Inside the Hive

With less than three weeks to go before the election, Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett joins co-host Emily Jane Fox to talk about the closing arguments each candidate is making—or not making, as it may be. Plus, he weighs in on the bigger questions of how Washington could normalize in a post-Trump world and what we should be doing in this final countdown.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With President Donald Trump as contagion in chief and the election right around the corner, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox break down the administration's trust deficit, the debate over the next presidential debate, and the personal bellwethers they've seen over the last few weeks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, co-host Emily Jane Fox sits down with former Obama White House advisor Valerie Jarrett to discuss what it’s like to work with Joe Biden, how debate prep usually works, what’s at stake in the coming weeks, and what a difference mentorship can make.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With a Supreme Court nomination fight, a debate slugfest, and a battle for the soul of our nation on the horizon, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk about what’s at stake for the winners and losers and how to make it through alive. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, “Inside the Hive” welcomes historian Peter Fritzsche, author of "Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich,” to help separate fact from exaggeration on the increasingly pressing question of how much Trump’s GOP resembles the Nazis of the early 1930s. As Donald Trump attacks democratic norms and undermines the electoral process, and AG William Barr stokes fear of "a socialist path” if Trump loses, historians are hearing distressing echoes of Adolph Hitler’s rise, from the fear-mongering demonization of the left to the threat of street violence and military force against enemies real and imagined. One difference: “A white ethnic America is much more important in Trumps’ campaign than the vision of a Aryan-ized Germany was in Hitler’s electoral campaigns,” says Fritzsche, who says the MAGA conception of America "means there are villains who have undone America but now there are the virtuous who can remake America and 'make it great again.’ I call it ‘muscular melodramatic populism'”—the same phenomenon that brought Hitler to power.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s Inside the Hive, Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox go deep into Bob Woodward's new bombshell of a book, which is all the more rattling because it is backed up by tapes of President Donald Trump himself detailing failure of leadership in the face of a global pandemic. Along with two other missives, from Michael Cohen and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the president and his family have been caught in a tattered web of their own words at a time when they needed to be weaving their own narratives if they want to have a chance in November. The question is whether or not book sales will translate into votes, and if any of this will hold until then. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s “Inside the Hive,” Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan assess the state of the presidential race at the end of the long, hot 2020 summer and find themselves torn between glimmers of hope for Joe Biden in the polls and the ongoing apocalyptic tidings of Trumpism. In a feature interview, Hagan talks to longtime Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, whose best-selling book “It Was All a Lie” is a confession, a mea culpa and a searing analysis of the racism and xenophobia that has swallowed the GOP with the rise of Donald Trump, who he deems a “traitor” to his country. "I really think he is against America, what it means to be an American,” he says, blaming the Republican Party for "a complete collapse of responsibility that they had to defend democracy in America. And they failed." Stevens also offers advice on how to talk to your Trump-loving relatives about their vote in November.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s “Inside the Hive,” Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan parse Trump's ghastly RNC, discussing what the Trump children’s speeches tell us about the family’s inner workings and the psyche of their narcissistic paterfamilias. As the GOP tries to turn the social unrest in Wisconsin into a suburban fear factor and tie it to Joe Biden, our hosts wonder whether this week’s convention—or the DNC, for that matter—will have any lasting impact. Plus: Joe Hagan talks to author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates about his role guest editing the September issue of Vanity Fair, which focuses on the Black Lives Matter movement and the fallout from the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Arriving in print and online during the Repulican National Convention, the issue aims directly at the heart of what’s at stake in this year’s election.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s “Inside the Hive,” co-hosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan discuss the four-day extravaganza of Democratic hopes and dreams and the official coming out of Joe Biden as the nominee who will face off against Donald Trump for the future of the free world. From Joe and Jill Biden’s 70s sitcom-worthy biography to Barack Obama’s cold dismantling of Trump to Kamala Harris’s intersectional feminist vision, Fox and Hagan examine the spectacle and speeches (and the musical choices) for clues to the deeper storylines and the political battles ahead. With Republicans rolling out their own program next week, our co-hosts are poised somewhere between hope and nausea.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this episode of Inside the Hive, the co-hosts of Showtime’s The Circus, which premiers its fifth season this weekend, stop by to talk about how quote-on-quote traditional campaigns may be extinct; how Joe Biden will handle a more progressive Democratic party; and the intricacies of filming their show during a global pandemic.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices