This Is Why Humiliated Trump Lives in Fear

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If your work depends on conversations check it out, applaud.ai/beast and use code beast for 10% off. That's plaud.ai/beast and use the code beast for 10% off. The secret of strongmen is that they live in fear. This is why they build their bunkers, that Trump was talking about, you know, not only the ballroom, the bunker underneath. That's his safe space. And the longer they're in power, the more paranoid they get. If you have surrounded yourself with people who will not tell you the truth, if bad things occur, then you start to make bad decisions. Welcome to DailyBeast podcast. I'm Hugh Dockty. I'm executive editor of the DailyBeast and I'm in for Joanna Kohl's to introduce some of her most brilliant special conversations over this past summer. We're doing a special edition because it's Labor Day. So if you're in the US or Canada, happy Labor Day. But before we get to these highlights, please take a moment, share this podcast with your friends and invite them to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We can also follow the DailyBeast on Substack. We've got QR code on the screen right now. We begin this special highlight show with Joanna's interview with Dr. Ruth Bengeat. She's the NYU history professor. She's the renowned scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders. I should say she's also the author of the hit Substack elucid and the book Strong Men. Please check them both out. And she and Joanna are discussing the threat of autocracy in America. Why Donald Trump is so obsessed with what else? His ballroom. And why Strong Men? Why Trump rely on humiliation. You've probably heard us talk about one skin before for their best selling skincare. But now they're bringing that same breakthrough longevity science to their scalp serum. OS one hair. Whether it's stress, hormonal shifts or just getting older. 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One skin.co with code beast and after you purchase they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Dr Ruth. I am really struck by how I get up in the morning, I get my cappuccino, I stride to work or I ride my city bike. Everything feels very similar to how it felt when Joe Biden was president. I was asking a friend the other day at the Yankees game. I was sort of struck looking around the stadium and I said are we are we actually in an autocracy and his point was don't be ridiculous you couldn't even ask that question out loud if we were actually in an autocracy. And then other people you know other friends are kind of feeling hysterical about it. Is this actually what an autocracy feels like? The confusion about it. Autocracies happen in stages unless there's a coup and there are still coups in the world and in a coup as a friend of mine who lived through a coup in Uruguay said he left his house in the morning in a democracy and he came back to a dictatorship the same day. Well but he was lucky to come back at all. So they happen over time and a lot of the like if we take Vladimir Putin he's been there for 26 years. Orban was there for 16 years and so we we've had Trump around for 10 years on and off. But he has done a huge amount in just 18 months or so. But all the same it doesn't feel for your daily life depending on who you are in America. If you're an immigrant you're living in fear you're not going out as much you could find yourself deported to a third country and and so the scale of illegal things that are going on is is enormous and in fact if you look comparatively at the first year of of this administration versus the first year of Putin or Orban or Erdogan in Turkey the changes are much more rapid and yet daily life for many many people can go on and we don't have a one-party state we don't have a crackdown on media that's total otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here I would certainly be in jail like many more people who speak out. So autocrats use different methods also today they sue you they rely on their thugs to give you death threats and so the methods are also different and if we're working with an old fashioned view of autocracy it's not going to look the same. You're an expert on the strong man but Trump right now seems like a weak man he seems sort of pathetic he's standing there trying to get the reflected glory from the Spain football team he's in a war that he's losing the economies of mass people are seeing the cost of the war at the gas pump. Does that make him more dangerous or less dangerous? So we're living through something extremely interesting in history because we're living through it in an accelerated fashion before I said that he has managed to do more lawless and repressive things in 18 months than most people we consider established autocrats today in their first 18 months but he's also managed to immerse himself in this process I call autocratic backfire. Autocratic backfire okay what is that? So when it usually happens over time but Trump is so extreme that he's doing it all very quickly. Is he extreme even for a strong one? Yes yes in many ways. So they are megalomaniacs they many of them are narcissists some sociopaths and they have a constant need to feed their ego because they are weak and fragile people. The secret of strongmen is that they live in fear and this is why they build their bunkers and Trump so was talking about not only the ballroom where people can adulate him and he can get money but the the bunker underneath that's his safe space and he's talking about the military hospital and there are going to be places where snipers can shoot people and he's always worried about being hunted when the Supreme Leader of Iran was killed he said I got him before he could get me and this the hunt or be hunted is the mentality of the strongmen. But to be fair Donald Trump has had several attempts on his life I mean the most dramatic being Butler, Pennsylvania but if I were Donald Trump I feel like you can cut him a break on that because he's genuinely been the target of assassination attempt. Yes of course of course and and they all are Putin many many autocrats hide them if they can. Putin's had a six or seven at least. Putin's had six or seven attempts on his life. Yes yeah and and they don't they don't want that that to be spread. And of course, - What I mean is not as concretely, they are interested in self-preservation, more generally. Not just, of course, they're interested in keeping themselves safe. Of course, they have to be like everybody else, and especially in their positions. But the strongman mentality is they're always looking out for number one, which is them. - Right. - And this is why they create what are called these like, inner sanctums around themselves, which are full of sycophants, family members, and in Lucid, my sub-stack, I have several articles about sons-in-law. There's a whole category, a subset of sons-in-law, who are part of this inner sanctum, who can keep their secrets 'cause they're family, their tasks with, often with corrupt deals. And so over time, if you only have sycophants around you, and everybody's subjected to loyalty tests constantly, you don't have what every manager knows is essential, which is objective feedback on your actions. - Right. - They're not interested in objective feedback. They want to be adulated. So we've all seen the cabinet meetings, where everybody goes round like it's North Korea, and says how great Trump is, and he requires that. It's also why in other countries, there are purges, like Xi Jinping is constantly purging people. - Right, you see those people sitting on the dius and suddenly someone comes along and literally takes them away, right? - Terrifying, because they get paranoid. That's one of the paradoxes. The more power they mass, the more afraid they are of somebody coming to take it away, or internal plotting, palace coups, this kind of thing. So, but if you have surrounded yourself with people who will not tell you the truth, if bad things occur, then you start to make bad decisions. Now, in our case, the tariffs, the shakedowns, so these had bad economic effects. And so that would lead another kind of leader to course correct. Okay, I made a mistake, didn't work, we'll do something else. Strong men never course correct. They barrel down even more. - Right, so they double down. - They double down, that's what they do. And the more they fear inside that they're looking like they're fallible rather than infallible, right? The more they feel they have to do what they want to do. And they start believing their own propaganda because there's always psychophantic religious people who tell them they're in office by the will of God. All of them have this, some form of this. And Trump has evangelicals, orthodox Jews, you're in office by the will of God. Everything you do is guided by destiny, and they start to believe it. And so I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times that was published February 1st about autocratic backfire. Ed Mussolini, Putin and Trump. And I talked about the first two who got into wars that in the first case went very badly. And Putin is not going well. And I said that Trump was getting into the zone as his popularity tanks, as he gets more desperate. And I warned people that he could start in, he could have some kind of military adventure. And then we had Iran. - Right. - And so war is something they do when they're in this zone because they feel like they want to prove themselves to history. They're going to do something world-historical. Putin's going to restore the Russian Empire. And then it goes badly. And they, often that's the end of them in various ways. They get outvoted or they lose power, create instability around them as in Russia. And so I think that Trump is on that trajectory now. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Thank you. What was going to happen next? 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(upbeat music) Putin is reputedly the richest man in the world. Donald Trump, as we know, made at least $2.5 billion and probably a lot more just in his first 16, 17 months in office. How important is the grift and the money here? - It's everything. - The first strong one. - It's everything. And in fact, people who do comparative autocracy studies say that the corruption in the first 18 months is off the charts. It surpasses actually anything, an early Putin after coups. The devastation to transparency, accountability, anything to do with conflicts of interest. They're not interesting conflicts of interest. These are quaint democratic notions. And so they are there as predators to kind of to seize whatever they can, including our tax dollars. So you have to look at it from the autocratic point of view, including kleptocracies like Russia. So tax dollars and any public agencies and public funds, they see them as something they can pray upon and use and turn to their own devices and spirit off used to be Swiss bank accounts. And now it's offshore financial areas. And so we've already seen Trump starting to do things with tax dollars and moving them here to pet projects. And we saw him with his $1.8 billion slush fund. This slush fund, right, the weaponization of the D.I. Dre. And in Russia, where it's institutionalized for many years, and that's why we call Russia kleptocracy. Gasprom, because gas and fossil fuels are the lubricants of the kleptocracy in Russia. Gasprom is the big conglomerate that's public. And it's been sacked. For years and years, there are a couple of really good books on this, and I have statistics and strongmen. It was sacked by Putin and his cronies. It was deprived of money. And then the money was sent off to offshore financial accounts. And so you literally pray upon the economy. The other thing that autocrats do is that they shake down private businesses. Now Putin has done this very explicitly. One out of six Russian businesses had had some kind of hassle by 2019. What Trump's doing is more of a shake down a threat. He's not actually going after them yet. But he threatens them. He has different ways of getting their loyalty, which is also why you see Tim Cook and all the big, big ones. But this is happening in an established kleptocracy. It's happens to any kind of prosperous business. And do people care? I mean, Trump has said he's got no empathy, and he doesn't care about people. He also says that people don't care about his own grift. He's openly said people don't care. I realized I could take this money. Do you think that's true? It is not true. And there are some very interesting studies now about-- because we hear all about the March of Autocracy and how skill for these guys are. We're not hearing about the fact we're living through a global renaissance of protest, mostly non-violent, all over the world. People are demonstrating and sometimes pushing out established elites, forcing people to resign. And one of the main issues we know from studies now is corruption, blatant corruption, deal making. The latest example, Albania, the Flamingo Revolution. And we started, and there's Kushner again. And so it ignited a popular protest, and it's the biggest protest since the fall of communism. And this is happening many places, hungry. And this was over Ivanka and Jared's discovery of an island just off the coast of Albania that they want to turn into a spa result. Yes, and so it has environmental things. It's about foreigners coming in and wrecking the natural heritage. It's about the complicity of Albanian authorities with these foreign grifters. And so people want a different kind of leadership, they don't want corruption. So corruption is one factor. Economic hardship that comes from a corrupt society is another. And the third is interesting, when a government is not only really brutal and starts using violence, but also uncaring, just doesn't really care what happens to its people. And we're seeing this in the United States, too. So these three things, I think, are coming together in the United States. That's why we see an uptick in protest and Democrats are winning their elections. It really isn't tenable. And so I don't think they will try and fix the election system, the MAGA and Trump, because they're desperate, but I see a trajectory for defeat. Let's talk about humiliation, because you talk about that in the strongmen, humiliation as a management tool, effectively. Can you talk to that? Yeah, so anybody, so unfortunately, for the countries that have afflicted with these people, these are damaged people who get pleasure from humiliating people, because it makes them feel important. It's actually not about the person being humiliated, it's about them. They have a need to do this. And so that's why they do it. They do it in private, but they especially do it in public. The best is if you do it on camera. And you take someone who has things they've served you well, and then you humiliate them. You take them down so that you stand above and everyone else has to fawn you. And you humiliate one to serve as a lesson to the others, to not get out of line. You can sort of see that around the cabinet table, that everybody's sort of avoiding his eye, because they don't want to be the subject of his random thoughts or possibly humiliation. When Vladimir Zelensky visited the White House earlier this year, and Trump humiliated him, and then JD Vance weighed in on top of the humiliation, was that a net positive for Trump? Does that humiliation that he inflicted? I understand how it might build him up in the moment, but in the longer term, did that serve him well? It depends if you're in part of Maga, and you've been brainwashed to hate Ukraine and hate Zelensky, who's supposed to be a Nazi, and all Ukrainians are Nazis. They used every trick, right? Then you thought this was great. It was great theater, it was great spectacle, right? And he did it against the background of his redone White House that looks a lot like Putin's palace, actually, the white and the gold. And if you were not Maga, you found this rather disgusting. And Zelensky, being a performer in his past, was the best equipped to get through this and not lose his dignity. It's very hard in such situations, but he knows how because he was on stage for years. And in that, he's like Trump, this is the only way he's like Trump. They are performers. And the fact that Vance was doing it, too, was that he was modeling the behaviors on this great world stage that Trump would approve of, right? So what happens is, have you seen how many times some, unimportant occasions, the Maga sick of fans, the officials, they wear the red tie, they wear Trump's aversion of Trump's uniform? Right, right. Everybody's sued in his tie, so it's also that behaviors that the leader approves of, which is being brutish, think about Hegseth, who's always brutish, but now he celebrates being brutish. And that's how you keep your status in the party is to become a mini-Trump. And so, during both in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, people talked about mini-hitlers and mini-Muslims, and these were like local officials, and they were hated by people because they were brutal and they were like laughable in their attempts to imitate the leader. And so we see that happening as well. So although we, there are many people who are not personally affected, especially if they're not political, and they're like, there's nothing going on. That's fine. There are cultural changes in Fregender, for behavior in the leadership class too, that have far-reaching consequences. We're really early in this, and I can just keep repeating, a lot has been done in 18 months. To wreck our institutions, it's very rare that somebody goes after science to wreck science. That's a whole other conversation. It's very rare that you come in and you instantly wreck something that gave such prestige and prosperity to the nation. And what's the short answer to that? Because I'd love to have you back, and we should talk about specific institutions he's gone after. And I hadn't thought of it in terms that you've just presented it. But why would he do that? What is in it for him possibly to wreck America's reputation as, you know, at the apex of science research? I think, and I wrote a series of essays in Lucid, right when he came in in 2025. I think he wants to wreck America as a democracy. He wants to completely wreck it in every way, and it's a predatory and wreck the institutions. And he said it in a 2024 campaign speech, he was going to make autocrats do great. So America has to go down so that Putin and Xi and North Korea and they can prosper. And I really think that there's an intention here to just bring us to our knees. And do you think that's because they have something on Trump or like what is his, what could possibly be his motivation for not building up America as the biggest, so that he's the biggest of all strong men? I think that first, as Bannon, I was always used to say, first to destroy and then you create. So the destruction of the administrative state. But I think that Trump long ago internalized ideas about geopolitics and statehood that are autocratic. And he, there is something with Putin. We don't know what it is. But that's a specific thing. In this world view, he, he doesn't like democracy. He likes strong man rule. And so it says, though, if you look at all the damage that's been done to institutions and to everything that brought us greatness, they've gone after these things. And it's extremely sad. Okay. I'm now fleeing from the office, convinced we're living in an autocracy. I would love you to come back and talk to us about the dismantling of specific institutions the Department of Justice, the scientific research, America's elite universities that have hitherto drawn talent from all over the world. I think it's so hard for people to imagine why anybody would want to tear their country down even if it is in theory to rebuild it as a mirror of them. Final question, is it too late? No, I don't think it's too late because the rapidity with which he's done all these depressing things we've been talking about is why there's a mobilization to, that's why Democrats are winning in places they don't normally win. That's why his polls are down. That's why the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is publishing op-eds that are like against his election denial. Even Fox News, which is the propaganda de facto channel of state, the state channel, is dissenting more. And so I think he's on a trajectory to failure because he has been too extreme and done too many things that affect too many people adversely. And if you were going to give one word of advice to the Democrats, as they barrel towards the midterms, what's the most effective way to impact someone like Donald Trump other than getting out the vote, but in terms of putting him on the back foot. It's hard to put him on the back foot because he's shameless. So rather than focusing on him, we have to focus on the election, actually. And it has to be, as happened in Hungary, an overwhelming turnout, so overwhelming that any of their machinations about it. being rigged won't hold up. Right, so too big to rig, yes. And now we have the highlights of one of the best interviews of the summer. It was with Kurt Anderson. I know he's a favourite guest and he and Joanna discussed his new book, The Breakup, which offers a fictional depiction of the death of one Donald J. Trump and spoiler. This death happens on the very same golden escalator that he came down in 2015 to launch his presidential campaign. Joanna and Kurt got into what it was like imagining this strange scenario for the 80-year-old president and the possibility of another American civil war. It's quite a conversation. Please enjoy it. Kurt Anderson, I am so glad to be clutching a copy of your book, The Breakup. You've spent three years writing it. And in that time you have imagined the death of Donald Trump, a smile crept across your face. When I said that, can you tell us in the book without too much of a spoiler alert, how he dies? Because it's not perhaps as one would imagine. Well, it is, the book is set in 2045 and there's a backstory to 2035 when at age 89, on in fact on his 89th birthday in my imagination, this is a novel. Donald Trump is celebrating both his birthday and the 20th anniversary of his first run for the presidency. He is at Trump Tower going down to meet his throng of January 6th pardonees and maga people and ICE agent pardonees and this this crowd of his to celebrate and party going down the famous golden elevator. And he dies on massive brainstorm stroke on the elevator as he's going out going down. The people gathered who had gathered for a party decide that it's a deep state assassination and begin writing and go out on Fifth Avenue in New York and bash pedestrians and car windows and store windows and it's the first spectacular piece of violence, spontaneous violence that then results a year later in an uprising in a true right-wing uprising, terrorist uprising because the Democrats mean time in the last few years in the early 30s have had a fall come back into federal power. Okay so so the breakup refers to two breakups right there's a divorce in it but it really refers to the breakup of America. You as a regular guest on the podcast you spend a lot of time thinking about what's happening culturally to America with this with this current president and it's odd that we're recording this on a Thursday and it's actually 10 years I think to the day since Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination to be president so it's particularly timely that you're that you're here. How much have you sucked out of the chaos that's going on now to inform this book? That's a good question. When my last two books were these big non-fiction books about 500-year American history and 50 years American history as a friend said and you like repeating basically my two fucking of America books. Right and so those certainly fed into this and for a while I was thinking oh I should maybe maybe I should write a non-fiction book about what the future could hold on. I said no no no no I'm done with those I'll return to novels this is my fifth one and so but certainly I was fed by that and fed by the last three years as you say I mean when I started I was setting the future so of course AI would be part of it and robots and all that stuff but a month after I started writing chat GPT appeared so it was like whoa this is cooperating in life with my writing process and the Trump thing of course he was out of office and you know was running but like you know back then and then of course 23 to 24 and and here he is so the last year and a half and I was basically done when he took off almost done when he took office this time the horror show of this term the nightmare beyond what I expected to tell you something I'm not alone in that obviously and what one of my characters expected who never you know thought her husband was overblown and hyperbolic and thinking oh it's this time it's going to be a threat to democracy obviously as well it was one of their his you know I told you so moments to his wife in this in this story and and so yeah the what has happened last year and a half didn't require any kind of wholesale restructuring of my story which was basically complete but certainly required me to go through and darken the backstory and and make you know the Trump 20s as one of the characters calls them more horrible and nightmarish than I had had them in my in the earlier draft is it possible and I can't I can't even believe I'm saying it out loud but is it possible but there is real violence that there is some kind of civil war in America and you tackle that in the book I guess my question as a for you as a novelist is what does it feel like imagining and writing about violence in the country that you live in is it is it good karma to do that that's a good question I hadn't thought of it as bad karma or good karma I think it's useful to squarely and clearly face the various possibilities the various contingencies and I'm not saying this is inevitable or even that is probable but I'm saying certainly that it's possible and I think I've depicted it plausibly and I think that in the last year and a half and the last three years since I was began writing this book it has become much less far-fetched than it seemed when I began as oh this would be interesting to think about so no it it um I don't so I don't think it's bad karma because I do think it is so difficult to think about it's so horrific to think about the war and the violence uh let alone breaking the country into parts but I also think I've you know will provide an ability for people to look at this future possibility and in some with some basis for thinking about it and some framework for thinking about it all right well I'm going to come on to the blurbs you've got in a moment and ask you how much you paid for them because the blurbs for this book are outrageous but I wanted to ask you something else first you've got a very good line in there about how American journalists refer to everything as a tragedy um and I'm actually going to quote it and you go life is half tragedy for Christ's sake maybe more than half which is one of the reasons why I grade almost everything on a curve and I guess my question is are we living through an American tragedy uh short answer yes I do think that we are already in a tragedy and and and I I I don't see how we get out of it suddenly or without pain of some degree between here and whatever the end is I'm asked that's the thing isn't I find is to imagine a happy ending now a happy ending for Trump or a happy ending for America well for America and and what I want to say is I mean this this book is immediately categorized by the algorithms as old dystopian maybe dystopian satire but still dystopian fiction and and I I had a conversation with my friend and Bloorber Gary Steingard who writes dystopian satires and he's he's got a great laugh but we'll go on today but as I said do you think of your fiction as dystopian said hey it's and and basically he said it's it's it's their comedy so sure but and I said I agree because I feel like dystopias are where there are zombies and everything is collapsed and it's it's a rubble and wreckage and oh my god it's horrible I mean on the other hand if you want to say we're in we're in a in a quasi dystopian situation now I'd buy that too so uh but but I feel one of the things I ended up writing with the breakup is is an ending I wouldn't call it a happy ending because there's a war and there and there's breaking up of the country but as with divorces and some of us at this table have been divorced and and and and you know one knows they're painful and complicated and awful in many ways and some many worse than others but you know sometimes they're mandatory and sometimes there's no other way to manage such a thing and well and they can also be new beginnings precisely that there is as my wife who as lost as I look we're still married said to me as we're talking about this very thing the other day She said about the book not our marriage. No, you're divorced. No, you're pending divorce. She said, you know, and no She said, you know is horrible and awful, and and if you're lucky liberating, you know, and so You know, I think so in my in real life and certainly certainly in my story thought five ten years from now Fifteen the war itself Looked pretty horrible and distopian, but I think You know out of out of facing the facts and dealing with the facts at hand if we can ever do that and that's he that's the thing with this book I in this story really is it's hard for me to imagine how we go back to You know pursuit of happiness and everybody getting along without some giant Spasm that that provokes Everybody looking at things the way they are just I it's hard to imagine a great leader will come John Ossoff will come and lead us all together back to a normalcy Maybe and that would be great, and I hope it happens, but but for many years and more these days I feel like The likelihood that it's impossible for that to happen in a normal way without some kind of fever-breaking invasion Civil war. I don't know who knows it could be many things, but Just on our own given everything given the The way we live in our digital bubbles and and hate the other and hate the other and hate the other and Have and have different views of how life should be led and countries should be governed. It's hard to imagine it without such a such a such a violent literally violent or or not rupture of some sort Our final highlight is a brilliant interview with our very one Farah Thomas and she is one of the daily beast DC team And she has been reporting on what the Trump administration called Renovations to capital you might use other words She is giving Joanna all the scoop on what he has done to the reflecting pool National Mall and of course going inside that disastrous state fair You've spent the last few weeks chronicling the physical changes in DC What is the latest with the reflecting pool? Well, I was down at the reflecting pool yesterday actually and it is now fenced off to the public So visitors unfortunately are unable to get those beautiful iconic pictures Of the Washington monument and the Lincoln Memorial. It is also drained completely So what you'll basically see if you go down there at the moment is a concrete drab mess There's no water. We don't know whether there will be water in the immediate future as to when this project will be finished It's interesting because as everyone knows this was a botched project that Donald Trump has since blamed on vandals He said that there was a 250 foot gash that vandals created possibly with a box cutter or a knife or some razor blades I saw no sign of that whatsoever I saw no signs of the American flag blue that he so famously Bragged about constantly What I did see However, was interestingly tire marks in the middle of the reflecting pool and you may recall Joanna in May the president took his Motorcade down to the reflecting pool and did a dry by essentially with secret service agents the interior secretary Doug Burgham and he's his entourage and there are tire marks down the middle of the reflecting pool Whether they are the presidents. I do not know But that's pretty much what you're going to see when you go the reflecting pool now It's it's quite a sad state of affairs that this really wonderful iconic landmark has been turned into this mess and a national embarrassment Really Washington is obviously built on a sort of soft water bad. It's swampy. Does it smell the reflecting pool? Do you know what when we first had the problems with reflecting pool the algae and the like I actually went down there A lot of people were kind of doing the same thing. They were putting their nose towards Just to see if there was anything strange people were actually strangely enough putting their hands in it as well Obviously before Donald Trump started to crack down on anyone and everyone who was looking like a vandal It did not smell to me, but I spoke to Taurus who thought that they could when the wind blew a certain way they could get a whiff of A whiff of something funky. It does not smell at the moment. It's just concrete, dreary, sad looking mess If you know you have an enormous deadline like the July the 4th week of America's 250th anniversary Surely this work would be done in advance with enough leeway that even were things to go wrong Which often happen in refurbishment projects anybody watching or listening to this who's ever tried to do an extension on their home or try and alter You know some part of their home or an office knows that building projects are notorious for going over budget and over time Nonetheless if you have people coming to town as you say for the world cup for a huge fireworks display What is going wrong in the organizational process of this that The city isn't gleaming and beautiful and a credit to the president who claims he is a world-class builder Well, that's right. I mean he claims he is a world-class builder I mean, I guess the fact that a lot of these projects are just rushed through I mean We had no idea until not long ago that he was suddenly going to be creating An American flag blue link in memorial reflecting ball nobody voted for it. Nobody knew about it Not that long ago, and suddenly he couldn't stop talking about it And that's the thing with Donald Trump you know every president leaves a mark on Washington You know that they're usually in the form of policies in terms of defining legacies Obama for example had the affordable care act or FDR had you know Re-shaped government itself but Trump seems determined to kind of leave something much more physical He wants monuments. He wants events. He wants buildings that people can literally point to You know, Washington is obviously the nation's capital, but for him it's also kind of an audience a stage So he's rushing through projects in a way That you know, then they don't have competitive tender processes and many occasions They're not well thought through. He's got I know for a fact that you know government sources tell me within various departments That they're just scrambling they'll they'll suddenly be hit with this this idea that he's he's bragged about Oh, I want a reflecting pool to be American flag blue and and suddenly you know, they've got a they've got to start scrambling So I think things are just a bit rushed The lack of I says I suppose processes around it and the fact that we have a president who really wants to I guess leave a legacy of Washington based on Physical structures and things that you can point point to the the the builder guy who was also a reality TV guy Once those sort of you know spectacles and and made for TV moments whether that's in the form of The great American state fair or the U of C fight night or the White House ballroom getting bigger and bigger and bigger All the we're about to have an indie car race driving down Washington DC The streets are about to be blocked off in August so that cars can drive at a hundred nine miles an hour Down Pennsylvania Avenue a street that's made for 25 miles an hour limits It's quite bonkers actually, but this is the president Okay, so let's talk about the great American state fair. I know you went there for the the closing days We've got some incredible photos that I want to show here. We have national endowment of the arts We have a man playing his heart out on the accordion with a fellow musician on a guitar. They've both got Cowboy hats on and they are playing to a crowd of precisely non It was very sad and yet very emblematic of the American state fair and I'm gonna say Joanna I'm from Australia. I love a good feel an American tacky fair bring it on you know the I was a cake who doesn't want deep Exactly so I went to the great American state fair having great hopes Rocked up. There were no lines. I went on the first day. I believe It was the day after Donald Trump had Turned it into had kicked it off with a rally because he couldn't get enough People to sing at his concerts. So he decided to make himself the headline act He kicked it off the night before it was a Thursday I go during the lunch break because I think okay. That's when the crowds will be workers will come People will will sort of you know be there Dead absolutely dead. I saw a band playing to absolutely no one. Yeah nearly dead. No lines I was interested in going into the various pavilions to see a bit of history and to see what I could find A lot of them were empty because of as we know a lot of states did not wish to participate The poor main pavilion. I think it had just two empty chairs and People were just going in there to get some you know some time out from the scorching DC heat There was of course Donald Trump's tacky arch that he'd made plywood replica of and put that into the very center right next to the equally tacky ferris wheel. The ferris wheel was the only ride. I was looking for more rides and it was the only thing I had a line. Actually, no, that's like the Florida. The Florida Pavilion had a few lines because they were giving away stuffed manatees and other things. So, people were in line for a stuffed manatee? Absolutely. Yes. And look, you would get a passport at the start and they would encourage you to go into every Pavilion to get your passport. So, it ended up being like a little scavenger hunt, which I guess got some people excited and wanting them to go in and out of the pavilions. It was a great way to get people in and out of some pavilions. But there were controversies. I mean, I remember within the first day, there was a mega fan was arrested for lewd conduct while he was watching some circus performers. He may have been their only crowd member. Was he the guy that was dressed as Uncle Sam? Yes. There was a guy that dressed as Uncle Sam, the food pavilion suddenly went dark. There was no power, which of course resulted in melted ice cream, much to much the annoyance of everyone there wanting to get an ice cream on the hot summer day. The pavilions were half empty. It was just, it was really sad. And I could not find a corn dog or funnel cake for the life of me. Oh no. No funnel cake. No corn dog. What is the point of a state for? Exactly. And look, I went back because I wanted to see what it was like towards the end. And it was exactly the same. No lines, lovely band playing to an audience of none. There was, I think, you know, people were kind of walking around. There were some school groups. I spoke to a couple of the vendors and they were just over it. They were like, July the 4th was fantastic because there were people here watching the fireworks, et cetera, et cetera. But this, the rest of it was just, I said, pretty slow and monotonous and they were ready for it to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you for supporting independent journalism. I am delighted to say that Joanna will be back tomorrow with Michael Rove from the latest episode of Inside Trump's Ed. They have so much to talk about. A big thank goes to our production staff on the Merrill, Ryan Murray, Rachel Paso, Heather Bussarro and Neil Rosenhouse. 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