallies early. And this sort of drives Trump insane. Now, to be clear, those people who are leaving, you know, those are Trump superfans. You know, the way someone else put it to me was like, you know, people with season tickets leave games early, too. So, you know, these are people who really love Trump.

But traditionally, those teams aren't winning very often either. That's true. Yes.

That's true. But I think that, you know, part of it is just that they're not totally there for him. I mean, what he gives them is permission to act out in ways that other people might judge them for in a space where it's okay to do that, in a space where it's okay to be cruel, it's okay to be, you know, nasty about the people that you don't like or that you hate and fear. But I think that, you know, a lot of times people are showing up because they want to be around other people who think like them. They want to feel less alone. And I think that's, you know, that part of it is very human, and we're pretty much, you know, we're all social animals. We're all like that. I think that, you know, the problem is obviously that it's centered around this man who has authoritarian ambition, authoritarian ambitions and is willing to create this sort of fictional universe in order to manipulate people into doing, you know, justifying terrible things.

I think we, you talk a little bit in this most recent article about the MSG rally and the comedian who came on and told a joke that belittled Puerto Rico, called Puerto Rico garbage, and there was an uproar around this conversation. But I think what it was speaking to was what the sensibility in that room was, who he was appealing to. And I think as somebody who goes to so many of these rallies, so many of these rallies, there's a trolling sensibility there. The t-shirts that you see are as mean as possible. They're belittling Kamala Harris, calling her Joe in the Ho was a big t-shirt that they had. Like the idea of being a troll is celebrated there. That's part of the fun. There's an ecstasy in the cruelty that happens at these events.

Right. They get to say the things that, you know, people might judge them for saying if they said them, you know, at their workplace or, you know, among their friends, depending on who their friends are. But in, you know, in this space, they get to say it and, you know, Trump will encourage it and they'll laugh at it and everybody will have a good time. And so, you know, I just think, you know, that part of it certainly has not changed. But there is something different about the degree to which people are making decisions on the basis of things that simply are not happening. You know, when you talk about this, there's sort of this conspiracy about Harris and Biden flying in undocumented immigrants from other countries in order to sign them up to vote. I mean, that's just not a thing that's happening. any compunctions about telling people these things because that's what justify... You know, the sort of conspiratorial world that they've created justifies, you know, some sort of radical action, like, say, trying to overturn an American election. Because, after all, there are these shadowy elites who are trying to destroy, you know, the world as you know it.

Mm-hmm. Do you know who those elites are? Well,

one of them is me, obviously. You? I... I'm obviously a part of the shadowy elite.

I knew it. You win people over when you say you drop an article and everybody thinks you're cool and suddenly you have all that power.

And suddenly, you know, I'm a member of the Illuminati. You

have another article that's in the most recent print edition of The Atlantic that talks about this Republican informant state, turning everybody into an informant. What is this snitch state that you're speaking to?

Well, I think, you know, before Roe v. Wade was overturned, there was this Texas ban that was passed. And, you know, I live in Texas. I live in San Antonio. And this ban that was passed that was based on the idea that, you know, if you had you could file a lawsuit in court over someone aiding or abetting an abortion and you could get ten thousand dollars for that. Now, that is a law that sort of incentivizes snitching. It's a snitch law. in Texas and in other conservative states, I mean, you can look at Florida, they sort of incentivize this informing on people for things that conservatives think should not be acceptable. And whether that's, you know, in some cases, they, you know, you talk about school curriculums or not just abortion, but discussing abortion. You know, a law like that is not just about making sure people don't have abortions, but it's about making sure people don't discuss them because you don't want somebody to sue you or sue someone you love on the basis of the fact that you, you know, paid for the Uber that took them to the airport that they went, then got on a plane and went to Colorado to get an abortion because they couldn't get basic health care in their home state. And, you know, especially a couple of years ago, Abbott put out this executive order defining gender affirming care for children as child abuse, which led to, you know, people, you know, it's one of the examples that was given to me was that a girl who was dressing in a gender nonconforming way, somebody reported her even though she wasn't even actually trans. She was just wearing pants or something. And this is the kind of environment that those laws create where these laws incentivize people to snitch on their friends and neighbors in the hopes of recreating stigmas that I think, you know, are no longer in society in the way that they once were. Obviously, it was once very stigmatizing to have had an abortion. It was very, you know, we're not that far off from where it was not all right to be out as a gay person in American society. You know, or, for example, we are not too far. I mean, it's been four years, but the racial justice protests that happened in 2020 brought out a lot of ideas that some people would rather not discuss and would rather be shoved, you know, back into the dark. And so what you can do is you can't necessarily argue people out of believing those things, but you can pass a law that says, you know, you're not allowed to bring a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates into the classroom, otherwise you might get fired.