Is Donald Trump the chicken or the egg? On the cusp of his second administration, the hosts of “Matter of Opinion” dissect whether the president-elect is a cause or symptom of trends in popular culture.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation. To listen to this episode, click the play button below.
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Carlos Lozada: So we have talked a lot in our recent conversations about the 2024 election, what a new Trump administration might bring, how the Democrats need to rebrand themselves, etc. In other words: a lot about politics and policies and parties. Today we’re going to do something a little bit different, and that is we’re going to think about the relationship between politics and culture — in particular, how the Trump era is felt in our art and our ideas, the things we read and watch and consume.
So I’m hoping we can start by examining a few cultural artifacts of the Trump era so far, especially now that the Trump era has officially been renewed and extended — for a new season.
Michelle Cottle: A new season!
Lozada: I mean, it’s multiple seasons, I think.
Ross Douthat: It depends what you call a season. I think a Trump term contains —
Lozada: To everything there is a season, Ross.
Douthat: Fair enough.
Lozada: All right. To start off, let’s just get very specific here. Is there a book, a movie, an album, a show, an artwork, an exhibit — anything that to you feels sort of perfectly symbolic of the Trump era so far? Ross, kick us off.
Douthat: So my general view is that the Trump era to date, and especially in Trump’s first term, was defined by a kind of oppositional culture, where culture-making was done sometimes consciously, sometimes less consciously, in reaction to Trump, against Trump, in the shadow of Trump. As opposed to, say, in celebration of whatever changes Trump was ushering into American life.
And that is framing for my choice of a representative Trump-era work of art, which is Guillermo del Toro’s movie “The Shape of Water,” which came out in 2017. Conveniently, the first year of the first Trump presidency, and then it won best picture in early 2018. “The Shape of Water,” for those who haven’t seen it —
Lozada: Sorry. I’ve never seen it. The only Guillermo del Toro movie I’ve seen is “Hellboy,” which I loved.
Douthat: Oh, you haven’t? Wow.
Lozada: I’m guessing this is different.
Douthat: You haven’t seen —? OK, well, you’re trying to sidetrack me into other Guillermo del Toro movies —
Cottle: Don’t get Ross down that rabbit hole.
Douthat: Let’s stay with “The Shape of Water,” which is a movie about a mute woman, played by Sally Hawkins, who works at a secret government laboratory in Baltimore, in the early 1960s, during the Cold War, a very significant time. And she is close friends with a closeted gay man who lives near her and a fellow cleaner at the laboratory who’s African American, played by Octavia Spencer.
Archived clip of “The Shape of Water”: What in the Sam Hill? No! You boys mind putting the trash in the can? That’s what it’s there for.
Douthat: And the plot of the movie is basically that the U. S. military figure who runs the laboratory, who’s played by Michael Shannon, who always plays either villains or people so tortured they might as well be villains, brings home some exotic fish-man creature taken from a South American river. And it’s sort of a humanoid, amphibian, intelligent. It can communicate in some ways.
And our heroine, the mute janitorial worker, falls in love with it. With him. And then a sort of conflict ensues between her, we’ll just say her intersectional coalition, and the forces of white male, McCarthyite, heteronormative patriarchy embodied by Michael Shannon.
Archived clip of “The Shape of Water”: What am I doing interviewing the [expletive] help? The [expletive] cleaners.
Douthat: And so this is a movie that I think represents how wokeness conceived of itself, how cultural progressivism conceived of itself in the Trump era, as this kind of alliance of minority groups and identities united in defense of a literal kidnapped South American. I mean, it’s a figure who represents the Other, with a capital O, and all pitted against the forces of white-male reaction. And it’s a del Toro movie. It’s very visually interesting. It is, I think, incredibly didactic and heavy-handed and absurd in its political statement-making.
But I think if you were going to pick a date certain where the kind of cultural reaction to Trumpism gets going in full on its way to becoming what we think of as wokeness writ large, you could do worse than picking the Academy Awards ceremony where “The Shape of Water” won best picture.
There you have it.
Lozada: So this movie, to you, embodies the kind of woke culture, anti-white male/#resistance culture that embodied especially the early Trump first term.
Douthat: Yeah, and this sense of sort of American history as itself a kind of nightmare story. That was one of the many interpretations of Trump’s original election — that this was the return of the repressed racist darkness of the American past, bursting into the open in the present.
And so what was needed was a kind of reckoning with how we had lived with Trumpism all along. So this movie was the Cold War version of that primal American narrative that then also shows up obviously across lots and lots of other cultural projects and efforts in the subsequent years.
Lozada: I’m glad you got “reckoning” out of the way, Ross. That is an absolute must word for Trump-era cultural products.
Douthat: Yeah — the idea that we’re reckoning with the past that got us to Trump.
Lozada: Michelle, how about you? Is it also a movie? What you got?
Cottle: So I totally take Ross’s point about a lot of the culture and a lot of the moments being a backlash or oppositional or whatever.
But I’m disregarding all of that. And I’m going to look in a totally different direction from Ross’s fancy-pants fish-man film. And we’re going to go with the good old western, macho “Yellowstone” TV series, of which I am, and Ross was, a huge fan.
Lozada: I’m 0-2. I haven’t seen this one, either. Sorry.
Cottle: It aired in 2018, and it is basically the story of this Montana ranching family. And it stars Kevin Costner as the aging patriarch who owns a chunk of land in Montana that’s supposed to be about the size of Rhode Island.
And it’s this primal story of this family and their traditions being beset by the forces of progress and rich developers and greedy politicians — and just basically modernity. It’s like all dogpiling on this cowboy culture in the middle of Montana.
Archived clip of “Yellowstone”: You can’t be here. It’s private property.
But this is a national park.
That’s a national park. This is the Dutton Ranch.
Cottle: It’s looking at really basic American things like land and tradition and family and violence and bloodshed. So it’s a little bit like a red state “Succession.” This is a comparison I like to make because blue state America and especially journalists and media types love “Succession.”
And “Yellowstone” — almost nobody paid any attention to this. Despite the fact that in the rest of America, it’s been one of the highest-ranked shows. It has exponentially more viewers and people really, really identify with a lot of these themes. And it seems very weird because it’s this rich ranching family. But beneath the surface, you have this whole — their lives and their values are under attack from outside, and they feel like they’re being left behind.
And I think this resonates with a lot of folks in the broader country, even if the particulars are a little bit different. At one point, Costner’s character runs for governor, and he basically makes his announcement by saying, I’m the bulwark against progress.
Archived clip of “Yellowstone”: I am the opposite of progress. I’m the wall that it bashes against, and I will not be the one who breaks.
Cottle: And so his daughter asks: What’s killing Kevin Costner’s character? And she basically says: The 21st century.
It’s very soap opera-y. In this show, if you’re trying to take somebody down, you’re not doing it with a hostile corporate takeover. You basically grab — literally — somebody grabs a cooler full of rattlesnakes and throws it on their enemy.
Douthat: Yeah.
Cottle: You know, Old Testament vengeance. And it is great TV.
Douthat: But so here’s — what’s fascinating about “Yellowstone” is everything you just described, Michelle. But then the further wrinkle is that the maker of the show Taylor Sheridan —
Cottle: Taylor Sheridan —
Douthat: Has very loudly protested against sort of right-wing Trumpy interpretations of his show. And I have a quote here from him talking about these things.
He said, “Look, the show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West and land grabbing. That’s a red state show?”
And the answer is: Yes, it is a red state show. For all the reasons you described. But it is also basically sympathetic to both the cowboys and the Native Americans as against all subsequent claimants on the West.
And then at the same time, obviously, it sets up Costner’s character as an antihero, not just not a simple hero —
Cottle: But a really hot sexy antihero —
Douthat: But a really hot sexy one —
Cottle: You’re pulling for. He’s not Tony Soprano — on some level.
Douthat: Well, Tony, I mean, many, many people found Tony Soprano kind of attractive. I have been informed. Reliable sources.
Anyway, all I’m saying is that the show contains within itself some of the complexities that help sustain and push Trump forward and —
Cottle: Very sophisticated in those ways.
Douthat: Maybe if you watch “Yellowstone,” you’ll have a sense of why that might be.
Lozada: I’m fulfilling my sort of, I guess, coastal journalist stereotype. I watched “Succession.” I did not watch “Yellowstone.” I’ve begun watching “Ozark.” Does that count? Does that get me any points?
Douthat: I didn’t really like Ozark.
Cottle: I didn’t really like Ozark, either. Although I’ve been told I have to try it again.
Lozada: I love Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. They’re both so great. I’ve watched the first two episodes of it so far.
Douthat: OK. All right. Well, we’ll talk about it later.
Cottle: Yeah, we’ll go there. But just for cultural understanding purposes, Carlos, give “Yellowstone” a shot. It’s totally soapy, but I love it.
Lozada: No — trust me, I, I grew up on soap operas. That is no problem for me.
All right, I will play true to type again and choose a book as my pick.
Douthat: A great American novel?
Lozada: No. Not at all. The exact opposite: terrible American nonfiction.
There was a cluster of books that came out during the first Trump administration that became kind of a canon of contemporary explorations of race in America.
And you had “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates — came out a little bit earlier. “White Rage,” by Carol Anderson. The New York Times “1619 Project” — first as a magazine, then as a book. “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi. And I think I wrote about all of these myself when I was a book critic.
But there was one book in this canon that stood out for me for its just astonishing kind of oversimplicity. And it’s one that came out in 2018 and was a best seller then but became a real sensation two years later during the summer of 2020. And that is White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo.
And the premise of the book is that, first of all, white people are not individuals. They are sort of an undifferentiated racist collective that is socialized to hate blackness and to institutionalize that prejudice in politics and culture and in business. Nonwhite people are almost entirely powerless. They rarely exist, except to give white Americans opportunities to kind of explore racial reality to help them know when they’re doing poorly or when they’re doing better.
Ross, I’ll see your reckoning and raise you a “Do better” — which was another standard refrain of Trump-era progressivism. What “white fragility” means is that once you reveal these realities to white people, they can’t deal with it, they recoil in disgust. They can’t cope with the truth bombs you’ve just unleashed, and their responses of anger and guilt and tears just recenters their experience and thus reinstates white hierarchy and control. Now what I love —
Cottle: Wait — was this why there was that whole thing about white women crying?
Lozada: Yes. Well, this was part of it. This was absolutely part of it.
Douthat: White women’s tears.
Lozada: And also kind of the Karen. What’s amazing to me about “White Fragility,” if you actually read the book — I don’t think a lot of people actually read it because it’s very hard to read.
The logic of “White Fragility” is irrefutable. Like any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself, right? So either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct. Or they resist those categorizations and question the interpretations, in which case they’re engaging white fragility and only proving the point.
So any dissent from white fragility as a concept is itself white fragility. So that kind of circular logic is how you get thought leaders and best sellers. So I pick this book because to me this was kind of peak antiracism, peak moral preening, peak reductive thinking in the Trump era.
I don’t want to use a broad brush on all these books that I mentioned. Like I said: I’ve written about them. I find a lot to appreciate in many of them. But this one to me just was astounding that it could achieve such success for the author, given the quality of the argumentation.
And that is something that happened between 2018 and 2020 for this book.
Cottle: So that kind of perfectly speaks to Ross’s kind of resistance culture.
Lozada: Yeah. It became kind of a status symbol. The way politics people have “The Power Broker” in their Zoom background, having “White Fragility” on your coffee table was kind of a sign that you were with it.
Douthat: Yeah. And this was obviously a part of Trump-era culture that we as people who write about politics or review books about politics confronted constantly in the second half of Trump’s first term. I do think it is interesting how it does and doesn’t bleed out into movies, TV and so on.
I’m interested in things like what happened to Disney movies, for instance, in the last five or 10 years — where there was a shift from having actual villains, like embodied villains like Scar or Ursula the Sea Witch or the Wicked Queen in “Snow White” to facing miasmic entities that you were supposed to overcome.
Like if you watch — one of the Disney movies that came out during the pandemic, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” which is set in sort of an alternate —
Cottle: See, my household has aged out of that, so I missed that one.
Douthat: Southeast Asia. Well, my household has not. And it’s in a way a classic Disney movie, except the villain is literally this kind of mist that never sort of condenses into an active adversary.
Or in the original “Moana,” there’s a villain who’s really just a good deity, a good island deity, who’s had her heart removed. Or even “Frozen 2.” I almost picked “Frozen 2” instead of “The Shape of Water.” In “Frozen 2,” it’s a Disney movie where the villain is the dead grandfather of Anna and Elsa who has dispossessed the native peoples of their lands.
He’s not even an active character. And again, there’s sort of miasmas and mists. There really was a shift to kind of structural views of villainy in Disney movies in this period.
So I find that really interesting: how you can have these theories of politics and social life and so on that manifest themselves in Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi, but I think they end up influencing a pretty wide range of pop culture.
Cottle: Fascinating.
Lozada: All the things that we’ve seized on here are sort of early to mid- Trump first term — except maybe the wider angle look at Disney films by Ross. But eras, whether in politics or in culture, are not always so neatly defined and cordoned off.
For instance, what do you see as the main differences or confluences between Obama-era culture and Trump-era culture? There was plenty of identitarianism in Obama-era culture. Think “Hamilton”; think “Glee.” These were enthusiastic visions of representation and identity.
How much is a natural evolution — and how much is a hard break?
Douthat: I think there’s a pretty jarring cut from the world of “Hamilton” to the world of Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi. I think very clearly “Hamilton” is about representation in which the represented groups, the Black and Latino actors playing these parts, are laying claim to the greatness of the American tradition. And the idea is that the white founding fathers are actually universal figures. And very clearly, that’s not at all what you’re getting in the interpretations of American history that are offered in the Trump —
Lozada: In fact, there was a “Hamilton” backlash afterward, where people looked back on it with a certain disdain.
Douthat: Yes, people were — well, like the “West Wing,” which we discussed in a recent bonus episode. (Hint, hint, listeners!) [Lozada laughs.] There was a kind of left-wing critique of “Hamilton” as a neoliberal text. Which it was, in a way: It’s about the first treasury secretary — the Wall Street multiculturalism.
I think with some of the other things you mentioned, there’s a little more of a gradual transition. Like “Glee,” for instance, anticipates “The Shape of Water” in certain ways. It’s like the cast of misfits and outsiders representing a sort of proto-intersectional vision of high school coming together.
But in the end, it’s a more, I think — I have not watched “Glee” all the way to the end — but I believe it’s a more fundamentally optimistic view of what intersectionality means than the later view, where it’s like you really have to crush the patriarchy. You’ve really got to do it.
Cottle: I do think it’s hard to parse out sometimes what is a reaction to versus kind of a harbinger of or something that goes hand in hand. Like, Trump didn’t bring about “Yellowstone.” The themes in “Yellowstone” are themes that were playing out politically, as well.
So another thing that has struck me in recent years, which is the merging of rap stars with country music. Like Post Malone and Shaboozey and some of these other folks have joined forces or just moved over and done country music. Which has always been in its own way kind of ultimate American music — but yet also increasingly has this very defiant middle finger to government and the establishment and elites.
And country music’s been having a moment in the last few years, anyway, in terms of its cultural influence. I don’t think that’s because of Trump, but I do think that it is a little bit of the dissatisfaction of very disparate groups with this kind of system and the way things are.
And they’ve come together in these really unusual ways.
Lozada: Well, Michelle, you’ve moved us right along into starting to imagine what a sort of deeper Trump-era culture might look like. As Ross said, so much of the early Trump-era culture was oppositional. Certainly the example that I brought up of “White Fragility” and that genre is in that vein. Now that Trump is here to stay, now that there’s really no such thing as a Biden era, do you expect to see popular culture that is friendlier — whether to him doing a goofy end-zone dance or to Trumpism more broadly?
Douthat: Just to pick up on what Michelle was talking about before the break: I think you could make some kind of argument that there is a kind of lower-middlebrow fusionist, anti-establishment culture that, without being pro-Trump in any kind of formal way, does represent something very different from the kind of oppositional culture we were talking about. Which tended to be much more high middlebrow, would be Oscar-bait movies and so on.
I think a lot of professional athletes are always somewhat right wing. That tended to be muted a bit when Trump was president and super-unpopular. If Trump is more popular, I think professional athletes’ sympathies for Trump will become less muted.
I feel like that kind of range of pop music and sports and so on, becoming a little less pious and a little more Trump-friendly is something that we’re likely to see for a little while, at least. I don’t know if you get to a point where you can talk about something that is Trump culture the way we talk about Reagan-era culture looking back. When you look back at the Reagan era, obviously there were lots of artists and intellectuals who hated Reagan and who made him a villain and treated him as a fascist. But there also was just this huge boom of patriotic action movies that we think of as sort of Reaganish culture.
We did have “Top Gun: Maverick,” which was a huge hit and maybe was in a way sort of itself a kind of foretaste of Trump’s return. But I don’t know how far that goes. Part of the issue here, too, is that Hollywood is so uncreative right now, generally. That it’s hard to even know what a big shift in the Hollywood zeitgeist would look like, because all they’re doing is making sequels and reboots.
Cottle: This year’s “Glicked” is basically “Gladiator II” and a rip-off of a Broadway musical.
Douthat: Well, at least nobody had filmed “Wicked” before. But I’m curious, Carlos, if I can ask you: You read more novels, I think, than either of us do right now —
Cottle: Combined.
Douthat: Even though, I guess I’m allegedly publishing a novel. [Laughs]
Cottle: Which I’m reading,
Lozada: Not allegedly.
Douthat: Not allegedly. In fact, in truth, Carlos, what’s your view of the sort of — are there sort of highbrow sources of culture in America right now? Not even highbrow — just like literary sources of culture in America right now that really matter? Were there novels of Trumpism — of the Trump era?
Lozada: I’ll mention a couple — one that I actually just read during Thanksgiving weekend.
First, Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.”
Cottle: Which is fantastic.
Lozada: Oh, yeah. I thought it was great. It’s a retelling of “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens. But it was set in sort of opioid-crisis Appalachia. And that, to me, feels like a novel of the Trump era in its substance without being overly preachy.
And I say that in every sense of “preachy.” It sort of skips over religion, and its politics are not as overt as — at least I didn’t think they were as overt as some might say.
The one that I think is very telling: It’s a novel that came out in 2001, but the movie just came out last year. The novel was “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and the movie was “American Fiction.” I strongly recommend both —
Cottle: It was a great movie.
Lozada: Both versions of this story. And the premise is you have a Black novelist approaching middle age, fixated on writing stories on like, American retellings of Greek dramas.
And they are respectfully reviewed — but don’t sell. And in the meantime, he sees a “Black novel,” “We’s Lives in da Ghetto,” that just completely overdoes every trope of a Black underclass life and becomes a raging success. And he’s so resentful of this, he’s so pissed off, that he writes his own version of a “Black novel.”
His agent kept telling him: Hey, you know, they kind of want a Blacker novel than the stuff you write.
So he wrote the ultimate clichéd, stereotypical Black novel. It’s called “My Pafology,“ with an F.
Archived clip of “American Fiction”: Mr. Lee is this um — is this based on your actual life?
Yeah, you think some [expletive] college boy can come up with that [expletive]
No. No. No, I don’t.
And of course, you know, the problem is it becomes a huge hit. And he has to decide whether he’s going to kind of live with that success or try to step away from it.
So it’s winking at you, but I think it’s a really good movie and novel for right now. Because it gets to this question that the left, the Democrats, are facing. Which is like, How deep do you go into identity politics as a kind of raison d’être of what your party is about?
That seems to have been a failure in this last election. And this novel creates a caricature of kind of the deepest version of that. So I would point to “Erasure,” even though it was published 20-plus years ago, and I would point to “Demon Copperhead” as kind of novels of the era.
But I think it’s way too early. I think the best novels about a period, especially a political period, take years or decades to actually come to fruition.
Douthat: Well — or to your point about the about “Erasure” being 20 years old: Or they’re written as prophecies, right? I think one of the key novelists of populism as a broad phenomenon, or populism and late liberal exhaustion in the Western world, is the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who started writing his books 20-odd years ago.
Lozada: Long ago.
Douthat: And he’s anticipating male-female alienation, the rise of incels, the internet and pornography as sort of these deranging influences. And he works his way around to doing a novel about an Islamic takeover of France. But ultimately, the core of his work is about the kind of social relations in the age of the internet and the sexual revolution that gave us this moment. But he starts writing about it long before Trump or anyone else sort of comes on the scene.
Lozada: Even the American novels that people turn to early on in the Trump era were things like Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” — which were not necessarily the best work of either of the two.
Douthat: Or “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Don’t forget Margaret Atwood —
Cottle: Speaking of subtle.
Lozada: I can’t forget. I can’t forget. Yeah.
Douthat: Here’s another question for you guys: I feel like one way to look at the shift that has — if we can use the term “normalized” Trump and that certainly made it possible for a lot of people who didn’t vote for him in 2016 to vote for him in 2024 — has in part maybe been a shift from the Trump archetype being sort of dictator to the Trump archetype being hustler. I feel like a lot of the stuff — again, what you were talking about before, Michelle, with rap and country music and these kinds of things: Like Trump contains multitudes, right? But one thing he is, is a kind of all-American hustler. And I don’t mean that as a pejorative. That is a powerful archetype in American life that has a tremendous appeal across racial lines —
Cottle: “American Hustle.”
Douthat: It’s different from the Reagan era. Reagan, whatever he was, was not a hustler. That wasn’t his vibe. So it made sense that the Reagan era in its peak produced movies about muscled-up American he-men defeating Communists.
But I feel like we’ll know that we’re in a sort of Trump-friendly pop cultural era if we get a bunch of movies about hustlers maybe. Or a bunch of novels or TV shows or something that are sort of mildly celebratory in the way of “The Sting” or movies of that vintage. I don’t know. That’s just a thought.
Cottle: If Trump had not been born wildly wealthy and entitled, he would have been like the Leonardo DiCaprio figure in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” selling penny stock out of a strip mall at the beginning of the show. He would have just been hustling his way along those lines. So I can see that.
Lozada: I was at the Miami Book Fair last month, and I did an event with Max Boot, who has just published a big biography of Ronald Reagan, which The Times just named one of its 10 best books of the year. And he said something that really stuck with me. He said that one time Reagan was asked how an actor could be president and that Reagan responded with something like: How could you be president if you aren’t an actor? That so much of the role is in fact a role. That you make yourself a character in popular culture.
And Trump absolutely did that with “The Apprentice.” I mean, I’m hardly the first to ever say this, but I am in the camp that believes that there is no Trump presidency without “The Apprentice” and without the role that Trump played as that character.
And when you talk about the hustle, Ross, I think the big moment not apprentice Trump but real-life Trump captures to me — a lot of that is the debate he was having with Hillary Clinton when she accused him of not paying taxes.
And what did he say? He said: That makes me smart. And that, to me, captures a lot of the kind of meaning of Trump as hustler in American life.
Let me ask you one last question quickly here. It’s been said that, and disputed, that politics is downstream of culture, right? The culture shifts first, and it seeps into our politics.
How do you see that in terms of the Trump era? Is Trump more a cause or a consequence of our cultural shifts?
Cottle: Oh, I think he’s a reflection of it. I mean, what does America worship? America worships celebrity. America worships money.
He was a character before he was president. And the reason he gets away with a lot of things that he does, that normal politicians can’t get away with, is because people think of him first as a celebrity and a character.
And so he gets judged by very different standards. He’s a showman above all else.
And let me be clear, I’m one of these people who thinks that the showmanship aspects of the presidency are often downplayed by pointy-headed folks like us. I do think that Reagan was right to some degree: You can’t do the job unless you have a kind of presence and are able to telegraph presidentialness, so to speak. So, yeah — I mean, all about that.
Douthat: Yeah. I’ve already written this, but I think that Hegel was right, and that some, some —
Cottle: That’s not pointy-headed —
Douthat: That’s not pointy-headed at all. Everyone loves Hegel.
There are some eras in history where a figure embodies the spirit of the age. So I don’t think you can separate Trump. It’s both. He’s both. He’s cause and effect at the same time. He is history in a golf cart.
Cottle: [Laughs] That is beautiful, Ross. That is so beautiful.
Douthat: I’m pretty sure I’m stealing that from someone on Twitter, so I apologize for the plagiarism.
Cottle: They can @ you.
Douthat: Yeah. All right.
Lozada: The Douthat phenomenology. That’s great.
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