Mitch McConnell promised bipartisanship in his speech about healthcare and delivered the exact opposite. The speech had very little “truth content”. (38 min)
The Koch brothers announced that they had 360 million dollars to spend on the next election if the Republicans passed healthcare and tax cuts. (48 min)
Tucker Carlson condemned the right wing media ~6 years ago and said the right needs its own institutions comparable to the New York Times. He started the Daily Caller which now makes money putting up bikini pictures, and then plays a host on Fox News that does nothing to challenge his audience, preferring to embarrass guests and make its visitors feel good. (1 hr 25 min)
Ezra: I think many of the criticism of the mainstream media are right. It has a cosmopolitan bias.
Tucker Carlson is all about business model. Dinesh D’hsousa is doing well because the Ann Coulter principle — the more extreme you are, the better you do. Authors always check their Amazon ratings.
Many Conservatives don’t consume mainstream media.
The media knew that the John Podesta leaks were coming from the Russians, but the business is comptetitive and people were concerned about appearing biased. (1 hr 38 min)
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have studied American politics for more than three decades. They are the town’s go-to experts on the workings of Congress. In 2012, they rocked Washington when they published It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a book that marshaled their considerable authority to argue that the dysfunction poisoning American government was the result of “asymmetric polarization,” notably a Republican Party that “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
This was a controversial diagnosis then. After Trump, it’s closer to the conventional wisdom.
E.J. Dionne is a columnist at the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of the classic book Why Americans Hate Politics. He’s one of the sharpest political observers alive.
And now, like a Canadian indie-rock supergroup, the three of them have come together to write One Nation After Trump, a dive into how the Republican Party created Trump, how Trump won, and what comes next.
As Dionne says in this interview, the American system was “not supposed to produce a president like this,” and so a lot of our conversation is about how the guardrails failed and whether they can be rebuilt. Mann, Ornstein, and Dionne may be political sages, but they’re also a lot of fun, and they have a lot of fun together. You’ll hear that in this conversation.
Books:
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal by William Leuchtenburg
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The First Congress by Fergus Bordewich
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels